ABSTRACT

Towards the end of 1598 Edward Hodgson, a yeoman from York, was called as a witness to the church courts. Hodgson recalled that: ‘One day in July last past or thereabouts being a workday about eleven O’clock [he] was in the new dwelling house of William Bonas situated within the parish of St Michael’s together with Edward Clint, Emma Clark, and others.’ 1 Bonas was a beer-brewer who had recently opened an alehouse to sell his beer. Robert Malton, a York tanner, likewise remembered that ‘one day about Lamas last past’ he ‘went to William Bonas his house where he found Edward Clint and others drinking’. More particularly, Malton found ‘Edward Clint sitting quietly with Edward Hodgson, James Denning and William Barker and Roger Deane and others’. 2 Here the accounts of Hodgson and Malton diverge slightly. Hodgson, who admitted he could not remember ‘all the speeches that then passe[d] amongst them’, testified that ‘Edward Clint called Emma Clark whore and said to her ‘Thou whore why wilt thou not bring in herring’? 3 Malton remembered the incident slightly differently. He testified that, after he sat down with Clint, ‘he willed Bonas’s maid [Emma Clark] to broil a herring and after she had [served him] such he thought the same was not well broiled then quoth Clint in merriment “Thou whore cans’t thou not broil a herring?”’ Clint’s outburst prompted James Denning to ask his companion, ‘Why do you call her whore? It will hold plea in our court’ to which Clint replied ‘I think her no harm, I laugh at her’. 4 Unfortunately for Clint neither Emma Clarke nor Elizabeth Bonas, wife of William and Emma’s mistress, saw the funny side. According to Malton, when Clint tried to leave the house ‘Elizabeth Bonas met the said Edward Clint and said to him “Call thou me a whore?” and hit him on the face with her fist.’ 5 And as Denning predicted, Emma later sued Clint in the church courts in York (‘our court’) for defamation, with Elizabeth launching her own legal suit for good measure.