Gender and Fraternal Orders in Europe, 1300-2000

Gender and Fraternal Orders in Europe, 1300–2000

Other books by Máire Fedelma Cross THE LETTER IN FLORA TRISTAN’S POLITICS, 1835–1844 GENDER AND POLITICS IN THE AGE OF LETTER-WRITING, 1750–2000 (with Caroline Bland) FLORA TRISTAN’S DIARY: The Tour of France 1843–1844 THE FRENCH EXPERIENCE FROM REPUBLIC TO MONARCHY, 1792–1824: New Dawns in Politics, Knowledge and Culture (with David Williams) POPULATION AND SOCIAL POLICY IN FRANCE (with Sheila Perry) VOICES OF FRANCE: Social, Political and Cultural Identity (with Sheila Perry) EARLY FRENCH FEMINISMS, 1830–1940: A Passion for Liberty (with Felicia Gordon) THE FEMINISM OF FLORA TRISTAN (with Tim Gray)

Gender and Fraternal Orders in Europe, 1300–2000 Edited By Máire Fedelma Cross Professor of French Studies, University of Newcastle, UK

Editorial matter, selection and Chapter 11 © Máire Fedelma Cross 2010 All remaining chapters © their respective authors 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN 978-0-230-27257-6 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 19

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

Foreword

ix

Notes on Contributors

xi

Chapter 1

Seven Hundred Years of Fraternal Orders Daniel Weinbren

Chapter 2

Men and Women in the Guild Returns Andrew Prescott

30

Chapter 3

Women in Monastic Orders Anne Winston-Allen

52

Chapter 4

The Archduchess and the Parrot Meg Twycross

63

Chapter 5

Masonic Apologetic Writings Robert Beachy

91

Chapter 6

Chivalric Muses: The Role and Influence of Protectresses in Eighteenth-Century Jacobite Fraternities Robert Collis

102

Chapter 7

‘The Fair Sex’ in a ‘Male Sect’: Gendering the Role of Women in Eighteenth-Century English Freemasonry Róbert Péter

133

Chapter 8

‘Sisters of Virtue’ in Swedish Pomerania Andreas Önnerfors

156

Chapter 9

The Politics of Sociability? French Masonic Culture before the Revolution James Smith Allen

180

Chapter 10 The Fraternity of Female Friendly Societies Daniel Weinbren

200

v

1

vi Contents

Chapter 11 Flora Tristan’s Appeal for Fraternity Máire Fedelma Cross

223

Chapter 12 Civic Space and Gender Roles in Lerwick’s Up Helly Aa Pamela M. King

244

Index

260

List of Illustrations Fig. 1.1: A member of the Independent Order of Oddfellows, Manchester Unity Friendly Society in her regalia, Winifred A. Baulk was a Provincial Grand Master in Hertfordshire in 1950. Permission to publish from Andy Durr, University of Sussex: Private Collection.

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Fig. 4.1: Semiramis, the Amazons, and Apollo: detail from Denis van Alsloot, The Triumph of the Archduchess Isabella 15 May 1615, Victoria and Albert Museum (5928-1859). © Victoria and Albert Museum.

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Fig. 4.2: The parrot cage and King Psapho: detail from Denis van Alsloot, The Triumph of the Archduchess Isabella 15 May 1615, Victoria and Albert Museum (5928-1859). © Victoria and Albert Museum.

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Fig. 4.3: The Archduchess at the papegay shooting at the Church of Notre Dame de Sablon: detail from the painting by Antonis Sallaert. On the left she holds up the crossbow, apparently getting ready to shoot. On the right she is seen standing at an upper balcony wearing the breuk of the King of the Guild. Two men cast largesse from upper windows. Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van Belgie. © KIK-IRPA, Brussels.

66

Fig. 4.4: The reinforced hat of the man who collects the arrows. Photo © Edward Vanhoutte 1999.

68

Fig. 4.5: The mast (wip). The ‘parrot’ is at the summit; lesser ‘birds’ are arranged on the cross pieces. St Joris Gild, Bruges. Photo © Edward Vanhoutte 1999.

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Fig. 4.6: Shooting at the parrot. The marksman adopts a backbreaking stance directly underneath the wip. Photo © Edward Vanhoutte 1999.

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Fig. 4.7: The Archduchess takes aim at the papegay at the shoot by the St George’s Guild, Ghent: detail from the anonymous seventeenth-century painting. Judging from the modern sport, she would have had to lean backwards much further than this decorous image suggests. Bijlokemuseum, Ghent. © KIK-IRPA, Brussels.

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Fig. 4.8: Apollo and Diana honour the Archduchess Isabella: engraving Trophee aux Dammes by E. Sijceram, from Louis Hymans, Bruxelles à travers les ages, 3 vols (Brussels: Bruylant, 1882–89), p. 185. © British Library Board, 10270 h. 2.

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Fig. 6.1: Ring of the Order of Toboso, inscribed with the motto ‘To a fair meeting on the Green’. Stored at National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh.

110

Fig. 6.2: Press advertisement from The Whitehall Evening Post, or London Intelligencer, 29 May 1750.

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Fig. 6.3: The Roster of the Cycle for 1772. Source: Grant Francis, Romance of the White Rose (London: J. Murray, 1933), plate XIII, facing p. 229.

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Fig. 6.4: Press advertisement from the Chester Chronicle and General Advertiser, 8 October 1779.

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Fig. 6.5: Illustration of the Cycle Badge or Jewel. Source: Hartshorne, p. 367.

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Fig. 6.6: Portraits of Charlotte, Lady Williams-Wynn and Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn, by H. D. Hamilton (1772). Source: Leighton, p. 17.

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Fig. 6.7: A Meeting of The Society of Royal British Archers in Gwersyllt Park, Denbighshire, by J. Emes and R. Smirke, April 1794. Source: frontispiece to Longman and Walrond.

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Fig. 7.1: ‘The Free-Mason’s Surpriz’d or the Secret Dis-Cover’d: a true tale from a Masons Lodge in Canterbury’, printed for T. Wilkins of Ruport Street, London (1754). By permission from the Library and Museum of Freemasonry, London.

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Fig. 8.1: Initiation scene from the ‘Order of Mopses’, in L’Ordre des Francs-Maçons Trahi et Le Secret des Mopses Revelé [The Order of Freemasons Exposed and the Secrets of the Mopses Revealed] (Amsterdam: [n. pub.], 1745). Image: Author.

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Fig. 8.2: One of the engravings in L’Ordre des Francs-Maçons Trahi, 162 showing the symbols of the Mopses (pug-dogs), chosen because of their qualities of love, friendship and fidelity. Image: Author. Fig. 8.3: Title page of Der Abelit (Leipzig: auf folten eines 167 Mitgliedes, 1746), shows an allegory of the secret order that on the following pages delivers its ideology in public. Image: Author. Fig. 9.1: Anon., ‘Voila Mes Plaisirs’ (c. 1800). Oil on canvas, framed with mirror. By permission from the Musée de la maison des Maçons, Grande Loge nationale française, Paris.

189

Foreword

The idea for this volume grew from a collaborative research project between Máire Cross and Andrew Prescott in the University of Sheffield where they organized an international conference on the theme of Gender and Fraternal Orders in July 2002 and where all but two of the authors here presented earlier versions of their work. Subsequently Robert Collis and Róbert Péter, now both closely associated with Andrew Prescott’s successor Andreas Önnerfors, currently Director of the Centre for the Study of Freemasonry in the Humanities Research Institute in Sheffield, contributed their chapters. The editor and her co-authors wish to express their appreciation for the reading of earlier versions, and the suggestions for revision, from colleagues. Equally, thanks are due to those whose work was associated with the project as contributors to the Sheffield conference: Mary Ann Clawson, Anthony and Linda Buckley from the Ulster Folk Museum, Duncan Moore, Nicola Reader, James Ward, David Stevenson and Ann Pilcher Dayton. Julie Denham from the Humanities Research Institute was invaluable for her administrative support and in compiling a first draft of the volume. Conrad Smith was instrumental in preparing the final version of the manuscript. To him a huge thanks. In addition to demonstrating the historical diversity of fraternal orders, the aim of the project is to convey how the question of gender has facilitated historical investigation of somewhat neglected social groups, including fraternal orders. What began as a feminist challenge to the dominant mode of historical interpretation and power relations in society, as well as in academe, the term gender has become a forceful implement for scholars. At first it was used as a weapon to reverse women’s exclusion from history, but now it includes the study of masculinities as it incorporates a method of defining men and women in terms of their existing, as well as their aspiring, social roles. The result has borne fruit: gender has highlighted aspects of brotherhoods and mutual connections hitherto overlooked. The case studies in this volume shed new light on the interactions of men and women in separate spheres, in separate or in mixed lodges, or in the wider social sphere. Over the centuries we see threads of common experiences and tensions in the patterns of reproduction of ix

x Foreword

hierarchical orders, of hierarchical gendered society within orders, and in some cases of rituals. Together they provide an insight into the rich tapestry of social interaction conveyed in the first chapter as familial. Máire Fedelma Cross

Notes on Contributors James Allen, Professor of History at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale is the editor of one and the author of three books. A specialist in modern French cultural history, including the role of women in Freemasonry, he has just completed a book-length study of personal and historical memory, tentatively entitled ‘A Privileged Past’. His current work deals with the selective historical memory of French emigration from J. Hector Saint John de Crevecoeur in the eighteenth century to the deportation of Jews and political dissidents after the Second World War. Robert Beachy is Associate Professor of European history at Goucher College, USA. His publications include books and articles on the roles of Freemasonry, clubs, and other institutions of civil society in shaping German commercial and political culture. He published The Soul of Commerce: Credit, Property, and Politics in Leipzig, 1750–1840 (2005), and co-edited Women, Business and Finance in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Rethinking Separate Spheres (2006). His recent research focuses on the origins and development of sexual identity in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Germany, and his monograph Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity will appear with Alfred A. Knopf in 2011. Robert Collis is currently Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield. His PhD entitled ‘The Petrine Instauration: Religion, Esotericism and Science at the Court of Peter the Great, 1689–1725’ won the inaugural European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE) Thesis Prize in 2009. He has published articles on Freemasonry and the Occult and co-edited a book with Andreas Önnerfors, Freemasonry and Fraternalism in Eighteenth-Century Russia (2009). Máire Cross is Professor of French in the School of Modern Languages at Newcastle University and President of the Society for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France. The founding director of the Centre for European Gender Studies and Head of the School of Modern Languages at Sheffield, she now leads the Centre for Gender Research in Newcastle University. She is the author, co-author and editor of works on French feminism and gender politics. Her publications include: The Letter in Flora xi

xii Notes on Contributors

Tristan’s Politics (2004), and an edited book (with Caroline Bland) entitled Gender and Politics in the Age of Letter-Writing, 1750–2000 (2004). In 2008 she was awarded the honour of Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques. Pamela King is Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Bristol. Her research interests are interdisciplinary, and focus chiefly on late-medieval English culture, particularly theatre and drama. She is author of The York Mystery Cycle and the Worship of the City (2006), has co-edited editions of both the York and Coventry mystery plays, and written numerous articles on civic religious drama. She also publishes on European civic and confraternal festivals more generally, and on medieval tomb sculpture, manuscripts and poetry. Andreas Önnerfors is currently Director of the Centre for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism at the University of Sheffield. His research interests focus on eighteenth-century press history and associational life. His publications include ‘Maçonnerie des Dames – the Plans of the Strict Observance to Establish a Female Branch’ in Alexandra Heidle and Jan A. M. Snoek (eds), Women’s Agency and Rituals in Mixed and Female Masonic Orders (2008) and two articles on female Freemasonry in Sweden in Acta Masonica Scandinavica 9 (2006). Róbert Péter is Senior Assistant Professor in the Institute of English and American Studies at the University of Szeged, Hungary, where he teaches modern British history. He is reviews editor of the Journal for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism and has published articles in English and Hungarian on English Freemasonry. His publications include: ‘Unio Mystica in the Dramatic Revelation of Masonic Secrecy?’ in Kathleen E. Dubs (ed.), Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Hiding and Revealing in Text and Performance (2006). Andrew Prescott was for twenty years a curator of manuscripts at the British Library where he took a leading role in a number of digitization projects. The founding director of the innovative Centre for Research into Freemasonry at the University of Sheffield in 2000, he became Librarian and Pro-Vice Chancellor at the University of Wales, Lampeter in 2007. He was appointed Director of Research for the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII) at the University of Glasgow in 2010. His publications on the history of Freemasonry include the edited volume Marking Well (2006), articles on the early his-

Notes on Contributors xiii

tory of Freemasonry and studies of the relationship between Freemasonry and radicalism in the nineteenth century. Meg Twycross is Emeritus Professor of English Medieval Studies at Lancaster University. She is Executive Editor of the journal Medieval English Theatre, and has published widely on medieval theatre in all its aspects. Her interest in the ommegangen of the Low Countries, especially those of Leuven, Brussels, and Antwerp, has proved a highly significant comparative strand in the study of the English pageant wagon plays and their processional roots. Her recent work on highresolution digital manuscript images is casting new light on the origins of the York Mystery Cycle. Dan Weinbren is Chair of the Friendly Societies Research Group at The Open University in the UK. He has written about fraternal bodies, particularly both friendly societies and the British Labour Party, in a number of books and journals in the UK, Germany and Australia. The subject matter of his other published works include the roles of families, the armaments industries and the Humanitarian League while his publications on theoretical frameworks include work on virtual heritage and oral testimony. Anne Winston-Allen is Professor of German Studies and Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. She published Convent Chronicles: Women Writing about Women and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (2004). Currently, she is working on an ‘Index of Manuscripts Illuminated by Women Artists in Religious Communities of the European Middle Ages’.

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1 Seven Hundred Years of Fraternal Orders Daniel Weinbren

For hundreds of years there has been an allure in popular culture to the notion of a band of brothers. From before Shakespeare’s Henry V, through Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, to the twenty-first century TV mini-series Band of Brothers, the phrase has evoked images of men fiercely loyal to one another, united for a cause greater than themselves. This interest has not been reflected in concerted scholarly attention to the long-term influence of fraternal organizations. This chapter introduces the theme of the volume in a literature review and contextualizes the authors’ contributions. The aim of this work is to conceptualize fraternal organizations and to emphasize the significance of their roles in both transforming and being changed by European societies over many centuries. It explores the significance of the links between rituals, secrecy, hierarchy and the maintenance of gendered roles over a period of several hundred years enabling new comparisons to be made and wider social mores to be reconfigured. No single associational form can encompass British friendly societies, French fraternal bodies, Lerwick’s ‘Vikings’ and Flemish ‘parrot’ shooters. However, if we classify them as siblings, the similar aspects of their responses to common threats and comparable opportunities emerge in a new light. There are studies of such bodies as the convent-based Youth Confraternity of the Purification of the Virgin (which had an important economic role and spread ideas about the importance of public, political and religious duties), the confraternities of early modern Florence and Bologna (which prepared abandoned children for civic life and family roles), the German regional student fraternities, Landsmannschaften (with their duelling ritual and rules about the order of meetings and the colours to be worn on armbands and sashes) and the fraternal associations which helped men to form communities in nineteenth-century America.1 In 1

2 Seven Hundred Years of Fraternal Orders

netting together such organizations, issues about how fraternal societies have been understood within different communities can be assessed, and comparisons of networks and effectiveness can be considered through the prism of gender. Some scholars have recognized the links between different fraternal elements, noting for example the importance of the links between guilds and Freemasonry.2 David Montgomery concluded that for skilled men in North America, manliness was associated with support for fellow workers, that there was a ‘mutualistic ethical code’.3 David Neave pointed out that ‘frequently office-holding in a friendly society preceded or accompanied active involvement in a trade union’.4 Simon Cordery argued that ‘historians have artificially segregated trade unions from friendly societies, examining the latter only in the context of working-class communities and ignoring or marginalizing the insurance provisions of the former’.5 However, in general, the overarching ‘culture of co-operation and mutuality among English working people between 1790 and 1890’, which Stephen Yeo perceived, has been linked infrequently to developments elsewhere in Europe or to a longer timespan.6 Concerned at such isolation, John Halstead and Andrew Prescott suggested that an important task of historians of different fraternal traditions was to engage in ‘breaking the barriers’.7 Few texts on the various siblings within the brotherhood of fraternal bodies refer to one another. Many of the connections between family, home and work which have led historians to stress how trade unions have been associated with communities, in mining areas across Europe for example, have not been made of other fraternal bodies. By recognizing the strength of male bonds, sometimes across conventional social and class lines, it becomes clearer that in many cases not only is the warp of community strengthened by the weft of fraternal organizations’ reciprocity, but that they cannot exist apart. Since the late nineteenth century, women have been permitted to join some of the fraternal orders which previously had been open only to men. The image of Winifred Baulk, a Provincial Grand Master (regional chair) of the Independent Order of Oddfellows, Manchester Unity in Hertfordshire in the 1950s, might have been composed in order to emphasize that women in positions of authority did not threaten the order (see Fig. 1.1). Nevertheless, despite her conformity to conventional dress codes within the order, the images of females as victims and virtues, portrayed on the apron, are in contrast to the stance of the wearer and throw into relief some of the gender tensions within fraternal orders. Often fraternal bodies have been conceptualized as part of other debates about, for example, the creation of modern social ordering and class-

Daniel Weinbren 3

Figure 1.1 A member of the Independent Order of Oddfellows, Manchester Unity Friendly Society in her regalia, Winifred A. Baulk was a Provincial Grand Master in Hertfordshire in 1950. Permission to publish from Andy Durr, University of Sussex: Private Collection.

4 Seven Hundred Years of Fraternal Orders

consciousness or the generation of a liberal consensus.8 Others have framed fraternal organizations in terms of health and welfare.9 Sheilagh Ogilvie has found material on the guilds in histories of technology, women’s work, migration, Jewish occupations, illegitimacy and economic marginalization.10 Such works often place the organizations and the notion of a unifying fraternity on the periphery.11 They have been categorized in other ways as well. Lynn Dumenil made a distinction based on activities: ‘expressive organizations […] directed primarily toward meeting the social and personal needs of their members, while instrumental organizations have specific [political or social] goals to accomplish’.12 However, ‘instrumental’ societies frequently sought to meet the needs of members, often through rituals which were similar to those of ‘expressive’ bodies, while ‘expressive’ bodies often had specific social aims. Unless the similarities and patterns of different fraternal organizations are clearly outlined, an attempt to merge them could lead to the creation of an amorphous ahistorical category. Beyond general, empirical observations (often noting that fraternal organizations have been formed for a variety of purposes, with mutual aid, Christianity, ritual, conviviality, singing and parades frequently being of importance) there has been a hesitation to outline common ground. While the Academic Society for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism noted that fraternal organizations ‘share common features and inner dynamics’, it has avoided a specific definition.13 Some scholars have focused on the mutual aid and life insurance associated with fraternal associations, others on the allure of ritual or the acquisition of social benefits. Recognizing that fraternal organizations embody the voluntary structured, gendered reciprocity built at the intersection of community, civility, charity and commerce should not undermine the perception of them as varied. To gain a better sense of the significance of fraternal organizations and to ensure that they are no longer conceptualized as marginal and divided does not require that all fraternal bodies be shoehorned into a single grand narrative. There is a need to recognize that the model provided by fraternal organizations was often used to promote specific identities. Migrants, whether from the countryside to the town or from one country to another, often do not have easy access to relationships based on blood or marriage. Many felt a need to create what has been termed ‘fictive’ kin (that is, not related by blood or marriage) based on rituals or close friendship ties that replicate many of the rights and obligations associated with family ties. Peter Clark has stressed the importance of both internal and international migration to the development of associ-

Daniel Weinbren 5

ational culture.14 While Martin Gorsky also emphasized the importance to membership growth of migration to towns, fraternal associations, perhaps aimed at those left behind by their kin were also popular in the countryside.15 There were confraternities for Jews and for Jesuits, and friendly societies for French Huguenots in London and Germans in Bradford, England.16 In Wales the Irish settlers created their own friendly societies which promoted local and national patriotism.17 The United Irishmen also promoted national identity, the Orange Orders, representing Protestants were fraternal bodies largely in Ireland and Scotland, the Irish National Foresters’ Association was open to men of any religion or class who were ‘Irish by birth or descent’ while the William the Fourth Society of Deptford, London excluded all Irish people.18 Members of the Philanthropic Ivorites promoted the Welsh language within a fraternal framework while the German Burschenschafter promoted notions of a nation of brothers-in-arms united against Jews.19 Roger Burt has indicated how far Masonic membership was an aid to migration to South Africa and Jessica Harland-Jacobs has demonstrated that Freemasonry spread with, and facilitated the work of, the British Empire.20 Fraternal bodies offered practical, financial and emotional support to those who moved far from their homes.21 Many fraternal organizations were open only to those from specific regions or religious sects and many excluded the poor and women. It is not that one size needs to fit all but that the current demarcation lines and chronological compartmentalization and taxonomies do not always aid comprehension.22 While there appears to be a common inheritance from the guilds and a widespread sense of community based on notions of ancient wisdom and on benevolent actions and sentiments which exemplified fraternal societies’ highest goals, there has never been a coherent single fraternal movement pulling in just one direction. One common thread running through fraternal organizations is that they are often structured in terms of families, with siblings and parents. Many fraternal bodies emphasized their similarity to idealized notions of the family, perhaps in order to promote charitable, trusting sentiments and reciprocity. Those who employed kinship terms such as brethren and mother staked a claim to a lineage back to the Church (in which monks were brothers and the pope the Holy Father) and to the notion of kinship between those not related by blood or marriage. An important aspect of families was that members were given roles determined by gender. As fraternal organizations are a product of (and have informed) gendered societies, their support for male bonds across social and economic divides and their assertion of specific gender roles which marginalize women

6 Seven Hundred Years of Fraternal Orders

from male civic structures have often been to the fore. However, there have been myriad ways in which fraternity assigned and reinforced gender roles. When he addressed a conference of the Independent Order of Oddfellows, Manchester Unity, in England in 1842, James L. Ridgely of Baltimore referred to the ‘members of one great family […] children of one great parent’ and suggested that American Oddfellows offered prayers ‘for the welfare of the Mother’, before he asked ‘What had they received from Mother?’23 The notion of maternal beneficence was reinforced by the Society’s emblem: this featured Britannia attended by Europe, Asia and Africa, bestowing the Grand Charter upon the USA through a native American while the past officers’ certificates included the arms of Australia, New Zealand, Cape Colony and the USA, these being ‘the homes of many of our foremost members, whose connections with the mother country and with our Order is thus symbolised’.24 The image of the family involved not merely rhetoric about international brotherhood but also metaphorical parental control from the organization which Ridgely called ‘The Mother of the Order’. In 1867 the historian of the Independent Order of Oddfellows, Manchester Unity mentioned that the growth of the Unity had been ‘for the benefit of the Brotherhood of the human family’.25 Just as the family need not be presented as a ‘black box’, a freestanding, sealed system, so the notion of a fraternal organization can be conceptualized not as a separate, free-floating creation but as incessantly mobile sets of discursive, contingent relationships.26 Indeed the notion of a distinction between the significance of fictive and real kin can be undermined by a broad conceptualization of fraternity. By using initiation rites, hierarchical structures, loyalty oaths and dress codes, many fraternal organizations sought to shape gender relations in ways which confirmed the dominance of men. However, fraternal organizations have also been employed by women to challenge such ideas. An acknowledgment of the diversity of positions adopted by fraternal organizations is not a denial of the commonality of their structured reciprocity; it is a recognition that from common roots within notions of community, civility, charity and commerce a variety of forms evolved. In Chapter 3, Anne Winston-Allen shows how the religious orders of medieval Europe not only imposed a separation of men’s and women’s spheres in the most important cultural activities of that period, but also provided a context for the articulation of a distinctively female voice at an early date. It was when women were organized separately from men that they gained greater collective autonomy. She notes the evidence of patrons, rules, rituals and an ‘emphasis on solidarity’ among

Daniel Weinbren 7

thirteenth-century self-supporting communities of women headed by a grand mistress and also assesses the importance of the retelling of the creation stories by ‘founding mothers’. She concludes that through these structured alliances, which echo and reinforce male constructions of fraternity, women could gain confidence, skills, and emotional and financial support. In medieval and early modern Europe, religious orders, guilds and fraternities played a central role in economic life.27 Guild members visited sick members, paid alms from a common chest, attended funerals, imposed fines on those who failed to attend or whose behaviour was not respectable, and often elected their officials and held annual feasts.28 There is evidence of charitable feasts being held before the first millennium.29 Some medieval parish guilds held annual banquets for paupers in honour of patron saints.30 Whereas kin-based support was pervasive when extended households were prevalent, as nuclear families developed and prevailed, so there was an increased need for assistance in the event of difficulties. As Andrew Blaikie pointed out, researchers concur that ‘nowhere in pre-industrial Europe could kin manage to support the poor alone and interdependencies always existed between families and a range of welfare organizations’.31 Young adult males were particularly likely to become victims of ‘nuclear hardship’ in early modern western Europe.32 The fraternal organizations which developed to meet their needs were not simply for insurance, indeed they ‘modified’ the insurance relationship with notions of gender and fellowship.33 In England fraternal associations were integral to the gradual, longsustained process of economic change which occurred between c. 1660 and c. 1800 because this economic shift relied on apprenticeship and service rather than kinships structures. By the age of 15 most people lived away from home, not with kin. The age of marriage was later than in many parts of southern Europe and many did not become parents until their late twenties. This enabled women to be more independent for longer periods of time, to have more choice in their selection of husbands and to be more likely to behave as economic partners within the marriages. Typically young men and women worked as servants for about a decade, while saving for their own marriages and households, and this led to greater age gaps between generations, less reliance on extended kin networks, and legal traditions that emphasized both spouses as producers of wealth, and allowed widows extensive rights over household property. The elderly were cared for through Poor Law provision. Social anxiety in the face of greater economic partnerships between men and women and the convergence of women’s

8 Seven Hundred Years of Fraternal Orders

and men’s lives, created a ‘heightened preoccupation with gender difference and female inferiority’.34 As industrialization and urbanization increased and the population grew, men sought new identities within religion, politics, and new scientific discourses. They developed rituals of civility and connected in fresh ways the notion of reciprocity (which could both include and exclude) to commerce, to charity and to their communities. They made fraternal associations which promoted moral and ethical beliefs within an economy of properties and commodities part of their habitus. Through their support for trusting deals and business ties, their practices aided the flow of capital. Sidney and Beatrice Webb saw the industrialization of the nineteenth century as a break from the past. The Reformation of the 1540s had seen the end of religious guilds in England: their property was confiscated and the Statute of Apprentices, 1563, removed their regulation of apprenticeships. The Webbs felt able to assert ‘with confidence, that in no case did any Trade Union in the United Kingdom arise either directly or indirectly from descent from a Craft Guild’.35 Others have appreciated that the craft guilds were maintained and their ideas spread. The guilds adapted to new economic conditions and were of considerable relevance to the regulation of trade during the eighteenth century.36 In 1797 Frederick Eden remarked on the similarities between guilds and the friendly societies.37 The latenineteenth-century Registrar of Friendly Societies, Edward Brabrook, suggested that the small, simple village friendly society resembled the benefit system of the guilds; Joshua Toulmin Smith referred to the guilds’ spirit of ‘mutual self-help’ and ‘manly independence’ and Cornelius Walford argued that the roots of modern insurance lay in the guilds.38 In 1906, a leading member of the Ancient Order of Foresters Friendly Society stressed the similarities between his fraternal association and the guilds.39 In 1926 John Clapham rhetorically argued that friendly societies’ graveside duties and drinking were ‘an old inheritance. Did not Anglo-Saxon guilds pay a subscription in malt?’40 Edward Thompson argued that ‘the friendly society helped to pick up and carry into the trade union movement the love of ceremony and the high sense of status of the craftsman’s guild’.41 More recently Michael Walker has demonstrated that seventeenth-century friendly societies had ‘the weight of guild heritage behind them’ and Anthony Black has stressed the importance of mutual obligation to fraternal culture.42 Although medieval guilds were not the only source of traditions of banquets in honour of saints at which paupers were well treated, as Gorsky concluded ‘guild mutualism was to be the template for the practices of later benefit clubs’, and others concurred.43

Daniel Weinbren 9

Sometimes accounts which stressed longevity implied inevitable progression. Despite the patronage, which can be found within trade unions and many other fraternal bodies, fraternal organizations have also been seen as mutual and self-administrating proto-democratic organizations. In 1919 Alice Clark argued that in England, while women’s membership of guilds was often through marriage, guilds were a means by which women were able to participate in the market economy.44 David Beito’s assessment of the 160 oath-bound, lay-controlled voluntary confraternities of fifteenth-century London concluded that ‘in theory and to a great extent in reality, confraternities were democratic and egalitarian’.45 One of the arguments for the extension of the franchise in the UK in 1867 was that working men had demonstrated their acceptability through their associational activities.46 The UK-based Ancient Order of Foresters Friendly Society recommended that members be sober and industrious in order to ‘purchase your own electoral rights’ while in 1869 a British MP argued that ‘these societies are teaching men the duties of citizenship’.47 In recognition of the training that fraternal associations could provide, one of the first Labour MPs in the UK explained in 1906 that he had ‘graduated in the university of the friendly societies’.48 Even the Mafia, multifunctional ritual brotherhoods focused on retaining and consolidating their political power, according to Letizia Paoli, had democratic internal structures.49 The tradition of some fraternal bodies to elect leaders and hold votes on a variety of matters was seized upon by late nineteenthand early twentieth-century commentators some perhaps eager to find roots for their political views. In late nineteenth-century Bristol there was a friendly society called the Guild of St Mary and St Joseph, and Guilds of Help were formed to ‘minister to the needs of the honest poor’ and promote thrift and self-help in Bradford (1904), Wimbledon (1907) and a number of other towns.50 In his Restoration of the Gild System of 1906, Arthur Penty advocated a ‘return’ to artisanal production organized through guilds. A theory of guild socialism was developed and in 1915, the National Guilds League was formed in the UK. Employing evidence from many local studies of guilds in London, Exeter, Shrewsbury, York and elsewhere, and alert to the importance of gender to the construction of fraternity, Andrew Prescott in Chapter 2 finds both continuities and discontinuities. He employs the English ‘gild’ returns of 1389 to challenge the view of medieval guilds as the embodiment of a pre-industrial equality of the sexes in the workplace. While most of the guilds he considered accepted women as members, they were excluded from positions of authority. Guilds, rather than being havens of communal, equitable self-help, were determined by local

10 Seven Hundred Years of Fraternal Orders

and national state considerations, and often the prevalent masculine agenda of the period. They were not all striving for greater equality: rather, the English guilds’ notion of fraternity, from which so much developed, reinforced particular inequalities between the sexes. In the 1980s some stressed how far guilds limited women’s participation in the labour market by, for example, excluding them from the accredited training required for independent work, and by forcing daughters, wives and widows out of workplaces.51 Building upon work in this century, which has emphasized the flexibility and variety within guilds, Ogilvie concluded that English and Dutch women’s participation in the market economy was ‘an important contributing factor to the industrious revolution beginning in north-west Europe in the later seventeenth century’.52 She also indicated that guilds restricted women’s roles. While some guilds helped to enforce gender roles, the localities where women faced the fewest economic restrictions were those associated with early consumer and industrial changes.53 Moreover, there was continued reinforcement of specific roles for men and women. In the Wildberg canton of early modern Württemberg, women were banned from becoming masters, though masters’ widows were not, the discouragement of women being ‘primarily to protect established male guild members from competition’.54 The fraternal form offered uneven opportunities for commercial connections, charitable links and community engagement. In her analysis of the role of women within fraternal organizations, Meg Twycross in Chapter 4 indicates how a sequence of paintings of a religious fraternal body, commissioned by the Archduchess of Austria in about 1615, can be employed to indicate the importance of the familial model to fraternal associations. The paintings depict a competition, organized by a fraternal body, the aim of which was to shoot a parrot-shaped target. One account of this event suggests that the wooden parrot was ‘magically resuscitated’. In addition the winner, a childless archduchess, was presented as providing ‘maternal care’ for her staff. This echoes the emphasis on rebirth and illusion during initiation ceremonies of many fraternal organizations and their frequent references to members as brethren or parents. It also indicates that although fraternal organizations did not always proscribe women (in this case there was a role for a woman within a martial fraternity of male shooters), they could circumscribe them. The tensions between the desire of men to exclude women and the recognition of the benefits of inclusion can be found in analyses of seventeenth-century France. While there were strong brotherhood traditions maintained by the journeymen who formed the compagnon-

Daniel Weinbren 11

nages, women were not entirely disengaged.55 In the eighteenth century, Freemasons gained considerable cultural importance within France, and by the 1780s, as James Smith Allen demonstrates in Chapter 9, women held significant positions within Freemasonry and contributed to creating a new model of fraternal organization. This was in the face of campaigns in England and France to ensure that Freemasonry was exclusively for men. Róbert Péter and Robert Beachy in their chapters argue that biblical support for separate, gendered spheres, the legal status of women, the greater curiosity of women and their inability to keep secrets, were all employed as arguments for men retaining their own spaces. This was where, Róbert Péter suggests, men could exercise their own ‘femininity’ in private, allowing women to enter only to socialize. Robert Collis, however, in Chapter 6, points to the importance of women in symbolic roles. Although Lady Elizabeth Caryll, as the figurehead of ‘the most important Jacobite fraternity in the first half of the eighteenth century’ had a limited role, the organization influenced other fraternal organizations in regard to women’s participation. Some went on to permit women to vote and engage in the male-dominated pursuit of archery. Andreas Önnerfors’s Chapter 8 analysis of a beneficiary of patrilineal status, the ‘exceptional’, Anna von Balthasar, demonstrates even within a ‘remote province’ of Swedish Pomerania there was scope for women to become involved in a fraternal organization. Although middle-class women were active within British households, in business and commerce and in the wider public arena, men and women were separated in new ways in early nineteenth-century middle-class family life, reinforced by Evangelical Christianity and clear gender roles.56 Anna Clark has suggested that from the late eighteenth century as more and more mills and factories opened, increasingly men and women were separated from one another and male artisans cultivated a homosocial male culture which privileged their masculinity.57 In the USA, as women gained greater control over the household and the children, and the notion of the family shifted, men retreated into fraternal organizations.58 Fraternal organizations were part of the contestation over roles with gendering a key determinant of the construction, development and maintenance of such bodies.59 In Chapter 11, a notion of complex, gendered interactions is bolstered by Máire Cross’s work on the socialist and feminist Flora Tristan, 1803–1844, who sought to use fraternal organizations to promote her political ideas. Through this engagement she stretched, and also strengthened, male-dominated associations. Mary Ann Clawson concluded that ‘the history of nineteenthcentury fraternalism was thus one of negotiation and accommodation, as

12 Seven Hundred Years of Fraternal Orders

well as domination, as men and women challenged each other’s models of communal life’. For her: The Masonic exclusion of women was consistent with the more general approach of the Enlightenment. […] Even in the nineteenthcentury world of supposedly separate spheres […] a quintessentially masculine institution like the fraternal order, where men withdrew from women to create their own space, could not isolate itself from feminine disapproval and initiative.60 Eric Hobsbawm also saw a change, concluding that there was no cultural division of labour between men and women. He proposed: Toward the end of the 19th-century, we find a distinct tendency in Europe and North America to treat women as persons in the same sense of bourgeois society, analogous to males, and therefore analogous also as potential achievers […] sometime in the last 20 or 30 years before World War I the role and behavior of women, as conceived in 19th-century bourgeois society, changed rapidly and substantially in several countries.61 Although Cathie Lloyd concluded that ‘in the past the revolutionary, egalitarian idea of “fraternity” has reinforced the marginalization of women in France’, fraternity has long been more than the forging of male alliances in the absence of women.62 While families are often associated with love, membership of them has not always been defined in terms of affection. The word family is derived from the Latin for domestic slave, the servant of a household. When a wealthy Elizabethan father sat down to dinner, he would sit at the head of the table called a board, in a chair, the only one in the house, while his wife, children and servants – his household – sat on benches or stools. He was literally the chairman of the board. Similarly, fraternal organizations, echoing families, may have stressed their charitable aims but they too had commercial and entrepreneurial ambitions. Fraternal organizations promoted civility and commerce through offering opportunities for members to learn and practise the rules of business and networking in privacy and across social boundaries. Often the law offered only limited protection against defaulters. Payment in kind and credit were endemic to much of the economy. Fraternal organizations which emphasized the importance of honour and civility could help merchants to build trust with one another, and could help trade

Daniel Weinbren 13

unionists to build the solidarity required to ensure a pay rise. It was often within the fraternal association that members learnt how to interact on a formal basis. In the eighteenth century, John Brewer noted, ‘affability, courtesy and reliability […] oiled the wheels of commerce’ while John Smail suggested that ‘commercial honor was closely linked with masculinity’.63 Freemasonry was ‘the most pervasive and influential form of secular voluntary organization in most English towns’ by the early eighteenth century, but there were many more fraternal bodies which supported families based on blood and marriage through the provision of that which is sometimes called fictive kinship.64 Peter Clark’s account of the rise of British associations in the early modern era illuminates the origins of friendly societies and their polycentric developmental pattern. He illustrated how ubiquitous was the concept of the voluntary society by citing the example of how in the eighteenth century heaven was visualized as one large friendly society.65 An understanding of fraternal organizations is enhanced if it is recognized that the concepts of business ethic and polite society developed symbiotically with fraternal organizations. While the value of deals struck through lodge membership can be difficult to measure, one business was dominated by fraternal bodies. In the Netherlands burial insurance was largely guild-based until the dissolution of the guilds in 1820. Mutual-aid organizations, often associated with guilds, continued to dominate the burial insurance market. In 1800 there were 248 such insurers out of a total of 254, the other six being commercial companies. A trade union scheme was established in 1840 and by 1890 there were 240 of these. The total number of mutual schemes was 699, or over 83 per cent of the total. Approximately half the population was covered by such schemes.66 There was a similar dominance of the burials insurance market by friendly societies in the UK. The values, notions of civility and camaraderie, aided the growth in complexity of exchange relationships, which justified property rights and a modern state to protect and police those rights. David Beito noted of fraternal organizations in the USA that ‘the successful climb up the degree ladder was the antebellum equivalent of building a good credit rating’.67 Commerce also lay at the heart of the Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian Mafia. This has been described as ‘a specific economic enterprise, an industry which produces, promotes and sells private protection. […] [a] “brand name”’.68 It also has oaths, codes and complex symbols and ceremonies, which stress that those involved are brothers. The skills developed in the lodge, of civil discourse, of strict procedures and hierarchies and of wealth collection and redistribution, were ones which could be required in male-dominated seats of national and local government. If

14 Seven Hundred Years of Fraternal Orders

members could rely on other members not to make their secrets public, to be discreet about the indiscretions of brethren, then this could reinforce the idea of an elite community with its own codes and privileges. It could bolster the conceptualization of the fraternity as a ‘network of strings that could be pulled’ to use Meg Twycross’s words. Some of the formal rituals within the lodge and processions outside it reinforced the importance placed on civility, order and trust. This emphasis often involved a focus on the use of privileged knowledge: notably passwords and rituals. Many fraternal bodies have emphasized confidentiality and concealment: What matters then, is not so much the particular thing that is kept secret as the fact that some kind of secret is created, and that it pertains to the prestige and privileges of a sex or age group within the larger society. The secret here is a separating or distancing mechanism between a leading and a subordinate group.69 Although fraternal oath taking was marginalized in the UK in the nineteenth century, it was central to many societies and ‘persisted well beyond the period of outright repression’.70 The founder and first Grand Master Workman of the US-based labourers’ fraternal organization, the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor, Uriah Smith Stevens, was also a Freemason and member of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows. He ‘saw in fraternal ritual the means to impose secrecy and create solidarity uniting workers in a bond of trust’.71 Secrecy is so central a concept to Bob James, who runs the Centre for Fraternal Studies, that he gave it considerable prominence in his definition of fraternal societies as ‘societies which use, or have used in the recent past, coded regalia, secret passwords, ritual and signs, and which have had a philosophy of brotherhood or mutual aid’.72 As Róbert Péter has indicated, notions of secrecy were gendered and employed to justify the exclusion of women. Much of the ritual of fraternal organizations was associated with gendered civility and the creation myths and popular re-enactments, which often excluded or marginalized women. Andreas Önnerfors noted ritual was sometimes employed as a reason for barring women from associational life on the grounds that it was too dangerous for them. In the UK the Druids claimed links with Moses, who won freedom with the help of his brother, while the Foresters connected themselves to Robin Hood, who led a group of men who strove for greater independence.73 An important Masonic ritual involves a drama in which a dead man is resurrected and supported by his brethren, and many of the symbols of the

Daniel Weinbren 15

Orange Order and its sibling Protestant organizations, the Royal Arch Purple Chapter and the Royal Black Institution can also be seen as supportive of the notion of heroic men without women.74 These myths embody deeper assumptions and indicate the perspectives of the narrators. References to Eden within societies’ accounts of their origins may imply nostalgia for a simpler, honest natural world which required protection. These could exist alongside references to Themis the Greek Titaness of good counsel who was the embodiment of divine order, law, and custom. She had a daughter Astraea, who had weighing scales and who was closely associated with Nemesis who had a sword used for retribution against both bad deeds and also undeserved good fortune. The Roman goddess of justice had both scales and a sword. She also had a blindfold so she could not see the social class of defendants. She may have inherited the two items for measuring and enforcing justice from the Mesopotanian sun-god Shamesh, who is also portrayed with these. These classical and earlier images connected fraternal societies (for many adopted such emblems) to notions of justice and equity, civilized existence, right custom, proper procedure and social order. From the Roman goddess Iustitia, or the archangel Michael, who also has scales and a sword, members could draw the conclusion that as you sow, so shall you reap and that a higher, often female, force is in charge of ensuring the fair balance within reciprocal altruism. The ideas expressed within such stories do not demand consensus over meaning, indeed they thrive in conditions of pluralism and enable imaginative fluid understandings to be shaped. Ritual has attracted people to fraternities, encouraged friendship, framed consideration of ethical issues, and reminded members of the ethos of their organization. Such considerations may have applied to women as well as men but, more often, while men were classified as brothers, women were sometimes mothers (a taxonomy attributed by, for example, Flora Tristan). Rituals and affirmations of brotherly love were important to the confidence and esteem of members. Malcolm Chase concluded that ‘the place of ritual within guild life may well have been stronger in the early eighteenth century than at any time since the Reformation. […] Elaborate ritual, hierarchy and the language of brotherhood was one means by which the frontier of skill was defended’.75 Ritual has enhanced the lives of numerous members and evoked a variety of emotions in people, notably fear, awe and respect. Men could attend the lodge and, through the drama, both marginalize contemporary issues and express their nurturing and paternal emotion.

16 Seven Hundred Years of Fraternal Orders

They could construct a version of familial relationships and fellowship and feel guided through their careers within the lodge. The myths, symbolic practices, public performances, ornate certificates and badges have helped to constitute and give meaning to notions of fraternity. They have advertised the fraternities, indicated the internal hierarchies and the routes to higher social status, and linked the different elements of the organizations’ structured reciprocity. The song, as Robert Beachy and James Smith Allen illustrate, was often at the heart of the fraternal organization and its complex interaction with social and gender control. As a form of communication it could aid the building of a civil community because it was orderly, yet flexible. Máire Cross has demonstrated that Flora Tristan was able to take the conviviality of the fraternal organization, one of the chief means by which it had helped promote gendered solidarity, and through a song contest, adapt it to her political and campaigning purposes. Across France there was a thriving tradition of using song to convey ideas. Flora Tristran employed this in order to encourage workers’ unity, She also used well-established terms of fraternity (signing her letters ‘your sister in humanity’) to encourage women and men of the working class to unite. Although even a song written in support of her campaign called her not a sister but a ‘dear girl’, it was through the genre of fraternal songs that this daughter of a SpanishPeruvian military aristocrat could bridge the social divisions between herself and the working people of France. In the UK, fraternal associations produced songbooks and attempted to regulate lyrics. A ruling in 1841 made by the UK’s largest friendly society made it clear that a fine could be imposed for ‘singing an indecent or political song, or giving an indecent or political toast or sentiment’.76 When there was major dispute in 1844 within this body the brothers picked up their pens to make their case. There was ‘a flood of scurrilous songs and pamphlets’, complained the Independent Order of Oddfellows, Manchester Unity’s historian, who also noted that thousands seceded into a newlyformed rival fraternal body in 1844.77 In Lerwick, the singing of the Gallic song is an element of the regulation of Up Helly Aa. Bill Needham, 1904–1983, joined the Manchester Unity Oddfellows in 1919. His recollections, recorded in the 1980s, suggest the importance of the public house, the continuing significance of secrecy and the mixture of formal regulations and boisterousness. His testimony provides an insight into how members understand their own past and that of their fraternal association and how respectable civility and rougher conviviality were often merged. Secrecy and rituals can be

Daniel Weinbren 17

perceived as aspects of civility and the community, and were often part of the mesh of fraternal organizations’ ethos: We had a monthly meeting and it was always held in a pub. […] It was run properly then, with a full committee, secretary, the lot. […] We always had a club room. […] There used to be a member on the door and he were called the Tyler and nobody strange would get into that meeting because you had a secret sort of code. You would have to knock on the door with your first two knuckles, twice. The Tyler would be behind the door, fastened on the inside. He would open the door and say ‘Brother Needham wishes to be admitted.’ Needham went on to recount how an initiate would be blindfolded and have a hot poker placed very near his bottom. He added ‘We had quite a lot of laughs about that. It was alright for us as knew, but it was them that didn’t know, you see!’.78 While for many members of fraternities it was the business of the lodge which was of primary importance, for example health provision, and for others the social activities were central, ritual enveloped all of these. It could take members from the everyday world into a mystical place derived from mummery, Freemasonry, popular theatre and ideals associated with the Abrahamic faiths, particularly Christianity. Ritual was practised in order to comply with the rules, to demonstrate respect and affiliation, to satisfy emotional requirements and nourish relationships, to strengthen social bonds and for pleasure. It had practical applications, being useful for checking on the status of members, informing them of the ideals of the fraternity, structuring change and networks within the organization and uniting members across time and space in common activities. By sharing rituals, members were linked by a sense of exclusivity. It was not always the case that this involved the exclusion (or their inclusion as either second-class brethren or wives) of women. Nevertheless, that the thread of a gendered organization runs through many of them indicates the importance attached to particular notions of business dealings, and civil and civic order. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries fraternal bodies and charities within the UK shared a range of activities, functions, members and structures.79 Members were likely to be familiar with both types of organization because many fraternal bodies had patrons who provided financial support and also because, even at the time when fraternal organizations had millions of members, many members often had to rely on kinship and charitable support during periods when the household

18 Seven Hundred Years of Fraternal Orders

income was reduced.80 Both charities and fraternal bodies sought to increase trust between members, or between clients and patrons, by placing upon them the triple obligation to give, to receive and to return the equivalent of that which had been received. Across Europe there were many Church-based fraternal bodies. In the UK many Christian charitable bodies, including the Salvation Army and numerous Sunday schools, ran their own friendly societies.81 In 1908 the Freemason Lord Baden Powell established a charity, the Scout Association, and in 1914 became president of an associated fraternal body, the first trustees of which were all peers: the Scouts Friendly Society. In Bristol, the Colston collecting societies, named after a local philanthropist, combined mutuality, charity and guild traditions and the Temple Lodge Benefit Society was both a Masonic lodge and a friendly society.82 Many fraternal bodies gave to charity and indeed mentioned charity as one of their principal aims. They sought to create a sense of brotherhood of obligation and of the possibility of reward for acts of kindness towards kin, however broadly defined. For some philanthropists, such as F. D. Mocatta, ‘charity took the place of a family’.83 Both charities and fraternal organizations generated solidarity and were often associated with social stability and the reduction of social divisions through the promotion of self-help, reciprocity and patronage. Both enjoyed rapid growth during periods of industrialization and urbanization. Many had similar structures and hierarchies, offering opportunities to gain respect, self-confidence, self-discipline and transferable skills. Recognition of their common roots in the guilds and their continuing common interest in institutionalizing benevolence through creating social relationships and mutual ties based on loyalty highlights the importance of charity to fraternal organizations. Charitable and fraternal bodies, some reliant on patronage, sought to transcend economic transfers between recipients and donors, or members, by building emotional and social relationships. Ensuring that members have the opportunity to develop appropriate civic and civil attitudes has long been central to fraternity. Sometimes there was overt patronage with fraternal organizations being used to help promote the preoccupations of local elites. In sixteenth-century Bologna, patrician families used knowledge acquired through their roles as the patrons of confraternities to aid their construction of municipal welfare schemes.84 More generally guilds were used by the Crown and town oligarchies in the Middle Ages to impose trade controls of various kinds. This became the basis of urban oligarchies, as in sixteenthcentury Flanders. Examples of uneven symbiotic relationships between elites and fraternities can also be found at other times and places. In the

Daniel Weinbren 19

UK, female friendly societies were frequently subject to male patronage, often expressed through the Church or by wealthy men. Although the term ‘fraternity’ has been used to exclude women it can usefully be employed to assess women’s friendly societies. Comparing a female friendly society in an English village largely owned by one family for whom the villagers worked, with the transcontinental affiliated orders, such as the Independent Order of Oddfellows, Manchester Unity, Daniel Weinbren in Chapter 10 finds sufficient similarities to argue that ‘fraternity’ is a term which can embrace them all. Patronage was not restricted to women. There were many patrons of male fraternal organizations, and interest in using notions of fraternity to promote quiescence continued into the twentieth century. Between 1903 and 1930 Henry Ford sought to marginalize the workplace fraternity of trade unions through his company-based fraternity. His house journal, Ford Man, argued that ‘The attitude of the Ford Motor Company towards its employees is not paternal but fraternal. […] Help the other fellow! That’s the Ford spirit. A splendid spirit of co-operation.’85 Its reciprocal philanthropic aims intersected with its engagement with commercial activities and its interest in developing the company’s notions of civility and of communities. Although Prescott concluded that British Freemasonry ‘is rooted in the local community’, in many ways fraternal organizations did not merely serve communities, they also created and nurtured them.86 When Thompson defined the ‘collectivist values’ which distinguished early nineteenth-century English working-class organizations he focused on fraternal organizations and proposed that: The friendly societies, found in so many diverse communities, were a unifying cultural influence. […] Friendly societies did not ‘proceed from’ an idea: both the ideas and the institutions arose in response to certain common experiences. But the distinction is important. In the simple cellular structure of the friendly society, with its workaday ethos of mutual aid, we can see many features which were reproduced in more sophisticated and complex forms in trade unions. […] It is indeed this collective self-consciousness, with its corresponding theory, institutions, discipline and community values which distinguishes the nineteenth-century working class from the eighteenth-century mob.87 In making the case that experience precedes culture, that when a cluster of men recognize themselves as a coherent group this was done via

20 Seven Hundred Years of Fraternal Orders

culture, he saw working-class culture in terms of a conscious commitment to communality. For Thompson fraternal organizations were ‘crystallising an ethos of mutuality very much more widely diffused’.88 Some fraternal organizations helped to forge the community of those engaged in the same trade. The similarity of guilds’ rules among the weavers of London, Oxford, Marlborough and Beverley and the existence of merchant and craft guilds in different towns with reciprocal agreements with one another indicates that networks, the basis of communities, existed.89 In 1815, the London-based men-only guild, the Society of Apothecaries, was licensed by statute to provide a system of education, assessment and registration.90 This suggests that men could gain respectability and status for themselves and their communities through their fraternal organizations. Fraternal organizations’ reciprocity was also often built upon the pageantry associated with the maintenance of communities. Late medieval York, for example, had a plethora of crafts, fraternities and guilds which provided mutual support and promoted religious processions.91 While regulated in different ways from the parade portrayed in the evidence considered by Twycross, it is clear that public displays of collective enthusiasm have long contributed to the maintenance of fraternity and of gendered communities. Religious orders and guilds expressed their corporate being by establishing controlled spaces, whether the nunnery or the guildhall. They expressed their public character through processions. The Flemish example discussed by Twycross shows vividly the politics and hierarchies of these spaces. The parade to mark the opening of the Derby Arboretum in midland England in 1840 was led by the town councillors who were followed by fraternal organizations in strict hierarchical order. All the societies had at least one banner and the larger societies boasted several.92 During a royal visit to Lewes in England, the crowds were policed by officers of fraternal organizations.93 On another parade to honour the King a newspaper reported ‘The Independent Order of Oddfellows appeared the greatest in numbers, most respectable in appearance and most orderly in conduct of any of the numerous societies that attended on this occasion.’94 Processions and parades, and private and public rituals, form a key activity for many fraternal bodies and were frequently promoted as a respectable, mediated means of allowing the working class access to public space. A report in The Odd Fellow, 1840, noted: On the whole the inhabitants of Newport have never witnessed such a procession, nor was any procession ever honoured with so

Daniel Weinbren 21

many thousands of followers and spectators who were to be seen from every window fronting the streets as they passed.95 Some thirty years later Sir George Young made a similar point about a different friendly society. Sometimes after a feast it was able to form a branch because ‘because the people in the neighbourhood had observed the banners and decorations which were very pretty’.96 In 1890 when a British cabinet minister made the case against a ban on street demonstrations he gave the example of friendly societies. He wrote that ‘these men are the pick of the working classes, perfectly orderly with an excellent object in view. It would be disastrous to get the police in collision with them.’97 There are numerous accounts of fraternal organizations’ events which stressed the civility of these bodies and the decorum of their communities.98 While the outward demonstration of fellowship, which enabled observers to see that members of the fraternal body loved one another, could aid both retention and recruitment, it was not always conventionally respectable. When in 1848, Thomas James Duffield, a Mason who kept a beer shop in south London, gave evidence in the court he claimed that he was a ‘respectable character’ who had been an Oddfellow and had arranged an excursion on a steamboat for the Society. He added that he had left that organization following the ‘riotous conduct on board the steamer’ on the excursion when members of the Society ‘threatened to throw the captain overboard’.99 Echoes of this contrasting behaviour can be found in Pamela King’s Chapter 12 analysis of the genesis of the Up Helly Aa celebrations. She suggests that Lerwick’s allmale ‘squads’ are modelled on the Independent Order of Rechabites, a teetotal friendly society, and notes socially trangressive modes of conduct as well as the continuing importance of fraternal organizations’ parades to communities. Many fraternal organizations’ communities were marked by controlled conviviality which avoided the threat of excessive rumbustiousness or revelling by meeting such threats halfway. Connecting notions of charity, commerce, civility and community under the umbrella of structured voluntary, gendered reciprocity illuminates the widespread importance attached to ‘self-help’, ‘respect’ and ‘independence’ and the discourse, articulated through legislation, of the ‘deserving poor’. It is through recognizing both the brotherly connections and the sibling rivalry between, for example, trade unions and Freemasonry, that the importance of organized systems of mutual aid can be evaluated. As Pamela King points out, knowledge of Seville’s Holy Week can inform an understanding of processions in Scotland.

22 Seven Hundred Years of Fraternal Orders

Uniting an apparently disparate number of organizations within one portmanteau, that of an often class-transcendent structure which bolstered both instrumental, practical support and expressive, emotional support, has its problems. There have long been tensions between brotherhood and selectivity. Although members might have gained a sense of egalitarianism within the lodge, as Mary Clawson pointed out, ‘fraternalism bases itself on the principle of exclusion, from which it derives much of its power’.100 Nevertheless, the studies collected here can be seen as written within a broad framework which recognizes both the commonality of fraternal organizations (without denying their individuality) and the ability of these bodies to assimilate members to dominant economic and social orders (while also being able to react against those mores). An emphasis on gendered reciprocity helps to ensure that there is appropriate recognition of women’s active participation within fraternal organizations and how they were often able to exercise influence through alliances with men. This volume offers a means to better understand how fraternal organizations can transcend and also to reinforce social and gender boundaries and enable people to join together in order to, as James Smith Allen puts it, have ‘a good deal of fun’.

Notes 1

2 3 4

5

Nicholas Terpstra, ‘In Loco Parentis: Confraternities and Abandoned Children in Florence and Bologna’, in The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy, ed. by Nicholas Terpstra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 114–31; Lorenzo Polizzotto, ‘The Medici and the Youth Confraternity of the Purification of the Virgin, 1434–1506’, in The Politics of Ritual Kinship, pp. 98–113; Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century, 1590–1710 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 13–14. David Neave, ‘Friendly Societies in Great Britain’, in Social Security Mutualism: The Comparative History of Mutual Benefit Societies, ed. by Marcel van der Linden (Berne: Peter Lang, 1996), pp. 41–64 (p. 60). Simon Cordery, ‘Friendly Societies and the British Labour Movement before 1914’, Journal of the Association of Historians in North Carolina, 3 (1995), 38–51 (p. 39); Simon Cordery, ‘Mutualism, Friendly Societies, and the Genesis of Railway Trade Unions’, Labour History Review, 67 (2002), 263–79.

Daniel Weinbren 23 6

7 8

9

10 11

12 13 14

15

16

Stephen Yeo, ‘Making Membership Meaningful: The Case of Older Cooperative and Mutual Enterprises in Britain’, in Membership and Mutuality: Proceedings of a Seminar Series organised at the LSE Centre for Civil Society, CCS Report Series: Report No. 3, ed. by Nicholas Deakin (London: LSE, 2002), pp. 8–9. John Halstead and Andrew Prescott, ‘Breaking the Barriers: Masonry, Fraternity and Labour’, Labour History Review, 71 (2006), 3–8. Kevin Hetherington, The Badlands of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1997); Bentley Brinkerhoff Gilbert, The Evolution of National Insurance in Great Britain (London: Gilbert Joseph, 1966), pp. 166–7; Donald Read, England 1868–1914: The Age of Urban Democracy (London and New York: Longman, 1979), p. 127; Geoffrey Crossick, An Artisan Elite in Victorian Society: Kentish London 1840–1880 (London: Croom Helm, 1978), pp. 174–98; Robert Q. Gray, The Labour Aristocracy in Victorian Edinburgh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 33, 40, 122–6; Trygve R. Tholfsen, Working Class Radicalism in Mid-Victorian England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977); John Garrard, Democratisation in Britain: Elites, Civil Society and Reform since 1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). James C. Riley, Sick, Not Dead: The Health of British Workingmen during the Mortality Decline (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Geoffrey Finlayson, Citizen, State, and Social Welfare in Britain 1830–1990 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); Barry Supple, The Royal Exchange Assurance: A History of British Insurance 1720–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 310; David T. Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890–1967 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Sheilagh Ogilvie, ‘Rehabilitating the Guilds: A Reply’, Economic History Review, 61 (2008), 175–82 (pp. 180–1). Issues of taxonomy are considered in Daniel Weinbren, ‘“Imagined Families”: Research on Friendly Societies’, Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts für die Geschichte der sozialen Bewegungen, 27 (2002), 117–36, and in Daniel Weinbren and Bob James, ‘Getting a Grip: The Roles of Friendly Societies in Australia and the UK Reappraised’, Labour History, 88 (2005); 87–104. Lynn Dumenil, Freemasonry in American Culture 1880–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. xii. See [accessed 4 December 2009], society publicity. Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World, Oxford Studies in Social History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 425, 507. Martin Gorsky, ‘The Growth and Distribution of English Friendly Societies in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Economic History Review, 51 (1998), 489–511 (p. 503); Alan R. H. Baker, Fraternity among the French Peasantry: Sociability and Voluntary Associations in the Loire Valley, 1815–1914, Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography, 28 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); David Neave, Mutual Aid in the Victorian Countryside: Friendly Societies in the Rural East Riding, 1830–1914 (Hull: Hull University Press, 1991). Lance Lazar, ‘The First Jesuit Confraternities and Marginalized Groups in Sixteenth-Century Rome’, in The Politics of Ritual Kinship, pp. 132–49;

24 Seven Hundred Years of Fraternal Orders

17 18

19

20

21 22

23

24

25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32

Elliott Horowitz, ‘Jewish Confraternal Piety in Sixteenth-Century Ferrara: Continuity and Change’, in The Politics of Ritual Kinship, pp. 150–71. Paul O’Leary, Immigration and Integration: The Irish in Wales, 1798–1922 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), pp. 187, 189. Andrew Prescott, ‘The Unlawful Societies Act of 1799’, in The Canonbury Papers, Volume I: The Social Impact of Freemasonry on the Modern Western World, ed. by Matthew D. J. Scanlan (London: Canonbury Masonic Research Centre, 2002), pp. 116–34; John Walton, Lancashire: A Social History, 1558–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 148–50; Anthony D. Buckley, ‘“On the Club”: Friendly Societies in Ireland’, Irish Economic and Social History, 14 (1987), 39–58. Karin Breuer, ‘Competing Masculinities: Fraternities, Gender and Nationality in the German Confederation, 1815–30’, Gender & History, 20 (2008), 270–87; Dot Jones, ‘Did Friendly Societies Matter? A Study of Friendly Societies in Glamorgan, 1794–1910’, Welsh History Review, 12 (1984/85), 324–49 (p. 345). Roger Burt, ‘Industrial Relations in the British Non-Ferrous Mining Industry in the Nineteenth Century’, Labour History Review, 71 (2006), 57–79 (p. 71); Jessica L. Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire: Freemasonry and British Imperialism, 1717–1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). Robert A. Leeson, Travelling Brothers: The Six Centuries’ Road from Craft Fellowship to Trade Unionism (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1979). On the need for fresh chronological divisions see Andrew Prescott, ‘A History of British Freemasonry, 1425–2000. Farewell Lecture to the Centre for Research into Freemasonry, 20 February 2007’: [accessed 31 January 2009]. James Spry, The History of Odd-Fellowship: Its Origin, Tradition and Objects with a General Review of the Results Arising from its Adoption by the Branch known as the Manchester Unity (London: Pitman, 1867), pp. 50–1. Robert W. Moffrey, A Century of Oddfellowship: Being a Brief Record of the Rise and Progress of the Manchester Unity of the Independent Order of Oddfellows, from its Formation to the Present Time (Manchester: IOOFMU, 1910), p. 207. Spry, p. 47. On this notion of the family, see Daniel Weinbren, ‘The Roles of Families’, in Themes in Local and Regional History, ed. by Ian Donnachie (Milton Keynes: Open University, forthcoming). ‘Guilds’ and ‘gilds’ are terms often used interchangeably. Here one spelling has been adopted. Susan Brigden, ‘Religion and Social Obligation in Early Sixteenth-Century London’, Past and Present, 103 (1984), 67–112 (pp. 104–7). Judith M. Bennett, ‘Conviviality and Charity in Medieval and Early Modern England’, Past and Present, 134 (1992), 19–41 (pp. 33–5). Elaine Clark, ‘Social Welfare and Mutual Aid in the Medieval Countryside’, Journal of British Studies, 33 (1994), 381–406 (p. 404). Andrew Blaikie, ‘Nuclear Hardship or Variant Dependency? Households and the Scottish Poor Law’, Continuity and Change, 17 (2002), 253–80 (p. 253). Richard Smith, ‘Charity, Self-Interest and Welfare: Reflections from Demographic and Family History’, in Charity, Self-Interest and Welfare in the English Past, ed. by Martin J. Daunton (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 23–50 (p. 28).

Daniel Weinbren 25 33

34

35

36

37 38

39

40 41 42

43

44 45

Peter Laslett, ‘Family, Kinship and Collectivity as Systems of Support in Pre-industrial Europe: A Consideration of the “Nuclear Hardship” Hypothesis’, Continuity and Change, 3 (1988), 153–75 (p. 166). Mary S. Hartman, The Household and the Making of History: A Subversive View of the Western Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), especially pp. 50, 262. Sydney Webb and Beatrice Webb, The History of Trade Unions (London: Longmans, 1893, revised 1920), p. 14. The Webbs noted how the leaders of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers and the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners trade unions sought to blur the distinctions between friendly societies and trade unions in evidence to a Royal Commission of 1867. They refer to the unions as ‘primarily national friendly societies’ and ‘mainly occupied in the work of an insurance company’ on pp. 265–6. S. David Smith, ‘Women’s Admission to Guilds in Early-Modern England: The Case of the York Merchant Tailors’ Company 1693–1776’, Gender & History, 17 (2005), 99–126. Frederick Morton Eden, The State of the Poor or An History of the Labouring Classes in England, 3 vols (London: Davis, 1797), I, pp. 595–7. Edward W. Brabook, Provident Societies and Industrial Welfare (London: Blackie & Son, 1898), p. 57; English Gilds, ed. by Joshua Toulmin Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1870, reprinted 1963); Cornelius Walford, Gilds: Their Origin, Constitution, Objects and Later History (London: George Redway, 1888), p. 5. Charles E. Ward, ‘Forestry in King’s Lynn and District’ was published both in Foresters’ Directory and the Guide to King’s Lynn, 1906 which were produced by the Ancient Order of Foresters to mark their holding of their High Court in the town in that year. Ward was the High Chief Ranger. John H. Clapham, An Economic History of Modern Britain, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), I, pp. 296–8. Edward P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, rev. edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 461, 462, 464. Michael John Walker, ‘The Extent of Guild Control of Trades in England, c. 1660–1820’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge, 1986), p. 345; Antony Black, Guilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 26–7. Martin Gorsky, Patterns of Philanthropy: Charity and Society in NineteenthCentury Bristol (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1999), p. 115; Bennett, pp. 33–5; Clark, ‘Social Welfare’, p. 404; Jacqueline Cooper, The Well-Ordered Town: A Story of Saffron Walden, Essex 1792–1862 (Saffron Walden: Cooper Publications, 2000), p. 183; Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Simon Cordery, British Friendly Societies, 1750–1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), p. 135; Clark, British Clubs. Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Dutton, 1919; repr. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), pp. 154–97. David T. Beito, ‘“This Enormous Army”: The Mutual Aid Tradition of American Fraternal Societies before the Twentieth Century’, Social Philosophy and Policy, 14 (1997), 20–38 (pp. 22–3).

26 Seven Hundred Years of Fraternal Orders 46

47 48 49 50

51

52

53

54

55 56

57 58 59

On friendly societies and the correlation between associational density and political participation see Martin Gorsky, ‘Mutual Aid and Civil Society: Friendly Societies in Nineteenth-Century Bristol’, Urban History, 25 (1998), 302–22 (p. 316); David G. Green, Working-Class Patients and the Medical Establishment: Self-Help in Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to 1948 (Aldershot: Gower/Maurice Temple Smith, 1985); Garrard, pp. 6, 184. Foresters’ Miscellany (March, 1850); J. Frome Wilkinson, History of the Friendly Society Movement (London: Longmans Green, 1891), p. 67. Oddfellows’ Magazine (November 1914), 701. Letizia Paoli, Mafia Brotherhoods: Organized Crime, Italian Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 41. Gorsky, Patterns, p. 181; Keith Laybourn, The Guild of Help and the Changing Face of Edwardian Philanthropy: The Guild of Help, Voluntary Work and The State, 1904–1919 (Lampeter: Mellen, 1994). Merry E. Wiesner, ‘Guilds, Male Bonding and Women’s Work in Early Modern Germany’, Gender & History, 1 (1989) 125–37; Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Women in the Crafts in Sixteenth-Century Lyon’, in Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, ed. by Barbara A. Hanawalt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 167–97. Sheilagh Ogilvie, ‘How does Social Capital affect Women? Guilds and Communities in Early Modern Germany’, American Historical Review, 109 (2004), 325–59 (p. 356). Clare Crowson, ‘Engendering the Guilds: Seamstresses, Tailors and the Clash of Corporate Identities in Old Regime France’, French Historical Studies, 23 (2000), 339–71; Dora Dumont, ‘Women and Guilds in Bologna: The Ambiguities of “Marginality”’, Radical History Review, 70 (1998) 4–25; Smith, ‘Women’s Admission’. The point is made in several chapters in Craft Guilds in the Early Modern Low Countries: Work, Power and Representation, ed. by Maarten Prak and others (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). Ogilvie, ‘Rehabilitating the Guilds’, p. 177; Sheilagh Ogilvie, ‘Guilds, Efficiency and Social Capital: Evidence from German Proto-Industry’, Economic History Review, 57 (2004), 286–333 (pp. 307, 324). Mary Ann Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 3. Leonora Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes, Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850, rev. edn (London: Routledge, 2002) presented this notion. The qualifications are derived from the following: Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Nicola Phillips, Women in Business, 1700–1850 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), p. 255. Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). Janet M. Burke and Margaret C. Jacob, ‘French Freemasonry, Women, and Feminist Scholarship’, Journal of Modern History, 68 (1996), 513–49; Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood; Carnes, Secret Ritual; Mark C. Carnes, ‘Middle-Class Men and the Solace of Fraternal Ritual’, in Meanings of Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, ed. by Mark C.

Daniel Weinbren 27

60

61

62

63

64

65 66

67 68 69

70

71 72 73

74

Carnes and Clyde Griffin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 37–66. Mary Ann Clawson, ‘Nineteenth-Century Women’s Auxiliaries and Fraternal Orders’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 12 (1986), 40–61 (pp. 43, 44). Eric J. Hobsbawm, ‘Culture and Gender in European Bourgeois Society 1870–1914’, in Technology, Literacy, and the Evolution of Society: Implications of the Work of Jack Goody, ed. by David R. Olson and Michael Cole (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006), pp. 101–14 (pp. 103, 107). Cathie Lloyd, ‘Women Migrants and Political Activism in France’, in Gender and Ethnicity in Contemporary Europe, ed. by Jacqueline Andall (Oxford: Berg, 2003), pp. 97–116 (p. 97). John Brewer, ‘Commercialisation and Politics’, in The Birth of the Consumer Society: The Commercialisation of Eighteenth Century England, ed. by Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and John Harold Plumb (London: Routledge 1982), pp. 197–262 (p. 215); John Smail, ‘Credit, Risk, and Honor in Eighteenth-Century Commerce’, Journal of British Studies, 44 (2005), 439–56 (p. 454). Paul Elliot and Stephen Daniels, ‘The “School of True, Useful and Universal Science”? Freemasonry, Natural Philosophy and Scientific Culture in Eighteenth-Century England’, British Journal for the History of Science, 39 (2006), 207–29 (p. 207). Clark, British Clubs, p. 5. Marco H. D. van Leeuwen, ‘Historical Welfare Economics in the Nineteenth Century: Mutual Aid and Private Insurance for Burial, Sickness, Old Age, Widowhood, and Unemployment in the Netherlands’, in Charity and Mutual Aid in Europe and America since 1800, ed. by Bernard Harris and Paul Bridgen (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 89–130 (pp. 95–7). Beito, From Mutual Aid, p. 11. Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 1. E. Michael Mendelson, ‘Primitive Secret Societies’, in Secret Societies, ed. by Norman Ian MacKenzie (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), pp. 20–37 (p. 22). David Vincent, The Culture of Secrecy: Britain, 1832–1998 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 59. Following the 1834 prosecution of six Dorset men for swearing illegal oaths as part of a friendly society initiation ritual, the Independent Order of Oddfellows, Manchester Unity abolished its traditional oath of mutual support. Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood, p. 138. [accessed 3 November 2009]. Stephanie L. Barczewski, Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 79–80. Anthony D. Buckley, ‘The Chosen Few: Biblical Texts in a Society with Secrets’, in Negotiating Identity: Rhetoric, Metaphor and Social Drama in Northern Ireland, ed. by Anthony D. Buckley and Mary Catherine Kenney (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), pp. 173–93. On the significance of the swearing of friendly-society oaths, see Malcolm Chase,

28 Seven Hundred Years of Fraternal Orders

75

76

77 78 79

80

81

82 83 84

85

86

87 88 89 90

Early Trade Unionism: Fraternity, Skill and the Politics of Labour (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. 167. Malcolm Chase, ‘A Sort of Corporation (tho’ Without a Charter): The Guild Tradition and the Emergence of British Trade Unionism’, in Guilds and Associations in Europe, 900–1900, ed. by Ian Anders Gadd and Patrick Wallis (London: Centre for Metropolitan History, 2006), pp. 187–224 (pp. 189–90, 192, 193). Laws for the Government of the Independent Order of OddFellows, of the Manchester Unity (Manchester: Richmond & Froggett, 1841) quoted in Cordery, British Friendly Societies, p. 49. Spry, p. 61. Quoted in Dave Bathe, ‘Oddfellows and Morris Dancing in a Peak District Village’, in Folk Music Journal, 5 (1985), 4–47 (p. 40). Gorsky, Patterns, pp. 18, 117; Frank K. Prochaska, Christianity and Social Service in Modern Britain: The Disinherited Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 11; David Edward Owen, English Philanthropy, 1660–1960 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 472; Bernard Harris, The Origins of the British Welfare State: Social Welfare in England and Wales, 1800–1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), pp. 72, 77. Sara Horrell and Deborah Oxley, ‘Work and Prudence: Household Responses to Income Variation in Nineteenth Century Britain’, European Review of Economic History, 4 (2000), 27–58. Alfred P. Wadsworth, ‘The First Manchester Sunday Schools’, in Essays in Social History, ed. by Michael W. Flinn and Thomas Christopher Smout (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 100–22 (pp. 101, 117, 119). Peter H. J. H. Gosden, The Friendly Societies in England, 1815–1875 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961), pp. 20–1; Keith D. M. Snell, ‘The Sunday School Movement in England and Wales: Child Labour, Denominational Control and Working-Class Culture’, Past and Present, 164 (1999), 122–68 (pp. 130–1). Gorsky, Patterns, pp. 117, 119. Owen (p. 424) notes the pattern among philanthropists of being either single or childless. Nicholas Terpstra, ‘Appenticeship in Social Welfare: From Confraternal Charity to Municipal Poor Relief in Early Modern Italy’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 25 (1994), 101–20. Wayne A. Lewchuk, ‘Men and Monotony: Fraternalism as a Managerial Strategy at the Ford Motor Company’, Journal of Economic History, 53 (1993), 824–56 (pp. 845–6). Andrew Prescott, ‘A Body Without a Soul? The Philosophical Outlook of British Freemasonry 1700–2000’, paper given to conferences at the Free University of Brussels Cornerstone Society and Canonbury Masonic Research Centre, November–December, 2003. Thompson, pp. 462–3. Thompson, p. 463. Chase, Early Trade Unionism, p. 24. Penelope J. Corfield, ‘From Poison Peddlers to Civic Worthies: The Reputation of the Apothecaries in Georgian England’, Social History of Medicine, 22 (2009), 1–21 (pp. 16–17).

Daniel Weinbren 29 91

92

93 94 95 96

97 98 99 100

Heather Swanson, ‘Crafts, Fraternities and Guilds in Late Medieval York’, in The Merchant Taylors of York: A History of the Craft and Company from the Fourteenth to Twentieth Centuries, ed. by R. Barrie Dobson and David M. Smith (York: University of York, 2006), pp. 7–22. John Claudius Loudon, The Arboretum: Catalogue of Trees and Shrubs (1840) held by Derby Local Studies Library. (Address to Town Council, drawings and account of the grand opening), pp. 92–5, [accessed 15 December 2009]. Quoted in The Town Book of Lewes 1702–1837, ed. by Verana Smith, vol. 69 (Lewes: Sussex Record Society, 1972), pp. 270–3. Report on the Coronation of 1830, quoted in Moffrey, p. 43. Report on the anniversary celebrations of the Temple of Peace Lodge, Newport in The Odd Fellow, 1 August 1840. Discussion of the paper of Francis G. P. Neison, ‘Some Statistics of the Affiliated Orders of Friendly Societies (Oddfellows and Foresters)’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 40 (1877), 87–9. Letter of 3 May 1890, PRO MEPOL/2/248 cited in Donald C. Richter, Riotous Victorians (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981), p. 159. Warwick Advertiser, 8 June 1894. Old Bailey Proceedings, trial on-line Reference Number: t18480228-934 (28 February 1848). Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood, p. 11.

