Tag: Yorkshire

Agility in the face of adversity

Featured by middlingculture, posted in Guest Post, Long Read

glassmakers, glaziers and the middling sort

Dr Louise Hampson from the University of York traces the fascinating, not-to-mention agile, lives of glaziers and glassmakers in early modern Northern England.

In 1503, Robert Preston, master glazier of York, a prosperous and contented man who headed a significant workshop, died. In his will, he left generous charitable bequests, gave his tools and stock of glass to his partner Thomas Ynglyshe, and bequeathed ‘suitable’ books from his library to his apprentice.1 His biggest legacy was, however, the glass he had painted and installed across the north of England in churches, abbeys, and cathedrals. They had been his workshop’s absolute bread and butter and York was a regional hub for this specialist craft. Window glass itself was not made in England at this date, it was imported from various places on the Continent, but it was here that it was painted, grozed (cut to shape), and leaded up into enormous windows of breath-taking beauty by workshops like Preston’s. In this period the biggest clients for most glass workshops like Preston’s were the thousands of churches, cathedrals and religious houses which had been such a feature of every city, town and village for over five hundred years.2

Ruins of St Mary’s Abbey York © Creative Commons

Fast forward one hundred years to 1603 and the landscape, literal and metaphorical, looked very different. The religious houses had gone, stripped of their lead, windows, and timber. The number of parish churches had been drastically reduced (in York’s case by a third) as income from the laity for prayers, masses and the accoutrements of pre-Reformation worship had stopped, and religious imagery had become a minefield of what was acceptable.3 Although windows had not been a particular target for Reformers (that would come later in the Civil War), the appetite for new figurative religious imagery in church windows had largely dried up and church patronage now took other forms.  

For Robert Thompson, master glazier and glass painter, the head of a glass workshop in York, survival depended on finding new clients, creating new designs and opening up new markets. Fortunately for him, the appetite for conspicuous display had not gone away, but simply shifted in emphasis from the public realm to the private and from the religious to the secular. Where once the wealthy would have paid for windows of saints and angels in churches with donor figures and imprecations to pray for the soul of the donor, they now paid for richly detailed coats of arms demonstrating their social credentials and generosity to the upkeep of the church fabric.4 They also took a fancy to having elaborate painted glass in their houses as windows became bigger. For those newly ennobled or enriched by the dissolution of the monasteries, coats of arms played a key role in establishing or acquiring social status and what better way to show the world your ‘aristocratic’ lineage than in shining glass?5

York Guild of Glaziers register, 1598 © Author’s own

For those lower down the social scale, the ‘middling sort’, the fashion for glazed windows (as opposed to shutters or windows covered with linen or filled in with pieces of flattened horn) began to be an achievable ambition and one which marked out your social status. Glass was still expensive but becoming cheaper as production shifted to home turf and the thicker edge and ‘crown’ (or bullseye) pieces became available, which allowed humbler domestic windows to be constructed from many small pieces leaded into a square or diamond net. The glaziers who would previously have been occupied glazing churches now moved to glazing houses for merchants, craftsmen and the rising professional classes.

Sixteenth century domestic window
© Creative Commons

At the same time as the world of the master glazier had been turned upside down, the Crown had been taking steps to break the Continental monopoly on window glass manufacture and establish glass furnaces on English soil. In 1567, Elizabeth I had brought two Continental glassmakers (Jean Carré of Antwerp and Giacomo Verzelini of Venice) to London to teach the English how to make the fine-quality glass necessary for window glazing.6 The industry took off, initially predominantly in the south of England, with furnaces fired by wood. However, there is early evidence of furnaces being set up in the north with the burial of the ‘uxor Amabie Glassman’ being recorded in Lastingham parish register on 2nd March 1593 and evidence for furnaces being discovered in excavations in Rosedale and Hutton-le-Hole.7

Woodcut of a glass furnace from Vannoccio Biringuccio ‘De la pirotechnica’ published in Venice by Venturino Roffinello, 1540.
© The Corning Museum of Glass, 2002 http://www.CMoG.org

