The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England

by Mortimer, Ian

  A whip-jack or freshwater mariner is a beggar who claims to be an out-of-work seafarer, and who may present a fake licence to that effect. His chief trade is to rob booths at fairs or to pilfer from stalls.

  A frater begs or steals from women as they go to and from markets.

  A queer-bird has lately been released from prison; he is supposedly looking for work, but steals what he can in the meantime.

  A palliard or clapperdudgeon is a thief or beggar in a patched cloak and little else, who will plead poverty at any opportunity.

  A washman is a palliard who lies down in the highway and feigns injury or illness, seeking the help of a Good Samaritan whom he will then try to rob.

  An Irish toyle is a travelling salesman who overcharges for his substandard wares.

  A jarkman is a forger – a ‘jark’ being slang for a seal. He can read and write, and forges documents such as licences to beg, to pass between ports and to act as a proctor in court.

  A kinchin co is a runaway boy on the highways, who will eventually fall in with a crowd of ruffians and become one of them. Hence a runaway girl is a ‘kinchin mort’.

  A courtesy man is a handsome, well-dressed man who pretends to be your friend when you arrive in a strange town. He will accept drinks and presents from you, but when you are not looking, will relieve you of your purse and any other valuables. Often to be found in the best inns.

  A prigger of prancers is a horse thief. He will take a horse from a pasture or from a man who stops at an inn. Often priggers pretend to be locals when travellers stop in a village. If someone offers to walk your horse while you have a pot of beer, do not accept – you will never see your mount again.

  A hooker or angler walks about the town during the day watching out for things that can be reached from an open window, especially linen and woollen clothes. He then returns at night with a staff with an iron hook and, having lifted the latch of the shutter with a knife, uses the hook to take the clothes. These are then passed to his doxy to sell at an alehouse.

  A counterfeit crank is a man who pretends to suffer from the falling sickness (epilepsy), or who goes about filthy and naked in order to encourage people to pity him and give him alms. He may put soap in his mouth to make it froth and appear all the more frantic.

  A dummerer pretends to be unable to speak in order to beg from sympathetic people.

  A demander for glimmer is an attractive and vivacious young woman, often the doxy of an upright man, who approaches her victims in an alehouse. She will use her charms to win their affection, and then seek some token made of silver or gold, suggesting that if they give her something valuable they might meet her at some distance from the town to have sex. Whether or not the woman is at the appointed trysting place, her would-be lovers will lose whatever valuables they bring – as well as their purses – when they arrive and meet the upright man.

  As you can see, in the criminal fraternity, women are the sexual companions of the men, the lookouts and the temptresses – and are either abused or looked after, according to their luck. Prostitution goes hand in hand with criminality, both in its straightforward form – being paid for sex – and in an infinite variety of other ways, such as blackmailing a man who has been seduced or thieving from him while he is without his hosen. However, many women evade justice. The law is not clear as to whether a married woman can be held responsible for her actions.9 For this reason many doxies marry a rogue or an upright man: if they are caught thieving with their husband and he is a known criminal, he will hang, but she will not, claiming that she was simply obeying him. Some judges treat women more leniently because they are less criminally adept; they steal less frequently and when they are caught they often hold stolen goods of low value. As a result, 85 per cent of all those indicted for theft are men.10 Violent crimes are even more closely aligned with gender: almost all cases of assault and murder that come to court are instances of men fighting. Women are not thought to be capable of beating a man, so unless they actually kill their male victim, or beat up another woman, they are unlikely to find themselves in court on a charge of affray.

  There is one exception to this: rioting is as much a female occupation as a male one.11 This is because it is one of the few forms of protest open to women – and when you take action as a group you lessen the danger to yourself as an individual. In August 1577 a commotion breaks out at Brentwood, Essex, when thirty women take the law into their own hands. They seize Richard Brooke, schoolmaster of Brentwood grammar school, and beat him thoroughly for some misdemeanour – probably an injustice to one of their number. The women resist arrest and by the time the sheriff and the JPs arrive they are holed up in the church armed with pitchforks, bills, a pikestaff, two hot spits, two kettles of boiling water, three bows, nine arrows, a hatchet, a hammer and a large stone. When the JPs try to arrest them, several men refuse to assist and many of the women escape.12 One suspects the men know where their best interests lie.

