personal defamation, litigation, acts of parliament, 1573, oppositional discourses, sexual slander
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28
Frequently, such proclamations also provide evidence that outlawed literature was not always dealt with to the satisfaction of the authorities. One from 1573 rebukes the “negligence of bishops and other magistrates, who should cause the good laws and acts of parliament made in this behalf to be better executed, and not so dissembled and winked at as hitherto (it may appear) that they have been”. The proclamation complains that, because of such laxity, religious non-conformists have been allowed the freedom to disseminate their propaganda “both by open preachings and writings”.
41
Such anxieties about the influence of oppositional discourses helped to create a niche for pot-poets, courtier poets and zealous statesmen alike hoping to advance their careers or reputations by answering in kind such propagators of heterodox opinions.
In the case of personal defamation, opting for litigation against detractors, although common among the merchant classes, was a course of action that seems to have been less appealing to members of the nobility, gentry and clergy. In J. A. Sharpe’s survey of sexual slander, for instance, it is indicated, within the narrow scope of his research, that they rarely brought cases to court in comparison with their social inferiors who exhibited significantly more litigious tendencies.
42
Thus, while the importance attributed to reputation transcends
(Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2000), pp.252-78 (pp.252-3). These proclamations are discussed pp.51-6.
41 ‘Enforcing Act for Uniformity of Common Prayer’, Hughes and Larkin eds (1961), II. p.380 and p.379.
42 J. A. Sharpe writes that the “eagerness to defend reputation […] was something which ran from the top to very near the bottom of English society” and accounts for “the explosion in litigation over defamation which occurred from the mid sixteenth century onwards”. The social status of those exhibiting enthusiasm for litigation against insult was, however, “usually inferior to that of the gentry [and of] the middling sort; tradesmen, shopkeepers, yeomen, artisans, and the wives of members of these occupational groups”. Noticeably, one of Sharpe’s few examples of slander against the gentry was responded to personally. He cites the example of William Vaughan, “a Welsh gentleman who wrote a lengthy book against slander as an answer to those who alleged that his wife’s death through being struck by lightning was a divine punishment for sinful living”. Defamation and Sexual Slander in Early Modern England: The Church Courts at York, Borthwick Papers, no. 58 (York: Borthwick Papers of Historical
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