Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (37 page)

And the poor were getting poorer. The demographic expansion and associated inflation of prices and rents between 1550 and 1650 was a slow-going disaster for most ordinary people. Too many workers competed for too few jobs on farms or in towns; too many renters for too few cottages; too many mouths for too little food. Admittedly, the average annual rate of inflation of prices was low by modern standards, less than 2 percent a year. But most workers’ wages rose far more slowly if at all. As a result, real wages fell 60 percent between 1500 and 1600. This led to the breakdown of old economic and social relationships. Husbandmen whose holdings were so small that they had no surplus crops to sell had to supplement their incomes by poorly paid wage-work on a great landlord’s land. They might find that a series of bad harvest years combined with declining real wages could force them, as above, first, into debt, and then to sell their land and become cottagers. Cottagers who owned no land, bought all their food, rented their houses from such a landlord, and whose main source of livelihood came from such wages might “break” (“go broke”) entirely, join the ranks of the landless laborers, migrate, or seek the relief of the Poor Law.

Many went to London or other cities, hoping to obtain work no longer available in the countryside. They often failed to do so, not least because England’s one major industry, the wool trade, stagnated at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries. Migrants unable to find jobs were widely regarded as vagrants and potential criminals – masterless men and women who had dropped out of the Chain. Parliament passed legislation like the Statute of Artificers in 1563 designed to improve the economy, as well as several Poor Laws both to relieve those unable to work and to punish or deter able-bodied people from leaving their homes and hitting the roads. After 1580, an increasing number of such people crossed the Atlantic to seek land in the British colonies of the New World. Most of the poorest traveled as indentured servants or, from the mid-seventeenth century, as convicts whose sentences had been commuted to transportation (in effect, banishment) overseas. Thus, the population expansion and the ensuing struggle for resources and livelihood changed lives in England and across the Atlantic world. It will be the fundamental theme, affecting all the others, throughout this chapter.

The Social Order

How did the Tudor–Stuart social order weather these changes? As we have seen, the Great Chain of Being hinged upon the notion of a semi-permanent “estate” or “degree” to which each English woman or man was assigned by God at birth. But the changes described above made such permanence elusive. For example, the number of noble families in England rose from as low as 36 at the end of the Wars of the Roses to about 60 in 1600, and then to over 130 by the 1640s. The nobility’s increasing thickness on the ground may actually have hurt its prestige: after all, the more such families there were, the less special each one became. This, combined with the sheer expense of maintaining a noble lifestyle and the growing importance of the gentry, led some historians, most notably Lawrence Stone, to argue that the titled aristocracy was in economic and political decline by the end of the Tudor period.
²
But members of the higher nobility still made thousands of pounds a year in rents alone. They still dominated the Privy Council and the great court offices. In the localities, as we have seen, the Tudors sought to lessen the Crown’s dependence on great noble families like the Percys, Nevilles, and Fitzgeralds, and outlawed their affinities. But they still relied on titled lords lieutenant to maintain order, raise the militia, and enforce Orders in Council in each county. In effect, a military caste was evolving into a service elite. Given that elite’s continued status, wealth, and power, Stone’s view is clearly an exaggeration; it might be better to say that while the English nobility maintained its privileged position, other social groups were catching up.

Just as some historians have posited a decline of the nobility, so, for many years, there was a debate about the rise of the gentry.
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That debate was never conclusively settled, for two reasons. First, the term “gentleman,” never very precise, was being redefined during our period to include criteria beyond birth. This was partly due to the influx of new men who had bought monastic lands or risen through government service. James I added to the confusion by creating a new title, that of “baronet” (to come after the noble ranks, but before knights and esquires), which he also sold. Moreover, contemporaries began to see education and professional activity as compatible with gentility. This left William Harrison (1535–93) to offer the more or less circular definition that anyone who “can live idly and without manual labour, and thereto is able and will bear the port, charge, and countenance of a gentleman … shall be … reputed for a gentleman.”
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A second problem with the notion of a rising gentry class is that gentry fortunes varied from family to family, region to region, and generation to generation. Still, it is clear that the overall number of gentle families
was
rising during this period and that the proportion of land in the hands of those with middling estates was rising too. According to Stone, between 1500 and 1640 the number of baronets and knights in England rose from about 500 to 1,400; of esquires from 800 to 3,000; and of plain gentlemen from 5,000 to 15,000, for a total of nearly 20,000 gentlemen by the middle of the seventeenth century.
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If we assume, conservatively, four persons per family, this comes to less than 2 percent of the total population of England and Wales. Nevertheless, this tiny fraction of late Tudor and early Stuart England amassed between one-third and one-half of its land.

