‘Heroick Informers’ and London spies:

Abstract

This chapter examines debates about the dangers of fairs. In late-Stuart England, some notable and polite London men fashioned themselves into urban patriarchs. Reform movements, such as societies for reformation of manners, provided middling London reformers incentive to observe the city around them from a moral high ground. From this perspective, London’s fairs seemed dangerous – they threatened social order particularly because they encouraged behaviours contrary to reformers’ own notions of polite masculinity. Middling men had available to them two discourses that motivated their urban reform attempts: religious sermons and tracts and satirical periodical literature. Men who heard sermons or read pamphlets regarding the dangers of vice and public immorality looked around them at London’s post-fire urban landscape in disarray. Sermons calling for religious renewal or cleaning up social ills and avoiding ‘lewd’ behaviour took on a specific meaning as they were preached, printed and disseminated in a city undergoing the constant flux of post-Fire reconstruction. Men who participated in urban reform movements considered London’s fairs disorderly events that threatened their gendered ideals. Becoming ‘Heroick’ Christian informers and policing urban amusements, middling men made themselves essential to the urban environment and propagated a new style of masculinity.