Millennium

by Ian Mortimer

21 Rogers, War Cruel and Sharp, p. 1.

  1401–1500 The Fifteenth Century

  1 For further argument on this point, see Ian Mortimer, ‘What Hundred Years War?’, History Today (October 2009), pp. 27–33.

  2 C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415–1825 (1969), p. 26.

  3 Accurate measurements of the Earth’s diameter did exist – Eratosthenes and Posidonius had both come up with figures correct to the nearest thousand miles in the ancient world – but these works were unknown to Columbus.

  4 Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine (2nd edn, 1988), p. 153. An astronomical clock powered by dripping mercury appears in a Castilian manuscript of that same decade.

  5 Ian Mortimer, The Perfect King (2006), p. 288.

  6 Gimpel, Medieval Machine, p. 169.

  7 Lynn White Jr, Medieval Technology and Social Change (OUP paperback edn, 1964), pp. 125–6; Ian Mortimer, The Fears of Henry IV (2007), pp. 92–3.

  8 White, Medieval Technology, p. 127.

  9 The National Archives, Kew, London: DL 28/1/2 fol. 15V.

  10 Lucy Toulmin Smith (ed.), Expeditions to Prussia and the Holy Land Made by Henry Earl of Derby (1894), p. 93.

  11 Chris Woolgar, The Senses in Medieval England (2006), p. 139. The cheaper two mirrors were worth 15s. 5d and 7s. 9d; the third mirror was a jewelled one worth £13 10s.

  12 It is possible that Gutenberg did not ‘invent’ the printing press but learnt the idea. As is well known, printing was familiar centuries earlier in China than it was in the West, and the Koreans started to use movable type a few decades before Gutenberg. It is also said that Laurens Janszoon Coster of Haarlem was printing texts in Latin with movable wooden type in the early 1420s, prior to the fire that destroyed his home town. The printed woodblock was certainly in use in the West decades before Gutenberg. Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media (2005), p. 31.

  13 Ibid., p. 33.

  14 Evan T. Jones and Alwyn Ruddock, ‘John Cabot and the Discovery of America’, Historical Research, 81 (2008), pp. 224–54.

  1501–1600 The Sixteenth Century

  1 Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media (2005), p. 13.

  2 Ibid., p. 15.

  3 Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind (1997), p. 132.

  4 W. B. Stephens, ‘Literacy in England, Scotland and Wales 1500–1900’, History of Education Quarterly 30, 4 (1990), pp. 545–71, at p. 555

  5 Other English examples include the bishops of Hereford and Lincoln, who actively resisted Edward II; John Stratford, archbishop of Canterbury, who tried to resist Edward III; Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury, who opposed Richard II; Richard Scrope, archbishop of York, who opposed the government of Henry IV; Cardinal Beaufort, who tried to bring about the abdication of Henry IV.

  6 William P. Guthrie, The Later Thirty Years War (2003), p. 16; Geoffrey Parker, ‘The Military Revolution 1560–1660 – a Myth?’, Journal of Modem History, 48, 2 (1976), pp. 195–214, at p. 199.

  7 The debate was started by Michael Roberts, The Military Revolution 1560–1660 (Belfast, 1956).

  8 For the introduction of the stirrup, see Lynn White Jr, Medieval Technology and Social Change (OUP paperback edn, 1964), pp. 1–39, esp. p. 24.

  9 In addition, the case of Japan shows that in that country at least, it was ambitious and strong government that led to the demand for firearms, not vice versa. See Stephen Morillo, ‘Guns and Government: A Comparative Study of Europe and Japan’, Journal of World History, 6, 1 (1995), pp. 75–106.

  10 Parker, ‘Military Revolution’, p. 206.

  11 Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (2013), p. 32.

  12 C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire (1969), p. 49.

  13 110 per 100,000 people equates more or less to 165 per 100,000 adults, the Dodge City figure. See Carl I. Hammer Jr, ‘Patterns of Homicide in a Medieval University Town: Fourteenth-century Oxford’, Past & Present, 78 (1978), pp. 3–23, at pp. 11–12; Randolph Roth, ‘Homicide Rates in the American West’, http://cjrc.osu.edu/homicide-rates-american-west-randolph-roth. Downloaded 20 January 2014.

  14 Manuel Eisner, ‘Long-term Historical Trends in Violent Crime’, Crime and Justice, 30 (2003), pp. 83–142, at p. 84.

  15 This chart is based on the figures in Eisner, ‘Long-term Historical Trends’. The English figure in this chart is a simple average (mean) of those for 1400 and 1600, and the Italian figure for 1700 is a simple average (mean) of the figures for 1650 and 1750.

