As we have been discussing on this blog–with much more content to come (including a virtual tour)–the project has been busy creating an immersive virtual experience: a detailed digital recreation of an interactive parlour room from Elizabethan and Jacobean England, brought to life with voices and memories that you can navigate yourself. This week, we’re piloting this innovative resource.
We invite you to join our pilot event from 11am to 1pm on 8th September at National Gallery X, London:
Are you a researcher or heritage professional in early modern studies? If so, come and experience what it’s like to go back in time (virtually) to your research period. We need your help to know how we can make the most of this resource going forward: What would you want to know when stood in a room your subjects wrote in, socialised in, or slept in? How might you use a virtual room and what questions does it make you ask. Spaces are tight, so please book now to road test this 1620s parlour…
We are thrilled to host a blog written by members of the TIDE project. TIDE investigates “how mobility in the great age of travel and discovery shaped English perceptions of human identity based on cultural identification and difference.” The following profiles, written by Lauren Working, Emily Stevenson, and Tom Roberts, use our Status Calculator to think through immigrant experience and merchant travel in the period, reflecting on our categories and considering how middling identity fits with nationhood, travel, and social mobility.
How will the Social Status Calculator place a noblewoman who renounced her wealth, took a vow of poverty and perfection, moved to a new country, and pitted herself against Protestant authority in London? Meet Luisa de Carvajal, a Spanish woman who arrived in London in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, intent on bringing the English back into the fold of the Roman Catholic Church.
What is your gender?
Female
Do you have a title?
No
Carvajal was born into a noble family, but she was orphaned at the age of six. She took a vow of poverty before she moved to London, and never married.
Do you have a coat of arms?
No
Can you write?
I write regularly, though not just for professional/trade purposes.
Carvajal left a spiritual autobiography, mystic poetry, and dozens of letters to prominent English and Spanish Catholics. Her opinions on London and the royal family were particularly scathing. ‘In my opinion’, she wrote to her friend Inés de la Asunción in 1607, ‘only to please God can one tolerate living here’. She called James I’s daughter, Elizabeth, an ‘ignorant slip of a girl’ and ‘the boy prince’ Charles as ‘a nasty little so-and-so in matters of religion’.
What property do you own?
I rent property and do not own any.
This is a bit misleading since Carvajal grew up in an aristocratic home. She inherited wealth and engaged in a sustained legal battle against her brother for her inheritance in the 1590s. When she won, however, she donated the money to the Society of Jesus. In London, she wrote with pride about living in poverty in a house in Spitalfields, where she and her ‘warrior maidens’ made ends meet by making gold embroidery thread, typically used in Spain for religious vestments. She also created relics made from the bodies of executed priests, preserving their bodies in her household in East London and sending them to various patrons and clients in gold and silver boxes.
What is the main thing you do to earn a living?
James I himself referred to Carvajal as a ‘foreigner’ and a ‘spinster’, but I am going to go with, I work in a profession, such as a lawyer/academic/clergyman/writer/clerk. Carvajal had a profound sense of religious vocation, which she devoted her life to while choosing not to become a nun.
What positions of office or authority have you held?
I hold a position in a stranger church and/or hold an influential place among immigrant craftspeople.
Technically, Carvajal didn’t hold office. But she firmly believed her misión de Inglaterra was conferred onto her by God, connecting her evangelism to missions happening in other parts of the world. As a result, she possessed a keen sense of divinely-appointed authority. ‘In the session of the Council of State’, Carvajal wrote to the Duke of Lerma, the Archbishop of Canterbury George Abbot had brought forth the accusation that ‘I have brought many Protestants to my religion by means of persuasion’.
How much are you worth?
I’m going to tick the lowest amount, under £20, though this is reflects Carvajal’s wealth in London, rather than her upbringing in Pamplona, Valladolid, and Madrid.
What is your living situation most comparable to?
I have some furnishings including a table, some stools, and some earthen pots; I have tools for my trade; I have just enough to get by some months and plenty in other months; if I get ill then I will need to depend on charity. All of my furniture is old and inherited and I cannot afford to buy any new pieces.
When Carvajal was arrested in 1608, she used her shabby clothes as evidence of her commitment to the cause, recording that during the interrogation ‘my sleeve, on which all the light was falling, had a mended spot or two showing, and on my head was a ragged black taffeta’.
Credit in the community
I struggle to get by through my work and am dependent on charity.
Carvajal’s charity came from high places, and she was well-connected, having access to the households of Catholic ambassadors in London. She also provided some relief to imprisoned Catholics before their execution, offering to pray with them and bringing them pear tarts.
What kind of people are in your close social circle?
The lord/lady of the manor; a lawyer, town or court clerk, an author, a clergyman; other tradesmen or shopkeepers in my locale or their wives; other servants who work in the houses on my street; financially secure wives and widows.
Carvajal interacted with a range of men, women, and children from different social statuses. She learned English with the help of two ‘ladies form the land’ and offered spiritual guidance to prominent English Catholics. Once comfortable with the language, she publicly preached in the streets of London. She visited priests in prison, ambassadors, and complained about the ‘false bishop’ Abbot and other Jacobean councillors who sought to restrict her efforts to convert. She also corresponded with high-ranking courtiers in Spain, including Philip III’s favourite, the Duke of Lerma.
Status…
Professional middling
The calculator has placed Carvajal as ‘professional middling’, ‘defined by your high level of literacy’. This seems accurate in terms of the kinds of connections and spaces that Carvajal moved through: a kind of ‘golden mean’ between her aristocratic upbringing and her fervent rejection of wealth and comfort in the second half of her life. It places due emphasis, too, on her strong sense of vocation through her spiritual work, including her language-learning skills. But this useful exercise also raises attention to what thrums beneath social categorization, from the influence of personal choice (in this case, downward mobility) to the way migrant women sought to find a place in drastically different environments from those they called home.
Bibliography
Anne J. Cruz, The Life and Writings of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza (Toronto: Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2014)
The Letters of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, Volume I, ed. Glyn Redworth (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012)
Glyn Redworth, The She-Apostle: The Extraordinary Life and Death of Luisa de Carvajal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
This Tight Embrace: Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza (1566 – 1614), ed. Elizabeth Rhodes (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2000)
Portrait of Luisa Carvajal y Mendoza, c. after 1614, printed by Juan de Courbes
The Turkey Merchant’s Daughter
By Emily Stevenson
Joan Staper was born on 24 November 1570 at 6:30 pm to Richard and Dionis Staper. Her father, one of the most important English merchants in the sixteenth century, was deeply invested — financially and personally — in the Anglo-Levant trade, which brought vast quantities of luxury goods into England. Her mother was a member of another mercantile family, the Hewitts, and Joan would make a similar mercantile marriage to Nicholas Lete, another merchant involved in the Levant trade.
In many respects, Joan’s life was entirely typical of her social circle, atypical only in that an unusual number of details — such as the exact time of her birth — have been preserved. These details are recorded thanks to her many visits to Simon Forman and Richard Napier between 1597 and 1622.[1] Joan’s visits addressed a wide range of questions including: whether she was pregnant, whether her husband’s ship was likely to return soon, whether her daughter could be convinced to marry her mother’s choice of spouse, and which member of her household had stolen her wedding ring. These records give us access to a level of quotidian detail which makes it possible to place Joan on the calculator.
Do you have a coat of arms/Where did you get this coat of arms?
Yes, I was awarded it in my lifetime
Both her husband and father had coats of arms: Lete’s were awarded in 1616 and Staper’s appear on his monument in St Helen’s Bishopsgate, apparently awarded during his lifetime.[2]
Can you write?
I can write, but little writing in my hand survives
Joan was able to write, evidenced by a note in the Casebooks that ‘Mres Leate sent […] a letter in the behalf of her daughter [J]ane who hath for this twelfemonthe bene troubled w[ith] a swelling’.[3] There is, however, no other known evidence of Joan’s ability to write, nor extant examples of her writing.
What property do you own/What is the main thing you do to earn a living/What positions of office or authority have you held?
I own and/or lease the building/rooms I live in/I live by the finances of my husband (but that doesn’t mean I don’t do any work!)/I have never held office
Joan lived by the finances of first her father, then her husband in property that the men owned and, typically for a woman, never held local office.
How much are you worth?
£500+
The exact details of Joan’s finances are difficult to ascertain, since she does not seem to have left a will. From her husband’s will (written after her death, since Joan is not mentioned), they appear to have been wealthy without living extravagantly. He left 1000 marks in 1631 to each of their three daughters: this comes to around £666 each (according to the National Archives Currency Convertor), which places the family well over the £500+ limit.
What is your living situation most comparable to?
I have a very large home […]
The absence of Joan’s will makes this question difficult to answer, and her husband’s will divides the estate equally between his sons without any specific mention of items. One exception is the portrait of Nicholas ‘in oyle colour’ given by their sons after his death to the Ironmongers’ company, ‘to remain in the Hall as a remembrance of their dear deceased father’.[4] The artist is not named in the records, suggesting that they were a local rather than immigrant artist. There are similar glancing references to luxury goods in the Casebooks: Joan gave Napier ‘succet & a night cap of silke’ brought back by her husband’s ships in return for his services.[5] There is no indication, however, of the family acting as literary patrons, while Nicholas’ failure to apportion expensive items such as furniture or fabrics amongst his children suggests that this was not where the Lete family invested their wealth. The second category — ‘I have a very large home […]’ — thus seems the most fitting.
Credit in the Community: which statement is comparable to your situation?
I have a fair amount of spare money to spend at my leisure
Joan’s level of financial credit is unclear: something between ‘a fair amount of spare money’ and the ability to ‘spend at will’. The constant anxiety regarding ships expressed in the Forman and Napier casebooks suggests that it would be more accurate to err towards the former, as a considerable amount of capital was tied up in ships and ventures.
What kind of people are in your close social circle?
Prominent tradesmen and their wives [OR] Financially secure wives and widows [OR] Wealthy merchants or their wives
Joan’s social circle definitely included the wives of prominent tradesmen, wealthy merchants and financially secure wives and widows — many of them related to her.
Status…
Upper Middling
The social status calculator, using these answers, places Joan in the ‘Upper Middling’ category. This tracks with her family’s level of wealth and their social status, and also usefully recognises that though merchants held considerable influence, it was not necessarily through inheritance such as a title or land. Joan’s marriage to Nicholas Lete is one example of a common way in which wealthy mercantile families attempted to circumvent this issue: her sisters made similar marriages, all serving to embed the Staper family deeper into the web of London’s mercantile family networks and ensuring the continuation of their influence after the death of their patriarch.
Using the calculator for Joan also highlights some of the difficulties of tracking the social mobility of mercantile women in the period. Though the most personal facts — when was she born, whether she could write, what she worried about — are available to us thanks to the records of her conversations with Napier, questions of finance and property are more difficult to answer because Joan was financially dependent on male figures all her life and did not leave a will. Her level of personal choice in these matters is impossible to know, since it was not recorded, and there lies a tension in trying to fit facts to answers when Joan’s presence is only inferred. Social mobility was vital to Joan’s social role — and for other merchant women as well — and this fluidity also means that her social status at the end of her life may have been different to its beginning, making the calculator result primarily significant for her later years. It remains a useful exercise, however, with the ‘Upper Middling’ category recognising the importance of gaining and maintaining social status for such merchants, as well as the potentially meteoric changes in fortune resulting from participation in England’s growing trade networks.
How will the Social Status Calculator place a London-born son of Italians and self-described ‘Englishman in Italiane’? Meet John Florio, the linguist, translator, and celebrated translator of Montaigne whose career as England’s champion for Italian cultural consumption brought him from the cramped lodgings of a French silkweaver to the Privy Chamber.
What is your gender?
Male
Do you have a title like Sir, Duke, Duchess, Princess, etc.?
No
Do you have a coat of arms?
Yes
A marigold with the sun in chief.
Can you write?
I write regularly, though not just for professional/trade purposes
Writing was of course central to John’s career and reputation, but it was not a primary source of income in a commercial sense. His early printed Italian dual language manuals were as much (unsuccessful) attempts to secure patronage as they were functional language learning materials for an expanding middling sort with Italianate tastes. Whilst some works of translation carried out in the 1580s can be said to have been commercially driven, and his employment as reader in Italian and private secretary to Queen Anne would have involved writing and translating correspondence, John’s more distinguished and celebrated works of translation and lexicography were not financially viable in the commercial world of print, and instead required the support of wealthy and often aristocratic patrons.
What property do you own?
I own and/or lease several buildings in the community I live in
[OR]
I rent property and do not own any
The dramatic change in John’s fortunes throughout his life make this question difficult to answer. What we know of John’s property comes from his will in 1626, seven years after the death of his patron Queen Anne and the loss of his position at court, when he lived in a leased property in Fulham valued at around £6 per annum. However, it seems likely that he would have owned other properties during his more prosperous years that were then sold when the family fell on hard times.
