The Many-Headed Hydra

by Peter Linebaugh

  Almost as many as are sundry Nations:

  For in the world all things so hanged are

  Than any thing unhangs’d is strange and rare.

  When Taylor visited Hamburg in 1616, he was fascinated by the execution of a poor carpenter who was smashed to pieces on the wheel by an executioner. Compared to “our Tyburn Tatterdemalion or our Wapping winde-pipe stretcher,” the poet exclaimed, the Hamburg executioner seemed like one of the pillars of Hercules!25 Taylor made explicit the relationship between hanging and capitalism when he compared the hanged to “dead commodities.”

  Many poor women imprisoned, and hanged for Witches. Ralph Gardiner, England’s Grievance Discovered (1655). Rare Books Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

  Women were a specific target of terror, as four thousand witches were burned and hundreds more hanged after 1604, when the punishment for “bewitchment” was made more severe. The terror had three peaks, in 1590–97, 1640–44, and 1660–63. Between 1558 and 1680, 5 percent of all English indictments, and fully 13 percent in the Home Circuit, contained charges of witchcraft. James I had himself interrogated women accused of witchcraft and had written a treatise of erudite misogyny, Daemonologie, to assert against skeptics the reality of witchcraft and the need for capital punishment. Silvia Federici has shown that the European witch-hunt reached its most intense ferocity between 1550 and 1650, “simultaneously with the Enclosures, the beginning of the slave trade and the enactment of laws against the vagabonds, in countries where a reorganization of work along capitalist lines was under way.” The ducking stool, the cart’s tail, branding, the pillory, the cage, the thew, and the branks were all used for the torture of women.26

  In all its forms, terror was designed to shatter the human spirit. Whether in London at the birth of capitalism or in Haiti today, terror infects the collective imagination, generating an assortment of demons and monsters. If Francis Bacon conceptualized the science of terror from above, Luke Hutton’s Black Dog of Newgate, written in 1596, expressed the folklore of terror from below. Hutton had been indicted for theft in 1589 (specifically, for stealing surgical instruments) and served a short bid in Newgate; though he composed a great ballad of banditry and remorse (“Be warned, young wantons, hemp passeth green holly”), his life would end at the gallows in York in 1598. He dedicated The Black Dog to Chief Justice Popham, who had probably pardoned him for an earlier conviction and for whom the poem was an ambiguous kind of payback.27 It tells the story of Hutton’s arrest, detention, and first days in Newgate. In the poem the black dog is a diabolical fury that first appears as a broom man quietly cleaning the streets, reminding us that terror often masks itself as cleanliness: the Privy Council “swept” the street of vagabonds. The sweeper is then transmogrified into a beast, like Cerberus (Hydra’s sibling), a dog whose ears are snakes, whose belly is a furnace, whose heart is steel, whose thighs are wheels, and who seizes Hutton and tosses him into Newgate. The burden of the poem is to name the dog, a burden that is never lifted; the inability to name the oppressor thus becomes a first disability of terror.

  The myth of the black dog originated in the Middle Ages, at a time of famine. A scholar jailed in Newgate—for conjuring which “by charms and devilish witchcraft had done much hurt”—was deemed by the other prisoners to be “passing good meat.” His fellow inmates watched in horror as the scholar turned into a dog, “ready with his ravening jaws to tear out their bowels”; driven to a fearful, insane frenzy, they then killed the prison-keeper and escaped, “but yet whithersoever they came or went they imagined the black dog to follow.” Some said that the black dog was a standing stone in the part of the dungeon called Limbo, “the place where the condemned Prisoners be put after their Judgement, upon which they set a burning candle in the night, against which, I have heard that a desperate condemned Prisoner dashed out his braines.”28 In certain respects the black dog of Newgate parallels the voodoo backa, or dog of repression, who also feeds on human beings. The backa is a form taken by the living dead, or zombie: “It was a walking spirit in the likeness of a black dog gliding up and down the streets a little before the time of execution.” In Ireland Edmund Spenser observed zombies among the defeated Irish, who “looked like anatomies of death; they spoke like ghosts crying out of their graves.”29

  Newgate’s black dog led Hutton and many others to that acme of the regime of terror, the hanging:

  Yon men which thou beholds so pale and wan,

  Who whiles look up, and whiles look down again,

  Are all condemned, and they must die each man.

