Early Modern Notes

A read-worthy essay on law- and crime-related biographies (pdf) in the ODNB Online. (The essay is free to access, but you’ll need a subscription [or a good friend with a subscription] to access the biographies mentioned in it.)

From Natalie of Philobiblon, the news that upstairs in the English department there’s a new colleague who is working on the biographies of Renaissance ‘nobodies’. (Yes, I am mildly entertained to get Aber news first from a blogger in London, but no doubt I’d have bumped into her sooner or later…)

Sometimes amongst early modern court records, you find autobiographical material. This is most common in what are known as ‘settlement examinations’ or in the petitions of paupers for poor relief: in both cases the life of the petitioner or examinant is being set out to establish the case (or lack of it) for eligibility for parish-based support. But there are a few others, confessions to crimes that (for less immediately obvious reasons) reach back into the personal history of the offender.
(more…)

I was looking for someone who wasn’t, as it turned out, in the DNB and turned this up. Not quite Bodyline, mind you. Oh, The Ashes they’re a-coming and we’re gonna thrash those upstart Aussies. (Like we’re thrashing those upstart Kiwis, no doubt.)

Christina (or possibly Christiana) Willes, “pioneer of round-arm bowling in cricket” (forerunner of modern overarm bowling), was baptised in February 1786, the daughter of a Kent landowner. She married Richard Thomas Hodges, another Kent squire in 1810. (Their death dates are not known). It was their son Edward who recorded his mother’s contribution to the development of the game in a 1907 article:

It was my mother’s skill in throwing the ball to him [John Willes, Christina's brother] for practice in the barn at Tonford … He then trained a dog to fetch the ball, and there was a saying that Willes, his sister, and his dog could beat any eleven in England.

There seems to be some debate over whether the story should be taken at face value or whether “the suggestion that John Willes took his cue from his sister could… have had its origins in the playful ridicule of contemporaries”. The truth of the matter could have some significance:

Her name has been invoked by historians of women’s cricket as that of the first of her sex to assist in the game’s technical development, and was mentioned, inevitably, in coverage of the battles over the discriminatory admission policies of the MCC, which belatedly opened its doors to women members in 1999.

Whether she gave him the idea or not, John Willes’ adoption of the bowling style itself incurred some controversy.

John Willes first bowled round-arm at Lord’s in 1806; ten years later the MCC formally outlawed the practice, but Willes continued to use the style in county games and tried it once again at Lord’s, famously, in a match between Kent and the MCC in 1822. He was no-balled for throwing—becoming the first player to incur this penalty—and reportedly rode out of Lord’s ‘in high dudgeon’, vowing never to play the game again (Frindall, 14). The umpire reputedly acted under the influence of Lord Frederick Beauclerk, a formidable cricketing presence of the era and a decided opponent of the innovation. After holding trials in the previous year the MCC gave its approval to round-arm bowling in 1828; the change was formally written into a full revision of the game’s rules in 1835.

Never say that cricket doesn’t move with the times.

It’s over 80 years since Alice Clark wrote what is recognised as a classic work of women’s history: Working life of women in the seventeenth century (1919). However, it’s spent long periods since then out of print – and it’s out of print again at the moment (as far as I can tell), despite having been republished by Routledge in 1992 with a splendid new introduction by Amy Louise Eriksson. There was also a 1982 edition introduced by Jane Lewis and Miranda Chaytor, and a 1960s reprint of the first edition. I thoroughly recommend it, but you’ll have to try the library or hunt down a secondhand copy, I’m afraid.

In addition, there’s very little about Clark online (she is mentioned here), which is my excuse for writing this. I have a soft spot for Alice Clark (not least for her maxim that “those who don’t make mistakes don’t make anything”). This was her only book. She wasn’t a conventional academic historian; rather, a feminist and businesswoman whose life encompassed many other activities and who only began historical research at the age of 38. In fact, she was a member of the Clark family, who were Quakers, of shoemaking fame (you know, those horrible sensible shoes you wore as a kid because your mum made you, except they recently got all trendy and cute).

