https://www.jstor.org/stable/3786636

Full text: https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/3786636

Again as with my last post on the topic of history, I'd recommend reading the entire article first before reading my brief analysis and summary of what I think the main points are.

This is a study of crime in Elizabethan-era Hertfordshire which notes a few things I find interesting. Here are a few notable points the article makes.

It notes that the study of women and crime is challenging because of two factors. One being that there was uncertainty during the time period over whether married women (feme coverts) could be held to account for their crimes. The other being that there is evidence that "then, as today", women in general were treated relatively leniently compared to men when they offended. The article cites a few examples of this happening.

"The Hertfordshire justices of the peace arrested William Harper but not his daughter when both were found at a house which they had seized (SR 5/51). A constable was noted for his refusal to discipline women vagrants in Worcestershire (Bund, Worcestershire County Records, p. 39)."

Thus female criminals are likely undercounted in the official statistics.

The author of the article theorises that this is because women were seen as less criminal, and theorises that if they took advantage of their informal legal protection in numbers that were too large, the system would have been changed. While this is possible I think the author does not consider other potential causes for the disparity in treatment. It does not make much sense to treat identical crimes as different simply because of the sex of the perpetrator. There's a huge amount of evidence showing that people in general are more protective of women than they are of men, and less willing to inflict harm on them. I think it is more likely that this simply reflects sex bias.

It notes that the majority of those who committed theft and other economic offences were men, and that women were underrepresented in these crimes. The author notes that this could be due to men's more assertive personalities, but also theorises that this could be because in Elizabethan Hertfordshire women could feel they were provided for in a way that men could not, in a couple of ways.

First, women could depend upon their husbands. There is abundant evidence in the Quarter Sessions records that the Hertfordshire justices assumed that although women might contribute to the household economy, it was the husband's work which was absolutely essential. Again and again, complaints were made about men who were not working in which the phraseology proved that the main difficulty perceived about an idle man was that he was not taking care of his dependent wife and children. For example, the constable and some inhabitants of Hoddesden complained to the justices of some neighbors who played cards when they should have been working "to the great impoverishing of their wyves and children." The people of Ware asked that a neighbor be released from jail, not for his own sake, but because his imprisonment meant that his wife suffered in poverty.24

A wife's contribution was not discounted. After Edward Hurste beat Anne Roberts, who was pregnant, with a pitchfork when she was gleaning in his field, the authorities noted that her inability to attend to her home and family while she recovered was a hindrance to their maintenance.25 But this was the only such case. Far more common were the instances in which parisioners or justices fretted about a man's idleness because of its evil effect on the wife. Obviously, the magistrates believed that wives could and should be economically dependent on husbands.26

As to the woman unfortunate enough to lack her own man, there is reason to think that Elizabethan society acknowledged more of an obligation to her than it would have to an impoverished male. This was the second way in which women could be dependent. Other scholars have noted a high number of women on Elizabethan and early Stuart poor lists.27 It is impossible to prove that single women received more help than single men in Hertfordshire until family reconstitution has been completed for the parishes with extant poor lists, but scattered evidence does seem to indicate some special understanding for the single woman's, or at least, the widow's plight. She was likely to be seen as one of the worthy poor simply because she lacked a man, while a man, to be seen as worthy of charity, usually needed some special qualification such as old age, sickness, or victimization by fire. John Cutts begged the Mayor of Saint Albans for help for Elizabeth Lawrence, explaining that she was in "very hard case" since her husband had died; assuming that she was incapable of defending herself against the malevolence of her son, he begged that the Mayor's "Christian consideration of her helpless estate" would induce his charity. After Simon Howe deserted his family in the winter, leaving them at the mercy of neighbors, Thomas Shotbolte, a justice of the peace, took it upon himself to find them a hay house in which to make refuge, and the next summer, when the hay house was needed to store the bounties of the harvest, he saw that other provisions were made for them.28 If it were true, as Paul Slack has argued, that a poor woman could expect more assistance from her neighbors and from the magistrates than a poor man, then we have further evidence that Elizabethan women might have envisioned themselves as cared for in a way that men were not.29

Finally, women possessed a third alternative - they could depend on lovers. We should not consider this prostitution in a formal sense, or take it as evidence of assertiveness or independence on the part of the women involved. In the records examined, only one probable prostitute appeared: Joan Drury, who was cited at Saint Albans archdeaconry court because she "suffered persons to commit incontinency in her house with her knowledge as it is said."30 Most women in rural Elizabethan England who profited by sleeping around probably did not conceive of themselves as prostitutes. They did not operate in a fixed place; there were few formal arrangements, or explicit price structures.31 The sexual arrangement between Sara Awstin and Lancelot Reynolds, as described in the former's deposition at the Hitchin archdeaconry court, may well have been typical. She spoke of several times when she had slept with Reynolds, several different occasions when he had given her varying amounts of money, though not as a formal payment. Finally, she had become pregnant and prayed him "to have some care of her." At this point, Reynolds began giving her money not for sexual favors, but in order that she agree to accuse another man of fathering the prospective bastard.