That is not to say that land stayed long in the same aristocratic hands. Because of a high rate of infertility, many noble and gentry families died out, making plenty of land available for purchase. The land market grew even more active thanks to the Dissolution of the Monasteries and Elizabeth’s alienation of Crown estates. In addition, peers and gentlemen began to diversify by investing in their mineral rights, or in schemes to drain fens, or in trading voyages. Still, the incomes of individual gentlemen varied considerably: a knight with extensive landholdings might make from £1,000 to £4,000 a year, a substantial “county” gentleman with multiple estates, £500 to £2,000. Gentlemen with one small estate, often referred to as lesser or “parish” gentry, might make far less, some struggling even to reach £100.

Below the privileged 2 percent, contemporary writers had the greatest admiration and affection for those commoners they called “yeomen.” The greatest of these, perhaps 10,000 families in 1600, might equal or surpass the parish gentry in wealth. The 80,000 or so lesser yeomen families made anywhere from £40 to £50 a year. Generally, they held at least 50 acres, either owning it outright or leasing it from an aristocrat as freeholders. Freeholders were virtual owners: they might have to pay a nominal rent, but they could never be evicted so long as they paid it, and could sell, lease or bequeath their land at will. They could vote for their county’s parliamentary representative because their landed income far exceeded the 40 shilling (£2) requirement (see the Introduction). In fact, inflation was increasing the numbers of men who so qualified. Though about 8 percent of the total population of England and Wales, their share of the land was rising from about 20 percent in the fifteenth century to as much as 25 percent in 1600. Unlike gentlemen, most yeomen worked their own land; but unlike most husbandmen, they had farmhands and domestic servants to assist them, and they did well out of the inflation of this period. Their wills indicate that, increasingly in the sixteenth century, they slept on feather beds, ate well, and sent their sons to good
grammar schools
. Such education, combined with continued economic success, might gentrify the family over a generation.

Below this level came husbandmen and cottagers. The former generally rented up to 30 acres apiece, yielding, on average, perhaps £15 a year, but that income could fall to dangerous levels in time of dearth. They held their land on a variety of tenures less secure than freehold. Copyholders had the next best terms: they paid their landlord a significant entry fine and a nominal rent, both set in the Middle Ages. In return they had the right to occupy their land for a specified term of years or the length of several lives. These terms were entered on the manor’s court roll and so could not be changed by either party easily. Leaseholders paid rent for the number of years specified in their leases; at the end, they could be thrown off the land and had to pay a high entry fine for renewal. Often, landlords tried to impose more “flexible” (read harsher) terms for the next lease, converting freehold or copyhold to leasehold. Finally, tenants at will could be thrown off the land whenever their landlord wanted.

According to a statute of 1589, all cottages were supposed to have four acres attached, but, in practice, most cottagers had little or no land, held what they had by leasehold or at will, and had no help from servants. Even for those with a small parcel of land, it probably yielded only a few pounds a year. As it required about £12 a year to support a small family in the later Elizabethan period, this latter group, in particular, had to find supplemental sources of income. Men could bring in about £10 a year in wages by taking on additional work on someone else’s land. Women might engage in wool-spinning at home. But since both real wages and the wool industry were stagnating or declining, these people had their hands full just maintaining solvency. During the bad years of the mid-1550s, mid-1590s, and early 1620s, it was common for members of this group to fall into debt, fail to make their entry fines or rent, lose their land or house, and have to go on the poor rate or take to the roads in search of work. According to parish registers, one-half to two-thirds of any given village were no longer resident there 10 years later. Most moved to another village, or to a town where they populated an alternative social chain (see below). A few went to the Americas; the rest swelled the ranks of the itinerant poor.

The Gender Order

One of the most exciting developments in history – not just English history – of the past half century has been the gradual excavation of the previously ignored lives of women in the early modern period. It is not that historians were unaware of the existence of women, but women’s experience was often dismissed as irrelevant to the big national issues of religion, politics, and the economy. Even historians who realized the significance of women’s experience and who were open to the idea that the story of 50 percent of the population ought to be told found themselves stymied by a seeming lack of evidence: the majority of literate people in the early modern period were men, and few women left testimony about their lives in their own words. For too long, it seemed that early modern women were forever doomed, apart from a few clamorous queens, to remain mute, and so ignored, in narrative histories like this one.

At first, those historians who did take up the challenge sought women’s experience in sources which addressed them directly, such as statutes, sermons, medical treatises or conduct books, by telling them how to be good women. These sources, almost always written by men, proclaimed patriarchy both loudly and softly. That is, they reinforced the Great Chain’s notion that women were designed by God to be inferior and subordinate to men, urging men to treat them firmly and gently, yet also warily as potential tempters and hysterics. As we have seen, humoral medical theory saw women’s bodies as excessively moist and cold, their spirits alternating between hysterical passion and stolid passivity. Parliaments, preachers and physicians urged women to be better daughters, wives, and mothers – their God-given roles – by being prudent, silent, chaste, and obedient to the men whom God had placed over them. As with most writings within this tradition, these reveal anxiety that too often women were impulsive, loud, loose, and insubordinate, with potentially dire consequences for peace in the family and in society at large. These works assigned women to a separate, domestic world from men, in part to keep them away from temptation. While men went out into the public sphere to conquer the world, making policy, fighting wars, striking business deals, serving on juries, or working jobs depending on their class, women, excepting queens, were consigned to the private, domestic sphere of the home. According to these tracts, their job was to stay indoors, maintaining the piety, health, and cleanliness of house and children, perhaps occasionally venturing to market to buy bread. Those historians who argued that men and women inhabited entirely separate spheres tended to see this as consistent with an ironclad, smothering system of patriarchy in which early modern men engaged in a relentless campaign of oppression against women. Early feminist historians stressed that women lost legal identity in marriage, becoming
femmes coverts,
in effect the wards of their husbands, losing the right to do business or dispose of property, including their own dowries. Historians also noted a rise in the prosecution of scolding and witchcraft circa 1580–1640 (see below) and that women were the vast majority of those so prosecuted. All these trends seemed to signal so many unequal battles in the war on women.

But as in so many other areas of early modern life, the louder contemporaries proclaimed the gendered aspects of the Great Chain of Being, the more reality they obscured. First, historians of royal and aristocratic women would point out that four queens reigned in our period, two of them at least (Elizabeth and Anne, who reigned 1702–14) very effectively. Even when men ruled, their consorts often played a more active role than traditionalists would have liked: Anne Boleyn pushed Henry on the Reformation and Henrietta Maria (1609–69) famously advised Charles I (reigned 1625–49). During the Civil Wars of the mid-seventeenth century, the latter queen went abroad to secure money and troops for the Royalist cause. While these actions were controversial and contributed to the downfall of both women, this did not stop some contemporaries from urging William III’s consort, Mary II (reigned together 1689–94), to involve herself more in government. Nor were queens the only women with influence at court. Under Henry VIII, Charles II (reigned 1660–85), James II (reigned 1685–88), and William III (reigned 1689–1702) royal mistresses had political significance and possibly, in Charles’s case, influence. The court provided many opportunities for women who did not share the royal bed to have a public role: if there was a female sovereign or consort, she would need ladies of her Privy Chamber or Bedchamber, and female dressers and maids of honor to attend her. Under Queens Elizabeth and Anne these women were assumed to have influence; even if not true, this gave them a kind of power with those making the assumption. Women at court certainly played an important role as intermediaries for men who could never achieve the same intimacy with a queen. A great politician needed a wife, a cousin, a friend in the royal Privy Chamber or Bedchamber. He also needed a competent consort to supervise the family estates while away at court, Parliament, or war. Barbara Harris has discovered evidence of aristocratic Tudor women who held special commissions to administer justice, or to select juries; although these were isolated examples, they were not considered scandalous. As the seventeenth century wore on, elite women came to engage in political activity, for example, canvassing for members of parliament. Finally, in London especially, elite and mercantile wives and daughters went shopping in such public venues as the Royal Exchange and the New Exchange, which fulfilled some of the functions of modern shopping malls. In this context, their taste for fine foods, fabrics, and furniture promoted a wide variety of new luxury trades, both foreign and domestic (see below).