The Reformation of Manners

Abstract

It is a historiographical orthodoxy that the late Elizabethan and early Stuart period was characterised by the widespread promotion of ideals of moral reformation, with attacks on drunkenness, fornication, swearing, blasphemy, gaming, dancing, revelling and profaning the sabbath. From the floor of the House of Commons to the ale-bench, contemporaries wrestled with the tension between order and good fellowship. This dialogue was not without practical consequences, as the whipping of pregnant brides, the shaming of common drunkards, the fining of swearers and the sawing down of maypoles suggests.2 Both secular and ecclesiastical courts were preoccupied with ‘the reformation of man-ners’.3 So much, it seems, can be taken for granted. There is, however, an emerging consensus that this episode was neither entirely novel nor unique. The 1290s, the 1470s, the 1660s, the 1690s and the 1750s were all periods in which personal morality was subjected to public scrutiny.4 It has become apparent that a very wide range of institutions might control and punish misbehaviour, and that the balance of responsibility between them changed over time. The church courts had long held jurisdiction over such matters, of course, and the secular courts of later medieval England also sporadically made presentments about them.5