The Tudor South West at Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum: Part 4 – The Spanish Armadas

Posted on December 19, 2013 by drsang

Laura Sangha

This is the fourth post in a week long series about an exhibition at Exeter’s museum. Click on pictures for enlargements.

Day one: a map of Exeter
Day two: domestic decoration
Day three: goldsmiths and urban redevelopment

Pendennis Castle, Cornwall.

Politically, the south west was of crucial importance during Elizabeth’s reign when hostilities with Spain put Devon and Cornwall in the front line. This drew the region into events of national importance, but these events were also experienced on a local level and were of particular significance for the region. The 1588 Spanish Armada is probably the best known event of Elizabeth’s realm, and is certainly the most iconic, but for the south west things didn’t end there: two more invasion fleets sailed for Britain in 1596 and 1597. From the exhibition catalogue I learned that the region had in fact had been repeatedly strengthened militarily during the Tudor era – forts were constructed at western harbours in the reign of Henry VIIII, including the impressive examples at St Mawes (1543) and Pendennis (1546). In Elizabeth’s reign, Plymouth’s St Nicholas Island was heavily fortified in 1583-85 and Sir Richard Grenville was given command of the defence of Devon and Cornwall in March 1587, when he readied the equipment and defences of the peninsula. Anxieties remained high throughout the 1590s, Plymouth received more fortifications, and a small force landed at Mousehole, Newlyn and Penryn in 1595, doing extensive damage when they set them afire.

But it was the 1588 Spanish Armada that really became embedded in national consciousness and whose memory has endured. This is surely because the failed invasion was accorded with such importance at the time. Special forms of prayer were issued by the government giving thanks for the nation’s deliverance, and celebrations marking the defeat became a regular fixture in a rapidly developing new national ‘Protestant’ calendar, as David Cressy has documented. In the epic struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism, God appeared to have revealed his hand, assisting the numerically inferior and poorer Protestant forces to miraculously defeat the mighty fleet of a Catholic superpower. This was not a mere fluke convergence of bad weather and inspired naval leadership, this was a providential deliverance. The ‘Protestant wind’ that sent the Spanish ships into disarray was proof of God’s special care and protection of his chosen people, those Protestants who professed the ‘true’ faith.

Even at the time the iconography of the Armada was well developed (again giving lie to the ‘iconophobia’ discussed in a previous post). If you see a crescent of tall masted ships you are probably looking at a representation of the Armada of 1588, and there a few examples of these crescents in the RAMM’s exhibition. Most obviously, there is the ‘Armada Portrait’ of Elizabeth I, so called because the queen is framed by two images of the naval action. Above the queen’s left shoulder the English ships are shown bravely sailing towards a confrontation with the Spanish fleet in its distinctive crescent formation; over her right shoulder a wreckage strewn seascape represents the remains of the once proud Spanish fleet.

Augustine Ryther engraving, note Exeter top right.

Augustine Ryther engraving, note Exeter top left.

The exhibition also houses a wonderful series of exquisite hand coloured engravings, telling the story of the engagements off the Devon and Cornish coasts. The engravings were produced by Augustine Ryther from charts which recorded the route of the Armada around the coast. They really do provide the story of the events – this black and white copy shows the recognisable crescent shape of the fleet, and collapses the timing of the events so that two parts of the action are shown simultaneously, creating an easily understood narrative. This is a technique that I often encounter when examining early printed material with my students, particularly those ballads and broadsheets that seem to be aimed at the least literate members of society.

The prints are similar to the tapestries that were hung in Parliament in 1650. Commissioned in 1592, the ten tapestries were enormously expensive, costing £1,582 (the equivalent of 87 years wages for a labourer in 1590); and enormous in size: we think they measured 14 feet in height and between 17 and 28 feet in width. In 1650 they found their way into the Houses of Parliament, where they were mentioned in debate on several occasions. As if further evidence were needed of the longevity and significance of the Spanish Armada, in 1798 when there were concerns about a possible French invasion, the artist James Gillray was commissioned to produce images that would rouse patriotic fervour in the English people – the series of satirical prints he produced included one (above) depicting a French Admiral ordering his men to destroy the Armada tapestries.

Finally, amongst other Armada memorabilia in the collection there is also a commemorative medal similar to the one in the picture. These were not only produced in England but also in other Protestant nations, indicating the way that the defeat of Catholic Spain reverberated throughout Europe, an important symbolic victory for international Protestantism. The medal in the RAMM collection is from the Netherlands. In the 1580s the Dutch United Provinces were in revolt against Catholic Spain, and Spanish hostilities against the English were in part an attempt to stop the English aiding their European Protestant allies.

The museum medal depicts the Armada in its familiar crescent shape. It bears the famous inscription ‘Flavit Jehovah et Dissipati Sunt’ (with ‘Jehovah’ in Hebrew letters, the Tetragrammaton יהוה): ‘Jehovah blew with His wind and they were scattered’. It is a reference to Job 4: 8-11:

Even as I have seen, they that plow iniquity, and sow wickedness, reap the same.

By the blast of God they perish, and by the breath of his nostrils are they consumed.

The roaring of the lion, and the voice of the fierce lion, and the teeth of the young lions, are broken.

The old lion perisheth for lack of prey, and the stout lion’s whelps are scattered abroad. [King James Version]

Spanish Armada – so famous it made it into the Simpsons.

References like this are deeply suggestive of one of the ways that Protestantism was changing English society. Scriptural allusions were commonplace, and from the way that they are used (casually, briefly) it strongly suggests that people were expected to recognise them and the deeper religious truths that they stood for. Job has of course already cropped up in this series of posts (see day two, domestic decoration), here the brief quotation serves a similar purpose as an image: a reminder, a prompt to reflection, a stepping stone to a more profound appreciation of one’s own faith.

In the final post tomorrow: a round up of the prominent themes.

‘West Country to World’s End: the South West in the Tudor Age’ runs until 2 March 2014 at Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum. You can find all the details about the museum, it’s opening times, it’s wonderful café and more here.

The Tudor South West at Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum: Part 3 – Goldsmiths and urban redevelopment

Posted on December 18, 2013 by drsang

Laura Sangha

This is the third post in a week long series about an exhibition at Exeter’s museum.

Day one: a map of Exeter
Day two: domestic decoration

Today I want to talk filthy lucre. One of the things I learnt at the RAMM was that Exeter was an important centre for the goldsmith trade from as early as the thirteenth century, and this set off a train of thought that ended up in the surprisingly short-term world of town planning. I’ll try to recreate the train here.

The goldsmiths golden age

Many of Exeter’s early modern artisans had their workshops in Goldsmith Street, an impressive thoroughfare that had a church at either end, almshouses, and a handsome hall used by the Company of Tailors. The exhibition houses a variety of related items, but the one that took my eye was a communion cup made by John Jones, one of the wealthiest goldsmiths in early modern Exeter. It is indicative of the fact that in this society, ‘fine art’ did not necessarily mean paintings (though there are some wonderful Holbeins in the exhibition, if that’s your thing). This cup, manufactured from silver with delicate engraving around the gilt-edged rim and foot, is extremely accomplished, in fact I was rather surprised by quite how fancy it was, given that this was over ten years into the Calvinist-inspired Elizabethan reign. The cup is still a thing of beauty, it could easily be a lot plainer and less ostentatious.

