Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  ‘Chicks up front’

  Except for a few privileged groups, those who tried to form associations larger than the family to achieve social and economic goals ran grave risks, and therefore in the West – in the seventeenth as in the twentieth century – women took a prominent role in many collective protests. According to a study of bread riots in western France, ‘the most constant element was the presence of women’ – indeed, throughout France, women outnumbered men in more than half of all known rural food riots and in more than three-quarters of all known urban food riots; while ‘some crowds consisted entirely of women’.18 In part, this disparity reflected the realities of daily life – in the villages the men spent the day working in distant fields, leaving only women at home, while in the towns women spent much of their time in the streets, either shopping or selling – but it also reflected long traditions. Jean Nicolas, who discovered this imbalance, noted that the women who took the lead in early modern food riots

  Had inherited patterns of ritualized behaviour that transcended time. From one end of France to the other, and across the centuries, the tempo of their actions seemed universal: first they shouted, then they overturned any structure easily tipped over, emptied the baskets full of grain, rushed into the shops, and blocked the way … To turn disorder into a riot required only stones to hurl, ashes to throw into the eyes of merchants, knives to slit the sacks.19

  Women likewise took the lead in popular disorders elsewhere in seventeenth-century Europe. In the Dutch Republic, when the magistrates of Haarlem invited bids for collecting a new excise duty in 1628, a group of women attacked the first man to make a bid, shouting: ‘Let's sound the drum and send our husbands home; then we'll get the bastard and beat him up because we cannot be punished for fighting.’ In England, when in 1645 a group of women mounted a protest against the collection of excise duties in Derby they ‘went up and down beating drums and making proclamations … that such of the town as were not willing to pay excise should join with them and they should beat the [excise] commissioners out of town’. When the commissioners tried to discuss the matter with the town council, one of the women banged her drum outside the council chamber so loudly that it drowned out the debate; and when a soldier tried to collect excise, a crowd tethered him to the bull ring in the marketplace whilst ‘the women did beat the drums as before’. Collection only began after the authorities agreed that the proceeds would be used locally and not sent to London.20 Dutch rioters often chanted the slogan ‘Women can do no wrong!’, and English magistrates agreed. ‘If a number of women (or children under the age of discretion) do flocke together for their own cause, this is none assembly punishable,’ wrote the author of a standard handbook for magistrates in 1619; while that same year the Court of Star Chamber, asserted (in a case that involved breaking down the fences around enclosed fields) that women were ‘not subject to the lawes of the realme as men are, but might … offend without drede or punishment of lawe’.21

  In part, this double standard reflected the realization that a woman and her family might cross the threshold between survival and starvation in a matter of days if not hours. In 1930 Richard Tawney, a social historian of early modern England, visited China (then in the grip of famine) and reported that, in some areas, ‘the position of the rural population is that of a man standing permanently up to the neck in water, so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him’. An English pamphlet published during food riots in Essex in 1629 described the plight of the local weavers in remarkably similar terms: most ‘cannot live unless they bee paied every night, many hundreds of them havinge no bedds to lye in, nor foode; but from hand to mouth mainteyne themselves, their wives and children’. In France, insurgents half a century later exclaimed when faced by famine that ‘you only die once’ and so they ‘would prefer to be hanged than to die of hunger’, and that ‘they were dying of hunger, and would rather hang to finish their lives sooner’. In Paris ‘you could hear women in the market-place cry out that they would rather slit their children's throats than watch them die of hunger’. In such circumstances, ‘survival’ could easily lead to resistance and even revolt.22

