A Brief History of Britain 1485–1660

by Hutton, Ronald

  What needs to be stressed is that before 1640 we are in a different age, a unique epoch in British cultural history when the island was gripped in the experience of religious conversion and its immediate consequences. When all the reservations have been entered about the capacity of people for doubt, laxity and blasphemy, it remains true that these eighty years represented a time when the confessional temperature was unusually high. The great rent in Western Christianity and the promises of renewal and perfection held out both by Protestantism and by the Catholic Counter-Reformation produced in contemporaries a sense of living through an age in which both the deity and his satanic adversary were exceptionally active. When the strains of population pressure and inflation are added to those produced by the changes in the Church, it is easy to form an impression of a society within an emotional pressure-cooker, requiring either a reduction of heat or a huge explosion to release the tensions that were building up within it.

  Witchcraft

  One spectacular expression of those tensions was the trial and execution of individuals suspected of witchcraft: that is, of harming other human beings, or their possessions, by the use of uncanny powers. It is worth emphasizing that modern Western society is most unusual in refusing to believe that this sort of harm is possible. Most communities across the world have done so, throughout recorded time, and those of ancient Europe certainly did: the death penalty for it is recorded in the codes of the pagan Roman Empire and among the peoples to the north of it who were to form most of the medieval states which succeeded it. Trials for the offence are recorded throughout the Middle Ages, in Britain as elsewhere, but they were relatively rare. Christians harboured serious doubts regarding the willingness of their all-powerful and entirely good god to allow evil spirits and evil people to deploy supernatural power against humans, and discounted some ancient witch beliefs as superstition. The burden of proof that a person was bewitched was often placed on the accuser; and it is inherently difficult to demonstrate that an act of magic has been committed. What changed everything was the evolution of Western Christian theology, during the later Middle Ages, to credit its God with having permitted the devil the ability to perform actual acts of harm against humans, using other humans as his agents. From this it was a short step, taken in the 1420s and 1430s, to believing in a newly appeared and terrifying heresy, of people who secretly worshipped Satan and were rewarded with the gift of demonic servants who would injure neighbours against whom they harboured grudges. However potent, this idea was slow to mature, only claiming a few thousand victims in a corridor running from Italy up to the Netherlands during the next 150 years.

  What really set it loose across Europe was the struggle between Protestant and Catholic, in which the fight against satanic witchcraft became one aspect of the general programme of reformers and counter-reformers. As the Continent’s wars of religion peaked in the period between 1560 and 1650, so did the witch trials in most regions. All this is certainly true of Britain, where the transformation of witchcraft into a capital crime, rather than a concern for churchmen, was first attempted, briefly, as part of the Henrician Reformation. It was the Elizabethan one which completed the work, joined simultaneously by that in Scotland: in 1563 Parliaments in both nations enacted statutes prescribing the death penalty for deeds of witchcraft, which were to remain in force for almost 200 years.

  The total number of people put to death will never be calculated with precision, because of the loss of local legal records. The most recent expert estimates run at 400–500 in England and Wales and anything between 800 and 2,500 in Scotland, which would give Britain approximately 4 per cent of the total number of executions likely to have occurred in early modern Europe. The higher Scottish body count is especially significant in view of Scotland’s much smaller population; and has a further grim aspect in that those executed in England and Wales were hanged like any other felons, while those in Scotland were burned like heretics, though usually after being strangled. The overall totals represent small entries in the annals of early modern British suffering, especially as they stretched over more than a century. The English and Welsh body-count represented the number of deaths commonly claimed by plague in a provincial town in just three months, whereas even the Scottish one, taken at its maximum possible, amounts to a quarter of the number of people killed in a few hours at Flodden or Pinkie.

  This statistical judgement, however, is somewhat weakened by the fact that trials were concentrated in time and place. In Sussex, a total of sixteen people were brought to court, and just one was executed: to speak of a ‘witch hunt’ in that county is clearly futile. In Essex, by contrast, hundreds of people were indicted, and at least eighty-four executed. The Scottish trials were located overwhelmingly in the Central Lowlands, with a smaller number in the southern uplands of the kingdom and another found in extensions of territory running out from the Lowlands along the inlets and islands of the Firth of Clyde and all the way up the eastern coast to the Northern Isles. Prosecutions for witchcraft were certainly not a feature of the cultural backwoods: on the contrary, they were concentrated most heavily in the regions around the respective capitals: in the counties surrounding London, and the regions around Edinburgh. This fits well with the fact that they were provoked by a new theological construct, of witchcraft as a satanic counter-religion, which had been imported from abroad. The regions of the British Isles which seem most free of them were the Celtic-speaking areas: Gaelic Ireland, the Scottish Highlands and Western Isles, the Isle of Man and Wales. As all of these were subject to the same laws that produced frequent trials elsewhere, and some (such as Wales and the Isle of Man) have good records, there must be a cultural reason for the difference; but this is a matter that has never been properly investigated. Trials were also rare in large urban centres, as they fed on the suspicions and frictions generated by small communities in which neighbourly interaction was close and daily.

  The British trials were also concentrated in time. In England they spanned the period from 1566 to 1682 or 1685, but a third to a half of the total number of executions occurred in East Anglia in just two of those years, 1645–7. This was the systematic hunt led by Matthew Hopkins, the self-styled ‘Witch-finder General’, which was big and savage even by continental standards. In Scotland, trials also began in the 1560s, and lasted until 1727, but most were concentrated in four big hunts, lasting a few years each, between 1590 and 1663. If these were ‘epidemics’ of witch trials, then the ‘endemic’ sort, of a steady trickle of cases through the decades, also had local concentrations: most in the English Home Counties took place in the reign of Elizabeth. Over time there was apparently a slow westward drift, as in the late sixteenth century trials were most common in eastern Scotland and south-east England, while in the later seventeenth century they were at least most prominent on the western side of Scotland, and in the English West Country. By extension, this movement produced a spectacular late episode on the far side of the Atlantic, in the only mass trial in England’s American colonies, at Salem in 1692.

  Accusations were always generated from below, by ordinary people who accused others in their community against whom they had usually long harboured suspicions. To bring somebody to trial was normally so difficult and drastic a step that it was undertaken as a last resort, after gentler methods had failed, such as using counter-magic to break the presumed witchcraft, or befriending the suspected witch in order to get the curse removed. The legal cases therefore represent only the visible tip of an iceberg of suspicions, anxieties and enmities which never surfaced in court. Accusations seem rarely, if ever, to have been made a cover for more secular motives of dislike; they reflected, instead, a genuine belief that the people concerned had done magical harm to others and were seriously dangerous. The actual incidence of trials was conditioned by the willingness of magistrates to accept denunciations. The high number in Essex was related to the unusual zeal for social and moral reform among its officials, while that in the Scottish Lowlands mirrors the act
ivity of the region’s kirk sessions, who had the same zeal. Sussex, by contrast, had a very stable economy and society, and so little social polarization: hence perhaps the low rate of accusation. Everywhere, witchcraft was essentially one item on the hit-list of the ‘Reformation of Manners’, usually coming after the reduction of profanity, fornication, poverty and the number of alehouses. The results differed according to national legal systems. In England the accused were tried at county assize sessions, by juries of strangers directed by professional judges, and about 70 per cent were acquitted. Those who died were normally senile, saddled with an unusually bad local reputation, or convinced that they had actually cursed people, with success. The East Anglian bloodbath of 1645–7 occurred because the assize system had collapsed in the Civil War, leaving a gap into which Hopkins stepped, a nobody from the minor gentry, with a personal hatred of witchcraft. He invited communities to name their suspects and then employed effective methods of bullying and torture to obtain confessions, followed by trials conducted by a special commission which lacked the usual judges. The much bigger body-count in Scotland likewise reflects the fact that suspects were tried there by local committees, staffed by people who were likely to know them personally and share the animosities which had brought the accusations.

  There is one very striking feature of those accused: that they were overwhelmingly female, witchcraft being the only crime for which more women were prosecuted than men. The proportion of them among defendants in Essex was 92 per cent, and 85 per cent in Scotland, putting Britain on the high side of an overall average of 80 per cent for the whole of Europe. This in itself must make the witch trials an issue for historians of women, and indeed the witch is one of the very few images of independent female power which traditional Western culture has bequeathed to the present. The other features of that image, as an elderly, poor and solitary woman, need some revision. The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, which concluded in 2003, found that most of the accused were middle-aged, married and from the middle ranks of local society; not marginal at all, but central to the functioning of local communities. Nor was middle age in itself a suspicious feature, because many of them had first become thought of as witches when they were young. If anything distinguished them from other women in that category, it was a quarrelsome and sharp-tongued nature, which made their neighbours, of both sexes, ill at ease. Historians have expended much ingenuity on the possible reasons for the association of witchcraft and women, finding explanations in the structure of early modern social and intellectual structures. What weakens them is that the huge preponderance of female defendants across Europe is an average achieved only by flattening out important local variations. Scotland’s nearest neighbour to the north-west is Iceland, which had a vicious series of trials in which over 90 per cent of the accused were male. Just across the Channel from England is Normandy, where three-quarters of those tried were men. The social, economic, political and religious conditions of Icelanders were too similar to those of Scots, and those of Normans too similar to those in the rest of France, to make structural explanations for these anomalies work. What seems to lie behind them are ancient local traditions concerning the nature of magic, which focused on different gender stereotypes. It is a reminder that the early modern trials, though produced by a distinctive set of late-medieval beliefs, drew upon very deep roots in popular belief, stretching far beyond Christianity.

  The great century for witch-hunting in Europe was 1560–1660, and enthusiasm for it was waning in most regions of the Continent by the latter date, although it continued in fringe areas far into the eighteenth century. In Britain, the trajectory of trials fitted the overall pattern, as social elites in England became increasingly reluctant to encourage accusations and allow convictions after 1660, and in Scotland after 1670. In 1736, Parliament repealed all the laws of both kingdoms that had made witchcraft a crime, and declared it an imposture or illusion instead. This shift of opinion was part of a package, whereby tolerance of presumed witches went together with tolerance of Roman Catholics, and of Protestants who rejected the established Church. Likewise, the decline of a belief in the power of magic was associated with the loss of a world picture in which the Christian God was constantly intervening, to reward and punish in human affairs: as angels and devils receded in the imagination of the dominant social groups, so did witches. In all these respects, the decline of witchcraft prosecution was part of the winding down of the religious fervour released by the Reformation, just as the upsurge in it had been one product of that event. It had become obvious that for some reason the deity who ruled human affairs was not allowing either Protestant or Catholic to prevail absolutely over each other, and that communities which put members to death as witches turned out to be no luckier, happier and healthier than those which did not. In one sense, the early modern European witch trials had been the last gasp of the medieval preoccupation with purity of religion; in another, they were a short-lived and unsuccessful experiment in ways to cope with misfortune, which represented one feature of the transition from the pre-modern to the modern world.

  Family Values

  By the end of the twentieth century, most people in the English-speaking world had a common concept of what ‘traditional’ family life had been like, before the social changes of the second half of the century began to disrupt it. Married couples lived together with their children, until the latter reached their mid to late adolescence and sought work or higher education. Of those couples, the men went out to work and earned the income, and women mostly stayed at home and managed its domestic affairs, at least until the children had departed. This system meant that youngsters were given adequate attention and discipline, and the bonds thus created encouraged children in turn to care for their parents when the latter became elderly and infirm. Marriage was supposed to be based on true love and companionship, and although many unions developed strains, most couples survived these and continued to live together and care for each other into old age. Individuals varied greatly, of course, in what they actually thought of this model of family life, from profound nostalgic affection to vehement loathing; but most would have accepted it as the old-fashioned norm, and still do. How does it match up to the realities of life in early modern Britain?