What is the main thing you do to earn a living?
I work in a profession, such as a lawyer/academic/clergyman/writer/clerk/doctor
We can say with confidence that John worked in a profession, albeit a poorly defined one with no concrete training programme. Whilst in Oxford in the early 1580s, he worked as a tutor in Italian to interested students, although without an official university position. Returning to London in 1583, he taught Italian to the daughter of the French Ambassador, Michel de Castelnau, and translated several news items dispatched from Rome whilst possibly in the employ of Sir Francis Walsingham. As he became connected to those prominent Inns of Court men and intellectuals in the circle of Sir Philip Sidney, John caught the attention of the Earl of Southampton and the Countess of Bedford, who he tutored from the early 1590s. This financed both his first Italian/English dual language manual in 1578, and his celebrated translation of Montaigne’s Essays in 1603. Both this work and his reputation as England’s leading expert in all things Italian brough him into the orbit of Queen Anne, and the following year he was appointed her private secretary and Groom of Privy Chamber. This position came with a yearly pension, which had risen to £100 by the Queen’s death in 1619.
What positions of office or authority have you held?
I work for the government of the country (I advise the Queen, I am the chancellor or I am in charge of a royal department)
Groom of the Privy Chamber, Reader in Italian, and Private Secretary to Queen of Anne.
How much are you worth?
I don’t know
This really depends on what point in John’s life we are focusing on. Although we have some sense of his worth between 1604 and 1619, he had little financial security either side of this period. Arriving in London a migrant with no family or friends in the city, the 1570s and early 1580s were marred by poverty and unsuccessful attempts to secure patronage. As he became well acquainted with the intellectual circles around Oxford, the Inns of Court, and the French Embassy, he found relatively steady employment as a language tutor and translator. How much this paid is unclear, although he relied heavily on the generosity of Nicholas Saunders, a gentleman from Surrey, for several years before eventually coming to the attention of Southampton and Bedford. Patronage was of course an unreliable income, and even the stability he attained under Queen Anne would not last. Following the Queen’s death in 1619, the pension of £100 per annum that she had reportedly promised John was denied by the Lord Treasurer. Over the next few years, his fortunes steadily worsened until his death from plague in 1626.
Few material possessions are listed in John’s will – he bequeaths his daughter, Aurelia, her deceased mother’s wedding ring, which was regrettably the only thing of any value he had to give by ‘reason of my poverty’. This was not strictly true. He had collected some ‘Three hundred and Fortie’ Italian, French, and Spanish language books by his death, which he bequeathed William, Earl of Pembroke, to place in his library at Wilton or Baynards Castle as a ‘token of my service and affection’. He also left Pembroke a curious jewel described as a ‘Corinne stone’, gifted to his late benefactor the Queen by Ferdinando de’ Medici, Duke of Tuscany. He also kept several other items items gifted him by his former employer, including a ‘Faire blacke velvet deske, embroidered with seede pearles, and with a silver and guilt inkehorne and dust box therin’, which he left to his son-in-law, James Mollins; and two ‘oule greene velvett deske with a silver inke and dust box in each of them’, which he gifted to his ‘much esteemed, dearely beloved, & truly honest good Friends’ Theophilius Field, Bishop of Landaffe, and Dr Richard Cluet, vicar of Fulham.
There was clearly some financial dispute between John and Aurelia. She claimed he owed them ‘threescore pound’, although John claimed that ‘my conscience telleth mee, & soe knoweth her conscience, it is by Thirty Foure pound or therabouts’, plus a separate loan from James of £10 for which two gold rings encased with thirteen diamonds (another gift from the Queen) was given up as collateral. John proposed that they accept the rings, which ‘I might many tymes have had forty pounds readie money’, several other items, and the lease of his house in Shoe Lane as payment.
What is your living situation comparable to?
I’m young; live in accommodation owned by my employer, college or inn; I am starting to build up things pertinent to my trade; I’m always learning.
[OR]
I have lots of tools/items in order to work my living; a stock of materials to use in my trade; some joined furniture including one or two special pieces with carving; perhaps a servant and an apprentice
Again, the answer depends entirely on the period. If he was the ‘Jhon Flehan’ residing with the French silkweaver Michael Barnyard in the parish of St James Garlick Hythe in November 1571, he would have lived in overcrowded conditions with many other strangers from the continent when he first arrived back in England. He appears to have secured the resources and connections to print his first dual language manual, Florio his first fruites, in 1578, although he failed to spark the interest of the dedicatee, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and a few years later he’s found residing in presumably meagre quarters in Oxford as a language tutor. From 1583, he resided in the house of the French Ambassador on the Strand. We can assume that his living situation changed after he came to the attention of the Southampton and the Countess of Bedford, and his £100 per annum salary under Queen Anne to the Queen would have given him the means to live an exceptionally comfortable lifestyle. Whether he purchased a property is unknown, and dependent on whether he was considered ‘native-English’ in the eyes of the law. He claimed English identity, but it’s likely that both his parents were first generation migrants, in which case John was, in the best-case scenario (legally speaking), a denizen. This meant that he had certain limited rights, including the right to lease property, sell merchandise, and inherit/bequeath property. Owning land or properties freehold, however, was restricted to the natural-born English.
In any case, he resided at a leased property in Fulham with his second wife Rose and servant Arthur until his death, surrounded by the tools of his trade: hundreds of books and three separate writing desks.
Credit in the Community: which statement is comparable to your situation?
I have some spare money, have the ability to borrow on credit, and can spend and take risks
[OR]
I don’t know/none of these
Clearly a man in the employ of the Queen had some standing amongst creditors, although John would often allude to anti-stranger hostility from the English throughout his work. He was also known to butt heads with others at court, and feared that some of these adversaries would discourage the Earl of Pembroke from supporting Rose after his death, pleading in his will that the Lord Chamberlain ‘not suffer her to be wrongfully molested by any enemi of myne’.For whatever reason, Pembroke’s support was not forthcoming, and other, later friendships and associations proved equally fickle. His ‘true honest good Friends’, Field and Cluet, refused his request to act as executors of his estate, and the responsibility reverted back to Rose. It is worth noting, however, that despite his professed poverty, he had no creditors worth naming in his will apart from his daughter and son-in-law.
What kind of people are in your close social circle? (check all that apply)
The lord/lady of the manor
[OR]
A lawyer, town or court clerk, an author, an academic, a physician, a clergyman or their wives
[OR]
Students at universities or the inns of court
[OR]
Other tradesmen or shopkeepers in my locale or their wives
[OR]
Wealthy merchants or their wives
Florio interacted with a range of men and women from different social statuses. He was, of course, employed by the Queen and acquainted with senior statesmen; he was patronised by well-respected families in the shires, and aided proto colonialist through works of translation. He caroused with Inns of Court men, a close friend of the Welsh preacher Matthew Gwinne and the poet, Samuel Daniels, marrying his sister in 1580. Ben Jonson gifted a copy of his 1605 play, Volpone, in which hereferred to Florio and ‘his Loving Friend … the ayde of his Muses’. He maintained correspondences with renegade recusants, like Theodore Diodati, exchanged ideas with heretical ex-Dominicans, like the cosmologist Giordano Bruno, and was acquainted with London’s community of wealthy Italian merchants and financiers.
Status…
Profession-al Middling
The calculator has placed Florio as ‘professional middling’. He possessed a ‘high level of literacy’, was exceptionally mobile, and relied on his ‘social networks with the landed gentry, urban gentry, and middling officeholders’. It was a difficult task as John’s fortunes changed greatly over the course of his life, and he did not, as did many his contemporaries, set up shop in London teaching Italian to aspiring courtiers, and English to resident Italian merchants, but navigated his way through the English social hierarchy by forging a place for himself at a prominent intersection – the interest in and admiration for Italian culture. Strikingly, it suggests that if property ownership factors into our assessments of social status, we inevitably exclude a substantial number of first- and second-generation migrants who were exceedingly wealthy and well connected, but unable to own property freehold. For Florio in particular, who capitalised on his Italian heritage to assert his authority as London’s preeminent advocate for Italian language and culture, difference meant both his exclusion from traditional social and economic systems and his inclusion in a vast intellectual network that resulted in a singularly impressive career.
Bibliography
‘Will of John Florio of Fulham’, 1 June 1626, TNA, PROB 11/149/289
Florio, John, Florio his firste fruites which yeelde familiar speech, merie prouerbes, wittie sentences, and golden sayings (London, 1578; STC (2nd ed.) / 4699)
Florio, John, Florios second frutes to be gathered of twelue trees, of diuers but delightsome tastes to the tongues of Italians and Englishmen (London, 1591; STC (2nd ed.) / 11097)
Florio, John, Queen Anna’s nevv vvorld of words, or dictionarie of the Italian and English tongues, collected, and newly much augmented by Iohn Florio, reader of the Italian vnto the Soueraigne Maiestie of Anna, crowned Queene of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, &c. (London, 1611; STC (2nd ed.) / 11099).
Pfister, Manfred, ‘Inglese Italianato – Italianato Anglizzato: John Florio’, in Renaissance Go-Betweens: Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Andreas Höfele and Werner von Koppenfels (Germany: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co, 2005)
Wyatt, Michael, The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: The Cultural Politics of Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
[2] ‘ARMS OF NICHOLAS LEATE. From Camden’s Grants, Hart. MS. 6095’, printed in Joseph Leete, The Family of Leete (London: Blades, East & Blades, 1906), p. 189.
Guest post by Hannah Yip, a Research Assistant for ‘GEMMS – Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript Sermons’, an SSHRC-funded project based at the University of Regina, Canada. Her latest article, ‘What was a Homily in Post-Reformation England?’, is published in The Journal of Ecclesiastical History.
The English Protestant divines discussed in this blog were of ‘professional middling’ status. Although they were highly educated individuals, many of them holding degrees from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, they relied on their livings and patronage from institutions and wealthier individuals to support themselves. While the role of published writings as instruments of patronage for Protestant clergymen in early modern England is widely recognised,[1] the question of whether there were alternative avenues for securing patronage, such as scribal publication, remains largely unaddressed. Moreover, how did Protestant preachers decorate their manuscripts intended for patrons? What evidence do we have that they practised the art of penmanship and drawing in their leisure time?
Today, the subject of ‘Protestant art’ in post-Reformation England constitutes a thriving area of study. Over the past thirty-five years, historians have continued to challenge Patrick Collinson’s ‘iconophobia’ thesis, contributing to a deeper understanding of the manner in which English Protestants generated a visual culture of their own.[2] While such research has included the Protestant clergy’s defence of visual imagery in certain contexts, there has been insufficient research into the practical engagement of these divines with the visual arts. One principal exception is represented in studies of the graphic art of Samuel Ward (1577–1640), town preacher of Ipswich; in particular, his print entitled The Double Deliverance, claimed by the minister to illustrate ‘the two grand blessings of God to this nation’ but ultimately misinterpreted as a personal affront to Catholic Spain.[3] The limnings of Stephan Batman (c. 1542–1584), rector of St Mary’s, Newington, Surrey, have also been explored at some length by M. B. Parkes, who has drawn attention to a treatise on the art of limning written by the cleric which appears to be no longer extant.[4] One of Batman’s commonplace books featuring his drawings survives as Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Eng 1015, and is available to view in its entirety here.
To what extent did Protestant churchmen cultivate their skills in draughtsmanship, and why? This blog examines the devotional artistic endeavours of other Protestant ministers as manifested primarily in manuscript, posing crucial questions regarding their function as gifts for patrons or as forms of record-keeping and private meditation. It begins to enquire whether the pen-and-ink drawings within these manuscripts can be categorised as a genre of Protestant artwork which has not, thus far, been recognised either by palaeographers or by historians of early modern visual culture.
It was undoubtedly the case that the wide range of confessional allegiances, theological positions and religio-social groups could dictate Protestant divines’ appreciation for art and their own artistic pursuits. In their fascinating article about the scheme of imagery for a Wiltshire parish church designed by Christopher Wren (1589–1658), dean of Windsor and father of the famous architect, Louise Durning and Clare Tilbury emphasised the ways in which his designs negotiated the boundaries between the Laudian ‘beauty of holiness’ and a word-centred piety.[5] Jasper Mayne (1604–1672), a prolific poet and playwright as well as a Royalist Oxfordshire vicar, not only expressed his disdain for ‘the vanity of some of our Modern Prophets,who can see Idolatry in a Church-window’ in a typically moderate Protestant defence of ‘the Ornamentall use of Images’, but also revealed his dedication to art in a poem extolling the qualities of the ‘table-book’ of Anne King (b. c. 1621), sister of Bishop Henry King (1592–1669).[6] Detailed analysis into the attitudes of preachers hailing from multiple branches of Protestantism towards the visual and decorative arts richly merits further investigation.
