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dwellordream · 3 years ago

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“Perhaps the most degrading aspect of woman's subjection in the early modern period was a husband's right to strike his wife. A proverb recorded in 1475 allowed: ther be iii thyngs take gret betyng: a stockfish, a milston, a fedirbed, a woman. A century later, a jest tried to make the most of this mundane and unpromising subject: A certayne lytle boy seeing his father beating his mother every daye, and hearing him saye one night when he was abed, that he had forgotten to do one thing: I know what it is quoth the chyld, what sayd the father: Mary (sayd he) to beate my mother. While the merry books labored to wring humor from the thud of fist against flesh, church courts adjudicated horrific cases of male violence against women, whether maid, wife, or widow.

English law allowed husbands to beat their wives as much as they liked so long as severe injury or death did not result. On this issue the law was more conservative than church doctrine, which was firmly, though not consistently, set against wife beating. Many preacher-pamphleteers cited the Pauline precept that husband and wife were one flesh, arguing that it was wrong to seek to harm oneself. Henry Smith held that "these mad men which beat themselves should be sent to Bedlam till their madness be gone." Although the one-flesh argument erases the individual woman on the receiving end, at least it could be invoked to stay men's hands. Popular literature did not fail to register the doctrine's attractiveness to wives.

In an early Tudor example of gossips' literature, The gospelles of dystaves, women secretly gather to hear the following "gospel" preached by a wise shrew: "He that beteth his wyfe shall never have grace of our lady tyl he have pardon of his wyfe .... Mary faith it is great synne as he wolde despaire himself / for after that whiche I have herde our vicar saye it is but one body man and woman togather." Some conduct-book authors managed to find a loophole even here. William Whately's A Bride-Bush (1623) called wife beating permissible after all else failed because it could serve as a healing "corosive" to a husband's "owne flesh." In this perverse bit of sophistry, wife abuse becomes pious self-flagellation. Other godly pamphleteers urged husbands to be proactive.

Robert Snawsel's A looking glass for maried folkes (1610) told husbands they had every right to control their wives by firm discipline, "including beating and deliberate changes of mood." One extremist even offered his readers lessons in wife beating, showing how husbands could measure and justify their blows. Certainly, the church did not fully or logically enforce its own strictures. In 1618, for example, an episcopal court judge chastised a Lincolnshire vicar for beating his wife in the churchyard. The offense lay not in his beating her but in doing so on holy ground. Faced with such acts of Christian instruction, wives were told to endure with patience and thank their husbands for the correction.

Henry Bentley's The Monument of Matrones (1589) contained this prayer "to be used by the wife that hath a froward and bitter husband": O most wise and provident GOD ... if it be thy good pleasure with frowardness, bitternes, and unkindnesse, yea, the hatred and disdaine of my husband, thus to correct me for my fault, I most hartilie thanke thee for it ... and that I for my part may quietlie beare the frailtie, infirmitie, and faults of my husband, with more patience, mildnesse and modestie, than hitherto I have, so that mine example may be to the comfort and commoditie of other to doo the like. Many women refused to serve as comforting examples of patience, fighting back when attacked and crying out for help. Neighbors were their first line of defense because local authorities could not be counted on to prevent severe or mortal injury.

Gowing has shown that women under attack turned to women neighbors first and there is evidence that all members of the community expected women to risk their own safety for the well-being of other women. Some beaten women filed complaints against their husbands in church courts or (more rarely) in civil courts. Not surprisingly, women who sued men for violence usually brought other women to court as witnesses. Though many husbands bitterly resented the women neighbors who intervened, neighbors continued to act as a vigilant and moderating force. Because of the wider social conflicts wife beating engendered, the extent of a husband's right to correct his wife was a live issue in the courts and in neighborhoods.

Ballads show irate husbands grousing that their hands are tied, although they itch to pound their wives, because their wives' friends will criticize and slander them. Neighbors upbraid the harshest wife beaters with terms leveled at their sense of honor and rationality: vicious or repeated beatings could raise the cry that a man was "bedlam" or "unmanly." Being known as a wife beater could shame some men, but others ignored such pressure until either a wife's death or the law stopped them.Faced with intransigent offenders, neighbors sometimes escalated countermeasures. In a case from Bristol in 1667, a group of neighbors surrounded a notorious wife beater and threw dirt at him, creating "a loud mocking demonstration" that strongly resembled charivari.

Another example of neighborhood discipline concerns a child beater rather than a wife beater-making it a rare case because parents' right to administer beatings was seldom questioned-but it does shed light on the verbal arsenal that communities could deploy against transgressors. In 1622, neighbors of a prominent Essex citizen named Richard Turner wrote rhymes to mock him for brutally beating his daughter Anne. Among its many verses: Hye thee home Anne, Hye thee home Anne, Whippe her arse Dicke, Will have thee anon. All those that love puddinge, Come unto Parke Street, And learne the songe, Whip Her Arse Dick. As if that weren't enough, the song goes on to compare Turner to a child murderer who had just been hanged.

Written by artisans and tradespeople, the song spread from town to town through the posting of copies and constant singing so that even children came to know the song and torment Turner with it. For a time he was forced to stay indoors, hoping the "balleting" would abate. Visual culture bears evidence of the social pressures that functioned to limit male violence and to succor the abused. "Patience Baited," an emblem by George Wither, spells out collective limits on patriarchal privilege, warning that even the meekest wife will finally turn and fight.

The image shows a sheep attacking its tormentor, a young boy. The poem informs readers that anyone who mistreats a friend or spouse runs the risk of social ostracism: Thus, many times, a foolish man doth lose His faithfull friends, and justly makes them foes .... And by abusing of a patient Mate Turne dearest Love, into deadliest Hate: For any wrong may better bee excused, Than, Kindnesse, long, and willfully abused.

Male drunkenness was a leading cause of "kindnesse long and willfully abused," and jests involving domestic violence are generally alcohol-sodden. Many merry tales strongly criticize alcoholic husbands who ruin their health and pauperize their families. Pasquils Palinodia (1619) blames husbands for driving wives to other men's arms because of their own alehouse haunting and violent drunkenness, while Thomas Heywood's Philoconothista, or the Drunkard, Opened, Dissected, and Anatomized (1635) shows brawling, puking asses and goats served by an alewife who looks on with a touch of scorn. In some jests, wives seize the position of agency in the narrative, in a brief but significant moment of linguistic mastery.”

- Pamela Allen Brown, ““O such a rogue would be hang’d!” Shrews versus Wife Beaters.” in Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England

#pamela allen brown #history #renaissance #cw: domestic violence #tudor #elizabethan #jacobean #better a shrew than a sheep

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