Political Space in Pre-industrial Europe

Political Space in Pre-industrial Europe

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Political Space in Pre-industrial Europe

Edited by Beat Kümin University of Warwick, UK

With a preface by JAMES C. SCOTT

© Beat Kümin and the contributors 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Beat Kümin has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editor of this work. Assistant Editor: James R. Brown. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Political space in pre-industrial Europe. 1. Politics, Practical – Europe – History – To 1500. 2. Politics, Practical – Europe – History – 16th century. 3. Politics, Practical – Europe – History – 17th century. 4. Politics, Practical – Europe – History – 18th century. I. Kümin, Beat A. 320.9’4–dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Political space in pre-industrial Europe / [edited by] Beat Kümin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6072-9 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Europe – Politics and government – 1492-1648. 2. Political culture – Europe – History. 3. Politics and culture – Europe – History. 4. Spatial behavior – Political aspects – Europe – History. 5. Human geography – Political aspects – Europe – History. 6. Europe – Social life and customs. 7. Europe – History – 1492–1648. I. Kümin, Beat A. D234.P65 2009 940.2–dc22 2009005563 ISBN 978-0-7546-6072-9 (hbk) ISBN 978-0-7546-9548-6 (ebk.V)

Contents List of Figures and Table Notes on Contributors   Acknowledgements  

vii ix xiii

Preface   James C. Scott

1

Introduction   Beat Kümin

5

Part I: Political Sites 1

Representing Political Space at a Political Site: The Imperial Diets of the Sixteenth Century   Henry J. Cohn

2

The Princely Court and Political Space in Early Modern Europe   43 Ronald G. Asch

3

Drinking Houses and the Politics of Surveillance in Pre-industrial Southampton   James R. Brown

4

Politics, Clubs and Social Space in Pre-industrial Europe   Peter Clark

5

Political Spaces and Parliamentary Enclosure in an Upland Context: Cumbria c.1760–1840   Ian D. Whyte



19

61 81

95

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vi

Part II: Spatial Politics 6 7 8 9 10 11

Political and Geographical Space: The Geopolitics of Medieval England    Christine Carpenter

117

Social Space and Urban Conflict: Unrest in the German Imperial City of Esslingen am Neckar   Alexander Schlaak

135

The Spatial Dynamics of Parish Politics: Topographies of Tension in English Communities, c.1350–1640   Steve Hindle and Beat Kümin

151

Petitioning Places and the Credibility of Opinion in the Public Sphere in Seventeenth-Century England   David Zaret

175

Which Switzerland? Contrasting Conceptions of the Early Modern Swiss Confederation in European Minds and Maps   Andreas Würgler

197

Outwitting Power: Bogus Kings and Officials in Early Modern England   Tobias B. Hug

215

Part III: Outlook 12

Comment from a Historical Perspective   Bernard Capp

13

Spaces in Theory, Spaces in History and Spatial Historiographies  249 Mike Crang

Index  

233

267

List of Figures and Table Figures 1.1

1.2

5.1

5.2

The imperial Diet of Regensburg, 1597. The Emperor’s commissioner, Archduke Matthias, receives a delegation (Peter Zimmermann, Verissima delinatio Augustissimi Consessus legatorum …, Augsburg, 1598). Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Munich, Einbl. XI, 189

28

Investiture of Elector Augustus of Saxony with his fiefs at the Diet of Augsburg, 1566 (woodcut by Hans Tirol). Kunstsammlungen und Museen, Augsburg   

40

Part of Jefferys’ map of Westmorland (1770) showing networks of roads across the commons which were soon to be extinguished by enclosure. Thomas Jefferys, Historic Map of Westmorland, 1770, with an introduction by Paul Hindle (Kendal, 2001), map 2  

102

Location of Watermillock township and some of the locations mentioned in the text  

108

8.1 The political topography of the late medieval English parish  

162

8.2 The political topography of the early modern English parish  

163

8.3 The functional differentiation of the English parish c.1350–1640 

172

10.1 Switzerland in the Schwyz and Bern perspective (c.1600)  

199

10.2 Hans Conrad Gyger/Conrad Meyer, Helvetiæ Rhætiæ et Valesiæ, cæterorumque confoederatorum ut [et] finitimorum populorum tabvla geographica et hydrographica nova [et] exacta/operâ [et] studio Ioh. Conradi Gÿgeri delineata; [et] à Conrado Meÿero in æs incisa anno christi 1657 (Helv. Tigurini [Zurich], 1683) [1 map on 2 fols, c. 1:500,000; copperplate engraving, 55 x 76 cm]: Universitätsbibliothek Bern, ZB, Sammlung Ryhiner, Ryh 3206:5 

209

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Table Table 4.1 Types of Voluntary Association in Europe  

89

Notes on Contributors Ronald G. Asch, formerly a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute London and Lecturer at the University of Münster, holds a chair at the University of Freiburg as successor to Wolfgang Reinhard. He is the (co-)editor of Politics, Patronage and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age (1991); Der Absolutismus – ein Mythos? Strukturwandel monarchischer Herrschaft ca. 1550–1700 (1996); Der Adel im Ancien Régime: Von der Krise der ständischen Monarchien bis zur Revolution (ca. 1600–1789) (2001), and the author of Der Hof Karls I.: Politik, Provinz und Patronage 1625–1640 (1993), a study of the English court before the Civil War. Other publications include a history of the Thirty Years War (1997), a short German biography of James VI and I (2005) and a survey of the history of the European nobility (Europäischer Adel in der Frühen Neuzeit, 2008). Ronald Asch is a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Arts and Sciences. James R. Brown is interested in the material venues of social exchange in early modern England. He has written on the parish church and his PhD thesis on ‘The Landscape of Drink: Inns, Taverns and Alehouses in Early Modern Southampton’ (University of Warwick, 2008) is currently being developed as a monograph. He has served as facilitator for two Leverhulme Trust academic networks: ‘Social Sites – Öffentliche Räume – Lieux d’échanges 1300–1800’ (University of Warwick, 2005– 2008) and ‘The Documentation of Individual Identity: Historical, Comparative and Transnational Perspectives since 1500’ (University of Oxford, 2008–). He is currently co-ordinating the Mellon-funded project ‘Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters’ based at the University of Oxford. Bernard Capp is Professor of History at the University of Warwick and a Fellow of the British Academy. His books include Cromwell’s Navy: The Fleet and the English Revolution, 1648–60 (1989), The World of John Taylor the Water-Poet (1994) and When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighourhood in Early Moden England (2003). He is currently writing a book on ‘England’s Culture Wars’ in the interregnum, 1649–60, and articles on bigamous marriage (Historical Journal, 2009) and on masculinity and emotion. Christine Carpenter is Professor of Medieval English History at the University of Cambridge. She works on landed society, politics and government c.1200–1500. Her publications include Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401–1499 (1992; winner of the Royal Historical Society Whitfield Prize),



Political Space in Pre-industrial Europe

The Wars of the Roses: Politics and the Constitution c.1437–1509 (1997), The Armburgh Papers (1998) and, as joint editor, Political Culture in Late Medieval Britain (2004). Since 1999, she has been in charge of the AHRC-funded project to calendar the fifteenth-century Inquisitions Post Mortem; two volumes of these are in print and another three are soon to follow, covering the years 1422–47. She is completing A New Constitutional History of England c.1215–1509. Peter Clark is Professor of European Urban History at the University of Helsinki and was previously for 15 years Professor of Economic and Social History and Director of the Centre for Urban History at the University of Leicester. He has researched and written extensively on urban and social history. He published British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (2000) and his book European Cities and Towns 400–2000 was published by Oxford University Press in 2009. Henry J. Cohn, Emeritus Reader in European History, University of Warwick. Researches on the political, religious and social history of the Holy Roman Empire, c.1400–1650. Publications include The Government of the Rhine Palatinate in the Fifteenth Century (1965 and 1992) and articles on imperial diets and the German Peasants’ War. Edited Government in Reformation Europe, 1520–1560 (1970) and the periodical Parliaments, Estates & Representation (2002–2007). Mike Crang is a Reader in Geography at Durham University and (co-)author of Cultural Geography (2004) and Doing Ethnographies (2007). He has researched around understandings of space and time in contemporary and historic settings, editing a collection on Virtual Geographies: Bodies, Spaces and Relations (1998), and written several papers on the role of technologies in changing understandings of place and location. He examined the commemoration of history and local identity in early twentieth-century Sweden and contemporary Britain through museological practice with papers in Ecumene, Environment & Planning and Society & Space. He has published theoretical papers on the connection of time place, social practice and memory and co-edited the collection Thinking Space (2000). Steve Hindle is Professor of History at the University of Warwick where he has taught since 1995. He has worked extensively on the history of rural communities in early modern England. He is the author of The State and Social Change in Early Modern England (2000) and On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, c.1550–1750 (2004). His next monograph, a study of the Warwickshire parish of Chilvers Coton, is provisionally entitled The Social Topography of a Rural Community in Seventeenth-Century England. He is currently editor of the Economic History Review.

List of Contributors

xi

Tobias B. Hug was Research Assistant at Zürich University, Research Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, Postgraduate Research Fellow at the University of Warwick and Teaching Associate at Queen Mary, University of London. He works in the fields of historical anthropology, micro-history, social and new cultural history of early modern England. Publications include the monograph Impostures in Early Modern England: Representations and Perceptions of Fraudulent Identities (2009). He now lives and works in Switzerland. Beat Kümin, formerly a Research Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and the University of Bern, is Associate Professor in Early Modern European History at the University of Warwick. He works on local communities and their social centres in England and German-speaking Europe between c.1400 and 1800. Publications include the monographs The Shaping of a Community: The Rise & Reformation of the English Parish c.1400–1560 (1996), Drinking Matters: Public Houses and Social Exchange in Early Modern Central Europe (2007) and the edited collection The European World 1500–1800: An Introduction to Early Modern History (2009). Alexander Schlaak, formerly a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Constance, Germany, is a Research Stipendiary at the Institute of European History in Mainz. He works on the development of writing in urban communities in German-speaking Europe between c.1500 and 1800. Publications include ‘An den Grenzen des Machbaren: Zur Entwicklung von Schriftlichkeit in frühneuzeitlichen Reichsstädten am Beispiel des Esslinger Supplikenwesens’, in Esslinger Studien 44 (2005) and ‘Overloaded Interaction: Effects of the Growing Use of Writing in German Imperial Cities, 1500–1800’, in D. Sabean et al. (eds), The Holy Roman Empire, Reassessed (c.2009). James C. Scott is Sterling Professor of Political Science and Anthropology at Yale University, where he is Director of the Program in Agrarian Studies. He is author of: Moral Economy of the Peasant (1976), Weapons of the Weak (1985), Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990), Seeing Like a State (1998) and The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Mainland Southeast Asia (c.2009). Ian D. Whyte is Professor of Historical Geography in the Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University. His interests include the social and economic history, landscape history and environmental history of post-medieval Scotland and northern England. Recent books include Transforming Fell and Valley: Parliamentary Enclosure and the Landscape in North West England (Centre for North West Regional Studies, Lancaster University, 2003) and World Without End? Environmental Disasters and the Collapse of Empires (2008).

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Andreas Würgler is Lecturer in Early Modern European and Swiss History at the University of Bern. He works on forms of popular protest, the political and cultural history of representative institutions and European media history from 1400 to 1800. Publications include the monograph Unruhen und Öffentlichkeit: Städtische und ländliche Protestbewegungen im 18. Jahrhundert (1995), Medien in der Frühen Neuzeit (Enzyklopädie deutscher Geschichte, c.2009) and the coedited collections Bittschriften und Gravamina: Politik, Verwaltung und Justiz in Europa 1400–1800 (2005) and Praktiken des Widerstandes: Suppliken, Gravamina und Revolten in Europa (15.–18. Jahrhundert) (2006). David Zaret is Professor of Sociology and History at Indiana University – Bloomington, where he is also Senior Advisor, Office of the Provost. He is working on a cross-cultural study of supplication and petitioning. Publications include The Heavenly Contract: Ideology and Organization in Pre-Revolutionary Puritanism (1986) and Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England (2000).

Acknowledgements This volume emerged under the auspices of ‘Social Sites – Öffentliche Räume – Lieux d’Echanges 1300–1800’, a collaboration of historians at the Universities of Dresden, Paris I and Warwick facilitated by an ‘International Networks’ grant of the Leverhulme Trust (2005–2008). I would like to thank fellow members Christian Hochmuth, Wolfgang Kaiser, Susanne Rau and Gerd Schwerhoff for stimulating exchanges; James Brown and Tobias Hug (additionally) for their effective project management; and the Leverhulme Trust – as well as Warwick’s Research Development Fund – for the generous support of our activities. I am grateful to all authors for contributing to the first network workshop ‘Political Space in Pre-industrial Europe’ (University of Warwick, 3–6 November 2005) and for revising their papers in line with the emerging themes of this volume. I am particularly indebted to James C. Scott for his readiness to address and engage with scholars working on late medieval and early modern Europe and to Bernard Capp and Mike Crang for commenting on spatial approaches from different perspectives. The production process has been greatly assisted by James Brown (who helped with a wide range of editorial tasks), Mandy de Belin (who kindly drew the figures for my collaboration with Steve Hindle) and the expert guidance from Thomas Gray at Ashgate Publishing. B.K., September 2008

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Preface James C. Scott

Being asked to help open the conference that has resulted in this fine volume and, now, to open the volume itself is, in this case, an honour all the more welcome because it is accorded an impostor. I am unqualified on at least three grounds. I am neither a historian nor a geographer and my work has largely been about Southeast Asia, not late medieval or early modern Europe. Under the circumstances, if I can be useful at all, it will be as an impostor and provocateur. Taken collectively, these essays amount, in my view, to a powerful endorsement of the ‘spatial turn’ in political history. Each, in its own way, is a convincing demonstration of the proposition that all political space – architectural, ceremonial, territorial, cultural – is socially constituted in ways that shape, not always intentionally, the events that can occur in that space. The social shaping of space ensures, one might say, that all events and practices take place not in an abstract and homogeneous space but in particular distinctive places. All acts, in this sense, originate somewhere. They all have a provenance. They indelibly bear the birthmarks of their origin no matter how vigorous the attempt to pass them off as universals. Such pseudo-universals as, say, capitalism, citizenship, or even, today, the English language, bear more than traces of their origin in early industrial Britain, in the French Revolution, and as a minor dialect of the Germanic tongues, respectively. When political space is filled, as it inevitably is, by people, speech, activity, representations, memory, physical objects, this cultural action transforms space into a particular, constraining place. The same, of course, can be said about time. Just as there is no placeless space there is equally no timeless space. Though we often examine norms, identities, and ideologies as if they were free-floating, we know that they are only alive when their feet touch the ground, when they are embedded in a particular place and time and in human actors. Fixing the provenance and messy particularity of politically-charged institutions and practices exposes the contingency and fragility of any social arrangement. Demonstrating how things might have been otherwise (and might still again be otherwise) is precisely, as this volume shows, to realize the subversive potential of the best history. Those who benefit most from existing arrangements have generally most to gain by representing them as timeless and universal; to insist on place, contingency, and historicity is, by definition, to disrupt this project of ideological stabilization. The great sweep of these essays, covering institutions as different as churches, medieval banquets, public houses, political clubs, princely court centres, and Imperial Diets as well as activities as diverse as petitioning, enclosure, map-making and



Political Space in Pre-industrial Europe

impersonation cannot easily be brought into focus by a single lens. Most, however, depict a competitive struggle to shape social spaces to one purpose or another. One possible approach among many to this struggle to shape political space might be to distinguish in a rough and ready way vernacular places from official places, understanding that most political space is, in fact, an alloy of the two genres. As a homely illustration I offer the example of the road between my hometown of Durham, Connecticut and the coastal town of Guilford, 16 miles away. The vernacular name for this road at the Durham terminus is ‘the Guilford Road’ as it tells us where we will get to if we take it. The same road at the Guilford end is, logically enough, called ‘the Durham Road’ as it tells those who live in Guilford where they will get to if they take it. Notice that, in its vernacular existence, this ‘place’ has two names depending on where the person naming it is located. There are, of course, other roads leading to Durham from other surrounding towns, called ‘the Durham Road’ by their residents. As a vernacular system this works well; no one is confused. At the (non-local) county level, however, confusion arises. If you have been injured in an automobile accident and summon the ambulance to a location on ‘the Durham Road’, they will want to know which ‘Durham Road’ you are talking about. It could be a matter of life and death. The State of Connecticut, therefore, in its wisdom, calls the road between Durham and Guilford ‘State Route 77’, a unique designation, part of an infinite numerical series, best located on an official map of all roads in the state. The vernacular and official identities of the road coexist with little friction. As a Weberian ideal type, one might think of vernacular spaces and places as those constituted by the aggregate activities of many people often, but not necessarily, without any deliberate intention of bringing about this result. The footpaths, short-cuts and informal gathering places that exist in any cityscape or countryside would be a case in point. In older cities, many streets are, in fact, the belated official recognition of what began as the footpaths traced by daily activity. Vernacular spaces of this kind rarely have a formal existence and are best understood as nodes and trajectories created by a time-elapse photograph of actual movement. The more casual, improvisational, and un-institutionalized such spaces are, the more difficult they are to surveil and control. Order, repetition and predictability – what I have elsewhere called ‘legibility’ – are the policeman’s friend. Many vernacular spaces such as fiestas, pilgrimages, fairs, popular rituals and taverns are more fixed in space or time. In general, however, one might say that there is an affinity between plebeian activity, especially when it is potentially seditious, and vernacular spaces. Official spaces and places, by contrast, especially when they are public, tend to be heavily ceremonial, didactic and highly scripted. Imperial New Delhi, St Petersburg, Angkor Wat and Washington DC were each intended to overawe elites, provincials and the populace at large with their power and majesty. Their geometrical regularity was also, like the Roman military encampment, meant both to convey an overall order and to establish spatial modules that would facilitate inspection and control. The replicated order of the Spanish imperial town in the

Preface



New World is not just an aesthetic display of civil and religious order but a unit of management in the same way that McDonald’s franchises are standardized so that they can be rapidly assessed by a functionary from headquarters with a clipboard and a check list. The effort of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to ‘harmonize’ systems of statistics, land tenure, property law, currency regulation and so on throughout the world is animated by precisely the same spirit. Much of globalization is an attempt to sculpt vernacular places throughout the world to an international standard: that is to say, the vernacular standard of the North Atlantic liberal democracies passed off as a new universal and backed by imperial power. Scripted ceremonial displays – for example the medieval banquet with its ranked tables and menus, the coronation of a monarch, the May Day Parade in the Soviet Union prior to 1989, the mass, minutely choreographed ‘march-by’ of Kim Il Jung in Pyongyang – whatever else they may do, imply a single or unified playwright, a single conductor, a single intelligence orchestrating the performance. It is, in this sense, implicitly hierarchical. One might say that official spaces and places are, presumptively, an arena that privileges elites. Most of the time, even the plebeian participants and bystanders at such displays are on their best behaviour. They take care not to step out of line. It is normally impossible to tell, from their public conduct alone, whether they are unwilling conscripts going through the motions or enthusiastic participants. Like La Bruyère’s courtiers, they have mastered the art of the mask and know what is expected of them. The most interesting political spaces, however, are those which are most contested over time and where it is not entirely clear who is in control. My current fieldwork in Burma provides a small illustration of such ambiguity. When the military junta raised petrol prices in 2006, the popular grumbling was palpable. Rumours reached Mandalay, where I was studying a small marketplace demonstration in Yangon, hundreds of miles away, by a handful of students against high prices. I assumed that it was one of the first, daring manifestations of discontent but my teacher brought me up short. He believed it was almost certainly a police provocation designed to draw in opponents of the regime so they could be identified and detained. His friends were equally suspicious. Thus, what might have seemed a plebeian political space was judged contaminated. Rather like East Germany with its ubiquitous Stasi or Ceausescu’s Romania, where it was said that half the population was paid to watch the other half, the Burmese regime has penetrated, or is believed to have penetrated, the whole of political space, with the exception of some Buddhist monasteries. As most civic space is now regime-occupied territory, an atomized but alienated public is reduced to the most improvisational, vernacular forms of protest such as nighttime graffito, rumour and individual gestures. More rarely, vernacular forms of political space-making can occupy, with striking effect, the most scripted of official sites. An obvious example is the brieflived popular occupation of Tiananmen Square by opponents of the Chinese Communist Party in 1989. The creation of a centralizing, ceremonial site for the display of power always carries within it the danger of its usurpation for a ritual



Political Space in Pre-industrial Europe

of reversal, a Black Mass, on that same spot. The symbolic capital created by the Chinese authorities at this symbolic centre became, suddenly, a ready-made asset that could be cashed in, in this case temporarily, by plebeian actors. It did not require any planning to know that Tiananmen Square was the appropriate stage for an anti-regime festival. As I write this, the Chinese government is bending its efforts to ensure that an international display of its competence, grandeur and power, the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, are not spoiled by plebeians from China or abroad. A useful template for contested political space, in my view, is the pre-Lenten Carnival. It has been a cultural battleground for a Gramscian war of position between secular authorities, Catholic and Protestant establishments, and plebeian customs and practices for a very long time. It is, like many later democratic rituals such as electoral campaigns, a political site where elites and oligarchs try to stage-manage a performance by plebeians who, as in Carnival, are essential to the performance but whose conduct can never be securely predicted. Such shared but always contested political sites would seem to be the most promising terrain on which to examine the politics of place.

Introduction* Beat Kümin

After a period of marginalization by socio-economic and cultural priorities in the second half of the twentieth century, political history, once the undisputed flagship of the study of the past, is experiencing a sustained renaissance. Originally restricted to diplomatic relations, (military) power struggles and the deeds of social elites, the field’s definition has expanded to the negotiation and enforcement (‘politics’) of all binding rules (‘policies’) within the institutional framework of any territorial unit (‘polity’). As a result, the discipline has engaged with a growing range of human exchange and an ever more diverse spectrum of agents. State formation, to take a classic theme from the early modern period, now appears less like a linear campaign orchestrated from above, but a protracted dialogue between centre and periphery, innovation and tradition, shared values (like peace, order and the common good) and fiercely contested priorities (articulated in lawsuits and representative assemblies). The latest readjustment of perspectives owes much to the cultural turn of the last few decades, when the historical sciences in general moved their focus from ‘hard facts’ – dates, reigns and quantifiable entities – to ‘softer’ issues like identities, perceptions and representations. This shift prompted interest in new topics like communication structures and the construction of meaning by individuals and social groups. Numerous programmatic works dedicated to ‘political culture’, a ‘new political history’ or ‘historical policy research’ underline the stimulating quality of these fresh departures. *

  I would like to thank James Brown, the members of the ‘Social Sites Network’, participants of the 2005 workshop on ‘Political Space’ and the seminar audience of the ‘Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies’ at the University of York for their comments and suggestions on various aspects of this introduction. 1  Andreas Rödder, ‘Klios Neue Kleider: Theoriedebatten um eine Kulturgeschichte der Politik in der Moderne’, Historische Zeitschrift, 283 (2006): 657–88, esp. 677–8.    See the plurality of approaches featured in the ‘European Science Foundation’ project The Origins of the Modern State in Europe, 13th to 18th Centuries (7 vols, Oxford, 1995–2000), and Michael Braddick, ‘State Formation and the Historiography of Early Modern England’, History Compass, 2 (2004) [http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/loi/ hico; consulted 10/9/2007].    Conceptual reflection is particularly intense in German-speaking Europe: Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger (ed.), Was heißt Kulturgeschichte des Politischen? (Berlin, 2005); Ute Frevert and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt (eds), Neue Politikgeschichte. Perspektiven einer historischen Politikforschung (Frankfurt a.M., 2005); Luise Schorn-Schütte, Historische Politikforschung. Eine Einführung (Munich, 2006). On the reinvigoration of the field in



Political Space in Pre-industrial Europe

The early modern period, to sketch some of their preliminary conclusions, featured a dynamic political system distinct from both the feudal and personalized bonds of the Middle Ages and the dominance of parties, opinion polls and electronic media of modern times. Between the fifteenth and early nineteenth centuries, face-to-face interaction through rituals and ceremonies was increasingly complemented (but not superseded) by recourse to writing and the use of print, particularly in the larger territories. Defence and the administration of justice continued to serve as principal legitimizations for rulers, but alongside a paternalistic concern for the ‘common good’ became ever more prominent, prompting unprecedented regulatory activity by the emerging ‘police state’ and closer interaction between centre and periphery. In spite of tendencies towards oligarchization, common people exercised influence through local government positions, petitioning and various forms of resistance. Political practice in general remained characterized by notions of personal honour and ad-hoc solutions rather than ideologies and blueprints. There was no neat separation of powers between legislative, executive and judicial authorities and the ‘public sphere’ consisted of temporary or thematic intensifications of debate among more or less narrowly circumscribed groups (reaching far down the social scale in exceptional moments like the German Reformation or the English Revolution) rather than informed and institutionalized reasoning among the aspiring bourgeoisie (as from the eighteenth century). International relations involved agents, networks and cultural transfers well beyond diplomatic channels. Major wars and peace congresses like that of Westphalia in 1648 produced a European state system based on the balance of power, while constant rivalry between its leading players fostered processes of centralization, bureaucratization and fiscalization. The princely court – represented in its archetypal form by Louis XIV’s palace of Versailles – symbolized dynastic glory and facilitated not so much a disciplining of the aristocracy, as an ongoing negotiation of interests between monarchs and the new service nobility of household officials, administrators and army commanders. Another prominent ‘turn’ in the humanities and social sciences, however, has as yet had a more limited effect on the field. In spite of a host of conceptual reflections, dedicated conferences and specialized studies, the potential of ‘space’ the Anglophone world see Susan Pedersen, ‘What is Political History Now?’, in David Cannadine (ed.), What is History Now? (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 36–56.    General trends emerging from e.g. Wayne te Brake, Shaping History: Ordinary People in European Politics 1500–1700 (Berkeley, 1998); Jan Glete, War and the State in Early Modern Europe (London, 2002); Jeroen Duindam, Vienna and Versailles: The Courts of Europe’s Major Dynastic Rivals, 1550–1780 (Cambridge, 2003); Rudolf Schlögl (ed.), Interaktion und Herrschaft: Die Politik der frühneuzeitlichen Stadt (Constance, 2004); Dagmar Freist, ‘Öffentlichkeit und Herrschaftslegitimation in der Frühen Neuzeit’, in Ronald Asch and Dagmar Freist (eds), Staatsbildung als kultureller Prozess (Cologne, 2005), pp. 321–51; see also Beat Kümin, ‘Review Article: Political Culture in the Holy Roman Empire’, German History (forthcoming c.2009).

Introduction



as an analytical category for political history remains to be fully explored. While operating with territorial concepts like ‘counties’ and ‘courts’ as a matter of course, political scientists have tended to privilege issues of power and chronology, fearing perhaps that greater sensitivity to space would inescapably reduce the role of human agency and time. And yet, pioneering work on the integration of these dimensions has been conducted. Closer scrutiny of civic ceremony in Italian Renaissance cities, for example, reveals how ritual performances – particularly processions by dignitaries along carefully chosen routes within the communal topography – helped contemporaries to perceive towns not just as physical, legal and social units, but also more abstract political spaces: In Venice … the annual processions of the doge served as a living representation of the supposedly unchanging constitution of the regime. A dozen times a year or more, the leading office holders participated in lengthy processions … through the streets of the city, always winding their way back to the great basilica of St Mark where these hard-headed politicians humbled themselves before their protector saint. … The order of procession defined the legal relationship between the various political and bureaucratic offices within the Venetian hierarchy.

In an attempt to promote more sustained engagement with spatial dimensions, the academic network ‘Social Sites – Öffentliche Räume – Lieux d’échanges 1300– 1800’ dedicated its first workshop in 2005 to the theme of ‘Political Space in Pre-industrial Europe’. The present volume unites a selection of papers presented at the Warwick gathering in November 2005 as well as a number of additionally commissioned contributions. The network pursues two principal objectives. One 

  For initial orientations see Jürgen Osterhammel, ‘Die Wiederkehr des Raums: Geographie, Geohistorie und historische Geographie’, Neue politische Literatur, 43 (1998): 374–95; Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift (eds), Thinking Space (London, 2000); Martina Löw, Raumsoziologie (Frankfurt a.M., 2001); Denis Cosgrove, ‘Landscape and Landschaft: Lecture Delivered at the “Spatial Turn in History” Symposium’, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute Washington, 35 (2004): 57–71.    An observation made in the report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences: Open the Social Sciences (Stanford, 1996), p. 26. I owe this reference to James Brown.   Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), p. 235. ‘Why … did Florentines expend such energy in a formal behaviour that moderns tend to dismiss as mere spectacle? The answer is that contemporaries believed that in these rites they witnessed the political process at work. Inhabitants participated to be part of that process. Rather than being theatre, the formal public life of this city articulated the changing order of things, and was part of that change.’ Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (Ithaca, 1991), pp. 213–14.    For information on network initiatives, related scholarly activities and a bibliography of spatial approaches to the premodern period see the ‘Social Sites’ website: http:// go.warwick.ac.uk/socialsites (consulted 10/9/2007).



Political Space in Pre-industrial Europe

is to promote greater awareness of evolving spatial uses and perceptions in the past, both on the macro-level of humanity’s place in the (meta-)physical order, including the move from a geo- to a heliocentric cosmology in the course of the Renaissance, the rejection of Purgatory as an intermediary place between earth and heaven during the Protestant Reformation and the changing balance between local and global markets in the wake of European expansion, and on the micro-level of personal situation within a locality or social centres such as churches, market squares or public houses. As the example of the Italian piazza – an architectural complex, ritual space and social construct with ever-changing functions (not just over the centuries, but also depending on climate, season, religious calendar and economic cycle) – demonstrates, studies of the latter require a combination of spatial with a range of other apposite approaches.10 A second network objective is to test the viability of theoretical models for the early modern period. Spatial approaches have a long academic pedigree, including seminal contributions by Georg Simmel (with particular reference to the phenomenon of borders) in the early and Henri Lefebvre (on the social production of different levels of space) in the late twentieth century, but the turn of the millennium saw a sudden surge of systematic investigations into the spatiality of human exchange in disciplines ranging from archaeology to literary studies.11 One common denominator of most of these works is the emphasis on the ‘relational’ constitution of space. In contrast to ‘essentialist’ understandings, which endow given units – a town, pays historique, region or even vast geographical landscape such as the Mediterranean12 – with specific characteristics shaped by environmental and socio-economic structures, more recent conceptualizations envisage space as the dynamic product of interactions between locations, objects and human agents, that is to say as situational syntheses dependent on mental    Helge Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos – From Myths to the Accelerating Universe: A History of Cosmology (Oxford, 2006); Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (eds), Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2005); Donatella Calabi, The Market and the City: Square, Street and Architecture in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2004); Renate Dürr and Gerd Schwerhoff (eds), Kirchen, Märkte und Tavernen. Handlungs- und Erfahrungsräume in der Frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt a.M., 2005). See also the forthcoming proceedings of the network workshops ‘Social Space and Religious Culture’ (eds Susanne Rau and Gerd Schwerhoff) and ‘Sites, Places, Spaces’ (ed. Wolfgang Kaiser). 10  Mario Isnenghi, L’Italia in Piazza: I luoghi della vita pubblica dal 1848 ai giorni nostri (Bologna, 2004), esp. pp. 19–29. 11   Georg Simmel, ‘Soziologie des Raumes’, in Rüdiger Kramme et al. (eds), Georg Simmel. Aufsätze und Abhandlungen, 1901–1908 (vol. 1, Frankfurt am Main, 1995), pp. 132–83; Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, 1991; 1st French edn, 1974). In addition to works cited in note 5 above see also Matthew Johnson, An Archaeology of Capitalism (Oxford, 1996), and Bernhard Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland (Basingstoke, 2000). 12  The latter e.g. in a classic text of the French Annales school: Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (London, 1973).

Introduction



perceptions and the networks in which individuals find themselves. According to one prominent voice: Space can be seen as a relational ordering of living beings and social goods. … [To] include human beings in the conceptualization of space is unusual and initially renders reflection about spaces more difficult. But it is necessary, because … people … display the distinctive property of being able to position themselves and to leave their positions. Moreover, they influence the construction of space through facial expressions, gestures, language, etc. … Social goods, too, exert external effects, for example through odours and noises, thus influencing the possibilities of spatial construction. […] Two basic processes of space construction are to be distinguished. First, space is constituted by the situating of social goods and people … We shall call this process spacing. Spacing means erection, building, or positioning. Examples are the display of wares in a supermarket, … the networking of computers [etc]. Second … the constitution of space also requires synthesis, that is to say, goods and people are connected to form spaces through processes of perception … or recall. In the day-to-day activity of constituting space, synthesis and spacing are concurrent, since action is always processual.13

In such a conceptual framework, space no longer appears as an inert shell or ‘container’, but as a relational construct and, in turn, a factor with a potential to shape subsequent forms of human exchange.14 Applied to an early modern example, inexplicable or miraculous events would have been experienced very differently by contemporary witnesses, depending for example on their location, religious beliefs, knowledge of comparable events, personal networks, mindsets (local-customary as in the case of pious peasants or ‘universal-critical’ as for a Humanist like Erasmus) and specific attributes of the place (a street corner, church or open field). Once ‘synthesized’ into a holy site by popular consensus or Church endorsement, the

13  Martina Löw, ‘The Constitution of Space’ (lecture delivered at the University of Paris I on 14 March 2005 [accessible at http://raumsoz.ifs.tu-darmstadt.de/, consulted 11/9/2007]). For a fuller account see her Raumsoziologie, esp. the summarizing theses on pp. 271–3. 14  Using somewhat different terminology, Thomas F. Gieryn places similar emphasis on the ‘agentic’ notion of ‘place’ as a ‘constituent element of social life’: ‘A Space for Place in Sociology’, Annual Review of Sociology, 26 (2000): 463–96, esp. 463. Differences in the definition of key terms like ‘place’ and ‘space’ complicate interdisciplinary work in the field and some form of standardization – perhaps by using ‘location’ for a specific geographical point, ‘place’ for a site constituted by the interaction of particular agents, objects and atmospheric elements and ‘space’ for the various physical and mental relations between all relevant factors – would be highly desirable.

Political Space in Pre-industrial Europe

10

previously unremarkable spot could turn into the focal point for activities like pilgrimages, thus shaping subsequent social exchange. Among other opportunities, a refined spatial methodology offers the chance to move beyond the binary models that have tended to structure discussions in the field. Inspired by anthropological studies, for example, religious historians sought to demarcate the sacred and the profane (with liminal areas in between); drawing on sociological work, students of gender relations drew firm lines between the private and public spheres; while political scientists prompted historians of resistance to contrast locations of power with subversive ‘social sites’. Perceptive and highly stimulating as investigative tools, none of these polarities really stood the test of historical verification, an exercise more likely to reveal overlaps, situational differences and conflicting perceptions.15 The principal aim of the Warwick workshop was to utilize spatial approaches and insights for the study of politics in the past. What, if anything, can recent theories and/or reconstructions of pre-modern spatial perceptions and practices contribute to our understanding of decision-making processes? Is it possible to combine investigations of political space with due sensitivity to changes over time?16 Does a closer focus on the spatiality of human exchange provide ‘value added’ not only with respect to ‘conventional’, but also the ‘new’ political history? The network’s anticipated answer to all of these questions, of course, was affirmative: common sense alone seems to suggest that key themes like church-state relations, military planning, colonialism and diplomatic encounters must have been affected by variables like personal connections, metaphysical beliefs, spatial mobility and geographical knowledge. Given the limits of one single project, however, thematic, regional and chronological priorities had to be set. The focus of this volume thus lies on two broad themes, ‘political sites’ and ‘spatial politics’, with particular – but not exclusive – reference to England and German-speaking Europe. Two principal research questions guided the authors’ investigations: • •

15

Where did political exchange take place? How did spatial dimensions affect political life in different contexts?

  For critical assessments of such polarities see Nicholas Vincent, ‘The Pilgrimages of the Angevin Kings of England, 1154–1272’, in Colin Morris and Peter Roberts (eds), The English Experience from Becket to Bunyan (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 12–45; Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1993), esp. pp. 240–41; Susanne Rau and Gerd Schwerhoff, ‘Öffentliche Räume in der Frühen Neuzeit. Überlegungen zu Leitbegriffen und Themen eines Forschungsfeldes’, in Susanne Rau and Gerd Schwerhoff (eds), Zwischen, Gotteshaus und Taverne (Cologne, 2004), pp. 11–52; and the essay by James Brown in this volume. 16  Explicit attempts to combine the two analytical variables in Jon May and Nigel Thrift (eds), Timespace: Geographies of Temporality (London, 2001).

Introduction

11

In terms of regional coverage, concentration on England and the Holy Roman Empire allows examination of different constitutional environments – one associated with a strong centre and growing parliamentary powers, the other with political fragmentation and absolutist tendencies – and heterogeneous confessional settings – one with an idiosyncratic (eventually ‘Anglican’) state church, the other with institutionalized (if long explosive) co-existence of Lutheran, Catholic and (from 1648) Reformed territories. Here again, however, polarities apply only to a point: representative elements were by no means absent in the German-speaking lands, as the examples of the Imperial Diet and numerous quasi-autonomous city-states illustrate, while the Church of England failed to integrate substantial numbers of Catholics and Protestant Nonconformists.17 Chronologically, the perspective extends from the later Middle Ages right up to the eighteenth century, an extended period for which there is as yet no satisfactory terminology. ‘Pre-industrial Europe’ has been used here to highlight the volume’s emphasis on the centuries preceding full-scale industrialization of the continent, without denying the existence of ‘advanced’ forms of production before that point or claiming to cover the entire time-span covered by the phrase. While most of the authors approach the issues from a historical point of view, contributions from the fields of sociology, cultural geography and political science reflect the interdisciplinary character of current spatial research. Following a ‘Preface’ by James C. Scott, who kindly agreed to open the workshop with observations from a different chronological and regional perspective,18 the volume is structured into three parts: I. ‘Political Sites’, focusing on locations of political exchange; II. ‘Spatial Politics’, engaging with a range of different practices and constellations; and III. ‘Outlook’, offering two more general assessments of the field. Part I begins with Henry J. Cohn’s study of the locations of German Imperial Diets. Every few years, the amorphous phenomenon of the ‘Empire’ penetrated the walls of a (more or less) mutually agreeable host city. Through representatives of all estates and elaborate rituals such as investitures, the ‘German Nation’ acquired a tangible shape and political agency. The ceremonial entry of the Emperor, requisition of urban infrastructure, temporary suspension of immunities and the presence of foreign troops, to name but a few examples, fundamentally transformed the townscape for months on end. Intricately designed and lavishly furnished palaces, as Ronald G. Asch shows in his comparative survey, allowed the display of monarchical might and the control of access to the sovereign. Non-peripatetic rulers had to strike a delicate balance between openness and distance and develop ways to remain symbolically present in the provinces they no longer visited. Far from   For recent surveys see Peter Wilson, From Reich to Revolution: German History 1600–1806 (Basingstoke, 2003); Raingard Eßer, Die Tudors und die Stuarts 1485–1714 (Stuttgart, 2004). 18   The name of the network, of course, alludes to his seminal concept of ‘social sites’: James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990), pp. 108–35. 17

12

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being mere ‘theatres’ of power, princely courts allowed the negotiation of interests, with nobles seeking advancement through dedicated service, the forging of factions and the construction of patronage networks. Aristocratic residences and presence simultaneously transformed nearby capital cities. Further down the architectural hierarchy, divergent political forces intersected in public houses, too. In contrast to the conventional emphasis on disorder and subversion, James R. Brown highlights their use as surveillance sites in an English urban community. Delinquent behaviour was not only prohibited by Parliamentary statutes, town mandates and licensing regulation, but publicans, staff and patrons themselves can all be found ‘looking and listening’ for evidence of crimes, immoral acts and seditious language, be it in drinking lounges, back rooms or even bedchambers. The prevalence of informal policing in drinking establishments suggests limitations to the popular negotiation of political authority in early modern towns. Voluntary associations are identified as pillars of civil society by Peter Clark. While meeting in ‘real’ places (often in fact inns and taverns), they helped to create wider political spaces through the discussion of news, administrative training, public works and personal networks. In comparative perspective, English clubs and societies – according to Clark’s bold thesis – appear much more diversified and autonomous than either their continental equivalents or religious confraternities, perhaps because of higher urbanization rates and a less interventionist government on this side of the Channel. In the relatively peripheral location of Cumbria, meanwhile, parliamentary enclosure saw outsiders imposing national norms on a distinctive local environment characterized by a high proportion of open commons. Ian D. Whyte’s contribution traces the resulting increase in spatial awareness, especially regarding boundaries, and the loss of customary political and recreational sites. Drawing on a rural case study and a yeoman’s diary, furthermore, he finds sociability in indoor venues more socially homogeneous than in outdoor arenas, which allowed for greater mixing of different groups. Part II opens with a reminder of the importance of ‘real’ political space for the governance of a territory. In a wide-ranging analysis of links between central authority and local landowners in medieval England, Christine Carpenter points not only to variables of distance and terrain, but also to the significance of tenurial geography (for example the number, size and distribution of major estates) and the structure of local communication networks, often based on gatherings of noblemen and gentry in locations such as their own houses, town halls and parish churches. Drawing on theoretical work on the predominance of face-to-face communication in pre-industrial politics, Alexander Schlaak examines a series of conflicts in a German Imperial Free City. The adoption of a spatial perspective reveals how particular sites were used, marked and violated in the course of these disputes and how the opposing parties exploited the fundamental variables of absence/presence and internal/external sources of power. Changing ecclesio-political constellations in English parishes between the late fourteenth and early seventeenth centuries are the focus of a collaborative essay by Steve Hindle and Beat Kümin. Charting the positions and strengths of numerous forces on both sides of the communal

Introduction

13

boundary as well as in the metaphysical sphere, it observes adjustments in several basic polarities (men vs women; better vs lower sort; laity vs clergy) as well as a dramatic shift from purgatory and penitential incentive towards external secular authority as the principal power source in parish life. Zooming in on the 1640s, David Zaret casts new light on the explosion of popular political debate during the English revolution. Faced with a near-unanimous consensus that discussion of public affairs outside established arenas like Parliament or town halls smacked of sedition and libel, printed petitions obscured their origins in locations like private or public houses. Adopting deferential tones, they purported to be spontaneous grievances and helped to build an ‘abstract’ public sphere by rendering ‘real’ place invisible. Vague and imprecise space, by contrast, is the theme of Andreas Würgler’s scrutiny of early modern maps of the Swiss Confederation. Neither its own members nor the major European powers could agree on the exact extent of this complex network of sovereign republics, allies and associated territories. Depending on confessional affiliation and a range of other variables, the contours of certain boundaries varied significantly. Maps, furthermore, were used for representative purposes (marginal decorations often featured cantonal crests, historic scenes and landscapes) as well as the transmission of geographical information. Invented spaces, finally, form a principal theme in the discussion of bogus kings and officials by Tobias B. Hug. Dynastic uncertainties, an embryonic bureaucracy and the lack of reliable means of identification facilitated the assumption of false identities and the usurpation of power at all levels of the English polity. Avoiding the few well-controlled sites where they might be detected, impostors appropriated official symbols and language to further their own personal and financial interests. The volume concludes with two commentaries in Part III. Bernard Capp offers a review of the contributions from a historian’s perspective, while Mike Crang, an exponent of the cultural geography movement, provides an assessment of the implications of varying spatial approaches for our understanding of pre-industrial political processes. Does ‘space’ constitute a fruitful new tool for political history? The essays and commentaries in this collection hope to provide some early indications. With a view to the ‘Social Sites’ network objectives, that is the study of spatial perceptions/ practices in the past and the applicability of current theoretical concepts, at least, the project yields valuable insights. It demonstrates, for example, that pre-industrial Europe featured a much wider range of political sites than is usually assumed: not just princely courts, town halls and meeting-points of representative assemblies, but open fields as well as the back rooms of provincial public houses. This differentiation surely relates to the amorphous quality and versatility of specific places or spaces, as seen with regard to the circumscription of the Swiss Confederation, the sites of revolutionary petitioning and the imaginary claims of territorial powers by bogus officials. Spatial dimensions, furthermore, emerge as key features of political life, be it in terms of proximity to rulers, the presence or absence of key agents, periodic

Political Space in Pre-industrial Europe

14

manifestation of Empires, a growing preoccupation with borders and shifts in political constellations within local communities. As for theoretical concepts, some contributors insist on the primary significance of ‘real’ physical space (layouts of buildings, topography, distance, communication infrastructure, landholding patterns) and warn against the potential overstretch of yet another fashionable ‘turn’.19 The examples of English petitions, associations and surveillance, however, all illustrate ways in which specific activities undertaken in ‘real’ topographical locations connected people with the wider political spaces of local government and more abstract notions like religious ideals and the emerging public sphere.20 Most importantly, perhaps, the studies substantiate the extent to which political spaces acquired meaning through processes of relational constitution. These involved agents (from courtiers down to poor widows), places (like market squares and parish churches), objects (such as uniforms or drinking vessels) and atmospheric elements (among others: time of day, seasons of the year, dynastic instability, presence of strangers). Changes in the constellation resulted in modifications of spatial experience: this is why representations of royal might like massive palaces could easily turn into symbols of decline (i.e. if rooms, courtyards and gardens remained empty or fell into disrepair) and why convivial exchanges over a drink often metamorphosed into conflicts about personal honour or sometimes, if unsympathetic ears listened in, accusations of subversion. Many avenues remain to be explored. One rewarding approach might be scalar analysis, that is the systematic study of the respective positions, vertical ordering and interrelations of multiple spatial units. Such investigations, according to Neil Brenner, are unlikely to reveal stable pyramid shapes, but rather ongoing processes of production, contestation and rearrangement of specific configurations, in other words mosaics of different spatial hierarchies. Yet partial and temporary fixations of scalar relationships (resulting in certain constraints on subsequent evolutions) can be achieved by powerful historical agents such as the state. Given the fraught and dynamic relationships between princely courts, regions and local communities in the early modern period, such a model opens intriguing possibilities for political historians.21 For future work, therefore, enhanced sensitivity to spatial variables offers new ways to look at familiar sources and promises to deepen our understanding

19

  See the summary of the plenary discussion in the workshop report by James Brown and Christian Hochmuth: http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/tagungsberichte/id=981 (consulted 12/10/2007). 20   Cf. the proceedings of the first ‘Social Sites’ network initiative, a panel on the relationship between microspaces and the wider world, in Dürr and Schwerhoff, Tavernen. 21   Neil Brenner, ‘The Limits to Scale? Methodological Reflections on Scalar Structuration’, Progress in Human Geography, 25 (2001): 591–614, esp. 591.

Introduction

15

of political issues, whether they relate to individuals, social groups, economic structures or the mentalities and perceptions of people in the past.

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Part I Political Sites

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Chapter 1

Representing Political Space at a Political Site: The Imperial Diets of the Sixteenth Century Henry J. Cohn

Not only did the Holy Roman Empire occupy the greatest land space of any political entity in early modern Europe, but it had Europe’s most complex political structure. During its heyday – the century from 1486 onwards – the Empire’s representative body, the imperial diet (Reichstag), may have failed to resolve permanently the intractable problems arising from the Reformation, but it performed valuable functions. It legislated for the judicial and economic life of the Empire; it eventually raised taxation to help repel the Ottoman advance in the second half of the sixteenth century; and above all it provided a political forum for the Emperor and the imperial estates – the electors, princes and imperial cities – to work through their disagreements by discussion rather than military conflict. When this system later broke down because of disputes over the Reformation settlement at the Peace of Augsburg of 1555, the Thirty Years War ensued. Although the diet was able to attract the intense interest and admiration of European commentators, notably Jean Bodin, the Empire had no capital city and therefore no place where the diet could meet regularly and secure its own building and permanent bureaucratic base, at least not until the Perpetual Diet at Regensburg from 1664. The Reichstag operated instead in the peripatetic tradition of the medieval court of the emperors, from which it partly took its origin, meeting in a number of imperial cities and very occasionally in a town in the elected emperor’s inherited territories. For large stretches of the century under review    See Friedrich H. Schubert, Die Deutschen Reichstage in der Staatslehre der frühen Neuzeit (Göttingen, 1966); Friedrich Beiderbeck, ‘Die Wahrnehmung des Reichstages in der Reichspolitik König Heinrichs IV’, in Maximilian Lanzinner and Arno Strohmeyer (eds), Der Reichstag 1486–1613: Kommunikation, Wahrnehmung, Öffentlichkeit (Göttingen, 2006), pp. 497–521, esp. 499–500, and the whole section in this volume on the perception of the Empire and its diet in the rest of Europe, pp. 405–521.   On the late medieval origins of the diet, see Peter Moraw, ‘Versuch über die Entstehung des Reichstags’, in Hermann Weber (ed.), Politische Ordnungen und soziale Kräfte im Alten Reich (Wiesbaden, 1980), pp. 1–36; Peter Moraw, ‘Hoftag und Reichstag von den Anfängen im Mittelalter bis 1806’, in Peter Moraw, Über König und Reich (Sigmaringen, 1995), pp. 47–71; Gabriele Annas, Hoftag – Gemeiner Tag – Reichstag, 2 vols + CD-Rom (Göttingen, 2004); Henry J. Cohn, ‘The German Imperial Diet at the End of

20

Political Space in Pre-industrial Europe

the diet met on average every two years. Most sessions lasted for months and were attended by several thousands of people, if one includes the court entourage and advisers of the emperor and princes and the servants and military guards of all the delegations. During this prolonged period the resident population may well have doubled in size. The fact that this ‘political site’ regularly changed its location produced not only severe logistical problems for those attending the diet but challenging disruptions to the spatial dispositions of the ruling councils and inhabitants of the chosen cities. Historians of the Empire have long been aware of the importance of political space and political sites. Approaches to explaining its nature have come full circle over the past 350 years. Publicists from the late seventeenth century onwards described it as a system of many parts, bound in a whole, which stood in complex relationships to one another. There followed the lengthy aberration of nationalist historians of the nineteenth century and beyond who mostly condemned the old Empire for failing to match the achievements of supposedly absolute monarchies to the west – let alone those of the second German Empire after 1871. In recent decades, however, the Empire has been seen not as a state manqué, but as a political system within a region. In 1989 Georg Schmidt summed up the view of a school of historians who were both inspired by their mentor Volker Press and aware of the movement for European integration: Die Verfassungsstruktur des Alten Reiches, die allen Mitgliedern und Subsystemen größtmögliche Unabhängigkeit gewährte und dennoch einen übergeordneten Zusammenhang in Form einer Verantwortungsgemeinschaft bewahrte bzw. stets von neuem konstruierte, könnte den Blick schärfen für ganz andere als ‘staatliche’ Integrationsmodelle, die regionale und lokale Eigenheiten und Selbstbestimmung mit der notwendigen Einbindung in größere Verbundssysteme verknüpfen. [The constitutional structure of the Old Empire allowed all its members and subsystems the greatest possible independence and nevertheless retained, and indeed constantly reconstructed, an overarching framework in the form of a the Fifteenth Century’, in Jaume Sobriqués et al. (eds), Representative and Parliamentary Institutions (2 vols, Barcelona, 2005), vol. 1, pp. 149–57.    Bernd Roeck, Reichssystem und Reichsherkommen (Stuttgart, 1984), p. 155.    Georg Schmidt, Der Wetterauer Grafenverein (Marburg, 1989), p. 15. He has more recently described the Empire as an ‘Empire-State’, but still regards its framework as a political system. See Georg Schmidt, Geschichte des Alten Reiches (Munich, 1999), pp. 43–4. A good introduction to the controversy over the idea of an ‘Empire-State’ may be found in the contributions by Schmidt, Heinz Schilling and Johannes Burkhardt in Matthias Schnettger (ed.), Imperium Romanum – Irregulare Corpus – Teutscher Reichs-Staat (Mainz, 2002); see also Peter H. Wilson, ‘Still a Monstrosity? Some Reflections on Early Modern German Statehood’, Historical Journal, 49 (2006): 565–76.

Representing Political Space at a Political Site

21

community of responsibility. Its structure could make us more keenly aware of models for integration – other than the state – which combine regional and local specificities and self-determination with the necessary incorporation in larger systems of association.]

According to this notion of a political system, based on the writings of the sociologist Niklas Luhmann, the actors within it have varying degrees of both power and sovereignty. They react towards one another in accordance with their estimation of their own interests and the likely reactions of others, and within the legal and other rules of the system. This is quite similar to Wayne te Brake’s definition of ‘political space’ as ‘an arena, bounded in terms of both authority and territory, within which political bargaining can occur’. However, te Brake makes no reference to sociological theory and, more importantly, gives popular action greater weight alongside ruling elites than do German historians, with the notable exception of Peter Blickle and his school. Now, if this political systems approach is adopted, the history of the Empire as a whole becomes inseparable from that of its constituent parts: the princes, imperial cities, the other immediate powers, and even the mediate ones who were subordinate to the imperial estates. Each region had its own, smaller political system, under the domination of one or more hegemonial princes. The centre and the periphery reacted upon one another, so that regional history and the history of the Empire may not be studied in separate compartments, as so often was past practice. Thus the territorial consolidation of the principalities in the late medieval and early modern periods influenced their relations with the king/emperor, and vice versa. As specific examples, the choice by the electors of Charles V as emperor in 1519 can be explained as partly a result of the configurations of regional politics, and soon the interrelation between local and imperial politics would strongly influence the fortunes of the early Reformation. The influence of the Emperor varied in intensity and effectiveness according to both his personal abilities and the receptiveness of the intermediate rulers below him. That receptiveness normally differed regionally. Zones of influence may be charted which remained virtually the same throughout the period to 1450, and with modifications for at least a century afterwards.    Volker Press, Das Alte Reich (Berlin, 1997); Michael Sikora, ‘Formen des Politischen. Der frühmoderne deutsche Reichstag in systemtheoretischer Perspektive’, in Frank Becker (ed.), Geschichte und Systemtheorie (Frankfurt am Main, 2004), pp. 157–84.    Wayne te Brake, Shaping History: Ordinary People in European Politics 1500– 1700 (Berkeley, 1998), p. 3.    Peter Blickle, Obedient Germans? A Rebuttal (Charlottesville, 1997).    Henry J. Cohn, ‘Did Bribes Induce the German Electors to Choose Charles V as Emperor in 1519?’, German History, 19 (2001): 1–27; Armin Kohnle, Reichstag und Reformation (Heidelberg, 2001).    Peter Moraw, Von offener Verfassung zu gestalteter Verdichtung. Das Reich im späten Mittelalter 1250 bis 1490 (Berlin, 1985); Moraw, Über König und Reich.

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1. Zones ‘near’ to the king were mostly regions where the kings had formerly held lands and where there were few or no large principalities – chiefly Swabia, Franconia, and the middle Rhineland. These were the regions, along with the monarch’s own dynastic lands, which normally supplied most of his loyal advisers, military chiefs, chancery officials and creditors. They were also more likely actually to pay the taxation voted by the imperial diet when military contributions came on stream during the later fifteenth century. 2. Men in zones ‘open’ to the king, like the Upper Rhineland, were sometimes prepared to enter his service or become his allies, at others not, depending on political circumstances and personal relationships. 3. ‘Distant’ regions almost never had any connection with the king and included most of the north of the Empire and the lands of the Wittelsbachs, who, after the extinction of the Luxemburgers in 1437, were the only dynasty competing for the throne with the Habsburgs. The kings had a special relationship with the seven electors, more often than not one of barely concealed hostility. Although royal influence did not depend solely on distance, it was a large element in the equation, as the use of the spatial terms ‘near’ and ‘distant’ implies. This brief summary is intended to show that ideas about ‘political space’ have long been current among German historians of the late medieval/early modern Empire, even if they did not use that phrase. Their analysis assumes moreover that royal and princely authority was not based primarily on legal or military power, but on personal and political influence and on the reciprocal obligations between clients and patrons. It follows that political and constitutional history must be underpinned by prosopography and other tools of social history. Moreover, modes of communication between the various participants were crucial. Face-to-face encounters were the most politically valuable ones long after printed administrative documents and printed propaganda had become instruments of the emperors’ rule from the last quarter of the fifteenth century. Here the absence of a capital city for the Empire gave a greater role to imperial diets. The Habsburg court, whether it happened to be in Vienna, Innsbruck, or some other city in the hereditary lands of the emperor, was too remote to act as a focal point for most German princes and cities, even if imperial counts, knights and others of lesser rank might flock there for employment. Diets, on the other hand, met frequently and for increasingly long sessions in the imperial cities of southern or western Germany, and each was attended by thousands of members of the ruling elites, nobles and officials. Already 12 of the 18 diets in the reign of Charles V (1519–58) met for over three months; four out of the last five diets of his reign, held between 1545 and 1555, each spent over

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six months in session.10 Alongside the court and person of the Emperor, the diets were the one place where the unity of the Empire, to which all paid at least lip service, was represented – and in two senses of the word representation. For one, the ceremonial significance of the diet’s sessions, especially the role of formal ceremonies in conveying added legitimacy to the decisions eventually reached, has been well analysed by Rosemarie Aulinger and Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger.11 Turning to another meaning of representation, although only local rulers (the electors, princes, ruling prelates and imperial cities) sat in the imperial diet, and although many of them had their own local diets and councils in which the nobles, towns and other estates of their territories were represented, they saw themselves as representing the political community of the German nation: in 1480 they voted aid against the Turks for three years ‘on behalf of the whole nation’ (von der ganntzen nacion wegen) and urged Emperor Frederick III (1440–93) to ensure the compliance of those who had not attended the diet.12 At this time the estates as a whole were beginning to usurp the electors’ powerful claims since the late thirteenth century – and especially since the Golden Bull (1356) which confirmed their constitutional and other privileges – that they enjoyed something akin to co-rule with the emperor.13 This self-assurance of the estates grew out of the late medieval understanding that they were identical with the Empire,14 but also in 10

 Alfred Kohler, ‘Wohnen und Essen auf den Reichstagen des 16. Jahrhunderts’, in Alfred Kohler and Heinrich Lutz (eds), Alltag im 16. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 1987), pp. 222–57, esp. 234; Walter Ziegler, ‘Die Regensburger Reichstage der frühen Neuzeit’, in Dieter Albrecht (ed.), Zwei Jahrtausende Regensburg (Regensburg, 1979), pp. 97–119, esp. 117–19. 11  Rosemarie Aulinger, Das Bild des Reichstages im 16. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1980); Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Zeremoniell als politisches Verfahren: Rangordnung und Rangstreit als Strukturmerkmale des frühneuzeitlichen Reichstags’, in Johannes Kunisch (ed.), Neue Studien zur frühneuzeitlichen Reichsgeschichte (Berlin, 1997), pp. 91–132; Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Die zeremonielle Inszensierung des Reiches, oder: Was leitet der kulturalistische Ansatz für die Reichsverfassungsgeschichte?’, in Schnettger, Imperium Romanum, pp. 233–46; Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Die Symbolik der Reichstage’, in Lanzinner and Strohmeyer, Der Reichstag, pp. 77–93. 12  Eberhard Isenmann, ‘Kaiser, Reich und deutsche Nation am Ausgang des 15. Jahrhunderts’, in Joachim Ehlers (ed.), Ansätze und Diskontinuität deutscher Nationbildung im Mittelalter (Sigmaringen, 1989), pp. 145–245, esp. 202–3; Eberhard Isenmann, ‘König oder Monarch? Aspekte der Regierung und Verfassung des römisch-deutschen Reichs um die Mitte des 15. Jahrhunderts’, in Rainer C. Schwinges et al. (eds), Europa im Spätmittelalter. Politik – Gesellschaft – Kultur (Oldenbourg, 2006), pp. 71–98, esp. 77. 13   Winfried Eberhard, ‘Herrscher und Stände’, in Iring Fetscher and Herfried Münkler (eds), Pipers Handbuch der politischen Ideen, vol. 2 (Munich, 1993), pp. 467–551, esp. 495–502; Henry J. Cohn, ‘The Electors and Imperial Rule at the End of the Fifteenth Century’, in Björn Weiler and Simon MacLean (eds), Representations of Power in Medieval Germany 800–1500 (Turnhout, 2006), pp. 295–318. 14  Eberhard, ‘Herrscher und Stände’, p. 492.

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some respects went beyond it. When opposing royal taxation, princes might argue, as Elector John Frederick of Saxony did in discussions during 1542 over whether to reintroduce the Common Penny tax, that they were protecting the common man from excessive burdens.15 Strong elements of self-interest were present in this paternalistic outlook, but at least the weight of double taxation was reduced. The estates behaved in a manner reminiscent of those in Bohemia, Hungary, Poland, Sweden and elsewhere engaged in ‘aristocratic constitutionalism’.16 It is also noteworthy that the procedures of the diet and issues concerning representation, such as the pressure to grant full powers to delegates and to admit the binding nature of legislation even on absentees, were similar to those facing monarchs and representative institutions in other European countries. There were however differences between the Empire and the rest of Europe. More than in the case of other European estates, meetings of the imperial diet were occasions for activities far wider than those which occurred within its formal sessions. When the monarch was present (he was quite often absent), he simultaneously held his royal court (Hoftag) in the same imperial city. The court, not the diet, was a major nodal point for European diplomacy with many foreign envoys in attendance. Royal justice was dispensed, vassals invested with fiefs, and much other business transacted outside the diet.17 In addition, extracurricular activities for all estates included banquets, dances, jousting tournaments, occasional princely wedding festivities or funeral obsequies, hunting expeditions and other means of extravagantly displaying the reputation and honour of both emperor and princes.18 These distractions of both business and pleasure were among the reasons for the length of diets and the frequency with which they ended with an unfinished agenda. The cumbersome nature of the deliberations was further compounded by not only the variety of interests which the delegates represented but the distances they had to travel in order to attend. Indeed, the problems of attendance were such that decision-making was often hampered by the frequent absences of many princes. It was accepted that the personal presence of the six electors (the king of Bohemia did not attend diets) and 15   Deutsche Reichstagsakten. Jüngere Reihe. Deutsche Reichstagsakten unter Kaiser Karl V [hereafter DRA.JR], vol. 15, Der Speyrer Reichstag von 1544, ed. Erwein Eltz (4 parts, Göttingen, 2001), part 3, pp. 245–54. 16  Michael Roberts, On Aristocratic Constitutionalism in Swedish History, 1520–1720 (London, 1966). 17   Paul-Joachim Heinig, ‘Der Wormser Reichstag von 1495 als Hoftag’, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, 39 (2006): 337–57. 18   For these activities and on procedure in the diets see Aulinger, Bild des Reichstages; and also Stefan Mühlhofer, ‘Die Reichstage zur Zeit Karls V’, in Stephan Diller (ed.), Kaiser Karl V. und seine Zeit (Bamberg, 2000), pp. 108–18; Henry J. Cohn, ‘The German imperial diets in the 1540s’, Parliaments, Estates & Representation, 26 (2006): 19–33 [now also in Wacław Uruszczak et al. (eds), Separation of Powers and Parliamentarism (Warsaw, 2007), pp. 293–308].

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over sixty lay and ecclesiastical princes would expedite discussions. Otherwise their delegates would have to report back for new guidance from their principals on any issues for which they had no previous instructions. The extant voluminous correspondence between envoys and their princely masters shows how often this proved necessary. Moreover, all urban delegates engaged in such regular overland correspondence during diets. Although attendance by the electors was usually good, that by princes was poor, especially those from ‘distant’ regions, who might not even send envoys. The excuses given for absence included ill-health and local political problems. Antagonism to the Habsburgs sometimes featured, but expense became a major issue when diets were frequent and lengthy. Whereas delegations cost relatively little, honour and reputation required that the leading princes who attended diets should bring over a hundred – the emperor over a thousand – of their nobles, advisers and servants on the long and sometimes dangerous trek to the imperial city where the assembly was held, and then maintain a lavish lifestyle while it lasted.19 Often it was simpler just to stay at home. Moreover, many princes waited before leaving home to see who else, including the emperor, was en route, before themselves setting out, and so the diet met many weeks after the appointed date and some who attended still arrived very late. Even then, many princes – and sometimes the emperor – left before the concluding resolutions. Further cause for delay – and also an instance of how diets affected political activity throughout the Empire – was the abundance of other meetings before and during the sessions. These rival or supporting representative bodies complicated the consultative process. Separate urban diets prior to most imperial diets coordinated the strategy of the cities. The imperial counts, lords and prelates met to choose and brief their three voting members on the college of princes. From 1541 onwards information was prepared for diets by delegates from most of the ten circles, new regional institutions to which responsibility for the administration of military affairs, taxation and keeping the peace was increasingly being devolved by the overburdened diet. The Protestant Schmalkaldic League met to formulate policy, which was then uniformly repeated in the instructions by many Protestant estates to their imperial delegations. In addition, en route to diets the Habsburgs held audiences with individual electors and princes to secure support for the imperial proposals. Further away, the Austrian, Bohemian and Hungarian diets in the Habsburg hereditary lands voted war taxes. Without an assurance that this had been done in advance, the imperial diet would not even consider contributing.20 Among similar meetings which continued during diets and took place across the city which hosted them, both the urban diets and the Schmalkaldic League  Erwein Eltz, ‘Die Reise zum Reichstag’, in Kohler and Lutz, Alltag im 16. Jahrhundert, pp. 195–221; Kohler, ‘Wohnen und Essen’, ibid., pp. 222–57; Albrecht P. Luttenberger, ‘Pracht und Ehre. Gesellschaftliche Repräsentation und Zeremoniell auf dem Reichstag’, ibid., pp. 291–326, esp. 295–301. 20   For this and the next paragraph, see Cohn, ‘German imperial diets in the 1540s’, pp. 25–29. 19

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produced their own concluding resolutions at the same time as those of several diets of the 1540s. From 1544 delegates from the circles held their discussions between the various sessions of the diet’s plenary assembly and its three colleges of electors, princes and imperial cities. The estates’ delegations consulted privately with one another in their lodgings or on retreats to a monastery during holy days, while princes personally present held counsel with their advisers, as the Elector Palatine Ludwig V often did daily in his inn.21 The king/emperor and his counsellors negotiated ceaselessly between sessions with the colleges and with individual estates. Increasingly, Protestant and Catholic estates met in blocs, instead of effective discussions on the religious disputes taking place in the colleges. In 1543 the two religious parties only met separately, never in the colleges, foreshadowing the Itio in partes which in 1648 became enshrined in the constitution. Moreover, because the Empire had few of the central institutions of a conventional monarchy, the diet, its colleges and sometimes its numerous committees often performed governmental actions such as adjudicating disputes between imperial estates and attending to the nuts and bolts of raising an imperial army, tax collection, auditing accounts, and processing floods of supplications or petitions. Within the diet’s formal sessions questions of space often affected the deliberations. In the plenary sessions, colleges and committees the practice of seeking the opinions of members of the estates or their delegates in strict order of precedence (the Umfrage) was rigidly adhered to. Therefore quarrels over precedence were not only vital matters of honour and prestige, but politically essential for those seeking a greater voice in debates and a better chance of being chosen for the committees which mushroomed to overcome some of the delays in the laborious processes of consultation. The three lay and three ecclesiastical electors were spared these disputes over precedence because the Golden Bull had laid down in minute detail their seating, speaking and processing order for elections, coronations, meetings of all kinds, religious services and even banquets (festive meals and dances could of course also be used for informal political negotiations). The Golden Bull is a classic source acknowledging the importance of spatial relationships between people – their physical placement in relation to one another – in political, religious and social contexts.22 Over the centuries, however, wrangles over precedence bedevilled the clerical and lay benches of the house of princes. In 1498 the princes even successfully objected to sitting at the feet of the electors, 21

 The minutes of Ludwig’s council resident at diets were recorded in the 1520s and 1540s, Henry J. Cohn, ‘Protocols of the German Imperial Diet during the Reign of Emperor Charles V’, in Johannes Helmrath and Georg Feuchter (eds), Vormoderne Parlamentsoratorik (Frankfurt am Main, 2008), pp. 53–71, at pp. 63, 67–8. 22  The text of the Golden Bull is most easily accessible in English at ‘The Avalon Project’ of the Yale Law School (http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/medieval/golden. htm; consulted 23/10/2007). See Johannes Kunisch, ‘Formen symbolischen Handels in der Goldenen Bulle von 1356’, in Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger (ed.), Vormoderne Politische Verfahren (Berlin, 2001), pp. 263–80, esp. 264–70.

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whose dais had to be lowered before the session could open.23 Akira Shibutani has traced the struggle for precedence between Württemberg, Pomerania, Hesse, Baden and Mecklenburg from 1495, when the count of Württemberg was elevated to the rank of duke, until 1653. In various interim settlements and the final solution, the princes agreed, in the spirit of compromise which often characterized diets, to take turns in occupying the senior role. Shibutani shows that along the way one important factor influencing the dukes of Württemberg was the greater influence which higher precedence at diets would give them over their rivals, the margraves of Baden, in the regional politics of the Swabian Circle in the south-west – further evidence for the interaction between the politics of diets and that of the regions.24 The urban representatives were assigned an especially humiliating position in plenary sessions as their struggle throughout this period to obtain constitutional parity with the other colleges was repeatedly rebuffed. The Emperor sat at one end of the room, flanked by the ecclesiastical electors to one side, their lay counterparts to the other. Likewise, the ecclesiastical bench of the house of princes occupied one side of the hall, the lay princes the other. At the end of their combined deliberations the much larger number of urban representatives – over one hundred, sometimes over two hundred – were summoned to stand huddled together at the far end to receive the agreed decisions of the seated upper colleges for their assent or comments. The earliest depiction of this scene is an anonymous coloured copper engraving of c.1598 (see Figure 1.1), but the configuration conforms to that described in earlier sources.25 The multiple deliberations of the diet and associated bodies, a product of the unique nature of imperial political space, complicated the use of urban space at the time of diets. Already the choice of imperial city was determined by the need for extensive accommodation for meetings of all sorts and for lodgings, as well as for provisions to support thousands of extra people for several months. Few cities were able to cope, especially when the sessions became longer, and so the number of cities visited was progressively reduced from 13 in the second half of the fifteenth century to nine in the first half of the sixteenth until it was only four in the later sixteenth century, and one, Regensburg, after 1603. At different periods certain cities proved to be the most suitable for a variety of reasons. Among the considerations which came into play were convenience of access for the estates and for the Habsburgs in their western or eastern lands, the political situation of the moment, ease of communication between the diet and the regions, and – probably 23   Ulrich P. Ecker, ‘‘‘… sitzen untätig herum, verhandeln nichts aber verzehren viel Geld’’. Organisation und Ablauf des Freiburger Reichstags’, in Hans Schadek (ed.), Der Kaiser in seiner Stadt. Maximilian I. und der Reichstag zu Freiburg 1498 (Freiburg. i. Br., 1998), pp. 56–93, esp. 62. 24  I am grateful to my Japanese colleague for allowing me to read his paper, ‘The Struggle for Precedence in the Early-Modern German Imperial Diet’, in advance of its publication in Uruszczak, Separation of Powers and Parliamentarism, pp. 309–15. 25  Aulinger, Bild des Reichstages, p. 394; ill. 20.

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This figure has intentionally been removed for copyright reasons. To view this image, please refer to the printed version of this book

Figure 1.1

The imperial Diet of Regensburg, 1597. The Emperor’s commissioner, Archduke Matthias, receives a delegation (Peter Zimmermann, Verissima delinatio Augustissimi Consessus legatorum …, Augsburg, 1598). Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Munich, Einbl. XI, 189

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more important than most others – the availability of accommodation and the local urban experience in, and capacity for, hosting large assemblies. Eighty assemblies (including the precursors of the Reichstag, which itself emerged fully only towards the end of the fifteenth century) met in the 300 years from 1356 to 1654, 15 of them at Nuremberg, 14 at Regensburg, 12 at Augsburg, ten at Frankfurt am Main, seven at Speyer, six at Worms, and 16 at altogether 15 other places. In the fifteenth century Frankfurt and Nuremberg had the most meetings, in the sixteenth Augsburg and Regensburg, as the centre of gravity for imperial politics shifted to the south-east under Habsburg rule.26 Frankfurt had been an early choice as a wealthy city associated with imperial elections and with logistical expertise in welcoming large numbers of visitors to its fairs. The city enjoyed favourable transport conditions and was convenient for the four Rhineland electors who in the fourteenth century had become the powers behind the throne, but in the long run it proved to be not large enough to house any but the smaller imperial and regional assemblies.27 Nuremberg had a population four times as large and had also always been especially loyal to emperors, and it even became the repository of the imperial crown jewels in 1424. Its financial expertise made it a natural collecting point for imperial taxes in the fifteenth century and in 1500–1502 and 1521–24 it was home to the imperial regiment which functioned in the Emperor’s absence. However, manifestations of popular Protestant sentiment became intrusive soon after, and thereafter diets were only held at Nuremberg in 1542 and 1543, when the city was the only Protestant member of the Emperor’s nine-year imperial league of 1535 and a bridge between the religio-political parties.28 According to the Golden Bull the first diet of every reign was due to be held at Nuremberg, but in 1521 plague led to the switch to Worms; the electors also advised that it was more convenient than Frankfurt for accommodation, provisions and other needs.29 The electors, who had to be consulted on the venue as well as 26   Of the 21 fifteenth-century assemblies, nine met at Nuremberg and six at Frankfurt. Of 37 in the sixteenth century, 11 met at Augsburg and nine at Regensburg. See Karl Härter, ‘Aachen – Frankfurt – Nürnberg – Regensburg. Politische Zentren des Reiches zwischen 1366 und 1806’, in Bernd Heidenreich and Frank-Lothar Kroll (eds), Wahl und Krönung (Frankfurt am Main, 2006), pp. 175–88, esp. 178, 184. 27  Ibid., p. 179; Pierne Monet, ‘Principalis sedes orientalis regni. Francfort-sur-leMain, un pôle central de l’Empire à la fin du Moyen Age?’, in Christiane Lebeau (ed.), L’Espace du Saint Empire du Moyen Age à l’époque moderne (Strasbourg, 2004), pp. 97– 113, esp. 101–5. 28   Härter, ‘Aachen – Frankfurt – Nürnberg – Regensburg’, p. 182; Reinhard Seyboth, ‘Reichsinstitutionen und Reichsbehörden in Nürnberg im 15./16. Jahrhundert’, Mitteilungen des Vereins für die Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg, 79 (1992): 89–121; Helmut Neuhaus, ‘Zwischen Realität und Romantik: Nürnberg im Europa der frühen Neuzeit’, in Helmut Neuhaus (ed.), Nürnberg. Eine europäische Stadt in Mittelalter und Neuzeit (Nuremberg, 2000), pp. 43–68, esp. 65. 29  Ludwig Petry, ‘Zur Bedeutung von Worms als Reichstagsstadt’, in Fritz Reuter (ed.), Der Reichstag zu Worms von 1521 (Worms, 1971), pp. 1–12, esp. 1–2, 8.

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the agenda of the diet, agreed in 1558 that Ferdinand I (1558–64) should hold his first diet at Nuremberg, but the Emperor in the end did not comply, on the grounds that the city was heavily populated and accommodation difficult to find. Like Ferdinand, Maximilian II (1564–76) preferred Augsburg over Nuremberg in 1566, this time because of the press of imperial business which prevented him from travelling so far. Rudolf II (1576–1612) held his first diet in Augsburg (1582) out of concern that Catholics would not be able to celebrate mass in Nuremberg. By 1612 it was the city of Nuremberg which asked that Emperor Matthias should not summon the diet there for fear that the attending Catholic estates might demand that the city’s Protestant churches be returned to them. For his part, Matthias gave as reasons for avoiding Nuremberg its overpopulation, the inflation which would make costs prohibitive for those attending, the poor provisioning of the city and the danger of plague, as well as concern that the practice of Catholic worship could not be guaranteed, nor churches be available for it.30 Just as Augsburg replaced Nuremberg as the leading south German commercial centre in the sixteenth century, so it took over for a while the role of the Habsburgs’ preferred venue for diets. Augsburg’s advantages included its size and ability to house the numerous participants in diets, its commercial, financial and cultural links to the imperial court and the estates of the Empire, and its position as a communications centre for transport and the postal networks. Maximilian I (1493–1519) had greatly favoured Augsburg and even as late as 1612 its plans for rebuilding the town hall showed its ambitions to be the real capital of the Empire.31 Although Regensburg had hosted the ‘Great Christian Diet’ of 1471, at the end of the century Bavarian attacks on its imperial status were compounded by internal unrest, until in 1500 Maximilian I gave the city a new constitution and therefore greater political stability. Only thereafter could its advantages come fully into play: its close proximity to the Habsburg lands and the convenience of transport down the Danube to Prague. Its population decline from the late Middle Ages left plenty of spare accommodation, as well as many good inns. Like Augsburg, it benefited after 1555 as a site for diets from the co-existence of the two faiths within its walls stipulated in the Religious Peace.32 In the years after 1520 another important factor came into play. Already Maximilian I had established temporary postal routes to the venues for diets 30

 Neuhaus, ‘Nürnberg in Europa der frühen Neuzeit’, pp. 61–3.  Rosemarie Aulinger, ‘Augsburg und die Reichstage des 16. Jahrhunderts’, in Welt im Umbruch. Augsburg zwischen Renaissance und Barock (3 vols, Augsburg, 1980–81), vol. 3, pp. 9–24, esp. 17; Heinrich Lutz, ‘Augsburg und seine politische Umwelt’, in Günther Gottlieb et al. (eds), Geschichte der Stadt Augsburg (Stuttgart, 1984), pp. 413–33, esp. 414. 32   Ziegler, ‘Regensburger Reichstage’, pp. 100–101; Andreas Klinger, ‘Das Reich und seine Hauptstädte’, in Stephan Wendehorst and Siegrid Westphal (eds), Lesebuch Altes Reich (Munich, 2006), pp. 73–9, esp. 74–5; Alois Schmidt, Regensburg (Munich, 1995), pp. 196–7. 31

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since 1495. Charles V created regular postal services with stations for changing horses, linking Brussels via the Rhine crossing at Rheinhausen (near to Speyer and Worms) to Augsburg, Innsbruck, Trent, Rome and Naples. Whereas Maximilian had held diets in 14 cities, Charles relied on only five: Augsburg, Nuremberg, Regensburg, Speyer and Worms. Nuremberg soon placed itself at a disadvantage through refusing to house a post office, but the others were on or near the main staging posts.33 Despite the fact that there was no mention of postal issues in the advance discussions with the electors on where to summon each assembly, Wolfgang Behringer has claimed that ‘[t]heir situation on the main postal routes predestined Speyer, Worms and Augsburg as sites for the holding of diets’.34 His assumption that concerns about communication with the rest of Europe were an unstated ‘precondition’ for the location of diets does not do sufficient justice to the existence of other, equally important preconditions, notably adequate accommodation and provisioning, and the absence of plague, which were often discussed. By the sixteenth century diets were anyway limited, with the notable exception of Nuremberg, to episcopal cities, which alone had the large number of ecclesiastical foundations and houses of individual clerics which could be assigned to the growing number of visiting estates who took up residence for longer periods; few cities any longer had a royal castle, and therefore the bishop’s palace was the most obvious residence for the monarch during diets. Moreover, the restriction of choice to just a few cities came about through experience acquired by the emperors and estates of where the facilities had proved convenient in the past. Political considerations could still override all else, as in the negotiations of 1547 after the military defeat of the Protestants. Charles V’s brother and Regent, Archduke Ferdinand, and the electors of Brandenburg and Saxony would have preferred Nuremberg or Regensburg, given their closer proximity to those areas not yet fully pacified, but Charles insisted on Augsburg because of its central location which allowed him to react more quickly to developments in France and Italy.35 The emperor often found it easy to impose his choice of city because the electors were divided over their preferences. In 1565 Maximilian II proposed Augsburg as his first choice, Worms as second. The three Rhineland ecclesiastical electors of Cologne, Mainz and Trier favoured nearby Worms, but the electors of Brandenburg and the Palatinate both argued that the city was too small. Elector Palatine Frederick II pointed out that princes now came with larger followings than under Charles V, while the number of houses in Worms had declined since the last meeting there in 1545. Moreover, during rain the city became a ‘swampy, 33

  Wolfgang Behringer, ‘Kaiser, Reichstag und Postwesen (1490–1615)’, in Lanzinner and Strohmeyer, Der Reichstag, pp. 117–48, esp. 118–24; Wolfgang Behringer, ‘Communications Revolutions: A Historiographical Concept’, German History, 24 (2006): 333–74, esp. 346–52. 34   Behringer, ‘Kaiser, Reichstag und Postwesen’, p. 126. 35   DRA.JR, vol. 18, Der Reichstag zu Augsburg 1547/48, ed. Ursula Machoczek (3 parts, Munich, 2006), part 2, p. 58.

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unhealthy, filthy’ place, provisions were uncertain, timber especially hard to acquire, and the Netherlands had bought up all foodstuffs. Clearly the elector’s officials had done their homework on Worms, but behind the elector’s arguments probably also lay his concern that a diet at Worms would focus attention on his previous attacks on the property of ecclesiastical foundations in the see of Worms. The Emperor for his part gave as grounds for deciding in favour of Augsburg that plague was present in the Rhineland and above all that he did not want to travel too far into the Empire when heavy conflicts with the Turks were to be expected in Hungary.36 By contrast, in 1570 the three archbishops insisted so hard on one of three Rhineland sites – because they did not wish to go to any of the three distant south-eastern cities suggested by the Emperor in case German troops should withdraw from France through their lands – that Maximilian eventually chose Speyer, rejecting Frankfurt on grounds of the plague and Worms for unknown reasons; in the end Speyer had similar problems to those expected in 1566 of Worms as it was not able to provision and house the estates adequately.37 A whole range of political, religious and logistical considerations influenced the choice of venue, of which transport and communications were but one. Once the place for the diet was chosen, and sometimes even beforehand, preparations began in the appointed city to meet the challenges a diet presented.38 The best organized imperial cities drew up lists of available accommodation which could be referred to on subsequent occasions. Such records do not survive for all venues, but as early as 1397/98 Frankfurt had prepared lists of its inhabitants who could give accommodation for horses and men. By 1442 royal agents were negotiating with the city over the prices for lodgings, which in 1409 had been fixed by the city alone.39 For the major diet of 1471 in Regensburg, for which 10,000 visitors were expected – about as many as the city’s population – the council decided that the earlier brief lists of places where those of higher rank had stayed 36   Deutsche Reichstagsakten. Reichsversammlungen 1556–1662 [hereafter DRA.RV], vol. 2, Der Reichstag zu Augsburg 1566, eds Maximilian Lanzinner and Dietmar Heil (2 parts, Munich, 2002), part 2, pp. 83–6. 37   DRA.RV, Der Reichstag zu Speyer 1570, ed. Maximilian Lanzinner (2 parts, Göttingen, 1988), part 1, pp. 118–22, 151–3. 38  In 1485, when invitations for a diet at Würzburg in December had been sent out, the city council earmarked stabling for between 6,000 and 8,000 horses for the visitors and declared a free market to prevent inflation, before Maximilian I moved the diet to Frankfurt am Main. See Deutsche Reichstagsakten. Mittlere Reihe. Deutsche Reichstagsakten unter Maximilian I. [hereafter DRA.MR], vol. 1, Reichstag zu Frankfurt 1486, eds Heinz Angermeier and Reinhard Syboth (2 parts, Göttingen, 1989), part 1, pp. 33–4, 93 n. 2. 39   For 1442 only the list of quarters for the king, his retinue and their 927 horses has survived. See Deutsche Reichstagsakten. Ältere Reihe [hereafter DRA. ÄR], vol. 16, Reichstagsakten unter Kaiser Friedrich III, 1441–1442, eds Hermann Herre and Ludwig Quidde (Gotha, 1921–28), pp. 328–31; Gustav Beckmann, ‘Das mittelalterlche Frankfurt am. Main als Schauplatz von Reichs- und Wahltagen’, Archiv für Frankfurts Geschichte und Kunst, 3. Folge 2 (1889): 1–140, esp. 14–17.

