The Culture of Cloth in Early Modern England

Textual Constructions of a National Identity

Roze Hentschell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317036692
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Through its exploration of the intersections between the culture of the wool broadcloth industry and the literature of the early modern period, this study contributes to the expanding field of material studies in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. The author argues that it is impossible to comprehend the development of emerging English nationalism during that time period, without considering the culture of the cloth industry. She shows that, reaching far beyond its status as a commodity of production and exchange, that industry was also a locus for organizing sentiments of national solidarity across social and economic divisions. Hentschell looks to textual productions-both imaginative and non-fiction works that often treat the cloth industry with mythic importance-to help explain how cloth came to be a catalyst for nationalism. Each chapter ties a particular mode, such as pastoral, prose romance, travel propaganda, satire, and drama, with a specific issue of the cloth industry, demonstrating the distinct work different literary genres contributed to what the author terms the 'culture of cloth'.

PART 1
Resistance in the Flock: Labor Rebellion in Pastoral Poetry and Prose Romance

Chapter 1

Pasture and Pastoral: Sheep, Anti-Enclosure Literature, and Sidney’s Seditious Peasants

“It is meant therby, when any man hath taken away and enclosed any other mens common, or hath pulled down houses of husbandry, and converted the lands from tillage to pasture. This is the meaning of this word, and so we pray you remember it.”

—Instructions to the Enclosure Commissioners, Appointed June 1548

“Is it then the Pastoral poem which is misliked? (For perchance where the hedge is lowest they will soonest leap over.) Is the poor pipe disdained, which sometime out of Meliboeus’ mouth can show the misery of people under hard lords or ravening soldiers, and again, by Tityrus, what blessedness is derived to them that lie lowest from the goodness of them that sit highest; sometimes, under the pretty tales of wolves and sheep, can include the whole considerations of wrong-doing and patience; sometimes show that contentions for trifles can get but a trifling victory.”

—Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy (c. 1582)

“It is not easy to forget that Sidney’s Arcadia, which gives a continuing title to English neo-pastoral, was written in a park which had been made by enclosing a whole village and evicting the tenants.”

—Raymond Williams, The Country and the City

In writing a book that argues for the centrality of the wool cloth industry in the early modern imagination and in forming England’s nationalism, I would be remiss if I did not explore the role of England’s sheep, the source of this venerable product. However obvious it may seem that sheep played a crucial part in England’s economies, there has been no thorough study of the animal as the cultural icon that I argue it was in the sixteenth century. Perhaps it is the very omnipresence of sheep, both in the English countryside and in the textual production of the period, that allows them to be ignored. To critics interested in the rural landscape, the pervasiveness of sheep in pastoral and agrarian literature has rendered them as little more than background noise to the shepherd’s song or the farmer’s instruction. And while historians have long recognized the singular importance of wool and cloth in shaping England’s economic structure in the Middle Ages and early modern period and literary critics have recently begun to acknowledge its crucial place in shaping an understanding of the culture, the source of the product has received curiously little attention. This chapter, then, is an attempt to carve out a space for sheep to be recognized. Once we see the significance of sheep in shaping both agrarian texts and pastoral literature, we may also begin to bring them to the forefront of the discussion of the cloth industry. Indeed, I argue that these two endeavors are intimately tied. It is precisely because the wool broadcloth industry was so central in shaping England’s image in the early modern period that texts concerning sheep proliferated.

In this chapter, I will first trace the role of sheep and sheep farming in the period’s pastoral literature and in husbandry manuals, popular didactic texts that dispense advice on farm management, demonstrating that the presence of sheep is not merely part of an idyllic backdrop, but often a serious reminder of their importance in early modern economies. A hallmark of early modern pastoral literature is the idealized representation of sheep. The ovine became an emblem for an imaginative bucolic world, representing the otiose life of the lovelorn shepherd-poet. At the same time, the animal had significant material importance as the source of England’s primary industry. The animal was valued above all others for its raw wool and therefore materially crucial to England’s economic welfare.1 The sixteenth and early seventeenth century saw two seemingly disparate worlds, the courtly and the agrarian, intersect in the figure of the sheep. Thus we have two competing images: On the one hand we find sheep as convenient props in a pastoral landscape of leisure. On the other hand, we see sheep as sources for human consumption and profit. These two representations, however, are not necessarily relegated to one type of text nor are they mutually exclusive. Just as we see the economic importance of sheep in pastoral literature, we also find an idealized portrait in many didactic texts. Although a study of sheep in these texts allows us to gain a greater understanding of how significant they were to the culture, by and large shepherds and their sheep emerge as agrarian heroes, central to engendering the image of the lauded cloth industry.

