Disruption in the Well-Ordered Household: Age, Authority, and Possessed Young People

Abstract

Authority in early modern England ran along various channels, and operated within a spectrum of spheres of concern. At one end of that spectrum lay the authority most familiar to the historian and the general reader, the authority of the monarch and central government. At the other, lay that bundle of social norms and conventions, often imperfectly grasped and articulated by contemporaries, which constituted, in the broad sense of the term, the ‘authority’ within which people lived their everyday community and family lives. In between these there lay a number of webs of authority. Some, like the authority inherent in the social structure, have been much studied by historians as they have attempted to reconstruct social hierarchies or analyse languages of social description. Others, like the authority which structured gender relations, have come to attract considerable attention from historians over the last few years. Yet others, like the problems of authority implicit in the relationships between different age groups which form the background to this chapter, although now the subject of an important new book by Paul Griffiths, have been little studied hitherto.¹ This is odd, since, even when due allowances are made for the stereotyped social complaint of contemporary didactic literature, it is evident that concern over the age hierarchy, over the problems of maintaining appropriate behaviour in different age groups, and of ensuring the authority of older people over younger ones were all firmly embedded in Tudor and Stuart social comment.