Genders and Sexualities in History
Series Editors: John H. Arnold, Joanna Bourke and Sean Brady
Palgrave Macmillan’s series, Genders and Sexualities in History, aims to accommodate and foster new approaches to historical research in the fields of genders and
sexualities. The series promotes world-class scholarship that concentrates upon
the interconnected themes of genders, sexualities, religions/ religiosity, civil society, class formations, politics and war.
Historical studies of gender and sexuality have often been treated as disconnected fields, while in recent years historical analyses in these two areas have
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Authority, Gender and Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern England brings
issues of gender into dialogue with the highly fertile ‘new history of the emotions’. The contributing authors tackle a range of different specific topics – from
the pedagogic treatment of sin, to political ‘anxiety’ regarding social order, to
the Shakespearean representation of love – but all share a strong interest in how
‘emotion’ (as potentially both innate human affect, and as culturally constructed
norms) intersects with issues of gender, sex, and sexuality. These intersections are
not only social, but political – not only within the politics of the household, but
also the fraught politics of late medieval and early modern civic government.
The essays tackle a fascinating variety of different sources: letters, preaching tales,
ballads and plays, guild records, early print books, embroidery, conduct manuals,
trial records and more. This excellent collection demonstrates also how productive it can be to discuss such topics across the medieval/early modern divide.
Titles include:
John H. Arnold and Sean Brady (editors)
WHAT IS MASCULINITY?
Historical Dynamics from Antiquity to the Contemporary World
Valeria Babini, Chiara Beccalossi and Lucy Riall (editors)
ITALIAN SEXUALITIES UNCOVERED, 1789–1914
Heike Bauer and Matthew Cook (editors)
QUEER 1950s
Cordelia Beattie and Kirsten A. Fenton (editors)
INTERSECTIONS OF GENDER, RELIGION AND ETHNICITY IN THE
MIDDLE AGES
Chiara Beccalossi
FEMALE SEXUAL INVERSION
Same-Sex Desires in Italian and British Sexology, c. 1870–1920

Roberto Bizzocchi
A LADY’S MAN
The Cicisbei, Private Morals and National Identity in Italy
Raphaëlle Branche and Fabrice Virgili (editors)
RAPE IN WARTIME
Susan Broomhall (editor)
AUTHORITY, GENDER AND EMOTIONS IN LATE MEDIEVAL AND
EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
Matt Cook
QUEER DOMESTICITIES
Homosexuality and Home Life in Twentieth-Century London
Peter Cryle and Alison Moore
FRIGIDITY
An Intellectual History
Lucy Delap and Sue Morgan
MEN, MASCULINITIES AND RELIGIOUS CHANGE IN
TWENTIETH CENTURY BRITAIN
Jennifer V. Evans
LIFE AMONG THE RUINS
Cityscape and Sexuality in Cold War Berlin
Kate Fisher and Sarah Toulalan (editors)
BODIES, SEX AND DESIRE FROM THE RENAISSANCE TO THE PRESENT
Christopher E. Forth and Elinor Accampo (editors)
CONFRONTING MODERNITY IN FIN-DE-SIÈCLE FRANCE
Bodies, Minds and Gender
Rebecca Fraser
GENDER, RACE AND FAMILY IN NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICA
From Northern Woman to Plantation Mistress
Alana Harris and Timothy Jones (editors)
LOVE AND ROMANCE IN BRITAIN, 1918–1970
Dagmar Herzog (editor)
BRUTALITY AND DESIRE
War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century
Josephine Hoegaerts
MASCULINITY AND NATIONHOOD, 1830–1910
Constructions of Identity and Citizenship in Belgium
Robert Hogg
MEN AND MANLINESS ON THE FRONTIER:
Queensland and British Columbia in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
Julia Laite
COMMON PROSTITUTES AND ORDINARY CITIZENS
Commercial Sex in London, 1885–1960
Marjorie Levine-Clark
UNEMPLOYMENT, WELFARE, AND MASCULINE CITIZENSHIP
“So Much Honest Poverty” in Britain, 1870–1930
Andrea Mansker
SEX, HONOR AND CITIZENSHIP IN EARLY THIRD REPUBLIC FRANCE

Nancy McLoughlin
JEAN GERSON AND GENDER
Rhetoric and Politics in Fifteenth-Century France
Jeffrey Meek
QUEER VOICES IN POST-WAR SCOTLAND
Male Homosexuality, Religion and Society
Jessica Meyer
MEN OF WAR
Masculinity and the First World War in Britain
Meredith Nash
MAKING ‘POSTMODERN’ MOTHERS
Pregnant Embodiment, Baby Bumps and Body Image
Tim Reinke-Williams
WOMEN, WORK AND SOCIABILITY IN EARLY MODERN LONDON
Yorick Smaal
SEX, SOLDIERS AND THE SOUTH PACIFIC, 1939–45
Queer Identities in Australia in the Second World War
Jennifer D. Thibodeaux (editor)
NEGOTIATING CLERICAL IDENTITIES
Priests, Monks and Masculinity in the Middle Ages
Kristin Fjelde Tjelle
MISSIONARY MASCULINITY, 1870–1930
The Norwegian Missionaries in South-East Africa
Hester Vaizey
SURVIVING HITLER’S WAR
Family Life in Germany, 1939–48
Clayton J. Whisnant
MALE HOMOSEXUALITY IN WEST GERMANY
Between Persecution and Freedom, 1945–69
Midori Yamaguchi
DAUGHTERS OF THE ANGLICAN CLERGY
Religion, Gender and Identity in Victorian England

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Authority, Gender and
Emotions in Late Medieval
and Early Modern England
Edited by

Susan Broomhall
The University of Western Australia

Selection, introduction and editorial matter © Susan Broomhall 2015
All remaining chapters © Respective authors 2015
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
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First published 2015 by
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Authority, gender and emotions in late medieval and early modern England /
edited by Susan Broomhall.
pages cm. — (Genders and sexualities in history)
ISBN 978–1–137–53115–5 (hardback : alkaline paper)
1. Great Britain—History—Medieval period, 1066–1485. 2. Authority—
Social aspects—Great Britain—History. 3. Emotions—Social aspects—
Great Britain. 4. Social role—Great Britain—History. 5. Sex role—Great
Britain—History. I. Broomhall, Susan, author editor of compilation.
DA175.A98 2015
305.30942'09024—dc23
2015012847
Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.

In memory of Philippa Maddern (1952–2014)
Scholar, leader, mentor, friend.

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Contents
List of Tables

xi

Acknowledgements

xii

Notes on Contributors

xiv

Introduction: Authority, Gender, and Emotions in
Late Medieval and Early Modern England
Susan Broomhall
1 From Letters to Loyalty: Aline la Despenser and the
Meaning(s) of a Noblewoman’s Correspondence in
Thirteenth-Century England
Kathleen Neal
2 The Role of Exempla in Educating through Emotion:
The Deadly Sin of ‘lecherye’ in Robert Mannyng’s
Handlyng Synne (1303–1317)
Anne M. Scott
3 How to be ‘Both’: Bilingual and Gendered Emotions in Late
Medieval English Balade Sequences
Stephanie Downes
4 St Richard Scrope, the Devout Widow, and the Feast of
Corpus Christi: Exploring Emotions, Gender, and
Governance in Early Fifteenth-Century York
P. J. P. Goldberg
5 Anxieties with Political and Social Order in
Fifteenth-Century England
Merridee L. Bailey

1

18

34

51

66

84

6 Raising Girls and Boys: Fear, Awe, and Dread in the
Early Modern Household
Stephanie Tarbin

106

7 Authority in the French Church in Later
Sixteenth-Century London
Susan Broomhall

131

ix

x Contents

8 ‘The Pattern of All Patience’: Gender, Agency,
and Emotions in Embroidery and Pattern Books in
Early Modern England
Sarah Randles
9 A Subject for Love in The Merry Wives of Windsor
Diana G. Barnes

150
168

10 Emotions, Gender Expectations, and the Social Role of
Chancery, 1550–1650
Amanda L. Capern

187

Select Bibliography

210

Index

222

Tables
1.1

Women’s letters in SC 1 (Ancient Correspondence):
widows and non-widows

xi

22

Acknowledgements
How is authority made through the emotions? What are the qualities
of affective as well as effective leadership of others? This volume exists
because of the scholarship, friendship, and mentoring of Winthrop
Professor Philippa Maddern. Without her unstoppable curiosity to
know about the lives and experiences of women, children, blended
families, domestic violence, and the environment in medieval England,
and to draw us in as avid readers of her careful findings, audiences of
her enthusiastic presentations and participants in her animated discussions, we would perhaps not be considering the topics that form the
present work, or at least not in the same ways. Her ability to draw out
the intriguing qualities of mundane and often difficult archives, and
to combine them with penetrating quantitative analyses, has allowed
us to look anew at some old ideas and has given us hope to be able to
approach others in far more novel ways.
Pip passed away on 16 June 2014, after a determined battle against
cancer that she refused to let define her or impede her from the work
that she loved so much. (The Australian Research Council Centre of
Excellence for the History of Emotions, 1100–1800, of which Philippa
was the Founding Director, has a Memorial Page at http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/about-the-centre/who-we-are/memorial-page-forfounding-director-philippa-maddern.aspx.) Generations of students,
early career scholars, and colleagues in the humanities, and especially
medieval studies, in Australia were lucky enough to be mentored by
Pip, and benefited from her support, guidance, and carefully considered
advice. Some of us even managed to ingest her experimental cooking of
medieval recipes, offered for delectation at seminars between the piles
of paper worthy of an archaeological dig that was her office, and lived
to tell the tale.
This volume also exists because of the financial support and community provided by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence
for the History of Emotions, 1100–1800 (project number CE110001011).
The Centre has helped to foster interest in discovering how emotions
make history, and has enabled many of the contributors of this volume
to meet and exchange ideas over the past few years. Additionally, colleagues at The University of Western Australia have provided support
and assistance, as well as sharing their ideas and thoughts on emerging
xii

Acknowledgements

xiii

research. Thank you to Pam Bond, Michael Champion, Jane Davidson,
Sarah Finn, Andrew Lynch, Joanne McEwan, Jeremy Martens, Lesley
O’Brien, Anne Scott, Katrina Tap, Stephanie Tarbin and Tanya Tuffrey,
whose insights, encouragement and friendship continue the supportive
culture that Pip worked so hard to foster.
Pip gently guided and encouraged, applying her intellectual authority
to create an emotional culture of support, passion, and curiosity into
which we were all drawn. The authors of this collection all feel privileged to have known Pip – through her scholarship, as a research leader,
as a wise and patient mentor, and as a very dear friend. We dedicate this
volume to her memory.

Notes on Contributors
Merridee L. Bailey is Senior Research Fellow with the ARC Centre of
Excellence for the History of Emotions at The University of Adelaide.
She works on the history of book culture and issues of socialization and
morality in late medieval and early modern England. She is the author
of a book on childhood, Socialising the Child in Late Medieval England
c. 1400–1600 (2012). She is working on morality and emotions in merchant practices in London, c. 1400–1650.
Diana G. Barnes is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of
Queensland. She has written Epistolary Community in Print, 1580–1664
(2013) and essays on letter writers Margaret Cavendish, Mary Wortley
Montagu, and Dorothy Osborne. Her current research includes a book,
provisionally entitled The Politics of Civility: Historicising Early Modern
Genres of Community, and a co-authored book on the history of women’s
letters.
Susan Broomhall is Professor of Early Modern History at The University
of Western Australia and Fellow of the Australian Academy of the
Humanities. She was a Foundation Chief Investigator in the Australian
Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions,
1100–1800, and is now an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. She
is the author of a series of works that explore gender, and more recently
emotions, in early modern France, the Low Countries, and, through
stranger communities, England. She is the editor of Emotions in the
Household, 1200–1900 (2007); (with Stephanie Tarbin) Women, Identities
and Communities in Early Modern Europe (2008); (with Jacqueline Van
Gent) Governing Masculinities in the Early Modern Period: Regulating Selves
and Others (2011); (with Sarah Finn) Violence and Emotions in Early Modern
Europe (2015); Spaces for Feeling: Emotions and Sociabilities in Britain,
1650–1850 (2015); and Gender and Emotion in Early Modern Europe:
Destroying Order, Structuring Disorder (2015).
Amanda L. Capern is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Women’s History
at the University of Hull and author of The Historical Study of Women:
England 1500–1700 (2008, 2010). Her current projects include a monograph on Women, Land and Family in Early Modern England, an edited
xiv

Notes on Contributors xv

collection titled The Routledge History of Women in Early Modern Europe, and
a research project on women in Chancery.
Stephanie Downes is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of
Melbourne in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for
the History of Emotions, 1100–1800. She has previously published on
aspects of late medieval Anglo-French literary and manuscript culture
and its modern reception.
P. J. P. Goldberg is a social and cultural historian of the later Middle Ages
who has written extensively on gender, family, and bourgeois society.
His books include Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy:
Women in York and Yorkshire, c. 1300–1520 (1992); Women in England,
c. 1275–1525: Documentary Sources (1995); Medieval England: A Social
History, 1250–1550 (2004); and Communal Discord, Child Abduction and
Rape in the Later Middle Ages (2008). He teaches history at the University
of York and is a member of the Centre for Medieval Studies there.
Kathleen Neal is Assistant Lecturer in Medieval History at the Centre
for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Monash University. Her recent
research concerns the role of letters in political communication between
the royal government and its subjects in thirteenth-century England.
Her wider research interests include medieval theories of grammar and
rhetoric, the rise of vernaculars, and gendered participation in political
behaviour.
Sarah Randles is Honorary Fellow in the School of Historical and
Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. She has recently
completed Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Australian Research
Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, 1100–1800.
Randles has previously published on medieval and later textiles, and on
medievalism in Australian architecture, and has a particular interest in
the relationship between objects and emotions. Her current research project explores the emotions of pilgrimage and sacred place, focusing on
the relics and other aspects of the material culture of Chartres Cathedral.
Anne M. Scott is Honorary Research Fellow in English and Cultural
Studies at The University of Western Australia. Her field of research is
fourteenth-century English literature, and she has written and taught
on Piers Plowman, the poetry of Hoccleve and Chaucer, and many
other fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English and French texts. She
has a long-standing interest in penitential literature, and particularly in

xvi

Notes on Contributors

Robert Mannyng’s Handling Synne. She is Editor of Parergon, the journal
of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early
Modern Studies, which is now available as part of the Project MUSE
database.
Stephanie Tarbin is Lecturer in History at The University of Western
Australia, with research interests in the gender and social history of
late-medieval and early modern England. She has previously published
essays on moral regulation, masculinity, women’s friendships, and
fatherless children, and is co-editor (with Susan Broomhall) of Women,
Identities and Communities in Early Modern Europe (2008).

Introduction: Authority, Gender,
and Emotions in Late Medieval
and Early Modern England
Susan Broomhall

This collection explores how situations of authority, governance, and
influence were practised through gender ideologies and emotional performances in medieval and early modern England. Authority is inherently
relational – it must be asserted over someone who allows or is forced to
accept this dominance. The capacity to exercise authority is therefore a
social and cultural act, one that is shaped by identities such as gender and
by practices that include emotions. The essays in this volume explore how
gender and emotions shaped the ways in which different individuals could
assert or maintain authority, or indeed disrupt or provide alternatives to
conventional practices of authority.

Authority, practices, and texts
Authority, governance, influence, power, and agency are closely related
concepts. In this volume, however, we focus primarily on the term
authority as a practice of dominance by one individual or community
over others, and which involves particular modes of emotional persuasion and the rehearsal of gender ideologies in order to be achieved.
As such, the essays here explore forms of authority that were asserted
particularly in written, material, and performance texts and that were
intended for wide access and/or reception and visibility.
Power, influence, and agency are broader concepts than authority,
which is our focus here. As Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski
argue, power and agency can be experienced by many individuals in a
wide range of contexts, ‘although often a sobering perspective insists
on the necessarily limited nature of such claims’.1 Not all experiences
of agency, however, constitute authority in the sense of aiming to
assert power in visible and tangible ways over others. Moreover, while
1

2

Susan Broomhall

authority can emerge from and itself create power, in the textual forms
analysed here it is also distinct from forceful acts of domination over
others. In this way, our collection follows the distinction suggested by
Sini Kangas, Mia Korpiola, and Tuija Aionen who argue, in the introduction to their recent volume on religious and secular forms of authority
in the Middle Ages, that ‘while power could be seized suddenly by sheer
brutality or force, authority inferred a broadly held legitimate aspect
and an ability to influence others by other means than coercion’.2
These means might involve violence, for as Philippa Maddern’s work
on fifteenth-century England has shown us, ‘[v]iolence and law were …
intricately entwined in the process of the legitimation of power and
authority’.3 Asserting authority over others in this period was a form
of power that required legitimation, but was often transient, contested,
and unstable.4 This collection explores authority therefore as a practice
that was earned and achieved through a range of (often subtle) means,
including the employment (and sometimes manipulation) of contemporary gender ideologies and performances of emotion.
The idea of authority as a form of power that is earned is underpinned
by an understanding of authority as a negotiated practice. This aligns
with a broad historiography for medieval and particularly early modern
England that, following the insights of Michel Foucault particularly, has
firmly challenged the idea that contemporary hierarchies and subordination were meekly accepted by the population and highlights instead
the ambiguities of authority and the responses of the governed.5 In
their collection investigating ‘micro-sociologies of power’ in specific
contexts, for example, Michael J. Braddick and John Walter propose
an ‘early modern power grid’ as a way of conceptualizing the complex,
multidimensional access to, and performance of, authority in and from
a variety of positions and roles.6
Authority was also a form of power that was dynamic and had to
be continually practised. As such, as Robert Zaller has argued, the discourse of legitimacy could be ritualized, intentional, representational,
or expressive. These modes of discourse became ‘the currency of legitimacy, the form in which the daily transaction of power occurs and the
shape in which it is ultimately constituted’.7 Our collection focuses on
evidence for how authority was practised not only in social experiences
but also within textual and material sites, genres, discourses; forms that
bear witness to contemporary assumptions about the relationship of
gender to authority, and through which emotional articulations were
rehearsed, performed, and manipulated in order to assert authority.
Such works were largely created by civic and church leaders determining

Introduction

3

law, governing urban environments, policing neighbourly interactions,
or attending to the health of readers’ souls, or by those who aspired to
regulate others, such as the authors of early printed didactic treatises.
These were sources making authority in material and discursive ways.
Many, as the authors here point out, were works that also created the
narratives of their communities and societies, such as civic records,
legal documents, and religious acts. Scholars of the late medieval book
remind us that the act of their creation, exchange, or archiving signalled
the values of a minority, and emphasized particular networks and relationships of power.8 Even in early modern England, the particular ways
in which written texts could create and sustain authority for certain
groups over others, were still being negotiated in relation to custom,
memory, and community narrative-making.9 These are thus records
that we must interpret carefully for their meanings about contemporary societies, and which offer evidence for analysis of how gender and
emotional discourses were employed to achieve their authoritative and
memorializing aims.
Some essays in this volume explore sources produced for and in
England’s urban centres. Merridee L. Bailey examines the anxieties of the
urban mercantile and political class at the end of the fifteenth century,
articulated and fuelled by the strategic publishing of William Caxton for
this market. She analyses a series of conduct books that offered a moral
programme for both adults and children to allay fears and prepare the
next generation for England’s new political, economic, and social environment. P. J. P. Goldberg considers the assertion of influence through
the performative potential for the Corpus Christi plays in medieval York
to offer politically subversive messages, celebrating and memorializing
a local martyr, Archbishop of York, Richard Scrope, in connection with
Christ’s Passion. Goldberg explores these attempts to create an authoritative and ultimately healing narrative of the actions of York’s political
and religious communities in relation to Henry IV as they were told and
retold in ecclesiastical court and civic records.
Whereas these essays examine texts presenting authoritative spiritual
voices operating within their communities, the evidence of the complex
and often more ambiguous realities of authority are the focus for other
contributors. Susan Broomhall’s essay studies acts from the tight-knit
French Huguenot community of Threadneedle Street in London, whose
consistory – an ever-changing, elected group of men in temporary
authority over others – investigated the illicit social and sexual relations of refugees within and beyond the Church. Their acts expressed
fears about their ability to exert control over the congregation and

4

Susan Broomhall

also about the perceptions of their practice of authority held by those
London authorities and other church communities who judged them
from afar, with particular consequences for their relationships with the
wider London mercantile and political elite with whom they sought to
cooperate. Stephanie Tarbin examines the implications of religious ideologies that were expressed in moralizing texts directed at children for
their quotidian experiences. She analyses children’s education and the
submission it prescribed to forms of authority – familial and divine –
using personal records and legal documentation in order to understand
children’s fears and their consequences both in terms of the familial
environment and how they were judged in court settings. Amanda L.
Capern also examines the judicial sphere, investigating the pleadings
and cause papers of the equity court of Chancery to demonstrate how
families, kin, and communities came increasingly to seek the regulation
of legal officials, from attorneys to the Lord Chancellor, concerning
what were social and economic disputes. Capern explores how specific
forms of legal documentation were key to determining the ways emotions were presented and manipulated by litigants in this context.
The careful selection of language within texts to create forms of power
and authority is studied by a further group of authors. Stephanie Downes
argues that French remained significant to the political, social, and emotional life of the English court until at least the fifteenth century. Thus,
the French ‘je’ operated as the authoritative form of the feeling self for
English authors during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Downes
explores what access to emotional authenticity and social alignments this
language choice could provide to poets in particular contexts to exercise
influence, particularly as they expressed the feeling self in female and
male voices. Diana G. Barnes examines the use of letters in Shakespeare’s
comedy, The Merry Wives of Windsor, to demonstrate how the capacity of
new participants to exercise influence by employing forms designed for
authoritative male speech in the public domain (an ability that could
now be learned through printed manuals) provoked fear and consternation for leading men. Shakespeare’s work appears to suggest that the everyday speech employed by women in letters could be more effective and
influential than the studied rhetoric of the humanist manuals.

Gendered theories and practices of authority
As is evident from the kinds of sources examined in this volume, contemporary gender ideologies were profoundly influential in shaping
forms of practice for male and female authority, and their articulations,

Introduction

5

as well as the kinds of emotional performances these necessitated or
allowed. The essays here expand upon studies that have already shown
that discourses and practices of authority, stemming from the Church,
household, or law courts, typically sustained patriarchal beliefs about
social identities such as gender, class, race, and ethnic and age-related
ideologies, and framed how and by whom forms of authority were
enacted and articulated.
Authority, therefore, operates through gendered identities.10 The contributions here examine how medieval and early modern moral treatises
and conduct books asserted knowledge about authority through assumptions about both gender and emotions, themselves mutually informing
ideologies and expressions. Anne M. Scott, for example, explores how
Robert Mannyng’s fourteenth-century rhymed treatise Handlyng Synne,
one of a wide range of didactic texts that proliferated after the Fourth
Lateran Council of 1215 and aimed to influence the behaviour of the
laity, negotiated control of the sin of lechery through what were considered gender-specific dimensions. Bailey demonstrates how moral
treatises in the era of early print contained complex demarcations of
the emotional traits and behaviours of specific groups of readers within
society. She observes distinct expectations for mothers and fathers about
their involvement in the acculturation of moral virtues in their children.
Such assumptions about the emotional roles of women and men within
families, their divergent need for social and sexual relationships, and
how these feelings could be expressed publicly, were also firmly embedded in the regulation undertaken by the consistory within the London
Huguenot Church studied by Broomhall. Capern’s study considers
how the law rehearsed and explored gendered assumptions about good
neighbourliness through the statements of witnesses about the actions
of plaintiffs or defendants. Moreover, she demonstrates how notions of
female covetousness and male honour and credit risked the reputations
of women and men respectively in Chancery cases.
In many cases, the essays in this collection examine sources that were
created by men in positions of authority. Writing was assumed to be
the prerogative of these men.11 The forms of emotional performance
that were used to practise authority were thus constructed in texts generally by men, and were considered to be appropriate when expressed
by men, although not usually all men. Competition and rank defined
masculine authority in the Middle Ages as much as the feminine, Ruth
Mazo Karras reminds us.12
Sometimes women too could assert power by adopting and adapting
codes, rituals, performances, and expressions of authority in specific

6

Susan Broomhall

ways, not simply as consorts or regents, but as women in a variety of
circumstances from motherhood to widowhood.13 How they did so
by performing emotions in spoken, textual, and material ways, is the
subject of a number of the essays here. Kathleen Neal investigates the
effects of thirteenth-century epistolary forms of political communication when adopted and adapted by an elite woman, Aline la Despenser,
and directed towards the royal Chancellor at a particularly volatile
moment in England’s political history. The letter is an especially rich
source for interrogating how women accessed this particular discourse
of authority, and how they tailored what were expected to be masculine
forms of rhetorical presentation to their own political ends. Embroidery,
Sarah Randles argues, could provide both women and men with representational displays of legitimacy, signalling their positions of power
through the commission and display of the work of professional male
embroiderers, but it offered women – through the production and
exchange of their own works – further material expression of authority
and instruments of influence. Powerful women subverted the conventional practice and display of feminine embroidery as a sign of subservient female docility to create material texts imbued with new meanings.
These women adapted the expressive and representational tools of both
authoritative masculinity and feminine passivity to their own purposes.
Importantly, just as gender framed ideas about authority and its
practices, it had implications for how women could express emotions
within particular discourses of authority. Contemporaries and scholars
alike have recognized that women’s words could hold specific power,
especially in religious, social, and household contexts.14 Thus, this volume examines how both women, and men writing through the female
voice, might use different emotional presentations and performances to
access authority than did men in similar positions. It also considers how
female use of emotional expressions that were more usually gendered
male might have, in itself, signalled an assertion of power. If gender
ideologies informed and sustained forms of authority in the medieval
and early modern period, then we must examine the resulting ways in
which rhetoric, display, performance, and behaviours of emotion were
experienced by individuals in those societies.

Emotional practices as both operations and
consequences of authority
This collection explores emotions as social and cultural practices. As
the sociologist Sara Ahmed has argued, emotions are formed through

Introduction

7

the relationships between bodies, objects, or subjects.15 The social
aspect of emotion has led other scholars, such as Barbara H. Rosenwein
and Benno Gammerl, to explore how specific communities defined
and articulated themselves through particular emotional styles.16
Furthermore, the connection of emotions to specific social and cultural
contexts suggests that social identities, including gender, age, faith, and
class, shaped the possibilities for emotional expression in medieval and
early modern England.17
Researchers of the period have observed that a number of particularly
strong emotions – such as anger – were the preserve of authoritative
men, and the articulation of them signalled their power.18 But men in
such positions frequently expressed other emotions, equally a consequence of their positions, that were not so much a privilege. These were
emotions rooted in anxiety, expressions of fears and concerns about
the maintenance of their position and their capacity to assert authority over others.19 Scott’s study of the extensive discussion of lechery in
Handlyng Synne shows the strong concerns of men in the Church with
the disruptive potential of love and lust, which required management
through such didactic texts. Bailey demonstrates how Caxton’s publishing regime exacerbated anxieties within mercantile and civic political
groups that stimulated a need for moral advice, self-improvement,
and pedagogical texts for adults and children. Broomhall’s study of
the French Church consistory acts demonstrates how the company
expressed shock, dismay, and outright concern at the sometimes passionate outbursts and unwillingness of parishioners to accept the consistory’s power to control their lives.
These essays provide examples of how emotional expression and practice were framed by gender ideologies operating in conjunction with
discourses of authority, but they also highlight occasions when these
ideologies, and the authority that they maintained, could be disrupted
by emotions. Sociologist Catherine A. Lutz has argued that emotions,
like ideologies of gender, are cultural-historical discourses of power,
requiring us to consider ‘the material, institutional and cultural capillaries of power through which discourses of emotion operate’.20 Feminist
scholars also highlight how emotions discourse can be ‘its own form of
commentary of power relations’.21 In this volume, we explore the possibilities of emotions to empower individuals to reject forms of authority
or to create alternatives, by expressing emotions that were inconsistent
with contemporary social codes, and to disrupt power networks in ways
that were unexpected, or with results that were unanticipated, by contemporaries. Philippa Maddern has argued for the power of emotions

8

Susan Broomhall

exhibited even by those who appeared most marginal or powerless in
medieval society, which could impact upon the hierarchical cultural
and administrative systems in which they participated.22 Tarbin’s
essay here similarly emphasizes the unexpected power of children’s
emotional behaviours and expressions in rejecting or accepting too
intently the expectation of parental obedience, which could surprise
adults by its vehemence and its outcomes in actions with sometimes
tragic consequences. Emotions expressed in religious contexts allowed
for unexpected voices, behaviours, or ideas to emerge, as Scott observes
of Robert Mannyng whose warning about the sin of lechery appears to
reveal an empathy for women mistreated by men.
Historians of emotions remind us that emotion words, behaviours,
practices, and expressions must be nuanced to their contexts – social,
cultural, generic among them.23 In the same way, the language of emotion and the cultural codes it conveys are an important consideration
in relation to authoritative expression. The essays in this volume argue
that interchange between France and England remained significant for
articulations of authority and performance of emotion in a number of
ways. Downes’ essay shows how emotional expression in and through
French was vital to the literary culture of fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury England. Bailey demonstrates how Caxton’s publication strategies circulated both French emotional traditions and political anxieties
about the loss of English territories in France through his choices of
which texts to publish. This dissemination of French material and ideas
into England informed emotional expression and display in profound
literary and cultural ways. We see continued explorations of the emotional and gendered nature of national identity and authenticity, as
well as cultural influence, in Barnes’ study of Shakespeare’s questioning
of Englishness and Broomhall’s French Huguenots seeking to distance
themselves from what they perceived as English fears about their social
and moral qualities.
Equally, the specific forms and nature of emotional expression in
such texts were determined in part by constraints of genre.24 Scott
demonstrates that the power of medieval didactic texts to regulate lives
depended upon their nuanced understanding of both the gendered and
emotional relations of everyday life and their capacity to manipulate
these to achieve their pedagogical effect. She emphasizes that the purpose of the exemplum was to persuade by entertaining, aiming thus to
elicit precise and powerful emotional response in readers and listeners.
Maddern’s work explored the success of the legal system in maintaining authority over fifteenth-century society, and, in her most recent

Introduction

9

work, the commonplace performance of emotional rhetoric to uphold
and sustain authority and the rule of law. Witnesses and participants
were expected to recount and display strong emotions in the court, and
Maddern argued that the intensity of emotion felt by the participants
actively influenced the eventual decisions of the judges.25 Such conclusions are echoed by Capern’s assessment of the highly emotional
experience of Chancery, a court that was widely held to provoke anger,
contempt, distrust, disgust, loathing, and rage in its participants. Capern
examines the ways in which female and male litigants articulated their
disputes through emotional language and gendered assumptions that
were designed to persuade legal authorities, but which also had implications for the families and communities of which they were members.
Furthermore, the kind of emotional expression that women and men
could adopt depended on assumptions about the suitability of that
genre for female and male expression respectively. Several essays in this
volume confirm the growing literature that highlights the power of the
letter as a source for women’s articulation of emotion.26 Essays by Neal
and Barnes both explore the capacity for influence and an authoritative
voice through the literary and linguistic registers of emotional expression in the specific generic context of the letter. Neal studies how la
Despenser’s letters illuminate the circumstances in which women could
enter epistolary exchange of this kind, and the gendered rhetorical
strategies they might use when the opportunity to do so arose. Barnes
too shows Shakespeare’s female protagonists expertly negotiating
sophisticated emotional rhetoric in their epistolary conduct, so much
so that contemporary men lamented and feared the power of their
achievement and its consequences for political authority. In a different genre, Randles examines how elite women’s expression of emotion
in embroidery could create influence and agency, rejecting or defying
the assumed codes for appropriate female passions and sentiments that
were proposed in printed male-authored pattern books.

Continuities or changes?
Scholars of medieval and early modern England come together in this
volume to analyse a wide range of textual and material records, from
personal, epistolary, civic, and legal documentation from the archives,
to conduct books, manuals, and literary works, as well as medieval
play cycles, Elizabethan drama, and the material culture of letters and
embroideries across the period. The essays to follow are presented
chronologically but are also grouped thematically to highlight their

10

Susan Broomhall

insights and interventions into different loci or texts about authority.
In this way, while recognizing the changing nature of authority, it is
also possible to trace some of the strong continuities as to how practices
of authority remained embedded in gender ideologies and emotional
performance.
The first three chapters of the volume adopt careful literary analyses
of medieval texts that aimed to employ emotions to achieve authority
and to move others to action. In the first chapter, Kathleen Neal’s subtle
textual analysis of Aline la Despenser’s letter demonstrates how a skilled
female interlocutor, not the traditional author of bureaucratic letters
of authority, could transgress the conventions of the epistolary genre
in thirteenth-century England to engage her recipient in a powerful
emotional and persuasive transaction. In the following chapter, Anne
M. Scott explores how the fourteenth-century didactic text, Handling
Synne, by Robert Mannyng, employed emotions to promote the moral
order and self-governance demanded by the Fourth Lateran Council,
instructing readers through emotional provocation. Scott argues
that through their engaged and enhanced emotional states, Mannyng
guided his audience through his unusually nuanced and sympathetic
analysis of the gendered nature of sin, particularly in relation to lechery. Stephanie Downes analyses the complex emotional expressions of
fourteenth- and fifteenth-century secular lyric, particularly in the hands
of poets who were multilingual, which was designed to appeal to men
and women in positions of power. She argues that the specific language
of emotional articulation employed by John Gower and Charles of
Orleans was an explicit choice made to direct their works to particularly
powerful English audiences, at court and in whose captivity Charles
found himself. In each case, these choices were made with the intent to
assert an authoritative voice of authenticity that reflected the male and
female perspectives from which they were written.
The following two chapters shift us to the world of civic and mercantile authorities in the growing medieval towns of England and to
political performances in which an emotional component was crucial
to the expression and maintenance of power. P. J. P. Goldberg explores
fifteenth-century notions of order as they were represented in York
during the rebellion of Richard Scrope, its heavy-handed repression
by Henry IV, and the consequences for perceptions of their respective
spiritual and political authority. He argues that contemporary devotion
to the martyr Scrope was anchored in a powerful feminized discourse
of Christian love shared among devout friends and supporters, which
drew on an authority far beyond the secular political realm of the

Introduction

11

monarch. By contrast, Merridee L. Bailey focuses on the political anxieties of mercantile men very much engaged in the politics of the city.
She analyses a printed literature of concern, stoked by the early printer
William Caxton, which connected the moral virtue of the individual
to the wider state of the commonwealth. These texts rehearsed the
duties and responsibilities of gentry and mercantile men over their
households, and reaffirmed expectations regarding their business and
political conduct, enflaming (profitably for some) as much as reflecting
the latent fear, shame, and anxieties of their readers.
The next two chapters focus by contrast on the roles of emotions in
shaping behaviours of authority and submission within the family and
household, the neighbourhood and parish.27 Stephanie Tarbin examines
the significance of fear and dread as active components of early modern
childrearing culture, as part of a hierarchy of obedience that flowed
from God to parents and household authorities. However, her essay
highlights the sensitivities of early modern populations to excessive
fears that prevented boys and girls from receiving adequate protection
from abuse or even caused them to self-harm, as well as the emotional
alignments within households and the strategies children employed to
cope. Tarbin’s analysis of lived experiences of emotion within families
and communities is complemented by Susan Broomhall’s study of the
consistory records of the French Church of Threadneedle Street in later
sixteenth-century London. Here too, the Church’s ministers, elected
elders, and deacons recorded moral presentations of the emotional
lives of the congregation, as parishioners were investigated before the
consistory. These acts revealed the many social and emotional permutations created by community members as they crossed the Channel to
establish new lives as refugees in England, often while retaining the old
associations and sociabilities of their communities of origin. The consistory acts also articulated the anxieties of the Church’s governing men
about their capacity to maintain control over their flock, in the face of
sometimes fiery opposition from those whom they investigated, under
the gaze of the watchful English authorities, and in the eyes of other
Protestant communities with whom they were in close contact.
These studies are followed by three chapters that examine very different domains for manifestations of emotion in early modern material
artefacts, letters, and legal culture. Yet each study offers evidence of the
significance of emotional dynamics to the production of authority in
their varied forms. Sarah Randles analyses how embroidery provided
an important means of self-expression and emotional agency to elite
women in relatively unique and ambiguous positions of authority

12

Susan Broomhall

(including captivity) and often fraught and challenging personal circumstances. For a wider group of women though, embroidery also provided a particularly gendered and authoritative material testament to
their moral virtue. Diana G. Barnes’ reading of Shakespeare’s The Merry
Wives of Windsor suggests letter-writing may have been well recognized
by early modern audiences as providing educated women with an outlet
for self-expression, agency, and influence. Shakespeare’s play renders
women’s art in this genre a product of the world of everyday speech
and sympathy and a rejection of the stilted, practised rhetoric of the
letter-writing manual. However, the play’s presentation of the power of
epistolary production in the hands of women shares much in common
with Kathleen Neal’s analysis of her thirteenth-century correspondent,
suggesting that women’s verbal dexterity and subtle expressive capacity
in this genre was well honed, perhaps in a context of fewer alternative
outlets for their sex. In the final chapter, Amanda L. Capern examines
the emotionally charged world of Chancery in which articulations of
emotion reflected not simply tensions between litigants but were also
purposefully performed to influence court personnel. Such acts in this
particular court environment made emotion central to the persuasion
of the judge whose authority was perceived to be in part derived from
his own emotional response to what he experienced there.
Collectively, the essays chart the changing forms in which ideas and
practices of authority were articulated and the consequent shifts in emotional manifestations that these signified or created. Emotional expression necessarily altered as authority was performed in varying spaces and
forms, from civic processions and street drama, to the courts and London
theatres. The increasing employment of law to interrogate familial and
community tensions, which changed local sociabilities but also heightened the expression of emotions contained in legal records and required
in that context, appears to be a constant from the medieval to the early
modern period. The emergence of print changed the nature of textual
content and readership, exposing new audiences to ideas about emotions in fiction and instructing readers in emotional regulation or rhetoric through handbooks for letter-writing, embroidery, or a moral life. Yet,
here too, the templates for reader persuasion through deliberate emotional engagements were no product of the print form, but long established conventions of manuscript didactic literature. Forms of authority
and the texts in which it was expressed certainly changed from the medieval to the early modern period, but the importance of gender and emotions to their function did not. Throughout the period, governance was
primarily a masculine preserve, a deeply held view that required women

Introduction

13

to assert authority and influence in different ways and through different
forms, including specific expressions of emotion that would persuade
and influence but were also understood as being appropriate to their sex.
Masculine authority, though, was likewise practised through emotional
performance. This entailed the demonstration of a wide gamut of emotions, from anger to love, loyalty and care, and included fears and anxieties that had to be managed. These performances of emotion as practices
of male authority operated throughout the medieval and early modern
period to inform and express the relationships between cooperating
hierarchies of authority and to signal and affirm the rights, responsibilities, and authority of men to regulate communities that ranged from the
household to the spiritual, the urban, and the national.

Notes
1. Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, ‘A New Economy of Power Relations:
Female Agency in the Middle Ages’, in Gendering the Master Narrative: Women
and Power in the Middle Ages, ed. Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 1–16 (p. 3).
2. Sini Kangas, Mia Korpiola, and Tuija Aionen, ‘Foreword’, in Authorities in
the Middle Ages: Influence, Legitimacy, and Power in Medieval Society, ed. Sini
Kangas, Mia Korpiola, and Tuija Aionen (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2013),
p. ix.
3. Philippa Maddern, Violence and Social Order: East Anglia 1422–1442 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 229; and Philippa Maddern, ‘Order and
Disorder’, in Medieval Norwich, ed. Carole Rawcliffe and Richard Wilson
(London: Hambledon, 2004), pp. 189–212.
4. Susan Broomhall and Jacqueline Van Gent, ‘Introduction’, in Governing
Masculinities in the Early Modern Period: Regulating Selves and Others, ed. Susan
Broomhall and Jacqueline Van Gent (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 1–22 (p. 6).
5. Key works by Foucault and power translated into English include Discipline
and Punish: The Birth of a Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Allen Lane,
1977); and The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley
(London: Allen Lane, 1978). See also Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton (eds),
Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy (Sydney: Feral Publications, 1979);
and Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s
Thought (London: Penguin, 1991). For early modern English analyses, see
Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox, and Steve Hindle (eds), The Experience of Authority
in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996); R. E. Archer
and Simon Walker (eds), Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England: Essays
Presented to Gerald Harriss (London: Hambledon, 1995); Tim Harris (ed.),
The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2001); B. M. Bolton and C. E. Meek (eds), Aspects of Power and Authority in the
Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007); and Richard W. Kaeuper (ed.), with
Paul Dingman and Peter Sposato, Law, Governance, and Justice: New Views on
Medieval Constitutionalism (Leiden: Brill, 2013).

14

Susan Broomhall

6. Michael J. Braddick and John Walter, ‘Introduction: Grids of Power: Order,
Hierarchy and Subordination in Early Modern Society’, in Negotiating
Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain
and Ireland, ed. Michael Braddick and John Walter (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), pp. 1–42.
7. Robert Zaller, The Discourse of Legitimacy in Early Modern England (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 3.
8. Felicity Riddy (ed.), Prestige, Authority, and Power in Late Medieval Manuscripts
and Texts (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2000).
9. See Adam Fox, ‘Custom, Memory and the Authority of Writing’, in Experience
of Authority, ed. Griffiths, Fox, and Hindle, pp. 89–116; Andy Wood,
‘Custom and the Social Organisation of Writing in Early Modern England’,
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 9 (1999), 257–69;
Andrew Gordon, Writing Early Modern London: Memory, Text and Community
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
10. R. W. Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987); and, for the medieval and
early modern world particularly, see A. Mark Little, ‘State, Masculinities
and Law: Some Comments on Gender and English State-Formation’, British
Journal of Criminology, 36, no. 3 (1996), 361–80; Dawn M. Hadley (ed.),
Masculinity in Medieval Europe (London: Longman, 1999); Elizabeth A.
Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage (London:
Longman, 1999); Philippa Maddern, ‘Origins of the Normative Citizen:
Body, Household, Kingdom and Cosmos in the Middle Ages’, in Women as
Australian Citizens: Underlying Histories, ed. Philippa Maddern and Patricia
Crawford (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001), pp. 13–47;
Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006); Judith M. Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy
and the Challenge of Feminism (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2006); Katherine Allen Smith and Scott Wells (eds), Negotiating Community
and Difference in Medieval Europe: Gender, Power, Patronage, and the Authority of
Religion in Latin Christendom (Leiden: Brill, 2009); Broomhall and Van Gent
(eds), Governing Masculinities; Alexandra Shepard, ‘Manhood, Patriarchy
and Gender in Early Modern History’, in Masculinities, Childhood, Violence:
Attending to Early Modern Women and Men, ed. Amy E. Leonard and Karen L.
Nelson (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), pp. 77–95; Judith M.
Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras (eds), The Oxford Companion to Women and
Gender in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), Section 1:
‘Gendered Thinking’.
11. Peter Haidu, The Subject Medieval/Modern: Text and Governance in the Middle
Ages (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004); Katharine Woodason
Jager, ‘The Practice of Makynge: Masculine Poetic Identity in Late Medieval
English Poetry’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, City University of New York,
2007); Juliana Dresvina and Nicholas Sparks (eds), Authority and Gender
in Medieval and Renaissance Chronicles (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing, 2012).
12. Ruth Mazo Karras, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late
Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003),
pp. 10–11; J. Hearn and D. L. Collinson, ‘Theorizing Unities and Differences

Introduction

15

Between Men and Between Masculinities’, in Theorizing Masculinities, ed.
H. Brod and M. Kaufman (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994), pp. 97–118.
13. Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (eds), Women and Power in the Middle
Ages (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988); Carole Levin, ‘The Heart and
Stomach of a King’: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994); John Carmi Parsons (ed.), Medieval
Queenship (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1994); Carole Levin and R. A. Sullivan (eds),
Political Rhetoric, Power and Renaissance Women (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1995); Sandra Cavallo and Lyndan Warner (eds), Widowhood
in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (London: Longman, 1999); Naomi
Miller and Naomi Yavneh (eds), Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the
Early Modern Period (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000); Philippa Maddern, ‘Widows
and their Lands: Women, Lands, and Texts in Fifteenth-Century Norfolk’,
Parergon, 19, no. 1 (2002), 123–50; Mary Beth Rose, Gender and Heroism in
Early Modern English Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002);
Laurel Amtower and Dorothea Kehler (eds), The Single Woman in Medieval and
Early Modern England: Her Life and Representation (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center
for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2003); Felicity Dunworth, Mothers and
Meaning in the Early Modern English Stage (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2009); Erler and Kowaleski (eds), Gendering the Master Narrative; J. L.
Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens: English Queenship 1445–1503 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005); Albrecht Classen, The Power of a Woman’s
Voice in Medieval and Early Modern Literatures: New Approaches to German
and European Women Writers and to Violence Against Women in Premodern
Times (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007); Charles Beem, The Lioness Roared:
The Problems of Female Rule in English History, Queenship and Power (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Kathleen M. Moncrief and Kathryn Read
Macpherson (eds), Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2007); Carole Levin and Robert Bucholz (eds), Queens and Power in
Medieval and Early Modern England (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2009); Alice Hunt and Anna Whitelock, Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of
Mary and Elizabeth (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Susan Doran and
Thomas S. Freeman (eds), Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
14. Sarah Beckwith, ‘Problems of Authority in Late Medieval English Mysticism:
Language, Agency and Authority in The Book of Margery Kempe’, Exemplaria,
4 (1992) 172–99; Laura Gowing, ‘Gender and the Language of Insult in
Early Modern London’, History Workshop Journal, 35 (1993), 1–21; Laura
Gowing, ‘Language, Power and the Law: Women’s Slander Litigation in Early
Modern London’, in Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England,
ed. Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker (London: Routledge, 1994),
pp. 26–48; Steve Hindle, ‘The Shaming of Margaret Knowsley: Gossip,
Gender and the Experience of Authority in Early Modern England’,
Continuity and Change, 9 (1994), 37–93; Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers:
Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1996); Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in
Early Modern England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988); Barbara A. Hanawalt, Of Good
and Ill Repute: Gender and Social Control in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998); Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Rosalynn Voaden, Arlyn

16

15.
16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.
22.

23.

Susan Broomhall
Diamond, Ann Hutchison, Carol Meale, and Lesley Johnson (eds), Medieval
Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain: Essays for Felicity Riddy
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2000); Laura Gowing, ‘Ordering the Body: Illegitimacy
and Female Authority in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Negotiating
Power, ed. Braddick and Walter, pp. 43–62; Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet:
Women, Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003); Classen, The Power of a Woman’s Voice.
Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 8.
Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); Benno Gammerl, ‘Emotional
Styles: Concepts and Challenges’, Rethinking History, 16 (2012), 161–75.
See Alison M. Jaggar, ‘Love and Knowledge: Emotions in Feminist
Epistemology’, in Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being
and Knowing, ed. Alison M. Jaggar and Susan Bordo (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1989); Catherine A. Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod,
Language and the Politics of Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990); Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a kind of Practice (and is that what
makes them have a history)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding
Emotion’, History and Theory, 51, no. 2 (2012), 193–220.
Barbara H. Rosewein (ed.), Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the
Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Jennifer C. Vaught
(ed.), Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English Literature (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2008); Susan Broomhall and Jacqueline Van Gent, ‘In the Name
of the Father: Conceptualising pater familias in the Letters of William the
Silent’s Children’, Renaissance Quarterly, 62 (2009), 1130–66; Ethan H.
Shagan, The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion and the Politics of Restraint
in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011);
Bernard Capp, ‘“Jesus Wept” but did the Englishman? Masculinity and
Emotion in Early Modern England’, Past & Present, 224 (2014), 75–108.
Mark Brietenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996): David Kuchta, ‘The Semiotics of
Masculinity in Renaissance England’, in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern
Europe: Institutions Texts, Images, ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 233–46.
Catherine A. Lutz, ‘Feminist Emotions’, in Power and the Self, ed. Jeannette
Marie Mageo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 194–215
(p. 197).
Lutz, ‘Feminist Emotions’, p. 194.
Philippa Maddern, ‘How Children were Supposed to Feel; How Children Felt:
England 1350–1550’, in Childhood and Emotion Across Cultures, 1450–1800,
ed. Claudia Jarzebowski and Thomas Max Safley (London: Taylor and Francis,
2013), pp. 121–40.
Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Emotion Words’, in Le Sujet des Émotions au Moyen
Age, ed. Piroska Nagy and Damien Boquet (Paris: Beauchesne, 2008), pp.
93–106; Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (eds),
Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Susan McClary
(ed.), Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Expressive Culture (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2012); R. S. White, ‘“False Friends”: Affective

Introduction

24.

25.

26.

27.

17

Semantics in Shakespeare’, Shakespeare, 8, no. 3 (2012), 286–99; Michiko
Ogura, Words and Expressions of Emotion in Medieval English (New York: Peter
Lang, 2013).
Robert Cockcroft, Rhetorical Affect in Early Modern Literature: Renaissance
Passions Reconsidered (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Gwynne
Kennedy, Just Anger: Representing Women’s Anger in Early Modern England
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 2000); Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering
of Melancholy, Feminism, Psychoanalysis and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance
Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).
See Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of
Emotions Annual Report (2012), online at <http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/media/63564/he130122_annual_report_2012_web_copy.pdf>
[accessed 21 September 2014].
James Daybell, Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006); James Daybell (ed.), Early Modern Women’s Letter
Writing, 1450–1700 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); James Daybell,
The Material Letter: Manuscript Letters and the Culture and Practices of
Letter-Writing in Early Modern England, 1580–1635 (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012). On gendered emotional expression, see Susan Broomhall
and Jacqueline Van Gent, ‘Corresponding Affections: Emotional Exchange
among Siblings in the Nassau Family’, Journal of Family History, 34, no. 2
(2009), 143–65.
See, however, the ambiguities of household and family leadership expressed
in Felicity Riddy, ‘Looking Closely: Authority and Intimacy in the Late
Medieval Urban Home’, in Gendering the Master Narrative, ed. Erler and
Kowaleski, pp. 212–28; and Linda Pollock, ‘Rethinking Patriarchy and the
Family in Seventeenth-Century England’, Journal of Family History, 23, no. 1
(1998), 3–27.

1
From Letters to Loyalty: Aline la
Despenser and the Meaning(s) of a
Noblewoman’s Correspondence in
Thirteenth-Century England
Kathleen Neal

Sometime between the summer of 1273, and early August 1274, the
Countess of Norfolk, Aline la Despenser, sent a letter to the Chancellor
of England.1 This was, in many ways, a completely unremarkable letter concerning a rather banal administrative matter; hardly the place
one might naturally look for evidence of intersections between gender,
emotion, and authority. Yet, as I argue in this chapter, Aline’s letter was
in fact a finely tuned articulation of affective persuasion. The beauty of
its design lay in a delicate weaving between observing the expectations
shaping letters of governance, and transgressing them in targeted and
gendered ways which become clear when the letter is read against its
particular context. Through simultaneous reproduction and disordering of the rules of letter-writing, it sought to evoke a range of positive
responses in one person – the chancellor to whom it was addressed – in
ways uniquely reflective of the relationship between him and its sender,
the countess. Close reading of Aline’s letter thus reveals how all senders
of letters to royal officers might manipulate affective rhetoric to achieve
their political, legal, or fiscal aims: it is a case study of how emotion
and authority regularly interacted in medieval England. Further, it
illuminates the circumstances in which women could enter epistolary
exchange of this kind, and the gendered rhetorical strategies they might
use when the opportunity to do so arose. The letter is an especially rich
source for interrogating how women accessed this particular discourse
of authority, and how they adopted and adapted expected, masculine
forms of rhetorical presentation to political ends.
The letter in question is first and foremost a straightforward request
for the issue of certain letters patent by the chancellor, whose task it was
to authorize such written instruments with the Great Seal. The request
18

From Letters to Loyalty

19

was entirely within the chancellor’s power to grant and he granted
many similar requests, although there is no extant evidence that he
granted this particular one. Specifically, the letter requested the issue of
letters patent of safe conduct for some 30 sacks of wool to be exported
to the continent from the Earl of Norfolk’s estates to cover the debts he
had incurred in crossing the Channel to meet the new king, Edward I,
recently returned from crusade. In translation, it reads:
To her own dear friend and well-wisher, Lord Walter de Merton,
chancellor of our lord the King of England, from Aline la Despenser,
Countess of Norfolk, greetings and dear friendship. Know, dear lord,
that my lord the earl has commanded his bailiffs that they cause his
wool to be transported overseas to pay for his debts which he has
incurred through his passage to meet our lord the king. For which
reason, lord, I pray you that you should wish to grant and to send us
the king’s letters patent of safe conduct by land and sea concerning the
same wool, which amounts to 30 sacks or a little more. Lord, do this
much for our prayer, if it should please you, that my lord should be
grateful and thank you upon his return.2
The extant records of the thirteenth-century Chancery and Exchequer
are full of similar requests for legal, para-legal, and fiscal preferment: it
was documents like these through which high medieval English governance was produced and maintained. High medieval English rulers
depended on letters and letter-writers. Kings and their officials were
rarely able to assert control by force;3 instead, persuasion was essential
to effective government and diplomacy, both of which relied on maintaining stable and functional relationships. Furthermore, governance
was more often reactive than proactive. The actions of royal officials
were provoked by specific requests or demands more often than by
centrally determined policy. Thus, both for the governors and the governed, letters were among the key written instruments for effecting real
political outcomes and regulating political life.
The scope of letters addressed to royal officials varied widely, yet because
of the letter’s role in governance, all such letters represented political
exchanges to some degree. Letters sent by the Prince of Wales addressing
matters of Anglo-Welsh relations,4 for example, had considerably wider
political ramifications than the countess’s request for a relatively routine
letter patent. Nevertheless, by virtue of being produced and sent, both
laid claim to legitimate participation in a particular discourse of authority.
This discourse operated within a set of rules, both articulated and implicit.

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Kathleen Neal

Following the explicit theories and unspoken expectations of epistolarity at the time, the countess’s letter observes a five-part structure in
which each section performs a specific rhetorical role. It makes use of a
polite and appropriate address (salutatio); briefly explains the need for
the letters requested (exordium and narratio); articulates a request for letters patent providing the detail necessary for their production (petitio);
and closes with an expression of gratitude (conclusio). In these general
features it is entirely unremarkable, and resembles nearly every other
extant thirteenth-century letter of request addressed to a royal official.
It demonstrates the degree to which the countess and/or her household
staff, along with many hundred other correspondents, were familiar
with the epistolary style of Chancery, and the requirements of letters
patent.
It ought not to surprise us that Aline should have acquired such
familiarity. Aristocratic women were expected to send and receive letters as part of their work of estate and household management. For
instance, in his Rules, Robert Grosseteste, the famous Bishop of Lincoln,
urged Countess Margaret de Lacy to employ ‘her letters’ to instruct her
householders, agents, and labourers in their duties.5 Indeed, as Philippa
Maddern has argued, ‘any woman with rights over, or possession of,
land or resources had to be prepared to take some share in the massive
textual activity involved in determining and maintaining ownership’.6
In the thirteenth century, the ‘share’ taken in textual activity such
as letter-writing by any aristocratic person, man or woman, would
likely have consisted of instructing or dictating to a scribe. The final
product was the result of collaboration between sender and scribe,
both of whom required some working understanding of the governing
expectations of the genre. The scribe, whose education equipped him
in the ars dictaminis, or art of letter-writing, would take some degree of
responsibility for shaping the content into an appropriate form. The
sender would then read or listen to drafts of their letters and approve
them prior to sending.7
Despite the ubiquity of letters and letter-writing among the aristocracy for the management of their estates, few women figure among the
correspondents whose letters have survived. Occasionally, model letters
with notional female senders are included in formulary collections,8
suggesting that women participated in epistolarity often enough that
scribes saw value in being prepared for the eventuality. Nevertheless, the
infrequency of such examples reinforces the overriding masculine focus
of scribal training and work. The typical concerns of contemporary
theoretical and practical manuals for clerks point to an assumption of

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21

and aspiration to a career writing letters (and other documents) largely
for noblemen.9 At the level of the realm, therefore, authority through
letters was gendered in ways which largely excluded female participation. Aline’s letter is thus both expected and unexpected. Interrogating
this tension is a key goal of this chapter.
Among the implicit rules of corresponding with the officers of the
crown was that participation was restricted within certain networks
of sociability. Unlike other avenues and written genres through which
one might make requests of royal government in the late thirteenth
century, letters relied on a specific and personal relationship between
sender and addressee. Among the extant letters of this period, preexisting personal connections can normally be traced between sender
and addressee where the correspondents can be identified, and letters
of request on behalf of those apparently without acquaintances at court
were generally written by their better connected friends or associates.10
Furthermore, contemporary theories of letter-writing described a rhetoric of address that reflected the societal, structural relationship between
correspondents, based on their nobility and office, and also on degrees
of personal affinity and affective bonds.11 The epistolary codes which
regulated appropriate articulation in letters of governance were thus
inherently personal and emotional, even while the content might be
procedural and bureaucratic.
This underpinning assumption, in which the exchange of letters
of governance was both affective and instrumental, was also strongly
gendered. Although women were embedded in aristocratic networks
of sociability,12 and expected to be competent in textual administration, corresponding with the crown in the thirteenth century was
principally a male activity. In the first place, the business in which the
king’s clerks were engaged was chiefly concerned with legal and paralegal matters of rule and lordship, effectively restricting relevant letter
exchange to those members of the aristocracy with full legal competence. Contemporary correspondence associated with the departments
of Chancery and Exchequer and preserved in The National Archives,13
for example, addresses the appointment of justices and escheators, the
assignment of cases to a particular hearing date or justice, instructions
to justices, sheriffs, and other royal agents, pleas and essoins, the distribution of funds for ‘public’ works such as bridge building, grants of
rights such as estovers or timber for building works, and financial or
mercantile protections, licences, and safe conducts. The forms of these
letters and their content support the legal association of correspondence of this kind. While the overall structure of letters derived from the

22

Kathleen Neal

ars dictaminis, the genre of letters of governance was dominated by the
model of the writ, the crown’s formal instrument of legal instruction.
Since full legal competency was not available to most women, except
in certain specific jurisdictions or circumstances, women were not frequently represented in this kind of correspondence.
Letters of governance thus reproduced the wider social order, in which
women were legally subject to the authority of a governing, male presence, typically a father or husband. The extant letters of SC 1 bear out
the suggestion that corresponding with the crown was principally a preserve of men in the thirteenth century. Over 93 per cent of the surviving
thirteenth-century examples were sent in men’s names, while there are
just 440 women’s letters (approximately 6 per cent) in the series, representing the correspondence of 125 individual women. This dramatic
quantitative distinction supports the contention that only certain,
limited circumstances enabled women’s participation in this particular
genre of textual activity.
Responding to the structural assumptions operating against women
as royal correspondents, women’s letters of governance laid claim to
legitimate epistolarity in gender-appropriate ways. For women, reference to enabling circumstances seems to have been an important part
of claiming authority to ‘write’. The widow is the classic and most
common example of the medieval woman’s opportunity to act and be
represented in her own name,14 and indeed, widows account for the
majority of women’s letters in SC 1 (Table 1.1). Two hundred and 77, or
63 per cent of women’s letters in the series were sent in widows’ names.
Widows who were not remarried held an unusual degree of independent agency and legal competency in thirteenth-century England.15
Their letters reflect their status as femme sole: their independence from
Table 1.1 Women’s letters in SC 1 (Ancient
Correspondence): widows and non-widows
Category
Widows
Non-widows

Unidentified
Total

Letters

Royalty
Relations
Religious
Other

277
48
60
21
27
7
440

(63%)
(11%)
(14%)
(5%)
(6%)
(2%)

Source: Kew, The National Archives, SC 1.

