[In the following essay, Patterson examines Holinshed's treatment of the lower classes in the Chronicles, suggesting that such interest in “local knowledge” illuminates the importance of displaying the various aspects of an entire culture in order to comprehend the process of forming a society.]

In time of this rebellion, a priest that by a butcher dwelling within five miles of Windsor had been procured to preach in favor of the rebels, and the butcher (as well for procuring the priest thereto, as for words spoken as he sold his meat in Windsor) were hanged: the priest on a tree at the foot of Windsor bridge, and the butcher on a paire of new gallowes set up before the castell gate, at the end of the same bridge. The words which the butcher spake were these. When one bad him lesse for the carcasse of a sheepe than he thought he could make of it: Naie by Gods soule (said he) I had rather the good fellowes of the north had it, and a score more of the best I have, than I would so sell it. This priest and butcher being accused on a mondaie in the morning whilest the kings armie was in the field, and the king himselfe lieng at Windsor, they confessed their faults upon their examinations, and by the law martiall they were adjudged to death, and suffered as before is mentioned.¹

The source of this anecdote is the Henrician section of Holinshed's Chronicles, first published in 1577, and republished in an expanded edition in 1587. I cite it as a symptom of interests and attitudes now discernible in this, the greatest of the Elizabethan chronicles. I say discernible now because they have not been visible to readers of the Chronicles for at least a century, obscured by political assumptions about what was unthinkable in the late sixteenth century, or by historiographical standards that evolved later, and that were incapable of embracing the very different intentions of Raphael Holinshed and his colleagues. If read today with different assumptions, the Chronicles reveal a remarkable commitment, or at least openness, to values whose stock has risen at the end of the twentieth century, and which therefore can be recognized and celebrated when we find them spoken in the different vocabulary of early modern England.

As I have explained in more detail elsewhere, these values were necessary to a project that was from the first collaborative. It entailed the cooperation of middle-class book-sellers and scholars, some of them members of the clergy, whose religious preferences spanned the spectrum from Roman Catholicism to strongly reformist Protestantism, at a time when the recent history of the English state was inseparable from the history of its church, and when both had shown a dangerous tendency to ricochet from one end to the other of that same spectrum. The idea for the project originated with a printer, Reginald or Reyner Wolfe, originally from Strassburg, who had been patronized by both Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell, and been employed as royal printer by Edward VI. Holinshed was employed by Wolfe as an assistant and translator, but his role must have grown gradually to that of editor-compiler. When Wolfe died, the financing of the project was taken over by John Harrison, Wolfe's son-in-law; Lucas Harrison, who had leased his shop from Wolfe; and George Bishop. The first edition was largely the work of Holinshed, who covered the history of England to 1572 and of Scotland to 1571. For the history of Ireland, he or Wolfe engaged the assistance of Richard Stanyhurst, and William Harrison was brought in when the first edition was almost ready, to write a “Description” of England that formed, as it were, an introductory essay on the complexity of “place” as an idea. When Holinshed himself died in 1580, plans already having been made to produce a new edition, the publishers' team expanded to include Ralph Newberie, Henry Denham, and Thomas Woodcock, as also did the scholarly team, to include John Hooker, alias Vowell, who continued the history of Ireland; Francis Boteville, otherwise known as Thynne, who continued and supplemented the history of Scotland; John Stow, whose famous manuscript collection had already been consulted by Holinshed for the 1577 edition; and Abraham Fleming, a minor literateur who seems to have been the major editor and compiler.²

The principles that this group shared, and that overrode their differences in religious belief, political preference, or local allegiance, included the following: (1) diversity of belief and opinion was to be faithfully recorded; (2) a corollary of this was a preference for verbatim reporting (what the butcher actually said) as distinct from the neutralizing voice of the editor-historian; (3) an anthropological interest in what we now call popular culture, which here means reporting the doings and opinions of groups usually thought of as beneath serious attention (what the butcher said has a place in the national record); and (4) a concern for justice and fairness. This last concern for the idea of justice not only involves the scrutiny of many incidents of protest by the laboring classes against what were perceived to be (by the protesters, and perhaps even by the chroniclers) social and economic injustice, but also, as in the trial of the butcher, detailed representation of how individuals from those classes were punished by the judicial system or its agents. Between them, these two types of scrutiny can suggest, especially when the examples are clustered together, that Holinshed and his colleagues recognized that popular protest, though scarcely to be encouraged, was often severely provoked; and that for those in the lowest strata of society the gap between law enforcement and justice as fairness was horrifyingly large.

This paper selects from my study of the Chronicles a group of examples intended to support only these contentions, and to be freestanding of larger arguments about the social, political, and religious agendas of Holinshed and his colleagues. They are selected to support the theme of “Place and Displacement,” in that in each instance the anthropological texture of the representation depends to a considerable extent on a sense of place, of local communities, and local observation. To put it another way, these are anecdotes that illustrate the complex relationship between time and place in the longer story of nation formation. Thus, to return to the trial of the butcher, its temporal context was the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1537, a Roman Catholic protest against the Henrician Reformation; but part of the story's point, evidently, is its ironic sense of locale, with the name of Windsor four times insisted upon, the executions being symbolically carried out “at the foot of Windsor bridge” and upon a pair of new gallows constructed for the purpose at the other end of that same bridge. Why the prominence of Windsor, if not that it was the king's residence, the place of royal power and supposedly immune from such manifestations of disobedience? Roger Manning, who found the story where Holinshed had found it, in Hall's Chronicle, suggested that “the severity of the punishment may also be related to the fact that [the offence] was committed within the verge (i.e., within twelve miles) of royal palaces while the king's banner was displayed in time of rebellion.”³

According to Hall, the butcher was executed under martial law, which exempted the authorities from all due process. The effect his version of the story had on Manning is recorded in his use of the word “severity”; but he saw nothing in it to disturb his belief that martial law was taken for granted by the public at large, and only became problematic fifty years later, when it appeared as one of the major grievances in the Petition of Right in 1629.⁴ The story as Holinshed retold it, however, seems intended to produce a meditation on severity. Although he retains the information that martial law was in force, the anecdote is presented as a peculiar application of the law of treason. The “words” which the butcher spoke, conceivably in jest but certainly casually in the course of his daily trade, were scarcely a justification for capital punishment. Even the most threatening clauses of the new treason legislation enacted in Henry VIII's reign, which, according to John Bellamy, “was regarded for the greater part of the remaining years of the century as the zenith of severity,”⁵ especially for its specific inclusion of “words,” would seem to have required more than this as a pretext for an exemplary execution. It is true, of course, that it was also for “procuring” the priest's sermon (itself only words) that the butcher was executed. But Holinshed's account differs in interesting ways from the earlier version of this anecdote recorded by Edward Hall, by including the insertion of that legalistic phrase, “for words spoken,” intimating that Holinshed had in mind precisely this extension of the treason law that was subsequently repudiated by Henry's own children, Edward VI and Mary Tudor. Hall, on the other hand, not only uses the word “treason” as if it were inarguable but states that both priest and butcher confessed “there treason,”⁶ a rather different matter from “confessed their faults.”

Let us now go back in time to Holinshed's treatment of what came to be seen as the original model of English social protest, whose repetition was, in the minds of government spokesmen, to be avoided at all cost: the 1381 uprising in the reign of Richard II. Holinshed depended for this section of the Chronicles primarily on Walsingham's Historia Anglicana,⁷ almost certainly by way of the edition published by Archbishop Matthew Parker in 1574; and because for much of his account he follows his source almost verbatim, his departures from it can claim a certain significance at the level of intention. Following Walsingham, Holinshed cites three events which might or might not be related, as causes, to the uprising: the “new and strange subsidie” called the poll tax (in the marginal note, “a greevous subsidie”) to be levied to support Buckingham's campaign in France; the appointment of Sir Robert Hales as Lord Treasurer, a man “not beloved of the commons”; and, perhaps merely as a coincidence, “about this time” the appearance of Wycliffe as a church reformer. Holinshed differs from Walsingham here only in being more specific about how the tax would apply. Walsingham's view of Wycliffe as “vetus hypocrita, angelus Sathanae” disappears; but Walsingham was the source for an overarching theory of causation, in attributing to the commons a larger grievance than even the notorious poll tax, that is, the desire to be free of villenage:

The commons of the realme sore repining, not onely for the pole grotes that were demanded of them … but also (as some write) for that they were sore oppressed (as they took the matter) by their land-lords, that demanded on them their ancient customes and services, set on by some divelish instinct & persuasion of their owne beastlie intentions, as men not content with the state whereunto they were called, rose in diverse parts of this realme, and assembled togither in companies, purposing to inforce the prince to make them free and to release them of all servitude, whereby they stood as bondmen to their lords and superiors.

