Going to Market (History of Retailing and Consumption) by David Pennington

Author:David Pennington [Pennington, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-03-02T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Women, Commerce, and Female Reputation

Mary Mase, the wife of a Cambridge brewer who sold her husband’s ale and beer, was doing business in the kitchen of Queen’s College when she was accosted by Martin Rust, a cook of the college. According to allegations in a defamation suit Mary Mase brought in 1611 against Rust, he declared to the kitchen staff that Mase was “an … ould skuruive coseninge Jade.” Rust then turned directly to Mase and wished on her “a plauge of god,” for “thou art an ould skurvie cosening Quean and thou workest with the diuell.”1 At first glance, the way in which Rust framed his accusations seems to confirm the claims of scholars who argue that early modern notions of female and male propriety were divergent, and indeed incommensurable. While contemporaries expected male householders, as rulers and the public representatives of their households, to assume a commanding bearing, they often characterized assertive female traders such as Mary Mase as lascivious, combative scolds—the very opposite of the idealized docile, chaste, modest housewife. And yet what seems to have fired Rust’s anger was his belief that Mase was a “cozener”—a trader who cheated her customers. His claim that Mase’s deceptive business practices left her parish “the worse … by 1000li [₤1000] and god knoweth what the towne is the worse” would have worried any trader, male or female. Because townswomen were active as consumers, retailers, and creditors, contemporaries rarely gauged their reputations solely in terms of sexual behavior and conformity to patriarchal prescriptions. Cultivating and defending a reputation for honesty and plain-dealing was as important for trading women as it was for male householders. Mase herself found vindication. Although the Vice-Chancellor’s court refused to levy the ₤100 demanded by Mase as recompense for the damage Rust did to her good name (such inflated sums, and their reduction or dismissal by the court, were common in defamation cases), they did require Rust to don the white cloak of the penitent and make a public apology to Mase before the congregation of her parish church. Restoring her reputation as both a clean living and an honest trader was clearly important to traders such as Mary Mase.

Mase’s defamation case calls into question studies which argue for the centrality of chastity and obedience to early modern conceptions of female respectability and “honor.”2 This is not to suggest that historians of gender relations lack good reasons to focus on contemporary conceptions of the gendered order and sexual morality. Fidelity to the male householder was of course the central patriarchal value upheld by preachers and courts; and moralists highlighted the difference between female “honor”—rooted in the passive virtue of chastity—and the active and public virtues that characterized male “honor.”3 As both Keith Thomas and Lawrence Stone argued some time ago, female infidelity inspired far more concern amongst men than male infidelity because adulteresses endangered their patriarchs’ ability to maintain legitimate lines of succession and inheritance.4 More recently, Laura Gowing has drawn upon the rich depositional

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