The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)

by Christopher Hibbert

  Gregory King thought that more than a million people in the country were occasionally in receipt of alms of one sort or another, the poor rate in his day being nearly £800,000 a year, a sum which was often said to be distributed with extravagant largesse as poor relief is commonly alleged to be by those who have never needed it. Richard Dunning maintained in 1698 that the parish dole was frequently three times as much as a common labourer with a wife and three children could afford to spend on himself, that people who had once received outdoor relief refused to work thereafter, seldom drank ‘other than the strongest alehouse beer’ and never ate any bread save what was ‘made of the finest wheat flour’.11

  The wages of a common labourer which Dunning said were spurned by those who could get relief were certainly low. They were meant to be regulated by schedules setting out maximum figures which were issued for each county by the Justices of the Peace. Although there were statutory penalties for both paying and receiving wages above the official rates, paying higher figures was sometimes agreed to after bouts of private bargaining. Yet most workers had to be content with the low wages given in Gregory King’s tables or perhaps with as little as £3 a year if they were provided with food and lodging as well. A worker who had a little land around his cottage and rights on the common might live without fear of hunger. Indeed, Gregory King estimated that half the poor who were in work ate meat every day, the other half at least twice a week, and even the unemployed might do so once a week. But for those who had no land to help feed hungry children life was hard, particularly in years of dearth such as that of 1659 and in those years of rising prices between 1693 and 1699 when the cost of bread doubled. Soon afterwards prices began to fall again; and by 1701 a chicken could be bought for 2d in Yorkshire, but even this was a price beyond the reach of many.

  Efforts were made to improve farming methods and so bring food prices down. Numerous books were published offering farmers advice, from Sir Richard Weston’s Discourses of Husbandrie of 1645 to Leonard Meager’s The Mystery of Husbandry: or Arable, Pasture and Woodland Improved which appeared in 1697. The Royal Society, founded in 1662, established an agricultural committee to conduct experiments and carry out research; and this committee advocated the growing of potatoes and of crops to feed animals during the winter months, the use of clover and sainfoin to convert arable land temporarily into pasture, and more efficient watering, manuring and fertilizing. Experts visited Holland to see how the Dutch – of whom advice was also sought before the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694 – had converted waterlogged land into profitable farms. At the same time certain practising farmers were turning to new crops and new methods on their own land. Colonel Robert Walpole, father of Sir Robert, the future prime minister, began growing turnips as cattle fodder on his estate in East Anglia in 1673. William Russell, the first Duke of Bedford, continued his father’s work of draining the Fen district – despite opposition from the local people who crept out by night to cut the dykes – and he lived to see good crops growing and cattle feeding on the land that had formerly produced little but reeds and wild ducks. In the Thames valley new market gardens appeared. Elsewhere forests were cut down to extend the acreage of farmland. Yet, over the country as a whole, as Maurice Ashley has pointed out, change was slow to come. Most farmers distrusted innovation, preferring to stick to their traditional ways and distrusting the new-fangled methods. As a pamphleteer observed in 1675: ‘It is our own negligence and idleness that brings poverty upon us.’12

  In his estimation of the numbers of persons in the various classes and callings in English society at the end of the seventeenth century, Gregory King listed 750,000 farmers earning on average £4210s a year, 280,000 ‘freeholders of the better sort’ having £91 a year, and 660,000 ‘freeholders of the lesser sort’ with £55 a year. Other categories listed in his tables were:

  There were also 12,000 people in the families of ‘eminent clergymen’ who earned £72 a year per family, and 40,000 in the families of ‘lesser clergymen’ with an annual income of £50 each. Their Church had emerged from the troubles of the seventeenth century with renewed strength. An Act of Uniformity passed in 1662 had decreed that all clergymen who did not conform to the Prayer Book liturgy by St Bartholomew’s Day were to lose their livings, and this had resulted in the expulsion from the Church of some thousand priests. Subsequently, lay Dissenters were, like Roman Catholics, excluded from public office and were otherwise persecuted, though usually for social rather than religious reasons. There was, however, no danger now of the country being overrun by Puritans any more than there was of it being governed by Roman Catholics.

