The Many-Headed Hydra

by Peter Linebaugh

  15. John Merrington, “Town and Country in the Transition to Capitalism,” New Left Review, no. 93 (September-October 1975).

  16. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh, 1767).

  17. New Life of Virginea: Declaring the Former Successe and Present State of that Plantation (London, 1612), republished in Force, comp., Tracts and Other Papers, 1:14; A. W. Lawrence, Trade Castles and Forts of West Africa (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1964), 293.

  18. J. M. Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 158.

  19. “The Woman’s Brawl,” in Samuel Pepys’ Penny Merriments, ed. Roger Thompson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 247–52.

  20. Bridget Hill, Women, Work, and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 103ff.

  21. Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School, and Street in London, 1870–1914 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996), 186–89.

  22. Man: A Paper for Ennobling the Species, no. 25 (18 June 1755).

  23. E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London: Merlin Press, 1991), and R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (London: Longman, 1912).

  24. William Fennor, The Counter’s Commonwealth; Or, A Voyage made to an Infernal Island (London, 1617); Historical Manuscript Commission, Rutland MSS, 1:334; J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England, 1550–1750 (London: Longman, 1984), 150; Pieter Spierenburg, The Prison Experience: Disciplinary Institutions and Their Inmates in Early Modern Europe (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991).

  25. Taylor’s Travels of Hamburgh in Germanie (1616) and The Praise and Vertue of a jayle and Jaylers with the most excellent mysterie and necessary use of all sorts of Hanging, in All the Works of John Taylor the Water Poet 1630 (facsimile edition, London, 1977).

  26. J. S. Cockburn, A History of English Assizes, 1558–1714 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 98; King James the First, Daemonologie in Forme of a Dialogue, Diuided into three Bookes (1597), ed. G. B. Harrison (London: John Lane, 1924); Silvia Federici, “The Great Witch Hunt,” The Maine Scholar 1 (1988): 31–52; Frederic A. Youngs, Jr., The Proclamations of the Tudor Queens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 76; Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596), ed. W. L. Renwick (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 63.

  27. The Black Dog of Newgate was first published in 1596; it was published in another edition in 1638 as The Discovery of a London Monster.

  28. A. V. Judges, ed., The Elizabethan Underworld: A Collection of Tudor and Early Stuart Tracts and Ballads (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1930), 506–7.

  29. Spenser, View of the Present State of Ireland.

  30. Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

  31. Sir George Peckham, “A true Report of the late discoveries, and possession taken in the right of the Crowne of England of the Newfound Lands, By that valiant and worthy Gentleman, Sir Humfrey Gilbert Knight,” in Richard Hakluyt, ed., The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; reprint, New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1965), 3:102–3, 112; A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985), 150.

  32. Cockburn, English Assizes, 126; M. Oppenheim, ed., The Naval Tracts of Sir William Monson (London: Navy Records Society, 1923), 4:109.

  33. James Horn, “Servant Emigration to the Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century,” in Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman, eds., The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 72; Richard S. Dunn, “Servants and Slaves: The Recruitment and Employment of Labor in Colonial America,” in J. R. Pole and Jack P. Greene, Colonial British America: Essays in Early Modern History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984); Abbot Emerson Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607–1176 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1947), 8–12, 13, 16; Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (New York: Capricorn Books, 1966), 19.

  34. Scott Christianson, With Liberty for Some: 500 Years of Imprisonment in America (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 16, 18.

  35. Jill Sheppard, The “Redlegs” of Barbados: Their Origins and History (Millwood, N.Y.: KTO Press, 1977), 12; Carl and Roberta Bridenbaugh, No Peace beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean, 1627–1690 (New York: Oxford University Press), 27; A Publication of Guiana Plantation (London, 1632), quoted in Smith, Colonists in Bondage, 285–86; Rafael Semmes, Crime and Punishment in Early Maryland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1938), 81; John Donne, “A Sermon Preached to the Honourable Company of the Virginian Plantation,” in The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1959), 4:272.

  36. A series of riots against spirits and kidnappers in the 1640s and 1650s led to legislation designed to regulate the servant trade and hence also to the first set of records, kept in Bristol beginning in 1654, upon which statistical analysis of the trade has been based.

  37. Robert C. Johnson, “The Transportation of Vagrant Children from London to Virginia, 1618–1622,” in Howard S. Reinmuth, ed., Early Stuart Studies: Essays in Honor of David Harris Willson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970), 137–51; Walter Hart Blumenthal, Brides from Bridewell: Female Felons Sent to Colonial America (Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1962), 65, 105, 107; Smith, Colonists in Bondage, 69–70.

  38. James Revel, The Poor Unhappy Transported Felon’s Sorrowful Account of his Fourteen Years Transportation at Virginia in America (London, n.d.), edited by John Melville Jennings and republished in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 56 (1948): 180–94 (Jennings shows that Revel arrived in Virginia between 1656 and 1671); “The Trapanned Maiden,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 4 (1896–97): 218–21.

  39. [Johnson], Nova Britannia, republished in Force, comp., Tracts and Other Papers, 1:27–28, 19.

