Abstract
In June 1623, Jane Sellars was discovered idle on the streets of Norwich and promptly dispatched to the town’s Bridewell to be put to work ‘till she be reteyned in service’. This was the first in a long string of offences which was to give Sellars the rather dubious distinction of being one of the most prosecuted individuals in late Jacobean and early Caroline Norwich.1 In April 1624, she was again found ‘livinge idely’ in the city. In Michaelmas 1625, Thomas Robinson of Yarmouth retained her for one year, but she broke her covenant and ran back to Norwich where the beadles discovered her Vagrant’ in April 1626. After the statutory whipping, the bench issued a pass and told her to return to Robinson, but Sellars never left Norwich and was back in Bridewell a few days later. At her discharge in August she was allowed two days to leave the city. Typically Sellars ignored the order, and was discovered ‘vagrant and out of service’ in October 1626 and was once again committed to Bridewell ‘till she be reteyned in service’. She was probably discharged without such employment, however, for she was picked up idle in November 1626 and confined in Bridewell ‘till further order’. In 1627, she ran away from two different masters, and in October found herself back inside the now familiar walls of Norwich Bridewell where she also celebrated Christmas 1628.
I must thank John Beattie, Bernard Capp, Peter King, Brian Outhwaite, Roger Schofield, Paul Slack, Keith Wrightson and my fellow editors for their very helpful suggestions in the preparation of this chapter. My earlier thoughts on this subject were given to seminars in Cambridge, London, Oxford, Toronto and Warwick, and I am very grateful for the constructive comments of the participants.
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Notes and References
H. Becker is quoted by R. V. Ericson, Criminal Reactions: The Labelling Perspective (Lexington, 1975), p. 112.
Cf. G. Germani, Marginality (NewJersey, 1990), p. 50.
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D. Downes and P. Rock, Understanding Deviance: A Guide to the Sociology of Crime and Rule Breaking, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1988), pp. 178–9;
P. Rock, ‘The Sociology of Crime, Symbolic Interactionism and Some Problematic Qualities of Radical Criminology’, in D. Downes and P. Rock (eds), Deviant Interpretations (Oxford, 1979), pp. 69–70; Ericson, Criminal Reactions, pp. 34, 38, 83, 95–6;
P. Burke, Sociology and History (London, 1980), p. 58.
Downes and Rock, Understanding Deviance, p. 150; S. Box, Deviance, Reality and Sodety (London, 1971), pp. 31, 39–41, 49.
For example by B. Geremek, The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Pans (English trans., Cambridge, 1987), pp. 121, 286, 288.
This is a principal theme of my new book about early modern youth. See P. Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560–1640 (Oxford, 1996).
M. Mitterauer, A History of Youth (English trans., Oxford, 1993), pp. 115, 131;
I. Krausman Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (New Haven, 1994), pp. 205–6.
P. Laslett, Family Life and Elicit Love in Earlier Generations (Cambridge, 1977), p. 44. Much of the recent research has been conveniently sum- marised in
G. Mayhew, ‘Life-Cycle, Service and the Family Unit in Early Modern Rye’, Continuity and Change, vol. 6 (1991), pp. 201–26.
See especially Mayhew, ‘Life-Cycle, Service and the Family Unit’; R. Wall, ‘Leaving Home and the Process of Household-Formation in Pre-Industrial England’, Continuity and Change, vol. 2 (1987), pp. 77–101.
See A. Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1981), p. 3;
A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640 (London, 1985), p. 23.
Elizabeth I c. 3. Cf. T. Hitchcock, ‘Paupers and Preachers: The SPCK and the Parochial Workhouse Movement’, in L. Davison et al. (eds), Stilling the Grumbling Hive: The Response to Social and Economic Problems in England, 1689–1750 (Stroud, 1992), pp. 145–66.
Quoted in W. Hunt, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution in an English County (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), p. 250.
Quoted by I. Pinchbeck and M. Hewitt, Children in English Society, Volume I: From Tudor Times to the Eighteenth Century (London, 1969), p. 235.
NAM 4, fol. 139v. Cf. E. M. Leonard, The Early History of English Poor Relief (London, 1965), p. 244.
In Italy, young female migrants were described as being ‘out of place’. See S. Cohen, The Evolution of Women’s Asylums Since 1500: From Refuges for Ex-Prostitutes to Shelters for Battered Wives (New York, 1992), pp. 62, 79.
Cf. K. S. Martin (ed.), Records of Maidstone Being Selections From Documents in the Possession of the Corporation (Maidstone, 1926), p. 23.
The source is J. F. Pound (ed.), The Norwich Census of the Poor, 1570, Norfolk Record Society, vol. 40 (Norwich, 1971).
