CORRECTING UTOPIA: 1516, 1551, 1556

In the early modern period the homonymic distinction between correction as penal rehabilitation and correction as a textual practice had not yet been sifted into the same disciplinary divisions recognized today. Utopia, its composition, and the political issues it addressed provide perhaps the single most intriguing case study for historicizing these intersections and overlaps.

Linguistic correction, for example, could mean not only the compositional strategy but also an ironic, rhetorical quality critics have long described in More's text. Whereas to modern readers textual correction primarily means deleting errors and fixing mistakes, in the classical and humanist rhetorical tradition in which More was working, correctio—that is, recalling one term only to replace it with another, more vehement one—or metanoia (a change of mind) meant nearly the opposite.Footnote ¹⁴ As a grammatical and compositional practice of doubling down, or amplifying by insertion and dilation, correction was a means to copiousness. Thomas Wilson (1523/24–1581), who often gave a “professedly protestant and provocatively novel” bent to his Arte of rhetorique (printed by Richard Grafton [1507–73] in 1553), stuck close to Cicero for his example of correction: “We have broughe before you my Lordes, into this place of judgement, not a thefe, but an extorcioner and violet robber, not an adoulterer, but a ravisher of maides, not a stealer of churche goodes, but an errant traitor, bothe to God and all godlinesse: not a common ruffin, but a moste cruel cut throte.”Footnote ¹⁵ As Wilson defined it, “correction is when wee alter a woorde or sentence, otherwise then we have spoke before, purposing thereby to augment the matter, and to make it appere more vehement.”Footnote ¹⁶

The associations of correctio as rhetorical device and syntactical pattern also shaped scribes’ and printers’ compositional practices of correction for texts and books. As Anthony Grafton has shown, connotations of dilation rather than redaction were retained in the early age of print.Footnote ¹⁷ A print corrector's job was not only to right errors, or to revise the text closer to its author's prior, singular intention; instead, Renaissance correction could change and amplify access to the text by means of new indexes, marginal indexes, or prefaces, and could not only involve “radical rewriting and the insertion of full-scale supplements” but even entail “a collaborative vision of authorship.”Footnote ¹⁸

In More's case this was at first a self-collaboration, for correction was precisely the compositional and rhetorical model he followed in writing and then rewriting Utopia, when he reopened his originally self-contained text—what became book 2 and its standalone description of Utopia proper—to insert the dilation of book 1 with its framing dialogues, “ex tempore” and just before print publication, as J. H. Hexter has demonstrated.Footnote ¹⁹ More worked backward to amplify not the severity but the ambiguity of his outcome. The text admits this, I would add, by punning coyly just as the amendment begins: “in order to correct [corrigendis] their errors.”Footnote ²⁰ Correction was the iterative process, refracted through the addition of the text's dialogic form, which provided enough political cover for publication. This process helped shape the irony Utopia remains famous for: the spatio-temporal gaps between what the text seems to say one moment and what it appears to mean the next, between each “joco-serious” proposal that appears to upend itself as soon as it's settled.Footnote ²¹ This is part of what made Utopia’s arguments particularly extractable for early modern readers, and remains part of why modern readers, more given to treating the text as a formal whole, are so deeply drawn into the imaginative reconstruction of Utopia’s fuller arguments and their puzzle of tones. Rhetorical and compositional correction was and remains a key feature of the text's appeal.

Meanwhile, correction was also both a philosophical justification for punishment and an actual penal strategy pursued in various intellectual and historical contexts, at least since Plato's Laws, famously in Utopia, and most powerfully when combined with a capitalist or ascetic Protestant belief in the ameliorating power of hard work (to use the shorthand of Max Weber).Footnote ²² Correction is an essentially utilitarian policy goal, itself slightly ironic, in that it seeks to make the bad or necessary evil of punishment as good or beneficial for the general welfare as possible, by taking as the aim of penal activities not only retribution and deterrence but the reformation of offenders for their reintegration into society.Footnote ²³ Such a theoretical aim was given its first comprehensive and recognizably modern institution for enforcement in London in the 1550s. This was Bridewell, the first “house of occupations” or “house of correction,” widely considered by historians of penology and social policy as the first prison anywhere in Europe designed to match hard labor with short, custodial sentences.Footnote ²⁴ “To the established notions of punishment as deterrence and retribution,” Bridewell “added the idea that it might be possible to cure criminal instincts through a healthy dose of labor,” as J. A. Sharpe has written.Footnote ²⁵

At the original house of correction, poor “vagrants,” “pilferers,” “nightwalkers,” and “beggars”—four of the criminalized identities most commonly recorded in Bridewell's court minutes, roughly 59 percent men and 41 percent women—were whipped and imprisoned at hard labor and forced crafts for varying durations, usually a few days or weeks, with the stated intention of turning offenders into newly obedient laborers for the commonwealth.Footnote ²⁶ Work included grinding corn, beating hemp, cleaning the city's ditches, and dredging the Thames in the manner of a chain gang, while longer-term prisoners were also forcibly trained in a range of crafts that included shoemaking, nailmaking, feltmaking, and even manufacturing tennis balls.Footnote ²⁷ After many whippings and long hours of work, an offender would be released, perhaps as the penitent apprentice for a new master such as Richard Brookes, a “fustian weaver” who agreed in 1602 to take on “40 vagrant boys and wenches” over a seven-year period.Footnote ²⁸

Despite serious controversies, this new institutional form proliferated relatively quickly. In the earliest years, Bridewell committed more than four hundred people annually, a number that swelled to more than a thousand per year by the 1580s, and doubled again to nearly two thousand imprisonments per year by 1600.Footnote ²⁹ Bridewell's bench soon averaged twenty-six sentencings per week, meeting twice and sometimes thrice weekly, making it one of the busiest and best-documented courts in England.Footnote ³⁰ London's flagship then became the model for the houses of correction required to be built across the nation by the repeated legislative acts within the old poor laws, beginning in 1576, continuing in 1597, 1601, 1604, and with concentrated effect in 1610.Footnote ³¹ Although the efficacy of these institutions was in constant question, by the 1630s England had built “a network of bridewells” that “covered the whole of England”; by 1618, Bridewell's convicts were being exported to the Virginia colony.Footnote ³² Correctional punishments became an ideological, although long-unrealized, cornerstone of early American penal codes, as witnessed by William Penn's (1644–1718) policies and Great Law (1668) or the language of Thomas Jefferson's (1743–1826) Bill for Proportioning Crimes and Punishments (1779).Footnote ³³ In a seminal analysis, Dario Melossi and Massimo Pavarini concluded that the correctional policies pioneered at Bridewell were “the most important example” in the prehistory of what would eventually become the penitentiary; the house of correction's “social function and its internal organization [were] … already to a large extent those of the classic nineteenth-century model.”Footnote ³⁴

The long-term influence of the house of correction and its penology makes the circulation of More's corrective rhetorical arguments at its founding a point of fascination. In fact, there are a surprising number of practical connections between the translated Utopia and these new political projects. Bishop has recently helped illuminate the text's reception and positioning by tracing the political activities of those behind the English translation, including George Tadlowe (1505–57), Ralph Robinson (1520–77), William Cecil (1520/21–1598), Thomas Smith (1513–77), and possibly Richard Grafton.Footnote ³⁵ My own focus will be restricted mostly to Bridewell and the 1547 law as the closest points for analytical comparison and historical contact. For example, although relatively little is known of the translator Ralph Robinson, his master at the Goldsmiths Company was Martin Bowes (1496/97–1566), one of the most important advocates and governors of Bridewell and the Royal Hospitals, who would have witnessed the 1547–49 Vagrancy Act in Parliament.Footnote ³⁶ Importantly, George Tadlowe, the sponsor of the translation whose “procurement, and earnest request” is credited on the 1551 title page, was equally active in his role as a governor of St. Bartholomew's, Christ's, and St. Thomas hospitals (which were jointly administered with Bridewell); Tadlowe was also a member of Parliament during the 1547–49 Vagrancy Act.Footnote ³⁷

