Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (86 page)

Certainly, contemporary observers thought the English the most violent people in Europe. In fact, murder was rare and declining. But frequent theft, occasional bread riots, ritualized violence, and political demonstrations suggest that inequalities of status and wealth took their toll. During the period after 1660, in particular, traditional or customary rights (to copyhold, to graze animals in common fields, to gather “waste” wood or grain from the lord’s land) were being eradicated as inconsistent with the new, more rational, economy, even though such rights were often crucial to a poor family’s survival. Their abolition often led to riots, demonstrations, or industrial disputes: hard times 1693–5 yielded an increasing number of bread riots, for example. But these demonstrations were neither full-scale rebellions nor unrestrained chaos: as we have seen (chapter 6), they generally took place around a very specific issue (such as the price of bread), had limited aims (such as making cheap grain available), specific targets (the miller or the baker), limited violence, and a rationale based upon shared conceptions of customary rights and legal fairness. Generally, the rioters appealed to the local authorities not only for redress of their grievances but for some degree of legitimation or acquiescence in their actions. More often than not, the upper classes, whether out of agreement with the people or fear of the mob, tended to go along at least during times of dearth, forcing the merchant middlemen to lower their prices, for example, and punishing the ringleaders lightly, if at all. Still, the absence of alternative, less dramatic ways to relieve social and economic tensions, combined with the increasing distancing, almost a siege mentality, of the upper classes, suggests that there were deeper problems within English society than grain prices. Early eighteenth-century England may look stable on the surface; it may actually have been stable in the sense of being unlikely to experience sudden, radical change; but stability is hardly to be enjoyed when much of what maintains it is the constant and mutual threat of violence directed from the have-nots to the haves and back again. English society at the turn of the eighteenth century witnessed increasing opportunity, but also increasing tension and fragmentation.

Let us return to the hypothetical woman with whom we began this chapter and ask how these opportunities and tensions would have shaped her life.
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If she were a member of the middling orders, she might have been apprenticed as a teenager to learn a craft, possibly in textile manufacture and sale, but as time wore on she would have found skilled trades increasingly closed off to her sex. She was more likely to have been farmed out as a domestic servant. If she had married and her London-based husband died (during, say, the plague of 1665 or serving in one of the many late-seventeenth-century wars), she might well have run his shop or business. Such widow-businesswomen were common in the printing, woolen, and victualing trades, though never in large-scale overseas trade. In the country and lower down the social scale, her life would have been divided between household management and agricultural work or cloth production. If the former, she would have done much of what men did, although less plowing or reaping and more planting, raking, and gathering, and she would have been paid less. In pasture regions, she might have had exclusive control of dairying. If engaged in cloth production, she would almost certainly have been concerned with spinning: our term for an older single woman (spinster) and the symbol of the woman’s sphere (the distaff) reveal the close bond between women and this work in the pre-industrial period.

Whatever her work, she would probably have been responsible for “physick,” herbal remedies and generally unpaid medical care for her family and, if she were a member of the elite, poorer neighbors. While she might have participated in petitioner marches on Parliament in the 1640s, or been at the forefront of a bread riot for a “just price,” she would have had little to do with political demonstrations between 1660 and 1714. Probably highly involved with the religious and charitable life of her parish, she was, nevertheless, unlikely to have embraced the radical ideas of
Women’s Speaking Justified
(1667) by the Quaker Margaret Fell (1614–1702). Our particular woman was quite likely a widow by 1714: women were four times more likely to die in the first 10 years of marriage than men, but if they made it to their mid-forties, they tended to survive their husbands. During her marriage, the common law had considered her a
femme covert
under the protection of her husband, capable of holding no freehold, making no will except through him. But individual situations varied. Some women held substantial property outside of land, and numerous women’s wills survive, not simply to take care of the older traditions of the widow’s dower or the wife’s portion, but to settle that property and a myriad of different circumstances – previous marriages, older children, younger children, family businesses. But most likely by 1714 our aged widow was poor, for, at this level of society, in an age before State- or employer-funded pensions, the only shelter against penury was the unsteady and poorly paid work in cleaning or sewing that an old woman might perform. The Hanoverian political future may have been stable, but its socioeconomic realities provided no guarantees for anyone, male or female.

Epilogue

The socioeconomic tensions described above should give us pause and cause us to ask, why should we pay attention to the story just told? If early modern English men and women were not quite certain of how to construct a stable, just, and prosperous society, what could they possibly have to tell us today? Why study their history? The authors would like to conclude this work by offering two reasons to do so.