For example, by D. Woodward, ‘The Background to the Statute of Artificers: The Genesis of Labour Policy, 1558–1563’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, vol. 33 (1980), pp. 32–46.
R. H. Tawney and E. Power (eds), Tudor Economic Documents, Vol. III: Pamphlets, Memoranda and Literary Extracts (London, 1924), pp. 345, 356, 363.
7 James I c. 3; B. H. Cunnington (ed.), Some Annals of the Borough of Devizes (Devizes, 1925), p. 83. Cf. the fears expressed by the Wiltshire Bench in 1655 discussed by
A. Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces: The Government of Stuart England (New Haven, 1986), p. 220. It has been argued that cases of being ‘out of service’ were part of a dual concern to ‘keep wages down’ and to assert patriarchal authority. See
J. Innes, ‘Prisons for the Poor: English Bridewells, 1555–1800’, in F. Snyder and D. Hay (eds), Labour, Law and Crime: An Historical Perspective (London, 1987), p. 48.
Including the opportunity to pursue alternative sources of income. See M. Roberts, ‘“Words They Are Women and Deeds They Are Men”: Images of Work and Gender in Early Modern England’, in L. Charles and L. Duffin (eds), Women and Work in Pre-Industrial England (London, 1985), p. 157.
J. P. Earwaker (ed.), The Court Leet Records of the Manor of Manchester … 1552 to … 1686, 6 vols (Manchester, 1884–90), vol. I, p. 241; vol. II, pp. 37, 43.
Cf. Geremek, Margins of Sodety, p. 221, on suspicions of immorality with respect to single women of the ‘popular and plebeian classes’ who lived ‘outside the context of the family’; E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London, 1991), ch. 2, esp. p. 501;
P.J. P. Goldberg, Women, Work and Life-Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire, c. 1300–1520 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 299–300; Cohen, Evolution of Women’s Asylums, pp. 62, 79.
M. E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 62, 23, 99, 62, 89; Goldberg, Women, Work and Life-Cycle, p. 299.
The operation and character of the Mayor’s Court is examined in greater detail in J. F. Pound, Tudor and Stuart Norwich (Chichester, 1988), ch. 9;
J. T. Evans, Seventeenth-Century Norwich: Politics, Religion and Government, 1620–1690 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 58–9, 85. The City Quarter Sessions were used less frequently for these sorts of petty disorders, though as we shall see, a few masterless youths were prosecuted there. The records of the Mayor’s Court, however, survive in an unbroken series for the entire period 1560–1645, and this permits us to quantify and tabulate with some confidence.
See A. L. Beier, ‘Vagrants and the Social Order in Elizabethan England’, Past and Present, vol. 64 (1974), pp. 9–10;
P. Slack, ‘Vagrants and Vagrancy in England, 1598–1644’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, vol. 27 (1974), reprinted in
P. Clark and D. Souden (eds), Migration and Society in Early Modern England (London, 1987), p. 54; Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth, chs 2–4. Cf. Goldberg, Women, Work and Life-Cycle, pp. 282, 292, 294.
A. Salerno, ‘The Social Background of Seventeenth Century Emigration to America’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 19 (1979), p. 38. The difficulties in placing parish apprentices can be partly followed in the State Papers. See, e.g., Public Record Office SP 16/239/6, 16/240/35, 16/250/2, 16/250/10, 16/259/15, 16/266/72. See also
P. Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1988), p. 142;
T. G. Barnes, Somerset, 1625–1640: A County’s Government During the Personal Rule‘ (London, 1961), p. 200; Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces, p. 216.
P. Clark, The English Alehouse: A Sodal History, 1200–1830 (London, 1983), p. 139.
A. L. Beier, Masterkss Men: The Problem of Vagrancy in England, 1560–1640 (London, 1985), pp. 20, 47, 55.
Salerno, ‘Social Background’, p. 38. Cf. D. Souden, ‘“Rogues, Whores and Vagabonds?” Indentured Servant Emigration to North America, and the Case of Mid-Seventeenth-Century Bristol’, Social History, vol. 3 (1978), p. 27; Beier, Masterless Men, pp. 161–3;
D. Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication Between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 63, 68.
The best recent summary of research is D. M. Palliser, The Age of Elizabeth: England Under the Late Tudors, 2nd edn (London, 1992), ch. 7. See also
J. Barry, ‘Introduction’, in Barry (ed.), The Tudor, and Stuart Town 1530–1688: A Reader in English Urban History (London, 1990), pp. 1–34. Cf. Beier, Masterless Men, pp. 39–40.
