The perception of the past in early modern England

Keith Thomas (1983)

Introduction

Ariel Hessayon

Keith Thomas has always been an innovator. When one thinks of his ground-breaking work perhaps the most striking feature is the elegant way in which he illuminates an often hitherto peripheral subject through a dizzying array of sources while at the same time gently guiding his readers towards important conclusions. Moreover, reviewing Thomas’s extensive publications in chronological sequence one marvels not only at the magisterial breadth of research interests, but also at his uncanny knack for anticipating scholarly fashion. Examples include an article on ‘Women and the Civil War sects’ (Past & Present, 1958); ‘The double standard’ (Journal of the History of Ideas, 1959); ‘History and anthropology’ (Past & Present, 1963); ‘Work and leisure in pre-industrial England’ (Past & Present, 1964); ‘The tools and the job’ (Times Literary Supplement, vii, April 1966); the incomparable Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (1971), a work that despite its critics has worn well with time; ‘Rule and misrule in the schools of early modern England’ (Stenton Lecture, 1976); ‘Age and authority in early modern England’ (Raleigh Lecture on History, British Academy, 1976); ‘The place of laughter in Tudor and Stuart England’ (Neale Lecture, University College, London, 1977); ‘The puritans and adultery: the Act of 1650 reconsidered’, in a Festschrift for Christopher Hill (Oxford, 1978); the wonderful Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (1983), which set the scene for the advent of Green History; ‘The meaning of literacy in early modern England’ (Wolfson College Lectures, Oxford, 1986); ‘Numeracy in early modern England’ (Prothero Lecture, Royal Historical Society, 1987); ‘History and literature’ (Ernest Hughes Memorial Lecture, 1988); ‘Children in early modern England’, in a Festschrift for Iona and Peter Opie (Oxford, 1989); ‘Cases of conscience in seventeenth-century England’, in a Festschrift for Gerald Aylmer (Oxford, 1993); ‘Cleanliness and godliness in early modern England’, in a Festschrift for Patrick Collinson (Cambridge, 1994); ‘Health and morality in early modern England’, in an edited collection of essays (1997); an edited anthology of sources for The Oxford Book of Work (Oxford, 1999); ‘Changing conceptions of national biography: the Oxford in historical perspective’ (Leslie Stephen Lecture, Cambridge, 2005); and ‘Art and iconoclasm in early modern England’, in a Festschrift for Nicholas Tyacke (Woodbridge, 2006).¹

From this it seems that the direction of Thomas’s research has been predominantly shaped by two impulses: the impact of contemporary events (feminism; changing attitudes towards sexuality, the family, childhood and the elderly, as well as labour and recreational activities; government education policies; Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat’ of technology and optimism about the use of computers; environmental concerns; fear of deadly, incurable epidemic disease, particularly AIDS) and new theories about human nature and human behaviour (notably developments arising from progress in psychology, sociology, anthropology and economics). Coincidentally, he recently predicted that future innovations in our discipline would spring from these same two sources.² In all this an understated radical agenda emerges. For although Thomas never fully embraced Marxism, with its once seductive teleology and overarching categories, he nonetheless successfully broke away from what were traditional, indeed narrow, intellectual preoccupations when he began his career at Oxford: the behemoths of political, diplomatic and military history. Escaping what he considers to be the tyranny of present-mindedness, Thomas’s imaginative, not to say sometimes nostalgic, reconstructions of earlier mental worlds and the varieties of lived human experiences have substantially enriched what was then largely unexplored historical terrain. So much so that his legacy has been like a giant oak tree whose branches spread almost haphazardly, roots delving deeply into fertile soil, evergreen foliage covering the vicinity in its shade.

Yet for all that, there has also been an acknowledged element of serendipity. When combined with what today appears a quaint way of organizing and writing up material – stuffing bits of paper containing handwritten information into thematically arranged envelopes; using ink, typewriter and eventually word processor – the result conveys a sense of traditional scholarly methods. This impression is reinforced when one considers Thomas’s habit of initially approaching fresh research topics through random, if gargantuan, browsing that enables him to harvest incidental references. Accumulating evidence piecemeal, with systematic and exhaustive reading following at a later stage, the impetus to fashion talks and articles in particular has come from a number of directions; suggestions from colleagues, contributions to Festschrifts and invitations to deliver prestigious lectures. Modern scholars working to deadlines imposed by the Research Assessment Exercise, publishing more frequently and earlier than they might have wished, can only envy such an unhurried pace of production. But that is a bygone age.

Coming to Thomas’s Creighton Trust Lecture on ‘The perception of the past in early modern England’ twenty-five years to the day after it was delivered before the University of London, the first thing one notices is that his key question remains relevant: should the past be studied for its own sake or in the service of the present? As he expertly demonstrates, the answer would have been straightforward to contemporaries – the past existed to legitimate or subvert present-day reality. Displaying the influence of social anthropology, briefly engaging with Michel Foucault’s view of popular memory and Antonio Gramsci’s notion of folklore, Thomas weaves together scattered and occasionally obscure sources into a vivid tapestry depicting sixteenth- and seventeenth-century learned and popular mentalities. He shows how a range of manuscripts and printed texts (authentic and forged documents such as charters and deeds, genuine and spurious genealogies, myths of national and civic origin, chronicles, histories, topographies, history plays, ballads, almanacs and chivalric romances) intermingled with collective memory of local legends (noble ladies riding naked through towns, the Danish Yoke, underground passages) and physical evidence (buildings, ruins, earthworks, stone circles, oddly shaped rocks, wells, place names, coins, weapons, skeletons, funeral monuments, stained glass windows, portraits, clothing and other artefacts), not to mention traditions (common law, religious rituals, calendar customs, Sunday sports, pastimes), to create both underlying tensions and sources of stability within English parliamentary, courtly and county politics as well as urban and rural life. These vestiges of the past, whether actual or fabricated, which had survived by chance or design, were appropriated by politicians, theologians, religious radicals, humanist scholars, antiquarians, playwrights, almanac writers, poets and painters, among others, in vital struggles during and after the Reformation as Catholics and Protestants constructed competing national, institutional, communal and individual identities. For as Thomas observes, the Reformation had created the sense of an ‘unbridgeable divide’ (p. 197) between the present and the past, a gaping gulf that despite ‘cultural and institutional continuity’ (p. 199) separated early modern from medieval England.

Since Thomas’s lecture our understanding of how the past was perceived in early modern England has been greatly enhanced by the work of Daniel Woolf, whose doctoral dissertation Thomas co-examined. In addition, thanks to Adam Fox’s research, we now know a great deal more about oral traditions and the interplay between oral and literate cultures in early modern England. Nonetheless, the outline that Thomas presents here continues to be an excellent introduction to this fascinating and central field. Furthermore, if it is self-evident that the world around us influences the ways in which we approach the past, and the aspects we choose to focus upon in our investigation, then it is equally true, as Thomas concludes, that ‘what we write has, willy-nilly, implications for the present’ (p. 214). Which is a roundabout way of saying that not only does the present influence the study of the past, but that very study influences the present, or as Thomas Hobbes succinctly put it; ‘of our conceptions of the past, we make a future’.

The perception of the past in early modern England*

Keith Thomas (1983)

The very great honour of being invited to give the Creighton Lecture is matched only by the difficulty of choosing an appropriate subject for the occasion. When Mandell Creighton himself was asked to deliver the Romanes Lecture at Oxford in 1896, he found it hard to settle on a topic which, as he put it, would occupy an hour without boring people too much. Eventually he plumped for what he called ‘a frivolous subject’, ‘The English national character’,¹ a tempting theme, but one which, as a Welshman, I feel it would be prudent for me to avoid.

One of the reasons for Bishop Creighton’s hesitation was that, like many modern historians, he had no particular axe to grind. G. P. Gooch would write of him: ‘he had no theories, no philosophy of history, no wish to prove or disprove anything’.² Creighton studied the past for its own sake; and many, perhaps most, academic historians would say that that was the right attitude to take. Professor Elton tells us that ‘those who would wish to make history acceptable and socially serviceable by directing its thoughts to the present day and the alleged demands of contemporary society unfortunately, with the best of intentions, lead it straight to destruction and damnation’.³

In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England that would have seemed a very strange position for a historian to adopt. The only respectable justification for the study of the past was that it could be of service to the present. The idea of history for history’s sake was no more acceptable (or even intelligible) than that of art for art’s sake. The case for recalling the past was a practical one. History was a great repository of experience from which useful lessons could be drawn. This assumption united the theologians, who saw in the past the workings of God, the moralists, who valued it for its examples of virtuous conduct, and the ‘politic’ historians, who looked to it as a source for maxims of statecraft.

Together, these practical expectations account for the great bulk of historical writing published in the early modern period. It is true that, under humanist influence, there was beginning to develop a critical scholarship which showed an embryonic concern with reconstructing the past ‘as it really was’, rather than just dipping into it for some particular purpose. But most historical and antiquarian study was animated by strong contemporary preoccupations and the notion of detached academic history belonged essentially to the future.

Meanwhile, the selection of those aspects of the past which were to be preserved was largely determined by contemporary needs. The most common reason for invoking the past was to legitimate the prevailing distribution of power. Antiquarians made historical inquiries so as to resolve questions of jurisdiction and precedence. Historians were concerned to instil patriotism, loyalty and acceptable political attitudes. They also provided genealogies and myths of origin for the ruling dynasty, the church, the common law and the aristocracy. To landowners, records of the past were indispensable as a buttress of property rights in the present. When Warden Woodward toured the New College estates in the sixteen-seventies, he used manorial documents from the reign of Richard II.⁴

Of course, many of these invocations of the past were historical fictions. There was a well-developed trade in the forgery of so-called ‘old deeds’, which could be made more convincing by being smeared on dirty windows or carried around for weeks in the forger’s pocket;⁵ and spurious genealogies were ubiquitous. The fabulous past was present in the royal pedigrees tracing the ruler’s descent from Noah or the Trojan Brutus, no less than in the ambitious family trees of Tudor gentlemen like Sir Arthur Heveningham of Norfolk, whose line went back to ‘Arphaxad, who was one of the knights that watched Christ’s sepulchre’.⁶ The University of Cambridge cited ‘ancient and credible historians’ to prove its foundation by ‘one Cantabar, a Spaniard’, 375 years before the incarnation of Christ.⁷ The moral or aesthetic value of such legends was at least as important as their historical veracity.⁸

Similar traditions were invoked by local communities to justify their civic rights or their common land or their immunity from some particular jurisdiction. Usually, they involved a mythical figure whose heroism had secured lasting benefits for posterity. It was not only Coventry which was indebted to a noble lady. At St. Briavel’s in Gloucestershire a countess of Hereford had ridden naked through the town (the only voyeur being struck blind) in order to secure the commons for the people;⁹ and at Dunster in Somerset Lady Mohun had obtained as much common land for the people as she could walk round barefoot in one day.¹⁰ At Tilney in Norfolk they could point to the tomb (‘of a wondrous antique fashion’) of one Hikifricke, who, ‘upon a time (no man knows how long since)’, had established the boundaries of the great common of Tilney Smeath by leading the neighbouring villagers in a battle against the landlord.¹¹

True or false, these myths functioned in early modern England to provide what the anthropologists call a ‘charter’ for contemporary claims. They called in the past to ratify the present. In a more subtle, but also more profound, way this was what most written works of history did too. For in their selection of subject matter they implicitly conveyed to their readers a sense of what was important, not just about the past but also about the present. The history offered by the Tudor chroniclers was the story of kings and nobles, wars and dynasties. The subject of the topographies and county histories which proliferated in the seventeenth century was the landed gentry, their seats and estates, their manorial descents, their heraldry, genealogy and monuments. In civic histories the chronology was that of the mayoral year and the election of municipal officers. The virtual exclusion of a large proportion of the population from any of these works paralleled their exclusion from social and political power. In this way the ruling authorities obtained what Sir John Plumb has called ‘a secure and usable past’. ‘If one controls people’s memory’, writes Michel Foucault, ‘one controls their dynamism’; and he argues that ‘it is vital to have possession of this memory, to control it, administer it, tell it what it must contain’.¹²

