Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History

by Bucholz, Robert

  These houses thus provided both public and private space. The former allowed them to be great political and social centers. Here, the local aristocracy gathered to select MPs or plan the implementation – or thwarting – of some royal policy. Traditionally, great families were also supposed to provide hospitality at key times of the year, such as Christmas, inviting the whole community, down to its lowest ranks, into their houses for feasting and revelry. On summer progress, Queen Elizabeth often imposed upon the hospitality of her most prominent subjects by turning up at their estates with her entire courtly entourage. This mark of royal favor was highly prized, but it could also be ruinous: the earl of Leicester once spent £6,000 to entertain the queen and her court at Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire!

  At least the man who paid the piper did not have to play the tune: that’s what servants were for. A great nobleman’s household might employ over 100, a middling gentleman’s, at least 20. During the sixteenth century a great peer employed gentlemen ushers to open doors, valets and ladies’ maids to assist his and his spouse’s daily toilet, chambermaids to clean his house, tutors to instruct his children, cooks for his kitchen, servers for his hall, footmen and grooms to perform menial tasks about his stables, and, of course, an army of grounds keepers, laborers,

  Plate 9 Hatfield House, south prospect, by Thomas Sadler, 1700. The diagram shows the plan of the first floor. Reproduced by Courtesy of The Marquess of Salisbury.

  and tenants to farm his estate. Supervising all of these would be a majordomoor steward, who was, himself, a gentleman of some education and ability. As the seventeenth century wore on, aristocrats would find less need for all this attendance and would reduce their domestic establishments accordingly.

  Large establishments of servants freed the landed classes from manual labor. It could be argued that early modern society geared the activities of the vast majority of people toward providing pleasant and fulfilling lives for a very small minority who did not work and who were proud of never having to do so. This freedom from work (or, more accurately, from manual labor) and the gradual decline in emphasis on their military role role allowed the aristocracy to concentrate upon other things: their duties as government officials, MPs, lords lieutenant, JPs, or sheriffs; the round of hospitality noted above; the traditional amusements for men of hunting and hawking, for women of conversation, sewing and playing music; and the making of lawsuits and scholarship. Litigation, usually over land, was an increasingly popular form of aristocratic conflict, which, along with the highly ritualized challenge and duel, replaced the old-style blood-feud between families. As for scholarship, by 1550, illiteracy was virtually unknown among the elite. The Tudor and Jacobean periods saw both upper-class men and women, many educated in the humanist tradition, devote themselves to philosophy, history, poetry, and art. The English gentleman excelled particularly at the literary arts: Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia (1516) and a History of Richard III (first English edition 1543); Sir Thomas Wyatt (ca. 1503–42, father of the rebel of the same name) developed the English sonnet; Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86) wrote Arcadia (1593); Sir Walter Ralegh, a history of the world (1614); and Sir Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Alban (1561–1626), laid important ground for the development of the scientific method in his Advancement of Learning (1605) and New Atlantis (1626), and for letters in his Essays (1597 and 1625). These men combined private learning with public duty: More and Bacon were lord chancellors and Wyatt, Sidney, and Ralegh were courtier-soldiers.

  One reason for all this cultural activity, as well as the above-noted decline in numbers of servants, was that nobles and great gentlemen increasingly forsook their country homes for the delights of London and the court. A small but growing minority rejected local society entirely, living at court as permanent employees of the government or the royal household – or hanging about in the hope of landing such employment. Others were amphibious: at home in both the provinces and the metropolis. By the Jacobean period there developed a London “season” from the late autumn to early spring, during which the landed aristocracy resided in the capital, attended plays, balls, and parties, and kept an eye on promising marriage prospects for their children. Several technological developments made this easier. In particular, the invention of the coach with box springs meant that an aristocrat could transport his entire family to the city in relative comfort. There was a concurrent improvement in road quality and, thus, safety – although a gentleman whose coach was overtaken by highwaymen or became mired in late spring mud would dispute this. For those who could not make it to the metropolis, from at least the mid-seventeenth century on an increasingly efficient postal service enabled them to receive news and stay connected via correspondence with those who were there.

