Normal women, p.23
Normal Women, page 23
Good Mr Thynne, since the writing of my letter unto you I have called to remembrance that the barrel of salad oil last bought is all spent. Wherefore I pray you may it please you to, in respect you are there, to make a choice yourself to buy a jar of oil of like quantity as the last which was bought. Also, if it so please you, to buy a keg of sturgeon which will be very serviceable for your table and will be kept until you pleased to have the same spent, both which are very necessary . . . I heartily thank you for the wires you sent me and do request you to speak to mistress Lincoln to make for each of your children to her wires and two robes.276
The increasing wealth of gentry households meant more money for the consumption of luxuries and more leisure time. Upper-class women started to visit London and the growing towns to make their own luxury purchases, and merchants and traders designed new shops to attract them with ‘Ladies Markets’.277 In 1609, the New Exchange opened for elite women shoppers, targeting lady customers with luxury items.278 Attractive shops and window displays turned retail shopping into a new leisure activity for wealthy women served by poor women.279
As soon as shopping was identified as ‘women’s work’, it was criticised by male commentators who associated it with extravagance, vanity and time wasting. Commentators complained that women were going out of their homes into the streets for their shopping, unprotected, unsupervised and undisciplined and ‘wasting’ money. The concerns about women being at liberty to shop, tapped into traditional fears about female vanity, female sexuality, female profligacy and Eve’s weakness to temptation. The high fashion excesses repelled Puritan thinkers. There were class anxieties too: commentators worried that the middling-class women were dressing above their working-class roots, breaking the sumptuary laws that were supposed to limit them to dark colours and serviceable fabrics.
Even the all-women rituals around childbirth, absolutely exclusive to women, became regulated, under the growing concern that women might be vain or extravagant, and should be not allowed to do their work as they wanted. The byelaws of Chester were amended to control the hidden traditions and rituals of childbed and churching. The male lawgivers claimed that ‘gret excesse and superfluose costes and charges’ should not be undertaken by the poorer people, who were getting into debt by copying their betters. Only the mother, sisters and sisters-in-law, and a midwife might attend the labouring mother in the town, and they were not allowed to overdress for the occasion.280
In the 100 years from 1550 to 1650 casual work – preferred by working wives – had been better paid than work agreed by the year or half-year.281 Women’s casual, seasonal and temporary rates of pay were equal to those of men.282 But from about 1650 the cash pay for full-time workers living ‘out’ increased, compared with those who took some of their wages as bed and board (like women servants) or those who were paid by the day (often women again). Even if the wage rate was the same, the workers paid in cash who benefited from free bed and board at home became better off. Wage-setting by rings of employers held all wages down. Slowly, after years of legally enforced inequality, it was thought that women’s wages were somehow ‘naturally’ less than men’s wages – even less than half the man’s wage.283 In fifteenth-century Norwich, where a subsistence wage was 8d to 1s a week, a master weaver could earn 3s a week, while the average unskilled female worker could barely survive on her wage of 8d a week.284
A pay gap between men and women in both casual and contracted regular work opened up. Male workers were paid an average wage of 10d a day, while women received less than half that – only 4d for a woman in regular work and 3d (the old rate for both men and women) for casual labour.285 In the late 1600s, Norfolk sheep shearers were paid 6d a day if they were women but between 7d and 14d if they were men.286
By 1620, most women worked inside the family business – for their father or husband-employer, unable to seek work from the competition, forced to accept the rate of pay that he could afford from his own wage or profit, or went unpaid.287 It benefited the family business if a wife took as small a wage as possible, produced as much food and goods as she could at home, and took no pay for raising the children and maintaining the home. The ‘double shift’ was her gift to the business and family.
The so-called ‘golden age for women’ was certainly over by the 1600s. Increasingly bound to their houses, women workers could not organise with others, or exchange information about the market or opportunities. They could not leave to find better wage rates, nor travel and take up better work. ‘Women’s work’ was paid at about half the male rate and in many places the differential was enforced by law. ‘Women’s work’ was work that men did not want to do, fitted around the ‘women’s work’ of producing for the family and maintaining a home unpaid. There is no promotion in ‘women’s work’, no career structure, no retirement age and no pension. Actually, there is no end – only death released a working woman from her work.
