A Brief History of the Tudor Age

by Ridley, Jasper

  The Act, like the statute of 1495, expressly referred to university scholars and discharged soldiers and sailors; and new provisions were inserted to punish unauthorized persons travelling through the country and acting as solicitors, physicians, pardoners who pardoned sinners, palm-readers, or players of unlawful games and actors in unlawful plays. This group were to be punished more severely than any other, for they were to be whipped twice on two consecutive days. For the second offence they were again to be whipped twice, and on the third day put in the pillory from 9 a.m. till 11 a.m. and lose one ear; for the third offence they were to be whipped twice and lose the other ear in the pillory.

  In 1536 the smaller monasteries, whose annual income was less than £200 a year, were dissolved and all the greater houses had gone by 1540. The monks themselves were paid pensions by the royal treasury for the rest of their lives, varying from £100 a year for the abbot to £5 a year for most of the monks, and forty shillings a year for the gardeners and some of the servants of the monastery; but many of the servants received nothing, nor did the beggars and others who had been granted hospitality in the monasteries. They added to the numbers of vagabonds in the realm. In July 1536 the Emperor’s ambassador, Chapuys, reported that 20,000 former inmates of the monasteries were begging on the highways. His figure is almost certainly exaggerated, because he was strongly opposed to Henry VIII’s religious policy and to the suppression of the monasteries, and received most of his information from the Papist enemies of the government; and he knew that Charles V would be delighted to read such reports.

  The government responded by passing another and even more severe Act against vagabonds in 1536, though further provision was made for giving charitable relief to the old and impotent. The mayors and JPs were to make sure that all able-bodied vagabonds who had been whipped and sent home to their native parishes were ‘kept to continual labour’ there; they were to organize house-to-house searches once a month to find any vagabonds in their parishes; and they were to take any child over five years of age who was found begging in the parish and assign him to employment with a master until he reached the age of sixteen. If any child over twelve refused to take such employment, or left it without permission, he was to be whipped, and any constable who refused to whip him was to be put in the stocks for two days with nothing but bread and water. If any vagabond who had been whipped was found idly wandering for the second time, he was to be whipped again and have the upper part of his right ear cut off as an identification mark; and any constable who refused to cut it off was to be fined five marks (£3 6s.8d.) on every occasion that he refused to do so. For the third offence the vagabond was to be hanged as a felon. The provisions for the punishment of constables who refused to whip beggar children or to cut off the ears of vagabonds, like the fines imposed on anyone who gave vagabonds food or shelter, suggest that there was quite widespread sympathy for vagabonds. Parliament never found it necessary to impose punishments on constables who refused to assist at the burning of heretics or at the execution of Papist traitors.

  The law against vagabonds was apparently enforced very vigorously under Henry VIII, for according to the historian Raphael Holinshed, who published his book in 1578, 72,000 thieves and vagabonds were hanged in Henry’s reign, though the great majority of these were undoubtedly hanged for stealing, and not for committing their third offence as vagabonds. The figure of 72,000 is very large, and as the total population of England at the time was under three million, it amounted to two and a half per cent of Henry’s subjects, which is almost as high a percentage of the population as the number of victims of Hitler and Stalin and the twentieth-century dictators. It has sometimes been suggested that this figure of 72,000 was a misprint or clerical error, and that 7,200 was the correct figure; but this overlooks the fact that in the Tudor Age people nearly always wrote figures in Roman numerals, and that no confusion could arise between Ixxiim (72,000) and viimcc (7,200). Seventy-two thousand is not impossible. The surviving records of proceedings at assizes and quarter sessions show that at most sessions some ten, twelve or fourteen defendants were hanged, most of them for theft. If an average of twelve people were hanged four times a year in each of the forty counties of England, this would give a total of 1,920 a year, or nearly 73,000 in the thirty-eight years of Henry’s reign.

