Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (85 page)

These men continued to respect their aristocratic betters but were not the least bit ashamed of making money. Rather, they held an ever-higher esteem for their own contributions to the commonweal and increasingly saw themselves as every bit as gentle, in their own way, as the landed classes. This further blurred the once clear pecking order of the old Great Chain of Being. When, in 1712, Edward and Nathaniel Harley, brothers of the earl of Oxford, wrote to one another, the former addressed the latter, a merchant living in Turkey, with the gentle title “esquire,” either as the brother of a peer or out of the now fashionable view that a prosperous man in any field was gentle. Nathaniel balked: “pray, Sir, inform your clerk who superscribes your letters that no merchants are wrote Esqs. but fools, coxcombs, and cuckolds.”
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Was he so traditional as to feel unworthy of the more elevated rank? Or was he so proud of being plain old “Mr.,” customarily borne by all merchants, as to spurn the pretensions of the fancier title?

Ordinary People and Popular Culture

Whatever became of the Great Chain of Being, the vast majority of the English people, well over 1 million families, some 90 percent of the population, remained at the bottom of the social pyramid. The most prosperous of these, some 310,000 families according to King, were yeomen, farmers, and husbandmen (see table 1).
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As will be recalled, the most successful among this group had, in the sixteenth century, evolved into gentlemen. Those who remained could still live reasonably comfortable lives, making anywhere from £30 to £350 or more a year. While they worked their own farms and rarely left them, they could afford to employ servants and farm laborers and to apprentice a son to a trade. A substantial yeoman might send that son to university and an Inn of Court. But the relative agricultural depression of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries hurt this group more than any other. The Land Tax and falling grain prices rendered them unable to make the agricultural improvements that aristocratic landowners could afford. Many husbandmen at the lower end of the income scale went into debt and, eventually, lost their land to more prosperous neighbors who could weather the storm. For others, the gradual replacement of long-term copyhold tenure with short-term leases meant that they were thrown off their land in any case. Upward movement into the elite nearly disappeared; rather, many yeomen and husbandmen families sank gradually, over several generations, into the ranks of cottagers and even laborers.

Conversely, the nearly 800,000 families of “Labouring People and Out Servants” (both agricultural and urban workers) or “Cottagers and Paupers” (table 1), while significantly poorer than yeomen and husbandmen, benefited from the slowdown in population and fall in grain prices during the second half of the seventeenth century. Because their numbers stayed relatively stable, the labor market ebbed in their favor. Landlords had to charge lower rents and employers pay higher wages to retain tenants and workers who might otherwise go elsewhere. Since they bought more grain than they sold, lower prices meant good news and full bellies. As a result, Defoe could write in 1724 that “[e]ven those we call poor people, journeymen, working and pains-taking people, do thus: they lie warm, live in plenty, work hard and know no want.”
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Admittedly, families at this level of society could expect to labor just as hard as their ancestors for no more than £6–20 a year. Since most of this income would have to be spent on food, there was relatively little left for other necessaries such as candles, soap, or cloth. For example, in the late-seventeenth-century village of Terling, Essex, it took £13 14s. to support a family of five, consisting of a husband, wife, and three children. Of this amount, £9 14s. went for food, leaving £2 for clothes and £1 each for rent and fuel. It would therefore seem that concepts like “discretionary income” and “conspicuous consumption” would be unknown to members of this social rank; instead, it was all most could do to get by on credit. And yet, there is some evidence that the new consumer economy penetrated even to this level. Wills and inventories of agricultural workers during this period often list linen sheets, window curtains, brassware, and books. Only in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, as the population began to grow again, putting upward pressure on rents, downward pressure on wages, would their situation deteriorate. When it did, many would tumble into the ranks of the poor.