See, e.g., V. Pearl, ‘Change and Stability in Seventeenth-Century London’, London Journal, vol. 5 (1979), reprinted in Barry (ed.), Tudor and Stuart Town, pp. 139–65;
S. Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London (Cambridge, 1989);
J. Boulton, Neighbourhood and Society: A London Suburb in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1987).
See I. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge, 1991);
P. Clark, ‘A Crisis Contained? The Condition of English Towns in the 1590s’, in Clark (ed.), The European Crisis of the 1590s (London, 1985), pp. 44–66.
P. Corfield, ‘A Provincial Capital in the Late Seventeenth Century: The Case of Norwich’, in P. Clark and P. Slack (eds), Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500–1700: Essays in Urban History (London, 1972), pp. 263–310; Evans, Seventeenth-Century Norwich, pp. 4–5.
J. Patten, English Towns, 1500–1700 (Folkestone, 1978), pp. 294–5.
See W. Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (London, 1622), p. 535; H. Cunningham, ‘The Employment and Unemployment of Children in England c.1680–1851’, Past and Present, vol. 126 (1990), p. 126. A recent study of women and gender in early modern Europe has noted that ‘authorities at times even tried to prevent grown daughters from continuing to live with their parents, arguing that parents gave them too much freedom which causes “nothing but shame, immodesty, wantonness and immorality”, with their idleness leading to “tearing hedges, robbing orchards, beggaring their fathers” ‘, Wiesner, Women and Gender, p. 99.
The sources are NMC 12–16 and 20. Of the 313 cases, 61 were prosecuted for being ‘at their own hand’ and 252 for being ‘out of service’. The chronology of prosecutions for both offences follows the same pattern. See P. Griffiths, ‘Some Aspects of the Social History of Youth in Early Modern England, with Particular Reference to the Period, c.1560–c.1640’ (unpublished University of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1992), p. 353 (table 6.3).
For example at the parish vestries of Finchingfield and Braintree in Essex, F. G. Emmison (ed.), Early Essex Town Meetings (Chichester, 1970), pp. 9, 15, 23–4, 46, 57–8, 63, 65, 78, 92, 115–16, 122, 126; in Maidstone, Martin (ed.), Records of Maidstone pp. 23, 72; in
Dorchester, D. Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1992), p. 82; and in Bedworth (Warwickshire),
S. C. Ratcliff and H. C. Johnson (eds), Warwick County Records, 5 vols (Warwick, 1935–9), vol. V, pp. 212, 217. For London cases, see Guildhall Library (London) Courtbooks of London Bridewell, vol. 4, fols 153, 186, 278, 312v, 320, 348v, 349, 356, 363, 370, 374, ; vol. 5, fols 61v, 80, 111, 118, 130, 168v, 308v; [C]orporation of [L]ondon [R]ecord [O]ffice Journals of Common Council [hereafter Jour.] 29, fol. 20v; 32, fol. 319; Repertories of the Court of Aldermen, 34, fol. 288. Interestingly, the gender bias was equally pronounced in these dispersed locations. Cf. Roberts, ‘“Words They Are Women”, pp. 157ff;
R. Thompson, Sex in Middlesex: Popular Mores in a Massachusetts County, 1649–1699(Amherst, 1986), pp. 89, 91–2; Thompson, ‘AdolescentCulture in Colonial Massachusetts’, Journal of Family History, vol. 9 (1984), p. 134. The tensions under review here also affected late medieval towns. See
M. D. Harris (ed.), The Coventry Leet Book: Or Mayor’s Register Containing the Records of the City Court Leet or View of Frankpledge AD 1420–1555, 4 parts, Early English Text Society, original series, nos 134, 135, 138, 146 (London, 1907–13), part II, pp. 545, 568.
Cf. Innes, ‘Prisons for the Poor’, pp. 54, 57, 76; J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1986), p. 562 (table 10.6).
The chronology of plague in Norwich can be followed in P. Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1985), pp. 126–43.
J. Walter, ‘The Social Economy of Dearth in Early Modern England’, in J. Walter and R. S. Schofield (eds), Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 126–8. Cf. Slack, Impact of Plague, chs 10–11; Slack, Poverty and Policy, pp. 143–5; Pound, Tudor and Stuart Norwich, pp. 116, 122.
Slack, Impact of Plague, pp. 181–4, 188; R. S. Schofield and E. A. Wrigley, ‘Infant and Child Mortality in England in the Late Tudor and Early Stuart Period’, in C. Webster (ed.), Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 61–95, Cf. CLRO Jour. 26, fol. 172.
