Abstract
In the hands of Thomas Deloney and Thomas Dekker, the legend of Simon Eyre emphasized his disregard for common concerns about both the place of aliens in London’s economy and the respect freemen were expected to have for the office of alderman. He put this disregard in the service of his desire for wealth and the elevated social status that would derive from it. Ultimately, Deloney and Dekker each affirmed the compatibility of Eyre’s personal ambition with the metropolitan moral economy by emphasizing his engagement in philanthropic acts that buttressed the established customs and structures of authority in the City and the nation. When they viewed Eyre’s career as a whole, early modern Londoners may well have considered it a powerful example of how in the marketplace the ends could justify the means.
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Notes
Anne F. Sutton in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). Parts of this chapter are adapted from Joseph P. Ward, “‘[I]mployment for all handes that will worke’: Immigrants, Guilds, and the Labour Market in Early Seventeenth-Century London,” in Immigrants in Tudor and Early Stuart England, eds. Nigel Goose and Lien Luu (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005), 76–87, used by permission.
E. A. Wrigley, “A Simple Model of London’s Importance in Changing English Society and Economy, 1650–1750,” Past and Present, 37(1967): 44–70
Richard Grassby, The Business Community in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).
For discussions of early modern London’s population see Roger Finlay, Population and Metropolis: The Demography of London 1580–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)
Roger Finlay and Beatrice Shearer, “Population Growth and Suburban Expansion” in London 1500–1700: The Making of the Metropolis, eds. A. L. Beier and Roger Finlay, eds., (London: Longman, 1986), 37–59
and Vanessa Harding, “The Population of London, 1550–1700: A Review of the Published Evidence,” London Journal 15, 2 (1990): 111–28.
For an assessment of the relationship between London’s job market and the level of migration into the metropolis see A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985), 40–42.
E. A. Wrigley, “A Simple Model of London’s Importance in Changing English Society and Economy, 1650–1750,” Past and Present 37 (1967): 44–70
and Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
For an examination of the factors that encouraged social stability in London’s neighborhoods see Jeremy Boulton, Neighbourhood and Society: A London Suburb in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). au5._Steve Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)
Joseph P. Ward, Metropolitan Communities: Trade Guilds, Identities, and Change in Early Modern London (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997)
and Ward, “Livery Companies and the World Beyond the Metropolis,” in Guilds, Society and Economy in London 1450–1800, eds. Ian Anders Gadd and Patrick Wallis (London: Centre for Metropolitan History, 2002), 175–78.
Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994)
and Paul Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Concerns about uncontrolled young people are discussed throughout Beier, Masterless Men and Paul Griffiths, Lost Londons: Change, Crime, and Control in the Capital City, 1550–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001)
Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz, eds., Rogues and Early Modern English Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004)
Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
J. Pound, Poverty and Vagrancy in Tudor England (London: Longman, 1971)
Conrad Russell, The Crisis of Parliaments: English History 1509–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 125
D. M. Palliser, The Age of Elizabeth, England under the Later Tudors 1547–1603 (London: Longman, 1983), 19
Michael A. R. Graves and Robin H. Silcock, Revolution, Reaction and the Triumph of Conservatism, English History, 1558–1700 (London: Longman, 1984), 73–75
John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 42–44
Jennifer Loach, Parliament under the Tudors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 116.
Sara Pennell, “‘Great quantities of gooseberry pye and baked clod of beef’: Victualling and Eating Out in Early Modern London,” in Londinopolis: Essays in the Social and Cultural History of Early Modern London, eds. Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 228–49.
For the porters generally, see Walter M. Stern, The Porters of London (London: Longmans, 1960), 1–81. For the reliance of indigent freemen on income as porters, see Ward, Metropolitan Communities, 59–64.
Thomas Brewer, A Newe ballad Composed in Commendation of the Societie or Companie of the Porters to the Tune of In Edenbrugh, behold (1605).
