¹ See e.g. James, Mervyn, English Politics and the Concept of Honour 1485–1642, Past and Present Supplements, III (1978)Google Scholar; Sharpe, J. A., Defamation and Sexual Slander in Early Modern England: The Church Courts at York, Borthwick Papers, LVIII (York, [1980])Google Scholar; Andrew, Donna, ‘The Code of Honour and its Critics: The Opposition to Duelling in England 1700–1850’, Social History, V (1980), 409–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Powis, Jonathan, Aristocracy (Oxford, 1984), ch. 1Google Scholar; Bryson, Anna Clare, ‘Concepts of Civility in England, c. 1560–1685’ (D.Phil, thesis, University of Oxford, 1984)Google Scholar; Childs, Fenela Ann, ‘Prescriptions for Manners in English Courtesy Literature, 1690–1760, and their Social Implications’ (D.Phil, thesis, University of Oxford, 1984)Google Scholar; Fletcher, A. J., ‘Honour, Reputation and Local Officeholding in Elizabethan and Stuart England’, in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. Fletcher, Anthony and Stevenson, John (Cambridge, 1985), 92–115CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ingram, Martin, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1987), esp. ch. 10Google Scholar; Kiernan, V. G., The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of Aristocracy (Oxford, 1988), esp. chs. 4–10Google Scholar. A useful bibliography of relevant literature in European languages is Keunen, Annemieke, ‘Bibliografie “Eer en belediging”’, Volkskundig Bulletin, XVIII (1992), 432–40Google Scholar.

² In addition to the works of Sharpe, Bryson, Childs and Ingram cited in the previous footnote, see e.g. Amussen, Susan Dwyer, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1988), ch. 4Google Scholar; Clark, Anna, ‘Whores and Gossips: Sexual Reputation in London 1770–1825’, in Current Issues in Women's History, ed. Angerman, Arina et al. (1989), 231–48Google Scholar; Gowing, Laura, ‘Women, Sex and Honour: The London Church Courts, 1572–1640’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1993)Google Scholar; idem, ‘Gender and the Language of Insult in Early Modern London’, History Workshop Journal, no. 35 (1993), 1–21; idem, ‘Language, Power and the Law: Women's Slander Litigation in Early Modern London’, in Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modem England, ed. Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker (1994), 26–47; Meldrum, Tim, ‘A Women's Court in London: Defamation at the Bishop of London's Consistory Court, 1700–1745’, London Journal, XLX (1994), 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Amongst the growing body of ‘historicist’ work on the literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that also addresses this issue, see notably McKeon, Michael, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740 (Baltimore, 1987), esp. 150–9, 255–65, 364–400Google Scholar; Brant, Clare, ‘Speaking of Women: Scandal and the Law in the Mid-Eighteenth Century’, in Women, Texts and Histories 1575–1760, ed. Brant, Clare and Purkiss, Diane (1992), 242–70Google Scholar.

³ For other patterns of thought that impinged upon notions of sexual honour, see Dabhoiwala, Faramerz, ‘Prostitution and Police in London, c. 1660–c. 1760’ (D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1995), ch. 2Google Scholar.

⁴ The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Latham, Robert and Matthews, William (II vols., 1970–1983)Google Scholar [hereafter Pepys, Diary], IV. 343, 357; V. 65, 269; VII. 329; VIII. 115; cf Boswell's London Journal 1762–1763, ed. Pottle, Frederick A. (New York, 1950), 59–60Google Scholar; Bryson, , ‘Concepts of Civility’, 364–5Google Scholar; Boulton, Jeremy, Neighbourhood and Society: A London Suburb in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1987), 148–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shoemaker, Robert B., Prosecution and Punishment: Petty Crime and the Law in London and Rural Middlesex, c. 1660–1725 (Cambridge, 1991), 101Google Scholar.

⁵ See e.g. Pepys, , Diary, II. 119Google Scholar; V. 30, 41, 263, 330; VII. 53, 173–4; VIII. 124, 307, 442.

⁶ See e.g.ibid., I. 252; III. 171, 210; IV. 166, 231, 289, 347; V. 83, 312, 313; VIII. 73, 527; IX. 60, 66, 104. More generally, Pepys felt his own honour and credit to be bound up with that of the Navy Office as a whole, and similarly conflated the reputations of other men with those of their office. This important, corporate understanding of reputation deserves further attention.

⁷ Ibid., VIII. 174, 205, 209, 246; cf. ibid., V. 126; IX. 383, 545, also 551.