But in early modern England such a goal was impossible to achieve. Anthropologists suggest that in some oral societies historical myth and contemporary reality neatly fit each other; no tradition will last which is incompatible with the prevailing distribution of power; and if a version of the past no longer serves to provide a modern ‘charter’ it will either be revised or swallowed up and forgotten.¹³ England was not like that. With its written records and printed books, it was incapable of such instant amnesia. The unassimilated, unfunctional past could not be so easily shrugged off. Much of it lay around in physical form. Buildings, ruins and earthworks were there for all to see. Coins, weapons and human bones were turned up by the plough. The names of houses, fields and villages recalled vanished institutions and previous inhabitants. The memory of the past was pre-served in calendar rituals, like that of Hock Tuesday, which commemorated Anglo-Saxon resistance to the Danes, and in funeral monuments, like the royal effigies in Westminster abbey, which in the seventeenth century crowds of people came ‘daily to view’.¹⁴

So much of the past was on permanent display that there was always a risk that some inadvertent survival might prove not supportive but subversive of contemporary claims; and when that happened the authorities had to intervene in an effort to suppress the unacceptable memory. This was why Protestant reformers smashed the images and painted glass which preserved memories of Catholic saints; and it was why Thomas Cromwell rewrote the story of Thomas Becket. In the same spirit, his adviser Sir Richard Morison urged the suppression of the Robin Hood games on May Day, because they encouraged the wrong attitude by depicting the outlaw in the act of rescuing from the sheriff of Nottingham ‘one that, for offending the laws, should have suffered execution’.¹⁵ Elizabethan and Jacobean historians were strongly discouraged from penetrating the secrets of state; and censorship of their writings was common.¹⁶

But the legacy of the past was too ubiquitous for any government to control. Popular perceptions were shaped by a host of competing influences, too complex to be easily manipulated. There were all the published chronicles and abridgements. There were historical plays, which, by Jacobean times, were numerous enough to give illiterate spectators some knowledge of every segment of British history from Brutus to James I, even if the knowledge was not always reliable: in 1683 the city of Norwich agreed to license a puppet show entitled ‘Henry the Fourth and Jane Shore’, after tactfully pointing out to the showman that ‘it should be Edward IV and not Henry’.¹⁷ There were ballads and verse histories: John Aubrey recalled that, when he was a child, his nurse ‘had the history from the Conquest down to Charles I in ballad’.¹⁸ There were the almanacs, with their admirably precise chronologies: 907 B.C. ‘Boots invented’; 1195 A.D. ‘The Bible first divided into chapters’.¹⁹ And there were the chivalric romances, which, in chapbook form, retained a large lower-class readership well into the eighteenth century. These tales of Bevis of Southampton and Guy of Warwick did at least as much as more conventional historical writing to shape popular notions of the past. For, then as now, the distinction between history and the fiction of ‘once upon a time’ was not easy to comprehend, particularly when the doings of these romantic heroes were located in some specific historical era: Guy of Warwick, for example, flourished (as the chapbook put it) ‘in the blessed time when Athelstan wore the crown of the English nation’.²⁰

This half-historic, half-mythical past was firmly anchored in popular consciousness by the widespread habit of attaching heroes and events to specific localities. When the antiquary John Leland visited Alcester in the reign of Henry VIII, he found that ‘the people there speak much of one S. Cedde, bishop of Lichfield, and of injuries there done to him’; at Lichfield they showed him a stone at the bottom of a well, ‘on the which some say that Ced was wont naked to stand on in the water, and pray’.²¹ Relatively few of these saints’ legends survived the Reformation, but when later antiquarians travelled through England, they encountered hundreds of similar local associations. Some may have been genuine, like the belief of the inhabitants of Chilham, Kent, that Julius Caesar had camped in their village during his second expedition to Britain. Some were at least possible, as in the identification of the place where William I had set up his standard before Hastings.²² But others were more optimistic. A visitor to seventeenth-century England could, if he wished, see the spot where Edward I had pitched the tent in which he died, the sword which had killed Thomas Becket, the hill where St. George had killed the dragon and the funeral effigies of Pontius Pilate and his wife.²³ At Nottingham he could contemplate Robin Hood’s well, his chair, his bow and his cap; at Guy’s Cliffe he could inspect the cave in which Guy of Warwick used to sleep and in Warwick castle he could gape at his sword, his armour and a rib of the monstrous boar he slew.²⁴

The past was also invoked to explain peculiarities in the local landscape. Ancient stone circles were said to be armies or wedding guests turned into stone.²⁵ Cromlechs and barrows were the graves of ancient princes or tombs of men slain in great battles, usually against the Danes.²⁶ Curiously shaped rocks were the work of giants²⁷ or the Devil (whose impact on the English landscape was considerable)²⁸ or of King Arthur, to whom, wrote William Camden, ‘the common sort ascribe whatsoever is ancient and strange’. Arthur already had his ‘chair’, his ‘oven’, his ‘palace^’ and his ‘well’. Sir Gawain’s skull was preserved in Dover castle; the Round Table was at Winchester; and in Cornwall was the place where Arthur had fought his last battle, ‘in token whereof ’, reported Leland, ‘the people find there, in ploughing, bones and harness’.²⁹

The past was thus ever-present in the minds of the common people. They showed visitors the sites of famous battles.³⁰ They had traditions about the origins of particular settlements³¹ and they offered ingenious explanations of how they had acquired their names: ‘our vulgar are whimsical in nothing more than etymologies of places’, thought Edward Lhwyd.³² Traditions about the past which validated contemporary claims were jealously cherished. When Leland visited Scarborough it was ‘an old mariner’ who explained to him that Henry I had granted the town its privileges; and in the New Forest in the eighteenth century there was still a family occupying the ground which they claimed had been given as a reward to their ancestor, a charcoal-burner, who had picked up William Rufus’s body and piously carried it in his cart for burial in Winchester.³³ Early modern England was, therefore, not at all like fourteenth-century Montaillou, where the mental world of the French villagers, we are told, had virtually no historical dimension at all.³⁴

Yet though there was a historical side to popular thinking, it did not necessarily coincide with the perceptions of the learned. The popular perception of the past was much less sequential or chronological. Episodes from different periods were not ranged in temporal order; they seem to have existed alongside each other in a single conflated past; and it was only the literary influences of the Bible, the chronicles and the almanacs which gradually helped to inculcate a more linear mode of thought.³⁵

Moreover, though popular memory was as selective as that of the educated, its principles of selection were not the same. Ordinary people could be indifferent to aspects of the past which their betters regarded as important. ‘Where is the folk ballad of Magna Carta?’ asks the historian of the folk song, ‘Or of Agincourt, for the matter of that?’³⁶ The historical records cherished by the well-to-do might be precisely those which the lower classes were content to do without. In one Staffordshire village the Elizabethan inhabitants deliberately defaced a church monument to the Beke family because it preserved details of the labour services due from the tenants of their lands.³⁷ During the Interregnum some radicals suggested that the manorial records which the gentry hoarded so diligently should be destroyed as instruments of tyranny. ‘Thou shalt see a cartload of skins, being records’, cried a sectary; ‘Prophesy against them: say they shall bear record no longer’.³⁸

In recent times some European historians have been attracted by the Italian Marxist Gramsci’s conceptions of ‘folklore’ as a body of popular belief which is formed, at least implicitly, in opposition to official views of the past;³⁹ and it is tempting to suppose that the traditions of the common people embodied a subversive memory of their struggles against their superiors. There are elements in the popular view of the past in this period which might support such a view; the idea that the people’s liberties had been lost under the Norman Yoke, for example⁴⁰ (though it is hard to find any popular, as opposed to learned, hostility to the Conquest and its legacy before the sixteen-forties; and the evidence of local tradition suggests that it was less the Norman Yoke than the Danish Yoke which was most vivid in the popular mind).⁴¹ There were subversive tales about outlaws: not just Robin Hood, but all his analogues and parallels, like ‘wild’ Humphry Kynaston of Myddle in Shropshire, who defied the under-sheriff and his posse by making a great leap on his horse over the Severn and about whom the people told ‘many romantic stories’, or the giant Jack of Legs, whose grave could be seen in Weston, Hertfordshire, and who, ‘as fame goes ... was a great robber but a generous one, for he plundered the rich to feed the poor’.⁴² In highly exceptional circumstances there could even be an explicit rejection of the whole tradition of official historiography. At the Putney Debates in 1647 the Leveller John Wildman declared that ‘whereas it’s spoken much of chronicles, I conceive there is no credit to be given to any of them; and the reason is because those that were our lords, and made us their vassals, would suffer nothing else to be chronicled’.⁴³

Yet though the people’s perception of the past was often different from that of their superiors, it was not necessarily antagonistic. Nor was it formed independently of other influences. Indeed there are two distinct reasons for hesitating to accept popular folklore as the expression of an autonomous lower-class view of the past. The first is that the extent of popular ‘belief ’ in these traditions is easy to exaggerate. As Edmund Gibson observed, when discussing the habit of labelling stones as King Arthur’s ‘table’ or ‘chairs’, these nicknames were not given ‘so much (as some have imagined) out of ignorance and credulity’, but ‘as a kind of rustic diversion’.⁴⁴ Many stories about the past survived because they were colourful, humorous, intrinsically memorable. It would be naïve to attribute their longevity solely to their ‘sheer entertainment value’ or to ‘popular love of a good story’, for there is no such thing as ‘sheer entertainment value’, unrelated to the audience’s own hopes and fears; and it would be right to enquire why particular stories should have evoked so strong a response. Nevertheless, there is a half-flippant quality about some of these rural traditions which should restrain us from treating them portentously.⁴⁵

The second reason for caution is that a large proportion, perhaps the overwhelming majority, of popular beliefs about the past had literary origins. They were not the pure water of oral tradition, springing unpolluted from the font of popular memory. Rather, they had been distilled by a long interaction between popular and learned culture. ‘Local tradition’, remarked W. H. Stevenson sardonically, is usually the false identification of a local antiquary impressed upon the minds of the inhabitants. Or, as Sir Edmund Chambers wrote more mildly, ‘folk belief on the one hand, literary and antiquarian ideas on the other, interpenetrate’.⁴⁶ Some of the topographical associations with King Arthur date back to the ninth century and beyond, but the great majority are subsequent, often long subsequent, to the twelfth-century history of Geoffrey of Monmouth. The ‘memories’ of St. Chad which Leland encountered at Lichfield are unlikely to have dated from the seventh century. They are much more likely to have been propagated by the zealous clergy who were the custodians of his profitable shrine and had read accounts of the saint’s life. Many medieval churches disseminated hagiographic legends by incorporating them in the noticeboards displayed for the benefit of visitors.⁴⁷

Notions which had originated with, or at least been preserved by, literate authors could thus become the property of the common people, and could be sustained or transmuted by them when they had been discarded by the educated. Tudor and Stuart antiquarians became increasingly self-conscious about the distinction between history and myth. Hostile to romances (‘the bastard sort of histories’, as one writer called them),⁴⁸ they specialized in debunking stories of Brutus or Arthur or Godiva; and in their readiness to denounce so-called ‘vulgar errors’ they did not always recognize their literary origins. Edmund Gibson dismissed Welsh mythology about drowned cities as ‘one of those erroneous traditions of the vulgar’, but the most recent student of this mythology concludes that it owed more to learned authors than to popular memory.⁴⁹ In 1715 Ralph Thoresby lamented the ‘brutish ignorance’ of some Yorkshire labourers who had destroyed a recently unearthed Roman statue in the hope of finding treasure; but the original source for the view that the Romans had buried their treasure before leaving Britain was the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.⁵⁰

Of course, the debris of literate culture could be reconstituted by the uneducated into an authentically ‘popular’ view of the past. But we should realize that such a view did not arise primarily out of oral tradition. All the evidence of other societies suggests that, without written records, memories will be short and very selective. People remember their fathers, but their grandfathers are hazier; and after that things are soon forgotten, though there may well be founding myths about the remote origins of society.⁵¹ We find the same in early modern England. There were the mythical founders of cities and families and there were the aboriginal giants who had hurled stones around the landscape and whose bones were occasionally still dug up.⁵² Biblical history had left its mark in the fossils, salt springs and marl pits which were popularly thought to be the result of Noah’s Flood.⁵³ But the interval between remote antiquity and the present day was much more perfunctorily sketched. Many genealogies leaped quickly from mythical ancestor to modern times; as one antiquary put it, they were like head and feet without a body, two ends without a middle.⁵⁴

This shallowness of oral tradition did not, however, prevent the emergence of some conception of what the relatively recent past had been like. On the contrary, it made the construction of such a notion all the easier by giving abundant scope to the imagination. The dramatic rupture with the medieval past occasioned by the Reformation created a sense of separateness and of an unbridgeable divide. This made it possible to perceive the recent past, not just as a collection of founding myths and precedents, but as the embodiment of an alternative way of life and set of values. The thought of the early modern period is well known to have been deeply affected by quasi-historical perceptions of ancient Israel and classical Rome. It was equally affected by a perception of medieval England.