Protest
In the sixteenth century, the ownership of land became increasingly defined and contested. Industry, building and shipping all needed wood and fuel from the forests and ore from mines. Moorlands and waste lands which had been left empty and used by the nearby villages became valuable. The monarchs – trying to ‘live off their own’ – exploited the massive royal landholdings, selling them off, renting them or exploiting them.
The destruction of the religious houses at the Reformation released land to new landlords who had no tradition of benevolent local lordship. As the 1500s progressed, they demanded more grazing land for sheep for the all-important wool trade – soon there were twice as many sheep as people. They enclosed the shared fields and common woodlands to bring more land into sheep farming. They ploughed up the communal arable strips and enclosed woodlands and moorlands for hunting. Up and down the country, landowners closed whole villages, driving the tenants away. In some counties, one in six villages were destroyed by their landlords from the mid-1400s to the mid-1500s.288
This did not take place without struggle, rarely recorded by the published writers of the landlords’ class. They concealed the landowners’ actions and glossed over the protests, calling the food rioters a mindless mob and the breaking of new fences criminal trespass. As lawmakers and the enforcers, landlords ruled in their own favour against their tenants and workers. It is not surprising that the very few accounts describe ignorant peasants fighting inevitable change, stupidly at war with their own ‘true’ interests.289
Women were at the forefront defending their gathering, gleaning, hunting and fishing rights on common and waste land and in the forests. Thorpe Moor in Yorkshire was kept free from enclosures by the ‘wyves of Kirkby Malzeard’ who took on their landlord, the Earl of Derby in 1549. Less than fifty years later, the new earl was also defeated by his tenants and then a new landlord, Sir Stephen Proctor, bought into the valley of Nidderdale in Yorkshire and attempted to enclose Thorpe Moor. He faced rebellions in 1597, 1600 and 1601, and assassination attempts – one by a local sorcerer hired by his gentry neighbours.290 His neighbours contrasted his Protestant, profit-seeking style with their own tradition of ‘good lordship’ – violent and personal control of their tenants. Lady Jolyan Yorke, his neighbour, said ‘Sr Steven had undone all th[e] country.’
Poor people and dependant tenants and workers were recruited on both sides. Poor cottagers who had built little shacks for homes on Thorpe Moor were attacked: one woman said she and her children were beaten and pushed out of their home in a night-time attack; another poor pregnant woman nearly died from a premature birth after an attack by a crowd of masked men, intent on protecting the Moor from incomers. Villagers and tenants drew on folk memories and on a deep knowledge of the law to preserve the common land against incursions by Proctor or his workers. They appealed to him directly – the women of Kirkby Malzeard ‘made humble suite’ for their commons to Proctor, ‘the most p[ar]te of them kneelinge upon their knee’, and a yeoman’s wife, Dorothy Dawson, acclaimed as Captain Dorothy, assisted by Alice Bayne led a band of 37 women into a pitched battle against hired miners in 1604. Seventeen women were prosecuted.291 A woman marching with them told the Star Chamber – the highest court on landowning – that the women had broken down fences to maintain ‘their rights of common’.292 The commoners of Kirkbyshire agreed to give up a third of the common land if the Countess of Derby would buy out the hated Proctor. When she did, the tenants reneged on their agreement and refused to give up their common. On May Day 1615, the Kirkbyshire tenants and commoners joined together with a secret password, broke down fences and said they would be ruled by ‘club law’ – the agreement of the community.293
James I and then his son Charles I were driven to exploit the royal forests by their need for money. To avoid going to Parliament for taxes, they sold land and tenancies in the royal forests and expanded the forest boundaries. Local people were banned from thousands of acres: at first 3,000 acres in the Forest of Dean and then 22,000 acres in 1639, 4,000 acres in Braydon Forest, 460 acres in Feckenham Forest, 1,589 acres in Leicester and a third of Malvern Chase – about 3,000 acres.294 The people who survived by gathering harvesting and gleaning in the forests rose up against the new enclosing landlords in a series of actions named the ‘Western Rising’. The first riots took place in Gillingham Forest, Dorset, in 1626 led by 14 men and 12 women who were arrested and fined. It was not a question of finance for them but a sense of belonging. They told the sheriff: ‘Here were we born and here we will die.’295
Two years later, royal soldiers joined the people in destroying some of the new enclosures, killing deer and burning crops. Arrested rioters were rescued by the crowd, royal messengers were assaulted and the crowd defeated the sheriff of Dorset with an arrest warrant for 100 so-called rioters.
