The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)
Page 24
The more shepe, the dearer is the woll,
The more shepe, the dearer is the mutton,
The more shepe, the dearer is the beefe,
The more shepe, the dearer is the corne,
The more shepe, the skanter is the white meat,
The more shepe, the fewer eggs for a penny.7
Later in the century the price of wool fell, while that of wheat rose and a return to arable farming consequently took place. But by then many agricultural labourers had been thrown out of work by the change to sheep farming, which required fewer men than arable, and those who could not find work again swelled the growing ranks of the unemployed.
In most parts of the country the same crops had been grown and the same sorts of implements used for centuries; but new ones were being introduced. Wooden ploughs were still in general use, though these were often now to be seen shod with iron; and horses, if still less common than oxen, were not so rarely used as draught animals. Since the 1520s hops had been grown in Suffolk as well as in Kent and the slightly bitter beer flavoured with them was preferred by most men to the traditional ale now normally reserved for the old and ill, women and children.8 Flax was grown in Lincolnshire; hemp in Sussex, Dorset and Somerset; saffron widely in Essex where Saffron Waiden had been so called for some time past. Kent and Devon were celebrated for their orchards, Suffolk for its horses, Cheshire, Worcestershire and Suffolk for their cheeses. The increasing demands of the towns, particularly of London, strongly influenced the produce supplied by the surrounding countryside, while the needs of growing industries, of shipbuilding and housing, hop-growing and glass-making all entailed the continuous supply of large loads of fuel.
Forests were certainly shrinking in size; and contemporaries constantly lamented the loss of trees and protested that the whole aspect of the countryside was being ruined. ‘As the woods here decay,’ wrote a man from Worcestershire, ‘so the glass houses remove and follow the woods with small change.’ William Camden observed the thinning of the woods in Wiltshire and Dorset; while, writing of the Forest of Arden in Warwickshire, the poet, Michael Drayton, quoted by Dr Rowse, complained:
For, when the world found out the fitness of my soil
The gripple wretch began immediately to spoil
My tall and goodly woods and did my grounds enclose:
By which in little time my bounds I came to lose.9
To be sure there were still vast tracts of the countryside covered with timber – much of Staffordshire was still a huge oak forest – and recent research has shown that the price which it fetched rose more slowly than those of any other agricultural product;10 yet the concern felt at the time was widespread, and industry was undoubtedly beginning to be voracious in its demands for wood and charcoal.
Textiles remained the most profitable industry. The work was still largely done at home, looms being set up in cottages and hired out by clothiers. But already there were fulling-mills; and one clothier, John Winchcomb, known to posterity as Jack of Newbury, was credited, later in the sixteenth century, by a popular ballad with having a large and improbably jolly factory:
Within one room, being large and long
There stood two hundred looms full strong.
Two hundred men, the truth is so,
Wrought in these rooms all in a row.
By every one a pretty boy
Sate making quilts with mickle joy.
And in another place hard by
A hundred women merrily
Were carding with joyful cheer
Who singing sat with voices clear.11
This is a fanciful picture, both as to numbers and to merriment; but although the overwhelming majority of the working population of the country still laboured on the land, the beginnings of England’s industrial future could already be discerned. An ingenious clergyman, William Lee, saddened, so it is said, by the sight of his wife spending evening after evening knitting stockings by hand, put his mind to the invention of a knitting frame which was soon in use in the hosiery industry in Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire.
There had long been tin-mines in Cornwall and Devon. Now there was widespread mining for lead and copper, iron and coal, in several places supervised by foreign immigrants. In 1561 overtures were made to an experienced German firm to help with the opening up of mines in the north. The Germans were at first reluctant to share their secrets with Englishmen. But four years later fifty German miners landed at Newcastle, a copper-mine was opened up at Newlands, and soon, so the queen was informed, ‘fine and perfect copper’ was being made. The immigrants settled down well in England: several married English wives; another, according to an entry in the Crosthwaite register, had an illegitimate child. They went to church in Crosthwaite; they bought an island on the lake, planted fruit trees and built a brewery and a pig-house; they acted in plays, practised archery, baited bears; they sent home money and asked for fishing tackle and books.12
While these Germans were working happily in the Lake District, other foreigners were helping in the development of mines in the West Country where ore of zinc, mixed with copper for the making of brass, had been found near Bath. Soon a profitable wire works had been established at Tintern. There were lead-mines in the Mendips and silver-mines in Devon. Saltpetre was being dug and there were several mills in Surrey where George Evelyn, grandfather of the diarist, had obtained a monopoly for the manufacture of gunpowder, a right which added immensely to the family’s fortunes. Elsewhere there were ironworks and salt pans, paper-mills and gun foundries. In the Weald of Kent there were blast furnaces beside the forges, and by 1565 steel was also being produced there. Coal, known as sea-coal because it was shipped down the coasts by boat, was being mined in ever-increasing quantities, and was being used not only in numerous manufacturing processes but also in private houses whose hearths and chimneys had to be reconstructed on account of the thick smoke which it gave off. By 1564 as many as 33,000 tons of coal a year were being shipped from Newcastle to London; and by 1598 these shipments had risen to 163,000 tons.13
