Ink, Stink Bait, Revenge, and Queen Elizabeth: A Yorkshire Yeoman's Household Book

Ink, Stink Bait, Revenge, and Queen Elizabeth: A Yorkshire Yeoman's Household Book Steven W. May and Arthur F. Marotti Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014 Several years ago the British Library received a large collection of papers of the Spencer and Stanhope extended family of Cannon Hall, Yorkshire, which they considered valuable chiefly for the correspondence of Lord Nelson's second in command at the Battle of Trafalgar. Upon arrival, a thorough examination of the full contents of the collection turned up a household book compiled by John Hanson of Rastrick, Yorkshire, a tenant of the Elizabethan-era family patriarch John Stanhope. Hanson (1517-99), a scrivener and apparently self-taught legal advisor, proved a man of broad interests. The diverse contents of his book speak to many of them. Hanson recorded a lengthy prose narrative plus a later ballad concerning a bitter fourteenth-century inter-family feud (Chapter 1); two long-lost broadside ballads describing Queen Elizabeth's post-Armada celebratory procession through London (Chapter 2); several texts copied from printed sources (Chapter 3); and other, unpublished, texts including two poems attributed to Elizabeth herself (Chapter 4). These are all bound together with lists of English monarchs, manorial tenants, and English counties, and instructions and recipes on such diverse subjects as making inks and pigments and catching fish and fowl. This intriguing and hitherto unknown source inspired Steven W. May and Arthur F. Marotti to undertake their summary and analysis of Hanson's work, to transcribe much of its contents, and more generally to emphasize the importance of an early modern scribal culture which has often been overlooked in assessing the intellectual tenor of the times. (Their inventive and certainly distinctive title derives from some of Hanson's own terms and themes: it remains to be seen if it will be easily remembered or readily forgotten in its full extent.) Hanson proves an apt subject for a discussion of scribal culture. May and Marotti make much of the importance of such a collection emanating from the pen of someone whom they describe as a mere yeoman. One may quibble with that social description, as Hanson appears to have derived his income and reputation from his work as a professional scrivener and legal advisor as well as from the collection of rents. But even this modest status at the lowest rung of the legal profession illustrates the sub-elite social level at which such a culture thrived by the mid-Elizabethan era, whilst his rural west Yorkshire base illustrates its geographic range. Those are important attributes. Modern scholarship has tended to observe pre-modern English scribal culture amongst the elevated social ranks operating from the country houses of the day or in proximity to London and the universities. Hanson's book may be unusual in emanating from someone of his social status, but it is not unique. May and Marotti very usefully place it in the context of other such efforts carried out, for example, by Thomas Brampton of Kempton, Suffolk; Henry Gurney of Great Ellingham, Norfolk; and, most interestingly, Hanson's fellow west Yorkshireman and contemporary John Kaye of Woodsome. (1) Given the undeniable fact that the material remains of sub-gentry or minor gentry families are far less likely to survive than those of the more affluent and generationally stable status groups, we are fortunate to have such works. As May and Marotti note, the preservation of most surviving household or commonplace books of this era result from the family's subsequent rise to long-term stability and affluence. (2) John Kaye's literary remains, for example, survived as the family became more affluent, influential and affluent in successive generations. John Kaye himself established his 'house' by shrewd investments in agricultural lands and coal mines. His direct descendants included a baronet in the early seventeenth century and a leading inventor of industrial machinery in the eighteenth, whilst the family seat at Woodsome survived into the twentieth. …

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