In a particular strain of literature in the sixteenth century, however, sheep and shepherds are presented not as innocent participants in an idyllic world, but rather as symbols of—and often key players in—the demise of an older, idealized social order. In texts that take up the issue of land usage in the sixteenth century, sheep are imbued with the power to destroy that landscape with their insatiability. In anti-enclosure literature of the sixteenth century in particular, the image of the greedy sheep takes shape. The second movement of this chapter, then, is an interrogation of the role of sheep in this popular mode of writing. For those who study early modern agrarian history, anti-enclosure literature holds a particularly important role, not only for the fine example of vitriolic polemic that it gives us, but also for how it reveals a preoccupation with the fate of the nation’s land. In the mid-sixteenth century, just as England’s wool broadcloth industry was flourishing as never before, there was an increasing concern with the deleterious effects this boom had for the agrarian communities, whose land had been turned into sheep pasture.

The study of enclosure in England in the early modern period is certainly well-trod ground; for decades, economic historians have been investigating both the reasons for and results of land enclosure, as well as the extent to which land was actually enclosed. Although property was enclosed for a number of reasons, it is clear that the writers of the invective against landlords who put up hedges or fences or dug trenches around their land, almost always focus on and decry the act of turning arable land into pasture for sheep grazing. In privileging sheep farming for wool production, landlords appeared willing to displace agricultural laborers, leading to depopulation of the countryside, widespread unemployment, and vagrancy. Although each of these serious social problems had several roots, enclosed pastures were regarded in the period as the primary cause. The landlord’s sheep, then, became the symbol for the enclosure and a central object of derision. In anti-enclosure riots of the sixteenth century in particular, sheep become metonymic representations of the greedy landlords on whose land they grazed. Thus, at a time when England was organizing sentiments of national solidarity based on the burdgeoning cloth trade abroad, there was a simultaneous notion that the very source of this wealth was causing the impoverishment of the nation at home. The anti-enclosure riots that occurred in the mid-sixteenth century, then, became the logical result of the privileging of sheep farming. Those resistant to the proliferation of sheep farms, particularly agricultural laborers, saw their livelihood dwindle just as the booming cloth industry increased the wealth of the landlords.

The background of the sheep’s role in pastoral texts, agrarian manuals, and anti-enclosure literature is the context for my re-reading of Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1580), the chapter’s final movement. My argument that much pastoral literature is concerned with the material conditions of sheep and shepherds opens up Sidney’s text to a new interpretation where the literary mode can be seen in relation to the material world of wool production and the debates surrounding it. Taking seriously the fact that Sidney composed this text while at Wilton House, the seat of the Earls of Pembroke, I read the scenes in which a drunken group of rustics revolt against the Duke Basilius as an example of the fear of agrarian resistance that plagued landowners in the sixteenth century. The manorial lands of Sidney’s brother-in-law’s family, in the county of Wiltshire, a rich wool-producing part of England, were not only notoriously enclosed in the mid-sixteenth century, but were also the site of an agrarian rebellion. Furthermore, several members of Sidney’s family were directly involved in suppressing mid-century enclosure riots. I argue that Sidney’s Arcadia presents us with a full picture of the ovine. The sheep is conventionally situated in the pastoral landscape of the text, serving as an accessory by which we can identify the shepherds and shepherd-poets of the prose narrative. They also become, like the beasts of anti-enclosure literature, associated with the aristocratic world of the landowner. Throughout the prose romance, the figure of the shepherd coincides with traditional representations we see in other pastoral poetry and prose. However, when revisiting The Arcadia by looking at the context of debates over land use and agrarian discontent, we see that the scenes of the insurrection of the Phagonians appear strikingly similar to the literature chronicling anti-enclosure riots. In the text’s suppression of the rebels we find a reassertion of the landlord’s prominence and a triumph of the sheep. And in this victory, we see a reification of the crucial position that sheep had in shaping England’s cloth industry and promoting the nation’s wealth.

The Golden Fleece

In Leonard Mascall’s popular husbandry manual, The First Book of Cattell (1587), the author interjects a verse in his didactic prose to emphasize the singular significance of the sheep in the daily life of the English:2

These cattell sheepe among the rest,

Is counted for man one of the best.

