Jacobean Inflation of Honours Author Paisley Mann Markup Editor Kate LeBere Data Manager Tye Landels Junior Programmer Joey Takeda Programmer Martin Holmes Associate Project Director Kim McLean-Fiander Project Director Janelle Jenstad The Map of Early Modern Londonhttp://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/includes.xmlVictoria, BC, Canada
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2016University of Victoria978-1-55058-519-3 Janelle Jenstad london@uvic.ca

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 Provider: University of Victoria Database: The Map of Early Modern London Content: text/plain; charset="utf-8" TY - ELEC A1 - Mann, Paisley ED - Jenstad, Janelle T1 - Jacobean Inflation of Honours T2 - The Map of Early Modern London ET - 7.0 PY - 2022 DA - 2022/05/05 CY - Victoria PB - University of Victoria LA - English UR - https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/THIR1.htm UR - https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/xml/standalone/THIR1.xml ER - Mann, Paisley. Jacobean Inflation of Honours. The Map of Early Modern London, Edition 7.0, edited by Janelle Jenstad, U of Victoria, 05 May 2022, mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/THIR1.htm. Mann, Paisley. Jacobean Inflation of Honours. The Map of Early Modern London, Edition 7.0. Ed. Janelle Jenstad. Victoria: University of Victoria. Accessed May 05, 2022. mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/THIR1.htm. Mann, P. 2022. Jacobean Inflation of Honours. In J. Jenstad (Ed), The Map of Early Modern London (Edition 7.0). Victoria: University of Victoria. Retrieved from https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/editions/7.0/THIR1.htm. Born digital. Chapman, George, Ben Jonson, and John Marston. Eastward Ho! Ed. R.W. Van Fossen. New York: Manchester UP, 1999. Print. Riggs, David. Ben Jonson: A Life. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989. Print. Sharpe, Kevin. Crown, Parliament and Locality: Government and Communication in Early Stuart England. The English Historical Review 101.399 (1986): 321–350. doi:10.1093/ehr/CI.CCCXCIX.321. Stone, Lawrence. Social Mobility in England, 1500–1700. Past and Present 33.1 (1966): 16–55. doi:10.1093/past/33.1.16. Stone, Lawrence. The Inflation of Honours 1558–1641. Past and Present 14.1 (1958): 45–70. doi:10.1093/past/14.1.45. The reign of James VI and I

The term thirty-pound gentlemen refers to the men who were able to buy their way into the gentry by purchasing titles. This practice was instituted by King James, and, as David Riggs notes, his Scottish cronies were often the ones who collected the bribes (Riggs 123). In the case of this particular phrase, the title of gentleman would have cost thirty pounds.

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 Kate LeBere Kate LeBere KL

Project Manager, 2020-2021. Assistant Project Manager, 2019-2020. Research Assistant, 2018-2020. Kate LeBere completed her BA (Hons.) in History and English at the University of Victoria in 2020. She published papers in The Corvette (2018), The Albatross (2019), and PLVS VLTRA (2020) and presented at the English Undergraduate Conference (2019), Qualicum History Conference (2020), and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute’s Project Management in the Humanities Conference (2021). While her primary research focus was sixteenth and seventeenth century England, she completed her honours thesis on Soviet ballet during the Russian Cultural Revolution. During her time at MoEML, Kate made significant contributions to the 1598 and 1633 editions of Stow’s Survey of London, old-spelling anthology of mayoral shows, and old-spelling library texts. She authored the MoEML’s first Project Management Manual and quickstart guidelines for new employees and helped standardize the Personography and Bibliography. She is currently a student at the University of British Columbia’s iSchool, working on her masters in library and information science.

 Joey Takeda Joey Takeda JT

Programmer, 2018-present. Junior Programmer, 2015-2017. Research Assistant, 2014-2017. Joey Takeda was a graduate student at the University of British Columbia in the Department of English (Science and Technology research stream). He completed his BA honours in English (with a minor in Women’s Studies) at the University of Victoria in 2016. His primary research interests included diasporic and indigenous Canadian and American literature, critical theory, cultural studies, and the digital humanities.

 Tye Landels-Gruenewald Tye Landels-Gruenewald TLG

Data Manager, 2015-2016. Research Assistant, 2013-2015. Tye completed his undergraduate honours degree in English at the University of Victoria in 2015.

