Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England available in Paperback
Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England
- ISBN-10:
- 0226269566
- ISBN-13:
- 9780226269566
- Pub. Date:
- 05/01/2006
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0226269566
- ISBN-13:
- 9780226269566
- Pub. Date:
- 05/01/2006
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England
Paperback
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$32.00Overview
Fumerton begins by building on recent studies of vagrancy, poverty, and servants, placing all in the light of a new domestic economy of mobility. She then looks at representations of the vagrant in a variety of pamphlets and literature of the period. Since seamen were a particularly large and prominent class of mobile wage-laborers in the seventeenth century, Fumerton turns to seamen generally and to an individual poor seaman as a case study of the unsettled subject: Edward Barlow (b. 1642) provides a rare opportunity to see how the laboring poor fashioned themselves, for he authored a journal of over 225,000 words and 147 pages of drawings. Barlow’s journal, studied extensively here for the first time, vividly charts what he himself termed his “unsettled mind” and the perpetual anxieties of England’s working and wayfaring poor. Ultimately, Fumerton explores representations of seamen as unsettled in the broadside ballads of Barlow’s time.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226269566 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2006 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d) |
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Unsettled
The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England
By PATRICIA FUMERTON The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2006 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-26956-6
Chapter One
Mobilizing the Poor
In 1594, Thomas Spickernell was listed by the town clerk of Maldon, Essex, as among those disaffected toward the Puritan magistracy and was described as "sometime apprentice to a bookbinder; after, a vagrant peddler; then, a ballad singer and seller; and now, a minister and alehouse-keeper in Maldon." "Minister," taken in the religious sense (as clergyman or, more generally, agent of a faith), would seem to be the key appellation in this list of occupations-given the intent of the clerk to indicate spiritual deviance. But the title is arrived at through the loosest of temporal connections-"sometime," "after," "then," "now"-and fails to achieve a culminating position of prominence in the list of occupations. Rather, "minister" is displaced from such a preeminent seat by the highly secular nomen "alehouse-keeper" (with which "minister" shares syntactical as well as temporal and geographical space). One might at this point even heretically question the spirituality of the term "minister" and conclude that it is not meant in the religious sense at all, but in the secular meaning of "servant," "attendant," or "administrator"-of ale, not faith.
Such a deviant slippage from sacral to secular place, whether consciously made by the clerk or not, may well have been inspired by the lone descriptor in the sequence of occupations: "vagrant." No matter what the clerk's prioritizing intent, no occupation in his list can necessarily follow another, and none can achieve sole preeminence, because all are versions of the same perceived lack of acceptable occupation: a profession of vagrancy. This is the real heresy posed by Spickernell (so insidiously that it has infiltrated the clerk's own logic). As a "sometime apprentice," Spickernell was "masterless," free of the binding terms and regulatory "freedom" of a company. Given that most printers/bookbinders were in London, Spickernell's former master was probably of London's Company of Stationers. The casualness implied by "sometime" suggests that Spickernell did not finish his term, which was, indeed, the case with 60 percent of the apprentices in London at this time. He was thus unsupervised, unplaced, and socially vagrant. As a peddler wandering from place to place selling his wares, he was not only socially but also physically and legally vagrant (hence the specific designation as such in the clerk's list). "Peddler" or "petty chapman" was included among the illegal occupations detailed in the vagrancy acts of 1572 and 1598, and although in 1604 peddlers and tinkers were omitted from a new vagrancy act, they continued to be harassed. Thus, in 1637 the petty chapman Thomas Bassett found himself accused of "wandering as a vagrant" and "selling false and counterfeit jewels" by the Salisbury authorities; he was subsequently punished. The type is imaged in figure 1. In addition to necklaces, pins, lace, gloves, and other such trinkets, the "vagrant" peddler would almost certainly carry pamphlets, chapbooks (cheap books) and/or ballads for sale, perhaps singing snatches of the latter to advertise his wares. As "ballad singer and seller" alone, Spickernell would not have been officially labeled vagrant but would have nevertheless often been treated as such (Prys Williams, for example, was punished in 1616 for being "a ballad-singer and vagrant")5 and would have frequented the same places as the peddler: street corners, fairs, markets, theaters, bear-baitings, wakes, and anywhere else people congregated. As unsettled print trades, Spickernell's alternative occupations ("sometime apprentice to a bookbinder," "vagrant peddler," "ballad singer and seller") are essentially interchangeable.