  Secular Courts

  In Elizabethan England, as today, there are many different courts. At Westminster you have four royal courts: the Court of the Exchequer, which deals with money owed to the monarch; the Court of Queen’s Bench, which adjudicates on the monarch’s other interests; the Court of Common Pleas, which deals with legal disputes between subjects; and the Court of Chancery, which is responsible for inheritances, trusts, marriage settlements and property. Then there is parliament, which judges certain cases of treason, and Star Chamber. Throughout the country local courts deal with a welter of criminal and civil cases. The most serious ones, felonies, are brought before the royal judges at the periodic assizes held in each county. The sessions held before JPs on a quarterly basis – the ‘quarter sessions’ – deal with the next level of criminal activity, mostly misdemeanours (indictable crimes that do not carry the death penalty). The JPs also enforce regulations, collect rates due for the maintenance of highways and the poor law, and issue licences (for example, to beg or to sell victuals etc). County courts, presided over by the sheriff, act as a small-claims court as well as overseeing elections to parliament. Hundred courts exist in two forms: there are the ordinary courts, which deal with nuisances between two or more manors (such as flooding, effluent, pollution, broken bridges and blocked highways); and the high constable’s sessions, or ‘petty sessions’, dealing with the punishment of vagabonds, apprenticeships, payment of excess wages, playing unlawful games and sowing sedition. The mayors of incorporated towns also hold courts dealing with everything from selling poor-quality merchandise to theft. Finally, you have thousands of manorial courts, which have two functions. The ‘court baron’ of a manor looks after the land and its usage by tenants and keeps the court roll that records who has tenure of what land. A ‘court leet’ deals with the election of manorial officers, disputes between tenants, and misdemeanours (but not felonies) committed by them. In some manors the two functions are brought together in one court, with the bailiff presiding; but it is fair to say that the system is in rapid decline, with many courts leet no longer being held and many courts baron meeting only very occasionally, as land is increasingly enclosed or let out on lease.

  Punishments

  If you are indicted of a felony, misdemeanour or trespass you need to know what sentence to expect. The following accounts for most of the punishments that these courts can deliver, in relation to the offences committed.

  Hanging. If you hide in a dark corner of Francis Hunt’s stables in Colchester on Christmas Eve 1575 you will see a servant enter, position a bucket behind Mr Hunt’s mare, drop his hose and bugger the animal. Unfortunately for the servant, Mr Hunt himself is hiding in the shadows. He reports the servant to the JPs and, at the next gaol delivery, sees him sentenced to be hanged.13 You might find it perverse that the statutory punishment for having sex with a horse is death, while a woman selling an eleven-year-old girl to strangers for sex is merely paraded around the city in a cart – but such is Elizabethan life.14 Capital punishment is applied in relation to c
apital offences, and a horse, being a man’s property, has more legal protection from sexual abuse than a poor girl.

  Hanging is the most common punishment for manslaughter, infanticide, murder, rape, arson, causing death by witchcraft, grand larceny (theft of goods worth more than 12d), highway robbery, buggery (unnatural sexual acts, normally with an animal) and sodomy. If you are indicted for any of these, the constable of the hundred or manor where you are arrested will take you to the county gaol where you will await the next assize session. This is when the royal judges from the Court of Queen’s Bench or the Court of Common Pleas arrive to deliver justice. There are just six circuits covering the whole country, and each judge needs to go round all the counties in his circuit, so you might have to wait some months in gaol before you have your day in court.