Henry Peacham, The Art of Living in London (1642). For recent research on vagrants, criminals, and servants in early modern London see Andrew McRae, “The Peripatetic Muse: Internal Travel and the Cultural Production of Space in Pre-Revolutionary England,” in The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550–1850, eds. Gerald MacLean, Donna Landry, and Joseph P. Ward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 24–40
Patricia Fumerton, “London’s Vagrant Economy: Making Space for ‘Low’ Subjectivity,” in Material London, ca. 1600, ed. Lena Cowen Orlin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 206–25
Paul Griffiths, “Overlapping Circles: Imagining Criminal Communities in London, 1545–1645,” in Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Place, Rhetoric, eds. Alexandra Shepard and Phil Withington (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 115–33
and Tim Meldrum, Domestic Service and Gender 1660–1750: Life and Work in the London Household (Harlow: Pearson, 2000).
For the Whittington found in the historical record see J. L. Bolton, “Dick Whittington: The Man and the Myth Exhibition at the Guildhall Library, 3 July-23 September 1989,” London Journal 15, 1 (1990): 72–73
Caroline M. Barron, London in the Middle Ages: Government and People 1200–1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Richard Johnson, A crown e garland ofgoulden roses Gathered out of Englands royall garden. Being the lives and strange fortunes of many great personages of this land (1612), subsequent quotations are from this text, which is inconsistently paginated.
See also Lawrence Manley, ed., London in the Age of Shakespeare: An Anthology (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986), 234.
The Eurocentric claim to discover new lands in the early modern period has inspired considerable scholarly effort in recent years. An excellent introduction to this research is Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna G. Singh, eds., Travel Knowledge: European “Discoveries” in the Early Modern Period (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).
T[homas] H[eywood], The Famous and Remarkable History of Sir Richard Whittington (1656), A1–A4; subsequent parenthetical citations refer to this text, but it is inconsistently paginated. The earliest surviving imprint of this work appeared 15 years after Heywood’s death, so although he is now accepted as the author of this tale, it has received very little notice from literary scholars
Edward T. Bonahue, Jr., “Heywood, The Citizen Hero, and The History of Dick Whittington,” English Language Notes 36, 3 (1999): 33–41; see also
James Robertson, “The Adventures of Dick Whittington and the Social Construction of Elizabethan London,” in Guilds, Society and Economy in London, 1450–1800, eds. Ian Anders Gadd and Patrick Wallis (London: Centre for Metropolitan History, 2002): 51–66.
On the significance of the Royal Exchange for literature of the City see Jean E. Howard, Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 29–67.
Fitzwarren’s comment suggests that he thought the vagrant Whittington might be disguised; see Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 33–46.
Heywood’s vision of Fitzwarren as patriarch interacts in several ways with the ideas developed by Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 112–22.
A crucial question that Heywood avoids is whether Whittington ever becomes the independent head of his household or if he continues to follow the lead of his father-in-law; see McKeon, p. 133 for a discussion of a seventeenth-century man who found his relationship with his wife’s father to have been “slavery.” On female agency in the seventeenth century see Marcus Nevitt, Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).}
On patriarchal authority more generally, see Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988).
Robert Tittler, Townspeople and Nation: English Urban Experiences 1540–1640 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001).
Whittington’s benefactions are detailed in Jean Imray, The Charity of Richard Whittington: A History of the Trust Administered by the Mercers’ Company, 1424–1966 (London: The Athlone Press, 1968).
Manley, ed., London in the Age of Shakespeare, 213–14. Indeed, not only did the cat appear in portraits of Whittington painted in his era, but also a children’s book published in New York in 1950 entitled Dick Whittington and His Cat gave the cat equal billing. Marcia Brown, Dick Whittington and His Cat (New York: Scribners, 1950).
C. S. L. Davies, Peace, Print, and Protestantism 1450–1558 (London: Hart-Davis MacGibbon, 1976), 299.
For discussions of the English attitudes toward the Moors see Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995)
and Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
On European captivity, see Daniel J. Vitkus, Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001)
Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World (New York: Random House, 2002)
and Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500–1800 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
Early modern understanding of wealth creation has been a topic of considerable interest to literary scholars; among many other works see Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
Blair Hoxby, Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002)
andLinda Woodbridge, ed., Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
Mary Beth Rose, Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981)
would suggest that Heywood’s version of the Richard Whittington legend would have found an audience throughout England as well as in London. The appearance of several reprintings of Heywood’s tale would suggest the same.
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© 2013 Joseph P. Ward
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Ward, J.P. (2013). “[A]s the Lord had decreed”: The Metamorphosis of Richard Whittington. In: Culture, Faith, and Philanthropy. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137065513_4
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