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Global Crisis

Page 18

by Parker, Geoffrey


  13. Burials in Berkshire, England, 1538–1700.

  Plague ravaged almost every parish in Berkshire in 1624 and 1625, but twice as many burials occurred in 1643, when rival armies struggled for control. Almost all of those buried in local churchyards were civilians, not soldiers.

  On sea as on land, battles were relatively rare in seventeenth-century Europe; but, one veteran estimated in 1677, ‘you will have twenty sieges for one battle’ (page 32 above) and sieges also claimed many lives. According to Lucy Hutchinson, an eyewitness of the siege of Nottingham Castle in 1644, ‘no one can believe, but those that saw the day, what a strange ebb and flow of courage and cowardice there was in both parties’ because, after the catharsis of passing through a killing ground, ‘the brave turn cowards, fear unnerves the most mighty, makes the generous base, and great men do those things they blush to think on’. Countless atrocities illustrate her point. Thus the previous year, when the Royalists captured Preston in Lancashire, ‘“Kill dead! Kill dead!” was the word in the town, killing all before them without any respect … their horsemen pursuing the poor amazed people, killing, stripping, and spoiling all they could meet with, nothing regarding the doleful cries of the women and children.‘33

  Civilians everywhere suffered violence at the hands of soldiers. A verse play from the Maas valley in the 1630s stressed the unpredictability of the horrors that war could bring. A ‘farmer’ described how disaster struck just as he and his family sat down for a meal together:

  It was Wednesday, at dinner time,

  When Mansfeld's soldiers came.

  They had no warrant for lodgings or food,

  But at our hearth they began

  To steal and to plunder,

  Not saying a word, neither ‘to the death’ nor ‘on guard’,

  Competing to see who could take the most.

  The narrator went on to relate how, while ‘competing’, the soldiers murdered his father because he tried to resist, then raped his sister, and finally set fire to the farm. Only the smoke allowed him to escape certain death.34 Similar outrages fill the powerful prints entitled ‘The misfortunes of the war’ by engraver Jacques Callot from Lorraine, just south of Liège, which show the sack of villages, the torture and murder of their inhabitants, and the revenge of the peasants against isolated detachments of troops.

  Two factors increased the likelihood of such atrocities in the mid-seventeenth century. First, the prevailing military conventions (sometimes called the ‘Laws of War’) held that rebels who took up arms to oppose their ruler ‘ought not to be classed as enemies, the two being quite distinct, and so it is more correct to term the armed contention with rebel subjects execution of legal process, or prosecution, not war’. It followed that in ‘a war waged by a prince with rebels … all measures allowed in war are available against them, such as killing them as enemies, enslaving them as prisoners, and, much more, confiscating their property as booty’.35 The worst military massacres of the age often occurred during civil wars or during the repression of those regarded by the victors as rebels; and the mid-seventeenth century, we know, saw a spate of civil wars and rebellions.

  The involvement of protagonists from different religions likewise raised the risk of mass killing. As Blaise Pascal observed in his Pensées: ‘Men never do so much harm so happily as when they do it through religious conviction’ – and the multiple conflicts of the mid-seventeenth century offer abundant examples. Thus in 1631 the Protestant city of Magdeburg in Germany refused to admit a Catholic garrison sent by its suzerain, Emperor Ferdinand II, made an alliance with his enemy and then derisively rejected Ferdinand's demand for surrender. When, after a long blockade, Magdeburg repudiated a final ultimatum, the besiegers launched a successful assault in which perhaps 20,000 men, women and children perished, while fire consumed all but the cathedral and 140 houses.36

  Few European military leaders in the mid-seventeenth century seem to have felt remorse about such massacres carried out in God's name: on the contrary, they often claimed scriptural warrant, urging their soldiers to follow the Old Testament example of Joshua and the Israelites at Jericho and ‘utterly destroy all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old’.37 Thus in 1645, at the fall of Basing House, the heavily fortified mansion of a Catholic peer, Protestant preachers whipped up a religious fervour among the besiegers so that when they at last forced an entry no quarter was given. The victors murdered in cold blood six priests found within, shot a former Drury Lane actor (with the sanctimonious comment ‘Cursed be he that doth the Lord's Work negligently’), beat out the brains of a young woman who tried to stop a soldier from abusing her father, and stripped naked even those they spared (including the famous architect Inigo Jones, who escaped the slaughter clothed only in a blanket). A newspaper account reassured squeamish readers that such horrors were fully justified because the victims ‘were most of them Papists. Therefore our swords did show them little compassion.‘38 Religious passion produced many other atrocities. The advance of a Cossack army through Ukraine in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1648 was accompanied by the massacre of at least 10,000 Jewish settlers; and six years later, as the Russian tsar prepared to invade the Commonwealth, he gave orders ‘to burn alive Poles or Belorussians subsequently captured who would not convert to Orthodoxy’ (see chapter 6). The following year, in Ireland, English troops commanded by Oliver Cromwell carried out a major massacre after they stormed the city of Drogheda. Cromwell later claimed ‘I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous [viz Catholic] wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent [read: Protestant] blood'; and that accordingly, ‘in the heat of the action’ he had forbidden his troops ‘to spare any that were in arms in the town’. At least 2,500 soldiers and at least 1,000 civilians (including all Catholic priests) perished.39