The granting of patents, to allow taxation of the glass furnaces, was a privilege distributed to favoured courtiers: Sir Edward Zouche vied for this ‘business’ with Sir Robert Mansell and this led to the glassmakers of London being charged different rates whilst still facing the challenge of imports which were becoming cheaper in order to compete! However, by 1615, concerns were growing about the depletion of woodlands (and the potential loss of timber for the navy) which led to the ‘Proclamation touching glass’ of 1615 which prohibited the use of wood in furnaces and required the use of coal instead.8 This favoured the furnaces of the Midlands and the north where coal was easily available and encouraged the establishment of furnaces on estates such as Wentworth Woodhouse in south Yorkshire. Mansell petitioned the Earl of Stratford, Thomas Wentworth, to allow a furnace for window glass to be built on his estate because coal was so accessible, and the proximity of nearby rivers allowed easy transport of the finished product.9

1947 newspaper showing how close the open cast mining came to Wentworth Woodhouse! © Creative Commons

Sir Robert Mansell bought out Zouche’s patent rights in 1615 giving him a complete monopoly on glass production, but it appears that the glassmen were an agile bunch who could set up and dismantle furnaces in remote places, like Rosedale, allowing them to evade the taxation system and increase their profits. The whole patent taxation system became so unwieldy and created such a disadvantage for native producers that it was abandoned in 1642.10 Small, family-run furnaces then sprang up around the south Yorkshire coal field which persisted into the nineteenth century: the Bolsterstone glasshouse ran a furnace near Sheffield producing both vessel and window glass (including coloured glasses) from the mid-seventeenth century until the mid-nineteenth century when glass manufacture became industrialised and the new ‘float’ process replaced traditional methods.11 

So, what did all this mean for those of the middling sort? The Thompson family were both members of this social stratum and those who serviced its needs and desires. The Thompsons were master glaziers and glass-painters who had been at the forefront of their craft from 1568-1620 and who rode the wave of change as the appetite for new religious imagery gave way to other work and new designs. The first of the family were recorded as glaziers in 1492, but the complex structure of the craft meant the Thompson sons also trained in other workshops (like the Petty’s) to learn specialist and new skills.12 The eldest Robert Thompson had trained in the workshop of the Petty family who had produced the last of the great glass for York Minster before the Reformation, making the coats of the arms for the windows of the great lantern tower in the late fifteenth century.13 The master glazier John Petty had, uniquely, been memorialised in the glass of the south front, above the civic entrance to the Minster after his death in 1510 possibly because he was mayor of York as well as a master craftsman. This record of the depiction of a master craftsmen in stained glass (now sadly lost) is exceptionally rare and a measure of the status enjoyed by the Pettys in York.14 

Petty glass from the lantern tower of York Minster Cross keys emblem from the glazing of the lantern of the central tower (LTN1-4, LTS1-4).  Painted by the Petty family c.1471, the same device is repeated against varied coloured backgrounds.
© Photo York Glaziers’ Trust, reproduced with kind permission of the Dean and Chapter of York

The Petty family were succeeded as master glaziers to the Minster by another Robert Thompson who had trained in the Petty workshop. His workshop had specific skills in ‘stayning’ or painting, a skill which continued to be in high demand. This was a skill his workshop passed on to one Marmaduke Crosby who took over as master glazier at the Minster in 1620.15 He had been an apprentice in the Thompson workshop and used his skills to design and make glass armorials for the York mansion of Sir Thomas Ingram, a self-made man who had risen to prominence on the back of the misfortune of others – he bought his country house, Temple Newsam near Leeds, from the bankrupt and disgraced Earl of Lennox for £12,000.16 Crosby made glass for his York house, Ingram’s Mansion, which was built on the north side of the Minster and installed armorials in the nave aisle which faced his house.17

The Ingram arms in the north nave aisle (n28). The date ‘1623’ ties these to the period when Marmaduke Crosby was working in this area of the Minster and on Ingram’s York mansion, so these arms are identified as his work.
© David O’Connor