Born in 1874, she was strongly influenced by the ‘first wave’ of feminism, particularly by debates about female economic dependence and ‘parasitism’ on men and its negative effects on women and society as a whole. She also needs to be understood in the context of early 20th-century concerns about the social effects of industrialisation and pioneering sociological investigations into contemporary conditions of the poor, and increasing interest in what was then called ‘economic history’ (it would now be termed social history). The contribution made to that historiography by women was subsequently ignored by many historians; feminist historians have in more recent decades worked to reconsider their significance.

Indeed, women were significant participants in what we might justifiably call the ‘first wave’ of (academic) social history in the early 20th century, only some of them writing women’s history. For its practitioners, it was just as important as the predominant political histories of states. But both social history and women’s history remained at the margins of the discipline.

This was in part because many of the practitioners were at the margins, or ‘amateurs’ working outside academic institutions, to which women were only just being admitted. Some universities were more welcoming than others. The London School of Economics was co-educational from its founding in 1895; women as both staff (including history professors such as Lilian Knowles and Eileen Power) and students constituted a significant minority presence. It was prepared to include unconventional students like Alice Clark, who was probably attracted by its concerns for contemporary social policy issues as much as the space it gave to economic history.

But before she went to the LSE, she spent much of her adult life (despite long periods of illness) working in the family factory, starting with an informal apprentice, to become a director in 1904. She was active in the suffrage cause, as a Liberal and on the Friends’ Committee for the Relief of War Victims. She originally took up a studentship to research women’s history in 1913 during one of her enforced breaks for illness, and completed her research after the war. After Working life of women was finished, she returned to the family business; she died in 1934.

She began her book with a forceful rejection of any notion that women were “a static factor in social developments” and therefore unimportant in historical study. On the contrary, she argued, they changed considerably over time with changing environments, and those changes require careful study because of the close bonds between women and men and women’s (indirect) social and moral influence. And she saw the seventeenth century as a period of profound change in English women’s lives; not perhaps in terms of most women’s actual experiences of change so much as in underlying trends – the forces represented by ‘capitalism’.

She used a wide range of sources (most of them in printed editions rather than directly in the archives): letters, diaries, wills, account books, magistrates’ wage rate assessments, parish records, guild and municipal records, tax returns, workhouse records, as well as prescriptive literature, pamphlets and literary sources. They were often quoted at length, employing a technique of building up a larger picture through details about and by individuals.

She traced a three-stage process of change in the organisation of work, particularly affecting women:

1. “Domestic industry”: all production takes place within the family, which is entirely self-sufficient.
2. “Family industry” (existing alongside 1. during the middle ages into the 17th century): the family is the key unit for the production of goods for sale (or exchange). While some household members might work for wages, most of the work was carried out within the household, and its income belonged to the whole family rather than to individuals.
3. “Capitalistic industry or industrialism” (first introduced in the 13th century, but not significantly expanding until the late 17th century): production takes place outside the household, controlled by the owners of capital while labourers receive (and compete for) individual wages.

Different groups of women were, however, affected differently by these changes:

1. “Capitalists”, including both the aristocracy/gentry and nouveau-riche;
2. The “common people”, small farmers, independent tradesmen/artisans etc (whom Clark saw as both the largest group and the most vigorous and worthy)
3. Pitiful “wage earners”, trapped in poverty, a small but growing group.

Among women of the first group, activity and hardiness gave way to idleness, pleasure and parasitism; equally affected but in a very different way were women of the wage-earning group who were dependent on incomes insufficient to support families. Women who had worked in higher-status, economically rewarding crafts and trades and professions were increasingly squeezed out by demands for capital and/or specialist training, and forced into insecure, low-paid and low-skill sectors. Everywhere, she argued, the consequence was the diminishment of women’s roles and status within the household and with it their influence on society in general, as this period saw a fundamental transition from a society which did not rigidly distinguish between domestic occupations and other work settings, to the modern division between ‘home’ (for women) and ‘work’ (for men).

