A Brief History of Britain 1485–1660

by Hutton, Ronald

  The central government seems to have been much more scared of disorder than people at a local level, regularly sending out directions to magistrates to show the utmost rigour and severity. One aspect of this anxiety was that the death penalty was extended to thirty more crimes during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (as opposed to just six in the previous 200 years), while the traditional medieval escape-route for the educated – that those who proved themselves able to read were given the ‘benefit of clergy’ and reprieved – was abolished. A pattern was instituted which was to persist until the end of the Georgian period: of more and more offences for which people could hang, accompanied by less and less actual hanging. In some ways, the late Tudor and early Stuart governments were like those of modern banana republics – scared of invasions, conspiracies and the risk that the poor might start talking about social justice. The crucial difference was that early modern England lacked a strong military presence and possessed strong decentralized government, so that actions on the ground were usually characterized by pragmatic common sense.

  The positive aspect of all this anxiety was represented by the English programme of poor relief, which was probably the best in Europe by the mid-seventeenth century. There is a paradox here, because by any test it seems that England had less actual poverty than most other European states of the age. It is true that the English seem to have thought that their problem was much worse than it actually was, but this does not alter the fact that they produced a disproportionate response. The most sensible conclusion is one that draws attention to the unusual density and standardization of administration in the English kingdom: the automatic Tudor reaction to any difficulty was to throw more government at it. By 1540, at the latest, the English had got the idea that social problems were not divinely ordained but could and should be remedied by human intervention. In addition, the country was relatively rich for the age, and so could afford to spend money on social problems, while the Reformation provided a further impetus to state action by removing medieval institutions, such as monasteries, which had dispensed charity. Calculating the actual level of poverty is very difficult. For one thing, contemporary records – tax assessments, rates to equip and pay the militia and rates to relieve the poor – had no standard way of reckoning it. For a second, it was a fluctuating phenomenon. The real problem for most people was underemployment – the ability to find work at some times of the year but not at others and the inability of many employers to pay a wage on which people could support themselves completely. A third difficulty for the historian is that Tudor and Stuart officials were not concerned to aid the poorest people in their communities but the most deserving, those who were too young, old or infirm to work or had too many children to support on their current earnings.

  Overall, poverty does seem to have been worse in towns than in the countryside, where there were more odd jobs available: it is probable that a fifth of the population of the average English town could not support itself in the year 1600, and a tenth of the average village. There were, none the less, some rural black holes, such as a Norfolk village studied by A. L. Beier, where 26.7 per cent of the inhabitants could not feed themselves. The best survey of the problem in the early modern world was made at Norwich, the second city of the realm, in 1570, where it was found that 75 per cent of adult men and 80 per cent of women had jobs. The real issue, however, was that many of these could not survive on the wages that they were paid. Poor relief therefore had to be both flexible and sensitive, paying people supplements to their regular income, especially at certain hard times of the year or the decade. In the cases of people who were chronically out of work or underemployed, the basic response was to aid those who could not labour and drive out the rest. The parish of St Mary, in Warwick, had 245 inhabitants incapable of supporting themselves in 1587, and decided to help 127. The poorer market town of Thirsk, in North Yorkshire, had 161 people in trouble by 1629, and decided that it was able or willing to aid just forty-three of those. The others had to solve their own problems or clear out. Those who were granted aid were expected to pay the price of allowing themselves to be regulated, morally, socially and politically, by those who provided it; although in practice it was rare to suspend relief purely because the recipients were badly behaved. Nor was parish provision usually equivalent to a living wage, so that recipients still commonly needed additional income to survive, which was provided by informal charity and a range of survival strategies such as extended credit, petty pilfering, gleaning and alehouse-keeping.

