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"As You Like It"
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NON-TRADITIONAL HOUSEHOLDS
In Thomas Harman’s world of rogues, vagabonds,
and sturdy beggars, how does one imagine alternative spaces and notions
of the renaissance household? If the Oxford English Dictionary defines
household as the inmates of a house collectively, an organized family
and the site of domestic economy, then it becomes a transferable space
that moves as its “inmates” move. Juxtaposed against the traditional
static structures called houses, the households of rogue literature
are temporary spaces where people gather. The number of persons belonging
to one household varies upon the type of work performed to support the
domestic economy. For example, there are the “Palliards,” who travel
with their “Morts,” woman-counterparts, and work together to deceive
people out of their goods and money. They go separately door-to-door
begging for goods that they will sell for hard currency in the market.
Every evening they return to their agreed location, likely an outhouse
or a sheltered spot on the side of the road.1
Then there is the “wild rogue” who is prone to a wide variety of deceptive
exploits in order to maintain himself. Furthermore, wild rogues tend
to live amongst each other in larger numbers than most thieves and beggars.
Harman describes the nightly convening of their household as follows:
When they meet in the barn at night, every one getteth a make to lie withal, and there chance to be twenty in a company, as there is sometimes more and sometimes less, for one man that goeth abroad there are at the least two women, which never make it strange when they be called, althought she never knew him before.2
In the household space of the wild rogue, men dominate the maintenance
of the domestic economy and solely call upon women for sexual pleasure.
Harman portrays these women merely as “sex slaves.”3
However, with the large number of men staying in the barn together one
has to wonder whether or not these encounters were solely heterosexual.
Women were outnumbered by men in regards to vagrancy, and on top of
that they were less likely to travel.4
A major critique of Harman’s work is that it perceives vagrants as morally
delinquent individuals who choose to steal and beg. Yet history demonstrates
that unemployment in the Renaissance era was linked to “economic causes
such as the depressions in the textile industry, harvest failures, [and]
enclosures.”5
This places the underworld household in a different context.
If one associates rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars with joblessness,
then the distinction between traditional households and non-traditional
households becomes a distinction of the working and unemployed. Moreover,
Harman’s stance on gender and sexuality admonishes vagrants as sexually
deviant and promiscuous. However, the notion of vagrants as “‘idle,
filthy beggars…producing bastards—bore little relation to the facts
revealed by the census’…which shows ‘people desperately striving to
maintain respectability.’”6
Click on an image below to experience life in the English household, theater or church