From Letters to Loyalty

23

male protection/control was a key enabling circumstance of their correspondence, and was normally directly referenced in the letter itself.
Frequently, widowed women would draw attention to their widowed
status in the address clause of their correspondence, where diplomatic
convention and dictaminal theory dictated the social ranking and relationship of the parties should be outlined. Widows not only mentioned
the fact of their widowhood, but also used the intitulatio of their address
to place themselves in dyadic relationship to a known male figure; a
relationship which implicitly authorized their epistolarity itself. Thus,
‘Mata, widow of Amanieu d’Albret [VI] lord of Casteljaloux’, ‘Gaillarda,
widow of Amauvin de Ambarès, lord of [St Louis-de-]Montferrand’,
‘Margaret, widow of Ralph de Ludington’, ‘Margery, widow of William
de Munslow’, ‘Julia, widow of Simon de Faversham, customer in
Ireland’, and ‘M., widow of William Tirel of Lewes’ constructed their
appropriate participation in letter exchange as an extension of their late
husbands’ networks of sociability, authorized by his decease.16
Aline la Despenser shared none of the natural or legal advantages
of widows and kin in constructing her right to approach the government of England by epistolary means: one might ask, then, how her
letter came to be written at all. As in men’s letters, and widows’ letters,
networks of sociability underpinned the legitimizing discourse of her
letter to the chancellor, but they were presented quite differently. As a
married woman, the language of widowhood with its affective and legal
persuasive resonance was not available to her. Instead, both structure
and vocabulary drew attention to other circumstances which authorized her epistolary activity.
In real terms, the letter’s composition was enabled by the absence of
her husband, the earl, who had crossed the Channel to meet the king.
These circumstances are mentioned in the letter itself both explicitly
and obliquely, for example, when the letter cites the earl’s ‘passage to
meet our lord king’ and in the promise that ‘upon his return’ he will
be grateful if his wife’s request has been met. These references occur in
important positions within the expected structure of letters as defined
by the ars dictaminis: the narratio, and the conclusio. In the former section, the background to the matter at hand was to be outlined in such
a way as to imbue the following request with a sense of naturalness and
inevitability, and in the latter, the chief rationale for complying with
the request was to be expressed in a convincing manner.17 By drawing
attention to the earl’s absence in these positions, the countess’s letter
manipulated its rhetorical and affective power to legitimize both the fact
of her letter, and the request it conveyed. Although the letter used little

24

Kathleen Neal

gendered vocabulary, its construction thus served to emphasize Aline’s
gender-appropriate behaviour and decorous, wifely obedience. It showed
that she had legitimate authority to act in her own name; and that her
action was implicitly sanctioned by her husband. The letter adapted the
expectations of contemporary epistolarity in order to justify the countess’s own, in some respects transgressive, participation in it.
The specific background to Aline’s association with the chancellor is
also relevant to her ability to access letter-writing within the context
of this specific exchange. It colours even the letter’s stock phrases with
particular affective resonance. The countess’s capacity to address a letter to the chancellor did not rest only on demonstrating that she acted
in good faith as an obedient wife. Nor did the networks of sociability
she activated though writing this letter derive solely or chiefly from her
marital situation. Rather, they derived from her natal family. She shared
a history of old family friendship, political allegiance, and feudal property ties with her correspondent, and her letter exploited this history
as part of its overall rhetoric of legitimacy, and to place the countess
herself in a position of agency in an ongoing patronage relationship.
The chancellor, Walter de Merton, founder of Merton College,
Oxford, was an educated cleric, a former Archdeacon of Bath and soon
to be appointed Bishop of Rochester. He had only recently been reappointed to the chancellorship. He had first served in the early 1260s,
during a brief reassertion of royal power in the midst of the baronial
revolt led by Simon de Montfort.18 He had probably been attached to
the Chancery since the mid-1230s,19 and his personal history was firmly
royalist, which is no doubt why he had been entrusted with the chancellorship in the absence of the new King Edward, first on crusade and
subsequently in Gascony.
Walter’s connection to Aline was of long standing. She was the
daughter and heiress of another prominent royalist and administrator,
Philip Basset, who had been Chief Justiciar in the early 1260s during
Walter’s first tenure as chancellor.20 The two men had been professionally acquainted for many years, and there are two letters from Philip to
Walter from the 1260s that also survive in the archives.21 Philip’s working association with Walter continued when he was appointed to the
Lord Edward’s council of lieutenants in 1270, as the future king departed
on crusade.22 Their acquaintance and common political affiliation was
strengthened by the fact that Walter had been a tenant in Philip’s lands
in Surrey, since 1266.23 Furthermore, since the death of Philip in 1271,
Walter’s lord in these lands had been Aline’s second husband, the Earl
of Norfolk, Roger Bigod, who held them through her right as heiress.24

From Letters to Loyalty

25

Thus, despite the importance of the earl’s absence in legitimizing Aline’s
letter itself, the approach to Walter was based on his enduring personal
links to the countess, and not to his direct acquaintance with the earl.
The connections between Aline and Walter were well established, and
this was significant both in enabling the countess to address him, and
for the meaning of their ensuing correspondence.
The history of their association indicates that, after her father’s death,
Walter was probably the most senior and perhaps the only personal
connection that Aline retained at the heart of the royal administration.
As such, he was both the obvious person for her to approach for aid,
and an important source of patronage, which it was in her interests to
cultivate. Clientelic or patronage relationships were powerful but fragile
social instruments, requiring constant re-affirmation.25 Letters, even of
a banal sort, were an effective mechanism for keeping patronage relationships alive, and for activating them at need.26 Indeed, in this sense,
women’s typical exclusion from the exchange of letters at the level of
royal government could have contributed to their relative exclusion
from the direct lines of political access and the patronage networks
which facilitated governance, serving to reinforce their wider political
disenfranchisement. If we hypothesize that a woman writing a letter
was thereby inserting herself not only into a largely masculine discourse
of authority, but also a masculine sphere of political participation and
networking, it becomes clear why women might have needed specific
rhetorical means of justifying their very presence in the exchange of
such correspondence: it was a powerful political tool.
Although issuing letters patent was a legitimate and regular activity
of the Chancery, the evidence of the SC 1 letters indicates it is appropriate to see the countess’s request as patronage in action, and not only a
routine matter of governance. A number of rhetorical features of Aline’s
letter link it directly to the operation of patronage, in ways which were
standard yet unusually gendered. The conclusio most explicitly marks
it as a member of a clientelic ‘genre’. It offered Walter the thanks of
the earl himself in return for the requested letters, implicitly giving a
promise of future favours from that quarter. Such pseudo-contracts lay
at the heart of patronage in later medieval England, and Europe generally. Specifying who would owe thanks to whom was a common way
of closing letters in SC 1,27 and similar phraseology can be found in the
more celebrated patronage correspondence of fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury Florence.28 Importantly, while at first glance perhaps appearing
to emphasize the earl’s interests as a central rationale for responding
positively to the countess’s request, this phrase also served to position

26

Kathleen Neal

Aline as the central agent in the proposed exchange of patronage. It
constructed her as the broker of the chancellor’s favour on her husband’s behalf.
We can identify similar rhetorical positioning of Aline as the pivotal
figure in the very opening clause, in the use of specific words ordained
by the ars dictaminis to highlight the direct, personal association of the
correspondents. Words like ‘dear friend’, ‘well-wisher’, and ‘dear friendship’ were among those advocated in the theoretical text books of the
day for use in letters between real and long-term friends.29 As we have
seen, this was a true reflection of Aline and Walter’s association, but
in practice, such discourse occurred almost exclusively between male
associates. In its use of friendship vocabulary, the address was thus
both utterly standard and strikingly unique. I have found the word
‘friendship’ in just one other letter from a woman in the SC 1 collection, one sent by Princess Eleanor of England to her cousin Edmund of
Cornwall,30 and the word ‘friend’ in just two letters by women sent to
senior clerics as part of the compound phrase ‘friend-in-God’.31
The vocabulary and rhetoric thus sets Aline’s letter apart from other
women’s letters in the SC 1 series, even while it associates it with
many other letters of request exchanged by men. Women’s letters
more commonly used words that conjured up kinship, maternal, or
marital roles, and expressed voluntary subordination to the other, for
example, in phrases like ‘due reverence and honour’. Such terminology was advocated for use by the inferior party writing to a superior,
as a means of flattery and engendering a positive affective response
through explicit recognition of an existing difference in social rank.32
It was therefore entirely appropriate for articulating the feminine
position in an exchange of letters, yet Aline’s letter did not adopt this
vocabulary. In this respect, her letter departed boldly from the standards expected of it.
Significantly, it does not seem that the countess’s letter was expressed
in this startling way as a result of being composed to a standard form
by a regular household scribe more accustomed to the correspondence of his master. None of the Earl of Norfolk’s extant letters uses
this combination of vocabulary.33 I therefore argue that this choice of
expression was a conscious strategy for foregrounding Aline’s personal
links to Walter. This strategy was ostensive, in that by transgressing the
expected, gendered patterns of letters of governance it drew attention
to itself, thus amplifying its affective impact on the chancellor’s good
will. To identify an ostensive means of deploying the available rhetoric
was the ideal strategy of letter-writers, who needed to be seen both to

From Letters to Loyalty

27

observe the form, and yet simultaneously to make their request distinct
and personal in order to persuade. Yet such a departure from the appropriate gendered forms of epistolarity could only have been undertaken
in the context of the kind of relationship shared by the chancellor
and the countess. To lay claim to such a degree of intimacy and social
equality without that history of association would have been a fatally
risky strategy, moving beyond the merely ostensive to the truly transgressive, and endangering the good reception of the letter itself. Hence,
this adaptation of the expectations of letter-writing was particular to its
context.
The remarkable ostensive language of the salutatio and its implication of the countess’s agency within this letter, are suggestive of the letter’s most intriguing possible meaning, which necessarily must remain
somewhat conjectural. This is the suggestion that the countess’s letter
was intended both as an explicit request for letters patent, and as a
coded statement of royalist loyalty, with specific political implications
for herself and her children. The early 1270s was a significant time
during which to address oneself to the royal government. It was less
than eight years since the baronial revolt led by Simon de Montfort had
been put down.34 That royal authority had been firmly re-established
by this time is only clear in hindsight. Robert Burnell, future chancellor and confidant of King Edward, wrote to de Merton at this time
warning of the dangers to the king’s interests from ‘uncertainly within
the realm’ and ‘those who wish to promote dissention’.35 To many
contemporaries, there remained a clear and present danger of rebellion
from within.36
The absence of King Edward on crusade and then in touring his Gascon
lands, mentioned obliquely in the countess’s letter, could have provided
dissenters with an ideal reason to avoid acknowledging the authority
of the interim government by corresponding with it or respecting its
written instruments. Indeed, the fact that the king was not present in
person to authorize his letters was exploited by Llewellyn ap Gruffydd,
Prince of Wales, to justify disregarding politically unpalatable orders.37
In the charged atmosphere of the late thirteenth century, even language
use may have been a choice with political resonance: recent work suggests that commissioning vernacular literature in English had become
a way of stating one’s loyalty to the baronial cause by the early 1260s,
while conversely using Anglo-Norman was to proclaim one’s association
with the royal court.38 Under these circumstances, I suggest that Aline’s
decisions to write to the royal government at all, and to eschew Latin
for Anglo-Norman, which was not yet common in correspondence of

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Kathleen Neal

this type, could have constituted performances of personal loyalty to
which her ostensive salutatio drew attention.
In addition to the uncertainty engendered by the new king’s absence,
an ongoing diplomatic disagreement with Flanders had led to an
embargo on the export of wool to that country. The latter was a circumstance of particular significance both to the crown and its vassals
since the wool trade was a major source of England’s royal revenue and
private wealth.39 The centrality of wool to the comital bottom line is
reflected in the main request of the countess’s letter, for letters patent
of safe conduct for wool to be sent from Norfolk by land and by sea.
Yet, observance of the embargo on wool was haphazard at best, and
many people simply disregarded it: the king himself wrote angrily to
his ministers that the streets of Flanders were so awash in English wool
that he was the laughing stock of Europe.40 It has even been suggested
by some modern scholars that Earl Roger was among those who flouted
the ban.41 However, the existence of the countess’s letters seems to suggest an intention to act within the law, and is consistent with an overall
intent to perform loyal obedience to the crown. Whether this intention
was the earl’s or his lady’s cannot be determined, although it is notable
that the narratio of Aline’s letter describes the earl ordering the export of
his wool, but not the securing of letters patent which is the substance of
her request. Subtly, it claimed the agency of this lawful and loyal action
for the countess herself.
Insofar as the countess intended a performance of loyalty to the crown
through this letter, it was not a redundant gesture. Although Aline’s
husband, Roger Bigod, was a royalist sympathizer, and her father had
been a noted and unwavering royalist during the revolt, her own actions
and associations had not always been so politically appropriate. Her first
husband, Hugh le Despenser, had been a vassal and close friend of Simon
de Montfort, and died at his side at Evesham while fighting against the
royal forces. The Despensers have even been implicated in commissioning anti-royalist literature in English during the rebellion.42 Aline herself had been placed in charge of the Tower of London and its royalist
prisoners during 1264–65, only relinquishing them when she received
news of the rebels’ defeat and Hugh’s death.43 It seems to have been only
through the personal intervention of her father that Aline escaped the
disinheritance that many rebels’ widows and children suffered after the
restoration of royal rule,44 and it is probable that he arranged her marriage to the Earl of Norfolk as part of her political rehabilitation.45
In this context, the adoption of certain standards based on epistolary
exchange between male peers can be understood as a rather bold claim

From Letters to Loyalty

29

on the chancellor’s special attention. It was, in Umberto Eco’s phrase, a
‘self-focusing appeal’, which signalled the possibility of readings other
than the most explicit within the letter itself.46 Far from being a merely
mechanical application of formulae, it was a strategy that reminded the
chancellor of his long acquaintance with the countess, and focused his
attention on her turn of phrase, encouraging him to look for deeper
implications.
None of the background circumstances I have outlined in this chapter
would have been unknown to Walter. Alerted to the unconventional
undercurrents of the letter by its unusual address he would easily have
understood a deeper significance in her request for royal authorization
for the wool export, the mention of the earl’s motives for travelling ‘to
meet the king’, and the hint that the debts needing repayment had
been incurred only in this noble enterprise. In almost every part of the
letter, except in the salutatio where it was most expected, occurs some
reference to royalist loyalty and decorous subordination to superiors.
All these things were appropriate and formulaic sentiments to include
in a letter of request, and of the letter of a dutiful wife. That is the
beauty of its construction. This apparently innocuous, and seemingly
formulaic text can be construed as a carefully targeted and disguised
appeal to enter into the book of those in royal favour, the name of Aline
la Despenser and by extension that of her son and heir, the younger
Hugh.47 This is not to suggest that the countess expected one brief letter
to be enough to achieve that goal, but it does suggest that she took any
and every opportunity to convey that message to agents of the crown;
and that a letter was a text capable of conveying it.
The Countess of Norfolk’s letter is unusual in the degree to which
we can uncover and suggest multilayered meanings, but its exceptional
nature merely serves to highlight the kind of weaving between the
expected and the transgressive, the adoption and the adaptation of
epistolary rules through which letters of governance could at once conform to the rules of epistolary composition, and express a distinctive
appeal with an affective impact on the recipient. Effective correspondence with royal officials was both a bureaucratic and an emotional
undertaking. Women were largely excluded from this kind of textual
activity, which was a legal and political undertaking, resting principally on male networks of sociability. This created particular challenges
for constructing women’s authority to produce letters of governance
at all. Nevertheless, when the opportunity to participate presented
itself, the tension between observing and challenging the standards of
genre which was inherent in creating persuasive epistles also generated

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Kathleen Neal

particular, gendered opportunities for women to articulate their intentions with affective resonance. Aline’s letter demonstrates how such
affective articulation could be encoded in surprisingly banal ways in letters of governance, and how deeply the historian must interrogate both
the context of an individual exchange, and the norms which governed
it, in order to understand its full implications.

Notes
1. This work was supported by Australian Research Council Project Grant no.
DP1092592. Earlier versions of this chapter were delivered at the biennial
meeting of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and
Early Modern Studies in Dunedin, New Zealand, and the Annual Meeting
of the Medieval Academy of America/Medieval Association of the Pacific in
2011. I thank Philippa Maddern for encouraging me to prepare it for print.
2. Kew, The National Archives (hereafter TNA), SC 1 July 1984. The letter is
printed in F. J. Tanquerey (ed.), Recueil de Lettres Anglo-Françaises (Paris:
H. Champion, 1916), p. 10; cf. my translation with Anne Crawford (ed.),
Letters of Medieval Women (Stroud: Sutton, 2002), p. 192. I thank Paul Brand
and Paul Hyams for advice on the translation; errors remain my own.
3. David A. Carpenter, The Reign of Henry III (London: Hambledon, 1996);
David A. Carpenter, The Struggle for Mastery: Britain, 1066–1284 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003); Michael T. Clanchy, England and Its Rulers:
1066–1272, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).
4. Kathleen Neal, ‘Words as Weapons in the Correspondence of Edward I with
Llywelyn Ap Gruffydd’, Parergon, 30, no. 1 (2013), 51–71.
5. ‘The Rules of Robert Grosseteste’, in Walter of Henley and Other Treatises
on Estate Management and Accounting, ed. Dorothea Oschinsky (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 388–407.
6. Philippa Maddern, ‘A Woman and Her Letters: The Documentary World of
Elizabeth Clere’, in Maistresse of My Wit: Medieval Women, Modern Scholars,
ed. Louise d’Arcens and Juanita Feros Ruys (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004),
pp. 29–45 (p. 33).
7. Neal, ‘Words as Weapons’, p. 57.
8. For instance, an isolated example of a letter from a wife to an absent husband
is recorded in London, British Library (hereafter BL), MS Additional 8167,
and printed in Lost Letters of Everyday Life: English Society, 1200–1250, ed.
Martha Carlin and David Crouch (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2013), pp. 238–41. A single letter from the dowager queen, Eleanor
of Provence, was preserved as an ‘outstanding letter of request’ in a late
thirteenth-century formulary from Salisbury. See BL, MS Royal 12 D. XI,
fol. 87 b.
9. Ian Cornelius, ‘The Rhetoric of Advancement: Ars Dictaminis, Cursus, and
Clerical Careerism in Late Medieval England’, New Medieval Literatures, 12
(2010), 289–330.
10. See, for example, the many letters of intercession sent by Eleanor of
Provence to officers of the crown, on behalf of various suppliants, discussed

From Letters to Loyalty

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.
16.

17.
18.
19.
20.
21.

22.

23.
24.
25.

31

in Margaret Howell, Eleanor of Provence: Queenship in Thirteenth-Century
England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 298–99.
Giles Constable, ‘The Structure of Medieval Society According to the
Dictatores of the Twelfth Century’, in Law, Church, and Society: Essays in
Honor of Stephan Kuttner, ed. Kenneth Pennington and Robert Somerville
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977), pp. 253–67.
For example, see Lars Kjær, ‘Food, Drink and Ritualised Communication in
the Household of Eleanor de Montfort, February to August 1265’, Journal of
Medieval History, 37, no. 1 (2011), 75–89; Emma Cavell, ‘Aristocratic Widows
and the Medieval Welsh Frontier: The Shropshire Evidence’, Transactions of
the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 17 (2007), 57–82; Barbara A. Hanawalt,
‘Lady Honor Lisle’s Networks of Influence’, in Women and Power in the Middle
Ages, ed. Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1988), pp. 188–212.
TNA, SC 1. The series includes 7,049 items dating from the reigns of Henry
III and Edward I; all figures derived by my calculations from Patricia Barnes
(ed.), List of Ancient Correspondence of the Chancery and Exchequer. Revised
edition (New York: Kraus Reprints, 1968).
Rowena Archer, ‘ “How Ladies … Who Live on Their Manors Ought to
Manage Their Households and Estates”: Women as Landholders and
Administrators in the Later Middle Ages’, in Woman is a Worthy Wight:
Women in English Society, 1200–1500, ed. P. J. P. Goldberg (Stroud: Sutton,
1992), pp. 149–81; but for the fluidity of the categories of ‘married’ and
‘unmarried’ see Cordelia Beattie, ‘ “Living as a Single Person”: Marital Status,
Performance and the Law in Late Medieval England’, Women’s History Review,
17, no. 3 (2008), 327–40.
Beattie, ‘“Living as a Single Person”’; Sue Sheridan Walker (ed.), Wife and
Widow in Medieval England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993).
These examples come from TNA, SC 1/18/210; 19/121; 22/36; 30/164;
33/145; 62/17. The phrase translated here as ‘widow’ is usually given (in
either Latin or Anglo-Norman French) as ‘who was the wife of …’, but occasionally as ‘relict’.
Martin Camargo, Ars Dictaminis/Ars Dictandi (Turnhout: Brepols, 1991).
C. A. F. Meekings, ‘Walter de Merton’, Studies in 13th-Century Justice and
Administration (London: Hambledon, 1981), Chapter IX, pp. lviii–lxxv (p. lxix).
See Meekings, ‘Walter de Merton’, p. lx.
R. Malcolm Hogg, ‘Philip Basset at the Court Coram Rege, 1261–63’, The Irish
Jurist, 21, no. 2 (1986), 272–89.
TNA, SC 1/7/33; translated in G. O. Sayles, The Functions of the Medieval
Parliament of England (London: Hambledon, 1988), pp. 97–8; see also TNA,
SC 1/7/34.
Richard Huscroft, ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go? Robert Burnell, the Lord
Edward’s Crusade and the Canterbury Vacancy of 1270–73’, Nottingham
Medieval Studies, 45 (2001), 97–109.
Meekings, ‘Walter de Merton’, p. lxxiv.
Marc Morris, The Bigod Earls of Norfolk in the Thirteenth Century (Woodbridge:
Boydell, 2005), p. 105.
Michael H. Gelting, ‘Reflections on the Insertion of Bureaucratic Structures in
Medieval Clientelic Societies’, in Law and Power in the Middle Ages: Proceedings

32

26.

27.

28.
29.

30.
31.

32.
33.

34.
35.

36.

Kathleen Neal
of the Fourth Carlsberg Academy Conference on Medieval Legal History 2007, ed.
Per Andersen, Mia Münster-Swendsen, and Helle Vogt (Copenhagen: Djøf,
2008), pp. 257–68; Paul D. McLean, The Art of the Network: Strategic Interaction
and Patronage in Renaissance Florence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2007).
Margaret E. Mullett, ‘Byzantium: A Friendly Society?’, Past & Present, 118
(1988), 3–24; Julian Haseldine, ‘Friends, Friendship and Networks in the Letters
of Bernard of Clairvaux’, Cîteaux: Commentarii Cistercienses, 57 (2006), 243–80.
Xavier Hélary, ‘Les Liens personnels entre les cours de France et d’Angleterre
sous le règne de Philippe III, 1270–1285’, in Thirteenth Century England XII,
ed. Björn Weiler, Janet Burton, and Phillipp Schofield (Woodbridge: Boydell,
2008), pp. 75–89. Hélary has remarked on the frequency of such phrases in
letters from members of the French court, but did not proceed to analyse
them in the context of patronage.
See McLean, Art of the Network.
Anonymous of Bologna, ‘Rationes Dictandi’, in Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts,
ed. James J. Murphy (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance
Studies, 1971), pp. 1–25. There is an extensive literature on the historical
meanings of ‘friendship’. See, for example, Friendship: A History, ed. Barbara
Caine (London: Equinox, 2009); Julian Haseldine, ‘Understanding the
Language of Amicitia. The Friendship Circle of Peter of Celle (c. 1115–1183)’,
Journal of Medieval History, 20, no. 3 (1994), 237–60; Philippa Maddern,
‘“Best Trusted Friends”: The Concepts and Practices of Friendship in
Fifteenth-Century Norfolk’, in England in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Nicholas
Rogers (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1994), pp. 100–17.
TNA, SC 1/30/58.
Two letters from Eleanor of Provence to Robert Burnell (TNA, SC 1/23/11
and SC 1/23/34); and an unusual letter exhibiting other strange vocabulary
choices from Katherine Paynel to John Langton (TNA, SC 1/27/133). For
the text and comments on the latter, see K. Edwards, ‘The Social Origins
and Provenance of the English Bishops During the Reign of Edward II’,
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 9 (1959), 51–79.
Constable, ‘Structure’; Laurie Shepard, Courting Power: Persuasion and Politics
in the Early Thirteenth Century (New York: Garland, 1999).
Seven are extant: TNA, SC 1/7/38; 15/64; 25/175; 26/115 &116; 28/48; and
29/191. The latter is illegible. Only two use the word ‘friend’ (amico in SC
1/7/38; amy in SC 1/25/175), and none use ‘friendship’ or ‘well-wisher’.
J. R. Maddicott, Simon de Montfort (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994).
TNA, SC 1/7/211; Sayles (Functions, p. 100) incorrectly attributed this letter
to Philip Basset and gave a date of 1261. I follow Patricia Barnes (see n. 13)
and J. R. Maddicott (‘Edward I and the Lessons of Baronial Reform: Local
Government, 1258–80’, in Thirteenth Century England I, ed. P. R. Coss and
S. D. Lloyd (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1986), pp. 1–30) in preferring Burnell,
with a date of c. 1272–73.
See Maddicott, ‘Lessons’; Richard Huscroft, ‘Robert Burnell and the
Government of England, 1270–1274’, in Thirteenth Century England VIII, ed.
Michael Prestwich, R. H. Britnell, and Robin Frame (Woodbridge: Boydell,
2001), pp. 59–70.

From Letters to Loyalty

33

37. TNA, SC 1/19/22. Calendared in Calendar of Ancient Correspondence Concerning
Wales, ed. J. Goronwy Edwards (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1935),
p. 86.
38. Mark N. Taylor, ‘Aultre Manier de Language: English Usage as a Political Act in
Thirteenth-Century England’, in Medieval Multilingualism: The Francophone
World and its Neighbours, ed. Christopher Kleinhenz and Keith Busby
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), pp. 107–26.
39. T. H. Lloyd, The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005).
40. TNA, SC 1/22/28; Huscroft, ‘Burnell and Government’, p. 67.
41. Richard H. Bowers, ‘English Merchants and the Anglo-Flemish Economic
War of 1270–1274’, in Seven Studies in Medieval English History and Other
Historical Essays Presented to Harold S. Snellgrove, ed. Richard H. Bowers
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1983), pp. 21–54 (p. 42); cf. Morris,
Bigod Earls, p. 109.
42. Taylor, ‘Aultre Manier’.
43. Thomas Wykes, ‘Chronicon Thomae Wykes’, in Annales Monastici, ed. Henry
Richards Luard, 5 vols (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and
Green, 1864–69), IV (1869), p. 175. I thank Susan Higginbotham for this
reference.
44. For the disinherited, see C. H. Knowles, ‘The Resettlement of England after
the Barons’ War, 1264–67’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th
series, 32 (1982), 25–41; for Philip’s intervention, see Calendar of the Close
Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, 1279–1288 (facs. edn New York:
Kraus Reprints, 1970), p. 88; TNA, SC 1/8/16: Philip was careful to secure a
copy of the relevant charter for his daughter’s own records from the chancellor in 1265.
45. Morris, Bigod Earls, p. 105.
46. Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1990), p. 55.
47. That is, Hugh Despenser the Elder.

2
The Role of Exempla in Educating
through Emotion: The Deadly Sin
of ‘lecherye’ in Robert Mannyng’s
Handlyng Synne (1303–1317)
Anne M. Scott

Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne,1 written between 1303 and 1317,
has been praised for the superb view it gives of medieval life;2 I suggest
that it is not just a view in the sense of being a window onto the medieval English world and what the people did, but a more fundamental
view into minds and hearts. Study of the text will help a modern reader
understand the mentality of those who used Handlyng Synne and other
contemporary didactic works, the ordinary medieval people who form
the majority of the community but have left few records of their lives.
Modern scholarship has become increasingly aware of the disparate
but enlightened audiences of medieval works through research such as
Claire McIlroy’s study of Richard Rolle,3 and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne’s
edited volume on Middle English literary theory.4 This chapter associates my work with theirs by arguing that the way Mannyng wrote for his
readers and listeners suggests that his audience was broad in class and
education, yet capable of sophisticated understanding and discernment.
The content of this didactic work follows the forms of order and
governance defined in the medieval Church’s ‘syllabus’ to be used in
instructing the laity in the truths of their faith and requirements for a
good moral life: the Creed, the ten commandments, the seven sacraments, and the seven deadly sins.5 In particular, it gives a detailed study
of sins and causes of sins, so that the laity can make a good confession,
an annual obligation for all the faithful since the decree of the Fourth
Lateran Council, 1215.6 It contains sections of instruction and of precept, followed by explanation relating the precept to circumstances of
daily life. There are proverbs and brief examples quoted to give both
textual authority and the authority of commonly held folk wisdom
to the precepts. And there are full-scale exempla, or illustrative stories
34

The Role of Exempla in Educating through Emotion

35

which recreate worlds sometimes vastly different from that of the
imagined fourteenth-century audience. It is specifically through these
stories that Mannyng engages the emotions, offering teaching intended
to persuade by arousing emotions such as fear, horror, desire, love, and
often, a salutary amount of humour.
Although we cannot know precisely how a medieval audience
received a text, we can, to a certain extent, discover who that audience
might be. Evidence from the ownership of books suggests that readership existed in various social groupings and occupations, both clerical
and lay, even extending to some urban and rural labourers.7 Judging
from the quality of material extant for lay entertainment and instruction, ‘whether or not they could read, they had to be sophisticated and
active listeners’.8 In the tradition of ad status sermons, the precepts,
explanation, and illustrative tales of Handlyng Synne reveal expectations
of how different groups are invited to think about religious and moral
teaching and to lead their lives; reciprocal attitudes of lords and their
people, priests and laity, priests and women, men and women are readily observable, seen through the author’s lens as he transmits his teaching within the authoritative formulas of the medieval Church.9
Mannyng writes with the papal authority given by the Fourth Lateran
Council to teach, which also outlined what to teach, and the authority of the thirteenth-century English bishops who decree that the
teaching should be in a form which the unlearned can comprehend.10
Mannyng’s immediate source and exemplar is the Manuel des Pechiez
(c. 1272) which he translated from Anglo-Norman, and itself relies on
the authority of the paradigms devised by the English bishops, and
by important teachers such as the Dominican friar Guillaume Pérault,
whose Summa virtvtvm ac vitiorvm (1249–50)11 was directly influential to
William of Waddington, the writer of the Manuel des Pechiez. Individual
sections of Handlyng Synne quote direct authority from Scripture and the
teachings of the Church Fathers, and the exempla – which, as I shall
discuss throughout this chapter, are specifically designed to educate by
engaging the emotions – carry the authority which Mannyng shares
with widespread users of the great collections such as the Dialogues of
St Gregory, or the Vitas Patrum.12 Mannyng’s text is locked into the
authority of all who have created, used, and adapted this material,
giving his teaching impeccable credentials.
With all these authorities supporting him, Mannyng has high expectations of his audience and its ability to profit from what he has written.
Like many other English religious writers, his Prologue first addresses
all Christians,13 then focuses on his own locality of Bourne, and, more

36

Anne M. Scott

closely still, his own religious community of canons, sisters, and lay
brothers:
To alle crystyn men vndyr sunne
And to gode men of brunne,
And specylay alle be name:
Þe felaushepe of symprynghame (57–60).
Whereas the immediate source, the Manuel des Pechiez, is in the AngloNorman French of the rulers, Handlyng Synne is in the native vernacular,
English,14 directed towards a comprehensive audience of those who
cannot understand Latin and perhaps not French, and slanted expressly
towards the laity, not the clergy, though the text contains several direct
addresses to these latter. Mannyng definitely expects some of his audience, among them the sisterhood of the double monastery of Gilbertines
at Sempringham, to be able to read the work, while at the same time
recognizing that many will listen to it being read. Joyce Coleman argues
plausibly that the original audience could have been the pilgrim guests
of the monastery at Sempringham.15 Certainly, Mannyng emphasizes at
many points that his work is intended primarily for a lay audience, some
of whom, at least, are expected to read it. From the Prologue this is made
clear, with Mannyng exhorting his readers to open the book at any point,
and to refer from one section to another; the selection of exempla, too, is
designed for the laity, to replace the ‘trotouale’, or idle tales, they would
otherwise hear in the tavern. This implies people in the lowest social
classes in addition to the more literate laity and Mannyng’s monastic
brothers and sisters. It is a single text taking account of social hierarchy
yet directing its teaching towards everyone.
This manual does not treat its audience like novices in the Christian
faith; the work has more the air of a compendium than a primer, and
the audience is invited to open the book at any page, and to read the
sections in any order, handling both the quantity of information and
exhortation, and grasping the sophistication of its content:
Whedyr outys þou wylt opone þe boke,
Þou shalt fynde begynnyng on to loke.
Oueral ys begynnyng – oueral is ende,
Hou þat þou wylt turne hyt or wende (121–4).
Not only does it offer the commonly known taxonomies of commandments, sacraments, sins, but there are graded taxonomies within the

The Role of Exempla in Educating through Emotion

37

sections – seven ‘spyces’ or types of lechery, for instance – and subdivisions within those. Some sections assume a subtle understanding
of the circumstances of sin – such as the frequently reiterated precept
to avoid speaking of ‘pryuytes’ (7512, 8320), sins so secret and personal
that to mention them will cause harm to the reader/listener,16 and the
comment, repeated more than once, that one’s conscience will tell one
when a sin has been committed:
Sum pryuytes of lecherye
Yn opun speche are vyleynye.
Þarfore wyl y nat hem alle descryue,
But alle behoueþ vs þer of shryue.
(confess)
Þyn ynwyt wote what þou hast wroght
(conscience)
And whych ys synne & which ys noght (8411–18).
The moral discernment implied here comes from having an informed, or
educated conscience. Nothing is considered too abstruse; the author sets
out to make the material comprehensible, and difficult teaching, such as
the doctrine of transubstantiation, is confronted and explained.17 Error
which might lead to heresy is always considered a possibility; unorthodox ideas are addressed and refuted. The material sets out to provide the
instruction necessary to acquire an informed conscience, yet to a certain
extent presupposes its existence, inferred from the many cross-references
within the work where the reader or listener is expected to remember
and make the connection with other sections of doctrine or advice. To
make such connections, knowledge and understanding of the subject
matter must already exist. Mannyng implies as much when he is unwilling to allow ignorance as an excuse for sin by the laity:
Þou lewed man knowest also
What ys to lete, what ys to do.
Þou knowest as weyl eury point
As þe prest þat ys anoint (7415–18).
It is also possible to gauge the more subtle responses that Mannyng
intends to provoke in his readers through the use of stories. We know,
from witnessing Chaucer’s Pardoner in action, for instance, that people
could be moved to penitence by a good story; the simplistic reaction the
Pardoner expects is a monetary offering to buy an indulgence which will
obtain for the penitent a mechanical absolution for sin. The contents
of Handlyng Synne are directed towards a more considered, intelligent,

38

Anne M. Scott

and long-term approach to repentance and the salvation of souls. The
lengthy document has two aims: to inform the mind and engage the
heart. The importance of knowledge is seen in the greater proportion of
lines dealing with instruction to those narrating exempla;18 but while
the doctrinal and behavioural material is solid, the exempla fulfil the
role of engaging the emotions – the mind assents and the heart drives
the will to action.

The exemplum: stirring mind and heart
Mannyng’s immediate source, the Anglo-Norman Manuel des Pechiez,19
which he translates, relies on stories to make the material, which is
lengthy and complex, enjoyable for lay people.20 In considering their
use in context, modern readers need to beware of assuming that the
exempla are aids to instruction only suited to simple listeners. Chaucer’s
Pardoner says, in a remark that may seem a little patronizing: ‘For lewed
peple loven tales olde’, yet he preaches a sermon full of exhortation,
precept, and subtle distinctions before concluding with his riveting
story.21 In Handlyng Synne, the exemplum is a fully integrated part of a
carefully organized teaching programme. Mannyng professedly writes
his ‘ryme’, to replace the ‘talys and rymys’ which the laity listen to ‘Yn
gamys, yn festys, & at þe ale’. He intends to replace the ‘trotouale | þat
may falle oft to velanye’ with edifying stories which will help people to
recognize circumstances which lead to sin, and which they might not
have understood before (46–49).
For swyche men haue y made þys ryme
Þat þey may weyl dyspende here tyme
And þer yn sumwhat for to here
To leue al swyche foul manere
And for to kun knowe þer ynne
Þat þey wene no synne be ynne (51–6).
This is more than writing to delight as the Manuel writer suggests. It is
writing to help the audience to ‘kun knowe … | þat þey wene no synne
be ynne’, that is, to achieve discernment, to be able to make distinctions, and to improve the moral quality of life. The exempla are told
with a narrative skill designed both to entertain and to make the teaching memorable; their power to move the audience to change depends
both on the emotional impact of the narrative, and on the audience
having a clear understanding of the issues being exemplified.

The Role of Exempla in Educating through Emotion

39

The purpose of the exemplum has traditionally been to persuade by
entertaining. An early editor of exempla collections, Thomas Crane,
quotes the statement, erroneously attributed to Bede, that a certain
bishop, very learned and subtle, was sent to convert the English, and,
using his subtlety in his sermons, failed to convert anyone. Another
less-learned friar was sent, who, using stories and examples in his sermons, converted almost the whole English people.22 Not only is this
anecdote an exemplum in itself, but, as Larry Scanlon points out, it fixes
the importance of the form at the centre of the foundation myth of
post-Roman English Christianity.23 Indeed, it implies that without the
narrative, the conversion of the English would have been impossible.
Early artes praedicandi mention the exemplum in such a way as to imply
that the exemplum not only entertains but teaches as well. Jacques
de Vitry puts it succinctly: ‘Many are stirred by examples who are not
moved by precepts.’24 Others instructing preachers elaborate more:
Go, therefore, and do likewise, because exempla move the mind
more effectively, stick more firmly in the memory, illumine the
intellect more easily, delight the listener, inflame the heart, remove
tedium, influence life, instruct in morals, while with their novelty
they charm the sense, and put to flight detestable drowsiness before
the preacher.25
In these recommendations, the exemplum is regarded not simply as
an embellishment to moral or doctrinal teaching, but the vehicle that
conveys the teaching and moves the listener to interact, whether by a
movement of greater understanding, an onrush of devotion, a resolution to improve morally, or a combination of all these.
What the exemplum narrates is linked to what the listener is going to
do, as Scanlon suggests: ‘The exemplum illustrates a moral because what
it recounts is the enactment of that moral. The moral does not simply
gloss the narrative. It establishes a form of authority, enjoining its audience to heed its lesson, and to govern their actions accordingly.’26 In
the case of Handlyng Synne, exempla are used so that the audience gains
information, remembers truths essential for salvation, and is moved by
such emotions as fear, sorrow, gratitude, or awe to adopt ways of behaving that will avoid sin and increase virtue. Yet if, as I have suggested earlier, managing the didactic material presupposes an audience of some
competence, dealing with the exempla can be still more demanding,
particularly when they stem from varying cultures and value systems,
albeit within the overarching system of the Christian Church.

40

Anne M. Scott

To illustrate this, I will take an exemplum from the many which relate
incidents in the lives of the early desert monks and hermits who were
not only distant in place and time but lived out ideals of prayer, solitude, penance, and chastity in situations foreign to Mannyng’s lay audience of fourteenth-century Lincolnshire. The tale of a renegade monk
who abandons his faith in God and tries to marry an Egyptian pagan
priest’s daughter because he is burning with lust and she is the first
woman he meets (171–330), has an exotic setting which makes such
stories appealing; and the theme that God is full of mercy in forgiving
the monk his gross infidelity is deliberately made astonishing within
the context of the story.
The monk commits a crimen – a grave sin that, in early Christian
thinking carries the ultimate penalty of damnation27 – but it is the
pagan priest who recognizes, through consulting his oracle, that God
will forgive the sin if the monk repents, therefore he bans his daughter
from embarking on the marriage.28 The ban effectively quenches the
monk’s ardour, and, under counselling from a hermit, he does penance,
not for the sin of unchastity, but of forsaking God. The exemplum
underlines the extraordinary mercy of God who can be persuaded to
forgive the grave sin of apostasy – a sin directed at the Godhead – and
conveys this through colourful and emotionally engaging details: a
‘maumet of hell’ who has access to truth; a one-time holy desert monk
who is prepared to throw away his soul for the love of a woman; a heathen priest who is more faithful to God than the monk himself.
This is the world of early Christian antiquity in which the mercy of
God is the paramount factor. As Peter Brown suggests, God is like a
late Roman emperor who has the power to grant amnesty: ‘Clementia
was an all-important imperial prerogative because the act of forgiveness was a stunning suspension on the part of a Roman emperor of an
untrammelled power to harm. It was the same with God.’29 To a modern
reader the tale may seem preposterous, yet in an exemplum, time is
telescoped, and what happened in early Christian desert communities
is applied to daily life in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, just
as New Testament parables are brought into the twenty-first-century
world every time they are interpreted and applied to modern living. The
pastoral manual acquires, in this way, an imaginative hinterland of continued belief and practice. Yet the story demands some discernment if
the laity are to apply the essence of the teaching to their contemporary
life. While the content of the story plays out a gender ideology which
implies that only a life of chastity can lead to perfection and women
are the main form of temptation to sin, the impact of the exemplum

The Role of Exempla in Educating through Emotion

41

is in its emotive portrayal of God’s mercy. What is taught refers to the
universal Church as well as to the immediate audience in Lincolnshire,
who, through the story, are invited to empathize with the wise hermit,
the truth-telling pagan priest, the victimized daughter, the penitent
monk, and the all-forgiving God, and, through this emotional experience, to grasp for themselves the wondrous and undeserved mercy of
God to all sinners, and repent of their sins accordingly.

Handling the Sin of Lechery
Mannyng has been criticized for portraying women as an immediate
cause of sin, in this showing himself to endorse the gender ideology of
contemporary male writers. Cynthia Ho analyses dichotomies in the portrayal of divine justice that, according to Mannyng’s exempla,30 refuse
forgiveness to women who commit adultery, or become priests’ wives,
yet have nothing to say on the fate of the participating male.31 Her essay
raises many questions about how women are expected to deal with the
lessons contained in the exempla. Yet, while several exempla present
women as both sinners and the cause of men’s sin, the didactic parts of
the section on the ‘Sin of Lechery’, to which I now turn, show Mannyng’s
compassionate understanding of the social situations in which women
operate, and the dangers to which they are exposed (7339–8586). This
suggests that the writer is happy to narrate a sensational tale, but at the
same time is humanely sensitive to the pastoral needs of women, in this
disrupting the traditional gender ideologies that underlie the sources of
his exempla.
The section starts with an initial schema setting out Church law
on sexual matters with clear definitions using English terms such as
‘spousebreche’ and explanations of technical terms such as ‘affynyte’,
which covers one of the more abstruse regulations against having sex
with a woman who has had sex with any of one’s kin.32 Sins are given
certain weightings: fornication between the young is the lightest, incest
is the worst. Measures of shared guilt are apportioned and long-term
consequences of sin are explained. If a young woman has willingly
consented to surrender her virginity, the man who is responsible must
care for her future; if she should turn to a life of lechery, the man who
deflowered her will carry the guilt of her sins. Lords who seduce other
men’s wives and daughters come in for particular criticism, and the
added iniquity of boasting about the deed and thereby bringing shame
to the woman is stressed as compounding the sin. Practical effects such
as the possibility of catching a sexually transmitted disease are listed,

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and the catalogue concludes with a direct address to men and to women,
recommending that they give their love to one person only, and strive
to overcome temptations of the flesh. This introductory material gives
legal information, applying it to recognizable everyday circumstances.
The advice is remarkable for being set in the context of contemporary
English life with little reference to supernatural powers either to help
or hinder a person in the pursuit of salvation – such references are the
preserve of the exemplum. In the straight didactic sections, sin is attributed, not to the temptation of the devil, but to a variety of mundane
causes. Women must not dress seductively to entrap men. Men must
not become procurers. Those who have the care of children must see
to it that they do not have the opportunity for sexual experimentation. The material is explained with a view to helping the audience
understand the life-changing consequences of such actions. Much is
made of the power of sight to influence the memory which, in turn
influences thought, leading to desire and eventual action. As well as
making distinctions between levels of responsibility, and demanding
foresight as to the long-term effects of actions, the text strongly invokes
the concept that protection against sinning involves everyone in the
community. Those who have a duty of care either to their subjects, as
‘lordynges’, or to their flock, as pastors, carry a particular responsibility
to which Mannyng returns repeatedly, and with both passion and indignation. He believes the abuse of women to be so prevalent among the
mighty that at one point he uses the image of a ‘castel of lechery’ (7644)
in which lords authorize their men to procure women; such perverted
authority allies these lords with the devil and their lecherous behaviour
is the equivalent of carrying a banner into battle against Holy Church.33
The castle and tower are the devil’s strongholds opposing, flagrantly,
the power of the Holy Church:
Sweche men areysen baner
A ens holy churches power,
And hem self are castel and tour
For to mayntene þe lechour (7651–4).
The purpose of this writing, so full of illustration from daily life,
explanation based on medieval theories of psychology, endorsement by
the authority of scripture, the fathers, homely proverbs, and exempla,
is to give the penitent autonomy. The detailed explanation is designed
to educate the consciences of the audience so that they can protect
themselves from sinning. At several points in the whole work, and at

The Role of Exempla in Educating through Emotion

43

least twice in this section, Mannyng insists that your own conscience
will tell you when you have done wrong (7667–8, 8411–18). He recognizes, however, that honest doubt may prevent someone from discerning whether something is sinful or not. The proposed safeguard, when
in doubt, is to confess everything, since the priest has a duty to decide
what is a sin and what is not (7607–10). The priest is necessary to give
absolution, and the penitent must confess in order to gain forgiveness,
but Mannyng’s instruction provides the reader with the tools to become
genuinely contrite and thereby secure salvation.

Teaching through the emotions
To suggest that the audience has been well taught in the elements of
faith and morals, and to indicate that they are therefore expected to
engage with the teaching, does not necessarily give an idea of how
they are moved to take this teaching to heart and to improve their
lives. Conscience is informed by precept, but the will is driven to action
when stirred by such emotions as fear, awe, and love in the face of the
inscrutable, the intangible, the unearthly. In medieval and early modern text and image, God is often terrifying, and the approach to his
presence through death is the ultimate terror.34 This terror is captured
in the exempla which draw on a wide body of shared emotional experience for their effect.
To examine the emotive and salutary effects of exempla, I turn,
finally, to two stories from the section on ‘Lechery’, each of which ends
with someone in the exemplum experiencing, then recounting, the terrifying events of the tale, thereby being moved to some form of life conversion. In the first, a Jew, travelling on a long journey, finds himself at
nightfall in a deserted spot, and takes shelter in an old temple of Apollo.
Feeling uneasy, and remembering having overheard people speak of
the power of Christ’s passion and death, he makes the sign of the cross
four times around himself. At midnight, a noisy rout of devils comes
to render account of their activities to Satan. The first devil tells how
he has created havoc by calling up storms at sea, and the second how
he has wrecked a wedding and set families at war – in both instances
causing death, misery, and destruction after only a short space of time.
Despite this, they are punished soundly as not reaching the grade of evil
expected by Satan. The third devil admits he has spent 40 years vainly
working on a bishop, until the previous night when the bishop patted a
visiting abbess on the back – whether with lecherous intention, or not,
the devil could not determine. For this success the devil is enthroned

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next to Satan. Alerted to the presence of the sleeping Jew, the fiends
then go to claim him, but he is, to them, an empty vessel, protected by
his special mark, the cross, and they leave with great lamentations. The
Jew hurries to the bishop, tells him the whole story, and is baptized by
the bishop, who then repents of his momentary folly (7727–882).
In order to respond to the implications of this conversion and
repentance, the audience must call upon a whole world of allusion and
reference evoked by the exemplum. The protagonist is an outsider – a
Jew whose professed faith puts him outside the general community –
stranded in a wilderness, at night, when evil spirits roam. In this
‘wasteyn’, the temple of Apollo belongs to another outcast and abandoned religious system. The first teaching point demonstrates the power
of Christ’s name at work in the Jew, who having heard tell of Christ’s
death – ‘Of Ihu crist he had herd speke’ – is inspired to meditate on the
passion. This generates a belief that turns itself into action prompting
him to make the sign of the cross around himself. Two different faiths,
Judaism and paganism, each considered by the medieval audience to
be the province of Satan, converge to be redeemed under this one sign.
In the story’s second phase, a rout of devils assembles for a satanic
chapter of accounts in which Satan attaches supreme importance to the
moral collapse of a man of God. Even a gesture that might not carry
evil intention – patting the nun on the back – draws an unprecedented
reward from Satan who knows that sin is cumulative, and the slightest
touch between a consecrated man and a woman may lead to full sexual
sin, as Mannyng has explained in the didactic section preceding the
story. The exemplum implies that, for the consecrated man, the female
body is connected with the devil and to be feared; for in making contact
with female flesh the bishop has surrendered power over himself to a
minor devil whose reward of being set on a throne beside Satan highlights the danger in which the bishop now stands.
Turning again to the Jew, the third phase of the story shows two
devils bewildered to find only an ‘empty vessel’ where they expected
to claim the unbaptized Jew. The Jew is described as ‘ler’ like a house
which has been abandoned,35 ‘voyde’,36 apostate from Judaism but not
yet received into Christianity, and ‘empty’,37 a vessel without content,
ripe for baptism, like the candidate who has been exorcized at the
Church Porch in readiness to be admitted to the font for the sacrament.
Unlike the bishop who, though without intention to sin, has exposed
himself to the power of the devil by touching a woman – an action
dangerous in itself – the Jew is unassailable because, even without
understanding, he has voluntarily marked himself for Christ and is free

The Role of Exempla in Educating through Emotion

45

of the devil’s power. In a stronger position than the bishop, the Jew,
although a ‘voyde vessel’, is able to go to the bishop, narrate to him the
whole story, and, in so doing, turn the bishop back – literally convert
him –‘the bysshop amended hym weyl’ (7882). This is as fundamental
a conversion as that of the Jew, who in turn benefits from the bishop:
‘þe crystendom at hym he toke’ (7879).
By narrating the events to the bishop, the Jew reconnects the richly
imaginative world of the exemplum to that of Mannyng’s audience. Far
more than a tale to illustrate the evils of lechery in the clergy, this is a
fully developed lesson in grace and salvation and in the power of Christ
over the age-old foe of Satan. The Jew, ‘empty’ through renouncing his
old law, is ready to receive God’s grace of conversion. He becomes the
vessel to bring salvation to the endangered bishop who had succumbed
to the devil’s temptation. God’s grace is thus shown to be bountiful, not
reliant on any hierarchy in order to be efficacious, not earned by either
person, nor deserved, but freely given by God. Although the ostensible
point is against clergy being tempted by women, the story gives scope
for the lay audience to exercise their judgement in assessing the wrong
doing of the bishop, and in grasping the theological point that the Jew,
who had not yet embraced Christianity, could still be saved by an act
of faith. Fear of the devil’s proximity, and awe at the saving power of
Christ, are emotional reactions to the story that make conversion possible both for protagonists and listeners.
The next tale in sequence also has an element of self-referentiality.
Here again, a character within the exemplum uses narration of the story
within which he is a player to effect the conversion of others. Preluding
the story, the text stresses the sacredness of the priest’s body, whose
mouth and hands consecrate the bread and wine into the body and blood
of Christ and, through the mass, commend to bliss those souls who are
saved, strengthen the love and faith of those on earth, and intercede for
the souls in purgatory who need to be released from their pain. This gives
the priest a significance beyond his own person, and emphasizes that a
woman who ‘dysturbleþ þe holy lyff | Of þe prest þurgh lecherye’ is interfering with something far more powerful than a mere man (7921–982).38
The outline of the tale is that an amorous priest took a wife who bore
him four sons, three of whom became priests and the fourth a scholar.
After their father’s death, all four sons beg their mother to repent of her
sin in marrying a priest, but she refuses, only asking them, when the time
of her death should come, to hold a vigil with her corpse for three days.
They do this and on three successive nights the house is visited by three
terrors. On the first night, it takes the form of a great noise, shaking the

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bier, and terrifying those keeping vigil. The sons manfully keep hold of
the bier and withstand the first night’s terror. On the second night, a
devil comes to pull the body out of the room but the sons counteract him
and replace the body, tying it to the bier with ropes. On the third night, a
crowd of devils rush in and carry off both body and bier. The sons believe
that their mother is damned, and the scholar spends the rest of his life
preaching her story to warn women not to ‘take’ priests (7983–8080).
In human terms, the story presents the family’s life as idyllic, full
of reciprocal love: the priest is ‘amerous’; his four sons are lovingly
educated; three sons become priests and one a scholar; they are an
apparently ordinary family living in England at a time in the not too
distant past, ‘Yn þe tyme of gode Edward – | Edward syre henryes sone’
(7986–7). Yet the priest has allowed love for his wife to replace the discernment of conscience that should come from his own learning; and
while he has educated his sons, he seems to have neglected his wife who
is his partner in lechery, the sin that, as Mannyng has pointed out at the
start of the section, is particularly evil because ‘hyt dampneþ eure two’
(7344). The value of the priest’s own knowledge has been diminished
by the hardening effect of his repeated sin.
When the father priest dies, the mother is urged by her well-educated
sons – who know the full implications of their parents’ sin – to repent.
But she makes a deliberate choice of sin and this world’s pleasure
against the immediate hardship entailed in serious repentance, believing that her three priestly sons will intercede for her. They were probably chantry priests whose most important function was to sing mass
for the repose of a donor’s soul in the belief that Christ’s redemptive
sacrifice, re-enacted in the mass, would save a person from damnation.
Several of the exempla in the work illustrate this power, but in this case
the story demonstrates that the two people are so caught up in their
sin, the priest by enjoyment, the woman by her refusal to repent, that
they create a situation even God cannot redeem. Outwardly so ordinary
and recognizable to the fourteenth-century audience, the family’s life
is founded on sin, and the denizens of the supernatural world are on
the doorstep, just waiting to intrude. Since the priest, in the person
first of the father, then of the three sons, represents the authority of
the Church, the fact that three priests are powerless to prevent the
mother’s body being seized underlines how absolutely the mother has
given power over herself to the devil. The wake with the neighbours
present becomes a battle with supernatural powers – the boys use rope
to tie the corpse to the bier – and the devil has to bring a whole cohort
to counteract the prayers of the four good sons.

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47

Mannyng ends this exemplum with the lonely figure of the fourth
son, the ‘scholar’, preaching his family’s story the length and breadth
of England, and although the ostensible lesson to be drawn is ‘A ens
wymmen þat prestes take’ (8077), as in the previous exemplum about
the Jew and the bishop, there are many more issues that an audience is
prompted to consider. Both tales evoke a sense of terror in the presence
of the devil, and awe at the cross’s power to protect the Jew, even without faith, as against the apparent powerlessness of the mass to save the
impenitent woman. The exemplum leads the fourteenth-century audience to discern why prayer can be sometimes ineffective and interiorize
the lesson that sin hardens the heart and prevents repentance.

Conclusion
Handlyng Synne is a document that promotes the order and governance that had been demanded by the precepts of the Fourth Lateran
Council and promulgated locally over two centuries through the pastoral decrees of the English bishops. In this text, part of the mechanism
for achieving this is the employment of tales, closely integrated into
Mannyng’s programme of rules, doctrine, and admonitions, but which
also share in the powerful story tradition of which the New Testament
parable is the exemplar par excellence – a tradition that engages the
emotions in order to provoke conversion. Many of the tales reflect gender ideologies derived from stereotypes that align women with temptation to sexual sin, and these are the tales designed to provoke emotions
of fear, horror, and disgust in an attempt to dissuade the reader from
engaging in the sin of lechery. Yet, in a strangely disruptive move,
when he develops his straight didactic message about the deadly sin
of lechery, Mannyng shows pastoral understanding of the difficulties
facing women, and even in the tales that align women with the work
of the devil, there is more than a hint of Mannyng’s own unstereotypical sense of empathy with women who are preyed upon, used, and
destroyed by men. Undoubtedly, the tales are designed to engage the
emotions to help the layperson apply teaching, but my argument has
been that Mannyng does not talk down to his audience. The range and
richness of teaching in Handlyng Synne and similar works written for the
laity are significant elements in the development of late medieval lay
piety which, by the fifteenth century, as Eamon Duffy suggests, would
far exceed ‘the modest expectations of Pecham and the thirteenthcentury bishops who devised the catechetical strategies of the medieval
English Church’.39

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Notes
1. All quotations are taken from Robert Mannyng, Handlyng Synne, ed. Idelle
Sullens (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1983).
Subsequent references will be cited in text by line number.
2. Kenneth Sisam, Fourteenth-Century Verse and Prose (1921; rev. edn Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 3.
3. Claire Elizabeth McIlroy, The English Prose Treatises of Richard Rolle
(Cambridge: Brewer, 2004).
4. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans
(eds), The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory,
1280–1520 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1999).
5. This syllabus was established by Archbishop Pecham’s provincial Council
of Lambeth in 1281, text available in F. M. Powicke and C. R. Cheney (eds),
Councils and Synods: With Other Documents Relating to the English Church. II,
A.D. 1205–1313 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), pp. 900–5.
6. Some of the manuals written before this time assume that people will receive
the Eucharist at least three times a year, at Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost,
but the Lateran Council made annual confession and communion obligatory as a minimum. See, for example, Stavensby’s Statutes, in Powicke and
Cheney (eds), Councils and Synods, p. 211.
7. For a succinct summary of literature on this point, see Wogan-Browne et al.,
Idea of the Vernacular, pp. 112–14.
8. Wogan-Browne et al., Idea of the Vernacular, p. 114.
9. For the relationship of Handlyng Synne to English synodal statutes, summae
confessorum, and artes praedicandi, see Fritz Kemmler, ‘Exempla’ in Context:
A History and Critical Study of Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s ‘Handlyng Synne’
(Tübingen: Narr, 1984), pp. 24–91.
10. Kemmler (‘Exempla’ in Context, pp. 24–34) outlines the influence of Bishops
Robert Grosseteste, Alexander Stavensby, and Peter Quivel on teaching
manuals for the priesthood.
11. Guilelmus Peraldus, Summa virtvtvm ac vitiorvm, 2 vols (Cologne, 1614).
12. Exempla collections were plentiful: The Dialogues of Pope Gregory, fl. 590–
604, the Vitas Patrum (lives of the earliest desert fathers, first written down
in the fourth century), the exempla of Jacques de Vitry, fl. c. 1160/70–1240,
the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Voragine, fl. 1230–98, the Alphabetum narrationem of Etienne de Besançon, fl. c. 1250–94, and the Contes moralisés of
Nicolas Bozon, fl. 1300–20, are some examples.
13. Early texts that include such an inscription are the Lives of Saints Margaret,
Katherine, and Juliana, written for ‘alle leawede men þe understonden ne
muhen latines ledene’ (‘all lay people who cannot understand the Latin
tongue’), quoted in J. A. W. Bennett and G. V. Smithers, Early Middle English
Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. xviii; McIlroy (English Prose
Treatises, pp. 10–17) quotes several later texts that do the same.
14. I have discussed the Englishness of the work and its accessibility to all
in ‘“For lewed men y vndyr toke on englyssh tonge to make this boke”:
Handlyng Synne and English Didactic Writing for the Laity’, in What Nature
does not Teach: Didactic Literature in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, ed.
Juanita Feros Ruys (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), pp. 377–400.

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49

15. Joyce Coleman, ‘Handling Pilgrims: Robert Mannyng and the Gilbertine
Cult’, Philological Quarterly, 81, no. 3 (2002), 311–26 (pp. 312–18).
16. Mannyng is not unusual in this reticence about what is usually taken to refer
to sexual deviance; though details do appear in customary law from the early
middle ages, and in some of the ecclesiastical penitentials, as explained by
James A. Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 149, 166, and 168. Mannyng’s
motives are pastoral – his intent is to prevent people from sinning, not to
give them ideas of sins they have not heard of!
17. See Scott, ‘Handlyng Synne and English Didactic Writing’, pp. 393–6.
18. In the Sullens edition I have used for this chapter, based on Oxford, Bodley
MS 415, 5,034 lines are devoted to exempla, out of a total text of 12,638
lines.
19. All references to the Manuel des Pechiez are taken from Robert Mannyng,
Robert of Brunne’s ‘Handlyng Synne’, AD 1303, with those parts of the AngloFrench treatise in which it was founded, William of Wadington’s ‘Manuel des
Pechiez’, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall (London: Kegan Paul Trench Trubner,
1901).
20. Manuel des Pechiez, lines 79–80.
21. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Pardoner’s Prologue, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry
D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), p. 195, lines 435–37: ‘Thanne
telle I hem ensamples many oon | Of olde stories longe tyme agoon. | For
lewed peple loven tales olde; | Swiche thynges kan they wel reporte and
holde.’
22. The Exempla or Illustrative Stories from the Sermones Vulgares of Jacques de Vitry,
ed. Thomas Crane (New York: Burt Franklin, 1890), p. xx: ‘Quidam episcopus
litteratus et subtilis valde missus fuit ad conversionem Anglorum, et utens
subtilitate in sermonibus suis nichil prefecit. Missus est alius minoris litterature qui utens narrationibus et exemplis in sermonibus suis, pene totam
angliam convertit.’
23. Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the
Chaucerian Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 32.
24. The Exempla, ed. Crane, p. xx: ‘Multi enim excitantur exemplis, qui non
moventur praeceptis.’
25. The Exempla, ed. Crane, p. xxi, quoting the unknown author of the Speculum
exemplorum: ‘Vade igitur, et tu fac similiter, quia exempla mentem efficaius
movent, memoriae firmius haerent, intellectui facile lucent, delectant auditum, fovent affectum, removent taedium, vitam informant, mores instruunt,
et dum sua novitate sensum permulcent, odiosam praedicatori somnolentiam fugant.’
26. The importance of context for the exemplum is thoroughly discussed by
Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power; and Kemmler, ‘Exempla’ in Context.
27. Peter Brown, ‘The Decline of the Empire of God: Amnesty, Penance and
the Afterlife from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages’, in Last Things: Death
and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. Caroline Walker Bynum and Paul
Freedman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), pp. 41–59
(p. 43), describes how in early Christianity sins meant ‘crimina’, public
sins of the hardened sinner such as adultery, murder, and perjury, that the
Church had the unique power to absolve.

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28. It is noteworthy that the equation of woman with heathen deity is lightly
made, and that neither woman nor heathen oracle comes in for criticism,
unlike parallel situations in the further two exempla discussed below.
29. Brown, ‘Decline of the Empire of God’, p. 47.
30. Cynthia Ho, ‘Dichotomize and Conquer: “Womman Handlyng” in Handlyng
Synne’, Philological Quarterly, 72 (1993), 383–401 (pp. 397–8).
31. These attitudes are part of longstanding customary Germanic law, as well as
Church law, predating Mannyng’s writings by several centuries. Brundage,
Law, Sex and Christian Society, pp. 132, 146.
32. For a clear summary of early church teaching on consanguinity and affinity,
see Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society, pp. 140–1.
33. This does not conflict with my earlier point that sin is attributed to mundane, not supernatural causes. In this image, the lords have already made
their sinful choices; in doing so, they behave like people who are rallying the
devil’s forces. The devils have not caused the sin.
34. The intimate portrayal of God as lover, which characterizes the writings of
many mystics, such as Margery Kempe, is a rare feature within Handlyng
Synne.
35. See Middle English Dictionary (University of Michigan, 2001), online at
<http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/> (hereafter MED): ‘Ler’: sense 1, Of
receptacles, vessels, grains, and the like: Empty, having no content; of a
house: unoccupied, vacant.
36. MED: ‘Voyde’, sense 9b, of persons, a sect: alienated from a spiritual standard, apostate.
37. MED: ‘Empti’, sense 1.
38. See Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society, p. 150, for conciliar strictures on
clerical marriages, and their harm to the sacrament of the Eucharist.
39. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–
1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 63.

3
How to be ‘Both’: Bilingual and
Gendered Emotions in Late
Medieval English Balade Sequences
Stephanie Downes

In the field of late medieval English literary study, work by Ardis
Butterfield, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Judith Jefferson, and Ad Putter,
among others, has confirmed that continental French continued to
influence the production and consumption of secular literature in
England until well into the fifteenth century.1 Those who used French
most often – usually, the literate, educated, male elite – ensured the
ongoing importance of the language in the political, social, and emotional life of the court. How the bilingual culture of England’s aristocracy impacted on the work of poets in late medieval England is the
subject of this chapter, which concentrates in particular on the relationship between bilingualism – whether individual or cultural – and the
expression of emotion in literature. My focus in this chapter is on two
secular balade sequences, one written in French, the other in English,
by authors who wrote and probably spoke fluently in more than one
language: John Gower (c. 1330–1408), court poet during the reigns of
Richard II and Henry IV; and Charles of Orleans (1394–1465), taken
by the English at the battle of Agincourt in 1415, and held prisoner in
England for 25 years. Both men were ‘bilingual’ in that they spoke at
least French and English fluently (Gower’s work also survives in Latin),
and both wrote lyric sequences in what sociolinguists would today call
an ‘L2’ or acquired tongue. These sequences used the first-person ‘je’
(Middle French: ‘jeo’) or ‘I’ (Middle English: ‘Y’) to explore the inner
emotional state of the man – or woman – in love.
The balade sequence lent both style and form to each poet’s extended
meditations on subjectivity and emotion. But what impact did the
choice of English or French have on their representation of a feeling
self? Did the choice of language affect each poet’s claim to literary
authority or to emotional authenticity? And were particular languages
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associated with particular forms of emotional and social governance
in late medieval England? The use of French in his Cinkante Balades
(‘Fifty Balades’) and in the Traitié selonc les auctours pour essampler les
amants mariés (‘Treatise, following the authorities, to educate married
lovers by example’) enabled Gower to reach a broad community of
aristocratic readers, whom he addressed on the subject of love in the
language most closely associated with it in late medieval English literary
culture. Charles of Orleans’s English lyric sequence – the first to appear
in English until Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella in the later sixteenthcentury – conversely, follows the experience of a single speaker over the
course of his infatuation with two separate women, the latter following
an extended meditation on the speaker’s grief at the death of the former. Many of the individual lyrics in the sequence also exist in French
versions, and together, they make up a strong resource for exploring
the representation of emotion across languages among late medieval
bilinguals. Yet for Charles, to write in English was to write for his captors
rather than his countrymen, to persuade, perhaps to flatter, in their own
tongue. For Gower, the decision to write in French may also have been
motivated by political circumstance, but it was still a natural, courtly
choice for poetry in late medieval England. Authorial management of
emotional expression in a non-native tongue, however, has not been
the subject of scholarship on language use in England during the period.
In demonstrating that analyses of feeling or emotion in Middle
English writing must take late medieval England’s other languages
into account, I wish to draw from psycho- and sociolinguistic research
into multilingualism and emotional expression, a subject that has
been on the rise over the past two decades. Recent studies in this area
have linked bi- and multilingual speakers’ language use with their
experience of emotion and verbal description of that experience. As
Anna Wierzbicka explained in a 2004 special issue of the Journal of
Multilingual and Multicultural Development on the subject of ‘Languages
and Emotions’: ‘Different languages are linked with different ways of
thinking as well as different ways of feeling; they are linked with different attitudes, different ways of relating to people, different ways of
expressing one’s feelings.’2 How true might these observations be for
those who read, thought, wrote, and spoke in more than one language
in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England? In comparing the work
of two (male) poets who chose to write in a non-native language, for
an aristocratic English audience separated by less than 50 years, I reflect
on some of these questions with respect to literary culture in the later
medieval period.