***

Early modern England had not one myth of the middle ages, but two; and they were sharply opposed to each other. One was supportive of the social order, the other potentially subversive. The opposition was not between learned and popular. It was between competing ideas among the learned themselves. Long afterwards, the essence of these conflicting views was admirably expressed in one of the brisk dialogues in Thomas Love Peacock’s novel Crotchet Castle (1831). For one of the participants, the romantic Mr. Chainmail, the middle ages meant fighting, feasting, praying, chivalry, courtly love and charity. For the other, the pounds-shillings-and-pence philosopher Mr. MacQuedy, they were a dreadful period of brutality and violence, barbarous poetry, lazy monks and immoral friars.

In the century following the establishment of the Tudor dynasty and the breach with Rome, the official view was close to that of Mr. MacQuedy. The times of popery, explained a Jacobean preacher, were ‘full of wars, bloodshed, massacres, treasons, rebellions, robberies ... Wicked and monstrous were those days’.⁵⁵ Protestants and humanists made a self-conscious breach with the immediate past. The Reformers claimed to return to the traditions of the primitive church, strenuously disowning those of its medieval successor. The humanists preferred classical antiquity to the degenerate Latin and credulous writings of the monastic era. Together, they portrayed the high middle ages as a period of ignorance and superstition, evoking it with appropriate meteorological metaphors: ‘thick mist’, ‘gross darkness’, a ‘cloud of ignorance’. ‘In the time of Popery’,^, wrote an Elizabethan, ‘they made darkness and ignorance two of their pillars. They fed the people with scum and dross’.⁵⁶ Literary critics disparaged the medieval romances for their barbarous rhymes, their inherent improbability and their unacceptable values: in the Morte d’Arthur, thought Roger Ascham, ‘those be accounted the noblest knights that do kill most men without any quarrel and commit foulest adulteries by subtlest shifts’.⁵⁷ Chivalric romances, ancient prophecies, tales of goblins and fairies were dismissed as part of one great clerical conspiracy ‘to busy the minds of the vulgar sort ... and to avert their conceits from the consideration of serious, and graver matters ... lest they might otherwise ... intend ... matters of state or religion ... which they kept secret and covert, as mystical privities ... to be handled and disposed by the clergy’.⁵⁸

At the centre of this conspiracy were the monks – idle, gluttonous, lecherous. The monks had been so lazy, it was said, that it was proverbial to call idle people ‘abbey-lubbers’ and ‘fat men were said to have abbots’ faces’.⁵⁹ The restraints of an unnatural celibacy had been so ineffective that the bones of thousands of dead infants had been found in the monastic fish-ponds.⁶⁰ The monastic orders would later achieve a central role in English pornography. When Willian Prynne sat next to Samuel Pepys at a dinner, he talked of the records he had found of ‘the lust and wicked lives of the nuns heretofore in England’, pulling an example out of his pocket to show him.⁶¹

In Protestant tradition, the middle ages became a time of darkness and mystery, ghosts and fairies, secret tunnels and alchemical elixirs. When Francis Kilvert was a Wiltshire curate in the eighteen-seventies, he found that the old people told strange tales of ancient times, declaring that the past was full of ‘witches, weasels [wizards] and wolves’. This view of the middle ages as strange and occult did not originate with the Romantic period or with eighteenth-century tales of gothic horror. It went back to the century after the Reformation, when Protestant theologians claimed that the medieval church’s doctrine of purgatory had fostered belief in ghosts, just as its exorcisms had encouraged stories of elves and fairies.⁶² By the nineteenth century there was scarcely a village in England without its tale of an underground passage supposedly linking the church or manor house with a deserted chapel or monastic ruin. Such legends date from the sixteenth century and the notion of the monastic era as a time of illicit intrigue.⁶³

The cultural and institutional continuity between Tudor England and the medieval past was, of course, too great to permit such a caricature to go unchallenged. The universities retained the scholastic syllabus, just as the lawyers looked to the judgements of their medieval predecessors. Literary advocates of the vernacular praised the work of Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate, thus helping to establish the canon of medieval English literature.⁶⁴ The Elizabethan reading public devoured medieval romances, while the courtiers of the Virgin Queen practised a romantic chivalry of jousts and tournaments, masquerading as Arthurian knights and defending mock castles in cardboard pageants.⁶⁵ Edward III and the Black Prince were accepted models of valour and military prowess; and in 1582 the privy council commanded that a highly nationalistic Latin verse account of English military exploits in the later middle ages be studied in all grammar schools.⁶⁶ The poetry of Daniel and Drayton represented the recent past as a time of heroic deeds and national glory:

O when shall English men

With such acts fill a pen,

Or England breed again

Such a King Harry?

The parvenu gentry of late Tudor England happily identified with a feudal past, building sham castles and commissioning monuments to their medieval ancestors.⁶⁷

This sentimental appeal to the medieval past was harmless enough, reinforcing as it did the nationalist aspirations and social authority of the Elizabethan aristocracy. But a much less comfortable view was developed by those who had lost out at the Reformation, the Catholics. Like other losers, they chose to romanticize the past in order to attack the present. Catholic propagandists noted that the breach with Rome had been followed by heavy taxation, a huge rise in prices and a general worsening in the position of the peasantry; and they contrasted these developments with what they called ‘those happy days past’, ‘the late better times’.⁶⁸ They confidently blamed Protestantism for the difference. The abolition of fast days, they suggested, had put up the price of meat.⁶⁹ The end of the confessional had sapped moral standards, unleashed avarice and precipitated a torrent of litigation.⁷⁰ The abandoning of the doctrine of purgatory had ended good works of charity.⁷¹ The marriage of the clergy meant that ministers could no longer afford to dispense hospitality, ‘as in times past was accustomed’; it also threatened to multiply the population to an intolerable level: one Elizabethan propagandist calculated that if clerical marriage were to continue for the next 400 years, the population of England would reach the grand total of 603,550,000.⁷²

Above all, the Catholics portrayed the Dissolution of the monasteries as a major catastrophe. It had flooded the labour market with unemployed persons. It had installed a new set of avaricious landlords, whose methods contrasted sadly with the lenient rule of the monks; and it had cut off charity to the poor.⁷³ The papist Nicholas Harpsfield, languishing in the Tower, offered a simple diagnosis of Elizabethan economic problems: ‘Whereby is it come to pass that where before there dwelt many a good yeoman … there is nobody now dwelling but a shepherd with his dog, but by the suppression of the abbeys? Whereby is it that … now sheep eat up houses, whole towns, yea, men and all, but by the suppression of the abbeys?’ Across the channel, the Jesuit Robert Persons took up the refrain: ‘Our religion prohibiteth landlords to raise their rents or any other way to press their tenants … Our good forefathers in times past, and especially all religious men, used to let their lands at a reasonable rate.’⁷⁴

Implicit in these writings was a picture of the medieval past as an idyllic time of charity, hospitality and prosperity: ‘it was a good world when Mass was up, for then all things were cheap.’⁷⁵

Just how cheap was a matter of dispute. Harpsfield thought that before the Dissolution eggs were ‘at twelve or more a penny’, whereas some of his co-religionists allegedly claimed that in those days ‘bread was bigger, ale was stronger, beef more plentiful ... twenty-four eggs for a penny’. The ballad-maker Deloney has ‘Ignorance’ asserting:

before the Vriars went hence,

A bushel of the best wheat

was zold for vourteen pence:

And vorty eggs a penny.

In modern times the painstaking researches of Thorold Rogers would reveal that the correct figure was twenty for a penny.⁷⁶

Such discrepancies did not affect the main message. ‘Every man that is about thirty years old’, declared John Christoferson in 1554, ‘shall witness with me that I say true that before we forsook the whole Catholic Church of God ... our commonwealth was so rich ... strong and mighty that no other was there ... that might be compared with it’. At the accession of Henry VIII, agreed George Cavendish, ‘this fertile and plentiful realm of England ... flourished in all abundance of wealth and riches’ and was ‘called then the golden world, such grace of plenty reigned then within this realm’.⁷⁷

Cavendish’s reference to the golden world alerts us. For it reveals that his picture of pre-Reformation England is not the simple product of oral tradition, but has been overlaid by literary convention. The same convention influenced other Catholics, like Thomas Dorman, who wrote in the fifteen-sixties that, before the Reformation, ‘charity, simplicity, sobriety, so reigned universally, that of us that time might well be called the golden age of which the poets dreamed’.⁷⁸

The classical idea of the golden age was not necessarily backward-looking, for it was common for Renaissance poets to pretend that a new golden age was about to be inaugurated by the accession of a virtuous ruler, like Elizabeth or James, who would restore the felicity of the past.⁷⁹ But more commonly the myth of the golden age represented a happiness which had gone for ever. It was now an age of iron.⁸⁰ Such a notion fitted in easily with the widespread, pessimistic belief that people were living in ‘the latter days’, which the scriptures had foreseen as a time of corruption and decay, marked by the declining fertility of the earth and the growing weakness of human bodies.⁸¹

The Catholics were therefore not the only ones to invoke ‘the former and better times of our forefathers’, ‘the flourishing and golden days’, ‘the constant service of the antique world’.⁸² Of course, not everybody was so pessimistic. Those who believed in the steady ascent of man scorned the myth of the golden age: life in the remote past had been rough and barbarous; new inventions were daily improving the quality of human life.⁸³ But nostalgia for the past remained implicit in most social criticism: one attacked an evil by evoking an earlier age when it had not existed. All through the middle ages there had been commentators who had looked back to some previous period as a time of lost perfection, whether the days of Richard II, or of Edward III, or of Edward, king and martyr, or even of St. Oswald, king of the Northumbrians.⁸⁴ Such a lament was a commonplace in European literature: ‘il buon tempo antico’; ‘le bon vieux temps’; ‘die gute alte Zeit^’.⁸⁵ No doubt, it reflected the universal tendency of old men to look back wistfully to the idealized days of their youth.

O born in days when wits were fresh and clear,

And life ran gaily as the sparking Thames;

Before this strange disease of modern life ...

So when Elizabethan Catholics made a nostalgic appeal to medieval England they were drawing upon assumptions which were shared by many of their contemporaries; and a heavy weight of literary and intellectual authority underpinned their lament. The notion of a lost medieval age of gold was upheld by many social critics, Protestant no less than Catholic; and if we examine the ephemeral literature of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries we can see it everywhere.⁸⁶ The chronology is vague and the details vary with the critic concerned. But the main features are remarkably constant.