Notwithstanding specific religious allegiances, it was certainly the case that an individual preacher’s skills in draughtsmanship could be used to his advantage when seeking or maintaining gentry patronage. With their bespoke woodcuts, engravings and accompanying verses, printed funeral sermons could serve as Protestant memorial keepsakes for a grieving patron’s family. Lucy Russell (c. 1581–1627), Countess of Bedford may have financed in part the production of a handsome octavo volume containing various visual and textual tributes to her brother, Sir John Harington, Second Baron Harington of Exton (c. 1592–1614).[7] A considerable number of presentation copies of manuscript sermons intended for patrons, written in the hand of the preachers themselves, survive in archives and libraries today. However, arguably few are as exquisite as a sermon dedicated to Lady Thomasine North of Mildenhall, Suffolk (c. 1586–1655), dated 27 August 1626 and preached locally by Nicholas Searle (1592–1678).[8] Searle was clearly an accomplished penman, exhibiting a variety of calligraphic hands in a manuscript which imitated a printed sermon in its layout and appearance, complete with decorated drop-cap initials. Bound in gold-tooled vellum, this was designed to pay tribute to an important patron in rural Suffolk.
The drawings of divines could also be rendered at the service of record-keeping. The commonplace book of the Cambridgeshire vicar Edward Beaver (c. 1649–c. 1705), an octavo volume comprising notes of sermons which he had attended in addition to memoranda and accounts, also contains several diagrams which connect his interests in astronomy with his faith (see Figure 1). ‘The Constellations as they stand in ye North Hemespheer of Heaven’ are spread out over twelve pages (ff. 9v–15r). While clearly not as sophisticated as the efforts of his contemporary, the astronomer Reverend John Flamsteed (1646–1719), Beaver’s sketches reveal a personal engagement with scientific study. This was an aspect of a cleric’s interests which could often find its way into his sermons.[9] Choosing Revelation 2:1 as his text (‘Unto the angel of the church of Ephesus write; These things saith he that holdeth the seven stars in his right hand, who walketh in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks’), the royal chaplain Thomas Bradley (1599/1600–1673) muses upon whether the ‘seven stars’ refer to ‘that famous Constellation clearly visible in our Horizon, in dorso Tauri, called by Astronomers, the Pleyades’.[10] A yet more erudite marriage of astronomical knowledge with biblical exegesis appears throughout a sermon delivered by Robert Gell (1595–1665), rector of the affluent St Mary Aldermary, London. Preaching to the Society of Astrologers, Gell’s final exhortation argues that ‘a living and powerfull faith […] hath the vertues not onely of some one Star, or some one Asterisme, or Constellation, but even of all the Stars, all the Constellations of the heavens’. Citing Daniel 12:3 (‘And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever’), Gell expresses his hopes that the members of his congregation ‘shall become true Magi’ who will subsequently ‘shine as the Firmament’.[11]
Figure 1. Edward Beaver’s commonplace book. British Library, Harley MS 2314, ff. 12v–13r.
Finally, churchmen could also decorate their manuscripts ‘for art’s sake’. British Library, Harley MS 663 is an autograph folio volume containing notes relating to the private accounts and sermons of William Hull (d. 1626), lecturer at St Oswald’s Church, Ashbourne, Derbyshire and dating from the first quarter of the seventeenth century.[12] At the end of the volume, there are several decorative tracings and drawings in pencil, evidently pricked from an original printed source (see Figure 2). There is little evidence to suggest that the volume was owned by anybody other than Hull before it passed into the Harleian Library. It is therefore likely that, in a spare moment, Hull traced these designs for his own pleasure. Such practices would not have been lost on the likes of an even more illustrious churchman, Bishop John Cosin (1595–1672). As Adrian Green has shown, the designs for Cosin’s ecclesiastical woodwork were inspired by Netherlandish and German pattern books.[13]
Figures 2a & 2b. Private accounts and sermons by William Hull. British Library, Harley MS 663, ff. 70r, 71r.
Deriving from devotional pursuits, but also undertaken at their leisure, these diagrams, drawings and instances of ornamental penmanship blur the boundaries between ‘recreation’ and ‘work’ in the service of God. Whereas the art of drawing and calligraphy may have been considered as secular pursuits which were at odds with clerical vocation, it was the case that these talents could, in fact, be utilised at the service of patronage, or to ally external interests in natural phenomena with the Protestant faith.[14] This blog challenges older assertions that the practice of drawing and limning was the principal preserve of royalty, courtiers and the landed gentry in the seventeenth century.[15] Such assumptions mean that it is of no surprise that preacher-painters exist on the margins of art-historical research. For example, Robert Tittler’s invaluable ‘Early Modern British Painters’ resource does not mention Francis Potter (1594–1678), rector of Kilmington, Somerset, whose portrait of Sir Thomas Pope (c. 1507–1559) hangs in Trinity College, Oxford, which Pope founded (see Figure 3).[16] The painting is an accomplished work, showing Potter’s sensitivity to the intricacies of his sitter’s jewellery and ermine.
Figure 3. Francis Potter, Sir Thomas Pope (c. 1637). Oil on panel. 119.4 × 81.3 cm. Trinity College, Oxford.
Very little research has been undertaken thus far on how preachers acquired these creative skills. By beginning to examine the artistic recreational activities of Protestant divines, this blog has highlighted that more research is required regarding the relative social status of the clergy, the ‘largest profession of the early modern period’, and the leisure time that they could afford to take.[17] Endowments attached to certain livings varied enormously, as did the backgrounds and early upbringings of clergymen.[18] It is possible that certain churchmen were able to build a rapport with the middling sorts ensconced within their parish by taking up recreations which they could identify with. Jill Francis has shown how the published garden designs of William Lawson (1553/4–1635), vicar of Ormesby in the North Riding of Yorkshire, were ‘simplified and accessible’, aimed towards the emerging class of rising gentry in the first quarter of the seventeenth century.[19] Considerations of space have precluded discussion of wealthier clergymen’s activities as art collectors, including the intriguing career of the Cumbrian rector William Petty (c. 1585–1639), who was both chaplain to Thomas Howard (1585–1646), Earl of Arundel and his principal agent, purchasing collections on his behalf.[20] Investigating the artistic recreations of clergymen in early modern England leads to the potential for discovering the origins of the characteristics of the Hanoverian squarson, whose lifestyle bore strong similarities to those of the landed gentry.[21] The recognition of certain preachers’ abilities to interpret art is also crucial for enhancing scholarly understanding of their engagement with the religio-political controversies of their day. In a published defence of a painting censured as showing King Charles I’s submission to the Pope, the Royalist divine Daniel Featley (1582–1645) demonstrated that the work was a representation of a story from the Golden Legend, analysing with considerable detail its religious symbolism which was incompatible with the accusations against the painting put forward at the Star Chamber.[22]
Moreover, whereas Durning and Tilbury previously argued that Dean Christopher Wren’s visual skill was ‘hardly a typical attribute of the early modern cleric’, this blog argues that, on the contrary, a wider awareness of certain clergymen’s capabilities as visual thinkers would advance scholarly knowledge of the external influences that informed the composition of their sermons.[23] The admirable work of Jean-Louis Quantin, Katrin Ettenhuber and Noam Reisner, amongst others, has revealed how preachers drew upon classical literature in addition to theological texts, ancient and modern.[24] But what about the godly inspiration which could be gained from studying artistic treatises? According to William A. Dyrness, The Mysteryes of Natvre and Art (London, 1634), a treatise by John Bate (fl. 1626–1635) which covered the art of drawing and painting, was owned by the staunchly godly Mather family in New England.[25] While I have argued elsewhere for the enthusiasm of the ‘hotter sort’ of Protestant ministers for other types of visual devices such as anagrams, more meticulous study may disclose further evidence of the appreciation of, and active engagement with, visual culture by clergymen across the wide spectrum of Protestant belief in post-Reformation England.[26]
[1] Paul Seaver, ‘Puritan Preachers and their Patrons’, in Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke, ed. by Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2006), pp. 128–42.
[3] Alexandra Walsham, ‘Impolitic pictures: providence, history, and the iconography of Protestant nationhood in early Stuart England’, Studies in Church History, 33 (1997), 307–28; Helen Pierce, Unseemly Pictures: Graphic Satire and Politics in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 35–47; Ema Vyroubalová, ‘Catholic and Puritan Conspiracies in Samuel Ward’s The Double Deliverance (1621)’, in Puritans and Catholics in the Trans-Atlantic World 1600–1800, ed. by Crawford Gribben and Scott Spurlock (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 47–65.
[4] M. B. Parkes, ‘Stephan Batman’s Manuscripts’, in Medieval Heritage: Essays in Honour of Tadahiro Ikegami, ed. by Masahiko Kanno and others (Tokyo: Yushodo Press, 1997), pp. 125–56 (p. 128).
[5] Louise Durning and Clare Tilbury, ‘‘Looking unto Jesus’[:] Image and Belief in a Seventeenth-Century English Chancel’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 60.3 (2009), 490–513.
[6] Jasper Mayne, A late Printed Sermon Against False Prophets, &c. ([London], 1647), p. 15; British Library, Harley MS 6931, ff. 59r–60v.
[7] Richard Stock, The Chvrches Lamentation for the losse of the Godly, &c. (London, 1614); Ted-Larry Pebworth, ‘“Let Me Here Use That Freedome”: Subversive Representation in John Donne’s “Obsequies to the Lord Harington”’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 91.1 (1992), 17–42 (p. 40).
[8] Suffolk Record Office, Ipswich, HD607/1. For presentation copies of sermons in manuscript which follow print conventions, see Mary Morrissey, ‘Sermon-Notes and Seventeenth-Century Manuscript Communities’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 80.2 (2017), 293–307 (p. 300).
[9] For Flamsteed, see Frances Willmoth, ‘Flamsteed, John (1646–1719)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn (2008), <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/9669> [accessed 13 November 2020].
[10] Thomas Bradley, A Sermon Ad Clerum, &c. (York, 1663), p. 4.
[11] Robert Gell, Stella Nova, A New Starre, Leading wisemen unto Christ (London, 1649), pp. 30–1.
[12] For this manuscript, see Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 276–81.
[13] Adrian Green, Building for England: John Cosin’s Architecture in Renaissance Durham and Cambridge (Durham: Durham University, 2016), p. 16.
[14] Mordechai Feingold, ‘Parallel Lives: The Mathematical Careers of John Pell and John Wallis’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 69.3 (2006), 451–68 (p. 457).
[15] Kim Sloan, ‘A Noble Art’: Amateur Artists and Drawing Masters c. 1600–1800 (London: British Museum, 2000), p. 11.
[17] Arthur Burns, Kenneth Fincham and Stephen Taylor, ‘Reconstructing Clerical Careers: The Experience of the Clergy of the Church of England Database’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 55.4 (2004), 726–37 (p. 737).
[18] Rosemary O’Day, ‘The Anatomy of a Profession: the Clergy of the Church of England’, in The Professions in Early Modern England, ed. by Wilfrid Prest (London: Croom Helm, 1987), pp. 25–63; Fiona McCall, ‘Children of Baal: Clergy Families and Their Memories of Sequestration during the English Civil War’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 76.4 (2013), 617–38 (p. 618).
[19] Jill Francis, ‘Order and Disorder in the Early Modern Garden, 1558–c. 1630’, Garden History, 36.1 (2008), 22–35 (pp. 29–30).
[20] For clergymen’s art collecting, see Tarnya Cooper, Citizen Portrait: Portrait Painting and the Urban Elite of Tudor and Jacobean England and Wales (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2012), pp. 138, 153. For William Petty, see David Howarth, ‘Petty, Rev. William’, Grove Art Online, <https://doi.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T066833> [accessed 13 November 2020].
[21] Wilfrid Prest, ‘Introduction: The Professions and Society in Early Modern England’, in The Professions in Early Modern England, ed. by Wilfrid Prest (London: Croom Helm, 1987), pp. 1–24 (p. 18).
[22] Daniel Featley, The Sea-Gull, &c. ([London], 1644); Laura Lunger Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 38–40.
[23] Durning and Tilbury, ‘‘Looking unto Jesus’’, p. 513.
[24] Jean-Louis Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the 17th Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), ch. 1; Katrin Ettenhuber, Donne’s Augustine: Renaissance Cultures of Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Noam Reisner, ‘The Preacher and Profane Learning’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, ed. by Peter McCullough, Hugh Adlington and Emma Rhatigan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 72–86.
[25] William A. Dyrness, Reformed Theology and Visual Culture: The Protestant Imagination from Calvin to Edwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 223–24.
[26] Hannah Yip, ‘‘Speaking now to our eyes’: Visual Elements of the Printed Sermon in Early Modern England’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Birmingham, 2020), ch. 3.