  The vagabonds may have been responsible for some of the assaults on members of the public, the maiming of farm animals, and other acts of wanton destruction which became frequent in the last years of Henry VIII’s reign; but many of these offences were probably committed by husbandmen and persons in other employment who had a grudge against society or wished for some other reason to indulge in hooliganism. The Act of 1545, which dealt with these offences, did not specifically attribute them to vagabonds, but to ‘men of evil and perverse dispositions and seduced by the instigations of the Devil’. These malefactors surreptitiously set fire to stocks of timber which had been assembled by householders in preparation for carrying out building work on their houses; they broke down the heads of dams and other waters, cut conduit pipes, burned carts laden with coal or wood, damaged apple trees and pear trees, cut out the tongues of cattle and other animals, and cut off the ears of some of the King’s law-abiding subjects. In view of the timber shortage in the kingdom, there was no doubt which of these offences was regarded as the most serious; for the Act provided that anyone who set fire to timber stocks was to be punished by death, whereas the other crimes referred to in the Act, including cutting off the ears of the King’s subjects, were punishable only by a £10 fine payable to the King and compensation to the victim of three times the estimated damage which he had suffered.

  After Henry VIII’s death, Parliament adopted a novel solution of the problem of vagabonds. In 1547 Edward VI’s first Parliament, under Somerset’s reforming government, repealed many of the Acts of Henry’s reign which had created new capital offences of treasons and felonies; but the statute which it passed against beggars and vagabonds was the most severe yet. The Act complained that previous laws against vagabonds had not been effective because those officers who should have enforced them had felt ‘foolish pity and mercy’ for the vagabonds; and it enacted that if any man or woman who was ‘lurking in any house or houses or loitering and idly wander by the highways side or in the streets in cities, towns or villages, not applying themself to some honest and allowed art, science, service or labour’ continued to do so for three consecutive days, he was to offer himself as a servant to any master who would pay him wages; if no master was willing to do so, he was to offer to serve some master for his meat and drink only. If he did not do this, anyone who encountered him could ask the JPs to make him his slave for two years. After the vagabond had been branded on the chest with the letter V, his new master was to take him, ‘and only giving the said slave bread and water or small drink, and such refuse of meat as he shall think mete, cause the said slave to work by beating, chaining or otherwise in such work and labour, how vile soever it be, as he shall put him unto’. If the slave ran away during his two years of service, he was to be branded, when recaptured, with the letter S and become his master’s slave for life.

  As beggars and vagabonds often carried their children around with them as they wandered through the country, their children over five years of age were to be taken from them and allotted as servants to masters chosen by the JPs, with whom the male children must remain till they were twenty-four and the female children till they were twenty; if they ran away, they were to become the master’s slave. If their parents, or anyone else, stole them away from their master, both the parent and the child were to become the master’s slave. Anyone who gave shelter to an escaping slave was to be fined £10. If a slave, during or after his term of slavery, assaulted his master or mistress, tried to burn their house or corn, or plotted with other persons to lie in wait for their master or mistress and attack them, they were to be hanged, unless their master or mistress was prepared to take them as their slave for ever. The refer
ence to slaves and their friends lying in wait for their master in order to ambush him is reminiscent of the plan of Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo to launch a secret attack on Prospero in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. These assaults were perhaps not an unknown occurrence in the Tudor Age.

  It is not surprising that this extraordinary statute, after having been largely forgotten by historians for 300 years, was rediscovered by Karl Marx in the Reading Room of the British Museum and cited by him in his Capital in 1867 as an example of class oppression; but it was repealed after three years on the grounds that it had not been enforced. The ferocious language of the Act was probably intended to frighten potential vagabonds, and this, rather than the punishment of the vagabonds, may have been the chief purpose of the Act; for the Act provided that it was to be read out in every market town on market day and twice a year at every quarter sessions. Even this provision may not have been enforced in practice, for the Act was so long that it must have taken more than half an hour to read it aloud.