It was a rural age: people lived in ‘the sweet country’, not in ‘unsavoury London’.⁸⁷ It was socially static: everyone kept his place and was ‘content with his vocation’.⁸⁸ Clothes were unpretentious: ‘the old English garb’ was plain country russet and each man dressed according to his station, not trying to pass himself off as better than he was.⁸⁹ Not yet effeminated by ‘luxury’, the inhabitants were healthy and vigorous, fighting, not with gunpowder but with the longbow, ‘the ancient glory of England’.⁹⁰ They had better teeth too (‘no tobacco taken in those days’).⁹¹ The ancient Britons had been healthier still, living on roots and the bark of trees, and capable of standing up to their chins in watery marshes for days on end.⁹² All this contrasted sadly with current physical deterioration. An observer in 1638 thought that the distance over which men shot arrows at the butts had diminished even since the accession of Elizabeth; and there was now no one strong enough to wield the lance which had been borne by Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk, the favourite of Henry VIII.⁹³

It is not difficult to recognize in this picture the ‘hard’ primitivism of classical tradition.⁹⁴ The notion of medieval Englishmen as vigorous, uncorrupted by luxury and social ambition, is so close to that of the sturdy citizens of republican Rome or the honest peasants of pastoral myth that it is tempting to dismiss the whole image as the product of rhetorical tradition. Certainly it is very close to the parallel myth constructed by Elizabethan Protestant nationalists of the Anglo-Saxons as a manly, warlike and pious race.⁹⁵

Yet, though this model of the past was shaped by obvious literary influences, it was not purely literary, for it possessed some distinctive features which were the result of genuine observation, albeit observation of the present rather than the past.

First, there was an awareness that consumer goods had multiplied. The supposed simplicities of the medieval age were contrasted with the Elizabethan clothes of silk and velvet, the silver and pewter on the tables, the newly invented coaches in the stable. Though most people welcomed the increase in comfort, there were others who could not reconcile themselves to the fickleness of fashion and who saw in the imitative buying of the lower-class consumer a threat to the certainties of the social order. The lament for a vanished age was implicit in the demand for new sumptuary laws, the vain attempts to establish a ‘settled fashion’ and the belief that most consumer goods were unnecessary superfluities.⁹⁶ It was pleasant to recall the past, when the only looking-glass for most women was a tub of water.⁹⁷

Second, there was hostility to the multiplication of lawyers and the growing volume of litigation. The medieval past was seen as a time when there had been few disputes and those had been amicably settled by informal arbitration:

If neighbours were at variance they ran not straight to law,

Daysmen took up the matter, and cost them not a straw.⁹⁸

The barrister John March produced statistics to show that actions for slander were non-existent before the reign of Edward III and very rare before the time of Elizabeth.⁹⁹ The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries may well have been the most litigious period in English history and the early middle ages the least, but a closer look at the judicial records of the fifteenth century would have dispelled the myth of an unlitigious past.¹⁰⁰ It survived because it fitted the belief (for which there was strong Biblical support)¹⁰¹ that in the perfect world lawyers and litigants did not exist.

Third, the medieval past had been sober. Conveniently forgetting the tradition that the invasion of William the Conqueror had succeeded because the English were drunk at the time, having been corrupted long before by the Danes,¹⁰² many critics now asserted that drunkenness had not reached England until the fifteen-eighties, when English soldiers fighting in the Netherlands had picked up bad habits from the Dutch.¹⁰³ John Aubrey later explained that in the middle ages, there were ‘no alehouses … When they had a mind to drink, they went to the friaries’.¹⁰⁴

Fourth, medieval sobriety had been accompanied, paradoxically enough, by lavish hospitality, freely extended by great householders to passers-by. This, it was said, was the ‘ancient custom of this realm of England’.¹⁰⁵ John Norden evoked the ‘old worthy houses ... whose kitchens’ smoke sent forth clouds of good meat and showers of drink for the poor’; and Bishop Goodman recalled the ‘huge gates and open doors, spacious halls, long tables, great kitchens, large chimneys … cellars, ovens, vessels, pots and powdering tubs, deep, profound, and bottomless’.¹⁰⁶ Conviviality became associated with the past. Hospitality was not just hospitality; it was ‘ancient hospitality’, ‘the true old English hospitality’.¹⁰⁷ Christmas was not just Christmas; it was ‘old Christmas’, ultimately the ‘old-fashioned Christmas’. ‘Old hospitality; old wine; old ale; all the images of old England’, as Peacock’s Dr. Folliot would put it.¹⁰⁸

Fifth, the medieval past had been a time of piety, honesty and ‘plain dealing’.¹⁰⁹ ‘Then were the churches open all day long, men and women going daily in and out hourly, to and from their devotions.’ On the walls of their dwellings (‘as in some old houses is yet to be seen’) there were painted hangings on which ‘were writ good, moral sentences ... which argues the goodness of that age’.¹¹⁰ Theft was so rare that there was no need for locks and keys.¹¹¹ A man’s word was his bond and legal obligations were unnecessary.

Was not then a merry time

When they [sic] neighbour came to mine:

Canst thou lend me twenty pound

For to buy a piece of ground?

Without statute or a bond,

Their word as good as any hand.¹¹²

This is the simplicity of pastoral, no doubt, but many were seduced by this vision of the innocent, trusting past. The Laudian divine John Pocklington was accused in 1641 of having affirmed ‘it to be an evident sign how acceptable the Romish religion was to God in former ages, because there were not then in the times of Popery so many murders, adulteries, robberies, etc., as since have been in the time of Protestancy’. Even the stout Protestant Philip Stubbes confessed that ‘if we look narrowly into the former times, and ages past, we shall find more godliness, devotion and zeal (though it were but a blind zeal), more love one towards another, more simplicity in dealing, more fidelity and faithfulness ... than is now to be found’.¹¹³

And, finally, the medieval past had been an age of charity. Benevolent monks and pious endowments had taken care of the poor, without any of the terrors and expense of the Elizabethan Poor Law. ‘Our forefathers’, thought Henry Smith, were men of ‘large liberality’. The ‘ancient citizens’ of London, noted John Stow, spent their money on hospitals and poor relief, not on banqueting houses for show and vanity. It was a great source of humiliation to godly Protestants that their forefathers should have so surpassed them in the performance of good works.¹¹⁴

This stylized picture of the medieval past would reach its apotheosis in the writings of John Aubrey, whose vivid picture of the later middle ages, virile and warlike, yet also charitable, pious, festive and unlitigious, has been admirably evoked by Dr. Michael Hunter.¹¹⁵ It would be wrong to mistake it for genuine social analysis. But neither can it be dismissed as a mere literary artefact. It was shaped by the historical circumstances of post-Reformation England and was an amalgam in which real social facts jostled together with the images of literary convention and the inherent nostalgia of social criticism. It was propagated by educated writers, but it also struck popular roots.

Particularly evident in Elizabethan England was nostalgia for the monasteries. ‘Many do lament the pulling down of abbeys’, wrote Francis Trigge in 1589. ‘They highly commend their liberality to the poor, their courtesy to their tenants, their commodity to the commonwealth’.¹¹⁶ There was widespread agreement that opportunities had been missed. The monasteries might have been reformed rather than abolished; or, at least, their resources could have been put to better use, to strengthen the royal finances, to help the poor, to support education and the clergy.¹¹⁷ From the localities came complaints that the Dissolution had jeopardized the prosperity of towns, the upkeep of roads and bridges, the repair of sea defences and the fabric of churches.¹¹⁸ Regret for the destruction of monastic buildings, attachment to the notion of a pious, contemplative life, the belief that abbeys and convents had provided employment for the gentry’s younger sons and a safe refuge for their unmarried daughters: all combined to produce a nostalgic picture of England before the Dissolution.¹¹⁹

Above all, it was said, the people had suffered. The end of monastic alms-giving, thought an Elizabethan, was a loss ‘of which the poor so much complain when they see the scattered walls that yet do stand’.¹²⁰ This gratitude for monastic hospitality was not shared by all the commons, many of whom had rushed to participate in the destruction of the abbeys and to ransack the ruins for building materials.¹²¹ But it was kept alive in ballads and popular doggerel:

That which was used in ancient time

When that abbeys were in prime,

When the beef and brews flourished,

When the silly souls were nourished,

Every table then was spread,

Even furnisht out with beef and bread.

Who was then the abbot’s guest?

The widow poor that was oppresst,

The pilgrims with their silvered hairs,

The orphans with their brinish tears.¹²²

In 1668 a woman in St. Albans related to Elias Ashmole how her grandfather ‘would often discourse’ of the abbey before the Dissolution, recalling that every stranger was given three days hospitality before any questions were asked. When Dr. Pococke visited Glastonbury in 1750, he reported that ‘the people here seem to have learnt by tradition to lament the loss of support they had from this abbey’. He was told that the monastery used to consume six oxen weekly and that the monks would ring the bell to call in the poor to eat what was left over.¹²³

The notion that the abbeys were particularly benevolent landlords also became deeply entrenched, ironic though it must have seemed to those who recalled the attacks which had once been made upon monastic enclosers and engrossers.¹²⁴ In the early sixteenth century the abbey of Furness had alienated its tenants by its modernizing estates policy, but by 1583 the tenants were contrasting their new landlord unfavourably with the monks of the past, who had provided them with weekly disbursements of bread and beer.¹²⁵

The reformers found this popular tradition of a charitable and prosperous middle ages a real obstacle to their progress; and at the Hampton Court conference in 1604 it was urged that ‘lamentable experience ... doth too plainly witness in most places’ that many people wanted Catholicism back because they thought that ‘love and charity and plenty’ had gone out of the world when the gospel came in. One of the ‘common opinions’ of ‘poor’ and ‘ignorant’ people which William Perkins thought it most important to dislodge was ‘that it was a good world when the old religion was, because all things were cheap’.¹²⁶

Transmitted both orally and through the published histories of Jeremy Collier in the eighteenth century and William Cobbett in the nineteenth, this image of medieval charity would survive to colour the thinking of many Victorian social reformers.¹²⁷ In the later sixteenth century it was greatly exploited by Catholic propagandists, who unashamedly identified medieval England with the vanished golden age. Robert Persons in his Memorial promised an end to the racking of rents, a check to social mobility, a reduction in litigation and the return of the commons to ‘their old simplicity, both in apparel, diet, innocency of life, and plainness of dealing’.¹²⁸ The prospect of ‘a golden day’ was held out in many of the prophecies with which discontented recusants sustained their hopes. With the return of popery and the monasteries would come ‘cheapness and plenty’.¹²⁹ During the fifteen-eighties and fifteen-nineties, bad harvests and heavy taxation generated what has been described as the ‘extraordinary fantasy of a vagrant army under Catholic commanders ready to liberate the poor of England’.¹³⁰ Meanwhile, Catholics in exile contrasted the alleged miseries of Elizabeth’s subjects with the felicity enjoyed before the Reformation, stressing all the now-conventional signs of deterioration: ‘there were never so many suits in law’; ‘never less neighbourhood among the people’; ‘never so much injustice, never so much extortion, never so much theft, never so much pride, ebriety’.¹³¹ The same power of this literary commonplace to stimulate political action can be seen in the royal proclamations by which the early Stuart kings repeatedly commanded the gentry to leave London and return to their houses in the countryside, there to dispense what was described as the ‘ancient and laudable custom’ of hospitality. ‘Let us in God’s name ... keep the old fashion of England’, urged James I; and his son repeated the theme: hospitality was an ‘ancient usage’, ‘for which this nation in former times hath been much renowned’.¹³² A similar acceptance of the myth of the past underlay the statute of 1607 against ‘the loathsome and odious sin of drunkenness’, which it described as ‘of late grown into common use within this realm’.¹³³

It was out of all these different allusions to a bygone age of happiness that there gradually evolved the now familiar notion of Merry England. It had long been customary for people who grumbled about the times to say that it ‘had never been merry’ since whatever they deplored had come into existence. ‘Surely, surely, good neighbours’, they said in the fifteen-thirties, ‘we had never merry nor wealthy world since abbeys were put down’; and in early Stuart times the old-style parson would lament that ‘it was never merry world since there was so much preaching, for now all hospitality and good-fellowship was laid abed’.¹³⁴ Scores of such utterances are recorded; and they carried with them the unmistakable implication that the past had been merrier than the present: ‘It was a merry world ... before the Bible came forth in English; all things were good cheap and plentiful.’