2 Men and Women in the Guild Returns Andrew Prescott

In introducing his 1891 book, Two Thousand Years of Gild Life, the Revd Joseph Malet Lambert described medieval guilds as follows: ‘They were very largely the Chambers of Commerce, the Friendly Societies, the Trades Unions, the Freemasonry, and in some degree the Joint Stock Companies, of the times when the merchant lived in his warehouse, which was also his factory as well as his shop.’1 Lambert’s quotation vividly illustrates the way in which the medieval guilds have haunted the imagination of those interested in later fraternal societies. The fundamental principle of a voluntary association contributing to a common fund for objects of mutual, charitable and social benefit was first established on a large scale by the guilds. The guilds also elaborated many of the characteristic features of later fraternal organizations. The most important contribution of the guild to the wider development of fraternalism was the articulation of the concept that a voluntary organization could be a surrogate family, with fellow members becoming brothers and sisters, but the guilds also pioneered many other fundamental features of fraternal organizations, such as the members’ feast as a central social activity; the holding of regular business meetings of the membership; the election of officers to hold funds and property and to ensure the members’ compliance with a set of ordinances; the use of processions as the chief expression of the organization’s public face; the administration of oaths to new members and officers; and the use of special clothing to denote membership. Guilds also pioneered much of the vocabulary taken over by later fraternal bodies, most familiarly the names used for officers, such as master, warden, deacon, and steward.2 The guilds have been seen as the great prototype of fraternalism and since the early twentieth century have been perceived widely as an ideal form of pre-industrial social organization promoting brotherhood and 30

Andrew Prescott 31

mutual solidarity. Malet Lambert was himself very active as an educational and social reformer in Hull and his interest in the history of guilds was closely connected with his concern to improve the quality of life in the city.3 The importance of the guilds in the British social imagination is evident from the way in which many different modern clubs and societies, ranging from students’ organizations to groups promoting such activities as embroidery or bell-ringing, style themselves as guilds. Well-known modern proponents of the social benefits of guilds included such guild socialists as Arthur Penty, G. D. H. Cole and A. R. Orage, who proposed that the restoration of the guilds would help eradicate the evils of industrialization and restore a ‘golden age’ of creativity, craftsmanship and pride in work.4 Penty, in a celebrated book published in 1906, argued explicitly for the revival of the guilds in order to enhance the quality of modern life, declaring that ‘Being social, religious and political as well as industrial institutions, the Gilds postulated in their organization the essential unity of life.’5 Penty approvingly quoted the architectural historian William Lethaby’s statement that ‘the masons’ and carpenters’ gilds were faculties or colleges of education in those arts, and every town was, so to say, a craft university’.6 It might be anticipated that guild socialist writers such as Cole would emphasize parallels between guilds and trade unions, but, since Cole saw trade unions as a product of the cataclysmic process of industrialization, he argued, like the Webbs, that there was no direct connection between the guilds and modern trade unions.7 As a result, the history of guilds in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was largely neglected until recently, although they were still very active at this time in many British towns and cities.8 The assumption that guilds offer lessons for the improvement of modern life has inevitably distorted understanding of their history. For example, Penty and other guild socialists, wishing to suggest that guilds provided an alternative to the capitalist system, referred to ‘the guild system’, implying that guilds were more homogenous and fixed in their structure and functions than was in fact the case. Likewise, the apparent parallels between guilds and such organizations as Freemasonry and friendly societies have encouraged researchers to focus on a search for links between these organizations while neglecting other aspects of their history – the baleful effects of such an approach can be seen from the extent to which the history of Freemasonry in Britain has been largely reduced to an inconclusive argument about its origins. The way in which guilds seem to prefigure many modern social organizations, together with the view that the guilds offer an alternative to the modern culture of

32 Men and Women in the Guild Returns

mass production, makes it difficult to approach the history of the guilds without suffering from an anachronistic taint. The idealization of medieval guilds has also influenced views of the relative social and economic roles of the genders in pre-industrial England. Guild socialist writers such as Penty seem to have taken little interest in the role of women to the guilds – if anything Penty saw one of the benefits of guilds as being their sense of masculine bonhomie. The guild socialist perception of the medieval guilds was deeply influenced by the French historian Georges Renard, whose history of the guilds was introduced to Britain by G. D. H. Cole. While Renard noted that ‘women were not excluded from gild life’ and described a number of women’s guilds such as the silk workers in Paris,9 he does not give the issue of women’s roles in medieval guilds much prominence and, in presenting the guild as a family, Renard saw guilds as dominated by men: Not only was father responsible for son, brother for brother, and uncle for nephew, not only were the ties of unity strengthened at regular intervals by guild feasts and banquets, but the ordinary dryness of the statutes was redeemed by rules of real brotherhood.10 Indeed, Renard saw the importation of female and other low-paid workers by capitalist masters as one of the means by which the guilds were undermined in the early modern period.11 Nevertheless, despite the way in which guild socialist writers frequently emphasized the male nature of the guilds, Judith Smart has pointed out that the ideas of guild socialism had a resonance for those members of the Women’s Political Association and Peace Army, who established a ‘Guild Hall Commune’ in Melbourne at the time of the Wharf Labourers’ strike in 1917. Smart suggests that: The ideas of guild socialism had particular resonance and relevance for the new social order to which these women aspired, given the focus of both the guild movement and feminists on selfmanagement, self-respect, quality of work, community and what was understood to be the specifically ‘spiritual nature of the problem of social reorganisation’.12 At roughly the time that the women in Melbourne were establishing their Guild Hall Commune, Alice Clark was working in England on her pioneering study of The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, which was published in 1919. Clark had been an active suffragette, serving on the Executive Committee of the National Union of Women’s

Andrew Prescott 33

Suffrage Societies.13 She amassed an impressive array of evidence to suggest that there was, prior to the eighteenth century, a ‘golden age’ in which men and women worked side by side manufacturing craft goods at home, a period which was brought to an end by industrialization. Clark sought to show that the late-Victorian treatment of women was a relatively recent phenomenon; as Marjorie McIntosh has put it, ‘since women had proved themselves capable of filling important economic roles even during the Middle Ages, women of the present could do likewise’.14 Perhaps influenced by guild socialism, Clark placed particular stress on evidence of women’s membership of guilds to demonstrate that in the pre-industrial period men and women frequently worked closely together, declaring that ‘There can be no doubt that the sisters shared fully in the social and religious life of the Gilds; it is also perfectly clear that the wife was regarded by the Gild or Company as her husband’s partner.’15 Initial criticisms of Clark’s thesis of a ‘golden age’ were made not by historians of guilds but rather by historians studying the process of industrialization. Thus, Ivy Pinchbeck, in a study published in 1930, argued that while women were certainly in some respects disadvantaged by industrialization, on the whole it created many new opportunities for them to become engaged in working life.16 It is only recently that historians interested in pre-industrial society have questioned Clark’s thesis and have suggested that, while there is indeed considerable evidence that women successfully undertook a wide range of economic activities in London and elsewhere during the later medieval and early modern periods, much of the work they undertook was low-paid and casual in character. Judith Bennett, for example, found that the number of women members of the brewers’ guild in London at the beginning of the fifteenth century had been consistently under-reported. However, Bennett points out that the majority of these women engaged in huckstering at the lower end of the trade. The more prosperous members of the London brewing trade, such as the hostellers, were all male. As brewing began to develop into a larger-scale economic enterprise from the end of the sixteenth century, the casual women hucksters inevitably became excluded from the trade. Bennett seeks to replace the vision of a lost ‘golden age’ under the guilds with a narrative of continuity in the economic status of women who are always left with the casual, small-scale, marginal economic activities. As she has put it, ‘I began to see it not as a story of transformation in women’s lives but instead of a story of remarkable stability for women despite considerable socioeconomic change.’17

34 Men and Women in the Guild Returns

Bennett’s stress on the low status of women in the London brewing trade has been echoed by scholars working on other professions elsewhere. Maryanne Kowaleski for example found in her study of fourteenth-century Exeter that women generally held low-status positions within trades and often switched from one trade to another.18 Likewise, Diane Hutton in her study of Shrewsbury found that women were often engaged in less lucrative crafts such as spinning, which could be performed at home.19 While Hutton found some evidence of guild membership by women, she also stressed the uncertainty of the documentary evidence for women’s role in economic life. However, others have cautioned against excessive pessimism with regard to the economic and social roles of women in the later Middle Ages. Kay Lacey, for example, has pointed out that the regulations governing apprenticeship in London assumed that both men and women would act as masters and apprentices, and Lacey lists a number of examples of women acting in both capacities.20 Lacey has also developed the earlier research of Marian Dale and emphasized the importance of silk working as providing a lucrative skilled trade for women,21 although, as Bennett and Kowaleski have stressed, the women silk workers never formed a guild.22 Again stressing the legal position of women in London, Caroline Barron has pointed out that although women could not hold office in the guilds or city government, a married woman could join her husband in business or trade independently in her own right.23 In words that seem to re-echo Alice Clark, Barron declares that married women ‘were frequently working partners in marriages between economic equals’. She concludes that ‘The picture of the lifestyle of women in medieval London is quite a rosy one; their range of options and prosperity differed only slightly from those men who shared their level of prosperity.’24 Barron sees these opportunities as reflecting favourable labour market conditions during the 150 years after the Black Death. Similar arguments have been developed by Jeremy Goldberg in his study of York, where he found many women being drawn into a variety of trades during the period between 1410 and 1450.25 Part of the reason for these conflicting interpretations is undoubtedly a failure to give sufficient weight to the effects of economic and demographic change on the work opportunities available to women. In proposing a ‘golden age’, Alice Clark, influenced by late-Victorian and Edwardian enthusiasm for the guilds as an alternative to industrial society, saw the guilds – and by extension the pre-industrial economy – as far more static and structured than was the case. The way in which the economic status of women in pre-industrial society was not fixed but shifted in reaction to economic, demographic, cultural and regional change has been recently extensively illustrated by McIntosh in what is

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probably the most through analysis since Alice Clark’s book of the role of working women in English society from 1300 to 1500.26 McIntosh replaces Clark’s ‘golden age’ with a much more nuanced picture which, by drawing on source material not previously used for study of these themes, namely petitions presented to the various equity courts, also helps bring to life the working conditions and opportunities of individual women in pre-industrial England. McIntosh also sees the period after the Black Death as offering improved opportunities for women on the labour market which subsequently disappeared, but one of the most striking contrasts between McIntosh’s work and earlier historiography is that there is hardly any mention of the guilds. Previous studies had placed great emphasis on guild membership as an indicator of female status, but for McIntosh the issue appears almost irrelevant. This may be explained by recent shifts in views of the nature of guilds. For scholars of Alice Clark’s generation, the distinction between craft guilds, regulating a trade in a particular town, and religious guilds, intended to support religious observances and charitable benefactions, was seen as axiomatic. Recent scholarship has argued that such strict demarcations are anachronistic and did not exist in the Middle Ages. As Elspeth Veale has observed: The distinction drawn [by historians of medieval England] between fraternity – an association which concerned itself particularly with religious ceremonies, especially the rites of burial, and with the social activities which its members enjoyed – and organised mistery may well have been drawn too sharply.27 Although various fraternities, fellowships, crafts and ‘mysteries’ (all terms used in medieval documents) were an all-pervading feature of medieval town life, there was no rigid legal categorization of them – they were loose and flexible organizations. The majority of these associations were not concerned with trade at all, and, as Susan Reynolds has commented: Just because words like guild, fraternity and society were used so widely, the associations they describe could be very various. Historians have themselves deepened their own confusion by their odd convention of using the word ‘guild’ in preference to all the others, and then assuming that guilds were basically trade associations.28 The most widespread form of guild in the later Middle Ages was a voluntary association, formed in honour of a particular saint and linked

36 Men and Women in the Guild Returns

to a local church, to commemorate the saint and to provide communal prayers for living and dead members. Members of the association might also enjoy various other benefits or contribute jointly to other objects of wider utility. Fraternities of this kind were characteristic of both town and countryside; they were one of the fundamental social units of later medieval life, as all-pervasive as the county, parish or manor. As these religious fraternities developed, they assumed extra functions. It was from religious associations of this kind that the more tradeoriented fraternities emerged. In London, for example, a fraternity at the Church of All Hallows, Bread Street, was founded by a mercer and a salter. Most subsequent bequests came from salters. Eventually, Salters’ Hall was built on land owned by the fraternity and the chapel of the guild became known as the Salters’ Chapel.29 A similar process occurred in York, where during the fifteenth century the Fraternity of St John the Baptist became associated with the tailors and the Guild of Holy Trinity in Fossgate with the mercers.30 In a number of towns, religious fraternities also assumed a civic role. In the thirteenth century, the guild merchant had been the chief means by which burgesses undertook corporate activities and was the effective government of many towns. The guild merchant declined in the fourteenth century, and religious fraternities emerged in a number of places as a mechanism to control the election of local officials and to minimize factional conflict. In Westminster, the Guild of the Assumption became a surrogate town council,31 while in Norwich, under the terms of a 1452 agreement, all aldermen were obliged to join the Guild of St George.32 Likewise, in the small town of Windsor, the election of the mayor and bailiffs was controlled by the Holy Trinity Gild.33 The chief driving force in the way in which these fraternities with primarily religious and social functions assumed trade responsibilities was the increasing requirement from the late fourteenth century imposed by royal and civic ordinances for individual crafts to undertake trade regulation.34 Because the emergence of these guilds was an ad hoc solution to immediate legislative requirements, trade regulation was carried on in a very haphazard fashion. Even more importantly, where such regulation was not required, guilds might not acquire trade regulation functions. Barrie Dobson has observed of Durham that: One is left with the overwhelming impression that, had it not been for the need to impose a procession and sequence of plays on the

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crafts of the city at their own expense, there would have been no formal guild regulations at all.35 In smaller towns such as Grimsby, craft guilds did indeed fail to develop.36 A major reason for the assumption of trade regulation responsibilities by various fraternities from the 1360s onwards was the impact of labour legislation. The Black Death had created a labour shortage and this resulted in legislation from 1351 to control wages and regulate terms of service. Between 1351 and 1430 more than a third of the parliaments passed legislation relating to labour. Much of this consisted of attempts to update increasingly elaborate tariffs of wages.37 The enforcement of this legislation became the responsibility of the Justices of the Peace. The building trades were a particular problem. The bulk of the surviving prosecutions under the labour legislation concerned carpenters and masons, and a number of the statutes specifically denounce the taking of excessive wages by these trades. Sarah Rees Jones has argued forcefully that increasing urban resentment of the powers of the JPs led to an enactment in 1363 stating that craftsmen were to join a single trade and that they were to be regulated by members of their craft.38 She suggests that this gave a major impetus to the assumption of regulatory powers by crafts. Rees Jones argues that the emergence of guilds as regulatory authorities fostered the development of oligarchies within each trade. The picture presented by Rees Jones of the process by which fraternities acquired powers in regulating trade and the process by which they fostered the emergence of oligarchies apparently contradicts the suggestion by Barron, Goldberg and McIntosh that the period from the time of the Black Death offered new economic opportunities for women. The oligarchies described by Rees Jones were dominated by men. Would not their emergence have restricted the economic opportunities available to women? How far were women involved in the wider activities of fraternities in the town? How can we get a clearer picture of the respective roles of men and women in guilds in the late fourteenth century? One major source survives purporting to give a snapshot of the guild activity during Richard II’s reign which has been little studied so far from the point of view of the relative roles of men and women in the guilds of late fourteenth-century England. In 1388, the large number of such fraternities prompted what might be described as a secret-societies scare. At the parliament which met at Cambridge in September and October 1388, the Commons presented a series of demands to improve the condition of the realm.39 Their first

38 Men and Women in the Guild Returns

request was that the badges and liveries, such as distinctive hoods, distributed by the King and other great lords to their followers, should be abolished. Second, the Commons asked that ‘all gilds, fraternities and their common chests shall be abolished […] saving always chantries ordained in ancient times for the souls of their founders’.40 The Commons were concerned that fraternities with a common livery were being used as a means of promoting false lawsuits and riotous attacks. They stressed that they were not hostile to fraternities established for genuine religious purposes, but were concerned that fraternities were being used as a cover for illegal activities. Similar worries about liveries and the promotion of false lawsuits had been expressed by the Commons before, but the focus on fraternities was new. Although the King did not agree to the abolition of guilds and fraternities, on 1 November 1388, sheriffs throughout England were ordered to make two proclamations.41 In the first, the masters and wardens of guilds and brotherhoods were ordered to make within three months written returns summarizing the following information: the manner and authority for the formation of the guild; the manner and form of all oaths, gatherings, feasts and general meetings of the brothers and sisters; the liberties, privileges, statutes, ordinances, usages and customs of the guild; and finally, full details of all the lands and goods held by the guild. A second proclamation ordered masters, wardens and surveyors of ‘misteries’ and crafts to bring the royal charters or letters patent held by them into Chancery for inspection. The legacy of these proclamations is a remarkable series of returns made during the early months of 1389 giving details of the ordinances of approximately 500 guilds.42 The guild returns of 1389 are among the most important sources for the study of guilds in medieval England. Without them, we should be largely ignorant of the activities of fraternities before 1450. For many of the guilds represented in these returns, very little other information survives prior to their dissolution in 1547. The returns are particularly rich in information about guilds in small towns and rural parishes, for which other sources can be very sparse. However, these 500 returns represent only a small proportion of the guilds active in 1389. The majority of the surviving returns are from East Anglia and Lincolnshire, with 289, over 55 per cent, from Norfolk and Lincolnshire. While there are further substantial groups of returns from Cambridgeshire, London and Suffolk, for many counties, such as Kent, Dorset and Lancashire, just one return for each survives. The skewed geographical distribution of the surviving returns reflects a variety of factors. The returns are mainly preserved in a chaotic artificial

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class in the Public Record Office, known as the Chancery Miscellanea, and some returns may have strayed or be lost. The discovery by Caroline Barron of four returns from London among the manuscripts of Richard Rawlinson in the Bodleian Library confirms that some returns have been extracted from the public records over the years, and further returns may be lying unidentified elsewhere. However, it is also likely that, for many of the other counties under-represented in the surviving returns, such returns were simply not made. Just as the survival of rolls of Justices of the Peace and other local judicial records is related to movements of the court of King’s bench,43 so the pattern of the survival of the guild returns may reflect a concentration by the Chancery or another agency on those counties for which the largest number of returns survive. The vast majority of the surviving returns (368) are in Latin, with another 57 in French. Particularly interesting, however, are the 59 returns in English, one of the earliest occasions on which English makes an appearance on such a large scale in the national archives. To give a flavour of the returns, a good example is a return for a fraternity in Dronfield in Derbyshire, just south of Sheffield.44 It is described as a certain guild or fraternity in honour of St Mary in the parish church of Dronfield for the maintenance of a light, chapel and two chaplains there. The return is made in the name of the aldermen and keepers of the fraternity. It begins by describing the circumstances of the foundation of the guild, in 1349, the year of the Black Death. It emphasizes that the purpose of the foundation was not only to honour the Virgin, but also to offer prayers for the health of the King and Queen, the peace and tranquillity of the realm, and for all living brothers and sisters and all past benefactors of the guild. Such a formulation, of course, helped emphasize the loyal and peaceable intentions of the fraternity. The return then gives details of the ordinances of the guild. It is first stated that all the brothers and sisters should swear to make every reasonable effort to support the maintenance of the chapel and services. But the function of the fraternity went beyond this immediate pious intent. The most characteristic feature of all the religious fraternities was the provision of funeral benefits. The Dronfield guild provided that on the day of his burial each brother should have around him 12 candles and each sister six candles. In memory of the dead brother or sister, all members of the guild would give a pauper a halfpenny on the day of his burial. The benefits of membership were not only available after death, however. It was ordained that if any brother or sister became impoverished through no fault of their own and could not

40 Men and Women in the Guild Returns

work, they should have a halfpenny a day from the funds of the guild or should live with another brother or sister. Litigation in fourteenth-century England was expensive and ineffective, and arbitration was preferred as an initial means of settling disputes.45 The Dronfield fraternity provided a framework for this, by ordaining that no brother or sister would prosecute another member of the guild without first having placed their case before the alderman or another brother of the guild. This was dangerously close to the kind of interference with the judicial process which had caused concern in parliament, and the return stressed that the brothers and sisters had agreed to this ‘without swearing or corporal oath’. The Dronfield fraternity held an annual meeting. The return stresses that, when the brothers and sisters attended this meeting, they wore their own clothing, apparently a response to parliament’s concern about liveries. At this meeting, all the brothers and sisters examined the state of the guild, heard the accounts, and appointed aldermen. Anyone of good and honest reputation who wished to become a brother or sister could do so, subject to the approval of the aldermen and one member of the fraternity. The return concludes with a list of the lands, rents and reversions belonging to the fraternity. The fundamental characteristics of the Dronfield fraternity are repeated throughout the returns, and the family resemblance is evident even for fraternities from larger cities such as Lincoln. This can be seen from the return, again in Latin, of the fraternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary established by the masons of Lincoln.46 The return is made in the name of the ‘graceman’, a local term used for masters of guilds. It states that the fraternity was established by the direction and advice of the masons in the year 1313. Although the return probably incorporates details of practices adopted later than 1313, this document is nevertheless of interest as one of the earliest descriptions from England of an organization associated with working stonemasons. The ordinances state that the brothers and sisters of the guild should meet together under penalty of a pound of wax, and take the guild’s candle to the appointed church, where it would burn on all feast days of the year. As in Dronfield, the provision of funeral benefits was a central concern of the fraternity. When any member died in the city, all members assembled with four candles, which were to be lit at Mass where the body was interred. At the same time, bread was given to the poor in honour of the deceased, with the graceman providing one penny from the guild funds and each of the wardens and members a halfpenny. Should a brother or sister die outside the city, the guild would commemorate their passing in the same way. More prestigious treatment

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could be procured by making a bequest to the guild: for a bequest of two shillings, a Mass would be said annually; for four shillings, two Masses, and so on. In the event of a brother or sister going on a pilgrimage abroad, the pilgrim was seen off from the city gates by the guild, and received a halfpenny from each member of the guild. On return, they received a hero’s welcome at the city gates, and were conducted to the cathedral ‘with joy and honour’. Like the Dronfield fraternity, the masons’ guild at Lincoln assisted impoverished members, although the amount offered was modest, just sixpence a year for a period of up to three years, to be repaid when the member’s circumstances improved. Again as at Dronfield, the fraternity provided its members with protection against litigation. Brothers or sisters who began litigation against each other while the guild was still trying to arbitrate between them were fined. It was also stipulated that if any brother or sister was arrested for any reason, except theft or murder, then the brethren would come to his or her aid and assist as brethren should do (the exclusion for theft and murder again suggests that the author of the return was conscious of parliament’s anxieties about false lawsuits). The members of the guild met together to manage its affairs annually on the day after Easter, at a gathering known as a morning speech. Anyone who failed to attend the morning speech was fined half a pound of wax. There were also fines for those who refused the office of graceman, warden or deacon. The fraternal feast, held on the day of the procession with the candle, was the major social occasion of the fraternity, and it was stipulated that the fraternity would then offer a good meal of meat or fish with bread and mead to as many poor persons as there were brothers and sisters in the guild. To support these activities, careful management of guild funds was required, and a number of the ordinances are concerned with finance. On entering the guild, every brother or sister paid four shillings or one quarter of barley, and also gave four pence, one to the deacon, one to the clerk, and two to the funds for the feast. Each brother was required to pay one farthing a week during the year. There were strict regulations about not retaining any guild property. Finally, all the masons who were members of the guild agreed that they would give 40 pence towards the cost of the candle each time they took an apprentice. This is the only explicitly recorded link between the fraternity and the craft of masonry. The focus of the Lincoln masons’ guild as presented in the 1389 return was on religious, social and mutual benefits. However, it was from precisely this kind of fraternity that craft guilds would emerge, a process that

42 Men and Women in the Guild Returns

can be seen at Lincoln from the inclusion in the ordinances of the Tylers’ Guild that all ‘tylers’ working in the city should join the guild and that no brother should do anything underhand to wrong another in working his craft.47 The Dronfield return describes its members as brothers and sisters. Although women receive only half the number of funeral candles awarded to men, the return otherwise makes no distinction between the male and female members of the guild. It is explicitly stated that both the men and the women must attend the annual meeting of the fraternity, suggesting that they had equal roles in its government. A similar feature is apparent in the Lincoln masons’ guild, where women appear to enjoy complete equality with men. The appearance of brothers and sisters apparently on a more or less equal footing is a striking feature of the 1389 returns. A very large proportion of the surviving returns refer specifically to women as members. The contrast between the picture presented in the 1389 guild returns and the evidence for women membership of guilds with trade powers later in the fifteenth century is striking – while there is ample evidence for women’s membership of trade guilds in the fifteenth century, there is much less evidence than can be found in the returns of 1388–89. Is this evidence that the process whereby the trade guilds emerged in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries also saw an exclusion of women from the government of the guilds? In examining more closely the information about men and women in the 1389 returns, it is essential first to consider how these texts were created. One thing which is certain is that they are generally not direct transcripts by guild officials of their ordinances. Two returns survive for fraternities in Yarborough in Lincolnshire, the Fraternity of Corpus Christi formed in 1358 and the Fraternity of St Peter in 1362.48 The return for the Corpus Christi guild is interesting because it emphasizes that men and women were involved in the discussions which led to the establishment of the guild. It also explicitly states that both brothers and sisters would attend the annual meeting on the feast of Corpus Christi, and would elect a supervisor of the guild. Interestingly, however, it states that the supervisor would manage the goods and chattels of the guild, by advice of the brothers (thus implying that the women were excluded from the management of the guild). The return of St Peter’s guild is made in the name of a different person. However, it is written in exactly the same hand as that for the Corpus Christi guild and exactly the same wording is used. One return had simply been copied from the other, with only the details of the guild and guild official being altered. Such a coincidence between the returns from a single place is

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perhaps not surprising, and can be explained by the use of a local attorney to make the returns. However, a number of other Lincolnshire returns make use of the form of words found in Yarborough. These include the returns for the Guild of the Virgin Mary at Fotherby, the three guilds at Falstow and the Corpus Christi guild at Alvingham.49 There is hardly any discernible difference between these six returns. The process by which the guild returns were produced has been illuminated brilliantly recently by Jan Gerchow in a remarkable pioneering study which has important implications for the use of all medieval archival materials. Gerchow points out that copying of the sort found in this Lincolnshire example is a common feature of all the returns. He describes other examples in Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, Norfolk and Lincolnshire.50 Moreover, even where there is no direct copying, many of the returns show similarities in form, structure and wording. Gerchow argues that the process by which the returns were created was a complex one. He suggests that one group of returns was prepared by the Chancery clerks at Westminster following interviews with guild officials. In other cases, the returns were prepared locally by what Gerchow calls ‘local chanceries’, which were perhaps offices associated with such local officials as the sheriff. These local returns also generally incorporate the results of an interview with guild officials.51 The returns bear many traces of this process of interrogation. Key additional information, such as that a guild has no lands, is often added in another hand at the end of the return, suggesting that the information was inserted at the end of the process. Working notes of names of members or officers are hastily added to the returns. The process by which the returns were prepared was probably not unusual: a similar procedure was apparently used in preparing indictments and inquisitions, with local juries being interviewed and their information being worked up into a formal record by clerks attached to the court.52 It is tempting in this context to suggest that the returns in English are closer to the original guild ordinances than those in Latin or French, but again similarities in wording and form can be found in the English returns – the returns from King’s Lynn, for example, suggest that the clerks preparing them took a particular interest in penalties for betraying the secrets of the guild. It seems that the clerk making the record of the inquisition preferred to use English because it was easier in this way to describe the complex ordinances of the guild than prepare a formal Latin or French version of them. Gerchow’s analysis has profound implications for the interpretation of the returns which emerge as mostly formal records of interviews,

44 Men and Women in the Guild Returns

not direct statements by guild officials. Thus, in the case of the return of the Lincoln masons, what we have is not the guild ordinances as established in 1313, but the official record of an inquiry into certain (but not all) aspects of the guild in 1389. The information in the 1389 returns has been filtered through a succession of bureaucratic processes. In this context, doubts may be felt as to whether any reliance can be placed on the information in the returns about the roles of men and women in the guilds. The group of copied Lincolnshire returns from Yarborough, Fotherby and elsewhere illustrate the dangers of assuming from joint references to brothers and sisters that men and women were on a equal footing within a guild. These returns state that both brothers and sisters attended the annual meeting of the guild, but the use of common formulae makes it impossible to determine whether this actually happened, or on what basis. Conversely, failure to refer to women may not necessarily indicate that they were excluded from a guild, but (as in the case of Chesterfield in Derbyshire where neither guild return mentions women) may simply reflect local clerical practice. In this context, a simple count of the number of returns which mention women is unsatisfactory as a guide to the extent of their involvement in guilds. It is necessary to concentrate on details which are explicitly gendered, as at Dronfield, where the funeral provision for men and women was different. In the return for the Gild of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Baston in Lincolnshire, members are consistently referred to as brothers, and its status as a male order is confirmed by the statement that, when a brother dies, the fraternity would elect a ‘worthy man’ to replace him.53 By contrast, in the Guild of St John the Baptist at Baston, the active involvement of women in the guild is confirmed by the stipulation that on St John the Baptist’s day, all the sisters of the fraternity should come to dance with each other on the pain of a fine.54 The sisters were also specifically required to attend vespers and matins on the eve of St John the Baptist and also on the day of their dance, carrying lights in their hand. In Stamford, the brothers and sisters of the Guild of St Martin supported a chaplain and a light in honour of the saint, and met together on the feast of St Martin.55 By an ancient custom, the fraternity baited a bull in the town, which was then sold to the benefit of the fraternity.56 The return says that the organization of this ‘bull running’ was a responsibility of the brethren, and this again apparently indicates a clear division of responsibility between the brothers and the sisters. In other cases, the involvement of women in the fraternity is apparent in a more prosaic way, where rates of subscription and benefit take into

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account marital status. Thus, for the Guild of Saints Fabian and Sebastian in London, it was stipulated that the wife of a brother could join the guild without extra payment on joining, but that they should both pay the quarterly subscription, while a single woman was to pay the same amounts as a man.57 Similar elaborate tariffs are evident in a number of other guilds.58 In other cases, active women’s membership is apparent from the inclusion of disciplinary clauses specifically concerning women.59 The occasional notes in the returns regarding membership of guilds also confirm the involvement of women. However, it is overoptimistic to assume from the 1389 evidence that women were members of the fraternities on equal terms with men. Although none of the guild officials named in the returns was a woman, the argument that fraternities were particularly receptive to women has depended on the specific statement of many returns that both brothers and sisters attended meetings of the fraternity where business was transacted and officials elected. If the returns are read as direct transcripts of guild ordinances, this would be a reasonable conclusion. However, vague formulaic statements by Chancery and other clerks that the brothers and sisters met together are less convincing – it is not at all certain that women had an equal voice at these meetings. In a substantial number of cases, women are specifically excluded from the running of the guild, and, since in this case a deliberate distinction is drawn, these statements are probably more reliable indications of practice than more general statements. Although the Gild of the Resurrection at St Martin’s church in Lincoln was founded by ‘thirteen brothers and sisters’, and men and women paid equal subscriptions, only the men were entitled to attend the morning speech, and the brothers elected the officials of the guild, who were men.60 Similarly, in the Guild of Garlickhithe in London, attendance at the quarterly meetings was restricted to the male members, who provided the officers.61 In other cases, although men and women were required to attend business meetings, it is explicitly stated that the officers will be men. These restrictions also occurred in rural fraternities. In the Guild of the Virgin Mary at the Church of St Andrew in Harlaxton in Lincolnshire, only men were elected as officials or took part in arbitration.62 A major driving force in the involvement of women in fraternities was financial. Men who joined a fraternity to secure spiritual benefits wanted their families to enjoy these as well. In order to ensure the guild funds were not depleted, it was necessary for the women to make a contribution. When men died, widows wanted to stay involved, and provision had to be made for single women. The guilds themselves

46 Men and Women in the Guild Returns

needed to maximize their income; many of the guilds recorded in the returns were very short-lived, and getting sufficient funds to maintain the work of the guild was a problem. However, this was not sufficient to ensure the women members full equality. A sense of gendered hierarchy remains frequently apparent. In the procession organized by the Guild of St Helen at Beverley, the sisters and the brothers marched separately.63 A similar sense of hierarchy was probably also a feature of the fraternity feasts, closely linked to the business meetings of the guilds. At Stratford-upon-Avon, the Guild of the Holy Cross organized a feast in Easter week. The return describing the feast gives a sense of its ritualized character.64 Before the feast was begun, elaborate prayers were held. There followed a ceremony in which ale was given to the poor. The men and the women both brought tankards to carry the ale, but there are separate regulations for each, suggesting that their roles were distinguished in some way. Moreover, only the women were fined for failing to bring a tankard, suggesting their role was more important in this ceremony. A characteristic of the medieval town was a sense of hierarchy imposed through ritual and ceremony, and this was doubtless also a feature of the fraternal feast. Gervase Rosser has pointed out how the structure of a fraternal feast could be very elaborate.65 At the Lincoln Fraternity of the Assumption, three barrels of ale were opened: at the opening of the first the guild’s ordinances were read; at the second, intercession was offered for the dead; and at the third, an appeal was made to the Virgin.66 However, it is not certain that men and women played the same part in these rituals. Charles Phythian-Adams noted that at Coventry in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it was unusual for women to be present at guild banquets.67 Most of the statements in the 1389 returns about fraternal feasts are again very formulaic, as in the statement of a guild at Coningsby in Lincolnshire that the brothers and sisters meet annually in a certain honest place and there eat and drink at their own cost, and make ordinances and disposition for the guild.68 Without knowing the seating arrangements, we cannot be sure that men and women played an equal part in these feasts. The 1389 returns show that women played an active role in many guilds, a conclusion confirmed in the fifteenth century by accounts and wills. However, the formulaic character of many of the returns makes it unsafe to assume that women enjoyed an equality of membership with men, and there are many indications that the rights of women members were restricted. This is particularly evident in the role of the guild in controlling the position of women in the public space. The guild provided,

Andrew Prescott 47

particularly through processions, a means by which women appeared in the public arena in the medieval town. However, it did so in a way which reinforced existing hierarchies. Thus, the men at Stamford ran the bull-baiting, while the women at Baston danced. It is a paradox which runs through the history of fraternal organizations that while, on the one hand, they have often promoted new forms of social interaction, on the other they have frequently reinforced existing hierarchies. It seems, from the 1389 returns, that the medieval guilds were no different. There has been a constant temptation, from the time of Alice Clark onwards, to assume that references to female membership of medieval guilds and fraternities are a straightforward indicator of economic status. The case of the 1389 returns is a reminder that such assumptions create many difficulties. A major problem is that the guilds were not straightforward trade regulatory bodies in the way that scholars of Clark’s generation conceived them. The trade guilds sprang in a complex fashion from religious fraternities, and the social and cultural components of the guilds remained as important as their economic function. Women may have enjoyed access to the religious or social benefits of the guild but may have been excluded from any significant involvement in its trade activities. Within the fraternity, there was frequently a strongly gendered social hierarchy which ensured that the women were kept at the foot of the feast table or even in another room. Above all, the documentary evidence presents difficulties because its own structures are themselves highly gendered. Hutton has pointed out how it is difficult to establish the true extent of women’s membership of guilds in Shrewsbury because membership details were recorded on a household basis and the man was assumed to be the head of the household. Likewise, the use of formulaic statements in completing the guild returns in 1389 makes it very difficult to know whether the extent of women’s membership was really as great as the returns at first sight suggest. The highly formulaic nature of many of the returns suggest that, while women were clearly admitted as sisters, they were very much second-class members of the fraternity – which only had limited ambitions in respect of sorority. A selection of the 1389 guild returns was published by Lucy Toulmin Smith for the Early English Text Society in 1870.69 They created widespread interest among social reformers. George Jacob Holyoake in his 1875 History of Cooperation noted how the returns suggested that ‘there were scarcely five out of the five hundred guilds known to history which were not formed equally of men and of women’.70 The 1389 returns have been

48 Men and Women in the Guild Returns

cited repeatedly in modern times by women seeking membership of fraternal organizations said to derive from guilds: women Freemasons referred to the 1389 return of the Lincoln stonemasons when seeking recognition by male Masonic lodges. Yet the formulaic character of the 1389 returns render them deceptive. At first sight they seem to describe a ‘golden age’ of men and women working and living side by side, but on closer examination this ‘golden age’ proves to be a chimera largely concocted by scribal formulae.71

Notes 1 Joseph Malet Lambert, Two Thousand Years of Guild Life (Hull: A. Brown, 1891). 2 For a good introduction to these aspects of guild life, see Gervase Rosser, ‘Going to the Fraternity Feast: Commensality and Social Relations in Late Medieval England’, Journal of British Studies, 33 (1994), 430–46. 3 Victoria History of the Counties of England: York East Riding, 8+ vols, ed. by Keith John Allison and others (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969–ongoing), I (1969), pp. 265, 267, 353–5. 4 For a recent discussion of guild socialism, see Kevin Morgan, ‘British Guild Socialists and the Exemplar of the Panama Canal’, History of Political Thought, 28 (2007), 120–57. 5 Arthur Joseph Penty, The Restoration of the Gild System (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1906), p. 64. 6 Penty, p. 65. 7 See for example George Douglas Howard Cole, Guild Socialism: A Plan for Economic Democracy (New York: Fredrick Stokes, 1920), pp. 8–15, and his introduction to Georges François Renard, Guilds in the Middle Ages (London: Bell and Sons, 1919), pp. xx–xxii. 8 For helpful collections of papers reflecting recent research in this area, see Guilds and Association in Europe 900–1900, ed. by Ian Anders Gadd and Patrick Wallis (London, Centre for Metropolitan History, 2006) and Guilds, Society and Economy in London 1450–1800, ed. by Ian Anders Gadd and Patrick Wallis (London, Centre for Metropolitan History, 2002). 9 Renard, p. 20. 10 Renard, p. 42. 11 Renard, pp. 86, 110. 12 Judith Smart, ‘Respect not Relief: Feminism, Guild Socialism and the Guild Hall Commune in Melbourne, 1917’, Labour History, 94 (2008), 113–32 (p. 114). 13 An account of Clarke’s life by Sandra Stanley Holton is in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 14 Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, Working Women in English Society 1300–1620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 29. 15 Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1919), p. 183.

Andrew Prescott 49 16 Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (London: Routledge, 1930). 17 Judith M. Bennett, Ale, Beer and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300–1600 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 7. 18 Maryanne Kowaleski, ‘Women’s Work in a Market Town: Exeter in the Late Fourteenth Century’, in Women and Work in Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. by Barbara Hanawalt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 145–64. 19 Diane Hutton, ‘Women in Fourteenth Century Shrewsbury’, in Women and Work in Pre-Industrial England, ed. by Lindsey Charles and Lorna Duffin (London: Croom Helm, 1985), pp. 83–99. 20 Kay E. Lacey, ‘Women and Work in Fourteenth and Fifteenth Century London’, in Women and Work, pp. 24–82. 21 Kay E. Lacey, ‘The Production of “Narrow-Ware” by Silkwomen in Fourteenth and Fifteenth Century England’, Textile History, 18 (1987), 187–204. 22 Maryanne Kowaleski and Judith Bennett, ‘Crafts, Gilds and Women in the Middle Ages: Fifty Years after Marian K. Dale’, Signs, 14 (1988–89), 474–88. 23 Caroline Mary Barron, ‘The “Golden Age” of Women in Medieval London’, Reading Medieval Studies, 15 (1989), 35–58. 24 Barron, ‘The “Golden Age”’, p. 47. 25 Peter Jeremy Piers Goldberg, Women, Work and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire, c. 1300–1520 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 26 McIntosh, pp. 20–8. 27 Elspeth Veale, ‘“The Great Twelve”: Mistery and Fraternity in ThirteenthCentury London’, Historical Research, 64 (1991), 237–63 (p. 263). 28 Susan Reynolds, An Introduction to the History of English Medieval Towns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 166. 29 Caroline Mary Barron, ‘The Parish Fraternities of Medieval London’, in The Church in Pre-Reformation Society: Essays in Honour of F. R. H. du Boulay, ed. by Caroline Mary Barron and Christopher Harper-Bill (Woodbridge: Brewer, 1985), pp. 13–37, (pp. 14–17). 30 Richard Barrie Dobson and David Michael Smith, The Merchant Taylors of York: A History of the Craft and Company from the Fourteenth to the Twentieth Century, Borthwick Texts and Studies: 33 (York: Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, 2006), pp. 17, 34–7. 31 Gervase Rosser, Medieval Westminster 1200–1540 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 285–93. 32 Benjamin R. McRee, ‘Religious Gilds and Civic Order: The Case of Norwich in the Late Middle Ages’, Speculum, 67 (1992), 69–97. 33 Victoria County History of Berkshire, ed. by Peter Hampson Ditchfield and William Page, 4 vols (London: St Catherine’s Press, 1906–24), III (1923), pp. 56–66. 34 See, for example, Heather Swanson, ‘The Illusion of Economic Structure: Craft Guilds in Late Medieval English Towns’, Past and Present, 121 (1988), 29–48. 35 Richard Barrie Dobson, ‘Craft Guilds and the City: The Historical Origins of the York Mystery Plays Reassessed’, in The Stage as Mirror: Civic Theatre in Late Medieval Europe, ed. by Alan E. Knight (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), pp. 91–106 (p. 100).

50 Men and Women in the Guild Returns 36 Stephen Henry Rigby, Medieval Grimsby: Growth and Decline (Hull: Hull University Press, 1993), p. 67. 37 Christopher Given-Wilson, ‘The Problem of Labour in the Context of English Government, c. 1350–1450’, in The Problem of Labour in FourteenthCentury England, ed. by James Bothwell, Peter Jeremy Piers Goldberg and William Mark Ormrod (York: York Medieval Press, 2000), pp. 85–100; Christopher Given-Wilson, ‘Service, Serfdom and English Labour Legislation 1350–1500’, in Concepts and Patterns of Service in the Later Middle Ages, ed. by Anne Curry and Elizabeth Matthew (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000), pp. 21–37. 38 Sarah Rees Jones, ‘Household, Work and the Problem of Mobile Labour: The Regulation of Labour in the Medieval English Towns’, in The Problem of Labour in Fourteenth-Century England, pp. 133–53. 39 Robin Lindsay Storey, ‘Liveries and Commissions of the Peace, 1388–90’, in The Reign of Richard II: Essays in Honour of May McKisack, ed. by Francis Robin Houssemayne du Boulay and Caroline Mary Barron (London: The Athlone Press, 1971), pp. 131–52. 40 Leonard Charles Hector and Barbara Fitzgerald Harvey, The Westminster Chronicle 1381–94 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. 356–69. 41 For all the following, see Jan Gerchow, ‘Gilds and Fourteenth-Century Bureaucracy: The Case of 1388–9’, Nottingham Mediaeval Studies, 40 (1996), 109–48. 42 The guild returns are now The National Archives, C 47/38/1 to C 47/46/480 inclusive. Two stray London returns are now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford: Caroline Mary Barron and Laura Wright, ‘The London Middle English Guild Certificates of 1388/9’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 39 (1995), 108–45. A number of the returns are printed in Joshua Toulmin Smith and Lucy Toulmin Smith, English Gilds: The Original Ordinances of More than One Hundred Early English Gilds, Early English Text Society, Original Series, 40 (1870), and others are summarized in Herbert Francis Westlake, The Parish Gilds of Medieval England (London: SPCK, 1919). 43 John Baylis Post, ‘Some Limitations of the Medieval Peace Rolls’, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 4 (1973), 633–9. 44 The National Archives, C 47/38/48. 45 Edward Powell, ‘Arbitration and the Law in England in the Late Middle Ages’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 33 (1983), 49–67. 46 The National Archives, C 47/41/154, edited and translated in William James Williams, ‘Gild of Masons at Lincoln’, Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 54 (1941), 108–10. 47 The National Archives, C 47/40/135. 48 The National Archives, C 47/41/185–6. 49 The National Archives, C 47/39/73, C 47/39/99–102. 50 Gerchow, pp. 128–35. 51 Gerchow, pp. 135–41. 52 Andrew Prescott, ‘The Imaging of Historical Documents’, in The Virtual Representation of the Past, ed. by Mark Greengrass and Lorna M. Hughes (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 7–22 (pp. 15–20). 53 The National Archives, C 47/39/77. 54 The National Archives, C 47/39/76. 55 The National Archives, C 47/41/173.

Andrew Prescott 51 56 On the bull-running, see further Martin W. Walsh, ‘November Bull-Running in Stamford, Lincolnshire’, Journal of Popular Culture, 30 (1996), 233–47. 57 The National Archives, C 47/41/196. 58 For example, the return of the Guild of St Margaret at King’s Lynn stipulates that at her death the sister of a brother should have a Mass with the same number of candles supplied by the guild as a member, whereas a son of a brother should only have one large candle: The National Archives, C 47/43/261. 59 For example, in the Guild of Palmers of St Mary at Ludlow women were only allowed to keep watch over dead brethren if they belonged to the household of the deceased and funds were earmarked solely to help girls get married or to go into a religious house: The National Archives, C 47/45/392. 60 The National Archives, C 47/40/144. 61 The National Archives, C 47/41/191. 62 The National Archives, C 47/40/124. 63 The National Archives, C 47/46/446. 64 The National Archives, C 47/46/440. 65 Rosser, ‘Going to the Fraternity Feast’, pp. 430–46. 66 Rosser, ‘Going to the Fraternity Feast’, p. 435. 67 Charles Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 68 The National Archives, C 47/39/94. 69 Joshua Toulmin Smith and Lucy Toulmin Smith, English Gilds: The Original Ordinances of More than One Hundred Early English Gilds, Early English Text Society, Original Series, 40 (1870). 70 George Jacob Holyoake, The History of Co-operation, 1 vol., originally 2 vols (London: Fisher Unwin, 1906), I, p. 164. 71 The author is extremely grateful to Máire Cross for her helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper and for her endless editorial patience.

3 Women in Monastic Orders Anne Winston-Allen

These were truly notable women, rich in virtue, and, as the wise man said, zealous for beauty, […] They so perfectly possessed and attested to the true virtues that they never lacked for inner nobility and godly wisdom and true wealth. ‘Edifying Points of the Older Sisters’ (Deventer Sisterhouse Book of Sisters, c. 1470)1 In a 1993 article Peter Dinzelbacher argued that Christine de Pizan (1361–1431), author of the famous ‘Book of the City of Ladies’, was the first female writer to express an awareness of women collectively.2 Previous to that time, Dinzelbacher asserts, women lacked any concept of themselves as ‘we women’ in opposition to the masculine world.3 If this is true, it represents a significant watershed in women’s thinking. Yet Christine de Pizan’s gender consciousness was not such an isolated case. This chapter will look at texts by writers in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century associations and orders for evidence of the development of a gendered perspective. As we have seen from the previous chapter, one of the difficulties of evaluating gender relations in fraternal orders is the paucity of texts that can be reliably attributed to women in the late Middle Ages. In England, besides Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, few if any written artifacts by women of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries survive. But in German- and Dutch-speaking areas many such texts remain: works that were composed without the help of male collaborators or editors. Beginning around 1310, women in Dominican houses in the south of Germany began to compile collections of biographies of the most famous members of their communities. The following century brought a veritable explosion of scribal and literary activities 52

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in the newly founded ‘sisterhouses’ and convents of the New Devout in the Netherlands and in reformed monastic communities that were part of the Observant reform movement in Germany. The books of sisters and other texts composed by these groups constitute a rich source of information on female alliances and networks. According to Alfred Haverkamp, one of the most important contributions to social change in the late Middle Ages was the development of associations. It was, Haverkamp asserts, the trend toward self-organization to solve social problems that led to a growth in self-awareness.4 To examine how women’s associations contributed to the structuring of roles and to the development of a gender awareness and a gendered perspective, we will look at women’s accounts of how their religious communities were founded and organized by groups of beguines. These texts from Dominican houses of the fourteenth century, as well as those of newer ‘sisterhouses’ established in the fifteenth century, seek to construct a history and communal identity for themselves by recalling their collective past and celebrating the outstanding members of the community. Unlike Christine de Pizan’s depictions of the virtuous women inhabiting her imaginary ‘City of Ladies’, which follow the tradition of Plutarch’s and Boccaccio’s moral biographies of ‘women worthies’, the sources to be considered here feature ‘worthies’ much nearer to hand. They recount the deeds of the beguine founding mothers and the lives of actual former inhabitants, women of exceptional virtues or spiritual power. Influenced by the dramatic growth of cities at the beginning of the thirteenth century, women in textile and trading centres throughout central Europe, from the Rhineland to Bohemia and from the Baltic to Switzerland, formed themselves into groups of so-called beguines. Living as unenclosed lay religious members in single houses that in some cases grew into large settlements, they supported themselves through the production of textiles, soap or candles, or by schooling young women, caring for the sick, and conducting prayer vigils for the dead.5 Through providing services that were essential to the growing urban centres, these women earned a livelihood and discovered a viable alternative to the limited options previously available to women in the late Middle Ages. Following on the heels of the widespread ‘apostolic poverty movement’ and an associated wave of lay piety focused on voluntary poverty, large numbers of women sought to take up an alternative, religious way of life.6 For those not patrician or affluent enough to be admitted to the overflowing convents of the regular orders, beguine settlements formed an alternative open to women from all walks of

54 Women in Monastic Orders

life. Here women could earn a livelihood, were free to come and go, to marry if they wished. Governing their own communities with limited oversight by Church authorities, the larger ‘cities of ladies’ were organized under a ‘grand mistress’.7 Soon the presence of communities of religious women living relatively unsupervised and outside the established orders became common fixtures of a new urban landscape – and a worry to the Church authorities. Whether beguine women considered themselves part of a larger movement is an issue treated by Herbert Grundmann in his pathbreaking book ‘Religious Movements in the Middle Ages’.8 As an example, Grundmann cites Hadewijch (fl. c. 1220–1240) whose writings, he asserts, indicate a ‘consciousness of the interconnections of the new feminine piety far across international borders’. Hadewijch mentions other beguines in Flanders, Brabant, Paris, Zealand, Holland, Frisia, England, and ‘beyond the Rhine’ in Saxony, Thuringia, and Bohemia.9 Positing the existence of a religiöse Frauenbewegung (women’s religious movement), Grundmann attributes the establishing of the extraordinarily large numbers of beguine communities that came into being in the early thirteenth century to the influence of wandering lay ministers preaching apostolic poverty and evangelism in the twelfth century. Inspired by this ideal, many lay people turned their backs on the world to take up a poor and simple life like that of the earliest Christians.10 The most popular of these charismatic preachers, Robert of Abrissel (c. 1045–1116) and Norbert of Xanten (c. 1080–1139), established communities in which their male and female followers could pursue a life of strict asceticism and discipline.11 It was out of these foundations that Fontevrault and the new ‘Premonstratensian’ order developed. By the mid-twelfth century so many women had been attracted to the movement that there are reports of more than a thousand ‘Premonstratensian’ sisters living in the diocese of Laon alone.12 Another chronicle describes innumerabilis multitudo (innumerable women) taking up a religious form of life in the area around Konstanz.13 In addition to religious motivations, researchers point to economic, social and demographic developments – such as a (much debated) surplus of women – to explain the large numbers adopting a religious life outside the institutional structures of the Church.14 Feminist historian Rebekka Habermas views the trend as neither religious nor economic but simply as a breaking out of the passive role assigned to women.15 Whatever the causes, it is clear that the number of women of all social ranks wanting to take up the religious life far exceeded the institutional options available to them. Overwhelmed by

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the applications for admission, the religious orders declared a moratorium on the admission of any new women’s houses.16 Jacques de Vitry (1160–1240) wrote that ‘three times as many Cistercian cloisters would have been needed’ to take them all in.17 Concerned about the endangered situation of religious women living in unincorporated groups throughout the diocese of Liège, de Vitry obtained verbal consent from newly elected Pope Honorius III (1216–27) for women to reside in communal houses without belonging to an order or following a rule.18 In the north the numbers of these unincorporated groups rose to some 3 per cent of women. In Cologne there were 100 beguine houses and the 60 in Strasbourg constituted an alarming 10 per cent of the female population.19 Accordingly, when the first Dominicans and Franciscans began to arrive in the south of Germany and the area of Alsace in the thirteenth century, they found numerous women living together in self-organized groups as beguines. The mendicant friars promptly took over their spiritual care, advising the women to adopt a rule and to apply for admission to their orders. As with the older orders the response was staggering.20 Unable to care for the multitude of new women’s houses being incorporated, the Dominicans, likewise, closed their doors to women. When this did not sufficiently reduce the burden, they took the draconian step of divesting themselves even of all the women’s houses that had already been admitted to the order. Only after some twenty years of exclusion was a compromise finally worked out permitting secular priests to take over sacramental duties, and women were again admitted.21 Despite readmission, the years of radical exclusion had a galvanizing effect on Dominican women’s consciousness. This can be seen in reports of it written in the fifteenth century. Around 1490, for example, at the convent of Kirchheim unter Teck in Württemberg, Magdalena Kremer recounted the expulsion of women’s religious communities from her order. She goes on to tell of a collective counteraction by the women in response, describing how many went to Rome and joined together to protest their situation to the Pope. Attributing the resolution of the problem to women’s collective effort, Magdalena describes their successful lobbying and the positive outcome: From many cloisters in German lands the sisters set out on foot in twos and threes, joined together, and travelled under great hardship to Rome where they protested their desperate situation and misery to our holy father the Pope and besought him that he would again place them under the direction and protection of the Dominicans.

56 Women in Monastic Orders

When the Pope perceived their great earnestness, he returned them to the care of the Dominicans. And where they previously had had one women’s cloister, they now had seven to one.22 Magdalena’s rejoicing in the sevenfold increase in Dominican women’s houses, in spite of the hierarchy’s attempts to keep them out, reflects not only the nuns’ feeling of accomplishment at winning their suit, but a sense of solidarity in their growing strength of numbers. The striking picture of scores of German Adelheids and Hildegards marching on Rome in a kind of women’s second Germanic invasion seems a startling one for women of the late Middle Ages. Other foundation histories narrate how the beguine founding mothers organized themselves independently and how they invented a rule of order. The ‘sister-book’ of the cloister of Engelthal (Nuremberg), Büchlein von der Gnaden Überlast (Little Book of the Overwhelming Burden of Graces), composed by Christine Ebner (1277–1355), recounts how the beguines selected a leader, choosing Adelheid Rotter, formerly a harp player in the entourage of Princess Elisabeth of Hungary, who had left the entourage at Nuremberg to live as a penitent there.23 Although the women did not have sufficient funds to establish a cloister, the account asserts that each one contributed all that she possessed. Christine describes how the beguines attempted to imitate the monastic office, relying on Adelheid who was literate and had been at court. Typical of the manner of fourteenth-century Dominican ‘sister-books’, Christine portrays the women’s charismatic spirituality and the way they acted out their religious devotion through a self-fashioned ritual. Thus Christine writes: They read the Office as well as they were able. At compline they went to their mistress [Adelheid] and asked her what they should do on the following day, and that they did willingly. When they sat at table, their mistress sat at the head. After she had eaten a little, she read to them in German: and it occasionally happened that some of them fell into a swoon and lay unconscious like the dead, for they were totally absorbed in God, as though departed. […] When people heard of their holy life, they gave them, out of devotion, all that they needed, especially Kunigunde, the Queen of Bohemia, who was very generous to them.24 After they had lived as an organized group for some time, the first Dominicans arrived in Nuremberg and the women asked to join their

Anne Winston-Allen 57

obedience. But like the other ‘sister-book’ foundation stories, Christine’s account depicts the women as starting their community first and on their own. Not all of the beguine communities organized by women were as poor as that of Engelthal. A fifteenth-century foundation narrative from the cloister of Unterlinden (Colmar), which was added to the original ‘sister-book’ by prioress Elisabeth Kempf (1415–1485), tells how two women, widows of noble families, founded the Unterlinden community with their own funds.25 Elisabeth portrays how the women consulted together, ‘they made their intention known to other widows in the neighborhood in order to hear their opinions about it. These women responded joyfully with advice and eager assistance.’ Elisabeth goes on to narrate how the beguines organized their way of life and hired a priest to conduct services for them: The two widows rented out the houses that they owned in Colmar for a yearly sum and moved with their sons and daughters to the outskirts of town, to a place called ‘under the Linden’ where there was a house and some property around it. After a short time they left that place on the advice of two respected women who had joined their group and moved, on the evening of the feast of St John the Baptist 1222, to a place called Aufmühlen, which is next to the chapel of that saint. There were then eight of them. […] Soon afterward they built on the same location some houses and a long, wide, and high stone dormitory. They enclosed themselves in this building and there led a pious life in the fear of God. After the manner of the old cloisters, they had maids and labourers work their fields and vineyards and paid a priest of spotless reputation at their own expense, who said the Mass for them almost daily.26 As in the other foundation accounts, these two widows eventually made the arduous trip to the papal court at Rome to petition for incorporation into the Dominican order. The narrative records how in Rome they visited the cloister of San Sisto in order to study its physical construction, habit, and practices as their model.27 As in these examples, the narratives typically tell stories of how women helped other women. This development is confirmed by Walter Simons’s recent study of beguines, showing a large number of female patrons. Forty-five per cent of beguinages were founded by women as the principal donors. Simons calls the beguine movement ‘the only movement in medieval monastic history that was created by women and for women’.28

58 Women in Monastic Orders

The foundation narratives proudly emphasize that fact. The Sisters of Katharinental (at Diessenhofen in Switzerland), whose foundation account was composed sometime after 1337, mention townspeople but identify by name specific women who helped the community financially.29 These descriptions particularly highlight the theme of beguine solidarity, the enduring of hardships and extreme privations to establish a community with only women’s resources. Similarly, the Oetenbach ‘sister-book’, Die Stiftung des Klosters Oetenbach and das Leben der seligen Schwestern daselbst (c. 1340) describes an honourable woman in the city of Zurich named Gertrut von Hilzingen: She took with her two persons of good will and they moved to an abandoned house that was in that city and there they established a cloister. And when they entered the house, the rain was coming in everywhere so that it was almost filled with water. Thus they moved in, relying on God’s mercy, and had at first nothing but water and bread. […] Of the three sisters, one was named Sister Mechthild von Woloshofen. She helped out in her father’s inn, but she had such sympathy for the other two that she left it and ate water and bread with them.30 This emphasis on solidarity, women’s resources, female donors, and independent initiative in fourteenth-century literary representations about the ‘founding mothers’ may not yet express a ‘we women’ mentality with regard to men, but it conveys a positive image of women’s capabilities and the role of their associations in providing emotional and financial support. A century later, a chronicle at the cloister of Ebstorf, near Lüneburg, shows a more clearly delineated gendered perspective. Here a sister describes the origins of the Ebstorf community by relating a parable of a lost ring. The narrator explains that the site on which her cloister was founded had first been occupied by a group of male canons. But the community received a vision that the altar there would be served by women. Some time later, one of the canons, while searching for a gold ring that he had lost, knocked over a candlestick, starting a fire that burned the house to the ground. The canons afterward abandoned the site. Wishing to re-establish a religious community in that place, a local count enlisted the help of his sister, a Benedictine nun, to send women of her order who ‘would embrace poverty out of love for God’.31 In this way the ring which the men had lost (the mandate to serve God) passed to the women. The author goes on to explain that the ring which each sister received on entering the order is a consecration ‘second only to that of a priest’.

Anne Winston-Allen 59

In all of these associational histories from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, women place themselves at the centre rather than at the margins. Their stories about beguine founding mothers do not characterize them as subalterns or as passive religious, but as women deciding on and actively initiating an alternative lifestyle. Whether there is here an emerging awareness of women collectively, as posited by Dinzelbacher, may perhaps be evaluated by considering Gerda Lerner’s list of five steps toward the development of feminist consciousness: (1) the awareness of women that they belong to a subordinate group and that, as members of such a group, they have suffered wrongs; (2) the recognition that their condition of subordination is not natural, but societally determined; (3) the development of a sense of sisterhood; (4) the autonomous definition by women of their goals and strategies for changing their condition; and (5) the development of an alternate vision of the future.32 Some of these criteria seem to be at least partially present in these associational accounts. Although the ‘founding mothers’ are not represented as subordinate to their male advisors, they are aware of their exclusion from the order and from pastoral care by its members. This is seen as unnatural but remediable by direct action in Rome. A sense of solidarity and sisterhood, of wealthier women supporting poorer ones, of sharing a common fate with ‘many women’s cloisters’ beyond one’s own community, and even an ‘alternative vision’ of beguine women breaking out of the limited choices available to them by making the decision to live an unincorporated religious life in common, are indications, if not of a new consciousness, then at least of changes afoot. Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski in their 2003 study Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages observed that the topic of women’s alliances with one another has received surprisingly little attention.33 They point to the scarcity of institutional structures for women beyond the family and to the importance of female networks and subcultures in providing emotional and financial support, instilling selfconfidence, and leadership skills.34 Here the ‘sister-books’ and the many little-known extant historical texts from women’s communities of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries have much to contribute. The view they provide of female associational life, networks, and alliances in the Middle Ages challenges conventional notions of women’s agency and women’s attitudes. The gendered perspective so evident in the works of Christine de Pizan has led scholars recently to question why other

60 Women in Monastic Orders

women did not write their own ‘cities of ladies’. The surprising answer is that in ‘sister-books’ of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they did indeed. The next chapter refers to the case of a high-profile aristocratic patroness from a shooting fraternity and celebrated in a different historical record – paintings.

Notes 1 Sisters of the Common Life, House of Master Geert, founded 1374. Cited from ‘Edifying Points of the Older Sisters’, in Devotio Moderna: Basic Writings, trans. and ed. by John van Engen (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1988), pp. 121–36 (p. 121). See also Hier beginnen sommige stichtige punten van onsen oelden zusteren, ed. by Dirk de Man (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1919), pp. 3–4. 2 Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. by Rosalind BrownGrant (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999). 3 Peter Dinzelbacher, ‘Rollenverweigerung, religiöser Aufbruch und mystisches Erleben mittelalterlicher Frauen’, in Mittelalterliche Frauenmystik, ed. by Peter Dinzelbacher (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1993), pp. 27–76 (pp. 59–60). 4 Alfred Haverkamp, ‘Leben in Gemeinschaften: Alte und neue Formen im 12. Jahrhundert’, in Aufbruch–Wandel–Erneuerung: Beiträge zur ‘Renaissance’ des 12. Jahrhunderts, ed. by Georg Wieland (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1995), pp. 11–44 (p. 43). 5 Amalie Fößel and Anette Hettinger, Klosterfrauen, Beginen, Ketzerinnen: Religiöse Lebensformen von Frauen im Mittelalter (Idstein: Schulz-Kirchner, 2000), p. 51. 6 Herbert Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages: The Historical Links between Heresy, the Mendicant Orders, and the Women’s Religious Movement in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Century, with the Historical Foundations of German Mysticism, trans. by Steven Rowan (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), pp. 18–21. 7 Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200–1565 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 50–1, 84–5, 194 (note 156). 8 Grundmann, pp. 75–88. 9 Grundmann, p. 81. Hadewijch’s dates have been contested: Wybren Scheepsma suggests that she actually wrote around 1300. See his ‘Hadewijch und die Linburgse sermoenen. Überlegungen zu Datierung, Identität und Authentizität’, in Deutsche Mystik im abendländischen Zusammenhang, ed. by Walter Haug and Wolfram Schneider-Lastin (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), pp. 653–82. 10 Grundmann, pp. 75–88. 11 Grundmann, pp. 7–9, 19–21; Brigitte Degler-Spengler, ‘“Zahlreich wie die Sterne des Himmels”: Zisterzienser, Dominikaner und Franziskaner vor dem Problem der Inkorporation von Frauenklöstern’, Rottenburger Jahrbuch für Kirchengeschichte, 4 (1985), 37–50 (p. 37); Penelope D. Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession: Religious Women in Medieval France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 4. Even earlier than Robert and Norbert, who received

Anne Winston-Allen 61

12

13 14

15

16

17 18 19 20

21 22

23

official permission to preach in 1096 and 1118, other wandering preachers were afoot at mid-century. See Bruce L. Venarde, Women’s Monasticism and Medieval Society: Nunneries in France and England, 890–1215 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 57. Brigitte Degler-Spengler, ‘Die religiöse Frauenbewegung des Mittelalters: Conversen-Nonnen-Beginnen’, Rottenburger Jahrbuch für Kirchengeschichte, 3 (1984), 75–88 (p. 79). Degler-Spengler, ‘Die religiöse’, p. 76. Venarde, pp. 87, 92, 126–8. On the ‘Frauenfrage’ see also Simons, pp. x–xi, 111; Ernest McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture with Special Emphasis on the Belgian Scene (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1954; repr. New York: Octagon, 1969), pp. 83–5; Karl Bücher, Die Frauenfrage im Mittelalter, 2nd edn (Tübingen: Laupp, 1910). Andreas Wilts suggests that the beguine movement must be seen under the rubric of social emancipation and combines not only religious but social, economic and political factors. See his Beginen im Bodenseeraum (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1994), p. 23; likewise Martina Spies, Beginengemeinschaften in Frankfurt am Main. Zur Frage der genossenschaftlichen Selbstorganisation von Frauen im Mittelalter (Dortmund: Ebersbach, 1998), p. 152. Rebekka Habermas, ‘Die Beginen – eine “andere” Konzeption von Weiblichkeit?’ in Die Unbeschriebene Geschichte: Historische Frauenforschung. Dokumentation des 5. Historikerinnentreffens in Wien, 16. bis 19. April 1984, ed. by Wiener Historikerinnentreffen (Vienna: Wiener Frauenverlag, 1984), pp. 199–207 (p. 200). Degler-Spengler, ‘Zahlreich’, p. 43; Annemarie Halter, Geschichte des Dominikanerinnen-Klosters Oetenbach in Zürich 1234–1525 (Winterthur: Keller, 1956), p. 17; Grundmann, p. 91. Degler-Spengler, ‘Zahlreich’, p. 41. Grundmann, p. 75. Fößel and Hettinger, p. 47. According to McDonnell, neither Cologne nor Strasbourg ever possessed more than two men’s beghard houses (p. 253). Whereas in 1228 there had been only four Dominican women’s communities (all located in France, Spain and Italy), by 1250 the German provinces alone had admitted 32 houses of female religious members and by 1302 nearly 50 more. In the north, women tended to become affiliated with the Cistercian order. In the German provinces, they increased from only 15 houses in the twelfth century to 220 just one century later. See Degler-Spengler, ‘Zahlreich’, pp. 44–5; Gustav Voit, Engelthal: Geschichte eines Dominikanerinnenklosters, Schriftenreihe der Altnürnberger Landschaft, 26, 2 vols (Nuremberg: Koru and Berg, 1977), I, 40. Degler-Spengler, ‘Zahlreich’, pp. 40, 46, 48. Magdalena Kremer, ‘Wie diß loblich closter zu Sant Johannes baptisten zu kirchen under deck prediger-ordens reformiert ist worden und durch woelich personen’, in Geschichte des Herzogtums Wuerttemberg unter der Regierung der Graven, ed. by Christian Friedrich Sattler, 2nd edn, 4 vols (Tübingen: Reiss, 1773–77), IV (1777), 218. Christine Ebner, ‘Der Nonne von Engelthal: Büchlein von der Gnaden Überlast’, in Bibliothek des Litterarischen Vereins in Stuttgart 108, ed. by Karl Schröder (Tübingen: Litterarischer Verein, 1871).

62 Women in Monastic Orders 24 Ebner, p. 2. 25 Katharina von Gueberschwihr, ‘Les “Vitae sororum d’Unterlinden”: Edition critique du manuscrit 508 de la Bibliothèque de Colmar’, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen age, 5 (1930), 317–517; Lebensbeschreibung der ersten Schwestern des Klosters der Dominikanerinnen zu Unterlinden von deren Priorin Catharina von Gebsweiler, trans. by Elisabeth Kempf (1415–1485), ed. by Ludwig Clarus (Regensburg: Mainz, 1863); Karl-Ernst Geith, ‘Elisabeth Kempfs Übersetzung und Fortsetzung der “Vitae sororum” der Katharina von Gueberschwihr’, Annuaire de la Société d’Histoire et d’Archéologie de Colmar, 32 (1984), 28–9. 26 Lebensbeschreibung, pp. 31–3. 27 Lebensbeschreibung, p. 33. 28 Simons, pp. 108, 143. Similarly Fößel and Hettinger comment on the phenomenon of women helping beguine women (p. 51). 29 Ruth Meyer, Das St Katharinentaler Schwesternbuch, Untersuchung, Edition, Kommentar, Münchener Texte und Untersuchungen, 104 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995), p. 144. The St Katharinental ‘sister-book’ is one of the three (of nine) that were edited by Johannes Meyer in the fifteenth century. Ruth Meyer, who compared other manuscripts of it to Johannes Meyer’s version, finds, however, that his changes were limited to modifying chapter headings, rewording unclear passages, and removing three sections that he did not consider sufficiently edifying. He also added a prologue and an epilogue which are the only parts not found in other manuscripts of the Katharinental text. Since these works do not differ appreciably from the six ‘sister-books’ that Meyer did not edit, they are regarded as essentially the women’s own work. See Meyer, pp. 66–79. 30 ‘Die Stiftung des Klosters Oetenbach und das Leben der seligen Schwestern daselbst, aus der Nürnberger Handschrift’, ed. by Heinrich Zeller-Werdmüller and Jakob Bächthold, Zürcher Taschenbuch, 12 (1889), 213–76 (pp. 218–19). Johannes Meyer also edited this ‘sister-book’, but the fourteenth-century author’s vivacious style stands out from Meyer’s later didactic additions. 31 ‘Litterarisches und geistiges Leben in Kloster Ebstorf am Ausgange des Mittelalters’, ed. by Conrad Borchling, Zeitschrift des Historischen Vereins für Niedersachsen, 4 (1905), 361–420 (p. 398). 32 Gerda Lerner, ‘The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-seventy’, Women and History, 2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 274. 33 Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, ‘Introduction’, in Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages, ed. by Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 10. 34 Erler and Kowaleski, pp. 13–14.

4 The Archduchess and the Parrot Meg Twycross

Everyone who works on medieval theatre knows of the painting popularly called ‘The Triumph of Isabella’. It is one of the few pieces of evidence about what a medieval English pageant wagon might have looked like. Fewer know that it is not English at all, but Belgian, and not precisely medieval (though possibly quite archaic) but High Renaissance, rising Baroque. It is one of a sequence of paintings of an annual procession or ommegang in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary, more precisely of Our Lady of the Sablon in Brussels, executed between 1615 and 1616 by the court painter Denis van Alsloot.1 It is a formalized panoramic painting, showing the procession winding its way up and down an open space (as yet unidentified)2 in the centre of early seventeenthcentury Brussels. It currently reposes in the Theatre Collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), London. Its companion picture, now in the Department of Paintings, Prints and Drawings at the V&A, shows the Shooters’ Guilds marching in the same procession, albeit in two halves, thanks to an early nineteenth-century owner who, finding it did not fit his wall space properly, not only sliced it in half but even removed the outside edges.3 Fortunately there is a copy in the Broodhuis/ Maison du Roi Museum in the Grand’ Place in Brussels,4 which shows us what has gone: it included a very fine mobile Hellmouth. This pair of paintings originally belonged to a much more ambitious set of eight.5 Two of the eight did not show the ommegang, but other scenes associated with the occasion. Of the remaining six, only four survive, the pair in the V&A, and another two now in the Museo del Prado, Madrid. They, and a report by the Jesuits of Brussels on their involvement with it, are indeed the only detailed evidence of the content and appearance of the procession in 1615.6 But why was this record made in the first place? Civic pride, perhaps: we have, for example, a sequence 63

64 The Archduchess and the Parrot

from Leuven in a manuscript history of that city recording a similar procession in 1594,7 and there are several others, roughly contemporary, from Antwerp.8 This sequence is however rather different. Many of the pageant cars in ‘The Triumph of Isabella’ are traditional religious ones illustrating the genealogy and the Seven Joys of the Blessed Virgin Mary. They can be matched almost identically from Leuven. However, there are others which have a more Renaissance-mythological look, and which obviously could tell a tale if interrogated. Who, for example, is the important lady surrounded by her maids of honour, heralded by Fame perched precariously on a pillar? Why has the goddess Diana joined the party with her nymphs? Who are these persons, very conspicuously male when you look at them in close-up, who appear to be dressed transvestitely as Amazons (Fig. 4.1)? And why is the leading figure (and the one bringing up the rear) carrying a very non-classical crossbow? And what, oh what, is this: a king reclining in a throne under an umbrella, attended by four feather-clad persons from the Americas, who appear to be guarding an enormous cage with apparently another feather-clad person inside it (Fig. 4.2)? When one looks at it in close-up, the top part of the cage appears to be full of birds.

Figure 4.1 Semiramis, the Amazons, and Apollo: detail from Denis van Alsloot, The Triumph of the Archduchess Isabella 15 May 1615, Victoria and Albert Museum (5928-1859). © Victoria and Albert Museum.

Meg Twycross 65

Figure 4.2 The parrot cage and King Psapho: detail from Denis van Alsloot, The Triumph of the Archduchess Isabella 15 May 1615, Victoria and Albert Museum (5928-1859). © Victoria and Albert Museum.

Obviously there has to be one clue which will tie all these allusions together, and it is no secret what this is. On 15 May 1615, Isabella Clara Eugenia, Archduchess of Austria, Infanta of Spain, Governor of the Netherlands, shot a parrot. To be more precise, she stood in for her husband the Archduke Albert, who was a hereditary martyr to gout,9 in the annual popinjay shoot of the Brussels Grote Kruisbooggilde (Great Crossbow Guild),10 and, according to the 1646 Latin account by the Leuven scholar Erycius Puteanus: Descending into the arena, she was favoured either by her skill (for what was it if not dextrous?), or by luck (for what was it if not fortunate?), a woman, but born to a masculine glory. What a beautiful and memorable spectacle! She stood, placed as if in majesty, with her husband the Prince Albert, among the archers of the Greater Crossbow Guild; about to shoot, she raised the machine; she fixed her eye on the

66 The Archduchess and the Parrot

summit; she loosed the bolt; and directed by some divine power, ‘the arrow did not speed in vain’: the bird dropped.11 Or, as he quotes from some Latin verses in her honour, ‘The parrot recognised his queen: and fell.’12 This was no mean feat. Popinjay shooting was a well-known sport in northern and western Europe, and remains so in the Low Countries and Germany to this day, with further outcrops in France, Switzerland and even Britain. It was a supreme test of marksmanship. The popinjay (papegay or gaai) was set as a target at the top of some very tall structure. The original parrots may have been live: by the time we catch up with them they are brightly painted or gilded wooden birds.13 By the twentieth century in Flanders they had usually become formalized bunches of feathers. Sometimes in earlier centuries they were fixed to a tree; other pictures show a church spire, the upper sail of a windmill,

Figure 4.3 The Archduchess at the papegay shooting at the Church of Notre Dame de Sablon: detail from the painting by Antonis Sallaert. On the left she holds up the crossbow, apparently getting ready to shoot. On the right she is seen standing at an upper balcony wearing the breuk of the King of the Guild. Two men cast largesse from upper windows. Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van Belgie. © KIK-IRPA, Brussels.

Meg Twycross 67

or a very tall mast, the usual practice today.14 For Isabella, it was a church spire, Notre Dame de Sablon, in what is now central Brussels, close to the Royal Library. The scene was commemorated for the Crossbow Guild, the chapel of which was in the church, by the painter Antonis Sallaert (Fig. 4.3).15 The shooting is proceeding in the left-hand side of the painting. Albert is seated under the white canopy. In front of him Isabella is aiming upwards at the popinjay fastened to a pole projecting from the top of the spire. Was Isabella’s shooting feat an elaborately staged piece of royal ceremonial, with her triumph in shooting the popinjay from the spire carefully pre-arranged? One nineteenth-century historian of Brussels suggested that all the royal personages who shot the popinjay had been mechanically assisted: ‘Perhaps their arrow was guided by an invisible thread, like in the scene from a play or an opera where William Tell hits the apple on his son’s head.’16 Various things seem to suggest its authenticity. Despite the obvious propaganda value, it seems to have created a disproportionately enthusiastic and long-lasting reaction. Isabella was subsequently invited to shoot in other competitions. Three years later, at Ghent, her participation in their parrot shoot was also commemorated by a painting: but it appears she missed her target.17 Puteanus himself says that it was ‘either through skill or luck’, which sounds over-temperate if the court and the guild were conniving at an elaborate set-up. But the cynical view also betrays a certain failure of historical imagination. Archery was a living sport for both men and women;18 hunting was still the pastime of kings and queens. The Hapsburgs were particularly addicted to it. Just because most of us are not toxophilists does not mean that a sixteenth-century princess could not be, as Puteanus was aware. This author was fortunate enough in 1999 to be allowed to attend a practice parrot shoot by the Bruges Gilde van Sint-Sebastiaan, founded in 1476 by Karel der Stoute (Charles the Bold).19 They are longbowmen: St Sebastian is the patron saint of longbowmen, St George of crossbowmen, and St Christopher and St Barbara (patron saint of explosions and pétomanes) of arquebusiers. It is an awesomely dangerous affair: not least from the spent arrows which come hurtling back to earth and bury themselves six inches deep in the turf. Official arrow-collectors wearing extraordinary wicker cartwheel hats with reinforced crowns and wide brims are the only people allowed on the field apart from the current marksman (Fig. 4.4). The mast (wip) on which the targets sit is 100 feet high.20 It is arranged like a square-rigged tall-ship’s mast, with four sets of yards just below the top: the mast, however, branches at the top into a curved toasting-fork shape with five prongs (Fig. 4.5).

68 The Archduchess and the Parrot

Figure 4.4 The reinforced hat of the man who collects the arrows. Photo © Edward Vanhoutte 1999.

It is hinged at the bottom and, when the targets are attached, swung up from the horizontal to the vertical: in itself a dangerous proceeding. The ‘parrot’ is a tall (about two-foot) bunch of feathers in bright red and yellow which sits on the topmost point of the mast. There are various subsidiary ‘birds’ placed on the lower yards of the mast, which score less: the smallest is a white-feathered ‘owl’, about four inches high, a very low form of bird – to hit it is to be laughed at. Each of the ‘birds’ is fitted by a pierced plastic toggle to one of a row of pegs which stick up from the ‘yard’. The successful parrot shooter has to hit the ‘bird’ from below with sufficient force to lift it from its peg and send it fluttering to the ground. The person who can do this at the official competition then becomes King of the Guild for a year. This is extremely difficult because the shooters stand very close to the bottom of the mast. They adopt a graceful but backbreaking attitude (Fig. 4.6), and aim vertically upward. Imagine doing this with a crossbow; then imagine doing this with a crossbow in full brocade court dress, with corsets and cartwheel ruff. Fortunately Isabella had been practised in the gentle arts of shooting since childhood: For our Isabella, already in her tender years, raising her spirit to masculine interests (viriles curas), while other baby girls are interested in

Meg Twycross 69

Figure 4.5 The mast (wip). The ‘parrot’ is at the summit; lesser ‘birds’ are arranged on the cross pieces. St Joris Gild, Bruges. Photo © Edward Vanhoutte 1999.

70 The Archduchess and the Parrot

Figure 4.6 Shooting at the parrot. The marksman adopts a backbreaking stance directly underneath the wip. Photo © Edward Vanhoutte 1999.

Meg Twycross 71

rattles, began to bear arms, to draw the bow, to fire the musket and to apply herself to hunting and hawking: which are all rudiments or simulacra of war, but entertain in time of peace. These are adopted by Princes, so that by shedding the blood not of men but of animals, they may separate savagery from pleasure and obtain prey and spoils without damage or danger … Our Diana could not be parted from her skill; she was born in a grove [the summer palace/hunting lodge of El Bosque at Valsaín near Segovia];21 she could never be anything but chaste; she communicated this image of war with modesty and shamefastness.22 By shooting the popinjay, she became King (or Queen)23 of the Archer’s Guild for the year, with the right to wear the king’s chain of office and hat badge, which she customized to female use. A double portrait of herself and Albert, by Otto van Veen, shows her wearing the collar (breuk) round her neck and the hat badge as a hair ornament.24 The collar deliberately balances the collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece worn by Albert, making a nice political point about the alignment of the archdukes with their imperial dynasty and their subjects’ concerns. The city magistrature, in honour of her achievement, also voted her a substantial cash prize of 25,000 florins.25 This she devoted to an annual dower for six poor girls connected with the Church of Our Lady of the Sablon, who were to be ready for two years to take part in a procession around the church. The painting by Antonis Sallaert commemorating this, a companion piece to the parrot shooting, shows the procession in 1616.26 She also paid for a new ceremonial guild meeting house, the Domus Isabellae, completed in 1626. This is presented in the panegyric as if it were a direct result of the popinjay shooting, but in fact it was a sop to the Great Guild of the Crossbow for depriving them of some of their practice grounds for the construction of the new Isabellastraat or rue Isabelle, which ran from the palace to the Collegiate Church of SS Michael and Gudula, now the cathedral. The road provided a much needed direct processional route from court to cathedral. A fortnight after the parrot shooting, the Guild, in partnership with the City, converted its annual procession in honour of Our Lady of Sablon, the major civic event, so that it also became a procession in honour of Isabella. She watched it from the Guild’s official chamber in the Broodhuis/ Maison du Roi, in the Grand’ Place. Reciprocally, she showed her appreciation of the honour by ordering it to be recorded by Denis van Alsloot in the sequence of paintings of which ‘The Triumph of Isabella’ was the fifth. This customization actually required only a modicum of work, though that would have been intensive, since the devisors27 only had days between

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the shooting on 15 May and the procession on 31 May. Most of the ommegang could be left as usual: the section that received all the attention was the one with the pageant cars which van Alsloot depicted in his fifth painting, our ‘Triumph of Isabella’. The core was still the Life and Joys of the Virgin Mary, traditionally showing the Tree of Jesse, the Annunciation, the Nativity, Epiphany (in the form of the Three Kings mounted on fantastic beasts), and Christ disputing with the Doctors in the Temple. The subjects and even the iconography were recorded in much the same form in the 1549 description by Calvete de Estrella,28 but in 1615 they were framed by other processional features alluding to Isabella’s triumph. Though the juxtaposition of the two sets of images, the traditional and the occasional, might at first seem incongruous, they are in fact making a statement: Isabella is not being equated, or compared, or even placed in competition, with the Virgin Mary, but draws her strength and her virtues from her strong Marian devotion.29 The customized pageants are almost aggressively secular and witty. This may be due in part to the schoolboy (or schoolmasterly) intoxication with classical learning. However, the cumulative image they present not only fashions the way in which the audience (and we, through van Alsloot’s painting) are to perceive the Archduchess’s feat, it seems permanently to have conditioned one strand of her public image. It provides a refreshingly romantic and youthful view of her, in contrast to the ‘humble wife, charitable mother and chaste widow’30 of her life after Albert. The pageants present, in order, a cavalcade of Amazons, led by Queen Semiramis, bearing a crossbow and flanked by Apollo and Diana, bearing longbows. Next is the parrot cage presided over by King Psapho of Libya.31 There follows the court of Isabella and her ladies, with Fame on a pillar. Royal and princely personages were quite used to being confronted with replicas of themselves and their virtues on pageants and triumphal arches. The ladies are on a different scale from the rest of the actors, as indeed is Fame, and it seems likely that they were played by small girls. The court of Diana and her nymphs are next, dressed in white and bearing longbows. This second court deliberately echoes the first. The Infanta’s ladies-in-waiting were famous for their virtues and decorum and the maternal care with which Isabella brought them up.32 Diana’s vengeful care for the chastity of her nymphs is a staple of the Metamorphoses. Apollo and the Nine Muses follow, playing on various instruments probably recycled from a previous Parnassus pageant which celebrated the Arts of Brussels. An allegorical scene can often easily be given a new twist by a change of context, underlined, as here, by explanatory captions.33

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After the Marian images comes an enigmatic one entitled ‘Heroina Isabella’,34 apparently loaded with female personifications of her virtues, then the funeral nef of the Emperor Charles V, again occupied by female figures apparently worshipping the Virgin and Child, though other interpretations have been offered, and displaying the coats of arms of the provinces over which the archdukes claimed to rule: a mixed dynastic, devotional and political statement. These last two are only obliquely related to the popinjay shooting, though they contribute to the overall image. The nef and its heraldry had been a familiar element of the procession ever since it was built in 1558, though its passengers could be varied according to the agenda of the day. The motif of Isabella as heroine needs further investigation: was this its first appearance? Uncannily, its most thorough treatment is by Erycius Puteanus in his funeral panegyric for the Archduchess, entitled ‘Idea Heroica’.35 As one might expect, these pageants play a series of variations on the linked themes of marksmanship, (chaste) womanhood and, most ingeniously, parrots. Diana the huntress was to be expected. Diana the virgin goddess might seem rather far-fetched as a surrogate for a famously happily married princess in her forty-ninth year, but it is not incongruous. There were degrees of chastity, which included marriage; ‘Le chaste Espoux, la vefve & la pucelle’.36 Isabella had been virgin for longer than she was married (she was aged 37 at her wedding), and though she and Albert had three children, they all died in their infancy. Like Diana’s nymphs, the ladies of her court were her surrogate children. Diana’s brother Apollo, identified by his sunburst headdress, makes his appearance in two roles: as archer and as musician accompanied by the Nine Muses, singing the praises of one who has outstripped him in marksmanship. We have a verbal explanation of only the first two: the most bizarre items, the cavalcade of Amazons and the cage of parrots, from the report of the Jesuit school which was responsible for producing them: It is truly unbelievable to relate how pleasing to everyone was the triumph displayed by our young people to Isabella our Prince when she took part in the popinjay shoot (the game is common throughout all Belgium) with the citizen crossbowmen, and was made Queen. In the public thanksgiving parade of the city, a troop of six mounted Amazons was drawn up, led by Semiramis carrying a crossbow, closely attended on each side by Apollo and Diana bearing quivers.37 The Amazons were famous for their marksmanship, even to cutting off their right breasts so they would not get in the way of the bowstring.

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They were also famous for their selective chastity. In the world of pageants, however, they had yet another existence. Isabella’s greatgrandmother, Juana of Castile, Joanna the Mad, had been greeted on her royal entry into Brussels in 1496 by a sequence of pageants featuring the Nine Female Worthies, who included the Amazons Hippolyta, Deiphile, Sinope, Menelope, Lampeto and Penthesilia. The Jesuits identify the leading Amazon with the crossbow in this procession as the Queen Semiramis, a slight confusion of nationality, but in Joanna’s Entry she appears in the sequence of Worthies between Menelope and Lampeto, correctly identified as babiloniorum Imperatrix.38 It seems likely that the Amazons in Isabella’s procession owed as much to Brussels pageant history as to Renaissance classicism. But Joanna’s Nine Worthies had an added resonance. Queens in armour, they were preceded by the pageant of a modern Amazon: Joanna’s own mother, and Isabella’s greatgreat-grandmother and namesake, Isabella la Catolica, shown receiving the surrender of the Moors at the conquest of Granada. There was no incongruity in adding Isabella to this dynasty of female warriors. Like her great-great-grandmother, and like that other namesake, Elizabeth I,39 she too had ridden before her troops, at the siege of Ostend, though her role there was to support Albert by sharing the dangers and discomforts of the field, like Othello’s ‘fair warrior’.40 How was the parrot to feature other than as victim? The Jesuit School rose to the challenge magnificently. There followed her (Semiramis) a pageant in which was the King of Libya, Psapho, with a huge company/cage41 of birds and parrots, which he is said to have sent out into the whole world, taught to say (in Greek), ‘Psapho is God’; so that he would, being reported to be God, be believed to be so. In the cage was a boy, dressed in parrot feathers, like one who was teaching many doves, painted in parrot colours, to say, ‘Isabella is Queen’.42 The real popinjay had only to drop, woodenly defeated; here it is magically resuscitated, multiplied, given back its proverbial tongue and set to work to spread Isabella’s fame throughout the world. The fact that the original Psapho was a fraud does not seem to matter. What the verbal account does not convey is that the human parrot-persons look remarkably like South Americans, the pageant car is decked overall with Jesuit banners and emblems, and the ensemble suggests that Isabella’s fame is to be transmitted in parallel with the conversion of the Indies. This may or may not have been intended, but the suggestion is there. There may

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also be a hint that Isabella’s conquest of the parrot kingdom is another example of her chastity. The parrot was known to be ‘an excessively lecherous bird’ and its role as a May-time target was susceptible to double entendres.43 Isabella was howbeit in real life very fond of parrots – one of her earliest portraits, at the age of four, with her two-year-old sister Catalina Micaela, shows her with a pet parrot perched on her wrist44 – and kept an aviary of exotic birds both in the ducal park at Brussels (La Warande) and at her country estate at Tervueren.45 As the account reveals, the birds in the giant parrot-cage on the pageant car were not in fact parrots, but carefully painted pigeons. As the procession passed the Broodhuis where she was ensconced in a window with her husband, the cage was opened and the birds released. One panicked pigeon flew straight at the archducal couple: Albert caught it and to great applause presented it to Isabella. She vowed to keep it in her menagerie and value it as if it had really been an exotic bird.46 Few victories in a sporting contest can have been so elaborately, or so expensively, celebrated. Why did the guild, and its patroness, think it worthwhile to go to all this trouble? To begin to understand this we should look briefly at the nature of the guild which mounted the annual popinjay shoot and organized the ommegang.47 It is misleading to compare the shooters’ guilds (schuttersgilden) of the Netherlands with England’s late medieval armed bands and militia. They both held official musters and shows of arms, but in the Netherlands the militia guilds became part of a more complex social pattern. This is possibly related to the different role of the city states in the medieval Low Countries, and indeed in many of the Germanic countries. They were far more independent of central or seigneurial government. The famous ritual of the Joyous Entry (Blijde Inkomst) was not merely a welcoming royal entry laid on by loyal citizens for a new monarch: its most important part was the legal confirmation of the chartered rights and privileges of the city by the ruler, who was then and only then welcomed into ‘his’ or ‘her’ city.48 The ruling families of the city formed an urban patriciate of a kind unlikely to have existed in England. Whereas in fourteenth-century York, for example, the urban elite were the big merchants, who stood slightly aloof from the more mundane trade and craft guilds: here there seems to have been a more complex layered structure, one part of which did not necessarily identify or group itself by its source of income. This is reflected in the role of the Shooters’ Guilds. These guilds first appear in thirteenth-century Flanders. Their weapon of choice was the bow and

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arrow, and then inevitably firearms. Oddly to some, though not to a continental European, the first recorded guilds specialized in the crossbow, and only later ones with the longbow. Later they added the hackbut or arquebus. They met together for target practice and soon formed themselves into clubs. Financially subsidized by the city, they started to behave in a club-like way, with dinners, entertainments, and local and national competitions. They had group portraits painted.49 Though membership was not restricted to the patriciate, there was a general tendency to support such as a faction.50 Members had to be freemen, and there was a certain status involved in belonging to a Shooters’ Guild: one had to pay for the uniform, buy weapons, pay entrance fees and have enough disposable free time to take part in the target practices and corporate festivities. We seem to have here a social elite based on membership of a sporting club, albeit one with a serious civic role. It was not tied to a trade or profession, but to affluence and presumably friendship and kinship bonds. The modern Bruges Guild of Saint Sebastian is not unlike a Rotary club, if one can imagine a Rotary club which meets together to indulge in an outmoded martial exercise and some very serious drinking. Parrot shooting raises a thirst. Membership is professional (doctors, lawyers), from business, industry, local government and politics (the Master in 1999 was also the local MEP). It would be difficult for an outsider to map the network of strings that could be pulled. There is no room here to go into the complexities of the organization of the guilds. In the foundation charter (22 February 1476) of the Guild of Saint Sebastian in Bruges, granted by Charles the Bold, the company, which was permitted to grow to the number of 100 or fewer, was to elect ‘a Master, with six inspectors and a clerk’ (ung doyen ou hooftman avecq six proviseurs ou vinders, et ung clerc) who were to be renewed every year at the Feast of Saint Nicholas in May.51 Somewhere along the way the office of hoofdman (Master) was granted for life. One can see a representative group of guild officials (in this case of the Little Guild of the Crossbow, since the Great Guild of the Crossbow was entertaining the Archduchess in their confraternity chambers in the Broodhuis) in the second painting of the van Alsloot series. They are soberly but expensively dressed. The hoofdman is the elderly gentleman with the elaborate silver collar marching at the front. The King marches at the back, wearing the gold collar and hat badge. His reign only lasts one year, whereupon he is superseded by the next king. If however, he manages to shoot the popinjay three years in succession, he becomes the ‘Emperor’ (Keizer) and is given special privileges. The Shooters also provided an essential and flamboyant element

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Figure 4.7 The Archduchess takes aim at the papegay at the shoot by the St George’s Guild, Ghent: detail from the anonymous seventeenth-century painting. Judging from the modern sport, she would have had to lean backwards much further than this decorous image suggests. Bijlokemuseum, Ghent. © KIK-IRPA, Brussels.

in civic parades, just as did the army and police in local British ceremonial and carnival occasions. Marching was an obvious part of their training. They also provided banners, drums and, in the case of the Arquebusiers, gunfire. Each guild was accompanied by its patron saint (here St George, St Margaret,52 and the Dragon), and mascot (usually a young girl),53 with supernumerary fools and devils as crowd marshals.

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These companies are always referred to in Dutch as ‘the Guilds’ (Gilden): in French les Serments. What we call the Trade Guilds are known as the Ambachten, the ‘crafts’. In the four paintings of ‘The Triumph of Isabella’, the Shooters’ Guilds occupy one canvas, the Trades another. The latter were not only a different social grouping (though some members of the Ambachten were probably marching with the Gilden), they did not have the same kind of social prestige, though they were equally concerned in electing the government of the city,54 and it would be a mistake to mark them down as proletariat as against the haute bourgeoisie of the guilds. As a high-status group, the Shooters Guilds provided a convenient interface between the court and the city. Important and influential members of the nobility were invited to grace their annual competition by shooting with them and even by becoming guild members.55 Isabella was by no means the first or only one. Contemporary historians provide laudatory lists of those who won the competition and thus became king. They included William of Orange, ‘the Silent’ (1562 and 1566); Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma (1587); and the twelve-year-old who was to become Emperor Charles V, Isabella’s grandfather (1512). Some elected a substitute to shoot for them: Philip II as Prince of Spain (1557), the Duke of Alva (1568), and earlier, one of Isabella’s predecessors as Governess of the Netherlands, Margaret of Austria (1518).56 But it is emphasized that Isabella shot ‘non vicariâ, sed suâ manu’ (not by proxy, but with her own hand).57 The popinjay shooting provided a sanctioned arena for social contact between rulers and ruled, to their mutual advantage. Good relations were displayed publicly, and both parties enhanced their self-image. Albert and Isabella were alive to the benefits of emphasizing their identification with the interests of their subjects; they were painted taking part in popular festivities, and even graciously attending village weddings.58 In the popinjay shooting, however, the cost-benefit balance was more equal. The Guild acquired added status because the ruler condescended to shoot with them, but they had what was almost a traditional right to invite her or him to do so. The prince was given the rare opportunity to show off a personal skill which they possessed in their own right and not merely by virtue of their office.59 Isabella’s French biographer in 1650 saw the 1615 popinjay shooting as a gesture both gracious and politically astute: Having judged that by shooting with the crossbow and the arquebus with them, she would gratify them, she entered the two confraternities: when her skill made her on two occasions60 Queen of the Popinjay, she became their Queen of Hearts; and having drunk in

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public to the health of her guild-brothers, the rumour of this honour won round everyone, who esteemed it the greatest compliment that a daughter of Spain could pay to their nation. These actions were done with such a good grace, that familiarity, tempered by discretion, could not give rise to any impertinence. As her generosity in no way diminished their respect, her gravity in no way rejected their affection.61 Both sides made the most of Isabella’s success to enhance the public perception of the relationship. The Guild swept her into their confraternity and its ceremonies, entertained her at their official chambers in the Broodhuis, and customized their procession in her honour, making her a conspicuous party to their celebrations as well as the focus of their devotion. She was seen wearing its insignia in public, even to having her portrait painted in it.62 It was assumed that thenceforward they had a special relationship, which also brought a tacit obligation to generosity: she gave the entire guild silken livery in her colours and later built the Domus Isabellae, where she attended their banquets,63 and which bore the inscription ‘Philippo iiii Hispan. Rege Isabella Clara Eugenia Hispan. Infans Magnae Guldae Regina Guldae Fratribus Posuit’ (Isabella Clara Eugenia, Infanta of Spain, [daughter] to Philip IV King of Spain, the Queen of the Great Guild, to the brothers of the Guild).64 Isabella ordered a highly expensive sequence of paintings from van Alsloot for her palace at Tervueren to commemorate the shooting match,65 and presented the Guild with a triptych by Otto van Veen showing herself and Albert kneeling before the crossbowmen’s patron saints, St George and the Blessed Virgin, with the ommegang winding its way on the facing panel.66 In return she received a stream of gratifying and image-building complimentary addresses, pamphlets and verses on the occasion, which were being recycled even in her funeral panegyrics. What part did the fact that she was female play in this image making? And how and in what way was she as a woman admitted to and integrated with this very martial, exclusively male society? Peter Arnade points out that because the Shooters’ Guild was also a religious fraternity, in Ghent women were admitted to it as ‘Guild sisters’, but that their role was restricted to ‘staffing the confraternity’s charitable hospital […] In contrast to their male counterparts, female members remained out of the public eye, participating neither in shooting exercises nor in ritual competitions’.67 Clearly, her sex enhanced her success. Paradoxically, being perceived as a weaker vessel makes her marksmanship even more exceptional, and memorable. The literary and pageantic strategy was to

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emphasize this singularity not with straight hyperbole but by comparing her with mythological overachievers, persons who transcended the usual limitations of their sex – the Amazons – and human nature – the goddess Diana – and then going one further. She does not equal the goddess Diana: she surpasses her.68 By winning the shooting competition Isabella has shown herself superior to and a worthy leader of the Guild the raison d’être of which is to prepare for war. She joins the company of warrior queens like Semiramis, Penthesilia and Tomyris. Margit Thøfner talks of the ‘feminization’ of Isabella in the propaganda of her day. Being the female element of the partnership between herself and Albert she could be allotted the nurturing, pacific, maternal role while he adopted the martial one.69 Since, she argues, the competition was ‘originally designed to maintain military skills in time of peace’; the ommegang was a kind of victory parade, but one ‘celebrating the Infanta as “Queen of Peace”’.70 But there seems to be very little of this in the imagery as presented, possibly because Albert had retired gracefully from the scene and left the focus of attention very properly on her. In any case, the binary male-female division does not really operate here. Like many powerful women of her age and after, she seems to have belonged to that mysterious third sex which can enjoy the advantages of both:71 ‘a woman, but born to a masculine glory’, as Puteanus described it.72 We should not be so fixated on the fact that she was a woman that we miss the point that she was also royal. As such she can be admitted to the highest (but it has to be the highest) rank in an otherwise allmale society, provided her function remains ceremonial and festive, and of course allows her to become a channel of influence and benefaction. Her role is like that of colonel-in-chief of the regiment, elegantly mythologized. The procession alludes to her royal descent in several ways. Obvious is the funeral nef of her grandfather with its heraldic banners and the Plus Oultre pillars. The replica court of Brabant stresses her current dignity. Less obvious are the Amazons, but as suggested, they may also refer to her ancestry. Isabella was for some time heir apparent to the Spanish throne. She was educated in statecraft by her father, and attended Council meetings from the age of 12.73 Her obituarist, striving to find the proper word to describe the kind of person this made her, comes up with virago, in its proper Latin sense of ‘a woman having the qualities of a man […] a warlike or heroic woman’: ‘Thus this maiden played the man in all things, this maiden played the heroine, she adorned all her words and deeds with every charm, and raised them to a masculine pitch with her virtues’.74 The word heroina, which Puteanus applies to her and which

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means something more like ‘demi-goddess’, probably appears on the image which immediately follows the Marian ones, Heroina Isabella.75 But, it is suggested, her skill won for her the final accolade that history had withheld from her. Once the greatest matrimonial prize in Europe, she saw the chances of becoming a queen slip away from her one by one.76 But if she was never to be a queen consort, here she wins the title for herself by her own prowess, and it is suggested that this is a worthy, possibly even a better substitute. As Saint-Germain said, her skill made her the Queen of the Popinjay, but her character made her Queen of Hearts. An engraving commemorating the event and entitled Trophee aux Dammes (Fig. 4.8)77 draws on the themes of this part of the ommegang and makes them explicit. It shows Isabella enthroned: over her baldachin, Our Lady of Sablon with Béatris Soetkens, the devotee who ‘rescued’ her cult statue from Antwerp. Flanking her are the archer gods, Apollo to stage right, Diana to stage left. In the middle kneel three huntress maidens, Penthesilia, Tomyris and Camilla, offering a bow and arrows. They declare in French: Let us pay homage: Her Highness has snatched from us all the glory of the bow and arrow. Doing battle beneath the standard of the Virgin Mary, she has the clear victory over two crowns. [It is] great joy to her subjects, a rebuke to envy, conduct befitting her noble lineage worthy of perpetual fame,78 that from being Her Highness, the Princess-Daughter of a king of high degree, she has by her own powers won the title of Majesty. Or as the Spanish subtitles sum up, ‘with her more than human powers […] she has fulfilled through war her Royal destiny’. The Archdukes knew how to deploy the media, and though several other rulers of the Netherlands shot the popinjay and were even painted doing so, van Alsloot’s paintings, to a lesser extent the allied panegyrics, and most certainly the fact that she was a woman, mean that Isabella has become the one everyone remembers. But even the most extravagant gesture of self-fashioning must surely have a kernel of truth. And while we are talking about token women and honorary men, we should remember that, no matter how extravagant it was, none of this would have happened if she had not been a superlative shot. The next five chapters examine how gender relations were instrumental in shaping eighteenth-century Freemasonry.

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Figure 4.8 Apollo and Diana honour the Archduchess Isabella: engraving Trophee aux Dammes by E. Sijceram, from Louis Hymans, Bruxelles à travers les ages, 3 vols (Brussels: Bruylant, 1882–89), p. 185. © British Library Board, 10270 h. 2.

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Notes 1 Geoffrey Ashton, Catalogue of Paintings at the Theatre Museum, London (London: Victoria and Albert Museum with the Society for Theatre Research, 1992), pp. 1–4; C. Michael Kauffmann, Victoria and Albert Museum Catalogue of Foreign Paintings I: Before 1800 (London: HMSO, 1973), pp. 5–7, Inv. 5928-1859; also Albert et Isabelle 1598–1621: Essays, ed. by Luc Duerloo and Werner Thomas [Exhibition Catalogue, Musées royaux d’Art et d’Histoire and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven] (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), pp. 205–6, based largely on Vincent Baesten SJ, L’Ommeganck de Bruxelles en 1615 d’après les tableaux de Denis van Alsloot, Précis historiques, 38 and 39 (1889, 1890). For van Alsloot (1570–1628), see The Dictionary of Art, ed. by Jane Turner, 34 vols (London: Macmillan; New York: Grove, 1996), I, pp. 686–7, though the information about this particular painting has several glaring errors; Marcel de Maeyer, Albrecht en Isabella en de Schilderkunst [Verhandelingen van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Akademie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België, Schone Kunsten 9] (Brussels: KVAWLSK, 1955), pp. 162–8; and Matías Días Padrón, El Siglo de Rubens en El Museo del Prado: catálogo razonado de pintura flamenca del siglo XVII, 3 vols (Barcelona: Editorial Prensa Ibérica; Madrid: Muséo del Prado, 1995), I, p. 103. In 1600 van Alsloot was appointed court painter to the Archdukes. 2 It is usually said to be the Place du Grand-Sablon/Grote Savel, the old Horse Market (Baesten, p. 114, note 3), but neither buildings nor street openings bear any resemblance to those depicted in the 1572 city map of Braun and Hogenberg (see John Goss, The City Maps of Europe: A Selection of 16th Century Town Plans and Views (London: Studio Editions, 1991), Plate 12, pp. 30–1) or in other slightly more contemporary maps or paintings. Margit Thøfner thinks they are just generic town scenes, in her ‘The Court in the City, the City in the Court’: Denis van Alsloot’s depictions of the 1615 Brussels “ommegang”’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 49 (1998), 185–207 (p. 185), but the same background appears in Sallaert’s rather different painting of the Procession of the Sablon. The companion pieces showing the shooters’ guilds and the trade and craft guilds, the ambachten, are recognizably in the Grand’ Place/Grote Markt. 3 Kauffmann, Inv. 168-1885 and 169-1885, and Baesten, p. 69. The dramatic history of these two paintings (see note 5, below) might explain why, other than for domestic considerations, the edges were trimmed off. 4 Brussels, Musée de l’Art ancien, inv. 171: see Catalogue inventaire de la peinture ancienne (Brussels: Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Département d’Art Ancien, 1984), p. 5. 5 The Archdukes commissioned van Alsloot to paint ‘huict grandes pièces contenant la procession tenue à Bruxelles l’an XVIe quinze, à la dédicace illecq, que madame a faict tirer’ to commemorate the occasion, for which he was paid 10,000 livres in instalments between 1615 and 1617. For a detailed discussion, see Baesten, pp. 28–9, though his arguments date from before the discovery of the 1636 Alcazar inventory, for which see Padrón, I, p. 106. The story of the paintings is complicated by the fact that many of them, if not all, were copied, probably in van Alsloot’s workshop, and it is difficult to map which of these went to Spain and which stayed in the region of Brussels: see de Maeyer, p. 165. A ‘giants’ painting (see below) and another version of the

84 The Archduchess and the Parrot pageant painting were lost in the fire at the Archducal Palace at Brussels in 1731 (de Maeyer, p. 468, nos 67–70). The simplest narrative says that the paintings were originally in the palace of Tervueren, but at the Archduchess Isabella’s death they passed into the possession of her heir the CardinalInfante Ferdinand and were removed to Madrid, where they appear in the 1636 Inventory of paintings in the ‘salon Grande de las Fiestas Publicas’ in the Alcazar. The descriptions in this inventory are full enough to enable us to identify the surviving paintings and to give some idea of what is missing. They were (1) the Trade Guilds (ambachten), now in the Prado; (2) the Shooters’ Guilds (serments), now in the V&A Museum; (3) both guilds together before the Archduchess (a much wider painting, at 20 feet, than the rest), missing; (4) the Giants and the Four Sons of Aymon riding the magical horse Bayard, missing; (5) the pageant cars, now in the V&A Museum; (6) the Magistrature and the Clergy, with the statue of Notre Dame de Sablon, now in the Prado. The remaining two did not show the procession, but (7) the parrotshooting itself, missing, now only in a copy (?) by Antoine Sallaert, Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, inv. 172 (see Catalogue inventaire 263); and (8) the festival of Diesdelle/Vivier de l’Oye, inv. 3446 of the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique (see Catalogue inventaire, p. 4), with several copies in other European museums including the Prado (Padrón, I, p. 112). It is not known why this should have been included in the group, unless it was to commemorate another festive occasion that year in which the Archdukes celebrated with their subjects. The group appears to have been split up very soon after (only two are in the 1686 Alcazar inventory). At least two were pillaged by the French during the Napoleonic invasion and then brought to England, either by Wellington’s soldiers, or by dealers who had bought them in France. The English ‘Triumph of Isabella’ was bought ‘from Mr Farrer’ in 1859 for the V&A. Painting (2), of the Shooters’ Guilds, was acquired by the V&A in 1885 from the estate of Henry Jerningham, Lord Stafford (died 1884). Sir George Jerningham (1771–1851), later Baron Stafford, had acquired it and kept it at Stafford Castle, where it was known as the ‘Kenilworth Pageant’, but either he or his son decided there would be no harm in cutting it into halves, presumably since they saw it as merely an interesting painting of Flemish architecture. The edges may of course have been damaged during the Napoleonic Wars: see Kauffmann, pp. 3–7. For large-scale reproductions of the canvases showing the Shooters’ Guilds and the Trade Guilds, see Edgard Goedleven, De Grote Markt van Brussel (Lannoo: Tielt, 1993), pp. 68–91. 6 Litteræ annuæ Provinciæ Flandro-Belgicæ Soc. Jesu: Vol. 2, 1612–1620 (Brussels: Collegium Bruxellense, 1615), p. 181, quoted by Baesten, pp. 115–17. The other major source for the detail of the procession is a vivid eyewitness description of it in 1549 by Juan Cristóbal Calvete de Estrella, El Felicissimo Viaje d’el … Principe Don Phelippe … desde Espana à sus tierras de la baxa Alemana: con la descripcion de todos los estados de Brabante y Flandes (Antwerp: Martin Nucio [Nuyts], 1552), pp. 74–8. This reveals that many of the wagons which appear in the van Alsloot painting have changed very little, except for an updating of costumes. The procession was likewise customized to please Prince Philip, later Philip II of Spain and Isabella’s father, the guest of honour. 7 Manuscript Liber Boonen in the Stedelijk Museum Mertens-van der Kelen, Leuven. The text was edited in the nineteenth century by the Leuven archivist

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8 9

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14

15

Edward van Even: Willem Boonen, Geschiedenis van Leuven geschreven in de jaren 1593 en 1594 (Leuven: Fonteyn, 1880), pp. 245–56. A new edition is in preparation by Meg Twycross with Guido Latré. See Meg Twycross, ‘The Flemish Ommegang and its Pageant Cars’, Medieval English Theatre, 2 (1980), 15–41, 80–98. See his funeral panegyric by Libertus Fromondus, Serenissimi Belgarum Principis Alberti Pii laudatio funebris (Leuven: Henricus Hastenius, 1621), p. 36: the Archduke suffered from the hæreditaria Austricis podagra. Baesten, p. 11, says that he was carried to the shoot in a chair, but gives no evidence. The painting by Sallaert shows him sitting in a chair under a canopy. Erycius Puteanus (Honorius van Born), Eryci Puteani Bamelrodi Bruxella Septenaria (Brussels: Jan Mommaert, 1646), pp. 76–7; Alexandre Henne and Alphonse Wauters, Histoire de la Ville de Bruxelles, 3 vols (Brussels: Perichon, 1845), II, p. 22; Baesten, pp. 10–11. Puteanus, Septenaria, p. 76. A literal translation of the first sentence is: ‘To whom, stepping down into that arena, either skill (for was it not done dextrously?) or luck (for was the outcome not successful?) favoured.’ Puteanus, Septenaria, p. 77, quoting the verses by Hermann Hugo, SJ, inscribed in the porch of the Sablon. The verses in the above note say that the parrot was wooden; however, Erycius Putenus says that it was aereum, copper- or bronze-coloured or -coated: Erycius Puteanus, Idea Heroica Principis vnius omnium optimae Isabellae Clarae Eugeniae Vita et Morte in exemplum delineata (Leuven: Joannes Oliverius and Cornelius Coenestenius, 1634), p. 12 (making a pun on aereum ‘bronze’ and aëreum ‘airy’). There is no reason why the two should be mutually exclusive. In Germany the popinjay is identified as an ‘eagle’, and appears still to be a wooden bird, as also in some parts of France. When asked how you knew you had hit the popinjay, an informed friend of this author replied ‘Its wings fall off.’ In a painting showing the Archduchess taking part in the popinjay shooting at Ghent in 1618, the target is set at the top of a mast: Albert et Isabelle, no. 288, p. 208. Leif Søndergaard, ‘De Skød Papegøjen’, Skalk, 6 (1999), 20–7 shows Scandinavian examples of the mast, from Olaus Magnus, Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus Book 15, Chapter 6, and from panoramas of Copenhagen (1596) and Aalborg (mid-seventeenth century), both set up in the fields outside the city. Magnus specifically mentions the crossbow in popinjay shooting: ‘Those handling very powerful crossbows fitted with blunt arrows try to dislodge and bring to the ground a target resembling a parrot, perched very high on an iron rod, and turning this way and that.’; Olaus Magnus, Description of the Northern Peoples, trans. by Peter Fisher and Humphrey Higgens, ed. by Peter Foote, annotation derived from the commentary by John Granlund, abridged and augmented, 3 vols (London: Hakluyt Society, 1996 and 1998), II, p. 731. A trawl of websites suggests that most modern archers use the mast, more or less technologically refined. See for example [accessed 3 May 2010]; the Kilwinning papingo shoot, however, the oldest in Scotland, uses a pole sticking out from the top of the church tower: [accessed 3 May 2010]. Brussels, Musée de l’Art ancien, inv. 172: possibly a copy of van Alsloot’s missing painting no. 7.

86 The Archduchess and the Parrot 16 ‘Peut-être leur flèche était-elle guidée par un fil invisible, comme dans la scène de drame ou d’opéra où Guillaume Tell abat la pomme sur la tête de son fils.’; Louis Hymans, Bruxelles à travers les âges, 3 vols (Brussels: BruylanteChristpohe, 1882–89), I, p. 190. 17 Information from Anne-Laure van Bruaene, via Peter Arnade. The inscription on the painting celebrates her joining in the competition but lists someone else as King: Josée Moulin-Coppens, De geschiedenis van het oude Sint-Jorisgilde te Gent (vanaf de vroegste tijden tot 1887) (Ghent: Drukkerij Hoste Staelens, 1982), pp. 174–5. 18 The Royal Armoury at Madrid preserves Charles V’s hunting crossbow: Carolus: Charles Quint 1500–1558, ed. by Hugo Soly and Johan van de Wiele [Exhibition catalogue, Sint-Pietersabdij Gent, 6 November 1999 to 30 January 2000] (Ghent: Snoeck-Ducaju & Zoon, 1999), no. 54, p. 202. 19 Fons Dewitte, 500 Jaar Vrye Archiers van Mynheere Sint Sebastiaen te Sint-KruisBrugge (Bruges: Orion, 1976): see [accessed 3 May 2010], the Guild’s website. 20 Communication from Jean-Marie Cardinael, Griffier of the Sint-Sebastiaansgilde. 21 This palace was destroyed by fire in 1686. For a brief description and image, see [accessed 3 May 2010]. Erycius Puteanus describes it as ‘æstivis maxime ardoribus inter umbras & aquas leniendis commodo, & venationi constructo’ (convenient, among shades and waters, to mitigate the extreme burning heat of summer, and built for hunting): Idea Heroica, p. 2. 22 Puteanus, Idea Heroica, p. 5. 23 The Guild’s website [accessed 3 May 2010] is insistent that she was King, not Queen, but contemporary accounts emphasize ‘Queen’, for reasons argued below. 24 Albert et Isabelle, no. 43, pp. 45–6. For illustrations of insignia, see Schatten van de Vlaamse Schuttersgilden, ed. by W. van Nespen with G. Simons and J. Gerarts [Exhibition Catalogue] (Antwerp: Oudheidkundige Musea, 1966–67; Brussels: Koninklijke Musea voor Kunst en Gescheidenis, 1967). 25 Henne and Wauters, II, p. 22. 26 Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, inv. 173; Albert et Isabelle, no. 188, pp. 141–2. 27 It is assumed by Baesten that the Jesuit school in Brussels was asked to devise this whole part of the ommegang: L’Ommeganck de Bruxelles, pp. 114–15. He may well, as a Jesuit himself, have had access to further documents, but the account quoted below only speaks of the cavalcade of Amazons and the Psapho wagon, which is conspicuously hung about with Jesuit banners and devices. Without further information, the extent of their involvement must remain uncertain. Later, they more or less took over the organization and theming of the procession of the Holy Sacrament of the Miracle, which superseded the Sablon ommegang as Brussels’s major annual procession. 28 Calvete de Estrella, El Felicissimo Viaje, fol. 77v. There were however many more in the 1549 procession. Some of those wagons may have been recycled for the ‘Isabella’s Triumph’ wagons. 29 See, for the Archdukes’ devotion to the Virgin, Luc Duerloo, ‘Archducal Piety and Hapsburg Power’, in Albert et Isabelle, ed. by Thomas and Duerloo,

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30

31 32

33

34

35 36

37 38

39 40

41

42 43

pp. 267–79, and also Jean Terrier, Portraicts des SS Vertus de la Vierge contemplées par Feue S.A.S.M. Isabelle Clere Eugenie Infante d’Espagne, a facsimile edition with critical introduction by Cordula van Wyhe (Glasgow: Glasgow Emblem Studies, 2002). On the relation between the Marian wagons and the Isabella wagons, see also Meg Twycross, ‘Some Approaches to Dramatic Festivity, Especially Processions’, in Festive Drama, ed. by Meg Twycross (Cambridge: Brewer, 1996), pp. 1–33 (pp. 16–17). From the title of Cordula Schumann, ‘Humble Wife, Charitable Mother and Chaste Widow: Representing the Virtues of the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia (1299–1633)’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, 2000), and the main themes of the devout portrait presented by Terrier’s emblem book. Probably recycled from the cage on the menagerie wagon described by Calvete de Estrella in 1549: El Felicissimo Viaje, fol. 77r. See Terrier, pp. xxviii–xxxiii. Fromondus even goes so far as to call the court of Albert and Isabella ‘a College of Vestal Virgins’: Alberti … Laudatio Funebris, p. 41. Jacques Stroobant, Brusselsche Eertriumphen (Brussels: Peeter de Dobbeleer, 1670), p. 33: Entry of Archduke Albert into Brussels, though this appears to have been a full-scale Parnassus mountain topped with Pegasus, as in Ant-werp. It was on a fixed stage, but there is plenty of evidence for the costumes, props and even sets of a successful stage presentation being transferred later to wagons. Currently it looks more like Hercina Isabella. This is confusing because there was actually a nymph called Hercina. But there is a marked ‘heroine’ strain in the panegyrics on Isabella. See Erycius Puteanus, Idea Heroica. Terrier, p. 11. Isabella is praised for having gathered the flowers of chastity appropriate to each stage. When Albert died, she became to all intents and purposes a Poor Clare. Baesten, p. 115. Berlin: Kupferstichkabinett, MS 88 D 5, fol. 47r; see Gordon Kipling, ‘Brussels, Joanna of Castile, and the Art of Theatrical Illustration (1496)’, in Porci ante Margaritam: Essays in Honour of Meg Twycross, ed. by Sarah Carpenter, Pamela King and Peter Meredith, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 32 (2001), pp. 229–54 (p. 236). Isabella or Isabel is the Spanish form of Elizabeth. ‘Non pugnabat quidem, sed belli tamen ac fortunae comes erat’: Puteanus, Idea Heroica, p. 9. She is compared specifically in this passage with Isabella la Catolica. The word cohors originally meant ‘poultry yard’, then a troop of militia. However, it seems clear that the author is using it to mean ‘cage’, as it is later opened so the birds can fly out. Baesten, p. 115. Malcolm Jones, ‘“Popinjay, Jolly May!” Parrot-badges and the Iconography of May in Britain, France and the Netherlands’, in Gevonden voorwerpen: opstellen over middeleeuwse archeologie voor H. J. E. van Beuningen, ed. by Dory Kicken, A. M. Koldeweij, and Johannes Rein ter Molen, Rotterdam papers, 11 (Rotterdam: Bureau Oudheidkundig Onderzoek Rotterdam, 2000), pp. 214–29 (pp. 215–17).

88 The Archduchess and the Parrot 44 Ilya Sandra Perlingieri, Sofonisba Anguissola (New York: Rizzoli, 1992), pl. 86; Buckingham Palace, Royal Collection, where it is attributed to Alonso Sánchez Coello. 45 Albert et Isabelle, no. 309, pp. 221–2; a delightful painting by Jan Brueghel I (Antwerp Rubenshuis, inv. S 130) shows the Archdukes strolling and feeding the deer in a park thronged with domestic and exotic birds. 46 Litteræ annuæ, quoted by Baesten, p. 115. 47 For a useful explanation in English of the Shooters’ Guilds and their social relations, see Peter Arnade, Realms of Ritual: Burgundian Ceremony and Civic Life in Late Medieval Ghent (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996): Chapter 3, ‘Shooting Confraternities and the Circulation of Prestige’, pp. 65–94; and Femke Kramer, ‘Why a Peasant is Taught how to “Shoot”: Rhetoricians, Militiamen, and a Late Medieval Dutch Farce’, in Festive Drama, pp. 180–9. Arnade’s analysis is particularly directed to Ghent, and thus probably paints a rather more confrontational picture than might be appropriate in other cities in the southern Low Countries. 48 Gordon Kipling, Enter the King (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 39–41; Albert et Isabelle, p. 49. 49 See Schutters in Holland, Kracht en zenuwen van de stad, ed. by Marijke CarassoKok and J. Levy-van Halm (Zwolle: Waanders; Haarlem: Frans Halsmuseum, 1988). As the title suggests, this concentrates on the northern Netherlands, and some of the terminology is different from that of modern-day Belgium. 50 Thøfner, p. 192. She gives a useful account of the political situation in Brussels at the time of the ommegang, pp. 189–93. See Arnade, pp. 70–1 for Ghent guild membership in the fifteenth century. 51 Dewitte, pp. 113–18 (p. 115). 52 She ought to be ‘fair Sabra, the King of Egypt’s daughter’, but the ommegang in Leuven identifies her very clearly with St Margaret, a lady who had no trouble disposing of dragons without masculine help. 53 This probably explains the presence of the two little girls in Rembrandt’s so-called ‘Night Watch’; they are not undersized camp followers. 54 Baesten, pp. 61–2; Henne and Wauters, I, p. 208. 55 See Arnade, pp. 81–2; Vier-hondert-jarigh Jubile over de memorable victorie van Woeringham op den 5. Junij 1288 (Brussels: Martinus de Bossuyt, 1688), p. 13. The latter says that the shooters of the Great Crossbow Guild are the lifeguard of the Duke of Brabant. 56 Vier-hondert-jarigh Jubile, pp. 13–14; Puteanus, Septenaria, p. 75; Hymans, I, p. 191 copies a list combining the Kings of the Crossbow and the Arquebus, starting with Charles the Bold in 1466. It is not known how many notables shot at the papegay and missed, as history only records successes. King Baudouin politely refused the chance to shoot with the Sint-Sebastiaans Gulde of Bruges when he honoured their 500th anniversary with his presence. 57 Puteanus, Septenaria, p. 76. 58 Albert et Isabelle, nos. 271, 272, pp. 195–7, by Jan Brueghel I, also in Padrón, I, pp. 208–9 and 212–13. Van Alsloot’s paintings, and those of Sallaert, are in the same tradition. 59 There is a parallel here with the young Henry VIII’s addiction to self-display in jousting and dancing: see Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter, Masks and

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60 61

62 63 64

65

66

67 68

69

Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 121–2 and 149. The author has not yet been able to discover what this second occasion was. Matthieu de Morgues, Sieur de Saint-Germain, Pourtraict en Petit d’IsabelleClaire-Eugenie Infante d’Espagne, Archiduchesse d’Austriche, Soveraine des PaysBas &c (Paris: Sebastien and Gabriel Cramoisy, 1650), pp. 41–2. Painting by Otto van Veen: see Albert et Isabelle, no. 43, pp. 45–6. Puteanus, Septenaria, pp. 76–7. Albert et Isabelle, no. 209, p. 254; Krista de Jonge and others, ‘Building Policy and Urbanization during the Reign of the Archdukes: the Court and its Architects’, in Albert et Isabelle, pp. 191–219 (pp. 211–13). De Maeyer, p. 165. Margit Thøfner suggests that the paintings ‘invert the bestowal of the title of Queen upon the Infanta Isabella. Originally she was the symbolic client of her capital city; but in Alsloot’s paintings it is the municipality who are her symbolic clients’ (Thøfner, p. 202). This seems to be too polarized. It depends of course on the setting in which the paintings are viewed: in Isabella’s palace the context foregrounds her, today in the Broodhuis Museum, for example, or in the other museums, they foreground the ostensible subject of the canvas. If the figures are in any way portraits of those taking part, then there is also a parallel with the ceremonial group portraits of the shooters’ guilds like Rembrandt’s Night Watch. Moreover, the fact that Tervueren was a hunting lodge, with a park given over to animals, was more appropriate to a sequence of paintings demonstrating the Archduchess’s skill in shooting than might at first appear. De Maeyer, pp. 77, 334–5. It was destroyed in the bombardment of 1695. It was not the first Royal Shooters’-King portrait in the room: commemorating the 1512 victory was a portrait of the Emperor Charles V and his father worshipping the Virgin Mary, with explanatory verses: Vier-hondert-jarighe jubilee, pp. 13–14. In 1618 she was invited by the Ghent crossbow guild of St Joris (St George) to shoot at the papegay. They also commemorated the event with a more naive painting (Albert et Isabelle, no. 288, p. 208). This is captioned with the names of all the guild officials of the year, and is clearly a guild status symbol. Arnade, p. 72. The caption in the front of Diana’s wagon reads: ‘VAINCV DE PLUS HAUTE TOURS IE VIEN FAIRE MON HOMAGE’ (Conquered, I come from the highest towers [of heaven] to pay my homage). This is particularly related to the account of the Royal Entry into Antwerp in 1599, when she was greeted as ‘a peace-making sovereign of the “sexus pacate”’: Thøfner, p. 192; Johannes Bochius, Historica narratio profectionis et inaugurationis serenissimorum Belgii Principum Alberti et Isabellae (Antwerp: Plantin, 1602), p. 146. This was partly because her mother Elizabeth de Valois was married to Philip II as a result of the treaty of Cateau Cambrensis and was thus, and because of her character, known as Regina Pacis (Puteanus, Idea Heroica, p. 2). Her later image after Albert’s death (and her own) also emphasized her maternal and pacificatory qualities, in which any warfare was spiritual: see Terrier. The partnership of Albert and Isabella was more equal than might have been expected. They addressed each other as ‘Brother’ and ‘Sister’

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70

71

72 73 74 75 76 77 78

(Saint-Germain, p. 10). Her status was in fact higher than his. (She was also several inches taller than he was – he is described by Fromond as pusillus (Fromondus, p. 36), she by Cardinal Bentivoglio as rather tall than short in stature compared with the average woman: Padrón, II, p. 1080 – and the difference in height does come out in their joint portraits.) Though their biographers make a point that she surrendered the government to Albert, they also say that there was a continual competition between them to yield the other precedence (Saint-Germain, pp. 10–11). Thøfner, p. 192. The ‘victory parade’ motif comes from one of the two origin myths for the procession, that it commemorated the victory in the battle of Woeringhen, 1288 (Thøfner, pp. 191–2); see Vier-hondert-jarigh Jubile. The author was first alerted to this possibility by being, not royal, or even a female prime minister, but a European wife in one of the more liberal Gulf States in the 1960s. Unfairly, one could both visit the harem, and attend the Sheikh’s formal dinners with one’s husband. As an anthropological category, it deserves further study. Puteanus, Septenaria, p. 76. Saint-Germain, p. 6. Puteanus, Idea Heroica, p. 6. It is difficult to read, and part of the O appears to be missing; it could read ‘Hercina’, which is, confusingly, the name of a nymph. See Thøfner, p. 193 for the unsuccessful attempts to make the Netherlands into a kingdom. Reproduced by Hymans, I, p. 185. A clumsy translation, but généreusité (‘generosity’) implied distinction of birth and therefore breeding.

5 Masonic Apologetic Writings Robert Beachy

The formal organization of the London Grand Lodge in 1717 and the spread of lodges to the European continent in the next 20 years created an important impulse for the first programmatic construction of a separate-spheres ideology. According to the Constitutions of the Freemasons, which was published by the London Masons in 1723 and served as a charter for the first Continental lodges, ‘no Bondmen, no Women, no immoral or scandalous Men’ should be granted admission.1 The exclusion of women offered one target for early opponents of Freemasonry who attributed Masonic fraternalism to one or several motives including misogyny, political conspiracy, and ‘unnatural’ or ‘perverse’ sexual practices. Apologetic Masonic writings responded by describing the benefits of masculine socialization and by highlighting its advantages over mixed-gender clubs. As Mary Ann Clawson has argued for men’s associations of Victorian America, exclusionary fraternalism compelled the American proponents of gender-segregated lodges and other organizations to draw sharp distinctions between themselves and those groups that admitted women.2 By the nineteenth century, of course, exclusionary fraternalism had recourse to an elaborate ideology of female domesticity. In contrast, eighteenth-century Masons were among the very first to theorize intrinsic gender difference, which they then used to justify their often embattled position. This chapter explores the precocious ‘contribution’ of Masonic fraternalism to an early Enlightenment construction of separate spheres. The exclusionary fraternalism of the early lodges, moreover, conforms closely to older scholarship on the emergence of a separate-spheres ideology. In her now classic Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution, Joan Landes argued that the Enlightenment public that emerged by the end of the eighteenth century constituted an implicitly 91

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masculine realm of public debate and discussion, which excluded and marginalized women. Likewise, English and German scholarship has identified a vigorous exclusion of women from civic and cultural life towards the end of the eighteenth century.3 More pointedly, Thomas Laqueur has argued that pre-modern notions of male and female sexuality, which placed men and women in the hierarchy of the Great Chain of Being, were displaced by 1800 with a new ‘two-sex’ model of radical sexual and gender difference.4 This transformation reflected work of the most important ideologists of feminine domesticity, including figures like Montesquieu, Rousseau and Kant, whose writings were published in the second half of the eighteenth century. Since Landes’s 1988 study, however, much eighteenth-century cultural history has emphasized precisely the opposite: namely the participation of women in Enlightenment institutions, including the Masonic lodges. Daniel Gordon has argued, for example, that the French Enlightenment valourized the impact of feminine characteristics, promoted mixedgender association, and granted women a special place in the ideology of sociabilité.5 Dena Goodman and Steven Kale view the French salons similarly as an arena where women could exercise significant agency.6 The recent collection of essays, Women, Gender and Enlightenment,7 is an especially valuable barometer of scholarly trends. Essays by Phyllis Mack, Ruth Perry, Suzanne Desan, Dena Goodman, Lynn Hunt, Kate Soper and others complicate older stereotypes about Enlightenment constraints placed on female identity and cultural participation, and qualify claims that women experienced complete political exclusion after 1789. They also suggest ways in which women gained an increased visibility and influence from eighteenth-century cultural developments – such as evangelical Protestantism – as well as more traditional Enlightenment institutions.8 Addressing Freemasonry specifically, Janet Burke and Margaret Jacob have argued that the francophone ‘lodges of adoption’ – a Masonic auxiliary association for women – ‘broadened and deepened the experience of enlightened culture’. In francophone Masonic culture, according to Burke and Jacob, ‘The process of gender integration appears to have been under way as early as the 1740s.’9 More recently James Smith Allen has traced the legacy of the French lodges of adoption into the twentieth century, arguing that ‘French Masonry […] provided a socially sanctioned outlet for women’s public activity in an otherwise prohibitive legal, political, and cultural context.’10 But Allen also suggests that the position of women in the French lodges represented a certain ‘exceptionalism’. ‘Their place in Freemasonry’, he contends, ‘is unusual if not unique.’11 Indeed, women’s eighteenth-

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century lodges of adoption appear to have been nearly an entirely francophone if not a French phenomenon. To date there is little evidence to document the existence of women’s lodges elsewhere in eighteenthcentury England or continental Europe. And as Burke and Jacob acknowledge, resistance to the lodges of adoption was vociferous, both within and outside of eighteenth-century France.12 Just as forceful were the outsider critiques of Masonry, which inspired the first apologetic Masonic responses. These writings began appearing by the 1720s, and addressed Masonry’s exclusionary fraternalism. In so doing, they adumbrated a separate-spheres ideology. What deserves emphasis here was the Masonic novelty of theorizing and justifying exclusionary fraternalism. In pre-modern Europe – outside of the Church – there were few examples of such emphatic fraternalism. Medieval universities emerged as all-male guilds, of course, but not even the religious fraternities or the European craft guilds were entirely segregated by sex, at least not before the sixteenth century, and even then only rarely with the same absolute exclusion of women. Moreover, none developed – again apart from the Church – the kind of theoretical justifications for the exclusion of women formulated by early pan-European Masonry. As the early-modern gender historian Heide Wunder has argued, in the early modern world ‘the effect of gender was graded according to age, marital status, and social class’; in an estate-based society, ‘there was no general subordination of all women’.13 For eighteenth-century contemporaries, therefore, Masonic fraternalism was decidedly innovative. It is therefore the timing of these early apologetic tracts – motivated by the need to justify Masonic fraternalism – that has been overlooked. When forced to explain the exclusion of women, British and Continental Masons began to construct and elaborate a complex set of sex distinctions and, implicitly, a codex of gender norms. Some of the earliest tracts and pamphlets – appearing in English, French, Dutch, and German, and often in multiple translations – emphasized the importance of shielding lodge brothers from sexual temptation. They also noted women’s legal and financial dependence on fathers and husbands as an implicit disqualification for lodge membership. Less generous Masonic publicists developed descriptions of the physical and moral ‘shortcomings’ of the female sex. Allegations of vanity, moral weakness and innate sensual depravity made women poor candidates for the rigours of lodge association, including fraternal loyalty and the ability to maintain secrets. Our purpose then is not to provide a systematic analysis of all Masonic publications but rather to consider the range of representative apologetic and anti-Masonic writings appearing between the 1720s and about 1770

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that foreshadow the rhetoric and substance of the separate-spheres ideology of the late Enlightenment and nineteenth century. The development of a pan-European Masonic literature in the eighteenth century requires some explicit comment. There is no small irony that Masons, committed to secrecy and esoteric ritual, would produce such an elaborate print culture. Of course, British Masonry was initially an oral culture, which only Anderson’s Constitutions began to publicize through print. Moreover, as Walter Ong has argued, printing and publication actually reinforced Renaissance orality and performance, and a similar dynamic is evident in eighteenth-century Masonic organization. It is clear that printing initially stabilized the Masonic ritual corpus and supported the proliferation of lodges.14 Arguably, print also worked to destabilize English Masonry in the second half of the eighteenth century by facilitating new Masonic systems as well as debates over the lodges of adoption and other competing secret societies. In any event, Freemasonry’s phenomenal growth is unimaginable without its corresponding publications. The character of eighteenth-century print culture generally is also an important consideration for understanding that of Masonry. There was at best a weak notion of intellectual property, and few copyright laws were codified in eighteenth-century Europe, much less enforced. We understand well from the work of Robert Darnton and many others that publishing piracy, unauthorized re-publication, translation, and unattributed citation – what we today call plagiarism – was common and widespread.15 The reproduction and re-publication of texts is thus a critical context for understanding the dissemination not only of Masonic writing but also of any Enlightenment work. Of course, Anderson’s Constitutions from 1723 represents one of the most widely printed Masonic works, appearing in French, German, and Dutch translations by the mid-eighteenth century. And while the Constitutions explicitly denied participation to women, Masonic ritual required that an initiate bare his left breast during the induction ritual as a symbol of purification and nakedness, the casting off of unenlightened attitudes upon entering the order. More significantly, the ritual guaranteed both symbolically and physically the male sex of all new members. Explaining and justifying this emphatic fraternalism – the exclusion of women – was from the very beginning one of the Masons’ greatest concerns. One of the earliest apologetic writings, The Free-Masons’ Accusation and Defence from 1726, represented an explicit attempt to justify the exclusion of women. The short tract is structured as a set of letters

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from a father who attempts to dissuade his son from joining a London lodge. One of the central elements debated in their correspondence is the relationship of the fraternal order to women. The father describes Masons as ‘utter enemies to the Fair Sex’, and questions how his son can reconcile his membership with his affectionate relationships with his mother and sisters. ‘Your Mother and Sisters’, he writes, were ‘alarm’d’ when they heard that ‘you were going to incorporate yourself with a Set of Men who are strongly suspected to bear no great Good-Will to the Fair Sex’. The son responds: ‘that the Ladies are a little jealous of the Fraternity is natural, from their Innate Curiosity, by reason the Mysteries of Masonry are secluded from that Sex’. But, the son also assures his father that his sisters and mother are integral to his wellbeing and happiness. That they should quibble at ‘such a Trifle’, considering the commitment and the effort required to join, the son finds inappropriate.16 Already in this very early text we can see the author’s concern with both criticisms of exclusionary fraternalism and its justification. Moreover, the author uses the dialogue to define one of the fundamental positions developed by Masons to justify their fraternalism. The distrust of excluded ‘ladies’ is ascribed to their undue ‘curiosity’ and ‘jealousy’. In effect, the inability of the ‘fairer sex’ to understand the requirements of secrecy is presented as an implicit justification for their exclusion. In another text, Apologie pour l’ordre des Francs-Maçons, published anonymously in The Hague in 1742 and in German translation just one year later, the author presents himself as a defender of women, decrying the satirical and misogynous works that belittle women. If some of the stereotypes of women, the author avers, are self-evidently true and justified, it is still mistaken to generalize for all members of the ‘fair sex’. But instead of criticizing feminine weaknesses, the author argues, one should simply recognize difference. To explain this difference the author invokes a natural order and claims that ‘the Creator’ (le créateur) assigned distinguishing qualities to man and woman and fixed each with its own vocation. Force and bravery, for example, appear to be reserved for man, just as beauty and gentleness for the woman. Men and women therefore complement each other, and each contributes in distinct and respective fashions to the greater good of society: ‘It remains however that each [gender] in its own way contributes to the welfare, the uses, and pleasure of human society according to its own constitution.’ 17 Through their profound understanding of this fundamental difference, the author asserts, Masons are in fact the staunchest supporters of all the rights and virtues of women.

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But if Masonry supports the ‘fairer sex’, the anonymous author questions rhetorically, why is it necessary to exclude women? In response, the author elaborates the ‘mature’ Masonic rationale that anticipates so perfectly the separate-spheres ideology of the late eighteenth century. In a set of responses enumerated from 1 to 12, the author informs us: despite their best efforts, Masons are still subjected to abuse by many foul-mouthed critics, and in part for excluding women. What would be our lot be if we permitted women to join? Even worse, since a mixedgender association would increase the criticism to which we are subjected. What if the lodge consisted of married couples and 50–50 gender ratio? Would this increase the virtue of our assemblies? No, this would certainly tempt some to exploit opportunities to flirt. The association of men and women would demean the seriousness of our purpose. Only a free and unsubjected being is in a position to satisfy the duties to which we are bound. Only men have this status. In contrast, women fall under the rule and laws of men. We do not argue that this is good or right, although we must point out that religion gives man the advantage in marriage and places him at the head of the family. Out of this state of affairs evolves the following: a woman can never guarantee her freedom, at least not for the length of her life, and for this reason: she can never offer her own liability. This is the case from her birth, until marriage, and finally until her death. Independence anyway is bad for her heart, so she requires an attachment to some man. As a housewife, she serves her husband and is dependent on him and is therefore not in a position to act independently for herself. But what if a single woman is determined never to marry? Should we accept her then? Could she keep her word and actually remain single? Were it not better for her to enter a nunnery or a cloister? The same holds for a widow, who despite her age can never really promise not to remarry. But what persecution would we subject ourselves to if we admitted a single or married woman against the will of her father or husband? What if we were forced to discipline or exclude such a woman for some infraction? Finally, how could any woman resist the demands of her father, husband or guardian to disclose the secret of our order? ‘No matter how patient and gentle a man might be or aggressive and independent a women,’ the author concludes, ‘law and religion have secured the man’s right which gives him the complete power to maintain women within the constraints demanded by the wellbeing, honour and duty of both men and women.’18 A third text published in 1744 by the Göttingen University professor Christian Ernst Simonetti reiterates many of these points while stressing the disruptive character of feminine sexuality. Simonetti argues

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that the absence of women represents one of the most important principles of the Masonic order, making it an absolute necessity to maintain this exclusion. ‘Why is this necessary?’, he asks. The first problem to emerge is with women’s sensuality and voluptuousness. Since women are clearly prone to displays of vanity in efforts to exceed members of their sex, their presence in any lodge would undoubtedly undermine the very qualities that lodge fraternalism was intended to foster. Women would also threaten the secrecy and discretion demanded of all lodge members. Since women are unable to withhold information, what would be the fate of Masonic ritual? The final and perhaps most fatal objection raised by Simonetti was the legal and financial dependence of most women on a father, husband or male guardian. With the notable exceptions of certain commercial and landed elites, most English and French women were reduced to the legal identity of their husbands or male guardians under common-law rules of couverture or through the status of femme couverte. In most of German central Europe, women were similarly forced to accept the legal and economic protection of gender guardianship, which conferred the status of a minor. Because of these legal and economic restrictions, women could never act as independent adults. How then, Simonetti reasons, could they accept the responsibilities, voluntarily, of Masonic membership? What if a father, husband, or guardian objected to their involvement?19 Into the 1740s Masonic authors often responded to rumours and popular stereotypes, or they anticipated criticisms of their exclusionary fraternalism. By mid-century, however, the apologists contended with a growing body of published anti-Masonic works. Of course, the papal bulls of 1738 and 1754 condemning Freemasonry, although reflecting the popularity and growth of the lodges, also inspired anti-Masonic critiques and publications. Here again, exclusionary fraternalism was one of the central Masonic elements that critics excoriated. And as Margaret Jacob has argued, in English, French, and Dutch contexts, it even inspired associations with homosexuality and accusations of sodomy.20 One typical anti-Masonic text, Safeguard Against the Freemasons, was published in 1751 and in German translation within the year. The author, a Spanish Franciscan, José Torrubia, attacked the Masonic exclusion of women, and without irony, though he belonged himself to one of the most exclusionary fraternal organizations. According to Torrubia, Masonic exclusion ‘insults the honor of many of the most esteemed women, whose virtue clearly exceeds that of even the best men’.21 Torrubia’s explanation is particularly suggestive since it hints at the potential of Masonic fraternalism to constitute a new social group within ancien régime society but at the

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expense of elite women. Clearly by 1750 many had grasped the significance of exclusionary Masonic fraternalism, not only for equalizing social and legal difference but also for excluding women. Again, Torrubia’s commentary underscores the novelty of a Masonic fraternalism that selfconsciously ignored ancien régime categories of religion and estate – constituting a meritorious brotherhood – while likewise excluding women, regardless of religion, estate, or merit. It is important to distinguish between different strains of Masonic gender ideology (Again, for the purposes of this chapter, the proponents of the francophone lodges of adoption have been deliberately ignored). While a few Masonic apologists were explicitly misogynistic, others, like the Göttingen professor Simonetti (considered above), identified themselves and Masons more generally as friends of women. In attempting to justify exclusionary fraternalism, however, even this protofeminist Masonic rhetoric embraced and promoted a separate-spheres ideology. One of the most interesting illustrations of this position comes from a somewhat obscure but prolific figure of the late German Enlightenment, Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel (1741–1796). As a Prussian bureaucrat and burgomaster of the East Prussian capital Königsberg, Hippel was a close friend of Immanuel Kant and also a prominent Mason. Hippel is best known today for his On Improving the Status of Women, which appeared anonymously in 1792, simultaneously with but independently from Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women. Like Wollstonecraft, Hippel takes issue with the French Constitution of 1791, which failed to grant political rights to women. And like Wollstonecraft, remarkably, he argues for women’s complete legal and political emancipation. Unlike Wollstonecraft, however, Hippel bases his position on a model of the sex-linked differences between men and women. For Hippel, men and women are fundamentally different beings, embodying a set of contrasting characteristics and virtues. Sounding almost like Rousseau, Hippel is very traditional: women are modest, gentle, patient, while men represent the opposite. In contrast to most ideologues of radical gender difference, however, Hippel believes that these traits qualify women to exercise full rights of political and civic participation.22 Does Hippel’s position have anything to do with Masonic fraternalism and gender ideology? Yes, indeed. In 1768, Hippel published a set of ‘Freemasonry Addresses’, which he had written and presented at various Berlin and Königsberg lodge functions. One of these, The Duties of a Freemason in regard to the Fair Sex, offers a fairly clear linkage between the

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Masonic gender ideology of the first half of the eighteenth century and Hippel’s mature thoughts on the emancipation of women from On Improving the Status of Women. Much of Hippel’s analysis supports the traditional arguments for exclusionary fraternalism. Like the Prussian lodges, and the German lodges more generally, he is clearly no friend of the lodges of adoption. Hippel affirms that women are and must be excluded from the lodges, but he refuses to present justifications that degrade women, including the arguments about feminine indiscretion or a disrupting sensuality. Instead, Hippel asserts that he is simply not permitted to give the real reason for the exclusion of women and thus folds the justification for exclusionary fraternalism back into the larger demands of secrecy. Hippel does attack anti-feminists and misogynists, however, who emphasize the shortcomings of the ‘fairer sex’ (as if men were perfect). He likewise refutes those who claim that women are not fully human. But he agrees that women by nature are rarely capable of holding public office. Instead, he maintains that the distinct and separate qualities of women, including their taste and their virtue, qualify them to exercise independent judgment, and – as he ultimately argues in 1792 – participate politically.23 The somewhat surprising and perhaps incongruous positions of a Masonic figure like Hippel provide an important benchmark for measuring the evolution of Masonic gender ideology. The francophone lodges of adoption notwithstanding, Freemasonry emerged in the eighteenth century as a pan-European fraternal association, committed to Enlightenment ideals of religious and social tolerance. Important associational venues for mercantile and professional elites, the lodges instantiated not only an incipient bourgeois social and political order but also its corresponding definitions of gender.24 Clearly the first Masons did not set out to develop a particular gender ideology. The arguments developed in Masonic print culture beginning in the 1720s were much more an inadvertent effect of the need to justify the exclusionary fraternalism enshrined in Anderson’s Constitutions. Yet Masonry’s exclusionary fraternalism both anticipated and articulated a strikingly modern set of gender norms. These justifications defined a set of sexual, emotional, social, and political differences distinguishing men from women in an attempt to justify the exclusionary fraternalism of the lodges. Cited for its precocious ‘modernism’ in promoting religious pluralism, in diminishing social and estate difference, or in establishing the practices of liberal and constitutional government, eighteenth-century Freemasonry also theorized a remarkably ‘modern’ ideology of the alleged character differences that divide men and women.

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Notes 1 James Anderson, The Constitutions of the Free-Masons: Containing the History, Charges, Regulations, &c. Of That Most Ancient and Right Worshipful Fraternity. For the Use of the Lodges (London: printed by William Hunter, for John Senex, and John Hooke, 1723), pp. 50–1. 2 Mary Ann Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 21–52. 3 The most important analysis of female domesticity in Britain is still Catherine Hall and Leonore Davidoff, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), and for Germany see Karin Hausen, ‘Family and Role-Division: The Polarisation of Sexual Stereotypes in the Nineteenth Century’, in The German Family, ed. by Richard J. Evans and W. Robert Lee (London: Croom Helm, 1981), pp. 51–83. 4 Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 5 Daniel Gordon, Citizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 191–4. 6 Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 253–7; Steven Kale, French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 7 Women, Gender and Enlightenment, ed. by Barbara Taylor and Sarah Knott (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005). See also the excellent review article by Anthony J. LaVopa, ‘Women, Gender, and the Enlightenment: A Historical Turn’, Journal of Modern History, 80 (2003), 332–57. 8 See Phyllis Mack, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 9 Janet M. Burke and Margaret C. Jacob, ‘French Freemasonry, Women, and Feminist Scholarship’, Journal of Modern History, 68 (1996), 513–49 (pp. 515, 546). See also Margaret C. Jacob, ‘Freemasonry, Women, and the Paradox of the Enlightenment’, in Women and the Enlightenment, ed. by Margaret Hunt and others (New York: Routledge, 1984), pp. 69–93. 10 James Smith Allen, ‘Sisters of Another Sort: Freemason Women in Modern France, 1725–1940’, Journal of Modern History, 75 (2003): 783–835 (p. 834). 11 Allen, pp. 832–5. 12 Jacob, ‘Freemasonry’, pp. 70–2; Burke and Jacob, p. 545. See also Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 121. 13 Heidi Wunder, He is the Sun, She is the Moon: Women in Early Modern Germany, trans. by Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 205. 14 See Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982); also Steven C. Bullock, ‘Publishing Masonry: Print and the Early American Fraternity’, in Freemasonry, Anti-Masonry and Illuminism in the United States, 1734–1850: A Bibliography, ed. by Kent Logan Walgren, 2 vols (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 2003), I, pp. lxi–lxxxi. 15 Only the British established effective controls on piracy with the Copyright Act of 1709. Under the ancien régime, France created a 12-year publishing

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16

17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24

privilege in 1777, which was extended to the author’s lifetime plus ten years in 1793. Only in the nineteenth century could the German state create a uniform copyright code. See Robert Darnton, The Business of the Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979); Frederick Compton Avis, The First English Copyright Act, 1709 (London: Glenview Press, 1965); Reinhard Wittmann, Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels (Munich: Beck, 1991). ‘Gentleman in the Country’ [pseud.], The Free-Masons’ Accusation and Defence, in Six genuine Letters between a Gentleman in the Country and his Son, a Student in the Temple wherein the whole affair of Masonry is fairly debated, and all the Arguments for and against that Fraternity are curiously and impartially handled (London: printed for J. Peele; and N. Blanford, 1726), pp. 7–8, 12, 18. See Jacques-Cristophe Naudot and Pierre Gosse, Apologie pour l’ordre des FrancsMaçons (The Hague: Chez Pierre Gosse, 1742). The German translation appears in Anhang zum Constitutionen Buch der Frey-Maurer, worin eine Sammlung verschiedener zum vortheil dieser Erhwuerdigen Gesellschaft ans Licht gekommenen merckwuerdigen Schutz-Schrifften, Reden und anderer Vertheidigungen enthalten (Frankfurt: Andreäische Buchhandlung, 1743), quoted from the German, p. 42. Anhang zum Constitutionen Buch, pp. 44–9, quoted from p. 49. Christian Ernst Simonetti, Sendschreiben an die Ehrwürdige Loge der Freymaurer in Berlin (Berlin: Gebr. Schmid, 1744), pp. 150–3. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment, pp. 121–2. Josef Torrubia, Schildwache gegen die Freymaurer (Ansbach: Bei J. Torrubia, 1752), p. 61. See On Improving the Status of Women, trans. and ed. by Timothy Sellner (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979). See Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, Sämmtliche Werke, 14 vols (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1827–39), X, pp. 234–46. See Robert Beachy, ‘Club Culture and Social Authority: Freemasonry in Leipzig, 1741–1830’, in Paradoxes of Civil Society, ed. by Frank Trentmann, 2nd edn (New York: Berghahn, 2003), pp. 157–75; and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, The Politics of Sociability: Freemasonry and German Civil Society, 1840–1918 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007).