The uniqueness of the Church of England

My first thought was that perhaps this is proof that the Elizabethan Settlement acted as a ‘broad umbrella’, incorporating a number of different types of Protestants and a range of churchmanship? Christopher Haigh has argued that the adjustments made to the Prayer Book at the start of Elizabeth’s reign, particularly additions to the words used during the administration of the Lord’ Supper, deliberately introduced ambiguity into the ceremony, encouraging a range of opinion about what actually happened during the sacrament to survive or evolve. Diarmaid MacCulloch has argued along similar lines, suggesting that these changes were to bring the English Reformation in line with what was happening in the rest of Europe, particularly in Germany and Geneva. It is entirely plausible that the fancy cup could be a part of these processes – the use of a silver work of art, rather than a plain wooden cup, would have been deeply suggestive to a congregation versed in the ritual and symbolic importance of the liturgy.

The impact of the Reformation

Beyond the sometimes obscure and always complicated world of Reformation theology, the goldsmiths can also tell us much about the way in which changes in belief left a deep and enduring imprint on early modern society. For part of the reason for the continued success and prestige of the goldsmith community in Exeter was the dissolution of the City’s priory and friaries in 1538 and ongoing changes in religious policy that sent a lot of work their way. Historians have discovered that far from being isolated and cut off from their local communities, monasteries were in many ways integral to the social and economic functions of their local region, providing charity and education, and as producers and consumers. Following their abrupt closure, the shock waves were swift, reshaping the landscapes of local communities physically as well as spiritually. Large, imposing buildings were torn down or their functions changed, and Henry VIII quickly appropriated the vast riches of these institutions. This not only meant that the crown took control of church lands, they also seized their more moveable treasures. For the large group of goldsmiths in Exeter, this would have meant a very welcome steady source of work and income, as church plate was confiscated, some of which had to be melted down and reworked in a more acceptable shape, suitable to the new reformed liturgy. This was a lucrative business, as at each stage of the process the participants could take their cut, not to mention that the parishes had to buy new plate from the goldsmiths to replace the old throughout the Tudor era. Similar processes happened in parish churches – the RAMM’s information card tells us that the churchwarden accounts of St Petrock’s church in Exeter show that Jones was paid £1 15s 5d in 1572 for ‘converting’ this communion cup to make it suitable for Protestant worship. Thus the redistribution of wealth that the dissolution triggered is not restricted to the property market but bought benefits and profits to other groups that can easily be overlooked.

Heritage and Urban Planning

Exeter’s Goldsmith’s Street as it once was.

Finally, I was also interested to discover the fate of Goldsmith Street – the majority of the historic buildings there were demolished by the City Council in the 1970s to make way for redevelopment – today you will find Marks and Spencer and Millets where the goldsmiths used to ply their trade. Although one of our enduring national myths is that bombing raids in World War II were responsible for the destruction of much of our pre-modern urban architecture, more recently historians have begun to question this narrative. They have drawn attention to the fact that many cities were already undergoing a programme of redevelopment that included sweeping away inconveniently narrow medieval streets that were seen as obstacles to modern infrastructure and progress. Though the blitz did account for damage in many historic centres, our society’s own decision to prioritise the needs of economic and industrial advancement over our historic past may be the real explanation of urban change. A recent article on the BBC website revealed that this is even true of Coventry, which suffered devastating destruction in a terrible air raid in 1940, but where demolition had actually started before the war and continued after it. Exeter too suffered, in a severe raid in 1942 1,500 houses were destroyed, 2,700 were seriously damaged, and the Cathedral itself was hit, narrowly escaping the destruction of the nave. But much of value was left, though not all of it was subsequently retained – wiped away just as Goldsmiths was to make way for shopping centres and fast food joints.

The shock of the new

Exeter’s Goldsmith Street now.

In many ways modern redevelopment of our urban landscapes is now just as shocking and significant as the deliberate destruction of the monasteries and the properties of the parish churches in the 1500s, and increasingly we are now beginning to see it that way. Each was an iconoclastic act, signalling a rejection of and moving away from the past. They were both inspired by a shift in the prevailing ideology and the emergence of something new: Protestantism, capitalism, modernity. Each are shocking to us now because these acts display a complete lack of respect for the past and for beautiful treasures which can now never be recreated. Each seems to have been driven by ‘the authorities’ in the face of limited public resistance, and in many cases the public seem unable to prevent the change even where they disagree with it. Perhaps this can helps us to understand the ‘compliance conundrum’ – the question of why there was a relative lack of any widespread resistance to the dissolution, despite the commitment that most English women and men had previously shown to the institutions. Perhaps they felt as helpless as we do in the face of development, perhaps they also felt a sense in which they were swimming against the tide in trying to preserve the past or stand in the way of state sponsored change. Or perhaps they came to terms with and even embraced the changes, regretting the passing of the old ways and the destruction of beautiful things, but eager to make the most of the opportunities that the new future offered them, and keen to create new and more beautiful – but different – things to replace those that had been lost.

In tomorrow’s post: the Spanish Armada arrives off the south west coast.

The Tudor South West at Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum: Part 2 – Domestic Decoration

Posted on December 17, 2013 by drsang

Laura Sangha

This is the second post in a week long series about an exhibition at Exeter’s museum. View the first post on a map of Exeter here.

In early modern England the population was expanding incredibly rapidly and massive inflation led to the deterioration of living standards for many of the lower sorts. In contrast, changes in income tended to increase the number of middling groups in society, those merchants, artisans and gentry who benefited from rising property prices. In the west country, the prosperous cloth trade and various mercantile enterprises meant that the middling sorts had money to invest in the arts. You are perhaps already aware of the National Portrait Gallery’s current exhibition on Elizabeth I and her People, and if that is your sort of thing, there are lots of paintings at the RAMM too, including ‘The Armada Portrait’ of Elizabeth I; several from the school of Holbein; numerous works by Exeter’s most significant artist to date, the miniature-painter Nicholas Hilliard; and a huge piece that tells the story of the arrival of Armada in the South West in 1588. Click on images for enlargements.

All are deeply impressive, but the artistic accomplishment of the south west is also to be found in the crafts – in the production of jewellery, elaborate drinking vessels, church plate (more on that in tomorrow’s post), household utensils, decorative plasterwork, moveable furniture, architectural stone and woodwork, and fine needlework. Some of these were functional, but all displayed the taste, wealth and status of their owners in this society.

Two of my favourite objects in the exhibition seem to be less about status, but certainly fall within the category of the decorative arts. They are a set of boards with an image painted on each them. Both are reasonably small – perhaps the size of an A3 sheet of paper – and one depicts Moses, the other Job. Each has a scriptural extract painted above the image. On loan from the V&A, they are part of a series of Old Testament figures. The drawings are plain but relatively accomplished: Job wears a long red tunic, cinched at the waist with a belt with a tasseled pouch hanging from it. He has a long brown pointed beard and wears a small turban and long boots, an interesting suggestion of ethnic stereotyping. He looks as if he is walking somewhere, and his hands are together and raised in supplication. The figure stands on some scraggly grass, and it is against a black background, in contrast to the scriptural text in black letter against a white background that forms a strip across the top of the board. It reads: ‘I ame sure that my redemer liveth and that I shall rise [oute?] of the earth at the latter day. Job [19?].’