Bilingual Emotions in English Balades 53

More surprising than sociolinguists’ findings that an individual’s use
of an acquired tongue affects both their experience and expression of
emotion is the way in which they have reached these conclusions: by
paying close attention to first-person expressions of emotion in literature. Since human emotional experiences are inherently subjective and
notoriously difficult to compare, psycho- and sociolinguistic researchers interested in emotional expression in bi- and multilingual speakers
have often turned to first-person narratives – both autobiographical
and fictional – in their analyses of emotional expression in an acquired
language.3 There is a rich resource to turn to in the literary productions
of writers in England in the later medieval period. The fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries abound with first-person narrative works. Some
have already been found compelling by historians of the emotions,
especially in the context of medieval experiences of religion, as in the
Passion lyrics and laments, written in the first person, and the ‘autobiographical’ writings associated with fifteenth-century mystic Margery
Kempe.4 These accounts, however, were written in English, and their
very vernacular ‘Englishness’ seems to have been, at least in part, what
led critics to argue that these might be more ‘intimate’ – to borrow
Sarah McNamer’s phrase – performances of emotion than those found
in Latinate works during the same period. But what of those first-person
narratives written in French in England during the Middle Ages? Can
we talk of subjective ‘feeling’ in French in England during the period,
and did feeling in French differ from feeling in English?
Native-English-speaking, Canadian-born writer Nancy Huston is
often cited by sociolinguists interested in how bilinguals themselves
feel about writing in another language, and about expressing emotions,
whether their own or others’. Huston has preferred throughout her
career to write novels and critical commentary in French rather than in
English. She is widely admired in France, where she has been a recipient of one of the country’s highest literary awards, the Prix Goncourt.
One critic of her work has suggested that the general accolades she has
received in her adoptive home may derive in part from the very fact
that has ‘chosen’ to write in French, rather than in English, thereby
valorizing that language and its literariness.5 Italian-born and nativeItalian speaker Christine de Pizan similarly chose French over her
maternal language. And it may be worth pointing out, on the other side
of the Channel, that a similar style of claim has been made throughout the long history of Chaucer criticism for Chaucer’s ‘choice’ of the
English vernacular over French. On the subject of emotional expression
in her writing, Huston has explained that ‘[t]he French language in

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general … was to me less emotion-fraught, and therefore less dangerous,
than my mother tongue. … It was cold, and I approached it coldly’.6
Psycholinguists tend to describe an emotional detachment from additional languages as related to an individual’s sense of their own inadequacy in that language.
Gower openly expressed his sense of his own inadequacy in French
in the Traitié:
To the community of the entire world
John Gower this Balade sends:
And if I do not have eloquence in French,
Pardon me when I go astray with it:
I am English – thus I seek in such a way
To be excused; but whatever anyone may say about it,
Perfect love justifies itself in God.7
By writing in French, Gower directed the Traitié to as wide a community
of readers as possible – the ‘universiteé de tout le monde’ – carefully
justifying his choice of language with reference both to his readers, and
to his subject matter, ‘amour parfit’, or ‘perfect love’. But he asks that
readers excuse his French on account of his being English, and speaking a version of French geographically removed from the continent.
Of course, like ‘emotion’, there was no equivalent term for ‘bilingual’ or
‘bilingualism’ in late medieval England, and – given the humility topos
above – Gower might have refused such a label if it existed. Even so,
Gower, like many other writers in England during this period, wrote
fluently in that language. His writing was even praised by nineteenthcentury French critics, many of whom found no equivalent to him
in France during the same period.8 Like Huston’s, Gower’s writing in
French has been admired by native French speakers. And, like her, he
describes a similar sense of detachment or alienation in his second
tongue. Huston, however, writes about a feeling of liberation in her ability to express emotions in French, whether literary or her own, precisely
because of her sense of clinical detachment from the language (‘It was
cold and I approached it coldly’). Gower denies facility of expression
in French – claiming to lack eloquence – but in his decision to write in
French was there access to a certain freedom of emotional expression?
This freedom is particularly interesting in the context of French literary
culture in England, which has for so long in the critical literature been
associated with the opposite: with rules, constraint, and bondage to
continental sources. Might writing in a second language have offered

Bilingual Emotions in English Balades 55

English poets the opposite: space in which to explore the capacity of
language(s) to express an individual’s feelings and experience of emotion? Writing and reading in French in late medieval England were
certainly markers of social identity and authority. But what this perspective also suggests is that authors in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century
English might have written less self-consciously and more exploratively
about emotion in a non-native tongue than has often been assumed.
No text survives in which Charles of Orleans expressed how he ‘felt’
about writing in English, but a series of references to his bilingualism
were made by later fifteenth- and sixteenth-century writers in both
France and England. Another royal poet, René of Anjou, wrote, inhabiting Charles’s literary persona, ‘For I was taken by the English and led
into servitude. | I remained there so long that I learned the language.’9
For Charles, however, writing in English might have had a particular
emotional intent: to persuade the English aristocrats who were his jailers that he posed no threat to the English cause in the war with France,
and perhaps, even, that in writing poetry about love in English that he
was more friend than foe.
Although Wierzbicka’s Emotions across Languages and Cultures (1999),
which draws on psychology, anthropology, and linguistics, remains a
touchstone account for historians of the emotions, literary examples
of emotional expression in an acquired language, such as those of
Gower and Charles, have not yet been the focus of critical analysis.
Using the first-person ‘jeo’ or ‘Y’, both Gower and Charles of Orleans
explore subjectivity and the experience of emotion in a non-native
language. The work of each poet must be understood in the context of
their bilingualism, and the multilingual cultural environment in which
they wrote. William Reddy’s concept of the ‘emotive’ may be useful for
literary historians interested in the expression of emotion, especially
where it is framed subjectively. According to Reddy, ‘emotives’ are ‘firstperson, present tense emotion claims’, which function as ‘instruments
for directly changing, building, hiding [and] intensifying emotions’.10
Reddy’s recent interest in the lyric writings of the medieval trouvère poets
takes literature – and the lyric ‘I’ – as the site of a complex exploration of
individual emotional expression.11 While Reddy has worked primarily
with French sources throughout his work on emotions, including with
sources written in the ‘French of England’, his work has not commented
on the emotional resonance of such utterances outside of France, or in
French as a second language.
Gower dons a variety of emotional masks in his Cinkante Balades.
These are consistently written in the first-person ‘jeo’, and told from

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the perspective of the male lover, who weeps and laughs, together and
by turns, and a woman, at first the object of the male speaker’s affections, but who also expresses sadness, anger, and affection in the face
of love – her own, or that of a suitor. In contrasting male and female
perspectives, Gower responded directly to continental poets who had
already produced lyric sequences exploring similar themes, such as the
Livre des cents balades from the 1380s and 1390s, a collective enterprise
which included poems by Jean de Saint-Pierre, Philippe d’Artois, and
Guillaume de Tignonville, or Christine de Pizan’s Cents balades d’amant
et de dame (1409–10), in which the narrative unfolds in dialogue
between a man and a woman. Gower’s male and female speakers occupy
slightly different emotional positions in the lyrics, as we might expect
from the genre: the male is consistently subservient, the woman slightly
haughty. But she is also vulnerable, or at least professes herself to be.
She questions the authenticity of the male speaker’s emotions, over and
again accusing him of lying about his feelings. The use of French allows
Gower to switch from the personal perspective of a man to that of a
woman more abruptly than in English. In French, feminine or masculine endings and agreements often confirm which gender is speaking
from the outset of the lyric; in English, the gender of the first person
is less clear, and is often assumed to be male. The male lover provides
the narrative frame for Gower’s Cinkante Balades and therefore tends to
dominate as the ‘default’ gender. The intrusion of the woman’s voice
calls the ‘real’ expression of his emotions into question, leaving the
reader to decide: which gender is telling the truth about love?
There is a single manuscript witness of the Cinkante Balades: British
Library, MS Additional 59495. Marginal notes in the manuscript bracket
the first four balades in the sequence as having been ‘made especially
for those who serve their loves in the expectation of marriage’.12 The
marginalia direct the remainder of the sequence to everyone and to
all types of lovers, especially those who wish to serve love: ‘The balades from here until the end of the book are universal, for everyone,
according to the properties and conditions of Lovers who are diversely
suffering the fortunes of Love.’13 The notes suggest the transference of
the poem’s subjectivity from speaker to reader, identifying particular
groups of readers, including both French-speaking aristocratic men
and women, for whom the poems themselves might be understood as
instruction, as consolation or as comfort.14
That Gower chose to write the balades in French certainly has much
to do with the continental style of poetry he imitated, but the poet
also chose French for his slightly later Traitié, a work directed ‘[A]l

Bilingual Emotions in English Balades 57

universiteé de tout le monde’, which instructed young married couples
in the emotional and moral behaviour appropriate to marriage. The use
of French for these works addressing both married couples and young
men and women about to enter into marriage was no doubt a practical
one, motivated by the fact that for some husbands and wives, French
may have been the only common tongue. It is certainly true that in
the late fourteenth century, English aristocrats still commonly took
wives from French nobility, and communication between many couples
must have been conducted, at the outset at least, in French (take, for
example, Henry V’s wooing of Catherine in Shakespeare’s play).15 In
1396, Richard II had married his second French-speaking wife, Isabella
of Valois. Gower might have written the Traitié as a wedding gift for
his own wife, Agnes Groundolf, on the occasion of their marriage –
possibly even their remarriage – in 1398. Although Agnes certainly
spoke English, she is unlikely to have understood Latin: an instructional
French poem reworking Gower’s magnum opus, the Confessio Amantis
(the ‘Lover’s Confession’), would have been a gift to flatter his wife’s
education and intelligence.
There is one moment of bilingualism in the communication between
lover and beloved in the Cinkante Balades: the male speaker laments the
hardheartedness of his beloved in refusing to speak to him, despite her
excellent command of ‘langage’. ‘Ma dame’, he writes, ‘who has a full
command of language | Makes no response to me when I entreat’.16 On
the occasion the lady does speak to the lover, she does so monosyllabically: ‘Then I hear her response in one word alone, | A worthless voice
immediately will say to me, “Nay”.’17 This one-word reply – ‘nay’ – is not
uttered in French, but in English: she thus doubly negates the lover’s
speech, refusing even to reply to him in the language of love in which
he woos her. The lady is, presumably, an English-born woman, one who
‘sciet langage a plentée’ – that is, speaks both French and English – but
whose choice of English, in response to the speaker’s French, attempts
to shut down his suit, and serves as a reminder of the artificiality and
art of the genre.
In balade XLI, we hear from the woman directly. Given her own
voice, she makes it clear that she does indeed have full command of
French, especially as the language of complaint: ‘I am one of those
[women], to speak truth, | Who myself complain about love and his
deceit.’18 The woman justifies what she has heard about love – that men
often lie – with her cautious treatment of the lover’s suit: ‘It is good that
a virtuous lady reflects carefully’, she concludes.19 Having decided that,
as in classical examples of men who betrayed women (Jason, Hercules,

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Aeneas), the lover is himself false – ‘you are at large and I am in dire
straits’ – she rejects him.20 But, in a subsequent balade, she offers her
heart to another – ‘Because to such a friend I wish to be a good friend
[lover]’ – showing that her mastery of language enables her to choose
her own suitor, and that she, too, can speak the language of love.21
Gower plays with different subjectivities throughout his sequence
and with different reactions to how one experiences love as a second
language, which one must learn in order to master it: the speaker’s lady
knows language (‘sciet langage’), but refuses to use it as the speaker
desires. The male speaker struggles throughout the sequence with the
inadequacy of his own tongue to express his feelings: ‘This balade for
you, my lady, I write, | For to attempt to speak brings only breath from
my mouth.’22 The lady’s refusal to love him back represents the failure
of his written words – his poor mastery of the language of love – to
convince her. The complete sequence is a philosophical reflection on
the condition of love and loving in literary form, at different ages and
stages of courtship, but one that is extremely conscious of the language
and languages of loving, and the slipperiness of language(s) in general
in conveying the authentic or sincere emotions of the speaker.
The sequence ends by distinguishing between ‘real’ or natural love
from that which is foolish or ‘mad’:
Love in itself is good in every guise,
If reason governs and justifies it;
But otherwise, it is but a foolish enterprise,
It is not love, but will be called madness.23
As in the Traitié, the mastery of love’s language is futile: it little matters, Gower claims, that his French is not perfect if his subject is ‘parfit
amour’. In the penultimate balade of the Cinkante Balades, Gower
reminds readers – male or female, married or not – that the truest of
loves is the love of a single woman – the Virgin mother – ‘Whoever
desires love cannot fall short with this ladylove’.24 This balade is mindful of the close relationship between the religious and secular lyric
during the period. Religious lyrics narrated from the perspective of the
Virgin herself, on the death of Christ, McNamer has argued, ‘developed
in England among a broad array of readers[,] the practice of feeling like
a woman’, which cast their readers, regardless of gender, in feminine
subjective positions in order to make them eyewitnesses to grief.25 In
Gower’s balade sequence, ‘feeling like a woman’ is different from ‘feeling like a man’ – and may even mean failing to speak the same language.

Bilingual Emotions in English Balades 59

In the fictionalized account of the English imprisonment of Charles
of Orleans by René of Anjou, it was Charles’s learning English during
his captivity that enabled him to woo English ladies:
For I was taken by the English and led into servitude.
I remained there so long that I learned the language,
By which I made the acquaintance of a beautiful, wise lady,
And was so captured by her, that I gave myself to Love’s service.26
Anjou emphasizes the duke’s learning to speak English as if it were a
more intimate language of love. Charles’s acquisition of the lady’s own
tongue enables him to make her acquaintance, to fall in love with her,
and, presumably, to write a lyric sequence in her honour.
Charles’s English lyric sequence is, however, at least in part an
extended meditation on the speaker’s experience of grief at the death of
an unnamed beloved. Toward the midpoint of the sequence are lamentations, first of distress at the news of her illness:
Allas! allas! how is hit gen entresse
Unto myn hert this woful tydingis here?27
And then, once she has died, of loss:
Alas, Deth, who made thee so hardy
To take awey the most nobill princess,
Which comfort was of my lijf and body
Mi wele, my ioy, my plesere and ricchesse?28
Another of these ‘mourning’ poems is a near translation of a well-known
balade by Christine de Pizan, ‘Seulete suy’.29 Christine’s poem is spoken
in the voice of a woman grieving for her dead husband, a voice which
has often been interpreted as that of Christine herself. ‘Seulete suy’
is often commented on in contemporary Francophone scholarship as
epitomizing the ‘new’ balade style of the late fourteenth-century French
poets. In the balade, the narrator laments being left by her beloved in a
series of three seven-line stanzas, plus an envoi, which, with two exceptions, all begin: ‘seulete suy’. The hollow made by grief on the narrator
deepens with each repetition; each new line adds nuance to the experience of mourning. Charles regenders the speaker: Christine’s feminine
endings and verb forms are impossible in the English version, and,
taken out of the context of the sequence, we could not be certain of the

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speaker’s gender until the fourth line of the balade, when (assuming the
hetero-normativity of the genre) he names his ‘maystres’:
Alone am y and wille to be alone
Alone, withouten plesere or gladnes
Alone in care, to sighe and grone
Alone, to wayle the deth of my maystres
Alone, which sorow will me neuyr cesse.30
In borrowing Christine’s device of beginning each line with the same
word, the English balade is unique: aside from the Beatitudes, and a
stanza of curses, beginning ‘woo worth’ (Woo worthe debate þat neuyr
may haue pece | Woo worthe penaunce that asskith no pite, and so
on), I know of no other example of anaphora in Middle English verse,
and no other similar literary device survives in any of Charles’s French
body of work. The English language offered Charles alternative space
in which to explore language’s capacity to express individual emotion.
Perhaps it even represented – as sociolinguists have found is often the
case for modern bilingual authors – an occasion to experiment less selfconsciously with forms of emotional expression other than his own
tongue. Might Charles also have experienced a sense of the detachment
and liberation of literary emotional expression in a second language?
And might his bilingual polysemy have contributed to his sensitivity to
the complex meanings of emotion words?
The majority of Charles’s English balades are self-translations rather
than refractions of the work of another poet. The parallel existence of
these English and French versions offers special insight into the expression of emotion in an acquired language in late medieval England.
Scholars comparing Charles’s French and English balades have already
made the claim that Charles’s English poems were more overtly depoliticized than his French ones, and more concerned with purely secular,
romantic expressions of love.31 There may, however, have been good,
practical reasons for Charles to choose to write lyric poetry in English
during his incarceration, which had much to do with his position in
contemporary politics. In line to the French throne, Charles was the
single most important prisoner of the Hundred Years War. He needed to
convince his English captors that he posed no threat to the war effort,
and that he might even be used to broker peace between the warring
nations, and it may be that he felt writing poetry in English to be a way
of performing his subjection to the English crown.

Bilingual Emotions in English Balades 61

In a balade which exists in both English and French versions, the
lover thanks either a lady (in the English) or a lord (in the French)
for offering him a ‘gift’. In the English balade, the ‘gift’ the speaker
describes he has received is that of her heart, which she has promised
him in love:
As for the gyft ye have unto me geve,
I thanke yow lo in all that in me is,
Forwhi y knowe now that ye love me thus
Which shall be quyt to yow if so y lyue,
[F]or resou[n] woll hit so this may y preve,
For “goode done good,” wherefore, myn hertis blis,
As for the gyft ye haue unto me geve
I thanke yow lo in all that in me is
[M]yn herte wol evir thinke him silf in greve
To that desert hit ben to yow ywis
Of which that long y trust ye shall not mys
Parcas sumwhat to raunsom yow or eve…32
The original editor of the French poems, Pierre Champion, speculated that in the French version Charles may have been thanking
the Count of Armagnac, father of his wife, Bonne, for the financial
help he received from the Armagnacs while he was in imprisoned in
England:
Pour le don que m’avez donné,
Dont tresgrant gré vous doy savoir,
J’ay cogneu vostre bon vouloir,
Qui vous sera bien guerdonné.
Raison l’a ainsi ordonné;
Bienfait doit plaisir recevoir,
Pour [le don que m’avez donné]
Dont [tres grant gré vous doy savoir]
Mon cueur se tient emprisonné
Et obligié, pour dire voir,
Jusqu’a tant qu’ait fait son devoir
Vers vous et se soir raenconné33

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Repetition of ‘don’ in the French in ‘don’, ‘donné’, and also ‘guerdonné’, ‘ordonné’, is recreated in the English ‘goode done good’ – in
which there is a pun on goods – and possibly even aural word play on
the English done and the French don. Such a vocabulary emphasizes
both gift and relationship as part of a contract or treaty – an emotional
economy – with terms and conditions to be worked through. The language of politics and exchange is interwoven with that of romance and
desire.
Literary texts have not often been a source of study for historians of
the emotions, and yet it is in literature that historians may find new
ways of talking about emotional utterance in text.34 Restoring literary
expressions of emotion to the multilingual contexts in which they
were written and received intensifies our understanding of the range of
emotional vocabularies in the past. Both Gower’s and Charles’s balade
sequences reveal a deep fascination with the capacity of language to
express emotion. For the bilingual poet, the meanings of words are far
from straightforward, and the expression of individual feeling an even
more complex and difficult task. It is for this reason that we would
do well not just to analyse further the works of bi- and multilingual
authors in late medieval England, but, through them, to pay closer
attention to the broad linguistic and semantic range of emotional
expression during that period, of which secular lyric, with its close
relationship to religious and devotional lyric, is a potent example. The
authors of these texts were able to make language choices which would
direct them to the appropriate audience of readers: in the case of Gower,
these readers were members of the English court and their wives; in the
case of Charles of Orleans, the intended audience for his English lyrics
was probably, at least in the first instance, his English captors. For both
poets, writing about a subjective experience of strong emotion (love)
in a second language provided access to alternative forms of affect and
authority, which worked in opposite ways to convince (or to fail to
convince) real or imagined readers of the speaker’s authenticity. Gower’s
use of French was as a ‘universal’ language of love, able to reach as wide
a community of aristocratic readers as possible. He professed his own
inability to communicate in a second tongue as part of his point that
language is fallible when it comes to perfect love, which transcends any
and all language and speech. The use of English helped signal Charles’s
affiliation with other English men, perhaps the real intended recipients
of his love-language.
The literary communities to which both poets’ writing ultimately
adhered, however, were not based on language, but its contents: Gower

Bilingual Emotions in English Balades 63

and Charles wrote within the same bilingual courtly culture, which
privileged male, aristocratic perspectives, and made frequent use of the
fictionalized voices of women. In exploring the identity of emotional
selves in a second language, their work suggests that expressions of
emotion in late medieval balade sequences were similarly double: male
and female, English and French. Focusing on the overlapping emotional
content of their work shows still more clearly the ways in which elite
literary cultures in late medieval England were consciously and consistently multilingual. Their very openness to language, and to different
vocabularies of gendered emotional expression, makes this period in
England’s history an extremely rich resource for the study of emotions
in literature.

Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the Australian Research Council’s
Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (project number
CE110001011). The chapter is based on the text of a talk I gave at the
first Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions collaboratory
I attended as a newly appointed early career research fellow, in Perth,
on the theme, ‘Languages and Emotion’. Philippa wrote to me while on
a research trip in London, initially asking if I might respond to one of
the other speakers. When another speaker was unable to attend at short
notice, she encouraged me to present some of my new research on ‘feeling’ in French in late medieval English literature. At Philippa’s invitation,
I arrived in Perth early, and wrote the talk over the space of a few extra
days before the collaboratory, in between walks over Kings Park and to
the haunting call of the peacocks in the beautiful UWA campus. This
chapter would not have existed without Philippa’s generosity or her
encouragement. For these, and much more, I am ever grateful.

Notes
1. See Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the
Hundred Years War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Judith Jefferson
and Ad Putter (eds), Multilingualism in Medieval Britain: Sources and Analysis,
1066–1520 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013); Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (ed.), Language
and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England (York: Boydell &
Brewer, 2009).
2. Anna Wierzbicka, ‘Bilingual Lives, Bilingual Experiences’, Journal of Multilingual
and Multicultural Development, 25, nos 2–3 (2004), 94–104 (p. 98).
3. Wierzbicka, ‘Bilingual Lives, Bilingual Experiences’, p. 95.

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4. See Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval
Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Fiona
Somerset, ‘Excitative Speech: Theories of Emotive Response from Richard
Fitzralph to Margery Kempe’, in The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval
Religious Literature, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Duncan Robertson, and
Nancy Bradley Warren (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 59–79.
5. Celeste Kinginger, ‘Bilingualism and Emotion in the Autobiographical Works
of Nancy Huston’, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 25,
nos 2–3 (2010), 159–78 (p. 165).
6. Nancy Huston, Losing North: Musings on Land, Tongue, and Self (Toronto:
McArthur, 2002), p. 59; Nancy Huston, Nord Perdu, suivi de Douze France
(Arles: Actes Sud, 1999).
7. John Gower, ‘Traitié selonc les auctours pour essampler les amantz marietz’,
in The French Balades, ed. R. F. Yeager (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute
Publications, 2011) (hereafter French Balades), Balade XVIII, pp. 30–2, lines
20–8: ‘Al universiteé de tout le monde | Johan Gower cest Balade envoie; | Et
si jeo n’ai de François la faconde; | Pardonnez moi qe jeo de ceo forsvoie: |
Jeo sui Englois, si quier par tiele voie, | Estre excusé; mais quoique nulls en
die | L’amour parfit en dieu se justifie.’ English translations are from Yeager’s
facing-page edition, pp. 31–3.
8. E. J. Delécluze, ‘Chaucer: Le Pèlerinage de Canterbury’, Revue française, 6
(April 1838), p. 39; H. Gomont, Geoffrey Chaucer, Poète Anglais du XIVe siècle.
Analyses et Fragments (Paris: Librairie d’Amyot, 1847), pp. 27–31.
9. Cited in Mary-Jo Arn, ‘Introduction’, in Fortunes Stabilnes: Charles of
Orleans’s English Book of Love, ed. Mary-Jo Arn (Binghamton, NY: Medieval &
Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995) (hereafter Fortunes Stabilnes), pp. 1–129
(p. 29): ‘Car prins fuz des Anglois et mené en servaige. | Et tant y demouray
qu’en aprins le langaige.’ The sequence is untitled in the single manuscript
witness; the title, ‘Fortunes Stabilnes’, is given by its modern editor, Arn.
10. William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of
Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 104.
11. William M. Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in
Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900–1200 CE (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2012).
12. London, British Library (hereafter BL), MS Additional 59495: ‘Les balades
d’amont jesqes enci sont fait especialement pour ceaux q’attendont lours
amours par droite mariage.’ See French Balades, p. 134, note for lines 25ff.
13. BL, MS Additional 59495: ‘Les balades d’ici jesqes au fin du livere sont universeles a tout le monde, selonc les propretés et les condicions des Amantz,
qui sont diversement travailez en la fortune d’amour.’ See French Balades,
p. 134, note for lines 2ff.
14. On ‘emotional’ or ‘intimate scripts’ and religious lyrics in Middle English,
see McNamer, Affective Meditation, pp. 12–14.
15. See Stephanie Downes, ‘French Feeling: Language, Sex and Identity in Henry V’,
in Shakespeare and Emotions: Inheritances, Enactments and Legacies, ed. Mark
Houlahan, Katrina O’Loughlin, and R. S. White (Basingstoke: Palgrave,
forthcoming).
16. French Balades, Balade XVII, pp. 84–5, lines 17–18: ‘qui sciet langage a plentée | Rien me respond quant jeo la prierai.’

Bilingual Emotions in English Balades 65
17. French Balades, Balade XVII, pp. 84–5, lines 20–1: ‘D’un mot soulein lors sa
response orrai, | A basse vois tantost me dirra, “nay”.’
18. French Balades, Balade XLI, pp. 116–17, lines 4–5: ‘Jeo sui de celles une, a dire
voir, | Qui me compleigns d’amour et sa feintise.’
19. French Balades, Balade XLI, pp. 116–17, line 8: ‘Bon est qe bone dame bien
s’avise.’
20. French Balades, Balade XLIII, pp. 119–21, line 23: ‘tu es a large et jeo sui en
destroit.’
21. French Balades, Balade XLIIII, pp. 120–1, line 7: ‘Q’au tiel ami jeo vuill bien
estre amie.’
22. French Balades, Balade XIIII, p. 81, lines 22–3: ‘Ceste balade a vous, ma dame,
escris, | Q’a vous parler me falt du bouche aleine.’
23. French Balades, Balade LI, pp. 128–31, lines 1–4: ‘Amour de soi est bon en
toute guise | Si resound le governe et justifie; | Mais autrement, s’il n’aist de
fole emprise | N’est pas amour, ainz serra dit sotie.’
24. French Balades, Balade LI, p. 130, line 13: ‘qui voet amer ne poet faillir
d’amie.’
25. McNamer, Affective Meditation, p. 119.
26. Quoted in Arn, ‘Introduction’, p. 29: ‘Car prins fuz des Anglois et mené en
servaige. | Et tant y demouray qu’en aprins le langaige | Par lequel fus acoiunt
de dame belle et saige, | Et d’elle si espris qu’a Amours fis hommaige.’
27. Fortunes Stabilnes, p. 205, lines 1928–9.
28. Fortunes Stabilnes, p. 207, lines 1994–7.
29. See Tracy Adams’s interpretation of the poem, ‘Love as Metaphor in
Christine de Pizan’s Balade Cycles’, in Christine de Pizan: A Casebook, ed.
Barbara K. Altmann and Deborah McGrady (London: Routledge, 2003),
pp. 149–66.
30. Fortunes Stabilnes, pp. 209–10, lines 2045–8.
31. Susan Crane, ‘Charles of Orleans: Self-Translator’, in The Medieval Translator
8: The Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages, ed. Rosalynn
Voaden, René Tixier, Teresa Sanchez Roura, and Jenny Rebecca Rytting
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 169–78 (p. 174).
32. Fortunes Stabilnes, p. 262, lines 3419–30. Italics denote balade refrain (ellipsis
in manuscript).
33. Chanson XXIV, in Charles D’Orléans, Poésies, ed. Pierre Champion, 2 vols
(Paris: Honoré Champion, 1923–27), vol. 1, p. 218. See also n. XXXIV in this
volume.
34. See Stephanie Trigg, ‘Langland’s Tears: Poetry, Emotion, and Mouvance’,
Yearbook of Langland Studies, 26 (2012), 27–48.

4
St Richard Scrope, the Devout
Widow, and the Feast of Corpus
Christi: Exploring Emotions,
Gender, and Governance in Early
Fifteenth-Century York
P. J. P. Goldberg

York at the beginning of the fifteenth century was a city that enjoyed
a comparatively high level of prosperity and self-confidence. The turbulent politics of the early 1380s may not have entirely disappeared,
but major rioting in the city was a generation away.1 The 1396 charter
represented a high water mark in terms of the citizens running their
own affairs under their own elected mayor.2 By and large the local
economy prospered and craft guilds were rapidly emerging. As the 1381
poll tax and the franchise register show, the city was characterized by
a wide range of crafts, with cloth manufacture, the provision of foodstuffs, leather working, and the metal trades all being major employers.
Bakers were concentrated on Ousegate close to the main grain market
on Pavement. Butchers packed The Shambles. The parish of All Saints,
North Street, conveniently located on the river, but on the opposite
bank from the mercantile heart of the city, was home to numbers of tanners and dyers underpinning the city’s leather and textile industries.3
Numbers of these craft groups were involved in the emerging Corpus
Christi Play first documented in 1386–87.4
In 1399, the capricious and largely unloved Richard II was deposed by
Henry Bolingbroke, heir to the Duchy of Lancaster, who assumed the
throne as Henry IV. Despite the time and patronage Richard had spent in
or bestowed on the city, York even lent Bolingbroke support in the form
of a substantial loan.5 Henry’s seizure of the crown both invited any
who felt alienated by his rule to challenge his legitimacy by rebelling
and prompted Henry himself to imagine any opposition in such terms.
In 1405, Richard Scrope, the then Archbishop of York, put himself at
66

Scrope, the Devout Widow, and the Feast of Corpus Christi 67

the head of a local protest movement critical inter alia of taxation
policy at precisely the same moment, and seemingly in co-ordination
with, actual rebellion by Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland. To
compound his apparent complicity in the king’s eyes, Scrope, the son
of an aristocrat and so familiar with a martial ethos, donned armour,
led a locally recruited army, including numbers of the clergy and friars
alongside gentry and other laity, and apparently awaited reinforcements
at Shipton Moor, a few miles north of York. It was here on 29 May that
Scrope was tricked into surrender. Scrope’s actions, however interpreted,
were foolhardy, but Henry’s response was both precipitate and brutal.
After a summary trial, Scrope was condemned for treason and beheaded
within sight of the walls of his own cathedral city. Henry IV’s actions
created a martyr. They also changed the city.6 It left a community politically divided, traumatized by the public execution of their archbishop,
emotionally bruised, and in need of healing. This chapter seeks to
explore something of this emotional agenda and how public and more
private expressions of piety and also contemporary gender ideology
might have fed into this agenda. In particular, it will consider the public
celebration of Corpus Christi, the feast dedicated to the body of Christ
and hence to the Eucharist, and the more private (and perhaps more
feminized) devotion reflected for example in books of hours. Finally,
it will re-examine a case from the ecclesiastical Court of York for the
light it throws upon the deep divisions still apparent within the city a
few years after the events of 1405 and how the case itself might have
provided a forum for giving expression for the anguish experienced,
but also for the strength achieved through shared spiritual experience
and values.
Richard Scrope may not have intended treason, but taking up arms he
certainly appeared treasonous. Likewise, though the judicial process – in
which the Chief Justice, Sir William Gascoigne, refused to be implicated –
lacked procedural regularity, the law nevertheless demanded that
traitors be put to death. Scrope, however, was no ordinary traitor.
A younger son of Henry, first baron Scrope of Masham, he seems to
have been a man of genuine integrity and deep piety, a scholar who
had spent the earlier part of his career at Oxford and later Cambridge,
holding office as Chancellor of the university in 1378, before serving for
several years at the papal curia. His time first as Bishop of Coventry and
Lichfield (from 1386) and subsequently as Archbishop of York (from
1398) appear unremarkable if only because the extant bishops’ registers
are better at reflecting routine administration than providing insight
into personalities. His death was his making. And Richard Scrope made

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a very good death, just as Henry IV made a very bad political calculation
in having him killed.
Clement Maidstone’s retrospective hagiographical account presents
Scrope’s death in terms that self-consciously conjure up the Passion,
a process in which Scrope was himself complicit, and which lends the
account an authority that transcends the mundane.7 Wearing a dark
blue hooded cloak, reminiscent of the Virgin’s gown, and seated on
a horse without a saddle like Christ sat on an ass, Scrope was taken
from his palace of Bishopthorpe to a field near the nunnery church
of Clementhorpe. As befitted his rank, he was executed not with an
axe, but with a sword. As the executioner prepared to deliver the fatal
blow, Scrope asked that he deliver five strokes in honour of Christ’s
five wounds. He kissed the executioner three times in commemoration of the Trinity and then knelt down and commended his soul to
Jesus. On the fifth stroke, his severed head fell to the ground. Thus
on Whit Monday, the morrow of Pentecost and the feast day of York’s
own St William, also an archbishop, Scrope’s Passion reached its terrible conclusion. At the same moment, King Henry was struck down
with leprosy as he journeyed to Ripon. Here history and hagiography
collide. Maidstone’s Latin narrative thus prompts an essentially clerical
readership to share in the martyr’s suffering, but also offers the hope of
salvation for those who so identify with his cause.
Scrope’s execution, following the judgment of what looked suspiciously like a kangaroo court, appeared to many, especially to
the clergy and laity of the region, less like justice and more like the
actions of a tyrant who wanted rid of a troublesome cleric. Henry
IV’s failure to exercise clemency thus made Scrope a martyr and gave
York its own Thomas Becket. An instant local saint, stories of miracles
soon began to circulate. An elderly man from Rawcliffe, then still
a hamlet just outside the city, had a vision of the archbishop only
three days after his execution: the archbishop warned him to confess
to planning the murder of a man 30 years earlier, instructing him to
place a candle above his tomb in the Minster. When the man came to
the Minster, he found the tomb covered with tree trunks specifically
placed to discourage any veneration of a traitor as a saint. Despite
his advanced years, the man simply lifted the heavy trunks from the
tomb. Here once again I am following Clement Maidstone’s retrospective hagiographical account with its resonance of Christ’s resurrection
on the third day, but he was no doubt accessing narratives current
at the time that served to give encouragement and hope to Scrope’s
otherwise traumatized devotees.8

Scrope, the Devout Widow, and the Feast of Corpus Christi 69

For the city that had supported Scrope in the abortive revolt, Henry
IV’s initial response was robust, but in time more measured. After the
debacle at Shipton Moor he ordered the immediate confiscation of all
property associated with anyone who had participated in the revolt.
The city’s constitution was suspended and the steward and the comptroller of the royal household were appointed to govern the city as
keepers. It was perhaps at this moment in early June 1405 that a large
group of men went from York to Bishopthorpe, the archbishop’s palace
where Henry stayed briefly, barefoot and bareheaded, wearing mean
garments and with ropes around their necks in absolute submission
to the king’s authority in what Christian Liddy has rightly read as a
ritualized, but necessary performance of contrition.9 Henry went along
with this ritualized role playing and in later August issued a general
pardon to the city. Even before this, however, William Frost, the city’s
mayor immediately prior to the deposed Adam del Banke and indeed for
most years since 1396, was being described as lieutenant to the king’s
two keepers. In this way, Frost exercised de facto governance as a man
clearly trusted by the crown. Immediately following the general pardon
issued to rebels, Frost was formally appointed warden.10
As Liddy has shown, even prior to 1405 Frost’s political career owed
much to his relationship with Henry IV as ‘a crown servant of some
standing’.11 During successive mayoralties, Frost had been instrumental
in securing the city’s financial support for the king and his continued
re-election was predicated on the understanding that Frost was the
guarantor of the king’s goodwill towards the city. But as Liddy has
also argued, this belief may have worn thin by the time of mayoral
elections in February 1405. Factional divisions, whose roots went back
many years, perhaps even to the political divisions that reduced York
to full-scale rioting in 1381, remained unresolved. The election of 1405
provided the opportunity to unseat Frost and appoint del Banke, a prosperous dyer of the parish of All Saints, North Street, who, unlike Frost,
had duly served in all the appropriate lesser offices of a man seeking to
build a political career in the city. The rebellion thus provided Henry IV
with the opportunity to restore his own man to power. Moreover,
when new mayoral elections were held again in February 1406, the
privileged minority of men who enjoyed citizenship and hence the
right to vote chose expediency and returned Frost as elected mayor for a
further term. Henry IV’s influence over the city was further augmented
by his ability to place his own men in positions of influence. He used
de facto control of archiepiscopal patronage consequent upon Scrope’s
demise to appoint as many of his own men to the cathedral chapter

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as vacancies allowed. Within little more than a year, the Minster had
a new dean and several new canons. There was a new Archdeacon of
York and Henry was also able to appoint a new warden of the Forest of
Galtres, which lay just outside the city to the northwest.12
There were limits to the extent of Henry’s reach. He could fill key
positions of authority, but he could not so readily control hearts and
minds. Though Scrope could not be venerated openly, there was little to
prevent private devotion. It is here that we find a number of indications
of the cult of St Richard Scrope in the city in the years immediately following his death. One is the almost accidental recording of oral culture
in the four-verse carol ‘The Bishop Scrope that was so Wise’ designed
for collective performance that would have encouraged a sense of community and determination with its insistent refrain ‘hay hay hay hay |
Thynke on Whitsonmonday’.13 Another manifestation is the small
number of extant books of hours – devotional works intended for lay
use – that include specific Scrope devotions. Perhaps the most prestigious of these is Oxford, Bodleian, MS Lat. liturg. f. 2 which Christopher
Norton has tentatively tied to Scrope’s nephew, Henry, third Lord
Scrope of Masham.14 On folio 146v, Scrope is depicted kneeling in
prayer even as the executioner’s sword has cut most of the way through
his neck. This image, which resonates with the iconography of Thomas
of Lancaster, executed by Edward II and revered within the region as a
saint and martyr, was probably added to the hours comparatively soon
after the execution. Two of the most important examples of the Scrope
cult in the city itself are both locally produced books of hours dating to
within a decade or so of his death and likely commissioned by devout
mercantile families. These are the Pavement or Pulleyn Hours and the
rather better known Bolton Hours.15 Such hours served as portable
devotional aids that might be used between home and church and
which may well have supported as much household as individual devotional practice, though the Bolton Hours may have been particularly
intended for use by a mother and her daughters.16
Just as private devotion could not be regulated, the same is true of
more circumspect commemoration. Royal patronage, moreover, might
impact on the higher levels of the diocesan administration, but it did
not extend to the lesser clergy of the city or of the Minster. Three years
following the shocking events of June 1405 a new devotional guild fashionably dedicated to Corpus Christi, the body of Christ and hence also
the Eucharistic host, was founded. The feast of Corpus Christi itself was
first instituted in the diocese of Liège as early as 1246, but it only really
took hold as a universal feast of the Church from 1317. Archbishop

Scrope, the Devout Widow, and the Feast of Corpus Christi 71

Melton first ordered that it be celebrated in the diocese in 1322 and by
1366 it had clearly become an established celebration in the city. By
1426, sometime after the guild’s foundation, the annual Corpus Christi
procession comprised ‘a great multitude of priests dressed in surplices
preceding, and the mayor and citizens of York with a great abundance
of other people flowing in following’ accompanied by torches.17 The
new guild was drawn primarily from local lesser clergy who would have
already been active participants in the procession. It is from the ranks
of these lesser clergy that the six chaplains were elected who exercised
office as keepers of the guild for the year. There is also evidence that the
guild may have built upon a pre-existing guild of chantry chaplains.
The likely connection between the foundation of the Corpus Christi
guild by the very lesser clergy who appear to have been such staunch
supporters of the late archbishop and the commemoration of the
martyred archbishop, led in Maidstone’s words ‘like a lamb to the
slaughter’, is not hard to discern. It is implicit in the coincidence of
timing, the evidence of early membership, and the guild’s devotional
focus. We know, moreover, that at her death in 1413 Agnes Wyman,
the recent widow of Henry Wyman, who was mayor in the year of the
guild’s foundation, left the guild a mazer or drinking vessel made of
maple wood that was associated with the archbishop and subsequently
treasured by the guild.18 The guild provided a legitimate vehicle for the
Scrope cult, where more open veneration of the locally proclaimed saint
was as yet problematic because of his association with treason. But the
guild also offered the prospect of reconciliation in a troubled city. It
promoted Eucharistic devotion where the Mass was seen to heal discord
and bind people together in amity, and it involved itself in the already
established Corpus Christi procession that likewise helped emphasize
the essential wholeness of the city. This no doubt was the perspective
of the city governors who participated prominently in the procession.
Another reading would be that the guild and the procession both provided vehicles for people to remember their local martyr and assert their
opposition to the crown in a form that deflected suspicion of political
subversion. Probably there was no single motive, just as there was no
consensus among the city’s political elite in a city that was divided
before 1405 and probably no less so after.
As we have seen, a Corpus Christi procession of the host on the day
of the feast seems to have grown up during the course of the fourteenth
century and from 1408 was joined by the Corpus Christi guild bearing their ten large torches before the sacrament. A series of pageants,
possibly in the form of essentially silent tableaux representing the

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Passion, seems to have emerged only towards the end of the fourteenth
century and may have grown directly out of the procession. By the early
fifteenth century, the Passion sequence had probably acquired a small
number of additional pageants such as a nativity pageant and some
Old Testament pageants, including a pageant of Moses and Pharaoh.
By 1415, the numbers of pageants had greatly increased and the Play
had evolved by this date from essentially a Passion sequence to the
full-blown Creation to Domesday Play cycle that we recognize today.19
It is tempting to suppose that the execution of Scrope may have
given impetus to the Play by inspiring more and more groups of artisans and traders – by this date beginning to be identified in many
instances in terms of guilds – to become involved in this devotional
project. Certainly the Passion sequence would have had immediate and
highly affective resonance for those who had witnessed Scrope’s last
hours. Thus the process of Christ riding a donkey through the streets
of the city in the pageant of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem can only have
been coloured by the memory of Archbishop Scrope riding a horse
without a saddle on his way to his execution. There was thus potential
for both the main Corpus Christi procession and the Corpus Christi
Play to serve as a powerful focus to the Scrope cult and thus to constitute potentially subversive and destabilizing influences within the city.
In fact, both were neutralized or at least curbed by the increased level
of involvement of wealthier citizens and mercantile families and the
consequent growing role of civic government at least in the organization of the Play.
Our knowledge of the earlier history of the York Play is comparatively
slight and my argument here must be somewhat speculative, but there
are some indications that during the 1420s the nature of the production
had evolved considerably from the earlier tableaux performances. It is
possible that it is from this period that the individual pageants began to
be fully dramatized, whereas previously they contained mostly gesture
and little in the way of speech. This is suggested by a record dated 1422
that raises for the very first time the problems caused by the proliferation of pageants and likewise refers for the first time to hearing the ‘holy
words’ (‘oracula’) of the performers.20 By 1431–32, it would seem that
some performances were pushed late into the night as, I would suggest,
the advent of text significantly lengthened individual performances.21
The second big change, however, is perhaps almost as significant. By
1428, it would appear a small number of wealthier crafts, including
the mercantile crafts of the mercers and the goldsmiths, had acquired
dedicated wagons on which to mount prestigious and visually arresting

Scrope, the Devout Widow, and the Feast of Corpus Christi 73

pageants.22 It is likely the opening Creation pageant of the tanners
and the concluding Doomsday pageant of the mercers were especially
striking. It is this trend to a much longer and much more spectacular
production that underlay the complaints of Friar Melton in 1426 that
the Play was distracting people from the true devotional purpose of
Corpus Christi.23
The mercers, who took responsibility for the final and most spectacular Doomsday pageant, are, of course, the mercantile group who
dominated civic government in the first part of the fifteenth century.
Their participation in this high-profile way coincides with growing
evidence for the role of the city government in beginning to police
and ultimately to organize a collective activity that had originally been
entirely owned by groups of artisans.24 The pageant itself gave dramatic
representation to Christ’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, which
is also the basis for the Seven Corporal Acts of Mercy, so the message is
not just one of devotional instruction, but also a means by which the
civic elite justified their claim to governance. By asserting their willingness to protect the weak and the vulnerable, the mercers also asserted
patriarchal authority. I want now to focus on one particular mercer or
merchant.
We can find visual representation of six of the Acts of Mercy in one
of the windows from All Saints, North Street. This window was the gift
of Nicholas Blackburn, who may indeed be represented as the charitable
male depicted in the glass. Blackburn was a leading merchant resident
in the parish who held office as mayor in 1412. He patronized one
William Revetour, a clerk employed by the city, who seems to have had
an active interest in drama and may well have had a role in the possible
changes to the Corpus Christi Play just outlined.25 He may also have
promoted the tanners’ pageant, tanning being the key industry of his
All Saints, North Street parish. Blackburn probably commissioned for
his wife and family’s use the so-called Bolton Hours already noted.26
The hours depict the Last Judgement or Domesday, together with
many other images including St Dominic and Scrope. Blackburn was
a relative newcomer to the city. When admitted as citizen in 1397–98
he was described as ‘of Richmond’ and was perhaps not yet resident in
York at that date.27 He may well have hailed initially from the Duchy
of Lancaster lands in Blackburnshire, the region around Blackburn in
Lancashire. This last would help explain why he may have been seen
as trustworthy by Henry IV when he was commissioned at the time of
the Scrope rebellion to supply large quantities of provisions for royalist
forces in Yorkshire. Certainly he was in royal favour the following year

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when appointed Admiral of the Fleet from the Thames to the North and
he further served on royal commissions in 1406 and 1408.28 As such,
like Frost, he can be seen as Henry’s man.
The Bolton Hours represent evidence of the process of recasting the
erstwhile rebel Scrope as a symbol of purity and chastity described by
Felicity Riddy and Sarah Rees Jones.29 One of the two depictions of
Scrope shows what may well be a Blackburn daughter devoutly kneeling before the saint whom she addresses as ‘Oh jewel of light and
virtue’ (‘O gemma lucis et virtutis’). This personification is rooted in
Scrope’s own reputation for purity, but represents a significant recasting of Scrope in gender terms. The son of a baron whose life had been
spent in military service in both Scotland and France, Scrope had
latterly assumed a very masculine and martial persona in exercising
leadership to rally opposition to royal policy and ultimately to don
armour and lead an army. By projecting Scrope as a model of chastity
that young women might emulate, Scrope was unharnessed from his
martial (and rebellious) identity, where, as was true of Joan of Arc less
than a generation later, virginity would have lent moral authority and
even power. Scrope’s identity was in effect both emasculated and feminized. Scrope, the leader of men and political symbol of opposition to
Henry IV, was thus represented as a model of affective devotion that
may have had a particular appeal to women, although part of the purpose is actually to control women.
The Bolton Hours reflects other, often cutting-edge, devotional trends
that Scrope helped to promote. He is known to have had a particular
devotional interest in the Name of Jesus and in the Five Wounds, which
last he used on his banner at Shipton Moor and invoked again at his
execution. He also established the feast of the Eleven Thousand Virgins
in the Province of York, which, as Patricia Cullum has argued, reflects
his own commitment to clerical celibacy.30 It is likely that Scrope helped
inspire interest in St Bridget of Sweden, herself a promoter of the cult
of Christ’s Wounds, whom he would have known about while at the
Roman curia. More speculatively, he may also have encouraged the cult
of St Zita of Lucca, a thirteenth-century servant noted for her chastity
and her charity. Venerated in London and East Anglia from the later
fourteenth century, St Sitha, as she was called by her English devotees,
was little known in the North before the fifteenth century. Reinforcing
the sense that a particular feminine piety operates here, in the Bolton
Hours a mother, perhaps Margaret Blackburn, kneels in prayer before
the saint whom she asks to protect her daughter, then perhaps in
service.31

Scrope, the Devout Widow, and the Feast of Corpus Christi 75

By the time he commissioned the Bolton Hours, Nicholas Blackburn
may well have joined the Corpus Christi guild, but significantly this
outsider and loyal supporter of Henry IV was not a founder member.
Although in origin essentially a clerical organization with an exclusively
clerical leadership, laity were members of the guild of Corpus Christi
from the advent. The founding lay members appear to have numbered
but 33 men and women: the Christological significance – Christ lived
33 years in this world – would have been obvious to contemporaries. At
least some of these 33 can be associated with the parish of All Saints,
Pavement, including members of the prosperous Gare family, William
Pountfret junior, and his kinswoman Dame Christina Pountfret, a vowess.
The parish clerk, John Watton, was among the clerical founders.32
The association of the guild with a parish that encompassed the city’s
grain market on Pavement can be understood symbolically to reference the bread of the Eucharist, which was the Body of Christ. The
particular involvement of some parishioners and specifically some from
Coppergate may also be connected with the fact that a Coppergate
resident, John de Kenley, together with his sons, was specifically implicated in the revolt. His home was confiscated and given to one Gerard
Herun, a king’s esquire.33 Together with his near neighbour William
de Pountfret, Kenley had served as a constable of the parish. Pountfret
himself had been one of the city chamberlains in 1380.34 His being in
the wrong faction following the events of 1380–81 no doubt frustrated
any further political career. We are here at the heart of a community
that, though politically marginalized by the events of 1405, found solace and strength in their shared devotional interests.
Eleanor McCullough suggests that one of the households clustered by
the church of All Saints, Pavement may have first owned the Pavement
Hours, the calendar of which includes the feast of the church’s dedication. As McCullough shows, the Pavement Hours demonstrate an interest in the cult of the Five Wounds that Scrope himself promoted and
was associated with him after his death. They also include a prayer to
Scrope that links the Wounds to Scrope’s death as well as that of Christ
and hence to the Mass, the ritual re-enactment of Christ’s sacrifice.35
Though they cannot be tied to a specific patron, the Pavement Hours
offer a window into the religiosity of some of the prosperous and
possibly close-knit neighbouring households such as those of Kenley,
Pountfret, Gare, and Thornton on Coppergate that faced the south side
of All Saints. From a remarkable matrimonial case of 1411, we know of
one particular woman resident in the Pountfret home who was seen
‘very often … on weekdays and holidays … to be present at divine

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services, listen devoutly to them, make oblations at masses celebrated,
and receive holy water and blessed bread from the hand of the parish
priest’.36 This was Agnes Grantham, the ‘devout widow’ of my title.
Until his death in March 1410, Agnes Grantham had been married,
probably for many years, to the York mason Hugh Grantham. A prosperous bourgeois couple – Hugh’s net estate was valued at nearly £150 – they
owned a comfortable and well-appointed house in Petergate with cushions, silver plate, painted hangings in the chamber, and live-in servants.
Hugh’s probate inventory indicates that he had likely worked on the
Minster, on Pocklington church, and on the York churches of St Giles,
All Saints in North Street, and the neighbouring Dominican friary. Agnes
was an active businesswoman who ran a significant brewing business. At
her husband’s death, she had malt in her brewhouse valued at £42 and
there were debts for transporting cartloads of barley, for hiring storage
in Pocklington, and for the carriage of faggots used to heat the brewing
vats.37 Agnes came by this date to be supplying ale to the household
of the Master of the large and important hospital of St Leonard at his
official residence in Acomb Grange, three miles to the west of York.
This last we learn from a series of extant lists of questions and depositions from a matrimonial action within the ecclesiastical Court of York.
Each party brought witnesses who were questioned in English according to a predetermined schedule drawn up by their own legal counsel
and designed to make the most effective case according to the needs of
canon law. These responses were then recorded as Latin depositions.38
According to Agnes’s version of events, on Thursday 30 June 1410, only
three months after her husband’s death, she went with her son Thomas
and her servant Alice from Petergate towards Acomb Grange in response
to a dinner invitation from William Feryby, the warden or master since
his appointment by the crown a year earlier.39 Agnes welcomed this
invitation as an opportunity to solicit Feryby’s help in trying to secure
an ecclesiastical benefice for her son who was an ordained deacon. In
fact, the invitation, made via Feryby’s man, John Dale, was a ruse to
lure Agnes into the woods that lay between the village of Acomb and
Acomb Grange. As Agnes and her party walked beyond Acomb, three
men attacked them. Thomas was threatened with a knife and, together
with Alice, was made to flee. Agnes, however, was seized, bound, unceremoniously bundled over the back of a horse, and led off into what
were described as ‘frightening and wooded places’. One of her abductors
was none other than John Dale. So Agnes’s ordeal began.
Over several hours, Agnes was variously held in a forester’s lodge,
moved deeper into the forest, and repeatedly threatened. Dale’s

Scrope, the Devout Widow, and the Feast of Corpus Christi 77

intention was to have Agnes for his wife. He threatened to rape her if
she would not go along with this. In time Agnes yielded, preferring to
preserve her honour at the cost of her right to choose whether to marry
or not.40 She was eventually taken to Healaugh where she was made to
publicly repeat marriage vows with Dale and then on to Askham. Here
at last she was able to make her escape, finally seeking help at Acomb
Grange and then among friends in York. There are several indications
that William Feryby was complicit in Agnes’s abduction. When her
servant Alice initially sought help at Acomb Grange she was allegedly
rebuffed. Agnes claimed that while she was being held captive, one of
her abductors even went to talk to Feryby.
Agnes’s case within the Court of York is a response to Dale’s own
petition to enforce a contract of marriage. He claimed to be lawfully
married to Agnes, but his counter narrative that the couple contracted
consensually survives only in outline. It should be noted that a year’s
mourning was customary before it was thought proper for a widow to
even contemplate remarriage. That Agnes should ride off with Dale and
find herself willingly agreeing to be his wife within four months of her
husband’s death is improbable. That such a man should wish to possess
such a capable and moneyed widow, however, seems entirely credible.
Agnes’s account of events as outlined by the testimony of her several
witnesses does not end with the events of late June 1410. On a summer
Saturday evening in an arbour within a neighbour’s garden only two
and a half weeks after her brutal kidnapping and assault culminating
in a forced, and hence canonically invalid, marriage, Agnes contracted
consensually to the elderly widower John Thornton. (It was no doubt
this that prompted Dale to initiate his action within the ecclesiastical court.) The venue was deliberate. By choosing the civilized and
romantic setting of a cultivated garden, Agnes asserted her willingness
to marry Thornton and simultaneously highlighted her lack of consent
to the man who had brutally attacked her in the wild depths of a forest.
Immediately following her marriage to Thornton, Agnes moved from
her Petergate home and came to reside in Coppergate where Thornton
resided. Agnes did not, however, move into Thornton’s home, but
rather that of his next door neighbour, William Pountfret, and specifically into the room used by his kinswoman Christina Pountfret, the
vowess and founder member of the guild of Corpus Christi established
only two years earlier.
Agnes’s behaviour may now seem bizarre, but it would not have
appeared so to her devout contemporaries. Agnes must certainly have
known John Thornton for some time before her precipitate marriage.

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Thornton and Pountfret are jointly noted as owing her husband £4 at
the time of his death, so there were clearly dealings between the three
men at least.41 Marriage offered Agnes a degree of security and protection she lacked as a single woman living, we are told, in continual fear
of her assailant. Her remarriage so soon after her first husband’s death
might have prompted censure among people who did not know her
circumstances, but this hardly explains her failure to move into her
new husband’s home. Perhaps there was a concern not to cohabit with
her new spouse so long as the validity of the marriage was contested as
a consequence of Dale’s claim. Other considerations emerge, however,
once we start to look more closely.
When I wrote about Dale contra Grantham and Thornton in
‘Brewing Trouble: The Devout Widow’s Tale’, I read the case for the
vivid glimpses it offered into later medieval society and culture,
including women’s economic activities and early fifteenth-century
devotional trends. It occurs to me now there is another level of meaning, a meta-narrative, dictated by the proximity of the case to the
events of 1405 which were so indelibly imprinted on the psyche of
what the nineteenth-century historian James Wylie described, with
the prejudices of his age, as ‘a priest-ridden and fanatical city’.42 The
Pountfret and Thornton homes effectively functioned as one household bound together not by carnal affections and ties of blood, but by
more enduring ties of spiritual friendship and shared devotional interests. Thornton even came to be buried beside Pountfret and memorialized the fact on his grave slab, describing Pountfret as his socius,
a term resonant of the close emotional bond between two men that
has been described by Alan Bray.43 Some of these devotional concerns
are glimpsed from the will of Avice, Pountfret’s late wife, who left
money to Mount Grace, the recently founded Charterhouse patronized by Scrope, and torches to burn in her parish church on the feast
of Corpus Christi.44 As founder members of the Corpus Christi guild,
the Pountfrets would have looked upon Richard Scrope as a saint and
martyr: they were of the mercantile class to whom the archbishop had
reached out and near neighbours of the rebel Kenley family. Agnes was
readily absorbed into this household because, as the depositions were
keen to show, she was a singularly devout woman who spent large
parts of every day across the road from the Pountfret house in the
church of All Saints, Pavement.
The Pountfret-Thornton-Grantham ménage can be understood as a
social and emotional unit bound together by shared Christocentric
and Eucharistic devotion, Christian love, and a commitment to chaste

Scrope, the Devout Widow, and the Feast of Corpus Christi 79

living. These are values that can be seen to be central to Scrope’s own
beliefs and, perhaps more importantly, the way in which Scrope was
commemorated after his martyr’s death. When Agnes Grantham was
attacked and fearful for her life and her virtue, it was the elderly and
eminently respectable widowers John Thornton, William Pountfret, and
Pountfret’s vowess kinswoman Christina who gave her security, love,
and a place where she could practise her devotions. Thornton provided
the respectability of a chaste marriage, Christina the companionship of
a bedfellow, and Pountfret the shelter of his home in the heart of the
city.
Agnes herself is portrayed as very much a model of femininity, devout,
chaste, caring for her household, charitable; she is presented as returning periodically to visit her Petergate home to watch over her employees
and her possessions there, but also ‘to give alms to the poor by bringing
them wood, fuel and other necessaries’. The scale and importance of
Agnes’s business activities as a commercial brewer, so conspicuous from
her husband’s probate inventory, is not readily apparent from the court
record. Although there is much here that accords with contemporary
understandings of bourgeois respectability, this is not a civic or magisterial discourse of good governance with its emphasis on patriarchal order
and discipline or the regulation of trade. Rather this is an alternative
devotional discourse that constructs the household in more egalitarian
terms as a spiritual community, a ‘holy’ household bound and given
strength by Christian love and shared devotional practices.
I now turn to Agnes Grantham’s adversaries. John Dale himself was
a man of little importance, a mere employee (‘simplex valettus’) of
the master of St Leonard’s at his official residence at Acomb Grange.
Agnes’s witnesses portray him as an unmanly man of violence lacking
all principle and decency. He lures Agnes by deceit to a place of danger, has her thrown ‘like a sack’ over the back of a horse such that her
dress was hitched up, exposing her, and uses violence and the threat of
rape to terrify Agnes and so gain his objective. It is apparent from the
depositions that the then master of St Leonard’s was complicit in the
terrifying assault. Even while Agnes was held against her will, Feryby
was informed of what was going on. When Agnes was first seized and
her servant ran for help at the Grange, she was turned away empty
handed. William Feryby was himself a career royal clerk who had
served as chancellor to Henry, Prince of Wales and the future Henry V.
His appointment in 1409 to the mastership of one of the largest and
wealthiest hospitals in the country, an office in the king’s gift, confirms
him as very much the king’s man.

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Agnes, the devout and virtuous mature widow, who prefers to
contract herself in marriage against her will than be defiled, is thus
presented as the subject of a contest between on the one hand her
protectors who appear to be close adherents to the spirit of the city’s
executed archbishop and, on the other hand, a wicked young assailant
who wishes to rob her of her virtue and her wealth, but also an assailant
who is the stooge of an outsider who can be identified as the loyal officer
of the king who had the same archbishop killed. Though Henry IV
used the period prior to Henry Bowet’s elevation to the archbishopric
late in 1407 to get loyal supporters onto the cathedral chapter, it is
unlikely that he could have had much impact on the composition of the
personnel of the ecclesiastical Court of York by the time this case came
before it. The Court can consequently be seen as a less than impartial
forum, but one with deep devotional attachment to and love for their
former archbishop. This may have impacted both on the way the case
was conducted and the way in which it was recorded.45
Behind the narrative that tells how a virtuous widow left the city of
York and, lured by deceit and trickery, ventured near the forest where
she was brutally attacked and forced to marry against her will lies a
meta-narrative that would have been apparent to anyone aware of the
events of 1405 and who mourned the death of Archbishop Scrope.
The fateful events preceding Scrope’s execution for treason found him
heading out of York with his armed followers to Shipton Moor by the
Forest of Galtres where he waited for three days confronted by the Earl
of Westmoreland’s army. On the third day, messages were exchanged.
Scrope presented his demands for reform and Westmoreland, expressing sympathy for their tenor, urged that the two men parlay on open
ground before the assembled armies. In the sight of the York rebels,
Westmoreland agreed to use his influence with the king, the two men
fraternized, and Scrope was persuaded to send word that his followers
should disperse. At this point, Scrope and his immediate supporters
were taken captive and marched south to Pontefract Castle.46
Scrope, the virgin prelate, was thus captured by trickery and deceit
just as Agnes Grantham, the chaste widow, was tricked into leaving York
and held captive on her way. Both were removed from the security of
York and found themselves at the forest’s edge. Agnes’s captor was an
employee of the Master of St Leonard’s, a client of Henry IV; Scrope’s
was the Earl of Westmoreland, who served the same king. Scrope’s fate
was death at the hands of a vengeful monarch. For his supporters, however, this was understood instead as martyrdom and sainthood. Agnes,
on eventually escaping her captor, sought security, comfort, friendship,

Scrope, the Devout Widow, and the Feast of Corpus Christi 81

and Christian love from a small group of devout men and women who
put their trust in Christ and his holy martyr Richard Scrope and the
healing power of the Eucharist. Henry IV may have suppressed Richard
Scrope’s rebellion and imposed his very masculine authority on the city,
effectively disenfranchising all opposition, but his actions were underpinned by treachery and brute force. As such, they lacked all moral
authority. Scrope’s loyal adherents enjoyed righteous certainty. In pursuing a feminized spirituality that emphasized chastity and Eucharistic
devotion, they put their trust not in the king or his servants, but in the
Lord and His servants. In this transitory life, they may have been rendered powerless, but they hoped for reward in the next life.

Notes
1. See Christian D. Liddy, ‘Urban Conflict in Late Fourteenth-Century England:
The Case of York in 1380–1’, English Historical Review, 118 (2003), 1–32.
2. Barrie Dobson, ‘The Crown, the Charter and the City’, in The Government of
Medieval York: Essays in Commemoration of the 1396 Royal Charter, ed. Sarah
Rees Jones (York: University of York, 1997), pp. 34–55.
3. P. J. P. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy:
Women in York and Yorkshire c. 1300–1520 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992),
pp. 64–71.
4. P. J. P. Goldberg, ‘From Tableaux to Text: The York Corpus Christi Play ca.
1378–1428’, Viator, 43, no. 2 (2012), 247–76.
5. Calendar of the Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office: Henry IV
A.D. 1399–[1413], 4 vols (London: H.M.S.O., 1903–9) (hereafter CPR), I
(1399–1401), 354.
6. P. H. Cullum, ‘Virginitas and Virilitas: Richard Scrope and his Fellow Bishops’,
in Richard Scrope: Archbishop, Rebel, Martyr, ed. P. J. P. Goldberg (Donington:
Shaun Tyas, 2007), pp. 86–99; James Hamilton Wylie, History of England
under Henry the Fourth, 4 vols (London: Longman, Green, 1894), II, 192–244;
Simon Walker, ‘The Yorkshire Risings of 1405: Texts and Contexts’, in Henry
IV: The Establishment of the Regime, ed. Gwilym Dodd and Douglas Biggs
(Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2003), pp. 161–84; W. Mark Ormrod, ‘An
Archbishop in Revolt: Richard Scrope and the Yorkshire Rising of 1405’, in
Richard Scrope, ed. Goldberg, pp. 28–44; W. Mark Ormrod, ‘The Rebellion of
Archbishop Scrope and the Tradition of Opposition to Royal Taxation’, in
The Reign of Henry IV: Rebellion and Survival 1403–13, ed. Gwilym Dodd and
Douglas Biggs (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2008), pp. 162–79.
7. Henry Maidstone, ‘Miscellanea Relating to the Martyrdom of Archbishop
Scrope’, in Historians of the Church of York and its Archbishops, ed. James Raine,
3 vols (London: Longman, 1879–94), II (1886), 306–11.
8. Raine (ed.), Historians of the Church of York, II, 309.
9. Wylie, History of England, II, 231; Christian D. Liddy, ‘William Frost, the
City of York and Scrope’s Rebellion of 1405’, in Richard Scrope, ed. Goldberg,
pp. 64–85 (p. 74).

