Abstract
In breaking open the study of depositions, historians uncovered valuable testimonial evidence of women’s active roles in the legal system. Their work allows me to present a further way of looking at such testimonies: first, by repositioning these depositions within a cultural role other than solely a legal one, we can then read them as representative of speech events and reasonably faithful accounts of women’s conversations: that is, witnesses’ testimonies are recorded by a scribe but frequently we are given witnesses’ direct speech. This opens up these oral testimonies to a detailed analysis of women’s interpretative maneuvers and rhetorical courage within legal (masculine) discourse. Second, using discursive analyses in this way (i.e., looking at the use of language as social action, as situated performance, and as expressive of a particular ideology) allows us to witness women devising forms of talk/conversation so as to insist on a different knowledge of their economic and sexual position, to openly negotiate the terms of their subordination (while sometimes being complicit with those terms), and to speak themselves into existence in relation to the present and past of their communities. Finally, women’s depositions give a wealth of detail about the experience of women that literature cannot offer—given literature’s particular purpose and aesthetics. Depositions “record” women’s (and men’s) voices describing life on the streets, in upper bed chambers, in the kitchen, in neighbor’s doorways, describing their struggles holding off sexual attacks, their apprehension for another’s safety, and their personal risk in bringing food or wood or medical help to neighbors.
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Notes
J. A. Sharpe notes that “Up to about 1500, slander had been the concern of the ecclesiastical courts, or of local tribunals. From that date the common law courts began to interest themselves” in defamations “and rapidly developed a wide cognizance in this area.” J. A. Sharpe, “Such Disagreement betwyx Neighbours’: Litigation and Human Relations in Early Modern England,” in Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West, ed. John Bossy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 170 [167-87].
Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3.
Helen Ostovich and Elizabeth Sauer, ed., Reading Early Modern Women: An Anthology of Texts in Manuscript and Print, 1550–1700 (New York: Routledge, 2004), 16.
What is true of Stephen Robertson’s assessment of witnesses in nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries North America was not so far removed from the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. “Many of those involved in legal proceedings were forced to participate and did so under the threat of punishment. All who testified might have had reasons to lie: to establish innocence or guilt, to pursue animosities or protect friendships, to please the powerful or thwart them.” Stephen Robertson, “What’s Law Got to Do with It? Legal Records and Sexual Histories,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14.1/2 (2005): 162 [161-85].
Stephen Robertson is summarizing Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, “Introduction: The Crime of History,” in Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, ed., History from Crime (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), ix.
Sara Heller Mendelson, “‘To shift for a cloak,’ Disorderly Women in the Church Courts,” in Women and History: Voices from Early Modern England, Valerie Frith, ed. (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1995), 5.
Herbert H. Clark and Richard J. Gerrig, “Quotations as Demonstrations,” Language 66.4 (1990): 764–805, esp. 792, 800, conclude that even though direct speech as represented in writing need not mimic the original utterance in every aspect, it is “conventionally implied” that the wording is verbatim in texts such as law court records (792).
Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 239.
Elizabeth A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex, and Marriage (London: Longman, 1999), 207.
Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighborhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 276.
Steve Hindle, “The Shaming of Margaret Knowsley: Gossip, Gender and the Experience of Authority in Early Modern England,” Continuity and Change 9.3 (1994): 404 [391-419], notes that “the Nantwich magistrates had contacted Jerome’s previous employers in Newcastle, and taken certificate of his conduct. The Newcastle authorities informed them that Jerome had been discharged of his post at St. Nicholas’ for behaviour ‘so notoriously scandalous both to the church and to us by whom he was entertained as we cannot with any due respect continue him in that place unless we should heape much reproach on ourselves.’ “
Amy Froide, review of “Nothing is so secret but shall be revealed: The scandalous life of Robert Foulkes,” by David Turner, in English Masculinities, 1660–1800, ed. Tim Hitchcock and Michele Cohen (London: Longman, 1999), 169–92 appears in H-Net Book Reviews for H-Albion, May 2000, h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=12048959965234, accessed June 5, 2009.
Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 106.
Tim Stretton, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 226.
Kathleen McLuskie, Renaissance Dramatists (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1989), 225.
Ibid., 3. The Statute of Artificers of 1563 was intended to “determine wage rates at the local level, to control conditions of employment for many workers including apprentices, and to restrict the mobility of labour.” Donald Woodward, “The Background to the Statute of Artificers: The Genesis of Labour Policy, 1558–1563,” The Economic History Review, n.s. 33.1 (1980): 32 [32-44].
Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England 1500–1720 (New York: Routledge, 1993), 48. In Chapter 2, note 51, Crawford points out that there were “numerous cases in the Mayor’s court book in Norwich.”
David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 37n104.
Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, 230. Ingram’s studies lead him to ask “just how firmly engaged were such couples” who were court defendants accused of sexual relations before marriage. He notes that while “as many as 70 percent of cases in the court of the archdeacon of Salisbury in the year 1627–1629” alleged prior intention to marry, such allegations were rarely made by defendants in Wiltshire (229). Informal promises seem to coexist with the (declining) practice of “formal spousals” (229).
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 4.
Sarah Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England 1550–1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 215.
Indeed, neighbors’ (or friends’ or kin’s) testimony was crucial to any married woman’s need for litigation: “since neither husband nor wife could testify against each other in court, a wife could not complain against certain actions of her husband” (Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 38). Except for ecclesiastical or church courts, married women did not have the right to litigate in their own names. See Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 11. And “common law allowed women very limited legal capacities.” See Subha Mukherji, “Women, Law, and Dramatic Realism in Early Modern England,” English Literary Renaissance 35.2 (2005): 251 [248-72].
Michael J. Braddick and John Walter, “Introduction. Grids of Power: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Early Modern Society,” in Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy, and Subordination in Britain and Ireland, ed. Michael J. Braddick and John Walter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 5 [1-42]. The discussion in Braddick and Walter concerns Scott’s distinction between a “public transcript” and a “hidden transcript,” namely, that “behind the public transcript of compliance and deference lies a more knowing and manipulative consciousness” (5).
Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 141.
And reminds one of the fact that two centuries later in nineteenth-century America, the extreme action of wife murder was still perceived as “a defense of the core tenets of patriarchy—sexual control, access, and regulation of women’s sexuality.” Sean T. Moore, “‘Justifiable Provocation’: Violence against Women in Essex County, New York, 1799–1860,” Journal of Social History 35.4 (2002): 896 [889-918].
Susan Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), Chapter 2. In pre-1660 Norfolk, male heads of households could be, and often were, punished in the courts for not maintaining obedience and sexual continence among their household. Yet, the level of violence considered acceptable was challenged by neighbors and communities who intervened in what they viewed as excessive “disciplining.”
The severall Plea and Answeare of the Lady Elizabeth Vaux to Robert Collins Complainant (1622). STAC 8/88/9. “dare” meant “defy,” “challenge,” even “scare,” “terrify,” as in “For our approach shall so much dare the field,/ That England shall couch down in fear, and yield” (Henry 5, iv, 2) or “Let his grace go forward,/ And dare us with his cap like larks” (Henry 8, iii, 2). Swynfen Jervis, A Dictionary of the Language of Shakespeare (London: John Russell Smith, 1868).
Richard Watts, Politeness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 168.
Bruce Fraser, “Perspectives on Politeness,” Journal of Pragmatics 14.2 (1990): 219–36.
Pierre Bourdieu, “The Economics of Linguistic Exchanges,” Social Science Information 16.6 (1977): 662 [645-68].
The same is true of language patterns advised for Merchants Groups that Magnusson examines in John Browne’s The Marchants Advizo, a business writing manual (1590) that went through three editions by 1640. Lynne Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 62, 122–23.
Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson, Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
The phrase is lifted from Laura Gowing’s study of London women’s court cases. In its extended form the phrase reads “to claim a verbal and legal authority that was at once powerful and fragile.” Laura Gowing, “Language, Power, and the Law: Women’s Slander Litigation in Early Modern London,” in Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England, ed. Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 28 [26-47].
James Sharpe, “The People and the Law,” in Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Barry Reay (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 246 [244-70].
Craig Muldrew, “The Culture of Reconciliation: Community and the Settlement of Economic Disputes in Early Modern England,” The Historical Journal 39.4 (1996): 915–16 [915-42], emphasis mine.
J. A. Sharpe, Early Modern England: A Social History, 1550–1760, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 95.
The “expansion of credit in Tudor and Stuart England depended on strategies for judging character and for gauging interpersonal trust based on words and actions, strategies aimed at limiting the natural uncertainties about judging the character of others.” Aaron Kitch, “The Character of Credit and the Problem of Belief in Middleton’s City Comedies,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 47.2 (2007): 407 [403-426].
Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order, 10, cites Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998).
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© 2011 M. C. Bodden
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Bodden, M.C. (2011). Women, Conversation, Crime, and the Courts. In: Language as the Site of Revolt in Medieval and Early Modern England. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230337657_4
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