Prologue (126a1–127d5)

While the Parmenides is a complex dialogue, its complexity isn't restricted to its maze of ontological arguments. The cast of characters, setting, and transmission are equally complex, and it seems needlessly so. To begin with, the dialogue's cast is quite large: there are roughly seven people in the prologue and internal conversation each. In the prologue we meet Cephalus, Adeimantus, Glaucon, Antiphon, a nameless bronzesmith, and Cephalus's fellow citizens, who number at least two but are perhaps more. Likewise, in the internal conversation we meet Socrates, Zeno, Parmenides, Pythodorus, Aristoteles, and those who came with Socrates, said to be many (127c2: ἄƛƛους τινὰς μϵτ᾽ αὐτοῦ ποƛƛούς), but because the entire group consists of seven (129d1: ἑπτὰ ἡμῶν ὄντων), really no more than two. The complexity keeps growing once we start sorting the characters out. To begin with names, four—Cephalus, Adeimantus, Glaucon, and Socrates— are familiar from the Republic, although the Cephalus of the Parmenides is not the Cephalus we find in the Republic. Like Cephalus, Antiphon's name is shared with another, his grandfather, while Aristoteles’ name recalls Plato's famous student. Eponymy aside, there are also the nameless, who seem unimportant enough to warrant anonymity: Cephalus's fellow citizens, those with Socrates, and the smith. Yet also unnamed is the all-important man Cephalus points to obliquely, when he asks Adeimantus and Glaucon the name of their brother of the same mother, i.e., their half brother Antiphon, and hence not their brother of the same father, i.e., Plato, our author. Looking to origins, things grow still more complex. Politically, Socrates, Pythodorus, Aristoteles, Adeimantus, Glaucon, and Antiphon are all of Athenian origin, with whom we could reasonably presume the smith and those with Socrates belong, though we cannot be sure. The rest are not Athenians: Parmenides and Zeno come from Elea, while Cephalus and his fellow citizens are from Clazomenae. Regarding parentage, we’ve already seen that Adeimantus, Glaucon, Plato, and Antiphon all have the same mother, while Antiphon has a different father.

In her fictional description of a dinner party at ‘Milby’ (Warwickshire) in the late 1820s, the novelist George Eliot presents pen portraits of six clergymen around the table who may be regarded as archetypes of the clerical profession: the hospitable minister, at home entertaining guests in his well-appointed vicarage; the clerical magistrate, invariably feuding with his quarrelsome congregation; the misanthropic evangelical, always running into debt; the intellectually ambitious Cambridge graduate, with aspirations to be a poet; the energetic pastor, fastidious in his self-presentation; and the frustrated incumbent of an impoverished rural living, destined for a successful career as a metropolitan lecturer. A seventh clergyman seated in the Milby vicarage dining room is, however, singled out by Eliot for praise as ‘the true parish priest’:

Indeed, Eliot's ‘true parish priest’, Martin Cleves, stands as the ideal type of country parson, a man who might be described in the rough idiom of Warwickshire labourers and artisans as an ‘uncommon knowin’, sensable, free-spoken gentleman; very kind and good natur'd too’.

Eliot's vivid characterisation of the ideal parish clergyman is particularly resonant in a volume of essays dedicated to the memory of Margaret Spufford, not least because it so elegantly weaves the minister into the social and economic fabric of the local community in which he lived. Although Spufford's work on the history of religion is primarily associated with her project to establish the descent of rural dissent, her commitment to demonstrate ‘the importance of religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ invariably led her back to the relationships between clergymen and parishioners as people. Although famous for her insistence that religion was primarily a matter of faith and was therefore essentially to be understood as a spiritual relationship between believers and their God, she was always keen to locate religious practice in its social and economic context.

AS WE SAW IN THE PREVIOUS chapter, the antiquarianism and medievalism of Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry fed into the emergence of the literary gothic, and by the end of the century dead lovers were starting to return with a vengeance: among others, Matthew Lewis's ‘Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogine’, or the English versions of Gottfried August Bürger's Lenore. Child included ‘The Suffolk Miracle’ from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century broadsides in the English and Scottish Popular Ballads because of its status as an English counterpart of the ‘spectre bridegroom’ story of European tales and of Bürger's poem, but he passed over other revenant ballads from English broadsides. For reasons that apparently lie in matters of style and authorship, he chose to include ‘Fair Margaret and Sweet William’, but not its counterpart, ‘William and Margaret’, both of which were in print in the 1720s. But the ballad gothic did not spring from nowhere, and ‘William and Margaret’ represents an important signpost for the direction, or at least for one of the directions, the ballad would take during the course of the century.