In my last post, I introduced the maritime hamlets of early modern Stepney and explored some of the ways in which the parish’s middling sort used admin and officeholding to establish themselves as part of a local elite. Returning to the vestry minutes book as a starting point, this post will examine some of Stepney’s less desirable parochial offices before attempting to place these stations within the maritime parish’s complicated civic and social hierarchies.
Noisome Graves and Troublesome Sextons
Plague had an acoustic, and that acoustic was the ringing of bells[1]
Adam Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England
Stepney’s sexton played a crucial role in the daily management of the parish. Responsible for both the ringing of the parish church’s bells and the digging of graves in the churchyard, the sextons employed at St Dunstan’s, Stepney, found no shortage of work during the first half of the seventeenth century. As the parish’s population swelled and outbreaks of plague tore through the riverside hamlets, the St Dunstan’s churchyard quickly became overburdened. The vestry minutes record that in 1625 ‘the spedy purchasing of one parcell of ground’ for new burials was ordered, as well the earthing over of the present churchyard, owing to the ‘noysome sents’ that emanated from ‘the ground there so opened by reason of so many bodies formerlie enterred there’.[2]
Unfortunately, the Stepney vestry found itself repeatedly troubled by ‘very uncivil and disorderly’ sextons.[3] In 1601, sexton Francis Whitacres was ‘put out of his place’ and ‘utterly dismissed’ from the parish for a series of transgressions, which included neglecting and breaking the church bells to ‘the great chardg’ of the parishioners; attempting to persuade the parish clerk to embezzle funds so that they did not ‘dye beggers’; breaking his bonds and promises with the vestrymen; and bidding a churchwarden to ‘shake his eares emonng dogges’. A later sexton, William Culham, was similarly declared ‘unfitt for any further imployement’ after making himself known to be a ‘contemner & scoffer of them that are godly’ and refusing to ‘suppress a victualing house’ that he leased and ‘furnish[ed] … w[i]th beere’.[4] The early modern sexton perhaps best lives on today in the shape of Shakespeare’s proud ‘sexton here, man and boy, thirty years’, the Gravedigger from Hamlet.[5] The Gravedigger’s oaths, flippancy, morbid wit, and request for a ‘stoup [jug] of liquor’ suggest that unruly sextons were not only found in Stepney but throughout the nation, working their knavish grave-making characters into the broader early modern imagination.
However, the position also provided perks and financial security. Along with the respected and necessarily literate clerk and curate, the sexton was provided a room above the vestry house and was also guaranteed a steady income owing to the constant need for bellringing and burials.[6] Furthermore, as demonstrated by Culham’s position as both sexton and landlord of the victualing house ‘the Rose’, Stepney’s sextons were able to pursue other economic ventures alongside their paid parochial responsibilities.
A sexton at work in Humphrey Crouch’s Londons Vacation, and the Countries Tearme (London: Richard Harper, 1637)
Bearers and Searchers of the Dead
During the plague of 1625, ‘certaine [individuals] dwelling about Stepney’ took it upon themselves to become ‘common bearers of such as die of the pestilence and other diseases’.[7] In an attempt to suppress the extortionate ‘summes of mony as are no ways sufferable’ that were charged by these bearers, Stepney’s vestry decided to formalise the trade, setting fixed rates for the bearers of between four and twelve pence depending on where the body was carried from and its method of burial. The vestry further ordered that the bearers must travel ‘w[i]thout cloakes and cary red wands in theire hands that euery one may take notice of them’. It was decreed that the production and delivery of the wands to the bearers would be the responsibility of the sexton.
Another office created in response to disease – this time an initiative of the vestry, rather than the regulation of an existing practice – was advertised for in 1617, although it was not filled until the outbreak of plague in 1625. It was ordered by the vestry that, in order to prevent the spread of infection, ‘there shalbe chosen in euerie hamlet two fit aged women to search and vew the bodies of euerie one decease[ed]’, with the women being paid ‘four pence a peece by the householder for the said vew and serch’ or the same amount by ‘the Churchwardens or Collectors for the poore’.[8] In 1625, Mary Oswell and Elizabeth Scott of Ratcliff were ‘chosen to be searchers […] in case & feare of Contagion of sicknes now suspected’.[9] Unsurprisingly, given the wealth disparity within the hamlet of Ratcliff, the St Dunstan’s parish registers reveal that both Mary Oswell and Elizabeth Scott resided in the hamlet’s poorer western side, in Shadwell near to Wapping Wall.
Elizabeth Scott of Shadwell, ‘widow & pentioner’, is entered into the parish’s burial register on 8 May 1626, one year after her appointment as a searcher of the dead.[10] Mary, ‘wife of William Oswell of Shadwell[,] mariner’, followed just under a year later on 6 March 1627.[11] By tracing Mary and William Oswell through the parish registers of Stepney, Wapping, and St Katherine by the Tower, it becomes clear that Mary lost a three-year-old son a month after becoming a searcher, and left an eight-year-old daughter and two-month-old son behind after her death.[12] William, perhaps owing to his need for childcare and an imminent return to sea, remarried just three months later.[13]
The above example illustrates that although women’s names are almost entirely absent from Stepney’s vestry minutes, women did indeed perform civic office and play vital roles in the management of their communities, as has been explored in fantastic detail by the Women’s Work in Rural England, 1500-1700project. However, in this instance, it is possible that Elizabeth Scott and Mary Oswell did not have much choice in the matter. In The Launching of the Mary by Walter Mountfort, a drama composed by the middle-ranking East India Company merchant during his 1632 return to Stepney from Persia, the hardships of mariners’ wives are extensively portrayed. The characters Mary Sparke and Isabel Nutt testify that the ‘two months paye a year’ provided by the East India Company is not ‘able to keep’ them whilst their husbands are at sea, and the character Dorotea conveys the need to ‘sitt at shopworke’ to ‘gett a liuinge by hard hand-labour’ during the ‘discontinuance of theyr husbands’.[14] Bearing in mind William Oswell’s profession, and the age of their children, it is possible that Mary Oswell found herself in a similar position.
Civic Benefaction
So far I have argued that while the office of sexton might not have been the most desirable or respected occupation, it was nonetheless a necessary job that provided a secure position and reasonable economic stability – as long as you behaved and did as the vestry asked. While the reputation gained from performing the role of sexton might not be transferrable to another parish, and there is no evidence in Stepney of individuals advancing from sexton to a higher parochial office, the parish’s sextons seem to consistently hold positions somewhere between securely middling and of the lower-middling sort.
Stepney’s bearers and searchers of the dead also performed acts of civic benefaction that were necessary to the continued function and wellbeing of the parish community. The performance of deeds that benefitted the broader civic community was a key way in which individuals could gain public reputation for being a valuable member of the parish. The bearers’ and searchers’ acts of civic duty took the form of the dangerous handling of the parish’s diseased bodies, and these acts were carried out in public view and were recorded in important records kept in the parish chest. However, while this might sound like the ideal circumstances for achieving social advancement, for the bearers and searchers of the dead the reward was not favourable reputation but the monetary incentive that directly replaced – or at least supplemented – the poor relief they would otherwise receive. The wages of these workers were provided directly from affording households or from the already established overseers of the poor. Although these ‘offices’ received parochial recognition – and in the case of the bearers were even provided with uniform – just like in the case of Shadwell in my previous post, these individuals were brought into the public eye and recorded within parish documents so that they could be identified, shaped, and regulated by the parish’s central governing body.
Stepney’s parish records are full of complex narratives. These may partly be pieced together through retrospective historical study, but, far from being superimposed by scholarship, they were consciously written into these texts by early modern individuals whose representations have remained inscribed upon them ever since.
The office of sexton is proving a particularly fascinating position to explore in the investigation of Stepney’s middling sort as, although the officeholders seem to have consistently occupied places amongst the parish’s lower-middling sort, unlike others in their social and economic position they held a secure role that was assigned to them for the length of their ‘naterall lyffe’.[15] Was it the guarantee of work and social position, but lack of hope for advancement from their office, that gave Stepney’s sextons the confidence to repeatedly act out against the vestry? As Hamlet notes to Horatio beside the Danish sexton, ‘The hand of little employment hath the daintier sense’.[16]
By Michael Powell-Davies (PhD Candidate, University of Kent, School of English and Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies)
[1] Adam Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 177.
[2] London Metropolitan Archives, P93/DUN/327, ff. 71v, 73r.
[3] London Metropolitan Archives, P93/DUN/327, f. 106r.
[4] London Metropolitan Archives, P93/DUN/327, ff. 106r, 113v.
[5] William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Methuen Drama, 2006), p. 420.
[6] London Metropolitan Archives, P93/DUN/327, ff. 40r, 71v.
[7] London Metropolitan Archives, P93/DUN/327, f. 70r.
[8] London Metropolitan Archives, P93/DUN/327, ff. 57v, 69r.
[9] London Metropolitan Archives, P93/DUN/327, f. 69r.
London Metropolitan Archives, P93/DUN/327, f. 83v. 3 April 1632.
Early modern London was a port city, which sat at the centre of England’s international networks of colonial and commercial venture. However, London’s maritime operations were underpinned by working communities that were situated just beyond the city’s walls, in the vast parish of Stepney to the east. Home to the riverside hamlets of Wapping, Shadwell, Ratcliff, Limehouse, and Poplar, and host to branches of powerful institutions such as the Navy, the East India Company, and Trinity House, Stepney provided London with the materials and workers necessary for the capital’s overseas activities. The economic growth of both London and the maritime sector in the late sixteenth century prompted a huge number of workers to migrate to maritime Stepney, some of whom settled permanently but many of whom were seasonal workers or mariners sent immediately to sea.
This post will offer a look at some of the individuals, chiefly of the middling sort, that lived, worked, and fought for their positions within the mobile communities of Stepney’s riverside hamlets. In a maritime parish permeated by competition at all levels, it was necessary for individuals to take advantage of every opportunity to establish their social and professional positions. For the early modern middling sort, holding administrative office was a valuable way in which one could achieve social advancement. The following exploration of Stepney’s vestry minutes book will uncover some of the ways in which middling individuals worked to write themselves into their local community and, through administrative culture, equipped themselves with the edge needed to get ahead in maritime London.
The vestry minutes book (1579-1662) of St Dunstan’s, Stepney, contains a textual record of the meetings and administrative activities of the parish’s chief civic and ecclesiastical governing body, the vestry. Chronologically ordered, and loosely structured around the annual election of parish officers, the vestry minutes provide a frequently updated index of the parish’s local elites, or ‘chiefest inhabitants’, as well as a record of the region’s shifting social, economic, and topographical landscapes.[1] However, Stepney’s vestry minutes book was not just a static record of past events; it functioned as a tool that, like the navigational instruments crafted in the maritime parish’s workshops, could be used to locate and project one’s current and future positions. As an object of communal memory and consensus that parish elites repeatedly returned to, and subsequently disseminated the contents of, the vestry minutes book provided a textual surface onto which the parish’s middling sort could write their identity and assert their position within their local community. By providing access to this important piece of administrative culture, the vestry served as a privileged platform on which Stepney’s land-based middling sort could attempt to negotiate and settle identities of place, self, and other within the parish’s turbulent and mobile maritime hamlets.
The Vestry
Although the appearance of vestries as the central unit of local government did not occur in many rural areas until after 1660, Stepney’s minutes indicate that the vestry was central to local governance and administration by as early as 1579.[2] Initially made up of thirty-two men – eight representing each of the parish’s four hamlets of Ratcliff, Limehouse, Poplar, and Mile End – Stepney’s vestry was populated by necessarily local individuals, who were largely drawn from the middling to upper-middling sort. Rather than being ruled directly by manorial authority or by the elite commercial or naval officers that worked within the parish, Stepney’s vestry was largely composed of individuals whose social and economic positions were won through the professional status that they held within the parish’s maritime industries. That they described themselves as the ‘chiefest inhabitants and p[ar]ishoners’ is significant – these were men that lived and worked within the realms of Stepney parish, and the parish bounds were often the limits of their influence.[3]
Stepney’s maritime social signature was clearly reflected in its vestry. From 1589 onwards, Stepney elected to operate a ‘select vestry’, meaning that only those chosen by the previous vestrymen were able to serve, ensuring the group remained a self-selecting maritime ‘in-crowd’. Amongst the names in the vestry minutes are individuals whose colonial and military involvement gained them wide renown, such as William Borough and John Vassall, and also those whose professional achievements earned them fame beyond the parish, such as John and William Burrell, a father and son that were, between them, Master of Trinity House and Master Shipbuilder for the East India Company.[4] However, most vestrymen were successful middling professionals whose occupations included ballasters, ropemakers, shipwrights, anchorsmiths, chandlers, and victuallers.
