by Will Durant
The Reformation fell in with the new economy. The Catholic Church was by temperament antipathetic to “business”; it had condemned interest, had given religious sanction to guilds, had sanctified poverty and castigated wealth, and had freed workers from toil on holydays so numerous that in 1550 there were in Catholic countries 115 nonworking days in the year;11 this may have played a part in the slower industrialization and enrichment of Catholic lands. Theologians approved by the Church had defended the fixing of “just prices” by law for the necessaries of life. Thomas Aquinas had branded as “sinful covetousness” the pursuit of money beyond one’s needs, and had ruled that any surplus possessions were “due by natural law to the purpose of succoring the poor.”12 Luther had shared these views. But the general development of Protestantism unconsciously co-operated with the capitalist revolution. Saints’ holydays were abolished, with a resultant increase in labor and capital. The new religion found support from businessmen, and returned the courtesy. Wealth was honored, thrift was lauded, work was encouraged as a virtue, interest was accepted as a legitimate reward for risking one’s savings.
II. LAW
It was a cruel age, and its laws corresponded to a pitiless economy, a shameful pauperism, a somber art, and a theology whose God had repudiated Christ.
Among populations mostly fated to poverty here and damnation hereafter, crime was natural. Murder was plentiful in all classes. Every man of caliber dangled a dagger, and only the weakling relied on the law to redress his wrongs. Crimes of passion were as frequent in life as in Shakespeare, and any Othello who failed to slay his suspected wife was rated less than a man. Travelers took highwaymen for granted, and proceeded in groups. In the cities, still unlit at night, robbers were as plentiful as prostitutes, and a man’s home had to be his castle. In the heyday of Francis I a gang of thieves called mauvais garçons despoiled Paris in full sunlight. Brantôme tells us, as unreliably as usual, how Charles IX, wishing to learn “how the cut-purses performed their arts,” instructed his police to invite ten such artists to a royal ball; after the ball was over he asked to see their spoils; the money, jewelry, and garments unostentatiously acquired by them during the evening amounted to many thousands of dollars’ worth, “at which the King thought he would die of laughter.” He allowed them to keep the fruit of their studies, but had them enrolled in the army as better dead than alive.13 If we classify as crimes the adulteration of goods, the chicanery of business frauds, the bribery of courts, the seizure of ecclesiastical property, the extension of frontiers by conquest, every second man in Europe was a thief; we may give some the benefit of clergy, and allow for an honest craftsman here and there. Add a little arson, a little rape, a little treason, and we begin to understand the problems faced by the forces of order and law.
These were organized to punish, rather than to prevent, crime. In some large towns, like Paris, soldiers served as guardians of the peace; city blocks had their wardens, parishes their constables; but by and large the cities were poorly policed. Statesmen weary of fighting the nature of man reckoned it cheaper to control crime by decreeing ferocious penalties, and letting the public witness executions. A score of offenses were capital: murder, treason, heresy, sacrilege, witchcraft, robbery, forgery, counterfeiting, smuggling, arson, perjury, adultery, rape (unless healed by marriage), homosexual actions, “bestiality,” falsifying weights or measures, adulterating food, damaging property at night, escaping from prison, and failure in attempted suicide. Execution might be by relatively painless beheading, but this was usually a privilege of ladies and gentlemen; lesser fry were hanged; heretics and husband-killers were burned; outstanding murderers were drawn and quartered; and a law of Henry VIII (1531) punished poisoners by boiling them alive,14 as we gentler souls do with shellfish. A Salzburg municipal ordinance required that “a forger shall be burned or boiled to death, a perjurer shall have his tongue torn out by the neck; a servant who sleeps with his master’s wife, daughter, or sister shall be beheaded or hanged.”15 Julienne Rabeau, who had killed her child after a very painful delivery, was burned at Angers (1531);16 and there too, if we may believe Bodin, several persons were burned alive for eating meat on Friday and refusing to repent; those who repented were merely hanged.17 Usually the corpse of the hanged was left suspended as a warning to the living, until the crows had eaten the flesh away. For minor offenses a man or a woman might be scourged, or lose a hand, a foot, an ear, a nose, or be blinded in one eye or both, or be branded with a hot iron. Still milder misdemeanors were punished by imprisonment in conditions varying from courtesy to filth, or by the stocks, the pillory, the whipping-cart, or the ducking stool. Imprisonment for debt was common throughout Europe. All in all, the penal code of the sixteenth century was more severe than in the Middle Ages, and reflected the moral disorder of the time.
