ABSTRACT
Elizabethan class-confl ict, we have seen, is no wanton anachronism, but was a bitter reality escalating through the post-Armada years. Increasingly it yielded, Keith Wrightson has noted, “a dichotomous perception of society”, a “language of ‘sorts’” which, in disregard of “the fi ne-grained (and highly contested) distinctions of the hierarchy of degrees” generated a language that “regroup[ed] the English into two broad camps . . . cleaving society into the haves and have nots, the respected and the contemned”. We need, agrees Andy Wood, to recognise “the continuing willingness of contemporaries to conceive of a simple division between ‘rich’ and ‘poor . . . Plebeian defi nitions of social confl ict worked within a dualistic perception of society”.2 “What whoresones were we that we had not killed the gentlemen” lamented the jailed Captain Cobbler, following the collapse of the Lincolnshire rising of 1536, “for I thought allwayes that they would be traytors.”3 William Poynet was prosecuted in 1549 for the claim that “Gents and Richemen have all catell and wolles & suche like things in ther hands nowe a days & the pore pe[o]ple are now Famysshed but C of us wyll rise one daye agenst them & I wylbe one.”4 ‘The rich’, as a hate-category, indeed expanded in the last decades of the sixteenth century, notes Wood, to encompass merchants and wealthy farmers.5 Plebeian class critique was
frequently convinced that its superiors were conspiring to destroy working men. As Somerset food rioters expressed it in 1596, “the ritche men have gotten all into their hands and will starve the poore.”6 Popular anger might even prove ignorant of that dazzled reverence for courtliness primly mandated by New Historicism: “Shyte uppon your Queene”, responded a labourer to magistrates in 1585: “I woulde to god she were dead that I might shytt on her face.”7