Moses wears a white tunic and his extra long, brownish belt flaps around his legs as if in a breeze. He has tights tucked into his high brown boots, and wears a warm looking hat. He has a brown beard, much shorter than Job’s, and he also looks like he is walking. In his arms is a large tablet divided in two, dashed lines across it representing the Commandments. There is a skull between his feet, and I was intrigued to see that Moses is blindfolded – I am assuming this represents the Lord’s impartial justice but would be delighted to hear of other examples of this. His inscription reads ‘The Lord will stirr up amonge the brethren a Profet, like unto me. Deutrinomy 18’.

The RAMM’s information card informs us that the boards might have been displayed in a church or private house near Plymouth, but immediately my little grey cells started humming. I doubted that it was the former in Elizabethan England, where the work of iconoclasm in parish churches was relatively complete. To me, these images were a surprise – what were images of scriptural figures doing here, in an era when images had been rejected by the reformers as leading to wrong belief and wrong practice?

When iconoclasts attack.

The scholarship on visual culture in early modern England can help to answer this question, as it has been rapidly developing in recent years. Earlier historians had to an extent been won over by Patrick Collinson’s argument that throughout Elizabeth’s reign, English Protestantism became less, not more popular in character. Crudely summarised, Collinson asserted that the first generation of Protestant publicists and propagandists made polemical use of cultural vehicles (songs, drama, cheap print, the visual arts), using these forms to transmit the evangelical message with the aim of converting the English people to Protestantism. Protestant plays were written and produced, godly ballads were published and sung, images were used to attack Catholicism and to commend their own religious beliefs and values. But around 1580 Collinson thought that a new generation of evangelicals began to reject visual and performative culture, judging it to be unsuitable for their religious message. This later generation of Protestants thought that plays, songs and images were distracting the audience and confusing the religious message. Worse, the arts mixed sacred ideas with filthy ‘popular’ forms, doing violence to religious truth by associating it with base, bawdy and inappropriate behaviour and language. In this new world, Collinson argued that Protestants came to completely refuse any appeal to the senses in religious matters. All images were ‘Popish’, most Elizabethan and Jacobean bibles therefore had no illustrations, the only decoration in the parish church was to be the Royal Arms and perhaps a table of the ten commandments. England had moved from iconoclasm in the first stages of reform (rejection of abused, dangerous and false images), to complete iconophobia (rejection of all images).

And yet…, whilst Collinson’s argument is enormously useful in thinking about the continuing repercussions of religious change, it is perhaps more useful for thinking about reforming clergymen than it is English society more broadly. Objections have been raised, and work is afoot to provide a corrective to the ‘iconophobia’ argument. It is easy to point to the continued existence of images in England – British Printed Images to 1700 is a website that hosts a database of several thousand printed images produced in Protestant Britain, and much decorated medieval furniture can be found in parish churches across the country to this day (though of course some of this may have been restored during a later era). Our Moses and Job boards are of course another example of later imagery.

So how can we explain Moses and Job? Are these a rare surviving example of something from the bottom of the Tessa Watt’s ‘ladder of sanctity’ – inoffensive Old Testament figures that Protestants were comfortable displaying in a secular context? Watt has taught us that those scriptural figures who were the least sacred in the Catholic tradition, those that did not have cults associated with them and who were therefore unlikely to be the focus of devotion, were often still depicted in post-Reformation England. Moses and Job fit the bill – they are Old Testament figures, and both are strongly associated with moral teaching and practices. You are not meant to worship them but to learn from their stories and they were probably a new element of visual language in the post-Reformation church – there are no wall paintings of Job in Anne Marshall’s excellent catalogue of medieval wall paintings, and only one of Moses – which was painted after the Reformation.

Watt’s theory therefore helps us to explain images that survived in the face of fierce criticism of the Catholic use of imagery in worship. It seems that the purposes of post-Reformation images were usually didactic, images were used symbolically to recall to mind important beliefs or Christian principles. Here the scriptural texts above the images suggest that these figures were intended as an aid to memory, representative of bigger theological and moral truths. Job stood for the trials, temptations and suffering that an ordinary family man might face in everyday life, the text the hope of release from them. Moses would call to mind the Ten Commandments (perhaps displayed for all to see in the parish church) and their importance as the basis of Christian morality and behaviour. Both are eminently suitable for display in a secular sphere such as the household, reminders of everyday Christian beliefs that could comfort and guide people as they went about their lives. Incidentally the British Printed Images database throws up eight images of Moses and two of Job, all from the seventeenth century, suggesting that these images might be less suitable for publication than for display in the household. Often these images are found in the frontispiece: Drexel’s School of Patience (1640) has an image of Job with the caption ‘Patience’; in Francis Quarles 1646 collection of miscellaneous reflections Boanerges and Barnabas Moses represents justice (in opposition to mercy) and wears a similar outfit to that depicted on our boards (see below); whilst a 1695 edition of Richard Allestree’s Works shows the prophet wearing a veil. Does the latter represent squeamishness over showing Moses’ face, or is it just because the book contains a section on the topic of veiling?

It appears then that Moses and Job need not have been out of place in the Elizabethan south west after all. Tara Hamling’s recent work on domestic decoration supports such an interpretation, and these boards indeed suggest that Elizabethan England ‘still contained many images to help its inhabitants in converting the words of the Protestant religion into a visualised experience’, as Tessa Watt has argued. These images were complementing and supporting preaching and reading, those activities more traditionally seen as the heart of Protestant practice. The physical environments that people inhabited had also been changed as a result of reform, reconfigured to encourage the development of the Godly society that the evangelicals strove to create.

In tomorrow’s post: musings on the impact of the Reformation, goldsmiths and contemporary urban redevelopment.

Further reading:

Patrick Collinson, ‘From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia: the Cultural Impact of the Second English Reformation’, The Stenton Lecture 1985 (University of Reading:1986). Reprinted in Peter Marshall (ed.), The Impact of the English Reformation (London, 1997).

Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety (Cambridge, 1991), chapter 4, ‘Idols in the frontispiece’.

Tara Hamling, Decorating the ‘Godly’ Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain (London, 2010).

The Tudor South West at Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum: Part 1 – City Map

Posted on December 16, 2013 by drsang

Laura Sangha

This is the first in a week long series of posts about a new exhibition at Exeter’s museum.

Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum

I few weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting a wonderful new exhibition at Exeter’s recently refurbished Royal Albert Memorial Museum. Titled ‘West Country to World’s End: the South West in the Tudor Age’, the publicity describes it as ‘celebrating the spirit of adventure and enterprise of south west people’ during the Elizabethan ‘Golden Age’. Along with some of my first and second year undergraduates, I was also lucky enough to attend a talking tour of the exhibition by one of its curators: Sam Smiles, Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter. It was an intriguing insight into the thought and planning that goes into such a project, and I was struck by how carefully constructed museum exhibitions are in order to allow viewers to assemble a history from the objects themselves. It led me to reflect on the way that the selection, juxtaposition and display of the objects prompts the viewer to make associations and identify themes, leading to their greater understanding of the period and the subject. The exhibition runs until 2 March 2014, and each day this week I will be offering some thoughts on objects from the exhibition, explaining what the items said to me and following up on the questions that they raised. Click on pictures for enlargements.

