Notes to tables 2.1 and 2.2

Each insult/allegation was counted only on the first occasion it appeared in each cause; each cause was counted separately. A small number of insults spoken other than by the defendant were not included (e.g., recorded as spoken by plaintiff to defendant in the course of a quarrel).

The insult ‘whore’ dominates the language of insult in these defamation causes, appearing in over 90 per cent of the women’s causes for which there is surviving evidence of the words used.¹⁶ This is not, however, a simple reflection of the emphasis on sexual defamation. In J. A. Sharpe’s analysis of causes from the whole diocese entering the Consistory and Chancery courts during the 1690s, women’s causes were just as concerned with sexual defamation, but the incidence of ‘whore’ was substantially lower than this sample from the city, suggesting possible variations between rural and urban linguistic repertoires. In addition, there may have been changes in the use of ‘whore’ over time; Sharpe’s comparison of women’s causes from the 1590s and 1690s shows considerable continuity in the prominence of sexual ‘crimes’ but a greater emphasis on the epithet ‘whore’ in the later period.¹⁷ Without doubt, this insult was commonly used and taken very seriously across the diocese, as elsewhere, throughout the period; but these variations suggest aspects of its development and use as part of the vocabulary of sexual defamation that have not yet been fully explored.

Two striking - and contrasting - uses of ‘whore’ deserve closer attention. The first is a strategy of specificity: as in the case with which this chapter opened, a named man’s ‘whore’. Further, this is a usage that tells us something about perceptions of sexual relations: men are seen as ‘possessing’ women. Insults conveying the opposite meaning are extremely rare; the only example in these causes was that of Grace Horner, who called Jane Morrett a whore and described a witness, George Wynne, as ‘one of her rogues’.¹⁸ Indeed, Dave Peacock has suggested that such portrayals of the inversion of ‘proper’ gender relations could serve to add force to the insult.¹⁹

In itself, this act of naming provided ‘authorising’ detail; it also led on neatly to longer narratives of illicit sex and betrayal. Hester Beeforth sued Thomas Thurnham for saying that she ‘was a whore, and Timothy Harlands whore, and that the said Timothy Harland had had as much knowledge of the said Esther Beeforth’s body, as of his owne wife’.²⁰ Francis Sergiant allegedly called Joan Daile ‘whore and further said that she was one Mr Kemps whore and that... Kemp plaid whore with her... upon... Francis Sergiants bed’.²¹ In considerably more detail, Benjamin Mangye defamed Sarah Bigg in similar terms, saying that she and a Mr Smith

had been private together in... Benjamin Mangyes chamber or roome for two or three houres att a time for the continuance of halfe a yeare, the doores of the said roome being bolted locked or fastned the doore, and that... Benjamin Mangye had severall times watched att the doore and that they had polluted, stained or spoyled the sheets or linens of... Benjamin Mangyes bed.²²

The unpleasant details, the stained sheets, watching at the door: they build a story that is compellingly believable.

The term ‘common whore’, on the other hand, might suggest an alternative strategy: presenting the image of the common prostitute, a woman making herself indiscriminately available to all men. It would help to explain the effect that John Peck was aiming for in saying to Juliana Foster, ‘I could have made the my whoore severall tymes... thou art a more common whoore than ever Pegg Beilbie was’.²³ However, a note of caution must be sounded here. The use of ‘common whore’ tends to be recorded only in the formal articles of causes; indeed, in Benjamin Mangye’s case, it was alleged in the articles that he had called Sara Biggs ‘common whore’, but these words were nowhere recorded in the detailed witnesses’ depositions.²⁴ In other words, given the legal status of the term, we may be witnessing the mediation of court officials at work here.