‘In came Margarets grimely Ghost’

In the Beaumont and Fletcher play The Knight of the Burning Pestle (c.1607), Old Merrythought, perhaps best described as a burlesque character whose life is given over to song and mirth, sings the following lines:

In Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, Percy identified this snatch of song with lines in the ballad ‘Fair Margaret and Sweet William’.2 That identification was endorsed by Child and has been generally accepted.3 In particular, Merrythought's stanza equates to the fifth stanza of Child's A text, quoted here directly from its broadside source, Fair Margaret's Misfortune:

Later, Merrythought sings again, ‘You are no loue for me Margret, I am no loue for you.’ This second snatch of song finds a very rough equivalent in the first half of the second stanza of Fair Margaret's Misfortune: ‘I see no harm by you Margaret; / nor you see none by me’.

This chapter focuses on the other side of the parish from that explored so expertly and compellingly by Margaret Spufford in Contrasting Communities. Or rather, if Spufford sought out the first shoots of religious enthusiasm, and then went on to trace how the different plants were connected together by genus and over time, this research is more concerned to study the mud from which they emerged. We can say ‘mud’ rather than ‘soil’, because an acute agrarian historian like Spufford understood the distinction between tilled, aerated, well-manured, weed-free ‘soil’ or ‘tilth’, and the lumpen, muddy fallows, where things grow because they are left largely to their own devices. It is this rather unkempt, weed-strewn, parochial religion that is the subject under consideration here.

It will be investigated through the ‘classic’ parish study, of a kind so familiar to Spufford, but one in which we read the evidence against the grain, in search of the unexceptional and the hidden, rather than the zealous or the strident. Given this, we might as well pick a location in which the other story, of growing Protestant enthusiasm, has already been well told. It seems appropriate, therefore, to investigate the obverse of the rise of puritanism through an analysis based around the long clerical career of an incumbent of the well-known Essex village of Earls Colne. However, this incumbent was not the puritan clerical diarist Ralph Josselin, but his even longer-serving Elizabethan predecessor, William Adams. Adams was nominated to the vicarages of Earls Colne and neighbouring White Colne in 1573 and, although deprived of Earls Colne in 1610, he continued serving in White Colne (and living in Earls Colne) until his death in 1627. This total elapsed service of fifty-four years dwarfed even Josselin's commitment of forty-two years to the village.

If Josselin was a clergyman whose spiritual regime was one of endless, patient, painful cultivation, his predecessor was someone who was happy to let the spiritual weeds grow. However, in investigating the parish under Adams, it is important for us to avoid simply accepting the story told by his enemies and his successors, that the village was (in the words of its later firebrand lecturer, the puritan émigré Thomas Shepard) not a place ‘that had any godliness’, but rather a spiritual or normative tabula rasa until it was remodelled by the ‘hotter sort’.

When could early modern society exchange formal credit instruments (a loan drawn up between two parties promising a fixed rate of repayment) without redrawing the terms? The question has implications for understanding how credit could supplement the cash supply and informal credit system, and the context which drove the need for transferable credit. Without surviving written credit instruments, it has been difficult for historians to understand how these instruments functioned. Using the probate record research methodology refined by Margaret Spufford and Peter Spufford offers the opportunity to answer these questions about the development of credit transferability, by studying the incidence of credit instruments in probate records. This has implications for the idea of a ‘Financial Revolution’ popularised by Dickson in 1967. In this theory, at the end of the seventeenth century the Bank of England and Treasury led innovations in transferable, assignable credit instruments, which made formal credit available to common people. Wennerlind was one of the first to challenge the periodisation of the Financial Revolution, arguing that changes in the conceptualisation of money occurred earlier. Recent scholarship by Muldrew and Coffman has moved the focus onto how innovation in the uses of credit was driven by public needs. Using Margaret Spufford's probate research, this article shows that as written credit instruments could be bequeathed to others without changing terms, they were transferable between persons and could supplement the lack of cash in the economy. This occurs from a far earlier point than Dickson's theory describes, with references to bonds and bills occurring from 1610, a century before the 1710 Act of Anne confirmed the transferability of promissory notes – demonstrating that the formalisation of credit did not occur as a result of government innovation. The appearance of formal credit in probate records in such different areas as Maidstone in Kent and Sedbergh in the West Riding of Yorkshire indicates that the lack of cash and need to support vulnerable people with an income on capital were consistent issues in varied areas. Adding colour to this conclusion are the debates on usury in published sermons, which indicate by their detail and permissiveness that lending at interest was in fact an accepted practice from the earliest point of this study.

