by Ian Mortimer
Among the self-made members of ‘the rich’ it is the businessmen who build the largest fortunes. Perhaps the most astonishing example is that of Hugh Audley, who begins with £200 in 1605 and dies worth £400,000 in 1662. The story of how he builds such a massive fortune makes for a compelling book; Samuel Pepys, ever conscious of his personal wealth, buys a copy and reads it in January 1663.23 But he finds little therein to inspire him. Audley is essentially a moneylender – and thus remains merely one of ‘the rich’ and never becomes one of ‘the great’.
It is possible to pass from a lower sort to a higher one. A hugely rich man can do this either by marrying the heiress of a great family that has fallen on hard times, or by lending money to the king. Those who choose the latter course are rewarded with a knighthood and sometimes even a baronetcy. Sir Robert Vyner, baronet, starts off life as the third son of a man of no great wealth from Warwick, but by 1672 the king owes him the colossal sum of £400,000. Sir John Banks, baronet, comes from Maidstone but now lives in a house on the grandest side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields; he is worth an estimated £100,000 when John Evelyn visits him in 1676. When he dies in 1699, his assets amount to £180,000.24 Evelyn thinks Sir Stephen Fox and Sir Josiah Child are even richer; Sir Stephen leaves an estate worth £172,024 and Sir Josiah’s wealth is probably greater still.25 This is impressive when you consider that Sir Stephen is the seventh son of a Wiltshire squire of modest means, and Sir Josiah started off as a brewer supplying the navy. All these stories show that opportunities do exist for men of talent to enter the hallowed halls of ‘the great’. Having said that, even sociable and generous financiers can never quite shrug off the stigma of having made their money in trade. Sir George Downing charmingly refers to them as ‘cheats, blood-suckers and extortionists’.26 People have a higher regard for those whose ancestors achieved their wealth by hacking other people to death in the service of a medieval king than for those who win their own fortunes through the barbaric practice of lending money.
Wealth is, of course, a relative matter. However, it is fair to say that, as only one in thirty people has £100 or more per year at his disposal, the great majority will regard anyone with an income of twice this as belonging to ‘the rich’. Some of those who clearly fall into this category have worked their way up from the rank of tradesman. Samuel Pepys is a good example. He does not have a country estate or a private income – he is the fifth child of a London tailor and a laundress – but, due to Mrs Mary Robinson’s legacy of £500 to benefit poor London boys with a good education, he is able to go to Cambridge University. In addition, he has a useful family connection in Edward Mountagu, his first cousin once removed. Mountagu has a country estate and an additional income of £2,000 per year from his offices as Councillor of State and General-at-Sea. More importantly, he also has the ear of Charles II, who showers him with rewards on his return to England in 1660: the king creates him earl of Sandwich and appoints him Master of the Great Wardrobe, Clerk of the Privy Seal and Vice-Admiral of the Kingdom. Soon after leaving university, Pepys gets a job as a clerk in Mountagu’s household and, about five years later, his employer uses his influence at court to obtain for Pepys the position of Clerk of the Acts, with an annual income of £350 and the possibility of making further profits through perks and bribes. Hence this tailor’s son enters the echelons of ‘the rich’. Eventually he rises to become the chief officer of the navy staff under James II. And, as anyone who has read Pepys’s diary will know, he certainly has the wherewithal ‘to live plentifully’. If the extent to which a young man can fill his life with wine, women and song is indicative of his true wealth, then there are few richer men in England than Samuel Pepys.
THE MIDDLE SORT
In turning to ‘the middle sort’ in England, we encounter about 238,000 households in which around 1.3 million people live, either as family members or live-in servants. Most of this sort are yeomen who own and work their own land, and prosperous citizens who have bought multiple houses as investments. The remainder are salaried military and naval officers or what contemporaries call ‘professionals’ – people who profess to follow a calling – clergymen, physicians, surgeons and school teachers. Such a range of activities means that this is the most varied group of all. What they have in common is their disposable income, their reliance on their own abilities to make ends meet, and the fact that they do not have the social connections or the financial safety net of ‘the great’ or ‘the rich’. As Gregory King’s schedule indicates, most have an income between £50 and £100.
This category is changing faster than all the others, due to increased professionalisation. Physicians have been treating the rich for centuries but it is only in this period that there are enough of them for the majority of ordinary people to become used to paying for a medical consultation and receiving a prescription for a medicine, which they can have made up at an apothecary’s shop. Likewise, there have been grammar schools teaching Latin in most towns since the thirteenth century but it is only now that they also require specialists to teach Hebrew, Greek and mathematics. Thus more and more professional teachers are required. In Scotland, too, every community is now supposed to have a school, as laid down in an Act of 1646. In addition, the innovations of the age create a number of new professions – banking, insurance, statistics, clockmaking, engineering, newspaper journalism, surveying, and so forth. The Restoration period as a whole is marked by the rise of professional men and the commensurate ascendancy of ‘the middle sort’.
THE WORKING TRADES
Gregory King’s schedule of incomes includes 100,000 households dependent on tradesmen who run shops or manufacturing businesses. The vast majority of them are town dwellers, performing services that generally date back to the Middle Ages. In most small towns, men carry on their trade in an informal way, normally operating from their homes. In larger places, however, there is a degree of formality, which permits certain people to cater to the townsfolk and prevents strangers from competing with them.
A city like Exeter controls its working tradesmen through the guild merchant system, in this case administered by the mayor’s court. On completion of an apprenticeship, on payment of a fee or on proving his right of succession to his father’s position, a tradesman becomes a member of a trade guild and a freeman of the city. He swears an oath of loyalty to the Crown and to the mayor and bailiffs of the city. In addition, he promises to pay his taxes and not to sue a fellow citizen anywhere but in the mayor’s court, and to follow all the bye-laws. He is then free to carry on his trade within the city’s boundaries and to take part in the selection of the city’s mayor and its two Members of Parliament. In reality, the civic authorities no longer go out of their way to impede traders who are not freemen. Innkeepers, alehouse keepers and victuallers rarely obtain the freedom of the city, having a separate licensing system. Nevertheless, if you are a tradesman yourself, you will want to become a member of the relevant guild. And if you want to have an overview of the vast range of trades carried out in the city, looking through the rolls of freemen can be most enlightening.
If you compare this list with a similar one drawn up for Exeter in the Elizabethan period (see The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England), you will see just how much has changed in three generations. These days the fulling of serges is the predominant trade. A hundred years earlier, the group now called ‘fullers’ were described as ‘tuckers’, and there were fifty-seven of them admitted to the freedom of the city, making them only the third-largest trade in Exeter. There were no ‘pressmen’ (printers) back then, either, or any distillers. There were no bricklayers, soapmakers, confectioners, watchmakers, tobacconists or grocers. There were very few silk-weavers. The largest contingent by a long way was formed by the merchants, whose ranks included the tradesmen now known as ‘grocers’.
This system of officially recognising the city’s tradesmen sounds very official, but in truth its formality masks a welter of problems. First and foremost is the fact that tradesmen simpl
y are not paid enough. Even if a man works six days a week for fifty weeks in the year (allowing time off for holy days and Christmas) and earns 20d per day, or £25 per year, and has six children, he will be hard-pressed to feed, clothe and educate them. The crushing fact is that wages have been declining for generations and now, in real terms, they are less than half of what they were in the mid-fifteenth century.27 Back then was the golden age for tradesmen, when skilled workers could earn enough to keep their families without having to worry all the time. Now, rather than minimum wages for their work, maximum wages are set by magistrates, limiting what men and women can earn. For instance, in Bedfordshire in 1684 it is laid down that a master carpenter should be paid 1s 4d per day (8s per week or about £20 per year) and if he receives food and drink from his employer his wages should be reduced to just 10d (5s per week, £12 10s per year). But these rates are only for the daylight-filled summer months; from mid-September to mid-March those rates should be reduced to 1s and 8d respectively, giving a carpenter an income of just £17 10s per year. And these are the wages for a master carpenter: while he is still a journeyman, they are limited to 1s per day without food in summer and 10d in winter (£13 15s per year). If you refuse to work, in an attempt to raise these wages, you are likely to lose your job and end up in prison. In 1677 a group of workers in the Wiltshire cloth town of Trowbridge parade through the streets following a fiddle player, demanding that their weekly wages rise from 6s to 6s 6d for a twelve-hour day, and calling on all the folk of the town to join them in the procession. The ring-leader, Aaron Atkins, is arrested, thrown in gaol and tried at the following quarter sessions.28
Another problem tradesmen face is that of property prices. You may think the modern world is facing a particularly acute problem, in that its skilled tradesmen are priced out of living in the towns and cities where they are employed. The same is true in the late seventeenth century. Look at their account books and you will soon see that Defoe’s declaration that the working trades ‘feel no want’ is open to question. As mentioned above, I am writing this book in a small town thirteen miles to the west of Exeter, called Moretonhampstead. My host is a weaver, called Thomas Mardon, and his house is well situated in the middle of town, within a stone’s throw of the churchyard. He is not doing badly for a weaver in 1692: he has an annual income of about £25, on which he keeps his wife, Anne, two children (they have already buried three others) and one servant. That just about covers all the bills. The problem is that he doesn’t own this house; he has a lease on it, granted more than fifty years ago to his now-deceased father-in-law. That lease expires after the death of the third person named in its conditions. As it happens, all three of those named people are dead already. The only reason that Thomas and his family have not been evicted is because, before he died, his father-in-law paid to have the name of his last surviving daughter, Thomas’s wife, added to the lease. As she is fifty-one years old in 1692, the family has to face the fact that she may not live much longer. What is to happen when she dies? Thomas will lose his workplace and the family their home. Thomas has therefore spoken to his landlord’s steward and has arranged a new lease. It is going to cost him the huge sum of £102.29 But what choice does he have? Suitable houses don’t come up very often. This is why tradesmen like him are correctly described as ‘labouring hard’. Men like Thomas can only look after their families by constantly planning for the lean times that undoubtedly lie ahead.
THE COUNTRY PEOPLE
The problems that beset a tradesman like Thomas Mardon also affect his rural counterparts. But not everyone in the country suffers in the same way. The great dividing line is whether you are working for yourself or whether you are merely labouring for a husbandman. If the latter, then life is tough at the best of times, and the chances are that you will be one of the next sort down, the habitually poor. Agricultural wages, like those of tradesmen, are less than half of what they were in the fifteenth century, although not quite as low as the nadir of the early seventeenth century. The wages for a male haymaker in 1684 are set at 10d per day, or 6d if he is given food and drink. Women are paid 6d or 3d for the same work. However, haymaking is a seasonal activity, so there is no payment for such work in winter. Likewise reaping: men can earn 1s 6d per day (without food) reaping in summer and women can earn 10d but, again, there is no winter work. Families must seek out what work they can, and take in extra jobs such as sewing and washing, as well as growing their own herbs and vegetables. Such people can rarely afford to eat meat with the regularity that their ancestors did. But even better-off husbandmen with 20–50 acres live precariously. The land they farm is rented or leased, and when some of it has to be left fallow, the challenge of making enough on the remainder to pay the rent or save for a new lease pushes many farmers into penury.
Let’s get hard-nosed about this and look at the economic effects of the freezing winters that Britain experiences during this period. If you are a husbandman with a relatively large farm of 40 enclosed acres, and that land is fertile and yields 18 bushels of wheat per acre in a good year, then, having set aside 4 bushels of seed per acre for replanting, you will potentially have a crop of 560 bushels or 70 quarters. What is that worth? In a year of great plenty, such as 1688, you might receive as little as 20s per quarter, so you’ll earn £70. After you have paid your three farmhands their summer wages of £18, you will still have £52 in hand. But you will probably want to use some of that grain yourself, for your own family, rather than selling it. There may well be some rent to pay too, on top of the lease. Then there’s the cost of maintaining the animals to pull the plough and produce the manure to enrich the soil. In addition there are parish rates and taxes to pay. And we have not factored in the necessity of leaving some land fallow, to recover its fertility. If you were to farm only half your 40 acres each year, your gross income would be about £26, before rates and taxes. But remember that we are talking here about a good harvest – what happens if the year is a bad one? Imagine you are leaving half your land fallow, and heavy rain in August wipes out half your crop: you will only take 9 bushels per acre off your land, four of which you’ll need to set aside as seed for next year. Even at the very high price of £2 10s per quarter, your gross turnover will be just £31 5s. After you’ve paid your farmhands reduced wages of £12, paid your rent and set aside enough to maintain your plough animals, you will be lucky to have £15 left for the whole year.
Of course, losing half your crop is not the worst-case scenario. You might lose it all.
Country folk, you will soon find, are shrewd, thrifty and cautious. They have to be. They spend their entire lives being heaved to and fro on the great pitchfork of the British weather. But they do have one great advantage over townsmen and tradesmen: they can at least eat the fruit of their own labour. Even if disaster strikes and half the season’s grain is lost to frost or flood, then what remains can at least sustain the desperate family. Farm labourers, on the other hand, might not be so lucky.
For this reason, you will find sacks of grain and piles of cheese stored in the barns and in the farmhouse itself. Have a look at Skiggs Farm in Writtle, Essex, in the early 1680s.30 The farmhouse is basically three rooms upstairs and three down, with a few extensions and outbuildings. The contents are worth £259 – including such luxuries as silver spoons, a silver bowl, a silver porringer, a Bible, a couple of carpets and a gun. The owner, Edmund Sterne, is clearly a prosperous man. But every item he possesses – every piece of furniture, the silver, all the farm implements and tools, everything in his kitchen and his stores – only adds up to about £40. The vast majority of his wealth is in the form of food. Some is stored in sacks – £34 of wheat, £24 of rye, £16 of oats, £18 of barley – and cheese worth £3 10s is in the cheese chamber; the rest of his wealth is out grazing in the fields and rooting around in a pig sty. This is how husbandmen cope with the unpredictable weather. Defoe is quite correct to describe the country folk as ‘living indifferently’. The very precariousness of their way of life preclude
s them from ever living well.
THE POOR
This is where we sink below the breadline. As Gregory King’s schedule of incomes makes clear, 60 per cent of the population lives at or below this level. Just as the modern term ‘upper class’ is insufficient to preserve the subtle distinctions that separate ‘the great’ from ‘the rich’, so the modern term ‘working class’ is inadequate to explain the gradations between workers who make ends meet, hard-pressed labourers, poor servants, paupers, the destitute and the truly pitiful.
Let’s start with the best-off members of this sort: ordinary mariners. Abroad for most of the year, they have few children at home requiring support, if any at all. Many never marry. If a mariner doesn’t have a house and keeps all his possessions in his trunk aboard his ship, he won’t have to pay any rent, rates or taxes. On board ship, all his food may well be paid for – especially if he is serving in the navy. There are irregular but not insubstantial rewards too, such as prize money when an enemy vessel is captured, or when he buys goods in one port and sells them in another for a profit. So a single seaman earning £20 per year might be better off than many tradesmen and farmers – as long as he avoids being captured by Barbary pirates, and doesn’t mind having to fight a skirmish every so often, and is happy climbing the rigging of a ship when caught in 50ft waves in the middle of the wholly inaccurately named Pacific Ocean at night. There is also the small matter of the 1 in 16 risk of being lost overboard … So you’ve got to be fairly desperate to want to spend your whole life aboard ship. When you meet some of those who do sail from port to port and hear them say how much they love being at sea, you will understand why when they tell you how they started: almost all of them come from a background of grinding poverty.
Take Edward Barlow, for example. You may not have heard about him, but he is the Samuel Pepys of the high seas. He is raised at Prestwich, near Manchester, along with his two brothers and three sisters. Their father is a husbandman with an income of just £8–9 per year. No man can feed and clothe his wife and six children on so little – and the children know it. Their family does not go to church because their parents cannot afford to clothe them; it is not thought seemly for people to enter the house of God in rags. So when Edward reaches the age of twelve, he gets a job. He works for a while in the coal delivery business, earning 2–3d a day. When he has conscientiously saved up enough, he buys himself a set of clothes so that he can fulfil his ambition and go to church on Sundays. Next he tries to become an apprentice ‘whitester’ (whitening yarn); he spends his spare time looking after cattle, and hedging and ditching. Underfed, underpaid and beaten, he abandons his apprenticeship and, aged thirteen, walks to London to seek his fortune, with two shillings in his pocket. He goes to find one of his older sisters, who works as a servant in the city; although she cannot help him, she suggests that he become a servant in their uncle’s alehouse in Southwark. It proves hard work. His aunt constantly accuses him of defrauding her when serving guests with beer or tobacco. Edward is forced to become a stable boy, to avoid such accusations. His uncle regularly beats him – on one occasion simply because he went to see a whale stranded in the Thames without permission. So his spirits are low when a ‘spirit’ approaches him with an offer of a rewarding job at sea. In reality, such men ‘spirit away’ their victims and do not let them see land again until they have landed in Jamaica, where they sell them as indentured servants (unfree, unpaid labourers). His uncle, to his credit, saves him from such a fate and eventually arranges that Barlow be made apprentice to the Chief Master’s Mate of the Naseby, the flagship of Edward Mountagu, Samuel Pepys’s kinsman and patron. After fifteen years at sea, his wages are 25s per month (£15 per year).31 He remains at sea for most of the rest of his life, teaching himself to read and write and drawing up his journal in a large, leather-bound book, which he manages to save from all the shipwrecks and other disasters that befall him.