  The sessions in London take place quarterly and, as Thomas Platter notes, ‘rarely does a law day in London in all the four sessions pass without some twenty to thirty persons, both men and women, being gibbeted’.15 It is hardly an exaggeration. At the sessions held at Newgate gaol on 21 February 1561, seventeen men and two women are found guilty of capital offences and taken off to be hanged at Tyburn. At the next sitting of the court three days later, eighteen men and two women are ordered to be hanged.16 On this occasion the Barber-Surgeons of the city are allowed to select one of the fresh corpses for anatomical experimentation. Many notorious criminals look on their execution as a chance to show off, giving away souvenirs to the crowd who turn out to watch them die. In 1583 a famous pirate wears crimson taffeta breeches on the day of his execution; he tears them off and gives shreds of them to his friends as he walks to his death.17 Most people are placed in a cart to be transported to the gallows. When the cart reaches the place of execution, they are made to stand. A leather hood is placed over the head of each condemned man and woman and a noose around their necks. The nooses hang in a line from a triangular frame supported on three sturdy posts. Then the cart is pulled away, leaving them all suspended, slowly being strangled by their own weight. They try to breathe and their bodies start to jerk in a sort of dance; it is then that their friends will step forward, take hold of the body and pull it down suddenly, to break the neck and hasten death. Where a violent offence such as murder was committed with malice aforethought, the gallows is set up as close to the scene of the crime as possible, even if it means that it has to be erected in the precincts of a church. On several occasions during the reign you will see gallows set up by the west door of St Paul’s Cathedral, after people have been found guilty of murder in the city’s largest churchyard. For pirates there is a special place of execution: at the low-water mark at Wapping. There all the ships entering the port of London see the dead mariners suspended with their feet in the water: the bodies remain there until three tides have covered them. Henry Machyn records such a hanging on 25 April 1562, when five sailors are executed for robbery at sea.18 One has the noose around his neck when a reprieve comes for him from the privy council. It seems Appletree is not the only one to escape death by the blessing of a moment.

  As you can see, not everyone condemned to death actually hangs. Some escape due to their connections with people of influence. Others claim Benefit of the Clergy. This is an ancient law which states that, if a man can read a passage from the Bible, he should be judged as a priest and handed over to his bishop for punishment; in such cases he will not hang, but will be branded on the left hand with a hot iron (he will hang if caught a second time). Many grave crimes, such as rape, arson, highway robbery and forcible entry, are beyond the scope of Benefit of the Clergy, having been specifically excluded by various kings down the ages; but the old law is still used regularly to escape the noose in cases of theft and manslaughter, despite increasing literacy. Ben Jonson reads ‘the neck verse’ to escape execution after killing a fellow actor in a duel in 1598. Obviously women cannot plead Benefit of the Clergy, as they cannot be priests; however, women can ‘plead their belly’. Pregnant women cannot legally be executed, but must be allowed to give birth first. Hence many women in gaol awaiting the judges try to get themselves with child, hoping to slip through the system afterwards.

  As a result of these loopholes, only 24 per cent of those facing serious offences in an assize court are hanged; 35 per cent are acquitted, 27 per cent claim Benefit of the Clergy, 6 per cent successfully plead pregnancy, 5 per cent are whipped, 1 per cent are sentenced to remain in prison for a specific term, and the remaining 2 per cent get away with a fine or die in prison awaiting trial.19 You don’t have to be cynical to see that Benefit of the Clergy probably acts as an incentive to learn to read. Of those who do hang, 75 per cent have been convicted of some form of theft – stealing food, horses, money or livestock – 18 per cent are found guilty of witchcraft, and 6 per cent of murder. The others are rapists, buggerers, sodomites, arsonists and housebreakers.

  Drawing, hanging and quartering. If a man is found guilty of treason he is sentenced to be ‘drawn’ to the gallows on a hurdle or sled, hanged, and then cut down while still alive and eviscerated, with his guts and private parts thrown into a specially prepared fire; then he is cut into quarters. If this happens to you, the butcher employed for the task will cut you in half at the waist, dividing your body in two. Then your head will be severed from your body and your ribcage divided down the middle, so that half your chest and one arm form a quarter. Your pelvis is then cleaved in two, each part with a leg attached, forming the last two quarters. Each of these quarters is then displayed in a prominent place in a town where you are well-known. Your head will probably find its way on to a spike on London Bridge.

