Book Review

In this impressive work McIntosh examines attempts by local authorities in communities throughout England to regulate public behavior that they found unacceptable. The sorts of behavior to which they objected--scolding, gaming, and drunkenness among others--have, of course, attracted scholarly interest in the past. But the bulk of that work has focused on the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and has been attached historiographically to the events of the subsequent rather than the previous period. Yet, as historians of late medieval and Tudor communities know, attempts to control misbehavior were not an Elizabethan novelty; local authorities had shown a strong interest in regulating social behavior for centuries before that time. The problem has been that our knowledge of early efforts to control behavior comes largely from studies of individual communities (such as McIntosh's previous studies of Havering), isolated in time and place and subject to the idiosyncrasies of local record keeping. Such studies have made a tremendous contribution to our understanding of premodern life, but they provide an imperfect vantage point from which to discern general trends. Only a carefully designed comprehensive study that employs comparable records drawn from a variety of communities over a long span of time will make it possible to trace such patterns with any degree of certainty. That is just what McIntosh has done here. She sets out to examine attempts by local authorities to control misbehavior in more than two hundred villages and small towns over a period of more than two hundred years. That broad scope allows her to make a strong case for three propositions: that the Puritans did not invent social control; that the historiographic divide separating the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is more of a hindrance than a help in understanding the history of premodern England; and that despite the well-known centralizing tendencies of the age, local initiative played a vital role in shaping social policy. McIntosh's arguments have already occasioned significant scholarly discussion (see Journal of British Studies 37 [1998]: 231-305) and are likely to continue to do so, making this work essential reading for anyone interested in premodern English history.	1
McIntosh began by dividing the period covered by her investigation into twenty-year "duodecades" (along with an initial thirty-year period from 1370-1399). She then sampled the records for each of the 267 courts selected for her study, reading two to three years' worth of its proceedings for each duodecade. To make sense of the information collected, she grouped the various offenses reported into three "clusters": the "disharmony" cluster (scolding, eavesdropping, and nightwalking), the "disorder" cluster (sexual misconduct, unruly alehouses, and bad governance), and the "poverty" cluster (hedgebreaking, sheltering vagabonds, refusing to work, and improperly taking on subtenants). In a separate and final category, she noted violations of laws against gaming. Surprisingly, McIntosh does not concern herself with the number of times particular violations were reported. Instead, she counted a community as being concerned with a particular type of misbehavior if it either presented an individual for the offense or it passed a bylaw against the offense. For each duodecade, a community is counted as either concerned or not concerned about a particular behavior, a binary one or zero. In her scheme, one case of scolding in one village is no different from ten cases in another.	2
Analysis of the data appears in chapters three, six, and seven. Chapter three looks at chronological trends for each of the eleven types of misbehavior. Chapter six compares social and economic characteristics of communities that displayed heightened concern with misbehavior (those reporting at least four different kinds of misconduct during a twenty-year period) with those that showed no concern. Chapter seven looks at similarities among communities that displayed concern with the same types of misbehavior. What she finds is often surprising. In chapter three, for example, she reports that concern with scolding remained relatively stable across the centuries covered by her study, neither rising nor falling in a dramatic way. She also found that while scolding was a predominantly female offense during the fifteenth century (with more than eighty percent of the courts that mentioned scolding naming only women as scolds), it did not remain so. In fact, by the last decades of the sixteenth century, only a third of the courts were presenting women alone for that offense. It must be remembered that since McIntosh is tallying courts rather than people, these figures do not represent the total number of male and female scolds. The data certainly suggest, however, that scolding was not regarded as a specifically female behavior at the end of the Elizabethan era, a finding that runs counter to what some historians have recently argued. McIntosh's study is full of such challenging discoveries.	3
One challenge that historians will have to consider lies in the time period addressed by McIntosh. Joining the late medieval with the Tudor era, she deliberately breaks the boundaries of conventionally defined historical periods. She is not the first to do this, of course, but the continuities she is able to demonstrate and the value of the comparisons she is able to draw make this the most effective case to date for rethinking inherited chronological divisions. McIntosh also makes an interesting case for the preeminence of local leadership in attempts to control misbehavior. She argues that the ways in which the local courts she studied ignored parliamentary directives, anticipated parliamentary action, and ventured to regulate matters over which they technically had no jurisdiction demonstrate that the impetus for such efforts came not from above, but from below. Concerns about public behavior, in other words, belonged first and foremost to the landholders, artisans, and traders who comprised the juries in the small communities she stud-ied, not to distant courts and councils.	4
McIntosh recognizes that the limitations of her approach will make this study a preliminary rather than a definitive one. As indicated above, she does not report the frequency of attempts to control misbehavior, and as a result she does not calculate rates of misbehavior based on population figures. For a study of this breadth, that is surely the right decision; such calculations are best left to local studies where detailed information makes more reliable estimates possible. But that does not make information regarding the frequency of presentments less crucial. It is entirely possible, for example, that while the proportion of courts prosecuting at least one case of scolding every twenty years remained constant over a century or more, the actual rate of presentments did change, a result that would significantly alter the meaning of her conclusions. Such determinations will have to await future studies. We will also need to learn more about the identity of the jurors who made the presentments and passed the bylaws studied by McIntosh (as Shannon McShef-frey has pointed out; see Journal of British Studies 37 [1998]: 269-78). Understanding the places such men occupied in their communities, the ways in which they understood their position as jurors, and how their status changed over time may help us to understand some of the patterns described in the book. Also deserving of further consideration is the relationship between religious and ideological developments and changing attitudes towards misbehavior. McIntosh provides a preliminary sketch of this subject in her final chapter, but it is clearly no more than a beginning. Those interested in the evolution of traditional Catholicism, humanism, Protestantism, and Puritanism will surely want to reexamine the development of these ideas in light of McIntosh's findings.	5
Ben R. McRee Franklin & Marshall College

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