Mapping Exeter

Engraving of Exeter by Hogenberg, 1587.

As a naturalised Exonian, I was very taken by the large scale reproduction of a map of Exeter as it was in 1587. Placed at the start of the exhibition it immediately orientates you within the early modern city, and it is fascinating for any number of reasons. The Exeter on the map has some familiar landmarks, yet the contours are not what are not what you expect: the river has been redirected in the centuries since, the castle and city walls have largely disappeared, and of course modern Exeter is far larger, incorporating parishes that were entirely separate in the early modern period and sprawling suburbs where once there was only farmland. The map is incredibly detailed – there are figures promenading in the streets and a couple of archers practise their skills by the Exe bridge, whilst the tenterhooks used in Exeter’s successful cloth trade are plain to see on the banks of the river. There are at least seven churches within the walls in addition to the huge cathedral, and everywhere there are wide green open spaces: a reminder that the Tudor urban environment was vastly different to our own. The map is hard to navigate for a modern too – the perspective allows the viewer to see the city in it’s entirety, but in doing so fails to indicate the very steep incline between the river and the city centre, so buildings that appear to be next to each other on the map are not experienced like that in reality.

Of course maps are never realistic in the way that they present their subject, they are designed to convey specific information to the map ‘reader’, thus the map designer chooses which aspects to emphasise and which to elide. The resulting distortion might therefore tell us more about the producers’ perceptions and intent than the place they are depicting. Thus we do not see the city ‘as it actually was’, but rather we see what the producer (or patron) wants us to. This map was made for the great city atlas edited by Georg Braun and largely engraved by Franz Hogenberg, published in Cologne in six volumes 1572-1617. Many of the images in this post can be seen at ‘Historic Cities‘ which has excellent digital reproductions of city maps of the past, present and future.

Meanwhile, just outside Oxford…

Braun and Hogenberg’s atlas contained 546 maps of cities, mainly European but there was also room for Mexico city and Casablanca. Other English cities included were London and the second city Norwich, Oxford and Cambridge, York, Canterbury, Chester and Bristol: the fact that Exeter was deemed worthy of inclusion alongside these indicates its important national status at the time. Hogenberg’s other city plans share features with Exeter’s –York is surrounded by a profusion of windmills, and in Norwich archers are also practicing their skills on the outskirts of town. There are differences too: Bristol, Cambridge and Norwich have sheep grazing in their hinterlands whilst in Exeter is surrounded by arable land, some of the maps have larger figures in contemporary dress in the foreground, indeed Oxford has what appear to be two scholars having an argument under a tree.

Either Chester was menaced by giant horses, or this map is not to scale.

The Exeter map thus tells me that Hogenberg saw the city as a Godly, thriving, well defended and well connected metropolis, relatively compact though already outgrowing the limits of it’s walls. The river was clearly a central part of it’s extensive trading and manufacturing activities, the water cluttered with boats and mills. A steady stream of people cross over the bridge towards the city gates, and within the walls there were some impressive houses suggesting wealthy citizens – this was a bustling regional centre, then as now. Surprisingly there are no cows to be seen (Cambridge, Bristol, Chester and other cities have sheep and horses grazing around about them), but there are some chaps fishing near a weir at Bonhay. The wide streets and green spaces within the city and the rolling Devon countryside which form the hinterland suggest this would be a good place to live and work, it is presented as a civilised, spacious and clean environment. As such, my suspicion is that it only tells part of the story of life in urban Elizabethan England.

In tomorrow’s post: what are images of Moses and Job doing in the Protestant south west?

‘West Country to World’s End: the South West in the Tudor Age’ runs until 2 March 2014 at Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum. You can find all the details about the museum, it’s opening times, it’s wonderful café and more on their website.

Credits:

Historic Cities, a joint project of the Historic Cities Center of the Department of Geography, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Jewish National and University Library.

Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg, ‘Civitas Exoniae (vulgo Excester) urbs primaria in comitatu Devoniae’, in Civitates Orbis Terrarum, Cologne. Vol. VI 1617.

The Immersive Turn: Or, what did a seventeenth-century drinking song sound like?

Posted on November 8, 2013 by manyheadedhailwood

Mark Hailwood

I know what you are thinking: isn’t it about time for yet another historical ‘turn’? Well, you’re in luck! I think there is a really interesting one already underway in early modern studies, quietly coming together from a number of different approaches and without, as yet, a clear sense of itself. I want to give it an identity, and I’m going to start by giving it a name: the ‘immersive turn’. But I’m open to suggestions.

What I mean by this is a growing desire on the part of early modern historians to try to recover a more multi-dimensional, multi-sensory feel for the period than we conventionally derive from an analytical reading of written sources: a search for the texture of the past, not just its texts. What prompted me to pull together this line of thought into a blog post was the recent attempt by students at De Montford to create a virtual version of seventeenth-century London before the Great Fire of 1666. It is worth a look, if you haven’t seen it already.

Pudding Lane Productions (http://puddinglanedmuga.blogspot.co.uk/century) have created a virtual 17th century London.

It seems to me that the interest generated by this project is a symptom of the fact that early modern historians are increasingly attracted to the idea of ‘immersing’ ourselves more fully in the physical and sensory aspects of the world that we study: the emergence of the study of material culture, increased attention to visual sources, to ‘space’, and to the history of the senses, might all be seen as part of this same process.

Pre-Reformation worship recreated (http://reformation.modhist.ox.ac.uk/index.html)

Pre-Reformation recreated

There have been recent attempts to recreate pre-and post-Reformation church interiors, and experiences of worship, for instance, and popular history books and TV shows taking the form of ‘Time Travellers’ Guides’ invite their readers and viewers to imagine the sights and smells one would encounter on entering a medieval or early modern city. All of these approaches invite us to imaginatively transport ourselves into the shoes of our early modern ancestors, and to concentrate on the immediate experience of sights, sounds and material surroundings.

These ‘immersive’ approaches have influenced my own work, especially in relation to the seventeenth-century drinking songs that I use to examine alehouse culture in the period. I don’t just mean that I get drunk and try singing them in the pub—although, we’ll come back to that—but rather that to understand the meanings of such songs it is important to think about the ways in which they were performed. It might be easy for a historian, sat alone at their desk quietly reading such a song, to misjudge the tone of its meaning, a tone that was informed by its tune, and also the manner and context in which it was actually sung, aloud, communally.

Singers in an alehouse window – hardly the same environment as sitting at my desk.

I developed a few thoughts on this in a short article for The Appendix, a new journal that embraces these new types of immersive and experimental history. You can read it for free here, and it would make sense to do so before reading on…. but, if you don’t have the time or inclination, here is the nub of it: I argue that it is important to think about how performance might influence the meaning of a seventeenth-century drinking ballad, and I applaud some recent attempts to recreate ballad performances. But I think they can misrepresent the tone in which such songs would have been sung.

For instance, take a moment to listen to EBBA’s recording of the drinking ballad, A Messe of Good Fellows, by clicking here.

A Messe of Good Fellows (© British Library)

It’s helpful to hear it put to a tune, but surely the tone would be a little more raucous if performed by a company of intoxicated good fellows bellowing it out from the alebench?

A bit more raucous. A bit more like it?