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10. CPR, III (1405–08), 40.
11. Liddy, ‘William Frost’, p. 80.
12. Henry IV also appointed to the prebends of Dunnington, Barmby, and
Stillington. See CPR, III, 21, 35, 45–7, 109, 413.
13. Stephen K. Wright (ed.), ‘The Bishop Scrope that Was so Wise’, in Richard
Scrope, ed. Goldberg, pp. 113–14.
14. Christopher Norton, ‘Richard Scrope and York Minster’, in Richard Scrope, ed.
Goldberg, pp. 138–213 (pp. 188–90).
15. See Eleanor G. McCullough, ‘Praying the Passion: Laypeople’s Participation
in Medieval Liturgy and Devotion’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University
of York, 2011).
16. Patricia Cullum and Jeremy Goldberg, ‘How Margaret Blackburn Taught her
Daughters: Reading Devotional Instruction in a Book of Hours’, in Medieval
Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain, ed. Jocelyn WoganBrowne, Roslynn Voaden, Arlyn Diamond, Ann Hutchison, Carol Meale, and
Lesley Johnson (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), pp. 217–36.
17. Goldberg, ‘From Tableaux to Text’, pp. 248–9; Alexandra F. Johnson and
Margaret Rogerson (eds), Records of Early English Drama: York, 2 vols (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1979) (hereafter REED: York), II, 728.
18. P. J. P. Goldberg, ‘Introduction’, in Richard Scrope, ed. Goldberg, pp. 1–16 (p. 8).
19. Goldberg, ‘From Tableaux to Text’, pp. 255–8.
20. Goldberg, ‘Tableaux to Text’, pp. 273–4; Johnson and Rogerson (eds), REED:
York, I, 37; II, 722.
21. Johnson and Rogerson (eds), REED: York, II, 732–3.
22. Goldberg, ‘Tableaux to Text’, pp. 271–3.
23. Johnson and Rogerson (eds), REED: York, II, 728–30.
24. For evidence of the mercers’ pageant wagon and properties, see Johnson and
Rogerson (eds), REED: York, I, 55–6.
25. Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘William Revetour, Chaplain and Clerk of York,
Testator’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s. 29 (1998), 153–71 (esp. p. 154).
26. Cullum and Goldberg, ‘How Margaret Blackburn Taught her Daughters’,
pp. 217–36.
27. Francis Collins (ed.), Register of the Freemen of the City of York, 1272–1558
(Durham: Surtees Society, 1897), p. 100.
28. CPR, III, 171, 236, 437.
29. York, York Minster Library, MS Additional 1; Sarah Rees Jones and Felicity
Riddy, ‘The Bolton Hours of York: Female Domestic Piety and the Public
Sphere’, in Household, Women, and Christianities in Late Antiquity and the
Middle Ages, ed. Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp. 215–60.
30. Cullum, ‘Virginitas and Virilitas’, pp. 86–99.
31. Goldberg, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–16; Angelo Raine, Mediaeval York (London:
John Murray, 1955), pp. 318–19. St Clement’s nunnery, inevitably associated
with Scrope’s martyrdom from its proximity to the place of execution, possessed an image of St Sitha from at least 1437 which seems to have drawn
pilgrims to the nunnery church. The priory also housed an image of St
Bridget of Sweden.
32. R. H. Scaife (ed.), The Register of the Corpus Christi Guild in the City of York
(Durham: Surtees Society, 1872), pp. 11–12.

Scrope, the Devout Widow, and the Feast of Corpus Christi 83
33. CPR, III, 38.
34. Maud Sellers (ed.), York Memorandum Book (Durham: Surtees Society, 1912),
p. 152; Collins (ed.), Register of Freemen, p. 68.
35. McCullough, ‘Praying the Passion’, pp. 38–85. The Bolton Hours also show
an interest in the Five Wounds, but the emphasis differs.
36. York, Borthwick Institute for Archives (hereafter BI), cause papers, CP.F.36.
These are partially translated in P. J. P. Goldberg (ed.), Women in England c.
1275–1525: Documentary Sources (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1995), pp. 152–5. Translations here are quoted from this edition.
37. Philip M. Stell, Probate Inventories of the York Diocese, 1350–1500 (York: York
Archaeological Trust, 2006), pp. 517–21.
38. R. H. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 127–31; P. J. P. Goldberg, ‘Echoes,
Whispers, Ventriloquisms: On Recovering Women’s Voices from the Court of
York in the Later Middle Ages’, in Women, Agency and the Law 1300–1700, ed.
Bronach Kane and Fiona Williamson (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013),
pp. 31–41, 169–71.
39. The narrative here largely follows with additions that in ‘Brewing Trouble:
The Devout Widow’s Tale’, Communal Discord, Child Abduction, and Rape
in the Later Middle Ages, ed. P. J. P. Goldberg (New York: Palgrave, 2008),
pp. 129–45, 204–9.
40. It is possible that Dale in fact raped Agnes, but Agnes’s account considerably
strengthens her case and (ironically) make less credible Dale’s claim to have
had consensual sex with Agnes.
41. Stell, Probate Inventories, p. 520.
42. Wylie, History of England, II, 244.
43. Francis Drake, Eboracum (London: William Bowyer, 1736), p. 295; Alan Bray,
The Friend (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003).
44. BI, Probate Register 3, fols 111–12.
45. Even perhaps the way it was archived, for though we have evidence that
Dale brought a number of deponents to testify on his behalf, none of their
depositions survives.
46. I follow Wylie’s narrative here, itself dependent on a number of contemporary chronicles: Wylie, History of England, II, 219–27.

5
Anxieties with Political and
Social Order in Fifteenth-Century
England
Merridee L. Bailey

In this chapter, I examine how late fifteenth-century books published by
William Caxton were part of a broader dialogue about social order and
moral anxieties. It is possible to infer emotional states through the political and social fears felt inside mercantile and gentry communities and
which were manifested as a heightened concern for moral standards.
Analysing fears concerning disorder is a way to see how the mercantile
and gentry classes demonstrated their interest in establishing moral
authority and status. As England’s first publisher, Caxton’s books deserve
special attention for how early print responded to, and exacerbated,
anxieties with political and social order. Caxton’s literature was reflective
of English political events and cultural changes particularly associated
with England’s loss of its French territories and the civil conflict created
by the Wars of the Roses. While escalating military and political intrigue
was felt most strongly inside royal and aristocratic circles, other social
groups, particularly England’s middling ranks of merchants and gentry,
responded in their own ways to anxieties and disorder in political rule.
Manuscripts and print offered a tool through which fears relating to
order and governance could be discussed. Awareness of social and political disorder leads to an interest in how to resolve insecurities and focus
on future stability. While this was often expressed as concern around the
legitimacy of political governance and a supposed national moral decay,
in many instances these anxieties were also translated into concerns
with the good and proper upbringing of the next generation. While
we recognize that adult texts were reflecting English political events to
an interested gentry and urban merchant audience, the circulation of
related anxieties relevant to upbringing and childhood also flourished.
This chapter integrates these two topics by exploring late fifteenthcentury literature which contributed to debates about political and
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Anxieties with Political and Social Order

85

social order by promoting morality and ethical conduct for gentry
and merchants, as well as inside family groups and for young people.
Throughout this chapter I take social anxieties, and political and social
fears, as collective emotions affecting gentry and merchant communities. Emotions are here understood as states of mind that touched the
lives of individuals but which were also felt, expressed, and discussed
at a community level, in this case by those who were members of
the gentry and mercantile ranks. Moral standards and virtues can be
thought about as responses which have been motivated by emotional
states related to fear and anxiety. These moral perceptions were then
oriented towards action. In this chapter I use literature as a window into
the mental strategies which existed to comprehend and deal with social
change and political turmoil. I analyse several mid-fifteenth-century
political manuscripts to establish the level of interest in political events
among a gentry and mercantile readership before introducing Caxton’s
texts. As the first businessman to set up a printing press in England,
Caxton established an early dominance over the English printing market. His texts, many of which identify concerns with England’s security
and a sense of changing English identity, can be fruitfully studied for
their contribution to the vogue for moral debate.

The political context
The mid- to late fifteenth century was a time of heightened social and
political tension. The period is associated both with the loss of French
territories from the 1440s and, on English soil, with the Wars of the
Roses. Economic recessions between 1440 and 1480 added a further
dimension to social and political upheaval. However, it would be
unwise to suggest that the fifteenth century was a period of continuous
emergencies. Michael Hicks cautions against this idea: ‘It was not that
fifteenth-century England was in turmoil bar a few brief interludes of
peace, but that only occasionally and only briefly was normal life disrupted by political crises.’1 An ever-present danger is for historians to
oversimplify levels of unrest, pointing to every century as a period of
crisis. A better approach is to recognize that a continuous level of political and social anxiety was present beneath the surface of medieval society with the potential for this to flare up at particular moments when a
threat seemed imminent. We can study these responses to see the extent
to which reactions were focused towards dealing with localized fears.
Although political and social unrest in the fifteenth century was sporadic, it was still played out on a large scale. Civil conflict was a problem

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for the entire commonwealth, meaning a collective response was often
prioritized. One of the impulses stressed in this period was the moral
regeneration of the whole of society to which everyone, including young
people, men, and women, could contribute with their particular abilities. This chapter focuses on men and the way their readership of texts
was part of an expression of political and moral authority in the context
of public anxieties with the state of England. In this way, gentry and
mercantile men became, theoretically, the brokers of authority of political and moral ideas for those in their community.2 This formed part of
their governance of the household which included wives, children, and
servants. This chapter specifically addresses the role of fathers striving
for the moral upbringing of children, noting that this was sometimes
collectively described in household manuals as the important role
‘parents’ (mothers and fathers) had in fostering moral character, and
sometimes relating specifically to particular ideas about the superiority
of fathers in understanding and laying out order and moral governance.3
Moral anxieties exercised a powerful and pervasive role in this society. Disquiet with morality and moral behaviour is best seen as a core
underlying anxiety running throughout the medieval period. Detailed
work on public court records from the immediate post-plague period
(1348–49) has established the noticeable presence of moral regulation
at the local community level.4 By the mid-fifteenth century a long-term
pattern had clearly been established for behaviour to be regulated by
non-elite men and women. Probing morality and behaviour via court
presentments was part of an active approach in instilling moral reform
and in controlling perceived disorder at a community level. Marjorie
McIntosh has been at pains to see the peaks and troughs in the regulation of moral conduct taking place in the community as unrelated to
wider national events.5 However, from the 1470s, the language of official national debates concerning order and law increasingly resembled
the language and phrasing of moral concerns in the lesser local courts.6
Critically then, localized moral concerns could have a palpable relationship with English crises at the commonwealth level.
The genuine military and political intrigues taking place in the midto late fifteenth century were ones to which an increasingly prominent
gentry and mercantile class chose to respond. It is important to remember that, by the early fifteenth century, and certainly by the end of the
fifteenth century, the readership for literature in the English vernacular
circulating both in manuscript and in print was made up of the ranks of
the gentry and merchants.7 These were also the men who were engaging with social and political debates in their day-to-day lives, either as

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87

merchants with connections to the Continent, local gentry, and lesser
nobles with powerful roles as Justices of the Peace, or the yeomen,
craftsmen, and prosperous tradesmen who were involved with juror
presentments in local communities. The type of emotional and cultural
alignment which occurs when anxieties and fears are commonly held
can result in tighter identification between groups. Manuscripts and
Caxton’s books were shared mirrors these groups used to think about
the nature of political order and to develop strategies to deal with these
anxieties. In many ways, the local interest in moral behaviour corresponded to the theoretical and intellectual interest in ethical conduct
and appropriate emotional regulation from inside the literary record. It
is to these texts that we now turn, beginning with three English manuscripts that are suggestive of a pattern of political writing for non-elite
readers. These manuscripts are De Consulatu Stiliconis, The Chronicle from
Rollo to Edward IV, and William Worcester’s The Boke of Noblesse.

Political manuscripts
In the mid-fifteenth century, the English translation of Claudian’s political and moral poem De Consulatu Stiliconis was decorated with Yorkist
emblems and presented to Richard, third Duke of York. John Watts has
suggested that the political discourse originally described by Claudian
in c. 400 CE was consciously identified with York’s political struggles
and his conflict with Henry VI’s government.8 In particular, we can note
that the poem relegated hereditary rule in favour of rulers working for
the common good of ‘the people’. In the context of fifth-century political and social emergency, Stilico’s right to rule as consul in Rome was
based not on dynastic heritage, but on his virtuous character. As this
suggests, conflating the themes of virtue with political agency would
have indicated alternative routes to power, themes strikingly relevant
to Richard and later to his son, Richard III.
Concerns with royal succession and governance were topical interests
for the gentry. In the mid-fifteenth century, moral behaviour and standards were particularly identified with the conflict between the Yorkists
and Lancastrians culminating in the violent confrontation between
Richard III and Henry VII, with Richard III utilizing moral judgements
in his bid for the crown, condemning his ‘illegitimate’ young nephews,
and using this as a barrier to their inheritance of the throne.9 Concerns
with government, national identity, and acceptable (and legitimate)
political order found expression within manuscripts owned by the
gentry.10 This political turmoil promoted different responses in how the

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commonwealth could be steadied and order restored. In The Chronicle
from Rollo to Edward IV, Raluca Radulescu has noted that the text ‘is
illustrative of contemporary fifteenth-century anxieties over rightful
kingship and governance in England’.11 By chronicling the English royal
genealogy, The Chronicle can be understood as one attempt to order and
direct future stability by referencing and revering past kings and holding
them up to the behaviour of current royal figures, a trope Caxton would
later use to considerable effect. The Yorkist bias of The Chronicle reflects
the uses which were made of literary texts to promote particular political
ideologies. Its presence within gentry circles attests to the involvement
of this group in political thinking and the knowing use made of literature to respond to national debates. The Chronicle itself sits within the
vogue for genealogies which were important tools used by royal families
during phases of instability, a trend which gentry families appropriated
with considerable interest. Joel T. Rosenthal writes that ‘families were
becoming self-conscious about their past. The Percy Cartulary … is a
product of an age that was becoming interested in comparing past performances with pre[s]ent value’.12 These social anxieties were controlled
and regulated by strategies which reinforced older imagined values.
Political and national tensions were all the more compelling in the
context of formerly unifying pride in English military accomplishments. Fifty years before Richard III’s and Henry VII’s quarrel over the
throne would split English loyalties, England had enjoyed victory at
Agincourt, with Henry V’s successes beginning a period of military
success and expansion into French territorial holdings. This was not
long lived, and defeats at Formigny and in northern France effectively
brought the Hundred Years War to an end. One of the best-known
discussions of these events occurs in William Worcester’s The Boke
of Noblesse (c. 1450–53), later amended and presented to Edward IV
in 1475. Worcester, a member of Sir John Fastolf’s staff, rationalized
England’s loss of Normandy, not in terms of military tactics, but as a
product of national moral conduct:
And we ought so to kepe us frome the offending and grevyng of
oure sovereyne Maker … that thoroughe oure synfulle and wrecchid
lyvyng ayenst his lawes he be not lengir contrarie to us, suffring us
this grevouslie for oure offensis to be overthrow, rebukid, and punished as we bee.13
Worcester sought an answer to England’s losses in a reignited interest
in chivalry, focusing on restoring the future through renewed optimism

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in England’s proud lineage and a restored moral vigour. Gerald Harriss
has commented that war in The Boke of Noblesse is ‘waged to fulfil
national destiny and it reflects a nation’s moral virtue. The English
lost Normandy, which was rightfully theirs, because they exploited it
for their own gain, not the common good, lacking self-discipline and
abandoning true chivalry’.14 In these mid-fifteenth-century texts, virtue
is overtly correlated with England’s political status. Virtue and moral
strength were necessary not only for the preservation of the commonwealth but as a means to secure its long-term international position.15
These moral states echo the fears that were operating within mercantile and gentry communities. Who could contribute to this collective
endeavour appears to have been determinedly male. Particular ideas
about national strength, military duty, and the rightful place of England
in Continental affairs drew on commonplace cultural tropes about
men’s roles and who, on face value, was able to achieve the emotional
states required for the development of these moral qualities. However,
Worcester’s ‘noblesse’, or the concept of virtue, could be connected to
anyone’s behaviour, male or female, a point Christopher Allmand and
Maurice Keen briefly make.16 Women had pathways to securing and
displaying their moral worth because of this. Philippa Maddern has
written about women’s access to honour through non-chivalric means.
While her work does not explicitly make use of the categories of ‘moral
conduct’ or ‘virtue’, it is easy to see her discussion of the Pastons’ loyalties to close kin and friends, their obligations to others, and the importance of reputation as having a close connection to very similar ideas
of virtue and moral conduct.17 While Worcester’s own text is tightly
bound to military matters, we shall see in later texts that men, women,
and children were all capable of collectively contributing to the greater
moral good through this emphasis on virtue and morality and that
men, women, and children were assumed to possess, at least potentially,
the emotional capacity to achieve these moral states.
Culture and power do not only travel downward from the elites to
the masses and networks of social and political agency were necessarily
more complex.18 Social and political agendas could be raised and driven
by the gentry, local governments, and peasants. D. McCulloch and
E. D. Jones have shown that such political awareness led to criticism.19
The rise of political commentary after the 1450s was itself related to the
diffusion of critical verse and bills which spoke of popular suspicion
towards government and law. Harriss sees the fifteenth century as a time
when respect for authority was destabilized by popular rebellion and the
pervasive use of oral and written forms of criticism.20 John Bellamy has

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argued that the worst periods of public disorder (represented by lawlessness and criminal activity) occurred between the years 1450–64 and
again from 1470–71, with a less dramatic peak in criminal activity occurring after 1475, following the French war.21 Concerns over the role of
the king and the responsibilities of kingship further ignited social anxiety at the collective level. Here, emotions like fear and anxiety come into
play as interior states precipitating actions and serving as an impetus for
change. Social changes gain momentum at these times, manifested in
this case by the common interest in reaffirming moral behaviour.
At the time of these political and military events, this body of political texts was being written and presented to kings and gentry to reflect
on these concerns and map out ways for stability to be restored within
the commonwealth. Those in the gentry and merchant ranks were also
absorbing and using the language of high politics and kingly behaviour
to suit their own purposes.22 At a time when the dominance and moral
supremacy of the nobility and the noble household were declining,
it is noticeable that moral order and political agendas were visible in
the manuscripts associated with gentry, urban, and merchant environments.23 The fears and anxieties that precipitated the impulse for
moral reform were inherently emotional. Those who were governing
households, and who had voices of authority in their own gentry and
mercantile communities, thought appropriate responses to social and
political disorder could be found in the rhetoric of moral order. This
moral reform was intended to alleviate fears; connecting emotions to
social and cultural practices. This connection can be detected to an even
greater degree with Caxton’s publications.

Caxton and political and social order in Le Morte Darthur
and the order of Chivalry
Caxton clearly grasped the connections between his books and the
political situation in England. The prologues he wrote often openly
referred to political figures or alluded to political intrigues. Caxton was
himself sufficiently entangled in political events to feel it necessary to
sue for pardon in 1483–84 after the events of the failed Buckingham
rebellion against Richard III, along with other recognized servants of
King Edward IV.24 His choice of texts to print can also be read in light
of contemporary political conditions. In the early phases of his career,
Caxton made a point of connecting his books to significant political
and royal figures. The Dicts or Sayings of the Philosphers (1477), Christine
de Pizan’s Morale Proverbes (1478), and The Cordial (1479) refer to

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Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, while the 1475 edition of The Game and
Playe of the Chesse refers to George, Duke of Clarence. Although dedicatory passages were probably always more strategic than real, Caxton had
gone to lengths to publicize connections with many of the prominent
political figures of his day. Unfortunately, many of the figures Caxton
emphasized did not survive the political unrest of the late 1470s and
early 1480s. George, Duke of Clarence, was executed in 1478 and
Anthony Woodville in 1483.
Early print had enormous potential to reach gentry and mercantile
readers. We know from Caxton’s marketing techniques that these early
printed books were intended for provincial gentry and urban merchant
audiences, lawyers, and officials, alongside the courtly figures referred
to in dedicatory passages.25 As a businessman and merchant himself,
it made sense for Caxton to print books directed at the urban elite
rather than focusing entirely on the relatively small and limited
aristocratic market. The descriptions of merchandise and merchant
occupations in Vocabulary in French and English (1480) were clearly
intended to appeal (and appeal only) to merchants. Caxton’s prologue
also confirmed the book’s utilitarian mercantile purpose:
Who this booke shall wylle lerne
May well entreprise or take on honde
Marchandises fro one land to anothir
And to knowe many Wares
Which to hym shalbe good to be bougt
Or solde for riche to become.26
However, as I have suggested above, England’s gentry and merchant
readers were not unsophisticated or naive, but were engaged in complex political and social activities and were valid political audiences for
Caxton to target in their own right.
Two highly politicized books printed by Caxton, Le Morte Darthur
(1485) and the Order of Chivalry (1484) contain prologues and narrative
choices which reveal the political and social agendas of contemporary
literature and the connections of these narratives to the macro-politics
of the time. Both texts were responding to wider political anxieties and
problems within the social order. The legend of King Arthur told in Le
Morte Darthur brings together these themes of English political identity
and gentry values, as well as establishing the connections between
printed material and the manuscript tradition. Felicity Riddy has written that Malory’s manuscript Le Morte Darthur circulated in ‘precisely

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that period of moral crisis, that vacuum of aristocratic values in the second half of the fifteenth century, when the governing elites, no longer
united against the French and the Scots, fell first upon each other in the
Wars of the Roses and then reassembled themselves under the Tudors
against their own tenants’.27 Karen Bezella-Bond has also suggested that
fifteenth-century interest in the legend of Arthur ‘may have responded
in part to England’s recent demoralizing loss of its French holdings
and in part to the destabilizing feuds among the English nobility and
gentry’.28 The gentry readership for Le Morte Darthur has been explored
as part of a wider non-elite interest in literature speaking to contemporary political and social culture.29 Malory’s account of past glories
and chivalric heritage would have resonated with late fifteenth-century
audiences aware of the Lancastrian–Yorkist divide in England and the devastating loss of French territories. Henry VI’s renunciation of the French
throne, the loss of continental holdings and territories in Aquitaine by
1453 created compelling contemporary perspectives on English failures
for Malory’s audience, while the conflict between Richard III and Henry
Tudor was taking place at the same time as Caxton’s 1485 publication.30
The relationship Malory’s and Caxton’s editions have to contemporary events should not be oversimplified given the long history this
source material has and our inability to track amendments and alterations perfectly to the texts. It is complicated still further by not knowing which source material Malory used, although we know Caxton had
one of the Le Morte manuscripts in his workshop.31 Despite problems in
locating the origins of the Arthurian story, it is reasonable for us to comment on the connections each text had to ongoing political disorder.32
Much can also be made of the connections to events in the 1480s which
Caxton offered in his own text.
Who was occupying the throne in 1485 would have been at the forefront of Caxton’s mind, and those of his well-read and astute readers.
In his preface to Le Morte Darthur, Caxton directly invites his audience
to compare current kingship with nostalgia for England’s glorious heritage: ‘Fyrst and chyef of the thre best crysten and worthy / kyng Arthur /
whyche ought moost to be remembred emonge vs englysshe – men tofor
al other crysten kynges.’33 Caxton often used his newly written and original prologues to emphasize moral behaviour and chivalric conduct. Sly
political and social subtexts provided alert readers with opportunities to
make comparisons with wider national debates if they chose to do so. In
this way, Caxton’s comments would have been particularly pointed and
meaningful if we accept they were read by a knowing and astute audience.

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Virtuous conduct was also developed inside Caxton’s narrative and
this edition is seen as the more morally conscious text, making moral
judgements the cause of Arthur’s ruin in a way Malory – who explained
Arthur’s downfall as a result of poor personal choices – avoided doing.34
Caxton deliberately promoted the moral superiority of past generations
in the text. Again in the prologue, he related chivalry to its original
champions, the nobility, and commented on the higher value the
English had previously placed on virtuous conduct. This moral state was
connected to emotion specifically through the state of shame:
to the entente that noble man may see and lerne the noble actes of
chyualrye / the Jentyl and Vertuous dedes that somme knyghtes used
in tho dayes / by whyche they came to honour / and how they that
were vycious were punysshed and ofte put to shame and rebuke.35
Shame is a central emotion to morality and conscience. Whether it
was being explicitly cast on readers as Caxton was doing through his
promotion of a chivalric past, or whether it was provoked internally
through an encounter with a higher moral value, feeling shame (or the
fear of being ‘put to shame’ with its connotations of public discredit)
prompts internal self-regulation and assessment. Shame is one of the
mechanisms for self-governance and emotional appraisal. A catalogue
of emotional states, like hate and love, as well as virtuous actions and
sins was also made which connected the morality of the Arthurian story
to emotional qualities:
For herein may be seen noble chyualrye / Curtosye / Humanyte
frendlynesse / hardynesse / loue / frendshyp / Cowardyse / Murdre /
hate / vertue / and synne / Doo after the good and leue the euyl / and
it shal brynge you to good fame and renommee.36
The development of these virtuous states and behaviours involved
maintaining appropriate emotions. Caxton then switches to the benefit
his book brings to all ranks of people, ‘promising’ his audience that
chivalry, virtue, and honour are relevant codes to modern living:
humbly bysechynge al noble lordes and ladyes wyth al other estates
of what estate or degree they been of / that shal se and rede in this
sayd book and werke / that they take the good and honest actes in
their remembraunce / and to folowe the same.37

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Michael Stroud suggests Caxton added a ‘bourgeois formula’ to Le Morte
Darthur, equating virtue with success in an attempt to appeal to commercial interests and the culture of self-advancement and acquisition
within merchant classes.38
Caxton’s edition identifies a stronger moral theme but there is also
some evidence that direct political revisions were made. A passage relating Arthur’s dream of a dragon and a bear meeting to fight is altered in
a way which suggests Caxton was conscious of the struggles between
Richard III and Henry Tudor. In the original text, the dragon is victorious over the tyrant (bear). In six places, Caxton alters ‘bear’ to ‘boar’,
the emblem of Richard III, leaving the dragon, the emblem of Henry
Tudor, in place.39 P. J. C. Field notes that symbolic imagery is known to
have appealed to Caxton, with a similar play upon words and images
appearing in Blanchardin and Eglantine (1488).40 It is likely that Caxton
made any alterations to the text around mid-July 1484, a time of continued attacks upon Richard III by Henry Tudor.41 Caxton would have
been concerned to avoid directly condemning Richard in 1484–85. The
political complexities of this period would have necessitated some mental manoeuvres in order to allude to political events while maintaining
a safe historical ambiguity.42 A subtext of undeserving kingly rule and
shameful noble conduct would have held meaning for Caxton, and
been interpreted by an audience as a metaphor for current rule, if the
audience elected to read it in this way.
The epilogue to the Order of Chivalry (1484) performs a similar function
although in a more direct way. It is hard to infer anything other than
that a direct comparison was calculatingly made between Richard III’s
England and past glories. Caxton lists past kings whom he upholds
for their conduct, virtue, and chivalry, beginning with Richard I and
continuing with Edward I, Edward III, and Henry V. From this list,
Richard III is visibly absent. A direct question is made to the audience
when Caxton asks: ‘I wold demaunde a question yf I shold not displease /
how many knyghtes ben ther now in Englond / that haue thuse and
thexercyse of a knyghte.’43 There is a distinctly argumentative tone to
this. In a subsequent act of flattery, Caxton introduces Richard III as the
solution to these ills:
And thus thys lytyl book I presente to my redoubted naturel and most
dradde souerayne lord kyng Rychard kyng of Englond and of Fraunce /
to thende / that he commaunde this book to be had and redde vnto
other yong lordes knyghtes and gentylmen within ths royame.44

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The audience could easily have interpreted the theme of shameful noble
conduct as a metaphor for current rule.
A direct correlation between many of these texts and the English
political environment is hampered by many earlier manuscripts circulating in England and Europe. This has implications for how this
material can be read to identify changing concepts of moral identity
and affective states in late fifteenth-century English society, as opposed
to reflecting ideas original to an earlier and sometimes international
heritage.45 Mary Louise Pratt has called the spheres of transnational
interaction ‘contact zones’, or ‘social spaces where disparate cultures,
meet, clash and grapple with each other’.46 Wider political experiences
can find relevance in an English environment when comparable concerns with moral and political disorder cross local lines. The poetry of
Alain Chartier is one example of material translated by Caxton (The
Curial, 1483 and 1484) and published in politically sensitive times.47
Chartier’s work exists in direct relationship with the Hundred Years
War. As Coldiron notes, correlations between French culture and
English culture are not always feasible or prudent, and certainly it
would be unwise to suggest too systematic a parallel between the two.
However, Chartier’s moral critiques of court life would have been relevant to English audiences in the mid-1480s who were living through
the recent bloody succession quarrels and who had been scandalized by
the probable murder of the two young princes. Appropriate contextualization helps us to see these texts as embedded within a contemporary
English national and political framework. Caxton’s original prefaces
are of great help in understanding the contemporary English responses
to this.
Royal intrigues not only affected the upper gentry and aristocratic
men involved in the day-to-day running of the commonwealth, or
indeed the women involved in authoritative actions. Social anxieties
filtered through the ranks. In the previous decade, Caxton’s 1474 Game
and Playe of the Chesse had upheld the idea that the lack of virtue on the
part of any single man, whether noble or commoner, was a threat to the
whole community. Unease with England’s state of civic and domestic
affairs created an environment which made collective moral conduct
and associated literature pertinent. In this environment, specific moral
concerns were raised in terms of the collective moral health of the commonwealth, and also, the proper upbringing of children. The moral
standards espoused in this literature involved nurturing the right emotions as well as developing the right patterns of behaviour.

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Childhood and order
The political texts I have discussed developed in an environment where
episodic (but recurrent) political and social disorders were acknowledged. Anxieties that were local and contingent to the English political
situation were associated by the mercantile and gentry audience, and by
the male authors writing these texts, with wider insecurities about the
moral condition of all members of the commonwealth. How the collective anxieties of this period are related to texts which focused on regulating behaviour and emotional states among children and families is a
question worth considering. This section examines several of Caxton’s
printed, instructional books that account for themes of morality in
the upbringing of boys and youths, as well as within family structures
more broadly. Here, the connection to political and social disorder is
expressed through the wider concern with regulating behaviour of the
whole of society.
Scholarship has tended to ignore the importance of literature for children in the reforming agendas of the medieval period. This is surprising
given the basic need to secure the conduct of the next generation as a
means of safeguarding social order itself. Although the connection to
political and social order has not featured prominently in the historiography of medieval children’s literature, the political sphere has been
closely explored for eighteenth- to twenty-first-century children’s texts.48
In eighteenth-century France, for example, children were acknowledged
as the future model citizens of the republic and valuable participants in
the community. French Revolutionary literature of the 1790s targeted
children in an attempt to create a politically active but morally compliant society.49 A very different set of social and political conditions existed
in England, and of course this society had its own unique awareness of
children, although it is now generally agreed that childhood was recognized and appreciated in the medieval period.50 Since medieval political
texts focused on restoring the present and the future to match former
glories, it should not be surprising just how significant advice literature
for the next generation would be. The following analysis integrates
instructional literature into the political debate, looking at how texts
aimed at children and families were connected to wider moral anxieties.
Several of Caxton’s prologues stridently censure current English conduct. The 1487 Book of Good Maners, based on Jacques Legrand’s Livre
de bonnes moeurs, begins with an abrupt declaration written by Caxton
to frame the text: ‘Whan I consydere the condycions and maners of
the comyn people whiche without enformacion and lernyng ben rude

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and not manerd lyke vnto beestis brute.’51 Caxton helpfully informs his
readers that this book would offer them ways to reform their conduct:
‘that it might be had and vsed emonge the people for thamendement
of their maners and to thencreace of vertuous lyung.’52 The manners
Caxton is referring to here were not the manners of polite conduct but
were the more complex ‘good and vertuous maners’ that were individualized and directed towards particular groups of people as ways to
reform character. In part, the creation of ‘good manners’ was also about
regulating emotions such as pride and fostering contrasting inner states
like humility. This was accomplished by the examination of the heart
and thoughts.53 Doing away with anger and ire, and cultivating the
internal desire to do good to every man, were also part of this wider
understanding of ‘good manners’. Lessons on different aspects of ‘good
manners’ were written for male householders, priests, rich men, poor
men, women, and children. The idea that women bore as much responsibility as men to cultivate personal virtue in themselves to benefit the
public good was a long-standing literary trope. While it was best exemplified by the writings of Christine de Pizan, it was by no means a new
idea when de Pizan was writing in the 1400s.54 Each group in the Book of
Good Maners had responsibilities to eschew emotions such as pride and
anger and to develop precise traits and characteristics that needed serious reflection and development. Once attended to, these good manners
would be visible to the community through how they acted. Left uncorrected they could cause social disapproval (particularly for women) or
could even jeopardize someone’s soul.
Alone, each chapter in the Book of Good Maners spells out how different groups of people and genders should behave: one exemplum might
refer to a woman’s chaste or unchaste behaviour; another to a prince’s
honourable conduct, which would set the tone for his subjects; while
another refers to the wisdom of speaking little. A chapter on hatred
and ire was addressed to the reader in general and while this was clearly
intended for men there is no reason women would have been excluded
from the general principle of regulating emotions like hatred and anger:
‘Alas what auaylleth me yf I hate my neyghbour. seen that in suche estate
I may not playse god. syth I loue not hym whom I ought to lone [sic].
and also I may haue noo pardon ne foryeuenes yf I forgyue not other.’55
Controlling and even eliminating destructive emotions was required
not only for self-governance but for the good of the wider community.
The wider agenda of this text is best understood when it is read as a
complete narrative on the health of the whole of society. Political texts
had long pointed out that the wellbeing of the community relied on the

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virtue of individuals. The absence of virtues – whether these were social,
economic, spiritual, or emotional – was a highly politicized concern.56
Book 4, Chapter 11 is the only section that specifically deals with
how parents (both fathers and mothers) are to care for their children.
However, several other sections reaffirm the importance of learning
good conduct in youth (Book 1.5; Book 4.3) while children and young
people are further mentioned in Book 4.9 (on servants) and Book 4.12
(on children obeying their parents). Shame is cited in Book 4.3 both as a
mechanism for creating good conduct – ‘he shal … ashamed for to doo
euyll’– and also as an emotional response to being chastised – ‘they shal
be a shamed to be reprehended’.57 Book 4.3 makes distinctions between
fathers and mothers in places where the biblical exemplum best suits
the story, but otherwise fathers and mothers are referred to jointly, as
the following example demonstrates:
Thene owen the fader & Moder to haue right grete aduys vpon the
gouernace of theyr chyldren as it shal be said here after. The children
also owen to theyr parentes & to theyr maistres to obey in folowyug
Isaac. the whyche obeyed in suche wyse to his fader that he was all
redy to receyue the deth at his comandement as it apperith the xxij
chapytre of genesis. & yet he was at the tyme of the age of xxxij
yere. And of dauid we rede how he was obeyssant to his fader / as it
apperith the fyrst boke of kynges / And Ihu Cryste hym self in his
yougth was obeyssant … his parentes.58
Similarly, Book 4.11’s main argument is that the greatest gift parents
(fathers and mothers) can give to their children is to ensure they are
brought up in the path of virtue: ‘the best herytage that fader and
moder may leue to theyr chyldren that is that they be garnyshed of
good maners of vertues / and of good customes.’59 Children are sufficiently malleable and unformed (in Book 4.3 infancy is compared to
wax, while in Book 2.5 youth is associated with green wood which can
be bent) that they will readily and eagerly absorb good doctrines. This
can be done through direct teaching but also by modelling good behaviour for children to take in and learn as they develop: ‘For the chyldren
ensiewe gladly and folowe the doctryne that is gyuen to them in theyr
yougthe.’60 Here, the book makes a distinction to do with the father’s
role with his sons:
the fader is to his sone cause of his nouryssyng & cause of his discyplyne by the whyche wordes it suffyseth not onely that the fader

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be caue of his chyldren by generacon. but more ouer he ought to
nourysshe and teche them.61
The focus on the father’s role as the primary nurturer of virtue is not
surprising for this period, and neither is the stated emphasis on sons,
although the dual references to parents elsewhere cautions against a
simple reading of any monopoly on virtue fathers had in the literature
for households. The focus on sons is, however, the default position in
this book. A single line in Book 4.11 picks out the need for daughters
to be taught practical skills in the event their families are unable to
support them:
the Emperour Octauyan made his sones to be taught and texcersyse
feates chyualrous. And his doughters he made to be taught to werke
wulle to that ende that they myght lyue by theyr labour in caas that
fortune faylled them.62
Merchant fathers certainly encouraged daughters to learn skills in order
to carry out honest labour and contribute to the household economy.
Parental responsibilities certainly changed the conduct, and virtue,
of the individual child but youthful upbringing had wider social resonances, outlined in Book 4.3, ‘Of the state of old age’. First, the convention that lessons which are learned in youth continue to influence
someone over the whole of their life cycle is reaffirmed: ‘euery persone
dooth that gladly that whiche he hath lerned to doo in his youtghe’ (St
Ambrose); and ‘is a thynge naturel to take playfance & delectacoñ in that
thynge / the whiche he hath be accustomed to doo in his chyldhode &
youghte’ (Aristotle).63 Second, the virtue of the wider community affects
the virtue of the individual: ‘it is hard for a yong man to be good / whan
he conuersed with people of enyl lyf.’64 The child ‘ought to duelle with
them contynuelly And thene by cause of the good people / he shal …
ashamed for to doo euyll’.65 The virtue of each person was not a separate
and individualized concern but reaffirmed the common good. The trope
of the body politic was even more strongly identified in those passages
detailing the behaviour of princes, which stressed how individual character traits and attitudes towards power were fundamentally tied to the
health of the realm. The child’s behaviour, and the parental role in shaping this, might never have this same ‘real’ political power, but each contributed towards the welfare of the commonwealth in their own right.
The prologue to Caton (1484) affirmed the contribution everybody
in society owed to the commonwealth. According to Caxton this

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obligation was not being met: ‘ther is almost none / that entendeth to
the comyn wele but only euery man for his singuler prouffyte.’66 Such a
hackneyed cry was, however, set within a particular, local, English context, contingent upon the situation Caxton observed upon his return to
his former home in the city of London after living on the Continent:
‘For as me semeth it is of grete nede | by cause I haue knowen it [London]
in my yong age moche more welthy prosperous & rycher than it is at this
day.’67 In writing the prologue, Caxton inserted a particularly English-,
even London-, focused specificity into an older narrative, reworking the
traditional moral, reforming tone into something relevant and meaningful to his audience. It was no doubt a way to market the book, but
it situates instructional texts for fathers and sons from its very earliest
moments in English printing history within a politicized environment.
The connection to young people was transparently established by
Caxton. The prologue overtly correlates the opening discussion on the
health of the commonwealth with the capacity children have to learn:
‘And as in my Iugement it is the beste book for to be taught to yonge
children in scole | & also to peple of euery age it is ful conuenient yf it be
wel vnderstanden.’68 Feeling and displaying appropriate love for parents
was also part of the emotional spectrum expected from children in this
period. More than a state of mind, or an inner feeling, appropriate love
(coming after a love of God) was to be expressed through moral acts
such as supporting and helping parents when it was needed. Appropriate
emotion was directly relevant to morality as an inner state that had a
powerful capacity to motivate duty and secure moral order.
Caton and the Book of Good Maners share many of the same exempla,
and like the Book of Good Maners, Caton uses a mix of historical examples, biblical passages, and traditional wisdom to promote the long
history of moral thinking, how this benefits the body and soul, and
the dangers which arise when moral thinking is allowed to decline. It
would be some time before books were published only for children, and
many of the exempla focus on adult behaviour. However, the Distichs
of Cato, from which Caton derived, had long been used in schools to
educate children in Latin and to inform their moral characters.69 Within
the first decade of the printing industry being established in England,
Caxton had developed this as an area which the presses could pick up
as a legitimate venture. From this point onwards, politicized, printed
instructional texts could be taken and promoted to the next generation of families and children. These texts strengthened the authority of
men, and specifically strengthened the authority of men who governed
households, by reinforcing their roles in advancing moral conduct to

Anxieties with Political and Social Order

101

dependents like children and servants. It was the potential that men
had for governance that was explicitly catered to within the lessons
found in Caton and the Book of Good Maners.

Conclusion
I have elsewhere argued that the shift from observable courtesy to
morality was taking place in literature over the late fifteenth and into
the sixteenth centuries. There was a concern to include children’s
morality as part of a larger, structural, moral reformation.70 Juror presentments from rural communities illustrate the long-term presence
of moral regulation in medieval society, while yeomen, craftsmen,
prosperous tradesman, and gentry were directly involved in reporting
and controlling misbehaviour at a local level.71 Slightly later than this,
sixteenth-century popular political dynamics in English villages were
centred upon the authority of local figures who were involved in regulating and arbitrating local misdemeanours and crimes.72 This practical
interest in monitoring moral behaviour was complemented by literature. That this literature was read and marketed to these same non-elite
groups helps us to tie manuscript and printed texts to political and local
government networks.
This chapter has deliberately addressed the question of whether the
political anxieties expressed in literary works were local and contingent
or more structural and has also investigated the gender and emotional
elements of this. Literature was a shared cultural means of communicating current anxieties, and people at the time did see the connections
between literary works and politics. At the same time, there was an everpresent concern with the moral health of the commonwealth. Emotions
like fear and anxiety precipitated the desire to find ways to affirm
moral standards while shame was used to inflame a sense of duty and
encourage self-assessment. The evidence points towards a connection
between the political circumstances existing in England and the similarly
ever-present concern with regulating behaviour. Political anxieties were
readily interpreted as moral failings. It was this trope that was particularly well suited to children’s literature, which dealt with how the next
generation was to be brought up for the health of the commonwealth.
It is also the case that printers like Caxton played on these anxieties,
addressing fears as a way to sell books. In this sense, emotional states
like fear, anxiety, and shame influenced how those in the gentry and
mercantile classes acted and what they were doing to promote moral
authority and attain governing status inside households. The fears

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surrounding the absence of morality and moral conduct were part of a
complex web in which texts offered solutions to perceived social and
political problems while reinforcing the very fears that lay underneath
them. Engaging with political and moral texts offered ways for men in
the gentry and mercantile classes to express their authority and moral
superiority, but it also left them open to having their fears exacerbated,
even if only through the light touch of the printer’s hands.

Notes
1. M. Hicks, English Political Culture in the Fifteenth Century (London: Routledge,
2002), p. 1.
2. Scholarship in the late 1970s and 1980s corrected the unthinking emphasis
on male power by examining women’s political and moral authority. See
for instance Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study
of Texts from Perpetua (d. 203) to Marguerite Porete (d. 1310) (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984); Joan M. Ferrante, To the Glory of Her
Sex: Women’s Roles in the Composition of Medieval Texts (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997). See also essays in Mary Erler,
Maryanne Kowaleski (eds), Women and Power in the Middle Ages (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1988) and Gendering the Master Narrative: Women
and Power in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
On women in families, see David Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); Barbara A. Hanawalt, The Ties that
Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1986). Perhaps unsurprisingly there has been a renewed interest in
understanding ‘medieval masculinities’ as a way into the study of gender
and power. See, for instance, Isabel Davis, Writing Masculinity in the Later
Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Derek G. Neal,
The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2008); and chapters in John H. Arnold and Sean Brady (eds), What
is Masculinity? Historical Dynamics from Antiquity to the Contemporary World
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
3. A recent study of fatherhood is Rachel E. Moss, Fatherhood and Its
Representations in Middle English Texts (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013).
4. M. K. McIntosh, Controlling Misbehaviour in England, 1370–1600 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998).
5. McIntosh, Controlling Misbehaviour, pp. 129–34; see also Peter Lake,
‘Periodization, Politics and “The Social”’, Journal of British Studies, 37 (1998),
279–90 (p. 283).
6. McIntosh, Controlling Misbehaviour, pp. 132–3.
7. Malcom B. Parkes, ‘The Literacy of the Laity’, in Literature and Western
Civilization: The Medieval World, ed. D. Daiches and A. K. Thorlby (London:
Aldus, 1973), pp. 555–77; R. L. Radulescu, The Gentry Context for Malory’s
‘Morte Darthur’ (Cambridge: Brewer, 2003). On print, see Margaret Lane Ford,
‘The Private Ownership of Printed Books’, in The Cambridge History of the
Book in Britain, Volume 3, ed. Lotte Hellinga, J. B. Trapp, John Barnard, David

Anxieties with Political and Social Order

8.

9.

10.

11.
12.
13.

14.
15.

16.

17.

18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.

103

McKitterick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 205–28
(pp. 213–18); Y. C. Wang, ‘Caxton’s Romances and Their Early Tudor
Readers’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 67 (2004), 173–88.
London, British Library (hereafter BL), MS Additional 11814; J. Watts, ‘De
Consulatu Stiliconis: Texts and Politics in the Reign of Henry VI’, Journal of
Medieval History, 16 (1990), 251–66. Sheila Delany offers a different interpretation of the dating of the manuscript but also points out that ‘the very
choice of text opens possibilities of contemporary English political analogy’.
Sheila Delaney, ‘Bokenham’s Claudian as Yorkist Propaganda’, Journal of
Medieval History, 22 (1996), 83–96 (p. 89).
See Hicks, English Political Culture, p. 37. It should be noted that Lancastrian
succession had always been problematic and that since 1400 there had been
outbreaks of rebellion and political in-fighting.
R. Radulescu, ‘Yorkist Propaganda and The Chronicle from Rollo to Edward IV’,
Studies in Philology, 100 (2003), 401–24. On gentry families and books, see
Radulescu, Gentry Context, pp. 39–81.
BL, MS Harley 116, c. 1461, fols 142r–146r; Radulescu, ‘Yorkist Propaganda’,
p. 402.
J. T. Rosenthal, Nobles and the Noble Life, 1295–1500 (London: George Allen &
Unwin, 1976), p. 91.
The Boke of Noblesse, Addressed to King Edward the Fourth on His Invasion of
France in 1475, with an Introduction by John Gough Nichols (London: J. B.
Nichols and Sons, 1860; repr. New York: Burt Franklin, 1972), p. 56.
G. Harriss, Shaping the Nation, England, 1360–1461 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
2005), p. 128.
According to Harriss (Shaping the Nation, p. 159), The Boke of Noblesse sought
to repair ‘the moral failings by which they [the English] had forfeited divine
favour’.
Christopher Allmand and Maurice Keen, ‘History and the Literature of War:
The Boke of Noblesse of William Worcester’, in War, Government and Power in
Late Medieval France, ed. C. T. Allmand (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,
2000), pp. 92–105 (p. 99).
Philippa Maddern, ‘Honour among the Pastons: Gender and Integrity in
Fifteenth-Century English Provincial Society’, Journal of Medieval History, 14
(1988), 357–71 (p. 363).
J. A. Ford, ‘A View from a Village: Popular Political Culture in SixteenthCentury England’, Journal of Popular Culture, 34 (2000), 1–19.
D. McCulloch and E. D. Jones, ‘Lancastrian Politics, the French War, and the
Rise of the Popular Element’, Speculum, 58 (1983), 95–138 (pp. 134–5).
Harriss, Shaping the Nation, p. 649.
J. Bellamy, Crime and Public Order in England in the Later Middle Ages (London:
Routledge, 1973), p. 9; McCulloch and Jones, ‘Lancastrian Politics’, p. 138.
Maddern, ‘Honour among the Pastons’, p. 363.
Harriss (Shaping the Nation, p. 94) writes that the nobility’s ‘credibility as
guardians of stability and order was shaken by the two worst outbreaks of
popular revolt in the Middle Ages, in 1381 and 1450, and by criticism of the
disorderly behaviour of their retainers. Their leadership of political society,
both nationally and in the localities, was increasingly shared with the middling landowners’.

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24. L. Gill, ‘William Caxton and the Rebellion of 1483’, English Historical Review,
112 (1997), 105–18.
25. Wang, ‘Caxton’s Romances’, pp. 173–88.
26. W. Caxton, Here endeth this doctrine at Westmestre by London [in] fourmes
enprinted [in] the whiche one euerich may shortly lerne. Frenssh and englissh
(Westminster: William Caxton, 1480), sig. A3r.
27. Felicity Riddy, ‘Contextualizing Le Morte Darthur: Empire and Civil War’, in
A Companion to Malory, ed. E. A. Archibald and A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge:
Brewer, 1996), pp. 55–73.
28. K. Bezella-Bond, ‘Blood and Roses: Maytime and Revival in the Morte
Darthur’, in Reputation and Representation in Fifteenth-Century Europe, ed.
D. L. Biggs, S. D. Michalove, and A. Compton Reeves (Leiden: Brill, 2004),
pp. 187–210 (pp. 180–1).
29. Radulescu, Gentry Context, pp. 83–112.
30. Riddy, ‘Contextualizing Le Morte Darthur’, pp. 66–70.
31. M. Corrie, ‘Self-Determination in the Post-Vulgate Suite Du Merlin and
Malory’s Le Morte Darthur’, Medium Aevum, 73 (2004), 273–89; L. Hellinga,
Caxton in Focus: The Beginning of Printing in England (London: British Library,
1982), pp. 89–94.
32. Elizabeth Archibald and A. S. G. Edwards, ‘Introduction’, in A Companion to
Malory, ed. Archibald and Edwards, pp. xiii–xv (p. xiv).
33. W. Caxton, Thus endeth thys noble and joyous book entytled Le morte darthur …
which book was reduced in to Englysshe by Syr Thomas Malory … and by me
deuyded in to xxi bookes … Caxton me fieri fecit (Westminster: William Caxton,
1485) (hereafter Le morte darthur), sig. iir. Original punctuation has been
preserved.
34. M. Stroud, ‘Chivalric Terminology in Late Medieval Literature’, Journal of the
History of Ideas, 37 (1976), 329–31.
35. Caxton, Le morte darthur, sig. iiir.
36. Caxton, Le morte darthur, sig. iiir.
37. Caxton, Le morte darthur, sig. iiir.
38. Stroud, ‘Chivalric Terminology’, p. 330.
39. P. J. C. Field, ‘Caxton’s Roman War’, in The Malory Debate: Essays on the
Texts of ‘Le Morte Darthur’, ed. B. Wheeler, R. L. Kindrick, and M. N. Salda
(Cambridge: Brewer, 2000), pp. 127–67.
40. Field, ‘Caxton’s Roman War’, p. 133.
41. S. C. Weinberg, ‘Caxton, Anthony Woodville and the Prologue to the Morte
Darthur’, Studies in Philology, 102 (2005), 45–65 (pp. 60–1).
42. Weinberg, ‘Caxton, Anthony Woodville’, pp. 62–4.
43. W. J. B. Crotch, The Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton (London: Early
English Text Society/Oxford University Press, 1928), p. 83.
44. Crotch, The Prologues, p. 84; see also Gill, ‘William Caxton’.
45. A. E. B. Coldiron (‘Translation’s Challenge to Critical Categories: Verses from
French in the Early English Renaissance’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 16 (2003),
315–44) suggests that literary translations ‘disrupt’ national boundaries and
make us consider how to connect texts across the broader context.
46. Coldiron, ‘Translation’s Challenge’, p. 335.
47. Coldiron, ‘Translation’s Challenge’, p. 326.

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48. A. E. Gavin (ed.), The Child in British Literature: Literary Constructions of
Childhood, Medieval to Contemporary (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
49. M. R. Higonnet, ‘Civility Books, Child Citizens, and Uncivil Antics’, Poetics
Today, 13 (1992), 123–40.
50. I have written on this elsewhere. See M. L. Bailey, Socialising the Child in Late
Medieval England, c. 1400–1600 (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2012).
51. J. Legrand, Here begynneth the table of a book entytled the book of good maners
(Westminster: William Caxton, 1487) (hereafter Legrand, Book of good maners),
prologue.
52. Legrand, Book of good maners, prologue.
53. Legrand, Book of good maners, book 1.3.
54. Carolyn P. Collette, ‘Chaucer and the French Tradition Revisited: Philippe
de Mézières and the Good Wife’, in Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in
Late Medieval Britain, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Rosalynn Voaden, Arlyn
Diamond, Ann Hutchison, Carol M. Meale, and Lesley Johnson (Turnhout:
Brepols, 2000), pp. 151–68 (p. 152).
55. Legrand, Book of good maners, book 1.7.
56. J. Adams, ‘“Longene to the Playe”: Caxton, Chess, and the Boundaries of
Political Order’, Essays in Medieval Studies, 21 (2004), 151–66.
57. Legrand, Book of good maners, book 4.3.
58. Legrand, Book of good maners, book 4.3.
59. Legrand, Book of good maners, book 4.11.
60. Legrand, Book of good maners, book 4.11.
61. Legrand, Book of good maners, book 4.11.
62. Legrand, Book of good maners, book 4.11.
63. Legrand, Book of good maners, book 4.3.
64. Legrand, Book of good maners, book 4.3.
65. Legrand, Book of good maners, book 4.3.
66. Here begynneth the prologue or prohemye of the book callid Caton (Westminster:
William Caxton, after 23 December 1483) (hereafter Caton), sig. aiir.
67. Caton, sig. aiir.
68. Caton, sig. aiir.
69. Nicholas Orme, Medieval Schools: From Roman Britain to Renaissance England
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 98.
70. See Bailey, Socialising the Child.
71. See McIntosh, Controlling Misbehaviour.
72. Ford, ‘A View from a Village’.

6
Raising Girls and Boys: Fear,
Awe, and Dread in the Early
Modern Household
Stephanie Tarbin

See that ye correcte them devly & discretly for theyr
faultes, so that they stonde in great feare & awe of the,
and if words wyl not reclayme them than take the rod
or weapon of correccion discretely vsed … be not to
roughe nor to hastye with them, but so order your selues to them that they maye both loue and feare you.
Heinrich Bullinger, The Christen State of
Matrimonye, trans. Miles Coverdale (1541)
My entierly beloued, the beginning of wysedome is the loue and
feare God …
Anon., A Glasse for householders (1542)1
The household as a basic unit of governance has been shown to be
integral to the social and political organization of medieval and early
modern society.2 Just as they are today, premodern households were the
primary place of socialization for children. Whether nurtured by parents
or kin, foster carers, benevolent strangers, employers, or teachers, children learnt how to conduct themselves in the social world through the
interactions and examples they encountered in the domestic settings of
childhood.3 Just as it is today, this process had an inherently emotional
aspect, as medieval and early modern children negotiated the forms of
emotional comportment, control, and expression they encountered and
were expected to adopt. In recent decades, scholars have been at pains
to demonstrate that, also like today, love and affection were integral to
premodern theories and methods of childrearing.4 But, unlike today, fear
and dread played a significant role in the ideas and practices of childrearing in the European past. For children, learning to revere and obey
106

Fear, Awe, and Dread in the Early Modern Household 107

parents was the first lesson in how to submit to authority. In normative visions of household emotions, the desired attitude of children and
youth towards heads of household was that of fear joined to love, echoing the emotional comportment of the individual Christian towards
God. As the prescriptive sources quoted above suggest, the household
was pictured as a microcosm of universal affective relations.
The linking of fear with love and awe implies that, in isolation, fear
could produce problematic effects. Medieval and early modern writers recognized that fear needed to be directed at a proper object in a
moderate amount to be a constructive emotion. Moralizing texts, such
as Miles Coverdale’s translation of Heinrich Bullinger’s Christen State of
Matrimonye above, advocated physical correction as a measure to instil
respect for authority in wayward youth, but their stress on moderation
or reason shows an awareness that fear could have undesirable effects.
Recalling how they were terrified by stories of malevolent beings and
vengeful figures in their childhood, other writers condemned the maidservants and old women who used threats of retribution to instil fear
and obedience into children. For some, the thrill of fear attached to
such stories was enjoyable; for others, the effects lasted into adulthood
in the forms of nightmares and physical cowardice.5 Godly authors also
associated their childish fears of supernatural or physical harms with
the earliest stirrings of their spiritual growth, as they turned to God for
comfort in distress, like Mary Pennington and Elizabeth Isham, or were
awed by evidence of divine omnipotence in nature, like Alice Thornton
and Elizabeth Stirredge.6 In these examples, childhood fears were cast
as productive, enabling children to progress in their development of the
appropriate demeanour toward God.
How did children perceive and respond to the deployment of fear
within the setting of household governance? What role did gender play
in the expectations and experiences of emotional comportment for girls
and boys? Adults produced much of the evidence about the fears of early
modern children, whether as observers of children, or as advisors to parents and householders, or as recorders of their own childhood fears. Such
sources offer insights into children’s experiences of fear but at a remove
from the child’s perspective and filtered through adult perceptions, often
with moralizing purposes. Personal recollections of childhood terrors
were blunted by the passage of time, and shaped by the aims and audiences of adult writers. Can we obtain a different view of children’s experiences of fear in the household by examining other bodies of sources?
This chapter examines a series of case studies drawn from legal records
where children were portrayed as fearful of adult anger, disapproval, or

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discipline. It considers whether children’s perceptions of authority can
be discerned in legal sources and what we might learn from this evidence
about how children negotiated circumstances where they were fearful.
When were children able to draw on their own emotional resources and
to what extend did they find aid or support within or beyond the household? Can we discern the role of gendered norms of emotional comportment in the actions of adults and the responses of children?
For this chapter, I have drawn upon case studies from ecclesiastical
suits, Chancery pleadings, coroners’ returns, and Old Bailey cases spanning the period c. 1400–1730. This evidence emanates from courts that,
like households, were part of a broad range of sites of governance in
medieval and early modern society. Broadly speaking, the legal jurisdictions examined here were concerned with the maintenance of public
order as much through the restoration of good relations in the community as through the enforcement of legislation.7 In addition, these courts
also enabled individuals – as litigants, petitioners, witnesses, jurors, and
defendants – to articulate their own perceptions and experiences of
social and emotional relations.8 Where legal proceedings hinged on serious disruptions to household order and involved children, as in cases
of underage marriage, unexplained deaths, or injuries to servants, and
also instances of sexual assault, court records can offer non-normative
perspectives on emotions and authority in domestic contexts.
In the legal records examined here, references to fear and associated
emotions functioned to explain or communicate motives, intentions,
and actions in ways that were meant to be credible in a particular legal
setting. As with other premodern sources about children, much of the
evidence produced in legal venues was not reported directly by children
but by adult observers or retrospectively by children who had reached
maturity and could initiate a legal suit on their own. The veracity, or
otherwise, of the events recounted by witnesses and petitioners cannot
be known and their narratives were always shaped to some degree by
the legal requirements of the courts in which they were recorded.9 Yet,
even if we concede that all such testimony was simply a plausible fiction created in a specific legal context, then accepting that narratives
aimed to be credible means that we may still read them as evidence of
cultural understandings about children’s emotions and experiences of
fear. Is it possible to discern in the legal sources any thematic patterns
and echoes of other genres treating children’s fears? As cultural historians have shown, mental structures or cultural scripts provided adults
(and children) with concepts and frameworks to make sense of experience and observation in legal settings.10

Fear, Awe, and Dread in the Early Modern Household 109

Some definitions are necessary. First, when referring to children, I am
using the term broadly to encompass all stages of childhood, including
adolescence, right through to the age of around 20. Generally, medieval and early modern paediatric theories distinguished a number of
distinct stages of childhood development, with an important milestone
at around six to seven years when the child acquired the ability to reason and consequently was to be subjected to discipline through formal
education, service, or some form of training. Another milestone was
associated with the onset of sexual development, usually around 12–14
years, and was also linked to the further development of reasoning
faculties. The end of this phase was less clearly marked by physical or
intellectual changes in premodern schemes of development, although
‘ages of man’ literature frequently placed the onset of the next stage at
21 years or later.11 In practice, a child’s experience of developmental
stages was inflected by other factors, particularly gender and social status, but the theories provide a framework of contemporary expectations
of the emotional capacities of children. More pragmatically, because
evidence of emotional experiences is rare, and because the ages of children in legal cases were not always precisely specified, I have found it
necessary to be inclusive when locating children’s experiences of fear
although I have endeavoured to distinguish the stages of childhood
more precisely where possible.
Second, in relation to the study of emotions in the past, I take what
could be characterized as a ‘weak’ social constructionist position.
I regard emotions, such as fear, as fundamental human attributes whose
expression and interpretation are shaped by cultural values and practices. That is, there are common physiological or instinctual dimensions
to human emotions but processes of cognition and forms of expression
vary from culture to culture.12 The categorization and representation of
emotion states is significant and to analyse the historically specific resonances of ‘fear’, I attend to the language of the sources for references to
associated emotions, moods, and feelings.13 Consequently, I am mainly
concerned with the social and performative dimensions of emotions.
Given the nature of the historical sources, where the personal voices
of children are rare and highly mediated, such an approach is perhaps
inevitable. Nevertheless, I must acknowledge that my ‘inner positivist’
also wants to know ‘how children felt’ and that is an underlying question in this chapter, although one fraught with difficulty.
Before turning to the evidence from legal proceedings, then, I begin
by putting the notion of ‘fear’ into its early modern discursive context.
Taking the constructivist position that understandings of emotions are

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subject to change over time means that we should not assume that emotions were perceived to ‘move’ in the same directions or to be grouped
in the same clusters as we view them today. Emotions do not exist in
isolation but are fluid and labile.14 The first section of this chapter examines advice to parents and householders regarding the socialization and
discipline of children for emotion words relating to fear. My analysis will
range across examples from about 1400–1730 for two reasons: first, that
is the period covered by the legal case studies; and, second, that there
is a good deal of continuity in the basic treatment of emotions in these
texts, although the genre as a whole developed and became more elaborate over time. The legal case studies in the remainder of the chapter are
examined in an approximately chronological order. My earliest evidence
derives from ecclesiastical materials in the fifteenth century, followed by
King’s Bench returns and Chancery petitions from the sixteenth century,
and the analysis concludes with Old Bailey prosecutions from the later
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

The discursive contexts: advice works on marriage
and household relations
Didactic literature, in the form of religious instruction or household
and marital advice literature, is a useful place to explore the semantic
range of the concept of ‘fear’ and associated emotions in household
relations. Advice to masters and mistresses about the management
of servants echoed advice to parents on the necessity of chastising
children and advice texts created analogies between the parent–child
relationship and the servant–employer relationship. The habit of referring to biblical authorities also helped to create a durable framework of
precepts concerning the role of fear and awe in the discipline of children and treatment of servants.15 Advice literature chiefly expressed an
educated, adult male perspective on emotions. Many of the authors
of books on marital relations and domestic economy were educated
at university and were members of the Catholic or Protestant clergy.
They identified their audience as pious householders, or young men
en route to householder status, in an urban, mercantile social context
that would have been familiar to the printers of the same advice texts.
But writers also expressed an expectation that their work would be
read aloud and addressed portions of their books directly to women,
children, and servants, so we should not discount them as secondary
audiences.16 From this perspective, didactic sources provide a general
framework of understanding for the emotion of fear. Read ‘against the

Fear, Awe, and Dread in the Early Modern Household 111

grain’ they may also allow the possibility of discerning subordinated
perspectives.
A fundamental prescription for Christian parents was the duty to
raise children in knowledge of God. Central to this principle was the
idea that children should learn to fear and love God, and that parents
should punish children’s transgressions to ensure that they did. So, a
late fourteenth-century tract, possibly by John Wyclif, exhorted parents
to teach children ‘to dred God before all othere thingis, and to love Him
most of alle thingis, for His endless might, endeles wisdom, endelesse
goodnesse, mercy, and charite’. The tract stressed that it was important
for parents to chastise trespasses against God’s commandments sharply
so that ‘teaching and chastising schulden in a fewe yeeris made goode
Christen men and wymmen’.17 Children were thus to be brought to
understand that God would punish sin and this understanding was
to be inculcated through early discipline. For some godly authors in
the sixteenth century, instilling fear of correction was necessary to
compel obedience in children. According to the English translation of
Bartholomew Batty’s Christian Man’s Closet,
Parents ought to haue a special care and regarde to their Children,
for they are not such as doe obey for shame, but for feare: not such
as doe abstayne from wicked things, for filthinesse sake, but for punishment. Feare is to be driuen into children, correcction and punishment is to be giuen, that being brought into some feare, they may
leaue their wickednesse.18
Pessimistic views about the sinfulness of human nature and the inherent
wickedness of children have been identified as characteristic of attitudes
among sterner Protestant reformers but assumptions about stages of
child development, particularly the gradual acquisition of reason from
the age of about seven years onwards, also contributed to ideas about the
necessity of inculcating fear in children.19 The advice offered to masters
in relation to servants was couched in similar terms of teaching and
correction but with less emphasis on instilling fear. Masters had a duty
to ensure their servants’ knowledge of God and teaching in virtue, and
were responsible for correcting their servants’ faults through reproof
and other discipline.20 The Puritan minister William Gouge advised
masters to choose servants carefully, considering how young servants
had been educated in their infancy and whether older servants feared
God.21 Again, assumptions about the maturation of children underlay
such advice: the young were viewed as pliable and receptive to good

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instruction, and hence able to learn to fear God, whereas older servants
had already formed their attitudes to authority in the household.
The emotions of fear and dread had positive resonances in Christian
morality. The authors of didactic works depicted fear and dread as more
akin to awe and reverence than to alarm, anxiety, apprehensiveness, or
terror. As Heinrich Bullinger explained to fathers in the mid-sixteenth
century, the correction of children was necessary ‘so that they stonde
in greete feare and awe of the’.22 Fear, when linked with dread and awe,
was part of the necessary emotional comportment of all subordinates
towards figures of authority, which established the foundations for
obedience and deference. We see this in exhortations to children and
to servants coupling obedience with obeisance, as shown by the oftencited Pauline precept that commanded children to obey and honour
parents, and required servants to work obediently and diligently. For
example, in his translation of the early fifteenth-century treatise Le Livre
des bonnes moeurs, William Caxton quoted Ephesians 6:5 in the following terms: ‘ye seruauntes, obey you to youre maysters in fere and drede,
and in simplenesse of herte. And it is nat sufficient oonly to obey, but
more ouer it is necessary that the seruaunt be diligent.’23 In a wider religious context, fear was an integral component of faith for Christians,
who were to fear the wrath of God in this world and the pains and torments of damnation in the next. Thus, fear and dread had a beneficial,
salvific function in that it led Christians to repent and amend sinful
behaviour, providing hope of eternal life.
The advice to parents and householders was primarily addressed to
men as fathers and masters but women too, as mothers and mistresses,
were invested with domestic authority. As parents, they were due the
obedience and reverence of their children, which moralists invariably
argued arose out of the love that ensued when mothers nursed and took
pains with infants themselves.24 Mothers were also exhorted to instruct
little children in the knowledge of God, Christian religion, and morality, and to chastise them for their faults. Similarly, as housewives and
mistresses, women were exhorted to cultivate the obedience and respect
of servants through virtuous qualities of modesty, gentleness, and meekness. Juan Luis Vives, for example, urged that the housewife ‘neither be
to rough and harde with her meyny, but gentyll and fauorable … more
like a mother than a maistresse: and rather optayne reuerence of them
with meekness than rygorousnes’, continuing with the observation that
‘we feare more them that be wise and discrete than them that be angry
and hasty … for quietness is of more auctorite than hasty breemnes’.25
The godly minister Robert Cleaver advised that a mistress should bear

Fear, Awe, and Dread in the Early Modern Household 113

herself wisely and modestly, so that servants would ‘feare, reuerence,
and so stand in awe of her, as the Mistresse and mother of the house’.26
The overriding message of domestic advice was that mothers and
fathers, mistresses and masters, stood in the place of God to children
and young people:27 by administering discipline they fostered proper
emotional comportment toward authority.
Yet the exercise of authority was nonetheless understood in gendered
terms. Moralists likened the duties of instruction and correction belonging to householders to the ‘office’ of a bishop and warned householders
that they would answer to God for their subordinates.28 Women’s exercise of authority in the household was conditional on wifely obedience
to husbands: household advice therefore characterized wives as helpers
in household government and exhorted women to give a good example
of submission and obedience to their subordinates.29
Household advice often suggested that there was a clear division of
domestic authority by gender but on closer inspection the boundaries
were blurred. Some moralists gave housewives full responsibility for
ordering the goods of household, warning householders to concentrate
on outside affairs.30 Others represented the instruction of small children and ongoing education of daughters as the task of mothers, with
fathers’ educational role commencing when their sons reached about
the age of seven years.31 Writers also portrayed the administration of
discipline to servants as a gendered task, with masters responsible for
the correction of male servants and mistresses responsible for that
of maidservants. For example, Vives advised the housewife to avoid
familiarity with servants and to ‘neither rebuke or correcte the men,
but leave that for her husbande to do’.32 Bullinger exhorted wives in
similar terms to maintain emotional distance from servants and not
to undertake correction of male servants, commanding husbands to
‘[l]ikewise … behaue them selues vnto theyr maydens in the house,
and commytte all the rule and punyshment of theym vnto theyr wifes.’
However, Bullinger qualified the division of disciplinary labour by adding ‘excepte the wife wold deale vnreasonably and wilfully with theyr
poore seruauntes’.33 Moreover, we find writers exhorting wives to order
household affairs in a manner to please their husbands and commanding fathers to instruct sons in their infancy rather than waiting until
they were ready for schooling.34 Because it was conditional on wifely
obedience to husbands, women’s domestic authority could be overruled or subordinated to that of male householders.
In works of domestic advice, the educative role of fear itself had different significance for boys and girls. Some moralists warned against

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excessive correction in teaching boys because fearfulness dulled their
spirits and wits, suppressing the desire for virtue, but regarded fearfulness as essential in the socialization of daughters. The anonymous
Glasse for housholders commented that
for as in men is nothing more reprouable than to be cowardes,
fearfull, peckyshe and of no stomake or corage: So in wemen is the
contrary, in whom there is nothi[n]g more laudable then fearfulnesse
and gentylnesse of stomake.
Consequently, girls were to be brought up in ‘all feare and drede with
litle fauoure shewed them vntyll they bee of a perfyte age and vnderstonding’ while parents and masters ‘shul entice and allure your chyldren with loue and good words’.35 Vives also represented women as the
more timorous sex and more disposed to vice and mischief by nature,
arguing that fear was necessary to restrain maidens. Foreshadowing the
arguments of pedagogues in the centuries after the Reformation, Vives
represented a carefully circumscribed programme of learning as a remedy for idleness and a support of chastity, along with domestic work
and the cultivation of fear of shame.36 In texts that did not distinguish
sharply between emotional regimes for girls and boys, the importance
of cultivating a sense of shame in girls and women shows the gendered
inflection of fear and related emotions. Caxton outlined, for example,
how women were to have ‘shame of repreef and drede of disobeyenge
of her partye for thenne a woman is loste and dyssolute whan she hath
in her neyther drede ne shame’. A maiden ought to be ‘shamefaste and
in all hir dedes & feates meke & humble’ to maintain the state of virginity.37 Since chastity was integral to feminine virtue, fear and dread
played a more prominent role in ideas about raising girls, in contrast to
theories of education for boys which advocated love and rewards.
Discussion of how to best perform necessary acts of discipline shows
the clustering of other emotions with fear. We have seen, already, how
Vives admonished wives to wield their authority lightly to promote
love, reverence, and awe among servants. Moralists recognized that
excessive or misapplied correction could lead children and servants to
undesirable emotions, such as anger, terror, anxiety, stupefaction, and
discouragement. Parents and householders were repeatedly exhorted
not to discipline in anger or haste, but with reason and moderation.
The late fourteenth-century Wycliffite tract cited St Paul’s behest to
fathers not to stir children to indignation lest they unknowingly commit offences, while householders were warned that, although the faults

Fear, Awe, and Dread in the Early Modern Household 115

of subordinates deserved a beating, they were to ‘amend them in faire
manere’, if they wished to have God’s mercy for their own faults.38
William Lowth’s translation of Bartholomew Batty’s Christian Man’s
Closet warned parents to use moderate discipline ‘least that they amase
their children with too much threatning: discourage them with their
bitter reproches: or with their rigor and crueltie to kill and murder
them’. The ‘feare, amazednesse and terror’ resulting from threats and
beatings lasted even into ‘mature and riper yeeres’.39 Thomas Carter, in
1627, warned parents to administer discipline mildly, or risk children
withdrawing their natural love and obedience. Parents should also avoid
making excessive threats to induce obedience because many times the
threat of a punishment, though not meant, ‘so feareth and terifieth the
hearts of younglings that it often causes them or to do that which they
ought not [or] otherwise would not do’. Similarly, threatening servants with severe correction could lead them to run away, so employers
should correct them privately and in due time.40 This is the negative
face of fear: the unreasoning dread that led to greater wrongdoing rather
than the beneficial ‘awe’ that fostered love and reverent obedience.
In general, the didactic texts presented an understanding of fear, awe,
and dread as a form of loving veneration for authority, which was exercised mercifully and actively encouraged virtuous effort. In this view of
fear and its related emotional states, the sensation of awe – as a solemn,
reverential wonder or respectful fear – appears paramount. But when
discipline was administered intemperately, fear took on much darker
hues as an abject state of alarm and consternation, which was ‘amazing’
in the sense of overwhelming and stupefying, even terrifying. In this
dimension of fear, the sense of ‘dread’ as an extreme anxiety for future
events dominated the perception of the emotion. For girls, and women
in general, this inhibiting dimension of fear, and its association with
shame, played a greater part in notions of desirable emotional comportment. Let us now turn to the legal case studies to explore how children’s
fears were represented, the extent to which reports of children’s actions
provide insights into their responses to fear, and the gendering of their
emotional comportment.