(2:735)

The reference to “beastlie intentions,” while not an exact translation, faithfully transmits to a later age, from which villenage has been banished, the original narrator's now obsolete political perspective.

Holinshed departed completely, however, from Walsingham when he came to describing how the general and diffused grievances had prepared for a particular and inflammatory occasion. His source here is, importantly, local knowledge, transmitted through some text that has not survived:

When this rebellion of the commons first began, diverse have written diverslie. One author writeth, that (as he learned by one that was not farre from the place at that time) the first beginning should be at Dertford in Kent: for when those pole shillings or rather (as other have) pole grotes, were to be collected, no small murmuring, curssing, and repining among the common people rose about the same, and the more indeed, through the lewd demenour of some undiscreet officers, that were assigned to the gathering thereof, insomuch that one of those officers being appointed to gather up that monie in Dertford aforesaid, came to the house of one John Tiler, that had both servants in his house, and a faire yong maid to his daughter. The officer therefore demanding monie for the said Tiler and for his wife, his servants, and daughter, the wife being at home, and his husband abroad at worke in the towne, made answer that hir daughter was not of age, and therefore she denied to paie for hir.

Now here is to be noted, that this monie was in common speech said to be due for all those that were undergrowne, because that yoonge persons as well of the man as of the womankind, comming to the age of foureteene or fifteene yeares, have commonlie haire growing foorth about those privie parts, which for honesties sake nature hath taught us to cover and keepe secret. The officer therefore not satisfied with the mothers excuse, said he would feele whether hir daughter were of lawfull age or not, and therewith began to misuse the maid, and search further than honestie would have permitted. The mother streightwaies made an outcrie, so that hir husband being in the towne at worke, and hearing of this adoo at his house, came running home with his lathing staffe in his hand, and began to question with the officer, asking who made him so bold to keepe such a rule in his house: the officer being somewhat presumptuous, and highminded, would foorthwith have flowne upon this Tiler; but J. Tiler avoiding the officers blow, raught him such a rap on the pate, that his braines flue out, and so presentlie he died.

Great noise rose about this matter in the streets, and the folks being glad, everie man arraied himself to support John Tiler, & thus the commons drew togither, and went to Maidestone, and from thence to Blackheath, where their number so increased, that they were reckoned to be thirty thousand. And the said John Tiler tooke upon him to be their cheefe capteine, naming himself Jacke Straw.

(italics added)

Holinshed was not, however, content with one local legend. Completely uninterested also in the criterion of non-repetition, he added an alternative version of the provocation from another village:

Others write, that one Thomas Baker of Fobbings was the first that procured the people thus to assemble togither; and that one of the kings servants named John Leg, with three of his fellowes practised to feele yoonge maids whether they were undergrowne (as yee have heard the officer did at Dertford) which dishonest and unseemelie kind of dealing did set the people streight in such a rage and uprore, that they cared not what they did to be revenged of such injuries.

(2:735-36)

The effect of these anecdotes runs counter to the earlier note of disapproval that resulted from following Walsingham. Here the message is one of social antagonism and sexual outrage. Feeling up teenage girls on the pretext of collecting what has already been designated a “greevous subsidie” does not recommend itself as an image of legitimate government. One would have to be tight-lipped indeed not to feel that some kind of primitive justice was done, or was felt to have been done, when Tiler rises to the defense of his daughter, and his neighbors rise in support of him and his family. This anecdote functions rhetorically as a mitigation of, if not an excuse for, the uprising as a whole, and not least because Holinshed gives two versions of the story, revealing its dispersal in the popular memory.⁸

As the revolt became more violent, Holinshed's account becomes more critical; even so there are moments at which he registers a complex sense of the rebels' motivation, especially as he recounts their vandalization of the house of the duke of Lancaster:

The shamefull spoile which they there made was wonderfull, and yet the zeale of justice, truth, and upright dealing which they would seeme to shew, was as nice and strange on the other part, speciallie in such kind of misgoverned people: for in that spoiling of the duke [of Lancaster's] house, all the jewels, plate, and other rich and sumptuous furniture which they there found in great plentie, they would not that any man should fare the better by it a mite, but threw all into the fire, so to be consumed; … One of them having thrust a faire silver peece into his bosome, meaning to conveie it awaie, was espied of his fellowes, who tooke him, and cast both him and the peece into the fire; saieng they might not suffer any such thing, sith they professed themselves to be zealous of truth and justice, and not theeves nor robbers.

