Rumour and Reputation in the Early Modern English Family

Abstract

In his recent book on the pursuit of fulfilment through friendship, sociability, honour, and reputation, Keith Thomas has commented that in early-modern England 'harmony was prized, whereas lawsuits, which set neighbour against neighbour, were [...] widely deplored as un-Christian breaches of charity'. 1 Bernard Capp, Craig Muldrew and Steve Hindle have all arrived at the same conclusion. 2 Steve Hindle put it this way: 'the ethos of community was one of charity, neighbourliness and reciprocal obligation'. 3 However, there are hints that despite all prescription and rhetoric in early-modern society, harmony, while desired, was not always achieved. 4 This article explores the role of rumouror the hearsay and gossip that circulated in a communityin eroding or maintaining reputations within and across families.To achieve this, it considers the nature of gossip, including the way it carried gender connotations, and the social dynamics involved in the passage of rumour from local community to the central law courts. Early-modern people regularly entered into bitter disputes over wills, money and inheritance, title to land, boundaries, animal thefts, and a 1 Thomas, The Ends of Life, p. 189. 2 See, Capp, When Gossips Meet; Muldrew, 'The Culture of Reconciliation'; Hindle, 'A Sense of Place?' 3 Hindle, 'A Sense of Place?', p. 108. 4 Capp, When Gossips Meet, p. 185. 'How the "gossip" became a woman'; Schofield, 'Peasants and the Manor Court: Gossip and Litigation in a Suffolk Village at the Close of the Thirteenth Century', pp. 3-42 (especially pp. 6-9) citing Bonfield, 'The Nature of Customary Law in the Manor Courts of Medieval England' and Beckerman, 'Towards a Theory of Medieval Manorial Adjudication: the Nature of Communal Judgements in a System of Customary Law'.3 the construction of the social identities of groups. That people gossiped and spread rumours is not under question here. In 1591 John Florio remarked that the question 'what news?' was the first asked by any Englishman. 6 Although Florio gendered this as a masculine trait, 'what news?' was exactly the question that Agnes Filer asked Edward Loxton when he walked into a tavern in 1539, only to be astonished when he replied that there might be war. 7 Gossip took place in the fields and woods, across hedges, by the hearth, in the streets and in front of church authorities. Indeed, it took place increasingly in newspapers and, from the 1690s, in the 'secret histories' that acted to circulate gossip in and around the royal court of the later Stuarts. 8 Tale-tellers and their listeners made a clear distinction between the potentially seditious news, like Loxton's, and the news that indicated trouble within families. Spreading rumours that the monarch was dead was dangerous and deeply shocking, but news that led to disorder in family life also was seen to threaten the stability of households and ultimately, therefore, the commonweal. 'Sins of the tongue' -or the 'boneless member' as the tongue was sometimes calledwere committed by those troublesome people in...

Gender, property and succession in the early modern English aristocracy: the case of Martha Janes and her illegitimate children

“…It was a situation that increased the social power of their mother through the claim of guardianship, though this came at a price and needed to be fought for. 57 When Lord Scroop died, other father figures came to the fore offering to protect and care for the estate. As the bodies of the children were bound up with the estate, this also meant that they became subject to the desire of other men to control and gain possession of the Scroop lands.…”