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were inadequate. The town clerk was empowered to have the watch masters in the eight quarters of the city collate a listing of every suitable house, and to assign two visitors to each bed. In effect this survey created a highly informative census of all but the poorest houses and those belonging to the clergy and Jews; 1,422 dwellings were recorded with places for 10,321 persons and 12,612 horses, though in the end fewer arrived.40 By the diet of 1498 at Freiburg im Breisgau the arrangements which were thereafter used by the imperial cities were already crystallized. The marshal of the emperor or his deputy advised the city of the expected demand for housing. Quartermasters from all the leading estates also arrived well before the scheduled opening of the diet to arrange accommodation. The city then inspected lodgings and stabling for their suitability, including the supply of straw and hay. Afterwards, more rooms had to be found for latecomers. In most cities the houses of patricians and of the bishop, cathedral canons, monks and other clergy took the larger contingents, and their inhabitants often had to move out. Freiburg lacked the larger premises for meetings of the diet, its colleges and committees which bigger cities offered, and so the city council had to meet in the modest house of the petty traders while the diet occupied the council house as well as four other public buildings. Freiburg’s town clerk understandably complained that the presence of the diet disturbed the business of the city.41 Some monarchs provoked resentment by expecting major alterations to their accommodation to be undertaken at urban expense. Shortly before the Nuremberg diet of 1487 Frederick III asked for extensive alterations to the Kaiserburg, but the town council replied that they would undertake them only in so far as they would not interfere with other buildings in the town, nor would they add an additional kitchen and another room which he had requested.42 When Charles V was accompanied to diets by his brother Ferdinand I or his son, Philip of Spain, or indeed by both at Augsburg for the diet of 1550/51, the numbers to be expected were all the greater, but so was the possibility of miscalculating the need for accommodation. In April 1550 the quartermasters of the three Habsburgs came to Augsburg to announce that they would bring a large number of armed cavalry. The council had no other recourse than to engage 243 carpenters and 201 day labourers to build stabling for 1,400 horses in the gardens and meadows of St Jacob’s suburb and to repair others in monastic buildings and elsewhere, as well as to erect many kitchens for the princes and lords at great cost. Yet the chronicler Paul Hektor Mair, a senior city official of some experience, reported that all the new stables stood empty as few

  Helmut Wolff, ‘Regensburgs Häuserbestand im späten Mittelalter’, Studien und Quellen zur Geschichte Regensburgs, 3 (1985): 91–198, esp. 92–7, 106–62, 165–6. 41   Ecker, ‘Organisation und Ablauf ’, pp. 60–61, 69–70. 42   Die Chroniken der deutschen Städte vom 14. bis ins 16. Jahrhundert [hereafter CDS], vol. 10, Die Chroniken der fränkischen Städte. Nürnberg, vol. 4 (Leipzig, 1872), p. 382 n. 5. 40

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cavalry came, and the council would have saved much money if it had sent experts to enquire whether so much construction work was really necessary.43 Especially but not only at the smaller venues for diets, bridges had to be built over alleys to link the main household of a visiting prince with adjacent kitchens or rooms. Worms erected bridges in 1495 for the electors of Brandenburg, Mainz and the Palatinate.44 For a different reason the quarters of the captive Elector John Frederick of Saxony at Augsburg in 1547/48 were linked by a bridge with those of his captor, Emperor Charles V.45 Other problems were created for the city authorities and the imperial marshal, of the Marschall von Pappenheim family, by the wish of many princes to have their customary abode and to be near to the Emperor and their own relatives and friends. At Worms in 1521 the more senior princes pulled rank to seize lodgings already allocated to others.46 The lodgings of the princes at Worms in 1495 were marked on the outside by large versions of their coats of arms, those of their entourage by smaller versions.47 By 1566 these signs also contained the number and names of those billeted in each house.48 During diets city councils met in the hall of a patrician, merchant or craft gild, while even the furniture had to be rearranged in the town hall for the convenience of the diet’s assemblies and according to the provisions of the Golden Bull. Six large chairs with arms were procured at Augsburg in 1547/48 for the electors. These chairs and the tables in the meeting rooms were covered with green cloth and the walls with tapestries, while the city also ensured that each room received a steady supply of sweetmeats, fruit, nuts, pretzels and wine served by the city’s own servants, who were however entitled to the leftovers.49 Not surprisingly, town councils were frequently at loggerheads with the royal marshal and quartermasters over the allocation of lodgings, as at Nuremberg between 1487 and 1542, though Regensburg and Speyer gave the royal marshal a free hand.50 The problem escalated under Charles V, whose officials applied methods familiar to them from abroad that were more appropriate to the billeting of troops. In 1530 the Augsburg chronicler Langenmantel noted that Charles’s quartermasters ‘dealt strictly with the population, with force, and quite otherwise than was ever previously heard of at diets in Augsburg’. Houses had to be opened   CDS, vol. 32, Augsburg, vol. 7 (Leipzig, 1917), p. 203.   DRA.MR, vol. 5, Reichstag von Worms 1495, ed. Heinz Angermeier (3 parts, Göttingen, 1981), part 3, pp. 1677–8. 45   Bartholomew Sastrow, Social Germany in Luther’s Time (London, 1902), p. 216. 46   Fritz Reuter, ‘Worms in 1521’, in Reuter, Der Reichstag zu Worms, pp. 13–58, esp. 42. 47   Fritz Reuter, ‘Worms als Reichstagsstadt 1495’, in Claudia Helm (ed.), 1495 – Kaiser, Reich, Reformen. Der Reichstag zu Worms (Koblenz, 1995), pp. 123–38, esp. 130. 48   DRA.RV, vol. 2, part 2, p. 1484. 49   CDS, vol. 32, pp. 399–401; Aulinger, ‘Augsburg und die Reichstage des 16. Jahrhunderts’, pp. 11–12. 50  Aulinger, Bild des Reichstages, p. 129. 43

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for inspection and, if the owners refused, force was used to break in. Guests were assigned lodgings without regard to the arrangements previously made by the councillors appointed by the city for this purpose. Householders preferred not to lease their property to the hated Spaniards and other foreigners. Some widows had to leave their houses to the Spaniards and many other families had to abandon their houses and beds, although some did it for money. The quartermasters told the council that it was disloyal to the Emperor when it questioned these practices.51 At the 1566 and 1582 diets major disagreements occurred between Augsburg and von Pappenheim over identifying quarters, inspecting the council chambers, and urban taxes. The marshal was accused of bringing in foreign craftsmen and petty traders to the disadvantage of the urban economy. He also tried to divert the payments by these people for their stalls and by merchants of the sales tax (Ungeld) to his own coffers. Most of the disputed issues were settled in the marshal’s favour in 1582.52 For a long time urban and imperial officials cooperated over another essential provision for diets, the issuing of a comprehensive ‘police ordinance’ (Reichstagsordnung) for their duration. Like so many of the arrangements for diets, Reichstagsordnungen were issued long before the sixteenth century, when they were merely refined and elaborated on. In 1442 these measures seem to have been firmly under the control of Frankfurt am Main city council, which prescribed the allocation of housing and stables, fire-fighting measures, ordering the watch, guarding the gates and towers, keeping the peace, the seating of dignitaries at investitures with fiefs, and how visiting princes were to be received. Craftsmen, innkeepers, hired mercenary soldiers and the officials in the city’s quarters all had their duties assigned. A committee of eleven was established to appear daily in the urban chancery to advise the burgomasters on further measures, and indeed from May to August the council issued 24 more regulations relating to the diet.53 In 1471 Regensburg drew on its own experience since 1454 to issue an ordinance with 84 articles – now printed, as were many later ones. Prices for lodging, food, fodder and other provisions were regulated in detail, but a constant theme henceforth was that such measures could not prevent inflation and overcharging when heavy demands were placed on limited resources. Many sumptuary measures were now also included to regulate gaming, brothels, the apothecary, beer houses, the supply of wine and meat, and much else besides. It was highly unrealistic to legislate that, on pain of a large fine, no burgher or resident was to drink or even be in the presence of wine or beer, not even on holidays, while the Emperor and other lords were guests in the city – a period which turned out to be three and a half months! However, the stipulated inspections to enforce many of these provisions 51   CDS, vol. 25, Augsburg, vol. 5 (Leipzig, 1896), pp. 367–8; Kohler, ‘Wohnen und Essen’, pp. 240–41. 52  Aulinger, Bild des Reichstages, pp. 127–8. 53   CDS, vol. 3, Nürnberg, vol. 3, pp. 356–60; DRA.ÄR, vol. 16, pp. 310–17, 327–8, 331–7.

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were undertaken and recorded on paper.54 The similarities between the regulations at successive diets suggest strongly that the urban authorities consulted not only their own records but other imperial cities and the royal chancery in compiling them. By 1495 Maximilian I had taken over legislating for the preservation of the peace, while leaving fire-fighting to the city council of Worms. Another sign of things to come were the provisions against the mocking of foreign clothes and customs; foreigners were to be served for money like everyone else. The whole ordinance was posted up everywhere in the city during the diet.55 Sixteenthcentury ordinances became additionally concerned with cleanliness and measures to prevent the plague, in conformity with the practices of the era.56 Anti-Spanish sentiment had already erupted at the diets of 1521 and 1530. Charles V wished to ensure that security remained firmly under his control. After Augsburg’s council engaged 1,000 landsknechts in 1530 to keep order and had chains made for use in case of unrest to block off all the streets, including those which had not previously had any, the Emperor rescinded the measure and engaged his own landsknechts – but at the city’s expense – to supplement the men of the watch. Apart from the envoys of six European monarchs and their retinues, Charles and Ferdinand had brought hundreds of foreigners, including hunters and their dogs from Spain. An edict with the royal seal governing relations between citizens and foreigners was posted up at the town hall. As in 1521, the Emperor brought his own executioner, who in ten weeks executed 146 persons, among them 40 Anabaptist men and women whom Charles made the city deliver up to him.57 After the end of the war against the Protestants in 1547, the royal mandate for Augsburg was especially preoccupied with disorderly soldiers and fracas in the streets. Movement about the streets was restricted and any Spaniard,   DRA.ÄR, vol. 22, part 2, ed. Helmut Wolff (Göttingen, 1999), pp. 394–425. The large sixteenth-century increases in the stipulated maximum prices for accommodation and the principal comestibles are tabulated and discussed in Kohler, ‘Wohnen und Essen’, pp. 247–56. 55   DRA.MR, vol. 5, part 1, pp. 135–6. At Augsburg more of the legislation in 1518 than in 1500 was issued by the Emperor than by the city. See Christoph Böhm, Die Reichsstadt Augsburg und Kaiser Maximilian I. (Sigmaringen, 1998), pp. 195–7. The excellent survey by Rosemarie Aulinger, ‘Reichsständischer Alltag und obrigkeitliche Disziplinierung’, in Kohler and Lutz, Alltag im 16. Jahrhundert, pp. 258–90, concentrates on the period from 1530. 56   For example 1532, Aulinger, ‘Augsburg und die Reichstage des 16. Jahrhunderts’, p. 19 n. 22; and 1548, a printed plague ordinance, DRA.JR, vol. 18, part 1, pp. 206–10. 57   CDS, vol. 23, Augsburg, vol. 4 (Leipzig, 1894), pp. 252–3, 263–4, 267, 271–2, 296– 7, 308; vol. 25, Augsburg, vol. 5, pp. 363–6. In 1541 the Regensburg chronicler reported that there were numerous quarrels involving foreigners, heavy drinking sessions and at least one murder a day during the diet. Ibid., vol. 15 (Leipzig, 1878), pp. 114, 170, 185. In 1550 Charles V himself now issued the ordinance governing prices for accommodation and provisions and had it proclaimed in Spanish, French and German, accompanied by herald and trumpet, before it was printed. Ibid., vol. 32, p. 212. 54

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Italian, Burgundian or German with a grievance was urged to bring it before a joint tribunal of imperial and urban officials sitting daily in the town hall where the diet met.58 Visiting Augsburg in 1547, Bartholomew Sastrow, a delegate from the dukes of Pomerania, observed that Charles V … to the terror of many, had a gibbet erected in front of the town hall; by the side of the gibbet, the strapado and, facing it, a scaffold at about an ordinary man’s height from the ground. This was intended to hold the rack, and the beheading, the strangulating, and kindred operations were to be carried out on it.59

In 1550 there were constant disturbances especially between Spaniards and the Protestant preachers; the soldiery twice smashed the pulpit and pews at the church of St Ulrich, which the city twice repaired. The Emperor’s two Spanish judges had their own prison and took some persuading by the city not to hang pregnant women. Spaniards and Burgundians as well as Germans were often hanged several at a time and others were subjected to whippings.60 Not only was there a clash between the cultures of urban residents, German visitors and foreigners, but the emperors and estates encroached on urban space through their requisitions of lodgings and provisions, the use of the streets for processions and tournaments, the issuing of separate legislation and the exercise of separate jurisdiction. Enclaves were created, especially the royal court, which partly overlapped with the already exempt areas of cities controlled by the clergy, but also extended beyond them. At least the succession of the Austrian Habsburgs in 1558 lessened some of the problems created for the cities by conflicts between different nationalities. Another cause of anxiety for city authorities was how to receive their high guests, especially the emperor. Royal entries were at all times red letter days for the imperial cities, not least when it was the first occasion that the ruling emperor entered a city, and at diets the long-established but evolving protocol was even more elaborate.61 Ordinary royal entries with large entourages gave cities experience in listing suitable accommodation and other arrangements also required at diets but for greater numbers. The royal entry, organized by the city, was one of the highpoints of the many ceremonies and festivities accompanying diets. It was preceded by a large party of councillors and armed men going out to meet the Emperor on the previous day on his way towards the city. Charles V’s return in 1530 from his imperial coronation at Bologna was marked by   DRA.JR, vol. 18, part 1, pp. 204–6.   Sastrow, Social Germany, p. 217. 60   CDS, vol. 32, pp. 217–21, 229–30, 235, 242. 61   See Albrecht Kircher, Deutsche Kaiser in Nürnberg ... 1500–1612 (Nürnberg, 1955); Gerrit J. Schenk, Zeremoniell und Politik. Herrschereinzüge im spätmittelalterlichen Reich (Cologne, 2003); Peer Fries, ‘Der Kaiser kommt in die Stadt’, in Rolf Kießling and Sabine Ullmann (eds), Das Reich in der Region während des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit (Constance, 2005), pp. 27–60, esp. 33–4. 58 59

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triumphal processions into nearly all the cities and princely residences through which he passed. Then at Augsburg on the eve of the diet he was greeted by 1,200 landsknechts and burghers under arms. Once he entered the city gate his route to the cathedral was lined with booths ‘in the Netherlands manner’ with allegorical scenes from history, mythology and contemporary events. Choral singing and prayers were followed by a papal blessing delivered by the legate and a Te Deum.62 In January 1566 Maximilian II entered Augsburg under a baldachin carried by 12 citizens and accompanied by numerous princes, 250 mounted men from the city, and 1,850 horsemen of his own and of the dukes of Bavaria. The whole procession took an hour to pass through the gate. Maximilian and his womenfolk were presented with the customary silver gilt cups filled with coins – in 1566 the larger-than-usual sum of 3,000 fl. (gulden) – and also with fish, wine and oats.63 At his first visit to any city the king received the homage of the city councillors inside the town hall and that of all the citizenry in the square outside in exchange for his confirmation of the city’s privileges.64 He usually entered the city – as occasionally did some leading princes of the Empire and even foreign rulers – with a crowd of people whom the city had previously banished or imprisoned and for whom as supreme judge he sought a pardon.65 This practice was so open to abuse that cities saw it as undermining their authority; in 1516 Augsburg held back the list of those to be exiled until Maximilian I had left the city.66 The royal court convening at the time of the diet had other opportunities apart from entries to impinge upon the cityscape, such as tournaments and jousting in the streets, where sand was laid, barriers erected, tents provided for the main protagonists and platforms for the spectators.67 Above all, diets were convenient occasions for monarchs to invest their princely vassals with fiefs, especially at the beginning of the reign, when all vassals, like the cities, had to renew their allegiance. It was traditional for the investitures of distinguished princes to take place in the open with specially erected platforms on a city square. During the six 62  Aulinger, ‘Augsburg und die Reichstage’, pp. 12–13; see also the description of the sources for, and stages of, Charles V’s entry in Aulinger, Bild des Reichstages, pp. 329–39. 63   DRA.RV, vol. 2, part 2, pp. 1485–8. Among the records for entry protocols sedulously kept by cities for future reference from at least the mid-fifteenth century were lists of the appropriate gifts – and their monetary value – to be given at various occasions to the emperor, members of the royal household, and other princes, including all who attended diets, for example Nuremberg in 1442 and 1444. CDS, vol. 3, pp. 361–9, 391–401, 513. 64   At Augsburg in 1566 this took place immediately after the conclusion of the diet. DRA.RV, vol. 2, part 2, p. 1501. 65   Schenk, Zeremoniell und Politik, pp. 350–58; Kircher, Deutsche Kaiser in Nürnberg, p. 46. 66   Böhm, Die Reichsstadt Augsburg, p. 204. 67   For example Worms in 1495. See Heinrich Boos, Geschichte der rheinischen Städekultur, 2nd edn (4 vols, Berlin, 1897–1902), vol. 4, p. 47.

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months of the Diet of Worms in 1495 there were investitures nearly every day; a list of them with 187 names is incomplete. Eberhard of Württemberg was invested five times with different fiefs, first as count, then as duke after his promotion by Maximilian I.68 Whereas Maximilian I had encouraged large numbers of vassals to attend by sending a message that he wanted to invest all of them in person at Worms, at the first diets of new monarchs in the sixteenth century many vassals sent representatives instead who received the fiefs more privately indoors. Maximilian II’s reign had the last of the outdoor investitures at Augsburg in 1566, when the investiture of Elector Augustus of Saxony was an especially splendid occasion. Hans Tirol’s woodcut shows members of the diet in attendance and the burghers hanging out of the windows around the wine market square at the traditional moment after the ceremony when the elector’s banner is thrown to the populace (see Figure 1.2).69 These were unique occasions for the royal court, the estates and the citizenry to celebrate as one body. It is hard to assess whether such an apparent display of harmony between townspeople and visitors meant that cities normally welcomed diets and benefited from them. Diets brought prestige to cities, which seem, at least until the troubles of the Reformation era, to have been eager to host them. Nuremberg sent embassies to Charles V at Barcelona in 1519 and Flanders in 1520 in fruitless attempts to uphold its right under the Golden Bull to host the first diet of the reign.70 In such a hierarchical society the patrician town councillors and their higher officials basked in the glory of the attending nobility to whose status many of them aspired. They were happy for Maximilian I and the princes to dance with their wives and daughters, visit artisans’ workshops, and consort with artists and humanists. Maximilian’s friendship with the Fugger and Welser banking families led to his nickname ‘the mayor of Augsburg’. Although after the first flush of youth Charles V behaved with greater reserve, town chroniclers frequently commented favourably on the willingness of all Habsburg emperors to shake hands with the leading citizens, something which their predecessors had apparently not done.71 At the same time cities were concerned about the costs incurred on building, hiring mercenaries, other security measures, ceremonies, and gifts for the high visitors, and kept meticulous accounts of them for future reference. Moreover, Maximilian I was especially inclined to seek loans wherever he went and to leave debts behind on his departure. He abandoned his wife Bianca Maria in Worms for five months after the end of the diet of 1495 and she had to acknowledge in 1497 68

  Hans-Martin Maurer, ‘Eberhart im Bart auf dem Reichstag in Worms von 1495’, Zeitschrift für Württembergische Geschichte, 59 (2000): 11–29, esp. 24–5; Heinig, ‘Der Wormser Reichstag’, p. 351. 69  Aulinger, Das Bild des Reichstages, p. 384, ill. 8. Since the investiture of Archduke Ferdinand at the diet of 1530, such occasions had become a favoured theme for woodcuts and published accounts. Ibid., pp. 381–3, ill. 13. 70   Kircher, Deutsche Kaiser in Nürnberg, pp. 30–31. 71   Ibid., pp. 23, 27; Friess, ‘Der Kaiser kommt in die Stadt’, p. 41.

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This figure has intentionally been removed for copyright reasons. To view this image, please refer to the printed version of this book

Figure 1.2

Investiture of Elector Augustus of Saxony with his fiefs at the Diet of Augsburg, 1566 (woodcut by Hans Tirol). Kunstsammlungen und Museen, Augsburg

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that the couple still owed the city money, which they probably never repaid.72 City councils cannot have viewed with equanimity the growth in imperial control over legislation, security and justice within their walls during diets of the sixteenth century. Many burghers, on the other hand, especially the innkeepers, craftsmen and traders – and indeed prostitutes – will have profited from the spendthrift royal court, princes and nobles. In anticipation of the diet of 1547/48 tradesmen’s shops at Augsburg ‘were crammed with precious wares, rich silk stuffs, golden and silver objects, diamonds and pearls’.73 But another observer noted at the same diet that ‘the common folk suffered much from the Spanish and German soldiery. They had to give them firewood, lights and salt, were driven and forced from their beds and out of their houses, while the sheds and fences about their gardens were pulled down and burnt’. Many poor people with children were expelled from their rooms and had to freeze in the attics or in wretched hovels.74 Admittedly these were the special circumstances of an occupying army at the so-called ‘Armed Diet’ after the defeat of the Protestants, but billeting had already been a problem in 1530. At all times the greater opportunities that poor people might have for wage labour were offset by the severe shortages of food and price inflation caused by the influx of many relatively prosperous members of the higher orders. For many cities the possible advantages of hosting diets were further discounted in the reign of Charles V by disputes over religion linked to those with foreign soldiers, papal envoys and other visitors. These were additional factors – including proximity to the Habsburg lands, ease of communications, and the convenience of a city in providing the right kind of accommodation and adequate provisions – in determining which cities were chosen as the best sites for the uphill task of holding together an Empire with special problems of spatial distance. Nevertheless, the diet, for all its elephantine procedures, did not remain inflexible when faced with the problems of imperial space.75 Strenuous efforts were made to provide more effective written and face-to-face communication at the diets and between those present and others throughout the Empire who followed the proceedings.76 Diets were willing to delegate more administrative responsibility to the circles, which was further enhanced by constitutional changes in 1555. Such devolved regional solutions to the problems of governing the Empire appeared more viable than the creation of additional central institutions like the failed imperial regiments of 1500–1502 and 1521–30. Since 1544 a diet drawn from all the circles (Reichsmoderationstag) met whenever it was necessary to establish financial contributions. Moreover, an imperial deputation (Reichsdeputationstag), a miniature diet or committee, was envisaged in 1555 to deal with serious breaches of the peace without having to call a full diet; its competence was later extended. 72

 Reuter, ‘Worms als Reichsstadt 1495’, p. 134.   Sastrow, Social Germany, p. 219. 74   CDS, vol. 32, pp. 91–2. 75  Cohn, ‘German Imperial Diets in the 1540s’, p. 33. 76   See Lanzinner and Strohmeyer, Der Reichstag. 73

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During the later sixteenth century these alternative smaller assemblies of envoys each met as frequently as the diet, reducing expenditure and time-wasting for the estates. Last but not least, in 1555 the Diet of Augsburg divided up the religious space of the Empire between the imperial estates. The politically determined provisions of the Peace of Augsburg, despite some flaws, helped to preserve religious peace for over sixty years and again, after modifications in 1648, down to the end of the old Empire.

Chapter 2

The Princely Court and Political Space in Early Modern Europe Ronald G. Asch

Among the sites and spaces which were of relevance for the political and social life of early modern Europe the princely or royal court played a particularly important role. The palaces in which court life took place had been designed to create conditions which facilitated the display of authority and power, and the way in which space was organized at court was meant to convey a political message. The same held good for the works of art and pictures displayed at court and the festivals and political rituals performed within its confines. The court has often been seen as a space which imposed such strict rules on those who entered it – the great aristocratic magnates in particular – that they lost their autonomy and became mere servants of an absolute ruler. More recent research however has largely rejected this approach and sees the court more as a space which left room for a process of constant negotiation about status and power between the ruler and his courtiers. In what follows I shall first address the hierarchy of space in the princely palace and shall then look at the relationship between the court and the wider world, in particular aristocratic society in general. Finally, I will examine the particular structure of communication at court. I Court life in early modern Europe was dominated by the quest for place and profit and by the competition for status and precedence. Both were intimately linked to 

  For medieval antecedents and the sixteenth century see the chapter ‛Geordneter Raum und Distanz’, in Werner Paravicini (ed.), Höfe und Residenzen im spätmittelalterlichen Reich: Bilder und Begriffe (2 vols, Sigmaringen, 2005), vol. 1, pp. 385–453.    For this approach see in particular Norbert Elias, Die höfische Gesellschaft, ed. Claudia Opitz (Norbert Elias, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2; Frankfurt a.M. 2002).    See for example Jeroen Duindam, Vienna and Versailles: The Courts of Europe’s Dynastic Rivals, 1550–1780 (Cambridge, 2003), and Ronald G. Asch, ‘Hof, Adel und Monarchie. Norbert Elias’ Höfische Gesellschaft im Lichte der neueren Forschung’, in Claudia Opitz (ed.), Höfische Gesellschaft und Zivilisationsprozeß. Norbert Elias’ Werk in Kulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive (Cologne, 2005), pp. 119–42.

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the politics of access. Only those who were able to gain access to the ruler could hope to influence his decisions in matters of patronage and to gain his favour. Court ceremonial granted or denied rights of access to certain groups of persons by reserving specific rooms in the palace for a select circle of courtiers and the ruler’s personal attendants. This spatial differentiation was particularly pronounced at those courts which followed the Burgundian-Spanish ceremonial rules – as for example in Vienna and most other German courts – but also in England which had its own independent ceremonial tradition, much less so in France where the king in comparison to Madrid or the imperial court was easily accessible and where most courtiers could at certain times of the day even enter the royal bedchamber, the innermost sanctum of the palace. Social distinction was organized at the French court not so much by a hierarchy of space but by granting other privileges such as the various ‘entrées’ during the lever and the coucher, the right to join the king in his coaches on his hunting expeditions or the right of women to be presented to the king (‘honneurs de la cour’). Otherwise visitors, even those who had no particular social status, could freely enter the gardens at Versailles and even the palace itself and observe the king in his state apartments – although a different set of private apartments was less accessible. Even here, outsiders could often gain entry when they found a courtier of sufficient standing who permitted them to follow him. In stressing the comparative spatial openness of the French court, however, a number of qualifications are necessary. French kings could only afford to be so accessible because a strict etiquette and a sophisticated ideal of polite conversation, which rendered it almost impossible to mention any controversial subject when talking to the king, created a distance between the king and everybody else which was not spatial in character but which nevertheless acted as a sort of invisible   For a survey of the history of the early modern court see John Adamson (ed.), The Princely Courts of Europe: Ritual, Politics and Culture under the Ancien Régime 1500– 1750 (London, 1999) and Duindam, Vienna. Important recent studies include Andreas Pečar, Die Ökonomie der Ehre: Der höfischer Adel am Kaiserhof Karls VI. (Darmstadt, 2003), and Mark Hengerer, Kaiserhof und Adel in der Mitte des 17. Jahrhunderts: Eine Kommunikationsgeschichte der Macht in der Vormoderne (Constance, 2004).    For this distinction see Hugh Murray Baillie, ‘Etiquette and the Planning of State Apartments in Baroque Palaces’, Archaeologia, 101 (1967): 169–99; and Samuel John Klingensmith, The Utility of Splendor: Ceremony, Social Life and Architecture at the Court of Bavaria, 1600–1800 (Chicago, 1993), pp. 115–44. See also Duindam, Vienna, pp. 161–71, and Irmgard Pangerl, ‘“Höfische Öffentlichkeit”: Fragen des Kammerzutritts und der räumlichen Repräsentation am Wiener Hof’, in Irmgard Pangerl, Martin Scheutz and Thomas Winkelbauer (eds), Der Wiener Hof im Spiegel der Zeremonialprotokolle (1652– 1800). Eine Annäherung (Innsbruck, 2007), pp. 255–86.    For the honneurs de la cour see Henri Carré, La noblesse de France et l’opinion publique au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1920), pp. 22–9; François Bluche, Les Honneurs de la Cour (2 vols, Paris, 1957).    See Joachim Christoph Nemeitz, Sejour de Paris (4th edn, Strasbourg, 1759 [1st edn, 1717]), pp. 212–13 and 403–6. 

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protective barrier for the monarch. Even well-established courtiers found it difficult to raise personal complaints or controversial political issues in conversation outside an official audience, and such an audience was only rarely granted. On the other hand, a king who had fully mastered the game of courtly behaviour, such as Louis XIV, was able to express his displeasure with great effect by the smallest gestures and signs, even by a mere frown.10 In the sixteenth century, when the refined politeness of the honnête homme did not yet shape noble culture in the same way, the openness of France’s royal palaces had been a much greater political problem, in particular during the Wars of Religion under Henry III. The last Valois built railings around his dining table to prevent courtiers from approaching him during meals, although these had to be removed again because the protest against such measures was too great. Nevertheless, henceforth noblemen could only address the king when he had first asked them to do so and in the royal palaces certain rooms of the royal apartments, in particular the king’s cabinet, became inaccessible to all but the most intimate royal companions and servants. Contemporaries thought that Henry III had been inspired by the English or the Spanish court ceremonial in introducing these new rules, alien to French court culture. Not all of these measures had a lasting impact, but nevertheless we are probably justified to speak of a real ‘révolution spatiale’, as Monique Chatenet has recently put it. She points out that the complicated system of different ‘entrées’ regarding the king’s bedchamber, which were so typical for French court ceremonial, was first created by an ordinance of 1585.11 The Wars of Religion created abnormal conditions. Because violence was so much part of aristocratic life even at court – Henry III and IV were after all both assassinated – strict rules of etiquette and a clearer spatial differentiation were necessary to protect the monarch, both his physical person and his body politic, that is his dignity and sacredness.12 That was at least the objective of the   For the ideal of the honnête homme and its impact see Emmanuel Bury, ‘Homme’, in Alain Montandon (ed.), Dictionnaire raisonné de la politesse et du savoir-vivre (Paris, 1995), pp. 483–96, and Maurice Magendie, La Politesse mondaine et les théories de l’honnêteté en France de 1600 à 1660 (Paris, 1925); see also most recently Stuart Carroll, Blood and Violence in Early Modern France (Oxford, 2006), pp. 311–18.    Sigrid von Massenbach (ed. and trans.), Die Memoiren des Herzogs von Saint-Simon (4 vols, Frankfurt a.M., 1977), vol. 3, p. 270; and Louis de Rouvroy, Duc de Saint-Simon, Mémoires, présentation de André Maurois (18 vols, Paris, 1977–9), vol. 11: 1714–1715 (Paris, 1978), pp. 435–6. 10  Ibid., pp. 484–5. 11   Monique Chatenet, La Cour de France au XVIe siècle: Vie sociale et architecture (Paris, 2002), pp. 133–40, esp. 139; see also Nicolas Le Roux, La Faveur du Roi: Mignons et courtisans au temps des derniers Valois (vers 1547–vers 1589) (Paris, 2000), pp. 178–85, esp. 184. 12   See Bernard Hours, Louis XV et sa cour: Le roi, l’étiquette et le courtisan (Paris, 2002), p. 81. 

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new household ordinances Henry III enacted, while his successor, less concerned about both his safety and his dignity, never quite abandoned the easier ways of a powerful but not very refined provincial nobleman from south-western France.13 In the seventeenth century, the French monarchy, while distancing itself from the informality which had marked Henry IV’s court, largely returned to the more traditional policy of easy accessibility, although some of Henry III’s measures, such as the rules regarding the entrées to the lever in the morning, had a lasting impact.14 Nevertheless, even Louis XIV, who largely lived a public life, felt a need to enjoy some privacy by retiring to his (second) wife’s apartments or a smaller residence or lodge near Versailles (for example Marly) at times. The ability to follow him to these private retreats was seen as a sign of great royal favour.15 To the extent that the person of the monarch became more and more a sacred symbol, physical proximity to the ruler was a privilege of the utmost value. Proximity could mean an apartment in the palace – a favour many courtiers sought in Versailles – but also the right (or duty) to sleep (or stay awake guarding the sleeping monarch) in the king’s bedchamber which the premier valet de chambre still enjoyed under Louis XIV, in the same way in which the English gentlemen of the bedchamber, or one of them, shared the same room with their monarch at night in the early seventeenth century.16 When the French monarch slept in his wife’s bedchamber or that of a mistress, the first groom of the bedchamber preceded him to the respective room before leaving the monarch alone, carrying his sword and his chamber pot and retrieving these important items in the morning.17 When the king was absent from Versailles, a valet de chambre nevertheless slept in his bedroom in front of the royal bed.18 Access to the private rooms of the palace was certainly important for courtiers, and Louis XIV received visitors in his bedchamber, although the central position the king’s bedchamber obtained in the palace of Versailles was only created in 1701, that is 14 years before the king’s death.19 When other rulers imitated this fashion, they sometimes built an official bedchamber (chambre de parade), with   For Henry IV’s court see Jean-François Solnon, La Cour de France (Paris, 1987), pp. 163–86. 14  Mathieu Da Vinha, Les Valets de chambre de Louis XIV (Paris, 2004), p. 44. 15  Duc de Saint-Simon, Mémoires, vol. 11, pp. 478–9. 16   For the apartments in Versailles see William R. Newton, L’espace du roi: la cour de France au château de Versailles 1682–1789 (Paris, 2000). For the valets de chambre see Da Vinha, Valets, pp. 44–5; for conditions in England see Ronald G. Asch, Der Hof Karls I. von England: Politik, Provinz und Patronage (Cologne, 1993), p. 132. The household ordinance of 1661 still assumed that one of the grooms or gentlemen of the bedchamber would sleep in the same room as the monarch. 17  Da Vinha, Valets, pp. 45–6. 18   Henriette Graf, Die Residenz in München: Hofzeremoniell, Innenräume und Möblierung von Kurfürst Maximilian I. bis Kaiser Karl VII. (Munich, 2002), p. 105. 19   Graf, Residenz, pp. 104–5. 13

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a bed of state, which they never really used for sleeping and which was only used as a symbol to convey the impression that the visitor had now been admitted to the sanctum sanctorum of the palace.20 Outside France, in Madrid and Vienna or at many German courts, the ruler’s (and his or her consort’s) apartments normally formed a long sequence of presence, guard, audience and ante-chambers, leading up to the cabinet and the bedchamber. Apart from formal audiences – and often not even then – only very few courtiers could enter the actual living quarters of the monarch, who remained invisible to most of them for long stretches of time and was most easily accessible when he went to chapel, participated in a religious procession – something the Habsburgs were particularly fond of – or while hunting.21 At courts where rules of access were more flexible and the monarch more easily accessible there was often a tendency in the second half of the seventeenth century to restrict access and to reorganize the spatial structure of the royal residences accordingly. Thus, Charles II of England tried in later years to reduce the number of courtiers and petitioners who were able to approach him at Whitehall, his principal London residence. This followed a period, subsequent to his return to England in 1660, when he had handed out virtually dozens of keys to the state rooms and even – to a lesser extent – to his private apartments at Whitehall.22 These seem to have been real keys which actually fitted the locks in Whitehall whereas the growing number of honorary Kämmerer (gentlemen of the Privy Chamber) in Vienna received only symbolic keys in the seventeenth century which they could and did display in their country seats but which did not actually give them access to the Emperor’s privy chambers. These Kämmerer constituted a sort of ‘virtual court’ and thus also a virtual political space in the provinces, as Mark Hengerer has argued.23 20   Simon Thurley, Whitehall Palace: An Architectural History of the Royal Apartments, 1240–1698 (New Haven, 1999), p. 106; see also his Hampton Court, pp. 204–5, for similar arrangements in the palace under William III. Thurley points out that the King’s private bedchamber was only accessible to those who had a special key, as the doors had no handles. For Germany see Graf, Residenz, pp. 210–13, and Erich Konter, Das Berliner Schloß im Zeitalter des Absolutismus (Berlin, 1991), p. 88. Konter sees the fact that in Berlin the Great Bedchamber did not occupy a central place in the palace and was less accessible as a sign of political weakness, demonstrating that absolute monarchs in central and east central Europe were less able to dominate the public sphere and political space than in France, but he ignores the long tradition which encouraged monarchs in these countries to lead a more secluded life (Konter, Schloß, pp. 84–5, 89). For the royal palace in Berlin see also Wolfgang Neugebauer, Residenz – Verwaltung – Repräsentation. Das Berliner Schloß und seine historischen Funktionen vom 15. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Kleine Schriftenreihe der Historischen Kommission zu Berlin, vol. 1, Potsdam, 1999). 21   Hengerer, Kaiserhof, pp. 216–42; see also Graf, Residenz, p. 212. 22   Brian Weiser, Charles II and the Politics of Access (Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 28–9. 23   Hengerer, Kaiserhof, p. 84; see also his ‘Adelsintegration am Kaiserhof (1618– 1665): Zeremoniell, Personal, Finanzen, Netzwerke’, Frühneuzeitinfo, 9 (1998): 274–9.

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Matters were different in England under Charles II, where dozens of courtiers seem to have had real keys to the king’s rooms. Trying to restrict access at Whitehall, however, was not an easy task as the rather chaotic not to say labyrinthine conglomeration of individual buildings from different periods which constituted the palace made it difficult to create a clear sequence of rooms leading to the privy lodgings where the king lived. This was somewhat easier in Windsor where new apartments were built in the 1670s in accordance with the requirements of a stricter etiquette. Access to the king would have been even more difficult, had Charles II’s plan for a vast new palace at Winchester come to fruition. Not only would Winchester with its geometrical layout have been the perfect baroque palace, its distance from London would in itself have reduced the number of persons attending the court.24 Even without moving the court to an entirely new and more modern palace, Charles II was determined to confine access to persons he could consider politically reliable in the later 1670s. In practice this meant, as Brian Weiser has shown, that Anglican royalists gained almost a monopoly of access after 1674, a monopoly which the most powerful minister during these years, the Lord Treasurer Danby, energetically defended, supported by allies in the king’s bedchamber such as the Duchess of Portsmouth, the maitresse en titre at the time.25 However, while the policy of open access before 1674 had often created chaotic conditions, because so many politicians were able to influence the king at one stage or another, thereby undermining the position of their rivals, the restrictions enforced in later years were also potentially dangerous. They left only parliament as a space and forum to voice discontent and gave credibility to the rumour that the king had become the prisoner of a small faction which – according to some critics – favoured Popery and despotism.26 Monarchs were, as this example shows, confronted by a paradox. If they were too easily accessible, it could become difficult to control the stream of petitions and suits, they risked being too generous and even undermining their own ministers by listening too often to opposing court factions, as Charles II’s grandfather James I had clearly done during his early years in England after 1603.27 On the other hand, a monarch who shut himself off from all contacts in his Privy lodgings could lose control and provoke the growth of a political Fronde outside the court. Matters could be made even worse when the ruler left control over access to his lodgings and his person to a single courtier or minister, a favourite. The political power of early modern favourites clearly rested on their ability to control access to the ruler,

  Weiser, Charles II, pp. 24–53.  Ibid., pp. 74–9. 26  Ibid., pp. 71, 79–81. 27   See Ronald G. Asch, Jakob I. König von England und Schottland (1566–1625): Herrscher des Friedens im Zeitalter der Religionskriege (Stuttgart, 2005), pp. 86–90. 24

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but it was this very monopoly which made them so odious and often provoked such violent opposition against them.28 Moreover, early modern courts were governed by a sort of horror vacui. Palaces could only represent the splendour of majesty when they were filled by courtiers – rooms that were empty and festivals which were thinly attended were seen as a sign that the ruler’s prestige and authority were in danger. Royal and princely palaces often sought to impress visitors and the public by the sheer vast amount of space which they provided for ceremonial occasions and accommodation, but this only worked when the royal household supplemented by a suitable number of hangers-on – all decked out in luxurious clothes – was sufficiently large to fill this space.29 Although both James I and Charles I of England, for example, repeatedly published proclamations which reminded peers and members of the gentry that their proper place for most of the year, in particular when the law courts in Westminster were not in session, was at home in their counties and not in London,30 court officials were alarmed when festivals or other ceremonial events at court were sparsely attended. Thus in 1635 the ‘groome porter complained that all our great lords are gone out of London this Christmas, that there are not gameing lords enough left to fill up the bill to play with his Majestie Juletyde’.31 This horror vacui may explain why some monarchs preferred at times a minimalist approach. Small studiolos or cabinets within the palace which created an atmosphere of intimacy could emphasize the aura of majesty and give the visitor – if he managed to gain admittance – the impression of entering into the sphere of the arcana imperii. This impression was underlined by decorations or collections of curiosa and works of art which – for the very reason that their message was difficult to decipher and could only be understood with the help of written commentaries – reinforced the feeling that mere mortals were inadequate   For the early modern favourite see Le Roux, La Faveur, and Ronald G. Asch, ‛Schlußbetrachtung. Höfische Gunst und Höfische Günstlinge zwischen Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit – 18 Thesen’, in Jan Hirschbiegel and Werner Paravicini (eds), Der Fall des Günstlings: Hofparteien in Europa vom 13. bis zum 17. Jahrhundert (Ostfildern, 2004), pp. 515–31, as well as his ‘“Lumine solis”. Der Favorit und die politische Kultur des Hofes in Westeuropa’, in Michael Kaiser and Andreas Pečar (eds), Der zweite Mann im Staat: Oberste Amtsträger und Favoriten im Umkreis der Reichsfürsten in der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin, 2003), pp. 21–38. 29  R. Malcolm Smuts, ‘Art and the Material Culture of Majesty in Early Stuart England’, in R. Malcolm Smuts (ed.), The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 86–112, esp. 89–93. 30   Felicity Heal, ‘The Crown, the Gentry and London: The Enforcement of Proclamations 1590–1640’, in Claire Cross et al. (eds), Law and Government under the Tudors (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 211–28. 31   ‘Rossingham to Scudamore, 3 January 1635’: London, The National Archives [TNA], C 115/M36/6447, and Asch, Hof, pp. 160–65 for further incidents of this sort. 28

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to understand the mysterious ways of their god-like rulers.32 Equally, small country houses and hunting lodges, perhaps built in the style of an Italian villa, could impress the visitor more by their elegance and their exquisite taste than by any outward splendour or their sheer size – the Queen’s house in Greenwich and other buildings by Inigo Jones would be examples of this approach in England. The built environment of the court had to ensure that the power and dignity of the ruler became and remained visible. It was in some way the very essence of court life to create this visibility of power, to make the essential religious, cultural and intellectual foundations underpinning royal or princely rule visible and readable for a wider public or at least for the political elite attending the court. On the other hand, the court was also often designed as a place where subjects were confronted by the mystery of majesty, the essentially secret or arcane nature of royal or imperial rule which remained in the last resort incomprehensible to mere mortals.33 European monarchs did not live in a forbidden city as the emperor of China did but in some monarchies, such as Spain in the seventeenth century, the king only appeared in public on a few rare occasions.34 Court ceremonial always kept his subjects, even his own courtiers at a great distance from the ruler who was accessible only to a few select officials and servants or perhaps even exclusively to a single all-powerful ministerial favourite. Even art, while glorifying power, might stress the mysterious nature of royal authority and majesty by employing an arcane mythological language which was deliberately designed to be incomprehensible for the outsider or for those who had not been initiated. Often the only message they could understand was that they were confronted by a secret and that behind this veil of confusing and dazzling images was a higher reality far above the humdrum workings of everyday politics. Few monarchs wholeheartedly pursued the opposite strategy of revealing everything and of keeping nothing hidden, instead showing the full majesty of kingship to the public or at least to everybody attending their court. Louis XIV may perhaps be seen as a case in point.35 Even in such cases,  Luciano Berti, Il Principe dello Studiolo: Francescio I dei Medici e la fine des Rinascimento fiorentino (2nd edn, Pistoia, 2002), pp. 99–133; Alexander Hoppe, ‘Rückzugsorte’, in Paravicini (ed.), Höfe und Residenzen, vol. 1, pp. 417–20; Pierre and Françoise Joukovsky, A travers la galerie François I (Paris, 1992). 33  The dialectic tension is emphasized by Andreas Gestrich, Absolutismus und Öffentlichkeit: Politische Kommunikation zu Beginn des 18. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 1994), pp. 45–54. 34   For Spain see Regine Jorzick, Herrschaftssymbolik und Staat. Die Vermittlung königlicher Herrschaft im Spanien der frühen Neuzeit (1556–1598) (Munich, 1998); see also Fanny Cosandey and Isabelle Poutrin, Monarchies espagnole et française, 1550–1714 (Neuilly, 2001), pp. 269–74, 279–83, as well as C. Lison Tolosana, La Imagen del Rey (Madrid, 1991). 35   As Gérard Sabatier has emphasized, the iconographical programme of Versailles was in itself designed to be fully comprehensible. Nevertheless, many frescoes were painted in such a way that the observer could not properly see them and could thus only appreciate their message by relying on a written description. In fact the iconography was 32

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there had to be refuges of intimacy, not only because most monarchs wished to be free from the rigid rules of court ceremonial at times, but also because one of the most precious gifts which rulers could bestow on their courtiers was to admit them to a small circle of intimate companions which was inaccessible to other members of the court. Louis XV of France is an example for such a strategy, as Bernard Hours has recently shown. The fourth Bourbon king has often been seen as a monarch who abandoned his own court, fed up with the daily routine of ceremonies and audiences, retreating into a sort of private life, filled with frivolous amusements and entertainments. He may appear as a ruler who had come to perceive his own palace as a prison. However, to some extent Louis XV, by creating new spaces of intimacy, reacted only to new ceremonial and political challenges. While he went out hunting or at the hunting parties held afterwards, when he admitted nobles to his apartment to eat, drink, play games and indulge in small talk and conversation he may have acted as if he were almost a private individual, no more than the first among equals in a small republic of noblemen and noblewomen. But this intimacy and companionship were themselves of high political significance. They were meant to create ties of loyalty which the formalized life at court with its rigid protocol could no longer generate. Yet permission to share the private life of the monarch could only be a mark of distinction if the ruler had a private life, or if arrangements at court could at times at least evoke the illusion of privacy and intimacy, so efforts were repeatedly made to create just such an illusion.36 The great beds of state situated in an official bedchamber fashionable at many European courts in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, which have already been mentioned, were as much a part of this illusion, as were the many more intimate subsidiary residences, hunting lodges or country houses surrounding the main palace. II In the sixteenth century most monarchs had still travelled a great deal. Some, like Emperor Charles V, spent almost their entire life travelling from one part of their realm to another, others undertook extensive tours of their kingdoms only not meant to inform but to proclaim the king’s majesty (‘Sa vocation est moins d’informer que de proclamer’). See Gérard Sabatier, Versailles ou la figure de roi (Paris, 1999), pp. 438–41, esp. 440. For Versailles see now also Joël Cornette (ed.), Versailles ou le pouvoir de la pierre (Paris, 2006). 36   Hours, Louis XV, pp. 116–27, and summarizing on p. 127: ‘Tout donne l’impression que le monarque absolu fut contraint à un mouvement perpétuel de retrait et de distanciation. Sous Louis XV, pour mettre le roi hors d’atteinte, il fallut l’enfouir sous les apparences du privé. Ainsi nous assistons à une politicisation du privé et non pas à une séparation des deux domaines sous l’effet d’une lassitude ….’

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in times of crisis, such as Charles IX of France in the 1570s,37 and many limited their progresses mainly to a select number of favourite palaces and country houses situated at a convenient distance from the administrative capital, as for example Elizabeth I of England. Elizabeth I, however, was also fond of visiting her courtiers and other noblemen at their own houses, thus integrating aristocratic residences into the space occupied by the court. Special bedchambers designed for the Queen, should she ever come to visit a country house, made this connection between aristocratic space and the space of the court visible.38 Only during the course of the seventeenth century did royal government cease to be itinerant. Louis XIV settled at Versailles after 1682, although the court still regularly went to Fontainebleau during the hunting season. By the later seventeenth century English kings tended to spend most of the year at Whitehall or Windsor or perhaps at Newmarket or Hampton Court, but rarely ventured much further; admittedly, that might have changed if Winchester had become the seat of a major palace as Charles II had planned. To the extent that he was no longer physically present outside the capital and its immediate surroundings and that solemn entries into the great cities of the realm, which had been important in the past for confirming or amending local privileges, were now obsolete, the monarch had to be represented in other ways. Statues, coats of arms, pictures in town halls, law courts and civic buildings or even triumphal arches in central squares were meant to dominate the public space in the remotest corner of the realm; and, of course, the monarch’s portraits did not just represent him. To some extent they could claim the same respect as the ruler himself. Sometimes portraits were even combined with a throne standing on a dais (the portrait was hung on a wall behind the throne in such cases) which was in itself a symbol of the royal presence and had to be greeted by those entering the room accordingly. It was certainly seen as a grave breach of etiquette to turn one’s back towards a royal portrait in a room.39 In the case of the Habsburg monarchy and the Holy Roman Empire eighteenthcentury portraits of the Emperor showed the ruler in the same posture which he would adopt when giving an audience in the Hofburg. Such portraits were publicly displayed during political ceremonies outside Vienna, for example when the citizens of an imperial free city swore fealty to a newly elected Emperor, who in such cases was represented both by an imperial commissioner and his portrait. In some ways the town halls or other buildings in which such ceremonies took 37   Jean Boutier, Alain Dewerpe and Daniel Nordman, Un tour de France royal: Le voyage de Charles IX (1564–1566) (Paris, 1984). 38  Mary Hill Cole, The Portable Queen: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Ceremony (Amherst, 1999). 39   Gérard Sabatier, ‘“Le Portrait de Cèsar, c’est César”: Lieux et mise en scène du portrait du roi dans la France de Louis XIV’, in Thomas W. Gaehtgens and Nicole Hochner (eds), L’image du roi de François Ier à Louis XIV (Paris, 2006), pp. 209–44, in particular 239–40; see also Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, 1992), pp. 91–7, and Louis Marin, Le Portrait du roi (Paris, 1981).

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place became part of the court as a political space.40 In Catholic Germany and the Habsburg monarchy, the Kaisersäle of the great monasteries and of episcopal palaces also symbolized, in a different way, the political presence of the absent Emperor and the loyalty of those who built these splendid rooms.41 Of course, at this stage fairly accurate maps and statistics made it much easier to control the space of the realm from one centre than before, so that the need to travel for the ruler and his court had been much reduced. Monarchs ceased to visit the provinces of their realms, sometimes leaving this task to younger members of the reigning dynasty, as Louis XIV did in 1700–1701.42 Enlightened reformers such as Frederick the Great or Joseph II might of course undertake regular inspection tours in their realms, but on such occasions public ceremonies were mostly avoided and the royal or imperial household – much reduced in size anyhow – stayed behind in the capital. However, the capital cities also changed when the age of the itinerant court ended. The great aristocratic families now acquired or built palatial town houses of their own in the capital, thereby transforming the urban environment. Cities like Vienna were almost entirely dominated by the palaces of the aristocracy in the eighteenth century and became a sort of extension of the court; Andreas Pečar has recently examined these building activities in greater detail. He has emphasized how the great families of the court aristocracy tried to inscribe their claims to power and status in the space of the city. In many ways they were dependent on the Emperor’s favour which they could, like other courtiers, lose at any time, but their magnificent palaces proclaimed their claims to status and the fact that they belonged to an exclusive elite in ways that no ruler could easily ignore. These buildings also demonstrated that they and only they were able to live in the style appropriate for the court aristocracy. Those who had sufficient financial resources could even build a second palace just outside the town walls, as the Liechtensteins did; that is, they could occupy a space where they were allowed to exercise their own jurisdictional rights and thereby proclaim in a subtle way their autonomy as noble lords, not in some far away province but within a short distance from the seat of the court.43 The Emperors were remarkably tolerant of such efforts and did not see them as a threat to 40

  Jutta Götzmann, ‘Kaiserliche Legitimation im Bildnis’, in Heinz Schilling, Werner Heun and Jutta Götzmann (eds), Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation 962 bis 1806: Altes Reich und Neue Staaten 1495 bsi 1805. Essays (Dresden, 2006), pp. 257–71. 41   Johannes Erichsen, ‘Kaisersäle, Kaiserzimmer: Eine kritische Nahsicht’, in ibid., pp. 273–88. 42   For the entrée royal in its declining phase see Anne Spagnolo-Stiff, Die ‘Entrée Solenelle’: Festarchitektur im französischen Königtum (1700–1750) (Weimar, 1996). See also Mathieu Zamponi, ‘Le tour de France des princes 1700–1701’ (PhD thesis, Université Pierre Mendès France-Grenoble 2, 2008). 43   Andreas Pečar, Ökonomie der Ehre: Höfischer Adel im Kaiserhof Karls VI. (Darmstadt, 2003), pp. 274–97.

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their own position. On the contrary, as the Habsburgs themselves mostly did not engage in great construction activities – apart from building churches or monasteries – until the completion of Schönbrunn in the 1740s, to some extent these aristocratic town houses compensated this deficiency, transforming the urban space into an extended court. Even religious space was shaped by the court and courtiers as great aristocratic families constructed conspicuous funeral monuments in the more important city churches, as Mark Hengerer has emphasized for the seventeenth century.44 In other capitals the effect of such aristocratic building activities was far more ambivalent. In England, Westminster became equally dominated by the town houses of the aristocracy in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, but these were no mere extension of the court. Rather, they provided a rival social space which was in competition with the court and which in the end, together with the coffee houses and theatres which were important meeting points for polite society, almost marginalized it in the eighteenth century.45 This is also true, though to a lesser extent, for Parisian salons and the hotels of the French aristocrats who moved to Paris in the eighteenth century to escape the strict etiquette of the court in Versailles.46 The meetings in the salons and social events taking place in the aristocratic town houses could in some ways seem more attractive than court festivals, although these were undoubtedly more splendid. But at court communication was severely restricted; one could not risk speaking one’s mind freely because one might offend a powerful courtier or the king himself.47 Seen from outside, all communication at court seemed to be an exercise in dissimulation, an effort to hide one’s real intentions and thoughts, and the interaction between the court as a political space and other centres of communication was shaped by the fact that courtly etiquette created a need for a different site to which courtiers could retreat to escape from the constraints of court life.

44   Mark Hengerer, ‛Adelsgräber im Wien des 18. Jahrhunderts. Betrachtungen zu einer Archäologie des adeligen Gedächtnisses’, in Mark Hengerer (ed.), Macht und Memoria: Begräbniskultur europäischer Oberschichten in der Frühen Neuzeit (Cologne, 2005), pp. 381–420. 45   Julia F. Merritt, The Social World of Early Modern Westminster: Abbey, Court and Community, 1525–1640 (Manchester, 2005), pp. 142–54, 194–200. For the eighteenth century see H.M. Port, ‘Town House and Country House: Their Interaction’, in Dana Arnold (ed.), The Georgian County House: Architecture, Landscape and Society (Stroud, 2003), pp. 117–38. 46   For the aristocratic residence in Paris see Mathieu Marraud, La Noblesse de Paris au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris, 2000), pp. 105–35. 47  Nicolas Faret, L’Honeste Homme, ou l’art de plaire à la cour (Paris, 1637), pp. 186–7.

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III Like other social sites the court certainly had its own structure of communication.48 In fact, communication at court often had a ritualistic character,49 which imposed strict rules on all participants. For a non-European court such as that of the Chinese Emperors under the Manchus it has recently been asserted that the thousands of servants, many of them eunuchs, slaves or concubines, resented the show of absolute loyalty and obedience which they were forced to put on daily; while outwardly demonstrating an abject servility they secretly engaged in all sorts of subversive activities, stealing the Emperor’s property, embezzling public funds, letting strangers into the innermost parts of the palace and so on. The ‘public transcript’ of their official behaviour and the ‘hidden transcript’ of their real thoughts and attitudes were clearly at odds, as Evelyn Rawski puts it in her book The Last Emperors, following James Scott.50 Can the same be said about European courts? Courtiers certainly developed an ability to present a specific persona to their audience when acting in the context of a particular social space. There was one persona for the public space of the court, the ‘front stage’ of aristocratic society in Goffman’s terminology, another one for the off-stage world of the backstairs which was so important for gaining access to the king’s more intimate companions or the monarch himself, and yet another persona for the wider space of metropolitan society or social sites at a greater distance from the court, such as the rural castle or country house or the provincial assemblies of Estates.51 Observed from outside, 48  On communication at court see also Rudolf Schlögl,‘Der frühneuzeitliche Hof als Kommunikationsraum. Interaktionstheoretische Perspektiven der Forschung’, in Frank Becker (ed.), Geschichte und Systemtheorie: Exemplarische Fallstudien (Frankfurt a.M., 2004), pp. 185–225; for a different social space see also his ‘Der Raum als “Universalmedium” in der frühneuzeitlichen Stadt’: http://www.uni-konstanz.de/FuF/ Philo/Geschichte/Schloegl/Schloegl/RaumalsUniversalmedium03.pdf (consulted 22/8/07). Schlögl argues here that the court was ‘an attempt to organise feudal state government through a distinct spatial order and a certain pattern of arranging human bodies in this order’ [‘Der Hof selbst ist ein Versuch, feudale Herrschaft als Staat über eine Raumordnung und ein Arrangement der Körper organisationsfähig zu machen’]. For the movement of bodies in the spatial order of the court see now also Dimitri Zakharine, Von Angesicht zu Angesicht. Der Wandel direkter Kommunikation in der ost- und westeuropäischen Neuzeit (Constance, 2005). 49  On rituals of conversation see Erving Goffman, Interaktionsrituale. Über Verhalten in direkter Kommunikation (Frankfurt a.M., 1986), p. 126; E. Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face to Face Behavior (New York 1967), chap. 4, section 2. 50   Evelyn Rawski, The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions (Berkeley 1998), p. 161. 51   For the difference between front stage and back stage areas with different rules for behaviour and conversation see Erving Goffman, Wir alle spielen Theater. Die Selbstdarstellung im Alltag (5th edn, Munich, 2007), pp. 99–126/The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (New York 1959), pp. 109–40.

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such contrasting performances were mere hypocrisy and dissimulation. Thus La Bruyere wrote about the courtier in his Characters: il ne nomme plus chaque chose par son nom … Non content de ne être pas sincère, il ne souffre pas que personne le soit; la verité blesse son oreille … Il vise également à se faire des patrons et des créatures … il pleure d’un oeil, et il rit de l’autre.52

A hundred years earlier, George Puttenham had written in his Art of English Poesie that a courtier should be able ‘to dissemble his conceits as well as his countenances, so as he never speake as he thinks, or thinke as he speaks, and that in any matter of importance his words and his meaning very seldome meete’.53 Dissimulation thus seems to be the very hallmark of the court and court society, not only because every word one spoke was a weapon in the scramble for place and profit, but also because face to face communication at court left no room for spontaneous behaviour, despite the famous ‘sprezzatura’ which created the impression of such spontaneity. In fact, as Castiglione had already pointed out, it was the courtier’s greatest art to conceal his efforts and to let his artificial behaviour appear to be natural and spontaneous.54 Throughout the later sixteenth and seventeenth century, manuals for would-be courtiers – one has to remember however that such manuals were written not so much for members of the aristocratic elite but rather for social climbers or non  Jean de La Bruyere, Les Caractères (Paris, 1965), pp. 216–17. See also AdelinCharles Fiorato, ‘Simulation/Dissimulation’, in Montandon (ed.), Dictionnaire raisonné de la politesse, pp. 801–45, Ursula Geitner, Die Sprache der Verstellung: Studien zum rhetorischen und anthropologischen Wissen im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Tübingen, 1992), and Louis van Delft and Florence Lotterie, ‘Torquato Accetto et la notion de la “dissimulation honnête” dans la culture classique’, in Alain Montandon (ed.), L’honnête homme et le dandy (Tübingen, 1993), pp. 35–58, as well as Margot Kruse, ‘Critique et justification de la dissimilation chez quelques moralistes du XVIIe siècle’, in Manfred Tietz and Volker Kapp (eds), La pensée religieuse dans la littérature et la civilisation du XVIIe siècle, Biblio 17: Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature 13 (Paris, 1984), pp. 147–70. 53   George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie [1589], eds G.D. Willcock and A. Walker (Cambridge, 1936), p. 299, as quoted by Markku Peltonen, The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour (Cambridge, 2003), p. 31. See also Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton, 1978). 54   Harry Berger Jr., ‘Sprezzatura and the Absence of of Grace’, in Daniel Javitch (ed.), The Book of the Courtier (New York, 2002), pp. 295–306. For Castiglione see also Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano (Cambridge, 1995); and Robert W. Hanning und David Rosand (eds), Castiglione: The Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture (New Haven, 1983). On dissimulation and selfconsciousness in face to face communication see also Goffman, Interaktionsrituale, pp. 133–5. 52

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noble members of court society such as secretaries – continually stressed how important it was for the courtier to disguise his own interests and convictions should they be in conflict with those of his master. Such a situation was only too likely if the master could freely follow his own fancy at court, whereas the courtier was hardly more than a servant and no longer the ruler’s councillor, who could give him advice from a position of authority – the role which Castiglione had still assigned to him. In fact, at the height of the fashion for reason of state tracts at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the combined influence of Tacitus and Machiavelli was greatest, rulers were admonished that permanent dissimulation was required of them if they wanted to govern successfully.55 However, one should also remember that from the beginning, from Castiglione onwards, the perfect courtier was designed as a sort of human work of art. The ideal of politeness, which formed such an important part of courtly behaviour, implied a certain artificiality and a high degree of permanent self-control, as at court ‘all performers watch themselves being watched’.56 A particular kind of selffashioning was required of the courtier, but for those who had been brought up as courtiers and were courtiers all their lives, as many aristocrats had been at least from the seventeenth century, it would be difficult to acquire an identity separate from this social role; personality and social role were in the last resort identical.57 This does not mean that there were no courtiers who were secretly dissatisfied because they failed to gain the profit, honour and status they sought, such as the Duc de Saint-Simon under Louis XIV, but they defined themselves so much as courtiers that they often found it impossible to leave the court, even though their career may not have prospered. The difficult relationship between ruler and courtiers within a political framework which gave the prince the chance to claim – at least in theory – absolute authority had been addressed in the Italian Renaissance at an early stage. Particularly interesting in this respect is Della Casa’s treatise De officiis inter potentiores et tenuiores amicos, published in 1543. The treatise was translated into English in the 1660s as The Arts of Grandeur and Submission or A Discourse Concerning the Behaviour of Great Men towards Inferiours and of Inferiour   Karl-Heinz Göttert, Kommunikationsideale: Untersuchungen zur europäischen Konversationstheorie (Munich, 1988), p. 61. For the influence of Tacitus see also Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 65. See also Ronald G. Asch, ‘Der Höfling als Heuchler? Unaufrichtigkeit, Konversationsgemeinschaft und Freundschaft am frühneuzeitlichen Hof’, in Wolfgang Reinhard (ed.), Krumme Touren: Anthropologie kommunikativer Umwege (Vienna, 2007), pp. 183–203. 56   Berger, ‘Sprezzatura’, p. 301. 57   For the idea of self-fashioning see Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance SelfFashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980), but also more recently John Martin, ‘Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence: The Discovery of the Individual in Renaissance Europe’, American Historical Review, 102 (1997): 1309–42. 55

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Personages towards Men of Greater Quality. Inferior personages could be ‘poor friends, servants, creatures, vassals and dependances’, and the great men were powerful officeholders or courtiers but also of course kings and princes.58 According to Della Casa there could be no real conversation between the powerful and their servants because what the servants or courtiers said was only designed to please or entertain their master; this statement became a commonplace in later tracts which at times even advised courtiers to avoid almost all conversations with the prince as the risk of betraying oneself in such situations was too high. Talents and personal gifts, which could create the impression that the servant was superior to the master, had to be concealed at all cost.59 Nevertheless, Della Casa advised against outright flattery as this implied a loss of personal honour and would destroy all social bonds between master and servant; he thought that such bonds could exist after all, despite the potential conflicts of interests. In his opinion, the master or prince had to respect his servants and remember that he owed them gratitude and adequate compensation for their services, because these constituted ‘a real debt, without the formality of covenant and bond’. After all, his servants were free men. Although they may have pursued mercenary objectives, ‘they were still friends of a lesser degree’ and not slaves, as Della Casa put it,60 and had voluntarily decided to serve their master. It remained a fact that the master owed them compensation for their services, but for the very reason that they were his friends, although friends of a lesser degree, they could not openly insist on such compensation; this would have destroyed the friendship to which they aspired.61 Della Casa’s tract illustrates the rules of communication at court. Life at court was only possible if both the courtiers and the ruler pretended that at least the high-ranking nobles attending the monarch were to some extent his friends or potential friends, though certainly not his equals.62 To some extent this may have been a fiction, but even powerful princes were well advised to play along with this game and respect its conventional rules, otherwise their court would have fallen apart. A space in which ruler and courtiers moved alongside each other could only be maintained if it was constructed as a space of potential friendship, not just of   Giovanni Della Casa, The Arts of Grandeur and Submission or A Discourse Concerning the Behaviour of Great Men towards their Inferiours, and of Inferiour Personages towards Men of Greater Quality, written in Latin by Johannes Casa and rendered into English by Henry Stubbe (London, 1665), Advertisement to the Reader [unpaginated]. 59  Ibid., p. 40. For Della Casa see Manfred Hinz, Rhetorische Strategien des Hofmannes: Studien zu den italienischen Hofmannstraktaten des 16. und 17. Jahrhunders (Stuttgart, 1992), pp. 277–94. 60  Della Casa, Arts, p. 44. 61  Ibid., p. 25. 62   For friendship at court see Andreas Schinkel, Freundschaft. Von der gemeinsamen Selbstverwirklichung zum Beziehungsmanagement – Die Verwandlungen einer sozialen Ordnung (Freiburg, 2003), pp. 254–64. 58

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authority and obedience. On the other hand, for the very reason that they played a role as the ruler’s friends the courtiers could never really claim any favour or grant as something which the monarch legally owed them as this would have destroyed the potential friendship.63 They had to wait for the king’s generosity and liberality, and conceal their discontent if they did not receive the rewards they had hoped for. This may have entailed a certain degree of dissimulation, but was a necessary element in a society where grants, titles and offices were a reward for loyalty and love, not for personal merits or a sort of performance-related bonus. IV The court was a public space which gained its prestige and special function from the fact that it was also the ruler’s private space. In any case its accessibility was limited and those who gained access did not all do so on the same conditions. By entering this specific space, which even in legal terms was jurisdictionally distinct from other areas, one accepted the rules and norms set by the monarch for his courtiers and all visitors. One may therefore be tempted to see the court as a typical example of a public sphere where communication between equals – and, some would argue, all communication based on sincerity instead of dissimulation – was impossible, but where the public provided a passive audience for the words and actions of one dominant actor, the prince, participating in a merely ‘repräsentative Öffentlichkeit’, to use an expression coined by Habermas. However, this view is too one-sided; at least in the sixteenth century and probably up to the mid-seventeenth century, debate at court ‘was not solely concerned with embodying, challenging or counselling the monarch but could be conducted in a sphere independent of the crown, for courtiers’ own political, personal and ideological reasons’.64 Even during later periods, when rulers such as Louis XIV asserted strong rhetorical claims to absolute power, they had to respect – and to be seen to respect – their courtiers’ claims to status and honour under normal circumstances. In fact, the secret of Louis XIV’s success was that, with the exception of some disgruntled malcontents such as the Duke of Saint-Simon, he largely convinced the higher nobility that he did so. To some extent, even under an ‘absolute’ monarchy, aristocrats who enjoyed enough social credit (however defined) were able to negotiate their status at court, though perhaps less so than in the sixteenth century when withdrawal 63   For this dialectic of friendship see Julian Pitt-Rivers, ‘The Kith and Kin’, in Jack Goody (ed.), The Character of Kinship (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 89–105, esp. 96–7. For the problem of friendship in the renaissance see also Allan Silver, ‘Friendship and Trust as Moral Ideals: An Historical Approach’, Archives Européennes de Sociologie, 30 (1989): 274–97, esp. 288. 64  Natalie Mears, Queenship and Political Discourses in the Elizabethan Realms (Cambridge, 2005), p. 107, and 268 for the role of the court as a focus for particular ‘public discourses’.

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from court and even military revolt were still real political options.65 But the court was not just the stage for the monarch’s glory and majesty; it also provided the indispensable platform for the search for prestige and honour which was of such a paramount importance for aristocrats. This search for honour could only succeed if the actions performed by noblemen and their families took place in public under the ‘sovereign’s gaze’ and that of other courtiers.66 In earlier periods, other sites had been as important at the court as a space where nobles could assert their status, for example tournaments or the assemblies of the local Estates and similar bodies, but in the great continental monarchies of the seventeenth century (and for the high aristocracy at least) the court attained paramount importance as the site where competition for honour and prestige took place.67 Thus, the court was a typical example of a space marked by agonistic communication,68 a space hierarchically structured, in which some were actors and others were mere spectators, but which was nevertheless more than just the theatre of royal power.

65   See Duindam, Vienna, pp. 98–9, 206–10; Katia Béguin, ‘Louis XIV et l’aristocratie’, Histoire, économie et société, 19 (2000): 497–512; and Leonhard Horowski, ‘Das Erbe des Favoriten: Minister, Mätressen und Günstlinge am Hof Ludwigs XIV’, in Jan Hirschbiegel and Werner Paravicini (eds), Der Fall des Günstlings (Tübingen, 2004), pp. 77–124. For negotiating status at court in the seventeenth century see Martin Butler, ‘Courtly Negotiations’, in David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (eds), The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 20–40, esp. 27, and Paul E.J. Hammer, ‘Upstaging the Queen: The Earl of Essex, France Bacon and the Accession Day Celebration of 1595’, in ibid., pp. 41–66. 66   Jay M. Smith, The Culture of Merit: Nobility, Royal Service and the Making of Absolute Monarchy in France 1600–1789 (Ann Arbor, 1996). 67   For this aspect of court culture see most recently Martin Wrede, ‘Code, Konzept und Konjunkturen des Rittertums in der französischen Hofkultur des 17. Jahrhunderts’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 33 (2007): 350–74. 68   Susanne Rau and Gerd Schwerhoff, ‘Öffentliche Räume in der Frühen Neuzeit. Überlegungen zur Leitbegriffen und Themen eines Forschungsfeldes’, in Susanne Rau and Gerd Schwerhoff (eds), Zwischen Gotteshaus und Taverne: Öffentliche Räume in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Cologne, 2004), pp. 11–52, esp. 19.

Chapter 3

Drinking Houses and the Politics of Surveillance in Pre-industrial Southampton James R. Brown

It is no longer necessary to justify the inclusion of inns, taverns and alehouses under the terms of this collection. A by-product of the recent growth of research that allows us to take ordinary people seriously as political actors is an appreciation of the political attributes of the spaces they inhabited: parish churches and marketplaces, dwelling houses and harbours enjoy prime locations on an interpretative landscape that no longer interns political agency within the institutional sites of state. Drinking houses in early modern Britain were politicized territories according to a wide variety of definitions. Within conventional understandings, the raft of royal proclamations and parliamentary legislation by which the alcohol trade was regulated placed them within the infrastructural reach of Westminster, while they furnished venues for conversations about state affairs as well as devices of nascent party politics; in the later Stuart period, for example, Whigs and Tories instrumentalized different inns, while public drinking choices and practices became potent carriers of political identity within representational economies. Connections between hostelries and varieties of ‘contentious politics’ (their provision of spatial and communicative resources for nonconformists, rioters and rebels) are even better known, while we are developing a nuanced appreciation of   For a review of the literature see Wayne te Brake, Shaping History: Ordinary People in European Politics (Berkeley, 1998), chap. 1.    Judith Hunter, ‘Legislation, Royal Proclamations and other National Directives affecting Inns, Taverns, Alehouses, Brandy Shops and Punch Houses, 1552 to 1757’ (PhD Thesis, University of Reading, 1994); Judith Hunter, ‘English Inns, Taverns, Alehouses and Brandy Shops: The Legislative Framework, 1495–1797’, in Beat Kümin and B. Ann Tlusty (eds), The World of the Tavern: Public Houses in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 65–82; Stephen K. Roberts, ‘Alehouses, Brewing and Government under the Early Stuarts’, Southern History, 2 (1980): 45–71.    Alan Everitt, ‘The English Urban Inn 1560–1760’, in Alan Everitt (ed.), Perspectives in English Urban History (London, 1973), p. 111; Angela McShane Jones, ‘Roaring Royalists and Ranting Brewers: the Politicisation of Drink and Drunkenness in Political Broadside Ballads from 1640 to 1689’, in Adam Smyth (ed.), A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 69–88.    Peter Clark, ‘The Alehouse and the Alternative Society’, in Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas (eds), Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Seventeenth-Century 

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their participation in what Keith Wrightson has termed ‘the political dimensions of everyday life’ by providing key arenas in which uneven power relationships within local communities were constituted, reproduced and contested. Partaking of all of these definitions, this article takes surveillance as a novel point of entry to drinking houses as a species of ‘political space’. Surveillance, understood here to include all forms of monitoring including but not confined to visual observation, is a valued attribute of governance and a key means by which a society’s power holders regulate the lives of subordinates and ensure the conformity of their behaviour to prescribed norms. It is often regarded as a constituent of modernity. Bureaucratic recordkeeping is described as a ‘rationalizing’ process, while the comprehensive scrutiny of present populations is seen as an outcome of digital technologies (computerized government databases and, more emotively, identity card schemes and closed circuit television). However, while early modern people would not have recognized the term, recent work disenchanted of modernization paradigms has shown convincingly that pre-industrial polities were also in a very real sense surveillance societies. Historians of early modern state formation have demonstrated that a decentralized culture of intelligencegathering was extruded into local communities via the old Poor Law, the church courts and the omnipresent activities of JPs to such an extent that, according to Edward Higgs, ‘public surveillance in early modern England was more intense and wide-ranging than anything experienced in Western societies today’. As well as their exposure to these official instruments, legal narratives evoke a world of near-constant vigilance in which ordinary householders, on whose accusations and

History presented to Christopher Hill (Oxford, 1978), pp. 47–72; Michael Frearson, ‘Communications and the Continuity of Dissent in the Chiltern Hundreds during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Margaret Spufford (ed.), The World of Rural Dissenters (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 273–87. The phrase ‘contentious politics’ is from Te Brake, Shaping History, p. xi.    Keith Wrightson, ‘The Politics of the Parish in Early Modern England’, in Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle (eds), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1996), p. 11. This is especially true of drinking houses and gender relations. See for example Amanda Flather, Gender and Space in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 110–21.    For a classic statement see David Lyon, The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society (Cambridge, 1994). The online journal Surveillance and Society contains very few contributions from historians, and none of these deal with the period before the nineteenth century. See: http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/journal.htm.    Edward Higgs, The Information State in England: The Central Collection of Information on Citizens Since 1500 (Basingstoke and New York, 2004), p. 32. See also Swen Voekel, ‘‘Upon the Suddaine View’: State, Civil Society and Surveillance in Early Modern England’, Early Modern Literary Studies 4.2 (1998) [http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/04-2/voekupon.htm]; and for the European context Valentin Groebner, Who Are You? Identification, Deception and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe (New York, 2007 [trans.]).

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testimonies an elaborate secular and ecclesiastical judicial apparatus depended for its functioning, were encouraged to know the business of others. Nuancing a historiographical emphasis on the destabilizing qualities of inns, taverns and especially alehouses as centres of disorder, this article argues for the centrality of drinking houses to social and material practices of surveillance within one provincial community: the port and borough of Southampton. Combining a variety of legal and administrative sources, especially pre-trial examinations and depositions generated by the borough quarter sessions and the Winchester consistory court, the structure of the discussion is as follows. After sketching some local and institutional contexts in section one, section two briefly rehearses the mechanisms through which drinking houses were made targets of surveillance. Emphasizing the role of material space, second three recovers some less wellknown ways in which they contributed to social monitoring by enabling the surveillance of threatening behaviour in three related legal and social contexts (vagrancy and theft; sexual immorality; and defamation and libel). It concludes that, while Southampton’s citizens participated extensively in the systems of vigilance contained within drinking houses, the cooption of these sites for the ultimate purposes of civic governors problematizes their sustenance of an emancipatory ‘hidden transcript’ and contributes to a critique of the usefulness of the concept to early modern power relations that has only recently started to emerge. Southampton and its Drinking Houses The discussion unfolds within the context of Southampton, a port town situated on the British south coast. Its population in 1596 has been estimated at 4,200, although this figure does not include a large floating community of soldiers, sailors and merchants who arrived at the town gates in connection with European warfare or trading networks which, while not as elaborate as during a medieval heyday, still extended to the Netherlands, the Mediterranean and, in the New World, Newfoundland and Virginia. Southampton had been incorporated in 1445 and attained county status two years later, transactions which shaped a distinctive borough ‘political space’ in which ruling authority was devolved to a small oligarchy of elite male householders. In theory some 50 burgesses, drawn mainly from the mercantile and distributive sectors, comprised the governing ‘corporation’, although in practice power was monopolized by an even smaller ‘common council’ of 12, deriving from    Classic statements include Clark, ‘Alternative Society’; and Keith Wrightson, ‘Alehouses, Order and Reformation in Rural England 1590–1660’, in Stephen Yeo and Eileen Yeo (eds), Popular Culture and Class Conflict 1590–1914: Explorations in the History of Labour and Leisure (Brighton, 1981), pp. 1–27.    John Robert Taylor, ‘Population, Disease and Family Structure in Early Modern Hampshire, with Special Reference to Towns’ (PhD Thesis, University of Southampton, 1980), pp. 196–7.

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the medieval merchant guild and consisting of the mayor, a handful of aldermen (all former mayors) and several appointed officers (including the recorder, bailiff and sheriff) who perpetuated themselves via private nominations. They presided at all four of the port’s judicial venues (the court leet, the quarter sessions, the admiralty court and the town court, which heard civil pleas), and summarily addressed all administrative, fiscal and judicial matters at their weekly gatherings within a specially-constructed Audit House, known as the Assembly.10 With the exception of the two small suburbs to the north (Above Bar) and east (St Mary’s), the borough remained physically confined to the parallelogram of its ancient walls. Among the timber-framed structures which lined its maze of arteries, inns, taverns and alehouses were ubiquitous; a multitude of drinking houses was a characteristic feature of urban communities throughout the continent, while in a port and occasional military base like Southampton provision was further enhanced by the presence of large numbers of itinerant soldiers and mariners. As early as 1531 the Assembly complained that ‘every other house is a brewer or tapper [retailer]’, while at the turn of the seventeenth century the ratio of drinking houses (eight inns, three official taverns and some 69 licensed and unlicensed alehouses) to male household heads stood at an impressive 1:11.11 The inns, taverns and alehouses that comprised early modern Britain’s victualling hierarchy were to an extent discrete places characterized by important differences in modes of legitimization, size, services and social profiles. In particular, while inns and taverns offered a full range of exotic consumption options (including wine) to a wealthy clientele within specialized environments, alehouses were carefully licensed, offered little in the way of consumer choice and, in Peter Clark’s slogan, were generally ‘run for the poor by the poor’ from ordinary dwelling houses which were in most cases largely unmodified.12 However, all were drinking houses which had the generic affiliation of serving alcoholic beverages to paying customers within permanent physical settings,13 while the legal and ideological distinctions between different types of establishment were complicated and reworked by social practice.14 10  The best overview of Southampton’s political and administrative organization is W.J. Connor, ‘Introduction’, in W.J. Connor (ed.), The Southampton Mayor’s Book of 1606–8, Southampton Records Series 21 (Southampton, 1978), pp. 10–14. On the political cultures constituted by incorporation see Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005). 11   The Third Book of Remembrance of Southampton 1514–1602, eds A.L. Merson and T.B. James, Southampton Records Series 2, 3, 8, 22 (4 vols, Southampton, 1952–79), vol. 1, p. 44. For a fuller discussion of numbers see James R. Brown, ‘The Landscape of Drink: Inns, Taverns and Alehouses in Early Modern Southampton’ (PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2007), pp. 20–29. 12   Clark, ‘Alternative Society’, p. 53. 13   This definition adapts Beat Kümin, Drinking Matters: Public Houses and Social Exchange in Early Modern Central Europe (Basingstoke, 2007), p. 2. 14   This is emphasized throughout Brown, ‘Landscape of Drink’, esp. pp. 28–9.

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The Surveillance of Drinking Houses As elsewhere, drinking houses, especially at the lower reaches of the institutional spectrum, provoked intense anxieties in Southampton’s governors. Although Paul Slack does not include the port in his roster of ‘godly cities’, and while its inhabitants never experienced the kind of systematic moral reformation imposed at seventeenth-century Dorchester,15 there seems to have been a Protestant ideological climate, probably sharpened after the arrival of a Calvinist stranger community in 1567, in which hostelries were fashioned (in the terminology of the 1601 leet jury) as ‘evil members’ of the body politic that jeopardized urban stability with a comprehensive portfolio of ‘vices and wickedness’.16 The regulatory spaces of Guildhall and Audit House echoed with claims that drinking houses promoted drunkenness, unbalanced household economies and kept servants from their employers at all hours of the night, and that they sustained sexual immorality, vagrancy and property crime by providing an infrastructure for plotting and the concealment and disposal of stolen items.17 Some typical regulatory sentiments crystallize in a 1574 court leet presentment of a small Above Bar inn called The White Horse, one of several made against this institution during the decade. Its landlord John Simons, jurors complained, presided over ‘a den of whores and thieves [rather] than a house of civil government’, suffering games and ‘keeping resort of lewd people’. Here, the social organization of the gaze was inverted and rogues hijacked the politics of looking; when a city gentlemen was assaulted and robbed by five assailants within a few miles of town limits, he reported ‘to his judgment and thinking the watch to have been made in that house’.18 These powerful discourses established drinking houses as primary targets of surveillance in early modern Southampton. Highly ‘legible’ within urban topography by the signboards which they were legally compelled to display, or perhaps by the empty barrels stacked outside their frontages,19 they fell within the 15   See Paul Slack, From Reformation to Improvement: Public Welfare in Early Modern England (New York and Oxford, 1999), pp. 29–52; David Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven and London, 1992). 16   ‘Court Leet Book, 1601’: Southampton, Southampton Record Office [hereafter SRO], SC6/1/26, fol. 22r. On the ‘strongly Protestant, if not actually Puritan’ attitudes of Southampton’s governors see A.L. Merson, ‘Elizabethan Southampton’, in J.B. Morgan and P. Peberdy (eds), Collected Essays on Southampton (Southampton, 1961), pp. 64–5. 17   Clark, ‘Alternative Society’. 18   Southampton Court Leet Records [hereafter CLR], eds F.J.C. Hearnshaw and D.M. Hearnshaw, Southampton Record Society 1, 2, 4 (3 vols, Southampton, 1905), vol. 1, p. 137. This example is also cited in Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History 1200–1830 (London, 1983), p. 5, a pioneering account of drinking houses at the bottom level of the victualling hierarchy. 19   The concept of urban ‘legibility’ is from Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, 1960), p. 60. In 1670 court leet jurors presented six publicans for having

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purview of a variety of roving personnel charged with keeping the public peace: constables, beadles, night watchmen and court leet juries and the presentment officers on whom they relied.20 They were sometimes subject to the ordering gaze of the mayor himself, as in 1639 when Robert Wroth, a future commissioner for securing the peace of the Commonwealth who had a particular disdain for drinking houses, recorded fines from ‘two townsmen which I found disordered at The Crown [inn]’ and ‘two townsmen which I found at Mrs Emmott’s [The Greyhound inn]’.21 There was suspicion of (in Southampton terminology) ‘corner houses’ whose secluded locations in the suburbs of Above Bar and St Mary’s placed them beyond the ambits of regulatory agents. Leet jurors regularly complained in the late 1500s about ‘the tipplers Above the Bar, who have their back doors towards Houndwell field’ which they supposedly used to ‘convey many evil persons of very lewd condition from the constables searching for them’, while in 1596 they encapsulated an alehouse operated on the willow-beds by the water’s edge, obscured by the town walls and those of an adjacent inn, as a ‘very ready receptacle for malefactors’.22 However, we should not regard surveillance as comprising only direct sensory monitoring, and recent work has expanded the definition to include the collecting and ordering information about citizens as well as their exposure to regimes of looking and listening. Again, there is a tendency to regard this ‘dataveillance’ as a feature of modern bureaucracies, although recent work has emphasized the extent to which pre-industrial people were also caught up and reproduced within paperized registration systems.23 The licensing of alehouses, mandated by a parliamentary act of 1552 and characteristically delegated to local agents in the form of JPs (who in the Southampton case were the selfsame members of the council), offers a primary example of this ‘information-based surveillance’ in action.24 The careful recording of license decisions and recipients meant that Southampton alehouse-keepers had ‘data doubles’ in quarter sessions order books (recorded systematically from 1619) and, from the 1650s, in dedicated recognizance files.25 These documents of record, ‘hogsheads’ and ‘casks’ before their doors. ‘Court Leet Book, 1670’: SRO, SC6/1/65, fol. 13r. 20   CLR, Hearnshaw and Hearnshaw, vol. 1, pp. 161–2. 21   ‘Mayors’ Account Books: Robert Wroth, 1638–9’: SRO, SC5/3/18, fols 2v, 4r. On Wroth’s later career see Christopher Durston, Cromwell’s Major Generals: Godly Government during the English Revolution (Manchester, 2001), p. 62. 22   CLR, Hearnshaw and Hearnshaw, vol. 2, pp. 273, 355, 309. 23   See Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (Oxford, 1993); Higgs, Information State, pp. 40–45; Groebner, Who Are You?, pp. 65–95. 24   Higgs, Information State, p. 40. 25   ‘Quarter Sessions Order Book, 1609–35’: SRO, SC9/2/1, fols. 38r–39v, 55r–56v, 80v–82v, 95r–96v, 104v–106v; ‘Recognizances of Alehouse-Keepers’: SRO, SC9/2/11. The phrase ‘data doubles’ is from David Lyon, Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and Digital Discrimination (Abingdon, 2003), p. 22.