Against men, ‘rogue’ assumed a prominence approaching that of ‘whore’ for women, appearing in 80 per cent of the causes for which the words spoken are recorded. Dave Peacock has recently challenged the assumption that this word carried no sexual meaning, arguing that in the late seventeenth century, ‘the term rogue was used specifically to refer to male sexual dishonesty and was particularly associated with whores’.²⁵ This is not, however, quite the case in late seventeenth-century York. Towards the end of the century, the courts are to be found paying particular attention to defining this word, and asking witnesses what they thought it meant. The answers in ‘non-sexual’ cases were simultaneously vague and definite: in the words of one, rogue ‘denotes and signifies a man to be a rascall a rogue and one that will stick att the commission of noe villany and injustice’. Other witnesses, though not quite as circular as this (a rogue is... a rogue?), tended to circle around lying, injustice,’ villainy’, and return to the related and familiar words ‘rascal’ and ‘knave’.²⁶ They knew it was bad, but were otherwise not entirely sure about it. Faramerz Dabhoiwala has argued that sexual conduct was becoming less important to male reputation at this time, and it is noticeable that a considerable proportion of the growth in men’s causes in York during the 1690s is made up of non-sexual defamations, especially allegations of commercial dishonesty.²⁷ In that context, these discourses on the word ‘rogue’ may hint at the beginnings of a broader shift in the meanings of male ‘honesty’ amongst the citizens of York.

At the same time, however, witnesses in other causes continued to provide the alternative meaning of rogue, associated with sexual dishonesty: ‘the words rogue and rascall are very opprobrious words, and do denote a man to be of wicked life and conversation, and for such are commonly taken’ was recorded in 1699.²⁸ This was apparently the prevailing use of the word ‘rogue’, and as such it frequently appeared in association with the word ‘whoremaster’ (or ‘whoremasterly’). Gowing argues that ‘whoremaster’ was not used to condemn men’s own sexual promiscuity or ‘as a preliminary to detailed sexual accusations’, but this is not the case in these York causes.²⁹ Anne Watson was brought to court for saying that ‘Richard Dennis was a whoremaisterly rogue and playd whore with his maideservant and gave her halfe a crowne and a paire of gloves’.³⁰ Witnesses told how they heard Thomas Hewitson call Thomas Daniel ‘whoremaster and said that he had kist a woman in John Scott’s entry the night before’. One witness went into even more detail, deposing that Hewitson said that Daniel ‘had fuct one Mrs Margaret Hutchinson in John Scott’s entry and then showed him the said Mr Daniel the said John Scott’s entry and told him that that was the place where he had fuct the said Mrs Margaret the very night before’.³¹ However, the use of the term ‘whoremaster’ in itself does support another argument: that ‘sexual insults of men revolved around their control of women’s sexuality’.³² In perceptions of sexual relations, men ‘master’ women, just as they ‘own’ them.³³ Moreover, what the ‘whoremaster’ lacks is manly and civilised control of himself.³⁴ Male sexual promiscuity can be criticised and condemned, but the terms of insult reveal deeply-held assumptions about gender relations and masculinity.

The trouble with a cuckold was precisely his inability to master his wife. And even if the word ‘cuckold’ was not actually spoken, whenever a married woman was accused of being a ‘whore’ her relationship to her husband was also being brought into question. Indeed, in a number of cases, the words over which a wife sued had been spoken to her husband in her absence and even in an all-male setting.³⁵ The reputation not just of the woman concerned but of the couple was at stake here, along with the husband’s standing amongst other men.³⁶ Now, court actions by married women based on the insult ‘whore’ were extremely common, while causes brought by husbands against the insult ‘cuckold’ were quite rare. Moreover, in a number of causes where both options would have been available, the preferred strategy seems to have been to focus on the defamation of the wife.³⁷ And when Henry Hunter sued James Young for calling him ‘cuckold’ and saying ‘that he fathered a barne which another man gott’, the defamation cause focused largely on Henry’s wife Anne:

James Younge replyed... [Henry Hunter] is a cuckold intimating thereby as this examinate conceived that... Anne... was a dishonest woman of her body and had committed the crime of adultery or incontinency with some man who had begotten a child of her body which she caused her husband to father and thereby made him a cuckold.³⁸

This certainly supports Laura Gowing’s depiction of ‘a vision of morality in which women, not men, bore the load of guilt for illicit sex’.³⁹ Yet clearly cuckoldry could only be represented through the activities of the cuckolding wife: the cuckold was essentially a passive, powerless figure. And therein lay the power of the insult: in its disturbing representation of the inversion of gender relations, deeply threatening to masculine authority and self-identity. Whores were bad, for sure, but cuckolds were just laughable.⁴⁰ They represented weakness, a failure of authority, sexual inadequacy; in short, failed manhood. If husbands were reluctant to have this raised in the public forum of the court, it is not entirely surprising.

