Wales and the Law: Violent Masculinities

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Angry men and violent bodies in early modern Wales: fatal confrontations and dangerous masculinities

An edited version of a paper read at the conference 'History, gender and the body', University of Essex, UK, June 2001

In the village of Burton in Denbighshire, in March 1636, a group of men were playing cards in an alehouse in Burton when Arthur ap William accused Hugh Banister of cheating (perhaps not for the first time). The two men began to quarrel and trade insults, but were pacified by the others. However, shortly after they had left the house, argument turned to physical blows: Hugh and another of the men began to fight. Arthur came up to them and slapped or punched Hugh, who retaliated by striking him on the head with a stake. Arthur died two days later, and Hugh was subsequently convicted of manslaughter.[1]

This type of incident, where one man killed another in a sudden quarrel, recurs regularly (far more often than premeditated murder) in the court records of early modern Wales, as elsewhere. But I want to start with a caution: court records are selective, in a way that inevitably emphasises conflict and crisis. Early modern homicide rates were substantially higher than in the twentieth century, but the numbers were still small, hardly justifying Lawrence Stone's assertion, with typical boldness, that '[f]riends and acquaintances felt honour bound to challenge and kill each other for the slightest affront' during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[2]

Some historians of early modern Wales have echoed Stone in stressing the quarrelsome, belligerent temper of their subjects,[3] although there has been no systematic analysis of early modern Welsh homicide rates for comparison with the much-studied English figures. I'm not going to address that here, although I will touch on issues that are relevant to this area's particular location on the Welsh/English border. What I want to do is to explore the contexts and causes of, and responses to, violence between men. This type of violent confrontation arising from an 'affront' was by far the most common type of homicide in early modern Denbighshire, and moreover it was a 'scenario' (to use the term of a modern criminologist) not confined to lethal encounters. Compared to premeditated murder, it was viewed with a degree of lenience both by local communities and the law: someone who had killed out of sudden anger and provocation could expect the sympathy of witnesses and merciful treatment from the legal system, either acquittal or conviction of manslaughter rather than murder.

The use of the body lay at the heart of what was legally recognised as 'provocation'. Not simply an assault, a blow struck; less serious physical contact such as jostling a man in passing on the street could be accepted as mitigating circumstances, provided the killer had retaliated while still in 'hot anger'. Verbal provocation was a more contentious area, and one where public opinion may have been rather more lenient than legal authorities: insults or 'chiding' alone did not satisfy the law, but words that threatened bodily harm did, as did insults aggravated by some physical aggression.[4] So, actions that violated, or threatened to violate, bodily integrity were widely accepted as justifying a physically violent response. This has, furthermore, important gendered dimensions; it is not accidental that we are observing a particularly masculine scenario. According to Garthine Walker, men could call on 'conventions of male honour to justify their [violent] actions and responses', something also evident in Natalie Davis's study of French men's pardon tales. But those conventions did not simply justify violence; sometimes - and Stone did make a valid point here - they might demand it.[5]

Donna Andrew wrote that 'the willingness to fight a duel, as well as the recognition of being a person who was "challenge-able" defined, in great part, what it meant to be a gentleman.'[6] I think that this kind of sentiment would have been relevant to many men, not just gentlemen, and not just in the specific aristocratic context of the formal duel. Many violent confrontations, whether lethal or not, began with a perceived violation of obligations or codes of behaviour and violence was used to reassert one's position, to defend threatened honour.[7] A substantial body of the expanding research into historical masculinities focuses on the importance of 'honour', but much of it emphasises sexual honour, just as much recent historiography on 'the body' focuses on the sexual.[8] And, while I would not question the importance of these subjects, this paper is meant as a reminder that there was more to both masculinity and bodies than sex.

Further, as has recently been pointed out, the history of the body 'all too often treats the human frame as something which was looked at rather than something which did things.'[9] Much has been written on parts of the often-naked body, on genitalia, on anatomy, on prescriptions. My emphasis is on bodies in action: on gestures, words spoken, blows. And I focus on the 'disruptive' elements of masculinities, those that, in Lyndal Roper's words, 'were a serious danger to civic peace rather than a prop of patriarchy.'[10] But I also want to emphasise that they were not 'mindless'; the men involved were using their bodies to a purpose, however dangerous and disruptive. As highly public events, these might well be seen as dramatic social 'performances' of competitive masculinity. And if no one was prepared to back down, violence could escalate with disturbing swiftness.

