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Piety and Poisoning in Restoration Plymouth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Peter Marshall
Peter Marshall*
Affiliation:
University of Warwick
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Extract

Can we identify a pre-eminent physical location for the encounter between elite and popular religious mentalities in seventeenth-century England? A once fashionable and almost typological identification of ‘elite’ with the Church, and ‘popular’ with the alehouse, is now qualified or rejected by many historians. But there has been growing scholarly interest in a third, less salubrious, locale: the prison. Here, throughout the century and beyond, convicted felons of usually low social status found themselves the objects of concern and attention from educated ministers, whose declared purpose was to bring them to full and public repentance for their crimes. The transcript of this process is to be found in a particular literary source: the murder pamphlet, at least 350 of which were published in England between 1573 and 1700. The last two decades have witnessed a mini-explosion of murder-pamphlet studies, as historians and literary scholars alike have become aware of the potential of ‘cheap print’ for addressing a range of questions about the culture and politics of early modern England. The social historian James Sharpe has led the way here, in an influential article characterizing penitent declarations from the scaffold in Foucauldian terms, as internalizations of obedience to the state. In a series of studies, Peter Lake has argued that the sensationalist accounts of ‘true crime’ which were the pamphlets’ stock-in-trade also allowed space for the doctrines of providence and predestination, providing Protestant authors with an entry point into the mental world of the people.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 42: Elite and Popular Religion , 2006 , pp. 261 - 271
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2006

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References

1 Robson, Lynn, ‘No Nine Days Wonder: Embedded Protestant Narratives in Early Modern Prose Murder Pamphlets 1573–1700’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Warwick, 2003.Google Scholar

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4 Robson, ‘No Nine Days Wonder’, passim. Other works making use of the genre include Dolan, Frances, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England 1550–1700 (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; Gaskill, Malcolm, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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6 Hell Open’d, 1.

7 Ibid., 3–22 (quote at p. 7).

8 Ibid., 7.

9 Ibid., 11.

10 Ibid., 22–25, 57–67.

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15 For example, Hell Open’d, 39, 85, 65–6.

16 Ibid., 26.

17 Ibid., 27–8.

18 Ibid., 28.

19 Ibid., 2–9.

20 Ibid., 31; The Dead Prophet yet speaking. A Funeral Sermon Preached at Plaisterers-Hall, Feb. 15. 1690 (London, 1691), 20.

21 A Serious Inquiry into that Weighty Case of Conscience Whether a Man may Lawfully Marry his Deceased Wife’s Sister (London, 1703), epistle.

22 Hell Open’d, 41.

23 Ibid., 41–2.

24 Ibid., 42.

25 Ibid., 46.

26 Ibid., 69.

27 Ibid., 71–3.

28 Ibid., 45, 50, 64, 77.

29 Ibid., 33–4.

30 Ibid., 36.

31 Ibid.

32 Sharpe, ‘“Last Dying Speeches”’, 155–6;Robson, ‘No Nine Days Wonder’, 264–5.

33 Hell Open’d, 63, 77.

34 Ibid., 78.

35 Keeble, N. H., The Literary Culture of Nonconformity (Leicester, 1987).Google Scholar

36 For evidence that murder pamphlets could fulfil this function, see Lake, Peter, ‘Puritanism, Arminianism and a Shropshire Axe-Murder’, Midland History 15 (1990), 37–64 Google Scholar; Robson, ‘No Nine Days Wonder’, 73.

37 Hell Open’d, 37.

38 John Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–168g (New Haven, CT, and London, 1991), 44–6; Jeremy Gregory, Restoration, Reformation and Reform, 1660–1828 (Oxford, 2000), 187–91.

39 Hell Open’d, 66.

40 Ibid., 74.

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42 Hell Open’d, 22–3.

43 Ibid., 28.

44 Ibid., 51.

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48 Ibid., 74–5.

49 Ibid., 75.

50 Ibid., 79.

51 Ibid., 20.

52 Ibid., 89. For examples in cheap print of secret murders exposed by ghosts, see Gaskill, Malcolm, ‘Reporting Murder: Fiction in the Archives in Early Modern England’, Social History 23 (1998), 14–16 Google Scholar; Robson, , ‘No Nine Days Wonder’, 53–4.Google Scholar

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54 Hell Open’d, 82–3.

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56 A point made by Robson, , ‘No Nine Days Wonder’, 60.Google Scholar

57 Revealingly, when an abridgement of Quick’s text was included in the compendium, The Wonders of Free-Grace: or, A Compleat History of all the Remarkable Penitents that have been Executed at Tyburn and Elsewhere (London, 1690), the editor decided to ‘mostly touch upon the penitent’ (161).

58 For instances of this, see Lake, , ‘Deeds against Nature’, 280–2.Google Scholar

59 Hell Open’d, 79.

60 Ibid., 81.

61 Ibid., 65, 79–81.

62 Duffy, , ‘Godly and the Multitude’; Spufford, Margaret, ‘The Importance of Religion in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in eadem, ed., The World of Rural Dissenters 1520–1725 (Cambridge, 1995), 1–102.Google Scholar