First, and perhaps the lesser of the two, is that the history of England from 1485 to 1714 is a terrific story. One does not have to be English; one does not have to be an Anglophile; and one certainly does not have to approve of England’s policies and actions over this span of time, to be aware of this fact. Ours has been the story of how part of an insignificant island, in 1485 poorer than contemporary Belgium, the military equal of, perhaps, Denmark, rose over the course of 250 years to become the wealthiest, most powerful nation on earth. It is the story of how that nation produced a rich culture, giving the world More’s
Utopia,
Shakespeare’s plays, Milton’s
Paradise Lost,
Purcell’s anthems and odes, the buildings of Sir Christopher Wren, the science of Sir Isaac Newton, and, not least, the King James Bible. It is the story of how a people survived repeated epidemics and near famine, one failed invasion and two successful ones, two Civil Wars, a series of violent reformations and counter-reformations in religion, a social and two political revolutions. It is the story of how they faced down, first, Philip II’s Spain, then Louis XIV’s France, in each instance the most powerful nation in the world. It is the story of how they then stumbled into a constitutional monarchy which would evolve into what was, arguably, the freest, most participatory state in Europe, if not yet a democracy. Simultaneously, they originated, fought over, and eventually tolerated a variety of lasting religious traditions. It is also the story of their struggle to assert natural rights and convert them into civil liberties which became the prototypes for many of the same rights and liberties we enjoy today. Along the way, the English story is filled with remarkable personalities: Thomas More dying “the King’s good servant, but God’s first”; Elizabeth I rallying her troops against the Spanish Empire with “the heart and stomach of a king”; Colonel Rainsborough asserting the civil rights of “the poorest he that is”; or Mary Astell charging that “all women are born slaves.” Above all, there are the stories of those countless ordinary people who did not leave us their names, but who struggled to survive and prosper and who, along the way, made of early modern England something greater than it had been.

Admittedly, the quotation of so many authority figures reminds us of a caveat: that the English “story,” as most narrative histories tend to be, is
par excellence
a story of rich white men (and a few rich white women) who pursued power and wealth out of ambition and greed. There should be no forgetting that the economic system which made eighteenth-century England the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth abducted, sold, and enslaved Africans; displaced Native Americans; destabilized India; reduced the Catholic Irish to near destitution; and exploited the vast majority of its own population – all so that a few landed aristocrats and powerful merchants could live lives of luxury. Nor should we forget the horrors visited on religious minorities in the name of orthodoxy, or that the female half of the population found few or no opportunities to make a career or have a say in the fate of their country. Those who ruled England – those who have, of necessity, received the vast majority of this book’s attention – were often guilty of injustice and oppression to their fellow human beings, not only by our own standards but even, sometimes, by those of their own day.

But this book has also tried to be about those English people who struggled
against
injustice and oppression. In so doing, they gave every oppressed group the example and the tools with which to seek a more just society. It was, after all, the people of England who, if not always first, then most loudly and successfully among the peoples of Europe taught the modern world that absolute monarchy was not the only viable form of government. It was the people of England who proclaimed that rulers should be answerable to the rule of law, to representative institutions, and, ultimately, to those over whom they ruled. It was the people of England who first stipulated that citizens could not be imprisoned without charge, tried without access to a jury, or taxed without the permission of their representatives. It was the people of England who, more than any of their contemporaries, first extended widely the right to vote, the right to express political opinions in speech or print, and the right to sack a ruler who failed to govern them justly and effectively. It was also the people of England who accepted that women could rule every bit as effectively as men: while central Europe would go to war over the question of female rule in 1740, England had already seen the successful reigns of Elizabeth and Anne. Admittedly, the people of England came later than some others – the Dutch, the Poles – to embrace religious toleration, and even then, did so within an exclusively Protestant framework. But it was certainly the people of England, more than any other European society, who demonstrated time and again that social class was not immutable, that one’s birth should not solely determine one’s future. How else would we have heard of Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell, Samuel Pepys, Abigail Masham, “Diamond” Pitt, and all those Whig financiers? Finally, it should never be forgotten that ordinary English people fought and sometimes died fighting for all of these notions. As a result of these choices and sacrifices, England became, in the course of the eighteenth century, if not the first “modern” society, then the European society possessing the greatest number of hallmarks of modernity. No wonder that when the American colonists took up arms against George III (1738–1820; reigned 1760–1820), they claimed to be doing so in order to defend the rights of Englishmen.

As historian Mark Kishlansky has written, “there could be no better measure of [the Stuarts’] accomplishments than the fact that eighteenth-century Frenchmen came to envy the achievements of seventeenth-century Britain.”
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Admittedly, most of those achievements were partial or beneficial to only a small fraction of the English population by 1714, or even by 1760. It would be many years before they would positively affect most people’s lives in England, let alone be applied to conditions across the British Empire. Indeed, if the task set by early modern English men and women was to build a just society, it remains, on both sides of the Atlantic, an unfinished one. But this serves to make their experience all the more relevant. In recent years, Americans have debated furiously over the rights of habeas corpus and against unreasonable search and seizure, congressional (read parliamentary) oversight and power of the purse, the proper relationship of religion to government, and whether the ruler is above the law (presidential signing statements). These familiar early modern controversies rage on, yet within a framework well established by 1714. That framework is the legacy to us of the people we have been studying. It was Sir Winston Churchill (1874–1965) – himself a distinguished historian of Queen Anne’s England, descended on his father’s side from the duke of Marlborough, but on his mother’s side from a citizen of the United States – who famously said to his mother’s countrymen: “Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.”
²⁸
The tools for which Churchill was asking in 1941 were, of course, material: ships, airplanes, guns. But the job was to defend the political, social, and cultural inheritance of the Atlantic world. As this implies, the idealistic and conceptual tools and traditions necessary to achieve a just society, a democratic government, freedom of worship, and an open intellectual life – the inheritance Churchill sought to perpetuate – had long before been passed across the Atlantic in the opposite direction. They existed, admittedly sometimes only in embryonic form, in but one place in 1714 – thanks to the courage and persistence of the people of early modern England.