6 Chilvaric Muses: The Role and Influence of Protectresses in Eighteenth-Century Jacobite Fraternities Robert Collis

This chapter looks at the role of women in eighteenth-century British fraternities, hitherto little studied by academics.1 As indicated in the previous chapter, the difficulty of ascertaining gender relations lies in the unambiguous and proscriptive stance officially adopted by Freemasons in 1723, when James Anderson (c. 1679–1739) laid out the general regulations of the fraternity in The Constitutions of the Free-Masons.2 Herein, as Robert Beachy stresses, Charge III stipulated that ‘the persons admitted Members of a Lodge must be good and true Men, free-born, and of mature and discreet Age, no Bondmen, no Women, no immoral or scandalous Men.’3 The Scottish Presbyterian minister made it abundantly clear that women were to be categorically excluded from every aspect of Freemasonry, which was by far the largest fraternity in eighteenth-century Britain. Thus, for the remainder of the century, despite the fragmentation of the Craft into various rival Grand Lodges, the prohibition on the participation of women in Masonic life apparently remained in place and was upheld by the vast majority of brethren. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that because women were excluded from Freemasonry that they were barred from all fraternal societies in eighteenth-century Britain. More specifically, in this chapter it will be argued that aristocratic women – principally in the guise of ‘protectresses’ – played a significant role in shaping the associational, ritualistic and hierarchical structures of Jacobitelinked fraternities between as early as the 1720s and the 1780s. What is more, one can demonstrate that this Jacobite tradition also infiltrated at least two recognized Masonic lodges – the Royal Denbigh Lodge and the Royal Chester Lodge – where lady patronesses were elected in 1787 and 1797 respectively.4 Evidence of the prominent roles played by women in Jacobite fraternities is of considerable import in terms of British social and cultural 102

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history in the eighteenth century. The extent of this influence will be discussed further below, where it will be illustrated how the foundation of the Society of Royal British Bowmen, in February 1787, replete with a lady patroness and full female participation, stemmed directly from Jacobite forms of fraternal sociability. The significance of female involvement in Jacobite fraternities is also constructive in being able to offer a new perspective on the nature of so-called adoption Freemasonry, in which female participation was permitted, as it developed in continental Europe (principally in France and Holland) from the 1740s. In recent years a rich vein of work on the history of Freemason women in eighteenth-century western Europe – particularly France and Holland – has been undertaken by a host of respected scholars.5 These groundbreaking studies have done much to broaden our knowledge of the changing nature of associational culture in western Europe, but have stopped short of crossing the English Channel and examining the role of women in Jacobite-linked fraternities. As will be outlined below in more detail, one can discern distinctive traits regarding female participation in Jacobite fraternities. The titles of ‘protectress’ and ‘patroness’, for example, are commonly used. The aristocratic ladies occupying these roles, who were normally related to male members of the fraternities, are praised using abundant chivalric language aimed at extolling their virtuous qualities. Moreover, the idealized representation of Jacobite protectresses or patronesses is reminiscent of the Catholic veneration of female patron saints. Thus, Mary, for example, is symbolized as God’s Protectress of the Roman Catholic Church.6 As a whole Jacobites were much more willing to embrace Catholic symbolism, even if by no means all Stuart loyalists linked to fraternal societies were Catholic. If one examines the early nature of adoption Freemasonry (and paraMasonry) in France, for example, one is struck by the pronounced similarities this form of fraternal association shares with the role and perception of women in earlier and contemporaneous Jacobite societies. In this regard, one can turn to a remarkable description of a mixed lodge, entitled the Chevalerie Secrette, mystérieuse & immortelle, contained in the August 1745 edition of La Clef du Cabinet des Princes de l’Europe, a monthly journal published in Luxembourg by André Chevalier (1660–1747).7 The lengthy nine-page description of the mixed fraternity, which is said to have been founded in a ‘beautiful town in the Province of Lorraine’ at the end of April 1745, reveals that it includes marquises, countesses and a baroness.8 These noble ladies are extolled for their virtues and are able

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to hold the ranks of Grand Mistress, First and Second Presidents and, significantly, Protectress of the Order.9 It is also extremely enlightening to refer to the Registre des procès verbaux of the Loge de la Candeur of Strasbourg, which was written in 1763. In this document, the orator of the lodge states that aristocratic women were adopted as patronesses of Masonic lodges in the time of Charles Radclyffe, the fifth Earl of Derwentwater (1693–1746), who was Grand Master of Freemasons in France between 1736 and 1738.10 The link to Radclyffe is highly significant, as he was an ardent Jacobite (who was beheaded by the British authorities in London in December 1746) and was also responsible for founding the first Masonic lodge in the French capital in 1725. In other words, Radclyffe was in a perfect position to act as a conduit between the blossoming brotherhood and Jacobite variations on fraternalism, which adopted more open attitudes towards female participation. In 1763, it is documented that Baroness de Flachslande was appointed the protectress of La Candeur Lodge. This Alsatian aristocrat, whose husband was also a member of the lodge, is praised by the orator, who remarks: ‘The charms which a sweet nature has embellished […] by a cultivated spirit, [such is] the nobility of sentiments, the goodness of the soul, the righteousness of heart, the equality of character, the charm of her society, the sweetness of more.’ The baroness replies by protesting that ‘the distinctive title of Protectress […] is too flattering’, whilst also praising the virtues practised by her brethren.11 As Margaret Jacob astutely notes, the ambience of this investiture is imbued with an almost bygone spirit of chivalry, as well as seemingly drawing on the Catholic tradition of the patronage of female saints.12 Hence, one could argue that evidence of female participation in Jacobite fraternities – principally in the guise of a protectress or patroness – provides an alternative model of association to that advocated by mainstream Freemasonry in Britain. This encouraged female participation, albeit to a limited extent, but by the end of the 1780s had evolved, in the case of the Society of Royal British Bowmen, into near-equal participation in associational culture. Moreover, this Jacobite model of mixed fraternal association bears striking similarities to Continental adoption lodges, whether Masonic or para-Masonic.13 This is noteworthy, as it suggests Jacobite networks not only influenced the development of male fraternalism on the Continent, but also played a pivotal role in shaping the nature of female involvement in fraternal societies. From a gender perspective, the emergence of the Antient and Noble Order of Gormogons in 1724, as a rival to Freemasonry, is significant.

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Little is known regarding this fraternity, apart from the publication of several articles and advertisements in the press between September 1724 and December 1735.14 However, with some justification it is believed that the society had strong Jacobite sympathies and that Philip, Duke of Wharton (1698–1731), a leading member of the so-called Hell-Fire Club (c. 1719–21) and a past grand master of English Freemasonry (1722–23) was a prominent initiate.15 There is no evidence to suggest that women were admitted to the Order of Gormogons; however, the laws and constitutions of the society, which were published in The Plain Dealer on 14 September 1724, reveal a far more ambiguous use of language than that expounded in Anderson’s The Constitutions of the Free-Masons of the previous year. Thus, the Gormogon constitutions merely stipulate that ‘remarkable Virtues have always recommended’ candidates for membership. Moreover, the order proclaims that it knows ‘neither Prejudice nor Partiality’ in conferring membership, with merit being the sole criterion.16 In many ways, the importance of the Gormogon constitutions lies not in what is explicitly stated, but in what is absent. No recourse is made to gender division and thereby the potential for female participation in the order is not categorically prohibited. In October 1724, a certain Verus Commodus also expounded the mythological chronology of the Order of Gormogons. In striking contrast to the legendary founding fathers of Freemasonry, as described by Anderson, the Gormogon account lists Nahama, the sister of Tubal Cain, as a revered founder.17 The simple inclusion of a single woman amidst a long list of male founders is highly significant, as it suggests a female prototype worthy of emulation. However, the meagre source material relating to the Gormogons makes it impossible to know whether they countenanced any form of female participation at their chapters at the Castle Pub in Fleet Street. Little has been written on the Most Ancient, Most Illustrious and Most Noble Order of Toboso, the first pan-European Jacobite secret fraternity that was active from as early as 1726 until at least 1739.18 What has been written has been largely dismissive. Modern commentators, on the whole, have been entirely content to reiterate Henrietta Tayler’s assessment, made in 1938, that ‘the mock order of Toboso was invented for the amusement of the little [Stuart] princes (Charles aged 11, and Henry aged 7).’19 In other words, it has been assumed that the Jacobite exiles in Rome formed ‘a light-hearted fraternity’ to ‘amuse themselves’ whilst ‘time hung heavily’.20 The one exception to this otherwise standard viewpoint has been posited recently by Steve Murdoch, who

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questions the purpose of ‘turning your potential generals into court jesters’.21 The research carried out by Murdoch has played a crucial role in reassessing the nature and raison d’être of the Order of Toboso. However, one can argue that it is possible to expand considerably upon this foundation if one examines the extant primary sources relating to the Jacobite fraternity. One crucial aspect of the Order of Toboso’s activities that has been completely overlooked by scholars is the nature of female participation in the fraternity. The name of the order itself honours Dulcinea del Toboso, the vision of feminine beauty conjured up in the mind of Don Quixote, the befuddled chivalrous knight created by Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616). Yet, despite the quixotic allusions suggested by the name of the order, the fraternity’s approach to women was not simply restricted to flights of romantic fantasy. This is first testified in a letter dating from 22 April 1734, when the Revd Ezekiel Hamilton, the Grand Master of the Order of Toboso – and an Anglican chaplain at the exiled Stuart court – wrote a remarkable letter from Radicofani Castle (some 120 miles north of Rome) on behalf of his Jacobite fraternity. The letter is addressed ‘to all true Knights, Squires &c.’, and concerns the reasons for refusing to initiate James Murray, Earl of Dunbar (c. 1690–1770). Significantly, the first point specified by Hamilton in defence of this decision states that: ‘The said James Murray &c. had once the insolence in our presence to fail in his respect to a right honourable lady who is the ever honor’d protectress of the most illustrious order of Toboso.’22 Six other reasons then follow as to why Murray was barred entry to the fraternity. Far from being simply an amusement for young princes in Rome, this ‘infamous libel’ – to quote Murray – that was penned by the Grand Master of the Order of Toboso sent shock waves through the exiled Jacobite court in Italy and beyond. Indeed, the accusations made by Hamilton, on behalf of the Order of Toboso, led to the intervention of James Stuart, the Old Pretender (1688–1766), who remarked that ‘I am sorry [Hamilton] should have acted so odd a part.’23 Moreover, Murray also saw fit to write a public rebuttal of Hamilton’s claims. In regard to Hamilton’s first accusation, Murray wrote that ‘I affirm, that to this Hour I do not know who that Dulcinea is, whom Mr Hamilton is pleased to style right honourable lady, and to whom he says I had the insolence to fail in respect.’24 Whilst the letter had enormous internal political ramifications within the Jacobite diaspora on the Continent, its significance in terms of gender studies should not be overlooked. After all, herein is contained the earliest-

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known reference to female participation in a para-Masonic fraternity – in the guise of a protectress. What is more, the tone of Hamilton’s accusation against Murray, vis-à-vis the ‘right honourable lady’ who is fulfilling the role of the ‘ever honour’d protectress’, implies that the position predates April 1734, when the letter was written. The scorn heaped upon Murray for his supposed insolence against the protectress also reveals a chivalric sense of reverence for the ‘honourable lady’, which is wholly in the spirit of the aristocratic ethos of latter Continental adoption lodges. In Murray’s reply to Hamilton’s ‘infamous libel’, he justifiably asks to know the identity of the protectress ‘by her own name’. It is not known whether Murray ever became aware of whom he was supposed to have offended, but luckily for historians Hamilton reveals the identity of the protectress – one Lady Elizabeth Caryll (d. 1754) – in a letter addressed to her from Leiden, dated 15 November 1736. The letter is worth quoting at length, as it tells us a great deal about the relationship between the Grand Master of the Order of Toboso and the fraternity’s protectress: To the Rt Honble the Lady Elizabeth Caryll Protectrice of the most Noble order of Tobosco. If I had received the honour of your Ladyships letter in due time I wou’d have sooner done my Self the honour to have return’d my most humble thanks for it And I should be a Very Unworthy Knight If I were not thoroughly sensible of your Ladyships Condescension in taking the least Notice of one who values himself on nothing More than the Honour of being Under Your Ladyships Protection: I shall endeavour to deserve the continuance of it by the most dutyfull respects to your Ladyship and by my Constant readiness to Obey your Comands.25 The language of the letter is replete with chivalrous proclamations of honour and loyalty from the Grand Master to Lady Caryll, the Protectress of the Order. Moreover, Hamilton expresses his commitment to obey the commands of his protectress, suggesting her role is more than merely a symbolic gesture to bygone modes of chivalric behaviour. This notion is reinforced in an attached letter, addressed to his fellow knight Lord Francis Sempill (d. 1748) in Paris.26 Therein Hamilton also indicates that Elizabeth Caryll was playing a key role in the secretive affairs of the order: ‘The fair Protectrice will have reason to tax me with want of duty and respect but I beg Your Lordship to give her the inclosed And to make my excuse to her in a better manner than I can doe for my Self.’27

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Knowledge of the active participation of Lady Elizabeth Caryll, as protectress of the Order of Toboso, is extremely enlightening in regard to understanding the associational nature of an early eighteenth-century Jacobite fraternity. Furthermore, it is also illuminating vis-à-vis the broader aspects of Jacobite culture, in which an English Catholic noblewoman could enjoy such an elevated status. Even a cursory glance at the family history of Elizabeth Caryll (née Harrington) is informative in comprehending why she, in particular, had been honoured with the title of Protectress.28 In 1686 Elizabeth Harrington married John Caryll, second Baron Caryll of Durford (1667–1736) in Sussex, thereby entering into one of the most prominent Jacobite Catholic families in England. Her husband was the nephew of John Caryll, first Baron Caryll of Durford (1626–1711), from West Harting in Sussex, who was Secretary of State to James II in exile at Saint-Germain-en-Laye between 1694 and 1701. Caryll was also a poet and playwright of some note and a friend of John Dryden (1631–1700).29 John Caryll (the younger) inherited his uncle’s literary proclivities and was a close friend of Alexander Pope (1688–1744). Indeed, Caryll was the inspiration behind The Rape of the Lock (1712), arguably Pope’s most well-known work, and was lauded by the poet as ‘the best man in England’.30 Whilst the younger Caryll did not reach the political heights attained by his uncle, he remained an active and loyal Jacobite until his death. Thus, whilst on the surface he was simply the landlord of the Caryll estate in Sussex, he also made frequent trips to France, such as in 1725, when, as Howard Erskine-Hill notes, ‘he was a figure of sufficient importance or influence to attend at the French court’ of Louis XV.31 Thus, Lady Elizabeth Caryll mixed in both educated literary circles and among Jacobite grandees in both England and among the exiled court on the Continent. The esteem in which she was held by John Caryll’s friends and associates is epitomized by Pope, who in a letter to his friend from 23 October 1733, writes: ‘My sincere services attend your Countess […] I hope she is as healthy as she is good.’32 However, little more can be gleaned about the life and character of Elizabeth Caryll, except for a number of family-centred letters, in which she assumes the role of the caring mother or grandmother.33 Yet, the surviving documents relating to the Order of Toboso, in which Lady Caryll is mentioned, provide a remarkable insight into the associational milieu of a prominent Jacobite noblewoman. In these documents Lady Caryll emerges from the relative obscurity of playing the dutiful squire’s wife on the family estate in Sussex, and assumes a

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pivotal role – whether it be merely honorary or not – in the ritualistic ceremonials and symbolism of arguably the most important Jacobite fraternity in the first half of the eighteenth century. The extent of Lady Caryll’s day-to-day involvement in the practical matters of the Order of Toboso is difficult to gauge. From the correspondence of Ezekiel Hamilton during the 1730s (in both Rome and Leiden), it is evident that he played a key role as Grand Master of the Order in both networking across Europe and in general organizational affairs. However, in a letter from Hamilton to fellow knight Sir Redmond Everard (d. c. 1740) in Paris, dated 31 January 1737, the Grand Master expresses annoyance at a delay in receiving a number of the order’s symbolic rings. Significantly, he states that ‘I beg you’l make my excuse to the fair Protectrice in ye best manner.’34 Thus, it appears that Lady Caryll, as the Protectress of the Order, was at least kept informed of the fraternity’s practical business, even if she herself played no role in directing affairs. It could well be that Caryll’s authority rested on a complex mix of bygone, chivalric gallantry and as a consequence of the tortuous nature of internal Jacobite politics. In respect of the latter, Lady Caryll’s involvement could have acted as a neutral foil to the bitter squabbles of the various Jacobite (male) factions. Hence, in the guise of a protectress, the leading male figures of the Order of Toboso, such as Hamilton, could thereby enact the pretence that ultimate authority had to be deferred to Lady Caryll. Prior to February 1737, when Hamilton wrote to Everard, the Grand Master and fellow Knights of the Order reserved their words of esteem to Lady Caryll, the ‘fair Protectrice’. However, in a letter from a certain ‘D. G.’ in London to Hamilton, dated 15 February 1737, the anonymous Knight of the Order relates the following interesting account: ‘Sr Patrick and I have very lately had the honour of paying our respects to the sister Protectresses of the Ancient & honourable Order, & were received Very Graciously.’35 No mention is made as to the identity of these ‘sister protectresses’, but evidently the order had seen fit to enlarge female participation in its affairs. The more pronounced role for such ‘sister protectresses’ is corroborated the following year, in a letter Hamilton wrote to Patrick Briscoe in Paris: I have nothing in particular to trouble you with except to remember me to all my Friends in Sury Street and elsewhere: Last Year the Order (of the Knights of Toboso) was much enlarged by making Necklaces with the Motto on them, I sent a few of them to England, as many as could be made during the time I stayed at Spa. I hope to get some more done the next season and I will not forget the Lady in Surry

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Street, I sent one to Sr William [Maxwell] for his Lady which I hope he has received.36 Herein, Hamilton explicitly states that the order has been ‘much enlarged’ by the making of ‘Necklaces with the Motto on them’. In other words, women have been accepted into the order, and as a mark of their initiation they received symbolic necklaces. The motto of the order was ‘To a fair meeting on the Green’, which adorned the rings of the knights of the fraternity (see Fig. 6.1).37 Judging by the fact that Hamilton sent Sir William Maxwell, fifth Earl of Nithsdale (1676–1744) a necklace for his wife, Winifred Maxwell (1672–1749), it seems that the new female initiates similarly would have been spouses or daughters of existing knights.38 The importance of female participation in the Order of Toboso should not be underestimated. Whilst the order seems to have declined from the 1740s, its influence was arguably much more long-lasting. The PanEuropean nature of the fraternity – with known members residing in Rome, Leiden, Rotterdam, Paris, St Petersburg, Valencia and London

Figure 6.1 Ring of the Order of Toboso, inscribed with the motto ‘To a fair meeting on the Green’. Stored at National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh.

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– meant that the order could potentially exert influence across the Continent. Indeed, those coming into contact with the social milieu of this Jacobite fraternity had the opportunity to glimpse a form of associational culture cast of a different hue than the exclusively male domain of English Freemasonry.39 As mentioned earlier, the role played by protectresses in the Order of Toboso bears striking parallels to those of the Protectrice in early adoption lodges in France, which emerged in the 1740s. Thus, it seems reasonable to suggest that the Order of Toboso could have played a part in shaping the acceptance of women into a form of sociability that previously had been a wholly male preserve. Furthermore, it is important to stress that this development was not merely restricted to continental Europe, but also continued to be practised at various other Jacobite fraternities in England and Wales. Indeed, the remainder of this chapter will be dedicated to illustrating the extent to which the formative model provided by the Order of Toboso was mirrored in a host of other Jacobite societies well into the 1780s. As with the Order of Toboso, little is known about the secretive Oak Society, which met at the Crown and Anchor pub in the Strand, London between 1749 and 1753. This Jacobite club was ostensibly established to garner support and funds for an anticipated attempt by Charles Stuart to seize power, who visited London incognito in September 1750. The society is known to have commissioned a series of medals, which featured a bust of Charles Stuart, whilst the reverse side was decorated with an emblematic illustration of a large ‘stricken oak’, alongside which can be seen a smaller, healthier oak that is shooting leaves. Above this emblem can be seen a Latin motto, Revirescit (‘it rejuvenates’ or ‘it grows green again’). However, what is of interest to us about the Oak Society is the fact that it was established and led by John Baptist Caryll, third Baron Caryll of Durford. J. B. Caryll was the grandson of Lady Elizabeth Caryll, and hence it is intriguing that the Oak Society contained many Catholic Jacobite noblewomen.40 An extant list of the female members of the society mentions the name of Charlotte Maria Radclyffe, third Countess of Newburgh (1694–1755), the wife of Charles Radclyffe. The other names stated in the list include Lady Henrietta Lee, Baroness Bellew of Duleek (1726–1752), Lady Theresa Mostyn, Cecilia Towneley, a Mrs Anderton (probably linked to the noted Jacobite Anderton family of Lostock Hill in Lancashire) and Lady Mary Molyneux (Caryll’s mother-in-law).41 Hence, J. B. Caryll was evidently continuing the tradition of active female participation in a Jacobite fraternity that was so closely connected to his grandmother. Whilst no other documents are apparently extant

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regarding the roles played by the female members of the society, it is possible to state that the women were all linked by marriage to powerful aristocratic Jacobites. This continues the tradition of the Order of Toboso, which in around 1737 evidently endeavoured to include the wives of knights in the fraternity. According to Mary Morgan, writing in 1795, ‘the establishment of the society of Sea Serjeants occupied a very important place in the history of the three counties of Carmarthen, Pembroke, and Cardigan’, in South Wales, ‘about the middle of the present century’. She cautions the reader, however, ‘not to think me a Jacobite, because I venerate this fraternity of very respectable men’.42 Morgan’s curiosity in the Society of Sea Serjeants – a fraternity indeed long suspected of harbouring Jacobite sympathies – had been piqued by a visit in 1791 to Tregib House, situated near Llandeilo in Carmarthenshire, which was the home of the Gwynne family. Here, she had been greeted ‘in a most hospitable manner’ by Miss Gwynne, who is described as being ‘the Lady President’ of the society. The account of the meeting between Morgan and Miss Gwynne provides a strikingly poignant picture of a proud, aristocratic lady, who as the last lady patroness of the society was the heiress to a moribund fraternity: The Lady President, who was then sitting at the head of her table, in a fine old hall, which was entirely surrounded with the portraits of the former members of the society of Sea Serjeants, twenty-six in number. Mr. Gwynne, her brother, was drawn as president, in his chair of state. There is also a picture of the chaplain to this community […] There was something exceedingly striking in this venerable groupe, and the antiquity of the place which they occupied […] Notwithstanding this lady sat, it may be said, in the midst of her dead friends, she preserved a wonderful degree of cheerfulness; nor did the vanity of the sex prompt her to dwell upon any one circumstance, in which she shone the most conspicuous of the throng that graced their galas.43 The last-known weekly meeting of the Sea Serjeants took place in Pembroke and began on 23 July 1763.44 Thus, by the time Mary Morgan met Miss Gwynne in Tregib, the last lady patroness of the society had been keeping the memory of the fraternity alive for nearly three decades. The origin of the society can be traced back to 1726, when an association of 25 Welsh gentlemen drew up a set of rules and regulations to govern the fraternity. It was agreed that the society would be limited to 25 members – who referred to each other as brothers – and would include a president, a secretary, an examiner, a chaplain and two stewards. New

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candidates, or ‘probationers’ as they were called, were appointed at the beginning of each annual weekly meeting. Upon admission to the society the prospective candidate had to swear to ‘faithfully observe the rules and orders’ and to ‘keep the secrets of the Society, and the form of your admission into it’. Moreover, the brethren of the society were to ‘attend in their coifs and proper habit of the order’. The brethren of the society also wore a silver badge, in the shape of a star and adorned with the image of a dolphin.45 As J. P. Jenkins has noted, the foundation of the Society of Sea Serjeants – with its Jacobite and aristocratic hue – was linked closely to the establishment of Freemasonry in Wales. Indeed, the first Welsh lodge was also established in 1726 in Carmarthen – the heartland of the Sea Serjeants. The founding master was Sir Edward Mansell, who was also a key founding member of the Sea Serjeants and who went on to become Wales’s first provincial grand master. On Mansell’s death in 1754, the position of provincial grand master went to David Gwynne of Taliaris – also a Sea Serjeant.46 In fact, David Gwynne was the brother of Richard Gwynne, the Sea Serjeant president from 1733 to 1752 and therefore was also the brother of Miss Gwynne, the last lady protectress of the fraternity. Yet, whilst the two fraternities shared much in common between 1726 and 1764 – including their leading lights – they were also markedly different in a number of crucial aspects. Jenkins rightly stresses that Freemasonry was more democratic in its social inclusiveness, with the first lodge containing three mercers, two glovers, an apothecary, a bookseller, a painter, a merchant, a brazier and a doctor.47 In contrast, the Sea Serjeants initially almost exclusively comprised aristocratic gentlemen with Tory and Jacobite leanings. Hence, the fraternity was long suspected of being a secret society convened to support the Stuart cause. As Mary Morgan notes: A general persuasion seems to have prevailed, among those who were not admitted into the mysteries of the society, that more was meant than met the ear: that their meetings had rather a political than a convivial tendency; and that the real object of it was to consult about the most proper methods of strengthening the Tory party, and to raise contributions for the service of the Pretender. This interpretation of the secret purposes of the meeting, was always denied with much earnestness by the Sea Serjeants themselves.48 Such suspicions surfaced in Bristol in 1754, when Sir John Phillips, the president of the Sea Serjeants, stood as a candidate for the Steadfast

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Tories. At the hustings, he was barracked by a crowd for being the president of what was perceived to be a secret Jacobite society.49 In 1749, the Sea Serjeants added a distinctive gender element to their fraternity, thereby further distinguishing their body from Freemasonry in Wales. In this year, for reasons unknown, the fraternity passed a resolution to elect a lady patroness.50 Jenkins argues that this significant development arose as a result of the failure of Jacobitism, with the Sea Serjeants meekly (and suddenly) transforming themselves into a dining society.51 This argument, however, ignores the pre-existing participation of women – in the guise of protectresses – in the highly political Order of Toboso. Moreover, it overlooks the inclusion of women in the Oak Society – again a secret political fraternity – that occurred at precisely the same time as the Sea Serjeants decided to elect a lady patroness. In other words, politics and female participation were hallmarks of Jacobite forms of secret and fraternal sociability, rather than mutually exclusive strands of associational culture. The novelty of electing a lady patroness is evident in the customary press advertisement published in The Whitehall Evening Post, or London Intelligencer on 29 May 1750, which announced the weekly meeting of the society (see Fig. 6.2). The unprecedented nature of the 1750 meeting merited the only significant addition to an otherwise standard announcement for the society, which published such advertisements between 1732 and 1763. Thus, from 1750 the Sea Serjeants elected a lady patroness every year, who was to be an unmarried lady of the town or neighbourhood.

Figure 6.2 Press advertisement from The Whitehall Evening Post, or London Intelligencer, 29 May 1750.

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John Pavin Phillips states that ‘as soon as elected, the secretary was to wait on her with the badge of the Society’. What is more, he adds that ‘the members, chaplain, and probationers, are allowed each of them to introduce a lady to attend the lady patroness to dine with the Society one day in the week’.52 Morgan corroborates this account, by describing how ‘each member appeared with a dolphin embroidered on the breast of his coat, conducting a favourite lady in the procession’.53 Hence, the lady patroness and the other female participants played an intrinsic role in both the private and public rituals of sociability of the Sea Serjeants. This fact is highlighted in the diary of Sir John Phillips, the president of the Sea Serjeants between 1754 and 1764. His entries for the annual meeting held in Haverfordwest in 1760, for example, inform us that on 11 July he paid Mr Thomas Bowen £1 and 1 shilling for ‘two stars, one for Lady Patroness, and one for Richard’. On 17 July, he writes that ‘Lady Patroness (Miss Jenny Philipps)’, his daughter, ‘and 20 other Ladies, din’d with ye Society at Long Room’, in Haverfordwest, ‘when was a Ball at night, and I danc’d with Lady Patroness’. The following morning ‘ye Ladies breakfasted with us there’. In 1761, the annual meeting was held in Cardigan, where on 20 June ‘Miss Anna Louisa Lloyd, of Bronwydd, was elected Lady Patroness’. On 23 June, ‘Lady Patroness and the Ladies dine with us in the Town Hall, and at night there was a Ball there.’ The next morning, once again, the ladies ‘breakfasted with us, and then went up the River as far as Kilgerran’. The following year, when the meeting was once again in Haverfordwest, Phillips describes how on 3 August ‘my daughter Katherine was elected Lady Patroness’, and that ‘on the 5th, she, and 18 other Ladies, din’d with the Society; danced at ye Ball at Long Room at night’, and then ‘breakfasted with Them there ye 6th’. The expenses for the meeting also include a payment of £2 and 2 shillings for a Mrs Williams for a ‘Star for Lady Patroness’.54 Thus, from the diary account of Phillips it is evident that the Sea Serjeants had embraced enthusiastically a form of associational culture that thrived on female participation. However, this participation appears to have been strictly regulated and ritualized. The election of the Patroness, for example, took place during the middle of the meetings in 1761 and 1762, whilst the other women only attended the dinner and ball on the last evening of the assembly, followed by the breakfast on the final morning. The Lady Patroness was also the sole female honoured with being able to wear the emblematic badge of the fraternity.

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Irrespective of the limited roles played by women in the Sea Serjeants, it is still enlightening to read descriptions of female participation in processions, dinners and evening entertainment, that is, in both public and internal rituals and entertainments. Hence, the Sea Sergeants were far less democratic in composition than the Freemasons in South Wales, but decidedly more gender-inclusive and arguably no less political than at their foundation. Indeed, the very public acknowledgement of female participation in their fraternity can be viewed, in a semiotic sense, as a political gesture. By this is meant that it could be construed as a symbol of their Jacobite, aristocratic and Tory persuasion, which was wholly at odds with the cultural mores of Hanoverian Whigs. The final Jacobite fraternity to be discussed – The Cycle – actually predates all the other societies discussed so far. It was established on 10 June 1710 (in honour of the birthday of the Chevalier of St George, James Francis Stuart) and the first meeting took place at Wynnstay, the family home of Sir William Williams-Wynn (c. 1665–1740), near Wrexham in North Wales. Williams-Wynn was the most powerful landed gentleman in Denbighshire, and probably in the whole of North Wales, who was the MP for Denbigh between 1708 and 1710. The fraternity remained in existence until 1869 and throughout this time the Williams-Wynn family of Wynnstay acted as custodians of the society’s traditions (and secrets).55 The name of the fraternity would seem to derive from the fact that it was customary to rotate meetings every three to four weeks within a compass of 15 miles of each member’s home. The earliest rules, regulations and membership list of the society date from 1724. The staunchly Jacobite hue of the fraternity can be gleaned from the Cycle Song, sung at meetings in the first half of the eighteenth century, which exhorts members to ‘keep old British Virtue in View, Despising the Tribe, Who are bought by a Bribe, Let’s be Honest and ever True Blue’.56 Thus, in its early incarnation the Cycle was political, Bacchanalian and social in its associational culture, and included a sizeable membership of between 40 and 60 aristocratic gentlemen emanating from North Wales, Cheshire and Shropshire. For 70 years the forms of associational culture of the Cycle seem to have remained unchanged, with the leadership of the fraternity passing down to Sir Watkin WilliamsWynn, third Baronet (1684–1749) and then on to his son, also named Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn, fourth Baronet (1749–1789). When the younger Watkin Williams-Wynn came of age, in 1770, he revitalized the Cycle under his leadership. As Paul Monod has rightly noted, the fraternity was ‘outrageously Jacobite’ in its symbolism and was no mere drinking club.

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The Cycle Roster (see Fig. 6.3) is replete with a star identical to Charles Edward Stuart’s ‘Micat Inter Omnes’ medal, whilst it is also adorned with a ‘true lover’s knot’, typical of Jacobite prints.57 Indeed, the Cycle still played a pivotal role in the associational life of Williams-Wynn and of the landed gentry of North Wales and the Marches in general. Throughout the 1770s, for example, the local press carried advertisements, such as the example below from the Chester Chronicle and General Advertiser of 8 October 1779, informing members of upcoming gatherings of the Cycle (see Fig. 6.4).

Figure 6.3 The Roster of the Cycle for 1772. Source: Grant Francis, Romance of the White Rose (London: J. Murray, 1933), plate XIII, facing p. 229.

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Figure 6.4 Press advertisement from the Chester Chronicle and General Advertiser, 8 October 1779.

Throughout the 1770s, Watkin Williams-Wynn was the leading figure in promoting all forms of associational culture in the region, with Wynnstay as an epicentre. In 1771, for example, he orchestrated the opening of a Masonic lodge at Wynnstay, which transferred to Oswestry in Shropshire in 1785, before closing in 1789 – the year in which WilliamsWynn died.58 Curiously, the meetings of the Masonic lodge at Wynnstay were always held the night after a Cycle meeting.59 Moreover, WilliamsWynn became vice-president of the Society of Antient Britons (the first London-based Welsh society) in 1772, and in 1775 was elected president of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion. The Welsh baronet was also a renowned patron of the arts, opening a popular theatre at Wynnstay, as well as taking a keen interest in music and painting. As with his father and grandfather, Williams-Wynn was also an active politician, entering parliament as an MP for Shropshire in 1772, before taking up a seat for life in Denbighshire in 1774.60 However, whilst the Cycle was only one of many societies and fraternities that shaped the everyday life of Williams-Wynn, it still retained the distinctive vestiges of its Jacobite roots. This helps to explain why the fraternity decided to inaugurate a new era in its history on 14 February (St Valentine’s Day) 1780, when Charlotte, Lady WilliamsWynn (1754–1832) was elected lady patroness. To mark the occasion a gold badge or jewel was made, which was ‘enamelled on both sides in green, “true blue”, and white’, whilst it also depicted a white rose in the centre (associated with the Stuarts), which is surrounded by an ‘ouroboros’ – an ancient symbol of cyclical recurrence frequently used in alchemical and Masonic imagery. Moreover, the badge ‘was to be worn at all Cycle functions’ (see Fig. 6.5).61 Hence, Lady Williams-Wynn was to participate in all Cycle functions. Thus, half a century after the Order of Toboso is known to have adopted a lady protectress, the Cycle in North Wales followed in the same Jacobite

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Figure 6.5

Illustration of the Cycle Badge or Jewel. Source: Hartshorne, p. 367.

tradition. Lady Williams-Wynn retained this position until her death in 1832, thereby ensuring that the Jacobite phenomenon of including a protectress or patroness continued well into the nineteenth century. Charlotte Williams-Wynn grew up ‘in the cultured and political atmosphere of the highest circles of English nobility’.62 Her father was George Grenville (1712–1770), the British prime minister between 1763 and 1765. However, as Rachel Leighton writes, she was also imbued with ‘the romantic traditions inevitably hanging round adherents to the cause of the Royal House of Stuart’. It would seem this largely stemmed from her maternal side, as her grandfather, William Wyndham (1687–1740), attempted to muster support for the Jacobite cause in the west of England in 1715. He was subsequently imprisoned in the Tower of London, where he lingered for several months, for his pro-Stuart stance.63 Charlotte was evidently a worthy match for the young Watkin WilliamsWynn (see Fig. 6.6), who was passionately interested in the arts and fraternal forms of sociability. According to Leighton, ‘her outlook on society shows a keen interest, she has a lively sense of humour, her powers of observation are quick and her sympathies alert’.64 In other words, she was a lady of education, taste and distinction, who seemingly would have relished the exclusive insight into what had hitherto been a world of male association. During the 1770s and 1780s many members of the Cycle, as with Watkin Williams-Wynn, were also Freemasons. Prominent among these was Thomas Cholmondeley (1726–1779) of Vale Royal in Cheshire, who was initiated in Chester at some point prior to December 1757.65 What is particularly noteworthy about Cholmondeley – Cycle member and Senior Grand Warden of the Provincial Grand Lodge of Cheshire – is that his

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Figure 6.6 Portraits of Charlotte, Lady Williams-Wynn and Sir Watkin WilliamsWynn, by H. D. Hamilton (1772). Source: Leighton, p. 17.

eldest daughter – Hester Cholmondeley (1766–1802) – was officially appointed the lady patroness of the Royal Denbigh Lodge, No. 505 on 29 December 1788.66 This remarkable and highly significant event records what would seem to be the first ever knowing appointment of a female to an official position within a Masonic lodge in the British Isles.67 The official minutes of this historic meeting record the following details: No meeting was held on December 27th, 1787, but on December 29th, 1788, a P. G. Lodge was held, at which the P. G. M., Sir R. S. Cotton was present, supported by his P. G. Officers. Bro. Joseph Burgess was invested as Pr. S. G. W., in place of Bro. James Folliott, and all the others were re-appointed. There was no procession on this occasion. Miss Cholmondeley of Vale Royal, was appointed Lady Patroness of the Society.68 The choice of the young and unmarried Miss Cholmondeley is entirely in keeping with the Jacobite tradition maintained by the Cycle. Whilst the lodge minutes do not specify whether Miss Cholmondeley was present at the meeting, it would be wholly in line with the spirit of

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Jacobite protectresses and patronesses if the young lady had been in attendance. As the daughter of Thomas Cholmondeley, Hester embodied the quintessential qualities of an aristocratic lady who was deeply imbued with the cultural mores of Jacobite traditions in North Wales and Cheshire. Her father was a leading civic figure in the region, and a staunch Jacobite. Moreover, the Cholmondeleys of Vale Royal were on exceptionally close terms with the Williams-Wynns of Wynnstay. In 1810 this tight bond was demonstrated by the marriage of Thomas Cholmondeley, first Baron Delamere (1767–1855), the brother of Hester, to Henrietta Elizabeth Williams-Wynn (d. 1852), the daughter of Watkin and Charlotte Williams-Wynn.69 Thus, one can only conclude that by 1788 the deeply engrained culture of Jacobite fraternal sociability in North Wales and Cheshire – epitomised by the Williams-Wynns and the Cholmondeley family – was able to influence the form of associational practices and rituals performed at Masonic lodges in Denbigh, and subsequently in Chester. Indeed, it could be argued that by the late 1780s distinctive forms of Jacobite sociability, which specifically embraced the role of an aristocratic lady protectress or patroness and that had a long tradition of including women in their associational practices, began to exert a profound influence on the entire social and cultural life of the aristocratic elite in North Wales and Cheshire. A fitting example of this influence can be seen in the establishment of the Society of Royal Bowmen in Wrexham on 27 February 1787. Many of the key founding members of this archery society – most notably Watkin and Charlotte Williams-Wynn – were old stalwarts of the Cycle.70 In fact the regulations of the society bear a striking resemblance to those of the Cycle, albeit with a noticeable expansion in the active participation of women (the wives and daughters of Cycle members). This similarity between the societies is borne out in the opening passage of the Society of British Bowmen book of regulations: ‘That a President, Lady Patroness, and Secretary, be elected Annually […] That the Meetings be held in Rotation, at the Houses of those Members who have erected [archery butts].’71 Thus, in addition to a lady patroness, the notion of rotating meetings is entirely in the mould of the Cycle. Yet, whereas the Cycle limited female participation to the figure of the Lady Patroness, the Society of Bowmen embraces a dramatically more inclusive stance towards its rules of association. In fact, the Society of British Bowmen has the notable distinction of being the first such society to admit women. Evidently the full inclusion

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of women did not take place at the first meeting, but the regulations of the society were soon amended ‘as several Ladies have honoured The Royal British Bowmen by consenting to become of their Society’. Hence, the society resolved ‘that they have the Right of Voting and Ballotting. That they be free of all Expences, except the Fines’.72 Thus, within this elite group of Welsh and Cheshire landed gentry, the regulations of the society afforded women equal rights to pursue this fashionable form of sociability. Whilst archery had become the latest craze for the social elite in Britain by the end of the eighteenth century, as Martin Johnes has noted, it was still an overwhelmingly male pursuit.73 The members of the Society of British Bowmen were fully aware of how their gender-inclusive form of sociability had fostered new codes of associational behaviour. This is demonstrated by the society’s refusal to reciprocate offers of freedom to shoot at the meeting place of the Royal Kentish Bowmen and the Toxophilite Society, the stated reason being that ‘these two societies consist of gentlemen only, who meet at inns, while the RBB have lady members and meet under quite different circumstances’.74 The regulations and minutes of the society in its early years, between 1787 and 1794, provide remarkable insights into how elite forms of Jacobite fraternal association, characterized by female participation in the form of protectresses and patronesses and in festive rituals of banqueting, could be adapted and transformed to face the new social, cultural and political realities of late eighteenth-century Britain. Shorn of political impetus and the need for secrecy, the Society of Bowmen still emphasized some aspects of Jacobite fraternalism. However, they incorporated these aspects into a new social aesthetic that openly and inclusively flaunted a (restricted) vision of a virtuous, chivalrous, graceful and ordered country idyll, which also drew on ancient Welsh and British mythological figures. The day-long meetings of the society were strictly choreographed and ritualized in order to realize this vision through performative acts. The regulations stipulated, for example, that each attending male member ‘appear in Green and Buff Uniform’ and that female members should wear ‘Green and Buff Dresses, under Penalty of One Guinea’. However, each elected lady patroness was honoured by being able to wear a hat with white feathers.75 In an engraving (see Fig. 6.7), which was originally sketched at a meeting at Gwersyllt Park on 12 June 1789, the Lady Patroness can be seen wearing her special hat with white feathers and standing next to the archery target. The highly choreographed aesthetic of the Society of Bowmen meetings, which were replete with music, singing, marching, dining, pyrotechnics

Robert Collis 123

Figure 6.7 A Meeting of The Society of Royal British Archers in Gwersyllt Park, Denbighshire, by J. Emes and R. Smirke, April 1794. Source: frontispiece to Longman and Walrond.

and poetry (as well as archery itself), is vividly brought to life in the society records of a meeting that took place at Wynnstay on 17 October 1788: The society met at 11 o’ clock in the great room and marched two and two to the shooting ground, the music playing a new march composed for the occasion, and colours flying. On their arrival at the ground, a royal salute of 21 guns was fired […] The contest then began. The lady’s prize was first determined in favour of Miss Harriet Boycott, who was invested with the badge by the President, as was, soon after, Sir F. Cunliffe, by the lady patroness. A general discharge of cannon after each ceremony The Society marched back to the house in the same order as before, except that the fortunate conquerors marched first crowned with laurel. After dinner the Society went into the great room, which was decorated with transparent paintings for the occasion. At the upper end of the room was the figure of a Druid carving the words upon an oak, ‘Royal British Bowmen, 1787.’ […] On the left a figure representing Pan playing on his pipe underneath ‘Sir Foster Cunliffe, Bt., President’. On the right a beautiful female figure holding a wreath of laurel; underneath, ‘Lady Cunliffe, Lady Patroness’.

124 Protectresses in Jacobite Fraternities

These pictures occupied the windows, and between the pillars at the lower end of the room were the badge of the Society, and crests and cyphers of the Patron, President and Patroness.76 The installation of a poet laureate for the society – the Revd Mr Walters – at a meeting on 17 July 1787 also reflects the manner in which women were employed to create a classical aesthetic of beauty and refinement: ‘After dinner the Rev. Mr Walters was attended by nine ladies representing nine Muses, one of whom placed a laurel wreath upon his head crowning him Bard to the society.’77 Even the names of two of the archery prizes – the Boadicea prize for the ladies and the Caractacus prize for men – allude to both the ancient (British and Welsh) nobility of archery and the glorious prowess of both sexes in achieving mastery of the pursuit. Thus, 1787 marks a highly significant moment in the social and cultural history of Denbighshire and Cheshire, in which the forms of sociability adopted by the aristocratic landed elite embraced female participation to an unprecedented degree in the British Isles. In the public sphere, the Society of British Bowmen formulated regulations and choreographed displays of ritual performance that revolved around equal female participation. This is not to say that gender identity was eradicated: rather the decision was made to champion a vision of femininity that proclaimed the grace, wisdom and beauty of women. Consequently, this enabled male participants in the rituals that revolved around archery to embody chivalrous and romantic ideals that simultaneously displayed their contemporary mores and their links to heroic and mythical role models from the past. In the private sphere of the Masonic lodge, the brothers of Royal Denbigh Lodge, No. 505, took the remarkable decision to appoint a young, unmarried aristocrat, who was the daughter of the former Provincial Grand Master of Cheshire, as their lady patroness. This decision was made only a year after the Society of British Bowmen decreed that women should have equal rights in their association. In many ways the decision by the Masons of Denbigh is no less remarkable than that made by the Society of Bowmen. One must remember that Anderson’s Constitutions of 1723 expressly decreed that no women were to be admitted into a lodge meeting.78 Despite bitter internal wrangling, this seems to have been a ruling that was upheld vigorously by all Freemasons within the British Isles between 1723 and 1787. Hence, one needs to ask why the Denbigh Masons took the highly irregular step of appointing a lady patroness, who it would seem was able to take part, to a certain degree, in ritual ceremonies and perfor-

Robert Collis 125

mances within the private sphere of the lodge? One can argue that the inspiration for their unorthodox appointment – as with the ruling of the Society of British Bowmen – derived from Jacobite forms of fraternal sociability. In North Wales and Cheshire such a strand of fraternalism was embodied in the Cycle, which played a crucial role in shaping the nature of secretive forms of Jacobite association practised by powerful members of the landed gentry. The activities of the Cycle revolved around the Williams-Wynn family. In the 1780s, the fraternity was led by Watkin Williams-Wynn and Charlotte, Lady Williams-Wynn, who together arguably exerted more political, cultural and social influence than any other couple in the surrounding area. Consequently, this influence spread beyond the narrow confines of the Cycle, to include regular Masonic activity and new forms of aristocratic sociability that was exemplified in the foundation of the Society of British Bowmen. In turn, one could argue that the decision to elect Lady Williams-Wynn as Lady Patroness of the Cycle in 1780 stemmed from an older Jacobite tradition that had taken root among the exiled community on the Continent, as well as in London, Sussex and South Wales. This distinctive form of Jacobite fraternalism can first be observed in the 1730s in the Order of Toboso. Crucially, this fraternity had a panEuropean network of initiates, who mixed freely in the aristocratic court circles of their respective adopted homelands. In other words, the forms of fraternal sociability practised by the Jacobite knights and protectress(es) of the Order of Toboso could have influenced like-minded individuals on the Continent. Bearing in mind the links between the Jacobite diaspora and the emergence of Continental Freemasonry in general, it is entirely possible that the development of so-called adoption Freemasonry also derived impetus from the forms of association practised by the Order of Toboso. In this sense, this helps to broaden our understanding of the cultural context behind the connection between Charles Radclyffe, the notable Jacobite, and the emergence of female participation in French Masonic (and para-Masonic) lodges, which revolved around the figure of a Protectrice de l’Ordre. In short, one could argue that the study of Jacobite fraternalism in eighteenth-century Britain and Europe can reveal much of worth vis-à-vis gender relationships among the aristocratic elite.79 Drawn together by ties of loyalty to the Stuart monarchy and by unfavourable political circumstances, these Jacobite associations developed ritualized forms of conduct that included pivotal roles for women. As the century progressed these roles within private societies came to play a formative part in the emergence of elite strands of public associational culture. Yet, women were

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still venerated in a chivalric sense as muses to be honoured, but this no longer precluded them from participating actively in social pursuits alongside their male peers.

Notes 1 For a notable exception, see Cécile Révauger, ‘Women Barred from Masonic “Work”: A British Phenomenon’, in The Invisible Woman: Aspects of Women’s Work in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. by Isabelle Baudino, Jacques Carré and Cécile Révauger, Studies in Labour History (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 117–27. 2 James Anderson, The Constitutions of the Free-Masons: Containing the History, Charges, Regulations, &c. Of That Most Ancient and Right Worshipful Fraternity. For the Use of the Lodges (London: printed by William Hunter, for John Senex, and John Hooke, 1723). 3 Anderson, p. 51. 4 John Armstrong, A History of Freemasonry in Cheshire (London: Bro. George Kenning, 1901), pp. 49, 54. 5 See Mary Ann Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Janet M. Burke and Margaret C. Jacob, ‘French Freemasonry, Women, and Feminist Scholarship’, Journal of Modern History, 68 (1996), 513–49; Gisèle Hivert-Messeca and Yves Hivert-Messeca, Comment la franc-maçonnerie vint aux femmes : Deux siècles de franc-maçonnerie d’ adoption, féminine et mixte en France, 1740–1940 (Paris: Dervy, 1997); Françoise JupeauRéquillard, L’Initiation des femmes, ou, Le Souci permanent des francs-maçons français (Paris: Editions Du Rocher, 2000); James Smith Allen, ‘Sisters of Another Sort: Freemason Women in Modern France, 1725–1940’, Journal of Modern History, 75 (2003), 783–835; Margaret C. Jacob, The Origins of Freemasonry: Facts and Fictions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Women’s Agency and Rituals in Mixed and Female Masonic Orders, ed. by Alexandra Heidle and Jan A. M. Snoek (Leiden: Brill, 2008). Included in this last publication is an article by Andreas Önnerfors, which studies the existence of a Loge de Dames in Copenhagen. The first protocols of this Danish adoption lodge date from 3 October 1748, when Anna Marie Rosal and Regine Eleonore Paulssen were initiated. See Andreas Önnerfors, ‘Maçonnerie des Dames: The Plans of the Strict Observance to Establish a Female Branch’, in Women’s Agency and Rituals, pp. 89–218 (pp. 90–1). 6 David Michael Lindsey, The Woman and the Dragon: Apparitions of Mary (Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 2000), p. 27 7 La Clef du Cabinet des Princes de L’Europe, ou Recuëil Historique & Politique sur les Matieres du tems a Août 1745 (Luxembourg: [n. pub.], 1745), pp. 88–97. Thanks to Andreas Önnerfors for informing the author about this valuable primary source. 8 La Clef, p. 89. 9 La Clef, p. 90.

Robert Collis 127 10 Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire, Strasbourg, MS 5437, ff. 20–30. See also Jean Bossu, ‘La Baronne de Flachslande, Protectrice de la Loge La Candeur, O. de Strasbourg’, in Travaux de la Loge nationale de recherches Villard de Honnecourt, 2nd series, 2 (1980), pp. 147–9; Jacob, Living the Enlightenment, p. 196. 11 Bibliothèque nationale et univesitaire, Strasbourg, MS 5437, ff. 31–2; also cited in Jacob, Living the Enlightenment, pp. 196–7. 12 Jacob, Living the Enlightenment, p. 197. 13 Mention should also be made to the so-called Order of Pugs (Mops-Orden), which was established in around 1740 and was open to Catholic noblewomen in Bavaria, such as Wilhelmine von Bayreuth (1709–1758). For more on the order, see L’Ordre des Francs-Maçons Trahi, et Le Secret des Mopses Revelé (Amsterdam: [n. pub.], 1745), pp. 199–240; Roland Martin Hanke, Mops und Maurer: Betrachtungen zur Geshichte der Mopsgesellschaft (Bayreuth: Verlag Deutscher Freimaurer, 2009). 14 The first press advertisement for the Order of Gormogons appeared in the Daily Post on 3 September 1724. It announced that the order had been founded by ‘Chin-Quaw Ky-Po, the first Emperor of China, many thousand years before Adam’. Moreover, a Chinese mandarin had introduced the order in England, where he had succeeded in ‘having admitted several Gentlemen of Honour into the Mystery of that most illustrious order, they have determined to hold a Chapter at the Castle Tavern in Fleet Street’. The last-known press advertisement appeared in the London Daily Post & General Advertiser on 9 December 1735. The announcement stated: ‘By Command of the VOL-GI. A General Chapter of the Order GORMOGON will be held at the Castle-Tavern in Fleet Street […] when all the Graduates and Licentiates are required to attend.’ Also see the well-known engraving by William Hogarth (1697–1764), entitled The Mystery of the Masonry brought to Light by Gormagons (c. 1724). 15 Gould states: ‘On the evidence before us we may, I think, conclude with safety, that the Gormogons were a small Jacobite Club, professing the same religion and political leanings as the Pretender.’ See Robert Freke Gould, ‘Masonic Celebrities: No. VI. – The Duke of Wharton, G. M., 1722–23; with which is combined The True History of the Gormogons’, Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 8 (1895), 114–55, p. 143. For more on Wharton’s role in the Hell-Fire Club, see Evelyn Lord, The Hell-Fire Clubs: Sex, Satanism and Secret Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). For more on Wharton’s Jacobite activities, see Lewis Melville, The Life and Writings of Philip, Duke of Wharton (London: John Lane, 1913). 16 Aaron Hill, The Plain Dealer: Being Select Essays on Several Curious Subjects, 2 vols (London: [n. pub.], 1734), I, pp. 430–1. 17 ‘Letter II. Giving an Account of the Most Ancient Order of Gormogons’, in The Grand Mystery of the Free Masons Discover’d, 2nd edn (London: [n. pub.], 1725), Appendix II. Cited in Gould, pp. 124–5. 18 No precise date can be given regarding the foundation of the Order of Toboso. One can take 1726 as an approximate date as Ezekiel Hamilton wrote in April 1734 that the fraternity was ‘in the eight year of our great mastership’. See Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of the Earl of Eglinton, Sir John Stirling-Maxwell, Bart., C. S. H. Drummond Moray, Esq., C. F.

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19

20 21 22 23

24

25 26

27 28

29

Weston Underwood Esq., & Sir Wingfield Digby, Esq. (London: [n. pub.], 1885), p. 185. The last-known reference to the Order of Toboso dates from April 1739, when Thomas Carte wrote to Robert Walpole regarding the rituals of the fraternity. See British Library, Mackintosh Collection, Add. MSS 34522, Vol. XXXVI. Extracts from the ‘Journal de la négociation de M. Carte avec M. Robert Walpole’, Stuart Papers, fol. 1. The Jacobite Court at Rome in 1719: From Original Documents at Fettercairn House and at Windsor Castle, ed. by Henrietta Tayler (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1938), p. 138. This view has been favourably cited by David F. Allen in 1990 and Rebecca Wills in 2002. See David F. Allen, ‘Attempts to Revive the Order of Malta in Stuart England’, The Historical Journal, 33 (1990), 939–52 (p. 950); Rebecca Wills, The Jacobites and Russia 1715–1750 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2002), p. 146. Wills, p. 146; Edith E. Guthell, The Scottish Friend of Frederic the Great: The Last Earl Marischall, 2 vols (London: Stanley Paul & Co, 1915), I, p. 168. Steve Murdoch, Network North: Scottish Kin, Commercial and Covert Associations in Northern Europe, 1603–1746 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), p. 339. Eglinton, p. 184. James Stuart to the Duke of Ormonde, 29 September 1734. See The Manuscripts of J. Eliot Hodgkin, Esq., F.S.A., of Richmond, Surrey (London: Historical Manuscripts Commission, 1897), p. 244. In the wake of the scandal caused by Hamilton’s letter, he was essentially forced to leave the court in Italy. Thus, from late 1734 Hamilton took up residence in Leiden, in the Netherlands. James Murray, Some Observations made by the Earl of Dunbar, on a Paper lately published by Mr. Ezekiel Hamilton, who tho’ a Clergyman in Holy Orders, has thought fit to declare himself Successor to Don Quixote, by assuming the grotesque Title of Grand Master of the Order of Toboso, and under that Name to publish his Calumnies against the said Earl in an infamous Libel, of which here follows an exact Copy (Edinburgh: [n. pub.], 1735), p. 3. Eglinton, p. 462. Francis Sempill was an active Jacobite agent and was close to the Caryll family. Indeed, he married Mary Mackenzie (d. 1740), the widow of John Caryll (d. 1718), the son and heir to the second Lord Caryll of Durford. For more on Sempill, see Hugh Douglas, ‘Sempill, Francis, Jacobite second Lord Sempill (d. 1748)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, September 2004); on-line edn, May 2008 [accessed 17 November 2009]. Eglinton, p. 463. For information on the family history of the Carylls of West Harting, see Revd H. D. Gordon, The History of Harting (London: W. Davy & Sons, 1877); Max de Trenqualéon, West-Grinstead et les Carylls, 2 vols (Paris: [n. pub.], 1893). John Caryll wrote two successful plays, The English Princess (1666) and Sir Salomon Single (1671) and the well-known poem, Naboth’s vineyard, or, The innocent traytor: copied from the original in holy scripture, in heroick verse (1679). He also wrote a political treatise on the plight of Roman Catholics in England, entitled ‘Not guilty, or, The plea of the Roman Catholick in England’ (British Library, Add. MS 28252, fols 140–8). Caryll’s sister, Dame Mary Caryll (d. 1712) was the founder and Abbess of the Benedictine convent of the

Robert Collis 129

30

31

32 33

34 35 36 37

38

39

Immaculate Conception at Dunkirk, up until her death. For more on John Caryll, first Baron Caryll of Durford and Mary Caryll, see Howard Erskine-Hill, The Social Milieu of Alexander Pope: Lives, Example and the Poetic Response (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), pp. 46–65; Howard Erskine-Hill, ‘Caryll, John, Jacobite first Baron Caryll of Durford (bap. 1626, d. 1711)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) [accessed 17 November 2009]. Pope to Martha and Teresa Blount, 17 September 1718, in The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. by George Sherburn, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), I, p. 512. Erskine-Hill, The Social Milieu, p. 86. The name of ‘Lord Caryll’ also appears on a list of English Jacobites composed by a group of exiles in 1743. See George Hilton Jones, The Main Stream of English Jacobitism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), p. 223. It is thought that Pope also warned Caryll about his Jacobite associations, as on 13 November 1729 he wrote: ‘Sir,- A friend of yours […] advises you to give a caution for the future to your indiscreet correspondents lest you suffer for their sins.’ See Correspondence of Alexander Pope, III, p. 70. Alexander Pope: Selected Letters, ed. by Howard Erskine-Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 246. For these letters, see British Library, Caryll Papers, Add. MSS 28224–54. As an example, see the letter she wrote to John Baptist Caryll (1713–1788), her grandson, on 29 July 1741. See Add. MSS 28230, f. 73. Eglinton, p. 470. Eglinton, p. 472. Eglinton, p. 517. National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh, H. NT 253. The ring preserved in Edinburgh was bequeathed to the museum by the descendants of Sir John Hynde Cotton, a known Jacobite sympathiser from Cambridgeshire. For more on Cotton, see Gabriel Glickman, ‘The Career of Sir John Hynde Cotton (1686–1752)’, The Historical Journal, 46, 4 (2003), 817–41. Sir William Maxwell was a prominent Jacobite who had been imprisoned in the Tower of London for his involvement in the uprising of 1715. His wife, Winifred Maxwell, Countess of Nithsdale, was also a well-known Jacobite courtier. See John Callow, ‘Maxwell, William, Fifth Earl of Nithsdale (1676–1744)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, September 2004); on-line edn, May 2006 [accessed 17 November 2009]. In many respects the Order of Toboso displayed many similarities with Freemasonry. The order had a designated Grand Master, for example, and its meetings were referred to as chapters. One such chapter took place in Spa in the Low Countries in early 1738. Ezekiel Hamilton writes that Dr James Hawley (c. 1704–1777) ‘was chosen Physician to the Order at a Chapter held at Spa’ (see Eglinton, p. 517). The word ‘chapter’ was also used by Freemasons as an alternative to ‘lodge’. As Bernard Jones notes, the term was used by medieval guild masons and had a distinctly religious association. See Bernard E. Jones, Freemasons’ Guide and Compendium (London: Harrap, 1979), p. 506. Moreover, Anderson’s Constitutions of 1723 also refers to the assembly of a chapter: ‘The Master of a particular Lodge has the

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40

41

42 43

44 45

46

47

48 49

50

51 52

Right and Authority of congregating the Members of his Lodge into a Chapter at pleasure upon any Emergency or Occurrence’ (p. 59). Hierarchy and rituals also governed the chapters of the Order of Toboso, alongside the secretive nature of the fraternity. For more on J. B. Caryll, see Melville Amadeus Henry Douglas Heddle de la Caillemotte de Massue de Ruvigny, The Jacobite Peerage, Baronetage, Knightage and Grants of Honour (Edinburgh: T. C. & E. C. Jack, 1904), p. 29. Caryll was also a member of the Independent Electors of Westminster, which was active between 1741 and 1763, principally composed of Tories and Jacobites. For more on this club, see F. Peter Lole, A Digest of the Jacobite Clubs, Paper LV (London: The Royal Stuart Society, 1999), pp. 73–4. London: British Library, Caryll Papers, Add. MSS 28, 249, fols 308–97. Also see Paul Kléber Monod, Jacobitism and the English People 1688–1788 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 83. Mary Morgan, A Tour of Milford Haven in the Year 1791 (London: [n. pub.], 1795), pp. 371–2. Morgan, pp. 374–5. For a fascinating description of the series of portraits, which were painted by Robert Taylor in 1748, during the presidency of Richard Gwynne, see the notebooks of Joseph Gulston (1745–1786), deposited at Carmarthenshire County Record Office, MS 3, fol. 65. 1783. Also see Major Francis Jones, ‘Portraits and Pictures in Old Carmarthenshire Houses’, The Carmarthenshire Historian, 5 (1968), 58–66. London Evening Post, 28 June 1763. John Pavin Phillips, ‘The Society of Sea Serjeants’, Notes and Queries, third series, II, (5 July 1862), 1–2, (p. 1); ‘The Sea Serjeants’, The Freemasons’ Magazine, 5 (1858), 396–8, (pp. 396–8); W. B. Hextall, ‘The Sea Serjeants’, Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 19 (1906), 100–1, (pp. 100–1). J. P. Jenkins, ‘Jacobites and Freemasons in Eighteenth-Century Wales’, The Welsh History Review, 9 (1978–79), 391–406 (p. 398). Jessica L. HarlandJacobs also discusses the links between the Sea Serjeants and the development of Freemasonry in Wales. See Jessica L. Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire: Freemasons and British Imperialism, 1717–1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), pp. 106, 108. See ‘Minutes of the Grand Lodge of Freemasons of England, 1725–39’, in Masonic Reprints of the Quatuor Coronati Lodge, No. 2076, London, 10 (Margate: [n. pub.], 1895), pp. 1144–5. Also see Jenkins, pp. 397–8. Morgan, p. 373. Peter D. G. Thomas, Politics in Eighteenth-Century Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales, 1998), p. 95; Phillips, pp. 1–2. As early as 1727, Richard Gwynne – then secretary of the Sea Serjeants – had stood as a Tory party candidate in Carmarthenshire. A letter was circulated by the society at this time ‘on behalf of our Brother Gwynne’. See National Library of Wales, Picton Castle MSS, Box 12. Also cited in Thomas, pp. 95–6. Phillips, p. 1; Hextall, p. 100. It would seem that the author(s) of the anonymous article on the Sea Serjeants in The Freemasons’ Magazine are mistaken in their claim that ‘from 1726 to 1759 the lady patronesses were Miss Betty Sherwin and Miss Phillips’. See The Freemasons’ Magazine, p. 398. Jenkins, p. 395. Phillips, p. 1.

Robert Collis 131 53 Morgan, p. 372. 54 All diary entries cited in Phillips, p. 2. 55 Albert Hartshorne, Old English Glasses: An Account of Glass Drinking Vessels (London: Edward Arnold, 1897), pp. 363–8. 56 Hartshorne, pp. 364–5. 57 Monod, p. 296. 58 John Lane, Masonic Records 1717–1894: Being Lists of All the Lodges at Home and Abroad Warranted by the Four Grand Lodges and the ‘United Grand Lodge’ of England (London: Edward Letchworth, 1895), p. 176. Watkin WilliamsWynn was initiated as a Mason on 28 March 1769, at the Coach and Horses public house in Chester. In 1770 he became Junior Grand Warden of England. See Armstrong, pp. 30–1. 59 Monod, p. 303. 60 Peter D. G. Thomas, ‘Wynn, Sir Watkin Williams, fourth baronet (1749–1789)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, September 2004); on-line edn, May 2008 [accessed 20 November 2009]. 61 Hartshorne, p. 367. 62 Correspondence of Charlotte Grenville, Lady Williams Wynn and her Three Sons: Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, Bart., Rt. Hon. Charles Williams Wynn, and Sir Henry Williams Wynn, G.C.H., K.C.B. 1795–1832, ed. by Rachel Leighton (London: John Murray, 1920), p. 2. 63 Leighton, p. 2. 64 Leighton, pp. 1–2. 65 Other Cycle members who were also Freemasons include Richard Barry, Richard Parry-Price and Philip Egerton. See Francis, p. 229. Also see, Monod, p. 303. The name of Thos. Cholmondeley, Esq., MP, of Vale Royal, appears in Armstrong, p. 21. On 27 December 1759, Cholmondeley became Senior Grand Warden of the Provincial Grand Lodge of Cheshire. At the same meeting Richard Barry was appointed Junior Grand Warden. Richard ParryPrice was initiated at a lodge meeting in Chester on 13 June 1775. See Armstrong, p. 38. Finally, Philip Egerton of Oulton Park rose to become Provincial Grand Master of Cheshire by 1782. See Armstrong, p. 43. Hence at least three Cycle members were in important positions within Freemasonry in Cheshire in the 1770s and 1780s. See Armstrong, p. 26. Monod notes that the Provincial Grand Lodge of Cheshire met on 10 June 1771, with Williams-Wynn, Cholmondeley, Barry and Egerton present. At the lodge meeting George Charles Cholmondeley, fourth Earl of Cholmondeley (1749–1827), was initiated. First, the date of the meeting is curious, as it is on the founding day of the Cycle, that is, also on the birthday of James Stuart. Second, in the minutes the writer inexplicably records that ‘Charles James’ and not George Charles Cholmondeley had been initiated. This may well be an innocent mistake, but it could also be an allusion to the House of Stuart. See Monod, p. 303. 66 In March 1797 a Miss Fosbrook was also nominated as the Lady Patroness of the Royal Chester Lodge. This event ranks as the first time such an appointment had been sanctioned in a recognized English Masonic lodge. See Armstrong, p. 54. However, in around 1793 a lodge in Penryn, Cornwall held a dinner with ‘upwards of fifty ladies’. Moreover, in 1797, the Kent Lodge, No. 15, invited ‘wives’ to supper. See Bernard E. Jones, Freemasons’ Guide and

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67

68 69

70

71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

Compendium (London: Harrap, 1979), pp. 484–5. This tradition recalls the Society of Sea Serjeants’ dinners held between 1750 and 1763. A year prior to Miss Cholmondeley’s appointment an intriguing event also took place in Essex, with the establishment of a lodge dedicated to Urania by several Essex ladies who ‘formed a select party’ in Braintree on 19 May 1787. As the General Evening Post reports, the lodge was convened in order to honour the birthday of Queen Charlotte (1744–1818), thereby suggesting it was a temporary sisterhood. Moreover, it seems that the occasion of the Queen’s birthday, which was also marked by the Brotherhood in the town (in the presence of Thomas Dunckerley (1724–1795), the Provincial Grand Master for Essex), was deemed a suitable occasion to sanction a temporary sisterhood in Braintree, in spite of the clear prohibition against such an action. One could argue that this carnivalesque-like inversion of normal Masonic practice was tolerated on such an occasion because of the nature of the day’s festivities in honour of the Urania-like Queen Charlotte. See the General Evening Post, Saturday 19 May 1787, Issue 8345. The association of Queen Charlotte with Urania, the Greek muse of astrology, was a relatively common motif when celebrating her birthday. On 19 May 1786, for example, J. N. Puddicombe of Dulwich College wrote An Ode for Her Majesty’s Birthday, in which he said: ‘Urania, heavenly muse, the noblest of the Nine’: see Public Advertiser, Saturday 20 May 1786, Issue 16223. However, the establishment of a female lodge dedicated to Urania in honour of Queen Charlotte provides a fascinating and seemingly novel manner of utilizing this motif. Thanks to Róbert Péter for referring the author to the General Evening Post article. Armstrong, pp. 48–9. Burke’s Peerage, Baronetage & Knightage, 107th edn, ed. by Charles Mosley, 3 vols (Wilmington, Delaware: Burke’s Peerage (Genealogical Books) Ltd, 2003), I, p. 1072. Other founding members of the Society of Royal British Bowmen, who were also Cycle members, include Mr Aldersey, Mr Apperley, Mr Thomas Boycott, Mr Thomas Eyton and Mr Philips Fletcher. See Cycle Roster (Fig. 6.3) and the Regulations of the Society of Royal British Bowmen (Wrexham, 1787), pp. 23–44. Regulations, pp. 5–6. Regulations, p. 13. Martin Johnes, ‘Archery, Romance and Elite Culture in England and Wales, c. 1780–1840’, History, 89: 294, (2004), 193–208 (p. 193). Charles James Longman and Col. Henry Walrond, Archery (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1901), pp. 204–5. Longman and Walrond, p. 204. Longman and Walrond, p. 205. Longman and Walrond, p. 205. Anderson, p. 57 The recent study by David Doughan and Peter Gordon on women, clubs and associations in Britain does not mention female participation in Jacobite fraternities or in the Society of British Bowmen. See David Doughan and Peter Gordon, Women, Clubs and Associations in Britain (London: Routledge, 2006). No mention of female participation in Jacobite societies is to be found either in Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World, Oxford Studies in Social History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

7 ‘The Fair Sex’ in a ‘Male Sect’: Gendering the Role of Women in Eighteenth-Century English Freemasonry Róbert Péter

To trace the origin of Females being excluded from the rites of Masonry will ultimately end in a mere conjecture, as the reason for their being so is one of the valuable secrets in possession of the Fraternity.1 Today on weekday evenings thousands of women and men after work rush to meet up with their fellows in the hearts of cities all over the world. They swiftly change their clothes and put on strange garments decorated with esoteric, geometrical and religious symbols. Then they solemnly enter clandestine temples, where they take secret oaths on sacred writings and teach each other about morality and the meanings of secret signs. The members of these societies are known as Freemasons. Even today most lodges maintain a striking principle, that is, that women are not allowed to join their company. This gender-exclusive rule, which logically follows from the historical development of the fraternity, is a fundamental requirement of the regular lodges that are affiliated with the English mother Grand Lodge.2 This body, properly called the United Grand Lodge of England, has given patents for approximately two-thirds of the lodges worldwide. The study of British Freemasonry has received proper scholarly attention only for a decade or so. Before the mid-1980s, academic research, especially in Britain, was restricted, among other things, by the closed archives of Masonic libraries. Most of the European academic centres for research into Freemasonry have been established within the first decade of the twenty-first century. The first such centre in Britain, which is at the University of Sheffield, organized its inaugural international conference in the summer of 2002 on the theme of fraternal organizations and the structuring of gender roles. It is striking to observe that scholarship has 133

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hardly yet examined the gender aspects of eighteenth-century British Masonic ideology, practice and iconography. Yet, this subject has been of great relevance to the ongoing debate on the impact of Enlightenment sociability on women in France. One discussion between Dena Goodman on the one side, and Margaret Jacob and Janet Burke on the other, has revolved around the relationship of Freemasonry to gender perceptions. Following a feminist line of scholarship, Dena Goodman accuses the ‘masculine’ lodges of repressing women and limiting their role in building the Enlightenment project, while Margaret Jacob and Janet Burke emphasize how the Enlightenment idea of equality was lived out in the Masonic ‘lodges of adoption’ first appearing in the 1740s.3 These popular women’s lodges were recognized officially by the Grand Orient, the governing body of French Freemasonry, in 1774. It can be said that the gender aspects of French Freemasonry have been well documented and properly examined4 but the same is not true for the lodges in the mother country of the society.5 As for gendering English Freemasonry, there is a clear need, for instance, for examination of eighteenth-century adoption lodges and their rituals, the first British appearance of which has been dated to the early twentieth century in scholarship so far. Drawing on several so-far neglected documents available in the Burney Collection of the British Library, as well as in the Library and Museum of Freemasons’ Hall in London, this chapter intends to contribute to this discussion by investigating the gender structures and roles represented in eighteenth-century English Masonic constitutions, pamphlets and rituals as well as newspapers. To examine these sources, the following method shall be adopted: first, we shall investigate the origin and public perception of the exclusion of women from the fraternity in England and discuss how Freemasons defended this ‘landmark’. Second, we shall analyse how and why English Freemasons invited women to participate in various Masonic activities including balls, feasts and public Masonic ceremonies. Third, we shall highlight how some British women, following the advice of some liberal-minded ‘brethren’, managed to subvert this gender-exclusive principle by establishing all-female or adoption lodges. Finally, the chapter will analyse the gender constructions of traditional male Masonic rituals as well as the so-far ignored English ceremonies of adoption lodges admitting both sexes. It was in 1723 that the Society of Freemasons published its first book of constitutions in London. As Margaret Jacob notes, in the eighteenth century ‘the constitutional ideal, the creation of constitutionally governed civil societies, was masculine work’.6 In accordance with this, and as discussed in previous chapters, the third charge demanded that the

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‘Members of a Lodge must be good and true Men, free-born, and of mature and discreet Age, no Bondmen, no Women, no immoral or scandalous Men, but of good Report.’7 The male dominance in Masonic membership can be dated back to the Middle Ages. Although modern Freemasonry as an institution was established in early eighteenth-century England, the founding ‘brethren’ saw the origin of their society in the medieval past. That is why their first book of Constitutions of 1723 heavily and intentionally builds on the regulations of medieval stonemasons. Mainly due to the nature of their work, the stonemasons’ guilds had predominantly male members.8 Relying on this tradition and considering the male-dominated European societies of their time it seemed natural to them to close their lodges to women. Despite their generally egalitarian rhetoric, English Freemasons had a bad reputation with regard to their attitude towards women in certain circles. For instance, in 1726 a father described Freemasonry to his son who had just been initiated into the fraternity as ‘a Set of Men who are strongly suspected to bear no great Good-will to the Fair Sex. […] The Good Wives hereabouts conclude themselves ruin’d the Moment their Husbands become Free-Masons’.9 In 1757 the London Evening Post reported from ‘a small Borough Town by the Sea, in the West Part of the Country of Dorset’: They have also a friendly Male, and Female Club, for depositing Sums in order to help one another, in case of Sickness or Distress, and besides what they call a Freemason’s Lodge: This last amuses many of the Inhabitants, who were puzzled to guess the Cause of this new-fangled Male Sect, springing up in that Place to the Disquiet of many of the Females (who are excluded […]).10 It is no wonder that masculinity and perhaps male superiority of this ‘Male Sect’ were ridiculed by the ‘profane’, that is, the non-initiated. The first such writing is dated as early as 1724 and entitled ‘The Sisterhood of Free Sempstresses’,11 which was a short skit on Freemasonry and women. It was soon followed by other anti-Masonic pamphlets, which reinforced the prejudices against the brotherhood. Freemasons were mocked in theatrical plays such as The Female Freemason (1737) and in humorous writings including The Discovery, or the Female Free-Mason (1771).12 In fact, the latter could have been based upon a real discovery, since, as we shall see, some Englishwomen must have joined an adoption lodge in the mid-1760s at the latest.

