Abstract
Much more than we can imagine today, medieval people were almost overwhelmed by a social world that rarely left them alone. Every individual faced an idiosyncratic collection of social pressures. Medieval townspeople had no fewer social pressures than peasants in their village communities. For the privileged urban burgesses or citizens—those men who had chosen to enroll in the Borough Community of their town or city, to pay its taxes and have its privileges—their fraternity was an important high-pressure and high profile glass tank. It is a very good one through which to see the mingling of group and individual. But since the game to which people subscribe was, like language, not of their own creation, this chapter tries to show how such groups might press upon their members, bending them all, if breaking only a few.1 It did so at every step by invoking and strengthening the master values of fidelity, honor, and hierarchical order upon which the justification for social action and social control rested.
And if at any time any differences arose or offenses broke out (as it can not be but sometimes there will, even amongst the best of men) they were ever so met with or nipped in the head betimes, or otherwise so well composed as still love, peace, and communion was continued. Or else the church purged off those that were incorrigible when, after much patience used, no other means would serve, which seldom came to pass.
William Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation
“You were very right to tell me then,” said Isabel. “I don’t understand it, but I am very glad to know it. “
“I shall always tell you,” her aunt answered, “Whenever I see you taking what seems to be too much liberty.”
“Pray do—but I don’t say I shall always think your remonstrance just.”
“Very likely not. You are too fond of liberty.”
“Yes, I think I am fond of it. But I always want to know the things one shouldn’t do.”
“So as to do them?” asked her aunt.
“So as to choose,” said Isabel.
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
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Notes
See Marjorie McIntosh, Controlling Misbehavior in England, 1370–1600 (Cambridge, UK.: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p.39,
D.M. Palliser, “Urban Society” in Fifteenth-Century Attitudes, ed. Rosemary Horrox (Cambridge, UK.: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 146.
Lorraine Attreed, The King’s Towns. Identity and Survival in Late Medieval English Boroughs (New York: Peter Lang, 2001).
Norman M. Trenholme, The English Monastic Boroughs (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1927);
Rodney Hilton, English and French Towns in Feudal Society. A Comparative Study (Cambridge, UK.; Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 25–52;
Margaret Bonney Lordship and the Urban Community. Durham and its Overlords (Cambridge, UK.: Cambridge University Press, 1992),
D.M. Owen, The Making of King’s Lynn. A Documentary Survey (London: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 63.
Ben R. McRee, “Religious Gilds and Civic Order: the Case of Norwich in the Late Middle Ages,” Speculum 67 (1992): 69–97.
R.H. Britnell, Growth and Decline in Colchester, 1300–1525 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
J.K. Chadwick-Jones, Social Exchange Theory. Its Structure and Influence in Social Psychology (London: Academic Press 1976).
See Clanchy, M.T., “Law and Love in the Middle Ages,” in Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West, ed. John Bossy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 59
Richard M. Wunderli, London Church Courts and Society on the Eve of the Reformation (Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy of America, 1981), p. 51
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© 2005 David Gary Shaw
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Shaw, D.G. (2005). E Pluribus Unum: Peer Pressures. In: Necessary Conjunctions: The Social Self in Medieval England. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06791-3_3
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