  The Act of 1550, which repealed this statute, reinstated the Act of 1530, which punished vagabonds by the slightly more lenient punishments of whipping and loss of ears, but not by death or slavery. It also enacted that any husbandman who refused to work for reasonable wages was to be deemed a vagabond. Any vagabond’s children between the ages of five and fourteen could be taken from the vagabond and put to labour without wages for a master chosen by the JPs till they reached the age of eighteen in the case of a boy or fifteen in the case of a girl; if the child ran away, the master could punish him by putting him in the stocks. But it was provided that if two witnesses persuaded the JPs that the master was being ‘unreasonable in ordering and bringing up’ the child, they were to remove him and send him as a servant to another master.

  The Act of 1550 introduced for the first time the institution which in later centuries became known as ‘the workhouse’. A house was to be set up in every parish where the aged and impotent poor were to be sheltered and cared for, and put to any work of which they were capable, which they were to perform without wages; if they refused to go to the house or to do the work, they were to be treated as vagabonds. Two years later, an Act made new provisions for the collecting of alms for the maintenance of the poor in these houses. Instead of merely requiring the vicars to urge the people to contribute, the Act of 1552 enacted that the vicar and churchwardens were to elect every year in Whitsun week two ‘Gatherers and Collectors of the Charitable Alms’, who were to attend church on the following Sunday and ‘gently ask and demand of every man and woman what they of their charity will be contented to give weekly towards the relief of the poor’; and the Collectors were to call on these people every week to collect the sums that they had promised to give. But there was no kind of compulsion on anyone to pay.

  The restoration of the Catholic religion under Mary did not lead to any change in the government policy about beggars and vagabonds. The only respect in which the clock was not put back to 1533 was in regard to the monasteries; for though Mary restored to the monks a few of the monastic lands which were still in the possession of the crown, she agreed to allow the purchasers of the confiscated property of the monasteries to retain the lands, as part of an unofficial bargain by which the representatives of the gentry in Parliament agreed to re-enact the law for burning heretics. The Acts of 1550 and 1552 for the punishment of able-bodied vagabonds and the relief of the aged and impotent poor remained unaltered; but for the first time a slight element of compulsion was introduced into the collecting of alms. If anyone in the parish refused to contribute to the relief of the poor in the houses established for them, the Gatherers and Collectors of the Charitable Alms were to ‘charitably exhort him to give, and if he is obstinate shall send him to the bishop’ of the diocese, who was to induce him ‘by charitable means and ways tested’ to contribute; and if he still refused, the bishop was ‘to take order for the charitable reformation of every such obstinate person’.

  Under Elizabeth the law remained unchanged until the Act of 1572, which repealed the earlier statutes for the punishment of vagabonds. Henceforth a vagabond was ‘to be grievously whipped and burned through the grissel of the right ear with a hot iron’ an inch wide, unless some ‘honest householder’ owning land worth twenty shillings or goods worth £5 agreed to take him into his service. If the vagabond left his employer, or if he was convicted of being a vagabond for a second time, he was to be hanged as a felon unless someone else agreed to employ him; and for the third offence he was in any case to be hanged, without benefit of clergy. Thus capital punishment for vagabonds was reintroduced, twenty-two years after it had been abolished by the Act of 1550. The aged and impotent poor were to be sent to the houses for the poor, which were now called ‘Abiding Places’; and no beggars were to be allowed to go to those Tudor health resorts, the baths at Bath or Buxton, without a licence from their local JPs.

  It is difficult to know how far the Acts against vagabonds were actually enforced in practice. The surviving records of the courts of assizes and quarter sessions contain very few cases of proceedings against vagabonds; but these records are incomplete, and in any case do not prove that vagabonds were not dealt with in the courts. The records show that about three-quarters of all the crimes tried in the courts were some form of theft, which is almost exactly the same percentage as it is in the courts in the twentieth century; and the most likely explanation of the absence of references in the court records to vagabonds is that it was simpler to prosecute and hang vagabonds for stealing, a crime which they were almost forced by circumstances to commit, rather than to proceed against them as vagabonds, when they could only be hanged for the third offence. It has been estimated that about 800 thieves were hanged every year in the reign of Elizabeth I, and many of these were almost certainly vagabonds.

