Daily Life in Elizabethan England (9 page)

Because the Common Law courts could be unwieldy, expensive, and

sometimes unduly influenced by the power and wealth of the parties involved, the Crown also had Equity courts. Equity courts functioned under the principles of Civil Law developed by the Romans and were not bound by the often tortuous traditions of Common Law. These courts included the Court of Chancery, the Court of Requests, and the Court of Star Chamber. Sometimes known as prerogative courts, since they were based on royal prerogative as opposed to Common Law, these courts were used by the Tudors to deal with overmighty subjects and were often favored by commoners as a means to seek redress more swiftly and cheaply than might be possible in the Common Law courts—and the Equity courts had the additional advantage of conducting their proceedings fully in English, without the heavy admixture of French and Latin legal jargon that pre-vailed in Common Law.

Civil Law also governed the operations of the Court of Admiralty,

which had jurisdiction over cases relating to the high seas and the ecclesiastical courts of the episcopal hierarchy. In addition to Common, Equity,
THE WORK OF A CONSTABLE

If two men be fighting together in a house (the doors being shut), yet may such an officer break open the doors, to cause the peace to be kept, though none of the parties have taken hurt. And . . . such an officer may carry them before a Justice of the Peace, to find surety for the peace, because they have broken the peace already. . . But if any of the parties to an affray have received any dangerous hurt, then ought such officer to arrest him that did the hurt, and to carry him to the gaol, there to remain till he find surety to appear at the next gaol delivery . . . The fact may fall out to be a felony, if so be that he which was hurt do happen to die within one year and a day next following such hurt done.

William Lambard,
The Duties of Constables, Borsholders, Tithingmen, and Other Such
Low Officers of the Peace
(London: R. Newberry and H. Bynneman, 1583), 15–16.

Society 35

and Civil Law, the legal system also embraced
customary
law, consisting of traditional laws and practices that were specific to particular communities or shires, applied in the local courts of boroughs, hundreds, and manors.

Multiple legal jurisdictions and systems of practice made for a complex system that could be exploited to advantage by those who knew its workings. With various courts available as potential avenues for pursuing a case, plaintiffs often steered toward those which they felt would be more advantageous, while defendants might lodge countersuits in alternative courts. Voluminous legal records show that Elizabethan England was a highly litigious society, where even ordinary people were remarkably familiar with the law and willing to use it when they had a grievance, often using legal pressure as a tactic in securing a satisfactory out-of-court settlement. In 1580, the courts of Queen’s Bench and Common Pleas handled over 13,000 cases at an advanced stage of litigation—suggesting that 1 household in 10 might have been involved in a case involving one of the central national courts. In 1602, the manor court of Keevil cum Bulking-ton dealt with over 130 prosecutions, encompassing matters from playing of unlawful games to failure to clean out watercourses.

Professional law enforcement did not exist, and the functions of the modern police force were largely fulfilled by unpaid part-time officials. At the local level, two important institutions were the town watch, responsible for patrolling the streets of a town at night, and the parish constable, Administering the law. [Furnivall (1879)]

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Daily Life in Elizabethan England

the closest thing to a local policeman. When a crime was alleged, it was the constable’s job to apprehend the accused and bring them before the appropriate authority. If the accused evaded capture, the constable was supposed to raise the hue and cry in the parish, calling on all inhabitants to find the suspect, and sending word on to the neighboring parishes as necessary. The actual administration of justice depended on the case. A trivial matter might be handled summarily by a justice of the peace. If the offense was more serious, the accused would need to be brought before a higher court, either being jailed in the meantime, or bound over to appear before the court if there was little reason to fear an attempt to evade justice.

Punishment

The most serious crimes were treason, murder, and a range of crimes classed as felonies, including manslaughter, rape, sodomy, arson, witchcraft, burglary, robbery, and grand larceny (theft of goods worth at least 12 pence). All these offenses carried a mandatory death sentence, making juries sometimes reluctant to convict in felony cases: one Justice complained that “most commonly the simple countryman or woman, looking no further into the loss of their own goods, are of opinion that they would not procure a man’s death for all the goods in the world,” so that “upon promise to have their goods again [they] will give faint evidence, if they be not strictly looked into by the Justice.”7

Someone convicted of a capital crime could escape death through a par-don from the crown. In the case of most felonies, it was also possible for men to plead
benefit of clergy
(this option was not open to women). In the Middle Ages the clergy had been exempt from secular punishment for felony, an exemption that extended to any man who could prove he was able to read. A version of the custom was still in use in the late 1500s. Benefit of clergy could only be exercised once: the convict would be branded on the thumb to mark that he had exercised this privilege (technically, he had been defrocked as a clergyman). Benefit of clergy was not available to those convicted of the most serious felonies, such as burglary and robbery.

Most execution was by hanging, although some crimes such as poisoning and heresy were punishable by burning, and treason was punishable by the triple punishment of hanging, drawing (disemboweling), and quartering (cutting the body into quarters). Nonfelonious crimes might be subject to lesser forms of corporal punishment, such as whipping, branding, or loss of a body part such as a hand or ear. Lesser punishments included fines and rituals of public humiliation, including confinement in the stocks or the pillory. The pillory confined both the head and hands: the convict was held immobile in a standing position, and vulnerable to the abuse of passersby. The stocks confined only the legs, and most of the time only one leg was secured; the stocks were often used simply as a means of restraint rather than punishment.