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The public was fascinated with the idea of female Freemasonry in the middle of the eighteenth century. This is well illustrated by the interpretation of a clandestine ‘Grand Assembly of the Ladies’ held in Thame, Oxfordshire on 6 July 1757. ‘The Occasion, however, of this Celebrity is hitherto so profound a Secret, that it hath given Room to an idle Report round the Country, that it was the Institution of a Lodge of Female Free Masons.’13 In response to these mockeries and anti-Masonic writings that attacked the lodges, among other things, for excluding women, Freemasons had to develop justifications for their all-male, gender-exclusive organization. This theme formed a continuing part of Masonic apologetics from the 1720s onwards. So let us review the main arguments of these works. ‘Why we don’t admit Women, as well as Taylors, into our Lodges?’, asked an alleged Masonic author as early as 1724 in The Plain Dealer.14 His answer, which appeared frequently in later defences, was the following: ‘I have some Reasons to fear, that our Secrets are in danger of being expos’d.’15 This was further elaborated by other Masonic pamphlets, which argued that women were incapable of keeping secrets. By using the rhetoric of male power and privilege in the cult of feminine domesticity of the eighteenth century, these Masonic writings only reinforced the existing socially constructed gender stereotypes. The following quotation from a letter written as a reply to an accusation of Freemasonry in 1726 also mirrors how Freemasons viewed women’s attitude to the fraternity: That the Ladies are a little jealous of the Fraternity is natural, from their Innate Curiosity by reason the Mysteries of Masonry are secluded from that Sex; but so far are Masons from slighting that agreeable Part of the Creation, that I fear, too many of the Brotherhood love ’em but too well.16 According to Marie Mulvey-Roberts, the ‘traditional female curiosity in the activities of the lodge is likely to have been a collective male fantasy fuelled by the self-importance of its members’.17 There is also an intriguing Masonic print from 1754 that illustrates female curiosity, which is entitled ‘The FreeMason’s Surpriz’d or the Secret Dis-Cover’d: a true tale from a Masons Lodge in Canterbury.’18 It depicts Moll, a chambermaid falling through the ceiling while discovering the ‘mysteries’ of Freemasonry (see Fig. 7.1). It was Captain George Smith, the Provincial Grand Master for Kent, who provided the most elaborate explanation about why women were not admitted into Masonic lodges in his debated The Use and Abuse of Free-Masonry in 1783. In this significant work, inter alia, he aimed to

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Figure 7.1 ‘The Free-Mason’s Surpriz’d or the Secret Dis-Cover’d: a true tale from a Masons Lodge in Canterbury’, printed for T. Wilkins of Ruport Street, London (1754). By permission from the Library and Museum of Freemasonry, London.

eradicate and remove the grounded opinions, especially of the ‘fair sex’, about Freemasonry. He hoped that if women rightly understood their exclusion from lodges, they would stop censuring Freemasons ‘with all the severity their delicate minds are capable of’.19 He states that the reason why, according to some Freemasons, women were not allowed to join this society: To take away all occasion for calumny and reproach, which those shallow geniuses seem to think would have been unavoidable, had they been admitted. And again, that since women had in general been always considered as not very well qualified to keep a secret.20 At this point he refers to the well-known biblical story of Samson and Delilah (Judg. 16), where the beloved Delilah betrayed him. However, he personally finds it ‘unjust to exclude the fair sex from benefiting by our societies on account of Dalilah’s behaviour’.21 Then he offers a more reasonable explanation relying on tradition and custom: My fair readers will please to recollect, that in the most early ages of antiquity, women’s minds were not so enlightened as in the present

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age; that they were only considered in the days of king Solomon as handmaids, and not as companions and associates to men employed in so learned, so useful, and so mysterious a society as masonry, as there are many transactions in the royal art, which are far beyond that knowledge which women in general attain. At the first institution of masonry, it was thought proper to exclude the fair sex, and as old customs are but too seldom laid aside, their expulsion has been handed down to us. And as we are such strict observers of its ancient manners and customs, so transmitted to us by our forefathers, these I hope will be sufficient reasons, both ancient as well as modern, why that most amiable part of the creation have hitherto been excluded.22 It is important to observe how Continental Freemasons defended the non-admittance of women in their lodges. Robert Beachy’s research on Masonic apologetic texts in continental Europe highlights that simple praise for homosociality in the earliest Masonic documents swiftly gave way by the middle of the eighteenth century to broad elaborations of sexual difference.23 However, the available evidence suggests that English Freemasons did not seem to go as far as their Continental brethren in their criticism of women – most of these arguments at least did not appear in English Masonic writings that the author consulted. Though we are unable to reconstruct how the members of the fraternity actually spoke about women after their lodge meetings, English Freemasons were very careful about how they addressed the ‘fair sex’ in public speeches and writings. Although allusions to women were lacking from most rituals, other Masonic writings made brief references to women. Most of these texts spoke respectfully of women and several of them even praised women. In a late eighteenth-century ritual book giving an account of the Genesis, separated from the ritual, one can find a quotation from Milton’s Paradise Lost (Book VIII) admiring womanly virtues: The Almighty then, as his last and best Gift to Man, created Woman, under his forming Hands, a Creature grew Manlike, but different in Sex, so Lovely Fair, that what seemed Fair in all the World before now seemed Mean, or in her summed up; on she came, led by her heavenly Maker, though unseen, and guided by his Voice, adorned with what all Earth or the Heaven could bestow

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to make her amiable. Grace was in all her Steps, Heaven in her Eye, and in every Gesture Dignity of Love.24 One possible reason for this praise of women in this context could be that Freemasons were trying to compensate for the masculine aspects of the ritual following this account. In a similar fashion, the aforementioned Captain Smith also emphasized that ‘no society, or body of men upon earth, can venerate, adore, and esteem the fair sex more than free-masons do’.25 Later he championed the virtues of women: ‘She is the most pleasing companion in the gay and cheerful hour of prosperity […] She is the tender and careful preserver of his health, and the ever-anxious and soothing attendant on his sickness.’26 To defend the merits of the fraternity, he claimed that Freemasons ‘are inspired with a far greater desire and reverence for the most sacred and happy of all institutions, marriage. […] and weigh the great importance of marriage, both as a sacred and moral duty’.27 Women were invited to a number of Masonic celebrations, on some of which special speeches were addressed to them. In these brief lectures, similarly to Smith, the leaders of the Craft not only glorified the basic principles of the fraternity but also tried to destroy the prejudices of the numerous women present, without whose merits, according to these lectures, no man could become a good Freemason. As Provincial Grand Master for Hampshire, before opening a provincial grand lodge in Southampton on 6 September 1777: Lord Charles Montagu gave a public breakfast to the ladies, who were attended by the Stewards of the Lodge, and afterwards introduced to see the brethren assembled in ample form. As soon as the company were seated, his Lordship, in a short, but elegant address, after politely thanking them for the honour of their visit, pointed out those excellent principles which are the basis of Free masonry, observing, that though Free and Accepted Masons had been often censured for shutting their doors against female enquiries, there was nothing in the institution but what merited their favour and approbation; for no man could obtain the character of a good Mason, unless he was a good brother, a good friend, a good father and a good husband. Brother Dunkerley next addressed the Ladies in a speech of equal elegance, after which the Foundation Anthem […] was sung […] The Ladies

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then took their leave, and the brethren proceeded in open lodge.28 The following newspaper report also testifies that Thomas Dunckerley (1724–1795), perhaps the best-known Freemason in the last decades of that century, was especially talented at making the fraternity more appealing to numerous contemporary women. On 12 August 1789, Dunckerley, as the Provincial Grand Master for Somerset, held Grand Lodge in honour of the Prince of Wales’s birthday, where he ‘delivered a charge to the Society, and made an elegant address to about four hundred Ladies, whom he with strong emphasis repeatedly styled the most lovely and beautiful part of the creation, without whose charms the life of man would not be worth possessing’.29 After lodge meetings Freemasons sometimes attended theatres and hence promoted the performances, during which special epilogues and prologues, often written by the ‘brethren’, were recited to popularize the merits of the brotherhood. In a theatrical epilogue spoken on an occasion on a Masonic visit to Drury Lane Theatre in 1729 or 1730, having recalled the classical biblical story about Samson’s betrayal by Delilah, a Freemason commenting on the exclusion of women from lodges expresses his grief in the following manner: We know, that the Ladies of this present Age Can keep a secret, if their Word engage; Our Lodges doors should therefore open fly, The Beauties of this Isle to gratify: But Solomon t’ each Tongue has fix’d a Chain Which past a certain Length, no Pow’r can strain. And yet to shew how complaisant we are, We’ve brought the Flow’r of all our Lodges here, Griev’d at the Heart we can’t receive you there We’ll do our utmost to redress that Wrong [sic].30 However, the view that Freemasons were women-haters also appeared at the beginning of other theatrical epilogues, often presented by the wives of Masons, but they ended up as anthems to the joys of marriage to a Mason: I thought – unable to explain the Matter, Each MASON, sure, must be a Woman-Hater […] Ye marry’d Ladies, ‘tis a happy Life, Believe me, that of a FREE MASON’s Wife,

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Tho’ they conceal the Secrets of their Friends In Love and Truth they make us full Amends.31 It is telling that this epilogue and another by Mrs Bellamy were published in Lawrance Dermott’s edition of the Constitutions in 1756,32 which, although forbidding women to join the brotherhood, had 13 women among its subscribers.33 By publishing these epilogues in their constitutions, Freemasons wanted to destroy the prejudices of women against the brotherhood and portray a positive picture of their fraternity. The following unique epilogue, written by Captain Gardiner and spoken by Mrs King, was introduced at the end of a new comedy called The Brothers and performed in front of, among others, Freemasons of the Royal Edwin Lodge at Dereham in Norfolk on 17 August 1770. Gardiner, who must have been a Freemason, also recommended women curious about the secrets of the fraternity to be indifferent to these ‘mysteries’ and to recognize the honour, honesty and loyalty of Freemasons: We Women, tho’ we like GOOD Masons well, Sometimes are angry that they will not tell; And then we flaunt away from rout to rout, And swear, like you, we’ve found the SECRET out: But O vain boast! to all enquiring eyes, Too deep the MINE where that bright JEWEL lies! That Masons have a SECRET is most true, And you, ye Beauties, have a Secret too: Now if the Masons are so rigid grown, To keep THEIR Secret to themselves alone, Be SILENT in your turns, ‘tis that allures, SILENCE! and bid the Masons – find out YOUR’S […] The ties of HONOUR only, Masons bind, Friends to each other, and to all mankind; True to their KING, and for their COUNTRY […] In peace, with honest hearts they court the Fair, And most they triumph when they triumph there: Their actions known, their bitt’rest foes approve, For all that Masons ask, is – LOVE for LOVE.34 It is clear from these accounts that from the early days of organized Freemasonry onwards several Freemasons realized the tension between the egalitarian principles of the fraternity and the discrimination of

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women from lodges. However, it is not hard to imagine that having consumed a few drinks after the ceremonies, the all-male company did not care much about the criticism of the excluded women and made jokes about the absent females or sang misogynist drinking songs, too. To decrease this tension between the egalitarian Masonic rhetoric and the actual discriminative practice, Freemasons invited women to participate in a number of public Masonic celebrations and involved them in various Masonic activities.35 Most Masonic halls and lodges were far from being alien environments to women since they could visit them during non-Masonic events such as concerts or public Masonic feasts including St John the Evangelist’s Day. The following examples will suffice to illustrate this. In 1764 the Caledonian Lodge commemorated St John the Evangelist, who was a patron saint for Freemasons, at their lodge in the Half-Moon Tavern, Cheapside: The Right Hon. and Most Worshipful Grand Master, Deputy Grand Master, and other Officers of the Grand Lodge, with a number of Ladies and Brethren of Distinction, honoured them with their presence. The evening was concluded with a ball, and the whole ceremony conducted with that form, order, regularity, and decorum, so becoming the dignity and character of that ancient and honourable Order.36 In May 1772, Bingley’s Journal found it remarkable that a great number of women were in the gallery of the Merchant Taylors’ Hall ‘when the Duke of Beaufort invited Lord Petre with the ensigns of the office of Grand Master’ in the presence of many persons of distinction, besides nearly 700 Freemasons.37 On 1 May 1775 Lord Petre laid the foundation stone of the Freemasons’ Hall ‘in the presence of 160 ladies, and upwards of 400 brethren’.38 The building was erected within a year and dedicated on 23 May 1776: Upwards 200 ladies, who were complimented with tickets to see the ceremonies and hear the musical performers, attended, and were introduced by the assistants to the hall committee into the galleries of the hall […] A solemn piece of music was next performed, during which the ladies withdrew to tea and coffee, and such of the musicians who were not masons, retired to accompany them […] the lodge was then covered, and the ladies introduced amidst the acclamations of the brethren.39 It is important to note that in the new Freemasons’ Hall there were two galleries, ‘either for music, or to admit women to the sight of such

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ceremonies as the laws of the society will permit’.40 Four years later a book about the moral and physical vindication of female talents, which was dedicated to Her Majesty, was sold only in a Masonic coffee house by the Freemasons’ Hall in Great Queen Street.41 During the celebration of constituting a lodge in Devizes on 28 July 1788, having displayed their regalia: The Right Worshipful Master (Andrew Bayntun, Esq.) in the Chair, and the officers and the brethren seated, the Lodge door was thrown open, when many Ladies did the Brethren the honour of a visit, and with a general smile of approbation, added much beauty to the splendor and dignity of the scene; in about half an hour the Ladies retired, and the lodge proceeded to business.42 From time to time Freemasons’ wives were also invited for special women’s nights, especially at the end of the eighteenth century.43 For the benevolence of society and the improvement of their public image, they established the Royal Cumberland School in 1788 for the education of the daughters of Freemasons.44 However, several enlightened minds, both women and men, were not content with this degree of women’s involvement in Masonic activities from the 1760s. They found the contradiction between the sexual exclusivity of the lodges and their ideal of equality increasingly unacceptable. The dissatisfaction of an educated woman led to the organization of a public debate in Capel Court on Bartholomew Lane in London on 29 December 1788, which addressed the following question: ‘Is it not an Instance of great Partiality, Inconsistency, and Injustice, in the Free Masons, to exclude the Fair Sex from a knowledge of their Secret?’ This advertisement reports that this question was brought forward at the particular request of a lady of great literary fame, who had ‘frequently honoured this society with her sentiments’.45 In the 1780s some progressive Freemasons, such as William Dodd and George Smith, also began openly to advocate the reformation of the fraternity. For instance, Smith not only regarded the non-admission of women ‘a very great misfortune’ offending the women but argued for the elimination of that ancient custom that barred women from lodges: There is no law ancient or modern that forbids the admission of the fair sex amongst the society of Free and Accepted Masons, and custom only has hitherto prevented their initiation; consequently, all bad usages and customs ought to be annihilated, and ladies of merit and reputation admitted into the society; or at least be permitted to

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form lodges among their own sex, in imitation of those in Germany and France.46 According to Smith, it is beyond dispute that women have an ‘undoubted right’ to become members of Masonic lodges since their minds are also capable of improvement. Furthermore, brethren who assist the women in forming female lodges do not violate their Masonic obligations.47 The publication of Smith’s book was so influential that ‘Several Ladies of the highest rank, determined to form a Lodge of Freemasons upon the plan which Captain Smith has given in his new work’, according to the correspondent of the Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser in 1783.48 He had no doubt that they would keep the secret as inviolably as men. Considering the moderate nature of the British Enlightenment, it is striking to observe that women’s lodges appeared in England almost at the same time as their French counterparts. Another London newspaper reported two years later that ‘a lodge of female Freemasons is now established at Paris, who differ from the societies, and from their own sex only in one particular, that they do not allow any men to be admitted into their lodge’.49 It is possible that the journalist confused Freemasonry with quasi-Masonic orders, several of which had all-female membership from the seventeenth century onwards. If the newspaper correspondent was not mistaken, this account is most remarkable since so far scholarship has not managed to identify any exclusively female Masonic orders prior to the twentieth century. Moreover, after Thomas Dunckerley’s holding of a grandiose Masonic celebration in honour of Her Majesty’s birthday in Braintree in Essex on 19 May 1787, as a letter published in the General Evening Post demonstrates, ‘Several ladies in this country formed a select party in this town, and dedicated a Lodge to Urania, in honour of the day.’50 There are at least two complementary reasons why this lodge was dedicated to the muse of astrology. On the one hand, Queen Charlotte was associated with Urania, for instance, in an ode written for her previous birthday.51 On the other hand, they may have chosen Uriania because of a well-known contemporary Masonic ode, written by Brother Jackson with music by Brother Gilding, which praised the Greek muse.52 It is possible that this ode was sung during the birthday celebration on that day. Although it might have been only a temporary lodge, this account, assuming its authenticity, is significant in the history of female clubs and societies, since there is no record of any Masonic society that only admitted women before the 1900s.53 What is more, the 1790s possibly witnessed the appearance of further adoption or all-female lodges. For example, on 17 May 1796 the Provincial Grand Lodge of Kent held an anniversary meeting at Dartford. The Freemasons’ Magazine described the ‘uncommonly

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brilliant, numerous and respectable procession’ where ‘much beauty and elegance was derived from the Lady Masons who assembled in great numbers, dressed in white and purple.’54 After the procession, Dr William Perfect, the Provincial Grand Master, politely conducted them into the church. If the ‘Lady Masons’ were actual Freemasons, it is astonishing that they were allowed to participate in the public procession of a regular Grand Lodge, the constitution of which barred women from Masonic work. If the term ‘Lady Masons’ only refers to the wives and sisters of male Freemasons, why did they dress up in white and purple? Nevertheless, in France women did not have to wait too long to be admitted officially into Masonic lodges since by the 1740s, gender exclusion had begun to break down.55 As opposed to the accidental involvement of women in English Freemasonry, the French lodges of adoption now began formally to admit women. Historians cite this event as a crucial moment in the history of Western liberal culture. According to Janet Burke, the eighteenth-century mixed lodges ‘showed quite clearly the first stages of feminist thought and the women members’ links to the Enlightenment’.56 Women tasted one of the first fruits of liberty in Masonic lodges. It should be stressed that they did so at a time when some of the Parisan salons of the great philosophes, like d’Holbach, specifically excluded women from their proceedings. However, these lodges of adoption were far from being egalitarian in their admissions policy since they mostly initiated women of high social status. In that respect, the first, probably temporary, exclusively female lodges formed in the 1780s in England – and perhaps in Paris – seem to be more radical and democratic, since the ‘sisters’ could perform freely their Masonic work without the guardianship of the ‘brothers’. However, for liberal-minded English Masonic reformers such as the author of Freemasonry for the Ladies, or the Grand Secret Discovered (1791), it was the Continent that ‘set the example to Masons of every region, of admitting at proper seasons, Ladies into their lodges, and France can boast even a princess of the Blood Royal patronising and assisting at their assemblies. The adopting [of] this trait of an enlightened period in England is withheld.’57 The author claims that the exclusion of the ‘Female Sex’ is a ‘circumstance not favourable to the gallantry of Britons’.58 The pessimism of the author leads him to exaggerations: for instance, he claims that it was only in Britain where prejudices against the fraternity exist ‘(and which have certainly contributed to prevent the general satisfaction of the good opinion of every one) have been kept alive and occasioned discord in those breasts in which domestic felicity should ever dwell’.59 It is clear from

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this account that in the 1790s the adoption lodges in England were far from being as widespread as in France. Similarly to Smith, the above author intended to destroy the prejudices about Freemasonry in his work dedicated to Her Royal Highness, the Duchess of York. He also questioned the common opinion regarding the inability of women to keep a secret. Somewhat surprisingly, he only advocated the occasional introduction of women into lodges. It was evident for him that they ‘should not be generally present’.60 For this purpose, he published an adoption ritual, which, along with the earliest-known example from 1765, we shall compare with traditional Masonic ceremonies in the last part of the chapter. Let us look at the traditional rituals of the fraternity since playing out ritualistic dramas is an essential part of Masonic practice. If we examine the rituals of the first three ‘degrees’ of the period, we can observe that, apart from very few exceptions, the written text of the rituals depicted a world without women. One exception is when the newly initiated brother is presented with two pairs of white gloves, ‘one pair for himself, and the other pair for a lady, with a strict charge to present them to that female, for whom he has the greatest regard’.61 The fact that womanly virtues were lacking from the universal truths and fundamental moral lessons of these ceremonies is not surprising at all in the male-dominated English society of the eighteenth century. In Masonic rituals only men were addressed and recognized as moral agents. As we have seen, this does not mean either that English Freemasons regarded eighteenth-century feminine virtues as irrelevant to life’s highest truths or that they did not occur in other dimensions of Masonic practice. For instance, in Masonic iconography Charity is depicted as a mother nurturing and protecting her children.62 However, it can be said that the language of the rituals privileged the male and his power. In English Masonic practice, if a non-Mason manages to pass through the lodge door guarded by the ‘Tyler’ with a sword to ensure only members of the fraternity entered, the sex of all new members is revealed both symbolically and physically, by exposing the left breast during the initiation ceremony of the first-degree ritual. However, this screening did not always prove to be a sufficient means to exclude the other sex, as the following passage from a footnote of a ritual concerning the exposing of the left breast confirms: This is done lest a Woman should offer herself; and tho’ many Women are as flat chested as some Men, and Brethren are generally

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satisfied with a slight Inspection, I would advise them to be more cautious; for it is probable, that a Woman, with a tolerable Degree of Effrontery and Spirit, may, one Time or other, slip into the Order, for Want of necessary Prudence. If the Irish may be credited, there is a Lady at this Time in that Kingdom, who has gone through the whole Ceremony, and is as good a Mason as any of the whole.63 To understand the main ideas conveyed in rituals it is essential to refer to the iconography of Freemasonry as the fundamental tenets of Masonic ideology have been indicated by symbols since the early days of the fraternity. The iconography of modern Freemasonry is built on the working tools of medieval cathedral-building craftsmen. The first rituals gave metaphorical interpretations of the working tools of these stonemasons: Freemasons were and are supposed to build up their own spiritual temples stone by stone. After the newly admitted Mason has been enlightened by the teaching of the ritual, he starts to dress, smooth and square his ‘Rough Stone’ by expanding his intellect, controlling his passions and purifying his life. In his Masonic labour of perfecting the stone (‘ashlar’ in Masonic terminology) the candidate metaphorically uses the so-called working tools such as the square and compasses. In terms of Masonic iconography, the former is to regulate actions, while the latter is to keep Masons in due bounds with all mankind, particularly with their ‘brethren’ in Freemasonry. These examples clearly show that the central icons of the fraternity include a number of masculine tools. As opposed to the medieval operative craftsmen, modern gentlemen Freemasons wear cotton or fine white leather gloves and lambskin aprons. The usage of these soft and elegant materials indicates the historical process during which the working stonemasons accepted gentlemen into their lodges in the early eighteenth century. Thus we can see that the Masonic lodge was a ritual space for men only, and its design and furniture in most cases reinforces that fact. The lodge offered a legitimate space for men where they could express their masculinity. Thus, another possible reason for the exclusion of women from the lodge could be that men wanted to immerse themselves in a masculine setting. However, it could be argued that being among men only, Freemasons could freely exercise their femininity since they did not have to play a man’s role in front of women. This could be illustrated by the moving table-speeches that took place when a brother was leaving a lodge because of his old age or illness.

148 ‘The Fair Sex’ in a ‘Male Sect’

One may well ask how these rituals were modified so that they could be used in the mixed lodges of adoption. What follows will highlight those elements of the two earliest-known English adoption rituals, from 1765 and 1791, which were regarded as feminine in eighteenthcentury England.64 What is most striking in the ritual entitled Women’s Masonry or Masonry by Adoption is the frequent practice of kisses: in particular the kiss of peace, which reoccurs six times during the ceremonies of the first three degrees. The candidate is addressed as ‘Masoness’, ‘Madam’ or ‘Sister’. Contemporary stereotypes about women also seem to appear during the first, entered apprentice degree when the master of the lodge asks the candidate ‘if it is not out of curiosity that she desires to be a Masoness. […] He then asks her if he shall find her a firm, resolute woman, free of all prejudice’.65 In the fellow-craft lodge there is a picture of Adam and Eve on the wall, where the biblical story of the first couple is invoked. The candidate wearing a blue ribbon is required to taste of the fruits of the tree in order to ‘know good and evil’.66 In this ritual framework, the third degree is called the ‘Mistress Mason’. In the Freemasonry for the Ladies (1791) adoption ritual, for the names of each degree, the term ‘degree’ is replaced with ‘dignity’. Of course, during the first dignity, she is not asked to expose her left breast. Instead: The Grand Master deputes a lady, (assisted by a brother,) who has proposed the candidate, to make the necessary preparation, which consists of depriving her of her rings and necklace, a white veil is thrown over her head, and thus blindfolded she is conducted by the brother to the entrance of the Lodge.67 During this ritual the candidate is divested of ‘prejudices natural to your sex’. The first sentence of the vow that she has to take refers to ‘by the honour which is the distinguishing characteristic of a woman of virtue’.68 After the vow of the second dignity, ‘the Elected Lady rises and is divested of the chain and ribbon from her right arm, instead of which she is entrusted with the bracelet of the order that her vow may be complete’. Here the term ‘Lady’ is used to address the candidate.69 Similarly to the male ritual, the left breast also plays a role at every admission since the candidate is given a silver trowel, which is worn on it.70 At the end of the ritual book we can find anthems and odes that were spoken and sung during the meetings

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of adoption lodges. It is interesting to note that they adopted the aforementioned well-known ode praising Urania, used in traditional lodges, by simply replacing the word ‘brotherhood’ with ‘sisterhood’.71 In conclusion, we have seen that the rhetoric and practice of eighteenth-century English Freemasonry tended to articulate the values of the dominant culture in the Age of Enlightenment. By using the rhetoric of male power and privilege in the cult of feminine domesticity of the eighteenth century, the principles of Masonic thought only reinforced the existing socially constructed stereotypes. English Masonic rituals praised the masculine system of order and rationality. Therefore, it was obvious for modern speculative Freemasons to exclude women from their fraternity. The justification of their gender-exclusiveness was naturally built on contemporary stereotypes such as the curiosity of women and their inability to keep secrets. These all reinforced the existing gender hierarchies. However, if we consider the historical development of Masonic ideology, it is clear that Masonic rhetoric was rarely deliberately antiwomen. Aside from some misogynist drinking songs, we have seen that English Freemasons wrote and talked about women with respect and sometimes with admiration. To please women they invited them to participate in a number of Masonic ceremonies including Grand Lodge feasts, balls and in the constitution of lodges, on some of which they were specifically addressed. The number of women who praised the values of Freemasonry during these occasions as well as theatrical epilogues in public and their assistance in fund-raising for Masonic charity, among other things, testify that Freemasonry was not an organization of a purely masculine tendency. It has been increasingly difficult for Freemasons to defend the exclusion of women ever since the foundation of the fraternity. Like most clubs and societies born in the Age of Enlightenment, traditional Masonic lodges continued to confirm the sharp gender division in eighteenth-century English society. However, on the Continent the enlightened reformers managed to break down the gender boundaries characteristic of Masonic practice as early as the 1740s. In England, this took place in the mid-1760s when the first adoption lodge must have been established there. This chapter has demonstrated the existence of probably temporary all-female and/or adoption lodges in the 1780s. The first appearance of both English adoption and exclusively female Masonic lodges has been dated to the twentieth century in scholarship so far. We have seen that this decade witnessed

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a change in the minds of women and men concerning the women’s involvement in Masonic activities in England. This could be seen in the context of a general transformation of mindset starting in the 1780s that also saw the establishment of the first female friendly society in York.72 As a result, women lived out the enlightened ideas of liberty and equality in mixed-gender, and especially in women’s, lodges which can be seen as the first stages of the feminist movement, though they were not devoid of social discrimination. Unlike official Freemasons, following the ideas about an egalitarian ‘siblinghood’ to their logical conclusion, some quasi-Masonic, convivial or Jacobite societies such as the Oak Society admitted both sexes to their ranks in Britain. In terms of gender, the philosophy of English Freemasonry has not undergone any significant changes since its genesis, which highlights the fact that gender issues still sharply divide the ideally universal and egalitarian Masonic world. In the recent evolution of the study of fraternal associations, gender analysis is of great assistance for scholars since it helps to categorize single-sex or mixed-gender organizations and better understand their inter- and intra-relationships.73

Notes 1 Free Masonry, for the Ladies, Dedicated by Permission to Her Royal Highness the Duchess of York. To Which are Added, Anthems and Odes, Etc. (Dublin and London: [printed, and Dublin: re-printed] by Thomas Wilkinson, 1791), p. 3. 2 United Grand Lodge of England (London: United Grand Lodge of England, 1999), p. xiii. 3 Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 245–59. Janet M. Burke and Margaret C. Jacob, ‘French Freemasonry, Women, and Feminist Scholarship’, Journal of Modern History, 68 (1996), 513–49. 4 However, as Margaret Jacob points out, most French historians do not realize that vast, unexamined archives were returned to Paris in 2000 from Moscow. Among them were over 750 large boxes of Masonic manuscripts stolen by the Nazis from the Grand Orient on rue Cadet in June 1940. For instance, some of the recently found documents prove that there had been a lodge for women in Bordeaux as early as 1746. The most recent works on the gender relations of French Freemasonry include James Smith Allen, ‘Sisters of Another Sort: Freemason Women in Modern France, 1725–1940’, Journal of Modern History, 75 (2003), 783–835; Margaret C. Jacob, The Origins of Freemasonry: Facts and Fictions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), pp. 99–129; Bernard Kenneth Loiselle, ‘“New but True Friends”: Freemasonry and the Culture of Male Friendship in Eighteenth-

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5

6 7

8

9

10 11

12

13 14 15 16 17 18

Century France’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Yale University, 2007); Women’s Agency and Rituals in Mixed and Female Masonic Orders, ed. by Alexandra Heidle and Jan A. M. Snoek (Leiden: Brill, 2008). There are two exceptions: Marie Mulvey-Roberts, ‘Masonics, Metaphor and Misogyny: A Discourse of Marginality’, in Languages and Jargons, ed. by Peter Burke and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), pp. 133–54. Mulvey-Roberts investigates certain gender-related issues of Masonic language but her usage of sources is sometimes confined to twentieth-century ritual exposures and eighteenth-century bawdy lodge drinking songs, some of which were written by Georgian anti-Masons. Based upon the latter documents, she highlights the misogynistic elements of Masonic practice, while, in this author’s opinion, she slightly exaggerates the ‘virulent’ misogyny of Freemasons. Cécile Révauger, ‘Women Barred from Masonic “Work”: A British Phenomenon’, in The Invisible Woman: Aspects of Women’s Work in EighteenthCentury Britain, ed. by Isabelle Baudino, Jacques Carré and Cécile Révauger, Studies in Labour History (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 117–27. Révauger examines the internal and external factors why women were excluded from lodges. Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in EighteenthCentury Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 135. James Anderson, The Constitutions of the Free-Masons: Containing the History, Charges, Regulations, &c. Of That Most Ancient and Right Worshipful Fraternity. For the Use of the Lodges (London: printed by William Hunter, for John Senex, and John Hooke, 1723), p. 51. In general, English craft guilds were never exclusively male, and women were admitted into their ranks form the Middle Ages onwards: see Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1919; repr. 1992); Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, Working Women in English Society, 1300–1620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). ‘Gentleman in the Country’ [pseud.], The Free-Masons’ Accusation and Defence, in Six genuine Letters between a Gentleman in the Country and his Son, a Student in the Temple […] (London: printed for J. Peele; and N. Blandford, 1726), pp. 18–19. St James’s Chronicle, or the British Evening Post, 10 July 1764, Issue 523. Read’s Weekly Journal, 25 January 1723/24 reprinted in The Early Masonic Catechisms, ed. by Douglas Knoop and others (London: Manchester University Press, 1963), pp. 226–8. Grub Street Journal, 21 April 1737, Issue 382; Middlesex Journal, or Chronicle of Liberty, 20 July 1771, Issue 363. The publication of The Discovery, or the Female Free-Mason was also reported in A Catalogue of Prints and Books of Prints, both Ancient and Modern, after the Most Eminent Masters (London: Hooper and Davis, [1779]), p. 68. London Evening Post, 9 July 1757, Issue 4630. The Plain Dealer, 14 September 1724, Issue 51. The Plain Dealer, 14 September 1724, Issue 51. ‘Gentleman’, p. 12. Mulvey-Roberts, p. 148. The Free-Mason’s Surpriz’d or the Secret Dis-Cover’d: a true tale from a Masons Lodge in Canterbury (London: printed for T. Wilkins of Ruport Street, 1754).

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19

20

21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28

29 30 31

32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39

The print is available on-line at [accessed 28 November, 2009]. Thanks to Harriet Sandvall for drawing the author’s attention to this item. George Smith, The Use and Abuse of Free-Masonry: A Work of the Greatest Utility to the Brethren of the Society, to Mankind in General, and to the Ladies in Particular (London: printed for the author; and sold by G. Kearsley, 1783), p. 350. Smith, p. 351. In the footnote he notes that ‘some men are equally as unqualified to keep a secret, as the women are here represented to be’. Later he claims that ‘women on the contrary keep their own and friends’ secrets better than men’. Smith, p. 359. Smith, p. 352. Smith, pp. 353–4. See Chapter 5, page 93. John Browne, The Master-Key Through All the Degrees of a Free-Mason’s Lodge; To Which are Added, Eulogiums and Illustrations, upon Free-Masonry; Theology; Astronomy; Geometry; Architecture; Arts; Sciences; Etc. with a Correct and Complete List of All the Modern Regular Lodges (London: printed A. L., 1798), p. 14. Smith, p. 350. Smith, p. 354. Smith, pp. 354, 356. Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 9 September 1777, Issue 2591. Smith might have referred to this occasion: ‘At Royal-arch processions; private and public Masonic orations, &c. at one of which the ladies were thus addressed by the orator [footnote: Thomas Dunckerley, Esq., provincial grand-master of Essex, Wiltshire, Dorsetshire.]’. Smith, p. 360. Morning Star, 17 August 1789, Issue 160. Reprinted in Early Masonic Pamphlets, ed. by Douglas Knoop, G. P. Jones and Douglas Hamer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1945), p. 231. The Antient Constitutions of the Free and Accepted Masons, Neatly Engrav’d on Copper Plates with a Speech Deliver’d at the Grand Lodge of York…. Likewise a Prologue Spoken by Mr. Mills, and an Epilogue spoken by a Masons’s Wife, at the Thatre-Royal in Drury-Lane, on Friday the 27th Day of December, 1728, 2nd edn (London: Printed for B. Creake, 1731) [British Library], no page number indicated. Laurence Dermott, Ahiman Rezon or, A Help to a Brother; Shewing the Excellency of Secrecy … The Ancient Manner of Constituting New Lodges … Also the Old and New Regulations … To Which is Added, the Greatest Collection of Masons Songs … Together with Solomon’s Temple An Oratorio … (London: printed for the editor, sold by Brother James Bedford, 1756), pp. 195–6. Dermott, pp. xix–xxii. Bingley’s Weekly Journal, or the Universal Gazette, 18 August 1770, Issue 11. Smith, p. 360; Révauger, pp. 122–4. London Chronicle or Universal Evening Post, 29 December 1764, Issue 1253. Bingley’s Journal, 2 May 1772, Issue 101. Smith, pp. 81, 148–9. Smith, pp. 98, 102–3.

Róbert Péter 153 40 Smith, p. 150. 41 Lady, Female Restoration, by a Moral and Physical Vindication of Female Talents; in Opposition to All Dogmatical Assertions Relative to Disparity in the Sexes. Dedicated to Her Majesty; and Humbly Addressed to the Ladies of Great Britain and Ireland. By a Lady (London: sold only at Free-Masons coffeehouse, Great Queen-Street, Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields; and J. Macgowan’s, No. 27, Paternoster-Row, 1780). 42 Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 2 August 1788, Issue 2075. 43 Bernard E. Jones, Freemasons’ Guide and Compendium (London: Harrap, 1956), pp. 72, 484–5. 44 Lloyd’s Evening Post, 3 October 1792, Issue 5503. 45 Star, 27 December 1788, Issue 205. 46 Smith, pp. 361–2. 47 Smith, p. 365. 48 Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 26 June 1783, Issue 4402. 49 Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, 25 June 1785, Issue 3862. 50 A letter from Braintree described the events of the day as follows: ‘Yesterday being the anniversary of her Majesty’s birth-day, the Brethren of the most ancient and honorable Society of Free and Accepted Masons assembled at the White-Hart inn, where a grand Lodge was held in honour of the day, by Thomas Dunkerley, Esq; the Grand Master for this country, &c. &c. A grand procession was formed to the church, and an excellent sermon given by the Rev. Brother M. P. Carter, from the 9th chapter of St Mark, part of the last verse. A liberal collection was made for the poor; and an elegant dinner provided for the Fraternity. The health of our gracious Sovereign, our much beloved Queen, the Duke of Cumberland, (our Grand Master) the Prince of Wales, Prince William-Henry, &c. were drank with all Masonic honours. The genuine spirit of loyalty appeared in this town, and the festival was conducted with that cheerfulness and harmony peculiar to the Society.’, General Evening Post, 19–22 May 1787, Issue 8345. 51 Public Advertiser, 20 May 1786, Issue 16223. Thanks to Robert Collis for informing the author about this ode. 52 ‘WAKE the Lute and quiv’ring Strings, | Mystic Truth Urania brings; | Friendly Visitant, to thee | We owe the Depth of MASONRY: | Fairest of the Virgin Choir, | Warbling to the golden Lyre, | Welcome, here thy ART prevail: | Hail! divine Urania, hail!’ For instance, this ode was reprinted in James Anderson [revised by John Entick], The Constitutions of the Antient and Honourable Fraternity of Free and Accepted Masons. Containing their History, Charges, Regulations, Etc. … For the Use of the Lodges. By James Anderson, … Carefully revised, continued and enlarged, with many additions, by John Entick (London: Printed for Brother J. Scott, 1756), p. 321. 53 However, we cannot entirely exclude the possibility that this was an adoption lodge. 54 The Freemasons’ Magazine, 6 (1796), p. 361. Thanks to Andreas Önnerfors for this invaluable reference. 55 It may be noted that the earliest (English) newspaper reference to a French adoption lodge dates back to 1737. On 22 December the London Evening Post reported that a certain Mademoiselle Cart—u, being a mistress of a Freemason, managed to get to know the secrets of the fraternity from him, ‘wherefore

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56 57 58 59 60 61 62

63

64

65 66 67 68 69

upon the strength of her Discoveries she set up a Lodge of her own, and receives Free-masons of both Sexes in all the Forms: the Lieutenant General of the police, indeed, sent for her, but she came off with only a bare Reprimand’. London Evening Post, 22 December 1737, Issue 1577. The article probably refers to Mlle Carton, an opera dancer, who was said to provide R. Hérault, Lieutenant General of the Paris police, with a Masonic ritual, which he soon published (see London Evening Post, 14 January 1738). The authenticity of this story is questionable, although the police records mention her name, but in a different context: five or six lords intended to invite some ladies of the Opera, including Mlle Carton, to join a mixed convivial order called L’Ordre de la Félicité. See A. J. B. Milborne, ‘The Early Continental Exposures and their Relationship to Contemporary English Texts’, Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 78 (1965), 172–93 (p. 173). The author thanks Margaret Jacob and Jan Snoek for helping him interpret this article. Janet M. Burke, ‘Leaving the Enlightenment: Women Freemasons after the Revolution’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 33 (2000), 255–65 (p. 255). Free Masonry for the Ladies, p. 4. Matthew Cooke’s handwritten name appears on the cover of a copy of this book available in the British Library. Free Masonry for the Ladies, p. 3. Free Masonry for the Ladies, p. 3. Free Masonry for the Ladies, p. 5. Free Masonry for the Ladies, p. 5. This motherly personification of ideal Masonic virtue occurs on the frontispiece of the 1784 edition of the Constitutions and, as Harriet Sandvall’s research shows, on numerous eighteenth-century Masonic certificates. J*** G******, Mahhabone: Or, the Grand Lodge Door Open’d. Wherein Is Discovered the Whole Secrets of Free-Masonry, Both Ancient and Modern, 2nd edn [with additions] (Liverpool: Johnson and Davenport; and J. Gore, 1766), pp. 29–30. The unknown Masonic commentator on this ritual refers to the authenticated instance of Elizabeth Saint-Leger, who was ‘made a Mason’ after she accidentally witnessed a secret ceremony carried out in her father’s library, which functioned as a home lodge on certain occasions during the decade from 1710s in Ireland. See Edward Conder, ‘The Hon. Miss Saint-Leger and Freemasonry’, Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 8 (1895), 16–23; Dudley Wright, Women and Freemasonry (London: William Rider & Son, 1922), pp. 84–7. It must be noted that her initiation took place prior to the constitutional exclusion of women in 1723. Jan Snoek identified and transcribed the first English adoption ritual available in the Library and Museum of Freemasonry in London (UGLE BE.825. Sis). This paper quotes from his transcription. Thanks to Jan Snoek for sending and allowing the author to use this transcription. Anon., Women’s Masonry or Masonry by Adoption (London: [n. pub.], 1765), p. 4. Women’s Masonry, p. 4. Women’s Masonry, p. 17. Free Masonry for the Ladies, p. 15. Free Masonry for the Ladies, p. 18. Free Masonry for the Ladies, p. 25. It is interesting to note that today there exists an order of women Freemasons known as the Honourable Fraternity

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70 71 72

73

of Ancient Freemasons in Britain. Understandably, this body is not recognized by the United Grand Lodge of England, but what is surprising about this society is the gender construction of their rituals and iconography. On the one hand, the members of this all-female body call themselves ‘brother’. Eileen Grey, Grand Master of the order in 1999, admits that sometimes it has hilarious consequences. For instance, somebody’s own sister in a lodge meeting becomes a ‘brother’. On the other hand, they not only use men’s rituals but have also preserved the masculine visual elements of ritual space. During their meetings they feel it more practical to wear plain clothes so as not to detract from the ceremony. So it can be argued that for these women, the icons of traditional Freemasonry are cosmopolitan and gender-inclusive rather than masculine. Sandra Miller, ‘The Women’s Lodge’ [Interview with Eileen Grey, Grand Master of the all-female Honourable Fraternity of Ancient Freemasons], Freemasonry Today, 9 (1999), 24–6 (p. 26); see Ann Pilcher-Dayton, The Open Door: The History of the Order of Women Freemasons 1908–2008 (London: Order of Women Freemasons, 2008). Free Masonry for the Ladies, p. 37. Free Masonry for the Ladies, p. 58. Anderson’s Constitutions (1756), p. 321. Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World, Oxford Studies in Social History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 108; Peter Gordon and David Doughan, Women, Clubs, and Associations in Britain (New York: Routledge, 2006). The author would like to thank Jan Snoek, Andrew Prescott, John Corrigan, and Harriet Sandvall for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this chapter. The author is grateful to the Hungarian Eötvös Postdoctoral and the British Academy Visiting Fellowships for enabling him to carry out research and write this chapter at the University of Sheffield.

8 ‘Sisters of Virtue’ in Swedish Pomerania Andreas Önnerfors

This chapter examines female participation in the predominantly male and secret social orders at the fringes of Enlightenment Europe, the Swedish province on German soil, Swedish Pomerania. Ideas on female participation in fraternal organization were not only a matter of an elite discourse in the hotbeds of European Enlightenment, they were transmitted at a local level. Since the revealing book L’Ordre des FrancsMaçons Trahi et Le Secret des Mopses Revelé1 spread throughout Europe in the 1740s, women of the educated elites of the Enlightenment could claim participation in the secret space that men had created in societies subject to rites of initiation (see Fig. 8.1). L’Ordre des Francs-Maçons Trahi presented detailed exposés of male Masonic rituals, songs and traditions with engravings and illustrations. By treating the gender-mixed Order of the Mopses side by side with Freemasonry in the same publication, the image was promoted that women equally could adopt rituals of initiation, secret symbols and customs of fraternalism. The Order of the Mopses, founded in Cologne, Germany around 1740, can be interpreted as a ritual and social game, arranged by Masons as a travesty of true Freemasonry, and adapted to what was supposed to attract women by using the pug-dog as a symbol of fidelity.2 Yet, the Mopses had a system of initiation rituals, the message of which is close to that of Freemasonry. The step from Freemasonry for men to that for women was not a great one. Given the vast spread of the book among the European readership, women must have asked the question: why couldn’t they form or join such organizations? Literary and scientific academies had already made the acceptance of female members an issue of honour that proved their truly enlightened nature. In the context of this development it was inevitable that eventually women would break into the symbolic world of Freemasonry, with its allusions 156

Andreas Önnerfors 157

Figure 8.1 Initiation scene from the ‘Order of Mopses’, in L’Ordre des FrancsMaçons Trahi et Le Secret des Mopses Revelé [The Order of Freemasons Exposed and the Secrets of the Mopses Revealed] (Amsterdam: [n. pub.], 1745). Image: Author.

to ideals of male brotherhood. Initiation into sisterhood challenged established views on gender and participation. It would be logical to look for early traces of such discourses in the avant-garde of the Enlightenment such as London, Paris, Berlin or Vienna.

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But here is an example from the edge of the old German empire, a territory from 1648 belonging to the Swedish crown, Swedish Pomerania, on the shores of the Baltic Sea. Intellectual life in this Swedish province within German territory was relatively limited and only established in the university town of Greifswald and in the port of Stralsund, the provincial capital.3 Nevertheless, in this remote province, the debate about secret orders and women’s participation therein was active by the 1740s. One reason is the influence of a learned society in Greifswald: the Königlich Deutsche Gesellschaft (Royal German Society), approved by the Swedish king and founded in 1740 with the objective of enhancing both the German language and the sciences. This society not only initiated the first learned journal in Swedish Pomerania, Pommersche Nachrichten von gelehrten Sachen (Pomeranian News of Educated Matters), published in the university town of Greifswald between 1743 and 1748, but also allowed women to become members. When Pommersche Nachrichten in 1745 published a review of the German translation of the above-mentioned L’Ordre des Francs-Maçons Trahi the debate on women’s membership exploded. On the one hand it was claimed that women were incapable of scholarship, studies or serious projects of morality: on the other it was suggested that it was possible to exemplify enlightened tolerance and cosmopolitan values by integrating women into hitherto purely male domains. This chapter depicts the fierce reactions to this development that took place in Swedish Pomerania not only through the initial debate in the magazine Pommersche Nachrichten, but also through a description of the life and ideology of different (secret) societies throughout the century. According to Reinhart Koselleck, during the Enlightenment the Secret and the Public were always styled as ‘a pair of twins’.4 Secret societies were not at all secret in the sense that they kept their mysteries to their members, but rather they provided strict privacy. In the closed assembly room of a lodge or a learned society, new forms of social organization could be explored: a new ideology could spread among its members. Ideals of friendship and companionship are two qualities that throughout the century were stressed as central for the human being as homo socialis. They constitute key ingredients of what in German is expressed through the word Geselligkeit, meaning ‘sociability’. Societies and orders opened up hitherto unknown encounters between the sexes under the aegis of an enlightened ideology. The similarity in the German language between the words for a large society, company and community (‘Gesellschaft’ in the modern sense) and a small society (‘Geselligkei’) in the sense of an association with members who share a certain interest (during the eighteenth century in a rich variety in the fields of science,

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literature, music, ethics and ideology) is of great importance. Within the small scale of a local association, the local (Freemasons’) lodge, or academic, musical or literary circles, new and often democratic forms of organization could be practised. This was an important prerequisite of modernity and a renegotiation and restructuring of gender roles. The spirit of a universal community, the Republique des Lettres, combined various elements: the belief in human perfectibility through education, science and the perfection of ethical behaviour via a doctrine of virtues; the belief in social competence, often expressed through the notion of fraternity; the belief in a free and open exchange of ideas; the crossing of cultural, ethnic and religious divides; and the potential equality between sexes in their intellectual capacity. These values were fundamental to societies of all kinds, to the press and to the protagonists themselves. Key ingredients in their self-representation were the writing and publishing of letters, books, articles and reviews. One of the best examples, according to Koselleck’s assumption about the relationship of the Secret and the Public, is that lodges and orders of all kinds (in spite of their presumed secrecy) were discussed openly in the press. This was the case in Swedish Pomerania, a part of Europe relatively remote from the London and Paris centres of the Enlightenment. The significant traits of the central culture were transformed at a local level, and here, the creation of a public sphere is of crucial importance. A journey from the German province by boat to Stockholm, the capital of the Swedish realm, took three weeks or more; Berlin and the court of Potsdam, the capital of the neighbouring state of Prussia, were at a distance of three days on horseback. News was spread mainly by the north German press in Hamburg. In general, we can assume a delay of at least three weeks from the time something happened or was published in central Europe until it reached the educated elites of Swedish Pomerania through correspondence, publications or the movements of travellers. But in spite of the fact that ideas travelled through Europe relatively slowly, they were discussed at a local level without undue loss of meaning. An example of this is the translation of Masonic rites and documents into other languages. One of the first articles ever published in Swedish Pomerania on the topic of Freemasonry5 tried (in German) to explain that the French version of English Masonry was wrong partly due to defective translations. One can imagine how such translations and assumptions about missing parts in the ritual texts circulated in Europe. It was not clear what was true, where it came from and how it should be written; often small amendments were made or parts struck out that seemed unimportant. Archives show this chaotic situation grew even more, parallelling

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the establishment of new degrees and systems. Evidence thus suggests that Masonic ritual not only was spread throughout Europe in a simplistic centre-periphery model with a clear hierarchy, but that the cultural diffusion of ritual practice followed sophisticated transformation patterns in a dynamic interplay between a large variety of actors serving disparate purposes. Attempts at standardization are a later phenomenon and are often rooted in vernacularization processes within the formation of national identities in Europe. In the first volume of Pommersche Nachrichten of 1743, three books on Freemasonry were reviewed.6 One publication, ‘Der Aufmerksame Freymaurer’ (The Observant Freemason), dealt with European politics. Another work treated the question as to whether such as a governor or mayor, before taking an oath, is entitled to allow the creation of a society the activities of which are unknown to him. This question concerned the debate surrounding whether the authorities could accept societies such as Freemasons’ lodges, something that was considered dangerous in some circles, especially by the Church authorities. This argument was directed towards Freemasonry also in the papal bull In Eminenti in 1738. The subject of secret orders or societies was not considered in the Greifswald journal during 1744. However, the volume of 1745 excelled in its coverage of these topics, both through reviews and letters to the editor.7 This was especially the case when the German translation of L’Ordre des Francs-Maçons Trahi was issued that year, the aim of which being to describe Freemasonry and the Order of Mopses in detail. The fidelity of the pug-dog (a very popular dog at eighteenth-century courts and often portrayed on Masonic porcelain figures) was chosen as a symbol for the members of the order.8 ‘The Detected Order of Freemasons and the Revealed Secrets of the Mopses’ was reviewed exhaustively in the February edition of Pommersche Nachrichten,9 announcing that it was possible to buy both the original French edition and the German translation in Greifswald at that time. The reviewer stated in the introduction: ‘those who laboriously devote themselves to detect the secrets of Freemasonry here get an opportunity to test their credulousness.’ The author was considered as belonging to the ‘curious crowd’. One of the members of the order had given the secret passwords and now the author, without breaking the oath, could reveal the secrets of Freemasonry. The aim of this undercover operation was to tear off the ‘rotten limbs’ of the order. New ones could now replace all secrets. The book, in octavo format, exposed in 112 pages the secrets of Freemasonry (a new edition of Samuel Prichard’s Masonry Dissected, which had been published in 1730). An

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appendix described over 30 pages the reception in the third (master’s) degree of Freemasonry. Three other appendixes treated the Masonic catechism, the oath, the cipher, tokens and signs and commented upon various practices. The Order of Mopses, which also received female members, was discussed over 39 pages; the final part of the book consists of more than 30 pages of Masonic poems and songs with engraved printed notes, which was a quite extravagant process. Many engravings showed details of the work and revealed rites within the orders (see Fig. 8.2). In the review, the intemperance among Freemasons was criticized with some indignation: ‘wine bottles are used as powder-barrels and wineglasses as cannon’. The members of the order lost sight of their wisdom and reason. A dissatisfied eyewitness was cited, Marquis d’Argens: ‘He became a member of the order and was exposed to ceremonies, each one more bizarre than the last. His curiosity could not be satisfied.’ Having experienced all the ceremonies, he wondered if this was all there was to Freemasonry. After he received an affirmative answer, he claimed his money back ‘and expressed his dissatisfaction that rational beings devoted themselves to childish games’. On the other hand, the reviewer also described the advantages of the order: the concord of the brethren, the amicable encounter and the honourable intentions. The review claimed that a bishop in Cologne had founded the Order of the Mopses after the papal bull against Freemasonry in 1738. It was open to both sexes: members did not swear an oath, but promised to follow certain rules. At the reception ceremony (compare with Fig. 8.1) they learned to scratch and bark; the candidate was chained around the wrist and received a leash. He or she had to kiss the back of a wax pug-dog. There existed Mopses’ Lodges in the courts of both Prussia and Sweden.10 Following publication of L’Ordre des Francs-Maçons Trahi, the reaction was harsh; the rites of Freemasons and Mopses were considered to be perverted and bizarre. Several articles claimed that it was especially dangerous for women to be exposed to such strange rites. Only two weeks after the review had been published, the editor of Pommersche Nachrichten stated that the book had aroused much curiosity and attention. Beneath the headline ‘Berlin’, the report of an eyewitness was published: he had overheard a conversation where a freshly received Freemason demanded his money back because he was disappointed with the supposed secrets. The article continues: But this is only true regarding the secrets, otherwise the Order has promoted much good. The society of Mopses on the contrary is the

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Figure 8.2 One of the engravings in L’Ordre des Francs-Maçons Trahi, showing the symbols of the Mopses (pug-dogs), chosen because of their qualities of love, friendship and fidelity. Image: Author.

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more irrational. It is said that the Mopses have founded two lodges in Stettin and have caused much discord. Two priests recently have preached against them.11 Stettin was the capital of the Prussian part of Pomerania, east of Greifswald. Three issues later, a letter to the editor denied the reports regarding Stettin. ‘The story told about Freemasonry’ (from Berlin) was left without comment ‘because I’ve heard so many of them’.12 But condemning the Mopses was unjust. The writer of the letter to the editor was not a Mops himself, but knew several members. None of these people could be accused of irrational behaviour. Besides, no Mopses’ lodge had been founded in Stettin. He did not believe the reports of preaching against the Mopses’ order. And even if the priests had so preached, often they suspected mischief where there was absolutely nothing to suspect. ‘At this moment, I hear that a third priest has preached against them. Stettin is lucky to have such an active spiritual garrison’ he ended with irony. The letter to the editor was not interpreted as a defence of Freemasonry or of the Mopses, but rather as an attack on the Church and the spiritual authority of priests. Some weeks later the debate continued: a priest, who felt himself accused, referred to articles on the subject in the journal Hamburgischer Correspondent.13 The writer of the letter to the editor was criticized for his defence of a small and unimportant order, and his critique of an old and established order: the clergy. Nowadays, the priest complained, everybody just did what he or she wanted; the priesthood should put up or shut up. And if they did talk, they and their office would be made a laughing stock.14 ‘The Guardians of Zion’ were at least conscious that backbiters would precede the arrival of Doomsday. Four issues later,15 the accused writer of the original letter launched a large-scale attack on the priest and the clergy in general on no fewer than four (of the issue’s eight) pages. The clergy was harshly criticized for its ideological fear. Later that year, in Pommersche Nachrichten, beneath the headline ‘Critischer Brief eines Freymäurers’ (a critical letter from a Freemason), L’Ordre des Francs-Maçons Trahi was decried in general.16 The author of the ‘critical letter’ claimed that the book did not reveal any secrets at all, just a French travesty of the original English Masonry. Probably the Englishmen had not told the real secrets to the French, although these Frenchmen may have been received in English lodges. Everything in L’Ordre des FrancsMaçons Trahi was wrong and had nothing to do with the real rites. The reviewer reminded himself that he had read somewhere that the English found the words ‘Franc-Maçon’ or ‘Freymäurer’ somewhat ridiculous, because it should be more properly termed ‘stonemason’. But the critique

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of Freemasonry and the Order of the Mopses did not appear for long in the press. It became such a widespread subject of discussion that the director of the Greifswald town school, Daniel Friedrich Schröder, that year, 1745, on an official occasion, was able to make a speech, ‘De nova technomenom societate’ (On the new society of constructors), which was published subsequently.17 Schröder compared the new order of Freemasons unfavourably with the old order of scholars and teachers. He accused the Freemasons of clouding their work in dark ink like octopuses do as soon as something approaches them. They were worse than dogs or snakes and should be banished from all Christian countries, Schröder said. It was indeed dangerous that ardent advocates of renewal so often also defended Freemasonry. As his main argument, Schröder cited a recently published book (probably L’Ordre des Francs-Maçons Trahi) that had revealed the secrets of Freemasonry. Schröder’s speech shows that the treatment even of a – to most people – totally unknown cultural phenomenon in the press and in a book created a kind of reality in the media that could be used as rhetorical ammunition. Neither Masons’ nor Mopses’ lodges had been founded by that time in Greifswald, but the old authorities of knowledge, the Church, and the foundations of learning, felt themselves threatened by new forms of organization of moral knowledge and by the dissolution of former well-defined lines of demarcation between the sexes. It is also clear that any foundation of a lodge or a moral society at that time in Greifswald inevitably would have led to conflicts, something that was to be confirmed by later developments. A letter to the editor of Pommersche Nachrichten gives us every reason to assume that Schröder’s speech became well known in the province.18 The sender, a certain Willig, from the capital Stralsund, admits here that he was influenced negatively by Schröder’s treatment of Freemasonry, but that he had since changed his mind. He had read a book with Masonic poetry: he was so delighted that he reworked some from the collection. Though not a poetry specialist, these verses gave him the impression of such a pure and virtuous attitude that Freemasonry could only be a force for good. Six issues later, a Masonic songbook was reviewed which was popular because of its morality. Following André Michel de Ramsay’s speech in Paris on the Templarian background of Freemasonry, a German translation of his book Voyages de Cyrus was reviewed later in 1746. The book, a fictional journey through Europe, was dedicated to the Swedish crown prince, later to become King Gustaf III, and published in the town of Wismar (which also belonged to the Swedish crown and where later a Masonic clergy was founded).

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But now it was time for action. In Pommersche Nachrichten a letter to the editor stated that a society had been founded in Greifswald with the name ‘Diogenes-Gesellschaft’ (Society of Diogenes). Its intentions were described in the letter which headed the issue: Either you will not believe that the happiness of your compatriots depends upon virtues or you will not know that among our citizens there dwells a society that feels compassion for our ruined world and that aims to create virtuous and good compatriots.19 This society was not of Freemasons or Mopses, the sender goes on, which may render it free from criticism. The Diogenes Society would satisfy those convinced that Pomerania, to reach its real contentment, still lacked Freemasons’ or Mopses’ lodges. To all patriots there was now an avenue opening up in the Society of Diogenes in Greifswald. The writer was not a member, but thought it to his own merit to have announced the news. As a friend of virtue and his native country, he counted himself fortunate that the tree of virtue had not died. After several unfruitful years it was growing again in Pomerania: ‘What a happy Destiny for my native country!’ He promised to provide a fuller report on the activities of the society at a later date and declared: ‘From now on, I will attend all meetings here, filled with the desire to get to know the endeavour among many to seek their new path to virtue. Signed J. L. N.’ A few weeks later, J. L. N. had to defend himself against a libellous article in the journal.20 Here was mocked a society which had virtue as its goal. J. L. N. felt insulted because in the Hamburg press he had been called a monkey, an unhappy messenger, deceived, naive, an enemy of virtues and a lunatic blinded by the glare of the lantern of Diogenes. He bemoaned his fate and concluded: ‘one can suppose that the one speaking [against the Diogenes Society] is a police commissioner whose salvation and welfare can be realized only through ridding all nooks and crannies of thieves and robbers.’ Some weeks later, in Pommersche Nachrichten, a letter to the editor was published in defence of J. L. N.21 Surprisingly enough it was from a woman who signed herself ‘The Servant and Lover of Virtue’. She admitted that she and her fellow ladies on several occasions had read the journal ‘where we often find something that is suitable and useful for our sex’. The news concerning a ‘school of virtues’ had pleased them enormously. They felt a strong desire to enrol at this school. By this letter they now wished to proclaim their intentions, so that a member of the school of virtue could reveal himself to them. It is not possible to prove

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the existence of a Diogenes society in Greifswald at this time, but the reaction to L’Ordre des Francs-Maçons Trahi shows clearly how deeply the public debate was influenced by a new concept of social organization that crossed the gender divide. The editor of Pommersche Nachrichten (later to become Worshipful Master of the Freemasons’ Lodge) Johan Carl Dähnert (1719–1785) commented on the letter of the ‘lovers of virtue’, saying that he more or less felt himself obliged to publish it, otherwise there would have been untoward consequences. We can interpret this letter from a group of women in 1740s Swedish Pomerania as the expression of a strong desire for participation. The discourse of the Enlightenment delivered a meta-ideology the central concepts of which could be claimed by different sections of society. The concept of ‘virtue’ provided an opportunity for women to claim admission and it was ideologically unsound to refuse them participation in the ennoblement of mankind. Subsequently, it was in principle considered wrong to deny women membership in organizations that promoted the central concepts of the Enlightenment. Before turning to the life and activities of Anna von Balthasar, who actually managed to break through the barriers between genders, it is worth shedding light on the first establishment of a secret order in Swedish Pomerania. In 1746, the Swedish Crown Prince Gustaf was born. To mark this event, Freemasons in Stockholm struck a medal and invited the young prince to be a member of their order. It is said that this was connected with the wave of negative publicity that the book L’Ordre des Francs-Maçons Trahi had caused throughout Europe,22 but interestingly enough, a secret society in Greifswald revealed its existence at this time. In 1746, one of the strangest books in the history of ideas in Swedish Pomerania was published: Der Abelit [The Abelite] (see Fig. 8.3). Its author was Peter Ahlwardt (1710–1791), later to become Professor of Philosophy at the University of Greifswald. On no fewer than 44 pages, Ahlwardt (a follower of the teachings of Spinoza and influenced by Christian Wolff’s philosophy) describes the ideology of the Order of Abelites: it is clear that he was influenced by Freemasonry. In Greifswald, a lodge of the Abelites was constituted as was, strangely for the 1760s, another in the Danish capital, Copenhagen. In 1764 a Danish translation of Der Abelit was published. The Copenhagen archives contain references to Ahlwardt together with detailed laws, charges and two speeches of the order.23 However, it is not clear whether it was possible for women to enter the lodge in Greifswald. Der Abelit was thoroughly reviewed in Pommersche Nachrichten.24 Even more interesting are the words of Ahlwardt in the preface to Der Abelit. Here he claims that the inhabitants of Greifswald had virtually forced the order to acknowledge its existence.

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Figure 8.3 Title page of Der Abelit (Leipzig: auf folten eines Mitgliedes, 1746), shows an allegory of the secret order that on the following pages delivers its ideology in public. Image: Author.

Ahlwardt states that mistaken assumptions, attributes and activities were widely propagated. He explicitly criticized press reports. The Abelites were not a society of Diogenes. Ahlwardt insisted that the Abelites were neither Freemasons nor Mopses: they had neither tried to copy their ideas nor felt any kind of attraction to them. It is striking that the differences

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between the ideologies are so minimal. One can assume that Ahlwardt rather was inspired by L’Ordre des Francs-Maçons Trahi but that he, following negative publicity and his lack of contact with established orders, decided to found a society of his own: the Abelites. The publication of Pommersche Nachrichten had ceased by 1748. There are no known references to the existence of secret societies during the following years. The editor of the journal, Dähnert, was by then appointed as university librarian and the physical reorganization of the university occupied the minds of the academic community of Greifswald which celebrated in 1750 a major event in its 300-year-old existence as the Royal Swedish University of Greifswald. A new main building was inaugurated which became an inspiration of enlightened ideas. The building itself combined several elements that represented the new roles of science and culture, openness, interaction and public engagement. In 1750 another key event took place in Greifswald with the first issue of a new weekly learned journal, Critische Nachrichten. For more than 50 years Critische Nachrichten played a key role in Swedish Pomerania’s intellectual life. Its main purpose was to publish book and magazine reviews, news from the European intellectual world and from Greifswald itself. Around 10 per cent of the articles concerned Swedish authors and themes. Thus was created a physical meeting place and a melting pot of knowledge and science as well as a promoter of public debate: Greifswald was able to take part in the all-European exchange of ideological ‘currency’. When Critische Nachrichten reported the inauguration of the new main building, one event must have struck many readers of the educated journal. First among the speakers was the Swedish Professor Kellman, but another, unexpected performance engaged the audience even more. Anna Christina Ehrenfried von Balthasar (1737–1808), aged only 13, accompanied ‘with drums beating and trumpets sounding’, mounted the steps to the platform and made a speech in Latin in favour of the Swedish royal family. Anna von Balthasar, a little-known protagonist of the master narration of the Enlightenment, broke through formerly well-defined barriers between the genders. Her life, admittedly exceptional, illustrates what enlightened philosophy could facilitate on a very local level of European society. She was not a wunderkind. Rather we should interpret her career in Greifswald as the result of an exceptional education at home, where she studied several languages: French, Latin and Italian, as well as art, music, philosophy and law. Her father, Augustin von Balthasar (1701–1786), was a law professor then chairman of the highest Swedish court of the German territories, the Königliches Schwedisches Tribunal (Royal Swedish Tribunal) in Wismar. In 1739 he was the driving force behind the

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foundation of the Königlich Deutsche Gesellschaft. He believed in the benefit of associations for the promotion of education and research. The journalist’s comment about her ‘proof of education’ in Pommersche Bibliothek leaves no doubt that she was a woman of significance: This perfect example may encourage other members of the beautiful sex to overcome obstacles which hinder their path to science. These obstacles are often considered to be unimportant; if one would only show some willingness to give them [women] access to the sciences […] It is an honour for our academy that a woman be placed above such doubts and with a thorough training in languages and sciences giving hope that she will present herself in such an admirable way.25 The Professor of Mathematics and Head of the Faculty of Philosophy, Andreas Mayer, nominated Anna von Balthasar for the Baccalaurea of Philosophy and Liberal Arts. ‘With an unexpected fearlessness’, the article goes on, Anna (again) mounted the steps and received her new academic degree: ‘She was united with science, where the doctoral hat of a Pomeranian lady will fit well.’ The students honoured her with a congratulatory poem in Latin: ‘They displayed their delight at seeing the Order of Scholars enriched by such a perfect member.’ Anna von Balthasar inherited her father’s enthusiasm for the library as a place of encounters. In July 1750 she made a speech on the occasion of the inauguration of the new university library in Greifswald, ‘Proof that libraries are the most secure dwelling places of a true and sincere friendship’.26 Anna argued that it was of the utmost importance that women be allowed to approach sciences. This was not only an advantage for women, but also proof of a truly enlightened attitude on the part of the educated order, which hitherto had consisted only of men. Furthermore, she argued that libraries were of the greatest importance: ‘Without libraries, the happiness of a state is incomplete.’ To open a library is to open a ‘temple of the most beautiful friendship’. And friendship is the true base of human companionship (‘Geselligkeit’). Friends provide orientation, it is possible to share their virtues: ‘we build our happiness upon them’. Each rank, gender and age could find in the library a place of friendship. Books could be seen as a way of living among friends even beyond death; these true friends provided guidance and supplied virtues and science.27 But she recognized that some people took issue with her sex; ‘they question its very humanity or only want to give the male sex the advantage to excel in arts or sciences.’ However she believed that the gentlemen in Königlich Deutsche Gesellschaft would be noble enough not to pronounce

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the female sex devoid of insight or science. They will not claim that nature has unfairly distributed aptitude for ‘the enrichment of reason and will’. Her very election to the society indicated how far the gentlemen stood from such a base way of thinking ‘among people who do not know the qualities of human beings’. The membership of Anna von Balthasar in Königlich Deutsche Gesellschaft was noted by the majority of German journals. Prominent members of other German societies sent their congratulations and started to correspond with her. She was also elected member of honour of the Königsberg and Jena societies. The day Anna von Balthasar was introduced in the Königlich Deutsche Gesellschaft, Jaques de Perard (1712–1762) from Stettin in Prussia was enrolled into the society. De Perard was a clergyman in the French parish of Stettin – Prussia was still a multicultural composite state rather than the vanguard of a unified Germany. In the Prussian part of Pomerania, religious refugees from France and the Palatinate area were allowed to settle. De Perard made Voltaire’s acquaintance during his time as court philosopher at Sans Souci. In Leipzig, de Perard was a member of the (academic) Masonic lodge Minerva.28 In Stettin, de Perard became Worshipful Master of the lodge Zu den drei Zirkeln, which later was integrated into the (Templarian) Clermont system in which de Perard was appointed ‘Majo Prior’ of the so-called ‘Capitulum Sedinensis’.29 He also edited the journal La Bibliotheque Germanique, which reported on German culture and literature. When de Perard expressed his gratitude for being elected a member of the Königlich Deutsche Gesellschaft in Greifswald, he especially stressed his delight regarding the reception of the new friend Anna von Balthasar ‘within our Order’. She was compared to Madame Chatelet in France, Bassi in Italy or Countess Ekeblad in Sweden: that Pomerania had its fourth Grace and its tenth Muse. Anna von Balthasar responded in fluent French, expressing her delight. But the main part of de Perard’s speech concerned the benefit of science to fraternal feelings. Although he was French, he had been honoured by membership of the Königlich Deutsche Gesellschaft. Religious fanaticism had been extinguished; the spirits of different people were united. All human beings as ‘citizens of one and the same world’ were obliged to work for the welfare of society, especially in times when ‘reason was breaking through more and more happily’. The differences between people and religions were in de Perard’s view within the Königlich Deutsche Gesellschaft replaced by a common, cosmopolitan idea. Through the society, Swedes, Pomeranians, Frenchmen, Italians and Poles were united in their endeavours.30 The next time a society assembled in Greifswald was between 1753 and 1755, when the successor to the ducal throne of Swedish Pomerania’s

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western neighbour state, Adolf Friedrich of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, studied incognito at the University of Greifswald. It is said that he kept close company with Anna von Balthasar. During this period it is known that the Order of Mopses was active in Swedish Pomerania. If a lodge was formally founded or if it just assembled at the ducal court, this has yet to be ascertained. What we do know is that Anna von Balthasar was recommended into the order by her two sisters-in-law, von Essen, and a Lieutenant-Colonel von Bugenhagen.31 In 1757 Swedish troops were sent to Swedish Pomerania to take part in the French coalition against Britain and Prussia. The Swedish campaign against Prussia was not successful, but it was the first time that Swedish officers, received as Freemasons in various lodges throughout Europe, gathered on such a scale. This initiated the constitution of a Swedish army lodge, Svenska Arméens Loge, in the spring of 1761. The author has already described elsewhere the developments that took place during and after the war.32 In Greifswald and Stralsund, three lodges, in the degrees I to III according to the Swedish rite, were founded.33 Parallelling this development, the so-called Clermont System established the Scottish and Chapter Lodges in Greifswald. Due to this establishment, Johan Carl Dähnert, together with a Swedish officer, von Coyett, took part in the famous meeting at Altenberg, near Jena, where Karl Gotthelf von Hund founded the ‘Strict Observance’, a Templarian and alchemist rite within Freemasonry. Dähnert and von Coyett returned to Swedish Pomerania and reformed the lodges there according to the new system. Strangely enough, among the archive material concerning this very episode in Stralsund, a ritual text in Swedish is preserved, describing a reception ceremony where a woman performs the main role as Master of the Order, ‘Ordensmästarinna’ as she is called, with the Swedish female grammatical ending.34 Women also performed other offices in the lodge. Recent archive discoveries at the largest collection of material concerning the Strict Observance in Copenhagen confirm that it was planned to found a women’s branch within the order.35 It is symptomatic that one of the most thorough studies on the subject completely ignored the very existence of these documents.36 Furthermore, Freemasonry for women was established in Sweden in 1776.37 A comparison between the materials however does not show a relationship between the ritual texts, but it is still remarkable that female ritual agency appears to have been accepted in the seemingly most male of all sociabilities, chivalric Freemasonry. Without doubt, the manuscript from Swedish Pomerania has been used in assemblies; there are several amendments and deletions. Besides that, two concepts are preserved and two extracts from the minutes show that new members were accepted in 1769.

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The assembly room is described as follows: The room where the members of the Order assemble must be steady and equipped with a sufficient number of chairs with a larger chair for the [female] Master of the Order. The chairs are lined up opposite each other in two rows and the chair of the Master of the Order at a higher level. In between the rows of chairs a table is placed which is covered attractively. Upon the table are placed four candle lights, a Bible and a sword or sabre, and in case someone is initiated [into the Order] a jewel of the Order.38 During the meeting, it was possible to discuss questions related to the activity of the order: The secretary announces which documents have arrived since the last assembly and the Master of the Order makes all proposals that may be appropriate. He [the secretary] also reports if anyone has applied for membership. In this case the application is deliberated upon in accordance to the Charges of the Order. Then if someone is going to be initiated, it is the duty of the Master of Ceremonies to introduce this person, walking on their left side.39 The main part of the document is a thorough description of the initiation rite: At the moment of their entrance to the assembly room of the Order, all members rise except the Master of the Order. She salutes only with a bow. After the recipient has been guided in front of the table where he is going to be dubbed [as a member of the Order] the Master of Ceremonies rises (while the other members sit down). He addresses the recipient as follows: ‘Sir! The Order of the Red Ribbon has taken your desire to become a member of the Order into account. Convinced about your embellished way of thinking and the good qualities that are needed to uphold the Order, we have agreed [upon your application] with exceeding delight, which I, on behalf of our Order, have the honour to tell you combined with the request that you directly take the oath normally used in the Order. After that you receive the authorization to be dubbed.’ […] The Secretary (who stands in front of his chair, as do the other members) administers the oath to the recipient. After the oath has been taken with a hand placed on the book (which lies on the table), the members take their

Andreas Önnerfors 173

places and the Secretary reads (standing) the Charges of the Order. After that, he sits down and the Master of Ceremonies rises and addresses the recipient: ‘Step back in front of the “dubbing table” to be dubbed by Our Master of the Order and to receive the jewels of our Order by [a female officer of the Order charged with attaching the jewels on to the recipients].’ The Master of the Order tells the [female officer] ‘Take the jewel of the Order and tie it on to Mister N. N., because he is going to be dubbed a member of the Order of the Red Ribbon.’ After the female officer has properly tied the jewel of the Order on to the recipient she sits down and now the Master of the Order steps forward to the ‘chair of dubbing’, takes the ‘dubbing sword’ with the right hand and touches the person placed before the table for the first time on the right shoulder saying ‘I dub you, N. N., to a member of Our Order of the Red Ribbon, be worthy!’ During the dubbing all members of the Order stand in front of their seats. After the Master of the Order has placed the sword in its proper place, the Master of Ceremonies steps forward with two wine goblets. One of them is handed to the Master of the Order and the second to the received brother or sister. The Master of the Order pledges the new member and says: ‘As N. N. is received as our brother/ sister in our Order, nothing else remains than to drink the toast that is regulated in our Charges.’ After that, the Master of the Order bows to the received member and takes her place. She and the other members congratulate the newly received member from their places and everyone sits down as soon as the received member has been shown his place by the Master Of Ceremonies.40 The ceremony ends with the following procedure: If something else remains to be considered, the deliberation proceeds and afterwards the assembly room is locked up; during the deliberations it should be kept locked. If the room of the Order is on the ground floor the shutters also must be firmly closed before the assembly starts. [At this point the final procedures are described] The members of the Order are requested: 1, to perform acts of mercy, so that people are satisfied: 2, to deliver all incoming documents that affect the Order to the Secretary immediately: 3, to inform the Secretary if someone has applied to a member of the Order to be received into the Order so that this person can be requested at the first occasion: 5 [there is no Part 4], never to mention anything to a stranger what kind of office anyone has in the Order and how the reception is performed: 6, to wear

174 ‘Sisters of Virtue’ in Swedish Pomerania

proper mourning attire if an oration to the memory of someone is delivered.41 Two extracts from the minutes of performed receptions are preserved from 4 February 1769: The Order consents to the initiation of Lieutenant Colonel and Knight of the Order of the Sword [given to merited Swedish officers] the Honourable H. B. P. v. W. as their Brother of the Order considering his noble way of thinking and his good and praiseworthy qualities to uphold the Order. After he had taken the oath, after the Charges of the Order had been read to him and after he had received the jewel of the Order as charged in the ceremonial he was dubbed and took his place. As he has handed over in writing the oath he has taken [orally] to the Secretary, he [H. B. P. v. W.] receives an extract from the minutes under which is placed the Seal of the Order and the year and day as it was written in former times.42 The documents preserved leave very little doubt that at the end of the 1760s, initiation rites were performed in Swedish Pomerania in fraternal organizations with the participation of women as officers in the lodge.43 A close reading of the reception rite, some of the ceremonies mentioned and some key words (‘charity’, the ‘splendid virtues’ and ‘moral qualities’ of the recipient) show a similarity to both the Order of the Mopses and Freemasonry. Within approximately 20 years, the full participation of women in secret orders had moved from an abstract debate in the press to reality through ritual performance. The foundation of Königlich Deutsche Gesellschaft in Greifswald by then had been established for 30 years. In 1740, Augustin von Balthasar described in vivid detail the human endeavour of sociability. This was the nucleus for further development: the Order of the Abelites, the Mopses order, Freemasons’ lodges and now an ‘Order of the Red Ribbon’. This example suggests that societies and orders opened up to the redefinition of gender roles in the discourse of the Enlightenment; they saw themselves as vanguards. When Andreas Mayer, architect of the new university main building in Greifswald, was elected to the Swedish Royal Academy of Science in 1752, he made this standpoint absolutely clear. The principles of ‘educated guilds’ had to be adapted to the educational system, otherwise, he argued, the realization of new ideas would take centuries.