William Cecil, to whom the 1551 edition is dedicated, was instrumental in the transfer of Bridewell to the city's control, and would have witnessed the 1547–49 Vagrancy Act in Parliament.Footnote ³⁸ Thomas Smith, who authorized the 1551 Utopia in his role as censor on the Privy Council and witnessed the Vagrancy Act in Parliament, is even thought by some to have been the principal author of this controversial legislation.Footnote ³⁹ The publishers and printers, Stephen Mierdman (1510–59) working for Abraham Veale, have been frequently linked with Edward Seymour, Protector Somerset (1500–52). Somerset's godly cohort was at this time launching its unprecedented campaign from the presses, while also enacting the institutional and legislative arms of its agenda, which included the house of correction and these early poor-law initiatives.Footnote ⁴⁰ Meanwhile, Richard Grafton—the evangelical printer and most important advocate, overseer, and governor of Bridewell in its earliest years—seems to have been the social glue that connected this cohort of Edwardian Reformers to one another; Grafton also provided the link to the printer of the 1556 edition, Richard Tottel (1528–93), who was Grafton's son-in-law and professional heir.Footnote ⁴¹

Bishop has thus concluded that the publication of the English Utopia can “best be understood as a contribution to wider efforts to construct programs of civic and social reform within local and national governmental structures.”Footnote ⁴² Chloë Houston has recently agreed that the network behind the Robinson Utopia maintained “interests in civic reform and social change, exemplified by [their] involvement in charitable projects such as the development of the Royal Hospitals,” and that these involvements “provide an important context for the reading of the Robinson Utopia as a text intended to influence and contribute to efforts to promote social change through the creation of new institutions, or the reform of existing ones.”Footnote ⁴³

Each of the 1550s editions was also positioned and repositioned for their two distinct historical moments. How could it be that a text by (late) More, the heretic hunter, was taken up by Edwardian gospelers in 1551, for example? Although such drastic cross-confessional politics still seem surprising, influential work by Quentin Skinner and David Norbook has considered More's original text in a tradition of civic, Christian humanism that was particularly amenable to the ethos of early Protestantism in England, despite what would have been More's own later objections.Footnote ⁴⁴ In its now-outsized first two words, the 1551 Utopia immediately represented itself as a repurposing, if not a subtle correcting: the title promises “A fruteful” and then “pleasaunt worke of the beste state of a publyque weale”—“fruitful” was a politically charged byword for evangelical Reformers at this time.Footnote ⁴⁵ David Baker has made a strong case for the Protestant repositioning of More's text by tracing many similar linguistic cues: the 1551 edition even went so far as to translate More's De Optimo Reipublicae Statu from one of More's 1516 title pages not only as “the best state of a common wealthe” but also as a “declaration of the Godly governement.”Footnote ⁴⁶

In the prefatory epistle to the 1551 octavo, however, Robinson seems to defuse such tensions, in part by laying the responsibility and indeed the blame for his bold production squarely on his friend Tadlowe, who “ceassed not by al meanes possible continualy to assault me, until … he caused me to agree and consente to the impryntynge herof.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Tadlowe's enthusiasm proved discerning. Robinson's sometimes loose but enduringly idiomatic translation would eventually go through five editions—1551, 1556, 1597, 1624, and 1639—before any rival appeared (Gilbert Burnet's version in 1684). In fact, the Robinson translation remains in wide circulation even to this day, as the copy for the Everyman and Oxford World's Classics editions currently in print.Footnote ⁴⁸

In the 1556 “corrected” edition, Robinson replaced his dedicatory preface to Cecil with a letter “to the gentle reader,” possibly since Cecil's position became clouded after the accession of the Catholic queen Mary I (1516–58; r. 1553–58), and since apologies were no longer needed at that time for More's later, conservative phase.Footnote ⁴⁹ Instead, Robinson feigned an apology that the fiction was ever published, and for the hastiness and haphazardness of his earlier version, submitted again here, “newlie perused and corrected,”Footnote ⁵⁰ though this claim would now seem misleading, since changes in the body text are impossibly minor. Not so in the Renaissance sense: transformed formal access as well as meta-commentary by the way of a new marginal index, or “diuers notes in the margent augmented,” show the edition was notably corrected.Footnote ⁵¹ This index and series of marginal glosses represented a significant departure from both the un-marginated 1551 edition and the much sparser marginal index provided in early Latin copies. As William Slights has written in a formative study, such printed marginal indexes and glosses “function[ ] to contextualize books in a particularly material way.”Footnote ⁵² For that reason, and because the marginal glosses shaped readers’ experience of the text not only in its own day but long afterward, the effects of the 1556 index will be a focus throughout this article.

In the deprecating 1556 prefatory materials, however, Robinson was again careful to distance himself from any such contexts or influences. A telling sententia from Utopia was nevertheless cited: “though in any of our actes and doynges, (as it ofte chanceth) we happen to faile and misse of our good pretensed purpose, so that the successe and our intent prove thinges farre odde: yet so we ought with wittie circumspection to handle the matter, that no evyll or incomoditie, as farre furth as may be, and as in us lieth, do therof ensue.”Footnote ⁵³ The passage from Utopia that Robinson mimes was noted by at least two early readers, and remains something of a touchstone for those (such as Skinner) seeking to understand More's Utopia in the tradition of Ciceronian, civic, Christian humanism: “But you must with a crafty wile & a subtell trayne studye and endevoure your selfe asmuch as in you lyethe, to handle the matter wyttelye and handsomelye for the purpose” so that “that whyche you can not turne to good, so to order it that it be not very badde.”Footnote ⁵⁴ In this passage one can hear an interpretation of More's own intentions in publishing Utopia in 1516, hastily corrected or ambiguously amplified, just at the moment of his entrance into the service of Cardinal Wolsey (1473–1530) and Henry VIII (1491–1547; r. 1509–47)—an interpretation as attractive to Robinson in 1551, and especially in 1556, as it continues to be today. In this understanding, More's Utopia was meant not only to offer a radically imaginative, indirect form of counsel but also to signal one's dedication to the tasks at hand, to the legal and administrative work of making Wolsey's (or Somerset's, or even Mary's) commonwealth slowly “less bad.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Robinson expresses a tempered resolve, despite the fact that theory (or “good pretensed purpose”) and practice (“our actes and doynges”) remained at a remove from one another.Footnote ⁵⁶ This seems to capture what must have been the sentiment of scattered commonwealth men during the Marian reprisals, when even the political necessity of their hospitals and their new prison did not necessarily ensure institutional survival.Footnote ⁵⁷ By imagining another, this world could slowly be made “less bad.” The 1556 edition, with its wry editorial apparatus, could still advance the topical project of an English Utopia.