No harmefull beast nor hurt at all,

His fleece of wooll doth cloth us all. (Aa1v)

The author not only asserts that the ovine is gentle in his demeanor, showing the animal’s kinship with man, he also makes clear the beast’s importance to “all” in the utility of his fleece. Of all the cattle, the sheep is regarded as particularly beneficial “for man,” indicating the crucial role that sheep play in the daily life of those who must be clothed. Mascall goes on to express that sheep

ought to be the first cattell to be looked unto, if ye marke the great profite that cometh by them: for by these cattell wee are chiefely defended from colde, in serving many waies, in coverings for our bodies. They do not onely nourish the people of the villages, but also to serve the table with many sortes of delicate and pleasant meates. (Aa2v)

Providing the central needs of food and clothing, sheep are crucial to both rich and poor, city dweller and country denizen.3 Lauded as useful and the source of “great profit,” Mascall recognizes their key role in England’s economy as well. In the form of wool and mutton, though, sheep are commodified and disassociated from the products they provide.4 Circulating in the economy, sheep become sources for human consumption and financial gain, as the continuation of Mascall’s poem makes clear:

His flesh doth feed both yong and old.

His tallow makes the candels white,

To burne and serve us day and night.

His skinne doth pleasure divers waies,

To write, to weare at all assaies.5

His guts thereof doe make whele strings,6

They use his bones to other things.

His hornes some shepeheards will not loose,

Because therewith they patch their shooes.

His dung is chiefe I understand,

To helpe and dung the plowmans land. (Aa1v)

The sheep’s body is parceled out in a sort of bestial blazon to show its variant uses. We move from a product recognizable even in pastoral literature—the value of the sheep’s “fleece of wooll”—to the more mundane and perhaps abject uses of the animal: its “flesh,” “tallow,” “skinne,” “guts,” “bones,” “hornes,” and—finally—“dung” represent its material importance.7 Here the sheep as animal is at once completely defamiliarized—disassembled into multiple commodities—while remaining whole; it is “his” body that is pieced apart.

At the same time as the sheep could be seen as the source of disparate products, the animal dotted the rural landscape, a pervasive visual symbol of its key economic role and the sum of its parts. The abundance of sheep was often of interest to countryside travelers who wrote about their observations. In his Perambulation of Kent (1570), William Lambarde, a London lawyer whose father was a master draper, describes the landscape of the Isle of Sheppey, a small island off the north Kent coast, which he regards as a microcosm of England when it comes to sheep farming.8 The sheep are

woorthy of great estimation, both for the exceeding fineness of the fleese (which passeth all other in Europe at this day, and is to be compared with the auncient, delicate wooll of Tarentum, or the Golden Fleese of Colchos, it selfe) and for the abundant store of flocks so increasing every where, that not only this litle Isle whiche we have now in hand, but the whole realme also, might rightly be called Shepey. (225–6)

English sheep are so aggrandized that they are described as if they were members of the nobility, “worthy of great estimation,” in their contribution to the nation. They are also ubiquitous and ever-increasing. As Paul Hentzner, a German traveler described in 1598, one only needs to see sheep grazing to be reminded of their material dominance:

There are many hills without one tree or any spring, which produce a very short and tender grass, and supply plenty of food to sheep; upon these wander numerous flocks extremely white, and whether from the temperature of the air or goodness of the earth, bearing softer and finer fleeces than those of any country. This is the true Golden Fleece, in which consist the true riches of the inhabitants, great sums of money being brought into the island by merchants, chiefly for that article of trade. (109–10)9

Hentzer’s description emphasizes the material “riches” that the sheep represent; their fleece, “soft,” “fine,” and “extremely white” are symbolic of the nation’s wealth and superiority of wool manufacture. At the same time, the language with which he demonstrates this reveals the extent to which sheep had become idealized figures. The sheep “wander,” as if roaming through the landscape of a pastoral poem. Their fine wool is possibly a result of the divine “goodness of the earth.” In both of these observations, the sheep become mythologized as “the Golden Fleece,” protected in the grove of England. As sacred as the object of Jason’s quest, English sheep emerge as materially and symbolically valuable.

This idealized representation of sheep is of course an important component of pastoral literature, where the animals often take on the properties of the idyllic land or the amorous shepherd. We find sheep as obedient props in a pastoral landscape of leisure, completely evacuated of their material use, as in John Dickenson’s The Shepheardes Complaint (c. 1594). In this poem, a shepherd falls asleep and dreams he is “transported into the blessed soile of heavenly Arcadia” (A3r) where

Flockes of sheepe fed on the plaines,

Harmlesse sheepe that rom’d at large:

Here and there sate pensive Swaines,

Waiting on their wandring charge. (A3v)

These “harmlesse” sheep play and “roam at large,” without the boundaries of enclosing hedges and with very little supervision from their shepherds who sit “pensive...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Ancient, Famous, and Decayed: The Culture of Cloth in Early Modern England
• Part 1 Resistance in the Flock: Labor Rebellion in Pastoral Poetry and Prose Romance
• Part 2 The Circulation of Subjectivity in the Cloth Trade
• Part 3 Staging the Cloth Crisis
• Bibliography
• Index