Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (8 page)

It should be obvious that, despite their declining economic situation, it was far better to be a landlord than a tenant. Even in the midst of recession, land was the key to wealth and power. Because of it, the landlord need do no manual labor himself – indeed, freedom from work is one contemporary definition of gentility. This left him the time and the leisure to judge and to govern. Contemporaries believed that land was the only form of property which automatically gave him the right to do so, since, unlike gold, it could not be transported elsewhere: landowners, their wealth fixed in one spot, were stuck with their decisions unlike merchants, who were able to pick up and leave. If you remember one thing about early modern England, it should be that the people who mattered – in 1485, in 1714, and beyond – owned land. They owned all those little villages which housed most of the English population. To some extent, despite the decline of actual serfdom, they “owned” – or at least dominated – the lives of all the people who lived in those villages.

One more crucial social fact. The group at the top, the landowners who possessed most of the nation’s wealth and power, formed a very small percentage of its population: about 0.5 percent. This raises a rather obvious question: why did the remaining 99.5 percent put up with this inequality? Why did they allow this small minority to have such a preponderance of wealth and power over their lives? To answer that question, we must turn away from the material world inhabited by the English. We must now examine their mental universe.

The Mental World of the English People, ca. 1485

In 1485, virtually all English men and women were Roman Catholics. All were taught and, so far as we can tell, nearly all believed, that God had created the universe, ordered it, and was active in its daily workings. In other words, the world was a physical manifestation of God’s will. It followed that however the world was, was how the world was supposed to be. In 1485 educated English men and women had many ways of describing how the world was supposed to be, most of them metaphorical. One of their favorite metaphors was that of the body politic. That is, when English men and women thought of their nation, they often conceived of it as a human body. The king was the head; the aristocracy the arms and shoulders; the tenant farmers and poor the legs and feet, etc. The beauty of this metaphor was that it conveyed that all parts of the body politic contributed equally to the common good, but were not equal in status: if the arms (aristocracy) or legs (tenant farmers) attempted to usurp the head (the king), chaos would ensue. Others portrayed the English polity as a tree, a ship, a building, even the strings on a lute. But there was no place for God and the other creatures of the universe in these schemes.

A more comprehensive metaphor was the one which later came to be known as the Great Chain of Being.
¹¹
That is, when contemporary English men and women thought of all the inhabitants of the universe, they thought of a hierarchy that looked something like this:

It should be obvious that those at the top of this hierarchy were closer to God than those at the bottom. This was held to be physically true, for in the days before people accepted the Copernican (sun-centered) cosmos, it was thought that God dwelt everywhere, but most often in the heavens. Thus, church steeples aspired upwards. Man dwelt upright on the earth, at the center of the universe, between the angels and the beasts, and so in the very middle of the Chain. Within the earth was the molten core of Hell, where the damned dwelt as far away from God as possible.

Apart from God, who was thought to be indivisible, each of the ranks in the Chain was further subdivided into smaller hierarchies. Medieval theologians did not just think of angels, for example, in an undifferentiated mass. Rather, they divided these celestial beings into nine ranks, from seraphim and cherubim down to mere angels. Animals, too, could be arranged into a hierarchy: was not the lion the king of the beasts? Was not the eagle a nobler bird than the sparrow? The whale a greater animal than the codfish? Plants, too, could be ranked (compare the mighty oak with the lowly fern), as could stones (diamonds vs. granite, for example). And so, with man:

King

Nobles

Gentlemen

Yeomen

Husbandmen

Cottagers

Laborers

The king was, of course, the ruler of the kingdom, the fount of justice and honor, God’s lieutenant on earth – and the owner of 5 percent of the land. His office and person will be addressed further in subsequent chapters. Just below him in the Great Chain of Being, ready (theoretically, anyway) to assist him in his rule, were the 50 or 60 families who, in 1485, made up the English nobility. This rank, like all links in the Chain, may be further subdivided into:

Dukes

Marquesses

Earls

Viscounts

Barons

Each title had been granted by the king, and was inheritable by the eldest son of its current holder when the latter died. That is, at the demise of John Talbot, third earl of Shrewsbury (b. 1448) in June of 1473, he was immediately succeeded by his eldest son, George Talbot, as fourth earl of Shrewsbury (1468–1538). At
his
death in July 1538 he was succeeded by his eldest surviving son, Francis Talbot, as fifth earl (1500–60), and so on. Female heirs were ignored, even when older than males. This was because the nobility had originated as the band of loyal warriors around an Anglo-Saxon monarch. Titles, and the lands which often went with them, had been granted in reward for, but also in anticipation of, military service. Despite (or because of) the example of Joan of Arc, contemporary attitudes toward men and women could not conceive of a military role for the latter. Nobility entitled the holder to sit in the House of Lords. Noble titles were, moreover, generally accompanied by grants of high office and landed estates, and virtual rule of their shires. As a result, these 50–60 families owned perhaps 5 to 10 percent of the land in England and commanded annual incomes ranging from
£
3,500 for the greatest landowners, the dukes of York, down to as little as
£
60 for the relatively poor Lords Clinton. Such great wealth, extensive landholdings, and military commitments implied large retinues of servants, known as affinities, which might include: estate managers, chaplains, servants, tenants, political allies, and hangers-on. Many of these retainers were housed in formidable castles which acted as mini-courts and centers of power in the locality, often in the king’s service, sometimes not.

