The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (51 page)

This unofficial ‘secret service’ established by Sir William Cecil and Francis Walsingham deals with more than just attempts on Elizabeth’s life. Walsingham’s spies send him information from every part of England. He also maintains thirteen spies in France, ten in the Low Countries, five in Italy, five in Spain, nine in Germany and even three in Turkey.
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Cecil similarly has agents in the London prisons, listening out for any conversations that might prove useful. It is fair to say that, wherever you go, you can never be sure of escaping the long arm of Cecil and Walsingham. Consider the case of Dr John Story, a Catholic lawyer and MP, who is locked up in 1563 after speaking some poorly chosen words against the queen. Escaping by night and reaching the Spanish ambassador’s residence, he manages to slip the country and flee to the Netherlands. There the duke of Alba appoints him to search all vessels coming from England, and Story assiduously combs every English ship for Protestant letters, books and messages. The zeal with which he conducts his work leads to him becoming the leader of a group of émigré Catholic activists, and more than just a minor irritant to the English merchants trading with the Low Countries. Cecil therefore decides to take action. In 1570 he sends agents to Dr Story who win his trust. They join him in searching English boats, until one day they lead him on to a boat whose captain has been primed. Dr Story is seized, taken to England and handed over to the privy council for interrogation and trial. Found guilty of high treason, he is drawn, hanged and quartered. ‘Black operations’ such as this, in which government agents seize residents in a foreign country and subject them to rendition, torture and death, have a long pedigree.
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The privy council controls England itself through liaison with the royal officers in each county. These are the sheriffs, Lords Lieutenant and Justices of the Peace. The sheriff presides over the county court, takes action against riots, and oversees visits by the queen and royal judges during the assize sessions. The Lord Lieutenant is in charge of civil defence in each county. It is his responsibility to muster the militia,
and to make sure its equipment is satisfactory and the men suitably trained. He also has to ensure the coastal beacons are ready to be lit in case an enemy lands in force. As a rule of thumb, therefore, the sheriffs and JPs deal with home-grown disturbances and the Lords Lieutenant with foreign threats. In 1570, for example, when the Northern Rebellion is about to break out, the privy council writes to the JPs in the region, urging them to take precautions. Martial law is imposed, 129 prosperous men are arrested and held for trial, and 500 poor men are summarily executed as a lesson to others.
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In July 1586, with fears of an invasion from Spain, it is the Lords Lieutenant who receive orders to muster the militia in their counties, to be ready to light the beacons and to repel the invaders.

The Criminal Underworld

It goes without saying that there are criminals among all classes. The highest nobleman in the land, the duke of Norfolk, is executed for treason. Many Catholic conspirators are members of the aristocracy and gentry. Gentlemen are taken before the courts for murder, and upstanding householders find themselves indicted for assault after they have given an over-zealous tax-collector a bruised head. Some members of the gentry even turn to piracy and highway robbery. We have already met Gamaliel Ratsey, the most famous highwayman of the time. This son of a Lincolnshire gentleman is something of a Robin Hood figure in the East Midlands: cunning, witty, courageous, generous to the poor and possessed of a sense of natural justice. Having robbed two wealthy wool merchants near Stamford, he knights them as ‘Sir Walter Woolsack and Sir Samuel Sheepskin’.
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However, the upper echelons of society do not typically take part in illegal activities. Most criminals are to be found among the lower classes, and it is their number and variety of tricks that you most want to guard against. Indeed, on entering a city you need to be wary of the ‘coney-catchers’ – people who will regard you as a coney from the country just waiting to be caught.

Various books are available which give details of the different types of criminal and their methods, the best-known being Thomas Harman’s
A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursitors
(1566).
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This gives lengthy descriptions of the low-life you will meet, many of whom you will
recognise as vagabonds due to the large hole in their right ear, which is burned through with a hot iron in line with the law of 1572.

An Abram-man or Abraham-man
is a beggar who walks bare-armed and bare-legged and pretends to be mad, so called after the Abraham ward in Bedlam, where the insane are housed. Some will charm you with their madness and sing or dance. If they come to a farm they will demand food in strident tones, and frighten young women with their wanton looks, in order to be paid to go away.