In the Forest of Dean in March 1631, the anti-enclosure rioters came in force. Five hundred people – led by men dressed as women296 – with drummers and a fife and flags were said to have assembled ‘armed with gunnes, pokes, halberds and other weapons’ to break fences and in-fill mining pits. A shot was fired at one land agent and an effigy of another was buried in his own ore pits. The next month even more people turned out: 3,000 marched with banners and drums and tore down the fences and attacked houses. Action continued over the next two years, people taking down fences as soon as they were repaired. In April 1631, 3,000 rioters with banners and drums removed most of the remaining enclosures in the forest. By the end of the month, all of the earlier enclosures had been removed. Over the next two years, the rioters attempted to destroy enclosures as they were put back in place.
One thousand rioters, wearing women’s clothing, assembled at Braydon over the summer of 1631 to break down fences and threaten the landlord. A servant who reported the rioters to the authorities had his home vandalised, and the sheriff and a court official representing the king were driven away with shots being fired.
The riots at Feckenham were not named as part of the Western Rising, but they followed the same pattern: people threw down the new fences in March 1631 after their appeal for foresters’ rights failed in court. The next year, 300 people rioting against enclosure had a pitched battle with forty armed men, the sheriff, a deputy lieutenant and a justice of the peace, who recorded that the foresters ‘in a most daring and presumptuous manner presented themselves unto us with warlike weapons (vizt) pikes, forrest bills, pitchforks, swords and the like’.
In Leicester, the local authorities supported the people in the anti-enclosure riots of 1627 and 1628. The Corporation of Leicester and residents appealed to the Privy Council against a new, enclosing landlord. The landlord was supported by the Privy Council and the House of Lords; but arrests and prosecutions of the rioters were quietly dropped.
Both the Forest of Dean and the Braydon/Chippenham riots were mustered by a call from ‘Lady Skimmington’ – an alias for several leaders, and invoking a woman’s leadership of a riot. Only a very few of the male rioters dressed as women – perhaps no more than seven – and they may have done this as a disguise and to invoke the traditional play of the skimmington ride – a community reproof. When the leaders were arrested, women’s clothing was used as a mark of shame: the male leaders of the Braydon Forest riots were set in the pillory – the public stocks – dressed in women’s clothes.
Many of the rioters were women defending what was seen as a particular women’s cause: their way of life on the land. Certainly, a woman’s productivity could only feed her family and support the economy if she had access to common lands. Common lands were sometimes described as the farmer’s spouse – his supporter and helper, and hedges were derided as girdles, as if the encloser was trying to tie a girdle around a fertile woman and keep her for himself. Many women hoped they would have immunity from arrest because of their inferior legal status. The Star Chamber confirmed in 1605 that husbands were responsible for the actions of their wives: ‘If a woman offend in trespass, riot or otherwise and an action is brought against her and her husband, the husband is answerable, notwithstanding the action was without his privity.’297
Women were more than supporters in food riots – they were almost always the leaders. Far from being mindless outbreaks, the riots were choreographed events, in which ordinary women insisted that food be sold at the usual price in the market so that they could feed their families. Sometimes they captured wagons taking food away from the market; they broke into grain stores and weighed out the grain themselves, often paying what they thought was a fair price; they challenged the town millers or bakers for underweight measures. Typically, there would be plenty of threat but little or no physical violence, as the profiteers bowed to the numbers of furious women, reduced prices or gave up exporting food and sold it locally. Ideally, the riot would be ended by a local authority, usually the justice of the peace, coming into the marketplace, weighing the food and agreeing a fair price – endorsing the women’s action.