Many of the superior officers in a noble household would be gentlemen or their ladies. In theory, the gentry consisted of knights, identified by the title “Sir” before their names; esquires, identified by an “esq.” after their names; and a new group of large landowners who could bear heraldic coats of arms and who increasingly appended the designation “gent.” to their names. These totaled about 3,000 people and owned between 25 to 30 percent of the land in England in 1485. The greatest knights held multiple estates and could claim annual incomes of
£
100 or more – surpassing some of the peerage. A lesser knight or esquire might make
£
40 to
£
100 a year, while a lesser gentleman with a single manor made
£
20 to
£
40 a year. Such an income provided a comfortable existence supported by a dozen or so servants. As we have seen, contemporaries believed that only those with the landed wealth to live such a life had the time or the right to have a say in running the country. An act of 1445 enshrined this belief by stipulating that only those with annual incomes over
£
40 could sit in the House of Commons. The members of this social rank also oversaw day-to-day local government for the king, serving as sheriffs, JPs, and commissioners of array (responsible for raising the militia) for their localities.

In theory, the right to vote for members of the House of Commons representing shires (counties) was limited by a statute of 1430 to those who owned land worth 40 shillings, or
£
2 a year (for an explanation of pounds, shillings, and pence, see Conventions and Abbreviations). This pretty much defined the lower limit of admission to the next rank in the Chain, the yeomen. Yeomen, were, thus, slightly less wealthy landowners than gentlemen, but still substantial farmers with secure tenure of their land and surplus crops to sell. A yeoman might hold several farms at once and usually employed servants, but he was not above farm labor himself. Yeomen had grown in number in the century before 1485 by taking advantage of a buyer’s land market. Contemporaries considered them the backbone of county society, serving on juries and the militia. Husbandmen might own or rent one large tract, cottagers a small one. Both might employ a few laborers on a seasonal basis to assist them with planting or the harvest and a successful husbandman had a small surplus crop to sell. Both groups might moonlight as millers, butchers, blacksmiths, or alehousekeepers. Laborers generally lacked a permanent home or work situation, moving about with the seasons. These last three groups formed the bulk of village society, described above.

Theoretically, every person in England could be placed, exactly, within the Chain. For example, individual ducal families could be ranked by order of creation. That is, if one family had received its dukedom from the king before another family, it outranked that family and would line up nearer the sovereign in ceremonial processions, preceded by other, more recent ducal families, who followed families of marquesses, who followed earls, who followed viscounts, etc., all in strict order of creation. And, of course, within every family, noble or common, there was a ranking:

Father

Mother

Male children, eldest to youngest Female children, eldest to youngest

As this indicates, the Chain implied a hierarchy of genders as well as of classes: traditional theology dating back to Aristotle defined “the female” as “a misbegotten male.”
¹²
Traditional humoral medicine saw women as colder and moister than men, making them weaker, less rational, more emotional. Under both the Chain and English common law, a woman’s status was a direct extension of that of the male to whom she was most closely related: if a woman’s father was of gentle status, she was gentle too. Upon marriage she took the status of her husband. If he died and she remarried, then she assumed her new husband’s rank. A widow who remained in that status was an anomaly in a society which did not know what to do with a woman who was independent of male control.

An even more important feature of the Chain was that the top rank in every subdivision was analogous to the top rank of every other subdivision – and of the Chain itself. That is, the father in the family, the king in the kingdom (and, of course, the professor in the classroom!) were analogous to God in the universe. They represented him; they wielded his authority; they were the unquestioned heads of their respective links and spheres of activity within the Chain.

Clearly, English people in 1485 were obsessed with order. Their fondest desire was, apparently, to account for every speck of matter in the universe and place it in a hierarchy. Equally, their greatest fear was that order would break down. It should be understood that this was a Chain, not a ladder. No one could move up or down, for that would imply imperfection in God’s plan. A fern cannot become an oak; a codfish cannot become a whale; a mother cannot be a father; nor should a husbandman try to become a peer – and, of course, no one could aspire to be king but the divinely appointed, anointed, and acknowledged heir of the previous king. To rise or fall in this society was to rebel against the Chain, against order – and, thus, against God.