The legal contexts: some case studies
Suits to annul marriage: ecclesiastical proceedings
In church court proceedings, testimonies about children’s fears of their
parents’ anger usually arose in the context of suits to annul marriage
contracts. These contracts were made either when children were under

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the canonical age of consent (which was 12 years for girls and 14 for
boys), or between adolescents who claimed to have been coerced. Such
suits to annul marriages usually appeared before the courts some time
after the original contract, when the children reached an age to pursue
legal options for themselves. In the evidence from this form of ecclesiastical litigation, fear does not seem to be an obviously gendered emotion.
Both boys and girls claimed (or were said to have claimed) to have gone
through with the contract for fear of angering a parent, like 12-year-old
Peter Hope who ‘durst not displease’ his mother.41 We can read such
testimony as claims of filial obedience and hence as the appropriate
form of emotional comportment of a child to parental authority. But
other litigants produced witnesses whose testimony invoked the abuse
of authority, when they testified to fears of beatings, and actual beatings, as explanations for acquiescence to unwanted marriages. Elevenyear-old Agnes Stowk, for example, was said to have been ‘led in fear
and dread’ to contract an unwanted marriage, and witnesses testified
that she appeared ‘as if compelled by fear’ after she was struck during
the marriage ceremony by her father’s executor and her godmother.42
Church court proceedings also suggest some of the ways that children
and adolescents attempted to resist pressures to marry against their will.
In a 1499 suit, Margaret Mawer, alias Grant, of Pickhill in Yorkshire, disputed a suit by John Sell to enforce a contract, claiming her kin forced
her into the contract against her will. Among the pressures allegedly
brought to bear on Margaret, her parents had thrown her out of their
home for refusing the match and a wealthy, older kinswoman (possibly
her great aunt) threatened to disinherit her. At the time of the contract,
Margaret was living with her grandfather, John Clerk. He deposed that
he had threatened to beat her during the betrothal ceremony in order
to coerce her to consent, and had only been restrained by the women
present. Other witnesses testified that he had menaced Margaret with
a stout staff. Margaret thus had several reasons for consenting to the
match through fear and coercion: parental displeasure, threats of disinheritance, and threats of physical punishment. Her main strategy for
resisting the match was to seek support outside the circle of her kin and
household, although her efforts were unsuccessful. When she confided
her reluctance to marry to her parish priest, he was afraid to oppose her
grandfather and kinswoman so counselled her to obey. Margaret also
tried to enlist the aid of the priest’s brother to help her run away to a
female friend, but he too refused. Some time after Margaret had made
the disputed contract with Sell, Margaret voluntarily married one John
Mawer, and when John Sell’s prior contract with Margaret was upheld,

Fear, Awe, and Dread in the Early Modern Household 117

she appealed the decision.43 Margaret appears to have been extraordinarily resourceful and resilient, but it may be significant that there were
women in her circle who provided actual or potential support for her
resistance.
Depositions from marriage suits relating to children show the deployment of both dimensions of fear in witness testimony. Litigants laid
claim to the ‘awe’-tinged fear of filial obedience, or alleged ‘dread’ of
reprisal to explain why they had consented to contracts and to show
why their marriages were not valid. Significantly, female litigants were
more likely than males to cite physical discipline or threats at the
making of marriage contracts in their childhood or youth.44 In a society where some advocated that girls be raised in ‘all feare and drede’
through plentiful correction, stories of beatings provided credible
support for claims of coercion. These plausible fictions show how fear
functioned to justify litigants’ actions in the past and to support their
aims in court. In some instances they are also suggestive about how
children might respond to fear-inducing circumstances, turning to kin
and friends for assistance.
Fearful or rebellious servants: King’s Bench inquest
returns and Chancery petitions
Suicides of children and young people provide chilling examples of
the destructive effects of fear that were depicted in household advice
literature. The case studies here are drawn from sixteenth-century
King’s Bench proceedings. In his analysis of this material, Terence
Murphy identified some 416 suicides aged 21 years or under in the
period 1485–1714, and suggested that ‘suicide among children was … a
strikingly common phenomenon’.45 His article offers a psychoanalytic
interpretation of youthful suicides as acts of impulsive spite or revenge
by children and adolescents who were isolated and powerless within
the pervasive structures of household authority and obedience in early
modern England. Murphy was sceptical about the role of fear, particularly fear of correction, as a motive for suicide, on the grounds that it
was a ‘conventional’ explanation. Because it was conventional, fear of
discipline or punishment may thus be regarded as a plausible fiction
available to jurors on coroners’ inquests. In the following, I examine
examples where fear of discipline was deployed as an explanation for
children’s deaths and cases where it was not, despite circumstances
where it might have been a credible motive.
The findings from inquiries into suspicious deaths were forwarded
to the court of King’s Bench and, from around 1500, survive in the

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indictment files of that court. In the case of suspected felonies, a coroner empanelled a jury to inquire into the circumstances of death before
delivering a verdict. Legally, suicide was defined as the crime of selfmurder (felonia de se). Although children under the age of 12 or 14 were
not viewed as fully rational and therefore were not normally held to be
criminally responsible, the notion that ‘malice supplied the age’ was
applied to suicide. This meant that children between the ages of seven
and 14 years were believed to be capable of killing themselves.46 The
inquisitions are a highly formulaic type of evidence, often containing a
bare minimum of details regarding the circumstances of death and the
deceased. These included the name of the deceased, where he or she
was found, by whom they were found, the method and instruments of
death, and the value of any chattels. The latter, along with the ‘weapon’
used to commit a felony, were forfeited to the king.47 By the sixteenth
century, verdicts commonly characterized suicides, like Thomas, son of
Walter Howlet, as ‘being led astray by diabolic stirrings and not having
God before his eyes’.48 As the sixteenth century wore on, verdicts also
described them as disregarding the peace and tranquillity of the queen’s
realm as well.
Inquisitions generally record few circumstantial details about events
leading to the death or the emotional state of the deceased. Jurors identified fear of punishment as a specific motive for suicide very rarely.
In one example, Agnes Adams, aged 12, went riding with a friend and
dirtied her clothes. Fearing parental correction, according to the jury,
she cast herself into her father’s pond. Similarly, William Smith alias
Helyer, a young boy (iuvenis) ate a leg of mutton and other food while
his master and mistress were out walking for recreation.49 The verdict
stated that he had then hanged himself in a derelict building near his
master’s house in fear of his master’s duty to correct him. In other
returns, the circumstances are suggestive but not definitive. Simon
Vincent was absent for a day when he was meant to move his master’s
cattle and later was found to have hanged himself in a hay-shed. In this
instance, it is unclear whether the absence was an occasion for punishment or the circumstance that prompted a search.50 Thomas Angell was
more clearly depicted as a servant who was absent unlawfully from his
master, and his disorder was reinforced by the information that he had
been ‘vagrant in the fields’, but the jurors refrained from any explanation of his motive, conventional or otherwise.51
In other cases, the circumstances were unequivocal that some servants and children not only had cause to fear excessive punishment, but
had also experienced it before their deaths. Agnes Brytton (designated

Fear, Awe, and Dread in the Early Modern Household 119

‘spinster’ so perhaps in her late teens or early twenties) went out at
night without the permission of her master. He brought her home and
chastised her by putting her leg in a ‘horse lock’. Agnes, with the horse
lock still attached to her leg, then threw herself into a nearby stream
and drowned.52 Since this punishment would appear to be both cruel
and humiliating (and not administered by a mistress as required in
domestic advice literature), it seems plausible that that despair contributed to her death, justifying the verdict of suicide. Murphy also
discusses the example of nine-year-old Thomas Lincoln, who died from
wounds after his mistress whipped him; his mistress was not accused or
tried for his death.53
Why did jurors see fear of correction as a credible motive for suicide
in some cases, yet in others returned a verdict of accidental death when
there was evidence of adult cruelty, or refrain from making overt judgements in other cases? The deaths of Agnes Adams and Agnes Brytton
are susceptible to other interpretations. The drowning of Agnes Adams
might have been explained as a mishap (was she attempting to clean
her clothes?), while the suicide verdict for the death of Agnes Brytton
could be an instance where the jury sheltered a murderer, her master,
from prosecution.54 But it is clear that in many of the above examples
the jurors provided circumstances that plausibly suggested the rebellious natures of the young suicides. Disorderly conduct represented
wilful disobedience toward household authority, just as self-murder
rejected the authority of God. The death of Agnes Brytton portrayed in
the verdict, can be read as a final act of rebellion: out late without leave
and hobbled by her master for correction, she then was ‘led astray by
diabolic stirrings’ to leave her master’s house again to drown herself.
The fear of correction leading to suicide, cited in the cases of Agnes
Adams and William Smith, evokes the panic, dread, and ‘amasement’
of immoderate correction in the household advice literature, but also
signified a rejection of lawful household authority.
Servants who feared correction and abusive or angry masters were
also depicted within the ‘plausible fictions’ of Chancery petitions.
A case in Chancery was initiated when a complainant lodged a ‘bill of
complaint’ seeking redress from the Chancellor regarding a problem for
which they could not obtain justice in a court of common law. Judges
in Chancery (‘Masters’) were not bound by the strict rules of procedure
and legal terminology that defined proceedings in courts like that of
King’s Bench and the Exchequer but could follow their conscience in
weighing the merits of individual petitions. Consequently, Chancery
dealt with disputes relating to a wide range of issues, including service

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contracts and apprenticeships, and complainants couched their petitions in highly emotive language.55 Many involved masters pursuing
apprentices, or their sureties, for broken contracts when young people
left before the end of a term of service. Claims that masters had ‘mishandled’ young people or used immoderate correction explained early
departures and threw doubt on the master’s right to recompense.56
Other disputes concerned the control of property belonging to young
people. Allegations of ill treatment by a master asserted that he was
willing to abuse his authority and added credibility to stories of unscrupulous property dealings.57
Explicit references to servants as fearful are less common than depictions of abusive, dishonest, or angry masters. Petitioners cited the actions
of fearful servants in order to justify lodging a bill of complaint. John
Hudson complained that London’s civic governors imprisoned him at
the instigation of John Neville, who was the master of his daughter Joan,
after she ran home to her father. Asserting ignorance of the ‘unreasonable
punishment’ that caused her to flee, Hudson claimed he had intended to
return Joan to service but, ‘in extreme fear’ of Neville and his wife, Joan
escaped again and would have harmed herself. Consequently, Hudson
‘being natural father’ to Joan gave her shelter until Neville came to his
house and beat him, before causing his imprisonment on the grounds
of stealing away his servant.58 Hudson’s petition made great show of his
daughter’s fear and the unreasonable beating inflicted by her master in
order to obtain a review of his treatment in the city courts.59 In another
dispute, Richard Hawkyns alias Fissher, a victualler, sued William Morrey
for the loss of money and horses entrusted to John Best, Hawkyns’s
16- or 17-year-old servant. Hawkyns claimed he had sent Best to buy
fish with 31s. 8d. and five horses for transport but Morrey had enticed
him into a game of cards and won all the money, causing Best to flee
‘in great fear because of the loss’. Subsequently Morrey, an inn holder,
had turned out the horses causing further expenses to Hawkyns.60 Again
this petition suggests that a fearful servant fleeing from authority after
wrongdoing was a believable situation.
The evidence from Chancery petitions and from the suicide verdicts
in King’s Bench reveals a belief that there were circumstances in which
children and young people feared household authority to an extent that
they would act rashly, to the point of self-harm. Immoderate correction
by masters was one such circumstance, fearing (and attempting to avoid)
due correction for faults was another. Suicide verdicts represent young
people’s fears as misdirected: they sought to avoid temporal punishment
instead of fearing God’s judgement. It is unsurprising that child suicides

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appear isolated and without support, since the verdicts provide few circumstantial details beyond youthful rebellion. The Chancery petitions,
on the other hand, suggest that fearful servants desired self-preservation
and, when able, sought support from kin and others. Although firm
statistics for violence against apprentices and servants by employers
elude historians, it is clear that beatings and excessive correction were a
common cause for complaint to authorities and that family and friends
helped young people to prosecute instances of abuse.61 Correction in
the household was simply an ideal preached by didactic literature, but
breaches of the recommended administration of discipline, according
to gender roles and moderation, did offer credible grounds for disobedience or flight from service.
Sexual assaults: proceedings of the Old Bailey
Some of the starkest evidence of children’s fears of physical discipline
appears in late seventeenth-century sexual assault cases tried at the Old
Bailey in London. In a number of cases, children concealed abuse from
family and friends. Accounts of the trials relate that victims kept silent
for fear of beatings or other reprisals from, variously, mothers, parents,
kin, and, in one instance, a schoolmaster. Sarah Southey, aged seven or
eight, initially said nothing of being raped in a dark cellar by William
Harding ‘lest her mother should beat her’. Thomas Broughton raped
10-year-old Catherine Phrasier on several occasions and frightened her
into silence ‘by telling her her Father and Mother would throw her into
the Thames if she discovered it’. Thirteen-year-old Phoebe Shaw said
she ‘durst not tell her mother till some time after’ she was abused by
her master William Willis (and even then she told others first, by which
means it reached her mother’s ears). Nine-year-old Bridget Stevenson
begged a maidservant to conceal the assaults on her ‘for fear her friends
should beat her’. One case involved two schoolboys who were molested
by their schoolmaster. One of the boys, Edward Caley, also tried to hide
his injuries from his grandfather, fearing that his grandfather would
return him to the master for a beating. The other boy, William Ham,
told his father he did not like the schoolmaster, but the father presumed
that this was a normal dislike resulting from the customary schoolboy
experience of beatings in the course of learning.62
Cases involving children were a fairly small proportion of sexual
assaults overall and most relate to girls because females were the main
victims of reported sexual assault. In the examples here, the children’s
ages ranged between seven and 13 years. In referring to them as ‘sexual
assault’, I am categorizing them in a generic sense although, strictly

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speaking, there were a number of offences that enabled a charge to be
laid.63 The Proceedings of Old Bailey, in which these cases appear, were
reports of trials published with the approval of the city governors of
London. They provide summary accounts of trials and evidence of witness testimonies, although it was rarely reported verbatim. The accounts
were widely read for information and enjoyment in the late seventeenth
and early eighteenth century. While they provide a simplified view of
the legal process and were increasingly shaped to portray how justice
served the criminals of the capital, the proceedings are valuable for the
evidence they offer about young victims of sexual offences.64
In the Old Bailey Proceedings, fear was cited as the reason why victims
concealed assaults. Delays in bringing prosecutions created problems for
victims: it was more difficult to assemble the physical evidence necessary
to prove a rape and in some cases it may have aroused jurors’ suspicions
about the possibility of collusion or fabrication. Phoebe Shaw, who
‘durst not tell her mother’ that she had been raped by her master illustrates this situation. Her testimony, combined with a midwife’s report
on her physical injuries, did not convince the jury she had been raped
by her master. Her former master defended himself by asserting that the
prosecution was malicious. He claimed that Phoebe had stolen from him
and had been dismissed from service, and that her mother encouraged
the prosecution because she was too poor to support Phoebe. But, in the
other cases, fear of parental correction does seem to have been accepted
by juries as a valid reason for not reporting an assault.
The Old Bailey cases suggest that dread of physical punishment rendered children, especially girls, passive and silent, unable to act against
their attackers. Considering that these cases relate to sexual assaults
we might also wonder whether a sense of shame contributed to their
silence, although the evidence makes no explicit reference to shame. As
Garthine Walker has shown in relation to narratives of rape, the language
of female sexual passivity also elided the emotions and perceptions of
women and girls in early modern sources.65 Some of the Old Bailey cases
hint that girls may have felt guilty for indulging sensual, if not sexual,
desires. Sarah Southey was enticed into the dark cellar by the promise
of apples; Bridget Stevenson allowed herself to be kissed when promised
shells and playthings. It is significant that mothers were often identified
as the object of fear for daughters in these accounts. This is in keeping
with the gendering of instruction and correction in didactic literature
and maternal responsibility for daughters’ chastity and reputation.
In contrast, the two boys in the sodomy case against the schoolmaster Isaac Broderick experienced less difficulty in confiding to women

Fear, Awe, and Dread in the Early Modern Household 123

than male household authorities. William Ham, aged 11, whose father
presumed the boy’s dislike of school was normal, was asked the cause
by his mother and the teacher’s attempts at sodomy were revealed. The
other boy in this case, Edward Caley, aged 10, was able to tell his troubles to a male servant and his aunt but not his grandfather. Caley first
told his bedfellow William Allen, on the condition that Allen would
stay silent. Caley feared that his grandfather would return him to the
teacher for a beating. The grandfather nonetheless noticed the boy’s
unease and questioned him. He refused to answer but later revealed the
assault to his aunt. For both of these boys, it was easier to impart their
problem to women in the household. Rather than fearing the males of
the household, both boys experienced difficulties in communicating
with paternal authority: William Ham because his father did not listen
to him, and Edward Caley because he presumed his grandfather would
return him to his school master. In the expectation of Caley and the
experience of Ham, male authority figures were likely to collude in the
support of each other.
In the case of girls, their fear of punishment led to inaction, and they
seem to have expected household authorities, especially mothers, to be
unsympathetic and unapproachable. Nine-year-old Bridget Stevenson
had the support of a female servant in her household, who discovered
Bridget had been assaulted on two occasions, but Bridget swore her to
silence. Phoebe Shaw used the indirect strategy of telling ‘some people’
about her master raping her, which eventually reached the ears of her
mother. In some cases, an assault was only discovered when it became
apparent that a child suffered from venereal disease – usually when a
mother noticed a girl’s pain. For the girls in these cases, fear seems to
have been a particularly debilitating or constricting emotion.

Conclusion
While it is difficult to discern how children coped with fear-inducing
situations from the evidence of legal proceedings, we catch glimpses
through the court records, which tend to show the horizon of expectations for children’s responses. The treatment of children’s fears in legal
sources can be formulaic: children’s fears of discipline may have been
asserted but were not described in detail if it was not necessary for the
requirements of evidence. In the example of coroners’ inquests, suicides
were characterized as lacking reverent fear of divine authority, but the
brief circumstances of some youthful suicides suggest an alternative
understanding: dread of immoderate punishment leading to mental

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stupefaction, even frenzy. Overall, the repeated references to children’s
fear of adults and the harsh imposition of discipline in legal sources suggests that fear of correction was seen as credible and perhaps even familiar to both adults and children. Certainly, we do not have to look far in
courts like the Old Bailey to find examples of adult brutality and cruelty
to children,66 while the domestic advice literature examined at the start
of this chapter also recognized the potential for violence in immoderate
correction.67 Such examples show that children plausibly had reason
to fear abuses of authority, just as the anxieties about appropriate discipline in didactic sources point to lapses in adult emotional control.
By stressing children’s fear of discipline I do not want simply to reiterate a DeMausean ‘black legend’ of commonplace brutality and abuse of
children. Rather, I think we need to give serious attention to the idea
that fear was a significant component of childhood experience in a society that recognized both the productive and destructive effects of this
emotion. The boundary between inculcating reverent obedience and
abject fear or resentful subjection was difficult for adults to negotiate
and the evidence considered here, as a whole, suggests that such ambivalence also caused significant anxiety for children anticipating physical
correction. In gender terms, such fear or anxiety may have had greater
impact on girls than boys, although children of both sexes experienced
a lack of trust with the parent figure responsible for their discipline. But
on a final, and more optimistic, note, it is possible to discern occasions
when the discourse around children’s fears and immoderate correction
provided a point of leverage or resistance to the misuse of authority.

Acknowledgements
This chapter began as a paper delivered to the ‘Childhood and Emotion
in Comparative Perspective’ conference held at the University of
Philadelphia in 2010. It owes much to the participants at that conference, but I am especially grateful to Philippa Maddern and Claudia
Jarzebowski. I would also like to thank Susan Broomhall, Joanne
McEwan, and Lesley O’Brien for support and advice during preparation
for publication.

Notes
1. Heinrich Bullinger, The Christen State of Matrimonye the Orygenall of Holy
Wedlok, trans. Miles Coverdale ([Antwerp: M. Crom], 1541), fols 70v–71r;
Anon., A Glasse for housholders, wherin that they may se, both howe to rule them
selfes & ordre their housholde verye godly and fruytfull (London: In officina

Fear, Awe, and Dread in the Early Modern Household 125

2.
3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

Richardi Graftoni, 1542), sig. Aiir. In quotations from printed primary
sources, I have silently expanded contractions and modernised punctuation.
See Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early
Modern England (New York: Colombia University Press, 1988).
Although the concept of socialization implies a process of education
imposed on children in the reproduction of the social order, I follow
Allison James (Socialising Children (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013),
pp. 2–5, 16–17) in regarding children as agents in their own socialization,
with particular experiences and perceptions of the ideals and practices of
social conduct. The variety of domestic contexts in which children were
raised in premodern Europe has gained recognition in recent studies. See for
example, Philippa Maddern, ‘Between Households: Children in Blended and
Transitional Households in Late-Medieval England’, Journal of the History of
Childhood and Youth, 3 (2010), 65–86; Sandra Cavallo and Silvia Evangelisti,
‘Introduction’, in A Cultural History of Childhood and Family in the Early
Modern Age, ed. Cavallo and Evangelisti (New York: Berg, 2010), pp. 8–13.
For a medieval context, see Barbara A. Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval
London: The Experience of Childhood in History (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1993); and for the early modern period, see Linda A. Pollock, Forgotten
Children: Parent–Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983).
Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2000), pp. 187–97, but esp. pp. 194–7 for frightening children to obey parents and nurses.
David Booy (ed.), Autobiographical Writings by Early Quaker Women (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2004), pp. 73, 120; Princeton University Library, Robert Taylor
Collection, MS RTC01 no. 62, Elizabeth Isham, ‘Boke of Remembrance’, c.
1639, fol. 4v. This text is available online at Constructing Elizabeth Isham,
1609–1654 (University of Warwick, 2008) http://www.warwick.ac.uk/english/perdita/Isham/bor_p4v.htm; The Autobiography of Mrs Alice Thornton, of
East Newton, Co. York, ed. Charles Jackson (Durham: Andrews & Co. for the
Surtees Society, 1875), pp. 6–8.
For the restoration of communal harmony in early modern courts, see Keith
Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680, rev. edn (London: Routledge, 2003),
pp. 165–7. For the goal of social harmony in Chancery bills, see Marjorie
K. McIntosh, Controlling Misbehaviour in England, 1370–1600 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 119–24. For social harmony in ecclesiastical courts, see Richard M. Wunderli, London Church Courts on the Eve
of the Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1981),
pp. 25–62 (esp. pp. 61–2).
On competing views of morality and the interaction between official,
popular, and individual values in ecclesiastical litigation, see Laura Gowing,
Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford,
Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 10–11, 112–19, 132–8.
Gowing, Domestic Dangers, pp. 41–8, 54–8; P. J. P. Goldberg, ‘Fiction in
the Archives: The York Cause Papers as a Source for Later Medieval Social
History’, Continuity and Change, 12 (1997), 425–45 (esp. pp. 438–40);
Cordelia Beattie, ‘Single Women, Work, and Family: The Chancery Dispute
of Jane Wynde and Margaret Clerk’, in Voices from the Bench: The Narratives

126

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.
16.

17.

18.

19.

Stephanie Tarbin
of Lesser Folk in Medieval Trials, ed. Michael Goodich (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006), pp. 177–202 (pp. 179–82).
Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers
in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987),
pp. 3–4; for a more psychoanalytic development of this approach, see Lyndal
Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality, and Religion in Early Modern
Europe (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 19–26, 230–7.
Philippa Maddern and Stephanie Tarbin, ‘Life Cycle’, in Cultural History of
Childhood and Family, ed. Cavallo and Evanglisti, pp. 122–9; Elizabeth Sears,
The Ages of Man: Medieval Interpretations of the Life Cycle (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 35, 41, 47, 61, 64, 78, 104, 128, 130.
Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, American
Historical Review, 107 (2002), 821–45 (p. 829); Carole Larrington, ‘The
Psychology of Emotion and the Study of the Medieval Period’, Early Medieval
History, 10, no. 2 (2001), 251–6 (esp. 251–3).
For a useful discussion of the approaches to conceptualizing emotions for
historical study, see Susan Broomhall, ‘Emotions in the Household’, in
Emotions in the Household 1200–1900, ed. Susan Broomhall (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 1–37 (pp. 7–10).
James A. Russell, ‘How Shall an Emotion be Called?’, in Circumplex Models of
Personality and Emotion, ed. R. Plutchik and H. Conte (Washington, DC: APA,
1997), pp. 205–20 (pp. 208–11).
Chilton Lathom Powell, English Domestic Relations 1487–1653 (1917;
New York: Russell and Russell, 1972), pp. 102, 128.
For example, Bullinger, Christen State of Matrimonye, fols 8r (children), 60v
(stepmothers), 62v (mistresses), 68v (servants), 73v–75r (mothers/wives).
Caxton commended his translation of Jacques Legrand’s Livre de bonnes moeurs to an audience of ‘reders & herers’. See Jacques Legrand, Here begynneth a
lytell boke called good maners, trans. William Caxton (Westminster: Wynkyn
de Worde, [1498]), sig. [Ai]r. For the ‘multiple reading networks’ of Caxton’s
courtesy texts and sixteenth-century domestic advice literature, see Merridee
L. Bailey, Socialising the Child in Late-Medieval England, c. 1400–1600 (York:
York Medieval Press, 2012), pp. 106–7, 115, 118–20, 124–5, 129–30, and
passim.
John Wyclif (?), ‘Of Weddid Men and Wifis and of Here Children Also’, in
The Trials and Joys of Marriage, ed. Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval
Institute Publications, 2002), lines 192–4, 196–7, available online through
the University of Rochester’s TEAMS Middle English Texts Series http://d.lib.
rochester.edu/teams/text/salisbury-trials-and-joys-of-weddid-men-and-wifisand-of-here-children-also [accessed 1 September 2014]; cf. Legrand, [A] lytell
boke called good maners, sig. Mii.
Bartholomew Batty, The Christian Mans Closet Wherein is Conteined a Large
Discourse of the Godly Training up of Children, trans. William Lowth (London:
Thomas Dawson and Gregorie Seton, 1581), p. 22.
For attitudes of evangelical Christians to childhood, see, for example, Allison
Coudert, ‘Educating Girls in Early Modern Europe and America’, in Childhood
in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: The Results of a Paradigm Shift in the
History of Mentality, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005),
pp. 389–441 (pp. 390–7); Philippa Maddern, ‘How Children were Supposed

Fear, Awe, and Dread in the Early Modern Household 127

20.

21.
22.
23.

24.

25.
26.
27.
28.

29.
30.

31.
32.
33.

to Feel; How Children Felt: England, 1350–1530’, in Childhood and Emotion
Across Cultures, 1450–1800, ed. Claudia Jarzebowski and Thomas Max Safley
(New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 121–40 (pp. 127–8): ‘But children, certainly
until age 7, and to some extent until age 14, were held to lack the capacity
for reason and steadfast will. Reason was enabled by a confirmed and stable humoral balance in favour not only of blood, but of blood sufficiently
heated to produce wit.’
Robert Cleaver, A Godly Form of Householde Gouernement for the Ordering of
Priuate Families (London: Thomas Creede, for Thomas Man, 1598), pp. 42–3;
William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties Eight Treatises (London: Iohn Haviland
for William Bladen, 1622), esp. pp. 655–6, 658–9; for examples of earlier
works on the duty of governors to correct the faults of young people and
set a good example to them, see, for example, Legrand, [A] lytell boke called
good maners, sig. Miir; Richard Whitford, A Werke for Housholders or for Them
Ye Haue the Gydynge or Gouernaunce of Any Company (London: Wynkyn de
Worde, 1530), sigs Bir–Biir.
Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, p. 648.
Bullinger, Christen State of Matrimonye, fol. 70v.
Legrand, [A] lytell boke called good maners, sig. Niir; for the ‘obeyssance and
honour’ children owed to parents, see sig. N[iiii]v. For other citations of
Ephesians 6:5, see Bullinger, Christen State of Matrimonye, fol. lxviiiv; Cleaver,
A Godly Form of Householde Gouernement, p. 386.
For example see, A Glasse for housholders, sigs [Dv]r–[Dvii]r and esp. sigs Eiiiiv–
[Ev]v where the author explains that lack of nursing in infancy leads to the
‘coulde loue and small reuerence’ of grown children who refuse support to
impoverished parents while maternal nursing brings security to aged parents
whose offspring ‘haue them in much loue, fear & reuerence as trewe children’; Batty, Christen Man’s Closet, fol. 53r; Juan Luis Vives, A Very Frutefull
and Pleasant Boke Called the Instruction of a Christen Woman, trans. Richard
Hyrde (London, [1529?]), Book I, sig. Cir.
Vives, Instruction of a Christen Woman, Book II, sig. Iiiiv.
Cleaver, A Godly Form of Householde Gouernement, p. 384.
A point made explicit by Vives, Instruction of a Christen Woman, Book I, sig.
Riiir.
A Glasse for housholders, sigs Eiiir–Eiiiv; Batty, Christian Mans Closet, fol. 15r; cf.
Wyclif(?), ‘Of Weddid Men and Wifys’, lines 247–9; Bullinger, Christen State
of Matrimonye, fol. lxviiir; Cleaver, A Godly Form of Householde Gouernement,
p. 18.
Vives, Instruction of a Christen Woman, Book II, sig. Iiiiv; Batty, Christian Mans
Closet, fol. 52v; Cleaver, A Godly Form of Householde Gouernement, p. 9.
Vives, Instruction of a Christen Woman, Book II, sig. Iiiir; Bullinger, Christen
State of Matrimonye, fol. lxvv; A Glasse for housholders, sig. Diiiiv; Cleaver,
A Godly Form of Householde Gouernement, p. 53.
Vives, Instruction of a Christen Woman, Book II, sig. Nir; A Glasse for housholders, sig. [Eviii]v; Batty, Christian Mans Closet, fols 53r–54v.
Vives, Instruction of a Christen Woman, Book II, sig. [Iiiii]v.
Bullinger, Christen State of Matrimonye, fol. 62r. The advice here seems to be
about avoiding suspicion of infidelity between spouses. For the view that
mothers and mistresses were the main disciplinarians in households, but

128

34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

Stephanie Tarbin
that fathers and masters might take over this role see, Whitford, A Werke for
Housholders, sigs Diir–Diiv.
Vives, Instruction of a Christen Woman, Book II, sig. Iiiiv; Gouge, Domesticall
Duties, pp. 546–7.
A Glasse for housholders, sigs [Evi]r–[Evii]v, [Eviii]v. The context makes it clear
that the children to be taught with love are boys, not girls.
Vives, Instruction of a Christen Woman, Book I, esp. chs iii, iv–v, vii–viii;
Coudert, ‘Educating Girls’, pp. 400–6.
Legrand, [A] lytell boke called good maners, sigs [Mv]r, Nir.
Wyclif (?), ‘Of Weddid Men and Wifis’, lines 169–71, 173–8.
Batty, Christian Mans Closet, fol. 24r.
Thomas Carter, Carters Christian Common Wealth; or, Domesticall Dutyes
Deciphered (London: Thomas Purfoot, 1627), pp. 132–3, 134 (for the quotation), p. 223 (for servants fearing correction).
F. J. Furnivall (ed.), Child Marriages, Divorces, and Ratifications in the Diocese
of Chester, A.D. 1561–6 (Millwood: Kraus Reprint, 1973), p. 20; cf. Kew, The
National Archives (hereafter TNA), Chancery Petitions, C 1/824/22, Agnes
Hewar (?) v Henry Evann. A dispute over lands and deeds arising from
Agnes claiming that she had entered into marriage with Henry when she
was within age but out of fear and dread of her mother and her friends and
against her will.
Canterbury Cathedral Archives, Consistory court depositions, 1410–1421,
CC X.10.1, fols 28v–30v, Clopton c. Stowk (1413). I am grateful to Philippa
Maddern for this reference.
Borthwick Institute for Archives (hereafter BIA), Cause papers, CP F.308,
John Sell (Seile, Sele of Bagby) c. Margaret Mawer alias Graunt of Pickhill
and John Mawer (1499). Cf. BIA, Cause papers, CP G.102, John Clay (Cley,
of Halifax) c. Elizabeth Clay alias Savell (Savil, Sayvel, of Halifax), 1519. I am
grateful to Loretta Dolan for the latter reference.
A study identifying more than 100 cases of child marriage in the north
of England noted only one instance of violence, which was inflicted on
Elizabeth Savell at her betrothal to John Clay. See Loretta Dolan, ‘Nurture
and Neglect. Childhood and Childrearing Practices in the North of England,
1450–1603’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, the University of Western Australia,
2014), pp. 107, 130. For the beating of Margaret Heed by her father, cited
in a 1488 London suit, see Shannon McSheffrey, Marriage, Sex and Civic
Culture in Late Medieval London (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2006), pp. 74–8. Agnes Paston reportedly kept her daughter Elizabeth
in ‘gret sorow’, beating her repeatedly during marriage negotiations with an
elderly widower. James Gairdner (ed.), The Paston Letters, A.D. 1422–1509, 7
vols (New York: AMS Press, 1973), II, p. 110.
Terence Murphy, ‘ “Woful Childe of Parents Rage”: Suicide of Children and
Adolescents in Early Modern England’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 17, no. 3
(1986), 259–70 (pp. 260–1). Murphy suggests that children under 15 years
formed some 17.5 per cent of suicides where ages were recorded, compared
with the 1 per cent of cases recorded for 1983 in the United Kingdom.
Alexander Murray (Suicide in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998), p. 396) estimated that the ‘young’ were nearly 7 per cent of his
sample of medieval English suicides.

Fear, Awe, and Dread in the Early Modern Household 129
46. Murphy, ‘Suicide of Children’, pp. 262–3.
47. Murray, Suicide, pp. 149, 151–2.
48. TNA, Court of Kings Bench, KB 9/2, membrane 292; cf. TNA, KB 9/629/2,
mem. 294 (Martin Deynes): ‘Ac idem Thomas tunc ac ibidem existen diabolicis instigacionibus seductus ac deum prae oculis suis non habens.’
49. TNA, KB 9/613/2, mem. 219 (Agnes Adam); TNA, KB 9/477, mem. 18
(William Smith alias Helyer).
50. TNA, KB 9/229, mem. 254–5.
51. TNA, KB 9/629/2, mem. 259.
52. TNA, KB 9/1073/2, mem. 121.
53. Murphy, ‘Suicide of Children’, p. 267.
54. Murray, Suicide, pp. 172–3.
55. Beattie, ‘Single Women, Work, and Family’, pp. 179–82.
56. TNA, C 1/ 796/33–34 Christopher Fyssher, citizen and mercer of London, and
John, his brother v The mayor, aldermen, and sheriffs of London (1533–38);
TNA C 1/901/3, Ralph Salysbury v The sheriffs of London (1533–38); TNA
C 1/1118/52John EYRE v Richard Stonyland of Lichfield (1544–47); TNA C
1/1171/5–6John Yardesley (Yerdley), citizen and capper of Coventry v John
Peerson, clerk.
57. TNA C 1/810/8 Richard Henmershe of West Ham, co. Essex, late apprentice
of defendant v Thomas Grafton, citizen and draper of London; the sheriffs of
London (1533–38); TNA C 1/859/16–17 William Marshall v The mayor and
officers of Chichester; John Rowland of Chichester, smith (1533–38).
58. TNA, C 1/816/12, John Hudson v the mayor and sheriffs of London
(1534–35).
59. TNA, C 1/816/12, John Hudson v the mayor and sheriffs of London.
60. TNA, C 1/824/79–81, Richard Hawkyns alias Fissher, yeoman, common victualler v William Morrey. Morrey’s replication told a different tale in which
Best played cards with strangers and Morrey reimbursed his losses out of
pity. The next day, according to Morrey, Best left the horses in town where
they were collected by another servant of Hawkyns and loaded up with fish.
61. Paul Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560–1640
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 312–14. It should be noted that most
examples of violence discussed by Griffiths relate to male apprentices (pp.
314–24); his analysis of the abuse of female servants is concerned with sexual
abuse (pp. 272–7). Cf. Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London, pp. 157–63,
183–8.
62. See Old Bailey Proceedings Online www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 7.1
[accessed 23 September 2014] (hereafter OBP), trial of William Harding,
1680 (t16800421-5); trial of Thomas Broughton, 1686 (t16860114-16); trial
of William Willis, 1715 (t17151207-52); trial of unnamed, 1719 (t1719022548); trial of Isaac Broderick, 1730 (t17300513-27).
63. That is, rape, defined in terms of penetration, which the defendant had to
prove; or assault with intent to rape, which could be proven on witness
testimony and physical evidence; sodomy, again defined in terms of anal
penetration; or assault with intent to commit sodomy, with lesser standards
of proof. By a statute of 1576, any sexual intercourse with a child under the
age of ten years was classified as felonious rape. The discrepancy between
this age and the age of consent, Julie Gammon has argued, created particular

130

64.

65.
66.

67.

Stephanie Tarbin
confusion regarding the status of intercourse involving girls between the
ages of ten and 12, which led to a number of cases being tried as misdemeanour assaults with intent to commit rape unless force and resistance could
be proved. See Julie Gammon, ‘“A denial of innocence”: Female Juvenile
Victims of Rape and the English Legal System in the Eighteenth Century’,
in Childhood in Question: Children, Parents and the State, ed. Anthony Fletcher
and Stephen Hussey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999),
pp. 74–95 (pp. 80–1).
Clive Emsley, Tim Hitchcock, and Robert Shoemaker, ‘The Proceedings – The
Value of the Proceedings as a Historical Source’, OBP; Robert B. Shoemaker,
‘The Old Bailey Proceedings and the Representation of Crime and Criminal
Justice in Eighteenth-Century London’, Journal of British Studies, 47, no. 3
(2008), 559–80.
Garthine Walker, ‘Rereading Rape and Sexual Violence in Early Modern
England’, Gender and History, 10, no. 1 (1998), 1–25 (pp. 5–6).
For instance, OBP, trial of Mary Broadbent, Mary Cosier, Mary Harding,
and Phillis Harding, 20 April 1726 (t17260420-63). In this case, the father
of Mary Broadbent, aged ten, launched an action for theft against her and
female neighbours. Mary’s stepmother claimed to love her more than a
mother but accused Mary of preferring bad company despite their efforts
to raise her up in virtue. Witnesses for Mary, including her paternal aunt
and her husband, told a different story in which Mary was used cruelly and
beaten by her father who sought to get rid of her. Witnesses also claimed that
the child had sought refuge with neighbouring women of good character.
Batty, Christian Man’s Closet, p. 25: ‘I my selfe haue knowne sume furious
parentes a brode, which haue vsed to strike and buffet their children about
the face and head, and to lay vpon them like Mault sackes with cudgels,
staues, forke or fire shouel … haue cast them on the grounde, an spurned
and kickt them like dogs.’

7
Authority in the French Church in
Later Sixteenth-Century London
Susan Broomhall

Exclusions and inclusions: the French
community in London
The French Church at Threadneedle Street was first established after
Edward VI granted a charter to persecuted strangers in 1550, making it
the oldest of the French Huguenot Churches in England.1 The community of the French Church was comprised of French-speaking refugees
from northern France and the Low Countries following the Genevan
Calvinist example. During this early period, the Polish Protestant Jan
Łaski, then superintendent of the Strangers’ Church in England, had
produced the organizational work, Forma ac ratio, printed in French
at Emden in 1556 and Dutch in 1557, which provided a blueprint for
congregational discipline in the Church for at least one hundred years.2
The death of Edward caused the communities to disband, with many
returning to the continent, but after the accession of Elizabeth, the
French Church was re-established in 1559. Edward Grindal, Bishop of
London, a supporter of the stranger Churches, became, as bishop of the
diocese, their official superintendent.3 By 1560, the Church began to
order itself, electing elders and deacons in July of that year.4 However,
Elizabeth I never formally confirmed Edward’s original charter, leaving
the stranger Churches in an ambiguous and nervous position as to their
status and permanence in England during this period.
The stranger communities of early modern England have been
the focus of sustained attention. These analyses have explored their
integration, religious beliefs, working practices, and cultural, religious, and economic impact within England.5 Scholars studying late
seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century poor relief, apprenticeship,
and charity school records for the London Churches, including those
131

132

Susan Broomhall

of Threadneedle Street, have tended to conclude that individuals identified strongly with the Church, and that the French Church shows evidence of a coherent and disciplined internal community.6 This chapter
analyses the evidence for, and nature of, relationships that the Frenchspeaking refugees forged on their arrival in London. To do so, it examines the sixteenth-century records of the French Huguenot community
of Threadneedle Street. Accompanying the liturgically and linguistically
distinct practices within the stranger communities were also particular
systems of social discipline and support. The consistory acts reveal how
the Church’s governing men dealt with moral discipline, from quarrels
and fighting, drunken, immoral, and blasphemous behaviour, marital
squabbles and adultery, to irregular betrothals and marriages.7 Several
sequences of acts from the sixteenth-century consistory of Threadneedle Street remain extant for analysis. These cover the period from
June 1560 to September 1561, April 1564 to December 1565, and June
1571 to September 1577.8 The acts dealt with a range of disciplinary
offences for which members of the community were brought before
the elders. They recorded not only offences and punishments, but also
frequently the voices of those brought before the consistory and debates
among the elders themselves.
The Church provided an important network for strangers to the city,
and security for those who had not received, or could not obtain, letters of denization.9 The acts suggest that not all members consciously
chose the discipline of French Calvinist practices so much as accepted
the Church’s moral authority as a requirement for the membership that
their social and financial status as foreigners and outsiders in London
demanded. In April 1561, for example, the acts recorded the views of
Anthoine le May and his wife Jeanne Le Febur, from Valenciennes, who
asked to join the Church ‘because they said that they had been told
that they could not work at their trades if they were not members of
the Church’.10 However, the company raised concerns ‘that they had
not heard good reports of them, especially the man, and that they could
not receive them until one could see that they conducted themselves
without reproach’.11 Membership of the congregation required acceptance of its oversight and disciplining of their lives. The Church was not
to be viewed simply as a haven for economic refugees. Likewise, the
elders expressed doubts about the suitability of Piere Becke, a native of
La Gorgne, who had asked to be received into the congregation. The
company responded that he could only be received after admitting his
‘idolatry committed during the time of Queen Mary’. They soon discovered that ‘the principal cause that led him to become a member of

Authority in the French Church 133

the Church was that he had trouble with his denization, hoping that
when he was in the Church we would provide him witness … so as to
access our Bishop and the mayor of the town’.12 Such cases suggest that
individuals realized the importance of the French Church as a conduit
for working in London, a significance that appeared at least as important for some as its role as an asylum through which they could practise
their faith.
As individuals were investigated before the consistory for illicit relationships and immoral behaviours both within the church community
and beyond it, the records provide evidence of the emotional and social
practices of the Church; that is, how social relations, neighbourliness,
companionship, love, and sex operated for Huguenot strangers in the
sometimes hostile environment of the city. Moreover, the acts demonstrate how the Church’s leading men employed emotional language in
their attempts to control the social and moral behaviour of parishioners, and record the emotional responses their reprimands evoked in the
women and men who were answerable for these offences. They expose
the emotional rhetoric that was an important part of the company’s
strategies of governance, but their authority was not always readily
accepted by parishioners, for the acts frequently record both divergent voices of the women and men brought before the consistory and
debates among the company itself.

Shock, anger, and tears: the authority of the elders
The acts of the consistory constituted a material and textual repository
of emotions for the French Church of Threadneedle Street, one seen
very much through the eyes of ‘the company’. These men were generally senior men elected from among the congregation who served as
elders and deacons, to sit in judgement on the morals and behaviour
of the congregation, and occasionally also over its ministers and each
other. The acts they created compiled the voices and behaviours of the
individuals who appeared before them, in addition to their resolutions
about each matter. These acts recorded the words and deeds of the
individuals who were called to answer claims of misconduct. In doing
so, through their expressions of shock and surprise not only at the
activities forming the subject of their investigations but also at parishioners’ responses when investigated, the acts exhibited the company’s
framework of emotional expression and its standards for judging the
behaviours of individuals. For example, the company recorded exasperation at the behaviour of some of the flock. When, in September

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1561, Nicolas Lancre came to ask permission to marry the widow Jaene
Wateble,
he was told that we were amazed that he was not ashamed to come
to us to ask it and that we know how his affairs stand, that he has
a wife in Rouen, and is engaged to another at Sainte Katherine, by
which we are greatly amazed at his impudence and that we could
have him put in bridewell.
They expressly forbade the woman, who was also a member of the congregation, from marrying Lancre, and warned her she would be sent from
the Church if she did.13 Apart from the explicit use of feelings to describe
the consistory’s views, the act hints at a loss of control on the part of the
elders as the original French record shifts tenses and perspectives in this
passage, from the more conventional past tense and distant narrative into
the present tense, and also changes from the more neutral and omniscient ‘on’ to the more connected and personal ‘nous’. The acts highlight
the emotional engagement of the Church’s governing men in their procedures of discipline and suggest that they felt keenly the frustrations and
anxieties of their position. These texts thus became a repository not only
for classifying kinds of irregular behaviour but also the appropriate emotional, religious, or moral responses from the authorities to these misdemeanours. Such documentation was intended to assure the company,
the future membership of the consistory, and the English authorities of
their capacity to keep a firm hand on their flock. In this sense, the acts
reflect company emotions, and give material form to its frustrations and
anxieties about its ability to control others, the limits of its authority,
and, as will be explored below, its reliance in knowing and judging the
behaviour of parishioners on the word of others in wider Protestant communities that were spread from London and the English French Church
parishes to the Low Countries, France, and German lands.
The company had the power to refuse communion to members of the
Church, denying individuals both the act of taking the Eucharist and
the fellowship of the congregation, which could leave refugees in limbo
about their entitlement to work and live in the city. However, continued misconduct within the community could also suggest the weak
authority of the consistory to limit their actions, at least in the short
term. It was, for example, common for angry individuals to refuse to
admit their faults. By no means did the whole of the Church’s congregation willingly accept the company’s judgement of their actions. Isabeau
Penis was instructed to admit her fault in abusing the wife of Godet and

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the minister Cousin, whom she had called carrion and chambermaids
of priests, but ‘she does not want to come to the consistory being called
several times and showing herself stubborn’. On this occasion, Penis
asked ‘to have a day to think about it, which was granted to her’.14 She
had already reappeared once more and been called to amend her ways
before September 1574, when she was summoned before the consistory
to answer new claims that she had insulted another parishioner. On this
occasion, the acts recorded: ‘she was not willing to accept [her faults]
and went away mocking both the admonition and the consistory.’15 It
was important for the company to record the murmured insults proffered to them. They were added to the existing faults of the individual,
who was expected to atone for them in due course.
Isabeau Penis was certainly not alone in requiring time to cool her
heels before the consistory. On 10 March 1565, Jaspaer Godbout and
his wife were brought before the company to admit the error of their
ways in conducting a fray in the streets, primarily between Godbout’s
sister and his wife. The acts recorded that the two women were on the
bridewell bridge ‘dishevelling one another’ and that Godbout, hearing
of the fight when he returned home, went to find his sister ‘to beat her
and to avenge himself’. Admonished by the elders to admit their fault,
the couple ‘did not want to hear it’.16 Finally, on 24 May, the wife of
Godbout presented herself to the consistory ‘suffering to recognize her
fault’. The authorities told her that they wished ‘to see an amendment
of her life in the future’, promising that if she could ‘conduct herself
more Christianly, we would forget what has happened without further
mention’.17 The company realized that some individuals needed time
to calm their feelings, but most parishioners eventually succumbed to
its moral authority over them, which was likely an acknowledgement
of the practical circumstances in which they found themselves as outsiders in London. When they did so, it was by recognizing the will of
the consistory in highly visible and evidently convincing displays of
penitence, sometimes even provoking tears. Thus, in October 1560, the
company recorded that Jehane, the wife of Jean Saloe, had completed
her public penance ‘before all the church … she was received by some
with tears and cries, seeing her truly displeased with her sin and asking
pardon of God and her Church for it’.18 Visible expressions of emotion
that were judged as heartfelt, were met with sympathy from the wider
congregation and approval from the company.
The consistory acts thus traced the passage of control over disruptive emotions among individuals, where outbursts of fiery anger and
obvious scorn gradually shifted (for most at least) to their subjugation

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and alternative expressions of sometimes equally passionate sorrow,
humility, and penitence before the Church. The long-running case of
Denis de Bonnighe in the records appears to attest to the correctness
of the company’s decision to patiently unpick the complex elements
of the evidence until they achieved a moral truth. In August 1571, the
company recorded their dismay and despair that there was little more
they could do with Denis de Bonnighe than forbid him publicly from
communion, ‘for his rebellion and refusal to come to the consistory,
called up to four times already’.19 He was, it seems, involved in a sexual
affair with Chrestienne Marissal that had resulted in her pregnancy.
Already the elders had investigated Bonnighe’s claims that Marissal and
her mother had used abortifacient drugs, suggesting Chrestienne had
bought the herbs named ‘venquel’ to drink and so ‘to discharge herself
of her fruit’. The consistory summoned Chrestienne to explain. She
admitted that she had bought the herb but told the Church’s governing
men that her mother had recommended it ‘because she did not have her
usual periods’.20 Once they had admonished and re-integrated the
mother and daughter, their attention turned back to Bonnighe. There
was the damning testimony of Bonnighe’s friend Jan Ballenghem to
resolve. Ballenghem had testified before the consistory that Bonnighe
had once observed to him:
‘there is the house of the girl who has given me a child’, about which
he [Ballenghem] said to him ‘but is it yours?’ Denis said to him, ‘is
it possible to have a child just doing it once? I only did it with her
once. It was at the last festival of Easter after lunch’. He [Ballenghem]
replied to him, ‘I don’t know because I have never done it’.21
Bonnighe still maintained his denials, and accused Ballenghem and
other witnesses of lying. Then, in October 1571, he came before the
company to announce that he would admit the truth, ‘not to have
your judgement (for I don’t value you at all) but to have the true judgement of God’, a statement the company carefully recorded in the acts.
He accused Marissal of getting him drunk, and causing him to fall
into sin.22 This was perhaps an attempt by Bonnighe to see an end to
the matter but the company was not impressed, especially seeing as
‘he had shown no sign of being touched by repentance’.23 It was not
before several more appearances and the continued insistence of the
consistory that, in January 1572, Bonnighe finally apologized to the men
whom he had accused of false witness and agreed to recognize his fault
publicly the following Sunday.24 The accounts of the consistory here

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bear witness to their persistence, which had paid off, and, moreover, to
their assessment of the appearances of true contrition.
The acts of the consistory allow us to interpret forms of social order
and moral authority within the French Church through archives that
offer insights into a range of emotions. Their very production spoke to
the concerns of the Church’s leading men to control individuals whose
lives and behaviours sometimes covered both sides of the Channel, but
they also provide evidence of their attempts to create forms of control
and to model actions and feelings about behaviours and the individuals who committed them. At the same time, they record the mediated
words of those who came before these men for judgement and to perform their own humility, sorrow, and shame through penitential acts.