With the onset of the Civil War, one might have expected the joyless and miserly Parliamentarian Ingram to dispense with Crosby’s services, not least as the Crosby family may well have been Catholics, but on the contrary, he transferred their contract to work on transforming Temple Newsam into a statement of his status and to design and install elaborate armorials to demonstrate his landed gentry credentials.18 Crosby had trained in a workshop which had been devoted to religious imagery whose skills were honed for the prestigious ecclesiastical clients which had been the backbone of the craft, but times had changed and the Crosbys nimbly switched their focus, adapted and remarketed their skills to appeal to a new and emerging domestic market, a market which continued to grow throughout the rest of the seventeenth century. 

Supported by the growth of local furnaces producing window glass of fine quality – possibly even producing some glass themselves, although the evidence is ambiguous – the Crosbys were well-placed to capitalise on these new opportunities and to reinvent themselves as suppliers to the gentry and to the middling sort who wanted a little bit of what had previously been the preserve of the church and the aristocracy.19 Agile and quick to pick up on new trends as old markets disappeared and new ones emerged (or could be built), the glaziers and glassmen – and women – of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries didn’t merely survive, they thrived!

Dr Louise Hampson

University of York

1 Testamenta Eboracensis: A Selection of Wills from the Registry at York. Vol IV ed. James Raine, Surtees Society 53 (Durham , 1869), 216-217.

2 John Blair and Nigel Ramsay, English Mediaeval Industries: Craftsmen, Techniques, Products (London, Hambledon Press, 1991), 275.

3 https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/yorks/city-of-york/pp365-404

4 See, for example, the depictions of the Roos family in the St William window (York Minster, nVII) c.1425

5 See for example Brereton Hall, Cheshire

6 Geoffrey Lane, “A World Turned Upside Down: London Glass Painters 1600-1660” in Journal of Stained Glass 29, (2005), 45-75.

7 ‘Sixteenth-Century Glass-making in Yorkshire: Excavations at Furnaces at Hutton and Rosedale, North Riding, 1968-1971’ in Post-Medieval Archaeology, 1972/01, Vol.6; Issue 1.

8 Eleanor Smith Godfrey, The Development of English Glassmaking 1560-1640 (Oxford, Clarendon, 1975), 16-28.

9 Denis Ashurst, The History of South Yorkshire Glass (Sheffield: J.R. Collins, 1992), 19-20.

10 Ibid, 9-10.

11 Ian Bailiff, “Bolsterstone Glass House, Stocksbridge, Sheffield, South Yorkshire: Luminescence Dating Report” Research Dept Report Series No.98-2010 (London: English Heritage, 2010).

12 John A. Knowles, “The Glass-Painters of York VIII: The Thompson family”, Notes and Queries S IX, no.12 (1921):163-165.

13 Knowles, “The Glass-Painters of York VII: The Petty family”, Notes and Queries S IX, no.12 (1921): 21-22.

14 David O’Connor, “John Petty, Glazier and Mayor of York: an early sixteenth-century memorial window formerly in the south transept of York Minster”, in Glas. Malerei. Forschung: Internationale Studien Zu Ehren Von Rüdiger Becksmann  ed. Ivo Rauch and Daniel Hess (Germany: Deutsche Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 2004), 254.

15 York Minster Archives E3/62/2

16 Anthony F. Upton, Sir Arthur Ingram, c.1565-1642: a study of the origins of and English landed family” (Oxford: OUP, 1961), 161-171.

 17 York Minster Archives E362/3

18 Upton, Sir Arthur Ingram Chapter 6.

19 Entries in the York Minster Fabric Rolls of the 1630s for purchases of turves for the glazier’s ‘furnace’ may refer to glass manufacture, but equally may be for the firing of painted glass and staining.