So, what do historians make of it 80+ years later? It would be surprising, really, if 3 decades of research since the 1968 reprint had not led to considerable modification of Clark’s work (she herself foresaw the possibility of it being discarded “when a deeper understanding of history becomes possible”). In some ways, it remains virtually unrivalled as a broad-ranging survey, since recent research has tended to be more specialised and narrowly focused. Many modern historians of work, including women’s work, would not argue with Clark’s broad conception of economic life and production. Research has more than demonstrated the key importance of the household and domestically-organised production in the early modern economy and society (and Clark was right: the ‘housewife’, whether you think of her as parasitic or an essential, unpaid service worker, is a modern invention). And her book, with its remarkable range and imaginative use of source materials, continues to stimulate research and ideas.

However, it’s agreed that her chronological framework was unsatisfactory and too simplistic. A number of developments she associated with the seventeenth century (such as the ‘masculinisation’ of professions like midwifery, and the removal of most production from the domestic environment) properly belong to the later 18th century or even later. She equated ‘capitalism’ with ‘industrialism’, but the former undoubtedly preceded the latter by some centuries. Further, subsistence household economies were already extremely rare by the 17th century.

Clark’s pessimistic view of modernisation has been criticised in view of long-term continuities in women’s work (low-paid, unskilled, casual, etc), and her emphasis on capitalism as the primary driving force with overwhelmingly negative effects has been challenged. Capitalism, from ‘putting out’ industries to the new factories of the 19th century, could equally offer women new working opportunities. The average differences between men’s wages and women’s wages have remained virtually unchanged since the middle ages. The single line downwards from a past ‘golden age’ has been rejected. Equally, though, its opposite, ‘whiggish’ celebratory accounts of ‘progress’ for women into modernity, are treated with much more caution too. Clark’s research reminds us that there are alternative, more sobering, interpretations.

Reading

Alice Clark, Working life of women in the seventeenth century, intro and ed by Amy Louise Eriksson (3rd edn, 1992 [1919])

Judith Bennett, ‘ “History that stands still”: women’s work in the European past’, Feminist Studies 14 (1988)

Maxine Berg, ‘The first women economic historians’, Economic History Review XLV (1992)

Maxine Berg, A woman in history: Eileen Power, 1889-1940 (1996)

Lindsey Charles and Lornal Duffin (eds), Women and work in pre-industrial England (1985)

Michael Roberts, ‘Sickles and scythes: women’s work and men’s work at harvest time’, History Workshop Journal 7 (1979)

Michael Roberts, ‘Women and work in sixteenth-century English towns’, in Penelope Corfield and Derek Keene (eds), Work in Towns 850-1850 (1990)

Olive Schreiner, Women and labour (1911)

Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden age to separate spheres: a review of the categories and chronology of English women’s history’, Historical Journal 36 (1993)

* For those with access, Alice Clark is in the Online DNB *

(And after all this activity in the last couple of days, I think I might just go into blogging hibernation for the rest of week…)

Hannah Snell, eighteenth-century ‘sexual impostor’, is one of this week’s featured lives at the ODNB (free access for the next few days only).

Mary, Lady Dering, seventeenth-century composer, is also featured.

Well, I thought the special Christmas links requests worked well – might do that again too – so lets try something more ambitious.

Is there an individual from the early modern period (the usual, 1500-1800ish) you’d like to know more about? I will endeavour to write short biographies, depending on how many requests you send in and how soon I get bored of it, based on whatever secondary sources (online or traditional) I can easily get hold of; and, at the very least, I’ll try to provide some links.

And please don’t suggest people like Elizabeth I or Napoleon Bonaparte for whom there are squillions of biographies already out there. (Though we don’t have to be talking totally obscure; well-known people are fine.)

