But poore men pay for all.131

  Many ballads like this, sung all around England, referred to an earlier better world, where the elite cared for their household, and even for their community, as their family. Whether such a world ever existed was not important – this was not a revolutionary call for change, but an appeal for a return to an imaginary past with the lord as a good father to a harmonious community.132

  Violence Against Women

  Women found themselves not only targeted by the poor laws, but also under tighter community control and censure. Judge Anthony Fitzherbert published a book on legal procedures in 1510, which confirmed a husband’s right to govern and chastise his wife and beat her to a ‘reasonable’ degree. She had some legal defence – a wife threatened with murder could ask the court for protection. In the Essex, Hertfordshire and Sussex Assizes of 1559 to 1625, women were victims in almost three-quarters of marital murders.133 From the 1550s, community cruelty to women was made legal and spontaneous abuse of women a legitimate punishment. The cucking stool that hoisted a woman into the air to shame her was widely developed after 1597 into a ‘ducking stool’, a more solid chair for a life-threatening punishment of holding a woman underwater, with every parish ordered by law to have a working version. The magistrates or community leaders would rule how often or for how long the woman should be ducked – sometimes women drowned; sometimes they died of shock.

  Ann Bidlestone was walked through the streets by an officer of Newcastle, recorded by the brewer Ralph Gardiner

  [And Cover] Ann Bidlestone from Ralph Gardiner, England’s Grievance Discovered, R. Ibbitson and P. Stent, 1655, p. 110 (Public domain)

  In Newcastle in 1655, Ann Bidlestone was put in a scold’s bridle – the town’s preferred punishment for argumentative women. The cage around her head had an iron skewer that she had to hold in her mouth which cut her and made her mouth bleed. This helmet-like torture device with a tongue depressor, to publicly gag the woman, was legal and commonly used from 1567.134 Some courts ruled that a guilty woman stand alone in church or in the market square, sometimes wearing only her shift or carrying a taper (a candle) as her punishment of public shame, especially for sexual misconduct. Women might be set in the stocks in the market or churchyard for the neighbours to stone or abuse.

  Women found guilty of serious crimes could escape execution if they were pregnant. Edith Sawnders, a single woman of London, caught thieving silver, ‘pleaded her belly’ in August 1565. She was not inspected by a jury of matrons until December, by which time she was pregnant and received a royal pardon. Catherine Longley was charged, with three other women, of stealing clothes in 1579. All but one were pregnant by the time they were inspected, and so pardoned. Occasionally a woman refused to shame herself. Agnes Samuel, accused of witchcraft in 1593, refused to plead her belly: ‘This I will not do. It will never be said that I was both a witch and a whore.’135 The magistrates hanged Agnes and her mother, who was also accused of witchcraft.

  The question of rape and who suffered from the crime changed in 1576 to recognise that it was a personal attack on a woman, not theft or damage of property owned by her husband, father or guardian.136 It was separated from charges of kidnap and defined as penile penetration of an unwilling woman, a definition that would be unchanged over the next 200 years. As a personal crime of violence, it was punishable by death,137 but this probably made juries reluctant to bring in a guilty verdict, for fear of executing an innocent man. The new law seemed to recognise a woman’s right to safety, but by making the crime one of unwanted sexual intercourse rather than a theft or damage to property, it defined rape, for the first time, as a sexual encounter motivated by desire. The victim was no longer a man whose property had been stolen away and damaged by a thief. The thief was no longer pursued by the man for compensation to be awarded by a judge and jury of similar property owners. Now the victim was a person notorious for unreliability. She – the last person anyone would trust – was obliged to define the act as rape by an audible, preferably violent, resistance during the act, coherent complaint afterwards, and production of witnesses and evidence. The woman faced sceptical interrogation from her social superiors long before anyone went to find the rapist. And since no woman could be trusted, she faced automatic doubt.