BOOK 1: “MAKE THEVES, AND THEN PUNISH THEM”

Utopia’s clarion call for the reform of criminal sentencing in England begins in book 1, soon after the seam identified by Hexter, or the textual stutter where More reopened the text.Footnote ⁵⁸ During the retrospective dialogue at Cardinal Morton's table, an archetypal English lawyer praises the rigorous justice then being dealt to the thieves and vagrants who throng London's streets, as petty criminals are strung up to die twenty at a time on the city's gallows. But the lawyer is perplexed. Since “so fewe escaped punyshment,” he wonders how it could be that thieves nevertheless remain “in every place so ryffe and ranke,” in the 1551 edition, or “so ryffe and so rancke,” in the 1556 corrected edition.Footnote ⁵⁹ Hythloday, however, sees nothing to be surprised about. “Marvel nothinge here at,” he retorts:

This is one of the most remarkably eloquent and convincing speeches in Robinson's translation.Footnote ⁶¹ Certainly early modern readers noted it. In a 1551 copy held by the British Library, a reader who signs his name (twice) as “Hughe Pigotte” has inserted two comments on this passage in an italic hand, unfortunately partially trimmed: “England [unreadable] to thev[es]”; “[E]xcellent reasons.”Footnote ⁶² (Of the four significant comments Pigot made throughout his margins, three concern Utopia’s statements on punishment.Footnote ⁶³) A reader in a 1556 copy held by the Bodleian Library drew an elaborate manicule in the margin here.Footnote ⁶⁴ In Brown University's 1556 copy, the previous passage was underlined, presumably by a member of the Inner Temple named “Agvstyn hynd,” who also dates his elaborate autograph to both 1571 and 1572 (fig. 1).Footnote ⁶⁵ In a sixteenth-century manuscript of law readings held by the British Library, extracts from Utopia including this passage are commonplaced: “the punishment for thefte in England is to extreame [and] cruell … for simple thefte is not so great an offence, that it ought to be punished with death,” and so on.Footnote ⁶⁶ This was what John Bacon noted as a point “of ye first book … agaynst the putting of theves to dethe,” when “rather they were put to work.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Indeed, “however difficult it may be to determine what More thinks of Utopia,” as George Logan has written, it has long seemed “perfectly clear what he thinks of the present condition of England.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Figure 1. Inscription of “Awgystyn hynd,” Brown University Library, D556 .M836f, sig. B^v. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. Author's photo.

What, then, is Hythloday's meaning? Death as a punishment for theft is both unjust and ineffective, he argues; it is neither moral nor expedient. First, this punishment is flawed primarily because it is disproportionate: too harsh, too extreme, too horrible. There is no fit between the punishment and the crime, and therefore, “I thinke it not ryght nor justice, that the losse of money should cause the losse of mans life.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Pigot's marginalia were again partly trimmed: “the losse of [mo]nie ought [not] to be the lo[sse] of anie ma[n's] lyfe.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Hind underlined this passage as well.Footnote ⁷¹ Second, punishing theft with death is simply ineffective, as evidenced by the persistence of thieves. The penalty addresses each instance indiscriminately and yet does nothing about the societal or structural troubles underlying these instances. This is mowing the grass, as some say today, rather than uprooting the problem. England's punishments irrationally seek to address criminals rather than crime itself, each case but not its causes. Hythloday will then go on to offer a more systematic account of the sources of poverty, unemployment, and thereby crime in England: the economics of enclosure, the pressures of foreign wars, the corruption of the elite. Along the way the 1556 edition's marginal notations pick up their pace, translating these causes into the lexicon of Protestant Reformers, primarily their favorite scapegoat, the sin of idleness: “Idlenesse the mother of theves”; “Of Idle servyng men come theves.”Footnote ⁷² Hind's underlining in 1571–72 followed accordingly.Footnote ⁷³

Hythloday's rational, causal, and systemic analysis, which, “rather than the invention of Utopian society,” was for Russell Ames “More's highest artistic and intellectual achievement,” was accomplished and partly limited by its corrective rhetorical structure.Footnote ⁷⁴ Hythloday's criteria are laid bare by sentences that shift back and forth between alternatives—first one, then the other. To generalize, first the moral, or Cicero's honestas or Aristotle's universal justice or the formalism of the common law, then (to generalize again), the expedient, or Cicero's utilitas or Aristotle's particular justice or the different formalism of Chancery equity.Footnote ⁷⁵ At each turn the argument dilates. Logan has suggested how the passage's “triple iteration” of its two claims—that death is neither just nor efficient as a punishment for theft—might be diagrammed: 1a, 1b, 2a, 2b, 3a, 3b (as inserted above).Footnote ⁷⁶ Rhetorically, the passage opens in two directions that turn out to be corrective, if not fully circular. Passing “the limites of Justice” one way, toward cruelty, can do nothing to stop offenders who have been driven from “extreme necessitie” to pass those same limits in another way, by committing crimes. As in the common legal maxim summum jus summa injuria (extreme justice is extreme injustice): justice enforced so strictly has become unjust.Footnote ⁷⁷ Or, as Hythloday himself asks a few pages later in another passage Hind has underlined: “why maye not this extreme & rigorous justice we be called plaine injurie?”Footnote ⁷⁸ In its bidirectional and doubly corrective address to two distinct values—morality and utility, neither just nor useful—returning each time to the same set of claims in an expanded and more detailed register, as if in widening and amplifying concentric circles, Hythloday's periods produce their analytic beauty. A similar pattern structures More's pithy metaphor. “Many are readier to Beate then to teach,” as a reader noted between 1600 and 1605 in a heavily marked 1556 copy now held by Princeton University (fig. 2).Footnote ⁷⁹

Figure 2. An example of the density of annotations in Princeton University Library, EX 3865.5.392.83.12, sigs. G7^v–G8^r. With permission of the Princeton University Library. Photo: Princeton University Library.

What results is a ruthless indictment of England's social order. Hythloday accuses English society of producing the very criminality it seeks to redress, in terms Robinson adapts for the lexicon of midcentury Reformers: idleness, profit, vice, education, and infection: “For this Justice is more beautiful in apperaunce, & more florishynge to the shewe, then either juste or profitable. For by suffring your youthe wantonlie, and viciously to be brought up, and to be infected, even from theyr tender age, by litle and litle with vice: then a goddes name to be punished, when they commit the same faultes after being come to mans state, which from their youthe they were ever like to do: In this point, I praye you, what other thing do you, then make theves, & then punish them?”Footnote ⁸⁰ Early readers were again particularly interested in this passage. Interestingly, in a 1551 copy held by the Bodleian, which is shorn of book 1 and contains only book 2, a secretary hand retained in the cropped end papers nevertheless copied out this passage (among others from book 1) at a time before the text's first half had been cut from the binding: “Justice more beautifull then … juste or profitable.”Footnote ⁸¹ Did a later reader cut book 1 because they cared so little for its arguments, or in order to make off with them? Pigot also commented on this passage, again partially trimmed: “By this meanes th[ey] first make and then hang thieves.”Footnote ⁸² Hind underlined this passage, and a reader who signed his name as Robert Hare marked this section with a manicule in 1572, in a 1556 copy held by the Folger.Footnote ⁸³

Hythloday's causal analysis remains as remarkable now as it was then. Taking into account the productive power of social structures and institutions, in addition to their repressive function, More's text has been called startlingly “original” for its era, perhaps what might now be called Foucauldian.Footnote ⁸⁴ “In his capacity to see past the symptoms to the sources of the trouble, in his grasp of the intricacy and ramification of social structure and social action,” Hexter wrote, More's mode of Christian humanism is surprisingly realistic, if not realist.Footnote ⁸⁵Utopia “does not find the causes of human misery in the mind or soul, in fate, in fallible and unchanging ‘human nature,’ or in the mental and moral weaknesses” of the subject, according to Ames, but rather in “material conditions” and “under social compulsion.”Footnote ⁸⁶