  16 Stephen Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), pp. 77–97.

  17 Ibid., pp. 91–2.

  18 Stephen Broadberry, Bruce Campbell, Alexander Klein, Mark Overton and Bas van Leeuwen, British Economic Growth 1270–1870 (2011). For fuller statistics, see the GDP per capita tables in the ‘Personal enrichment’ section of the Conclusion, drawn from the same source.

  19 B. R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics (1988, paperback edn, 2011), pp. 166–9.

  20 Pinker, Better Angels, p. 89.

  21 Azar Gat, ‘Is War Declining – and Why?’, Journal of Peace Research, 50, 2 (2012), pp. 149–57, at p. 149.

  22 Eisner, ‘Long–term Historical Trends’, p. 107, quoting Randolph Roth, ‘Homicide in Early Modern England, 1549–1800: The Need for a Quantitative Synthesis’, Crime, History and Society, 5, 2 (2001), pp. 33–68.

  23 Quoted in Henry Kamen, The Iron Century: Social Change in Europe 1550–1660 (1971), p. 6.

  1601–1700 The Seventeenth Century

  1 Henry Kamen, The Iron Century: Social Change in Europe 1550–1660 (1971), p. 13 (Geneva and Paris); E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (1981), pp. 532–3.

  2 Geoffrey Parker, The Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (2013), p. 17.

  3 Ibid. pp. 17, 57.

  4 Cecile Augon, Social France in the XVIIth Century (1911), pp. 171–2, 189, quoted in the Internet Modern History Sourcebook, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/17france-soc.asp. Downloaded 22 January 2014 (200 dying by roadside); Kamen, Iron Century, pp. 34–5 (rotting flesh).

  5 Parker, Global Crisis, p. 100.

  6 For the height of the troops, see ibid. p. 22.

  7 James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in Early Modern England (1996; paperback edn, 1997), pp. 256, 257.

  8 The data in this table are taken from tables 2.3–2.5 in Ian Mortimer, ‘Medical Assistance to the Dying in Provincial Southern England, circa 1570–1720’ (University of Exeter PhD thesis, 2 vols, 2004), pp. 92–3. The sample on which it is based is a selection of 9,689 probate accounts relating to the estates of deceased males in the diocese of Canterbury. The dates specified in the table are the central points in the date ranges 1570–1599, 1600–1629, 1630–1659 (1649), 1660–1689, and 1690–1719. Note that there are no data for 1650–1659, so the date ‘1645’ actually represents accounts dated 1630–49. A set of charts based on this data but adjusted to reflect the status of the deceased may be found in the published version of this thesis: Ian Mortimer, The Dying and the Doctors: The Medical Revolution in Seventeenth-Century England (Royal Historical Society, 2009), pp. 19–20.

  9 Teerapa Pirohakul and Patrick Wallis, ‘Medical Revolutions? The Growth of Medicine in England, 1660–1800’, LSE Working Papers no. 185 (January 2014). Available at http://www.lse.ac.uk/economicHistory/workingPapers/2014/WP185.pdf. Downloaded 29 April 2014.

  10 Ian Mortimer, ‘Index of Medical Licentiates, Applicants, Referees and Examiners in the Diocese of Exeter 1568–1783’, Transactions of the Devonshire Association, 136 (2004), pp. 99–134, at p. 128. Joshua Smith not only qualified as ‘of Mortonhampstead’; he lived in the parish, as shown by his son being baptised here in 1666 and his own burial here in 1672. His son, also called Joshua, obtained a licence to practise surgery in 1700.

  11 Quoted in Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family in England 1480
–1750 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 18–19.

  12 See Mortimer, Dying and the Doctors, p. 211.

  13 http://WWW2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp/documents/CT1970 p2–13.pdf. Downloaded 2 January 2014.

  14 http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/ward_1912/america_north_colonization_1700.jpg. Downloaded 2 January 2014.

  15 Fernand Braudel, Civilisation and Capitalism. Vol. 3: The Perspective of the World (1979), p. 190; C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire (1969), p. 114.

  16 Braudel, Civilisation and Capitalism, p. 522.

  17 Joan Thirsk and J. P. Cooper, Seventeenth Century Economic Documents (Oxford, 1972), p. 780.

  18 Jancis Robinson, The Oxford Companion to Wine (Oxford, 1994), p. 363.

  19 Kamen, Iron Century, p. 167.

  20 Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex (2012), p. 43.

  1701–1800 The Eighteenth Century

  1 Shakespeare’s England: An Account of the Life and Manners of his Age (2 vols, 1917), i, p. 202.

  2 R. C. Tombs, The Bristol Royal Mail: Post, Telegraph, and Telephone (n.d.), p. 11.

  3 For example, Plymouth and Dock Telegraph and Gazette for 4 May 1822. An illustration of this appears in the second plate section of this book.

