Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History

by Bucholz, Robert

  Plate 1 Diagram of an English manor. The Granger Collection, New York.

  After the excitement of the day, the villagers would return to their homes. A more substantial villager, say a yeoman, would live in a stone farmhouse in the North, a wooden one in the South. But at the end of the Middle Ages most villagers lived in one- and two-room huts or shacks, made of “wattle and daub” – essentially, mud, animal manure, straw – anything that would hold together within a timber frame.9 They had one wooden door and few windows – for windows let in the cold. These would be covered by thin horn or greased paper. If we were to enter one of these hovels, it would take our eyes some time to adjust to the darkness, first because of the lack of windows, and second because, in the center of the beaten mud floor, would be a smoking hearth. This would be the family’s main source of heat and implement for cooking. Its smoke was vented through a hole in the thatched roof. Looking about the room, there might be a few pots and pans, some tools, a candle holder with some candles, a chest, a table and a few stools, and some articles of clothing. Bags of flock or straw served as mattresses. The entire family lived in these one or two damp, drafty rooms with very little privacy from each other and, often, but a thin wall to separate them from their livestock. This would consist of perhaps a cow, certainly a sheep. The milk, cheese, wool, and, very occasionally, meat they provided would be crucial to keep the family fed and solvent, especially during bad times. Conversely, the death of the family’s animals could spell economic disaster, so it was as important to shelter them as it was to house the family itself.

  Prior to the period of time covered by this book, during the Middle Ages, these villagers would likely have been serfs, that is, unfree laborers who held land from their landlord in exchange for work on his estate. But, in an ironic twist, the Black Death which had been so destructive of human life had broken the chains of serfdom for those who had survived. That is, the dramatic fall in population which followed the epidemic had led to a labor shortage at the end of the fourteenth century. The peasants who were left alive, sensing their advantage, began to demand their freedom from serfdom and their pay in wages. So few peasants remained to do the work of the manor that, if their landlord refused to make concessions, they could always leave him for a master who would do so. At first, medieval landlords resisted. But in the end, the law of supply and demand, which few in the Middle Ages understood and no one had yet named, worked as inexorably on labor as it does on products: peasants were able to commute their serfdom into freedom, their work into wages, to be partly paid back to the landlord in rent. By 1485 most villagers were free tenant farmers; that is, they rented from a great landlord who owned the manor upon which the village was built. The villagers, unlike serfs, were able to leave this relationship if they wished. This forced landlords to try to keep their old tenants or attract new ones by increasing wages and lowering rents: since the time of the Black Death laborers’ wages had doubled from 2 pence a day to 4, while rents in some areas had fallen from the beginning of the century by as much as one-third.

  If we had chosen to visit a small hamlet in the rugged North or a fenland (swamp) settlement in East Anglia, the local people might make their living through pastoral (i.e., sheep or dairy) farming; spinning wool, flax or hemp; quarrying; and, of course, poaching in the king’s woods. Those on the coasts survived on fishing and trade. But most villagers in the southeast relied on arable (crop) farming. Near the village would be a plot of common land, where villagers’ animals could be grazed; and individual strips of land, farmed by each tenant (see plate 1). Late medieval farmers and estate managers knew about soil depletion and the need for crop rotation, so these strips would be grouped in three different fields. At any given time, one would hold an autumn crop, such as wheat; a second would hold a spring crop, such as oats or barley; and a third would lie fallow. The big tasks of medieval farming – plowing, sowing, and harvesting – would be organized communally, which means that the whole village, including its women and children, participated. Work lasted from sun-up to sun-down, which meant longer hours in summer, shorter hours in harsher conditions in winter. When not aiding their husbands and fathers in the fields, women cooked, sewed, and fetched water. Older children helped by looking after the family’s smaller children and animals. As we have seen, milk and wool could be sold for a little extra income. Another way to make extra money was to turn one’s dwelling into a “public house,” or “pub,” by brewing ale (traditionally a woman’s role).

  Perhaps in the center of the manor, perhaps on a hill overlooking the village, perhaps many miles away on another of the landlord’s estates, would be his manor house. He might have been a great nobleman or a gentleman. He might have owned and lived on this one estate, or have owned many manors and lived at a great distance. What is certain is that his control of the manor gave him great power over the villagers. First, the landlord owned most of the land in the neighborhood, apart from that of a few small freeholders. This provided him with a vast income from harvesting crops grown upon it, from mining minerals within it, and, above all, from collecting rents from the tenants who inhabited it. The landlord was also likely to own the best – and often the only – mill for grinding grain and oven for baking it. This provided another means to extract money from his tenants. Control of the land also gave him control of the local church, for he probably named the clergyman who preached there, a prerogative known as the right of advowson. He had the further right to call on the services of his tenants in time of war. His local power might lead the king to name him a local sheriff or justice of the peace (JP). This meant that he was not only the king’s representative to his tenants but their judge and jury for many offenses as well. His local importance might, paradoxically, require him to spend time away from his estates, in London. If he were a peer, he sat in the upper house of Parliament, the House of Lords, and acted as a crucial link between the court and his county. If he were a particularly wealthy gentleman (or the son of a living peer) he might be selected by his fellow landowners to sit in the lower house, the House of Commons. One of the few sets of records allowing us insight into a landowning family during the fifteenth century, The Paston Letters, shows how little time the Paston men actually spent on their estates in the country (in this case, Norfolk), and how much more of it they spent in London.10

  Admittedly, the same forces which had improved the lot of their tenants were compromising the wealth and power of the landed orders at the end of the Middle Ages. The decline in population had led to reduced demand for the food grown on their land. This produced a fall in prices which cut into their profits. Those profits were further compromised by the high wages that landlords now had to pay to hold onto their tenants. As a result, landowners increasingly abandoned demesne farming (that is, relying for profit on the sale of crops grown on that portion of the estate not being rented out) entirely in favor of renting nearly all their land to peasants, who paid a cash rent. These rents, not the food grown, eventually became the chief source of profit to great landowners. But, as we have seen, low population also forced landlords to keep rents low, once again to avoid losing their tenants. So, some landowners went further, abandoning crop farming entirely in favor of sheep farming, which was far less labor-intensive and more predictable, since it was less dependent on the weather. This process, called “enclosure” from the need to erect fences across otherwise open farmland in order to restrain sheep, was highly controversial precisely because it was less laborintensive. Contemporaries feared that tenants who had previously farmed the land would be thrown off it, thus losing both their jobs and their homes. The Church preached against enclosure, Parliament legislated against it, and socially conscious writers, most notably Sir Thomas More (1478–1535) in Utopia, complained that whole villages were being depopulated because of hungry sheep and greedy owners. Historians now question how many peasants were actually thrown off the land, since it had already been depopulated by the Black Death. Rather, enclosure was a strategy for kee
ping land profitable when there was no one to work it. But in some areas, such as the rich, arable Midlands, extensive enclosure in the sixteenth century did lead to real social problems. In any case, neither legislation nor propaganda was effective in stopping enclosure when a landlord had a mind to do it.

  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:

  Being Physical dwelling place

  God Everywhere

  Angels Heavens (includes, in descending order, stars, planets, sun, moon)

  Man Earth (the center of the universe)

  Animals Earth (but closer to the ground)

  Plants Earth (closer still)

  Stones Earth (the ground itself)

  the Damned Hell (beneath the ground)

  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: