Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (40 page)

There is even more evidence that, in life, non-elite parents did love and, to some extent, indulge their children. Unlike upper-class children, these tended to be nursed, sometimes for as long as three years, and reared, at least until early adolescence, by their own parents. This physical proximity may, possibly, have encouraged a psychological closeness lacking among the landed elite. Non-elite parents made toys for their children and seem to have worried constantly about their futures. They attempted to ensure those futures by educating them at home or in a parish or “petty” school. The sixteenth century saw a boom in the foundation and endowment of such schools. They were usually run by the local clergy, who taught reading, writing, and some arithmetic in English. The endowment allowed poor boys to attend and, very occasionally, some girls as well. However, young children could not always be spared for schooling because they were required to help their parents with shop or agricultural work. As a partial result, by about 1600, only about a quarter of the male population of England could write their names. The figure for women was but 8 percent. A higher proportion could probably read simple passages from ballads and elementary religious texts.

Children of yeomen or tradesmen might attend school until mid-adolescence; those of husbandmen or cottagers probably left school at about 7 or 8 to begin working full time on the family farm. Boys worked with their fathers as shepherds, cowherds, or reapers; girls, around the house looking after smaller children, tending animals, fetching water, and cleaning. Most adolescents (80 percent of boys and 50 percent of girls) then went into service outside the family. If they could afford it, a boy’s family might try to launch him on a career by purchasing an apprenticeship with a town or city tradesman. In such a case, the young man went off around the age of 14 to live with the merchant, who would, in theory, teach him his trade. This relationship lasted seven years and, for that time, the boy was a part of the merchant’s household and family. As such, he could not marry and was subject to his master’s discipline. Young girls might also formally apprentice, usually as seamstresses, but were more frequently “put out” to other families in the village as servants. Even a family with few girls might still “farm them out” and take in someone else’s offspring. The idea seems to have been that future wives and mothers would learn best how to run households from someone other than their own mothers.

Unlike their upper-class contemporaries, ordinary people often chose their marriage partners more or less on their own, without much initial parental direction. The reason for this freedom is simple: young people below the level of the elite had little property to lose. That does not mean that material circumstances were irrelevant at this rank. As we have seen, its young folk customarily delayed marriage until the economic circumstances were right, and many never married at all. Surviving testimony indicates that young women looked for men who had a reasonable prospect of making a living; while young men sought women who would be good household managers. Once a choice had been made, parental approval would customarily be sought, though denial might not be decisive. Alternatively, families or the village might act to prevent a marriage which had no hope of producing a stable household. Quite naturally, the village community did not want to be stuck supporting an improvident family on the poor rate.

How did young people of the lower orders meet? They often met at church or in the fields while performing daily chores about the farm. The custom of placing young people out to apprenticeship or service in other families facilitated social contact – and diminished parental control. There seems to have been some common recognition that young people needed privacy and time alone to sort out their feelings for one another. Once these were determined, however, things moved swiftly: canon law dictated that when a promise to marry had been made (a public, oral declaration in the present tense), the marriage was valid, albeit irregular, until it could be confirmed by a ceremony in church. A promise in future tense was considered binding if followed by physical relations. Despite the Church’s preaching to the contrary, this led to the common convention that it was acceptable for an affianced couple to engage in physical relations before the marriage ceremony took place. It is clear from parish registers that something like 20 percent of the brides in early modern England went to the altar pregnant.
¹⁷
But this does not mean that sexual promiscuity was tolerated, that promises to marry were often made solely to initiate sexual relationships, or that the latter were entered into lightly. We know this because Tudor and early Stuart illegitimacy rates were astonishingly low, perhaps 2 to 3 percent of births, though they rose during the demographic crisis 1590–1610 noted above. That is, once a promise to marry had been exchanged, the marriage did, usually, take place. A couple who failed to carry out their promise and conceived a child anyway stood a good chance of becoming pariahs in the village, which would be expected to support the child.

What was married life like for most ordinary people? Preachers and authors of guidebooks tried to set an ideal that can be traced to St. Paul, in particular 1 Corinthians 7 and Ephesians 5. Following Paul, the husband/father was to be the head of the household and, thus, of his wife. In keeping with the Great Chain of Being,
Domesticall Duties
(1622) by William Gouge (1575–1653) argued that “he is the highest in the family, and has authority over all, … he is a king in his own home.”
¹⁸
But Scripture and contemporary guidebooks also urged mutual respect and love. Neither the violence of spousal beatings nor the double standard resorted to by the upper classes was defended from the pulpit or advocated from the printing press. On the other hand, wives were expected to put up with nearly any ill treatment that was short of actual physical violence: “She never … saw Mr. Becke use any cruelty,” a servant deposed in a 1565 Church court case, “but that any woman might well bear at her husband’s hands.”
¹⁹
Divorce was almost impossible – it required an act of parliament. Formal separation was nearly so – it required the agreement of an ecclesiastical court (Mary Becke was seeking this in the case just mentioned). Both were well beyond the resources of all but wealthy married couples.

