Early Modern Notes

Steve asked: what did they do in the seventeenth century for tittle-tattle?

A very good question, although in certain respects the answer would be: pretty much what we do now. A crucial difference in England and Wales (I’m not sure about the Scottish situation?) until the end of the seventeenth century - with an important exception - arises from the strict government controls imposed on the press (and similarly elsewhere in Europe; the idea that freedom of the press was a positive thing did not really emerge until the eighteenth century). This confined presses to London, Oxford and Cambridge, as well as restricting the content of what they could print. (Explicit) criticism of (or scandal about) the government, the monarchy and the church was not allowed. So, although the first English newspapers date from the 1620s, they were slow to develop and not particularly exciting publications (see these pages for an overview and some primary sources; also this and some comments from George Williams). Only with the final lapse of the licensing acts (which was certainly not the end of censorship) in 1695 did the remarkable flowering and diversification of print culture - including news print - that’s such a feature of the eighteenth century really take off.

The important exception, however, was during the civil wars period in the 1640s when, amidst all the political turmoil, the licensing laws lapsed, and there was an explosion of radical, subversive and sometimes scandalous cheap print. Supporters of either side could buy newspapers full of propaganda and scurrilous stories about the enemy in addition to much more serious political and religious pamphlets and texts. For examples: this exhibit; clippings from Mercuris Aulicus (pro-Royalist); the execution of Charles I.

It’s worth adding that despite the restrictions, ‘ephemeral’ literature was already a thriving business in the seventeenth century. Broadsheet ballads on a wide range of topics were bought both to be read - with their striking woodcut prints, they might be pasted on walls like posters - as well as sung. Crime literature is another example (perhaps as old as print itself). It came in two main, though overlapping, forms: a) ‘rogue literature’, filled with stock characters from the ‘criminal underworld’, and ‘criminal lives’ (of highwaymen, pirates etc), which although ostensibly about ‘real’ individuals were often heavily fictionalised, not to say mythologised and stereotyped; and b) pamphlet accounts of sensational crimes and trials (usually murder, witchcraft and the like), in which individual cases were used to illustrate a religious, ‘providentialist’ message (ie, God will always bring heinous crimes to light, no matter how the perpetrators try to hide them and the criminals will in the end see the error of their ways). These would usually (claim to) be based on original legal documents (witness examinations etc), eye-witness trial reports and (sometimes) interviews with the criminals themselves. But that’s a whole topic in itself, so I’ll save it for another time…

Back to scandal. Rather than print, the main written vehicle for scandal, both within neighbourhoods and for the bigger political scene, was probably through manuscript media. ‘Verse libels’ (which could sometimes make it into print) proliferated; they were frequently extremely rude about their victims - scatological and/or sexual - and could land their authors and those who circulated them in trouble with the courts. (Unfortunately, I’m having difficulty at the moment locating any suitable examples. This might have to wait till I get home.)

In fact, our main sources for both written and oral gossip and scandal, neighbourhood slanders and political controversies, are court records. I’ve put up a couple of short examples of both at EMR (unfortunately, no document images for these):

Seditious words

Sexual slander

I’ve written on this blog about seditious words before. You can also read this and find further reading at my crime bibliography and this course bibliography on sedition, riot and popular protest. Adam Fox’s book Oral and literate culture in early modern England also contains a great discussion of how political rumours - and sometimes panics - were spread orally. Indeed, this is an expanding research topic. I have waiting for me at home a copy of The spoken word: oral culture in Britain 1500-1850 (ed. by Fox and Daniel Woolf); a number of chapters in The politics of the excluded 1500-1800 (ed Tim Harris) also focus on this.

Sexual defamation and gossip has been on the historiographical agenda for a little longer - much of it the work of historians concerned with women and/or gender. (I have yet another bibliography for those interested…) The English historians have focused on church court records, which are, believe me, truly wonderful things. (Later, for your delectation, I think I’ll put up some of the York depositions from my MA research, but they’re currently stored on another computer somewhere.) Church courts weren’t simply in the business of disciplining those who transgressed against the church’s authority; a large part of church court business consisted of suits between private individuals. Litigation in the church courts was relatively cheap and easy, and was certainly not confined to the wealthy.

A large proportion of the ‘causes’ or suits were about sexual defamation (if anything, increasingly so as the church courts declined in authority and popularity from the later seventeenth century onwards). That reflected the limits of these courts’ jurisdiction: only slanders that alleged activities that, if true, could lead to a prosecution in the church courts. Slanders alleging secular crimes had to be taken to the secular courts, which could also consider sexual slanders, as you can see from the example I’ve given. ‘Mixed’ spiritual/secular slanders - ‘thou art a thief and a whore’, let’s say - were a grey area, but did often end up in the church courts.

Probably the majority of suits concerned insults (something else I’ve mentioned here on the blog) flung directly at the plaintiff, often in the course of an argument. Others (often the most interesting) centre on reported gossip and sometimes the spread of a rumour can be traced - in pubs and parlours, on the streets and in workplaces. “What news?", apparently, used to be the standard question asked of those joining gatherings. And that’s where things have changed least, including our attitudes to gossip. We disapprove of it; but we do it anyway. It’s destructive of reputations; but it’s also an important form of social glue.

Probably more to be added later, but it’s time for lunch…