  The increasing resort of aristocrats to the metropolis and the court contributed to the gradual domestication and nationalization of the English landed elite. That is, by the end of the sixteenth century the English nobility and gentry had largely transformed from a feudal military cohort of limited local horizons and parochial ambitions into a service aristocracy whose primary responsibilities and interests were governmental, social, and cultural, whose loyalties were paid to the sovereign, and whose tastes were increasingly cosmopolitan. These changes, as much due to economic and social shifts as to the actions of the Tudors, would continue under the Stuarts, rendering the landed elite partners of the monarch instead of rivals – at least most of the time.

  Commoners’ Private Life

  How different were the private lives of those who served or rented from the landed elite, those who, traditionally, had “neither voice nor authority in the common wealth”?11 As we have indicated, those differences appeared, first, in the nature of the household and family into which one was born. Those of the middling ranks (merchants, professionals) might include a mere handful of apprentices and servants. At the lower ranks, families tended to be even smaller, more self-contained and “nuclear.” There were many reasons for this. People of all ranks did not, in general, live long enough for there to be simultaneously living grandparents, parents, and children. At the lower ranks, this was exacerbated by the fact that, though marriage was the ideal, many people never tied the knot: possibly 20 percent of all Englishmen and women remained single for their entire lives and at any given time, over half of all men and women were living in a single state. Those ordinary men and women who did marry tended to do so much later than their superiors, in their mid-to-late twenties for men, their early-to-mid-twenties for women. They waited because of financial considerations: a non-elite male was expected to be able to support his wife and family. Even if their parents and grandparents were living, the common expectation was that they would set up separate households. It might take years of hard work to reach this point. Since menopause tended, during the early modern period, to come in a woman’s midthirties or early forties, this limited her childbearing years and so the number of her children. Breastfeeding, a common practice at this rank, probably had some contraceptive effect. Yet another, more tragic, limitation on family size came from very high rates of infant mortality at the end of the sixteenth century: one in eight children died within the first year of life and fully one-quarter of those born never reached age 10.12 A final reason for small, nuclear families was that, as indicated above, people in the lower orders often had to move about in search of work, cutting contact with extended family. Take, for example, the limited chances for family formation in the life of one Thomas Spickernell, described with some disapproval by an Essex town clerk in 1594: “sometime apprentice to a bookbinder; after, a vagrant peddler; then, a ballad singer and seller; and now, a minister and alehouse-keeper in Maldon.”13 Thus, for the great mass of the people, families might come in many forms, but were generally small, say four to five individuals. Death often broke them up, only to produce new combinations if surviving adults remarried.

  Despite the high rate of infant mortality, the relatively short life expectancy of adults (about 38 years) must have meant t
hat children formed a higher proportion of the general population (perhaps 40 percent) than they do in highly developed countries today. That is, children were everywhere. What was early modern childhood like at this level of society? A relative lack of evidence on this question, much of it subject to conflicting interpretations, has led to a vigorous academic debate. There were some contemporary guidebooks on child-rearing, but, like their modern equivalents, they may reflect more wishful thinking than actual practice. Surviving diaries and letters of ordinary people are sparse and often terse. In particular, parental reactions to the deaths of children were often, by twenty-first-century standards, short and unemotional. Thus, the preacher Ralph Josselin (1617–83) wrote of his infant son, Ralph, who died at 10 days old, that he “was the youngest, & our affections not so wonted unto it.”14 This led historian Lawrence Stone to argue that, because the loss of a child was so common, parents may have reserved themselves emotionally from their children during the first few years of life. Stone and others, noting the formal and utilitarian nature of children’s dress, the relative lack of toys, and the tendency of children’s literature to emphasize moral instruction over entertainment during this period, have argued that early modern children were generally ignored, disciplined severely, or treated like miniature adults or pets. But other historians, such as Ralph Houlbrooke, Linda Pollock, and Keith Wrightson, have argued that few words may hide deep emotion.15 In fact, there is a fair amount of evidence to support the marquess of Winchester’s contention that “the love of the mother is so strong, though the child be dead and laid in the grave, yet always she hath him quick in her heart.”16

  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 ma
king 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.