It’s a curious thing, but one of the most significant figures in nineteenth-century Welsh cultural history is an upper-class English woman: Lady Charlotte Guest.

Lady Charlotte (born Charlotte Bertie in 1812, daughter of an English earl, brought up in Lincolnshire) came to live in Wales only after her marriage, in 1833, to the wealthy iron-master and MP for Merthyr Tydfil, Sir Josiah John Guest. She’d had, as a child, a passion for literature, medieval history and a range of other subjects, and an education that fostered her interests. And, fortunately for historians and biographers, she kept a diary for much of her life.

During the two decades or more that she spent in Wales, apart from rearing 10 children and becoming actively involved in local philanthropic work and promoting education, including adult education, she taught herself Welsh and translated into English the beautiful medieval Welsh tales to which she gave the name by which they are today most commonly known: The Mabinogion. (And if you’ve never read it, you should, although you might do better with one of these two modern editions.)

In 1852 her husband died and she took over management of his great ironworks for some years until she married her son’s tutor, Charles Schreiber, and the pair became avid collectors travelling Europe to create what would subsequently become the Schreiber Collection of ceramics in the V & A Museum.

Biography
A note on Lady Charlotte Guest
Short encyclopedia biography
Extracts from Lady Charlotte’s journal, 1833-52 (with biographical introduction)
Bust of Charlotte Guest (and bust of her first husband Josiah John Guest)
Merthyr’s famous sons and daughters

Merthyr Tydfil
Merthyr Tydfil and the iron industry

Some of the earliest Mabinogi manuscripts: The Red Book of Hergest and The White Book of Rhydderch
More on the Mabinogion
Project Gutenberg edition

Later, I should try to follow this up with something on Augusta Hall, Lady Llanover (of whom there’s much to be said about strong womanhood, harps and the invention of Welsh costume). In the meantime, here (after the fold) are the opening paragraphs of one of the stories in the Mabinogion, The Dream of Maxen Wledig.

(more…)

Jeffreys was one of a number of Welshmen who were prominent in law and government in the decades following the Restoration (eg, Leoline Jenkins, John Vaughan, John Trevor, William Williams).* He is also, of course, the most (in)famous.

He came from a notable Royalist Denbighshire family (mind you, most Denbighshire gentry families were strong Royalists…), and his grandfather had also been a professional judge. He was educated in Shrewsbury, then London, Cambridge and the Inner Temple. He courted a wealthy gentry woman, but after being thrown out by her father, married instead her companion, Sarah Neesham; their marriage was happy and produced seven children before Sarah’s death in 1678. (He married again, less happily, in 1679.)

Meanwhile, he was starting his legal career. He was called to the bar in 1668, and “became known as a master of cross-examination” at the Old Bailey and Middlesex sessions. He was evidently skilled in the art of gaining patronage (the biographer, Paul Halliday, who is broadly sympathetic, nonetheless uses words like “ingratiate” and “wheedle”, but it’s not clear to me that what he did was in any way unusual for the times). He made money, and bought himself estates in Buckinghamshire, where he played host to Charles II in 1678, who “reportedly drank his host’s health seven times”.

Soon after this he first became a judge, as Recorder in the Old Bailey. His style as a judge was decidedly interventionist (not unusual during that period, it should be noted, even if for moderns it represents another black mark against him). He was an early sceptic of the Popish Plot, and “a moderate in a year of immoderation”. Though evidently no great fan of Catholicism, he was already a strong supporter of the Catholic Duke of York (later James II), and amidst the anti-Catholic hysteria careful to “distinguish between Catholics generally and traitors specifically”. (For many, there simply was no difference.) However, he was already taking a severe line with ‘whig’ dissenters who criticised the government; and increasingly isolated amidst the whig tendencies of the governors of the City of London.

