Anatomy of a Duel in Jacobean England: Honour Cultures, Gentry Violence and the Law
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Our next Exploring the Past free lecture takes place on Wednesday 16th February 2022. Please sign up to book a place, and we will send a Zoom link a few days before the talk.
For February’s talk, we’re excited to welcome Dr Lloyd Bowen (Cardiff University), to speak on the theme: ‘Anatomy of a Duel in Jacobean England: Honour Cultures, Gentry Violence and the Law’:
This talk takes as its focus the best-documented duel in early modern England. This was a fight which took place in Highgate on 21 April 1610 between two gentlemen, one from Cheshire and one from Flintshire. Its fallout included a manhunt, a trial for murder, accusations of jury-rigging, and a controversial royal pardon. A unique legal archive allows us not only to reconstruct this duel in unprecedented detail, but also to follow its origins and its aftermath. The paper considers what this microhistory can tell us about elite violence, gentry honour cultures and the operation of the law in Shakespeare’s England, and argues that English gentlemen were perhaps not as ‘civil’ and ‘pacified’ as many commentators have argued.