When Margaret Spufford died in 2014, she left a legacy of scholarship equaled by few historians of early modern England. Her book Contrasting Communities (1974), about three parishes in rural Cambridgeshire, remains a timeless example of the local historian's art. Her publications on rural dissent, on the petty book trade, clothing, and the hearth tax all made great strides toward our understanding of the lives of ordinary people.
Organized into three sections, this celebratory collection of essays covers many of the subjects closest to her heart. The first section deals with faith. William Sheils looks at the one major community that Spufford largely passed over in her own work, Catholics, and points to the complexity of their relations with local Protestant nonconformists. Henry French looks in detail at Earls Colne and finds that social regulation—“reformation of manners,” if you like—took place under William Adams, not a puritan but rather a conformist “Atheos” type. It was driven by a fear of young people moving, stealing, and having illicit sex, and it can be linked to the demographic upturn from the 1580s. Finally, an engaging study by Steve Hindle of the life of the late seventeenth-century minister of Chilvers Coton (Warwickshire) finds him socially distant from his scattered flock, eschewing his duty as a deathbed comforter: “an alien in the local community that it was his duty to serve” (90). To be fair, his was a difficult task in a geographically mobile parish with a poor living, but he was also emblematic of the social stratification of the later seventeenth century: a forerunner of the “squarsons” of the eighteenth.
In the middle section, “Place,” Adrian Ailes shows how the heralds William Dugdale and Elias Ashmole used the hearth tax returns to aid them in their visitations, though—like Spufford—they found them a flawed gauge of status. Catherine Ferguson uses an in-depth analysis of poor-law papers and hearth tax records to offer a detailed picture of poverty in Woking in the 1670s. Patricia Wyllie uses probate documents to show the presence of transferable credit instruments in rural England as far back as the early seventeenth century, contributing to the notion of a financial revolution that long predated the 1690s. Crucially, such instruments had social depth—they were held by the middling sort—and could be found in the Yorkshire Pennines as well as in Kent.
The final section, “People,” sees Danae Tankard explore the engagement of Sussex gentry and merchants with the London clothing trade. A standout chapter by Christopher Marsh provides a fascinating microstudy of a case of cuckoldry, in which the sexual misadventures of a London household provided ripe material for use in a satirical publication. The unusual press interest was one of the perils, in this case, of living in Little Britain (St. Botolph without Aldersgate), near the heart of London's print trade and broadside balladeering industry. Finally, David Cressy looks at one of least well-known groups of people in early modern England, Gypsies, arguing that their origins were as migrants from India, rather than—in the somewhat fanciful formulations of a few recent scholars—a group that emerged out of the ashes of “feudalism” (whatever that was).
The essays are preceded by a moving recollection of Margaret Spufford's life and work by Peter Spufford, her late husband. The collection as a whole is well produced and nicely illustrated. The essays are interesting and of a consistently high academic quality. It is a small book, perhaps, but certainly one full of pleasant histories; she would have enjoyed it a lot.