  4 Fernand Braudel, Civilisation and Capitalism. Vol. 3: The Perspective of the World (1979), pp. 316–17.

  5 Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media (2005), p. 81.

  6 It is said that the abdication of James II was not known in the Orkneys for three months. J. H. Markland, ‘Remarks on the Early Use of Carriages’, Archaeologia, 20 (1824), p. 445.

  7 London Magazine, 3 (July–Dec. 1784), p. 313.

  8 Gentleman’s and London Magazine, or Monthly Chronologer (1785), p. 86.

  9 Mark Overton, http://www.ehs.org.uk/dotAsset/c7197ff4-54c5-4f85-afad-fbo5c9a5e1eo.pdf (‘caricature’); http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/agricultural_revolution _01.shtml (derogatory assessments). Both downloaded 30 January 2014.

  10 John Mortimer, The Whole Art of Husbandry or the Way of Managing and Improving Land (2 vols, 4th edn, 1716), i, pp. 32–3, 131, 157–60; ii, p. 177.

  11 Liam Brunt, ‘Mechanical Innovation in the Industrial Revolution: The Case of Plough Design’, Economic History Review, New Series, 56 (2003), pp. 444–77.

  12 Although potato farming certainly helped, it did not cover more than 2% of the agricultural land in 1801. See Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England (Cambridge, 1996), p. 102.

  13 E. A. Wrigley, ‘The Transition to an Advanced Organic Economy: Half a Millennium of English Agriculture’, Economic History Review, New Series, 59, 3 (August 2006), pp. 435–480 at p. 440.

  14 Wrigley, ‘Transition’, p. 451.

  15 Claude Masset, ‘What Length of Life Did Our Forebears Have?’, Population & Societies, 380 (2002), www.ined.fr/fichier/t_publication/474/publi_pdf2_pop_and_soc_english _380.pdf (downloaded 27 January 2014), quoting Élise de La Rochebrochard, ‘Age at Puberty of Girls and Boys in France: Measurements from a Survey on Adolescent Sexuality’, Population: An English Selection, 12 (2000), pp. 51–80; Peter Laslett, ‘Age at Menarche in Europe since the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2, 2 (1971), pp. 221–36.

  16 Ian Davidson, ‘Voltaire in England’, Telegraph, 9 April 2010.

  17 http://www.constitution.org/jjr/ineq_04.htm. Downloaded 24 February 2014.

  18 Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex (2012), pp. 57–9.

  19 Ibid. p. 66.

  20 Ibid. pp. 103 (Locke), 108 (Hume).

  21 Cyril Bryner, ‘The Issue of Capital Punishment in the Reign of Elizabeth Petrovna’, Russian Review, 49 (1990), pp. 389–416, at pp. 391 (abolition), 416 (unpopularity).

  22 Between 1651 and 1690 there were 824 executions in Amsterdam; between 1761 and 1800 there were 839. Given the growing size of the city (from 180,000 to 220,000), that amounted to a decline in the execution rate by a sixth. See Petrus Cornelis Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering (Cambridge, 1984), p. 82. At the Old Bailey in London, in the 20 years 1680–99, judges heard 6,244 cases and handed down 1,082 death penalties (17.3%). A century later (1780–99), they heard 14,971 cases and handed down 1,681 death penalties (11.2%). Figures from http://www.oldbaileyonline.org//. Downloaded 27 April 2014.

  23 Murray Newton Rothbard, Economic Thought before Adam Smith: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (2 vols, 1995; 2nd edn, 2006), i, p. 346.

  24 Juliet Gardiner and Neil Wenborn (eds), The History Today Companion to British History (1995), p. 63.

  25 These were the Exeter Bank (1769), the Devonshire Bank (1770), the City Bank (1786), the General Bank (1792) and the Western Bank (1793). http://www.exetermemories.co.uk/em/banks.php. Downloaded 27 April 2014.

  26 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789–1848 (1962), p. 46.

  27 A. E. Musson, The Growth of British Industry (1978), p. 60.

  28 Gregory Clark and David Jacks, ‘Coal and the Industrial Revolution 1700–1869’, European Review of Economic History, 11 (2007), pp. 39–72, at p. 44.

  29 Richard Brown, Society and Economy in Modern Britain 1700–1850 (2002), p. 58.

  30 Clark and Jacks, ‘Coal and the Industrial Revolution’, p. 47.

  31 Eric H. Robinson, ‘The Early Diffusion of Steam Power’, Journal of Economic History, 34 (1974), pp. 91–107, at p. 97.

  32 J. J. Mason, ‘Sir Richard Arkwright (1732–1792), Inventor of Cotton-Spinning Machinery and Cotton Manufacturer’, ODNB.

