Review of periodical literature for 2023: (iii) 1500–1700

The year 2023 saw many publications in the fields of early modern economic and social history. The articles discussed in this round-up cover topics which have been a mainstay over recent years, including histories of labour (especially women's work), colonialism, and slavery. Agrarian history has lately gained renewed attention, and once again featured in this year's scholarship. A notable cluster of articles focused on what petitions – of which large collections survive – can tell us about the early modern economy, society, and the state. The gender split of authors was roughly equal this year, a testament to the rich and diverse topics that this year's articles cover.

Labour history was the focus of several articles. The hiring of over 1000 unskilled workers for the rebuilding of St Paul's Cathedral in London between 1672 and 1748 is the subject of an article by Paker, Stephenson, and Wallis. Applying econometric analysis to records of labourers hired, the authors find that hiring practices ‘encouraged retention and reduced turnover, giving a core group of laborers more work, priority in rehiring after slowdowns, and access to additional ways to earn.’ (p. 1101). Over time, the share of ‘new’ workers (i.e. those who had not previously worked on St Paul's) fell (p. 1110). Casual, transient work was not the pattern of hiring here at St Paul's; rather, the length of time a worker had been employed was rewarded with additional labour opportunities.

A synthesis of recent publications on work and identity is offered in an article by Hailwood and Waddell. In particular, the article draws attention to recent scholarship on the breadth of working identities that moves beyond categorizing people into ‘sorts’. The authors call for future scholarship which comparatively analyses types of sources (e.g. self-created versus indirect evidence) as well as how working identities might intersect with ‘time, place, gender, forms of labour, and race’ (p. 158). An article by McVitty contributes to this growing scholarship on work and identity. She exposes a pre-modern culture of sexual misconduct and gendered violence in the legal profession through close study of a range of legal records (court records, internal records of Inns of Court, and public proclamations) in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England. While junior practitioners regularly participated in these behaviours, she argues, senior practitioners were responsible for condoning it (as well as sometimes participating) and shifting the blame to women. Although the legal community punished offenders, prosecution primarily sought to shield reputation and evade public consequences. Sexual misconduct and gendered violence contributed to the forging of tightly bound homosocial bonds that endure and persist within the legal profession today. To understand modern scandals of sexual misconduct within the common law profession, McVitty maintains, we must critically analyse inherited traditions.

Articles on women's work have become a strength of early modern economic and social history in recent years. This year, three articles on care work were published. In the first, Shepard traces care work activities of ‘working mothers’ in London from 1675–1800. Identifying incidences of ‘nurse’ (and its variants) in the Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online, Shepard finds that care work was dispersed broadly across a range of women (and sometimes men) in a variety of arrangements. Both a ‘form of pragmatic provision’ and a ‘commercial endeavour’ (p. 18), it was by no means exclusively carried out by the birth mother. In a second article, Mansell also uses court records as a window onto care work. Taking a microhistorical approach, she traces the end-of-life care received by a seventeenth-century unmarried man in Herefordshire. Through the articulations of care work and its value made by the litigant parties and the witnesses who testified on their behalf, she argues that the labour of care – both remunerated and unpaid, and physical and emotional – was economically valued in early modern England. A third article by Fox and Brazier focuses on the profession of midwifery, placing the seventeenth-century oath that midwives were required to swear under the microscope. The authors show that the oaths – a legal instrument of regulation – reveal what was important to both birthing women and to parish authorities. As officeholders themselves, midwives were ‘active participants in state formation’ (p. 248), and the authors note their crucial role in establishing what we might today see as an ethical code of midwifery.

A special issue on Scottish women's and gender history in The Scottish Historical Review this year contained three articles of interest to social and economic of the early modern period. The first, authored by Mason, focuses on women's property ownership. According to Scots law, a man could not sell property his wife brought to the marriage nor that jointly acquired during marriage without her consent. This consent was recorded by her signature on the deed and a private examination. Using a sample of approximately 1600 private examinations of seventeenth-century women in Glasgow, Inverness, and St Andrews, Mason questions how far the requirement of married women to consent to these sales constrained their husbands’ power over property. While we cannot know how many women were coerced into the private examination, Mason nonetheless argues that the procedure itself represents the legal importance placed on married women's consent in property transactions and the protection the courts offered them. Women did not hand over their consent freely, she finds. Many exchanged it for other property. Seventeenth-century married women, therefore, were not excluded from legal and economic processes. Sixteenth-century married women were the subject of an article in the same issue by Beattie (with Spence). The article explores the voluminous testamentary archive for sixteenth-century Scotland, finding that around one-third of wills were made by women. Through careful recategorization of those listed in the National Records for Scotland catalogue as ‘sometimes spouses’ from widows to married women, the authors show that wives made up the largest proportion of female testators. A sample of married women's wills shows that they rarely mentioned a husband's consent, were regularly able to bequeath their half or third portion of household goods, and that the clothing and jewellery they left could be extremely valuable. Significantly, the authors find that the women used language of community of property between husband and wife. A third article by Spence examines 2000 wills produced between 1560 and 1600. She argues that women who made wills were well aware of what was theirs to bequeath and that these documents should be read not just as formulaic or prescribed. Rather, they offer something of women's ‘voices’. Spence argues for three distinct ways in which these voices can be heard: firstly, in women naming their executors; second, in their instructions of how to care for children and stepchildren; and thirdly, through the items they left to others in the latter will and legacy sections of their testaments. Using wills from this perspective, she argues, shifts the focus away from other studies that show how women used their voices for ill to those who used their authoritative voices to advance the family position.

An article by Brock sheds new light on women's relationship to early modern trade and empire in Asia. The article focuses on the mercantile activities of one woman – Martha Parker – who operated as a merchant with the East India Company (EIC) in the second half of the seventeenth century. She was not alone. Over 1300 women had commercial interactions with EIC between 1600 and 1757, Brock shows. Women's commercial networks and practices within the EIC were key in shaping the Company's structure. Particularly upon their husband's deaths, women were agents in expanding their personal and household economies, accessing networks and using their existing knowledge of trading companies and mercantile business.

This was one of several articles this year that expanded our understanding of trade, mercantilism, and the global economy. An article by Bromley shifts our focus from ideas of the ‘centre city’ to the ‘centre country’ in thinking about transnational mercantile networks and global knowledge. Through a close study of trading company debates in the 1690s, the article positions mercantilism as ‘a process of interaction between private interests that stretched beyond London across England and the wider world’ (p. 748). Global knowledge, Bromley finds, was not limited to England's port cities, or domestic/overseas sites held by colonial administrators or Companies. Contribution to public interest, he argues, was asserted ‘by drawing links between private interests and national employment’ (p. 771) and a trade's capacity to support domestic employment. He draws attention to the importance of the middling sorts’ economic beliefs, expressed through the documents they left behind and particularly petitions (a source which we will see attracted great attention this year).

The 1604 Treaty of London and the ending of the Anglo-Spanish War was the subject of an article by Gajda. In this article, Gajda sheds light on the importance of merchants’ economic concerns scaffolded in the treaty. She points to the multi-layered and often competing interests of different mercantile groups. Some sought to recover finances lost through war, while others had directly benefited from war. Gadja closely analyses the manuscript tracts produced in making way for peace and is attentive to the lobbies made on both sides to the commissioners for peace negotiations by both individuals and companies. She argues that their attempts to influence the terms of the treaty ‘heralded a new and highly significant indicator of the wider public and central role that commercial concerns now held and would continue to play in the mainstream political life of the nation’ (p. 466). Merchants were also the subject of a piece by Papini. Her study of the accounts of Italian portraitist Antonio Franchi concentrates on the high volume of business he received in the late seventeenth century from British merchants and captains living and working in the port city of Livorno and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. She finds that, despite being notoriously expensive in Livorno, Franchi charged more favourable rates for his portraits than English painters. Meanwhile, the swelling British maritime community in Livorno and Tuscany encouraged artists to move to and work there.