It is also possible that the reputation and standing of a household was also at issue in a number of causes where a female servant brought a defamation suit. Christian Needham sued Anne Harland for calling her a whore and ‘potticar’s meat and sherriffe’s meat’, a reference to Francis Taylor, Christian’s master. Anne denied having said anything defamatory, but there may well have been some kind of gossip going around: several witnesses alleged that Taylor was paying Christian’s legal costs, and one implied that he was doing so out of ‘an extraordinary kindnes’ he had for her, an innuendo-laden choice of wording.⁴¹ Bridget Hodgson was sued for telling various citizens of Micklegate that ‘your neighbours waiting maide’, Hester Browne, had secretly given birth to a bastard child.⁴² The phrasing points to the way in which gossip in such a situation could come to involve the maid’s employers, potentially bringing into question their reputation as well as that of the maidservant herself. At the very least, they were failing to properly supervise their servants’ behaviour, and what did that say about the moral standards of their household?⁴³

Bastardy and venereal disease were the two primary sexual themes that defamers deployed as descriptive elaborations in constructing insults. Both depicted the consequences of sexual dishonesty as unpleasant, recognisable physical marks; both show gendered differences. Imputations of venereal disease were far more commonly directed at women than at men. Often, they consisted simply of the epithet ‘pocky’ or ‘burnt’ or ‘hot-arsed’, but they could involve more detailed stories or memorable turns of phrase, such as that of Martha Coates, speaking to Elizabeth Ashton: ‘goe thou pocky whoore thou hath a fireship in thy arse’.⁴⁴ Jane Canby, sitting on a stone, was quarrelling with Thomas Nelson in the street; Thomas commented derisively, ‘a cold stone is the best for a hott whore to sitt on’.⁴⁵ Priscilla Farnell was sued by John Baycock for saying to his mother Margery Baycock, ‘Never any of my sonnes shaved their heades for the French pocke as thine did’, also accusing Margery of helping John, who was a barber, to cure himself of the disease.⁴⁶ Similarly, Elizabeth Addison alleged that Susan Hartnes had secretly procured a cure for the pox. She also employed a theme used by a number of defamers: the danger of being infected. She warned a witness away from Christopher, Susan’s husband, saying ‘that whoe ever dranke of his drinke would have the pocks’.⁴⁷ A witness told how Matthew Cartwright and Edward Glaves quarrelled as they were in company together and Matthew said that Margaret, Edward’s wife, ‘was a whoore and that she was soe hott he durst not come nigh her’.⁴⁸ These causes do not show the fascination with grotesque ‘leaky’ women, or with men’s infected, half-eaten penises, that Gowing found in her research.⁴⁹ However, they do reveal the potency of images of the pox for defamers to exclude and isolate their targets: whores were infectious, sources of pollution and danger, perilous to associate with.

Again, women were much more likely to sue over allegations of bastardy than were men; in the only case in this sample the man sued in concert with the woman concerned.⁵⁰ Pregnancy, after all, had very different implications for women than for men: its physical marks and consequences were both immediate and lasting, and difficult to conceal. Women were also more likely to make accusations of bastardy, reflecting their role in the ‘rituals’ of childbirth and their particular authority in this area.⁵¹ And one of the small number of male defendants was in fact acting in partnership with his wife, in a dispute that led to three almost simultaneous and strongly contested causes. Two witnesses deposed that they had heard Martha Coates say to Elizabeth Ashton (in addition to the colourful insult already noted), ‘I had better have noe children as have them ill begott as thine are and having so many fathers for them’.⁵² In return Martha brought suits against both Elizabeth and Thomas Ashton, with witness testimony that Thomas had said that ‘she... had had a bastard and then bid her fetch home her bastards’.⁵³ According to the articles of the third cause, Elizabeth had spoken in similar terms, although none of the witnesses recorded it.⁵⁴ Yet again, given the tit-for-tat, decidedly exaggerated, quality of these exchanges, it is hard to imagine that this was ‘really’ about bastardy or sexual misbehaviour.

