defend, reputation, legal, amnesty, classical Rome, balladeer, William Elderton, libel

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social stratification, attitudes towards what might be the appropriate form of response to defamation seem to be particularly class determined, and those belonging to the lower gentry and above often appear to prefer defending their reputations personally rather than resorting to law. In fact, in the domestic flytings that I examine in Chapter Two, a common accusation levelled by the protagonists is that their adversaries’ inability to defend their reputations without outside help is a symptom of their lack of dignity and social standing. This sociological phenomenon of individual responsibility may be attributable, in part, to the existence of some sort of unspoken legal amnesty upon defamation among these groups, such as existed in classical Rome and in the case of courtly flyting in Scotland. ⁴³ Such an arrangement would seem to corroborate that a considerable degree of responsibility rested

Research, [1980(?)]), p.3 and p.17.

There are exceptions whereby those from the artisan and merchant classes opted for exchanges of libel. The balladeer, William Elderton, found himself drawn into an exchange of invective with both a hosier and merchant tailor, for instance (see Cat. F 132). Even at this lower end of the literary marketplace, however, balladeers, printers and their employees and apprentices fought many of their disputes verbally rather than on paper and sought recourse to the legal authority vested in the Company of Stationers to hear defamation cases. The Stationers imposed numerous fines for “vnseemly wordes” exchanged between those involved in the printing trade, and these are recorded in the Stationers’ Register (SR, I. 217). In one example the entry reads,

Receved of nycholas cleston for his fyne for that [he] Ded brawle and chyde with thomas [sturroppe] and also havynge vndecent Wordes therwithall …… iiij^s.

Sturroppe received the smaller fine of ij^s (SR, I. 276).

⁴³ According to Niall Rudd, while street flyting was prohibited and could incur harsh penalties including imprisonment and death, “political enemies paid each other[s’ libels] back in kind instead of going to law [and] the same applied to proceedings in the senate”, Themes in Roman Satire (Duckworth, 1986), p.43. Freedom of speech was permitted to the Roman lower classes, so it seems, during the ritualised exchanges of insult that took place at the Saturnalian festivals. See, for instance, John Dryden, A Discourse Concerning Satire, in Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson, 2 vols (Dent; NY: Dutton, 1968), II. p.107 (subsequent references for this text are given in parentheses following quotations). Courtly flytings in Scotland enjoyed a similar sort of amnesty whereas, according to Priscilla Bawcutt, street flyting might be severely punished, Dunbar the Makar (OUP, 1992), pp.223-4. Andrew McRae also notices that the libel appears to be “situated in a peculiarly licensed discursive space” in the early-Stuart period owing to the tastes of consumers of manuscript miscellanies, ‘The Literary Culture of Early Stuart Libeling’, MP, 97 (2000), 364-92 (p.375).

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