  Nevertheless, death in face-to-face violence rarely formed the largest category of mortality in early modern wars. Thus in the century 1620–1719, although some 500,000 Swedish and Finnish troops died in the almost continuous wars waged by their monarchs, only 10 per cent fell in battle (including King Gustavus Adolphus) and only 5 per cent in sieges (including King Charles XII). Of the rest, 10 per cent perished in prison while the remaining 75 per cent succumbed to the normal hardships of war. The stunning scale and impact of premature deaths among these troops emerge from two sets of demographic data. First, between 1621 and 1639, the parish of Bygdeå in northern Sweden provided 230 young men to fight in the ‘continental war’, where 215 of them died and five more received injuries that left them crippled: only ten of them remained in service in 1639 – and, since the war still had nine more years to run, the odds of their survival were slim. Thus of the 28 conscripts from Bygdeå who mustered in July 1638, all of them under 18 and many of them under 15 years old, all but one had died within three months of reaching the continent. The second set of data comes from the duchy of Finland between 1638 and 1648. These records list every one of the 14,000 local infantrymen conscripted in the duchy to fight in Germany, and reveal that two-thirds of them never came home. Throughout the Swedish Monarchy, military service had virtually become a sentence of death for males.40

  II. Only Women Bleed

  The ‘bitter living’ of Women

  The increased frequency of wars during the seventeenth century also brought serious demographic consequences for women. Some were direct, in that they sometimes became a primary target. Thus the (Protestant) government in Dublin in 1642 instructed their troops fighting the Catholic insurgents not to spare the women they encountered ‘being manifestly very deep in the guilt of this rebellion, and, as we are informed, very forward to stir up their husbands, friends and kindred to side therein, and exciting them to cruelty against the English’.41 Wars also had some indirect adverse impacts on women. Notably, the departure of husbands and sons to fight (and perhaps die) in the wars forced increasing numbers of women either to support families alone or to live as spinsters or widows. In
Württemberg, an area of Germany devastated by war, the number of households headed by single women rose to almost one-third of the total – an unprecedented number. In some ravaged villages in Burgundy (France) widows were the only householders. In the Swedish parish of Bygdeå, the ratio of men to women in 1620 already stood at 1:1.5, but 20 years of compulsory military service more than doubled the ratio to 1:3.6, while the number of households headed by women multiplied sevenfold. Many of them were ‘war widows’: the archives of the Swedish central government contain thousands of petitions desperately requesting payment of the wage arrears, or reimbursement of the expenses, due to deceased soldier-husbands, because the petitioner and her children were starving.42

  A German widow in 1654 spoke for all these indirect victims of war: she was, she lamented, ‘a poor woman with only a small field or so to her name’ who must therefore ‘earn a bitter living’. If she (or any other woman living alone) fell foul of the law, the males who ran the local courts would sentence her to hard labour; if she failed to behave in a subservient and docile way, her male neighbours would banish her; and, even if they allowed her to stay, they normally denied her the opportunity to learn or practise a trade (and thus compete with them).43 A ‘bitter living’, indeed.

  The lives of most urban women in the seventeenth century were scarcely sweeter. In many European cities two-thirds of those receiving welfare were women, most of them former servants. Their predominance is easily explained. In a world without domestic appliances or prepared food, as Olwen Hufton has noted, ‘the first luxury that any family permitted itself was the services of a girl, a maid of all work, to take on the drudgery involved in carrying water – a major time and energy consumer – and coal or wood, going to market or performing laundry service’.44 But as soon as a recession occurred, that ‘first luxury’ became the first casualty. Employers in ‘hard times’ had no scruples about getting rid of their maids; and even those who retained their jobs might have to forego wages and work in return for their keep. Either way, the chances of getting married and having children before the economy recovered remained slim. The fate of women who worked in industry was no better: unlike male apprentices, who enjoyed some job protection if their employer fell on hard times (or if women themselves fell ill or suffered injury), they would be thrown out of work without any ‘social security’ to sustain them.