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which contained the names and occupations of alehouse-keepers as well as those of their two sureties, were placed in a ‘great chest and deal box’ in the Audit House parlour, where they enjoyed active life as a ‘working archive’ that placed information about the borough’s drink workers within ‘fingertip reach’ of magistrates and other officials.26 Southampton’s unlicensed alehouse-keepers had most to fear from these registration technologies. Court leet jurors regularly requested paper-based licensing materials to assist their identification and suppression of illicit operators (as in 1613 when they presented ‘these persons whose names are underwritten not being of the company of the tipplers licensed delivered unto us by the town clerk’),27 while detailed textual dossiers of unlicensed individuals were regularly generated by the courts of leet and quarter sessions as well as the Assembly. Drinking Houses as Enablers of Surveillance How can these institutions, so frequently at the receiving end of sensory and documentary scrutiny, be analytically reconstituted as enablers of surveillance? Michael Frank has provided a basis for such an interpretative manoeuvre in his analysis of publicans as instruments of social control in eighteenth-century Germany, the conclusions of which can be applied to British contexts.28 A raft of central legislation, supplemented by local byelaws, was aimed squarely at Southampton’s publicans, especially at the lower end of the hierarchy.29 Mariner John Horwood had a characteristic set of responsibilities devolved to him when his license to operate at the sign of The Queen’s Arms was renewed in 1661. He was not to ‘permit or suffer any playing at … games’, nor was he to entertain ‘any person … upon any … holy day during the time of divine service’. He was not to ‘suffer any person to remain in his house tippling or drinking contrary to the law’, nor was he to tolerate any ‘tippling or drinking after the nine of the clock in the night time’.30 According to Frank, the responsibilities delegated to publicans 26   Paul Griffiths, ‘Bodies and Souls in Norwich: Punishing Petty Crime 1540–1700’, in Paul Griffiths and Simon Devereux (eds), Penal Practice and Culture 1500–1900: Punishing the English (London, 2004), p. 89. In 1659, when a now town clerk entered office, the outgoing incumbent delivered to his successor many important ‘books and writings’ including ‘the rolls of alehouse-keepers licensed’. ‘Assembly Books, 1642–79’: SRO, SC2/1/8, fol. 159r. 27   ‘Court Leet Book, 1613’, SRO, SC6/1/31, fol. 24v. A similar claim in ‘Court Leet Book, 1604’, SRO, SC6/1/28, fol. 19r. 28   Michael Frank, ‘Satan’s Servants or Authorities’ Agents? Publicans in EighteenthCentury Germany’, in Kümin and Tlusty, World of the Tavern, pp. 12–43. 29   See Hunter, ‘Legislation, Royal Proclamations and other National Directives’; and Hunter, ‘The Legislative Framework’. 30   ‘Recognizances of Alehouse-Keepers’: SRO, SC9/2/11, fol. 3r. The name of his establishment appears in connection with a regulatory offence in the ‘Court Leet Book,

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by the terms of their licences in a very real sense made them ‘authorities’ agents’ responsible for ‘bringing social disciplining policies to … the level of ordinary inhabitants’.31 Frank usefully captures the position of landlords as political intermediaries, even if he concludes that they failed to make good on their disciplinary obligations through a disregard of official injunctions. However, his metonymic focus on the agency of the publican obscures the multiple construction of drinking houses and effects a familiar ‘illusion of transparency’ by which built environments – ‘the concrete sites of the lifeworld’ – are abstracted into networks of social relations devoid of material or spatial referents.32 This is surprising in an article on social control given the prominence of an iconic architectural set-piece within disciplinary paradigms; while there is debate over the precise role and functioning of the panopticon within Foucault’s thought, it is the organization of sightlines at a material site that facilitates ‘conscious and permanent visibility’ and the subsequent psychological effects (culminating, of course, in self-monitoring ‘docile bodies’).33 I do not wish to conceptually relocate early modern drinking houses to the carceral archipelago, and their drinking rooms cannot be compared to the ‘small theatres’ of the panopticon or other ‘total’ environments such as factories, schools and hospitals. Pre-industrial drinking houses, even at the top of the hierarchy, were seldom purpose-built, while it was not until the 1900s that selfconscious proposals emerged for the ‘laying open’ of pub interiors and the banning of ‘secret’ compartments.34 Nonetheless, without wishing to elide the agency of their users, they possessed a range of structural attributes that were peculiarly suited to surveillance. Firstly, early modern drinking houses contained a greater concentration of agents than other civic locales. While by no means always busy they experienced a steady throughput of drinkers, lodgers and tradesmen, who joined (in contemporary parlance) ‘the people of the inn’ who were professionally obliged to observe and

1659’: SRO, SC6/1/59, fol. 12r. 31   Frank, ‘Authorities’ Agents?’, p. 38. 32  Edward J. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London, 1989), p. 7; Richard Biernacki and Jennifer Jordan, ‘The Place of Space in the Study of the Social’, in Patrick Joyce (ed.), The Social in Question (London, 2002), p. 135. 33  Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London and New York, 1977 [trans.]), pp. 200–209. For a convincing emphasis on the spatiality of the Foucauldian vision see Chris Philo, ‘Foucault’s Geography’, in Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift (eds), Thinking Space (London and New York, 2000), pp. 205–38. 34  On these discourses see James Kneale, ‘“A Problem of Supervision”: Moral Geographies of the Nineteenth-Century British Public House’, Journal of Historical Geography, 25 (1999): 333–48.

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inform:35 proprietors and their families, as well as legions of support staff in the form of tapsters, maids, ostlers and chamberlains. Secondly, certainly compared to ordinary dwellings, these potential surveillants operated within exposed interior arrangements. Probate inventories taken for Southampton publicans, of which over 70 have been located, reveal the majority of establishments to have had a principal drinking room, usually a hall or forechamber. Even in alehouses, capacities could be substantial; Ann Filleter, for example, could accommodate 17 seated customers in her forechamber in 1674.36 Nor is there evidence that these spaces were subdivided by the concealing partitions that seem to have been commonplace within metropolitan drinking houses. Only one establishment for which inventories survive, a tiny alehouse operated by William Bound, contained ‘table-board partitions’, and it is unclear exactly how they were used or configured.37 Although some social exchanges took place within smaller interior spaces, in parlours or chambers, these could still be exposed by structural inadequacies, by their status as passage rooms,38 or by ‘porthole doors’.39 And finally, the availability and consumption of intoxicants in the form of ale, beer, wine, spirits and tobacco induced states in which suspect individuals were far more likely to implicate themselves.40 We must now turn to social contexts and practice. Vagrancy and Theft A wide range of itinerant people – usually mobile labour, but officially fathomed as vagrants and vagabonds – were early modern Britain’s ‘panoptic sort’.41 They were associated with illegal activity as they slipped from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and most seriously threatened to become a charge on parish ratepayers  The phrase appears, for example, in a deposition from 1627. See Books of Examinations and Depositions 1622–44, ed. R.C. Anderson, Southampton Record Society 29, 31, 34, 36 (4 vols, Southampton, 1929–36), vol. 2, p. 37. 36   ‘Probate Inventory of Ann Filleter, Southampton, 1674’: Winchester, Hampshire Record Office [hereafter HRO], 1674 A039/1–2. 37   ‘Probate Inventory of William Bound, Southampton, 1674’: HRO, 1674 AD016. On the use of partitions in London establishments see Clark, English Alehouse, p. 65. 38  On passage rooms in inns see William A. Pantin, ‘Medieval Inns’, in E.M. Jope (ed.), Studies in Building History (London, 1961), pp. 183–4. 39   For example ‘Probate Inventory of Henry Padgett, Southampton, 1629’: HRO, 1629 AD49. 40   On the distinctive range of intoxicants retailed in Southampton drinking houses see Brown, ‘Landscape of Drink’, pp. 113–21. 41  Norma Landau, ‘Laws of Settlement and Surveillance of Immigration in EighteenthCentury Kent’, Continuity & Change, 3 (1988): 391–420. On ‘panoptic sorts’ see Didier Bigo and Elspeth Guild, ‘Introduction: Policing in the Name of Freedom’, in Didier Bigo and Elspeth Guild (eds), Controlling Frontiers: Free Movement Into and Within Europe (Aldershot, 2005), p. 3. 35

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if they succeeded in infiltrating local communities. Migrants gravitated to towns, especially to seaports, and the problem of ‘incomers’ seeking employment in the military and maritime sectors was so acute in Southampton that it was one of the few towns to implement the penalty of hair-cropping.42 Alehouses and inns, which offered subsistence, lodgings and casual labour as well as news of jobs elsewhere, were in both perception and reality a ‘site of vagrancy’.43 However, because nonresidents were regular users of drinking houses, the magistracy was in turn able to appropriate them as privileged vantage points on their names and activities, and the examination of publicans joined other mechanisms aimed at fixing the identity and controlling the movement of transients such as badging schemes and passportization.44 Alehouse-keepers were statutorily required not to ‘suffer any person to lodge or stay in his house above one day and one night but such whose true name and surname he shall deliver to some one of the constables or in his absence to some of the officers of the same parish the next day following’,45 while publicans from other levels of the hierarchy also testified to the arrival of strangers at local tribunals. Even John Simons, scourge of court leet jurors at The White Horse, described the appearance and movements of two suspect individuals ‘lately out of trouble from London’ who sought lodgings at his inn in 1577.46 In the 1670s, when fear of ‘firings’ at the hands of strangers was running high after some highprofile arsons in London and Taunton, beadles and constables were instructed to interrogate innkeepers as well as to ‘search all inns and other public houses and give Mr Mayor an account of all strangers that come to town’.47 However, recent work has demonstrated that pre-industrial fantasies of organized criminal subcultures fail to reflect the nature of crime, especially against property, in a society in which most criminal activity was amateur, small-scale and sporadic: a parenthesis in a life course rather than a career choice.48 Moreover,   J.S. Davies, A History of Southampton (Southampton, 1883), p. 294.  A.L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (London, 1986), pp. 79–81; Clark, English Alehouse, pp. 128–31; Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago, 2006), pp. 3–4, 6–8. 44   Higgs, Information State, pp. 41–2; Steve Hindle, ‘Technologies of Identification under the Old Poor Law’, The Local Historian, 36 (2006): 220–36. On the use of taverns to monitor non-residents in early modern Augsburg see B. Ann Tlusty, Bacchus and Civic Order: The Culture of Drink in Early Modern Germany (Charlottesville, 2001), pp. 162–7. 45   ‘Recognizances of Alehouse-Keepers’: SRO, SC9/2/11, fol. 3r. 46   Books of Examinations and Depositions 1570–94, ed. G.H. Hamilton, Southampton Record Society 16 (Southampton, 1914), p. 28. 47   ‘Corporation Journal, 1679–1734’: SRO, SC2/1/9, fol. 6. On the interrogation of innkeepers for identical purposes in early modern Troyes see Penny Roberts, ‘Arson, Conspiracy and Rumour in Early Modern Europe’, Continuity and Change, 12 (1997), p. 17. 48   See Paul Griffiths, ‘Overlapping Circles: Imagining Criminal Communities in Early Modern London 1545–1645’, in A. Shepard and P. Withington (eds), Communities in 42

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the eternal vigilance required in such scenarios was not a monopoly of state actors, even the unpaid, temporary officers who comprised the ‘unacknowledged republic’ of parish communities.49 Instead, we are now fully aware that early modern criminal justice, at the level of the detection and reporting of theft as well as during the juridified stages of the legal process, depended extensively on the private initiative of lay agents.50 Pre-trial depositions taken before quarter sessions suggest that, in a social and legal context in which ordinary householders were the lead investigators, drinking houses assumed an important role in the detection and later prosecution of property crime. Although not all guests, publicans and patrons lived up to contemporary ideals of watchfulness and public responsibility,51 especially if they had themselves been drinking, many were alert to a range of cues that could indicate that a theft had recently been committed. Drinking houses provided natural environments for acts of ostentation and conspicuous expenditure that always caused individuals to fall under suspicion. In 1650 Thomas Atkins, who kept an inn called the The Cross Keys at Salisbury, told Southampton magistrates that horse thief Henry Henstridge, himself an innholder who ultimately hanged for his crimes, had not only drank at his establishment but was also ‘booted and spurred’ (that is to say, on horseback) and ‘very full of money, and pulled … his handful of money out of his pocket’.52 ‘Careless boasting’ of criminal activity also ensured an inquiry, and inns, taverns and alehouses were common settings for male grandstanding.53 Horse thief Henry Henstridge once again fell foul of this when, while deep in his cups at an alehouse in the nearby village of Swathling, he bragged to the proprietor that he planned ‘to bestow £100 in horseflesh this summer’.54 Drinking houses were also sites of bargaining, and witnesses frequently reported overheard agreements between thieves and their associates for the transportation and disposal of stolen goods. In 1587, when drinking at an alehouse in the nearby village of Totton, Roger Byston became suspicious when he saw George Johnston deposit a blue coat with local resident William Trippe ‘and desired the said Trippe to sell it … for as much as Early Modern England (Manchester, 2000), pp. 115–30; Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2003), esp. p. 173. 49   See Mark Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England’, in Tim Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500–1850 (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 153–94. 50   See Cynthia Herrup, ‘New Shoes and Mutton Pies: Investigative Responses to Theft in Seventeenth-Century East Sussex’, The Historical Journal, 27 (1984): 811–30; Cynthia Herrup, The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in SeventeenthCentury England (Cambridge, 1987), chap. 4. 51   See Sharon Howard, ‘Investigating Reponses to Theft in Early Modern Wales: Communities, Thieves and the Courts’, Continuity and Change, 19 (2004): 409–30. 52   ‘Examinations and Depositions, 1648–63’: SRO, SC9/3/12, fo. 36v. 53   Herrup, ‘New Shoes and Mutton Pies’, pp. 881–2. 54   ‘Examinations and Depositions, 1648–63’: SRO, SC9/3/12, fo. 34v.

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they could get for it’, while in 1637 Joan Dally reported overhearing an agreement between two men for the sale of breeches stolen from a Southampton dwelling while they shared a bed in her St Michael’s alehouse.55 As in the case of the blue coat, drinking houses supplied likely contexts for the resurfacing of stolen objects themselves as thieves sought quick disposal and immediate liquid dividends. Their involvement in formalized receiving networks was one of the main contemporary charges against them; in 1602, for example, the leet jurors accused Peter Hendrick, who kept a small alehouse on the West Quay, of storing ‘ship’s provision… conveyed that way’ by the apprentice mariners who drank in his house.56 However, most pilfered items crossed their thresholds in connection with their untransgressive economic functions, in particular the availability of credit facilities and their role as informal arenas for the exchange of used goods. Most publicans reported suspicious items when they offered them as pawn. In 1639 Anna Lyle, who ran an alehouse with her goldsmith husband, described how she became suspicious when a local weaver offered her a piece of cloth which was ‘wet’ (it had indeed been stolen from a wagon and concealed in the fields to the north of the town), while the following year innholder John Warren described being offered ‘three yards of red broad woollen cloth’ which had been ‘carried off’ from a garden in nearby Nursling.57 Inns, meanwhile, were fully integrated into early modern Britain’s legitimate trade in horses, and as such formed natural venues for the identification of stolen animals that might have evaded detection in other contexts beyond the designated Trinity Fair.58 Southampton’s trade in horses centred on none other than The White Horse inn, and stolen beasts bearing warning signs of disguise or mutilation were spotted and stayed there at the behest of watchful ostlers in 1575, 1579 and 1602.59

55   ‘Loose Quarter Sessions Files’: SRO, SC9/4/8; Examinations and Depositions 1622–44, ed. Anderson, vol. 3, p. 51. Joan is not identified as an alehouse-keeper in the depositions, although her husband Thomas was identified by court leet jurors as a ‘tippler’ (alehouse-keeper) in St Michael’s parish in the stall and art roll for the same year. See ‘Court Leet Book, 1637’: SRO, SC6/1/48, fols 6r–11r. 56   CLR, Hearnshaw and Hearnshaw, vol. 2, p. 367. 57   Examinations and Depositions 1622–44, ed. Anderson, vol. 2, pp. 51–2; ‘Quarter Sessions Order Book, 1609–35’, loose [inserted] folio. Similar at ‘Loose Quarter Sessions Files’: SRO, SC9/4/195. 58   Peter Edwards, The Horse Trade of Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1988), p. 89; Walker, Crime, pp. 167–8. 59   ‘Book of Fines, 1550–92’: SRO, SC5/3/1, fol. 154r; ‘Mayors’ Account Books: William Stavely, 1579–80’: SRO, SC5/3/8, fol. 2r; Book of Examinations and Depositions 1622–44, ed. Anderson, vol. 1, p. 32.

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Sexual Immorality It was not only property crime that early modern Southamptonites were vigilant of; in a period in which sexual immorality was a perennial public concern, manifested in parliamentary acts against adultery and bastardy and what has been termed a national ‘reformation of manners’, it behoved all townspeople to be on the lookout for any carnal relations that manifested outside the prescribed channel of Christian wedlock.60 Adulterous couples often used drinking houses. They were venues for legitimate courtship rituals; provided drink, games and food; and offered an ostensibly discreet environment, complete with beds, free from spouses and, if the selected establishment was in a town or village where both parties were not known, the prying eyes of kin and neighbours.61 However, there is little evidence for claims of a ‘loose sexual culture’,62 and within the intimate patterns of looking, listening and movement that characterized drinking houses proprietors and other guests frequently detected the illicit nature of such ‘resorting’ and rendered account of it before the relevant public authorities. In 1652, for example, several witnesses, including the alehouse-keeper’s wife, reported on the suspect behaviour of two people from the hinterland, Hugh Tanner from Durley and a ‘strange young woman’ believed to be married to William Rook of Upham, in the public room of Thomas Loney’s alehouse in St Michael’s parish. They were seen sharing a jug of mead, a piece of fresh pork and some ‘penny simnels’ (a small, sweet bun); moreover, they were ‘very familiar together in their discourse, and did frequently call each other uncle and cousin, in the hearing and presence of these deponents’.63 The request of a back room, ‘private’ room or chamber, which most establishments even of the smallest variety offered to their guests, might be seen as offering adulterous couples a degree of protection from the straining eyes and ears of surrounding agents. However, as Laura Gowing has noted, such seclusion strategies were unlikely to be successful in a period when urban interiors were divided by thin and crack-prone plaster partitions, and in which inquisitive 60   See Martin Ingram, ‘Reformation of Manners in Early Modern England’, in Griffiths, Fox and Hindle, Experience of Authority, pp. 47–88; Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling 1525–1700 (2nd edn, Oxford, 1995), chs 5–8; Faramerz Dabhoiwala, ‘The Pattern of Sexual Immorality in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century London’, in Paul Griffiths and Mark S.R. Jenner (eds), Londinopolis: Essays in the Social and Cultural History of Early Modern London (Manchester, 2000), pp. 67–84 61   See Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 256–7; A. Lynn Martin, Alcohol, Sex and Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 87–90. 62  Ibid., p. 89. 63   ‘Examinations and Depositions, 1648–63’, fols 97r–v. Similar at ‘Book of Examinations and Depositions, 1575’: SRO, SC9/3/2, fols 5r, 22r.

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individuals proudly reported peering through and listening at architectonic apertures (half-open doors, keyholes, holes in walls) regardless of legislation against ‘eavesdropping’.64 Simply occupying ‘private’ spaces invited suspicion precisely because they offered a degree of insulation from the controlling public gaze that prevailed within main drinking rooms. This assumption surfaces powerfully in a set of depositions from 1602, which describe the highly suspect time-space trajectories of ‘Gubbins of Heath’ and a married woman in and around an alehouse operated by George Watson in Magdalen Field to the north of the town (whose fielden location on the site of a former leper’s colony was already ideologically unfortunate). Witnesses, including other guests and Watson’s permanent tenants, described the couple coming and going both day and night in a ‘very suspicious manner’, spending most of their time locked in a chamber in ‘private sort’, and only emerging in the evenings to walk in the garden and surrounding fields. According to Anne Watson, George’s wife, the couple came to her house primarily to ‘eat and drink’ and enjoy games of bowls in the orchard, but she claimed to have ‘suspected their dishonest lives together’, especially as ‘they were diverse times in the chamber’.65 Cases where extramarital fornication was discerned in drinking houses are even more suggestive of the intimacy of their looking and listening regimes, especially their ability to permeate with dormitory practice into interior spaces that would for the most part be off-limits in ordinary dwelling houses. This porosity is highlighted in a series of depositions from 1580 which report on the sexual comportment of Leonard Mills, who ended his career as an innholder in Southampton, but at this stage was still plying his trade as an alehouse-keeper in the nearby village of St Mary Bourne (near Andover in north Hampshire). Three young men who had been drinking and playing cards in his establishment one Sunday evening turned state’s witness on their host, providing Winchester’s consistory court with a salacious description of his fornication with a servant called Agnes which was alleged to have taken place in a chamber during their visit. After a period of ‘making merry in the hall’, the men described how ‘about midnight’ they retired to a ‘chamber by the hall to lie down’. The chamber, characteristically, contained two beds; they shared one, while ‘lying upon the other bed as though they were asleep [were] Leonard Mills … and Agnes’. The men feigned slumber and sharpened their sensory faculties. Sure enough, after ‘a good while in which [it] might be thought they were asleep’, they heard ‘tumbling and stirring’ from the adjacent 64  Laura Gowing, ‘The Freedom of the Streets? Women and Social Space in Early Modern London’, in Griffiths and Jenner, Londinopolis, p. 134. 65   The Book of Examinations and Depositions 1601–2, ed. R.C. Anderson, Southampton Records Society 26 (Southampton, 1926), pp. 50–52. Watson is not identified as an alehousekeeper, nor is his house described as an alehouse, in the depositions themselves. However, as well as the incidental detail provided in the accounts, we know he was operating as such because a George Watson from ‘All Saints Without’ appears in the stall and art rolls as a ‘tippler’ in the same year. See SC6/1/26, fols 7r–11v.

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bed and, ‘by reason of the glimpse of the fire in the hall giving onto the chamber door’, could ‘plainly espy Leonard upon Agnes’. They also reported whispered exchanges between the pair, claiming that Leonard urged Agnes ‘to be as good as your word’, assured her that the room’s other occupants were ‘fast asleep’, and in response to her request for haste replied that while he ‘could despatch him quickly … I have such pleasure in it if I could tarry very near an hour’.66 Defamation and Libel That surveillance was not only an ocular operation, despite the visual bias of its orientating models, has been implicit within the foregoing discussion; drinking houses possessed their own distinctive heard worlds, and we have seen staff and patrons combine the evidence of their ears with that of their eyes to lend multisensory authority to their accounts of varieties of (mis)behaviour. However, the next section participates more explicitly in what has been termed a ‘sound history of surveillance’ by exploring some ways in which drinking houses enabled the detection of misdemeanours that for the most part could only been sonically apprehended: what was said.67 As we know from the work of Laura Gowing and others, in a very real sense words had power in the towns and villages of early modern Britain. In a society of low literacy speech acts were the raw materials out of which a ‘common fame’ – and, by extension, the destruction of local reputation – were fashioned, and Southampton people regularly deployed private litigation in the form of defamation suits at the Winchester consistory against those individuals who endangered their social credit through slanderous allegations.68 The communicative norms of inns, taverns and alehouses made them an extremely common location for such insults. Then as now alcohol loosened tongues, and drinking houses were prime settings for verbal attacks on and defences of honour as well as for the exchange and dissection of local hearsay about the intimate details of personal lives. However, the very high number of defamation suits located within drinking houses must also suggest some ways in which they facilitated the detection of slanderous locution

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  ‘Consistory Court Depositions’: HRO, 21 M65 C3/8, fols 211–12, 215–16.   Michael Bull and Les Back, ‘Introduction: Into Sound’, in Michael Bull and Les Back (eds), The Auditory Culture Reader (Oxford, 2003), p. 5. 68   See Laura Gowing, ‘Language, Power and the Law: Women’s Slander Litigation in Early Modern London’, in J. Kermode and G. Walker (eds), Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England (London, 1994), pp. 26–47; James A. Sharpe, ‘Defamation and Sexual Slander in Early Modern England: The Church Courts at York’, Borthwick Institute of Historical Research Papers 58 (1972). For the medieval background see T. Fenster and D.L. Smail (eds), Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, 2003). 67

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and, in turn, furnished their victims with the necessary resources to restore their reputations at law.69 A verbal assault in a drinking house, especially if it occurred in the hall, was extremely likely to generate a large number of ‘credible witnesses’ who could testify to what they had heard and whose presence confirmed the gravity of the offence in the eyes of the court. While the validity of testimony from patrons could always be contested for reasons of drunkenness (in 1631, in relation to a slander at The Swan alehouse in Winchester, a friend of the accused discredited John Adderley’s incriminatory statement ‘by reason he was very much in drink for so he was’),70 this was for the most part unlikely to devalue the evidence of proprietors or servants. Other ‘public’ settings for insults (wells, meadows, churchyards and cathedral closes, the marketplace) offered a similar number of surrounding agents; however, these environments were more exposed to ambient noise and prevailing wind and lacked the architectural acoustics ideal for the accurate perception of speech. A small alehouse which held both defamer and witnesses in a single room was perhaps the ideal detection chamber, although sound is no respecter of space and could carry through the multiplication of drinking rooms found within larger establishments. In 1595 for example, when John Lambert told Thomas Parrett that ‘I have known thy wife better than thou dost’ while they were seated in the ‘taphouse’ or ‘buttery’ of The Katherine Wheel inn, he was overheard by three witnesses (including the establishment’s ostler) who described being in the adjacent hall at the time of the insult.71 Of course, it was not only ordinary householders who went in daily fear of gossip, verbal abuse and libellous attacks on their credit, and Southampton’s governors also listened out for those discussions of national and local themes that, if left unchecked, could incite violent crowd action in the form of riot or rebellion. The role of quotidian speech acts within the politics of resistance has been powerfully emphasized in recent work. In particular, James C. Scott’s comparative anthropologies of the tactical uses of speech and silence, widely endorsed within early modern studies, have encouraged historians to refigure the grumbles of social inferiors as ‘weapons of the weak’ that constituted indirect challenges to the authority of local elites.72 According to Scott such expressions flourish at

69  As well as the examples cited in the discussion see also ‘Consistory Court Depositions’: HRO, 21 M65 C3/11, fols 25, 318; C3/9, fols 233–4; C3/8, fols 58–9, 108–9, 133–4, 459–60; C3/7, fols 81–2; C3/4, fol. 642; 21 M65 C7/1/93, 95, 96; 45–6, 48–9, 35–7; 21 M65 C7/2/237–8, 171–3, 108–10, 50–51, 46, 40–41, 5–8; 21 M65 C7/5/32. 70   ‘Consistory Court Depositions’: HRO 21 M65 C3/12, fol. 58. 71   ‘Consistory Court Depositions’: HRO 21 M65 C3/10, fols. 507–11. 72   James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985), and his Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990). For relevant early modern applications see in particular Wrightson, ‘Politics of the Parish’, pp. 11–12; and John Walter, ‘Public Transcripts, Popular Agency and the

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semi-secret or ‘sequestered social sites’,73 and within the field ‘alehouse gossip’ stands almost as a metonym for empowering subordinate verbalizations.74 For sure, scandalous statements reverberated around drinking houses. Their constant flow of travellers rendered them ‘revolving doors of news, rumour and gossip’, especially within a port community,75 while the presence of intoxicants removed those inhibitions to fugitive statements that might have prevailed in other contexts. However, there is something problematic about calling the resulting talk ‘offstage behaviour’ or a ‘hidden transcript’ whose manifestation within what has been termed the ‘unregulated space of the alehouse’ was a guarantor of concealment from the ruling groups whose authority it is seen to frustrate.76 Instead, evidence from Southampton’s quarter sessions, where seditious speech was vigorously pursued by the council in their capacity as JPs, suggests that drinking houses were principal terrains for the detection of oral dissent in the borough. Public drinkers, most commonly strangers to the community, were frequently overheard and reported by a familiar range of informants for discoursing on the highest affairs of the realm. What motivated witnesses to expose such dialogue remains elusive and would have varied between cases, although fear of implication was likely to have been a powerful incentive. In 1538 a priest visiting from Guernsey was reported for speaking ‘seditious words’ of the king while refreshing himself in an unspecified alehouse,77 while servant Dorothy Tublin described how at Richard Pye’s alehouse in 1628 a scrivener from London threw down the house copy of The Paraphrases of Erasmus ‘in a disdainful manner’ and, probably referencing recent naval reversals in La Rochelle, claimed that ‘if god were not more merciful to our nation there would not shortly be this much left of our nation, pointing within an inch to the top of one of his forefingers’.78 In 1624, Oxford-educated minister and schoolteacher William Morgan from Somerset became even more garrulous on foreign policy in the chamber of an alehouse operated by clothier Roger Morse. According to three witnesses, including Morse, during a discussion which ‘touch[ed] the wars in the Low Countries’ Morgan described Elizabeth I as Politics of Subsistence in Early Modern England’, in Michael Braddick and John Walter (eds), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 123–48. 73   Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, p. 20. 74   For example Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2002), p. 15. 75  Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000), p. 352. 76   Walter, ‘Public Transcripts’, p. 128. 77  Darryl M. Ogier, Reformation and Society in Guernsey (Woodbridge, 1996), p. 44. I am grateful to Dr Ogier for drawing my attention to this reference. 78   Examinations and Depositions 1622–44, ed. Anderson, vol. 2, pp. 51–2. Pye is not described as an alehouse-keeper in Tublin’s deposition, although he is described as a ‘tippler’ in the stall and art lists for the same year. ‘Court Leet Book, 1628’: SRO, SC6/1/43, fols 6r–10r.

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‘a whore and a witch’, claimed that ‘England was weak and the castles were weak’ (injuring local pride by specifying the local battlements at Calshot and Hurst), and that Philip IV ‘paid more in one year to his soldiers than all the revenues of England were worth’. In a final rhetorical flourish, he claimed of Prince Henry that ‘before his body was cold on earth his soul was frying on a gridiron in hell’.79 Publicans were also reported by their customers for their scandalous interjections on current events. In 1641, merchant Henry Leavet reported that while ‘at the house of John Pratt’, an alehouse-keeper of long standing from St Michael’s parish who had evidently honed his skills in news-broking and punditry, he heard his host claim ‘that the king had usurped three shires from the Scots which are Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland’.80 Such cases acquired an additional charge in the 1650s and 60s. During the Interregnum, it is hard to avoid images of Southampton’s Parliamentarian loyalists staking out the ale bench and straining their ears for the linguistic indiscretions of nostalgic Royalists. In 1656, labourer John Pee described how while drinking at ‘Old Kingston’s who sells ale in the town’ he heard William Braithwaite claim while ‘much in drink’ that ‘my Lord Protector is a cheater and I will prove him a cheater’. Pee, clearly something of a Republican toady (he informed on the fornication of two lovers in a town ditch three years later), was probably not trying to exonerate Braithwaite with reference to his drunkenness so much as invoke the prevailing propaganda image of Royalists as profligate dipsomaniacs.81 After the Restoration, it was the turn of Royalists to tune their ears; in 1660, three men reported on Christopher Highton’s alehouse claim that ‘King Charles I (of famous memory) is a traitor’.82 Yet it was discoursing on Southampton matters, with its greater potential for fomenting disquiet in the Audit House backyard, that was probably the priority of the council. Records show ‘weapons of the weak’ repeatedly exploding in the hands of their wielders as slurred insults and complaints about civic power holders were heeded in hostelries, most usually by social superiors, and transmitted to their 79   Examinations and Depositions 1622–44, ed. Anderson, vol. 1, pp. 54–8. Again, deponents do not specify Morse as an alehouse-keeper. However, he is identified as such in the stall and art rolls. ‘Court Leet Book, 1624’: SRO, SC6/1/39, fols 6r–15r. This case transcended local political space and reached the Privy Council. See Calendar of State Papers: Domestic Series, 1624, p. 394. 80   Examinations and Depositions 1622–44, ed. Anderson, vol. 4, pp. 25–6. Pratt had been retailing ale since 1619, when he made his first appearance as a ‘tippler’ in the stall and art rolls. ‘Court Leet Book, 1619’: SRO, SC6/1/36, fols 6r–11v. 81   ‘Examinations and Depositions, 1648–63’: SRO, SC9/3/12, fols 119r, 122v. On discourses linking Royalism and the excessive consumption of alcohol see Mark J. Stoyle, Loyalty and Locality: Popular Allegainces in Devon during the English Civil War (Exeter, 1994), p. 242, and M. Keblusek, ‘Wine for Comfort: Drinking and the Royalist Exile Experience 1642–1660’, in Smyth, A Pleasing Sinne, p. 60. 82   ‘Examinations and Depositions, 1648–63’: SRO, SC9/3/12, fol. 127r.

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intended victims through judicial mechanisms. In 1640, in the kitchen of Widow Batson’s tavern, a butcher and a brewer heard a shoemaker wish a ‘plague of god’ on the assessors of the parliamentary subsidy, call the corporation ‘cony skin weavers’ (dissimulators) and categorize JPs (that is to say, the council) as ‘knaves’,83 while in 1724 a peruke-maker reported servant William Smith for speaking ‘abusively of the corporation’ while drinking at The Dolphin inn.84 In 1636, mayor Edward Exton discovered that, ‘behind his back in an alehouse’, a tailor called Richard Wilton had claimed that ‘he [Exton] took 12d of him to buy a shoulder of veal for his supper; meaning 12d taken from him by Mr Mayor for his profane swearing and cursing’. A further 12d was levied on Wilton for this ‘scoff and derision’.85 Still more serious were specific allegations of institutional corruption. In 1642, two concerned tapsters from The Dolphin informed on Richard Read’s allegation that ‘the magistrates of this town … favoured papists’.86 In the same year, also at The Dolphin, common brewer Christopher Benbury (who had provided evidence in the case of the seditious shoemaker in Widow Batson’s tavern) was himself overheard articulating the potentially detonative claim that ‘the [court leet] jury did countenance false measures and weights’ and that ‘men paid for selling … false measures’.87 The jury’s regulation of the borough’s serving vessels, explicitly designed to foreclose annoyances ‘between neighbour and neighbour’, was one of the most sensitive responsibilities with which they were charged.88 Conclusions Early modern operations of representation likened drinking houses to closed environments impervious to those processes of social monitoring that were central to the maintenance of stability in a period in which personal conduct had public import. To reiterate the 1601 court leet jurors, alehouses in particular were ‘receptacles ... of all lewd persons [italics added]’ and ‘maintainers of them in their vices and wickedness’.89 However, this case study has sought to demonstrate that, far from being inaccessible or unregulated, drinking houses were in fact 83   Examinations and Depositions 1622–44, ed. Anderson, vol. 4, p. 18. Deponents did not identify ‘Widow Batson’s house’ as a tavern, although we know it was operating as such because court leet jurors presented a ‘Dorothy Batson’ for having defective wine pots in the same year. See ‘Court Leet Book, 1640’: SRO, SC6/1/51, fol. 21v. 84   ‘Loose Sessions Files’: SRO, SC9/4/112c. 85   ‘Quarter Sessions Recognizances, 1632–46’: SRO, SC9/2/10, fol. 23r. 86   Book of Examinations and Depositions 1622–44, ed. Anderson, vol. 4, p. 43. 87   ‘Quarter Sessions Recognizances, 1632–46’, fols. 49v, 53v. 88   CLR, Hearnshaw and Hearnshaw, vol. 3, p. 485. On the role of leet courts in early modern consumer protection see Walter J. King, ‘Early Stuart Courts Leet: Still Needful and Useful’, Histoire Sociale/Social History, 23 (1990): 279. 89   CLR, Hearnshaw and Hearnshaw, vol. 2, p. 54.

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ventilated and shot through by modes of looking and listening and thus could perform stabilizing political work as facilitators of surveillance within the civic community. Space was central to this process; drinking houses combined unusual concentrations of agents and a wide variety of distinctive practices and behaviours (themselves untransgressive) within an architecturally bounded environment whose visual, acoustic and circulatory properties militated strongly towards the detection of illicit behaviour. Nor should the functioning of inns, taverns and alehouses as vectors of surveillance be imagined as top-down or wholly oppressive. They framed not the monitoring of the many by the few so much as the monitoring of the few by the many, and drinking houses emerge as lateral or coconstructed surveillance spaces in which ordinary citizens (as publicans, servants or customers) voluntarily informed on and deposed against a variety of perceived threats to the peace of the port. However, this rehabilitation of drinking houses as loci of surveillance must also place a question mark over any ‘hidden transcript’, those hostile statements and gestures so central to recent excavations of popular political agency, that relies for its subversive force on ‘remain[ing] essentially hidden, passing by unnoticed’ within hermitic habitats such as the alehouse.90 Indeed, in light of Andy Wood’s recent attempt ‘to qualify the… emphasis upon the agency of labouring people’ within a Yorkshire valley, it seems relevant to ask if there is a ‘darker, more pessimistic’ story to be told here also; a story in which alehouse remarks were dangerous, not empowering, and where publicans informed on paying customers, patrons on jovial hosts and drinking companies on each other not out of deference or respect for authority but because of ‘repression, fear [and] anxiety’ in a sociopolitical landscape characterized above all by its ‘hugely unequal distribution of power’.91 For all the insistence on the negotiated character of authority within recent work, the cooption of drinking houses by Southampton’s governors arguably reveals more about the reach and adaptability of early modern ruling structures than their susceptibility to forms of contestation.

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  Paul Griffiths, Andy Fox and Steve Hindle, ‘Introduction’, in Griffiths, Fox and Hindle, Experience of Authority, p. 6. 91  Andy Wood, ‘Subordination, Solidarity and the Limitations of Popular Agency in a Yorkshire Valley c.1596–1615’, Past and Present, 193 (2006): 70–71; see also Andy Wood, ‘Fear, Hatred and the Hidden Injuries of Class in Early Modern England’, Journal of Social History, 39 (2006): 803–26.

Chapter 4

Politics, Clubs and Social Space in Pre-industrial Europe Peter Clark

At Norwich during the early 1790s the Tuscalan Society, a literary-cum-debating club, met weekly in the city, its 14 or so members and visitors discussing and voting on a whole variety of subjects – deism, the new French law on divorce, the authenticity of Christianity, the coinage, and, even as war loomed with revolutionary France, political issues such as the French constitution, the royal prerogative and whether a monarchy or republic was preferable. For, as the secretary declared in 1794, the society was ‘established on the principle of unlimited discussion’, and as another member affirmed, ‘no beneficial change can ever be produced without a previous general discussion’. The Tuscalan Society was only one of many thousand voluntary societies in the eighteenth-century English-speaking world. Recently, mainly since the 1990s, political scientists have discovered that voluntary associations are a central constituent of civil society – and political space – in the contemporary developed world. Not surprisingly, the linkage was already recognized in Georgian Britain, as when the Shropshire cleric Melvill Horn asserted that the many voluntary associations in England ‘are the best means of promoting all the interests of civil society’. Nor was it simply British chauvinism. Foreign commentators and visitors in the eighteenth century saw the British political system distinguished by its clubs, free press and liberty of speech, and stressed the distinctly English character and political significance of clubs and societies. Indeed, there is a case for arguing that British and, for that matter, American political space since the eighteenth century has been dominated and defined by the role of voluntary associations. As other chapters in this book make abundantly clear, there was a plurality of political spaces in medieval and early modern Europe – from real physical 

  Norwich, Norfolk Record Office, MSS. G2.   For example John Hall (ed.), Civil Society: Theory, History, Comparison (Oxford, 1995); Robert D. Putnam, Making Civic Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, 1993), and his Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (London, 2000).    John Fletcher, The Nature and Rules of a Religious Society (Madeley, 1788); The Middlesex Journal, 31 August–2 September 1769; Pierre J. Grosley, A Tour to London (Dublin, 1772). 

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spaces outdoors like churchyards, streets or common lands to indoor spaces like council or parliamentary chambers, to virtual spaces and ideal spaces like county communities and nations. Here I am concerned with voluntary organizations meeting in real physical spaces (mainly indoors) but which created wider political spaces at a local, national and even international level. Though my principal concern is with the political role of British clubs and societies like the Tuscalan Society, they were not the only voluntary associations operating in pre-modern Europe. To better understand the relationship of British societies and political space, I want to make comparisons with some of these other voluntary bodies – specifically, the promiscuously named fraternities, confraternities or guilds (here I have preferred the term confraternity) which flourished in England and continental Europe during the late Middle Ages; and academies and societies which developed on the continent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From this comparative analysis it may be possible to identify some of the core factors affecting the relationship of early modern voluntary associations and political space. Looking first at the growth of British clubs and societies, it is clear that before the calling of the Long Parliament in 1640 the incidence of clubs and societies was relatively low, and few of them appear to have had any political function. The government acted strongly against any potential problem. When the Society of Antiquaries with its perceived links to the parliamentary opposition sought to meet in 1614 the government refused permission, and when various noble brotherhoods held meetings in London in 1623, they were suppressed and the members hauled before the Privy Council. After the start of the English Civil Wars and the collapse of censorship, clubs and societies multiplied, including political clubs, debating clubs like the Rota, and county societies which proposed public works. The decades after the Glorious Revolution saw the take-off of associational activity in England, and by the late Georgian period London boasted about 3,000 associations and provincial cities like Norwich had about 20 different types; even a small country town like Maidstone in Kent had up to 30 clubs and societies. In total, eighteenth-century Britain hosted about 130 different types, ranging from alumni associations, and book, blasphemy, benefit, bell-ringing, bird-fancying, building and bee-keeping associations to scientific, social, sporting and student societies, amongst many others. Political organizations were to the fore. As well as republican clubs in London before and after the Restoration, Whig and Tory clubs orchestrated party mobilization during the Exclusion Crisis, and following the Glorious Revolution party clubs became an important ingredient of borough politics, and linked with the petitioning movement contributed to the evolution of a national political space. In the 1760s John Wilkes mobilized a range of radical (and other) clubs   See Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800 (Oxford, 2000); Angela Dain, ‘An Enlightened and Polite Society’, in Carole Rawcliffe and Richard Wilson (eds), Norwich since 1550 (London, 2004), pp. 196–8; Peter Clark and Lyn Murfin, The History of Maidstone (Stroud, 1995), pp. 109–10, 113. 

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across the country (and the colonies) against the government, and in the 1780s the various County Associations cooperated country-wide to promote Parliamentary and government reform. By the 1780s national party rivalry between Whigs and Tories was increasingly structured by party clubs, and during the next decade reformist, radical and counter-revolutionary societies corresponded and networked to promote their views in the national political domain. Norwich supported about 40 political clubs in 1792 with over 4,000 members; such bodies established links with the London Society for Constitutional Information and later with the London Corresponding Society, whilst a Norwich delegate took part in the radical convention in Edinburgh. However, all kinds of societies – not just explicitly political ones – contributed to the formation of a wider political space, if we define it broadly in terms of national political activity, political communication, political education and administrative activity. Non-political clubs were drawn into political agitation like the Masonic, pseudo-Masonic and social clubs which supported Wilkes against the government in the 1760s, just as other societies lobbied Parliament and politicians on national issues. Thus the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge was heavily involved in the campaign against ‘Mother Gin’ in the 1730s which led to the draconian and abortive Gin Act of 1736. Later in the century antislavery and moral reform societies promoted campaigns lobbying for parliamentary measures on those issues. The dissemination of political news and all kinds of gossip was a basic function of many types of society. The exchange of news, political or otherwise, was also linked to the role of societies as meeting places for outsiders, newcomers to town and travellers. No less important was the increasing tendency for associations of many kinds, not least social clubs, to subscribe to newspapers and magazines, in which political news and comment were prominent features. Leading on from this, societies provided a space for political discussion and debate. Some societies had rules against the discussion of political (and religious) topics, but it was clearly difficult to maintain this kind of political vacuum during times of political crisis or election campaigns. At Dr Johnson’s Turk’s Head Club, for instance, the American Revolution caused bitter debate among Whig and Tory members. From the 1740s a growing number of debating societies sprang up both in London and provincial

  Clark, British Clubs; Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis 1678–81 (Cambridge, 1994); Neil McKendrick et al., The Birth of a Consumer Society (London, 1982), p. 232; Frank O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties (Oxford, 1989); Mark Knights, ‘Politics 1660–1835’, in Rawcliffe and Wilson, Norwich, pp. 182–4.    John S. Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 194–8; Middlesex Journal, 4–6 April 1769 et passim; Peter Clark, ‘The “Mother Gin” Controversy in the Early Eighteenth Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 38 (1988): 63–84; John R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery (Manchester, 1995); M.J.D. Roberts, Making English Morals: Voluntary Association and Moral Reform in England, 1787–1886 (Cambridge, 2004). 

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towns (like Norwich) which debated political issues during the American war and even for a while during the French Revolution. Helping this political consciousness and articulation was the kind of training in the political process that societies offered to a significant proportion of members. In London over half the members of benefit clubs may have served as elected officers over a period of three years, and in most voluntary associations all the membership voted in elections and participated in discussion of finances, venues, feasts and other administrative matters. Political education of this kind was not limited to the voluntary sector, of course; parish government provided a similar, if arguably narrower forum. But the multiplicity of societies and the fact that betteroff townsmen often belonged to several meant that club office-holding was a regular occurrence among the middling classes in larger towns. Only towards the end of the century, after the emergence of large-scale public subscription associations, often in the philanthropic field, was there a growth of oligarchic domination. Nor was it just political consciousness and training. A final type of political function that was notable among British voluntary associations was administrative. Thus the Port Club, established in 1782 at Stirling in Scotland, intervened in the local grain market to try and overcome a food shortage, lobbied the authorities directly for poor reform and the training of young people, and proposed a wide range of economic improvements to boost the town. In other sectors where the post-1688 state was not active associations responded. Thomas Bray proposed religious and missionary activity in the American plantations in the 1690s and, when the government failed to respond, he and his friends established the SPCK and later the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel to carry out the work. Reacting to growing public concerns over the high level of crime and the cost of prosecutions, hundreds of societies were established to pursue criminals and bring them to justice (though it is not clear that they were very effective). Many other associations took on administrative activity in a more ad hoc way, running schools or charities. British associations thus contributed to the formation of political space at three levels: through the development of the club room as a place where political    F.S. Stancliffe, John Shaw’s 1738–1938 (Place unknown, 1938); Boswell’s Life of Johnson, eds G.B. Hills and L.F. Powell (6 vols, Oxford, 1934–40), vol. 3, p. 281; Mary Thale, ‘The Robin Hood Society: Debating in Eighteenth-Century London’, London Journal, 22 (1997): 32–50; Donna Andrew (ed.), London Debating Societies 1776–1799, London Record Society, 30 (London, 1994).    Clark, British Clubs, pp. 379–80, 254ff.    Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Misc. Accession 7862; W.K.L. Clarke, The History of the SPCK (London, 1959); David Philips, ‘Good Men to Associate and Bad Men to Conspire: Associations for the Prosecution of Felons in England, 1760–1860’, and Peter J.R. King, ‘Prosecution Associations and their Impact in Eighteenth-Century Essex’, in Douglas Hay and Francis Snyder (eds), Policing and Prosecution in Britain 1750–1850 (Oxford, 1989).

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news was exchanged, political ideas debated and political processes experienced; through the political activity of the club in the local community; and through an increasing trend towards political networking and mobilization not just in the local community but in national and even international space (with increasing AngloAmerican interaction). It was a segregated political space – women and the poor were generally excluded. It was not always harmonious – it was vulnerable to party conflict. Nor was it an exclusive political space – it overlapped with state and civic institutions and other organizations. However the role of clubs and associations in the making of the political culture of Georgian Britain cannot be overestimated. How then does the political role of Georgian clubs and societies compare with the functioning of other types of voluntary associations in the pre-modern era, taking first the confraternities which had already emerged by the tenth century in various parts of Europe, but which multiplied in the later Middle Ages? After the Reformation they were usually suppressed in Protestant states and reorganized under increased official control in Counter-Reformation Catholic countries. Numbers of confraternities were high across Western Europe by the fifteenth century, whether in Northern Italy (over 150 at Florence, over 130 in Genoa, 200 at Venice), Spain (100 at Valladolid, 140 at Toledo), the Low Countries (considerable numbers at Antwerp and Bruges) or England (London had 150). Though some confraternities were more elitist than others, recruitment could be broadly based. In some Italian cities between 10 and 30 per cent of the adult population had a member in their family. Members included landowners and upper clergy, the middling and artisan classes and quite often women; but the lower orders seem to have been increasingly excluded.10 Many different types flourished including trade guilds, noble fraternities, youth guilds, women’s guilds, archers’ guilds, penitential groups, guilds of fools, ethnic fraternities and confraternities for special philanthropic purposes (maintaining hospitals or bridges). But some shared functions are clear. One was a strong religious or spiritual purpose. A Spanish definition of a confraternity was ‘a group of devout persons formed in order to perform works of piety and charity’. Masses and prayers were said for dead members, and brethren attended and sometimes organized their burials, while confraternities participated in the major liturgical festivities and processions of the religious year. A second major function was socio-economic solidarity and mutual support. In England, aid distributed to poor members of London fraternities was ‘casual and informal rather than automatic and regulated’; on the continent it was often more organized and systematic, with loan 10   Christopher F. Black, Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1989); Susan V. Webster, Art and Ritual in Golden Age Spain (Princeton, 1998); R. Van Uytven, ‘Scenes de la Vie Sociale’, in La Sociabilité urbaine en Europe du Nord-ouest du XIVe au XVIIIe siècle (Douai, 1983); Caroline Barron, ‘The Parish Fraternities of Medieval London’, in Caroline Barron and Christopher Harper-Bill (eds), The Church in Pre-Reformation Society (Woodbridge, 1985); Gervase Rosser, ‘Fraternités et changement social dans l’Angleterre médiévale’, Annales ESC, 48 (1993): 1127–44.

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funds for members down on their luck. Membership was also celebrated through rituals (feasts, processions), badges, symbolic artefacts and special language and behaviour between brethren. In this respect at least there are parallels with the functioning of clubs and societies in Georgian Britain.11 What about the political world of confraternities? Felicity Riddy has recently suggested that in terms of the ‘discursive public sphere of late medieval England we should think of inns and taverns, of guildhalls, meeting rooms in religious houses, of marketplaces and even homes’. But she does not document this view with regard to confraternities, and in general one does not find much to support the idea of their involvement in national or even local political activity or communication. True, the authorities feared that political intrigue was taking place at such meetings. At Bologna in the late fifteenth century the ruling power suspected one of the confraternities of harbouring opponents and in the 1530s various Sienese confraternities were thought to be centres of political intrigue and heretical ideas. However, the authorities usually moved swiftly to stamp on such activity. In England after the Peasants Revolt there was a survey of fraternities by the English government concerned about their potential for political disorder, but there is not much proof for their actual part in political unrest.12 Confraternities may have been more important in providing rudimentary political education for members, through their involvement in decision-making and officeholding. Italian confraternities had many offices and in London officials were usually chosen with the support of members (although they were sometimes nominated by outgoing officeholders). The pool of members able to hold office may have been limited by literacy levels, but literacy seems to have been rising in late medieval towns. Certainly there is clear evidence for the politico-administrative function of confraternities. In Venice the Scuoli Grandi, controlled by the Council of Ten, enforced military conscription in the city and provided funds for the militia. They also disseminated state propaganda. In England such bodies often served as shadow governments in small unincorporated towns, serving as a node and catalyst of political power. At Louth the local guild of St Mary was engaged in repairs to the sea-dykes and the town sewer as well as running a poor house and contributing to the cost of the parish church. In other places such as Norwich guilds could serve as places to bring civic factions together.13   Black, Italian Confraternities, p. 23ff; Barbara Hanawalt, ‘Keepers of the Lights: Late Medieval English Parish Gilds’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 14 (1984): 21–38; Webster, Art and Ritual, p. 15; Barron, ‘Parish Fraternities’. 12   Felicity Riddy, ‘Publication Before Print: The Case of Julian of Norwich’, in Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham (eds), The Uses of Script and Print 1300–1700 (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 45–6; Black, Italian Confraternities, p. 63. I am grateful to Gervase Rosser for his advice and comments on this issue. 13   Black, Italian Confraternities, pp. 80–83; Patricia Basing (ed.), Parish Fraternity Register, London Record Society, 18 (London, 1982), p. xi; Brian Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice (Oxford, 1971); information on Louth from Gervase Rosser; Ben R. 11

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Although it is difficult to make comparisons between different periods, each with their own political contexts, it may still be helpful when investigating institutional trends. Broadly speaking, the political functions of late medieval confraternities seem to have been less developed than in the case of later British clubs and societies. Political controls undoubtedly played a part. As we have already noted, rulers were nervous of confraternities’ involvement in trouble-making and were quick to intervene against them. In Venice controls were institutionalized. In addition, many fraternities had close links with the Church, meeting often on church premises, and supervision by the ecclesiastical authorities was already evident by the late Middle Ages in Italy and Spain (though this was less the case in Northern Europe). Church control over fraternities was increased by the Council of Trent and in 1604 the Papacy introduced regular supervision of fraternities by bishops.14 Other factors may likewise have contributed: the fact that many confraternities were located in the countryside, under the influence of local lords; or the way that those in towns may have suffered from the de-urbanization of the late Middle Ages, with high levels of mortality and major fluctuations in living standards. At the same time civic and state government was expanding and becoming more professionalized. Organizational arrangements may have had an influence too. With the exception of trade guilds confraternities often met irregularly, with much of their activity concentrated on the annual feast. The venue of meetings may also be significant. As well as gathering in churches, fraternities met in private houses and in their own halls. The Abingdon guild of Holy Cross assembled first in the house of a rich member and later in a house bequeathed to them. There is little evidence, on the other hand, for them meeting in inns, taverns or alehouses, despite the growing significance of drinking houses by the fifteenth century as communal venues and as places for the exchange of news. Confraternities thus seem to have been integrated into established structures or to have occupied their own territory rather than being linked with new forms of social and political space.15 Although confraternities continued in Catholic countries into the eighteenth century, their voluntary function was in decline, and by the seventeenth century new voluntary organizations were emerging in Italy, France, the Low Countries and Germany, as well as in England. So far as continental associations are concerned, academies have attracted a good deal of attention. By the mid-eighteenth century most countries had one or more. How voluntary they were remains a matter of debate with some recent work suggesting a significant dimension of this kind, but state backing and the participation of government officials was clearly important for larger academies in France and Germany. In Italy many academies seem to have McRee, ‘Religious Gilds and Civic Order: The Case of Norwich in the late Middle Ages’, Speculum, 67 (1992): 69–97. 14   Black, Italian Confraternities, p. 63ff. 15   See David Nicholas, Urban Europe 1100–1700 (New York, 2003); and Peter Clark, European Cities and Towns 400–2000 (Oxford, 2009), pp. 97–103; information kindly provided by Gervase Rosser.

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revolved around an aristocratic patron. Some learned academies were engaged in international scientific networking, through correspondence, publications, visits and joint projects, but the political implications of their activity seems less clear. Overall numbers were small – a hundred or so across Europe.16 More significant for our purposes were those clubs and societies which became increasingly numerous by the eighteenth century. In Germany we see an important take-off in the second half of the century, although with significant regional variations and differences between states. As well as language societies, we find scientific societies, reading societies or circles (430 by 1800); Masonic lodges (250–300); student and debating clubs; patriotic improvement societies; journeymen clubs; and at the end of the century radical political clubs. At Mainz, associations included a reading society founded in 1782 which had two rooms for its 170 members; several Masonic lodges; an Illuminati lodge (1781); a reformist Corresponding Reading Society (1789); and in the 1790s a revolutionary club.17 France likewise experienced a growing number of clubs and societies in the English style, some, like Masonic lodges, directly imported from across the Channel (830 were established 1732–93, although many were short-lived and probably no more than 200–300 functioned at any one time). Other societies included learned and literary societies, philanthropic and agricultural societies, social clubs, and from the closing years of the Ancien Régime mutual aid societies and political clubs.18 In the Dutch Republic improvement societies were joined by 300–500 reading societies and a miscellany of other types.19 Estimating the overall numbers of voluntary societies in European states requires more research but we can make some rough and ready comparisons in terms of the known types of association (see Table 4.1). Broadly speaking, the

16   See James E. McClellan, Science Reorganized: Scientific Societies in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1985); Daniel Roche, Le Siècle des lumières en province (Paris, 1978); Robin Briggs, ‘The Académie Royale des Sciences and the Pursuit of Utility’, Past and Present, 131 (1991): 38–87. 17  Richard van Dülmen, The Society of the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1992); Etienne Francois (ed.), Sociabilité et societé bourgeois, en France, en Allemagne et en Suisse 1750–1850 (Paris, 1986); Eckhard Hellmuth (ed.), The Transformation of Political Culture: England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1990); O. Dann (ed.), Lesegesellschaften und Bürgerliche Emanzipation (Munich, 1981); F.G. Dreyfus, Sociétés et Mentalités à Mayence dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1968), p. 497. 18   R. Halévi, Les loges maconniques dans la France d’Ancien Regime (Paris, 1984); J. Quéniart, Culture et société urbaines dans la France de l’ouest (Paris, 1978); Michael D. Sibalis, ‘The Mutual Aid Societies of Paris, 1789–1848’, French History, 3 (1989): 2–7. 19   See Wijnand Mijnhardt, ‘The Dutch Enlightenment: Humanism, Nationalism, and Decline’, in Margaret Jacob and Wijnand Mijnhardt (eds), The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century: Decline, Enlightenment, and Revolution (London, 1992), pp. 197–223; W. van den Berg, ‘Literary Sociability in the Netherlands, 1750–1840’, in ibid., pp. 253–69; I.L. Leeb, The Ideological Origins of the Batavian Revolution (The Hague, 1973).

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voluntary association appears much less developed as a social institution on the continent: Table 4.1 Types of Voluntary Association in Europe British Isles Types (number) 130

France 10

Germany ?13

Dutch Republic 11

Notes: British Isles: Association types include: agricultural, alumni (for schools, colleges and universities), artistic, bee-keeping, bell-ringing, book, benefit/mutual aid, bird-fancying, blasphemy, college common room, debating, educational, ethnic, gambling, horticultural, improvement, learned, literary, Masonic, pseudo-Masonic, medical, missionary, musical, neighbourhood, philanthropic, political, professional, prosecution, religious, regional, social control, sporting (numerous types), scientific, social, student, university, women’s etc. For many more examples see Clark, British Clubs. France: agricultural, boules, literary, Masonic, medical, musical, mutual aid, philanthropic, political, social. Sources: see footnotes. Germany: debating, language, Illuminati, journeymen, learned, Masonic, medical, musical, patriotic, political, reading, scientific, student. Sources: see footnotes. Dutch Republic: artisan, artistic, debating, improvement, literary, Masonic, military, patriotic, reading, scientific, student. Sources: see footnotes.

As in England, women were often excluded from membership but in general societies were more socially exclusive than was the case here. In the southern Netherlands Masonic societies recruited heavily from the nobility and high bourgeoisie (over 50 per cent of members even in the 1780s) compared with the much wider middling and artisan representation in the English Masonic orders. In France the bourgeoisie were more numerous in Masonic lodges than in other types of association which were often dominated by officials, military officers and clergy.20 The political function of continental societies may also have been less expansive than in Britain, or at least its development came later. I have come across only a scattering of evidence, although I am sure more remains to be discovered. In the seventeenth century language societies were established in Germany to reconcile the political divisions created by the Thirty Years War, but they later declined. At Hamburg, which had close commercial ties to England, the first patriotic society established in 1724 discussed the problems of civic government, although little was achieved. A second society established in 1765 was more influential, projecting a whole series of reforms in trade and social welfare, which contributed to the renewal of the urban community. On the other 20   Hervé Hasquin (ed.), Visages de la Franc-Maconnerie Belge du XVIIIe au XXe siècle (Brussels, 1983), pp. 48–54; Halévi, Les loges maconniques.

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hand, the widespread reading societies in Germany do not seem to have discussed political books until the late 1780s when more radical activity surfaces.21 In the Netherlands patriotic societies debated government reform and were active in the 1780s in mobilizing opposition to the House of Orange, but most of them were suppressed in the government reaction of 1787.22 In France reading societies, as at Nantes and Rennes, offered upper class members a wide range of newspapers and magazines during the 1770s and 1780s including works on improvement, which clearly had political implications, but political clubs only became important with the onset of the Revolution, and even so in 1793 the revolutionary authorities suppressed associational activity.23 In the Mediterranean world associational politics was largely notable for its silence. At Barcelona academies-cum-societies, attended by nobles and professional men, discussed moral and philosophical questions but not politics or improvement. Only with the French invasion in the 1790s was there was any emergence of political societies.24 In general, then, the contribution of voluntary societies to the formation of political space in mainland Europe appears rather limited up the 1780s – limited mostly to political education and discussion sotto voce. How do we explain this? In part the explanation is tied to the modest development of clubs and societies in general. High levels of state political control clearly played a part. In the Dutch Republic there was a ban on journeymen organizations. In France official approval was needed to set up local societies and this was often withheld. Even when states permitted the holding of society meetings they often fixed their agendas. Also critical was the expansive activity of Enlightenment states seeking (unlike in Britain) to extend their authority in many fields of domestic policy, a point to be discussed again shortly. Another factor was the strong competition from existing institutions: from confraternities, increasingly under Church control, in Catholic countries; from civic militias and neighbourhood associations in the Low Countries; from trade corporations in France, often strongly supported by the bourgeoisie. In sum, the power of state, Church and civic institutions, of corporate monopolies and other traditional institutions constrained the growth of alternative spaces – social, cultural and not least political – associated with voluntary associations.25 21

 Robert J.W. Evans, ‘Learned Societies in Germany in the Seventeenth Century’, European Historical Quarterly, 7 (1977): 130ff; Mary Lindemann, Patriots and Paupers: Hamburg 1712–1830 (Oxford, 1990), p. 78 et passim; Dann, Lesegesellschaften, p. 103ff. 22   Marc Boone and Maarten Prak, ‘Rulers, Patricians and Burghers: The Great and the Little Traditions of Urban Revolt in the Low Countries’, in Karel Davids and Jan Lucassen (eds), A Miracle Mirrored: The Dutch Republic in European Perspective (Cambridge, 1995), p. 122ff; Jacob and Mijnhardt, Dutch Republic. 23   Queniart, Culture et société, p. 435. 24   James S. Amelang, Honored Citizens of Barcelona: Patrician Culture and Class Relations, 1490–1714 (Princeton, 1986), p. 179. 25   Rudolf Dekker, ‘Labour Conflicts and Working-Class Culture in Early Modern Holland’, International Review of Social History, 35 (1990): 403; Queniart, Culture

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The limited growth of a free press, so important in providing the oxygen of publicity for associational activity, may have been another constricting factor. Although many large European cities began to get newspapers from the seventeenth century, and while provincial journals appeared in the eighteenth, government efforts at censorship, however ineffectual, may have led to an uncertain atmosphere and self-censorship. At Mainz the free circulation of newspapers, which doubtless contributed to the flurry of societies in the city, was singled out as ‘a truly British freedom’.26 Given that most eighteenth-century associations were located in town, the slow rate of urban growth on the continent may also have had an effect, dampening both urban demand and supply with regard to associations. In France the urbanization rate hardly moved between 1700 and 1800 (although this may mask advances before the Revolution, subsequently reversed). In Germany wide variations occurred between regions and between princely states and imperial cities, but the level of the overall urban population rose only a small amount between 1500 and 1800. Sluggish urbanization may have slowed the rise of new social groups (outside the largest centres) and held back improvements in living standards and wider demand for new sociable activities, such as associations.27 There are many aspects of associational activity in continental Europe which need to be explored further, including their finances and admission procedures. However, the venues used by associations are clear. Though some gathered in public places such as taverns, many more gathered in private houses, in fashionable salons or on their own premises; others met in places linked to the authorities.28 Of course, it would be wrong to exaggerate the contrast between Britain and continental Europe in the long eighteenth century. As more work is done the similarities may prove greater, but nonetheless my own guess is that the development of political space through the role of voluntary societies comes later in continental Europe and is always more selective and elitist, at least until the revolutionary era.

et société; Deric Regin, Traders, Artists, Burghers: A Cultural History of Amsterdam in the Seventeenth Century (Amsterdam, 1976), pp. 132–3; Gail Bossenga, ‘La Révolution française et les corporations: Trois exemples lillois’, Annales ESC, 43 (1988): 405–26. 26   Brendan Dooley and Sabrina A. Baron (eds), The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (London, 2001); Malcolm Gee and Tim Kirk (eds), Printed Matters: Printing, Publishing and Urban Culture in Europe in the Early Modern Period (Aldershot, 2002); Tim C.W. Blanning, Reform and Revolution in Mainz 1743–1803 (Cambridge, 1974), p. 196. 27  E. Anthony Wrigley, ‘Urban Growth and Agricultural Change: England and the Continent in the Early Modern Period’, in Peter Borsay (ed.), The Eighteenth-Century Town (London, 1990), p. 70; Jan de Vries, European Urbanization 1500–1800 (London, 1984), p. 154. 28   See van Dülmen, Society of the Enlightenment, p. 85ff.

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It is now time to return to the political significance of British voluntary associations in the eighteenth century and place it in the comparative context of the preceding discussion of confraternities and continental societies. One factor which was evidently influential in affecting the political role of voluntary associations was the relationship with government. In Britain it was not just that the government after 1688 did not interfere in the activity of societies, threatening but rarely closing them down when it did not like them, or that the censorship of the press ended in 1695, but that the creation of the so-called fiscal-military state left many areas of domestic policy open for specialist associational activity. Other traditional political agencies were also arguably in decline during this period – old-style municipal government, trade guilds and the established Church. This is in marked contrast with the late-medieval era, when institutional controls, state and civic, were growing, and with the continent in the eighteenth century, when Enlightenment states and their agencies sought to extend and consolidate control over their political territory, involving intervention in a kaleidoscope of economic, social and cultural areas. A further general point which seems significant for eighteenth-century Britain (especially England) was the dynamic of urbanization, linked to industrial and commercial expansion, that affected not only London and the provincial capitals, but even many smaller towns. In England urbanization levels accelerated from the late seventeenth century with over 70 per cent of European urban growth in the second half of the eighteenth century taking place in England. Recent research would put the level of urbanization in Britain as a whole at about 40 per cent by 1801. Urbanization was accompanied by high levels of physical and social mobility, the expansion of the service sector, large-scale urban infrastructure investment, improvements in communication networks as well as sharply rising living standards and consumer demand among upper, middling and some lower class groups. All of these factors, as I have argued elsewhere, contributed to the high levels of associational participation in Britain. As we have seen, the picture for the late Middle Ages was more variable, with urban recession and greater economic instability alongside some erratic improvements in living standards. On the continent during the eighteenth century urbanization was often sluggish and economic and social advances tended to be concentrated in the larger cities.29 In terms of organization, one important contrast between voluntary associations in Georgian Britain and their counterparts in late-medieval or eighteenth-century Europe was in the location of many of their meetings. Whilst confraternities and continental societies gathered in a variety of locations but not often in drinking houses, Georgian clubs and societies almost universally met in inns, taverns, coffeehouses and alehouses: there were relatively few exceptions (mostly larger societies like the Royal Society which had their own premises, although even this 29   Wrigley, ‘Urban Growth’, p. 64; John Langton, ‘Urban Growth and Economic Change: From the Late Seventeenth Century to 1841’, in Peter Clark (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain (3 vols, Cambridge, 2000), vol. 3, p. 462ff; Clark, British Clubs.

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had a linked social club which met in a tavern). Why did this matter? Firstly, because by the eighteenth century drinking houses were well-established as communal or public institutions with a wide variety of social, economic, civic and cultural functions: the term ‘public house’, meaning drinking house, first appeared in England in the 1650s. Admittedly, since the Middle Ages drinking houses had frequently come under attack as places of drunkenness and disorder; in the late seventeenth century, as Mark Knights has shown, coffeehouses were portrayed by critics as cradles of faction and political sedition. Beat Kümin has recently demonstrated the ambivalent role of the drinking place as contested space, with its mix of public and private functions, its propensity for disorder and its vulnerability to official intervention and regulation. Nonetheless by the eighteenth century, because of increased regulation and commercialization, drinking houses, their premises and landlords, were, at least in cities, becoming increasingly respectable and accepted in society, certainly in England. Building on their long-standing role as centres for the exchange of news and gossip, drinking houses were at the forefront of the information revolution of the eighteenth century, places where posted letters were collected and read, where a range of newspapers and magazines like the Spectator or Gentleman’s Magazine, taken by the landlord on subscription, could be perused and discussed. Clubs and societies which met on such premises were both integrated into and also contributed to the communication and discussion of news and information, political and otherwise.30 A second reason for the important relationship between clubs and societies and drinking houses was the entrepreneurial role of landlords. In England from the late seventeenth century innkeepers, coffeehouse-keepers and the like energetically promoted their businesses by hosting on the premises a range of musical concerts, sports meetings, plays and, last but not least, clubs and societies. Generally, they offered clubs special rooms, furniture, even loans. At least some publicans went further and promoted the political function of their premises through club meetings, petitions and processions.31 30   Ibid., p. 164 et passim; Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain (Oxford, 2004), p. 250; Beat Kümin, ‘Drinking and Public Space in Early Modern German Lands’, Contemporary Drug Problems, 32 (2005): 17; Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History 1200–1830 (London, 1983), chap. 8ff; Beat Kümin and B. Ann Tlusty (eds), The World of the Tavern: Public Houses in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2002). See also Peter Clark, ‘Politics, the City and the Popular Drinking House in Early Modern Europe’, in Stefan Ehrenpreis et al. (eds), Wege der Neuzeit: Festschrift für Heinz Schilling zum 65. Geburtstag (Berlin, 2007), p. 629. For coffeehouses see Brian Cowan, ‘The Rise of the Coffeehouse Reconsidered’, Historical Journal, 47 (2004): 21–46; and his The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffee House (New Haven, 2005). 31   Clark, English Alehouse, chap. 10; Alan Everitt, ‘The English Urban Inn 1560– 1760’, in Alan Everitt (ed.), Perspectives in English Urban History (London, 1973), p. 97; Anonymous, The Life and Political Opinions of the Late Sam House (London, date unknown).

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Lastly, the link between British clubs and societies and public drinking houses was spatial. Within premises clubs found a space which mirrored their role and importance in society as private organizations with a public and political function. Club rooms were often set aside for a club to meet privately, to carry out its various ceremonies and discussions, but they were also open to outsiders – visitors often came in, sometimes strangers from the street. In certain instances the ‘club room’ was little more than a closed off area of a public drinking room. The spatial significance went further. The principal drinking houses which accommodated the bulk of associations (other than benefit clubs) were often situated in the central areas of English towns which were increasingly improved with street lighting, paved streets and pavements, and a growing number of purpose-built cultural buildings – theatres, assembly rooms and the like. In other words, drinking houses – and the many clubs and societies which gathered there – were at the heart of the new social space of Enlightenment cities and towns.32 It was this new social space which enabled a more connected-up and fashionable cultural, social and political life to evolve, often taking place in the evening and through the night, as townsmen moved between clubs, concerts, the playhouse and assemblies. It was in this continuum of social places that political dialogue and news, contacts and networking increasingly developed and effervesced. Associational politics was thus heavily integrated into the new sociable world of the late-eighteenth-century British city, and, conversely, social and political space was increasingly anchored to the world of clubs and societies. Here, as I have tried to suggest, albeit rather sketchily, there are important contrasts with the scene in the late Middle Ages and the situation on the continent in the eighteenth century.

32

  For social space in English towns see Jon Stobart, ‘Shopping Streets as Social Space: Leisure, Consumerism and Improvement in an Eighteenth-Century Town’, Urban History, 25 (1998): 3–21; Michael Reed, ‘The Transformation of Urban Space 1700–1840’, in Clark, Cambridge Urban History, vol. 3, p. 628ff.

Chapter 5

Political Spaces and Parliamentary Enclosure in an Upland Context: Cumbria c.1760–1840 Ian D. Whyte

Parliamentary enclosure was one of the most important socio-economic changes to affect English communities in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The process of parliamentary enclosure has been widely viewed as a form of oppression of smaller landowners by larger ones, with smallholders and owner-occupiers being forced to sell out due to its high costs. The common rights of small farmers and cottagers were removed and replaced, if they were replaced at all, by small, sometimes distant allotments. Loss of common rights forced cottagers and smallholders to work as full-time labourers for the larger farmers. Deliberate social engineering was sometimes involved; enclosure was on occasion undertaken specifically to prevent further encroachments on the commons by cottagers. Enclosure caused social polarization and growing poverty at the lowest levels of rural society. In the Midlands a rise in poor relief was associated with loss of employment resulting from the conversion of arable land to grass following enclosure. While the economic and social effects of parliamentary enclosure have been the subject of long-continued debate, the ways in which it changed access to the countryside and perceptions of space, and how this affected the community, have received little attention. Relatively free and unrestricted access through the former open fields and over the commons was replaced by a landscape of individual ownership from which most people were excluded, apart from the designated access ways laid out by the enclosure commissioners. In economic terms the   Michael Turner, English Parliamentary Enclosure: Its Historical Geography and Economic History (Folkestone, 1980).   David Brown, ‘The Rise of Industrial Society and the End of the Self-Contained Village 1760–1830’, in Christopher Dyer (ed.), The Self-Contained Village: The Social History of Rural Communities 1250–1900 (Hatfield, 2006), pp. 96–113.    Jeanette Neeson, Commoners, Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England 1700–1870 (London, 1993); Keith Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor (Cambridge 1985); Leigh Shaw-Taylor, ‘Parliamentary Enclosure and the Emergence of an English Agricultural Proletariat’, Journal of Economic History, 61 (2001): 640–62.

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cottagers’ loss of rights to glean corn in the open fields, pasture animals, and use the range of resources provided by the commons is often likely to have been the most severe effect of enclosure on cottagers. The additional loss of recreational space, of access and freedom of movement, however, represented a symbolic exclusion from much of the countryside. The standard models of parliamentary enclosure and its effects have, however, been developed in the context of lowland, open-field England. The socio-economic impact of parliamentary enclosure was different in the uplands of northern and western England and in Wales, where enclosure involved mainly common grazings rather than open-field arable. It could be even more different where the structure of rural society itself varied from that of the model lowland English village community where, even before enclosure, a tripartite division had emerged in which labourers and smallholders were dominated by larger farmers who leased their land from the gentry and aristocracy. This chapter examines the context of parliamentary enclosure in Cumbria in order to establish how and by whom the process of enclosure was initiated, and its effects on different social groups. In particular, it aims to examine how enclosure affected the political sites and spaces which people used and how these were transformed by the process and impact of enclosure. Cumbrian Society in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries Cumbria has been seen as the ‘odd corner’ of England, a region where feudal characteristics lingered 150 years longer than the rest of the country. One of its most striking features in the eighteenth century was the survival of distinctive customary tenures. These were derived from old Border tenant right under which tenants received complete security of possession, effectively equivalent to freehold, in return for military service against the Scots. They could bequeath or sell their land to whoever they wished. They paid annual rents, fixed by the custom of the manor, which had failed to keep pace with inflation, but they were also liable for periodic fines on the change of a tenant or landlord, as well as boon services and   Ian Whyte, Transforming Fell and Valley: Landscape and Parliamentary Enclosure in North-West England (Lancaster, 2003).    Gordon Mingay, Parliamentary Enclosure in England: An Introduction to its Causes, Incidence and Impacts 1750–1850 (London, 1997).    Christopher Searle, ‘The “Odd Corner” of England. A Study of a Rural Social Formation in Transition: Cumbria c. 1700–c. 1914’ (PhD thesis, University of Exeter 1984).   Ibid., pp. 27–30.    John Beckett, ‘The Decline of the Small Landowner in Eighteenth- and NineteenthCentury England: Some Regional Considerations’, Agricultural History Review, 30 (1982): 97–111.   Angus Winchester, ‘Wordsworth’s “Pure Commonwealth”? Yeoman Dynasties in the English Lake District c. 1450–1750’, Armitt Library Journal, 1 (1998): 88.

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heriots.10 The amount of land held in this way in Cumberland at the end of the eighteenth century was estimated by contemporaries as two thirds of the improved land.11 Modern research has confirmed this figure for a large number of manors in Cumberland and Westmorland.12 The prevalence of these tenures greatly reduced the ability of manorial lords to commercialize agriculture on their estates because customary rents could not readily be raised in line with inflation.13 Cumbrian rural society then was characterized by an abundance of small owner-occupiers and family farms, many worked by family labour alone, with relatively few labourers and cottagers though many living-in servants.14 In a study of the probate inventories of late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Cumbrian yeomen Marshall found that two thirds of his sample had between four and eight acres of arable land and that most had ten or fewer cattle.15 There were relatively few resident magnates and larger gentry.16 The number of gentry families actually fell in the course of the eighteenth century.17 Contrasts in wealth and poverty were relatively muted and ordinary people did not come into contact with gentry or great landowners very often.18 Holdings were characteristically small but in many manors customary tenants enjoyed access to extensive common pastures.19 Cattle were more important economically than sheep in this period.20 In the early eighteenth century profits from the droving trade and by-employments 10   See esp. Christopher Searle, ‘Custom, Class Conflict and Agrarian Capitalism: The Cumbrian Customary Economy in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, 110 (1986): 106–33; G.P. Jones, ‘The Decline of the Yeomanry in the Lake Counties’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, 62 (1962): 198–223. 11   J. Bailey and G. Culley, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Cumberland (Newcastle, 1797), p. 178. 12   Searle, ‘Agrarian Capitalism’, p. 110. 13   Nicky Gregson, ‘Tawney Revisited: Custom and the Emergence of Capitalist Class Relations in North-East Cumbria 1600–1830’, Economic History Review, 42 (1989): 18–42. 14   Winchester, ‘Pure Commonwealth’, pp. 87–8. As late as 1851, even farms with only 40–50 acres in remote Cumbrian parishes might employ a living-in servant. See John Marshall and John Walton, The Lake Counties from 1830 to the mid-Twentieth Century (Manchester, 1981), p. 56. 15   John Marshall, ‘The Domestic Economy of the Lakeland Yeoman 1600–1749’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, 72 (1972): 190–219; John Marshall, ‘Agrarian Wealth and Social Structure in Pre-Industrial Cumbria’, Economic History Review, 32 (1980): 501–21. 16   Winchester, ‘Pure Commonwealth’, pp. 110–11; Beckett, ‘Decline of the Small Landowner’, pp. 91–3. 17   Winchester, ‘Pure Commonwealth’, pp. 110–11. 18   John Marshall, ‘Rural Society Before the Victorians’, in Oliver Westall (ed.), Windermere in the Nineteenth Century (Lancaster, 1991), pp. 9–18. 19   Beckett, ‘Decline of the Small Landowner’, p. 100. 20  Marshall, ‘Agrarian Wealth’, p. 512.

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in rural industry, especially textiles, generated modest prosperity for many owneroccupiers, to which was added the advantages of low land tax assessments as well as low rents.21 Profits from droving tied Cumbrian peasants into national markets but did not transform them as a class.22 In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Cumbrian customary tenants were often described by outsiders as ‘statesmen’ but were more often termed ‘yeomen’ in local usage. They have been portrayed as a conservative, backward and relatively uniform group but it is clear that by this time, if not indeed earlier, there were growing contrasts between wealthier customary tenants, some of whom were starting to move into the gentry, and their smaller neighbours.23 It is probable, however, that only the wealthiest yeomen played any part in the ‘county community’ within Cumberland, Westmorland or north Lancashire.24 This tenurial structure created a rural society which, if not totally corresponding to Wordsworth’s idealized ‘republic of shepherds and agriculturalists’, was less markedly stratified and more self-regulating than many communities in lowland England.25 The lifestyle of smaller Cumbrian yeomen was eulogized by Wordsworth in his portrayal of the sturdy, self-reliant and frugal ‘Michael’ (1800). Other contemporaries saw them differently though. A commentator in 1766 described their lives: ‘[They] work like slaves; they cannot afford to keep a man-servant, but husband, wife, sons and daughters all turn out to work in the fields; they wear wooden shoes, shod like a horse’s foot with iron … their diet is whey, potatoes, turnips, oatmeal bread, and oatmeal and water; they very seldom taste meat or wheat bread, and work very hard upon this diet ….’26 Slaves perhaps, but ones who nevertheless had a good deal of say in the affairs of their communities. The business of manorial courts which, among other things, regulated the management of the commons was in the hands of juries of customary tenants.27 Within individual townships local offices such as churchwardens, constables, overseers of the poor and highways, and trustees of schools were largely monopolized by members of the more prominent yeomen families who, in some cases, had occupied land in their communities for generations.28 There was, nevertheless, social mobility into and out of this group; customary tenements could be, and were, alienated.29 In addition, the 21

  Beckett, ‘Decline of the Small Landowner’, p. 105.   Searle, ‘Odd Corner’, p. 58. 23   Winchester, ‘Pure Commonwealth’, p. 96. 24  Alan Everitt, Landscape and Community in England (London, 1985). 25   Winchester, ‘Pure Commonwealth’, pp. 90–100. 26   The Gentleman’s Magazine, 36 (December 1766): 582. 27  Angus Winchester, The Harvest of the Hills: Rural Life in Northern England and the Scottish Borders 1400–1700 (Edinburgh, 2000), pp. 33–48. 28   Winchester, ‘Pure Commonwealth’, p. 97. 29  A.H. Duxbury, ‘The Decline of the Cumbrian Yeoman. Ravenstonedale: A Case Study’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological 22

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larger customary tenants let portions of their land to leasehold husbandmen, a group whose existence has often been overlooked. In the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries some customary tenants were bought out by aggressively expanding estate owners like the earls of Lowther and Thanet.30 A growing divergence between a minority of more wealthy yeomen and the rest is also evident.31 In the early nineteenth century high prices during the French wars brought a burst of prosperity to Cumbrian rural society but in the post1815 slump some customary tenants who had borrowed money during the war years to finance enclosure and improvement were forced to sell out.32 Enfranchisement, by removing the fines formerly payable upon alienation of customary tenements, converting their tenure to freehold, may have made the sale of small estates more attractive because fines no longer had to be paid to the manorial lord for a change of ownership. Another negative influence may have been the decline of domestic textile production which had almost disappeared by the end of the 1830s.33 Beckett and Jones have argued for a substantial decline in the number of small proprietors during this period but Walton suggests that this was more apparent than real and was linked to a drop in the popularity of the term ‘yeoman’ in contemporary sources like directories.34 The second half of the nineteenth century brought better access to markets with the spread of the railway network generating profits and stabilizing rural society so that Cumbria remained a region of small farms, though now more commercialized.35 Claims have been made that rural society in the Lake District in the later eighteenth century was still essentially a peasant one but, if so, it is clear that socio-economic changes, including parliamentary enclosure, had altered many aspects of such a society by the 1830s.36 The political sites for the yeoman elites who ran Cumbrian local society included, as in earlier times, the church, a key meeting place for discussing secular as well as spiritual matters. On the door of the church notices relating to township and parish business, including meetings concerned with enclosure, were fixed for the congregation to read.37 The school provided another official venue: Society, 94 (1994): 201–13. 30   Searle, ‘Odd Corner’, p. 102. 31   Winchester, ‘Pure Commonwealth’, p. 98. 32   House of Commons, Report of Select Committee on Agriculture, HO5 (1833): 303–14. 33   Jones, ‘Decline of the Yeomanry’, p. 220; Beckett, ‘Decline of the Small Landowner’, p. 102. 34   John Walton, ‘The Strange Decline of the Lakeland Yeoman: Some Thoughts on Sources, Methods and Definitions’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, 86 (1986): 221–33. 35  Margaret Shepherd, From Hell Gill to Bridge End: Aspects of Society and Economic Change in the Upper Eden Valley 1840–95 (Hatfield, 2003). 36   Searle, ‘Agrarian Capitalism’, p. 132. 37   Whyte, Transforming Fell and Valley, p. 47.

