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Honesty and dissent: resisting the Company of St George in Tudor Norwich

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 April 2019

Ben R. McRee
Ben R. McRee*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: ben.mcree@fandm.edu
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Abstract

‘Honesty and dissent’ explores strategies of political resistance in Tudor Norwich through an analysis of the city's prestigious Company of St George. Nearly a quarter of those nominated for membership during the second half of the sixteenth century failed to appear when summoned and declined to take up the livery; most eventually complied, but only after fines, threats of imprisonment and delays that could last a year or more. They pursued a strategy of passive resistance that allowed them to register objections while conforming to expectations of ‘honest’ behaviour. That underappreciated approach enabled citizens to push back against urban authorities without compromising their standing in the community.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , February 2020 , pp. 23 - 40
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

In the spring of 1576, the citizens of one of Norwich's four great wards selected Augustine Whall for membership in the Company of St George. Although the Company was a prestigious organization with a distinguished history, Whall was not pleased. He was a young man with limited resources, and Company membership entailed serious obligations.Footnote 1 Whall initially ignored the order to matriculate and declined to attend Company meetings. He was not the only one; in early June, Company officials warned five men, including Whall, that they would face fines if they did not appear and take their oaths. Several soon complied, but Whall continued to resist.Footnote 2 When he was summoned by the Company alderman on 17 June and reminded that ‘the morer parte of the ward’ had found him ‘mete for this company’, he pleaded poverty and asked for a delay ‘vntill he were of more years and had recovered som parte of the losses that as he sayde he of late had loste by evell dettes’.Footnote 3 Company officials were unmoved. They rejected his request, fined him £5 for recalcitrance and threatened to commit him to prison if he did not co-operate. Whall's resistance crumbled; he paid his fine and took the oath that morning. Two months later, officials returned all but 10s of the fine, citing Whall's humble submission and their regard for his late father, a former alderman and one-time mayor.Footnote 4

Whall was neither the first nor the last to resist induction into the Company of St George. Between 1565 and 1601, the organization recorded 99 cases in which an individual selected for membership balked at swearing the necessary oath, purchasing the dark-hued livery, and joining fellow members at Company gatherings. Although most cases were less richly documented than Whall's, the material that survives reveals a consistent pattern. Each began with an act of disobedience by an individual who declined the demand for entry into the Company. Resistance was met with a firm organizational response: threats, fines, seizures of property, even imprisonment in some cases. The conclusion was almost always peaceful, however, marked by submission and forgiveness. The predictable pattern of settlement makes it easy to underestimate the importance of these small-scale dramas. That would be a mistake. At a time when citizens of middling status were increasingly excluded from positions of influence in urban government and were generally reluctant to engage in organized resistance, the Norwich evidence suggests that some found alternative ways to express dissatisfaction.Footnote 5 Instead of openly challenging authority, they chose to engage in passive resistance, selectively withholding co-operation and, when called to account, returning to familiar patterns of deferential behaviour to reconcile themselves with the established order. That approach allowed them to express their grievances in a manner consistent with the behaviour expected of respectable citizens.

In London, as Jennifer Bishop has pointed out, members of the livery companies – important models for the Norwich fraternity – ‘were expected to behave in a controlled fashion at all times and to regulate their speech and behaviour according to the situation in which they found themselves’.Footnote 6 Both words and demeanour were important. To speak intemperately or act disrespectfully was not only to excite the ire of authorities, but also to mark oneself as something other than an ‘honest’ person. Self-control, respect for customs and careful attention to speech, dress and deportment were all included within the early modern understanding of honestas, a component of early modern humanism rooted in Cicero's De officiis. As Raymond Belliotti explained, ‘[f]or Cicero, honestas is more than what is morally right; it connotes a rectitude grounded in respect for the traditions of a social group backed by sanctions devised by that group’.Footnote 7 Jennifer Richards has discussed the importance of Ciceronian honestas in Tudor culture, noting that it encompassed ‘wisdom, justice, fortitude and decorum’. The last of those, she added, included ‘a show of “reverence” to others, “considerateness”, self-control of the passions and attention to one's dress and deportment’.Footnote 8 Phil Withington, meanwhile, has connected the humanist interest in honestas with the emergence of a ‘civic public sphere’ in early modern towns that helped to shape ‘rules of civil conversation’.Footnote 9 The behavioural expectations associated with this development put disgruntled citizens in a difficult position. How could they air their complaints without risking their reputations? It will be argued here that the actions of men such as Whall, though well short of the sort of organized protest that typically attract historical attention, should be seen as part of the arsenal of political resistance against overstepping urban magistrates. Their limited or ‘honest’ resistance formed part of a pattern of civic conduct that enabled citizens to push back against urban authorities without compromising their standing in the community.

A Company primer

The Company of St George was the Edwardian successor of the city's medieval Gild of the same name, an organization that had been founded in 1385 and had enjoyed close ties with city government from the mid-fifteenth century. The relationship grew even closer after 1549 when the medieval Gild reorganized itself as a ‘company’ in the aftermath of the second Chantries Act, jettisoning many of its traditional religious practices and substituting participation in the city's mayor-making ceremonies.Footnote 10 Although the Gild and successor Company had no constitutional role in city affairs, each was linked to local government by strong personal and ceremonial ties. Fraternity membership, as it had for a century, largely comprised those who had occupied influential posts in local government, including mayors, aldermen, sheriffs and common councillors. Each year, Norwich's outgoing mayor became the Company's alderman at the end of his term, and members of the Company (the ‘livery’) paraded with local officials at midsummer when the new mayor took his oath of office. Since 1452, in fact, the principal gateway to membership had been election to the city's sixty-member common council: new councillors were expected to take up the livery as a matter of course and maintain it for life. In a typical year, the city's freemen chose seven or eight new councillors, and their addition to the Gild's rolls helped to maintain a total membership of 160 or more throughout this period.Footnote 11 The fraternity thus comprised all those who had served at or beyond the rank of common councillor and functioned as a social and ceremonial adjunct to city government.