 Liam Sarsfield Liam Sarsfield LS

Research Assistant, 2010. At the time of his work with MoEML, Liam Sarsfield was a fourth-year honours English student at the University of Victoria. He now works at MetaLab.

 Kim McLean-Fiander Kim McLean-Fiander KMF

Director of Pedagogy and Outreach, 2015–2020. Associate Project Director, 2015. Assistant Project Director, 2013-2014. MoEML Research Fellow, 2013. Kim McLean-Fiander comes to The Map of Early Modern London from the Cultures of Knowledge digital humanities project at the University of Oxford, where she was the editor of Early Modern Letters Online, an open-access union catalogue and editorial interface for correspondence from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. She is currently Co-Director of a sister project to EMLO called Women’s Early Modern Letters Online (WEMLO). In the past, she held an internship with the curator of manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library, completed a doctorate at Oxford on paratext and early modern women writers, and worked a number of years for the Bodleian Libraries and as a freelance editor. She has a passion for rare books and manuscripts as social and material artifacts, and is interested in the development of digital resources that will improve access to these materials while ensuring their ongoing preservation and conservation. An avid traveler, Kim has always loved both London and maps, and so is particularly delighted to be able to bring her early modern scholarly expertise to bear on the MoEML project.

 Janelle Jenstad Janelle Jenstad JJ

Janelle Jenstad is Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and PI of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. She has taught at Queen’s University, the Summer Academy at the Stratford Festival, the University of Windsor, and the University of Victoria. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media (Routledge). She has prepared a documentary edition of John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Renaissance and Reformation,Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Early Modern Literary Studies, Elizabethan Theatre, Shakespeare Bulletin: A Journal of Performance Criticism, and The Silver Society Journal. Her book chapters have appeared (or will appear) in Institutional Culture in Early Modern Society (Brill, 2004), Shakespeare, Language and the Stage, The Fifth Wall: Approaches to Shakespeare from Criticism, Performance and Theatre Studies (Arden/Thomson Learning, 2005), Approaches to Teaching Othello (Modern Language Association, 2005), Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2007), New Directions in the Geohumanities: Art, Text, and History at the Edge of Place (Routledge, 2011), Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter, 2016), Teaching Early Modern English Literature from the Archives (MLA, 2015), Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana, 2016), Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota, 2017), and Rethinking Shakespeare’s Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge, 2018).

 Martin D. Holmes Martin D. Holmes MDH

Programmer at the University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre (HCMC). Martin ported the MOL project from its original PHP incarnation to a pure eXist database implementation in the fall of 2011. Since then, he has been lead programmer on the project and has also been responsible for maintaining the project schemas. He was a co-applicant on MoEML’s 2012 SSHRC Insight Grant.

 Paisley Mann Paisley Mann PM

Student contributor enrolled in English 520: Representations of London in Early Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Victoria in Summer 2008. Paisley Mann completed her MA at the University of Victoria and went on to doctoral work at the University of British Columbia. Her work on Thomas Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not MeYou Know Nobody began with a term paper on the play’s portrayal of illicit French sexuality, a topic she has also researched for the website <ref target="http://www.representationsfrance.cnrs.fr/index.htm">Representing France and the French in Early Modern English Drama</ref>. This topic interests her, although she specializes in Victorian literature, because she frequently works on how Victorian literature portrays France and French culture. She is also a contributor for Routledge’s online database Annotated Bibliography of English Studies.

 George Chapman George Chapman

Playwright, translator, and poet.

ODNB Wikipedia Sir William Dugdale Sir William Dugdale

Antiquary and herald.

EB ODNB Wikipedia Sir Petronel Flash Sir Petronel Flash

Dramatic character in Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and John Marston’s Eastward Ho!

 James VI and I James VI I King of Scotland King of England King of Ireland

King of Scotland 1567-1625. King of England and Ireland 1603-1625.

ODNB Wikipedia Ben Jonson Ben Jonson

Poet and playwright.

ODNB Wikipedia Sir Robert Knolles Sir Robert Knolles

First Earl of Banbury. Led a large group of London citizens to Smithfield to assist Richard II during the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381. Husband of Constance Knolles. Buried at Whitefriars Church.

ODNB Wikipedia John Marston John Marston

Playwright and poet.