The acuity of Hythloday's analysis in these passages is not without its dark humor, however, or the “mordancies of the harshest social critique,” as Logan put it.Footnote ⁸⁷ “I thinke there is no body that knoweth not, how unreasonable, yea: howe pernitious a thinge it is to the weale publike, that a thefe & an homicide or murderer, should suffer equall and like punishment,” Hythloday avers.Footnote ⁸⁸ When a thief is “in no lesse jeoperdie, nor judged to no lesse punishment” than a murderer, Hythloday's logical conclusion is that a robber might as well kill the victims he would otherwise merely rob, and thus more easily hide his crime.Footnote ⁸⁹ Why not? If the malefactor is caught for murder in addition to theft, the punishment will be no worse. Undoubtedly the policy's disproportion is appalling, but Hythloday's description also begins to seem hyperbolic: thieves are “strongly and forcibly provoked, and in a maner constreined to kill him, whome els he woulde have but robbed,” Hythloday claims, painting a particularly dark picture of the criminals he had moments earlier claimed were driven to steal only out of necessity.Footnote ⁹⁰

If Hythloday's rationalist account has gone a bit too far in privileging material conditions over human agency, and is now being satirized by More in this passage, the 1556 index did not follow the tonal shift. During this discussion the marginal markers spike in frequency again, showing a level of earnest interest not demonstrated since the earlier discussion of “idleness”: “Thefte in the olde lawe not punished by death”; “What inconnenience ensueth of punishynge theft with death”; “Punishing of theft by deathe causeth the thefe to be a murtherer”; “What lawfull punishment may be devised for theft.”Footnote ⁹¹ Thus those behind the 1556 edition directed access to the text for their readers and commonplacers, guiding attention to the matters they found most topical—remedies for the problems of “idle” beggars and dangerous thieves—but not necessarily clarifying which of these ideas More might have meant seriously and which were intended as satire. A commonplace book compiled by Edward Pudsey (1573–1613) ca. 1600 included this passage as one of eight sententiae clearly extracted with the aid of the 1556 edition's marginal index: “Punishing of theft by death can sete the theef to bee a murtherer, killing the partye whome els hee wold but have robbed,” Pudsey wrote.Footnote ⁹²

In fact, at this point the enthusiasms in the printed marginalia of the 1556 edition have begun to outstrip the text's own commitments in multiple ways. Hythloday commends the Roman practice of using perpetual penal slavery (“to be kepte in cheynes all the days of their life”) as a punishment for “great and heinous trespaces,” which the marginal index erroneously flags as “What lawfull punisment may be devised for theft” and “How the Romaynes punished thefte.”Footnote ⁹³ Neither Robinson nor More's Hythloday was likely to be discussing how the Romans treated minor theft specifically, even if Roman culture was known for its legal innovations regarding property, but rather how they dealt with still more serious crimes, or “great and heynous” (“magnorum facinorum”) ones.Footnote ⁹⁴ The notes then introduce “A worthy and commendable punishment of theves in the weale publique of the Polylerites in Persia” a full page before Polylerite punishments specifically are described, whereas usually the indexical markers are placed exactly at the one or two lines of text to which they refer.Footnote ⁹⁵

The index also begins to take on a voice of its own. As the body text describes how the Polylerites (meaning “people of much nonsense”) force their thieves to render restitution to their victims, rather than to their king, “whome they thinke to hav no more righte to the theifestolen thinge, than the theife him selfe hathe,” the marginal note offers a humorous reprimand: “A privie nippe for them that do otherwise,” meaning, perhaps, that this note serves as a rebuke to those that disagree with Polylerite doxa and its implicit criticism of the overreaches of an absolutist monarchy, or that the indicated portion of the text serves as a warning to those (such as More?) who might have tried to “do otherwise” in monarchical England.Footnote ⁹⁶ As it continues, the index increasingly functions to point out More's perceived humor in this way: “O wittie head,” reads one remark.Footnote ⁹⁷ “In this place semeth to be a nipping taunte,” reads another.Footnote ⁹⁸ But such self-aware comments are not made by the index concerning Utopia’s statements on punishment, which are pointed out in earnest, as useful sententiae. While the correctors of Utopia in 1556 were indeed alert to More's humor, they seem to have taken his penology seriously, or chose to present it as such.

There has been little speculation about the identity of the compositor of the 1556 index, but the printer Richard Totell is the most likely candidate: his well-known editorial interventionism, connections to London's legal community, and work on other titles by More, including his complete English Works in 1557, adds credence to this suggestion.Footnote ⁹⁹ Whoever was responsible, the effects were remarkable. The 1556 edition proffered an even more polyvalent experience for English readers by materially encouraging users of the book to turn back and forth between modes of Renaissance reading: a discontinuous, indexical experience, in which Utopia’s ideas could function more openly as social criticism or as a series of actionable critiques, alongside a more linear experience, in which the text's humor and mercurial shifts in tone returned to the fore. Hythloday's polemic against England's abstractly retributive justice is the most important case in point: singled out or decontextualized, these arguments appear eloquent, effective, sincere—especially the negative critiques of England. But in the positive proposals put forth next, in the system of the Polylerites, Hythloday's ethical position and the text's own tone become more difficult to determine with confidence. This has not stopped many readers, past and present, from endorsing some of Hythloday's earlier sentences while leaving others behind, however, or from embracing some of the described Polylerite ideas while leaving others unremarked.

For the sake of coherence or in the mind of a reader moving linearly, one might expect to approach Polylerite society with the criteria Hythloday has only just finished expounding: are these punishments for theft either just or useful? Criminals “themselves be condempned to be common laborers, and, oneles the thefte be verie heinous, they be neyther locked in prison, nor fettered in gives, but be untied and go at large, laboring in the common works. They that refuse labour, or go slowly and slacklye to their worke, be not onlye tied in cheynes, but also pricked forward with stripes. But beinge diligente about theyr worke they live without checke or rebuke. Every night they be called in by name: and be locked in theyr chambers. Beside their dayly labour, their life is nothing hard or incommodious.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Concerning utility or efficiency, one can respond in the affirmative. Punishments that turn offenders into laborers for the common good do appear more beneficial than those that would leave them swinging from scaffolds, although maintaining an underclass of penal laborers carries the serious risk of an uprising, which Hythloday will be at pains to deny. Regarding the relative justice of this penal code, conclusions have also been enthusiastically drawn.Footnote ¹⁰¹ As William Bright wrote in his commonplace book compiled between 1644 and 1676, the punishment “for thieves among ye Polylerites is approved of very well.”Footnote ¹⁰² The consensus that the Polylerite code “embodies a sensible view of the legitimate aims of punishment … to rehabilitate the criminal and to redress the damage done by his crime,” as Logan has written, continues to predominate among readers of Utopia now.Footnote ¹⁰³ The 1556 index concurred, or may have influenced this interpretation at its inception (and since) by pointing readers decisively to this passage as “the right end and intent of punishment.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Punishment's “right end and intent” flags another of the book's most eloquent phrases. The Polylerites are commended for the humane aims of their punishments, which “intendeth nothynge elles, but the destruction of vices, and the savynge of menne: wyth so usynge, and ordering them, that they can not chuse but be good.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Although leaving offenders no choice “but be good” might seem insincere, readers have tended to repeat the first phrase while leaving aside the second half of the sentence. For example, I would point out a pamphlet advocating for the house of correction as a national penal system, written around 1603–04 and reprinted in 1646, wherein a former Bridewell administrator named Thomas Stanley did precisely this: “The right end and intent of punishing of Rogues, is but the destruction of vices, and saving of men.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Stanley quoted not only Robinson's formulation of More (“the destruction of vices, and savynge of menne”) but also the 1556 edition's marginal index (“the right end and intent”) with equal accuracy.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Thus, in this instance one can be nearly certain that when the prison master and author of Stanley's Remedy sat down to pen his pamphlet in support of the house of correction, he not only remembered More's maxim, or a similar sententia out of Seneca; he opened up a 1556 Utopia to this particular page, and used this particular indexical mark to locate that ringing phrase.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