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Much more quickly, learned societies should receive ‘the repressed Truth with joy and distribute its treasures with inexhaustible zeal’. As illustrated through the example of Anna von Balthasar, the Königlich Deutsche Gesellschaft established a place for an exceptional woman to take part in this exoteric, or outwardly directed, distribution of the ‘treasures of Truth’. Probably, it was easier to integrate women into the meta-ideology of that time – happiness, progress, human autonomy and perfectibility – by pointing out their intellectual qualities. Without considering this potential, the Enlightenment vanguard would argue, the progress of mankind would experience a severe loss and proceed much more slowly. The ‘secret’ side of Enlightenment orders and lodges had in fact a similar, but esoteric, or inwardly directed, goal: the refinement of virtue and ethical behaviour among human beings. Even here, the main characters were conscious that it would take centuries to establish a new ethic via the old authorities: Church, family and school. To gather laymen (and laywomen) and in privacy perform rites with the goal of enhancing the moral capacity of the individual was more or less a common feature for all kinds of ‘secret’ societies during the eighteenth century. Also in this field, a woman such as Anna von Balthasar (through her membership in the Mopses’ Lodge) managed to participate. By following her life, the debate in the journal Pommersche Nachrichten, and elsewhere, we have found threads in what for a long time has been considered of peripheral interest – the intellectual life of Swedish Pomerania – that lead us directly into the central questions of the time: the renegotiation of human participation in society on social, political and cultural levels.

Notes 1 L’Ordre des Francs-Maçons Trahi et Le Secret des Mopses Revelé [The Order of Freemasons Exposed and the Secrets of the Mopses Revealed] (Amsterdam: [n. pub.], 1745) 2 Roland Martin Hanke, Mops und Maurer: Betrachtungen zur Geschichte der Mopsgessellschaft (Bayreuth: Verlag Deutscher Freimaurer, 2009), pp. 25–30. 3 The author’s dissertation: Andreas Önnerfors, Svenska Pommern – kulturmöten och identifikation 1720–1815 (Lund: Minerva, 2003), deals with the intellectual life of the province between Enlightenment and Romanticism and is considered a reference to the article as a whole. 4 Reinhart Koselleck, Kritik und Krise. Ein Beitrag zur Pathogenese der bürgerlichen Welt (Freiburg: Alber, 1959). 5 Pommersche Nachrichten von gelehrten Sachen (Griefswald: Johann Jacob Weitbrecht, 1745), p. 60 6 Pommersche Nachrichten von gelehrten Sachen (Griefswald: Johann Jacob Weitbrecht, 1743), pp. 41, 59, 79.

176 ‘Sisters of Virtue’ in Swedish Pomerania 7 On the Order of the Mopses, Pommersche Nachrichten von gelehrten Sachen (Griefswald: Johann Jacob Weitbrecht, 1745), pp. 114, 132, 138, 246, 268; on Freemasonry, p. 111; on the Diogenes’ Society in Greifswald, pp. 17, 47, 52. Ten articles during the year treated secret societies. 8 Nils Palmborg, ‘Till mopsens kulturhistoria’ [On the Cultural History of the Pug-Dog], Kulturen (1976), 17–33, deals with the cultural history of the pugdog and the bizarre rites of the Mopses’ Order. See also Hanke. 9 Pommersche Nachrichten, 14 (1745). 10 In I Guld och himmelsblått – frimureri, ett ideal i tiden, ed. by Tom C Bergroth and Maria Söderström (Åbo: Åbo Landskapsmuseum, 1992), p. 51, the introduction of the Order of Mopses to Sweden 1744 through Count Tessin is described. He and his wife became masters of a lodge of Mopses that counted the pretender to the Swedish throne, Adolf Fredrik and his wife, the Prussian Princess Lovia Ulrika (sister of Frederick II) among its members. 11 Pommersche Nachrichten, 17 (1745). 12 Pommersche Nachrichten, 20 (1745). 13 Hamburgischer Correspondent (1745), pp. 49–50. 14 Pommersche Nachrichten, 31 (1745). 15 Pommersche Nachrichten, 35 (1745). 16 Pommersche Nachrichten, 60 (1745). 17 Daniel Friedrich Schroeder, De nova texnomenon societate (…) (Greifswald: Struck, 1745). Announced in Pommersche Nachrichten (1745), 36. 18 Pommersche Nachrichten, 43 (1746). 19 Pommersche Nachrichten, 47 (1745). 20 Hamburgische Berichte, 51 (1745). 21 Pommersche Nachrichten, 63 (1745). 22 I Guld och himmelsblått, pp. 47–50. 23 Den Danske Frimurerordens Arkiv og Bibliotek (DDFO, Copenhagen), F XII ‘Abeliterordenens Lover og statuter’. 24 Pommersche Nachrichten, 85 (1746). 25 Pommersche Bibliothek (1750), p. 7. 26 ‘Beweis, daß Bibliothecen die sichersten Wohnplätze einer wahren und ächten Freundschaft sind.’ The speech is included in Hermann Müller, Anna Christina Ehrenfried von Balthasars Bedeutung als Gelehrte und Schriftstellerin (Greifswald: Struck, 1876), pp. 70–9. 27 When in 1775 a catalogue for the university library was printed, a copper engraving showed the ideal representation of the library as a place of knowledge performed as a social activity. Hidden on the balustrade is a Masonic symbol. 28 Klaus C. F. Feddersen, Wertvolle Funde alter Ritualhandschriften (Flensburg: Frederik, 2001), p. 36. The book deals with early Freemasonry in Leipzig. 29 Ferdinand Runkel, in his Geschichte der Freimaurerei in Deutschland (Berlin: Hobbing, 1931), Part I, p. 208r, shows a reprint of the Constitutional Act of Zu den drei Zirkeln from 1751 in Masonic cipher and German transcription. 30 De Perard’s speech in Hermann Müller, Anna Christina Ehrenfried von Balthasars Bedeutung als Gelehrte und Schriftstellerin (Greifswald: Struck, 1876), pp. 23–5. De Perard’s correspondence with the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences in Kungliga Vetenskapsakademien (Swedish Royal Academy of Science, Stockholm); Kungliga Svenska Vetenskapsakademiens dagböcker [The diaries of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science], pp. 170, 178, 187.

Andreas Önnerfors 177 31 Karl-Heinz Lock, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte der Freimaurerei in Mecklenburg’, in Quellenkundliche Arbeit Nr. 11 (Flensburg: Forschungsvereinigung Frederik, 1994), pp. 58–62; also Müller, p. 42, where her membership in the Order of Mopses is mentioned. 32 Andreas Önnerfors, ‘Frimureri i Svenska Pommern’ (published in three parts, I–III), Acta Masonica Scandinavica, 5, 6, 7 (2002–04); also his ‘The Swedish Order Exported – Freemasonry as a Conduit for Swedish and German Educated Elites during the Enlightenment and Early Romanite Period’, in The Social Impact of Freemasonry on the Modern Western World, ed. by Matthew Scanlan, The Canonbury Papers, 1 (London: Lewis Masonic, 2002), pp. 60–7; also his ‘240 Jahre schwedische Freimaurerei in Deutschland – die Logen SchwedischPommerns 1761–1816’, Jahrbuch der Freimaurerischen Forschungsvreinigung Frederik, 16 (2002), 143–90; also his ‘Die Freimaurerei in Schwedisch-Pommern des 18. Jahrhunderts – aufgeklärte Avantgarde und Kontaktzone zwischen Pommern und Schweden’, in Gemeinsame Bekannte. Schweden und Deutschland in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. by Ivo Asmus, Heiko Droste and Jens Erik Olesen (Münster: Lit, 2003), pp. 107–20. 33 The Army Lodge stated laconically in its charges (Section 13): ‘It is never allowed to have the female sex received into the Order.’ On the other hand it is a paradox that most of the values to which Freemasons endeavour are attributed with female qualities. Compare with the author’s publication of the charges in Mystiskt brödraskap: mäktigt nätverk, studier i det svenska 1700talsfrimureriet, ed. by Andreas Önnerfors (Minerva: Lund, 2006), pp. 94–101. 34 Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz (GStPK, Berlin) 5.2. S 85 ‘Betrifft Stricte Observanz 1765 u ff’. 35 Andreas Önnerfors ‘Maçonnerie des Dames: The Plans of the Strict Observance to Establish a Female Branch’, in Women’s Agency and Rituals in Mixed and Female Masonic Orders, ed. by Alexandra Heidle and Jan A. M. Snoek (Brill: Leiden, 2008), pp. 89–218, explores this source thoroughly. 36 René Le Forestier, Die templerische und okkultistische Freimaurerei im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert, trans. by Paul Schötz and A. Schwaab, 4 vols (Leimen: Kristkeitz, 1987–92), I–II, mentions nothing about this phenomenon, nor does Runkel. 37 Andreas Önnerfors and Jonas Andersson, ‘Kvinnligt frimureri i Sverige – inblick i en svensk adoptionsritual från 1770-talet’ [Female Freemasonry in Sweden: Insight into a Swedish Ritual of Adoption from the 1770s], and ‘Loix et statuts de la Maçonnerie des Dames’ [Laws and statutes of Female Freemasonry], Acta Masonica Scandinavica, 9 (2006), 145–59; 160–81. 38 ‘Rummet hwarest ordens ledamöter samankoma, måste wara stadigt, försedt med nödige stolar och en större stohl åt Ordens Mästarinnan, stolarne sättas i tvenne rader emot hwarandra, och Ordens Mästarinnans stol något owanföre, emellan stolraderna ställas et bord öwertäckt med något grant täcke, hwaruppå ställes 4 ljus, och lägges en Bibell, et swärd eller wärja, samt i händelse någon skall bliwa antagen et Ordens teckn.’ 39 ‘Secreteraren uppger hwilka handlingar sedan sidsta samankomsten inkommit och ordensmästaren giör alla propositioner som kunna behöwas föreställa; Han berättar äwen om någon giordt ansättning at bliwa ledamot i Orden hwarom öwerläggas på sätt som Ordens reglorna föreskrifwa och däräst någon skall bliwa antagen så har Ceremonie Mästarn at införa den samma, gående honom til wänster.’

178 ‘Sisters of Virtue’ in Swedish Pomerania 40 ‘Wid inkomsten i Ordensrummet stiga alla Ledamöterne opp utom Ordens Mästarinnan som blott med en bugning hälsar och sedan den som skal antagas blifvit förd framför dubbningsbordet, och Ceremoni Mästaren stält sig fram för sin stol, men de andra Ledamöterne sitta, tiltalar Ceremoni Mästaren honom sålunda[:] Min Herre Röda Bands Orden har tagit [er] begiäran at i Orden bliwa ledamot uti behörigt öwerwägande, och öwertygade om [ert] täcka tanckesätt samt de till Ordens upprätthollande goda egenskaper dertill med särdeles fägnad welat samtycka, hwilcket jag på Wår Ordens wägnar har den äran härmedelst har at berätta med begiäran, [att ni] nu genast aflägger den i Orden antagne wanliga eden, at sedan behörigen kunna bliwa dubbad. Eden stawas för den som skall antagas af Secreteraren som står fram för sin stol hwilcket äfwen alla Ledamöter göra, Sedan Eden är aflagd med hand å bok som lägges [på] Stora bordet, sätta ledamötena sig, och Secreteraren stående upläser Ordens reglorne, hwarefter han sätter sig och Ceremonimästaren stiger upp och säger[:] träden tillbaka framföre dubnings bordet at af Wår Ordens Mästarinna bliwa dubbat och Wår Ordens på knyterska undfå sitt orden teckn. Ordens Mästarinnan saÿer till på knyterskan tag Ordens tecknet och sätt det på Herrn N. N. ty han skall till ledamot i Wår Orden bliwa dubbat [in another version: ‘Tag ordens tecknet och sätt det på Herr N. N. ty han skal nu bli dubbad til Ledamot i Röda bands orden’], samt sedan på knyterskan på behörigt vis påsatt honom Ordens tecknet och satt sig går Ordens Mästarinnan fram till dubbnings stolen, tager dubbningsswärdet med högra handen och under det Hon rör Honom som stått framför bordet 1. gång med swärdet på högra Axlan, saÿer desse ord, jag dubbar Tig N. N. till ledamot av Wår [in another version: ‘Röda Bands’] Orden, war wärdig, under dubbningen äro alla Ledamöterne stående framför sina rum Sedan Ordens Mästarinan lagt swärdet från sig på sit ställe kommer Ceremoni Mästarn fram med 2ne vinpocaler hvaraf den ena gifweer åt Ord M och den andra åt den antagne. Brödren och systren, då ord M [fått] pocalerne dricker den dubbade til [in another version: ‘Ordens Mästarinnan dricker nya Ledamoten til och säger’] sägande Som N. N. är antagen til vår Ord Broder /:Syster:/ så återstår intet mera än at dricka den uti reglorne utsatte vår skål. Derefter niger Ord Mäst för den antagne och sätter sig på sit ställe. Då Ord Mäst och de andra Ledamötena stående hvar och en från sit ställe göra den antagne sina lyckönskningar, och alla sätter sig sedan Ceremonimästaren anvist den antagne sit rum.’ 41 ‘Skulle något widare wara at öwerlägga Continueras dermed och öppnas rumet sedan som altid under rådplägningnarne bör wara låst. Är Ordens rumet i nedra wåningen på et hus så måste luckorne innan sammankomst skier wäl stängas. Underställes om icke Ordens ledamöterne böra på alt sätt söka giöra barmhertighetens wärck och wälgerningar så at folck bliwa nöigda/ 2o at alla till någon ledamot ankommande papper som röra orden genast til Secreteraren öwerlämnas/3o äwen at Secreteraren underrättas om någon hos en ordensledamot giordt ansökning at i orden bliwa intagen, på det sådant af Honom wid första samankomstens kan anmodas [punkt fyra finns inte] 5o at aldrig nämna åt främmande hwad syssla hwar och en har i orden och huru det tillgår wid intagandet 6o at alla äro i kammarsorg då någon parentation hålles.’ 42 ‘Sedan Orden enhälligt för godt funnit at antaga Öfwerstel och Ridd af Congl Swerdes Ord Wälb H. B. P. v. W. til deß Ordens Broder i anseende till wälbe-

Andreas Önnerfors 179 mälta H Öfwerstel och ridd ädle tankesätt och til Ordens uprätthållande egande goda och berömwärda egenskaper, så blef H Öfwerstel och R nu, efter aflagd Ed, föreläsna Ordensreglor och undfångit Ordens teckn på det i Ceremonielet föreskrifna sättet dubbad och intog sit säte: kommande H Öfwerstel och R at till Secreteraren skriftel afgifwa den nu af honom gångna Eden hwarföre Herr wälbemälte Öf L och R härmedelst et urdrag af protocollet meddelas, under Ordens sigill, år och dag som förr skrifwit står.’ 43 An illustration of such female ritual agency is to be found in Lolo KrusiusAhrenberg, Tyrannmördaren C. F. Ehrensvärd: samhällssyn och politiskt testamente (Helsinki: Tammerfors, 1947), p. 121.

9 The Politics of Sociability? French Masonic Culture before the Revolution James Smith Allen

By 1799 the Abbé Augustin de Barruel had published all five volumes of his scathing indictment of the French Revolution, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme (1797–99).1 The Revolution, he alleged at length, was the result of a conspiracy by three ruthless enemies of throne and altar: the philosophes, whom he called ‘the sophists of incredulity and impiety’; the Freemasons, whom he confused with republicans, earning them the title of ‘the sophists of rebellion’; and the Illuminati of Bavaria, under the leadership of Adam Weishaupt, whom Barruel labelled ‘the sophists of impiety and anarchy’, the consummation of these unwise challenges to established authority. From such well-organized and relentless conspirators, the Abbé contended, arose the Jacobins’ blind quest for liberty, equality and fraternity. The Revolution’s sweeping destruction of the ancien régime’s traditional order and faith seemed proof enough of Barruel’s polemic. Avidly read and believed by aristocrats in exile, this work soon took on a life of its own, ultimately to become received wisdom for the bien-pensant, of course, but also for many observers on the political left. This particular Masonic mythology has since informed the work of historians from Louis Blanc to François Furet.2 Conspiracy theories are speculative fodder for fools and crackpots, however sincere, and generally fail to persuade responsible scholars. But Barruel’s influential notions require re-examination from another perspective, that of Masonic sociability on the eve of 1789. Freemasons deserve more careful attention to the historical significance of their associational life in an evolving bourgeois civil society. In the light of its subsequent role in French history, especially in helping to establish and sustain the Third Republic (1870–1940), can this early civic organization be characterized more precisely?3 Thanks to the Nazi occupation of France and its Vichy sympathizer, Bernard Faÿ, the Bibliothèque 180

James Smith Allen 181

nationale de France (rue de Richelieu) contains the largest public archive of confiscated Masonic materials, which suggest a more complex reality than Barruel described. The Freemasons’ initiation rituals, their legitimizing legends, their membership lists, their adoption of women, and more, their amicable conviviality – which can be documented readily despite this fraternal organization’s longstanding penchant for secrecy – all define another, much less politicized world view. Masonic culture in fact was less a revolution in the making than it was a manifestation of French association with no necessary relationship to politics. In their own way, Freemasons in France both undermined and supported the authority and legitimacy of traditional elites and institutions, including the monarchy and the Church. But more important, it developed a sociability the political implications of which most observers, like Barruel, have largely created to serve their own purposes.4 Such a position ill suits recent historians of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Some old myths live on. Following the conservative tradition of Barruel, via Augustin Cochon and his rehabilitation by François Furet, Simon Schama’s best-selling Citizens (1989), for example, restates the familiar accusation: The Jacobins inherited an emphasis on brotherly solidarity and equality from the equally popular Masonic lodges that had mushroomed around France in the later part of the [eighteenth] century. They also took from Masonry the pleasure of ritual and arcane symbolism, grafting the messages of revolutionary politics onto Masonic emblems like the eye of surveillance and the stonemason’s level (signifying equality) and the Masons’ obsession with triangles. The high-minded professions of faith in the universal fraternity of welldisposed men were also reiterations of a familiar Masonic refrain.5 According to the historians of eighteenth-century French political culture, Freemasonry established a democratic association that challenged traditional norms of public authority, the same challenge pursued more vigorously and violently by the Jacobins during the Revolution.6 Freemasons thus planted the seeds of the ancien régime’s demise. The explicit link between Jacobin clubs and Masonic lodges is qualified by Maurice Agulhon, Ran Halévi and Roger Chartier. The new political culture actually arose from an intellectual sociability, that is, a ‘public sphere’ first defined by Jürgen Habermas; the Freemasons were merely the largest of the associations in the eighteenth century to share in it.7 ‘In 1789 Masons numbered at least fifty thousand in France, or one man out

182 The Politics of Sociability?

of every twenty among those classes of the urban population likely to have been admitted into a lodge’, reports Chartier. Rather than assuming that this widespread phenomenon was in itself hostile to the ancien régime, Chartier discerns a contradiction within a socially mixed organization: Far from holding an abstract and absolute concept of equality, Masonic sociability attempted to consider individuals independently of their differing social condition and, in the tensions and conflicts it underwent, to produce a cross between egalitarian principles and exclusivity, between a respect for social difference […] and the constitution of a separate society. Chartier concludes cautiously: Although they swore an unfailing political loyalty, the lodges, cut off from society by the secrecy that was demanded of all brothers, nonetheless undermined the monarchical order by proposing a new system of values, founded on ethics, that was necessarily a negative judgment of the principles of absolutism. Thus Masonic lodges were not models for revolutionary Jacobin clubs so much as they were exemplars of government grounded in the values of modern civil society, not unlike coffee houses, cabinets littéraires, and provincial academies.8 The cultural origins of the French Revolution analysed here make more historical sense than the apparent conspiracies elaborated by Barruel and Schama. But Chartier’s appropriation of the Habermasian public sphere does not do justice to the complexly gendered nature of enlightened Freemasonry, according to Janet Burke and Margaret Jacob. In her book, Living the Enlightenment (1991), Jacob agrees that Masonry propagated British political values, namely, ‘religious toleration, relaxed fraternizing among men of mixed, and widely disparate, social backgrounds, an ideology of work and merit, and, not least, government by constitutions and elections’, precisely the values of many eighteenth-century philosophes. It thus provided the ancien régime an alternative model of liberal politics. But Freemasonry on the Continent was qualitatively different from its British origins; it admitted women, adding the liberal paradox of gender to the universal rights and reason of men. Jacob writes: The admission of women to eighteenth-century societies of ‘equals’ gives us one of the first moments in Western culture when liberal

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idealism about merit and equality had to face the reality of socially constructed gender differences. Predictably the brothers and sisters expressed many different reactions, ambiguities and confusions when faced with the disparity between words and life.9 Evidently, not everyone lived the Enlightenment the same way. All of a sudden, Freemasonry becomes both more and less revolutionary than the Abbé de Barruel and Jürgen Habermas have made of it. Freemason women – and there were more than a thousand of them in at least 65 documented lodges of adoption before 1789 – violated cultural norms by their public participation in civil society. But they were far from the Jacobin amazons at work in their own clubs between 1789 and 1793.10 They were instead the wives, sisters and daughters of Freemasons, or more often they were of aristocratic origin, hardly the subversives the men were taken to be. From Margaret Jacob’s perspective, Freemasonry is only a partial challenge to the ancien régime. As Joan Landes pointed out in 1988, the revolutionary public sphere represented very traditional notions of gender.11 Moreover, given the mock-seriousness of eighteenth-century aristocratic secret societies, such as Madame de Genlis’s Ordre de la persévérance, the message was often less than it seemed.12 The fashionably deistic Enlightenment on the one hand, and the French tendency to gallantry on the other, surely lent Masonic adoption of women an innocent, even banal quality. This gendered cultural practice needs to be set in the context of yet another historiographical debate, namely, the one over the masculinist tendencies of the eighteenth-century ‘age of reason’. Dena Goodman, for example, is sharply critical of Masonry, especially its adoptive variety for women, because it institutionalized social and political subordination in the public sphere by undermining the reciprocity between intellectual equals in the Republic of Letters. The result was the marginalization of women in Enlightenment discourse and their potential for civic participation, as was evident in Parisian salons in the 1780s. Writes Goodman: The revolt against monarchy by 1789 was prefigured by the revolt against salon governance in the 1780s, when young male citizens of the Republic of Letters formed their own societies based on a fantasy of masculine self-governance which displaced women from their central governing roles and resituated them as the objects of male desire and male learning.13 Freemasonry represented the pre-eminent male society in its organization and ideals, both borrowed from British notions of civil society;

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it excluded women from modern public life, thanks in large part to the very nature of Enlightenment thought in opposition to the ancien régime’s social and cultural relations which accorded space and authority to aristocratic women. The ‘politics of sociability’ in eighteenth-century France, as manifested in its salons run by powerful Parisian salonnières, defined in social life the complementarity of men and women in public. The two sexes had equally valuable roles to play, however different, in the Republic of Letters, which recognized the virtues of a social world governed by women in the interests of everyone. As Daniel Gordon has argued, a hierarchical society in an absolutist state could indeed make room for the practice of social equality, including women, despite the many limitations on its translation from the private to the public spheres.14 The craft’s exclusion of women was apparently one of them. Contrary to Jacob’s view of how Freemasons lived the Enlightenment, women could never overcome the civic handicap of complementary equality in a political universe that privileged civil liberties. Also contrary to Landes’s critique of rational discourse in the eighteenth century, public opinion was not ‘essentially masculinist’; nor does this characteristic ‘determine both its self-representations’ and its subsequent ‘structural transformation’ in the history of French civil society.15 These scholars, it can be argued, are making much more of Freemasonry’s implicit politics than it deserves. They have overlooked the non-political side to Masonic activities – the rituals, the legends, the mixed company, the eating and drinking, above all the pleasures of Masonic socializing – that was uppermost in the minds of many if not most men and women in this exemplary eighteenth-century association. As the social historian Otto Dann has pointed out about civic organization in France and Germany, the French were much less purposeful and far more sociable than the Germans in their voluntary associations: ‘Can one go even further and conclude from this’, asks Dann rhetorically, ‘that French sociability was less marked than the German [variety] by the codification and pursuit of concrete objectives and that it created a larger space for free communication and the simple pleasure of gathering together?’16 This apparent national characteristic in sociability, in its French sense, was even more marked in the all-toofrivolous eighteenth century. We mistake entirely our Masonic brothers and sisters if we take their politics more seriously than they did. A brief look at their initiations, stories, songs, socializing and adoption of women suggests how and why this admonition deserves some consideration.

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In the eighteenth century, the key Masonic ritual was the one for the third degree: the initiation of the Master Mason.17 Working the first two degrees – the apprentice and the journeyman – was actually an introduction to the symbolism, lore, and principles of solidarity and were often truncated in the same ceremony on the way to the centrepiece of Masonic ritual, the Master. Initiation into this last degree, one still recognized by all Freemasons, was based on the legend of Adonhiram, the biblical master craftsman better known as Hiram Abiff, who decorated the Temple of Solomon (1 Kgs 5; 2 Chr. 2) and was supposedly killed by his own workmen for not revealing the secrets of the trade. The ceremonies leading to the third degree were in effect a ritualistic re-enactment of Adonhiram’s martyrdom and his continued symbolic presence among practising Freemasons. At the heart of the ritual was the raising of Adonhiram back from the dead by the collective raising of the prostrate initiate from the floor by the other brothers in the lodge, whom he trusted not to drop him. As a consequence, the main theme of Masonic sociability was (and is) the keeping of secrets in a brotherhood of trust. The decoration of the lodge, for instance, remains appropriate to precisely this idea: the biblical Temple of Solomon and its columns, the skull of Adonhiram’s corpse, his coffin, the branch of acacia laid on his grave, and, of course, the tools of the craft shared by all Masons: the compasses, the level, the triangle, the plum-bob, the hammer, the saw and the like. The ritual seems serious, and for good reason. French Freemasons, united into a grand lodge in 1732, dressed up their traditions in order to distinguish themselves from far less respectable associations. About the same time, there originated a large number of scandalous sociétés bachiques – drinking, eating and dancing clubs – with their own private rituals that were the cause of much critical commentary.18 The most notorious among them were the Ordre de la félicité (founded in Paris in 1742), the Chevaliers et dames d’ancre (1746), and the Fendeurs et fendeuses (1747), besides dozens of others established much earlier.19 These openly licentious groups participated in the Regency period’s moral release from the constraints of Louis XIV’s suffocating piety; they represented the fullest expression of eighteenth-century French gallantry, if not outright prostitution. Like Anderson’s Constitutions, which was first translated into French in 1734, proper rituals were efforts, at least in part, to distinguish Freemasonry from such goings-on and to provide its adherents with a certain respectability. An association pledged to religious tolerance, social equality and moral virtue required some institutional order. Whatever Masonry’s ardent quest for legitimacy, the craft had its pleasures, too. The formal initiations were never far removed from the

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reward that awaited all Masons at the end of each ceremony: the singing, the storytelling, the eating and the drinking. Freemasonry’s rituals cannot be differentiated easily from the mixed, associated activities of its initiates who enjoyed the camaraderie that accompanied their gatherings. A subculture of sociability is in fact revealed in the Masonic language for what everyone knows as ordinary, collective enjoyment, that is, ‘les agapes’. For Masons the festive banquet after the working of degrees is called ‘the work of mastication’; ordinary tableware is known as tiles, trowels, shovels, pitchforks, swords and casks. Formal toasts are cannon-fire, turning water into ‘weak powder’, wine ‘strong powder’, distilled liquor ‘fulminating powder’, and so on. One eighteenth-century song, first recorded in early nineteenth-century Toulouse, underscored the relationship between Masonic virtue and socializing activity: ‘In this pleasant and charming gathering where innocence reigns, each Mason, glass in hand, blesses intelligence.’20 The present-day stereotype of the rotund, inebriated Mason has its origins in an eighteenth-century reality of prodigious conviviality. William Hogarth’s famous depictions of this popular notion were widely reproduced and sold in France. The accoutrements of these pleasures are evident in every Masonic museum and exhibition.21 Ample collections of French tableware dating from the eighteenth century – goblets and punch bowls, wine glasses and carafes, beer mugs and pitchers, shot glasses, dinner plates, serving dishes, coffee cups, tobacco jars, snuff boxes and the like – all of them decorated with Masonic scenes, symbols and insignia – are permanently on display in the Musée de la franc-maçonnerie, maintained by the Grand Orient de France on the rue Cadet in Paris. Far from mere vehicles for symbolic inscription, the elaborate ‘canons’, ‘rummers’, and firing glasses suggest the influence of the English men’s club, still apparent in the Freemasonry of the Grand Orient, which was readily entertained in the first French lodges founded by exiled Stuart sympathizers in 1723. A significant portion of Masonry’s extant material culture is clearly related to the socializing, both formal and informal, that occurs after every ritual. From the eighteenth century onward, as evidenced by the proliferation of appropriate paraphernalia, the camaraderie of food and drink has been as essential to Masonry as the initiation ceremonies themselves. Contemporary commentary on these activities is ambivalent. From its inception, as mentioned earlier, Masonry’s public reputation was a concern. The secret rituals, the heart of Masonry, had to be protected from all disparagement, however difficult that effort has always been while keeping the Masonic mysteries secret. Outsiders do not look kindly on their exclusion. Besides some incoherence in symbolism generally – one

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which evolved over time, from lodge to lodge, without a single obedience to enforce strict conformity – the discussion of initiation soon dissolved into predictably polite but still sociable commonplaces. Convivial sentiment was inextricable from even the most sententious expression. In the eighteenth century, Masonic enthusiast Louis Guillemain de Saint-Victor had some generous words: In our temples everything is symbol; All prejudices are vanquished; Masonry is the school Of decency and virtue; Here we tame the weakness Which demeans humanity, And the flame of wisdom Prepares us all for sensuous pleasure [la volupté].22 Apparently, even the most serious gestures and rituals had their lighter side, which was understood as something more or less than it seemed. As the occasional Mason, J. W. von Goethe, admitted to a Frenchspeaking lodge in Weimar, quipped insightfully, ‘the sacred secret known by everyone is neither sacred nor secret.’23 Masonic songs themselves were derived from popular lyrics in circulation long before Freemasonry came to France. Daniel Ligou has collected nearly an entire volume of them from the eighteenth century, many adapted from undistinguished popular verse. For example, in one celebration of the notorious transsexual chevalier d’Eon de Beaumont, who was initiated into a London lodge in 1766, Parisian Masons were wont to sing of his ambiguous sexual identity by borrowing from the street slang for clerical genitalia: He is of the Freemasons A very zealous member, Well schooled in The most secret mysteries. All the same, if he’s a woman, No more will he be welcome Unless everyone can see the crutch Of Father Barnabus.24 These expressions are hardly of the Enlightenment’s ideals, much less of a revolutionary character. Religious toleration, civic equality, fraternal

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solidarity: none of these prevailed everywhere in the rich social life of the Freemasons, given as they were to the lighter amusements often expressed in spoofs, like the mock-Masonic order detailed by the anonymous Almanach des cocus (1741).25 In keeping with the Masonic rules admonishing brothers not to swear in the lodge and sisters not to gossip maliciously about each other, satirical verse and drinking songs were not always subversive politics.26 Singing was indeed an essential complement to ritual, even though most Masons were not particularly musical and sang only during drinks and meals after the initiations. The more musically inclined among them were more than happy to take the lead in celebrating at least some of the simple virtues derived from benevolent deism, fraternal bonding and rational order in the world. As one founder of mixed Masonry in France, Georges Martin, put it, Masonry then represented ‘an epicurianism without much depth but not without charm’, whose major sentiments, happiness and pleasure, Freemasons tried hard to distinguish from their closest connotations, vice and licence.27 The ideal Mason depicted in eighteenth-century French songs, Ligou observes: Duly worshiped the eternal, or the Great Architect of the Universe. He was faithful to his king, a ‘friend of the fatherland’ and a ‘citizen’ [even here the term was used], generous, respectful of the masonic mysteries, about which he sought to instruct himself and to probe their significance essentially in order to combat his vices. He was virtuous, but his virtue was not strict. He was wise but did not disdain innocent pleasures. Above all, he was sociable with his Brothers.28 Eighteenth-century Masons, it seems, were chaps hail-fellow-well-met within the social and cultural context of a generally select membership: educated nobles, tolerant clerics and respectable bourgeois. As evidenced in the late eighteenth-century Masonic painting, ‘Voilà Mes Plaisirs’ (see Fig. 9.1), these sociable elites were hardly Jacobins-in-the-making. The presence of women Freemasons casts another, less revolutionary light on this association.29 France took the lead in the innovation of admitting women, possibly as early as 1737, only 14 years after the all-male British version of Freemasonry made its appearance in Paris.30 Women Masons were a French peculiarity that was in turn exported elsewhere on the Continent, given as it was to French cultural influence in the eighteenth century. There were a few such lodges in Stendal and Brunswick, the records of which are all in French.31 Moreover, a Viennese version of the phenomenon appeared about the same time, better known as the Mopses,

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Figure 9.1 Anon., ‘Voila Mes Plaisirs’ (c. 1800). Oil on canvas, framed with mirror. By permission from the Musée de la maison des Maçons, Grande Loge nationale française, Paris.

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that had little Masonic symbolism; it was primarily a secret ritual during which the initiate was required to kiss the rear of a small dog – politely stuffed for more delicate ladylike sensitivities – as discussed in Chapter 8. But the presence of women in French Masonry, especially for members of the royal court initiated into the Loge Saint-Jean de la Candeur, made the association much more of a salon in the précieuse tradition than a civic organization in the Anglo-American sense.32 In these privileged lodges of adoption, social life of a more refined sort prevailed, distinguishing their membership from similar but less reputable groups during the Regency period. In effect, they created a pleasurable vehicle for private charity; for women like the Princesse de Lamballe, the Duchesse de Chartres and Madame d’Hélvetius, generosity and sociability went hand in hand. Accounts of adoptive-lodge ceremonies are revealing of Masonry’s socially established credentials, not unlike those of the best-known philosophes, like Voltaire and Franklin, who also became Freemasons. In about 1780 an anonymous scribe, influenced by the Scottish rite, described the imposing initiations of eight different degrees from apprentisse, compagnonne and maîtresse to écossaise, chevalière de la lune and amazonne anglaise. After detailing the symbolic ornaments and ritual scripts for each degree, the redactor felt compelled to elaborate as well upon the banquet settings and the obligatory toasts, as if these were equally integral to the initiations; for each one, she even provided hand-drawn illustrations.33 Fuller accounts were published for the most prestigious lodges of adoption in the eighteenth century, such as Les Neuf Soeurs, Le Contrat social and La Candeur in Paris. The workings of the last-named lodge in 1778 and again in 1779, for instance, were printed in their entirety, including the speeches, the songs, the musical compositions, and even extracts of operettas, which were composed just for the occasion. Sang the Comtesse de Dessalles to verses written by the Comte de Sesmaisons: Dear Sisters, whose presence Has just embellished our initiations, Receive for recompense The pleasure which follows our steps. From the tie which binds us, Let us double the strength from this day And may respect remove itself In order to give way to love.34 What records exist of less exalted adoptive lodges in the provinces detail very similar poetry readings, concerts and balls, in addition to

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the usual banquets and toasts. The elaborate Masonic fêtes, which were celebrated in the nineteenth century with whole families and their non-Masonic friends, originated here in the eighteenth century. To be sure, the presence of women in Masonry posed a problem for many Masons.35 To underscore the social and moral independence of the craft, Anderson’s Constitutions explicitly excluded women, along with slaves, bondsmen, the ‘irreligious Libertine’, and the ‘stupid Atheist’.36 This formal prohibition thereby made a Masonic principle out of the pervasive male bonding at work in the regular lodges. Initiating women would not only violate the constitutions, many Masons contended, but it would make the men jealous of each other and create unnecessary dissension among them. Moreover, as is well known, these same Masons contended, women cannot keep secrets; as soon as they are initiated, they will reveal the mysteries and a fundamental Masonic tenet to keep the secrets would be violated. The particular ease that men enjoy in each other’s company would be lost; with women about, men would be constrained to behave less frankly. Besides, it was argued, women are the ornaments of virtue, not virtue itself, as the biblical version of Original Sin made clear to all Christians. Very early on, there were hostile accounts of women’s insatiable curiosity about the workings of the lodges; wives who spied on their husbands during meetings were allegedly initiated in order to protect the mysteries. According to the historian Albert Lantoine, this situation actually became something of a literary trope in the eighteenth century.37 All the eighteenth century’s stereotypes of women were thus deployed to justify their exclusion from the Masonic mysteries.38 By nature, women were dependent, disruptive, envious, spiteful, unreliable, artificial, curious, evil and sinful, all the attributes true Masons should never have. Robert Beachy summarizes well in Chapter 5 the counter-arguments proffered by Masonic defenders of the virtuous sex, like Theodor von Hippel, citing the principal basis for their exclusion, namely, women’s difference from men, better known by feminists as the double bind of essentialism (difference, however complementary, can never be equal). The proto-feminist theorists and practitioners of the eighteenth century laid the foundations for the revolutionary republic’s political and legal subordination of women. The Rousseauian arguments on behalf of women in private, such as in the family, were effectively used against them in public, such as in the Masonic lodge. And so it remained until the French Fifth Republic (1958 to the present date). Lodges of adoption were thus never fully integrated into Masonry. In accordance with the formal recognition of this innovation by the Grand Orient in June 1774, women Masons were to be entirely separate

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in membership and initiation. In fact, each lodge of adoption had to have a regular lodge to sponsor it, just as its rituals required the formal presence of men from the sponsoring lodge to ensure the regularity of the women’s work. The working of the men’s craft, however, was never open to the women. Adoptive rites, which are only vaguely Masonic in substance and symbolism, were ostensibly created to appease the demands of Masons’ wives, daughters and sisters, who wanted to share more fully in the lodges’ activities, without compromising the mysteries of rituals reserved exclusively for men. Manuals describing the ritual symbolism for women focus less on the craft than they do on the Pentateuch, especially the Book of Genesis.39 Jacob’s ladder, Noah’s ark and the Tower of Babel are used to inform the apprentisses; the Garden of Eden and Original Sin do the same for the compagnonnes; and Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, the cities of Sodom and Gommorah, and the transformation of Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt, among other sobering lessons from the Old Testament, define the initiation of the maîtresses. Hiram and his martyrdom are nowhere to be found. For many Masons like the Baron de Tschudy, adoption was not Masonry at all, but an ‘agreeable bagatelle’ for the ladies.40 For the women, of course, it was considerably more than that. Given the French predilection for mixed company among eighteenthcentury elites, especially in Parisian salons, Masonic accommodation of women in whatever form was almost predictable. Moreover, adoption had its ardent advocates. Louis Guillemain de Saint-Victor, for one, defended the practice of women’s modified participation. The multiple editions of his Manuel des franches-maçonnes before 1789 were efforts to rehabilitate the rituals and to explain their necessity to men and women alike. In his ‘Epître aux dames’ prefacing each edition, Guillemain de Saint-Victor wrote on behalf of the men: Too much punished by the isolation and the boredom that your absence has imposed on us, we are convinced that the object of our existence is to live with you; that we ought to be your friends and you our dear Companions; that we cannot separate ourselves from you without becoming either stupid or unhappy; and that your being, like us, the Work of the Creator of the Universe, you also have a heart, senses, desires, reason, and the strength to make use of them; and that in sum, if so often we have arrogated to ourselves the power to fail in our duties to Society, this is only by authority of the law of the strongest, a law that we acknowledge to be criminal.41 Less well known were the sentiments of the women Masons themselves. Few of their views were documented. But where they do appear,

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they largely concur with the men speaking on their behalf. During an adoptive ritual in Dijon, for example, the Présidente Fardel de Daix stated that Masonry provided women public space to enjoy the same privileges of respectable sociability as the men, for which she was eternally grateful.42 It may be that Masonic gallantry in the eighteenth century was indeed ‘decent’, as the ritual catechism for the apprentisses said it was.43 The ostensible purpose of adoptive Masonry was to make it so. Accordingly, adoption reached far more, and different kinds of, women than the bestknown aristocratic and royal figures in Paris. We know from Ran Halévi’s statistics that the craft before 1789 was practised most actively in smalland medium-sized commercial cities in the provinces.44 It follows then that the female family members of commercial travellers, military battalions and local public officials must have been included also. Although the best-documented lodges initiated the most socially prominent women in France, their less well-known counterparts elsewhere in the country are only now being studied. Mixed Masonic sociability also appeared in Valenciennes, for example, where in April 1785 the entire town – men, women and children – publicly celebrated the virtues of Masonry.45 None of the craft was worked for the occasion, but its social and cultural context was highlighted by the warm appreciation the community expressed in its collective festivities. Similarly, according to historian Louis Amiable, the scandals associated with women in Masonry, such as the infamous initiations by Les Neuf Soeurs in 1784, were an effort by the lodges, especially those of the Scottish rite, to control their working of the degrees, independently of the Grand Orient; the issue of women Masons profaning the mysteries in violation of Anderson’s Constitutions evidently was secondary.46 By then the place of women in elite Masonic society had been more or less assumed. In light of these considerations, the question of Freemasonry’s revolutionary nature seems either less obvious or less immediate. Instead of a hotbed of conspiracy as Augustin de Barruel would have it, or an incipient civil society as Roger Chartier has characterized it, or a complexly gendered paradox as Margaret Jacob has likened it, Masonry in France was something less fierce, less imposing, less contorted. There were, to be sure, many Masonic revolutionaries – some two-thirds of the Constituent Assembly, for instance – and there were some radical, even mystical ideas among them, such as Adam Weishaupt’s Illuminati and the Comte de Castiglione’s Egyptian rite.47 But they were Masonic only in inspiration, not in substance, and had fewer of the social rituals and pleasures that distinguished the Masons in their particular conviviality. If we want to

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see the Enlightenment or the Revolution in all Freemasonry’s activities, we need to redefine French sociability as far more instrumental than it must have been in fact. Similarly, we need to reconsider the ‘politics of sociability’ in the historiography of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution from Barruel onward. The conservative Abbé’s partisanship was no secret; his Mémoires are little more than a harangue and their legacy is apparent in subsequent critics of the radical revolution, including contemporary post-Marxist scholars like François Furet and Simon Schama. But even more probing analysis of French civic life in the public sphere, from Maurice Agulhon to Jürgen Habermas, demonstrates a political concern to document the failure of modern French liberalism.48 Taking their cue from Alexis de Tocqueville, these scholars suggest that an AngloAmerican civil society was and remains preferable to a Rousseau-like general will in France. The centralizing tendencies of monarchy and the Jacobin republic made this dream impossible in each subsequent regime from the First Empire onward. The gendered implications of civil society in France have been the source of a comparably rich historiography.49 The paradoxes of proto-liberal political culture on the eve of the Revolution need to be re-examined, however, not just from the perspective of gender, but also from that of sociability. The public sphere was social as well as intellectual and political. The intersection of these elements at work in the eighteenth century is perhaps yet another suggestion of the French cultural exception. At any rate, a closer examination of the Freemasons’ many pleasures complicates the Whiggish historiography of eighteenth-century France. Masonic life was not just about politics. For many men and women, it was a good deal of fun. The Revolution came later and has led historians to forget the enjoyment that many Masons had, with no real intention of creating a new regime. And so it must have been for other associations of like-minded company when the mechanisms of liberal politics were still embryonic and subject to cultural adaptation. The pervasive sociability of French Freemasonry offers a new and compelling way to think about this process of civic accommodation in modern Europe in all its complexity. The public sphere defined more than an informed public opinion; it encompassed a boisterous popular culture of food and drink in a social space that was also inhabited by singers, musicians, dancers, actors, mime artists, acrobats and hawkers, men and women alike.50 As Richard Cobb suggested long ago, the seemingly marginal expression of apolitical notions during the Revolution itself makes the eighteenth century’s public culture much more than

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a matter of mere conspiracy and violent revolution.51 And as all convivial Masons today know well, it is still very true.52

Notes 1 Abbé Augustin de Barruel, in Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme… ed. by Christian Lagrave, 2 vols (Vouillé: Diffusion de la Pensée Française, 1973). NB: all translations from the French into English in the text of the present article are the author’s, unless otherwise cited. Cf. Daniel Ligou, La Franc-maçonnerie et la révolution française, 1789–1799 (Paris: Chiron, 1989), pp. 9–47. 2 Lagrave, ‘Introduction’, I, pp. 9–25. 3 The heyday of French Freemasonry was not so much in the ancien régime as it was in the Third Republic when republican and Masonic ideals were virtually identical. See, for example, Mildred J. Headings, French Freemasonry under the Third Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1949); and Philip G. Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 15–30. 4 For how Barruel’s account of Freemasonry developed a historiographical life of its own, see John M. Roberts, The Mythology of the Secret Societies (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972), pp. 188–202. 5 Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), pp. 527–8. To his credit, Schama qualifies this allegation of Masonic guilt-by-association by pointing out the Jacobins’ abhorrence of secrecy and their proselytizing view of their clubs as ‘schools of public morality’ (p. 528); see also Bernard Faÿ, La Franc-maçonnerie et la révolution intellectuelle du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Cluny, 1935), pp. 281–6; and François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. by Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Paris: La Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1981), pp. 164–204. 6 For example, the younger scholars featured in Re-creating Authority in Revolutionary France, ed. by Bryant T. Ragan, Jr and Elizabeth A. Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992). 7 See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), the source of considerable scholarly reassessment of the Enlightenment’s relationship to the French Revolution. See Keith Michael Baker, ‘Defining the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France: Variations on a Theme by Habermas’, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. by Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 181–211. 8 Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. by Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 162–6; see also Maurice Agulhon, Pénitants et francs-maçons de l’ancienne Provence. Essai sur la sociabilité méridionale (Paris: Fayard, 1984) and Ran Halévi, Les Loges maçonniques dans la France d’ancien régime. Aux origines de la sociabilité démocratique (Paris: Armand Colin; Paris: EHESS, 1984).

196 The Politics of Sociability? 9 Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 73, 124; see also Janet M. Burke and Margaret C. Jacob, ‘French Freemasonry, Women, and Feminist Scholarship’, Journal of Modern History, 68 (1996), 513–49. 10 On this fascinating topic, see Suzanne Desan, ‘“Constitutional Amazons”: Jacobin Women’s Clubs in the French Revolution’, in Re-creating Authority, pp. 11–35. 11 Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 7, 44–5, was the first to point out the omission of gender from Habermas’s public sphere. For his critique of this perspective, see Baker, pp. 198–208. 12 See the tongue-in-check account of a secret society in Madame de Genlis, Suites des souvenirs de Félicité L*** (Paris: Maradan, 1807), pp. 74–80. 13 Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 11. This perspective has not gone unchallenged; see also, among others, Karen M. Offen, European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 27–30, who seeks to reclaim the eighteenth century for feminism; and Steven Kale, French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), pp. 1–16, who insists on the continued, though adapted power of salon women into the nineteenth century. 14 Daniel Gordon, Citizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 6–7. 15 Landes, p. 7. 16 Otto Dunn, ‘Sociabilité et association’, in Sociabilité et société bourgeoise en France, en Allemagne et en Suisse, 1750–1850, ed. by Etienne François (Paris: Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1986), p. 317. Only recently have social historians recognized the importance of voluntary associations in modern France, which since Alexis de Tocqueville have been regarded as weak and unimportant. The explosion of French associational life since 1968, however, has elicited greater interest in elucidating its historical development. 17 See for example Anon., Recueil des trois premiers grades de la maçonnerie. Apprenti, compagnon, maître. Au rite français 1788 [facsimile edition] (Paris: A l’Orient, 2001), pp. 119–204. Most other rites, including the Scottish and Egyptian, accepted this degree as the foundation for their later workings. 18 See the leering treatment of these groups in Arthur Dinaux, Les Sociétés badines, littéraires et chantantes, leur histoire et leurs travaux, 2 vols (Paris: Bachelin-Deflorenne, 1867), which considers more than 600 of them in the eighteenth century. It is in this unsavoury context that the Freemasons sought to establish their ideal associational life. 19 See the antiquarian but otherwise well-grounded Marianne Monestier, Les Sociétés secrètes féminines (Paris: Productions de Paris, 1963), pp. 102–65; also André Doré, ‘La Maçonnerie des dames. Essai sur les grades et les rituels des loges d’adoption, 1745–1945’, Bulletin du Grand Collège des Rites, 96 (1981), 1–26, devoted almost exclusively to the eighteenth century.

James Smith Allen 197 20 Bibliothèque municipale de Toulouse, MS 1215, ‘Rituel et recueil de chansons pour la Franc-maçonnerie du rite écossais’ (1813). 21 See, for example, the catalogues of exhibitions in Tours and Toulouse: Francmaçonnerie. Avenir d’une tradition, chemins maçonniques, 5997, ed. by Philippe Le Leyzour and others (Tours: Alfil, 1997) and Association Toulouse, Splendeurs maçonniques : itinéraire à travers les loges (Toulouse: Les2encres, 2003). 22 [Louis Guillemain de Saint-Victor], ‘A une soeur nouvellement initiée, qui demandoit ce qu’étoit la maçonnerie, et ce que les francs-maçons faisoient dans leurs loges’, in Manuel des franches-maçonnes, ou La Vraie Maçonnerie d’adoption (Philadelphia: chez Philarethe, 1787), p. 101. 23 Quoted in Yves Hivert-Messeca, ‘Secret’, in Encyclopédie de la franc-maçonnerie, ed. by Eric Saunier (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2001), p. 811. 24 In Chansons maçonniques, 18e et 19e siècles, ed. by Daniel Ligou (Paris: Cercle des amis de la bibliothèque initiatique, 1972), p. 43; see also discussion of the chevalier d’Eon de Beaumont in Gary Kates, Monsieur d’Eon is a Woman: A Tale of Political Intrigue and Sexual Masquerade (New York: Basic Books, 1995), pp. 204–5. On the nature of Masonic songs generally, see Gordon R. Silber, ‘Poèmes et chansons maçonniques du XVIIIe siècle : un aspect peu connu de la franc-maçonnerie’, Revue des sciences humaines, 37 (1972), 167–88, which shows the circulation of songs in and out of Masonry, in and out of France. 25 Almanach des cocus, ou amusemens pour le beau sexe, pour l’année M.DCC.XLI, auquel on a joint un recueil de pièces sur les francs-maçons (Constantinople: De l’imprimerie du grand seigneur, 1741), II, pp. 46–7. 26 Anon., ‘Statuts qui doivent s’observer dans les loges de dames’ (c. 1800), Bibliothèque municipale de Nancy, MS 1639 (932), fol. 5v. Rule No. 21 calls upon the Vénérable Maîtresse, the head of the adoptive lodge, to intervene in settling these personal disputes. Although comparable admonitions appear in the statutes for male Freemasons, they are given less pointed emphasis. 27 Quoted in Ligou, Chansons maçonniques, p. 19. 28 Ligou, Chansons maçonniques, p. 20. 29 See Giselle Hivert-Messeca and Yves Hivert-Messeca, Comment la francmaçonnerie vint aux femmes : deux siècles de franc-maçonnerie d’adoption, féminine et mixte en France, 1740–1940 (Paris: Dervy, 1997), pp. 14–152; and Françoise Jupeau-Réquillard, L’Initiation des femmes, ou Le Souci permanent des francs-maçons français (Paris: Du Rocher, 2000), pp. 27–58. 30 The first textual evidence of the Masonic initiation of a woman in France is Jacques-Christophe Naudot, Chansons notées de la très vénérable confrèrie des Francs-maçons précédées de quelques pièces de poésies convenables au sujet et d’une marche [des franches maçonnes] ([n.p.]: [n. pub.], 1737), though of unreliable date, but considerably earlier than the first mixed lodge documented in The Hague (1751). La Franc-maçonne, an anonymous contemporary account of women Masons, however, confirms that women had indeed been initiated by 1744. See Le Parfait Maçon : les débuts de la maçonnerie française (1736–1748), ed. by Johel Coutura (Saint-Etienne: Université de Saint-Etienne, 1994), pp. 12, 143–4. 31 See for example Geheime Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, MS 5.1.3 Nr. 3471; Karl Ludwig Friedrich Rabe, Die angenommene Freimaurereï, oder die Freimaurereï der Damen, erster Grad der Lehrlinge (Stendal: [n. pub.], 1785); and MS 5.2.B 133 Nr. 783, ‘Acta des

198 The Politics of Sociability?

32

33

34

35

36 37 38

39

40

41 42

43

Engbundes der Freimaurer-Loge Carl zur gekrönten Säulen in Braunschweig (1781–1787)’. The European spread of Masonic adoption is well discussed in Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, L’Europe des francs-maçons, XVIIIe–XXIe siècle (Paris: Belin, 2002), pp. 118–24. This point is well made by René Le Forestier in Maçonnerie féminine et loges académiques au XVIIIe siècle, ed. by Antoine Faivre (Milan: Archè, 1979), pp. 57–67. Note the extraordinary membership list of the Loge Saint-Jean de la Candeur in Archives nationales, MS AB XIX 5000, ‘Régistre de la loge d’adoption de Saint-Jean de la Candeur (1775–85)’. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Fonds Maçonnique, MS 4.1323, ‘Rituel maçonnique d’adoption’ (c. 1780). This compilation is well studied by Olivia Harman, ‘“L’Azille enchanté, ou La Réunion des deux sexes” : Réflexions sur le rite d’adoption dans la franc-maçonnerie de l’ancien régime’, Renaissance traditionnelle, 127–8 (2001), 250–60. Esquisse des travaux d’adoption, dirigés par les officiers de la loge de la Candeur… (Paris: [n. pub.], 1778), p. 33; see also Seconde esquisse des travaux d’adoption dirigés par les officiers de la loge de la Candeur… (Paris: [n. pub.], 1779). The Freemason debate over the initiation of women in the eighteenth century (and since) is well and fairly summarized in Albert Lantoine, Hiram couronné d’épines, 2 vols (Paris: Emile Nourry, 1926), I, pp. 31–46. James Anderson, in Anderson’s Constitutions : Constitutions d’Anderson 1723, ed. by Daniel Ligou (Paris: Edimaf, 1994), pp. 178–80. On this topic, see the amusing discussion of one example in Albert Lantoine, De la bibliographie maçonnique (Paris: Ferdinand Barbe, 1913), pp. 44–8. On this problem in Masonic history, see James Smith Allen, ‘Rebelles Without a Cause? Images of Masonic Women in France’, Labour History Review, 71 (2006), 43–56. In 1763 the Prince de Clermont was the redactor of ostensibly the first fully developed set of adoptive rites, even though some elements, like the Tower of Babel, were added later. Cf. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Fonds Maçonnique, MS 4.79 ‘Livre contenant tous les grades de la véritable maçonnerie… de l’année maçonnique 5763 [1763]’, fol. 122v–140r, and Ms. 4.149 ‘Maçonnerie des femmes (c. 1780)’, fol. 167–209. According to [Théodore-Henri, baron de Tschudy], L’Etoile flamboyante, ou La Société des francs-maçons considérée sous tous les aspects ([Paris]: A l’Orient, chez le Silence, [1785]), pt. 2, p. 247. Louis Guillemain de Saint-Victor, Manuel, p. 6. See Bibliothèque municipale de Dijon, MSS 1411–21 (44), vol. V, no. 8, ‘Loge de la maçonnerie des femmes, loge d’adoption’, a document discussed in Francesca Vigni, ‘Les Aspirations féministes dans les loges d’adoption’, Dixhuitième siècle, 19 (1987), 11–20, and Janet M. Burke, ‘Through Friendship to Feminism: The Growth in Self-Awareness among Eighteenth-Century Women Freemasons’, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History, 14 (1987), 187–96. See [André Honoré], Les Quatre Grades véritables et uniformes de l’ordre de l’adoption, ou Maçonnerie des dames… ([Paris]: [n. pub.], 1779), p. 22. According to the first historian of adoption, Masons included women primarily ‘de faire partager leurs plaisirs à cette belle moitié du genre humain’: Claude-Antoine Thory, Annales originis magni Galliarum O., ou Histoire de la fondation du Grand Orient de France (Paris, Dufart, 1812), III, p. 343.

James Smith Allen 199 44 See Halévi, pp. 55–89. 45 Grand Lodge, The Hague (Kloss Collection MS XIX-237), ‘Relation d’une superbe fête maçonnique rendue le 6 avril 1785 par les bourgeois de Valenciennes aux francs-maçons et aux dames de cette ville….’ 46 On this issue in particular, see Louis Amiable, Une loge maçonnique d’avant 1789. La Respectable Loge des Neuf Soeurs (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1897), pp. 100–28. 47 On the mystical associations with eighteenth-century Masonry, see the important work by René Le Forestier, La Franc-maçonnerie occultiste au XVIIIe siècle et l’ordre des Elus Coens (Paris: Dorbon-ainé, 1928); also his Les Illuminés de Bavière et la franc-maçonnerie allemande (Geneva: Slatkine, 1974). 48 On this problem see Mark Hulliung, Citizens and Citoyens: Republicans and Liberals in America and France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 128–59. 49 This historiography is well surveyed in Pierre Rosanvallon, The Demands of Liberty: Civil Society in France since the Revolution, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 247–65. 50 On the miscellany of popular culture in eighteenth-century France, see Robert M. Isherwood, Farce and Fantasy: Popular Entertainment in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), and Daniel Roche, The People of Paris: An Essay in Popular Culture in the 18th Century, trans. by Marie Evans in association with Gwynne Lewis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 197–268. 51 See Richard Cobb, The Police and the People: French Popular Protest, 1789–1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 246–324. Cf. Roche, pp. 271–7. 52 This chapter was first presented at the annual meeting of the International Consortium on Revolutionary and Napoleonic Europe, 1750–1850, sponsored in February 2003 by the University of Louisiana, Lafayette. The author wishes to thank Allan Pasco and Bob Forrester for their helpful comments on an earlier draft that was based on research for James Smith Allen, ‘Sisters of Another Sort: Women Freemasons in Modern France, 1725–1940’, Journal of Modern History, 75 (2003), 783–835. A much shorter version of this chapter was actually delivered to the conference on Lodges, Chapters and Confraternities in July 2002 at the University of Sheffield, UK.

10 The Fraternity of Female Friendly Societies Daniel Weinbren

In this chapter, the structured reciprocity of female friendly societies, even those with overt patrons, is presented as a categorization which is also applicable to men’s societies. The first part addresses the notion of independence, then the focus is on the financial aspect of the Southill Female Friendly Society, SFFS, which existed between 1844 and 1948 for women of that Bedfordshire village in England who were of ‘a good and honest character’, in good health and aged between 14 and 45 when they joined. Members had few other opportunities to reduce the risks associated with illness other than accept the uneven reciprocity of the SFFS. The patrons may also have seen the SFFS as an investment opportunity. Then the attractions of Southill, with its healthy housing and relatively liberal interpretation of relief legislation, are presented as evidence of another important attribute of successful friendly societies, their centrality to social networking. Next is considered how far mutuality and philanthropy were interwoven within the SFFS and elsewhere. An assessment of the roles of civil engagement and moral regulation within friendly societies follows and the final section suggests that a notion of fraternity which emphasizes flexible reciprocity can net together both vast international brotherhoods and tiny village societies in a way which illuminate understandings of nineteenth-century society. Many accounts of friendly societies stress how, in order to try and secure pooled funds for members unable to work, or for their widows in the event of a member’s death, they developed trust through rituals, drinking, feasting, parading and visiting the sick. It is also well established that the societies’ mutual aid enhanced the respectability and independence of members. Crossick and Gray conceptualized the friendly societies in terms of the development of class-consciousness.1 Thompson, Chase and Cordery found a commonality between the friendly societies 200

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and the trade unions.2 Best suggested friendly societies were an expression of independence,3 a view echoed by Cronin, Neave, Kirk and Kidd.4 Friendly societies often have been portrayed as distinctive from charities.5 Garrard concluded that charities ‘produced deference amongst some recipients’, while friendly societies were ‘likely to enhance the independence of their members’.6 These approaches focus on men’s friendly societies and echo the friendly societies’ self-presentation as independent (as in the name of what was the largest friendly society: the Independent Order of Oddfellows, Manchester Unity).7 However, as Davidoff and Hall argued, ‘public was not really public and private not really private despite the potent imagery of separate spheres’. During a period when there was a ‘permeation downwards of the ideology of the separate spheres, independence and interdependence had different meanings often associated with discourses about masculinity and femininity’.8 Broadly speaking, in the early eighteenth century the notion of independence conveyed political interference, presumption and insubordination among the poor. By the mid-nineteenth it signified those moral qualities that induced a male labourer to support himself and his family while remaining submissive and available for hire. Cordery has demonstrated that in the later nineteenth century, friendly societies helped to shape notions of independent manly self-help.9 For some male societies independence was from women: interdependence involved drinking with men. The charter of the Merthyr lodge of the Ancient Order of Britons aimed ‘to provide for sickness’, but only after indicating that it sought to ‘raise our nation to note in the world by teaching men to act as men, husbands as husbands, fathers as fathers and to make all those who unite with us better members of society’.10 The Oddfellows claimed that it ‘had made men, strong self-reliant men’.11 On those friendly societies’ banners which featured women they often symbolized the spouse, widow or the abstract (for example, Charity).12 Considering another fraternal body Durr also stressed gender divisions when he argued that the Freemasons’ ‘ideology of interdependence, its practical manifestation being giving and receiving’ could be conceptualized as ‘fraternal charity’.13 Bohstedt made the differences explicit. He referred to men’s societies as ‘often proto-trade unions’ while those for women offered ‘collective mutual aid to defend household security – or perhaps even to substitute for household security among employed single women’. Although the returns made following a survey of friendly societies in 1803–04 are inaccurate in regard to women’s societies (which were not always distinguished from those for men) Bohstedt noted that 6000 of the 9000 women in female friendly societies in 1803 lived in towns where riots occurred. He

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concluded that while the men were turning to more quiescent political activities, the female societies may have served as ‘a source for cohesion in riots’.14 It is within contested notions of independence that the fraternity of the female societies needs to be placed. There is little evidence of conventional independence within the SFFS. It was supported financially by two local landowners (Colonel Shuttleworth and the MP and brewing magnate Samuel Whitbread) and their wives.15 The cover of the SFFS’s printed rule book states ‘Patron: Samuel Whitbread’.16 The doctor who attended members of the SFFS also contributed to the society.17 Among the female patrons were several members of a local milling family who owned 50 acres and three women from local farming families whose husbands were Poor-Law Guardians. These traits indicate that the SFFS was similar to other female societies. Workington coal owner and MP, J. C. Curwen, founded two friendly societies for men while his wife ran both the Female Society and the Sisterly Society.18 In Hanley, Staffordshire, members of the Female Provident Society (Etruria) paid 1s. 1d [51⁄2p] a month into their society in 1813 and received up to 12 shillings [60p] a week in benefits.19 These were relatively generous terms, perhaps because the society had the support of patrons. While the day-to-day running of the society was in the hands of elected women members, the trustees of the society, subject to annual election, had to be ‘three Gentlemen of known respectability’ and the treasurer also had to be male. The Newcastle-under-Lyme Female Society had female honorary members.20 In Somerset there were women’s friendly societies with patrons in Nether Stowey, Stoke-under-Ham and Ashbourne.21 In Ashbourne the local clerics and gentry played significant roles in the running of the female friendly society. Lady Louisa Cavendish was one of a number of patrons who helped to found the Ashford Female Friendly Society.22 In Shropshire, the Countess of Powis supported the Bishop’s Castle and Lydbury North Female Friendly Society which existed between 1840 and 1900.23 In Derbyshire, Henry Okeover founded female societies in his villages in Ilam, Okeover, Mappleton and Rosliston.24 Elsewhere in the county the Middleton-by-Wirksworth Female Friendly Society was supported by Mrs Wood of Wirksworth Hall, Lady Hatherton, the vicar’s wife and other patrons.25 In Norwich, the Friendly Society for the Benefit of Poor Women was dominated by the wealthy as was the Friendly Female Society at York, while in Honiton the procession of the Lacemakers’ Society was headed by its fashionable patronesses.26 There were similar societies in Leeds, Huddersfield, Wakefield and elsewhere.27 In 1856 five of Warwickshire’s eight recorded female societies met in church schoolrooms and were largely run by Christian men.28 Barton-in-Fabis Friendly

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Society, Nottinghamshire allowed open decision-making votes among the women members but still had men in control of finance from its foundation in 1821 until its closure in 1955.29 The similarities between the SFFS and these other societies do not mean that it should be dismissed as a typical female friendly society dominated by a backward-looking paternalism. Moreover, female friendly societies varied in their structures. The 1874 commissioners classified friendly societies into eleven categories with the ‘Societies of Females’ forming Class 11. However, these, as William Beveridge pointed out in 1948, ‘must all in fact have belonged to one of the other classes as well’.30 Evelyn Lord was also sceptical about such a taxonomy, referring to ‘misconceptions inherent in feminist narratives’ which emphasize that women were excluded. She has challenged the categorization of female societies as pale reflections of a male norm.31 Women were active within mixed-sex societies and formed their own independent friendly societies in a number of areas.32 Their rule books indicate that officials were elected and new members admitted by those who came frequently to meetings.33 The Women’s Box Society at the Sign of the Hawk, Gateshead and the Friendly Society of Women in Easington Lane were among a number of women’s friendly societies which apparently addressed the idea of independence in similar terms to those of men.34 The United Sisters of Tobacco Pipe Makers (registered in 1805) and the Female Friendly Bookbinders (1815) were among those societies which made payments to members who were unable to work, and included in this work for their husbands.35 In terms of sociability and refreshment some women’s societies took on what might have been perceived as male attributes. Edward Derrington noted in his journal in 1843 that a priest had told him of a network of ‘female lodges where mothers and single females go to drink ale till twelve or one o’clock’.36 There were female affiliated orders such as the Female Foresters, the Odd Women, the Odd Females and the Loyal Order of Ancient Shepherdesses. Most were established in the 1830s and 1840s. The 1874 Royal Commission on Friendly and Benefit Societies reported that Shepherdessses and Oddsisters were apt to be ‘greatly given to liquor’ and that members of the Oddwomen’s Club smoked pipes. Joining the SFFS can be presented as a pragmatic business decision. In 1844, when the SFFS was created, straw plaiting – which employed half the women in the parish – was experiencing a revival.37 Straw plaiting had grown rapidly in Bedfordshire after 1815.38 There were 253 plaiters in Southill in 1851. Moreover, agricultural labourers’ wages were falling in the county. Bedfordshire spent at least 15s. [75p] per capita on poor relief

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in the 1831–32 period but between 1834 and 1847 a considerable decrease in Bedfordshire’s expenditure on poor relief was achieved through a reduction in relief paid to low-waged, able-bodied men.39 In the seven winters of the years 1840 to 1846 almost all those in Bedfordshire in receipt of aid on account of ‘insufficiency of earnings’, were widows or deserted wives with dependent children.40 As Williams noted of Bedfordshire villages the ‘withdrawal of outdoor relief to the able-bodied after 1834 meant that self-provisioning, by-employments, and other forms of “self-help” became more important to labouring families to ensure their survival’.41 In the 1860s tariffs were abolished and imports of cheaper plaits from Japan and China which were better suited to the machine stitching process reduced the price of British plait.42 Despite this women continued to plait in Bedfordshire. In 1871, around one in three of 10- to 15-year-old females in the county were plaiters.43 In the SFFS all those in work were recorded as plaiters, the landladies of the two pubs being the only exceptions. Plaiting was sufficiently well paid that it was noted by the Registrar General of Friendly Societies in 1874 as being conducive to the formation of female friendly societies. The importance of plaiting can be gauged from the 1881 census which recorded that of the 248 women in paid work in the village, 139 were plaiters, 48 were servants, 13 dressmakers and no more than five women were engaged in any other single occupation.44 In addition, 24 of the members’ children and siblings were straw plaiters, 48 were labourers or gardeners and there was also a market gardener, an under-gamekeeper and a servant.45 There was not much other work for children. In 1881, of the 38 servants employed by 12 of Southill’s elite households only four were local girls.46 Southill’s school log books reveal that although children were kept from school in order to engage in gleaning, field work, acorn picking and other tasks, the head recorded that ‘the farmers of the neighbourhood are exceptionally good with regard to refusing to give employment to children unless they are qualified to leave.’ Market gardening had spread to the area in recent years and 61 of the 71 husbands of SFFS members about whom information is available were agricultural labourers, other labourers or gardeners. There was also a gamekeeper, a woodman, a shepherd, a cowman and a groom.47 Many would have been badly paid. In 1868 wages in Northumberland were 50 per cent above those of Bedfordshire and in 1904, when real wages were higher than they had been since 1850, in Ridgemount, Bedfordshire 38.5 per cent of the working families had such low incomes that they lived in primary poverty.48 There is not necessarily a correlation between women’s employment opportunities and membership of female friendly

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societies as studies of Preston and Nottinghamshire indicate.49 In some areas women’s pay contributed to support for their families rather than to insurance.50 Although it is difficult to ‘catch’ women within many sources for economic history, in Southill the female friendly society played a similar role to many men’s societies, being an important part of the overall familial survival strategy.51 The alternatives to the SFFS looked meagre in comparison. Many friendly societies failed through lack of funds or actuarial acumen. Possibly the high level of illiteracy among rural women led to the accounts frequently being kept by educated men.52 In 1813 the Black Horse Female Friendly Society of Nottingham had a male clerk, perhaps because only two of the 27 members could sign their names.53 The SFFS treasurer was always the vicar. Numerous societies failed through lack of financial ability. The collapse of the agricultural labourers’ trade union in the late nineteenth century was hastened through its involvement in the provision of friendly society services.54 Women found it difficult to join national friendly societies for although they were permitted to join the Independent Order of Rechabites and the Sons of Temperance, they were barred from the Oddfellows and the Ancient Order of Foresters, the two largest affiliated societies, until the 1890s.55 In 1892 the Ancient Order of Foresters allowed women to join, the Oddfellows when it formally recognized female lodges in 1893 and the Loyal Order of Ancient Shepherds followed in 1895. Even then, recruitment was slow for, as Gertrude Tuckwell, Honorable Secretary of the Women’s Trade Union League told the Select Committee on the Aged Deserving Poor in 1899, women’s wages were so low that many were unable to afford to join a friendly society.56 However, some men were barred from friendly society membership for similar reasons: the perception that they were in dangerous trades or because they could not keep up the payments. Until the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, wives had no right to their benefits – which belonged to their husbands. They were perceived to be a higher insurance risk and unable to run their own societies. The Oddfellows held that women tended to be paid less than men and to make more claims.57 The women could have put any savings they had in the Post Office Savings Bank. However, during the period between the first branch opening in 1861 and the final payment made into the SFFS in 1914, the Post Office Savings Bank put its money into consolidated annuities which paid a fixed rate from which savers received an annual rate of interest of only 2.5 per cent. In effect, for many years, savers subsidized the government. Moreover, in order to prevent impulse purchasing, a delay of several days was enforced on withdrawals made by Post Office

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Savings Bank depositors. While there were restrictions on payments from the SFFS, membership of the SFFS enabled women to draw on collaborative reserves, not just their own resources. If husbands joined different friendly societies then families could spread their risks but the options were limited and comparable to those of the women. Four societies were recorded in neighbouring Shefford in 1803 which appear to have survived until the 1830s.58 There was no gentrydominated countywide friendly society and the Southill Estate Benefit Club was sponsored by Whitbread, while Shuttleworth was president of the district branch of the National Deposit Friendly Society, in Biggleswade (adjacent to Southill).59 Three of the patrons of the SFFS were also members of the Biggleswade Loyal Dreadnought Lodge of Odd Fellows.60 The SFFS received money from the local elite as well as the women, some of its patrons giving as much as 60s. per annum [£3]. In addition to their ordinary payments (1s. entry fee and 1s. 5d. a week) [5p and 7p] all members contributed 6d. [21⁄2p] on the death of a member (whose family received 30s. [£1.50]). There were few obligations placed upon members as a local woman, usually the wife of the church clerk, was paid 30 shillings [£1.50] a year to collect and administer funds. In order to claim benefits (10s. 6d. [521⁄2p] for a confinement, 3s. 6d. [171⁄2p] for sickness for four weeks, less after that) a member had to produce a Medical Certificate and to have paid a year’s worth of subscriptions. In the 1890s, when over £200 a year was being given to the society, there was a membership of 60 women, around 15 per cent of those eligible to join. The sums donated then fell and following the death of Whitbread and his wife, ceased. In 1948, the remaining members, who had joined between 1892 and 1914, were repaid their subscription money, less any benefits they had received. The approximately £750 remaining went to the Church and the ‘Living of Southill’, a decision made by the churchwardens, one of whom was local landowner Simon Whitbread and the other his estate manager.61 The latter noted, ‘It is not generally known that there is a large balance in hand and I do not propose to disclose the fact.’62 As Clark argued, in regard to Hanoverian England, the ‘landscape’ of friendly societies ‘was determined both by upper-class involvement and by the fluctuating character of demand […] club activity was further shaped and constrained by the extent of alternative forms of sociability and relief, and by local perceptions and rhythms of community’.63 The Whitbread Brewery, insured against fire through a mutual insurance company, reflected these widespread rhythms.64 The SFFS’s Rule 14, ‘Any person ceasing to be a member from non-residence in Southill parish will receive back one third of her yearly payments to the fund

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and forfeit the remainder’, also indicated the importance attached to continuity as an element of conventional inter-class interdependence. Relatively few members moved far from the parish. The birthplaces of 65 members of the SFFS have been traced: 49 of them were born in the parish of Southill and the remaining 16 were born in nearby villages or towns. Between 1851 and 1911 the population of Southill fell by 29 per cent. In 1881, 1191 people were recorded as having been born in Southill and still resident in Britain. Sixty-five per cent of these still lived in the parish and over half of those who had left still lived within walking distance. This reflects the common pattern of rural migration, being frequently over short distances.65 In general, men were more likely to make economic gains from travel whereas women who travelled most frequently become domestic servants, often in London which was work restricted to the unmarried.66 In comparison with other counties relatively few migrated from Bedfordshire to the Empire and women in particular were very reluctant to emigrate.67 Staying near to kin made economic sense and women had the opportunity for employment as straw plaiters, which was not the case in other areas. Studies indicate that the least migratory people were those with local specializations, such as straw plaiters, and that the second group most likely to remain in situ were farm workers.68 The majority of men in Southill were agricultural labourers. Through work and marriage, women tied households to one another and to the locality.69 Domestic self-provisioning and interhousehold exchanges were of themselves probably not reasons for remaining in Southill, but sharing often provided security and impeded social or geographical mobility.70 Moreover, between 1834 and 1914, a woman could only make a claim for parish relief where she was ‘settled’ – that is, in the parish of her birth or of her husband’s birth. This regulation was not applied in some areas and by 1865 ‘settled’ had come to mean being resident for one year. Nevertheless, the perception that moving to another parish might endanger the possibility of making a claim on parish relief persisted.71 Some employers preferred to take on local people, who would otherwise be a burden on the rates, rather than those from outside the parish who would otherwise be the responsibility of another parish. The larger friendly societies offered support to travelling brothers.72 This would have been less of an attraction to women. The continuum, in terms of what societies offered to members, was between village friendly societies and the affiliated orders, not between men’s and women’s societies. Women also may have wished to remain in Southill because it was a relatively healthy place. Southill parish subscribed to the Bedford General Infirmary (erected in 1803 largely due to Whitbread’s £4000 endowment)