To be "now" an alehouse-keeper was to site provisionally, and thus suspiciously, all three of the above "professions," since unsettled laborers (including runaway apprentices and servants), peddlers, and ballad singers would all frequent the alehouse for food, lodging, sales, and the hope of finding service. Finally, all such groups also came together under the nomen of disaffected "minister" in the term's secular sense (the alehouse-keeper "ministering" ale to his customers), as well as-at least in the minds of many authorities, such as Maldon's clerk-its religious meaning. On the latter score, officials often suspected the unsettled of being recusants, radical Protestants, or irreligious-especially when gathered together at ungodly assembly points such as alehouses-not because many itinerants were indeed such religious dissidents, but because by the very nature of their mobility, they were considered wholly deviant. From the perspective of authority in a patriarchal and theoretically static society, the laboring poor who moved from job to job and place to place were tremendously threatening and subversive, whatever their actual religious or political position might be.
What begs for exploration here is the connection-or, more accurately, the heretical disconnection-in early modern England that linked makeshift "professions" (such as those undertaken by Spickernell and like poor workers) and the lower-order subject. As an end point to such an investigation, my study aims to make space for a new notion of "low" subjectivity-economic, social, psychological, and metonymic-that escaped the "bound" and made a home of homelessness. An originary trace of such an unbound subject can be detected in a newly emergent economy characterized by mobility, diversity, alienation, freedom, and tactical (as opposed to strategic or authorized) craft. Traced through this unsettled economy, the largely invisible laboring poor glimpsed in the case of Spickernell emerge as distinctive subjects but with potentially extensive reach. Indeed, they have the potential to embrace metonymically many of the lower orders (not just the indigent and homeless) of early modern England: mobile wage laborers, on land and at sea; unstable servants and apprentices; and even some of the multitasked poor householders of the period, both men and-perhaps even more so-women. Our gaze is thus low but elastic: it extends beyond the legally vagrant/itinerant poor and the crisis years in which they emerged during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to include consideration of how such crises might subtly and sometimes insidiously penetrate the home and extend into the deep substructure of the later seventeenth century. In order to make visible such an elastic connectedness, however, we need to rethink not only our traditional theories of place as hierarchical and stable, but also our traditional notions of subjectivity as "high" or erudite and as unitary or consistent. We must make more class-specific the totalizing language of exchange and theatricality, or self-fashioning, that has-as Christopher Pye rightly sees-marked (and marketed) new historicist notions of early modern subjectivity. The first part of my book thus concludes by positing a theory of "low" subjectivity that is itself unsettled: a subjectivity that could invest in multiple types of "selves" (whether additionally, intermittently, or provisionally) and that itself might be only casually or occasionally held.
My goal, then, is to open up our perspective of the low to consider a large body of physically and psychologically unsettled poor, not just those determined in the period to be legally vagrant. But the judged vagrant remain vital to this study because so many of them were in fact itinerant laborers. There is further value in looking at those labeled and arrested for vagrancy as a group if we read the evidence about them as representations rather than simply facts, because study of the arrested "vagrant" renders transparent the contemporary preconceptions and misconceptions about the unsettled poor in general. We shall, then, begin at rock bottom-however slippery or shifting the ground-and trace the unmooring of the poorer subject in the tide of labeled "vagrants"-however inaccurate or misleading the term-that appeared to overrun late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. This will be the focus of the present chapter.
