Love and Dishonour in Elizabethan England

One beautiful autumn afternoon in 1979, Professor Ralph Houlbrooke discovered a tightly rolled vellum strip of over five metres length in the old Public Record Office, Chancery Lane. It described in poignant detail the clandestine marriage and marital breakdown of a late-sixteenth-century couple from East Anglia, Charles and Elizabeth Forth (née Jerningham). Captivated immediately, Houlbrooke resolved to revisit the case in his retirement. Thirty-nine years later, the resulting monograph has been published. Meticulously researched, this magnificent microhistory unravels the twists and turns in the (mis)fortunes of two families, culminating in a fateful marriage. Chapters One and Two introduce the Jerninghams, a long-established Catholic family from Suffolk, and describe their rise and ruin between the 1300s and 1500s, with a particular focus on the escapades of John Jerningham, the father of the book’s protagonist, Elizabeth Forth. In Chapter Three, we meet the contrasting Forth family, descendants of wealthy Hadleigh clothiers, who acquired substantial landholdings in the early 1500s, and became highly respected members of the Protestant elite

Ancient history · Archaeology · Cohabitation · Economic history · Elite · Genealogy · Microhistory · Political science · Politics · Protestantism · Remarriage · Sociology · Anthropology · Classics · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Religious Studies