  Judgment is given that cord shall stop their breath

  For heinous facts—as murder, theft and treason.

  Unworthy life! To die law thought it reason.

  The sermon ended, the men condemned to die,

  Taking their leaves of their acquainted friends,

  With sorry looks, pacing their steps, they ply

  Down to a hall where for them there attends

  A man of office who, to daunt life’s hopes,

  Doth cord their hands and scarf their necks with ropes.

  Thus roped and corded, they descend the stairs:

  Newgate’s black dog bestirs to play his part,

  And does not cease for to augment their cares,

  Willing the carman to set near his cart.

  Which done, these men, with fear of death o’erhanging,

  Bound to the cart are carried to be hanged.

  This rueful sight, yet end to their doomed sorrows,

  Makes me aghast and forces me bethink.

  Woe unto woe! And so from woeful’st borrows

  A swame of grief. And then I sounding sink.

  But by Time’s aid I did revive again.

  Might I have died it would be lesser pain!

  Overwhelming horror thus conduced to a desire for death, a second disability of terror. The black dog did the work of reason and law, using death to elaborate a culture of fear that was indispensable to the creation of labor-power as a commodity.30

  The Black Dogge of Newgate. Luke Hutton, The Discovery of a London Monster called, the black dog of Newgate (1638).

  If the prison, house of correction, and gallows expressed one aspect of capitalism in England, military adventure, colonization, and plantation expressed another around the Atlantic. When Sir Humphrey Gilbert established the first English colony in the New World, in Newfoundland in 1583, the chronicler of the settlement compared it to the military adventures of Joshua, who conquered “strange nations,” took their lands and divided them among God’s people, and kept the vanquished at hand “to hewe wood and to carie water.” Gilbert’s hewers and drawers included not only “savages” but his own countrymen—those men, women, and children who had “live[d] idly at home” and might now “be set on worke” in America, mining, manufacturing, farming, fishing, and especially “felling . . . trees, hewing and sawing . . . them, and such like worke, meete for those persons that are no men of Art or science.” Both Gilbert and Richard Hakluyt, the main propagandists for English exploration and settlement, saw an advantage in England’s late entry into the European scramble for New World colonies: the expropriations that coincided with colonization meant that England, unlike Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, or France, had a huge and desperate population that could be redeployed overseas.31

  Authorities emptied the jails for the Cadiz expedition of 1596 and again for Mansfield’s army in 1624. According to the Beggar Act of 1598, the first-time offender for begging was to be stripped and whipped until his back was bloody; second-time offenders were banished from England, beginning the policy of transportation. Several thousand soldiers were recruited from London’s Bridewell between 1597 and 1601, and in 1601 and 1602 four galleys were built and then manned by felons. After 1617 transportation was extended as a statutorily permitted punishment for felons; at each assize thereafter, half a dozen men were reprieved for galley service and ten conscripted for the a
rmy. Sir William Monson expressed the relationship among expropriation, theft, terror, and slavery when he wrote:

  The terror of galleys will make men avoid sloth and pilfering and apply themselves to labour and pains; it will keep servants and apprentices in awe; . . . it will save much blood that is lamentably spilt by execution of thieves and offenders, and more of this kingdom than any other. . . . And that they may be known from others, they must be shaved both head and face, and marked in the cheek with a hot iron, for men to take notice of them to be the king’s labourers, for so they should be termed and not slaves.32