The people did not resent these ferocious punishments. They took some pleasure in attending executions, and sometimes lent a helping hand. When Montecucculi confessed, under torture, that he had poisoned, or had intended to poison, Francis, the beloved and popular son of Francis I, he was dismembered alive by having his limbs tied to horses which were then driven in four directions (Lyons, 1536); the populace, we are told, “cut his remains into little morsels, hacked off his nose, tore out his eyes, broke his jaws, trained his head in the mud, and ‘made him die a thousand times before his death.’”18
To the laws against crime were added “blue laws” against recreations supposedly infringing upon piety, or innovations too abruptly deviating from custom. Fish-eating on Friday, required by common law in Catholic lands, was required by state law in the Protestant England of Edward VI to support the fishing industry and so train men to the sea for the navy.19 Gambling was always illegal and always popular. Francis I, who knew how to amuse himself, ordered the arrest of people who played cards or dice in taverns or gaming houses (1526), but he allowed the establishment of a public lottery (1539). Drunkenness was seldom punished by law, but idleness was almost a capital crime. Sumptuary laws—designed to check conspicuous expenditure by the newly rich, and to preserve class distinctions—regulated dress, adornment, furniture, meals, and hospitality. “When I was a boy,” said Luther, “all games were forbidden, so that card-makers, pipers, and actors were not admitted to the sacraments; and those who had played games, or been present at shows or plays, made it a matter of confession.”20 Most such prohibitions survived the Reformation, to reach their peak in the later sixteenth century.
It was some consolation that enforcement was rarely as severe as the law. Escape was easy; a kindly, bribed, or intimidated judge or jury let many a rascal go lightly punished or scot free. (“Scot” originally meant an assessment or fine.) The laws of sanctuary were still recognized under Henry VIII. However, laxity of enforcement was balanced by frequent use of torture to elicit confessions or testimony. Here the laws of Henry VIII, though they were the severest in the history of England,21 were ahead of their time; they forbade torture except where national security was held to be involved.22 Delay in trying an indicted person could also be torture; one complaint of the Spanish Cortes to Charles V was that men charged with even slight offenses lingered in prison as long as ten years before being tried, and that trials might drag on for twenty years.23
Lawyers bred and multiplied as the priesthood declined. They filled the judiciary and the higher bureaucracy; they represented the middle classes in the national assemblies and the provincial parlements; even the aristocracy and the clergy depended on them for guidance in civil law. A new noblesse de robe—the “furred cats” of Rabelais—formed in France. Canon law disappeared in Protestant countries, and jurisprudence replaced theology as the pièce de résistance in universities. Roman law sprang back to life in Latin countries, and captured Germany in the sixteenth century. Local law survived alongside it in France, “common law” was preferred to it in England, but the Justinian Code had some influence in shaping and sustaining the absolutism of Henry VIII. Yet in Henry’s own court his ch
aplain, Thomas Starkey, composed (c. 1537) a Dialogue whose main theme was that laws should dictate the will of the king, and that kings should be subject to election and recall:
That country cannot long be well governed, nor maintained with good policy, where all is ruled by the will of one not chosen by election but cometh to it by natural succession; for seldom seen it is that they which by succession come to kingdoms and realms are worthy of such high authority... What is more repugnant to nature than a whole nation to be governed by the will of a prince?... What is more contrary to reason than all the whole people to be ruled by him which commonly lacketh all reason?... It is not man that can make a wise prince of him that lacketh wit by nature.... . But this is in man’s power, to elect and choose him that is both wise and just, and make him a prince, and him that is a tyrant so to depose.24
Starkey died a strangely natural death a year after writing his Dialogue—but 334 years before it reached print.