So it was possibly a relief to all concerned when he resigned as Recorder and was subsequently appointed Chief Justice of Chester (presiding over both the Great Sessions of Cheshire and of the Chester circuit of the Welsh Great Sessions – Flintshire, Denbighshire and Montgomeryshire). Nonetheless he continued to work as a lawyer in the London courts (in which he frequently clashed with his Welsh opponent William Williams), vigorously representing the king’s interests, including the prosecution of Lord Russell for treason.

(The biographer is not really interested in these more mundane matters, but during his stint in Cheshire and Wales Jeffreys also upheld the crown’s interests by pursuing coiners with the same energy that he brought to prosecutions for sedition and treason.)

In 1683 he became the Chief Justice of the court of King’s Bench. King’s Bench frequently dealt with weighty treason trials and within days of the appointment, Jeffreys was presiding over the trial of the whig ‘martyr’ Algernon Sidney for his involvement with the Rye House Plot (and in a sense sparring with William Williams again; although, since Sidney was charged with high treason he was not permitted legal counsel in court, he did take informal legal advice from Williams).**

In 1684, Jeffreys became an Assize judge, and his very first tour of duty was on the western circuit. In May 1685 he was elevated to the peerage as first Baron Jeffreys of Wem by the new king, James II. And it was probably inevitable that he would be among the judges appointed to return to the west for the trials following the Monmouth Rebellion: the ‘Bloody Assizes’.

And so to the events that forever sealed his reputation as Bloody Judge Jeffreys. His actions are entirely consistent in the light of his career to that point, his unwavering loyalty to the Stuart monarchy and his harsh attitude towards those who threatened it in any way. His treatment in court of Lady Alice Lisle, an elderly widow accused of treason simply for taking a few rebels into her house after their defeat, has been particularly condemned (although the biographer notes that there is some doubt about the reliability of the only account of the trial). Less often noted, perhaps, is that Jeffreys delayed her execution and recommended her to the king for a pardon; as the biographer says: “it was James who pointedly denied mercy in this and scores of other instances that September”.

Many of the rebels did receive a degree of royal mercy; those who confessed had their sentences routinely commuted to transportation to the West Indies (a relatively new penal practice at the time). And although James’s severity is emphasised by the biographer, he also notes that the outcomes were not very different to other rebellions of the early modern period, “an age that replied viciously to rebellion”. Of about 2600 prisoners, nearly half confessed. Most of the nearly 1400 who took their trial were convicted and sentenced to death; about 200 were in fact executed, and the rest were transported.

Jeffreys was rewarded by James with the post of Lord Chancellor. But his health was poor, although he continued to be active in the courts and in parliament. Nor can he have been happy with James’ pro-Catholic policies; James attempted to reconcile the whigs and dissenters by promoting them (eg, in commissions of the peace appointing JPs) alongside Catholics. (Not exactly a resounding success, it should be said.) And, despite Jeffreys’ loyalty, his influence waned as James preferred Catholic advisers at court.

Which did not protect him from retribution after the Revolution. Jeffreys made an attempt to escape after learning that James had fled the country: he disguised himself as a sailor and tried to take ship from Wapping. He was quickly exposed and arrested however, and committed to the Tower of London on charges of treason. But his health was rapidly deteriorating and he died in April 1689 in the Tower, a month short of his forty-fourth birthday. His effigy was gibbeted and burnt by a London mob some time later that year; he was specifically excepted from a general act of pardon in 1690; and his grotesque place in history was secured by a flood of condemnatory pamphlets.

It’s worth saying this: if it weren’t for the ‘Bloody Assizes’, Jeffreys would probably be rated as an excellent judge (by the standards of his times), certainly when no political interests were at stake, and as an outstanding lawyer-advocate. He would nonetheless be remembered as a severe and zealous judge when politics did enter into the question; he was without question harsh, often brutally so, on those – from coiners to peers of the realm – who represented a threat to the government to which he remained steadfastly loyal. Indeed, the problem, the biographer argues, is that he was too loyal, too committed to the Stuarts, “at a time when political survival required the kind of pliability that made it possible for Jeffreys’s rival, William Williams, to move from whig leadership to the inner circle of James II’s government and back again”.