  Banishment legislation was aimed at the Irish, the Gypsies, and Africans after the 1590s. The English conquest of Ireland in 1596 laid the material foundation and established the model for all conquests to follow. Land confiscation, deforestation, legal fiat, cultural repression, and chronic crises of subsistence caused the Irish diaspora, sending men and women in waves to England and America. In 1594 all native Irish were commanded to leave England. Ulstermen found in Dublin were shipped to Virginia as slaves, as were Wexford rebels in 1620. The Gypsies, a nomadic people who had brought Morris dancing to England, offered an example of life lived without either landownership or master. By an Act of Mary, any Gypsy who remained in England longer than one month could be hanged; an Act of Elizabeth expanded the capital laws to include those who “in a certain counterfeit speech or behavior” disguised themselves as Gypsies. In 1628 eight men were hanged for transgressing these laws, and their female companions transported to Virginia. In 1636 another band of Gypsies was rounded up; the men were hanged and the women drowned at Haddington. Africans, too, commanded the attention of Queen Elizabeth I, who in 1596 sent an open letter to the lord mayor of London and to the mayors and sheriffs of other towns: “Her Majesty understanding that several blackamoors have lately been brought into this realm, of which kind of people there are already too many here . . . her Majesty’s pleasure therefore is that those kind of people should be expelled from the land.” In the same year, she engaged a German slave dealer to confiscate black people in England in return for English prisoners of war. In 1601 she proclaimed herself “highly discontented to understand the great numbers of negars and Blackamoores which . . . are crept into this realm.”

  Another part of the terror was forced labor overseas, a different kind of “going west.” Through the transatlantic institution of indentured servitude, merchants and their “spirits” (i.e., abductors of children and adults) shipped some two hundred thousand workers (two thirds of all those who left England, Scotland, and Ireland) to American shores in the seventeenth century. Some had been convicted of crimes and sentenced to penal servitude, others were kidnapped or spirited, while yet others went by choice—often desperate choice—exchanging several years’ labor for the prospect of land and independence afterward. During the first half of the seventeenth century, labor-market entrepreneurs plucked up the poor and dispossessed in the port cities (London and Bristol especially, and to a lesser extent Liverpool, Dublin, and Cork) and sent them initially to Virginia, where the practices and customs of indentured servitude originated. In order to entice settlers to and secure labor for the infant colony, the investors of the Virginia Company of London fashioned a covenant between the company and the workers. Imperial and local rulers of other colonies, most notably Barbados, adapted the new institution to their own labor needs. Indentured servitude, Eric Williams has remarked, was the “historic base” upon which American slavery was founded.33

  Prisons of various kinds—including the ship’s hold, the tender boat, the hulk, the crimp house, the pressroom, the “cook-house” (London), the barracoon, the storehouse, the factory (Gold Coast), the trunk (Whydah), the cage (Barbados), or the city jail (almost anywhere)—were, as Scott Christianson has shown, indispensable to the various Atlantic slave trades, whether the prisoners were sailors, children, or felons, whether they were from Africa or from Europe.34 Many indentured servants, Thomas Verney explained in 1642, came from the “bridewells, and the prisons.” Sir Josiah Child claimed that “the major part” of the women servants were “taken from Bridewell, Turnball Street, and such like places of Education.” It was a time when “jayls [were] emptied, youth seduced, infamous women drilled in.” According to a pamphlet of 1632, the plantations they were destined for “were no better than common ‘sinkes,’ where the commonwealth dumped her most lawless inhabitants.” Virginia’s servants were said to “have no habitations, & can bring neither certificate of their conformity nor ability and are better out than within the kingdom,” while Maryland’s were “for the most part the scum of the people taken up promiscuously as vagrant and runaways from their English masters, debauched, idle, lazy, squanderers, jailbirds, and the like.” John Donne promised in a sermon of 1622 that the Virginia Company “shall sweep your streets, and wash your dores, from idle persons, and the children of idle persons, and imploy them: and truely, if the whole Countrey were such a Bridewell, to force idle persons to work, it had a good use.” He wanted America to function as a prison, and for many it did.35

  Among those many were thousands of children, for the hewers and drawers were young. The Virginia Company made arrangements with the city of London for the transportation of several hundred poor children between the ages of eight and sixteen from the city’s Bridewell to Virginia. London’s Common Council approved the request, authorized constables to round up the children, and shipped off the first young laborers in the early spring of 1619. When a second request was made, the council was again accommodating, but the children themselves had other ideas, organizing a revolt in Bridewell and declaring “their unwillingness to go to Virginia.”36 Their resistance apparently drew attention, and it was soon discovered that the city lacked the authority to transport the children against their will. The Privy Council, of which Francis Bacon was then a member, jumped into the fray, granting the proper authority and threatening to imprison any child who continued to resist. Of the several hundreds of children shipped to Virginia at this time, the names of 165 were recorded. By 1625 only twelve of those were still alive; the other 153, or 93 percent, had died. There is little reason to assume different outcomes for the fourteen to fifteen hundred children said to be on their way to Virginia in 1627, or for the four hundred Irish children stolen “out of theyre bedds” in 1653 and sent off to New England and Virginia.37