At a Ruthin alehouse, in June 1665, an argument broke out between Lewis Lloyd and George Piers when George demanded some money that Lloyd owed him: 'there passed severall base and threatning words between them on both sides'. A friend of George Piers, Hugh ap Edward, 'began to multiplie words and foment the quarrell', 'snapping' Lewis under the chin, snatching his hat and hiding it in another room. When Hugh returned, Lewis 'pushed him downe with his hand, and upon further provocation threw him downe againe beateing him with his hands'. George moved in to 'second' Hugh; they were '[d]esperately and confusedly lugging one another by the haire of the head', and bystanders could not part the men. Ultimately, the landlord, Richard Key, arrived to break up the fight; what happened next is unclear, but George later died of head wounds for which he blamed Richard (although Richard, Lewis and Hugh were all later acquitted).[11]

Alcohol may well have contributed to the violence in this case: both George and Hugh were reported to have been very drunk, and it seems likely that Lewis was in a similar state. The fighting began with an argument over debts, a recurrent scenario in violent confrontations. But most striking of all is the way in which a man's hat played a role in escalating the conflict. The significance of Hugh's ostensibly 'trivial' action depends on an understanding of the symbolic importance of this item of clothing in the period. Men's hats directly signified status, 'symbolic representations of the differences in social rank and quality on which order rested'.[12] Refusing to remove one's hat, to bare the head, in the presence of a social superior was a sign of outrageous political radicalism. Conversely, to knock a man's hat from his head represented a serious affront, and refusing to return it could only have compounded the insult. As Natalie Davis, noting similar incidents in sixteenth-century France, comments: '[e]xchanged, demanded, stolen, and especially knocked off, hats triggered trouble'.[13]

Let's return to disputes about debts, which, like accusations of cheating at cards, involved challenges to a man's moral integrity; 'in a developing market economy which was founded upon myriad bonds of trust', the seriousness of such disputes should not be underestimated.[14] They might be arguments about paying for drink. John Crosley died in December 1664 following a fight that began in an alehouse when the landlady, Judith the wife of William John, demanded payment of old drinking debts. She was clearly annoyed when Crosley's companion told her to be quiet and she would be paid later. She snatched up John's hat and refused to return it until she was paid: hat trouble again. At this John lost his temper, and he attacked Judith. They were struggling together when Judith called out to her husband for help; William struck John on the head with a staff.[15]

And if pubs and alcohol consumption were common features in inter-personal violence, it must be stressed that neither was essential to its happening, nor to its intensity, and that places of work and business were frequent sites of conflict. For example, a non-fatal confrontation in Wrexham in 1664 followed an argument over some work that George Malpas, a blacksmith, had done for Hugh Dutton. George himself was absent; it was his servant, Thomas Evans who came to the defence of the absent smith's honour when Hugh called him 'a cheating rogue and knave for selling [Hugh] an iron chayre made of ill iron'.[16] The two men accused each other of lying and then exchanged physical blows, with Thomas striking Hugh on the head with an iron bar.

If this incident was partly a matter of honesty, it was also, it should be noted, about workmanship. Similarly, a lethal chain of events at Denbigh in September 1687 involving John Salusbury and his servant Robert ap Richard intertwined honesty and competence at an essentially physical occupation. Robert was driving Salusbury's oxen at plough, when they got into some difficulty. Robert detailed his efforts to rescue the situation, getting onto the shaft 'to stay it from falling'; but his master rebuked him and 'gave [him] crabit words'. According to a witness, John asked ... Robert 'why he did not drive the sayd teame as other people did', and Robert replyed, 'ther was more people to follow the other teames'. John then 'declared that ... Robert... did lie'; 'hearing that word', Robert retorted that it was John who lied. At this, John struck Robert on the back with a stick, and Robert struck back, hitting John on the head with the handle of the goad he was carrying to drive the cattle. John was knocked to the ground, and although he managed to get up and strike Robert again, and maintained that he would have him punished, he was reeling 'as iff he was drunke' and died later the same day.[17]

Here, as before, we have a escalating sequence of hostile exchanges, shifting rapidly from verbal to physical conflict. Harangued and accused of incompetence, Robert's decidedly undeferential response contained strong, demeaning implications about his master's worth: Salusbury was too miserly, or perhaps too poor, to employ enough workers to do the job properly.[18] When Robert refused to be silenced by the accusation of dishonesty, simply returning the insult, his master attempted to physically 'discipline' him. But, in his own words, Robert was unable to 'endure the blowes', and struck back. And even after being knocked down and seriously wounded, John continued to try to re-assert his authority. (The jury at the subsequent trial appear to have agreed that Robert had been unreasonably provoked, finding him guilty only of manslaughter.)

