Eavesdropping (19 page)

Note that the eavesdropping that was outlawed was
not
the opportunistic kind that could be done in the comfort of one’s own home, or the area around it, or in the doctor’s office, a restaurant, or the hairdresser’s. It was
not
the embedded or social type of eavesdropping that people do while simply going about their business, in the place where that business is normally done. The kind of eavesdropping outlawed by the English was
not
the kind that is enhanced when a person like Andre Breton’s detective adopts an “ultra-receptive posture,” or puts himself “in a state of grace with chance.” No, the kind of eavesdropping that was criminalized was more adventurous, for it involved leaving one’s home, going to another person’s residence, and taking up a position near an outer wall, well outside of any normal social or business context. It involved trespassing. The punishment was a small fine.

This invasive sort of secret listening clearly bothered the English, who were growing accustomed to the benefits of domestic life and private conversation. But listening was not the only, or even the
most worrisome, thing. When the English passed a law against eavesdropping they forbade the
conjunction of two behaviors
(as in blackmail legislation), making it a crime to “listen under walls or windows, or the eaves of a house to hearken after discourse,
and thereupon to frame slanderous and mischievous tales
.”
³⁰

Unlike the separate elements of blackmail, either of these acts—eavesdropping or telling tales—would have been worrying, but this imprecision in the English law is discouraging, because it means we cannot easily tell from the arrest records who eavesdropped, told tales, or both. Fortunately, the language in some of the charges adds clarity. For example, Marjorie McIntosh turned up numerous cases where a person was charged with being “a listener at windows and
sower of discord
between the neighbors, or “a common listener at night who
followed the said listening by increasing disputes
.”
³¹

Arrests for the criminalized kind of eavesdropping left behind a trail of court records going back over six hundred years. A careful look at this history—much of it nicely documented by McIntosh in her book,
Controlling Misbehavior in England
—provides insight into our ancestors’ desire to observe and control the personal lives of others. McIntosh’s tabulation of selected court records indicates that for a good two hundred years, beginning in the 1370s, the medieval cocktail of eavesdropping and tale-telling comprised about eight percent of all social crimes.
³²

In
court-welcomed
eavesdropping, the testimony of a single eye witness goes on for pages and pages. By contrast, court records in a typical case of
court-punished
eavesdropping are limited to the charge itself. For example, in 1425 John Rexheth was charged with “listening at night and snooping into the secrets of his neighbors.” Nearly a century later, Agnes Nevell was accused of disturbing Edward Node by lying under his windows, where she “hears all things being said there by the said Edward.” In 1578 a court ruled that Philipp Bennett was “an Evesdropper, and doth harbour under the wall and windows of his neighbours.
³³

Reasons for the concern about listening are obvious. In the privacy of their own homes, people were clearly entitled to engage in intimate conversation. But there was real fear that if the eavesdroppers
talked
—a temptation if wrong doing was suspected—they would undoubtedly do so in conspiratorial tones, or a state of rage, and this would stir up trouble. Neighborhoods, it was feared, would become unruly; villages would become difficult to govern.

I have yet to encounter in court records one piece of overheard conversation that caused problems when passed on. Possibly it was what they saw and heard the people do, not what they said; or perhaps the courts were attempting to keep the content of invasively eavesdropped conversations from going further.

In the U.S. there were fewer eavesdropping arrests but similar concerns with eavesdropping as a
cause
of social disturbances. In June of 1886, Louisa Ehrline was indicted for eavesdropping in Pennsylvania. The indictment alleged that she “was and is a common eavesdropper,” and that she “did listen about the houses and under the window and eaves of the houses of the citizens then and there dwelling,
hearing tattle and repeating the same in the hearing of other persons
, to the common nuisance of the citizens of this commonwealth, and against the peace and dignity of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”
³⁴

If a person were to stand under the eaves of a modern house, it is unlikely that it would be possible to hear much “tattle.” The walls are too thick and insulated, and even where a bit of speech might leak out, it would quickly be lost in the ambient noise. But in early modern England the acoustics for eavesdropping were ideal. There was virtually no background noise—no cars or trucks, or noisy lawn equipment—and the walls were just as eavesdroppers like them: holey, cracked, and paper thin.

In her book, McIntosh wrote that in Romford, a market town, the sound of a domestic argument “was magnified because the narrowness of the streets and walls meant that words spoken in or near one house might be heard in
several other buildings
.” In a trial held in 1613, Elizabeth Hunter, a thirty-three-year-old widow, testified to the effect “that while in her own house one morning she heard two women ‘chiding.’” Elizabeth went to her door and saw Grace Patient and Alice Flud, across-the-street neighbors, standing in their own doorways, arguing. Two other witnesses, young women who worked in a shop behind Alice’s house, testified that “Grace called Alice ‘a hedge whore,’” according to McIntosh’s trial notes, “and that Elizabeth had joined in the argument, while still standing in her doorway across the street.”

In abutting houses it was not even necessary to go outside in order to hear what the neighbors were saying. In 1586 Margery Oliver took her laundry to Agnes Bolter’s house in Romford so that they could talk while Margery dried and smoothed the clothes. “As the two women chatted, Elizabeth Stevens,
a neighbour in an adjacent house
, overheard them and thought they were discussing her. She began to shout slanderous comments
through the wall
about Margery, calling her ‘a bridewell bird’ and ‘an errant whore,’ saying that she had an illegitimate child.” These insults, according to McIntosh, were heard by the two women folding the laundry on the other side of the wall, but also by Agnes’s husband Thomas, who was working somewhere else in the house.
³⁵

In certain respects, a stroll through early seventeenth-century Romford, and countless other villages throughout England, Europe, and colonial America, was like the “stroll through the worlds of animals and men” envisaged by Jacob von Uexküll. For inside the ecological “bubble” of these places there was the resonance of countless human sounds and signals, many given off incidentally by people as they went about their daily business, allowing each to
note the whereabouts and actions of every other villager. Whether the actors liked it or not, every disturbance of the sensory landscape was treated as a “To whom it may concern’ message, and everyone was concerned.