Admission to the Company brought with it an obligation to pay various fees and, of particular concern to matriculants, liability to serve as one of the organization's feastmakers, officials chosen each year to organize and underwrite the annual celebration.Footnote 12 Roughly two-fifths of those who joined the Company during Elizabeth's reign could expect to serve in that post. Feastmakers did not have to account for their expenses, so details of the Norwich feast are largely absent from the records. But it extended over two or three days and was undoubtedly a lavish and costly affair.Footnote 13 In London, Ian Archer noted that Company feasts were ‘characterized by extraordinary largesse’, and could cost £100 or more.Footnote 14 Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin reported that the feast sponsored by the London drapers in 1566 cost more than £112.Footnote 15 Norwich was not London, of course, and costs may not have run to that extreme; election feasts in Oxford, for example, were less than half that in the early 1600s.Footnote 16 The office of feastmaker in Norwich was nevertheless regarded as a burdensome one in which no member was expected to serve more than once and that many sought to avoid altogether. The best way to do that was to purchase a dispensation from serving, with 74 members (18 per cent of those who joined) doing so between 1560 and 1601.Footnote 17 Most ultimately accepted the risk, however. The feast and associated festivities were, after all, established customs that augmented the city's honour and strengthened its government.Footnote 18 Satisfactory service could also demonstrate a feastmaker's commitment to the community and fitness for higher office.Footnote 19 In Norwich, four feastmakers were selected each year in a carefully choreographed two-stage process: electors began by selecting two members who had belonged for at least four years but had not yet held the office.Footnote 20 Those two then selected two others to serve with them. After each stage, electors presented a ‘garland’ to the men they had selected; receipt of the garland signified acceptance of the post.Footnote 21

For those eligible, these were anxious moments, and some were not above skipping the meeting (a finable offence) or disappearing from the hall at the critical moment. In a memorable 1586 case, electors chose Thomas Rooke, but when they came into the hall ‘to deliv’ him the garlond’, he was not to be found. They promptly withdrew and chose a replacement. Additional details emerged later, after Rooke had been fined for his disappearance. During the hearing, Rooke maintained that he had in fact been present in the hall throughout the proceeding ‘and stode in the leccon tyme at the screne thear’ (at the lower end of the hall) with two other members. One of them (Thomas Fenne) came in and testified that he had sat with Rooke during the dinner and ‘dyd wager wth Rooke a pottle of wyne that Rooke shold be one of the ffeastmakers’. They had separated after dinner, however, and he did not see where Rooke went, though he did spy Rooke later, after the election. The case was not settled until 1588 when the second witness came in and swore that Rooke had in fact been present throughout the election. Absolved of wrongdoing, Rooke was promptly chosen as feastmaker once more, this time serving without incident.

Membership and resistance, 1561–90

In the spring of 1561, city and Company leaders revised the Company's membership policy. An entry in the minute book for 1 April reported that city officials meeting during Passion Week – the last week of March in 1561 – decided that ‘certeyne persons’ were now to be chosen for membership in the Company ‘although thei shoulde not then be admitted into the Common Councell of the Cittie’.Footnote 22 The text does not specify who would name the individuals, but the timing of the decision points to the same bodies that chose the city's common councillors. Members of that body were selected by the citizen-householders of the city's four wards each spring during Passion Week – Conesford on Monday, Mancroft on Tuesday, Wymer on Wednesday and Ultra Aquam on Thursday. It appears that those bodies were now also to choose additional members for the Company, the ‘certeyne persons’ of the regulation.Footnote 23 As in the past, some would enter the Company when they were first elected to the common council, but now non-councillors could be selected as well.Footnote 24

Company minutes offer only the barest of rationales for the change, explaining that the departure from tradition was intended ‘for the mayntenance of the worshipfull company’, a formulation that could suggest a depletion of Company ranks and corresponding decline in revenue.Footnote 25 No membership lists survive from this period to test that hypothesis, but Norwich had experienced two serious epidemics in the 1550s: an outbreak of what was likely plague in 1554–55 and influenza in 1557–59. Each was severe enough to earn a place on Professor Slack's list of epidemic years in English towns, and the influenza outbreak was noted in particular for the toll it took on the city's political elite.Footnote 26 As Table 1 indicates, the record of city council elections during the 1550s suggests that ward assemblies selected unusually large numbers of new councillors in 1555 and 1558.Footnote 27 The numbers in Table 1 are not mortality figures, of course, and it is important to remember that electors would have had many reasons for selecting new councillors in a given year: death, certainly, but also emigration, infirmity, unsatisfactory performance or promotion to aldermanic rank. The increases are, however, consistent with an attempt to repair the damage inflicted by episodes of increased mortality. Given the overlap in membership, it is likely that Company ranks were similarly affected, though the Company, being nearly three times larger, would have had considerably greater numbers to make up.

Table 1.

New city councillors, 1551–60.

Sources: NRO 16/d 2, proceedings of the municipal assembly, 1491–1553; 16/c 3, assembly minute book, 1551–68.

How did the new policy affect Company admissions after 1561? Table 2 records the choices electors made during the first ten years of the revised scheme. In 1561, they chose nine new city councillors who were expected, in accordance with long-standing practice, to join the Company, a figure slightly above but consistent with the long-term average, and they then went on to add ten additional inductees who had not been elected to the city council. That produced 19 new liverymen, a substantial figure equalled only by the recent post-plague influx in 1555. Numbers tumbled in the next two years, first to seven in 1562 and then to one in 1563, before recovering in 1564 and remaining strong for the rest of the decade. Several patterns in these data are worth noting. First, the number of new city councillors fell after 1561, averaging just 5.7 for the decade, a decline of almost 40 per cent from the 1550s. Non-councillors more than made up the loss, however, joining at a rate of 7.3 per year and comprising nearly two-thirds of new Company members over the course of the decade. One consequence of those patterns was a reduction in the circulation of council office as fewer citizens now rotated through that body.Footnote 28 That development suggests that the steady stream of new city councillors added before 1561 – an average of eight each year – had been fuelled less by the demands of city government than by the needs of the Company. That body's hunger for new members had apparently worked to broaden participation in the common council in the early Tudor period when Company and council membership were firmly linked; decoupling the two in 1561 allowed electors to choose councillors without regard to membership levels in the Company, and they responded by trimming the pool of councillors. Second, and notwithstanding the single new member added in 1563, additions to the Company remained strong throughout the decade, reaching 17 three times and averaging 11.5 per year. That was 25 per cent higher than in the previous decade, which was already on the high side of previous practice, and suggests that the Company was still dealing with losses from the earlier epidemics. Third, the selection of non-councillors (the ‘certeyne persons’ of the 1561 regulation) became the primary form of entry to the Company after 1563. From 1564 to 1570, 29 individuals joined the Company as new city councillors, while 59 matriculated without having been elected to the council. Some of those latter would, of course, go on to become councillors in subsequent years, but many did not. The new pattern, one that grew stronger over time, meant that Company members no longer shared the common experience of council service.Footnote 29

Table 2.

New city councillors and Company members, 1561–70.

* The new membership regulation of 1561 made it possible to choose councillors who had previously been admitted to the Company as ‘persons’. Before 1561, all new city councillors would have been new to the Company as well.

Sources: NRO 16/c 3, 4, assembly minute books, 1551–68, 1568–85; 17/b 10, St George's Company, rules, regulations, members, 1452–1602.

