The Practice of History

Staging Arrests as Historical Method

In my last article, I set out come of the key questions raised by trying to script the two versions of the early modern arrest account, Astell vs. Hurst: what did it actually mean to arrest someone? What role did witnesses play? And what was the effect of violence upon perceptions of an arrest? These questions were at the forefront of my mind when I took this incident into the workshop room earlier this year, ably aided by my trained fight director CJ and a cast of ten student actors from Sheffield’s undergraduate body. In a series of three private workshops, I presented my actors with the scripts of eleven arrests taken from the Star Chamber record and asked them to stage them. A final workshop took place with a small audience of academics and postgraduates, as part of a conference I held at Sheffield on the experience of law and government in early modernity.

The assailants attacking Astell first (plaintiff’s vision), gif courtesy of Lucy Clarke.

My goal with practice-as-research (PAR) isn’t reconstruction. As I’ve mentioned previously, staging incidents sites squarely in the middle of my research process. It’s designed to provoke questions that otherwise I wouldn’t think of, and thus guide my more conventionally “historical” research. For this reason, and out of a desire to stage the incidents as they appear in the Star Chamber record, I don’t act as a director. I give the actors the scripts, with a summary of the incident (with an excerpt from the original record), and we work together from there. This method’s taken some trial and error – Including the original record makes it easier for student actors to participate in working out what if means, practically speaking, to arrest someone, or to ‘make resistance’. Those discussions are often the most fruitful, as they force me to consider what realities the archival sources are trying to reflect (or, indeed, create). Workshops consist of staging the incidents in different ways, often guided by what questions and answers the actors themselves have raised in discussion.

My fight director is also a key part of the process, as we must first work out what kinds of violence are represented in the legal cases – what it meant to ‘beat’ someone became an enduring questions – and indeed it sometimes becomes clear that it was impossible for events to have occurred in the way the archive states because they’re physically unfeasible! Though there’s a gap between “real” violence and stage combat (because, unfortunately, I can’t have my actors actually punch each other) it’s still methodologically useful. Firstly, given my interest in how witnesses perceived what was happening, stage combat is realistic enough to elicit similar responses of shock, gear and outrage in audiences (and me!). Secondly, the physically challenge of carrying out choreographed violence draws attention to very real practical questions: how hard is it to hold onto someone who’s trying to get away from you? How do you restrain someone while you’re outnumbered in a crowd? How do you ‘carry away’ someone to prison?

The bystanders protesting Astell’s treatment (plaintiff’s version), photo courtesy of Lucy Clarke.

Workshopping Astell vs. Hurst wasn’t a question of establishing what happened. To be honest, I’m still not sure which of them were telling the truth (if either!). But each narrative offers a view of what an illegitimate and legitimate arrest ought to look like – as both plaintiff and defendent were bidding to be believed by the court – and therefore offers a three-dimensional view of how an arrest might manifest in “real” life. As such, staging it, repeatedly, discussing it with my actors and fight director, and then conference attendees, provided vital answers to some of the questions I had uncovered in the process of scriptwriting. Most of those answers were themselves questions that demanded further research, either in the workshop room itself, or in the archives. These questions, moreover, offered a crucial perspective on the functioning of the early modern state.

Firstly, scripting has raised the question of what it meant to arrest someone. When we staged both versions of the incident it was clear that there could be multiple ways of gaining hold of the arrestee’s body, but also that resistance could prove difficult. When actors asked if they should physically touch ‘Astell’, it forced me to go back to legal prescriptions. Although handbooks for magistrates described an arrest as ‘taking hold’ of a person, it’s worth noting that a 1627 Star Chamber ruling that denies that an arresting official need put his hands on his quarry. What was also clear is that the legal handbooks’ focus upon taking hold of an arrestee was much more complex in practice. When we staged the defendants’ account, we experimented with having ‘Astell’ push ‘Cooper’s’ hand off his should, revealing that just placing a hand on the should of a would-be prisoner might not be sufficient. In such a situation, it becomes clear that an arrest was not as simple as the law would have preferred. According to both contemporary legal handbooks and the landmark ruling of Mackalley’s Case in 1611, an arrest was supposed to be immediately obeyed, even if one could not see the officer! But staging the defendants’ version of the case revealed that making an arrest could be consideraly more complicated.

Astell attacking Cooper (defendants’ version), photo courtesy of Lucy Clarke.