(2:738; italics added)

While the description of the vandalism itself is a close paraphrase of Walsingham (1:457), the sentences in italics are Holinshed's additions, whose intention is confirmed by marginal comments: “Strange dealing of the rebels,” and “The justice of the rebels.”

We also need to locate somewhere between these two positions—guarded sympathy and shocked antipathy—the effect of Holinshed's recapitulation of the famous sermon of John Ball to the multitude on Blackheath. For where Walsingham introduced Ball as someone who “taught both the perverse doctrines of perfidious John Wycliffe, and … false insanities” (“Docuit et perversa dogmata perfidi Johannis Wiclyf, … et insanias falsas”),⁹ Holinshed observes merely that “this man had beene a preacher the space of twentie yeares, and bicause his doctrine was not according to the religion then by the bishops mainteined, he was … prohibited to preach in anie church or chappell.” Driven from the church, Ball proceeded to “set foorth his doctrine in the streets & fields where he might have audience” (2:748-49; italics added). The import of Ball's prohibition has been subtly altered in the direction of historical relativism by the presence of that humble “then,” the sign of ideological change; and if what was acceptable in religion could change, so presumably could the social doctrine for which Ball had so long been excoriated.

This is what John Ball had spoken on Blackheath, taking as his text the “common proverbe”:

When Adam delv'd, and Eve span,
Who was then a gentleman?

and arguing that “from the beginning, all men by nature were created alike, and that bondage or servitude came in by unjust oppression of naughtie men”:

For if God would have had anie bondmen from the beginning, he would have appointed who should be bond & who free. And therefore he exhorted them to consider, that now the time was come appointed to them by God, in which they might (if they would) cast off the yoke of bondage, & recover libertie. He counselled them therefore to … destroie first the great lords of the realme, and after the judges and lawiers, questmoongers, and all other whom they undertooke to be against the commons, for so might they procure peace and suertie to themselves in time to come, if dispatching out of the waie the great men, there should be an equalitie in libertie, no difference in degrees of nobilitie, but a like dignitie and equall authoritie in all things brought in among them.

(2:749)

The text of the sermon was taken verbatim from Walsingham; so that were anyone to object that these were dangerous positions even to articulate in the late sixteenth century, the chronicler could simply point to his faithful transmission of a fifteenth-century monastic chronicle.

Holinshed's representation of the Peasants' Revolt, then, was inconclusive, but not irresponsibly so. It is less judgmental than Walsingham's, or rather it offers a more even-handed dispersal of judgment against both sides in the contestation. Although there are moments of sympathy and admiration for the rebels, and more obvious passages of rejection and repulsion, in sum the story asserts the complexity of events and the difficulty of evaluation, not their simplicity. Indeed, this is how Holinshed summarized it:

To declare the occasion whie such mischeefes happened thus in the realme, we leave to the judgement of those that may conjecture a truth thereof, by conferring the manners of that age & behaviour of all states then, sith they that wrote in those daies, may happilie in that behalfe misse the trueth, in construing things according to their affections. But truelie it is to be thought, that the faults, as well in one degree as another, speciallie the sinnes of the whole nation, procured such vengeance to rise, whereby they might be warned of their evill dooings, and seeke to reforme the same in time convenient.

(2:751; italics added)

The move to morality at the end in no way cancels the potent advice to the reader to be on the alert for bias in the medieval chroniclers—including class bias, for we have under scrutiny the “behavior of all states then.”¹⁰

This is equally true of Holinshed's treatment of another famous moment of popular disorder over two centuries later, the events of Ill May Day, 1517 (a day notorious among literary scholars by virtue of its deletion from the text of the play of Sir Thomas More).¹¹ In this case the scene is emphatically urban, and packed with detail about where the different phases of the disturbance actually occurred. Holinshed's source was Edward Hall, who may even have witnessed the riot; we can track Holinshed's intentions by noting that, although his account might be dismissed as a close paraphrase of Hall, he did in fact make significant additions to Hall's narrative. To make matters more complex still, in 1587 Abraham Fleming went back to Hall's account to retrieve some passages of emotional force and ideological clarification that Holinshed had originally omitted. If I read their strategy correctly, the chroniclers did not accept the judgment of modern historians that Ill May Day was a regrettable case of industrial protectionism driven by xenophobia. They saw it rather as a confrontation between court and city, with the citizens in the disadvantageous position, and as one of the many stories scattered throughout the Chronicles about how readily justice is perverted by other powerful interests.

