Highlanders and the City: Migration, Segmentation, and the Image of the Highlander in Early Modern London, 1603-c.1750

The study of Scottish migration in the early modern period has experienced extensive growth in recent decades, but has tended to privilege overseas movement over the presence of Scots elsewhere in Britain. This is particularly true of migrants from the Scottish Highlands: much has been written about Highlanders in America or Continental Europe, but almost nothing is known about their experiences in England and Wales, and in particular in London, consistently the major destination of Scots moving southwards. This article seeks to address that gap by exploring the extent and nature of Highland migration to London during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It begins by surveying the surviving evidence for Highlanders’ presence in the English capital, suggesting that they were most readily to be found in the elite and mercantile sectors, and were comparatively rarer among the ranks of artisans, professionals, or the poor. It is also argued that Highlanders tended not to form a coherent ethnic ‘bloc’, but instead were subsumed within the wider Scottish diaspora. This, however, was paradoxical, because London was during this period developing a strong image of ‘the Highlanders’ as distinctive from ‘the Scot’. The article therefore goes on to explore the origins of Highlander imagery, and concludes that those Highlanders actually resident in London contributed very little to it. Instead, image-makers drew predominantly on pre-existing Scottish stereotypes, travellers’ reports, outlaw tales, and political discourse, for example surrounding Jacobitism. All of this suggests a degree of invisibility around the Highland community in early modern London, and that, the article suggests, underlines the fundamental blurriness of the Highland/Lowland divide within Scotland. It also indicates that a segmented, rather than ethno-cultural model of assimilation might offer the most reliable means of understanding the Scottish diaspora in early modern London.

“O'erwhelmed with noise”: Abject Female Speech in Epicene; or, The Silent Woman

This article discusses Ben Jonson's 1609 play Epicene; or, The Silent Woman, with a particular focus on Morose's excessive solitude and aversion to noise. The article begins by demonstrating how Epicene ostensibly relies on early modern discourses of female speech. The ideal woman of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century conduct literature was silent, a quality inseparable from the associated virtues of chastity and modesty. Morose takes this imperative to its extreme in his search for a bride of “thrifty speech,” who “spends but six words a day” (1.2.28-9). In contrast, excessive female speech is associated with women's proverbial corporeal leakiness, “hermaphroditic” or “epicene” gender, and uncontrolled sexual desire. Above all, the play insists that noisy, desiring, masculine women are a product of the emergent consumer culture located in the city. This raises a contradiction: are women all inherently prone to noisiness, or does female noisiness trouble the boundaries of gender? If women are naturally noisy, what is it about early modern London that, according to the play, exacerbates this? How we understand the nature of noise has profound implications for our reception of Morose. Rather than defining Morose solely in terms of his apparent agoraphobia and miserly character, as earlier criticism tended to do, attention to the ways in which both Morose and Epicene attempt to construct intolerable noise as an innate feature of urban womanhood can illuminate the structure of social abjection at work in policing the boundaries of masculinity and male communities.

“Saucy Stink”: Smells, Sanitation, and Conflict in Early Modern London

This article examines olfactory offenses in early modern London. It explores how inhabitants managed causes of malodorous air, focusing on common nuisances stemming from everyday household practices like laundry and waste management. Clotheslines were hung up between lodgings, households disposed of kitchen waste in gutters overflowing with garbage, and neighbours used stinking, communal privies. Seasonal weather intensified the city’s poor air quality, and rainwater washed refuse into urban rivers. In the early seventeenth century, the growing awareness of the effects of air quality on health coincided with significant demographic changes in the city. Insalubrious air was intrinsically linked to increased migration, overcrowded neighbourhoods, and the spread of diseases. The improvement of the city’s air quality became a more immediate concern for Londoners, civic authorities, and the early Stuart monarchs, who deployed a range of sanitation strategies. As London grew, so too did concern for its inhabitants and the dwellings they occupied.

Civic Pageantry in Early Modern London

Book reviews: Finlayson, J. Caitlin and Amrita Sen, eds. Civic Performance. Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London. Abingdon-New York: Routledge, 2020. xiv + 254 pages. ISBN 978-1-138-22839-9. Hb. £96.