The navigation and operation of trade was also the subject of several articles. Jopling questions the usefulness of the term ‘Jamaica discipline’ to describe a set of ideas followed by Anglo-American privateering and pirate groups in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Jopling contests the received narrative that these groups were egalitarian and anti-authoritarian, highlighting instead fragmentation and core differences amongst privateers and pirates. He points to evidence of their intentions to embed themselves within colonial society to legitimize their activities. The social norms these groups adhered to were flexible and inconsistent, rather than constituting any kind of Jamaica discipline. In an article for a forum titled ‘Risk and Uncertainty in the Early Modern World’ published in the same journal, Reid focuses on ideas of risk and profit in British Atlantic merchant shipping. Evolutionary – rather than revolutionary – shifts in shipping technology characterize the British Atlantic maritime economy, he argues. The size of ships, for example, remained consistent throughout the period 1600–1800 due to risk associated with large ships travelling at speed. Instead, fleets grew to ensure the maritime economy remained buoyant. Reid argues for technological conservatism in explaining productivity of British merchant shipping.

An article by Ruderman and van Waijenburg explores the revocation of the Royal African Company's (RAC) monopoly in 1698, and particularly the Company's response to its loss in trading privileges. The authors code and analyse the highly systematized format (including stock phrases and repeated commands) of an almost complete set of 292 instruction letters sent by the RAC to its slave-ship captains on trips to West Africa between 1685 and 1706. Innovative coding offers countless insights into the Company's operation, many of which are beyond the scope of the article. Focusing on the 1698 revocation of the monopoly, the authors find that the Company operated with high organizational flexibility both before and immediately after, responding to changes and adopting new measures for more efficient management of the trade in enslaved African people. The infrastructure of the trade itself – especially slave-ship captains who continually sailed the West African coast – could be mobilized to monitor the activities of the RAC's principal agents at West African forts, and report back evidence of factors cheating the Company in the face of the collapse of the monopoly. The RAC, the authors argue, fought to maintain their position until they ran to standstill.

The navigation of imperial projects also featured in an article by Smith which explores the attempted replacement of Irish legal strategies by English planters in Collymore, County Cork. Legal tensions arose between two prevailing legal systems: on the one hand, customary practices of Gaelic lordship and partible inheritance (including tanistry, in which lordship descends to the most eligible relative or heir, rather than a direct patrilineal descendant) and, on the other, primogeniture and other Anglican legal mechanisms. Smith argues that, through routine legal cases such as inheritance disputes and chancery suits, Gaelic lords recast (but also rearticulated) their authority in the English vocabulary of the law. Tensions rumbled on for almost a century, but the rhetorical shifts Irish lords made in redefining their own sense of lordship kept them in dialogue with English law and practice, thereby changing ‘the terms on which the Tudor-Stuart state interacted with them, carving out new spaces and developing new strategies within the evolving and increasingly fraught environment of plantation Munster.’ (p. 58)

This year was a bumper year for articles on global capitalism, race, and colonial exploitation. The enslaved racialized labour that the transatlantic trade relied upon was the topic of an article by Roper. The author contends that the commonplace assumption that labour preferences in English colonial America shifted from indentured service to slavery are overblown. The trafficking and enslavement of Africans and natives was a fundamental part of English colonization from as early as the 1610s and only the development of large-scale trafficking determined the numbers of Africans in Anglo-America. This was not a shift in planter attitudes towards a colonial labour force, he argues. Rather, it was a question of access to African people. An article by Smith draws out important nuances in how the servant institution was conceptualized in relation to slavery, arguing that – according to devotional literature and servant manuals – the obedient servant performed Christian liberty, while the servant who resisted resembled African plantation slaves or galley slaves rowing for Muslim masters. Wage labour and servants who became ‘hirelings’ (living at their own liberty and hiring themselves out as they wished) could even be portrayed as being worse than a slave. This racialized rhetoric, Smith argues, fed into the formation of an obedient white working class in pre-industrial England.

An article by Stock considers British perceptions of Asia through a study of 350 geography books (including geographical reference works, gazetteers, encyclopaedias, and schoolbooks) between 1652 and 1832. Stock argues that these books circulated ideas about Asia in popular literate culture, with a readership that ranged from school children to ‘armchair tourists’ and actual travellers (p. 123). Of interest to social and economic historians is Stock’s conclusion that, for most of these texts, ‘Asia's past facilitates contemporary Europe, and Asia's present and future enables further European growth’ (p. 132). Nonetheless, while Asia's resource-rich lands offer premium conditions for generating economically advanced cultures, societal mismanagement has left these resources wasted and therefore ripe for economic exploitation.