The Early Modern Precariat: Women in the Precarious Household Middling

by middlingculture, posted in Long Read, Project Post, Social Status Calculator

*Trigger Warning: mentions of coercive control and financial abuse*

Woman with Broom. Dummy Board at V&A. Although this image is of a wealthier woman than our examples, she is said to represent ‘industry’ by her broom. Women of precarious middling status were certainly industrious! For a discussion of these kinds of images see: Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson, A Day at Home in Early Modern England (Yale University Press, 2017), p.228.

Women in early modern England occupied positions across the “middling” scale.  There was no singular “female experience” in this period, but a rich and varied spectrum—one in which women suffered at the hands of patriarchal ideologies but in which many women still had degrees of economic independence and cultural and sexual agency. 

This blog explores the complexity of two women’s experiences of their social worlds and the precarity of their positions.  Precarity was a fundamental feature of early modern social status, with individuals socially mobile both upwards and downwards.  Young individuals could be well-poised to establish themselves in a trade or profession, but their advancement was by no means guaranteed. Similarly, in a period in which credit and reputation was all-important, few were ever entirely safe from social and economic deterioration.

Our social groups calculator, launched last week, sets out new social status categories for early modern England. In compiling it, we took into account different gendered experiences as well as different life-stages: things were complicated in the period because a young apprentice (ostensibly in the “latent/emergent category”) might come from almost nothing, or they might be the younger son of gentry parents who had helped start him in a powerful and potentially lucrative trade (such as merchant or haberdasher).  Similar complications exist within the “precarious household middling”: individuals in this category had the run of their own household and likely had an income derived from their trade or other practices, as well as through domestic production of foodstuffs or goods. 

Such a position was not always dependent on a male head of house or a “nuclear family.”  Certain widows and older, socially-established single women sometimes fell into this category.  They held property (either owned or rented), derived an income (from land, some form of trade or production, or taking up a late husband’s trade and/or his apprentices or shop, or other small inheritance), yet their independence was not future-proof. Various factors, including legal costs, rent, wages or trade disputes, and reputational damage, could jeopardise a woman’s station.

This blog introduces two examples emerging from Middling Culture’s archival research that demonstrate the real-life consequences of social and economic precarity for those within the “precarious household middling” group.  It looks at two means of precarity for the women in question: i) marriage coercion and ii) wage holding and worth.

1. Marriage Coercion in Yorkshire: Hanson and Turnar

In 1568, Isabelle Hanson was subject to a marriage validity suit before the Consistory Court of York (an ecclesiastical court that dealt with “spiritual” infringements, including behavioural offences such as adultery or marriage disputes) (CP.G.1406, 975, 1008).  The testimonies, known as depositions, from such courts are not straightforward or direct examples of words spoken by the individuals in question; rather, they were generated “collaboratively” by the subject, scribes and clerks, and/or legal intermediaries.  Yet they can be treated as examples of real actions, situations, and sometimes of quoted speech.[i]

 In Hanson’s case, the court wanted to establish whether she and George Copley were legally married—something that could occur in this period without a formal church wedding but via a “contracting” or “handfasting” in pretty much any location, provided sufficient witnesses were present and the correct words were spoken and tokens exchanged.

Although a singlewoman, it seems Hanson had some stable living, including a “farmhold” (a small piece of farming land) which she used to make money, on top of other unstated forms of income.  It is possible that this financial situation led Hanson to value her independence or for her to wait, as we might put it now, for the right man to come along—or no man at all.  In any case, her testimony in the court suggests she was in no rush to settle into a marriage: she claims she had previously “contracted” herself to another man (Stephen Trygot), who then promptly disappeared for some months.  Convinced he would not return (and seemingly relieved at the fact), Hanson perhaps thought she was free of undesirable couplings.  But she explains that her uncle then impatiently forced her hand in marriage, declaring his insistence (perhaps as someone with financial and/or familial authority over her as guardian or head of household) that she marry George Copley. 

Despite the “handfasting” ceremony having gone ahead, the Consistory Court process allowed Hanson the chance to revisit the “oaths” sworn.  She and her representatives understood the dynamics of the court; Hanson undermined the validity of the contract by explaining that she was “soo constreined by her said uncle” when she spoke the words of marriage, suggesting they were not spoken freely and willingly.

Other individuals who testified in the case shed some more light on Hanson’s situation.  Copley was the servant of a seemingly unscrupulous local landowner, Gervaise Bosvile, with whom Hanson was presently at suit over her farmhold.  Copley himself told the court that she held the lease from Bosvile, who was her “Landlord,” and that there was “a suit made by … Mr Bosvile against her for a farmhold (and that rightfully).” He minimises the significance of this legal clash by suggesting that the farm in question is “but a small part of her living.”  In other words, she could do without the extra income because she had, he stated, “living elsewhere.”

Copley’s words paint a fascinating, if enigmatic, picture of Hanson’s social situation. According to him, she had a “living” (perhaps an allowance or inheritance, or perhaps a trade), happily supplemented by the profits of agricultural land rented from a local gentleman.  Her situation seems almost comfortable.

Other comments paint a different picture.  Although Copley minimised the significance of the legal suit over the farmhold, numerous depositions imply that Bosvile was blackmailing Hanson into marriage by using her lease to the farm as leverage.  Bosvile had repeatedly approached Hanson trying to broker a marriage with his servant Copley (for what reasons remain unclear).  Hanson’s interrogatories (the list of questions posed on her behalf to deponents—those testifying) suggest she was “afraid.”

These claims of fear would mean Hanson was hardly financially stable and suggest that she required the farm’s income to stay afloat.  Perhaps Bosvile knew this.  Hanson’s uncle told the court that once she and Copley were married, “Mr Bosvile said that he would discharge her of all suits and other troubles.”  This implicitly-detectable economic abuse indicates how single-woman-run households could be capable of a comfortable “Living” (as Copley puts it) but equally how such comfort or security remained contingent upon patriarchal power structures and institutions such as marriage.

Other examples of economic marital coercion arise from the York Consistory Court.  Most egregious is the case of Christina Turner of Hutton Cranswick in 1593 (CP.G.2671 & A).  Turner explains that she and her late husband were tenants of “a cottage in Fosen belonging to Christopher Bell, father of … Richard [Bell]” at the time her husband died.  They “had no interest therein but at the good will and pleasure of the said Christopher, under whom they held the same from year to year.”  This married couple were part of the “precarious household middling,” with no long-term claim or contract to their place of residence, though they seemingly ran their own house and presumably paid rent.  Within three days of her husband’s death, Christopher Bell came to the house and “discharged her of the same and cruelly threatened her that she should not tarry there except she would grant her good will of Jane Stocke[r], her daughter, to Richard Bell [his son].”  This court case appears several more times in the records, with both Christina Turnar and Jane Stocker herself insisting that the landlord exploited the newly-widowed Turnar’s precarious position in order to manipulate her daughter into marrying his son.

This case demonstrates how it can be difficult to place women who occupied a grey line between “precarious household middling” and “dependent poor.”  Turnar and her husband remained vulnerable to the caprices and abuses of their landlord.  Their precarity also had an effect on others associated with the household, in this case on the young woman Jane Stocker. 

Yet the case also shows the complexity in questions of marriage and social status and the room for agency among those on the lowest rungs of the middling.  It is perhaps unlikely, given her mother and father-in-law’s financial position, that Jane Stocker had a significant dowry; however, because her mother had remarried it is equally possible that Stocker’s late father had a portion aside only for Jane; this would offer a further financial motivation for the Bells’ interest in a marriage.  In any case, the prospect of marrying the son of a substantial landowner could well seem an appealing prospect.  Yet Stocker prizes other questions, not least that of consent, above the match.  Her own deposition (included in an appendix here[ii]) is testament to the agency women sometimes displayed in the ecclesiastical court, using otherwise largely patriarchal legal structures to resist those with whom they did “utterly dissent a match.”  Although the outcomes of this particular case and Hanson’s above have not remained on the record, there are numerous examples where women who insisted upon their lack of true consent to a contract successfully had their marriage dissolved or annulled.