In the London of Henry VIII, we are told, there had been for some time “a great hartburning and malicious grudge amongst the Englishmen of the citie of London against strangers,” whose freedom to operate as craftsmen in the city had led to “the great hinderance and impoverishing of the kings liege people” (3:617). The actual riot was ignited, however (as in the 1381 uprising) by a mundane episode involving individuals. Holinshed insists that it was the strangers (in this case, the French) who gave the provocation:

It fortuned that as a carpenter called Williamson had bought two stockdooves in Cheape, and was about to pay for them, a Frenchman tooke them out of his hand, and said they were not meate for a carpenter. Well said the Englishman I have bought them and now paid for them, and therefore I will have them. Naie said the Frenchman, I will have them for my lord the ambassadour. And so for better or woorsse, the Frenchman called the Englishman knave, and went awaie with the stockdooves.

(3:617-18)

But there was worse to come. The Frenchman went to his ambassador, and “surmised a complaint against the poore carpenter,” who was sent to prison; when Sir John Baker and others protested against this treatment, the ambassador answered “that by the bodie of God … the English knave should lose his life, for he said no Englishman should denie that the Frenchmen required, and other answer had they none” (3:618).

There were several other episodes illustrative of these tensions: but the result was that a certain John Lincoln approached Dr. Beale, a canon of St. Mary's Hospital and (like the butcher of Windsor) persuaded him to deliver an incendiary sermon on the economic consequences of uncontrolled foreign business in the city. Holinshed calls it a “pitiful bill,” but one containing “much seditious matter” (3:619). On April 28, several young Londoners “piked quarrels to certeine strangers … some they did strike, some they buffeted, some they threw in the kennell [gutter]” (3:620). A rumor began that on May Day the Londoners would rise and kill all the aliens. Cardinal Wolsey sent for the Lord Mayor to warn him, and after consultation with his own council and with Sir Thomas More it was agreed that there should be a curfew announced on May Day eve. That evening, Sir John Munday, an alderman (whose descendant Anthony Munday was one of the “hands” in the later dramatization of these events) found two young men playing at the bucklers in Cheapside, with a great many onlookers; for, as Holinshed, like Hall, reminded his readers, the curfew had only just been announced, so that many were probably still unaware of it. Munday commanded the game to cease, and when one of them asked why, Munday arrested him. Then all the other apprentices rescued their colleague, “& cried, Prentises and clubs” (3:620). By eleven that night, there were six or seven hundred persons gathered in Cheapside, and another three hundred in St. Paul's churchyard. Those who had previously been imprisoned were rescued from Newgate, and the riot was on in good earnest. In a famous episode, Sir Thomas More encountered them, and attempted to persuade them to disperse; but “from ten or eleven of the clocke, these riotous people continued in their outragious dooings till about three of the clocke, at what time they began to withdraw, and went to their places of resort: and by the waie they were taken by the maior and heads of the citie, and sent some of them to the Tower, some to Newgate, and some to the Counters, to the number of three hundred” (3:621). In other words, the rioters had already exhausted themselves and were on their way home when the arrests were made.

At this point, Holinshed's account began to expand significantly, into areas of analysis that Hall had avoided. Holinshed inserted an explanation of why, against all reason, the disproportionate charge of treason was invoked in the indictments of the rioters. Sir John Fineux, lord chief justice, chose to apply to this situation legislation from the reign of Henry V (2 Henry V.c.6) that, where truces pertained between England and other countries, any attacks on members of those nations would constitute treason. “And note,” Holinshed added, “that judge Fineux said, that all such as were parties to the said insurrection, were guiltie of high treason, as well those that did not commit anie robberie, as those that were principall dooers therein” (3:623). In addition, he further extended the reach of the fifteenth-century statute into social control by applying it to breaches of the statute of laborers.

John Bellamy has commented on this astonishing legal interpretation, for which Holinshed seems to be our only informant, as “bad law based on worse history.” He assumed it was the king or Wolsey who told the judges that treason was to be charged, but “whoever had the idea of using the statute of 1414 was certainly not well informed historically.” Perhaps Fineux knew the weakness of the crown's case, hence his reference to an insurrection in Kent “made against the statute of labourers,” perhaps the act of 1381 (5 Ric. II st. 1.c.6) which had made it treason to initiate the Peasants' Revolt.¹²

Something that Holinshed omitted from his transcription of Hall, but that Fleming carefully retrieved, may also bear on the legal issues:

Now upon examination it could never be prooved of anie meeting, gathering, talking, or conventicle, at anie daie or time before that daie; but that the chance so happened without anie matter prepensed of anie creature saving Lincolne, and never an honest person in maner was taken but onelie he.

(3:622; Hall, 590)

This, Bellamy suggested, meant that the crown was seeking evidence of men conspiring together, in the hope of laying a charge of compassing the king's death;¹³ but because no evidence could be found, Fineux had to resort to the clearly irrelevant statute of 1414. In addition, we may assume, the issue of class argued against a normal application of the treason law of Edward III; because the only person involved above the level of artisan or apprentice was Lincoln himself, the participants were assumed to be incapable of rational planning.

The results of this manipulation of the law can now be anticipated. Returning to Hall, Holinshed described how, on May 4, the prisoners were brought through the streets tied in ropes, some men, and some “lads of thirteene yeeres of age,” 278 persons in all. All were adjudged guilty of treason and condemned to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. Eleven pairs of gallows were set up “in diverse places where the offences were doone” (as well, we now recognize, as to distribute the exemplary spectacle) and the prisoners were there executed “in a most rigorous maner, in the presence of the lord Edmund Howard, knight marshall.” It is important to recognize that whereas the tone of pity had been fully established by Hall, it is the justice of these events that Holinshed brings into question. Yet one of the most surprising aspects of the Chronicles' transmission is that, for the 1587 edition, Fleming went back to Hall for two brief passages previously omitted, that respectively enhanced the pathos and sharpened the sense of injustice. Howard, we are told, “shewed no mercie, but extreme crueltie to the poore yoonglings in their execution: and likewise the dukes servants spake manie opprobrious words, some bad hang, some bad draw, some bad set the citie on fire, but all was suffered” (3:624).¹⁴

Ill May Day is only one episode in the long and violent saga of Henry VIII's reign, and its violence tends to shrink into insignificance beside the string of executions of queens and aristocrats. The account of Edward VI's short reign as the chroniclers choose to structure it, however, is dominated by two interrelated events: the protests generated all over the country by the Edwardian Reformation and the social policies of Protector Somerset; and, as their consequence, the trial and execution of Somerset. In other words, the analysis of causation and provocation of popular protest here receives an unexpected complication—the fact that a social reform program, if insufficiently prepared for, can be rebarbative.¹⁵ Holinshed had given an evenhanded account of Somerset's 1549 proclamation against enclosures, “tending to the benefit and releefe of the poore,” but added that “how well soever the setters forth of this proclamation meant … yet verelie it turned not to the wished effect, but rather ministred occasion of a foule and dangerous disorder” (3:916). Anti-enclosure riots, he reported, broke out in Somerset, Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire, Kent, Essex, and Lincolnshire. At the same time, Edward's own program was liturgy-centered, and a more religiously-motivated rebellion broke out in Devon and Cornwall. The Chronicles record the “articles” or demands of these rebels, who insisted upon a return in their local churches to the doctrine of transubstantiation, complaining about those who “rudely presuming unworthilie to receive the same, put no difference betweene the Lords bodie & other kind of meat; some saieng that it is bread before and after” (3:918-19). The Chronicles also cite hostile assessments of these rebels' motives by John Foxe, whose Protestant bias discounted any “consent in their diversitie,” and by Sir John Cheke, the full text of whose 1549 pamphlet, The Hurt of Sedicion, was incorporated into the Chronicles.

But the reader was still encouraged to consider the structure of the society that had so quickly revealed its points of tension. For example, Holinshed himself had contributed to the story of the rebellion in the southwest counties another anecdote of the workings of martial law—the tale of a miller “that had been a great dooer in that rebellion,” who was being pursued by Sir Anthony Kingston. “But the miller being thereof warned,” Holinshed had written, “called a good tall fellow that he had to his servant, and said unto him:

I have business to go from home, if anie therefore come to aske for me, saie thou art the owner of the mill and … that thou hast kept this mill for the space of three years, but in no wise name me.”

The inevitable occurs; Kingston arrives to arrest the miller, and finding the servant ready to own to ownership of the mill, had him hauled away to the nearest tree, saying, “Thou hast beene a busie knave, and therefore here thou shalt hang.” When the servant, in panic, reclaims his real status, nothing avails:

Well, then, said Sir Anthonie, thou art a false knave to be in two tales, therefore said he, hang him up; and so incontinentlie hanged he was in deed. After he was dead, one that was present told Sir Anthonie, Suerlie sir this was but the millers man. What then, said he, could he ever have doone his maister better service than to hang for him.

(3:925-96)

We might be able to infer the social purpose of this real-life fable from that “incontinentlie,” that puts up its own small resistance to the summary judgements of martial law, not to mention the brutal joke at the end; but Holinshed helped the watchful interpreter by adding a marginal note: “This was a hard proceeding, though the partie had been nocent.”

In 1587 this section of this history was massively expanded by inclusion of place-specific material: the story of the uprisings near Exeter, as told by John Hooker, whose native territory this was and who wrote as an eyewitness of the events of 1549.¹⁶ His story (like Holinshed's fable of naive peasant and callous knight) indicates that though Edward's attempts to enforce a genuinely reformed liturgy was the primary cause of the unrest in the southwest, there were occasions when religious motives were complicated by friction between the classes. This should interest those who follow the adventures of Sir Walter Ralegh, whose father was the troublemaker. “It happened,” wrote Hooker,

that a certeine gentleman named Walter Raleigh dwelling not far from thense, as he was upon a side holie daie riding from his house to Excester, overtooke an old woman going to the parish church of Saint Marie Clift, who had a paire of beads in hir hands, and asked hir what she did with those beads? And entring into further speeches with hir concerning religion, which was reformed, and as then by order of law to be put into execution, he did persuade with hir that she should as a good Christian woman and an obedient subject yeeld thereunto; saieng further, that there was a punishment by law appointed against hir, and all such as would not obeie and follow the same, and which would be put in execution upon them.

(3:942)

It is easy to imagine this episode being conveyed by the younger Ralegh to Spenser, and transformed by him into one in The Faerie Queene (1:3:13-14) whereby Una, symbol of a united Protestant church, encounters the old woman Corceca, “blind Devotion,” telling her beads in the darkness of a cave. Hooker's tale not being an allegory, however, but a local memory of human misunderstanding, such overzealous and officious behavior on the part of Ralegh senior makes matters considerably worse:

This woman nothing liking, nor well digesting this matter, went foorth to the parish church, where all the parishioners were then at the service: and being unpatient, and in an agonie with the speeches before passed betweene hir and the gentleman, beginneth to upbraid in the open church verie hard and unseemelie speeches concerning religion, saieng that she was threatened by the gentleman, that except she would leave her beads, and give over holie bread and holie water, the gentleman would burne them out of their houses and spoile them, with manie other speeches verie false and untrue, and whereof no talke at all had passed betweene the gentleman and hir. Notwithstanding she had not so soon spoken, but that she was beleeved: and in all hast like a sort of wasps they fling out of the church, and get them to the towne which is not far from thense, and there began to intrench and fortifie the towne.

(3:942)

Ralegh himself was captured and kept prisoner in a local church tower, “being manie times threatned to be executed to death,” but survived. While I certainly would not claim that Hooker's account favors the old woman and her colleagues, his attention to psychological detail (her “agonie” at the conversation with Ralegh) is remarkable; and without his local knowledge we would have an impoverished sense of what regionalism does and does not explain in the social and religious history of this period.

Local knowledge is, of course, a phrase taken from Clifford Geertz, whose theorizing of the procedures of cultural anthropology has been central to some of the developments of the new historicism. Cultural history, which is what I now try to practice, can appropriate Geertz's definition of the anthropological approach to culture as necessarily “microscopic.” The cultural anthropologist, wrote Geertz, “confronts the same grand realities that others—historians, economists, political scientists, sociologists—confront in more fateful settings: Power, Change, Faith, Oppression, Work, … but he confronts them in contexts obscure enough … to take the capital letters off them. These all-too-human constancies, ‘those big words that make us all afraid,’ take a homely form in such homely contexts. But that is exactly the advantage. There are enough profundities in the world already.”¹⁷ In Holinshed's Chronicles, homely contexts and the local knowledge that is stored there, knowledge that may not have made its way into grander archives, may be more symptomatic of the culture as a whole than the great scenarios of state formation, international diplomacy, and ecclesiastical polity. In selecting these examples to commemorate the CEMERS 25th Annual Conference of 1991, I am struck by the way in which the specificities of place (and sometimes of displacement) themselves connote precisely the relationships between Power, Change, Oppression, Faith, and above all Work. The Tyler family of Dertford in Kent, or the Baker family of Fobbings, who defended their daughters against sexual harassment and themselves against the notorious “Poll Tax” of 1381; the butcher who joked in his Windsor shop of his sympathy for the Roman Catholic insurgency of 1537 and himself became a macabre landmark; the London artisans and storekeepers who felt themselves displaced by Frenchmen in May 1517; the naive miller's man who fatally took his master's place on the gallows in 1549 because nobody bothered to check his identity—they all stand, dramatically and evocatively, for much larger issues than themselves. The differences, and the convergences, between religious, political, and economic causes, and the regional inflections they acquired at different historical moments, are essential to the complex analysis the Chronicles were intended to encourage in the Elizabethan reader. And the fact that in these stories one is given instant access to recognizable (if not “real”) people has a special benefit for the modern academic: it humanizes the forbidding abstractions with which we alienate ourselves (so often it seems deliberately) from our not after all so very distant past.