Indeed, I suggest in the article that a modern-day football song – with a well-known tune, repetitive chorus, and an inebriated collective of (mostly) men – might actually come closer to capturing how such drinking songs would have been experienced in the alehouse. In case you haven’t had the pleasure of experiencing terrace tunefulness first hand, click here. I’ve tried to pick a relatively inoffensive one, but apologies to residents of Cardiff.

In response to the article I also received a suggestion from Phil Edwards, a Lecturer in Criminology at Manchester Met and an enthusiastic folk musician, that present day folk singing – often pub-based and communal – might be a closer descendent of the seventeenth-century alehouse song. I expect many historians would probably agree, but it is still a bit too sanitised and orderly for what I imagine performance would have actually sounded like. See what you think by listening to this ballad singaround recorded by Phil.

Are folk singarounds the key?

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on which style of performance you think is most effective at ‘transporting’ us into the experiential world of our early modern forebears, but more importantly, I suppose, I’d like to know whether you think this little experiment in ‘immersion’ is a worthwhile exercise at all. Is attempting to recreate the sounds, or the smells, or the sights/sites, of the early modern past allowing just a little too much imagination into the historical process? It is undoubtedly an imprecise science, and we will never be able to capture with any certainty the tone of ballad performances – which no doubt varied immensely anyway. Is it therefore likely to be as often misleading as illuminating? A bit of fun perhaps – a harmless thought experiment to fill a coffee break – but not to be taken as a serious part of the historian’s craft? Or is the ‘immersive turn’ the next big thing, a way of bringing history to life that can enhance the understanding of both academic historians and non-academics alike?

Norwich Entertainments – Part VI: Rope dancing and nine-pins

Posted on October 14, 2013 by Brodie Waddell

Brodie Waddell

On 1 December 1677, the Norwich Mayor’s Court granted permission for a new performer to ply her trade in the city:

Mrs Saboul Rymers hath Lycence to make shew of Dauncing upon the Rope at the Redd Lion in St Stephens for a weeke from this day.¹

Rope dancing, now usually known as ‘tight-rope walking’, had already been a popular entertainment for thousands of years by the time Mrs Rymers arrived in Norwich. It was a common amusement in the seventeenth century, apparently beloved by rich and poor alike. The Duchess of Cleveland, King Charles II’s famous mistress, ‘greatly admired’ one these acrobats, and Samuel Pepys reported that he ‘saw the best dancing on the ropes that I think I ever saw in my life’ at Bartholomew’s Fair in 1664.

Continue reading →

The Past is a Foreign Country: History and Analogy, Part II

Posted on September 30, 2013 by drsang

Laura Sangha

A visual analogy of analogy.

In my previous post on History and Analogy I explored why we use the technique and the ways in analogy can be a two-edged sword (if you will). Here I want to give some examples that I have come across recently when preparing for my module on Tudor England. I didn’t have to look far for these, evidence of the ubiquity of these types of comparison. Many are taken from G.W. Bernard’s The Late Medieval English Church, the book that inspired the original post. If you have any examples of your own, please do add them in the comments below.

The short and pithy:

G.W. Bernard is unable to resist analogies, whether historical or not. How about:

Did people collect indulgences in the spirit that we collect tokens or Air Miles?[1]

Or a W.G. Hoskins comparison passed on by Brodie that is short, pithy, and controversial to say the least:

Henry VIII was ‘England’s Stalin’.[2]

The elaborate and multi-layered:

Grappling with the problem of how to perceive of early modern culture in Music and Society in Early Modern England, Christopher Marsh invites us to envisage culture as a lute, with each of it’s six strings representing:

Early modern culture made flesh.

…one of the basic socio-cultural polarities that helped individuals to understand their world and to locate themselves with it: gentle/ common, male/ female, old/ young, clerical/ lay, urban/ rural, native/ foreign. The extremes are permanently connected, and in tension, the strings form a musical staircase that allows for traffic in both directions, the sounds produced can be in harmony or might result in ugly clashes, anyone can pluck and strum as they see fit…[3]

The familiar:

If an analogy is a comparison between the familiar and unfamiliar, there is also a tendency for writers to use a concept that they know particularly well and which they would assume might therefore particularly resonate with their audience. Bernard’s comparisons of modern academic and late medieval religious institutions are a case in point, the author connects with his reader by drawing on what they have in common. In some instances, this can allow him to load his prose with a double meaning, as here:

How far were religious vocations – like those of modern academics – stultified by the piling up of administrative tasks, by the burdens of detailed administration of buildings and estates? Was there a loss, or a lack, of spiritual impetus and creative energy?[4]

The peculiarly appropriate:

In other instances, the analogy is pleasing because it is fitting, as with Alexandra Walsham’s allusion in her book on landscape:

Before we can begin to investigate the Reformation of the landscape, it is necessary to evacuate the sedimentary layers of religious association that had been deposited upon it over the course of the preceding two millennia.[5]

Religious cultures are actually slightly more complicated and layered than these sediments.

The unintended:

Technically this is not an analogy, but given Bernard’s love of comparison it was hard not to read the following as a metaphor for the life of an early career academic:

…there was no necessary connection between ordination – a relatively straightforward matter – and the security of a benefice – a relatively difficult matter, since all turned on finding a suitable post. A priest might wait years before obtaining a benefice. Meanwhile he would seek employment as an assistant, as a deputy, as a chantry priest or as a chaplain in a domestic household… for which there were many opportunities… In practice they did play a considerable part in the religious life of a parish, despite lacking any formal pastoral responsibilities.[6]

Even if Bernard had not encouraged his reader to draw such parallels, current debate about the rectitude and extent of zero-hour contracts in academia reverberates through the passage.

The mundane:

Sometimes the comparison is straightforward and passes without much notice:

Of course, monasteries were organic entities, all that grows decays, and, just as in a garden, weeding and pruning deadwood were perennial tasks.[7]

The humorous:

At other times humour provides some light relief:

The tone of many Elizabethan congregations seems to have been that of a tiresome class of schoolboys.[8]

Any modern British university historian who has lived through countless administrative reorganisations, and seen the consequences of, say, the restructuring of local governments, will hesitate before pronouncing too confidently on the shortcomings of the monasteries in late medieval England.[9]

As with historical analogy, nitroglycerine should be handled with care.

[On the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist:] the strength of conservative feeling at home, and the sensitivity of Protestant divisions abroad, made the issue the theological equivalent of nitro-glycerine: it had to be handled with care.[10]

And Patrick Collinson…

Patrick Collinson was renowned for his epigrammatic, witty and entertaining writing style, and the well-turned comparison was an important component of this. Jonathan reminded me of his special talent by passing on this wonderful bit of analysis:

When Picasso came to Sheffield to attend a peace rally, he sat on the platform making sketches and dropping them on the floor. Nobody picked them up. These preliminary sketches – Swallowfield and Terrington – can lie where they have fallen. Our subject is neither local government nor village republics, but the political culture of England at its centre and summit, in the age of Elizabeth I.

Here is a further selection, all drawn from the same chapter on the culture of Puritanism:

Traditionally, puritanism and culture have been seen as polar opposites, so that an essay on puritan culture might seem to merit no more space than the topic of snakes in that book on Iceland, which, according to Samuel Johnson, contained a chapter consisting of a single sentence: ‘There are no snakes to be found anywhere in the island’.

