Introduction

Everyone in early modern England belonged to a community. Membership entailed not just shared space but a social arrangement that organised lives, managed relationships, and shaped identities within lifespans and across generations. Communities were built on values, informing the collective evaluation of conduct to determine reputation and status. Yet ideals were honoured as much in the breach as the observance, especially at times of rapid change, which suggests why contemporaries worried about them so much. This chapter will explore both enduring and evolving characteristics of English communities, in terms of physical appearance and, less tangibly, how community was experienced – a more transcendent sense of attachment sustained by feeling and emotion.

Community was so fundamental to existence that contemporaries made little effort to define it. Unlike the household, the term conveyed only a vague sense of identity and engagement. In 1604 the schoolmaster Robert Cawdrey, drawing on the Roman concept of communitas, gave it simply as ‘fellowship’, offering ‘communion’ as a synonym. Throughout the seventeenth century, lexicographers elaborated on this without much deviation. One described ‘Fellowship in partaking together’, another ‘injoying in common or mutual participation’. The best definition that some dictionaries managed was ‘to commune’, derived from communicare, hinting that communities were arenas for making human connections. Communities, then, grew from dynamic social relations. The radical Robert Coster sought in 1649 ‘to advance the work of publick Community’ by challenging landed tyranny. Only by levelling its gentry and clergy, he argued, could England enjoy ‘Brave Community’. Thus ‘community’ had overtones of both ‘charity’ and ‘commonwealth’, fusing ideals of spiritual and economic unity. Hobbes conceived community in terms of ‘concord’ and ‘covenants’, which like ‘peace’ and ‘love’ struck him as vital pre-conditions for stable government. By this time, the secondary definition of ‘a Corporation or Company incorporate’ was emerging, shifting the meaning from ‘spiritual congregation’ to ‘political and commercial collective’. This is not to imply, however, that the habit of lay association was not already established in the Middle Ages, nor that the community's spiritual dimension had disappeared by the modern period.

Early modern social historians have made ‘the community’ a category of analysis, essential to understanding the intersecting currents of continuity and change that characterise their period.

The history of witchcraft as a crime in England maps roughly onto the early modern period as a whole. Exactly how many suspected witches were prosecuted between 1542 and 1736 is unknown; we can only extrapolate from where records are most complete. An estimated 1,000 trials, spread over two centuries and 9,000 parishes, suggests that it would have been rare to experience one directly. Some places, notably in Essex, indicted scores of witches; many more did not. Despite the persistent notion that villagers routinely used accusations to explain misfortunes and attack enemies, the numbers speak for themselves. Perhaps, then, witchcraft has attracted more attention than it deserves. And yet it is justified as a historical subject by more than quantification alone. Case-studies have revealed fine details of social activity and change: the interplay of learned and plebeian ideas, shifting attitudes to gender, popular legal activity, and so on. Witchcraft has been profitably studied from above as ideology and policy; from below as an expression of socio-economic conflict; and from within as a spyhole on early modern subjectivity, fantasy and psychological meaning. It is a point of entry, not an end in itself.

Unanswered questions nonetheless remain. The political dimension in local society deserves more attention: how did particular personalities and affiliations permit (or inhibit) the development of suspicions into accusations? Fresh connections might also be made by historians of medicine, law and art, likewise by theologians and philologists.

In 1977 Professor Sir Geoffrey Elton (as he later became) published an essay in which he acknowledged crime to be a discrete historical concern. From his guarded, perhaps even grudging, tone one cannot help feeling that for him a single decent monograph would have sufficed, and that his reaction to subsequent outpourings would have been less than enthusiastic. Quite what he would have thought of a book concerned with just three crimes one can only imagine. Elton was sometimes dismissive of the 'new' social history not because he thought its objectives worthless, but because so much traditional political and constitutional history had yet to receive attention. His concern is understandable. 'As some of the leading actors of history recede from our attention', E. P. Thompson wrote in the same year that Elton's essay appeared, 'so an immense supporting cast whom we had supposed to be mere attendants upon this process press themselves forward'. These were the people history had forgotten, their reanimation in its infancy. Yet many scholars were already fulfilling what Keith Thomas had predicted in 1966, namely that social history in the future would 'not be a residual subject but a central one around which all other branches of history are likely to be organized'.

This is a book about the changing mental world of English people between the mid-sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries, and how that world might be reconstructed and understood through the history of crime and criminal justice. As such, it is concerned with crime only in so far as crime allows insights into mentalities, rather than with crime per se. Indeed, attention is limited to three specific crimes - witchcraft, coining and murder - the aim being to explore what public and private reactions to these peculiarly significant offences reveal about how our ancestors - mostly ordinary working people - perceived themselves, their social environment and their universe, and, conversely, how these perceptions both reflected and shaped popular beliefs and behaviour over time.

Although, like all excursions into the history of mentalities, these case studies will attract criticism of both purpose and method, it is a central contention that the most one can do is explain what is to be described and how, all the while keeping a careful eye on reasonable limits of interpretation. This introductory chapter, therefore, draws upon a range of historical and anthropological works to define mentalities in general, and indicate what they mean here in particular. From there, four themes of long-term continuity and change are outlined, then linked to the concrete human contexts from which they derive substance and meaning.

Amateur office-holding and voluntary prosecution, supported by state majesty and divine providence, were the keystones of accusatory justice in early modern England. Even where murders were concerned, the process of apprehending and committing suspects depended on people passing information to unpaid, untrained law officers, or what together they gleaned from pre-trial investigations conducted informally in the community. Although these procedures could be highly efficient, from the later seventeenth century the power of providence as an ideological prop was diminishing; the sacred was 'no longer regarded as a workable means of effectively ordering the profane world', and instead men began to find new ways to solve the problems which they themselves - as opposed to the devil or any other supernatural agency - were responsible for causing. Associated with this was increasing judicial insistence on higher evidential standards to prove murder at law, a requirement which called for more thorough investigative methods. Relying on communities to provide testimony which was symbolic, subjective and suggestive (rather than factual, objective and conclusive) became less acceptable. This change, though undramatic even by the end of the period, paved the way for the development of detective policing and the routine presentation of forensic medical evidence by expert witnesses in the nineteenth century. The seeds of secularization and professionalization had been sown.