In the details, however, the policies of Hythloday's Polylerites seem ironically flawed. First, so little is said about the annual chance at parole offered to these offenders that one might suspect their sentences are intended to be, as in Hythloday's description of ancient Rome, perpetual. The marginal index contributes to this impression by mislabeling and highlighting the perpetual servitude as “What lawfull punisment may be devised for theft” and “How the Romaynes punished thefte” (“there to be kepte in cheynes all the days of their life”), then misdirecting readers to the “worthy and commendable punishment of theves in the weale publique of the Polylerites in Persia” on that same page.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ As Logan has written, it seems “this system does not fully embody Hythloday's point that the severity of punishment ought to be proportional to the degree of heinousness of the crime: all thefts of whatever kind or size appear to be punished by perpetual bondage.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ This isn't entirely so, at least not if one considers the text's later aside about the annual chance at parole. But should the thief of a loaf of bread who has made restitution to its owner still be forced to serve at a minimum a year-long sentence, and perhaps a perpetual one? The quality of the punishment—labor rather than death—is better proportioned. But the quantity—a year or a lifetime—is not. These objections do not appear to have unsettled Bright or Stanley, however, although the point would not have been lost on anyone in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth century: as a punishment for minor crimes administered at Bridewell, for example, hard labor usually lasted for a few days or weeks, not years (unless an offender was taken on as a longer-term trainee).Footnote ¹¹¹

There are other reasons to question the sincerity of Hythloday's counterproposal. For example, as part of his assurances that the penal laborers are kept under careful control, several means of identifying this class of penal servants are described—as underlined by Hind, and marked by a manicule in the Bodleian's Tanner 66 (1).Footnote ¹¹² Penal laborers are forced to wear robes of a specific color, are given a certain “rounded” haircut “above the eares,” and have their ears clipped in a certain way: “the type of the one eare is cut of.”Footnote ¹¹³ The text continues: “Neither they can have any hope at all to skape away by flienge. For howe should a man, that in no parte of his apparell is like other men, flye prevelie and unknowen, oneles he woulde runne away naked? Howebeit so also flyinge he shoulde be discriued by the roundying of his heade, and his eare marke.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ These assurances may again seem to be relatively empty ones: clothes can be changed, and anyone who could find a hat or grow their hair longer than their ears could mask the signs of their criminal brand, at least temporarily.

More destabilizing, however, would be the credulous conclusion. If it is really meant to be believable that a clipped ear would always give the escaped slave away, how could anyone also believe in the possibility of their rehabilitation as free citizens? Hythloday claims that none of the punished are “hopeles or in dispaire to recover againe his former estate of fredome, by humble obedience, by paciente suffringe, and by geving good tokens and likelyhoode of himselfe, that he wyll ever after that, lyve like a trewe, and an honest man. For every yeare divers of them be restored to their freedome: throughe the commendation of their patience.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ This is the utopian hope of repentance, the mercy of correction; true “patience” will commend itself and be commended. But how will the offender return to life as a “trewe, and an honest” man if he is so effectively and permanently branded as a criminal that he could never have had any hope to escape? What life beyond crime or beyond punishment can really be intended? In his advocacy for houses of correction on a national scale, the Bridewell administrator Stanley was himself capable of pointing out precisely the same harsh reality in England: “such a note of infamie” as criminal branding in fact precluded offenders from ever reentering employment, Stanley argued: “they may be assured no man will set them on work.”Footnote ¹¹⁶

For his part, Cardinal Morton, Hythloday's fictional interlocutor in this conversation within a conversation (but also More's real patron in childhood), is open to the idea of Polylerite penology. He considers aloud ways to implement these policies in England and suggests that vagabonds be treated in the same way that the Polylerites treat thieves: “me thynketh that these vagaboundes may very wel be ordered after the same fashion, against whom we have hitherto made so manye lawes, and so little prevailed.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ (“Vagaboundes,” the marginal index alerts readers.Footnote ¹¹⁸) The cardinal's sycophants all agree, illustrating Hythloday's point about the futility of counsel. The cardinal's fool takes the policy a step further, suggesting that hard labor might serve to help those demographics the margin indexes as the “Sicke, aged, impotent persons and beggers,” in addition to thieves and vagabonds.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Why shouldn't all the miserable and needy be rounded up “sumwhere oute of my sight” in a kind of penal colony, yet within the city? the jester asks.Footnote ¹²⁰ This fool would “make a lawe, that all these beggers shall be distributed, and bestowed into houses of religion,” since the monasteries were already such dens of iniquity.Footnote ¹²¹

In cases such as these, Utopia’s double-edged depictions would have held pleasures of both recognition and ironic distance for early readers. English citizens would indeed have been familiar with the vagaries of criminal branding, which had been instituted in recent decades by repeated legislative acts, in 1531, 1536, 1547, and 1550, and continuing beyond 1593 and 1598, when ear boring and ear clipping were once again replaced with whipping as punishment for vagrancy; yet they also knew these policies stumbled in enforcement, presumably due to the difficulty of convincing local justices and constables to impose such disfigurements on their neighbors.Footnote ¹²² Early readers could also have recognized Polylerite punishments in their own institution at Bridewell, with its whipping posts to inspire fear but rhetorical aspirations toward more humane conditions, its laborers and craftsmen for hire, its chain gangs and attempts at uniforms. And yet, with the important distinction that Bridewell's sentences were better proportioned to the crime and to the individual on a case-by-case basis, not universally or blindly applied. But perhaps most delightful of all would have been this latest joke, placed in the mouth of Morton's moronic fool—this notion that friars were the worst of the vagabonds, and that the monasteries should be repurposed into public hospitals. For that was precisely what was being done at St. Thomas Hospital and at Christ's Hospital, thanks to the efforts of a generation that had printed their own Utopia on the side. Hind at least saw fit to notate this passage in 1571–72, and Bacon took triplicate note of it in his 1551 copy: “cardinalls fool … nota the begynge of … the geste of the cardinales Foole.”Footnote ¹²³

BOOK 2: “HOW LITTLE LIBERTE THEY HAVE”

Modern historians have indeed cited the utopian quality of the new institutions and prisons that appeared in England in the sixteenth century, and yet there are no prisons at all in Utopia itself, or in book 2.Footnote ¹²⁴ No jails, no houses of correction: U-topos, the good place (eu-) or nonplace (ou-), has hospitals, but no explicitly carceral institutions.Footnote ¹²⁵ How could this be? No brick-and-mortar institutions are needed, it seems, because for punishment Utopia consigns offenders to varying sentences of public labor, to be completed in the open air, without the imposition of walls or institutions, alongside Utopia's other slaves or bondmen—those foreigners who have either volunteered themselves for permanent bondage or have been taken as prisoners in war. As another version of a penal code wherein work serves as the primary punishment, the Utopian code reflects that of the Polylerites, although with the additional and more explicit distinction that in Utopia “the decerning of punishment” is “putte to the discretion of the magistrates,” as the marginal index points out, rather than existing as any universal norm.Footnote ¹²⁶ In fact, since Utopia has so few laws, there is “no prescript punishmente” (“certam poenam”) appointed for any crime at all, except adultery: all adulterers are punished with permanent slavery (“grauissima seruitute”), or, as the 1602 hand in Princeton's 1556 edition comments: “Breakers of wedlock punished with most grievous Bondage.”Footnote ¹²⁷ Instead of a “pre-script” penal code, “accordinge to the heynousenes of the offense [facinoribus] … the punishemente is moderated by the discretion of the counsell” on a case-by-case basis.Footnote ¹²⁸ Utopia's more proportionate punishments thus act as a foil for England's previous status quo but also support the argument that the sentencing of the Polylerite system, itself part of More's textual correction or dilation in the Renaissance sense, was presented ironically. The hypocrisies and impracticalities of criminal branding, for example, are not mentioned in book 2. And yet there are other, perhaps graver, ethical contradictions implied by Utopia's indistinct systems of bond slavery and penal slavery, though these contradictions were not material for the 1556 index, and did not stop Reformers such as those behind these books from attempting to legislate and enact similar policies, as my final analysis of the 1547–49 Vagrancy Act will confirm.

