The Many-Headed Hydra

by Peter Linebaugh

  5. Quoted in Alexander Brown, ed., Genesis of the United States (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1890), 1:86–87.

  6. Robert Rich, Newes From Virginia, The Lost Flocke Triumphant (London, 1610), republished in Wesley F. Craven, ed., A Good Speed to Virginia (1609) and Newes From Virginia (1610) (New York: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1937); True Declaration, 14, 20.

  7. [Richard Johnson], Nova Britannia: Offering Most Excellent fruites by Planting in Virginia (London, 1609), republished in Force, Tracts and Other Papers, 1:8; “The Relation of Lord De-La-Ware, 1611,” in Lyon Gardiner Tyler, ed., Narratives of Early Virginia, 1606–1625 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1907), 213.

  8. Strachey, A True Reportory, 41; George Percy, “A Trewe Relacyon of the Procedings and Ocurrentes of Momente wch have hapned in Virginia (1612),” Tyler’s Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine 3 (1921–22): 260–82 (quotation on 269); Emanuel van Meteren in John Parker, Van Meteren’s Virginia, 1607–1612 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1961), 67; Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 73; J. Frederick Fausz, “An ‘Abundance of Blood Shed on Both Sides’: England’s First Indian War, 1609–1614,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 98 (1990): 55–56.

  9. On the Mayflower, Hopkins insisted that the magistrate’s powers were limited and that the passengers, once ashore, were entitled to follow “their owne libertie.” In this instance his protest led not to a sentence of death but to the formation of the Mayflower Compact, the Pilgrims’ constitutional framework of civil self-government. See Captain Thomas Jones, “The Journal of the Ship Mayflower,” in Azel Ames, ed., The “Mayflower” and Her Log (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1907), 254–58; Charles Edward Banks, The English Ancestry and Homes of the Pilgrim Fathers (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1968), 61–64.

  10. Evidence about the intrigues comes from Strachey, True Reportory, and J. Smith, General Historie, 638, 640, where it is noted that conflict developed among the three who decided to remain on the island.

  11. Investors in England continued to complain of “the revels and perpetuall Christmas kept [by settlers] in their Sommer Islands.” See Edmund Howe, Annals of John Stowe (London, 1614), 942 (quotation); True Declaration, 21; Strachey, True Reportory, 87; Henry Wilkinson, The Adventurers of Bermuda: A History of the Island from its Discovery until the Dissolution of the Somers Island Company in 1684 (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), 87.

  12. Victor Kiernan, Shakespeare: Poet and Citizen (London: Verso, 1993); Robert Ralston Cawley, “Shakespeare’s Use of the Voyagers in The Tempest,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 41 (1926): 688–726. Many scholars agree that Shakespeare read Strachey’s account in manuscripr soon after it was written in 1610. Its publication was delayed until 1625 because the leaders of the Virginia Company feared that the tales of resistance would discourage further investment.

  13. Wesley Frank Craven, “An Introduction to the History of Bermuda,” William and Mary Quarterly, 2d ser., 17 (1937): 182.

  14. Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company: The Failure of a Colonial Experiment (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1932; reprint, 1964), 24.

  15. [Johnson], Nova Britannia, 10; Raphe Hamor, A True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia and the successe of the affaires there till the 18 of June 1614 (London, 1615), 19; Brown, Genesis, 1:252; Rich, Newes from Virginia; [Richard Johnson], New Life of Virginea: Declaring the Former Successe and Present State of that Plantation, Being the Second part of Nova Britannia (London, 1612), republished in Force, comp., Tracts and Other Papers, 1:10.

  16. Karl Marx, Capital, ed. Dona Torr, vol. 1, chap. 26, “The Secret of Primitive Accumulation.” J. R. Wordie has estimated that 2 percent of England’s land was enclosed in the sixteenth century; 24 percent in the seventeenth century; 13 percent in the eighteenth century; and 11.6 percent in the nineteenth century. See his “The Chronology of English Enclosure, 1500–1914,” Economic History Review, 2d ser., 36 (1983): 483–505. See also Roger B. Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 92; E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1925), 2:144–52.

  17. William Harrison, in his The Description of England (1587; reprint, ed. Georges Edelen, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1968), reports (page 193) that some seventy-two thousand rogues were hanged during the reign of Henry VIII.

  18. A. V. Judges, ed., The Elizabethan Underworld: A Collection of Tudor and Early Stuart Tracts and Ballads (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1930); Gamini Salgado, The Elizabethan Underworld (London: J. M. Dent, 1977).

  19. A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1986), 4; Manning, Village Revolts, 208.

  20. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “The German Ideology” (1845–46), in Marx and Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 5:69.

  21. Christopher Hill, “The Many-Headed Monster,” in Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 189; Bacon, “Of Seditions and Troubles,” in The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. Michael Kiernan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 45; Beier, Masterless Men, 161–64; A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–1775 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 8.

  22. Robert Gray, A Good Speed to Virginia (London, 1609), republished in Craven, ed., A Good Speed to Virginia and Newes From Virginia, 7.

