David Wootton’s Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm since Hippocrates will be published by Oxford in June. He teaches early modern history at the University of York, where he is an Anniversary Professor.
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Vol. 16 No. 14 · 21 July 1994
pages 20-22 | 2919 words
Disarming the English
David Wootton
- To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right by Joyce Lee Malcolm
Harvard, 232 pp, £23.95, March 1994, ISBN 0 674 89306 9
The Thirty-Nine Articles required all Englishmen to practise archery on Sundays. For the Elizabethans bearing arms was a duty, not a right. Few of them were allowed to shoot at anything but targets: all game in the kingdom belonged to the Queen and could only be hunted under licence. Bows and arrows, guns and pistols must normally have been kept at home, but every man carried a knife with which to cut his food, and every gentleman a sword. Fights were common, but the law required you, if attacked, to retreat until your back was against the wall: only then could you kill with impunity. After 1604 one particular weapon was singled out as especially in need of control: the Stabbing Act made it always murder, never manslaughter, to kill someone with a knife. This was the one weapon everyone had to hand.
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Letters
Vol. 16 No. 15 · 4 August 1994
From Nicholas Denyer
According to David Wootton (LRB, 21 July), ‘the Thirty-Nine Articles required all Englishmen to practise archery on Sundays.’ Would Professor Wootton please explain which of the Articles he has in mind?
Nicholas Denyer
Trinity College, Cambridge
Vol. 16 No. 17 · 8 September 1994
From David Wootton
Nicholas Denyer (Letters, 4 August) is right to be sceptical of my claim that ‘the Thirty-Nine Articles required all Englishmen to practise archery on Sundays.’ Article 38 states: ‘It is lawful for Christian men, at the commandment of the Magistrate, to wear weapons, and serve in the wars,’ but it was the state, not the Church, which specifically required archery practice on Sundays. A conscientious objector would, however, have been guilty of heresy, as would an opponent of capital punishment (‘The Laws of the Realm may punish Christian men with death’).
David Wootton
Brunel University