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in Tom Rumney’s diary it was the normal meeting place for the surveyors of the highways and other official groups in Watermillock township.38 The alehouse and inn were more convivial and informal places to transact business, the latter being the preferred choice of enclosure commissioners as their place of meeting.39 These were bounded indoor sites where interactions tended to be more exclusive and between people of similar social status. However, many of the day-to-day contacts in this society occurred out of doors in association with farming. The busy periods of the year – sheep shearing, mowing hay and harvesting crops – were communal activities with a strong social element. So too were ‘boon days’ when neighbours turned out with horses, ploughs, carts and other implements to provide a day’s labour for an entering tenant who, in turn, laid on a dinner.40 Cumbrian open field systems, although in former times widespread, extending to the very heads of valleys like Great Langdale and Wasdale, had largely been enclosed by private agreements by the later eighteenth century.41 Where they survived they provided another focus for cooperation and communal effort. A feature of rural society in Cumbria was widespread access to the resources of the common pastures. These provided a key political site where people could meet and interact regardless of status. In the early nineteenth century Cumberland and Westmorland had higher proportions of their area in unenclosed common pasture than any other counties in England.42 The commons of individual townships, often thousands rather than hundreds of acres in extent, were frequently bounded by those of other communities and delimited only by marker stones, allowing animals to range over huge areas.43 All customary tenants, however modest their holdings, had common rights, while cottagers and landless labourers also enjoyed de facto access to many commons though the tendency during the eighteenth century was for this to become less frequent.44 For manorial lords commons represented a limited source 38   Tom Rumney of Mellfell (1764–1835) by Himself as set out in his Letters and Diary, A.W. Rumney (ed.) (Kendal, 1936), pp. 76, 102. 39   Whyte, Transforming Fell and Valley, p. 47. 40  C.M.L. Bouch and G.P. Jones, A Short Economic and Social History of the Lake Counties 1500–1830 (Manchester, 1961), p. 230. 41   Blake Tyson, ‘Murton Great Field near Appleby: A Case Study of the Piecemeal Enclosure of a Common Field in the Mid-Eighteenth Century’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, 92 (1992): 161– 82; G. Elliot, ‘Field systems of North-West England’, in Alan Baker and Robin Butlin (eds), Studies of Field Systems in the British Isles (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 41–92. 42  Michael Williams, ‘The Enclosure and Reclamation of Waste Land in England and Wales in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 51 (1970): 55–69. 43  Angus Winchester, ‘Dividing Lines in a Moorland Landscape: Territorial Boundaries in Upland England’, Landscapes, 1 (2000): 16–32. 44   Winchester, Harvest of the Hills, p. 32.

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of income from fines on encroachments, overgrazing or other infringements of ‘good neighbourhood’.45 Mineral rights offered the uncertain prospect of greater incomes. The real value of the land, in the eyes of many manorial lords, could only be unlocked with enclosure.46 For the commoners themselves the commons, as well as providing grazing, also provided a range of resources including stone, peat, turf, heather, bracken, gorse and wood. They also provided open space for individual recreation and communal entertainment. Walking on the common for pleasure rather than necessity was an activity frequently recorded in the early nineteenthcentury diary of Tom Rumney of Mellfell.47 The numerous local race meetings were held on common land as were many of the great cattle fairs in the region, like Rosley, Penrith Fell and Brough Hill. Fox hunting on foot across the commons and, in parts of the Lake District, stag hunting, were activities in which customary tenants and gentry could freely mix. The commons provided outdoor spaces where social contacts were much more heterogeneous than the more exclusive, bounded indoor spaces considered above. In more practical terms the commons facilitated contact between communities which was hindered only by limitations imposed by topography and drainage. Jefferys’ map of Westmorland, published in 1770 before the start of extensive parliamentary enclosure, shows complex networks of roads and trackways criss-crossing the commons (Figure 5.1).48 By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, the system of regulating the commons through manorial courts was starting to break down. The profits from the droving trade were encouraging commoners to graze more animals than they were allowed under systems of levancy and couchancy or stinting.49 The first of these systems limited commoners to grazing on the commons in summer only the number of livestock that could be wintered on the ‘inbye’ (improved) land of their holdings. Stinting involved dividing an area of pasture into a fixed number of grazing units, usually termed ‘cattlegates’, which were allocated to commoners in proportion to the sizes of their holdings. Larger tenants were also beginning to hound the animals belonging to other commoners, driving them off the best grazings with their dogs and even denying smaller commoners any access to the pastures.50 A shift in the balance of Cumbrian rural society was occurring as the communal ethos weakened in the face of growing commercialization and individualism, providing a context for the spread of parliamentary enclosure.

45

 Ibid., pp. 45–7.  Christopher Searle, ‘Customary Tenants and the Enclosure of the Cumbrian Commons’, Northern History, 29 (1993): 126–53. 47  Rumney, Diary. 48  Thomas Jefferys, Historic Map of Westmorland, 1770, with an introduction by Paul Hindle, Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society: Record Series 14 (Kendal, 2001), map 2. 49   Searle, ‘Customary Tenants’. 50   Whyte, Transforming Fell and Valley. 46

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This figure has intentionally been removed for copyright reasons. To view this image, please refer to the printed version of this book

Figure 5.1

Part of Jefferys’ map of Westmorland (1770) showing networks of roads across the commons which were soon to be extinguished by enclosure. Thomas Jefferys, Historic Map of Westmorland, 1770, with an introduction by Paul Hindle (Kendal, 2001), map 2

Parliamentary Enclosure in Cumbria It was in circumstances like these that parliamentary enclosure became an attractive proposition for small as well as large customary tenants and manorial lords.51 Parliamentary enclosure was the last stage in a long process in which boundaries in the uplands became more sharply drawn and use shifted from the collective to the individual. In medieval times the Cumbrian uplands had been 51

  Searle, ‘Customary Tenants’, p. 147.

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huge hunting forests. Grazing gradually ousted hunting and the extensive upland wastes became apportioned out between individual manors.52 Encroachment by squatters and the creation of enclosed stinted pastures was widespread in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.53 As late as the eighteenth century the boundaries of commons were often vague and unclear.54 Progressive enclosure between the 1770s and the mid-nineteenth century converted much of this oncecommon resource to individual freehold allotments owned by specific farmers. It created a rigidly geometric landscape of sharply-defined boundaries designed to exclude people as well as their livestock from the new allotments. Only in a few cases, where allotments were created from high-lying, poor-quality pasture, did their owners receive express permission from the enclosure commissioners to use marker stones to indicate the boundaries rather than more expensive stone walls.55 Enclosure also led to the clearer definition of the boundaries of those commons which were not enclosed. For a manorial lord who could not readily increase estate income due to the restrictions of customary tenure, short of buying out large numbers of yeomen there were two main ways of increasing estate income within the agricultural sector: demesne improvements such as the conversion of deer parks to leasehold farms, and parliamentary enclosure of the commons. The manorial share from the enclosure of a common might amount to an allotment sufficiently large to allow a new leasehold farm to be created. In lowland England parliamentary enclosure was generally initiated by the larger landowners and, as the criterion for acceptance of a bill in Parliament was at least a two thirds majority in terms of the value of the land owned by the petitioners rather than their number, it was not unknown for enclosure to be pushed through regardless of the objections of small landowners. Only in occasional cases, as in the enclosure of the 12,000 acres of common in Cartmel parish, the act for which was passed in 1806, is there evidence of the larger proprietors deliberately trying to cheat the smaller ones.56 In Cumbria enclosure was sometimes set in motion by manorial lords. In the later eighteenth century families like the Earls of Thanet, whose northern estates focused on Appleby Castle, bought up the rights of a number of manors with the specific intention of initiating enclosure and gaining the value of the manorial allotments.57 In other cases it was clearly the larger customary tenants and not the manorial lords who were pushing for enclosure. A set of correspondence from Christopher Dobson, steward on the Edenhall estate near Penrith, to his absentee master Sir Philip Musgrave, provides examples of townships where the larger customary tenants were far more keen to enclose than   Winchester, Harvest of the Hills, pp. 10–12.  Ibid., pp. 68–71. 54   Winchester, ‘Dividing Lines’, pp. 21–3. 55   Whyte, Transforming Fell and Valley, p. 97. 56  Ibid., pp. 39–40. 57   Searle, ‘Odd Corner’, p. 199. 52 53

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their manorial lords.58 A distinctive feature of Cumbrian parliamentary enclosure was the fact that in most cases even the smaller customary tenants appear to have been either in favour of enclosure or at least not actively against it.59 The motives involved, however, were complex, and there is evidence that in some cases at least the smaller owner-occupiers agreed to enclosure reluctantly as the only realistic option available to them. In the example of the common of Bleatarn in 1770 Dobson noted that all of the tenants were keen to enclose. The reason, however, was that the Earl of Thanet had recently bought the manorial rights of neighbouring Great Ormside. It was suspected (correctly) that he would soon start to enclose Great Ormside common and that this would put unacceptable pressure on the common of Bleatarn. Enclosure seemed the safest course.60 The advantage of parliamentary enclosure for the smaller customary tenants was that it gave them an allotment to add to their existing holdings of ‘inbye’ (improved) land in lieu of existing grazing rights which might be of little real value if access to them was made difficult or if their value had been diminished by overgrazing. The enclosure commissioners usually tried to ensure that the smaller customary tenants received allotments which were contiguous with, or at least close to, their existing lands.61 Opposition to parliamentary enclosure in Cumbria was usually centred on specific, local issues rather than enclosure per se.62 Where it was possible to examine precisely who was for and against enclosure the opposition tended to come from the smaller owner-occupiers. It would be interesting to know more about the case of Ravenstonedale where, in 1767, 91 customary tenants drew up a petition opposing attempts by their manorial lord, Sir James Lowther (whose nickname ‘Jimmy Grasp-All’ speaks volumes), to enclose their common.63 Cases of concerted opposition sometimes related to relatively small commons where the costs per acre of enclosure were proportionally high, forcing smaller owners to sell their allotments, as occurred at Dacre.64 However, a study of changes in land ownership associated with parliamentary enclosure in Westmorland indicates that overall under a fifth of small owners sold their allotments in the period between the passing of the act and the writing of the final award and that many of those who

58

  Kendal, Cumbria Record Office, WD/CAT/MUS/A2173, Letters 15/9/1770, 10/12/1770, 12/1/1771. 59  Christopher Searle, ‘Cumbria’s Parliamentary Enclosure Movement: A Comparative Case Study of Rural Quiescence’, Transactions of the Antiquarian and Archaeological Society of Cumberland and Westmorland, 95 (1995): 247–69. 60   Kendal, Cumbria Record Office, WD/CAT/MUS/A2173, Letter 10/12/1770. 61   Whyte, Transforming Fell and Valley, p. 45. 62   Searle, ‘Customary Tenants’, pp. 144–5. 63   Kendal, Cumbria Record Office, WDX 176. 64   Searle, ‘Customary Tenants’.

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did so were only part-time farmers who may have been taking advantage of the high prices to raise capital for investment in their non-agricultural activities.65 Opposition to parliamentary enclosure can be demonstrated less directly, however, by the extensive areas of unenclosed common which still remain today. Virtually every community in Cumbria is likely to have considered the desirability of enclosing their commons at some time between the 1760s and the later nineteenth century. Some of them demonstrably did this two or three times without actually setting proceedings in motion.66 In cases where enclosure is known to have been considered but was never initiated it is probable that it was the high cost, particularly of land improvement, which put landowners off.67 Parliamentary enclosure was probably one of the most significant processes in altering spatial and environmental perceptions as well as economic perspectives in Cumbria in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Even when it only impacted indirectly on a community, with the enclosure of a neighbouring common, it caused a sharpening in the definition of rights and boundaries. By removing the most significant communal element in the economy of a manor or township it promoted individualism and commercialization, particularly as the division of a common could lead to an increase in average farm size of 50 or even 100 per cent.68 By changing the balance between ‘inbye’ land and waste it altered environmental perceptions, particularly in terms of what was (and was not) improvable. Prior to parliamentary enclosure management of the commons had been regulated by purely local assemblies in which customary tenants had enjoyed a major say: the manor court, concerned with transfers of property and offences against local law and custom, and the byrlaw court, which dealt with everyday farming matters at a township or hamlet level.69 The process of enclosure, however, thrust the commons into a regional and national arena. Enclosure was planned by commissioners who might come from within the same county but were chosen quite deliberately for their lack of local connections and involvement. They operated from inns which were not necessarily located within the township whose commons were being enclosed and which might not be much used by local people. The customary tenants, even the large ones, were required to attend the commissioners’ meetings at which they were mere participants rather than leaders. The lawyers and surveyors employed by the commissioners were also 65

 Ian Whyte, ‘Parliamentary Enclosure and Changes in Landownership in an Upland Environment: Westmorland c. 1770–1860’, Agricultural History Review, 54 (2006): 240– 56. 66   For example the enclosure of the commons of Broughton in Furness. See Barrow, Cumbria Record Office, BD 17, fols 1–20. 67  Ian Whyte, ‘The Costs of Parliamentary Enclosure in an Upland Setting: South and East Cumbria c. 1760–1860’, Northern History, 43 (2006): 97–115. 68   Whyte, Transforming Fell and Valley, p. 90. 69   Winchester, Harvest of the Hills, pp. 33–44.

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often drawn from outside the community. The commissioners and their assistants implemented an act passed in Westminster and laid out a new planned landscape conforming to national norms, similar to enclosed environments elsewhere from Northumberland to the south coast.70 The process of enclosure imposed standardized procedures relating to elements like boundaries, the size and shape of allotments and the width of access roads which again were so visibly different from existing local landscapes of ‘ancient enclosures’ that it is often easy to identify the boundaries of former commons on modern Ordnance Survey maps without recourse to the award map. Parliamentary enclosure also changed attitudes to the land regarding levels of investment in improvement as well as land use, again emphasizing the adoption of non-local norms. It also changed political attitudes to land because the allotments were usually granted in freehold and manorial lords often took the opportunity at enclosure to enfranchise their tenants, converting their main holdings from customary tenure to freehold. Enfranchisement had occurred on some manors as early as the sixteenth century, but it became much more frequent as an accompaniment to parliamentary enclosure.71 This may have altered political structures by creating more voters but this dimension of parliamentary enclosure has yet to be explored. Enfranchisement associated with enclosure may also have made it easier for smaller owners to alienate their lands, as with freehold they no longer had to pay the substantial fines which accompanied the transfer of ownership of a customary tenant. The survey and mapping of the commons to be enclosed involved in many cases the first detailed cartographic representations of these areas which were often remote and rugged. Prior to these maps the commons had been seen as so many units of resource, such as cattlegates and shares of turbary, rather than as fixed areas comprising so many statute acres. It is notable that the estimated areas of Cumbrian commons included in the initial enclosure bills and acts were often wrong by a factor of 20 per cent or more72 Parliamentary enclosure also introduced the practical mathematics of land surveying as well as the scientific rationality of agricultural improvement to areas which had previously been seen as marginal. Enclosure also involved the improvement of access roads to the new allotments. The turnpiking of many main roads in Cumbria in the later eighteenth century had dramatically improved transport conditions both within the region and in greatly reducing the time required to reach London by stagecoach. Parliamentary enclosure roads complemented the turnpikes at a local level. On early enclosures from the 1760s and 1770s like Orton and Skelton the main enclosure roads were

70  Michael Turner, ‘The Landscape of Parliamentary Enclosure’, in Michael Reed (ed.), Discovering Past Landscapes (London, 1984), pp. 132–67. 71   Searle, ‘Cumbria’s Parliamentary Enclosure Movement’, p. 249. 72   W.E. Tate and M. Turner, A Domesday of English Enclosure Awards (Reading, 1978) pp. 85–90, 264–9.

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laid out with a generous width of 60 feet.73 This may have been designed to make the movement of livestock easier but it also probably reflects techniques of road construction and drainage which were still not particularly effective, making it advisable to leave plenty of room to detour around wet patches. By the end of the eighteenth century the width of the main public access enclosure roads had been reduced to 30 feet as McAdam’s technique of surfacing became more widely adopted.74 The standards of construction required for enclosure roads, which had to be approved by local justices, and the experience acquired in building them may have helped to improve the quality of local roads more generally. Certainly the road system was sufficiently good to allow materials like stone, lime and coal to be transported by cart over considerable distances. In some areas, as with the 28,000-acre enclosure of Inglewood Forest, an entire network of new roads was created on a gridiron plan.75 Changing Political Sites: The Township of Watermillock The changing nature of political sites in Cumbrian society under the impact of parliamentary enclosure can be examined in more detail through a case study focusing on the township of Watermillock on the north side of Ullswater (Figure 5.2). Watermillock has been chosen because of the detail provided by the surviving diary of Tom Rumney of Mellfell, one of the more prominent customary tenants in the township, covering the years 1805 and 1806.76 Diaries kept by Cumbrian yeomen from this period are rare, and this example provides valuable insights into the distribution of power at a local level, the nature and use of political spaces and the action space of an individual from a political background. Watermillock was a large township within the parish of Greystoke with a population in 1801 of 338. The commons of Watermillock extended to some 4,500 acres, while the township contained no village; settlement was dispersed across hamlets and individual farmsteads. The diary depicts a community in which the local offices were in the hands of families of customary tenants some of which, like the Clarks, Castlehows and Rumneys, could trace their origins back to at least the fifteenth century. It appears to have been difficult (but not impossible) for leasehold husbandmen like Rumney’s brother-in-law, Joseph Todd, to break into this group, which provided most of the overseers of the poor and highways, trustees of the school and jurymen at the manorial court. The diary also shows that there were more labourers and leaseholders in Watermillock than might have been expected. It should be remembered, however, that Watermillock was located   Whyte, Transforming Fell and Valley, pp. 73–4.  Ibid., pp. 73–4. 75  Angus Winchester, England’s Landscape: The North West (London, 2006), pp. 97–8. 76  Rumney, Diary. 73 74

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on the edge of the Lake District rather than at the head of one of its dales and may have had a more diversified social and occupational structure. Winchester has suggested that the more accessible communities on the edge of the Lake District were more liable to population change and turnover than the remoter dales.77 There are indications from the parish register that the number of labourers and wallers in the community increased substantially from the 1790s, possibly due to the wartime expansion of cultivation.78 The number of leaseholders may also have increased under wartime conditions. There was certainly keen competition for land and the diary mentions two unsuccessful attempts by Joseph Todd to bid for the tenancy of larger farms. In both cases he was beaten by men offering higher rents. The lack of rigid stratification in Watermillock society is shown by Rumney’s behaviour when he hired skilled workers such as wallers to undertake work at Mellfell. Instead of holding himself aloof he worked alongside them in quarrying, carting and construction. In a similar way he worked at mowing and harvesting along with his servants and was proud of his practical skills.

This figure has intentionally been removed for copyright reasons. To view this image, please refer to the printed version of this book

Figure 5.2

77

Location of Watermillock township and some of the places mentioned in the text

  Winchester, ‘Pure Commonwealth’, p. 104.   H. Maclean, The Register of the Parish of Watermillock in the County of Cumberland: Baptisms, Marriages and Burials 1579–1812 (Kendal, 1908). 78

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It is not clear to what extent leaseholders and labourers were allowed access to the resources of Watermillock’s commons. There was certainly something of a farming ladder in Watermillock for men listed in the baptism register as labourers are sometimes subsequently referred to as husbandmen. It is also clear from other studies of Cumbrian communities such as Duxbury’s work on Ravenstonedale that there was a good deal of mobility within the ranks of the customary tenants as well, although the extent and nature of social mobility in Watermillock requires further study.79 Although in parts of Cumbria like the Eden Valley local political sites focused on a central nucleated village, this was not the case in Watermillock with its dispersed farms and hamlets. Nevertheless the main political sites – the church, school and alehouse – were concentrated within a limited area almost a mile from the main road along the side of Ullswater. Elsewhere in the township the commons provided sites for a range of formal and informal social activities as well as the meetings which occurred in the course of their economic exploitation. Because of Watermillock’s dependence on the manor and parish of Greystoke the parish church and manor court there were important political sites outside the township at which people from Watermillock interacted with officialdom, including the rector of the parish and the estate steward. Other meeting places included inns outside the township at Pooley Bridge, where the Dacre enclosure commissioners held their public meetings in 1806, and Patterdale where local people on a day out could rub shoulders with aristocratic tourists. Other important business relating to the township such as the investment of donations to the school funds was carried out in the market town of Penrith (population 3,801 in 1801) nine miles away. Penrith was the nearest source of skilled medical, legal and financial services, and of imported consumer goods, food and drink. The major cattle fairs of the region, including Patterdale but especially Penrith Fell, provided opportunities for hiring servants and transacting a range of business as well as buying Scottish cattle. Occasionally local affairs could go to more distant political sites such as the assizes at Carlisle, as was the case in 1805 when there was a dispute between the inhabitants of Watermillock and the rector of Greystoke over the payment of tithes on lambs. Watermillock seems to have had only one near-gentry family at this period, the Robinsons of Watermillock House. John Robinson’s father was designated as ‘Esq’ on Donald’s map of 1774.80 When John died in 1807, Watermillock House – although only resembling a wealthy yeoman’s home – was advertised in the Times as a property suitable for a gentleman.81 The Hasells of Dalemain in the neighbouring parish of Dacre were more definitely gentry with a large modern mansion but the owner, Edward Hasell, lord of the manor of Dacre, mixed socially 79

 Duxbury, ‘Decline of the Cumbrian Yeoman’, p. 209.  Thomas Donald, Historic Map of Cumberland 1774. Reprinted by the Cumberland and Westmorland Society (Kendal, 2002). 81   The Times, 31 October 1807. 80

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with Tom Rumney at fox and stag hunts. Most of the people mentioned in the diary are given their Christian and surnames. Labourers and servants were sometimes referred to by their surnames only, implying a lower social status. Rumney often referred to people of similar or higher status to himself as ‘Mr’, including the curate, Edward Hasell, fellow customary tenants, professional men and the principal tradesmen in Penrith. ‘Mr’ was a term which was becoming increasingly common at this time to describe people of gentry status.82 At a higher level the Duke of Norfolk, although lord of the manor of Watermillock, was rarely seen by the inhabitants. An absentee landlord, the dates of his arrival at Greystoke were nevertheless recorded by Rumney in his diary. This was a society which was very mobile physically yet whose action space was mostly within a ten-mile radius of home. Rumney records many visits to Greystoke, five miles away and Penrith (nine miles). Much of the movement was on foot. This was a time when a saddle horse cost more than a male servant’s annual income, and when such animals were taxed, so even yeomen were used to walking. Although Rumney had worked for many years in London as a clerk in a West Indies merchant’s office, it is clear from his letters that his action space during his years in London was also limited and mostly traversed on foot.83 Although he made two visits to London in 1803 and 1804, his journeys outside the local area during the period covered by the diary were few including one visit to family and friends in West Cumbria and another to relatives at Thursby near Carlisle, the latter so that he could attend the assizes when the lamb tithes case was being heard. The commons of Watermillock were not enclosed until right at the end of Rumney’s life in 1835. However, enclosure impinged on the commoners of the township indirectly during the period covered by the diary when the common of the neighbouring manor of Dacre was enclosed in 1806. Under the terms of the General Enclosure Act of 1801, the commissioners for Dacre had the power to straighten the boundary between their common and that of Watermillock in order to reduce the cost of fencing it.84 This involved identifying the line of the existing boundary to the satisfaction of both sets of commoners, then re-aligning it by means of exchanges of land. This proved difficult. A group of Watermillock commoners met the Dacre commissioners at the site to discuss the alteration of the boundary. The Watermillock customary tenants, however, were unable to agree among themselves where the existing boundary lay. A search of old manorial documents revealed a written account of an earlier perambulation and on the basis of this a new boundary line was eventually agreed. At this point the Duke of Norfolk, on one of his visits to his northern estates, became involved. He and Rumney spent part of an afternoon walking the line of the new boundary to ensure that the rights of the Duke and his tenants were not being infringed. Rumney was obviously 82   John Beckett, ‘The Peasant in England: A Case of Terminological Confusion?’, Agricultural History Review, 32 (1984): 122. 83   A.W. Rumney (ed.), From the South Sea House (London, 1914). 84   Whyte, Transforming Fell and Valley, pp. 47–8.

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gratified at being able to monopolize the Duke’s company in this way. There is a sense that the Duke, despite having so much power, was an outsider and that it was the Watermillock customary tenants who were really in control. However, for reasons which are not made clear in the diary some of Rumney’s neighbours seem to have objected to the extent or nature of his involvement in the determination of the new boundary. Perhaps he seemed over-friendly with the Duke. Bowing to pressure of opinion, he dissociated himself from further involvement in the affair. In this community, with a number of families of roughly equal status, public opinion clearly acted as a powerful check to prevent one of their number from getting above themselves. The enclosure process within Dacre manor aroused strong local opposition. An attempt by Edward Hasell of Dalemain to enclose the common in 1795 had been defeated because of fears over the cost of enclosure to the tenants and concerns about the extent to which the land could be improved. The second attempt in 1806 succeeded, partly because in a period of rapid inflation the prospects of converting the common to arable looked better, but even then there was a vocal minority of owners in opposition.85 This may have put the customary tenants of Watermillock off the idea of enclosing their own commons for a generation. The act for the enclosure of the Watermillock commons was passed in 1829 and the award drawn up in 1835.86 While some of the common, like Rumney’s allotment on the summit of Little Mell Fell, was scarcely capable of improvement, much of the ground on the low common, bordering with Dacre and to the south of the church, was of better quality and capable of conversion to improved pasture or arable. By this time Rumney seems to have been in favour of enclosure. He received allotments amounting to 180 acres and bought a further 58 acres from portions of the commons sold by the commissioners to offset the public costs.87 In December 1835 Rumney held a party on the summit of Little Mell Fell to celebrate the staking out of the allotments. In what was, symbolically, one of the last uses of the common as a political space, activities such as racing and wrestling were organized and a considerable quantity of alcohol was drunk. Within a few days Rumney was dead and his passing marked the end of the last generation of Cumbrian customary tenants whose lifestyles had an echo of the peasant traditions of earlier times. The award of 1835 did not alter the distribution of landholding in Watermillock significantly, but the general enlargement of holdings may have made many small farms more viable. In Cumbria, while parliamentary enclosure was associated with the sale of some allotments by customary tenants, the process appears to have had less drastic effects on the structure of rural society than in lowland England and, if anything, to have reinforced the structure of yeoman owner-occupiers. In communities which had a significant proportion of small leaseholders and landless labourers it is not 85

  Searle, ‘Customary Tenants’, pp. 260–63.  Tate and Turner, English Enclosure Awards, p. 88. 87   ‘Watermillock Enclosure Award’: Carlisle, Cumbria Record Office, Q/RE/1/17. 86

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clear how much their lives were changed by enclosure. In some manors they might have enjoyed de facto access to the commons but there are indications that such privileges were being increasingly curtailed during the eighteenth century and may not have existed on many commons by the time that enclosure occurred.88 There is also evidence that enclosure caused increased demand for labour, both short-term in the creation of the new landscape and longer-term in farming it.89 Conclusion This chapter has attempted to look at a familiar topic, parliamentary enclosure, from a different perspective and in a region where this topic has received little attention. It has demonstrated that the impact of parliamentary enclosure on Cumbrian commons was to remove significant outdoor political sites and reduce contacts between different social groups within particular manors and townships as political sites became more confined to bounded indoor settings. The removal of commons by enclosure reduced access to outdoor political space for poorer people such as labourers. Enclosure reduced and formalized recreational spaces, which became confined to vestigial areas such as village greens or were lost entirely. This was recognized in the 1845 General Enclosure Act which provided for the setting aside of up to four acres of land for the ordinary people of the community to use for recreation. Compliance with this was often tokenistic, as is shown by the example of the Strickland Roger enclosure north of Kendal, where the recreation allotment is an isolated, high-lying plot of hillocks and bog which can have been of little use to local people for any recreational purpose.90 Before enclosure the commons had been spaces of contact and interchange, of cooperation and sometimes conflict. Parliamentary enclosure generated new types of cooperation and conflict: over claims to common rights and over allotment boundaries, roads, ring fencing and land improvement that greatly reduced access to land for formal and informal activities. It removed some important political sites such as races and fairs where people from a wide range of backgrounds had formerly been able to mix. But it is important to remember too that many communities did not enclose their commons, either by deliberate choice or default, and that where they survived so often did communal institutions like manorial courts and commoners’ associations.91 It is hoped that future work integrating formal sources like enclosure awards with informal ones such as correspondence   Winchester, Harvest of the Hills, pp. 32–3.   Whyte, Transforming Fell and Valley, p. 91. 90  Ibid., p. 50. 91  Eleanor Straughton, ‘Beyond Enclosure: Upland Common Land in England and Wales since 1800’, in Ian Whyte and Angus Winchester (eds), Society, Landscape and Environment in Upland Britain, Society for Landscape Studies: Supplementary Series 2 (Birmingham, 2004), pp. 89–98. 88

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and diaries will shed more light on the changing character of political spaces and of the environmental and geographical perceptions linked to them, during this period of rapid and profound social and economic change.

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Part II Spatial Politics

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Chapter 6

Political and Geographical Space: The Geopolitics of Medieval England Christine Carpenter

Many recent studies approach space as an arena, a site for politics at all levels, and often something that was contested; even if the space itself was real – for example, the inside of a church – its role in politics is seen as symbolic. Beginning with the formative work of Norbert Elias on the court of Louis XIV, the arena that has particularly interested historians of the politics of governance in the early modern period has been the royal court. Elias’s work has had a profound effect in two ways, both of them relating to the handling of space. First, there is the interest in ceremonial and the space within which it occurs. This kind of work, some of it inspired by cultural anthropologists’ study of ritual and ritual space, notably that of Clifford Geertz, can be subsumed into the ‘symbolic/contested space school’ of early modern historiography. Secondly, there is the idea of the court and its cultural artefacts as a means for the display of royal power. This has encouraged historians of the court to disregard or even deny the practical application of this power: as one such historian has put it, much of the authority that was claimed was ‘an illusion, a confidence trick, done by iconography and propaganda’. Even studies that explore the structure and functions of courts in closer and more subtle fashion mostly ignore the nuts and bolts of the enforcement of the royal authority which these courts were designed to glorify, confining their discussion of links between court and country to the role of courts as ‘points of contact’ and centres of patronage. Thus, real space, the distance across which government has to travel if it is to be government in any real sense, is ignored. This article is about the physical space of governance. Appropriately enough for a paper located primarily in late medieval England, the starting point is the famous encounter in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part I between Owen Glendower and Harry Hotspur: Glendower intones portentously ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep’, to which Hotspur, who is growing increasingly tired of this windy self-styled magician, responds, ‘Why,   Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford, 1983); Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton, 1980), chap. 4; Richard Bonney, The European Dynastic States 1494–1660 (Oxford, 1991), p. 486 (quote); Ronald G. Asch and Adolf M. Birke (eds), Princes, Patronage and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Early Modern Age c.1450–1650 (Oxford, 1991); P. Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, 1992).

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so can I, or so can any man,/But will they come when you do call for them?’ In late medieval England (by which is commonly meant c.1300 to c.1500), we encounter a government that aimed to exercise an extraordinary degree of direct influence on its subjects’ lives, policing, taxing and making its law available right down to village level, and which had, since at least the early thirteenth century, been the single most important source of authority for the greatest to the least landowner. Yet this was a government with no standing army, no police force and self-evidently no technology for communication or transport between centre and locality. Much of this would of course apply to later periods but, from the sixteenth century, local military forces became directly organized to serve the crown, and power, which had been localized, became more centred on Westminster and the crown. If ever a country should have been ungovernable, in the sense of what the government aspired to do being outstripped by its inability to do it, it was England in this period, and for a long time it was thought that this was indeed the case. We now know that this is a mistaken assumption and this article will show in outline how government in this period was put into effect – how geographical space was spanned so that governance could be achieved. We need to begin with some basics about rule in medieval England. We do not have to be particularly Weberian to recognize that any government, whether we wish to call it a state or not, that wants to go beyond issuing commands and would like to have its commands obeyed, will, in the last analysis, need a monopoly of force. This power needs to be non-negotiable and available on the spot. With no standing army, and none of the modern technology that would make it possible for governments to know that force was needed in a particular place, and then rush it to the site of resistance or rebellion, kings were, to a greater or lesser extent, reliant on the force that landowners could raise from among their peasant tenants. Since it was the nobility who individually wielded the greatest landowning power in any one area, they were the key to the king’s capacity to rule rather than merely reign but we must not forget that the lesser landowners collectively owned far more land than the nobles, and so a second key issue was how the equation of power between king, nobles and lesser landowners operated. There was also one further factor: the number of fighting men the king could raise from his household, to use as a mobile enforcement mechanism. The household was the core of the   Henry IV Part I, III, i.   See notes 9–15 below.    For an introduction to this, see Steven J. Gunn, Early Tudor Government, 1485– 1558 (Basingstoke, 1995) and Penry Williams, The Tudor Regime (Oxford, 1979).   Christine Carpenter, The Wars of the Roses: Politics and the Constitution in England, c. 1437–1509 (Cambridge, 1997), chap. 1. K.B. McFarlane was the seminal figure in revising this interpretation. See for example his ‘The Wars of the Roses’, in McFarlane, England in the Fifteenth Century (London, 1981 [originally published in 1964]), pp. 231–61.   Christine Carpenter, Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401–1499 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 36, 283–4, 288–9.  

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country’s forces when the king took personal command of his army for foreign war throughout the medieval period but, as we shall see, its function within England changed over time. Put fairly schematically, there were three successive models in the rule of England between the Conquest and about 1500 (although what one might call the ‘Tudor’ model was beginning to emerge towards 1500). The first, from roughly the Conquest to the later twelfth century, represented baronial power at its greatest. At this time, the barons’ feudal lordship over their knightly tenants had real meaning, above all in the jurisdiction of their feudal, or honorial, courts, which ensured that, for the security of the landed property which gave them their power, wealth and status, the knights were dependent on their lords. The power of constraint in the shires was therefore very much under the barons’ control. Since this was not a period when kings sought to do a great deal, this was not a major concern. However, kings were already surprisingly successful in what they did desire to do, which was essentially to place a great deal of political and financial pressure on the barons to ensure that they could secure enough baronial money to pay for the defence of the French lands of these kings of French origin. That also meant ensuring that the local officers, primarily the sheriff, did the kings’ and not the barons’ bidding. All this was achieved by straightforward military trials of strength, backed up by making examples of individual barons, and using the growing reach of the law to wield authority over the barons and, the feudal courts’ power notwithstanding, even over some of their knightly tenants. The extent of the kings’ authority, despite their limited reach into the shires, can be seen from the profound instability of Stephen’s reign (1135–54) when most of this localized authority became non-functional. This early partial swing of local force towards the king was the result, first, of the lack of unity among the barons (for a variety of personal and institutional reasons) when confronted by an aggressive king, and, secondly, of the knights’ enthusiasm for royal intervention to protect them against their lords, once it began to be offered. The second phase goes roughly from the late twelfth century to the early fourteenth although, from about the mid-thirteenth, we begin to move into the next one. First, from the reign of Henry II, the universal availability of the king’s law, the common law as it is called, to all landowners led to the rapid decay of the  Michael Prestwich, Armies and Warfare in the Middle Ages: The English Experience (New Haven, 1996), pp. 39–41; Andrew Ayton, Knights and Warhorses: Military Service and the English Aristocracy Under Edward III (Woodbridge, 1999), p. 11.    This account is inevitably lacking in nuance and the references are introductory but contain guides to further reading: some of the interpretative gloss is my own. For change in the late fifteenth century, see Carpenter, Wars of the Roses, chap. 9–12.    Judith A. Green, The Aristocracy of Norman England (Cambridge, 1997), and her The Government of England Under Henry I (Cambridge, 1986); John Hudson, The Formation of the English Common Law (Harlow, 1996); Paul Dalton, Conquest, Anarchy and Lordship: Yorkshire 1066–1154 (Cambridge, 1994). 

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feudal courts. This brought about an institutional tie to the crown which applied to all landowners, since the king thenceforth held the jurisdictional authority over their estates. For this and other reasons, kings were now doing far more in the localities and proceeded to extend their power there further still. The number of local government officers grew, as did the crown’s commissions to supervise both the localities and their officers. Constrained by the fact that they needed the king to protect their lands and to help them control and regulate their knightly tenants, the barons mostly felt unable to resist the king either locally or nationally and so the power of their peasant tenantry was de facto put at the king’s disposal. For their part, the knights, on balance, got more out of the king than they lost in financial demands – these were still made most directly on the barons – or in unwanted local interference, and so they too were ready to place their men at the king’s disposal. That meant that there was neither a noble leadership nor a knightly following to combine in using their military muscle against the king and against the enforcement of his rule. Meanwhile, the king’s household was becoming a fearsome agency of royal power, especially under John, who effectively put England under military rule. Indeed he spent much of the latter part of his reign travelling around England, in order to bring his own force directly to bear on his subjects. Via his household forces, he could probably raise several hundred well-armed and trained fighting men, who in any conflict over local predominance would be pitched primarily against primitively armed peasants. Also, for much of his reign, his sheriffs were members of this household, each of them capable of raising his own knightly retinue to deal with any resistance in the counties that they administered.10 Then things began to change. Magna Carta in 1215 put an end to pillaging the barons and forced kings to take smaller individual sums from a larger number of people and so the knights became increasingly the objects of royal predatoriness. Magna Carta itself had shown that, if the king went too far, the combined force of his landowning subjects could outweigh his household forces and not only make him retreat from such intensive rule of the shires but even oblige him to promise to rule in a very different kind of way. During the thirteenth century, the twin needs of securing money for war in both France and the rest of Britain and extending law and policing within the realm, the latter desired by both the king and his subjects, led to an enormous increase in the extent and depth of government. That meant that the king had to listen when the lesser landowners, whom we should now begin to call gentry rather than knights, responded to their experience of royal government by making their own demands. These ultimately were to include that the local officers should be drawn from the local gentry and that the amount of direct royal supervision of both the officers and their fellow gentry be reduced. But it also meant that the king himself had to delegate more, by enlarging the number of local   Hudson, Formation of the Common Law; W.L. Warren, Henry II (London, 1973); James C. Holt, Magna Carta (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1992); Sidney Painter, The Reign of King John (Baltimore, 1949); Stephen D. Church, The Household Knights of King John (Cambridge, 1999). 10

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officers, and accept that they had to be local men, embedded in local society. The quintessential type of officer in this respect was eventually to be the JP, a local man, empowered to police all the king’s subjects and to control the wage and other demands of the lowliest subjects in the period after the Black Death. Just as there could be no attempt any more to rule the shires through offices and commissions staffed by men who were very much the king’s, so the force that subvented local rule could no longer consist of a background of quiescent landowners, cowed into submission when necessary by the sheriff’s, or an itinerant king’s, forces. It must also be observed that John’s itineration in the latter part of his reign was already wholly unsuited to the central bureaucracy which existed by the time he came to the throne. This bureaucracy was large and growing larger, and itineration would have been entirely impossible as the government grew still more in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. One way and another, by c.1300 local force alone could stand behind what the king sought to accomplish.11 And so we reach the late medieval model, with which we are here primarily concerned. As has been indicated, it was one of local rule by local men, with very little direct supervision by commissions or by other agencies sent out from the centre. Meanwhile, the key figures in harnessing local landowners in support of royal rule were the nobility.12 How early in the fourteenth century this became the norm is rather uncertain at the moment. One reason for this uncertainty is that serious doubts are now being expressed concerning long-standing ideas about the process of delegation of local office to local men, now acting largely without supervision from officers or commissions answering directly to the king. Until recently it was believed that this was completed by 1361, when it was understood that the JPs attained their position as the key local officers in law and peace-keeping. However, there is now evidence from several different directions suggesting that the late medieval dispensation was not complete until some time between the 1370s and 1390s. For example, Edward III made periodic use of very fierce commissions of enquiry until the early 1360s and, from within his household, his serjeants-at-arms were used, as it has been put, as ‘enforcers’ in matters in which he felt strongly engaged – mostly the financing, supplying and running of the war.13 Even so, it was already impossible for Edward to deal  Michael Prestwich, Plantaganet England 1225–1360 (Oxford, 2005); D.A. Carpenter, The Reign of Henry III (London, 1996); W.L. Warren, The Governance of Norman and Angevin England 1086–1272 (London, 1987); A.L. Brown, The Governance of Late Medieval England 1272–1461 (London, 1989); G.L. Harriss, King, Parliament, and Public Finance in Medieval England to 1369 (Oxford, 1975). 12   For references see n. 16 below. 13  Richard Partington, ‘Edward III’s Enforcers: The King’s Sergeants-at-Arms in the Localities’, in James S. Bothwell (ed.), The Age of Edward III (Woodbridge, 2001), pp. 89–106. Earlier works that imply the existence of the ‘late medieval dispensation’ from the early fourteenth century include the classic K.B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford, 1973), pp. 102–21 and Nigel Saul, Knights and Esquires: The 11

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with the full range of governance without extensive delegation to local people and reliance on local power.14 How did this system of governance work? It is important to emphasize that, however reliant it was on local men and local power, it was predicated on the existence of a set of institutions at the centre, some of them of considerable antiquity and all of them staffed by highly-trained and very expert bureaucrats, and on formal mechanisms for these to communicate with mostly equally venerable institutions of local government.15 The king and his government communicated their commands to the localities through the writ, authenticated by the royal seal. The local officer to whom most of these went was the sheriff, and he was then responsible for their implementation and their return, usually endorsed with a brief account of what he had done. By this period, the other most important local officer was indeed the JP and each county had a group of these. If the king’s government was to be enforced, it was essential that everyone understood that the combined force of the peasant tenantry from the lands in the county could, at need, be placed behind the local officers. How this state of affairs was achieved is summed up in the phrase ‘bastard feudalism’. This used to be a pejorative term for the allegedly inferior and violence-ridden social and governmental system which had succeeded ‘feudalism’ but is now (like ‘feudalism’) used merely as historical shorthand – in this case, for the way landowning society was organized and government enforced in the localities in this period. In most counties, local cohesion among greater and lesser landowners was secured by the leading noble or nobles in the area building up followings, known as affinities, from among the local gentry. In this way they could ensure that the military potential of the county was harnessed to the uses of the king’s government. The local officers themselves would normally be part of a lord’s local affinity and therefore bound in to the local powers. The nobility, who might hold local office – notably as JPs in the counties where they were preeminent landowners – but rarely exercised it, were nevertheless effectively the king’s representatives in the shires, an aspect of their generally accepted role as the chief props to the throne. As a rule, there was no need for the implicit manpower that the nobles commanded, directly through their own lands or indirectly through their links with the gentry, to be made explicit, since the ruling classes, the landowners who controlled the force, were in agreement on what the government did. The nobility and the gentry representatives would have negotiated taxes with the king Gloucestershire Gentry in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1981), chap. 3–5. For a discussion of some of these points, see Christine Carpenter, ‘War, Government and Governance in England in the Later Middle Ages’, in Linda Clark (ed.), Conflicts, Consequences and the Crown in the Late Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 1–22. 14   W. Mark Ormrod, The Reign of Edward III: Crown and Political Society in England 1327–1377 (New Haven and London, 1990), pp. 155–7. 15   Brown, Governance; Gerald Harriss, Shaping the Nation: England 1360–1461 (Oxford, 2005), chap. 3.

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in parliament, and therefore be willing to pay them and to encourage their tenants to do so. Policing the lower classes, especially when they were trying to exercise their economic muscles after the Black Death of 1348–49, to secure higher pay, lower rents and, in some cases, freedom from the demands of seigneurialism, was something on which all landowners were agreed. Disagreement arose over the implementation of the king’s law among the landowners themselves. By this time, most civil and criminal pleas concerning nobles and gentry were heard in the king’s courts at Westminster. However, the administration of the cases had to be done in the county from which they came. Thus, any criminal prosecution – which might relate to damage to property or persons during a dispute over land – normally relied on the JPs finding a case to answer, before the case was removed by writ to the King’s Bench at Westminster. A private plea would be initiated in King’s Bench or the Common Pleas, the other main Westminster court. In both cases, it was impossible to proceed without the presence of the defendant and it was the sheriff who would be sent the writs to arrest the defendant or otherwise force him to appear. The sheriff would also empanel a local jury and execute judgments if any were reached. From this we can see very easily how the administration of the law in the shires could become completely enmeshed in local power politics, especially when we bear in mind the leadership of the local nobles, whose effective power among the gentry depended greatly on being able to look after their clients’ landed interests, and that the local officers were almost invariably close associates of the nobles. This is what gave the so-called evils of ‘bastard feudalism’ such a bad name in the older historiography. It is now understood that this system for making public rule effective by relying on both private power (land), and on the private relationships that enabled power to be mobilized on the king’s behalf, did in fact work, according to its own rules and expectations: rules and expectations which have only recently begun to be grasped. Most of the time, there was enough give and take among what were usually fairly cohesive societies to enable what seem, on the face of it, rather dubious structures for enforcing law and policing to work, without more than the kind of bumpiness that would be expected in any non-totalitarian method of enforcement.16 More pertinent to the analysis of local enforcement in this period is to illustrate what could happen when a county was so divided that the implicit local force was made explicit, since such instances show very clearly the relationship between local government and local force. Both illustrations come from Henry VI’s reign and they demonstrate another facet of this system, which was that it was usually only under the worst rulers that we find failures of such a dramatic nature in the system. The first example is one that 16   There has been a large amount of work on this subject since the 1960s, which has entirely reshaped the field. For a summary, see G.L. Harriss, ‘The Dimensions of Politics’, in R.H. Britnell and A.J. Pollard (eds), The McFarlane Legacy: Studies in Late Medieval Politics and Society (Stroud, 1995), pp. 1–20, and his Shaping the Nation, chap. 6; Christine Carpenter, ‘Gentry and Community’, Journal of British Studies, 33 (1994): 356–65 and my Wars of the Roses, chap. 2 and 3.

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is chronologically later and shows failure on a relatively small, albeit important, scale.17 In 1454, a time when leadership from king and nobility was crumbling, two important Derbyshire gentry families, the Blounts and the Longfords, were locked in a dispute of unknown origin. Both parties were sent writs summoning them to appear before the king’s council. When the sheriff’s messenger tried to hand over the one addressed to the Longfords at one of the family’s residences, he was threatened with death and retreated. On his second attempt, when he simply left the writ at the door, he was overtaken on the way home by John Longford and a score of servants, who beat him up, tried to force him to eat the writ, seal and all, and finally made him tear it up, after which they spat on it. Then he was imprisoned and, finally, he was taken back to the Longfords’ principal manor. Significantly, he arrived there with an escort of a hundred armed men, part of a large concentration of other local gentry and their tenants and servants, which, having gathered at the Longford residence, rode off to trash the Blounts’ main Derbyshire residence. So, here we have a very graphic exemplar of the land/power equation that made local enforcement either possible or impossible. First, there is the fact that it could be assumed that a lone sheriff’s messenger could deliver a writ, expecting it to be obeyed, because it was assumed that local force could readily be called up if there was resistance. Secondly, we can see, very dramatically, what happened when a county was so divided that this was no longer the case. Thirdly, we can also see how, under these circumstances, one side in a local conflict could put together a little army of neighbours, friends and political associates – the local society that normally under-wrote the king’s government – and their peasant tenants and servants, to attack their opponents from within the same local society. For the second example, we go back to 1437, an uneasy time when Henry VI should have been taking the reins of government but was beginning to show that he was unlikely ever to do so.18 The leading noble power in Bedfordshire at this time was Reginald, Lord Grey of Ruthin, but there was a pushy new arrival, John Cornwaill, recently ennobled as Lord Fanhope, whose links with the group coalescing around the newly adult king were allowing him to challenge Grey’s dominance of the county. As was implicit in the brief account of late medieval local governance given earlier, it was important that the political complexion of the local officers reflect power structures in the county. In this case they did not, and it was Grey who continued to have the controlling interest among the JPs. But Fanhope, with his proximity to the throne, was able to elicit a special commission of enquiry. The commissioners, accompanied by armed men, came the few miles down the road from Fanhope’s residence at Ampthill to Grey’s principal   For what follows, see R.L. Storey, The End of the House of Lancaster (London, 1966), chap. 11; Helen Castor, The King, the Crown, and the Duchy of Lancaster: Public Authority and Private Power 1399–1461 (Oxford, 2000), chap. 8. 18   For what follows, see Philippa C. Maddern, Violence and Social Order: East Anglia 1422–1442 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 206–25; for the national political context, see Carpenter, Wars of the Roses, pp. 90–94. 17

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Bedfordshire manor of Silsoe, where, in what was clearly intended as an act of aggression, they intended to sit. Predictably, they were met at Selsoe by Grey and his retinue of a hundred men or more. Grey’s reported comments showed that he understood very well that this commission into ‘felonies, trespasses, insurrections’ in Bedfordshire was aimed at his tenants, an almost explicit exemplification of the relationship between tenantry and local political clout. After intervention by a neutral party, both sides dispersed, but two years later there was a more dramatic encounter. This took place in Bedford Town Hall, where this time it was the Greydominated commission of the peace that was sitting and Fanhope, allegedly with sixty men, who set about to intimidate both the JPs and their officials and the members of the public who were attending the sessions. Grey had come similarly arrayed – allegedly with eighty men – presumably because he was expecting trouble. It seems that Fanhope attempted to use his own commission to take over the proceedings. Predictably, with so many people crammed into an enclosed space, feelings riding high and panic among the unarmed public, things got out of hand, and a minor riot ensued, accompanied by the collapse of furniture and a staircase, leading to the deaths of perhaps eighteen people. Here, therefore, we have a very clear illustration of the direct relationship between local military power and the authority to enforce the king’s law locally; of what happened when the authority given by the crown to local officers did not match the actual local power structures; and of the consequences of fierce local division, in this case owed to this mismatch of public and private authority in Bedfordshire. Having established the general principles of how this rule across geographical space worked, we may now say a little about the many variables in the practice. First, there is the question of distance. It may seem very obvious but distance from Westminster was an immensely important factor. This can be seen very clearly in the time taken to send out writs and the way in which their transport was organized. Royal messengers would travel outwards from Westminster, often carrying writs for several counties in a particular region, and the delivery time would naturally extend as they rode further on their journeys, especially if they had to take in other counties along the way.19 There were some parts of the country that would simply expect to be less closely supervised because of the time it took to communicate in either direction and to implement any emergency measures that became necessary, such as the summons to the council which featured in the Blount/Longford dispute. Conversely, parts of the country that were near to Westminster would not only be easier to police but were also likely to be places where laymen who were close to the king purchased land. Kent, for example, was home to numbers of Henry VI’s political household, some of them natives who had acquired more land as they did well out of this rather over-generous king, some of them new arrivals. 19

  James F. Willard, ‘The Date and Delivery of Letters Patent and Writs in the Fourteenth Century’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 10 (1933): 1–11; Mark Brayshay, ‘Post-Haste by Post Horse? Communications in Europe, 1400–1600’, History Today, 42 (1992): 35–41.

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Although the courtiers’ presence in Kent actually led to disorder, when the lower orders rebelled against these men in 1450, it was an easier exercise to quell the rebellion by punitive commissions than it would have been in areas outside the home counties.20 But merely to cite distance is to simplify the geography of governance because there was also the matter of tenurial geography. This is a complex issue, relating primarily to the disposition of noble lands, which were the main determinant of how a county was ruled, and even of whether it could be ruled at all.21 Distance was a significant issue in this as well, in that, generally speaking, it was in the more distant parts of the realm that nobles were likely to hold the more geographically concentrated estates. The most extreme examples of this are the Welsh Marcher lordships, uniquely undiluted blocks of noble lordship, where, moreover, the king’s writ did not run.22 The Duke of Buckingham, one of the great Marcher lords, who was also a considerable landowner elsewhere in England, reputedly had 4,840 tenants on his estates in the early sixteenth century.23 It is no accident that kings who fell out with Marcher lords were among the most likely to face large-scale military confrontation.24 Although they were never as concentrated either territorially or jurisdictionally, the lands of the great northern lords gave their owners fairly undiluted lordship by English standards and indeed, at about the same period when the Duke of Buckingham had such a large tenantry, the bailiff of the head of the great northern Percy family, the Earl of Northumberland, believed that his master could raise no fewer than 11,241 tenants against the Scots.25 Thus, on both the Welsh and the northern marches, it was not just distance that encouraged greater self-policing but also the presence of some very powerful lords, most famously, in the later middle ages, the Nevilles and the Percies. This should not be seen as a failure of government because, besides the fact that it was an obvious response to a matter of simple geography, these lords played a large part in the organization of local defence, in the north throughout this period

 Isobel M.W. Harvey, Jack Cade’s Rebellion of 1450 (Oxford, 1991).   See below. 22  R. Rees Davies, Lordship and Society in the March of Wakes 1282–1400 (Oxford, 1978). 23  Carpenter, Wars of the Roses, p. 36. 24   For example, Edward II and Roger Mortimer, Earl of March, Richard II and the Earl of Arundel, Henry VI and Richard Duke of York. See Davies, Lordship and Society, pp. 53–8; P.A. Johnson, Duke Richard of York 1411–1460 (Oxford, 1988), p. 14 and chap. 5–9; Anthony Tuck, Richard II and the English Nobility (London, 1973), chap. 3–6. 25  Carpenter, Wars of the Roses, pp. 54–6. The pattern of noble landowning was effectively established after the Conquest. See Robin Fleming, Kings and Lords in Conquest England (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 178–80. For late medieval examples, encompassing both great nobles and a minor one, see Harriss, Shaping the Nation, p. 98 and Chris GivenWilson, The English Nobility in the Late Middle Ages (London, 1987), pp. 67–8. 20 21

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and in Wales in dealing with Glendower’s revolt.26 As against this, Steven Ellis has suggested that this delegation to the local powers in the highly militarized border areas, especially in the north, which was undoubtedly a war zone for most of the later middle ages, is indicative of a two-tier system of governance: that it was really only a southern core, which he equates with the lowland areas of England, that should be regarded as under effective rule from Westminster, while the rest was to a greater or lesser extent a frontier zone. Although an interesting idea, it rather disregards some key factors. First, local studies have shown that the interaction of public rule and private power described above was effective well outside Ellis’s core. Secondly, by the fifteenth century all the really powerful agglomerations on the peripheries of England were owned either by the crown (Chester, Cornwall and Lancashire) or by a cleric effectively appointed by the crown (Durham). Thirdly, the greater border nobility, in both Wales and the north, all owned significant lands, quite often the lands from which they derived the largest part of their wealth, in the south, while the border lands that meant so much to these lords militarily and politically could only be defended by a king who controlled the whole of the kingdom. Consequently the marcher nobles had as much of a vested interest in effective government throughout the realm as anyone else – perhaps more.27 In fact, tenurial geography was a crucial factor everywhere in determining the nature of rule. Especially important were whether a county could be readily dominated by a single noble, whether there needed to be accommodation and powersharing among a group of nobles or whether the local nobility were either too weak tenurially, or too often absentees, to take the lead with any ease. A complicating factor was the crown, in areas where it was either the dominant landowner or just one of several local nobles. This applied not just to the peripheral agglomerations that have been mentioned but, from 1399, to all those regions where the Duchy of Lancaster was a major landowner. In all the counties where this was the case, the king’s personal capacity, and his ability to find time, or not, to intervene directly, could affect the balance of local political power decisively. What was at stake everywhere was the effect of local tenurial structures on the relative weight of nobility and gentry in each county. Looked at very schematically, counties could be loosely divided into those where a noble who knew how to turn landed hegemony into political authority would have a relatively easy task, as for example in Warwickshire or the part of Devon not controlled by the Duchy of Cornwall; those where power-sharing between two or possibly more nobles was required, for 26   Harriss, Shaping the Nation, pp. 529–32; R.L. Storey, ‘The North of England’, in S.B. Chrimes, C.D. Ross and R.A. Griffiths (eds), Fifteenth-Century England 1399–1509 (Manchester, 1972), pp. 129–44; R.R. Davies, The Revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr (Oxford, 1995). 27   Steven G. Ellis, Tudor Frontiers and Noble Power: the Making of the British State (Oxford, 1995), esp. ‘Conclusion’. The issue is discussed in Carpenter, Wars of the Roses, pp. 56–7.

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example in Suffolk; those with a powerful absentee noble, usually the king, as in Lancashire, Chester or Nottinghamshire; those with a number of locally relatively weak nobles, who might include the king, which required complex alliances to make local governance work, for example, in Norfolk. Without suggesting for a moment that the noble/gentry relationship was a one-way hierarchy, it is true to say that noble leadership was the expected local paradigm, but how well it worked, and how much on the gentry’s terms, would, in the first instance, be determined by this tenurial geography. But, here again, we must return to ‘actual’ geography. The two are closely linked: as we have seen, the greater concentrations tended to be on the peripheries but it should be observed that they were also more likely to be found in the uplands, partly of course because the English uplands mostly lie on or towards the peripheries. However, even within areas well away from the periphery, and regardless of territorial geography, any areas of the country that were relatively inaccessible were more likely to have their own kind of political and social structure.28 Two contrasting examples may be offered here. First, the heart of the Warwickshire Arden, the wooded area that was cleared and colonized relatively late, was, for a variety of geographical, tenurial and economic reasons, home to a closely knit group of minor gentry and substantial yeomen who, for much of the fifteenth century, were not generally speaking drawn into politics and political connections in the rest of the county. Secondly, the High Peak in Derbyshire was isolated and relatively hard to govern because, by English standards, it was relatively mountainous. However, the interplay of geography, tenure and the circumstances of lordship is highlighted by the fact that, because the High Peak was also dominated tenurially by the Duchy of Lancaster and therefore by the king, when Henry VI, that most ineffectual of kings, largely left it to its own devices, it was the greatest gentry family in the region, the Vernons, that became local power-brokers for much of the reign.29 Thus far, we have been looking at the means by which late medieval rulers did – or did not – get their wishes obeyed at a distance. We have seen that much of the local variation in the context for enforcement was due to the local tenurial structure, for this in many ways determined the nature of local landowning society and it was local landowners who provided the private power and private cohesion 28  Carpenter, ‘Gentry and Community’, pp. 361–4, and my Wars of the Roses, pp. 54–9 and Locality and Polity, chap. 9–16; M. Cherry, ‘The Courtenay Earls of Devon: The Formation and Disintegration of a Late Medieval Aristocratic Affinity’, Southern History, 1 (1979): 71–97; Castor, King, Crown, and Duchy of Lancaster, Part 2; Michael J. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism: Cheshire and Lancashire Society in the Age of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Cambridge, 1983); Simon Walker, The Lancastrian Affinity 1361–1399 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 141–81; Simon J. Payling, Political Society in Lancastrian England: The Greater Gentry of Nottinghamshire (Oxford, 1991). 29  Carpenter, Locality and Polity, pp. 21–4, 296–7 and chap. 10–16; Susan M. Wright, The Derbyshire Gentry in the Fifteenth Century, Derbyshire Record Society 8 (Chesterfield, 1983), chap. 2, 5–9.

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that enabled the king’s government to be done, as well as the local officers who made it happen. We shall conclude by taking the geopolitics of rule right down to the local level: the formation and perpetuation of local networks. These groupings of nobles and gentry, having at their heart the preservation of gentry lands and of nobles’ local power, and the enforcement of the government that contributed to both these aims, had to be built on mutual trust and an agreed understanding of how local governance should be carried out. What both nobles and king sought was the help and cooperation of the gentry in making governance work in the shires. What the gentry sought was a reliable network of friends, to participate in property sales and settlements, witness that these had occurred if they were challenged, and help to resolve conflict at an early stage or to pursue actions at law if that became unavoidable. If loyalty to a particular noble was the main common factor among a group of gentry, the leadership of the lord would be the main factor in securing loyalty and harmony among them; if kinship and/or neighbourhood was more important, then it would be these horizontal ties. Often, vertical and horizontal ties were closely intertwined. For all these purposes to be achieved, people needed to meet, and it would be an intuitive assumption that what occurred at such local gatherings had a major import for local politics and local governance.30 How can we discover whether this was indeed the case? The public and private sources for this period are mostly formal and stereotyped although official documents, especially legal records, sometimes contain informative gems. Fortunately, however, we are able to lift the veil more regularly on this world by means of the extraordinary collections of gentry letters from the fifteenth century, four in number, that have come down to us.31 I shall give a few examples from the many that could be offered to indicate what lies behind the lists of names on deeds, wills, marriage agreements, legal records and so on that are our main sources for identifying local networks. First, the links between the private gatherings that fostered trust and friendship and the outcome of such trust can be seen very clearly in the account of Robert Armburgh’s feoffment to use of his disputed property in Warwickshire.32 On the occasion when the feoffment was made, two of 30  Carpenter, Locality and Polity, Part 2, ‘Gentry and Community’, pp. 340–80; The Armburgh Papers: The Brokholes Inheritance in Warwickshire, Hertfordshire and Essex, c.1417–c.1453, ed. Christine Carpenter (Woodbridge, 1998), pp. 44–5. 31   The Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, eds Norman Davis, Richard Beadle and Colin Richmond (3 vols, Oxford, 1971–2005); Kingsford’s Stonor Letters and Papers 1290–1483, ed. Christine Carpenter (Cambridge, 1996); The Plumpton Letters and Papers, ed. Joan Kirby, Camden Society Fifth Series, 8 (1996); Armburgh Papers, ed. Carpenter. See also Christine Carpenter, ‘The Stonor Circle in the Fifteenth Century’, in Rowena E. Archer and Simon Walker (eds), Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England (London, 1995), pp. 175–200, for some remarks on the use of these sources for these purposes. 32   This was the medieval equivalent of a deed of trust: the feoffees to use held the land to the use of the actual owner: for a short introduction see Prestwich, Plantagenet England,

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Armburgh’s three feoffees from among the more prominent Warwickshire gentry were entertained to dinner at his house and Armburgh’s wife marked the event by giving each of them a home-made purse with a gold coin in it.33 Secondly, we can observe how crucial pieces of information affecting property disputes might be gleaned when people met. For example, in 1451, Margaret Paston’s uncle, Philip Berney, happened to be staying in the bailiff’s house at King’s Lynn when the bailiff and another visitor, a retainer of Lord Moleyns – a powerful courtier who was trying to wrest an estate away from the Pastons – exchanged some significant news about Moleyns’ movements and intentions. All this was overheard by Berney’s servant, who passed it on to his master who in turn passed it to Margaret.34 Information on government actions that might have an adverse effect on a family could also be acquired. In the same year, the Duke of Norfolk had a dinner in his house – it is unclear whether in East Anglia or London – with the intention of discussing how to obtain a commission from the king to knock down a wall that Agnes Paston had erected which allegedly stopped the king’s highway. Someone, presumably via one of Norfolk’s guests, got word of the dinner and its purpose and let Agnes know.35 As a final illustration, we can on occasion show very precisely how personal encounters among members of local networks eased the path of the king’s government. For example, in 1463, a writ to raise men for a campaign in Scotland was brought to Thomas Stonor’s house, while Stonor was away, by a son of his wife’s cousin. Stonor’s wife tried to use their kinship to extricate Stonor from this responsibility but the kinsman who brought the writ was able to use the relationship to force her to take the writ and pass it on to Thomas.36 The significance of this kind of personal contact shows how far the places and possibilities for encounters among local landowners helped mould local power structures. One of the examples above was taken from a lord’s residence: if a great lord’s local seat was the most likely place for leading gentry to come together, the chances are that the lord would be the focal point for local politics and governance. Records of noble households, where they exist, can tell us about this. For example, the very full household account for the countess of Warwick for 1420–21, when her husband was serving in France, reveals numbers of leading local gentry, several of them local officers of the crown, coming to attend her – and her husband when he returned towards the end of the period – at the earl’s residences, as they passed through his estates, notably in the West Midlands, the centre of his power. There are in fact deeds involving members of the Earl of Warwick’s affinity that give strong indications of having been sealed at a gathering of such men at one of pp. 423–6. 33   When Armburgh needed his local allies, he reminded the most prominent of them of this event: Armburgh Papers, ed. Carpenter, pp. 45, 139. 34   Paston Letters, eds Davis, Beadle and Richmond, vol. 1, p. 240. 35  Ibid., pp. 34–5, 36–7. 36   Stonor Letters, ed. Carpenter, vol. 1, pp. 62–3. The date and campaign are deductions but reasonable ones.

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the earl’s West Midland residences.37 If, on the other hand, the local lords rarely came to the region and, if they did, they were not automatically attended by the gentry, the latter might be less open to magnate influence. Even if there was a dominant local lord, his visits even to the centre of his estates would be irregular and relatively infrequent, for he would have estates in other parts of the country, especially if he was a great noble, and duties about the king and, like the Earl of Warwick in 1420–21, duties abroad as soldier or ambassador.38 Consequently, we need to consider the contexts in which the gentry might meet one another on a more regular basis. The Paston letters reveal the importance of Norwich as a place where, because it was a major town and market, a religious centre and the centre of local government, the gentry often encountered one another, for good and sometimes for ill. For example, when the Pastons were in acrimonious, and sometimes violent, dispute with the Duke of Suffolk in the mid-1460s, Margaret Paston, who was often resident in Norwich at this time, was able not just to pick up some useful knowledge about the duke’s anti-Paston legal initiatives in Norwich, but also to meet other members of the local gentry to sound them out on their dispositions (in this instance, she was hardly polite about those she mentioned).39 Conversely, from the Stonor Letters, and from the network revealed by the property transactions and other dealings of the Stonors’ circle of friends and associates, we can observe a gentry social and political world that was distributed across the Thames Valley counties of Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire, none of which had a town with the same kind of all-purpose central role of Norwich.40 In counties where the local courts still played a large part in landowners’ lives, there may have been a particularly strong sense of gentry solidarity and county identity. One very unusual example of this has been drawn by Michael Bennett from Cheshire, a county with a comital administration largely independent of the crown (albeit that, from the mid-thirteenth century, the earl was the king or his heir). Here, in April 1412, more than 60 knights and other gentry, from every part

 Carpenter, Locality and Polity, pp. 317–18, 337–8; C.D. Ross, ‘The Household Accounts of Elizabeth Berkeley, Countess of Warwick, 1420–1’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 70 (1951): 81–105. The document on which this is based gives a much more comprehensive idea of the attendance of the local gentry: ‘Calendar of the Household of Richard Beauchamp Earl of Warwick, 30 September 1420–9 March 1421’: Longleat, MS of the Marquess of Bath, Misc. IX. 38  McFarlane, Nobility, pp. 19–40; John Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (Cambridge, 1996), chap. 2. 39   Paston Letters, eds Davis, Beadle and Richmond, vol. 1, pp. 323–4. On this dispute, see Colin Richmond, The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century: Fastolf’s Will (Cambridge, 1996), and Helen Castor, Blood and Roses (London, 2004), chap. 7–12. 40  Carpenter, ‘Stonor Circle’, pp. 179–80. 37

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of Cheshire, met in Macclesfield church to deal with a property dispute between two major local families, the Grosvenors and the Leghs.41 But, for the casual day-to-day meetings that were so important in making these networks stable and effective, gentry were more likely to meet in very informal and localized contexts and all the more so if there was no obvious noble, urban or governmental meeting-point. As letters and other evidence tell us, there were other occasions, apart from reciprocal visits or encounters at the house of a third party, when meetings of this kind occurred. For example, in c.1474 an arbitration could be arranged by members of the Stonor circle, in a dispute between William Stonor and another member of the group, because all of them, it was hoped, would be present at the commemoration of the death of Thomas Stonor, William’s father. Here therefore we can observe a local network, connected primarily by kinship and neighbourhood, meeting together on a social occasion to nip rapidly in the bud a conflict that could have torn the grouping apart and brought disorder to the Thames Valley region. It is an excellent exemplification of the way in which much of local governance was presaged on the existence of local networks which in their turn depended on ease of communication among their members.42 One place where people could be reasonably certain of finding someone was at their parish church on a Sunday. It must be admitted that the evidence suggests that this was a location where people were sought out with hostile rather than cooperative actions in mind. For example, Agnes Paston was accosted in church on a Sunday in 1451 by one of those who had complained about the wall in which the Duke of Norfolk was alleged to be taking an interest, while in 1461, in the feud between two Warwickshire gentry families, the Verneys and the Dalbys, Mrs Dalby and her entourage were attacked by the Verneys as she was on her way to her local church and one of her servants was knifed in the churchyard.43 Nevertheless, even if it is these dramatic encounters that tend to leave evidence in the records, they indicate that the church was also a recognized place to meet, either casually or by design, for more friendly purposes. As all these examples show, houses and churches as meeting-places were by no means gender-specific. There were of course gatherings that were exclusively male, notably those concerned with the business of local government and hunting parties. Rural and urban religious guilds, which often had men and women from the local nobility and gentry among their members, were another place for social interaction among landowners. However, this was another arena for masculine interaction, for, on the evidence we have, the noble and gentry members who attended meetings or acted on behalf of the gild were

  Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism, pp. 22–3. For Cheshire’s unusual local institutions, see Tim Thornton, Cheshire and the Tudor State 1480–1560 (Woodbridge, 2000), Part 1. 42   Stonor Letters, ed. Carpenter, vol. 1, p. 148; Carpenter, ‘Stonor Circle’. 43   Paston Letters, eds Davis, Beadle and Richmond, vol. 1, pp. 36–7; Carpenter, Locality and Polity, p. 496. 41

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exclusively male.44 From the correspondences, we also learn of instances when meetings could not be held because the weather was too bad and business might have to be cancelled or put on hold. This happened to Sir William Stonor when his uncle, another Thames Valley landowner, was unable to travel because ‘the wether is suche that I dare not ryde’.45 One of the earliest Stonor letters tells us that a similar postponement of business occurred c.1380 because ‘ceste temps est pluviouse et bret jours’.46 Such comments put a particular gloss on earlier remarks about upland areas and their access to both government servants and messengers and to landowners from outside the region, especially in winter time. They also illustrate why some networks might be very localized, especially if they consisted largely of lesser men, who were unlikely to participate in the larger public and private affairs of the county or region. This article has argued that all historians who concern themselves with governance in the centuries before the railway and the telegraph need to think about the physical space between the central government and the point of enforcement. But the late middle ages, when the government sought to do so much, while relying almost entirely on local men and local power to accomplish its tasks, is a period when this is a particularly fruitful question. It demands that we constantly bear in mind the geography of distance and terrain as well as the geography of tenure. It demands also that we search among our records for the priceless pieces of information that will show us how, within these varying geographical parameters, the nobility and gentry, who were both enforcers and consumers of governance, fashioned a political and social world which enabled kings to rule and not just to reign.

  See for example Nigel Saul, Scenes from Provincial Life: Knightly Families in Sussex 1280–1400 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 63–4; Carpenter, ‘Stonor Circle’, pp. 191–2, and my ‘Town and “Country”: The Stratford Guild and Political Networks of Fifteenth-Century Warwickshire’, in Robert Bearman (ed.), The History of an English Borough: Stratfordupon-Avon 1196–1996 (Stroud, 1996), pp. 62–79. 45   Stonor Letters, ed. Carpenter, vol. 2, p. 36. 46  Ibid., p. 19. 44

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Chapter 7

Social Space and Urban Conflict: Unrest in the German Imperial City of Esslingen am Neckar Alexander Schlaak

1. Introduction Social spaces are susceptible to conflicts. On the other hand, conflicts often tend to occupy various social spaces while they are being played out. These observations are connected to the fact that power relations are always embedded in the (re)production of spaces. Hence, it is surprising that for a sustained period scholars neglected or only briefly investigated the interdependencies between social spaces and conflicts. However, towards the end of the twentieth century, the ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities and social sciences – associated with the understanding of spaces as socially constructed phenomena – changed the situation. Now, the spatial dimension of social action appears to be a central concern of historians from many subdisciplines. Disputes over space were omnipresent and were fought on several levels. The reasons for such conflicts often lay in different, and sometimes competing, definitions of space. This makes research on conflicts over space extremely valuable for historiography. Through the observation of clashes over differing definitions of space we are able to gain access to past ideas about the nature of politics and sociability beyond the existing achievements of work conducted within the traditional fields of constitutional or legal history. As Howard Harris and Alan Lipman have stated, differing definitions of space ‘are not necessarily    The author wants to thank his colleagues at the Interdisciplinary Research Centre SFB 485 in Constance for their helpful comments on the topic. Special thanks go to Florian Daniel Ernst and James R. Brown, who kindly corrected the author’s English.    See the anthology on spaces of power in early modern cities by two members of the ‘Social Sites’ network, in particular Christian Hochmuth and Susanne Rau, ‘Stadt – Macht – Räume. Eine Einführung’, in Christian Hochmuth and Susanne Rau (eds), Machträume der frühneuzeitlichen Stadt (Constance, 2006), pp. 13–40.   Maren Lorenz, ‘Strittiger Herrschaftsraum – Stettin 1662. Hafen und Handelsplatz oder Bollwerk und Brückenkopf’, in ibid., pp. 193–213, esp. p. 193.   Ibid.

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of similar weight’; people conceive and interpret spaces ‘in circumstances characterized by asymmetric distributions of social power’. According to this argument, power structures have a crucial impact on the spatial organization of society and on the use or violation of spaces within the framework of social action. Thus competing claims over the definition of specific spaces might play a role in the escalation of conflicts. It seems to be a characteristic of medieval and early modern times that concepts of social order were often transformed into spatial arrangements. Individuals and groups were allocated fixed places in such orderings, in which hierarchies could be symbolized by oppositions such as above/below, left/right, or inside/outside. Spaces in general appear to have an immense significance in societies that base their political culture and social order primarily on oral communication, in which forms of social and political interaction are characterized by the instantaneous cognition of all attendees. In this case social spaces are not abstract topics of public discourse, but rather consistently perceivable media that operate via the senses. However, because of the everyday perceptibility of social spaces in the medieval and early modern period, conflicts were always on the agenda. The often violent and long-lasting disputes over the honour of a person or social group represent a case in point. Honour marked the boundaries of a claimed space that had to be permanently defended within public settings. Such features were even more virulent in dense settlements like towns or cities. Around 1500, early modern towns – at least in the Holy Roman Empire – still used predominantly oral forms of communication for the reproduction of their political culture. Within these ‘face-to-face societies’, visuality, locality and spatial symbolism, as well as strictly observed norms for the performance of political and social rituals, seem to have been essential for the stability of the urban community.10 Accordingly, norms, symbols and spatial formations had to be

   Howard Harris and Alan Lipman, ‘Social Symbolism and Space Usage in Daily Life’, The Sociological Review: New Series, 28 (1980): 415–28, quote at p. 419.   Lorenz, ‘Strittiger Herrschaftsraum’, p. 193.   Marian Füssel and Stefanie Rüther, ‘Einleitung’, in Christoph Dartmann, Marian Füssel and Stefanie Rüther (eds), Raum und Konflikt. Zur symbolischen Konstituierung gesellschaftlicher Ordnung in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Münster, 2004), pp. 9–18.   Rudolf Schlögl, ‘Der Raum als Universalmedium’ (Lecture at ‘Machträume in der frühneuzeitlichen Stadt’, a conference of the Interdisciplinary Research Centre SFB 537 at the Technical University Dresden on 9 December 2004, and due to be published).    For an ideal typical description of a ‘face-to-face society’ see Peter Laslett, ‘The Face to Face Society’, in Peter Laslett (ed.), Philosophy, Politics and Society (Oxford, 1956), pp. 157–84. 10   Rudolf Schlögl, ‘Vergesellschaftung unter Anwesenden. Zur kommunikativen Form des Politischen in der vormodernen Stadt’, in Rudolf Schlögl (ed.), Interaktion und Herrschaft. Die Politik der frühneuzeitlichen Stadt (Constance, 2004), pp. 9–60.

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combined carefully to avoid the proliferation of conflicts that could endanger the stability of the community as a whole. This paper will explore the manifold ways in which space was consciously manipulated in the context of social and political conflicts in early modern towns as well as the numerous ways in which the protagonists used norms and symbols to regulate the progress of a dispute. It will do so by examining a revolt of the barbers and barber-surgeons in the German imperial city of Esslingen am Neckar that lasted from the end of the 1720s to the beginning of the 1730s. This conflict, while far from being a large-scale uprising such as the famous Fettmilch riot in Frankfurt am Main, yields remarkable insights into the political culture of German towns in the first half of the eighteenth century in general, and into the underlying correlations between power structures and the use of space in particular. The argument sketches recent approaches to spatial theory and early modern conflicts (2) before proceeding to an analysis of the actual events that comprised the revolt (3 and 4). Finally, a summary outlines further perspectives for historical research (5). 2. Early Modern Conflicts and Social Space: Approaches and Definitions Large-scale rebellions in early modern cities within the Holy Roman Empire have been one of the main fields of research in German historiography during the second half of the twentieth century.11 This is due to the fact that ‘German cities and towns experienced a turbulent political life in the two and a half centuries between the Reformation and the French Revolution’.12 Some scholars went even further in their evaluation of early modern town revolts. Peter Blickle, for example, associated the rebellions and riots of the urban citizenry against their magistrates with a specific stretch of time: from the so-called guild revolts of the late medieval period to the outbreak of the French Revolution.13 Other historians argued that the urban revolts of the early modern period should not be understood as disordered outbreaks of violence within the cities,14 often emphasizing the conservative character of the uprisings. The agitators did not normally question the political system as a whole, but rather focused on a single grievance or a specific set of 11

  The works of the German historian Wilfried Ehbrecht were pathbreaking in this context. See, for instance, Wilfried Ehbrecht, ‘Verlaufsformen innerstädtischer Konflikte in nord- und westdeutschen Städten im Reformationszeitalter’, in Bernd Moeller (ed.), Stadt und Kirche im 16. Jahrhundert (Gütersloh, 1978), pp. 27–47. 12   Christopher R. Friedrichs, ‘Urban Conflicts and the Imperial Constitution in Seventeenth-Century Germany’, Journal of Modern History, 58 (1986): 98–123, quote at p. 98. 13   Peter Blickle, Unruhen in der ständischen Gesellschaft, 1300–1800 (Munich, 1988). 14  Urs Hafner, Republik im Konflikt. Schwäbische Reichsstädte und bürgerliche Politik in der frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen, 2001), p. 144.

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complaints.15 This continued to characterize revolts until the eighteenth century when – as many historians have observed – urban town revolts were carried out with less violence, and the imperial courts and other external institutions emerged as the new arena for the resolution of conflicts.16 However, while research on large-scale conflicts within the municipalities of the Empire flourished from the 1970s, smaller conflicts between individuals or social groups attracted growing interest only from the following decade. Surveys of the latter coincided with another so-called turn in humanities: the ‘cultural turn’. Mentalities and grievances of the common people attracted attention in new fields such as criminal history.17 Nevertheless, it is astonishing that a separation between criminal history and the history of urban revolts is still discernible, even though both deal with the ‘deviant’ actions of historical subjects.18 This is remarkable given the frequency with which historians struggle to determine the point at which a small intra-urban dispute turned into a large-scale political conflict.19 The term ‘space’ made its entry into historical research from geography.20 After long debates among scholars who favoured either absolutist or relativistic definitions,21 space is now understood as process-related and relational; it is conceived not as predetermined but as constituted by the perceptions of social actors which – in turn – are tied to a particular materiality. Simply speaking, spaces are now mainly defined as social spaces. Even so, as Christian Hochmuth and Susanne Rau have recently argued, we should not make the mistake of substituting traditional ideas about space as a container with purely relational definitions, simply because such concepts seem insufficient for the analysis of social and cultural

15  Otto Brunner, Neue Wege der Verfassungs- und Sozialgeschichte (Göttingen, 1968), p. 300. 16  Christopher R. Friedrichs, ‘German Town Revolts and the Seventeenth-Century Crisis’, Renaissance and Modern Studies, 26 (1982): 33. 17   For example Andreas Blauert and Gerd Schwerhoff (eds), Mit den Waffen der Justiz. Zur Kriminalitätsgeschichte des Spätmittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt a.M., 1993); Gerd Schwerhoff, Aktenkundig und Gerichtsnotorisch. Einführung in die historische Kriminalitätsforschung (Tübingen, 1999); Andreas Blauert and Gerd Schwerhoff (eds), Kriminalitätsgeschichte. Beiträge zur Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte der Vormoderne (Constance, 2000). 18  Andreas Würgler, ‘Diffamierung und Kriminalisierung von “Devianz” in frühneuzeitlichen Konflikten. Für einen Dialog zwischen Protestforschung und Kriminalitätsgeschichte’, in Mark Häberlein (ed.), Devianz, Widerstand und Herrschaftsordnung in der Vormoderne (Constance, 1999), pp. 317–47, esp. p. 317ff. 19   Blickle, Unruhen, p. 8. 20   Schlögl, ‘Raum’, p. 2. 21   For example John Urry, ‘Social Relations, Space and Time’, in Derek Gregory and John Urry (eds), Social Relations and Spatial Structures (Basingstoke, 1985), pp. 20–48, esp. p. 21; or Martina Löw, Raumsoziologie (Frankfurt a.M., 2001), pp. 24–35. See also Beat Kümin’s introduction to this volume.