EB ODNB Wikipedia font-style: italic;

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The term thirty-pound gentlemen refers to the men who were able to buy their way into the gentry by purchasing titles. This practice was instituted by King James, and, as David Riggs notes, his Scottish cronies were often the ones who collected the bribes (Riggs 123). In the case of this particular phrase, the title of gentleman would have cost thirty pounds. However, the monetary figure varies, and thus so does the term for those who moved upwards on the social scale by way of making a payment. In addition to these terms, the phrase inflation of honours is also used by modern historians to denote this practice (Stone 24). As Lawrence Stone notes, the most fundamental dichotomy within the society was between the gentleman and the non-gentleman, a division that was based essentially upon the distinction between those who did, and those who did not, have to work with their hands (Stone 17). This distinction explains the desire of commoners to become gentlemen. Upon acquiring a title, one would move up considerably in social standing. James was able to capitalize on this desire for social climbing, using the money he collected to finance his own spending (Stone 47–48).

The 1605 play by Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and John Marston entitled Eastward Ho! satirizes this new class of gentleman. Sir Petronel Flash is a debauched knight who, had it not been for his bought title, would have remained the unimpressive-sounding Mr. Flash (Riggs 122). In this instance, he has bought a knighthood for thirty pounds. This point is made clear in the following exchange between two gentlemen in Eastward Ho!:

First Gentleman: I ken the man weel, he’s one of my thirty-pound knights. Second Gentleman: No, no, this is he that stole his knighthood o’ the grand day for four pound. Chapman 4.1.197–200

Riggs explains that lest anyone fail to grasp the reference to James, First Gentleman turns into a comic Scotsman with a heavy brogue while speaking the line that refers to his thirty-pound knights (Riggs 123). The passage assumes that something that can be bought can also be stolen, like any other commodity.

During James’ reign, the practice of selling knighthoods became popular. Stone records that there was a remarkable increase in the number of the upper class, which trebled at a period when the total population barely doubled (Stone 23–24). He identifies the growth of each level of the upper class: the number of peers rose from 60 to 160; of baronets and knights from 500 to 1,400; of squires from perhaps 800 to 3,000; of armigerous gentry [gentlemen allowed to wear a coat of arms] from perhaps 5,000 to around 15,000 (Stone 24). While Stone does qualify that these increases resulted from a variety of factors—the extremely high rate of reproduction among the gentry, as well as the creation of new wealth due to trade—these increases were in large part influenced by the practice of the inflation of honours (Stone 24). Kevin Sharpe notes that, historically, scholars have not paid enough attention to the impact that the inflation of honours had on early Stuart society (Sharpe 322).

The practice of buying titles had a significant impact on the way in which the monarchy was perceived. In The Inflation of Honours 1558–1641, Stone calls the open sale of titles in the seventeenth century a crying scandal, and suggests that the titles bestowed in such a way were no longer viewed as legitimate. The decision to sell titles betrayed the system of bestowing honours as fundamental[ly] artificial and exposed it to public contempt and ridicule (Stone 45). This mockery of the inflation of honours is clear in the above passage from Eastward Ho!

Naturally, as a result of the increase in the number of gentlemen, the cachet associated with being a gentleman waned. By 1682 Sir William Dugdale reluctantly agreed that these Marks of Honour are now by most people grown of little esteem (qtd. in Stone 48). The enormous growth of the lowest titled rank—armigerous gentry—from 5,000 to 15,000 would have greatly debased the prestige of having this title (Stone 24). The increase in the number of armigerous gentry made those belonging to the nobility (the upper ranks of the gentry) increasingly concerned about the exclusivity of their positions.

There was some debate surrounding the sale of the title of esquire and the consequences of this practice. Originally the title was used only for the younger sons of peers and their male heirs, knights’ male heirs, and judges, sheriffs, and justices of the peace. But Sir Robert Knollys suggested that the title of esquire should be sold in a similar fashion to the title of gentleman (Stone 48). However, this move was blocked by aristocrats (the elite members of the gentry) who were fearful of losing their prestigious position in society. This decision to block the sale of esquiries demonstrates the alternative view about the selling of titles. For those without titles, the ability to purchase the ticket into honourable society was positive. For those who already possessed titles, the inflation of honours represented a threat to their elite gentleman’s club.