A map of Leadenhall Street and Houndsditch which includes several parish churches and synagogues. Excerpt from John Rocque’s 1746 map of London, from David Rumsey maps.

June 1780 saw some of the most destructive riots ever to break out on the streets of London. Motivated by anti-Catholic feeling, The Gordon Riots involved several days of violence, looting, and targeted attacks on Catholic chapels, homes, and businesses. Much of the violence was levelled at areas inhabited by Irish immigrant workers, and hundreds of people died over the course of a few days.

One mob was directed towards the house of Cornelius Murphy in Golden Lane by a neighbour who lived fifteen or twenty yards down the street. The neighbour, Susannah Clarke, informed the mob that Cornelius Murphy’s house ‘was a Roman Catholick house, and down it should come; that there had been an Irish wake in the house, and down it must come’. Clarke, along with forty others assembled, was subsequently indicted for ‘demolish[ing] and pull[ing] down the dwelling-house’.[1] Indeed, Murphy reported, his house was almost entirely destroyed by the mob within three to four minutes. This targeted violence was instigated by his neighbour’s insistence that she had witnessed him hosting an Irish wake, or a similar Catholic gathering inside his own home.

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London, with its semi-clandestine Catholic networks, coexisting Jewish and foreign Protestant communities, and a plurality of Protestant Nonconformist denominations, has long been recognised as a centre of religious diversity. Yet the story thus far, with its focus upon the establishment of ‘stranger’ churches or the building of early synagogues, has tended to overlook an integral setting of religious practice for communities of all faiths: the spaces, rhythms, and meanings of the home.

It was in often overcrowded and densely packed lodgings across the City and its suburbs that the multitude dramas of life, death, and faith played out: individuals being born, sickening, and dying, the invitation of kin to witness a domestic baptism or to view a dead body, instances of visiting, mutual assistance, collective prayer, and informal gatherings which solidified connections between households and strengthened religious communities. In the early modern period, as in more recent times, religious refugees came to London to make their home, and different minority communities closely co-existed amongst the same networks of streets. The home could be viewed as a setting of relative religious freedom, privacy, and safety, yet it could also, as the example of the destruction of the home of Cornelius Murphy demonstrates, be viewed with suspicion, be associated with subversive religious practice, or become a target for intolerance or religious violence.

My new book, Birth, Death, and Domestic Religion in early modern London, offers the first in-depth study of domestic religion in early modern London, surveying the years of intense religious change between the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and the aftermath of the 1780 Gordon Riots. It compares the experiences and practices of Catholics, Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews, French Protestants, and Protestant nonconformists of various denominations, as well as those conforming to the established Church. The focus upon the home allows for a richer understanding of religious life and toleration in the capital: a story that has thus far largely played out in the parish churches, more rarely in the meeting houses, and more rarely still in the synagogues.

The book accesses domestic religion through a focus upon practices associated with childbirth and death: events of universal significance for all religious communities that lived in the City, and events that, for all households, predominantly took place in the home. It makes the case for the importance of the home as a setting of religious practice and, crucially, for sustaining ‘communal’ religious practice. These communities were nurtured not only by the ritual year and gatherings in places of public worship, but by informal practices of visiting, hospitality, and reciprocal care, at moments of individual crisis and in response to the rhythms of the life course.

A focus on the home, and upon transitional life-cycle moments, shifts us away from the actions of male priests, ministers, and rabbis, and foregrounds not only the agency of the laity, but specifically the role of women in sustaining religious communities. Women held authority within but crucially also beyond their own households. As well as women’s role in reinforcing routines of daily prayer and family religion, it was women who would visit the homes of others to assist in childbirth, to care for the sick, to wash and lay out bodies. Yet like many complex stories of human nature, this is a tale not only of the ordinary men and women who cared for others and bolstered faith communities, but of those, like Susannah Clarke, who stoked intolerance, violently targeted their neighbours, and ultimately destroyed the homes of those who believed, practised, or lived differently to them.

Domestic religion has never solely been about what happened behind closed doors, and it can never be disconnected from restrictions and suspicions outside of the walls of the home. The story of domestic religion in London is one of both close coexistence and intolerance, and it’s about both individual household-families and attempts to make home within a densely populated and diverse metropolis. This book goes some way towards opening these doors and uncovering these complex stories.

^[1] London Lives, Old Bailey Proceedings: Accounts of Criminal Trials, Trial of Susannah Clark, 28th June 1780, t17800628-76

Birth, Death, and Domestic
Religion in Early Modern
London by Emily Vine

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