Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History

by Bucholz, Robert

  The Marxist interpretation is not entirely fair. The upper classes may have been out for themselves, but there is plenty of evidence that they believed, possibly naively, that they were also helping their fellow subjects. When aristocrats endowed a school or treated their tenants at Christmas, they may have been trying, subconsciously, to buy off their inferiors or alleviate their guilt, but the vast majority were not sufficiently critical of the general economic and social situation to realize that they were attempting to solve problems of their own making and far too vast to be cured by a few bequests. Moreover, precisely because society promoted the idea of paternalistic responsibility, peasants could sometimes use it to exact concessions from their betters, as we shall see in the case of riots. In any case, it could be argued that society was held together not so much by “vertical” bonds of loyalty to one’s social superiors and inferiors as by the glue of common interest that existed “horizontally” among kin and neighbors of more or less the same rank.

  Kinship and Neighborliness

  At first glance, there is very little evidence that extended kin cared for or had much use for each other in early modern England below the ranks of the elite. Below this social level, geographical mobility tore kinship ties asunder. But that also meant that if one left the village to go to a provincial city, to London or to the colonies, one might very well have been preceded there by a relative. One might legitimately ask an uncle or a cousin for help in finding a first job or, perhaps, for financial assistance. Indeed, for early modern people the word “cousin” was applied elastically to any relation, no matter how distant – often in expectation of some benefit. But even this contact tended to be fortuitous and temporary. Once established in a new location, or if one decided to stay at home in the first place, the most immediate source of help would be the neighbors.

  There were no guidebooks, no written rules on how to be a good neighbor. Rather, neighborliness was a set of attitudes, shared but unspoken, which dictated certain behaviors that enabled early modern villagers to deal collectively with hardship, maintain their individual “credit,” and get along. It tended to be enforced by those women, standing at doorsteps and gossiping in the market, to whom we referred above. A villager could call on neighbors to loan money or tools or to watch home or goods in his or her absence. At moments of crisis or celebration – giving birth, a wedding, illness, or death – neighbors helped out by preparing meals. Indeed, one’s coming into and one’s going out of the world occurred in the company of neighbors. When a woman began to “lie in” for childbirth, there was no obstetrician to call; the local midwife and other neighborly women assisted her. When a villager died, these same women cleaned and dressed his or her corpse. In the early modern period, neighborliness – a sense of communal sharing and mutual responsibility – knit the community together in a web of personal credit and debt, filling in for a lack of institutions, such as banks, hospitals, mortuaries, and insurance companies, which perform similar services in the modern world.

  Neighborliness could also stifle and hurt. It employed peer pressure and, sometimes, the law to enforce community standards and curb objectionable behavior. That is, a good neighbor was never (or not often) loudly drunk or blasphemous, quarrelsome, litigious, abusive, violent – or even too different. If a neighbor were guilty of such transgressions, he or she could be pressured to desist or punished in a number of ways. As we have seen, a husband or wife who beat his or her spouse or was a notorious adulterer might be treated to the “rough music” of a charivari, the banging of pots and pans outside his or her window; or the offending couple might be burnt in effigy or run out of town on a rail in what was called a skimmington, either figuratively (again neighbors might be deputized to play their roles) or – in really serious cases – in person. Another way of applying peer pressure was public ridicule. Thus, mocking rumors and rhymes might circulate the village:

  Woe to thee, Michael Robins,

  That ever thou wert born,

  For Blancute makes thee cuckold,

  And thou must wear the horn.

  He fetches the nurse To give the child suck,

  That he may have time,

  Thy wife for to fuck.28

  Only when such informal pressure failed did good neighbors resort to the institutions of local government or the Church. A reputed scold might be ducked in the local millpond before being brought to the attention of the local JP. Property disputes and minor punch-ups might be taken to the local clergyman before resorting to the manorial, hundred, or borough court. A notorious blasphemer might be brought up on charges before a Church court by his or her parish priest or neighbors. In very serious cases, a ne’er-do-well or ill-liver might be excommunicated by such a court – that is, forbidden to take communion in church. This meant that the individual was literally out of communion and so out of community with his or her fellow villagers, a situation which could imperil not only one’s social or economic well-being but one’s very soul. This should remind us that early modern society did not draw great distinctions between moral and legal codes, spiritual and civil transgressions.

  Still, a major tenet of neighborliness was that one did not complain to the civil or ecclesiastical authorities lightly. Rather, one did so only if a neighbor’s behavior was chronic or heinous. Good neighbors worked things out. Put another way, neighborliness not only kept village society together; it, perhaps more immediately and effectively than religion or deference, was the real first line of defense against disorder. It was important for the justices and priests who administered common or canon law to remember where their jurisdiction ended and to keep their noses out of people’s business as much as they could – hence the widespread unpopularity of Puritan kill-joys bent on reform. Thus, neighborliness encouraged cooperation not just among members of the lower orders, but between the orders as well. How did it deal with society’s very lowest order, the poor?