Ann Johnson, Testamentary Case, 1629

Ann Johnson was a widow and woman who sat on the wavy line between the dependent poor and the precarious household middling. The company she kept—of shoemakers, clerks, stationers, and clothiers—was solidly middling; she was able to live by her ‘handie labour’ in the service of one Thomas Deane and ‘hath wrought for day wages over fower yeares & […] her work is commonly stock cardinges’; she also had at least some furniture, ready money of around £3, a brass pot, and bonds in writing. However, she was keenly aware that this if she lost favour with Deane that she ‘might goe a beginge’.[iii] At the end of her life, Ann had the vestiges of what would have been a solidly middling married life – a chest, a coffer, a brass pot, bonds owed to her, and paperwork – but, she rented a room in a house and lived with some need to earn a wage to avoid falling into poverty, which was more akin to a wage labourer.

Ann’s master, Thomas Deane, went to Chester’s Consistory Court to dispute the distribution of Anne’s belongings at her death. The court wished to uncover whether Ann had been coerced into leaving her goods to her master, Thomas Deane, and whether she had made any kind of nuncupative will (a will declared by speech rather than formally written and signed). Thomas Deane, the master of the workhouse where Ann worked, claimed that she left all of her money and possessions to him, to the great distress of her family, and the detriment of her great-niece Margaret Plombe was the other possible beneficiary of Ann’s goods. The depositions given by witnesses on both sides of the argument give a fascinating insight into what the end-of-life of a precariously middling woman looked like: vulnerable and independent, but with enough stuff to be fought over.

Thomas Deane claims that in the presence of him and Gwen Evans, one of his wool carders, at his work house, Ann said that she would ‘leave all of her goods unto Thomas Deane […] wishing him to give something hee pleased unto Margaret Plombe daughter of Phillip Plombe’ and that ‘she uttered these words in earnest but whether to please […] Thomas Deane or not he cannot answere’. Gwen Evans, confirms this, saying that Ann:

divers times betwixt Christmas last and the time the decedent died […] Ann Johnson, being of perfect sence and memory did say & affirme that her master Thomas Deane should have all that ever shee had and wished that hee would give something what hee pleased unto Katherine’s Wench, meaneinge Margaret Plombe daughter unto Plombe, conditionally that he should keepe what hee gave her in his hands & not give it to her mother for she would spend it.

Her colleagues, then, were very certain that Ann intended to bequeath her possessions to her master, Thomas Deane, and that she spoke ‘in earnest’ and repeatedly whilst at work.

However, the court wanted to establish whether Ann was coerced by Thomas Deane, and responses to questions posed to other witnesses suggest her vulnerability. Elizabeth Quaile, another of Ann’s colleagues, says that ‘she is a hired servant’ to Deane and that she is:

uncertaine whether the decedent did speake in earnest […] & saith the occasion that moved her to utter the words predeposed […] was that [Thomas Deane] asked her to whom shee would leave her goods & asked her what shee would leave to divers of her frends nameinge them & she said shee would leave all shee had unto him & none other.

Elizabeth illustrates a power dynamic between Thomas Deane as workhouse owner and Anne, which suggests the coercion Thomas Deane had over Ann’s public declaration of her wishes.

Those that socialised with Ann also told a similar story, with Alice Lea, who encountered Ann before the fire at the home of her niece Kathryn Plombe in St Mary’s parish, chester, believed that Thomas ‘hath not or ought not to have any of the goods of the decedent […] either by any pretended will or otherwise reference’. She’d heard Ann say that Margaret ‘shall have what I have’ but that she ‘did not desire them to be present as witnesses’. Thomas Fletcher, shoemaker, also present by the fire, agreed with Alice’s details, adding that Ann ‘confessed the said Deane had money of hers in his hands and yf shee shold take it out of his hands hee would let her have no worke & then shee said shee might goe a beginge’. Ann’s financial situation, however, remained murky, with others, who read her paperwork to her, claiming she had money owed to her too. Richard Moreton, a stationer who lived in the same house as Ann often ‘reade over the writings and bonds the decedent had for what money was owing unto her’ and often heard Ann say before him and his wife that Margaret should have her ‘brass pot’ and ‘all her goods’ and William Price, another literate man, provided the same reading service for Ann so that she could plan ‘when the sum was due’. Ann was, then, likely short on ready money but wealthier than her material circumstances showed, due to the debts owing to her.