In 1629, a slump in the cloth industry led to hardship across England. Corn merchants bought up grain stocks of wheat and rye in the local markets to ship to towns, and even abroad. Local magistrates in Maldon, Essex, reported that rioters were trying to hire muskets and had threatened to ‘kill farmors, or anye other factors yt wear imployed to buye or sell any Corne’.298
Poor women labourers and wives of labourers or craftsmen marched with their children to the quayside, where several grain ships were being loaded. They boarded the ships and filled their bonnets and aprons with rye to take away to mill into flour for bread.299 Just like the women rioting against enclosure, the women believed they were not under the law. They said: ‘Women were lawless and not subject to the lawes of the realme as men are but might . . . offend without drede or punishment of the law.’300
They were right – seventeenth-century advice for magistrates read: ‘If a number of women (or children under the age of discretion) do flocke together for their own cause, this is none assembly punishable by these statutes, unlesse a man of discretion moved them to assemble for the doing of some unlawful act,’ meaning that a crowd of women assembling spontaneously is not a crime.301 It is only a crime if they are led by a man of importance. An all-woman uprising cannot be prosecuted.
One of the rioting women was Ann Carter, who had been the wife of a prosperous butcher, mistress of her own house, employing two servants only the previous year. Her husband lost his business and the family home, and Ann was thrown into poverty. Another was Elizabeth Sturgeon, a labourer’s wife who said she was ‘in pouertie and wanting victuall for her children’.302
Ann Spearman, a day labourer, said she went to steal rye from the ships ‘because she cold not have Corne in the m[ar]kett and [because] certaine fflemishe shipps . . . [lay] at Burrow Hills . . . there to receiue in Corne to carry beyond sea’. Margaret Williams told magistrates that she went to the ships ‘amongst others of her owne accord . . . Corne being deare and . . . being carried awaie . . . and she being a poore woeman’. One woman was asked who had incited her to riot and she answered, ‘The Crie of the Country and hir owne want.’303
Only a few of the rioters were arrested and they were not accused or convicted of any crime but were ‘bound over’ to keep the peace. Ann Carter denied leading the riot, and she too was bound over. The local magistrates searched the grain ships for other food that was needed locally, such as bacon, cheese or butter. The leading townsmen – bailiffs, aldermen and head burgesses – agreed to buy the corn at their own expense and sell it at an agreed price, to the poor: ‘the Corne [p]rovided by Mr Jacobs the marchant now lyeing within the Burrow shall be bought at Convenient price if yt maybe had for our poore and so to make stay of yt from transportinge’.
The riot was a completely successful performance by both common people and the elite who recognised their appeal. The initial threat of violence was followed by non-violent direct action by women. The magistrates supported their action and the townsmen set a fair price for the food. They even won a national concession: the Privy Council announced that grain should not be taken from any hungry areas and sold elsewhere. It must be offered first in the local market.
But only three months later, there were more ships loading grain at Maldon. This time Ann Carter openly led the rioters, and as merchants continued to ship corn out of hungry areas she travelled around the clothing townships, to drum up support, and sent out letters, which she signed as ‘Captain’:304 ‘Come, my brave lads of Maldon, I will be your leader for we will not starve.’305
As many as 300 men and women, unemployed cloth workers, marched with Ann Carter, boarded a ship, assaulted the crew, stole the cargo and forced the vessel to sail away empty. Another group of rioters broke open a warehouse and carried off more grain. They assaulted the leading merchant, Mr Gamble, and made him give them £20. He called the magistrates and the crowd melted away as the JPs arrived.
