Safety
We can easily imagine why early modern people valued safety. As the frequency in the period of the memento mori trope highlights — particularly in its many different visual representations — dangers encountered in this period included infant mortality, plague, starvation, and war.
Hans Holbein the Younger. Boer en de Dood. 1538. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
In times of danger or distress, early modern believers often turned to the biblical psalms for comfort. Shared with Islamic and Judaic traditions, the psalms for Christians were (and still are – recent Amazon listings show three titles published in a single day, including a colouring book) a popular part of the Old Testament. Offering what was seen as a model dialogue with God, they were frequently used to voice a believer’s fears and an urgent appeal to God for rescue. It’s here that I started to unpick the lexical thread within the term safety.
In April 1648, John Milton translated Psalms 80-88. No-one knows for certain why but the search for the occasion of their writing is fascinating. Milton’s use of common metre and simple language suggests that they could have been composed for singing, for widespread use, or, perhaps, for a particular public meeting. Whatever their intended purpose, however, they weren’t published until 1673 when they appear in Poems etc, upon Several Occasions.
By April 1648, the first phase of the English Civil War had ended but the country was still torn — dangers abounded, the king’s fate was uncertain. In such a context, the strong desire for safety in Psalm 80 struck me on first reading. Here is Milton’s translation of the final verse:
So shall we not go back from thee
To ways of sin and shame,
Quick’n us thou, then gladly wee
Shall call upon thy Name.
Return us, and thy grace divine
Lord God of Hosts vouchsafe,
Cause thou thy face on us to shine,
And then we shall we safe.
The final line, with its simple monosyllables, occurs three times in Milton’s version of the psalm. It is a subtle variation on popular versions of it at the time. For example, the final line of the same psalm in Francis Rous’ Psalter of 1643 ends ‘and then full safe are we’, where the rhythm of the line almost trivialises the sense of ‘safe’. Milton’s line, by contrast, landing heavily on the term as the destination of the hopeful repeated ‘shall’ of previous lines, draws attention to the concept of safety and sent me to check the meanings of ‘safe’ and safety in the period.
The OED makes clear that in the seventeenth century, in addition to its more physical meanings, safety could refer to the ‘soules safety’ (1646 citation). Both the Geneva Bible and the King James Authorised version use ‘saved’ at the end of Psalm 80 to signal this theological sense of the term, closer to ‘salvation’ (a state indicated in Milton’s translation by the ‘grace divine’ that the Lord God has vouchsafed). But Milton’s choice of ‘safe’ rather than ‘saved’ pushes towards a sense of more immediate physical safety. As so often in this period the physical and the spiritual are wrapped around each other. For the post-Reformation Church of early modern England, the state of safety is perhaps linked with ‘assurance’ — a sense that you know you are saved by God beyond the grave and therefore feel safe in the present.
What safety might feel like for a nation in turmoil is suggested, too, by other aspects of Milton’s psalm translations of 1648. England is seen as a second Israel; the English as God’s chosen people. In Psalm 84 the ‘dwellings fair’ of the Lord of Hosts provide a ‘safe abode’ for the sparrow and the swallow. And in Psalm 80, the image of a ‘lovely vine’ growing over and protecting an England currently threatened with ‘rudest violence’ might suggest how safety was understood by believers who saw their English Reformation as needing God’s protection.
That physical safety could be imperilled by ‘ways of sin and shame’ is also made explicit in a letter from Parliament to the church ministers of London in late April 1648. A ‘Day of Humiliation’ is ordered:
Whatsoever Dangers are threatened or feared, either by Divisions amongst our selves, or Practices from Enemies abroad, we have Assurance out of the Word of God, that we are not in the least Danger, if God Almighty be not incensed against us for our Sins and Wickedness, which our Consciences testify that he is exceedingly against every one of us in Particular, and the Kingdom in General; yet we believe that if we do heartily and sincerely humble our selves, and turn to the Lord, crying mightily to him in servant Prayers, with a lively Faith in Christ, we shall surely be delivered from all Evils and Dangers, and enjoy all needful Blessing and Benefits to the whole State and Kingdom;
This passage echoes the sense of safety in Milton’s Psalm 80. Physical and spiritual safety here are directly and causally linked; prayer and faith will make us safe.
There are other references to safety in the decade that also need investigating. A search on Early English Books Online reveals that the 1640s have by far the most occurrences of the term safety in titles of works. A scan of these books and documents reveals they almost all use safety in an apparently physical (and often military) rather than spiritual sense, in collocations such as ‘safety of the three kingdoms’. But, perhaps, the spiritual sense of the term lies behind many of these; a safe kingdom is one protected by God, a kingdom fit for Christ’s coming.
The patterns of meanings within safety are more complex than first appeared to me. Physical and spiritual resonances are interwoven during a national conflict that was also a national debate about church-state relations and personal routes to salvation. Holbein’s woodcut above, from the very early stages of the Reformation, captures some of this complexity. Death and danger might be beside you as you went about your work, but there is a shining safe haven just beyond the hill.
Melissa Marsh is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London.
Selected Bibliography.
Milton, John. Poems, &c. Upon Several Occasions (London, 1673).
Rous, Francis. The Psalms of David in English meeter (London, 1643).
Rushworth, John. 'Proceedings in Parliament: April 1st - May 1st 1648', in Historical Collections of Private Passages of State: Volume 7, 1647-48 (London, 1721), pp. 1045-1074. British History Online [accessed 16 July 2021].
16 July 2021.