⁸ Ibid., VIII. 100, 155; Ingram, , Church Courts, 297–8, 302–3Google Scholar; Amussen, , Ordered Society, 102, 104Google Scholar; Muldrew, Craig, ‘Interpreting the Market: The Ethics of Credit and Community Relations in Early Modern England’, Social History, XVIII (1993), 163–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here esp. 179–81.

⁹ This specific usage of the last term (as in men, women or people ‘of character’, or ‘of some character’) appears to have been an eighteenth-century evolution: see e.g. Oxford English Dictionary, ed. Simpson, J. A. and Weiner, E. S. C. (2nd edn, Oxford, 1989)Google Scholar [hereafter OED²], s.v. ‘character’, ¶13; Corporation of London Record Office, GJR/M1, 1 June, 3 June (1752); GJR/M2, 16 Oct., 3 May, 6 May (1761); GJR/M3, 10 May, 11 May (1762).

¹⁰ For typically subtle and illuminating juggling of these concepts, from one particularly influential perspective, see The Tatler, ed. Bond, Donald F. (3 vols., Oxford, 1987), e.g. I. 342–7Google Scholar (no. 48, 30 July 1709), 531 (no. 78, 8 Oct. 1709); II. 73–7 (no. 92, 10 Nov. 1709), 140–4 (no. 105, 10 Dec. 1709); The Spectator, ed. Bond, Donald F. (5 vols., Oxford, 1965), III. 463–6Google Scholar (no. 390, 28 May 1712).

¹¹ Cf. Spectator I. 416–19 (no. 99, 23 June 1711).

¹² Pepys, , Diary, VIII. 120Google Scholar (my emphasis); cf. ibid., VIII. 132.

¹³ [Dunton, John], The Night-Walker: Or, Evening Rambles in Search after Lewd Women, with the Conferences Held with them, &c. To be Publish'd Monthly, 'till a Discovery be Made of all the Chief Prostitutes in England, from the Pensionary Miss, down to the Common Strumpet, 2 vols. of 4 issues each (1696–7)Google Scholar [hereafter Night-Walker, vol./issue], vol. I, issue I, sig. [A4r] (the nature of this source is elucidated in Dabhoiwala, ‘Prostitution and Police’, appendix B). Cf. The Life and Errors of John Dunton Late Citizen of London; Written by Himself in Solitude (1705),371, 393, 398 and for me notion that the unchastity of a man was—as John Milton put it—‘much more deflowering and dishonourable’ than that of a woman, see Le Comte, Edward, Milton and Sex (New York, 1978), 18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Jeremy Collier, ‘Of Whoredom’, in idem, Essays upon Several Moral Subjects (3 parts, 1705), III. 113–55, quotations from III. 121, 123, 134. Cf. [Allestree, Richard], The Whole Duty of Man, Laid Down in a Plain and Familiar Way for the Use of All, but especially the Meanest Reader (1658)Google Scholar, in [idem], The Works of the Learned and Pious Author of the Whole Duty of Man (2 vols., Oxford, 1684), I. 121; Taller, I. 400–3 (no. 58, 23 Aug. 1709); Thomas, Keith, ‘The Double Standard’, Journal of the History of Ideas, XX (1959), 195–216, here 203–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Andrew, , ‘Code of Honour and its Critics’, 416–17Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Kent, Joan, ‘Attitudes of Members of the House of Commons to the Regulation of “Personal Conduct” in Late Elizabethan and Early Stuart England’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, XLVI (1973), 41–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wrightson, Keith Edwin, ‘The Puritan Reformation of Manners, with Special Reference to the Counties of Lancashire and Essex, 1640–1660’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1974)Google Scholar; Thomas, Keith, ‘The Puritans and Adultery: The Act of 1650 Reconsidered’, in Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Seventeenth-Century History Presented to Christopher Hill, ed. Pennington, Donald and Thomas, Keith (Oxford, 1978), 257–82Google Scholar; Ingram, Martin, ‘Reformation of Manners in Early Modern England’, in The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England, ed. Griffiths, Paul, Fox, Adam and Hindle, Steven (forthcoming, 1996)Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Bryson, ‘Concepts of Civility’, ch. 7; for these particular themes see esp. 344–7, 370–1; 361–3, 367, 369–71; 347–50, 352–3, 362–9.

¹⁷ Thomas Bray to James Blair, 3 Apr. 1700, University of Maryland Archives, Thomas Bray Collection, Case 10, fos. 220r–2r. For further illustration of how libertine and ‘reasoned’ assumptions about sexual conduct infiltrated clerical circles towards the end of the seventeenth and over the first half of the eighteenth centuries, cf. ‘A Young Clergyman’ [i.e. Maclauchlan, Daniel], An Essay upon Improving and Adding to the Strength of Great-Britain and Ireland, by Fornication; Justifying the Same from Scripture and Reason (1735)Google Scholar, whose authorship and context is elucidated by Smith, Norah, ‘Sexual Mores and Attitudes in Enlightenment Scotland’, in Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Boucé, Paul-Gabriel (Manchester, 1982), 47–73, here 61, 71–2 n. 68Google Scholar.