Normally, this sort of awareness is helpful in small, interdependent communities, but something else was happening in Romford. The villagers were blaming each other, shaming each other, fighting to expose wrong doing, and doing everything
ferociously
. What was going on?

One thing that was going on was staggering population growth, a change that, as mentioned earlier, would cause the social landscape to restructure on a massive scale. In the year 800, the population of the British Isles was estimated at 1.2 million, a figure that had grown to 2.8 million by 1200, with a further increase to 5.3 million in 1340.
³⁶
These changes produced strangers where there had been friends and acquaintances, with heightened competition for the same small slices of economic action. The result was an “extraordinary amount of back-biting, malicious slander, marital discord and unfaithfulness, and petty spying,” according to historian Lawrence Stone.
³⁷
“If new arrivals and established families were being forced into closer contact in housing, commerce, and employment,” wrote McIntosh, “harmonious social interactions may well have been jeopardized. The spread of quarreling, malicious gossip, and invasions of privacy could thus all have been magnified as population levels increased.”
³⁸

Trouble was bubbling up but there was no one at higher levels who could bat it back down. Lacking an effective constabulary, the citizens of tiny villages would just have to operate their own system. Not that there was something missing here. In this and practically everything else, the order of the day, literally, was
posse comitatus
—“the power of the county.” This is all there had ever been. Like the Athenian citizens, the English had their own system of social control.

In the arrests for eavesdropping there is generally less detail than in the court-welcomed cases, as indicated, but the records reveal one thing about the people who were caught under the walls and windows of their neighbors’ houses—their gender. McIntosh has reported that for a good two hundred years, beginning in the 1370s, about eighty percent of the courts having some incidence of eavesdropping (blended with nightwalking) happened to
hear male cases only
.

McIntosh never actually counted the number of males and females who were arrested for eavesdropping—it was the number of courts reporting only one sex or the other, or both—but there must have been a fairly strong difference between the sexes for her to get such lopsided figures; and this presents us with a conundrum. If court-welcomed eavesdropping was so frequently carried out by women, why were so many men charged with this other kind of criminalized eavesdropping? In fact, we will see that it makes more sense to ask why
so few women were arrested
.

To appreciate my reasons for reframing the question, it helps to consider a fact about the architectural type of eavesdropping. It was best done under the cover of darkness. If one was detected
before
eavesdropping, the desired perceptual experience was unlikely to be forthcoming. If discovered
afterwards
, the eavesdropper might be reported. If eavesdroppers wished to avoid detection, and to escape prosecution, they needed to take up their under-eaves position at night. With poorly lighted streets, there was a chance that they might be able to do it
and
get away with it.

Earlier we asked who was home more often. Now it is necessary to ask: who was out at night? Out at night was not where respectable women would normally be found. Being seen out after dark posed a physical danger to women, and to their reputation, since they would have been suspected as “nightwalkers,” or prostitutes. “Merely to walk unescorted at night rendered a
woman liable to be
arrested for immorality
,” wrote Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford. “Women, but not men, were subject to a
de facto
curfew after dark.”
³⁹

The English had a term for out-at-night individuals. They were
noctivagators
. The root
vagor
implies that nightwalkers were seen as vagrants, or wanderers, with no discernible reason for being out.
⁴⁰
There are indications that the “nightwalker” label was already in use in fourteenth-century London. Three centuries later, a justice ruled that it was lawful to arrest nightwalkers in order to
prevent
“malfeasance.”
⁴¹
Since women were not supposed to venture outside at night, it was unlikely that many would be seen or arrested for eavesdropping. McIntosh reported that between 1370 and 1600 over ninety percent of the arrests for nightwalking were of men.

But were men out just because they could get away with it, or were they out for a reason that was functionally related to the eavesdropping for which they were arrested? Were they investigating? Were they patrolling what they took to be the boundaries on their own territory? Were they attempting to keep their neighborhoods safe? Or were they on their way home from a public house, and in a mood for mischief?

As we saw earlier, there appears to be a rather general relationship between sex and territoriality in the animal kingdom. Males generally spend more time looking for predators, and defending their territory, than do females. Among primates, adult males are distantly vigilant, focused on the periphery of the troop’s occupied territory. Adult females are proximally vigilant—more concerned than males with the welfare of infants. I assume that medieval English men were out, in part, because they were attempting to keep the outsides of homes—their neighborhoods and villages—safe by protecting the outer perimeters, trusting women to police internal spaces. But in the next chapter we will see that the prevalence of male eavesdroppers was not merely due to a difference in opportunity, for men have long been the ambient strollers
who kept an eye on strangers, even where women had equal opportunities to participate.

Eavesdropping led to “slanderous and mischievous tales” which, as we have seen, could get one arrested for a violation of the “eavesdropping” law. But what is concealed here is the fact that irresponsible accusations, or any charge that was rendered loudly, stridently, and persistently could—
by itself
—get one arrested for a different crime, one that was
implicitly female
. It was called “scolding.”

The legal statutes of 1675 defined a scold as “a troublesome and angry
woman
, who by her brawling and wrangling amongst her Neighbours, doth break the publick Peace, and beget, cherish and increase publick Discord.”
⁴²