At first, Utopian punishments appear primarily correctional. Only the most serious crimes are punished publicly in Utopia, and never by death or simple confinement. Instead, in a reformulation of the argument from book 1, Utopians punish severe crimes “with the incommoditie of bondage,” for

Utopian punishments extract maximal utility and benefit, for the individual but especially for society. Offenders are remade as labor for the public good and continuing examples for general deterrence—not wasted in the flash of a spectacular execution, but laboring as a daily reminder.Footnote ¹³⁰ The ultimate end would be not only retribution or social utility, however, but reintegration into society—or at least to confirm that offenders are “broken and tamed.” Hythloday could even seem to describe Utopia's penal bondage “as a progressive form of individual improvement and social control,” and “a positive, virtue-instilling institution … that existed as much to redeem wayward individuals as it did to punish them,” as Michael Guasco has written.Footnote ¹³¹

The text's optimistic rhetoric is belied by its own details, however. Even more so than among the Polylerites, the actual possibility of rehabilitation—or breaking and “taming”—appears to be undermined. For example, in Utopia the task of butchering animals is reserved “for the hands of theire bondemen.”Footnote ¹³² Any distinction in More's Latin between the bondsmen (famuli) mentioned here and the slaves or servants (servi) described elsewhere is obscured by Robinson's “bondage” and “bondmen” (perhaps since it is obscured in More's text as well, as these famuli are later servi when it is added that they also do the hunting):Footnote ¹³³ “For they permitte not their frie citezens to accustome them selfes to the killing of beastes, through the use whereof they thinke, clemencye the genteleste affection of oure nature by lytle and lytle to decaye and peryshe.”Footnote ¹³⁴ Utopians do not allow their free citizens to hunt or slaughter animals, because they believe this practice habituates the hunter or butcher to inhumanity, corrupting by “lytle and lytle” their moral character.Footnote ¹³⁵ Instead they reserve this necessary task for their “bondmen.” As Pudsey wrote in his commonplace book near 1600, “Bondemen are appointed butchers & not free citizens, lest thorough the vse there of, clemency shold by little & little perish.”Footnote ¹³⁶

But what about the opposing effect? Given that Utopian society believes these tasks will degrade rather than improve an offender's character, correction seems unlikely. In fact, all corrupting, shameful labors and “base busyness” are reserved for those in bondage: “al vile seruice, all slavery, and drudgerie, with all laboursome toyle, & base busines [sordis laboris] is done by bondemen [serui].”Footnote ¹³⁷ Or, as Pudsey wrote, “the basest part of butchery … they leave to their bondmen.”Footnote ¹³⁸ The marginal index marks this poignant inverse to the humanist belief in the improvability of individual behavior: “Of the slaughter of beastes we have learned manslaughter.”Footnote ¹³⁹ Violence can be acquired. Admitting this, the Utopian penal system must maintain only a highly conditional hope for rehabilitation, when their most violent criminals are condemned to labors that, according to Utopia's own beliefs, will encourage criminal behavior. Utopian penal service may have been “ideally a temporary condition for the enslaved,” but in practice it would have tended to be otherwise, as the text itself and its 1556 apparatus slyly admitted.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Recidivism rather than rehabilitation would be the effect.

Neither is Utopian bond slavery as humane or progressive as it pretends. In fact, in the details, Utopia's bond slavery seems to be equally as punitive as its penal service. For example, Hythloday's claim that many a “vile drudge” or “poore laborer in an other country” has volunteered for the fair and humane bondage of Utopia over their own destitute freedom is contradicted by the experience of the Anemolian ambassadors, who were assumed to be slaves by the Utopians when they arrived festooned in golden chains, and were ridiculed as such.Footnote ¹⁴¹ This suggests that even the bonds of eu-topian slavery connote dishonor and are psychologically punitive. The irony was noted by Pudsey: “Ynfamous persons & bondmen wear in their ears & on their fingers rings of gold about their necks chaines & on their legs gyves.”Footnote ¹⁴² Stephen Greenblatt agreed that slavery in Utopia “functions not only as a penal and economic institution but as an extreme form of shaming,” and noted the degrading and self-perpetuating aspects of Utopian slavery as a “chilling” feature of More's fiction.Footnote ¹⁴³ Neither did the text's distinction between noncitizen “drudges” and citizen penal drudges appear relevant in 1605 to a reader in Princeton's 1556 copy, who noted that “ther owne they punish” even more “sevearly” than they do their foreign slaves—implying that bondage of either sort was punishing.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Nevertheless, this degrading system of bond slavery was enthusiastically embraced in the margins of the 1556 edition, whose index notes as “A mervelous equitie of this nation” the practices of Utopian slavers, who only “make bondemen of prisoners taken in battayle” under certain circumstances, who never acquire children, and who much prefer to purchase for “very lytle” foreign criminals condemned to death.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ These bondmen they keep “not onely in continual woorke and labour, but also in bandes” alongside their own native criminals, who they think have deserved the “greater punishmente” of such enslavement for having erred despite being brought up “so godlye” in Utopia.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Penal servants are “kept in continuall labour,” the 1605 hand in Princeton's 1556 copy notes.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

Thus, there are several reasons to wonder what the actual difference would be within this distinction between, on the one hand, Utopian penal service, which—despite its rehabilitative rhetoric—would be nearly as permanent as Utopia's bond-slavery proper, and, on the other hand, Utopia's bond slavery, which—despite its humanitarian claims—would be nearly as punitive as its penal service. But at this point a common caveat about both forms of bond slavery in Utopia must be considered. For neither form of Utopia's penal or bonded slavery is hereditary; neither forms a caste. No one in Utopia is born a slave. This is the regard, as Schlomo Avineri has pointed out, in which Utopian slavery has often been said to be relatively less arbitrary than many historical forms of enslavement, especially racial slavery.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

If one pauses, however, and imagines the ends and consequences of the Utopian thought model, as is required of any reader of Utopia, this objection does not stand. If one does believe that Utopia's practices rely on nothing like a caste system, still, it is undeniable that the society relies heavily on a group of slave laborers. Precisely because Utopian slavery is not hereditary, then, one can see that it will need to be self-perpetuating in other ways, with other consequences. First, Utopia's magistrates will be motivated to keep their penal servants in permanent bondage, rather than to seek their rehabilitation or recognize their parole. Second, peace-loving and freedom-loving Utopia will always need more slaves, new slaves—it will therefore need more criminals or more prisoners of war. Utopia will be motivated to conduct foreign conquests, or, like the “people of much nonsense,” Utopia will be motivated to find criminals to punish if its society is to survive, or exist, so structured.

