English Masculinities, 1660-1800 by Tim Hitchcock Michelle Cohen

Author:Tim Hitchcock, Michelle Cohen [Tim Hitchcock, Michelle Cohen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Renaissance, Great Britain, General
ISBN: 9781317882497
Google: GsYeBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-07-30T16:06:37+00:00

Part Three

Violence

Chapter Seven

Reforming Male Manners: Public Insult and the Decline of Violence in London, 1660–17401

Robert B. Shoemaker

Historians of crime, who have for some years been interested in the topic of ‘women and crime’, have only recently turned to the study of the male criminal per se. While in patterns of prosecuted crime men have historically been accused of involvement in a much wider range of offences than women, one feature of male criminality which stands out is their disproportionate involvement in crimes which involve interpersonal violence. Reflecting contemporary stereotypes that men were naturally more aggressive than women, studies of crime invariably find considerably higher levels of violence among men than women. Thus, for London between 1660 and 1725, men accounted for 75 per cent of the indicted assaults, and 81 per cent of the recognisances, which were specifically identified as violent at the Middlesex quarter sessions. Similarly, in his study of the neighbouring county of Surrey, John Beattie found that men accounted for 91 per cent of the defendants accused of homicide between 1660 and 1800.2 It can be argued that such statistics reflect contemporary stereotypes, that because female violence was less conceivable it tended to be under-recorded, but such impressive differences between male and female experience cannot be explained away so easily. If we accept that men in this period were more likely to be violent, then not only do we need to discover why that was the case, but we also need to explore the significance of the fact that over a period of several centuries the amount of violent crime recorded in England, and therefore the amount of violence men committed, declined substantially. The fact that such an important change could occur underlines the point that violence is not an inherently masculine trait; certain social patterns and definitions of masculinity encourage or discourage violence. In her contribution to this volume, Elizabeth Foyster has shown how prescriptive writers in the eighteenth century sought to problematise and control male anger and aggression. This chapter will investigate an aspect of the concurrent actual decline of violence in this period, the process by which men’s violence on the streets of London was replaced by an alternative means of pursuing conflicts, the public insult.

When disturbed by the objectionable behaviour of others, men in this period could respond in various ways: by ignoring it, through litigation, through verbal insult, or through physical attack (the latter two strategies were often conducted in groups). One of the stereotypical gender differences in this period was that, in the words of Richard Allestree, ‘a woman [has] ordinarily only that one weapon of the Tongue to offend with’, while a man can attack with ‘anger’ and ‘brawling’.3 But in fact, in the century after the Restoration men, too, frequently pursued conflicts and attacked the honour of others through public insult. Such behaviour was remarkably similar to stereotypically female behaviour, however, and concerns about effeminacy contributed to the decline of the public insult in the late eighteenth century. Male

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