Agricultural History Review, Volume 67 Part 2 (2019), p. 316

Faith, place and people in early modern England honours the life and work of Margaret Spufford, a pathbreaking social historian of dissent, rural communities, mobility and microhistory. From Contrasting communities through Small books and pleasant histories, to The world of rural dissenters, Spufford’s every contribution proved her a meticulous, archivally grounded, and insightful scholar, whose life experiences encouraged in her an enduring sympathy with ‘the poor and obscure’ (p. 10). The collection begins with a heart-warming essay by her husband Peter Spufford, titled only ‘Margaret’, which recounts her remarkable career and the challenges she overcame, including illness at several stages of life. We are painted a picture of a very different academic world for the Spuffords, in which it was possible to spend days per week in the archives for years at a time, teach a night class to engaged mature students, receive Cavendish College research support, and access to research and travel grant support from Keele as an honorary lecturer in 1974. It is a world that enabled Margaret Spufford to produce several impressive books in a row, and a world we have clearly lost; one imagines that today her trajectory through higher education would be functionally impossible to achieve, and that the academy is poorer for it.

The collection divides into three sections, each corresponding one of the main arenas which dominated Spufford’s scholarly inquiries: ‘faith’, ‘place’ (particularly the definitive unit of the rural locality, the parish), and ‘people’. Examining faith by way of fascinating parish vicars and Catholic nonconformists, chapters by William Shiels, Henry French and Steve Hindle open the volume. Shiels contrasts the recusant communities of the Stour valley, Essex, and Lancashire, principally through an investigation of first Thomas Tresham, and second the Montague family. He challenges the ‘mainly positive view of denominational relations at the parochial level’ extent in our existing scholarship (p. 31). French returns us to Earls Colne and to the entirely mediocre precursor to early modern England’s most posthumously famous pastor, Ralph Josselin. We learn about the ministry of William Adams, vicar of Earls Colne between 1573 and 1610, when he was deprived. By looking at Adams, apparently content as he was to ‘let the spiritual weeds grow’, French excavates the ‘men indifferent’, those who were ‘readie for any coate’ of religion to be placed upon them (p. 47). Steve Hindle’s following chapter on the ‘sad fortunes’ of the Rev. John Perkins, of the Warwickshire parish of Chilvers Coton, follows on excellently from French’s. We learn about the spatial arrangements of rather crowded pews, and about how the silences of the parish’s voluminous record-keeping speak volumes about the marginality of Perkins, a figure apparently at both the spatial and social edges of the parish he was meant to tend. We discover at the end of this chapter that the Sad fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton was based on Chilvers Coton, in an excellent piece of narrative revelation (p. 91). The ‘faith’ section holds together well and provides a series of insightful and archivally rich case studies of marginality, the ‘mud’ of everyday religion, and dissent.

The second and third sections concentrate on ‘place’ and ‘people’. Ailes provides an interesting look at how ‘that great antiquary’ William Dugdale, his ‘compulsive cataloguer’ friend Ashmole, and the ‘numeracy nut’ Gregory King each contributed in novel fashion to both Restoration Heraldry work and to statistical use of the Hearth Tax (p. 99). Ferguson examines Hearth Tax receipts and overseer’s accounts in Restoration Woking and provides a very useful table of tax exemptions (p. 122) as part of her reconstruction. It seems significant how robust the medical provision for the poor in Woking was as early as the 1670s, for example the £1 7s. 6d. spent on the lying-in of Susan Slatt, who bore a bastard child in a Woking barn in 1673 (p. 125). Slatt must have been very ill in the immediate aftermath. I confess I do not understand the parting shots fired at ‘the more cynical’ (p. 131) interpretations of Hindle with respect to the old poor law, since On the parish? quite clearly demarcates an enormous range of compassionate treatment by individuals, against a backdrop of systemic and institutional parsimony. Wylie examines the ‘long prehistory’ (p. 149) of credit relationships in probate materials, with as much as 47 per cent of one surveyed parish’s probates featuring ‘formal credit’ by 1755. The final section on ‘people’ begins with a chapter by Danae Tankard, looking at men’s fashion and the centrality of the London clothing market. While Tankard nods at Spufford’s Great reclothing of rural England in her introduction, the chapter mainly focuses on the spending and dress habits of three middling and upper-class men and it is visually rich with several great examples of surviving apparel (p. 153). This is followed by an excellent chapter from Christopher Marsh, on the ‘ballading’ of the London cuckhold Stephen Seager, who tried to separate from his wife Grace in the Court of Arches in 1669. Marsh combines masterful readings of the unique surviving ballad ‘The Joyner’s Job Finished’ which comments salaciously on the entire affair, and in particular on Seager’s infertility and foolishness, revealing to his neighbourhood that (in Marsh’s memorable phrase) ‘the cuckhold’s home was a house of cards’ (p. 178). Wonderfully written and rich in detail, this chapter proves a real highlight of the volume. David Cressy concludes the volume with a survey of debates around the origins and cultural composition of Gypsy communities in England, ‘marginal people in a stressful culture’ (p. 202). The chapter departs from the temporal consistency of the rest of the volume to examine a debate over the authenticity of Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller ancestry over a chronological distance rather away from ‘Margaret Spufford’s England’.

Readers of the Agricultural History Review will find no significant interventions in this volume to do with agrarian, agricultural, or indeed environmental history. However, if they seek well-researched and tightly argued case studies of the local and generally rural parish, and wish to flesh out an understanding of the intersections between religious practice, social marginality, space and place, and everyday life, than Faith, place and people in early modern England: Essays in honour of Margaret Spufford certainly has much to offer.