Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History

by Bucholz, Robert

  According to Church of England liturgy and numerous moralists who wrote on the subject, the primary purpose of marriage was neither to exchange property nor to contain sexual energy and avoid sin, let alone to fulfill mutual love. Instead, couples were supposed to marry, principally, to have children. According to figures derived from a sample of parish registers, about one-third of all married couples bore a child within the first year of marriage; two-thirds to four-fifths did so within two years. The average wife experienced six to eight pregnancies, only four of which resulted in a child who lived to adulthood. Childbearing was dangerous for both mother and child, especially past the age of 35. In an age which lacked effective painkillers, surgery, or antibiotics, there was a 6–7 percent chance of dying from excessive bleeding or sepsis, as in the case of Henry VIII’s third wife, Queen Jane, over the course of one’s child-bearing years. This reality, along with poor diet and early menopause, may help to explain a noticeable drop-off in fertility among married women around age 35: despite the opposition of the Church, there were primitive contraceptive techniques (coitus interruptus), devices (animal skin condoms, potions), and folk-remedy abortifacients. Whether popular or effective, these practices suggest that some early modern people sought to limit their family size or their childbearing years.

  What were the living conditions of ordinary people at the end of the sixteenth century?21 Despite the destructive effects of inflation, most people were living lives of greater material comfort than had their ancestors at the end of the fifteenth century. First, beginning in southern England and sweeping westward and northward, this period saw a “Great Rebuilding” of houses. Slowly, starting in an area known as the Weald in Kent, one- and two-room huts were being replaced by more substantial dwellings designed to last more than one generation. Lesser gentry, yeomen, and substantial husbandmen, in particular, began to build multiroomed houses of timber frame with an infill of plaster, wattle, or, for the most prosperous, brick (see plate 10). Stronger, thicker materials meant that walls could be punctuated with windows, letting in more light. Typically, at the center of this “Wealden” house would be a hall, open to the rafters, with an earthen floor and a hearth in the middle whose smoke floated through a hole in the roof. Flanking the hall was a suite of service and storage rooms at one end; at the other end was a parlor. For the first time, private bedchambers, separated from the family’s daily living area, occupied an upper story above each wing (see diagram). Sometime in the sixteenth century, Kentish yeomen families began to put a ceiling over the hall and add more rooms above with separate fireplaces and chimneys. Thus, a substantial farmhouse might have 12 rooms. A poor cottager would still have to be content with one or two, but they were increasingly made of stone or wood and he and his family, too, could warm themselves at a real fireplace with a chimney. Even humble farmers slept on beds with mattresses and laid their heads on pillows, as opposed to the bare rushes on dirt floors of earlier days.

  Plate 10 Tudor farmhouse at Ystradfaelog, Llanwnnog, Montgomeryshire (photo and ground-plan). Crown Copyright: Royal Commission of the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales.

  Yeomen abandoned their wooden trenchers, plates, and spoons for tin, pewter, even, in the best houses, a bit of silver. Diet consisted, for the well off, of meat and fish, wheaten bread (baked at home by servants), a variety of dairy products, beer (brewed at home), and wine. Most days, the lower orders consumed simple rye bread or oatcakes, bacon, porridge, cheese, milk, and beer. Buying food and preparing meals took time; even water had to be fetched from a nearby well or stream. Parish feasts were especially looked forward to, because they provided rare opportunities for humble men, women, and children to share cooking tasks and indulge themselves plentifully.

