11 - Enmity in Early Modern England

Summary

This chapter considers the impact of the wider political environment on social relations. The word ‘quarrel’ had different meaning for early modern English people. Manners were not progressively civilised: the rise in the homicide rate between the 1570s and the 1620s came at precisely the same time that new ideas and codes of behaviour were imported from Europe. Ciceronian ideals ennobled the pursuit of private enemies in the name of the public good. In the first decades of the seventeenth century the distinction between public and private became highly charged with a moral force and potency, which drew upon classical republicanism, traditional ideas of the commonwealth and radical Calvinism. The chapter traces the fortunes of the English quarrel. It looks at the nature of the spike in violence in the period 1570-1620; assesses the role played by civil society in mediating quarrels before the civil war; reflects on what contemporary ego-documents have to say about enmity; and concludes with some speculation about the reasons for the second spike in elite violence, 1660-1720.