Elizabethan Era Domestic Discipline

[AlinaX]

Noblemen were so comfortable with acknowledging their bastards that there's a surname convention for it - "Fitz-" basically means "illegitimate son of".

Fitz was literally just 'son of' and in the post-Elizabethan era was sometimes used to construct the surnames of illegitimate royal heirs.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Fitz was literally just 'son of' and in the post-Elizabethan era was sometimes used to construct the surnames of illegitimate royal heirs.

Literally yes, but as I understand it, it became associated with bastardry because a legitimate son would normally just take his father's surname. AFAIK the use wasn't limited to royalty, though I think you're right that it was more common post-Elizabeth.

It was used at least occasionally before Elizabeth - Henry VIII's illegitimate son was Henry FitzRoy, for instance ("son of the king").

 

[Damoiselle]

Approaching this from a cynical perspective: no doubt plenty of Elizabethan noblemen were violent abusive types, but they would usually have had easier targets at hand.

Once they'd produced an heir and a spare, AFAIK there wasn't much expectation on the couple to spend time together, or indeed for the husband to remain monogamous. Noblemen were so comfortable with acknowledging their bastards that there's a surname convention for it - "Fitz-" basically means "illegitimate son of". And they had plenty of servants to kick around with far less risk of blowback.

FWIW, the theme of "nobleman mistreats a noblewoman, and gets done over by her aggrieved family" shows up several times in Shakespeare - I can think of three off the top of my head, and my Shakespeare is far from exhaustive.

Yeah, like they could wantonly rape and abuse any peasant woman who took their fancy, so...

I didn't know about "Fitz." That's fascinating.

edit: I guess I should have. Lord knows I've read enough Philippa Gregory.


This makes me think of that part in the Much Ado About Nothing film version, where the supposedly loving father "finds out" that his daughter Hero is having an affair so that her love interest isn't interested in marrying her anymore, and he's in a fury at her. In the movie they have him smack her. I'm not sure if the smack is consistent with the Shakespearian text or just a flourish in the film, but his fury is definitely text-based. And his right to do this is naturally never challenged. A noblewoman having leverage is still entirely dependent on the will of the men in her life.

 

[Enchantment_of_Nyx]

I did a little reading for my own education on this subject. I hadn't originally intended to post about it, but there were so many well-sourced and thoughtful posts here that I decided to share what I found.

I decided to do the reading because I was surprised to the resistance to the idea that the historical record might not be terribly accurate with regard to domestic abuse/"discipline" in the Elizabethan era. It made me wonder what the reason was for that reaction. I still don't know. The easy answer is that none of us will ever know how much the regency romances we read have soaked into our heads. I find that a bit facile. A better answer may be that the Elizabethans were excellent propagandists. As Bramblethorn says (albeit in support of an opposite argument), "Sometimes what 'everybody knows' ain't so." I wanted to fact check the common perception because to me, it didn't hold together logically.

In the discussion, I noticed a tendency to quarrel with individual points rather than broader concepts. Of course, individual points can be debated concretely, whereas the concept is far more subjective. However, I thought some of the specific criticisms chosen were instructive and indicative of a bias underlying the argument. For instance, the bit about the ruling that a man could beat his wife with a rod no wider than his thumb, attributed to Sir Francis Buller. It was correctly pointed out that he was mocked as "Judge Thumb." What was ignored was the fact that a sitting justice was interpreting common law in a manner that permitted beating one's wife. Do we really care the size of the rod? It was at the measure, and not the practice, at which the mockery was aimed.

The rulings of Dr. Marmaduke Coghill, an Irish judge and one of the most influential Irish politicians of his time, should put to rest the idea that "Judge Thumb" was an aberration in his views on wife beating. "In his capacity of Judge of the Prerogative Court, Coghill was called on to decide a question between a wife and her husband, who had given her a good beating. The doctor [Judge Coghill] delivered a grave opinion, that moderate chastisement, with such a switch as he held in his hand, was within the husband's matrimonial privilege." Gilbert, Sir John. A History of the City of Dublin: Vol. I. J. McGlashan, 1859, p. 170.

What wasn't pointed out was that Judge Buller's foray into the rules for wife beating didn't take place until the late 1700s, putting it outside of the Elizabethan era. Judge Coghill's opinion was at least several decades earlier. Sir Gilbert's book doesn't give the year of the decision, but Coghill became a judge in 1699 and died in 1738.