The colliers that plied between the northern ports and London, were, as G. M. Trevelyan observed, one of the two chief nurseries of English seamen. The other was the fishing fleets that sailed out of the harbours of Devon and Cornwall – bringing cod back from as far away as the shores of Newfoundland – and from Lynn and Yarmouth and other east coast ports in search of herring. The fishermen, many of them fighting sailors in time of war, were helped by the government which insisted upon the observance of ‘fish days’ for economical as much as religious reasons, insisting upon the punishment of such offenders as the woman pilloried for serving meat in her tavern during Lent, and stressing the importance of maintaining the skills and numbers of seafaring men in an age when England’s interests were becoming more and more maritime. By encouraging the fishing industry the government also helped to revive wasted towns, to keep down the consumption of beef and mutton, to reduce the amount of arable land converted into pasture and thus the numbers of workless men, the constant worry of every Tudor administration.14
The maintenance of order, both in the repression of the rebellious poor and the subjugation of the over-ambitious rich, was seen as the prime responsibility of government. Every part of society, wrote Richard Hooker in his influential Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, expressing a commonly held opinion, must have ‘one head or governor’. This held true of the family, just as it held true of the State as a whole. Men were learning to accept the authority of the Crown as their ordained ruler; and local authorities and local customs were giving way to central government. At the same time the power of the craft guilds was declining; and wages and prices, conditions of trade, industry and of apprenticeship were all coming under the control of the State. A Statute of Artificers, for example, which was enacted in 1563 decreed that all craftsmen, whether in town or country, had to learn their crafts for seven years under a responsible master, since ‘until a man grows into 23 years, he for the most part, though not
always, is wild, without judgement and not of sufficient experience to govern himself’. Not until that age could he either become a master on his own or offer himself as a journeyman for hire. The statute also directed magistrates in each county to fix rates of wages for all grades of labour according ‘to the plenty or scarcity of the time’.15
Neither increasing respect for local government, nor the activities of the most conscientious justices of the peace in dealing with miscreants and social and political malcontents could, however, prevent the frequent eruption of riots and local disturbances and the occasional widespread rebellion. On Evil May Day in London in 1517, an immense mob of apprentices, ruffians and disillusioned clerics, incited by a preacher at St Paul’s Cross and led by a xenophobic broker, attacked the houses and workshops of foreign merchants and craftsmen and was brought under control only after troops had been called in, guns fired from the Tower and 400 prisoners taken. In 1536 a protest in Lincolnshire against the dissolution of smaller monasteries sparked off the Pilgrimage of Grace in which feudal magnates, opposed to the extension of royal control over the northern counties, and peasants, protesting against the enclosure of arable lands for pasture, joined forces in improbable alliance against the Crown. A few years later two other rebel armies were up in arms, while there were further serious anti-enclosure riots; and in 1554 some 3000 men from Kent, led by Sir Thomas Wyatt, marched upon London in protest against the proposed marriage of Queen Mary to Philip II of Spain. The rebels got as far as London Bridge but so many cannon were brought against them they had to retire to Kingston. Wyatt was arrested and brought to the Tower, and he and about 100 of his followers were executed. Within the next few years there were yet more riots by apprentices in London, this time against the city government, and by poor people in the country, once more against enclosures.
There was no doubt that the grievances of the country people were justified. There was widespread unemployment, appalling destitution and a burning resentment that the Dissolution of the Monasteries had accelerated an inclination by landowners to consider their estates as commercial assets to be fully exploited for quick profits, rather than as valued possessions enabling whole communities to supply their own needs. Most of the land appropriated by the Crown did not pass from the religious houses to the so-called ‘new man’ of Tudor society, but into the hands of existing local landowners, two-thirds of all peers being granted or purchasing monastic estates. Yet both those ‘new men’ who did manage to acquire them, and those more numerous older families that did so – as well as those speculators who turned refectories into forges and monastic guest-houses into factories – were anxious to make money out of their possessions, to increase rents, evict tenants, change the terms of leases, and enclose common land at the expense of the poor villager.16
In a celebrated sermon, Hugh Latimer, the son of a yeoman who rented a farm for £3 or £4 a year, contrasted his father’s state with that of his successor. His father, so Latimer said, was able to keep 100 sheep and thirty cows and had enough tillage to support half a dozen men; he had paid for the education of his son; had provided his daughters with generous portions on their marriage; had offered hospitality to his neighbours and alms to the poor. His successor, on the other hand, paid over four times as much in rent, and was unable ‘to do anything for his Prince, for himself, nor his children, nor give a cup of drink to the poor’.17 Many another man, so the Rev. William Harrison contended, considered himself lucky to have a roof over his head, an acre of ground, and a few ‘cabbages, radishes, parsnips, carrots, melons and pumpkins by which he and his poor household liveth as their principal food, sith they can do no better’.18