* * *
Many factors-none of which were singularly "new" in the period-conspired to create a proliferation of dispossessed laborers in Elizabethan and Jacobean England and, more importantly, a contemporary sensibility that vagrancy had reached new crisis levels. Heather Dubrow has studied two frequent causes of homelessness and migration: the loss of parents and the loss of dwellings due to fire or property disputes. The list goes on: rising population and unemployment (especially in the economic depressions of the 1590s, 1620s, and 1630s), decreases in noble households and hospitality, rising rents (to 1650), the conversion of copyhold tenures to leaseholds (fueling property disputes), high agricultural prices, and low wages. All were among the many significant factors contributing to an increase-and, more importantly, a felt increase-in the number of dispossessed poor. Anxiety over the perceived rise in physical unsettledness manifested itself in a number of ways: the escalation of official proclamations and statutes against "Rogues, Vagabonds and Sturdy Beggars"; the upsurge throughout the country in alehouses, which catered especially to the poor and homeless; contemporary impressions of an epidemic of masterless men; the expansion of slum tenements and suburbs in cities; dramatic increases in mandatory and spontaneous roundups of perceived vagrants; and the massive proliferation of beggar and rogue literature, to name but a few.
In actuality, towns (such as Maldon) bore the brunt of the problem of the displaced and impoverished, and by the 1620s many towns felt overwhelmed. During crisis years, we find, the numbers of indigent in urban societies could rise to 20 percent or more, far outstripping the usual 5 percent slated for poor relief. Those unprovided for, or inadequately provided for (mostly members of the laboring poor struggling all along to stave off penury), necessarily resorted to begging, theft, and/or migration to other towns in search of food, lodging, and opportunity. But many towns strictly enforced the Tudor poor laws, ejecting poor migrants of recent date, which often compelled the migrant to become perpetually unsettled. Driven (and sometimes whipped) from town to town, the urban mobile poor occupied not so much a place as a space of alienation. A caveat: the conditions that might open up such an alien space of unsettledness were widely variable (dependent on such factors as originary status, family size, gender, and locality), as were the different ways the space of unsettledness might be inhabited. The latter was especially the case for those wage laborers or housed poor who might only metonymically associate themselves with the unsettled subject, as we shall see most clearly in the life of the seaman Edward Barlow. But even among the legally vagrant, there was no cast-iron type. Vagrants were not all identical or interchangeable. There were, however, some typical features to the unsettled experience that allow us to formulate the following broad, if tentative, generalizations.
First and foremost we might stress the common detachment of the urban itinerant from any sense of stable community. The myth of a vagrant subculture, promulgated in the contemporary rogue literature of Thomas Harman, Robert Greene, and Thomas Dekker, among others, has been debunked by recent historians of vagrancy. Peaking in the 1590s and early 1600s, when itinerancy was on the increase because of severe economic depression, such rogue literature depicted the unsettled as professional criminals organized in gangs of an alternative culture replete with hierarchy and canting language. Little historical evidence supports this imagined criminal community. When the mobile poor engaged in crime other than vagrancy, it was most often petty and impromptu. The average English itinerant traveled alone or with one other person. And gatherings-such as occurred at markets, fairs, or alehouses-were mostly spontaneous. Indeed, as Paul Slack points out, the physically unsettled
might have their familiar haunts in a local ale-house, an isolated barn, or a lodging-house like that of John Matthew, a Salisbury hosier, but whether they relied on petty crime or persuasive begging for their livelihood, or were genuinely seeking work, their chances of success depended on their relative solitude. They also often depended on a certain anonymity, hence the frequency of aliases in these records.
The Salisbury register of arrested vagrants, 1598-1669, which provides us with one of the fullest surviving records of the physically unsettled in the early modern period, is peppered with such aliases adopted by itinerants in their efforts (often vain) to cover their tracks: "John Heyward alias Chrowche alias Hancock, an idle vagrant person was punished," notes the entry for January 26, 1599; "Margaret Legge alias Jackson alias Smyth was found wandering as a vagrant, not giving any reason or account of her wandering" (nor presumably of her change of names), declares an entry on January 11, 1610. Whatever her "real" identity, we know that Margaret escaped whipping because she was pregnant. The inability or refusal of officials to fill in more information about these arrested vagrants and their various identities contributes to our unsettling sense of an anonymous and-in the sequential listing of aliases-displaced identity.
