Economic Immorality and Social Reformation in English Popular Preaching, 1585–1625

NOTES

• Thomas Adams, The white deuil, or The hypocrite vncased … Preached at Pavls Crosse (1613), pp. 36–52. All primary sources were published in London unless otherwise noted.
   Google Scholar
• R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926; repr. London, 1948), pp. 140–96; Christopher Hill, ‘Puritans and the Poor’, Past & Present, 2 (1952): 32–50; Charles H. George, ‘English Calvinist Opinion on Usury, 1600–1640,’ Journal of the History of Ideas, 18 (1957): 455–74; Millar Maclure, The Paul's Cross Sermons, 1534–1642 (Toronto, 1958), pp. 122–35; Laura Stevenson O'Connell, ‘Anti-Entrepreneurial Attitudes in Elizabethan Sermons and Popular Literature’, Journal of British Studies, 15(2) (1976): 1–20; Richard Greaves, Society and Religion in Elizabethan England (Minneapolis, 1981), pp. 547–647; Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 56–79. On the issue of ‘usury’, the debate over supposed theological factions has already been thoroughly exploded in Eric Kerridge, Usury, Interest and the Reformation (Aldershot and Burlington, 2002), esp. pp. 53–76.
   Google Scholar
• Patrick Collinson, ‘Christian Socialism in Elizabethan Suffolk: Thomas Carew and His Caveat for Clothiers', in Carole Rawcliffe, Roger Virgoe, Richard G. Wilson and Alfred Hassell Smith (eds), Counties and Communities: Essays on East Anglian History (Norwich, 1996); idem, ‘Puritanism and the Poor’, in Rosemary Horrox and Sarah Rees Jones (eds), Pragmatic Utopias: Ideals and Communities, 1200–1630 (Cambridge, 2001); Steve Hindle, ‘Dearth, Fasting and Alms: The Campaign for General Hospitality in Late Elizabethan England’, Past & Present, 172 (2001): 44–86, esp. pp. 54–61; idem, ‘Exhortation and Entitlement: Negotiating Inequality in English Rural Communities, 1550–1650’, in Michael Braddick and John Walter (eds), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2001); John Walter, ‘Public Transcripts, Popular Agency and the Politics of Subsistence in Early Modern England’, in ibid., esp. pp. 125–33; Mark Valeri, ‘Religious Discipline and the Market: Puritans and the Issue of Usury’, William and Mary Quarterly, 54(4) (1997): 747–68; Juliet Ingram, ‘Conscience of the Community: Clerical Complaint in Early Modern England ‘, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2004.
   Google Scholar
• Mary Morrissey, ‘Interdisciplinarity and the Study of Early Modern Sermons', Historical Journal, 42(4) (1999): 1119.
   Google Scholar
• Several scholars have demonstrated the influence of religious ideals in the economic thought of educated elites, but they have focused on learned texts which few plebeians would have encountered: Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-century England (Princeton, 1978); David Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580–1680 (New York, 2001), esp. pp. 49–94; Whitney Jones, The Tree of Commonwealth, 1450–1793 (Madison, 2000), pp. 85–143.
   Google Scholar
• Paul Slack, ‘Books of Orders: The Making of English Social Policy, 1577–1631’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 30 (1980): 3; idem, ‘Dearth and Social Policy in Early Modern England’, Social History of Medicine, 5(1) (1992): 1–17. The major proclamation of 1587 can be found in Paul Hughes and James Larkin (eds), Tudor Royal Proclamations (New Haven, 1969), III, pp. 532–4. The key dearth years were 1586/7, 1594/5–1597/8, 1608/9, 1613/4 and 1622/3 as recorded in the ‘Annual Price of Wheat’, in Joan Thirsk (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales (Cambridge, 1967), IV, pp. 854–5. For Sandys' offensive in 1588, see Norman Jones, God and the Moneylenders: Usury and the Law in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1989), pp. 110–13.
   Google Scholar
• Thirsk, Agrarian History, IV, p. 236; Jones, God and the Moneylenders, pp. 196–8.
   Google Scholar
• Maclure, Paul's Cross Sermons, p. 7.
   Google Scholar
• Even Catholics and separatists seem to have denounced enclosing, hoarding and usury in very similar terms: Greaves, Society and Religion in Elizabethan England, pp. 595–646. For unity regarding usury, see Kerridge, Usury, Interest and the Reformation.
   Google Scholar
• All references to the homilies are taken from The second tome of homilees (1571 edn). The belief that ‘Couetousnes endeth in Idolatrie, and fitlie is so tearmed’ is also taken up by Lancelot Andrewes in his sermon on The wonderfull combate (1592), p. 93.
   Google Scholar
• Jeremiah Dyke, A counterpoison against couetousnes … preached at Pauls-Crosse (1619), p. 17.