  This is the full traitor’s death, as suffered by many Catholic sympathisers in Elizabeth’s reign, including Dr John Story, who is ‘drawn from the Tower of London to Tyburn, and there hanged, disembowelled and quartered, his head set on London Bridge and his quarters on the gates of the city’.20 The ‘drawing’ on a sled to the gallows is a ritualised humiliation, and an important part of the cruel ceremony.21 Robert Mantell, alias Bloys, is executed in this way in 1581 for pretending to be the still-living Edward VI. Six years later a smith living in Hatfield Peverel is sentenced to death for treason for simply expressing his belief that Edward VI might still be alive.22 Anthony Babington, Chidiock Tichborne and twelve other conspirators are sentenced to suffer the same gruesome fate in 1586. Many people turn up to watch their killing; but on this occasion the eviscerations of the first seven are so awful to behold that they evoke sympathy from the crowd. The queen orders that the remaining seven traitors are to be hanged until completely dead before being eviscerated.

  Beheading. The nobility are not hanged for treason, but beheaded. The duke of Norfolk is executed in this manner on Tower Hill (just to the north of the Tower of London) in 1572. The earl of Northumberland is beheaded at York in the same year and the earl of Essex loses his head for high treason on Tower Green in 1601. Most famously of all, Mary, queen of Scots, is beheaded at Fotheringay in 1587 for her complicity in the Babington plot.

  The above-mentioned aristocrats are not the only people to be judicially beheaded in Elizabeth’s reign. The Halifax gibbet – a precursor of the guillotine – is used for all those found guilty of theft in the town of Halifax. Here the people do not wait for the assize judges. According to William Harrison, if you steal something worth 13½d or more in Halifax, you will be beheaded forthwith on the next market day (Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday):

  The engine wherewith the execution is done is a square block of wood of the length of 4½ feet, which does ride up and down in a slot … between two pieces of timber that are framed and set upright, of five yards in height. In the nether end of the sliding block is an axe, keyed or fastened with an iron into the wood, which being drawn up to the top of the frame is there fastened by a wooden pin … unto the middle of which pin also there is a long rope fastened that cometh down among the people, so when the offender hath made his confession and laid his head over the nethermost block every man there present
doth either take hold of the rope (or putteth forth his arm so near to the same as he can get, in token that he is willing to see true justice executed), and, pulling out the pin in this manner, the head-block wherein the axe is fastened doth fall down with such a violence that, if the neck of the transgressor were as big as a bull, it should be cut asunder at a stroke and roll from the body by a huge distance.

  Twenty-three men and two women are beheaded in this way over the course of Elizabeth’s reign.

  Burning at the stake. You have already come across instances of people being burnt alive for heresy, such as the Anabaptists in Aldgate in 1575. In addition, women are burnt at the stake for high treason, which is the fate of Mary Cleere in 1576. It is also the punishment for women guilty of petty treason; in 1590 a young woman is burnt to death in St George’s Field, outside London, for poisoning her mistress.23

  Peine forte et dure. When people stand mute in court and refuse to plead guilty or not guilty, they are sentenced to suffer peine forte et dure (strong and hard punishment). This means the victim is crushed to death beneath a board on which seven or eight hundredweight of stones are placed, one by one. In order to increase the suffering, a sharp stone is placed beneath the victim’s spine. Astonishingly, some brave souls voluntarily choose this horrible death of their own free will. If a woman wishes to preserve an estate for her children, which will be confiscated if she is found guilty of a crime, she may refuse to offer a plea.24 Margaret Clitherow is crushed to death in 1586, refusing to plead in order to save her children and fellow Catholics from being tortured to testify against her.

  Imprisonment. People are normally locked up in gaol only to restrain them until they can be brought to trial; as we have seen, fewer than 1 per cent of assize cases result in a sentence of imprisonment. However, the privy council threatens people with imprisonment. In 1562 a royal proclamation stipulates that no one may speak of the falling value of money or else be imprisoned for three months and then pilloried.25 Attempts to kill people with witchcraft and eating meat in Lent may also lead to periods of incarceration.