  In the past, everyone had agreed that female sexuality was voracious. Eve was easily tempted; a woman would have sex with almost anyone if her father or husband did not guard her. Thinkers influenced by the ideas of courtly love believed that women were initially cool but female refusal could be followed by seduction, and rape was only a degree of force beyond that. In a society that held these opinions, rape conviction rates were vanishingly low: less than 1 per cent of all indictments recorded on the total Home Assize Circuit between 1558 and 1700.138 In three Elizabethan counties of Kent, Surrey and Essex, 63 men stood trial for rape, and 19 were found guilty, a conviction rate of 30.15 per cent.139 This was high because in Surrey, 25 of its 32 trials had been for the rapes of under-age girls, and since young girls could not consent, any intercourse was a rape.

  Prostitution

  Prostitutes came under increasing criticism and control as sexually transmitted diseases were blamed on them. Syphilis, an incurable and fatal sexual disease, was first seen in England in early 1490. Every country in Europe named it after their enemy. To the Russians, it was the ‘Polish disease’. But in Shrewsbury in 1493, a chronicler gloomily recorded the ‘French pox’: ‘About thys tyme began the fowle scab and horrible sickness called the freanche pocks.’140

  However named, everyone agreed that promiscuous women provided the source of the illness. Even previous plague outbreaks had been blamed on sexually active women, as God’s punishment for fornication.141 Leprosy was believed to be carried by women without any sign, and transmitted by sexual intercourse during menstruation. Syphilis was thought to spontaneously generate in the bodies of promiscuous women, who gave it to healthy men, who might suffer from it but were not themselves infectious.142

  Venereal disease came into England in the late 1500s, the first case recorded in Romford in 1578. Joan Callowaie told the church court that she had intercourse with five men and one ‘did burn her very pitifully’. An enterprising brothel-keeper of Romford, Widow Agnes Newman, became a surgeon to sufferers.143 Other theorists took the view that since venereal disease was caused by unchaste women, it would be cured by a diseased man having sex with a virgin.144

  Licensed brothels, which had protected prostitutes from abuse, were closed in most towns from 1546.145 Sex work became illegal and prostitutes faced arrest, while clients were mostly ignored. Part of the clampdown came only for the sake of appearances. Some towns fined prostitutes as a way of taxing their profits. At the port of Winchelsea, sex workers had to pay a fine of 6s 8d every quarter – in effect a fee to trade – and in York, sex workers rented their rooms in St Andrew’s churchyard from the church.146

  For many women prostitution was not a permanent job but a resource in an emergency, according to their personal difficulties. Some single women exchanged sex acts for gifts or financial support but were not considered prostitutes. The Norwich Census of the Poor of 1570 categorised women as single, married, widowed, deserted, and as ‘grass wenches’ – sexually active unmarried women, sometimes with bastard children. Six grass wenches were named.147

  In London, women walking in the streets could be sent to the prison for criminal women and orphans at the old Palace of Bridewell, accused of prostitution on nothing more than the word of the magistrates. Provincial women found themselves punished by their community. Those who were on the streets for any reason, away from workplace, home or church, faced public censure. By the 1600s, women had been all but enclosed: even meeting places like ale houses or the new coffee shops were barred to them unless they were working there.

  Puritans in power from 1649 to 1660, during the Commonwealth years, again attempted to close brothels. One prosecution of a St Clement Danes’ bawdy house named the prostitutes, including Anne Cobbie, who was well regarded and popular. The court records described her as a ‘tawny Moor’ with famously ‘soft skin’. The brothel owners were imprisoned and the house closed. Cobbie may have retired and married a local haberdasher, Richard Sherwood.148

  The restoring of the permissive court of Charles II allowed the return of public prostitution. It was clear that some of the ladies of the court, indeed women favoured by the king himself, were rewarded with money, goods, land and titles. Charles II’s English mistress, actress Nell Gwynn, endeared herself to the crowd by saying she was not one of his disliked Roman Catholic mistresses but she was the ‘Protestant Whore’.

  Women Enslaved

  From the 1560s onwards, increasing numbers of kidnapped people were brought from Africa to England and sold as slaves to owner-employers. More than half a century before, Catherine of Aragon had brought a slave in her retinue when she arrived in England to marry Arthur, Prince of Wales. She was named after Catherine – Catalina – and she worked as a domestic servant in the queen’s chamber: ‘She had to make the Queen’s bed and attend to other secret or private services of her Highness’s chamber.’149

  Catalina attended both of Catherine’s wedding nights in 1501 and 1509, before returning to Spain to marry and have children. She was later described as ‘esclava que fue’ – ‘the slave that was’, suggesting that she had been released from slavery.

