Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History

by Bucholz, Robert

  At trial, the cards seem to have been stacked against the accused: for example, he or she was not entitled to legal representation, and could only call witnesses at the judge’s discretion. Still, a fortunate defendant might yet escape punishment at many points. Jurors might reduce the value of the goods lost so as to prevent capital punishment; a pregnant woman could “plead her belly,” postponing a hanging, possibly indefinitely. Some felons escaped via benefit of clergy. This was an ancient custom dating back to the Middle Ages, during which clergy could not be punished by civil courts. To prove that one was a cleric, one was asked to read, for during the Middle Ages only clerics could do so. Literacy was increasing by the sixteenth century, but this loophole remained on the books, so that anyone who could read the beginning of Psalm 51 – popularly known as the “neck verse” – literally saved his or her neck!33 At trial, a jury might, of course, acquit the accused on the evidence, or even their own feelings of neighborliness: according to one contemporary, “most commonly the simple countryman and woman … are of opinion that they would not procure a man’s death for all the goods in the world.”34 In the end, between 20 and 40 percent of those arraigned for felonies in one three-county sample were found not guilty. Even for the remainder, all hope was not lost. Mercy might be bestowed by the judge at sentencing: only about 20–30 percent of those convicted above were sentenced to death. Or the king might, often at the judge’s recommendation, issue a pardon at any point before a sentence of death was carried out: about 10 percent so sentenced were so reprieved. Nevertheless, Tudor England executed about 800 people annually.

  As this implies, discretion, community feeling, and an awareness of individual circumstances were part of how the law was carried out: victims prosecuted, JPs indicted, and juries convicted as much on the reputation and circumstances of the accused as they did on the evidence. We see this in the case of those laws designed to regulate personal morality and enforce community standards of behavior by attacking, as one historian has put it, “boozing, brawling and the begetting of bastards.”35 The number of such laws multiplied rapidly between 1550 and 1650, in part because of pressure from Puritans, in part because of growing upper-class anxiety over disorder generally. They included the Act of Uniformity and Acts against recusancy, drunkenness, sexual license and illegitimacy, illegal begging and vagrancy, and unlicensed alehouses. A series of lower courts with overlapping jurisdictions enforced these laws: quarter sessions (meeting four times a year) and petty sessions, presided over by JPs; borough courts in towns; manorial courts in the country; and archdeacon’s and other ecclesiastical courts for moral offenses. Punishments were intended to shame the perpetrators and intimidate would-be imitators. For example, adulterers or fornicators might be paraded around town in a cart or tied to a post in the market and whipped.

  Still, cooperation with these laws was not always easy to obtain. Take the regulation of alehouses. The ease of brewing ale was (and is) such that almost anyone could open their house as a “pub.” A government survey of 1577 found some 15,000 alehouses; by the 1630s that number had doubled. One further reason for this was that alehouses grew increasingly important as community centers after the Reformation. That is, when the newly reformed churches withdrew from hosting wakes, wedding receptions, church ales, and other social events, the alehouses stepped in, with one difference. Whereas the whole community might gather at the church for such events, the local elite would not, generally, enter an alehouse. Alehouses were associated not only with drinking, but also with other, even more dubious activities such as music-making, dancing, gambling, and, in some cases, prostitution and the fencing of goods, not to mention the violence and disorder that always accompanied such pursuits. Consequently, critics viewed the alehouse as the enemy of family life and church attendance. Thus Christopher Hudson opined in 1631: “Alehouses are the nests of Satan where the owls of impiety lurk and where all evil is hatched.”36

  Little wonder that the ruling elite sought to regulate alehouses. From the reign of Edward VI on, the government required such establishments to be licensed by the local JP. This initiative was largely unsuccessful: a survey of 40 townships in Worcestershire in the 1630s reveals the existence of 81 licensed alehouses, and 52 unlicensed. Things were much worse in Lancashire by 1647, where the 83 licensed alehouses were outnumbered by the 143 unlicensed houses. Obviously, in an age without a police force, the local country gentleman could not look into every cottage which opened its door to the thirsty. The constables responsible for closing down unregulated alehouses confronted two conflicting concepts of order – the elite’s concern for regulation and authority and their fellow villagers’ concern for consensus and neighborliness – not to mention some angry drinkers! On a deeper level, the example of alehouses reveals the limits of royal and aristocratic authority: if the community as a whole rejected a law, that law was virtually unenforceable. Ordinary men and women may have been deferential, but only up to a point.

