Negotiating Exclusion in Early Modern England, 1550–1800

Naomi Pullin, Kathryn Woods, Naomi Pullin, Kathryn Woods

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367338862
• eBook ISBN: 9781000359121
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

This edited volume examines how individuals and communities defined and negotiated the boundaries between inclusion and exclusion in England between 1550 and 1800. It aims to uncover how men, women, and children from a wide range of social and religious backgrounds experienced and enacted exclusion in their everyday lives.

Negotiating Exclusion takes a fresh and challenging look at early modern England's distinctive cultures of exclusion under three broad themes: exclusion and social relations; the boundaries of community; and exclusions in ritual, law, and bureaucracy. The volume shows that exclusion was a central feature of everyday life and social relationships in this period. Its chapters also offer new insights into how the history of exclusion can be usefully investigated through different sources and innovative methodologies, and in relation to the experiences of people not traditionally defined as "marginal."

The book includes a comprehensive overview of the historiography of exclusion and chapters from leading scholars. This makes it an ideal introduction to exclusion for students and researchers of early modern English and European history. Due to its strong theoretical underpinnings, it will also appeal to modern historians and sociologists interested in themes of identity, inclusion, exclusion, and community.

Part I

Exclusion and Social Relations

1 Domestic Exclusions

The Politics of the Household in Early Modern England

Bernard Capp

Contemporaries liked to imagine the household as a well-ordered society, bound together by love and duty. This ideal, as they were well aware, was often far removed from reality. The prescriptive conduct books of the period, such as William Gouge’s Of Domesticall Duties (1622), spelt out the all too common failings of husbands, wives, children, and servants, and the tensions they generated. This essay shows how such tensions, in a variety of contexts, could lead to an unwanted wife, child, stepchild, sibling, or occasionally husband, being marginalised or driven out. Social exclusion was a phenomenon that possessed a significant domestic dimension. The essay focuses on two remarkable cases, both of which underline the particular threat to domestic order when a family head proved unable to assert his authority. In the first case, this resulted in a struggle between the head’s second wife and her stepson, each attempting to exclude the other from influence and authority within the household. In the second, a man’s adult children were gradually excluded from his home and business by two scheming women who were not even related to him by blood or kinship. And eventually, the father found himself excluded too. Collectively, these remarkable tales of domestic exclusion underline the potentially unstable nature of marital arrangements and family structures in seventeenth-century England.

Exclusionary Contexts

The most common contexts for domestic exclusion were fourfold: a breakdown in relations between a father and his adult offspring; friction between siblings, often over inheritance; a failing marriage; and tensions within a second (or subsequent) marriage, between an adult and his or her stepchildren. In the first scenario, an angry father might disinherit a son or daughter, often for defying or ignoring him over the choice of a marriage partner, or for converting to Catholicism or a nonconformist movement.¹ In one such case, young William Serjeant was ‘turnd out of doores’ by his angry father in 1668 for joining the Quakers, and the Bristol Quaker community was left to find him a home.² Siblings frequently quarrelled over their father’s will, sometimes while he was still alive. A furious dispute erupted in 1589 over the affairs of John Dampire, an elderly Somerset villager described as ‘very simple and easy to be seduced’. His son Thomas had pressured him into giving him a substantial part of his estate, outraging his other son, who discovered that little would now remain for him. Dampire had wanted to be generous to both sons, but Thomas’s sharp practice had effectively excluded that possibility.³ Failing marriages, a third frequent context, could often lead to domestic violence or adulterous liaisons. An unfaithful wife would usually try to conceal her affair, but an unfaithful husband might go further, driving his wife away or allowing another woman to usurp her role as a housekeeper or even her place in the marital bed.⁴ Such behaviour was found at all levels of society. Sir Richard Grenville, who sued for divorce in 1632, had allegedly given his wife Mary a black eye, called her a whore, and ‘excluded her from governing the house and affaires within dore’. One of his kinswomen now ‘ordered and ruled all things’. Mary, who had brought him a considerable fortune, had retaliated by mocking him as a ‘petty fellow’ not worth ten groats when they wed, ‘and sung unseemly songs to his face to provoke him’. A hostile witness called her ‘domineering’ and ‘imperious’, but it was Mary who was excluded from her wifely functions and the freedom of her house, and now lived, she said, in fear of her life.⁵ At the other end of the social hierarchy, we hear of a heartless Sussex villager who made his wife sleep in a spare room and locked her out of the house while he had sex with their maidservant.⁶

Stepfamilies, the fourth context, were a common feature of early modern society, the product of high mortality rates and remarriage. Many reconstituted families developed satisfactory relationships, but tensions were common, and the unkindness of stepparents was proverbial.⁷ The safety and welfare of young children were often at risk, while older children worried about their inheritance. Would a stepmother turn their father against them? Would a stepfather overturn the arrangements their own father had made for them? Those adults who viewed their stepchildren as an unwelcome burden responded with cruelty or neglect, a pattern we again find at all levels of society. In some cases, unwanted stepchildren were literally excluded, pushed out and sometimes left to fend for themselves. In desperation, some turned to crime to survive.⁸ Robert and Margaret Buckley took a very different course, petitioning the Privy Council in 1638 to tell their sorry tale. Their father, Sir Richard Buckley (or Bulkeley) of Beaumaris, had been a wealthy landowner, but after his death, his widow married a family servant, Thomas Cheadle, and soon fell completely under his sway. Cheadle then claimed that the children were illegitimate and drove them out, placing them in ‘mechanick Trades’ under new names. When Robert later appealed to his mother for relief, Cheadle had him imprisoned and uttered dire threats if he ever claimed the family name.⁹