  40. E. D. Pendry, Elizabethan Prisons and Prison Scenes (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literature, 1974), 1:2, 15.

  41. [Samuel Rid], Martin Markall, beadle of Bridewell, His Defense and Answers to the Bellman of London (London, 1610).

  42. The American Anthropologist 90 (1988): 406.

  43. Jane Ohlmeyer, “The Wars of Religion, 1603–1660,” in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery, eds., A Military History of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 168.

  44. Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis (London, 1629).

  45. P. Dan, Histoire de la Barbarie et de ses Corsaires (Paris, 1637), quoted in Stephen Clissold, The Barbary Slaves (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977), and Peter Lamborn Wilson, Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs and European Renegadoes (New York: Autonomedia, 1995).

  46. Thomas Harman, A Caveat for Common Cursitors Vulgarly Called Vagabonds (1567).

  47. Page Dubois, “Subjected Bodies, Science, and the State: Francis Bacon, Torturer,” in Mike Ryan and Avery Gordon, eds., Body Politics: Disease, Desire, and the Family (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994), 184.

  48. Appius and Virginia (1625–27?).

  49. Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, 1640–1649 (London: Heineman, 1976), 292.

  50. Anne Chambers, “The Pirate Queen of Ireland: Grace O Malley,” in Jo Stanley, ed., Bold in Her Britches: Women Pirates across the Ages (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 104.

  51. Thomas Edwards, Gangraena, or, A Catalogue and Discovery of Many of the Errors, Heresies, Blasphemies, and pernicious practices of the Sectaries of this time (1646–47).

  52. Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller; Or, the Life of Jacke Wilton (1594).

  53. Edwards, Gangraena, 121.

  54. The Kingdomes Faithfull and Impartiall Scout, 6–13 April 1649, in Edwards, Gangraena, 268.

  55. The True Informer, 21–28 February 1646, in Edward
s, Gangraena, 262.

  56. Cyril Outerbridge Packwood, Chained on the Rock: Slavery in Bermuda (New York: Eliseo Torres & Sons, 1975), 85.

  57. Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, 92. See Hobbes, Behemoth: The History of the Causes of the Civil Wars in England, quoted in Christopher Hibbert, Charles I (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 149–50.

  58. Hibbert, Charles I, 149–50.

  Chapter Three

  1. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London: Penguin, 1972), and H. N. Brailsford, The Levellers in the English Revolution (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1961), 11.

  2. Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1992); and David Sacks, The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450–1700 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1991).

  3. Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1690 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), and Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto, 1984), have noted her remarkable presence.

  4. Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (London: Viking, 1993), 200. See also C. R. Cragg, Puritanism in the Period of the Great Persecution of 1660–1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957).

  5. The Broadmead Records were published by E. B. Underhill in 1847. A second edition, printed in 1865 by Nathaniel Haycroft, preserved much of the orthography, emphatic typography, capital letters, and paragraph divisions of the original. This formed the basis of a third edition, published in 1974, edited and with a long, scholarly introduction by Roger Hayden. Our analysis is based on a scrutiny of the manuscript text at the Broadmead Church in Bristol.

  6. Roger Hayden, introduction to The Records of a Church of Christ in Bristol, 1640–1687 (Bristol: Bristol Record Society, 1974).

  7. Bridget Hill, Women, Work, and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 133.

  8. Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1919), and Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 158. See also Elliot V. Brodsky, “Single Women in the London Marriage Market: Age, Status and Mobility, 1598–1619,” in R. B. Outhwaite, ed., Marriage and Society: Studies in the Social History of Marriage (New York: St. Martin’s, 1981), and P. J. P. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire, c. 1300–1520 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

  9. Paul Bayne, An Entire Commentary upon the Whole Epistle of the Apostle Paul to the Ephesians (1643).

  10. Nell Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 71.

  11. A. S. P. Woodhouse, ed., Puritanism and Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 103.

  12. Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720 (London: Routledge, 1993). 123.

  13. David Harris Sacks, “Bristol’s ‘Wars of Religion,’” in R. C. Richardson, ed., Town and Country in the English Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 103.

  14. Hayden, introduction to Records of a Church of Christ in Bristol, 27:85.

  15. Claire Cross, “‘He-Goats Before the Flocks’: A Note on the Part Played by Women in the Founding of Some Civil War Churches,” in G. J. Cuming and Derek Baker, eds., Popular Belief and Practice (Cambridge: Ecclesiastical History Society/Cambridge University Press, 1972).

  16. G. F. Nuttall, Visible Saints; The Congregational Way, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957). 35.

  17. Ian Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Ireland, Scotland, 1645–1653 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 103.

  18. J. F. McGregor, “The Baptists: Fount of All Heresy,” in J. F. McGregor and B. Reay, eds., Radical Religion in the English Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 44.

  19. Underhill, the nineteenth-century editor, changed this to “libertinism,” surely a different thing from “Libertisme,” yet itself not without its advocates in the 1640s: Abiezer Coppe in A Fiery Flying Roll, 1:1–5, taught that God’s service was “perfect freedom and pure libertinism.”

