By now, I hope you’re feeling well equipped with a veritable arsenal of uproar-inducing tactics that would rile any reputable Renaissance character. However, as we have seen, it’s not always as straightforward as it looks. There just wasn’t a sure-fire way of winding-up all people, in all situations, all of the time – you needed to know what you were doing!
Throughout our period, the vast majority of the population would have liked to see people greeting them with a bare head and a bended knee; they found that such civilities eased and smoothed their daily existence, minimizing confrontation. In particular, people in positions of authority wanted to see social structures acted out in the behaviours around them. Those at the very bottom of the social ladder, however, could only dream of receiving such gestures of respect, despite bowing and scraping to everyone they encountered. Longing to receive a share of that consideration, they could, perhaps surprisingly, become some of the most vehement supporters of respect gestures.
High or low, the inhabitants of Tudor and Stuart Britain would generally have been disgruntled, wrong-footed or even outraged by a refusal to remove a hat and perform a bow. And yet we have also seen that there were small groups of people, particularly towards the end of the era, who actively disliked being on the receiving end of such behaviour. For the Quakers, who refused to remove their own hats and bend their own knees in an attempt to follow a more godly way of life, receiving such courtesies from others was an embarrassment.
Likewise, most people felt that a woman should guard her tongue. Silence and modesty were much admired as virtues in womankind, and when women did speak, a mild tone and gentle words were thought to be best; yet there were those who also held a certain admiration for the wife who could hold her own in a street-slanging match. The extended riffs of colourful language in numerous court cases bear witness to the pride involved in picking an apt and cutting phrase. So we must conclude that although any victim of a phrase like ‘nitty slitty breached knave’ might well have been very upset by the verbal attack, some of the bystanders may have enjoyed the performance immensely. Perhaps there were even some protagonists who rather relished the verbal fencing for its own sake, much as we see reflected in the theatres of the time, where word duels were hugely popular.
If it was hard to annoy all of the people, it was also rather tricky to do it all of the time. Different behaviours shifted from good to bad and back again with disconcerting frequency. Almost any man would have felt aggrieved to be called a knave in 1590, but far fewer would have objected fifty years earlier, or indeed fifty years later, as the term waxed and waned in its offensive impact. We have encountered numerous words and phrases that fluctuated in much the same way, from shouts of ‘witch’ to ‘Puritan’. Nor was this exclusive to words. Swashing your buckler in 1570, despite the disapproval of civic authorities, attracted lots of admiring attention at West Smithfield from young women who thought you adventurous and daringly manly, but if you tried it in 1620 the young women would laugh and sneer at you for being old-fashioned, crude and lower class. Equally, the halting, clerical walk was for many years entirely respectable and acceptable. Yet from the 1620s to the 1650s, the wide-scale fashion for such mannerisms among the vocal, self-appointed ‘godly’ crowd turned it into a flashpoint of irritation for other members of society.
Other behaviours relied upon context in order to offend. Cross-dressing on the stage or in more local entertainments was both normal and respectable (except in the eyes of a few of the ultra-conservative) so long as it was men or boys dressing as women; but remember the uproar when a young man dressed as a woman to attend a lying-in party in the birth room, or the diatribes against women wearing ‘mannish’ hats in the street. Morris dancing frequently involved one man dressed as a character called ‘the maid’, but if any of these men used their female costume outside of the performance, hostility and indeed legal action became much more likely. It is the use of drag in inappropriate places that underlies most of the official records that we have of cross-dressing. Infiltrating an all-female lying-in party may well have been envisaged as a bit of fun but it caused upset and consternation because of the sincerity of the tradition of the birth room. Had it been a girls’ night out at the local alehouse that had been gatecrashed by the young cross-dressing lad there would have been little need for official involvement; people might have been a bit miffed, but the level of fluster, even shock, would have been much lower.
Context was also key in judging the offence that might be caused by bodily exposure and (loss of) control of bodily functions. Spitting, farting, urinating and menstruating were all natural and unavoidable physical processes that were to be managed in a cleanly way and preferably in private. The more public the actions, the more offence could be generated, but that was not the only criterion. Formal situations generated more disgust than informal ones: spitting, for example, was less forgivable at the dinner table than in other contexts. The location also played a part. To spit when outdoors was hardly objectionable, but spitting while taking a walk along the long gallery in a fashionable house could easily cause consternation unless you did so into your handkerchief. Then there was the complication of social status. Underlings were generally expected to show particular care in their control over bodily functions in the presence of their masters, but could afford to be much freer in their movements among social equals or inferiors.
