Societies for the reformation of manners in the 1690s
Societies for the reformation of manners were established through local initiatives in many of England’s larger urban areas during the 1690s to eradicate vice and immorality. Civic leaders, magistrates and lawyers dedicated themselves to seeking out and punishing those who infringed laws against profane swearing, Sabbath-breaking, prostitution and drunkenness. The movement for ‘moral reform’ represented a Protestant rejection of the excesses and liberality of the post-Restoration period under Charles II and James II. But apart from its religious overtones, it can also be seen as a reaction to the severe social problems of crime, disorder and poverty afflicting England’s towns in the midst of harsh economic conditions. Although the established Church played a significant part in promoting the campaign, the societies were not exclusively ‘Anglican’ in outlook, but were also open to the participation of dissenters.
Up to the mid-1690s the societies were concentrated mainly in the London area – the very first at Tower Hamlets – and were the outcome of an initial phase of enthusiasm to suppress immoral behaviour prompted by royal proclamations against vice and debauchery, and by discussion in the press, in Parliament and in the church. By 1699, at the height of the movement, there were no fewer than ten societies in London, extending into Middlesex and Southwark, while in the provinces there were at least 20 more, of which the leading ones were at Bristol, Coventry, Leicester, Newcastle, Portsmouth, Edinburgh and Carlisle. The later societies sprang up, it seems, in response to further proclamations issued by the king in 1698 and 1699 for ‘preventing and punishing immorality and profaneness’, and exhortations to circuit judges and clergy to root out vice. The societies distributed large quantities of propaganda in their localities urging witnesses of crimes committed ‘against God’ to inform their parish constables, who then arrested the offender and brought him before a justice of the peace.
Many MPs of all political shades were actively engaged in promoting the work of the societies, either in their own locales or in the London region, and several were active in promoting a series of reforming measures in the Commons during the 1690s. These bills targeted specific ‘moral’ crimes (chiefly profane swearing, cursing, blasphemy and sexual immorality), as well as other practices felt to be detrimental to society (duelling, lotteries, gaming and the licentiousness of the press), with almost half the bills attempted during 1697-9. But despite generating much parliamentary discussion, the only measure to reach the statute book was the Blasphemy Act of 1698, which, though it had commenced as a wide-ranging bill against ‘profaneness, atheism and debauchery’, had been narrowed to a purely religious focus.
Outside London, the societies were usually active for only a few years and from the early 1700s were largely superseded by the societies for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge and for the Propagation of the Gospel, whose objectives were primarily educative rather than suppressive. In and around the capital, however, the societies continued to operate and they published annual reports of their prosecutions up to 1738.
