Are your neighbours spying on you? In the 17th century they had the power to destroy your life

It was in this context that bawdy courts — a Kafkaesque phenomenon unique to the era — thrived. Fuelled by neighbours who watched your every move, these tribunals could be triggered simply because you’d spent too much time alone, with potentially devastating social consequences.

What were bawdy courts?

These were ecclesiastical tribunals that thrived in the early 17th century, tasked with enforcing Christian moral conduct and turning ordinary people into judges.

They earned the name ‘bawdy courts’ because they were often concerned with salacious cases, with jurisdiction over everything from adultery and fornication to seemingly minor violations like dancing on the Sabbath or failing to attend church. A strange blend of justice and spectacle, they institutionalised the human impulse to observe, judge and meddle.

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At one tribunal held in Easter 1618 for instance, a man appeared for keeping his alehouse open during church services, accused of doing so to tempt the congregation to his establishment instead of places of worship. There are also examples of more violent crimes, like that of Roger Lodes, a curate, who drew his dagger in the churchyard against a man named Thomas Atkinson.

Witness or voyeur?

Perhaps the most remarkable element of this system wasn’t the crimes themselves but rather how they were discovered. Far from relying on confession or official investigation, these courts were powered by community surveillance.

As sociologist and author Tiffany Jenkins describes on an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, neighbours essentially spied on each other: “There are a number of cases where people are taken to court where they have to explain why they were in private for 15 minutes or so,” she says, “and the witnesses who are called are very forthcoming about what they've seen.

“The witnesses will talk about, ‘Well, I could see through the keyhole or the crack in the door or the gap in the window that they were having relations.’”

Sometimes, they would fetch their friends to join the spying and corroborate the story. Jenkins recalls one instance where the witness said “I went to find Joan, the shoemaker, and she came and had a look and could also see that this couple were having intimate relations.”

It might sound almost comical, but those testimonies could become the basis of real legal action.

“The community really were responsible for bringing this to people's attention,” Jenkins explains. “If you didn't, you could be accused of bawdy, which is effectively encouraging lavishness and poor behaviour."

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Although everyone was subject to this moral scrutiny, women seem to have borne the brunt of it. Their reproductive potential placed them at the centre of communal anxiety and accusations could prompt bodily inspections in attempt to uncover the truth; some women, Jenkins notes, would even have their breasts felt to see whether they were pregnant or not.

She explains that in an era without formal welfare systems, an illegitimate child posed a burden not just to the mother but to the whole community.

“Say a woman had a child out of wedlock, the community would have to take care of them,” says Jenkins.

“They wouldn't move away, go to the big city. The woman wouldn't be able to do that. You lived and died together, and so you were much more responsible for each other.”

Yet, while this might sound restrictive, such surveillance sometimes offered protection. Domestic abuse for instance – largely unregulated by formal law at the time – was much more visible in these tightly monitored environments.

Suspicion of solitude

In this world where moral failure was assumed to thrive in private spaces, the act of being alone became highly suspicious.

“Privacy was frowned upon, it was for adulterers and murderers,” says Jenkins. “Even the attempt to acquire privacy was seen as suspicious [..] you could be plotting as well as fornicating, and both these things were frowned upon.

We see this same sentiment from Martin Luther himself – theologian and architect of the Protestant Reformation – who warned a friend, as Jenkins puts it, “don't be alone because that's when the devil comes”.

This led to a kind of internalised surveillance, where people didn’t just distrust their neighbours; they even didn’t trust themselves to behave properly behind closed doors.

“[Privacy] only becomes something that is celebrated in the Victorian period,” says Jenkins. “It takes a couple of centuries before privacy is seen as a kind of national value in England and in America.”

The spectacle of shame

So what happened if you were found guilty of getting up to no good?

Punishments from the bawdy courts were rarely violent, but this didn’t prevent them being effective. A typical sentence was public penance, in the form of standing before the congregation in a white robe and confessing your sins aloud.

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It sounds like a light punishment, but in small communities where how you were perceived meant everything, this spectacle could have devastating consequences.

“Public shame was effective,” says Jenkins. “It could ruin people's reputations. And so, people would fall over themselves to find ways not to be publicly shamed.”

Some managed to buy their way out. Jenkins recounts one man from Banbury who paid £3 to avoid the humiliation of a public confession after being accused of fornication.

This was a significant sum at the time, and demonstrates the lengths people would go to avoid disgrace.

Tiffany Jenkins was speaking to Lauren Good on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.