The hired labourers, whose numbers had much increased with the decline in those of smallholders, were no better off. Some, such as hedgers and ditchers, harvesters and thatchers, were paid at a daily rate; others, like shepherds and milkmaids, who offered their services at fairs, were usually paid by the year; but few were well rewarded. On the Darell family estates at Littlecote and Axford in Wiltshire, field-workers were paid 2d or 3d a day, the more skilled hedgers 7d, ploughmen is a week with board, and shepherds 6d a week also with board. Threshers received from 3d to 7d a day according to the grain, the shepherd’s boy 2½d, thatchers 2s for five days’ work.19 These rates seem to have been fairly typical, though in Cheshire in 1594 some thatchers were getting no more than 1d a day and reapers only 2d, both without meat or drink; and in Yorkshire in 1593 threshers were also being paid id a day in winter, 2d in summer, but these did have their food as well. According to an East Riding assessment of that year a woman servant in charge of ‘brewing, baking, kitching, milk house, or malting that is hired with a gentleman or rich yeoman’ was not permitted to receive more than 17s a year in addition to her board and lodging.20 At least, this woman had enough to eat but there were thousands who did not; and in times of dearth, of murrain in cattle, of foot-rot in sheep, and of steeply rising prices, there were outbreaks of famine. In December 1596 there were seven deaths from starvation in the streets of Newcastle, and twenty-five in two successive months the next autumn.21
There was disagreement as to who or what was responsible for this sorry state of affairs. There were those who laid it at the door of a wicked people justly punished by an avenging God; there were others who blamed the inherent idleness of working men; some said the debasement of the coinage was at the root of the evil, or inflation, or the gold pouring into Europe from America; or the tendency of merchants to concentrate on the importation of foreign luxuries rather than on the expansion of markets for home-based industries. A few placed the responsibility upon the decline of charity; in fact, a recent study of wills and benefactions has shown that there was no such decline, that charitable institutions and causes benefited from handsome endowments far more regularly towards the end of the sixteenth century than they had done at the beginning.22 It was at least agreed by many that the selfishness of grasping landlords had, indeed, thrown thousands of country people out of work, and that the crowds of vagrants, rogues and vagabonds had been enlarged by the Statute of Liveries of 1504 which, by denying a lord’s traditional right to be served by a retinue of liveried retainers, forced yet more troublesome and master less men out of employment, and onto the roads.
As the ballad ‘Now-a-Dayes’ put it:
Temporall lordes be almost gone,
Householdes kepe thei few or none,
Which causeth many a goodly man ffor to beg his bredd:
Iff he steele ffor necessite,
ther is none other remedye
But the law will shortlye
Hange him all save the hedd.23
It was also generally agreed that the numbers of vagrants had been swollen by the Dissolution of Monasteries. The new vagrants were not monks who were given pensions and mostly went into other occupations, but servants and dependants – whose services were not required by the new owners of the monasteries’ lands – and the poor who had begged at the gates and had often been indulged, whether deserving charity or not.
The actual numbers of these beggars and vagabonds was a subject of constant speculation. In 1577, William Harrison wrote, ‘It is not yet full three-score yeares since this trade began, but how it hath prospered since that time it is easie to judge, for they are now supposed of one sex and another, to amount unto about 10,000 persons, as I have heard reported.’24
Other estimates put the number much higher. In 1594 the Lord Mayor of London suggested there were as many as 12,000 beggars in the city alone; and in 1569 a search by constables throughout the country initiated by the Privy Council seems to have resulted in the apprehension of 13,000 rogues and masterless men.
They were of two main types, the filthy, ragged vagabonds, as described in Thomas Harman’s Caveat for Common Cursetors (1568), who roamed about the country, alternately begging and stealing and sometimes wreaking havoc in the villages through which they passed, and the smartly dressed and cunning tricksters, the ‘conny-catchers’, whose pl
oys were revealed in various pamphlets by Robert Greene and whose activities were mostly limited to London and a few other of the larger towns.
According to Harman the roaming vagabonds, who often travelled about in large companies, tended to specialize in a particular form of preying upon the respectable public and to be distinguished from each other by cant names. There were the masterful ‘Upright Men’ who were regarded as leaders of their gangs; bullying ‘Rufflers’ who begged from the strong and were strong enough themselves to rob the weak; ‘Hookers’ or ‘Anglers’ who stole clothing from open windows by means of hooked poles; Triggers of Prancers’ who were horse thieves; ‘Palliards’ who obtained money by exhibiting scars revoltingly exacerbated with arsenic and ratsbane; ‘Fraters’ who pretended to be collecting money for hospitals; ‘Whip-Jacks’ who made out that they were shipwrecked sailors; ‘Counterfeit Cranks’ who feigned the symptoms of the falling sickness; ‘Dommerers’ who presented themselves as deaf mutes; and ‘Abraham Men’ who faked insanity like the ‘Bedlam Beggars’ described by Edgar in King Lear. These men, ‘with roaring voice’,
Strike in their numb’d and mortified bare arms
Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary;
And with this horrible object, from low farms,
Poor pelting villages, sheep-cotes, and mills,
Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers
Enforce their charity.25