It is, in fact, incorrect to state that there is no evidence that beating wives was ever permitted under English law. The English jurist William Blackstone recognizes it. Anyone who follows English jurisprudence will recognize Blackstone as a well-recognized authority. I did not trace this to the original source, but according to Wikipedia, and the two cited sources, Blackstone wrote in the late 1700s in his Commentaries on the Laws of England that, "by an 'old law', a husband had formerly been justified in using 'moderate correction' against his wife but was barred from inflicting serious violence." The threshold for "serious violence" at the time may have been quite a bit higher than it is now. More to the point, English statute is not really the controlling factor. English law is primarily common law, a creature of precedent. Those precedents frequently do not stem from statutory authority, but from interpretations of principles the jurists believed reflected the rights and obligations afforded under English law.

I thought it surprising that nobody addressed the fact that women deemed "scolds" were subjected to ducking (arguably a less sophisticated form of waterboarding, and a dangerous one) and the scold's bridle (a metal cage around a woman's head that forced a metal bit into her mouth), along with the half-naked parade through town. Those are examples of a basic kind of violence - violence against a person's ability to express themselves, and serious punishment for stepping out of line. While the term "scold" could be applied to a woman who argued with her neighbors, it was applied primarily, if not nearly universally, to women who argued with their husbands. If a woman couldn't argue with her husband, could she reasonably and safely report being beaten? Especially if she was beaten for a provocation that the wife herself likely acknowledged as legitimately deserving of punishment?

Significantly, the concept of "scolds" was paired with the concept of "cuckholds," which did not mean what it does today. A cuckhold was a man who "failed" in his position of patriarch. (The "ducking stool" was originally, the "cucking stool," whereon a woman was "cucked.") If a man was married to a scold it was because he failed to keep her in line, making him a cuckhold. A cuckholded husband was jeered by the community. The community punished his wife because it deemed him incapable of doing so. The significance of this is obvious. Unless men wished to be seen as cuckholds, it was up to them to take measures to keep their wives in line.

I'm not suggesting that women of the nobility were subject to ducking stools or scold's bridles. But, noble women were deemed inferior to noblemen, just as women of noble classes were deemed inferior to their spouses. The same thing that motivated the ducking stools and scold's bridles among the lower classes surely motivated a less public equivalent among the upper classes. Damoiselle correctly pointed out three instances in Shakespeare's plays where a man runs afoul of his wife's family for mistreating her. Despite the soap opera quality to Shakespearean plays, I think it's reasonable to conclude this happened. Feuding seemed to be a pastime of the nobility. It's also reasonable to conclude Taming of the Shrew is consistent with attitudes of the times. Othello hits his wife, and is only called upon to apologize, all this before he kills her. At least one of Shakespeare's rotten fathers (can't remember which one) hits his daughter because she doesn't want to go along with his plans for her marriage.

Speaking of fathers and daughters, I was surprised by the discounting of the fact that girls in Elizabethan times were often brutally beaten by or at the direction of their fathers. Yes, a girl was no longer technically a girl when she married, even if that happened at the age of 12, but the argument entirely overlooks the way marriage was viewed. It was a transfer of filial obedience from a father to a husband. It was a handing over of the reins. A girl was not transformed into a different creature by virtue of marriage. Do we really think the father who thought it was within his rights to beat his daughter into submission looked at his wife much differently? The power to do either, and the motivation for doing either, was the same.

Finally, I noticed in my reading that the ascendancy of Queen Elizabeth did not have a clear relationship with women's improved status. To be clear, women's status was improving by that time, but the at least partially inaccurate assumption that she paved the way for reform may be an example of assumptions that we apply without reference to causality. Dr. Kemp, a well-respected authority on women of the Elizabethan era, wrote that Elizabeth I "is not known for having directly advanced the cause of women's equality" and "not a promoter of women's rights." Kemp, Theresa D., Women in the Age of Shakespeare. Greenwood Press, 2010, p. 31. Elizabeth used the concept of "the king's two bodies" to assert her authority, relying on her "body politic" and presumed God-given authority through it, rather than her merit as a woman. She argued that she had the fortitude of a man and the mind of a man. She was a savvy politician and she did what she deemed effective. She was certainly not doing a Regency rendition of "I am Woman, Hear Me Roar," even though if any woman of the era had a right to roar and be acknowledged, it was Elizabeth.