  The short answer is, hardly at all. Most people in the period came from broken homes, simply because the high rate of mortality meant that most had lost at least one parent by the time they reached the age of fifteen (as well as some siblings). Marriage was certainly in most cases for life, because divorce was almost impossible; but then life was short and unions regularly broken by death. Somebody who survived into old age with adequate means and a taste for marriage would probably have had at least two successive spouses. The deathrate meant that in 1600 about 40 per cent of the population was aged under twenty-one. The majority of children had left home permanently by their mid-teens, and many much earlier, as part of a long process of increasing participation in the workforce, first with family and then with employers. From the parental home they went into service or apprenticeship, with frequent changes of employment if better openings appeared. Opportunities for leisure and adventure were greater than for other age groups, but the sheer physical mobility of young people, as they sought subsistence, and the social divisions between them, prevented the development of distinctive youth cultures. The target of most, generally not achieved until their twenties, was to secure long-term employment and so achieve the economic base for marriage and parenthood if desired. It was a system ideally suited to a fragile economy which required a maximum flexibility of cheap labour. It was also an economy characterized by mobility, as people had to keep moving to find new work. This is another reason why it was the community, and not the family, which cared for individuals who became too old or sick to support themselves; their relatives, if still alive, would commonly have left the area.

  The age certainly had a concept of romantic love, expressed in popular stories, but the brutal realities of life meant th
at an ideal partner needed to combine personal attraction with a capacity to contribute to income. A popular proverb ran ‘There’s more to marriage than four bare legs in a bed.’ Both men and women needed to earn for a family unit to survive. Sexuality itself was generally at a low level in a society characterized by chronic malnutrition, infestation with vermin, exhausting daily labour, an almost complete lack of privacy and of commercial erotica, and a general ignorance of contraception. Parish registers indicate that the boom in conceptions occurred from late May to July when the grass got high and the ditches dry. Most children did not reach puberty until their late teens, removing most of the problem of juvenile pregnancy. This situation had a practical benefit, in that repressed sexuality meant a comparatively low level of rape; it occurred, but seemingly not often. It rarely features in the criminal records, and the personal records left by women indicate little fear of it, for example when travelling alone. The gentry and aristocracy, and prosperous middle sort, suffered from few of the impediments of the majority; they even had access to a trade in erotic literature and pictures from the mid-seventeenth century. Their sexuality was accordingly much more vigorous, and puberty came on five or six years earlier. In many respects, the effect of improved living conditions during the past 200 years has been to give the bulk of the population a sex life formerly enjoyed only by the elite.

  For all these differences, family values were still an issue for the early modern British. Between 1560 and 1640, writers regularly cited the family as the cornerstone of the social and political order. Many commentators agreed that respectable family men were the people best fitted to hold public office, because the qualities needed for a successful husband and father were those of a good governor. The corporation of Thetford, in Norfolk, long tolerated the notorious laziness of one member, but expelled him in 1630 when he was convicted of fornication, for bringing the whole council into disrepute. The boom in prosecutions of sexual offences between 1580 and 1620 was not due merely to fear of more surplus and impoverished population, but to a belief that loose morals undermined the family, and with it the bedrock of social order. Both anxieties were generated by tough economic times. We need not, however, necessarily take such perceptions as reality. The same writers who held that the family was the foundation of social order cited it as the model for national government as well; but at the end of the seventeenth century, when it became politically inconvenient to see kings as all-powerful fathers, many authors came to deny the parallel. Likewise, as the pressure of population and prices eased after 1660, so did the ‘Reformation of Manners’. The idea that family stability and the stability of society are straightforwardly connected is unproven; what is amply demonstrated is that people in times of social and economic pressure rally to the close-knit family as an ideal symbol of harmony and order.