In his first book Church courts, sex, and marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1987), Martin Ingram surveyed marriage and sexualities and their regulation in testing times of rapid population growth and religious revolution. In this equally masterful new book, Ingram goes back to 1470 to examine sexual regulation before and after England's Reformation. Its ‘main themes’, he writes, are ‘that sexual regulation was not a creation of the Reformation but was nonetheless inflected by it’ (p. 406).

Appropriately, Carnal knowledge is organised along chronological lines. The opening chapters set historiographical scenes and examine late medieval ideas of marriage, households, and reputation for the five chapters on regulation before 1540 that follow. These cover rural church courts, larger towns, Southwark and Westminster, and London's church and secular courts. The final third of the book examines regulation after England's Reformation with chapters on the quarter century after 1530, the provinces in the first half of Elizabeth's reign, and London Bridewell. The last chapter points ahead to a ‘new world’ of discipline (p. 389) when England's population doubled and economic forces drove sexual regulation.

Ingram shows that the sexual lives of the English were much regulated. He finds ‘a vigorous disciplinary regime’ in the late medieval countryside (p. 88); more cases in large towns; ‘impressive totals of prosecutions [of] sexual vice’ in the London area (p. 147); and an ‘extraordinarily intense regime of sexual regulation’ in London itself before 1530 (p. 41). He straddles the Reformation as few do, but can only work with the cards he has been dealt. Early records are incomplete, making it difficult to fix chronologies. Church court samples from the early 1520s for Leicestershire and West Sussex barely make it to two hundred cases. London has more, but the pre-1530 record pile is Ben Nevis to the late Tudor's Everest, meaning that we will never know the full extent of sexual supervision in earlier times. But Ingram does a first-rate job to bring together a range of records that give nuanced portraits of this monitoring (church, borough, and manor courts, London City and wardmote records, and King's Bench indictments).

Ingram's refrain is that ‘Innovation owed much to tradition’ (p. 399), which is important for those of us who begin our books around 1550. A purge of vice in late 1540s London did not ‘come out of the blue’ (p. 295); regulation still depended on church courts in 1600 (p. 401); the civic ethics behind anti-vice drives after 1560 was generations old; and regulating sex after 1560 was a ‘continuation’ of ‘well-established patterns’ shaped by late medieval ‘religious and moral ideas’ (pp. 11, 140).

Penance and punishment were harsher in Elizabeth's reign. Already in Henrician London, Ingram sees ‘increasing recourse to physical penalties’ (p. 285) with first references to carting and ducking, while whipping was fast becoming ‘a staple of judicial punishment’ (p. 286). Provincial towns climbed on board later. Some were involved in stormy spats with the Church and ‘tacitly’ dropped prosecuting sexual offences unless statute said otherwise, although large towns with histories of regulating through local custom continued as before (p. 338). Ingram notes ‘striking innovations in sexual regulation’ in Colchester, for example, due to the strength of puritanism and good relations with ecclesiastical authorities. Carting offenders was ‘routine’ there (pp. 340, 343–5). Town after town carried out more whipping and carting. If this is a general pattern (none of Ingram's five towns are north of the Trent) it is vital for chronologies of punishment and it would be illuminating to see how it fits in with fifteenth-century trends. Ingram also argues that London Bridewell is best seen in terms of ‘traditional’ policing and regulation. That said, Bridewell's court was a complete break with the past: a prison with its own court that had powers to police, prosecute, and punish inside its walls with multiple after-effects for jurisdictions and policing. It was the first-of-its-kind workhouse prison in Europe, emerging from civic ethics and needs that were more or less the same whether England (or London) was Protestant or Catholic.

This is a book of three ages: pre-Reformation, the immediate post-Reformation, and a ‘new world’ of regulation towards 1600. Secular and religious authorities acted ‘in favour of marriage’ before the Reformation, homing in on adultery, prostitution, and disorderly households (pp. 28–9). There were regional variations, but by 1600 attention shifted to bridal pregnancy, pre-marital sex, and illegitimacy. England's population boom accompanied by steep rises in poverty that hit parish budgets hard meant that regulation was increasingly trained on the poor. Illegitimacy and bridal pregnancy were ‘commonplace’ in church courts from 1620 (p. 416), though the cost-burden argument perhaps works better for secular courts.

Quarter Sessions need to be brought into this picture along with more areas of the country. But this is a model of sexual regulation over a long stretch of time that matters greatly. I do, however, have a question about one of its elements: prostitution. There were a fair number of brothel-keeping charges before the change of religion: 140 indictments at Kings Bench in 1502, for example. Southwark's Stews were still open but in danger after opposition from ecclesiastical and secular authorities that led to their closure in 1546. Ingram suggests that there was ‘a decline in the sex trade in provincial towns’ half-a-century later, even in large Exeter with ‘few indications of organized prostitution’ (pp. 404, 353). I wonder if this is more to do with plummeting prosecution. Prostitution was booming in mid-1570s London but not one keeper or prostitute was brought before Bridewell's court sixty years later. Bridewell's governors urged aldermen to take action against ‘bawds and the practice of bawdery’ when they themselves were doing next to nothing in this area.

It was not just the ‘bawdy trade’. Only one or two cases were heard each year, and annual illegitimacy and fornication case-rates at Bridewell in 1640–1658 were first and second respectively in the age of the Adultery Act (1650). This was a massive drop in the number of cases since Elizabethan times and the main reason for this was what London magistrates chose to prosecute. Recent work has shown that the scope and scale of moral reform in the 1650s was not as wide and successful as once thought, but still significant. There are well-documented ‘reformations of manners’ in particular places. But to wrap England before 1660 in a puritan stranglehold as some have done is wrong. We should put the suggestion that declining regulation of sex by secular and church authorities was an eighteenth-century phenomenon on hold for a while. It might need qualifying. Martin Ingram will have a large hand in this.