Shortly followed by:

But if man shall not live by bread alone, he must have bread, and perhaps some butter and even jam to spread on it; and it is not likely that puritans found all their needs supplied by ‘every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God’.

Furthermore:

‘it was those local teacup storms which gave substance, a cultural or counter-cultural substance, to the very concept of ‘Puritanism’.

Now, whenever you see an okapi, you will immediately think ‘Puritanism’.

And my favourite:

That is not to say that the thing identified as ‘puritanism’ had no real or prior existence, any more than the large quadraped which Sir Harry Johnston ‘discovered’ in the Ituri rainforests in 1900 had no existence until Johnston gave it a name, ‘okapi’.[11]

And we are still only on the third page of the chapter. It seems very fitting therefore that in his obituary, John Morrill used an analogy to sum up Collinson’s lifelong interest in Puritanism:

The obsession at its heart is the role of principled disobedience within powerful institutions, a study of those committed to reform from within. And that is how Pat saw himself… He became an establishment figure who struggled to square his radical conscience with membership of establishments.

[1] G. W. Bernard, The Late Medieval English Church: Vitality and Vulnerability before the Break with Rome (London, 2012), p. 143.

[2] W.G. Hoskins, The Age of Plunder (1976), p. 232.

[3] C. Marsh, Music and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 15-22.

[4] Bernard, The Late Medieval English Church, p. 197.

[5] A. Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2011), p. 18.

[6] Bernard, The Late Medieval English Church, p. 79.

[7] Bernard, The Late Medieval English Church, p. 190-1.

[8] K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England (London, 1971), pp. 191-2.

[9] Bernard, The Late Medieval English Church, p. 196.

[10] P. Marshall, Reformation England 1480-1642 (London, 2003), p. 65.

[11] P. Collinson, ‘Elizabethan and Jacobean Puritanism as Forms of Popular Religious Culture’ in C. Durston & J. Eales (eds), The Culture of English Puritanism 1560-1700 (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 32-4.

The Past is a Foreign Country: History and Analogy, Part I

Posted on September 10, 2013 by drsang

Laura Sangha

I’ve just finished G.W. Bernard’s The Late Medieval English Church, which is an excellent and well informed survey, in case you are wondering. One of the things that made it a particularly enjoyable read were the analogies that peppered the text, which were thought-provoking and on occasions mischievous. For example:

The attitude of medieval townsmen to their local cathedral was, it has been suggested, rather like that of their successors to modern universities: an ambiguous mixture of slight suspicion and considerable incomprehension was alleviated by a natural pleasure that this corporate giant might contribute to their own prestige and economic welfare.

Should pilgrim badges… be seen as sacred objects, almost ‘secondary relics’, for those who acquired them, or more like the souvenirs that day trippers buy today? … Medieval pilgrimage has been compared to modern museums, full of half-comprehending tourists, of young people having a day out, yet with serious and scholarly purposes at their core. Are the experiences of those who go church-crawling, or visit the blockbuster exhibitions in art galleries, or go to concerts at all comparable? Does the ritual of pilgrimage meet a perennial human need?… How many pilgrims took part in pilgrimages in much the same part-materialistic, part-sentimental way that many nowadays treat Christmas? [1]

The early modern pilgrim badge and its modern walking stick equivalent?

Along with Brodie Waddell’s recent post on jargon and Mark Hailwood’s comparison of early modern alehouse ballad singing with modern football chants, it got me thinking about language, and more specifically about the way that we use analogy in writing and teaching. For historians, the carefully picked parallel is a potent weapon, it provides an inference or argument from one (familiar) particular to another, in the process attaching meaning to the unfamiliar particular. Analogy enables us to grasp the new and to process the different. For the early modernist, this is especially useful, because a parallel can help us to negotiate the strangeness of our subject and to close the gap between the mysterious and murky past and the bright shiny present. This is exceptionally useful when it comes to teaching: when I challenge my students to try to understand the early modern mentality I often begin by inviting them to self-reflect on their own experience, before exploring the early modern equivalent. So you might ask students to list what they think are the main elements of ‘identity’ in the present day, before discussing how early modern people thought about the same, the comparison drawing attention to those areas of similarity and difference which then invite explanation.

Similarity as well as difference is of course key here. Historical analogies are neat, effective and pleasing, but also fraught with peril because it is unlikely that the two particulars in the analogy are exactly the same. Bernard acknowledges as much:

Another scholar has offered the metaphor of ‘faultlines in the landscape’ but, while that is suggestive, it nonetheless rests upon the underlying inevitability of the coming earthquake.[2]

Just imagine the Late Medieval Church criss-crossed with lots of these.

In similar vein, Versailles might have ‘sowed the seeds of the second world war’, but this suggests a dangerous teleology that might distort our understanding of the interwar years. Thus a facile or lazy comparison can obscure rather than illuminate. Politicians and journalists in particular play a dangerous game when they use analogy in association with events that are still unfolding, or to justify actions or simplify complexity. Recently, the labeling of the wave of demonstrations and regime changes in North Africa and the Middle East as the ‘Arab Spring’ (an allusion to the Revolutions of 1848 and the Prague Spring) has fitted rather awkwardly with subsequent developments that bear no relation to the promise of rebirth, liberation and growth usually associated with the pre-summer season and the historical precedents. One commentator notes that:

It appears that the right analogy is a different central European event — the Thirty Years’ War in the 17th century — an awful mix of religious and political conflict, which eventually produced a new state order.

Analogies surely work best only when the dissimilarities of the two things are considered alongside the parallels – the analogy can in fact help you to identify both. Ruling out unsuitable analogies is also a useful strategy, as Peter Marshall does when describing the processes of the English Reformation:

The modern analogy is less with the overthrow of ancien regimes in 1789 and 1917 than with the ‘cultural revolution’ of 1960s China, in which central government worked in alliance with cadres of true believers to undermine reliable elements in positions of authority, and radically reconstruct the outlook of people as a whole.[3]

More in common than you might think?

It is always a delight when students come up with their own analogies, because it reveals their learning: their coming to terms with information and expressing their own understanding of it. When discussing oral culture, and the astonishing feats of memorisation that early moderns were capable of, one student declared that it wasn’t that surprising that people knew the Bible off-by-heart, as she felt sure that if someone named a chapter from any Harry Potter novel she would be able to recall the important events from memory. Other memorable comparisons were Henry VIII’s visitation officers as ‘Ofsted Inspectors’, Elizabeth I’s beauty ‘trending’ at court, and Charles I’s relationship with the Duke of Buckingham as a classic ‘bromance’. These are not simply throwaway comments, they reveal students grasping and reframing the past in a way that resonates with their own existing knowledge.

**I followed this up with another post with examples of different types of analogies, incorporating those suggested to me by readers.**

[1] G. W. Bernard, The Late Medieval English Church: Vitality and Vulnerability before the Break with Rome (London, 2012), pp. 159-60; 143.

[2] Bernard, The Late Medieval English Church, p. 236.

[3] P. Marshall, Reformation England 1480-1642 (London, 2003), p. 58.