Vor when we had the old Law

A merry world was then:

And every thing was plenty

Among all zorts of men.¹³⁵

In 1552 Dr. John Caius urged his contemporaries ‘to live quietly, friendly and merrily one with another, as men were wont to do in the old world, when this country was called merry England’. ‘Twas a merry world in the old time’, says a character in a Jacobean dialogue – a formula which William Wordsworth would echo over 200 years later:

They called Thee MERRY ENGLAND, in old time.¹³⁶

Originally, the word ‘merry’ had meant no more than ‘pleasant’ or ‘happy’. As Sir George Clark sternly remarks, ‘the phrase “Merry England” does not imply any abnormal jollity among our ancestors’. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the expression carried overtones of prosperity and fertility; and it was in that sense that Brutus was said to have conquered ‘Merry England’. But gradually the term acquired an increasingly festive connotation, conveying not just contentment but jollity and conviviality, as in ‘the merry monarch’ or ‘merry Christmas’.¹³⁷

This association of Merry England with festive rejoicing, particularly with the rural sports of the village green, owed something to the tradition of pastoral romance which inspired such royal diversions as the ‘Maying’ of Henry VIII at Shooters Hill in 1515, when the king and queen sat on the greensward and were served with wine and venison by royal archers dressed as Robin Hood and his merry men, or the entertainment for Queen Elizabeth at Elvetham in 1591, when three musicians ‘disguised in ancient country attire’ greeted her with ‘a pleasant song of Corydon and Phillida’.¹³⁸ The pastoral myth of shepherds fleeting the time carelessly as they did in the golden world exerted as powerful a spell on the courtiers of Elizabeth as it would do on those of Marie Antoinette.

But what really established the association between Merry England and bucolic rejoicing was the attempt in the early seventeenth century by crown and church to revive country revels, Sunday sports and what they called ‘the old exercise of England’. Their aim was to show that the popish past had no monopoly of festivity and to rebuff the puritans, who had tried to suppress wakes and ales. Rural sports supposedly fostered neighbourliness, while diverting the populace from more seditious amusements. Such considerations underlay Captain Robert Dover’s revival of the Cotswold games in 1612 and the issue of the two Declarations of Sports in 1618 and 1633. They were still there at the Restoration, when the duke of Newcastle advised Charles II to bring back maypoles, cakes and ale and ‘all the old holidays, with their mirth … Feasting daily will be in Merry England … The divertisements will amuse the people’s thoughts and keep them in harmless action, which will free your Majesty from faction and rebellion’.¹³⁹

It was in defence of such pastimes against their puritan critics that the myth of Merry England finally emerged.

Happy the age, and harmless were the days

(For then true love and amity were found)

When every village did a may-pole raise,

And Whitsun-ales and May-games did abound:

Then reigned plain honest meaning, and good will.¹⁴⁰

In the early seventeenth century Nicholas Breton, William Warner, Richard Corbett, Ben Jonson and other writers helped to consolidate this nostalgic image of the village green with its maypole and dancing, its curds and cream, cheesecake and syllabub, all set in a rapidly receding past in which classical arcadia and rural England were evenly blended.

I should think it still might be

As ’twas, a happy age, when on the plains

The woodmen met the damsels, and the swains,

The neatherds, ploughmen and the pipers loud,

And each did dance, some to the kit or crowd,

Some to the bagpipe; some the tabret moved,

And all did either love or were beloved.¹⁴¹

Already Merry England had moved from the late middle ages to the Elizabethan period. In due course it would move still further forward. For Dryden it lay in the early seventeenth century:

Then our age was in its prime,

Free from rage and free from crime,

A very merry, dancing, drinking,

Laughing, quaffing, and unthinking time.¹⁴²

By the mid Hanoverian period ‘the glory of old England’ was associated with the age of Anne, supposedly the last period of simple manners before the corruption of the Walpolean era.

      were England now [sighed William Cowper]

What England was, plain hospitable, kind

And undebauched.¹⁴³

By the eighteen-twenties it had reached a point somewhere in the mid eighteenth century, ‘when the tables were covered with brawn, and beef, and humming ale ... and when rich and poor were alike welcome to enter and make merry’, as Washington Irving’s Squire Bracebridge put it.¹⁴⁴ By mid Victorian times, the past invoked by the demure revivals of maypoles and rush-bearing was too vague to be capable of any precise chronological location. But the attributes of Merry England were constant: a contented, revelling peasantry and a hierarchical order in which each one happily accepted his place and where the feast in the baronial hall symbolized the ideal social relationship.¹⁴⁵

Of course, the myth was strenuously denounced from the moment it appeared. ‘They say it was merry’, sneered a pamphleteer of 1534, ‘but they tell not what time it was, with whom, nor wherein it was merry’. And the challenge was repeated by many later critics. ‘Show me when this good world was.’¹⁴⁶ Defenders of the new order protested that the days of popery had not been days of plenty. ‘See what dearth, death and dearness was then!’ cried Bishop Pilkington. If the monks had seemed generous landlords, argued Francis Trigge, that was only because the population had been so reduced by the Black Death that landlords were glad to get tenants on any terms. The low prices of the past had the same explanation: ‘Who would not sell twenty eggs a penny than keep them till they be rotten?’¹⁴⁷ If our forefathers were less litigious, said George Hakewill, that was because they settled their disputes by violence and civil war.¹⁴⁸ As for ‘ancient hospitality’, its extent had been greatly exaggerated and its effect was to nourish a throng of beggars who would have been better off beating hemp in Bridewell. If the so-called ‘good-housekeeping’ of former times were examined, said the preacher Richard Bernard, ‘we should find ... such houses were houses of riot, excess, prodigality, gluttony, and drunkenness’. The traveller Fynes Moryson rejected ‘the vulgar opinion, preferring old times to ours, because it is apparent that the cloisters of monks (who spoiled all that they might be beneficial to few) and gentlemen’s houses (who nourished a rabble of servants in idleness, and in robbing by the highways) ... were cause of greater ill than good’.¹⁴⁹ Anyway, even if the poor had been materially better off in the past, they had the gospel now and that was worth more than any carnal blessing.¹⁵⁰

In the same spirit the puritan clergy opposed the Laudian attempt to restore the mirth of the village green. To them, wakes and maygames were heathenish vanities, encouraging idleness and wasting energy. One puritan sympathizer, denouncing May Day customs and Whitsun sports, declared that those who followed the Hocktide practice of importuning people for money for the church ‘did as good pick their pockets’.¹⁵¹ For these enemies of collective revelry, the myth of Merry England could hold no charm.

***

There was thus no single perception of the medieval past in early modern England and no unchallenged custodian of popular memory. Rival myths, developed in the course of political and religious struggle, and shaped by inherited literary convention, competed for popular allegiance. At a time of fierce ideological conflict, a ‘balanced’ view of the recent past, of the kind hinted at in the writings of Samuel Daniel, was inevitably a rarity.¹⁵² What was at issue in the conflicting attitudes of Laudians and puritans to the idea of Merry England was less a view of the past than a clash between two sets of values in the present: the one upholding community, conviviality and hierarchy; the other emphasizing sobriety, industry and individualism. A similar conflict of values underlay the contrasting Protestant and Catholic views of the middle ages. Because these rival myths were so deeply rooted in opposing views of the world, they could never be dislodged by historical research; and each would have a long subsequent life. Myths which express some social or ideological need can seldom be refuted; and the debate between Mr. Chainmail and Mr. MacQuedy can go on forever, regardless of whatever our modern, hard-headed medievalists say.

The relative impotence of historical scholarship in areas like these should give academic historians pause for thought. It is, I think, a relatively common experience to find that what we write about the past has very little effect upon the historical conceptions of ordinary people. Since most academics write for each other, this is perhaps not very surprising. But the tenaciously ineradicable character of some popular stereotypes of the past is something of which we should be aware.

No doubt, our most deeply rooted images of the past are those acquired in childhood; and until historians rewrite the literature of the nursery they will never alter popular perceptions. But there is more to it than that. These historical myths have an imaginative utility and a social function, ratifying as they do our deepest assumptions. People hold on to outdated images of the past because they need them. The modern sceptical historian is a debunker of myth and contemptuous of the sort of sentimentality about the past I have been describing. But the sad truth is that he can only expect to be listened to when he operates in an area wholly uncharged with current social meaning, that is to say when he deals with issues to which his contemporaries are indifferent. Only when the past is seen as irrelevant to the present, can detached academic history hope to enjoy a monopoly of attention.¹⁵³ Meanwhile it competes with a host of more powerful influences.

Yet how detached is academic history itself? The irony is that even the most scrupulous historian is busy myth-making, whether or not he realizes it. For are we not, all of us, manipulating our genealogies to meet new social needs when we investigate hitherto neglected aspects of the past, constructing pedigrees for, say, the working classes or for women or for black people? And even when our subject matter remains resolutely traditional, are we not reassuring ourselves when we demonstrate that the people of the past were no less subject than we to the pressures of economic interest or sexuality or whatever our current anxieties may be? We are thus just as active as our unacademic predecessors in constructing a charter to reinforce, or sometimes to subvert, present-day attitudes; and our perception of the past is still unconsciously shaped by contemporary preoccupations. Perhaps the myths we construct are less influential than the popular myths with which they compete. But that does not make them any less mythical.

So though, like Bishop Creighton, we may have no wish to prove or disprove anything, we should be aware that what we write has, willy-nilly, implications for the present. And not only for the present. For it is still the case, as Thomas Hobbes wrote long ago, that ‘of our conceptions of the past, we make a future’.¹⁵⁴

Appendix A
The Danish Yoke

There is much evidence for popular mythology relating to the Danish occupation. The Northamptonshire antiquary John Morton thought in 1712 that local legends about battles between the Saxons and the Danes should be disregarded: ‘’tis the way of the vulgar with us to attribute all such actions to the Danes and ... there are many such erroneous traditions.’¹⁵⁵ Castles, stone circles, burial mounds and other monuments were frequently associated with the struggle against the Danish invaders.¹⁵⁶ Several wild plants were said (perhaps originally by local antiquaries) to have derived their reddish colour from the blood spilt during the resistance; and in the north the dwarf mulberry (or cloud berry) was popularly known as the Knotberry because the Danish king Cnut had allegedly subsisted on it during a beleaguered period. In Lancashire there was a bird (‘of a luscious taste’) which ‘in remembrance of King Cnut they call the Knot-bird’.¹⁵⁷ Traditions of resistance to the Danes were kept alive by the Hock Tuesday play and by annual bonfires.¹⁵⁸ The widely read romance of Guy of Warwick told how that hero had distinguished himself fighting against the ‘bloody Danes’; and the great cruelty of the Danish invaders was proverbial.¹⁵⁹

Appendix B
Underground passages

Popular belief in the existence of subterranean passages between old houses, castles, monasteries and other ruins is attested in most modern studies of regional folklore.¹⁶⁰ If all these alleged subways had really existed, it has been said, ‘medieval England must have been honey-combed by a tube-system of singular and bewildering intricacy’.¹⁶¹ The belief in their existence seems to have been established by the later sixteenth century. In 1570 John Dee casually referred to ‘secret passages underground, between place and place (as this land hath divers)’; and George Owen records an example in Elizabethan Pembrokeshire.¹⁶² There are several seventeenth-century instances. Tristram Risdon mentions a castle in Womworthy, Devonshire, ‘between which and the house (as some say) was a passage under ground in our forefathers’ remembrance’. In Doncaster Abraham de la Pryme saw in the ruins of a religious house the entrance into a ‘private subterranean passage’ running two or three miles under the river ‘to another ancient monastery’. In 1700 Charles Leigh referred to ‘those subterraneous passages made use of by the monks which may be observed in various monasteries’.¹⁶³ It has been suggested that the delusion (which is not confined to England)¹⁶⁴ was encouraged by the discovery of cellars, undercrofts and elaborate drainage systems in some of the great abbeys.¹⁶⁵ But this does not account for the popular readiness to discover tunnels which were not there.