Further, the number of women’s causes that record the use of many ‘non-sexual’ insulting words is a notable feature of this sample - especially given the predominant emphasis on women’s sexual reputation in research based on these sources. It is true that in terms of ‘core accusations’ men’s causes were rather more varied. Yet women’s causes - even allowing for the larger number - show a much wider range of imaginative strategies (and more use of ‘personalising’ detail) and involve a number of telling non-sexual themes that were not (or were less often) applied to men.

Most striking of all is the theme represented by the related insults ‘impudent’ and ‘brazen-faced’. These were only ever used against women. In a notable case, witnesses recorded that Henry Cooper was drinking in (male) company at the house of Michael Nightingale one evening when his wife Mary Cooper came to ask him to go home, at which Nightingale called her an ‘impudent whoore’ and threatened to turn her out of the house. Mary returned home in considerable distress, crying to a manservant that Nightingale had ‘undone’ her. She sent the servant back to Nightingale’s house to fetch a lantern that had been left there, and when the servant told Nightingale of her complaint, he slandered her again ‘in a very passionate manner’.⁵⁵ Nightingale’s violent reactions - both the insult and the threat of physical violence - can be seen as a response to a perceived threat to his authority (from a woman and a servant), in a setting reminiscent of the alehouse brawls examined by Amussen: the use of violence to discipline and reassert one’s place.⁵⁶ Mary’s subsequent counter-challenge, in taking him to court, simultaneously shows the power of such a tactic (in that she felt she had to do so) and its contestability.

The use of this theme in exchanges between women may also be suggestive of disputes and tensions over status and authority. In the case brought by Jane Morrett against Grace Horner for saying that Jane was ‘a brazen faced impudent whore’, this could well have included issues of age and marital status: Jane was young and a spinster, Grace married and a mother.⁵⁷ To name a woman ‘impudent’ or ‘brazen-faced’ was to define her in contrast to prescriptive ideals of ‘proper’ feminine behaviour, deference, obedience and modesty. Yet the obligations and responsibilities of women as wives, workers and mothers provided another, conflicting, set of ideals and practices.⁵⁸ In fulfilling one set of expectations, it was all too easy for a woman to transgress the other; after all, if Michael Nightingale’s house was an alehouse, Mary Cooper can be seen as attempting to carry out her responsibilities to her family by limiting her husband’s spending there. And however successfully women negotiated these tensions, the contradictions meant that this verbal weapon was always available for use against them.

A further sign of anxieties and contests over social and economic status lies in the recurring use of insults such as ‘base’ and ‘beggarly’, applied both to women and to men. In one striking case, Elizabeth Ballard sued Thomas Penrose following a dispute over the collection of hearth taxes. Penrose, according to witness testimony for Ballard, demanded the money (‘in a haughty and uncivill manner’):

whereupon the said Mrs Ballard said to him that he need not be soe hasty for her relacions had paid his Majesties more moneys than he had done... and... the said Mr Penrose replyed that made her soe begarly as she was.

He refused to accept her payment, claiming that it was bad coin, and began to seize some household goods. (Did she deliberately offer recognisably false coin, a sign of her contempt, or was he being insultingly provocative in refusing to accept the money?) In her witnesses’ accounts, she attempted to prevent him and was called ‘whore’ and ‘bitch’ and assaulted; according to Penrose and a constable who was present, she called him ‘rogue pimping rogue scabbed curre and other base names’ and assaulted him so that he had to defend himself and was provoked into speaking ‘ill words’. Both sides, one suspects, were being highly selective here; the cause was strongly contested, matching the intensity of the parties’ antagonism.⁵⁹ In early modern England, as Amussen points out, ‘wealth and worth’ were joined through the concept of ‘credit’.⁶⁰ Penrose’s (political) authority could be challenged by disparaging his financial ‘credit’ and he responded, reversing the insult, in terms that carried much more than simply economic meaning. (After all, the Ballards were some way from pauperdom if they had been assessed to pay hearth taxes). And from there to exchanging sexual insults and ‘base names’ - and physical assaults - was another short step.