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contexts.22 Similarly, John Urry has tried to demonstrate that neither of the two positions (relationism or absolutism) ‘can be sustained without qualification’.23 In particular, the significance of architectonic spaces and their inherent materiality suggests the necessity of an interpretative compromise between relativistic and absolutist understandings of space. The work of Rudolf Schlögl represents one of the most recent attempts to create a typology of early modern spaces.24 He combines common elements of spatial approaches with insights drawn from modern communication theory and focuses on the media structure of early modern cities. Schlögl distinguishes four types of spaces (architecturally marked spaces; ephemeral spaces; virtual spaces; and convoluted spaces) that together constitute an order of spaces. In Schlögl’s view, the architectural demarcation of space turns spaces into places,25 with the town hall, the church, the tavern or the city with its walls serving as examples.26 Ephemeral spaces are defined as temporally limited but periodically recurring spaces,27 as for instance the market – which often had a fixed place within the municipality but was limited to specific days – or the site used for the annual meeting of the whole citizenry when burghers or newly appointed officials took oaths (the Schwörtag). Demands of indeterminate duration characterize virtual spaces that are prevalently situational and sometimes change rapidly.28 Effectively, they appear to be the real spaces of power. The communication of honour seems to be one of the best examples under the preconditions of the media structure of the early modern city. Ultimately, Schlögl cites convoluted spaces which are composed of different types of spaces and represent a reflection of society as a whole. Within Schlögl’s scheme, virtual spaces have particular significance within the development of conflicts, as at first glance they appear to be one of the main arenas for the use and abuse of norms and symbols within the context of intraurban quarrels. 3. Esslingen am Neckar in the Early Modern Period The city of Esslingen had already lost its political importance by the middle years of the sixteenth century. Situated close to Stuttgart and accordingly to the centre of power within the Duchy of Württemberg, it faced the same problems during the two and a half centuries until the French Revolution as many other communities in the south of the Empire that possessed an autonomous status and 22

  Hochmuth and Rau, ‘Stadt – Macht – Räume’, pp. 28–9.  Urry, ‘Social Relations’, p. 22. 24   See in general Schlögl, ‘Raum’. 25  Ibid., p. 8. 26   See the essays of James Brown and Peter Clark in this volume. 27   Schlögl, ‘Raum’, p. 8. 28  Ibid., p. 9. 23

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were subordinate to the emperor alone. A large number of these self-governed townships faced a substantial social, political and economic crisis at the end of the eighteenth century.29 Esslingen am Neckar was no exception. The factors contributing to the decline of this previously proud Swabian town were external as well as internal. The pressure exerted by the Duchy of Württemberg strongly influenced the economic and political life of the inhabitants. Esslingen was an enclave within the Duchy of Württemberg, and did not possess a larger territory like the nearby imperial city of Ulm or some communities within the Swiss federation. Hence, Esslingen was under more or less permanent economic pressure from its potent neighbour.30 Obstacles such as the protective duty politics of Württemberg and other handicaps characterized the everyday life of the city’s burghers. Nevertheless, it might be argued that this situation also fostered a certain stability within the city. The lack of large-scale conflicts until the outbreak of the so-called Bürgerprozesse at the end of the eighteenth century31 seems to endorse this suggestion. Disunity might have given the Duke of Württemberg an extra opportunity to manipulate the political life of the city, or even to try and integrate Esslingen into his own sphere of influence. The emperor was often far away and could not always effectively execute his function as the protector of the city. However, this apparent unity masked internal difficulties. As Christopher Friedrichs has mentioned with reference to the Empire as a whole, ‘politically autonomous communities were normally governed by self-perpetuating oligarchies, and historians have long maintained that urban oligarchies tended to become increasingly exclusive after the Reformation’.32 This was particularly the case in the imperial city of Esslingen, where we can observe an intensification of the oligarchic character of the urban political culture, especially in the eighteenth century, and an apparent concentration of political power in the hands of a few families.33 The tendency to limit entrance to the most important offices within the administrative apparatus was increasingly resented by the citizenry. The political centre of power was the small or inner city council (Kleiner Rat), consisting of 21 aldermen that were normally drawn from the most influential  Uwe Schmidt, Südwestdeutschland im Zeichen der Französischen Revolution. Bürgeropposition in Ulm, Reutlingen und Esslingen (Ulm, 1993), pp. 20–21. 30   Schmidt, Südwestdeutschland, p. 32. 31   With regard to the lack of large-scale conflicts see Otto Borst, Geschichte der Reichsstadt Esslingen am Neckar (Esslingen, 1977), p. 237. The most detailed survey of the ‘Bürgerprozesse’ is Ulrich Eberlein, Die Esslinger Bürgerprozesse. Eine Untersuchung der innerstädtischen Auseinandersetzungen in den letzten Jahren der Reichsunmittelbarkeit unter besonderer Berücksichtigung rechtlicher, wirtschaftlicher und sozialer Hintergründe. Zugleich ein Beitrag zur Rechtsgeschichte der schwäbischen Reichsstädte im 18. Jahrhundert (Tübingen, 1987). 32   Friedrichs, ‘Urban Conflicts’, p. 100. 33   Schmidt, Südwestdeutschland, p. 47; Eberlein, Bürgerprozesse, p. 40. 29

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families. Two attorneys and the highest judge (the Stadtamman) often attended the meetings of the magistrate. Co-optation was the most common mode of electing new councilmen. The traditional representative body, the large or outer city council (Großer Rat), was composed of 18 burghers, but had lost most of its power after the 1552 reform of the urban constitution by Charles V.34 Above all, its members were elected and affirmed by the 21 aldermen, lacking the right to assemble independently or without the knowledge of the small city council.35 Control over the guilds (which also lost most of their political influence in 1552) was delegated to two members of the small and one member of the large city council (the Handwerks-Herren).36 In addition, several aldermen functioned as chief masters for some guilds or crafts. The records also provide evidence that an ad hoc delegation by members of the small council was frequently convened to settle disputes in cases of disagreement among the craftspeople. The clearly oligarchic character of the political system of the city affected virtually all domains of economic and social life until the eighteenth century. These were the general conditions in 1729 when the barbers and barbersurgeons revolted. Although it was undertaken by a relatively small social group, it had some influence on the political culture of the city. The events might even be interpreted as forerunners of the clashes between the citizenry and the urban elite which took place at the end of the century, the Bürgerprozesse that shattered the urban community as a whole. 4. The Revolt of the Barbers The barbers and barber-surgeons were part of the pelt-mongers guild, but enjoyed relative independence.37 Their remote position within the corporation resulted in various pleas for the formation of their own guild that were all declined by the magistrate and brought the barbers into conflict with the urban physicians. They feared the intrusion into their own domain; however, conflicts between both parties were numerous even before the eighteenth century and often centred on the right to perform surgery.38

34  A contemporary chronicle provides insights into the events surrounding the reforms of Charles V. See Dionysius Dreytwein, Esslingische Chronik. 1548–1564, ed. Adolf Diehl (Tübingen, 1901). 35   The archival sources bear out the weak position of the large city council after 1552. See the collections of statutes in ‘Regimentsordnungen’: Esslingen, City Archives, Reichsstadt F. 4. 36   Karl Pfaff, Geschichte der Reichsstadt Eßlingen (2 vols, Esslingen, 1840), vol. 2, p. 524. 37   Pfaff, Geschichte, p. 761. 38  Ibid., p. 759.

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The underlying reasons for the conflict that finally erupted in autumn 1729 are difficult to specify. Hence, most of the previous surveys of the history of Esslingen scarcely touch the events.39 Apparently, the starting point was a petition by five master craftsmen of the barbers – Johann Knauss, Georg Friedrich Mattle, Simon Laissle, the so-called older Müller and his son, the younger Müller – to the city council dating from 1 September 1729.40 The barbers complained about two urban physicians, Johann Georg Authenriet and Johann Friedrich Stuber, who were accused of having detained money in the context of the muster of the Swabian troops, which were based near Esslingen in the summer of 1729. Furthermore, the two physicians had – according to the barbers – presumed to be exclusively responsible for the healthcare of the soldiers. The city council treated the affair as a normal conflict between social groups and decided to investigate the case. However, the situation escalated in the context of the affirmation of all urban officials after the Schwörtag. The barbers and barber-surgeons, as well as the urban physicians, were obliged to appear annually in front of the council in order to be confirmed as members of the urban healthcare community. However, on 1 November 1729 the barbers declined to do so. Two of their masters, Johann Knauss and the younger Müller, explained that they could not stand beside Authenriet and Stuber in the council’s parlour within the town hall.41 Authenriet and Stuber had been declared dishonourable by the barbers because of their previous misdoings and infringements. The council reacted by commanding the barbers out of the room in order to discuss possible measures. But as the aldermen tried to summon them again afterwards, Knauss and the younger Müller had already left, pretending to have pressing business within the city. Interpreting this disappearance as an act of disobedience, committed in the heart of the council’s residence, the aldermen decided to send Knauss and the younger Müller to prison.42 The mayor subpoenaed the two undutiful barbers on the afternoon of the same day. This episode reveals two differing conceptions of space that were connected to the power structures within the city. Whereas the barbers took the time surrounding the ephemeral space of the Schwörtag as a chance to articulate their grievances in front of the magistrate, the aldermen emphasized the significance of their virtual space of power. However, what at first glance seems to be a simple conflict over honour, with the city council as a mere referee, becomes a more complex dispute when we look at the background of one of the culprits, Johann Georg Authenriet.

39

 Otto Borst, Ulrich Eberlein and Karl Pfaff provide only brief summaries of the conflict. 40   ‘Records on the Barbers and Barber-Surgeons’: Esslingen, City Archives, Reichsstadt F. 87. 41   ‘Minutes of the Small City Council, 1729–1730’: Esslingen, City Archives, Reichsstadt RP 1729–30, pp. 10–12. 42  Ibid.

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He was a member of the large city council at that time.43 Although he did not belong to the inner circle of power within the city, he had been elected as a representative of the urban citizenry by the aldermen, and he enjoyed the faith of the most influential families. Moreover, the members and former members of the large city council were allowed to enter power spaces to which no liveryman normally had access.44 Informal consultations and arrangements within these exclusive rooms of the urban elite surely occurred on a daily basis. Hence the barbers’ complaints appeared particularly problematic. Either way, the conflict was difficult to resolve, but the first reactions of the aldermen when faced with the behaviour of the barbers in the town hall was predictable. The magistracy insisted on its position as the urban authority and advanced the norm of obedience against the honour of a social group. But although the aldermen tried to adjudicate the ongoing dispute impartially, their support for Authenriet and Stuber was hardly surprising given their ties to at least one of the two accused physicians. Consequently, the later actions of the barbers were not only directed towards the two defendants, but also against the virtual space of the magistrate. On the afternoon of 1 November 1729, immediately following the decision of the council to put Knauss and the younger Müller into prison, the two barbers refused to appear in front of the mayor.45 He had to threaten the barbers with force in order to finally imprison them. However, the younger Müller soon announced that the barbers might appeal to the emperor or to their colleagues in other cities as the dispute progressed. This indicated to the magistrate that the barbers would transcend the municipal area and – for this reason – violate the virtual space of the magistrate in order to obtain their rights. The night saw a more concrete violation of space, committed by the three chief companions of the arrested barbers: the older Müller, Simon Laissle and Georg Friedrich Mattle. Seemingly with the knowledge of the gaoler they entered the prison, caroused with Knauss and the younger Müller until late at night, and discussed their future proceedings against the city council.46 Meanwhile, the aldermen worried about the barbers’ possible appeal to the emperor as well as a potential revolt of the journeymen barbers. Their anxiety was not without cause, as disputes between or within artisan corporations could always lead to large-scale conflicts.47 Therefore, on 3 November 1729 the 43   ‘Minutes of the Small City Council, 1729–1730’, p. 138. Authenriet, as well as a person named Sebastian Stuber, who might have been a relative of Johann Friedrich Stuber, also appear in a list of the members of the large city council a few years later. See ‘Minutes of the Small City Council, 1734–1735’: Esslingen, City Archives, Reichsstadt RP 1734–35, pp. 226–37. 44   Pfaff, Geschichte, p. 625. 45   ‘Minutes of the Small City Council, 1729–1730’, p. 17ff. 46  Ibid. 47   Klaus Gerteis, ‘Frühneuzeitliche Stadtrevolten im sozialen und institutionellen Bedingungsrahmen’, in Wilhelm Rausch (ed.), Die Städte Mitteleuropas im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Linz, 1981), pp. 43–58, 329–41, esp. p. 54.

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city council read out the articles of the barbers and their journeymen in the presence of all of them, announcing an investigation into the role of the gaoler in the affair.48 It should be mentioned at this point that the reading out of the city’s statutes was normally connected with the annual Schwörtag. Apparently the magistrate used a direct reference to an ephemeral space as a way of restraining the conflict (in marked contrast to the barbers’ actions at the very beginning of the dispute). During November 1729 the barbers petitioned for the right to appeal to colleagues in other cities of the Empire because of the magistrate’s refusal to redress their grievances.49 However, while the journeymen barbers started to threaten the assistants of Authenriet and Stuber in December 1729, their masters contacted their fellows in the imperial city of Ulm without the knowledge of the magistrate. Word spread to the aldermen on 3 January 1730, in the context of an inquiry in front of the council during which the aldermen wanted to challenge the barbers about the journeymen’s assaults on the employees of Authenriet and Stuber in December.50 Knauss and his comrades declared that Authenriet and Stuber were deemed ignoble by their fellows at Ulm and reemphasized their refusal to stand next to the two defendants in the future. After this repeated violation of its authority, the council embarked on individual interrogations of the barbers and their journeymen in order to discover the underlying reasons for the conflict. Furthermore, the aldermen were finally forced to ask for help from beyond their own space of power. They consulted the city council of Ulm about the contacts between their respective groups of barbers. One week later, the journeymen of Authenriet, Stuber and Authenriet’s son transcended their role as victims in the conflict and attacked the assistants of the barbers with fists and knives.51 Nobody was killed, but obviously the city council had significant problems retaining control, even though the citizenry remained calm at this stage of the conflict. Help came via a letter from the aldermen of Ulm around 12 January 1730, shortly after the violent clash between the journeymen. Ulm explained that neither its barbers nor the local Handwerks-Herren had outlawed or doomed Authenriet and Stuber.52 In fact, the barbers of Ulm were seemingly reluctant to take sides in the conflict. This clarified the matter for Esslingen’s political leaders. The barbers had mocked them and had to bear the consequences. The aldermen decided that all barbers were to be interrogated again and that their masters should sign the minutes of the examinations themselves. This was supposed to be a highly symbolic act, as script still had a highly affirmative (and almost sanctified) character. However, 48

  ‘Minutes of the Small City Council, 1729–1730’, p. 17ff.  Ibid., pp. 31–2. 50  Ibid., pp. 72–3. 51   See an extract of the minute of the ‘Stadtamman’ from 10 January 1730 in ‘Records on the Barbers and Barber-Surgeons’, F. 87. 52   According to a report on the ensuing events by the urban attorney Eckher in the presence of the city council on 12 January 1730. See ‘Minutes of the Small City Council, 1729–1730’, pp. 96–102. 49

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Knauss and the journeymen disobeyed and went back to prison. Having learnt their lesson, the aldermen explicitly prohibited anybody to contact Knauss there.53 The inmates tried not to yield: Knauss refused the interrogation until 24 January 1730,54 and the journeymen remained in prison for two more weeks. However, this time the sanctions imposed by the magistrate seemed much more severe, as one of the journeymen of Georg Friedrich Mattle died while imprisoned.55 The clash between two major norms of that time – the honour of a social group on the one hand, and the norm of obedience towards the authorities on the other – had resulted in a casualty. In the meantime the aldermen prepared a resolution and, as they hoped, an end to the ongoing conflict. Although the citizenry had remained neutral until this point, this could change rapidly. Therefore, it was decided that Authenriet and Stuber should swear a purifying oath and regain their honour, a highly symbolic deed reinforced by the presence of all other barbers as witnesses. The alleged financial irregularities involving Authenriet and Stuber were to be investigated further. Initially hesitating and declaring their reluctance to be present during the act, the barbers were finally forced to obey and the defendants swore the required oath on 13 February 1730.56 Nevertheless, this was far from the end of the dispute. After their masters had seemingly conceded defeat, some journeymen left the city the same afternoon without warning.57 According to Rudolf Schlögl, the violation of the boundaries of social spaces was often used as a tool to provoke or to initiate communication, and the demonstrative exodus of whole social groups seems to have been one of the most effective ways to halt urban politics until the eighteenth century.58 The departure of the journeymen had to be taken seriously. The aldermen assumed they had travelled to Ulm and decided to contact the city’s magistrate. During the following days and weeks the master barbers denied any knowledge of the whereabouts of their journeymen.59 Yet they did not condemn their move either. In a petition to the magistrate of 16 March 1730, Knauss and his colleagues requested access to all records relating to the ongoing dispute, but also expressed understanding for the actions of their ‘honourable’ journeymen.60 This was too 53   See a certificate by the gaoler from 18 January 1730, in ‘Records on the Barbers and Barber-Surgeons’, F. 87. 54   ‘Minutes of the Small City Council, 1729–1730’, p. 108. 55   This emanates from another certificate by the gaoler from 12 September 1731, in which he stated that a journeymen of Mattle had died in prison approximately one and a half years ago. See ‘Records on the Barbers and Barber-Surgeons’, F. 87. The exact date cannot be reconstructed, but it might have been during the first week of February 1730. 56   ‘Minutes of the Small City Council, 1729–1730’, pp. 133–42. 57  Ibid., pp. 147–8. 58   Schlögl, ‘Raum’, p. 12. 59   See the interrogation by a deputation of the small city council on 7 March 1730: ‘Minutes of the Small City Council, 1729–1730’, p. 178. 60  Ibid., pp. 190–91.

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much for the aldermen. The magistrate suspected the masters of collusion and imposed a hefty fine. Furthermore, letters went out to towns and cities in which the journeymen might stay. On pain of penalties the magistracy demanded their immediate return. Finally, the aldermen appealed for help to the emperor himself.61 The ability of the magistrate to manage the conflict within its own sphere of power had reached clear limits. The weeks and months before the emperor’s decision saw numerous provocations by all protagonists (although the parties stopped short of violent actions). On 23 March 1730, for example, barber Georg Friedrich Mattle rejected the magistrate’s fines,62 prompting the city’s messenger to throw the respective decree on a table in his house. This was a conscious way of expressing discontent, for it was widely believed that reception of a written document implied its acceptance.63 Thereafter we find evidence that the barbers repeatedly appealed to colleagues in other cities without the permission of the magistrate.64 The aldermen reacted to these perceived violations of the council’s virtual space by blacklisting the journeymen who had left the city. In return, the barbers protested against the magistracy’s unilateral appeal to the emperor, accusing it of subjecting a guild matter to the mechanisms of juridical process.65 They feared an unnecessary and costly prolongation of the conflict and warned of the dangers of unsettling an entire craft. The emperor’s edict66 apparently brought an end to the quarrels.67 Resting on the biased report by the aldermen, the decision was not too surprising. The journeymen were to return to the city and all barbers were commanded to obey the magistrate as their legitimate authority in the future. Above all, they had to commit themselves to accept Authenriet and Stuber as honourable persons by taking an oath. Otherwise they would forfeit their citizenship. The imperial edict was read out to the assembled parties on 15 June 1730.68 Following heated debates, triggered by Knauss’s announcement of a personal appeal, the barbers obeyed and took the oath.

61

 Ibid.  Ibid., pp. 207–8. 63   Urs Hafner, ‘Gravamina im Rathaus. Zum sozialen Sinn der Übergabe kollektiver Beschwerden in süddeutschen Reichsstädten des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts’, in Cecilia Nubola and Andreas Würgler (eds), Forme delle Comunicazione Politica in Europa nei Secoli XV–XVIII. Suppliche, Gravamina, Lettere (Bologna, 2004), pp. 289–307, esp. p. 306. 64   ‘Minutes of the Small City Council, 1729–1730’, pp. 244–6. 65   See the petition of the barbers in ‘Records on the Barbers and Barber-Surgeons’: Esslingen, City Archives, Reichsstadt F. 86 (2 May 1730). 66  Dated 3 June 1730. 67  Esslingen, City Archives, Reichsstadt F. 86. 68   ‘Minutes of the Small City Council, 1729–1730’, pp. 345–53. 62

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Even so, the barbers soon lodged an appeal in Vienna.69 The dispute had definitely transcended the virtual space claimed by the urban authorities. At the same time the journeymen provoked the aldermen by playing a game of absence and presence within the city. After the Schwörtag, at the end of August and the beginning of September 1730, they repeatedly refused to attend the reading out of the barber’s commandments as it resembled a submission to the magistrate.70 Yet the aldermen insisted and ultimately succeeded. We do not encounter further relevant actions until the first quarter of 1731. This time, however, it was the citizenry who confronted the city council. The mayor informed the aldermen that several young males as well as established burghers had attacked the city’s night watch, one of the central markers of political authority.71 Whether these actions had direct links to the revolt of the barbers is uncertain, but similar incidents suggest that the citizenry shared at least certain resentments towards the city council.72 We hear of the barbers’ refusal to attend another reading out of their statutes at the end of August 1731,73 but the culmination point came just before the following Schwörtag. During a council meeting the mayor reported that the barbers had drafted a list of more general gravamina against the aldermen.74 Furthermore, a certain number of burghers had already signed them. From the aldermen’s point of view, this could be the beginning of a large-scale uprising or the convocation of an imperial commission, both of which endangered the common good of the community. As Hans-Christoph Rublack has pointed out, ‘it is no accident … that integrative norms gain expression when social systems are threatened by disintegration, that is, when conflict arises’.75 What is most interesting about the council’s discussions is the fact that it seemingly surrendered its claims to be the sole definer of political space within the city. The magistrate even considered enlisting the large city council in a future investigation of the affair, but eventually rejected the idea.76 Finally, a deputation consisting of the town chronicler and two members of the small council were commissioned to study the incidents and 69

 At some point between 15 June and 13 July 1730: see the minute of the council meeting on 13 July 1730. Ibid. p. 378. 70   See the entries from 29 August, 4 September and 8 September 1730 in the ‘Minutes of the Small City Council, 1730–1731’: Esslingen, City Archives, RP 1730–31, pp. 18–40. 71  Mayor’s report of 28 March 1731: ibid., p. 338. 72   This might be concluded from a later petition by the musketeer Beuerle – who was present during the burghers’ attack on the night watch in March – in which he asked the magistrate for his dismissal: ibid. p. 400. 73   ‘Minutes of the Small City Council, 1731–1732’: Esslingen, City Archives, RP 1731–32, p. 4. 74  Ibid., pp. 505–12. 75   Hans-Christoph Rublack, ‘Political and Social Norms in Urban Communities in the Holy Roman Empire’, in Kaspar von Greyerz (ed.), Religion, Politics and Social Protest: Three Studies on Early Modern Germany (London, 1984), pp. 24–60, quote at pp. 52–3. 76   ‘Minutes of the Small City Council, 1731–1732’, pp. 505–12.

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resolve the issues. This appears to have calmed the parties, but the attitude of the barbers still worried the aldermen. In a final attempt to resolve the conflict, a member of the urban authority entered the professional space of one of the barbers: the town chronicler discussed the affair with Knauss while being shaved by him in September 1732.77 Surprisingly, Knauss was prepared to accept a settlement, as long as the barbers recouped part of the costs of their lawsuit against Authenriet and Stuber. This appeared to be an acceptable resolution for the magistrate. However, Authenriet and Stuber refused the proposal, and the last real possibility of settling the conflict within the urban space was lost. The dispute now had to be decided by the imperial courts. The conflict continued for almost two more years and ended with the dismissal of the barbers’ complaints by the Reichshofrat in Vienna.78 Nevertheless, the quarrels had a greater influence insofar as the emperor kept a much closer eye on the political culture of the city during the following years. The installation of an imperial commission in 1748, which brought significant changes with respect to the administrative apparatus, was one of the consequences of increased supervision and might be interpreted as a partial if delayed success for the barbers. Nonetheless, the imperial commission could not alter the oligarchic character of the urban centre of power. Not surprisingly, Esslingen became one of the most unstable cities within the Empire in the second half of the eighteenth century.79 The antagonism between citizenry and urban elite became almost tangible and finally culminated in the Bürgerprozesse. In this context, the revolt of the barbers was one of the very few previous clashes between the urban magistracy and a group of burghers, and might therefore be seen as a prefiguring of the later, large-scale conflict. 5. Conclusion With reference to France, Charles Tilly noted that ‘the more closely we look at … contention, the more we discover order. We discover order created by the rooting of collective action in the routines and organization of everyday social life and by its involvement in a continuous process of signalling, negotiation, and struggle with other parties whose interests the collective action touches’.80 Spatial 77   See the entry of 16 September 1732 in ‘Minutes of the Small City Council, 1732– 1733’: Esslingen, City Archives, RP 1732–33, pp. 16–19. 78  Eberlein, Bürgerprozesse, p. 42. 79   Klaus-Peter Schroeder, Das Alte Reich und seine Städte. Untergang und Neubeginn: die Mediatisierung der oberdeutschen Reichsstädte im Gefolge des Reichsdeputationshauptschlusses 1802/03 (München, 1991), p. 373. 80  Charles Tilly, The Contentious French: Four Centuries of Popular Struggle (Cambridge MA, 1986), p. 4, quoted in Kevin C. Robbins, ‘The Social Mechanisms of Urban Rebellion: A Case Study of Leadership in the 1614 Revolt at La Rochelle’, French Historical Studies, 19 (1995): 559–90, quote at p. 577.

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organizing principles appear to be one of these routines of everyday social life in the early modern city. People were aware of being surrounded by social spaces and acted accordingly, even in times of conflict. Against the background of this interdependency between social actions and social spaces, the various practices of using, marking and violating social spaces in the context of ongoing quarrels become highly significant. Marian Füssel and Stefanie Rüther have observed that those practices could range from simple verbal or physical actions to ritualized stagings and highly formalized juridical forms of handling the dispute.81 The revolt of the Esslingen barbers featured many of these aspects. Virtual spaces appear particularly susceptible to the dynamics of the conflict, as their features were, on the one hand, deeply rooted in the social structure and political order of the city, and, on the other hand, dependent on the self-conceptions of the opposing parties. Questions surrounding the status of the magistrate as unrestricted ruler over (or mere representation of) the urban citizenry accompanied the dispute. In contrast, ephemeral spaces and their context seemingly provided a platform for the ritualized beginning and intensification of the conflict, or for attempts to end the dispute. The prominence of actions in conjunction with the annual Schwörtag is an example of this association. But, given that actors often use different symbols and norms to achieve their goals,82 there were significant distinctions between the parties involved in the conflict. The clash of two of the most important norms of the time – obedience towards the local authorities on the one hand, and the honour of a social group on the other – brought about various forms of using signs and symbols for different purposes. The magistrate repeatedly insisted on his monopoly over the definition of the political space within the city. Imprisonments, as well as the physical blockading of social spaces, exemplified the position of the aldermen as the urban authority. On the other hand, highly symbolic acts like the reading out of the statutes of the barbers, the purifying oath of Authenriet and Stuber as well as the signing of the minutes of an interrogation by one’s own hand were other common measures by which the magistrate attempted to keep the conflict in check, before it transmuted into a mere juridical process. The ways in which the barbers attempted to emphasize their claims via space-related actions were also numerous. Probably most important in terms of the tactical violation of social spaces was their manipulation of the consequences of absence and presence.83 As social actions are capable of constituting social spaces, the absence of designated actors has a crucial impact on the configuration of such social spaces. The repeated 81

  Füssel and Rüther, ‘Einleitung’, p. 15.   Michael Jucker, ‘Negotiating and Establishing Peace between Gestures and Written Documents: The Waldmann Process in Late Medieval Zurich (1489)’, in Jacoba van Leeuwen (ed.), Symbolic Communication in Late Medieval Towns (Leuven, 2006), pp. 101–23, esp. p. 120. 83  Ronald Asch’s essay in this volume also refers to the importance of both presence and absence for the structuring of communication within the early modern court. 82

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refusal of the journeymen to attend the reading out of the barbers’ articles, their exodus out of the city as well as their masters’ travel to the Viennese appeal court can be interpreted as conscious attempts to violate the virtual space of the urban authorities. Furthermore, the last two examples in particular throw light on another highly significant variable for the stabilization of social spaces: the impact of external factors. The barbers’ appeals to their colleagues or to the emperor in Vienna, as well as the magistrate’s letters of inquiry to the aldermen in Ulm, had implications for the progress of the intra-urban conflict. As ‘the evolution of any urban conflict can be understood only by paying close attention to the interaction of “internal” and “external” factors in each case’,84 it could be the same for the constitution and disintegration of social spaces.

84

  Friedrichs, ‘Urban Conflicts’, p. 102.

Chapter 8

The Spatial Dynamics of Parish Politics: Topographies of Tension in English Communities, c.1350–1640 Steve Hindle and Beat Kümin

In late medieval and early modern Europe, parish churches were political as well as religious sites.* At least once a week, the local congregation assembled not only for worship, but also for sociability and communication about a wide range of issues, including the allocation of communal resources, the minutiae of local gossip and the dissemination of news from the wider world. The order of church seating, the protocols of processions and other rituals, and the pattern of officeholding all reflected gender roles, social hierarchies and power relations, leading to countless disputes over parochial priorities and precedence and, in turn, to the ongoing renegotiation of communal relations. This essay analyses the spatial dynamics of parish politics in late medieval and early modern England. It is concerned less with ‘movements within’ or ‘negotiations about space’ than the topography of agents, sites and institutions affecting the governance and organization of a local community. For analytical purposes, the latter can be grouped into three main categories: first, forces located within the parish boundary (henceforth classed as ‘intra’-parochial); second, those based outside (‘extra’-communal factors); and, finally, those belonging to the ‘meta’-physical sphere. To do justice to the complexity of the resulting matrix, the investigation ought ideally to be multi-focal, sketching the situation from the respective viewpoints of all parishioners. As a starting-point, however, the following discussion limits itself to the perspective of those middling householders who constituted the backbone of the parish community and were the principal agents in parish politics. In which context did these people find themselves? By the fifteenth century, the English parish network had long been developed. There were occasional *

 This paper elaborates on Beat Kümin’s spatial reading of the parish church of St Mary’s, Warwick, during the field trip of the ‘Political Space’ workshop on 5 November 2005. The authors are grateful for comments received by the participants and to Mandy de Belin for agreeing to produce the figures. 1  The most recent analysis is Henry R. French, The Middle Sort of People in Provincial England, 1600–1750 (Oxford, 2007), esp. chap. 2 and 4.

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adjustments throughout the centuries, but the next major reorganization of the system did not occur until the Victorian age. Compared to other European territories, pre-Reformation England was a relatively centralized polity and its Church in a somewhat healthier state. As principal units for the cure of souls financed by the local laity, parishes represented the point of intersection between the sacred and the profane in medieval society. Embedded in the Church hierarchy, with links through deans, archdeacons and (arch-)bishops extending all the way to the pope in Rome, and simultaneously connected to specific secular units of lordship (typically manors, vills and towns), parishioners in the most remote of communities were always in touch not only with political elites beyond the parish boundary but also with the wider cosmic order. The doctrine of Purgatory, based on an intermediary place between this world and the next where souls could be purified of any remnants of sin, provided strong incentives for Christian living and the performance of good works. Pious bequests for the increase of divine service or church building significantly reduced the time benefactors had to spend in the cleansing fires after their death. As a result, both monetary gifts and landed property accumulated in the hands of parishioners, who were keen to keep them under lay supervision. Due to the relative weakness of alternative secular communities, furthermore, parish representatives engaged in public works and even performed occasional local government functions. All these tasks required those ‘political’ skills conventionally associated with the allocation and administration of resources. Householder assemblies increasingly acted as sovereign bodies and churchwardens – from the thirteenth century onwards – as the main parish officials. The physical framework for most of these negotiations was the highly complex space of the local church, a setting shaped not only by human agents (priests, gentry and commoners), but also by institutions (chantries, guilds and ‘stores’) and objects (such as images, monuments and porches). The impact of sixteenth-century change on parish politics was profound. The Reformation(s) brought the dismantling of a large number of fora for participation   Norman J.G. Pounds, A History of the English Parish: The Culture of Religion from Augustine to Victoria (Cambridge, 2000).   Richard M. Smith, ‘“Modernization” and the Corporate Medieval Village Community in England: Some Sceptical Reflections’, in Alan H.R. Baker and Derek Gregory (eds), Explorations in Historical Geography (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 140–79; R.N. Swanson, Church and Society in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 1989).    Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory (Chicago, 1984); Clive Burgess, ‘“A Fond Thing Vainly Invented”: An Essay on Purgatory and Pious Motive in Late Medieval England’, in S.J. Wright (ed.), Parish, Church and People: Local Studies in Lay Religion, 1350–1750 (London, 1988), pp. 56–84.    Beat Kümin, The Shaping of a Community: The Rise and Reformation of the English Parish, c. 1400–1560 (Aldershot, 1996), esp. chap. 2.   Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400– 1580 (New Haven, 1992), esp. chap. 4.

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within the parish – principally the lights, chantries and fraternities associated with the doctrine of Purgatory. The Tudors simultaneously instrumentalized the local ecclesiastical community, charging it with statutory secular functions including the maintenance of the highways; the provision of men and arms for the county militia; and the relief and regulation of the poor. This change in the focus of administrative activity entailed new opportunities for political participation within the parish, especially in the creation of the ever more significant office of the overseer of the poor. By the early seventeenth century, parish communities represented not just units of worship but of obligation and control, and numerous localities saw the consolidation of both formal and informal structures of oligarchy, especially in the form of the ‘select vestry’, through which access to the circuits of representation and authority within and beyond the parish could be regulated. How can ‘spatial approaches’ contribute to a closer understanding of these processes? Recent theoretical contributions have helpfully suggested that space is best understood not as a given physical entity, but as a relational construct emerging through the interaction of agents, objects and atmospheric features in specific locations.10 Historical agents have different means and opportunities to influence spatial arrangements, depending on variables like their access to resources, social standing, local expertise, physical position and political power. Priestly words and rituals, for example, could transform an architectural edifice into a ‘House of God’. Iconoclasts and non-conformists, by contrast, endeavoured to strip church buildings of sacral attributes by removing objects of veneration. Once constituted, spaces in turn have the potential to structure human exchange, for example by exercising ‘sociopetal’ influence (that is, encouraging social association and participation) or by entailing ‘sociofugal’ effects (through exclusion and avoidance).11 This conceptual framework promises new opportunities for parish studies, a field often characterized by ‘essentialist’ understandings, in which local communities are categorized into ‘urban’ or ‘rural’; ‘Catholic’ or ‘Puritan’; or



 Ibid., part 2.   Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1640 (Basingstoke, 2000), chap. 8; and his On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, c. 1550–1750 (Oxford, 2004), chap. 4.    Keith Wrightson, ‘The Politics of the Parish in Early Modern England’, in Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle (eds), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (London, 1996), esp. pp. 25–31; Beat Kümin, ‘Parish und Local Government: Die englische Kirchgemeinde als politische Institution 1350–1650’, in Peter Blickle (ed.), Gemeinde und Staat im Alten Europa (Munich, 1998), pp. 209–38; Steve Hindle, ‘The Political Culture of the Middling Sort in English Rural Communities, c. 1550–1700’, in Tim Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, 1500–1850 (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 125–52. 10  Martina Löw, Raumsoziologie (Frankfurt a.M., 2001); Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift (eds), Thinking Space (London, 2000). 11   Bryan Lawson, The Language of Space (London, 2001), pp. 140–44. 

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‘lowland’ or ‘upland’ entities.12 It allows greater engagement with contextual complexities by incorporating human, material and atmospheric elements into our reconstructions. A number of pioneering works already demonstrate the potential of such approaches, especially if they are combined with dynamic variables such as movement and change over time.13 A crucial prerequisite for a more general survey, however, is to take account of the principal agents and forces which were responsible for the perennial reconstruction of space. It is this objective to which the present essay aspires. It should go without saying that the following discussion represents only a starting-point, a first attempt to sketch relevant research questions and to propose appropriate analytical categories. These categories, like many others which could be conceived, self-consciously imply bold abstractions (‘the clergy’ and ‘the laity’); simplifications (especially with regard to the quality of relationships between specific groups); and blurred borderlines (particularly between the ‘intra-’, ‘extra-’ and ‘meta-parochial’ spheres). The argument is structured in three parts: first, a sketch of the political topography of the late medieval parish; second, a corresponding examination for the early modern period; and, third, some preliminary conclusions. Future work will hopefully refine the analytical tools and broaden the geographical perspective. I The parish was a highly complex organism, consisting of members from different families and occupations; age, wealth and gender groups; and estates and neighbourhoods – all of whom had distinct priorities, needs and personal acquaintances. They attended church for advice and edification, but also to retain their due place in the social topography; to stay in touch with their ancestors (buried in the churchyard or, in the case of elites, the nave or chancel); and to participate in numerous ceremonial and convivial customs. Each and every parishioner entering the nave experienced the same church space in a peculiar fashion, depending on the personal networks in which (s)he stood and the spatial matrixes created

12   See for example the seminal (and differentiated) division of early modern society into ‘chalk’ and ‘cheese’ regions in David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660 (Oxford, 1985), esp. chap. 4. 13   Pamela Graves, ‘Social Space in the English Medieval Parish Church’, Economy and Society, 18 (1989): 297–322; Kate Giles, ‘Public Space in Town and Village, 1100– 1500’, in Kate Giles and Christopher Dyer (eds), Town and Country in the Middle Ages (Leeds, 2005), pp. 293–312; Neil S. Rushton, ‘Spatial Aspects of the Almonry Site and the Changing Priorities of Poor Relief at Westminster Abbey c. 1290–1540’, Architectural History, 45 (2002): 66–91; David Postles, ‘The Market Place as Space in Early Modern England’, Social History, 29 (2004): 41–58; and the essays collected in Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (eds), Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2005).

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by these relationships.14 Adopting the perspective of ‘typical’ members of the middling sort, what might this constellation have looked like? Can we recreate the political topography of the multiple bonds and tensions in which they found themselves? Figure 8.1 attempts a summary diagram of spheres and relationships (see p. 162 below), but in the first instance it may be helpful to dissect the various layers step-by-step. To begin with the ‘intra’-parochial sphere, a principal polarity was that between laity and clergy. Spatially expressed in the canonical division between those who held financial responsibility for the nave (the parishioners) and for the chancel (the rector), the two groups were entirely dependent on each other and simultaneously affected by numerous lines of tension. In return for religious instruction and the administration of sacraments, the laity provided the incumbent’s livelihood. The latter also assisted parishioners in tasks like record-keeping and the annual stock-taking of communal possessions (as did Sir Christopher Trychay at Morebath in Devon).15 On the other hand, issues like the control of specific spaces (to say nothing of the personal failings of individual clerics) triggered numerous conflicts. At Dunster in Somerset, for example, rector and community ‘disagreed over the schedule of services, control of the offerings and tithes, and maintenance of the building’.16 Zooming in on the nave alone, a basic dividing line separated the sexes. Many communities allocated men and women to different zones, although this did not always take the conventional shape of a female north and a male south side of the church.17 Religion as well as political life was highly gendered, with most women having at best informal channels of influence, through attacks on reputation, the exercising of pressure on decision-makers and the performance of customary roles on ceremonial occasions. More rarely – specifically in the parochial context of the West Country – women might be members and office-holders of female guilds and stores. Ironically, the chief source of female empowerment was the deprivation represented by bereavement, with the widow’s assumption of some of 14   Contemporary accounts in David Dymond and Clive Paine (eds), The Spoil of Melford Church: The Reformation in a Suffolk Parish (Ipswich, 1992), pp. 1–11 (Roger Martyn), and Richard Gough, The History of Myddle, ed. David Hey (Harmondsworth, 1981), pp. 77 ff; Robert Dinn, ‘“Monuments Answerable to Men’s Worth”: Burial Patterns, Social Status and Gender in Late Medieval Bury St Edmunds’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 46 (1995): 237–55. 15  Eamon Duffy, The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (New Haven, 2001), p. xiii. 16   Katherine L. French, The People of the Parish: Community Life in a Late Medieval English Diocese (Philadelphia, 2001), p. 158 (1498). 17   For the plurality of arrangements see Gabriela Signori, ‘Links oder rechts? Zum “Platz der Frau” in der mittelalterlichen Kirche’, in Susanne Rau and Gerd Schwerhoff (eds), Zwischen Gotteshaus und Taverne: Öffentliche Räume in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Cologne, 2004), pp. 339–82.

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the public functions and social prestige associated with her late husband. At Yatton (Somerset), Elizabeth Newton even acquired the position of churchwarden.18 The principal political actors, however, were male householders taking a full share in the parish’s financial obligations.19 All of them had access to the annual assembly approving the wardens’ accounts, with absentees – as at London’s St Botolph Aldersgate in the late 1400s – liable to fines for failing to exercise this basic political right. The desirability of near-universal attendance also emerges from the vestry ordinance of St Stephen’s, Bristol, around 1520 and from the records of a dispute at Morebath (Devon) in the 1530s, when a head-count produced 26 against 5 votes, revealing that 31 out of a total of 33 householders in the community had participated in the consultation. The late medieval English parish, in other words, was based on remarkably ‘modern’ principles such as broad participation and periodic accountability, but it was never egalitarian. Another source of tension was the dividing line between what we might only semi-facetiously refer to as ‘front-’ and ‘back-benchers’. The latter consisted of modest householders without much influence on executive matters. Typically seated towards the back of the church, they could at least signal consent and murmur disagreement during assemblies, as they did, for example, at Tavistock (Devon) in 1518 when members of the elite unilaterally commissioned an expensive new silver cross. The ‘front-benchers’ encompassed the middling and better sort, who provided the pool of officeholders and usually sat further forward. Members of the local top brass sometimes grouped themselves into yet smaller supervisory bodies, variously referred to as the ‘masters’, the ‘feoffees’ or ‘the eight men’, usually consisting of those (self-)appointed elder parochial statesmen who oversaw political matters in their capacity as advisors and trustees (what we might call non-executive directors). As well as co-operation and mutual support, we find many conflicts within the political establishment. Typical scenarios were squabbles between factions (as indeed in the Tavistock dispute) or fierce disagreements over precedence in church seating or parish processions.20 An ambiguous position was occupied by the poor. Lacking political enfranchisement (due to their inability to contribute in parochial levies), they still played a crucial role in the spiritual economy. Christ, of course, had shown particular  Christine Peters, Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England (Cambridge, 2003); Katherine L. French, ‘Women Churchwardens in Late Medieval England’, in Clive Burgess and Eamon Duffy (eds), The Parish in Late Medieval England (Donington, 2006), pp. 302–21. 19  The argument in this paragraph is elaborated in Beat Kümin, ‘“By all the Whole Body of the Parish”: Entscheidungsfindung in der englischen Kirchgemeinde, 1500–1550’, in Heinrich R. Schmidt et al. (eds), Gemeinde, Reformation und Widerstand (Tübingen, 1998), pp. 85–102, and Beat Kümin, ‘The Secular Legacy of the Late Medieval English Parish’, in Burgess and Duffy, Parish, pp. 95–111. 20   For examples of such conflicts see French, People of the Parish, pp. 54, 167; and Graves, ‘Social Space’, 314. 18

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disposition towards them and prayers of the poor thus carried disproportionate weight in contemporary understanding. In this sense, the relationship with more prosperous parishioners was deeply reciprocal, consisting of a mutually beneficial interchange of alms-giving and intercession.21 The same could be said for the strong links between the living and the dead: the doctrine of Purgatory allowed the former to assist the latter in the hour of direst need, while the deceased’s testamentary resources helped parishioners to sustain and expand their spiritual operations.22 Memorial brasses and prestigious burial sites reminded the living of their debt to the most prominent donors, who as at Ashton (Devon) might even intrude themselves into the congregation’s line of vision.23 Pious benefaction resulted in the efflorescence of sub-parochial institutions. Numerous lights were endowed on side altars and placed under the supervision of churchwardens. The most expansive bequests established distinct clerical benefices, in the form of chantries founded to support a priest singing daily masses for the testator’s soul. These services could distract devotion and funding away from the parish itself, but many actually added liturgical books, clerical manpower and a more sophisticated musical repertory to their communities.24 Similarly varied ties existed with the growing wave of voluntary associations known as guilds or fraternities, which gathered specific groups around a particular altar, usually with the objective of securing members elaborate funerals and additional intercession. Some assisted their mother churches with funds and devotional services, but others, such as the near-national Palmers’ Guild at Ludlow (Shropshire), developed an exclusive, extra-parochial profile. A spatial reading of the respective positions of these plural sites of worship, often linked through architectural devices like squints (allowing visual co-ordination and phasing of the elevation of bread and wine during mass), nonetheless suggests a continued primacy of the parochial high altar.25 The rigid character of the parish network prevented easy adjustments to changes in settlement patterns and demography. Many hamlets and villages, especially in the large communities of the north of England, invested in local sites of worship with the ultimate aim of acquiring full rights of baptism and burial. This objective was undermined both by canon law and by vested interests, and many ‘chapels of ease’ developed highly-strained relations with their mother churches. Forced to attend (and indeed support) the latter, local pride as well as genuine inconvenience  Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, pp. 357–62.  A.N. Galpern, The Religions of the People in Sixteenth-Century Champagne (Cambridge MA., 1976). 23   Graves, ‘Social Space’, 319. 24  Clive Burgess, ‘“For the Increase of Divine Service”: Chantries in the Parish in Late Medieval Bristol’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 36 (1985): 46–65. 25   Ken Farnhill, Guilds and the Parish Community in Late Medieval East Anglia, c. 1470–1550 (York, 2001). For a spatial analysis involving viewshed analysis see Simon Roffey, The Medieval Chantry Chapel: An Archaeological Approach (Woodbridge, 2007). 21 22

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fostered intra-communal resentment, while the main parish bodies not unreasonably feared that formal separation could jeopardize their own viability.26 An even more serious challenge, at least in the eyes of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, came from the sort of unorthodox practices associated with cunning folk and ‘heretical’ movements like Lollardy. Once considered thoroughly corrosive of late medieval religion, most scholarship now assesses the problem in less dramatic terms. The late medieval parish was a broad church and able to integrate a heterogeneous spread of ideas. Lollards normally kept their heads down, meeting discreetly in ‘known houses’ but simultaneously shouldering parochial duties, and many priests passively tolerated attempts to harness quasi-magical powers from sacred objects and words.27 Here, as in other respects, much local research would be needed to complete this general sketch of intra-parochial constellations. The parish boundary divided intra- from extra-communal agents and interests. Sometimes identified by physical markers, it was popularly internalized through the annual ‘beating of the bounds’, a ritual perambulation linked to customary local celebrations.28 Given the heterogeneity of actual political and ecclesiastical structures, Figure 8.1 depicts a number of prominent institutions straddling the borderline. Manor houses, town halls and monastic institutions could, of course, be located both within and without a given community. Invariably, there was plenty of scope for co-operation as well as tension, but – simplifying dramatically – relations with urban authorities were least likely to be confrontational. Parish elites played a significant role in municipal government and their churches held an important place in the sacral landscape, while town officials offered their professional services in legal and financial matters.29 The gentry could also be present and supportive (the Clopton family of Long Melford annually invited all neighbours to a celebration at Kentwell Hall), and parishioners took an active role in institutions like the manor court, but issues like patronage, tenurial obligations, social distance and diverging religious tastes carried enhanced potential for friction.30 From a spatial 26   C.J. Kitching, ‘Church and Chapelry in Sixteenth-Century England’, in Derek Baker (ed.), The Church in Town and Countryside (Oxford, 1979), pp. 279–90; David Dymond, ‘The Chapel-of-Ease: Symbol of Local Identity and Ambition’, The Ricardian, 13 (2003): 203–16. 27   For diverging scholarly judgements on the virulence of unorthodoxy compare Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1971), with Duffy, Stripping of the Altars; and Richard Rex, The Lollards (Basingstoke, 2002), with Robert Lutton, Lollardy and Orthodox Religion in Pre-Reformation England: Reconstructing Piety (Woodbridge, 2006). 28  Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, pp. 136–9. 29  A classic study is Charles Phythian-Adams, ‘Ceremony and the Citizen: The Communal Year at Coventry, 1450–1550’, in Peter Clark and Paul Slack (eds), Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500–1700 (London, 1972), pp. 57–85. 30   Summarizing Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500–1700 (Basingstoke, 1994), pp. 349–55; on the Cloptons’ hospitality, see Dymond and

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perspective, the relative positions of parish church, manor house and/or town hall created idiosyncratic geographies of power in each community, with one frequent configuration in rural areas involving the immediate juxtaposition of church and manor house (sometimes with a specific pathway and door connecting the two). Physical proximity, however, provides no sufficient indicator for the character of this relationship: a far-away lord or patron had fewer chances to interfere in dayto-day parish politics, but may have also been more reluctant to meet obligations regarding the maintenance of the fabric or the cure of souls. A similar argument can be made for friaries, nunneries and monasteries which presented parishioners with additional spiritual and material resources and, at least for their elites, distinctive sites for burial. On the other hand, they could divert benefactions away from the communal church and ruffle feathers through incorporation, socio-economic encroachments and inadequate clerical provision.31 Unambiguous outsiders were royal and higher ecclesiastical institutions. According to spatial theory, they might be classed as ‘visitors’, that is agents with only temporary access to a specific object or community, as opposed to ‘occupants’ like the parishioners themselves.32 Starting with the papacy as the highest Church authority, we find a steady stream of interventions, especially by means of council decrees (Lateran IV of 1215 with its demand for annual confession and regular preaching providing the prime example), presentations of priests to specific benefices or permission for the creation of new parishes.33 A little further down, diocesan bodies affected localities through synodal legislation (sometimes with detailed spatial instructions)34 and general church government. England’s rich series of bishops’ registers testify to the multitude of contacts and problems in this relationship, with reference both to the lower clergy and the laity. Episcopal approval had to be sought, for instance, when holy ground was reconsecrated following bloodshed in the church, and while full-scale visitations were at best occasional, travel expenses in churchwardens’ accounts testify to the existence of multiple ties between ecclesiastical centre and periphery.35 The most intrusive aspect was the activity of church courts, which claimed jurisdiction over all men in holy orders and a wide spectrum of religious, moral and contractual Paine, Melford Church, p. 7. 31   Neil S. Rushton, ‘Monastic Charitable Provision in Tudor England: Quantifying and Qualifying Poor Relief in the Early Sixteenth Century’, Continuity and Change, 16 (2001): 9–44; Swanson, Church and Society, pp. 82–8. 32   Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson, The Social Logic of Space (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 14–15. 33   Swanson, Church and Society, pp. 11–16. 34  Altars, for example, had to be moved further eastwards after 1100: C. Davidson Cragoe, ‘Liturgical Fittings and Theological Change in the Twelfth Century’ (Paper to the Annual Conference of the Ecclesiological Society, 2004). 35   See for example the 2 s. for ‘costage when they rode to the busshop’ (1504–5) in Churchwardens’ Accounts of Ashburton 1479–1580, ed. A Hanham (Exeter, 1970), p. 33.

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issues involving parishioners. With sanctions stretching to the excommunication of individuals and the suspension of divine service in entire communities, ecclesiastical judges exercised very tangible influence over localities.36 On the other hand, external tribunals represented a welcome resource in situations where parishioners lacked autochthonous powers or intra-communal mediations had failed. The warden of St Michael, Hitcham (Buckinghamshire), for example, brought the theft of a chalice and other communal property before a county jury in 1412. Elsewhere, numerous parish-related disputes emerged in Chancery (an equity court unimpeded by the technicalities of the Common Law) on the eve of the Reformation.37 Chancery represented one of the still relatively loose ‘points of contact’ between royal and parochial government. Others involved sporadic statutory activity (such as the mortmain acts restricting the amount of property transferable into the dead hand of the Church) and the Exchequer, which selected the ecclesiastical network for a number of taxation experiments, most notably the highly efficient parish subsidy of 1371.38 Finally, and most diffusely, the metaphysical dimension needs to be addressed. There were subtle gradations from profane to holy sites in and around the church building. Towards the ‘secular pole’ of the community we find alehouses, already the bêtes noires of medieval moralists and – from the later sixteenth century – a principal object of the Puritan ‘reformation of manners’.39 In or just outside the walled precinct, church houses provided social centres for parish ales – convivial celebrations in support of fabric funds – and other communal services like storage or brewing. In the church building itself, a sequence of ‘liminal’ spaces such as the porch (linking the worldly and spiritual spheres by accommodating pre-Reformation marriage ceremonies and – as at St John’s, Cirencester – multistorey administrative premises) and the rood screen (which demarcated the lay and clerical parts of the church) ultimately led to the ‘sacred pole’ represented by chancel and sanctuary where Christ himself became present in the sacrament of the altar.40 36  Richard Wunderli, London Church Courts and Society on the Eve of the Reformation (Cambridge/ Mass., 1981). 37   Beat Kümin, ‘Parishioners in Court: Litigation and the Local Community, 1350– 1650’, in Susan Wabuda and Caroline Litzenberger (eds), Belief and Practice in Reformation England (Aldershot, 1998), pp. 20–39, here 35; French, People of the Parish, pp. 38–43. 38   Mark Ormrod, ‘An Experiment in Taxation: The English Parish Subsidy of 1371’, Speculum, 63 (1988): 58–82. 39   Keith Wrightson, ‘Alehouses, Order and Reformation in Rural England, 1590– 1660’, in Eileen Yeo and Stephen Yeo (eds), Popular Culture and Class Conflict, 1590– 1914: Explorations in the History of Labour and Leisure (Brighton, 1981), pp. 1–27; Beat Kümin, ‘Sacred Church and Worldly Tavern: Reassessing an Early Modern Divide’, in Coster and Spicer, Sacred Space, pp. 17–38. 40   Patrick Cowley, The Church Houses: Their Religious and Social Significance (London, 1970). On the concept of liminality in this context see Steve Hindle, ‘Destitution,

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For parishioners, interaction with the metaphysical sphere was the most important and pressing spatial concern. The devil constantly tempted them into mortal sins and thus the horrors of eternal damnation. Infants who died without the sacrament of baptism entered into a state of limbo, unable to benefit from the rewards of Christian sacraments and education. Most members of the community, however, held realistic hopes of reaching heaven. Fulfilment of parochial obligations, especially participation in the ‘social miracle’ of the mass, where Christians from heterogeneous backgrounds could temporarily overcome their many divisions, provided a sound basis.41 Additional initiatives, tailored to individual status and wealth, augmented the chances of intercession and post-mortem benefits. While highly spiritual in intent, the resulting stream of benefactions entailed a host of more mundane implications, not least a boost for communal resources and requirements for political processes of administration and allocation. Competition for prime commemorative locations and the addition of new devotional foci continuously modified the ‘liturgical space of a parish church’, which ‘went through long periods of creation, through acts of patronage, rather than exisiting as a finite entity’.42 To draw an intermediate summary, therefore, the pre-Reformation English parish stood at the intersection of multiple contacts, reciprocal relations and lines of conflict (Figure 8.1). Even in this schematic simplification, the overall picture appears frightfully complex. What stands out is, first, the (mediated) metaphysical link through Purgatory, a diffuse yet terrifying place with enormous repercussions for the mentalities and activities of late medieval parishioners. In this metaphysical regime, the sacred and the profane were intricately intertwined and (spatially) overlapping. Priests provided indispensable services (whatever their personal shortcomings and economic encroachments) and their number (incorporating those associated with chantries and fraternities) was high. A second major impression is the plurality of internal reciprocities and fault lines (often in fact involving the same groups), especially between the two sexes, ‘front-’ and ‘back-benchers’, and laity and clergy. The presence of saints, ancestors and the poor helped to contain this corrosive potential. The late medieval parish, third, was embedded in wider spatial networks of power and authority. Contacts with external bodies, however, remained occasional and local loyalties and constellations appear paramount in everybody’s lives.

Liminality and Belonging: The Church Porch and the Politics of Settlement in English Rural Communities, c. 1590–1660’, in Christopher Dyer (ed.), The Self-Contained Village? The Social History of English Rural Communities, 1250–1900 (Hertford, 2006), pp. 46–71; and Dave Postles, ‘Micro-Spaces: The Church Porch in Pre-Modern England’, Journal of Historical Geography, 33 (2007): 749–69. 41   John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1985), chap. 4. 42   Graves, ‘Social Space’, 311.

Relationship marked by reciprocity as well as frequent tensions

Reciprocal relationship of (mainly) unproblematic character

Destination or contact with/ influence over/appeal to

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Figure 8.1 The political topography of the late medieval English parish

Key

Relationship marked by reciprocity as well as frequent tensions

Reciprocal relationship of (mainly) unproblematic character

Destination or contact with/ influence over/appeal to

This figure has intentionally been removed for copyright reasons. To view this image, please refer to the printed version of this book

Figure 8.2 The political topography of the early modern English parish

Key

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II Moving to the later sixteenth century and the period of the consolidation of the new ecclesia anglicana, a similar representation of the political topography produces dramatically different results (cf. Figure 8.2). Although many of the intra-parochial tensions (between clergy and laity, between ‘front-’ and ‘back-benchers’, between men and women) look familiar, the extra- and metaparochial dimensions of parish politics were radically transformed. The parish became much more vulnerable to the intrusion of external authority, especially in the form of episcopal visitations, royal proclamations read from the pulpit and magistrates’ orders directed at constables and overseers. More strikingly still, the theological revolution of the late 1540s entirely recast the geographies of the afterlife. These developments were in many ways sociofugal, dividing the parish community into sub-groups (rate-payers and rate-receivers; deserving and undeserving poor; communicants and separatists; elect and reprobate) which, whether or not they became institutionally recognized, were now inscribed in the mental maps of all parishioners. Intra-parochially, however, communion continued to exercise sociopetal influence. Despite the Protestant emphasis on preaching, an issue to which we shall return, the 1559 Prayer Book required all inhabitants to participate in parochial liturgy. Although it is by no means clear that the entire congregation communicated simultaneously or even on an equal footing – with the young often made to attend special services, the poor expected to make do with inferior communion wine and some household servants routinely excused attendance – there were very significant moral, ecclesiastical and political pressures towards conformity, not least in the form of recusancy fines for those who failed to attend.43 Communion, moreover, retained its significance as an incorporative ritual, symbolizing the state of charity which was supposed to exist between fellow Christians and idealized as the central tenet of good neighbourhood. The clergy were, accordingly, empowered to exclude those in dispute with their neighbours.44 The ideal of neighbourliness was, however, just that: an ideal. There is plenty of evidence that even in the parish church, the social site where reconciliation was most highly valued and most powerfully insisted upon, disputes over precedence exerted much sociofugal pressure. Disputes over church seating were particularly acute in this period, especially as payments for particular pews became more common. There is as yet no scholarly consensus over the meaning of ‘pew rage’, but it must be related to the social differentiation affecting local communities by the late sixteenth century.45 It  Arnold Hunt, ‘The Lord’s Supper in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, 161 (1998): 39–83. 44  Christopher Haigh, ‘Communion and Community: Exclusion from Communion in Post-Reformation England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 51 (2000): 699–720. 45   See for example Nesta Evans, ‘A Scheme for Re-Pewing the Parish Church in Chesham, Buckinghamshire, in 1606’, The Local Historian, 22 (1992): 203–7. For a 43

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is, moreover, striking that so many contestations pitted women against women, who were still sitting apart from men in many communities. Like other controversies (including accusations of witchcraft and sexual slander) with conspicuous female involvement, pew disputes were gender-related rather than gender-specific. They nonetheless testify to the intense competition over place and precedence in church seating as ‘a social map’ of the community.46 There were also continued intra-parochial tensions between the laity and the clergy, arguably exacerbated by the range of theological and liturgical preferences now expressed within the Church of England; and by the enhanced pretensions and expectations of a clerical profession increasingly confined to university-educated sons of yeomen, or often even younger sons of gentlemen. That the pastoral ambitions of these men were often frustrated by the recalcitrance of congregations who refused to meet their exacting standards or denied their claims to precedence is amply demonstrated by squabbles such as those between Thomas Pestell and his congregation in Packington (Leicestershire) over tithes and vexatious litigation.47 In spatial as well as social terms, men like him came from a different world from that of their parishioners, ensuring that they were often perceived as ‘visitors’ rather than ‘occupants’. And when such men brought their wives with them, the potential for conflict was all the greater since – until the later seventeenth century at least – parish topography lacked the appropriate coordinates for the location of clerical marriage.48 Clergymen might also find themselves excluded from the process of parish government. As we have seen, informal oligarchies were not unknown in late medieval communities but the development of select vestries consolidated social and political power in the hands of the chief inhabitants. The most celebrated example is that of the ‘company’ of Swallowfield (Wiltshire) who met in secret and communicated their priorities to the minister only when he could help them to address specific problems like immigration control.49 As elsewhere, the emergence of the select vestry was designed to confine the prerogatives of decision-making and resource-allocation to the better sort of parishioners who, as at St Mary’s pessimistic reading of the social impact of pew disputes, see Catherine Wright, ‘The Spatial Ordering of Community in English Church Seating, 1550–1700’ (unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2001); a more upbeat assessment in Christopher Marsh, ‘Order and Place in England, 1580–1640: The View From the Pew’, Journal of British Studies, 44 (2005): 3–26. 46   Quoting Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion, p. 32. 47   Christopher Haigh, ‘The Troubles of Thomas Pestell: Parish Squabbles and Ecclesiastical Politics in Caroline England’, Journal of British Studies, 41 (2002): 403–28; and, more generally, his ‘Anticlericalism and Clericalism, 1580–1640’, in Nigel Aston and Matthew Cragoe (eds), Anticlericalism in Britain, 1500–1914 (London, 2000), pp. 18–41. 48   Helen L. Parish, Clerical Marriage and the English Reformation (Aldershot, 2000). 49   Steve Hindle, ‘Hierarchy and Community in the Elizabethan Parish: The Swallowfield Articles of 1596’, Historical Journal, 42 (1999): 835–51.

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Islington, disdained their poorer neighbours as ‘refractorie and contentious persons of mean condition [who] had endeavoured to resist and hinder [their] good determinations and proceedings’ at parish meetings. Little wonder that there should be occasional backlashes, as in the coups of lesser ratepayers staged at Ashwell (Hertfordshire) or Braintree (Essex).50 As these examples suggest, the parish community had effectively been redefined, perhaps even recast, by the late sixteenth century. Two groups in particular were marginalized, perhaps even severed altogether, from the processes of intra-parochial negotiation. The first was the poor. Once principal participants in the rituals of incorporation and commemoration, especially funerals, through which the Christian community was constructed and consecrated, they became dispensable by the late 1500s.51 Spatially speaking, the poor found themselves increasingly confined to the rearmost seats in the church, where their noise, pollution and peril could be kept at an appropriate distance. If they were recognized by the parish officers as deserving (that is, respectable and long-settled) residents of the parish, they might be treated with benevolence and sympathy under the terms of the Elizabethan poor laws, which envisaged relief in cash (pensions of sixpence a week) or kind (occasional subsidies of fuel, clothing, shoes or rent).52 Still, in retaining a highly visible presence as members, however marginal, to the community, they fared considerably better than the second group, the parish’s deceased ancestors, who had once been instrumental in the meta-physical topography. In the social matrix dictated by late medieval theology, the human community had by definition included not only the living but also the dead, who were linked together by the power of intercessory prayer. But after the ‘death of purgatory’, the boundaries of that community were redrawn, the power of prayer restricted and the agency of the dead in the supernatural economy diminished.53 The community of the late Elizabethan parish was, accordingly, constituted less in the meta-physical space of intercession than in the real time of the here and now. To be sure, some forms of commemoration remained central to the parish economy, but the material provision of the seventeenth-century endowed charity – providing for perpetual doles of cash or bread to rigorously defined groups of respectable inhabitants – was but a pale shadow of the towering edifices of perpetual chantry or fraternity foundations.54 Even so, parish benefactors confidently encroached on church space over which they claimed proprietorial interest: the monument to the   Hindle, ‘Political Culture’, p. 132 (Islington); Hindle, On the Parish?, p. 191 (Ashwell); Wrightson, ‘Politics of the Parish’, pp. 28–9 (Braintree). 51   The better sort stipulated with increasing regularity and firmness that the poor should be denied hospitality on such occasions. See Hindle, On the Parish?, pp. 122–3. 52  Ibid., pp. 379–98. 53   Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford, 2002). 54   Steve Hindle ‘“Good, Godly and Charitable Uses”: Endowed Charity and the Relief of Poverty in Rural England, c. 1550–1750’, in Anne Goldgar and Robert Frost (eds), Institutional Culture in Early Modern Society (Leiden, 2004), pp. 164–88. 50

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lawyer Sir Lawrence Tanfield in Burford (Oxfordshire) is perhaps only the best of many examples of an early Stuart gentleman seeking to monopolize communal space with his own tomb, in his case all the more pointedly given his notoriously antagonistic relationship with his tenants.55 Intra-parochial controversies of this kind were, in time-honoured fashion, best resolved through ritualized acts of reconciliation, yet the post-reformation church was denuded of virtually all the processions and festivities which had been the lifeblood of corporate Christianity. It was no accident that one of the very few rituals to survive the battles over communal sociability was the beating of the bounds at rogationtide. This was a ritual explicitly designed to reaffirm the spatial boundaries of the parish. The annual perambulation was ‘a corporate manifestation of the village community’, both reflective, and constitutive, of a sense of belonging to the parish.56 Yet it is significant that the following century saw considerable controversy over entitlement to participate. In a characteristic illustration of ecclesiastical intervention, the archdeacon of Berkshire insisted as late as 1615 that perambulations be kept by ministers ‘with a sufficient number of the parishioners of all sorts, aswel of the elder as younger sort, for the better knowledge of the circuits and bounds of the parish’.57 From as early as 1559, however, other prelates enjoined clergymen to walk the parishes as they were accustomed, but only ‘with the curate and the substantial men of the parish’.58 As might be expected, restrictions on participation were also geographical and jurisdictional. Thus Bishop Howson of Oxford stipulated in 1628 that the numbers walking be ‘restrained and limitted by the minister and the church-wardens and some other substantial men of your parish’, in order that perambulations ‘be not overburthensome’, ‘especially with out-commers’ from other parishes.59 Like wakes and church-ales, it was feared that rogationtide festivities might all too easily tempt the migrant poor of adjacent parishes to take advantage of hospitality and thus to subvert the spatially ‘exclusive’ purpose of perambulations. Intra-communal priorities of parish elites, to move to our second sphere, had profound implications for extra-parochial relations. In particular, the control of  M.S. Gretton, Burford Past and Present (London, 1920), pp. 55–6, 73–81; and more generally Heal and Holmes, Gentry, pp. 338–41. 56  Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 65. 57   Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Early Stuart Church, ed. Kenneth Fincham (2 vols, Woodbridge, 1994), vol. 1, p. 132. 58   Tudor Royal Proclamations 1485–1603, eds P.L. Hughes and J.F. Larkin (3 vols, New Haven, 1964–9), vol. 2, p. 122; see also Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Period of the Reformation, ed. W.H. Frere (3 vols, London, 1910), vol. 3, p. 264 (Archbishop Grindal, 1571). 59   Visitation Articles, ed. Fincham, pp. 197–8. On the increasing exclusivity of perambulation see Steve Hindle, ‘Beating the Bounds of the Parish: Order, Memory and Identity in the English Local Community, c. 1500–1700’, in Michael Halvorson and Karen Spierling (eds), Defining Community in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 205–27. 55

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immigration sat very comfortably with the priorities of ratepayers who under the terms of the Elizabethan poor laws of 1598 and 1601 were expected to fund a communal welfare system predicated on the notion that charity not only began but also ended at home. Failure to defend the parish boundaries against undesirables would, it was feared, prejudice the interest of the ancient, settled deserving poor. The worst-case scenario was that at Layston (Hertfordshire) where the rector complained in 1636 that twenty years of unregulated migration had allowed at least eighty welfare scroungers to infiltrate the parish, exhausting the resources of poor rates and endowed charity alike. This fear of ‘poor strangers crept amongst us’ was ubiquitous, until a federal co-ordinating structure for welfare republics was established in 1662, when the settlement laws clarified the conditions of local entitlement. Even into the eighteenth century, decisions about parochial responsibility were controversial and might entail ‘exclusion crises’ during which ‘strangers’, single mothers or newly-married migrant couples were hounded across parish boundaries.60 The Elizabethan poor laws thus reinforced communal boundaries, transforming each parish into a welfare republic staffed by its own elite of fund-managers. This transformation of the political culture was, moreover, achieved in full cooperation with the central institutions of the Tudor state. Parish officers gave Tudor and early Stuart governance a palpability and presence in the localities which it would otherwise have lacked, especially in those areas where the ‘natural governors’ of provincial England were too thinly settled to make any real contribution to the maintenance of order. The parish elites of rural England were therefore incorporated into the machinery of Tudor and Stuart government, a process which added a new depth and complexity to local social relations. Just as the early seventeenth-century parish was becoming less permeable in geographical terms, it was accommodating itself to the political demands of the regime, and parish elites even began to wield influence in the extra-parochial politics of county and realm: attending petty sessions in their capacity as parish officers; dispensing legal judgment in their role as grand or trial jurors; and exercising political choice in parliamentary elections by virtue of their status as substantial freeholders.61 To be sure, the social area of even relatively humble villagers might extend a dozen or so miles from the church in which they were baptized, but that of the better sort of the local community now stretched at least as far as the county town, and arguably even as far as Westminster. This was especially true of those prosperous individuals who either on their own behalf or acting in the interests of the parish drew upon the authority of the state to settle their disputes in the law courts. The looser points of contact represented by Chancery or the Exchequer in the Middle Ages were stabilized and intensified during the unprecedented boom in litigation which took place between 1560 and 1640. The result was that the stream of   Hindle, On the Parish, pp. 313–25.   Hindle, Social Change, chap. 8 (due to inflation, many more people now qualified under the forty-shilling threshold for the franchise established in 1430). 60

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instructions from the secular and ecclesiastical authorities – proclamations from the crown, visitations from the bishop, articles of enquiry from the magistrates, jury charges from the assize judge – which already poured into the parish, was swollen by a hailstorm of writs, judgments and decrees from the central courts of common law and equity. While the intra-parochial polity changed only gradually in the early modern period (though it doubtless operated at an enhanced pace), the growth of the Tudor state entailed a radical transformation in the nature of extraparochial politics. The most radical discontinuity of all, however, took place in the metaparochial sphere. In addition to the recasting of the geographies of the afterlife, the emergence of Calvinism as the official creed of the English church entailed further transformations. The doctrine of predestination distinguished even among the living, dividing parishioners into a tiny minority of the elect who, although eternally anxious about their own soteriological prospects, were destined for salvation and a multitude of unregenerate sinners who were condemned to the everlasting fires of hell. Those who exhibited the outward signs of election – piety, charity, thrift and worldly success amongst them – considered themselves to be members of a household of faith which by definition transcended the parish boundary, reaching outward in the spiritual affinities of collective fasting, prayer meeting and sermon gadding. The Godly therefore straddled intra-, extra- and meta-parochial politics, participating in an increasing national culture of bible reading and asceticism, and distancing themselves from the ‘profanity’ and ‘superstition’ of those of their neighbours who remained wedded to the oral world of local custom and ‘popular culture’.62 Was this the point at which the term ‘parochial’ – in the sense of insular, backward-looking, small-minded, perhaps even xenophobic – first acquired its pejorative connotations? III Reviewing the political topography of the English parish during the three centuries under consideration, we find elements of stability, evolutionary change and dramatic transformation. The physical shell or fabric of the church building emerges as the strongest continuity. Even when there were attempts, in the early seventeenth century, to hold parish vestries elsewhere (be it in alehouses or private dwellings) parishioners actively sought to retain the customary practice of meeting in the church. Moreover, after the great age of building and architectural embellishment in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the physical exterior of the parish church (its sculptures, images and glass aside) looked little different in 1640 than it had in 62

  Patrick Collinson, ‘Elizabethan and Jacobean Puritanism as Forms of Popular Religious Culture’, in Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (eds), The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (London, 1996), esp. pp. 46–56; Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2000), chap. 2.

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1500. Despite the very significant upheaval of the intervening period, the church building itself endured as the primary focus of worship, and perhaps even identity, within local society. Intensification of existing tensions represents evolutionary change. Compared to pre-Reformation lights, chantries, fraternities and pilgrimages, novel modes of post-reformation voluntarism proved more difficult to contain. In the run-up to the Civil War in particular, Puritans and sectaries (who found themselves dissatisfied with a liturgy and church government they considered but half-reformed) sought less to supplement but rather to replace parochial worship with religious activities outside the local church and beyond the communal boundary. The fasts, biblereadings, prayer meetings and sermon-gadding of the hotter sort of Protestants represented open and ever-more-frequent challenges to the Church of England.63 Extra-parochial ties to ecclesiastical and fiscal authorities also intensified. Following occasional experiments with parish subsidies in the late Middle Ages, the presence of royal tax assessors was institutionalized by the time of the hearth taxes of the 1660s and 1670s.64 A similar pattern is evident with respect to episcopal jurisdiction over parish affairs. The authority of the bishops was, as we have seen, of very long-standing, although the increased regularity of visitation articles and the growing self-consciousness of the churchwarden as broker between the social networks of the neighbourhood and the formal authority of ecclesiastical justice ensured that parishioners were even more conscious of diocesan influence in 1640 than they had been in 1440.65 Dramatic change, of course, has also been observed, most notably in salvation doctrine and local government duties. Iconophobia, furthermore, transformed the arrangement and appearance of church interiors: memorials were chiselled, images defaced, windows smashed and walls white-washed. Spatially speaking, multifocal divine worship, in which parishioners enjoyed significant choice between a large number of altars and images before which mass could be celebrated and prayers could be said, evolved into mono-focal concentration on the word of God propagated from the pulpit. Late medieval liturgical variety gave way to scriptural fundamentalism. There was equally profound reorganization of those liminal spaces which had traditionally served as foci for intra-communal activity. The church houses which had once been so common in late medieval England fell into disrepair, their function as a charitable and convivial resource for all the inhabitants of the parish being only partly fulfilled by their successors, the almshouses, whose terms of endowment often stipulated that residence and charity was to be restricted 63

  Beat Kümin, ‘Voluntary Religion and Reformation Change in Eight Urban Parishes’, in Patrick Collinson and John Craig (eds), The Reformation in English Towns, 1500–1640 (Basingtstoke, 1998), pp. 175–89. 64   Michael J. Braddick, Parliamentary Lay Taxation in Seventeenth-Century England (Woodbridge, 1994), pp. 241–52. 65   John S. Craig, ‘Cooperation and Initiatives: Elizabethan Churchwardens and the Parish Accounts of Mildenhall’, Social History, 18 (1993): 357–80.

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only to the honourable, perhaps even the honorary, poor. Ales and wakes which had traditionally raised funds for the church and the poor soon came under the disapproving scrutiny of disciplinarian campaigns. Revellers were driven from the churchyard to the village green and subsequently into tippling houses. The balance between communal and fragmented sociability tipped towards the latter, a mode of socialization which was much more difficult to police. Merry England was on the ropes, as reformers and revellers fought an attritional battle over the times and spaces thought appropriate for customary celebrations.66 Widening the perspective, our preliminary sketch of the spatial dynamics of the Reformation(s), state formation and social differentiation suggests that longterm developments in English parishes cannot be adequately conceptualized as a transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, from localism to universalism or as processes resulting in its ‘secularization’ or ‘breakdown’.67 Traces of each of these can be found, but contrasting evidence is equally prominent. Early modern ‘disenchantment’, for example, occurred in some areas (like side chapels), while others (churchyards) were vigorously ‘de-profanized’.68 Elements of Gemeinschaft survived in pressures to attend corporate communion and while English people became increasingly mobile, when they were laid to rest, relatives and executors very frequently sought to identify them not as members of a generalized community of corporate Christians, but as inhabitants of a particular parish.69 Inscriptions on gravestones symbolized that strong sense of place and belonging, which – in ever-varying configurations – underpinned the mental landscapes of English parishioners. The key process emerging from this study is one of bifurcation or ‘layering’, in which the spiritual and secular functions of the parish were redefined in radically different ways (see Figure 8.3). On the one hand, the ecclesiastical community became ever more porous, in the sense that the parish struggled to defend its spiritual preeminence in the face of confessional fragmentation. On the other, 66

  Peter Clark, ‘The Alehouse and the Alternative Society’, in D.H. Pennington and K.V. Thomas (eds), Puritans and Revolutionaries (Oxford, 1978), pp. 47–82; Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion, pp. 44–72; Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1994), chap. 4–5. 67   Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society (Cambridge, 2001 [originally 1887]); Smith, ‘Modernization’; Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in PreRevolutionary England (Harmondsworth, 1964), p. 484 and chap. 12 (breakdown/ secularization). 68  Eamon Duffy, ‘The Disenchantment of Space: Salle Church and the Reformation’, in James D. Tracy and Marguerite Ragnow (eds), Religion and the Early Modern State (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 324–47; David Dymond, ‘God’s Disputed Acre’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 50 (1999): 464–97; a conceptual overview in Will Coster and Andrew Spicer, ‘Introduction: The Dimensions of Sacred Space in Reformation Europe’, in Coster and Spicer, Sacred Space, pp. 1–16. 69   Keith D.M. Snell, Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity and Welfare in England and Wales, 1700–1950 (Cambridge, 2006), chap. 8.

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the secular community was strengthened (to the point of near-impermeability) by the execution of new governmental responsibilities, especially the relief of the poor and the policing of settlement. Consciousness of the location of the physical thresholds of belonging became imperative precisely because of the high economic costs of unchecked migration.

Key: ‘religious activities’

c. 1350 ‘secular activities’ influence from ecclesiastical authority influence from secular authority

This figure has intentionally been removed for copyright reasons. extra-parochial engagement To view this image, please refer to the printed version of this book accessibility

c. 1640 Figure 8.3 The functional differentiation of the English parish c.1350–1640 The peculiarity and ambiguity of the English case lies in the fact that the ‘civil parish’ created by sixteenth-century social policy was not a new territorial unit at all, but the result of the incorporation of the existing ecclesiastical community into the machinery of the Tudor state. Thereafter, analytically speaking, the constitution of space no longer occurred within the integrated framework of a primarily religious unit (with informal secular duties) under moderate external supervision, as had been the case in the late Middle Ages. Rather, it now took place in the distinct domains of the ‘ecclesiastical parish’ (where Church and state authorities made intense efforts to stem sociofugal tendencies) and the ‘civil parish’ (where crown, magistrates and parish officers worked towards a

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well-ordered and exclusive commonwealth). In reality, of course, the two units encompassed the same people within the same boundaries, but – depending on individuals’ role and context – the functional differentiation of their environment led to dramatically divergent experiences of political space. Similarly, in line with their various historiographical perspectives present-day observers might come to radically different conclusions in their assessment of the early modern parish in general and of sixteenth-century change in particular. This variety, we suggest, owes much to the interplay of agents, objects and atmosphere in early modern local society.

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Chapter 9

Petitioning Places and the Credibility of Opinion in the Public Sphere in Seventeenth-Century England David Zaret

The ‘public sphere’ is an unavoidable topic in commentary on political space. Unlike the German antecedent concept, Öffentlichkeit, developed by Jürgen Habermas over forty years ago, the English term has explicit spatial referents, when it is described as a widely-accessible arena, forum, realm, or space for political communication that invokes public opinion in support of contested claims. In exploring this topic, I have two objectives: first, to explore the problem of credibility for opinions expressed by petitioners in the early public sphere in the English Revolution; second, to demonstrate the utility of sociological writings on a spatial concept – place – for studying this problem. In recent studies of the public sphere in mid-seventeenth-century England, a key unsettled issue is the problem of credibility. Against formidable obstacles, what lent credibility to political claims in popular settings in the 1640s, when petitioners lobbied Parliament to advance contested political agendas? The concept of a public sphere denotes popular participation in political communication that involves more than mere reception of broadcast messages – otherwise, the concept applies to symbolic displays of authority in heraldry, pageantry and processions, to a public realm not unlike a theatre where applause is compulsory. Popular participation in contestation over rival political views – by petitioning, for example – is central to the very idea of a public sphere. This violated communicative norms of secrecy and privilege shared by contemporaries of nearly all religious and political persuasions in the English Revolution, excepting some radical sectaries and writers. Later, in the turbulent aftermath of the Popish plot and the Exclusion crisis just before and after 1680, affirmation of the potential rationality of popular opinions in politics was facilitated by deism and natural religion as they displaced Puritan Calvinism in the Whig opposition. This eliminated religious obstacles to a pluralist view of politics based on principles of consent and tolerance. However, from 1640 to 1660 there was scarce, if any, support for these principles. Royalists remained wedded to patriarchal and organic worldviews, and not notably more so than adherents of parliamentary factions. Contemporaries just as strongly opposed ‘innovation’, viewing it as deviance, antithetical to all social order. In the early 1640s, leaders of parliamentarian and royalist factions concurred ‘in an ideological

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rejection of change’. Later, even radical ideas were ‘frequently expressed in a phantasmagoric historicism like the Levellers’ dreams of the halcyon days of Edward the Confessor’. Under such conditions, how did contemporaries build a public sphere, when widely-shared habits of thought militated against perceptions of credibility for expressions of contestable opinions by anyone who lived outside the charmed inner-circle of politics? Current historical research describes the expansion of popular discussion of public issues, links this to shifting political imperatives, and explores social contexts for popular political discourse. But what remains unclear is how this expansion surmounted or circumvented deep-seated assumptions that attributed positive consequences to free speech only under very limited circumstances: when it occurred in ‘councils’, for example, in Parliament, the Privy Council, or the councils of municipal corporations. Outside such corporate places, expressions of contestable opinions on public issues were construed, at best, as presumption, more likely as factious or seditious libel. I argue that the emplacement of popular political conversations – in particular, of drawing up, signing, and presenting petitions – not only facilitated expressions of contestable opinions but also impeded their credibility. Places of provenance impeded credibility because, when linked to particular circumstances and persons, opinions with any critical content were liable to perceptions of libel. The relocation of political claims to a virtual place, in print, reinforced credibility; this concealed petitioning places and thereby deflected perceptions of presumption or libel. This spatial analysis of credibility derives from recent work in sociology on the credibility of truth-claims in science, which in turn builds on studies of science in seventeenth-century England. The Public Sphere At a conference convened in 1989 to celebrate and discuss the belated publication in English of Habermas’s Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, I described the rise of a public sphere in seventeenth-century England, which, I argued, occurred in an earlier, more popular milieu than the one identified by Habermas. I also argued, with no more success, that a key assumption by Habermas is untenable, namely that more critical, rational habits of thought arose in the public sphere precisely because that communicative space isolated political discourse from what Habermas   Conrad Russell, Unrevolutionary England (London, 1990), p. xvii; Mark Kishlansky, ‘Ideology and Politics in the Parliamentary Armies, 1645–1649’, in John Morrill (ed.), Reactions to the English Civil War (London, 1982), p. 165.    Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge MA, 1991); David Zaret, ‘Religion, Science and Printing in the Public Spheres in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge MA, 1992), pp. 212–35.

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then called material civilization. Capitalism, printing, and experimental science, I suggested, were aspects of material civilization that, far from contaminating the public sphere, were in fact constitutive of it. We should therefore not imagine the public sphere as a space demarcated from civil society. The resounding skepticism that greeted these claims would have been less if the conference included more historians who worked on early modern Europe. My specific arguments flowed from widely-accepted, general premises of these historians, for example, a predilection for exploring the broad terrain where elite and popular cultures overlapped in pre-industrial Europe rather than presuming a sharp boundary between them. Over the last decade, references to an emergent or early public sphere have proliferated in historical studies of early modern England, for example in Ann Hughes’s work on the controversies provoked by Thomas Edwards’s polemical masterpiece, Gangraena, which ‘both illustrates and was made possible by the existence of a “public sphere” in 1640s London’; or in Kate Peters’s study of Quaker pamphleteering, which shows how ‘the availability and use of print changed the nature of political participation, involving ever wider audiences in debate … and even ushering in notions of public opinion and political consent’. Proliferating references in recent historical scholarship to the public sphere in early modern England coexist with widespread disagreement over the precise meaning of claims about public opinion in this era. Was popular participation a substantial feature of the early public sphere? Or was the public sphere only an ideal

   With regard to another boundary delineated by Habermas, Phil Withington shows how the supportive structure afforded for public conversations by civic corporations ‘poses significant problems for Habermas’s distinction between “the state” … and an emergent “public”’. See his The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 126–7. The same conclusion is advanced by Peter Lake and Steven Pincus, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England’, Journal of British Studies, 45 (2006): 292.   Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004), p. 409; Kate Peters, Print Culture and the Early Quakers (Cambridge, 2005), p. 194. See also Steven Pincus, ‘“Coffee Politicians Does Create”: Coffee Houses and Restoration Political Culture’, Journal of Modern History, 67 (1995): 807–34; Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, 1994), pp. 3–26; Alexandra Halasz, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1997); David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic (Cambridge, 1999); Michelle O’Callaghan, ‘“Now Thou May’st Speak Freely”: Entering the Public Sphere in 1614’, in Stephen Clucas and Rosalind Davies (eds), The Crisis of 1614 and the Addled Parliament (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 64–79; Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2003); Withington, Politics of Commonwealth; David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Princeton, 2000).

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upheld by Levellers and a few writers like John Milton and George Wither, who alone ‘sought to create anything approaching a Habermasian public sphere’. Most of this disagreement can be dispelled if we acknowledge that, for historical research, some themes in Habermas’s work are irrelevant. Studies of the public sphere by historians rely on a ‘spatialized’ understanding of the public sphere, ‘conceiving of it as a space or domain of free expression and argument that is accessible to any social group’. This certainly fails to capture the full complexity of the concept: for Habermas, the public sphere is a utopian ideal of communication as well as a space for communication. But what is lost in the spatialized rendition is the least tenable aspect of Habermas’s work: setting as the normative goal of the public sphere the transcendence of particular interests, the securing of a universal interest, a consensus delineated by a critical or pure reason that is ‘undistorted’ by social differences. Just as Tudor and early-Stuart writers recoiled from intimations of faction that imperiled the organic unity of the social body, critical theorists reject the suggestion that particular interests, negotiation and comprise are, like diamonds, forever. This last point indicates why we should measure the rise of the public sphere, not against utopian ideals, but against a historical point of departure – communicative norms of secrecy and privilege, which rested on patriarchal-organic world views. At issue are four variable dimensions of the public sphere: more participation; less censorship; more explicit appeals to reason that militate against arguments based on social status; and more claims to communicative freedom. There was less, not no, censorship in the 1640s following the collapse of effective controls on the press, which facilitated a vibrant world of competing political texts. Many printed political texts in the 1640s and 1650s were propaganda – that is to say, published at the instigation of grandees in support of partisan points of view. Why is this incompatible with claims about an emerging public sphere? It is indisputably true that ‘[p]ropaganda involved not so much rational evaluation of political issues, or a search for truth, but rather the presentation of an exclusive viewpoint’. However, this militates only against hyper-idealism in critical theory and not a historicallygrounded concept of a public sphere that is amenable to historical inquiry.

