66. Former clergyman hanged ' in the Pett... in a Transport of Rage and Fury..'

On Tuesday the 31st of March 1691, following the Assizes at York, Mr. Edmund Robinson, condemned for high treason the previous week, was executed. A married man with a son, he was one of eleven convicted criminals hung that day. Two were executed for murder, two for burglary, three for horse-stealing and one for burning down a barn.

Edmund Robinson, born in Colne Parish in the County of Lancaster, Nicholas Battersby of the City of York, and Robert Cokeson from the Parish of Wakefield in the County of York, were executed for the high treason of counterfeiting the King’s coin. All three denied their guilt.

The day before their execution the Reverend George Halley MA preached a sermon at York Castle before the condemned prisoners. The sermon was published in London later the same year together with an appendix giving Halley’s account of the life and trial of Edmund Robinson, himself a former clergyman. After schooling and some university studies, Robinson had been ordained both Deacon and Priest and spent about eleven years in a curacy at Holmforth, part of the Parish of Kirk-Burton in Yorkshire. He also preached for a year at Haworth in the Parish of Bradford, a place later to become the home of the Bronte family. Edmund Robinson, however, was not an exemplary curate. He forged licences, conducted clandestine marriage celebrations and, according to Halley, was actively ‘impairing and Counterfeiting the King’s Coyn’ when living in the Parish of Kirk-Burton.

At school it seems Robinson had struck up a friendship with a young man called Greggson whose father had a reputation as a ‘Coyner’ and who was himself later executed at Lancaster for coining. Whatever the origins of his criminal predilections, Robinson was able to explain to Halley all the tricks of his ‘Black Art’, ‘what difference there was, as to advantage, in Clipping and Coyning, and how the one was easier, and less troublesome than the other; that he melted down his Clippings, and what sav’d of them in Coyning, he transmitted to the Gold-Smiths, of whom he received very frequently very considerable Sums of Money... Alas! What won’t men do when blinded by interest; when Mammon is their God?’

Suspension and excommunication by the church does not seem to have put a brake on Robinson’s career as a coiner and counterfeiter. At the York Assizes of 4th March 1678, he was acquitted on a charge of coin-clipping but convicted ‘for uttering false Money’ and fined twenty pounds. The following year, at the York Assizes of 17th March 1679, he was ‘again Convicted of Uttering False Money’ and this time fined five hundred pounds. At the York Assizes of 1st August 1685, he was again tried for coining and acquitted. ‘But’, observed Halley, ‘though the Pitcher goes oft to the water, it comes home broken at last’; at York in 1691, Robinson was ‘Try’d for his old Treason in Coyning, found guilty, and deservedly Executed for the same.’

Robinson denied his guilt throughout his trial and used all the legal challenges and extra-legal manoeuvres available to defend himself. ‘Never Man produc’d more Witnesses to invalidate a single Testimony’, observed Halley: ‘some of them did very wonderfully agree together,... their words were the very selfsame, there was not one tittle Difference or Variation, by which and some Cross questions it plainly appear’d that they had conn’d their Lesson Together.’ Mistakenly thinking he would be able to buy himself a reprieve, Robinson, much to Halley’s dismay, remained defiant to the last, neither confessing his crime nor repenting his sins:

            But alas! after he had taken a solemn Leave of his Son... and given him a Charge to be dutiful to his Mother, and the like, when he ascended the Ladder, instead of performing the Religious Duty I press’d him to, instead of imploring the Mercy and Forgiveness of God for his great and manifold Transgressions of the Laws, both Humane and Divine, and particularly for the Scandalous Life he had led, when being taken under the highest obligations to the contrary, as having taken Holy Orders upon him, instead of expressing an Universal Love and a Catholick Charity, he did nothing but bitterly inveigh against the Law, the Judge, the Jury, the Witness, and against the Clerk of the Assize, for producing the records of his former Trials against him. Thus he died in the Pett, thus he expir’d rather in a Transport of Rage and Fury, than with a Christian Temper and Disposition.