The first indications of reluctance to join the Company appeared just a few years after the new policy took effect (Table 2, ‘Reluctant entrants’). From 1565 to 1567, nine of those selected for membership balked at joining the Company. Two of the nine were newly selected councillors: Francis Rugg and John Hewer, both chosen in 1565. The Company imposed a 10s fine on Rugg and threatened a larger penalty if he did not comply. He showed up at that point, was sworn ‘very gentlye’ and his 10s penalty was forgiven. Rugg's willingness to co-operate, underscored by the words used to describe his submission, provides a good example of the decorous behaviour expected of citizens. John Hewer's holdout was resolved in co-operative fashion as well. He was granted a temporary reprieve ‘at the request of Mr. Richard Davy’, the Company's alderman, and did not take his oath until the following year. All the other reluctant entrants were non-councillors, chosen in accordance with the new membership policy, and all but one were permitted to delay their entries.Footnote 30 Company minutes reveal that Thomas Bray, chosen in 1565, asked to be released from his obligation, and that his request was granted due to ‘his estate’. His problems were apparently temporary, however, as he was chosen the very next year as a city councillor and joined the Company without further complaint.Footnote 31 In 1566, five men failed to take the oath; the Company fined each of them 6s 8d and allowed them to join later – three in 1567, one in 1568 and one in 1569.Footnote 32 The decade's final case was not resolved so neatly. Thomas Word was the only prospective member who did not comply in 1567, and something about his behaviour irked officials. Company leaders imprisoned Word after he ‘contemptuously made defalt and absented himself’, forcing the Company's bedell ‘to seek hym Vpp’.Footnote 33 The language used in this case suggests a breach of civility – perhaps a refusal to play the penitent as others had done – and contrasts sharply with the more submissive demeanour of Rugg.

Despite Word's behaviour, reluctance to join the Company was not a serious problem during the 1560s. It occurred in only three of the ten years from 1561 to 1570 and involved only nine of the 115 individuals who joined, less than 8 per cent. All cases but Word's were apparently resolved quickly and satisfactorily, with the Company's responses demonstrating flexibility and a willingness to take individual circumstances into account. Records unfortunately say little regarding the motives of these men. Some – perhaps most – were concerned about being chosen as feastmaker in four years' time; the delays granted in seven of the nine cases would be consistent with that explanation. But other motives are possible too: objections to the changing meaning of Company membership with the influx of non-councillors, for example, or personal conflicts with Company leaders or with those who had selected them for membership. Whatever the reasons, reluctance to join continued at a slightly elevated but still modest level into the 1570s and 1580s. Table 3 summarizes the figures for those decades, repeating the totals from the 1560s for reference.

During the two decades after 1570 the Company noted 25 individuals who did not take their oaths when summoned. Of those, 19 came from the non-councillor group, a figure consistent with their share of new members, and most cases were resolved without drama.Footnote 34 Looking at the 1570s, six did not show up to take their oaths in 1574, five, including Augustine Whall, demurred in 1576 and four failed to appear in 1578. Once again, the incidents are clumped into just three years. The 1574 cases were quickly resolved. Each prospective member was originally assessed 3s 4d, but the fines were forgiven when all six appeared two weeks later and, with the scribe noting their demeanour, made ‘reasonable annswers’ for their default.Footnote 35 Outcomes in 1576 were not so neat. At least two of those who initially held themselves back took their oaths shortly after being warned, but Whall, as we have seen, faced the possibility of prison before submitting, and another prospective member did not swear until two years later. The four who resisted in 1578 were threatened with much larger fines (100s) – perhaps a result of the experience with Whall – and all but one quickly took the oath. John Goslyng held out, however, and incurred the 100s penalty for his stubbornness. He relented the following year, took his oath, and had all but 6s 8d of the fine returned to him. The Company's account emphasized the submissive behaviour of the reluctant recruit. Goslyng, the scribe wrote, ‘acknowledgith his faulte’, ‘submittith him selfe’ and ‘craveth the favour’ of the alderman.Footnote 36

Table 3.

New city councillors and Company members, 1561–90.

Sources: NRO 16/c 3–5, assembly minute books, 1551–68, 1568–85, 1585–1613; 17/b 10, St George's Company, rules, regulations, members, 1452–1602.

The 1580s saw ten cases, falling once again into three different years. Most were settled quickly and predictably, with partial forgiveness of fines and new members taking the oath either the year they were elected or the next. As in the previous decade, however, at least one case proved more intractable and elicited a stronger response from Company officials, though they chose not to repeat the 100s fines used in 1578. It began in 1584 when Thomas Payne was selected to join the Company but did not show up to take his oath. An initial 5s fine did not induce him to comply, and despite repeated notices, Payne stayed away for two additional years. In the meantime, perhaps in response to his actions, the Company adopted a series of escalating penalties, beginning with the modest 5s fine already levied. Continued non-compliance would be followed by an additional 20s penalty and, if necessary, the seizure of personal property.Footnote 37 Officials put the new scheme into action against Payne in 1587, adding 20s to the original fine and seizing ‘a piece of whyte canwas’ to encourage payment. That finally brought a response, and Payne swore his oath in June.Footnote 38

A number of conclusions emerge from the first three decades of the new membership policy. First, hesitance to swear the oath was persistent, but modest in scale. Roughly one in ten of those chosen (34 of 328) displayed reluctance sufficient to be noted in the records. Second, instances of resistance occurred in clusters, with several prospective members holding themselves back at the same time. Single cases of resistance were rare, and in most years no one balked. In years during which resistance appeared, however, the proportion of those who failed to take their oaths could be substantial, averaging 33 per cent over this period and creating brief episodes of elevated non-compliance. Leaders never spoke of collusion, but it seems likely that those who hesitated took encouragement from one another. Third, reluctance to matriculate was not limited to non-councillors, though they were somewhat more likely to demur. Between 1561 and 1590, just under 8 per cent of councillors new to the Company dragged their feet, while more than 11 per cent of non-councillors did so. Though neither group balked in great numbers, it is clear that reluctance to join the Company was not confined to a single group. Fourth, the shift to enrolling members who were not city councillors continued. Over the 30-year period surveyed thus far, nearly 70 per cent of those chosen had not been elected to the city council.Footnote 39 Fifth, most cases were settled without undue drama. Frequent forgiveness of fines and a willingness to postpone entries suggest that Company officials recognized the hardship that membership could pose and were willing to work with those who might have found it difficult to serve as feastmaker, providing they displayed appropriate deference and did not prolong their holdouts.Footnote 40 Patience with this quiet form of resistance began to wane by the end of the 1570s, however, as the Company experimented with firmer responses, including larger fines, imprisonment and seizures of property.