The Vestry Minutes Book
This example of a minutes book was a new form of textual culture that developed alongside the establishment of England’s vestries and the growing civic consciousness and cultural identities of the middling sort. Drawing on established models of administrative and textual culture, such as chronicles and court records, vestry minutes often rhetorically positioned the vestry to speak on behalf of the entire parish and depict the group’s decisions through a united authoritative voice.
Wee the Cheefe Parishoners beinge now assembled together […] have by mutuall assent and consent, ordayned and agreed, that there shalbe chosen of the fowre Hamletts viz. Ratcliff Lymehowse, Popler and Milend, Eight specyall p[er]sons w[hi]ch […] assemble together in the Vestrie and there to consult, and agree, howe to reforme, and order any matter, or thing […] and the same enter or cause to be entered in this Churchbooke for a Testimony of their agreement.
We the Parishoners p[re]sently assembled both for ourselves, and in the name of all the rest of the Parishoners doe bynde our selves, and them by mutual assents, To howled, observe and mayntayne.
London Metropolitan Archives, P93/DUN/327, f. 19r-19v. 17 August 1589.
The language of unity and consensus used throughout these minutes was especially important for the Stepney vestry’s depiction of itself as a cohesive governing unit, as the group of thirty-two was larger than most early modern vestries, which nearly always consisted of twelve or twenty-four members.[5] In 1599, the vestry elected to increase its number even further to forty. Reflecting the vestry’s large membership, Stepney’s minutes book contains a vast diversity of “hands” (handwriting styles representing an individual) both anonymous and identifiable, giving the book the appearance of an incredible work of joint authorship – an example of this multitude of hands can be seen in the list of signatures included later in this post. Furthermore, a wealth of scribal evidence throughout the book demonstrates that generations of future vestrymen repeatedly returned to the vestry minutes and election records.
The above table records the names of the vestrymen elected for Ratcliff and Limehouse in 1594; ‘dead’ and ‘gone’ are marked against the names of those no longer on the vestry and the names of future vestrymen are inserted into empty spaces. Whilst the inscriptions of ‘dead’ and ‘gone’ evidence that the minutes have been returned to by a parish clerk or a member of the vestry, it is not entirely clear when any of these notes were made. Joseph Pett’s name is inserted towards the bottom of the list for Limehouse alongside the label ‘dead’ – whilst Pett did become a vestryman in 1599, the next vestry election after the creation of this table, he did not die until 1605.
Paper Performances and Placemaking
Whilst the surface performance of unity and continuity was important for the vestry’s image as an authoritative collective, the minutes book’s pages also served as a site of social competition amongst the vestry, particularly amongst those of the middling sort that were looking to consolidate and improve upon their hard-won positions.
Stepney’s vestry minutes book was a stage on which displays of skill and literacy were performed. The vestry minutes were produced and consulted in meetings that involved influential maritime figures, meaning that individuals who had earned a place on the vestry, but who were still seeking social and professional advancement, could exhibit their skilled identity in front of – and in competition with – the other local elites.
London Metropolitan Archives, P93/DUN/327
Robert Salmon, who served variably as vestryman, auditor, and churchwarden for Stepney parish between 1623 and 1641, was a prominent merchant, a leading director of the East India Company, a sometime Master of Trinity House, and the suggested eponym for Stepney’s Salmon Lane.[6] A conservative estimate, based on the number of signatures made in the vestry minutes book, puts the document in Salmon’s hands and gaze at least fifty times during his tenures. Catching Salmon’s attention through the vestry meetings and minutes could have proved a profitable endeavour.
From ‘A Map of London and the adjacent Country’, John Rocque, 1746
Whilst it was Salmon’s reputation that placed his name onto the map and into public use, the vestry meetings – and the minutes book itself – also played a part in shaping place and space in early modern Stepney.
As the East India Company’s presence in Stepney rapidly increased, particularly after the building of Blackwall Yard began in 1614, the hamlet of Poplar’s importance began to be challenged by nearby Blackwall. Within the vestry minutes, the ‘hamlet of Popler’ increasingly becomes the ‘hamlet of Popler & Blackwall’, reflecting Blackwall’s rising significance.
London Metropolitan Archives, P93/DUN/327, f. 108v. 16 April 1650
However, Stepney’s vestry minutes book not only records the ways in which conceptions of local place changed, but evidences active attempts made by vestrymen to shape the places of the parish. Just as the area of Blackwall had been thought of as a subdivision of Poplar, before being elevated to the same status as the hamlet itself, the district of Shadwell began as a part of the larger hamlet of Ratcliff. In 1641, the vestry formally decreed that owing to the difficulty of managing Ratcliff’s growing population, they would divide the hamlet into two distinctly bounded administrative regions.
Whereas the Hamlet of Ratcliffe is of late so largely encreased by the multitude of buildings & number of Inhabitants […] It is therefore at this vestry ordered & decreed, so farre as in vs lieth, that in the Hamlet of Ratcliffe shalbe chosen two Churchwardens […]
the Churchwarden of Ratcliffe to have for his division, Stepney, Whitehorse street, Brookestreet, Ratcliffe wall, Ratcliffe street unto the old balist wharfe, And the Churchwarden for Wapping side to have for his division, upper Shadwell, lower Shadwell, Ratcliffe highway, Foxes lane, wapping wall, Prusons Iland, Kingstreet Wapping, Knockfergus, Newgravel-lane & Old gravel-lane.
London Metropolitan Archives, P93/DUN/327, f. 99r. 19 May 1641.
Yet, whilst Ratcliff’s division from Shadwell is explained as an administrative necessity, the vestry’s decree also functioned as a placemaking activity that was closely bound to the control of civic identities. The vestry’s division of Ratcliff into the ‘Stepney’ and ‘Wapping’ sides clearly distinguished the wealthy eastern side of Ratcliff from the much poorer Shadwell to the west. Although both sides had churchwardens to regulate their districts, it was only the eastern ‘Stepney’ side that retained the name of Ratcliff and only this side that was represented on the vestry. Furthermore, whilst the decree’s first item clearly asserted that the two churchwardens ‘shalbe reputed & taken but as one’, within four years Ratcliff’s churchwarden is openly referred to as the ‘upper churchwarden’ over Shadwell’s ‘under’, consolidating Ratcliff’s superiority.[7] That the large majority of vestrymen lived and worked in Ratcliff, rather than Shadwell, is no coincidence.
By formalising the social and economic division between Ratcliff and Shadwell through the creation of parochial offices, and through further repeated appraisals within the vestry minutes of an ‘upper’ Ratcliff and ‘under’ Shadwell, Stepney’s vestry consciously shaped concepts of place within the parish.[8] By 1670, Shadwell had become its own distinct parish, functioning as no part of Stepney at all.
‘Shadwell Churchwarden’. London Metropolitan Archives, P93/DUN/327, f. 99r. 19 May 1641.
Being elected to the vestry was a testimony to one’s reputation and position within a local community. It allowed middling individuals, who were still working daily to keep their social and economic positions, to assert their place amongst a ‘better sort’ and attempt to fix this achieved position through acts of parochial legislation and record-keeping. Stepney’s vestry minutes book functioned as a tool that allowed its users to demonstrate their skills and project their own envisaged identities, whilst also shaping places and managing the ‘divers others’ that were not a part of the vestry’s ‘unified’ local elite.
By Michael Powell-Davies (PhD Candidate, University of Kent, School of English and Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies)
[1] London Metropolitan Archives, P93/DUN/327, f. 30r. 26 May 1597.
[2] Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, 1550-1640 (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 206-7.
[3] London Metropolitan Archives, P93/DUN/327, f. 30r. 26 May 1597.
[4] For biographies of these individuals, and many others mentioned in the vestry minutes book, see Memorials of Stepney Parish, ed. by G. W. Hill and W. H. Frere (Guildford: Billing & Sons, 1891).
[5] J. F. Merritt, ‘Religion and the English Parish’, in The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Volume I, ed. by Anthony Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 122-147 (pp. 135-6).
[6] Sydney Maddocks, ‘Ratcliff’, Copartnership Herald, 3.26 (1933), no pages. Hector Bolitho disputes this claim, suggesting that the lane is named after an earlier Captain Robert Salmon (fl. 1588) in Without the City Wall (London: John Murray, 1952).
[7] London Metropolitan Archives, P93/DUN/327, f. 99r. 19 May 1641.
[8] London Metropolitan Archives, P93/DUN/327, f. 103v. 6 May 1645. Subsequent references to the ‘West’ and ‘East part of the Hamlett of Ratcliffe’ evidences that ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ are appraisals of position rather than topographical references.
Lettice Greene, like the majority of women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, led a life in which her social status was determined by her male relatives. The life of her husband, Thomas Greene, was very well documented, particularly during the period 1602-1617, when he was town clerk and then steward of Stratford-upon-Avon. Lettice emerges as an important figure in documents made by or pertaining to her husband and other Stratford residents. This blog post presents a portrait of a middling woman who emerges from fragments of text.
Middling women’s activities often have to be glimpsed through snatched words, and their biographies are frequently partial. Their lives, where documented, are often written by men, though they followed very different trajectories: their educational experienced was geared towards skills that facilitated their running of a household, they very rarely gained positions of office, and their luck in marriage often determined whether they lived comfortable or difficult adult lives.[1] Their experiences, however, were varied, and many young women gained apprenticeships and positions of service before marriage and continued to have evolving careers over the course of their lives, as the Women’s Work in Rural England project has shown.[2]
Lettice began her life as the youngest daughter of a landed gentleman of West Meon in Hampshire. Here she would have had a privileged life, and she inherited 100 marks out of the profits of her father’s land. She bought this into her marriage to Thomas Greene, which took place in or around 1603, by which time she would have been in her late 20s. Thomas, although he was entitled to the title “gentleman” due to his education at the legal training centre of Middle Temple, was reliant on wages gained from his work for survival, and their early life in Stratford was spent as lodgers at New Place. Therefore, at this point in her life Lettice could be considered what we are terming “profession-al middling” status (working in or adjacent to a profession or literate role for a living), dependant on the hope that her husband would rise in status and wealth throughout his life. Although this status would have been gained through marriage, and shows a downward mobility from her landed gentry beginnings, from the evidence presented below, it seems that she may also have held this status in her own right, through the work she performed in relation to her husband’s profession as town clerk.
Lettice as a Writer and Networker
Letter from William Chandler to Thomas Greene at the Middle Temple. 26th January 1614. Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, BRU15/5/151.
Lettice first caught my attention when I was exploring her husband Thomas’ cultural life through his writing. The letter in fig.1 is from William Chandler to Thomas, who was at the time of the letter, 26th January 1614, away from Stratford at the Middle Temple, where he spent a lot of his time. William asks Thomas for a subpoena out of the Star Chamber for six labourers involved in the enclosure of the common fields at Welcome, to which the Stratford Borough Corporation was opposed. He writes that:
I would intreate you if you have not the note of Remembrance that you tooke concerninge Mr Combe and other busyness at London all ready, then I would intreete you to Right downe to my mother greene that shee may send you the note up to you by the next retorne of the carrier.
Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, BRU15/5/151.
This sentence tells us a lot about Lettice’s important role in her husband’s professional life. She was clearly literate enough to read her husband’s fiendishly tricky cursive handwriting (which was especially bad in any of his ‘notes’) and could navigate her husband’s working space to the point of locating a particular document. Without his wife’s household management, Thomas might have been left to make do without some important information. Lettice, then, played an important role in mediating between Thomas’ life at the Middle Temple and his Stratford business.
The second document that gives an insight into Lettice’s involvement with her husband’s professional world emerges from Thomas’ diary, which records his conversations and actions during a protracted enclosure dispute in 1614 and 1615. Lettice’s social network of Stratford women gave her information, via Margaret Reynolds, of attempts by the local Combe brothers to buy up land from nearby landladies; this insight was relayed to her in Thomas’ absence, and he then recorded it in his diary when he got back.[4] Lettice was, then, trusted as a source for town news to be written down and Thomas’ recording of the conversation he had with her after his return home demonstrates the social role she played as a gatherer of information.
The third document where Lettice’s presence is marked is on a deed of conveyance for Elizabeth and Adrian Quiney drawn up in 1611, which she signs as a witness in fluent italic hand. Here we get more of a sense of her social connections – she signs alongside her husband as well as Edmund Rawlins (another lawyer) and Judith Shakespeare, William Shakespeare’s daughter. She was, then, connected to some of the most powerful women in Stratford-upon-Avon: Elizabeth Quiney, the merchant and landowner, the Shakespeares (with whom she and Thomas also lodged at New Place in the first decade of the 17th century), and Margaret Reynolds, another female landowner. Her handwriting, present in her signature, also hints at her high level of literacy: her ink distribution is even and her hand confident (despite having to add an ‘I’ into her first name – Let^i^ce). The image of Lettice which emerges from these three documents is one of active involvement within her community and embeddedness within a network of socially and economically prominent women.