The degree of offence was often magnified by gender. A wide range of misdemeanours that were met with disapproval when performed by men were utterly outrageous when enacted by women. We are accustomed to seeing this double standard applied to sexual conduct, where men are partly forgiven for visiting a prostitute or taking a mistress (the ‘boys will be boys’ approach) while the women involved in those same encounters are thoroughly condemned. The very words outline the difference. A man who visits a prostitute can be called a client, a word that covers many activities and relationships, but he remains a man. The woman is defined by the activity. She is a prostitute, not a woman who works as a prostitute. Promiscuous men are often lauded for their virility, held up as examples of prime masculinity, but you would have to look very hard indeed to find any historical reference to a positive side of female promiscuity.
Such attitudes have been brought to our attention many times in studies of the British Renaissance era, but the dual response is also evident across many of the other forms of mischief that we have been exploring. Smoking and drinking to excess, for example, were disgusting habits that provoked much harsher judgement when women indulged. The public tolerance of men who puked up their drink, exhaled their smoky fumes over people and roared home disturbing all the neighbours was not extended to the women who joined them. The men are termed drunkards and stinkards but the women are almost without exception also branded as whores. The male drunkard might sober up and return to respectability but the female drunkard faced a much longer road in search of her former social standing.
Good manners in general demanded far more from women than from men. A small slip by a man was excusable, even amusing, but a moment of laxity by a woman risked more in the way of public disapproval. Take farting, for example: men who farted in public could afford to laugh it off in a hearty fashion, marking themselves out as robust and vigorous. Fart jokes in both elite and plebeian literature generally have a very masculine tone and feature male protagonists. The farter is funny – naughty, perhaps – but there is nothing fundamentally wrong about him; he is still a good fellow. Jokes about women farting are much rarer, and where they do occur are often coy, rather slyer and crueller in nature. Think back to the two published accounts of fart jokes from the last chapter: the open, rumbustious and cheerful ‘Parliamentary Fart’ populated by men alone, and the sideways swipe at a woman disguising her farts by blaming the dog. Women’s failures of bodily control are skipped over in most forms of literature – a decision that is often presented as ‘chivalrous’, a polite and considerate averting of the gaze – but it masks this underlying double standard. Male bad behaviour can be openly laughed about because it has little impact, but female bad behaviour must be covered up as too shameful for the public gaze.
Another trend we have encountered in our search for bad behaviour is just how often people did it in the proper way – behaving well in their choice of transgression, if you will. This is particularly marked across gender boundaries. People shouted one set of insults at their female foes and another, quite different set of words at their male enemies; there were rude gestures employed by both sexes but others that were used primarily by men, such as thigh slapping, or the hands-on-hips stance and finger wagging that were the preserve of women. Fighting, as we have seen, was also highly gender specific, being for the most part a male form of conflict, with the fairer sex only occasionally getting involved, and then only targeting their opponents’ face and hair. Fighting with weapons was even more strongly associated with men.
Social class, too, had a bearing upon the correct form of naughtiness. In 1590, a quarrelsome gentleman refrained from throwing a punch; instead he issued a challenge and met his adversary at dawn, armed not with a staff or a sword and buckler, but with a rapier. There was a right way and a wrong way to break social rules. Or perhaps we should say that there were many layers of rules and that the majority of rule breakers were willing only to break one or two of these layers at a time. The dueller was breaking the law and offending against both the Church and society, harmony and forbearance being the most widely held ideals when faced with personal irritation and upset. The dueller was willing to set those considerations aside, to behave badly in the eyes of the world – but only up to a point.
During the whole of our period we find not a single account of an Englishwoman taking part in a duel. There are a handful of accounts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (some of which are apocryphal), and elsewhere the magnificent Swedish noblewoman Gorwel Gyllenstierna is recorded as taking on the man who married her sister in 1661, while over in France as the seventeenth century drew to a close Julie d’Aubigny was embarking on an extraordinarily colourful career of cross dressing, opera singing and duelling, but within British shores female duellists are limited to the realms of fiction. We almost witness an overturning of the usual gender rules in Twelfth Night when the count’s servant – a young woman disguised as a young man (played by a young male actor) – is bullied into facing the cowardly Sir Andrew Aguecheek. The duel is, however, halted before it begins by the arrival of the young woman’s brother. Even upon the stage – and performed by a man – the suggestion of a woman duelling is a shocking one that Shakespeare pulls away from. Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher in their play The Maid’s Tragedy (1610) are a little braver and permit their young male actor playing the part of a young woman dressed as a man to fight, drop ‘her’ guard and be fatally wounded. The scene was clearly regarded as the play’s big draw, and a woodcut of the thrilling, killing blow adorns the front of the published version.