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and for many years contracted a member of the Royal College of Surgeons to take responsibility for the poor.73 In addition, the Whitbreads built many of the houses (marked, for example, ‘SW 1815’, ‘WHW 1855’ and ‘WHW 1864’) in Southill. The properties were also likely to be insured, given the Whitbreads’ ‘patronage’ of Sun Insurance, a joint stock company rather than a mutual insurance scheme.74 An investigation by the Biggleswade Board of Guardians concluded that cottages in Southill ‘may fairly be considered as model dwellings’.75 Lloyd argued that such cottages played comparable roles to the friendly society in that they symbolized and reinforced ideas about the importance of stability, hierarchy, duty, male authority and female sexual virtue in the overcoming of poverty. Those who dwelt in cottages were felt to display ‘the traits and habits necessary for participation in friendly societies’.76 The common ground shared by the SFFS and other friendly societies was that membership was perceived as aiding stability and self-reliance during a period of social fragmentation and change. For Southill’s elite the alternatives to maintaining the SFFS may have appeared to be of limited value. Thirty-five miles away in Brixworth, Northamptonshire, the principal landowner withdrew his annual subscriptions to local burial, sickness, coal and clothing clubs, encouraged labourers to leave the area and provided charity only to local men who did not apply for outdoor relief. There was a rise in agricultural trade unionism, a population fall, and outdoor relief became a key issue in Board of Guardians’ elections.77 Friendly societies shared plenty of attributes with trade unions but the mutuality in Southill appears to have been broader, despite the disparities of power. Just as the Foresters and Oddfellows were seen as supportive of respectability and quiescence, so the SFFS could be perceived as an aid to the transcendence of competitive relations and political and social inequalities.78 The SFFS, in common with many friendly societies, may have been perceived as an aid to political continuity.79 On his election as a Liberal MP in 1892, Whitbread remitted 20 per cent on the half-year’s rents due from his tenants in Southill and that year 2100 excursion tickets were issued for his annual picnic, which featured music, performances and racing.80 Their Liberal traditions did not stop Samuel Whitbread, his wife Isabella and their son Samuel Howard supporting the creation in 1913 of a Bedford branch of the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage. Samuel Howard went on to support the Conservatives in both of the general elections of 1910.81 The other main patron of the SFFS, Colonel Shuttleworth, was an active Conservative. Having, like the Whitbreads, made his money in trade, he used his benevolence to confer status and

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legitimacy upon a political career. His engagement with the SFFS is comparable to the activities of Sir George Bowyer whose 1873 parliamentary election campaign included parading under a banner that he had donated to the Loyal Bowyer Union Lodge of Oddfellows.82 From the late eighteenth century agricultural improvement societies encouraged the establishment of village friendly societies for men. The gentry often ran such societies.83 In Ashdon, Essex, in the early nineteenth century, the vicar dominated the club and in there were also patronized friendly societies in Tendring and Aldham.84 In the 1860s and 1870s the Dowager Lady Tollemache started and sponsored a coal club, a children’s clothing club, a children’s boot club and an adults’ clothing club in Suffolk villages while Mary Ann Dixon ran similar schemes in Lincolnshire.85 In 1874 Lady Stradbroke made clear the strategic importance of maintaining class links as a means of managing social tensions within rural areas: [She enumerated the farm labourers’] many Benefit Clubs, clothing, coal, and shoe clubs, etc. subscribed to unanimously and chiefly supported by their employers; their cottage garden shows and prizes; their dinners and treats and Christmas and harvest; schools for their children, which until the passing of the late [Education] Act [of 1871] were kept up entirely, and many are still, by their employers and landlords. All these are benefits and comforts which are not thought of, and would not be feasible in large manufacturing districts, but which add materially to the happiness and unity of the two classes employers – and labourers.86 In Southill a charity which distributed coal and money to the aged poor was under the control of Samuel Whitbread until his death whereupon the two churchwardens took it over, one of whom was Colonel Isitt of the Southill Park Estate Office. Across the county women were less likely than men to enter the workhouse and more likely to enter an almshouse.87 At least four former SFFS members became tenants of the Southill almshouses. The vicar and the churchwardens distributed money from another local charity, Smyth’s, among the poor of the parish. Recipients included members of the SFFS such as Mrs Hatton who was an almshouse resident and a widow with two children.88 The local upper classes through the state, local charities, their control over employment and distribution and the SFFS, controlled the incomes of many local women.89 Although the men controlled the finances, engaged in politics and had a higher public profile, there were twice as many women as men

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among the SFFS’s honorary subscribers. These women supported local schools and the local nursing association. Elizabeth King, daughter of one of them, recalled spending happy hours as a child with one of the SFFS members, Nellie Boud, a servant and later almshouse resident in Southill, and that her mother’s charitable acts included driving local children to the hospital.90 The school log books record frequent visits and help from patrons of the SFFS: Mrs and Miss Bailey, the Revd Lambarde, Lady Isabella Whitbread and her daughter, Maud (1859–1898). On the occasion of a royal wedding John King provided a van to take local children to and from Southill Park for a day-long treat with the Whitbreads. In 1911, Lady Isabella and Samuel Whitbread provided £100 each as a 4 per cent loan for a girls’ training home.91 The ways in which the SFFS was treated like a charity are comparable to the roles assigned to other friendly societies. In the 1880s the Oxford Charity Organization Society was central to the creation and subsequent development of the Oxford Working Women’s Benefit Society.92 By the 1890s there were 20,000 paid female officials in philanthropic societies, often performing similar roles to women in friendly societies while the Bristol-based Female Friendly Clothing Society employed visitors as if it were a charity.93 In the latter half of the nineteenth century some of the men’s ‘democratically managed insurance clubs’ began to move away from middleclass supervision. By the 1870s of the two million registered friendly society members in England and Wales only 43,417 were in societies controlled by honorary members.94 Indeed some wealthy men overtly courted the societies. However, among the male societies, patronage continued within both workplace-based societies and overt trade unions such as the Friendly Society of Ironfounders.95 The North Staffordshire Coal and Ironstone Workers’ Permanent Relief Society, for example, was dominated by the colliery proprietors and in 1870 there were around 80 railway company friendly societies.96 There was also internal charity for, after detailed surveillance of their circumstances, the Foresters and Oddfellows provided charity for needy members. As Howkins argued, although ‘friendly societies were never simply agencies of paternalism, most of them took on that aspect at different times’.97 That the SFFS was closely associated with the Church of England makes it typical of many friendly societies. In the latter part of the nineteenth century there were examples of such support in Berkshire, Hertfordshire, Nottinghamshire, Surrey, Yorkshire and elsewhere while the Oddfellows and the Foresters ‘openly courted the Anglican church’.98 When a member of the Isle of Man Sisterly Society (instituted in 1816) fell ill she had to have a certificate signed by two churchwardens and a minister and

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only then ‘the surgeon (if to be had)’.99 The popular Anglican-dominated Girls’ Friendly Society, for unmarried women of a ‘virtuous character’, had patrons but also an elected council, quasi-autonomous branches and motto (‘Bear ye one another’s burden’) identical to many men’s friendly societies.100 It had over 150,000 members within 25 years of its foundation in 1875, its object being ‘to create a bond of union between ladies and working girls […] forming a Society, a kind of Freemasonry among women, of which the sign manual shall be Purity and the hand held out shall be Fellowship’.101 It can be classified as an element of the emphasis on ‘the gift’ within Anglicanism’s ‘new paternalism’ which highlighted the importance of aid between the classes.102 It was also in accord with an important tenet of the Church, for ‘bringing the masses into the church had been an important goal for all factions of Anglicans throughout the nineteenth century’.103 Numerous friendly societies were associated with Sunday schools many of which were dominated by clerics and the middle class.104 The near ubiquitous philanthropic Anglican mothers’ meetings often had savings banks and friendly sick benefit clubs attached and ‘saturated the poor with a mix of benevolence and self-help’.105 To friendly societies large and small, male and female, clerics played many administrative, organizational and supportive roles. In some cases they acted as pastors in the sense of that Foucault used the notion of pastorship, to denote the means by which modernizing societies provided guidance for individuals inside and outside the state.106 Despite the concern in the mid-nineteenth century, frequently expressed by clerics and others, about the number of illegitimate births to Bedfordshire straw plaiters, the SFFS’s rules did not focus on this matter.107 Rule 10 simply stated that ‘any person losing her character for morality or otherwise shall be expelled from the society’. There is no evidence to suggest either that there was anything other than mutual acceptance of this rule by members, or that the definition of loss of character was a matter on which members could make a judgement. What the rule reflects is the familiarity with social institutions which was necessary for the interclass mutuality to be maintained. Legislation in 1793 encouraged friendly societies to lodge copies of their rules with government authorities. Many did not, but about 10 per cent of the female societies which provided rule books made childbirth payments only to married mothers. Many subsequent societies followed this pattern.108 Such regulations may reflect the views of members as well as patrons. A female friendly society in Ashford, Derbyshire, which had no patrons provided for the first illegitimate child, but, and this may indicate economic considerations, it would not pay out for illegitimate twins.109 A Birmingham female society had a

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rule banning adulterous members.110 It was not only female societies which regulated probity. There were echoes of such regulations in the rule books of numerous other societies. Between 1870 and 1890 state expenditure on the aged in England and Wales fell by two thirds. The number of women paupers in receipt of outdoor relief fell from 166,000 to 53,000.111 However, in Southill in 1892 the cost of outdoor relief per hundred inhabitants was relatively high (£15 in 1892 compared to between £8 and £18 in surrounding villages). Donations to the SFFS peaked in the 1890s when patrons, particularly the magistrate and the vice-chair of the parish council, may have seen this largesse as a means of alleviating the rates bill.112 In these capacities these two men, Whitbread and King, would have dealt with a number of members as two members were in receipt of poor relief for two years, one for three years, nine for an average of five years each, three more for nine years, two for 11 years, one for 12 years and one for 16 years. The SFFS was like other friendly societies in that many of those in positions of authority saw friendly societies as a means of regulating the poor. This was made clear by an official estimate made in 1874 that ratepayers were saved not less than £2 million by friendly societies. Furthermore, the legislative framework initiated with the 1793 Friendly Societies Act which aimed at ‘diminishing the Publick Burdens’ treated them more like local authorities than banks or insurance companies.113 The economic capital of Southill’s elite, gained through marriage or in the engineering, brewing and agricultural markets, was symbiotically linked to control of the administration of Poor Law legislation and to charitable activity, for the patrons’ mutuality, without participatory structures, was one of a number of different regulative systems, part of a shifting dynamic to be seen in the context of ideas about gender roles, housing, the Poor Law and overt charities. Through encouraging poor women to invest in their own welfare provision, within strict guidelines, and to be less reliant upon state provision, which was paid for and administered locally, the elite helped to ensure that the selective alleviation of local distress remained within its control. Threats to the norms of beneficence, deference and patronage, such as the rise of the women’s suffrage campaign, were countered through campaigns for the preservation of the status quo. Everyday activity, community ties and civilities in the locality were shaped to consolidate the position, encourage hierarchy and order, maintain the ideal of self-governing individuals and families unified through Christian and civic community and weaken alternative intraclass contacts. Consideration of village life in the round indicates the dynamics of the friendly society. Providing charity to the deserving poor,

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that is those who exhibited moral probity, enhanced the status of the benefactors without challenging the inequalities between donors and recipients.114 In addition to any ideological attachment to mutuality, women in Southill who wished to save benefited from joining the friendly society in that they were rewarded for doing that which they were already doing, which was straying neither from conventional morality nor from the village. Migrants left behind employment opportunities and networks based upon the pervasive parish or near-parish endogamy while investment in an independent village friendly society (if one had existed), one of the national friendly societies or in the Post Office, carried a higher risk or the likelihood of a smaller reward. SFFS membership was compatible with making claims upon charities or the state (and may indeed have improved the chances of success) and was unremarkable. To see women’s friendly societies as evidence of a structured yet fluid system of reciprocity built where community, civility, charity and commerce intersect, is not to marginalize gender or employ an ahistoric taxonomy. Rather, it is to recognize that membership involved generic economic considerations and transactions. In the case of Southill it imposed a twofold relationship with the market. The women had to engage in their own economic activity and through their nurturing of their families in the home, enhance the economic activity of men and children. The importance of the charitable element is demonstrated by the close correlation between membership and donations. As the latter fell, so did the numbers joining. In other friendly societies the importance of economic benefits and patronage were different, but were still facets of those societies. What the regulated civility of the SFFS’s reciprocal obligation and the associational culture of the Oddfellows had in common was that both, in different ways, helped to maintain communities. The degree of civic engagement and conviviality may have differed, but the components were comparable. Durr distinguished the Oddfellows and the other affiliated orders from village societies arguing that to the former ‘self-help was secondary and the primary purpose was to spread among their members ideas of benevolence, love and charity. The Oddfellows had more in common with the masons than with the county or village friendly society.’115 However, although the balance was different in the Oddfellows and the Foresters compared to the smaller societies, similar concerns about sentiment, political economy, prosperity and morality as well as gender can be found and by making this connection the widespread significance of fraternity can be better appreciated.

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The following chapter looks at how female familial imagery manipulated by a socialist feminist impacted on fraternal proselytism.

Notes 1

2

3 4

5

6 7

8

9 10

11

Geoffrey Crossick, An Artisan Elite in Victorian Society: Kentish London, 1840–1880 (London: Taylor & Francis, 1978); Robert Q. Gray, The Labour Aristocracy in Victorian Edinburgh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) pp. 33, 40, 122–6. Edward P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, rev. edn, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), pp. 375–83, 401, 457; Malcolm Chase, Early Trade Unionism, Fraternity, Skill and the Politics of Labour (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. 66; Simon Cordery, British Friendly Societies: 1750–1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003). Geoffrey Best, Mid-Victorian Britain 1851–75 (London: Fontana, 1979), pp. 291–2. James E. Cronin, The Politics of State Expansion: War, State and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 25; David Neave, Mutual Aid in the Victorian Countryside: Friendly Societies in the Rural East Riding, 1830–1914 (Hull: Hull University Press, 1991), p. 86; Neville Kirk, Change, Continuity and Class: Labour in British Society, 1850–1920 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 29–31, 49–50, 60; Alan J. Kidd, State, Society and the Poor in Nineteenth-Century England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), p. 112. This taxonomy is assessed in Daniel Weinbren, ‘Supporting Self-Help: Charity, Mutuality and Reciprocity in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in Charity and Mutual Aid in Europe and North America since 1800, ed. by Bernard Harris and Paul Bridgen (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 101–32. John Garrard, Democratisation in Britain: Elites, Civil Society and Reform since 1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 277, 282–3. The term Oddfellows here and subsequently refers to this body and not to one of the other 35 or more organizations which had the word in their names. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850, rev. edn (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 33; Kidd, p. 129. Cordery, British Friendly Societies, pp. 102–4. Dowlais and Merthyr Unity of the Ancient Order of Britons, 1860 Lodge Charter. Copy in the Museum of Welsh Life, Cardiff, cited in S. L. Evans, ‘A Study of the Socio-economic Changes in Merthyr Tydfil that Contributed to the Development and Perpetuation of the Friendly Societies’ (unpublished master’s thesis, University of Wales, 1994), p. 45. Similar words were used at a society dinner in 1874. The speaker hoped that ‘the Order would continue to extend its influence of making men provident and happy, better husbands and better fathers’. See Kentish Mercury (21 February 1874) cited in Crossick, p. 193. Oddfellows’ Magazine, 414 (June 1909) in Cordery, British Friendly Societies, p. 166.

Daniel Weinbren 215 12

13

14

15

16

17

18 19

20 21

22

23

24 25 26

See Daniel Weinbren, ‘Beneath the All-Seeing Eye: Fraternal Order and Friendly Societies’ Banners in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Britain’, Journal of Social and Cultural History, 3 (2006). Andy Durr, ‘Chicken and Egg – the Emblem Book and Freemasonry: The Visual and Material Culture of Associated Life’, Transactions of Quatour Coronati Lodge (February 2005), pp. 8–10. John Bohstedt, ‘Gender, Household and Community Politics: Women in English Riots 1790–1810’, Past and Present, 120 (1988), 88–122 (pp. 98–9). The survey results can be found in PP Abstract of the Answers and Returns under 43 Geo. 3 Relative to the Expense and Maintenance of the Poor in England, (1803–04), p. xiii. Colonel Frank Shuttleworth (1845–1913) retired from engineering to Old Warden which adjoins Southill. He became a Conservative county councillor, High Sheriff and a justice of the peace. Involved in numerous local societies he was called by the Biggleswade Chronicle, 1 January 1913, ‘quite the ideal squire’. During the life of the SFFS, Samuel Whitbread (1830–1915) was the Liberal MP for Bedford from 1852 to 1895. He was married to Lady Isabella (1836–1916). Their son Samuel Howard Whitbread (1858–1944) was Liberal MP for Luton from 1892 to 1895 and then Lord Lieutenant from 1912 to 1936. An earlier family member, Samuel Whitbread (1764–1815) enclosed Southill in 1797. There is no record of the formation of the society or of its original structure. When he came to wind it up, the Whitbread estate manager and churchwarden for 40 years, Colonel Samuel Gilbert Isitt (1882–1964), wrote a note, held in Bedfordshire County Record Office (hereafter BCRO), indicating that he considered that it dated from 1844. On the difficulties for female friendly societies in locating doctors see Evelyn Lord, ‘Weighed in the Balance and Found Wanting’: Female Friendly Societies, Self-Help and Economic Virtue in the East Midlands in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Midland History, 22 (1997), 100–12 (p. 101). Cordery, British Friendly Societies, p. 48. The figures in square brackets are literal conversions to decimal currency from the old shillings and pence: not direct modern equivalents but provided to make comparisons within the chapter more straightforward. Clive Bradbury, ‘The Impact of Friendly Societies in North Staffordshire’, Staffordshire Studies, 13 (2001), 127–44 (pp. 130, 134). Lord, ‘Weighed’, pp. 105–6; Margaret D. Fuller, West Country Friendly Societies: An Account of Village Benefit Clubs and their Brass Pole Heads (Reading: Oakwood Press, 1964), pp. 154–5. C. Hurt, ‘Women in Action: Female Friendly Societies, 1770–1915’ (unpublished Certificate in Higher Education dissertation, University of Nottingham, 2006), p. 10 cites FS15/98. Ivy Evans, ‘Bishop’s Castle and Lydbury North Female Friendly Society’, South West Shropshire Historical and Archaeological Society Journal, 1 (1989), 19–28 (pp. 19–20). Lord, ‘Weighed’, p. 105. Hurt, p. 4. Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World, Oxford Studies in Social History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 358.

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28

29

30 31 32

33 34 35 36

37

Sarah Lloyd, ‘Pleasing Spectacles and Elegant Dinners: Conviviality, Benevolence and Charity Anniversaries in Eighteenth-Century London’, Journal of British Studies, 41 (2002), 23–57 (pp. 54–5); Caroline O. Reid, ‘Middle-Class Values and Working-Class Culture in Nineteenth-Century Sheffield’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Sheffield, 1976), pp. 515, 539; Hilary Marland, Medicine and Society in Wakefield and Huddersfield 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) pp. 25, 190, 198–9. Peter Terry Weller, ‘Self Help and Provident Friendly Societies in Coventry in the Nineteenth Century’ (unpublished master’s thesis, University of Warwick, 1990), pp. 40, 105. Rules of the Barton-in-Fabis Friendly Society, reprinted in Friendly Societies: Seven Pamphlets (New Hampshire: Ayer Publishing, 1972). See also Susan Andrews, ‘The Barton-in-Fabis Female Friendly Society’, East Midland Historian, 3 (1993), 15–23. William Henry Beveridge, Voluntary Action: A Report on Methods of Social Advance (London: Allen & Unwin, 1948), p. 25. Lord, ‘Weighed’, p. 101. Jim Turner, ‘The Frontier Revisited: Thrift and Fellowship in the New Industrial Town, c. 1830–1914’, in Middlesbrough: Town and Community 1830–1950, ed. by Anthony James Pollard (Stroud: Sutton, 1996), pp. 81–102 (p. 91); Lord, ‘Weighed’, pp. 100–12; Female Foresters: A Century of Landmarks, ed. by Audrey Fisk and Roger Logan (Southampton: Ancient Order of Foresters, 1992); Dot Jones, ‘Self-Help in Nineteenth-Century Wales: The Rise and Fall of the Female Friendly Society’, Llafur, 4 (1984), 14–26; Julie O’Neill, ‘In the Club’: Female Friendly Societies in Nottinghamshire 1792–1913 (Nottingham: Trent Valley History Group, 2001); Pat Thane, The Foundation of the Modern Welfare State (London: Longman, 1982), p. 21; Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); p. 37 notes that of the London friendly societies registered under the 1793 legislation, 15 per cent were female and in Stockport between 1794 and 1823, 33 per cent of the friendly societies were for women. In 1824 the proportion was 16 per cent in Nottinghamshire, 27 per cent in Cheshire, 18 per cent in Lancashire and 35 per cent in Leicester. Sheila Lewenhak, Women and Trade Unions (London: Benn, 1977) p. 20; Clark, The Struggle, p. 35. Robert Colls, The Pitmen of the Northern Coalfield: Work Culture and Protest 1790–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987) pp. 261–2. Clark, The Struggle, p. 37. Journal of Edward Derrington, 23 February 1843, cited in Clive Behagg, ‘Secrecy, Ritual and Folk Violence: The Opacity of the Workplace in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century’, in Popular Culture and Custom in NineteenthCentury England, ed. by Robert D. Storch (London: Croom Helm; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1982), pp. 154–79 (p. 157). William Apfel and Peter Dunkley, ‘English Rural Society and the New Poor Law: Bedfordshire, 1834–47’, Social History, 10 (1985), 37–68 (p. 62). On the buoyancy of plaiting and the depression of female wages see Keith D. M. Snell, ‘Agricultural Seasonal Unemployment, the Standard of Living, and Women’s Work in the South and East, 1690–1860’, Economic History Review, 34 (1981), 407–37 (p. 431).

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39 40 41

42 43 44 45

46

47

48

Plaiting straw for hats dates back to at least 1630. The trade grew rapidly in Britain in the early nineteenth century following the cessation of imports of plait from Italy in 1804, a series of import controls, and the invention of a device for splitting straw lengthwise which, by 1815 cost only 6d. [21/2p]. In 1851 there were over 10,000 straw plaiters in Bedfordshire, 14.9 per cent of the total female population of the county, and this figure was 15.5 per cent a decade later. On the role of straw plaiting in village life in Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire see László L. Gróf, Children of Straw: The Story of a Vanished Craft and Industry in Bucks, Herts, Beds and Essex (Buckingham: Barracuda Books, 1988); Edwin Grey, Cottage Life in a Hertfordshire Village: How the Agricultural Labourer Lived and Fared in the Late Sixties and Early Seventies (Chesham: Barracuda Books, 1935) pp. 68–9; and Pamela L. R. Horn, ‘The Buckinghamshire Straw Plait Trade in Victorian England’, Records of Buckinghamshire, 19 (1971), 42–54. George R. Boyer, Economic History of the English Poor Law, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 111. Apfel and Dunkley, pp. 40, 44. Samantha Williams, ‘Earnings, Poor Relief and the Economy of Makeshifts: Bedfordshire in the Early Years of the New Poor Law’, Rural History, 16 (2005), 21–52 (p. 46) (Her emphasis). Judy Lown, Women and Industrialisation: Gender at Work in NineteenthCentury England (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), p. 48. As plaiting was seasonal and many plaiters were part-time the census information is probably an underestimate. A decade later, 36 of the 580 working women were plaiters and 18 were former straw plaiters. On child straw plaiters see Jennie Kittingham, ‘Country Work Girls in Nineteenth-Century England’, in Village Life and Labour, ed. by Raphael Elkan Samuel (London: Routledge, 1975), pp. 73–138 (pp. 120–5); Gróf, p. 80; Pamela L. R. Horn, ‘Child Workers in the Pillow Lace and Straw Plait Trades of Victorian Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire’, Historical Journal, 17 (1974), 779–96 (p. 789); Hugh Cunningham, ‘The Employment and Unemployment of Children in England, c. 1680–1851’, Past and Present, 126 (1990), 115–50 (pp. 144–5). It was typically the case that rural girls’ service began in small, middle-class homes: see Jessica Anne Gerard, ‘Family and Servants in the Country-House Community in England and Wales, 1815–1914’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London, 1982), pp. 95–7. The others were a platelayer on the Midland Railway (the Midland Railway came to Southill in 1857), a fitter at Woolwich Arsenal, and a licensed victualler. On the growth of market gardening in the area see Frank Beavington, ‘The Development of Market Gardening in Bedfordshire, 1799–1939’, Agricultural History Review, 23 (1975), 23–47 (pp. 27, 32). George Culley, an assistant commissioner, cited in The Commission on the Employment of Children, Young Persons, and Women in Agriculture, PP 1867/68 XVIII First Report p. xxviii; Harold Hart Mann, ‘Life in an Agricultural Village in England’, Sociological Papers, 1 (1904), 163–93 (p. 161), cited in Eddie H. Hunt, ‘Labour productivity in English agriculture, 1850–1914’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 20 (1967) 280–92 (p. 287).

218 The Fraternity of Female Friendly Societies 49

50

51 52 53

54

55 56

57

58

59

60 61 62 63

Julie O’Neill, ‘“The Spirit of Independence”: Friendly Societies in Nottinghamshire 1724–1913’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Nottingham Polytechnic, 1992), p. 98; Shani D’Cruze and Jean Turnbull, ‘Fellowship and Family: Oddfellows’ Lodges in Preston and Lancaster c. 1830–c. 1890’, Urban History, 22 (1995), 25–47. On the relationship between wages and friendly society membership see Evelyn Lord, ‘Derbyshire Friendly Societies and the Paradox of Thrift’, Journal of Regional and Local Studies, 16 (1996), 11–17. Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, 17 vols (London: Macmillan, 1902–03), I (1902), pp. 37–49; IV (1902), pp. 300–1, 310–11, 322–3; B. Seebohm Rowntree, Poverty: A Study of Town Life, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1922), p. 56. Pamela Sharpe, ‘Continuity and Change: Women’s History and Economic History in Britain’, Economic History Review, 48 (1995), 353–69 (p. 354). Clark, British Clubs, pp. 364, 380. Hurt, p. 3. One exception is the Crail Sea Box Society (which helped seamen and their families during periods of distress). The account book held in Crail Museum indicates that in the 1770s the club administrator was a woman. Quoted in Malcolm Bee, ‘A Friendly Society Case Study: The Compton Pilgrims Benefit Society’, Southern History, 11 (1989), 68–9 (p. 86); Nigel Scotland, Methodism and the Revolt of the Field: A Study of the Methodist Contribution to Agricultural Trade Unionism in East Anglia 1872–1896 (Gloucester: Sutton, 1981), p. 170. Richardson Campbell, Provident and Industrial Institutions (Manchester: Board of Directors, Independent Order of Rechabites, 1923), p. 244. Report from the Select Committee on the Aged Deserving Poor 1899, p. 95, cited in John Macnicol, The Politics of Retirement in Britain, 1878–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 31. A. W. Watson, Friendly Societies for Women, with Special Consideration of the Sickness Risk from the Actuarial Point of View (Manchester, Independent Order of Oddfellows, Manchester Unity, 1897), pp. 1–4. Samantha Williams, ‘Poor Relief, Labourers’ Households and Living Standards in Rural England c. 1770–1834: A Bedfordshire Case Study’, Economic History Review, 58 (2005), 485–519 (p. 514). County societies existed wholly or partially in 20 counties: see Malcolm Bee, ‘Providence with Patronage: The Royal Berkshire Friendly Society 1872–1972’, Southern History, 16 (1994), 100–21 (p. 118). On the Estate Benefit Club see W3977, BCRO; on Shuttleworth’s role see Biggleswade Chronicle, 21 November 1891. The National Deposit was a model for at least one friendly society sponsored by a railway company: see Simon Cordery, ‘Mutualism, Friendly Societies and the Genesis of Railway Trade Unionism’, Labour History Review, 67 (2002), 263–79 (p. 268). Whitbread, as a brewer, benefited from the fact that many friendly societies met in pubs: see Peter Mathias, The Brewing Industry in England 1700–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), pp. 264, 277–8. Biggleswade Chronicle, 28 May 1892. Simon Whitbread (1904–1985) was the son of Samuel Howard Whitbread and grandson of Samuel Whitbread. Note in SFFS file, BCRO. Clark, British Clubs, p. 383.

Daniel Weinbren 219 64

65

66

67

68

69

70

71

72 73

74 75 76

Hugh Anthony Lewis Cockerell and Edwin Green, The British Insurance Business 1547–1970: An Introduction and Guide to Historical Records in the UK (London: Heinemann Educational, 1976), p. 28. Dennis R. Mills and Kevin Schürer, ‘Migration and Population Turnover’, in Local Communities in the Victorian Census Enumerators’ Books, ed. by Dennis R. Mills and Kevin Schürer (Oxford: Leopard’s Head Press, 1996), pp. 218–28. On rural migration see also George R. Boyer and Timothy J. Hatton, ‘Migration and Labour Market Integration in Late Nineteenth-Century England and Wales’, Economic History Review, 50 (1997), 697–734. Snell, ‘Agricultural’, p. 431. For evidence that rural women were preferred for domestic service and found it difficult to get mill work in, for example, Preston, see Wendy M. Gordon, Mill Girls and Strangers: Single Women’s Independent Migration in England, Scotland and the United States, 1850–1881 (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002). Jill Chambers, ‘Assisted Emigration from Bedfordshire under the New Poor Law 1835–1860’, Bedfordshire Family History Society, 4 (1983). See also Gary Howells, ‘Emigrants and Emigrators: A Study of Emigration and the New Poor Law with Special Reference to Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire and Norfolk, 1834–1860’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Leicester, 1996). On women migrants see Charlotte Erickson, Leaving England: Essays on British Emigration in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). For local reports on migrants see Biggleswade Chronicle, 28 February 1913. E. Abbott, ‘Straw Plaiting in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, 1871–1881: Some Factors affecting Straw Plaiting Families, their Residential Persistence, Work and Education’, in Project Reports in Family and Community History, CD-ROM (CDR0008), ed. by L. Faulkner and R. Finnegan (Milton Keynes: The Open University, 1997). Ruth L. Smith and Deborah M. Valenze, ‘Mutuality and Marginality: Liberal Moral Theory and Working-Class Women in Nineteenth-Century England’, Signs: Journal of Women, Culture and Society, 13 (1988), 277–98 (p. 288). The case that for poor urban women there was more promise in the resources of neighbours and kin than in individual mobility is made by Ellen Ross, ‘Survival Networks: Women’s Neighbourhood Sharing in London before World War One’, History Workshop Journal, 15 (1983), 4–27. Michael E. Rose, ‘Settlement, Removal and the new Poor Law’, in The New Poor Law in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Derek Fraser (London: Macmillan, 1976), pp. 25–43 (p. 36). On travelling brothers see Daniel Weinbren, ‘The Good Samaritan, Friendly Societies and the Gift Economy’, Social History, 31 (2006), 319–36. Samantha Williams, ‘Practitioners’ Income and Provision for the Poor: Parish Doctors in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, Social History of Medicine, 18 (2005), 159–86. Robin Pearson, Insuring the Industrial Revolution: Fire Insurance in Great Britain, 1700–1850 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 117. Biggleswade Chronicle, 27 August 1892. Sarah Lloyd, ‘Cottage Conversations: Poverty and Manly Independence in Eighteenth-Century England’, Past and Present, 184 (2004), 69–108 (p. 94).

220 The Fraternity of Female Friendly Societies 77

78

79

80 81 82 83

84

85 86 87

88 89

90 91

92

Elizabeth T. Hurren, ‘Welfare-to-Work Schemes and a Crusade against Outdoor Relief in the Brixworth Union, Northamptonshire in the 1880s’, Family and Community History, 4 (2001), 19–30. The importance of supporting bodies which performed such roles is discussed in Lauren M. E. Goodlad, ‘“Making the Working Man like Me”: Charity, Pastorship and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain; Thomas Chalmers and Dr James Phillips Kay’, Victorian Studies, 43 (Summer 2001), 591–617 (pp. 594–5). Andrew Philips, ‘Four Colchester Elections: Voting Behaviour in a Victorian Market Town’, in An Essex Tribute: Essays Presented to Frederick G. Emmison as a Tribute to his Life and Work for Essex History and Archives, ed. by Kenneth Neale (Oxford: Leopard’s Head Press, 1987), pp. 199–227 (p. 217); Garrard, p. 166; Martin Pugh, The Tories and the People 1880–1935 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), pp. 155–6; Mary Bliss and Mary Day, Cirencester Benefit Society 1890–1990 (Cirencester: Cirencester Benefit Society, 1990), pp. 41–3. Biggleswade Chronicle, 16 July 1892 and 6 August 1892. Biggleswade Chronicle, 29 April 1910. Abingdon Herald, 3 July 1875. Bee, ‘A Friendly Society’, p. 75. For an account of two Christian sisters who sought to promote schools, religious services and women’s clubs among the poor in an area near Bristol, see Martha More, Mendip Annals, or a Narrative of the Charitable Labours of Hannah and Martha More (London: James Nisbet, 1859). For accounts of such societies in other parts of the country see Daniel Weinbren, ‘“Imagined families”: Research on Friendly Societies’, Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts für die Geschichte de sozialen Bewegungen, 27 (2002), 117–36 (p. 130). 1854 Report quoted in David J. Appleby, ‘Combination and Control: Cultural Politics in the Management of Friendly Societies in Nineteenth-Century Essex and Suffolk’, Essex Archaeology and History, 33 (2002), 323–32. Jessica Anne Gerard, ‘Lady Bountiful: Women of the Landed Classes and Rural Philanthropy’, Victorian Studies, 30 (1987), 183–210 (p. 198). Letter in The Times, 16 April 1874. David Thomson, ‘The Welfare of the Elderly in the Past: A Family or Community Responsibility?’, in Life, Death and the Elderly: Historical Perspectives, ed. by Margaret Pelling and Richard M. Smith (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 194–221 (pp. 203–4). Biggleswade Chronicle, 26 April 1912. Southill males were not ignored by the elite who also supported the choral society, the Scouts and Southill Park Cricket Club: see Biggleswade Chronicle, 3 March 1911, 22 March 1912, and 4 April 1913; Southill Park Cricket Club, 100 Years of Cricket 1884–1984 (Southill: Southill Park Cricket Club, 1984). E-mail to the author from Elizabeth King, 19 February 2000. W3976, BCRO; Biggleswade Chronicle, 17 January 1913 and 24 December 1892. The Whitbreads had provided for local women in the past: for example, in 1764, Samuel Whitbread I made an endowment to a charity school, stipulating that some of the money be spent on straw hats for poorer female pupils: Gróf, p. 19. Robert Humphreys, Sin, Organised Charity and the Poor Law in Victorian England (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 94.

Daniel Weinbren 221 93 94

95

96 97 98

99

100

101 102 103

104

105 106

Martin Gorsky, Patterns of Philanthropy: Charity and Society in NineteenthCentury Bristol (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1999), p. 167. Simon Cordery, ‘Friendly Societies and the Discourse of Respectability in Britain, 1825–1875’, Journal of British Studies, 34 (1995), 35–58; Alun Howkins, Reshaping Rural England: A Social History 1850–1925 (London: Harper Collins Academic, 1991), p. 80. Cordery, ‘Mutualism’, pp. 263–79; John Benson, ‘Coalowners, Coalminers and Compulsion: Pit Clubs in England, 1860–80’, Business History, 44 (2002), 47–60; Friendly Society of Ironfounders, records, Modern Record Centre, University of Warwick, MSS 41/FSIF/4/4. Bradbury, pp. 130, 134; Cordery, ‘Mutualism’, pp. 265–7. Howkins, p. 81. Bee, ‘Providence’, p. 106; David Neave, ‘Anglican Clergy and the Affiliated Order Friendly Societies’, in Regional Studies in the History of Religion in Britain since the Later Middle Ages, ed. by Edward Royle (Hull: Humberside, 1984), pp. 184–9; Evelyn Lord, ‘The Friendly Society Movement and the Respectability of the Rural Working Class’, Rural History, 8 (1997), 165–74 (pp. 170–1); James Obelkevich, Religion and Rural Society: South Lindsey, 1825–1875 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 88; Diary entry of the Revd G. D. Newbolt of Souldrop (1856–1895) in ‘Some Bedfordshire Diaries’, The Publications of the Bedfordshire Historical Records Society, 40 (1959), pp. 206–21; Alan Armstrong, Farmworkers: A Social and Economic History, 1770–1980 (London: Batsford, 1988), p. 108; A. James, ‘Religion – the Extent of its Influence on the Community of Weobley, Herefordshire during the Decade 1850–1860’, in Project Reports CD-ROM. Rules and Orders to be observed by the Isle of Man Sisterly Society, Manx Heritage Museum D126/3(b). Thanks to Alan Franklin for a copy of these rules. Brian Harrison, ‘For Church, Queen and Family: The Girls’ Friendly Society 1874–1920’, Past and Present, 61 (1973), 106–38. See also Patricia Mitchell, The Girls’ Friendly Society, 1875–1900, unpublished doctoral thesis, Open University (2003). Anon., The Girls’ Friendly Society (London: Girls’ Friendly Society, 1877), p. 2. Howkins, pp. 74–7, 159–60. Cheryl Walsh, ‘The Incarnation and the Christian Socialist Conscience in the Victorian Church of England’, Journal of British Studies, 34 (1995), 359–74 (p. 374). Alfred P. Wadsworth, ‘The First Manchester Sunday Schools’, in Essays in Social History, ed. by Michael W. Flinn and Thomas Christopher Smout (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 100–22 (pp. 101, 117, 119); P. H. J. H. Gosden, The Friendly Societies in England, 1815–1875 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961), pp. 20–1; Keith D. M. Snell, ‘The Sunday School Movement in England and Wales: Child Labour, Denominational Control and WorkingClass Culture’, Past and Present, 164 (1999), 122–68 (pp. 130–1). Frank K. Prochaska, The Voluntary Impulse: Philanthropy in Modern Britain (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), pp. 55, 62, 74. Michael Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, with Two Lectures By and an Interview With Michel Foucault, ed. by

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107

108 109 110 111 112 113

114 115

Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 87–104. The illegitimacy rate among straw plaiters and other women is examined in Horn, ‘Child Workers’, p. 791; Gróf, Children; M. Borgars, ‘Straw Plaiters of Maulden: A Study of Bastardry in a Nineteenth-Century Bedfordshire Community, Education’, in Project Reports CD-ROM; and Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London: Virago, 1983), p. 194. A study of an adjacent plaiting area found no significant differences in illegitimacy rates in plaiting and non-plaiting areas. See Nigel Goose, ‘How Saucy did it Make the Poor? The Straw Plait and Hat Trades, Illegitimate Fertility and the Family in NineteenthCentury Hertfordshire’, History, 91, 304 (2006), 530–56. Fuller, pp. 153–4; O’Neill, ‘The Spirit of Independence’, p. 94; Clark, British Clubs, pp. 376–7. Quoted in Lord, ‘Weighed’, p. 110. Dorothy Thompson, Outsiders: Class, Gender, and Nation (London: Verso, 1993), p. 81; see also Clark, British Clubs, pp. 38, 54, 69. Pat Thane, ‘Women and the Poor Law in Victorian and Edwardian England’, History Workshop Journal, 6 (1978), 29–51 (p. 39). Biggleswade Chronicle, 27 August 1892; on King’s and Whitbread’s positions, see Biggleswade Chronicle, 26 April 1912. John Richard Edwards and Roy A. Chandler, ‘Contextualising the Process of Accounting Regulation: A Study of Nineteenth-Century British Friendly Societies’, Abacus: A Journal of Accounting, Finance and Business Studies, 37 (2001), 188–216. See also John R. Edwards, Roy A. Chandler and Malcolm Anderson, ‘The “Public Auditor”: An Experiment in Effective Accountability’, Accounting and Business Research, 29 (1999), 183–98. Alan J. Kidd, ‘Philanthropy and the “Social History Paradigm”’, Social History, 21 (1996), 180–92 (pp. 183, 186–7). Andy Durr, ‘Ritual of association and the organisations of the common people’, Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, Transactions of Quatuor Coronati Lodge No 2076, 100, (1987), 88–108; James Burn, An Historical Sketch of the Independent Order of Oddfellows M.U. (Manchester: A. Heywood, 1845), p. 12, referred to the ‘ennobling principle of fraternal charity and brotherly love’. The term ‘affiliated societies’ appears to have originated in the Report of the Registrar of Friendly Societies, 1858.

11 Flora Tristan’s Appeal for Fraternity Máire Fedelma Cross

On 24 July 1843 a Toulon blacksmith, Louis Langomazino sent a song lyric to Flora Tristan in Paris. In it he enjoined his fellow workers: Let us unite! At the banquet of life Let us play the role God is offering to all. Let us love one another well, sweet sympathy Will make us strong, this dear girl Wishes to ally herself with us today. In raptures let us sing these sacred words Let us be united, let us be united!!1 Flora Tristan was the ‘dear girl’ who wished to ally herself with the workers whose unity would make them strong. The words of this the third verse and the chorus refer to her call for the creation of a workers’ union inspired by fraternity as a way for the working class to end its economic misery and social and political oppression. Her message was designed deliberately to be simple: if only workers could overcome their differences and organize themselves into a self-help association they would find the means to happiness and comfort. What was the significance of Flora Tristan and singing in this example of gender and working-class fraternal organizations? Born on 7 April 1803, Flora Tristan was unfortunate in that her father, a Spanish-American aristocrat, died early in her childhood and she was brought up in modest circumstances by her French mother. By the age of 17 she had married her first employer, André Chazal, a lithograph artist, but by 1825 was separated from him and had left her three young children in care to take employment as a ladies’ companion. She lived in various temporary addresses in order to flee from her 223

224 Flora Tristan’s Appeal for Fraternity

husband’s persecution especially after she began earning from her writing that began and flourished with travel and politics. It was while preparing her first major work on her Peruvian voyage Pérégrinations d’une paria, that Tristan wrote and published her first extensive work in 1835 calling for a fraternal association to support women travelling, Nécessité de faire bon accueil aux femmes étrangères. Then followed a novel Méphis and her London travel journal Promenades dans Londres. Her very first publication was a petition to parliament, for the restoration of divorce. Her second petition for the abolition of the death penalty (not enacted in France until 1981 by the socialist government) was an attempt to intervene to spare her husband from this fate – he had shot her in September 1838 but she recovered enough to attend his trial when he was given a prison sentence for life with hard labour. Before her untimely death in Bordeaux in November 1844, Tristan had become a familiar figure in the socialist intellectual milieu in Paris and had succeeded in creating a political network of workers in the towns of provincial France through the notion of self-help. In many ways she believed she could take forward a synergy of the existing ideas of selfhelp being promoted by the workers from the craftsmen’s tradition of brotherhoods and by the social thinkers disenchanted with the laissezfaire values promoted by the regime’s politicians. Flora Tristan is criticized for thinking that she epitomized the Saint-Simonian notion of female redemption, but a closer look at the manner in which she communicated with the workers she encountered illustrates two things: she was determined to forge ahead with creating workers’ self-help groups and the gendered images within their songwriting showed there were other inspirations of idealizing women than that of the revolutionary muse of the socialists.2 A simple message of fraternity was ideal for the genre of the song. It could rouse strong emotions of well-being about solidarity, brotherhood and unity and could thus be the instrument of political mobilization as well as the medium. Flora Tristan wanted men to sing her message. Her attitude to fraternal organizations can be seen in her use of the song. Fraternal sentiments were expressed intensely in song lyrics in a different manner from conversations in encounters with activists. For Flora Tristan’s political purposes it was important to have songs; her appreciation of them is more important than previously thought as they had an impact on her success in promoting her fraternal association. The lyrics of Langomazino’s song reveal the way its composer makes a distinction from the spontaneous call for mass action that occurred in the revolutionary past: in this song violent actions against the status

Máire Fedelma Cross 225

quo by societies or by individuals or by ‘the people’ are repudiated. If the people rise up they will do so in dignity and in peace: With peace we shall do wonders, With the union we shall be all powerful; Songs of love will charm our ears.3 This song lyric was among several written in response to an appeal from Flora Tristan placed in her preface to the first edition to Union ouvrière. Unpublished, it is a sample of popular song composition, an activity at its zenith in the France of the mid-nineteenth century.4 It is also a sample of the popularization of workers’ unions, a particular type of fraternal association taking shape in France at this time. Through Flora Tristan’s call for a song there is an overlapping of two types of fraternal association: song clubs and these early forms of mutual-aid societies or trade unions. Tristan had inspired a response from members of the Lice chansonnière, a songwriters’ association, and found this network of sociability willing to help spread the word about another more structured form of sociability: workers’ unity. In the event the results were a mixed bag of enthusiasm and resentment. One leading member of the song composition fraternity of Paris, Ferrand, about whom little is known, was to prove to be more protective of his association’s reputation than be interested in promoting working-class fraternity on a wider scale. He found the message to be of less significance than the preservation of his song association’s rules and standards. Several songwriters from the provinces such as Langomazino were more generous with their efforts. Tristan’s call for a song produced more than stirring calls for union. It got men to sing about the union, but not always in harmony with her ideas of collaboration. This incident was part of Flora Tristan’s attempt to get through to those most in need of hearing her message: the illiterate workers. She was attempting to organize them into one specific action, to form a union. Although her connection with different workers’ fraternal associations and her own contribution to their growth has been studied, the connection Flora Tristan had with the genre of song or of song clubs has been given little attention to date.5 Without going into any great detail about the common use of songs by fraternal organizations, her most important French biographer, Jules Puech, is the only one to give an account of the reactions to her request for a song composition, recognizing that her appeal for a song was a vital step in forming relationships with the leading characters of this influential network.6 The call for a song brought immediate results and her diary shows that she

226 Flora Tristan’s Appeal for Fraternity

was aware of the power of singing for propaganda and the immediate impact in performance at the workers’ banquets she organized subsequently during her tour of France in the summer of 1844. She described her effect on members of the competitive journeyman guilds, the Devoirs, who were traditionally in bitter rivalry with one another: This merging of these four Devoirs is a great event for the chapter in Marseilles. If my words of love had been powerless to touch certain reticent hearts this act completely won them over. They all came up to shake my hand weeping with emotion. – That was quite an indescribable moment! Oh! everything in this world springs from love! – they all loved one another like good brothers. (To be written in full – I lack time and the strength). The trouble that poor Roussel took to get people to sign up – the disorder caused by two or three individuals with no scruples – the way that the song can help – and a thousand other things to which I shall return. I left there exhilarated by happiness, I couldn’t sleep a wink all night and the next day I was shattered, worn out.7 During this campaign, as she built up amicable relations with workers’ groups, Tristan alluded to intense feelings of love in a familial sense in her propaganda. In her understanding of fraternity, it was important to win converts through this discourse of brotherhood and sisterhood. The song was an ideal outlet for such emotions with familial metaphors providing an outlet for fulsome expression of attachment among preacher and disciples. Its lyrics display the way that men in individual and collective positions deferred to a certain degree to a single and singular woman attempting to contrive a way of exploiting this genre for her own political purposes, albeit for the cause of humanity. Singing has always been a complex social activity involving more than one kind of collective association. It incorporates interactions of a number of agents: composer, lyricist, singer or singers and the audience. Political singing was and still is by definition a particular or specific social genre. The rise in the numbers of workers’ fraternal associations’ meetings in the mid-nineteenth century increased the occasions to use songs to mark special events in ceremonies, to strengthen a sense of identity and to represent a form of collective expression. The frequent changes of regime gave ample opportunity for affirming forms of sociability in public festivities. With the growth of fraternal organizations during the first half of the nineteenth century there was plenty of scope for using song to convey political messages.

Máire Fedelma Cross 227

Song composition was just part of a rich cultural development of mid-nineteenth-century France with Paris playing a leading role where the circulation of ideas among the lower classes through the medium of newspapers, books and letters had increased dramatically.8 Other cultural outlets developed or adapted to absorb new ideas and new forms of sociability among workers. Tristan would have been aware of the existence of songs, as there was a prolific output of their composition and performance in social clubs in the France of the 1840s reaching a climax during the Second Republic. The arrival of the commercial café concert provided another outlet for performance but the political repression after Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état in December 1851 which incurred a renewed surveillance of the dangerous classes sounded the death knell of the more spontaneous and informal singing groups as well as of the Second Republic. Gender and class divisions determined the structure of song associations. The two main rival bourgeois associations were Le Caveau, which dated from 1730, and La Lice chansonnière, formed in 1831 by republican workers. The singing associations affiliated to these two societies met monthly for a good meal and singing composition sessions. Women were excluded from both. The Caveau tradition was deliberately apolitical and anti-intellectual. Singing was about wine, women and song.9 This was equally true of the working-class organizations known as the Goguettes. After 1820 the number of Goguettes soared to over 400 to the extent that in the mid-1840s there was practically one for every street in Paris.10 In the custom and practice of singing therefore there were clubs for songwriters, clubs for performing songs and there were political associations that used song for propaganda purposes. Gauthier reminds us that the genre of song, part of a strong oral culture, was suited particularly to those with little education.11 Techniques in songwriting for the popular classes, like reading and writing, were not acquired easily in the early nineteenth century, although pioneers such as Guillaume Louis Bocquillon were inventing methods for teaching the basics of music theory, but little formal training was needed for singing.12 Evidence from other sources indicates that there was a great deal of interest in music making for political purposes, where the lyrics were put to already known tunes.13 The concept of song as a social artistic form as well as a political medium raises the very big question of definitions and assumptions about the authentic voice of the people in folk-song or working-class artistry.14 Since it is not directly relevant to this chapter it must be left aside for the present: suffice it to say here that new openings in artistic expression had

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been occurring from 1789 onwards together with the increasing democratization of forms of sociability in the new bourgeois and urban classes, with overlap and continuity of activities in the old artisan orders. New opportunities arose in which to express new sentiments of collective solidarity: New pressure put on lateral forms of social and political organisation. It was a rebellion against old hierarchy and father figure of monarch. […] Patriarchal authority was put to death and a republic of equal male brotherhood proclaimed.15 While there has been some attention to the way music contributed to cultural expression and politicization during the revolutionary moments involving ceremonies and crowds, song composition by workers has been analysed in the context of fraternal and/or artistic political expression but rarely with attention to a specific gendered dimension.16 As in the song cited above, Flora Tristan’s experience offers a sample of the extent of the reception of her ideas through song. The contribution of the genre of song as a focus for political sociability of men and women in fraternal associations can be measured thanks to the rare survival of written examples of the songs and letters sent to Tristan in the spring and summer of 1843. The song associations, in their heyday in Paris – they were an urban phenomenon – ranged from the simplest of spontaneous local gatherings for the purpose of singing for pleasure and fun to the more solemn renditions, most sophisticated of journeymen’s fraternities or other working men’s singing associations, a far cry from the well-documented codification of the classical repertoire of the song in upper-class circles performed in salons and concert halls with which Tristan was more familiar.17 Through this worker-song occurrence we can sample the reception of the fraternal association proposed and organized by Flora Tristan. This was not the only workers’ association envisaged in the 1840s, neither was it the only song written for that particular association. The very ancient rite of collective music making among fraternities and less formal social groupings evolved continually, shaped by social and cultural circumstances. In France during the 1840s, social or fraternal associations, the sole purpose of which was to produce songs and perform them, were at their peak when Flora Tristan was campaigning for her union.18 The high point of this musical fraternal association activity coincides therefore with the simultaneous growth of politicized fraternal organization and the increase in articulation of social aspirations by members

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of the popular classes. Of course singing in all social classes had always been more than a mutual social activity with its own rites and conventions. It has always been exploited successfully for propaganda methods by institutions holding power – the Church, the Army, employers – and those out of power, such as union activists and other republican and democrat groups opposed to the Monarchy that had replaced the conservative Bourbon regime after a successful popular three-day revolution in July 1830. Louis Philippe of Orleans had been brought to power by the disenchanted bourgeoisie desirous of a more liberal constitutional regime with freedom of the press and rights to form political clubs. The new freedoms lasted until the September laws of 1835, passed after there had been several further attempts at popular uprisings in 1831, 1832 and 1834, and an assassination attempt on the Citizen King who, by the 1840s, with his first minister François Guizot, had become impervious to calls for political reform, only to be overthrown in another popular uprising in February 1848.19 Throughout the period under discussion, the possible breakdown of public order was the greatest fear of the authorities and economic, social and political empowerment the greatest desire of the opposition groups who would resort to many forms of subversion, including singing. Police surveillance included watching the meetings of singing clubs. As songs were meant for performance, the more often people met, the more songs they were liable to sing. However, in the milieu where Flora Tristan was urging to sign up for her fraternal union, many songs were sung and then forgotten. Tristan did not record the name of the song sung at a particular emotional meeting she described in Marseille. It is therefore all the more interesting to read this surviving sample. Langomazino mentioned a critical tactic: the right of the people to overthrow an oppressive regime by force in order to claim its rights, a key legacy of French history. The socialist interpretation of this inalienable right was to energize social solidarity in organizations, thus giving a specific revolutionary but pacifist meaning to fraternal organizations in the mid-nineteenth century. Tristan’s self-created role as the woman redemptress was stimulated by romanticized song images typified by ‘this dear girl’. The discourse of this political song composition and the circumstances of its use or neglect have a direct relevance to the theme of gender and fraternal association. Tristan’s direct approach to the best-known specialists of songwriting had succeeded as it brought songs from lesser-known composers such as Langomazino. Although it would be impossible to generalize from one woman’s experience, the perspective of this female challenge to workers in a

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largely masculine domain can measure a different kind of awareness of membership of fraternal associations from that normally described. Even more unusually, we can look at the limitations and possibilities of a gendered analysis of masculine sociability in two overlapping fraternal organizations: a song composition contest from among songwriters’ associations for a new socialist union. The complex nature of workers’ fraternal associations in nineteenthcentury France has been discussed by scholars such as Agulhon, Aminzade, Magraw, Lequin, Sewell, Rancière and Truant.20 Indeed the politicization of French workers has fascinated political observers and historians because of the legacy of 1789. The significance of the vocal elite is not our focus. Arithmetically we know it was insignificant compared to the size of the social class from which it originated: As the study of those who took part in drafting editions of the almanacs indicate, the Parisian working class put more trust into the republican left during the final years of the July Monarchy. More than twenty or so workers wrote in the almanacs of the republican left.21 Equally it could be said that by 1843, when Langomazino composed his song, France was already famous for many types of fraternal associations and clubs because ‘an increasing number of workers became involved in some form of political activity during these years that produced so many calls for social changes’.22 The song composition reflects this phenomenon of the advanced politicization of the working class in France, albeit of a small number. The ruling classes feared the dangerous classes’ potential for creating further revolutionary upheavals. Equally anxious to avoid bloodbaths and in tune with other Utopian socialists, Flora Tristan preferred to foster fraternal associations of brotherhood and union as mentioned in the song, as the antithesis of revolutionary violence.23 In the new era of increasing proletarianization through industrialization, class hatred fomented by grinding poverty was seen as anathema to the wellbeing of humanity. The Utopians, Saint-Simonian men and women, Christian socialists, Icarian communists and men and women philanthropists from the enlightened bourgeoisie, sought to develop ways of finding a reconciliation of class hatred through their humanitarian visions of a class-collaborating harmonious society.24 After the failure of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, Marx and Engels developed further their theory of dialectical materialism based on their observations of the irreconcilable interests of opposing classes: the bourgeoisie and the

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proletariat. This, they said, would be resolved with the inevitable victory of the proletariat over its class enemy, the bourgeoisie. Tristan’s scheme was somewhere in between the Utopians and Marxism. Her idealization of familial love among workers was an effort at the reconciliation of conflicting fraternal organizations as well as gender and classes.25 She recognized the potential for popular uprisings because of irreconcilable class interests, but she was convinced that the working class could be the instrument of its own liberation through the peaceful means of a fraternal organization. Self-help groups of fraternal associations of some variety were proposed by all socialists whether or not they believed in the inevitability of the collapse of capitalism. Even those critics of Utopian socialists, Marx and Engels, helped shape the First and Second International Socialist Organizations that met in London in 1864 and Paris in 1889, but although based on fraternity, their efforts did not specify gender equality as an ambition in the way that Flora Tristan had specifically called for gender equality in her Union ouvrière. The song dimension offers an insight into reaction to her brand of fraternal association. The following is an extract of the student Leclair’s version, entitled ‘La Marseillaise de l’Union ouvrière’. It was one of the two chosen by Tristan to be included in the appendix to the second edition of her book: Glory to work, glory to love By which all men are brothers, And may heaven hasten the day Of our workers’ independence! Let us unite; in unity Our servitude will disappear, And from a dispossessed people We shall be reborn as a wise people! […] All our rights of man are yours, O mothers of humanity, On your brows as on ours You need the sun of equality! On this star of a new world Fix your triumphant looks, O women, blood which gives birth Is acknowledged by your children!26 Just how representative, or how political, or how large the French nascent working class was, is a question that dominates political history to the

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detriment of others, such as expressions of gender relations in political communication. Suffice it to say in this instance that the workers were by no means a heterogeneous group, with individuals and societies getting involved in the secret-society tradition, the hard-core Babouvists’ revolutionary tradition, the new republican movement of political suffrage, and the neo-Christian social pacifist campaign for social and economic reform.27 Whatever the tendencies, they depended on social meetings for political communication. It was doubly difficult for a woman outsider such as Flora Tristan to gain access to worker circles and to gain recognition from their leading activists, as many writers were seeking the attentions of a relatively limited number of potential activists from the mass of illiterate workers. A song sent from Toulon to Paris in July 1843 meant word had spread quickly about Flora Tristan’s Union ouvrière, as it had only just been published that spring. Of most interest here are the brief moments of explicit gender opinions in these new channels of communication between songwriters and contests and the female author of a fraternal association.28 In terms of networking with fraternal organizations and contributing to the discourse of their politics, the year 1843 was momentous for Flora Tristan. By dint of her literary success, the author of Promenades dans Londres had established a reputation as a champion of the oppressed; she had succeeded in penetrating the socialist intellectual milieux of both France and Britain where schemes of fraternal organizations were being created.29 Like all reformers, she considered her fraternal union was much better than existing schemes. In a chapter entitled ‘De l’insuffisance des sociétés de secours, compagnonnage, etc.’ (On the inadequacy of mutual-aid societies, guilds, etc.) she explained her intentions: A plan for a general union, the aim of which is to give the working class a social status so that it is in a position to demand its right to work, its right to education and its right to political representation, because it is clear that all other improvements will follow from these rights.30 She had many types of association to emulate in those years of creativity, both at home and abroad.31 In order to emphasize the power of fraternal solidarity to the French workers she chose to cite the celebrated case of the most oppressed and poorest, rather than the most politically sophisticated: it was not so much the vision of the English Chartists campaigning for the suffrage that inspired her in her drafting

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of a workers’ union but the penny-a-week contributions given to the champion of emancipation, Daniel O’Connell, in order to procure and fund a defender of the people. She explained that through the small contributions mounting to a much larger sum, the Repeal Association served as a shining example of what the really oppressed could achieve by association. If the Irish could achieve emancipation, argued Tristan, surely too could the French workers: French people you are the richest people on the whole earth, […] if bare-footed starving Irish workers can give a two-million stipend for twelve years to their defender O’Connell, then surely you French workers could give fourteen million per annum to house and feed your honest work veterans and train the novices.32 Not content with salon talk of the Parisian socialist intelligentsia, Flora Tristan had decided to find a wider audience, although she maintained pressure on leading Parisian activists in her fund-raising publishing campaigns and for gaining contacts in worker associations. Rather than operate within the well-intentioned but bourgeois philanthropic milieu of liberal professionals, scientists, doctors and women do-gooders, Tristan believed she was breaking new ground by intentionally seeking direct contact with authentic ‘workers’: Workers have been the subject of debates in parliament, Christian sermons, they are discussed in social talk, on stage and especially in court, but no one has tried to talk to the workers. That is a method that must be tried.33 Her book, Union ouvrière, the sole intention of which was the creation of a workers’ organization, of the same name Union ouvrière, was aimed directly at inciting men and women of the working class (specifically mentioning ouvriers and ouvrières) to form an autonomous movement, free from bourgeois influences, to create their own means of salvation from the oppression of poverty. In gender terms alone this was revolutionary. In organizational terms Tristan forged links with fraternal organizations in a very short time in ways that no other individual man or woman had imagined or succeeded in doing. Quite how she did so can be appreciated in her tactic of using the song. Since she considered it to be a vital part of her propaganda, we have the evidence as she chose to present it in her later editions of Union ouvrière. The impact of the song is also mentioned in her diary where she recorded

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the success and failure of rallying workers to her fraternal union, particularly at the ceremonious banquets she held during her tour of France where the idea of the union would be toasted. Her accounts are vital evidence of the organization and atmosphere of these association meetings and of the reception to the idea of this proposed fraternal union. Before she got to the stage of meeting workers, Tristan had to find them. In order to do this she got in touch with the workers’ association leaders in Paris. By February 1843 Flora Tristan had corresponded with or had held a series of meetings with leading worker intellectuals and their various support networks, including the compagnon reformer Agricol Perdiguier and writers Louis Vinçard, Charles Poncy and Jacques Gosset. She sought their aid as militant artists, already known for their writing in different genres, whether novels, poetry, song, newspaper articles or personal memoirs. To them her request was to win their public support for her idea of a union and of a publication. Vinçard, the printer Rosenfeld, Louis Evrat and Perdiguier, associated with the workers’ monthly publication La Ruche populaire, gave her most support. However, although sympathetic at first, full support from an organization that accepted all her ideas was not forthcoming: either there was disagreement over some of her female ideas or there were organizational problems. La Ruche populaire was undergoing some turmoil financially and politically in 1843 and was soon to have its own scissions. Disagreements between Tristan, her worker contacts and publishers over publication and policy dragged on over the next two months until Tristan realized that the only way to get published was to draw up her own subscription list, and the only way to get an organization off the ground was to campaign for it herself. Some had found her plan for a workers’ self-help palace too Utopian, some found she was too frank about workers’ behaviour out of hours, others did not agree with her belief in gender equality among workers. She met with antagonism as an intellectual femme bourgeoise who wished to impose her own ideas for a union on them. At first she claimed she sought nothing more than their approval of her ideas in print for a new kind of organization, but then she assumed they would do more than approve. She wanted them all to sign up for this form of union. In the event she could persuade no publisher in Paris to take on the book as a commercial enterprise. She also needed an advance sum to pay for the publication and distribution and she needed to organize the book sales. The publication venture was a runaway success in terms of self-help and cooperation. Publication figures speak for themselves. In the same year of 1843, despite the disagreements with

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leading workers, she succeeded in getting her book Union ouvrière published (the preface for the first edition is dated 7 May 1843) and subsequently distributed entirely through raising subscriptions and contributions from well-wishers. Political networking is a gradual process with a cumulative effect. One fortuitous contact led to another. Through her propaganda contacts with the elite of Parisian workers Tristan tested her ideas, was published and set about creating her own propaganda for her own workers’ association. This in turn led her to concentrate on further propaganda methods. What better way to spread the idea of unity against the oppressor than to use the most popular cultural vehicle, the song, for spreading new ideas to her audience of ‘7 millions d’ouvriers’? She prefaced her first edition of May 1843 with her call for a song and explains why: I would have liked to place a song at the beginning of this little book that would have summed up my idea: THE UNION, and to have as a chorus: ‘Brothers, let us unite! Sisters, let us unite!’ The extraordinary effect a song has on workers assembled in a crowd is caused by magnetism. A song can produce heroes for war or priests preaching peace.34 She then went on to explain the outcome of her initial request to Pierre-Jean de Béranger, the most senior figure among song lyricists of the time:35 I went straight to Béranger’s home to ask the people’s poet for a song for the union. – The great poet and excellent man received me in a fraternal way and told me: ‘Your title is beautiful, very beautiful!’36 By engaging in the propaganda process of the song, composition acquired a further intimacy with workers’ cultural networks. She was to discover that feelings ran very high about this cultural phenomenon: apart form the question of class and gender identity was that of the professional integrity, dignity and pride of the songwriters. In some ways she was to attain greater affinity with some leading workers, in others she was to distance herself further. The way both affinity and antagonism developed affected her own professional identity as a socialist propagandist. In step, in workers’ organizations, workers would sing her praises as the ‘dear girl’, out of step with their ambitions she would be lampooned mercilessly as a female busybody.37

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At first she approached well-known songwriters and poets, namely Eugène Sue, Charles Poncy and the poet Béranger. She recorded the details of her visit to Béranger in the first pages of her journal of 1843. Present at the composer’s table was another poet of humble origins, Savinien Lapointe, who went on to become a songwriter of note. Reasons for giving a detailed account in her diary were specific to her propaganda campaign and pedagogical for class-interest lessons. She was met with a polite refusal by Béranger, who claimed he was past writing feisty songs for great causes. She must have insisted: he did not turn down her request for help and it would seem that he gave her moral support in the months subsequent to her visit: he was appointed judge of the competition but like a good liberal could not make up his mind on the outcome saying all the entries were worthy. This in fact is what led to the dispute with Ferrand who did not agree with her choice of entry for the prize of a medal that Sue had donated. As an outsider to the artistic milieu of worker poets and composers, Flora Tristan developed a direct and forceful style when seeking help, hence her visit to the home of the poet Béranger, or a letter to the bestknown composers of her day, whom she approached before the visit to Béranger. The letter gave her further material with which to exploit the song contest as she then published her selection of letters with the songs chosen in her third edition. Her letter to Poncy gives us an idea of the tone she adopted when asking for collaboration in this project: Dear Mr Poncy, I know you through your poetry and through a man who loves you sincerely, the poet Vinçard. – I would like to tell you that I have high hopes of you. – because in the mission I intend to carry out I need help from worker writers. But before I tell you for what and how I am counting on [you] – I want you to read my book on the Poverty of the English Workers. […] Please dear Sir, write to me while you are reading this – so that I know what effect this veritable exact description of all the misfortunes that afflict the English people affects your soul as a poet. – It does not mater if the letter is disorganised, just send it to me as it is, – without copying it – because that will dilute the impact. I repeat, I have a real interest (because it comes from the love I feel for humanity) in taking possession of your soul, your heart and your mind, because I would like to be able to use everything that is good and beautiful in you to carry out my great and beautiful task! I shake your hand affectionately and am your sister in humanity. Flora Tristan, Paris, 20 January 1843.38 Poncy responded by composing some verse but refused to have it identified as a song saying he thought his colleague Vinçard was a better

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choice. As it was too late for the first edition, at the end of the second edition of her book Tristan added an appendix to include his offering together with two song compositions as the best among the results of her call for a song which would publicize the spirit of her new workers’ union. Tristan considered that the reply from Poncy reinforced the authenticity of his composition as a worker poet. She included it with the song: I had asked Mr Poncy for a song: the letter he sent with it adds further merit to this precious gift. – It proves that the poet is really a worker and that the mason worker is a great poet. ‘Dear Madam, I apologise for taking such a long time to reply. But I work three leagues from the town where we are constructing a lazaret. I am living far away from any literature or politics or from any news. I am living with some Genoans, the sky and the sea. That is all. Added to which I am slaving night and day and that manual labour leaves me with very little time in the evening to devote to my studies, that is if I am lucky enough to stay awake. My letters only come with the supplies in cargo boats sometimes more than a fortnight after their arrival in Toulon. That is what happened to yours. – Enclosed is my work; I am sure that it will not please you. […] Nevertheless, I wanted to prove my goodwill to please you and to be useful to my brothers.’39 Writing from an isolated building site, Poncy was far removed from the rivalries of Parisian circles. His message was simple: he would produce something for his brothers. This particular worker poet was already a great favourite with George Sand. Indeed Flora Tristan was well aware of the fact that she had to compete with George Sand for the attentions of the worker-poet milieu. We do not know if this explains why she chose to place Poncy’s letter and song in the third edition of Union ouvrière. Langomazino’s song was not included. We can only speculate why. There is no mention of this rejection, nor is there a record of any reply to Langomazino. In 1843 Flora Tristan became acquainted with a group of people alien to her in class and gender. One of her remarkable abilities was the dexterity with which she handled new situations. In tune with her age she was eager to seize on every opportunity that would facilitate her contact with people. The song helped reach a wider population: music and singing were essential parts of many fraternal organizations for promoting fraternal feelings. Songwriting for Flora Tristan was an ephemeral interest. It was to be a vehicle of propaganda in the way

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other associations used it. She recognized that through the medium of song she was more likely to reach the oppressed and excluded who had no voice. She was not the first person to use the song in this way to gain publicity for her cause, but little attention has been given to her interest in this genre. Yet it was important: her persuasion worked and as songwriters were letter-writers we have a record of the political relationships worked out through the agency of gender and class. Tristan’s aspiration to use this genre created a political space for her which would not have existed otherwise and broke down class and gender barriers in a way she had not envisaged and in a way unique to the song genre. Although she did not keep an exact record of the songs she received, she presented her selection in an appendix to Union ouvrière and retained copies in her correspondence. Throughout this exchange in letters and in verse Flora Tristan prioritized the call for solidarity over and above any other theme. She believed the workers’ union would surpass ignorance and poverty, the greatest enemies of the worker. She used familial metaphors to promote a sense of fraternity and the songwriters responded to this message. Her authority as an outsider had come from her writing about the English working class. Unashamedly inimical of any existing systems, such as those of Pierre Moreau or Perdiguier, she relished using the discourse and communication systems of previous or competing ventures, such as the song. The Parisian elite of skilled workers was the vanguard of thinkers and activists, more wary perhaps than its provincial brothers, but with more power and flexibility in networking. The apparent ease with which Flora Tristan was able to galvanize enough people in Paris and in the provinces to participate in a song contest is testimony to this sophisticated network. The songwriters Tristan contacted were not professionals but were involved politically in a wider fraternal network. With or without the help of song fraternities, Tristan’s proposal for a union did not succeed with the Parisian elite but it left her a free agent to branch out and to campaign in provincial towns where the songs proved useful for crystallizing expressions of political will at the workers’ banquets. Whether it was by intuition or imitation, Flora Tristan knew how to get the men to sing.40 The final chapter discusses fraternal merrymaking of a quite different order.

Notes 1 ‘Unissons-nous ! au banquet de la vie | Prenons la part que Dieu nous offre à tous. | Aimons-nous bien, la douce sympathie | Nous rendra forts, cette fille chérie | Veut, aujourd’hui s’allier avec nous. | Avec transports chantons

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2

3

4

5

6 7 8

9

10 11

12

13 14

ces mots bénis | Soyons unis, soyons unis ! !’, song from a letter to Flora Tristan, Puech Archive, Castres, France. For a recent contribution to a gendered interpretation of Utopian socialism by Flora Tristan’s contemporaries but where there is little reference to their interface with workers’ organizations see Naomi Andrews, Socialism’s Muse: Gender in the Intellectual Landscape of French Romantic Socialism (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006). ‘Avec la paix nous ferons des merveilles, | Avec l’union nous serons tout puissant ; | Des chants d’amour charmeront nos oreilles.’, Puech Archive, Castres, France. For a recent biography of Langomazino, see Dominique Lecoeur, Louis Langomazino (1820–1885) : un missionnaire républicain de la Provence aux îles Marquises (Les Mées: Association 1851; Mane: Alpes de lumieres, 2002). See Marie-Véronique Gauthier, Chanson, sociabilité et grivoiserie au XIXe siècle, Collection historique (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1993); Pierre Pierrard, Chansons populaires de Lille sous le Second Empire (La Tour-d’Aigues: Editions de l’Aube, 1998). The author has explored elsewhere the themes of the song composed for Flora Tristan’s workers’ union: see Máire Fedelma Cross, ‘Tuning into Politics: Flora Tristan’s Songs for the Union ouvrière’ in French History and Civilization: Papers from the George Rudé Seminar, ed. by Ian Coller, Helen Davies and Julie Kalman, 1 vol. (Melbourne: The George Rudé Society, 2005), I, 82–96. For further background on Tristan’s political impact on the worker organizations see Máire Fedelma Cross, The Letter in Flora Tristan’s Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004). See Jules-L. Puech, La Vie et l’oeuvre de Flora Tristan (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1925) pp. 156–61. Flora Tristan’s Diary: The Tour of France, trans. by Máire Fedelma Cross (Berne: Peter Lang, 2002), pp. 309–10. See Ronald Gosselin, Les Almanachs républicains : Traditions révolutionnaires et culture politique des masses populaires de Paris (1840–1851) (Paris: Editions de l’Harmattan et Sainte-Foy; Quebec: Presses de l’Université de Laval, 1993). For an analysis of the bawdiness (grivoiserie) as an expression of masculine sociability see Marie-Véronique Gauthier, ‘Sociétés chantantes et grivoiserie au XIXe siècle’, Romantisme, 68, 1990, 75–86. Gauthier, Chanson, sociabilité et grivoiserie, p. 45. Marie-Véronique Gauthier, ‘Frénésie poétique et anti-intellectualisme dans les sociétés chantantes au XIXe siècle’, in Melanges offerts à Maurice Agulhon. La France démocratique, ed. by Anne-Marie Sohn and others (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1998), pp. 157–66 (p. 159). See Guillaume-Louis Bocquillon, Methode B. Wilhem – manuel musical (Paris: Perrotin Libraire Editeur, 1841), trans. by James Alexander Hamilton as Singing for the Million: Wilhem’s Celebrated Method of Teaching Singing in Classes (London: D. Almaine & Co., 1843). Ralph P. Locke, Music, Musicians, and the Saint-Simonians (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986). For a discussion of the literary establishment’s appreciation of the ‘folk voice’ of the people see Michel Brix, ‘Une renaissance romantique : les chansons populaires’, in La Voix du peuple dans la littérature des XIXe et XXe siècles, ed. by

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15

16

17

18

19

20

21

Corinne Grenouillet and Éléonore Reverzy (Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2006) pp. 29–40; also Robert Muchembled, Culture populaire et culture des élites dans la France moderne XVe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Flammarion, 1991). Artistic Brotherhood in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Laura Morowitz and William Vaughan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. 32. See also Carol E. Harrison, The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth Century France: Gender, Sociability, and the Uses of Emulation (Oxford: Oxford Historical Monographs, 1999), W. Scott Haine, The World of the Paris Café: Sociability among the French Working Class, 1789–1914 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). For a discussion on working-class cultural identity in France see Jacques Rancière, La Nuit des prolétaires (Paris: Fayard, 1981); Neil McWilliam, Dreams of Happiness: Social Art and the French Left, 1830–1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). The opening of Tristan’s novel Méphis is set at a ball where the mysterious heroine enchants the hero with her song recital: Flora Tristan, Méphis, 2 vols (Paris: Ladvocat, 1838; repr. Paris: Indigo & Côté-femmes éditions, 1996–97), I (1996), 28. See also Emmanuel Hondré, ‘Le conservatoire de Paris et le renouveau du “chant français”’, Romantisme, 93 (1996), 83–94. For the production of music in early nineteenth-century French bourgeois public circles see David Tunley, Salons, Singers and Songs: A Background to Romantic French Song, 1830–1870 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); William Weber, Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1975); Jane Fulcher, The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicised Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Under the Restoration Monarchy, 480 song societies existed with 9600 songwriters and 300,000 songs produced in Paris alone. See Gauthier, ‘Frénésie poétique’, p. 161. For further details of this period see Hugh A. C. Collingham, The July Monarchy: A Political History of France 1830–1848 (London and New York: Longman, 1988); William Fortescue, France and 1848: The End of the Monarchy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005). See for example, Maurice Agulhon, Une ville ouvrière au temps du socialisme utopique. Toulon de 1815 à 1851 (Paris and The Hague: Mouton, 1970); Ronald Aminzade, Ballots and Barricades: Class Formation and Republican Politics in France 1830–1871 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Roger Magraw, A History of the French Working Class, 2 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); Yves Lequin, Les Ouvriers de la région lyonnaise 1848–1914 (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1977); William H. Sewell, Jr, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Cynthia Maria Truant, The Rites of Labor: Brotherhoods of Compagnonnage in Old Regime and New Regime France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). ‘Comme en témoigne l’étude de ceux qui collaborent à la rédaction d’almanachs, la classe ouvrière parisienne met davantage sa confiance dans le programme politique de la gauche républicaine au cours des dernières années de la monarchie orléaniste. Plus d’une vingtaine d’ouvriers écrivent dans les almanachs de la gauche républicaine.’, Gosselin, p. 71.