Colonial exploitation was also the subject of an article by Bennett. The article focuses on the EIC's imperial project of developing a plantation system on St Helena, a South Atlantic island off the coast of Africa. Bennett traces the EIC's ambitions in mirroring of Barbadian sugar cultivation system, an economic model based on intensive farming and violent labour management. In St Helena, they tried sugar, indigo, cotton, and saltpetre. Caribbean models were, Bennett argues, of wider geographical significance. He offers brief glimpses of speculative plantation schemes beyond the Cape of Good Hope proposed in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. An article by Menzin interrogates the link between sugar products and capitalism. The English demand for sugar, she argues, was a key causal factor in English imperialism and, as a driver for the industrial revolution, should be given equal importance to the expansion of production in laying imperialist groundwork. Menzin highlights the importance of New England, in supplying the Barbadian sugar society (with wood for homes and foodstuffs, for example) and as a consumer. Evidence from account books, court and probate records, government documents, and narrative sources integrates sugar product consumption in Massachusetts Bay from the mid-seventeenth century into the story of English imperialism led by demand.

Early modern agrarian histories and histories of the land market produced a smattering of articles this year. An article by Leech focused on urbanization in Coventry, drawing new attention to the dual importance of dissolution and the Reformation in processes of land acquisition and enclosure of commons. Leech shows that, by the 1550s, the corporation of the city had taken possession of much of the land in and around Coventry, justifying enclosure and its investment into civic obligations as improving the commonwealth. An article by Bottomley offers a detailed investigation of property rights of minors through the Court of Wards between 1540 and 1660. The article argues that the Crown's re-imposition of wardship – whereby the Crown could take the lands of a minor into its wardship as well as the minor themselves – undermines property rights in this period. Although most people's land was never taken under wardship, rates of wardship nonetheless rose and its threat undermined the ability to freely and wholly enjoy a property. The Crown, Bottomley argues, manipulated wardship as a means to increase its own income (though maladministration meant that this revenue was largely lost). Wardships were sold, which had economic consequences upon the land. Values dropped as guardians stripped the land of its assets.

Agrarian management was the subject of an article by Sørensen who uses farming manuals and books to embed ideas of thrift, industriousness, and improvement within sixteenth- and seventeenth-century discourse. He argues that a shift in thought around how agriculture should be managed took place at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Thrift – which invoked ideas of household or farm management within a localized community – was gradually replaced by a national, more impersonal discourse of improvement and industriousness. Greater cooperation between agrarian improvers and the state was envisaged by the mid-seventeenth century. Agricultural labourers were virtually removed from the picture, imagined as ‘factors of production’ (p. 569) rather than part of the household family.

Two articles by Taylor reinvigorate the subject of early modern market tolls on grain. The first article, published in The Historical Journal, offers a close study of disputes over grain tolls in marketplaces (which included disputes over changes in existing toll collection practices, introduction of new practices, and evasion of toll payment). Taylor finds that tolls represented an ‘increasingly ambiguous position within early modern English economic culture’ (p. 928). Taylor argues that, far from being unimportant to economic life, they are emblematic of a complex transition from a society in which bargaining was predicated on ideas of community (which was accompanied by ideas of social and moral obligation) to self-interest. The second article, appearing in the pages of Social History, takes these same disputes and looks at them through the lens of paternalism. Taylor shows that duty towards the poor took precedence over the interests of private individuals. Figures of authority who were involved in managing toll corn had a paternalistic responsibility to the poor – though, as she argues, they did not always do so willingly or kindly. The politics of grain toll collection therefore mark it out as clearly demarcating the social order and the subordination of the poor.

A series of articles focused on the well-being of the early modern English. Literacy received renewed attention in an article by Hailwood. Focusing not on full signature literacy but on marks left on the page in depositions by those whom scholars would have traditionally deemed ‘illiterate’, Hailwood draws our attention to subcategories of literacy that tell us something more about writing and reading practices in a society of nascent literacy. In particular, he points to the more widespread recognition of letters (which he terms ‘letteracy’) and pen competency.

