A Brief History of Britain 1485–1660

by Hutton, Ronald

  Even so, parliamentary processes themselves were not wholly out of reach of ordinary people. Most often, the county and city elites would decide amongst themselves which of their number would occupy seats in any election: only in a minority of cases, before 1640, did they quarrel amongst themselves and put up rival candidates, thereby permitting an election. None the less, that minority could amount to scores of contests, and here the electors were decisive. There were a few boroughs in which all householders could vote, and in the counties anybody could do so who owned land worth at least £2 per annum. Inflation turned that into an increasingly easy qualification during the Tudor period, while the lack of an electoral register potentially enabled large numbers to vote who actually failed to achieve it. Although social mobility was limited, there were genuine opportunities for people to better themselves: London apprentices had a seven to one chance in favour of becoming householders in their own right, while a third of them went on to join the elite companies which dominated the trades of the city. Government in post-Reformation England was expanding and deepening, rather than centralizing: the state represented a growing reservoir of authority on which people drew for their own needs. The early modern English were both subjects and citizens.

  During the reign of Elizabeth, the Privy Council, Parliaments, justices and parish officers worked together to apply the old principle of progressive taxation to the growing problems of poverty, hunger and social polarization. The impetus came from the council, drawing on local models, to produce a system by which the richer members of each parish paid a rate to keep the poor and helpless in it from starving. It was completed in law by 1600, and slowly put into action during the following century, being mostly in place by 1660. Inefficient and corrupt it could certainly be, but it was the best national provision of relief in its age, and must have done much to take the social tension out of economic hardship. From the 1600s onwards, there was also an ever-widening escape route from poverty in England, not available to most Europeans: to go overseas, to Ireland or to the English colonies in North America, where better conditions might obtain.

  At the same time, society continued to be bonded together by the fact that the royal government would at times apparently act against the rich on behalf of their social inferiors. Once more, a test issue was enclosure. Almost 100 years after Wolsey had first set the example of going after landlords who took away common rights, royal government was still acting upon it. In 1607, rioting against new enclosures of common land affected three Midland counties. The Crown responded exactly as Wolsey had done, with a commission of enquiry, which reported back that in many cases the grievances of the rioters had been just. The guilty landowners were duly prosecuted by royal officials, and the Earl of Lincoln was the most eminent of a succession of them to suffer heavy fines. The harvest failures of 1629–31 produced another spate of protests, which the government followed up once again. This time it was Lord Brudenell who was the most prominent of a series of gentry punished by the state after popular complaints. He had enclosed common land with a view to converting it to sheep pasture, a form of farming which required little labour and would therefore tend automatically to reduce employment and increase poverty. When fining him in the royal Court of Star Chamber, the reigning Archbishop of Canterbury accused him of having ‘devoured the people with a shepherd and a dog’.

  The government always ordered the suppression of rioting as well, and the arrest of those who had instigated it. Those ringleaders were by definition few; after a particularly serious riot at Malden in Essex, during 1629, eight people were indicted out of 300 involved. Their treatment followed a highly significant pattern. If, on investigation, they were shown to have confined themselves to urging others to break down harmful enclosures, or stop grain from being hoarded or exported, then they were rebuked and bound over to keep the peace; and the bonds specified were usually small and not always actually demanded. If, on the other hand, they had incited others to steal grain, or denounced landowners in general, and the society and governmental systems with which they were associated, then they were put to death. In 1596 two young men in Oxfordshire decided to lead a popular rebellion that would overthrow the local gentry, and then move on London. After just two others turned up to support them, they called off the plan; but news of it leaked, and all involved were arrested. The two leaders died in prison, apparently of the treatment that they received there, and two of their friends were hanged, drawn and quartered as traitors. As John Walter has pointed out, having thus turned a farcical episode into a horrific example, the central government went on to fine the local gentry whose treatment of commoners had provoked such local hatred, and to put a new law against enclosure through the next Parliament, to address one of the grievances concerned.

  When all this is said, there remain some spectacular cases in which the Crown united with landowners in actions which were contrary to the interests of commoners, and provoked violent reactions. These tended to be in areas marginal to the main economic centres of the nation, which were subordinated to what was perceived to be the national good. One consisted of the Fens, the marshes dividing East Anglia from the Midlands, and represented underused land which, during a time of population growth and food shortage, could be drained and converted into rich arable land. During the 1620s and 1630s many of the landowners there, including the king, commenced this work. It ran counter to the interests of the Fenlanders themselves, from middle-rank landowners downwards, who relied on the marshland for grazing, and its vegetable and animal products. They responded by destroying the new works and by taking the developers to court, only to be punished for the riots and defeated in the legal actions. They merely bided their time, however, and on each occasion on which the central government became distracted by war or rebellion thereafter, they demolished the drainage works again, and the farms erected on the reclaimed land. Gradually, as the century wore on, they were given a share in the profits of the improvement projects, or compensation for loss of rights. Where they were not, the cost of maintaining the schemes in the face of local hostility eventually rendered them no longer viable.