A ruffler
carries a weapon of some sort and will tell you that he is a discharged soldier. He begs for his relief. If you do not satisfy him, he will use his weapon on you. A typical scene is that a man comes riding up beside you on the road. He will greet you and converse with you pleasantly until you approach a wood. Then he will reach forward, take the reins of your mount and, without explanation, lead you into the wood. The next thing you know he will have your purse, clothes and horse.

An upright man
is a ruffian and thief who travels the highways, carrying a staff, with authority over all the other criminals in ‘his’ area. He also commands the
doxies
(women) of other thieves and uses them to pilfer from those he distracts in conversation at a fair, or to receive stolen goods from a house where he has temporarily taken service.

A doxy
is the term for a woman who is the sexual partner of one or more thieves answering to an upright man. According to the
Caveat for Common Cursitors
‘these doxies be broken and spoiled of their maidenhead by the upright men, and then they have their name of doxies, and not before’.

A mort
is a homeless woman. If she is married she is called an ‘autem mort’; if not, she is a ‘walking mort’. When she has fallen in with a group of thieves and been ‘broken in’ by the upright man, she becomes a doxy.

A dell
is an innocent, unmarried girl or young woman who is on the road. According to Harman, ‘these go abroad young, either by
the death of their parents and nobody to look unto them, or else by some sharp mistress that they do serve, so they run away … Or she is naturally born one, and then she is a wild dell. These are broken very young. When they have been lain with by the upright man then they be doxies and no dells.’

A rogue
is not as authoritative or physically imposing as an upright man, but similarly a man who makes his living on the highways, thieving at fairs and breaking into the houses of the wealthy.

A wild rogue
is a thief with no abode who does not answer to an upright man. Some beg, pretending to seek a long-lost kinsman or friend. Others intimidate their victims with their staff. If one begs a penny from you, he will take your readiness to give as a sign that you have disposable wealth in your purse. According to Harman, a wild rogue will often support several womenfolk accompanying him on his travels.

A prigman
is a man who takes clothes while they are drying in fields or on hedges, or steals chickens and sells them at the nearest alehouse.

A whip-jack or freshwater mariner
is a beggar who claims to be an out-of-work seafarer, and who may present a fake licence to that effect. His chief trade is to rob booths at fairs or to pilfer from stalls.

A frater
begs or steals from women as they go to and from markets.

A queer-bird
has lately been released from prison; he is supposedly looking for work, but steals what he can in the meantime.

A palliard or clapperdudgeon
is a thief or beggar in a patched cloak and little else, who will plead poverty at any opportunity.

A washman
is a palliard who lies down in the highway and feigns injury or illness, seeking the help of a Good Samaritan whom he will then try to rob.

An Irish toyle
is a travelling salesman who overcharges for his substandard wares.

A jarkman
is a forger – a ‘jark’ being slang for a seal. He can read and write, and forges documents such as licences to beg, to pass between ports and to act as a proctor in court.

A kinchin co
is a runaway boy on the highways, who will eventually fall in with a crowd of ruffians and become one of them. Hence a runaway girl is a ‘kinchin mort’.

A courtesy man
is a handsome, well-dressed man who pretends to be your friend when you arrive in a strange town. He will accept drinks and presents from you, but when you are not looking, will relieve you of your purse and any other valuables. Often to be found in the best inns.

A prigger of prancers
is a horse thief. He will take a horse from a pasture or from a man who stops at an inn. Often priggers pretend to be locals when travellers stop in a village. If someone offers to walk your horse while you have a pot of beer, do not accept – you will never see your mount again.

A hooker or angler
walks about the town during the day watching out for things that can be reached from an open window, especially linen and woollen clothes. He then returns at night with a staff with an iron hook and, having lifted the latch of the shutter with a knife, uses the hook to take the clothes. These are then passed to his doxy to sell at an alehouse.

A counterfeit crank
is a man who pretends to suffer from the falling sickness (epilepsy), or who goes about filthy and naked in order to encourage people to pity him and give him alms. He may put soap in his mouth to make it froth and appear all the more frantic.

A dummerer
pretends to be unable to speak in order to beg from sympathetic people.

A demander for glimmer
is an attractive and vivacious young woman, often the doxy of an upright man, who approaches her victims in an alehouse. She will use her charms to win their affection, and then seek some token made of silver or gold, suggesting that if they give her
something valuable they might meet her at some distance from the town to have sex. Whether or not the woman is at the appointed trysting place, her would-be lovers will lose whatever valuables they bring – as well as their purses – when they arrive and meet the upright man.

As you can see, in the criminal fraternity, women are the sexual companions of the men, the lookouts and the temptresses – and are either abused or looked after, according to their luck. Prostitution goes hand in hand with criminality, both in its straightforward form – being paid for sex – and in an infinite variety of other ways, such as blackmailing a man who has been seduced or thieving from him while he is without his hosen. However, many women evade justice. The law is not clear as to whether a married woman can be held responsible for her actions.
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For this reason many doxies marry a rogue or an upright man: if they are caught thieving with their husband and he is a known criminal, he will hang, but she will not, claiming that she was simply obeying him. Some judges treat women more leniently because they are less criminally adept; they steal less frequently and when they are caught they often hold stolen goods of low value. As a result, 85 per cent of all those indicted for theft are men.
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Violent crimes are even more closely aligned with gender: almost all cases of assault and murder that come to court are instances of men fighting. Women are not thought to be capable of beating a man, so unless they actually kill their male victim, or beat up another woman, they are unlikely to find themselves in court on a charge of affray.

There is one exception to this: rioting is as much a female occupation as a male one.
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This is because it is one of the few forms of protest open to women – and when you take action as a group you lessen the danger to yourself as an individual. In August 1577 a commotion breaks out at Brentwood, Essex, when thirty women take the law into their own hands. They seize Richard Brooke, schoolmaster of Brentwood grammar school, and beat him thoroughly for some misdemeanour – probably an injustice to one of their number. The women resist arrest and by the time the sheriff and the JPs arrive they are holed up in the church armed with pitchforks, bills, a pikestaff, two hot spits, two kettles of boiling water, three bows, nine arrows, a hatchet, a hammer and a large stone. When the JPs try to arrest them, several men refuse to assist and many of the women escape.
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One suspects the men know where their best interests lie.

Secular Courts

In Elizabethan England, as today, there are many different courts. At Westminster you have four royal courts: the Court of the Exchequer, which deals with money owed to the monarch; the Court of Queen’s Bench, which adjudicates on the monarch’s other interests; the Court of Common Pleas, which deals with legal disputes between subjects; and the Court of Chancery, which is responsible for inheritances, trusts, marriage settlements and property. Then there is parliament, which judges certain cases of treason, and Star Chamber. Throughout the country local courts deal with a welter of criminal and civil cases. The most serious ones, felonies, are brought before the royal judges at the periodic assizes held in each county. The sessions held before JPs on a quarterly basis – the ‘quarter sessions’ – deal with the next level of criminal activity, mostly misdemeanours (indictable crimes that do not carry the death penalty). The JPs also enforce regulations, collect rates due for the maintenance of highways and the poor law, and issue licences (for example, to beg or to sell victuals etc). County courts, presided over by the sheriff, act as a small-claims court as well as overseeing elections to parliament. Hundred courts exist in two forms: there are the ordinary courts, which deal with nuisances between two or more manors (such as flooding, effluent, pollution, broken bridges and blocked highways); and the high constable’s sessions, or ‘petty sessions’, dealing with the punishment of vagabonds, apprenticeships, payment of excess wages, playing unlawful games and sowing sedition. The mayors of incorporated towns also hold courts dealing with everything from selling poor-quality merchandise to theft. Finally, you have thousands of manorial courts, which have two functions. The ‘court baron’ of a manor looks after the land and its usage by tenants and keeps the court roll that records who has tenure of what land. A ‘court leet’ deals with the election of manorial officers, disputes between tenants, and misdemeanours (but not felonies) committed by them. In some manors the two functions are brought together in one court, with the bailiff presiding; but it is fair to say that the system is in rapid decline, with many courts leet no longer being held and many courts baron meeting only very occasionally, as land is increasingly enclosed or let out on lease.