Name games

‘But what art thou?’ ailing Edmund asks disguised Edgar, his slayer, in King Lear. This was a crunch question for the times. No other one was asked more often or caused more trouble if left up in the air. Anything uncertain unsettled City leaders. Lives needed noting. The criminologist Tannenbaum says that societies ‘cannot deal with people [whom they] cannot define’. Imagine the panic in Common Council, then, when reports landed on tables in 1603 that ‘lewd and ydle persons’ had committed a string of ‘divers outrages’, who ‘cannot well be described but by viewe and sight of them’; or when word spread in the next year about a scary gang of ‘lewde and dangerous’ stragglers, ‘who cannot yet be described by any particular markers whereby they may be noted’. Three shifty-seeming nightwalkers were ordered to go back down to Bridewell's cells in 1644, ‘untill Mr. Treasurer [can] be satisfied what they are’. This need to know and name gave form to something shapeless. People were pinned down on paper with names, addresses, and jobs. Magistrates knew what to do if suspects stood in docks drenched in suspicion: name them, label them, end things in a verdict. Only then did they have identities to criticize (if necessary). Tannenbaum sums this up nicely in just one word: ‘define’.

Examinations were all about evidence, but also getting biographies, important in cultures where good family backgrounds and hard slog in jobs could place people.