Men were rather more likely to be accused of financial dishonesty than women; certainly, only men brought defamation suits where this was the sole issue. In particular, they were vulnerable to allegations of cheating in business. These causes appear later in the period, again suggesting shifting concerns; the earliest was in 1682 and is quite typical. Robert Hillary sued John Hirst following a dispute over a cask of wine, for saying that he was a ‘cheating rogue’ and ‘denyed his own handwriting’.⁶¹ However, for both women and men, accusations of sexual and financial dishonesty frequently went hand-in-hand. A witness deposed that William Sergison called Robert Hewitt a ‘picklocke fellow’, accused him of having a hand in the destruction of two of his cattle and rounded it off with ‘thou art a whore maister’.⁶² Thomas Moxon and Mary Edwardes were quarrelling when, accusing her of stealing some ‘barn hippins’ (babies’ napkins) from him, he called her ‘both a whore and a theef and said that he would prove her a theef and her husband should prove her a whore’.⁶³ Jane Carter brought together several themes to defame Isabella Thompson:

Jane Carter... in an angry, passionate and reflecting manner [did] call ... Isabell Thompson whore, and further said that she had made her former husband a cuckold and that the lads in the street did call him cuckold... Jane Carter did then and there call [Thomas Thompson, Isabella’s present husband] rogue, and bid him tell his wife... to bring home the shifts that she had stolen from her either cleane or uncleane.⁶⁴

The two causes involving accusations of witchcraft, made by a husband and wife against the same woman, similarly brought together different kinds of ‘dishonesty’. John Fetherston called Jane Tyreman ‘damned whoore dissembling bitch dissembling bitch dissembling whoore and witch’. The suit against his wife, also called Jane, contains similar insults, but is additionally much more precise about what Tyreman was being accused of. A witness deposed that Jane Fetherston said to Tyreman, ‘Thou devill wilt thou destroy us’ and called her ‘witch and said she had bewitched her kine [cows] for that she... could gett noe milke from them’, and went on to say to the witness that Tyreman ‘had gotten her kyne milke and her owne milke and therefor said God blesse my child from her’. At first Fetherston seems to be accusing Tyreman of ordinary maleficium, but she actually goes on to imply that somehow Tyreman is actually using witchcraft to steal the milk (a much more unusual allegation and, again, one involving ‘mundane’ but important everyday household goods).⁶⁵ As in several of the cases above, the sexual insult is brief and formulaic; it is the non-sexual components of the defamation - lying, cheating, theft, witchcraft - that are the focus of attention, of detailed accusations and witness testimony, whatever the gender of the plaintiff. It is not that the sexual element is unimportant, but it would seem simplistic to imagine, for example, that it was Jane Tyreman’s primary concern (another witness recorded that she simply said that Jane Fetherston ‘had called her witch’ when she asked him to give evidence).⁶⁶

‘Thou devill wilt thou destroy us...’ Jane Fetherston’s fury seems to have been matched only by her fear. ‘Cruelty’, or physical violence, is an occasional but noteworthy theme in women’s causes. Again, it does not appear in men’s causes, reflecting a situation where men had more access to legitimate physical violence-as-discipline and, indeed, male honour could on occasions require violent action. Men and women accused of violent crimes constructed very different narratives in attempts to justify their actions; female victims of male assault avoided speaking even of self-defence, of fighting back, focusing instead on their defencelessness and vulnerability.⁶⁷ Female physical violence was viewed as particularly repellant, providing the context for insults such as ‘cut throat heart eaten devil quean’ or ‘murthering whore and butcher whore’.⁶⁸ In men’s causes, conversely, it is weakness that is a source of insult. This might be the weakness of the cuckold or the coward,⁶⁹ or mental weakness: only men are insulted as a ‘fool’.⁷⁰