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Source

Halley, George, 1691. A Sermon Preach’d at the CASTLE of YORK, to the condemned prisoners on Monday the 30th of March, 1691, being the day before their execution. With an Appendix: A Short Account of Mr. Edmund Robinson, who was Condemn’d for High Treason, in Counterfeiting the King’s Coin, on Monday the 23 of March 1691 and Executed on Tuesday the 31st of March, 1691. London.

65. How's your brand image? Econolingua and Market Metaphors.

In a period when we are so conscious of the potential commercialisation of everything from sport, games and education to the genetic code and concepts of the self [what's your brand image?], it is instructive to look back at earlier times and examine the spread of market metaphors into everyday life.

Ben Jonson, in the induction to Bartholomew Fair (1614) [see blog 63], presents his play ‘as merely another commodity in a mercantile world.’ The idea of words, plays, people as commodities for barter or exchange in the marketplace brought the language of commerce to centre stage in the new Elizabethan and Jacobean playhouses. Sandra Fischer’s Econolingua: a glossary of coins and economic language in Renaissance Drama (1985) illustrated in detail the pervasiveness of economic and commercial terminology in the plays of the period and demonstrated the extent to which economic and commercial transactions were beginning to define social relationships, individual motivations and cultural institutions:

Economy begins to penetrate all human relations: money becomes the only way of assessing value, profit the only impetus for human action. Comedy shows characters defined by economic status: usurers, misers, prodigals, younger brothers, heirs, merchants, shopkeepers, tradesmen, scriveners, new men, charitable gentlemen, impecunious rogues; widows, wives, virgins, marriageable daughters and sisters, prostitutes. Plots often treat the growing connection between money and love; courtship and marriage become economic games, legal contracts, exchange transactions. The transference of wealth begins to represent love, the possession of wealth to define social value and status, and human relations to offer themselves primarily as means to profit through exploitation of exchange value rather than appreciation of intrinsic worth. Sex and wooing become commercial transactions, often instigated in a market or shop setting. In some plays women are actually auctioned off to the highest bidder.

By the end of the sixteenth century a range of economic language and terminology was in use in London providing a rich vein for playwrights to mine when drawing character and plot. Econolingua was embedded in popular culture and was by no means the language of the specialist few or of the merchant estate alone. Playwrights’ allusions, colloquialisms, double-entendres, puns, metaphors and stereotypical characterisations all suggest a common familiarity of audiences and authors with the everyday practicalities of a money economy, with the general language of commercial transactions and with the market roles related to specific occupations. Plays are full of references to the documents of the commercial world - to accounts, assurances,  bills, bonds, indents, indentures, inventories, quittances (documents certifying the full repayment of debts), reckonings, sureties, tallies, tenders; of references to financial processes and outcomes - audits, barter, brokage, credit, fees, forfeits, interest, investment, monopolies, profits, tolls, usury; of references to the physical locations associated with business and trade - the counting-house, the Exchange, the market or mart, the mint; and of references to the dramatis personae of the business community - agents, auditors,  bankrouts (bankrupts), bondmen, brokers, bursemen (merchants and money-men), cashiers, chapmen (buyers and sellers, hagglers over prices), creditors, market men, notaries, scriveners*, usurers. 

[*A scrivener was a scribe or an amanuensis, but scriveners were particularly associated with the writing of contracts and bonds and often acted as notaries and investment brokers.]