Like Jane, it seems Ann’s position on the lowest rungs of the middling put her into a position where she was susceptible to exploitation from powerful men. She had enough wealth to make it worth Thomas’ time to fight the case to court, but not enough to live out her widowhood entirely comfortably. This tension is exposed by Alice Lea and Thomas Fletcher who demonstrate the powerful coercion Ann suffered through Thomas’ withholding of her wages; financial control therefore led to Ann’s public declaration of her wishes at work.

The last person to spend time with Ann before she died was Anne Fornby, her neighbour who recalls that, whilst she knelt by Ann’s bedside in the upper chamber of her house, she heard her say ‘good cousin Anne be good to my Peggie, meaning Margaret Plombe, a childe daughter to Phillippe Plombe & Katherine Plombe’. She also testifies to the coercion saying that Ann often promised ‘almost anybody something at her death’ and that she ‘did not with a full intent and meaning leave anything to the said Deane, but only to please him because she had work from him’. After Ann died, Fornby, being left with her keys, ‘tooke out thereof three poundes VIIIs & noe more’ from her ‘chest or coffer’ in order to keep it safe.

This is where the case ends, without a written resolution, but the fact that the dispute over Ann Johnson’s goods reached the early seventeenth courtroom is fascinating, when it was only in 2015 that Thomas’ type of coercion was acknowledged by the criminalisation of controlling behaviour. There are parallels between Jane and Ann: both were living independently and sought to maintain their status as single women; both had a small amount of wealth – enough for them to become the targets of more powerful men; both were subject to economic abuse; and their actions, words and mode of living were subject of consistory court scrutiny. Their precariously middling status, where they were able to generate enough income to live alone, also meant that they were at risk of falling into poverty, and their social networks were keenly aware of this fact in the depositions they gave. Despite this, it seems the consistory court valued and sought to establish consent—to determine whether yes really did mean yes in both cases, given the incidence of precarious, single women’s coercion in early modern England.

By Callan Davies and Hannah Lilley

[i] (For more on the evidential issues of depositions and their language, perhaps start with the work of Laura Gowing or Frances Dolan’s True Relations).

[ii] “…about a year ago, this examinant’s father-in-law died and her mother (being then left a poor, comfortless widow) was threatened diverse times by the father of Richard Bell, that unless she would maek them atch that his son Richard Bell and her daughter, [me], might be married together, he would put her forth of her house wherein she then dwelt and she would make up that match she should nto want anything that he could do for her, wherewith their said mother being moved, acquainted this respondent therewith and required her consent thereunto, whereunto this respondent did utterly dissent a match, which she altogether disliked, and told her mother that she had rather be buried quick than match that way. Whereupon her mother once or twice beat [me] very sore and said to [me] that she should have the said Richard Bell to her husabnd whether she would or not. And in so much that even this day twelve months past, the said Richard Bell’s father and Richar Bell himself and Mr Sadler, vicar of Foston, and two or three more dined at [my] mother’s house at Foston, and after dinner was done the said Bell’s father and Mr Sadler called on [me] to go with them into a lathe of Bell’s thereby, which [i] at first Refusing, [my] mother again threatened her to go with them. And thereupon she went with them into the said lathe, to whom neither before that time nor at that tyme, the said Richard Bell did ever once move a word to [me] for [my] consent or good will to marry him, until Mr Sadler the vicar commanded them to join hands…” ()

[iii] Chester Record Office WC 1629.

[iv]< https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/controlling-or-coercive-behaviour-intimate-or-family-relationship#:~:text=or%20coercive%20behaviour%3A-,The%20offence%20of%20controlling%20or%20coercive%20behaviour,force%20on%2029%20December%202015.&gt;