____________

¹ P. Burke, B. Harrison and P. Slack, ‘Keith Thomas’, and G. Mandelbrote, ‘The published writings of Keith Thomas, 1957–98’, in Civil Histories: Essays presented to Sir Keith Thomas, ed. P. Burke, B. Harrison and P. Slack (Oxford, 2000), pp. 1–30, 359–77; The Royal Historical Society Bibliography of British and Irish History <http://www.rhs.ac.uk/bibl/> [accessed 21 Nov. 2008].

² K. V. Thomas, ‘History revisited’, Times Literary Supplement (11 Oct. 2006) <http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25340-2399024,00.html> [accessed 21 Nov. 2008].

* This lecture was drafted during my time as a visiting fellow at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra. I am grateful to the director, Professor Ian Donaldson, and to the deputy director, Professor Graeme Clarke, for much kindness.

This article was first published by the University of London, 1983. The editors would like to thank Sir Keith Thomas for his kind permission to reproduce it here, and for his helpful comments during the publication process.

¹ L. Creighton, Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton (5th imprint, 1905), ii. 165–6.

² G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the 19th Century (2nd edn., 1952), p. 349.

³ G. R. Elton, ‘The historian’s social function’, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., 5th ser., xxvii (1977), 210.

⁴ Progress Notes of Warden Woodward for the Wiltshire Estates of New College, Oxford, 1659– 75, ed. R. L. Rickard (Wilts. Archaeol. and Natural Hist. Soc., 1957), p. 61.

⁵ E.g., The Lady Ivie’s Trial, ed. Sir J. C. Fox (Oxford, 1929), pp. 121–4, 157–8.

⁶ A. Hassell Smith, County and Court (Oxford, 1974), p. 158. Cf. A. R. Wagner, English Genealogy (2nd edn., Oxford, 1972), pp. 358–66; W. H. Greenleaf, ‘Filmer’s patriarchal history’, Historical Jour., ix (1966).

⁷ P. Stubbes, A Motive to Good Workes (1593), pp. 46–7; T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (1950), pp. 25–6.

⁸ Cf. John Rastell’s comment on the history of Geoffrey of Monmouth: ‘For although that many men suppose it to be a feigned story … yet … in the same story reading a man may see so many notable examples of divers noble princes that wisely and virtuously governed their people, which may be an example to princes now living to use the same’ (The Pastime of People (1529; 1811 edn.), p. 7).

⁹ British Library, Additional MS. 53726 fo. 38; Samuel Rudder, A New History of Gloucestershire (Cirencester, 1779), p. 307 (a slightly different version). Cf. J. C. Lancaster, Godiva of Coventry (Coventry, 1967).

¹⁰ H. C. Maxwell Lyte, Dunster and its Lords, 1066–1881 (1882), p. 19.

¹¹ John Weever, Ancient Funerall Monuments (1631), p. 866. In William Dugdale, The History of Imbanking and Drayning (1662), p. 244, ‘Hikifric’ is said to have been not the leader of the villagers but the owner of the disputed ground. It is tempting to connect him with the hero of the popular chapbook, The History of Thomas Hickathrift, a giant-killer who gave part of his lands to the poor to be their common.

¹² J. H. Plumb, The Death of the Past (1969), p. 41; ‘Film and popular memory: an interview with Michel Foucault’, Cahiers du Cinéma (July–Aug. 1974), pp. 251–2 (trans. in Radical Philosophy, xi (1975), 25–6).

¹³ See, e.g., Literacy in Traditional Societies, ed. J. Goody (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 30–4; M. T. Clanchy, ‘Remembering the past and the good old law’, History, lv (1970), 166–7; D. P. Henige, The Chronology of Oral Tradition (Oxford, 1974), esp. ch. 1.

¹⁴ Weever, p. 41.

¹⁵ Brit. Libr., Cotton MS., Faustina C II fo. 18; G. R. Elton, Policy and Police (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 185, 257, n. 1.

¹⁶ See, e.g., F. Smith Fussner, The Historical Revolution (1962), pp. 38–41; H. Baker, The Race of Time (Toronto, 1967), pp. 28–34.

¹⁷ Extracts from the Court Books of the City of Norwich, 1666–88, ed. W. Rye (Norfolk and Norwich Archaeol. Soc., 1905), p. 169. Cf. F. E. Schelling, The English Chronicle Play (New York, 1902); Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (1612; Shakespeare Soc., 1841), pp. 52–3.

¹⁸ Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. O. Lawson Dick (1950), p. xxix.

¹⁹ Thomas Tegg, Chronology, or the Historian’s Companion (7th edn., 1831), p. 88; Richard Saunders, 1665: Apollo Anglicanus (1665), sig. A4.

²⁰ The History of Guy, Earl of Warwick, in V. E. Neuberg, The Penny Histories (1968), p. 82. On the romances, see R. S. Crane, ‘The vogue of Guy of Warwick from the close of the middle ages to the romantic revival’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, xxx (1915); R. S. Crane, The Vogue of Medieval Chivalric Romance during the English Renaissance (Menasha, Wis., 1919); M. Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories (1981), ch. 9.

²¹ The Itinerary of John Leland, ed. L. Toulmin Smith (1964 edn.), ii. 51, 99.

²² Camden’s Britannia, ed. Edmund Gibson (1695), p. 197; Daniel Defoe, A Tour through England and Wales (Everyman’s Library, 1928), i. 125.

²³ Defoe, Tour, ii. 277; John Denton, An Accompt of the most considerable Estates and Families in the County of Cumberland, ed. R. S. Ferguson (Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeol. Soc., tract ser., ii, 1887), p. 68; The Travels of Dr. Richard Pococke, ed. J. J. Cartwright (Camden Soc., 1888–9), ii. 249; The Torrington Diaries, ed. C. Bruyn Andrews (1934; repr. 1970), iii. 206–7.

²⁴ Charles Deering, Nottingham Vetus et Nova (Nottingham, 1751), p. 73; J. C. Holt, Robin Hood (1982), pp. 106–8, 176–8; Crane, ‘The vogue of Guy of Warwick’, pp. 135–6, 168–9.

²⁵ John Aubrey, Monumenta Britannica, ed. R. Legg and others (Sherborne, 1980), pp. 47, 66; Camden’s Britannia, ed. Gibson, pp. 254, 269.

²⁶ Aubrey, Monumenta, pp. 83, 238, 259, 794; Thomas Gerard, The Particular Description of the County of Somerset, ed. E. H. Bates (Somerset Record Soc., 1900), p. 85; W. Johnson, Folk-Memory or the Continuity of British Archaeology (Oxford, 1908), p. 87.

²⁷ Aubrey, Monumenta, pp. 68, 386, 388, 810, 1024, 1036.

²⁸ Johnson, pp. 70–1, 74; Aubrey, Monumenta, pp. 272, 924.

²⁹ Camden’s Britannia, ed. Gibson, pp. 545n.–546n.; Browne Willis, A Survey of the Cathedral Church of St. David’s (1717), pp. 65–6; E. K. Chambers, Arthur of Britain (1927; repr. 1964), pp. 183–95; The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. E. Vinaver (1954), p. xvi; Itinerary of John Leland, i. 316.

³⁰ Robert Plot, The Natural History of Stafford-Shire (Oxford, 1686), p. 449; Defoe, Tour, ii. 88; William Burton, The Description of Leicester Shire (1622), p. 47; Nathaniel Salmon, The History of Hertfordshire (1728), p. 56.

³¹ E.g., Itinerary of John Leland, ii. 21; Gerard, p. 115; Robert Plot, The Natural History of Oxford-Shire (Oxford, 1677), pp. 352–3.

³² R. T. Gunther, Early Science in Oxford, xiv (Oxford, 1945), 465.

³³ Itinerary of John Leland, i. 60; William Camden, Britannia, ed. R. Gough (2nd edn., 1806), i. 186; J. R. Wise, The New Forest: its History and its Scenery (1863), p. 97.

³⁴ E. Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, village Occitan de 1294 à 1324 (Paris, 1975), pp. 426–7, 430.

³⁵ Cf. the remarks of Paul Rousset in Mélanges d’histoire du moyen âge dediées à la mémoire de Louis Halphen (Paris, 1951), pp. 630–1; and M. Beresford, The Lost Villages of England (1954), p. 77.

³⁶ A. Lloyd, Folk Song in England (1967; 1975 edn.), p. 137.

³⁷ Sampson Erdeswicke, A Survey of Staffordshire (1717), p. 192.

³⁸ Nicholas Smith, A Warning to the World (1653), p. 4. Cf. Hugh Peter, Good Work for a Good Magistrate (1651), p. 33 (‘it is very advisable to burn all the old records; yea, even those in the Tower, the monuments of tyranny’).

³⁹ A. Gramsci, ‘Osservazioni sul Folclore’, Opere di Antonio Gramsci, vi (Torino, 1950), 215.

⁴⁰ C. Hill, ‘The Norman Yoke’, in his Puritanism and Revolution (1958).

⁴¹ See app. A.

⁴² R. Gough, Antiquities and Memoirs of the Parish of Myddle (Shrewsbury, 1875), pp. 28–9; Salmon, p. 184.

⁴³ The Clarke Papers, ed. C. H. Firth (Camden Soc., 1891–1901), i. 318.

⁴⁴ Camden’s Britannia, ed. Gibson, pp. 628–9.

⁴⁵ On the problem of ‘belief ’ in folk-tales, cf. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Zande Trickster (Oxford, 1967), pp. 24–5.

⁴⁶ Asser’s Life of King of Alfred, ed. W. H. Stevenson (Oxford, 1904; 1959 edn.), p. 237. Chambers, Arthur of Britain, p. 194. Cf. Henige, The Chronology of Oral Tradition, pp. 97–103.

⁴⁷ A. Gransden, Historical Writing in England (1974–82), ii, app. E (Tabulae).

⁴⁸ Mathias Prideaux, An Easy and Compendious Introduction for Reading all Sorts of Histories (Oxford, 1645), p. 343.

⁴⁹ Camden’s Britannia, ed. Gibson, p. 591; F. J. North, Sunken Cities (Cardiff, 1957), pp. 87, 14.

⁵⁰ Ralph Thoresby, Ducatus Leodiensis (1715), p. 159; The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, trans. G. M. Garmonsway (Everyman’s Library, 1953), pp. 10–11 (s.a. 418).

⁵¹ See, e.g., C. Waterton, Wanderings in South America (Everyman’s Library, n.d.), p. 148; R. Redfield and A. Villa Rojas, Chan Kom: a Maya Village (Chicago, Ill., 1934), p. 12; A. Irving Hallowell, ‘Temporary orientation in Western civilization and in a preliterate society’, American Anthropologist, xxxix (1937), 666–7; E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer (Oxford, 1940), pp. 105, 108; Clanchy, p. 167.

⁵² Aubrey, Monumenta, p. 116; The Berkeley Manuscripts, ed. Sir J. Maclean (Gloucester, 1883–5), iii. 193.

⁵³ T. Habington, A Survey of Worcestershire, ed. J. Amphlett (Worcs. Historical Soc., 1893– 9), p. 466; Charles Leigh, The Natural History of Lancashire, Cheshire, and the Peak (Oxford, 1700), i. 59; G. Owen, The Description of Pembrokeshire, ed. H. Owen (Cymmrodorion Record Ser., 1892–1936), pp. 71–2.

⁵⁴ Habington, i. 192.

⁵⁵ Thomas Granger, A Familiar Exposition or Commentarie on Ecclesiastes (1621), p. 171.