Over recent years, there has been an emerging focus on early modern food cultures. An article by Taverner and Flavin sheds new light on food stuffs, costs, and practices through the sixteenth-century accounts of Dublin Castle, residence of one of England's chief officeholders, Sir William Fitzwilliam. Taverner and Flavin show that elite consumption in Ireland was advanced, with mercantile activity well integrated into mainland Europe. The article offers new evidence of how a lord deputy strained to demonstrate early English imperial power through excessive consumption and a bountiful table. A second article by these two authors with co-authors Meltonville, Reid, Lawrence, Belloch-Molina, and Morrissey takes a radical, interdisciplinary approach to understand beer and its place in early modern diets. The article unites historians, experimental archaeologists, agronomists, microbiologists, brewing scientists, craftworkers, farmers, and maltsters to recreate an oat-based beer using early modern records (again from Dublin Castle, a large, high-ranking Irish home). The authors set out to investigate: ‘how alcoholic was beer in the past and how much energy did it provide?’ (p. 517) The article carefully sets out the process of recreating the beer and the experiment results. The beer they brewed had an alcohol by volume (ABV) of 5–5.3 per cent and an energy content of 260–272 kCal per pint, figures comparable to modern beers. Despite cautioning against taking these figures as new benchmarks due to imperfections in the process, the authors tentatively conclude that beer was an important source of energy in early modern England (though lower than other estimates) and that – given several pints were being drunk per day – had the potential to cause significant inebriation.

The extension of credit offered a framework for the close study of over 3500 debt suit entries in the Elizabethan Court of Common Pleas by Kipling. The author tracks the characteristics of those engaged in borrowing and lending in Elizabethan Sussex, revealing that most litigants involved in debt suits were below the level of the gentry and came from across the county and its immediate neighbours. The author draws out connections to London, pointing to the prevalence of credit being extended to county merchants from the capital.

Poverty and household consumption in the long run was the focus of an article published by Horrell. She constructs a price index for ordinary households running from 1260–1869 using a chained-Laspeyres methodology that accounts for changing patterns of household expenditure over time. The author produces indices for the pre-industrial period that are align closely with those reliant on Allen's fixed consumption basket. She therefore confirms Allen's consumer price index (CPI) as a reliable indicator of living costs and real wages. Both indices for this period, Horrell argues, reflect households’ dependence on agrarian products whose prices demonstrated similar co-movements. Prices followed the output of agriculture, meaning that the development of the household consumption bundle over time had little impact on the cost of living. Industrialization, however, brought a shift in household expenditures away from agrarian products and towards imported groceries and manufactured goods. This undermined the co-dependency. Economic growth and rising incomes caused cost of living to drift from Allen's basket of respectability, making his CPI less reliable for the later period. Poverty and cost of living was also the focus of an article by Waddell. He explores the idea of progress and what it means in early modern history by placing the economic crises of the 1690s under the spotlight. Waddell contrasts economic hardships with typical narratives of late Stuart expansion and the Glorious Revolution. Exploring the economic impact of the French wars, coin clipping, failed harvests, and rising prices in this decade, Waddell reminds us to be wary in viewing the late seventeenth century simply as a story of progress and economic success.

In the face of such economic and social hardship, early modern society may have felt powerless. However, the power of early modern petitioning has been enjoying its heyday in recent years, with scholarship expanding enormously in using it as window onto socio-political lives of ordinary people. An article by Burnett explores the decline of neighbourliness through a sample of 192 collectively produced petitions from Staffordshire and Worcestershire between 1589 and 1700. She argues that, rather than seeing these petitions as contradictory to the idea that communal cooperation was waning in the seventeenth century, they tell a story of both collective identity and mutual support as well as individualistic aims. Petitioners gathered signatories and supported their neighbours’ causes while also marking themselves out as individuals in their signatures and seeking individual integration through collective petitioning. Neither should be seen as mutually exclusive, she argues, and taking both together complicates our understanding of neighbourliness. An article by Rhodes also takes petitions as a source base for examining early modern marital relations. Rhodes adds to scholarship on marital breakdown, exploring 37 of a total of 127 petitions collected from Lancashire between 1660 and 1700 recorded couples living apart while remaining married. She focuses on deserted or absconded wives who remained in contact with their husbands and used petitioning as a means to procure maintenance from their (often abusive) husbands. The article sheds light on the circumstances that led these women to leave, how they coped with separation, and the widespread acceptance within society of estranged couples.