  North of the Border, we are in a different world. Scotland likewise introduced poor relief measures during the same period, but without the vital element of compulsory rates. The needy were left to local schemes, usually found in towns and based on voluntary collections. By contrast, the Scots did much better in education. From the start of the official Reformation, the Kirk had wanted a school in every parish, for all children over five, supported by the local property-owners. This was slow in coming: a national system was not established until 1616, and it was not made compulsory for forty more years, but it eventually turned the Scots into one of the best-educated nations in Europe. The difference in criminal justice was even more marked in a nation still characterized by decentralized government, strong family bonds and powerful lordship. Much of it was still meted out by a patchwork of local courts dominated by the nobility, while, as Keith Brown has shown, blood feuds remained a regular method of settling scores.

  To carry weapons of war was a sign of pride, and neither the law nor the judges who enforced it were regarded as objective. The power of a lord to protect his kin and tenants was best displayed by his prowess in conducting a quarrel, so that a peaceable one was regarded by his dependants as a weakling who would attract predators, and thus a liability. Feuds were almost always over local matters, such as inheritances, boundaries and revenues, but they could invade the royal court and last for generations. Both sides were usually careful to limit the damage done, so that raiding was selective and episodic. It was also informal, rarely employing the machinery of the state and of political life: nobles simply murdered their rivals instead of getting the Crown to execute them. There was an epidemic of such feuds in the late sixteenth century, the product of the price and population rise coupled with the legacy of the civil wars that followed Mary’s deposition. King James and the Kirk worked between them to bring it under control, and by the early seventeenth century the custom was dying out. It was noted by the 1630s that landowners near Edinburgh, especially lawyers and courtiers who were most in touch with new fashions, were starting to build country houses without fortifications or accommodation for armed retinues.

  None the less, early Jacobean Scotland was a bloodthirsty place. When only four of the eleven murderers of an Earl of Eglinton were killed in reprisal, it was thought that his avengers had shown unusual restraint. The range war between the Cunningham and Montgomery families was relatively restrained, but still devastated the Irvine valley. Unmarried women were temptingly vulnerable targets. Beyond the Highland line, things got still worse. The body count in the Gordon v. Campbell feud in 1593 ran to hundreds, and the internal squabbles of the Macleods of Assynt killed off fourteen out of the twenty-eight male members of the family. When a man won a lawsuit against some Macfarlanes in 1619, they cut out his tongue and intertwined his guts with those of a dog before slicing his throat.

  So it was post-Reformation England which led the way into the British future. It was a society markedly different from that of the present day, and yet not totally alien, while measures were being taken in it that pointed directly towards later norms. In both the distinctive modern British attitude to capital punishment, and the equally distinctive adoption of a welfare state, social attitudes are embodied which were in preparation by the Tudor and Stuart English.

  Famine and Plague

  It has been emphasized that the period between 1560 and 1640 was one of exceptional economic pressure, to which the English found various response
s. One further, entirely reasonable, reaction to such pressure was to collapse and die under it, and many took this route. When the surviving parish registers of late Tudor and early Stuart England are inspected, almost all contain years in which the normal number of burials more than doubled, and historians in the 1970s adopted the term ‘crisis mortalities’ for such events. The two obvious questions to ask about this phenomenon are why it occurred, and whether anything changed in it during the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  Answers to these questions are fraught with technical problems. In the 1810s, when a national census becomes available against which local data can be checked, it is clear that a third of all deaths were not being registered. The proportion in earlier centuries was probably not very different, and so the records that we have, even where any survive, are no more than a sample of reality. Certain tactics can be adopted to identify the mass killers of the age. Where burials multiply steeply after a bad harvest, then famine is probably the cause. A steep rise in late summer probably indicates bubonic plague, which struck at this season. Several epidemic diseases, however, were not seasonal, and can only be identified from contemporary comments, which are rare and are often frustratingly vague. Where they are precise, interpretation can be difficult for modern scholars; for example, one cause of death mentioned around 1600 was the ‘bloody flux’ (bloody diarrhoea), which was thought to be a mysterious form of disease. It was the experience of modern famines in African nations that taught historians that it is actually the last stage of starvation, when the intestinal wall disintegrates because of lack of nutrients. Bad harvests can usually only be detected from high bread prices, and records of prices only survive for some regions. Finally, if a local mortality was exceptionally severe, then record-keeping would cease altogether, leaving no evidence for crisis mortality.