Another notable group of fatal confrontations centred not on working relationships but holidays and festivities. The mabsant or wake in eighteenth-century Wales, usually held around harvest-time, was intended as 'an occasion for neighbourly hospitality', but could equally be an occasion for disorder and brawling. It has been argued that these festivals expressed competitive and antagonistic relationships between parishes - usually symbolically, such as in the ritual enactment of battles in which invading enemies were routed.[19] But these tensions could on occasion engender real, and lethal, fights. A particularly dramatic case took place at Henllan, near the town of Denbigh, in 1754, and is notable for involving hostility not simply between neighbouring parishes but also between industrial and agricultural communities, and between English and Welsh. The fighting, which came at the very end of the day, revolved around the actions of John Foulke, a Henllan blacksmith who bore a grudge against some visitors from Denbigh - a group that was described variously as 'Denbigh people', 'factory people' and 'Englishmen', while the locals were 'the Welsh country people'. Tensions were already brewing between these two groups (although it is unclear why) when John Foulke picked a fight with a man pointed out as the 'champion of Denbigh' and apparently sparked off a general battle, with many of the men armed with sticks torn from hedges, and some throwing stones. In the melée John received head wounds which he proudly showed off to friends. If he had satisfied his honour, he paid a high price: he died shortly afterwards.[20]

Early modern historians overwhelmingly stress change when they write of interpersonal physical violence. They have painstakingly traced a statistical decline in homicide prosecutions from the middle ages to the twentieth century, and there have been many attempts, with varying degrees of subtlety, to explain this trend. But to look closely at the qualitative contexts of men's lethal confrontations is to be struck first of all by continuity. There are, for example, striking similarities between the patterns of lethal confrontations, 'honour contests' among late-twentieth-century Australian men studied by a criminologist, and those I encountered in seventeenth-century Wales.[21] However, there are also major differences that have received less attention than the generalised pattern of decline.

Today, homicide, and physical violence more generally, is overwhelmingly a lower- or even under-class crime as well as a masculine one. Indeed, this characteristic is central to a number of modern sociological analyses: physical violence as the preserve of men who lack social and political power.[22] But in the seventeenth century it encompassed a far broader social spectrum, and a very different place in the workings of political authority - even if there were signs of the beginnings of change. So, I want to conclude with a case of violent gentlemen.

A drinking party at Wrexham in December 1686 included two gentlemen, John Power and James Eyton (both from Shropshire, but regular visitors to the town) and two dragoons, John Rich and James Lindsay, who were colleagues in the same troop. Visiting four different inns or taverns in the course of the afternoon, the group consumed substantial quantities of both ale and wine. Quite early in the proceedings, the two civilians tried on the soldiers' uniforms: Eyton borrowed Rich's red cloak, 'saying yt he ye said Mr James Eyton would goe & walk with ye cloak for a frolick if [Rich] was pleas'd to lend it him', and Power followed suit by borrowing Lindsay's cloak. Then Eyton declared that ''tis not handsome to go without swords' - or, in Power's version of events, it was Rich who said that 'they did not look like souldiers without swords' - and so they added the two soldiers' swords to their costumes.

Events took a much less playful turn later in the day, however, when William Lewis, another dragoon, arrived at the Sun tavern where they were drinking wine and called Rich out of the room. In Lewis' version, it was to ask 'why [Rich] reflected upon him because he was a Welchman', although Rich gave a different reason for Lewis's chagrin: Rich and Lindsay had allegedly 'spoake ill of him behind his back, by reason that he ye said William Lewis had been tyed neck & heels'. In their examinations, both men claim, not very plausibly, that they then amicably resolved their difference before joining the others. At least, no one else thought so. At first, the group seems to have made some effort to keep the peace, but then, in Rich's words:

Mr John Power changed his seat, and went by William Lewis to sitt, yn Mr John Power & William Lewis spoke in Welch which language this examinant understandeth not to one another, sometimes whispering, then presently Mr John Power said, I know there is a quarrell amongst you, you had best box it out, no sir, said this examinant, tis not ye fashion amongst souldiers to box, then said Mr John Power, fight it out with swords, it is but ye killing of one man...

After that it was not long before fighting began in earnest, during which Lindsay was fatally stabbed; the situation was somewhat confused, with all of those involved armed with swords and/or daggers, but Power himself was amongst those later charged with the killing, although he claimed to have been too drunk to know what had happened.[23]

This case weaves strands of a complex, fascinating fabric of masculine identity: again, elements of national and linguistic tensions, but also connections (Power spoke Welsh and his residence was given in different documents as variously in Shropshire or near Wrexham, where he certainly had close family connections); military honour codes; and a 'riotous' upper-class masculinity that was beginning to give way to codes of masculine gentility that emphasised 'civility'.[24] At the turn of the seventeenth century, one could find members of powerful gentry families in a pitched battle on the streets of Ruthin, probably unusual even then but, I suspect, extremely unlikely by the 1680s.[25] John Power and James Eyton could only play at being warriors.