Complex networks and sociabilities
The acts provide us with a wide range of examples of how the company
sought to regulate the congregation, but the consistory was limited
to investigating only those behaviours that were called to its attention by others. Here, the Church’s leading men relied on an unusually
wide network of surveillance and informants that covered both sides
of the Channel. All of its members had travelled over the seas at least
once to join the French Church in London, a process that often separated husbands and wives, and youths from supervising elders in the
conventional ways and left individuals freer (or more at risk) to apply
their own moral codes. Such freedom from the direct oversight of family, neighbours, and local communities while in transit may also have
caused some of the resistance from parishioners to the consistory: having experienced social and moral freedoms, some were keen to not live
under such restrictions again.
The case of Jean de Quief, for example, was a complex one, highlighting a range of challenges for the company in controlling the behaviour
of congregational members who traversed the Channel. In December
1571, Quief, who had returned to the Low Countries some five weeks
earlier, was brought before the consistory to explain rumours that during his ten-day journey back to London, he had committed debauchery
with Jenne, a native of Chambray and the wife of Jean du Bois. Jenne
was one of a number in the travelling party, which also included Robert
Bloquet and his wife, from Bethune, and Pierre, the 19-year-old son of
Henry de la Haye. Quief was questioned as to whether he had asked
du Bois to sleep with him and if they had lodged together during the
journey. He denied these allegations, explaining that upon their arrival

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at Sandwich there had been only two beds for all of the party, and that
he had slept on a bench. Then Quief admitted that he had removed his
stockings and slept at the end of du Bois’s bed. The company pressed
further, whereupon he confessed that he had slept once with du Bois at
Sandwich, although he claimed that he had not solicited her before or
during the crossing and that it had been du Bois who had invited him
to sleep in the bed.25 The company then ordered Jenne herself to appear
before the consistory. She declared that Quief had asked her several
times over the crossing, leading her to understand that she was not the
first he had slept with in such a way.26 She denied inviting him into the
bed and explained that in Sandwich she had wanted to sleep at the foot
of the bed herself, while he was in the bed, but that
he had greatly importuned her, while promising that he wouldn’t
do anything, and would leave her in peace. She, struck by cold and
assured by his promise, got into the bed but had only just gotten
in when he jumped on her, saying ‘if you say anything, they’ll put
you in prison. You must make them think you are my wife’ among
several other things.27
These claims Quief denied. Jenne du Bois swore on the damnation of
her soul it was the truth. The consistory decided to send them both to
await further evidence from other members of the travelling party.
Within the week, Robert Bloquet attended the consistory. He declared
that he had known Quief for five months, since they had set off from
Arras together to come to London. Bloquet was aware that Jenne du Bois
had a husband in London and declared that he heard from the party’s
night at Boulogne,
the bed creaking a lot, about which he was surprised, and left his bed
with his dagger in his hand, not wanting to allow any of that sort of
mischief in his company but his wife stopped him, praying him not
to intervene or say anything.
He also said that the pair had slept together at Sandwich and ‘he had
never heard the woman say a word; he did not perceive that du Bois’s
wife made any sign of resistance’.28 This was damning evidence indeed.
Cateline Midy, Bloquet’s wife, declared that for the first few days of the
travel, Quief and du Bois had slept in a room with others, or apart in
separate chambers. Indeed, she remembered that their hostess at Hedin
who had ‘perceived the way of things between Jean de Quief and the

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said Jenne … said that she would allow no ribaldry in her house’. By
the time they reached Boulogne, though, they had slept together ‘as
licitly as a man does with his wife’.29 Midy perceived no resistance from
Jenne, indeed ‘she showed her contentment with it and it seemed, to
look at her, that she liked it very well indeed’.30 From this kettle of fish
the company admonished the Bloquets for not having prevented the
immoral behaviour. The couple readily admitted their faults and promised ‘to conduct themselves more Christianly in future’.31 As for Jean
de Quief, the company reproached his failings, especially as a man in a
public position offering assistance to those seeking to cross the sea, who
placed themselves and their loved ones in his trust.32 By the end of the
month, both Quief and du Bois admitted their faults and the company
hoped this ‘scandal that was so great and so public’ was at an end.33
However, on 1 January 1572, one Anthoine Troille, from the French
community of Norwich, appeared to declare that he had heard from
Loy Malpau of Arras that Quief had earlier slept with a ‘slut at the
Blan Coulon lodging house in Arras’, and that the brothers Robert and
Rollant Laiguier and Huchon Camu had said that ‘Quief had been found
debauching by a sergeant and been taken prisoner’. Troille also claimed
that at Hedin, Quief had slept with a prostitute named Mariette and that
at Sandwich he had borrowed money from both Meurisse de Horne and
Guillaume Hennere, neither of whom he had paid back.34 Troille later
complained that Quief and another man, Jean de la Fosse, had attacked
him in the street as he left the consistory, insulting and punching him.35
De la Fosse later confessed that he had been upset that Troille called his
wife a slut ‘even in this country’, at which point the consistory decided
they would write to the Church in Norwich to find out the truth of all
these allegations.36 Troille, de la Fosse claimed, had made these allegations in a household in Arras and he produced Jeanne lHomme, the
wife of Hubert Lenglé, in whose house the statement had been made,
to support his evidence. He claimed that Troille had repeated the allegations on his journey from Norwich to London, where he was to testify
about his knowledge of Quief’s behaviour on the continent.37 This case
highlighted how difficult it was for the Church’s leading men to control
behaviours that took place in multiple locations, but also that regulation and discipline could and did occur after the event. The rumours
and actions of Quief, Troille, and de la Fosse demonstrate the extensive
links among French communities in London, Norwich, and Sandwich
through which the refugee travellers were commuting on their arrival
in England, between and in which they exchanged news from across
the sea. Moving to England did not signal the end of past sociabilities,

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identities, and behaviours from the continent. Rather, they had a tendency to follow and catch up with newcomers and were an important
part of the Church’s vetting process for applicants to the congregation.
More common, though, was the consistory’s participation in adjudicating on marriages, irregular cohabitation, or multiple betrothals
of couples whose parishes of origin were far away. The company held
suspicions that a number of couples might not have been formally married and required them to present evidence that a formal ceremony had
indeed occurred. Thus, in May 1561, Guerart Scot and his wife Marie
appeared to show such evidence for their marriage from the Church
in Edam, Piere de Rous of Henin from the then minister at Antwerp,
Jaques Gaste and his wife from the Church in Frankfurt, and Jaenne
Charlier who had married an Englishman there.38 The complexities of
lives lived across the Channel were apparent in cases such as that of
Robert Tronquet, which came before the consistory in October 1560.
Tronquet, originally from Arras but then living at Westminster, had
married Jennette Du Verlin around 1532, and they had lived together
for several years. After ‘several debaucheries’ Tronquet had left his wife
for Boulogne, and afterwards travelled to England where he married
another woman with whom lived for some 13 years. He had since left
this wife and, recognizing ‘that he had greatly failed’, crossed the sea to
find his first wife, telling her he had returned from life in Scotland and
that he wished to resume their marriage. He lived with Du Verlin a bare
fortnight before returning to London, where he submitted himself to
the punishment of the company for his behaviour.39
Such cases also embroiled the company in negotiations of intrafamilial tensions. In October 1561, Nicolas Le Roy appeared before the
consistory to ask the company to ‘admonish his daughter because she
wanted to marry against his will and that of her mother to a young man
called Jehan Gramer whom no one knows and can provide witness for’.
For her part, his daughter Ezabeau, a widow, explained: ‘she does not
want to do anything against the will of her father and mother, but she
would very much like them to be content for they have already forbidden one match.’ The company instructed Jehan to go home to Metz,
where he could obtain a letter from his parents and friends, which
Ezabeau felt certain he would be happy to do. However, Ezabeau’s
compliant words did not match those of her fiancé. When the following day Jehan himself appeared before the company to be instructed to
undertake the voyage before the marriage, the company found him less
happy at the prospect. He complained that ‘things were too advanced
to go so far and that it would cost him a lot of money’. The company

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were not hopeful; they considered the couple headstrong, noting in the
acts that ‘he gave us enough to understand that they did not want any
counsel but their own’.40
The case of Andrien du Pont, which came before the consistory in
November 1571, illustrates some of the ways parishioners interpreted
their marital circumstances. Du Pont asked the company to admit himself and his wife to communion in the Church. He provided a notarized
statement of witnesses in Tournay to the fact that, as of August 1571,
a woman named Joesne from Montz, whose real name was Francoise
Hels, and who was married to du Pont, now lived with Rubert Moriel,
with whom she had two children. Du Pont had left his wife in Antwerp
‘in good friendship’, but when he returned some months later he found
that they could no longer get on with one another and that she had
entered into another relationship. Du Pont and Hels had been married
for some 13 years and had four children together, of whom only one
survived and lived with du Pont’s uncle. Du Pont had brought to the
consistory another woman from Edam, whom he had since married,
wishing now to participate in communion of the French Church. He had
a good report from his local elder, and evidently considered his previous
marriage null and void. The company agreed to his request and accepted
the couple into the Church, concluding ‘as to his marriage we will not
interfere and leave this affair to those who have the authority’.41
These cases indicate the breadth of control that the consistory tried
to exert over its congregation and its reliance on the words of others to
discipline illicit behaviour. Parishioners were often impatient to form
partnerships and circumvented Church authority by simply living
together, claiming marriages abroad in ceremonies that were difficult to
verify, or using the English parish churches to marry, and only making
apologies for these deeds afterwards. Women were perhaps under particular pressures from men in the community to marry and re-marry,
and the Church leaders encouraged husbands to bring out their wives
and children quickly in order to support them but perhaps also to regulate male sexual behaviour.

Relationships with the English
In the early years of the French Church, many new arrivals came before
the elders for investigation because of their attempts to integrate into
the wider London community, having married English or other foreign
partners outside the Threadneedle Street Church. These were actions
that the company was required to oversee. The discipline of the French

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community was not simply a matter of applying Calvinist beliefs in
practice, but also had important political consequences for the position
of the Church in London. The Londoners did not universally receive
strangers with open arms and there was deep suspicion that newcomers
were as much economic migrants as persecuted religious refugees. The
French community, and its opportunities for interactions with locals,
were thus tightly controlled. As such, in 1565 the Bishop of London
reminded the parish church clergy that strangers could not join English
congregations unless they had written certification of approval from the
French minister.42 In the 1570s, religious violence in France prompted
a fresh wave of immigration, which was met with further restrictions
to strangers’ social, legal, and economic rights and made migrants ever
more reliant on the support of their Churches.43 In October 1573, the
acts acknowledged receipt of a letter from the Queen’s council to seek
out any English within their congregation and to exhort the company
not to accept ‘English who by curiosity or contempt of their own ceremonies’ wished to receive communion within the French Church.44
In February 1574, the company thus reiterated that they would only
receive at communion those English ‘who carried an attestation from
their parish as being of good living and conversation, and not despising
their English church’.45 In this context of limited formal contact
and the surveillance and suspicion of the strangers from the English,
the consistory was consistently concerned to prevent illicit behaviours
from becoming subject to English attention.
Among the practices that the company had to prevent was the marriage of members of the congregation in English parish churches as a way
to circumvent the necessary approval of matches from the consistory. In
January 1576, Marie Le Conté, widow of Jehan Bailly, came under investigation by the consistory for having married Andrien Gaillé without
permission ‘in an English parish near the gate of Newgate’.46 Her vague
responses to the company – ‘she thinks he is a widower, but she has no
certainty’ – disconcerted them: ‘It was remonstrated to her the great fault
that she has committed to be married to a man whose wife could still be
living.’ They ordered that she ‘must apply all diligence to find out if he
is a widower and not otherwise’ and insisted that until she did so, they
could not declare the marriage legitimate nor administer the sacraments
to her.47 Le Conté’s answers may have been deliberately vague, for in
October that year, the act noted that her marriage to Gaillé could not
be recognized after it had been uncovered that Gaillé still had a wife living in the Low Countries, and as this was against ‘all order divine and
human’, she was forbidden from communion for a year. Le Conté ‘was

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told that we cannot yet receive her until we see a true repentance in her
and … that she tries to make known to us if the women of her claimed
husband is still living or not and we will inform ourselves on our side
too’.48 When she returned in May 1577 asking to be readmitted to the
Church, she now claimed that Gaillé had not revealed the existence of
his wife, thus tricking her into the marriage.49 The company was willing
to find this explanation plausible and Le Conté was once more integrated
into the congregation. For single women there may have been great
pressure, from men within and without the community, to marry. While
this may have presented some women with desirable choices, for others
remaining unprotected and single may have presented a grave danger to
their personal safety and moral reputation.
The consistory was also keen to silence any infighting within the
Church that could spill out on to the streets of London. In October
1571, Alixe, the wife of Nicholas le Roy, brought a complaint against
Philipine Seneschal, her daughter-in-law, for having called her a murderess and a thief and crying out that she should be hanged. Alixe noted
that ‘these insults were proffered in the street at dinner time to the
great scandal of the neighbours’.50 She was able to bring forth two witnesses to these claims: Flemish Franchoise Sero and an Englishwoman
named Aelles Joanes, both of whom confirmed that the insults were
spoken in French and English, that several neighbours had heard them,
and that the quarrel had lasted a long time.51 Some weeks later, Alixe
and Philipine were called before the consistory with their husbands,
together with the neighbours ‘who were offended by this quarrel’.
Philipine was admonished for the scandal she had given to the neighbours and the Church and, after having sought forgiveness from her
mother-in-law, the neighbours, and the consistory, she ‘promised to live
in better edification in the future’. As for Alixe, the company admonished her to ‘no longer provoke her children to anger [but] to support
them as much as possible and as reason requires’. Emotional control,
indeed parental care towards one’s children, was of utmost importance
in the company’s thinking, as it demanded that the two households do
away with ‘all enmity, division, and bitterness … [and] love and support
one another, that they love their children as should a mother and father
without giving them occasion to lose their courage’. Finally, each family agreed to ‘live more Christianly than they had done and to nurture
peace together’.52 Keeping the peace with each other, especially in situations where those in the English community could hear, was important.
Being embroiled in affairs with the English authorities was what the
company hoped to avoid, but it was not always possible. In August

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1571, the company called Jehan Checquet, Jehan Dabrune, and Jehan
de Verneil to be admonished after their drinking the week before had
brought the community to the attention of the English authorities.
Despite repeated previous warnings to at least two of the men to amend
their ‘debaucheries’ and ‘excessive drunkenness’, Verneil had been
placed in the stocks ‘because of his responses when the English asked
him where he was going’. The company explicitly expressed its fears to
the men: ‘these mockeries and things tend to irritate the English against
us strangers.’53 These fears were realized in the case of Yve de Forge. In
April 1572, the company heard a complaint from Matthew Colclough,
one of the masters of Bridewell, who claimed that Forge was ‘conducting himself very badly with the wife of another’ and moreover, ‘that he
covered himself under the cloak of this Church’. Colclough demanded
to know if Forges was indeed a member of the congregation and whether
it would vouch for his honesty. The company was forced to admit
its failure publicly: responding that Forge was no longer considered a
member of the congregation because he had refused to submit to the
company’s discipline.54 The case of Anthoinette de Gascongne, a young
girl from Liège, must also have been shameful for the company, but its
acts recorded the case neutrally. Gascongne admitted to having committed debauchery with an Englishman, with whom she had subsequently
had a child. She had been sent back to the French Church by the local
magistrate, who instructed them to supervise her.55 Such cases showed
the company’s lack of power to prevent the exposure of illicit behaviours
to outsiders such as the local English community, to whom there was
such need to demonstrate their moral restraint and good living. The
exposure of illicit behaviour within the French Church to the English
was a source of constant concern for the company, who themselves
were being judged for their capacity to regulate their community, which
in turn encouraged more rigorous oversight of congregation members.

Conclusions
The evidence of the sixteenth-century consistory acts suggests that for
the leading men of the French Church at Threadneedle Street, most
of whom were only temporarily in positions of authority as elected
elders and deacons, governance could be not only a source of power
but also deep anxiety and frustration. It required constant vigilance,
extensive use of communication networks across England and the
continent, and tremendous patience to press individuals, sometimes
over months and even years, until the full extent of illicit acts were

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revealed. In the meantime, they could expect disruptive emotional
behaviours, expressed as lies and verbal abuse within the consistory and
even threats and insults to their families from hostile female and male
parishioners outside it, for the unwanted attention these men shed on
their lives. They also faced criticism from the London authorities for
any misdemeanours within the community that became the subject of
attention among the English, who had the power to impose additional
restrictions on their lives and ultimately to refuse to support the refugees in England if they were perceived as a disruptive presence.
At the same time, individuals met the company’s gaze on their
behaviours with a wide range of emotional responses that did not suggest
every member of the congregation wholeheartedly accepted the agenda
of moral discipline that was part and parcel of Calvinist confessional
practices. Moreover, the exceptional mobility of the congregation led
to increased opportunities for misdemeanours. Some men whose lives
were lived between England and the continent appeared in particular to exploit their unique lifestyle to access certain sexual freedoms,
although the evidence of the acts demonstrates that they were rarely as
unobserved as they might have hoped. When examined, many women
and men did comply quickly with quiet admissions and contrition, but
others resisted for months before accepting the power of the Church’s
leading men to control their words, sexual partners, drinking habits,
family life, neighbourly relations, and other behaviours in and out of
their homes, the parish, and even the country. Without membership
to a stranger Church, most of the refugees could not operate in the
city, officially at least. What the acts demonstrate is that governing the
morals of the French Church during its early years of establishment did
not begin and end at the parish boundaries of Threadneedle Street, but
reached back through time and over the sea to bring a far wider group
of individuals into the emotional life of this Protestant community.

Notes
1. Elsie Johnston (ed.), Actes du Consistoire de l’église française de Threadneedle
Street, Londres: vol. 1, 1560–1565 (London: Huguenot Society of London,
1938) (hereafter Actes 1), p. xii. For a detailed history of the Threadneedle
Street Church, see Baron Fernand de Schickler, Les Eglises du Refuge en
Angleterre, 3 vols (Paris: Fischbacher, 1892); George B. Beeman, ‘Sites and
History of the French Churches of London’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society
of London, 8 (1905–8), 13–59; and George B. Beeman, ‘The Early History of the
Strangers’ Church, 1550–61’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London, 15
(1935), 261–82.

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2. Toute la forme et maniere du Ministere Ecclesiastique, en l’Eglise des estra[n]
gers, dresse a Londres en Angleterre (Emden, 1556); see also Michael Stephen
Springer, Restoring Christ’s Church: John a Lasco and the ‘Forma Ac Ratio’
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
3. Actes 1, p. xiv; see also Patrick Collinson, Godly People: Essays on English
Protestantism and Puritanism (London: Hambledon, 1983), esp. Chapter 8,
‘Calvinism with an Anglican Face: The Stranger Churches in Early Elizabethan
London’, pp. 213–44.
4. Actes 1, p. xvi.
5. Andrew Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth-Century London
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Ole Peter Grell, Dutch Calvinists in
Early Stuart London: The Dutch Church in Austin Friars, 1603–1642 (Leiden:
Brill, 1989); Marcel F. Backhouse, The Flemish and Walloon Communities at
Sandwich during the Reign of Elizabeth I (1561–1603) (Brussels: Koninklijke
Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten, 1995);
Randolph Vigne and Graham C. Gibbs (eds), The Strangers’ Progress:
Integration and Disintegration of the Huguenot and Walloon Refugee Community,
1567–1889: Essays in Memory of Irene Scouloudi (London: Huguenot Society,
1995); Ole Peter Grell, Calvinist Exiles in Tudor and Stuart England (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 1996); Andrew Spicer, The French-Speaking Reformed Community
and their Church in Southampton, 1567–c. 1620 (London: Huguenot Society,
1997); Robin D. Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage: The History and Contribution of the
Huguenots in Britain (1995; Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2001); Randolph
Vigne and Charles Littleton (eds), From Strangers to Citizens: The Integration
of Immigrant Communities in Britain, Ireland and Colonial America, 1550–1750
(Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2001); Liên Bich Luu, Immigrants and the
Industries of London, 1500–1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Nigel Goose and
Liên Luu (eds), Immigrants in Tudor and Early Stuart England (Brighton: Sussex
Academic Press, 2005); Anne Dunan-Page (ed.), The Religious Culture of the
Huguenots, 1660–1750 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).
6. See ‘Tracing your poor Huguenot ancestors in London Huguenot records’, a
guide to seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century Huguenot poor
relief documentation provided by the Huguenot Society of Great Britain
and Ireland, which can be viewed as a PDF from their ‘Family History’ page
at: http://www.huguenotsociety.org.uk/family.html [accessed 15 September
2014]; Eileen Barrett, ‘Poor Relief in Hanoverian London: Assistance to
Widows in the Period 1735–1750’ (unpublished Master’s thesis, Massey
University, 1997); William C. Waller, ‘Early Huguenot Friendly Societies’,
Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London, 6 (1898–1901), 201–35; C. F.
A. Marmoy, ‘L’entraide des réfugiés français en Angleterre’, Bulletin de la
société de l’histoire du protestantisme français, 115 (1969), 591–604; Randolph
Vigne, ‘Dominus Providebit: Huguenot Commitment to Poor Relief in
England’, in Religious Culture of the Huguenots, ed. Dunan-Page, pp. 69–86;
Susan Broomhall, ‘From France to England: Huguenot Charity in London’,
in Experiences of Charity, 1250–1650: Revisiting Religious Motivations in the
Charitable Endeavour, ed. Anne M. Scott (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 193–212.
7. On comparative Huguenot social disciplining in France, see Raymond
A. Mentzer, ‘Disciplina nervus ecclesiae: The Calvinist Reform of Morals’,
Sixteenth Century Journal, 18, no. 1 (1987), 89–116; Raymond A. Mentzer,

Authority in the French Church 147

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.
16.
17.

‘Le consistoire et la pacification du monde rural’, Bulletin de la Société
de l’histoire du protestantisme français, 135 (1989), 373–89; Raymond A.
Mentzer, ‘Ecclesiastical Discipline and Communal Reorganization among
the Protestants of Southern France’, European History Quarterly, 21 (1991),
163–83; Raymond A. Mentzer (ed.), Sin and the Calvinists: Morals Control
and the Consistory in Reformed Tradition (Kirksville, MO: Truman State
University Press, 1994); Raymond A. Mentzer, ‘Morals and Moral Regulation
in Protestant France’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 31 (2000), 1–20;
Raymond A. Mentzer, ‘La place et le rôle des femmes dans les églises
réformées’, Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 46 (2001), 119–32.
Martin Dinges (‘Frühneuzeitliche Armenfürsorge als Sozialdisziplinierung?
Probleme mit einem Konzept’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 17 (1991), 5–29),
though, questions the efficacy of Calvinist moral reform through poor relief
funding.
Actes 1; Anne. M. Oakley (ed.), Actes du Consistoire de l’église française de
Threadneedle Street, Londres: vol. 2, 1571–77 (London: Huguenot Society,
1969) (hereafter Actes 2).
Actes 1, pp. xiv, xv: their legal position was precarious because of the nonconfirmation of the charter by Elizabeth. Denization provided a means for
foreigners to enjoy some of the rights of native-born subjects. A denizen
could purchase – though not inherit – property, but could not vote, as could
a citizen.
Actes 1, p. 38, 5 April 1561: ‘a cause se dissoient il que on leur auoit faict
entendre quil ne pouroient besongner de leur mestier sil ne sont de leglises.’
All translations are the author’s own, punctuation added.
Actes 1, p. 38: ‘que on na point bon tesmoignage de eulx principalment de
lhomme et que on ne les peult Recepuoir Jusques a ce que lon apercoiue qui
se conduisent sans Reproche.’
Actes 1, p. 52, 12 August 1561: ‘pour lydolatrye comisse Du temps de la
Royne marie’; ‘La cause principal qui le menoit de se Renger estoit pour
cause qui lest en trouble pour la denizen esperant que quant il seroit Rengiet
que lon luy doneroit tesmoignage comme a vng des membres de leglise pour
auoir ace vers nostre Euesque et vers mylord le maire de la ville.’
Actes 1, p. 78, 14 September 1561: ‘on luy Respondit que on estoit esmerueilles que il ne se hontisoit point de nous venire demander telle et que
nous sacuns comme ses affaires se portent quil a sa femme a Rouen et quil
en a fiances encoire vne autre a saincte katerine parquoy on se esmerveille
grandement de son impudence et quil luy feroit on le feroit [sic] metre au
bridouell.’
Actes 2, p. 98, 2 December 1562: ‘les appellant charognes chambrieres de prestre comme elle a confesse avoir fait de ce aussy quelle nest voullut venir au
consistoire y estant appellee par plusieurs et se monstrant opiniastre; A prie
davoir jour pour y penser quy luy a este accorde.’
Actes 2, p. 143, 15 September 1574: ‘elle n’a voulu recognoistre et se mocquant desdytes admonitions et du Consistoire se nest allee.’
Actes 1, p. 105, 10 March 1565: ‘on deschuelles lune lautre’; ‘pour la batter
et pour son venger’; ‘il ny veullent point entendre.’
Actes 1, p. 111, 24 May 1565: ‘soffrant a Recognoistre sa faulte’; ‘de voire en
elle pour laduenire vng amendement De vie que de le metre deuant toute

148

18.

19.
20.
21.

22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.

28.

29.

30.
31.
32.
33.
34.

35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.

Susan Broomhall
leglise’; ‘pour laduenire elle se Conduise plus crestienement et on metira en
oubly ce qui est pase sans en faire autre mention.’
Actes 1, p. 13, 17 October 1560: ‘deuant tout la fasce de leglise … laquelle fut
Receu de plusieurs auec larmes et pleure la voiant vrayment desplaisante de
son peche et en Demander pardon a dieu et a son Eglise.’
Actes 2, p. 9, 8 August 1571: ‘pour ses rebellions en refus de ne voulloir venir
au consistoire appelle jusques a quatre fois.’
Actes 2, p. 3, 4 July 1571: ‘se discharger et quicter son fruict’; ‘parce quelle
navoit ses mois ordinaires.’
Actes 2, p. 20, 21 September 1571: ‘voila la maison de celle qui ma donne un
enfant dont luy dit Mais est il a vous? Denis luy dit, est il possible pour une
fois davoir un enfant? Je nay ey affaire qu une fois a lelle et fut la derniere
feste de pasques a lapres middy luy respondit je ne my cognoye point car je
nen ay jamais eu.’
Actes 2, p. 23, 6 October 1571: ‘non point pour lavoir de vous (carje ne vous
estime point un rien) mais pour ce que ceste un vray Jugement de Dieu.’
Actes 2, p. 26, 17 October 1571: ‘il n’a monstré este touché de Repentance.’
Actes 2, p. 55, 9 January 1572.
Actes 2, p. 41, 12 December 1571.
Actes 2, p. 43, 13 December 1571.
Actes 2, p. 44, [13 December 1571]: ‘il limportuna tant luy promestant
quil ne luy feroit rien et quil le la laiseroit paisible elle oppressee de froict
saseurante sur la promesse dudict du Quief se coucha, elle ne fut point sy
tost couchee quil ne loppressa luy disant que sy vous dictes quelque chose
on vous boutera en prison il fault faire entendre que vous estes ma femme
avec plusieurs aultres propos.’
Actes 2, p. 45, 18 December 1571: ‘le lict fort cracquer dont il fut esmeu et
sortit hors de son lict son pognar en la main ne volant permectre telle villenie en sa compagnie mais sa femme lempescha lepriant de ne se bougher
et de ne rien dire’; ‘quil a jamais ouy parler mot a la femme ausy il ne se est
point perchu que la femme dudict du Bois aye faict quelque resistance.’
Actes 2, p. 46: ‘a Hedin lhostesse saperchut du train de Jean de Quief et de
ladicte Jenne … elle disoit quelle ne vouloit soutenir nulles ribaudes en sa
maison’; ‘ausy licitement comme lhomme feroit avec sa femme.’
Actes 2, p. 46: ‘comme elle le montroit a sa contenance et sambloit a le voir
quelle lappetoit fort bien.’
Actes 2, p. 46: ‘sy porter plus christienement a lavenir.’
Actes 2, p. 46.
Actes 2, p. 50: ‘quant au scandal quy est sy grandt et sy publicq.’
Actes 2, p. 51, 2 January 1572: ‘couché avec une putain au logis du Blan
Culon audict Arras’; ‘ledict du Quief auroit esté trouvé par ung sergent paillardant lequel le print prisonier.’
Actes 2, p. 51.
Actes 2, p. 58, 16 January 1572: ‘mesme en ce pays.’
Actes 2, p. 61, 6 February 1572.
Actes 2, p. 39, 1 May 1561.
Actes 1, p. 12, 15 October 1560.
Actes 1, p. 85, 31 October 1561: ‘dadmonester sa fille a cause quelle se
vault marier contre son voloir et de celuy de sa mere scauoir a vng jouene

Authority in the French Church 149

41.

42.
43.

44.
45.

46.
47.

48.

49.
50.
51.
52.

53.

54.
55.

homme nomme jehan gramer que nul ne cognoit et qui na nul tesmoinage’;
‘Respondit que elle ne veult point faire contre la volunte de son pere et de sa
mere, mais elle vodroit bien qui se contenteront, car il leur ont desia empesches autre partye’; ‘la chose estoit bien avances pour aller sy loing et quil
cousteroit beaucoup dargent’; ‘Il donnoit asses eut [struck through] a entendre quil ne voloient croire autre conseil que le leur propre et quil estoient
desia promis ensemble.’
Actes 2, pp. 32, 33, 7 November 1571: ‘en bonne amytye avec elle’; ‘que
quant a son marriage ne on se mesloit point on ne laisse laffaire a ceulz quy
en ont lauctorite.’
Actes 1, pp. xxvi–vii.
For analysis of the rights of aliens which declined in the 1570s and 1580s,
see Liên Luu, ‘Natural-Born versus Stranger-Born Subjects: Aliens and their
Status in Elizabethan London’, in Immigrants in Tudor and Early Stuart
England, ed. Goose and Luu, pp. 57–75.
Actes 2, p. 127, 5 November 1573: ‘les Anglois qui par Curiositie ou mespris
de leur ceremonies.’
Actes 2, p. 132, 17 February 1574: ‘silz napportent attestation de leur paroisse, pareillement aussy quils soient de bonne vie et conversation, ne mesprisans point leur eglise angloise.’
Actes 2, p. 174, 5 January 1576: ‘a ungne paroisse Angloise pres la porte de
Nieugat.’
Actes 2, p. 174, 12 January 1576: ‘elle pense qui lest vef mais de certitude
elle nen ha point’; ‘A elle remonstre la grande faulte par elle commisse sestre
mariée a ung home duquel la femme peult encores ester vivante’; ‘quelle doibt
faire toutte diligence de scavoir sil estoit vef ou point daultrement.’
Actes 2, p. 183, 11 October 1576: ‘contre tout ordre et divine et humaine’;
‘Luy a este dict que nous ne le pouvons encore recepvoir jusques a ce quon
voye une vray repentance en elle et … elle taschera de nous faire paroistre
sy la femme de son mary pretend est encores viviante ou non et nous nous
imformerons aussy de nostre costé.’
Actes 2, p. 199, 16 May 1577.
Actes 2, p. 24, 10 October 1571: ‘Ces Insultes furent proferees en pleine Rue
a lheure de disner au grand scandale des voisins.’
Actes 2, p. 27, 18 October 1571.
Actes 2, p. 30, 28 October 1571: ‘tous Les voisins quy ont estez offense de
ceste querelle’; ‘en meilleur edification’; ‘ne plus provocquer ses enffans a
couroux de les supporter autant que sera possible et que la Raison le porte’;
‘toutte Inimitie division et Rancune … quilz sayment et supportent les uns
les aultres Quils ayment leurs enffans comme porte le debvoir de pere et de
mere sans leur donner occasion de perdre le courage … vivre plus cristiennement quilz nont pas fait et de nourrir paix ensemble.’
Actes 2, p. 13, 29 August 1571: ‘debauchement’; ‘ivrongnise voire excessive’;
‘a cause de ses responces lors que les anglois luy demanderent ou il alloit’;
‘mocqueries et choses tendant a irriter les anglois contre nous estrangers.’
Actes 2, p. 73, 7 April 1572.
Actes 2, p. 130, 23 December 1574.

8
‘The Pattern of All Patience’:
Gender, Agency, and Emotions in
Embroidery and Pattern Books
in Early Modern England
Sarah Randles

In sixteenth-century England, as elsewhere in Europe, embroidery was
produced in vast quantities at enormous expense in both time and
materials. Since the Reformation had moved the bulk of embroidery
production away from the Church, there was room for ‘a remarkable
expansion’ of this art form in the private sphere.1 In the form of personal dress and household furnishings, it became a significant status
symbol for royal courts and great households that aspired to wealth
and power. Santina Levey makes the point that the textile furnishings,
including a large number of embroideries, acquired for Hardwick Hall
by Elizabeth Countess of Shrewsbury (Bess of Hardwick) were more valuable than the building itself.2 Professional embroiderers, employed to
fulfil commissions, produced many of these embroideries commercially,
but at the same time, amateur embroidery also flourished, and was promoted as an appropriate leisure activity for women of rank, and those
who aspired to it. Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603) and Bess of Hardwick
(1527–1608) both embroidered, as did Mary Queen of Scots (1542–87),
particularly during her period of captivity in England when she was in
the custody of Bess of Hardwick’s husband, George Talbot, the Earl of
Shrewsbury, from 1569 to 1584.
These three women were at the centre of the profound religious, political, and social changes that shaped sixteenth-century England and the
world beyond it. Each experienced periods in which she wielded, unusually for women at the time, enormous political authority and times
when her power was precarious or endangered. The embroideries these
women designed, commissioned, made, and gave, serve as illustrations
of and counterpoints to their changing fortunes, and sometimes even
as the instruments of their authority. None of these women needed to
150

Gender, Agency, and Emotions in Early Modern England 151

engage in the production of textiles for practical purposes, to either
clothe themselves or their families, or to furnish their homes. Nor, like
professional embroiderers, did they need to produce consumer goods in
order to make a living. Embroidery for these women participated in a
broader construction of agency, in the ways that they dealt with more
personal issues such as their lack of freedom, the way to spend their
leisure time, the negotiation of personal relationships, and the design
and production of the embroidery itself. The purposes of embroidery go
far beyond the practical or decorative.
There were moral connotations to the practice of embroidery in
sixteenth-century England. It was seen as an appropriate activity for
leisured gentlewomen, and one which could be expected to inculcate
virtue in its practitioners, a belief made explicit in many pattern books.
By undertaking embroidery, women were perceived as being diligent
and dutiful, complying with masculine authority and conforming to
ideals of performed femininity. Embroidery, whether as a commodity
or a practice, also played an important role in the emotional lives of
women. It could provide a means to regulate the emotions of the maker,
or, particularly in the form of gifts, attempt to influence the emotional
states of others. It could be used as a method of expressing emotions,
either for the maker’s own satisfaction, or to communicate emotional
messages such as love, grief, or hope to intended audiences. This chapter will, therefore, consider what the range of purposes for the practice
of embroidery might have been in this period, beyond the purely pragmatic; in particular, how it related to the expression of authority, the
construction of gender and social status, and the emotional lives of the
women who undertook it.
The sixteenth century also saw for the first time, starting in Germany,
but rapidly spreading across Europe, the production of a large number
of printed pattern books showing designs for embroidery, lace, and
weaving, as the printing press became more common and paper became
cheaper. These books clearly sold well, judging by the number of different titles and the number of editions that survive, as well as the rapidity
with which books were reissued.3
The titles, subtitles, dedications, and illustrations for many of these
pattern books suggest that they were intended for a largely female
audience. While the titles of the earlier German pattern books tended
to the stolidly descriptive, including numerous variations on ‘Ein neu
modelbuch’,4 the titles of the later Italian, French, Dutch, and English
pattern books give an insight into the expectations which surrounded
the production and use of the patterns. Such titles as Convivio delle belle

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donne (1531)5 and comments such as Federico Vinciolo’s in his dedication to Catherine de’ Medici for his book Singuliers et nouveaux pourtraicts (1587), ‘insomuch as those matters pertain principally to the ladies’
(‘pui que ce choses la appartiennent principalement aux Dames’),6 show
that the pattern books were clearly aimed primarily at women. The
common use of terms like ‘ladies’ and ‘gentlewomen’, and their equivalents, indicates that it was specifically women of the upper classes who
were expected to use them. The success of pattern books also coincided
with a rise in literacy for women, and increasing leisure time for women
of the nobility and merchant classes. The images on the title pages of
these books frequently show well-dressed women engaged in textile
work of the types to which the printed patterns lent themselves; that is
to say, small-scale works of embroidery, lace, and the weaving of narrow
wares, using a box- or rigid-heddle loom.7
The presentation of gender in the pattern books has led to the prevailing view by commentators that the sort of embroidery they depict was
performed, as a pastime, by female, aristocratic amateurs and by middleclass women, following the designs of male professional embroiderers. Levey expresses the view that there was a sharp dichotomy between
the work of amateur and professional embroiderers:
In assessing the pattern-books it has to be remembered that they do
not relate directly to professional embroidery and lace-making; they
were intended to help the skilled amateur follow in the footsteps of
the professional.8
The implication of this view is that the women who used these pattern
books were largely the consumers of design, their agency limited to the
selection of patterns from the published range and the choice of materials with which to work them. Rozsika Parker, in contrast, claims that
the distinction between amateur and professional embroiderers was
only developing in the sixteenth century, although professional work
was mostly undertaken by men, at least in the embroidery guilds, particularly the London livery company. She notes, however, the difficulty
in ascribing any given embroidery to either professionals or amateurs:
historians have displayed a tendency to attribute any work of considerable size and skill to professionals, projecting the conditions of
later embroidery production onto the sixteenth century, when the
division between amateur or professional work had not yet been
established.9

Gender, Agency, and Emotions in Early Modern England 153

While the names that appear on the title pages of the books are
almost invariably male,10 these are often the names of the printers who
acted as publishers, and are not necessarily the designers of the patterns, although it is also possible that men were designers, or that they
were responsible for cutting the woodblocks or, later, making plates for
engravings. Indeed, the origins of the printed patterns themselves are
often obscure, since the majority of the publishers at the time plagiarized the work of others, sometimes modifying it, but often not, and
sometimes merely adding a new title page, sometimes in another language, to an existing work. Blocks might be recut, for new works, but
they were also traded, at times internationally, to produce new books
with different titles or text in another language, ironically containing
titles and rubrics which stated time after time that these works contained ‘all new’ patterns.
Yet if the designers of the prints and their gender cannot be known
with any certainty, the voices with which the potential recipients were
addressed, including noble ladies to whom the books were dedicated,
were generally male. In at least some instances, these addresses were
explicitly written by the publishers, as was the case with William Barley,
who admitted that the book he published as A Book of Curious and
strange Inuentions, called the first part of Needleworkes (1596), was ‘First
Imprinted in Venice’, but was ‘Newlie augmented’ and ‘now againe
newly printed in more exquisite sort for the profit and delight of the
Gentlewomen of England’.11 The book which Barley had produced ‘at
his great cost and charges’ and caused to be published ‘for the benefit of
his countrie’ was dedicated to Lady Isabel, Dowager Duchess of Rutland,
and the dedication is followed by a verse in which the male narrator
exhorts ‘sweet gyrles’ to learn the skills of needlework expounded in the
book. A similar tone is evident in many of the pattern books, in which
a masculine author addresses female embroiderers. This might suggest
a simple, gendered dichotomy between the apparent designers of the
work and the female embroiderers who carried out the designs provided
for them. Yet such a dichotomy does not withstand close scrutiny, even
in this case, as Barley relies on the notion of female patronage. The
relationship between printed patterns and extant pieces raises issues of
creativity, gender, and agency, and the divisions between professional
and amateur work.
The rise of pattern books has been interpreted as representing a shift in
creative authority from women to men. The creativity of the embroiderer
has long been underestimated, and in some surprising places. In The
Subversive Stitch, her feminist history of embroidery, Parker states: ‘One

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Sarah Randles

reason why the subject matter of embroidery is summarily dismissed
is that embroiderers work from patterns. … However, needlewomen
chose particular patterns selecting those images which had meaning for
them.’12 Parker does not allow that women may also have designed the
images which had meaning for them. Levey writes that ‘Embroiderers,
particularly amateurs, were dependent on others for the transfer of their
chosen designs to the working linen or canvas’,13 while Margaret Abegg
grudgingly admits that ‘Italian needlewomen were skillful enough to
re-arrange the more elaborate designs to suit themselves in their embroidery and drawn work’.14 This view subscribes to the common feminist
trope that dichotomizes between the needle and the pen, and assumes
that practitioners of textile work invariably follow designs created by
others, generally conceived of as male.15 The realities of gender in the
production of embroidery in the sixteenth century are far more complex.
The issue of creativity is illustrated by the relationship between the
printed patterns and extant embroideries. Abegg provides a number of
examples of embroideries and other textile works, such as lace, based
on known printed patterns. However, only relatively few of the extant
textiles can be linked directly to printed patterns, indicating perhaps
that many more patterns have been lost than survive, or that there was
a design process independent of the circulation of printed patterns.
Where extant textiles can be shown to be based on printed patterns,
there is frequently considerable room for a free interpretation of the
pattern.16 Moreover, the process of copying from other printed sources,
by means of re-cutting blocks, allowed for variations in versions of the
patterns, so it is always difficult to be sure whether the variation has
occurred at the point of interpretation, or whether the embroiderer has
worked from a variant pattern. The intertextuality of pattern books also
means that it is rarely if ever possible to identify the original designer
of the printed patterns, even when the first appearance of a specific
motif or design in a pattern book can be traced. The designs which
appeared in the pattern books for lace and embroidery also appeared
in designs for items in other media, such as metalwork, and indeed on
other material items themselves, including armour, pottery, wood- and
stone-carving, book bindings, and jewellery.17
Nor were pattern books the only method of disseminating designs
for embroidery. While there are few surviving examples of samplers
from the sixteenth century, those that do survive are clearly intended
as working records of designs, in contrast to the more formalized, pedagogical seventeenth-century examples which are designed to demonstrate the maker’s proficiency.18 The sampler was a way of transmitting

Gender, Agency, and Emotions in Early Modern England 155

a design, possibly from one embroiderer’s work to another, or possibly
from a printed pattern book. Similarly, forms of embroidery which are
not well represented in printed sources, such as blackwork, indicate that
embroidery designs could be designed and transmitted by embroiderers
independently of printed sources. Both women and the male designers
of embroideries could use the printed pattern as a source of creative
inspiration, rather than as a prescriptive pattern to be slavishly followed.
Designing for counted-thread embroidery is hardly challenging
(although being able to produce good design requires talent). Any design
drawn on a grid can be transferred to the fabric by counting threads in
woven material or squares in net grounds, and there are many textiles
in existence which cannot be traced to any known printed pattern. In
one of the first known pattern books, Hans Schönsperger’s Furm oder
Modelbuchlein, printed around 1523, an additional pattern has been
drawn in ink on one of the blank, gridded pages, presumably provided
for this purpose, suggesting that the owner of the book, who was willing to use the designs of others, was also inspired to produce her or his
own designs.19
While men as printers and publishers were usually the financial beneficiaries of the rising demand for such works, it was not always the
case. Isabella Catanea Parasole (c. 1570–1620) stands out as a female
designer and publisher of pattern books in the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries. She was a Roman wood engraver, who
produced several pattern books for embroidery and lace, based on her
own designs, containing her name on the title page, and dedicated to
aristocratic women. The first of these, Specchio delle virtuose donne (The
Mirror of Virtuous Women) appeared in 1595. Evelyn Lincoln has argued
that Isabella’s ‘name on the title page gave the patterns authenticity,
and provided the female consumers of the books with a role model’.20
As Lincoln also points out, a small minority of the pattern books also
explicitly included men, whom she presumes to be professional embroiderers, in their audiences, including Niccolò Zoppino’s Gli Universali di
tutte e bei dissegni (Venice, 1532), which stated that the designs could
be used ‘si di huomo come di Donna’.21 A neawe treatys as concerning
the excellency of the needle worcke, produced by Guillaume Vorsterman
in Antwerp in 1527, and again in the same year with a recut title page
for the English market, states that it is ‘not only for craftsmen but also
for gentle women and young damsels’, suggesting that the male professional was envisaged as the primary user of the work.22
The gender dichotomy in pattern design is further broken down by
the example afforded by Elizabeth Lucar (1510–37), the London author

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of Curious Calligraphy (1525), and the wife and daughter of wealthy
merchants. Her epitaph, which was recorded on a brass plate in the
church of St Michael, Crooked Lane, London, praises her for her skill
in needlework:
She wrought all Needle-workes that women exercise
With Pen, Frame, or Stoole, all Pictures artificiall,
Curious Knots, or Trailes, what fancie could devise,
Beasts, Birds or Flowers, even as things natural.23
This is a text that requires some decoding in order to establish the nature
of Lucar’s achievements. Susan Frye interprets the word ‘wrought’ in the
first line as the past tense of both ‘write’ and ‘work’, and in her version
of the text, transcribes it as ‘wrote’, as does Parker.24 George Ballard,
however, writes it as ‘wrought’. The latter is a far more usual term in
the description of early modern needlework in England, where women’s
work is synonymous with needlework, and the term ‘work’ itself is used
to mean just that. Frye argues that the term ‘needle-work’ is used broadly
in the sixteenth century, to mean not just sewing, or embroidery, but also
other textile skills not necessarily actually involving a needle.25 Kathleen
Staples, by contrast, argues for a narrow definition of needlework to mean
specifically counted-thread embroidery on canvas.26 The second line of
this quatrain refers to three implements: the pen, frame, and stool. Frye
suggests that a pen might mean a paintbrush as well as a pen, and that
Lucar might have done several things with her pen or paintbrush: she
might have used it to design needlework patterns, to prick patterns on
cloth by using the pen as a stylus, or to paint the designs mentioned.
While patterns, including printed ones, were frequently transferred to
cloth by the technique of ‘pricking and pouncing’, where coloured powder was rubbed through holes in a paper pattern (not the cloth), it seems
unlikely that the author of the epitaph would have bothered to extol
Lucar’s ability to undertake this menial task. Frye interprets the ‘Frame’ as
either a weaving loom or a ‘device to hold embroidery taut’ and a ‘Stoole’
as something to hold cloth for working. It is more likely though, that
stool in this context refers to a small weaving loom of the type pictured
on many of the covers of contemporary pattern books.27 The epitaph
makes it clear, therefore, that Lucar both designed and produced embroideries, including perhaps canvas work, and also woven items. There is
no evidence that she might have designed for the purpose of printing
patterns, rather than simply for her own use, but the example given by
Parasole proves that it is not impossible that she might have done so.

Gender, Agency, and Emotions in Early Modern England 157

Women, therefore, as well as men, could participate in all aspects of
creative design for embroidery. Embroidery is an area in which women,
particularly well-educated members of the wealthy classes, were capable
of producing their own embroidery designs, either for their own purposes or for financial gain, and did not need to rely on either published
pattern books or male professional embroiderers to design for them. The
pattern book is neither an authoritative source of design, nor necessarily
a uniformly masculine one. Where elite women embroiderers chose to
use them, they did not necessarily do so passively. This has important
implications for understanding the complexity of their relationship to
the works they created.
However, not all women who embroidered wished, or were equipped,
to design their own patterns. Queens routinely employed embroiderers
as part of their households, and it is clear that these, usually male, professionals were expected to draw the designs which were then embroidered by their employers, though it is likely that the women may have
had input into the design process. Mary Queen of Scots had employed
an embroiderer to produce designs for her during her reign in Scotland,
and clearly felt the lack of this work during the ten months of her captivity in Lochleven Castle in 1567. She wrote to the Lords and Council
asking for an embroiderer ‘to draw forth such work as she would be
occupied with’, a request which was refused. She was, however, sent a
canvas with 18 flowers painted on it and outlined in black silk.28 Mary’s
work therefore was to fill in the outlines. Given that the vast majority
of embroidery that can be securely attributed to Mary Queen of Scots
used a counted-thread technique, this suggests she did not exercise
any great creativity in design, at least on that occasion. Not only her
political authority but her ability to choose the subject matter for her
embroidery had been taken from her.
Later, while in captivity in England, Mary worked with her captor’s
wife, Bess of Hardwick, to create a large number of cross- and tentstitch embroidered panels, of the type described as ‘carreaux’ (squares)
in a later inventory of Mary’s possessions,29 some of which were later
mounted on fabric grounds. Each panel contained an ‘emblem’, or
image, sometimes with accompanying text, which was then appliquéd,
to ground fabrics.30 Many of these images have been shown to have
derived from printed sources, but were of deep personal significance to
Mary, as will be discussed further below. Her earlier use of a professional
embroiderer to undertake drawing, and the fact that Bess of Hardwick
also employed embroiderers during the period of Mary’s captivity,31
suggests that these pieces were probably designed in collaboration with

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an artist, who would have been responsible for adapting images to
meet Mary’s specifications. The agency and creativity displayed in these
works are therefore shared, and the boundaries between the amateur
and professional blurred.
The embroideries undertaken by Mary and Bess, identified by their
‘signatures’ or ciphers, are not, however, works of the highest quality.32
The panels, particularly those worked by Mary, show an asymmetry
and naivety which suggest that if these were drawn by a professional
embroiderer, he or she might not have been the most accomplished
artist. Those undertaken by Bess of Hardwick in the same style and
technique, particularly those depicting plants in octagons, show a
rather more balanced composition. This difference might be the result
of different skill levels in interpreting the designs painted onto the
canvas, or it might possibly be the result of each of the women transferring the designs from the printed sources. As Frye has observed,
‘[n]either Mary nor Bess seems to have had much patience for intricate
or tiny stitches’.33 In any case, neither the workmanship nor the artistry of these works compares to that of the large, professionally made,
beautifully shaded, naturalistic, tent-stitch panels and hangings which
rivalled woven tapestries in sixteenth-century Europe, including examples from the Hardwick collection, such as a long cushion depicting the
Sacrifice of Isaac.34 This suggests that the purposes of the Countess of
Shrewsbury and the Queen of Scots in producing these works was not
primarily to acquire high-quality household furnishings, which could
be acquired by either commission or purchase, but points towards more
personal and emotional motivations.
The moral qualities of embroidery are stressed repeatedly in the
subtitles of sixteenth-century pattern books, using terms like ‘industrious’ and ‘noble’, together with ‘beautiful’, all adjectives qualifying the
noun ‘ladies’. Vinciolo ends his dedication to the ladies and young
women with the apparent non-sequitur, ‘to die unremitingly for virtue
is not to die’, while Adrian Poyntz who published an English version
of Vinciolo’s work, described the patterns within: ‘these workes belong
chiefly to Gentlewomen for to passe away their time in vertuous exercises.’ Richard Shorleyker’s A schole-house for the needle (1624) follows the
opening address to the reader with an extended verse dialogue between
diligence and sloth, in which sloth tries to convince diligence to lay
aside her needle work.35 Embroidery and also lacemaking were being
constructed here as an occupation with moral benefits, specifically for
women, and proof against the sin of idleness. The pattern books therefore also take on a larger role than merely facilitating the transmission

Gender, Agency, and Emotions in Early Modern England 159

of design; they also become models in a metaphysical sense. This is
reflected by the fact that in English at least, the word ‘pattern’ at this
time retains a moral meaning.36
Lena Cowen Orlin has contended that the role of needlework in
performing virtue for early modern English women has meant that it
also inculcated a culture of female invisibility and self-abnegation, in
which ‘for early-modern viewers the woman disappeared into her work.
Needlework signified as a badge of virtue, and its practice enabled a
woman to achieve an invisibility that in this respect paralleled that of
the man of good fame’.37 It is hard to argue that the embroidery practised
by women like Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, Bess of Hardwick, or
Elizabeth Lucar conferred much in the way of invisibility. Mary’s repetition of her cipher in her needlework, together with such emblems of her
royal status as crowns aimed to confirm her identity, even when this
was under threat. Bess of Hardwick’s embroidered ‘ES’ motif mirrors the
same letters in stone which still grace the roof of her showpiece building
at Hardwick Hall. Rather, these women used embroidery to assert their
political and social identities, while at the same time conspicuously performing the part of the idealized, virtuous woman. As William Barley’s
introductory verses assert, ‘This worke besemth Queenes of great renowne |
And Noble Ladies of a high degree’.38 Bess of Hardwick linked virtue and
embroidery in a tangible way. She produced, by means of a workshop, a
series of large-scale hangings depicting the cardinal virtues and the liberal
arts as women, together with a series depicting female worthies, which
included Bess herself. As Frye has persuasively argued, Mary Queen of
Scots is also depicted in the series as Chastity, in her mourning white and
accompanied by the unicorn supporter from the Scottish arms.39
As well as extolling needlework as a virtuous activity, many of the pattern books also promise that the practice of embroidery can produce positive emotions. Vorsterman’s A neawe treatys states on the title page that
‘gentle women and young damsels … therein may obtain great cunning
delight and pleasure’.40 Similarly, Barley promises ‘profit and delight’,
while Poyntz offers ‘profit and contentment’.41 Shorleyker likewise combines emotional and fiscal benefits in A schole-house for the needle, which
will ‘no doubt yield profit unto such as live by the Needle and give good
content to adorne the worthy’.42 Vinciolo promises in the opening sonnet that Les Singuiliers and Nouveaux Pourtraicts will deliver ‘un grand
contentement’, and that the patterns it contains will ‘overcome your anxieties and occupy the mind’ (‘trompe vos ennuis & l’esprit employer’).43
Mary Queen of Scots might have benefited from this ability of
embroidery to raise spirits. When Nicholas White visited her in Tutbury

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in February 1569, he asked her how she spent her time when she was
confined indoors by bad weather. Her reply is recorded in a frequently
quoted passage:
She sayd that all the day she wrought with her needil, and that the
diversitie of the colors made the worke seme less tedious, and continued so long at it till the very payn did make her to give it over; and
with that layd her hand upon her left side and complayned of an old
grief newely increased there.44
While this response has been cited simply as evidence that Mary undertook embroidery, and for its political implications, less attention has
been paid to what it reveals about Mary’s emotional state and the role of
embroidery in producing or regulating it. In The Anatomy of Melancholy,
published in 1621, Robert Burton advocated the use of embroidery and
other textile work for women to avoid idleness and thereby melancholy:
Now for women, instead of laborious studies, they have curious needleworks, cut-works, spinning, bone-lace, and many pretty devices of
their own making, to adorn their houses, cushions, carpets, chairs,
stools, (for she eats not the bread of idleness, Prov. xxxi. 27. quaesivit lanam et linum) confections, conserves, distillations, &c., which
they show to strangers.45
In doing so, he was promoting a view already well understood by the
publishers of the sixteenth-century pattern books, but it does not appear
to have been particularly helpful to Mary in her captivity. Far from indicating her enthusiasm for the work, she finds it ‘tedious’, with only the
colours of her threads to relieve that tedium. The use of ‘grief’ is White’s,
not Mary’s, but it suggests the bodily experience of emotional pain, and
it seems that her attempt to use the practice of embroidery to regulate
her emotions or to distract herself from them was counterproductive in
this instance.
Yet it seems that embroidery in company did provide Mary with
emotional relief. In 1569, the Earl of Shrewsbury wrote about her to
William Cecil:
This Queen continueth daily to resort unto my wife’s chamber,
where with the Lady Leviston and Mrs Seton she useth to sit working
with the needle in which she much delighteth and in devising works;
and her talk is altogether of indifferent, trifling matters.46

Gender, Agency, and Emotions in Early Modern England 161

The collaboration between Bess and Mary has left lasting evidence
of their friendship, which, while it lasted, was a significant source of
creativity and consolation. The practice of embroidery in company provided an opportunity to enhance whatever emotional benefits might
have been afforded by the work itself. The work inculcated a feminine
sociability and friendship within the boundaries of an activity seen as
appropriate for women. Later, Mary commented that her embroiderer,
Bastien Paget, ‘in this dreary time cheers me by the work he invents,
after my books, the only work that is left me’.47 Embroidery might not
have been Mary’s preferred occupation, but she clearly felt that it was
better than nothing for lifting her spirits.
The choice of subject and form for embroidery could also be a way to
evoke memory and perform emotional work. Both Mary Queen of Scots
and Bess of Hardwick executed needlework panels that symbolized their
mourning for their deceased husbands. These works are clearly related,
showing that the women collaborated in the design process. In the
case of Bess, the large needlepoint square, which now forms the central part of the Cavendish Hanging in the Oxburgh set, represents her
mourning for her second husband, Sir William Cavendish. The central
motif depicts tears falling onto smoking quicklime, accompanied by
the motto ‘Extinctam lachrimae testantum vivere flammam’ (‘tears witness
that the quenched flame lives’), which is surrounded by emblems and
monograms symbolizing Bess and William, and the marriage between
them.48 As Levey has pointed out, the central motif is based on the
impresa, or personal motif of Catherine de’ Medici,49 Mary’s former
mother-in-law, indicating that the panel represents both the shared
memories and the friendship of the two women. Another square panel
in the Oxburgh set, though now detached from its hanging, depicts
an armillary sphere, with the arms of France, Spain, England, and
Scotland, as well as the knotted snake of the Cavendish family and a
small dog. The motto, in Spanish reads ‘Las Pennas Passan Y Queda La
Speranza’ (‘sorrows pass but hope survives’). Margaret Swain has read
this embroidery in a political context,50 but it can also be interpreted as
representing Mary’s attempts to retain hope in an increasingly hostile
and difficult situation.
Mary also made frequent use of imprese in her own work. Many of
the smaller panels in the Oxburgh hangings allude to the emblems of
her family members, or images referring to them, both living and dead,
including the phoenix of her mother, Mary of Guise, and a dolphin
representing her first husband, François II, as dauphin. Michael Bath
suggests that by using family member’s emblems and signing them

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with her own monogram, Mary was identifying with the sentiments of
the mottos.51 Even the form of the Oxburgh hangings – with octagonal
needlework panels applied to a velvet ground – is one which reflects
the use of the same form and technique in embroideries recorded in the
French royal inventories.52
While Patricia Wardle is correct in concluding that Mary was ‘following a French fashion’ in using these forms for the embroideries
she made while in captivity in England,53 and was also instrumental
in introducing this fashion to Bess of Hardwick, on an emotional level
these embroideries have a function beyond that of mere fashion. By
recreating the textiles of her happier youth as emotional objects, Mary
performs a practical nostalgia, evoking memories of people and places
lost to her. While the mottos and devices may have represented ideals
which Mary could espouse, it is likely that they were chosen not for
their intellectual value, but because they represented her family. The
embroidery functions, therefore, as a kind of emotional autobiography.
The idea that the panels might represent a tangible form of affection
is perhaps supported by the existence of a separate panel depicting
‘Iupiter’, thought to be Mary’s pet dog. The embroideries she created
were emotional objects, whose value to her lay less in the costs of the
materials or the labour used to create them than in the symbolic representations of personal emotions.
Embroidery could also be a means of negotiating status and affection,
particularly in the form of gifts. As a princess, Elizabeth I had sent gifts
of her own embroidery to her brother, Prince Edward, her father, Henry
VIII, and stepmother, Katherine Parr. These gifts had political connotations, a feature which has frequently been discussed, in that they were
a method of bringing Elizabeth into the eye of those who had power
to grant her their favour. However, they also were tangible representations of emotion. Elizabeth’s gifts to Edward were items of clothing, an
embroidered shirt, made when she was six, and an arm bracer, made the
following year, objects which could stand in for his body, so that the
work she put into them could stand as a substitute for physical affection
between the brother and sister.54 The manuscript books with embroidered covers, made when she was 11 and 12, which she gave as gifts to
Katherine Parr and her father were designed to show off her considerable accomplishments, but also to demonstrate filial affection in tangible form, and to elicit affection as well as political favour in response.55
On the cover of one of the books made for Katherine Parr, Elizabeth
depicted pansies, which Frye has identified as the word ‘pensé’, evoking thought and remembrance;56 they are also known as ‘heartsease’,

Gender, Agency, and Emotions in Early Modern England 163

a term which evokes Elizabeth’s hopes for an improved relationship
with her father and stepmother. Mary’s gifts of needlework to Elizabeth
were less effective, although Elizabeth acknowledged them, and noted
that they were ‘wrought with her own hands’.57 Needlework as a gift
of the self clearly endowed it with additional status, even if it failed
to achieve the desired emotional or political response. In this case, the
failure to achieve Elizabeth’s clemency, through gifts of embroidery
or by other means, eventually cost Mary her life. Mary’s gifts to her
cousin were undermined by another attempt to assert her authority by
means of needlework. The emblematic embroidered cushion, depicting
a hand pruning an unfruitful vine, which she sent as a gift of Thomas
Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, was deemed to represent a treasonous
message. It was used as evidence in his trial for treason, for which he
was executed, as was, ultimately, Mary herself.58 Mary’s attempts to
negotiate affect and assert her authority through her gifts of needlework
were disastrous, not because such a method was inherently ineffective,
but because she had underestimated its power.
In producing embroidery, whether designed by themselves, in partnership with professional embroiderers or through the means of printed
pattern books, the early modern women discussed here participated in
a means of self-expression and emotional communication and regulation. Although the gender distinctions between amateur and professional embroiderers were not as rigid as they were later to become, the
production of embroidery was nonetheless gendered. That gendering
was, however, not a simple binary in which men designed and women
executed embroideries. Rather, the metaphysical interpretations of the
work of embroidery were dependent on gender, with the work carrying
moral weight for women, particularly those of the leisured classes. For
Elizabeth Lucar, the design and execution of embroidery took place
within such a moral framework, in which it represented a specifically
Christian virtue. Embroidery provided for the elite women discussed
here both a polyvalent practice and a tangible set of objects. While
the work of embroidery had the potential to participate in a dominant
discourse of virtuous femininity, at the same time it provided a highly
gendered way for women to assert their agency and even to subvert
that discourse. Embroidery could provide a means of emotional expression and regulation, allowing the embroiderer to combat melancholy
or grief with colour and design. She could also use it to assert varying
levels of creative agency in the process of production, either by adapting her own designs from printed sources, instructing a professional
embroiderer to draw or carry out the work, or indeed by designing and

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executing it herself. The making of embroidered items also provided
a site for sociability among elite women, but also allowed for creative
communication between such women and professional male embroiderers. The opportunities for pleasure afforded by embroidery meant
that it could ameliorate the suffering occasioned by captivity and
uncertainty. Loss, grief, and nostalgia could be expressed in the works
themselves, and embroideries made as gifts could function as a way of
negotiating authority, by expressing affection and hope for improved
circumstances, although in the perilous political climate of sixteenthcentury England, they could prove dangerous tools. For Elizabeth I,
Mary Queen of Scots, and Bess of Hardwick, their needlework represented a world in which the personal was deeply political and the
political was deeply personal.

Acknowledgement
Please see Shakespeare, King Lear, III. ii. 37: ‘LEAR: No, I will be the
pattern of all patience.’ I am grateful to Dr Philippa Kelly for suggesting
this text for my chapter title.

Notes
1. Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine,
3rd edn (London: I. B. Taurus, 2010), p. 66.
2. Santina Levey, An Elizabethan Inheritance: The Hardwick Hall Textiles (London:
National Trust, 1998), p. 6.
3. The most comprehensive work on the subject remains Arthur Lotz, Bibliographie
der Modelbücher: beschriebendes Verzeichnis der Stick- und Spitzenmusterbücher
des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (1933; repr. Leipzig: Anton Hiersemann,
1963). Lotz catalogues some 156 extant pattern books in over 400 editions
between 1523 and 1700, and traces their relationships to each other. Other
significant treatments of early modern pattern books for embroidery and
other textile work include Charlotte Paludan and Lone de Hemmer Egeberg,
98 Mønsterbøger Til Broderi, Knipling og Striking (98 Pattern Books for Embroidery,
Lace and Knitting) (Copenhagen: Danske Kunstidustrimuseum, 1991); and
Margaret Abegg, Apropos Patterns for Embroidery, Lace and Woven Textiles
(Riggisberg: Abegg Stiftung, 1978; repr. 1998).
4. Examples include: Peter Quentel, Eyn new kunstlich boich (Cologne, 1527);
Hans Hofer, Ain New Formbuech’len der Weyssen Arbeyt (Augsburg, 1545); and
Johann Schwarzenberger, Ain new Formbüchlin (Augsburg, 1534).
5. Niccolò Zoppino, Convivio delle belle donne (Venice: Per Niccolò d’Aristotile
detto Zoppino, 1531).
6. Federico Vinciolo, Les Singuiliers et Nouveaux Pourtraicts (Paris, 1587).
7. See, for example, the title page of Peter Quentel, Ein new kunstlich Modelbüch
(Cologne, 1541), reproduced in Parker, The Subversive Stitch, p. 67.

Gender, Agency, and Emotions in Early Modern England 165
8. Levey, An Elizabethan Inheritance, p. 6.
9. Parker, The Subversive Stitch, p. 67.
10. The significant exception of Isabella Catanea Parasole will be discussed further below.
11. William Barley, A Booke of Curious and strange Inuentions, called the first part of
Neeleworkes (London: William Barley, 1596).
12. Parker, The Subversive Stitch, p. 12.
13. Levey, An Elizabethan Inheritance, p. 52.
14. Abegg, Apropos Patterns, p. 44.
15. See, for example, Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (London: McGibbon
and Kee, 1970), pp. 87–8.
16. For example, see Abegg, Apropos Patterns, pp. 47–57, but note that the correspondences between printed and embroidered versions of patterns are
frequently not exact.
17. Michèle Bimbenet-Privat, ‘Rinceaux’, in The History of Decorative Arts: The
Renaissance and Mannerism in Europe, ed. Alain Gruber (New York: Abbeville
Press, 1994), pp. 113–89.
18. The first known sampler to be signed and dated is that made by Jane
Bostocke, 1598, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. It records
examples of different patterns in no particular decorative arrangement.
19. [Hans Schöensperger], Furm oder Modelbuchlein (Augsburg, c. 1523). This
design, a vine and trefoil border, was subsequently copied and printed in a
number of other pattern books, suggesting that this copy of Schöensperger
may itself have been used as a pattern for other books.
20. Evelyn Lincoln, ‘Models for Science and Craft: Isabella Parasole’s Botanical and
Lace Illustrations’, Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation,
17 (2001), 1–35 (pp. 30–1).
21. Lincoln, ‘Models for Science and Craft’, p. 11, n. 25.
22. Guillaume Vorsterman, A Neawe Treatys as Concerning the Excellency of the
Needle Worcke (Antwerp, 1527). This may have been the first pattern book to
appear in England.
23. The brass plate was lost in the Great Fire of London in 1666, but the text was
preserved in George Ballard, Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain, Who
have been Celebrated for their Writings, or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts
and Sciences (Oxford: W. Jackson, 1752), pp. 36–7. The ‘Curious Knots’ and
‘Trailes’ refer to cleverly worked knotwork and vine patterns.
24. Susan Frye, Pens and Needles: Women’s Textualities in Early Modern England
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), p. 1; Parker, The
Subversive Stitch, p. 75.
25. Frye, Pens and Needles, pp. 1–2.
26. Kathleen Staples, ‘Embroidered Furnishings: Questions of Production and
Usage’, in English Embroidery from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1580–1700:
Twixt Art and Nature, ed. Andrew Morrall and Melinda Watt (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 23–37.
27. See ‘stool, n.’, 6, Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford University Press,
2014) http://www.oed.com [accessed 4 September 2014] (hereafter OED
Online). The sixteenth-century citations make it clear that this term denotes
a loom, rather than a frame for embroidery or tapestry as the definition
suggests.