   Google Scholar
• Eph. 5:5 and Jam. 4:4 were often cited as proof-texts, which is hardly surprising considering their annotations in the 1560 and 1602 editions of the Geneva Bible. See William Jackson, The celestiall husbandrie … in a sermon at Pauls Crosse (1616), pp. 26–7.
   Google Scholar
• Henry Smith, The poore mans teares opened in a sermon (1592), p. 20.
   Google Scholar
• Henry Smith, The examination of vsury in two sermons (1591), p. 2.
   Google Scholar
• Peter Lake, ‘Anti-popery: The Structure of a Prejudice’, in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds), Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603–1642 (London and New York, 1989), p. 83. This argument has recently been expanded by Arthur Marotti, Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, 2005), chs 2 and 5.
   Google Scholar
• William Loe, The ioy of Ierusalem … preached at Pauls Crosse (1606), sig. G4r. For a direct association between greed, idolatry and the dark art of alchemy, see Dyke, Counterpoison against couetousnes, p. 38.
   Google Scholar
• This is perhaps what inspired Henry Smith to claim that the covetous ‘bowe vnto Baal’ because they are ‘enemies to God’ in his popular sermon on The benefit of Contentation (1590), sigs. A4r, B2v.
   Google Scholar
• William Burton, Ten sermons vpon … the sixt of Matthew (1602), 202. For evidence of his ‘popular appeal’, see C. S. Knighton, ‘Burton, William (c.1545–1616)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004).
   Google Scholar
• Jackson, Celestiall husbandrie, pp. 22–3.
   Google Scholar
• ‘An Homilee agaynst gluttony and drunkennesse’ in Homilees. Annotation from Psalm 15:5 in the Geneva Bible (1560 edn).
   Google Scholar
• Smith, The examination of vsury, p. 33.
   Google Scholar
• Jones, God and the Moneylenders, pp. 109, 114; Hindle, ‘Dearth, Fasting and Alms', pp. 60–1.
   Google Scholar
• Christopher Haigh discusses the seriousness of exclusion from communion in his ‘Communion and Community: Exclusion from Communion in Post-Reformation England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 51 (2000): 721–40, esp. pp. 738–9.
   Google Scholar
• Walter, ‘Public Transcripts', p. 131; ‘Kendal Stage Play’, Star Chamber Records, 29 April 1622, PRO STAC/8/34/4, printed in Audrey Douglas and Peter Greenfield (eds), Records of Early English Drama: Cumberland, Westmoreland, Gloucestershire (Toronto, 1986), p. 191.
   Google Scholar
• Walter, ‘Public Transcripts', p. 129.
   Google Scholar
• Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (London and New York, 2002), p. 110.
   Google Scholar
• Jackson, Celestiall husbandrie, p. 24.
   Google Scholar
• Maclure, Paul's Cross Sermons, pp. 15–18.
   Google Scholar
• Charles Richardson, A sermon against oppression … preached at Paules Crosse (1615), pp. 4–5; Smith, Examination of vsury, pp. 9–10.
   Google Scholar
• Ibid., p. 25.
   Google Scholar
• Anon., Three Sermons, Or Homelies, to Mooue Compassion towards the Poore (1596). For the context of this preaching campaign, see Hindle, ‘Dearth, Fasting and Alms', pp. 54–61. See also Jim Sharpe, ‘Social Strain and Social Dislocation, 1585–1603’, in John Guy (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge, 1995).
   Google Scholar
• Anon., Three Sermons, sigs. G2r–G2v.
   Google Scholar
• For a thorough discussion of the social consequences of pestilence, see Paul Slack, The Impact of the Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1985).
   Google Scholar
• Smith, Benefit of Contentation, sig. A5r.
   Google Scholar
• Jackson, Celestiall husbandrie, pp. 25–6, 30–1; Adams, White deuil, p. 49. The striking similarity between these two passages seems to indicate plagiarism on Jackson's part as his was published three years after Adams's well-known sermon.
   Google Scholar
• Loe, Ioy of Ierusalem, sig. F3r.
   Google Scholar
• Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace, pp. 29–32; Jones, God and the Moneylenders, pp. 8–10.
   Google Scholar
• Smith, Examination of vsury, p. 15. Cf. Miles Mosse, The arraignment and conuiction of vsurie … in sixe sermons, preached at Saint Edmunds Burie (1595), p. 81.
   Google Scholar
• Adams, White deuil, pp. 50–1.
   Google Scholar
• Adam Hill, The crie of England … preached at Paules Crosse [in 1593] (1595), pp. 29–30; Andrew Willet, A fruitfull and godly sermon preached at Paules crosse (1592), sig. C1r–C2v; Adams, White deuil, pp. 45–6. To ‘bray’ was to ‘crush’ or ‘beat’. The passages paraphrased are Isa. 3:15, Mark 12:40, Prov. 27:22, Psalm 14:4, and Mic. 3:2–3. For more examples of these phrases, see William Burton, A caueat for suerties, two sermons … made in Bristoll (1593), pp. 92–3; Richardson, Sermon against oppression, pp. 11, 15; Jackson, Celestiall husbandrie, p. 31; Anon., Three Sermons, sig. G2v.
   Google Scholar
• Walter, ‘Public Transcripts', pp. 140–1.
   Google Scholar
• Dyke, Counterpoison against couetousnes, p. 55. See also Smith, Examination of vsury, pp. 9–10.
   Google Scholar
• T. M., The true narration of the entertainment of his Royall Maiestie (1603), E4v–F2r. It is not entirely clear from the text whether it is the ‘the people there-about’ who used the term ‘woluish’ when ‘beseeching his Maiestie’ or just the narrator.
   Google Scholar
• Smith, Poore mans teares, p. 6.
   Google Scholar
• Anon., Three Sermons, sig. G2v.
   Google Scholar
• Hughes and Larkin (eds), Tudor Proclamations, III, pp. 193–5 (no. 795); H. W. Saunders (ed.), The Official Papers of Sir Nathaniel Bacon (Camden Society, 3rd ser., XXVI, London, 1915), pp. 140–1.
   Google Scholar
• Dyke, Counterpoison against couetousnes, pp. 40–1; Loe, Ioy of Ierusalem, sig. F3r.
   Google Scholar
• See ‘cormorant’, ‘cormorancy’ and ‘cornvorant’ in the Oxford English Dictionary (1989); Karen Edwards, ‘Cormorant’, Milton Quarterly, 39 (2005): 258–9. For a discussion of images of carnivorous vermin more generally, see Mary Fissell, ‘Imagining Vermin in Early Modern England’, History Workshop Journal, 47 (1999): 1–29, esp. pp. 4–11.
   Google Scholar
• Douglas and Greenfield, Records of Early English Drama: Cumberland, Westmoreland, Gloucestershire, pp. 191, 197.
   Google Scholar
• For a popular translation of More's image of enclosers' sheep ‘devour[ing] hole fieldes, howeses and cities', see A fruteful, and pleasaunt worke … called Vtopia (1551), sig. C6v.
   Google Scholar
• Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), pp. 194–203. For ‘unnatural’ imagery more generally, see Kathryn Brammall, ‘Monstrous Metamorphosis: Nature, Morality, and the Rhetoric of Monstrosity in Tudor England’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 27(1) (1996): 3–21.
   Google Scholar
• Richardson, Sermon against oppression, p. 11; Smith, Examination of vsury, pp. 21–2, 31; Dyke, Counterpoison against couetousnes, pp. 25–7. Under Charles I, the Cornish preacher Charles Fitz-Geffry branded them as ‘Horse-leeches', ‘earth-wormes', ‘Caterpillers and Locusts' in his sermons on The Curse of Corne-Horders with the Blessing of Seasonable Selling (1631), pp. 33–5.
   Google Scholar
• Adams, White deuil, p. 51.
   Google Scholar
• Several points in the following discussion have been treated more fully by Juliet Ingram in her examination of social criticism in assize sermons: Ingram, ‘Conscience of the Community’, ch. 2.
   Google Scholar
• Smith, Poore mans teares, p. 24. He cites 1 Cor. 4 and Ecc. 7 as proof-texts. The phrase ‘man of bloud’ (2 Sam. 16:7–8) also linked the offender to tyranny, as in the famous epithet applied to Charles I.
   Google Scholar
• Jackson, Celestiall husbandrie, p. 23. See also Richardson, Sermon against oppression, p. 17. Some of these preachers may have been borrowing from Thomas Becon's well-known Edwardian polemics, which often paraphrased Basil: e.g. A fruitful treatise of fasting (1551), sigs. E7r–E7v.
   Google Scholar
• Ian Green, The Christian's ABC: Catechism and Catechizing in England, c. 1530–1740 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 462–3.
   Google Scholar
• More detailed information on enclosure and government policy can be found in Thirsk, Agrarian History, IV, pp. 227–38; Edwin Gay, ‘The Midland Revolt and the Inquisitions of Depopulation of 1607’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, new ser., 18 (1904): 195–244. See also Hughes and Larkin (eds), Tudor Proclamations, II, pp. 310–11 (no. 560), and Larkin and Hughes (eds), Stuart Royal Proclamations (Oxford, 1973), I, pp. 154–8, 161–2 (no. 71, 72, 73).
   Google Scholar
• Adams, White deuil, pp. 46–7 (citing Isa. 5:8–10).
   Google Scholar
• Larkin and Hughes (eds), Stuart Proclamations, I, pp. 154–8, 161–2 (no. 71, 72, 73).