  Crisis mortalities were indeed usually local in character. Most harvest failures only occurred in some regions. The greatest in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries took place in 1596–8, and affected every part of Europe, but in England it had an impact on only 28 per cent of parishes which have left records; it almost completely spared Kent and East Anglia, because of their more diverse economies. The greatest British epidemic was that in 1557–8, almost certainly influenza, which killed between 16 per cent and 20 per cent of the English population; but it reached less than half of the parishes which have left registers. On the whole, town-dwellers were more vulnerable to disease because of their more crowded and dirty living conditions, but less vulnerable to famine because urban centres could lay up stocks of grain. Population pressure hit some places much harder than others. The number of people in England as a whole more or less doubled between 1500 and 1640, but that in Sussex hardly increased. The population of Cambridgeshire rose by about 40 per cent, but almost all of that took place in the marshlands of the north of the county, where landless people found it easiest to squat and to find a living; and these overcrowded and poor communities were the most vulnerable to serious mortalities. Even in a single parish, location and income could make a huge difference: the rich lived in better built homes set in better drained and ventilated areas, and so died less easily. It is also true that the data collated by historians does not always match the perceptions of contemporaries. When the burial data for the seventeenth century was finally collated in the 1980s by the Cambridge Group, the most lethal year of all turned out to have been 1657–8. At the time, however, nobody seems to have realized this: there were comments about the summer being ‘sickly’, with slow-working fevers abroad, but no sense of any real danger or disruption. As the eye travels along the other columns in the graph, however, the second tallest represents the year 1665–6, when everybody knew that they were trying to survive a terrifying outbreak of bubonic plague, which closed down two-thirds of the nation.

  When all these cautions are applied, certain overall patterns do stand out. Between 1530 and 1630, every serious harvest failure was followed by at least a doubling in local deaths. This does not seem to have been the case in the previous 200 years, even given the lack of comparably good records, and seems genuinely to have been a new phenomenon, showing the impact of population pressure in forcing people towards the bread line. Between 1500 and 1650, moreover, every fifty-year period contained an average seven epidemics severe enough to disrupt the life of the nation badly. The death tolls were prodigious; probably more people died of plague in London alone in three months of 1665 than were killed in the whole of the civil war which rent England and Wales for four years in the 1640s. But this plague was not the worst to hit the city in the early modern period: that of 1563 probably destroyed a larger proportion of its inhabitants. Communities could continue to function almost normally through a famine, which by definition only slew the poor, but a severe outbreak of disease, even though the rich were still significantly less vulnerable, could bring a local economy to a halt, so that commerce could not be transacted and taxes and rates not levied.

  Of all these killers, the one that created the greatest fear was bubonic plague, which has been proved in the twentieth century to have been caused by a bacillus carried by the fleas that prey on black rats; as the rats die of it, the fleas bite humans. To earlier generations it was completely mysterious: all that was known was that it had reappeared dramatically in Europe in the fourteenth century, from the east, and remained ever since, swelling into epidemics every twenty to forty years. Humans caught it with appalling ease, and it killed the majority of those who did so, in high fever and the agony caused by suppurating swellings. It was entirely responsible for about half of the crisis mortalities that have been detected and explained in early modern England, and was a contributing factor in others. Although it was a long-familiar horror by the Tudor period, the English at that time gradually developed new measures to contain it, enacted at central, regional, municipal and parish levels, in the same spirit as those they developed to combat poverty, alehouses, fornication and other perceived or actual social ills. By the early seventeenth century, these measures were firmly in place. As soon as plague broke out in a town or district, almost all those who were able to leave swiftly would do so; which by definition consisted only of the wealthier. The exceptions among this group were the clergy and officeholders, who would probably send away their families but were expected themselves to remain at their posts and work to bring the community through the approaching ordeal. Most seem to have done so, maintaining religious services and the machinery of local government throughout.

  Four practical measures were adopted in the face of the outbreak, one of which was probably completely ineffectual but the rest of which were apparently very potent. The pointless one was to shut up and guard households in which the disease had appeared, locking in the healthy with the sick, until it had long ceased its ravages. Households which wanted to get rid of their infected members could have them sent to pest-houses, converted or purpose-built shacks on the edge of communities, which were effectively concentration camps for plague victims. As neither of these measures confined the deadly fleas, they almost certainly represented a needless infliction of suffering. What was far more effective was that plague-ridden communities either sealed themselves off from their neighbours or (more commonly) were sealed off from them. This process of quarantine does seem to have worked well, as long as it was strictly enforced, in limiting the spread of the epidemic. It could also work on a national scale, as the British gradually learned the rewards of suspending all contact with foreign ports in which the disease had appeared. Parishes and towns also became increasingly efficient in identifying the disease and in disposing swiftly of the dead, in mass graves served by burial parties working at night. Finally, towns came to lay up funds to cover the cost of feeding households closed up because of infection, and of meeting the increased need for poor relief as commerce was restricted or suspended during the outbreak. These funds were increasingly supplemented by collections of money taken up in churches in regions still free o
f infection, on royal orders, and sent to assist those that were afflicted.

  The short-term impact of such mortalities on social, economic and political life could be devastating. Communities would need to repair the damage to their population, wealth and trade links, and the central government could raise no taxes in them while an epidemic was in progress. A severe outbreak of plague could seriously undermine England’s ability to wage war, not merely by depleting its tax base but by striking at its soldiers and sailors; the complete failure of Elizabeth’s expedition to Le Havre in 1563 was due to the depletion of her army by the disease. On the other hand, it is notable that throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the ruling elites became more and more proficient in keeping themselves out of the way of infection. Until the mid-Tudor period, leading politicians and churchmen, judges, town aldermen and justices of the peace all died in national epidemics; by the seventeenth century they seem to have become largely immune to them. Like hunger, large-scale infectious disease was becoming a tragedy of commoners, and they were easily replaced in a period of growing population. The great flu outbreak of 1557–8 just put that growth back by five years. In most towns, houses left empty by plague were filled up within a few months by immigrants from the countryside, and a few years, at most, were needed to make good the total loss of inhabitants.

  Something more fundamental altered as well. After 1623, famine disappeared from England. Bad harvests were just as frequent, but were ceasing to kill people in large numbers, even though they continued to do so in Scotland until the end of the century and in continental Europe for longer. The great outbreak of bubonic plague in 1665–6 was, likewise, the last in Britain, even though the disease continued to ravage other parts of Europe until the eighteenth century. The two greatest scourges of Tudor England were therefore eliminated long before the end of the Stuart period. Discovering why is easy in the case of famine, where there are many explanations. The greatest was that the steady increase in population began to level off in the early seventeenth century, and was replaced by the 1660s with a slight drop. This was the result of greater mortality in the hard years around 1600, increasing immigration to the new American colonies, and, above all, a decline in births. The English were starting to control their own fertility, by marrying, on average, ten years later in 1640 than they had been doing in 1590 and so greatly limiting the period of time in which children could be conceived. In addition, a larger number of people than before had ceased to marry and have children at all. With a drop in population, accompanied by a continuing expansion of the economy, the value of real wages could rise again and increased food production and job opportunities make a considerable impact. Between 1600 and 1660, also, the poor relief system came into general operation, and new forms of farming and small-scale industry were adopted. By the 1660s England was becoming a regular exporter of foodstuffs for the first time, and cottagers were making lace or nails, plaiting straw, weaving and knitting to supplement or replace subsistence farming or labouring. Internal communications and marketing systems were better developed, to move food from regions of surplus to those of dearth.