  Even more striking are the events that occurred simultaneously in the royal forests of Wiltshire, Somerset and Dorset. There the Crown likewise attempted to combine its own enrichment with that of the nation by having the land enclosed and divided up for agricultural exploitation. It took care to reconcile local opinion by giving all who owned land, including smallholders, a cut of the proceeds. What it did not take into account was that the forests also contained a large population of landless people who lived by cottage industry partly dependent on forest products. They could find nobody except a few very minor gentry to take up their cause, but when enclosure began they resisted it ferociously. The combined forces of central and local government needed years to quell the initial outbreak of rioting and, just as in the Fens, local people proceeded to attack the ‘improvements’ again at every point during the next three decades at which the attention of the authorities was distracted. They also eventually won their cause, either by forcing the abandonment of the schemes or by being awarded compensation.

  Even as they fought every institution and body to which they had been accustomed to defer, the commoners, like earlier rebels, still sought to preserve the fabric of the normal political and social order. Where they could find no leaders who had any inherent status, they awarded fictional titles, usually military, to those who came forward. The chief coordinator of the 1607 Midland riots was called ‘Captain Pouch’, while those who performed the same function in the western forests were nicknamed ‘Lady Skimmington’. This expression was normally applied to the mock processions and pieces of street theatre used to mock and humiliate individuals who offended the morality of their local communities: wife-beaters, husband-naggers, petty thieves and so forth. The men to whom it was applied were seen as reminding the Crown of its misdeeds in a similar fashion. The symbols and rituals adopted by those involved in such resistance reveal an int
ense preoccupation with spurious legality. By copying the trappings of normal authority, they felt able to take actions which, in a just world, ought to have been taken by their social superiors on their behalf. Thus the forms of law and order could be observed while the reality was suspended.

  At the Wiltshire village of Great Wishford, the rioters drilled like militiamen, with red feathers and badges as insignia, before destroying the local enclosures. In another part of that county, having learned that the legal definition of riot consisted of an action committed by three or more persons, they formed into couples for the same work. In the Fens, locals started a fund to pay for lawyers to plead their case in London. At one community in that region, the village men kicked a football across a recently drained land, calling it their customary pitch, and demolished all the works that they found in the way of their game. In the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, commoners paraded and burned effigies of the enclosing gentry before attacking their hedges and fences. Those of Feckenham Forest, Worcestershire, donned masks for the act of demolition, not to conceal their identities, which were obvious, but to become impersonal agents of justice even as public executioners masked their faces before performing their duties. In Braydon Forest, Wiltshire, men put on women’s clothes before proceeding to the work of destruction, again as part of a process of distancing themselves from their normal roles. Enclosure rioters in the Welsh valley of Ystrad Marchell, Montgomeryshire, did exactly the same thing, without any sign of communication between the two; these were a symbolic action that ran deep enough to be instinctive. Both forms of response, the giving of spurious titles to leaders and the donning of ritual dress for riot, were to last far into the nineteenth century, when Captain Swing led southern English labourers against the new farm machinery and the Rebecca rioters donned frocks to attack turnpike gates on Welsh highways. They have, indeed, not wholly disappeared, as anybody who witnessed one of the protests against road-building schemes in the 1990s will be aware.

  Thus, as the great age of popular rebellion passed away during the Elizabethan period, the same mechanisms of protest, resistance and negotiation remained in action, but at the level of riot rather than of revolt. They served a social order that was certainly unequal and unjust by modern standards, but was by those of early modern Europe remarkably tough and flexible, with relatively responsible social elites and responsive central government, and normally dutiful commoners who were prepared to defend their own interests by both legal means and direct physical action when threatened. It saw its people through some of the worst economic conditions that Europe has ever experienced.

  Crime and Poverty

  By the European standards of the age, Wales and Scotland had only an average level of violence, while England was remarkably peaceful. Travellers did not seem to worry greatly about being robbed or killed on English roads or streets. In Essex, a county with perfect legal records for the period, twenty-five parishes never experienced any accusations of felony at all between 1560 and 1640, while very few suffered a rate of them greater than one every two years. This was partly because of good policing, constables and magistrates being both local and numerous in every district. At the remote hill town of Kirkby Lonsdale, in Westmorland, they represented 35 individuals out of a total adult male population of 200. If the English of the period wanted to cause injury, their means to do so were limited: the evidence of wills is that by 1600 nine-tenths of the population owned no weapons at all except knives, which were intended not for defence but for mealtimes. When affected by crime, commoners did not turn to noblemen for protection, as happened across much of the Continent, but reported the problem to their neighbours, who normally included a constable. Murders were no longer avenged by blood feuds, but by legal prosecutions. On the other hand, even England was a violent place by modern standards. It seems, in fact, to have been getting ever less dangerous since legal records begin: so that homicide cases between 1560 and 1640 ran at three to ten times the present level per head of population, but at half that of the thirteenth century. Violence had also become steadily more of a domestic matter: in the fourteenth century, 8 per cent of recorded homicides took place within the family, while by the seventeenth the level had risen to 20 per cent and it reached 50 per cent during the twentieth.