  Perhaps the most notorious form of social deviance addressed by the law concerned witchcraft. Contrary to popular belief, witchcraft accusations were not very common during the Middle Ages and there was no statute against the practice until 1542.37 But between about 1560 and 1640 there was an epidemic of witchcraft accusations and prosecutions in England. Historians have studied this phenomenon in the hope that it may tell us something new about the nature of the Reformation, relations between the genders, and the village communities which produced these disputes. Numerous explanations have been offered. Some see the trend as having been inspired by the rise of the Puritans, though it has been demonstrated that Puritans were no more afraid of witches than other Christians. Others have seen the increase of witchcraft prosecutions as a means of asserting male supremacy over women, since men were almost never accused. It may or may not be a significant counter-argument that at least half the witnesses and accusers were other women. A variant feminist argument contends that women were forced by a patriarchal society to use witchcraft accusations to compete with other women in disputes over reputation and the control of female social space.

  Perhaps the most suggestive explanation for the rise of witchcraft accusations was offered in 1971 by Keith Thomas in Religion and the Decline of Magic.38 Thomas’s argument operates on many levels. At the simplest level, he noted that medieval (Catholic) religion had provided consolation for the ever-present disasters and high death rate in pre-modern England, while that of the Reformation did not. In particular, Catholicism offered remedies in the form of prayers and rituals which, according to Catholic belief, were efficacious. That is, you prayed to St. Margaret, the patron saint of childbirth, to be safely delivered; to St. Oswald, associated in some places with shepherding, to protect your sheep. If you thought yourself bewitched, you could ask the priest for an exorcism. The Reformation continued to emphasize Satan’s great power, but it abolished the beliefs and practices which had been used to fight him, leaving early modern English people feeling alone and helpless in the face of misfortune. No wonder that they feared the evil magic of witches and found it a persuasive explanation for misfortune.

  But this does not explain why the accused witch was usually female, old, poor, widowed or single, and well known to her accuser. Typically, a poorer, older woman would approach a neighbor for assistance, especially so after the Reformation when the economy began to slump and monasteries and other institutions which had looked after such individuals were largely abolished. Such a beggar, if turned away, might mutter a curse which, given the precarious nature of early modern life, might seem, later, to have come true – hence the subsequent accusation. Thomas’s argument places the focus on the better-off accuser, whose new self-interested worldview rubbed up against an older notion of community, creating guilt and, at times, recourse to accusation and the law. Historians have not taken Thomas’s theory as the last word on the subject. But it does serve to remind us of the power of religious belief to explain the unexplainable; the potential of national economic trends
to affect individual lives; the precarious place of women in the local community; and the narrowness and cruelty of which the village neighborhood was capable.

  Finally, the village community could transgress the law en masse. The most obvious way in which this happened was in revolt or riot. Popular revolt – as opposed to the rebellions led by aristocrats detailed in previous chapters – was a much less serious problem for the later Tudors and early Stuarts than it had been for their predecessors. Much more common during this period were individual riots, although some historians see a political sub-text in nearly all such demonstrations. Riots may be divided (albeit not exclusively) according to motivation: those, usually based in London, directed against some ethnic or national group; “calendar” riots associated with particular festivals and times of year; demonstrations by unpaid or demobilized soldiers or sailors; and, finally, food or enclosure riots. The first were the result of the xenophobia and anti-Catholicism for which the English were infamous during the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Often, apprentices would attack a foreign merchant or the entourage of a continental ambassador. For example, on July 13, 1618 a crowd of some 4,000 to 5,000 people besieged the Spanish ambassador’s house in London after one of his servants accidentally knocked over a child in Chancery Lane. In the end, the authorities persuaded them to disperse, but other incidents ended in violence and bloodshed.