  33 Neil McKendrick, ‘Josiah Wedgwood and Factory Discipline’, Historical Journal, 4 (1961), pp. 30–35, at p. 33.

  34 The statistics in this paragraph are from Brown, Society and Economy, pp. 51 (cotton), 56 (pig iron), 48 (patents). The figure of 22 patents for 1700–09 has been revised to 31 in line with the official figure, http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/patent/ p-about/p-whatis/p-oldnumbers/p-oldnumbers-1617.htm. Downloaded 2 February 2014.

  1801–1900 The Nineteenth Century

  1 Robert Woods, ‘Mortality in Eighteenth-Century London: A New Look at the Bills’, Local Population Studies, 77 (2006), pp. 12–23, table 2 (1700, 1800); Geoffrey Chamberlain, ‘British Maternal Mortality in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 99 (2006), pp. 559–63, figure 1 (1900). The figure for 1900 is for England, not London specifically.

  2 This chart is based on figures in Paul Bairoch and Gary Goertz, ‘Factors of Urbanisation in the Nineteenth Century Developed Countries: A Descriptive and Econometric Analysis’, Urban Studies, 23 (1986), pp. 285–305, at pp. 288, 291.

  3 B. R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics (1988, paperback edn, 2011), pp. 545–7.

  4 The data in this chart were downloaded on 5 February 2014 from the Internet Modern History Sourcebook, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/indrevtabsi.asp. That source credits The Fontana Economic History of Europe, vol. 4. part 2. The statistics for the United Kingdom do not tally with those given above, taken from British Historical Statistics, so these have been omitted from the table.

  5 These insights were gained from reading through the admissions registers of St Thomas Lunatic Asylum, Bowhill House, Exeter, which are now in the Devon Record Office, ref: 3992F.

  6 C. R. Perry, ‘Sir Rowland Hill’, ODNB.

  7 http://www.theiet.org/resources/library/archives/featured/francis-ronalds.cfm. Downloaded 6 February 2014.

  8 Information for USA from http://www2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp/documents/CT1970p2-05.pdf. Downloaded 9 February 2014. Information for UK from British Telecom’s website, http://www.btplc.com/Thegroup/BTsHistory/Eventsintelecommun icationshistory.htm. Downloaded 9 February 2014.

  9 Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind (1997), p. 410.

  10 Ibid., p. 407.

  11 Vivian Nutton, ‘The Reception of Fracastoro’s Theory of Contagion’, Osiris, 2nd series, 6 (1990), pp. 196–234.

  12 Porter, Greatest Benefit, p. 412.

  13 These images are
to be found in the Daily Mail publication, Covenants with Death.

  14 This much-misquoted passage was delivered by Grey in the course of a debate in the Lords on 22 November 1830. See Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates.

  15 Neil Johnston, ‘The History of the Parliamentary Franchise’, House of Commons Research Paper 13/14 (1 March 2014), http://www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/RP13-14.pdf. Downloaded 13 February 2014.

  16 Sabine Baring-Gould, Devonshire Characters and Strange Events (1908), pp. 52–69.

  17 K. D. Reynolds, ‘Norton [née Sheridan], Caroline Elizabeth Sarah’, ODNB.

  18 In 1568, Mary Cornellys of Bodmin received a licence to practise surgery throughout the diocese of Exeter: Ian Mortimer, ‘Index of Medical Licentiates, Applicants, Referees and Examiners in the Diocese of Exeter 1568–1783’, Transactions of the Devonshire Association, 136 (2004), pp. 99–134. Margaret Pelling also informs me that a woman called Adrian Colman and another called Alice Glavin obtained licences in the late sixteenth century: Margaret Pelling and Charles Webster, ‘Medical Practitioners’, in Charles Webster (ed.), Health, Medicine and Morality in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 165–236, at p. 223. Also Isabel Warwike of York received a licence in 1572. By the mid seventeenth century, when the term ‘doctor’ became synonymous with ‘physician’ and formal education was seen as essential to the acknowledgement of medical expertise, women were barred from obtaining medical qualifications.

  19 Deborah Simonton, The Routledge History of Women in Europe since 1700 (2006), pp. 118–19.

  20 Robert A. Houston, ‘Literacy’, EGO: European History Online, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0000/000028/002898eb.pdf. Downloaded 14 February 2014. UNESCO, Progress of Literacy in Various Countries: A Preliminary Statistical Study of Available Census Data since 1900 (1953); UK figures are from Sixty-fourth Annual Report of the Registrar General (1901), 1xxxviii.

  21 George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (Penguin edn, 1989), p. 84.

  1901–2000 The Twentieth Century

  1 I am grateful to Nick Hasel of Woodbarn Farm, Chew Magna, for this anecdote.

  2 Figures for this graph are from B. R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics (1988, paperback edn, 2011), pp. 541–2.