  Poverty and Charity

  If an ordinary person in pre-modern England lived long enough, there was a good chance that he or she would end up poor. But being poor was different in 1603 from what it had been in 1485. In many ways, the medieval worldview embraced the poor, while the early modern worldview did not. That is, medieval Catholics looked upon the poor not only with pity, but also with a certain amount of approval, even affection. Unlucky in this world, they were virtually guaranteed salvation in the next. Moreover, they provided opportunities for good Catholics to perform soul-saving works on their behalf, by giving alms, contributing to monasteries and hospitals, and so on. The contemporary ideal of aristocratic hospitality obligated the rich to provide an open hearth to their tenants, the needy, and even strangers. In any case, because the Black Death had left a labor shortage in its wake, the number of poor people seemed to be manageable for late medieval society.

  By 1603 the problem of poverty was no longer manageable. Rising unemployment caused by the increase in population, growing numbers of people who had lost or been thrown off their land, high prices and stagnant wages were creating ever greater numbers of poor people. Real wages fell for about 40 years beginning in the 1570s. It has been estimated that at the end of the Tudor period, depending on the current state of the economy, something like 10 to 20 percent of the general population could not meet their expenses out of their income, about a third resorted to begging, and some 20,000–40,000 people were in a state of nearperpetual migration. The migrant poor included seasonally employed laborers, the unemployed, apprentices going to or from their service, demobilized soldiers, beggars, the lame and sick, and criminals. Contemporaries had a hard time distinguishing these various categories of poor people from each other, not least because any poor individual might fall into one or the other category at any given moment. For example, laborers who hired themselves out to work in the fields or on building projects during spring, summer, and fall often became unemployed in winter. This might lead to vagrancy, begging, illness, even theft as they tried to feed their families. No wonder one cont
emporary in 1552 looked back nostalgically to the pre-Reformation period as “the old world, when the country was called Merry England.”29

  Some reacted to the poor, especially the roving poor, with hostility and fear. Because the modern study of economics was unknown, they did not understand that the poor might not have had much choice in the matter. Still, with the numbers of poor rising, monasteries and church-run charities dissolved in 1536–47, and the ideal of noble hospitality in decline, something had to be done. Protestant moralists – the Commonwealthmen – tried to address the causes of poverty, but most people seem to have assumed that, apart from the lame, the sick, children, or the elderly, poor people might find jobs easily if only they were willing to look for them. The first Poor Law of 1536 thus distinguished between those unable to work, deemed “deserving” or “impotent” poor, for which relief was to be provided; and the “undeserving” poor, popularly known as “sturdy beggars,” who were able-bodied but, apparently, refused to work. That refusal suggested that they were lazy and, probably, up to no good – shiftless, masterless persons who had opted out of the Great Chain of Being. According to popular myth, they went about the country in roving bands, robbing, assaulting, and, in general, intimidating honest, respectable folk. Therefore, sturdy beggars had to be punished.

  As early as 1495, Parliament ordered beggars placed in the stocks for three days, whipped, and then sent back to their home parishes.30 The Vagrancy Act of 1547 decreed that anyone leaving his or her home parish or refusing to work be branded with a “V” for vagrant and enslaved for two years. This law was unenforceable and soon repealed, but previous legislation still mandated whipping masterless men and women until bloody. In 1572 Parliament ordered vagrants to be whipped and bored through the right ear as a punishment for a first offense, condemned as a felon for a second offense unless taken into service, and hanged for a third. Many communities refused to enforce such harsh punishments, but not all: between 1572 and 1575 the Middlesex JPs branded 44 vagrants, put eight in service, and hanged five! The death penalty for vagrants was only abolished in 1593.

  Fortunately, despite the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the Protestant deemphasis of good works, there was a countervailing tendency in treating the deserving poor. First, private gentry- and merchant-led charity continued unabated in the later Tudor and Jacobean periods, as evidenced by the number of schools and hospitals endowed. One reason for this may have been the influence of Calvinism and its insistence that the elect could be found at all levels of the Great Chain (hence the search for the “deserving poor”). Second, many local communities launched charity schemes of their own or took over old Church-run almshouses and hospitals. London acquired five hospitals between 1544 and 1557: St. Bartholomew’s to care for the sick poor, Christ’s (Greyfriars) to educate foundlings, St. Thomas’s for the old and feeble, Bethlehem (“Bedlam”) for the mentally ill, and Bridewell for the able poor to be set to work. The “relief” these provided might be worse than poverty itself – Bedlam and Bridewell became bywords for harsh treatment – but the breadth of the scheme was innovative. Third, the central government mandated further local action. The parliamentary acts of 1563 and 1572 made compulsory the support of the “deserving” poor by a local tax on parishioners which came to be known as the poor rates (though it was not until after 1660 that all 9,000-plus English parishes collected them). These were to be administered by local JPs assisted by churchwardens who collected them and overseers of the poor (usually modest yeomen, husbandmen, and artificers) who distributed them weekly. In fact, under the later Tudors, the parish became the crucial unit of local government, repairing roads, providing weapons for the militia, and above all assuming responsibility for the poor. The funds subsequently distributed were known as “outdoor relief”: that is, poor parishioners could receive charity while living at home. Often, parish officers gave extraordinary payments to community members needing a little temporary help. All payments depended on the good conduct of recipients: the Poor Law may have been a manifestation of public charity, but it was also a means to coerce proper behavior and, where charity was denied, expel the undesirable from the community.

