From the wonderful Old Bailey Proceedings Online
July 1779: Robert Wright was tried, convicted and fined for libel: singing, speaking (’in a loud voice’) and publishing
divers false, scandalous, infamous, malicious, and obscene songs and and matters of and concerning Elizabeth the wife of Joseph Orpwood and Elizabeth the daughter of the said Joseph reflecting on their character and reputation
The OBP provides a copy of one of Wright’s scurrilous songs, although it was not, it would seem, read out in court as the defence admitted the contents.
…Says she [the daughter], my dear, I hope you’ll be so kind,
You shall ever enjoy me when you are inclin’d;
Tho’ I’d have you take care; for if we are found out,
It will certainly cause a most terrible rout. …
You must know that I lie near the top of the house,
Where there’s none to molest us, no, not so much as a mouse;
In at the garret window you easily may get.
Then into my room you I quickly will let. …
But her father has lately found out their fun,
By which I’m persuaded, his daughter’s undone.
Her mother cries, Hussey, how could you do so?
And Betsy says, Mammy, you very well know,
When you was in your youth you the like game did play,
Then be not so angry, dear mother, I pray;
It is said that one P - in the Borough did dwell,
A man that you loved most wonderous well. …
Since then, my dear mother, your frolicks are known,
I hope you will always be ready to own,
That all have their failings, tho’ a difference in crimes;
And you’ve had your tail-n-gs some hundreds of times. …
There were three prosecution witnesses. The first was Joseph Orpwood, husband and father of the slandered women. Apparently Wright had at one time ‘paid his addresses’ to Elizabeth the daughter, but there had been ‘a kind of detachment’ two years earlier because she ‘did not approve of it’ and would not speak to him afterwards. Then he began ‘industriously’ spreading his songs ‘about the market’, including to some of Joseph’s customers who reported it to him.
Printed copies of the songs, Orpwood discovered, were being sold (1/2 d. a piece) around the neighbourhood; in a confrontation Wright admitted that he was selling them and further insulted Elizabeth ‘before twenty or thirty people’. The other prosecution witnesses further attested to the key issue in libel and slander cases (whether pursued as criminal prosecutions like this one or in litigation): that the scandalous words had been spread publicly and deliberately. Orpwood asserted that the libels had damaged his reputation and with it his business, but: ‘I do not prosecute for any profit but for the sake of publick justice, that we may be cleared from such an infamous libel’.
This justification was significant. After all, the Orpwoods had another legal remedy available to them: they could have sued Wright in the ecclesiastical courts (still quite busy with such cases during the period) or even secular courts, as a ‘tort’. That was, indeed, probably a more common response than a criminal prosecution (as a ‘breach of the peace’), certainly in a court such as the Old Bailey where the case would receive extensive publicity. What if Wright had been acquitted? That could have done the Orpwoods’ reputation no good at all. Taking a (alleged) slanderer to court could be a risky business (Oscar Wilde, more than a century later, being simply the most famous example of how much there was to lose), and the higher the court, the higher the risks.
Although the Orpwoods clearly had a strong case against Wright, nonetheless choosing the Old Bailey entailed some very public raking through of the whole business. Wright’s counsel might have insisted on the song being read to the court, a further humiliation; and in any case the publishers of the OBP made sure that their entire readership could peruse it at their leisure. In addition to his fine, Wright was discharged on condition of making a public apology to the Orpwoods (and paying their costs). The church courts, although they could not levy fines, would have imposed a similar penance. The trouble with taking slander or libel to court, then as now, was that in order to be vindicated it was necessary to remind people, again and again, of the original slurs – even if actual repetition of the defamatory words could be avoided. It might even add to them, if defendants brought their own witnesses (though Wright did not, many defendants in litigation suits certainly did) to counter-attack the plaintiffs and their witnesses.
Nonetheless, throughout the early modern period (though especially in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries), these were risks that many thousands of people were willing to take. Early modern people, it’s often been noted, were extremely law-minded, despite social pressures to avoid where possible the disruption and rancour (and expenses) likely to be generated by court proceedings. That did not prevent the tactical launching of law suits (and even prosecutions) in order to force opponents to come to negotiated agreements. And for all the disapproval of litigiousness, the law courts were never short of business.
And early modern people were extremely sensitive about personal reputation (’good name’, ‘fame’, ‘credit’, ‘honesty’, ‘character’). This is not really surprising. Many plaintiffs in slander or libel cases (the strict distinction between oral slander/written libel was only just emerging, by the way) were ‘middling’ people, tradesmen or craftsmen (Joseph Orpwood was a butcher) whose business relationships were personalised and locally based. Moreover, these were family businesses centred on households, and a slur on a householder’s wife – who was frequently intimately involved in running the business anyway – or children, or servants, reflected on and damaged the whole household. Indeed, the vast majority of defamatory statements recorded in court archives targeted the women of these middling households and centred on their sexual behaviour.
There were, of course, plenty of cases that turned on financial dishonesty (many of them in the archives of the secular courts, whereas much of the research so far has concentrated on church courts, leading to an inevitable emphasis - possibly over-emphasis - on sexual defamation); but it is quite clear that sexual reputation was a vital component of ‘honesty’ and ‘credit’ as a whole (most clearly for women, but men did sue over sexual slanders as well). It was taken for granted that if people were believed to be promiscuous or adulterous, their reputation as a whole and with it their livelihoods would suffer; plaintiffs never needed to spell out how the publicising of sexual slanders against them had ‘prejudiced’ their business. You or I may be entertained (yes, I often am, I admit) by insults such as ‘hot-arsed whore’ - ‘hot-arsed’ being a common reference to veneral disease; you might even think them trivial (and that’s how they were commonly viewed by historians until quite recently); but the vast early modern legal archives of sexual defamation demonstrate compellingly that at the time they could be taken very seriously indeed – and that the risks of public legal action were considered worth taking in the hope of public redress and the restoration of that all-important reputation.
Honour, Reputation and Defamation Bibliography at EMR
Review of Laura Gowing, Domestic dangers: women, words and sex in early modern London
Review of S M Waddams, Sexual slander in nineteenth-century England
Women’s sexuality, slander and witchcraft accusations