   Google Scholar
• Adams, White deuil, pp. 45–6; Jackson, Celestiall husbandrie, p. 146.
   Google Scholar
• Samuel Gardiner (ed.), Reports of the Cases in the Courts of the Star Chamber and High Commission (Camden Society, 2nd ser., XXXIX, 1887), pp. 59–65. For similar symbolic allusions to hanging by tenants, see Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000), p. 315; Keith Wrightson, ‘The Politics of the Parish in Early Modern England’, in Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle (eds), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (London, 1996), p. 23; and John Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism: Peasant and Landlord in English Agrarian Development (Houndsmills, 1986), p. 171.
   Google Scholar
• Jones, God and the Moneylenders, p. 63; Kerridge, Usury, Interest and the Reformation, pp. 53–76; Hughes and Larkin (eds), Tudor Proclamations, II, pp. 485–6 (no. 657). On the importance of credit more generally, see Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1998).
   Google Scholar
• Willet, A fruitfull and godly sermon, sig. C1v; Smith, Examination of vsury, pp. 13, 26; Adams, White deuil, pp. 50–2. For ‘crimes of necessity’, see Steve Hindle, On the Parish? The Micro-politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, c.1550–1750 (Oxford, 2004), pp. 81–92.
   Google Scholar
• Much has been written on the regulation of food distribution, most of it in the Thompsonian ‘moral economy’ tradition. For two excellent pieces, see Slack, ‘Books of Orders'; John Walter, ‘The Social Economy of Dearth in Early Modern England’, in John Walter and Roger Schofield (eds), Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society (Cambridge, 1989).
   Google Scholar
• Hughes and Larkin (eds), Tudor Proclamations, II, pp. 532–4 (no. 686); III, pp. 28–31, 61–2, 169–72, 193–5 (no. 706, 726, 784, 795); Larkin and Hughes (eds), Stuart Proclamations, I, pp. 20–1, 86–7, 186–8, 242, 285–6, 297–9, 363, 416–22, 521–2, 563–5 (no. 10, 40, 85, 109, 133, 163, 182, 207, 219, 236).
   Google Scholar
• Gardiner (ed.), Reports of the Star Chamber, pp. 44–5. This is also a reminder of how interconnected various forms of economic malpractice might be; the hoarder, encloser, rent-racker and even usurer might all be the same person.
   Google Scholar
• Larkin and Hughes (eds), Stuart Proclamations, I, p. 363 (no. 163); Jackson, Celestiall husbandrie, p. 23, preached on 25 Feb. 1616/7. For oppression as ‘a degree of murder’, see also Richardson, Sermon against oppression, pp. 7–8.
   Google Scholar
• Buchanan Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England, 1586–1660 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980), p. 37.
   Google Scholar
• Richardson, Sermon against oppression, pp. 7–8. See Isa. 1:17–23, esp. annotations (1560 edn). In frustration Henry Smith called ‘the vsurer a legall theefe, because before he steale, he tells the partie how much he will steale, as though he stole by law’: Examination of vsury, p. 5. For the commonplace that laws were merely ‘spiders webs, which do … Hold the weaker creatures, but let the stronger passe through’, see Ingram, ‘Conscience of the Community’, pp. 128–9, 164–9.
   Google Scholar
• Jackson, Celestiall husbandrie, pp. 23–4.
   Google Scholar
• Keith Wrightson, ‘Estates, Degrees, and Sorts: Changing Perceptions of Society in Tudor and Stuart England’, in Penelope Corfield (ed.), Language, History and Class (Oxford, 1991), pp. 45–6.
   Google Scholar
• Adams, White deuil, p. 37.
   Google Scholar
• E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past & Present, 50 (1971): 76–136; idem, Customs in Common (New York, 1993). Recent contributions include Andy Wood, ‘The Place of Custom in Plebeian Political Culture: England, 1550–1800’, Social History, 22(1) (1997): 46–59; Steve Hindle, ‘Persuasion and Protest in the Caddington Common Enclosure Dispute, 1635–1639’, Past & Present, 158 (1998): 37–78; Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics, pp. 49–124. The chief exceptions to this secular focus are the chapters by Hindle and Walter in Braddick and Walter (eds), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society; and Steve Hindle, ‘Dearth and the English Revolution: The Harvest Crisis of 1647–50 Revisited’, Economic History Review, forthcoming.
   Google Scholar
• John Walter and Keith Wrightson, ‘Dearth and the Social Order in Early Modern England’, Past & Present, 71 (1976): 28–9.
   Google Scholar
• For the eighteenth-century context, see Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd’, and, more recently, Adrian Randall and Andrew Charlesworth (eds), Moral Economy and Popular Protest: Crowds, Conflict and Authority (London, 2000).
   Google Scholar