  Even during good times, no one could depend on a long and healthy life. Early modern people lacked modern understandings of hygiene, nutrition, and disease, were prone to sudden accident, and survived at the mercy of the elements. We have already noted the frequent and utterly baffling (to them) recurrences of plague, influenza, typhoid fever, cholera, whooping cough, not to mention innumerable undifferentiated fevers, fluxes, agues, and mysterious afflictions like “griping of the guts.” Simple infections – a cut on the leg, a sore in the mouth, the bacterial stew associated with childbirth – could prove fatal in days. Others might live for years with debilitating conditions: arthritis and rheumatism, bad or missing teeth, lameness due to rickets or badly set bones. Only the wealthy could afford doctors. This was just as well given the contemporary state of medical knowledge, which was still based on humoral theory and classical precedent. Early modern medicine was iffy on diagnosis: it knew when you had plague; but diagnoses like “griping of the guts” are more graphic than scientific. And it was utterly hopeless on cure, often inadvertently violating the Hippocratic doctrine “Do no harm” with treatments involving leeches, blisters, plasters, purgatives, and horrendous surgeries minus anesthetics or antibiotics. If the doctor, apothecary, or surgeon did not finish you off, an accident might suffice. Children frequently drowned in rivers, ponds, and wells. Animals could gore, crush, or maim. Since most dwellings were made of wood and thatch, fire was an everpresent danger, especially in cities, where flimsy buildings were packed within old medieval walls.

  When it came, death, like life, was experienced differently according to one’s social rank. The family of a great Elizabethan nobleman who died usually mounted a heraldic funeral. This was an elaborate affair, organized by the royal Office of Heralds, in which the many banners and honors of the deceased would be put on display. The idea was not so much to console the family at the loss of an individual as to remind the community of the continued power and importance of the family. But by the 1630s, heraldic funerals fell out of favor as an expensive and “fruitless vanity.”22 Increasingly after 1650, the elite buried their dead privately, at night. Expensive tombs and monuments in parish churches continued to emphasize the status and honor of the lineage well into the seventeenth century, but they too were eventually replaced by simple wall plaques.

  The death and burial of an ordinary person was much less elaborate than a heraldic funeral, but here, too, community was important. In the early modern period death generally took place not in a hospital but at home, among one’s relatives and friends. Once the moment of death had passed, women of the family or village prepared the corpse. Prior to the Reformation, mourners engaged in a pre-funeral vigil, called a wake, followed by the funeral and prayers for the deceased – for days, months, and years on end – all in the hope of reducing his or her time in Purgatory. The Church of England abolished much of this ritual when it repudiated the doctrine of Purgatory, but funerals remained elaborate communal affairs in which the deceased was expected to leave monetary bequests to the community and gifts, both large and small, such as gloves and rings, to those who attended. In return, one’s neighbors were expected to turn out, even the very poor, who might receive gloves or a suit of clothes for the occasion. The ceremonies concluded with a feast which served as a sign of the healing of the community. Over the course of the seventeenth century, even these rituals and acts of charity gave way to less public funerals in which the nuclear family concentrated on its own grief.

  Given the vast differences in experience, traditions, lifestyle – and deathstyle – between the upper and lower classes, not to mention the genders, it is perhaps no wonder that some historians have focused more on those differences than on the attitudes and institutions which united English men and women into one nation and culture. Some have argued that the hierarchical principle in English society was so strong, the lives and attitudes of aristocratic English men and women so different from the great mass of ordinary people, that there were really two cultures in England. Those two cultures, separated at the Reformation, were growing farther apart in the seventeenth century as upper-class men and women grew richer, better educated, more urban, more cosmopolitan – and increasingly withdrawn from those below them in the Chain who did the
work to sustain their privileged lives. What institutions and attitudes linked the various segments of the Chain into something which we can, still, meaningfully call England?

  Religion

  For most early modern English men and women, religion was, undoubtedly, the chief institutional and intellectual bulwark against disorder and social strife, their primary source of explanation and solace for the uncertainties of life, and the foundation of their code of moral conduct. After the Reformation, the Protestant religion did much to define who the English were vis-à-vis their Catholic – and often hostile – neighbors. Some historians believe that this identity as a crusading Protestant nation, a chosen people under attack by infidels, almost singlehandedly created English nationalism and that sense of English uniqueness referred to in our Introduction. How were these ideas instilled in the populace?

