Controlling Misbehavior in England, 1370–1600

Abstract

In this important study, Professor McIntosh argues against the suggestion that social regulation was a distinctive feature of the decades around 1600, resulting from Puritanism. Instead, through an examination of 255 village and small-town communities distributed throughout England, Professor McIntosh demonstrates that concern with wrongdoing mounted gradually between 1370 and 1600. In an attempt to maintain good order and enforce ethical conduct, local leaders prosecuted people who slandered or quarrelled with their neighbours, engaged in sexual misdeeds, operated unruly alehouses, or refused to work. Professor McIntosh also explores who the offenders were as well as the factors that led to misbehaviour and shaped responses to it. More generally, Professor McIntosh sheds light on the transition from medieval to early modern patterns and succeeds here in opening up little-known sources and new research methods.

The social economy of the medieval village in the early fourteenth century1

“…90 90 On the transmission of moral and intellectual conceptions to the late medieval village, see McIntosh, Misbehavior , pp. 24, 36–8; see also Spufford, ‘Puritanism and social control’. …”

Carnal Knowledge

“…As McIntosh has pointed out, some places did indeed suffer the stress of increasing population, often the result of in-migration, even in the late fifteenth centuryin particular, this was true of certain market centres in the orbit of the metropolis. 53 Elsewhere the difficult circumstances that were in many areas the concomitant of low population levels were not necessarily conducive to tolerant attitudes. There were also medical concerns, centring on the plague andespecially after the arrival of syphilis in England in the closing years of the fifteenth centuryon sexually transmitted disease, though this issue is far less prominent in the records than might have been expected.…”

State Formation and the Historiography of Early Modern England

“…Efforts at social regulation very similar to those of the later Tudor period have been traced to much earlier periods, expressed through different institutions, and without godly protestantism. 24 Many medieval historians are reluctant to employ the term state, however, associating it with a number of characteristics of modern states, or elements of our political vocabulary, which were not present in the medieval period. 25 With or without the term state, however, it is clear that similar analytic concerns are being addressed: both in the account of the functional challenges being addressed and the style of explanation for the failure or success of the responses.…”