⁵⁶ Peter Barker, A Iudicious and Painefull Exposition upon the Ten Commandements (1624), p. 85; W. Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–47 (Mass. Hist. Soc., 1912), i. 3; Sir Francis Hastings, A Watch-Word to all Religious, and True Hearted English-Men (1598), p. 9; William Worsnop, A Discoverie of Sundrie Errours (1582), sigs. E3^v–4.

⁵⁷ Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. G. Smith (1904), i. 3–4, 239–40, 323; ii. 12–16.

⁵⁸ I[ohn] H[arvey], A Discoursive Probleme concerning Prophesies (1588), pp. 68–9.

⁵⁹ The Works of James Pilkington, ed. J. Scholefield (Parker Soc., Cambridge, 1842), p. 610; [Francis Trigge], An Apologie, or Defence of our Dayes (1589), p. 9.

⁶⁰ I. R[hodes], An Answere to a Romish Rime lately printed (1602), sig. D4; James Hart, ढλινικη, or the Diet of the Diseased (1633), p. 330; John Favour, Antiquitie triumphing over Noveltie (1619), p. 541; [John White], The First Century of Scandalous, Malignant Priests (1643), sig. A4v.

⁶¹ The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. R. Latham and W. Matthews (1970–83), iii. 93. Cf. R. Thompson, Unfit for Modest Ears (1979), ch. 8.

⁶² Kilvert’s Diary, ed. W. Plomer (new edn., 1960), iii. 154; K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), pp. 269, 391, 589–90, 607, 610.

⁶³ See app. B.

⁶⁴ R. Foster Jones, The Triumph of the English Language (Stanford, Calif., 1953), pp. 83–4, 118, 171, 178n.; Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, i. 240–2; J. A. Burrow, Medieval Writers and their Work (Oxford, 1982), ch. 5.

⁶⁵ M. Girouard, Robert Smythson and the Elizabethan Country House (1983), pp. 210–17.

⁶⁶ Acts of the Privy Council, new ser., xiii (1581–2), pp. 389–90. The book was Christopher Ocland, Anglorum Praelia (1580), later translated by I.S. as The Valiant Actes and Victorious Battailes of the English Nation (1585). Cf. D. H. Horne, The Life and Minor Works of George Peele (New Haven, Conn., 1952), pp. 250–1; and Charles Allen, The Battailes of Crescey, and Poictiers (1631).

⁶⁷ J. G. Mann, ‘Instances of antiquarian feeling in medieval and Renaissance art’, Archaeol. Jour., lxxxix (1932); E. Mercer, English Art, 1553–1625 (Oxford, 1962), pp. 4–5, 87–8; J. Mordaunt Crook, ‘Introduction’ to C. L. Eastlake, A History of the Gothic Revival (2nd edn., Leicester, 1978), pp. 27–8; Girouard, pp. 219–32.

⁶⁸ William Allen, A Defence and Declaration of the Catholike Churchie’s Doctrine touching Purgatory (Antwerp, 1565), fos. 168^v, 169^v. Cf. John Christoferson, An Exhortation (1554), sig. Aa iij^r–v; Pole’s Defense of the Unity of the Church, trans. J. G. Dwyer (Westminster, Md., 1965), p. 202; N. Sander, Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism, trans. D. Lewis (1877), i. 156–8.

⁶⁹ Epistle by the translator (‘G.T.’ [Robert Persons?]), ‘to the Honorable Lordes of Her Majesties Preevie Councell’, pp. 13–15, in [Robert Persons], An Epistle of the Persecution of Catholics in Englande (Douay, [1582]); [Richard Broughton], An Apologicall Epistle (Antwerp, 1601), pp. 92–4; Tudor Treatises, ed. A. G. Dickens (Yorks. Archaeol. Soc., 1959), p. 134.

⁷⁰ Epistle by G.T., pp. 25–7, in [Persons], Epistle of the Persecution of Catholics; [Broughton], Apologicall Epistle, p. 122; Thomas, pp. 155–6.

⁷¹ Allen, Defence and Declaration of … Purgatory, fo. 158.

⁷² Epistle by G.T., pp. 16–17, in [Persons], Epistle of the Persecution of Catholics; [Broughton], Apologicall Epistle, p. 91.

⁷³ [Broughton], Apologicall Epistle, pp. 111–12; Nicholas Harpsfield, A Treatise of the Pretended Divorce between Henry VIII and Catharine of Aragon, ed. N. Pocock (Camden Soc., 1878), pp. 298–9; Dickens, p. 135; Sander, p. 157.

⁷⁴ Harpsfield, Treatise of the Pretended Divorce, p. 299; Epistle by G.T. in [Persons], Epistle of the Persecution of Catholics, pp. 17–18.

⁷⁵ William Harrison and William Leygh, Deaths Advantage little regarded (1602), sig. N1^v.

⁷⁶ Harpsfield, Treatise of the Pretended Divorce, p. 299; John Walsal, A Sermon preached at Pauls Crosse … 1578 (n.d.), sig. Dvii; The Works of Thomas Deloney, ed. F. O. Mann (Oxford, 1912), p. 352; J. E. Thorold Rogers, A History of Agriculture and Prices in England (Oxford, 1866–1902), iv. 381.

⁷⁷ Christoferson, Exhortation, sig. Zvii^r–v; George Cavendish, The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey, ed. R. S. Sylvester (Early English Text Soc., 1959), p. 11.

⁷⁸ Thomas Dorman, A Proufe of Certeyne Articles in Religion (Antwerp, 1564), fo. 138.

⁷⁹ F. A. Yates, Astraea (1975), pp. 29–87; G. Parry, The Golden Age Restor’d (1981), pp. 16–18; A. Fox, Thomas More: History and Providence (Oxford, 1982), pp. 46–7.

⁸⁰ E. Armstrong, Ronsard and the Age of Gold (Cambridge, 1968); H. Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance (1969); H. Kamen, ‘Golden age, iron age: a conflict of concepts in the Renaissance’, Jour. Medieval and Renaissance Stud., iv (1974).

⁸¹ H. Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance (New York, 1950), pp. 525–33; H. Baker, The Wars of Truth (1952), pp. 65–78.

⁸² Godfrey Goodman, The Fall of Man (1616), pp. 247–8; I.M., A Health to the Gentlemanly Profession of Serving-Men (Shakespeare Assoc. facsimile, 1931), sig. C4; William Shakespeare, As You Like It, act ii, scene 3.

⁸³ A. B. Ferguson, Clio Unbound (Durham, N.C., 1979), chs. x, xi.

⁸⁴ Political Poems and Songs relating to English History, ed. T. Wright (Rolls ser., 1861), ii. 267; John Gower, Confessio Amantis, prologus, ll. 93–117; John Gower, Vox Clamantis, lib. vi, cap. xiii; F. Graus, ‘Social utopias in the middle ages’, Past & Present, xxxviii (1967), 14. Cf. G. G. Coulton, Medieval Panorama (Cambridge, 1949), pp. 624–5.

⁸⁵ C. T. Davis, ‘Il buon tempo antico’, in Florentine Studies, ed. N. Rubinstein (1968); N. Edelman, Attitudes of 17th-Century France toward the Middle Ages (Morningside Heights, N.Y., 1946), pp. 41–2; H. Delbrück, ‘Die gute alte Zeit’, in Erinnerungen, Aufsätze und Reden (Berlin, 1902), pp. 179–212.

⁸⁶ See J. Peter, Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature (Oxford, 1956), pp. 68–9, 71, 104; and, esp., M. Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints (1966), pp. 204–7, where the description of ‘nostalgic utopianism’ anticipates some of my argument.

⁸⁷ Walter Cary, The Present State of England (1626), p. 13.

⁸⁸ Dorman, A Proufe, fo. 138; Works of James Pilkington, p. 415; Tristram Risdon, The Chorographical Description or Survey of the County of Devon (1811), p. 10.

⁸⁹ William Terilo, A Piece of Friar Bacons Brazen-Head Prophesie (1604), sigs. B4, C1^v, C2^v; Bodleian Library, MS. Rawlinson B 206 fo. 60 (and [Humphrey King], An Halfe-Penny-Worth of Wit (3rd imprint., 1613), pp. 20–1); Cary, Present State of England, pp. 10–11.

⁹⁰ Goodman, The Fall of Man, p. 106; Sir John Smythe, Certain Discourses Military, ed. J. R. Hale (Ithaca, N.Y., 1964), pp. xli, 69, 75, 108.

⁹¹ Aubrey, Monumenta, p. 52.

⁹² Stephen Gosson, The School of Abuse (1579; Shakespeare Soc., 1841), p. 24 (drawing on Dio, Roman History, lxxvii. 12).

⁹³ Henry Peacham, The Truth of our Times (1638), pp. 189–90.

⁹⁴ Cf. A. O. Lovejoy and G. Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (1935; repr., N.Y., 1965), pp. 9–11.

⁹⁵ R. Tuve, ‘Ancients, moderns and Saxons’, E.L.H.: Jour. Eng. Literary Hist., vi (1939).

⁹⁶ I hope to write at greater length on this subject elsewhere.

⁹⁷ William Warner, Albions England (1612 edn.), p. 201.

⁹⁸ A New Enterlude no lesse wittie: then pleasant, entituled New Custome (1573), sig. Aiv^v; The Roxburghe Ballads, ed. W. Chappell (Ballad Soc., 1871–4), ii. 585.

⁹⁹ J[ohn] M[arch], Actions for Slaunder (1647), pp. 7–9.

¹⁰⁰ C. W. Brooks, ‘Litigants and attorneys in the king’s bench and common pleas, 1560– 1640’, in Legal Records and the Historian, ed. J. H. Baker (1978), p. 44; E. W. Ives, The Common Lawyers of Pre-Reformation England (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 7, 216. For a similar myth in France, see FranÇois Hotman, Francogallia, ed. R. E. Giesey, trans. J. H. M. Salmon (Cambridge, 1972), p. 520.

¹⁰¹ I Corinthians VI: 7.

¹⁰² R. V. French, Nineteen Centuries of Drink in England (2nd edn., n.d.), p. 54; William Lambard, A Perambulation of Kent (1576), pp. 280–2; Joannis Seldeni Opera Omnia, ed. David Wilkins (1726), iii, pt. 2, 1816.

¹⁰³ William Camden, Annales, trans. Abraham Darcie (1625), 2nd pagination, p. 5; Smythe, Certain Discourses Military, pp. 28–9.

¹⁰⁴ John Aubrey, Miscellanies upon Various Subjects (4th edn., 1857), p. 215.

¹⁰⁵ Cyvile and Uncyvile Life (1579), sig. Bii^v.

¹⁰⁶ J[ohn] N[orden], The Surveyors Dialogue (1607), p. 85; Goodman, Fall of Man, p. 375.

¹⁰⁷ The Life and Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Robert Greene, ed. A. B. Grosart (Huth Library, 1881–6), xi. 272. Camden’s Britannia, ed. Gibson, p. 874; Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. G. Birkbeck Hill and L. F. Powell (Oxford, 1934–50), ii. 167.

¹⁰⁸ The Pepys Ballads, ed. H. E. Rollins (Cambridge, Mass., 1929–32), iii. 51; John Taylor, The Complaint of Christmas and the Teares of Twelfetyde (1631); The World, civ (26 Dec. 1754), 104; Thomas Love Peacock, Crotchet Castle (1831), ch. xvii.

¹⁰⁹ F. G. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Disorder (Chelmsford, 1970), p. 60; Thomas Dorman, A Disproufe of M. Nowelles Reproufe (Antwerp, 1565), fo. 29v; A New Enterlude … entituled New Custome, sig. Aiv^v; Old English Ballads, 1553–1625, ed. H. E. Rollins (Cambridge, 1920), p. 134.

¹¹⁰ Aubrey, Miscellanies, p. 218; Aubrey on Education, ed. J. E. Stephens (1972), p. 63.

¹¹¹ Terilo, A Piece of Friar Bacons Brazen-Heads Prophesie, sig. C1^v.

¹¹² [King], Halfe-Penny-worth of Wit, p. 20. Cf. Christoferson, Exhortation, sig. Aavij^v; I. M., Health to the Gentlemanly Profession of Serving-Men, sig. G3.