The appearance of Margaret Spufford's Contrasting Communities in 1974 transformed our understanding of the experience of religion and devotion at the parochial level in the century and a half following the Reformation. That it took a social and economic historian to focus the attention of ecclesiastical and political historians on the lived experience and religious context in which the bulk of the population negotiated their spiritual relationship with God, and how that informed their social relationships with their neighbours, says much about the boundaries that existed within the historical sub-disciplines up to that date. It is no surprise that Spufford was a pioneer in breaking down the boundaries between those historical approaches: her earlier work focused on the economic and social life of country men and women as they went about their daily lives, and to that scholarly work she brought her own personality, which was rooted in a deep understanding of the importance of religion to each individual and to the networks upon which she or he depended, be they household, family or neighbour. That understanding informed the later chapters of Contrasting Communities and brought a number of doctoral students to study with her, who continued and developed her approach, culminating in the collection of essays which she edited and introduced as The World of Rural Dissenters 1520–1725, in 1995. Spufford's work was focused on the Protestant dissenting experience, and both her own work and that of her students did much to reveal the extent to which these dissenters, both Lollards before the Reformation and Quakers after the Restoration, notwithstanding their religious separateness, were firmly socially embedded in their local communities. These essays identified dissenters not so much with the periphery, but with part of the mainstream of local society in many neighbourhoods. In terms of religious culture, the work of Spufford's students produced a more nuanced understanding of that porous boundary between what we might term, and what contemporaries called, ‘the godly’ and the dissenters, those accused by ecclesiastical authority who refused to bend to its will.

When I reviewed The World of Rural Dissenters, I commented on the fact that a large section of the ‘dissenting’ religious population were not discussed within its pages – that is to say, the Catholics – and that some consideration of these, in the light of another book which appeared shortly after Contrasting Communities, might prove profitable.

TODAY, AN UNDERSTANDING of the gender dynamics and gender roles of the Middle Ages generally stems from a confluence of several literary and historical streams: anti-feminist treatises from the Middle Ages, medieval romance, medievalist fiction from writers such as Tolkien and Tennyson, and even scholarship on the Middle Ages and medieval romance. As discussed in the introduction, whether the perception of gender in the Middle Ages as portrayed in medievalist fantasy is “correct” or not is secondary to understanding what that perception is and how it developed, as well as how writers such as Martin approach, use, and/or reject that perception.

Various uses of medievalism – both social and literary – indicate that the general beliefs about gender roles in the Middle Ages favor strong, warrior men and submissive, chaste women, with the occasional warrior woman allowed. Michael Drout believes some of this impression may have been inspired by Tolkien, whose Middle-Earth includes very few women and largely eschews all forms of reproduction. Drout claims that students new to medieval studies might be surprised by the visibility of women in medieval literature and history, even viewing the idea of gender as an “intrusion” on their preconceived notions of the Middle Ages. This observation generalizes to a larger point about the role of men in constructing the Middle Ages – for the most part, medieval writers were men, medieval historians were men, and early medieval scholars were men – in that the portrayal and construction of gender is one-sided. Nancy Partner reminds us that many of the medieval women available for study are fictitious, invented by men for male interests, and that medieval studies has traditionally been “men studying men.”

Since Martin is writing epic fantasy set in a medievalist world, especially one that is strongly influenced by medieval romance and attempts to avoid high fantasy's tendency toward simple morality and an innocent Middle Ages, gender issues are, of course, complicated in A Song of Ice and Fire. As with the structures and narrative discussed in the previous chapter, Martin's handling of gender issues also shows strong influences from medieval romance – again, the original romances and not the Victorian or Pre-Raphaelite reconstruction of them. Moreover, Martin not only reconstructs the gender dynamics of medieval romance, but also considers the implications of these dynamics on society in general and his characters in particular – men as well as women.