Or perhaps what Utopia would require is simply a body of ever-more slave-like citizens. In fact, the carceral foundations of Utopian discipline can be located paradoxically in the lives of their general citizenry, rather than their bond slaves or criminals; not in their public institutions but in their nonprivate homes; and not only in their closely held control but in the forced migrations of their entire social body. In Utopia doors can hardly be closed, let alone locked: “These doores be made with two leaves, never locked nor bolted, so easie to be opened, that they wil follow the least drawing of a fynger.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Since their doors open at the touch of a finger, “there is nothinge within the houses that is private.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ These uncloseable doors serve as a perfect emblem for the reverse liberty More has depicted and ironized throughout Utopian society and his dialogic text: with nowhere to hide Utopians can have nothing to hide. Furthermore, in yet another hair-splittingly ironic arrangement, recalling Utopia's approach to suicide (forbidden) and euthanasia (encouraged), or to work (enjoyed by citizens) and degrading work (enjoyed by slaves), while free Utopians are moved from household to household every ten years, and from town to town interchangeably, unsanctioned travel is gravely punished—not on the pain of death, of course, but of penal slavery. Free Utopians move constantly in intervals at the will of the magistrates: “Every tenthe yeare they chaunge ther houses,” notes one hand in Princeton's 1556 copy.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Yet roaming or vagrant Utopians are held in penal bondage. It might be said that this policy is primarily intended to interrupt ties between people and possessions or places, but it would also seem to produce within its citizens the alienation from genealogical social life that Patterson argued is a defining feature of slavery.Footnote ¹⁵² Certainly the one thing that follows every Utopian is work: “If they stay above a day they fall to their occupations,” as the 1605 hand commented on this passage in Princeton's copy.Footnote ¹⁵³

“Now you se how little liberte they have,” and, further, “howe they can have no cloke or pretence to idleness. There be neither winetavernes, nor ale houses, nor stewes, nor anye occasion of vice or wickedness, no lurkinge corners, no places of wicked counsels or unlawfull assembles.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Utopian panopticism extends from their fields and halls even into their homes, where all citizens are constantly “in the present light, and under the eies of every man.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ There is even the suggestion that Utopia polices thoughts and desires, since their penal code punishes “motions” to crimes as harshly as the crimes themselves; as one skeptical reader remarked, in the single marginal note left in one 1556 copy held by the British Library, partially cropped: “this is to mak[e?] all sinnes equa[lly?] disprooved … concerning theif[es?] / & murderers.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ That More's Utopia—itself an extended and exceptionally provocative thought—should describe a society in which such contemplations could be condemned as criminality is an exemplary instance of the text's mordant wit.

Fredric Jameson has argued that the tradition of utopian texts inaugurated to some extent by More can be recuperated as “maps and plans to be read negatively,” to locate sources of suffering and exploitation in their own historical contexts.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ “The best Utopias are those that fail most comprehensively,” because such fictions “can serve the negative purpose of making us more aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ But if this sort of reverse critique was More's purpose, it was not entirely his effect, for his model was enthusiastically repositioned and perhaps too earnestly received: “O holy commonwealth, and of Christians to be folowed,” gushes the marginal note for the above panoptic passage, in both the 1556 and early Latin editions.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ “No alehouses nor wine tauvernes,” repeats the most diligent reader of Princeton's 1556 edition, beneath this indexical mark.Footnote ¹⁶⁰

As it so happens, the remarkably careful records left by this reader—who dated two series of notations particularly focused on idleness as beginning on “December 4, 160[2]” and “January 16, 1602”—display an unusual level of interaction not only with the text but also with the 1556 index.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Some of the most heavily annotated passages in this entire copy are found in these pages, where the discussion of idleness is helpfully divided by the marginal index into “The kyndes & sortes of idle people” (fig. 3).Footnote ¹⁶² The manuscript annotator then adds a number next to each stereotype: “1” next to “Women”; “2” next to “Priestes and religousmen”; “3” next to “Riche men and landed men”; “4” next to “Servyingmen”; and “5” before “Sturdy and valiaunt beggers.”Footnote ¹⁶³ “Set all to work on profitable occupations,” the reader's annotations conclude, after copying out a long sequence mostly verbatim from the body text, arranged along the numbered index in this enthusiastically crammed margin.Footnote ¹⁶⁴

Figure 3. An example of the annotator's use of the printed marginal index in Princeton University Library, EX 3865.5.392.83.12, sigs. J^v–J2^r. With permission of the Princeton University Library. Photo: Princeton University Library.

UTOPIA, THE 1547–49 VAGRANCY ACT, AND THE ORIGINS OF THE HOUSE OF CORRECTION

In 1547, “An Acte for the Punishment of Vagabondes and for the Relief of the poore and impotent Persons” began as so many sermons, tracts, and legislative pronouncements on these topics did, and as the 1602 hand in Princeton's 1556 Utopia would have appreciated, by denouncing “Idlenes and Vagabundrye” as “the mother and roote of all theftes Robberyes and all evill actes and other mischiefs.”Footnote ¹⁶⁵ The index to the 1556 edition put it more succinctly, as Hind underlined: “Idlenesse the mother of theves.”Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Idleness was the catchword for the Hythloday of book 2, and for discourses of poor relief across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it was hardly the “roote,” as the Hythloday of book 1 had known. An earlier indexical comment, and another passage underlined by Hind, had more accurately discerned a causal chain: “The decay of husbandry causeth beggary, which is the mother of vagaboundes & theves.”Footnote ¹⁶⁷

In fact, More's fiction still remains the best-known diagnosis of persistent social problems that impelled the real political projects under consideration in this article's concluding pages.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Since at least the 1470s, and especially since the 1520s, England's population and prices had been rising, while supplies and employment had not kept pace.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Impoverished laborers and those displaced by enclosure migrated from rural to urban environments, forming crowds of the so-called idle, vagrant, or masterless.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Shorter-term crises exacerbated unrest, including failed harvests in the late 1540s, 1590s, and early 1620s.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Such conditions created England's real and perceived vagrancy crisis and drove the country's tax-funded schemes to both relieve and control the poor during the later medieval and early modern periods.

Within these efforts a turn toward work discipline was shaped by several influences. Historians debate the relative importance of humanism, Protestantism, and increasing commercialization as factors that might have varying impacts within specific political regimes, such as Edward VI's government (1547–53), or Oliver Cromwell's (1599–1658) Protectorate (1653–58), for example.Footnote ¹⁷² The shift in ethos evolved slowly from longer perspectives; Marjorie McIntosh has discerned as much continuity as disruption within these programs between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.Footnote ¹⁷³ Yet the dramatic events of the Henrician and Edwardian eras of the Reformation undoubtedly catalyzed these changes, if only by rending so “much of the institutional fabric which had provided charity for the poor in the past,” as Paul Slack has described it.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Protestant replacements for the services of the monasteries were especially needed. Attempts that had been underway since at least 1414 to reform and reorganize England's ancient hospitals suddenly gained greater urgency, as witnessed by the founding or refounding of London's five Royal Hospitals between 1547 and 1553, including Bridewell, with its emphasis on work discipline for minor offenders and the able-bodied poor.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Legislative efforts, such as iterations of the early poor laws passed in 1536, 1547, 1576, 1598, 1610, 1646, and 1649, increasingly described their goal as the “correction” of vagrants and vagabonds and aimed to retrain profitable members of the commonwealth by setting offenders to work.Footnote ¹⁷⁶

These longer histories, along with the shorter-term upheavals of the mid-Tudor crises, form the background for two exceptionally suggestive projects of the late 1540s and 1550s: not only the founding of Bridewell in 1553, which “provides an almost unique example of an institution that has been universally regarded as marking” a “new departure” in penology, as Sharpe has written, but also the Vagrancy Act of 1547–49 that preceded it, and which Davies has called “the most savage act in the grim history of English vagrancy legislation.”Footnote ¹⁷⁷