¹⁸ See e.g. Journaal van Constantijn Huygens, den zoon, van 21 October 1688 tot 2 Sept. 1696, Werken van het Historisch Genootschap, new ser., XXIII and XXV (Utrecht, 1876–1877)Google Scholar, supplemented by Boersma, F., ‘Het ongelukkige lot van een dagboekschrijver: Herwaardering voor Constantijn Huygens jr., secretaris van Willem III, Groniek, no. 101 (1988), 29–53Google Scholar. A telling illustration is the behaviour of Sir Charles Sedley, libertine par excellence. On the surface, he renounced debauchery in the 1690s, supported the 1699 Immorality Bill, and passed down into history as the archetypal ‘reformed rake’: see Bryson, , ‘Concepts of Civility’;, 354, and references given thereGoogle Scholar; Hayton, David, ‘Moral Reform and Country Politics in the Late Seventeenth-Century House of Commons’, Past and Present, no. 128 (1990), 48–91, here 63, 90CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In fact, as Lawrence Stone has uncovered, he continued to engage in sexual intrigue: Uncertain Unions: Marriage in England 1660–1753 (Oxford, 1992), 57–8, 64–5Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Cf., e.g., Night-Walker, I/1, sigs A2r–Br, and An Account of the Societies for Reformation of Manners in London and Westminster, and other Parts of the Kingdom (1699), 93–7, with Spectator, II. 216–19 (no. 182, 28 Sept. 1711); IV. 370–71 (no. 525, 1 Nov. 1712), 382–4 (no. 528, 5 Nov. 1712). For the continued association between sexual debauchery and male ‘honour’ at the middle of the eighteenth century, see e.g. Cumberland, Denison, A Sermon Preached before…the Magdalen-House Chanty, on Thursday the 5th of April, 1764 (1764), 15Google Scholar.

²⁰ [Allestree], Whole Duty, I. 87; cf.ibid., I. 121.

²¹ See e.g. [Allestree, Richard], The Ladies Calling (1673)Google Scholar, in [idem], Works, II. 10; Baxter, Richard, A Christian Directory: Or, a Summ of Practical Theologie, and Cases of Conscience (2 parts, 1673), I. 402–3Google Scholar; Night–Walker, I/1, pp. 13, 16; I/2, pp. 1, 10–13, 25–6; I/4, pp. 3, 12, 23; II/2, sig. [A4V]; ‘Moreton, Andrew’ [i.e. Defoe, Daniel], Every-Body's Business, is No-Body's Business; or Private Abuses, Publick Grievances: Exemplified in the Pride, Insolence, and Exorbitant Wages of our Women-Servants, Footmen, &c. (1725), 17–18Google Scholar; Welch, Saunders, A Proposal to Render Effectual a Plan to Remove the Nuisance of Common Prostitutes from the Streets of this Metropolis (1758), 4–5Google Scholar.

²² See above, n. 2.

²³ For a typical example of the complex of social, economic and moral factors that could be adduced at law in estimation of a woman's ‘credit’, see Public Record Office, London, KB 9/919, certiorari 5 (Trinity 1671), which encapsulates proceedings in both ecclesiastical and secular courts. Parallel findings emerge from research by Dinah Winch into slander litigation in later seventeenth-century Sussex and Cheshire; I am most grateful to her for allowing me to read some of her work in progress.

²⁴ The centrality of sexual conduct to acceptable female behaviour was a commonplace of defamation cases brought by women at the church courts; but to a large degree this was simply because most other types of slander were actionable only in secular courts, notably at Quarter Sessions. Although the nature of sessions records makes it very difficult to recover the wording or even to quantify the incidence of non-sexual slanders, about 7 per cent of all recognisances returned to Quarter Sessions in Middlesex and Westminster between 1660 and 1725 were issued explicitly for defamation–a total of well over a hundred cases a year, many more than were brought before the equivalent ecclesiastical court. In addition, the sessions dealt with a huge number of cases of assault involving women, many of which undoubtedly involved verbal abuse. Unfortunately, however, recognisances seldom record the precise form of words in either type of case. For figures, see Shoemaker, , Prosecution and Punishment, 50 (Table 3.3), 316 n. 16Google Scholar; Meldrum, ‘A Woman's Court in London’. For examples, see Greater London Record Office, WJ/SR/1602, recognisance 85 (Oct. 1681); WJ/SR/2632, recognisance 189 (Apr. 1735); MJ/SR/2016, recognisances 105, 109 (Sept. 1703); and MJ/SR/2409, recognisance 251 (Aug. 1723), whose slander combined sexual and non-sexual slurs: ‘“bitch, whore, common whore, cheating all people in ye weight of her butter”, with other vile and opprobrious language’–how typical this was is now impossible to ascertain.