Another writer (I didn't keep the name!) suggested that Elizabeth's ascendancy actually created a backlash because men felt that the patriarchy was threatened. This rings awfully true, but to know it for a fact, we would have to have writings by Elizabethan men who were self-aware enough and honest enough to say so.

In my review, I found a great deal of conflicting information stated as fact rather than opinion. It is possible to read one authoritative source and come away with one impression, and another authoritative source and come away with the opposite. I found it significant that Regency-era England seemed to do an awful lot of contemporaneous white-washing as compared to earlier eras. Particularly during Elizabeth's time, much was published that idealized English society. A surprising array of manuals on behavior existed, many of which clearly did not reflect practice. I find the art more reliable, which is the opposite of what one might expect.

I have satisfied myself on the question I originally asked. I will never be able to prove it, but I think a reasonable person will see another side to the historical story. I didn't initially intend to post anything about this, since I did the reading for self-edification, so unfortunately, I did not keep my sources. I just kind of gobble stuff up as I go and make determinations about credibility as I read it. Once the content of a book is digested, the figurative book cover goes in my brain's shredder.

My browser history suggests that I found the following instructive in addition to those cited above:

Lynda E. Boose, ‘Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman's Unruly Member’, Shakespeare Quarterly 42

Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson, Order and Disorder in Early Modern England

Martin Ingram,'Scolding Women Cucked or Washed': A Crisis in Gender Relations in Early Modern England?

Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker, Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England

David E Underdown, ‘The Taming of the Scold: the Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England

All the sources found in this: https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/89638/1/89638.pdff

 

[Bramblethorn]

This makes me think of that part in the Much Ado About Nothing film version, where the supposedly loving father "finds out" that his daughter Hero is having an affair so that her love interest isn't interested in marrying her anymore, and he's in a fury at her. In the movie they have him smack her. I'm not sure if the smack is consistent with the Shakespearian text or just a flourish in the film, but his fury is definitely text-based. And his right to do this is naturally never challenged. A noblewoman having leverage is still entirely dependent on the will of the men in her life.

I don't think that smack is in the script, but Shakespearean scripts are pretty light on direction so it doesn't mean much. It'd be far milder than Titus Andronicus, though I think part of that may come down to portraying Roman customs rather than his own period.

 

[Damoiselle]

I did a little reading for my own education on this subject. I hadn't originally intended to post about it, but there were so many well-sourced and thoughtful posts here that I decided to share what I found.

I decided to do the reading because I was surprised to the resistance to the idea that the historical record might not be terribly accurate with regard to domestic abuse/"discipline" in the Elizabethan era. It made me wonder what the reason was for that reaction. I still don't know. The easy answer is that none of us will ever know how much the regency romances we read have soaked into our heads. I find that a bit facile. A better answer may be that the Elizabethans were excellent propagandists. As Bramblethorn says (albeit in support of an opposite argument), "Sometimes what 'everybody knows' ain't so." I wanted to fact check the common perception because to me, it didn't hold together logically.

In the discussion, I noticed a tendency to quarrel with individual points rather than broader concepts. Of course, individual points can be debated concretely, whereas the concept is far more subjective. However, I thought some of the specific criticisms chosen were instructive and indicative of a bias underlying the argument. For instance, the bit about the ruling that a man could beat his wife with a rod no wider than his thumb, attributed to Sir Francis Buller. It was correctly pointed out that he was mocked as "Judge Thumb." What was ignored was the fact that a sitting justice was interpreting common law in a manner that permitted beating one's wife. Do we really care the size of the rod? It was at the measure, and not the practice, at which the mockery was aimed.

The rulings of Dr. Marmaduke Coghill, an Irish judge and one of the most influential Irish politicians of his time, should put to rest the idea that "Judge Thumb" was an aberration in his views on wife beating. "In his capacity of Judge of the Prerogative Court, Coghill was called on to decide a question between a wife and her husband, who had given her a good beating. The doctor [Judge Coghill] delivered a grave opinion, that moderate chastisement, with such a switch as he held in his hand, was within the husband's matrimonial privilege." Gilbert, Sir John. A History of the City of Dublin: Vol. I. J. McGlashan, 1859, p. 170.

What wasn't pointed out was that Judge Buller's foray into the rules for wife beating didn't take place until the late 1700s, putting it outside of the Elizabethan era. Judge Coghill's opinion was at least several decades earlier. Sir Gilbert's book doesn't give the year of the decision, but Coghill became a judge in 1699 and died in 1738.