It is arguable that the English Renaissance dramatists, in their incorporation of economic ideas and expressions in their plays, are reflecting social changes of the period, particularly those changes that are consequent upon the development and extension of the market economy(1). It is Fischer’s view that by the middle years of the sixteenth century, the medieval economy, ‘a branch of religious morality based on Biblical texts and classical teaching and indoctrinated into the public through standard sermons, morality plays, and econo-religious tracts warning of the spiritual consequences of the abuse and misuse of money', is being progressively displaced by the expansion of a money economy and the demands of a growing international trade. This process of displacement, argues Fischer, is reflected in English Renaissance plays where a range of ‘recurring metaphor clusters’ (for example, marriage as an economic contract, women as merchandise, the economics of sex, human worth as exchange value) illuminate ‘the transition from medieval economy to mercantilist ethics’. Indeed Fischer claims that the ‘metaphors do not appear haphazardly; instead, they indicate first a resistance to the exchange ethic, then a grappling with its operation, and finally an acceptance of its metamorphised system of economy as the dominant force in society.’

This notion of a logical progression of dramatic metaphors paralleling social and economic changes in the period covered by the plays themselves is hard to sustain. The transition from a set of  values and attitudes rooted in feudalism to an acceptance of the ethical premises and ideology of a market economy and market society(2), if it happened at all in this linear fashion, which I very much doubt, happened over many generations. It was certainly not encompassed by the timespan of English Renaissance drama. The economic artefacts and commercial devices, the retailing and wholesaling practices, the banking and legal structures that support trade, the coinage and bills of exchange, the merchants and moneylenders, while they may give rise to a rich vocabulary for Renaissance dramatists to draw upon, have their origins in the medieval world. The practical realities of the marketplace and its transactional mode were undoubtedly well understood by Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences. That those audiences accepted ‘mercantilist ethics’ as the organising principle for society generally is, however, not easily demonstrated.

Jean-Christophe Agnew, however, goes further than Fischer in theorising the relationship between the language and content of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays and changes in economy, society and culture. In Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theatre in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (1986), he argues that the theatre is instrumental in forming new attitudes towards individuality, personality, motivation and personal relationships, attitudes that are congruent with a newly emerging market economy and market culture. It is, in Agnew’s view, the theatrical representation of the impact of commercial and money values on issues of individual identity and motivation, and on personal relationships, that partially shapes new definitions of these matters in the broader community: ‘The early modern stage did more than reflect relations occurring elsewhere; it modelled and in important respects materialized these relations.... Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre....did not just hold the mirror up to nature; it brought forth “another nature” - a new world of “artificial persons” - the features of which audiences were just beginning to make out in the similarly new and enigmatic exchange relations then developing outside the theatre.’ For Agnew the critical period for understanding the growing impact of market exchange on definitions of individuality and personal identity is the two hundred year period from 1550 to 1750. The years from 1550 to 1650 - “the long sixteenth century” - are those ‘in which the disruptive and transformative powers of market exchange were first brought home to Britons,’ and the years from 1650 to 1750 are those ‘in which Britons and Americans alike began to fashion a culture of the market.'(3)

But the purchase of commodities and of character, the acquisitive instincts associated with, and promoted by, the excitements of the marketplace, and the reflection of these phenomena in cultural products like novels, is not simply a feature of “the long eighteenth century”. Even if, as has been argued, a fully fledged consumer society had emerged in England by 1800, we can nevertheless look both back and forward in time to similar connections between the commercial and the cultural. In his Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (1992), Douglas Bruster, for example, explores the relationship between the economic and social conditions of the period, the nature of theatres as commercial enterprises and the content of the plays performed in those theatres. He argues that, although the market was not a new phenomenon, Shakespearian London was a city at the hub of an energetic market expansion and developing financial sophistication and complexity. With its growing commercialism, expanding population and, following the agricultural depression of the 1590s, increased rural migration, unemployment and vagrancy, London was at the centre of an emergent ‘market society’. He links these macroeconomic conditions to the structure of the theatre industry and to textual analysis of particular dramas.