  Jason Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (Aldershot, 2004), p. 332. See also Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering, pp. 272–5.    Harold Mah, ‘Phantasies of the Public Sphere: Rethinking the Habermas of Historians’, Journal of Modern History, 72 (2000): 154.   In contrast, the political crisis in 1614 over the Addled Parliament vividly appeared in scribal texts. While these texts ‘explored the contours and implications of the disagreement between king and commons with relative freedom and energy, the press was silent on the matter’. Joad Raymond, ‘“The Language of the Public”: Print, Politics and the Book Trade in 1614’, in Clucas and Davies, Crisis of 1614, p. 95.    Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, pp. 331–2. 

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Thus, we can readily see why some historians are ‘not concerned with the actual existence of Habermas’s idealized public sphere’ or with ‘all the normative and conceptual Habermassian baggage that usually attends the use of the term’. However, this raises one last question: how far can we modify the concept of a public sphere and still retain its utility for the overarching theme of democratic citizenship and politics?10 In answering this question, participation – the first of the four variable dimensions of the public sphere listed above – is crucial. A public sphere does not exist if participation is limited to receiving messages, for example buying pamphlets or hearing sermons. Popular participation does not inhere in addresses by authors to ‘readers’ in prefaces to printed texts, or in writings by literary elites – for example, satires by Wither in 1614 or radical polemics by Milton – that envision a public sphere.11 Opportunities must exist for discussion, debate and sending messages from peripheral places to the political centre. Without evidence of these activities in peripheral places, specifically as they mobilize and invoke opinion in order to lobby political elites, references to the public sphere are severed from the historical (and normative) underpinnings of the liberal democratic model of the public sphere. Place Over the last decade, a spatial turn has occurred in sociological research and theory, which runs parallel to trends in historical scholarship. Drawing upon recent work by geographers, sociologists are actively exploring spatial themes that previously attracted little attention, aside from a few, albeit notable studies.12 In    Pincus, ‘Coffee Houses’, p. 808; Peter Lake and Michael Questier, ‘Puritans, and the “Public Sphere” in Early Modern England: The Edmund Campion Affair in Context’, Journal of Modern History, 72 (2000): 590; and see Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 17–18; Hughes, Gangraena, p. 414. For the opposite position, see Mah, ‘Phantasies’. 10   For Habermas, a ‘popular public sphere emerged only in competition with the literary public sphere of the late eighteenth century’ and cannot be located in earlier centuries ‘without somehow changing the very concept of the public sphere to such a degree that it becomes something else’: ‘Concluding Comments’, in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, p. 465. 11   For example Halasz, Marketplace of Print, chap. 5; Lake and Questier, ‘Puritans, Papists, and the “Public Sphere”’, pp. 590–91; O’Callaghan, ‘Entering the Public Sphere’, pp. 73–4; Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, p. 151. 12   For example Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, 1977); Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Primitive Classification (London, 1963); Barry Schwartz, Vertical Classification (Chicago, 1981); Georg Simmel, Soziologie (Leipzig, 1908), pp. 614–708.

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empirical research and theoretical writings by sociologists, this spatial turn leads in different directions. In theoretical writings on modernization and postmodernity, a dominant line of thought argues that institutions are no longer anchored or embedded in space, as economic and technological change attenuates space as a constraining and organizing feature of modern life.13 Under imperatives of capital accumulation and political control, time conquers space. Thus, assertions by social theorists about the importance of spatial issues lead to claims about the declining importance of space as a structural factor in modern societies. Very different conclusions arise from empirical studies of place in several lines of inquiry, most notably, urbanization and urban communities, design professionals, and the rise of science.14 In these studies, place is central for understanding continuity and change in the modern world. Place is not space. As Bourdieu notes in his discussion of space as the material side of habitus, ‘the continuous, homogenous space of geometry’ is not the same ‘as the practical space of practice, with its dyssymmetries, its discontinuities, and its directions conceived as substantial properties’.15 Put simply, place emerges from the intersection of space and socially-structured experiences. According to Gieryn, place is a ‘unique spot’, a ‘space filled up by people, practices, objects, and representations’. Gieryn’s codification of the concept of place in sociology is compatible with similar, though less precisely delineated concepts advanced by historians, for example, in Miles Ogborn’s work on London’s geographies from 1680 to 1780, which investigates ‘the spaces and places of the past – and of the banks, newspapers, actresses and umbrellas that fill them’.16 Gieryn’s succinct definition of place is that it is firstly a geographic location; secondly has a material form that ‘combines natural environment and built architecture’; and thirdly is imbued with meaning as ‘the object of labile and contested narrations and imaginations’. More than ‘setting or backdrop’, place brings people together in immediate and proximate co-presence, and has profound sociological implications. Place ‘stabilizes and gives durability to social structural categories, differences and hierarchies … embodies and secures otherwise intangible cultural norms, identities, memories … These   For example Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Ithaca, 1991); J. Nicholas Entrikin, The Betweenness of Place: Towards a Geography of Modernity (Baltimore, 1991); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford, 1990); Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge, 1990). 14   See Thomas F. Gieryn, ‘A Space for Place in Sociology’, Annual Review of Sociology, 26 (2000): 463–96. 15   Bourdieu, Theory of Practice, pp. 117–18. See also Dennis Cosgrove, ‘Landscape and Landschaft’, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, 35 (2004): 57–71. 16  Miles Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies 1680–1780 (London, 1998), p. 1. See also Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, pp. 88–9: Place implies ‘a broadly defined sense of structure – social, architectural, and geographical’ that ‘formed the social and material fabric of cities and boroughs’. 13

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consequences result uniquely (but incompletely) from material forms assembled at a particular spot, in part via the meanings that people invest in a place’. In this rendition, place has power, even agency. Places are constructed, but once built have enabling and constraining consequences, for example ‘[p]laces reflect and reinforce hierarchy’.17 The concept of place has immediate relevance for the problem of credibility. Steve Shapin has shown how the authority of scientific knowledge in seventeenthcentury England was sustained by ‘its transit to and through a public space’, the experimental spaces in homes maintained by gentlemen governed by norms of trust and virtue.18 Today the credibility of science relies on the architectural standardization of laboratory buildings.19 Modern laboratories are examples of the power of place inasmuch as the credibility of scientific truth-claims is sustained by an emplacement that deflects awkward questions about the crucial ceteris paribus assumption in science – the assumption of ideal equivalence in the practices of scientists that underpins reproducible results. Via trust in genteel homes in the seventeenth century or architectural standardization today, scientific places facilitate the disappearance of all the messy contingencies relating to the provenance of truth claims. The important paradox of place and truth, identified by Gieryn, is that all truth-claims have a provenance – they arise in this or that laboratory. But ‘as they become truth, these claims shed the contingent circumstances of their making’, as they pass ‘from place-saturated contingent claims to place-less transcendent truths’. Special places ‘allow claims to escape place, to transcend its suffocating particulars’.20 I suggest a parallel argument for political claims and the authority of public opinion in the English Revolution. Place is important for understanding the eruption of popular expressions of opinion, in alehouses, churches, coffeehouses, homes, marketplaces, streets and taverns. Some places were especially conducive to activities intended to constitute and invoke opinion by petitions. However, perceptions of places of provenance in terms of their location, participants and conversations, especially when such places were outside the extant corporate structure, gravely threatened the credibility of opinions advanced by petitioners.

 Thomas F. Gieryn, ‘Three Truth-Spots’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 38 (2002), p. 113n; Gieryn, ‘A Space for Place’, pp. 466, 472–4. 18   Steven Shapin, ‘The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England’, Isis, 79 (1988): 384; and his A Social History of Truth (Chicago, 1994), p. 409. 19   Peter Galison and Emily Thompson (eds), The Architecture of Science (Cambridge MA, 1999); Thomas F. Gieryn, ‘What Buildings Do’, Theory and Society, 31 (2002), pp. 35–74; Gieryn, ‘Three Truth Spots’, pp. 113–32. 20   Gieryn, ‘Three Truth Spots’, p. 113. 17

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The Place of Petitioning Before the English Revolution, petitions were an essential, uncontroversial feature of everyday life. In religion, they were invoked metaphorically to explain prayer. Worldly petitions advanced every conceivable deferential request: for individual advancement or on behalf of a guild or municipality; for relief from debt, imprisonment or any other official disfavour; for redress of individual grievances (as a bill to an equity court); and for collective grievances. For the latter, petitioning in early Tudor England was ‘one of the key mechanisms of interaction between popular politics and the state’.21 Petitioners approached all seats of authority, from the monarchy on down the corporate hierarchy to the chambers where common councilors and wardens deliberated on municipal and guild affairs. But for all purposes, including redress of grievances, petitioning was governed by rhetorical and performative rules that accorded no legitimacy to popular political discussion and sharply separated traditional petitions from public, ideological pronouncements. Hence, no contradiction existed between the right of subjects to petition – which was a commonplace in contemporary thought – and the restricted model of political communication that derived from organic-patriarchal worldviews. Popular discussion of public issues was held to have inevitably negative outcomes because contemporaries understood the issue as a choice between reasoned debate under conditions of secrecy in ‘councils’ (a point to which I will return) and demagogic oratory in public. The point of departure for this reasoning was classical rhetoric, and a widely-shared assumption in early modern England: commoners constituted a ‘many-headed monster’ whose irrationality precluded a role in politics. Norms of secrecy and privilege flowed from ingrained habits of thought that led contemporaries of nearly all religious and political persuasions to conclude that, at the hands of commoners, opinion was inherently irrational. The idea that irrationality inversely correlates with rank, a central theme in organic and patriarchal conceptions of politics, received added support from Protestant emphasis on the corruption of reason. In this context, irrationality was not (as Locke would later argue) understood as a contingent condition, shaped by material and educational privations. Claims by commoners to a ‘voice’ or right to participate in political communication were perceived as irrational as a foot claiming the prerogative of a brain. As well as to commoners, this applied to Cambridge-educated lawyers like John Stubbs, whose right hand was struck off with a cleaver in 1579 in punishment for writing The Discoverie of A Gaping Gulf Whereinto England Is Like To Be Swallowed by another French marriage, which offered unsolicited counsel to the 21

 Richard Hoyle, ‘Petitioning as Popular Politics in Early Sixteenth-Century England’, Historical Research, 75 (2002): 366. These petitionary practices were similar to those on the continent. See Beat Kümin and Andreas Würgler, ‘Petitions, Gravamina and the Early Modern State: Local Influence on Central Legislation in England and Germany (Hesse)’, Parliaments, Estates & Representation, 17 (1997): 43–6.

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Queen against marriage to the Catholic duke of Anjou. Stubbs was condemned for ‘offering to every most meanest person of judgment … authority to argue and determine, in every blind corner, at their several wills, of the affairs of public estate’. The situation was no different in early Stuart England, when, for example, the ‘greater openness, and liberty of discourse’ on political topics prompted King James to prohibit the practice, claiming such topics ‘are not fit themes of subjects for vulgar persons or common meetings’.22 Of course, contradictions existed between norms of secrecy and privilege and communicative practices. It was often necessary or expedient for political communication to transgress restrictive boundaries. For example, both before and after the English Revolution laxity in enforcing procedural rules allowed lobbyists and other interested parties to be active participants in deliberations of parliamentary committees.23 In Elizabethan and Jacobean England, prominent public figures such as the second Earl of Essex and the Duke of Buckingham courted popular support quietly behind the scenes, while publicly disclaiming ‘popularity’.24 Similar discrepancies between formal rules and practices existed in petitioning before the English Revolution. But as we shall see, these discrepancies were greatly magnified by many, often massive episodes of political petitioning after 1640. At the outbreak of the English Revolution, there was widespread popular interest in petitions. In London this was heightened by the processions that accompanied the conveyance of a petition to Parliament. For petitions from counties and municipalities, delivery to Westminster was the endpoint of a process that began in local public settings, often with bitter debates over the merits of a proposed petition. Petitions were printed, reprinted, reported in newspapers, described in personal letters, and attacked or defended in a correlative pamphlet literature. For promoters, receivers, opponents, and observers of these documents, petitioning was not conceived as an abstract individual right but as a medieval privilege that provided limited immunities to norms of secrecy. Petitions conveyed ‘grievances’. They neither invoked public opinion as a normative authority nor otherwise conveyed any intimation about subordinating politics to popular will – no more than prayer intimated anything other than submission to divine will. Rules surrounding the practice and rhetoric of petitioning highlighted deferential, juridical and spontaneous appearances in expressions of grievance. Deferential   Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture, p. 54, and see pp. 50–61; Stuart Royal Proclamations, eds James Larkin and Paul Hughes (2 vols, Oxford, 1973), vol. 1, p. 495. For more on Stubbs, see Natalie Mears, ‘Counsel, Public Debate, and Queenship’, The Historical Journal, 44 (2001), p. 468. 23  Chris Kyle and Jason Peacey, ‘“Under Cover of so much Coming and Going”: Public Access to Parliament and the Political Process in Early Modern England’, in Chris Kyle and Jason Peacey (eds), Parliament at Work (Woodbridge, 2002), pp. 1–23. 24   Thomas Cogswell, ‘The People’s Love: the Duke of Buckingham and Popularity’, in Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust and Peter Lake (eds), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain (Cambridge, 2002). 22

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rhetoric depicted petitioners as humble suitors, who ‘pray’ for relief. Deferential practice involved supplication, with submissive postures and rituals for presenting a petition to a petitioned authority. Grievances contained in petitions were framed as an apolitical conveyance of ‘information’ on local conditions, humbly submitted to inform a petitioned authority. Emphasis on spontaneity reinforced apolitical appearances: ‘So questionless may the members of the body politic, finding themselves wounded or weakened … by humble petition sue unto the King and Parliament … the very heart and head’. The writer of these comments, which defended petitions against bishops, describes the right to petition in terms of ‘freedom of information’.25 Like pain, petitions spontaneously convey information to the brain, an apolitical flow of information on local conditions to political centres. The distinction between an ideological pronouncement and a traditional petition is further illustrated by contemporary distinctions between ‘grievance’ and other words that signified criticism. Early in the reign of James I, a leading member of the Puritan gentry, Sir Francis Hastings, was questioned about his role in a Puritan petition from Northampton that members of the Privy Council thought was ‘seditious, malicious, factious’ for suggesting ‘that a thousand [Puritans] are discontented’. They were not ‘discontented’, protested Hastings, but ‘grieved’. Nearly a half century later, radical activists in the New Model Army used identical words to defend their petitions, which Parliament denounced in 1647: there was no ‘discontent’, only ‘grievances’.26 For us, the distinction is meaningless. But contemporaries drew fine distinctions between apolitical conveyance of grievance by petition and factious or libellous discontent. The sudden appearance of political petitioning in the 1640s involved printed petitions, and pamphlets with commentary on petitions. Though this immediately signals a departure from norms of secrecy and privilege, the innovation was not prompted by democratic principles. It was driven by political imperatives, initially from conflict between Charles I and the Long Parliament arising from threats by the Stuart monarchy to property and parliamentary authority. Subsequently, this conflict was compounded by factional politics within the Parliamentary alliance. Gathering signatures to petitions that were paraded to Parliament and then printed was one way to define party lines, gain popular support, overawe opponents, and lobby representatives. So was reprinting individual petitions gathered together in collections, such as Sir Thomas Aston’s 1642 collection of Royalist petitions that supported Charles and advocated repression of sectaries. This prompted a proposal

 T. Robinson, The Petitioners Vindication from Calumnie and Aspersion (1642), pp. 2–3. See also Anon., The Petition Of The Most Substantiall Inhabitants of .. London (1643), sig. A2r. 26   The Letters of Sir Francis Hastings, 1574–1609, ed. Claire Cross, Somerset Record Society, 69 (London, 1969), pp. 90–91; The Clarke Papers, ed. Charles H. Firth (2 vols, London, 1992), vol. 1, pp. 31, 36, 50–53. 25

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in An Appeale To The World In These Times of Extreme Danger for publishing a collection of pro-Parliament petitions.27 This use of petitioning as a political tactic magnified discrepancies between appearance and reality that had many precedents in pre-revolutionary England. Deceptive appearances provided petitioners with an important resource, enabling them to put an acceptable face on requests that could otherwise be viewed as factious or seditious. In late-Elizabethan England Puritan clerics led a carefully orchestrated petition campaign; and, as J.E. Neale noted long ago, ‘a false impression of spontaneous and general discontent had been created which temporarily deceived both council and queen’. Elaborate games of impression management by petition continued at the beginning of James I’s reign, including the circulation of petition forms with blank spaces, where organizers inserted local grievances ‘to avoid the suspicion of conspiracy’.28 In addition to factious discontent, discrepancies between appearance and reality in petitions flowed from libellous and malicious intent. Early in his reign, James invited his subjects to report grievances on monopolies and charters, but he warned of severe consequences ‘if we shall perceive that their petitions shall savor of humor, and tend only to slander and calumniation, and indeed have no other foundation but such as often happens in vulgar people, under pretense of seeking public redresses to utter private malice’. Later in his reign, the king observed that ‘the fair pretense’ of a ‘humble’ petition might disguise a frontal assault on royal prerogative. When discussing procedures for receiving petitions, members of the Addled Parliament (1614) acknowledged the danger that ‘petitions might contain libels or treasons’.29 Contemporaries were well aware that different particular interests – factional as well as personal – might lurk beneath the fair face of petition, which, on closer inspection, was libellous or seditious. When used as a political tactic in response to political necessity, petitioning had two consequences that greatly amplified discrepancies between idealized appearances and reality in petitionary expressions of grievance. Firstly, petitions promoted popular discussion of politics as an inherent feature of their production – more political talk was not simply a consequence of the availability of printed petitions. Promoters met to discuss the content of prospective petitions and make arrangements for circulating petitions for signatures. Competitive efforts to gather many signatures required yet more conversations. Secondly, these conversations occurred in places where they were most liable to perceptions of faction and libel – outside extant corporate structures. Printing was integral to the proliferation of political talk in petitioning. Printing not only made petitions more accessible to readers but also to subscribers. Subscription campaigns were quickly mounted  Thomas Aston, A Collection of Sundry Petitions (1642); Anon, An Appeale To The World (1642). 28   Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture, pp. 95–6. 29   Stuart Royal Proclamations, eds Larkin and Hughes, vol. 1, p. 13; James I, His Majesties Declaration (1622), pp. 5, 7; Proceedings in Parliament 1614, ed. Maija Jansson (Philadelphia, 1988), p. 86. 27

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by circulating printed petitions, usually in a crude, unembellished broadside edition, for the purpose of gathering signatures. In London these had blank spaces where Presbyterian activists could insert the name of their ward in the title of the petition. Royalists, Presbyterians and Independents all did this in the 1640s, and then subsequently published a different edition of their petitions for sale to the public.30 Petitions were read aloud in churches, sometimes supported with sermons intended to prompt listeners to subscribe. But reports of conflict and resistance indicate that conversations on petitions did not flow only one way, from promoters to potential subscribers. In 1641–42, exhortations to parishioners from clerics who wanted their flocks to sign petitions in support of Charles and the established liturgy encountered distinctly un-sheep-like responses. When this occurred in Canterbury, one witness reported ‘a great uproar … some did set their hands to it, others refuse’. A parishioner reported that his Isle of Ely vicar ‘pressed me so far for my reasons of refusing, until some coarse language passed between us’. In Chester, a prebend argued with parishioners who refused to sign a petition promoted on a Sunday by the Cathedral clergy. In Lincolnshire, a Stamford clergyman sent his clerk to obtain signatures to a petition in support of the established church government ‘and with those they could not prevail for their hands’ the clerk summoned a town alderman ‘to see if they could that way prevail with them’.31 Puritan clerics and other supporters of the Long Parliament also hectored potential subscribers and encountered resistance.32 Coercion and manipulation were widespread but decried. The ideal of informed consent to petitions was widely affirmed even as political grandees enlisted local gentry and clergy to act as whips, to persuade tenants and parishioners to sign. Not only was there more talk, but, as I noted above, talk in dangerous places. In some campaigns, individuals encountered petitions in corporate places, when petitions were initially proposed and circulated for subscription. Promoters organized subscription campaigns by wards, parishes, hundreds and counties. Petitions were read and signatures solicited in churches, guild halls, at municipal councils, ward moots and meetings of county grand juries. In 1645 and 1646, Presbyterian activists in London organized petitions by ward to lobby the Common Council of the City to prefer a like-minded petition to Parliament.33 Perceptions of faction were less likely when local authorities presented grievances on behalf   Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture, p. 241.   The Oxinden Letters 1607–1642, ed. Dorothy Gardiner (London, 1933), p. 232; London, British Library, Harleian Manuscripts 383, fol. 197; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Nalson Manuscript 13, fol. 66; Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 1998), p. 96. 32   For example The Fairfax Correspondence, ed. G.W. Johnson (2 vols, London, 1848), vol. 1, pp. 377–9, 391; Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (London, 1985), pp. 289–90. 33   Hughes, Gangraena, p. 337. 30 31

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of a corporate body than when petitions were organized and promoted outside corporate structures, when private associations of individuals met in homes, taverns, and sectarian congregations to debate strategy, frame petitions, and organize the process of gathering signatures and publishing petitions. However, many petition campaigns were organized and conducted partly or wholly outside corporate places. Before 1640, inns and taverns were common sites for political table-talk, fuelled by oral and scribal transmission of news. During the English Revolution, these places were nodes for the distribution of printed political pamphlets. Tavern clubs, as they were called by contemporaries, were sites where factions gathered to discuss political issues and strategies and promote petitions. Guildhalls provided another place for these activities, as did coffeehouses. Meetings of the Harringtonian Rota Club ‘alternated between a coffeehouse and a tavern’.34 In these places, petitioning in politics was the organizational analogue to sectarianism in religion. Both the gathering of separatist congregations and political petitioning cut across traditional residential affiliations of ward and parish, joining individuals in voluntary associations united by opinion. For example, in July 1643 an emerging Independent faction in London distributed printed advertisements that informed ‘well affected persons’ that from 4am until 8pm on July 19 at the Merchant Tailors Hall they could ‘hear and subscribe a petition to the Parliament’ for more active prosecution of the war against Charles. In addition, supporters who were gathering signatures to copies of the petition were requested to bring them to the Hall on the same day. This information was also available to readers of a newspaper, Special Passages, that had reprinted the advertisement. Peace petitioners who advocated an accommodation, on terms palatable to Charles, also used printed announcements to summon subscribers to meetings.35 In homes, inns and taverns conversations on petitioning politics covered general themes and also tactical and mundane organizational questions. When was it best to present a petition? How should money be raised to defray printing and distribution expenses? Hostile and sympathetic accounts of a meeting in a private home of a gardener for promoters of the January 1648 Leveller petition include a report by a Presbyterian cleric, who was persuaded by a parishioner to attend the meeting ‘to hear and judge of such objections and satisfaction as should be then brought con and pro’. Though the cleric was not persuaded, his own and Leveller accounts agree that the meeting featured conversation on stepping up pressure on Parliament to move ahead with radical reforms, and debate over tactical issues. Was it better to proceed with a massive, nationwide campaign for a new radical petition or ‘to frame something speedily’, possibly thanking Parliament for its previous votes against the King ‘because the large petition will be a long time before it be presented’? Electing the former course, attendees at the meeting appointed ‘treasurers’ and ‘collectors’ who were charged with obtaining  Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (New York, 1978), p. 98.   Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture, p. 248.

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and disbursing funds for printing and distributing the petition across the nation, ‘though the honest soldiers now at Whitehall would save them something in scattering them up and down in the counties’.36 These proceedings were guided, in part, by instructions in a letter from Leveller leaders that was circulated and read in other homes. The letter informs recipients that ‘many honest persons are resolved already’ to support the petition, and requests supporters to ‘appoint meetings … and there to select faithful men of public spirits’ who will transmit the petitions to supporters in towns and villages who will procure subscriptions. But a very different view of this letter and the London meeting emerges from hostile accounts, such as the one by the Presbyterian cleric: ‘The conspiracy seems to be formed, and the actings to be at hand: treasurers chosen, collectors appointed … emissaries sent abroad to stir up the people … ‘Tis indeed called a petition, but the whole frame and matter of it is nothing else but a calumny’, that is to say a libel.37 The key terms in these diametrically opposed representations of the 1648 meeting were widely used by all parties in debates over petitions and petitioning. For a petition’s supporters, ‘honest’ men of ‘public spirits’ assemble to petition, as appears in references by Lilburne and his allies to ‘diverse persons of several qualities’ who had come together ‘to consider of something for the good of the City and Kingdom’ in 1648. But for opponents, participants in these meeting were conspirators who sent ‘emissaries’ with ‘libels’ into towns and villages ‘to stir up the people’. In printed arguments over Leveller petitions in 1645, William Prynne described a summer meeting in the Windmill tavern, where radicals ‘lately conspired together’ to present yet another of the ‘scurrilous, scandalous, seditious, railing libels’ in the form of a petition.38 Vibrant petitioning in the English Revolution flowed from places and activities that had dangerous connotations. When linked to particular places outside the corporate structure – for example homes, taverns, coffeehouses – expressions of opinion on political issues were easily construed as libels. For contemporaries, libel was a well-known category for describing a malicious, false opinion, usually directed against a prominent, public person. Before 1640, a prominent mode of political communication consisted of railing, often pornographic libels – for example, in the mid-1620s, the ‘Duke of Fuckingham’ – circulated widely via   George Masterson, The Triumph Stain’d (1648), pp. 6–7, 25; [Walter Frost], A Declaration of Some Proceedings of Lt. Col John Lilburn (1648), p. 17; John Lilburne, A Whip For the Present House of Lords (1648), pp. 13–14; John Wildman, Truths Triumph (1648), p. 8. 37   [Frost], A Declaration, pp. 18, 20, 35. For an Independent pamphlet that reprints private letters with instructions for organizing a Presbyterian petition, see A New Birth of the City Remonstrance (1646), p. 5. 38   William Prynne, A Fresh Discovery of Some Prodigious New Wandring-BlasingStars, & Firebrands (1645), Sig. A1r, p. 17; John Lilburne, Innocency and Truth Justified (1646), p. 4. 36

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oral and scribal modes of communication for ‘a range of social classes, including the non-literate. They were widely disseminated … verse libels were copied or read aloud in private or public, circulated amongst friends and associates’.39 Contemporaries closely associated libels and popular expressions of opinion by particular persons in private places, an association which fuelled hostile accounts of specific petitioning places and persons. Opponents of a Huntingdonshire petition against the established liturgy accused puritan petitioners of meeting at ‘all public conventions of assizes, sessions, fairs, markets, and other public assemblies’ to obtain signatures. Opponents of a petition drive in Cornwall in support of the King and the established liturgy also described the places where promoters sought signatures: they ‘solicited hedgers at the hedge, plowmen at the plow, threshers in the barns’.40 When promoters of a petition in Newcastle in 1640 were questioned, evidence of their factious intent was not simply the content of their grievances to the Short Parliament (for example Popery and prerogative taxes) but information on the meetings in homes where the petition was framed, copied and made available for signatures. This discrediting tactic persisted after the Restoration, with the addition of coffeehouses as a site for petitioning. A petition from Norfolk parishioners against their conformable minister was attacked by a counter-petition, which reported that the gathering of signatures was ‘carried on at taverns & coffee houses’.41 Thus, the places of popular petitioning were as much an impediment as a resource for mobilizing and constituting public opinion. Contemporaries of all political and religious persuasions remained extremely wary of presumptuous, malicious, factious or seditious words and deeds. In the 1640s, virtually no one was inclined to abolish the distinction between a deferential request and factious or libellous imposition of popular will on politics. Assumptions that placed deference and patronage at the core of social life persisted and did not vanish or suddenly decline after the 1640s, any more than a near-universal antipathy towards innovation. Under these circumstances, it is not evident how the massive mobilization of public opinion in private places acquired credibility. Current historical research suggests simply that this activity was initially prompted by the sheer weight of political imperatives under conditions of civil war, and then acquired legitimacy as contemporaries gained experience with political petitioning: ‘An enlarged public sphere arose from rivals fighting their own corner, defending conflicting … versions of the truth’, writes Hughes. According to Norbrook, ‘[t]he growing public sphere at once facilitated and helped to cause the pressure toward representation, as citizens who were becoming accustomed to wide public debate found that  O’Callaghan, ‘Entering the Public Sphere’, pp. 64–5. See also Bellany, Politics of Scandal, p. 132. 40  Maltby, Prayer Book and People, pp. 94n, 96. 41   Calendar of State Papers Domestic Series: Charles I, eds J. Bruce, W.D. Hamilton and S.C. Lomas (23 vols, London 1858–1897), 1639–40, pp. 600–604; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Tanner Manuscripts 134, fol. 212. 39

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they were still treated as subjects by Parliamentary oligarchs’. For Pincus, ‘[t]he widespread acceptance of the value of public opinion represents a new conception of political and social space, a conception constitutive of the public sphere’. This, he says, was facilitated by coffeehouse sociability, as contemporaries gained experience with contested political ideas in a public space beyond the confines of home and in the company of intimate friends. Phil Withington qualifies these claims by noting that, long before the introduction of coffee into England, many of its inhabitants were ‘were well acquainted with, skilled in, and protective of forms of civil and public discourse’. Public conversations and deliberations were common features of everyday life in London and other civic corporations: ‘As a forum for conversation the coffeehouse was not so much a disjunction with the alehouse … as contiguous with the council chamber.’ What unites these arguments, as well as those I have advanced elsewhere, is the claim that public opinion acquired greater authority in political life as people gained more experience with invoking it in political contests.42 However, this argument is not unlike trying to ride on a wagon that one is pulling. It vastly underestimates the immense gulf that separated contemporary norms on communicative practices and modern notions about public opinion. To resolve this paradox, we need to examine how the representation of opinions as grievances in printed petitions deflected attention away from places of petitioning that featured popular participation in wide-ranging conversations on politics. Idealized appearances in printed petitions militated against libellous appearances on two fronts. Firstly, the form and rhetoric of printed petitions highlight deferential and submissive appearances – the opposite of unruly libelling. As I have argued elsewhere, royalists and parliamentarians referred to form and rhetoric in printed petitions to defend them from attacks by adversaries.43 Secondly, in printed petitions, circumstances of place and provenance were invisible, or almost invisible – references to place remained in petitions from the inhabitants of this or that county or city. Beyond that, and perhaps the number of signatures and references to the ‘loyal’, ‘honest’ or ‘godly’ qualities of subscribers, readers encountered premises, reasons, and humble requests to the petitioned authority. For petitioning that occurred outside the corporate structure (for example, that did not originate in a Grand Jury), printed petitions omitted reference to the particular places where petitions were debated, framed and circulated for signatures. In these petitions, the suppression of place was crucial for maximizing spontaneous and minimizing conspiratorial appearances. Moreover, petitionary requests in print displayed no connection to contentious and unruly discourse that invariably attended political discussions in private places. Instead, the printed petition magnified the very properties – decorum, discretion, restraint – that contemporaries associated with

42   Hughes, Gangraena, p. 414; Norbrook, Writing the Republic, p. 142; Pincus, ‘Coffee Houses’, pp. 811, 833; Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, p. 127. 43   Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture, pp. 90–92.

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councils in corporate places.44 This association rested on a sharp distinction between ‘orderly discussion and disclosure of sensitive words’ in councils ‘with the volatile temper of popular opinion in which gossip and speculation rushed to every corner’.45 In this regard, petition organizers confronted the same problem faced by authors of polemical political pamphlets who were hired to ‘broadcast their message in ways which were not recognizably official, and which created the impression of being spontaneous manifestations of support’.46 Printed petitions conceal place and provenance, deeds and words that unfold over time in particular places as public opinion is constituted in petition campaigns. Instead, a printed petition presented readers with an account of a discrete public performance: an information on grievances experienced by petitioners, humbly delivered to the door, behind which the petitioned authority conducted its councils. Thus, political petitioning was perceived to be less innovative to the extent that the ceremonial performance in print directs attention away from petitioning places. This displacement of place by an idealized ceremonial performance occurs not only in petitions but also in printed pamphlets that defended petitions, by Royalists as well as by moderate and radical factions within the Parliamentarian coalition. In 1646 Levellers defended their initial petitions for radical reform, observing that we ‘do most humbly address our informations of the grievances and present evils’ for Parliament’s consideration. Two years later, after agitators in the Army failed to secure united support for radical proposals in An Agreement of the People, Levellers in London framed and printed a petition in January 1648 that advanced similar radical political objectives, not with reference to the Agreement, but to prior Leveller petitions, which had been met with harsh responses from the Long Parliament. The January 1648 petition also encountered fierce opposition, including strident denunciation in pamphlets. Levellers defended the 1648 Petition by invoking their right ‘to frame and promote petitions, for your better information of all such things as are … grievous to the commonwealth’.47 Partisans of all political and religious persuasions used this logic to defend their petitions. They disclaimed innovation in their petitioning but readily found it in petitions from their adversaries, in allegations about seditious libels originating in particular places. 44

 David Colclough, ‘“Better Becoming a Senate of Venice”? The Addled Parliament and Jacobean Debates on Freedom of Speech’, in Clucas and Davies, Crisis of 1614, pp. 57–8. ‘Free speech’ in Parliament and other councils was not an unlimited right but a privilege, a duty to speak the truth, but in a manner appropriate to place and person. See Diane Parkin-Speer, ‘Freedom of Speech in Sixteenth-Century English Rhetorics’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 12 (1981): 65–72. 45   Paul Griffiths, ‘Secrecy and Authority in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century London’, The Historical Journal, 40 (1997): 927. 46   Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, p. 62. 47  Richard Overton, Vox Plebis (1646), p. 58; John Harris, A Lash for a Lyar: Or, The Stayner Stayned (1648), p. 12. This responds to allegations by a Presbyterian witness to an organizational meeting of Leveller petitioners. See [Frost], A Declaration.

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When Independent writers criticized dangerous innovations in Presbyterian petitions, the leading Presbyterian polemicist Thomas Edwards accurately accused Independents of hypocrisy. In reply to Independent charges that Presbyterians convened private meetings to draw up petitions that lobbied Parliament on matters currently under debate, Edwards observed that his adversaries ‘in a disorderly tumultuous way, being but private, particular persons … have had many strange meetings, and drawn up petitions with clauses and passages meddling with the affairs of Parliament’. Later that year, the same point appears in a pamphlet that defends the May 1646 Presbyterian petition from London to Parliament – its title page states that the pamphlet is Very useful for all that have subscribed the petition.48 But Presbyterians were just as guilty of hypocrisy in 1646. In response to an Independent cross-petition, a Presbyterian newspaper, The Scotish Dove, reported ominously that ‘[t]here are many thousand hands gathered all about the suburbs … especially at conventicles and private meetings’. In 1647, when reports of meetings and circulating petitions by local Independents reached the Presbyterian-dominated county committee in Kent, the committee issued a declaration, observing that ‘several petitions are set on foot’ in the county ‘wherein they take to themselves a liberty of venting their own private thoughts … in matters concerning the public’. Similar contradictions appear in pamphlets by Independents, Levellers and activists in the New Model Army, in which authors denounce innovative petitioning by other groups even as they push this activity in new directions themselves.49 As an idealized performance displayed in print that invokes public opinion, the printed petition was disconnected from the mobilization and constitution of public opinion that occurred in petitioning campaigns. The credibility of opinions advanced in printed petitions, and the correlative pamphlet literature, was secured by a not-so-creative redefinition of opinions as spontaneous conveyances of information on grievances. This not only deflected accusations of libel by adversaries of a petition but also permitted a petition’s promoters to proceed without acknowledging or embracing the truly innovative nature of their activities. The redefinition of opinions was not creative inasmuch as it flowed from a formulaic application of traditional petitionary rhetoric and practices in framing petitions. So particular places facilitated popular discussion and debate on political issues but also militated against the credibility of opinions emanating from this milieu. Debates over the respective merits of opinions invoked in support of different political positions thus frequently turned on the issue of whether the expressed opinion, or its mode of expression, was compatible with traditional petitionary rhetoric and practices. Opponents of a petition revealed real (or imaginary) details about ‘back-stage’ activities that discredited proper appearances in the ‘frontstage’, where petitions were displayed in print culture. 48  Thomas Edwards, Gangræna (1646), pp. 44, 67; A Glasse For Weak Ey’d Citizens: Or A Vindication of the Pious, Prudent and Peaceable Petition (1646), p. 6. 49   Scotish Dove (1646), p. 676; Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture, pp. 254–7.

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Two principal exceptions include the Quakers. In the early 1650s they declined to justify their printed appeals as petitions because it is ‘below the saint’s privilege to petition or make address unto councilors of men’.50 More significantly for the development of formal political philosophy, a second exception arose when experience with political petitioning led some radical writers to perceive limitation in petitions as a means of subjecting politics to public opinion. For example, in 1645 Lilburne invoked traditional ideas in associating petitioning as a major feature of Parliament when he argued that ‘the House of Commons is nothing less than the representative body of the People … to make, alter, abrogate laws as occasion shall require; to hear and relieve the grievances of the people, and to reform what is amiss in the commonwealth’.51 A few years later, limitations inherent to the reactive nature of petitioning prompted proposals for constitutional reform from Lilburne because it is ‘an improper, tedious, and unprofitable thing for the people to be ever running after their representatives with petitions’.52 Free elections, a vastly expanded franchise, and a free press would be a better means of aligning politics with public opinion. However, these were isolated voices. Invoking public opinion as the ultimate source of political legitimacy was advocated by a minority within a minority during the English Revolution. This fundamental tenet of liberal democracy gathered wider support only toward the end of the reign of Charles II. Even then, explicit invocation of public opinion by some early Whig (and Tory) writers occurs alongside the older vocabulary of ‘grievance’ and debates over the compatibility of an expressed grievance and traditional petitionary practices and rhetoric. Nonetheless, there is a palpable difference: in printed political pamphlets generated by the Exclusion Crisis in aftermath of the Popish Plot, references to popular political opinions in particular places often include commentary on the circumstances that enhanced or diminished the rationality of opinions affirmed by Tory and Whig petitioners. In the 1640s and 1650s, mere reference to petitioning places was sufficient to convey intimations of libel and sedition. At the beginning of this article, I suggested that affirmations of the potential rationality of public opinion in the 1680s were facilitated by the rise of deism and natural religion among parliamentarian opponents of the Stuart monarchy, as a more optimistic appraisal of human reason moderated the intolerant vision of godly politics in puritan religion. This is why Whig writers could defend ‘tumults in a commonwealth as not only preferable to tyranny but positively beneficial’, whereas in the 1640s and 1650s all contemporaries decried ‘tumultuous’ petitioning, which appeared in descriptions of the places where petitions were   A Brief Discovery … Also, Certain Queries upon a Petition (1653), p. 18. See Peters, Print Culture and the Early Quakers, p. 210. 51   John Lilburne, England’s Miserie, And Remedie (1645), p. 1. 52   John Lilburne, Englands New Chaines Discovered, in The Leveller Tracts, 1647– 1653, eds William Haller and Godfrey Davies (New York, 1944), p. 160; see also his An Agreement of the Free People of England, in ibid., p. 324. 50

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promoted.53 A second reason for the growing credibility of popular opinions was the precedent of political petitioning in the English Revolution. General and very detailed references to these precedents figure prominently in printed political tracts from 1679 to 1682. These include commentary on the places and circumstances of petitioning, in which older strictures about grievances coexist with new claims about conditions that promote or hinder principles of consent and reason in expressions of popular opinion. But during the English Revolution, without these precedents and the mellowing influence of deism and natural religion, the credibility of public opinion derived from representations that diverted attention away from dangerous practices in particular places. Conclusion During the English Revolution a complex relationship existed between petitioning places and printed petitions. Conversations among individuals in particular places resulted in printed texts that invoked public opinion to advance a political agenda. In print, this invocation refers to a fiction, to a collective opinion of the ‘inhabitants’, ‘citizens’, ‘well-affected’ or corporate representatives of a place. As the opinion of a collectivity, public opinion is a discursive fiction, existing only when it is instantiated in discourse, when invoked as the opinion of a public. In this form public opinion was, and remains today, inseparable from the devices, the organizational and rhetorical practices, used to represent it. But this nominal form as a discursive fiction arises from real conversations in particular places, where promoters solicit signatures to petitions or pollsters record opinions for polls. Compounding this complexity is the potential of the discursive fiction to influence the opinions of particular individuals. Early modern petitions were produced in order to shape opinions of individuals, just as modern polls influence individual opinions. The distinction between the nominal and real aspects of public opinion, between the printed invocation of public opinion and its mobilization in real places, facilitates a resolution of some unsettled issues in recent writings on the public sphere and early modern politics. When focused on nominal aspects, researchers are likely to conclude that the public sphere in mid-seventeenth-century England existed mainly in the imaginations of Milton, Wither and a few other writers. But we arrive at very different conclusions if, instead, we examine the places where petitions were discussed, framed and circulated for signatures. The early modern public sphere was built by communicative practices that were not acknowledged in theory or otherwise legitimated by general principles. Contrary to a key tenet of critical theory, practice preceded theory. Contrary to another tenet, no boundary existed between the public sphere and places in civil society. 53   Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the English Republic, 1623–1677 (Cambridge, 1988), p. 111.

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I have also shown that the credibility of opinion within the emergent public sphere in seventeenth-century England relied on the suppression of petitioning places in printed petitions and the correlative pamphlet literature. Suppression of place deflected attention from specific circumstances – most notably, conversations among private persons in non-corporate settings – that contemporaries associated with libel and sedition. Readers of printed petitions encountered seemingly spontaneous ‘grievances’ and not ideological discontent with extant authorities and policies. These differences between activities in petitioning places and their representation in print suggest the importance of virtual places for understanding how inhabitants imagine and think about particular places. The rhetoric and form of printed petitions created an idealized account of the ceremonial supplication that surrounded the presentation of a petition to Parliament. Petitioning activities were envisioned and defended with reference to the idealized attributes of petitions as they appeared in print. This is only one type of evidence for the textual communities that were increasingly important for English politics in the 1640s and 1650s. Central to these communities were printed pamphlets and other texts, which were vitally important for defining collective identities, mobilizing resources and sustaining networks.54 During the English Revolution, the place of petitioning in print culture was not merely a consequence of enlarged and enlivened expressions of opinions in petitioning places. The truly innovative inception of a robust public sphere was propelled by printed petitions because they suppressed perceptions that honest petitioners were engaged in anything other than a venerable, ancient tradition.

54   For textual communities and Presbyterianism in the 1640s and Quakers in the 1650 see Hughes, Gangraena, pp. 16, 301–17, 439–42; Peters, Print Culture and the Early Quakers, chap. 7.

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Chapter 10

Which Switzerland? Contrasting Conceptions of the Early Modern Swiss Confederation in European Minds and Maps Andreas Würgler

In the twenty-first century historians might be surprised to learn that the borderlines of the old Swiss Confederation had never been precisely fixed before its very end in 1798. Neither Swiss politicians nor European diplomats shared a common conception of what exactly the size and position of the Swiss Confederation, in the early modern period also known as Switzerland or Corpus Helveticum, should be. The cartographers in their turn, whether Swiss, Dutch or French, German, Italian or British, did not simply map these uncertainties and differences, but rather they added some new variations. Thus in both reality and on maps it was impossible to draw the exact borderlines of the old Swiss Confederation. Not only in the context of the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences one might ask: What were the reasons for this? What were the differences? And how can we understand and explain the various conceptions or projections of the Confederation’s very shape and size? In what follows, I will try to find some answers to these questions by looking first at Swiss conceptions of Switzerland’s boundaries, then at the definition of the Swiss Confederation in European peace treaties, and    See Andreas Würgler, ‘Eidgenossenschaft’, in Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz (13 vols, Basel, 2002–), vol. 4, pp. 114–21, esp. 120, or the electronic version: www.hls.ch (also in French and Italian).    Jürgen Osterhammel, ‘Die Wiederkehr des Raumes: Geopolitik, Geohistorie und historische Geographie’, Neue Politische Literatur, 43 (1998): 374–97; Martina Löw, Raumsoziologie (Frankfurt, 2001); Frithjof Benjamin Schenk, ‘Mental Maps. Die Konstruktion von geographischen Räumen in Europa seit der Aufklärung’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 28 (2002): 493–514; Etienne François, Jörg Seifarth and Berhard Struck, Die Grenze als Raum, Erfahrung und Konstruktion. Deutschland, Frankreich und Polen vom 17.–20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt, 2007).    For the growing interest in the topic of boundaries, borderlines and frontiers see Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley, 1989); Alexander Demandt (ed.), Deutschlands Grenzen in der Geschichte (Munich, 1990); Guy P. Marchal (ed.), Grenzen und Raumvorstellungen (11.–20. Jahrhundert) (Zurich, 1996); Daniel Nordman, Frontières de France. De l’espace au territoire XVIe–XIXe siècle (Paris, 1998); François et al., Die Grenze als Raum, pp. 7–29, esp. 7–11.

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finally at Switzerland’s borderlines as they appeared on early modern maps, especially those produced by Swiss, French, German and Dutch cartographers. The Swiss Cantons’ Conceptions of Switzerland’s Boundaries Analogous to the well-known historiographical label of the ‘composite monarchy’, the early modern Swiss Confederation was called a ‘république composée’ by early modern French diplomats. According to the most recent historiography this composite republic was formed by three categories of political units: first, the 13 full members, called cantons; second, about a dozen subject condominions; third some three to nine half-members, the so-called associated territories. However, questions of who belonged to this ‘composite republic’ and how far its territory stretched were controversial even among their members and not as clear as modern historical maps might suggest. Let us look at what two different members had in mind when they spoke or wrote about the ‘Swiss Confederation’ or ‘Switzerland’. This attempt may seem to be fairly anachronistic, but two arguments support the assumption that it is not. First, since the sixteenth century, map production and map literacy and therefore mind-mapping spread throughout Europe, at least in the more educated parts of society. Second, a spatial conception of the Confederation emerges from the fourteenth-century treaties which specified areas of mutual military support as well as from sentences banishing individuals not only from their canton, but from the whole Confederation. According to the authorities of the canton of Schwyz, one of the founding members of the Confederation in central Switzerland, rural and Catholic, the territory of the Confederation around 1600 had a quite different shape than according to those of the large Reformed canton of Bern, dominated by the eponymous city (Figure 10.1).  Instruction for Jean de La Barde, Paris, 18 December 1647, in Suisse. Receuil des instructions données aux ambassadeurs et ministres de France des Traités de Westphalie jusqu’à la Révolution française, 30/1, ed. Georges Livet (Paris, 1983), p. 9.    For a general survey see Hans Conrad Peyer, Verfassungsgeschichte der alten Schweiz (Zurich 1978); Würgler, ‘Eidgenossenschaft’, pp. 114–21.    For example Jörg Rentsch and Dominik Sauerländer (eds), Putzger. Historischer Weltatlas. Schweizer Ausgabe (Berlin, 2004), p. 100.    Bernhard Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 6, 79, 86. Jeremy Black writes of ‘Carto-Literacy’: Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past (New Haven, 1997), p. 15.    See the Zurich treaty of 1351, in Quellenbuch zur Verfassungsgeschichte der Schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft und der Kantone von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, eds Hans Nabholz and Paul Kläui (3rd edn, Aarau, 1947), p. 15, art. 1 [hereafter Quellenbuch]; Guy P. Marchal, ‘“Von der Stadt” bis ins “Pfefferland”. Städtische Raumund Grenzvorstellungen in Urfehden und Verbannungsurteilen oberrheinischer und schweizerischer Städte’, in his (ed.), Grenzen und Raumvorstellungen, pp. 225–63, esp. 250–55. 

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Mulhouse

Princebishopric of Basel

Neuchâtel

This figure has intentionally been removed for copyright reasons. To view this image, please refer to the printed version of this book Pays de Vaud (Two) Leagues of Rhetia (The Grisons)

Geneva

Swiss Confederation Pays de Vaud: Part of the Bernese Territory not acknowledged by the Catholic Cantons Territories with unclear status for either Catholics or Protestants

Figure 10.1 Switzerland in the Schwyz and Bern perspective (c.1600) Let us examine some differences. Bern did not consider the south-eastern parts to be Swiss, because in 1600 it had no formal relationship with the Three Leagues of Rhaetia, called the Grisons. Schwyz, however, did not consider Geneva to be part of Switzerland, because the latter was allied only with the cantons of Bern and Zurich. In the second half of the sixteenth century, the Catholics had rebutted several demands from what they considered the capital of the Calvinist heresy to become a full member of the Confederation. While Geneva had never been accepted by all cantons, the cases of the exterritorial cities or exclaves of Mulhouse in Alsace (now French) and Rottweil in Swabia (now German) were different. Although both of them had been allied with all 13 cantons since the early sixteenth century (1515 and 1519), the Catholic cantons revoked the treaty with Protestant Mulhouse after serious conflicts in 1586, whereas the Reformed cantons ended their relationship with Catholic Rottweil during the Thirty Years War in 1632.10 All 

  Wilhelm Oechsli, ‘Orte und Zugewandte. Eine Studie zur Geschichte des schweizerischen Bundesrechtes’, Jahrbuch für Schweizerische Geschichte, 13 (1888): 1–497, esp. 453–64, 468, 471, 476–8. 10   Both Catholic and Protestant cantons ceased their relations in 1689 without, however, formally terminating the old treaty: Oechsli, ‘Orte und Zugewandte’, pp. 315–19.

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of these cases involve associates rather than full members of the Confederation. We may therefore relate these differences to diverging conceptions of membership and/or confessional antagonism, with obvious consequences for the shape of the Confederation’s territory. However, there was another difference. Schwyz did not consider the western parts of Bern’s territory Swiss, because Bern had conquered these lands (the so called Pays de Vaud with Lausanne) in 1536 without the cooperation and consent of the other Swiss cantons (except the fellow-conqueror Fribourg), and, probably far more importantly, because Bern imposed the Reformation there. Schwyz, together with the other Catholic cantons, insisted on the borders valid at the time of their treaties with Bern (1353) and Fribourg and Solothurn (1481).11 In other words, according to the Catholic members, Swiss territory was shaped by bi- and multilateral treaties (and especially the clauses regulating mutual military aid) rather than the mere addition of (cantonal) territories. The next section examines which of these competing geographical visions asserted itself in the early modern diplomatic context. Swiss Boundaries in International Peace Treaties To answer this question we need to examine both bilateral alliances between the Confederation and specific European powers and the (mostly multilateral) international peace treaties which mention the Swiss. Swiss Foreign Alliances The most important bilateral alliances were those with France, the Confederation’s principal ally and (since 1601) immediate neighbour. From the Ewiger Frieden [eternal peace treaty] of Fribourg in 1516 until the late eighteenth century, French Kings signed a series of alliances focusing above all on the mercenary trade.12 While all 13 cantons and five associates – the abbot and city of St Gallen, the Grisons, the Valais and the city of Mulhouse – are explicitly mentioned in 1516, subsequent alliances were less comprehensive. Zurich and Bern in particular refused to sign the renewals of 1549, 1564 and 1582, because of strong opposition to mercenary service in Reformed territories. Some associates, too, joined only selectively.13 It   See Quellenbuch, p. 26, art. 4 (1353); pp. 67–8, art. 4 (1481).   1521, 1549, 1564, 1582, 1602, 1663, 1715, 1777. For details see Rudolf Thommen, ‘Friedensverträge und Bünde der Eidgenossen mit Frankreich 1444–1777’, Basler Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Altertumskunde, 15 (1916): 117–214. 13   Zurich did not even sign the first contract of 1521. Rottweil participated in 1521, 1602 and 1663 and the City of Biel in 1521, 1602, 1663 and 1777; the latter, however, did not join the agreements of 1516 and 1549, the Grisons were absent in 1777 and many other examples could be added. 11

12

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is thus clear that the Swiss Confederation was not a united body, but a network of members with a high degree of autonomy in international affairs. International Treaties International treaties between European powers had a key role in the definition of political boundaries. Some listed the Confederation even though the Swiss had not participated in the actual conflicts or the respective peace negotiations. This reflected specific clauses in Swiss-French (and also Swiss-Austrian) alliances requiring the parties to include each other in any peace agreements.14 Hence, in the 1510s, several international treaties mentioned the Swiss Confederation. However, they did not list each canton, which meant that nobody could map the actual area covered by the peace.15 While the Swiss cantons seem marginal in these events (they were only mentioned as allies of the Kings of France), they complained in 1544 that the Peace of Crépy, between Charles V and Francis I, only mentioned the 13 cantons but not their associates. Through his ambassador, Francis told them not to worry, as the phrase ‘XIII cantons of the Confederation’ implicitly covered all members. Furthermore, the treaty – like most other early modern peace treaties – set a deadline for the inclusion of allies. Thus, the French Crown enumerated all the cantons and their associates.16 Fifteen years later, the French King reassured the Swiss that he had inserted the XIII cantons as well as their associates in the peace treaty of Câteau-Cambrésis with Spain and England: ‘[L]es Treize cantons, les Ligues Grises, Valais, Saint-Gal, Torquembourg [Toggenburg], Mulhausen et autres alliés et confédérés desdits sieurs des Ligues.’17 To some extent, the treaty thus reflected the different categories which formed the ‘helvetic body’: cantons, named and unnamed associates, while neglecting the subject territories of the Swiss condominions. 14

  See for example the alliance between the King of France and the XII Cantons (without Zurich), 5 May 1521, art. IX, in Amtliche Sammlung der älteren eidgenössischen Abschiede, eds Jakob Kaiser et al. (22 parts in 8 vols, Lucerne, 1856–86) [hereafter ‘EA 1–8’], EA 4/1, p. 1497, and similar paragraphs in other treaties: EA 2, pp. 917–18 (1474); EA 5/1, p. 1884 (1602); EA 6/1, p. 1650 (1663). 15  This was the case in the Treaty of Mechelen between the Pope, the Emperor and the Kings of England and Aragon in 1513 (EA 3/2, p. 1359: Mechelen, 5 April 1513); or in several English-French treaties between 1510 and 1518 (EA 3/2, p. 1338: London, 23 March 1510; EA 3/2, p. 1397: Westminster, 5 April 1515; EA 3/2, p. 1417: s.l., 20 October 1518). 16   EA 4/1/d, no. 204 (Baden, 14 December 1544; request by the cantons); EA 4/1/d, no. 212p (Baden, 25 February 1545; the French ambassador’s answer). Extract of the peace treaty of Crépy (Crespi, 18 September 1544): ibid., p. 1087. 17   ‘The 13 cantons, the Grisons, Valais, St Gallen, Toggenburg, Mülhausen, and other allies and confederates of the mentioned Confederation’: EA 4/2, no. 72mm (Baden, 4 June 1559), and ibid., p. 1458: peace treaty of Câteau-Cambrésis (3 April 1559).

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The case of the peace of Vervins in 1598, between Spain and France, shows that it really mattered whether all parts of the Confederation appeared or not. The Spanish included the cantons, the Grisons ‘and their allies’ in the newly negotiated peace, while the French named the cantons and all their associates explicitly as ‘the Grisons, Valais, the abbot and the city of St Gallen, Toggenburg, Mulhouse, Neuchâtel and the other allies of the named Confederation’.18 The city of Geneva, realizing that it was not named, sought clarification from the French king who answered that it was included in the phrase ‘the other allies of the named Confederation’.19 This unilateral declaration, however, was only a partial success, for Geneva needed international backing to resist the Duke of Savoy’s attempts to conquer the city – as he tried again four years later in 1602. It was well understood that the Pope and Catholic King of Spain refused to sign an agreement favouring the centre of Calvinism.20 The Vervins treaty was the last explicitly Catholic Peace negotiated by the Holy See without the involvement of Protestant powers. Pope Clement VIII’s mediation depended on the exclusion of the Reformed who, in his opinion, were ‘much greater enemies of the Church than the Turkish’.21 Most international treaties of the seventeenth century – among them the key settlement of Westphalia (1648)22 which exempted the Confederation from the Empire (later interpreted as a declaration of Swiss sovereignty) – mentioned the Swiss Confederation as a single entity without reference to individual members.23 In the later seventeenth century, the Swiss made greater efforts to be fully included in treaties between European powers. After some failures – Nijmegen 1678/9, the   EA 5/1, pp. 1871–72 (peace treaty of Vervins, 2 Mai 1598). Henry IV informed the Swiss of this formulation by a letter from Paris (ibid., 13 June 1598) presented to the Diet by his ambassador, Sieur de Mortefontaine (EA 5/1, no. 355b; Baden, 28 June 1598). Arthur Erwin Imhof, Der Friede von Vervins 1598 (Aarau, 1966), does not discuss this aspect. 19   EA 5/1, p. 1873 (Declaration by Henry IV; Monceaulx, 11 November 1598). 20  L[ouis] Vulliemin, Geschichte der Eidgenossen während des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (part 2, Zurich, 1844), pp. 325–6. Now confirmed by Bertrand Haan, ‘La dernière paix Catholique européenne: édition et présentation du traité de Vervins (2 Mai 1598)’, in Claudine Vidal and Frédérique Pillebou (eds), La Paix de Vervins 1598 (Aisne, 1998), pp. 9–64, esp. 53, 55. 21   Aldobrandini (by order of Clement VIII) to Alessandro de Medici (legatus a latere in France), Rome, 15 June 1596, quoted (in Italian) by Agostino Borromeo, ‘Clément VIII, la diplomatie pontificale et la paix de Vervins’, in Jean-François Labourdette et al. (eds), Le Traité de Vervins (Paris, 2000), pp. 323–44, esp. 333, note 30. See also ibid., p. 330 note 22 and p. 331 note 26. 22   EA 5/2, p. 2218; recent research in Marco Jorio (ed.), 1648. Die Schweiz und Europa. Aussenpolitik zur Zeit des Westfälischen Friedens (Zurich, 1999). 23  Oechsli, ‘Orte und Zugewandte’, p. 236, lists the Peace of Madrid 1630 (between Spain and England: ‘die Bünde und Cantone der Schweizer und Graubündner’); the Peace of Cherasco 1631 (between the Emperor and France); the Peace of Westminster 1654 (between England and the Dutch Provinces); the Peace of the Pyrenees 1659 (between France and Spain); and the Peace of Nijmegen 1678. 18

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Imperial-French Truce of 1684 – they finally succeeded in 1697. From an early point in the negotiations, they petitioned the rulers of the Empire, France and Spain for inclusion in the peace of Rijswijk. In addition, the Protestant cantons approached William III and the Dutch Republic with the same request.24 Rijswijk, in fact, became the first treaty listing all cantons as well as associated towns and principalities25 – with the sole exception of the prince-bishopric of Basel (which was considered ‘imperial’ rather than ‘confederate’). The distinction between those commonly acknowledged by all confederates, and those only accepted by the Protestant cantons (newly termed ‘verbündet’ [allied] rather than ‘zugewandt’ [associated]), had previously been known, but was now emphasized and formalized. This created three categories of members – cantons; general associates (the abbot and city of St Gallen, Biel, Grisons, Valais) and partial allies (namely Geneva, Neuchâtel and Mulhouse) – alongside the subject condominions.26 Geneva again demonstrates the importance of explicit inclusion. During the conflict, its brocade industry had suffered from the German blockade against French goods and Genevan merchants worked hard to secure the ‘Swiss’ label for their products. The city’s situation deteriorated again during the War of the Spanish Succession 1701–13, because of the French army’s reliance on Genevan capital. The ability to trade with all powers required unambiguous linkage to the Confederation in multilateral treaties,27 which allowed the city to benefit from their recognition of Swiss neutrality. None of these treaties provided full security, but valuable bargaining tools, allowing Geneva to become the ‘smuggler’s central depot’.28 The next major international peace, signed at Utrecht and Baden (Switzerland) in 1713/14, confirmed the list of cantons, associates and allies with one major difference: while Geneva and even the prince-bishop of Basel were included, the City and Principality of Neuchâtel were not. This reflected the outcome of the Neuchâtel succession dispute, which gave the Prussian king (rather than a relative of the French monarch) control over the territory from 1707. France thus considered Neuchâtel Prussian, which threatened to deprive Neuchâtel merchants of the trade privileges the Swiss enjoyed in France. Regardless of the efforts of Neuchâtel envoys to Bern, Baden, Berlin and Paris (and a French pledge to leave   EA 6/2, no. 276b (General Diet, Lucerne, 23–27 February 1694); EA 6/2, no. 285b (General Diet, Baden, July 1694); EA 6/2, no. 293f (Protestant Conference, Aarau, 7–10 December 1694); EA 6/2, no. 335b, k (General Diet, Baden, 1 July 1696); EA 6/2, no. 345h (Catholic Conference, Altdorf, 6 November 1696); EA 6/2, no. 346k, i, s (Protestant Conference, Aarau, 6–9 December 1696). 25  Oechsli, ‘Orte und Zugewandte’, pp. 238–9, 241. 26   EA 6/2, no. 370b (Catholic Conference, Luzern, 6–8 November 1697); EA 6/2, no. 372d (General Diet, Baden, 3 December 1697); EA 6/2, no. 380t (General Diet, Baden, 18 April 1698). 27   Herbert Lüthy, Die Tätigkeit der Schweizer Kaufleute und Gewerbetreibenden in Frankreich unter Ludwig XIV. und der Regentschaft (Aarau, 1943), pp. 70–77. 28  Lüthy, Schweizer Kaufleute, pp. 217–18. 24

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Neuchâtel’s status unchanged in the Treaty of Utrecht), France’s peace agreements with Great Britain and the Netherlands omitted Neuchâtel from the list.29 The issue remained unresolved until 1856, when the Prussian king formally renounced the rights, if not the title, of a Count of Neuchâtel. The boundaries of the Confederation were thus contested among Swiss cantons as well as European powers. The rulers of Spain and Savoy endorsed the ‘Catholic’ position (refusing to recognize Protestant allies like Geneva and Mulhouse), England and the Dutch Republic favoured the Protestants’ much more inclusive interpretation (encompassing Geneva, Mulhouse and Neuchâtel as well as the prince-bishopric of Basel), while the Empire and France failed to commit to either side.30 It is worth noting, however, that the Protestant cantons shaped international perceptions to a much greater extent than the Catholics, in spite of the latter’s political majority within the Confederation. Another intriguing point is the willingness of the international community to concede more territory to this small political entity than the greater part of its members had ever claimed. One reason was the interest of many European powers (France, Spain, Savoy, the Empire, German territorial states and, to a lesser extent, the Pope, Britain and the Low Countries) in as big a pool of Swiss mercenary soldiers as possible. But how were these confederate and international conceptions of Switzerland actually visualized in early modern maps? The Swiss Confederation on Early Modern Maps Early modern cartography reflected the diversity of opinion about the extent of the Swiss Confederation, particularly with regard to Geneva, the prince-bishopric of Basel and the exclaves of Mulhouse and Rottweil. The principality of Neuchâtel, in contrast, usually appears as Swiss.31 Political entities are identified by two, sometimes complementary, means: boundaries and coats of arms. 29

 The French ambassador in Switzerland, who initially pretended to have no knowledge of any commitment to preserve Neuchâtel’s status, subsequently supported diplomatic moves by Bern, Berlin and London to change France’s position in the treaty of Baden (Switzerland) 1714, that is to say the peace settlement with the Holy Roman Empire: Alfred Schnegg, ‘Le XVIIIe siècle’, in Neuchâtel et la Suisse (Neuchâtel, 1969), pp. 93–123, esp. 98–101. 30   For details see Martin Körner, ‘Allianzen’, in Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz (13 vols, Basel, 2002–), vol. 1, pp. 195–7; Thomas Maissen, Die Geburt der Republic. Staatsverständnis und Repräsentation in der frühneuzeitlichen Eidgenossenschaft (Göttingen 2006), pp. 187–296. 31   For a (Swiss) exception see Johann Caspar Steiner (Zug, 1685) [Ryh 3202: 29]. Unless stated otherwise, all maps can be consulted online through the digital edition of the Ryhiner Map Collection at the University Library, Bern (http://www.stub.unibe.ch/stub/ ryhiner/images/ch/pcsearch.htm; cited as: author (place, date) [Ryhiner shelf-mark]). The collection is discussed in Thomas Klöti, Johann Friedrich von Ryhiner 1732–1803. Berner

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Boundaries Early maps – intended for sailors, merchants, pilgrims or armies – feature coastlines, rivers and roads rather than political boundaries.32 The latter, however, became increasingly prominent from the sixteenth century.33 States (monarchies and republics) thus achieved a spatial shape. Technically, borderlines were identified in two ways: as (dotted) lines on the original print or as hand-coloured additions by the map-maker or subsequent owners. The latter produced better visual effects but also diversity: if owners coloured maps at their own liking, they were likely to follow different interpretations.34 Such borderlines, furthermore, could not be geometrically accurate. In (Alpine) Switzerland, maps based on triangulation of landscapes were only available from 1864,35 considerably later than in France (1681–1789).36 Seeing the results, the French king is said to have commented Staatsmann, Geograph, Kartenbibliograph und Verkehrspolitiker (Bern, 1994). For reprints of many early modern Swiss maps see Leo Weisz, Die Schweiz auf alten Landkarten. Mit einem Geleitwort und einem kartographisch-technischen Anhang von Eduard Imhof (Zurich, 1945), and Georges Grosjean, 500 Jahre Schweizer Landkarten (Zurich, 1971). 32   See the oldest surviving Swiss map by Konrad Dürst (c.1496) in Weisz, Landkarten, no. 26; the pilgrim’s map to Rome by Erhard Etzlaub (1500) in Ute Schneider, Die Macht der Karten. Eine Geschichte der Kartographie vom Mittelalter bis heute (Darmstadt, 2004), p. 22; the Ptolemy edition of Martin Waldseemüller’s 1508 map (Strasbourg, 1513) in Weisz, Landkarten, no. 32; Waldseemüller’s second map of Switzerland in the Ptolemy edition (Strasburg, 1520): ibid., no. 35; and his world map (1507): ibid., no. 29. Borderlines are also absent from the various editions of Sebastian Münster’s maps of Switzerland (based on Aegidius Tschudi): ibid., nos 46/47 (1540), 50 (1550). For a general account see Black, Maps and History, pp. 12–13. 33   Uta Lindgren, ‘Die Grenzen des Alten Reiches auf gedruckten Landkarten’, in Rainer Müller (ed.), Bilder des Reiches (Sigmaringen, 1997), pp. 31–42. For French maps see David Buisseret, ‘The Cartographic Definition of France’s Eastern Boundary in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Imago Mundi, 36 (1984): 72–80, 72; more generally Peter Barber, ‘Maps and Monarchs in Europe 1550–1800’, in Robert Oresko, G.C. Gibbs and H.M. Scott (eds), Royal and Republican Sovereignty in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 75–124, esp. 75; Nordman, Frontières de France. Black, Maps and History, pp. 17, 24–5, dates the increasing importance of borderlines to after 1600. Claire Gantet, ‘Die äusseren Grenzen des Heiligen Römischen Reichs. Wahrnehmungen und Repräsentationen in der zweiten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts’, in François et al., Die Grenze als Raum, pp. 53–76, deals only with the German-French, but not the German-Swiss border. 34  Lindgren, ‘Die Grenzen des Alten Reiches’, p. 32. 35   David Gugerli (ed.), Vermessene Landschaften. Kulturgeschichte und technische Praxis im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Zurich, 1999); David Gugerli and Daniel Speich, Topografien der Nation. Politik, kartografische Ordnung und Landschaft im 19. Jahrhundert (Zurich, 2002). 36   Josef W. Konvitz, Cartography in France 1660–1848: Science, Engineering, and Statecraft (Chicago, 1987), pp. 1–31, esp. figure 6 showing which areas of France had been mapped before and after 1789. The technique of triangulation was known in the

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that exact measuring had cost him more land than any war.37 In spite of geodetic precision and France’s leading position in European mapmaking, however, even its borderlines were not clearly fixed until the king commissioned the newly-founded geographical office to prepare an atlas of France’s boundaries in 1775.38 The earliest maps showing the Confederation’s political boundaries date from 1538. One was drawn by the Swiss Catholic humanist and politician Aegidius Tschudi (1505–72) and increased in size by Sebastian Münster in Basel.39 The tiny borderline excludes the town of Geneva and the bishopric of Basel, but includes Neuchâtel, the allied cities/exclaves of Mulhouse and Rottweil (albeit with unrealistic corridors to the main territory) and even the Imperial city of Constance.40 The latter reflects the very close relations between the cantons and the city and bishop of Constance; yet although Constance is situated on the south (that is to say the ‘Swiss’) side of the river Rhine, none of the cantons had ever considered the city part of the Confederation. After 1548, when it became an ordinary Austrian territorial town, not even maps did so anymore. The same boundaries appear on the second version of Tschudi’s map, rearranged and edited as a single-leaf woodcut by the Zurich chronicler Johannes Stumpf in 1538.41 The case of Rottweil mirrors the city’s gradual distancing or exclusion from the Confederation. To highlight the close relationship, sixteenth-century maps featured a small corridor between Switzerland and Rottweil (which, in reality, was an exclave). From the seventeenth century, several maps excluded the town, either by simply allocating it to the Empire42 or by omitting the area around Rottweil altogether.43 The other exclave Mulhouse, in contrast, retained a more prominent Netherlands from the sixteenth century: ibid., pp. 2–3, and David Bitterling, ‘Der absolute Staat und seine Karten. Eine kritische Geschichte’, in Christoph Dipper and Ute Schneider (eds), Kartenwelten. Der Raum und seine Repräsentation in der Neuzeit (Darmstadt, 2006), pp. 94–109 and 226–7, esp. 95, 101–2, 107–8. 37  The differences are shown on the map Carte de France corrigée (1693) in Konvitz, Cartography in France 1660–1848, p. 8, figure 1. See also Schneider, Die Macht der Karten, p. 42. 38   Konvitz, Cartography in France, pp. 18, 1, 35–8. 39   Grosjean, 500 Jahre Schweizer Landkarten, pp. 7–10; Katharina KollerWeiss, ‘Aegidius Tschudis grosse Manuskriptkarte des schweizerischen Raums und der angrenzenden Gebiete’, Cartographica Helvetica, 32 (2005): 3–16, esp. 3–5. 40  Reproduced in Weisz, Die Schweiz auf alten Landkarten, no. 41. 41   Printed ibid., no. 53 (Stumpf’s later editions no longer included Mulhouse, but still Rottweil: ibid., no. 57). Curiously, the map in Josias Simler, Von dem Regiment der loblichen Eydgnossschaft zwey Buecher, ed. Hans Jacob Leu (2nd edn, 2 vols, Zurich, 1735), vol. 2, after p. 16, still places Constance (but no longer Mulhouse and Rottweil) within Switzerland. 42   For example Nikolaus David Hautt (Luzern, 1641), in Weisz, Die Schweiz auf alten Landkarten, no. 147. 43   Pierre Duval (Paris, 1664) [Ryh 3203:23] and Weisz, Die Schweiz auf alten Landkarten, no. 158; Heinrich Ludwig Muoss (Zug, 1710) [Ryh 3206:46] and ibid., no.

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position for two reasons. Situated closer to the Swiss border (near Basel), it could not easily be excluded. As a Protestant city, furthermore, its standing increased when the Reformed cantons gained the upper hand following their victory in the confessional war of 1712. Mulhouse was even readmitted to some of the sessions of the federal diet (Tagsatzung) from where it had been excluded by the Catholic cantons in the late 1500s. Sixteenth-century Swiss cartographers did not show Geneva as a member of the Confederation;44 neither did Italian, German or Dutch mapmakers until the mid-1600s,45 nor an independent French map of 1625.46 The same is true for the early works of the most famous Swiss cartographer Hans Conrad Gyger (1599– 1674)47 until his improved map of Switzerland in 1657 (which was probably the first ever to include Geneva; Figure 10.2).48 After that, most French,49 Dutch50

148; Gerard and Leonardus Valk (Amsterdam, after 1705) [Ryh 3202:32] and ibid., no. 174; Johann Baptist Homann (Nürnberg, 1714) [Ryh 3203:4]; Guillaume Delisle (Paris, 1715) [Ryh 3203:9]. 44   Aegidius Tschudi and Sebastian Münster (Basel, 1538) in Weisz, Die Schweiz auf alten Landkarten, no. 41; Aegidius Tschudi and Johannes Stumpf (Zurich, 1547): ibid., no. 57. 45   Antonio Salamanca (Rom, 1555): Weisz, Die Schweiz auf alten Landkarten, no. 60; Abraham Ortelius (Antwerpen, 1570) [1573 edn: Ryh 3202:7], Gerhard Mercator (Duisburg, 1585) [Ryh 3202:9] and his Dutch successors Jodocus Hondius (Amsterdam, 1631) [Ryh 3202:11] and Jansson (Amsterdam, 1640). See also Franchino Giudicetti, Die italienischen Nachzeichnungen der Schweizer Karte des Aegidius Tschudi 1555–1598 (Murten, 1993), pp. 2–6. 46   Gaspar Baudouin and Melchior Tavernier (Paris, 1625) [Ryh 3202:14]. 47   Hans Conrad Gyger (no place, after 1600) [Ryh 3202:18A] and (Zurich, 1637) [Ryh 3202:17]. 48   Hans Conrad Gyger (Zurich, 1657) in Grosjean, 500 Jahre Schweizer Landkarten, no. 16, and the second edition (Zurich, 1683) [Ryh 3206:5]. On Gyger (or Giger or Geiger) see Grosjean, 500 Jahre Schweizer Landkarten, pp. 20–23. Dutch cartographer Joannes Janssonius may have included Geneva a little earlier, but his map is only vaguely dated ‘1640–1670’ [Ryh 3202:22]. 49   Pierre Duval (Paris, 1664) [Ryh 3203:23] and (Paris, 1677) [Ryh 3203:24]; Nicolas Sanson (Paris, 1667) [Ryh 3203:20]; Nicolas Sanson/Alexis-Hubert Jaillot (Paris, 1670) [Ryh 3206:8]; Sanson/Jaillot (Paris, 1693) [Ryh 3206:9]; Jean-Baptiste Nolin (Paris, c.1701–1750) [Ryh 3202: 37]; Nicolas de Fer (Paris, 1703) [Ryh 3203:1] and (Paris, after 1721) [Ryh 3203:6]; Guillaume Delisle (Paris, 1715) [Ryh 3203:9] and Delisle/Dezauche (Paris, 1790) [Ryh 3203:12]. Exceptions: Christophe Tassin (Paris, 1668) [Ryh 3202:16]; Rigobert Bonne (Paris 1767) [Ryh 3203:40]. 50   Gerard Valck (Amsterdam, c.1670–1690) [Ryh 3202:31] and (Amsterdam, after 1705) [Ryh 3202:32]; Alexis-Hubert Jaillot/Pieter Mortier (Amsterdam, 1690–1720) [Ryh 3202:35]; Nicolai Visscher (Amsterdam, after 1726) [Ryh 3202:27]. The exception is: Zacharia Châtelain (Amsterdam, c.1705–1738) [Ryh 3203:3].

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and British51 maps added Geneva to the Swiss territory, whereas German maps remained divided: the (Catholic) Augsburg publications52 excluded Geneva, the maps printed at (Protestant) Nürnberg53 mostly included the small republic. Geneva thus turned Swiss earlier on maps (from 1657) than in international peace treaties (Rijswijk 1697). Gyger’s 1657 map was the first to include Geneva in the Confederation by means of a printed boundary. On the second edition from 1683, reproduced here, the lines were coloured after printing. Geneva is given the same colour as the Valais, the Three Leagues of Rhaetia (Grisons) and other associates of the Swiss Confederation and its crest appears on the left margin (among cantons) rather than at the bottom (the place for condominia). The shape of Geneva’s territory was simplified, because it actually consisted of six parts (‘islands’) lacking a common boundary. Gyger clearly wanted to depict political relations rather than exact borderlines. In a similar way, maps depicted the prince-bishopric of Basel as a member of the Empire until the mid-seventeenth century and as Swiss from the 1660s. There was no apparent basis for this change in international law, since the territory only appeared among the Confederation’s associates in the peace treaties of Utrecht in 1713 and Baden in 1714. France seems to have been the trendsetter: Nicolas Sanson d’Abbéville (1600–1667), the royal cartographer, displayed the bishopric as a member of the Confederation on his map published in 1667, as his Parisian colleague Pierre Duval had done three years before. Yet the change took some time to be generally accepted. Some French, Dutch and Swiss maps of the late seventeenth century assigned the princely territory to the Empire, others to the Confederation. By the eighteenth century, however, it usually appeared as Swiss.54 51   British maps were mostly copies of French or Dutch models. Senex, for example, follows Duval (Paris 1664) [Ryh 3202:23]: John Senex (no place, c.1720) [www.zumbo. ch]; Emanuel Bowen (no place, 1747) [www.zumbo.ch]; Abraham Rouvier, Thomas Kitchin and John Rocque (London, 1767) [Ryh 3203:35]; William Coxe (no place, 1779) [Ryh 3204:15]; Coxe (no place, 1787) [Ryh 3204:7]; Laurie and Whittle (London, 1794) [www.zumbo.ch]. 52  Matthäus Seutter (Augsburg, c.1710–1730) [Ryh 3203:18]; Matthäus Seutter and Tobias Conrad Lotter (Augsburg, c.1740–1760) [Ryh 3203:20 A and Ryh 3203:24]; Matthäus Seutter and Johann Michael Probst (Augsburg, after 1758) [Ryh 3203:19]. See also Michael Ritter, ‘Die Augsburger Landkartenverlage Seutter, Lotter und Probst’, Cartographica Helvetica, 25 (2002): 3–10. 53   Geneva excluded: Johann Baptist Homann (Nürnberg, 1702) [Ryh 3203:4]. Geneva included: Johann Baptist Homann and Johannes Hübner (Nürnberg, 1732) [Ryh 8608:1 and 3203:25]; Tobias Mayer and Hoffmännische Erben (Nürnberg, 1751) [Ryh 3203:29]; Gabriel Walser (Nürnberg, 1769) [Ryh 8608:2]. On the Augsburg-Nürnberg rivalry see Barber, ‘Maps and Monarchs’, p. 76. 54   The only exception in my sample is the second edition of Muoss (Zug, 1710) [Ryh 3206:46], which follows the first edition from 1698 in this respect [Ryh 3206:12].

Figure 10.2 Hans Conrad Gyger/Conrad Meyer, Helvetiæ Rhætiæ et Valesiæ, cæterorumque confoederatorum ut [et] finitimorum populorum tabvla geographica et hydrographica nova [et] exacta/operâ [et] studio Ioh. Conradi Gÿgeri delineata; [et] à Conrado Meÿero in æs incisa anno christi 1657 (Helv. Tigurini [Zurich], 1683) [1 map on 2 fols, c. 1:500,000; copperplate engraving, 55 x 76 cm]: Universitätsbibliothek Bern, ZB, Sammlung Ryhiner, Ryh 3206:5.

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Coats of Arms Finally, I would like to move from the centre to the edges of early modern maps. Many were framed by artfully styled decorations such as images of cities, allegoric representations (river gods, Mars, seasons), historical events (battles, foundations), cityscapes and especially coats of arms. For a long time these embellishments have been neglected by historians of cartography, who deemed them mere ornaments.55 Maps have traditionally been understood as images of limited sections of the earth’s surface.56 This definition is restricted to one function and not applicable to political boundaries, which (especially in the early modern period) could not actually be seen – with a few exceptions such as the Chinese wall.57 Moving beyond the fixation on actual landscapes, the International Cartographic Association now defines maps as symbolic representations of geographic reality based on a cartographer’s creativity in order to display relations in space.58 Large, hand-coloured maps with opulent decorations were not primarily intended to ‘copy’ reality, but rather to represent the splendour of political power in spatial terms – and sometimes even to underline political claims on disputed territories. Coats of arms were the most common signs of power and sovereignty in the early modern period. They could be placed on the margins, but many maps embed crests or small signatures/pictures of locations within the map itself. The characteristic series of blazons, which represent not only the lords of given territories, but also their relative rank (Rang), carry particularly strong symbolism. To serve different purposes, mapmakers combined cartography and art. Up to the end of the

55   See Joachim Neumann, ‘Deutschlandkarten bis zum Ende des Heiligen Römischen Reiches Deutscher Nation. Geschichtsdeutung aus Karten und humanistischen Landesbeschreibungen sowie aus reichsweiten Synthesen früher Landesaufnahmen’, in Dagmar Unverhau (ed.), Geschichtsdeutung auf alten Karten. Archäologie und Geschichte (Wiesbaden, 2003), pp. 397–410, esp. 399; Klöti, Johann Friedrich von Ryhiner 1732–1803, pp. 276–7. For another perspective see Peter Barber, ‘Einleitung’, in idem (ed.), Das Buch der Karten. Meilensteine der Kartographie aus drei Jahrtausenden (Darmstadt, 2006), pp. 6–9, 7; Martina Stercken, ‘Kartographische Repräsentation von Herrschaft. Jos Murers Karte des Zürcher Gebiets von 1566’, in Ferdinand Opll (ed.), Bild und Wahrnehmung der Stadt (Linz, 2004), pp. 219–40. 56   Grosjean, 500 Jahre Schweizer Landkarten, p. 3; Black, Maps and History, p. 12. 57   The wall seems to be the only boundary marked on early modern Chinese maps: Ralph E. Ehrenberg, Mapping the World: An Illustrated History of Cartography (Washington, 2006), pp. 84–5, 116–17. 58   Schneider, Die Macht der Karten, p. 7. See also Konvitz, Cartography of France, p. 19; Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (New York, 1992), pp. 1–3; Nordman, Frontières de France, pp. 9–11; Barber, Das Buch der Karten, p. 6.

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seventeenth century, it could be argued, such ornaments and cartouches were of greater relevance than scientific precision.59 Surprisingly, neither cantonal governments nor the Confederation’s diet commissioned maps in the early modern period. They were designed by enthusiasts or learned specialists and edited by commercial publishers. Censorship could be a threat, but – as many dedications illustrate – cartographers often enjoyed harmonious relationships with cantonal governments. Unlike most of their European colleagues, who acted on princely commissions,60 Swiss cartographers usually worked on their own initiative. This could explain some of the ‘mistakes’ or discrepancies between maps and ornaments. In a few cases, allied or associated territories appear as members of the Confederation in the marginal crests, but not in terms of actual boundaries, which may have been a lesser priority for cartographers at the time. From a comparative perspective, we can note some interesting features and developments. Coats of arms seem to have been more important markers of membership (as full member, associate or ally of the Confederation) than boundaries, particularly for Mulhouse, Rottweil and the city of Geneva. The crest of the princebishop of Basel, on the other hand, appears only rarely. Duval’s map of 1664 omitted it, while including the territory within the Swiss frontier,61 and the same applies to eighteenth-century maps. There is no simple reason for this difference, but it may reflect the fact that the prince-bishop was the only associate without an unlimited or ‘eternal’ treaty with the Swiss.62 The case of Neuchâtel is interesting, because the city and count of Neuchâtel were permanent allies of some, but not all, of the Swiss cantons (Bern since 1406, Fribourg since 1495, Luzern and Solothurn since 1501) and because of the change of sovereign in 1707. The maps apparently did not reflect the transfer to Prussia, despite France’s refusal to list Neuchâtel as a member of the Confederation in the peace treaty of Utrecht (1713).63 A case of censorship may illustrate the significance of crests and ornaments. In 1703, the Protestant cantons decided to confiscate a new map of Switzerland 59   Barber, ‘Maps and Monarchs’, p. 75, insists that maps ‘are extraordinarily multifaceted’. They could also be used on coins or, in the British case, as decorations for the Great Seal of the Commonwealth: ibid., p. 77. On decorations see ibid., pp. 101–2, 116–20. 60  David Buisseret, ‘Monarchs, Ministers and Maps in France before the Accession of Louis XIV’, in David Buisseret (ed.), Monarchs, Ministers and Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of Government in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, 1992), pp. 99– 123; Christine Marie Petto, ‘Kartographie als Staatsaufgabe – die Förderung französischer Kartographen im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert’, Cartographica Helvetica, 12 (1995): 38–41; Schneider, Die Macht der Karten, pp. 36–42 (Spain, the Netherlands, France, Britain). 61   Sanson (Paris, 1667) [Ryh 3203: 20]. Duval (Paris, 1664) [Ryh 3203:23] lists the principality – without a coat of arms – in the margin. 62   See Würgler, ‘Eidgenossenschaft’. 63   EA 7/1, no. 57 (Aarau, 8–15 Januar 1715): conference of Zurich and Bern.