The 1590s

Matters might well have continued in this way, with a small fraction of those chosen balking at the prospect of membership but co-operating in the end. That was not to be. The Company experienced a flood of resistance during the 1590s (Table 4). A total of 65 individuals – more than half of those tapped for membership – engaged in at least brief holdouts, a rate more than five times that for the previous 30 years. During the first half of the decade, resistance occurred in every year, with over 60 per cent (31 of 51) of those who should have taken the oath from 1591 to 1595 refusing the initial call to appear. It was particularly strong in 1595, when nearly all of those selected (11 of 14) declined. Resistance dropped in the middle of the decade, with just 7 cases (20 per cent of the total of 35 potential new members) from 1596 through 1598, all but one of those in 1596. The respite was brief, however, as refusals surged again in 1599–1600. During those final two years, 82 per cent (27 of 33) of potential members refused the oath. The paragraphs that follow will explore this development more closely and attempt to explain how what had been a manageable phenomenon came to dominate Company affairs at the end of the century.

Table 4.

New city councillors and Company members, 1591–1600.

* Due to the numbers who did not take the oath on time, figures in this column fell short of expected enrollment in most years. Figures exceeded expected enrollment in 1595, 1597 and 1598, however, due to late matriculation of members selected in previous years.

Sources: NRO 16/c 5, assembly minute book, 1585–1613; 17/b 10, St George's Company, rules, regulations, members, 1452–1602.

Hints of trouble had appeared in a series of regulations adopted a decade earlier, during the 1580s. Several of those rules were aimed at practices that might have disturbed committed Protestants. The annual mayor's breakfast, for example, which took place on the day on which that official took his oath, was ended in 1581 as it was ‘nowe thought very absurd’ that participants ‘should serve their bellys before they serve God in the churche’.Footnote 41 Later that same year, the feast itself was moved without explanation from a Sunday to the Thursday before midsummer.Footnote 42 And in 1583, the Company informed its members that dress for the feast was not to be ‘of any other than black or sad color’.Footnote 43 Taken together, those changes suggest discomfort with the festive nature of the annual celebration, possibly fuelled by Protestant enthusiasm.Footnote 44 But reluctance to join the Company was not exclusive to one version of the faith. Some of those who had hesitated during the 1570s belonged to families with Catholic ties, while ‘ardent Protestant’ magistrates such as Roger Weld and members of the Sotherton family did not appear among those who held themselves back.Footnote 45 Company records, it is worth adding, never cited religious scruples as a reason for any prospective member's resistance.

Two other regulations from the early 1580s can be linked more directly to the explosion of opposition in the next decade. Those measures touched on the cost of the feast and the availability of dispensations from feastmaking; each betrays growing concern about the burden imposed on the responsible officials. The first was a 1581 by-law that called for an end to the custom of gathering at the feastmakers’ expense on the day after the principal day. That practice, which had been the target of unsuccessful reform efforts in the past, had become, according to the new rule, a ‘great chardge’ to the feastmakers, leading many to seek dispensations from the office.Footnote 46 The supply of dispensations had, in fact, been growing, alarming those eligible for the office and giving rise to ‘great exclamacoinis’ as early as 1583.Footnote 47 That prompted the second measure: an attempt to rein in their sale by increasing the price. Henceforth, a 1583 regulation declared, no one deemed ‘sufficient’ to bear the cost of the feast was to be discharged for less than £13 6s 8d.Footnote 48 Although that directive was never fully implemented and was repealed two years later, the steady supply of dispensations did come to an abrupt end in 1588. Between May 1588 and June 1594, only a single dispensation was granted – that to a member who had moved out of the city.Footnote 49 Altogether, the Company issued only 12 dispensations during the 1590s (11 per cent of those who joined), just over half the number provided in the 1580s.Footnote 50

The reasons for trimming the supply of dispensations were never stated. That is unfortunate as their shrinking availability correlates closely with a related sign of dissatisfaction: falling attendance at the annual feast. Surveyors’ account rolls recording feast turnout survive from 1581 to 1591, the only such records for the second half of the century. They report steady attendance from 1581 through 1588, with an average of 164 members present.Footnote 51 In 1589, attendance plummeted, however, when only 105 members turned up. The timing, which matched the beginning of the dispensation drought, may, of course, have been coincidental. But Company leaders connected the poor turnout directly to concerns over feastmaking. They concluded that those ‘fyttest to beare the burthen & chardge’ had stayed away to avoid selection to that office.Footnote 52 The question of dispensations was, of course, intimately linked to service as feastmaker, with the disappearance of the former affecting liability for the latter. The absence of a third of the members suggests, moreover, that more than avoidance of office was involved. The diminished turnout can be read as a protest – against the absence of dispensations perhaps, or more generally against the burden of feastmaking. Those were possibilities that leaders either missed or chose to ignore. Eschewing reform, they opted instead for a narrow, punitive response, decreeing that those eligible to serve could henceforth be chosen whether present at the feast or not.Footnote 53 The emphasis on Company authority and member obligation evident in the new regulation, which ran to more than 500 words and included a detailed specification of penalties, could only have exacerbated the concerns of prospective matriculants.

While the disappointing feast turnout of 1589 signalled dissatisfaction within the Company, the spark for wider resistance among those yet to take their oaths likely came from deteriorating economic conditions during the decade that followed. The ‘crisis of the 1590s’ created a variety of fiscal and political challenges for urban governments and the merchants who ran them, and rising prices made the task of the feastmakers, who were responsible for procuring food and drink for the Company's midsummer celebration, more onerous.Footnote 54 Indeed, as early as 1587, those officers complained of ‘great derenes’ and requested financial assistance from the Company.Footnote 55 They had reason to be concerned; the previous autumn's harvest had been poor, and historical price indices show 1587 to have been an expensive year.Footnote 56 Five of those chosen for membership held back from their oaths that year, half the total for the decade and the first since 1584.Footnote 57 But prices fell back in 1588, and did not rise significantly until 1591. Five members failed to take the oath in that year, the first since 1587. That was just the beginning, however. In 1595, the start of a four-year span of poor harvests described by Hoskins as ‘perhaps the worst sequence of the entire century’, prices soared even higher, and nearly 80 per cent (11 of 14) of potential members initially refused the oath.Footnote 58 Similarly high levels of resistance in 1599 and 1600 were also correlated with elevated prices.