  23. In composing Gonzalo’s speech, Shakespeare drew heavily on Michel de Montaigne’s essay “Of Canibals,” which was written in 1579 and translated into English in 1603. The word cannibal, many believe, is a corruption of “Carib,” the name of the Indians who fiercely resisted European encroachment in the Americas and who were rewarded for their efforts with a lasting image of flesh-eating monstrosity. Montaigne, however, turned the image on its head, praising the courage, simplicity, and virtue of those routinely called “savage” by many Europeans. See The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, ed. Jacob Zeitlin (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1934), 1:178–90.

  24. Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); A. Feuillerat and G. Feuillerat, eds., Documents Relating to the Revels at Court in the Time of King Edward VI and Queen Mary (Louvain: A. Uystpruyst, 1914), 89. See also Sandra Billington, Mock Kings in Medieval Society and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) and Hal Rammel, Nowhere in America: The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Other Comic Utopias (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990). For a satire of plebeian traditions of the world turned upside down by a contemporary of Shakespeare, see [Joseph Hall], Mundus Alter et Idem (1605), reprinted as Another World and Yet the Same, trans. John Millar Wands (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).

  25. Gray, A Good Speed to Virginia, 19; William Strachey, The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania (London, 1612), reprint ed. Louis B. Wright and Virginia Freund (London: Hakluyt Society, 1953), 92; “The Voyage of Sir Henry Colt” (1631), in V.T. Harlow, ed., Colonising Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana, 1623–1667, 2d ser., no. 56 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1925), 93. We are indebted here to William Brandon, New Worlds for Old: Reports from the New World and Their Effect on the Development of Social Thought in Europe, 1500–1800 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1986), chap. 1.

  26. Montaigne, “Of Canibals,” in Essays, 1:181. Montaigne drew upon Andre Thevet, Singularitez de la France Anarctique (1558), and especially on Jean de Lery, Histoire d’un Voyage Fait en la Terre du Bresil (1578).

  27. Cawley, “Shakespeare’s Use of the Voyagers,” 703–5; Kipling quoted in Charles Mills Gayley, Shakespeare and the Founders of Liberty in America (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 74.

  28. Strachey, Historie
of Travell, 24, 26; Hamor, A True Discourse, 16, 23–24; Sumner Chilton Powell, Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town (New York: Doubleday, 1963).

  29. J. Smith, General Historie 638–39; Parker, Van Meteren’s Virginia, 67.

  30. Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). See also Ronald Takaki, “The Tempest in the Wilderness: The Racialization of Savagery,” Journal of American History 79 (1992): 892–912, and the exchange involving Vaughan, J. R. Pole, and Takaki, letters to the editor, Journal of American History 80 (1993): 764–72.

  31. Chambers, William Shakespeare, 2:334–35.

  32. Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto, 1984), 6–7; C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, eds., Ben Jonson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 7:173; Walter Raleigh, The Discovery of the Large, Rich and Beautiful Empire of Guiana (1596), in Gerald Hammond, ed., Sir Walter Raleigh: Selected Writings (London: Fyfield Books, 1984), 98; K. G. Davies, The Royal African Company (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 1, 9; R. Porter, “The Crispe Family and the African Trade in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of African History 9 (1968): 57–58; Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), chap. 1.

  33. Kenneth R. Andrews, The Spanish Caribbean: Trade and Plunder, 1530–1630 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 141.

  34. True Declaration, 9; “Instruccons orders and constitucons . . . issued to Sir Thomas Gates Knight Governor of Virginia” (1609), in Susan Myra Kingsbury, ed., The Records of the Virginia Company of London (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1933), 3:16.

  35. W G. Perrin, ed., Boteler’s Dialogues (London: Navy Records Society, 1929), 16; Manning, Village Revolts, 199, 207–10. John Cordy Jeaffreson, Middlesex County Records (London, 1887), 2:xvii; Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978); John Nichols, ed., The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First (London, 1828), 1:69.

  36. Michael Roberts, “The Military Revolution,” in Essays in Swedish History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967), 195–225; Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 18–22.

  37. Wilkinson, Adventurers of Bermuda, 65, 114; John Pory, Secretary of Virginia, to Sir Dudley Carlton, in Lyon Gardiner Tyler, ed., Narratives of Early Virginia, 1606–1625 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1907), 283 (second quotation); Darrett B. Rutman, “The Historian and the Marshal: A Note on the Background of Sir Thomas Dale,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 68 (1960): 284–94, and “The Virginia Company and Its Military Regime,” in The Old Dominion: Essays for Thomas Perkins Abernathy (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 1964), 1–20. See also Stephen Saunders Webb, The Governors-General: The English Army and the Definition of the Empire, 1569–1681 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 5–6, 67, 78, 437.

