A Brief History of the Tudor Age

by Ridley, Jasper

  Although Fitzherbert and the farmers who read his book saw only the advantages of owning sheep, the government became increasingly worried, and in 1534 an Act was passed to restrict it. The statute declared that wealthy landowners had bought up arable land and converted it to pasture, and some had acquired as many as 24,000 sheep; this had doubled the price of corn, cattle, pigs, geese, chickens and eggs, and also of wool. So it was enacted that no landowner was to own more than 2,400 sheep,8 excluding lambs aged less than one year, on pain of a fine of 3s.4d. for every sheep over 2,400 which he owned. No one was to take a tenancy of more than two farms unless he lived in the parish where the farm was situated.

  Title-page of the first edition of a best-seller of the Tudor age, published probably in 1523.

  Edward VI’s Parliament passed a more drastic Act in 1552, which enacted that by 25 March 1553 every parish must have as much land in tillage as it had in any year since the beginning of Henry VIII’s reign in 1509, and that such land must be kept in tillage for the next four years. But the Act proved to be unenforceable.

  The legislation did not prevent the continued predominance of the sheep in agriculture. In 1555 Parliament tried to encourage dairy farming by enacting that any farmer who owned more than 120 sheep must keep one cow for every sixty sheep that he owned; but by the end of Elizabeth’s reign the decline of tillage was alarming the government more than ever, and an Act was passed in 1597 which applied to the twenty-five counties where the situation was most serious. All land which had been converted to pasture since the Queen’s accession on 17 November 1558, after having been in tillage for twelve years, was to be reconverted to tillage before 1 May 1599; and in future no land which had been in tillage for twelve years was ever to be converted to any other use.

  From the beginning of the Tudor Age, the government was concerned about the shortage of the cheap labour which was needed in husbandry. Until the fourteenth century the land had been cultivated by serfs, or bondmen, but by the beginning of the Tudor Age serfdom had very largely disappeared in England. It lingered on in a few isolated pockets. Several monasteries owned bondmen, but they were manumitted and set free when the monasteries were dissolved, though as late as 1538 the Earl of Arundel refused to manumit a bondman at Cromwell’s request, on the grounds that it would diminish the value of his lands for his heirs; and the man had to remain a serf. But by the beginning of the sixteenth century there were only a few thousand serfs remaining in England. All the other husbandmen worked for their employer, who was sometimes a country gentleman and sometimes a yeoman or man of lower rank, in return for wages paid either wholly in money, or partly in money and partly in clothing, food and drink.

  After serfdom began to disappear in the fourteenth century, Parliament on several occasions passed a Statute of Labourers which fixed the maximum wage which could be paid to husbandmen and other workmen and artisans, and made it a criminal offence for any employer to pay, or for any employee to receive, a higher wage, though the employer was free to pay a lower wage and the employee to accept it, if they could agree to this by bargaining. At the beginning of the Tudor Age, the law was regulated by the Act of 1444, but a new statute was passed in 1496. It fixed the maximum annual wage that could be paid to a bailiff in charge of a farm at 26s.8d., with an additional five shillings per annum for his clothing, meat and drink if these were not supplied to him in addition to his wages. The maximum for a chief shepherd was twenty shillings per annum, with an extra 5s. for clothing, meat and drink. The ordinary husbandman was not to receive more than 16s.8d. per annum with 4s. for clothing, meat and drink; the woman servant no more than 10s. per annum with 4s. for clothing, meat and drink; and children under fourteen no more than 6s.8d. per annum and 3s. for clothing, meat and drink.