Company leaders had attempted to break the surge of resistance in 1596 by adopting harsh new penalties. Fines of £5 on a first failure to take the oath, with seizure of property and imprisonment to secure payment if necessary, and £10 for subsequent refusals, replaced the much smaller existing penalties in that year.Footnote 59 The changes appeared to work. Record prices notwithstanding, seven new recruits (plus six holdouts from previous years) took the oath in 1597 with no shirkers, and six in 1598 with only one holdout.Footnote 60 But leaders then reversed themselves. Despite the effectiveness of the enhanced fines, they declined to enforce them in 1599 and after, offering no explanation for their change of heart.Footnote 61 Penalties were allowed to fall once again to only 5s, prompting resistance to reach the highest levels of the decade. Over 80 per cent of those eligible initially declined the oath that year, with a similar proportion doing so in 1600. As notable as the resurgence of protest, however, was the speedy resolution of most cases, at least during the first year. In 1599, 14 of the 17 prospective members who balked at joining returned quickly to obedience, swearing their oaths before the end of the year.Footnote 62 That is an extraordinary figure. During the more generally compliant 1580s, only half of those who had declined the initial demand ended up taking the oath in the same year they were selected, and during the first six years of the 1590s, the proportion of quickly resolved cases had fallen to just a third. The fact that four-fifths of those who held themselves back in 1599 made amends within the year suggests that most of the holdouts had no intention of mounting a serious challenge to the Company's authority. They simply wanted to register their unhappiness in a socially acceptable form – even if it cost them 5s to do so.

Conclusions

It remains to consider the significance of the foot-dragging response chosen by many of those selected for Company membership. What did they accomplish? And what do their actions reveal about attitudes towards urban government during the late Tudor era? In some cases, especially during the 1560s, individuals won short respites from membership, postponing the possibility of being selected as feastmaker. For many, that would have been an acceptable outcome. There was also undoubtedly some satisfaction in openly registering their unhappiness, even if the burden to which they objected remained.Footnote 63 And there is evidence that the Company's leaders heard members’ protests and shifted policies in response. Although they did not alter the duties of the feastmakers, they did experiment with carrots – financial subventions to help those overburdened officials, for example – and sticks, such as the changing penalties for non-compliance. That suggests that protests had some material value, that submission did not mean resignation or defeat. It appears, in fact, that both aggrieved prospective members and frustrated Company officials came to recognize hesitance and quiet delay as part of the vocabulary of civil conversation in the public sphere. Indeed, the reduction of the enforced penalty (from £5 to 5s) constituted a tacit acceptance of this passive form of protest. Such considerations should not, of course, obscure the fundamental power relationship at work. Unwilling recruits had limited options; although they could slow the process down, plead poverty and complain, they knew they would have to co-operate in the end. To do otherwise would have taken them beyond the bounds of honest behaviour, a journey few were willing to make.

Reluctant members’ restraint did pay off in the end. That can be seen most clearly in their political careers, which brief episodes of resistance seem not to have harmed. Augustine Whall, whose objection to joining the Company introduced this article, went on to serve as a common councillor for 14 years following his submission, and was later chosen to fill one of the city's 24 aldermanic posts. He was not alone. Of the 99 who initially failed to take their oaths, 18 went on to hold that elite office. And although Whall never served as mayor, others did. During the troubled 1590s, 6 of the 65 who resisted entry later reached the city's highest office. That exactly matched the proportion of future mayors drawn from those who showed up on time and took their oaths as directed.Footnote 64 We will never know, of course, how career paths might have shifted had so many not hesitated to join the fraternity. But given the information that survives, these figures provide strong evidence that honest resistance did not cloud participants’ political futures.

The Company of St George survived into the eighteenth century, as did tensions arising from its membership policy. The difficulties faced by those tapped for inclusion were, in fact, of great interest to city librarian and antiquary Benjamin Mackerell who wrote an account of the Company in the 1730s. His was a wide-ranging story, drawing extensively from the documentary record and culminating in a moralizing narrative of the organization's demise in 1731–32. In Mackerell's telling, the ‘honourable tyrannical Company’ was brought down by the ‘courage’ of William Clarke, sheriff in 1725 and alderman for Fyebridge in 1729, who questioned the organization's membership policy. Arming himself with knowledge of the fraternity's history and declining an order to join its ranks, Clarke challenged Company leaders to prove their authority to compel submission. They failed. Thus ‘ferreted out of their old lurking holes’, officials made the decision to disband, bringing a 300-year organizational history to an end.Footnote 65 Most interesting in the present context is Mackerell's presentation of Clarke. The alderman who toppled the fraternity appears in the narrative as a resolute but remarkably self-controlled opponent of tyranny. When threatened with crippling fines and imprisonment for failure to co-operate, Clarke calmly held his ground, insisting that the Company prove its authority. As long as it could do so, he promised ‘he would not be obstinate, but immediately comply’; he affirmed that he ‘only desired time and opportunity to be convinced’.Footnote 66 His demeanour throughout the dispute was calm and steady – never cursing or insulting Company representatives and never losing his composure. Mackerell presents Clarke as a decorous reformer; though he may not have displayed the deferential behaviour authorities desired, he did maintain the standards of speech and deportment expected of respectable citizens. The hero of the piece thus provides a fitting if ironic example of the decorous pattern of resistance that his Elizabethan predecessors had established.

Appendix: comparative prices, 1587–1600, indexed to 1580–89 average

Footnotes

†

The author would like to thank the staff of the Norfolk Record Office for their expert assistance. He also gratefully acknowledges the support of Franklin & Marshall College's Faculty Research and Professional Development Fund.

Sources: E.H. Phelps Brown and S.V. Hopkins, ‘Seven centuries of the prices of consumables, compared with builders’ wage-rates’, Economica, new series, 23 (1956), 312; R.C. Allen, ‘London.xls’, column DQ (consumer price index for London in pence), an Excel spreadsheet on Nuffield College's website, accessed 15 June 2018 at www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/people/sites/allen-research-pages/. Note that Allen dates the accounting year differently than do Phelps Brown and Hopkins; Allen's 1586 is Phelps Brown and Hopkins’ 1587 – 1586–87 in both cases.

References

1 Whall had married and taken up citizenship as a grocer just three years earlier: www.freereg.org.uk, accessed 9 Mar. 2016; L'Estrange, J., Calendar of the Freemen of Norwich, from 1307 to 1603, ed. Rye, W. (London, 1888), 148Google Scholar.