According to Gregory King, there were about 30,000 vagrants in England in 1688. But this number might skyrocket between wars as common seamen and soldiers, representing some 85,000 families, were demobilized (table 1). Moreover, significant numbers of the “working poor” (the cottagers and laborers described above) were periodically thrown out of work when planting, harvesting, or the building season ended. As this implies, poverty was often a seasonal or stage-of-life (widowhood, for example) condition. Widows, orphans, and those disabled in war were often alone in the world, without a familial support network. As we have seen, this led the poor to move about, looking for work or for charity or just to stay one step ahead of the authorities (see chapter 6). As we have also seen, this produced fear and loathing among the more prosperous classes, and not just because they had to pay the poor rate. Vagrants and beggars were a nuisance, and one could never tell who was really deserving, who just too lazy to work. Nor could one easily distinguish them from thieves, pickpockets, pimps, prostitutes, or murderers. In short, the poor, including, but by no means limited to, the criminal element, still represented to their betters a force for disorder, a reminder to respectable English men and women that they might have mastered the French and, perhaps, the natural universe, but that their own world was liable to explode into disturbance, crime, or riot at any moment.

The early modern English polity tried a number of remedies. The traditional one was to urge obedience and deference from the pulpit. The Church of England was still the religion of the vast majority of people, its rituals still the milestones of their lives, its physical plant still the religious and, to some extent, the social center of their communities. But much had changed about the beliefs espoused by the community which celebrated those rites and holidays.

The good news in religion was that the wrenching conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, combined, perhaps, with the new emphasis on empirical demonstration, reason, and moderation, had, by the early eighteenth century, left most English men and women deeply averse to religious zealotry (what they called “enthusiasm”) and its corollary, persecution. It is true that Dissenters remained second-class citizens, theoretically banned from office by the Test and Corporation Acts; and that Catholics and Jews really were kept out of many walks of public life, including the universities and Parliament, by the same and other legislation. But the old hatreds which inspired these laws were subsiding in the eighteenth century and one could even hear a few voices for their repeal. Similarly, old fears and superstitions, such as that inspired by witches, had also died out among the educated classes. While common folk continued to believe in their existence, it was almost impossible by 1700 to find anyone in authority who would treat the complaint seriously. The last execution for witchcraft in England took place in the 1680s; the last trial in 1712; and the statute which made it a felony was finally repealed in 1736. In fact, while the educated classes grew wealthier, spent more time in cities, and embraced rationality and experimental science, most of the population, with little access to this brave new intellectual world, seem to have retained their ancient beliefs in folk custom, herbal remedies, and superstition. Anthony à Wood (1632–95) reported in the 1680s that country people still believed in ghosts and fairies. Here, too, the gulf between the elite and the masses was growing.

Paradoxically – and alarmingly from the point of view of the elite – the credulity noted above did not, apparently, extend to belief in all the tenets of the Anglican faith. Rather, the political and intellectual revolutions of the seventeenth century which had discredited religious zealotry seem also to have weakened, if only because they discredited coercion, popular religiosity. There is conflicting evidence about church attendance in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but overall it suggests that fewer people attended Sunday services. The Toleration Act freed not only Dissenters from having to go to church, but also the skeptical, the lazy, or the just plain sleepy. Church courts, which had traditionally regulated personal behavior (Sabbath breaking, blasphemy and swearing, adultery and fornication, drunkenness, some debt), were in decline in most parts of the country by the 1720s. In short, the Church’s ability to coerce obedience and good behavior from its flock was on the wane, while skepticism, excessive materialism (what contemporaries called “luxury”), and general bad behavior were thought to be on the rise.

In response, there arose Societies for the Reformation of Manners which declared their own war on the most objectionable aspects of popular culture. Supported by both Anglicans and Dissenters, members went about identifying drunkards, prostitutes, and blasphemers – and encouraging constables to apprehend them. Clergymen like the nonjuror Jeremy Collier (1650–1726) railed against the licentiousness of the theater. To make up for absenteeism and pluralism, the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) and Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) were founded. These organizations disseminated religious literature and education at home and in the colonies.

The Church had always played the major role in education. While this period saw a decline in the availability of university and legal education for ordinary people, it continued to witness the growth of public and grammar schools for the prosperous, private academies (often run by Dissenters) for the offspring of the middling orders, and petty schools to give poorer children some facility in reading and writing. The last two offered education to girls as well as boys. For the very poor, especially in London, manners were to be reformed in charity schools, endowed by a wealthy patron and administered by a Church-licensed teacher, often the pastor himself. Where there was no established school, some rudimentary education could probably be had at the overworked hands of the local parish priest. As a result, by 1715 some 45 percent of the male population and 25 percent of females could sign their names, the best indicator of literacy available to historians.

Perhaps the Church-run institution which had the greatest impact at this level of society was the Poor Law. By the early eighteenth century the poor rates, collected on a parish-by-parish basis, yielded £400,000 a year and supplemented the income of 4 to 5 percent of the general population. The parish vestry distributed this money, but only to the “deserving” poor (widows, orphans, the lame, the sick, the aged) and only to those who could prove that they had been born in the parish. In practice, much depended on the personal generosity of the local JP (who approved or withheld the distribution of charity), the churchwardens (who collected it), and the overseers of the poor (who dispensed it) on site. To fill the gaps in official humanitarianism, many private charitable institutions sprang up in the later Stuart period, including the endowed charity schools noted above as well as hospitals. Admittedly, their existence probably did more to indicate their benefactors’ good intentions than they did to solve the problems of ignorance, sickness, and poverty in eighteenth-century England.

One reason that poverty concerned so many contemporaries is that it was thought to lead to crime. As was the case for earlier periods, we do not have valid crime statistics for the century after the Restoration, but there seems to have been a widespread sense that crime was on the rise, especially in the 1690s, and again in the period 1710–25. Grub Street stoked these fears by churning out an endless stream of sensationalist crime literature such as Captain Alexander Smith’s
History of the Lives of the Most Noted Highway-men, Foot-pads, House-Breakers, Shoplifters and Cheats
(1714). Famous criminals, like Jack Sheppard (1702–24) or Jonathan Wild (1682–1725), became national celebrities and folk heroes: indeed, Wild was later immortalized in Gay’s
Beggar’s Opera
(see above) and a novel by Fielding. As “boss” of the London criminal underworld Wild took advantage of the new medium of the daily newspaper to advertise his services in recovering stolen goods – filched by his own gang! Traditional crimes like pickpocketing and shoplifting grew more tempting as trade and wealth increased, while new crimes like fraud, embezzlement, and counterfeiting grew out of the financial and commercial revolutions.

In response, Parliament passed an avalanche of capital legislation: the number of crimes for which one could be put to death rose from about 50 in 1680 to over 200 by 1820. Some of these laws seem draconian by the standards of any society. For example, after 1698 it was a capital crime to steal or assist in stealing goods worth over five shillings (just under a workman’s weekly wage) from a shop or warehouse. And yet, “the bloodiest criminal code in Europe” operated more by intimidation and deterrence than by real violence. That is, it actually hanged very few offenders. Many more were never prosecuted to the full extent of the law, or were acquitted, transported to the colonies, or granted a royal pardon. Some historians of crime have argued that the law’s real effectiveness stemmed from its theatricality and its constant reminder that it was the upper classes who held all the cards. Others have argued that the lower orders genuinely accepted the hierarchical assumptions of English society and felt protected by the law: after all, they, not the landed aristocracy, were the usual victims of crime. It should also be recalled that the vast majority of people encountered the law not as victims of felonies or through the terrors of criminal prosecution but in its more mundane civil manifestations such as contract, property, debt, libel, or disorderly conduct. Ultimately, we cannot know how most ordinary English men and women felt about the law or whether they were substantially steered away from criminal behavior and toward a sullen deference by institutions such as the “bloody code.”