  When Charles II’s brother, the Roman Catholic James II, threatened to establish a royal despotism backed by a powerful army, the Anglican gentry and the Church of England were essential elements in the forces that overthrew him and brought to the throne in his place his elder daughter Mary and her husband, James’s nephew, the Dutch Protestant, William of Orange, who, before becoming William III and Mary II, were required to accept a limitation of royal powers as outlined in a Declaration of Rights. Soon after their accession all Nonconformists, with the exception of Unitarians, a sect which rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, were granted freedom of worship by the Toleration Act of 1689. Nonconformists were also allowed to escape the jurisdiction of most of the penal laws to which Roman Catholics were still subject, though – unless they were prepared to take Holy Communion at least once a year in their parish church – they remained excluded from public life.14

  Nonconformists were at this time largely confined to towns, and remained so until the Wesleyan movement led to the formation of many dissenting congregations in the country. There were one or two Dissenters among the nobility and a few among the gentry. But most were from the kind of families that produced John Bunyan, whose father made a living by farming nine acres and did tinkering work to make ends meet, and George Fox, founder of the Quakers, who was the son of a weaver. They were proud of their independence and of the seriousness with which they regarded their faith as compared with what they took to be the laxer attitudes of the congregations in the churches where the opinions of the squire were likely to be as dominant as those of the parson, if not more so.

  He has often told me [wrote Addison of Sir Roger de Coverley] that at his coming to his estate he found the Parishioners very irregular; and in order to make them kneel and join in the responses, he gave every one of them a hassock and a Common-Prayer book; and at the same time employed an itinerant singing-master, who goes about the country for that purpose, to instruct them nightly in the tunes of the Psalms. As Sir Roger is landlord to the whole congregation, he keeps them in very good order, and suffers nobody to sleep in it besides himself; for if by chance he has been surprised into a short nap at sermon, upon recovering out of it he stands up and looks about him, and if he sees anybody else nodding, either wakes them himself or sends his servants to them.15

  Unquestionably the services in many parish churches were already controlled by the squire in this patrician way, and were to be so for generations to come, even in our own century when the patron of a living would, like King Edward VII at Sandringham, place his gold watch prominently on the back of the pew in front of him so that the rector should not be tempted to prolong the sermon for more than the prescribed ten minutes. Yet Anglicans were not so indifferent to their faith, nor so inclined to regard churchgoing as principally a social duty, as many Nonconformists liked to suppose. In most good Anglican homes graces were said before and after meals, and the family and their servants met for daily prayers: in the home of Alice Thornton, daughter of a member of the minor gentry of Yorkshire, the whole family was called to prayers by a little bell at six in the morning, at two in the afternoon and again at night.16

  While the influence of the Puritans had been paramount in England, soldiers had been authorized to enter private houses to ensure that the Sabbath and the fasts ordered by Parliament were being properly observed; maypoles had been
cut down, brothels as well as theatres had been demolished; gambling dens had been closed; race-meetings banned; and the number of alehouses diminished. Acts were passed for the punishment of sexual incontinence, making fornication a felony; and acts of public penance during Morning Prayer for sexual offences became more frequent, a girl who had been found engaged in illicit carnal relations being required to parade clothed in white, and carrying a white sheet, bare-headed, bare-legged and barefoot, ‘in sight of the congregation’. After the gospel had been read she was required to say ‘in a penitent manner and with an audible voyce as folloeth’:

  I, A.M., spinster of this parish, not having the fear of God before mine eyes nor regarding my owne soule healthe to the displeasure of Almighty God, the danger of my soule and the evill example of others committed the vile and heinous sinne of fornication.17