  An Act of 1576 inaugurated yet another change in policy and began the practice, which was to last for the next 260 years, of giving work to the aged and impotent poor to perform in their own homes. In every borough, the mayor was to keep a store of ‘wool, hemp, flax, iron or other stuff’ and hand it out to the aged and impotent poor for them to do any work that they were able, and were ordered, to do with these materials. The authorities were to pay them what they considered to be a suitable wage for the work done. If any old or infirm person refused to do the work, or spoiled or embezzled the materials, the churchwardens and Collectors and Governors of the Poor could decide, by a majority vote, to send the offender to the House of Correction ‘in convenient apparel mete for such a body to wear . . . there to be straitly kept, as well in diet as in work, and also punished from time to time’ as the Governors of the House of Correction saw fit. Any old or infirm person who was given poor relief but nevertheless went begging was to be whipped and burned through the right ear, and hanged for the third offence, unless an honest householder with the necessary property qualification was prepared to take him into his service.

  The Act of 1576 for the first time imposed a punishment on those parishioners who refused to contribute to the cost of providing relief for the deserving poor or for maintaining a House of Correction. Anyone who refused to respond to the exhortations of the Collectors for the Poor was to be forced to pay twice the rate that he would otherwise have had to pay.

  The problem of vagabonds had always been accentuated by the soldiers discharged from the army; and after the whole nation had celebrated and given thanks to God for the victory over the Spanish Armada, Parliament at long last made special provision for discharged and wounded soldiers. A statute of 1593 enacted that any soldiers who had ‘adventured their lives and lost their limbs or disabled their bodies’ by their service in the army since 25 March 1588 could apply to the county treasurers for a weekly sum of money for their relief, to which every parish was to contribute. Any wounded soldier who, despite receiving a pension, went around begging, was to be punished as a vagabond.

  The Parliament of 1597 passed five statutes dealing with old and infirm beggars, wit
h vagabonds, and with wounded and impotent soldiers. The death penalty for vagabonds was again abolished, and was never reintroduced in England; it was retained only for discharged soldiers who were wandering around the country, committing crimes and terrifying the population. Vagabonds were to be punished by whippings, and persistent offenders could be sentenced by the courts to confinement in a House of Correction or to be banished from the realm. It was only if they returned without permission from banishment that they were to suffer death. Parishioners who refused to contribute for the relief of the poor could now be punished by imprisonment; and the parents and children of old, blind and infirm paupers were required to pay such contributions for their maintenance as were fixed by the JPs. These provisions were re-enacted by two statutes in Elizabeth’s last Parliament of 1601.

  The law for the relief of the deserving poor and the punishment of vagabonds, which was enacted in 1597 and confirmed in 1601, continued to apply with very little change till the New Poor Law was introduced in 1834, when the granting of relief to the poor in their homes, which in some form or other had existed throughout the Tudor Age, was virtually abolished. After another hundred years, the Abiding Places and workhouses of 1550 were in their turn abolished, and the principle of paying for poor relief by compulsory insurance was instituted in the twentieth century. But the dual problem of giving charitable relief to the poor and discouraging idleness is still with us in 1988, though no one now suggests that able-bodied shirkers should be punished by whipping, mutilation, enslavement or death.

  15

  TUDOR MEN AND WOMEN

  WHAT WERE MEN AND WOMEN like in the Tudor Age? It is not easy to understand the outlook of our ancestors, who are separated from us by only thirteen or fourteen generations, by studying the contemporary chronicles, the State papers, the Acts of Parliament, the ecclesiastical registers and the law reports, though we can learn a little more from the few diaries which have survived and from the words and behaviour of the characters in the plays of Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists.