Going to Market

Women, Trade and Social Relations in Early Modern English Towns, c. 1550-1650

David Pennington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472443700
• eBook ISBN: 9781317126157
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

Going to Market rethinks women's contributions to the early modern commercial economy. A number of previous studies have focused on whether or not the early modern period closed occupational opportunities for women. By attending to women's everyday business practices, and not merely to their position on the occupational ladder, this book shows that they could take advantage of new commercial opportunities and exercise a surprising degree of economic agency. This has implications for early modern gender relations and commercial culture alike. For the evidence analyzed here suggests that male householders and town authorities alike accepted the necessity of women's participation in the commercial economy, and that women's assertiveness in marketplace dealings suggests how little influence patriarchal prescriptions had over the way in which men and women did business. The book also illuminates England's departure from what we often think of as a traditional economic culture. Because women were usually in charge of provisioning the household, scholars have seen them as the most ardent supporters of an early-modern 'moral economy', which placed the interests of poor consumers over the efficiency of markets. But the hard-headed, hard-nosed tactics of market women that emerge in this book suggests that a profit-oriented commercial culture, far from being the preserve of wealthy merchants and landowners, permeated early modern communities. Through an investigation of a broad range of primary sources-including popular literature, criminal records, and civil litigation depositions-the study reconstructs how women did business and negotiated with male householders, authorities, customers, and competitors. This analysis of the records shows women able to leverage their commercial roles and social contacts to defend the economic interests of their households and their neighborhoods.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Households, Marketplaces, and Neighborhoods

This book argues that women traders were central to the commercial life of early modern English towns. It attempts not only to reconstruct the types of work trading women did, but also their business practices, mentalities, and relationships with town authorities and neighbors. As Pamela Sharpe has argued, the study of women’s working roles can reveal more than the nature of gender inequality; it can also teach us much about the operation of the early modern economy.¹ We should therefore be as interested in what the experiences and activities of tradeswomen tell us about the commercial culture and social life of urban communities as we are in what they tell us about the gendered division of labor.

The contention that women could wield influence over commerce would have been unsurprising to contemporary observers of the early modern marketplace. An early seventeenth-century penny-priced ballad entitled “An excellent new Ditty” proposed that “women the best Warriers be, for they made the Devill from earth … to flee.”² Looking for merriment, “Old Beelzebub” visits the marketplace in order to offer leases of eternal life. He makes deals with a cast of greedy characters—tradesmen and their wives; gallants and disobedient “roaring sons”; usurers and corn-hoarding landowners—before finally being driven away by the fishwives of Billingsgate market in London. The women terrify the Devil by raising a ferocious “noyse”; they “brabled with [each] other/ [over] which first should have choise” of his offering. The Devil concludes:

“I must [flee] from them,

for, should I stay here,

In pieces, among them,

My body they’d tear!”

(Quoth he) “I am willing

to deale among men,

But nere will have dealing

’mongst women agen!”

The anonymous author of this ballad was hardly alone in claiming that market women were too forceful, too “warrior-like” in their dealings. Ballad writers and dramatists clearly spotted a commercial opportunity in gendered anxieties, for they populated their tales with caricatures of aggressive working women. Learned authors of household conduct books may have had less of an eye for sales, but they too accused trading women of breaches of feminine decorum.³ Moreover, trading women’s aggressive pursuit of profits worried moralists who believed that the rapacious pursuit of wealth and possessions—signified in the ballad by their attempts to purchase immortality, that priceless item—undermined the provision of necessities to consumers at a fair price, the proper purpose of commerce. The prescriptive and popular printed sources of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reflected a desire for a commercial and gendered order which seemed troublingly out of reach. So too did the emerging architecture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century market towns. Many of these towns invested in new town halls to house market officials. These halls sometimes featured “surveillance” galleries on the second story from which market officials could observe the traders below; they were testimony to the contemporary belief that the urban moral, economic, and gender order would fall apart without proper oversight.⁴

Gender historians have often cited early modern women’s trading activities to complicate the simplistic notion that women were confined to a separate domestic “sphere.”⁵ But they have rarely been as curious about early modern trading women as they have been about these women’s contemporary critics and regulators.⁶ Since the 1919 publication of Alice Clark’s landmark Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, scholars have offered competing theories about women’s loss of occupational opportunities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This debate has largely overlooked trading women. Overviews of the subject emphasize women’s lack of access to high-paying and high-status craft and mercantile trades.⁷ Studies of specific occupations have focused on those jobs—commercial brewing and baking, midwifery, and dairy farming—from which women were gradually excluded.⁸ Because most early modern trading women operated on the retail level, often on behalf of male householders, it has been easy to assume that their activities merely confirm gloomy interpretations of women’s earning power and economic agency.⁹

If the long-running focus on working women’s occupational status has deflected our attention from trading women (whose activities often did not fit neatly with early modern conceptions of occupation), so too has the common, but tacit, assumption that women’s involvement in urban commerce has little to tell us about the practice of a broader business and commercial culture. Historians of plebeian protests, most famously E.P. Thompson, once emphasized the role of the female shopper turned rioter. And yet Thompson and others considered women’s commercial interests only in terms of the experience of buying, not in terms of selling.¹⁰ Poor women were, in such accounts, merely reacting to the failure of local officials to enforce paternalistic custom and law. Historians have seen female retailers as having even less influence over the norms of commerce than riotous consumers. Hemmed in by market regulators on the one hand, and by the practices of wealthy male wholesalers on the other, they were, according to one of the few studies of market women, facing a marketplace which they “never regulated; could rarely influence; but to whose changing structures they were required to adjust.”¹¹ When historians have turned to how women conducted business, they have often limited their investigations to poor women attempting to patch together an “economy of makeshifts.”¹² Of course poor women, out of necessity, often broke commercial rules or dealt dishonestly with customers. As one scholar has put it, “self-preservation was the name of the game and any means of accomplishing this was justified.”¹³ Early modern trading women appear resilient, yet always on the defensive; they reacted to, but could scarcely shape, the commercial culture of their communities.