Cf. P. Sharpe, ‘Poor Children as Apprentices in Colyton, 1598–1830’, Continuity and Change, vol. 6 (1991), pp. 259–60 who finds large rises in the number of pauper apprentices in times of ‘specific distress’ like dearth, high prices, the Dutch Wars and related trade depression. In Colyton, the year of the highest number of apprenticeships (1647) was a year of plague and high prices.
D. Underdown, ‘The Taming of the Scold: The Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England’, in A. Fletcher and J. Stevenson (eds), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 116–32. Sadly Underdown confines his thoughts about being ‘out of service’ to a single sentence (p. 119). Further, he simply assumes that these cases are gender-specific without investigating the sex ratio of offenders, or indeed, the precise tensions which lay behind them.
J. A. Sharpe, Early Modem England: A Sodal History, 1550–1750 (London, 1987), p. 80.
I have followed the discussion of sex ratios in E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 224–6. Cf. D. Souden, ‘Migrants and the Population Structure of Late Seventeenth Century Provincial Cities and Market Towns’, in P. Clark (ed.), The Transformation of English Provincial Towns, 1660–1800 (London, 1984), pp. 99–132; Pound, Norwich Census of the Poor, appendix 1.
Cf. Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth, ch. 6; Ben-Amos, ‘Women Apprentices in the Trades and Crafts of Early Modern Bristol’, Continuity and Change, vol. 6 (1991), pp. 227–52; Sharpe, ‘Poor Children as Apprentices’, p. 259;
M. Roberts, ‘Women and Work in Sixteenth Century English Towns’, in P. Corfield and D. Keene (eds), Work in Towns, 850–1850 (Leicester, 1990), p. 91. training of young women in this period is more fully explored in Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth, pp. 145–50.
NMC 14, fos 83, 46; 12, fol. 640. Cf. R. A. Houston, Social Change in the Age of the Enlightenment: Edinburgh, 1660–1760 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 80, 139, 181–2. Wiesner, Working Women in Renaissance Germany (New Brunswick, 1986), pp. 88–9.
43 Elizabeth I c.2; 7 James I c.4, Cf. R. B. Shoemaker, Prosecution and Punishment: Petty Crime and the Law in London and Rural Middlesex c.1660–1725 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 168–70.
See, e.g., Slack, Impact of Plague, esp. ch. 2; M. Healy, ‘Discourses of the Plague in Early Modern London’, in J. A. I. Champion (ed.), Epidemic Disease in London, Centre for Metropolitan History Working Papers Series (London, 1993), pp. 19–34.
See Evans, Seventeenth-Century Norwich, pp. 84–6, 96–7; Pound, Tudor and Stuart Norwich, p. 87; P. Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 141–5; Slack, Poverty and Policy, p. 119.
Evans, Seventeenth-Century Norwich, p. 96; Pound, Tudor and Stuart Norwich, p. 85. The emergence of new groups is fully examined in Evans, Seventeenth-Century Norwich, chs 2–3; and Pound, Tudor and Stuart Norwich, pp. 78–82. One indication of this shift in the distribution of influence in municipal politics was the number of disputed elections in this period; another was the controversy about the appointment of lecturers; see Evans, Seventeenth-Century Norwich, pp. 66–79, 84–96; Pound, Tudor and Stuart Norwich, pp. 88–90; P. King, ‘Bishop Wren and the Suppression of the Norwich Lecturers’, Historical Journal, vol. 11 (1968), pp. 237–54. ‘By the 1620s Puritanism was a socially respectable movement with deep roots and its leaders were among the towns élite’ — Evans, Seventeenth-Century Norwich, p.102.
Though this decline was gradual and more rapid in certain trades; others retained tight control over entry through service. See. C. Brooks, ‘Apprenticeship, Social Mobility and the Middling Sort, 1550–1800’, in J. Barry and C. Brooks (eds), The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550–1800 (London, 1994), pp. 54–62. Cf.
K. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1985), chs 2 and 5; Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry, chs 2, 6 and 7.
E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common, pp. 36–42, 352–403. See also the contribution of John Rule to this volume, Chapter 9 below; and M. J. Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law and Policy in England, 1830–1914 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 17–19, 51.
Smith’s position is discussed in H. Hendrick, Images of Youth: Age, Class and the Male Youth Problem, 1820–1920 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 15–16.
Quoted by A. J. Randall, Before the Luddites: Custom, Community and Machinery in the English Woollen Industry, 1776–1809 (Cambridge, 1991), p. 243.
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Griffiths, P. (1996). Masterless Young People in Norwich, 1560–1645. In: Griffiths, P., Fox, A., Hindle, S. (eds) The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England. Themes in Focus. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24834-6_6
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