  European women lost their immunity only when resistance got out of hand. During the famine year of 1629, Ann Carter, a butcher's wife from the town of Malden in Essex, led a large crowd of women to prevent the export of grain from the region and, motivated by ‘the crie of the country and her own want’, they forced the would-be exporters to pour their grain into their bonnets and aprons. Her conduct on this occasion reflected the accepted protocols of early modern protest, but over the next two months Ann toured the area to mobilize support, took the title ‘Captain’ and proclaimed ‘Come my brave lads of Malden, I will be your leader for we will not starve.’ This time, a crowd of several hundred unemployed cloth-workers broke into a grain store and removed the contents. A week later the government arrested Ann, put her on trial for sedition, and after the (all male) jury convicted her, hanged her the next day. In the Netherlands in 1652, 45-year-old Grietje Hendrickx was likewise arrested, tried and sentenced for collecting stones in her apron, carrying them to the rioters and ‘inciting bystanders to join in’. The following year, the authorities issued a warrant to arrest two women who had led a riot:

  Griet Piet Scheer, aged 36, blond hair, thin face with blue eyes, fairly tall, slim figure, soberly dressed. She dresses at times in black and at others she wears a blue overall with red sleeves; she acted as captain. Alit Turfvolster, bearer of the flag, is as tall but somewhat stouter than the above-mentioned Griet; she sniffs somewhat through her nose, is brown of complexion with black hair and untidy clothes; she wears a bodice with a linen apron, and her age is 30.

  Court records show that few of the women charged with leading street protests were under 25 years, and fewer still were over 60: most were (like all the above mentioned insurgents) between 30 and 45.23 Lungs as well as age counted, and here too women enjoyed an advantage because many of them worked as street-vendors who spent their days singing and shouting out their wares as they passed through the streets. One observer in 1643, the year with more grain riots than any other in seventeenth-century France, noted that unrest in Bordeaux ended when the authorities distributed bread to ‘the women who shouted most’.24

  Women might also lead other forms of collective protest. The riots against drainage schemes that threatened common rights in eastern England in the 1630s involved mostly ‘women, boys, servants and poor people whose names cannot be learned’, who broke open the new dykes, chased off the workmen and smashed their wheelbarrows; while a shouting and stool-throwing group of women in Edinburgh in 1637 started the Scottish Revolution. During the Corpus de Sang in Barcelona three years later, an observer noted the role of ‘a cruel woman – and most of them were cruel on this occasion – who told the rioters that she had seen a Castilian’ enter a local church. The men then went in and ‘beat him to death’.25 Protestant survivors from seven Irish counties commented on the prominent role played by women in ‘hurting’ British settlers during the rebellion of 1641. According to a woman from Newry in County Down, her female Catholic neighbours were ‘more scornfull and cruell then the men, swearing and vowing they would kill them becawse they were of English kynd’, while a women in County Armagh ‘was soe cruell against the English and Scottish that she was very angrie with the souldjers becawse they did not putt them all to death’. Three other deponents in County Armagh (all women) described how a ‘bloudy virago’, had used a pitchfork to ‘force and thrust’ over a dozen of her Protestant neighbours into ‘a thatcht howse’, which she then ‘sett on fyre’ so that all ‘were miserably and barbarously burned to death’.26 Another female survivor testified that ‘the Irish women would follow after the Irish rebel soldiers and put them forward to cruelty with these and such wordes, “Spare neither man, woman nor child”’. A male deponent recorded that another ‘bloudy virago’ had, ‘out of divellish and base spite and malice to the English and Scottish’, been ‘the p
rincipall cawser and instigator of the drowning of fifty Protestants – men, women and children – all at one time’. Meanwhile at Kilkenny, the Confederate capital, the heads of several British soldiers defeated in battle were brought out and ‘sett upon the Markett crosse, where the Rebells – but especially the women there’ – gathered round and ‘stabbd, cutt and slasht those heades’. One of them drew her dagger and ‘slasht at the face of the [late] William Alfrey and hitt him on the nose’.27

  Although accounts of revolts outside Europe sometimes mention the participation of women, they always appeared in subordinate roles. Thus in India during the 1650s, when villagers resisted Mughal efforts to collect taxes, ‘the women stood behind their husbands with spears and arrows. When the husband had shot off the matchlock his wife handed him the lance, while she reloaded the matchlock.’28 In China, although women appear in some exploits recorded in Water Margin, the popular Ming novel about outlaws, they do so only as helpers to their bandit husbands. Doubtless some women participated in the popular rebellions of the late Ming period – although Chinese officials normally named only the leaders (all male) and dismissed their followers as ‘thugs’ or ‘wastrels’ – but two considerations make it improbable that Chinese women could have taken the lead in revolts like Ann Carter, Griet Piet Scheer or Alit Turfvolster: first, neither Chinese law nor custom had a concept similar to ‘women can do no wrong’; second, the practice of first binding the feet and then secluding ‘respectable women’ from puberty to menopause would have severely limited their ability to lead street protests.29

