Writing Rogues: Cheap Print Representations of Deviance in Early Modern London Eleni Liapi PhD THE UNIVERSITY OF YORK DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY September 2013 ABSTRACT The figure of the rogue, either as a trickster or a threat, gripped the early modern imagination. Through plays, pamphlets, proclamations and gossip about criminals, London dwellers were bombarded with information about rogues, all of which created the impression that London was swarming with such unsavoury characters. This thesis adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the study of pamphlets about rogues, combining the history of print culture and its methods with the social history of London and crime. This contrasts with previous treatments of this material: rogue literature has been used as background for the analysis of early modern plays, especially late sixteenth- and early seventeenth- century ones, by literary scholars, and has usually been dismissed by historians as entirely fictional. My thesis focuses on cheap pamphlets about rogues from 1590 to 1670; this period saw a burst of publications about criminals, ranging from rogue discoveries to narratives of life and death and descriptions of prisons. Through these publications, the image of the rogue was modified, acquiring new connotations, such as the Cavalier, while at the same time retaining earlier ones, such as the trickster figure or the image of the prodigal son. These changes in the image of the rogue, while not challenging the consistency of his/her depiction, reflect the continuing importance of this figure in perceptions of crime. The majority of these texts was published in London, was London-centric in its contents, and was advertised as news about crime in the metropolis. Consequently, this thesis explores the complexity of rogue pamphlets’ interaction with the social world, their readers and perceptions about crime and morality. From the starting point of cheap print about roguery, this examination leads into broader discourses about deviance, urbanisation and the marketplace of print. 2 Contents LIST OF FIGURES AND ILLUSTRATIONS ...................................................... 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................... 6 DECLARATION ................................................................................................... 7 Introduction ............................................................................................................ 8 Creating the Elizabethan Underworld ............................................................ 9 Debunking the Elizabethan Underworld ...................................................... 13 Searching for rogues: chronological and thematic selection of pamphlets .. 23 History of the book and social and cultural history of crime ....................... 30 The function of the pamphlets about rogues ................................................ 34 Chapters........................................................................................................ 45 PART 1: ‘Print Trade, Texts and Readers’ .......................................................... 49 Chapter 1: Corpus of texts ............................................................................... 49 Findings ........................................................................................................ 57 Distribution and trends over time ................................................................. 66 Chapter 2: ‘Rogues, Readers and cheap print’ ................................................. 79 Audience and 'lowly' readers ....................................................................... 85 Part 1: Evidence from the texts .................................................................... 89 Part 2: The physical form of the pamphlets ............................................... 111 PART 2 .............................................................................................................. 132 Chapter 3: The ‘other’ London: rogues, citizens and the negotiation of social change ............................................................................................................ 132 The rogue as the demonised Other ............................................................. 133 Official discourse and demonisation .......................................................... 138 ‘Reynart the thief’: the trickster and the rogue .......................................... 143 3 Exposés of officialdom .............................................................................. 149 Rogues and urban change........................................................................... 161 Chapter 4: Voices from the records: rogues on trial ...................................... 179 Part 1: News ............................................................................................... 181 Part 2: Court Records ................................................................................. 189 PART 3 .............................................................................................................. 222 Chapter 5: Hectors and highwaymen: crime pamphlets and public opinion in the 1650s ........................................................................................................ 222 ‘Loyal Hind’, ‘the prince of thieves’: crime pamphlets and royalist propaganda in the 1650s............................................................................. 225 ‘Swear and Swagger, Drink, Rant, and Rogue’: hectors and Cavaliers in the 1650s .......................................................................................................... 243 Chapter 6: ....................................................................................................... 260 Infamous last words: rogues’ dying speeches in the seventeenth century ..... 260 The playful robber: Charles Courtney and his escapes from categorization .................................................................................................................... 268 Ventriloquism and conversion: Goodcole’s A true Declaration of the happy Conversion, Contrition and Christian Preparation of Francis Robinson . 276 Evading questions, mitigating guilt: James Turner’s dying speech ........... 283 Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 293 Appendix 1 ......................................................................................................... 299 Appendix 2 ......................................................................................................... 303 NOTE ON TEXT AND ABBREVIATIONS .................................................... 307 BIBLIOGRAPHY .............................................................................................. 308 4 LIST OF FIGURES AND ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1 Pamphlets per year. 69 Figure 2 Size of pamphlets until 1640. 75 Figure 3 Size of pamphlets 1640-1671. 75 Figure 4 Publications 1590-1640. 77 Figure 5 Publications 1640-1671. 77 Figure 6 Table of rogue pamphlets' sheets. 115 Figure 7 Thomas Harman, The Groundworke of conny-catching 123 (1592), Title-page. Figure 8 Anonymous, The life, apprehensio[n,] arraignement, 157 and execution of Char[les] Courtney (1612) , Title- page. Figure 9 Luke Hutton, The Blacke Dogge of Newgate (1596), 158 Title-page. Figure 10 We Have Brought our Hogs to a Fair Market (1652), 240 detail from p. 5. Figure 11 Anonymous, A Second Discovery of Hind’s Exploits 240 (1651), Title-page. 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The research for this thesis was supported by the Fund ‘Sofias Saripolou’, administered by the University of Athens. In addition, I have received research grants from the Society for Renaissance Studies, the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies of the University of York, the Jarvis Fund, and the Institute for Historical Research. I would like to thank all of them. My thanks also to Jim Sharpe, my supervisor, for his continual support these four years, for important feedback and for providing the inspiration for my thesis. I owe a debt of gratitude to Mark Jenner, my supervisor, for being a tough but fair audience for my work, for being extremely generous and helpful, and especially for accepting my constant questions with good grace (or at least a sense of humour). I would like to thank Helen Smith, for all her help, for the most detailed feedback I have ever received and not least for providing reassurance that talking faster than light is not an issue! To Costas Gaganakis, for stirring my initial interest in the early modern period and for providing more support than I could hope for. My thanks to all my friends who have made life more exciting and interesting, and for helping me decide what I wanted to do. I owe much to Hannah, Chris, Sara, Jo, Maria, and Antoine, for reading parts of my thesis and/or having to listen to ‘high-spirited and fast-paced’ papers of mine. To Takis, for setting this all to motion. To Filippos, for keeping me sane-or, at least, as much as anyone could hope for. Finally, and most importantly, to my parents and brother: I cannot express how much it means to me that they keep putting up with their prodigal daughter/sister. 6 DECLARATION I declare that all material in this thesis is original and my own work, and that no material has previously been submitted for the award of a degree by this or any other university. Eleni Liapi 7 Introduction Upon a cheating Companion. He that was borne out