  A baby girl described as ‘a negro’ was baptised with the name of Mary in Plymouth in 1594, and her father was said to be a Dutchman.150 ‘Lucy Negro’ played a part in the Gray’s Inn revels of Christmas 1594. She had been a dancer at the court of Elizabeth and was cast in the masque in the role of ‘the Abbess of Clerkenwell’ – probably a brothel-keeper.151 A census of ‘Strangers’ in Barking, around 1598, lists five ‘negras’ including two women: one named Clare who lived at the house of Widow Stokes, and Maria who lived at Olyver Skynnars. The census in the next year shows Clare still living at Widow Stokes’, but Maria – written as Marea – had moved to Richard Wood’s house. Men and women slaves kidnapped from Africa became fashionable status symbols as servants to the aristocracy. In 1599, Dennis Edwards wrote to the Earl of Hertford’s secretary, ‘Pray enquire after and secure my negress: she is certainly at The Swan.’152

  The number of African people kidnapped and brought to England prompted an announcement from Elizabeth I in 1596 that they should all be transported again – out of the country. In 1601, a German slave taker was authorised to kidnap 89 slaves from their owners, ship them to Spain and Portugal, and exchange them for white prisoners who had been enslaved by Barbary pirates.153

  Some enslaved women created strong bonds with their owner/employers, who remembered them in their wills. Frances – an ‘African maid’ – received £10 in the 1600 will of her London merchant employer, and Joane ‘the blackemore’ was given £3 in her employer’s will in 1612.154 A former slave, Helenor Myou was wealthy enough to own household goods in Middlesex in 1612. She witnessed against thieves who had stolen her property: collars or ruffs, a pillowcase and other ‘divers goods’. Another woman who may have been enslaved but managed to gain both freedom and prosperity was Cattelena – a single African woman living in Almondsbury, Gloucestershire. The only surviving record of Cattelena is the inventory of her possessions at her death in May 1625, when she left a cow (worth £3 10s), a bed, a bolster, a pillow, a pair of blankets, a sheet, a quilt, four little pots, one pewter candlestick, one tin bottle, a dozen spoons, three earthen dishes, two dozen trenchers, one table cloth, all her wearing apparel, and one coffer and two little boxes.

  Some women found freedom but not prosperity. Unknown numbers died of poverty in the streets with no parish to claim as home. One, named Marie, was found in the capital in 1623, ‘a poor woman being a Blacke Moor, Named Marie, who died in the street in Rosemary Lane’.

  A very few slaves were freed by baptism, following the dwindling belief that a Christian could not be enslaved by Christians. Mary Fillis (1577–?1631) arrived as a child slave from Morocco aged about six years old and worked for a London merchant, John Barker. On his death, Mary Fillis was inherited by his widow, until she was bought or hired by Millicent Porter – a widowed seamstress in the village of East Smithfield. Here Mary Fillis converted to Christianity and was baptised at St Botolph’s Aldgate on 3 June 1597, her owner/employer Millicent Porter acting as her godmother. The two women may have regarded baptism as setting Mary free, and she may have married Christian Peters of the parish. Mary Peters, a ‘poor blackamore woman’, was buried at Tower Hill in 1631.155

  Most of the slaves in England won freedom for themselves by running away and making a life among escaped slave communities, or finding shelter with white working-class people. Augustina Patra, a ‘blackamoor servant’, was punished in 1601 by the London Bridewell ‘for running away in diverse times’ from a noble household.156 Mary – ‘a Black moore servant to Captain Sallanova of Weymouth and Melcombe Regis’ – was caught at Dorchester after running away from her owner and sent back to him in 1633.

  The slave-owners had not yet invented a theory of different races each with different status. Most people thought – as the ancient Greeks, and indeed as modern gene scientists157 – that there was one human race with variations and no meaningful constant differences between one variant and another. But by the 1500s, the word ‘fair’ was used interchangeably with whiteness, as well as its earlier meaning of beauty; and the opposite of ‘fair’ was not only ‘foul’ but also ‘dark’.158 ‘Blackness’ and ‘Jewishness’ were sometimes used interchangeably.

