The price of the poor's words: social relations and the economics of deposing for one's ‘betters’ in early modern England

Abstract

Historians of early modern England are aware that the legal testimony of poor, dependent, and subordinated individuals was regarded with suspicion. Contemporaries believed that labouring people would provide false evidence in return for ‘gifts’ or ‘rewards’. To what extent did such assumptions accurately reflect the processes whereby such witnesses came to depose for their ‘betters’? This article uses sixteenth‐ and early seventeenth‐century perjury and subornation suits from the court of Star Chamber to reconstruct labouring people's experiences and understandings of the politics of testimony. In explicating the structural and material factors that could militate against their deposing, override their reservations about doing so, and colour the contents of the depositions they gave, it makes two broader contributions to our understanding of the period. On the one hand, it presents a markedly more pessimistic account of the social relations involved in the increase in litigation. On the other, it reappraises a category of source—depositions—that historians have long regarded as providing singularly privileged access to the expressions of social groups that left little trace in the historical record.

Women, Legal Records, and the Problem of the Lawyer's Hand

“…27 Hillary Taylor's recent work confirms some of their suspicions and reveals how the intricacies of local politics influenced deponents' decisions about whether, or how, to participate in legal disputes. 28 Furthermore, within pleadings and depositions themselves, allegations of lying are rife. Parties also accused opponents (and even commissioners) of falsifying depositions by inserting words or phrases that "were never uttered, nor spoken by the said deponent, nor sett downe in the paper deposicions," and from the later sixteenth century onward English prosecutions for perjury rose dramatically.…”