As the web thickened, the price-revolution came to be elaborately embedded in entire economic systems, and social conflicts began to grow. The Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation shattered the most important unifying institution in the Western world—the Christian church. Religious conflicts of great violence broke out, and continued through a period that corresponded almost exactly to the years of the price-revolution. These two movements— Reformation and price-revolution—were connected. In Germany, many historians have found evidence that the rapid spread of the Protestant Reformation and also the Peasants’ War were closely linked to increasing economic stress, caused by population growth and price inflation.48
Figure 2.11 shows that in the period from 1544 to 1627 a growing proportion of English tenants became landless (or held less than two acres) in three villages of Cambridgeshire: Chippenham on chalk soil in East Cambridgeshire, Orwell on clay soil in West Cambridgeshire, and Willingham in the fens near the Isle of Ely. All percentages are computed from Margaret Spufford’s tabulations of survey data except Chippenham in 1636, which is estimated from a survey of landowning in that year and evidence of total population. The source is Margaret Spufford, Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1974), 73, 100, 149.
These linkages appeared in Belgium and the Netherlands during the 1560s, when Calvinism suddenly spread from one city to the next in the so-called Iconoclast disorders. Mobs of newly converted Calvinists attacked Catholic churches, smashing the sacred artifacts that were hated symbols of the old religion.49 Historians have concluded that the Iconoclast movement was directly linked to economic instabilities, and particularly to a sudden surge in grain prices in the Netherlands from 1564 to 1566.50 Similar connections between religious conflicts and economic fluctuations were also observed in England, France, Switzerland and Scandinavia from 1558 to 1640.51
The causal connection between economic and religious movements was highly complex. In some instances, price disturbances operated as a direct determinant of religious events—as with the Dutch and Belgian Iconoclasts. In others, religious disturbances led to price fluctuations during the major wars of the Protestant Reformation. In general, it might be said that both the Reformation and Counter Reformation on the one hand, and the price-revolution on the other, were parallel expressions of deep imbalances in European society.
From Imbalances to Instability
In the late sixteenth century, dangerous instabilities began to develop in European society. Prices surged and declined in broad swings of increasing amplitude. A case in point was the price of grain in England, which rose very sharply in great surges during the 1540s, 1570s, 1590s and 1620s. Intervening decades were marked by periods of sudden price-decline, which were sometimes equally disruptive. Similar patterns appeared in the prices of many commodities throughout Europe. The effect on social and economic relationships was profoundly unsettling.
Historian Y. S. Brenner observes that “while grain prices continued to rise gradually as the sixteenth century progressed, their yearly fluctuations became more severe.” He concludes that this pattern was “consistent with the price behavior which is to be expected if a market’s equilibrium between supply and demand is upset.”52
The price of grain rose and fell sharply from one harvest to the next, in a manner that was similar to price movements in the thirteenth century. As early as 1529, a major famine occurred throughout Europe. Its effects were especially severe in northern Italy. The city of Venice, with its huge granaries, was overrun by hungry peasants from the countryside. A Venetian wrote, “Give alms to two hundred and as many again appear. You cannot walk down a street or stop in a square or church without multitudes surrounding you to beg for charity: you see hunger written in their faces, their eyes like gemless rings, the wretchedness of their bodies with skins shaped only by bones. . . . many villages in the direction of the Alps have become completely uninhabited.”53
Conditions worsened toward the end of the century. The greatest suffering occurred in the period from 1594 to 1597, when four harvests failed in a row. Much of Europe experienced a cruel famine which was long remembered as “the great dearth.”
With famine came epidemic disease. Rates of mortality fluctuated through the long period of the price-revolution. When death rates fell several years running, prices increased and wages declined. On the other hand, when death rates rose, prices declined and wages increased. This happened in England during the 1550s, when epidemics took an exceptionally heavy toll— killing as many as 20 percent of the population in a five year period.54
Some were quick to profit from these misfortunes by speculation and the hoarding of scarce commodities. A dramatic example occurred in the cities of Ghent, Antwerp, and Lille during the years 1565 and 1566, when the Danish sound was closed to grain ships, and a major famine occurred in the Low Countries. One of Antwerp’s richest merchants, Pauwels van Dale, bought large quantities of grain and kept it off the market to drive its price still higher. In September, 1565, while the poor were literally starving in the streets of Antwerp, the warehouse of Pauwels van Dale was so packed with grain that the building collapsed. A wild riot broke out and spread through the city.