It was loyalty that destroyed Jeffreys. His commitment to serve his king kept him at his post even longer than the king stayed at his. Like all tories, Jeffreys was loyal to the Church of England too and believed in its social and political primacy… Unlike most tories, Jeffreys placed his loyalty to the crown above his loyalty to the church when James II’s policies forced him to choose.

…………………………….

* Leoline Jenkins (from Glamorgan) was a lawyer, skilled diplomat and civil servant in Charles II’s reign; John Vaughan (of Trawscoed near Aberystwyth) is remembered as the Lord Chief Justice whose decision in the Bushell case of 1670 established jury independence (the principle of jury nullification, which I should probably add to the glossary); William Williams (of Llanforda, Denbighshire) was a famous lawyer and politician, who became speaker of the House of Commons (and was grandfather of the eighteenth century ‘Leviathan’ Watkyn Williams Wynn); and John Trevor of Trefalun (also Denbighshire), another politician who became Speaker, managed to get himself dismissed and disgraced for corruption (which did take some doing…) during the 1690s.

** Whereas John Hampden, also accused of complicity in the Rye House Plot, was prosecuted for the lesser charge of sedition, and as that was a misdemeanour, was permitted counsel: he chose Williams. Following the Revolution of 1688, and largely because of the notorious treason trials of the 1680s, the law was changed to allow defendants charged with treason to have legal counsel.

Like many accused witches in the early modern period, Jane Wenham of Church Lane, Walkern, Hertfordshire, had long been suspected of witchcraft before she was brought to court, as well as having a reputation for “swearing, cursing, idleness, thievery, and whoredom”. Perhaps she did not enjoy her reputation. Twice widowed and with children by the time of her prosecution in 1712,* ironically she herself seems to have set off the legal process that led to her trial when she complained to a local JP of defamation by a neighbour who had called her a “Witch and a Bitch”. When she could get satisfaction from neither the JP (who refused to take any action) nor the local church minister’s arbitration, she was heard to say “if she could not have justice here she would have it elsewhere”, “dangerous words for any witch to utter”, as the biographer (Owen Davies) points out. Shortly afterwards the minister’s daughter was “afflicted with terrible fits and delusions” (Salem is, by the way, merely the most famous example of cases where children and adolescents played this kind of prominent role) and Jane immediately came under suspicion.

She was arrested and searched for teats (which would have represented a sign that she had been suckling a demon ‘familiar’); none were found. She herself offered to undergo a swimming test, but instead another test was proposed: to recite the Lord’s Prayer (something a witch was supposedly unable to do). When she faltered, “her guilt was confirmed in the eyes of those present” (no doubt if she had ‘passed’, they would simply have tried other ‘tests’ until they found one that she would fail…), and she was committed to prison to await trial. Sixteen witnesses lined up against her, with typical accounts of bewitching young children and livestock, as well as “a magic concoction said to be made from rendered corpses”. The only indictment accepted by lawyers, however, concerned not the ‘maleficium’ (harmful witchcraft) but a charge of conversing with the devil in the form of a cat (a ‘diabolical pact’; it’s often argued whether diabolism was a part of continental European conceptions of witchcraft imported to English law and superimposed on a distinctive form of English witch beliefs).

Jane was convicted, but the death sentenced was reprieved by the judge, Sir John Powell, who had been sceptical throughout the trial and subsequently intervened on her behalf for a royal pardon, despite a pamphlet campaign against her. But it would seem that it was too dangerous for her to go home again, and she was given shelter first by a whig landowner, Colonel Plumer, at Gilston, Herts, and later by Earl and Countess Cowper at Hertingfordbury, near Hertford, where she died and was buried in 1730.