  As we have seen, every English subject was expected to attend the local parish church on Sunday – from 1549, by law. At church, loyal subjects were asked to pray for the royal family against its enemies. They also heard sermon after sermon defending the Reformation, delineating Catholic error, and justifying civil and clerical authority by arguing that these came from God and that to question or disobey them was a grave sin leading to personal ruin, or worse. The church layout represented this theology physically. Although the Edwardian attacks on “superstitious” images had laid waste to thousands of rood crosses, statues, and stained-glass windows, the church walls still displayed memorials to leading members of the congregation. Indeed, the Elizabethan and early Stuart period was the great age for constructing gentry family tombs and monuments. The sixteenth century also saw the installation of pews, in which living congregants arranged themselves according to the prevailing social hierarchy, with local aristocrats sitting in the most ornate seating at the front, followed in decreasing ostentation, comfort and social rank by the other members of the congregation. A century later, Richard Gough could write a top-to-bottom history of his village by going through its church pews from front to back.23 The Church also provided for most English men and women the arena for every important rite of passage in their lives: their births, in baptism; their progress to adulthood, in confirmation; their marriages in holy matrimony; the births of their children at their baptisms; and their deaths via church funerals. Church feasts and festivals undoubtedly furnished highlights and happy memories; while the Church’s ceremonies and teachings about death and the afterlife offered a potentially consoling note in an uncertain world.

  It is therefore not a little ironical that for most of the century and a half after 1536, religion was often a source of bitter controversy, resentment, and even violence, at all levels of community. Indeed, while the Reformation seemingly extended royal and parliamentary power into areas of faith and ritual, as Ethan Shagan has shown, it also opened up those matters to popular debate and even manipulation. Die-hard Catholic recusants stayed away from the parish church entirely, thus calling their political loyalty into question. “Church papists” and would-be Puritan reformers attended the Church of England but objected to many of its practices: the former mumbled obstinately during the reading of the Book of Common Prayer, while the latter balked at the sign of the cross at baptism, the churching of women after childbirth (the ritualistic thanksgiving to God for their safe deliverance and reacceptance into the community), and even, as we shall see, any special remembrance of Christmas. Other members of the Church, eventually to be called Anglicans, loved these practices and, by the end of Elizabeth’s reign, were ready to defend them in word in deed. Imagine the level of tension aroused within the community when an individual conscience clashed with local tradition, the convictions of the clergyman, or the instructions of the bishop, possibly leading to the unwanted attention of his consistory court or that of High Commission.

  Adding to the stress on the local clergyman was the fact that after the numerous purges and deprivations of the Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and Elizabethan settlement, there were only about 8,000 pastors left to serve the 9,000 or so parishes in England. Obviously, absenteeism and pluralism continued to be a problem just when the various royal dissolutions and raids on Church property had reduced the Church’s wealth. While this undoubtedly compromised the affluence of the bishops, it was the rural clergy who had the most trouble making ends meet. In 1535 one-half of all incumbents made less than £10 a year, one-third less than £5, often because their tithes had been impropriated (i.e., appropriated) by a lay patron. This placed them on the level of the humblest cottager. On a more positive note, the clergy was becoming better educated in the sixteenth century: in Canterbury diocese the proportion of clergy with university degrees rose from 18 percent in 1571 to 60 percent by 1603; even in the poor diocese of Lichfield the percentage rose from 14 in 1584 to 24 in 1603. At the same time, the fact that post-Reformation pastors were no longer viewed as semi-divine, consecrated beings, but could marry and have children, may have given them greater insight into the daily problems of their flocks.