  The wages of artisans were fixed on a daily basis, with a higher wage allowed in summer than in winter, as the workmen worked longer hours during the light summer evenings. The maximum wage of master carpenters, plumbers, bricklayers and joiners between Easter and Michaelmas was to be 6d. per day, or 4d. if meat and drink were provided for them, and 5d. per day, or 3d. per day with meat and drink, between Michaelmas and Easter. The summer and winter wages of many other categories of artisans were similarly fixed. The unskilled artisan and labourer was to receive, between Easter and Michaelmas, 4d. a day, or 2d. a day if meat and drink were supplied; between Michaelmas and Easter the wage was 3d. a day, or 1d. a day with meat and drink. Any employer who paid higher wages than these rates was to be fined 40s. for each offence, and every workman who accepted higher wages was to be fined 20s., eighty times his daily wage. If any artisan or labourer who was not in work was offered employment at these wages, and refused to accept it, the employer who had made the offer could ask the local JPs to imprison the artisan or labourer until he agreed to work for him.

  The hours of work were also fixed, because ‘divers artificers and labourers retained to work and serve waste much part of the day and deserve not their wages, sometime in late coming unto their work, early departing therefrom, long sitting at their breakfast, at their dinner and noonmeat,9 and long time of sleeping at afternoon, to the loss and hurt of such persons as the said artificers and labourers be retained with in service.’ So it was enacted that between the middle of March and the middle of September every artisan and labourer had to be at work before 5 a.m. and continue till between 7 and 8 p.m., with breaks of two hours for breakfast, dinner, sleep and noonmeat; and the workman was only to be allowed to sleep between the middle of May and the middle of August. In winter, the hours of work were to be from dawn to dusk, with the same breaks for meals. The Act also contained a provision that any workman who left his job without his master’s consent, except to enter the King’s service, was to be punished by one month’s imprisonment and a fine of twenty shillings.

  The legislation did not succeed in preventing artisans and labourers from obtaining an increase in wages, especially after the inflation began in about 1545. The influx of silver from the mines of Mexico to the money market at Antwerp, and Henry VIII’s policy of debasing the currency as a way of raising money to pay for his war with France, nearly doubled prices in the next ten years; and by 1556 the husbandman’s daily wage had risen to sevenpence.

  John Ponet, the Protestant Bishop of Winchester, referred to this in a book against Queen Mary which he published in exile at Strasbourg in 1556 and which was smuggled into England. He tried to arouse the people’s anger against the government by associating the inflation with the reintroduction of the Catholic religion, though in fact it had already been running at nine per cent a year under Edward VI.

  When were ever things so dear in England as in this time of the Popish Mass and other idolatry restored? Whoever heard or read before that a pound of beef was at fourpence; a sheep twenty shillings; a pound of candles at fourpence; a pound of butter at fourpence; a pound of cheese at fourpence, two eggs a penny, a quarter of wheat sixty-four shillings, a quarter of malt at fifty shillings or above; the people driven of hunger to grind acorns for bread meal, and to drink water instead of ale?

  The inflation ceased after 1560, and prices remained stable for about thirty years; but there was another sharp rise in prices at the end of the Tudor Age, when four bad harvests in succession between 1594 and 1597 caused an annual inflation of 10.4 per cent. The poorer classes suffered severely, because food prices, except for fish and ale, rose by 190 per cent in these four years, while wages hardly rose at all.

  During the inflation of Edward VI’s reign, Parliament tried to keep wages stable by passing an Act in 1549 to prevent combinations by workmen to obtain a rise in wages. It enacted that if any artificers or labourers conspired together to obtain higher wages or shorter working hours, ‘or shall not enterprise or take upon them to finish that another hath begun’, they were to be punished for the first offence by a fine of £10 or twenty days’ imprisonment on bread and water; and for the third offence the offender was to pay a fine of £40, and if it was not paid within six
days, he was to stand in the pillory, have one of his ears cut off, be forced to work as a labourer all his life, and be for ever incapable of giving evidence in a court of law.

  The government tried to control the rise in prices as well as wages. In 1534 an Act was passed to reduce the excessive price of meat. If, in any district, farmers were refusing to sell their cattle to butchers at reasonable prices, the butchers could apply to the local JPs to fix a reasonable price for the cattle. More far-reaching measures against overcharging were taken in Edward VI’s reign. It was forbidden to buy butter or cheese and resell it except in an open shop, fair or market, or to buy corn, wine, fish, butter, cheese, candles, farm animals or rabbits at any fair or market, and to resell them at any fair or market within four miles of where they were bought; and no one who bought oxen, cows, sheep or goats was to resell them unless he had kept the animals in his own house or farm for five weeks.