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by the famous French cartographer Alexis-Hubert Jaillot (1632–1712). The corpus delicti was not an inaccurate boundary, but the fact that Jaillot – while observing the customary arrangement of cantonal arms – had replaced the central motive of William Tell or the Swiss foundation oath by a portrait of Louis XIV. The cantons considered this an insult, because it implied subordination under the King of France.64 This essay has focused on some contrasting conceptions of Switzerland’s shape and size, but there were others. One example is the so-called ‘eidgenössischer Schirm’, that is to say the Swiss guarantee of military protection for certain nonmembers like the city and bishop of Constance, the four small towns on the river Rhine known as ‘Waldstädte’ (the ‘forest towns’ of Rheinfelden, Säckingen, Laufenburg and Waldshut), the Fricktal, the Franche Comté (a part of Burgundy under Austrian and later Spanish rule), southern parts of the Alsace and the princebishopric of Basel.65 Switzerland, furthermore, was (and is) divided by linguistic borders between German, French and Italian, although this factor never really surfaced in early modern discussions of borderlines.66 Yet another issue is the fact that some French, Dutch and German maps showed the Confederation as part of the French Kingdom67 or the Empire.68 Tobias Mayer’s map, produced in 1750, even offered several alternative imperial boundaries, suggesting that there were varying perceptions.69 A final set of boundary disputes concerns disagreements about cantonal borders as well as demarcations between communal and individual properties. Such conflicts were increasingly settled by new genres of small-scale maps (‘Katasterkarten’) which recorded local borderlines in intricate detail.70   EA 6/2, no. 537q (Baden, 9 December 1703): Protestant conference during the Swiss Diet. On Jaillot see also Petto, ‘Kartographie als Staatsaufgabe’, pp. 38–9. 65   Adolf Niethammer, Das Vormauernsystem an der eidgenössischen Nordgrenze. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Schweizerischen Neutralität vom 16. bis 18. Jahrhundert (Basel, 1944). 66  Norbert Furrer, Die vierzigsprachige Schweiz. Sprachkontakte und Mehrsprachigkeit in der vorindustriellen Gesellschaft (15.–19. Jahrhundert) (2 vols, Zurich, 2002). 67   See Oronce Fine, Novus totius Galliae descriptio (Paris, 1553), reproduced in Monique Pelletier, Cartographie de la France et du monde de la Renaissance au Siècle des lumières (Paris, 2001), p. 10, and in Bitterling, ‘Der absolute Staat und seine Karten’, pp. 98–9; and Nicolas Sanson, Carte générale du Royaume de France en douze gouvernements généraux (Paris, 1644), reproduced in Mireille Pastoureau, Les Atlas français, XVI–XVIIe siècles. Répertoire bibliographique et étude (Paris, 1984), p. 609. 68   Frans Hogenberg (Cologne, 1576) [Ryh 3401:6]; Matthias Quad and Johannes Bussemacher (Cologne, 1589) [Ryh 4301:9]; Frederick de Witt (Amsterdam, c.1659– 1688) [Ryh 4301:40]; Johann Baptist Homann (Nürnberg, c.1705), reproduced in Dagmar Unverhau (ed.), Geschichtsdeutung auf alten Karten. Archäologie und Geschichte (Wiesbaden, 2003), p. 275. 69   Tobias Mayer (Nürnberg, 1750) [Ryh 4302:60], reproduced in Lindgren, ‘Die Grenzen des Alten Reiches’, figure 6. 70   The great importance and longevity of these conflicts emerges from the subject indexes (‘Materienregister’) s.v. ‘Marchen(sachen)’ in EA 3/1 to EA 8. 64

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Conclusions Various and contrasting conceptions of both the size and shape of the Swiss Confederation existed in the early modern period. First, there was a Catholic and a Protestant view. Second, there were the perceptions reflected in European peace treaties which were distinctive, yet generally closer to those of Swiss Protestants than Catholics. Third, we encounter many different cartographic visualizations of the Confederation. Despite many varieties, over the course of the period they increasingly leaned towards the Protestant model of Switzerland, sometimes even in contradiction of international law. Not only Swiss, but also French, Dutch and German, and even English and Italian maps depicted Switzerland as much larger than it actually was in both domestic and international perspectives. Five principal findings can be summarized. First, the increasing importance of boundaries reflected the modern state’s spatially constructed concept of government. Second, the uncertainty about frontiers was related to overlapping lordships, divided dominions and unsettled conflicts – none of which specifically ‘Swiss’ issues. The monopoly of state power had not yet fully materialized. Third, boundaries were not as important as they became in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury maps. Coats of arms, however, appear as a central and distinctive means of demarcation. Fourth, the minority of Protestant cantons successfully spread their (not exclusively confessional) conception of the Confederation in cartography as well as in international law. Even today, Switzerland’s border essentially mirrors71 that promulgated by Protestant representatives during the early modern period. Finally, in political terms, the northern sections of the prince-bishopric of Basel were never considered to be part of the Confederation, but maps made them Swiss before 1800. In 1815, the Congress of Vienna followed suit and they remain Swiss today. On this historical background, Switzerland might just leave the problem of whether or not to join the European Union to the cartographers.

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  With three exceptions: the former allied city of Mulhouse is now French; the former Austrian baillage Frickthal was Napoleon’s ‘gift’ to the ‘Helvetic Republic’ in 1802/03; and the former condominium of the Grisons, the Veltlin or Valtellina, opted for the Cisalpine Republic in 1797 and is now Italian.

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Chapter 11

Outwitting Power: Bogus Kings and Officials in Early Modern England Tobias B. Hug

In 1600, a labourer from Kent was found guilty of treason at the Rochester Assizes. He had publicly declared ‘I am kynge of the Realme. I was borne in White hall and that is my house and I will have itt yf I lyve’. In what follows I will chart similar stories of individuals who clashed with authorities since they claimed a false identity. Unstable social and political structures and practices, or to put it differently, unstable representations, I will argue, enabled people to invent their own political space. Erving Goffman has suggested that individuals to some extent create their persona, yet that the latter depends on time and space. Concepts of space shape our own conceptions of who and what we are as individuals; one role of space is therefore to generate settings that assist the performance of identity. Space, on the other hand, is also the result of social interaction; the same can be said of representations, understood as socially negotiated and widely accepted ideas and notions. What particularly interests me here is the question of the relation between power structures and practices and the shaping of identity. I will illustrate how, by claiming a bogus identity, individuals engaged with and negotiated representations such as the monarchy and officialdom, and how they acquired and applied power to their own benefit, possibly even attempting to change local or ‘national’ practices. It has become clear that the notion of physical space will here be extended into that of subjective or virtual space. The general meaning of political imposture is very broad and includes a variety of aspects ranging from royal impostures such as those of Perkin Warbeck in the reign of Henry VII to the thrilling adventures of spies, or even Cicero’s and Machiavelli’s advocacy of dissimulation and politicians’ concealment of their true aspirations. However, the term is suitable as it implies the filling of a power vacuum in a very broad sense by means of a (non-)spatial claim. What, then, are the benefits for an exploration of political space of studying a relatively small number of impostures of some rather minor historical figures? Research    Calendar of Assize Records, ed. James S. Cockburn (15 vols, London, 1975–97) [hereafter Cockburn, CAR], Kent Indictments Elizabeth I, p. 449.   Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York, 1959).    For ‘territories of the self’ and the ‘concept of claim’ see Erving Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order (London, 1971), chap. 2.

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on popular politics has long demonstrated that engagement with socio-political issues went beyond ‘court chambers’ and was equally not confined to the educated but involved individuals of different social strata, age and gender. Along with different ‘expressive actions’ such as demonstrations and riots the impostures can be considered as ‘an integral part of an interactive political process – as statements within an ongoing conversation’. They provide us with a distinct picture of ‘political opportunity structures’ of which subjects might have made use. Explorations of political imposture might thus complement studies of popular politics. I will focus on two aspects of political imposture that span almost the entire spectrum of the governmental body in early modern England: bogus kings and officials. Let us first briefly turn to the former. I have shown elsewhere in more detail how individuals exploited a vacuum of power by assuming the identity of a royal personage in order to advance themselves and perhaps a political faction. It is an old, European-wide and fairly familiar phenomenon, and one that was not specific to the early modern period. Well known are the cases of the counterfeit Baldwin in Flanders, the pseudo-Fredericks, the three false Dimitris in Russia and the false kings of Portugal, to name just a few. Evolutionist views have attributed the incidents to gullible peasants, and in the contemporary popular mind the phenomenon frequently reflected the credulity and ignorance of a whole age or nation. However, such arguments miss an important point, above all the opportunity to explore deeper cultural mechanisms. For a fuller understanding it is crucial to contextualize their activities more broadly. Despite the eventual failure of these claimants, we should bear in mind that they frequently received widespread support. Their appeal was not a matter of illiteracy or social status. It has often been neglected that apart from the influence of specific political, social, religious as well as economic conditions, the claimants’ ‘success’ rested to a great   Wayne te Brake, Shaping History: Ordinary People in European Politics, 1500– 1700 (Berkeley, 1998), pp. 11, 13.   The following section is mainly based on Tobias B. Hug, ‘“I Come of To Highe a Bloode to be a Roague for I am Kynge of the Realm”: Representations and Perceptions of Impostors in Early Modern England’ (PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2006), chap. 4.    For a good overview of the variety and continuity of pretenders and claimants in the western world from antiquity to modernity, see Clive Cheesman and Jonathan Williams, Rebels, Pretenders and Impostors (London, 2002).   Among others, see Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (rev. edn, New York, 1970); Maureen Perrie, Pretenders and Popular Monarchism in Early Modern Russia (2nd edn, Cambridge, 2002); Yves-Marie Bercé, Le roi caché. Sauveurs et imposteurs. Mythes politiques populaires dans l’Europe moderne (Paris, 1990).    For example Alexandre Stroev, Les aventuriers des Lumières (Paris, 1997), p. 224.   Richard Aldington, Frauds (London, 1957), pp. 4–5, 31; Ian Arthurson, The Perkin Warbeck Conspiracy 1491–1499 (Stroud, 1994), p. 44; Richard Swiderski, The False Formosan: George Psalmanazar and the Eighteenth-Century Experiment of Identity (San Francisco, 1991), p. 1. 

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extent on the fact that they also filled an emotional vacuum – the claimants were expected, desired. In the context of early modern England several factors created such vacuums and thus facilitated the appearance of pretenders and royal impostors. These included dynastic disputes and, related to them, the lack of a male heir, as well as uncertainty over the fate of younger members of the royal family. Unstable marriages and liaisons, both overt and ‘secret’, sparked off rumours about potential offspring and heirs. Catholic/Protestant rivalries were another prominent cause prevalent throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the sixteenth century it was the new and controversial phenomenon of female monarchs that triggered doubts about their legitimacy and capability of governing the realm. Finally, widespread ignorance over the physical appearance of royal figures also facilitated impostures. We have to distinguish between two terms: while royal impostors are ordinary people, often without even a noble background, who claim a royal identity and thus a legitimate right to the throne, pretenders have to belong to a broadly defined royal family.10 The late fifteenth-century cases of Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck are paradigms of royal impostures in English history that are both widely known and extensively covered in the recent historiography.11 I will therefore not dwell on them, but rather focus on the later examples of ‘Edward impostures’ (that is, persons impersonating Edward VI). They are intriguing in many respects, and also reflect a European-wide phenomenon that is slightly different from clearcut royal impostures and links imposture to the universal messianic myth of the sleeping hero.12 The belief is founded on prophecies and is usually associated with resistance movements. For instance, Edward II (1327) and Richard II (1400) were probably murdered in prison, but were both thought to be alive and to return.13 Apart from the Duke of Monmouth in the late seventeenth century, Edward VI is the best English example of a sleeping hero.14 He was revered as a deliverer who would follow his father Henry VIII, yet his premature death in 1553 ended all hopes. The phenomenon lasted for more than fifty years until the early seventeenth century. Among the individuals who fell in the category of Edward impostors were   This definition of ‘pretender’ follows Cheesman and Williams, Rebels, p. 9.   Both of them impersonated members of the Plantagenet dynasty. By posing as Edward, Earl of Warwick, in 1486–87, Simnel and his supporters wanted to remove Henry VII from power. Simnel was crowned at Dublin as Edward VI before invading England. In the 1490s, Warbeck ignited a crisis of international dimensions by claiming to be Richard, Duke of York for six to eight years until his execution in 1499. See Michael Bennet, Lambert Simnel and the Battle of Stoke (Gloucester, 1987); Anne Wroe, Perkin: A Story of Deception (London, 2003); Arthurson, Perkin Warbeck. 12   The best comparative analysis is still provided by Bercé, Le roi caché. 13   See Keith Thomas, Religion and Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England (Harmondsworth, 1991), pp. 496–7. 14   For the Duke of Monmouth see Hug, ‘I Come of to Highe a Bloode’, chap. 4. 10 11

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rumour-mongers, those who genuinely believed in their royal identity, puppets of political factions, and deliberate deceits. Five months after Edward’s death, Robert Taylor, Edmond Cole (or Coles), a London gentleman and mercer, and Thomas Wood, a servant, all claimed that Edward was still alive but none of them passed himself off as the king. Both Cole and Wood owed money to the government, and it is very likely that their primary motivation was not a genuine belief in the return of the king, but a desire to embarrass and undermine the monarch by blaming Queen Mary for their hardship.15 Similar causes might have led to the seditious words of one Thomas Vaugham, a ‘vagrant’ Welshman, who said that the king was still alive and a substitute child had been put to death. Like the 1540s, the 1590s were years of dearth. The decade also witnessed stricter law enforcements against vagrants, a fact that might have contributed to his anger and fear. Vaugham’s longing for a deliverer and his disappointment in the Queen, this time Queen Elizabeth, are apparent. He argued that ‘this king had saved the lives of the commons in England, Wales, and Ireland with his corn and provisions, and was at that moment himself in Ireland’.16 He thus accused the Queen of not caring enough for her subjects, but his allegations also alluded to rumours that she had borne and murdered illicit children.17 All of these rumour-mongers declared that Edward was still alive. It seems that they had simply repeated what had come to their ears in some alehouse, inn or marketplace and was in line with their wishful thinking and hope, but none of them had serious political ambitions. Their stories were gossip, which, as James C. Scott put it, ‘is perhaps the most familiar and elementary form of disguised popular aggression’ and rumour ‘the second cousin of gossip and magical aggression’.18 Their words were not against the institution of monarchy per se; on the contrary, they argued for a strong male monarch. However, the words often aimed at the reputation of the monarch, sometimes very directly, at other times in more disguised form. Gossip, as Karma Lochrie puts it, ‘publicizes the private, personal, and secret affairs of others, disregarding the boundaries of public and private’.19 The throne was obviously not empty, but various factors had created a vacuum which helped to shape a ‘new’ political space, namely that of gossip and rumour. It is a vastly   Acts of the Privy Council of England, 1552–54, ed. John Roche Dasent (London, 1890–1974), vol. 4, pp. 363, 364, 367, 391–2 (hereafter APC); Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia, 1994), p. 97; Margaret E. Cornford, ‘A Legend Concerning Edward VI’, English Historical Review, 23 (1908): 286–90. 16   Historical Manuscripts Commission (HMC) 9, Hatfield, Part 9 (London, 1902), pp. 167, 173. 17  Levin, Heart, p. 83. 18   James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (Yale, 1990), pp. 142, 144. 19   Karma Lochrie, Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia, 1999), esp. p. 63. 15

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vulnerable domain of any political body, and one of which governments were much afraid; it was occupied and reshaped by these ordinary rumour-mongers, and used as a stage of self-expression. Among those who indeed passed themselves off as Edward VI was William Featherstone. In May 1555, a couple of days after rumours started that Queen Mary had given birth to a prince, Featherstone appeared in London as Edward VI. He was the son of a Dorset miller and had been servant to Sir Peter Mewtas, a gentleman of the privy chamber under Henry VIII and Edward, for eight years. He was incarcerated and later whipped through the city and banished.20 Early the following year, Featherstone returned and again proclaimed himself to be the late king. This time he was condemned to death for having ‘caused letters to be cast abrode that king Edwarde VI was alyve’ and ‘shew[ing] himselfe to be King Edward, so that manye persons, both men and women, were troubled by him’. Hanged, beheaded, and quartered at Tyburn, and having his head piked and displayed on London Bridge, he underwent the brutal ritual of a traitor’s death.21 His persistence in the claim is remarkable, but his true motivation will remain a secret. He might have been encouraged and made to believe in his role by Peter Mewtas, who had joined Northumberland’s attempt to block Mary’s succession and was thus imprisoned in 1553 and again in 1555. During Elizabeth’s reign, one Robert Bloys or Blosse, alias Mantell, a London yeoman, was first imprisoned in 1578 for the same offence, but managed to break out. He was a suspected Catholic. Recaptured in 1581, he was again convicted of impersonating the king and executed.22 Apparently, an Oxford scholar had convinced him that Edward was still alive. The main accusation was not so much his claim that Edward was alive, a fact which the attorney-general did not regard as treason, but rather that his escape and thus his presence in the country had encouraged others to spread seditious libels to the disturbance of the realm’s peace.23 An obvious religious motivation is evident in the case of Gervase Smith, parson of Polstead in Suffolk, who in 1606 also pretended to be Edward VI. Like his predecessor, James I had disappointed the expectations and hopes of radical  Charles Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England During the Reigns of the Tudors, From AD 1485 To 1559, ed. William D. Hamilton (2 vols, London, 1875/7), vol. 2, p. 129; APC, 1554–1556, vol. 5, p. 122. For Mewtas, see Darryl M. Ogier, ‘Mewtas, Sir Peter (d.1562)’, Dictionary of National Biography. 21   Wriothesley, Chronicle, vol. 2, pp. 133–4. 22   Cockburn, CAR, Essex Indictments Elizabeth I, p. 175; Calendar of State Papers: Domestic Series (CSPD), 1581–90, pp. 308, 309. See also Thomas, Religion, pp. 498–9. 23  Ibid., pp. 498–9. See also John Strype, Annals of the Reformation and Establishment of Religion, and Other Various Occurrences in the Church of England, During the First Twelve Years of Queen Elizabeth’s Happy Reign (4 vols, Oxford, 1824), vol. 2, part 1, pp. 355–6; vol. 2, part 2, pp. 503–5; Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study (London, 1970), p. 78. 20

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Protestants. Smith, a fervent Puritan, had been very disenchanted with James as the ‘subject of apocalyptic hopes’, for the King had failed to restore the true faith and to persecute Catholics effectively.24 In his community, Smith had become well known for his fixation with ancient prophetic tales. His prophecies included the restoration of the true faith, and he believed in Edward as a ‘Puritan hero’. Earlier, he had circulated a book stating that King Sebastian of Portugal was still alive.25 Despite the fact that these impostors were either instigated by someone or depended on supporters and did not therefore act autonomously, there is hardly any evidence of serious political ambitions or even a mass movement comparable, for instance, to those in thirteenth-century Germany unleashed by the pseudoFredericks. The appeal of Edward varied according to individual circumstances, but clearly reflected a desire for stability, both on a micro individual-psychological and a macro historical level, as the appearances of Edward impostors often coincided with times of crisis. For some, there was clearly a religious issue at stake; for others, the unstable socio-economic conditions may well have strengthened a yearning to have a male ruler once more, a symbol of normality and stability. Imposture often derives from an emotional vacuum. Some individuals may have been driven by personal distress to invent a new identity as a last resort, whether as fraud or fantasy. In July 1599, a period of abject poverty, Edward Tedder, a Kentish labourer who declared in public that he was the rightful ‘kynge of the Realme’, blamed the Queen for his current hardships and cursed the authorities for denouncing him as a rogue. These were plain words. Here was a man who explicitly claimed a political site by declaring the Palace of Whitehall to be his own ‘house’. Whereas in most other examples the claim of physical space is only implicit, this is an exceptional example of an undisguised claim of a specific royal site. Tedder was found guilty and hanged for contriving Elizabeth’s death.26 Many of the examples mentioned above entered the most powerful realm of political discourse by exploiting a rich prophetic tradition that even governments or vying dynasties had sometimes used to their advantage.27 However, contrary to other 24   See Bernard Capp, ‘The Political Dimension of Apocalyptic Thought,’ in C.A. Partides and Joseph Wittreich (eds), The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature (Manchester, 1994), pp. 93–119, quote at pp. 102–3. 25   The book might be The True Historie of the late and lamentable aduentures of Don Sebastian King of Portguall (London, 1602) or A Continuation of the Lamentable and Admirable Adventures of Dom Sebastian King of Portugale. With a declaration of all his time employed since the battell in Africke against the Infidels 1578 (London, 1603). It is an assertion that Marco Tulio Catizone, who was also deemed an impostor and imprisoned in Venice, was indeed the king. He first appeared in 1598 and was executed in 1603. See also Mary Elizabeth Brooks, A King for Portugal: The Madrigal Conspiracy, 1594–1595 (Madison, 1964), esp. pp. 45–9; and Thomas, Religion, pp. 500–501. 26   Cockburn, CAR, Kent Indictments Elizabeth I, p. 449. 27  On the use of the Brutus and Arthur legends and other myths, for example, see Thomas, Religion, pp. 493–6.

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forms of political disguise such as folktales, symbolic inversions, and rituals of reversal, royal impostors disputed the monarch’s right to the throne. Such claims obviously posed a threat to the stability of government and religion, which explains the often harsh punishments; although there were many issues at stake, one major concern of governments was the spread of seditious rumours that might evolve into social uprisings.28 Let us now move on to the second aspect, namely that of bogus officials. State formation is one of the processes that defined the early modern period, and its results and effectiveness have been the subject of many historiographical debates.29 While some historians have subsumed it under the grand narrative of modernization, others rightly pointed out the reluctant realization and slow progress of these processes. Although a timeless symptom of any institution, the phenomenon of bogus officials sheds further light on the limits of state formation in this period. Again, we shall be concerned with the question of what opportunities weakly defined and organized political space might offer to an opportunistic individual. The phenomenon clearly implies the exploitation of structural fissures and weaknesses for merely personal advantage, and thus draws attention to some practical problems of governing a vast territory with many parts under only indirect central control. It is an illustrative example of how individuals appropriated instruments and practices which were designed to enforce political rule, and eventually exercised control over subjects. While religious and political matters frequently formed the motivation of royal impostors, for the most part bogus officials acted for financial reasons, alone or with accomplices. The problem of assumed official authority was noted before the period considered here; for example, there is evidence of false messengers from the Middle Ages, but research on the subject is scarce.30 In 1596, Elizabeth I issued a proclamation ‘ordering punishment of persons with forged credentials’. It was directed at individuals who took ‘upon them to be messengers of her majesty’s chamber and for that purpose [wear] boxes or escutcheons of arms’ and with  On dissemination mechanisms for news and rumour see Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2002), chap. 7. 29  Among others, see Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c.1550–1640 (Basingstoke, 2000); Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c.1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000). On bogus officials, see Hug, ‘I Come of To Highe a Bloode’, chap. 1. 30   See Valentin Groebner, ‘Describing the Person, Reading the Signs in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe: Identity Papers, Vested Figures, and the Limits of Identification, 1400–1600’, in Jane Caplan and John Torpey (eds), Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Princeton, 2001), pp. 15–27, messengers at p. 17; Valentin Groebner, Gefährliche Geschenke. Ritual, Politik und die Sprache der Korruption in der Eidgenossenschaft im späten Mittelalter und am Beginn der Neuzeit (Konstanz, 2000), pp. 91–3; Michael Jucker, ‘Secrets and Politics: Theoretical and Methodological Aspects of Late Medieval Diplomatic Communication’, Micrologus: Nature, Sciences and Medieval Societies, 14 (2006): 281. 28

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forged warrants containing the names of lords, privy counsellors, or ecclesiastical commissioners extorted money from victims.31 Cases of bogus officials can be uncovered in various sources such as the Acts of the Privy Council, the Calendar of Assize Records, the extant court rolls for the Middlesex County Sessions, or the Westminster Quarter Sessions.32 However, we must bear in mind that these sources record only a proportion of the crimes which were actually committed and are therefore insufficiently consistent to give an adequate picture of the total number of bogus officials in the period. Bogus officials existed at all levels of state organization and ranged from petty constables, bailiffs and watchmen to superior officers such as messengers and JPs. As early as 1538, one John Pratte, a servant of Ralph Salter of Harpley, came to the house of the Carmelite Friars of Norwich and announced himself as a servant of the Lord Privy Seal, namely Thomas Cromwell, the royal vicegerent. At the time Cromwell had been commissioned by Henry VIII to organize systematic visitations of all monasteries, and Parliament had produced a list of houses to be closed and their property to be confiscated. Pratte pretended to have a commission to suppress the house, but he could not produce it when asked. The prior brought him before the mayoralty court, where Pratte confessed to the imposture. He exploited what were undoubtedly tense times for monasteries. However, the case also hints at the difficulties in identifying those appointed or deputed to carry out similar tasks, in this case lower rank officials such as servants, as well as corruption among the commissioners; Pratte simply hoped to extort money from the prior and keep it for his own means. He was sentenced to stand at the pillory, with a paper reading ‘For false feygning to be the kynge’s commyssioner’; his ears were nailed to the pillory and then cut off.33 Also of interest is the claim of one Blount who, in 1596, rambled the country with a ‘deputacion of a comission concerninge the execution of a stattute for the wearinge of wollen cappes’.34 The subject matter of his commission is not   ‘Proclamation 779’, in Tudor Royal Proclamations, eds Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin (3 vols, New Haven, 1964–69), vol. 3, pp. 159–60. Note that in our context the word ‘messenger’ extends the meaning of the nuntius of medieval diplomacy and means an ‘official employed by the state to carry important dispatches or to serve writs and summonses; ... having the further duty of apprehending state prisoners’; Oxford English Dictionary. 32   In a recent study of the Westminster Quarter Sessions between 1685 and 1720 the author argues that ‘before 1685, almost no London impostors chose to act as parish officials’. See Jennine Hurl-Eamon, ‘The Westminster Impostors: Impersonating Law Enforcement in Early Eighteenth-Century London’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 38 (2005): 461–83, quote at 462. For a slightly different view of the issue, see Hug, ‘I Come of To Highe a Bloode’, chap. 1. 33   Victoria History of the Counties of England: County of Norfolk, ed. William Page (2 vols, London, 1906), vol. 2, p. 432. 34   APC, 1596–7, vol. 26, p. 73. 31

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as farfetched as it at first appears and must be understood in the context of the economic struggle of the 1590s. Its purpose was not simply to benefit Blount but was supposed to serve a wider community of crafts- and tradesmen. Already in 1571, a law had been passed that ordered the non-gentry over the age of six to wear ‘an English-made cap of knitted wool on Sundays and holy days’ in order to improve the industry.35 We may assume that Blount was in the wool trade and had experienced the decline of the textile industry himself; with his self-proclaimed though not entirely fabricated deputation, he certainly hoped to boost the industry by his own means. The Acts of the Privy Council reveal a few complaints against purveyors of the Queen. Some officials were misusing their authority by taking too many goods from her subjects – like one purveyor who not only collected wine for the Queen but also a fair portion for himself – but others were bogus officers. Pawl Elliott, for instance, spread the ‘rumour’ in the Southampton area that the Queen would collect a third of the goods of every household in the realm and, pretending to be a ‘searcher for Brasse and Pewter’ who were appointed by JPs, he deprived several victims of ‘pannes, brasse pottes, pewter vessell, hattes and such like, constrayninge the people to agree with them for the recovering of their goodes againe’. John Hamlett, who had assisted Elliot in spreading the rumour, was committed to Winchester gaol.36 Of widespread concern were individuals who exacted money, often with counterfeited warrants. Like Robert Hadsoll, a yeoman of Sittingbourne in Kent, some officials were corrupt and clearly abused their authority. Between 1656 and 1659 he assaulted and falsely imprisoned three people, for several hours in each case, in order to extort money from them. Hadsoll had indeed served as bailiff for the Hundred of Milton in 1658 and 1659 and for the Lathe of Scray in 1656 and 1657; he can therefore not be considered an impostor, but was simply misusing his authority.37 By contrast, others were evidently bogus. In 1589/90, William Davyes 35  N.B. Harte, ‘State Control of Dress and Social Change in Pre-Industrial England’, in D.C. Coleman and A.H. John (eds), Trade, Government and Economy in Pre-Industrial England: Essays Presented to F.J. Fisher (London, 1976), pp. 132–65, quote at p. 138. On the economic decline of the 1590s, see Peter Clark, ‘A Crisis Contained? The Condition of English Towns in the 1590s’, in Peter Clark (ed.), The European Crisis of the 1590s: Essays in Comparative History (London, 1985), pp. 44–66, esp. p. 49. 36   APC, 1558–70, vol 7, pp. 241, 371; APC, 1575–7, vol. 9, pp. 265–6, 271, 283, 314. For ‘searchers of Brasse and Pewter’ see William Lambard, Eirenarcha: Or of The Office of the Iustices of Peace, in two Bookes. Gathered 1579, and now reuised and first published, in the 24 yeere of the peaceable raigne of our gratious Queene Elizabeth (London, 1582), p. 499. 37   Cockburn, CAR, Kent Indictments 1649–1659, pp. 328, 330, 232, 248, 266, 300, 315. ‘One’ Robert Hadsoll, bailiff for the same administrative units appears also for the years 1662, 1663 and 1669 in Cockburn, CAR, Kent Indictments, Charles II: 1660–1675, pp. 50, 83, 193. The Lathe of Scray had 17 divisions, among them Milton Hundred. See Frederick A. Youngs, A Guide to Local Administrative Units, Vol. 1: Southern England (London, 1979), p. 632.

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pretended to be messenger of Her Majesty’s Chamber, and accompanied by others burst at night into the house of one Baker, threw him out of bed and onto the street where they caused him to be arrested by a sergeant of the city and imprisoned. Baker eventually managed to write a complaint against Davyes, and his case was examined, but it is not known how it ended.38 A few months later, one John Cooper falsely arrested a number of people and caused them to appear in court. In the same year, an arrest warrant was issued against Anthony Nixon and John Norbury. Both were accused of roaming the county of Buckinghamshire and elsewhere under false names and ‘under the name of Pursivantes with warrantes, and some of our names and signatures conterfaited unto them’; Norbury went under the names of John Smith and Thomas Browne. It was not until two years later that the two bogus bailiffs were eventually caught and imprisoned.39 John Whaley, a merchant of Bath, wrote a complaint since he had been falsely arrested by someone claiming to be a messenger and in possession of a writ with the forged signatures of some privy councillors. John Goymer, Robert Taylor, George Curtis and George Taylor were all accused of being false messengers and extorting money, and one John Melloes forged the handwriting, signatures and seal of arms of the Lord Treasurer and defrauded several people. Claiming to be a messenger of the chamber, he too presented false arrest warrants, extorted money from the accused and sent them to court to face the charges against them.40 In 1596, the Privy Council issued a warrant for the arrest of ‘one Maddox, a Groome of the Chamber’ who claimed to be a messenger of the Chamber.41 In 1623 Thomas Williams claimed to be a sworn messenger of the Court of High Commission and the Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘by pretence whereof he hath forced diverse of his Majesties liege people to compound with him and cosened them of their moneys’.42 George Grimes was accused in 1658 of having taken ‘upon him to be a parson [sic] imployed by the State to take and apprehend thieves’; he was charged with not only falsely distraining people but also for receiving money in exchange for their release, sometimes for as much as twenty pounds.43 Four years later, one Thomas Simons, a tailor, was bound over ‘for falsely pretending himself to be a deputy marshall’. He was charged with apprehending ‘debauched persons and unjustly forcing them to give unto him certain money’ only to let them off again ‘without the knowledge of any of his

  APC, 1589–90, vol. 18, pp. 79–80.   APC, 1590–91, vol. 20, pp. 353, 242; APC, 1591–2, vol. 22, p. 65; APC, 1592, vol. 23, pp. 330, 344. 40   APC, 1591, vol. 21, p. 468; APC, 1592–3, vol. 24, p. 323; APC, 1595–6, vol. 25, pp. 130, 210, 270; APC, 1597–8, vol. 28, p. 424. 41   APC, 1596–7, vol. 26, p. 120. 42   Middlesex County Records, ed. John C. Jeaffreson (4 vols, London, 1886–92), vol. 2, p. 166 (hereafter Jeaffreson, MCR). 43  Ibid., vol. 3, p. 273. 38

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Majesty’s Justices of Peace’; the accusation was brought by Gilbert Thomas, the (genuine) Provost Marshall of Middlesex.44 Many of these pretend officials benefited from the difficulties of identification. Their main proofs of identification, and thus their power to ‘create political space’, were legal documents, that is an arrest warrant or another written command, order or authority. The authenticity of the documents should have been guaranteed through personal handwriting, seals and signatures, but these could easily be forged. Moreover, the problem appears to have been not so much that they apprehended people, but that they did not bring them before the authorities and freed them for money instead. False arrests or accusations were humiliating and a blot on someone’s escutcheon. Communication and legal procedures were slow and time-consuming as well as a financial burden. As in the Davyes/Baker case, we might therefore assume that some actions were part of a quarrel and therefore aimed at specifically selected individuals. In 1609, Robert Jones, servant to Percy Richardson, a London merchant tailor, was accused of riotous behaviour, and ‘takinge uppon him to be a maiestrate of ye peace and executing the office of a maiestrate uppon Elizabeth Hall’.45 A month later, Charles Levet, servant of Ottewell Worseley, also a merchant tailor, and most likely an accomplice of Robert Jones, was accused of the same offence.46 It is possible that the three agents knew each other, and a personal dispute was at the bottom of the incident. This is an interesting hypothesis which supports my argument that while geographical distance and poor communication played a role, the primary issue that facilitated such pretences was not so much the anonymity of cities and towns or the estrangement of officers from fellow citizens, but rather the ill-defined nature of early modern officialdom. It can be observed that the agents were hardly total strangers but frequently came from the same area, ward, parish or village. For instance, Richard Mase of Challock, only four or five miles north of Ashford, was indicted for cozening there in June 1577 since ‘under pretext of collecting provisions for the queen’ he took victuals from several people; he was acquitted, probably because he had returned the goods.47 John Bentley, a yeoman of East Malling near Maidstone, and John Copstacke, a ‘mylner’ from Marwood, probably in South Kent, were also indicted for ‘cozening’. At East Malling in 1584 they used forged letters and Queen’s Bench warrants to defraud John Payler of five shillings. Both were found guilty and set in the stocks.48 John Bentley was a local man, literate and of the middling sort, who had cheated another resident out of money by pretending to be a high constable, although it may have been Copstacke who impersonated the constable. As in most cases, we lack further information that might reveal the relationship between the three parties. But, as mentioned 44

  London, London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), MJ/SR 1260/75.   Jeaffreson, MCR, vol. 2, p. 37. 46  Ibid., p. 39. 47   Cockburn, CAR, Kent Indictments: Elizabeth I, p. 154. 48  Ibid., pp. 221–2. 45

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above, a false arrest could obviously inflict harm on someone’s social credit and was thus an alternative means of conflict, one that perhaps remained uncovered because it was conducted under the guise of legality. The motives behind such activities and the choice of the victim are quite obvious in the following incident. In 1651 John Browne and Thomas Bradford, both of Holborn, forced an entry into the house of Richard Baylie of Clerkenwell, who did not live far from their own dwellings. Constables were allowed to break open a house if they suspected a felon,49 but Browne and Bradford undoubtedly set out with the intention of robbing the house of a person they knew possessed some valuable goods. One of them claimed to be a bailiff, they pointed loaded pistols at Baylie, and eventually ‘arrested’ and took him away; in his absence, the accomplice of the bogus bailiff stole some of Baylie’s possessions.50 The fluidity of boundaries between a bunch of riotous and drunken fellows and constables can be illustrated by an incident which took place in London in 1571. Most of the agents were locals. A group of men described as yeomen and tailors living in Charterhouse Lane in Clerkenwell ‘assembled riotously’ with ‘eight unknown disturbers of the peace’. Formidably equipped with ‘clubs, knives, daggers and other weapons’, they ‘exercised and took upon themselves the office of the constables of St John’s Strete, without the knowledge of the said constable, and made watches at Clerkenwell, and … made arrests of suspected persons, and then wilfully permitted the same suspected persons to escape’.51 In 1643 an Act was passed to improve the organization of the watch system which, among other issues, addressed the supervision of constables, beadles and watchmen; for this purpose, ‘two or more honest and able men’ were to be appointed by the Alderman, deputy and members of the Common Council.52 A lack of visual recognizance was certainly one major disadvantage. Constables did not wear uniforms or possess any identification cards, and other members of the watch would just be dressed like any other citizen. Apart from coats, staves, spears, pikes, lanterns, bells and clappers, few other descriptions of costume appear in the sources. In The humble petition of Robert Wilkins ab[ou]t Miscariages of Watching (1678), Wilkins, a city constable, complained that watchmen lacked uniforms and passwords which made it impossible to differentiate between the watches of different wards and criminal gangs that roved the city in the dark, ‘armed with halberds and lanthorns 49   See William Sheppard, The Offices and Duties of Constables, Borsholders, Tythingmen, Treasurers of the County-Stock, Overseers of the Poore, and other Lay-Ministers. Whereunto are adjoyned the severall Offices of Church-Ministers and Church-Wardens (London, 1641), pp. 54–5. Whereas according to Sheppard this could happen even without warrant, five decades later Gardiner noted that a warrant of a justice was necessary. See [Robert Gardiner], The Compleat Constable (London, 1700), p. 66. 50  LMA, MJ/SR 1076/110 and 111. 51   Jeaffreson, MCR, vol. 1, p. 68. 52   An Act of Common Covncel for the Well-Ordering and establishing of the Watches within this City, and payment of the Beadles Salary (London, 1643), p. 6.

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similar to the watchmen’s and when challenged claim[ing] to be a watch from another part of the City’.53 Arrests were a relatively loosely regulated business, since they were not solely a matter for constables and other officers acting under a sheriff. Members of the community were also allowed to detain offenders and then hand them over to the authorities. According to William Sheppard’s Offices and Duties (1641), citizens were bound to assist constables in apprehending offenders and authorized to arrest individuals themselves and take them before a JP.54 To recognize a person empowered to make an arrest as an official could therefore be difficult. While a ‘sworne and knowen Officer’ was allowed to arrest someone without a warrant, only his servant was obliged to produce a document.55 As Sheppard stated, a ‘Constable or the like officer giveth sufficient notice what he is, when he saith to the party I arrest you in the Kings name, &c. for this is an arrest in Law’. Even if the arrested person did not immediately recognize him as an officer they had to obey; on the other hand, if the officer had no lawful warrant the victim could accuse him of false imprisonment.56 In the case of the pretended constables in Clerkenwell, it was a combination of anonymity and force that enabled the rioters to make arrests. However, the fact that everyone was entitled to apprehend a fellow citizen clearly facilitated misuse. We have seen a few cases where individuals claimed to be a servant of X or a deputy of Y. The employment of private clerks, servants or informal assistants was indeed a major problem, more so perhaps than those of absenteeism or the delegation of power to deputies. The scheme of the yeomen Cornelius Crouch and William Leader was clearly aimed at a chosen victim. In 1677 they went to the house of William Freeman and told one of the servants they were lettercarriers in the service of Henry Earl of Arlington, the Postmaster General. They delivered ‘nine false and counterfeit letters marked with a marke resembling the marke of the Post Office’, declared that the letters had been sent from overseas, and requested a delivery fee of 36 shillings and six pence, which was duly paid by the servant. We do not know how the two were exposed, but eventually they both

 Donald Rumbelow, I Spy Blue: The Police and Crime in the City of London from Elizabeth I to Victoria (London, 1971), pp. 25, 53, 55. 54   Sheppard, Offices, pp. 165–6, 55; [Gardiner], Compleat Constable, p. 28. See also Cynthia B. Herrup, The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in SeventeenthCentury England (Cambridge, 1987), esp. chap. 4; Mark Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England’, in Tim Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500–1850 (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 153–94, esp. pp. 156, 162; Valerie Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution: City Government and National Politics, 1625–43 (Oxford, 1961), chap. 2. 55  Lambard, Eirenarcha, p. 98. 56   Sheppard, Offices, p. 79. 53

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confessed and were fined 40 shillings.57 The scheme of one Edward Wilkinson, allegedly a labourer ‘of ill name and fame’, is again a familiar one. In 1681, he introduced himself to Musgrave Bibby as an officer of the court of the Bishop of London, and presented him a false writing which required Bibby to appear within three days before the bishop at the Prerogative Court at Doctors’ Commons ‘to answer on oath to certain matters’. Wilkinson then demanded the remarkable sum of £39 15s 6d and ‘promised in consideration of the payment’ to abandon the case.58 Similarly, six years later, one Richard Miller, a wigmaker, was tried at the Old Bailey for ‘counterfieting [sic] himself to be a Cleark, belonging to Doctor Commons [and] sending Processes to people in his own Name’.59 Recent research suggests that accusations against neglectful officials in various sources should not be read as signs of unstable magisterial authority in early modern England.60 Rather, the cases highlight some characteristic features of early modern officialdom, both on the structural and the individual level. Already by the Middle Ages kings and their advisers had begun to establish a more or less centralized and uniform system of government. The country was divided into shires which were all ruled by the same combination of local officials: sheriffs, escheators, coroners and JPs. In theory, they were all supposed to act according to a uniform code of law, English common law, and were supervised by royal commissioners and the king’s judges on their biennial circuits. However, poor means of communication were only one thing causing difficulties in ruling such a vast country. First of all, central and local bureaucracies were slow to evolve and only half-developed. The boundaries of ‘officialdom’ were far more blurred than today, and there was a lack of supervision. Patronage, a key feature of institutions, and indeed of social and political life in general, did not necessarily involve kinship and service but ‘could be based on friendship, common interests, or merely that attachment by a lesser man to the following of a greater’. Even leading royal ministers had staff working for them on a largely private basis.61 Appointments in lower-ranking offices were thus relatively arbitrary. To gain entry it was important to know an influential person and to use their name. This helps to understand why someone was believed when he ‘simply’ declared he was acting in the service of a prominent person.   Jeaffreson, MCR, vol. 4, p. 78. For a similar cheat, see Old Bailey Proceedings (OBP), online at: http://www.oldbaileyonline.org (consulted 24 May 2005), October 1687, trial of William Leaver (t1687014–33). 58   Jeaffreson, MCR, vol. 4, pp. 156–7. 59   OBP, January 1687, trial of Richard Miller (t16870114–33). 60   Herrup, The Common Peace, chap. 5; Joan Kent, The English Village Constable, 1580–1642: A Social and Administrative Study (Oxford, 1986), chs 4–7; Keith Wrightson, ‘Two Concepts of Order: Justices, Constables and Jurymen in Seventeenth-Century England’, in John Brewer and John Styles (eds), An Ungovernable People: The English and Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1983), p. 29. 61   See G.E. Aylmer, The King’s Servants: The Civil Service of Charles I, 1625–42 (2nd edn, London, 1974), pp. 69–83, quote at p. 83. 57

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A great many of the officials such as the gentlemen of the privy chamber worked part-time and unpaid. At the local level, parish officers such as constables were essentially ordinary householders, serving without remuneration and usually for only one year. Some positions such as that of JP were prestigious, others such as constable or watchman were often despised since they demanded time and money, and officers were often confronted by the resentment of their neighbours. Common law and parliamentary legislation defined the duties of officials. However, these regulations were not strict and handled very flexibly. Literacy levels were relatively low and regulations were hardly available in written form. Knowledge of regulations was thus scarce as it was obtained on a mainly oral basis. The phenomenon of bogus officials therefore reveals a lack of information and awareness of the exact scope of such regulations on the part of both officials as well as the people. Furthermore, we have noted the lack of clear visual identifications such as uniforms, which made impersonation relatively easy; the main credentials were legal documents whose essential features of authentication were forged without great difficulty. Instruments such as warrants, letters, proclamations or seals, through which the impostors presented themselves as officials, were hardly verifiable by most individuals although their symbolism was respected. Written documents serving as identification features and credentials were of major importance, but the fact that they were relatively novel in the consciousness of early modern English men and women made them a volatile tool. Among early modern political sites we might differentiate between more ‘controllable’ sites such as palaces, councils or assemblies and others that were more easily and commonly ‘accessible’ such as private houses, inns, taverns or market places; politics was thus ubiquitous. Though bogus officials kept out of the ‘controllable’ sites, their activities did not necessarily take place in an ‘illegal’ underworld. Their claim implied a connection to one of these controllable sites. They frequently occupied common political sites to create their own political space by manipulating instrumental structures and institutional practices. While the choice of ‘accessible’ sites did increase their chances of success, the actual physical sites, I suggest, did not play a primary role in shaping their identity. What helped to create ‘their’ new space were symbols or symbolic actions which authorized practices in the early modern period. By means of forged documents such as warrants, orders, letters, passes or declarations, which empowered specific individuals to carry out certain actions, bogus officials created both subjective and physical political space. On the one hand they fashioned a political identity; on the other, a forged document could indeed change ‘ordinary’ physical space into a political site. In the perception of both victim and bogus official, the backroom of a tavern, for instance, could suddenly become a temporary prison cell for someone falsely arrested by a bogus bailiff with a forged warrant. The deviant behaviour of bogus officials played a constitutive role in the production and reproduction of social relations. Not only did the exposure of these frauds reaffirm social boundaries, but they also helped to clarify and redefine the role, function, and duties of officials. By claiming a royal identity and thus

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challenging royal representation, Edward impostors, too, not only carved their own imaginary world, but also negotiated the relationship between subjects and monarch on a public stage. Edward impostors and bogus officials thus help to explore the virtual and subjective dimensions of political space, as created through processes of social interaction and perception. Space was thus not primarily defined through physical attributes but rather via the interaction of those who occupied it. By assuming the role of a royal official or a king and thus challenging negotiated and widely accepted representations, impostors created their own imaginary space, primarily that of an invented identity; however, by utilizing a multilayered power vacuum they also managed to transform these representations.

Part III Outlook

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Chapter 12

Comment from a Historical Perspective Bernard Capp

This chapter offers some brief reflections on the essays collected here, from the perspective of a historian of seventeenth-century England, and touches on two other avenues that may be worth exploring under the rubric of political space. The collection focuses primarily on political sites and spaces, both physical and conceptual, and on the political dimension of spatial relationships. Future research might also take on board the significance of political space in another abstract sense: space as absence, or vacuum, whether the physical absence of human actors (the ruler, courtiers) or of institutions (in particular periods or geographic locations). And it should give some attention to the gendered dimensions of political spaces and sites. Several essays focus on political space in the world of high politics. The contributions of Ronald Asch, Christine Carpenter and Henry Cohn, though ranging widely, address two central issues: the enforcement of the rulers’ authority in the more distant parts of their dominions, and the question of access or proximity to these rulers. Christine Carpenter shows that by the late medieval period English monarchs were no longer itinerant figures; they depended instead on local magnates to maintain and assert their authority, with the magnates themselves embedded in a wider network of affinities – local gentlemen – and with royal officers such as sheriffs integrated into the system. How well the system worked depended on a range of variables: distance from the centre, terrain, ‘tenurial geography’ (the pattern of land-holding in each region), and the competence of the ruler. The Tudors developed the institutional dimensions of this system, with Councils in the North and the Welsh Marches, county militia forces headed by trusted noblemen and officers drawn from the leading gentry, and with an evergrowing range of responsibilities heaped upon justices in county quarter sessions. At the same time, Elizabeth used royal progresses to reinforce her authority in the provinces, seizing the opportunity to meet and charm both local landowners and civic dignitaries. As is well known, however, she proved reluctant to venture outside the south and east, where her political authority and popularity were most secure. The northern borders posed a significant problem for all the Tudors, as for their predecessors. Yet centrifugal forces were always kept in check. Carpenter notes that the Percies and Nevilles, powerful northern magnates frequently in conflict with the Lancastrian crown, nonetheless depended on the central state

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as a bulwark against the Scots. Similarly, in 1536 the Yorkshire leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace were concerned not only by the religious implications of the break with Rome but that the exclusion of Princess Mary from the succession had created a real danger of the English throne passing to the Scottish royal family. By the end of the century the Tudors had found a solution to the northern problem by breaking the Percies and Nevilles and establishing tight control of the region through the Council of the North, staffed by crown-appointed officials. The Emperor Charles V governed a very different political entity, an agglomeration rather than a conventional ‘state’, and frequently appears as the archetypal peripatetic ruler of Renaissance Europe. The Holy Roman Emperor needed to be physically present in order to exert his authority to the full, not least so that local elites could plug into networks of patronage and clientage, and raise their concerns. As the period advanced, however, rulers became increasingly fixed rather than peripatetic, and their royal courts and the associated machinery of government grew in scale and complexity. The later Habsburgs, both Austrian and Spanish, were far less mobile than Charles V and his predecessors. Louis XIV based his government mainly at Versailles after 1682. These developments necessitated the development of elaborate protocols to govern access to the ruler and behaviour at court, issues explored here by Ronald Asch. Aristocrats needed access in order to seek office, favours, and grants, and to assure themselves of their status in relation to others. But such access needed to be regulated. If it was too free and the court too familiar, a ruler could lose respect and even control; equally, if a court became too exclusive, he might become politically isolated. And as Asch notes, a magnificent palace reinforced royal authority only when it was thronged with splendid courtiers. An empty court would merely draw attention to the monarch’s isolation. Different courts evolved different solutions, some enforcing very tight restrictions on access to the royal presence, as in Spain, others developing rigid codes to govern what could be said in his presence, as in France. Whatever the court system, considerable power inevitably accrued to the privileged few who enjoyed proximity to the ruler on a daily basis, whether a trusted minister or favourite, a royal mistress, or the gentlemen of the privy chamber. The royal court, while undoubtedly the most important political site in early modern Europe, was of course only one of many. Some sites were ephemeral, such as the elaborate triumphal arches erected to mark a royal entry. Equally symbolic were the ubiquitous royal coats of arms set up on public buildings and (after the Reformation) inside English churches. Contemporaries were fully aware of their significance. Following the abolition of the English monarchy in 1649, the new republican regime devoted considerable energy to ensuring that royal statues were destroyed, pictures removed, and the royal coat of arms replaced by those of the 

 Carpenter, ‘Political and Geographical Space’, pp. 117–34.  Anthony Fletcher and Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions (5th edn, Harlow, 2004), p. 147.   Asch, ‘The Princely Court’, pp. 43–60. 

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Commonwealth. At the Restoration in 1660 all these changes were immediately reversed. We find a parallel in the navy, an internationally visible embodiment of state authority. In 1649 English warships designed to embody royal prestige, such as the Charles, Henrietta Maria and Royal Prince were promptly renamed. The Commonwealth preferred its own symbolism, proclaimed in the Liberty and Resolution, and in newly built ships named after republican officials (such as the Speaker and President), generals (Fairfax) or famous victories (Marston Moor and Naseby, which bore a triumphant effigy of Oliver Cromwell trampling England’s enemies underfoot). The French navy was also used by the crown to embody royal authority, with warships bearing names such as Dauphin, Les Trois Roys, Le Grand Henry and La Couronne. At a very much humbler level, we can find informal royal sites that ordinary citizens would encounter in their daily lives. Hundreds of English inns and alehouses bore signs such as the King’s Arms or King’s Head, and while such buildings might not be imposing, their names placed the concept of monarchy within the consciousness and conversation of ordinary people on a daily basis. Similarly Englishmen and women, like those in continental Europe, carried everyday symbols of monarchical authority in their purses and pockets, through the royal heads embossed on their coins. The symbolism of monarchy proved allpervasive, even in the years when England had declared itself a republic. Any survey of non-royal political sites would probably begin with those institutions closely linked to the crown: councils and representative bodies such as the French Estates (provincial and, until 1614, occasionally national), the Spanish cortes, German diets, English, Scots and Irish Parliaments, and so on. Alongside them, and perhaps equally important, were the institutions and courts of law. The administration of royal justice and the enforcement of ‘the king’s peace’ had been at the heart of the state’s function for centuries. Judges were appointed by the crown, and removed if they forfeited royal trust. English assize judges, travelling through the provinces on their ‘circuits’, generally opened proceedings with a speech underlining royal authority and conveying the most pressing concerns of the king. After 1649 the Commonwealth’s judges played a similar role, defending the new regime and urging local justices and gentlemen to cooperate with it. The fusion of legal/judicial and political space could not, of course, guarantee harmonious relations at all times. The contested boundaries between royal authority and that of the judges of the French Parlements helped plunge France into the convulsions

   Sean Kelsey, Inventing a Republic: The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649–1653 (Manchester, 1987), chap. 3.    Bernard Capp, Cromwell’s Navy: The Fleet and the English Revolution 1648–60 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 52–3; Alan James, The Navy and Government in Early Modern France 1572–1661 (Woodbridge, 2004), pp.169–72.    Kevin Sharpe, ‘“An Image Doting Rabble”: The Failure of Republican Culture in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (eds.), Refiguring Revolutions (Berkeley, 1998), pp. 31–2.

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of the Frondes in 1649. Treason trials and public executions, political sites which were generally controlled by the crown, could prove similarly contested. A treason trial was designed not only to condemn a defeated rebel or plotter but to proclaim the ruler’s authority to a packed courtroom, an authority further underlined by a public execution before a huge crowd gathered round the scaffold. Very often the demoralized prisoner cooperated with the state’s agenda, admitting his guilt, expressing penitence and acknowledging the justice of his punishment. But there were also occasions when ‘rebels’ and ‘traitors’ (and ‘heretics’) followed their own script, turning the courtroom and scaffold into sites of political defiance. The funeral pyres of the Protestant martyrs burned by Mary Tudor in the 1550s became sites of symbolic defiance to royal authority, while many of the Catholic seminary priests executed for treason by Elizabeth used the scaffold to assure the crowd that they were dying for their faith, and were happy to do so. Similarly, many of the royalist conspirators and rebels executed in the 1650s declared their readiness to die for the Stuart cause, while several of the regicides executed after the Restoration in 1660 insisted at the gallows that Charles I had been rightly condemned as a tyrant. Occasionally a jury too might turn the courtroom from a site of political authority into one of defiance. When the Leveller John Lilburne, who had been banished for life on pain of death, returned to England without permission in 1653, his condemnation should have been a mere formality. In the event the jury declared him not guilty of any crime deserving death, whereupon the crowds outside burst into cheers, and even the soldiers on guard joined in the celebration. It is unlikely that the jurors were all Levellers; rather, the verdict represented a symbolic gesture of defiance to a deeply unpopular regime. And faced with such a clear demonstration of public feeling in the capital, the regime proved too nervous to override the verdict and put Lilburne to death. The twin spatial significance of the law – both institutional and ‘occasional’ – found a parallel in the church. Generally the Catholic Church and established Protestant churches supported royal authority, both from mutual self-interest and on ideological grounds, with the church recognizing the king as God’s lieutenant on earth, and the king accepting his religious duty to protect the church. Conflict over the boundaries of their respective authority meant that this arrangement too encountered many problems. Charles V and Philip II both took their Catholic responsibilities seriously but nonetheless clashed frequently with the papacy, as did ‘the most Christian king’ Louis XIV of France. During the religious wars in Germany, France and the Netherlands, the clergy were drawn ineluctably into political controversies, as were the clergy throughout Britain in the 1640s and  A. Lloyd Moote, The Revolt of the Judges: The Parlement of Paris and the Fronde 1643–1652 (Princeton, 1971).    Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat (New Haven, 2002), chap. 6–7.   Austin Woolrych, From Commonwealth to Protectorate (Oxford, 1982), pp. 250– 61. 

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1650s. Presbyterian ministers helped stir up Scotland’s defiance of Charles I in 1639–40, and their puritan admirers in London hailed the Scots as ‘angels sent by God’ to free England from tyranny.10 In England and Wales, hundreds of more conservative-minded parish clergy were removed as ‘malignants’ during and after the civil war, many of them for having used the pulpit to urge support for the king. The pulpit became still more important in 1649. Hundreds of moderate puritans (‘Presbyterians’) attempted to undermine the authority of the new Commonwealth by encouraging their congregations – including local magistrates – to defy and shun it. The central government had no doubt that the Presbyterian clergy posed a major threat to the new regime, and the Council of State devoted much of its time and energy to silencing or removing them.11 If churches and law courts were political sites intended (in part) to reinforce the established order of government, there were others, more informal, which stood in far more ambivalent relationships towards it. Thus carnivals, strongly entrenched in much of southern Europe, provided a site where ordinary citizens could mock the shortcomings of their rulers with relative impunity. While they did not pose a direct challenge to government, they were a powerful reminder of communal values, and an implicit warning of the possible consequences should such values be flouted. It is not surprising that the authorities looked on carnivals with suspicion, or that on several occasions, most notably at Romans in 1579–80, carnivalesque disorder escalated into serious violence and bloodshed.12 Petitioning constituted another political space in which particular groups could signal their discontent with the behaviour or policies of the authorities. The petition offered a far more acceptable means of channelling public concerns, yet its own ‘acceptability’ remained problematic. That is David Zaret’s point of departure, as he looks at the petition within the context of an emerging ‘public sphere’ where issues could be freely debated by politically engaged citizens. The process of gathering signatures in taverns, shops and private houses involved canvassing in places offensive to traditional conceptions of propriety, by which political debate was confined to privileged elites within specific and exclusive locations. A petition framed by a Grand Jury within the formal space of a quarter sessions or at the assizes fitted easily within conventional structures; one hawked round taverns and alehouses did not, and thereby lacked ‘credibility’. The printing press, Zaret suggests, offered a ready solution for the petitioners. Once in print, the petition was essentially delocalized, stripped of its embarrassing spatial origins, and could   Calendar of State Papers: Venetian, 1640–2, p. 97.  Ian Green, ‘The Persecution of “Scandalous” and “Malignant” Parish Clergy during the English Civil War’, English Historical Review, 94 (1979): 507–31; Calendar of State Papers: Domestic, 1649–52, throughout; see also my England’s Culture Wars (in preparation). 12  Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival in Romans (Harmondsworth, 1979); Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 1978), chap. 7; Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975), chap. 4. 10

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appear as the respectable voice of ‘well-affected’ or ‘honest’ citizens inhabiting an imagined public space.13 Zaret’s argument is persuasive. And while the great majority of petitions remained unpublished, their contents were frequently summarized in the newspapers of the 1640s and 1650s. But what role, if any, did the unpublished and unreported petition play in developing this conceptual political space, the public sphere? Of course the participatory element in drafting a petition and gathering signatures remained much the same whether or not the final text was published. Petitions were often intended to raise public awareness and mould opinion as much as to elicit a specific response. Sir Thomas Aston’s Remonstrance against Presbitery (1641), which denounced a Cheshire petition against episcopacy, printed the text of the offending document because, he believed, its sponsors had never intended to present it to Parliament. Their purpose had been to agitate among the Cheshire public, and to radicalize public opinion.14 The politics of Leeds in the 1650s, characterized by ferocious struggles between rival factions, was pursued through a succession of petitions and counter-petitions. Though none appeared in print, they were promoted assiduously throughout the town and their organizers secured many hundreds of signatures, collected at crowded meetings and door-todoor. ‘Credibility’ was achieved not by print but by the standing of the individuals persuaded to present or sponsor the petition.15 Zaret is undoubtedly right, nonetheless, to stress the importance of print in the development of a public sphere, especially in the 1640s and 1650s, and again from the late 1670s. And while the petition was best equipped to link public opinion to the formal structures of political authority, other genres did just as much to encourage debate. Pamphlets, newspapers, almanacs and ballads that explicitly answered those issued by an opposing party or faction all assumed an audience well aware of alternative viewpoints, and were urging readers to weigh up the rival arguments, whether privately or in company. If the state could not accept total freedom of the press, it acknowledged that total control was impossible. It is surely significant that from the early 1640s the elites began to use print to encourage public debate. Parliament’s decision to publish the Grand Remonstrance in 1641 was recognized as a momentous step, inviting a wider public into matters of state hitherto viewed as the exclusive preserve of the political elites. Thereafter both king and Parliament employed writers to set out their case. This was a very public debate, even if all parties studiously ignored the issue of where (outside the printed page itself) that debate should be pursued. In 1649 the new Commonwealth made only half-hearted attempts to suppress Eikon Basilike, the late king’s meditations ghosted anonymously by John Gauden. Instead, recognizing the 13

  Zaret, ‘Petitioning Places’, pp. 175–96.  Aston, Remonstrance, sig. a2–v, b4v, p.1; John Morrill, Cheshire 1630–1660 (Oxford, 1974), pp. 46–55. 15   See my England’s Culture Wars, drawing on London, British Library, Add. MSS 21417–27. 14

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huge impact the work was enjoying, it commissioned John Milton to compose and publish a counterblast.16 Similarly, Marchamont Nedham was hired to write a pro-government newspaper which would combine reliable news with editorials arguing the benefits of republicanism and attacking monarchy as inherently oppressive.17 In the wake of the civil wars there was a general recognition that political and religious opinion was deeply divided, and would remain so for the indefinite future. Nedham, the Commonwealth’s most effective propagandist, advised the government to suppress dangerous publications designed to stir up rebellion and resistance. But he believed it would be counter-productive to try to suppress all critical speech or hostile squibs and satires. These provided essential outlets for public feeling, he argued, and to prosecute every satirist would merely give unwarranted publicity to their views.18 That, in effect, was the policy the Commonwealth followed for several years. Though born of weakness rather than principle, it was a striking acknowledgement of a conceptual political space in which political and religious differences were recognized as incontrovertible facts. The bitter invective found in the alehouses and taverns of post-war England, and the derisive political squibs of the period, were far removed from the polite, reasoned discourse that Habermas saw as the attributes of his public sphere. This was a public sphere grudgingly conceded by an embattled regime. Cromwell felt strong enough to rein it back in 1655, suppressing all but the two government newspapers and imposing tighter restrictions on the rest of the press. But no one imagined that political pluralism could be wished away. Much of the progovernment propaganda in the 1650s, reinforced by assize judges and ministers, took the form of urging people to live quietly under the government, whatever their personal beliefs and preferences. One Suffolk minister pleaded in print in 1656 for all factions to live quietly under the existing government, even ‘though it be none of the best’.19 Zaret’s essay helpfully reminds us that the notional political space of print was closely bound up with the sites where that print had originated. Ann Hughes’s recent work on the Gangraena controversy similarly links print to the networks of correspondents who contributed to it, or challenged its material, and to the people who discussed and argued in the bookshops where it was sold.20 We are now familiar with unofficial political sites such as the eighteenth-century coffee-house, and the clubs and associations which Peter Clark explores in Chapter 6. These all   Eikon Basilke, ed. Philip B. Knachel (Ithaca, 1966); John Milton, Eikonoklastes (1649). 17  Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven, 1994), pp. 182–7; Jason Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 104–5, 228–9 and throughout. 18  M. Nedham, Certain Considerations Tendered in all Humility (1649), pp. 7–11. 19   William Gurnall, The Magistrates Portraiture Drawn from the Word (1656), p. 8. 20  Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004). 16

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opened up new spaces for debate and political engagement. Equally important was the political role of the tavern, inn and alehouse. They might be the sites in which political initiatives were devised and promoted, whether an election campaign or a petition. Such places were also, of course, associated with rowdy celebrations and disputes, which might have a very different political significance. These elements often came together in the political ‘health’: drinking to the health of the king and confusion of his enemies, or to the health (or destruction) of a political party (royalist/parliamentarian, or Whig/Tory). Health-drinking proclaimed the company’s political allegiance, and simultaneously asserted its domination over a particular physical space and time. That made the practice especially appealing, for example, to cavaliers during their years of political impotence in the 1650s. And inevitably, such spaces were sometimes contested. When other customers refused to join in a health, or defied it, health-drinking could trigger violent and occasionally fatal brawls. In 1654 the Commons ordered a bill to ban the practice, though the early dissolution of the House meant that no law emerged.21 James Brown’s essay alerts us to a very different aspect of the spatial significance of alehouse politics: the alehouse and its licensee as part of a surveillance society. The law imposed heavy responsibilities on licensees, requiring them to maintain good order, prevent illegal games, and report suspicious strangers and seditious words. The assize judges meeting at Taunton in 1649 directed that no one was to receive a licence unless he could produce a written certificate of respectability from the local minister, churchwardens and some of the most substantial inhabitants.22 The records of most large boroughs contain numerous cases of seditious words and other forms of misbehaviour, reported to the local authorities by licensees and respectable customers, whether moved by a sense of public duty or fearing the consequences of remaining silent. It remains the case, however, that both central and local authorities regarded alehouses more as potential threats than as instruments of control, especially in urban contexts. Most towns contained numerous unlicensed as well as licensed premises, and ‘disorderly’ alehouses that had been officially suppressed often contrived to survive, sometimes reopening with a new licence awarded by a more complaisant magistrate. John Livesey, a Lancashire minister, complained bitterly in 1657 that it was almost as hard to close a ‘rotten ale-house’ as to conquer the Turks, and a Middlesex alehouse-keeper boasted that if he were suppressed one day, he could secure a new licence by the next.23 Moreover many licensees, and many customers, showed a striking lack of respect for constables and other parish officers, hindering them when they entered to search the premises, and showering them with abuse and even blows. For their part, easygoing parish constables were frequently content to return bland reports of ‘omnia bene’ to the authorities. When local opinion was firmly set against an   Commons Journals, 7, p. 391; Capp, England’s Culture Wars.   J.C. Cockburn (ed.), Somerset Assize Orders 1640–1659 (Taunton, 1971), p. 32. 23   J. Livesey, Enchiridion Judicum (1657), p. 162; London Metropolitan Archive, MJ/ SR/1183/88. 21

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unpopular magistrate, levy or ruler, it was unlikely that licensees, customers or parish officers would report a resentment they shared. It was the intemperate outsider, and the individual who dared to challenge the locally dominant view, who was likely to find himself in trouble. But James Brown’s essay adds an important and overlooked dimension to the subject, and it challenges us to formulate an interpretative framework to encompass both subversion and surveillance. With alehouse talk and healths we have moved from the national to more local political spaces and sites. Several essays here explore the very local dimension of political space. In particular, Steve Hindle and Beat Kümin chart the evolution of the English parish in its broadly political dimension, as it developed from an essentially religious origin into the ‘civil parish’, with overseers and vestries exercising authority over a range of secular issues. The parish became increasingly a unit of political (self-)government, if one in which participation was increasingly confined to parish elites. Their essay focuses primarily on rural parishes in the period up to 1640. How would the picture change if we widened the lens to include the urban parish and the period of the civil wars and beyond? Urban government possessed an additional layer of borough magistracy, and freemen felt themselves to be citizens of an urban commonwealth. Each town had its own political identity; the level of participation in urban government varied widely, and the borough corporation often found its authority shared or competing with those of other political sites such the guilds or, as at Cambridge, the University.24 As we move through the seventeenth century, rapid in-migration posed an ever-increasing problem for both civic and parish officers in many boroughs. In the exploding suburbs of the capital, parish officers faced an impossible task; the population of Stepney, for example, rose from a mid-Tudor figure of 2,000 to over 40,000 by 1700.25 Leeds too, a rapidly growing cloth centre, remained a single parish, despite a population of 7–8,000, until a daughter-church (St John’s) was opened in 1634. Borough status was achieved in 1626 but failed to deliver either good order or stable government in a town wracked by economic, political and religious divisions.26 There were different problems in the Shropshire town of Oswestry, where the parish church had been demolished during military operations in the civil war, forcing the inhabitants to worship in the dilapidated town hall. Thirteen years later we find the magistrates begging the government for help to rebuild the church, pleading that that the town hall could hold only 300 to serve a community of two or three thousand potential worshippers.27 Hindle and Kümin note that the English parish structure remained essentially unchanged between the Middle Ages and Victoria’s reign. Such stability could prove a mixed blessing, given huge shifts in population and the vagaries of financial provision. Oliver Cromwell   Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 85–123.   Vanessa Harding, ‘The Changing Shape of Seventeenth-Century London’, in Julia F. Merritt (ed.), Imagining Early Modern London (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 117–43, esp. 139. 26   See n. 15, above. 27   Calendar of State Papers: Domestic, 1657–8, p. 32. 24 25

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and his council spent much of the later 1650s debating and approving the merger or division of parishes, and providing augmentations to sustain under-funded ministers.28 Without the resources to pay a good minister and keep the building in repair, parish government was seriously undermined and the state lost much of its ability to reach into the locality. Petitioning, which Zaret explores in the national context, also held a significant place in the world of local politics. Respectable parishioners might petition justices assembled at quarter sessions to support (or denounce) their minister, or ask them to eject a quarrelsome family or suppress a disorderly alehouse.29 The poor petitioned too, throughout Europe, especially over food shortages and financial impositions. And when petitions failed, anger might trigger a riot. Rioting crowds are not directly addressed in this volume, but they have received considerable attention in recent years and occupy an intriguing political space in early modern societies. The old picture of a mindless mob has been replaced, thanks initially to the work of E.P. Thompson, by a recognition that crowds often had a strong sense of the legitimacy of their demands and demonstrated some knowledge of the law. The fact that local authorities tended to address the rioters’ grievances, and imposed only mild punishments, indicates not only a sensible pragmatism; it suggests too that they recognized the riot as occupying an informal space within the political geography of their society, even if it lacked any formal legitimacy.30 But riots were not only an alternative form of petitioning. In France, Germany, Italy and other parts of continental Europe they often possessed a fiercely punitive element, with participants seeking vengeance against their oppressors. French crowds frequently attacked, humiliated and sometimes even killed hated officials.31 In England too protests could have a strong punitive element, at all levels. The Yorkshire Pilgrims of 1536, though proclaiming their loyalty to the king, demanded that his chief minister Thomas Cromwell be put to death, and a century later huge demonstrations in London forced Charles I and the House of Lords to agree to the execution of his hated minister Strafford. A punitive element is also often evident in much smaller-scale disturbances, whether the sacking of bawdy houses in early

  Calendar of State Papers: Domestic, 1656–8, throughout; Ann Hughes, ‘“The public profession of these nations”: The National Church in Interregnum England’, in Christopher Durston and Judith Maltby (eds), Religion in Revolutionary England (Manchester, 2006), pp. 104–5. 29   Susan Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1988), chap. 5. 30  E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London, 1991), chap. 5–6; J. Walter and K. Wrightson, ‘Dearth and the Social Order in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, 71 (1976): 22–42; Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 82–111. 31   For an overview see Wayne te Brake, Shaping History: Ordinary People in European Politics 1500–1700 (Berkeley, 1998). 28

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Stuart London, or the ritual humiliation (and occasional beating) of transgressive husbands or wives in ‘skimmingtons’ and other forms of folk justice.32 To end I will touch briefly on two other aspects of political space. While ‘space’ generally signifies either place or distance, it can also stand for emptiness, absence, or vacuum. This sense appears in several of the essays here; Asch and Carpenter explore the issue of royal authority in the absence of the sovereign’s physical presence, and Tobias Hug explores how impostors might exploit any vacuum to assert their own political authority. Absence also features in Alexander Schlaak’s study of urban unrest at Esslingen, with truculent journeymen shunning the public reading of the barber-surgeons’ articles. The significance of politically ‘empty’ space features again in Carpenter’s tenurial geography, with a landowning magnate losing much of his local influence if he was frequently absent attending the king or serving in wars abroad. We find a faint echo centuries later in the politics of Cumbrian Greystoke, where Ian Whyte shows how the duke of Norfolk, for all his eminence and landed wealth, was essentially no more than an outsider, with decisions controlled by local freeholders. The absence of even a resident squire made possible the ‘republic of shepherds’ in the Cumbrian hills. In that context, space in the sense of physical terrain played an important role too: a scattered population in valleys separated by hills and moorlands fostered a political culture of independence. In other regions too, even lowland regions, the absence of a resident squire might create the space for a self-governing community, or at least a community of the more prosperous freeholders and tenants – such as Duffy’s Morebath, Hoskins’s Wigston, and Wrightson’s Terling – where such people viewed themselves as the ‘better sort’, natural magistrates in the absence of social superiors.33 A political vacuum could also pose real dangers to those in authority. Henry VIII’s destruction of the Howards, the dominant family in Norfolk, seriously weakened royal authority in the county and left space that enabled Kett’s rebellion to escalate in 1549. By contrast, simmering unrest in Sussex was defused by the intervention of the earl of Arundel, deploying an informal authority passed down through his family for generations.34 A century later, following the civil 32   Fletcher and MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions, p. 148; Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution (Harmondsworth, 1978), pp. 20–32; K.J. Lindley, ‘Riot Prevention and Control in Early Stuart London’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 33 (1983): 109–26; M. Ingram, ‘Ridings, Rough Music and the “Reform of Popular Culture” in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, 105 (1984): 79–113; Thompson, Customs in Common, chap. 8. 33  Eamon Duffy, The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (New Haven, 2001); W.G. Hoskins, The Midland Peasant (London, 1957); Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700 (2nd edn, Oxford, 1995). 34  Diarmaid MacCulloch, Suffolk and the Tudors (Oxford, 1986), pp. 73–7; L. Stone, ‘Patronage and Paternalism in Tudor England: The Earl of Arundel and the Peasants’ Revolt

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war, dissent was able to sweep through the ranks of the New Model Army partly because many senior officers were away in London; radical pamphlets circulated among soldiers dispersed in lodgings, with no officers to challenge their message. This paved the way for the army’s momentous revolt in 1647, which was led from the lower ranks.35 Something similar occurred in the navy, where opinion was far more conservative. Vice-Admiral Batten had been removed from his command in 1647, suspected of royalist sympathies, and his nominated successor, Thomas Rainborough, was barred from taking up his appointment by the House of Lords, who regarded him as a dangerous radical. The resulting absence of any overall commander allowed dissent to fester in the fleet, and to erupt in the most dangerous political mutiny in English naval history.36 The absence of institutions could be equally important. The regional history of seventeenth-century France was hugely influenced by the presence or absence of provincial Estates. The absence of any meeting of the national Estates General after 1614 was also significant. In Castile, where the cortes survived, the absence of the aristocracy and clergy from its meetings after 1538 seriously reduced its ability to resist the demands of the crown. In medieval England, national parliaments had often met in provincial cities and towns, and the abandonment of this pattern in the early modern period created resentment. The articles of the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 included a demand that a Parliament be called at York or Nottingham, reflecting a sense that northern concerns went unnoticed in far-off London.37 For Parliaments did not only pass laws and vote taxes; they served to bring public concerns to the government’s attention. Though MPs from the North sat in the Westminster Parliament, it was far more difficult for their electors to liaise with them to pursue local initiatives, by organizing petitions and sending groups to lobby ministers. During the 1630s, when no Parliament met, England lacked any national forum in which political opinion might coalesce or find voice. In the short term that absence made life much easier for Charles I, but it also helps to explain why he so disastrously misread English public opinion in 1640. It also explains why even today English historians remain at odds over the political climate of the 1630s.38 Finally, we may touch on the gendered dimensions of political space, an aspect largely overlooked here. Women, though formally excluded from political institutions, were often, of course, an important presence in royal courts, wielding of 1549’, Journal of British Studies, 13 (1974): 19–23. 35  Austin Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen: The General Council of the Army and its Debates 1647–48 (Oxford, 1987), chap. 2–4; Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. M. Sylvester (1696), pp. 52–3. 36  Capp, Cromwell’s Navy, pp. 16–29. 37   Fletcher and MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions, p. 148. 38  Compare for example Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, 1992); Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford, 1990); Ann Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War (Basingstoke, 1991).

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influence as royal mistresses (especially where such positions became formalized, as in Bourbon France) or as maids of honour, attending on the queen. The gender dynamics inevitably changed under a queen regnant, whether single (like Elizabeth Tudor or Sweden’s Christina) or married, like Anne, with her close and influential confidantes Sarah Churchill and Mrs Masham. While Elizabeth preferred male favourites, and was notoriously jealous of other women, her court provided a significant role for women nonetheless. The ladies of the privy chamber were not only important channels of communication, but also played an important role in advancing the suits they delivered.39 Women also possessed a political role outside the court. Among the elites, the aristocratic household was an important political site in its own right. Penny Richards has shown, for example, how the women of the Guise family played a key role in the bloody political machinations of France during the Wars of Religion.40 A century and more later that role had mutated into the world of the salon hostess, and the gossip of English tea-table gatherings, where polite women could decorously undermine the moral or financial credit of their adversaries. Gossip could play a quasi-political role for ordinary women too, as they gathered and talked at the market, conduit, well, pump and washing-place. The daily exchange of news and views was at one level simply social and recreational, but it also did much to shape local public opinion, which might then be sufficient to prod parish officers into action against a disorderly alehouse or troublesome neighbours. Local public opinion might equally lead to direct collective action against such targets, and if the grievances were economic, it might set in motion the process that could turn marketplace grumbling into open riot. In addition the respectable matrons of a parish enjoyed a very specific, personal authority over the bodies of female servants and spinsters suspected to be pregnant or guilty of infanticide. Such authority could also be formalized, in the ‘juries of matrons’ appointed (or self-appointed) to examine suspected witches for the devil’s marks, or to determine whether a convicted felon could secure a reprieve by ‘pleading the belly’.41 The domestic conduct books that were popular in early modern England confined women’s lives to the household, but they acknowledged that they played an important political role within that miniature commonwealth. The wife was recognized as a joint (if subordinate) governor, with authority over servants,   Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1998), pp. 349–80; Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family and Political Argument in England 1680–1714 (Manchester, 1999); James Daybell, Women LetterWriters in Tudor England (Oxford, 2006), pp. 229–64. 40   Penny Richards, ‘The Guise Women: Politics, War and Peace’, in Jessica Munns and Penny Richards (eds), Gender, Power, and Privilege in Early Modern Europe (Harlow, 2003), pp. 159–70. 41   Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003), pp. 272–87; Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, 2003). 39

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especially maidservants, and children. In the large households of aristocrats and the larger gentry, this could give her extensive responsibilities and powers, especially when her husband might be away for extended periods pursuing his political, financial or legal interests. In that situation the wife’s responsibilities might well include estate management, dealing with the problems of tenants, buyers and suppliers. Even at far humbler levels, writers recognized the household as a political unit, and often gave advice on how best to govern it. William Gouge, the most expansive adviser, stressed the need to reward and praise good service, and the need to supervise servants closely at all times. The good housewife should rise early and go late to bed, leaving neither space nor time for servants to breed disobedience in any form. Contemporaries recognized that many would work hard only under the immediate scrutiny of their master or mistress. A housewife without the requisite skills of household government, whether too strict, too lax, or too idle, would find her servants idling, spreading gossip, grumbling, and engaging in all the rudimentary forms of political subversion spelled out by James Scott.42 Political space in early modern Europe thus possessed multiple dimensions. Its formal sites extended from the royal court, through representative assemblies and town halls, to humble parish vestries. It existed too in ephemeral sites, such as royal entries and civic procession, and symbolic sites, such as statues, monuments, and royal coats of arms. Almost equally important were its associated spaces, especially in the law and the church. The pulpit’s importance as a political space was turned to good account in the Elizabethan Homilies and bitterly attacked by Gerrard Winstanley, the Digger. Winstanley jeered that the clergy ‘will turn as the ruling power turns, any way: to popery, to protestantism; for a king, against a king; for monarchy, for state-government; they cry, “Who bids most wages?”’.43 Winstanley was too cynical, and between two and three thousand ministers were ejected from their livings for refusing to ‘turn’ in the twenty years that followed the outbreak of the civil war in 1642. But few Europeans doubted the close relationship between church and state, and most regarded religious unity as a political necessity, however elusive it proved in practice. And Winstanley himself envisaged that in his communist utopia, public-spirited teachers would explain to the citizens each week, in secular sermons, the benefits of a commonwealth and the evils of kingly rule.44 Informal political sites played an important, if more diverse, role. Some, like the larger urban inns, could straddle the boundary between formal and informal, providing the regular venue for meetings of petty and quarter sessions and even

42  Capp, When Gossips Meet, esp. chap. 2–4; James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1985). 43   G. Winstanley, A New Years’ Gift (1650), in Christopher Hill (ed.), Winstanley: The Law of Freedom and other Writings (Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 166. 44   G. Winstanley, The Law of Freedom (1652), in ibid., pp. 345–6.

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(as at Maidstone) the assizes.45 At Wirksworth, in Derbyshire, the Elizabethan moothall built to house meetings of the king’s courts (those of the Duchy of Lancaster) also served as the venue for meetings of the bar-mote, the court of the association of independent lead-miners, who jealously guarded their traditions and liberties.46 As the period advanced, parts of north-western Europe developed a respectable informal space as the expanding world of political print found a physical embodiment in the coffee-house, inn, tavern, club and association. By contrast the alehouse enjoyed an ill-defined and sometimes confrontational relationship with the larger political world, while the rowdy gatherings of ‘rough music’ and ‘skimmington’ existed within spaces wholly separate from formal political structures. Political space, understood in terms of physical distance, is primarily concerned with the crucial issue of how a court-based ruler could assert authority over remote provinces. If he employed official deputies or informal agents, how could they wield sufficient power to govern effectively on his behalf without being tempted to pursue their own, independent agendas? Political space conceived as a vacuum centres on the absence of a capable ruler, whether through the succession of a small child (Henry VI, Edward VI, James VI or Louis XIV among many others), madness (Henry VI again) or the extinction of the royal line, as in Russia following the death of Ivan IV. While England successfully navigated the potential crisis threatened by the end of the Tudor line, Russia endured years of anarchy, civil war and foreign invasion before the election of Michael Romanov in 1613. At a slightly lower level, the absence of a landed magnate able to control a region on the king’s behalf would significantly weaken royal authority, while at a lower level still, the absence of a resident gentleman landowner facilitated the development of a different kind of local political regime, one dominated by ‘middling sort’ yeomen and their equivalents. Finally, political space possessed a gendered dimension, from the royal court to the politics of the individual household. This was a theme of enduring interest to contemporaries, explored in sermons and conduct books as well as on the stage. Shakespeare dealt with it at every level, from the national politics of Macbeth and imperial politics of Anthony and Cleopatra to the domestic politics of The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Taming of the Shrew. And women created their own political spaces in the street and marketplace, sometimes in petitions and rioting, but more commonly in the moulding of local public opinion. That was a ‘public sphere’ of their own, lacking in formal status but familiar to all.

45   Alan Everitt, ‘The English Urban Inn 1560–1760’, in Alan Everitt (ed.), Perspectives in English Urban History (London, 1973), pp. 110–12. 46  Andy Wood, The Politics of Social Conflict: The Peak Country, 1520–1770 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 130–32, 169–78.

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Chapter 13

Spaces in Theory, Spaces in History and Spatial Historiographies Mike Crang

In this essay I want to sketch out a set of spaces, spatial relations and spatial scales as ways of framing some issues about premodern political space. This I do in large part to resist the temptation so often evident in the geographic literature to end up privileging one space, scale or relation as the arena of the political. Be that classic political geography and its fixation on the territorial scale of the state or urban historical geography with a focus upon, and indeed conflation of, the public sphere of politics and the public space of the city. This volume provides ample evidence of the different sorts of locales and configurations that affected political action. Through this essay my aim is to move from the simple, though crucial recognition that everything, bar angels dancing, occupies space – that is, political events are in space and happen over space – to a view that asks how space shapes those events and finally one that looks to see a history of political space where the space itself is produced and shaped through evolving and competing political activities. So this is a three layered account that, firstly, embeds political histories in the spaces and places of the past – suggesting different spaces and places mattered more or less to different forms of politics in different ways. In a sense this is the simplest statement that geography matters as variation over the face of the earth and responds to the volume’s thematic concern with where political exchange occurs. Thus, throughout the essay, I try to show that political forms and practices are always located. How history has conceptualized spatial variation, and the presentation of space, is discussed in the next subsection. Secondly, the essay reflects on some of the different ways of conceptualizing spatial registers of events. That is, it will move us beyond the listing of places or the analysis of variations of practices in space and time to focus upon space itself and ask what manner of space we are investigating and thus how we should conceptualize ‘the spatial’ in different practices. And thirdly, it asks us to clarify what these multiple, and possibly competing, spatial registers do to our accounts when we examine past events. Like Arnade, we might ask what the apparently synchronic notion of ‘space’ does to ‘time’; that is, to assumptions that causality resides in chronology and that narrative is the primary medium of history. Historians have been wary    Peter Arnade, Martha Howell and Walter Simons, ‘Fertile Spaces: The Productivity of Urban Space in Northern Europe’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 32 (2002): 515–48.

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of using spatial terms since, as Foucault noted, ‘the use of spatial terms seems to have the air of anti-history. If one started to talk in terms of space that meant that one was hostile to time’. Spatial registers may disrupt history’s investment in time and linearity, and may appeal as offering ‘a respite from the meta-narratives that have long threatened to reduce [places] to footnotes, outcomes of functionalist processes generated outside the historians’ view, in the shadowy world where such abstractions as “the market”, “political self-determination”, or “the state” reside’. This vision of space as material grounding – bringing abstract processes to earth – sees places as where multiple processes come together in complex real world constellations. But there are other spatialities to be found, where the kind of space varies between practices and societies. Differing societies have, as Lefebvre would say, not just differing social relations and contradictions in space but also of space. The nature of space itself differs. To put it another way, societies do not occur in a pre-given space where the only question is how much of it they occupy but rather they create space of different kinds. A plurality of notions of space helps; as Arnade put it, historians answer old questions and pose new ones by making space a central theoretical concern. To view space, previously accorded a bricks-and-mortar inertness, as alive with generative capacity changes understandings of causality. If space does not just contain objects but is created through them, then equally objects are not simply located in space, it is space that defines the objects. Thus, after Heidegger, we might better talk of spacing as an action. For him a Greek temple is not added to a given place but rather ‘the building precedes its site’. The temple creates the sense of sacred space and thus the ground for its people. Thus we might follow Martina Löw who suggests that ‘[s]paces are conceived today as processual, relationally ordered systems’ and thus that investigating them means not just ‘observing the way structures are ordered in space but looking into how these structures form spaces’. Space does not exist outside of social practice, or indeed theoretical practices, and is not a neutral medium upon which action is inscribed.10 

 Ibid., p. 521.  Ibid., pp. 540–41.    Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, 1991 [trans.]), p. 334.   Arnade, Howell and Simons, ‘Fertile Spaces’, p. 516.    Mike Crang, ‘Time: Space’, in Paul Cloke and Ron Johnston (eds), Spaces of Geographical Thought (London, 2005), pp. 199–217.    Mark Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (Cambridge MA, 1993), p. 61.    Stuart Elden, Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History (London, 2001), p. 66.   Martina Löw, ‘The Social Construction of Space and Gender’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 13 (2006): 120. 10   Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift, ‘Species of Spaces’, in Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift (eds), Thinking Space (London, 2000), pp. 2–3. 

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The chapter will unpack three spatial registers (of spatial representations, of spatial scale and relational space, and the lived space of sociality), to suggest how different spaces shape activities and our accounts of them. Representing Place and the Cartographic Imaginary Conventionally, there was the assumption that geography dealt with variation over space while history dealt with change through time. Such crass separations have never really held and the subdiscipline of historical geography thoroughly muddied that water. But for many social science and humanities approaches space often had a fairly passive role – a stage on which temporal processes occur or something that offers ‘local colour’ on minor variations on the main theme. It is a context that explains deviation from otherwise invariant social processes. The antithesis of treating space as context for social processes might be the Annales school and its geohistoire of regional characters, producing idiographic accounts of regional identity and the shaping of landscapes over the longue durée of human inhabitation. People and their places are bound together in distinctive regions, each of which is ‘an area carved out by axe and plough, which belongs to the people who have carved it out’.11 This sensitivity to individual places offers a mosaic of differentiated cultural landscapes distributed over the map forming ‘a variegated landscape of differentially adapted human groups to their immediate environment’.12 In this sense people and landscape are mutually imprinted; in the words of Paul Vidal de la Blache: It is man [sic] who reveals a country’s individuality by moulding it to his own use. He established a connection between unrelated features, substituting for the random effects of local circumstances a systematic cooperation of forces. Only then does a country acquire a specific character, differentiating it from others, till at length it becomes, as it were, a medal struck in the likeness of a people.13

This imagining of human difference encodes a cartographic spatial representation of cultures fixed in place. As an analytic approach it speaks to the emotional attachment to natal soil, where nationalist romantic authors like Eduard Spranger distinguish the ‘milieu or environment as the surroundings into which any human 11   K. Olwig, ‘Sexual Cosmology: Nation and Landscape at the Conceptual Interstices of Nature and Culture; or, What does Landscape Really Mean?’, in Barbara Bender (ed.), Landscape: Politics and Perspectives (Oxford, 1993), p. 311. 12   Kevin Archer, ‘Regions as Social Organisms: The Lamarckian Characteristics of Vidal de la Blache’s Regional Geography’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 83 (1993): 500. 13   Vidal de la Blache, La personnalité géographique de la France (London, 1941), p. 8 [trans. Howard Brentnall].

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individual is born and the Heimat which is the outcome of the process of growing together with the land’.14 This spatiality maps emotional belonging onto discrete and bounded spatial containers, where space is always ‘a bounded medium of some kind which provides a sense of security and belonging’.15 However, it also points to creating places through cultural action, rather than seeing space as a container existing, in Lefebvre’s words, ‘prior to whatever ends up filling it’.16 The interaction of senses of self and space identified by Tom Conley’s study of cartographic rhetoric suggests the importance of representations of space in shaping our sense of spatiality. He picks out moments such as the shift from European Cordiform map projections, where the world is wrapped around a heart shape, to island cosmographies, which depict individualized locations, as showing changing views ‘from one of the microcosmic self as mirror of the macrocosmic world to one in which both the reader and the characters discover that every figure counts as an insular entity among thousands of others’.17 The change in depicting space reflects shifts in society. The rise of the map can be linked to the emergence of nation states that defined themselves as territorially bounded and exclusive entities.18 Thus in the Ditchely portrait of Elizabeth I, painted by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger c.1592, the monarch stands upon a map of southern England with globe pendant earrings suspended from her ears, expressing the connection of territory and possession. The action of mapping is performative of the nation state in two ways. More than simply recording the territory, it first creates a territorialized imaginary that we now take for granted where the nation is defined by its extent, so modern atlases of medieval Europe anachronistically project a vision of territorially defined and discrete entities onto the past.19 Second, it offers a technology of governance. Thus, Saxton’s maps of England occur at a time when Burghley and Cecil were using maps to locate nobles, their strengths and loyalties, while in ‘English tracts promoting New World colonies in the 1580’s, there is less inscription of legal and ritual ceremonies that signify monarchical power, so much as an impulse to

14  Elizabeth Boa and Rachel Palfreyman, Heimat – A German Dream: Regional Loyalties and National Identity in German Culture 1890–1990 (Oxford, 2000), p. 5. 15  Ibid., p. 23. 16  Arnade, Howell and Simons, ‘Fertile Spaces’, p. 520. 17  Tom Conley, The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis, 1996), p. 177. 18   Bernhard Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland (Basingstoke, 2001); Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, 1992). 19  Michael Biggs, ‘Putting the State on the Map: Cartography, Territory, and European State Formation’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 41 (1999): 374–405.

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geographical surveillance that is ubiquitous in and perhaps even inseparable from these accounts’.20 One can argue that the formation of the modern state depicted on the map was constituted in part through cartography – as a store of knowledge reflecting surveys that rulers sponsored to penetrate the ground over which they ruled; as a spatial form modeled on the map’s linear boundary and homogeneous space; and, in the imagination, as political authority symbolized by territory and the earth’s surface comprehended as a composite of states.21

This conceptualization of space, Foucault suggests, betrays a shift from a medieval spatiality of emplacement, grounding activity in locations that had specific meaning, to a more abstract sense of space as open, unending and varying only quantitatively by amount and position. Thus, Foucault suggested that with ‘the constitution of an infinitely open space, the space of the Middle Ages turned out to be dissolved. A thing’s place was no longer anything but a point in its movement’.22 The most famous example of the rise of this abstract space is the mapping of the west of the USA where, beyond route 277 in Ohio, land was marked out for potential homesteads, settlements and townships from great sweeping meridians charted across the land with such regularity that it was compared to graph paper.23 It drained all substantive content from place and replaced it with empty, exchangeable units of measurement. What this facilitated was the rapid commodification of land – with standard plot sizes and multiples thereof, identified by their unique location in the grid. This version of space sees territory as divisible and multiplicable. The only change is quantity. As Lefebvre put it: ‘This is a space, therefore, that is homogeneous yet at the same time broken up into fragments.’24 While this account points to the performativity of spatial representations, in making the world ‘conquerable and containable for purposes of human occupancy and action’,25 it does not go far enough in looking at the actual performances of mapping. As Edwards notes: It is all too easy to think that we understand the power and the charm of the early modern map … we imagine we perceive the spirit of European artists, rulers, merchants and landlords for the first time in possession of their material environment: bursting the bubble of Medieval parochialism and stretching out 20   Mark Koch, ‘Ruling the World: The Cartographic Gaze in Elizabethan Accounts of the New World’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 4.2 (1998): 11. 21   Biggs, ‘Putting the State on the Map’, p. 374. 22  Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, 16 (1986): 23. 23   Andro Linklater, Measuring America: How the United States was Shaped by the Greatest Land Sale in History (London, 2002), p. 178. 24  Lefebvre, Production of Space, p. 342. 25  David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford, 1989), p. 326.

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to govern a space as limitless as the geometry which framed it. And if we do not celebrate this breaking free from place to space then we mourn it.26

Cosgrove thus argues it is possible that concerns with maps as technologies of power dehistoricize them as artefacts. Looking upon them as symptoms of grand processes risks anachronistically projecting our modern (abstract) spatialities back onto the maps.27 Seeing maps as entangled products embedded in a variety of writing practices gives a more sensitive view than just seeing them as ruses of power. Thus some maps were made more in the epideictic mode of celebrating achievements of rulers and potentates than signifying a ‘mathematization of experience’28 – one should not ignore the important role of the cartouches and other marginalia on maps that were hugely significant to contemporary readers.29 Moreover, even the geometry needs to be set in its contemporary context where, for instance, the use of formal geometry in New England town plans offered a ‘mathematised morality of compassing and proportion’, signifying attempts to balance ‘virtue, grace and providence and the chaotic energies of history and commerce’ and thus were ‘gestures in an anxious rhetoric of self-constraint’ rather than ‘expressions of a proto-Enlightenment culture of systematic domination’.30 Maps could relate to more than abstract spatial imaginaries. Alpers suggests that in the Dutch golden age maps were considered to be a kind of picture and pictures were considered descriptive.31 We might term these ‘spatial vernaculars’, as Yonemoto does in her study of Tokugawa mapping, where she emphasizes a need to ‘understand maps as part of a larger mapping process, one that was imbricated in the growth of urban culture’.32 There, Ryūsen’s 1689 single sheet map combined the information of a gazetteer of nobles and clans with spatial information. It disavowed exact surveying as ‘useless’ since the ‘the map’s function is to help people find their way, in the city itself as well as in city life’.33 Ryūsen’s map of Japan reworking the legendary monk Gyōki’s eighth-century maps shows this vernacular evolved since the difference between Ryūsen’s maps and the Gyōki-style model he references is the conspicuous absence in the Ryūsen’s maps of a visual center. In Gyōki’s   Jess Edwards, ‘Study, Marketplace and Labyrinth: Geometry as Rhetoric’, New Formations, 57 (2005): 126. 27   Denis Cosgrove, ‘Mapping Meaning’, in Denis Cosgrove (ed.), Mappings (London, 1999), p. 132. 28   Edwards, ‘Study, Marketplace and Labyrinth’, p. 140. 29  Conley, The Self-Made Map. See also Würgler in this volume. 30   Edwards, ‘Study, Marketplace and Labyrinth’, pp. 141–2. 31   Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1989). 32   Marcia Yonemoto, ‘The ‘Spatial Vernacular’ in Tokugawa Maps’, Journal of Asian Studies, 59 (2000): 653. 33  Ibid. 26

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maps there is a clear emphasis on the imperial capital, but in Ryūsen’s maps, all roads do not lead to Kyoto or to Edo. Instead of giving central status to a single city, the map lacks a center. Instead, it guides the reader’s attention to Japan’s roads. The road network made movement to and from multiple ‘centers’ possible, and in this way, the map captures the growing interest in and necessity of travel in the late seventeenth century.34

Likewise, Japanese sea charts of the period show coastal itineraries rather than portolan-style coordinates across open, abstracted space. They encode the sea as dangerous and the land as civilized and the focus of prosperity and peace.35 As Conley notes, images, discourse and travels entwine in shared rhetorical constellations.36 Nor does a lack of maps equate to a lack of spatial awareness in medieval Europe. Thus, while maps were limited we might look at the rise of ‘chorographies’, that is in Ptolemy’s schema detailed depictions of places, or rather more painterly views than abstract expansive geographies of connections. Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographei, which went through 36 editions between 1544 and 1628, offered panoramic views of mostly German cities which built on longstanding traditions of birds’ eye views of cities. The same spatial representation is evident in the six volumes of Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum where, for instance, the map of London has a hill somehow inserted south of Southwark to offer a convenient surrogate vantage point for the viewer, positioned alongside several denizens of noble degree and dress, who look out upon a vista of London stretching from Westminster to the Tower.37 The contrivance is typical not so much of a will to power as the expression of a belief in the unity of urban life and space, and thus a desire to unify it in representation even if no such view was afforded the actual observer.38 This range of spatial representations reflects social values, not a teleological narrative of ever-improving accuracy. Thus, in a study of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Marseille, Smail outlines competing locational systems in the city. Notaries led the use of locational references by street or house, referring for instance to ‘Moneychangers Street’ (Carreria Cambiorum), but artisanal accounts imagined the city as neighbourhoods referring to the area of moneychangers (Cambio). Propertied classes, meanwhile, referred to territorial blocks as ‘islands’ (Insula Cambiorum). In these cases ‘the lexical term remains the same. It is the structure of space – imagined as a street, as a vicinity or as an island

34

 Ibid., p. 657.   Marcia Yonemoto, ‘Maps and Metaphors of the “Small Eastern Sea” in Tokugawa Japan (1603–1868)’, Geographical Review, 89 (1999): 169–87. 36  Conley, The Self-Made Map. 37   Koch, ‘Ruling the World’, pp. 6–8. 38  Lucia Nuti, ‘Mapping Places: Chorography and Vision in the Renaissance’, in Cosgrove, Mappings, p. 99. 35

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– that shifts’.39 The differences reflect spatial practices not relative accuracy, so while for landowners streets became a mere buffer between islands of possessed territory, the neighbourhood imaginary of artisans reflected the organization of space around confraternities. Creating Space: Scales of Life, Spatial Relations of Places The preceding discussion suggests some spatial representations and scales have become hegemonic at particular moments in either the real world or academic studies, or both. We might distinguish spatial visions that see the world as composed of processes acting at different spatial scales and those which see places not as differently sized containers but composed of entangled spatial relations. In this sense, scalar accounts often focus upon the dimensional extent of political action and organization rather than its embedded nature. Scalar accounts thus tend to see the emergence of more or less untidily nested scales of political organization forming a hierarchy of theatres within which, and between which, activities are organized. In contrast, relational approaches focus upon how activities embed processes and promiscuously entwine with connections of varying spatial extent. As Amin puts it, relational approaches depict ‘a topology marked by overlapping near and far relations and organizational connections that are not reducible to scalar spaces’.40 Relational accounts are not so much concerned with hierarchical levels of organization as horizontal relations.41 Moreover, relational accounts understand all processes as grounded in (differing) places rather than some occupying a more abstract space. So in this section I want to try to show how these two perspectives offer insights into thinking about premodern life. One prominent model has indeed seen the two as not merely different approaches but as characterizing different spatialities of competing historical processes – that is finance capital and the state, with the former an open set of relations and the latter stabilizing through territorial control in Arrighi’s famous formulation.42 Certainly we have known the national scale is often inappropriate, since Braudel alerted us to the grand regional scale of the Mediterranean and the functioning of world cities in long distance trade.43 39  Daniel Lord Smail, ‘The Linguistic Cartography of Property and Power in Late Medieval Marseille’, in Barbara Hanawalt and Michael Kobialka (eds), Medieval Practices of Space (Minneapolis, 2000), p. 43. 40  A. Amin, ‘Spatialities of Globalization’, Environment and Planning A, 34 (2002): 386. 41   Sallie A. Marston, John Paul Jones and Keith Woodward, ‘Human Geography Without Scale’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30 (2005): 416–32. 42   Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London, 1994). 43   Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (2nd edn, Berkeley, 1995).

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Thus, in ‘the mercantile era, when oceans connected centers of coastal settlement into networks of seaborne commerce, diaspora, and empire, the maritime city often maintained a tenuous relationship with the landed empire of its hinterland’.44 Melaka served as the major entrepôt between the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean, and in James Scott’s view ‘Melaka in 1500 before the Portuguese conquest was with its polyglot, trading population probably more diverse, open and cosmopolitan than its contemporary trading port, Venice’.45 Burke argues that we should see Venice as an information centre for trade and commerce between east and west – an open, porous city composed of flows moving through it.46 As Kümin suggests in the introduction to this volume, followers of Braudel then replaced one fixed scale (the nation) with another (the meta-region such as the Mediterranean). Most accounts have long since accepted that no scale may be natural but focus upon the production of scales through political action and contest.47 In this way we need to constantly look at whether we have an ontological or epistemological category for analysis, or one where reflexive political action transforms a category of knowledge into one of power. To offer one case study of the contrasts of notions of produced scale and relational space we might take up urban space and look at the production of the ‘city’ as a distinctive space and scale. This imaginary of self-contained urban space has figured large in urban histories of Northern Europe from Ennen and Pirenne’s classic studies onwards. So often we find the depiction as follows: The medieval city was a densely built environment, a ‘compact silhouette’, with encircling walls and imposing towers that protected it from the surrounding landscape. The walls served not only defensive purposes, however; they also demarcated a special realm or sphere of urban rights. Those ‘urban rights’, Ennen goes on to explain, were predicated on a widespread system of civic equality that was fundamentally in opposition to the feudal system that prevailed outside city walls, and on a constitution that allowed citizens to participate in their own government, even granting them supreme political autonomy.48

In other words it is a spatially defined entity where rights and freedoms are enjoyed by virtue of residence. Such a scalar imaginary reflects the self-ideology and spatial practices of cities where as ‘early as the thirteenth century, the citizenry of these  Carolyn Cartier, ‘Cosmopolitics and the Maritime World City’, Geographical Review, 89 (1999): 279. 45  Cited in ibid, p. 280. 46   Peter Burke, ‘Early Modern Venice as a Center of Information and Communication’, in John Martin and Dennis Romano (eds), Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297–1797 (Baltimore, 2000), p. 404. 47   Sallie A. Marston, ‘The Social Construction of Scale’, Progress in Human Geography, 24 (2000): 219–42. 48  Arnade, Howell and Simons, ‘Fertile Spaces’, p. 530. 44

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towns regularly expressed their claims for urban privileges – or “liberties,” as they typically called them – in spatial terms, describing their republics as coherent, discrete, sociopolitical spaces, enclaves carved out of an alien geographical, social, and political terrain’.49 For instance, Attreed’s study reveals the intimate and recursive connection of legal claims and spatial entities: Every town possessed, and developed within, concrete, geographical space, whether it was physically demarcated by walls and gates or only judicially defined by charters and grants. But those spaces could also be shared and challenged by other corporate bodies, especially that of the Church. The resultant clash of claims engendered conditions under which the identities of both bodies underwent change and definition … legal rights, exercised within the abstract juridical space that defined the unique state of the town, required real geographical space for their fullest and most secure expression. The pursuit of that physical space forced urban officials to clarify their needs, motives, and ideals in ways conducive to self-definition.50

Rather than urban islands of freedom in a feudal sea, cities were shot through with complicating jurisdictions and their boundaries, walls or not, were rather porous. Thus, in Exeter, the extramural liberty of Dean and Chapter was a compact holding where civic rights to collect tallages and arrest offenders were resisted from the mid-thirteenth century until an Act of Parliament in 1436. Its compact spatial form strengthened both the claim of the church and aided a compromise over control. The Bishop’s fee of Stephen was more problematic being dispersed around the city which ‘struck city authorities as deeply threatening to their supremacy within the delimited urban space … since … miscreants from the city’s liberty could escape into the episcopal liberty, sometimes simply by crossing a street’.51 The depiction of urban liberties has an illustrious and controversial career. Thus, a spate of revisionist studies have suggested that ‘cities were simply bigger, more powerful conglomerations of people drawn from – and bound to – a more diffuse “feudal” culture’.52 This debate is refracted through a North/South divide where urban cultures, and certainly urban historiography, North and South of the Alps are markedly different. If the previous paragraphs used Northern examples then the Italian Renaissance has been seen as an urban story where cities overcame the medieval ‘hodgepodge of spatially conceived loyalties governed by neighborhoods, clans, families, and local religious practice’.53 My aim is not to work through these arguments but to point to the ways in which the spatial construction of cities 49

 Ibid., p. 532.  Lorraine Attreed, ‘Urban Identity in Medieval English Towns’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 32 (2002): 572. 51  Ibid., p. 574. 52  Arnade, Howell and Simons, ‘Fertile Spaces’, p. 533. 53  Ibid., p. 536. 50

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refracts and sustains practices, and provides constraints and resources. Relational accounts might highlight that ritual performances, ‘far from being independent of space, acquire their power precisely through occupying particular spaces’.54 These performances gain significance from location but also change the meaning of location by overwriting the landscape with temporary routes and processions which reinscribe significance on the built fabric and modulate the meanings of fixed points.55 On the other hand, to parallel Cohn’s contribution to this volume, one can see scales of governance imbricated in one another on the occasion of the Imperial visit to Siena in 1452 where fears about hosting the overlord prompted a festival before the visit using ‘a ritual route which claimed and declared possession of the city’s public spaces’, celebrating the popolo regime and self government.56 In addition, the city issued an invitation and a guarantee of safe conduct, none too subtly turning the Emperor who claimed to rule over them into the guest of the free city. The ritual of greeting was staged outside the northern gate of the city, the Porta Camollia, in a relatively large open field that enabled the theatrical displays surrounding the official ceremonial of the meeting between the city’s guests and the civic representatives, an event which took place in front of a large crowd of spectators, as well as positioning the ritual in a neutral liminal zone. The gates of the city were symbolically charged spaces marking ‘a legal and military boundary between the civitas and the contado’, but also forming ‘a symbolic threshold for citizenship, authority and a host of other values associated with membership of the urban community’.57 The ritual inscription of gates has often formed a key moment of spatially instituting power and symbolic control.58 Within the city, spaces are also symbolically charged so that when, for instance, Siena hosted a papal visit, the papal court was installed around significant palaces lining the routes between the Cathedral housing the Pope and major religious institutions while unsightly butchers and blacksmiths were removed from visible streets.59 A structuralist reading of a city might embed these scales in the fabric of the city, thus Venice’s spaces would suggest that ‘the central node of Venice expressed a complex symbolic structure, understandable in terms of the humanist ideas

54

 Ibid., p. 525.   Philippa Jackson and Fabrizio Nevola, ‘Beyond the Palio: Urbanism and Ritual in Renaissance Siena’, Renaissance Studies, 20 (2006): 139. 56   Fabrizio Nevola, ‘Lieto e trionphante per la città: Experiencing a Mid-FifteenthCentury Imperial Triumph along Siena’s Strada Romana’, Renaissance Studies, 17 (2003): 588. 57   Ibid., p. 591; Jackson and Nevola, ‘Beyond the Palio’, p. 140. 58   Victoria Sanger and Isabelle Warmoes, ‘The City Gates of Louis XIV’, Journal of Urban History, 30 (2003): 50–69. 59   Fabrizio Nevola, ‘Ritual Geography: Housing the Papal Court of Pius II Piccolomini in Siena (1459–60)’, Renaissance Studies, 20 (2006): 201–24. 55

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shared by the Venetian patriciate and in terms of the Venetian myth’.60 That is, looking at the Piazza San Marco one can see axes of sacred (the Basilica) and secular (the flanking arcades of the Procuratie); monarchical (the Doge’s Palace); the aristocratic and republican; as well as oppositions of sea and land. This constellation of symbolic sites was itself cast within a wider triangular pattern of locations surrounding the Doge’s Palace and the Basilica that contrasted San Marco as the site of order and ritual, with the Arsenal as a place of technology and the Rialto that was dominated by a commercial logic. This symbolic geography underpins maps such as that of Jacopo de Barbari, which centres on San Marco and whose visual distortion increases the further one looks from there. It depicts cosmological significance and order as much as being a realistic representation. Cosgrove’s interpretation suggests that the subject of the map ‘is the commonwealth of Venice rather than the physical city’, using a visual metaphor to instantiate the Venetian state.61 Thus, Venice’s spatial representation as bounded city fosters the myth of the urban republic focusing upon the scale of the city rather than the relations that extend the city far beyond its physical edges. One can trace through arguments on the significance of urban scale and symbolism in the Arabic world too. Thus, the Ayyubid city of Aleppo is dominated by a citadel setting its foreign rulers apart from the ruled, and enclosing the palace within. Beneath its walls, the dar al’adl court of justice was linked to the palace by a hidden passage, allowing rapid everyday access and egress without recourse to the massively ornamented ceremonial gates of the citadel that form the route for processions, while the mosque on the highest point is visible from the whole city both unifying and surveying it.62 There is a complex literature on ‘Islamic urbanism’ that has often read urban form out of Islamic faith in problematic ways given the massive variation as various rulers at various times have built and used cities differently. Indeed, even the most ostensibly ‘simple’ element of the alignment of mosques upon Mecca is more variable than might be imagined with, for instance, qibla alignment in Morocco varying as much as 45 degrees within one city.63 Accounts have long pointed to putatively shared features of a citadel, permanent market, religious school and city walls, as well as the organization of residences by wards based on ethnicity or trades, with quarters arranged in concentric zones by social status, progressing from higher levels at the centre, for instance as recounted by Ibn Battuta in the fourteenth century: 60  Denis Cosgrove, ‘The Myth and the Stones of Venice: An Historical Geography of a Symbolic Landscape’, Journal of Historical Geography, 8 (1982): 150–52. 61   Ibid.; Juergen Schulz, ‘Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice: Map Making, City Views, and Moralized Geography before the Year 1500’, The Art Bulletin, 60 (1978): 425–74. 62   Y. Tabbaa, ‘Circles of Power: Palace, Citadel, and City in Ayyubid Aleppo’, Ars Orientalis, 23 (1993): 181–200. 63  Michael E. Bonine, ‘The Sacred Direction and City Structure: A Preliminary Analysis of the Islamic Cities of Morocco’, in O. Grabar (ed.), Muqarnas VII: An Annual on Islamic Art and Architecture (Leiden, 1990), pp. 50–72.

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Near the mosque as a religious center we will find the suppliers of the sanctuary, the suq of the candle merchants, the dealers in incense and other perfumes. Near the mosque as an intellectual center we will find also the suq of the booksellers, the suq of the bookbinders, and, as its neighbor, the suq of the leather merchants and the makers of slippers; … Adjoining this group of markets we enter the halls of the dealers in textiles, the qaisariyya … Next to the textile trade the carpenters, locksmiths, and the producers of copper utensils will be located; and somewhat farther from the center, the smiths; Approaching to the gates … one will find … the makers of saddles and those of pack saddlers … Then the vendors of victuals brought in from the country who sometimes will form a market outside the gates, together with the basket makers, the sellers of spun wool and the like.64

This structure has become the underpinning of many broadly derogatory accounts that compare Islamic cities with the idealized European urban spaces mentioned earlier. Thus, Planhol would see the quarters as disrupting the unified urban ideal often depicted in Renaissance accounts given their lack of specifically urban liberties and polities.65 The Orient becomes negatively defined as lacking European spaces. Lived Space and Spaces of Sociality These urban symbolic systems, partly conventional and partly derived from formal institutions, were not uniformly understood or indeed accepted. Thus, just as the juridical space of the city might be porous and fragmented so too was its symbolic registry where competing and conflicting codings clashed – from church, commercial and civic liturgies to the sign systems of the aristocracy. The symbolic world of the city was not then about location in disembodied abstract space but a medieval sense of locus as social place.66 This is not just at the grand level of the formal signs of statecraft but at the micro-level associating people, places and trades. Thus, ‘in thinking about the place that was the medieval city we have to enlarge our conception of public space to include this shared system of signs’; in, say, Rue Saint Antoine, new apprentices were forced to kiss the ‘Truie qui file’ [The Spinning Sow] sign that designated the street, with their elders carefully smashing their noses into it until nightfall heralded by dancing and revelry through the neighborhood.67 The presence of the sign system was physical 64   Michael E. Bonine, ‘From Uruk to Casablanca: Perspectives on the Urban Experience of the Middle East’, Journal of Urban History, 3 (1977): 150. 65  Ibid., p. 149. 66  Michael Camille, ‘Signs of the City: Place, Power and Public Fantasy in Medieval Paris’, in Hanawalt and Kobialka, Medieval Practices of Space, p. 9. 67  Ibid., pp. 16–17.

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as well as visual, secular as well as sacred, personal and public. In navigating the medieval city the presence and intrusion of signs is well documented, with London for instance banning signs in 1375 (and again in 1419) that stretched more than seven feet into the highway: [T]he old sculptural signs, jutting out as they did onto the street-space itself, became one with the rubbed-up-against, quotidian chaos of the body politic. As well as this important material aspect, the way such signs create a kind of mental map of modes of power is also important. The medieval imaginary was teeming with signs that differentiated one mini-element, that is one house, from another.68

It was only in 1805 that Paris compelled the numbering of streets to replace the more than 3,000 pictorial signs of the eighteenth century. This, then, is perhaps the rise of an abstract space in the heart of the city.69 Alongside this was a sonoric landscape70 where local neighbourhoods were distinguishable by bells as acoustic communities. The cathedral or central bells, or the call of the grand mosque, might offer the unity of city, and there was a hierarchy in control of official sound. However, equally vociferous, and part of neighbourhood identity, were those forms of public insult and rough music that also contributed to a layered semiotic system.71 The social and the symbolic geographies of cities were linked. The Venetian symbolic landscape was animated and sustained by numerous rituals such as the Doge’s annual Marriage to the Sea, or the Ascension Day processions in the Piazza.72 Thus, the symbolic geography creates sites of heightened charge and significance for different people and occasions. For example, the gendering of social and spatial worlds is illustrated in Venetian legal judgments. Medieval legal space involved both managing the moral distance of good and bad,73 and also the use of locations whose symbolic meaning addressed the crime or the victim. Punishment might involve the exclusion of offenders from both direct and indirect access to political power by excluding them physically from the places around San Marco where that power was exercised. Alternately, a cheating Merchant would be denounced in the Rialto, and when the courts sought to rescue a defamed woman’s honour it had the slanderer taken and castigated during Mass in her own 68

 Ibid., pp. 11–12.  Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 2 vols, vol. 1 (Berkeley, 1984). 70  Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation and the History of the Body (Berkeley, 1993). 71  David Garrioch, ‘Sounds of the City: The Soundscape of Early Modern European Towns’, Urban History, 30 (2003): 5–25. 72  Dennis Romano, ‘Gender and the Urban Geography of Renaissance Venice’, Journal of Social History, 23 (1989): 339. 73   Valerie I.J. Flint, ‘Space and Discipline in Early Medieval Europe’, in Hanawalt and Kobialka, Medieval Practices of Space, pp. 149–66. 69

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and neighbouring parish churches.74 This sketches out a map of communities and audiences, at least in the eyes of official Venice. A female geography of parish, neighbourhood and home was enforced by the double veiling of women beyond those confines – they were themselves covered and also travelling on covered gondolas. In Ferrara, frescoes depict a similar pattern with respectable women viewing public events from, and being viewed at, balconies with unrespectable women depicted in the street.75 This regulation and marking of space might be seen in the conduct of gossip, with the urban authorities concerned over the movement of words on the street. The symbolic geography of Venice located public speech in San Marco, the information of commerce in the Rialto and confined feminized gossip to the neighbourhoods. However, in practice this division is less clear, since male gossip was a crucial, if sometimes destabilizing, part of politics. The concern was so great the state regulated speech and commanded silence at elections in this small extension of St Mark’s square beside the Basilica, which was restricted to the nobility for two hours a day called the ‘Piazzetta’ or the ‘Broglio’ (literally, and revealingly, the Intrigue or Entanglement). As befits a commercial city the flow of information was central to urban life. Thus on 23 June 1509, the Venetian diarist Girolamo Priuli commented: People were gossiping and talking and spreading so many lies without any foundation in the Piazza San Marco and under the loggia of the Procuratie and at the Rialto and in the churches and barbershops that one could not figure out what was true … beyond being embarrassing, [it] was damaging, since whatever was spoken and said in the piazze was then described outside the city, since there were many diverse explorers and listeners.76

The location of gossip, its control and connection to external flows seem crucial here. One might contrast it to the kind of geographies of the printed word traced by Roger Chartier.77 The gendered fears over gossip often compared the open female mouth to the open door and the exposed body; as threats to familial honour they became the sites of huge psychosocial investment. Thus, in fourteenth-century France Henri de Mondeville likened the body to ‘the house of the soul, which like any house can only be maintained as such by constant surveillance of its openings. The woman’s body is seen as an inadequate enclosure because its boundaries are

74

 Romano, ‘Gender and the Urban Geography’, pp. 341–5.  Diane Ghirardo, ‘Women and Space in a Renaissance Italian City’, in I. Borden and J. Rendell (eds), Intersections: Architectural Histories and Critical Theories (London, 2000), pp. 170–98. 76   Elizabeth Horodowich, ‘The Gossiping Tongue: Oral Networks, Public Life and Political Culture in Early Modern Venice’, Renaissance Studies, 19 (2005): 37. 77  Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France (New Jersey, 1987). 75

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convoluted … turned inside out’.78 The effect, according to Stallybrass, is that ‘the surveillance of women concentrated upon three specific areas: the mouth, chastity and the threshold of the house’.79 Spaces might both inscribe and be inscribed with sexualized identities. The yellow veil that officially marked out the Venetian prostitute in public was matched by the infamy bestowed upon any women present in the Rialto or indeed the semi-official zoning of the insula Rivoalti as the centre of prostitution and the bestowal of official place names on at least two brothels. Prostitution thus also became part of the city’s symbolic geography and that geography policed women’s sexuality. The presumption might be that women in known areas were prostitutes, and prostitution was often policed by being spatially confined and controlled – trying to spatially separate reputable and disreputable women.80 On the other hand, the convent was a distinctive female place where virginity conjoined with public honour.81 Bordellos and convents were both located at the margins of many Italian cities. The policing of belonging and social place figures not only in formal scales of neighbourhoods or parishes but also in their social relations. Compared to modern European neighbourhoods based around income stratification, premodern European districts were generally more socially diverse than modern ones and defined by structures of political allegiance rather than wealth, where mercantile quarters or locations had servants living with masters and many districts functioned through a social hierarchy. But the pattern is massively varied where, for instance, Parisian parishes of 12,000 had a weaker hold on popular imaginations and affiliations than Milanese ones of two thousand. In Milan, neighborhood-based religious associations were everywhere. The most important were the eighty-six or so Companie della Croce. These centered on crosses erected in intersections or squares where the male members were required to congregate each evening for prayers … and they were fundamental in shaping people’s awareness of space. The crosses in particular were landmarks, visually striking and strategically located. The images and altars were maintained by the local people whose protection they assured, and they promoted a very strong sense of territory.82

Here, then, we have a sense of space as enabling those dense associations that sustained civic and political life. The mutual entanglement of space, practice and society is illustrated by the rise of Baroque court festival culture – keyed to the creation of specific spaces through artificial light, and offering a new rhythm and 78

 Camille, ‘Signs of the City’, p. 27.  Ibid., p. 23. 80   Ghirardo, ‘Women and Space’. 81  Romano, ‘Gender and the Urban Geography’, p. 345. 82  David Garrioch, ‘Sacred Neighborhoods and Secular Neighborhoods: Milan and Paris in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Urban History, 27 (2001): 409–10. 79

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pattern of life where ‘Baroque festival culture, [tied] new secular spaces with innovative divisions of daily time. The great spaces built for balls and celebrations at European courts in the seventeenth century (such as the Whitehall Banqueting House in London, the Herkules-Saal or the Kaiser-Saal at the Munich residence, or the Dresdner Zwinger) made possible better-lit evening gatherings’ and shifted key social events from the street to the court, and from day to night.83 Here, the colonization and regulation of the night offers another story of the emergence of specific practices in the space-times of the city. Spaces of Historiography The different ways in which I have tried to unpack space – as a way of representing the world; as relational and scalar spaces; and as the site of lived practice – reflect a number of tensions and contrasts both in how space is used and how space has been analysed. Through the discussion of mapping as historical practice and as an analytic imaginary, and through the articulation of the urban scale of government in practice – as an imaginary and myth actively deployed by people at the time, as well as an analytic construct imposed on practices that exceed and destabilize such scalar accounts – I suggested that differing scales frame activities and that spaces are produced and not given. The differing scales framing practices may also conflict and compete with each other. One might draw a parallel with time, where scales of spatial activity are no more natural than senses of periods, generations and epochs – but just as effective in framing life. Meanwhile, temporal narratives may parallel the sense of spatial relations, where historical narrative leaps unevenly over chronology, so spatial relations twist and play with locational proximities and distances. My aim, then, has been to suggest that we always have socially constructed spaces – as exemplified when cadastral patterns, and patterns of allegiance and lineage, along with differentiated connectivities and modes of transport, refract juridical patterns of influence and control.84 Space is not a given dimension for action, but rather is produced through action. As Michel Foucault put it pithily enough: The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We … live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.85 83   Craig Koslofsky, ‘Court Culture and Street Lighting in Seventeenth-Century Europe’, Journal of Urban History, 28 (2002): 746. 84   See for instance Carpenter in this volume. 85   Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, p. 23.

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He draws on the sense of groundedness that space gives to accounts – the connection to the lived world – that is undoubtedly one of its attractions. Likewise, his insistence that we live in a world of relations that produce heterogeneous sites raises issues about the historical transformation of senses of space and of dominant categories of space. Thus, the dominant account of modernizing space might be seen as the triumph of an optical space, of an abstract cartographic mode of understanding space, emerging against medieval accounts. We might define this as a scopic spatiality where all … is visible; … there is nothing hidden, occult, or mysterious. All things exist insofar as their properties are perceptible and an account can be made of them; as such, all things are inert. This is a non-mythical form of realized eschatology: the truth of what is fully present and presenced. The truth and identity of the material order declares itself by the force of its own existence … [As Lefebvre tells us] ‘The illusion of transparency goes hand in hand with a view of space as innocent, as free of traps or secret places’.86

This is, Lefebvre continues, the ‘modernist trio, triad or trinity [of] readabilityvisibility-intelligibility’, or what de Certeau characterized as a slow revolution draining mystery from the world.87 For a spatial historiography, then, the issue is one of thinking through spaces that fit the times. But also, as inevitably as historical narrative relates the past to our time or reflects the voices of the past through the writing of the present, so too it must relate our spaces to past spaces, the space of the archive to that of the world depicted. A spatial view, in other words, that does not seek to put everything in its place and find a place for everything, but also uses the connections and contortions of spatial relations to complicate and enrich accounts.

86  Discussing Lefebvre: Graham Ward, ‘Michel de Certeau’s “Spiritual Spaces”’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 100 (2001): 503. 87  Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable:The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 1 (Chicago, 1992 [trans.]).

Index

Abingdon 87 absence 24–5, 49, 53, 127, 145, 147, 149, 227, 233–4, 243–4, 247 absolutism 11, 20, 57, 59 academies 82, 87, 90 access 27, 44, 46–8, 55, 59, 79, 95–6, 99, 100, 104, 106–7, fig.8.3, 229, 233–4, 260, 262 accommodation see lodgings accountability 156 acoustics 76 adjudiction 26 administration 84 admission 91 affinities 122, 130, 233 age 216 agency 7–9, 14, 21, 60–61, 68, 71, 80, 138, 149, 151–4, 156, 158, 173, 181, 233, 249, 253 agriculture 88, 98, 106 alcohol 61, 64, 69, 75, 77, 111 alehouses see public houses Aleppo 260 allegory 38, 210 alliances 199–200, 206, 211 almanacs 238 almshouses 170; see also poor Alpers, Svetlana 254 Alps 205, 258 altars 157, 170 America 81, 83–4, 253–4 Amin, A. 256 Anabaptists 36 animals 96, 100–101, 103, 107, 109–10 Anjou, Duke of 183 Annales School 251 Anne, Queen of England 245 anonymity 227 anthropology 10, 76, 117 antiquarianism 82

appearance 217 appropriation 221 Arab 260 archaeology 8 architecture 8, 50, 53–4, 68, 74, 80, 139, 153, 169–70, 180–81 archives 266 aristocracy see nobility armies 33, 35–8, 41, 63–4, 89–90, 96, 108, 118–22, 124–7, 142, 153, 184, 188, 191–2, 198, 200, 203–6, 212, 233, 235–6, 241, 244 Arnade, Peter 249–50 arrests 223–7 Arrighi, Giovanni 256 art 43, 49–50, 52, 210, 253–4 artisans 259, 261 Arundel, Earl of 243 Asch, Ronald 233–4, 243 assemblies 87, 94, 105, 109, 129–33, 139, 141–2, 147, 149, 152, 156, 158, 165–6, 183, 186, 188–9, 192, 229, 238, 246–7 associated territories see Swiss Confederation association 21, 200–201, 203, 208, 211 Aston, Sir Thomas 238 atlases 252 atmosphere 14, 49, 154, 173 Attreed, Lorraine 258 audiences 45, 47, 51, 55, 59 Augsburg 29–39, fig.1.2, 42, 208 Augustus of Saxony, Elector 39, fig.1.2 Aulinger, Rosemarie 23 Austria 25, 201, 206, 234 authority 143–4, 146–7, 148–9, 153, 164, 170, fig.8.3, 172, 181–2, 184, 190, 215, 221, 223, 225, 227–8, 233–8, 240, 243, 245, 247, 253, 259 autonomy 53, 140, 201, 257

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Baden 27 balance of power 6 ballads 238 banishment 236 banquets see dining baptism 157, 161 Barbari, Jacopo de 260 barbers 137–50, 263 Barcelona 39, 90 bargaining see negotiation Baroque 48, 264–5 Basel fig.10.1, 203–4, 206–8, 211–12, 213 bastard feudalism 122, 123 Battuta, Ibn 260 Bavaria 30 beating of the bounds see perambulation Beckett, John 99 bedchambers 44–8, 51–2, 73–4 Bedford 125 Bedfordshire 124–5 Behringer, Wolfgang 31 Beijing Olympics 4 belonging 167, 171–2, 198, 252, 264 Bennett, Michael 131 Berkshire 131 Berlin 203 Bern 198, fig.10.1, 199–200, 203, 211 Bible 84, 170 Biel 203 billetting 34 Black Death 121, 123 Blickle, Peter 21, 137 Bloys, Robert 219 Bodin, Jean 19 body 263 Bohemia 24–5 Bologna 86 borders 8, 14, 100, 103, 105–6, 110–12, 126–7, 136, 145, 151–2, 154, 158, 167–70, 173, chap.10, fig.10.2, 226, 228–9, 233, 235–6, 252–3 boundaries see borders Bourdieu, Pierre 180 bourgeoisie 6, 89–90 Brandenburg 31 Brake, Wayne te 21 Braudel, Fernand 256–7 Braun, Georg 255

Brenner, Neil 14 bridges 34 Bristol 156 Britain 61, 67, 81, 86, table 4.1, 120, 197, 204, 208, 213, 236 Brown, James 240–41 Brussels 31 Bruyere, Jean de la 56 Buckingham, Duke of 126, 183 Buckinghamshire 131, 224 bureaucratization 6, 66, 121, 228 Burford 167 Burgundy 37, 44 burial 85, 157, 159, 170–71 Burke, Peter 257 Burma 3 Calvinism 65, 169, 175, 199, 202 Cambridge 241 canon law 157 Canterbury 186 cantons see Swiss Confederation capitalism 177 capitals 22, 30, 53–4, 256 Carlisle 109–10 carnival 4, 237 Cartmel 103 cartography 106, 197–8, 204–13, 251–6; see also maps Carpenter, Christine 233, 243 Castiglione, Baldassare 56–7 Catholic(ism) 4, 26, 30, 48, 53, 79, 85, 87, 90, 183, 198, fig.10.1, 199–200, 202, 204, 206–8, 213, 217, 219–20, 236 causality 50 censorship 91–2, 178, 211, 239 centralization 3, 6, 228 centres 6, 21, 31, 46, 118, 122, 168, 179, 184, 255, 257 ceremonies 3, 6–7, 23, 37, 39, 44–5, 49, 50–53, 154–5, 191; see also rituals Certeau, Michel de 266 chantries 152–3, 157, 166 chapels 47, 157, 171 charity 84, 166, 168, 170 Charles I of England 49, 78, 184, 186–7, 237–8, 242, 244

Index Charles II of England 47–8, 52, 193 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor 21–22, 31, 33–4, 36–7, 39, 41, 51, 141, 201, 234, 236 Charles IX of France, 52 Chartier, Roger 263 Chatenet, Monique 45 Cheshire 131–2, 238 Chester 127–8, 186 China 3–4, 50, 55, 210 chorographies 255 Christ 156, 160 Christina, Queen of Sweden 245 chronology 265 Church 87, 90, 92, 152, 169, 202, 236, 246, 258 church houses 160, 170 churches 54, 61, 76, 87, 99, 109, 132, 139, chap.8, 181, 186, 234, 237, 241–2, 246, 250, 259–60, 263 churchyards 82, 132, 154, 171 Cicero 215 cities see towns citizens 137, 139–40, 143–5, 147–9, 194, 225, 227, 235, 237–8, 241, 246, 257–9 cityscape 210 civil society 81, 177, 194 civilization 177, 255 Clark, Peter, 64, 239 cleanliness 36 Clement VIII, Pope 202 clergy 33, 37, 77, 85, 87, 89, 109, 127, 15, chap.8, 185–8, 236–7, 239–40, 242, 244, 246 clubs chap.4, table 4.1, 187, 239, 247 coasts 205 coats of arms see crests coffee houses 54, 92–3, 181, 187–90, 239, 247 Cohn, Henry 233, 259 colleges 26 colonization 128, 252 commemoration 161, 166 commercialization 93, 99, 101, 105 common good 5–6 common law 119, 160, 228–9 common people see middling sort

269

commons 82, chap.5 Commonwealth 235, 237–9 communication 5, 22, 27, 30–32, 41, 54–6, 58, 60, 75, 83, 92–3, 118, 122, 125, 132, 136, 139, 145, 151, 165, 175, 176, 178, 182–3, 188–90, 194, 225, 228, 245 communities 62, 95–6, 98, 100–101, 105–9, 111–12, 137, 141, chap.8, 212, 220, 227, 237, 241, 243, 259, 262–3 compromise 27 concealment 215 condominions see Swiss Conferation confessions 11 conflict 14, 26, 37, 85, 112, 117, 120, 124– 6, 129, 132, chap.7, 151, 156, 158, 160–61, 164, 167, 170, 175, 184, 186, 190, 199, 201, 203, 212–13, 217, 225, 236, 240–41, 258, 265 conformity 164 confraternities see guilds Conley, Tom 252, 255 Connecticut 2 conservative 98, 137, 192 Constance 206, 212 constitution 11, 20, 23, 26, 41, 141, 193, 257 consumption 64, 71, 92, 109 contacts 130 contexts 154, 251 contingencies 181 control 153, 221, 229, 234 conventicles see nonconformity convents see monasteries conversation 44–5, 58, 194–5, 216 Cornwall 127, 189 correspondence 25, 88, 112, 129–33, 144, 188, 239 corruption 79, 222–3 Cosgrove, Denis 254, 260 cosmographies 252 cosmology 8, 260 cottagers chap.5 Council of Trent 87 councils 23, 33–9, 41, 63, 66, 78, 124–5, 140–49, 158, 176, 190–91, 222–4, 226, 229, 233–5, 242

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of the Church 87, 159 Counter-Reformation 85 country houses 50–52, 55, 130 countryside see rural courtiers chap.2, 126, 233–4 courts legal 5, 24, 37, 49, 63–4, 71–2, 74–5, 77, 79, 109–10, 112, 119–20, 123, 129, 131, 138, 146, 148–9, 159–60, 165, 168, 190, 215–16, 222, 224–5, 228, 233, 235–7, 240, 242, 246–7, 258, 260, 262; see also manors princely 6, 23, 39, chap.2, 117, 234, 244–7, 264–5 courtship 73 credibility chap.9, 237 credit 59, 72 crests 204, 208–13, 234, 246 crime 63, 65, 66, 69–72, 84, 138, 160, 222, 224, 226, 236, 245, 258, 262 crisis 140, 220 Cromwell, Oliver 78, 235, 239, 241 Cromwell, Thomas 222, 242 crosses 264 crowds 242 cultural turn 5, 138 cultural transfer 6 culture 216 Cumbria chap.5, 243 cure of souls 152, 159 custom 4, 105, 169, 171, 195 customary tenure chap.5 Dacre 104, 110–11 dead 157, 166, 169 dearth 218 debate 82–3, 88, 189, 192–3, 238–40 defamation 75–79 defence 126 deference 182–4, 189–90 deism 81, 175, 193–4 delegation 121–2, 127 Della Casa, Giovanni 57–8 demagogy 182 democracy 4, 179, 193 demonstration 3, 216 Derbyshire 124, 128, 247 Devon 127

diaries 107, 110, 113 diaspora 257 diet see food diets 11, chap.1, fig.1.1; see also representative assemblies dining 24, 26, 45, 51 diplomacy see international relations discourse 136, 176, 190, 194, 220, 255 discussion 185–6 disenchantment 171 disorder 63, 93 dissimulation 54, 56–7, 59, 215 distance 22, 24, 41, 44, 50, 52–3, 55, 125–6, 133, 158, 166, 206, 225, 233, 247, 265 doges 7 Dorchester 65 Dresden 265 drinking chap.3, 87, 109, 111, 223, 240 drinking houses see public houses drunkenness 65, 76, 78, 93, 226 Duffy, Eamon 243 Dunster 155 Durham, Connecticut 2 Durham, England 127 Dutch (Republic) 88, table 4.1, 90, 197–8, 203–4, 207–8, 212–13, 254 Duval, Pierre 208, 211 early modern (period) 21, 151–4, fig.8.2, 164–73, chap.10–11, 234, 242, 244–6, 253 Eberhard of Württemberg 39 economy 95, 97, 105, 128, 172, 223 education 83–4, 86, 90, 99–100, 109, 165 Edward II of England 217 Edward III of England 121 Edward VI of England 217–20, 230, 247 Edward the Confessor 176 Edwards, Jess 253 Edwards, Thomas 177, 192 elect, the 169 elections 4, 25, 84, 106, 141, 143, 168, 193, 240, 263 Elias, Norbert 117 elites 3, 5, 50, 53, 56, 63, 76, 152, 154, 158, 167–8, 177, 179, 234, 237–8, 241, 245, 260–61

Index Elizabeth I of England 52, 77, 183, 218–23, 233, 236, 245, 252 Ellis, Steven 127 Ely 186 embedding see emplacement Empires 14 emplacement 1, 121, 135, 152, 161, 176, 180–81, 210, 233, 249, 253–4, 256, 259 enclaves 37, 140, 258 Enclosure chap.5, fig.5.1 encroachment 103 enforcement 117, 123–4, 133, 218 England 10–11, 44–6, 48, chap.3–6, chap.8–9, 201, chap.11, 233–7, 239, 242, 244–5, 247, 252 Enlightenment 53, 90, 92, 94, 254 Ennen, Edith 257 entries, 37, 52 environment 50, 68, 105, 113, 180, 251, 253, 257 epistemology 257 Erasmus 9, 77 essentialism 8, 9 Essex, Earl of 183 Esslingen am Neckar chap.7, 243 estates 120 etiquette 44–5, 48, 52, 54 Europe 1, 20, 24, 31, 55, 88, 92, 152, 198, 200–204, 211, 213, 216–17, 234–5, 242, 247, 253, 255, 257, 261 European Union 213 everyday life 148, 182, 190, 235 exclaves 199, 206 exclusion 89, 95, 100, 103, 143, 153, 165, 167–8, 172, 206–7, 234, 244, 252, 262 Exclusion Crisis 82, 175, 193 excommunication 160 execution 37, 219–20, 236 exemption 202 Exeter 258 expansion 8 experience 14 fabric 159, 169 face-to-face society 136

271

factions 48, 86, 156, 175, 178, 185–7, 189, 216, 218, 238 fairs 29, 72 families 97–8, 110–11, 140–41, 143, 154, 217, 258 farmers 95–6 fashion 94 favour 59 favourites 48, 50 fear 80 Featherstone, William 219 feoffment to use 129–30 Ferdinand I, Emperor 30–31, 33, 36 Ferrara 263 feudalism 6, 87, 119–20, 257–8 fields 74, 76; see also open fields finance 29, 41, 53, 91, 142, 145, 152, 155–6, 221, 241–2, 256 fines 228 fiscal see taxation Flanders 39, 216 flattery 58 folk tales 221 Fontainebleau 52 food 84, 98, 100, 109, 130, 225, 242, 261 ‘Forbidden City’ 50 foreigners 35–8, 65, 70, 77, 168 forests 103 forgery 221–3, 225, 229 Foucault, Michel 68, 250, 253, 265 fragmentation 171 France 31–2, 44–6, 54, 81, 87–8, table 4.1, 89–91, 119–20, 148, 197–202, 205, 207–8, 211–13, 234–6, 242, 244–5, 263 Franche Comté 212 Francis I of France 201 Frank, Michael 68 Frankfurt a.M. 29, 32, 35, 137 fraternities see guilds Frederick II, Elector Palatine 31 Frederick III, Emperor 23, 33 Frederick the Great 53 freedom of speech 81 freehold 96, 99, 103, 106, 168 Freiburg i.B. 33 Fribourg 200, 211 Fricktal 212

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Friedrichs, Christopher 140 friendship 58, 129, 228 Fuggers 39 functions 171–3, fig.8.3 funerals 157, 166 Füssel, Marian 149 gates 258–61 Geertz, Clifford 117 gender 10, 132, 151,154–5, 165, 216, 233, 244–7, 262–4; see also masculinity and women Geneva fig.10.1, 199, 202–4, 206–8, fig.10.2, 211 gentry 96–8, 101, 109, 120, 122–3, 127–9, 130–32, 133, 152, 158, 167, 184, 233–5, 243, 246–7 geography 1, 8, 10–11, 113, chap.6, 133, 138, 159, 169, 179–80, 200, 206, 210, 242, 251 geometry 48, 103, 180, 205, 254 geopolitics chap.6 German 10–11, 212 Germany see Holy Roman Empire Gheeraerts, Marcus 252 Gieryn, Thomas 180 gin 83 globalization 3 Goffman, Erving 55, 215 Golden Bull 23, 26, 29, 34, 39 good works 152, 157, 161 gossip 77, 83, 93, 151, 191, 218, 245–6, 263; see also rumours Gouge, William 246 government 92, chap.6, 152, 158, 165, 168, 170, 172, 211, 213, 218–20, 228, 234, 237, 241, 246, 259; see also local government Gowing, Laura 73, 75 Gramsci, Antonio 4 Greece 250 Greenwich 50 grievances 142, 144, 147–8, 183–5, 192–5 Grisons fig.10.1, 199–203, 208, fig.10.2 groups 138, 145, 149, 154, 161, 164, 237 Guernsey 77

guilds 64, 82, 85–7, 90, 92, 132, 137, 141, 143–4, 146, 152, 155, 157, 166, 182, 186–7, 241, 256 Guilford, Connecticut 2 Guise, family 245 Gyger, Hans Conrad 207–9, fig.10.2 Gyōki, monk 254 Habermas, Jürgen 59, 175–6, 178–9, 239 Habsburgs 22, 25, 27, 29–30, 33, 37, 39, 47, 52–4 Hamburg 89 hamlets 105, 107, 109 Hampton Court 52 Harris, Howard 135 healthcare 142 heaven fig.8.1–2 Heidegger, Martin 250 hell fig.8.1–2 Hengerer, Mark 47, 54 Henry II of England 119 Henry III of France 45–6 Henry IV of France 45–6 Henry VI of England 123–5, 128, 247 Henry VII of England 215 Henry VIII of England 217, 219, 222, 243 heraldry 175; see also crests heriot 97 heroes 217, 220 Hesse 27 hidden transcript 55, 63, 77, 80 hierarchy 3, 7, 44, 60, 136, 151–2, 180–81, 256 Higgs, Edward 62 highways 100–101, fig.5.1, 109, 112, 130, 153, 205, 255, 262 Hindle, Steve 241 hinterland 257 historiography 20–22, 62–3, 135, 137–9, 173, 176–81, 198, 210, 217, 221 Hochmuth, Christian 138 Hogenberg, Franz 255 Holy Roman Empire 10–11, chap.1, 7, 44, 47, 52–3, 67, 87–8, table 4.1, 89–90, chap.7, 197–9, 202, 206–8, 212–13, 220, 234–6, 242 cities chap.1 electors 19

Index emperor chap.1, 140, 143, 146, 150, 259 estates 19, 21, 23 princes chap.1 honour 6, 24–6, 58–9, 60, 75, 136, 139, 142, 145, 149, 225–6, 262–4 horses 71–2 Hoskins, W.G. 243 Hours, Bernard 51 households 118, 120–21, 130, 156, 223, 229, 246 houses 87, 91, 146, 158, 181, 187–9, 220, 224, 227, 229, 237, 255, 262–4 Howard, family 243 Hug, Tobias 243 Hughes, Ann 177, 189, 239 humanism 206, 259 Hungary 24–5, 32 hunting 24, 51–2, 101, 103, 110, 132 Huntingdonshire 189 husbandmen 107, 109 iconoclasm 153, 170 iconography 117 identification 70, 72, 225–6, 229 identities 5, 61, 131, 180–81, 195, chap.11, 241, 251, 258, 262 ideology 6 images 152, 169, 170, 255 immigration 168 imperial diets see diets imposture chap.11, 243 improvement 99, 103, 105–6, 111–12 inclusion 203–4 incorporation 172 individual(ism) 95, 101–2, 105, 136, 138, 212, chap.11 industry 92, 98, 203, 223 inflation 96–7, 111 inheritance 217 innovation 175 inns see public houses Innsbruck 22, 31 institutions 180 integration 21 intercession 157, 161, 166 interiors see space

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international relations 6, 24, 36, 77, 197–8, 200–204, 208, 213 interrogations 144–5, 149 intimacy 51, 55, 73–4 intrusion 164, 167 inventories 69, 97 inversion 221 investitures 38–9, fig.1.2 Ireland 218, 235 Islam 260 islands 255 Italy 7–8, 31, 37, 57, 85–7, 197, 207, 212–13, 242, 258, 264 Ivan IV of Russia 247 Jaillot, Alexis-Hubert 212 James I of England/VI of Scotland 48–9, 183, 185, 219–20, 247 Japan 254–5 Jefferys, Thomas 101, fig.5.1 Jews 33 John Frederick of Saxony 24, 34 John, King of England 120–21 Johnson, Samuel 83 Jones, G.P. 99 Jones, Inigo 50 Joseph II, Emperor 53 juries 123 jurisdictions see courts, legal Kent 125–6, 192, 223 keys 47–8 King’s Lynn 130 kinship 73, 129, 130–32, 228 kitchens 33–4, 78 Knights, Mark 93 Kümin, Beat 93, 241, 257 Kyoto 255 La Rochelle 77 laboratories 181 labourers 96–7, 107–10, 111–12, 215, 220, 228 labyrinths 48 laity chap.8 Lake District 99, 108 Lancashire 98, 127–8, 240 landowners chap.5–6, 233

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landscape 8, 95, 103, 112, 158, 171, 205, 210, 251, 257, 259, 262 languages 88 Laufenburg 212 law(yers) 105, 258 leasehold 99, 103, 107–9, 111 Leeds 238, 241 Lefebvre, Henri 8, 250, 252, 253, 266 legislation see regulation legitimization 6, 23, 64, 189, 193, 217, 242 Levellers 176, 178, 187–8, 191–2 libel 76, 176, 184–5, 188–93, 195, 219, 236 liberties 258 licensing 64, 66–7, 68 Liechtenstein 53 lights 157 Lilburne, John 188, 193, 236 limbo 161, fig.8.1 liminality see space Lipman, Alan 135 literacy 86, 189, 198, 216, 229 literary (studies) 8, 88 liturgy 85, 161, 164–5, 170, 186, 189, 261 living 157, 166, 169 local(ity) 21, 118, 122, 133, 136, 171, 215, 228, 241–2, 249 local government 6, 14, 120, 122–4, 128–9, 131–2, 152, 170 locations 8, 20, 31, 75, fig.5.2, 172, 233, 237, 252–3, 255, 259 Lochrie, Karma 218 Locke, John 182 lodgings 26–7, 29–35, 41, 49, 68, 70 logistics 20, 29 Lollardy see nonconformity London 48–9, 70, 77, 82–4, 86, 92, 106, 100, 156, 177, 183, 186, 190, 192, 219, 225–6, 237, 241, 243, 244, 255, 262, 265 Long Melford 158 Louis XIV of France 6, 45–6, 50, 52–3, 57, 59, 117, 212, 234, 236, 247 Louis XV of France 51 Louth 86 Löw, Martina 9, 250 lowlands 96, 98, 103, 111, 127 loyalty 258

Lucerne 211 Ludwig V, Elector Palatine 26 Luhmann, Niklas 21 MacDonald’s 3 Machiavelli, Niccolò 57, 215 Madrid 44, 47 magic 158 Magna Carta 120 Maidstone 82 Mainz 88, 91 majesty 50, 60 manors 98, 101–7, 109–10, 112, 124, 152, 158–9 maps 53, 101, fig.5.1–2, 106, 164–5, chap.10, fig.10.1–2, 251–6; see also cartography margins 210, 254, 264 markets 8, 61, 86, 98–9, 101, 109, 112, 131, 139, 181, 218, 229, 245, 247, 250, 260–62 marriage 165, 217 Marseilles 255 Marshall, John 97 Mary I of England 218–19, 234, 236 masculinity 132, 147, 220, 263–4 Masonic 83, 88–9 mass 85, 161, 170 materiality 177, 180–81 mathematics 106, 254 Matthias, Archduke fig.1.1 Matthias, Emperor 30 Maximilian I, Emperor 30–31, 36, 38–9 Maximilian II, Emperor 30–32, 38–9 Mayer, Tobias 212 meals see dining, food meaning 180 measures 79 Mecca 260 Mecklenburg 27 media 6, 136, 139 mediation 160 Mediterranean 8, 63, 90, 256 meetings see (representative) assemblies Melaka 257 member(ship) 200, 211 mentalities 15, 138, 161 messianic 217

Index metaphysics 8, 10, 151, 160–61, fig.8.1–2, 164, 166, 169 method(ology) 10 Middle Ages 6, 11, 21, 85, 87, 92–3, 102, chap.6, 151–2, 154–61, fig.8.1, 221, 228, 233, 241, 252–3, 255, 257, 261–2, 266 Middlesex 240 middling sort 85, 89, 92, 151, 155–6, 182, 225, 247 Milton, John 178–9, 194, 239 mind-mapping 198 miners 247 miracles 9, 161 mobility 10, 36, 51, 53, 56, 69–70, 77, 83, 88, 92, 96, 98, 109–10, 120, 168, 171, 233, 241, 255–6 modernity 62, 156, 180, 221, 266 monarchy 198, 205, 215–21, 228, 230, 233–6, 239, 240, 246, 252, 260 monasteries 26, 33, 53–4, 158–9, 222, 264 Mondeville, Henri de 263 money 222–5, 227–9, 235 Monmouth, Duke of 217 monuments 54, 152, 166–7 morality 65, 73–5, 83, 90, 159–60 Morebath 155–6, 243 Morocco 260 mosques 260–62 Mulhouse fig.10.1, 199–201, 203–4, 206–7, 211 Munich 265 Münster, Sebastian 206, 255 music 38, 93–4, 157, 262 myths 50, 260, 265–6 Nantes 90 Naples 31 national(ism) 20, 215, 251 nations 23, 37, 256–7 Neale, J.E. 185 Nedham, Marchamont 239 negotiation 5–6, 21, 26, 43, 59, 80, 148, 151, 178, 201, 203 neighbourhood 90, 101, 129, 132, 154, 164, 170, 255–6, 260, 262–4 Netherlands 32, 63, 77, 85, 87, 89–90, 236

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networks 9, 85, 88, 94, 99, 101, fig.5.1, 129–30, 132–3, 151, 154, 157, 161, 195, 201, 234, 239, 255 Neuchâtel fig.10.1, 202–4, 206, 211 neutrality 203 Neville, family 126, 233–4 Newcastle 189 New World 63 news 77–8, 83, 85, 87, 93–4, 151, 187, 239, 245 newspapers see periodicals nobility 6, 22, 39, chap.2, 89–90, 96, 99, 110–11, chap.6, 217, 233–4, 243–7, 252, 254–5, 263 nonconformity 158, 169–70, 175, 177, 184–9, 192–3, 220, 236–7 Norbrook, David 189 Norfolk 128, 189, 243 Norfolk, Duke of 130, 132 Northumberland 106 Norwich 81–4, 86, 131, 222 Nottinghamshire 128 Nuremberg 29–31, 33–4, 39, 208 oaths 145–6, 149 obedience 55, 59, 142–3, 145, 149, 246 objects 8–9, 14, 41, 72, 152–3, 173, 180, 223, 226, 264 occupants 159, 165 officials 22, 33–5, 39, 47, 49, 50, 55, 57, 62, 64, 66–7, 70, 84, 86, 89, 95, 98, 100, 103–7, 109, 111, 119–25, 129–30, 140–41, 143–4, 148, 151–3, 155–8, 164, 166–8, 170, 172, 216–17, 221–30, 233, 235, 237, 239–40, 242, 245, 258 Ogborn, Miles 180 Ohio 253 oligarchization 6, 63, 84, 140–41, 148, 153, 165, 190 ontology 257 open fields chap.5, 259 opinion chap.9, 244–5, 247 opportunism 221 orality 229 Orange, House of 90 order 2–3, 5, 148–9, 168, 237, 260 Oswestry 241

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Ottomans 19, 23, 32 outdoors see space Oxford 77 Oxfordshire 131 palaces 31, chap.2, 259–60 panopticon 68 panorama 255 papacy 87, 202, 204, 236, 259 Paris 54, 203, 261–2, 264 parishes 69, 70–71, 84, 86, 99, 108–9, 132, chap.8, fig.8.1–3, 186–7, 189, 225, 229, 241–2, 245, 246, 253, 263–4 Parliament 48, 78, 82–3, 95, 103, 123, 175–6, 184–7, 189–93, 195, 222, 235, 238–40, 244 participation 178–9 parties 6, 61, 82–3, 175, 184, 193, 240 Paston, family 130–32 pastures 96–7, 100, 103–4, 111 patriarchy 175, 178, 182 patriotism 88–90 patronage 44, 158–9, 161, 189, 228, 234 peasants 9, chap.5, 118–20, 122, 124, 216 peace 5, 6, 36, 41, 66, 80, 121, 197, 200, 219, 226, 235; see also treaties Congress of Vienna 213 Imperial-French Truce 203–4 Peace of Augsburg 19, 30, 42 Peace of Baden 203–4, 208 Peace of Câteau-Cambrésis 201 Peace of Crépy 201 Peace of Nijmegen 202 Peace of Rijswijk 203, 208 Peace of Utrecht 203–4, 208, 211 Peace of Vervins 202 Peace of Westphalia 202 Pečar, Andreas 53 Penrith, 110 perambulation 110, 158, 167 perceptions 8–10, 13, 181, 212–13 Percy, family 126, 233–4 performances 56–7, 59, 215, 253 periodicals 81, 83, 91, 93, 183, 193, 238–9 periphery 6, 21, 179, 184 Peters, Kate 177 petitions 26, 47–8, 93, 103, 142, 144, 145, chap.9, 237–40, 242, 244, 247

philanthropy 85, 88 Philip II of Spain 33, 236 Philip IV of Spain 78 physicians 141–3 pilgrimage 10, 205; see also resistance, Pilgrimage of Grace Pincus, Steve 190 Pirenne, Henri 257 place 1, 4, 9, 13–14, 130, 139, 171, chap.9, 249–51, 253, 255–61, 266 official 2–3 vernacular 2–3 plague 29–32 plans 107 plantations 84 plebeian 2–4 pluralism 239 points of contact 117, 160, 168 Poland 24 police 118, 120–21, 123 police state 6 policies 5 politeness 54, 57 political culture 5, 141, 168, 243 political history 1, 5, 10, 13 political science 10–11, 81 political sites 4, 13, part I, 220, 229, 233, 236–7, 240–41, 245 politicians 48 politics 5, 50, 89–90, 92–4, 107, 128–9, 135, 145, 149, 176, 179, 194, 208, 210, 213, 229, 233 polity 5 Pomerania 27, 37 poor 41, 64, 85–6, 95, 97, 153, 156–7, 161, 164, 166, 172, 242 poor laws 166, 168 popular (culture) 21, 169, 177, 182, 216; see also middling sort population 108, 241 porches 152, 160 pornography 188 ports 63–4 Portugal 216, 257 postal services 30–31, 93, 106, 227 postmodernity 180 power 7, 21–22, 43, 50, 80, 107, chap.6, 135–7, 139–40, 142–3, 144, 148,

Index 151, 153, 159, 161, 181, 210, 215, 234, 254, 255, 257, 262 power-sharing 127 practices 10, 64, 69, 190, 194, 215, 250, 256 Prague 30 prayer 157, 166, 169–70, 183 pre–industrial period 11, 13 precedence 26–7, 43, 165 predestination 169 presence 41, 52, 136, 147, 149, 166, 168, 234, 244, 261–2 press see periodicals Press, Volker 20 prestige 26, 49, 60 pretenders see imposture print 6, 22, 176–7, 183–6, 188, 190–95, 205, 208, 237–9, 245, 263 prisons 51, 142–3, 145, 149, 217, 219, 223–4, 227, 229 Priuli, Girolamo 263 privacy 187, 192, 195 private space see space processes 256 processions 7, 38, 47, 86, 93, 151, 167, 175, 183, 246; see also perambulation profanity 169 professionalization 87 progresses 52, 233 propaganda 86, 117, 178, 239 property 130, 184 prophecy 217, 220 prosopography 22 prostitution 41, 63, 77, 242, 264 protest 3 Protestant(ism) 4, 8, 11, 25–6, 29–31, 36, 37, 41, 65, 182, 198–9, 202–4, 207–8, 211, 213, 217, 220, 236; see also nonconformity providence 254 provisions 29, 31–5, 41, 73, 79 proximity 22, 46, 159, 265 Prussia 203–4, 211 Prynne, William 188 pseudo-Fredericks 216–20 Ptolemy 255

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public houses chap.3, 86–7, 91, 92–4, 139, 187, 218, 229, 235, 237, 239–40 alehouses 64, 69, 72–4, 76–7, 79, 100, 109, 160, 169, 171, 181, 242, 245, 247 inns 26, 30, 35, 41, 61, 64, 68, 71–2, 76, 79, 100, 105, 109, 246–7 taverns 64, 79, 181, 187–9, 247 public (opinion) 111, 190–93, 204, 238–40 public space see space public sphere 6, 10, 14, 59, 86, chap.9, 237–8, 247, 249 public transcript 55 public works 152 publicans chap.3, 93, 240 punishment 146–7, 221–2; see also fines, prison Purgatory 8, 152, 157, 161, fig.8.1 purification 149 Puritans see nonconformity Quakers see nonconformity railings 45 railway 99, 133 rational(ization) 62, 106, 176 Rau, Susanne 138 Ravenstonedale 104 Rawski, Evelyn 55 reading 88–90, 144, 147, 149–50, 169–70, 179, 186, 238, 266 realism 260 reality 185 reason 178, 194, 182, 193–4 reciprocity 22, 161 reconciliation 167 recreations 24, 38, 51, 67, 74, 93, 96, 101, 111–12, 171, 245, 261, 265 Reformation 6, 19, 21, 73, 85, 137, 140, 152–3, 164–73, 200, 234 reformation of manners 73, 160 Regensburg 19, 27, fig.1.1, 29–32, 34, 35 regions 8, 20–22, 25, 27, 88, 251, 256–7 regulation 24, 35–7, 41, 61, 67, 93, 98, 101, 110–12, 118, 153, 159, 164, 169, 193, 221–3, 226, 229, 234, 240, 244, 258

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relational space see space, social production religion 10, 85, 131, chap.8, fig.8.3, 172, 182, 219–21, 234, 239, 261 Renaissance 7–8, 57, 234, 258, 261 Rennes 90 representations 5, 23, chap.2, 188–9, 193, 195, 210, 251–6 representative assemblies 5, chap.1, 55, 60, 141, 180, 207, 211, 235, 244, 246 republics 198, 20, 208, 234–5, 239, 258, 260 reputation 76, 218 residences 12, 31, 38, 46–7, 51–2, 124, 130–31, 142, 170, 257, 260, 265 resistance 1, 2, 6, 10, 14, 37, 48, 55, 60–61, 76, 80, 82, 93, 104–5, 111, 118, 124–6, chap.7, 176, 186, 195, 216–19, 221, 225–7, 236, 240–47 Glendower’s Revolt 127 Kett’s Rebellion 243 Peasants Revolt 86 Pilgrimage of Grace 234, 242, 244 revolution 88, 93 American 83 English 6, 175, 181–3, 187–8, 193–5 French 1, 84, 90, 137 Glorious 82 Rheinfelden 212 rhetoric 182, 184, 190, 192–3, 195, 252, 255 Richard II of England 217 Richards, Penny 245 Riddy, Felicity, 86 riot see resistance rituals 3–4, 6–7, 43, 55, 73, 86, 117, 136, 149, 151, 153, 160, 164, 166–7, 184, 219, 221, 252, 259–60, 262; see also ceremonies rivers 205–6, 210, 212 roads see highways Romanov, Michael 247 Romans 237 Rome 31 rood screen 160 rooms 84, 88, 94 Rottweil fig.10.1, 204, 206, 211 routine 51, 149

Royal Society 92 Royalists 78 Rublack, Hans–Christoph 147 Rudolf II, Emperor 30 Rumney, Tom 101, 107 rumours 3, 48, 77, 217–9, 221, 223; see also gossip rural 12, 55, 87, chap.5, 132, 153, 159, 168, 198, 241; see also villages Russia 216, 247 Rüther, Stefanie 149 Ryūsen, Ishikawa 254 Säckingen 212 sacraments 155, 161, 164 sacred space see space sailors 63–4, 67, 160, 70, 72 Saint-Simon, Duc de 57, 59 salons 54, 91, 245 salvation 169–70 Sanson d’Abbéville, Nicolas 208 Savoy 202, 204 Saxony 31 Saxton, Christopher 252 scales see space, scales Schlaak, Alexander 243 Schlögl, Rudolf 139, 145 Schmalkaldic League 25 Schmidt, Georg 20 Schönbrunn 54 schools see education Schwyz 198–200 science 88, 106, 177, 181, 211 Scotland 78, 84, 96, 109, 126, 130, 234–5, 237 Scott, James C. 55, 76, 218, 246, 257 scriptures see bible sea 255–7, 260 seals 225, 229 seating 26–7, fig.1.1, 35, 156, 164–6 Sebastian, King of Portugal 220 secrecy 50, 175, 178, 182–4, 217–8 sects see nonconformity secular(ization) 171, fig.8.3; see also space, secular sedition see resistance seigneurialism 123 self-fashioning 57, 229

Index senses 66–7, 73–5, 79–80, 136, 226 separation of power 6 servants 58, 69, 72, 80, 108–10, 124, 130, 132, 164, 218, 222, 227, 245–6, 264 services 92, 96, 109, 161, 228 settlement 107, 168, 172, 253, 257 sex(uality) 65, 73–5, 165, 264 Shakespeare, William 117, 247 Shapin, Steve 181 shepherds 98 Sheppard, William 227 Shibutani, Akira 27 shops 237, 239, 263 Siena 86, 259 signboards 65, 261–2 Simmel, Georg 8 Simnel, Lambert 217 situation 8, 10, 57 skimmington 243, 247 Slack, Paul 65 slavery 83, 98 Smail, Daniel Lord 255 smallholders chap.5 Smith, Gervase 219 smuggling 203 sociability 69, 135, 151, 171, 190 social 8, 15; see also space, social production social control 67 social discipline 68 social polarization 95, 98, 164, 171 social policy 172 social sciences 197, 251 social sites 10, 55, 77 societies chap.4, 250, 252 sociology 10–11, 21, 175, 179–80 solidarity 85, 131 Solothurn 200, 211 sound(scape) 262 Southampton chap.3 Southeast Asia 1 sovereignty 21, 202, 210 space abstract 14, 253–5, 261–2, 266 back-stage 192 binary models 10, 136, 153–4, 161, fig.8.1–2, 164, 171

279 civic space 3 conceptions of 142, 215, 233, 253 (as) container 9, 138–9, 153, 250, 252, 256 convoluted 139 definitions of 135–6, 138 disintegration of 150 dynamics of chap.8 ephemeral 139, 144, 149, 234, 246 experience of 173 front-stage 192 fusion 235 imagined 255, 257 indoor 68–9, 73–4, 82, 100, 112, 136 informal 242, 246–7 invisible 190 liminal 10, 160, 170, 259 macro 220 manipulation of 137 micro 220, 261 outdoor 100–101, 112, 136, 189 overlapping 213 perceptions of 136, 138 permeability of 74, 79, 168, 171–2, 257–8, 261 physical 12, 14, 63, 68, 81–2, chap.6, 153, 194, 215, 220, 229–30, 233, 240, 243, 258, 260 private 10, 44, 46–8, 51, 59, 73–4, 87, 91, 93–4, 169, 189–90, 218 profane 10, 152, 160–61, 171, 172 professional 148 public 10, 52, 55, 59, 73, 76, 93–4, 136, 175–6, 181, 183, 189, 218, 234, 238, 259, 261 registers of 249 relational see space, social production of religious 42, 54 sacred 9, 45–6, 152, 160–61, 171, 250, 260 scale 8, 14, 44, 60, 249, 256–61, 265 secular 260, 265 social 7, 54–5, chap.4, chap.7 social production of 1, 8–9, 14, 26, 68, 135, 138, 149–50, 153–4, 172, 180, 210, 213, 215, 230, 249–50, 252, 256, 264–6 sociofugal 153, 164, 172

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sociopetal 153 spacing 9, 250 subdivisions of 69, 73 subjective 215, 229–30 symbolic 117, 136–7 synthesis 9 typology of 139 urban 27, 37–8, 53–4, 148 versatility of 13 violation of 136, 143, 145–6, 149–50 virtual 82, 139, 142–3, 147, 149–50, 176, 195, 215, 230 Spain 35–7, 41, 44–5, 50, 85, 87, 201–4, 234–5, 244 spatial theory 8–10, 13–14, 137–9, 153, 176–81, chap.13 spatial turn 1, 6–7, 14, 135, 179–80, 197 spatial vernaculars 254 Speyer 29, 31–2, 34 sports 93, 111 Spranger, Eduard 251 squares 8, 38–9, 52, 61, 76, 264 squatters 103 squints 157 St Gallen 200–203 stabilization 80, 136–7, 140, 220–21 stabling 33, 35 Stallybrass, Peter 264 Stasi 3 state formation 5, 62, 221 states 14, 21, 61, 71, 87, 90, 92, 118, 168, 169, 171–2, 182, 205, 213, 222, 233, 235, 238, 242, 246, 249–50, 252–3, 256 Stephen, King of England 119 Stirling 84 Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara 23 Stonor, family 131–3 Strafford, Earl of 242 strangers 240; see also foreigners stratification 108 streets 82, 94, 181, 247, 255, 258, 261–2, 265 structuralism 259 Stubbs, John 182–3 Stumpf, Johannes 206 Stuttgart 139 style 53

subordination 212 subscriptions 84, 186–90, 192, 238 suburbs 64, 66 subversion see resistance Suffolk 128 Suffolk, Duke of 131 superstition 169 surveillance chap.3, 240, 263 surveying 105–6 Swabia 27, 140 Swallowfield 165 Sweden 24, 245 Swiss Confederation 140, chap.10, fig.10.1, fig.10.2 symbol(ism) 4, 13–14, 46–7, 52, 117, 136–7, 139, 149, 175, 210, 220, 229, 235–6, 246, 253, 259–64 system 21 Tacitus 57 taste 50, 158 Taunton 70, 240 taverns see public houses Tavistock 156 taxation 6, 19, 24, 29, 35, 64, 79, 98, 110, 118–19, 122, 160, 168, 170, 189, 244 technology 62, 118, 254, 260 Tedder, Edward 220 Tell, William 212 tenants/tenures 3, 96–7, 99, 103, 106, chap.6, 158 tenurial geography 126–8, 133, 233, 243, 249 territories 7, 21, chap.10, 210, 221, 264 Thames Valley 131–3 theatre 54, 60, 93–4, 175, 259 theft 69–72 theology 164–5 theory 176–81; see also spatial theory Thirty Years War see war Thompson, E.P. 242 Tiananmen Square 3–4 Tilly, Charles 148 time 1, 7, 10, 67, 154, 180, 215, 229, 240, 246, 249–50, 265–6 Toggenburg 201–2 tolerance 175

Index topography chap.8, fig.8.1–2, 264 topology 256 tourism 109 town halls 34, 37, 52, 125, 139, 142–3, 158–9, 241, 246 town houses 53–4, 64 town walls 53, 66, 139, 257–8, 260 towns 7, chap.1, 52–3, chap.3, chap.4, 132; chap.7, 152, 180, 182, 188, 198, 202, 206, 210, 224–5, 240–41, 244, 249, 254–62, 264; see also Holy Roman Empire trade 63, 68, 87, 89, 92, 101, 110, 203, 205, 223, 256–7, 260–61, 263 transparency 50, 68 transport 29–30, 32, 51, 71, 106–7, 118, 125 travel see mobility treason 219, 236 treaties 197–8, 200–204, 208, 211, 213; see also peace Trent 31 truth 181 Tschudi, Aegidius 206 Turk(ish) 202, 240 turnpiking 106 Ullswater 107 Ulm 144–5, 150 uniforms 226, 228–9 universals 1, 3, 171 universities 241 uplands 102, 133 urbanization 91–2, 180 Urry, John 139 vacuum 215–17, 220, 230, 233, 247 vagrancy 69–70, 218 Valais 200–203, 208, fig.10.2 values 255 Vaud fig.10.1, 200 Venice 7, 86–7, 257, 259–60, 262–3 Versailles 6, 44, 46, 52, 54, 234 vestries 153, 156, 165, 169, 241, 246 vice 79 Vidal de la Blache, Paul 251 Vienna 22, 44, 47, 52–3, 147–50, 213 village greens 112, 171

281

villages 96, 109, 157, 188, 225; see also rural violence 122, 144, 146, 159, 217–8, 237, 240, 242–3 visibility 50, 68, 213, 266 visitations 159, 164, 169, 222 visitors 29, 39, 44, 49, 59, 94, 110, 130–32, 159, 165, 259 voluntarism 81, table 4.1, 157, 170, 187 Waldshut 212 Wales 96, 126–7, 218, 233, 237 walls see town walls Walton, John 99 Warbeck, Perkin 215, 217 warrants 223–5, 227, 229 wars 6, 36, 63, 207 American Revolutionary 84 English Civil 82, 170, 189, 237, 239, 241, 246 French Revolutionary 99 French Wars of Religion 45, 245 Spanish Succession 203 Thirty Years War 19, 89, 199 Warwick, Countess/Earl of 130–31 Warwickshire 127–30, 132 Watermillock 100, 107–11, fig.5.2 weapons 226 ‘weapons of the weak’ 76, 78 weather 133 Weber, Max 2, 118 Weiser, Brian 48 welfare 89, 168 Welsers 39 West Midlands 130–31 Westminster 49, 54, 61, 106, 118, 123, 125, 127, 168, 183 Westmorland chap.5, fig.5.1 Whitehall 47–8, 52, 220 Wilkes, John 82–3 William III, Orange 203 Winchester 48, 52, 63, 74–6, 223 Winchester, Angus 108 Windsor 48, 52 Winstanley, Gerard 246 witchcraft 77, 165, 245 Wither, George 178–9, 194 Withington, Phil 190

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women 38, 44, 46, 48, 55, 73–5, 85, 89, 130, 155, 165, 168, 217, 244–7, 262–4 Wood, Andy 80 wool 222–3 Wordsworth, William 98 Worms 29, 31–2, 34, 36, 39 Wrightson, Keith 62, 243 writing 144, 146, 179, 229, 238 writs 122–5, 130, 169, 224, 254

Württemberg 27, 139–40 Yatton 156 yeomen 98–9, 107, 109, 128, 219, 223, 226–7 Yonemoto, Marcia 254 Zaret, David 237–9 zones 22 Zurich 199–200, 206