ABSTRACT
Second, where Salisbury’s framework is multi-sensory, Carpenter’s attention is exclusively to the eyes. And, third, Carpenter’s conception of the sheriffs’ vision is much more literal. The nineteenth-century editor of the London custumal translated the participle conspicientes as ‘ever on the watch’.5 Against what were the sheriffs to be vigilant? Whom were they to watch? Upon which areas of the city were they to concentrate? The short passage from Carpenter’s Liber albus helpfully introduces the theme of this essay: the relationship between surveillance and urban disorder. Carpenter’s choice of the noun sollicitudo, which could be translated not only as ‘duty’, but also as ‘anxiety’, conveyed the general uneasiness that surrounded the mayoral office in early fifteenth-century London. The memory of the 1380s – of confrontations on the streets of the capital between the supporters of rival claimants to the London mayoralty, John of Northampton and Nicholas Brembre – had not dimmed by the late 1410s, when Carpenter completed his book.6 But in prioritising the eyes over the ears, Carpenter’s dread was large-scale, open revolt. The argument here is that surveillance arose from a complex connection between rebellion and speech. The word ‘surveillance’ is a nineteenth-century coinage; and in the wake of Michel Foucault’s work on the invention of the prison during the Enlightenment, the practice of surveillance has tended to be examined in relation to one, or both, of two metanarratives: the onset of modernity and the emergence of the disciplining power of the state.7 The origins of modernity are, of course, a matter of debate. Medievalists, interested in questions of power and social control, have explored concepts and mechanisms of surveillance in earlier periods and practised by a variety of institutions. R. I. Moore’s now classic story of the Western church’s use of techniques of religious and moral surveillance to ensure doctrinal orthodoxy, and to maintain authority between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, continues to be a touchstone for scholarship on the classification, stigmatisation, and extirpation of ‘dissent’ in the Middle Ages.8