Tudor history on TV, and a partial review of David Starkey’s ‘Music and Monarchy’…

Posted on August 14, 2013 by Jonathan Willis

Jonathan Willis

Early modern history has done pretty well out of the BBC lately. Earlier this year, in late May and early June, there was a season of programmes (apparently 5 documentaries constitute a ‘season’) based around the Tudor Court. We had an interesting and quite adventurous treatment of The Last Days of Anne Boleyn, which made the brave decision not to give top billing to a single authoritative historical narrator, or wrap up its argument with neat historical conclusions, but instead featured a real diversity of opinions from half a dozen historians and historical novelists. Diarmaid McCulloch presented a view of Thomas Cromwell which, while at first glance appearing to owe much to GR Elton, also contained a few tantalising hints of the major new biography he is working on (and which I for one am very much looking forward to reading). Thomas Penn told the story of Henry VII, Winter King, and Ian Mortimer presented a Time-Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England. And finally, Melvyn Bragg made the case for William Tyndale as The Most Dangerous Man in Tudor England in appropriately evangelical mode, in a strange piece of film which was shot like an episode of the late-lamented popular BBC spy drama, Spooks.
These documentaries were accompanied by re-runs of the Showtime series, The Tudors (which I don’t intend to dissect here!), and all in all I think that this sort of documentary interest in the period is, in the immortal words of Sellar and Yeatman, A Good Thing. Another recent onscreen foray into Tudor England has been conducted by David Starkey, in his four-part series Music and Monarchy, which began airing on 20 July and finished on Saturday 10 August: UK residents can still catch it on iplayer. Entitled ‘Crown and Choir’, the first episode looked at ‘royal music’ in England from Henry V to the death of Elizabeth I. I have to say, that as a historian who has written a fair amount about sixteenth century music, I had somewhat mixed feelings about watching this documentary. I like the fact that the history of music is something that people (and documentary-makers) seem to be increasingly interested in: in recent years the BBC has also given us Sacred Music and Howard Goodall’s Story of Music, both of which were interesting pieces of television. But music and monarchy? Starkey is of course primarily an historian of elites, and of court culture. But (and I hope that, given the recent online symposium on history from below, I am preaching largely to the converted) the story of music in the sixteenth century is so much more interesting than that, in terms of the broader role it played in popular culture and religion.

On balance, watching this first episode of Music and Monarchy I was pleasantly surprised. Starkey, for all his controversy and confrontational style as a commenter on current affairs, is a compelling and captivating storyteller, and it’s pretty clear that he is passionately interested in his subject. The tone strikes about the right balance: it isn’t overly simplified or patronising, and neither is it loaded with too much technical jargon. Occasionally Starkey allows his effusiveness about the music to cloud what could be a more rigorous analysis, but this is popular TV, not an academic lecture. He talks to a small number of musicians and academics, including the multi-talented David Skinner, and includes lots of long, sumptuous performances of pieces of early music in the venues in which they were (or at least in which they could possibly have been) performed. All in all then, this documentary too, to my surprise, is probably A Good Thing. Except… For 50 minutes of ‘Crown and Choir’ I broadly enjoyed what I was watching. But for the last 10, I pulled out my hair, and if my train carriage had had opening windows I might have thrown the iPad I was watching out of one of them. This is for two main reasons.

Bad Thing #1. In large part, the interplay between music and monarchy (and religion) was dealt with well, but in the final ten minutes what had functioned quite successfully as a lens turned suddenly into a pair of blinkers. Elizabeth I saved church music, we were told (partly right), but not only that, she did it singlehandedly, solely by maintaining a chapel royal of equivalent musical magnificence to her father, Henry VIII. Inside it, Elizabeth composed for herself a warm and dazzling sacred oratorio; beyond her chapel was merely a cold and frosty Protestant wasteland. Now that is just plain wrong. Even if we leave aside the complex musical picture in the Elizabethan parish church, which may well have still contained an organ, a choir, or at least a couple of paid singers, what about the musical livings she preserved elsewhere, and the university college and cathedral choirs up and down the country? True the chapel royal was probably the best resourced choir in Elizabethan England, but its musical reputation was maintained in part by poaching singers and composers from other musical establishments, such as the composer and organist William Byrd from Lincoln Minster.

Bad Thing #2. Where the parish church was briefly mentioned, it was as a cold, austere, whitewashed box, devoid of all visual and oral ornament. Cue a group of aged parishioners slowly and tunelessly droning out the ‘Old Hundredth’, a musical oxymoron; ‘all people than on earth do dwell, sing to the lord with cheerful voice’! That, Starkey observed, was as good as it got: the best that the man in the street (or at least the parish church) could aspire to. Again, leaving aside the complexity of the parish situation, which I would characterise as a vibrant and amorphous fusion of traditional and innovatory musical forms, the problem with this sort of approach is that it harks back to an outdated musicological approach that equated musical ‘quality’ with historical significance. Congregational metrical psalmody might not be the sort of music that features on the glossy CDs produced by modern choirs like the Sixteen or the Tallis Scholars, but that does not mean that it lacked value or importance (interestingly, the bibliography of the book that accompanies the series references rather dated literature on this topic, such as Temperley’s 1979 Music of the English Parish Church). For the first time, ordinary men and women were invited to play an active and participatory role in parish church worship, by joining in and singing praises together in one resounding voice. Starkey even misses a trick here in terms of his focus on music and monarchy. Such was the popularity and success of congregational song, that in the 1570s the government produced a series of metrical anthems, to be sung to familiar tunes to the glory of both God and the Queen. These works were most obviously to be sung on the ‘Crownation Day’ celebrations of 17 November, and far more people sang them than ever even heard Byrd’s beautiful motet, O Lord, let thy servant, Elizabeth. The reason that the vernacular sacred oratorios of Handel proved so popular in the eighteenth century, one might surmise, is at least in part because by that point the English had been singing themselves Protestant for the best part of two centuries. The reformation had effectively turned every parish church into a choir, albeit often a not very good one.

I don’t feel professionally qualified to comment on the rest of the series, and anyway this is supposed to be a blog, not a monograph. I’m now three-quarters of the way through, and broadly I think that his perspective is an interesting one, and that the documentary is a Good Thing – it might even inspire some people to find out more. But just as the story of popular religious music cannot be told without paying some attention to the interventions of kings and queens, so the musical legacy of kings and queens cannot be properly told without paying some attention to popular reception. And ‘reception’ in this context should not be envisaged as a passive process, but as a means by which people helped to shape the Protestant nation of which they themselves were part.

Everyday Life and the Art of the Dutch Masters: A Social Historian’s Perspective

Posted on June 28, 2013 by manyheadedhailwood

Mark Hailwood

The visual culture of the early modern period has been a prominent theme here on the many-headed monster, what with Jonathan’s recent post on what God looked like, and my own series of posts on woodcut workers, so I thought another contribution to these musings would be welcome.

So, below is an essay I was recently asked to write for a guidebook for an art exhibition being held at The Collection Museum, Lincoln. ‘Masterstrokes: Great Paintings from York Art Gallery’ runs until 26th August, and contains some of the highlights from York Art Gallery’s collection, on temporary display in Lincoln.

The painting I was asked to comment on is Cornelis Bega’s ‘Tavern Scene’, 1662, approaching it from the angle of what it might be able to tell a social historian. Here is what I came up with:

What is a social historian? The main thing that marks us out from our colleagues in political or economic history is that we are concerned not so much with the ‘great men’ or macro-economic developments—which have undoubtedly played their part in shaping our past and present—but with the everyday lives and experiences of ordinary men and women. We want to know what life was like in the past for the majority of our ancestors.