  The Act did not apply to an innkeeper who resold them to customers in his inn; to anyone who had been licensed by the JPs as a common drover and who resold them more than forty miles from the place where he bought them; or to anyone living within one mile of the sea who bought and resold fish. But Parliament had dealt with profiteering in imported fish in another Statute in 1542. Fishermen in the Cinque Ports, and in other places in Sussex and Kent, were in the habit of going to sea and meeting French and Flemish fishermen from Picardy, Normandy, Flanders or Zeeland in the Channel or the North Sea, buying their fish from them, and bringing it back to England to resell at a profit. Parliament, believing that the fish would be sold at cheaper prices if the French and Flemish fishermen came to English ports and sold it there themselves, made it illegal for anyone to buy fish abroad, or at sea, and resell it in the King’s realm; but this did not apply to fish that had been bought in Ireland, Scotland, the Orkneys and Shetlands, or in Iceland or Newfoundland.

  Gardeners at work in a kitchen garden. A somewhat stylized woodcut in The Gardener’s Labyrinth, published in 1572 under the name of Henry Dethicke, which disguises the identity of a prolific gardening writer called Thomas Hill.

  In view of the law which prohibited artisans and labourers from leaving their employment without their masters’ consent before the expiry of their term of service, many workmen refused to enter into the usual contract of employment for a year or three months. They became casual labourers, or ‘journeymen’, who agreed to serve a master only from day to day, and left, when they felt inclined, to take a better job elsewhere. This was prohibited by an Act of 1550, which declared that ‘many young folk and servants of sundry occupations’ would not take employment by the year, ‘but at their liberty by the day, week or otherwise work . . . to the intent that they will live idly at their pleasure, and flee and resort from place to place, whereof ensueth more inconveniences than can be at this present expressed and declared’. So it was enacted that weavers, tailors, shoemakers and other craftsmen were not to employ any unmarried person for a term of service of less than three months, on pain of one month’s imprisonment and a fine of 40s.

  Every journeyman who worked at any trade was to be compelled to accept any employment which he was offered in his trade for three months, six months or a year at wages which, if the parties could not agree, should be assessed as reasonable by the mayor or the local JPs. If he refused to take this employment, he was to be punished by one month’s imprisonment and a fine of 20s. The statute also enacted that no unmarried person who had never been married – it did not apply to widowers – could be employed as a husbandman for a term of less than one year.

  The laws regulating wages and hours of work continued to be widely avoided, and in 1563 Elizabeth I’s Parliament tried again. It recognized that one reason why the law had not been enforced was because the rise in prices had made the wages too low; so the Act no longer fixed a maximum wage for the various classes of labourers, but, taking inflation into account, enacted that the wages should be fixed by the local JPs, who had to meet for this purpose every year within six weeks after Easter and send their order to be confirmed by the Privy Council before 12 July. Any employer who paid more than the maximum wage laid down by the JPs was to be punished by ten days’ imprisonment and a fine of £5, and a servant who accepted a higher wage was to be sentenced to twenty-one days’ imprisonment. The Act confirmed the working hours laid down in the earlier Acts. Between the middle of March and the middle of September the husbandmen and artisans were to be at work by 5 a.m. and not leave work till between 7 and 8 p.m., and their rest breaks during the day were not to exceed two and a half hours, including half an hour ‘at the most’ for a sleep between the middle of May and the middle of August. Between the middle of September and the middle of May they were to work from dawn to dusk, with one and a half hours for work breaks.