Notes

1. Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 6 vols. (London, 1807-8; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1965), 3:802.

2. For full discussion of the “syndicate” who contributed to the Chronicles over two decades, see my Reading Holinshed's Chronicles (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994).

3. Roger B. Manning, “The Origins of the Doctrine of Sedition,” Albion 12 (1980): 107.

4. Ibid., 108-9; see also Lindsay Boynton, “Martial Law and the Petition of Right,” English Historical Review, 89 (1964): 255-84.

5. John Bellamy, The Tudor Law of Treason (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 37.

6. Edward Hall, Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancaster and Yorke, ed. Henry Ellis (London, 1809; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1965), 823.

7. See Thomas Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, ed. H. T. Riley, 2 vols. (London: Rolls Series, 1863), 1:449-450. Walsingham, monk of St. Albans (fl. 1440), is still the chief authority for the reigns of Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V.

8. The second version of the story, involving John Leg, derives from the Chronicon Henrici Knighton, ed. J. R. Lumby (London: Rolls Series, 1895), Vol. 92, 2:130-31:

   There was a certain John Leg with three colleagues asked the king to give him a commission to investigate the collectors of this tax in Kent, Norfolk and other parts of the country. They contracted to give the lord king a large sum of money for his assent; and most unfortunately for the king his council agreed. One of these commissioners came to a certain village to investigate the said tax and called together the men and women; he then, horrible to relate, shamelessly lifted the young girls to test whether they had enjoyed intercourse with men. In this way he compelled the friends and parents of these girls to pay the tax for them: many would rather pay for their daughters than see them touched in such a disgraceful way.

   The translation comes from R. B. Dobson, Peasants' Revolt of 1381 (London: Macmillan, 1970), 135. It is interesting that Holinshed preferred the version which stresses the youth of the female victim and leaves her sexual innocence intact.

9. Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, 2:32.

10. In 1680, Sir Thomas Browne, an outspoken Royalist during the civil war period, implied that Holinshed was unusually sympathetic to popular protest. In his unpublished antiquarian work, “Reportorium, or Some Account of the Tombs and Monuments in the Cathedrall Church of Norwich,” he wrote of Bishop Roger [de Skerning], “in whose time fell out that blooddy contention between the moncks and the citizens begunne at a fayre kept before gate, when the church was sett on fire, which to compose King Henry the third came in person to Norwich. Hollinshed for this confusion layeth much blame upon William de Brunham who was then prior of the convent butt hee who would knowe the names of the citizens who were chief Actors in this tumult, may find them sett downe in the Bull of Pope Gregorie the eleventh.” See Works, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, 4 vols. (Chicago, 1964), 3:131.

11. For current thinking about this episode of theatrical censorship, see T. H. Howard Hill, ed., Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More: Essays on the Play and its Shakespearian Interest (Cambridge, 1989).

12. Bellamy, 18-19.

13. Ibid., 20.

14. It is worth comparing this account, with its emphasis on a heartless justice, with that produced by John Speed, following Richard Grafton: “for which riotous offence John Lincolne the onely instigator was hanged; and foure hundred men, boyes, and eleven women led in ropes along the City in their shirts, and halters about their neckes to Kinges Hall at Westminister, where his Majesty … pardoned the offenses to the great rejoycing of the Londoners.” See Speed, History of Great Britain (London, 1614), fol. Xxxxx2^r.

15. For an excellent brief account of the reign and Seymour's policies, as well as his “fundamental administrative error and his overbearing circumvention of the Privy Council,” see John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982), 25-30.

16. Compare The discription of the cittie of Excester, collected and gathered by John Vowel (London, 1575).

17. See Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in his The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 3-30.