This newsletter is the third in a row to mention the prolific 17th-century balladeer Martin Parker. (I referenced his involvement in a pamphlet war in last week’s newsletter and the featured woodcut of the one before that came from a ballad he penned.) He is included this week because he is yet again the author of the ballad to which the featured woodcut was attached, but this is entirely coincidental.
The fact that I’ve happened to stumble across him twice when choosing illustrations to feature is a testament to how pervasive and voluminous his writing was. We can talk (quite justifiably) of the impact of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson on the culture of their time — but Martin Parker was surely a cultural force in his own right.
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Featured woodcut
When murders appeared in pamphlets and ballads of the 16th or 17th century, they were very commonly accompanied by gory woodcut illustrations designed to attract potential customers and, often, induce a “shock factor” which justified the pamphlet’s existence by pre-emptively answering the question a reader might have before deciding to purchase a book: “Is this crime really grisly enough to deserve to be put in print?”
The anonymous woodcutter who devised the above illustration which appeared on a ballad written by Martin Parker and published by Francis Coles in 1624 certainly understood his brief, and produced an image which was not only gripping but also a cut above the vast majority of its contemporaries (i.e. cheap print woodcuts) in terms of quality.
The printer is, to my knowledge, unknown — but the ballad had a very competent distributor in Francis Coles, who had that year joined forces with five other publishers to form a “Ballad Stock” which dominated the print market. (Some more about that can be read in this newsletter from two weeks ago.)
Unfortunately the ballad or pamphlet for which this woodcut was tailor-made does not seem to have survived, and it was certainly not commissioned for the narrative it accompanies. It seems to show a sword-wielding man standing defiantly in front of a cave filled with a pile of bodies (likely his victims), besides a kneeling woman, and underneath the bodies of three young children which are hanging from a tree branch.
A triple homicide in Cornwall
The 1624 ballad is interesting in its own right, however. It relays news of a “cruell Cornish murder” from July of that year in which a career criminal called Walter James — accompanied by his wife, a young woman, and a boy — killed a young girl and her mother. He had initially posed as a beggar desperate for alms but reportedly decapitated the mother after she explained there was no money to give, before going on to murder her seven-year-old daughter.
A short while later, a young woman arrived at the scene, where the murderers were still present. She was the sister of the young girl, and daughter of the beheaded mother. It was because of her that the criminals were there, for they wished to steal the dowry of £40 in gold that her father had reportedly offered to the best suitor for his daughter.
Shocked at the terrible sight before her, she fled and attempted to call for anybody nearby to help, but was intercepted by James, who “cut off her head most bloodily”.
James and his two female cronies then set the house on fire to hide the evidence of their crimes, but, Parker insists, “God did then declare/His power” by causing the bodies to remain intact, “as if no fire had beene”.
A murder investigation was swiftly launched and it was ordered that all vagrants be treated as suspects. The young boy who had accompanied James soon revealed all to a Justice of the Peace. He claimed James had debated killing him to prevent such a betrayal. James and his companions were tried at the following Lent Assize. The boy was acquitted and sent to the parish in which he had been born to turn over a new leaf — presumably on account of his very young age, cooperation with the authorities, and lack of active involvement in the crimes. The other three were sentenced to hang.
James denied his guilt even as he mounted the scaffold at his execution and “tooke his death with laughter”, though his wife and the other woman confessed.
All three were executed, but James’ punishment was not yet complete. For his role in orchestrating the murders, and his refusal to repent, his body was displayed in chains in the village of Crowan, Cornwall, where the crime had taken place.
Parker must have felt that some readers might have doubts about this particularly brutal crime, not least because (as he himself notes) he never named the victims or explained where the father of the household (who we’re told was a blind man) was during all of this.
Sceptical readers were provided with the names of eight local “eminent men” who could be consulted “for confirmation of the verity of this tragicall Story”. An extremely incredulous reader could, if they so wished, make the ~250 mile trip and inspect James’ hanging corpse for themselves.
A brief bit on the alehouse culture wars
It is basically a fact that nothing new ever happens. Or, at least, that there is nearly always a very similar precedent for anything “new” which does.
Cultural commentators decrying the plague of “wokeness” afflicting universities in the West, stifling free speech and causing institutions to veer from their intended path of education, would probably have been moralising Puritan pamphleteers in another lifetime.
I suspect I’ll write something more substantial on this subject matter in the future, so I’ll only briefly touch on another target of the early modern “culture wars”, on which (as far as I know) present-day critics have not yet set their crosshairs: pubs.
In my article about Tudor England’s “criminal underworld” (which did not really exist), I point out that paranoid writers suggested that criminal vagrants used a network of alehouses and inns to find lodging and fence stolen goods. More generally, it was feared that they were hubs of villainy where crimes were plotted, sedition planned, and treasonous thoughts given air. There were more than 14,000 alehouses in England in 1577 (not including many operating without a license) — a number which had doubled by the 1630s. That’s a lot of potential plotting.
A pamphleteer in 1660 wrote that “alehouses are the devils Academies, the Nurseries of all vice and Wickedness.” In these dozen words he pretty much summed up the opinion of a part of English society which was in the numerical minority but made sure its voice was heard for a hundred years.
The battle against alehouses played out not only in print but also on the ground. Edmund Gurnay, The Rector of Harpley, led a gallant — if ultimately fruitless — campaign against alehouses in his town, presenting three petitions between 1621 and 1622 which requested that “these licentious houses so harmful unto our town and no way profitable unto the country” be shut down. How many of these alehouses were actually operating without a license is unclear but, in any case, Gurnay’s final petition lamented that although “there was [a] warrant granted and served accordingly […] since that time there have been more alehouses in that town than before”.
Whether this was because alehouse keepers were flouting the law and operating illegally or because Justices of the Peace were continuing to give out licenses and disregarding the concerns of some of the locals could reveal whether it was local dissent or judicial ambivalence which was most to blame, but the functional reality was this: alehouses kept popping back up.