  Clerics and Fools

  In Europe, the clergy formed a second group who served as proxies during popular protests. Some became quite outspoken. A mid-seventeenth century French catechism, for example, condemned as guilty of homicide those ‘who failed to calm and disperse popular sedition when they have the power to do so, such as magistrates’. A French priest had no doubt that his flock's opposition to billeting would prosper, because ‘since the soldiers lacked just aims, and thought only of pillaging the city and other base designs, God would withdraw his blessings and grant that the first to be assigned and ordered [to seek billets] would perish’.30 In Naples in 1647, some priests assured the insurgents that their struggle ‘was just, because they were oppressed by excessive taxes and attacked and provoked by the Spaniards’; and many Spaniards questioned the allegiance of Archbishop Filamarino, who remained in Naples throughout the revolution and on several occasions appeared in public ceremonies alongside the rebel leaders.31

  Clerics from other faiths intervened as proxies in popular revolts elsewhere. Throughout the Ottoman empire, local sheikhs (the heads of a Sufi or dervish lodge: see chapter 7 above) handled negotiations between the central government and a community either oppressed by taxes or by local officials, often securing redress of grievances before violence began. For example, in Cairo, protesting merchants and artisans would habitually march from the principal souk, Khan al-Khalil (also known as the ‘Turkish bazaar'), to the al-Azhar mosque to request the intervention of a sheikh with known ties to the governing elite.32 In China, Buddhist monks sometimes became spokesmen for the oppressed. Thus in 1640, in a Jiangnan town, a monk organized a ‘strike for grain’ (da mi) in which crowds of over a hundred peasants visited the houses of the rich asking for food: they spared houses that provided sustenance and burned those that refused. In general, however, Buddhist (and Daoist) clerics lacked the local authority wielded by their Christian and Sufi counterparts, partly because most of them lived in temples largely isolated from the rest of the population, and also because the dominance of Confucian ethics undermined any claim to moral leadership made by others.33

  A third proxy occasionally able to speak truth to power was the ‘fool’, whom ancient tradition allowed to voice unwelcome criticisms to rulers. Most Islamic rulers grudgingly tolerated the criticisms and claims voiced by a Majdhūd (‘holy fool’) – indeed the Ottoman authorities may have initially overlooked the Messianic claims of Shabbatai Zvi because they considered him a ‘holy fool’.34 Holy fools were also common in Orthodox Christianity: they wore no clothes, draped themselves in chains and wore an iron hat, living in extreme poverty and begging for food. Although they normally spoke nonsense, they sometimes slipped sharp criticisms into their silliness, thus managing to confront even the tsar with unpalatable truths. In the 1660s the Old Believer Avraamii got away with his vociferous opposition to the liturgical reforms supported by Tsar Alexei by posing as a ‘holy fool’, which allowed him to speak (though not to write) with impunity. Likewise in Portugal in 1637, those who rioted against attempts to impose a new tax at Évora made a simpleton their leader: ‘Manuelinho, secretary of the young people, ministers of divine justice’ signed the manifestos posted in the streets against the ‘tyrant Pharaoh’. That same year, when Archibald Armstrong, Charles I's Scottish Fool, heard of the rioting in his native land provoked by imposing a new Prayer Book on English lines, he asked the architect of the proposal, Archbishop Laud, ‘Who's the Fool now?’ in an attempt to change government policy. Although Laud had Archie banished from the court and confiscated his Fool's coat, the jester still had the last laugh. A courtier who encountered Archie without his fool's coat, and asked where it was, received the reply: ‘Oh, my lord of Canterbury [Laud] has taken it from me, because he or some of the Scots bishops may have use for it themselves!’35