  A few Europeans fretted about the demographic consequences of economic recession. Thus in 1619, suspecting that the population in his region had recently declined, Sancho de Moncada, a priest from Toledo, Spain, examined local parish registers for proof (apparently the first person ever to use them in this way). He found that, in the wake of a severe episode of plague and famine in 1599, the registers recorded ‘not one half of the marriages that there used to be’, so that births in and around Toledo remained far lower than before. In Andalucía, half a century later, Francisco Martínez de Mata also consulted the parish registers and found, like Moncada, that both marriages and births had fallen catastrophically during the harvest failures of the 1640s. Subsequent research by demographers on parish registers has confirmed these findings – but also revealed another important consequence. In the words of E. A. Wrigley, throughout early modern Europe ‘Marriage was the hinge on which the demographic system turned'; and when bread prices doubled, marriages normally fell by one-fifth and the age of brides at first marriage rose.45

  Thanks to the expanding economy of the sixteenth century, European women married on average at age 20 and many gave birth to eight or nine children and some to ten or more. In the first half of the seventeenth century, however, brides were on average 27 or 28 when they married; few gave birth to more than three children; and an increasing number had no children at all. Equally important, more women remained celibate. In England, householders in the seventeenth century sometimes publicly objected at the reading of marriage banns, and after marriage refused to allow couples to live together, if they seemed too poor to raise a family (the prevailing Poor Law system made householders responsible for supporting the local poor). Of Englishwomen born around 1566 who might have married in the 1590s, only 4 per cent failed to do so; but of those born around 1586, who might have married in the 1610s, over 17 per cent failed to do so; and of those born around 1606, who might have married in the 1630s, over 25 per cent failed to do so.46

  These developments reduced the total population in the seventeenth century more rapidly than they would do today because of remarkably high mortality among both mothers and children. In the words of a prominent (if somewhat patronizing) male midwife: ‘Going with child is a rough sea, on which a big-bellyed woman and her infant floats the space of nine months: and labour, which is the only port, is so full of dangerous rocks, that very often both the one and the other, after they have arrived and disembarked, have yet need of much help to defend them against divers inconveniences.’ Or, as the terse French proverb put it: ‘A pregnant woman has one foot in the grave’ (Une femme grosse a un pied dans la fosse). Surviving records suggest that in Europe perhaps 40 women per 1,000 died as a result of childbirth (compared with 0.12 per 1,000 in much of western Europe today). The death of the mother became even more frequent if the child died in the womb (and since this becomes more frequent at times of scarcity and disease, it must surely have become more frequent during the 1640s). Moreover, as elsewhere in the early modern world, at least one-quarter of all children born in Europe died within their first year, and almost one-half died before reaching the age of reproduction. In the graphic phrase of the French demographic historian Pierre Goubert, in the seventeenth century ‘It took two children to make an adult’.47

  Mothers in the early modern world needed to give birth to at least four children simply to maintain a given population level – at least four, because not all of those who survived to adulthood would marry and be fertile. Even in periods of prosperity, a woman who married when she was 27 or 28 would find it hard to give birth to four children, since fecundity waned in her late thirties; and periods of adversity triggered important biological and behavioural responses that reduced fertility. On the one hand, malnutrition leads to more spontaneous abortions and fewer conceptions (sometimes because ovulation has ceased), decreased libido, a rise in the age of menarche, and a fall in the age of menopause. On the other hand, a serious food shortage often reduced coital frequency (either through abstinence or increased spousal separation). At the same time, the greater prevalence of disease associated with famine increased deaths, especially among pregnant women and new mothers. For all these reasons, the birth rate in many if not most European communities in the mid-seventeenth century fell below – often far below – the level required to maintain the overall population (Fig. 14).48

  The rising age of brides when they first married, together with the increase in female celibacy, had one further deleterious effect: an increased risk of illegitimate pregnancies. Mid-seventeenth-century parish registers reveal that between one-fifth and three-fifths of all births took place only a few months (and sometimes only a few weeks) after the parents’ marriage; while pregnancies also increased among spinsters who never married. Urban court records throughout Europe are full of testimony from or about young women who came to town looking for work and, when they could not find it, were tricked or coerced into prostitution. One such newcomer to London was reassured by her landlady ‘that it is better to do so [become a prostitute] than to steal and be hanged’. Although perhaps true in the short term, this survival strategy seldom offered a permanent escape from poverty. Instead, it increased the risk of sexually transmitted diseases, and also created a cruel dilemma for single mothers if they became pregnant: either they aborted, abandoned or killed their babies at birth, or else they faced the shame and hardship of having to survive by begging – in which case they as well as their babies would probably die.49

  14. A subsistence crisis: Geneva 1627–32.

  Burials increased and conceptions declined in step with the rise in the price of bread
in Geneva, a city of 15,000. Similar patterns occurred in communities throughout early modern Europe (and, if similar serial date existed, probably elsewhere in the northern hemisphere).

  In most of East Asia, the birth rate also fell in the mid-seventeenth century, and although this decline also reflected a reduction in the reproductive capacity of women, it reflected different social pressures. In China, several generations of a family might live together in the same household – a proverb claimed that ‘five generations under one roof’ was optimal. Although this happened rarely, a typical Chinese household included one or more parents and one or more of their married sons and their families, forming a single economic, religious, social and demographic unit which could easily number 50 members from three generations. They produced and consumed in common; they performed collectively the appropriate rites for the well-being of family members both alive and dead; they shared the burden of caring for aged and needy relatives; above all, they discussed and determined family size together, because the purpose of marriage was production as well as reproduction. ‘Demographic decisions’ in many parts of China were ‘never individual’ but had to be ‘negotiated with co-resident kin according to collective goals and constraints’.50

 

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