Lettice’s fluent handwriting, ability to locate and send documents to her husband, and role as a gatherer of information begs the question, just how frequently did Lettice write? Where did it all go? How typical was she of a middling woman married to a professional man who often spent time away for work? I’d been willing to imagine from her handwriting that Lettice was a regular scribe; that maybe she sent letters to her husband in his absences; that maybe she noted down information given to her. Her importance as an administrator only comes to light in a few documents, with her inevitable considerable unpaid labour towards her husband’s professional life hidden – if we had her matriarchive then #thanksfortyping might well be applicable to Lettice’s writing!
Lettice – a Businesswoman?
Although very little information survives about Lettice’s and Thomas’ home ‘St Mary’s’, it was described at its sale in 1617 as having a ‘brewing furnace’ and a brewhouse, as well as some land. This hints at the kind of activity Lettice may have participated in to enhance the household’s income. If Lena Orlin’s research into Anne Hathaway, and her speculation that Anne brewed beer at New Place is considered, it is not unlikely that Lettice, whilst lodging there, picked up this skill and continued it in her own home.[5] Her social circle of women who were economically active and successful in their own right, like Elizabeth Quiney and Margaret Reynolds, would suggest that Lettice also participated in similar enterprises within the town. Middling wives and widows conducted a range of paid and voluntary work within their homes and locales, and so it would not be unusual for Lettice to have generated produce in her brewhouse and on St Mary’s land to sell on.
After the house’s sale, Thomas and Lettice moved to St John’s Parish, Bristol, where, they largely disappear from the record.[6] Sadly, it seems Lettice’s marriage was not as economically or socially advantageous as she perhaps anticipated when she married a Middle Temple lawyer, who had secured a good position of office. In Thomas’ will (the final document in which Lettice can be found) he makes Lettice sole executrix, and bequeaths all of his remaining goods to her his ‘most deare & loving wife, being sorry that I haue noe more (than I haue to doe good a woman)’.[7] This statement is an extraordinary admission of Thomas’ failure to sustain the lifestyle Lettice was born into, but also suggests her important role as part of a team in marriage. Although, then, it is difficult to gain a full picture of Lettice’s life, these small mentions of her activities in documents pertaining to others hint at her varied work activities and the essential role she played in her household’s economic production. Perhaps, then, we might think of Lettice as having more than a supporting role, but as sharing a career with her husband, through her labours in his absence and domestic production of consumables.
Hannah Lilley
[1] For an introduction to women’s education see: Caroline Bowen, ‘Women in Educational Spaces’ in The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. by Laura Lunger Knoppers (Cambridge: CUP, 2009).
[2] See https://earlymodernwomenswork.wordpress.com/ and Laura Gowing, ‘Girls on Forms: Apprenticing Young Women in Seventeenth-Century London’, The Journal of British Studies 55:3 (2016), 447-473.
[3] BRU15/5/151. William Chandler to Thomas Greene, Stratford the 26th January 1614. The survival of this letter within the borough archives suggests that either it was never sent, or that Thomas bought it back from London with him.
This document details a rather formal conclusion to a brotherly quarrel.
BL Harley MS 2054
Dated 1599, it’s preserved as part of a manuscript “anthology” of copied and original documents from Chester’s administrative past by early antiquarian, Randle Holme II.
The brothers in question, Robert and George Cally, were both musicians, and they seem not to have been able to agree how to share the profits of their profession. This formal accord, signed by both of them, concluded that they should split the shares equitably between them based on the number of sons each had (1 and 2 respectively, at this date, with provision for this to change in the future). Having agreed to terms, they pledged to “Contynue be and remayne of one consorte and to play vpon their instrum{en}t{es} together still in one Company and be loving and frendlie.” The subsequent shape of their careers shows that this happy settlement didn’t last so long… But the Callies do present a fascinating case study of a large family of musicians adept at navigating the social hierarchy, status, and commercial possibilities of musical performance in the early modern city.
Meet the Callies
The Cally/Kelly family were something of a Chester dynasty of musicians. They had been active as musicians or performers from at least the mid-sixteenth century, and the George and Robert of this particular document were at their busiest in the early years of the 1600s.
After their agreement to continue as “one Company,” they seem to have split and sought different areas of patronage in the following decade. George, for instance, became a servant to the Earl of Derby (William Stanley), while Robert worked for Sir John Savage—both local elite figures. In their introduction to the Cheshire edition of Records of Early English Drama, Elizabeth Baldwin, Lawrence Clopper, and David Mills point out how the nature of this patronage arrangement speaks to a complex hierarchy of service: in 1609, under these new employment situations, George accused Robert of “crouching” to Savage (ie being servile or sycophantic), the erstwhile Mayor of the City, and he suggested that working for the mayor was far less prestigious than working for the noble Earl of Derby (lxiii).
Nearly a decade after signing the accord with his brother, George became the first musician to be made “free” of the city (granting him privileges and rights in accordance with his profession), granted in 1608 without any customary fee. He was clearly proactive not only in arranging his financial legacy for his children but in securing requisite status and authority within the city to practice music as a serious trade or profession.
The Case of the Missing Musicians
This proactive approach went further in 1613, when the Chester “waits”—the musicians who work formally for the city—just vanished without a trace! George saw this as an opportunity to petition the City for the role for himself and his company. He asked the Assembly whether he “and his felowe Musitians may be admitted waytes […] in steede of the Waytes now absent fyndinge Instrumentes of his own Charg to perform the service” (REED p. 387 and and Calendar of Assembly Minutes, ed. Margaret J. Groombridge, 1956, p. 66). The Assembly delayed a decision “vntill it may be vnderstoode what are become of the ould waytes.” This tantalising Case of the Missing Musicians notwithstanding, the Assembly did eventually grant the petition, and the mayor even gives them extra instruments on top of those Cally promised to secure himself: a “double Curtayle [a bassoon-like instrument] wantinge a staple of brasse for a reede, and one tenor cornett beinge the Citties instrumentes” (REED 383).
George was also more widely engaged in commercial competition and jostling for status, petitioning in 1615 for protection against “strangers” who were teaching music and dance. His complaint asserts his rights as a freeman of the city and also draws on his newfound public “office” as City Wait; he also emphasises how his musical ability and dance teaching have not only helped keep him and his family of ten children “but hath allso obtained & procured a good respecte and estimacion from men of the best sort & generall fashion truelie sensible and respectiue of the like faculties [of music and dance]” REED 407-08). Cally’s wording confers significant status on the public musician, indicating the role’s respectability and music’s potential for social mobility (and so speaking very closely to Ipswich’s Marten the Minstrel, who likewise occupied important public office as a town musician).
Just Dance 1612
Such musical rivalry is detectable throughout Chester’s rich history of music, play, and performance, sometimes overlapping with its wider leisure industry (especially in drinking!). In 1595, for instance, we hear of Richard Preston from Warrington, a musician who was visiting with his company when he gets into an altercation with an over-eager musical enthusiast (available on the Intoxicants website):
about 10 of the clock in the night upon Tuesday last this examinate and his company were playing upon their night’s music up St Werburgh’s Lane out of the Eastgate Street towards their host Foxall his house and saith that in that Lane Mr William Hicock clerk who came out of John Stile’s tavern overtook them and spake to this examinate and requested this examinate to leave him this examinate’s treble violin to play upon […]
Chester Record Office ZQSE 5/46
After a few drinks, the evening of violin-exchange turns into the theft of the musician’s sword by the drunken Hicock and a violent scuffle. In 1612, a Quarter Sessions case shows Robert involved in similarly impromptu performance, with an apprentice going to a “Sillibub” at Margery Waterson’s house, before meeting Robert Cally at 4 in the morning, whom he asked “to teache him daunce & stayed dancing one hower” (REED 391).
A pamphlet written by T. F. in 1579 offers a lively picture of what such dance teaching might have looked like. Written partly in satire and partly in censure of such revelry, the pamphlet’s speaker tells us how he visited a dancing school in London to partake in some of the pleasures “that were straunge and noueltie [sic] vnto vs of the Cuntrie”:
when wée weare come into the Schoole: the Musitions were playing and one dauncing of a Galiard, and euen at our entring hée was beginning a trick as I remember of sixteens or seuenteens, I doo not very wel remember but wunderfully hee leaped, flung and took on
Newes from the North C3r
T. F. indicates something of what visitors to Chester might meet in the Callies—a distinctly different urban leisure scene from quieter surrounding towns and villages. Such a difference is certainly borne out by the many different court documents of Chester from the mid-sixteenth-century onwards that recount individuals visiting or holidaying in the city, simply in order to sightsee, to drink in inns and taverns, or to meet up with friends. As such, individuals like the Callies helped create an atmosphere of play that was central to Chester’s economy and to the movement of people in and through its streets—in other words, to its local identity and sense of place.
Middling Musicians
The Callies therefore occupied a major role in the festive life of the city, while, even in a court case dealing with bad behaviour, delineating its propriety or respectability, in a similar way to George’s advertising of positive reviews from “men of the best sort.” As he intimates in his petition in 1615, by monopolising the trade of music and dance in the city, individuals like Cally could control its status and ensure that it was taught and performed to standard.
And so the document above signed between Robert and George in 1598/9 testifies to a rivalry developed early in their musical career. It also makes clear that at this earlier stage than the examples above, the two played together in a troupe, ahead of subsequent work for two different elite employers (Savage and Stanley respectively) and eventually for the city (at least for George and possibly for Robert or other Cally family musicians who may have formed part of George’s promised “company”). Despite their various quarrels, their brotherly connection and the longer family history of professional music-playing clearly helps map for them a way to make a living as musicians and dancing instructors. In this, they parallel the extraordinary rise to prominence of Edward Alleyn, a key and perhaps exceptional middling success story, who began as a player in a troupe with his elder brother; Shakespeare’s brother, Edmund, who followed the playwright to be an actor in London, also springs to mind!
The signatures of George and Robert Cally on this document offer a wonderful chance to get a little closer to the rich and tempestuous creative lives of these two remarkable personalities of early modern Chester.
For this second instalment of ‘Working from Home’ in early modern England, I’m going to take a look at some of the tools and materials urban individuals used as part of their trade in two posts. The first looks at the wider uses of tools and the second studies joiners.
The chisel in the image above might seem fairly ordinary, but for the 17th century tradesman it would have held a specific function and purpose for the performance of their craft. In early modern towns, individuals were set up and equipped to work from home, or in the home of their employers, and would often share tools, moulds and materials with their peers. Home set-ups are also a recurring concern from our own period of social distancing where many people have difficulty accessing the necessary equipment for performing their job – e.g. an adequate internet connection, working laptop or a comfortable seat.
From 1560 onwards there was a shift in how these tradespeople’s’ working spaces developed, with open hall houses giving way to an increase in rooms with specific purposes. Jane Whittle has noted that in Kent from 1600 to 1629 there was an increase in the number of specialist service room[s] within houses (like brew houses, mills and warehouses).[1] Two of this project’s team leaders, Catherine Richardson and Tara Hamling, have shown how people in urban settings invested in locks and doors to separate ‘working space from other spaces’.[2] Artisans would craft these areas to mark their trade identities to passers-by through the tools, materials and wares on display—and they often displayed shop boards at their openings, so they were not dissimilar from our own understanding of high street retail. But these shops were spaces of production, too, and could double as the site in which a trade was performed.
Randle Holmes III’s, The Academy of Armoury, or a Storehouse of Armoury and Blazonry, published in 1688, helps explain the importance of shop tools to urban identities. In it, he describes the trades he encounters through his home town of Chester, the tools artisans use and the ‘terms of the art’ as well as providing illustrations. The above image Holmes’ workings in a manuscript compiled in 1649, and on this folio he depicts tools used in three professions (butchers, bakers and coopers) in careful detail.
Tools are considered part of symbolic identities. Individual tradesmen are tied to their craft through the material culture that surrounds it in the form of the assemblages of tools used for their work. Tools were kept with and deployed by a person. As such, they could be viewed like clothing, which conveyed signals about a person’s status, residence, societal roles, gender, wealth and occupation. [3] A tradesman formed a close association with the equipment they shaped, repeatedly employed, and held.
Randle Holmes, Academy of Armoury, pp.364-65.
This facsimile, taken from the printed edition of Academy of Armoury, illustrates tools used in woodworking crafts like carpentry, joinery, and carving. The accompanying text is distinctly heraldic in its language with, for example, the mallet in the fourth image on the top row is elaborated with:
IV. He beareth Sanguine, a joyners mallet, Argent. By the name of Mallet. There is much difference between the masons, and the Joyners or Carpenters Mallets, the first being round and heavy, the others square both in the face and sides.
Randle Holme, The Academy of Armoury, or Storehouse of Armoury and Blazonry (1688), p.365
Holmes both describes what a woodworking mallet looks like and specifies how it should be used in a coat of arms. ‘Argent’ is the heraldic term for silver, and ‘Sanguine’ is blood red, so he also prescribes the correct colours for the mallet’s proper rendering. Holmes also uses the phrase ‘he beareth’ and ‘to bear’ has the meaning to be ‘the wearer of a garment, ornament, badge, etc.’ (3a, oed). A tool often borne in a joiner’s hand is here used as a suggestion for his coat of arms, linking his identity to the equipment he uses for his trade. Within the Academy of Armoury, Holmes paints the visual world of trade identity through tools.
Tools at Home
Inventories—lists of goods made at (relatively wealthy people’s) death—sometimes record the tools belonging to an individual, and occasionally in great detail. They are therefore a means through which we might ground the tools deployed in Holmes’ volume in specific locales.
For example, Thomas Bonner, an Ipswich blacksmith inventoried in 1583 had a variety of tools in his shop.
The shoop stuff
Item one stythe [blacksmith’s anvil] and blocke ______4 0 0
Item a paier of bellowes and appurtenances _______ 0 12 0
Item a beake horne [the pike of a blacksmith’s anvil] and carnayle toole and the blockes 0 2 6
Item one vyce ___________ 0 5 0
Item nyne hammers __________ 0 6 0
Item thre payer of tonges ________0 1 6
Item the smalle tooles _________0 1 8
Item tenn Punchins [small pointed tool which could pierce materials] ___0 1 6
Item a nayle stocke __________0 0 8
Item fyve fyles two buttres a paier of pynsons and other tooles_____0 1 4
Item a carte strake wrought _____ 1 7 6
Item fyftie six pound Iron ________0 4 8
Item LVIIIli leaden waights________0 4 10
Item two beames and skooles_______ 0 5 0
Item one smythes troughe___________0 0 6
Item a gryndston and cranke and the troughe _____ 0 5 0
From: The Ipswich Probate Inventories 1583-1631, ed. by Michael Reed (Boydell Press, 1981). Hereafter, IPI.)
Some of these tools are specialised to the blacksmith’s craft with a ‘stythe’ being a blacksmith’s anvil:
Bonner also has tenn ‘punchins’ which are small, sharp tools used to pierce metal. In his possession of ten of these punchins, Bonner would be able to produce piercings of various aesthetic effects, creating decorative touches to his work in ways which might make his work easily attributable to him.
Alongside his tools, Bonner has fire attending equipment, essential for the heat needed in the manipulation of metal, but also for light and warmth within the shop. Passers-by would be able to observe Bonner at work from the street, could judge his work, and make requests for wares to be made for them. The shop, in this sense, was a permeable boundary between the home and the outside world, where production and purchase happened in the same space.
The value of tools can be seen in the way they became heritable items. For example, Gilbert Mayerte, Millwright of Ipwich’s will details that:
‘I give and bequeathe unto the sayd Richard my sonne all my Tymber plancke bourd toles and all other tinges necessary belonging and Apperteyning to my science’
Suffolk Record Office, Ipswich Branch, IC/AA1/7/67.
As such, craft identity as it is expressed through tools, permeates workspaces in multi-layered ways: tools used to create items for consumption in the present may have been inherited from a family member or employer which gave them significance as memory prompts of past craftsmen in their continued use through generations. Patterns of craft could then be established in locales where these tools and techniques were passed between people through inheritance. We can see this with the distinct style of armchair that emerged from Salisbury joiners’ workshops in the seventeenth century, as seen in a past blog post.
Apart from the shop, there were many other rooms used for manufacture or for the storage of tools and materials. On a small scale, these rooms might be listed as chambers. For example, houses in Ipswich and Bristol occasionally have ‘shop chambers’, which were linked spatially and in purpose with the shop.
These chambers frequently contained tools, materials and shop wares. Stephen Grenewich, dyer of Ipswich, had a room next to his shop that held weights and scales and a skraier (a frame for layering cloth upon) for clothworking (IPI, p.55). On a larger scale, someone might have workhouses or warehouses. For example, Henry Piper of Ipswich, poldavisweaver (poldavis is a particular type of cloth common in Brittany, which was bought over to England in 1547, and Ipswich became the centre of its production in England), inventoried in 1615, has two workhouses with nine looms and various cloths ‘in makinge’ and this demonstrates a larger scale of production taking place domestically, with multiple employees—an “SME” or small “factory.”[4]
In non-inventoried houses low down the social scale, in precariously middling or poor households, tools would also have appeared. There are plenty of examples in churchwardens accounts of wool cards, timber and other tools and materials handed out in charity to enable those less fortunate to generate income.
These practices extend to women’s work. Widows often inherited shops and responsibility for its trade and production, alongside household labour. For example, Ann Barnarde, widow of Ipswich whose inventory was taken in 1606 possesses tools for embroidery – a ‘reell and a little yarne’ – things she may have used to generate some income (IPI, p.65). A request for a women’s service in needlework appears in an Ipswich deposition too, where Margaret Morgon remembers that one Dorothy, a servant to Mr Barker,
bought unto the house of this deponent [Margaret] one shirte wrought w[i]th blacke worke of sylke & requested her this deponent to breake the same & to make the said dorothie a neckercher thereof w[hi]ch she […] so did.
Margaret recognises this shirt as stolen, but does the work anyway, with this case later going to court. The fact that the material garment recycled for the neckercher was stolen, is the only reason this example of Margaret’s work (and indeed Dorothy’s time as a servant before her marriage) is recorded. Work like this, completed with small tools like needles relies on archaeological examples like this needle to understand craft practices:
There are many gaps in our understanding of practice generated by tools and materials which were ephemeral, used then thrown away, or too insignificant to be frequently recorded. But records, archaeological finds and images demonstrate how essential tools were to a trades-person’s identity within an urban setting. Next time I’ll be looking more closely at a particular kind of making setting and the tools used within it: the joiner’s workshop.
By Hannah Lilley
[1] Jane Whittle, ‘The House as a Place of Work in Early Modern Rural England’, Home Cultures, 8:2 (2011), 133-150, pp.134-136.
[2] Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson, A Day at Home in Early Modern England: Material Culture and Domestic Life, 1500-1700 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), p.144.
[3] For more on clothing, tools in civic ceremonies, and identity this see, Catherine Richardson, ‘Dugdale and the Material Culture of Warwickshire,’ in C. Dyer and C. Richardson eds., William Dugdale, Historian, 1605-86: His Life, His Writings and His County (Boydell and Brewer, 2009).
[4]Eric Kerridge, Textile Manufactures in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), p.123.
How did ordinary people “play” in towns and cities outside of London in early modern England? Leisure is a crucial aspect of middling experience and a key theme for this project, which aims to understand the different elements of non-elite cultural experience, ranging from gambling to reading to musical tuition.
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ipswich and its surroundings—one of our community case studies—offers an insight into the vibrancy and variation of public forms of “play” in this period, one that tells us a great deal about how Tudor and Stuart people understood recreation (and, in turn, how the development of the playing industry in London had crucial “provincial” contexts). Our work on Bristol has already shown how a long-standing playhouse in Wine Street (operative for some 20 years) sat at the centre of a lively political and commercial network of middling individuals in the early seventeenth century. This property was a tenement with one front door and several rooms—all let out for various purposes—in which one or two rooms were used to host “comedians.” Despite, or perhaps because of, the multipurpose nature of this property, its proprietor Margaret Woolfe explained that it was “commonlie called the playhouse” by Bristolians (The National Archives MS C2/328/28). Her description testifies to the flexible nature of the term “playhouse” and its applicability to a range of architecturally-, commercially-, and recreationally-diverse enterprises.
“for kepinge A pleyhowse”
The archives of Ipswich and wider Suffolk contain further evidence of the way expansive “play” activities shaped the lives of the non-elite.
In 1627, Jacob Abadham was reportedly running a playhouse in Ipswich. It’s not certain quite what was on offer in the establishment, but like the Woolfes’ venue in Bristol, the Quarter Sessions cited Abadham “for kepinge a Pleyhouse,” in this case among a list of individuals bound £10 “not to plaie att vnlawfull games” (which could encompass anything from dicing and carding to bowling) on the 17 January (Suffolk Archives C/2/9/1/1/8, 178). Two years later, John Payne was bound “not to suffer any pleyinge in his house” (28 July 1629; 198). Such instances indicate how the term playhouse described, at least in this corner of the country, spaces where “game” was practised and extend the connections between the performance of playing and gaming along the lines recently identified by theatre historians such as Gina Bloom, Erika Lin, and Tom Bishop. It also testifies to Peter Clarke’s remarks about how, in the wake of attacks on church-orientated festival, the alehouse increasingly became a centre of communal games and rituals (with a corresponding increase in regulation) (The English Alehouse [1983]).
These activities sat among a broader spectrum of what residents would have termed playing. Visiting bearwards, for instance—particularly in the mid-to-late sixteenth-century—were popular purveyors of entertainment in the area. One payment from 1565 records a fee delivered to the “dewekes bereward for his reward for baitinge of his beares vppon the corne hill” (Suffolk Archives C/3/2/1, 21v [19]). This entry indicates where exactly bearbaiting would occur in early modern Ipswich—in the Cornhill immediately before the main civic building, the Moot Hall (or Town Hall).
from John Webb, The Town Finances of Elizabethan Ipswich (1996)
This is not only where all the work of government and legal proceedings would take place, but it was also where visiting troupes of players would have performed before the town authorities and perhaps wider audiences. These include “national” troupes patronised by major figures (including the Queen, Fortescue, Worcester, or Pembroke) but also troupes identified by their very regionality: “c{er}ten players of Lincolnshere” (SA C/3/2/1, 29r [27]) and “Mr Tewk{es} plaiers the highe sheriff of Essex” (21v [19]).
When the cook Henry Semer was arrested in Ipswich on 14 March 1620 “for ffightinge w{i}th the pleyers” (SA C/2/9/1/1/8, 59), it may therefore have been an altercation with one of these well-rewarded visitors, but it could also have been for a quarrel with somebody he knew well. The town had a long history of its own performers, particularly surrounding the prominent Martin the Minstrel, rewarded frequently in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign for his varied theatrical labours in and around the town. It also seemingly commissioned its own drama from local schoolchildren; in 1565, the Chamberlain “paide for a play to mr Scott{es} lads the sonday before newe yeres day [10s]” (SA C/3/2/1, 12r).
Middling Minstrelsy?
But what does the elastic nature of “play” have to do with the cultural lives of the middling sort? Play represents one vehicle for achieving prominent status in the community and for securing the type of local political and administrative agency that so often marks out those in the “middle” stratum of society from their more precarious, even disenfranchised, neighbours.
Community performance is one area that might afford such agency. The study of civic pageantry is at present an especially lively field, and Tracey Hill’s work and her current REED Civic London project explore the breadth and extent of those involved in theatrical activity across livery companies, the mayoralty, and beyond in the early modern capital. Ipswich’s political structures—upheld by the type of people this project aims to learn more about—were no less involved with the commissioning of play, and as a consequence (beyond “patronage” and livery), the notion of formal administrative “officeholding” extends in this period to performance.
In 1558, the first year of the Queen’s reign, the chief performer of early Elizabethan Ipswich Martin the Minstrel was carried by the Chamberlain and his horse to see the local MP, John Suliard (SA C/3/2/1, 6r). Martin’s role in local diplomacy and civic ceremony indicates the crucial connection between public office and professional performance in this particular community, and he and his company also play “before” the bailiffs’ physical and symbolic “entry” into their roles in 1567.
To Martyn the mynstrell for him & his company in plaienge before m{aste}r baylyff{es} at ther entrye of ther Baylywicke xs
(SA C/3/2/1, 29r)
To Martyn the minstrell for playenge before M{aste}r Bayly Whetcrofte at his goinge to m{i}chaelmas t{er}me [no cost entered]
(SA C/3/2/1, 29r)
It is highly likely that Martin the Minstrel is also William Marten, musician and player, who was funded by the town to perform in his various “entertainment” roles, including fees for him “and his companye for A playe at the mote hall” in 1572 (ibid. 38r). By 1582, Ipswich had purchased
at the request of Will{ia}m marten musician the said Will{ia}m marten & his Company being 6 in all […] waight{es} [woodwind instruments] bought at the townes chardge & that he & they shall therewith s{er}ue the towne for one yere in suche order as by the bayliff{es} shalbe thoguht mete & requisit And the said Will{ia}m & his Company to send to the considerac{i}on of the towne, for ther wages in that behalf, And it is furder Agreed by the consent of the said will{ia}m that if the towne shall not lyke of ther s{er}uice At the yere ende that then he the said will{ia}m shall repaye the som{m}e f money the towne shall so disburse backe ageyne And for the better assurance of payment therof the said Will{ia}m p{ro}miseth to stonde bound with sufficient suerties Accordyngly as by mr Bayliff{es} for the tyme being shall thinke mete And allowe of/.