  Even with these conditions, many contemporaries objected to such handouts. They felt that poor people should repay the community with their own labor. And so the Act of 1572 authorized parishes to put the homeless poor, including sturdy beggars, into workhouses (“indoor relief”) where they were required to spin wool, hemp, and flax or work iron to sell for the parish. In a workhouse such as Bridewell, families were broken up, husbands separated from wives, parents from children. The latter were often put into apprenticeships, as were outright orphans. The goal was threefold: to give the poor a usable skill; to get them to pay for their own relief; and to make the experience of going to the workhouse so unpleasant that no one would want to resort to it. Thus, the system’s ultimate objective was to reduce the tax burden which the poor represented. This strategy never produced the desired effects; the number of poor people and the expense of relieving them continued to rise: to £10,000 in 1610, £100,000 in 1650, £400,000 in 1700. The famines of the 1590s resulted in further parliamentary statutes of 1598 and 1601 which enabled parishes to erect dwellings for the homeless, provide schooling, or purchase apprenticeships for poor or orphaned children. Finally, the Act of Settlement of 1662 allowed overseers of the poor to ship them back to the parishes of their birth.

  The Poor Law’s combination of carrots and sticks was often cruel and always inefficient. Some parish officials did everything they could to drive the poor away, using the Act of Settlement as an excuse to reduce their tax rolls. Others were more lax, even welcoming and generous, to the unfortunate. But even their generosity could not eradicate poverty and some historians think that private charity was far more abundant and effective during this period than any of the government’s various stratagems. Still, the English Poor Law was one of the first attempts in Europe to provide government relief since Roman times. The recognition that the English nation had a responsibility to care for its least fortunate members, that the most fortunate should be made to contribute via the poor rates, and that the local parish should be the state-mandated vehicle for both indoor and outdoor relief was remarkably advanced, far ahead of anything on the continent. Hypocritical, inconsistent, and inadequate as the Poor Law may seem to modern eyes, it probably did help to tide people over during a crisis. Its existence may even help to explain why, despite real famine in the 1590s and 1620s, England did not experience widespread popular rebellion as did, say, France during the same period. This appearance of paternalism, neighborliness, fairness, and generosity by the haves in English society may have alleviated the misery, or at least forestalled the questioning, of the have-nots.

  Law and (Dis)order

  What happened in this society when religion, paternalism, deference, and neighborliness broke down? Much of the history of crime remains speculative because contemporary records simply do not allow for modern-style crime statistics, and many offenses went unrecorded in any case.31 The crimes perpetrated by, or inflicted upon, early modern English men and women may be divided, for the sake of convenience, into four types: violence against persons, theft or destruction of property, moral offenses, and riot. To judge from surviving court records and the anecdotal testimony of natives and foreigners, premeditated murder and assault in families were fairly rare. So were rape and infanticide, but this may be an illusion created by the failure to report such transgressions. Rather, most bloodshed in early modern England seems to have been spontaneous, fueled by drinking or gambling. Aristocrats went about armed with swords, while working men often bore knives or tools. This, plus the contemporary assumption that dueling or fisticuffs were appropriate ways to settle points of honor or reputation, undoubtedly contributed to impromptu violence.

  Still, contemporaries seem to have been far more worried about theft. During a period when the rich were getting richer and the poor poorer, we should not be surprised to l
earn that three-quarters of assize court prosecutions involved property crimes, that the vast majority of the accused were poor, or that their number rose in times of dearth. In theory, early modern society treated thieves especially harshly. In 1603 theft of goods above the value of 1 shilling was a felony, punishable by death, as was an increasing number of other offenses during the early modern period.32 Not all thieves went to the gallows, however. First, if there were no fatalities, the victim had the choice of whether or not to report the crime. Good neighbors tried to work things out without resorting to the law. If the victim did “raise the hue and cry” or complain to the local constable or JP, the latter could investigate, interrogate witnesses, and make out a warrant for arrest. Since there was no police force and the office of constable was a part-time one, apprehension was uncertain, for the accused could flee to another locale. If the constable managed to apprehend the accused, he was brought before the JP. Since there was no such thing as a district attorney or crown prosecution service, the victim now had a choice as to whether or not to prosecute and under what statute to do so. Since he paid prosecuting costs, he might think twice. The victim or the JP might also undervalue the goods stolen so as to avoid the possibility of capital punishment. If both agreed, then the suspect was “bound over” (held) and an indictment drawn up. Then a grand jury, composed of minor but respectable gentry and yeomen, met to determine whether the case went forward or the indictment was thrown out. If the latter, the accused went free; if the former, the case was tried at the assizes. The assizes were meetings held twice a year in which two assize judges, royal appointees, arrived at a large market town on their regular circuit to preside over felony cases. A prosecuting attorney tried the case before a regular or “petty” jury, again all male, who judged innocence or guilt. It was up to the assize judges to pass sentence of mercy or death.