The author concludes "[I]t seems reasonable to argue that Elizabethan women were less likely than men to become thieves or to break commercial rules because they had less need to do so. Confronted by need or driven by greed, Elizabethan men had to strike out on their own. In similar situations, women were more able to turn to males for help."

Society's response to domestic violence and marital quarrels are also addressed.

Apparently a unique kind of "moral horror" was attached to family quarrels, and efforts were made to settle them as privately as possible. "Robert Chester, a justice of the peace, explained to some of his colleagues that he had bound one man to keep the peace toward his wife because "his behavior towards her had been monstrous, better befitting a beast than a man." Although Chester's letter had been torn at a crucial point it appears that some sexual abuse was involved. "He persuaded another man to ... the wife being present," and when she would not yield, grew angry and chased her with a knife. Chester's shock at this was apparent."

Neighbors interfered in domestic fights. The husband in the prior case was reported to Chester by neighbours. In another case neighbours also objected to a man who when "over taken with drinke will beate his wyfe" to their "great disquiet." This doesn't much seem like a culture that endorses wife-beating to me.

While the author states that it is impossible with any certainty "to know who started and who won most of these domestic feuds", they still try to suggest that marital violence at the time was directed mainly by husbands against wives by using this evidence: "Surely, it is significant that most of the evidence we have of Elizabethan women beating their husbands comes from ballads, which usually have a strong comic element, while the evidence of husbands beating wives comes from the portentous tracts of moralists, seriously concerned with what they perceived as an important problem. The ridicule attached to a man beaten by his wife may have made it unlikely that he would willingly publicize his humilation by going to the magistrates. but if this kind of problem had been at all prevalent, it is hard to believe that more serious mention of it would not be found in the sources."

I have a serious problem with this analysis. You can see a similar pattern in the modern day where we see innumerable portrayals of violence by women towards men, and especially wives towards husbands, and it is almost always portrayed in a comic manner, whereas domestic violence against women is hardly ever portrayed comically and always portrayed as a serious issue. Newspapers, governments, NGOs, etc, talk about DV against women as a serious issue, but not about DV against men. And this is despite the fact that perpetration of DV in modern times has been found repeatedly to not be significantly gendered, or has been found to be primarily female-perpetrated, even when it comes to severe forms of violence.

All that is evidence of is that Elizabethan society did not see DV directed against men as a serious problem, and saw DV directed against women as a serious problem needing to be remedied, as we still do in the modern day. Whether we regard something as a "serious problem" or not does not necessarily have to reflect the actual real life prevalence of that problem. Either way, again, Elizabethan England to me does not sound like a society that tolerated wife-beating.

Edit: It is also interesting to see an acknowledgement of proxy violence. In trying to explain the predominance of male perpetrators in violent conflicts with neighbours, the author notes:

"there is some reason to suspect that a large number of the quarrels appearing at Quarter Sessions were between heads of families. In two sample parishes, the accused in each case was traced in the parish registers. Two thirds of the men were certainly married. At the most, a third, and in all likelihood fewer, might have been resident servants or dependent children. This seems an indication that in many cases of discord, family members may have turned their grievances over, Mafia-style, to the head of the family, and that he typically would go to his opposite number in the offending family to settle the case. It would be difficult to prove this conclusively, but tantalizing evidence for such a hypothesis appears in a case which came before William Cocke. It was alleged that Robert Aunsell grew angry because he claimed that Thomas Barledge's master would not avenge Barledge after he had been beaten by Thomas Turner. Aunsell had insisted that not only Turner but Turner's master must be punished, and that Barledge's master was the one who must do this or there would be "such a stir as Pirton had not seen for many years". If it is true that interpersonal quarrels which appeared in the secular courts were often violent and were frequently handled by heads of families, this would explain why women were underrepresented in these cases." The author concludes "Women seemed likely to depend on men to settle their quarrels when they could."

Women really do seem to have been able to rely on men to help them with a whole array of things, from economic provisioning to settling disputes. The article continuously frames it as "dependence" which has negative connotations, but I view being able to get others to do shit for you as a massive benefit. Calling it "dependence" really starts to sound like an attempt to snatch oppression from the jaws of privilege, so to speak.

The article addresses much more in it. In some places. the author jumps to some spurious conclusions. There are many I can identify. One of them is a section where the author states that there was a "taboo" against females using force and being violent and that physical expression was forbidden to them, but fairly little is shown to indicate that such a taboo existed. In fact, the previous assertion that moralists frequently attempted to reduce wife-beating but ignored husband-beating contradicts this claim.

There is also one section towards the end which somewhat goes off the rails containing statements such as that an Elizabethan wife's "role was always to obey" and that "every crime is in some sense a little rebellion against authority, and therefore ultimately political",

However, much of the information contained within about Elizabethans' treatment of men and women is still fairly interesting, regardless.

In short, it's a mixed bag. It's got good information but the author unfortunately decides to try to use the information to paint a somewhat feminist-leaning picture of the past, one which I challenge repeatedly in my post. It'll be interesting to see what people think about the article, and what they agree and disagree with.