The first substantive chapter uses a drinking song to tell the story of a man who travels to London from the countryside to attend an annual fair. As he cavorts with a prostitute behind a tent, she picks his pockets and he must leave the city with nothing to show for his time at the fair except a raging case of the pox. The chapter follows the fictional prostitute and the man through the streets, using actual medical cases and advertisements to piece together what each would have felt as their symptoms developed, as well as their desperate attempts to find affordable treatment. The main aim of the chapter is to establish much-needed context for the remainder of the book, both about the disease and about London’s ever-growing market in remedies for it. The chapter shows that those selling pox cures and those selling sex embodied the very same urban threats in writing of the era: in ballads and in medical writing, both prostitutes and purveyors of pox remedies were presumed to be deceptive, self-serving, and sexually aggressive. Their very existence personified the unbridled consumption and unchecked vice of the big city.

Guild and craft apprentices had entered written contracts (indentures) with their masters and mistresses since the late medieval era in England. Consent in these relationships was not a matter of great anxiety, and the documents treated the topic with minimal concern. From the 1570s, English parish officers adopted these indentures for the new system of parish apprenticeship. They carefully archived masters’ written consent for future reference, to help ensure that better-off householders fulfilled their roles in providing for the poor children bound to them. A small number of parish apprenticeship indentures included new “free will clauses,” which stated that the pauper child in question had offered free and willing consent to serve. Although little contemporary commentary exists on the matter, parish officers likely inserted such language as a defense against suspicions that they had excessively coerced poor children to enter unwanted labor contracts. The chapter concludes with a case study of a guild apprentice whose gentry status protected him from recruitment into colonial servitude.

The treatment of alleged “spiriting” victims in London courts versus colonial American courts further reveals presumptions of consent to work. The lower courts in London offered redress to people targeted by illicit transatlantic servant brokers when they escaped before transportation. Early modern notions about how people’s behavior flowed from their intentions meant that contemporaries sympathized with rescued or escaped spiriting victims in London precisely because they had avoided transportation. By contrast, spirited servants who arrived in the colonies struggled to shift the perception that the mere fact of their arrival indicated that they had wanted to come. The colonial magistrates presumed that newly arrived servants had been complicit in their own transportation and oversaw the belated creation of servants’ indentures. Far fewer servants found redress for spiriting in the colonies than in London, because of this presumption and further procedural obstacles.

From the 1610s in London, servant brokers, merchants, and eventually justices of the peace and their clerks recorded consent to transatlantic colonial indentured servitude with heightened attention. In doing so, they were responding to the vastness of the distances servants crossed, compounded with the multi-year length of their contractual terms and the unlikeliness of the servants returning home. The assignability of these contracts further differentiated them from the contemporaneous forms of indentured labor. In this newer system, contracts more often specified the voluntary nature of servants’ agreement with a free will clause, precisely because their willingness seemed implausible. The treatment of different categories of recruits, including adults, children, convicts, and paupers, are compared. Unwilling recruits could sometimes secure their release before the ships departed England. Sealed indentures made escape far less achievable.

To explore what it meant to own and possess in the eighteenth century, Keeping Hold looks to instances in which people lost possessions and how they responded to such experiences. Chapter 2 begins the book’s focus on loss and does so by looking to urban sites. It looks to the city of the eighteenth century: London. The capital was of growing importance in this period as an economic powerhouse and social hub. Guidebooks emerged as an important genre for those seeking to comprehend London’s densely filled and ever-lengthening streets. The chapter explores these sources and finds how the capital was increasingly imagined as a site of deception and loss, where possessions might be pickpocketed or simply left in the bustle and in which servants and apprentices regularly ran away. The chapter examines how eighteenth-century Londoners responded to such perceived threats by utilising technologies of security, such as pockets and collars. By doing so they worked to prevent loss.