Similar events occurred elsewhere. At Malines, the houses of grain speculators were marked with blood. Riots occurred in Ghent, Lille and other towns—an expression of popular rage against speculators and monopoleurs who not only profited from price fluctuations, but also made them worse.55
Hoarding and speculation spread widely through Europe in time of scarcity. They were done not only by merchants, but also by noble families and even monarchs. In Russia, historian Jerome Blum writes, “the price rise of this period was aggravated by the engrossing of goods by wealthy men, including the Tsar, who sought to benefit financially from the shortage.”56
Figure 2.12 compares wheat prices with major famines and plagues in England. The sources are the Bowden series of wheat prices in England, in W. G. Hoskins, The Age of Plunder (London, 1976), 87, 246–47; and Andrew Appleby, Famine in Tudor and Stuart England (Stanford, 1978), 95–154.
Monetary factors became yet another source of instability. European states and sovereigns tinkered endlessly with their coinage during the sixteenth century, sometimes inflating the value of their coins, sometimes deflating them again. In England, an inflationary “great debasement” from 1541 to 1551 drove prices higher. This was followed by a “great recoinage” in 1561, which had the opposite effect. By and large, debasements became more common than recoinages. The monetary policies of the European monarchs added momentum to the price-revolution, and increased its instability. A dangerous cyclical relationship developed. High prices forced governments to debase their currency; debasement in turn drove prices higher. The wheel kept spinning round and round.
Moralists preached against these practices. Merchants protested angrily. Even satirists added their mite. When the weight of silver in English testons was reduced by a third, the coins were ordered to be “blanched” or washed with a wafer-thin coat of silver so that the portrait of Henry VIII would remain bright and shiny. As they passed from hand to hand, the copper core quickly showed through, and gave the king a distinctly ruddy complexion. A poet wrote:
These testons look red, how like you the same?
’Tis a token of grace; they blush for shame.57
Figure 2.13 compares debasements of English money with the Phelps-Brown-Hopkins index of consumable prices in southern England (1451-75=100). The evidence indicates that debasements caused inflationary surges but did not drive the underlying trend. Sources include G. D. Gould, The Great Debasement (Oxford, 1970); C. E. Challis, The Tudor Coinage (Manchester, 1978); and Henry Phelps Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins, A Perspective of Wages and Prices (New York, 1981).
A related source of instability arose from international flows of specie. Europe in the late sixteenth century was awash with money, which sloshed back and forth from one sove
reignty to another. Many contemporaries attributed the movement of prices primarily to international trade and the balance of payments. Sir Francis Drake’s raids had a similar effect by different means. They removed from the Spanish economy between one and two million pounds (of which £600,000 were silver and gold bullion) and brought it to England between 1577 and 1580.58
Economic imbalances engendered political instabilities. Spain in the reigns of Charles V (1516–1556) and Philip II (1556–1598) was the strongest state in Europe. Like many other great powers, even to our own time, it fell into the fatal habit of deficit spending, and was finally reduced to a fiscal condition that historian J. H. Elliott describes as “chronic bankruptcy.” At least six times between 1557 and 1647, the Spanish government went bankrupt, and found itself unable to meet its obligations or to borrow further. These fiscal crises occurred every twenty years with remarkable regularity—1557, 1575, 1596, 1607, 1627, 1647. Spanish historian Vicens Vives writes, “the vicious cycle was complete: the larger the state’s debts became, the harder it was to meet them.”59 Other states were caught in the same cycle. Deficit financing was not invented in the twentieth century. In England, France and Germany, rulers became chronic debtors.60
These instabilities were deepened by the effect of war. The two steepest surges of inflation in the 1540s and 1590s were periods of heavy military spending. Here was yet another vicious circle between economic imbalances, political instability, and war.61
The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century
