This is a companion piece to Lucy Clarke’s article ‘Arrests as Performance: Opening the Practice of Early Modern English State Authority to Scrutiny with Practice-as-Research’, recently published Open Access in History Workshop Journal 101.
How did ordinary people apprehend the power of the state in early modern England? One’s first thought might be the spectacle of the monarch, progressing through the streets of London on her way to Parliament, surrounded by horsemen and courtiers. On a day-to-day basis, however, the state was most visible through the bodies of magistrates charged with governing the kingdom. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, justices of peace, sheriffs, and constables were parts of everyday life throughout England and Wales, empowered to enact orders from the central government at Westminster and to execute legal processes originating in the central courts. This work was generally conducted in public: in streets, marketplaces, and alehouses, surrounded by locals. It was in these interactions that the state manifested. When a magistrate successfully arrested a man, it made his theoretical authority to do so real for those who witnessed it.
The idea that a successful arrest performs state power is currently all too familiar. The brutal immigration crackdown unleashed by Donald Trump in his second presidency has seen the intensification of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity, with armed, masked men violently kidnapping undocumented immigrants across the US. The Department of Homeland Security issues press releases proudly naming the ‘criminal illegals’ that ICE have detained every few days. The violent arrest of Christian Cerna in June 2025 was filmed by the ICE agents who rammed his car and dragged him out at gunpoint. It was later posted by ICE’s X account, accompanied by a reference to then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s remarks that anti-ICE rioters ‘will not stop us or slow us down’. This footage served as a statement of total power – a demonstration of what ICE, and Trump’s government more broadly, can do.
It’s my contention, in my article in HWJ 101, that examining how arrests were carried out in early modern England allows us to see just how strong the state was. Historians have often referred to the ‘performativity’ of authority in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, noting how important it was for a magistrate to present himself as legitimate to avoid resistance. My research goes further by analysing what that performative work was, and how it related to its audiences.
Given that ordinary English people experienced the state through bodies in action, my research draws heavily upon the use of practice-as-research, where I ask actors to stage historical arrests with scripts I’ve developed from archival sources. Staging early modern arrests raises questions that otherwise don’t come out of approaching records of arrests on the page, and asking how an arrest was physically done forces me to consider the risk involved with all performances of authority. It unsettles our ideas of state authority, suggesting that the state was actually far more fragile than has previously been recognised, and, crucially, that ordinary people had the power to resist and destabilise it.
If we look just at the textual records of arrests in the Court of Star Chamber, where you’d be sent if you were accused of disrupting or disobeying your own arrest or someone else’s, we might be fooled by the simplicity of the language: magistrates will state ‘I arrested him’, referring to it as a fait accompli. This gets complicated when you try to stage the arrests: the role of the audience, in particular, suggests we ought not to see state power as so easily enacted.
The interventions of audiences in arrests could prove seriously disempowering to a magistrate. Bystanders might demand that the arresting officer present their warrant, even though this wasn’t actually a legal requirement, or question the legitimacy of the process being served. One Thomas Wilberfosse, witnessing the arrest of Robert Webster at Market Weighton in 1604, approached the arresting officials ‘with great rage and impatience’, proceeding to use ‘threatening words and reviling speech’. The plaintiff is very careful to state that this verbal assault was ‘publiquely in the hearing of the said inhabitants’ of Market Weighton. But Wilberfosse wasn’t done: he declared loudly that ‘the said arrest was unlawfull and unjust and that by the law it might be resisted without danger’, before appealing to his neighbours that it was a shame for them to ‘suffer any such honest neighbour as [Webster] to be taken from amongst them by any knave Bailiff… by tickets and warrants which they had no reason to believe’. This extensive repudiation of the arrest, the bailiffs’ authority, and the legitimacy of their warrant, according to the Star Chamber case, encouraged the people of Market Weighton to start brawling with the magistrates. As you might expect, Robert Webster did not get arrested that day.
Moments like this could imperil the performance of state authority: whether it was a challenge to the warrant that slowed down the arrest, or a full-on assault on the magistrate, audience intervention posed a significant risk to the exercise of state authority. What I’ve seen, when staging these incidents, is that the audience was often the key determinant of whether an arrest succeeded. State power was hugely dependent on its public reception.
In a lot of cases, bystanders only really become visible in the textual record when they start to cause problems for the magistrate. When you turn these records into a script for performance, however, you realise that those bystanders are there the whole time, because the arrest took place in an open street, or market square, or pub. When you stage the scripts, these audiences have an undeniable gravity: actors playing magistrates often tell me that they feel they need to address the witnesses, and instinctively raise their voices so they can be heard better.
If we go back to Thomas Wilberfosse’s intervention in Robert Webster’s arrest, we ought to notice the emphasis upon Wilberfosse’s insults being ‘publiquely in the hearing’ of the people of Market Weighton. This, to me, suggests the threat that was felt from bystanders: it wasn’t just that Wilberfosse had insulted the magistrates, it was that he had made a challenge to their authority that other people could hear, and, presumably, be swayed by. This was a deeply vulnerable performance of authority, where the magistrate’s enactment of state authority could be unsettled by an alternative voice. When we staged this arrest, it was striking how much it felt like a stage invader at a comedy gig: Wilberfosse’s appeal to the bystanders denied Bussell and Darrell their control of the audience, and their privileged position as the sole performers.
Being an audience often feels the same as sanctioning a performance. This is why active bystander training is so often promoted as a response to police abuses: instead of remaining a witness, you intervene to stop it. It’s also very much how early modern English people felt about giving audience to something. Sir Thomas More refused to attend Anne Boleyn’s coronation as he felt it was tantamount to approving of it, while Star Chamber cases frequently condemn magistrates for witnessing crimes rather than taking measures to stop them.
Actors and attendees at my workshops have often highlighted the centrality of the audience in sanctioning arrests. At one session in 2024, multiple attendees commented that they felt, by simply standing and watching an arrest taking place, that they were complicit in it. At another, actors playing bystanders protesting a violent arrest noted that they felt the power rested entirely with them, not the magistrate. Given what bystanders might do to magistrates to prevent them carrying out an arrest, this is perhaps unsurprising. But I think it’s striking that the overwhelming conclusion of half a decade of practice-as-research is that audiences held the balance of power because of their capacity to turn from witnesses into protestors. This suggests that we shouldn’t see early modern state authority as inherently secure. Instead, we should recognise that the public nature of exerting state authority meant that it was inherently insecure because it relied upon the support of its audiences. Ordinary people in early modern England held a great deal more power to resist their governors than might be assumed.
This power to refuse to sanction an act of state authority isn’t just historical. Across the US, protestors against ICE have impeded their attempts to arrest and detain ‘illegal’ immigrants, ranging from passive resistance by blocking roads and sidewalks, to shouting at agents and even threatening them with violence. In Glasgow in 2021, an Immigration Enforcement van was prevented from detaining two immigrants by a vast crowd of neighbours who blocked the van’s passage. In these moments, state power was not performed into reality.
What these moments hold in common with the likes of Thomas Wilberfosse is that they represent bystanders refusing to be an audience to the enactment of authority. In our own political moment, perhaps it is worth recognising that when the state demands quiescent witnesses, its people retain the power to refuse.