Writing Town and Village in Seventeenth Century England
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Clore Management Centre
Our expert panel take on six linked topics that disclose life in England's towns and villages. Even now, this writing is greatly under-researched and writing beyond the metropolis unacknowledged. Yet, if we know that most annotators of playbooks were in London, surely we can ask - how were those in the 'provinces' using their growing skills in literacy? Our panellists are literary scholars and historians. They dive deep into the written worlds that await, and the evening culminates with cows and their writers in Erica Fudge's Bloomsbury Research lecture. Bring us the research we've missed, bring your questions and thoughts.
Panellists are: Niall Allsop, Judith Hudson, Ed Legon, Grace Marshall, Abigail Williams. Eric Fudge gives the lecture. Sue Wiseman (Birkbeck) chairs.
Timings and abstracts:
START 3.00
3.15 Panel 1 Care and constables
‘A Policeman’s lot is not a happy one’: early modern village constables and the labours of the law
Judith Hudson
In seventeenth-century England, each village had an annual obligation to elect at least one resident to act as its constable. Serving as constable was an expected part of life progression for many in this period, therefore, and yet the office itself came with a huge range of responsibilities, of which law enforcement was only one. Untrained and unpaid, many postholders struggled with the role. Manoeuvring uncomfortably between their obligations as agents of the Crown and their duties to the local population, constables were at times seen to cross lines, participating in extra-judicial ‘rough music’ actions, for example, whilst also at times becoming the object of abuse, pranks and protest by their own neighbours. This paper will take as its focus the 1626 ballad ‘Song of a Constable’, in which one such village constable, James Gyffon of Albury in Surrey, documents the highs and lows of seventeenth century officeholding and offers insights into the day-to-day operation of a village in this period.
Remote care between town and village: the letters of George Hearne, 1648-1723.
Grace Marshall
The paper will consider a series of letters written by an ageing father in White Waltham, Berkshire to his son in Oxford. In its reading of these texts, the paper will draw out early modern ideas about illness and care as they are shaped by ideas about the village, the town, and distances in-between.
Precarious Performers: Village Ministers in the Civil Wars (in Devon)
Niall Allsop
The paper will discuss the journal of John Syms (British Library Add MS 32597). Syms served two rural Devon parishes during the civil wars: first as curate of Sheepstor, and later as intruded minister in Robert Herrick's recently-vacated living at Dean Prior. The journal suggests how village priests acted as disseminators of books and propaganda, but in Syms's case especially as an aural teacher and performer. This was an exposed and highly political role, and the journal also shows how Syms responded to the resulting risks.
TEA 4.40
5.00 Panel 2 Looking in, looking out: writing working communities
'The Visibility of Industry in Seventeenth-Century England and Wales'.
Ed Legon
The textile industry was of profound cultural, social, and political importance in seventeenth-century England and Wales. It was a commonplace of public discourse that the transformation of fleece into fabric, and its transportation abroad, busied the hands of thousands of men and women throughout the realm, lubricated the wheels of the nation's incipient empire, and lined the pockets of the Crown. It was, then, the very fabric of the commonwealth. While cultural representations of the textile industry have received some recent attention, this paper attends to what we might describe as 'domestic economic tourism literature'. This literature often represented (and, no doubt, influenced) the visibility of clothmaking and clothmakers to English people. Such 'visibility' was made legible in contemporary authors' descriptions of the extensive urban and suburban spaces of textile production and trade. It also took the form of authors' accounts of architectural representations of the wealth that accrued to early capitalists (notably in the form of 'wool churches'). Nonetheless, the paper concludes that these 'touristic' accounts were very often ideological and partial; in their celebratory sketches of the nation's industry and wealth, the stark inequality, precarity, and poverty that plagued the textile industry was often elided.
The tennis ball of fortune: John Cannon and the cultures of mixed literacy in a Somerset village
Abigail Williams
This paper will explore what it meant to be a reader and scribe in a village community in the Somerset levels in the early eighteenth century. John Cannon, (1684-1743) called himself the ’tennis ball of fortune’. His lavishly illustrated 600 page manuscript Chronicle of his life narrates his journey from ploughboy to excise man to writing master and teacher. I will explore both what Cannon achieved with his literacy - his reading, borrowing and cultural aspiration - and examine his complex role as an informal village scribe.
6.00pm Erica Fudge
Fed on Scraps: Fed on Scraps: Bits of Animals in the Early Modern Archive
Erica Fudge
All too often animals have been marginalised and objectified. Work in the field of animal studies has, over the past 30 years, attempted to change that by focussing on the nonhuman creatures that have been and continue to be simultaneously vital and erased. Different disciplines have approached this in different ways, and our reconsideration of our shared human-animal histories has complicated our understanding not only of the past, but also of how we live now by reassessing the complexity of the world in which animals played such a crucial role. This talk will focus on some mundane encounters between the species – the little engagements that can be traced in the fragments of the legal archive - and through them it will attempt to bring the worlds of the people and animals of the early modern past to life. In it we will encounter the mutilated hen, the disobedient dog, the clipped sheep, and the drunk human. Bees will be drowned, pigs skinned, and geese stuffed into places they really should not be, and through all these creatures we will trace a world which was not only full of beasts, but was also a surprisingly complicated in its understanding of them. And we will ponder, too, why it is so surprising to us now that that past was so complicated
Paper 45 mins
Event END 7.30ish
This is a London Renaissance Seminar event.
Contact name: Sue Wiseman
Speakers- Abigail Williams
- Ed Legon
- Erica Fudge
- Grace Marshall
- Judith Hudson
- Niall Allsop
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