  20. Laurence Clarkson, Generall Charge (1647).

  21. Edwards, Gangraena 3:27, 163.

  22. G. F. Nuttall, The Welsh Saints, 1640–1660 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1957), 34; 1–37.

  23. C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, 40.

  24. Karen Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–1641: The other Puritan Colony (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 179. A useful overview is Elaine Forman Crane, Ebb Tide in New England: Women, Seaports, and Social Change, 1630–1800 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998).

  25. The New Law of Righteousness (1649), 216; The Law of Freedom (1652), 524.

  26. Lodovick Muggleton, Joyful News from Heaven (1658; reprinted 1854), 45.

  27. N. Smith, Perfection Proclaimed, 2.

  28. Human Nature (1640); Works, 4:40–41.

  29. Woodhouse, ed., Puritanism and Liberty, 390–6.

  30. Eikon Basilike, chap. 9.

  31. Underhill quoted in Alfred Cave, The Pequot War (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 152.

  32. And, “whereas the Scriptures say, That the Creator of all things is no Respecter of persons, yet this Kingly Power doth nothing else but respect persons, preferring the rich and the proud . . .,” The Law of Freedom (1652), 508, 530.

  33. Hugh Barbour and Arthur O. Roberts, Early Quaker Writings, 1650-1700 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1973), 165. See also The Quaker’s Catechism (1655).

  34. John F. Mackeson, Bristol Transported (Bristol: Redcliffe, 1987).

  35. Mack, Visionary Women.

  36. The Exceeding Riches of Grace Advanced (1651 and 1658), 122–25. Barbara Ritter Dailey, “The Visitation of Sarah Wright: Holy Carnival and the Revolution of the Saints in Civil War London,” Church History 55, no. 4 (December 1986): 449–50.

  37. William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), 79.

  38. John Saltmarsh, Smoke in the Temple (1600s), quoted in Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, 179.

  39. Woodhouse, ed., Puritanism and Liberty, 184.

  40. Emery Battis, Saints and Sectaries: Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy in Massachusetts Bay Colony (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), 69.

  41. Cave, The Pequot War, 139.

  42. Carol Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York: Vintage, 1987).

  43. John Winthrop, A Short Story of the Rise, Reign, and Ruine of the Antinomians, Familists, and Libertines (London, 1644), reprinted in David D. Hall, The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638: A Documentary History, 2d ed. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), 139.

  44. Ibid., 218; Edward Johnson, Johnsons Wonder—Working Providence, 1628–1651, ed. J. Franklin Jameson (London, 1654; reprint, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910), 124–125.

  45. Silvia Federici, “The Great Witch Hunt,” The Maine Scholar 1 (1988): 32.

  46. Ibid.

  47. Mack, Visionary Women, 123.

  48. Ibid., 104; Woodhouse, ed., Puritanism and Liberty, 367.

  49. See also Leo Damrosch, The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 2.

  50. A Publicke Discovery of the Open Blindness of Babel’s Builders (1656).

  51. A Few Words Occassioned (1654).

  52. James Nayler, Saul’s Errand to Damascus (London, 1653), A Discovery of the First Wisdom (London, 1653), An Answer to the Book called the P
erfect Pharisee (London, 1653), 22.

  53. James Nayler, The Lamb’s Warre (1657).

  54. H. N. Brailsford, A Quaker from Cromwell’s Army (London, 1926).

  55. C. Hill, The English Bible, 165–66; Cragg, Puritanism in the Period of the Great Persecution.

  56. Nathaniel Ingelo, The Perfection, Authority, and Credibility of the Holy Scripture (1659), and A Discourse Concerning Repentance (1677).

  57. Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (New York: Viking, 1984), 164.

  58. Richard Ligon, A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (London, 1657).

  59. Hilary Beckles, A History of Barbados: From Amerindian Settlement to Nation-State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 43.

  60. We see it also in Henry Jessie, who in the 1658 edition of The Exceeding Riches of Grace Advanced introduces Dinah as “a Moor not born in England,” an ethnic marker added eleven years after the first edition of 1647.

  61. Christopher Hill, A Tinker and a Poor Man: John Bunyan and His Church, 1628–1688 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988).

  62. James H. Cone, For My People: Black Theology and the Black Church (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1984), 71, commenting on Fanon.

  63. Marcus Garvey, Vanity Fair; Or the Tragedy of White Man’s Justice (1926), in Robert A. Hill and Barbara Bair, eds., Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1987), 115–39.

  64. Lodovick Muggleton, The Acts of the Witnesses of The Spirit (1699; reprinted 1764), 73–74.

  65. Painter, Sojourner Truth, 30.

  66. Andrew Hopton, ed., Tyranipocrit Discovered with his wiles, wherewith he vanquisheth (1649; reprint, London: Aporia Press, 1991), 29.

  67. For the term “Atlantic Mountains,” See Peter Linebaugh, “All the Atlantic Mountains Shook,” Labour/Le Travailleur, no. 10 (1982): 87–121, whose title quotes William Blake’s song beginning book 2 of Jerusalem (1804).

  68. Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938), 103.