‘O ye soverens that sytt and ye brothern that stonde ryght uppe’ and ‘ffrom ye highest vnto ye lowest degree’: Performative Peacemaking in Cambridgeshire during the Wars of the Roses
In 1479 John Morton (c1410–1500), the Oxford-educated doctor of civil law, was installed as bishop of Ely. The 1470s marked a period of relative and long-absent peace in the realm, following twenty-four years of the civil war now known as the Wars of the Roses. The brief readeption of Henry VI in 1470–1 ended with…
‘A great prophanacion made both of day & place’: Animal Cruelty as Performance?
CW: The following post discusses animal cruelty & death (cat) In preparing the REED: Cambridgeshire records, I was drawn to an event that demanded explanation beyond what the record provided. The diocesan court proceedings for 10 April 1639 list five men, William Smith, William Wade, Thomas Barkinn, Bartholomew Scott, and a ‘Reynolds,’ a servant of…
‘Immodestly in Mans Apparrell’: Queer Possibility and Tagging Gender in the Cambridgeshire Records
REED’s Cambridgeshire records present various instances of potentially queer gender performance and dress. Each example provides a window into examining early modern gender, as well as a case studies for REED to explore tagging criteria for gender in its online editions. In a record from the diocesan court in 1602, Anne Petigall is ‘vehemently suspected…
The Plague and the Hope
By now we are all familiar with the experience of walking into a crowded place and worrying whether it is safe to be there, whether the number of people breathing in that space correlates to the higher possibility of infection and disease. Finally, we decide that the pleasures of social interaction or entertainment are not…
‘To Know the Sick from the Whole’: Sixteenth-Century Plague Records from the Southampton Book of Fines
A painter’s wife makes crosses on doors to mark the houses of those suffering from the plague. A man called John Lorde puts white rods in the hands of the infected ‘to know the syke from the whole.’ Men and women bear the sick to church. Sick people cry out for help. These evocative accounts…
The Drama of Recusancy in Yorkshire’s North Riding
Recusancy – the refusal to attend regular services of the newly-founded Church of England (usually in favour of attendance at the celebration of a Catholic mass) – was prohibited by the 1559 Act of Uniformity, with harsh penalties for non-compliance. The fines could be crippling: an initial fine of twelve shillings for non-attendance was soon…
Real-life drama in Yorkshire’s North Riding: Sir Thomas Hoby and the Protestant North
It is a commonplace that Tudor and Stuart societies were among the most litigious in history, and that the courts were regularly used to settle scores, advance personal wealth, and control relationships. Sir Thomas Posthumous Hoby (1566–1640) is a particularly egregious example of this mindset; his name appears frequently in the court records of the…
Playing Companies in Yorkshire’s North Riding
The North Riding collection of documents provides evidence of playing companies on a number of levels, ranging from local companies based in the Riding to touring companies from London. London companies would have travelled under the patronage of a member of the aristocracy or gentry, avoiding the severe penalties under Elizabeth’s Poor Laws of 1572…
Playing Places in Yorkshire’s North Riding
Gouthwaite Hall Gouthwaite Hall in Nidderdale was likely built by Sir John Yorke in the early seventeenth century, and was the site of the notorious performance at Candlemas in 1609 of an anti-Protestant play performed by the North Riding company of Christopher Simpson of Egton. Gouthwaite Hall as it was in the early seventeenth…
Plays in Yorkshire’s North Riding
Perhaps the most exciting discovery for a REED editor is a document that not only identifies a company of performers, their patron, their fee, and the date of their performance, but also the play they performed. Most of these records lie in household accounts, which were kept by the steward of the gentry estate that…
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