The “Acte for the Punishment of Vagabondes and for the Relief of the poore and impotent Persons” began by demanding a deceptively utopian scheme for handling vagrancy and petty crime: rather than simply whipping, stocking, carting, or hanging offenders, they would be put to work. Lamenting that “godlie Statutes hitherto hath had small effecte,” and “Idle and Vagabounde persons” continue to “remayne and increase” as “unprofitable membres or rather ennemyes of the Commen wealthe,” the statute suggested that if such enemies of the state should be punished with “deathe whipping emprysonement or with other Corporall payne,” it would not be beyond their due, citing what might be classed as both retributive (“it were not without their desertes”) and utilitarian (“for thexample of others and to the benefit of the Commen wealth”) justifications.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ But the law's ultimate aims were distinct. Offenders should be “brought to be made proffitable” and to “doo service” rather than put to death or simply imprisoned.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ As in Utopia, reintegration and the extraction of exponential utility were the stated ideals.Footnote ¹⁸⁰

Under the 1547–49 law, however, offenders would not only be set to work (and were not really very likely be rehabilitated). Instead, they would become “Slaves,” temporarily at first, but under sentences that were designed to quickly be extended to life. At the outset, any master whose employment had been refused or reneged on for any reason could summon two justices of the peace, who, “hearing the proefe of the Idle living of the saide parsone” from at least two witnesses, would “immediatelie cawse the saide loyterer to be marked with an whott Iron in brest the marke of V” and “adjudge the said parsone living so Idelye to such presentor to be his Slave.”Footnote ¹⁸¹ Sentences were set initially at two years: “To have and to holde the said Slave to him his executors or assignes for the space of twoo Yeres.”Footnote ¹⁸² Any offender caught trying to escape was to be branded (on the forehead this time) with an S and condemned for life. Any S caught running away a second time was to be executed: “to suffer paynes of death as other fellons ought to doo.”Footnote ¹⁸³ No parole for the original sentences, and no privilege of the clergy whatsoever, was to be given.

Several of the same ironic patterns noticed in Utopia thus reemerge here: as in the conflicted code of the Polylerites, permanently branding and scarring offenders (V for vagabond, S for slave) would effectively render promises of reintegration empty, as even Stanley in the seventeenth century had recognized. In fact, sentences under the 1547–49 law quite explicitly moved only one way. Every universal two-year sentence could quickly be extended to a lifetime of forced labor, but none could be shortened for an offender who had proven themselves reformed. Permanent bondage, rather than rehabilitation, would have been the more likely effect.

Although the 1547–49 law made none of Utopia's ironic claims about the humane conditions of its slavery, there were many other similarities. During their period of bondage, “to have and to holde” an offender required providing only bread and water for sustenance. Beating and chaining the enslaved person with a “a rynge of Iron abowt his Necke Arme or his Legge” was endorsed wherever deemed necessary—especially if any of these bondmen were found to be gathering together without warrant, and perhaps thereby conspiring.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ As in Utopia, a master could “cawse the saide Slave to worke by beating, cheyning or otherwise” in whatever labor, however degrading to person or character, or “how vyle so ever it be.”Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Again as in Utopia, provisions for a convict-leasing scheme were included, wherein slaves could be held by individuals, as well as by parishes and corporations.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ But again going slightly farther, the act's punishments were explicitly meant to justify reducing offenders to chattel slaves, who could be sold, leased, or bequeathed as “anny … movable goodes or Catelles.”Footnote ¹⁸⁷

The act's emphasis on targeting poor children (or “Infant Beggars”) seems particularly concerning, even or especially given the so-called “mervelous equitie” of the Utopian slavers, who were praised by the 1556 edition for not taking children captive.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Under the 1547–49 act, any “children” (defined by the law as between the ages of five and twenty-four for men or twenty for women) seen begging or wandering, even if they had committed no other crime beyond their poverty, and certainly whether “theie be willing or not,” could be taken in for forced adoption as servants or apprentices by any master able to catch them; all that was needed was physical detainment and presentment before the constables and justices of the peace.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Once captured, these children and adolescents would fall under the same conditions and penalties as adult vagrants for attempts to escape: first, to be permanently sentenced and branded as indentured “Slaves” and, second, to die.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Any “suche Slave or Slaves or children so adjudged” and found to be “resisting there corrections” could be put to “suffer therefore paynes of death.”Footnote ¹⁹¹

The law's passage was its peak, however. Its “extremitie” could not have been “putt in use,” as the statute that repealed it in 1549 stated; there is little external evidence that the statute was ever enforced at all.Footnote ¹⁹² And yet, although the 1547–49 act certainly merited rejection as “extreme,” its provisions were not necessarily so far from other forms of unfreedom practiced in England across the medieval and early modern periods: serfdom, villeinage, indentured servitude, and forced apprenticeships for children—one feature of the 1547–49 law with a long and successful afterlife, as Steve Hindle has pointed out—and, later, houses of correction and workhouses.Footnote ¹⁹³ What was most unusual, however, was also what was most Utopian about the 1547–49 statute, and what became the organizing principle of those later institutions: the deployment of such a labor condition explicitly as punishment.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Thus what seems particularly unacceptable and unusual now—the practice and language of slavery, which the 1547–49 act appears to have envisioned as a way to “produce the effect of penal servitude while sparing the trouble of establishing any machinery to administer it,” as Davies wrote—was swiftly rejected.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ But what was actually more unique about the law in its own time was the conceptual shift toward deploying labor as punishment, and this correctional idea was not rejected at all. Precisely such a concept was coming to permeate national legislative attempts to organize poor relief from the parish upward, and precisely such a concept was then given its first dedicated institution almost immediately thereafter, at London's Bridewell, and by many of the same Reformers involved with both the 1547–49 law and the 1550s Utopias.

Although details of parliamentary debates or amendments to this Vagrancy Act are unfortunately lost, Tadlowe, Cecil, Smith, Bowes, and Nicholas Ridley (1500–55) would all have been serving in Parliament when the act was passed in 1547, as well as when, in the wake of the uprisings and crises of 1549 and the subsequent demise of Somerset's protectorate, the legislation was hastily repealed.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ Thus this earlier attempt at top-down reform and its embarrassing failure would have been fresh in their memories when Tadlowe, Cecil, Smith, and their cohort were involved with the English Utopia in 1551; or when Tadlowe, Bowes, Ridley, and Grafton advocated for the establishment of the house of correction in 1550–53; or when Tadlowe, Bowes, and Grafton convened its administration in 1556 and thereafter; or even when Grafton's son-in-law Tottel printed the 1556 edition. Thomas Smith would surely have recognized comparisons to the “ferocity” of the 1547–49 law when he acted alongside his former pupil Cecil as censor on the Privy Council, allowing Utopia to go to print in 1551 (translated by Cecil's schoolmate Robinson), for Smith is even thought to have been the author of the 1547–49 Vagrancy Act.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ As More wrote in his Utopia, in a passage marked with a manicule in a 1556 copy held by the Folger Library, lessons learned from “adversities” and “experience of the world” are those “which beinge so learned can not easely be forgotten.”Footnote ¹⁹⁸

Perhaps it was as a political lesson learned the hard way, rather than as the reversible map described by Jameson, that the “oddball blueprints” of both the 1547–49 Vagrancy Act and even Utopia did not prove so eccentric, given the “actual institutional developments” at Bridewell that followed so closely thereupon, as Beier, for example, has argued.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ Institutions rather than legislative statements carried these ideas forward. “Life in a house of correction” would turn out to be “very like the slavery envisaged in 1547,” as Davies concluded.Footnote ²⁰⁰ And yet both the law and the new form of prison were also in their own moment, as Innes and others have noted, and as this article has sought to substantiate, in all senses of the term, quintessentially “utopian.”Footnote ²⁰¹