This chapter explores works by two contemporary London-based Black British playwrights who also direct, produce, and perform: debbie tucker green and Mojisola Adebayo. Examining plays produced and performed between 2005 and 2019, the chapter suggests that both women create distinctive work that combines singular dramaturgy with transformative politics, shifting the framing of spectatorial perspective. They are also known for making innovative, experimental, and poetical work at the intersection of aesthetics and politics. The chapter traces the Blochian utopian possibility of ‘something’s missing’ (etwas fehlt) in tucker green’s dramaturgy of refusal. In her plays, the chapter suggests, we can identify what Herbert Marcuse’s called ‘the Great Refusal’, which develops a utopian sensibility via negation. Frequently working class, Black, and female, tucker green’s belligerent characters reveal to audiences what is missing in their difficult lives, how everything should be different in Britain. In Adebayo’s work, forged in the community-led Black Mime Theatre in the 1990s, utopian possibility forms part of the affective spectatorial encounter with her theatre. Whilst Adebayo’s plays are less abrasive, they similarly highlight what is missing. The transformative energy of her dramaturgy can be seen in utopian foretastes of alternative lives, in which Black, queer, and de-colonial modes of intersubjectivity become possible.

There is a modern expectation that since Shakespearean theatre is in some respects a popular art form, it should represent ordinary people in a positive or sympathetic light. This hope is frustrated at many points by the hierarchical structure of early modern culture, and its consequent tendency to identify the common people with whatever is ignoble and disorderly – an identification which is deepened, in plays as in society more generally, by the conventional image of the people as a nameless, fickle, and latently rebellious crowd. The pejorative force of these associations is complicated, however, by the fact that something like that very crowd is present in the theatre itself, watching, even co-creating, the show. It is as a formal dimension of the entertainment that ‘the people’ most tellingly take possession of Shakespeare’s stage.

Twenty-first-century readers perhaps associate the word ‘citizen’ with nations and states. The inhabitants of England in the later Middle Ages, however, were subjects of the king, not citizens of a nation. The word ‘citizen’ did exist in late medieval England, but it referred to cities and towns rather than nations, realms or states. A citizen was someone who swore an oath to be a member of an urban political community: a person who paid taxes to the local urban government, took up municipal office when called upon and contributed towards the defence of the city. In return, the citizen received the right to practise a trade within the city and to be tried by the city’s own law courts.

This viewpoint examines The Dying Negro, A Poem (London, 1773). The poem was directly inspired by a May 1773 newspaper account of an unnamed enslaved man who had sailed to London with his enslaver, emancipated himself, and was subsequently recaptured; he died by suicide while imprisoned in a ship anchored in the River Thames awaiting transport back to the Americas. Authors John Bicknell and Thomas Day used this tragic event to wage a poetic protest against slavery in the British empire. As the American Revolution neared, the authors revised the poem, including its title, to fortify its antislavery message. Subsequent editions condemned the hypocrisy of American slave-owning Patriots, using their embrace of slavery to assert English moral superiority in the Revolutionary conflict. The Dying Negro was published in multiple editions and sparked popular engagement in debates over slavery and the meaning of freedom in the era of the American Revolution.

This chapter considers the event perceived as the culmination of a good religious life – the final days and hours. The analysis considers deathbed prayers and the taking of sacraments, along with the presence of a priest, minister, and other visitors of the same faith or congregation. It argues that the deathbed – as both a site and an occasion – was an important prompt for communal religion within the home. The final days, hours, and moments of an individual’s life were recognised as a significant opportunity for religious expression for those belonging to all confessions. While some scholars have argued that post-Reformation deathbeds were increasingly secular, this chapter analyses numerous descriptions of Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant deathbeds which emphasise that an individual’s piety and composure in their final hours were interpreted as a reflection of their piety in life. Dying was a process which required witnesses, participants, and visitors, both to provide spiritual comfort to the dying individual and to observe and learn from their example.