Contemporary observers would have been surprised to learn that market women were largely powerless in the face of commercial change. Indeed, the influence of early modern women over the marketplace made many uneasy. It is, after all, the fishwives who swarm the market in the “Excellent New Ditty.” Drawings and woodcuts depicting the marketplace almost always included women as both retailers and consumers. In his 1598 pamphlet on Londoners’ sharp trading practices, Hugh Alley populated his sketches of London markets with female stallholders and hucksters.¹⁴ In the illustrated broadside Tittle-Tattle; Or the Several Branches of Gossiping, a satirical attack on female sociability, women dominate the marketplace—trading, gossiping, and sharply observing the delivery and weighing of foodstuffs.¹⁵ The gendered stereotypes in these images are easy to identify. Often unregistered is that they also reflect the power women could wield in the world of local commerce. The fact that many women combined their roles as managers of household resources, consumers and retailers, placed them in a strategic position from which they could, if not regulate, at least shape how traders conducted business. Trading women didn’t need to riot to exert pressure. Detailed knowledge of prices, customs, and regulations; friendly contacts with officials and neighbors; an ability to spread information that could make or break a rival’s reputation: these were intangible assets, but possession of them gave women considerable influence over the conduct of local commerce.

This book focuses on the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a period in which England experienced the birth pangs of a commercial revolution.¹⁶ It is commonplace to observe that every period is one of both continuity and change; nevertheless the century—which followed several centuries of steady demographic and economic growth and preceded the relative prosperity of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—was one of awkward transition. The moralists, economic thinkers, and policy makers of the period took a particularly dim view of profiteering.¹⁷ Suspicions of covetousness were not unique to the time, but they were given urgency by economic crises and threats of social upheaval. Several decades of abundant harvests were punctuated by the severe dearths of the 1590s.¹⁸ Trade disruptions and harvest failures in the 1620s and 1630s brought another round of misery.¹⁹ In the face of rising poverty and uncertainty—and the protests they provoked—it is unsurprising that authorities worried that the paternalistic order, in which commerce was to be regulated for the good of the commonwealth, was in danger of fraying.

And yet the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were marked by new opportunities as well as perils. Population growth and new consumer demands prompted manufacturing and commercial entrepreneurship. The rise of rural industries to satisfy demand for novel consumer goods—including such items as playing cards, tobacco pipes, and glassware—was one response; the growing number of retail shops in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century towns was another.²⁰ The growth of English provincial towns is another indication of adaptation and resilience. The spectacular expansion of London once overshadowed studies of early modern urbanity, but more recent studies have highlighted the robustness of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century provincial towns.²¹ As Penelope Corfield has found, “A more complex and polycentric urban society was emerging, with a concomitant growth in the number of large towns and a broadening range of economic specialization.”²² Early modern England, of course, remained a predominately agrarian society, but the importance of provincial towns cannot be measured by size alone, for they brought commercial development to the countryside.²³ The demographic recovery and expansion of English towns after the contraction of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries certainly brought social problems, including higher rates of disease, vagrancy, and poverty. Nevertheless, migration from rural to urban areas suggests that economic opportunities were to be had for both men and women in England’s provincial towns. This book explores women’s commercial work in the context of three institutions which shaped the early modern commercial economy: the household, the marketplace, and the urban neighborhood.

Household, Marketplace, Neighborhood

Early modern writers and urban authorities assumed that the stable, economically autonomous patriarchal household was the foundation of the urban social order. They likened households to little commonwealths in which the male householder, his wife, children, servants, and apprentices all had their places within a hierarchy. Sir Thomas Smith, drawing upon Aristotle’s classification of political regimes, described the household as an aristocracy—“one of the best kindes of a common wealth”—in which “a few and the best [of the household] doth governe” the matters for which they are best fit. Thus, male heads of household—possessing the greatest strength, courage, and powers of reason— were public representatives of the household, and worked abroad to supply the needs of the household; the wife managed the house and its resources, though she was to get her way through her beauty and persuasive “sweete words” rather than by physical force or strength of mind.²⁴ While Smith invoked Aristotle, clergy turned to biblical exegesis to legitimate the patriarchal household and its accompanying gendered division of labor. With their different sets of ancient sources, Smith and the clerics underscored the timelessness, and permanence, of properly structured household relations.

Town officials imagined urban communities as “confederations” of such households, and so it is little wonder that when they considered economic activity, they continued to think in terms of the household oeconomy rather than of an impersonal market economy.²⁵ The assumptions of early modern thinkers have leaked into historians’ accounts. Most historians ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• The History of Retailing and Consumption General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Households, Marketplaces, and Neighborhoods
• 2 Prescription, Anxiety, and Acceptance: Representations of Market Women in Popular Culture
• 3 Cooperation and Conflict: Women, Commerce, and the Household Economy
• 4 Traders, Hucksters, and Creditors: Independent Tradeswomen and the Commerce of Early Modern Towns
• 5 Conflicting Interests, Common Interests: Female Traders, Marital Status, and Town Authorities
• 6 Women, Commerce, and Female Reputation
• 7 When to Give and When to Gouge: Bargaining, Neighborliness, and the Limits of the Moral Economy
• 8 The Potency of Women’s Words: Gossip, Slander, and the Enforcement of Plain Dealing
• 9 Women, Protest, and Marketplace Politics
• 10 Conclusion: To Runneth & Raveth after Markets
• Bibliography
• Index