III. MORALS
How did the people of Latin Christendom behave? We must not be misled by their religious professions; these were more often expressions of pugnacity than of piety. The same sturdy men who could believe so fiercely could fiercely blaspheme, and the girls who on Sunday bowed demurely before statues of the Virgin rouged their cheeks hopefully during the week, and many of them got themselves seduced, if only as a proposal of marriage. Virginity had to be protected by every device of custom, morals, law, religion, paternal authority, pedagogy, and “point of honor”; yet it managed to get lost. Soldiers returning from campaigns in which sex and liquor had been their chief consolations found it painful to adjust themselves to continence and sobriety. Students majored in venery, and protested that fornication was but a venial sin,25 which enlightened legislators would overlook. Robert Greene declared that at Cambridge he had “consumed the flower of my youth amongst wags as lewd as myself.”26 Female dancers not infrequently performed on the stage and elsewhere “absolutely naked”;27 this, apparently, is one of the oldest novelties in the world. Artists looked down their noses at the rules and regulations of sexual behavior,28 and lords and ladies agreed with the artists. “Among great folk,” wrote Brantôme, “these rules and scruples concerning virginity are made little of.... . How many girls I know, of the Great World, who did not take their virginity to the marriage bed!”29 We have noted the sort of story that sweet Marguerite of Navarre seems to have heard without a blush. The bookstalls were stacked with licentious literature, for which high prices were greedily paid.30 Aretino was as popular in Paris as in Rome. Rabelais, a priest, did not feel that he would reduce the sales of his Gargantuan epic by spattering it with such speech as would have made Aretino run to cover. Artists found a ready market for erotic pictures, even for pictured perversions;31 masterpieces of this kind were sold by street hawkers, letter carriers, strolling players, even at the great fairs.32 All the perversions found place in this period,33 as in the aristocratic pages of Brantôme.34
Prostitution prospered in income and prestige; it was in this age that its practitioners came to be called cortigiane—courtesans—which was the feminine of cortigiani—courtiers. Some generals provided prostitutes for their armies, as a safeguard for the other women of occupied towns.35 But as venereal disease grew almost to the proportions of a plague, government after government legislated against the unhappy filles de joie. Luther, while affirming the naturalness of sexual desire, labored to reduce prostitution, and under his urging many cities in Lutheran Germany made it illegal.36 In 1560 Michel de l’Hôpital, Chancellor of France, renewed the laws of Louis IX against the evil, and apparently his decree was enforced.
Meanwhile the absurd lust of flesh for flesh begot the hunger of soul for soul, and all the delicate embroidery of courtship and romantic love. Stolen glances, billets-doux, odes and sonnets, lays and madrigals, hopeful gifts and secret trysts, poured out of the coursing blood. A few refined spirits, or playful women, welcomed from Italy and Castiglione the pastime of Platonic love, by which a lady and her courtier might be passionate friends but sedulously chaste. Such restraint, however, was not in the mood of the age; men were frankly sensual, and women liked them so. Love poetry abounded, but it was a prelude to possession.
