Austrey
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Seventeenth Century Austrey TURBULENT
TIMES The seventeenth century was a
time of change and challenges to the established order, including the
confrontation between King and Parliament and the growth of religious dissent
after the Civil War. Although ordinary villagers left
little written evidence of their thoughts, feelings and opinions, there is
plenty of evidence to suggest that rural people took an active interest in
religious debate. William Weston's
colourful account of the Cambridgeshire villagers who, ‘sedulously turned the
pages and looked up the texts cited by the preachers’ at the Puritan
conferences at Wisbech in the 1580s and '90s, is particularly convincing on this
point. It is also significant that
publication of printed commentaries, chapbooks and sermons increased
dramatically in the decades leading up to the Civil War.
Discussion was not limited to religious matters.
Radical preachers also gave vent to controversial views on a number of
matters closer to home, such as enclosure, depopulation and the treatment of the
poor. Although illiterate villagers
had indirect access to these ideas through the ‘oral culture’ of the church
and the alehouse, literacy was a powerful force in the spread of radical ideas.
Literacy
and the spread of ideas
Access to ideas that challenged
the prevailing religious and social establishment was an ingredient of change at
parish level. In fact it could be argued that an interest in and concern about
events outside the parochial world was the first step in the development of an
informed ‘public opinion’. Literacy
and the dissemination of news or
information was crucial to this process since it opened up new possibilities for
the villagers. We know that the midland gentry
had an appetite for 'newes' because of the stream of written communications,
printed articles and copies of parliamentary speeches bundled up in newsletters
from kinsmen and associates in London. In the years leading up to the Civil War
it seems that the Warwickshire gentry clubbed together to buy newsheets, reading
detailed accounts of the conflict between king and parliament in printed
journals such as The Weekly Account, Perfect
Occurences and The Scottish Dove. To find out about the involvement
of ordinary villagers in these events we have to sift through personal diaries
and state papers looking for evidence of gossip, common talk and ‘libels’ of
a political nature. The most active
peddlers of information were travellers and preachers who found an eager
audience for their public utterances. John
Rous, the celebrated diarist, records that the scandals of the Court, disputes
over church doctrines, Parliament and taxes were common talk in the provinces in
the 1620s and 1630s. Rous, who was
then incumbent of Santon-Downham in Norfolk, found particularly avid interest in
the latest ‘newes’ from the Capital among his parishioners.
Indeed, the popular preoccupation with current affairs was already a
recognisable source of amusement. ‘Every man askes what newes? Every
man's religion is known by his newes’, declared one of Rous’ fellow
justices at the Mondeford sessions, in mock parody of a sermon preached before
the King at Whitehall, and echoing, presumably, the fashionable greeting. The general interest of the
public in national events is forcefully shown than by the government’s
largely unsuccessful attempts to suppress ‘lavish
and licentious talking in matters of state’. Damaging rumours spread
quickly to the great alarm of the authorities, eager to stamp out any challenge
to their position, as for example in November, 1634, when the vicar of Abingdon
in Berkshire was reported as ‘a great
disturber of the peace’ for publishing ‘strange
doctrines’. An informant
relates that ‘he has lately presumed in
his preaching to venture upon state business and ... has denied the king's
supremacy... in a public sermon’. Coachmen were particularly notorious
gossipmongers who played an active part in carrying news to the provinces. That
same year a coachman was accused of relaying
‘false news, lies and tales about
the Archbishop of York’. A
few months later a Cambridge man was reported for speaking against the bishops
and the Book of Recreations after drinking sack in the Falcon Tavern!
Sources and Notes
William Weston, The Autobiography
of an Elizabethan, ed. P. Caraman,
(London, 1955), in M. Spufford, Contrasting Communities, 262-3. F.J. Levy, ‘How
Information Spread among the Gentry, 1550-1640’, Journal of British Studies,
21 No. 2 (Spring, 1982), 24-25. A.L. Hughes,
‘County Community’ thesis, 56-7, 401.
Diary of John Rouse ... from 1625 to 1642, ed.
M.A.E. Green, Camden Society, lxvi London,
1856), 44 (the justice was ‘Mr
Taylor’). CSPD 1634-5, 311.
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