  In 1647 an ordinance decreed that all persons who had acted in any playhouse in London were to be punished as rogues; in 1648 men and women who had acted in public could be whipped and those who had watched them act could be fined; in 1654 cock-fighting was prohibited, not so much because it was cruel as because it was ‘commonly accompanied with gaming, drinking and swearing’. Anyone ‘profanely or vainly walking’ on the Lord’s Day was penalized; and stricter rules were made to enforce public worship and to prevent Sunday travelling and trading. A new Act was passed against profane swearing and it became an offence to gamble with cards. It was also an offence for apprentices or servants to remain in a tavern after eight o’clock on a holiday. For six months horse-racing was abolished and it was even considered a crime, in certain circumstances, to play football: one John Bishop, an apothecary, was charged with having at Maidstone, ‘wilfully and in a violent and boisterous manner run to and fro’ and kicked ‘up and down in the common highway and street within the said town and county, called the High Street, a certain ball of leather, commonly called a football’.18

  Punishments for crimes such as this were unlikely to be severe, but the crime of blasphemy was punished ferociously. James Naylor, who said that he was God, declared that a man might enjoy the pleasure of love with any woman provided she belonged to the same sect. His own sect was mostly composed of women who sat round his chair for hours on end chanting, ‘Holy! Holy! To the true God and Great God and Glory to the Almighty!’ Naylor was sentenced to be set in the pillory in Palace Yard; to be whipped to the Old Exchange by the hangman; two days later to be pilloried at Old Exchange and to have a hole bored through his tongue; to be branded with a B; to be taken to Bristol to be publicly whipped and to be sent through the town on a horse’s bare back with his face to the tail; then to be placed in solitary confinement at Bridewell.19

  During the time of the Long Parliament, between 1645 and 1647, witchcraft was also punished with great severity. For generations people had been turning to ‘cunning men’ and ‘wise women’, ‘sorcerers’, conjurers’, ‘Messers’ and ‘charmers’ for protection against pain and illness and early death, and against fire and dearth, for magical cures and love potions, for help in the recovery of stolen goods or the discovery of buried treasure or missing children. The witches consulted offered all manner of treatment and wizardries, from curing headaches by boiling a lock of the patient’s hair in urine, then throwing it into the fire, to treating sick animals by tapping them with magic wands or tying bunches of herbs to their tails. One Northumberland witch placed her lips to the mouths of sick children ‘and made such chirping and sucking that the mother of the said child thought that she had sucked the heart out of it and was sore affrighted’. Others made diagnoses by examination and measuring of the ill person’s clothes or, as a cure for ‘heart-ache’, crossed garters over their ears while muttering incantations. Yet it seems that before 1500 it was extremely rare for witches to suffer more than the mildest punishments; and, according to Keith Thomas, examination of medieval judicial records has so far revealed no more than a dozen known cases of supposed witches being executed for the whole period between the Norman Conquest and the Reformation; ‘and most of these had been involved in plots against the monarch or his friends’.20

  Towards the middle of the seventeenth century, however, witch-hunts became much more hysterical than they had been in the past; and, although many judges lamented the vindictiveness with which they were pursued – and some, like the Lord Chief Justice, Sir John Holt, who seemed ‘to believe nothing of witchery at all’, did their best to bring about acquittals – there were others who showed themselves determined to secure conviction even upon the flimsiest of evidence. Lord Chief Justice North confessed that he had condoned the conviction of three innocent women at Exeter because he feared that acquittal might result in a fresh wave of witch-hunting.21 As it was, the uproar in court was sometimes so deafening that the evidence could not be heard above the din. At the trial of Mary Spencer in 1634 there was such a row that she could not hear the charges which were brought against her.22