Not to marriage. Parents were still too matter-of-fact to let love choose mates for life; marriage, in their dispensation, was a wedding of estates. Erasmus, sensitive to the charms of woman but not of matrimony, advised youngsters to marry as the oldsters wished, and trust to love to grow with association37 rather than wither with satiation; and Rabelais agreed with him.38 Notwithstanding these authorities, a rising number of young people, like Jeanne d’Albret, rebelled against marriages of realty. Roger Ascham, tutor to Elizabeth, mourned that “our time is so far from that old discipline and obedience as now not only young gentlemen but even very girls dare... marry themselves in spite of father, mother, God, good order, and all.”39 Luther was alarmed to learn that Melanchthon’s son had betrothed himself without consulting his father, and that a young judge in Wittenberg had declared such a betrothal valid; this, the Reformer thought, was bound to give Wittenberg a bad name. In the university, he wrote (January 22,1544),
we have a great horde of young men from all countries, and the race of girls is getting bold, and run after the fellows into their rooms and chambers and wherever they can, and offer them their free love; and I hear that many parents have ordered their sons home .... saying that we hang wives around their necks.... . The next Sunday I preached a strong sermon, telling men to follow the common road and manner which had been since the beginning of the world .... namely, that parents should give their children to each other with prudence and good will, without their own preliminary engagement.... . Such engagements are an invention of the abominable pope, suggested to him by the Devil to destroy and tear down the power of parents given and commended to them earnestly by God.40
Marriage contracts could be arranged for boys and girls as young as three years, but these marriages could be annulled later, if not consummated. The legal age for full marriage was generally fourteen for boys, twelve for girls. Sexual relations after betrothal and before the wedding were condoned. Even before betrothal, in Sweden and Wales, as later in some American colonies, “bundling” was allowed: the lovers would lie together in bed, but were admonished to keep a sheet between them.41 In Protestant lands marriage ceased to be a sacrament, and by 1580 civil marriage was competing with marriage by a clergyman. Luther, Henry VIII, Erasmus, and Pope Clement VII thought bigamy permissible under certain conditions, especially as a substitute for divorce. Protestant divines moved slowly toward allowing divorce, but at first only for adultery. This offense was apparently most prevalent in France, despite the custom of killing adulterous wives. Illicit love affairs were part of the normal life of French women of good social standing.42 A triangular ménage like that of Henry II, Catherine de Médicis, and Diane de Poitiers was quite frequent—the legal wife de convenance accepting the situation with wry grace, as sometimes in France today.
Except in the aristocracies, women were goddesses before marriage and servants afterward. Wives took motherhood in their stride, gloried in their numerous children, and managed to manage their managers. They were robust creatures, accustomed to hard work from sunrise to sunset. They made most of the clothing for their families, and sometimes took in work from capitalist entrepreneurs. The loom was an essential part of the home; in England all unmarried women were “spinsters.” The women of the French court were a different species, encouraged by Francis I to prettify themselves in flesh and dress, and sometimes turning national policy by the guided missiles of their charms. A feminist movement was imported into France from Italy, but rapidly faded as women perceived that their power and prominence were independent of politics and laws. Many French women of the upper class were well educated; already, in Paris and elsewhere, the French salon was taking form as rich and cultivated ladies made their homes the rendezvous of statesmen, poets, artists, scholars, prelates, and ph
ilosophers. Another group of French women—let Anne of France, Anne of Brittany, Claude, and Renée serve as instances—stood quietly virtuous amid the erotic storm. In general the Reformation, being Teutonic, made for the patriarchal view of woman and the family. It ended her Renaissance enthronement as an exemplar of beauty and a civilizer of man. It condemned the Church’s lenience with sexual diversions, and, after Luther’s death, it prepared the way for the Puritanic chill.
Social morality declined with the rise of commercialism and the temporary disruption of charity. The natural dishonesty of man found fresh forms and opportunities as a money economy displaced the feudal regime. The newly rich. holding securities rather than land, and seldom seeing the individuals from whose labor they benefited, had no traditions of responsibility and generosity such as had gone with landed wealth.43 Medieval commerce and industry had accepted moral checks in the form of guild, municipal, and ecclesiastical regulations; the new capitalism rejected these restraints, and drew men into a strenuous competition that pushed aside the old codes.44 Commercial frauds replaced pious frauds. The pamphlet literature of the age groaned with denunciations of wholesale adulteration of food and other products. The Diet of Innsbruck (1518) complained that importers “add brick dust to ginger, and mix unhealthy stuff with their pepper.”45 Luther noted that merchants “have learned the trick of placing such spices as pepper, ginger, and saffron in damp vaults to increase their weight. There is not a single article out of which they cannot make profit through false measuring, counting, or weighing, or by producing artificial colors.... . There is no end to their trickery.”46 The Venetian Senate branded a shipment of English woolens as fraudulent in weight, make, and size.47