The 1380S and 1550S. the Continuity Is Underscored by the Persistent En- Forcement of Medieval Labor Legislation by Sixteenth-Century Quarter Sessions Courts

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REVIEWS | 459 the 1380s and 1550s. The continuity is underscored by the persistent en- forcement of medieval labor legislation by sixteenth-century Quarter Sessions courts. If these conclusions make the title something of a misnomer, they are also not particularly new. That the English yeomanry arose from the internal differentiation of the peasantry was argued for early modern Cambridgeshire by Spufford in 1974 and for medieval Norfolk itself by 2 Campbell in 1984. The book is further hampered by a rigid methodol- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/32/3/459/1703560/002219502753364326.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 ogy, which maintains that a society must be either “peasant” or “capital- ist” (there is no trace of the seminal 1970s articulation debate among anthropologists and development economists in the bibliography, let alone in the text) and clings to an outdated contrast between “dynamic” England and “stagnant” France (the author seems unaware of recent work by Moriceau and Hoffman on early modern France).3 Even within the narrower parameters of the ªndings for Norfolk, similar problems obtain. After taking Brenner and others to task for an exclusive preoccupation with a single prime mover of economic development, Whittle goes on to read the late medieval stirrings of peasant land concentration as an autonomous process unleashed by the collapse of serfdom. Demography, she insists, had nothing to do with it, even though her claim that serfdom impeded the process of accumulation runs contrary to the opinion of most medieval historians and is sup- ported by no direct evidence from the study area. Furthermore, Whit- tle’s own evidence indicates that the abundant supply of land in post- Plague Norfolk made it much easier to accumulate. Parcels got larger long before the price of land itself began to rise. An impressive array of sources undergirds this study. It would have been nice, however, to see more conceptual creativity emerge from such careful archival spadework, especially given the author’s admoni- tion that historians ought to pay more attention to theory. Govind P. Sreenivasan Brandeis University A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law, and the Second Earl of Castlehaven. By Cynthia Herrup (New York, Oxford University Press, 1999) 216 pp. $25.00 cloth $13.95 paper In A House in Gross Disorder, Herrup retells a story that is familiar—at least in its bare outlines—to students of early modern English history. In

2 Margaret Spufford, Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seven- teenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1974); Bruce M. S. Campbell, “Population Pressure, Inheritance and the Land Market in a Fourteenth-Century Peasant Community,” in Richard M. Smith (ed.), Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle (Cambridge, 1984), 87–134. 3 Jean-Marc Moriceau, Les fermiers de l’Île-de-France, XVe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1994); Philip T. Hoffman, Growth in a Traditional Society: The French Countryside, 1450–1815 (Princeton, 1996). 460 | CATHERINE PATTERSON 1631, Mervin Touchet, second earl of Castlehaven, was accused by family members of committing sodomy and aiding a servant to commit rape upon his wife. He was found guilty and executed. But Herrup demon- strates that this seemingly simple case was far from straightforward. She uses this highly charged tale as a lens through which to view early modern society, and, in particular, the ways that law intersected with moral- ity and social organization.

Herrup approaches the case from three intertwined perspectives: Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/32/3/459/1703560/002219502753364326.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 biographical, legal, and literary. Chapters 1 and 4 scrutinize the lives of the major characters before and after the trial. These individual stories give important insights not only into the details of the case but also into the broader moral and social anxieties of the day: a patriarch who cannot keep order in his family; an English noble tainted by Irishness and Ca- tholicism; a head of household who seems to favor his minions over his wife and children; a son who publicly accuses his father; wives charged with incontinence; and servants gaining parts of a noble patrimony—all markers of proper order gone awry. Herrup uses these biographical sketches to examine how this dysfunctional family broke the prescrip- tions of early modern social values, but also to reveal the tensions between order and disorder that permeated society more broadly. The central portion of the book deals with the legal proceedings themselves. Herrup examines the legal and social constructions of sodomy and rape—the two main charges against Castlehaven—showing how ambiguities about the nature and characteristics of the crimes made the case far from clear-cut. The prosecutors for the Crown focused less on the earl’s sexual acts (their case was not airtight) than on his social, moral, and religious failings. They emphasized his weakness as a father, a husband, a head of household, and a nobleman, articulating the dangers that his example posed to society at large. By “embedding the speciªc charges into a broader ediªce of sin” (64), prosecutors built a case that spoke directly to early modern sensibilities and anxieties. Deftly inter- weaving discussion of the nuts and bolts of legal procedure with a close reading and textual analysis of the legal arguments of the Crown and the defense, Herrup reveals the “interplay among sexual accusations, legal process, and social values” (145). Her multidimensional approach to the law and legal sources makes this book far more than a simple trial narrative. The book’s ªnal chapter analyzes the literary remains of the trial. The story of the earl has been retold many times in different ages, reºecting varying concerns. It helped sell more copies of State Trials in the eighteenth century; it served as the centerpiece of titillating tales of the naughty nobility in the nineteenth century; and it has been used to symbolize early modern attitudes toward homosexuality and sexual de- viance in more recent times. Herrup rightly reminds us of the dangers of “treating any text too reverently” (142–143); the Castlehaven trial (like many historical events) produced not one clear narrative, but a jumble of interpretations suiting particular times and places. REVIEWS | 461 Those trying to determine the earl’s guilt or innocence will ªnd no satisfaction in this book. Herrup is more interested in raising questions than in ªnding black-and-white answers. This approach adds subtlety and complexity to the story, but it also means that the analysis does not always follow a clear direction. The discussions of order and misrule can, at times, feel repetitive. But, overall, the book succeeds admirably both in conveying an interesting criminal case and analyzing the broader soci- etal patterns that it revealed. One of Herrup’s goals was to show the cul- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/32/3/459/1703560/002219502753364326.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 tural and social dimensions of legal procedures, as well as legal verdicts. A House in Gross Disorder lives up to that goal, skillfully using the tech- niques of legal, social, and cultural history to make the earl of Castlehaven’s sad tale reºect the anxieties of an age. Catherine Patterson University of Houston

Urbane and Rustic England: Cultural Ties and Social Spheres in the Provinces, 1660–1780. By Carl B. Estabrook (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999) 317 pp. $60.00 This book, a study of the city of Bristol and its hinterland, argues that the divisions between urbanites and villagers were even deeper than the familiar divisions of class and gender in early modern England. Whereas other historians have claimed that the provincial cities that emerged in the late seventeenth century were conduits for the spread of urban cul- ture to the nation at large, Estabrook ªnds that villagers within a stone’s throw of the city walls were virtually untouched by urban mentalités and that Bristolians knew more about what happened in London than in their rural environs. Only in the mid-eighteenth century did suburban developments bring city people physically into the country, but such developments represented less a melding of urban and village cultures than an extension of the former into the space of the latter. Estabrook reports that only religious dissenters found shared values and established net- works across the topographical divide, a fact that underscores the central role of Anglican parochial organization in focusing the attention of both urban and rural people upon their immediate geographical locale. Much of the book’s interest lies in its methodology, particularly Estabrook’s use of quantiªable materials (wills, inventories, and parish registers) to examine questions of cultural value and preference. Patterns of charitable giving, of lending and borrowing, of marriage, of appren- ticeship, and of consumption are all brought into play to demonstrate the gulf between urban and rural values and experiences. Villagers spent none of their spare cash on the mirrors, books, musical instruments, and caged birds with which Bristolians ªlled their houses. Urbanites lent and borrowed promiscuously to and from social equals and superiors, toler- ating a high degree of uncertainty about repayment; in villages, by contrast, lenders were of higher status than borrowers and demanded