  Some women, it was supposed, became witches after having fornicated with the devil or having kissed his rectum in which ‘lustful women took especial delight’, though such charges were much more common on the Continent than they were in England. Coitus was very painful because the devil had an extremely large and hard penis, sometimes shod with iron, at others covered with brittle fish-scales, and his semen was cold as ice. But this did not necessarily mean that the body of a woman who had been entered by him would show that she had been hurt. It was possible for a woman who was proved in court to be a virgin to have ‘committed uncleanness’ with the Devil as she could have done so without being deflowered. In the absence of witnesses who were prepared to swear that they had seen the accused fornicating with the Devil or with an incubus, evidence was accepted from distinguished witch-finders such as Matthew Hopkins who could discover whether or not a woman was possessed by the devil by sticking pins into her flesh to discover the places rendered insensitive by the Devil’s touch. Witches could also be detected by their habit of throwing back their hair, their inability to cry, their practice of walking backwards and intertwining their fingers, by the devils that took the shape of animals, mostly toads and cats, who were their familiars, and by a third nipple on some part of their body.

  Hopkins, the son of a minister of Wenham, Suffolk, was said to have been a lawyer when the Civil War began. He claimed to have had his first experiences of witches in 1644 when he was in practice at Manningtree where he procured the condemnation of twenty-nine women who had made sacrifices to the Devil. Thereafter as the self-styled ‘Witch-Finder General’ he travelled about the countryside with a male assistant and female searcher, charging a fee for his discovery of witches in the various places where he stayed. Suspected women were urged to confess and were hanged when they did so. Those who declined to confess were stripped and searched for their secret nipple, placed cross-legged and bound on a table in a closed room with a hole in the door through which their ‘imps’ could enter. They were kept like this for as long as two days without food or sleep, being occasionally untied and made to walk round the room until their feet blistered and they were prepared to admit what was required of them.23

  These measures taken against supposed witches, usually women who had caused disquiet or offence in their communities, were sanctioned by the authorities. A commission was granted in 1645 for their trial at Bury St Edmunds at which John Godbolt was the judge and before which Samuel Fairclough preached two sermons on the evils of witchcraft. Several victims were tried and hanged, and there were subsequent trials and executions all over Suffolk and Norfolk, Essex and Huntingdonshire and at Cambridge. Not all the victims were women. John Lowes, the ancient vicar of Brandeston, Suffolk where he had been incumbent for fifty years was ducked and otherwise ill-treated until he felt obliged to confess to avoid further suffering. He was hanged at Framlingham, having been permitted to read his own funeral service.

  There was little active opposition to these trials; and it was not until John Gaule, a Huntingdonshire clergyman who b
elieved in witches himself raised objections to the methods used to discover them, that Hopkins’s career came to an end. ‘Every old woman,’ wrote Gaule in a book based on several sermons on witchcraft, ‘with a wrinkled face, a furr’d brow, a hairy lip, a gobber tooth, a squint eye, a squeaking voyce, or a scolding tongue, having a ragged coate on her back, a skull-cap on her head, a spindle in her hand, and a dog or cat by her side, is not only suspected but pronounced for a witch.’24 Soon after Gaule’s book was published Hopkins was himself accused of witchcraft and made to undergo the same examinations as had his victims. He was hanged in August 1647.

  Thereafter trials and executions of witches were not so frequent, but they did not come to an end. The prevalence and danger of witches was emphasized by Sir Matthew Hale, Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer, who when directing a jury in a trial in 1661 ‘made no doubt at all of the existence of witches, as proved by the Scriptures, general consent and acts of parliament’. In this case two widows were indicted for causing certain children to be taken with fainting fits, to vomit nails and pins and to see strange ducks, mice and other animals which were invisible to everyone else. A toad had run out of their bed and when thrown on the fire had exploded with a loud crack like a pistol shot. Sir Thomas Browne, author of Religio Medici, gave evidence for the prosecution which succeeded in obtaining the conviction and execution of both prisoners.

  At a subsequent trial in 1665 Hale sentenced two witches to death on the evidence of a woman who said that her children ‘coughed extremely and brought up crooked pins’ and once a big ‘nail with a very broad head’ which she produced together with forty of the pins. A doctor spoke of the ‘subtlety of the Devil’ while giving his evidence and explained how the working of the humours of the body in relation to this subtlety brought about this ‘flux of pins’.25