It looks as though Jane became caught up in the political rivalries of the early eighteenth century; three of the virulent pamphlets against her were written by a high-churchman (ie, a Tory) and her protectors after her pardon were Whigs. But the fact that she had to leave her home for her own safety also reminds us that while those in authority – like Sir John Powell – were becoming increasingly sceptical about witchcraft, leading to the repeal of the capital witchcraft statutes in 1736, ‘ordinary’ people did not necessarily concur. Historians such as Peter Burke have written of an increasing gap between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ culture during the early modern period, and witchcraft beliefs can be taken as one index of this.

It should be noted, though, that scepticism about witchcraft among the learned and powerful had been around as long as the ‘witch craze’ itself (and conversely, they did not all suddenly stop believing in 1736…). But earlier scepticism had often taken the form of doubts about whether witches were as dangerous as they were portrayed and the possibility of deciding guilt or innocence; in the eighteenth century, more fundamental doubts about whether witches existed at all were on the rise. What marks the early modern period out (across much of Britain, Europe and the American colonies, though with considerable variety in many respects, including timing, intensity and the extent to which women were the primary targets of accusations**) is not simply the existence of witch beliefs, but the extent to which those who made and enforced laws regarded witches as a social and often political threat so serious that that they had to be hunted out and subjected to the harshest rigours of the law.

Incidentally, while Jane may have been the last convicted witch in England, in Scotland (different legal system, remember) that dubious honour belongs to Helen Duncan in 1944. (Yes, you read that date right; the trial took place in the midst of wartime/political paranoia – a not uncommon feature of much early modern witch persecution.)

Links on the rise and fall of witch hunting

Witchcraft and the occult 1400-1700
The witch hunts
WWW-VL Witchcraft links
Salem Witch Trials documentary archive
Witchcraft bibliography project (pdf)
The Damned Art
Witchcraft, demonology and inquisition
Finnish witch trials
Witchcraft in seventeenth-century Flintshire
Witches and witch trials in England, Scotland, Ireland, the Channel Islands
.

*This date seemed odd to me at first; I had a notion that the prosecution was sometime around 1730 (and this date appears in some online resources too). But the pamphlets cited are dated 1712, and that date is in the title of a secondary article. Perhaps there’s been a confusion with the date of Jane’s death…

** In some areas, the profile was quite different to the usual stereotypes, notably Scandinavia where most of the accused were men. Some regions (Wales is the example I know best) saw very few witch trials at all; the parts of Europe torn apart by religious wars were the most affected, particularly in terms of mass trials and burnings (by the way, whatever certain films may tell you, witches in England were hanged not burnt to death).

Often, you’ll read that in the early modern period, women were excluded from holding any official posts. This is not quite true. They were generally ineligible to do so, since local offices such as parish constable (held for a year at a time) were held only by independent householders of sufficient income to qualify. Married women were excluded, and most widows or spinsters were too poor to be eligible.

However, Jane Kitchen was left a widow of some means following the death of her husband John (a yeoman farmer) in October 1643, just as it became his turn to be constable in the rotation system practised in their village (as in many others), Upton by Southwell in Nottinghamshire. They had married in 1619 and had three living children, and he left her the farm. She was not the first woman in Upton to hold a local and usually male post: Jane Parlethorpe served as churchwarden in 1643. Like widows of gaolers who took over from their husbands, Jane Kitchen took on the post for John’s allotted year.

Perhaps these unusual choices in Upton were also related to the fact that it was wartime and there may well have been fewer able-bodied men on hand for the tasks than usual. It certainly made Jane’s duties more onerous than in peace time. (It should be remembered that an early modern constable was not simply an officer of law enforcement, but also had many administrative duties, including responsibility for collecting taxes and the like.) The parish was unfortunate enough to be near both a royalist and a parliamentarian garrison, both of which made demands on the local population. For several weeks in early 1644, in addition, they had to provide supplies to the besiegers of Newark.