  The Etiquette of Collective Violence

  With or without proxies, most early modern rebels issued ‘warnings’ before they resorted to violence. Posters would appear in the streets warning an individual whom the community identified as an oppressor to change his (or, less often, her) ways; women would gather and kneel together in the open and noisily weep and wail in front of the house of an abusive landlord. If such ‘shaming’ tactics failed to produce concessions, satirical songs might be composed and sung at night outside the offender's house. Artefacts might be used to convey a message: a cart left in the doorway, implying that another would soon carry away a coffin; a bonfire lit, suggesting that the owner's house would be next; or someone hanged in effigy from a gallows – the ultimate sign of disapproval short of violence. If all of these coded warnings, too, failed to produce the desired changes, the aggrieved graduated to destroying property, starting with distant assets such as vines, fruit trees, mills and storehouses, moving on to stoning windows or smashing down the front door. After that, the terrified victims usually fled.36

  Those who ignored these warnings ran the risk of serious harm – although even then, violence against property and people was normally applied with precision. In England in 1642 a group called the ‘Colchester plunderers’ ransacked a score of country mansions in Essex so thoroughly that later visitors found merely ‘bare walls’ or ruins ‘desolate without inhabitant’ – but the plunderers only targeted the property of those whom parliamentary and Puritan propaganda denounced as ‘Papists and malignants’ (that is, royalists). That same year, crowds surrounded the Palace of Westminster vociferously calling for the exclusion of bishops – but, as a French diplomat observed, ‘If this were any other nation, I believe the city [of London] would be in flames, and blood flowing within 24 hours’.37 And, indeed, rioters in some parts of continental Europe often showed little restraint. In Barcelona, after the murder of the viceroy in June 1640, a royal judge watched in horror from his hiding place in a church steeple as rioters murdered every Castilian they could find, filled with ‘an incredible rage, without sparing the church where they killed someone hiding beneath the altar, without seeing or knowing who it was until the blood running out from under the frontal revealed that some unfortunate was hiding there’. Angry Catalans surged through the streets of Barcelona again the following December, seeking out and murdering all those suspected of collaboration with ‘the enemy’ (viz. their former sovereign, Philip IV): this time they disfigured their victims with repeated blows before hanging them from gallows in the city square.38

  The following year, the
Irish rebellion also saw acts of extreme violence towards individuals. Thus a Catholic in County Down exclaimed, as he ran his neighbour ‘twice or thrice throrowe the body’ with his rapier: ‘That will make an end of him, that he shall never write a mittimus [arrest warrant] to send mee to Down jaoyle [jail] againe.’ In County Antrim, another Catholic cut his Protestant neighbour into ‘many pieces’ and then ‘lay downe his bloody sword and put his fingers’ in his victim's ‘mouth, and nipped his flesh to see if he were dead or not; and, beinge dead, he sayes that “I am glade that I haue gotten thee, for I had rather haue had thee then all the rest in the towne”’.39 For southern France, William Beik has postulated the existence of a ‘culture of retribution’: once an angry crowd had decided that someone ‘“had it coming to him”, there was no such thing as excessive force’. In the province of Aquitaine, for example, at least 30 of the 50 known tax rebellions in the course of the seventeenth century involved the humiliation, execution and (often) mutilation of a tax collector by the rioters.40

  The anthropologist David Riches has noted that violence serves not only as a convenient and economical instrument to transform society, but also as an ‘excellent communicative vehicle’ with which to make symbolic statements. In many parts of Europe, crowd violence therefore often followed an etiquette that mirrored legal protocols. Rioters paraded their victim, often a tax collector, around the town with his hands bound and dressed only in a shirt, forcing him to make ‘honourable amends’ at each crossroads and square – just as happened to those convicted by the king's judges. Sometimes the crowd then set the victim free, so he could warn others of the fate that awaited all tax collectors, but others they executed and quartered – again following the same measured ritual, often performed in the same places, as in state trials.41