Máire Fedelma Cross 241 22 ‘La grande nouveauté de ces années riches en revendications sociales de toutes sortes, c’est le passage d’ouvriers de plus en plus nombreux vers une forme de culture politique.’, Gosselin, p. 71. 23 See Marcel David, Le Printemps de la fraternité. Genèse et vicissitudes 1830–1851 (Paris: Aubier, 1992). For an analysis of Flora Tristan’s attitude to revolutionary violence see Máire Fedelma Cross, ‘“A Conflict of Interests”: Gender, Class and Revolutionary Violence in Flora Tristan’s Campaign 1843–44’, in Violence and Conflict in the Politics and Society of Modern France, ed. by Jan Windebank and Renate Gunther (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995), pp. 21–35. 24 Louis-René Villermé, Tableau de l’état physique et moral des ouvriers employés dans les manufactures de coton, de laine et de soie (Paris: Paul Renouard, 1840; repr. Paris: Etudes et documentation internationales, 1989). 25 See Tessie P. Liu, The Weaver’s Knot: The Contradictions of Class Struggle and Family Solidarity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). 26 ‘Gloire au travail, gloire à l’amour | Par qui tous les hommes sont frères, | Et que le ciel hâte le jour | De nos franchises ouvrières ! | Unissons-nous ; dans l’unité | Disparaˆıtra notre servage, | Et de peuple déshérité | Nous renaitrons en peuple sage ! […] | Tous nos droits d’hommes sont les vôtres, | O mères de l’humanité, | Il faut à vos fronts comme aux nôtres | Le soleil de légalité ! | A cet astre d’un nouveau monde | Fixez vos regards triomphants, | O femmes, le sang qui féconde | Est avoué par vos enfants!’, Flora Tristan, Union ouvrière, ed. by Daniel Armogathe and Jacques Grandjonc (Paris: Des femmes, 1986), pp. 277–8. 27 For a recent article on Babeuf, see Ian H. Birchall, ‘When the Revolution Had to Stop’, in The French Experience from Republic to Monarchy, 1792–1824, ed. by Máire Fedelma Cross and David Williams (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 42–57. For a study of the vote see Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Sacre du citoyen. Histoire du suffrage universel en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), pp. 253–94; Raymond Huard, Le Suffrage universel en France 1848–1946 (Paris: Aubier, 1991), pp. 19–68. For work on Tristan’s contemporaries see David W. Lovell, ‘The French Revolution and the Origins of Socialism: The Case of Early French Socialism’, French History, 6, II (1992), 185–205; Pamela Pilbeam, French Socialists before Marx (Teddington: Acumen, 2000). 28 For significant contributions to the collective question of gender in fraternal associations in France, but in a later period, see Helen Harden Chenut, The Fabric of Gender: Working-Class Culture in Third Republic France (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005); Gender and Class in Modern Europe, ed. by Laura Levine Frader and Sylvia O. Rose (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); Patricia Hilden, Working Women and Socialist Politics in France, 1880–1914: A Regional Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). 29 See Iorwerth Prothero, Radical Artisans in England and France, 1830–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 30 ‘Un plan d’union générale, dont le but serait de placer la classe ouvrière dans une position sociale qui la mît à même de pouvoir réclamer son droit au travail, son droit à l’instruction et son droit à la représentation devant le pays ; car il est bien clair que de là découleraient naturellement toutes les autres améliorations.’, Union ouvrière, p. 149. 31 She quoted the following names in a footnote in her address to the workers: ‘Saint-Simon, Owen, Fourier, and their followers, Parent-Duchâtelet, Eugène

242 Flora Tristan’s Appeal for Fraternity

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

Buret, Villermé, Pierre Leroux, Louis Blanc, Gustave de Beaumont, Proudhon, Cabet, and among the workers, Adolphe Boyer, Agricol Perdiguer, Pierre Moreau, etc.’, Union ouvrière, p. 139. ‘Et vous, peuple Français, le plus riche de toute la terre, […] si les ouvriers irlandais allant nu-pieds et le ventre creux, ont donné, pendant douze ans deux millions d’honoraires à leur défenseur O’Connell, vous pouvez bien vous, ouvriers Français, donner quatorze millions par an pour loger et nourrir vos braves vétérans du travail et élever les novices.’, Union ouvrière, p. 144. ‘A la tribune des chambres, dans la chaire chrétienne, dans les assemblées du monde, sur les théâtres et surtout dans les tribunaux on a parlé des ouvriers ; mais personne encore n’a essayé de parler aux ouvriers. – C’est un moyen qu’il faut tenter.’, Union ouvrière, p. 147. ‘J’aurais désiré pouvoir mettre en tête de ce petit livre un chant qui résumât mon idée : – l’UNION, – et pour refrain : – « Frères, unissons-nous ! – Sœurs, unissons-nous ! » – Le chant produit sur les ouvriers réunis en masse un effet extraordinaire qui tient du magnétisme. A l’aide d’un chant on peut, à volonté, en faire des héros propres à la guerre ou des hommes religieux propres à la paix.’, Union ouvrière, p. 138. Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1780–1857) had published his last songs by 1833 in which he expressed his sympathy for Utopian socialist projects. An antimonarchist, in 1848 he refused to accept a seat in the new assembly but also refused to associate himself in any way with Napoléon III. See Le Maitron : Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier français (CD-ROM, Paris: Editions de l’Atelier, 1997). ‘Je suis allée droit chez Béranger, le poète de tous, lui demander le chant de l’UNION. – Le grand poète et l’excellent homme m’a reçue d’une manière toute fraternelle et m’a dit […] « Votre titre est beau, très beau ! ».’, Union ouvrière, p. 138. ‘O’Connell in petticoats’: see Máire Fedelma Cross, ‘Flora Tristan’s Socialist Propaganda in Provincial France, 1843–1844: The Relationship between Propaganda, Identity and Political Rhetoric in Flora Tristan’s Campaign for a Workers’ Union’, in Propaganda, Political Rhetoric and Identity, 1300–2000, ed. by Bertrand Taithe and Tim Thornton (Stroud: Sutton, 1999), pp. 151–65 (p. 152). ‘Monsieur Poncy, Je vous connais par vos vers et aussi par un homme qui vous aime sincèret, Vinçard le poète – Je vous dirai que j’ai fondé sur vous de grandes espérances – parce que dans la mission que je projette remplir, j’ai besoin pr m’aider d’ouvriers écrivains – Mais avant de vous dire en quoi et comment je compte sur [vous] – je désire que vous ayez lu mon livre sur les Misères des ouvriers anglais. […] Je vous en prie, mon cher Monsieur, écrivezmoi pendant que vous serez sous l’impression de cette lecture – afin que je sache l’effet qu’aura produit sur votre âme poétique la terrible et exacte description de toutes les misères qui accablent le peuple anglais. – Que votre lettre soit en désordre, peu importe, envoyez-la moi telle qu’elle sera, – sans la copier – la correction la refroidirait. Je vous le répète, j’ai un grand intérêt (car c’est au point de vue de l’amour que je ressens pr l’humanité) à prendre possession de votre âme, de votre cœur et de votre esprit, parce que je voudrais pouvoir me servir de tout ce qu’il y a de bon et de beau en vous pour effectuer ma grande et belle oeuvre ! – Je vous serre la main affectueusemt et suis votre sœur

Máire Fedelma Cross 243 en l’humanité. Flora Tristan, Paris, ce 20 janvier 1843.’, see Stéphane Michaud, Flora Tristan, Lettres, reunites, présentées et annotées (Paris: Seuil, 1980), pp. 132–3, also cited in his Flora Tristan : La Paria et son rêve (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2003), p. 157. 39 J’avais demandé à M. Poncy un chant : il me l’envoya et la lettre qui l’accompagnait ajoute un nouveau mérite à ce précieux don. – Elle prouve que le poète est réellement un ouvrier maçon et que l’ouvrier maçon est un grand poète. ‘Madame, Je vous demande bien pardon d’avoir mis un si long retard à vous répondre. Mais je travaille à trois lieues de la ville sur une île où nous bâtissons un lazaret. Là je vis loin de toute littérature, de toute politique, de toute actualité. Je vis avec quelques Génois, le ciel et la mer. Voilà tout. Ajoutez à cela que je travaille tout le jour comme un damné et que le travail des bras ne me laisse que les très courts loisirs du soir à consacrer à mes travaux littéraires, heureux que je suis lorsque le sommeil ne s’en empare pas. Mes lettres ne m’y parviennent qu’avec les bateaux chargés de matériaux, souvent plus de quinze jours après leur arrivée à Toulon. C’est ce qui est arrivé à la vôtre. – Voici mon travail ; je suis persuadé d’avance qu’il ne vous plaira pas. […] Néanmoins, j’ai voulu vous prouver ma bonne volonté à être agréable à vous et utile à mes frères.’, Union ouvrière, p. 269. 40 Thanks to Tim Baycroft, Andrew Prescott and Conrad Smith for their comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

12 Civil Space and Gender Roles in Lerwick’s Up Helly Aa Pamela M. King

Lerwick (pop. 7000), capital of the Shetland Islands (pop. 22,000), lies equidistant between Aberdeen and Bergen. Up Helly Aa is Lerwick’s winter fire festival, deriving from celebrations of Yule in the old calendar, now settled on the last Tuesday in January. Although the Vikings clearly did visit Shetland, as the Orkneyinga Saga testifies, so did everyone else. Long after the Vikings had been and gone, Lerwick grew up in its sheltered harbourage in the sound between Mainland and Bressay, providing service industries, including smuggling and prostitution as well as the more reputable production of woollen garments, to seventeenth-century Dutch mariners. Modern-day Lerwigians work at the fishing (although the once-thriving herring industry is all but dead), tourism, and oil-related industries. The origins of Up Helly Aa are no more ancient than they are ‘Viking’, but are the product of a cunning conspiracy of town, gown and crown to regularize dangerous practices popular amongst the indigenous local population as a respite from fishing, knitting, smuggling and the rest. The practices in question included dressing up in outlandish costumes, setting fire to tar barrels and rolling them through the narrow streets, as well as lighting balls of tarred rope and posting them through the letterboxes of the clergy, local councillors, and other members of the middle-class inhabitants of the ‘New Town’ of villas which had grown up in the lee of the ridge which rises behind the old town on the harbour front. While Victoria and Albert were falling in love with and sentimentalizing the Scottish heartland, their son Prince Alfred discovered Shetland, contributing to the construction of Lerwick’s town hall, the Gothic exterior of which conceals a vaulted interior hall constructed to look like an upturned longship, with stained-glass windows representing what the Victorians conceived the Vikings to have looked like. The festival settled 244

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into the original of its present pattern around the same period, under the influence of temperance and socialist movements, taming the prevailing chaos by offering the local male populace the acceptably masculine opportunity to dress up as their Norse ancestors.1 The organization of the present-day festival is very complex. All revolves around the Guizer Jarl, who is given the freedom of Lerwick for the day and immediately declares a public holiday. He is a member of the Up Helly Aa committee, the aldermanic group in charge of the festival, but he also belongs to a ‘squad’. There are currently 42 squads, each of which participates in Up Helly Aa every year, dressing up, or ‘guizing’, according to some topical and/or satirical theme. When a squad has been able to demonstrate stability by turning out for at least 15 sequential Up Helly Aa’s, it qualifies to be the Jarl’s Squad, and one of its number is taken on to the committee to prepare for the day when he will be Jarl. Only the Jarl’s Squad dresses as Vikings, and when a squad is Jarl’s Squad it is augmented by returning émigrés and other invited male relatives of squad members. All squads meet weekly throughout the year to organize and make their costumes and devise their ‘turn’ for the festival. The Jarl’s Squad is even more active, having to perform various public and charitable duties all year. It is reckoned to cost the Jarl in the region of £15,000 of his own money to fulfil the office, and the Viking costumes of every squad member are so elaborate that many take out ten-year savings plans in anticipation. The Up Helly Aa committee organizes the building of the galley which will be burnt and the making of torches for the 1500 participating squad members, and also runs the Up Helly Aa museum which is housed in the roof space of the galley shed. There is in addition a junior Up Helly Aa, made up of squads of boys from the local schools, which has its own mini-procession, and burns its own galley before the main event. No women are involved at all in any element of the festival thus far described, but the female relations of those involved in Up Helly Aa have devised their own vital role in the festival as hostesses in the ha’s (halls) where the all-night parties take place. Their roles are equally status sensitive and ritualized. The evolution of Up Helly Aa is complex. As an historian of the medieval mystery plays who has also studied Spanish religious and civic festivals such as Valencia’s Corpus Christi and Seville’s Holy Week, the author was intrigued by organizational coincidences: the squads operate a guild system; the galley shed is just like the pageant house of modern Valencia (and possibly like those of fifteenth-century Coventry and York); and the composition and route of the Lerwick procession held no surprises for someone familiar with the Spanish festivals. That, and the later discovery

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of other anthropological studies of festive events, was the genesis of this chapter.2 It seems important to distinguish between the narrative of practices which evolved into Up Helly Aa, and the narrative of the evolution of the festival from the moment at which it settled into something identifiable as its current form. It is in the latter narrative that we find an understanding of the gender roles and attitudes that can be observed in the present-day festival. One could argue that those roles and attitudes are historically determined by a particular moment of social history in which male confraternities such as the Rechabites offered models for the organizational principles on which the squads are modelled. At the same time bourgeois female domestic life was given an assertive public face and a voice through radical journalism and the foundation of associations directed at women. The selfconscious and self-confident approach to the role of the married woman that characterizes the very end of Victoria’s reign goes some way to explaining not only the evolved physical organization of the ha’s, but the confidently autonomous status of that organization. Callum Brown’s recent intelligent and sensitive study of Up Helly Aa approaches the history of the festival by aiming to ‘peel back the layers’, not to ‘debunk myth’ but to show how a community’s ‘deepest heritage is preserved and celebrated through every invention and transformation of custom’, and how the present-day ritual is ‘deeply modern’.3 One could have no argument with Brown’s meticulously researched thesis, but where he contextualizes Up Helly Aa within the set of calendar customs, here we will look at its present-day organization less as ritual than as theatre, or as a liturgy which embraces the whole civic community, allocating roles and spaces in a way which is influenced by membership of social group and by gender. The components of the festival currently form a sequence of events at Up Helly Aa. On the Monday evening immediately preceding the festival, the galley shed is open by invitation for the ‘Signing of the Bill’ by the Guizer Jarl. The ‘Bill’ is a large billboard on which is written a topical satirical attack on local worthies, designed to expose suspected corruption and humbug in general. The galley is also on public view for the first time. Once signed, the Bill is transported to the market cross where it stays for the next 48 hours. At nine in the morning on the Tuesday, the Jarl’s Squad accompanied by a brass band processes around the town, the costumes on view for the first time, and the galley is taken down to the harbour front where it sits all day. The Jarl’s Squad’s ‘Viking’ costumes are unique to each successive

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year’s squad, elaborate and immensely expensive constructs of metal, leather, sealskin, fur and feathers. Certain elements are always present in the iconography, however, including helmet, axe and shield, the last bearing whatever device has been adopted by the squad. There is no attempt at ‘authenticity’; rather the folklorist’s image of the Viking, dressed in fur, leather and precious metals, topped by a horned or winged helmet, prevails. Each year’s Jarl’s squad vies to outdo its predecessors in the luxury and ingenuity of its costumes. At mid-morning there is an invitation-only reception in the town hall at which all past Jarls, civic dignitaries and honoured guests witness the Chairman of the Burgh Council, in the company of the Lord Lieutenant, hand custody of Lerwick over to the Jarl for the day. There are speeches and toasts. The Jarl’s band plays traditional music to entertain the guests, and the platform party seals the handover by drinking from a silver longship. The Jarl’s Squad then spends the afternoon visiting local hospitals and nursing homes. After dark (late afternoon) the junior squads assemble behind the town hall with their galley, have their own torchlight procession, take their galley on to the burning site, and set fire to it. This is followed by the torchlight procession proper. Fifteen-hundred men in fancy dress process to and fro along the packed streets of the New Town carrying burning torches. The Jarl stands on the galley which has been brought from the shore to take part in the procession. The galley is eventually brought into the park, followed by all the squads who begin to form concentric circles around the ship. When all are in place, they sing the Galley Song, which is sung at every point in the proceedings. The Jarl gets out of the galley, then the innermost circle of torch-bearers throw their torches into the galley, turning and passing between the next rank who do likewise, until all the torches are in the galley which is now ablaze. They all then sing the lament for the galley and disperse. Now the parties begin. Throughout the whole night, each of the 42 squads, including the Jarl’s Squad, visits each of 12 ha’s in sequence. The ha’s, run by female hostesses, are in schools, church halls and hotels, each one providing throughout the night food, drink, and dancing to live bands. When a squad arrives at a ha’ it is introduced by the master of ceremonies and the floor is cleared for the guizing. The squad performs its turn, lasting about five minutes, and based on some topical local or national satirical theme, or on a television show or pop video. The Jarl’s Squad costume is derived from tradition, but the reverse applies to members of the other squads, whose extravagant and inventive costumes offer

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a distillation of the year’s popular culture. A lot of the guizings involve cross-dressing. After a squad has performed, it stays to join in a dance or two, retires to the dining area and is fed, has a drink, then gets into its transport and moves on to the next ha’. The highlight of the night is the visit of the Jarl’s Squad and the most prestigious ha’ appears to be the one favoured by the wives of members of the Jarl’s Squad. On Wednesday morning proceedings finally come to an end almost exactly 24 hours after they began. The day is a public holiday. Civic procession typically beats the bounds of civic space. As Gwen Neville observes of the Selkirk Border Riding, ‘The encirclement of the boundaries is an encirclement of the known and possessed world, in opposition to the world beyond, unknown and impossible to control.’4 In Selkirk, the whole burgh space is encircled to mark it off from the estates of ‘the encroaching aristocracy’. Elsewhere, encircling processions are more selective and that selectivity implies an articulation of nuanced places within the overall civic space. In the southern Catalan town of Elche every year a unique drama of the Assumption of the Virgin is performed. The effigy of the Virgin Mary was, according to legend, washed up on a local beach in an ark in the troubled closing years of the fourteenth century. With her was the text of a play of her Assumption and the promise that if the statue was enshrined in the city, the play performed every year, the city would be protected from incursions from outside. The statue – actually the latest in a series of replacements – is on numerous occasions throughout the year paraded around the town on a processional route which follows the line of the now missing city walls. Henri Lefebvre’s ‘conceptual triad’ for understanding the social production of space is helpful to an understanding of what appears to be happening in these instances. First, there is spatial practice, which embraces production and reproduction and the particular locations and spatial sets characteristic of each social formation. Spatial practice ensures continuity and some degree of cohesion. In terms of social space, and of each member of a given society’s relationship to that space, this cohesion implies a guaranteed level of competence and a specific level of performance. Second are representations of space, which are tied to the relations of production and to the ‘order’ which those relations impose, and hence to knowledge, to signs, to codes, and to ‘frontal’ relations. Third, representational spaces, embodying complex symbolisms, sometimes coded, sometimes not, are linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life, as also to art (which may come eventually to be defined less as a code of space than as a code of representational spaces).5

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The processional route in Elche differs from that in Selkirk because it excludes not only the modern industrial sprawl, separated from the old town by the river, but also the medieval Jewish quarter and Moorish arabal, offering a reproduction of Elche as a protected place, nuanced in a particular way.6 In Lerwick, civic space is similarly nuanced by processional routes. The morning procession takes place near the harbour, where the galley spends the day, but the main route of the torchlight procession begins at the Victorian town hall and occupies the space between there and King Harald Street, the main area of middle-class Victorian villa development on the landward side. The centre of the Old Town, Commercial Street (where the tar-barrelling used to take place) is too narrow to take the galley and torchlight procession, so is no longer a focal point except that the Bill is posted at the market cross which is at the end of Commercial Street. Thus on the one hand the confected Viking ship-burning festival is contained within ‘civilized’ Lerwick, the area which grew up with the application of civic and ecclesiastical structures to an unruly and godless trading port: the burning site is a children’s swing park in the middle of that area. On the other hand, the Bill which, with its merciless lampooning of public figures and exposures of pomposity, is an element preserving and distilling the origins of Up Helly Aa as a feast of misrule; it is displayed at the heart of the original settlement. The processions articulate historical social divisions in the town, but there is also another dimension to the festival’s use of space, and that is the sharp delineation between the male occupation of space in processions which operate outside and are mobile, and the femaledominated indoor places, the ha’s. Postmodern theories of urban geography suggest certain understandings of how gender divisions operate in civic space, but in the case of Lerwick these should be applied with caution, for although Lerwick behaves institutionally as an urban hub, it is very small indeed. According to Gwen Neville’s definitions, Lerwick behaves indisputably as a town, ‘an entity [that] is an incorporation, a body’, as opposed to a village, ‘an ongoing cohesive group of kin and co-workers but one that does not act as a body’.7 In Lerwick, however, the transformation from ‘village’ to ‘town’ had little to do with critical mass, but was impelled by the arrival of the middle-class professional newcomers with whom Up Helly Aa has historically a symbolically ambivalent relationship. In regard to the spatial freedom of its women in particular, Lerwick continues also to function more like a village, for its women are little constrained in their spatial behaviour, and militant reclamation of the streets is probably not a serious issue.8 It can be

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argued, therefore, that the gendered spatial divisions in modern Up Helly Aa are not much influenced by any default ‘urban’ behaviour. Women on the relatively safe streets of remote little Lerwick are not in reality spatially constrained, so their spatial behaviour at Up Helly Aa is more ritual than real, determined more by history than by actual social conditions. The spaces that are occupied by the genders in Up Helly Aa conform to a classic ‘private’ versus ‘public’ delineation.9 Recent work in women’s studies follows Michelle Rosaldo’s conclusion that ‘women’s sociality is necessarily subsumed by the public sociality of men, so that men’s control of the public world means that women become devalued outsiders’. She points out that this pattern is exaggerated: The elaboration of the private as a domestic haven of feminine grace and charm, and of the public as the arena of aggressive masculine competition, is increasingly seen as a development that enabled the bourgeoisie to distinguish themselves from other social groups.10 In terms of Up Helly Aa, the exaggerated adoption of masculine aggressive public behaviour, involving civic power, civic territory and recollections of an aggressive Viking past, is contrasted with an equally ritually elaborated adoption of female roles which are associated with interior spaces, which take the ideal of home, hearth and hospitality, to extend and institutionalize it in the ha’s. On the face of things, then, conformity with this delineation of space implies complicity with the norms of a dominant – white, middle-class, western – society. Yet both male and female roles, by exaggerating gender difference, are now predominantly ritualistic. They are also determined in ways, and nuanced in particularities, which resonate with the aspirations of specific social groups at the socio-historical moment at which Up Helly Aa took on its present nature. In other words, the particular form that women’s roles in the ha’s assume at Up Helly Aa, may be complicit generically with the culturally subsidiary role of the female, but it is also aspirational and bourgeois in the particularity of its manifestations in a manner best understood by reference to the Lerwick of a century ago. The role taken by the women is, in terms of the festive liturgy, a correlative of that played out by the men. The all-male squads operate on what is fundamentally an evolved guild structure, based around the three intersecting bonds of kin, occupation and neighbourhood. Callum Brown found it difficult to define these bonds, preferring to see the squads as ‘friendship based’, again highlighting the tensions between Lerwick’s

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social operation as a burgh but one the size of a village. Brown quotes an observer: Everybody fits together in Shetland. I could go out at night and stand in a pub and that’s the council boss standing next to me, talking to […] the man who […] collected the rubbish. They would all be in the same bar, and everybody would be friendly. And you wouldn’t find it strange to be in the same club or the same squad together.11 This is true so far as it goes, but it would be fatuous to believe that Lerwick aspires to be a class-free society. However, because of its size and relative isolation, it has undoubtedly developed different codes of behaviour which involve a pragmatic abstention from some habits of socially exclusive behaviour. The other thing it has done is to develop a fixation with genealogy, known locally as ‘coontin’ kin’ reminding Shetlanders that they are all related to one another, but also drawing in members of the Shetland diaspora. Every year the Jarl’s Squad is swelled by returning émigrés who are kin of its indigenous members. Brown also notes that now in the squads ‘manual and technical occupations dominate’.12 Between the wars it was respectable for the local professional classes to participate in Up Helly Aa, but they now abstain from direct involvement, possibly out of squeamishness born of developments in middleclass class-consciousness which rejects the sexism, the conspicuous spending, dressing up and hard drinking. The liberal middle classes of the late twentieth century internalized a different and politicized brand of social inclusion in their mores which has left the squads of Up Helly Aa as the preserve of the business and manufacturing groups, the modern inheritors of the trades and crafts. The structures are, however, entirely comparable with those observed by Gwen Neville in the Selkirk Riding, where the festival is also organized through a structure composed of ‘guilds’ which are ‘ceremonial men’s societies’. They function through ‘a series of meetings, dinners, and receptions for months preceding and following the day of the celebration itself’, where one guild is composed entirely of returning exiles, those born in the town but now working elsewhere, and where the central figure is elected from similar social groups, being a man born and brought up in the town, still living and working within its bounds, who invests substantial sums of his own money in the role, is given the freedom to rule the town for the day, and, in his capacity as lord of misrule, declares a public holiday.13 Acceptance or rejection of engagement in the festivals for the

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men in both communities seems to be based on a choice between overt conformity with contemporary enlightened mores, including attitudes towards women, or with ‘tradition’, and the balance of that choice to be socially, and possibly educationally, determined. Gwen Neville also discerns, in the construction of what she also recognizes as the civic liturgy of the Selkirk festival, a connection with the clandestine, ritualized, practices of men’s associations, in particular Freemasonry, which she believes might bear further investigation.14 The organizational structures of the Up Helly Aa squads reveal similar auspices as well as some evidence of an actual lineage of this type. Indeed it seems highly probable that when a country so deeply affected by the Protestant Reformation as Scotland manifests festive structures reminiscent of the medieval guild system for organizing processions of the kind which persist in Roman Catholic Europe, it is the evolution of confraternal organizations such as the Freemasons which holds the key to some sort of continuity. In Lerwick’s town hall, a building intimately bound up with the origins of ‘modern’ Up Helly Aa, in addition to the stained-glass windows showing fanciful Victorian impressions of the Viking kings of the sagas, there is another window full of Masonic symbolic devices. Brown connects the origins of ‘respectable’ Up Helly Aa in the latter half of the nineteenth century with the determined infiltration of Lerwick society by a number of fashionable confraternal organizations. He writes: Taken together, the 1860s witnessed a concerted attempt by the forces of ‘rational recreation’ to fill the festive calendar with so many events of a religious, temperance, charitable or militaristic nature that ‘mischief’ was squeezed out.15 The Rechabites and the Good Templars in particular had a profound influence on the nature of the festival, and of the town itself, which they succeeded in voting ‘dry’ by plebiscite in the 1920s.16 Taking their name from the Middle-Eastern tribe which adhered down the ages to a pledge not to partake of intoxicating liquor (Jer. 35:6), the Rechabites evolved in the mid-nineteenth century from ‘The Salford Temperance Burial Society’ which adopted the resolution to found a total abstinence benefit society on fraternal lines. It was constituted so that a member could join for life no matter where they moved to, rather than having to transfer between friendly societies.17 Membership tables indicate that ‘Zetland’ District 96 was founded with 20 members in 1890, rising to 296 in 1895, 279 in 1900, 266 in 1905 and 279 again in 1910. This compares with the cradle of Rechabitism, the Isle of Man, which shows membership for the

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same period rising from 2481 to 3007.18 There was also a juvenile branch in Zetland District, having 32 members in 1895, 41 in 1900 and 1905, then falling off to 24 in 1910. Like all confraternities, the Rechabites were characterized by elaborate rituals, and were organized into sub-groups, or ‘tents’, analogous with the lodges of the Freemasons. The Freemasons themselves were part of an older tradition in the town, distinct from the new self-consciously improving and temperancepromoting organizations, and traditionally had held uproarious celebrations on St John’s Day. This is not the place in which to go into the relationship between the Freemasons and other later-founded temperance organizations. What is of interest is the apparent consensus in matters of structural organization, which in its ceremonial form is in turn analogous with the medieval guild system. The matter of whether and, more probably, how, sometime in the mid-seventeenth century, the processional, dramatic and ritual practices of the organizations associated with working stonemasons transformed into that social institution known as ‘speculative Masonry’ is a subject of continuing interest amongst those engaged in research into Freemasonry.19 Moreover, with the withering of the more zealous friendly societies such as the Rechabites, which shaped modern Up Helly Aa, there remains an abiding intimate relationship between the Up Helly Aa committee and the Freemasons. To summarize, Up Helly Aa can be read as both an evolution of, and as something set up in opposition to, Lerwick’s tradition of Yuletide misrule. That can be argued both ways; the fact remains that the inspiration for the form that the festival takes owes much to the confraternal organizations which were attempting to assert a civilizing influence over Lerwick in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Those confraternities were themselves well practised in the organization of civic pageantry on a confraternal model. Despite the discontinuity of the Reformation, that model owes something of its inspiration to the medieval guilds and their civic and religious festivals which have survived in evolved form in Roman Catholic Europe. That being the case, it is perhaps less surprising that the underlying social and organizational patterns observed by the author in the Up Helly Aa of 2002 were quite so reminiscent of those of Semana Santa in Seville, or of Corpus Christi anywhere it is or was celebrated. The confraternal heritage of the organization of the squads is an exclusively male history, but one which had indirect influence on the development of the female organizations surrounding the ha’s. All communities which sustained a large influx of visitors attracted by occasional festive events – before mass tourism made communities proficient in catering commercially for visitors – had to find ways of accommodating the

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surplus population. In Elche, as in other Spanish cities hosting major religious festivals, the practice of staying up all night to participate in vigils and/or processions evolved. Whether this feat of stamina is perceived as festive, penitential, or both, it dealt conveniently with the problem of accommodation. In more northerly climes, the custom of keeping open house was more normal, and was practised in living memory in remote communities in the western highlands of Scotland, for example, at the time of year when the Free Presbyterian Church celebrated its annual sacrament of communion. In nineteenth-century Lerwick too there was an established practice of keeping open house for those who came from afar to participate in Yuletide festivities. As Up Helly Aa’s popularity spread, alongside the ease of travel to Shetland for returning exiles as well as those from outlying communities and other islands in the archipelago, the open-house system became overloaded. It was then that the organizers turned to the Rechabite and Masonic halls for venues for their hospitality, and from which the social institution of the ha’s was born. This drew the Lerwick women’s role as providers of hospitality out of the definitively private domestic domain of the middle-class home, into much more public territory. Moreover this move took place at the same time as the social and domestic role of women was being redefined radically. The growth of social organizations and friendly societies for women, and of the women’s movement, together provided women with new social structures and outlets beyond the extended family and a new self-consciousness of their social role. The movement most affected those women in the majority who did not work in industry but were confined to the domestic world, either as middle-class wives and mothers, or as working-class girls in domestic service. The development of Up Helly Aa in its current form is contemporaneous with the woman’s suffrage movement, a period in which radical female philanthropists were active in reforming and ‘improving’ the lot of young female servants, rescuing prostitutes and promoting the common cause of women in society over the ‘upstairs-downstairs’ divide. In Scotland, for example, Ishbel Majoribanks, Lady Aberdeen, founded the Onward and Upward Association and an eponymous magazine, promoting to servant girls and their mistresses her formula for achieving happiness as a woman no matter what one’s rank in society. The formula was based on current Church of Scotland preaching, a social doctrine of education, diligent hard work, modesty, temperance and sexual continence. Lady Aberdeen was also president of the Liberal League and of the International Council for Women, a campaigner for votes for women and a petitioner of the General Assembly for the admission of women

Pamela M. King 255

into the ministry of the Church of Scotland, so she may be seen as at the cutting edge of the female emancipation movement of the 1890s. It is interesting, therefore, to see what the Onward and Upward Association promoted as the appropriate and enlightened role of the working- or middle-class woman of the day. Prominent in the association’s declared objects was the ‘desire to reach mistresses as well as servants and to bind both together by common interests’.20 The magazine itself was a mixture of household hints and improving aphorisms, one of which sums up the nature of this brand of female radicalism: To me the highest type of true womanhood is exemplified in the life of a loving, patient, devoted wife or mother whose whole life is so apportioned and divided that she fulfils all the duties of a perfect wife and mother without starving her intellect and nature.21 The evolution of the ha’s at Up Helly Aa seems to coincide both in date and in spirit with this articulation of the social values associated with radical middle-class womanhood in the public domain. Read through feminist cultural theory, Up Helly Aa, like many established cultural rituals, sharply delineates the male and the female roles as, respectively, dominant and subsidiary, pertaining to ‘culture’ and pertaining to ‘nature’. In summary the argument for this opposition derives from Simone de Beauvoir’s observation that men freed from the bases of familial orientation which constrain and preoccupy women, define their sphere of activity as ‘cultural’, that is at an interfamilial level concerned with the human project of transcending nature, generically referred to as ‘culture’ and typically involving, for example, religion, politics and social ritual. There is a demonstrable consensus across all human cultures that ‘culture’ thus defined is considered superior to ‘nature’. The division between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ is itself culturally defined, and moreover women as conscious members of culture recognize and accept their own devaluation in these terms. For she, too, is an existent, she feels the urge to surpass, and her project is not mere repetition but transcendence towards a different future – in her heart of hearts she finds confirmation in the masculine pretensions. She joins the men in the festivals that celebrate the successes and victories of the males.22 The role that women have had carved out for them, or that they have taken to themselves, in Up Helly Aa conforms precisely to these broad definitional categories. Women appear to celebrate vicariously the reflected

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glory of their menfolk in the squads. Their participation is also closely articulated to reflect the rank of their individual menfolk, such that in the 2002 celebration the wives and girlfriends of the Jarl’s Squad wore gold filigree pendants or brooches specially made in the pattern adopted for the Squad’s shields. When the Jarl’s Squad arrived at the ha’ where many of their partners were waiting, the women’s spontaneous behaviour involved various social gestures which claimed special status deriving from their partners’ roles in the ritual. This status was acknowledged in the behaviour of the other women present who were also engaged in self-conscious roles as the ha’s hostesses. The hostesses reign supreme as providers of food and drink, and as regulators of behaviour in the ha’s all night. Each ha’ has to provide facilities for dancing, drinking and eating for all its stationary guests as well as over 1500 visiting men, many of them quite drunk, throughout a twelvehour period. This is entirely managed by a hostess and teams of women organized in shifts. The women involved not only keep the tables replenished with the traditional ‘reested’ lamb, sandwiches, scones, cakes and pastries (all home-made), serve all comers with soup, hot pies, tea and coffee, they mostly also dance all night not only with Vikings, but with men dressed as everything from penguins to babies in nappies. These women who are Lerwick’s society hostesses may wait upon drunks at table, but they do so in full evening dress. They also control behaviour: the space of the ha’s is theirs. Men are recruited to act as bouncers, masters of ceremony and furniture shifters in these indoor spaces which form an autonomous female domain. The ha’ in which the author assisted was not dry (although that is their reputation): anyone who wished could drink themselves silly, but in a separate space reserved for the purpose apart from the eating and dancing areas. This was plainly practical, given that the event strives to include children. Serving a drunk in a panda suit with a cup of soup at 5.30 a.m. the author was alert to the operation of which she was part, where smiles of formal welcome, elegant gowns, indefatigable dancing and the decorous management of the tired and emotional concealed a catering operation of near-military precision which speaks of years of experience and months of preparation. In a number of respects, the hostess’s role is more sustained, more arduous, and involves more skill, judgment and responsibility, than those of any of the men during the event itself. It is, however, founded on those ‘female’ functions associated with nurture, that is ‘nature’, as opposed to the ‘cultural’ functions of the male, and the women occupying the roles demonstrate their complicity in this hierarchy in their solicitous and selfeffacing behaviour toward the visiting squads, in particular the Jarl’s Squad

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and the Jarl himself. When the Jarl arrives at a ha’, the hostess, who has herself been working hard for over 12 hours non-stop at this point, greets him, relieves him of axe and helmet, and otherwise ensures that he is provided with food, drink and dancing partner. His bodily and social needs are her major ritualized consideration. Up Helly Aa thrusts men and women into exaggeratedly distinct and equally assertive gender roles which are underlined rather than blurred by the number of burly guizers disporting themselves as flamenco dancers or as Madonna. There may be no superficial political correctness about Up Helly Aa, but close observation of the event informed by an understanding of radical social mores in the period when it developed in its present form, and of the potential for both complicit and resistant productions of space in gender-orientated civic ceremonial, reveal that the role of women in Up Helly Aa, always expressed in the negative, is possibly misunderstood by many commentators. Copycat Up Helly Aa’s on the other islands in the archipelago do include women in the squads, but Lerwick has staunchly resisted any such dilution of the gender stereotyping inherent in the festival. Equal Opportunities legislation may be invoked eventually to force the acceptance of women who want to be involved in the squads. There was allegedly an attempt by a woman to infiltrate one of the squads by disguising herself as a man in the 1900s, and a militant move for inclusion which involved the production of an ‘alternative’ Bill in the 1980s, but still there has not been a general or sustained move by women to involve themselves in the squads. Brown finds the inclusion of women in the small rural communities but not in ‘more urbane and modern Lerwick’ ironic.23 The real irony, however, lies in the persistent belittling of the role women do play in Up Helly Aa by commentators. Lerwick’s men may wish to play at imitating women; Lerwick’s women for the most part once the girlish excitement at the prospect of being allowed to set fire to a boat has dispersed, show little urge to counterfeit men. Brown quotes one local woman’s comment on the militants of the 1980s as saying, ‘I think sort of most women at that time thought, “Oh my God it’s embarrassing women more than helping them”.’24 The experience of Up Helly Aa as a woman and an observer brought the author to notice how highly developed and complementary already was the role of women in the festival, such that one can readily understand why there might be no real momentum in the mature female population to join in with the men and to break the integrity of what is already a well-defined element of the civic liturgy. Of course, Up Helly Aa reinforces gender stereotypes in which women collude, as is the case in so many confraternal celebrations, but the

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subsidiarity of the female role has been overstated by those so transfixed by men in Viking suits and a burning galley that they fail to attend fully to the balance of the whole event. Women have enjoyed a degree of economic autonomy throughout Shetland’s history. If we pass swiftly over their obvious role in Lerwick’s origins as a place offering hospitality to passing shipping, we cannot avoid the islands’ most famous consumer export, hand knitwear, always and still the product of women’s economic activity. Gwen Neville observes of the festivities she has studied in the Scottish Borders that ‘a happy and successful common riding is truly an affirmation of the local world and its centrality in the ongoing economy as well as in every other aspect of its symbolic centrality’.25 There too she finds women balancing ‘their modern position as citizens […] with their traditional position as town and family member – a position of obligation with responsibilities to maintain the older, ascribed order of idealized past burgh life’.26 The women who manage and run the ha’s are articulating precisely this sense of obligation in their deep understanding of the nature of their role in the civic liturgy that is modern-day Up Helly Aa, a role without which neither the happiness nor the success of their community’s defining festival could be assured.27

Notes 1 The authoritative modern study of the history of the festival is Callum G. Brown, Up Helly Aa: Custom, Culture and Community in Shetland (Manchester: Mandolin, 1998). 2 See in particular Gwen Kennedy Neville’s study of the Border Ridings, The Mother Town: Civic Ritual, Symbol, and Experience in the Borders of Scotland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 3 Brown, p. ix. 4 Neville, pp. 42–3. 5 Henri Lefebvre, ‘The Production of Space’, in The Spaces of Postmodernity: Readings in Human Geography, ed. by Michael J. Dear and Stephen Flusty (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 131–41 (p. 139). 6 See Pamela M. King and Asuncion Salvador-Rabasa Ramos, ‘La Festa d’Elx: The Festival of the Assumption of the Virgin, Elche (Alicante)’, Medieval English Theatre, 8 (1986), 21–50, and Pamela M. King, ‘Elche Again: La Venida and Semana Santa’, Medieval English Theatre, 12 (1990), 4–20. 7 Neville, p. 85. 8 See Linda McDowell, ‘Towards an Understanding of the Gender Division of Urban Space’, in The Spaces of Postmodernity, pp. 120–6. 9 McDowell, p. 121, citing the conclusions in Women and Space, ed. by Shirley Ardener (London: Croom Helm, 1981); Women, Culture and Society, ed. by Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), p. 8.

Pamela M. King 259 10 Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose, ‘Introduction: Women’s Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies’, in Writing Women and Space, ed. by Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose (New York: The Guildford Press, 1994), pp. 1–28 (p. 3). 11 Brown, p. 23. 12 Brown, p. 23. 13 Neville, pp. 29, 51–5. 14 Neville, pp. 32–3, 88. 15 Brown, p. 110. 16 Brown, pp. 167–70. 17 Richardson Campbell, Rechabite History: A Record of the Origin, Rise, and Progress of the Independent Order of Rechabites Salford Unity, from its Institution on August 25th, 1835, to the Present Time (Manchester: Board and Directors of the Independent Order of Rechabites, 1911), p. 10. 18 Campbell, pp. 432–3. 19 In a Scottish context, the fundamental starting points remain David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century 1590–1710 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and his The First Freemasons: Scotland’s Early Lodges and their Members, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Grand Lodge of Scotland, 2001). The author is grateful here to V. Wor. Bro. the Revd Neville Barker Cryer, PGC, for discussion of his work on the subject of the connection between the medieval guild system and speculative Freemasonry: Neville Barker Cryer, York Mysteries Revealed (Understanding an Old English Masonic Tradition) (Hersham: Ian Allan Publishing, 2006). 20 James Drummond, Onward and Upward: Extracts (1891–96) from the Magazine of the Onward and Upward Association Founded by Lady Aberdeen for the Material, Mental and Moral Elevation of Women (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1983). 21 Drummond, p. 25. 22 Simone de Beauvoir, quoted in Sherry B. Ortner, ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’, in Women, Culture and Society, pp. 67–87 (p. 76). 23 Brown, p. 188. 24 Brown, p. 186. 25 Neville, p. 71. 26 Neville, p. 62. 27 The research for this article would not have been possible without the assistance of Robin Hunter, an accomplished ‘fixer’, and the hospitality of the author’s cousins Margaret and John Finlayson of Bressay; the author wishes to thank these, and all the other Shetlanders encountered, for their unstinting warmth and generosity.

Index Abelites, 166, 167, 174 Aberdeen, Lady, 254 Abiff, Hiram (Adonhiram), 185 Abrissel, Robert of, 54 Academic Society for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism, 4 Adams, Charles Phythian, 46 Adonhiram see Abiff, Hiram Africa, 6 Agulhon, Maurice, 181, 194, 230 Ahlwardt, Peter, 166–8 Albert, Archduke, 65, 67, 71–5, 78–80 Aldham, 209 Alfred, Prince, 244 Allen, James Smith, 11, 16, 22, 92, 180 Alsace, 55 van Alsloot, Denis, 63, 71–2, 76, 79, 81 Altenberg, 171 Alva, Duke of, 78 Alvingham, 43 Amazons, 64, 72–4, 80, 183 America, 1, 2, 6, 12, 64, 74, 91 Amiable, Louis, 193 Aminzade, Ronald, 230 Ancient Order of Britons, 201 Ancient Order of Foresters, 205 Ancient Order of Foresters Friendly Society, 8, 9 Anderson, James, 94, 99, 102, 105, 124, 134–5, 185, 191, 193 Anglicans, 106, 210–11 anonymous texts, 95, 96, 109, 188, 190 Antwerp, 64, 81 Apothecaries, Society of, 20 Apprentices, Statute of, 8 Arboretum, Derby, 20 Archduchess of Austria, 10, 65 d’Argens, Marquis, 161 Arnade, Peter, 79 Ashbourne, 202

Ashdon, 209 Ashford, 202, 211 Asia, 6 Astraea, 15 Aufmühlen, 57 Australia, 6 Austria, 10, 65 Babouvists, 232 Baden Powell, Lord, 18 von Balthasar, Anna Christina Ehrenfried, 11, 166, 168–71, 175 von Balthasar, Augustin, 168, 174 Baltic, the, 53, 158 Barron, Caroline, 34, 37, 39 de Barruel, Augustin, 180–3, 193–4 Barton-in-Fabis, 202 Bassi, 170 Baston, 44, 47 Baulk, Winifred A., 2, 3 Bayntun, Andrew, 143 Beachy, Robert, 11, 16, 91, 102, 138, 191 Beaufort, Duke of, 142 de Beaumont, d’Eon, 187 de Beauvoir, Simone, 255 Bedford, 207–8 Bedfordshire, 200, 203–4, 207, 211 beguines, 53–9 Beito, David, 9, 13 Belgium, 66, 75 Bellamy, Mrs, 141 Bellew of Duleek, Baroness, 111 Bennett, Judith, 33–4 de Béranger, Pierre-Jean, 235–6 Berkshire, 210 Berlin, 98, 157, 159, 161, 163 Best, Geoffrey, 201 Beveridge, William, 203 Beverley, 20, 46 Biggleswade, 206, 208 Biggleswade Loyal Dreadnought Lodge of OddFellows, 206 260

Index 261 Birmingham, 211 Bishop’s Castle, 202 Black Death, 34–5, 37, 39 Black Horse Female Friendly Society, 205 Black, Antony, 8 Blaikie, Andrew, 7 Blanc, Louis, 180 Boccaccio, 53 Bocquillon, Guillaume Louis, 227 Bohemia, 53–4, 56 Bohstedt, John, 201 Bologna, 1, 18 Bordeaux, 224 Boud, Nellie, 210 Bowen, Thomas, 115 Bowmen, Society of Royal British, 103–4, 121–5 Bowyer, Sir George, 209 Boycott, Harriet, 123 Brabant, 54, 80 Brabrook, Edward, 8 Bradford, 5, 9 Braintree, 144 Bressay, 244 Brewer, John, 13 Briscoe, Patrick, 109 Bristol, 9, 18, 113, 210 Britain, 31–2, 66, 102, 104, 122, 125, 133, 145, 150, 171, 207, 232 British Empire, 5, 207 Brixworth, 208 Bronwydd, 115 Brown, Callum, 246, 250–2, 257 Bruges, 67, 76 Brunswick, 188 Brussels, 63, 65, 67, 72, 74–5 von Bugenhagen, Lieutenant-Colonel, 171 Burke, Janet, 92–3, 134, 145, 182 Burney Collection of the British Library, 134 Burschenschafter, 5 Burt, Roger, 5 Cain, Nahama, 105 Cain, Tubal, 105 Caledonian Lodge, 142 Cambridge, 37

Cambridgeshire, 38, 43 La Candeur Lodge, 104 Canterbury, 136 Cape Colony, 6 Cardigan, 112, 115 Carmarthen, 112–13 Carmarthenshire, 112 Caryll, John, 108 Caryll, John Baptist, 111 Caryll, Lady Elizabeth, 11, 107–9, 111 Castile, 74 Catalina Micaela, 75 Cavendish, Lady Louisa, 202 Centre for Fraternal Studies, 14 de Cervantes, Miguel, 106 Charles the Bold, 67, 76 Charles V, Emperor, 73, 78 Charlotte, Queen, 144 Chartier, Roger, 181–2, 193 Chartists, 232 Chase, Malcolm, 15, 200 Chatelet, Madame, 170 Chazal, André, 223 Cheshire, 116, 119, 121–2, 124–5 Chester, 102, 117, 119, 121 Chesterfield, 44 Chevalier, André, 103 Chevaliers et dames d’ancre, 185 China, 204 Cholmondeley, Hester, 120–1 Cholmondeley, Thomas, 119, 121 Christian socialists, 230 Church, the, 5, 18, 19, 54, 93, 103, 160, 163–4, 175, 181, 206, 210–11, 229 Presbyterian Church, 102, 254 Roman Catholic Church, 103–4, 108, 111, 252–3 Church of Scotland, 254–5 Cistercians, 55 Clapham, John, 8 Clark, Alice, 9, 32–5, 47 Clark, Anna, 11 Clark, Peter, 4, 13, 206 class-consciousness, 200, 251 Clawson, Mary Ann, 11, 22, 91 Clermont System, 170–1 Cobb, Richard, 194 Cochon, Augustin, 181

262 Index Cole, G. D. H., 31–2 Collis, Robert, 11, 102 Colmar, 57 Cologne, 55, 156, 161 Colston collecting societies, 18 Commodus, Verus, 105 Commune, Guild Hall, 32 compagnonnages, 11, 234 confidentiality, 14 see also secrecy confraternities, 1, 5, 9, 18, 78, 246, 253 Coningsby, 46 Conservatives, 208 Copenhagen, 166, 171 Cordery, Simon, 2, 200, 201 Corpus Christi, Fraternity of, 42 Cosa Nostra, 13 Coventry, 46, 245 von Coyett, 171 Cronin, James, 201 Cross, Máire, 11, 16, 223 Crossbow Guild, 65, 67, 71, 76 Crossbow Guild, Great, 65 Crossick, Geoffrey, 200 culture, 1, 2, 5, 8, 11, 19, 31, 92, 94, 99, 103–4, 108, 111, 114–16, 118, 121, 125, 145, 149, 159, 168, 170, 181, 182, 186, 194, 213, 227, 248, 255 Cunliffe, Lady, 123 Cunliffe, Sir Foster, 123 Curwen, J. C., MP, 202 Cycle, The, 116–21, 125 Dähnert , Johan Carl, 166, 168, 171 de Daix, Présidente Fardel, 193 Dann, Otto, 184 Darnton, Robert, 94 Dartford, 144 Davidoff, Leonore, 201 Delilah, 137, 140 Denbigh, 102, 116, 120–1, 124 Denbighshire, 116, 118, 124 Deptford, 5 Derby Arboretum, 20 Derbyshire, 39, 44, 202, 211 Dereham, 141 Dermott, Lawrance, 141 Derrington, Edward, 203

Desan, Suzanne, 92 Dessalles, Comtesse, 190 Devizes, 143 Devoirs, 226 Diessenhofen, 58 Dijon, 193 Dinzelbacher, Peter, 52, 59 Diogenes Society, 165–7 Dixon, Mary Ann, 209 Dobson, Barrie, 36 Dodd, William, 143 Dominicans, 55, 56 Domus Isabellae meeting house, 71, 79 Dorset, 38, 135 Dronfield, 39–42, 44 Druids, 14 Drury Lane Theatre, 140 Dryden, John, 108 Duchesse de Chartres, 190 Duffield, Thomas James, 21 Dulcinea del Toboso, 106 Dumenil, Lynn, 4 Dunckerley, Thomas, 139–40, 144 Durford, 108, 111 Durham, 36 Durr, Andy, 201, 213 Easington Lane, 203 East Anglia, 38 Ebner, Christine, 56–7 Ebstorf, 58 Eden, Frederick, 8 Ekeblad, Countess, 170 Elche, 248–9, 254 Elisabeth, Princess of Hungary, 56 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 74 Engels, Friedrich, 230–1 Engelthal, 56–7 England, 5–9, 11, 20, 32, 35, 37–8, 40, 52, 54, 75, 93, 108–9, 111, 119, 133–5, 145, 148–9, 200, 206, 210, 212 Enlightenment, the, 12, 91–2, 94, 98–9, 134, 144–6, 149, 156–9, 166, 168, 174–5, 181–4, 187, 194 Erler, Mary, 59 Erskine-Hill, Howard, 108 von Essen, 171 Essex, 144, 209

Index 263 de Estrella, Calvette, 72 Etruria, 202 Europe, 2, 6, 7, 10, 12, 18, 53, 66, 81, 91, 93–4, 97, 103, 109, 111, 125, 138, 145–6, 149, 156, 159–60, 164, 166, 171, 194, 230, 252–3 Everard, Sir Redmond, 109 Evrat, Louis, 234 Exeter, 9, 34 Farnese, Alexander, Prince of Parma, 78 Faÿ, Bernard, 180 Female Friendly Bookbinders, 203 Female Friendly Clothing Society, 210 Female Friendly Societies, 202, 205 Fendeurs et fendeuses, 185 Ferrand, 225, 236 de Flachslande, Baroness, 104 Flanders, 18, 54, 66, 75 Florence, 1 Fontevrault, 54 Ford, Henry, 19 Foresters, 5, 8, 9, 14, 203, 205, 208, 210, 213 Foresters Friendly Society, Ancient Order of, 8, 9 Fotherby, 43–4 Foucault, Michael, 211 France, 1, 5, 10, 12, 16, 32, 39, 43, 66, 78, 81, 91–4, 97–8, 103–4, 108, 111, 125, 134, 144–5, 159–60, 163, 170–1, 180–8, 190–4, 223–34 Franciscans, 55 Franklin, 190 fraternal organizations, 1, 2, 4–7, 9–22, 30, 97, 102–4, 150, 174, 225–6, 228, 230 Fraternal Studies, Centre for, 14 Fraternity of Corpus Christi, 42 Fraternity of St John the Baptist, 36 Fraternity of St Peter, 42 Fraternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 40 Freemasonry, 2, 4, 5, 11, 13, 17, 19, 21, 30–1, 81, 91–2, 94, 97–9, 102–5, 111, 113–14, 125, 133, 135–7, 141, 144–50, 156, 159–61,

163–4, 166, 171, 174, 181–8, 193–4, 211, 252–3 Freemasons, 11, 48, 91, 97, 102, 104, 116, 119, 124, 133–44, 146–7, 149–50, 159–61, 164–7, 171, 174, 180–1, 183–5, 187–8, 190, 194, 201, 252–3 Friedrich, Adolf, 171 friendly societies, 1, 2, 5, 8, 9, 13, 18, 19, 21, 31, 200–13, 252–4 Frisia, 54 Furet, François, 180–1, 194 Galley Song, 247 Gardiner, Captain, 141 Garlickhithe, Guild of, 45 Garrard, John, 201 Gateshead, 203 Gauthier, Marie-Véronique, 227 gender, 1, 2, 4–11, 14, 16, 17, 20–2, 44, 46–7, 52–3, 58–9, 81, 91–3, 95–9, 102, 104–6, 114, 116, 122, 124–5, 133–4, 136, 145–6, 149–50, 156, 159, 166, 169, 174, 182–3, 193–4, 201, 212–13, 223–4, 228–35, 237, 246, 249–50, 257 gendered roles, 1 de Genlis, Madame, 183 Gerchow, Jan, 43 Germans, 5, 184 Germany, 52, 55, 66, 75, 144, 156, 170, 184 Ghent, 67, 79 Gild of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 44 Gild of the Resurrection, 45 Gilde van Sint-Sebastiaan, 67 Gilding, Brother, 144 Girls’ Friendly Society, 211 von Goethe, J. W., 187 Goldberg, Jeremy, 34, 37 Goodman, Dena, 92, 134, 183 Gordon, Daniel, 92, 184 Gormogons, Antient and Noble Order of, 104–5 Gorsky, Martin, 5, 8 Gosset, Jacques, 234 Göttingen, 96, 98 Granada, 74

264 Index Grand Orient de France, 134, 186, 191, 193 Gray, Robert, 200 Greifswald, 158, 160, 163–6, 168–71, 174 Grenville, George, 119 Grimsby, 37 Grundmann, Herbert, 54 guilds, 2, 4, 5, 7–10, 13, 15, 18, 20, 30–47, 67, 71, 75–9, 93, 135, 174, 226, 232, 245, 250–3 Guild Hall Commune, 32 Guild of the Assumption, 36, 46 Guild of Garlickhithe, 45 Guild of the Holy Cross, 46 Guild of Holy Trinity, 36 Guild of Saints Fabian and Sebastian, 45 Guild of St George, 36 Guild of St Helen, 46 Guild of St John the Baptist, 44 Guild of St Martin, 44 Guild of St Mary and St Joseph, 9 Guild of Saint Sebastian, 76 Guild of the Virgin Mary, 43, 45 Guilds of Help, 9 Guizer Jarl, 245–6 guizing, 245, 247 Guizot, François, 229 Gustaf, Swedish Crown Prince, later Gustaf III, 164, 166 Gwersyllt Park, 122 Gwynne, David, 113 Gwynne, Miss, 112–13 Gwynne, Richard, 113 Habermas, Jürgen, 181–3, 194 Habermas, Rebekka, 54 Hadewijch, 54 Hague, The, 95 Halévi, Ran, 181, 193 Hall, Catherine, 201 Halstead, John, 2 Hamburg, 159, 165 Hamilton, Revd Ezekiel, 106–7, 109–10 Hampshire, 139 Hanley, 202 Harlaxton, 45

Hatherton, Lady, 202 Haverfordwest, 115 Haverkamp, Alfred, 53 Hell-Fire Club, 105 d’Hélvetius, Madame, 190 Hertfordshire, 2, 210 hierarchies, 1, 13, 15, 18, 20, 46–7, 56, 92, 146, 149, 160, 208, 212, 228, 256 von Hilzingen, Gertrut, 58 von Hippel, Theodor Gottlieb, 98–9, 191 Hobsbawm, Eric, 12 Hogarth, William, 186 d’Holbach, Baron, 145 Holland, 54, 103 see also the Netherlands Holy Cross, Guild of the, 46 Holy Trinity, Guild of, 36 Holyoake, George Jacob, 47 Honiton, 202 Honorius III, Pope, 55 Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 118 Hood, Robin, 14 Howard, Samuel, 208 Howkins, Alun, 210 Huddersfield, 202 Huguenots, 5 Hull, 31 von Hund, Karl Gotthelf, 171 Hungary, 56 Hunt, Lynn, 92 Hutton, Diane, 34, 47 Icarian communists, 230 Ilam, 202 Independent Order of Odd Fellows (USA), 14 Independent Order of Oddfellows, Manchester Unity, 2, 6, 16, 19, 20, 201 Independent Order of Rechabites, 205 industrialization, 8, 18, 31, 33 International Council for Women, 254 International Socialist Organisation, 231

Index 265 Ireland, 5, 147, 233 Isabella Clara Eugenia, Archduchess of Austria, 63–5, 67–8, 71–5, 78–81, 208 Isabella la Catolica, 74 Isle of Man, 210, 252 Isle of Man Sisterly Society, 210 Italy, 106, 170 Iustitia, 15 Ivorites, Philanthropic, 5 J. L. N., 165 Jackson, Brother, 144 Jacob, Margaret, 47, 92–3, 97, 104, 134, 182–4, 193 Jacobites, 11, 102–6, 108–9, 111–14, 116–22, 125, 150 Jacobs, Jessica Harland, 5 James, Bob, 14 Japan, 204 Jarl’s Squad, 245–8, 251, 256 Jena, 170–1 Jenkins, J. P., 113–14 Jesuits, 5, 63, 73, 74 Jewish quarter, 249 Jews, 5 Johnes, Martin, 122 Juana of Castile, 74 Julian of Norwich, 52 Kale, Steven, 92 Kant, Immanuel, 92, 98 Katharinental, Sisters of, 58 Kellman, Professor, 168 Kempe, Margery, 52 Kempf, Elisabeth, 57 Kent, 38, 136, 144 Kidd, Alan, 201 Kilgerran, 115 King, Elizabeth, 210 King, John, 210, 212 King, Mrs, 141 King, Pamela, 21, 244 King’s Lynn, 43 Kirk, Neville, 201 Knights of Labor, Noble and Holy Order of the, 14 Königsberg, 98, 170 Konstanz, 54

Koselleck, Reinhart, 158, 159 Kowaleski, Maryanne, 34, 59 Kremer, Magdalena, 55, 56 Kunigunde, Queen of Bohemia, 56 Lacey, Kay, 34 Lady Masons, 145 de Lamballe, Princesse, 190 Lambert, Revd Joseph Malet, 30, 31 Lancashire, 38, 111 Landes, Joan, 91, 92, 183–4 Landsmannschaften, 1 Langomazino, Louis, 223–5, 229–30, 237 Lantoine, Albert, 191 Laon, 54 Lapointe, Savinien, 236 Laqueur, Thomas, 92 lawsuits, 38, 41 League, National Guilds, 9 Leclair, 231 Lee, Lady Henrietta, 111 Leeds, 202 Lefebvre, Henri, 248 Leiden, 107, 109–10 Leighton, Rachel, 119 Leipzig, 170 Lequin, Yves, 230 Lerner, Gerda, 59 Lerwick, 1, 16, 21, 244–5, 247, 249–54, 256–8 Lethaby, William, 31 Leuven, 64–5 Lewes, 20 Liberal League, 254 Lice chansonnière, 225, 227 Ligou, Daniel, 187–8 Lincoln, 40–2, 44–6, 48 Lincolnshire, 38, 42–6, 209 Llandeilo, 112 Lloyd, Anna Louisa, 115 Lloyd, Cathie, 12 lodges of adoption, 92–4, 98–9, 103, 134–5, 145, 148–9, 183, 190–2 Loge St Jean de la Candeur, 190 London, 5, 9, 20–1, 33–4, 36, 38–9, 45, 63, 91, 95, 104, 109–11, 114, 118–19, 125, 134–5, 143, 157, 159, 187, 207, 224, 231

266 Index Lord, Evelyn, 203 Lorraine, 103 Lostock Hill, 111 Louis Philippe of Orleans, 229 Louis XIV, King of France, 185 Loyal Bowyer Union Lodge of Oddfellows, 209 Loyal Order of Ancient Shepherdesses, 203 Loyal Order of Ancient Shepherds, 205 Lüneburg, 58 Luxembourg, 103 Lydbury, 202 McIntosh, Marjorie Keniston, 33, 34, 35, 37 Mack, Phyllis, 92 Madrid, 63 Mafia, the, 9, 13 Magraw, Roger, 230 Mainland, 244 Majoribanks, Ishbel (Lady Aberdeen), 254 Manchester Unity Oddfellows, 16 Mansell, Sir Edward, 113 Mappleton, 202 Margaret of Austria, Governess of the Netherlands, 78 Marlborough, 20 Married Women’s Property Act, 205 Marseille, 226, 229 Martin, Georges, 188 Marx, Karl, 230–1 Marxism, 231 Masonic ideology, 147 Maxwell, Sir William, fifth Earl of Nithsdale, 110 Maxwell, Winifred, 110 Mayer, Andreas, 169, 174 Mecklenburg-Schwerin, 171 Melbourne, 32 Merthyr, 201 Michael, archangel, 15 Middle Ages, 18, 33, 52–4, 56, 59, 135 Middleton-by-Wirksworth, 202 migrants, 4, 213

migration, 4, 207 Milton, John, 138 Mocatta, Frederick David, 18 Molyneux, Lady Mary, 111 Monod, Paul, 116 Montagu, Lord Charles, 139 Montesquieu, Baron de, 92 Montgomery, David, 2 Mopses, 156, 160–1, 163–5, 167, 171, 174–5, 188 Moreau, Pierre, 238 Morgan, Mary, 112–13, 115 Moses, 14 Mulvey-Roberts, Marie, 136 Murdoch, Steve, 105–6 Murray, James, Earl of Dunbar, 106, 107 Napoleon, Louis, 227 National Deposit Friendly Society, 206 National Guilds League, 9 National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage, 208 National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, 33 Neave, David, 2, 201 Needham, Bill, 16–17 Nemesis, 15 Nether Stowey, 202 Netherlands, the, 13, 53, 65–6, 75, 78, 81 see also Holland Neville, Gwen, 248–9, 251–2, 258 New Zealand, 6 Newcastle-under-Lyme, 202 Newport, 20 Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor, 14 Norbert of Xanten, 54 Norfolk, 38, 43, 141 North Staffordshire Coal and Ironstone Workers’ Permanent Relief Society, 210 Northamptonshire, 208 Norwich, 36, 52, 202 Nottingham, 205 Nottinghamshire, 203, 205, 210 Nuremberg, 56

Index 267 O’Connell, Daniel, 233 Oak Society, 111, 114, 150 oaths, 6, 13, 30, 38, 133 Observant reform movement, 53 Odd Females, 203 Odd Women, 203 Oddfellows, 6, 201, 205, 208–10, 213 Oetenbach, 58 Ogilvie, Sheilagh, 4, 10 Okeover, 202 Okeover, Henry, 202 Ong, Walter, 94 Önnerfors, Andreas, 11, 14, 156 Onward and Upward Association, 254–5 Orage, A. R., 31 Orange Orders, 5, 15 Order of the Golden Fleece, 71 Ordre de la félicité, 185 Orleans, 229 Ostend, 74 Oswestry, 118 Oxford, 20, 210 Oxford Working Women’s Benefit Society, 210 Oxfordshire, 136

Plutarch, 53 Pomerania, Prussian, 163, 170 Pomerania, Swedish, 11, 156, 158–9, 166, 168, 170–1, 174–5 Poncy, Charles, 234, 236–7 Poor Law, 7, 202, 212 Pope, Alexander, 108 Pope, the, 5, 55–6 popinjay shooting, 65–7, 71, 73–6, 78, 81 Post Office Savings Bank, 205, 213 Potsdam, 159 Powis, Countess of, 202 Premonstratensians, 54 Presbyterian Church, 102, 254 Prescott, Andrew, 2, 9, 19, 30 Preston, 204 Prichard, Samuel, 160 Protestants, 5 Provincial Grand Lodge of Cheshire, 119 Prussia, 159, 161, 170–1 Puech, Jules-L., 225 Puteanus, Erycius, 65, 67, 73, 80

Palatinate, The, 170 Paoli, Letizia, 9 papal bull, 160–1 Paris, 32, 54, 107, 109–10, 144, 145, 157, 159, 164, 183–8, 190, 192–3, 223–5, 227–8, 230–5, 237–8 Pembroke, 112 Penty, Arthur, 9, 31–2 de Perard, Jacques, 170 Perdiguier, Agricol, 234, 238 Perfect, Dr William, 145 Perry, Ruth, 92 Peru, 224 Péter, Robert, 11, 14, 133 Petre, Lord, 142 philanthropism, 18, 19, 200, 210–11, 230, 233, 254 Philip II, Prince of Spain, 78 Philipps, Jenny, 115 Phillips, Sir John, 113, 115 Pinchbeck, Ivy, 33 de Pizan, Christine, 52–3, 59

Radclyffe, Charles, 104, 111, 125 Radcylffe, Charlotte Maria, 111 Radicofani, 106 railway company friendly societies, 210 de Ramsay, André Michel, 164 Rancière, Jacques, 230 Rawlinson, Richard, 39 Rechabites, 21, 205, 246, 252–4 Rees Jones, Sarah, 37 Reformation, the, 8, 15, 252–3 Renard, Georges, 32 Repeal Association, 233 Republic of Letters, 183–4 Resurrection, Gild of the, 45 returns, guild, 9, 38–40, 42–8, 201 Revolution, French, 91, 180–2, 194 Reynolds, Susan, 35 Rhineland, 53 Richard II, King of England, 38 Ridgely, James L., 6 Ridgemount, 204

Quixote, Don, 106

268 Index rituals, 1, 4, 6, 8–9, 14–17, 20, 46, 56, 75, 79, 94, 97, 115–16, 121–2, 124, 134, 138–9, 146–9, 156, 159–60, 171, 174, 181, 184–8, 190, 192–3, 200, 246, 250, 253, 255–6 Robert of Abrissel, 54 Robin Hood, 14 Rome, 55–7, 59, 105–6, 109–10 Rosaldo, Michelle, 250 Rosenfeld, printer, 234 Rosliston, 202 Rosser, Gervase, 46 Rotter, Adelheid, 56 Rotterdam, 110 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 92, 98, 194 Roussel, 226 Royal Arch Purple Chapter, 15 Royal Black Institution, 15 Royal Chester Lodge, 102 Royal Cumberland School, 143 Royal Denbigh Lodge, 102, 120, 124 Royal Edwin Lodge, 141 Royal German Society, 158 Royal Kentish Bowmen, 122 La Ruche populaire, 234 Saints Fabian and Sebastian, Guild of, 45 St George, Guild of, 36 St Helen, Guild of, 46 St John the Baptist, Fraternity of, 36 St John the Baptist, Guild of, 44 St Martin, Guild of, 44 St Peter, Fraternity of, 42 St Petersburg, 110 Saint-Simonians, 224, 230 de Saint-Victor, Louis Guillemain, 187, 192 Salford, 252 Sallaert, Antonis, 67, 71 Salters’ Hall, 36 Salvation Army, 18 Samson, 137, 140 Sand, George, 237 Sans Souci, 170 Saxony, 54 Schama, Simon, 181, 182, 194 Schröder, Daniel Friedrich, 164

Scotland, 5, 21, 252, 254 Scottish rite, 190, 193 Scouts Friendly Society, 18 Sea Serjeants, the, 112–16 secrecy, 1, 11, 14, 16–17, 37, 43, 93–7, 99, 105, 113–14, 116, 122, 133, 136–8, 140–1, 143–6, 149, 156, 158–61, 163–4, 166, 168, 174–5, 181–3, 185–7, 190–1, 194, 232 sects, 5 Segovia, 71 Select Committee on the Aged Deserving Poor, 205 Selkirk, 248–9, 251–2 Sempill, Lord Francis, 107 Sempstresses, Sisterhood of the, 135 de Sesmaisons, Comte, 190 Seville, 21, 245, 253 Sewell, William, Jr, 230 SFFS, 200, 202–13 Shamesh, 15 Sheffield, 39, 133 Shetlands, 244, 251, 254, 258 Shrewsbury, 9, 34, 47 Shropshire, 116, 118, 202 Shuttleworth, Colonel, 202, 206, 208 Simonetti, Christian Ernst, 96–8 Simons, Walter, 57 Sint-Sebastiaan, Gilde van, 67 Smail, John, 13 Smart, Judith, 32 Smith Stevens, Uriah, 14 Smith, Captain George, 136, 139, 143–4, 146 Smith, Joshua Toulmin see Toulmin Smith, Joshua Smith, Lucy Toulmin see Toulmin Smith, Lucy Society of Apothecaries, 20 Soetkens, Béatris, 81 Solomon, King, 138, 140, 185 Somerset, 140, 202 song, 16, 116, 164, 186, 223–30, 232–7 Sons of Temperance, 205 Soper, Kate, 92 South Africa, 5 Southampton, 139 Southill, 200, 203–4, 206–9, 212–13

Index 269 Southill Estate Benefit Club, 206 Southill Female Friendly Society, 200, 202–13 Spain, 16, 65, 78–81, 97, 223, 245, 254 Spinoza, 166 Staffordshire, 202, 210 Stamford, 44, 47 Statute of Apprentices, 8 Steadfast Tories, 114 Stendal, 188 Stettin, 163, 170 Stevens, Uriah Smith, 14 Stockholm, 159, 166 Stoke-under-Ham, 202 Stralsund, 158, 164, 171 Strasbourg, 55, 104 Stratford-upon-Avon, 46 straw plaiting, 203–4, 207, 211 Stuart, James, the Old Pretender, 106 Stuart, Prince Charles Edward, 105, 111, 117 Stuart, Prince Henry, 105 Sue, Eugène, 236 Suffolk, 38, 43, 209 Suffrage Societies, National Union of Women’s, 33 Surrey, 210 Sussex, 108, 125 Sweden, 161, 170–1 Switzerland, 53, 58, 66

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 194 Tories, Steadfast, 114 Torrubia, José, 97–8 Toulmin Smith, Joshua, 8 Toulmin Smith, Lucy, 47 Toulon, 223, 232, 237 Toulouse, 186 Tower of London, 119 Towneley, Cecilia, 111 Toxophilite Society, 122 trade unions, 2, 8, 9, 13, 19, 21, 30–1, 201, 205, 208, 210, 225 Tristan, Flora, 11, 15, 16, 223–5, 228–34, 236–8 Truant, Cynthia Maria, 230 de Tschudy, Baron, 192 Tuckwell, Gertrude, 205 Twycross, Meg, 10, 14, 20, 63 Tylers’ Guild, 42

Taliaris, 113 Tayler, Henrietta, 105 temperance, 245, 252–4 Templars, Good, 252 Temple Lodge Benefit Society, 18 Tendring, 209 Tervueren, 75, 79 Thame, 136 Themis, 15 Thøfner, Margit, 80 Thompson, Edward P., 8, 19, 20, 200 Thuringia, 54 Toboso, Most Ancient, Most Illustrious and Most Noble Order of, 105–12, 114, 118, 125

Vale Royal, 119, 120, 121 Valencia, 110, 245 Valenciennes, 193 Veale, Elspeth, 35 van Veen, Otto, 71, 79 Vichy, 180 Victoria, Queen, 246 Vienna, 157 Vikings, 1, 244–7, 249–50, 252, 256, 258 Vinçard, Louis, 234, 236 Virgin Mary, Guild of the, 43, 45 de Vitry, Jacques, 55 Voltaire, 170, 190 von Woloshofen, Mechthild, 58

Union ouvrière, 231–3 United Grand Lodge of England, 91, 133 United Irishmen, 5 United Sisters of Tobacco Pipe Makers, 203 Up Helly Aa, 16, 21, 244–6, 249–55, 257 Urania, 144, 149 urbanization, 8, 18 USA, 6, 11, 13 Utopians, 230–1, 234

270 Index Wakefield, 202 Wales, 5, 111, 113–14, 210, 212 North Wales, 116–18, 121, 125 South Wales, 112, 116, 125 Walford, Cornelius, 8 Walker, Michael John, 8 Walters, Revd Mr, 124 Warwickshire, 202 Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, 8, 31 Weimar, 187 Weinbren, Daniel, 1, 19, 200 Weishaupt, Adam, 180, 193 West Harting, 108 Westminster, 36, 43 Wharton, Philip, Duke of, 105 Whitbread, Lady Isabella, 210 Whitbread, Maud, 210 Whitbread, Samuel, 202, 206–10, 212 Wildberg, 10 William of Orange, King, 78 William the Fourth Society, 5 Williams, Samantha, 204 Williams-Wynn, Charlotte, Lady, 118–19, 121, 125 Williams-Wynn, Henrietta Elizabeth, 121 Williams-Wynn, Sir Watkin, 116–19, 121, 125 Williams-Wynn, Sir William, 116, 118 Willig, 164 Wimbledon, 9 Windsor, 36

Winston-Allen, Anne, 6, 52 Wirksworth Hall, 202 Wismar, 164, 168 Wolff, Christian, 166 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 98 Women’s Masonry or Masonry by Adoption, 148 Women’s Suffrage Societies, National Union of, 33 Women’s Trade Union League, 205 workers, 2, 14, 16, 32, 34, 207, 223–38, 249 Workington, 202 Wrexham, 116, 121 Wunder, Heide, 93 Württemberg, 10, 55 Wyndham, William, 119 Wynnstay, 116, 118, 121, 123 Xanten, Norbert of, 54 Yarborough, 42, 44 Yeo, Stephen, 2 York, 9, 20, 34, 36, 75, 150, 202, 245 Yorkshire, 210 Young, Sir George, 21 Youth Confraternity of the Purification of the Virgin, 1 Yuletide, 253–4 Zealand, 54 Zurich, 58