Society 37

THE SOCIAL SPECTRUM IN ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL, LONDON

What whispering is there . . . how by some slight to cheat the poor country client of his full purse that is stuck under his girdle? What plots are laid to furnish young gallants with ready money (which is shared afterwards at a tavern, thereby to disfurnish him of his patrimony? . . . What swearing is there, yea what swaggering, what facing and out-facing? What shuffling, what shouldering, what jostling, what jeering, what biting of thumbs to beget quarrels, what holding up of fingers to remember drunken meetings, what braving with feathers, what bearding with mustachios, what casting open of cloaks to publish new clothes?. . . For at one time, in one and the same rank, yea foot by foot, and elbow by elbow, shall you see walking the Knight, the Gull [dupe], the Gallant, the Upstart, the Gentleman, the Clown

[bumpkin], the Captain, the Apple-Squire, the Lawyer, the Usurer, the Citizen, the Bankrupt, the Scholar, the Beggar, the Doctor, the Idiot, the Ruffian, the Cheater, the Puritan, the Cutthroat, the High-men, the Low men, the True-man, and the Thief.

Thomas Dekker,
The Dead-Terme
(1608), in
The Non-Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker,
ed. Alexander B. Grosart (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), 4.50–51.

Imprisonment was not the typical means of punishment, but its use was on the rise. Debtors might be imprisoned until they repaid their debts.

Serious misdemeanors might result in time at a House of Correction, a new form of institution of which the most famous was Bridewell in London: here vagrants, prostitutes, and other convicts worked on treadmills to grind grain, picked apart ropes to make oakum, and beat hemp plants to prepare the fibers for spinning. Imprisonment was usually for a matter of months, but sentences of life imprisonment were not unknown.

Ecclesiastical courts might impose public penance, which would

involve some form of public ritual in which the wrongdoer would publicly acknowledge his or her offense. It was difficult for the church courts to enforce their punishments against the truly recalcitrant. The ultimate sanction was excommunication, or exclusion from church services. This punishment theoretically excluded the wrongdoer from society, but in practice many people defied such sanctions. Obstinate excommunicates were supposed to be imprisoned by secular authorities until they relented, but the government did not always have the will and means to pursue them, and as many as 5 percent of the population may have lived excommunicate.

A snapshot view of the workings of the law can be found in the story of Jeremy Heckford, a villager from Marks Tey in Essex. In 1584 he was unemployed and in trouble with the local authorities; he fled Marks Tey, to be picked up later the same year as a vagrant in Chelmsford, where he
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Daily Life in Elizabethan England

was imprisoned on suspicion of felony. No charges were pressed, and he was eventually released. By 1587 he was back in Marks Tey, where he was tried and acquitted for stealing some grain. In 1589 he was brought before the Essex Quarter Sessions court, where he was indicted for a theft valued at 2s.—enough to qualify as a felony and send him to the gallows. The jury reduced the valuation to the level of a petty larceny, and Heckford was punished by whipping. The following year he was convicted of stealing some hose and petticoats in Marks Tey. This time the valuation of 2s. was not reduced. Heckford tried to plead benefit of clergy, but failed to prove his ability to read, and so ended his life on the gallows.8

In a society without a professional police force to enforce its laws, social control relied heavily on the use of spectacles of punishment. Hangings were public events, attended by large crowds of men, women, and children, and the sight of such punishments was considered instructive and essential in teaching the young to behave themselves. Even after execution, the remains of an executed criminal were displayed as a warning.

The corpses of murderers were left in cages called gibbets to be picked clean by carrion birds, and the heads of executed traitors were impaled above the gatehouse on London Bridge. Continental visitors were inevitably struck by the grisly spectacle: one Swiss visitor noted the “more than thirty skulls of noble men who had been executed and beheaded for treason and for other reasons—and their descendants are accustomed to boast of this, themselves even pointing out out one their ancestors’ heads on this same bridge, believing that they will be esteemed the more because their antecedents were of such high descent that they could even covet the crown.”9

NOTES

1. On the population of England, see D. M. Palliser,
The Age of Elizabeth
(London: Longman, 1992), chap. 2. For a contemporary atlas of England, see John Speed,
The Counties of Britain
[1616] (London: Pavillion, 1988).

2. Sir Thomas Smith,
De Republica Anglorum
(London: Gregory Seton, 1584), 27.

3. Keith Wrightson,
English Society, 1580–1680
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1982), 176.

4. Arthur F. Kinney,
Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars: A New Gallery of
Tudor and Early Stuart Rogue Literature
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1973), 91–94.

5. Kinney,
Rogues,
150–52.

6. Palliser,
Age of Elizabeth,
381.

7. R. H. Tawney and Eileen Power,
Tudor Economic Documents
(London: Longmans, 1924), 2.341.

8. Wrightson,
English Society,
163.

9. P. Razzell, ed.,
The Journals of Two Travellers in Elizabethan and Early Stuart
England
(London: Caliban Books, 1995), 13.

3

Households and

the Course of Life

THE ELIZABETHAN HOUSEHOLD

Elizabethan England was truly a family oriented society. Society was considered to consist not of individuals but of households, with everyone either a head of household or subject to one. In counting population it was customary only to reckon householders: wife, children, servants, and apprentices were subsumed under the man at the head of the household, who was expected to be the official point of interface between household members and the external world. The household constituted the basic unit not only of the society but of the economy as well—the family business was the rule rather than the exception.