  Even elite white women did not have control over their lives. Frances Coke, daughter of the jurist Edward Coke, known as the ‘father of English liberties’, was kidnapped by her own father, tied to a bedpost and whipped until she agreed to marry the man of his choice, Sir John Villiers, who was said to have gone insane three years after the marriage.

  Upper-class Women’s Work

  Ladies of the centralised and growing Tudor courts were career courtiers, providing continuity during the change of a monarch – especially important during the revolving door of the Henry VIII years. Four ladies of the Henrician court became queens themselves – promoted from being ladies-in-waiting. Ladies represented their country at diplomatic meetings and parties, created a stylish and cultured ambience that was part of the identity of the monarchy, prepared and performed in devotional acts and secular entertainments, and assisted in the smooth running of the court – consuming and creating etiquette, culture, fashion and art.159

  The development of the masque into a complicated and lengthy musical dance-drama, calling for many performers and audience participation, reinforced the courtly love image of passive women, but created a serious art form for women as writers, choreographers, designers, prop-makers, costumiers, musicians, artists, stage technicians and managers.

  Women painters benefited from the fashion for portraits and murals for the court and the elite. There were 24 women painters registered with the Painter Stainer’s Guild, which numbered 2,600. Famous women court painters include Susanna Horenbout (1503–54), who was a ‘gentlewoman’ and ‘illuminator’ at the courts of Anne of Cleves and Kateryn Parr. Her sister-in-law Margaret Holsewyther, another elite woman painter, may have inherited her brother Lucas Horenbout’s workshop on his death, and continued his work. Levina Teerlinc (1510–76) was the only court miniaturist at the court of Henry VIII, and received commissions for hundreds of miniatures. Paid an annual pension by the king and his successors, she may have trained the more famous Nicholas Hilliard. Anne Gulliver, widow of the Serjeant Painter to the Crown, John Brown, inherited his equipment and possibly his post on his death in 1532. He left her his tools ‘for as long as she occupyeth mine occupation’.160

  Audrey Beene inherited her painting shop in ‘the Exchange’ and a stock of paintings from her professional painter husband Thomas, himself the son of a painter mother and father. Susannah Penelope Rosse painted with the more famous Samuel Cooper and most of the miniatures in the so-called ‘Samuel Cooper pocket book’ were painted by her.161 The fashion for portraits spread to the provinces. Katherine Maynor of Ampthill, Bedfordshire, was the widow of a painter and may have taken over his artwork business. Alice Hearne, a painter in her own right, inherited her husband’s equipment and continued in the business. The records of the Painters’ Guild of Chester from 1575 to 1640 show seven women painters in the town who inherited their husbands’ shops and freeman status. If they did not paint, they ran the business: training apprentices and hiring journeymen. The widows of the painters Gerlach Fliche and Robert Pilgrim were executors of their husbands’ wills.162 Alice Gammedge of Saffron Walden in Essex left painting supplies and frames to her son in 1591.163

  As the Tudor court grew bigger than its predecessors, more paying and pensioned roles were created for elite women. Elizabeth Woodville of York (queen from 1464 to 1483) had five ladies-in-waiting, seven maids of honour and two female servants. Two generations later, Catherine of Aragon had 33 women in her household.164 The reigning queen Mary I had up to 36 and Elizabeth I had 38.165

  Elizabeth’s privy chamber consisted of a semi-professional corps of women: 16 paid and six or more honorary. Some were permanent appointments: Blanche Parry and Mary Radcliffe never married and served for almost the entire reign. Some were family members from the Boleyn and Carey side. They supervised her linens, wardrobe and jewels, assisting with dressing and washing, serving food and nursing her during illness. One woman usually slept with the queen as her ‘bed-fellow’, for company and security. The constantly changing young maids-of-honour served as companions, dancers, entertainment and as an attractive backdrop to Elizabeth when the court was on show.166 Many of the relationships were long-lasting and affectionate.