²⁵ See e.g. Pepys, , Diary, I. 48Google Scholar; II. 179; III. 32; IV. 341; VIII. 71, 212. Cf. ibid., II. 210–11; IV. 114; V. 30, 250; VI. 90; VII. 299, 314; [Allestree, ], Ladies Calling, II. 1Google Scholar.

²⁶ Pepys, , Diary, II. 235Google Scholar; cf. ibid., VII. 120, 238. For a very different situation, when the word was made to carry tremendous weight between them, see ibid., IX. 369–71.

²⁷ Borsay, Peter, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–1760 (Oxford, 1989), 226–7, 237–4Google Scholar; and above, n. 4.

²⁸ See e.g. Pepys, , Diary, IV. 181 and n. 3Google Scholar; VIII. 423; IX. 220; Lodewijk van der Saan, ‘Verscheyde Concepten en Invallen, Aengaende mijne Verbeeteringe te Soecken’, Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden, MS BPL 1325, fo. 42V (c. 1696).

²⁹ [Defoe, Daniel], Some Considerations upon Street-Walkers. With a Proposal for Lessening the Present Number of them [1726], 4Google Scholar. By mid-century, it had become something of a moralist commonplace that honest women aped the fashions of prostitutes: see e.g. Fielding, Henry, The Covent-Garden Journal and A Plan of the Universal Register-Office, ed. Goldgar, Bertran A. (Oxford, 1988), 312Google Scholar; Reflections Arising from the Immorality of the Present Age: In which some Self-Evident Facts are Pointed at, which Seem to Call for a more Immediate Redress, than any other Article in our Policy (1756), 52–8; Conder, John, A Sermon Preached before the Society for the Reformation of Manners (1763), 27Google Scholar.

³⁰ For the last two incidents, see Pepys, , Diary, III. 68Google Scholar; VIII. 331.

³¹ Memoirs of the Life of Barbara, Dutchess of Cleveland, Divorc'd Wife of Handsome Fielding (1709), 2 (my emphasis).

³² See Dabhoiwala, , ‘Prostitution and Police’, 55–9Google Scholar; and cf., for later decades, Clark, ‘Whores and Gossips’.

³³ Night-Walker, II/4, sig. [A4r]; cf. ibid., I/4, p. 23; II/3, p. 23; II/4, pp. 17–18.

³⁴ Tatler, I. 346–7 (no. 48, 30 July 1709). Cf. A Congratulatory Epistle from a Reformed Rake, to John F —g, Esq; upon the New Scheme of Reclaiming Prostitutes [1758], 11–12.

³⁵ OED²first recorded usage 1749. Derivations such as ‘demi-reputable’, ‘demi-reputation’, ‘demi-monde’ and the like are all nineteenth-century coinages. Cf. also Fielding, , Covent-Garden Journal, 312Google Scholar.

³⁶ [Hanway, Jonas], A Plan for Establishing a Charity-House, or Charity-Houses, for the Reception of Repenting Prostitutes. To be Called the Magdalen Charity (1758), 16 (italics in original)Google Scholar.

³⁷ With specific regard to sexual immorality, see Dabhoiwala, ‘Prostitution and Police’, chs. 2–6; for an introduction to the more general historiography of this topic see e.g. Brewer, John, ‘This, That and the Other: Public, Social and Private in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Shifting the Boundaries: Transformation of the Languages of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Castiglione, Dario and Sharpe, Lesley (Exeter, 1995), 1–21Google Scholar.

³⁸ See e.g. Ingram, Martin, ‘Ridings, Rough Music and the “Reform of Popular Culture” in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, no. 105 (1984), 79–113CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fox, Adam, ‘Ballads, Libels and Popular Ridicule in Jacobean England’, Past and Present, no. 145 (1994), 47–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cust, Richard, ‘Honour and Officeholding in Early Stuart England: The Case of Beaumont v. Hastings’, Past and Present, no. 149 (1995), 57–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Felicity Heal, ‘Reputation and Honour in Court and Country: Lady Elizabeth Russell and Sir Thomas Hoby’, in this volume.