Solitary wandering and a kind of anonymity marked the unsettled subject's detachment not only from any stable community but also, as in the case of Margaret and her unborn child, from any complete family. "Family structure among vagrants," remarks A. L. Beier in Masterless Men, "is a story of fragments, of individuals cut adrift from kin and masters." Under economic duress, husbands deserted their families-in such numbers that a vagrancy statute of 1610 stipulated "that all such persons so running away, shall be taken and deemed to be incorrigible rogues"-while abandoned wives often took to the roads to seek them out and/or to beg. In 1582 Anne Smyth, sadly, was twice so deserted by her husband, and the second time cheated by him as well. Apprehended in Warwick, she explained that she dwelled in Lincoln but that her husband had left her about six weeks earlier.
And she following after to seek him found him here at Warwick on the fair day the first day of May last. And he brought her to an alehouse where he left her and willed her to tarry there until he came out of the market and then he would keep her company and so with fair word went away from her and took from her a cloak and since then she did not see him.
The proliferation of "ands" in this report (no fewer than seven), with few subordinating clauses, verbally enacts Anne's bleak experience of displacement: one event follows and replaces another, with little change but in the details, such as the loss of a cloak. But such loss does not deter Anne's determined wandering. Cloakless, she continues searching for her husband. Many such deserted wives wandered from town to town in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Despite the increase in displaced married women, however, most of the physically unsettled at this time were children, adolescents, and young adults. Whether leaving home because of a parental loss of the kind Dubrow so feelingly describes, or to help relieve family poverty, or to hide a pregnancy, or as punishment for the deed, the majority of these youths were single and unattached. About half were single men; a quarter were single women.
Liaisons, licit and illicit, were formed among this generation of unsettled youths, but they were mostly unstable and short-term. For this reason, traditional terms such as family or household seem highly inadequate to describe the kind of social ties itinerants formed; "modular affective units" might be a more accurate, if too clinical, phrase. In this context, physical separation was not so much a breaking of the marriage tie as an expected part of it. Such fluid bonding characterized even the marriages of laboring peddlers and petty chapmen, who often came from the ranks of unsettled youths and were likewise often persecuted for vagrancy. In her extensive study of these itinerant salespersons, Margaret Spufford provides numerous accounts of wives separated from husbands for long periods of time, each partner wandering as if they occupied parallel, unplaceable universes (some were not even able to name what town they were in when "arrested" by authorities). Bernard Barrye was typical: "terming himself a petty chapman," he was arrested in Salisbury on September 8, 1612, for "wandering as a vagrant," and he had "a wife and child wandering about Dorchester." Such marital dis-union, Spufford posits, suggests "the possible lightness of attachment represented by marriage, particularly amongst the very poorest" of these traders. Findings of an increase in "quasi-uxorial" relationships between migrant women and single male employers in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century urban environments (by Michael Roberts) and of a high incidence of remarriages of expediency among the Norwich poor (by Margaret Pelling) would seem to support Spufford's hypothesis. The Salisbury register included many such chapmen and peddlers, together with lists of other young couples temporarily coming together and disbanding in loose sexual/affective relationships. Officials carefully noted such laxity, or, as they termed it, "lewd living." Slack provides a tally of the entries:
There were 17 couples ... described as "living lewdly together, being unmarried"; ten single women were spared punishment because they were pregnant; another 17 were sent back to their husbands, while one man alleged that he "travelleth from place to place to seek his wife who is departed from him, and here he persuaded one Felton's daughter that he would marry her."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Unsettled by PATRICIA FUMERTON Copyright © 2006 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsPreface: Making Space for the Working Poor
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Text
Part 1 - Unsettled Subjects
1. Mobilizing the Poor
2. London's Economy of Unsettledness—and Beyond
3. Disguising the Working Poor: Harman's Caveat
4. Unsettled Subjectivity: The Virtual "I"
Part 2 - The Case of Edward Barlow
5. "Not Well Settled in My Mind"
6. Poor Men at Sea: "Never to be worth one groat afore a beggar"
7. Charting Barlow
Part 3 - Toward a Lowly Aesthetics of Unsettledness
8. The Ballad's Seaman: A Constant Parting
Epilogue: Unsettling the New Global Economy
Appendix A: Edward Barlow's Family Tree
Appendix B: Inventory of George Barlow, 1686
Appendix C: Record of Edward Barlow's Mobility (On Land and Sea)
Appendix D: Will of Edward Barlow, Commander of the Liampo, 1708
Appendix E: On the Variation of the Compass
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index