So much for the ideal and the official; what of real-life marriages? Contemporary legal records, personal diaries, and letters indicate a full range of marriages, from happy to miserable. There is some evidence to suggest that the marriages of ordinary people were closer than those of their social superiors, with more mutual consultation, shared decision making and, as indicated above, work. After all, non-elite husbands and wives had to work very closely together to keep their families solvent. Thus Sir Anthony Fitzherbert related in his
Booke of Husbandrye
“an old common saying, that seldom doth the husband thrive without leave of his wife.” Edward Newby of Durham declared in his will of 1659 “that what estate he had, he together with his wife Jane had got it by their industry.”
²⁰

Nevertheless, some marriages did fail. Since divorce was virtually impossible for people at this rank, the community tolerated informal separation. Sometimes, husbands left wives altogether. More often, marriages ended because of death. In fact, the high and often sudden mortality of early modern society probably broke up as many marriages prematurely as divorce does today in the modern Western world. When it did so, rapid remarriage was expected, especially for women. There were several reasons for this. First, a widow might possess property, which enhanced her economic attractiveness but also made her anomalous in a society which thought that all property should be vested in men. Second, a widow was assumed to have sexual experience in an age when women were thought to be the gender most driven by their sexual passions. Failure to marry her off might lead to unwanted competition for other women, both single and married. In other words, this was a society which simply did not know what to do with or where to fit women with money and experience. Widows of urban craftsmen could carry on a deceased husband’s trade if they were able – we have records of a substantial number of widows continuing as printers – but married women had no legal existence apart from their husbands. Indeed, contemporaries most often defined women only as spinsters (at one time meaning a maiden single woman, later a single woman too old to marry), wives, or widows – that is, by the presence or absence of husbands. With the abolition of the convent as an alternative at the Reformation, there remained only remarriage, service of some sort, or such disreputable alternatives as begging, theft, or prostitution.

According to Church of England liturgy and numerous moralists who wrote on the subject, the primary purpose of marriage was neither to exchange property nor to contain sexual energy and avoid sin, let alone to fulfill mutual love. Instead, couples were supposed to marry, principally, to have children. According to figures derived from a sample of parish registers, about one-third of all married couples bore a child within the first year of marriage; two-thirds to four-fifths did so within two years. The average wife experienced six to eight pregnancies, only four of which resulted in a child who lived to adulthood. Childbearing was dangerous for both mother and child, especially past the age of 35. In an age which lacked effective painkillers, surgery, or antibiotics, there was a 6–7 percent chance of dying from excessive bleeding or sepsis, as in the case of Henry VIII’s third wife, Queen Jane, over the course of one’s child-bearing years. This reality, along with poor diet and early menopause, may help to explain a noticeable drop-off in fertility among married women around age 35: despite the opposition of the Church, there were primitive contraceptive techniques
(coitus interruptus),
devices (animal skin condoms, potions), and folk-remedy abortifacients. Whether popular or effective, these practices suggest that some early modern people sought to limit their family size or their childbearing years.

What were the living conditions of ordinary people at the end of the sixteenth century?
²¹
Despite the destructive effects of inflation, most people were living lives of greater material comfort than had their ancestors at the end of the fifteenth century. First, beginning in southern England and sweeping westward and northward, this period saw a “Great Rebuilding” of houses. Slowly, starting in an area known as the Weald in Kent, one- and two-room huts were being replaced by more substantial dwellings designed to last more than one generation. Lesser gentry, yeomen, and substantial husbandmen, in particular, began to build multiroomed houses of timber frame with an infill of plaster, wattle, or, for the most prosperous, brick (see
plate 10
). Stronger, thicker materials meant that walls could be punctuated with windows, letting in more light. Typically, at the center of this “Wealden” house would be a hall, open to the rafters, with an earthen floor and a hearth in the middle whose smoke floated through a hole in the roof. Flanking the hall was a suite of service and storage rooms at one end; at the other end was a parlor. For the first time, private bedchambers, separated from the family’s daily living area, occupied an upper story above each wing (see diagram). Sometime in the sixteenth century, Kentish yeomen families began to put a ceiling over the hall and add more rooms above with separate fireplaces and chimneys. Thus, a substantial farmhouse might have 12 rooms. A poor cottager would still have to be content with one or two, but they were increasingly made of stone or wood and he and his family, too, could warm themselves at a real fireplace with a chimney. Even humble farmers slept on beds with mattresses and laid their heads on pillows, as opposed to the bare rushes on dirt floors of earlier days.

Plate 10
Tudor farmhouse at Ystradfaelog, Llanwnnog, Montgomeryshire (photo and ground-plan). Crown Copyright: Royal Commission of the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales.

Yeomen abandoned their wooden trenchers, plates, and spoons for tin, pewter, even, in the best houses, a bit of silver. Diet consisted, for the well off, of meat and fish, wheaten bread (baked at home by servants), a variety of dairy products, beer (brewed at home), and wine. Most days, the lower orders consumed simple rye bread or oatcakes, bacon, porridge, cheese, milk, and beer. Buying food and preparing meals took time; even water had to be fetched from a nearby well or stream. Parish feasts were especially looked forward to, because they provided rare opportunities for humble men, women, and children to share cooking tasks and indulge themselves plentifully.