And, like other gentlemen of the period, they may have been experiencing the contradictions between ongoing older virtues - 'heroic' prowess and physical mastery [26] - and new manners for gentlemen emphasising reason and politeness. Moreover, as Anna Bryson points out, there were inherent tensions within the new rules, between 'gentlemanly freedom, or independence, and the demands of rules of civility', for self-control and discipline.[27] And it has been suggested that Welshmen in adjusting to political and cultural change 'experienced a very particular version of the so-called "civilizing process"'.[28] Perhaps, in his sudden shift from peace-making to inciting violence, John Power was dramatically expressing the inner conflicts felt by many gentlemen of his time and (social and geographical) place.

In early modern society, physical violence was not simply a weapon of the 'weak' and marginal. Susan Amussen has, indeed, argued that much physical violence in early modern England was used as a disciplinary tool. It was crucial to state power, not least in the judicial system, but, moreover, it could not be entirely monopolised by the state: power and the right to use violence went hand in hand - as did the use of violence and any claim to status or authority.[29] And at the heart of these violent masculine confrontations were those men's bodies: not simply Foucauldian bodies enduring discipline and punishment, but bodies used in efforts to enforce discipline in a way that was regarded with some ambivalence. Certainly, it seems inadequate to view these lethal confrontations, however spontaneous and unpredictable, as simply uncontrolled, purposeless eruptions of 'macho' aggression. And perhaps in certain, public, situations where there existed conflicting expectations of what status and authority the men involved were entitled to, and a resulting unwillingness by either side to concede, the use of bodily violence was particularly likely to have unintended, fatal consequences.

These notes are minimalistic: only primary sources and directly relevant secondary sources are cited. A discussion of this topic with much fuller references is to be found in my thesis, 'Crime, community and authority in early modern Wales: Denbighshire 1660-1730' (University of Wales PhD thesis, 2003), ch. 3.

1. National Library of Wales [NLW], Great Sessions records [GS], 4/22/1.18-21, 51, 104, 66, 169.

2. Lawrence Stone, The family, sex and marriage in England, 1500-1800 (London, 1977), 94. For similar dynamics of masculine violence revealed in court records in nearby Cheshire, see Garthine Walker, Crime, gender and social order in early modern England (Cambridge, 2003), ch.2, 4.

3. See, eg, David W Howell, The rural poor in eighteenth-century Wales (Cardiff, 2000).

5. Garthine Walker, 'Crime, gender and social order in early modern Cheshire' (PhD thesis, University of Liverpool, 1994), 78; Walker, Crime, gender and social order, 33-49; Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the archives: pardon tales and their tellers in sixteenth-century France (Stanford, 1987), ch 2.

6. Donna T Andrew, 'The code of honour and its critics: the opposition to duelling in England, 1700-1850', Social History 5 (1980), 415.

7. Amussen, 'Punishment, discipline and power: the social meanings of violence in early modern England', Journal of British Studies, 34 (1995).

8. See, e.g., Elizabeth A Foyster, Manhood in early modern England: honour, sex and marriage (London, 1999).

9. Mark Jenner, 'Body, image, text in early modern Europe', Social History of Medicine 12 (1999), 151.

10. Lyndal Roper, 'Blood and codpieces: masculinity in the early modern German town', in Oedipus and the devil: witchcraft, sexuality and religion in early modern Europe (London, 1994), 108.

12. A J Fletcher, 'Honour, reputation and local officeholding in Elizabethan and Stuart England', in Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (eds), Order and disorder in early modern England (Cambridge, 1985), 97.

14. Alexandra Shepard, 'Manhood, credit and patriarchy in early modern England', Past and Present 167 (2000), 86.

18. See Shepard, 'Manhood, credit and patriarchy', on the importance of economic sufficiency, the ability to provide properly for one's household, to notions of manhood.

19. Richard Suggett, 'Festivals and social structure in early modern Wales', Past & Present 152 (1996).

21. Kenneth Polk, When men kill: scenarios of masculine violence (Cambridge, 1994), ch. 4

22. Polk, When men kill, 88-92; also R W Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley, 1995), ch 4.

24. Anna Bryson, 'The rhetoric of status: gesture, demeanour and the image of the gentleman in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England', in L Gent and N Llewellyn, Renaissance bodies: the human figure in English culture, c.1540-1660 (London, 1990).

28. Michael Roberts, ' "More prone to be idle and riotous than the English";? Attitudes to male behaviour in early modern Wales', in Michael Roberts and Simone Clarke (eds), Women and gender in early modern Wales (Cardiff, 2000), 281.