THUS BOOK ORIGINATES out of research into ballads printed in England and Scotland from roughly the sixteenth century up until the period just before the First World War. Francis James Child famously referred to the Roxburghe and Pepys collections of broadside ballads as ‘veritable dung-hills, in which, only after a great deal of sickening grubbing, one finds a very moderate jewel’, but the fact is that the particular ballads Child favoured, largely on aesthetic grounds, have always coexisted with and comprised part of a much more substantial culture of ballads in print. This book is in some sense an attempt to redress the balance. Indirectly, it takes up the insistence of the great ballad scholar Roger Renwick, in his Recentering Anglo/American Folksong (2001), that studies should be founded on the underlying evidence of the data accumulated over the centuries. However, in doing so it brings into the open the very real discontinuities that there are in ballad history, contrasting with the implicit continuities that have frequently been inferred both from the discipline founded by Child, and from the folk song collecting of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These discontinuities in turn demand a reconsideration of the past: the shifting literary histories of the ballad genre itself, the inherently backward-looking nature of a core repertoire of ballads, and the historical past as it is remembered and reworked through ballads – the past of the ballad and the past in the ballad

‘Ballad’ is taken here to embrace an entire, dynamic culture of cheap verse literature and song, with an emphasis on its narrative varieties, such that it is not amenable to ready definition, even while most of the examples discussed in the pages that follow will seem relatively familiar. Study of the subject has surely advanced to a stage where strict definition is not demanded, and in any case the first chapter addresses some of the variety that falls under the ballad heading. The book is concerned specifically with literary (even bibliographical) histories, but reference is made to melodies where the evidence suggests they could have a bearing on continuity (or discontinuity) among ballads.

I first heard of Margaret Spufford in my first term of research at Cambridge, when seated in the blue armchairs in the Anderson room in the university library, working though visitation records of the diocese of Ely, looking for schoolteachers. The archivist, Dorothy Owen, whispered loudly in my ear, ‘You do know, don't you, that Margaret Spufford has already gone through these records?’ Spufford, it seemed, might be a colleague or collaborator, perhaps a rival, and she was already ahead of me, as she long remained.

Spufford made her name with Contrasting Communities, which I praised in The American Historical Review. The scholarship she sometimes described as ‘serendipity’ was grounded in the most persistent, attentive and innovative archival research. Her arguments about the importance of soil types and farming practices for variations in social organisation and cultural flexibility were fully supported by the evidence, and where she had doubts she said so.

Over many years Margaret Spufford and I became friends and correspondents, criticising each other's work along with wholesome encouragement. Our most fruitful disagreement concerned the extent of literacy, and the ability of ordinary English men and women to read the output of the popular press. I took a somewhat minimalist position, restricting literacy to perhaps 10 per cent of the women and no more than 40 per cent of the men, while she argued that signature indicators were untrustworthy, and that the ability to read was more widespread. Now that the dust has settled, I think we might agree that literacy was strongly stratified by class, status, occupation, gender and location, while exceptional individuals transcended the constraints of their environment. Print was indeed widely distributed, reaching many on the margins of literacy, but many English villagers remained as benighted as their ministers often said they were.

Spufford's work opened up a third tier of the early modern social experience. The first tier was occupied by the crown and nobility, and the leading members of the so-called political nation. Its historians are legion and talented. The second tier embraced the parish gentry and their clerical and professional associates, who constituted the ‘county community’. Study of their accounts and correspondence has expanded understanding of domestic life and political culture, yet only of the top 2 per cent of the population.

A previously unknown broadside ballad, dating from the 1660s, has recently come to light in the archives at Lambeth Palace. It bears the title The Joyners Job finished OR, The Loving Mistress, and there appears to be no other surviving copy. It describes recent events in the life of an unnamed joiner who lives, according to the narrator, ‘not far from this place I do hear’. The joiner's sexual inadequacy has combined disastrously with his lustful wife's longing for a baby. She commits adultery, first with a local glazier and then, more sensationally, with her husband's own apprentice. When the joiner realises what has happened, he makes a fool of himself by publicising his shameful predicament, in the mistaken hope that others will offer him sympathy and support. In many ways, the ballad was a fairly standard production: the title and subtitle are followed by ten verses, all designed for singing to one of two tunes that are named but not notated; each verse ends with a catchy singalong refrain; three woodcut pictures, all recycled from other ballads, provide additional visual interest; and, at the bottom, a line of text states that the song was ‘Printed for J. Clarke at the Harp and Bible in West Smith-field’. In one respect, however, the song is a peculiarity. The unique copy was preserved as an exhibit in the papers relating to a case that was heard in the Court of Arches during the autumn of 1669. Stephen Seagar, a joiner, sought a judicial separation from his wife, Grace, claiming that she had committed adultery with his apprentice, Tarrant Reeve (already it feels familiar). Seagar claimed that the song was all about him and his household, adding that ‘many copies’ were in circulation on the streets around his home in Little Britain, London. Unusually, therefore, we can trace the origins of a specific printed ballad and connect it very closely to named individuals and to the environment in which they lived. Adam Fox has observed that broadside ballads are difficult to interpret because ‘we have the texts but not the contexts’. In this instance, we are lucky enough to have both.