The Fray on the Meadow: Violence and a Moment of Government in Early Tudor England

Fig 1.

Detail of Map of the Isle of Portland and Weymouth, by Robert Adams (1590).

How was Tudor England governed? It is a deceptive question.

One way of answering it, of course, would be to look at queens, kings, ministers, parliamentarians, courtiers, lord chancellors, keepers of the great seal, cardinals and vicegerents: the big names; the powerful men and women. But, when we consider that this was a state without a standing army, a bureaucracy, or a police force, the question of how becomes all the more fascinating and impenetrable. How was Tudor England governed? When the 'state' had so little formal power, how did it attempt to control violence and crime, police morals and faith, and collect tax? The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have been identified as a period of 'state formation', in which there was a major growth in the competencies of government, widely defined.¹ But how did this happen?

To answer this question, we need to think about how government – which I'm defining here as the formal control of people's actions by that collection of officials, institutions, and ideas that we normally call the state – reached from Westminster down into England's parishes. Historians of the late medieval and early modern state have used central archives, family papers, and the records of local courts and parishes to consider the relationship between Westminster and the localities and to gauge the power of English government. They have done much to illuminate the 'organisation, institutionalisation, representation and expression of political power' on which the early modern state depended.² This article takes a different approach. It is not a study of slow, structural change, or of gradual administrative development. Instead, it is a micro-study of government. It looks closely at a 'moment of government' for which we have very detailed records, to tease out from the event some wider insights into the nature of the early modern state. Doing so, it suggests that government was not just something that was, it was something that happened. There were moments, flashpoints, such as instances of disorder, where government was supposed to intervene. It was supposed to be an actor in these momentary dramas. Indeed, it is in the frequent involvement of the 'state' in such moments that there lies a key element of the routinization of the 'state idea'. In order for the idea that there was an overarching body of authority to exist, people had to see it in action.

Moreover, in the Tudor context, the engagement of the state in such dramatic moments depended on the actions of those people charged with carrying out the will of the state, notably officeholders. In the Tudor period, these officeholders were amateurs, and usually quite ordinary people. Thus, by extension, in the key flashpoints at which the state was supposed to show its power, its ability to do so depended on the tradesmen, yeoman, husbandmen and shopkeepers who acted in its name. The ways they did so, I would like to suggest, involved them performing a role: that of a state actor. Thus, in order to gain a better sense of how the Tudor state worked, we need to look in close detail at how people acted in its name. To do so means looking closely at what we might term 'state dramas' or 'moments of government': arrests, public announcements, the serving of writs, and suchlike. This means turning to the techniques of micro-history.

Micro-history is now a well-established tool of the discipline.³ It involves, broadly speaking, the close analysis of small things, such as individual places or events, such that the detail of the past emerges. It has, though, only rarely been applied to the history of the Tudor state. This article focuses on one location, but it is not a local history as such. Rather, it is a history of a specific incident – an obscure though very violent one – that took place on a festival day in the small Dorset town of Weymouth in...