The real-life dueller was conforming not only to gender expectations but also to an actual written code with carefully prescribed actions and procedures: deferring the meeting until the designated time, selecting the approved venue, pre-agreeing whether the fight was to finish at the first drawing of blood or whether it would continue to the death and involving other people in formalized roles (the ‘seconds’, gentlemen chosen by the duellists to be present as supporters and witnesses to ensure that proper procedure was carried out). In almost every way he was a conformist, a well-behaved gentleman embracing the strictures of a widely held honour code. He took offence at the sort of things he was told were insupportable and responded in the manner of his social class and gender. When a village wife found herself in conflict with a neighbour it was words and gestures that she selected as the perfect weapons for the occasion. This was what was expected of a person of her class and gender. Yes, they were bad, but they were an informally tolerated form of bad. There was a ready-made vocabulary for the situation and a number of well-understood postures and hand gestures. She could, of course, extemporize upon the themes, employing different combinations of the usual words and sentiments, even introduce one or two flourishes of her own into the mix, but essentially she was following a set pattern.
Within the general run of insult, injury, disgust and repulsion there are numerous discernible groups who based their own set of social rules on breaking the rules of society at large. We have frequently turned to Thomas Dekker’s Guls Hornbook in our exploration of the murky side of life, noting the advice he gave upon bows, nakedness, visits to the privy during meal times and so forth. What emerges as the perfect ‘gul’ is a recognizable character, contemptible to many of the citizens of London who had to deal with the real-life versions every day. What gave the small book its humour and bite was the way it pointed out the conformity and uniformity of a certain group of badly behaved men at a very particular moment. The gul is a creature following a set of rules. They are not, perhaps, the rules that their fathers and tutors might have chosen, but they are nonetheless a coherent set of behaviours that were current among a group of wealthy young men who thought themselves rebellious, adventurous and beyond the normal bounds.
The code applied most closely to gentlemen’s sons who found themselves at a loose end in the country; their fathers or brothers held the land titles and were occupied in supervising estates, leaving them to be somewhat surplus to requirements. Clutching their patchwork of small inheritances and allowances, they congregated in London and forged a small subculture. Their bad behaviour carried a defiant tone, a devil-may-care performance that masked a need to fit in with their fellows, if not with the strictures of more mainstream society. They took special care over their appearance, investing heavily in fine fabrics and fashionable clothing and adopting a distinctive long-haired look that contrasted sharply with that of the citizens they lived among. They spent their time in a small number of well-known locations, St Paul’s in particular, where significant concentrations of their fellows would gather. They were young and notoriously touchy and they liked to believe that they were superior to those around them. They got up late in the morning, frequented the theatre and other public entertainments, drank heavily, took up smoking with enthusiasm and indulged in rude and loutish behaviour at the inns, taverns and alehouses where they ate their meals. (Anyone who tries to tell you that teenage subcultures were invented in the second half of the twentieth century is sadly lacking in historical perspective.)
Guls and gallants are prominent at the turn of the century, emerging in the 1580s and fading away as the Civil War approached. Similarly badly behaved subcultures, such as the swashbucklers of the 1550s to ’70s and the gangs that coalesced from around 1590, occupied broadly equivalent niches. The bad manners, casual violence, heavy drinking, smoking and sartorial extravagances that they employed were by no means unique – we have seen all of these iniquities spread across all strata of society in both town and country – but for those within the groups and those looking in from the outside their particular blend made them appear unique.
In contrast to these idle, wealthy males were other distinctive groups who embraced bad behaviour as a badge of belonging. The Quakers, for example, would have been mortified to be bracketed with guls, Hectors and swashbucklers, but they too used civility – or lack thereof – quite consciously to form and strengthen group identity. The autobiographical writings of early converts are quite explicit, detailed and focused upon the difficulties encountered in shifting their behaviour from the mainstream to the appropriate Quaker way of doing things and the social pressure that was exerted by their new religious cohort to do so. Other ‘hotter sorts of Protestants’ or ‘Puritans’ also found great affirmation in social dissonance. The distinctive walks, the use of kissing and handshakes, the refusal to join in drinking to someone’s health, the rejection of certain fashions as well as heavy usage of ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ all marked them out as separate and different. Those who wished to signal that they had undergone a ‘convincement’ (conversion) embraced these atypical behaviours that rubbed the rest of the population up the wrong way. They, too, like the Damned Crew, Hectors and Tytere tue, thought themselves superior to the common herd.
With all this in mind, to be utterly bad would require you to be something of a chameleon constantly adjusting your speech, manners, mannerisms, dress and accoutrements in order to remain at odds with those around you.