Bruster points out that both capitalism and the theatre were institutionalised in London during this period. The Royal Exchange (“Gresham’s Exchange”) was constructed in 1566-67 with a range of new shops establishing themselves in the surrounding piazzas. It provided national and international finance and foreign currency exchange, and distributed new coinage. The New Exchange, ‘a kind of stock exchange and estate agency’, was built in 1609. The Red Lion opened for plays in 1567, and the first purpose-built public playhouses, The Theatre and The Curtain, were built in 1576 and 1577 respectively. The Rose, the first theatre to be built on the south side of the River Thames, opened in 1587, The Swan in 1595 and The Globe in 1599. Playhouse construction continued into the new century. The playhouses were set up as entirely commercial enterprises although they did occasionally perform subsidised productions. Critics and playwrights of the period recognised this entrenchment of theatres and plays within a context of business and market transactions. Stephen Gosson, who was a playwright and later a critic of the theatre, called theatres ‘the very markets of bawdry’. The playwright Thomas Dekker drew a direct parallel between the theatre and the Royal Exchange: ‘The theatre is your poets’ Royal Exchange, upon which their Muses - that are now turned to merchants - meeting, barter away that light commodity of words for a lighter ware than words - plaudits.

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(1).  Market Economy: “a money economy in which open market exchange is the dominant form of economic transaction, in which there is regulation to facilitate open market competition, and in which buyers and sellers, producers and consumers need have no personal or social ties other than those necessary for the completion of their market transactions.”

(2). Market Society: “a society in which the social structure, the most powerful institutions and organisations, the highest political offices, the key leadership positions, the most prestigious social roles, and the pre-eminent forms of social control, primarily reflect or serve market-determined status.”

(3). Market Culture: “a cultural system in which market symbols, market language and market ideology dominate the material, intellectual and spiritual life of the community.”
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Sources:

         Agnew, Jean-Christophe, 1986. Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theatre in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
         Bruster, Douglas, 1992. Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
         Fischer, Sandra K., 1985. Econolingua: A Glossary of Coins and Economic Language in Renaissance Drama, Newark, University of Delaware Press.

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Related Blogs:
 9.  The Adventures of a Banknote, 18 November 2011.
11. "In the Name of God and of Profit", 26 November 2011.
63.  Mistress Commodity and the Shop of Satan, 24 August 2013.

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64. The Hanging Clown: A Story for 9/11

from Fellini's La Strada 1954

How you made us laugh. You were such a clown. Everyone said so. You were like that as a child. I can’t think where it came from, certainly not your mother or I. You were a natural. Always up to mischief. As if you could see the world through a hidden eye that stood everything on its head and gave it a shake to see what dropped out. You were a friendly bat hanging from the ceiling in the corner of the cave watching the world upside down and swooping down periodically to give us a scare and jolt us from everyday complacency.

You had this ability to keep us off balance. Right from your baby days, you rejected the routines of daily life. Your potty training antics were a nightmare. You thought it a huge game. A kind of hide and seek war-game in which you would find some outlandish unexpected place to make your mark. Having completed your business there, you would rush around the house announcing your exploit in delight, turn somersaults across the living-room carpet, and then sit chuckling to yourself as the whole grumbling yelling household set out, tempers fraying, on a frantic search to track down your latest escapade, searching the staircase from the attic to the cellar, through cupboards and drawers, underneath tables and chairs, in shoes and pots and pans and waste paper baskets. You had us all in a state of panic and fear but a panic and fear mixed with hilarity and laughter at the whole charade. And then one day, for your pièce de résistance, you finally went in your potty. By that time it was the last place we bothered to look and we spent a whole morning in trepidation at what we might inadvertently stumble on. Now, we thought, seeing that you had delivered your gift in the appropriate place, you were ready to buckle down to the discipline of growing up.

How wrong we were. You never did grow up. Not in the conventional sense. That was part of your charm. You were a happy child wholly entertained by your own imagination and you grew into a happy clown. In your innocent way you pricked everyone’s pretensions. But without bitterness or irony. You popped your eyes wide open, pulled disbelieving faces, went tongue-in-cheek at everyone, everything, yet never from malice. I don’t think there was a malicious bone in your body or thought in your head. To you the whole world was one enormous playground laid out for your entertainment.