Recovering these experiences is far from straightforward. For the period that I study—the seventeenth century—the subjects of my research have rarely left behind any of their own accounts of what their lives were like. Only 30% of men, and 10% of women, were fully literate, and those that were tended to come from the upper ranks of society. As such, there are few letters or diaries surviving from humble men and women recording the fine details of their day-to-day trials and pleasures.

As a result, the social historian needs to be ‘omnivorous’ in their search for useful sources of evidence. They need to cast their net wide and glean what they can from surviving court records such as witness statements, from surviving popular ballads and songs, or from the indirect evidence provided by the extant writings of elite social groups. They might also be able to gain insights from the visual culture of the period they study.

In this regard, Dutch Golden Age paintings—such as Cornelis Bega’s ‘Tavern Scene’ on display here—are a tantalising prospect for the social historian. Many adopt a realist focus on the everyday life of seventeenth-century peasants and artisans. Moreover, many of them depict scenes of tavern culture, an aspect of everyday life that has increasingly come to attract the attention of social historians. There is a frustration here though for the historian of seventeenth-century England: there is no English equivalent in this century for the vibrant genre of everyday life paintings being produced in the Netherlands (I’m not quite sure why, but it is a common subject of speculation in conversation with my colleagues). So there is an obvious problem inherent in trying to use paintings of Dutch tavern culture to draw conclusions about English tavern culture, but if we put that to one side for the moment we might think about what sorts of questions a social historian could ask of paintings such as Bega’s ‘Tavern Scene’.

Thanks to York Art Gallery for permission to reproduce this image (YORAG782)

At first glance we might wonder if the utility of this painting lies more in what it tells us about contemporary attitudes towards tavern culture than what it can tell us about what actually took place in them from day to day. It could be taken to encapsulate a common negative stereotype of taverns that was most closely associated in England with Puritans—those who enthusiastically embraced the new Protestant religion—who were known to be particularly vociferous in condemning drunkenness as an ‘odious’ and ‘loathsome’ sin. Is the standing male character slightly off-balance perhaps, his shirt falling open as the decorum slips, drunkenly leering at the bosom of the… serving maid? Taverns were often criticised as sites of inappropriate sexual promiscuity, and we could read this depiction as a visual equivalent to the many sermons that were preached against the immorality of tavern culture in the period.

A closer look suggests that Bega is offering us much more than well-trodden moralising in his tavern scene. The social historian’s gaze is drawn to some of the more quotidian aspects in the painting. There seems, for instance, to be crumpled bedding laid out on the bench behind the central female character. This highlights an important fact about seventeenth-century taverns (or as they were more commonly called in England, alehouses) that the modern viewer may not appreciate: unlike the pubs of today, the primary purpose of an alehouse in this period was not to provide a location for recreational drinking. Rather, it had two main functions: one was to sell ale to local people who did not have the means to brew their own at home. Ale (usually weaker than our modern equivalent) was an important part of the daily diet and a key source of calories and nutrients, and was consumed with all meals by men, women and children. In this sense the alehouse was meant to serve more as an off-license. In practice, of course, many allowed drinking on site and they did become sites for recreational drinking and drunkenness, but this was forbidden in legislation.

Their other (legitimate) purpose was to provide lodging to travellers. As such they were invariably situated on main roads, something we can see in another painting in this exhibition, Meindert Hobbema’s ‘A Wooded Landscape’. It looks like a drinking house on the left, identifiable by its ‘ale-post’, the ancestor of the pub sign, protruding into the road to show that ale was available.

Thanks to York Art Gallery for permissions (YORAG2005.608)

With this is mind another reading of this tavern scene is possible. What we have is not a scene of drunken debauchery, but a party of travellers who have spent the night asleep on the alebench (alehouse accommodation was rarely plush, and often involved simply sleeping on a bench or sharing a bed with landlord and landlady!) The man with his back to us is still rousing himself from sleep. The standing character is not yet fully dressed, but is nonetheless taking his ‘morning draught’ of ale, the seventeenth-century equivalent of that first cup of coffee. What we might be seeing is the depiction of a morning routine after an overnight stay at the tavern, a far from untypical experience in an age when the lower orders did most of their travelling on foot, and only limited distances could be covered in a day.

We are also struck, of course, by the act of reading taking place at the centre of the scene. It is intriguing, given the statistics of female literacy, that it is the female character doing the reading. What is she reading? Could it be a broadside ballad? These were songs printed on a single (sometimes folded) sheet of paper that were sold cheaply—usually for a penny, the same price as a pint of ale—and often took the form of drinking songs to be sung in alehouses, or even pasted up on their walls. Is that one pasted up in the alcove on the back wall? Perhaps one discarded on the floor in the fore ground to the right? These drinking songs have received a lot of recent attention from social historians, who have mined them for insights they may offer into seventeenth-century tavern culture. Is this a depiction of one being performed? Is the standing male responding to a call that was common in these songs to raise a toast to his companions, or to raise a loyal toast to the King, another familiar feature of these songs?

Arguably the scene is too sedate to be a raucous rendition of a drinking song. Another interpretation may be that the reader is relaying the latest news from a printed newsheet—possibly news of a successful sea battle that is spurring the toast of her companion, or even a satirical political broadside that is the root of his mirth. Both of these were common subjects for cheap printed wares that circulated in taverns. Indeed, the discussion of news and politics in taverns was common and widespread long before the emergence of the coffeehouse in both England and the Netherlands from the mid-seventeenth century, the drinking establishment which is more commonly associated with a public thirst for news and politics. Is Bega looking to capture the fact that the politics of ‘great men’ were not as detached from the world of everyday tavern culture as historians have often thought?

It is, of course, beyond us to know for sure what Bega wanted us to take from his tavern scene, and at best it remains a somewhat indirect form of evidence of everyday life in the past for the social historian. That said, there are a number of aspects of his scene—the tavern as a place of lodging, the circulation of printed ware in these locations—that accord with the evidence of tavern culture in the seventeenth century that social historians have garnered from other sources. It reinforces our sense that tavern culture was about more than mindless drunkenness and sexual promiscuity, providing vital services and a venue for the dissemination and discussion of the issues of the day. Given these areas of overlap between Bega’s scene and what we can recover from other sources there may well be cause for optimism for social historians that such paintings can be a reliable guide to everyday life in the past. Or at the least, another component of our omnivorous diet of sources.

the many-headed monster

the history of 'the unruly sort of clowns' and other early modern peculiarities

Category Archives: History

The Tudor South West at Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum: Part 4 – The Spanish Armadas

The Tudor South West at Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum: Part 3 – Goldsmiths and urban redevelopment

The Tudor South West at Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum: Part 2 – Domestic Decoration

The Tudor South West at Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum: Part 1 – City Map

The Immersive Turn: Or, what did a seventeenth-century drinking song sound like?

Norwich Entertainments – Part VI: Rope dancing and nine-pins

The Past is a Foreign Country: History and Analogy, Part II

The Past is a Foreign Country: History and Analogy, Part I

Tudor history on TV, and a partial review of David Starkey’s ‘Music and Monarchy’…

Everyday Life and the Art of the Dutch Masters: A Social Historian’s Perspective