(SA C/2/2/2/1, 142)
The company were kept as the town waits (“musicians” or performers named after the popular woodwind instrument similar to the oboe—the “wait”) from this date forward, ratified again in 1590 (ibid. 293), before in 1597 they were discharged of their retainer in the time of sickness (March 1597). Martin’s skills ranged in thirty-odd years of service from “playeng the fooles in the hall” (SA C/3/2/1, 30r) to professional musicianship. His company’s career was already established by the time it was appointed to civic service, though continuance in that role seemingly depended upon the tastes and approval of the Ipswich governing authorities.
The shawm or wait (Wikimedia Commons)
The hiring of Marten’s troupe formalised the existing relationship between Ipswich and the “independent” Martin the Minstrel and his company, instituting a new career phase in a public service role akin to the “watch” or to beadles, surveyors, or highways inspectors. Other such offices rewarded by the Chamberlains include attorneys, pursuivants, and sergeants—roles more formally recognised today, perhaps, as part of a town hierarchy. Yet Martin’s activities also position him as a man of both financial success (with regular reward from the Chamberlain) and “office,” as the local player and musician leader.
More surprisingly, Marten also occupies a second formal role in civic administration as the clerk of the market. From at least 1574 onwards, for several years, he received payments of 6 shillings and 8 pence per quarter for this responsibility, at the same time as he fulfilled his theatrical roles. These successive payments from 1575 testify to a complementary relationship between creative performance and bureaucratic office in the early modern commonwealth:
It{e}m p{ai}d to Will{ia}m Marten clarke of the markett the xxiiijtie daye of Iune for his q{uar}ter wag{es} — vjs viiijd
It{e}m p{ai}d to will{ia}m marten Clarke of the markett more the xxtie daye of Iune by a warrant for musicke at ye gilde dinn{er} — xs
(SA C/3/2/1, 87r)
Marten’s social status is therefore determined by both public administration and play. An inventory from 1580 made by the town treasurer indicates how these roles had similar material concerns regarding the township’s possessions, with the inventory of items “vnder the Custodie of will{ia}m Marten clark of the m{ar}kett” including several bushells, a chain, brass scales, “A pound wayte & A q{uar}ter of A pound” (165r). A fortunate pun therefore draws together Martin the minstrel—player of the wait (the woodwind instrument)—with Marten the clerk, who commanded the town’s measures and weights.
Not only does Marten rise above hand-to-mouth existence thanks to his regular employments here, but his negotiations between local authority, townspeople, and a paying public position him as a key civic actor, in all senses of the term. Such roles are particularly important if we are to understand this broad and complex status of those between the “elite” and the wage labourer, particularly in the case of early modern Ipswich and Bristol: urban environments where major political power was increasingly monopolised by a closed oligarchy but where intermediate positions (such as Marten’s) delivered degrees of civic agency. Marten the Minstrel’s biography as gleaned from these records may be scattered, but it allows us to put him as an early, provincial parallel (albeit on a smaller scale) to successful actor-entrepreneurs with civic or royal responsibilities in London later in the century, such as Edward Alleyn.
Work, Home, and Play
Marten’s offices represent one aspect of middling status inextricably bound up with theatrical performance, but the social significance of play for a range of non-elite men and women also extended to physical spaces. We have seen, for instance, how Abadham was cited for running a playhouse and Payne fined for playing at his house. In this sense, “play” can bring together the ostensibly closed domestic home with public and even commercial leisure activity.
Inns and taverns doubled up themselves as play/houses, and these spaces may indicate an overlap with Abadham’s or Payne’s properties: there was a worryingly thin line for authorities in this period between the common inn or alehouse and a household that played host to multiple visitors—not least in a period where regulation of victualling houses, rented rooms, and inns was intensifying (see, for instance, punishment by imprisonment of any “such p{er}sons as have taken any Inmates into their houses” [1625; SA C/2/9/1/1/8, 151]). Those ranging from the JAMs (the just-about-middling—those above wage labour) to the upper ends of middle status (those pushing gentry level) frequented such spots to play, gamble, and/or drink, and Mark Hailwood’s study of the alehouse (ostensibly the “lowest” drinking spot) has illustrated the demographic diversity of these social spaces.
What might be on the surface more clearly be defined as a domestic house—and middling homes in particular—also had sense of multiplicity and permeability. Catherine and Tara explore in A Day at Home in Early Modern England how these properties acted as “multifunctional houses and spaces” with a “penetration of work and leisure, domestic and commercial production” (266). This happens not only at the level of household production or artisanal practice (in the sense that a goldsmith’s workshop, say, may be in the street-facing room of their home), but at the level of game and play, too.
When Peter Watlyn was indicted for “pleyinge & sufferinge pleye” in Ipswich in September 1621 (SA C/2/9/1/1/8, 92) or when Thomas Cowper was indicted simply for “pleyenge” (1623, ibid. 108) they were being accused of hosting and practising an activity that sat, uncomfortably for authorities, between public commerce and “private” sinfulness. According to more cynical commentators, they also help to fill the civic coffers; T.F.’s Newes from the North (1579) complained that town officials only pay lip service to the punishment of unlawful gamers, arguing that “if there were as great gayn and profit to the Magistrates and Officers in the godly lives and honest conversation of the common people as there is in the contrary: these harbours of ungodliness and misnurture, would have less favour anad maintenance than they have” (F4r). Watlyn, Cowper, and the Suffolk “playhouse” owner Abadham therefore, by circles, helped pay the wages of sanctioned civic players like Martin the Minstrel and formed part of a calculatedly, regulated-just-enough industry that simultaneously infringed upon and enriched the community.
Such individuals were also “playing” in a range of establishments beyond the inn, as illustrated by examples like Bristol’s Thomas Rockwell, whose probate inventory records not only an array of pictures and painted hangings but “a payer of playing tables” in the closet next to the hall (Bristol Archives, EP J/4/18, Bundle 1620). If “playhouse” were a fluid concept for early modern men and women, then certain semi-permeable middling homes could easily have represented spaces where household sociability borders on commercial recreation and where the line between the domestic house and the playhouse is teasingly thin.
Games board from Granada, 16th century. V&A (154-1900).
Material items are one clue to how such interaction between work and leisure extended out from the household and across the spectrum of society, as is clear from the likes of Alexander Cooke and Nicholas Goldbolde, who found themselves in trouble with the Petty Court in 1576 for spending working hours playing at dice:
about fortnett before Whitsontide Laste he this exa{m}i{n}a{n}te and one Nicholas Godbolde were in companie together & they played together at the dyce at the game called Passage for monie at w{hi}ch tyme the seid nycholas Godbolde ded Wynne of this exa{m}i{n}a{n}te Syxtene pence & then Lefte plaie And furdre this exa{m}i{n}a{n}te saithe that he this deponent & the seid nycholas Godbolde plaied together oth{er} tymes at the Dyce for monie At m{istre}s ffastoll{es} hayestacke when they had served ther Cattell And this vppon his othe he confesseth to be trewe./ ./ ./
(SA C/2/3/8/1, 155)
Dice are small material props that can instantly transform a space for work into a commercial or profit-based recreational activity—here, gambling in an outdoor work location. Inside the inn, tavern, or even the domestic home, such items can have a similar effect: a pair of dice could conceivably be enough to transform John Payne’s “house” into a “playhouse” or (to use another common early modern term) “dicing house.” Those of higher means and status are unsurprisingly much more rarely subject to legal repercussions than those with limited political or financial agency, but that does not mean that similar forms of recreation were not, directly or indirectly, important parts of their worlds.
Dice and accessories from games board (above) from Granada, 16th century. V&A (154-19
Indeed, other physical items might advertise “greater” cultural capital but similarly align the house and the playhouse: the Woolfes’ theatre in Bristol, for instance, is associated with a pair of virginals that Nicholas Woolfe bequeathed to his son Miles. Christopher Marsh has explained how ostensibly “high-status” instruments such as virginals might nonetheless be found in more “popular” non-elite spaces such as alehouses and taverns (Music and Society in Early Modern England [2010]); it’s not a stretch to imagine them in use in a theatre in a well-heeled part of town. As such, the Woolfes’ household tuition, practice, and pastime merge in these objects into spaces designed for paid public performance.
These examples, from Marten the Minstrel to the Woolfes in Bristol, indicate that “play”—in all its forms—could be a valuable, profitable, and respectable means to social preferment. Such individuals combined creativity with business or administration to enhance their cultural, financial, and political capital—and just as importantly, one might imagine, to delight in and share their artistry.
Many thanks to Chris Pickvance for this guest post on the furniture of the middling sort. You can hear Chris talk the team through a “middling” style chair in the video at the end of this post…You can also read more about furniture of this and other periods at the Regional Furniture Society.
In an ideal world (for researchers) there would be a close correspondence between household social status and domestic furniture. Higher status households would have greater incomes or wealth and be living in larger houses with more specialized rooms. They would thus have furniture of higher quality and of more varied types. In practice, life styles are not only influenced by means. Large houses can mean more ‘old’ furniture is preserved, for example because inherited ‘family’ furniture is valued, or because old pieces are relegated to servants’ quarters or outbuildings. Moreover, norms can differ among households in the same economic position.
Wood
In the 1560-1660 period, furniture was mainly made of solid oak; veneer arrived later. Imported and exotic woods became available in small quantities or through chance purchases as trade routes extended to Asia and the Americas. Cypress and juniper chests were also imported and survive in considerable numbers. Decoration took the form of work on the surface: primarily various forms of carving, to a small extent stain or paint, and the introduction of inlay.
1627 chest with a variety of carved motifs (Bonhams)
Middling Furniture?
Applying this approach to the ‘middling sort’ is not straightforward. As Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson write in A Day at Home in Early Modern England, this group is defined more by its social status (they ‘held social positions that bestowed a certain superiority within their local contexts’) than by a shared economic position (‘they might be moderately to exceptionally wealthy’) (p.9). It follows that their furniture preferences were shaped by local as well as national influences rather than being invariant across localities.
This is consistent with the evidence of diversity. On the one hand, the furniture that survives from the 1560-1660 period is likely to over-represent the furniture of the middling sort and upper classes; lower quality and less durable furniture is intrinsically less likely to survive, and in so far as furniture enters the market, pieces that are less appealing to later users, including collectors, are less likely to survive. One can thus conclude that the furniture of the middling sort constitutes a major part of what survives today from this period.
Motifs, Techniques and Region
On the other hand, while renaissance motifs such as fluting, guilloche, scrolling and gadrooning were taken up nationally, in most regions they were combined with local favorites, e.g. the ‘worm’ and Celtic interlace in the Lake District, dragons in Cheshire, Wales and the Borders, the ‘domino’ in Wiltshire and the ‘eye’ in Wiltshire and Dorset. Dates, initials and, occasionally, couples’ names were popular features on carved press cupboards, chests and armchairs in Cheshire, Lancashire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, and Cumbria. East Anglia was particularly open to Flemish renaissance influence, and Scotland and the South West to French renaissance influence.
Dorset or Devon box with eye motif and colour, late 17th c. (Bonhams)
Carved work covered a range of techniques. The simplest was incising produced by a V-tool, which led to ‘outline’ designs which left most of the surface intact, as in Dorset and Devon, where it was combined with paint or stain on boarded pieces. The most common type of carving dug deeper into the surface of the oak to produce recurrent patterns such as guilloche, and needed greater skill. Indeed, combinations of these stock patterns were the main feature of English carved furniture. Relief carving was rare and limited to adornments such as sculptural terminal figures, whereas on the Continent furniture with sculpted scenes could be found.
Box c 1600 with rectilinear inlay, nulling, punchwork and mastic initials (Bulstrode www.bulstrodes.co.uk/)
As well as carving, fine rectilinear inlay using contrasting woods arrived in the middle to late Elizabethan period, brought by German and Flemish migrant craftsmen, initially in the most costly furniture. Floral inlay followed soon after and remained popular in Yorkshire armchairs, press cupboards and chests till late in the 17th century.
1682 Lake District chair with Celtic interlace and ‘worms’ (Bonhams)
On the other hand, punched work was used as a background to a main design, as a decorative element in it, or to fill secondary spaces.
1626 armchair with carving, punchwork and mastic
Other techniques included the use of mastic to add contrast to incised designs, as on this armchair.
1626 date in mastic
It cannot, however, be concluded that those frame and panelled chests and panel back armchairs which lack carving on their panels were therefore made for lower status social groups. Such groups sat on stools, not panel back armchairs of any type, and their chests are most likely to have been of the simple ‘six plank’ boarded type which could also serve as benches. Rather, plain panels indicate the range of variation within the furniture of the middling sort. Finally, the century in question saw a great expansion in furniture ownership and all aspects of domestic comfort, so statements about furniture need to be qualified by reference to time and place as well as social status.
Middling Culture 