  This does not mean that they were necessarily more effective at instilling belief into those flocks. Some evidence from the late Elizabethan period suggests that, despite the law, Church attendance was poor and general knowledge about religious doctrine varied tremendously. Puritan clergy and laity, in particular, complained about the number of people who neglected Sunday services for work or the pleasures of the alehouse, gambling, morris-dancing, bear-baiting, hunting, archery, or football – holdovers of a more traditional and festive culture. The great divine Richard Baxter (1615–91) recalled the Sunday experience in his boyhood Shropshire:

  In the village where I lived the reader [curate] read the Common Prayer briefly, and the rest of the day even till dark night almost, except eating-time, was spent in dancing under a maypole and a great tree not far from my father’s door, where all the town did meet together …. So that we could not read the Scripture in our family without the great disturbance of the tabor [drum] and pipe and noise in the street …. [W]hen I heard them call my father Puritan it did much to cure me and alienate me from them; for I considered that my father’s exercise of reading the Scripture was better than theirs.24

  Puritan clergy were scandalized that so many people saw the Sabbath as an excuse to engage in such activities, which not only corrupted body and soul, but might lead to more bastards to pay for on the parish poor rolls. Puritan magistrates tried to outlaw or regulate them on Sundays and, sometimes, altogether. As we shall see in the case of alehouses, they often failed, especially in traditional villages built around arable farming in the Southeast. Where local gentlemen or civic authorities were Puritan, the ruling elite became enemies to a wide range of popular activities, and, so, further distanced from ordinary people. Instead, they began to construct an alternative, Puritan, culture.

  Even those who did make it to church on Sunday may not have done so willingly or attentively. One clergyman complained that “Some sleep from the beginning to the end … as if the sabbath were made only to recover the sleep they have lost in the week.” Some congregants were no better behaved when awake. For example, in the 1630s Church officials in Dorchester complained of Henry Greene, who was charged with “laughing and talking and walking up and down” during services. This was, perhaps, not so bad as the physical blows or exchanges of “lousy rogue” and “lousy bastard” which passed among teenage boys during long sermons.25 Even those who listened quietly may not have emerged with a coherent understanding of their faith. Others picked-and-chose what to believe and practice. The Church’s message probably contributed to a greater tendency among the English to accept the social order than to challenge it. But it was apparently not enough, by itself, to keep them always toeing the line. That message had to be reinforced by contemporary notions of paternalism and deference.

  Paternalism and Deference

  The “grease” that was supposed to lubricate the links in the Great Chain of Being was the set of symbiotic attitudes called paternalism and defere
nce. As we have seen, an aristocratic landlord was expected, like a good father (hence “paternalism”), to look after his tenants and the ordinary people in his locality as he would his children. In return, the common man or woman was expected, in the words of the Prayer Book, “to order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters” (see Introduction).26 It is difficult for people reared with our modern emphasis on individual self-fulfillment to understand the seemingly universal acceptance of paternalist/deferential ideas and forms of behavior at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries. In fact, they may not have been embraced sincerely or wholeheartedly even then. Marxist historians have argued that paternalism was merely a screen for the depredations of a greedy ruling class. That is, in reality aristocrats exploited aggressively their power over the lower orders and, in return, gave only a small portion of their time, attention, and income back in legal or charitable endeavor. According to this view, paternalism did not aim to ease the lives of the less fortunate but simply to fool them into putting up with their lot. The impulse for sincere paternalism was, in any case, ebbing among the upper classes, first because the Tudors weakened notions of “good lordship” and local allegiances between the aristocracy and their subordinates; second, because the economic situation at the end of the sixteenth century encouraged a more capitalistic (read ruthless) exploitation of land, rents, and tenants; and, third, because the Reformation rejected the spiritual efficacy of good works. We have already noted that at the end of the Tudor period the landed classes were getting richer while many of their tenants were stagnating economically or growing poorer. As the former spent more time abroad or in London, they spent less time on their estates, close to their tenants. Hence, contemporary complaints about the decline of aristocratic hospitality and modern arguments that the upper class was distancing itself – physically and emotionally – from the lower orders. When they were at home, seventeenth-century aristocratic landlords increasingly erected high walls and wrought iron gates around those homes, ostensibly to contain wildlife in ornamental deer parks, but also to keep out “the rabble.” For their part, the rabble may have acted deferentially in public, but there is evidence of grumbling and questioning in private, as in the case of the Norfolk parish clerk who, in the wake of Kett’s rebellion, supposedly opined “[t]here are to[o] many gentlemen in England by five hundred.”27