
Sex, Whipping, and Pottage in Stepney - benbreen
https://thesocialhistorian.wordpress.com/2015/06/06/sex-whipping-and-pottage-in-stepney/
======
esloanpa
This is a fun read and describes a lot of the social "types" seen in
Shakespeare's London. The thing that interested me the most was the discussion
of the scold, a figure that makes a lot of appearances in art from the time.
The scold, the over-domineering woman who beat/verbally humiliated her
husband, was a character that seemed to provoke a fair amount of anxiety in
people during this time. An unruly woman like a scold was thought to represent
a house in disorder, and was seen as the result of a husband's failure to
adequately assert his masculine authority. To counter the behavior of the
scold, a husband could employ a number of strategies, including the scold's
bridle, which you can see here: [http://bit.ly/1QTuxrU](http://bit.ly/1QTuxrU)
and here: [http://bit.ly/1PedRgu](http://bit.ly/1PedRgu) It's an amazing
historical artifact of a time when female speech was particularly feared. The
idea of a man walking his wife on a leash is particularly jarring, and I find
it impossible to imagine that such things were ever actually the case...but
lots of woodcuts seem to indicate it was.

Have questions about the culture of the Renaissance, or Shakespeare in
general? I'd love to answer them. I'm a Shakespearean working in a SaaS
company and love to talk about the wild period that his plays came from. Let's
talk!

~~~
k__
I always find it interesting how people talk about the past, like everything
has changed since then.

After I went to a theater play of victorian times, everyone was shocked about
the fact that a man and a woman couldn't be in one room when no one else was
there if they weren't married.

But a few weeks later I overheard a call of a girl sitting next to me in a
train station, where she told the caller that she "didn't let her male friend
drive her home from the party, last night. because no one else was driving
with them and she didn't want the people to get a wrong picture so she called
a taxi"

I found this an interesting read too. especially the cuckold stuff. Even today
it's hard for a man to let the women take charge, because society is harassing
him if he does.

~~~
esloanpa
Yep. Even though we like to claim that we are far more modern and advanced
than our historical predecessors, many of the same narratives and anxieties
about what is or is not appropriate for men and women remain the same as in
the Renaissance and even ancient Greece/Rome.

------
douche
There were a lot of really interesting English social customs that are
recorded from that Tudor/Stuart period. Between all the cuckolds horns,
shrews, scolds, and conflicts between Catholics, Anglicans and the
Puritan/Quaker/other protestant splinter groups, there's a lot of bizarre-
seeming rituals that people undertook. Not to mention accusations of
witchcraft.

One of the better books I read in my coursework on early modern England was
Fire From Heaven, which covers a bunch of this stuff
([http://amzn.to/1VzJn8r](http://amzn.to/1VzJn8r))

One I came across recently, reading one of the Patrick O'Brian Aubrey/Maturin
novels was the practice of wife selling
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife_selling_(English_custom)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife_selling_\(English_custom\)))

~~~
thaumasiotes
You really confused me with the apparent reference to
[http://www.amazon.com/Fire-Heaven-Mary-
Renault/dp/0375726829...](http://www.amazon.com/Fire-Heaven-Mary-
Renault/dp/0375726829/)

;p

------
sandworm101
This sort of treatment is not distant history. It all boils down to the
concept that women were their husband's literal property. A husband being
bossed around by his wife was akin to a farmer being bossed around by his
horse. And if you think treating people as legal property was abolished
alongside slavery, think again.

"Wife selling persisted in England in some form until the early 20th century;
according to the jurist and historian James Bryce, writing in 1901, wife sales
were still occasionally taking place during his time."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife_selling_%28English_custom...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife_selling_%28English_custom%29)

~~~
_yosefk
From the Wikipedia article: "Although the custom had no basis in law and
frequently resulted in prosecution..." and "Writing in 1901 on the subject of
wife selling, James Bryce stated that there was "no trace at all in our
[English] law of any such right."

(It also says that people did it despite it being illegal, but this doesn't
seem very different from any subculture encouraging illegal behavior at any
point in time, in that such subcultures always exist, and one can't
extrapolate the attitudes within such a subculture to the entire society.)

~~~
sandworm101
No trace in the law doesn't mean it was illegal. What that means is that no
court has reported a case on the matter. That can mean it was very rare, or
just was so accepted that it was never challenged in court, or happened in
those many places where courts were not much of an option.

Even if something gets to some form of courtroom, the chances that a decision
would be written down and reported were slim during most of english history.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Read that quote again. "Although the custom [...] frequently resulted in
prosecution..."

It was illegal. I don't think, before the modern era, the law applied very
well to the peasantry. It makes me wonder if the current system we aspire to,
one law for everyone in the same country, really makes sense. There's
something to be said for the rich ordering their society their way, and the
poor ordering their society their way.

~~~
_yosefk
So what's the threshold separating "rich" from "poor"? What laws apply to me
if my net worth fluctuates around that threshold? Different laws depending on
the day?

Now if being poor means you can't become rich legally then they do become
closer to separate societies, but I sure wouldn't want to live under such a
system.

~~~
thaumasiotes
That was just phrasing. The principle isn't that we enshrine a division
between rich and poor. The principle is that separate communities enforce
their own norms among themselves. It happens that separate communities may
differ systematically in many ways, including wealth. But taking premodern
England as an example, all of the aristocracy would belong to the same group,
while different impoverished villages across the country would _not_ share a
unified system; they'd all have their own systems, because unlike the
aristocracy, they don't have much to do with one another.

The laws applying to you are those of the community you belong to,
irrespective of your net worth. If you want to change them, you need to be
accepted by a different community (and then go live among them). The
traditional way of doing that is to marry in.