  A second common excuse for riot was a festival gone out of hand. The most famous example of this is the riots which traditionally occurred in London on Shrove Tuesday or during the Easter season. From the late Elizabethan period into the 1670s young men, usually apprentices, attacked the brothels and playhouses concentrated in London’s suburbs. These riots were large, sometimes involving hundreds, even thousands, of persons. They were also highly ritualized: the rioters were very specific in their targets and behavior, destroying property but not, generally, assaulting persons. Other, smaller, demonstrations might occur during or immediately after wartime when soldiers or sailors assaulted government officials, demanding their pay.

  Food or enclosure riots generally happened in times of high food prices, when the community’s well-being was thought to be jeopardized: examples occurred in Gloucester in 1586, Kent, Somerset, and Sussex in 1596–7, in London throughout the 1590s, in the Midlands in 1607, and throughout southern England in 1630–1. They often began with women, who were, of course, especially concerned with putting food on the table. They were directed against middlemen such as grain sellers, corn factors, and millers. Unlike the ethnic riots mentioned above, these demonstrations were usually non-violent, involving theatrical or ritualized gestures and symbols rather than bloodshed: marching, burnings in effigy, cross-dressing, rough music, pulling down fences, even the ritual plowing or planting of an enclosed field. Sometimes tenants went on rent-strike or occupied disputed land. Clearly, these activities were meant to grab the attention of the ruling elite, inform them of a grievance, and remind them of their paternalistic duties. They were not meant to unhinge the prevailing social order: in fact, enclosure rioters sometimes carried copies of royal proclamations against that hated practice and they often petitioned the local lord or JP for redress. Still, the implied threat of mob violence must always have been apparent to such authority figures. Perhaps because they were outnumbered; perhaps because there was no standing army and the militia was ineffective against its own neighbors; perhaps because, as good paternalists, they often saw the rioters’ point of view, they frequently punished the gouging merchants or even, very occasionally, the enclosing landlord. A ringleader might be prosecuted, even hanged, but the vast majority of rioters were rarely punished severely. In this case, the village community asserted itself against the local elite or its subordinate allies and, sometimes, in the short term, won.

  This may seem surprising given the Tudor reputation for savage reprisals against rebels and traitors. But rebellion and treason threatened the fabric of the national political order. Local bread and enclosure riots did not. Rather, they may have reinforced that fabric by reasserting the role of the king and the ruling elite to guide the economy. The inhabitants of early modern England – both elite and non-elite – seem to have known when to apply violence and when not to do so; generally, it was a last resort. Rioting was a necessary safety valve which the upper classes were careful and wise not to try to shut off completely. By not doing so, by, instead, redressing the immediate grievances of the rioters, the ruling class enhanced their reputation as paternal rulers and protectors, and so encouraged deference.

  What of those who could not succeed or would not conform to the patriarchal, pastoral “paradise” outlined above? Were there no alternatives to neighborly charity, the Poor Law, or the local pillory? Of course there were; for starters, they could go to town.

  Cities and Towns

  In 1603, as in the Middle Ages, cities and towns represented freedom, an alternative social order, and economic opportunity borne of a developing capitalistic market economy. As we have seen, one alternative to the Poor Law was to take to – or be forced onto – the roads, which helps to explain the rising percentage of English men and women living in cities and towns. It has been estimated that by 1550 some 10 percent of English and Welsh people lived in cities of 2,000 or more inhabitants. For our purposes, urban England may be divided into market and county towns, provincial capitals, and London. Salisbury in Wiltshire, Dorchester in Dorset, and Rye in Sussex were good examples of market or county towns. A market town might have about 1,000 people; the county town, seat of the shire or diocese, perhaps several thousand people. But both would swell during a fair, after harvest time, or, in the case of a county town, during the assizes. There were only a few provincial capitals in England: Newcastle-upon-Tyne and York in the North, Norwich in East Anglia, and Bristol and Exeter in the West Country. Such cities held between 10,000 and 13,000 people ca. 1600 and had complex economies. They might trade with London or even be involved in international trade. Some towns specialized: Sheffield, Yorkshire was famous for its cutlery, Wigan, Lancashire for pewter. All such towns were connected to the countryside: yeomen and husbandmen brought their grain to sell, minor nobles and gentry came to attend meetings of the assize courts and quarter sessions, their sons to attend schools. Thus, these urban centers were closely linked to the rural social Chain, even if they were not part of it.

  The reason they were not fully integrated into the traditional Chain of social ranks was that they had long before developed their own hierarchies, based not on birth or land but on mercantile and professional wealth. Since wealth fluctuates and may desert one family as it attaches itself to another, there was more economic, social, and even political mobility in town than in the countryside. At least that’s what people thought. Most people knew the myth about Dick Whittington (ca. 1350–1423), a poor but industrious kitchen scullion from the country who was supposed to have risen to be lord mayor of London through sheer dint of hard work. When later historians examined the facts, it turned out that Whittington was, indeed, lord mayor of London for three terms, but that, far from starting out poor, he had come from a Gloucester landowning family and had been apprenticed to a mercer, a trade which dealt in luxury fabrics. Perhaps the point is that cities were thought to be wide open centers of opportunity. In reality most were, like each county community, dominated by an oligarchy.

  In most towns, the corporation headed that oligarchy. The corporation consisted of the mayor, the town’s council or court of aldermen, and various officers like the recorder (secretary) or chamberlain (treasurer). These officials administered civic government, enforced order, regulated trade, and, generally, made the law. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, they gave orders to keep the streets lit and clear of refuse, to contain the plague, and to facilitate poor relief. If the town sent representatives to Parliament, the corporation were frequently the only townsmen who had a vote. In general, they comprised the oldest and wealthiest mercantile families and their
rule was self-perpetuating. That is, they alone could appoint to vacancies on the aldermanic council and they were careful to name their own family members. To further secure their privileged position, they often intermarried and, increasingly in the sixteenth century, sought royal charters enshrining their privileges. They also did their best to maintain good political and social relations with the local aristocracy while trying, at the same time, to preserve their town’s independence of it.

  Just below the corporation in the town government hierarchy were the guilds or (as they were called in London) livery companies. At the end of the sixteenth century, each small town generally had one guild consisting of all of its merchants and craftsmen. In a big town there would be guilds or companies for each trade or craft. Guilds had arisen in the Middle Ages because the Church was hostile to the idea of an unregulated market in labor and products, and suspicious of the pursuit of wealth for its own sake. In theory the guild sought to limit the wild swings of fortune associated with capitalism by acting as a combination of Better Business Bureau, trade association for standards and practices, lobbying group, fraternity, and mutual aid society all wrapped up into one. Thus, the guild set prices, wages, and standards of workmanship on locally made products. Consistent with their original association with the Church, guilds also founded schools and hospitals for members and their children and they tended to look after widows of deceased guildsmen. As in the Middle Ages, one had to be a member of the local guild (a “freeman,” i.e., “free of the guild”) to set up a shop and pursue trade. Unfortunately, getting into one could be difficult. Guilds were often accused of using high entry fines and strict (or arbitrary) standards of workmanship to keep membership low and, therefore, profits high. Moreover, in most towns only guild members were considered full citizens, though in some towns this encompassed most men. These freemen elected various lesser officers which kept the town running and in some big towns they, not just the corporation, voted for the MPs. As the sixteenth century wore on, the guild, full of small merchants and tradesmen, often found its economic and political interests at odds with those of the big merchants in the town’s corporation, not least because of the widening gap in wealth between the two groups. Moreover, the constant traffic of migrants made it more difficult for the guild to maintain its control of trade. Increasing numbers of merchants sought to avoid guild control by setting up their shops just outside the town’s walls and, therefore, the guild’s jurisdiction.