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28. Michael Bath, Emblems for a Queen: The Needlework of Mary Queen of Scots
(London: Archetype, 2008), p. 3.
29. The Chartley Inventory, undertaken in 1585, lists a large number of such
panels, many depicting animals and plants, and some described as ‘petit
point’ in various stages of completion. See Bath, Emblems for a Queen,
pp. 5–6.
30. For a catalogue raisonné of these embroideries, as well as a detailed discussion of their iconography and history, see Bath, Emblems for a Queen. The
embroideries worked by Bess of Hardwick and Mary Queen of Scots during
the latter’s captivity in England have now been divided between three collections, with a portion of the collection mounted in a screen at Hardwick
Hall, those which form the hangings known as the Oxburgh Hangings at
Oxburgh Hall in Norfolk, and a number of unattached panels in the Victoria
and Albert Museum in London.
31. Santina Levey, The Embroideries at Hardwick Hall: A Catalogue (Great Britain:
National Trust, 2007), pp. 23–4.
32. Those embroideries believed to have been undertaken by Bess are marked
with an ‘ES’ for ‘Elizabeth Shrewsbury’, and those by Mary in different
ciphers representing two interlocking ‘M’s, or intertwined letters spelling
‘MARIE STVART’.
33. Frye, Pens and Needles, p. 58.
34. Levey, Embroideries at Hardwick Hall, p. 314. For examples of these highly
sophisticated needlework designs, including both French and English examples, see Maria-Anne Privat-Savigny, Quand les Princesses d’Europe Brodaient:
Broderie au petit point, 1570–1610 (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées
nationaux, 2003). Although Mary Queen of Scots, in particular, is credited
with having created a large number of embroidered items – far greater than
she was likely to have been able to produce in her lifetime – many of these
would have required a greater level of skill than that evident in the panels
which she is known to have worked.
35. Richard Shorleyker, A Schole-house, for the Needle (London, 1624).
36. ‘pattern, n. and adj.’, I. 2. a, OED Online.
37. Lena Cowen Orlin, ‘Three Ways to be Invisible in the Renaissance: Sex,
Reputation, and Stitchery’, in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, ed. Patricia
Fumerton and Simon Hunt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1999), pp. 183–203 (pp. 185–6).
38. Barley, A Booke of Curious and Strange Inuentions.
39. Frye, Needles and Pins, pp. 60–2.
40. Vorsterman, A neawe treatys, title page.
41. Barley, A Booke of Curious and Strange Inuentions; Adrian Poyntz, New and
Singular Patternes and Workes of Linnen (London: J. Wolfe and Edward White,
1591), title page.
42. Shorleyker, A Schole-house, for the Needle, ‘To the reader’.
43. Vinciolo, Les Singuiliers et Nouveaux Pourtraicts.
44. Cited in Bath, Emblems for a Queen, p. 4.
45. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford: Henry Cripps, 1621).
46. Bath, Emblems for a Queen, p. 4.
47. Bath, Emblems for a Queen, p. 4.
48. Levey, Embroideries at Hardwick Hall, pp. 338–40.

Gender, Agency, and Emotions in Early Modern England 167
49. Levey, Embroideries at Hardwick Hall, p. 340.
50. Margaret Swain, The Needlework of Mary Queen of Scots (Carlton: Bean, 1986),
pp. 87–8.
51. Bath, Emblems for a Queen, p. 7.
52. Patricia Wardle, ‘The Embroideries of Mary Queen of Scots: Notes on the
French Background’, Bulletin of the Needle and Bobbin Club, 64 (1981), 1–20
(pp. 7–9).
53. Wardle, ‘Embroideries of Mary Queen of Scots’, p. 9.
54. Frye, Pens and Needles, p. 31.
55. Frye, Pens and Needles, pp. 33–41. Although Frye (p. 37) suggests, following Margaret Swain’s observations, that Elizabeth’s embroidered cover of
The Glass of the Sinful Soul for Katherine Parr makes use of a couched down
passamenterie braid, close examination of the junctions of the depicted
knotwork and the places where it has worn away, suggests rather that it is
executed in plaited braid stitch, as is the central monogram ‘KP’. This is a
particularly difficult stitch to execute, and more so in metallic thread, and
is just as much a virtuosic performance on Elizabeth’s part as the translation
of the text. Frye reads the cipher on the other embroidered binding which
Elizabeth made for Katherine Parr as a composite evoking multiple family members, including Anne Boleyn, Henry, Katherine, and Elizabeth, as
well as ‘R’ for ‘Rex’ or ‘Regina’. This reading does not take into account the
diagonal left to right crossbar which forms an ‘N’, so it seems more likely
that the cipher is intended to be read as Katherine (or one of its alternative
spellings), emphasizing the personal relationship between Elizabeth and her
stepmother rather than the broader family one.
56. Frye, Pens and Needles, p. 35.
57. Frye, Pens and Needles, p. 51.
58. Bath, Emblems for a Queen, p. 50.

9
A Subject for Love in The Merry
Wives of Windsor
Diana G. Barnes

Harold Bloom’s argument that Shakespeare’s plays represent ‘the outward limit of human achievement aesthetically, cognitively, in certain
ways morally, even spiritually’, was a new spin on an old argument
established over the eighteenth century and entrenched through an
educational programme disseminated throughout the British Empire
and the greater English-speaking world over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For Bloom et al. it is because Shakespeare is the origin of
what it means to be human, that his oeuvre is the ultimate authority on
our emotions. Making the point that we cannot ‘conceive of ourselves
without Shakespeare’, Bloom cites Owen Barfield who wrote in 1928
that ‘there is a very real sense, humiliating as it may seem, in which
what we generally venture to call our feelings are really Shakespeare’s
“meaning”’.1 One simple reason for this is the fact that ‘Shakespeare.
The very name evokes the acme of the English language’, as Seth Lerer
asserts in Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language (2013).
Indeed, Shakespeare is the single most cited authority in the second
edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1989) with over 33,000 references to his works.2 According to Lerer, ‘He coined … six thousand
new words’. Certainly the roots of modern English – including many
of the words and concepts we use to describe and understand our
emotions – derive from this period, and in this sense, as Lerer asserts,
‘Shakespeare stands on the cusp of modernity’. But, this has less to do
with Shakespeare’s individual genius and inventiveness and more to do
with a socio-discursive revolution underway during his lifetime. The
mix of Anglo-Saxon, learned Latin, everyday parlance, and ‘low’ speech
that Lerer observes in Shakespeare’s language is testimony to this.3
Much emotion is invested in maintaining and reaffirming Shakespeare’s
authority, and to credit Shakespeare as the source of that emotion
168

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stymies analysis. Only by going back to the beginning, to analyse the
construction of emotional effects in the plays, can we grapple with the
myth.
Shakespeare’s dramatic oeuvre by no means presents a consistent
vision of Englishness. A number of his plays document the heated
contest for authority between spoken and written, elite and popular
discourses that produced the Englishness for which he came to stand.
The Merry Wives of Windsor is a case in point. It presents the town
of Windsor not as timelessly English but as a happy mélange of local
and foreign, spoken and learned discourses disrupted by Falstaff, an
uncouth newcomer who sends love letters to the citizen wives. Letter
writing was threatening because, as the popular letter-writing manuals
taught, the adept letter-writer knew how to adjust language to create
effective emotional impressions to gain mastery in a variety of situations. By this means Falstaff aimed to cuckold the citizens, and trick
the merry wives into opening their purses to him; that is, he sought
financial gain through sexual conquest.
Much has been written on how The Merry Wives of Windsor depicts
a distinctly English community, using language play to mark up social
and class distinctions to comedic effect. This is achieved via the juxtaposition of a native English culture against Welsh and Anglo-French
dialects and pedagogical discourse. The Merry Wives of Windsor does
not depict an ideal, native English community as a static continuous
reality, but rather, as Adam Zucker points out, it represents Windsor as
a community under pressure to respond to influences alien to its mercantile values.4 The play opens with the residents of Windsor expressing
their affront at Falstaff’s rude intrusion into their village. Although the
residents of Windsor had already accepted French- and Welshmen into
their community, Falstaff’s garrulous martial and courtly mores are out
of place. The problem is represented through the many letters interpolated into the play script. Letters abound in this play: Sir Hugh Evans
the Welsh pastor dispatches one to Mistress Quickly about Slender’s
love for Anne Page; Sir John Falstaff, who steps out of the battlefields of
Shakespeare’s Henriad to visit Windsor with his entourage, writes love
letters to Mistress Page and Mistress Ford, the citizen wives; the French
Dr Caius writes a letter to Sir Hugh Evans; and the young gentleman
Fenton describes one Anne Page has written him. As this list shows,
letter writing is not the property of a single type of character. This is
not to say that the differences between the courtly interlopers, citizens
and their wives, and foreigners are ironed out in the process, rather the
characters are distinguished from one another through their relative

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ability to engage effectively with letter-writing culture. Although at
this time most letter-writers were men, in this play, men’s skill in letter writing is found wanting. Falstaff follows the kind of rhetorical
template presented in popular epistolary rhetorical manuals, and the
Welsh Pastor and French doctor’s efforts are limited by their uncertain
grasp of the subtleties of the English language. The citizen wives and
daughters, however, exercise untutored fresh native wit in their reading
and writing of letters.
Letters appear frequently in Shakespeare’s plays, not because the
author’s imagination regularly ran dry as Muriel Bradbrook claimed, but
rather because of the place of letters in early modern English culture.5
The citizens of Windsor and visitors from the court and battlefield who
appear in the play recognize letter writing as an affective technology,
that is, as a means of empowering themselves by engineering emotional
effects through the adaptation of a learned script. Long associated with
the teaching of rhetoric, letter writing was steeped in an intellectual
history beginning with the classical period, formalized in the medieval
ars dictaminis, and adapted by humanists. Ars rhetorica, or the art of
persuasion, depended upon the effective modulation of emotion. As
Peter Mack explains ‘self-presentation, manipulation of the audience,
emotional appeals and the use of figures of speech, as well as arguments’
are stock rhetorical techniques.6 During the sixteenth century, Brian
Vickers argues, following the widespread recognition that oratory and
other modes of classical rhetoric were not really useful, more utilitarian genres, including letters, became popular vehicles for rhetoric and
the claims made for it.7 For the early moderns, the letter was a genre
of crucial importance because it demonstrated the practical value of
classical and humanist rhetoric in negotiating everyday life. Practical
how-to manuals for writing letters flooded the late sixteenth- and early
seventeenth-century English print marketplace.8 These manuals geared
to teach ‘any learner’ epistolary rhetoric and the attendant skills in
eloquence and persuasion, promising that effective letter writing would
improve a person’s prospects in the public world.9 Adapting the classical rhetorical concept of decorum, they presented taxonomies of kinds
of letters defined by interpersonal relationships, such as mother to son,
or between friends or lovers, for example, and described the linguistic
and formal traits suited to each affective mode. What was radical about
the manuals was their opening of elite learning to the rapidly expanding reading public: rhetoric was no longer a discourse exclusively available to courtiers, aristocrats, and the graduates of grammar schools and
universities. Rather letter-writing manuals instilled a discursive and

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affective versatility that, they promised, would empower any learner.
It was, however, a somewhat strained sales pitch: the manuals were
rather dry composites of rhetorical theory, matched with classical,
humanist, and local English letters with their rhetorical parts marked in
the margin. Nonetheless, they were tremendously popular, frequently
reprinted, widely read, and constantly adapted. The frequent appearance of letters in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor is symptomatic of this socio-discursive phenomenon.
Letters within a play represent a special case of letter-writing culture.
Lynne Magnusson argues that because letters were defined as conversation in writing (by humanist scholars such as Erasmus), that is, as the
closest form of writing to speech, they provide insight into everyday
speech acts. Printed letter-writing manuals provided the dramatist with
a ready ‘repertoire of social interaction scripts’ invaluable for representing the contest between characters for social position. The theory
of letter writing presented in the manuals illuminates the process of
social negotiation for which the letter-writer needed to be prepared.
Letter writing and its theory, then, elucidate contemporary assumptions
about ‘how relative social position affected language and style’, and
also something of the social negotiation at work in spoken and written
language at the time Shakespeare was composing his plays.10 As Alan
Stewart cautions, we must keep in mind that letters in the plays are
‘stage letters’, that is, ‘richly theatrical’ adaptations of ‘the grammar of
early modern letter writing’ as presented in the manuals, and not real
missives.11 Letters within play texts may be richly theatrical, but they
have a different status from the rest of the dramatic dialogue. Tiffany
Stern points out that letters within plays are also physical properties
that an actor might hold in his or her hand and thus part of the mise-enscène. The text of stage letters was extra-dramatic material interpolated
into a play’s dialogue, and it had an unstable relationship to the play
text. Such letters were not necessarily even written by the dramatist.
The physical letter might not only contain the words of the letter for
the actor to read, but also prompts to remind the actor when to read the
letter. Frequently, letters in plays were ephemeral manuscript texts that
were not transcribed into the printed version of the play. This may
have given the production company the opportunity to adapt and
substitute the contents of a letter for a particular performance.12 The
many letters mentioned, read, dispatched, and received in The Merry
Wives of Windsor may not tell us much about real contemporary letters and letter-writing culture, but they do provide the linguistic traces
of a conflict between different groups of people and their mores, and

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provide a valuable insight into a process of social transformation. What
this play’s representation of letter-writing culture shows is a profound
ambivalence about the power of rhetoric to misrepresent emotions, and
thereby to manipulate the naive.
In order to understand how epistolarity works in The Merry Wives
of Windsor, let us consider why Falstaff decides to write letters in the
first place. In the opening line, Justice Shallow, offended by Falstaff’s
abusive behaviour, declares he will ‘make a Star Chamber matter of
it’ (I. i. 1–2).13 Falstaff is identified as an uncivil interruption to life in
Windsor. Generically his behaviour belongs elsewhere. He is a refugee
from Shakespeare’s history plays, and his drunken buffoonery and lusty
schemes, fitting for a soldier serving the young Prince Hal in wartime,
do not fit the citizen community of Windsor. When Falstaff appears in
person in the second scene, the Host of the Garter asks him to tell his
story ‘scholarly and wisely’ (I. ii. 3). With no war on, Falstaff is unemployed and struggling to find the ‘10 pounds a week’ (I. ii. 7) to support
himself and his men, and he may have to ‘turn away some of [his] followers’ (I. ii. 4–5). Even after the Host takes Falstaff’s servant, Bardolfe,
off his hands to re-employ him as a tapster, Falstaff tells his men, Nym
and Pistol, that he is still ‘almost out at the heels’ (I. ii. 28). When
Falstaff explains that he is relieved to see the back of Bardolfe since ‘His
thefts were too open, his filching was like an unskillful singer, he kept
not time’ (I. ii. 23–4), he makes it clear that he does not have a moral
problem with Bardolfe’s dishonesty. Rather, he is frustrated by Bardolfe’s
ineptitude. As Falstaff sees it, trickery is the only means available to
him. He declares ‘There is no remedy, I must cony-catch, I must cheat’
(I. ii. 30). The kind of discrete, skilful ‘filching’ Falstaff plans is revealing. He targets the wives of upright citizens of Windsor: ‘I do mean to
make love to Ford’s wife. I spy entertainment in her … she gives the leer
of invitation’ (I. ii. 40–1), and, more to the point, ‘the report goes, she
hath all the rule of her husband’s purse’ (I. ii. 49–50). Confident in his
ability to turn the situation to his advantage he decides to send Mistress
Ford a letter, and another to Mistress Page:14 ‘I will be cheaters to them
both, and they shall be exchequers to me’ (I. ii. 66–7). Thus he plans
to employ persuasive epistolary rhetoric to capture the hearts of the
citizen wives, and thereby gain access to their husbands’ wealth. The
art of rhetorical persuasion in epistolary form is a scholarly scheme for
making money but, as we will see, not a wise one to adopt in Windsor.
The first sign that Falstaff’s plan to feign love for the citizen wives will
go awry is Nym and Pistol’s refusal to deliver the letters on the grounds

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of affective decorum. Nym will ‘run no base humour’ and hands back
‘the humour-letter’ in order to ‘keep the haviour of reputation’ (I. ii.
74–5). Privately Nym and Pistol resolve to inform Page and Ford of ‘the
humour of this love’. Nym and Pistol are hardly reputable characters
but they would rather engage in open-faced bullying and filching than
the kind of emotional deception Falstaff plans.
The Quarto and Folio versions of Merry Wives differ on a number of
counts, including their representation of letters. Note the spacing and
use of italics employed to depict the reception of Falstaff’s first letter in
the 1602 Quarto, by comparison to the First Folio version, as follows:
Enter Mistresse Page, reading of a Letter.
Mis. Pa. Mistresse Page I loue you. Aske me no reason,
Because theyr impossible to alledge. Your faire,
And I am fat. You loue sack, so do I:
As I am sure I haue no hart but to grant
A souldier doth not vse many words, where a knows
A letter may serue for a sentence. I loue you,
And so I leaue you.
Yours Syr Iohn Falstaffe.15
and the Folio:
Enter Mistris Page, Mistris Ford, Master Page, Master
Ford, Pistoll, Nim, Quickly, Host, Shallow.
Mist. Page. What, have I scap’d Love-letters in the
holly-day-time of my beauty, and am I now a subject for
them? let me see?
Aske me no reason why I love you, for though love use reason for his precision, he admits him not for his Counsailour:
you are not yong, no more am I: goe to then, there’s sympathy:
you are merry, so am I: ha, then there’s more sympathy:
you love Sacke, and so doe I: would your [stet] desire better sympathy?
Let it suffice thee (Mistris Page) at the least if the Love of
Souldier can suffice, that I love thee; I will not say pitty me,
‘tis not a Souldier-like phrase; but I say, love me:
By me, thine owne true Knight, by day or night:
Or any kind of light, with all his might
For thee to fight.
Iohn Falstaffe.16

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In the Quarto, Mistress Page reads out the complete text of the letter
sent, including the opening address and subscription. By contrast, the
longer Folio letter seems to start mid-way, and it includes a few lines of
poetry absent from the Quarto. Like popular epistolary manuals, a font
change distinguishes the Folio letter from the surrounding text. In the
Folio, Mistress Page describes herself being addressed by the letter, musing: ‘What have I scaped love-letters in the holiday time of my beauty,
and am now a subject for them? Let me see: [Reads].’ She recognizes that
Falstaff’s love letter ‘hails’ or calls her into the subject position of the
loved woman. This is anticipated in the preceding scene (absent from
the Quarto) when Falstaff says ‘I can construe the action of her familiar
style, and the hardest voice of her behaviour – to be Englished rightly is
“I am Sir John Falstaff’s”’ (I. iii. 42–5). Pistol responds ‘He hath studied
her well, and translated her will – out of honesty into English’ (I. iii. 46).
Before reading the letter, Mistress Page recognizes that epistolary discourse calls her into a position within the ideology it supports; her ‘Let
me see’ registers her scepticism over how far she will be made subject
to its scholarly rhetoric. The Folio version is my focus here. Although
it lacks the full letter, it gives more emphasis to the effect of emotive
persuasion in epistolary discourse.
For the early moderns, letter writing was a quotidian rhetorical
art. Like oratory, upon which it was modelled, a letter was designed
to persuade either by demonstrative, deliberative, or judicial means.
Following classically derived rhetorical precedents, manuals instructed
budding letter-writers that the means or mode of their argument should
be determined by its place or locus, defined, following Cicero, as ‘the
dwelling place wherein the argument resides’.17 This literally meant
identifying the nature of the relationship of the writer to the recipient,
and giving due consideration to their relative social positions (decorum).
Thus, letter writing was defined by its location within specific social
relations, including social and class position, but articulated through
emotional terms – embedded in the greeting, farewell, subscription,
tone, mode of argument, and length – selected for their suitability to
each relationship. To take a couple of examples from a popular late
sixteenth-century manual, Angel Day’s The English Secretorie (1586), a
letter that closes ‘Acknowledging my selfe deepely bounde unto your L.
for manye sundry favours: I doe remayne in all humble reverence’ articulates a very different affective bond from that expressed by ‘Rejoycing
not a little at the health of you and all other our friendes. I hartelye bid
you farewell’.18 The former is suited to a formal relationship between
unequal parties, and the latter to a more even relationship between

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familiars, and yet emotion is invested in each. In both cases, the emotional effect is geared to persuade, that is, to urge the reader to recall the
mutual obligation that exists between the two parties. Through copious
examples, the manual teaches the budding letter-writer how to employ
the technical skills of rhetoric to embed emotion into interpersonal
language that is decorously sensitive to social positioning. As Frank
Whigham and Lynne Magnusson show, letter writing (as presented in
the manuals) was a conservative discourse, but one that could be utilized to renegotiate social relations.19
Falstaff’s letter reveals a writer lacking discursive guile. Evidently he
considered some epistolary precepts, and attempted to identify the
place of his epistle. In both versions, the sense of Falstaff’s letter is
roughly the same. Although he declares that he loves her against all
reason, he attempts to persuade her that they are well suited. The first
idea that reason does not hold in love is standard, yet invention should
have stimulated him to sugar his prose. He pays lip service to the idea
that a love letter should involve sympathy between parties. Since neither is young, both love to drink sack, and be merry, then she could
hardly wish for ‘better sympathy’. Acknowledging that epistolary communication should reflect the character or ethos of the writer he closes:
‘I will not say “pity me” – ‘tis not a soldier-like phrase – but I say “love
me” ’ Here in his bumbling misapprehension of the tenets of rhetoric
enshrined in the effective letter, he rejects a key means of mounting a
persuasive epistolary argument. According to Thomas Wilson successful rhetoric depends upon amplification, particularly via emotional
appeals, as he makes clear in the chapters ‘Of Moving Affections’ and
‘Of Moving Pity’ included in his Art of Rhetoric (1560).20 In spite of
Falstaff’s efforts, his failure to align his language and emotions to the
occasion, leads Mistress Page to conclude that he is not the ‘true Knight’
he pretends to be.
Mistress Page responds emphatically to his breach of decorum: ‘What
a Herod of Jewry is this? O wicked, wicked world! One that is well-nigh
worn to pieces with age, to show himself a young gallant?’ (II. i. 16–21).
In other words, she identifies that he is using epistolary rhetoric for
the wicked end of disguise and seduction. He is neither young, nor on
intimate terms with her; she declares ‘he hath not been thrice in my
company!’ (II. i. 22). She continues: ‘What an unweighed behaviour
hath this Flemish Drunkard picked – with the devil’s name! – out of
my conversation, that he dares in this manner assay me?’ (II. i. 16–21).
For all his careful study of ‘her familiar style’, his letter depicts neither
her character nor their relationship accurately. In rhetorical terms,

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Falstaff’s argument is misplaced; it misrepresents their relationship.
Consequently, Mistress Page recognizes neither the writer as an authority nor herself as a ready subject for his manipulation. In response, she
takes ‘the dominant power position’, as Peter Erickson observes,21 and
defensively vows to take revenge (II .i. 22–6).22 Mistress Page shows very
little concern either for whether Falstaff actually loves her, or her own
feelings towards him. She recognizes that the affront is not personal,
but one on her community. She understands the code of civility foundational to an ideal epistolary practice and recognizes its manipulation.
Mistress Page’s indignation over Falstaff’s indecorum is spiked when
she discovers that he has sent a duplicate letter to Mistress Ford:
MISTRESS PAGE: Letter for letter, but that the name of Page and Ford
differs! To thy great comfort in this mystery of ill opinions, here’s the
twin brother of thy letter. …
MISTRESS FORD: Why this is the very same – the very hand, the very
words! What doth he think of us? (II. i. 61–5, 73–4).
The duplication of the letters angers the women because it is proof of
further indecorum: he thinks he can court them by a formula.23 Mistress
Page rages:
MISTRESS PAGE: … I warrant he hath a thousand of these letters, writ
with blank space for different names – sure, more, and these are of
the second edition. He will print them, out of doubt; for he cares not
what he puts into the press, when he would put us two. I had rather
be a giantess, and lie under Mount Pelion (II. i. 66–71).
She assumes that he has copied model letters in print, and that he not
only aims to use his copy and its second edition to seduce them, but
reuse it a thousand times over. Falstaff has followed a formula but failed
to adapt it to fit the addressees or to portray himself honestly. The
women judge him harshly for this. To use a form letter to propose making love to them lacks the personal touch necessary to enflame their
amorous passions.24 A love letter should convey intimate sentiments
between two people but Falstaff’s copies lack specificity and thus intimacy of address. If Falstaff thinks something duplicated en masse would
press Mistress Page or Mistress Ford into sexual compliance, then he is
wrong. His indiscriminate epistolary reiterations suggest a lover only
capable of mechanical and impersonal reproduction ‘for he cares not
what he puts into the press, when he would put us two’. Mistress Page

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compares such an act to the motion of a printing press, indiscriminately
reproducing copy after copy on blank sheets of paper. Pointedly she
locates this lewd vision not in Windsor, but somewhat anachronistically
‘under Mount Pelion’, the mythical location for the dispute between
Hera, Aphrodite, and Athene that initiated the Trojan War.25 This martial connotation is supported by the phrase to ‘press into service’ which
also meant to forcibly enlist into military service.26 Mistress Page is not
seduced by Falstaff’s lewd schemes and lofty aspirations. She recognizes
the gender warfare he instigates. Her name may be Page but she will not
take Falstaff’s impression. The implication is that authorship, textual
and sexual, is unmoored, literally made impotent, by the mechanical
reproduction of emotional scripts.
When the merry wives repudiate the print-generated, highfalutin, rhetorical templates that Falstaff imports into the social dialogue of Windsor,
they act as ‘arbiters of the mother tongue’ as David Landreth aptly
describes them.27 They seem to defend the oral culture and native intelligence of townsfolk against the mass-produced bookish formulae peddled
by an inept and dissolute courtier/soldier. Here, the affective authenticity of the citizen wives is pitched against Falstaff’s swaggering masculine
bravado and emotional deception. None of the printed books claiming
to teach ‘learners’ the art of letter writing recommend outright duplication of epistolary models, however. The manuals stress that learners
should practise imitation and adaptation and strive to exercise invention.
The wives may have been impatient with Falstaff’s letters, because in the
manuals at least, epistolary discourse is represented as largely masculine.
Although Elizabethan letter-writing manuals addressed an imagined
readership of male ‘learners’, both the gendering of letter writing and the
affective social relations it supported were contested.28
Windsor, the locus of the play, invokes a specific historical link
between letters, oratory, gender, authority, and governance. It is a town
situated in the shadow of Windsor Castle where Elizabeth I held court
regularly. The appearance of Quickly disguised as the Fairy Queen in
the masque in Act V, Scene v of The Merry Wives of Windsor underscores
this connection. This is a phatic joke designed to encourage the audience’s sympathetic recognition of the linguistic and cultural legacy at
play. Roger Ascham, tutor to Elizabeth I, identified Windsor as the locus
for his textbook for aspiring gentlemen, The Schoolmaster (1570). He
recalls a dinner party discussion on education that took place when the
court was residing at Windsor, on 10 December 1563, ‘in Sir William
Cecil’s chamber, Her Highness’ principal secretary … in the company of
so many wise and good men together as hardly then could have been

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picked out again out of all England beside’.29 After which he retired to
the Queen’s private chambers where she recited Demosthenes’ oration
upon the duty of a loyal subject to his monarch. Later one of the members of the dinner party, Sir Edward Sackville, invited him to write up
his views on education. In this account, Ascham opposes the urbane
conversation of men with the Queen’s singular inimitable oration.
This juxtaposition anticipates the place he gives to letters in the pedagogical scheme he lays forth. Motivated by a thinly disguised desire to
redress the gender balance in state power, Ascham states mid-volume:
‘It is your shame (I speak to you all, you young gentlemen of England)
that one maid should go beyond you all in excellency of learning and
knowledge of divers tongues.’ The Queen’s sovereign eloquence, he
protests, is not met by ‘the best-given men of this court’ and ‘scarce one
or two rare wits in both the universities have in many years reached
unto’ it.30 The Queen embodies Cicero’s ideal orator Demosthenes, and
Ascham presents Cicero’s letters – or the everyday adaptation of oratory
rhetoric – as an antidote.31 Ascham recommends that once the youth
has been taught the basics of Latin grammar, he should be read Cicero’s
letters. After explaining the style, grammar, and content of a letter, the
master should set his student to translate it into English and then, some
time later, back into Latin.32 The master should then place the student’s
efforts against Cicero’s original, praising him when he ‘doth well, either
in chosing, or true placing of Tullies words’. The exemplary spirit and
grammar of Cicero are invoked in this intimate mimetic scene; schoolmaster, student, and Cicero are bound together in their quest for civility
via pleasurable learning. The imitation of Ciceronian epistolary discourse has formal and affective consequences: it classicizes the student’s
English and Latin and it inculcates the student in Ciceronian amicitia,
or friendship between men based upon parity, equality, and sympathy.33
He becomes Cicero’s familiar and equal, and enters that non-temporal
learned community Petrarch promoted in his familiar letters.34 Ascham
presents the letter as an ideal preparation for the kind of speech that
would put a man on equal footing with the most powerful men of the
realm and the erudite queen.35 As I have explained, letter writing was
predicated upon identifying the ‘places of the argument’, this usually
meant the writer taking into consideration his or her social relationship
to the recipient, but in the educational programme Ascham lays down,
Windsor is identified as the locus for the queen’s authority and amicitia.
Friendship is a mode of affective epistolary discourse capable of binding
English men together in friendship and thus conferring an authority
upon them that would redress their position vis-à-vis the queen.

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On first inspection, Ascham’s ideals fall flat in The Merry Wives of
Windsor. Certainly letter writing appears impotent against feminine
speech and social force. Falstaff has been deluded by the promises made
by Ascham and countless manuals into thinking that ‘A souldier doth
not use many words, where a knows | A letter may serve for a sentence’,
as he explains in the Quarto letter. Indeed he might have had better luck
speaking to the women in person. Falstaff writes love letters rather than
the letters of masculine friendship Ascham recommends. If The Merry
Wives of Windsor does respond to Ascham’s gendering of letters as masculine, it is a parodic reversal of its logic. How is feminine epistolary culture portrayed then? Neither Mistress Page nor Mistress Ford are writers
themselves, but they are good readers. They judge what they read; their
speech is powerful, and they refuse to be co-opted by Falstaff’s epistolary
rhetoric. They decorously preserve their reputations, and scheme only so
far as it does not compromise their honesty. Other members of the female
community should also be considered. Mistress Quickly has a certain rhetorical pull in the play, but it is not established by anything so highbrow
as orating Demosthenes. Her many ludicrous verbal gaffs show her to be
unlearned, and yet her linguistic incompetence does not disempower her.
She may confuse ‘infection’ with ‘affection’ (II. ii. 109) and pronounce
that ‘Hang-hog’ is surely ‘Latin for bacon’ (IV. i. 43), but she performs
the role of the Fairy Queen who directs her fairies to pinch Falstaff in the
masque (V. v).36 Significantly for my argument, she not only has skill in
governance but is a carrier of letters. Furthermore when she conveys the
wives’ responses to Falstaff’s letter, she shows that she understands the
place of emotion in effective epistolary rhetoric. She reports:
[Y]ou have brought [Mistress Ford] into such a canary ’tis wonderful.
The best courtier of them all, when the court lay at Windsor, could
never have brought her to such a canary – yet there has been knights,
and lords, and gentlemen, with their coaches, I warrant you – coach
after coach, letter after letter, gift after gift, smelling so sweetly, all
musk, and so rushling, I warrant you, in silk and gold, and in such
alligant terms, and in such wine and sugar of the best and the fairest,
that would have won any woman’s heart; and, I warrant you, they
could never get an eye-wink out of her (II. ii. 57–68).
Here, Quickly supplies the terms of the letter of reply that Mistress Ford
has not written, without actually putting her pen to paper and engaging in rhetorical dishonesty. She speaks the sugared prose sorely lacking
in Falstaff’s letter and spikes his desire not just for love but renewal of

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his social position by alluding, as Ascham did, to times when the royal
court was at Windsor. Quickly’s grasp of amatory epistolary rhetoric is
sufficiently persuasive to make Falstaff a willing subject in the women’s
schemes of retribution. The terms of the reply Quickly supplies for
Mistress Page – ‘But I have another messenger to your worship. Mistress
Page hath her hearty commendations to you too’ (II. ii. 89–91, my italics) –
underscores her familiarity with stock epistolary phrases. There is plenty
of linguistic confusion in Quickly’s speech, but in her role as the carrier
of letters she effectively manipulates epistolary rhetoric to stir up the
emotions that persuade Falstaff to comply, without writing a word. It
might seem that feminine oral discourse is victorious in this play, but
Quickly is hardly the queen of rhetoric. She could only play the queen
of the fairies in a comical farce. Although she exhibits some sophistication as a carrier of the merry wives’ letters, she is linguistically inept. It
is Page’s daughter who holds the promise of genuine linguistic renewal.
The Folio includes one female letter-writer: Anne Page. Although her
letter to Fenton is neither read out on stage nor scripted in the play
text, Fenton describes its content in detail to the Host of the Garter.
In it she gives an amusing account of the events that have unfolded
thus far ‘wherein fat Falstaff | Hath a great scene’ (IV. vi. 16–17); she
also describes her parents’ schemes for her marriage and the planned
masque. Evidently she can spin an entertaining yarn, and, according
to Fenton, she is a decorous letter-writer. He wonders at how effectively
she cuts her humour to the measure of his taste:
The mirth whereof so larded with my matter
That neither singly can be manifested
Without show of both (IV. vi. 14–16).
Her letter is founded upon genuine sympathy for her correspondent. It
is no mass-produced form letter. Neither does it follow the other precedents for women’s letter writing in print at the time.
Although Ascham attempted to mobilize Ciceronian epistolary discourse to reclaim English men’s discursive mastery, the gender of epistolary form is not easily fixed. Epistolary theorists debated this matter. Juan
Luis Vives, for instance, described the letter and oratory as feminine, distinguishing them by class: the former was the art of a plebeian girl, and
the latter of a gentlewoman.37 The most obvious model for feminine
epistolary rhetoric in circulation was Ovid’s Heroides. Although it was
used to teach rhetoric and letter writing in the grammar school curriculum, it is hardly mentioned in the epistolary manuals.38 The letters of

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Ovid’s raped, captured, and deserted heroines to the men who seduced,
abducted, and abandoned them were widely admired, but viewed warily
and employed cautiously in education. These poetic letters represented
an emotional contract based upon difference and inequality, and painful, unresolved emotions associated with love, rather than the sameness
and equality of emotional and social station of Ciceronian letters of
masculine friendship. Erasmus got around the problem by separating
familiar letters, based upon Cicero’s letters of masculine friendship,
from love letters which could be authored by women. Love letters, he
determined, were properly classified as poetry and therefore beyond the
scope of his manuals.39 English epistolary manuals maintained the distinction, and where they treated love letters, they dropped the rhetoric
manual format, no longer marking the rhetorical parts in the margin,
and presented the love letters as fiction.40 Poetic feminine letters were
also popular. George Turberville’s translation The Heroical Epistles of the
Learned Poet Publius Ovidius Naso, In English verse (1567) went through
numerous editions, as did Michael Drayton’s adaptation of the Heroides
to English history, England’s Heroical Epistles (1597). In this tradition,
women write letters but their participation in epistolary dialogue does
not give them parity of position or power with their male counterparts.
Ascham’s influence can be detected in the many persuasive letters written by men to women that appear in Elizabethan prose fiction, such
as: William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (1566–67), Sir Geoffrey Fenton’s
Certaine Tragicall Discourses (1567), George Gascoigne’s The Adventures of
Master F. J. (1573), and George Pettie’s A Petite Palace of Pettie his Pleasure
(1576).41 Typically, these letters rehearsed the standard critique of rhetoric. For example, when George Gascoigne’s male secretary, or letterwriter, instructs young Elinor in the art of writing letters, he teaches her
how to use rhetoric for disguise and trickery.42 Anne Page’s letter writing
stands apart from these traditions of female letter writing represented in
popular print: she is neither a victim nor a malign secretary.
Anne Page represents a fresh page in a number of ways: as others
have observed, she reinvigorates the depleted aristocracy represented
by Fenton with mercantile wealth; and she is an author whose writing is not so endlessly reproduced that the personal and emotional
significance is wrung out of it. She possesses the invention necessary
to turn her sympathetic observation of her community into an entertaining story ‘larded’ with good-humoured ‘mirth’, and she imprints
the product of her pen upon her lover’s page so effectively that he
is uncertain whether he and her letter could be seen ‘singly’ thereafter. She astutely identifies the place of her epistolary argument, and

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accurately represents her character, Fenton, and their relationship. Her
letter so successfully hails Fenton as its subject that he declares that it
defines him.43 She employs the persuasive arts of rhetoric to achieve
good. When the Host asks Fenton ‘Which means she to deceive, father
or mother?’ (IV. vi. 45) and Fenton replies ‘Both, my good host, to go
along with me’ (IV. vi. 46), they acknowledge that she will exercise her
discretion and determine her own fate. More importantly her sympathetic and emotionally decorous letter gives her the necessary authority to script the comic masque that will take place in Windsor forest
at ‘Herne’s oak, just twixt twelve and one’ (IV. vi. 19) and initiate the
happy denouement of the plot.
According to my reading, ideological ‘consolidation of aristocratic
power’44 is achieved in this play through an inventive female letterwriter capable of replotting events in terms that sympathetically fit her
social locus. Anne Page’s letter writing perpetuates the merry wives’ programme of linguistic cleansing, and has something of Quickly’s native
wit. She judiciously employs epistolary rhetoric to turn such feminine
linguistic know-how to productive use.45 Her letter writing represents a
corrective to Ascham’s opposition between feminine oration and masculine letters; in The Merry Wives of Windsor, effective letter writing is
feminine. Mistresses Page and Ford and Quickly know enough about
epistolary rhetoric to recognize Falstaff’s emotional duplicity and they
refuse to acknowledge his authority. Anne Page produces the only epistolary script that has emotional authenticity. The women’s involvement
in letter writing tempers the masculine bias of Elizabethan letter-writing
manuals and the negative vision of female letter writing popularized
by Ovid’s epistles. The Merry Wives of Windsor parodies the humanist
claim promoted in manuals that book-learned rhetoric was useful in the
social world. It pitches Falstaff’s bad, mechanical, epistolary reproduction against Anne Page’s decorum and sympathy. Aptly, unlike his letter,
hers is not reproduced in the play text; it is fair copy circulating beyond
the printed text. Anne Page’s letter might effectively reform her husband as a subject in her plot, but it remains his property and, as such, it
circulates at his discretion. This is one of the things that brings Erickson
to conclude that ‘women’s superior power’ is ultimately contained in
the play.46 As this discussion has shown, the tropes of letter writing that
pervade the play contradict this argument. Fenton acknowledges that
Anne Page writes the script for the future when he praises her letter writing, and repeatedly describes their love as mutual, adapting a principle
of amicitia, or friendship between equals, to define their relationship. In
both versions of the play, he stresses that this mutuality is an emotional

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183

quality. In the Quarto edition he says: ‘The fervent love I bear to young
Anne Page, | And mutually her love again to mee’, and in the Folio:
‘the dear love I bear to fair Anne Page, | Who mutually hath answered
my affection’ (IV. vi. 9–10). If rhetoric is figured initially as Falstaff the
uncouth and unwelcome intruder into English citizen culture, and then
practised with decorum and emotional sensitivity by Anne Page, the
play seems to argue that it is here to stay, and like the Welsh and French
dialects, it will be absorbed into the discursive mêlée that is English
mercantile culture. The result may be surprising: it does not advantage
the courtly, battle-weary, itinerant Falstaff, but rather it nourishes and
gives efficacy to a new sympathetic native discourse suited to citizens
and their merry wives and wise daughters.
John J. Joughin complains that, in spite of vigorous efforts, radical
literary criticism has been unable to destabilize the pervasive authority
of ‘the eponymous Shakespeare myth’ and the conservative values it
upholds, owing to ‘the complex of cultural processes which function
to safeguard the Bard effectively as the guarantor of Englishness – both,
simultaneously, as a representative of a conservative populism and as
an exclusivist icon of high culture’.47 One modest place to begin, this
chapter argues, is to analyse the place of discourse, emotion, and gender
in The Merry Wives of Windsor, a play that documents the radical sociodiscursive transformations in process during Shakespeare’s lifetime. It
deals with the mix of spoken tongues that went hand in hand with the
globalization of trade but also the blending of written and learned discourses with spoken language effected by popular print. The location of
the drama at Windsor invokes debates about the gendering of discursive
authority and governance that raged during Elizabeth’s reign. Through
its treatment of letter writing, particularly of love letter writing, The
Merry Wives of Windsor represents Englishness under construction and
exposes the workings of that ideology for our analysis.

Notes
1. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead,
1998).
2. See ‘Dictionary Facts’, Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press,
2013) online edition http://public.oed.com/history-of-the-oed/dictionaryfacts/ [accessed 26 July 2014].
3. Seth Lerer, Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2013), pp. 129–40. See also John J. Joughin,
‘Shakespeare, National Culture and the Lure of Nationalism’, in Shakespeare
and National Culture, ed. John J. Joughin (Manchester: Manchester University

184

4.

5.

6.

7.
8.

9.

10.
11.
12.
13.

14.
15.
16.

17.

Diana G. Barnes
Press, 1997), pp. 269–94; Sean McEvoy, ‘Shakespeare at 16–19’, in Shakespeare
in Education, ed. Martin Blocksidge (London: Continuum, 2003), pp. 97–119;
Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin, ‘Introduction’, in Post-Colonial Shakespeares,
ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 1–26.
Adam Zucker, The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 23–53; see also Leah S. Marcus,
Unediting Shakespeare: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London: Routledge,
1996), pp. 68–100.
Muriel Bradbrook (Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry: A Study of his Earlier
Work in Relation to the Poetry of the Time (1951; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1979), p. 153) declared that ‘As for the action, whenever
Shakespeare can think of nothing else to do, he puts in a misdirected letter’.
She was writing of Two Gentlemen of Verona, but she may well have been
describing The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Peter Mack, ‘Humanist Rhetoric and Dialectic’, in The Cambridge Companion
to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), pp. 82–99 (p. 83).
Brian Vickers, ‘Some Reflections on the Renaissance Textbook’, in Renaissance
Rhetoric, ed. Peter Mack (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994), pp. 81–102.
See Katherine Gee Hornbeak, ‘The Complete Letter Writer in English
1568–1600’, Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, 15, nos 3–4 (1934);
Jean Robertson, The Art of Letter Writing: An Essay on the Handbooks Published
in England During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 1942); and Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands
of the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).
See my discussion of Angel Day’s The English Secretary (1586 and 1599
editions) in Epistolary Community in Print, 1580–1664 (Farnham: Ashgate,
2013), Chapter 1, pp. 19–46. Some passages following have been adapted from
material first presented in this chapter.
Lynne Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and
Elizabethan Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 3, 76.
Alan Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008),
pp. 6, 40.
Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 174–200.
Unless otherwise indicated, quotations are from William Shakespeare, The
Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. Giorgio Melchiori (London: Arden Shakespeare,
2000), for which the Folio is the copy text. Subsequent act, scene, and line
references will be cited in text.
Arthur Kinney, ‘Textual Signs in The Merry Wives of Windsor’, Yearbook of
English Studies, 23 (1993), 206–34 (p. 213).
William Shakespeare, A Most Pleasant and Excellent Conceited Comedy, of Syr
Iohn Falstaffe, and the Merrie Wives of Windsor (London, 1602), sig. [B4r].
William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor in Mr William Shakespeare’s
Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London, 1623), pp. 38–60 (p. 43), reprinted
in The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare, prepared by Charlton
Hinnan, with a new introduction by Peter W. M. Blayney, 2nd edn
(New York & London: Norton, 1996), pp. 57–78 (p. 61).
See Cicero, Topica, 2.8.

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18. Angel Day, The English Secretorie (1586), pp. 24, 26.
19. On social decorum in letters, see Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue,
pp. 61–90; Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of
Elizabethan Courtesy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp.
18–20; and Frank Whigham, ‘The Rhetoric of Elizabethan Suitor’s Letters’,
PMLA, 96 (1981), 864–82.
20. Peter E. Medine, ‘Introduction’, in Thomas Wilson, Art of Rhetoric (1560),
ed. Peter E. Medine (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2010),
pp. 1–32 (pp. 17–18).
21. Peter Erickson, ‘The Order of the Garter, the Cult of Elizabeth, and ClassGender Tension in The Merry Wives of Windsor’, in Shakespeare Reproduced:
The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor
(London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 116–40 (p. 117).
22. Later in the scene she says ‘It makes me almost ready to wrangle with
mine own honesty’; I differ from Natasha Korda (‘“Judicious oeillades”:
Supervising Marital Property in The Merry Wives of Windsor’, in Marxist
Shakespeares, ed. Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow (London:
Routledge, 2001), pp. 76–110 (p. 93)) on this point, who argues that Falstaff’s
letter triggers the wives’ self-scrutiny.
23. Here the comic twin device is purely an effect of textual iteration. See
Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 133.
24. Elizabeth Pittenger, ‘Dispatch Quickly: The Mechanical Reproduction of
Pages’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 42 (1991), 389–408 (p. 393).
25. Perhaps more to the point, it conjures a cautionary tale about the dangers
of over-reaching circulating in William Golding’s translation of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses: ‘Men saie that Giants went about the Realme of heaven to
win, | To place themselves to reigne as Gods and lawless Lordes therein. |
And hill on hill they heaped up aloft into the skie, | Till God almighty from
the Heaven did let his thunder flie, | The dint whereof the ayrie tops of
high Olympus brake, | And pressed Pelion violently from under Ossa strake.’
See Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation, ed. John Nims
(Philadelphia: Paul Dry, 2000), book 1, lines 173–8.
26. The term is used in this sense in the contemporary play Thomas Dekker’s The
Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599). Jane, the wife of Ralph the shoemaker, explains
to Master Hamon that ‘My husband lives, at least, I hope he lives | Press’d
was he to these bitter wars in France’ (IV. i. 88–9). See Bartleby.com’s Harvard
Classics edition, online at http://www.bartleby.com/47/1/41.html [accessed
3 July 2014].
27. David Landreth, ‘Once More into the Preech: The Merry Wives’ English
Pedagogy’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 55 (2004), 420–49 (p. 421).
28. Walter Ong, ‘Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite’, Studies
in Philology, 56 (1959), 103–24; Vickers, ‘Some Reflections’, p. 84; Edmund
Spenser and Gabriel Harvey, Three Proper, and Wittie, Familiar Letters: Lately
Passed betwene two University Men: Touching the Earthquake in Aprill last, and
our English refourmed Versifying, in The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed.
J. C. Smith and E. De Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912),
p. 611; Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992).

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29. Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster, ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1967), p. 5.
30. Ascham, The Schoolmaster, ed. Ryan, p. 56.
31. Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance
Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 65.
32. Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster, ed. Edward Arber (London: Constable,
1935), pp. 25–7.
33. On double translation, see Martin Elsky, Authorizing Words: Speech, Writing,
and Print in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1989), pp. 54–6, 122–5.
34. Francis Petrarch, Familiares, in Petrarch’s Letters to Classical Authors, trans.
Mario Emilio Cosenza (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1910), p. 1.
35. In a marginal note, Ascham glosses ‘Much writyng breedeth ready speekyng’
reiterating Cicero and Erasmus’s counter to Plato’s assertion that writing
distorts speech. See Ascham, The Schoolmaster, ed. Arber, p. 29.
36. On Mistress Quickly’s errant discourse as the feminine threat, see Patricia
Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen,
1987), pp. 27–31.
37. Judith Rice Henderson, ‘Defining the Genre of the Letter: Juan Luis Vives’
De Conscribendis Epistolis’, Renaissance and Reformation, o.s. 19 (1983), 89–105
(p. 101).
38. Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
39. Desiderius Erasmus, De Conscribendis Epistolis [On the Writing of Letters]
(1522), trans. Charles Fantazzi, in Collected Works of Erasmus: Literary and
Educational Writings, 3; De Conscribendis Epistolis, De Civiliatate, ed. J. K.
Sowards (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), p. 204.
40. When Angel Day’s The English Secretary introduces love letters it abandons
manual format.
41. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 28–31.
42. George Gascoigne, The Adventures of Master F. J., in An Anthology of Elizabethan
Prose Fiction, ed. Paul Salzman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987),
pp. 9, 15.
43. On this point, I disagree with Landreth (‘Once More into the Preech’, p. 422)
that ‘Anne Page is assimilated by her own ideal man, Fenton, into the exterior purposes of court society’.
44. Erickson, ‘Order of the Garter’, p. 124.
45. I am suggesting that the rowdy plot lines occupying so much stage time have
more ideological significance than Richard Helgerson (‘The Buck Basket,
the Witch, and the Queen of Fairies: The Women’s World of Shakespeare’s
Windsor’, in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, ed. Patricia Fumerton and
Simon Hunt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 162–82,
(p. 168)) credits.
46. Leah S. Marcus, ‘Levelling Shakespeare: Local Customs and Local Texts’,
Shakespeare Quarterly, 42 (1991), 168–78 (p. 177); Erickson, ‘Order of the
Garter’, p. 117.
47. Joughin, ‘Shakespeare, National Culture’, p. 279.

10
Emotions, Gender Expectations,
and the Social Role of Chancery,
1550–1650
Amanda L. Capern

Chancery was a court that became infamous for provoking anger, contempt, distrust, and disgust, even loathing and rage, two basic emotions
that feature right at the centre of Robert Plutchik’s three-dimensional
emotions wheel. Chancery never became well known for the positive basic emotion of joy.1 Yet, some litigants must have experienced
a happy outcome. All literary representations of Chancery have been
overwhelmingly negative. Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House of
1793 portrayed the jealous viciousness of Mrs Lennard and her hidden
will alongside the stifling orderliness of the court, with its dull annual
reports and opaque precedents.2 In 1920, John Galsworthy gave us In
Chancery, one volume of the Forsyte family chronicle focused on the
unforgettably mean and proud ‘man of property’, Soames Forsyte,
whose ‘possessive instinct never stands still’ and extends to his wife.3
Again the court of Chancery featured almost as a metonym for people
who were jealous and obsessive and deeply interfering. And then there
is Bleak House. The trundling and cripplingly expensive case over a
disputed will, which Charles Dickens named Jarndyce v Jarndyce, played
to a knowing readership, though, ironically, the court so hated by the
Victorians had a structure and procedures that originally developed
from the late sixteenth century under Thomas Egerton, Lord Ellesmere,
in response to the weight of demand. There are two questions, then,
to answer in relation to human emotions and Chancery in the critical
period of its expansion of business. First, what emotions did early modern litigants bring to Chancery – at least, according to the records left
behind – and were the emotions gendered? Second, what emotions did
early modern litigants express about Chancery itself? To answer these
questions this chapter uses Chancery pleadings and cause papers (bills,
answers, replications, and rejoinders) of plaintiff/s and defendant/s
187

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Amanda L. Capern

for the period 1550–1650 and a range of early printed sources about
the court.4 Answers to the two questions, no matter how tentative, are
important in addressing current historiography about social relations
and the functionality of the court.
Chancery records offer a richness of evidence for social and economic
historians. Annie Abram was one of the first to recognize this when
she ploughed them for material for English Life and Manners in the
Middle Ages (1913).5 The economic historian, Maurice Beresford, also
once pointed out that the decree rolls alone provide quantitative data
for agrarian history and qualitative material embedded in the records
of disputes over earthenware pots, theatre mortgages, and ‘the affairs
of orphans, widows, almshouses, apprentices, schools, and the like’.6
In other words, Chancery records reveal the stuff of life and recently
a number of historians have been mining them for information on
the complexities of early modern markets and the economy and the
networks of debt and obligation that held together (or pulled apart)
families and communities.7 Early modern people resorted to Chancery
because of the dependence of local communities on legal intervention
when self-policing tactics proved ineffective. The link between neighbourly relations and kinship with Chancery is dialectical and complex.
Chancery, which was an equity court, made decisions based on the
concept of fairness. It was, therefore, embedded in collective, local
consciousness as a space for the articulation of emotions in exchange
for redress. There were striking overlaps of jurisdiction in the period,
between, for example, Queen’s/King’s Bench and Chancery, but it was
equity – or ‘positive law’ – that most actively legislated in the arena
of emotive legal cases.8 The Statutes of Parliaments regulated the trade
of everything from grain and pigs to buttons and lace, but it was the
equity courts – and increasingly Chancery – that dealt with actual
human interaction during trade.9
Chancery made an impact on private life because early modern families were essentially small, private businesses in a world comprised of
multifarious and interconnected small family businesses. Chancery’s
caseload overlapped with that of the common law courts, but crucially,
it accommodated litigation by married as well as single women, raising the expectation of its role as an arbiter of family relationships.
Chancery had the power to issue original writs (as well as decrees and
orders), which parties in a case had to respond to, and it even mopped
up marital disputes from the ecclesiastical courts.10 Chancery cases frequently had at their heart a person’s will, as petitioners sued executors
for legacies and chattel, widows sued for dower, and children sued for

The Social Role of Chancery 189

their portions. Kinship between litigants was actually a reason to sue,
Chancery being seen as a court that ‘would entertain a cause where kinship or other connections might influence a judgement’.11 Humphrey
and Mary Abell took Mary’s mother, Agnes Warry, to Chancery in 1628
over a copyhold cottage, pasture, meadow, and arable farm at Foxton in
Somerset because Agnes’s possession or use of the estate did not respect
Mary’s inheritance by manorial custom despite all solicitations put to
her ‘in friendly manner’.12 In this case, the plaintiffs claimed they could
get no relief either by manorial custom or common law because the
manorial roll had disappeared. The duplication of jurisdiction across
different courts was neither unusual nor theoretically problematic –
though not without an element of competition too – because the petitioning process was considered to be an appeal directly to the queen’s/
king’s conscience when avenues of relief had been sought by people in
vain and they were left with nothing but due complaint.13
Increased use of wills after the Statute of Wills in 1540 was one cause
for the climbing number of suits brought to Chancery and this alone
brought the court more squarely into the emotional centre of people’s
lives in local communities.14 The presence of testamentary proceedings in a case guaranteed high emotional content because, as Philippa
Maddern once pointed out, unlike court records, wills ‘marked, if not
the only, at least the most significant moment in a testator’s life’ and
can be filled with ‘apparently artless outbursts of affection, suspicion
or concern’.15 The wills of Robert Angell and his son caused emotional
mayhem. Robert left a written will in 1628 splitting his lands between
his two sons, Robert and John, with the proviso that if one son died
without issue the whole inheritance would go to the other son. Robert
died leaving a daughter and when John died she expected to inherit the
remainder of the estate, but John Angell left a nuncupative will, stating
in front of several witnesses at his deathbed that ‘if I thought I should
be any worse I would send for my sister Ann … my sister should know
how sick I am … [she] is likely to be heire of all I have’.16 Ill and emotional, John Angell suddenly yearned for his sister and he left ambiguous evidence about her being the ‘likely heir’, ‘must be heire’, and
probably ‘sole heir’, and that ‘she might have all that I have for there is
none to debar her of it’ – except, of course, his niece.17
Bernard Capp and Linda Pollock have both argued that emotional
displays, especially angry outbursts in public, were discouraged in
early modern England, Pollock arguing that in studying the emotions
it is crucial to understand their culturally specific and situated use.
The emotions – or passions in early modern humoral understanding

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of their bodily operation – feature within concepts like virtue, suggesting that demonstrations of despair might actually have a positive
connotation when articulated in the space of a court. Rightly, Pollock
suggests that the modern researcher needs to ask not only how we recognize emotions such as anger in the past, but also when an apparently
negative emotion might be perceived as positive in one situation and
only negative in another.18 According to Capp, early modern people
‘though easily roused to anger, were committed to the ideal of “good
neighbourliness”’.19 Lawsuits were not considered positive conduits for
uncontrolled emotions, but were rather a breach of Christian charity
and an act that abandoned early modern ideals of ‘kindness’, reciprocal
obligation, and reconciliation of conflict.20 Craig Muldrew has spoken,
for example, of cultural norms of ‘concord, reconciliation and peaceable relations’.21 There is a puzzle in the historiography here. Certainly
the language of consensus versus conflict – expressed as kindness or
unkindness – was dichotomous and loaded with cultural meaning that
travelled from village and town to the court of Chancery in cause pleadings and depositions. Unkindness was a term that expressed the concept
of uncharitable behaviour extended to kin and lack of Christian charity
afforded to the weaker person in a social relationship.22 The widow Anne
Amundersham explained her case in 1588 by deposing that her brotherin-law, Charles Monck, tried to ‘molest, sue and vexe’ her for debts owed
to him after ‘some unkindness’ had fallen out between her and her sister
and that he now treated her, ‘a desolate and a comfortless widow’, by
‘expostulating of many unkindnesses’.23 It is a little difficult, therefore,
to square the early modern ideal of social harmony with cases like that
of Anne Amundersham and the statistics also require explanation. From
the late sixteenth century onwards, there were ‘about 60,000 suits being
initiated yearly before the central courts’ and the London Consistory
Court alone witnessed a rise in female defamation cases which ‘substantially outflanked demographic change’.24 Marital litigation cases in
the Court of Requests also ‘expanded steadily’ from the 1590s.25 Tim
Stretton has recently challenged what he calls the ‘surprisingly positive
vision of the meaning and effect of rising interpersonal conflict’, and
he argues that just because much value was placed on neighbourly relations, there is no reason to suppose that rising levels of litigation did not
intensify pressure on local communities and lead to heightened social
conflict within them.26 Alexandra Shepard has reached the same conclusion in her work on the university courts in Cambridge.27
The dialectical process of information and emotions exchange between
community and court is one that is worth considering further. Landed

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and mercantile families depended on good relations with neighbours
and kin to thrive and survive as economic units and individuals would
spend very large sums on lawyers to settle disputes and also to maintain
the good reputation needed to do business. The ‘chains of credit’ in rural
and market towns depended on central courts like Chancery ‘to maintain the trust upon which credit was based’.28 Growing use of wills and
strict settlements from the late sixteenth century reflected economic and
concomitant social change. The transactional nature of interpersonal
relations hardened because of the legal complexities of expanded commerce. Muldrew points to ‘the sheer complexity of innumerable reciprocal obligations’, and argues that the early modern market constituted a
dense web of promissory notes and bonds.29 Stretton has also recently
suggested that economic change itself, ‘as the exchange value of money
eclipsed its use value’, resulted in more family and community disputes
accompanied by erosion of faith in the law courts to sort them out.30
Wills and settlements were, effectively, private law, but when disputes
arose, the overlapping jurisdictions of common law and equity law were
needed to resolve ambiguous legal entitlements. The question arises,
then, about Chancery as an expanding arena for articulation of emotions.
The anthropological view would be that if the material interests of
individuals are viewed as integral to the internal dynamics of family
relationships and the relational in communities, then emotion becomes
a vital category of analysis.31 In early modern English society, the
twinned concepts of trust and honour were invoked to encapsulate the
sense of being ill-treated over material things in life. They were concepts
that became a legal trope, placed centrally (in terms of persuasive location)
within Chancery pleadings. They were lent secondary efficacy by the idea
that coercion and obstruction had been the cause of a person’s misery.
For example, Anne Amundersham’s bill to Chancery stated that she
had placed ‘great trust and confidence’ in her brother-in-law, before he
started charging her interest on her debts.32 The linguistic construction
is multiplied many times over in pleadings. Anne Drewe’s pleadings
provide evidence of coercion. She took out two bills in Chancery in
1608 accusing several people of obstructing her right to title so that she
could not ‘peacablie and quietlie’ enjoy her farming land and woodland
in Hampshire.33 She deposed that the defendants broke trust by not
listening to reason, by taking possession of the land through ‘casuall or
other meanes’ and by hiding, altering, and defacing documents to force
her off her land.34
Early modern credit relations were, thus, inseparable from and linked
to sociability. They were also, therefore, linked to gender construction,

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especially in terms of masculine or feminine trust and honour. All
Chancery statements were transformed into legal evidence by an oath
being sworn on the Bible. How litigants were supposed to behave while
under oath was influenced by the gender expectations of conduct
books. In terms of the litigant’s cognitive appraisal of a situation, they
were reporting not only on factual information but its emotional impact
as transformative (in the present and/or future) of their material and
emotional wellbeing. Affective events became infused by gender expectations into a document of legal persuasion. Male litigants were bound
by an amphibolous language of honour that incorporated ideas straight
out of Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier such as chivalry,
courtesy, and civility. Male honour outside the court intersected with
the language of pride and indignation during a Chancery case. Richard
Bowdler, a merchant’s factor, brought a suit in 1620 against George
Morgan, a merchant he supplied, complaining that Morgan had fiddled
the books. Morgan was literally ‘called to account’, the court having the
authority to subpoena an individual to produce documents and records
for scrutiny by a group of appointed commissioners. He was ordered to
pay £579 6s. and was outraged at the breach of trust shown by Bowdler
and by the impact of the Chancery decision on his reputation as a man
whose honour was under-written by his financial honesty. He countersued, Chancery overturned the decree and Bowdler was ordered to pay
£7,486 1s. 10d. But matters did not stop there – to clear his name and
restore his honour, Bowdler then petitioned Parliament to have the
proceedings in Chancery made void.35 One of the men felt concerned
enough about their male reputation to have the whole proceedings
published in a broadside for a public airing.
Men’s litigiousness is well known, though women’s litigiousness
has also become more clearly understood through the work of Laura
Gowing and Tim Stretton among others.36 Approximately 10 per cent
of all cases in Chancery were brought by single female plaintiffs (mostly
feme sole, though some feme covert as well). A much higher percentage
still of cases featured women as uxor.37 The ‘culture of litigation’, suggests Stretton, witnessed a proportionally greater rise in female litigation than male in the Court of Requests. It rose from about 25 per cent
during the reign of Elizabeth to about 40 per cent by the end of the
reign of James VI and I, some of the increase being accounted for by
spillage from Chancery after a decision made by Chancellor Hatton in
1589 to move smaller Chancery cases.38 The impact of female gender
construction in Chancery was complicated because two sets of dualisms
came into play in the instance of every woman litigant to intersect with

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their position – plaintiff or defendant – in relation to the legal case.
First was the dualism of the quiet and ordered Christian woman who
co-existed with the woman of medical texts who was controlled at times
by her passions such as uterine fury and absence of reason. Male plaintiffs, often acting in collusion with their wives, could use the very effective tactic of suggesting a female defendant’s loss of reason to undermine
her evidence. Agnes Warry’s son-in-law and daughter made repeated
reference to the way in which she ‘withstood the orators’, ‘fayning …
excuses’ about how she ‘could not but to her greate losse remove the
goods she had’ in the house they wanted from her.39 Perhaps unsurprisingly, when she came to write her will Agnes decided not to include
her daughter and son-in-law.40 The universe of kin expanded and contracted contingently during the emotional moment of making a will, as
Maddern has shown, and wills often revealed nothing about inter vivos
property transfer, whether this had been through amicable indenture or
the legal force of an unwelcome Chancery order.41
The second dualism, of course, was the legal one of feme sole/feme
covert. The never-married feme sole could be seen as being as susceptible as the feme sole widow to the manipulative behaviours of the more
powerful in society, who were, by default, men. In 1638, Katherine
Proctor, the niece of a wealthy yeoman farmer, Miles Proctor, lodged a
bill of complaint in Chancery against a ‘confederacy’ of men who, ‘by
practice and combinacion [sic] among them’, had fraudulently taken
possession of her uncle’s land when she was ‘the right heir and next
of blood’.42 The answer of the main protagonist made an appeal to the
cultural expectation that Proctor would want to find a male heir. He
deposed that Miles Proctor’s last words were to call him ‘my brother’.43
Even though the two men were not, in any way, blood related, he tried
to invoke kinship through their shared masculinity. Miles Proctor’s
widow, as executor of her husband’s will, was crucial to the defeat of
the men, as she could bring together in her witness statements her
widow’s despair with the important legal responsibility she held to protect her husband’s interests and wishes.44 The emotional content of the
Proctor women’s case was heavy indeed – the embattled widow and her
defenceless niece – and they won. However, a single woman plaintiff
or defendant could also fall prey to the gender expectation of women’s
weakness in the face of temptation. The covetous, greedy woman was a
caricature of satirical pamphlets and ballads that crossed over into representation of female litigants in court evidence. In 1619, the married
plaintiffs Edward and Susan Alston accused Elizabeth Elsam of behaving
‘contrary to all right equity’ by fraudulently plotting to keep all of her

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late husband’s estate to ‘the benefitt’ of herself.45 She was accused of
being deceitful and dishonourable in hiding conveyances and the probate inventory of her husband’s chattels so that they could not establish
his worth at death and they put this down to her greed.46
Married couples came to Chancery with different expectations arising
from conflicting advice. Women under coverture were expected to manage family money and assets wisely in their role as household managers,
but men expected to have the final say. Marriage manuals occasionally
advised women to place their family’s interests ahead of husbands who
were feckless.47 Case law laid down by the Lord Chancellor’s decree of
1467 was unequivocal: ‘whatever a married woman does may be said to
be done for dread of her husband.’48 However, research on coverture has
revealed that the agency of a woman under coverture was rather greater
than this would suggest and Chancery cases do reveal a greater ambiguity in the treatment of married women than one might expect.49 There
were also subtly different gender expectations in relation to the type of
property involved. The wealth that was invested in chattels rather than
land or capital was feminized in a way that could favour female litigants; but not always, and only if there was not a clash of female interests. In a pleading of 3 May 1593, Lady Elizabeth Weston was accused
by her son-in-law, Thomas Bishop, of ‘secretly and covertlye’ keeping
‘jewells, money, goods and chattels … being of greate vallue’ which had
been the property of her dead husband.50 Thomas Bishop was interested
in the portable investment value of the jewels, but his wife, Jane, the
other plaintiff, felt an additional emotional attachment to the material
objects themselves: ‘one jewell called a flower of dyamonde … one jewell called a cross of dyamonde … one jewell with pictures enamylled …
dyvers pettycoats of great vallue.’51 These, of course, had belonged to
her deceased mother. Thomas and Jane Bishop believed that Elizabeth
Weston had placed these in ‘some secret place’, but Elizabeth Weston
deposed that her husband, while alive, had given jewellery and clothes
away ‘to her greate misliking’, because she, also, wanted the highly personal items that were missing, including the first wife’s clothes.52
However, the key to a history of emotions and gender expectations
in Chancery does not just lie in searching for descriptive evidence in
the court records about the feelings of female and male litigants about
property. Chancery was embedded in the social history of England
and it existed in dialectical relation to the people who brought cases
and participated in evidence collection. The habitus of Chancery lay
in its constantly adapting structure and organizing principles, producing collective practices understood by Chancery officials and litigants

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alike.53 Chancery, just like other overlapping social structures such
as kin, household, and church, was a generator of community, the
manifestations and representations of which changed over time. As
Susan Broomhall and others have shown in relation to the household,
Chancery accommodated ‘multiple emotional communities’, emotions
themselves potentially creating constellations of power and individual
agency.54 The interaction between individuals and the court was complex not least because it existed to serve their needs. Chancery was
representative of the monarch and a two-way conduit for what Patrick
Collinson once called ‘monarchical republicanism’.55 The monarch’s
negotiating power for and with the public was the reward litigants
received in exchange for their obedience. In Chancery, the power of
litigants lay in being ruled and being granted ‘the weapons of the weak’,
which included use of their emotions to appeal to the monarch’s conscience.56 Their initial bill of complaint represented what John Walter
would call a legitimate ‘public transcript’, or protest about their condition.57 Litigants, witnesses, and Chancery officials were all inescapably
linked by emotions not least because, as Robert Plutchik once argued,
cognitive feedback loops produce emotions and the increased autonomic activities that lead to cognitive actions (a neuroscientist would
say through the production of multiple monoamine neurotransmitters)
produce overt behaviours (often gendered) and outcomes or effects.58
Put more simply, the physiological changes that took place when interaction between court and litigants created emotions led themselves
to the cognitive decisions that decided further interaction. Indeed,
one question worth asking is if Dickens, in his portrayal of Jarndyce v
Jarndyce, captured in fictional form the litigant and court trapped in a
cycle of emotional cause and effect.
The imagined central presence of the monarch is an important key
to understanding the strategies and responses of litigants in Chancery.
Chancery was one of the English central law courts, the origins of which
lay in the medieval royal court. After the common law courts separated
from the Curia Regis at the end of the thirteenth century, the justice
that was still thought to be vested in the office (and, therefore, natural
body) of the king led to petitioning the king for redress if justice was
not thought to be delivered elsewhere. The petitions were referred on to
the Chancellor, who, by the end of the fourteenth century, dealt with
all the business of the court with the help of legal clerks.59 The original
locus of Chancery was wherever the Lord Chancellor happened to be,
including his household where he read petitions and affidavits in a case
and reached a verdict, though by 1550 his office was associated with

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the smaller and larger Inns of Court around Chancery Lane.60 Some
legal historians regard Chancery as an embryonic English civil service
or ‘the original bureaucratic department of state’.61 However, it was in
the construct of conscience that Chancery located and found its raison
d’être. The Lord Chancellor in Chancery came to represent the monarch’s conscience, so that effectively he became the chief interpreter
of the king’s law of equity. Both king/queen and Chancery jurisdiction
were embedded in the lex terrae: ‘[w]hat Chancery does is part of the
law of the land.’62 Therefore, in its very constitution Chancery was a
court that dealt with people’s emotions and the focus of their emotional
engagement with the court was the Lord Chancellor himself. He was
the only judge; his authority was law, not least because he could overturn judgements at common law and conscience itself became seen as
‘rooted in some higher law’.63 Litigants saw the Lord Chancellor’s power
of governance and authority in the localities, whether urban or rural,
as supreme in property and money-matters close to the heart. For this
reason, petitioners to Chancery appended very personalized statements
to their causes. ‘And the Orators shall dayly pray for your lord[shi]pp
in health’, said Humphrey and Mary Abell when trying to reclaim her
father’s tenancy of a cottage and farm in Foxton.64
The origins of most of the business and case law of Chancery lie in
cases such as Messynden v Pierson (c. 1420) when Thomas Messynden
discovered that the feoffees of his father’s land refused him the right to
come into the land and he appealed on the grounds that he ‘can have
no recovery at common law’.65 Cases were, therefore, not just emotional
in content, but emotional in process. The language of no recovery of an
entitlement changed not at all and became a mainstay of Chancery business. Through emotional pleas, plaintiffs had to claim ‘non-recovery’ at
common law or the need for discovery of documents that would prove
their common law right. Quite a bit of non-recovery business came
from copyhold cases (because of the weaker position of the tenant in
relation to the lord of the manor) and Chancery came to have effective
control of the rolls. Mostly these cases were a plea for recovery of tenure
through sighting the copy in the rolls, plaintiffs requesting a search for
the entry.66 Elizabeth Angell, who was the only daughter and heir of
John Angell of London, claimed that she could not access possession of
her father’s lands in 1648 because ‘by some sinister and casuall meanes’
some of her kin had concealed title deeds which she asked the court
to have ‘discovered’ so that she should enjoy ‘recovery of her rights
by law’.67 Female plaintiffs deploying the language of being wronged
laid claim to an enhanced embedded emotional content because of

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their sex. However, it was not simple and social status also enhanced
the emotional impact of a plea. In the case of Alan Best, a yeoman, in
1597, redress was sought from the fraud of Lady Anne Brooke, whom
he accused of hiding an inventory linked to a will.68 Widows had pleading power by virtue of their vulnerability and this could be doubled in
relation to a man of better social standing. The widow Margaret Baynes
took a goldsmith, Robert Myles, to Chancery when he tried to evict
her from an inn previously owned by her husband.69 Certain phrases
developed that bent and shaped emotions to the needs of equity law
and became in themselves legal tropes that formed the building blocks
to resolution of the case and decree. Bills were drawn up claiming
‘the sufferance of the plaintiff’, ‘wrongful dealings’, and a desire ‘to
be relieved’.70 In this way, emotions had to be performed and enacted
in order to build the legal case. Indeed, the performance of emotions
in the court setting, as Philippa Maddern once pointed out, actually
produced legal decisions.71 In other words, emotions, procedures, and
process were all inextricably linked and channelled through the generic
labels that litigants and deponents used to describe others – ‘solicitous
husband’ or ‘cruel guardian’, for instance – as they recorded their case
or supported the case of an ally. There was an intersection between emotional social categorization and social expectations, including those of
gender, status, and age. The ‘grieving widow’ was more than just a legal
category describing feme covert – it was an emotionally loaded trope
designed to invoke the Lord Chancellor’s pity in order to influence his
decision and win the case.
Chancery was a bill of procedure court. Early Chancery drew up bills
in legal French, but by 1550 a standardized form of ‘Chancery English’
was being used.72 Standardization was the result of the sheer weight of
work and the development of training of lawyers in the Inns of Court.73
Use of the vernacular rendered attorneys and legal clerks accessible to
litigants who brought to them the myriad small (and large) annoyances
and disappointments of daily life, which were then transcribed and collated as pleadings by clerks at the request of one complainant or complainants (the plaintiffs). A set of interrogatories was determined and
put to the defendant/s, who then needed to lodge their answers with
lawyers. In some cases, the plaintiff/s followed this with a replication
to the answer and the defendant/s then had right of rejoinder. Stretton
has demonstrated that many of the cases brought to Chancery were
shifted from the common law courts, often for strategic reasons. Indeed,
he suggests that many cases were vexatious as people used the court
essentially as an appellant court to claim no recovery at common law

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or require discovery of evidence. When pleading sufficiency at common
law, plaintiffs needed to claim that the case at common law was fraudulent in some way.74 Maurice Beresford noted in many cases involving
land enclosure that ‘the combat of the initial pleadings is soon revealed
as a posture’.75 However, performance and posture is never entirely
devoid of emotion and is always something more situated and lived
than performativity suggests. The emotional process prompted by following procedure often intensified when each side called their witnesses
(or deponents). Witnesses also testified after being sworn in by an oath
taken on the Bible before giving their answers to interrogatories put to
them by men of standing commissioned by the court. Witness re-telling
of events was as much of a performance, including the narrative of emotion needed for persuading the court of the reliability of themselves and
their evidence. The commissioners who took the evidence were metaphorically given ‘the keyes to the libertie of England’, commanding ‘full
power and authoritie to examine diligentlie all witnesses’ and so the
legitimate authority they wielded made them the temporary locus of an
emotional public transcript as the case unfolded in layers of emotionally crafted evidence.76
Chancery cases are best understood not as something that took place
in one of the central law courts, but as taking place in a fluid environment that existed between the court (wherever it was sitting) and multiple communities spread out like a web throughout the kingdom. And
because ‘Chancery subsisted on the deficiencies of the common law and
on pleas of defective evidence and partiality’ it was always dealing with
litigants who were disaffected both with their neighbours and the legal
system.77 It heard petitions from plaintiffs whose power relationship to
the defendant was sometimes so unequal that they might not get a fair
deal and could be subject to force or duress. It heard cases in which the
plaintiff was desperately seeking relief from a bond, such as Barrantyne v
Jeckett of 1553/4.78 The very nature of equitable justice meant that from
the outset, Chancery was a court that heard from and about people who
were already disaffected or feeling vulnerable with one another and with
the law. Equitable justice could only be arrived at by using ‘conscience
as a criterion of judgement’, but, of course, this remained a rather
uncertain principle even as the legal language of conscience seeped
into public consciousness.79 Dennis Klinck has observed that the Coke–
Ellesmere jurisdictional conflict in the early seventeenth century did
lead to reflection on conscience, its meaning and impact and, according
to Klinck, Puritan writers, notably William Perkins, defined equity as
the interplay between the role of the magistrate and the moderation of

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social interactions that altered – for the better – the conduct of private
individuals.80 Certainly Mark Fortier has spoken of a ‘culture of equity’
that mixed ideas of Christian equity with the language emerging from
Chancery and the concept was used as a tool of moral persuasion in
literary works of drama, poetry, and history to form part of the English
cultural heritage.81
Litigants understood the role of conscience in their lives. However,
this does not preclude them disagreeing with equity decisions in their
individual cases. In Chancery some suits, by definition of ‘discovery and
recovery’, were short, only getting to the bill stage and the legal drama
could be unfolding elsewhere. Anna and Toby Chapman, for example,
in 1617, asked for the discovery and recovery of her father’s will and
the probate inventory which were not ‘at large’ because of ‘secret plots’
involving both of her brothers; she only wanted her marriage portion
of £100 out of her father’s £4,000, but in the standard emotional appeal
she claimed that her brothers were trying to defraud her of her ‘sole
and only maintenance and meanes’.82 The common span of cases was
about two to three years with up to five years not unusual.83 Cases that
involved multiple suits and went on for many years did exist and they
were the ones most responsible for escalating conflict at home and
against the court. Perhaps the best example is that of John Barterham.
Described by contemporaries as ‘a headstrong litigious Man’, Barterham
pursued multiple cases over more than three decades.84 He became
‘utterlie consumed in tedious and expensive suites of Law’ and when
he was finally awarded damages that fell vastly short of his expectations and expenses he turned his anger on John Tindall, a Master of
Chancery.85 On 12 November 1616, Barterham followed Tindall while
‘full of rage, furie, and headlong indignation’ and after a little ‘uncivill
language’ outside Lincoln’s Inn he shot him dead.86 The reporter on the
case spoke of Barterham’s ‘melanchollie thoughts’, which he associated
with the loss of control and anger.87 This was an idea that had common
cultural purchase. Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621 spoke
of ‘Lust harrow[ing] us on the one side, envy, anger, ambition on the
other’, both sexes being ‘torn in pieces by our passions, as so many wild
horses’ that become mad.88 Barterham hanged himself in the King’s
Bench prison, a location loaded with the symbolism of fallen and dishonoured manhood.89
It was in the very long cases, then, that emotions between litigants
could turn into deeply negative emotions against Chancery. Chancery
was, by its very nature, integrally involved in difficult local and familial disputes and if they were not quickly resolved the court became

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both solution to and cause of further social conflict. The Victorians
did not invent the critique of Chancery. After all, as early as the 1590s
Shakespeare wrote the famous line ‘let’s kill all the lawyers’.90 Much
later, in 1828, a writer for the Monthly Magazine said that ‘the grand
evil of the Court – its original sin – is the narrowness of its capacities
relatively to the matters requiring its attention’ and he reached the
unforgiving conclusion that ‘it is obvious that gentle medicines and
soothing palliatives will be about as efficacious as breathing over a limb
up to which mortification was crawling’.91 The Bob Cratchets were just
so visible by then. They were to be seen either sitting at their wooden
desks surrounded by alphabetically arranged pigeonholes or drinking
coffee at Millington’s.92 But their visibility was not new either. The Six
Clerks were established in an office in Chancery Lane from 1622 where,
according to one later, rather biased, commentator, they ‘performed
their increasingly useless functions’.93 However, the terminology of Old
Corruption was used by Chancery lawyers, themselves, when they were
annoyed at having to put all business through the sworn clerks, who
occasionally fell prey to a cull of their numbers.94 In other words, the
social discourse of hating Chancery emanated as much from within
the legal profession as without, as Chancery periodically underwent
reform ahead of the Judicature Act of 1873. For example, during the
1650s, when delays in Chancery became lengthy, the situation was
seized upon by Exchequer lawyers who tried to attract Chancery litigants with the promise of shorter cases and after Chancery survived the
Commonwealth period – becoming stronger because of reduced competition – cheaper under-clerks of Chancery quickly exploited the rising
fees of the Six Clerks Office by offering to do the same job for half the
price ‘more expeditiously’.95 Both served to feed a popular hatred of
Chancery.
One further factor accounts for the negative emotions aimed at
Chancery. Equity law made it requisite that plaintiffs ‘show not only a
cause of action in conscience but also the absence of a remedy at law’.96
Only a dogmatic escalation of emotions, in petitionary statements that
transformed parties in a case into supplicants to the king’s conscience,
could succeed at showing absence of remedy at law. The emotive relationship invoked by equity law between monarch and subjects by legal
process was summed up by one pamphleteer when he commented that
‘The Law is a dumbe King; the King a speaking Law’.97 Early modern
litigants were highly indignant per se. Legal fees were a constant butt
of jokes. Everything (absolutely everything) cost money – every termhiring of an attorney, every injunction, every writ for execution of

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a decree, every decree (at £16 8s. in the 1650s, paid by plaintiff/s as
well as defendant/s), every extra sheet of vellum if more than one piece
was used, every enrolment of a deed, and so on and on.98 The devious
clerks Prag and Prog in A New Case Put to an Old Lawyer of 1656 were
‘dangerous for mens purses’ and Hold-Case, the lawyer, had an alias
of Long-Suit to indicate his propensity for spinning out proceedings.99
Prag had ‘a sublime and zealous spirit for advance of the Law’, though
his main quality consisted of being able to procure for the Masters
of Chancery ‘Decoys, Cheats, and meer Petty-fogging Foists, and
Hackney-Jades’.100 But such representations were inevitably Janus-faced
because the principle of ‘no remedy at law’ created a mutual dependency between litigants and the monolith of equity that Chancery had
become. Those who attempted to save the court from abolition claimed
‘the sweetnesse of Equity, which is nothing else but Mercy qualifying the
sharpnese of Justice’.101 The anonymous writer of Considerations Touching
the Dissolving or Taking Away the Court of Chancery reminded potential
litigants of the substantial benefits to them of invoking equity: ‘[t]he
Wolf may eat the Lamb, when there shall be none to stretch out their
hand to deliver the oppressed.’102 Written in 1653, after the regicide,
it would seem that when the chips were down for lawyers, the king’s
conscience did not need a king. The writer also issued a dire warning to
the Commonwealth – if Chancery collapsed, ‘the heap of new causes’
would ‘swell up the discontents of the people’.103 Commercialization
of printing and the expansion of print culture after the 1650s ensured
that Chancery cases, such as The Case of Sir Robert Atkyns … against a
Decree Obtain’d by Mrs. Elizabeth Took of 1695, appealed to an expanding
market for scandal that was also fed by trial accounts of adultery and
divorce cases (especially after the Norfolk case of 1700) and ordinaries’
accounts of criminal trials such as that of Stephen Arrowsmith for rape
of a child.104 The law of conscience transformed easily into morality
tale, though the reporter on the Tindall murder went one step further
to undermine the prerogative of the king in Chancery: ‘Rulers and
Maiestrates, are Gods upon earth, yet they are Mortall Gods.’105
Studying Chancery without studying in detail the litigants is like
studying only one half of an equation. The freedom of contract thought
to belong to the Lockeian private individual, or individual conceptualized as free to contract with others, was not so new to the late seventeenth century. At least from the late sixteenth century, there had been
a need for systematic and growing intervention in private affairs by
public institutions. Chancery was one of those institutions because,
as Michael McKeon’s work has so acutely revealed, there was never

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anything secret really about people’s domestic and working lives.106 The
category of knowledge that was classified as private law was shaped by
the changing needs of individuals over time and the informal and extrainstitutional identity of the legally informed individual formed a public
that could (and did) use its knowledge of law to invoke the conscience
of the queen/king to their own advantage. Emotions articulated in court
about private life created a bond that connected litigant and lawyer in a
dialectical process that affected not only the individual but also collective outcomes, including legal change.107
Emotions in Chancery ran high between litigants and were aimed
also at the court and its personnel. Indeed, Chancery was doomed to
frustrate and anger its clients. It collected evidence of their distress with
one another and required that they articulate emotions to make the
very sort of case that would be put to the law of equity and conscience.
The emotional outbursts of litigants easily deflected at the court itself.
Thomas Audley’s 1526 analysis of the impact of equity touching the
individual’s possessive instinct is instructive. Use of property depended
‘solely on confidence and trust between those who are in actual possession’ and when possession was in direct contradistinction to enfeoffment
at common law, then equity law made everyone uncertain of their title
‘for now land passes by words and bare proofs in the Chancery’ according to ‘the whim (arbitrement) of the judge in conscience’.108 Legal
intervention – once invoked – was identified with the Lord Chancellor
whose authority was representative of the monarch and state governance and who could, therefore, become the focus of popular discontent.
Furthermore, the 1536 Statute of Uses placed confidence and trust at
the heart of how Chancery dispensed justice, when the concept of use,
which Henry Sherfield in 1623 called ‘bastardly’, meant that estates had
started passing through use and not common law to the point where
‘the use is somewhat clogged, that it cannot dance up and down at
all times so lightly as it could before it was clogged with the estate’.109
Dickens could not have said it better. The somewhat indeterminate law
of use and possession meant that litigants had to take it very much
on trust that Edward Coke was right when he said that Chancery ‘will
not order a matter … which is directly against a rule and maxim of
the common law’.110 ‘Where Certainty wanteth, the common Law faileth’, according to one legal report of 1665, but ‘help is to be found in
Chancery’.111 These principles heightened the collective belief of lawyers
in the effective role of conscience as a calibrator of common law, when
what was actually on offer was constant accumulation of case law
that was supposed to determine byzantine distribution of real estate and

The Social Role of Chancery 203

capital assets. Chancery became an edifice that just could not live up to
its own ideals and, as has been shown, between 1550 and 1650 it was
already producing cases that provided the model for Jarndyce v Jarndyce.
However, the strongest evidence of the largely negative emotional
response to Chancery can be found in the wake of the regicide, when
the execution of the king led to an almost complete collapse in popular
belief in the court’s ability to deliver justice through a law based on the
king’s conscience. The survival of Chancery after the regicide may well
have been to fulfil continued social need for arbitration in property and
debt disputes. Litigants and the court remained locked in a destructive
mutual dependency that simply ensured the ire of future generations
of litigants. Indeed, Chancery litigants and lawyers continued to be
irritable with one another and they simply learnt afresh how to criticize
Chancery and to find ways of emoting both in pleadings and in print.

Notes
1. Dylan Evans, Emotion: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001), p. 5; Robert Plutchik, ‘The Nature of Emotions’, American
Scientist, 89 (2001), 344–50.
2. Cheryl Nixon, ‘Legal and Familial Recordkeeping: Chancery Court Records
and Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House’, Literature Compass, 2 (2005),
1–24, citing D. M. Kerly, An Historical Sketch of the Equitable Jurisdiction of the
Court of Chancery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1890), pp. 185–7.
3. John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1929),
p. 343.
4. Kew, The National Archives (hereafter TNA), C2, C3, C5, C6, C22 (1558–1649).
Chancery records number half a million sets of documents and are relatively
under used. They have been fairly extensively considered by historians interested in the law itself and Chancery as a legal institution. See, for example,
Timothy S. Haskett, ‘The Medieval English Court of Chancery’, Law and History
Review, 14, no. 2 (1996), 245–313; W. J. Jones, The Elizabethan Court of Chancery
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967); Henry Horwitz, Chancery Equity Records and
Proceedings 1600–1800 (London: H.M.S.O., 1995); Dennis R. Klinck, Conscience,
Equity and the Court of Chancery in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate,
2010); Michael Lobban, ‘Preparing for Fusion: Reforming the Nineteenth
Century Chancery’, Law and History Review, Part I: 22 (2004), 389–427; and Part
II: 22 (2004), 565–99.
5. Janet Sondheimer, ‘Abram, Annie (1869–1930)’, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography, online edition (Oxford University Press, 2004) http://www.
oxforddnb.com/view/article/61580 [accessed 21 August 2014]; see also Mary
Clayton, ‘The Wealth of Riches to be found in the Court of Chancery: The
Equity Pleadings Database’, Archives, 28 (2003), 1–31.
6. M. W. Beresford, ‘The Decree Rolls of Chancery as a Source for Economic
History, 1547–c. 1700’, Economic History Review, 32 (1979), 1–10.

204

Amanda L. Capern

7. See, for example, Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of
Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave,
1998); Sara Butler, ‘The Law as a Weapon in Marital Disputes: Evidence from
the Late Medieval Court of Chancery, 1424–1529’, Journal of British Studies,
43 (2004), 291–316; Tim Stretton, ‘Written Obligations, Litigation and
Neighbourliness, 1580–1680’, in Remaking English Society: Social Relations and
Social Change in Early Modern England, ed. Steve Hindle, Alexandra Shepard,
and John Walter (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013), pp. 189–210. I have recently
argued that there was not so much separation between the meanings of
male honour and female honour in property and business cases as might be
expected, but that the pervasive cultural construction of femininity based
on sexual honour was confined to and defined by the legal jurisdictions
that placed it on trial (‘Femininity and Honour in Early Modern English
Chancery Court Cases’, unpublished conference paper, Berkshire Conference
on the History of Women, Toronto, 22 May 2014).
8. Lloyd Bonfield, ‘Seeking Connections between Kinship and the Law in Early
Modern England’, Continuity and Change, 25 (2010), 49–82.
9. Bonfield, ‘Seeking Connections’, p. 54.
10. John Baker, The Oxford History of the Laws of England: Volume VI, 1483–1558
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 171.
11. William J. Jones, ‘Conflict or Collaboration? Chancery Attitudes in the
Reign of Elizabeth I’, American Journal of Legal History, 5, no. 1 (1961), 12–54
(p. 20).
12. TNA, C3/393/3, Pleadings, Humphrey Abell and wife Mary Abell v Agnes
Warry, 1628.
13. N. G. Jones, ‘The Bill of Middlesex and the Chancery, 1556–1608’, Journal of
Legal History, 22, no. 3 (2001), 1–20; J. F. Baldwin, ‘The King’s Council and
Chancery II’, American Historical Review, 15 (1910), 744–61 (p. 750).
14. Joseph Biancalana, ‘Testamentary Cases in Fifteenth-Century Chancery’,
Legal History Review, 76 (2008), 283–306 (esp. pp. 304, 306).
15. Philippa Maddern, ‘Friends of the Dead: Executors, Wills and Family Strategy
in Fifteenth-Century Norfolk’, in Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England:
Essays Presented to Gerald Harriss, ed. Rowena E. Archer and Simon Walker
(London: Hambledon, 1995), pp. 155–74 (esp. pp. 155, 158); cf. David
Cressy, ‘Kinship and Kin Interaction in Early Modern England’, Past &
Present, 113 (1986), 38–69. Enjoyable discussions with Philippa Maddern –
Pip – deeply influenced my reading of wills and, indeed, of all seemingly dry
legal records.
16. TNA, C5/387/4, Pleadings, Elizabeth Angell v John Tounson and Anne
Tounson, 1648; and TNA, C22/1009/43, Depositions, Elizabeth Angell v
John Tounson and Anne Tounson and Richard Cockerill, John Gooseman,
Elizabeth Tadman, 20 October 1652.
17. TNA, C22/1009/43, Depositions, Elizabeth Angell v John Tounson and Anne
Tounson and Richard Cockerill, Thomas Veritie, John Gooseman, Francis
White, 20 October 1652.
18. Linda Pollock, ‘Anger and the Negotiation of Relationships in Early Modern
England’, Historical Journal, 47 (2004), 567–90 (esp. pp. 570–4).
19. Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighbourhood in Early
Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 204–5.

The Social Role of Chancery 205
20. See Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), ch. 6; Capp, When Gossips Meet,
chs 5, 6; Craig Muldrew, ‘The Culture of Reconciliation: Community and
the Settlement of Economic Disputes in Early Modern England’, Historical
Journal, 39 (1996), 915–42; Steve Hindle, ‘A Sense of Place? Becoming and
Belonging in the Rural Parish, 1550–1650’, in Communities in Early Modern
England: Networks, Place, Rhetoric, ed. Alexandra Shepard and Phil Withington
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 96–114; Linda Pollock,
‘Honor, Gender, and Reconciliation in Elite Culture, 1570–1700’, Journal
of British Studies, 46 (2007), 3–29; Linda Pollock, ‘The Practice of Kindness
in Early Modern Elite Society’, Past & Present, 211 (2011), 121–58; see also
Pollock, ‘Anger and the Negotiation of Relationships’.
21. Muldrew, ‘Culture of Reconciliation’, pp. 918–19.
22. Pollock, ‘Practice of Kindness’, p. 135.
23. TNA, C2/A2/58, Pleadings, Anne Amundersham v Charles Monck,
1596–1603.
24. Muldrew, ‘Culture of Reconciliation’, p. 918, incorporating his statistical
estimations from C. W. Brooks, Pettyfoggers and Vipers of the Commonwealth:
The ‘Lower Branch’ of the Legal Profession in Early Modern England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 49–51, 56–7; p. 305 n. 21.
25. Tim Stretton (ed.), Marital Litigation in the Court of Requests 1542–1642
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 9.
26. Stretton, ‘Written Obligations’, pp. 192–3.
27. Alexandra Shepard, ‘Litigation and Locality: The Cambridge University
Courts, 1560–1640’, Urban History, 31 (2004), 5–28.
28. Craig Muldrew, ‘Rural Credit, Market Areas and Legal Institutions in
the Countryside in England, 1550–1700’, in Communities and Courts in
Britain 1150–1900, ed. Christopher Brooks and Michael Lobban (London:
Hambledon, 1997), pp. 155–78 (p. 177).
29. Muldrew, ‘Culture of Reconciliation’, p. 925; see also Muldrew, Economy of
Obligation.
30. Stretton, ‘Written Obligations’, p. 209.
31. Hans Medick and David Warren Sabean, ‘Interest and Emotion in Family and
Kinship Studies: A Critique of Social History and Anthropology’, in Interest and
Emotion: Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship, ed. Hans Medick and David
Warren Sabean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 9–23 (p. 13).
32. TNA, C2/A2/58, Pleadings, Anne Amundersham v Charles Monck,
1596–1603.
33. TNA, C3/266/3, Pleadings, Anne Drewe v Hugh Matthewe and Alice
Matthewe, 13 April 1608; TNA, C2/D3/16, Pleadings, Anne Drewe v William
Fisher and William Lacy, 18 June 1608.
34. TNA, C3/266/3, Pleadings, Anne Drewe v Hugh Matthewe and Alice
Matthewe, 13 April 1608; TNA, C2/D3/16, Pleadings, Anne Drewe v William
Fisher and William Lacy, 18 June 1608.
35. Anon., Richard Bowdler, Plaintiff. George Morgan, Defendant (London, 1621),
single-sheet broadside.
36. Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern
London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Tim Stretton, Women Waging Law
in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

206

Amanda L. Capern

37. This is a provisional calculation based on a late seventeenth-century sample
used in preparation for Arts and Humanities Research Council Collaborative
Doctoral Project No. AH/M004384/1, ‘Women in Chancery: An Analysis of
Chancery as a Women’s Court of Redress in 17th Century England’, Amanda
Bevan (Principal Legal Records Specialist, TNA) and Amanda Capern.
38. Stretton, Women Waging Law, p. 43, figures from p. 39, citing Amy Erickson,
‘Common Law versus Common Practice: The Use of Marriage Settlements
in Early Modern England’, Economic History Review, 43 (1990), 21–39 (p. 28);
and Wilfred Prest, ‘Law and Women’s Rights’, Seventeenth Century, 6 (1991),
169–87 (p. 182). For women in economic cases in the Court of Common
Pleas see Lloyd Bonfield, ‘Finding Women in Early Modern English Courts:
Evidence from Peter King’s Manuscript Reports’, Women’s Legal History:
A Global Perspective, Special Issue of Chicago-Kent Law Review, 87 (2012),
371–91.
39. TNA, C3/393/3, Pleadings, Humphrey Abell and Mary Abell v Agnes Warry,
January 1628.
40. TNA, PROB/11/189/13, Will of Agnes Warry, 6 May 1642.
41. Maddern, ‘Friends of the Dead’, pp. 155, 158.
42. TNA, C6/107/110, Pleadings, Proctor v Twistleton, Spalton, Nailer, Dickenson,
and Howson, 1641.
43. TNA, C6/107/110, Pleadings, Proctor v Twistleton, Spalton, Nailer, Dickenson,
and Howson, 1641.
44. Cf. Philippa Maddern, ‘Widows and their Lands: Women, Lands and Texts in
Fifteenth Century Norfolk’, Parergon, 19, no. 1 (2002), 123–50 (p. 125).
45. TNA, C6/1/19, Pleadings, Alston and Alston v Elsam, 1619.
46. TNA, C6/1/19, Pleadings, Alston and Alston v Elsam, 1619.
47. Capp, When Gossips Meet, p. 29.
48. Anon. (1467), calendared in J. H. Baker and S. F. H. Milsom (eds), Sources
of English Legal History: Private Law to 1750 (London: Butterworths, 1986),
pp. 98–9.
49. See Tim Stretton and Krista J. Kesselring (eds), Married Women and the Law:
Coverture in England and the Common Law World (Montreal and Kingston:
McGill-Queens University, 2013).
50. TNA, C2/B4/51, Pleadings, Thomas Bisshoppe and Jane Bisshoppe v Lady
Elizabeth Weston, 3 May 1593.
51. TNA, C2/B4/51, Pleadings, Thomas Bisshoppe and Jane Bisshoppe v Lady
Elizabeth Weston, 3 May 1593.
52. TNA, C2/B4/51, Pleadings, Thomas Bisshoppe and Jane Bisshoppe v Lady
Elizabeth Weston, 3 May 1593 and 10 May 1593.
53. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1990), pp. 53–4.
54. Susan Broomhall, ‘Emotions in the Household’, in Emotions in the Household,
1200–1900, ed. Susan Broomhall (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008),
pp. 1–37 (pp. 14–15).
55. Patrick Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’,
in Elizabethan Essays, ed. Patrick Collinson (London: Hambledon, 1994),
pp. 31–57.
56. James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).

The Social Role of Chancery 207
57. John Walter, Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2006); and John Walter, ‘Public Transcripts,
Popular Agency and the Politics of Subsistence in Early Modern England’,
in Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination
in Britain and Ireland, ed. Michael J. Braddick and John Walter (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 123–48 (esp. pp. 123–4).
58. Plutchik, ‘The Nature of Emotions’, p. 347. For the current interplay of
psychoanalytical theories between Plutchik’s ‘wheel of emotions’ and
monoamine neurotransmitters, see Lövheim’s ‘cube of emotion’: Hugo
Lövheim, ‘A New Three-Dimensional Model for Emotions and Monoamine
Neurotransmitters’, Medical Hypotheses, 78, no. 2 (2012), 341–8.
59. Philip H. Pettit, Equity and the Law of Trusts, 6th edn (London: Butterworths,
1989), pp. 1–2.
60. Robert Megarry, Inns Ancient and Modern: A Topographical and Historical
Introduction to the Inns of Court, Inns of Chancery, and Serjeants’ Inns (London:
Selden Society, 1972), p. 33.
61. Baker, The Oxford History of the Laws of England, p. 171.
62. Klinck, Conscience, Equity and the Court of Chancery, p. 158, citing Thomas
Egerton, Lord Ellesmere, The Priviledges and Prerogatives of the High Court of
Chancery (London, 1641), sig. A3r.
63. Klinck, Conscience, Equity and the Court of Chancery, p. 159.
64. TNA, C3/393/3, Pleadings, Humphrey Abell and Mary Abell v Agnes Warry,
1628.
65. Messynden v Pierson (c. 1420), calendared in Baker and Milsom (eds), Sources
of English Legal History, pp. 94–5.
66. Alexander Savine, ‘Copyhold Cases in the Early Chancery Proceedings’,
English Historical Review, 17 (1902), 296–303 (esp. pp. 300, 302–3).
67. TNA, C5/387/4, Pleadings, Elizabeth Angell v John Tounson and Anne
Tounson and others, 1648.
68. TNA, C2/B31/58, Pleadings, Alan Best v Lady Anne Brooke, 1597.
69. TNA, C2/B13/5, Pleadings, Margaret Baynes v Robert Myles, 1587.
70. Anon., Y. B. Pas. 4 Edward IV, fol. 8 (1464); Case of Lord Dacre (1535);
Anon., CUL, MS Gg. 2. 31 fol. 33 (1602) decision of Thomas Egerton, Lord
Ellesmere; all calendared in Baker and Milsom (eds), Sources of English Legal
History, pp. 96; 106; 453.
71. ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions Annual Report (2013).
72. John H. Fisher, ‘Chancery and the Emergence of Standard Written English in
the Fifteenth Century’, Speculum, 52 (1977), 870–99. Chancery hand made
its way into A Newe Booke of Copies (1574; 1585; 1620).
73. C. M. Rider, ‘The Inns of Court and Inns of Chancery and their Records’,
Archives, 24 (1999), 27–36.
74. Stretton, ‘Written Obligations’.
75. Beresford, ‘The Decree Rolls of Chancery’, p. 2.
76. TNA, C22/1009/43, Warrant of the Commissioners to collect Depositions,
Elizabeth Angell v John Tounson and wife Anne Tounson, 23 September 1652.
77. Jones, ‘Conflict or Collaboration?’, p. 52.
78. Edith G. Henderson, ‘Relief from Bonds in the English Chancery: MidSixteenth Century’, American Journal of Legal History, 18 (1974), 298–306
(p. 298).

208

Amanda L. Capern

79. Dennis R. Klinck, ‘Lord Nottingham and the Conscience of Equity’, Journal
of the History of Ideas, 67 (2006), 123–47 (p. 123).
80. Dennis R. Klinck, Conscience, Equity and the Court of Chancery, chs 5–6.
81. Mark Fortier, The Culture of Equity in Early Modern England (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2005), pp. 22–3.
82. TNA, C2/C21/55, Pleadings, Anna Chapman v Tobie Chapman, 9 May
1617.
83. William T. Jones, ‘Due Process and Slow Process in the Elizabethan
Chancery’, American Journal of Legal History, 6 (1962), 123–50 (p. 130).
84. The Harleian Miscellany: Or, a Collection of Scarce, Curious and Entertaining
Pamphlets and Tracts … Found in the Late Earl of Oxford’s Library, 8 vols
(London: T. Osborne, 1744–6), VIII, 21.
85. A True Relation of a Most Desperate Murder, committed upon the Body of Sir John
Tindall Knight, one of the Maisters of Chancery (London, 1617), sig. Av.
86. A True Relation of a Most Desperate Murder, sigs Br–B1v.
87. A True Relation of a Most Desperate Murder, sig. Br.
88. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621; London: J. M. Dent &
Sons, 1978), p. 69.
89. A True Relation of a Most Desperate Murder, sig. B2v; The Harleian Miscellany,
VIII, 21.
90. See Henry VI, Part II, Act IV, scene ii.
91. Anon., ‘Court of Chancery: No. III’, Monthly Magazine, Or, British Register
(London: R. Phillips, October 1828), pp. 372, 385.
92. J. C. Fox, ‘The Chief Clerks in Chancery and their Predecessors’, Law
Quarterly Review 29 (1913), 418–24; Hugh H. L. Bellot, ‘The Inns of
Chancery their Origin and Constitution’, Law Magazine and Review
Quarterly, 5th Series, 37 (1912), 189–202.
93. Robert Megarry, Inns Ancient and Modern: A Topographical and Historical
Introduction to the Inns of Court, Inns of Chancery, and Serjeants’ Inns (London:
Selden Society, 1972), p. 36.
94. Lobban, ‘Preparing for Fusion’, esp I, pp. 396–7, II, p. 617.
95. Anon., ‘Court of Chancery: No. III’, p. 372, citing [Joseph Parkes], Parkes
History of the Court of Chancery (London: Longman, 1828), p. 255. See also,
Anon., Reasons for the Bill for Regulating the Six Clerks Office in Chancery, with
an Answer to the Six Clerks Case (c. 1668–1700); Henry Horwitz, ‘Chancery’s
“Younger Sister”: The Court of Exchequer and its Equity Jurisdiction,
1649–1841’, Historical Research, 72 (1999), 160–82 (pp. 162–3). For the
attempted reforms of Chancery in the 1690s see Mike Macnair, ‘Common
Law and Statutory Imitations of Equitable Relief under the Later Stuarts’, in
Communities and Courts, ed. Brooks and Lobban, pp. 115–32 (pp. 116–17).
96. Baker, The Oxford History of the Laws of England, p. 174.
97. A True Relation of a Most Desperate Murder, sig. B3r.
98. Anon., Proposalls [sic] Concerning the Chancery (London, 1650), Table of Fees
appended after p. 27; Orders in Chancery (London, 1665), pp. 37–46.
99. Anon., A New Case Put to an Old Lawyer (London, 1656), p. 5.
100. Anon., A New Case Put to an Old Lawyer, pp. 8–9.
101. Anon., Proposalls [sic] Concerning the Chancery, sig. Ar.
102. Anon., Considerations Touching the Dissolving or Taking Away the Court of
Chancery (London, 1653), p. 9.

The Social Role of Chancery 209
103. Anon., Considerations Touching, p. 8.
104. Cf. Amanda L. Capern, ‘Adultery and Impotence as Literary Spectacle in the
Divorce Debates and Tracts of the Long Eighteenth Century’, in Spectacle,
Sex and Property in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture, ed. Julie A.
Chappell and Kamille Stone Stanton (New York: AMS, 2015); Old Bailey
Proceedings Online www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 7.1 [accessed 25 August
2014], trial of Stephen Arrowsmith, 11 December 1678 (t16781211e-2); and
Anon., The Confession and Execution of the Two Prisoners that suffered at
Tyburn on Munday the 16th of Decemb., 1678 … Steven Arrowsmith, for a Rape
committed on a Girl between eight and nine years of age (London, 1678).
105. A True Relation of a Most Desperate Murder, sigs C2v–C3r.
106. Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private and the
Division of Knowledge (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2005).
107. Cf. Brian Cowan and Leigh Yetter, ‘Public and Privacy in Early Modern
Europe: Reflections on Michael McKeon’s The Secret History of Domesticity’,
History Compass, 10 (2012), 599–607 (pp. 600–1).
108. Thomas Audley’s Reading on Uses (1526), calendared in Baker and Milsom
(eds), Sources of English Legal History, p. 104.
109. Henry Sherfield’s Reading on Wills (1623), calendared in Baker and Milsom
(eds), Sources of English Legal History, p. 124.
110. Stone v Withipole (1589), Edward Coke for the defendant, calendared in
Baker and Milsom (eds), Sources of English Legal History, p. 500.
111. Anon., Reports or Causes in Chancery (London, 1665), p. 25.

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Index
Abduction 76–7, 80, 181,
Abegg, Margaret 154
abortion 136
Abram, Annie 188
absolution 37, 43,
abuse 11, 42, 116, 120–1, 124,
129 n. 61, 145
Acomb Grange 76–7, 79
adolescents 116–17
adultery 41, 49 n27, 132, 201
agency 1, 9, 11, 12, 22, 24, 27–8, 87,
89, 150–3, 158, 163, 194–5,
Ahmed, Sara 6
Aionen, Tuija 2
alienation 54, 66
aliens and strangers 131–45
Allmand, Christopher 89
amicitia 178, 182
anger 7, 9, 13, 56, 97, 107,112,
114–16, 119, 120, 133–5, 143,
176, 187, 189, 190, 199, 202
Anjou, René of 55, 59
anxiety 3, 7–8, 11, 13, 84–8, 90–1,
95–6, 101, 112, 114–15, 124,
134, 144, 159
apprentices 120–1, 129 n57, 129
n60, 188
ars dictaminis see letter writing, rules of
Arthur, King 91–4
Ascham, Roger 177–82
Askham 77
audience and listeners, see also
readers 8, 10, 12, 34–47, 52, 62,
84, 91–6, 100, 107, 110, 126 n16,
151, 155, 170, 177
awe 39, 43, 45, 47, 106–7, 110,
112–14, 115, 117

Barterham, John 199
Bath, Michael 161–2
Batty, Bartholomew 111, 115
beatings, see also discipline,
violence 115, 116, 117, 120–1,
123, 130 n 66, 135
Bellamy, John 89
Beresford, Maurice 188, 198
Bess of Hardwick (Elizabeth, Countess
of Shrewsbury) 150, 157–9,
160–4, 166 n30, 166 n32
betrothal, irregular 116, 128 n44,
132, 134, 140
Bezella-Bond, Karen 92
Bigod, Roger V, Earl of Norfolk
24, 28
bilingualism 51–5, 57, 60, 62–3
bishops, archbishops 3, 20, 24, 35,
39, 43–5, 47, 66–8, 70–2, 78, 80,
113, 131, 133, 142
blasphemy 132
Bloom, Harold 168
Bolton Hours 70, 73–5
books of hours, see also Bolton Hours,
Pavement Hours 67, 70, 75
Bourne (Brunne) 35, 36
Bradbrook, Muriel 170
Braddick, Michael J. 2
Bridewell 134–5, 144
St Bridget of Sweden 74, 82 n31
Broomhall, Susan 1–17 as author, 3,
5, 7, 8, 11, 131–49 as author, 195
Brown, Peter 40
Bullinger, Heinrich 106–7, 112–3,
126 n16, 127 n33
Burton, Robert 160, 199
Butterfield, Ardis 51

Bailey, Merridee L. 3, 5, 7, 8, 11,
84–105 as author
Barley, William 153, 159
Barnes, Diana G. 4, 8–9, 12, 168–86
as author

Capern, Amanda L. 4–5, 9, 12,
187–209 as author
Capp, Bernard 189, 190
captivity, see imprisonment
care 13, 41–2, 60, 98, 111, 143
222

Index
Carter, Thomas 115
Castiglione, Baldassare 192
Caxton, William 3, 7–8, 11,
84–5, 87–8, 90–101, 112, 114,
126 n16
celibacy 74
Chancery 4–5, 9, 12, 19–21,
24–5, 108, 110, 117, 119–21,
187–203
cases 189–94, 196–7, 199
commonwealth period and
201, 203
gender and/in 188, 191–4, 196–7
Inns of Chancery 197
Lord Chancellor and 192,
194–7, 202
origins and case law 196–8, 202
pamphlets about and
reports on 200–2
powers and jurisdiction 188–9,
194–6, 198–9
procedures and costs 192, 194,
197–9, 200–202
reform in 192, 197
Six Clerks Office 200
Chartier, Alain 95
chastity 40, 74, 78–81, 97, 114,
122, 159
Chaucer, Geoffrey 37–8, 49, 53
children see also sons and
daughters 3–5, 7–8, 11, 27–8,
42, 84, 86, 89, 95–101, 106–24,
141, 143, 188
chivalry 88–94, 192
Cicero 174, 178, 180–1
civic elites 2–4, 7, 10, 66–81, 120
Cleaver, Robert 112
Clementhorpe 68
clergy 36, 45, 67, 68, 70–1,
110, 142
Coke, Sir Edward 198, 202
Colclough, Matthew 144
Coldiron, A. E. B. 95
Coleman, Joyce 36
Collinson, Patrick 195
companionship 79, 133
compassion 41
concern 7, 11, 84–7, 90, 94–6, 98–9,
101, 132, 137, 144, 176, 189

223

conduct and moralising texts 3–5,
7–11, 34–48, 92–102, 110–15,
121–2
conscience 37, 42–3, 46, 93, 119,
189, 195–6, 198, 200–3
consistory, French Huguenot 131–45
contempt 9, 142, 187
Corpus Christi
Feast 67, 73, 78
guild 70–71, 75, 77–8,
play 66, 73
procession 71
correction 106–24, 131–45
Court (ecclesiastical) 3, 67, 76–7, 80,
108, 110, 115–117, 188
court (law)
Chancery, Court of see Chancery
Common law courts 119, 188,
195, 197
Consistory Court (London) 190
Exchequer, Court of 119, 200
King’s/Queen’s Bench, Court
of 110, 117–20, 188, 199
Parliament (Statute Law) 188
Requests, Court of 190, 192
University courts (Cambridge) 190
Old Bailey 108, 110, 121–3
court (royal) 4, 10, 12, 21, 27, 32
n27, 51–2, 62–3, 95–6, 150, 169,
170, 177, 179, 180
courtship 58
covetousness 5, 193–4
Crane, Thomas 39
credit, see reputation
cruelty 119, 124
Cullum, Patricia 74
Dale, John 76–9, 83 n40, 83 n45
daughters 24, 40–1, 70, 74, 99,
113–14, 120, 122, 128 n44 136,
140, 143, 156, 170, 180, 183, 189,
193, 196
death 24–5, 28, 43–5, 52, 58,
59, 67–8, 70–80, 108, 117–19,
189, 194
de Merton, Walter 19, 24–5, 29
desire 35, 42, 58, 62, 97, 114, 122,
178–9
despair 119, 136, 190, 193

224

Index

Despenser, Aline la, Countess of
Norfolk
in baronial rebellion 28
as letter writer 6, 9, 20, 18–19, 20,
23, 28, 29–30
political rehabilitation of 27–8
Despenser, Hugh le (1233–1265) 28
Despenser, Hugh le (1261–1326) 29
detachment 54, 60
devil/s 42–7, 50
devotion 10, 39, 67, 70–5, 78–81
Dickens, Charles 187, 195, 200, 202–3
didactic texts, see conduct and
moralizing texts
discernment 34, 37–8, 40, 46
discipline 79, 108–11, 113–15, 117,
121, 131–45
disgust 9, 47, 187
dismay 7, 136
disobedience 114, 119, 121
distress 59, 107, 202
distrust 9, 187
divorce 201
Downes, Stephanie 4, 8, 10, 51–65
as author
dread 11, 106, 112, 115–17, 119,
122–3, 128 n41, 194
drunken behaviour 132, 136, 144,
172, 175
Duffy, Eamon 47
education and child-rearing 4–5, 7,
11, 20, 34, 57, 100, 106–24,
125 n3, 168, 177–8, 181
Edward I 19, 24, 27–8, 94
Edward II 70
Edward III 94
Edward IV 88, 90
Edward VI 131, 162
Egerton, Thomas, Lord Chancellor
Ellesmere 187, 198
Elizabeth I 131, 150, 159, 162–4,
167 n55, 177, 183, 192
Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury see
Bess of Hardwick
emblems 157, 161–3
embroiderers
amateur 150–2, 155
professional 150, 152, 155, 157

embroidery 6, 9, 11, 12
creativity and 153–4, 157
gifts of 151, 162–4
empathy 8, 47
epistolarity see letters; letter writing
equity, law and culture of 188–9,
196–7, 199, 202
Erickson, Peter 176
Erler, Mary C. 1
eucharist 48, 50, 67, 70–1, 75, 78,
81, 134
exemplum, exempla 34–47, 97–8, 100
faith 7, 34, 36, 40, 43–5, 47, 112, 133
families see also kinship 4–5, 8,
11–12, 24, 43, 46–7, 70, 72, 85,
88, 96, 99, 100, 140, 145, 151,
188, 191, 199
Fastolf, John 88
fathers 5, 22, 25, 28, 45–6, 61, 86,
98–9, 100–1, 112–14, 116, 118,
120–1, 123, 128 n33, 130 n66,
140, 143, 162–3, 182, 196, 199
fear 3–4, 7–9, 11, 13, 35, 39,
43–5, 47, 78–9, 84–5, 87,
89, 90, 93, 101–2, 106–24,
127 n24, 128 n41, 144
Feryby, William 76–7, 79
Field, P.J.C. 94
Five Wounds 68, 74–5, 83 n35
flattery 26, 94
Forest of Galtres 70, 80
fornication, see also sexual
misconduct 41
Fortier, Mark 199
Fourth Lateran Council 5, 10, 34,
35, 47
Foucault, Michel 2
France 8, 32 n27, 51, 53–5, 74, 88,
96, 131, 134
French Church, see Threadneedle St
French language 4, 8, 36, 51–63,
131, 143, 151, 169, 183, 197
French territories, English-held 84–5,
88–9, 92
friendship 19, 24–7, 32 n33, 55, 58,
77–8, 80, 89, 116–17, 121, 128
n41, 136, 140–1, 161, 170, 174,
178–9, 181–2, 189

Index
Frost, William 69, 74
frustration 134, 144, 172, 202
Frye, Susan 156, 158–9
Galsworthy, John 187
Gammerl, Benno 7
Gascoigne, Sir William 67
gentry 11, 67, 84–6, 88–92, 95–6,
101–2
George Plantagenet, Duke of
Clarence 91
Goldberg, P.J.P. 3, 10, 66–83
as author
Gouge, William 111, 127 n20
governance 1, 3, 12, 18–19, 21–2,
25–6, 29, 30, 34, 47, 52, 66–81,
84, 86–8, 101, 106–8, 133, 144,
177, 179, 183, 196, 202
Gower, John 10, 51–8, 62
Gowing, Laura 192
grace 45
Grantham, Agnes 76, 78–80,
83 n40
gratitude 20, 23, 39
grief 52, 58–9, 151, 160, 163–4
Grindal, Edward, Bishop of
London 131
Grosseteste, Robert, Rules of 20
guilt 41, 122
Handlyng Synne 5, 7, 34–47
Harriss, Gerald 89
hatred 93, 97, 200
Hatton, Sir Christopher,
Lord Chancellor 192
Healaugh 77
Henry IV 3, 10, 51, 66–70, 73–5,
80–82
Henry V 57, 79, 88, 94
Henry VI 87, 92
Henry VII 87–8, 92, 94
Henry VIII 162
hermits 40–1
Herun, Gerard 75
Hicks, Michael 85
Ho, Cynthia 41
honour 5, 26, 59, 77, 89, 93, 97,
112, 191–2, 202, 204 n7
horror 35, 47

225

household 5–6, 11, 13, 20, 26, 69,
70, 75–6, 78–9, 86, 90, 97–101,
106–24, 139, 143, 150, 157–8,
194–5
Huguenots 3, 5, 7–8, 11, 131–45
humility 54, 97, 114, 136–7, 174
humour 35, 180–1
Hundred Years War 60, 88, 90,
92, 95
husbands 22–4, 26, 28, 30 n31, 57,
59, 76–9, 113, 130 n66, 137–8,
141, 143, 150, 161, 172, 182,
193–4, 197
Huston, Nancy 53–4
identity
moral 95
national 8, 85, 87, 91
self 4, 8, 55, 63, 74, 159, 202
imprisonment 10, 12, 51, 59,
60, 61, 67, 76, 77, 80, 120, 138,
139, 150, 157, 160, 162, 164,
166 n 30, 199
inadequacy, feelings of 54, 58
influence 1–4, 6, 8, 9, 12, 13, 39, 42,
69, 72, 80, 99, 101, 151, 169, 181,
189, 192, 197
insults 134–5, 139, 143, 145
James VI and I 192
Jefferson, Judith 51
Jews 43–5, 47, 175
Joan of Arc 74
Jones, E.D. 89
Joughin, John J. 183
judges 4, 9, 12, 119, 196, 202
Kangas, Sini 2
Karras, Ruth Mazo 5
Keen, Maurice 89
Kempe, Margery 53, 50 n34
Kenley, John de 75, 78
kinship 4, 21–3, 26, 41, 75, 77, 79,
89, 106, 116–17, 121, 188–91,
193, 195–6, 199
kindness 190
Klinck, Dennis 198
Korpiola, Mia 2
Kowaleski, Maryanne 1

226

Index

laity 5, 34–8, 40, 45, 47, 67–8, 75
lament 9, 44, 53, 59
Lancastrians 87, 92
Lancre, Nicolas 134
Landreth, David 177
Łaski, Jan 131
Latin 27, 36, 51, 53, 57, 68, 76, 100,
168, 178–9
law 2–5, 8–9, 11–12, 19, 21–3, 28–9,
41–2, 45, 49 n16, 50 n31, 67, 86,
89, 116, 118–19, 129 n63, 187–203
Canon law 76–7
lechery, see also sexual
misconduct 5, 7–8, 10, 34–47
legitimation 2, 6, 19, 22–5, 66, 71,
84, 87, 100, 142, 195, 198
Legrand, Jacques 96
Lerer, Seth 168
Letters 4, 6, 9, 10, 18–30, 140, 142,
168–83
parts of: salutatio 20, 21, 26,
27, 29; narratio 20, 23, 28;
conclusio 20, 23, 25
of women 4, 6, 9, 10, 12, 19, 20,
22, 23, 26, 28, 168–183,
letter writing
manuals 4, 12, 20, 169–71, 174–5,
177, 179–82
role of scribes in 20, 26
rules of 18, 20–1, 23, 26, 29, 170;
see also letters, parts of
Levey, Santina 150, 152, 154, 161
Liddy, Christian 69
Lincoln, Evelyn 155
Lincolnshire 40–1
loathing 9, 187
London 3–5, 11, 12, 28, 74, 100,
120–2, 131–45, 152, 155–6,
190, 196
Newgate 142
Westminster 140
love 7, 10, 13, 35, 40, 42–3, 45, 46,
50 n34, 51–63, 66, 78–81, 93,
100, 106–7, 111–12, 114–15, 127
n24, 130 n66, 133, 143, 151, 169,
172–83
loyalty 13, 27–9, 88–9, 178
Lucar, Elizabeth: 155–6, 159, 163
Lutz, Catherine A. 7

Mack, Peter 170
Maddern, Philippa xii, xiii 2,
7, 8–9, 20, 63, 89, 124, 189,
193, 197
madness 58
Magnusson, Lynne 171, 175
Maidstone, Clement 68, 71
Malory, Thomas 91–3
Mannyng, Robert 5, 8, 10, 20,
34–47
Manuel des Pechiez 35, 36, 38, 49
marriage, forced, see abduction
marriage, irregular 132, 140–3,
Mary I 132
Mary, Queen of Scots 150, 157–63
mass 45–7, 71, 75–6
McCulloch, D. 89
McCullough, Eleanor 75
McIlroy, Claire 34
McIntosh, Marjorie 86
McKeon, Michael 201
McNamer, Sarah 53, 58
memory and commemoration 3, 39,
42, 68, 70–2, 78–9, 161
menstruation 136
merchants 73, 84–6, 90–1, 94, 96,
99, 101–2, 192
mercy 40–1, 73, 111, 115, 201
misery 43, 191
mockery 135, 144
monks 40–1
morality
anxieties with standards 84–6,
88–90, 92–102
regulation 3, 7, 10–11, 34–47,
57, 86, 96–102, 107, 112–14,
131–45
embroidery and 12, 151,
158–9, 163
mothers 5–6, 26, 45–6, 58, 70,
74, 86, 98–9, 112–13, 116,
121–3, 127 n33, 128 n41,
136, 140, 143, 161, 170, 182,
189, 194
mourning, see also grief 59, 77, 80,
159, 161
Muldrew, Craig 190–91
multilingualism 52–3
Murphy, Terence 117, 119

Index
Neal, Kathleen 6, 9, 10, 12, 18–33
as author
neighbourly relations 3–5, 11–12,
46, 75, 77–8, 130 n66, 133, 137,
143, 145, 188, 190–1, 198
Norwich 139
nuns 44
obedience 7–8, 11, 24, 28, 107,
111–13, 115–17, 124, 194
Orleans, Charles of 10, 51–2, 55,
59, 62
Orlin, Lena Cowen 159
Ovid 180–1
parables 40, 47
Parasole, Elizabeth Catanea:
155–6, 165
parents, see also mothers and
fathers 8, 11, 46, 86, 98–100,
106–7, 110–12, 114–16, 118,
121–2, 124, 140, 143, 180
Parker, Rozsika 152–4, 156
Parr, Katherine 162–3, 167 n55
passions 9, 42, 176, 189, 193, 199
Paston family 89, 128 n44
patronage 24–6, 66, 69, 70, 73, 75,
78, 153
pattern books: 151–2, 154–7
Pavement Hours 70, 75
penance 40, 49, 135
penitence 37, 41–3, 135–7
Perkins, William 198
persuasion 1, 8, 10, 12–13, 18–9, 23,
27, 29, 35, 39, 40, 52, 55, 170,
172, 174–5, 180–2, 191–2, 198
Pérault, Guillaume 35
Percy, Henry, Earl of
Northumberland 67
Pizan, Christine de 53, 56, 59–60,
90, 97
plays and drama 3–4, 9, 12, 57, 66,
72–3, 186–3, 199
Plutchik, Robert 187, 195
poets 4, 10, 51–63, 95, 181
politics 3, 6, 10–11, 18–9, 24–5,
27–9, 51–2, 60, 62, 72–3, 84–102,
106, 142, 150, 157, 159, 160–4
Pollock, Linda 189, 190

227

Pratt, Mary Louise 95
precept 34–9, 43, 47, 110, 112, 175
pregnancy 136
pride 88, 97, 192
priests 35, 40–1, 43, 45–6, 71, 76,
78, 97, 116, 135, 169, 170
print 3–5, 7–9, 11, 12, 84–7, 90–1,
96, 100–2, 110, 131, 151–8, 163,
170–1, 177, 180–3, 188, 201, 203
Putter, Ad 51
rage 9, 176, 187, 199
Randles, Sarah 6, 9, 11, 150–67
as author
rape 77, 79, 83 n40, 108, 121–3, 129
n63, 181, 201
readers and recipients see also
audiences 3, 5, 8, 10–12, 29, 34,
36–8, 40, 43, 47, 52, 54, 56, 58,
62, 68, 85–8, 91–3, 97, 101, 158,
175, 177, 179, 187
Reddy, William 55
Rees Jones, Sarah 74
refugees 3, 11, 131–45, 172
reputation 5, 74, 89, 93, 122, 143,
173, 179, 191–2
respectability 79
revenge 80, 107, 117, 176
Revolt of 1405 66–7, 69
Richard I 94
Richard II 51, 57, 66
Richard III 87, 88, 90, 92, 94
Riddy, Felicity 74, 91
Ripon 68
Rolle, Richard 34
Rosenthal, Joel T. 88
Rosenwein, Barbara H. 7
rumour 137, 139
sacraments 34, 36, 44, 50, 71, 142
salvation 38–9, 42, 43, 45, 68
samplers 154–5
Sandwich 138–9
Satan 43–5
scandal 95, 139, 143, 201
Scanlon, Larry 39
scorn 135
Scott, Anne M. 5, 7, 8, 10, 34–50
as author

228

Index

scripture 35, 42
Scrope, Henry 70
Scrope, Richard, Archbishop of
York 3, 10, 66–75, 78–82
seduction 41, 42, 175–7, 181
self, see identity
self-expression 11–12, 163
self-harm 11, 120
self-governance 10, 89, 93, 97, 101
Sempringham 36
sermons 35, 38–9, 73
servants 69, 74, 76–7, 79, 81, 86,
90, 98, 101, 107–8, 110–15,
117–21, 126 n16, 128 n40,
129 n60, 129 n61, 172
sexual experimentation 42
sexual misconduct 3–5, 7–8, 10–11,
34–47, 77, 79, 83 n40, 108,
121–23, 133, 136–40, 142–5
sexually transmitted diseases 41
Shakespeare, William 4, 8–9, 11, 57,
164, 168–83, 200
Shepard, Alexandra 190
shame 11, 41, 93–5, 98–9, 101, 111,
114–15, 122, 134, 137, 144, 178
Shipton Moor 67, 69. 74, 80
shock 7, 133
sin 5, 8, 10, 34–47, 93, 111, 135–6,
158, 200
St Sitha, servant saint 74, 82 n31
Smith, Charlotte 187
sociability 11–12, 21, 23–4, 29,
137–41, 161, 164, 191
sociolinguistics 51–3, 60
sodomy 122–3, 129 n63
sons 45–7, 67, 74–6, 87, 98–9, 100
sorrow and sadness 39, 56, 136–7, 161
speech, women’s 4, 6–7, 12, 57,
134–5, 179, 180
Staples, Kathleen 156
stepmothers 130 n66, 162–3,
167 n55
Stern, Tiffany 171
Stewart, Alan 171
Stretton, Tim 190–2
Stroud, Michael 94
submission see also obedience 4, 11,
69, 107, 113, 135–6, 139, 140,
143, 145

suffering 56, 68, 164
suicide 117–20, 123, 128 n45
summa 35, 48
supervision 11, 133–45
support networks 10, 66, 69, 71,
75, 80, 100, 108, 116–7, 120–23,
130 n67, 131, 132, 142–3, 145,
172, 197
surprise 8, 133, 138
suspicion 89, 122, 127 n33, 140,
142, 189
sympathy 12, 80, 135,173, 175, 178,
180, 182
tanners 66, 73
Tarbin, Stephanie 4, 8, 11, 106–30
as author
tears 133, 135, 161
temptation 40, 42, 45, 47, 193
terror 43–7, 107, 112, 114–15
Threadneedle St Church, London 3,
5, 7, 11, 131–45
unchastity 40, 97
Valois, Isabella of 57
vernacular 27, 36, 53, 86, 197
Vickers, Brian 170
violence, assault and destruction 2,
43, 67, 76–7, 79, 87, 108, 121–4,
128 n44, 129 n61, 135, 142
virginity 41, 74
virtue 5, 11–12, 39, 57, 79, 80,
85, 87, 89, 93–5, 97–9, 111,
114, 130 n66, 151, 158–9,
163, 190, 197
Vitas Patrum 35, 48
de Vitry, Jacques 39, 48–9
Vives, Juan Luis 12, 113–14, 180
Walker, Garthine 122
Walter, John 2, 195
War of the Roses 84–5, 87, 92
Wardle, Patricia 162
Watton, John 75
Watts, John 87
‘weapons of the weak’,
concept of 195
Whigham Frank 175

Index
widowers 77, 79, 128 n44, 142
widows 6, 22–3, 28, 71,
76–80, 134, 140, 142,
188, 190, 193, 197
Wierzbicka, Anna 52, 55
William of Waddington 35, 49
Wilson, Thomas 175
Windsor 169, 170, 172, 177–83
wives 23–4, 29, 41, 45–6, 57,
61–2, 73, 77–8, 86, 132, 134–5,
137–44
Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn 34, 51
Woodville, Anthony, Earl Rivers 91
Worcester, William 87–9
Wyclif, John(?) 111, 114
Wylie, James 78

York 3, 10, 66–81, 87
All Saints, North Street 66, 69,
73, 76
All Saints, Pavement 75
Coppergate 75, 77
Court of York 67, 76, 77, 80
Keepers of 69, 71
Mayor of 66, 69, 71, 73
Minster (cathedral) 68, 70, 76
Petergate 76, 77, 79
Province of York 74
Yorkists 87–8, 92
Zaller, Robert 2
Zita of Lucca see St Sitha
Zucker, Adam 169

229