Petitioning also featured in an article by Chaffin and Wallis. Connecting petitions submitted by goldsmith apprentices to the Lord Mayor's Court for early discharge with the apprenticeship records of the Goldsmiths’ Company, the article explores the contractual framework of apprenticeship as well as providing estimates for gaps in livery company apprenticeship registers. Analysis of the petitions shows that apprentices from within the city and with paternal ties to the livery company more frequently made use of the Lord Mayor's Court. The authors find the court was used in processes of negotiation and reconciliation between masters and apprentices, and that court resolutions were provisional not absolute. Appealing to the Lord Mayor's Court could assist in offsetting the reputational cost discharged apprentices might bear. Several female apprentices who were probably working for the freeman's wife petitioned as members of the Company but did not appear in the apprenticeship registers. The authors therefore identify a gender-based blind spot in the records and undercounting of apprentices, with under-registration by livery companies affecting around 1 in 20 (and more acutely for female apprentices).

The trend in studying petitions is apparent in Paterson's article on the monopoly of starch in early seventeenth century England. Paterson explores the operation and control of monopolies through a petition made by the Grocers’ Company in 1608 with the support of the Lord Mayor of London against the newly incorporated Starchmakers’ Company, who held the monopoly on the production of starch. She traces the rhetoric around monopolization that the Companies used in their petitioning, exploring how it drew on the contemporary language of liberty as well as proposing a solution to the production of starch. Rather than suggesting the Grocers’ Company themselves might produce starch, they suggested a scheme of interest to the Crown: the banning of domestic production altogether (thereby ensuring edible wheat was not wasted on starch production) and free importation. The Starchmakers’ Company, by contrast, refuted each point of the petition, presenting themselves not as restricting starch production (so long as it was not made of wheat) and in fact as staunch supporters of the poor starch-makers (in comparison to the greedy Grocers’ Company). While the Grocers’ petition was unsuccessful, the document offers insight into traders’ attempts to navigate the economic challenges posed by monopolization and projection.

While petitions offer evidence of societal interaction with the state, several articles focused on ways in which the state exercised its control. Civic control was the subject of an article by McSheffrey, who pieces together the proceedings of the oft quoted but routinely understudied 1517 Evil May Day riots from scattered archival records. McSheffrey traces the anti-immigration and xenophobic feeling amongst London apprentices against alien artisans that sparked the riots. She points to the climate of xenophobia that was building before the riots as London guild apprentices found their special privileges eroded. The Dutch and the French, she argues, were particular targets. The harsh penalty meted out to the rioters (treason, which came with the death penalty, as the riots were framed as an attack on authority) was a response by the King to what he saw as poor government by the city and as a symbol of royal autocracy. An article by Dyer explores gentry honour and R.H. Tawney's sixteenth-century ‘agrarian problem’ through a Staffordshire murder case of 1515. The dispute arose over a dung heap allegedly belonging to husbandman Henry Flackett, who defended his claim to the dung against the gentleman Humphrey Walker, when his servants attempted to take it away. Dyer shows how these agrarian tensions led to Walker asserting his authority, ensuring that ‘no-one of lower status would question his authority over his servants’ (p. 20). Flackett paid the ultimate price of his life. The case, Dyer argues, also reveals lack of effective law enforcement, particularly among those of higher status.

Finally, while the subjects of lockdowns and quarantines have eased up in contemporary news, the experience and management of early modern plague continues to generate new publications. An article by Udale explored the implementation of the 1578 national quarantine law through the case study of three waves of plague in Bristol. Using data from parish registers, Udale compares patterns of household mortality in plagues occurring in 1565 and 1575 with the post-law outbreak of 1604. He finds that mortality in 1604 (after the 1578 plague order) was substantially higher than in the two earlier outbreaks, with burials clustered more tightly into household groups across all areas of the city. In 1604, attempts to quarantine were particularly concentrated in central, more affluent parts of the city where the city's rulers lived, suggesting the civic elite sought to protect themselves first and foremost.