During the decade of the 1590s, the price-revolution entered a new stage—a prolonged and very painful period that historians call the “general crisis of the seventeenth century.” They use that name with good reason. This was the darkest era in European history after the catastrophe of the fourteenth century.1
The first signs were similar to those of the medieval crisis. During the last quarter of the sixteenth century, the economy of Europe was afflicted by the same cruel combination of rising prices and falling opportunities that neoclassical economists would call “stagflation” in the late twentieth century. The economy of England was a case in point. Historian Barry Supple writes, “the last years of Elizabeth’s reign can no longer be considered as a prosperous era of economic expansion.” He finds evidence of a deep economic depression in the 1580s and 1590s. At the same time, prices of consumables rose even more rapidly than before.2
Conditions differed in detail throughout Europe, but the general trends were much the same. Real wages and industrial prices were depressed, while the cost of food and fuel climbed higher, and also became highly unstable—rising and falling in sharp surges of increasing amplitude. The real wages of artisans and laborers fell farther behind the cost of living, while returns to land and capital continued to advance. Wealth became increasingly concentrated in a few hands. That tendency engendered Francis Bacon’s epigram: “Money is like muck, not good except it be spread around.” But the wealth of Europe was not spread around in the late sixteenth century. The rich grew richer, while increasing numbers of the poor were driven very near the edge of starvation.3
Figure 2.14 shows that harvest prices became more dangerously volatile as the price revolution approached its climax. It compares average annual prices of wheat, barley and oats with a 31-year moving average. The source is C. J. Harrison, “Grain Price Analysis and Harvest Qualities, 1465–1634,” Agricultural History Review 19 (1971) 135–55, building on W. G. Hoskins, “Harvest Fluctuations and English Economic History, 1480–1619,” ibid., 12 (1964) 28–46; and “Harvest Fluctuations and English Economic History, 1620-1759,” ibid., 16 (1968) 15-31; and P. Bowden, “Statistical Appendix,” in Joan Thirsk, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, IV, 814-70.
As these very dangerous trends continued, the western world experienced a major disaster. In 1591, the weather turned wet and cold. European peasants watched helplessly as their wheat and rye were beaten down in the fields, and their hay crops rotted in the meadows. The same thing happened the next year, and the year after that, and altogether seven years running. In France, the wine harvest was late and small from 1591 to 1597. Grain crops fared even worse. English historian W. G. Hoskins observed, “the 1594 harvest was bad; 1595 was even worse; 1596 was a disaster; 1597 was bad too.”
This was more than merely a short spell of bad weather. It was a shift in the climate—one of several sharp downturns in the early modern era that have been called collectively the “little ice age.” The decade of the 1590s was so cold that Alpine glaciers began to send rivers of ice through inhabited valleys. In 1595 the Giétroz glacier buried the villages of Martigny and killed seventy people. Disasters of the same sort happened at Grindelwald and Chamonix and the Val d’Aosta.4
Similar events had happened before, but in the 1590s they came at a time when the economy was dangerously overstrained. Families had little in reserve. Food riots broke out in many parts of Europe. As the troubles continued, people began to starve. A season of scarcity grew into a massive famine that was called the “great dearth.” There were terrible scenes of suffering in many parts of Europe. A Swede wrote in 1597:
People ground and chopped many unsuitable things into bread such as mash, chaff, bark, buds, nettles, hay, straw, peat moss, nutshells, peastalks, etc. This made people so weak and their bodies so swollen that innumerable people died.
Many widows, too, were found dead on the ground with red hummock grass, seeds which grew in the fields, and other kinds of grass in their mouths.
People were found dead in the houses, under barns, in the ovens of bath houses and wherever they had been able to squeeze in, so that, God knows, there was enough to do getting them to the graveyard, though the dogs ate many of the corpses.
Children starved to death at their mothers’ breast, for they had nothing to give them suck.5
Similar scenes were described in England, Scotland, France, Germany, Scandinavia, Hungary, Russia and Spain.