It is, in fact, incorrect to state that there is no evidence that beating wives was ever permitted under English law. The English jurist William Blackstone recognizes it. Anyone who follows English jurisprudence will recognize Blackstone as a well-recognized authority. I did not trace this to the original source, but according to Wikipedia, and the two cited sources, Blackstone wrote in the late 1700s in his Commentaries on the Laws of England that, "by an 'old law', a husband had formerly been justified in using 'moderate correction' against his wife but was barred from inflicting serious violence." The threshold for "serious violence" at the time may have been quite a bit higher than it is now. More to the point, English statute is not really the controlling factor. English law is primarily common law, a creature of precedent. Those precedents frequently do not stem from statutory authority, but from interpretations of principles the jurists believed reflected the rights and obligations afforded under English law.

I thought it surprising that nobody addressed the fact that women deemed "scolds" were subjected to ducking (arguably a less sophisticated form of waterboarding, and a dangerous one) and the scold's bridle (a metal cage around a woman's head that forced a metal bit into her mouth), along with the half-naked parade through town. Those are examples of a basic kind of violence - violence against a person's ability to express themselves, and serious punishment for stepping out of line. While the term "scold" could be applied to a woman who argued with her neighbors, it was applied primarily, if not nearly universally, to women who argued with their husbands. If a woman couldn't argue with her husband, could she reasonably and safely report being beaten? Especially if she was beaten for a provocation that the wife herself likely acknowledged as legitimately deserving of punishment?

Significantly, the concept of "scolds" was paired with the concept of "cuckholds," which did not mean what it does today. A cuckhold was a man who "failed" in his position of patriarch. (The "ducking stool" was originally, the "cucking stool," whereon a woman was "cucked.") If a man was married to a scold it was because he failed to keep her in line, making him a cuckhold. A cuckholded husband was jeered by the community. The community punished his wife because it deemed him incapable of doing so. The significance of this is obvious. Unless men wished to be seen as cuckholds, it was up to them to take measures to keep their wives in line.

I'm not suggesting that women of the nobility were subject to ducking stools or scold's bridles. But, noble women were deemed inferior to noblemen, just as women of noble classes were deemed inferior to their spouses. The same thing that motivated the ducking stools and scold's bridles among the lower classes surely motivated a less public equivalent among the upper classes. Damoiselle correctly pointed out three instances in Shakespeare's plays where a man runs afoul of his wife's family for mistreating her. Despite the soap opera quality to Shakespearean plays, I think it's reasonable to conclude this happened. Feuding seemed to be a pastime of the nobility. It's also reasonable to conclude Taming of the Shrew is consistent with attitudes of the times. Othello hits his wife, and is only called upon to apologize, all this before he kills her. At least one of Shakespeare's rotten fathers (can't remember which one) hits his daughter because she doesn't want to go along with his plans for her marriage.

Speaking of fathers and daughters, I was surprised by the discounting of the fact that girls in Elizabethan times were often brutally beaten by or at the direction of their fathers. Yes, a girl was no longer technically a girl when she married, even if that happened at the age of 12, but the argument entirely overlooks the way marriage was viewed. It was a transfer of filial obedience from a father to a husband. It was a handing over of the reins. A girl was not transformed into a different creature by virtue of marriage. Do we really think the father who thought it was within his rights to beat his daughter into submission looked at his wife much differently? The power to do either, and the motivation for doing either, was the same.

Finally, I noticed in my reading that the ascendancy of Queen Elizabeth did not have a clear relationship with women's improved status. To be clear, women's status was improving by that time, but the at least partially inaccurate assumption that she paved the way for reform may be an example of assumptions that we apply without reference to causality. Dr. Kemp, a well-respected authority on women of the Elizabethan era, wrote that Elizabeth I "is not known for having directly advanced the cause of women's equality" and "not a promoter of women's rights." Kemp, Theresa D., Women in the Age of Shakespeare. Greenwood Press, 2010, p. 31. Elizabeth used the concept of "the king's two bodies" to assert her authority, relying on her "body politic" and presumed God-given authority through it, rather than her merit as a woman. She argued that she had the fortitude of a man and the mind of a man. She was a savvy politician and she did what she deemed effective. She was certainly not doing a Regency rendition of "I am Woman, Hear Me Roar," even though if any woman of the era had a right to roar and be acknowledged, it was Elizabeth.