This was all the clear when we began to discuss when the arrest was finished. When we staged both versions of the incident, I asked actors when they pinpointed arrest as completed. Notably, no one felt that the arrest was finished in the defendants’ version when Cooper declared ‘I arrest you’. They provided two differing takes. One group of actors said they felt the arrest was completed once Astell was in custody, while another felt that it was only finished once they have successfully taken him “off-stage”. This is striking – both takes emphasises that an arrest was, again, a much longer moment than the legal formula ‘he arrested him’ suggests, and that it might remain open to challenge long after the words ‘I arrest you’ were uttered. This is in opposition to the legal handbooks, and crucially gives an insight into why the ruling on Mackalley’s Case might have been so insistent that the mere assertion of an arrest was enough to compel obedience, because arrests were not simply finished when the legal formula had been uttered. And this is matched by the numerous accounts in Star Chamber of arrests that were claimed to be ‘done’ but were still interrupted by their prisoner being rescued away.

Secondly, violence played a vital role in the legitimacy of an arrest. As I noted before, the two accounts use their accusation that their opponent hit first to claim legitimacy. The difference in temporality was noted by several actors, too, who immediately perceived this difference between the two arrests as being central to their narrative, identifying the ‘assault’ on Astell in the plaintiff’s version as being clearly illegitimate. Others said that the more non-violent arrest staged in the defendants’ version seemed more official. Conference attendees agreed that unprovoked violence delegitimised the arrest. And, most interestingly, the actor playing Hurst felt that the level of violence offered to Astell was inversely proportional to the arrest’s authority – he felt disempowered by having to resort to violence to assert authority. This struck me: given the emphasis that both the law and Star Chamber litigants place upon the idea that all arrests ought to be obeyed immediately, I think it’s revealing that resorting to violence might well prove that your authority was not all that secure in the first place.

Astell being successfully taken away (defendants’ version), photo courtesy of Lucy Clarke.

Finally, scripting this incident had raised questions about the audience. Both plaintiff and defendants use bystanders to underscore the (il)legitimacy of the arrest. Astell alleges his neighbours made a great outcry about the violence offered to him, and claims that Cooper only declared it to be an arrest once this outcry had happened. By contrast, Hurst only refers to bystanders in claiming that one Robert Symson (accused by Astell of being part of the mob that assaulted him) just happened to be ‘goinge about his necessary busines’ in the street. And Cooper – as a magistrate would be expected to – commanded him in the Queen’s name ‘to ayde and Assist him aboute the Execution of the said Arrest’, after which Symson pitched in to help ‘in obedience to hir Majesties lawes’, suggesting that his joining in was because he recognised the arrest’s legitimacy. However, conference attendees felt that intervention by another party did not simply lend credibility to the arresting officials, but merely complicated the situation, a challenge to my preconceptions that I’m still thinking about now.

Crucially, though, both actors and the conference audience agreed that the witnesses to both versions of the incident were central. Cooper argued that she felt the fragility of her authority when we staged the defendants’ version. Even staging a “legitimate” arrest, she felt that the security of the arrest depended upon the audience present. The conference attendees similarly agreed that the audience were vital to the assertion of legitimacy but raised an interesting development on this point. Several felt that the arrest could only be legitimised if there were witnesses present, a take which strikingly mirrors contemporary concerns that an arrest done in the night was illegitimate (and indeed caused much controversy in Mackalley’s Case). Other actors commentated that they felt the audience to be source of strength or threat depending entirely on how well-disposed to them they were. It’s striking that staging the two versions of the incident engendered such a response. Even when witnesses said and did little, such as in the defendants’ version, when staged they were such a palpable presence that it was impossible to ignore them. The workshops demonstrated that bystanders were an audience whose compliance could not be guaranteed, and that the reception of an arrest was key to its success.

Astell being successfully taken away (defendants’ version), photo courtesy of Lucy Clarke.

Historians so often treat the assertion of authority as something that just happened – a performance that could not possibly fail. That is what might appear from merely reading the records and legal prescriptions. But as soon as we attempt to bring these incidents to life, it becomes clear that we should not take legal formulae at their word. ‘He arrested him’ is not the simple, fait accompli exertion of authority that it suggests. Indeed, staging Astell vs. Hurst indicates that we need to problematise the conventional, pacified narrative of English state formation. Making an arrest was a performance in its truest sense, because it could fail, at multiple points beyond when the legal process had apparently concluded, and so we must interrogate how the arrest was done. And an arrest’s success relied in large part on its reception by witnesses. If we are to understand the reach and strength of the early modern state, then we must account for its audiences, even when they seem to be silent.

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