The great dearth fell cruelly upon the poor, while the rich remained secure in their plenty. In London’s affluent central neighborhoods, the number of burials increased very little during these years; but outlying parishes inhabited by the poor suffered severely. The effect of scarcity was to deepen the material inequalities that were already very great in European culture, and to contribute to growing social instability.6
Another consequence of scarcity was an increase in crime. The pattern was much the same as in the fourteenth century. When the price of food surged, crime increased sharply. When prices fell, criminal acts declined. This correlation was very strong in the later stages of every price-revolution from the Middle Ages to our own time.
These troubles were compounded by the growth of disease. During the great dearth many parts of Europe reported much trouble with the “bloody flux.” This was perhaps not dysentery as many have surmised; similar symptoms are caused by malnutrition. Soon other epidemic diseases spread swiftly through a weakened population. The plague returned to Europe, ravaging its cities and many parts of the countryside. One of the worst outbreaks was the Cantabrian Plague, which killed half a million people in Iberia from 1597 to 1602, then spread to England and other parts of Europe.
Figure 2.15 compares annual indictments for crimes against property in the English county of Essex, with an index of mean annual wheat prices in England (1470-79=100). Indictments are missing for the years 1568, 1575, 1577, 1583, 1596, and 1598-99, and have been added by linear interpolation. The source for indictments is J. S. Cockburn, “The Nature and Incidence of Crime in England, 1559-1625,” in idem, ed., Crime in England, 1550–1800 (Princeton, 1977), 68. Wheat prices are from Joan Thirsk, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, IV, 1500–1640 (Cambridge, 1967), statistical appendix, 865.
As in the fourteenth century, plague did not strike a single blow. It returned again and again, with shattering effect. The region of Angers was an example. In the diocese of Murienne, it was introduced by soldiers returning from a military campaign (a comm
on means of infection). Repeated epidemics followed in 1583–84, 1598, 1626, 1631 and 1639. Of 62 parishes in the diocese, 56 were severely infected. Two parishes (Modane and Aiguebelle) lost more than 40 percent of their inhabitants. In the diocese as a whole, the death rate rose to 80 per thousand—much below the toll of the Black Death in 1348, but twice the normal level.
This was merely one of many epidemic diseases that spread through Europe, which suffered much from visitations of smallpox, diptheria, typhus and other nameless infections. One historian writes that “no century since the fourteenth has a worse record for epidemic disease.”7
At the same time that mortality increased, rates of fertility declined. From northern Germany to southern Spain, the number of inhabitants fell sharply after a long period of growth. In the cathedral of Toledo a clergyman named Sancho de Moncado studied his baptismal registers and found that the number of births dropped from the mid-sixteenth century to 1617 by 50 percent. Moncado observed that this decline happened not because of pestilence or migration, but “because the people cannot support themselves,” as a consequence of scarcity and the soaring cost of food.8
The combined effect of rising mortality and falling fertility caused a reversal of demographic growth in the seventeenth century. This was the only period after the Black Death when the population of Europe actually declined.
As if these sufferings were not enough, a major economic collapse occurred in the period from 1610 to 1622. This was more than merely a cyclical downturn. It was a major break in the secular trend. Historian Ruggiero Romano observed its effects almost everywhere in Europe. In the Baltic, the number of ships passing through the Danish Sound reached its peak near the year 1600, and then after a period of fluctuation declined steadily for more than fifty years. In the Spanish port of Seville, a major entrepot for American trade, the monumental research of Huguette and Pierre Chaunu yielded evidence that total tonnage entering and leaving Seville harbor rose steadily through most of the sixteenth century to a peak in the year 1610; then it fell sharply, and kept on falling for many decades. In Venice, Ragusa, Leghorn and Marseilles, customs duties and anchorage taxes peaked in the early seventeenth century, then declined catastrophically after 1618. In Danzig, the grain trade collapsed after 1619. In England, Italy and Spain, the sale of wool and textiles peaked in the decade 1610–20, then entered a deep depression that continued for half a century. Even the prosperous Low Countries—an exception to many seventeenth-century trends—were caught in this economic collapse. Industrial production began to decline in Amsterdam and Rotterdam after about 1620.9
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