1. The meaning of honour advanced here is informed by Linda Pollock's definition of honour as ‘the reputation of an individual… less derived from a person's internal virtue than from society's judgment of an individual's worth’. See Linda A. Pollock, ‘Honour, Gender, and Reconciliation in Elite Culture, 1570–1700’,Journal of British Studies, 46, (2007), p. 5.
2. See Craig Muldrew,The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England(New York, 1998) and Muldrew, ‘Credit and the Courts: Debt Litigation in a Seventeenth-Century Urban Community’,Economic History Review, 46 (1993), pp. 23–38.
3. Analyses which focus on honour more broadly in the sense of addressing the issue of sexual reputation among men include Elizabeth A. Foyster,Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex, and Marriage(London, 1999) and Alexandra Shepard,Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England(Oxford, 2003). For a recent discussion of the study of honour in early modern England, see Keith Thomas,The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfillment in Early Modern England(New York, 2009), pp. 147–86.
4. For example, Mervyn James and Lawrence Stone have posited the idea that violence was endemic in elite society and that duelling was a common occurrence. See Lawrence Stone,The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford, 1965) and Mervyn James,Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England(Cambridge, 1986). Violence was a very real part of the social landscape, yet James and Stone, as many recognize, overstated their case.