2 The fifth man, Robert Borne, is not noted again in the Company's records until 1578 when he was sworn in.

3 Norfolk Record Office (NRO), 17/b 10, 1452–1602, 284.

4 Ibid., 286.

5 Historians have remarked on both the narrowing of political authority during the Tudor period, with citizens of modest means increasingly excluded from positions of influence, and on the lack of concerted resistance to that trend. As Catherine Patterson concluded, ‘[s]erious civic unrest was a rarity. For all the economic, social and religious tensions present in sixteenth-century towns, urban communities remained generally peaceful and urban government proved remarkably resilient’: Patterson, C., ‘Town and city government’, in Tittler, R. and Jones, N. (eds.), A Companion to Tudor Britain (Oxford, 2004), 127Google Scholar. Patterson and others have cited a variety of reasons for the acceptance of expanding magisterial authority, including the importance of civic honour, the need for officials to meet civic expenses out of their own pockets, and broad participation by ordinary citizens in lower offices, such as that of constable: Patterson, ‘Town and city government’, 124–5; Archer, I., ‘Politics and government 1540–1700’, in Clark, P. (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. II (Cambridge, 2000), 241–6Google Scholar. Even if open rebellion was rare, political dissent was not entirely absent, of course. Peter Clark noted factional troubles, for example, in Kentish towns during the 1590s: Clark, P., English Provincial Society from the Reformation to the Revolution: Religion, Politics and Society in Kent, 1500–1640 (Rutherford, NJ, 1977), 253–5Google Scholar. And Robert Tittler recorded legal challenges to attempts to narrow authority in a number of towns in the 1590s when ruling groups sought to expand their authority through new or revised charters: Tittler, R., The Reformation and the Towns in England: Politics and Political Culture, c. 1540–1640 (Oxford, 1998), 191–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar. And Archer noted conflict over the enclosure of common lands in Coventry: ‘Politics and government 1540–1700’, 245–6, a topic recently taken up for an earlier period by Christian Liddy who investigated enclosure riots in York, Coventry, Southampton and other towns before 1520: Liddy, C.D., ‘Urban enclosure riots: risings of the commons in English towns, 1480–1525’, Past and Present, 226 (2015), 41–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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8 Richards, J., Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge, 2003), 26CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and more generally 23–8. Decorum could be a physical as well as a verbal performance, and, as John Walter has reminded us, subordinate groups could manipulate the gestural code to get their message across: J. Walter, ‘Gesturing at authority: deciphering the gestural code of early modern England’, Past and Present, 203, supplement 4 (2009), 96–127. The relationship between early modern expectations and the emphasis that late medieval cities had placed on ‘sad’ and ‘discreet’ behaviour merits further study. See, for example, Kermode, J., Medieval Merchants: York, Beverley, and Hull in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1998), 29Google Scholar; also Hanawalt, B.A., Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History (Oxford, 1993), 199Google Scholar.

9 Withington, P., ‘Public discourse, corporate citizenship, and state formation in early modern England’, American Historical Review, 112 (2007), 1018–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also ‘Honestas’, in Turner, H.S., Early Modern Theatricality, Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature (Oxford, 2013), 522Google Scholar.

10 See McRee, B.R., ‘The mayor and the saint: remaking Norwich's Gild of St George, 1548–49’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 79(2016), 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 The selection process for city councillors had been set in a 1415 agreement that settled a long-running dispute. The ‘composition’ made that year called for annual election of the 60 common councillors by ‘alle ye enfraunchised men housholders’, of the city, meeting by ward on successive days each spring: Hudson, W. and Tingey, J.C. (eds.), Records of the City of Norwich, vol. I (Norwich, 1906), 98–9Google Scholar. See the recent account by Liddy, Christian in Contesting the City: The Politics of Citizenship in English Towns, 1250–1530 (Oxford, 2017), 195–203CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 New members owed an entry fee of 20d and a payment of 2s to the bedell. They were also obligated to purchase the livery (valued at 5s in a 1580 case: NRO, 17/b 10, 1452–1602, 301). Annual fees included a payment towards the cost of the feast (3s for city aldermen and 2s 6d for everyone else) and 12d in ‘almes’, which went to the priest's salary and poor relief.

13 Regulations over the third quarter of the century reference a drinking or ‘banquet’ after evensong on the day before the feast, a dinner and a supper on the principal day and a continuation of unspecified nature on the following morning. The gathering on the morrow of the main day was controversial, and various attempts to end it were made between 1549 and 1581. See NRO, 17/b 10, 1452–1602, 178, 179, 190–1, 202, 262, 266, 272, 274, 302–3.

14 Archer, I., The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge, 1991), 116, 119CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Kilburn-Toppin, J., ‘“Discords have arisen and brotherly love decreased”: the spatial and material contexts of the guild feast in early modern London’, Brewery History, 150 (2013), 30Google Scholar.

16 Felicity Heal reported that the Oxford feast cost £40 in 1602 and £43 in 1607: Heal, F., Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1990), 339CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Those who sought dispensations typically did so several years after joining the Company as they neared the four-year mark of eligibility for the office of feastmaker. The charge for a lifetime dispensation varied from person to person and decade to decade, though a few were issued gratis. It cost anywhere from £2 to £20 at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign and as much as £30 at the end; median payments were £5–£6 throughout. The availability of dispensations waxed and waned: the Company granted 30 during the 1560s, 10 in the 1570s, 22 in the 1580s and 12 in the 1590s. That variability could reflect a pattern found by Richard Wunderli for London aldermen, who fined out of office more frequently during periods when the city needed money: ‘Evasion of the office of alderman in London, 1523–1672’, London Journal, 15(1990), 3–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Kermode, J.I., ‘Urban decline? The flight from office in late medieval York’, Economic History Review, new series, 35 (1982), 179–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The absence of Company account rolls for most of this period makes it impossible to correlate the availability of dispensations with revenue in Norwich. The Company also sold temporary exemptions, usually lasting one to five years, which delayed eligibility for the office. The cost of a temporary exemption also varied, but was typically 6s 8d per year.

18 That was also the case in London, where Archer concluded that ‘most wardens seem to have welcomed the opportunities to advertise their status’, Pursuit of Stability, 117.

19 Compare the experience of London companies described by Kilburn-Toppin, ‘“Discords have arisen”’, 34–5.

20 The Company's 12-member council and the feastmakers from the previous year comprised the electors for this office.

21 Surviving account rolls from the 1580s and early 1590s include regular payments for making the garlands: NRO, 8/f, surveyors’ account rolls, 1581–92, passim.

22 NRO, 17/b 10, 1452–1602, 221. ‘Certeyne persons’ is a phrase that appears regularly in the records of the city assembly to refer to individuals picked to carry out specific tasks.

23 The details of the selection process were not specified, nor were they recorded in either city or Company documents during this period. The ward assemblies apparently acted independently in making their selections, however, as suggested by language from 1596 stating that those chosen by the wards would only be admitted if they were ‘thought mete’ by the Company: NRO, 17/b 10, 1452–1602, 361. By the early eighteenth century, the Company was reportedly supplying written lists of those it wanted elected to the ward assemblies, a procedure it claimed ‘formerly & in antient times hath been used’: NRO, 17/b 11, 1602–1729, 572–3; J.G. Kilmartin, ‘Popular rejoicing and public ritual in Norwich and Coventry, 1660 – c. 1835’, University of Warwick Ph.D. thesis, 1987, 306; Miller, J., ‘Containing division in Restoration Norwich’, English Historical Review, 121 (2006), 1041–2Google Scholar. It is not known when that pattern began.

24 The by-law has slipped by largely unnoticed. Eighteenth-century antiquary Benjamin Mackerell did catch the change, however, calling it ‘the source from whence so many evils afterwards ensued’: Mackerell, B., ‘Account of the Company of St George in Norwich’, Norfolk Archaeology, 3 (1852), 344Google Scholar. Mackerell's report garbled the details of the original entry and is not a reliable guide to the new provision.

25 The Company issued 30 dispensations from the feastmaker's office during the decade, the highest number in Elizabeth's reign and consistent with a need for revenue. See n. 17.

26 Slack, P., The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (reprint edn, Oxford, 1990; first published 1985), 128Google Scholar.

27 New councillors are here defined as those who had never previously served in the city's common council. They are distinct from those who had once served and were returning after a period away from council service. That was not an unusual pattern; most long-tenured councillors did not serve continually. John Surman, for example, was first elected for the ward of Conesford in 1558 and served three consecutive terms. He was then out of the council for three years before being selected again in 1564 and serving four consecutive terms. He was off in 1568, and was then selected eleven straight times from 1569 to 1579. He is counted as a new councillor here only in 1558.

28 Had narrowing council participation been an unarticulated goal of the 1561 regulation? The evidence from elections in the 1560s is mixed. In five of the ten years, including the initial opportunity in 1561, electors chose seven or more new city councillors, consistent with long-term trends in council participation. But in several years, notably 1564 and 1570, they added substantial numbers of non-councillors and few new councillors. The varying pattern of selection during the decade suggests that reducing council participation had not been the original goal of the regulation. Its potential for that end emerged quickly, however, possibly as early as 1562, and certainly by 1564. Note that new councillor selections rose slightly (to just over six per year) after 1570, still well below pre-1561 levels, before falling again after 1590.

29 Of the 73 non-councillors chosen 1561–70, 34 went on to become members of the common council.

30 Non-councillors comprised 63% of new Company members between 1561 and 1570 (73 of 115) and 78% (7 of 9) of those noted as reluctant.

31 NRO, 17b, 1452–1602, 241.

32 That fine was equal to the fee for granting a one-year exemption from election as feastmaker, and the Company may have chosen to treat these cases in a similar manner. The longer delays to 1568 and 1569 should, however, have cost more in that case.

33 NRO, 17/b 10, 1452–1602, 250. Word had been admitted to the freedom as a fishmonger in 1558. The resolution of his case has not been preserved and it is not known what became of him. He held no city offices after 1564 (when he had been chosen as constable for West Wymer), and there is no further trace of him in Company records.

34 Non-councillors comprised 71% of new Company members and 76% of those who balked at joining from 1571 to 1590.

35 NRO, 17/b 10, 1452–1602, 275. The fines were lower than those levied during the 1560s.

36 Ibid., 296.

37 Ibid., 322, 326. The fines were formally adopted in 1586. Property seizures (‘distresses’) were not part of that by-law and were first used in conjunction with the new fines in the following year.

38 Ibid., 323, 325–6.

39 Only half of the non-councillors were subsequently chosen to serve on the common council, continuing the pattern established in the 1560s (see n. 29). Non-councillors who were later elected to the common council typically reached that status within four or five years of joining the Company, though the interval could extend to a decade or more. New councillors who balked did not suffer any interruptions to their civic careers.

40 Behaviour on both sides fits the ‘idiom of fraternity’ described by Patrick Wallis for London companies: Wallis, P., ‘Controlling commodities: search and reconciliation in the early modern livery companies’, in Gadd, I.A. and Wallis, P. (eds.), Guilds, Society and Economy in London 1450–1800 (London, 2002), 87Google Scholar and passim. For similar practices in an earlier period, see Hanawalt, B.A., Ceremony and Civility: Civic Culture in Late Medieval London (Oxford, 2017), 127–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 NRO, 17/b 10, 1452–1602, 302.

42 Ibid., 304. Since 1574, the feast had been held on the Sunday before the eve of the feast of St John the Baptist; before that it had been held on the Sunday after Trinity Sunday. In 1585, the day was shifted again, this time to the Tuesday after the feast of St Peter: ibid., 316.

43 Ibid., 312.

44 The growth of Protestant sentiment in Elizabethan Norwich is well documented. Muriel McClendon has traced Protestant dominance of city government after 1558: McClendon, M., The Quiet Reformation: Magistrates and the Emergence of Protestantism in Tudor Norwich (Stanford, 1999), 191–9Google Scholar. Matthew Reynolds has detailed the appearance of ‘forward’ Protestant thinkers such as John More in the city: Reynolds, M., Godly Reformers and their Opponents in Early Modern England: Religion in Norwich, c. 1560–1643, Studies in Modern British Religious History vol. 10 (Woodbridge, 2005), 64–70Google Scholar and passim.

45 See Reynolds, Godly Reformers, 47–8, 52–4, 90–1 and passim. Reynolds identified several Norwich families with Catholic ties, including those to which Augustine Whall and Richard Lussher, both of whom resisted in 1576, belonged. Two Sothertons joined without protest after 1561: John in 1583 and Thomas in 1587. The Aldrichs, another prominent Protestant family had a mixed record. John Aldrich was one of those fined in 1574 for not taking the oath, though the fine was forgiven. Michael and William Aldrich swore without incident in 1589 and 1592, respectively. Michael objected strongly to selection as feastmaker in 1595, however, being jailed before finally submitting.

46 NRO, 17/b 10, 1452–1602, 302–3.

47 Ibid., 313. Lifetime dispensations averaged 0.7 per year from 1571 through 1577; from 1578 through 1587 they were distributed at a rate of 2.3 per year.

48 Ibid., 313. The proposed fee was one third more than the highest charge levied during the 1580s, which was £10. No one ever paid the increased fee, and £10 continued to be the maximum in practice.

49 Robert Baker was given the dispensation in 1592 in case he should return to Norwich in the future.

50 During the 1580s, the Company issued 22 dispensations covering 18% of new members. Temporary dispensations also declined during the late 1580s and early 1590s. Measured in terms of time dispensed, the 10 years from 1576 through 1585 saw 103 years of eligibility excused; the next 10 years, from 1586 through 1595, saw only 39 years of eligibility dispensed.

51 NRO, 8/f, surveyors’ account rolls, 1581–92, passim. The highest attendance during that period was 172 and the lowest was 159.

52 NRO, 17/b 10, 1452–1602, 334. It is worth noting that the 1589–92 Norwich outbreak of plague began about this time, though it is unlikely to have affected attendance. The first evidence of increased mortality appeared on 12 July, almost two weeks after the feast, when the mayor's court received its weekly report of burials. The figure for the week ending on that date was 24, the largest total to that point in the year and twice the average for the previous month (my thanks to Professor Paul Slack for pointing me to these reports). At the time of the feast, however, burials had fallen within a more typical range – 14 for the week prior and 9 for the week after: NRO, 16/a 12, mayor's court book, 1587–95, 295, 286, 292. During the previous and more severe epidemic of 1584–85, burials had been much higher, reaching 30 the week before the feast and 38 the week after in 1585 with no effect on attendance (161 members that year): NRO, 16/a 11, mayor's court book, 1582–87, 452, 458.

53 NRO, 17/b 10, 1452–1602, 334. Attendance recovered in the wake of the new regulation, but only partway. The last two surviving accounts reported 134 members in attendance in 1590 and 131 in 1591, still some 30 short of pre-1589 levels.

54 For the ‘crisis of the 1590s’, see Clark, P. (ed.), The European Crisis of the 1590s: Essays in Comparative History (London, 1985)Google Scholar, as well as the more recent contribution by Geoffrey Parker on the role of climate: Parker, G., ‘History and climate: the crisis of the 1590s reconsidered’, in Leggewie, C. and Mauelshagen, F. (eds.), Climate Change and Cultural Transition in Europe, Climate and Culture, vol. 4 (Leiden, 2018), 119–55Google Scholar. On the political repercussions for urban communities, see Clark, English Provincial Society, 246, 251–5.

55 NRO, 17/b 10, 1452–1602, 326.

56 I have compared two price indices for this period: the classic Phelps Brown and Hopkins basket of consumables and the more recent consumer price index for London compiled by R.C. Allen. Indexing each series to its 1580s average indicates that prices in 1587 were more than a third higher than the decadal average. Full details and a table of values extending through the 1590s can be found in the appendix.

57 In London, Archer noted that excessive costs led the haberdashers to cancel their yeomanry dinner between 1586 and 1595, while the merchant tailors had been holding their dinner only every third year since 1570: Archer, Pursuit of Stability, 119. The haberdashers’ timing meant that they reinstated their dinner just before the highest prices of the century.

58 Hoskins, W.G., ‘Harvest fluctuations and economic history, 1480–1619’, Agricultural History Review, 12 (1964), 32Google Scholar. According to the indices cited above, prices were 40% (1595 and 1596) to more than 80% (1597) higher than the 1580s average during that four-year span. Note that Hoskins, like Allen, dates the accounting year differently than do Phelps Brown and Hopkins. Hoskins’ (and Allen's) 1586 is Phelps Brown and Hopkins’ 1587 – 1586–87 in both cases.

59 NRO, 17/b 10, 1452–1602, 359. The measure was approved in May of 1596, after the selection of members for that year, and first affected those chosen in 1597. The penalties had previously been set at 5s and 20s in 1586. Penalties of 100s had been tried previously in 1578. They had already revived the sale of dispensations, albeit on a modest scale, offering two in 1594, one in 1595, two in 1596 and four in 1597. Whether this sterner effort to halt resistance among the propertied can be linked to wider attempts to reform local manners is doubtful. But a full account of behavioural reform during the 1590s in Norwich has yet to be written. Muriel McClendon did discover an increase in prosecutions for a wide range of behaviours beginning in the 1560s, but her study only goes as far as 1581: McClendon, Quiet Reformation, 209–24. Paul Griffiths, who has looked at prosecutions for vagrancy between 1590 and 1645, found that cases did rise sharply, but not until the early 1600s: Griffiths, P., Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560–1640 (Oxford, 1996), 359–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 Nicholas Dyngle was the only one to resist during that two-year span, and he suffered both imprisonment and the enhanced monetary penalty – with no friendly reduction for submitting – before taking his oath.

61 Perhaps they concluded that it was better to impose modest penalties that produced willing submission than to insist on punitive fines that bred resentment as Wallis has argued for London. He cited the spirit of ‘concord and fraternity that lay at the centre of the guild idea’ as one reason for mild punishments in the London companies: Wallis, ‘Controlling commodities’, 92.

62 In 1600, only five of the ten who resisted swore their oaths in the same year, a level consistent with the 1580s.

63 Their actions call to mind the small victories won by twentieth-century peasants practising what James Scott called ‘everyday resistance’. Peasant aims, he wrote, were ‘not directly to overthrow or transform a system of domination’, but ‘to thwart material and symbolic claims from dominant classes’: Scott, J.C., Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985), 301Google Scholar. Although the merchants, craftsmen and professionals selected for membership in the Company of St George were clearly not in the same position of weakness as the peasants studied by Scott, they did find themselves at a disadvantage when it came to Company demands, which were backed by the city's legal apparatus, and did pursue an indirect form of protest.

64 Five of the 54 who swore their oaths without protest between 1591 and 1600 (inclusive) later became mayor. The proportion is 9% in each case.

65 Mackerell, ‘Account of the Company of St George’, 374, 372 for quoted passages, 366–74 for full narrative. On Mackerell's antiquarian work, see Stoker, D., ‘Mackerell, Benjamin (bap. 1685, d. 1738)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar, accessed 19 June 2018, doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/17607, and ‘Benjamin Mackerell, antiquary, librarian, and plagiarist’, Norfolk Archaeology, 42 (1994), 1–12Google Scholar. Clarke's protest relied on the Gild and Company's old records, and one suspects that Mackerell, who had access to the documents and the expertise to exploit them, furnished Clarke with the material he needed. Unstated in Mackerell's account, though perhaps obvious to contemporaries, was the influence of Whig–Tory conflicts on the outcome; Clarke's victory coincided with Whig ascendancy in local government. Several modern accounts have restored that political context: Kilmartin, ‘Popular rejoicing’, 307–10; Rogers, N., Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford, 1989), 338–9Google Scholar; Miller, ‘Containing division’, 1042. For more general accounts of partisan struggles in the city, see Wilson, K., The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995), 376–404Google Scholar; Knights, M., ‘Politics, 1660–1835’, in Rawcliffe, C. and Wilson, R. (eds.), Norwich since 1550 (London, 2004), 171–4Google Scholar. More recently, Daniel Howse has interpreted Clarke's actions as part of a broader campaign against privileged institutions: D. Howse, ‘Governance, social relations and popular politics in eighteenth century Norwich’, University of East Anglia Ph.D. thesis, 2013, 173–5.

66 Mackerell, ‘Account of the Company of St George’, 367.

Figure 0

Table 1. New city councillors, 1551–60.

Figure 1

Table 2. New city councillors and Company members, 1561–70.

Figure 2

Table 3. New city councillors and Company members, 1561–90.

Figure 3

Table 4. New city councillors and Company members, 1591–1600.