This chapter examines rituals which took place after childbirth, uncovering evidence of baptisms, circumcisions, and even churching ceremonies that were held in domestic spaces. It suggests that a range of ceremonies we would now associate with public places of worship were frequently located in domestic spaces. It moves beyond studies which have argued that domestic baptism primarily took place in the home out of necessity, demonstrating that elective domestic baptism was more commonplace than has previously been acknowledged. Domestic ceremonies could also take place in networks of homes, being accommodated not in the family home, but in the home of a midwife, rabbi, or lay co-religionist. These ceremonies, and associated processions from the home to the place of public worship, marked the symbolic ending of the lying-in period, the departure of the mother from the home, and the welcoming of the child into the religious community. They emphasise the significance of the home as a setting of communal sociability and religious practice, and provide an important opportunity to consider the central place of the individual household within its congregation.

This chapter examines religious practices which took place in the home immediately after death: from the laying out, washing, and watching of the body, and domestic gatherings such as ‘wakes’, to the removal of the body from the home, its transfer to a burial place, and the attendant rituals associated with the disposal of the body and mourning for the deceased. It also identifies evidence of cases where the home itself was used as the location for the funeral rites. While the watching and disposal of the body necessarily catered to social and biological needs, religious aspects were closely intertwined with many seemingly practical decisions. The washing and laying out of the body, for example, would generally be performed by members of the parish or local religious community. This chapter makes use of wills, personal writing, burial records, and congregational records which provide an insight into the relationships between individual households and a wider congregation, including its designated burial ground. It argues that the home facilitated acts of communal religion in the hours and days after death, as it became the setting for gatherings and acts of charity to the body.

This chapter analyses domestic practices associated with childbirth. It considers how urban households approached and framed childbirth as an event of religious significance, by examining prayers that were said before, during, and after the event of childbirth, as well as ritual attempts to demarcate the setting of birth or the lying-in chamber from the rest of the home. Through an examination of the ecclesiastical licensing of London midwives, it explores post-Reformation attempts to regulate the female domestic event of childbirth, amid fears that it could be associated with ‘Popish’ or superstitious practices, and concerns that Catholic midwives, if operating undetected, would attempt to perform clandestine Catholic baptism. By considering personal writing and Quaker and Jewish congregational birth records, it examines the faith of midwives and invited gossips, situating the lying-in room within the broader parish or religious community, and showing how those invited into the home could be representatives of the congregation beyond its walls. It shows that such occasions emphasisied women’s relative authority both within and outside their own households.

This chapter provides a detailed comparative overview of domestic religion in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London, setting out evidence of a range of domestic devotional activities as performed by households of different faiths, and introducing the legislation which, to varying extents, restricted the open religious expression of these different communities. It considers how larger domestic gatherings involving participants other than members of the household would have been restricted by legislation such as the Conventicle Acts (1664–89), as well as self-regulation within the recently established Jewish communities. This legislation or congregational law drew a distinction between household and family prayer and ‘gathering for worship’ in domestic spaces. The chapter suggests that domestic gatherings for worship were permitted in certain circumstances, and that these circumstances generally coincided with life-cycle events.

While Birth, Death, and Domestic Religion suggests that collective piety, sociability, and visiting were associated with the life-cycle events of childbirth and death, connections between homes were also sustained through daily preparations for death. This chapter argues that news of sickness and death was transmitted easily out of and into urban homes, and that this news had a discernible impact on the religious practices of other households in the neighbourhood, parish, or wider religious community. It is not concerned with the event or process of dying itself, but with how a community beyond the affected household responded to that fact. It argues that death made the walls of the urban home permeable. The awareness of an individual’s death, transmitted through word of mouth, or subsequently through the printing of a funeral sermon, entered the homes of others and had a perceptible influence on their daily religious practices. This chapter seeks to bridge the gap between two important functions of the home: firstly, the home as the site of most natural deaths, and secondly, the home as an important setting for daily religion.