  The experience of seventeenth-century servitude has survived in two firsthand accounts, written by James Revel and an anonymous woman who called herself a “Trapann’d Maiden.” Convicted of theft and sentenced to hang, Revel entered the land of the living dead when his execution was transmuted to fourteen years’ labor in Virginia. When he arrived there after midcentury, he was purchased by a planter, given a “hop-sack frock in which I was to slave,” and set to work on a plantation alongside ten European and eighteen African slaves. Emphasizing the terror of his sentence, he said he “had much rather chuse to die than go” to America. For her part, the female servant was “cunningly trapann’d” by a spirit and likewise sent to Virginia, where she suffered years of “Sorrow, Grief, and Woe.” She wore rags, slept on a bed of straw, drank only water, and ate poorly, being given no meat. She hewed wood (“The Axe and the Hoe/Have wrought my overthrow”) and drew water (“The water from the spring/Upon my head I bring”), all the while withstanding the abuse of “my Dame.” There was “No rest that I can have,/Whilst I am here a slave.”38

  In 1609 the author of Nova Britannia, who saw the project of colonization as “farre excelling” the heroic deeds of Hercules, explained the connections among the dispossessed, the new penal code, and the rise of a new mode of production: “Two things are especially required herein, people to make the plantation, and money. . . . For the first, wee need not doubt, our land abounding with swarmes of idle persons, which hauing no meanes of labour to relieue their misery, doe likewise swarme in lewd and naughtie practises, so that if we seeke not some waies for their forraine employment, we must prouide shortly mor
e prisons and corrections for their bad conditions.” By 1617 ruling-class policy was to ship the expropriated to far-flung labor markets, and various slave trades grew up to accommodate and extend the policy. Thus began what in a later day would be called the middle passage. Terror was instrumental; indeed, it was a mechanism of the labor market for the hewers and drawers. They had become deracinated. This was a third disability of terror.39

  THE SPECTER OF HERCULES

  If some used the biblical concept of “hewers of wood and drawers of water” to give form to the formless, others saw the amorphous class as a many-headed hydra and conjured Hercules to terrorize and destroy the beast, especially during the revolutionary circumstances of the 1640s, when the incipient class began to find new means of self-organization. Paradoxically, the worst sites of oppression and terror offered opportunity for collaboration. For example, the prison, like the shipwreck, was something of a leveller, where the radical protestant, the sturdy rogue, the redundant craftsman, the Catholic recusant, the wild Irishman, the commonist, and the cutpurse met on roughly equal terms. Lovelace in the Westminster Gatehouse in 1642 penned the lines, “Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.” E. D. Pendry, a historian of Elizabethan prisons, argues that the wave of prison riots that occurred during the second decade of the seventeenth century was due less to a deterioration of conditions than to the meeting of heretics and thieves, or political and common prisoners.40 Martin Markall, the beadle of Bridewell, stressed the association of landed offenders, such as Irish rebels, Gypsies, and Roberdsmen, with those of the sea, such as mariners and pirates. English, Latin, and Dutch were the languages of communication in prison.41 The prison, like the ship and the factory, organized large numbers of people for purposes of exploitation, but it simultaneously was unable to prevent prisoners from organizing against it. Hewers and drawers helped to inaugurate the English Revolution. If we return now to Bacon’s theory of monstrosity, we can see that his “holy war” was really a campaign of extirpation and genocide. To understand his murderous prescriptions of 1622, we must hold the seven heads of his hydra up to the “Satanic light” of history-from-below. The “wise man” of the scientific revolution gave original voice to Conrad’s cry in the Congo in 1897: “Exterminate all the brutes.”