In many ways this is familiar territory to us in the twenty-first century. We, too, are accustomed to moving between groups who hold varying opinions and sensibilities, to adjusting our behaviour according to our surroundings, the company we are keeping, or even the time of day (think of the nine o’clock watershed upon terrestrial TV in the UK and the US equivalent of ‘safe-harbour’). Words that one group of people find offensive can be embraced by another group, denoting belonging. I remember quite vividly, for example, learning to swear. I was working for the railways and in one particular posting found myself viewed as an outsider. I was supposed to be learning about the workings of a yard but the men would not let me be involved in any way until I accidentally said a word which, unbeknownst to me at that time, was considered rude in that part of the country. Everyone relaxed. Suddenly, as a swearer, I was on the inside. Everyone felt much more comfortable and as long as I continued to pepper my speech with swear words I was one of the gang.
Familiar, too, are all the concepts about bodily control; the preference for people to exercise discretion when dealing with bodily processes, fluids and waste products remains strong. The disgust we feel when someone vomits over our shoes, splashes their urine all around the toilet bowl or leaves their used tampon out on show links us directly with our ancestors. The mischievous use of farts and burps to raise a laugh in company or subvert a formal situation is no mystery to us since these things lie well within our own experiences. Annoying people by the way you dress or the mannerisms, speech patterns and gestures that you choose to adopt are especially beloved by the youthful members of modern society, seeking to carve out an identity of their own, just as different groups of young people sought to do in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Nor is the concept of behaving badly along approved lines one that we are unfamiliar with, and gender is still a major contributing factor; although the divide is less absolute than in the past, there remains a bias towards female fights being fundamentally verbal and male fights being more likely to involve physical violence. Our sense of outrage at such behaviours also continues to contain a gender bias. The fulminations in the tabloids about a growth in the number of young women who use violence are often couched in terms that make it clear that female indulgence in intimidation, muggings and other attacks is somehow worse and more frightening than their male equivalents.
But while the general landscape of bad behaviour has points of continuity from past to present we have seen that the detail can be illuminatingly dissimilar and point to radically different mindsets. The rather casual reminder within a manners book that a young serving man should avoid murdering anyone can bring a modern reader up short. A woman running to tell the Lord Mayor of London that she has just spied upon her neighbour having sex with a man who is not her husband also gives pause for thought.
The badly behaved reveal to us a society that valued reputation and respect far, far more strongly than we do. We see people whose self worth and social status is tightly and intricately bound up with regular small public performances of respect and who react vigorously, and often violently to the smallest slight. We have seen how much of that respect is bound up with sexual behaviour, for both sexes. No matter what the source of the disagreement, slanging matches in the street tended to degenerate into accusations of whoredom and cuckoldry because it was the most effective form of attack. It was in matters of sexual behaviour that the weakest spot in someone’s armour could be found. Innuendo and unfounded speculation was enough to undermine, or threaten to undermine, social standing.
The proliferation of male outbursts of violence, whether it be with fists, staffs or swords highlights a completely different understanding to our own of what it means to be a man in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Physical prowess, strength and ‘bravura’ commanded respect and admiration, they denoted leadership and authority. Higher status individuals were expected to be more touchy and prone to violence than humbler men, and masculine authority within the family rested in part upon the use of physical ‘chastisement’ to subdue and control children, wives and servants.
We see, too, a society that is by no means prudish, but who see sexual behaviours in a particularly black and white mould, with clearly defined boundaries between good and bad behaviour but with little interest in further, more detailed, classification.
The near obsession with clean linen and the distaste for nudity are also laid out to our view. Inspired by medical understandings of the nature of disease and exposed by the moans and complaints about other people’s failings, from the playing cards engraved by Wenceslas Hollar, to the sharp comments of Lucy Hutchinson in her biography of her husband and contained within the humorously dreadful shenanigans of figures such as Thomas Dekker’s guls.
People’s beliefs about the way the natural world worked, about human bodies and our interactions with the divine are revealed as drastically different from our own understandings, and we are brought back to them again and again by their commentary on bad behaviour. People resembling beasts, for example, is a frequent theme of suboptimal behaviour and is rehearsed with significantly more vitriol and disapproval than we would ascribe to animalistic habits, reminding us of the Renaissance viewpoint that men and animals were substantially different, separated by God into those with and without souls and that this was a fundamental and un-crossable divide.
The physical and spiritual differences between the sexes are another extraordinarily powerful driver in this historical period that we have seen converted into a myriad of gender specific misdemeanours. The story of the Garden of Eden is placed at the centre of the lived experience of every man and woman backed in many instances by Galenic humoral theory.
We have only scratched the surface here, of course, but what a wonderful, exotic and intriguing world is beginning to shine through. It is a hugely varied and complex world, with many different groups, places, situations and times demanding subtly different responses, driven by viewpoints that can seem strange and even shocking to the modern mind. But oh, so fascinating. And just think, this is where we all came from.