Like other women of means who were appointed constables, apparently, Jane hired a man as a deputy ‘to act as the public figure and to do the “legwork” but the constables’ accounts show make it clear that, within the village, Jane was recognised as the responsible party’. At least partly because of the heavy war time demands (but possibly also because she was a woman in a man’s place, with the extra burden of having to prove that she was up to the job?), the accounts she kept for the year were detailed and conscientious, and ‘some of the longest in the Upton constables’ book’. The biographer, Martyn Bennett, suggests that her accounts ‘throw a perhaps unique light on the practicalities of being a woman constable during the early modern period’. For anyone interested, the constables’ book is in the Nottinghamshire Archives.

Some links with information about constables and parish administration (there doesn’t seem to be that much available online on this subject; if you know of anything I’ve missed, let me know):
Dartford Archives: Law and order
Old Bailey Proceedings: London constables
Parish bibliography
Section on officers in my crime bibliography at EMR (By the way, quite simply the best recent essay on the subject of local office-holding is Mark Goldie’s ‘The unacknowledged republic’ in Tim Harris (ed), The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500-1800 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). And there’s plenty more worth reading in that volume too.)

Catherine is described by the DNB as ‘alleged highwaywoman’ and her biography (by Barbara White, one of the many brand new biogs in the new edition) is a fascinating mix of the known and the legendary. The history: she was an orphaned heiress of Caddington, Hertfordshire who became the ward of the royalist Fanshawe family in the early 1640s and was married off to Thomas Fanshawe (Viscount Fanshawe of Dromore) in 1648 (Ann Fanshawe, writer of a well-known memoir, attended the wedding). It seems that Catherine’s inheritance was mined to help pay off the family’s political debts; her husband had a ‘dissolute reputation’ and was at one point imprisoned in the Tower after being implicated in Booth’s Cheshire rising in 1659. She died, childless, in June 1660.

She became associated with ‘the legend of a gentlewoman or noblewoman who neglected by her spouse, led a double life and operated by night as a highwaywoman’ – the ‘wicked lady’. The story goes that she initially robbed in partnership with a farmer-highwayman, Ralph Chaplin (who taught her the art of highway robbery) – not for money but for ‘adventure’ and ‘the exercise of manly attributes’. Chaplin was killed during a hold-up, and she carried on alone, ‘her crimes increasing in brutality and violence. She became known as a ruthless killer, murdering both those who resisted and those who did not’.

Her final hold-up was in June 1660 near St Albans, in which she shot and killed the driver but was herself mortally wounded by a man whom her victim had given a lift. The legend continues that she was buried ‘at night, in secrecy and outside the Fanshawe vault’. But it doesn’t quite end there: her ghost continued to cause mayhem (including haunting and setting fire to her former home).

The biographer is sceptical of the identification of Catherine with the legend; there are flaws in the evidence, and other possible candidates (eg Martha Coppin). Nor is it known when Catherine’s name became associated with the story. Nonetheless, the legend thrived into the twentieth century, becoming the basis of popular novels and two film versions of The Wicked Lady. The first (1945), a huge British box office hit, starred Margaret Lockwood (and was at the time considered scandalous, not least for Lockwood’s amazing bosom – which had to be, um, edited for American audiences; I haven’t seen it yet but am told that it’s hammy but great fun); it was remade in 1983 with Faye Dunaway (panned).

Links

Katherine Ferrers – legend of the lady highwayman
The Wicked Lady of Markyate Cell
Katherine Ferrars: The Wicked Lady
The real Wicked Lady
The real Wicked Lady update
Was Katherine Ferrers really the villain she’s made out to be?
A timeline that doesn’t even get the date right… (and this is a ‘professional’ museum site, for chrissakes)

…

Huzzah! The university has now got off-campus access to the DNB sorted out. Any special requests?