Of course we despaired of you. What parent wouldn’t? How would you ever cope we wondered with the serious business of life, establish a career, make commitments, look after money, a partner, a family? It never occurred to us that clowning was your career, that there was a whole wide world of clowns for you to play with, that there was money in clowning - not that money was something you took the least bit seriously. We never dreamed you would find a lovely clownette waif to journey with you, or that you and the saucer-eyed Gelsomina would produce, irony of ironies, two of the most serious little children on the planet, children who seemed to feel they had to grow up in a hurry so that they could care for their clown-child parents.

We let you loose on the world, watched in astonishment as you thrived, and were proud as only parents can be proud. In our eyes you became a clown for all seasons and all ages, your origins in antiquity. You were the sage-fool of classical times, the rustic naïf unsophisticated commonsense philosopher. You were the ritual Amerindian clown violating conventions and taboos, simultaneously silly and wise, simple and crazy, sage and oracle. You were the tarot’s alpha and omega fool, anarchic and venturesome in your quest to understand and expose the idiocies of the times. You were the mock Pope at the medieval feast of fools, licensed to criticise and deflate authority, permitted disrespect. You were the artless Shakespearean jester deflating affectation, confronting unvarnished realities with a clear eye and ready wit, wiser than your betters, penetrating to the truth beneath wordy spin-doctored facades. You were a son of a world beyond our world. And you were our son too, our family safety valve, standing between us and our hostilities, releasing and neutralising our tension, anger and aggression, defusing our conflicts and violent outbursts.

I suppose it had to end in tears and a terrible sadness. Isn’t that the destiny and legacy of clowns? You could not have foreseen what would happen. None of us could. Perhaps you overstepped some invisible mark in the clown cosmos, some point at which the God of All the Clowns decided you should be brought to account, that you were having too much fun, that the joke was finally over and your laughter should be turned to our tears. Were you ever conscious, I wonder, of how charmed your life had been? Of the miracle it had lasted so long?

Does every generation have its childish laughter stifled by some watershed event that wipes out the innocence and optimism of youth? For your great grandfathers it was the trenches of the Somme and Passchendaele and the ravines and gulleys of Gallipoli. For your grandfathers the annihilation wrought at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the horrors of the opening of the Nazi death camps. For your mother and my generation Vietnam and the My Lai massacre. For yours the world of innocence came crashing down with the Twin Towers. I am glad you did not survive to understand the significance of that September morning.

We need you more than ever now. Your wisdom, your drollery. You promised hope in a cruel, barbarous world, a dram of merriment for these weary times when there are so many causes for tears. There are no sage clowns in the courts of our new emperors. The wise fools are dead and only idiot clowns hold sway in the world, harsh strident Cassandras screaming abuse, and dolorous pierrot miming a wordless silent despair. The last vestiges of the child in me died with your death and my laughter now, such as it is, is driven by fear and a sick foreboding.

Sadly, we never had any part of you to bury, but Gelsomina gave us a little toy clown you had bought her in the Grand Bazaar at Istanbul shortly after the two of you met. The clown has a small crimson hat perched on his frizzy hair, and a large pink bow-tie above his pristine white shirt with the mother of pearl buttons. He wears a sequined jacket in a kaleidoscope of colours over turquoise pantaloons, yellow and white hooped socks and large yellow boots. We have made him the centrepiece of a tribute to you. He hangs upside down in the hallway above a triptych of family photographs and a copper plaque engraved with the words ‘In memory of Jonathan Mehmet, June 23 1959 – September 11 2001’ and a quote from Balzac: ‘As children only do we laugh, and as we travel onward laughter sinks down and dies out. To laugh you must be innocent and pure of heart.’ It reminds us as we go in and out on our daily business of the privilege and burden of laughter, and of how you made us laugh so.