Pigs in the Church

Coat of arms for the Corbin family,
of which I am a descendant.
(From: byandbylord.blogspot.com)

"The reality of privilege, by the seventeenth century, had virtually no connection at all with the medieval vision of an aristocracy of warriors whose qualities were said to be inherited, from father to son. Of those medieval knights, precious few still had descendants in possession of their ancestral fiefs in the sixteenth century. While the actual personnel of the medieval warrior caste was gone forever--the families having died out or lost their seigneurial rights--the trappings of chivalry, constantly reinterpreted, remained in place, secured by a steady flow of edicts from the royal palaces. Coats of arms were fabricated at short notice, for a price, by specialists in heraldry. The palaces and country houses of Europe were filled with phony dukes and marquises who asserted the antiquity of their privileges, which they did not hesitate to trace back to ancient Rome or even ancient Troy.

Newcomers to noble status, whether they had bought their fiefs in 1500 or in 1600, knew how to keep up appearances. They dressed the part. They built elaborate country houses. They maintained large numbers of retainers. They were presented at court. Their claims might arouse the suspicion of a handful of noblemen of older vintage, the king himself might laugh, privately, at their pretensions, but in public, as they made their way in silk-lined coaches toward masked balls and other expensive entertainments, who could deny their eminence?

Were they not received at court? Were they not lords among their peasants? Were they not set apart from commoners by their expensive wigs, their fashionable clothes, their perfumed gloves, the jeweled swords which hung from their belts? Participants in a ballet of deference, the noblemen and would-be noblemen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were constantly removing and replacing their wide-brimmed hats, acknowledging the superior rank of a duke or president, receiving the homage of their own presumed inferiors. Bowing and scraping, insisting on their prerogative to remain seated or to keep their hats on, attended by servants and pushing their way into the place they felt entitled to on public occasions, hordes of men and women insisted on their various and conflicting positions in the world of privilege. They came to blows, at church, over the right to be seated in the front benches. 'They are like pigs,' wrote a country priest. 'Like pigs, they tear each other up. They have nothing but contempt for each other, they think that they can add weight to their own reputation by accusing others of being of more recent nobility.' Since privilege was largely a matter of wealth and of appearances [not birth], it is not surprising that appearances mattered so much. Kings set the tone, establishing elaborate hierarchies at court. At the royal palace in Versailles, thousands of courtiers lived in fear of committing breaches of etiquette, clinging to bewildering distinctions of rank. It was bad manners to knock at a door in Versailles. The proper way was to scratch at the door with the little finger of the left hand. If the servant of a social superior brought you a message, you had to receive him standing and bareheaded. If you encountered the royal dinner on its way from the kitchens to the table, you were obliged 'to bow as to the King himself, sweeping the ground with your hat and saying, in a low, reverent, but distinct voice: 'The King's dinner.' Who could sit down, in the presence of whom, and on what, was a vexing problem at court. Two prominent people could not meet without verifying the seating arrangements in advance. A fifteen-year-old duchess, elevated by her recent marriage to a rank which made her superior to her own mother, has a screaming fit when the usher on duty throws open both leaves of the door as her mother enters the room. As her social inferior, the mother was entitled only to one half of the door being opened for her." (63) --George Huppert, After the Black Death: A Social History of Early Modern Europe

I am descended from the Corbin family, which has its own coat of arms, pictured above. Therefore, I hereby assert my full privileges. I am declaring myself tax-exempt and demand that you not read this blog while you are sitting on the toilet or riding the bus. Such action would not be respectful to my rank.

Election Trickery in New York

"On election day [late 1690s], orders were sent to the captains of English ships in the harbor to send their sailors to the polling place so that the Leislerians, who were heavily represented in the laboring class, would believe an impressment was imminent. This ruse proved successful, sending the Leislerian candidates down in defeat." (55) --Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution

"New Amsterdam, now called New York"
From: New York Public Library Picture Collection Online

New York politics in the 1690s was dominated by two political factions: the Leislerians and the anti-Leislerians. Although the two did not precisely divide along ethnic and class lines, Leislerians were highly representative of Dutch and laboring class New Yorkers while the anti-Leislerians were generally representative of socially and economically elite English and Dutch New Yorkers. The two parties were formed in reaction to Jacob Leisler, the self-proclaimed governor of New York from 1689 to 1691. Leisler had taken advantage of the change of royal power during the Glorious Revolution in England to seize political control of the New York colony. He remained in this position until 1691 when England sent a new royally appointed governor. Leisler did not relinquish power voluntarily; he was arrested, tried and found guilty of treason by an all-English jury, and executed. His Dutch and laboring class supporters remained politically active after Leisler's death.

The other background detail you need to know in order to understand this quote has to do with English impressments. In the colonial period, when the British navy was in need of new sailors during wartime, impressment gangs would come ashore in American cities and force able-bodied men into naval service. Therefore, able-bodied men had an incentive to steer clear of impressment gangs. In this case, the anti-Leislerians were able to discourage laboring class voters from being in the streets and voting simply by creating the appearance of an impressment. This was quite a trick!