Earning a living

If it was thought perfectly natural that law and the ‘public interest’ should intervene in the private lives of families, it follows as self-evident that it should also have been involved in those aspects of ‘political economy’ that took place beyond the household, in the streets, the alehouse, the guildhall or the marketplace. This was of course most uncontroversial in connection with obvious infractions of the criminal law, where mutual protection mandated collective vigilance. As the complier of statutes Ferdinando Pulton put it, while private suits might be considered private matters, criminal cases were the ‘concern of all men’, and since all men benefited from the common peace, all were required from time to time to participate in the maintenance of it. Yet, as many historians have pointed out, the use of legal sanctions to govern personal behaviour in the early modern period often seems to have been more comprehensive than this, and, according to some accounts, it was also the source of hegemonic power that the social elite could use to exercise political and social control. Consequently, the aim of this chapter is to investigate the relationship between the individual person and society at large, primarily by examining the nature and extent of constraints on what could be said in public and what could be done in public spaces outside the household.