  The Act of 1563 went further than any earlier legislation in conscripting labour for the farms. It drew up a comprehensive list of thirty-one trades, from clothworkers and tailors to arrowheadmakers and cooks, and enacted that any unmarried man, or married man under thirty, who had been trained in these trades could be ordered by the mayor or local JPs to take employment in his trade on a yearly contract of service unless he was working in husbandry or in the household of a nobleman or gentleman. Any other man between the ages of twelve and sixty, unless he was a fisherman, a sailor, a university student, or if he or his father owned land worth 40s. a year or goods worth £10, could be compelled to work as a husbandman for any master who was willing to employ him. Any unmarried woman between the ages of twelve and forty could be ordered by the JPs to take service for a year, a quarter, a week or a day with any master whom they saw fit to appoint. If the man or woman refused to accept this employment, they were to be imprisoned until they agreed to take the job. The JPs were given power to order that at haymaking and harvest time any artisan ‘and persons as be meet to labour’ should work from day to day on the land for any farmer whom the JPs nominated; and if they refused to do so, they were to be placed in the stocks for two days and one night. No master could dismiss a servant, and no servant could leave his employment, without a quarter’s notice on either side, except for a good reason which had been accepted by the local JPs; and any servant who did so was to be imprisoned. The Act also provided that any servant who assaulted his master, mistress or any person appointed to a position of authority over him was to be imprisoned for a year and suffer any further punishment that the JPs chose to inflict, provided that it did not entail the loss of his life or limb.

  At the end of their terms of service, the husbandman and artisan were not permitted to leave the town or parish in which they had been employed, unless they had obtained a certificate from the local vicar, for which the vicar was entitled to charge them twopence. The certificate was to be signed and dated by the vicar, and to be in this form: ‘Memorand, that AB late servant to CD of E, husbandman, in the county of —, is licensed to depart from his said master and is at his liberty to serve elsewhere, according to the statute in the case made.’ No one was permitted to employ any person who did not produce such a certificate, and any workman who did not produce it within twenty-one days, when required to do so, was to be whipped as a vagabond.

  The Act attempted to prevent husbandmen from leaving the land by enacting that craftsmen could only take a youth as an apprentice if he lived in a market town in the same county and was not the son of a husbandman or labourer.

  It was the JPs themselves who came off best as a result of the statute. It provided that every JP who carried out his duties under the Act was entitled to five shillings a day for his expenses, to be paid to him from the parish rates.

  If the MPs hoped that this long and complicated statute of 1563 would finally solve the problem of the labour shortage in husbandry, they were disappointed. There continued to be evasions of the law, and when Parliament passed another Act in 1597 to clarify some ambiguities, it complained that the Act of 1563 was not being properly enforced.

  The government throughout the Tu
dor Age was also concerned with the problem of housing for agricultural workers, for they knew that one of the factors which threatened to cause the decay of husbandry was that no houses were available for husbandmen. An Act of 1489 compelled landowners who let arable land to maintain in a good condition any houses on the land; but this Act was ineffective, and more far-reaching legislation was passed in the last years of the Tudor Age. A statute of 1597 enacted that any house which had been let with 20 acres of land for at least three years since the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558, except the dwelling house of a nobleman or gentleman, ‘shall be adjudged a House of Husbandry for ever’; and any landowner who had allowed houses of husbandry to fall into disrepair since 1558 was to rebuild a specified number of new houses to replace them.

  There was another great cause for concern, which was as serious as the decay of husbandry. The shortage of timber was already being felt at the end of the fifteenth century, and it became much worse during the Tudor Age. Wood was still very largely used in housebuilding, as well as in the building and repair of ships, and it was the most usual form of fuel, though peat was also burned, and by the middle of the sixteenth century coal was becoming more common, especially in the districts near the coal mines. The development of the iron industry in the Weald of Sussex, Surrey and Kent, and later the glassworks which opened in the area after 1560, greatly increased the demand for wood as a fuel for the furnaces, and led to tree-felling and deforestation on a scale which alarmed the government. When Edward VI’s Parliament in 1553, pursuing its consumer-protection policy, enacted that every faggot of wood sold in London or Westminster must be at least 3 feet long and 20 inches in circumference, it complained about the poor quality of timber offered for sale ‘these sixty years . . . by reason of the great scarcity of wood, that is happened since the time of the said King Edward IV’.