Abstract

"Female Spinners and City Merchants: Anti-Monopoly Agitation in Early Stuart England"

Ellen Paterson, University of Oxford (ellen.paterson@keble.ox.ac.uk)

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the English crown introduced patents of monopoly over a range of commodities. Consequently, subjects across the realm found themselves pushed out of their trades or forced to pay for licences to continue to practice them. Faced with profound changes to their economic realities, many articulated their grievances to such centres of authority as the parliament, privy council, and the crown. This paper will focus on the outbreak of anti-monopoly agitation in the parliament of 1621, focusing on a rich set of depositions in the House of Lords given by female spinners and merchants in London. It will show that non-elite subjects were active participants in the negotiation and formation of the crown’s fiscal policies as they fought to protect their economic rights and liberties. Everyday interactions with ‘loose agents’ of the state, monopolists and patentees, pushed subjects to interact with some of the highest authorities in the land. This paper ultimately shows that a wider remit of subjects were involved in discussions of the regulation of the economy than the pamphlet writers and merchants so often identified in pre-existent literature, highlighting the dialogues and negotiations triggered by the crown’s intrusive fiscal policies.