A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

sadism, are rare. So are sex crimes - not more than half a dozen in twenty-five years. ‘Hans
Milliner, a smith, who violated a girl of thirteen years of age, filling her mouth with sand that she
might not cry out...’ (Evidently the girl was not killed.) ‘A man beheaded for violating a girl of
fourteen.’ Two homosexuals are executed for committing sodomy, and a farm labourer for buggery
with cows and a sheep. Apart from the sadism of the robbers, most of the crimes seem to be
curiously anonymous; they seem to spring out of circumstances rather than out of a criminal
disposition.
From Luke Owen Pike’s History of Crime in England we learn that at the same period in England
the commonest crimes were robbery and - oddly enough - perjury. ‘Perjury... was the most
thoroughly ingrained of all the English crimes.’ This refers to the perjury of witnesses and jurors in
court cases. Corruption was widespread, starting with government ministers; everyone was
expected to take bribes, and jurors were only following the custom of their betters. Pike remarks
significantly: ‘During the reigns of the Tudors, men in the highest positions still resorted to those
mean arts which have now, at any rate, descended to a lower grade of society.’ The poor committed
the occasional theft and murder; the rich indulged in conspiracy and corruption.
Yet society is now changing fast, and it is inevitable that crime will follow it sooner or later. This is
the age of the Elizabethan drama, and the plays of Shakespeare and Marlowe are full of clearly
individualised characters - not the wooden types of the Morte d’Arthur and Orlando Furioso - even
of Don Quixote. ‘In Shakespeare’s time,’ says Erich Kahler, ‘the destiny of peoples coincided with
the destiny of their monarchs and nobles’ (p.500 of Man the Measure). And, what is more, the
ordinary individual began to feel that he was, in some obscure way, the equal of the monarch and
noble. We only have to look at the popular journalism of the time - pamphlets by writers such as
Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe - to see that they assumed a very high degree of mental alertness
in their readers. Indeed, as Q. D. Leavis argues in Fiction and the Reading Public, ‘By modern
standards they show an insulting disregard of the reader’s convenience: the dashing tempo, the
helter-skelter progress, the unexpected changes of direction and tone so that the reader is constantly
faced with a fresh front, the stream of casual allusion and shifting metaphor, leave us giddy as the
Elizabethan dramas leave us stunned’ (p.88). People who were capable of plunging into this
foaming whirlpool of prose were not afraid of using their minds. Like the ancient Greeks, they
loved to go to the theatre and be told a fascinating story of murder and intrigue. But they loved too
the simple, almost characterless novels of the time such as Sidney’s Arcadia, Greene’s Card of
Fancy and Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller, in these they didn’t want character - only to be told an
interesting story. Yet as soon as men are capable of spending an hour or so in ‘another world’, they
have also learned to daydream and to detach themselves from their own narrow lives.
This explains why, when James I called his first parliament in 1604, he found himself faced with a
houseful of respectful but strong-minded individuals, determined to stand by their rights. And the
new religious Puritanism was not the expression of a grim and joyless morality; it was an assertion
of religious individualism, a defiant rejection of both Bloody Mary’s Catholicism and Queen
Elizabeth’s new Anglican church, which looked like Catholicism with an English accent. We find
the new spirit in John Milton’s ‘masque’ Comus, presented in 1634, in which the wicked enchanter
Comus tries to seduce a girl lost in the forest. One of her two brothers - searching for her - makes a
long speech about chastity, and about how a noble idea enters
The unpolluted temple of the mind,
And turns it by degrees to the soul’s essence,
Till all be made immortal...