The Fetherstons also dwelt on Jane Tyreman’s physical appearance, her ugly, ‘withered’ face.⁷¹ This may specifically relate to the ‘witch’ accusation; Peter Rushton has noted cases in Durham where ‘crooked shape or strange appearance’ was associated with the witch.⁷² But it was also part of a more general theme, again almost exclusively directed at women. Against men, the theme of physical appearance was used only occasionally: one man, for example, was told that he had ‘a deft whorish face’, another that he was an ‘ill lookeing roague’. Christian Needham said that Anthony Harland ‘had whored all his teeth out’.⁷³ Meanwhile, women’s faces and ‘tails’ provided a continual source of insult. The latter usually appeared in accusations of infection with the pox, as noted above, and we have already seen the popularity of ‘brazen-faced’ as a term of insult. But defamers also used ‘ugliness’ in itself as part of insults. Margaret Hawksworth sued Jane Thompson for calling her ‘a fatt arsed bitch and fatt arsed sowe’.⁷⁴ Elizabeth Topham was sued for saying that Mary Wild was ‘a tallowfaced, wyde mouth’d, ugly bitch’.⁷⁵ Elizabeth Pickard took Francis Field to court after an incident in a John Orton’s house, where Field was distraining some of Orton’s household goods, including some pewter. Elizabeth was called ‘an ugly whoore’ and ‘a downe looking whoore’ when she ‘told the said Feild that she wondred he would offer to meddle with the pewther’.⁷⁶

The painted whore face appears only once in these causes, but in striking association with another physical image. Robert and Catherine Crooke were sued by Mary Spragg, in separate causes, although this was clearly another joint campaign by husband and wife. A witness recorded that Robert called Mary ‘a b[r]asen faced whore and a painted whore... and bid her looke in her forhead if she was not branded for a whore’; Catherine was reported to have called her ‘a painted whore, painted drabb painted bitch and colly-whore, and painted chade, and bid her get her gone in for she had the marke in forehead’.⁷⁷ The use of branding amongst the repertoire of early modern punishments is familiar, but this image of specifically branding the forehead of a whore seems more like an inventive adaptation, creatively mixing those official punishments and the ‘whore’s mark’, the slit nose, perhaps with a real mark or scar that Mary bore on her head.

Defamation causes in late-seventeenth-century York very rarely refer to noses as such, but they share with earlier Londoners the concern to make the whore ‘as visible as she was meant to be’ and focus on parts of the body on which ‘discredit could be visibly marked out’.⁷⁸ Such linguistic practices ‘em-body’ social values: ‘treating the body as a memory, they entrust to it in abbreviated and practical, i.e. mnemonic, form the fundamental principles of the arbitrary content of the culture’.⁷⁹ Corporeal images, overlapping but not synonymous with the sexual, pervade women’s causes - pregnancy and childbirth, disease and sometimes dirt, ugliness and physical markings, bodily comportment and ‘carriage’ - while men’s bodies seem to carry less fraught significances. Female bodies are simultaneously weak and threatening. These are ‘fantasied and fantastic figuration[s] of the body’, which construct, reinforce and regulate (hetero-)sexual practices and gender norms.⁸⁰

A close study of the language used in defamation in these York causes suggests that within causes based on sexual defamation, sexual insults varied in their importance, from detailed accusations to brief, formulaic epithets with far more emphasis on non-sexual components of the defamation. The significance and use of the common insults ‘whore’ and ‘rogue’, for example, varied considerably. Garthine Walker has made an important point, which is also true for men: ‘[w]hile sexual insult provided a conceptual and linguistic repertoire through which women’s honour could be damaged, defended and asserted, that honour was not necessarily itself sexual’.⁸¹

Insults were word-pictures evoking a whole range of negative images: deviance, corruption, pollution, disorder, weakness, poverty, ugliness. These might often be represented in sexual and corporeal terms; they were also powerfully expressed through economic images and those of insubordination and the failure of legitimate authority. None of these were only about gender relations, but all were profoundly gendered. The ‘double standard’ can be seen to represent a duality not only of ‘culpability’, but also of power. It is also, as a result, a double-edged standard; if women were blamed and made responsible for illicit sex, men were potentially vulnerable to it - regardless of personal sexual behaviour. A married man’s whole reputation and standing outside the household could be undermined by representing him as a cuckold, a husband who could not control his wife’s sexual behaviour within the household. Defamation wove together power, sexuality and gender; it also connected the household and the wider community, the ‘private’ and ‘public’. The next chapter will take a closer look at the neighbourhood and legal contexts and practices of defamation.