Adolescents and young adults were not always passive victims, and family dynamics could be complex. If both partners brought children into the new marriage, tensions might erupt from day one between the stepsiblings. In one Sussex family in the early 1600s, the two sets of children hated each other so much that the parents were forced to maintain separate households to keep the peace. Older children might never accept unwanted stepparents, and sometimes found ways to undermine their position. A stepmother might find herself vulnerable, for example, if her husband had to be away for an extended period. In one Cheshire case, a father left his son in charge of the estate and directed him to provide well for his stepmother. Instead, he seized the opportunity to reduce her to destitution.¹⁰ Very occasionally, we find a stepfather similarly targeted, as in the case of Daniel Town, an Anglican minister in Yorkshire. Town and his second wife, a widow with adult children, proved ill-matched and ‘did woefully disagree’, whereupon her two sons threatened to kill him. In 1672 they contrived to have him imprisoned, and when he was released and returned home, he was attacked by four men and dumped in the street, with wounds that may have proved fatal.¹¹

These stories, and many others like them, provide glimpses of domestic exclusion in a range of forms and contexts. The remainder of this essay focuses on two striking cases, both hitherto overlooked, which enable us to reconstruct the family dynamics of exclusion in far greater depth and add new dimensions to our understanding of inclusion and exclusion in the seventeenth-century household.

The Pagitts: Son Versus Stepmother

In the early 1630s James Pagitt, a successful London lawyer, was the rather ineffective head of a troubled household. Though its problems never reached the courts, his son Justinian kept a notebook which gives us a detailed, if partisan, account of a struggle over several years between him and his stepmother, each seeking to undermine and marginalise the other.¹² Justinian was a law student, dividing his time between home and his rooms in the Middle Temple. He and his younger brother were not seriously threatened by their stepmother, for he was already in his early twenties and there were no half-siblings to endanger his inheritance. But he believed that his stepmother was abusing her position as wife and housekeeper, and neglecting her responsibilities to her husband and stepsons. In response, he compiled a comprehensive dossier of her offences, each catalogued with precise details of time, place, and witnesses. He complained, for example, that she would order the maid to buy only the cheapest meat at the market, some of it already rotten and stinking, to save housekeeping money which she then kept for herself. The house was dirty, and the hall was dark because she would not buy candles for the lanterns. Though her own clothes were well maintained, she took little care of the household linen or her husband’s and stepchildren’s clothes, and the laundress complained she was not allowed sufficient soap to wash them properly. The servants were often directed to leave the cleaning and cooking and spend their time spinning, carding, and knitting, to make money which his stepmother then kept for herself. The cook complained she was not even allowed time to wash the platters. Pagitt’s stepmother had a generous housekeeping budget of £3 a week, but misled her husband and told him that she needed more. When he wanted to invite a guest for dinner, she would claim that she did not have enough money to cater for such an occasion. Disgusted by her fraudulent devices, Pagitt wanted to see every item of expenditure set down precisely in an account book.

We only have Pagitt’s version of the domestic situation. Some of his material came from his own observation, some from the servants, and some from neighbours. The servants passed on stories to their friends, which Pagitt feared was undermining the family’s good name. The maid, for example, told how she was directed to buy stale butter by the pennyweight, ‘which the Neighbours jeer at to my fathers disgrace’. The notebook also throws incidental light on a very different dimension of these household tensions. Pagitt often reflected on spiritual and religious matters, and how well he was obeying all Ten Commandments. He acknowledged that the Fifth Commandment (to honour and obey parents) applied equally to stepparents, and feared that he might be committing a sin whenever he criticised or confronted his stepmother. On the other hand, he fretted, when he failed to challenge her, she behaved still worse, so silence might also be a sin. Pagitt was also fully aware of the material issues at stake in this situation. One section of the notebook is headed, ‘Inconveniences which might arise to me if I should inform my father concerning my mothers etc’. The ‘etc.’ suggests that he was unsure how to categorise his mother’s misconduct. Moreover, she would obviously retaliate by telling his father lies about him, and he would no longer have his clothes washed or mended. But in the next section, headed ‘Inducements to me to inform against her’, he reflected that his stepmother could hardly treat him worse than she already did. And if she was suffered to carry on, she would control his father so tightly that it would become impossible ever to free him. Pagitt eventually decided to pass over small matters in silence, but speak out on major abuses. He would try to please his father in all things, to protect his own position. And if necessary, he could make his own laundry arrangements.

Pagitt insisted that his concern was solely for his father, abused by a devious woman betraying her duties as wife and housekeeper. A recurring marginal note reads, ‘Provides for herself. Neglects her husband’. He presented his own mistreatment as a secondary issue, but it clearly rankled. He was certain that she was trying to turn his father against him, and feared being marginalised or excluded. When he reported her failings to his father, she did indeed retaliate with stories about his own minor misdeeds. Pagitt believed that she wanted to push him away, almost literally. She suggested, for example, that he should always live in the Middle Temple in term-time, not at home. And when their father thought of spending the vacation at his country house, she told him that Justinian would rather stay behind. That was untrue, and he saw it as a blatant device to exclude him. James Pagitt remains an enigma. Justinian fretted about his father’s health, and worried about him sleeping in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Approaching Early Modern Exclusion and Inclusion
• Part I: Exclusion and Social Relations
• Part II: The Boundaries of Community
• Part III: Exclusions in Ritual, Law, and Bureaucracy
• Afterword
• Contributors
• Index