  38. True Declaration, 15; Percy, “A Trewe Relacyon,” 67; John Smith, A Map of Virginia (1612), in Philip L. Barbour, ed., The Jamestown Voyages under the First Charter, 1606–1609 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 3:333; Henry Spelman, “Relation of Virginea” (c. 1613), in Arber, ed., Travels and Works, 1:ciii; Fausz, “Abundance of Blood Shed,” 55–56; Nicholas Canny, “The Permissive Frontier: The Problem of Social Control in English Settlements in Ireland and Virginia, 1550–1650,” in K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny, and P. E. H. Hair, eds., The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America, 1480–1650 (Detroit; Wayne State University Press, 1979), 32 (Smith quoted). See also Canny’s The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established, 1565–1576 (New York: Harper and Row, 1976).

  39. William Strachey, comp., For the Colony in Virginea Britania: Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall, etc., ed. David Flaherty (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 1969); Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, 32; Wilkinson, Adventurers of Bermuda, 65; J. Smith, Generall Historie, 654, 666 (quotation); Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 79–81; Rutman, “The Historian and the Marshal,” 15; Stephen Greenblatt, “Martial Law in the Land of Cockaigne,” in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 1988), 129–63.

  40. Smith, A Map of Virginia, 2:370; Percy, “A Trewe Relacyone,” 266; Helen C. Rountree, The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), and Pocahantas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia through Four Centuries (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990). See also Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 271, 301; James Axtell, “The White Indians of Colonial America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 32 (1975): 55–88. Rountree (The Powhatan Indians of Virginia, 87) calls Powhatan society an “incipient class system,” but the evidence for this is unpersuasive. What minimal social distinctions there were did not grow out of differentiation of economic function or property holding, but rather were based on hunting ability or capacity for leadership.

  41. On Markham (or Marcum), see [Captain Gabriel Archer?], A relatyon . . . written . . . by a gent. of ye Colony (1607), in Barbour, ed., Jamestown Voyages, 1:82; J. Frederick Fausz, “Middlemen in Peace and War: Virginia’s Earliest Indian Interpreters, 1608–1632,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 95 (1987): 42.

  42. Percy, “A Trewe Relacyon,” 280.

  43. J. Smith, General Historic, 646–48; Craven, “Introduction to the History of Bermuda,” 177.

  Chapter Two

  1. Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 132.

  2. Stephen B. Baxter, “William III as Hercules: The Political Implications of Court Culture,” in Lois G. Schwoerer, ed., The Revolution of 1688–1689: Changing Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 95–106.

  3. Francis Bacon, Of the Wisdom of the Ancients (1609).

  4. Katharine Park and Lorraine J. Daston, “Unnatural Conception: The Study of Monsters in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France and England,” Past & Present 92 (1981).

  5. Against Charles Tilly, whose view of European proletarianization emphasizes “natural” increases in fertility, ignores enclosure, and occludes terror, we return to the interpretation of Marx, who says that expropriation is “written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.” Indeed, the branding of the recalcitrant (with letters made from the admixture of blood and fire) was part of the terror. Where Tilly ignores slavery, Marx writes, “It is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, played the greatest part.” Charles Tilly, As Sociology Meets History (New York: Academic Press, 1981), chap. 7, and “Demographic Origins of the European Proletariat,” in David Levine, ed., Proletarianization and Family History (New York: Academic Press, 1984).

  6. On the Spirit of Patriotism (1736).

  7. Northern Star (1838), quoted in Gareth Stedman-Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 104.

  8. C. Osborne Ward, The Ancient Lowly: A History of the Ancient Working People from the Earliest Known Period to the Adoption of Christianity by Constantine (Chicago, 1888), 1:39.

  9. George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters (New York: Bantam, 1970), 123. H. N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1961); also Norah Carlin, “Liberty and Fraternities in the English Revolution: The Politics of London Artisans’ Protests, 1635–1659,” International Review of Social History 39 (1994): 252; George Unwin, Industri
al Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904), 207–10; Swift, On the Wretched Condition of Ireland (1729); James Connolly, Erin’s Hope . . . The End & The Means (Dublin, 1909); Cyril Brigg’s Crusader, April 1921; Nelson Mandela’s closing address to the African National Congress, July 1991.

  10. Robert Albion, Forests and Seapower: The Timber Problem of the Royal Navy, 1652–1862 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1926), 127.

  11. [Richard Johnson], Nova Britannia: Offering Most Excellent fruites by Planting in Virginia (London, 1609), republished in Peter Force, comp., Tracts and Other Papers Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America, From the Discovery of the Country to the Year 1176 (1836; reprint, Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1963), 1:14; David Freeman Hawke, Everyday Life in Early America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 15; Charles F. Carroll, The Timber Economy of Puritan New England (Providence, R. I.: Brown University Press, 1973), 54; Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 19–23.

  12. Polyolbion (1613). Michael Williams, The Draining of the Somerset Levels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Joan Thirsk, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 5, 1640–1750: Agrarian Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 323.

  13. Jeremy Purseglove, Taming the Flood: A History and Natural History of Rivers and Wetlands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Oliver Rackham, The History of the Countryside (London: J. M. Dent, 1986), 390; Keith Lindley, Fenland Riots and the English Revolution (London: Heineman, 1982), 34, 38, 72, 77.

  14. Rackham, History of the Countryside; see also Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 32, 48.