Another writer (I didn't keep the name!) suggested that Elizabeth's ascendancy actually created a backlash because men felt that the patriarchy was threatened. This rings awfully true, but to know it for a fact, we would have to have writings by Elizabethan men who were self-aware enough and honest enough to say so.

In my review, I found a great deal of conflicting information stated as fact rather than opinion. It is possible to read one authoritative source and come away with one impression, and another authoritative source and come away with the opposite. I found it significant that Regency-era England seemed to do an awful lot of contemporaneous white-washing as compared to earlier eras. Particularly during Elizabeth's time, much was published that idealized English society. A surprising array of manuals on behavior existed, many of which clearly did not reflect practice. I find the art more reliable, which is the opposite of what one might expect.

I have satisfied myself on the question I originally asked. I will never be able to prove it, but I think a reasonable person will see another side to the historical story. I didn't initially intend to post anything about this, since I did the reading for self-edification, so unfortunately, I did not keep my sources. I just kind of gobble stuff up as I go and make determinations about credibility as I read it. Once the content of a book is digested, the figurative book cover goes in my brain's shredder.

My browser history suggests that I found the following instructive in addition to those cited above:

Lynda E. Boose, ‘Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman's Unruly Member’, Shakespeare Quarterly 42

Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson, Order and Disorder in Early Modern England

Martin Ingram,'Scolding Women Cucked or Washed': A Crisis in Gender Relations in Early Modern England?

Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker, Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England

David E Underdown, ‘The Taming of the Scold: the Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England

All the sources found in this: https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/89638/1/89638.pdff

Thorough, thanks.

For my part, I never meant to imply that noblemen abusing their wives just didn't happen. I think the problem is partially that this thread began with a specific question founded on a flawed assumption.

"What was the normalized or official method for correcting disobedient noblewomen women?"


So most of us who were answering in the firm negative were answering *that* question, and that question is just...it's premised on a vision of noble life that lacks nuance. When it comes to "well-bred" women (gag), the expectation, the doctrine, is that she should just *be* well behaved. A noble born women behaving in a way that they think calls for correction is kind of embarrassing for the nobles, because it calls into question their presumed superiority over the other classes.


But of course, The Taming of The Shrew mindset was still perfectly accepted, and the lower classes adored that kind of thing as entertainment.

 

[Enchantment_of_Nyx]

Thorough, thanks.

For my part, I never meant to imply that noblemen abusing their wives just didn't happen. I think the problem is partially that this thread began with a specific question founded on a flawed assumption.

"What was the normalized or official method for correcting disobedient noblewomen women?"


So most of us who were answering in the firm negative were answering *that* question, and that question is just...it's premised on a vision of noble life that lacks nuance. When it comes to "well-bred" women (gag), the expectation, the doctrine, is that she should just *be* well behaved. A noble born women behaving in a way that they think calls for correction is kind of embarrassing for the nobles, because it calls into question their presumed superiority over the other classes.


But of course, The Taming of The Shrew mindset was still perfectly accepted, and the lower classes adored that kind of thing as entertainment.

It was really just a point of curiosity for me. It's like when you've seen something a million times and then suddenly look at it, tilt your head to the side and think, "Wait a minute..." I often find myself doing that with historical accounts, possibly because there have been so many times we've revised our thinking on various subjects in history. When something doesn't make sense to me, I keep poking at it. Sometimes I get a good answer; sometimes I don't. This time, all I got was that there were competing and conflicting social impetuses governing the behavior in question.

It was an interesting bit of reading. The "Judge Thumb" decision was particularly entertaining, even though it was about a century too late for my purposes. I read two accounts of the story that differed as to the details, but were similarly funny. According to one way I read it, the wife in question was a countess. She reportedly sassed Judge Buller right in the court room and asked him to measure his thumb so she would know what to expect from her beatings. Another way I read the story didn't say anything about who the wife was, but said a countess sent Buller a message afterwards, asking him to measure his thumb so she would know the extent of her husband's rights. (One suspects her husband knew better than to try that business with her.)

The Irish Judge, Marmaduke Coghill, had a funny twist to his story, too. Apparently, the lady he was courting sent him packing after he issued that ruling. Evidently, she wasn't keen on the prospect of domestic arrangements with the old windbag. I think Irish ladies may have had a tradition of kicking up their heels a bit. Judge Coghill died a bachelor.