¹¹³ The Petition and Articles, or Severall Charge exhibited in Parliament against John Pocklington (1641), p. 29; Stubbes, Motive to Good Workes, p. 43.

¹¹⁴ The Works of Henry Smith (Edinburgh, 1866), ii. 49; John Stow, A Survey of London, ed. C. L. Kingsford (Oxford, 1908), ii. 78; Lambard, Perambulation of Kent, p. 230; H. C. White, Social Criticism in Popular Religious Literature of the 16th Century (New York, 1944), p. 269; W. K. Jordan, Philanthropy in England, 1480–1660 (1959), pp. 230–2.

¹¹⁵ M. Hunter, John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning (1975), esp. pp. 186, 215–16; Aubrey, Miscellanies, pp. 213–21.

¹¹⁶ Triffe, An Apologie, p. 7.

¹¹⁷ Edward Coke, The Fourth Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England (1817 edn.), pp. 43–4; H. C. White, ch. 3; A. B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Durham, N.C., 1958), pp. 252–61; Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Everyman’s Library, 1932), i. 247–8.

¹¹⁸ E.g., Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1581–90, p. 13; George Poulson, Beverlac (1829), i. 338; J. Thirsk, English Peasant Farming (1957), pp. 26–7; F. W. Austen, Rectors of Two Essex Parishes and their Times (Colchester, 1943), p. 65; The Agrarian History of England and Wales, iv, ed. J. Thirsk (Cambridge, 1967), 337–8; Somerset Record Office, Wells diocesan records, A 91, A 98, A 101 (presentments for South Stoke).

¹¹⁹ Christopher Lever, The Historie of the Defenders of the Catholique Faith (1627), p. 56; A. Wood, The History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford (Oxford, 1792), i. sig. e3^r–v; M. Aston, ‘English ruins and English history: the Dissolution and the sense of the English past’, Jour. Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xxxvi (1973).

¹²⁰ J. Barston, The Safegarde of Societie (1576), fo. 109v.

¹²¹ Original Letters Illustrative of English History, ed. Sir H. Ellis (3rd ser., 1846), iii. 139.

¹²² Bodl. Libr., MS. Rawlinson B 206 fo. 59r–v. In the printed version the allusions to abbeys and pilgrims have been removed and gentry houses and disbanded soldiers put in their place ([King], Halfe-Penny-worth of Wit, pp. 19–20).

¹²³ Elias Ashmole (1617–92), ed. C. H. Josten (Oxford, 1966), pp. 1127–8; Travels of Dr. Richard Pococke, i. 147, 149. Some years ago the senior common room butler of my Oxford college showed me a watercolour of St. John’s in the early 19th century which he kept in his pantry. It depicted a group of gypsies and their children outside the kitchen door. The butler explained that ‘the old monks’ used to feed the poor at the gates of the college.

¹²⁴ Cf. the editor’s judicious remarks in Dickens, pp. 32–3, 36–9.

¹²⁵ S. M. Harrison, The Pilgrimage of Grace in the Lake Counties, 1536–7 (1981), pp. 20–1, 61–2; Thomas West, The Antiquities of Furness (1774), pp. 122–8.

¹²⁶ Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the MSS. of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu (1900), p. 37; The Workes of … William Perkins, i (Cambridge, 1616–18), sig. A2.

¹²⁷ Jeremy Collier, An Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain (1708–14), ii. 163–5; Defoe, Tour, ii. 214; William Cobbett, A History of the Protestant ‘Reformation’ (1824–6); A. Chandler, A Dream of Order: the Medieval Ideal in 19th-Century English Literature (1971), esp. chs. 2, 5.

¹²⁸ Edward Gee, The Jesuit’s Memorial, for the Intended Reformation of England (1690), pp. 232–7, 256, 257.

¹²⁹ Thomas, pp. 406–8.

¹³⁰ W. Hunt, The Puritan Movement (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), p. 60; P. Clark, English Provincial Society from the Reformation to the Revolution (Hassocks, 1977), pp. 249–50, 454.

¹³¹ [Richard Verstegan], A Declaration of the True Causes of the Great Troubles (1592), p. 59; [William Allen], A True, Sincere, and Modest Defence, of English Catholiques (n.d. [1584]), p. 168; T. H. Clancy, Papist Pamphleteers (Chicago, Ill., 1964), pp. 28–30; The Letters and Despatches of Richard Verstegan, ed. A. G. Petti (Catholic Record Soc., 1959), pp. 12–14.

¹³² Stuart Royal Proclamations, ed. J. F. Larkin and P. L. Hughes (Oxford, 1973–83), i. 370, 561 (and 357); ii. 112, 350 (and 171, 301); The Political Works of James I, ed. C. H. McIlwain (Cambridge, Mass., 1918), pp. 343–4.

¹³³ 4 Jac. I, c. 5.

¹³⁴ Brit. Libr., MS. Royal 17 B xxxv fo. 9v; A. G. Matthews, Walker Revised (Oxford, 1948), p. 162.

¹³⁵ The Works of Roger Hutchinson, ed. J. Bruce (Parker Soc., Cambridge, 1842), p. 8; Works of Thomas Deloney, p. 351. For others, see, e.g., Emmison, pp. 47, 48; Worsnop, Discoverie of Sundrie Errours, sig. I2v; Calendar of Assize Records. Sussex Indictments. Elizabeth I, ed. J. S. Cockburn (1975), no. 520; Richard Porder, A Sermon of Gods Fearfull Threatnings (1570), fo. 12v.

¹³⁶ John Caius, A Boke or Counsell against the Disease commonly called the Sweate (1552), p. 29, in The Works of John Caius, ed. E. S. Roberts (Cambridge, 1912); A Fooles Bolt is soone shott (1614), p. 28, in The Complete Works of Samuel Rowlands (Hunterian Club, 1880), ii; The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. T. Hutchinson, rev. E. de Selincourt (1904), p. 463.

¹³⁷ G. N. Clark, The Wealth of England (1946), p. 60n.; Middle English Dictionary, ed. H. Kurath, S. M. Kuhn and others (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1954), s.v. ‘miri(e)’; A New English Dictionary, ed. J. A. H. Murray (Oxford, 1888–1933), s.v. ‘merry’.

¹³⁸ Hall’s Chronicle (1809), p. 582; John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth (1823), p. 116.

¹³⁹ C. Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (1964), pp. 192, 195; Robert Dover and the Cotswold Games. Annalia Dubrensia, ed. C. Whitfield (1962), pp. 17–18, 132; S. A. Strong, A Catalogue of Letters and other Historical documents exhibited in the Library at Welbeck (1903), pp. 226–7.

¹⁴⁰ [William Fennor?], Pasquils Palinodia (1619), sig. B3.

¹⁴¹ Ben Jonson, The Sad Shepherd, I.ii (on which see J. B. Bamborough, ‘The rusticity of Ben Jonson’, in Jonson and Shakespeare, ed. I. Donaldson (1983); and A. Barton, ‘Harking back to Elizabeth: Ben Jonson and Caroline nostalgia’, E.L.H., xlviii (1981), 726–8); Nicholas Breton, The Court and Country (1618), in Inedited Tracts, ed. W. C. Hazlitt (1868), p. 183; Warner, Albions England, p. 121; The Poems of Richard Corbett, ed. J. A. W. Bennett and H. R. Trevor-Roper (Oxford, 1955), pp. 49–52; Whitfield, Robert Dover and the Cotswold Game, passim.

¹⁴² The Poems of John Dryden, ed. J. Kinsley (Oxford, 1958), iv. 1763.

¹⁴³ H. M. Atherton, Political Prints in the Age of Hogarth (Oxford, 1974), pp. 119–20; A Collection of Letters publish’d in Old England (n.d. [1743?]), p. 28; William Cowper, The Task, iii, ll. 742–4.

¹⁴⁴ Washington Irving, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (1819–20; World’s Classic edn., 1912), p. 265.

¹⁴⁵ R. Judge, The Jack-in-the-Green (Folklore Soc., 1979), pp. 58–65; B. Bushaway, By Rite (1982), pp. 21, 268, 274. Cf. E. McDermott, The Merrie Days of England. Sketches of the Olden Time (1859).

¹⁴⁶ A Litel Treatise ageynste the mutterynge of some papists in corners (1534), sig. Bvi; Granger, Familiar Exposition on Ecclesiastes, p. 170.

¹⁴⁷ Works of James Pilkington, p. 611; Trigge, An Apologie, pp. 11–12.

¹⁴⁸ George Hakewill, An Apologie or Declaration of the Power and Providence of God (2nd edn., 1630), pp. 466–7.

¹⁴⁹ Richard Bernard, Ruths Recompence (1628), p. 150; F. Moryson, An Itinerary (Glasgow, 1907–8), iv. 94; Works of James Pilkington, pp. 610–11.

¹⁵⁰ Works of James Pilkington, p. 612; Porder, Sermon of Gods Fearfull Threatnings, fo. 13; A Fooles Bolt is soone shott, p. 29, in Complete Works of Samuel Rowlands, ii; Robert Abbot, A Hand of Fellowship (1623), p. 267.

¹⁵¹ Bodl. Libr., Oxford diocesan papers, c. 27, fo. 46. Cf. Hill, Society and Puritanism, ch. 5.

¹⁵² Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, ii. 367–73; M. McKisack, ‘Samuel Daniel as historian’, Rev. Eng. Stud., xxiii (1947), 237–8.

¹⁵³ Cf. J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Time, institutions and understanding’, in Politics and Experience: Essays presented to Michael Oakeshott, ed. P. King and B. C. Parekh (Cambridge, 1968), p. 237.

¹⁵⁴ Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law, ed. F. Tonnies (2nd edn., 1969), p. 15.

¹⁵⁵ John Morton, The Natural History of Northampton-Shire (1712), p. 53.

¹⁵⁶ E.g. John Aubrey, Monumenta, p. 816; Camden, Britannia, ed. Gough, i. 95, 103; Plot, Natural History of Stafford-Shire, p. 432.

¹⁵⁷ Camden’s Britannia, ed. Gibson, p. 802; G. Grigson, The Englishman’s Flora (1955), pp. 35, 346, 348.

¹⁵⁸ E. K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage, i (1903), 154; Plot, Natural History of Stafford-Shire, p. 385.

¹⁵⁹ Spufford, p. 225; Risdon, p. 143; Stephen Gardiner, A Machiavellian Treatise, ed. P. Donaldson (Cambridge, 1975), p. 50.

¹⁶⁰ E.g. J. Trotter Brockett, A Glossary of North Country Words (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1825), p. 211; Shropshire Folk-Lore, ed. C. S. Burne (1883), pp. 85–9; J. Simpson, The Folklore of Sussex (1973), pp. 24–6; E. Porter, The Folklore of East Anglia (1974), pp. 106–8; D. Jones-Baker, The Folklore of Hertfordshire (1977), pp. 41–5; Marilyn Lewis in The Local Historian, xv (1983), 493.

¹⁶¹ A. H. Thompson, ‘Superstitions regarding the middle ages’, Trans. Leicestershire Archaeol. Soc., xxv (1949), 40.

¹⁶² John Dee, preface to The Elements of Geometrie of … Euclide, trans. H. Billingsley (1570), sig. djv; Owen, Description of Pembrokeshire, p. 245.

¹⁶³ Risdon, p. 294; The Diary of Abraham de la Pryme, ed. C. Jackson (Surtees Soc., 1870), p. 35; Charles Leigh, The Natural History of Lancashire, Cheshire, and the Peak, (Oxford, 1700), i. 13. Cf. Reliquia Spelmannianae (Oxford, 1698), p. 150.

¹⁶⁴ G. L. Kittredge, ‘The friar’s lantern and Friar Rush’, Publications of the Modern Language Assoc. of America, xv (1900), 433.

¹⁶⁵ A. H. Thompson, p. 40; B. S. Smith, A History of Malvern (Malvern, 1964), p. 76.