  These overall trends, however, conceal important short-term fluctuations. In particular, there was a surge in recorded homicides and thefts between 1560 and 1620, marking the worst point of the pressure exerted by population growth and inflation. Contemporaries were conscious of living in a ‘crime wave’, and often deeply concerned with it. Their response was what Keith Wrightson, in the 1970s, called ‘the Reformation of Manners’: a systematic campaign by various county and urban magistrates to regulate and improve local social conditions. It included severe punishments for non-marital sex and the bearing of bastard children, which together threatened to increase the number of children without a family structure to feed and clothe them; attempts to relieve the poor and stop vagrancy; campaigns to abolish traditional parish feasts and festivities at which drunkenness, violence and fornication might all occur; and the regulation and closure of alehouses. There were certainly a great number of alehouses around: one was counted for every ninety-five people in Essex in 1644 and for every fifty-seven in Lancashire in 1647, and both those estimates were made after the systematic closure of many more. They multiplied as poverty grew, being both a means by which those who ran them could make a living and by which those who used them could drown their sorrows. They also, however, nurtured alcoholism and illness and consumed grain which could otherwise be turned into bread. It is hard to separate the economic from the religious elements in the ‘Reformation of Manners’. Areas such as East Sussex could contain numerous religious Puritans while never instituting a programme of social reform, while towns which did undertake one were sometimes shrinking rather than suffering the strains of expansion. None the less, it does seem that the pressures of religious change and population and price rises combined in general to produce the necessary climate in which local campaigns to reform behaviour could occur.

  The Scottish Lowlands were subjected in the same period to a much more intensive Reformation of Manners than England, striking at much the same targets. The difference was that the campaigns there were supported more vigorously by parliamentary legislation, and had a perfect local vehicle in the parish kirk sessions, which functioned both as commissions of enquiry and as courts in trying and sentencing offenders to penance and changed behaviour. Between 1560 and 1600 the sessions at St Andrews, on average, judged a sexual offence once every fortnight, in addition to those of drunkenness, sabbath-breaking, and so forth. The stool on which sinners sat in church to show their repentance and be shamed became as central an icon of Scottish Protestantism as the pulpit. These penances were enforced with notable equality on both women and men, and reinforced by fines which were imposed in proportion to the wealth of those punished. In addition, the same kirk sessions sought to arbitrate quarrels between neighbours and within families, especially in cases of defamation, and enforce paternal responsibilities. Whether such sustained campaigns actually made a difference to social behaviour cannot be proved – the number of offences itself calls this into some doubt. They certainly made their mark on formal attitudes, slowly establishing a stolid disapproval of the activities stigmatized by kirk sessions as hallmark of proper conduct among at least the Lowland Scottish gentry (called lairds) and wealthier townspeople, which was clearly present by the early seventeenth century. The elders who sat in the sessions became actively sought after as solvers of local social problems. All things considered, the social and religious reformation that took place in early modern Scotland was the most profound in the British Isles, and one of the most intensive in Europe.

  In both nations the policing system worked because criminals were seen as disruptors of the whole community. Victims would instigate their own investigations, aided by fellow parishioners who would include constables, and the r
esult was usually a settlement out of court: legal actions were a last resort. The people who actually got prosecuted tended to be strangers, newcomers or individuals with a particularly bad reputation. Once in court, these people were also the most vulnerable. In Wiltshire between 1600 and 1640, 68 per cent of locals accused of theft were convicted, but 93 per cent of outsiders. Likewise, it was those who offended repeatedly who got hanged. During the course of the early modern period, courts became more and more reluctant to take life: roughly half of those who were sentenced to death in England between 1547 and 1553 actually suffered the penalty, but only a quarter between 1603 and 1625 and a tenth between 1702 and 1714. The disappearance of the death penalty in modern Britain was a process with very long roots. Prison sentences were rarely handed out, because local government could not afford the cost of keeping the town and village jails clean, warm and dry enough to avoid killing any long-term residents. They were employed instead as holding pens for people awaiting trial. The usual alternative to hanging was flogging, increasingly replaced, as the seventeenth century progressed, by transportation to the new English colonies across the Atlantic.