Garbage was deposited in kennels in front of one’s door. Drainage gutters carried raw sewage down the middle of cobbled streets, but unpaved streets had no drains at all. Even when kites (the red kite, which is now nearly extinct) and ravens did their part to clean up the filth, the stench remained.
Air Pollution
By 1604, Londoners were complaining about “smutty air,” the result of burning so much coal in fireplaces and in small, tiled stoves of glazed earthenware. In 1652, smoke pollution was so bad that one could no longer see the Tower from the roof of St. Paul’s.
Stray Animals
Cats, swine, rabbits, and pigeons were thought to be dangerous in times of plague, although the rat was rarely a suspect. Dogs were also persecuted. In 1543, loose dogs were to be banished or killed and buried out of the city of London at the common laystalls. Hounds, spaniels, and mastiffs might remain in the city if they were kept indoors. In 1563 this order was amended so that a dog might go out on a leash. Those who disobeyed were fined 3s. 4d. or lost their dog. A mayoral proclamation that same year ordered the slaughter of loose cats and dogs. Many London parishes had their own dogkillers. In 1578, citizens had to be forbidden to throw out of doors “any dead dogs, cats, whelps, or kitlings, or suffer them there to lie in such careless order as at this present they do.”
A SAMPLING OF URBAN CENTERS
Brighton: The largest of Sussex’s eighteen market towns, Brighton was a major fishing port even though it had no proper harbor. In 1514 it was burnt by French raiders. In the early seventeenth century, the Brighton fishing fleet regularly fished for herring in the North Sea. In the 1520s, Brighton had fewer than 1,000 inhabitants, but by the 1670s the population had more than doubled.
Bristol: A separate county (from the fourteenth century) as well as a city and the seat of a bishopric, Bristol was a major urban center from about 1550 onward and the distribution center for southern Wales. A population of 12,000 in 1600 made it the third largest English city. An international port, second only to London in importance, it also had a virtual monopoly on the supply of cod. In the sixteenth century it had a reputation for being cleaner than most cities.
Canterbury: The largest town in Kent, with a population of 6,000 by 1650, it remained an ecclesiastical center even after the destruction of the tomb of Saint Thomas Becket and the subsequent decrease in its tourist trade. The archbishop of Canterbury, highest prelate in the reformed church, had his seat there.
Chester: County town of Cheshire, a port on the river Dee, which monopolized trade with Ireland and was distribution center for northern Wales. It was also the administrative headquarters of the County Palatine and Earldom of Chester (a feudal honor held by the heir-apparent). In 1541, Chester became the seat of a bishopric. It was damaged by fire in 1564. The population was 7,600 in the 1660s.
Colchester: The only major town in Essex, it was a port with a population of 9,000 in the mid-seventeenth century.
Coventry: A medieval cloth-manufacturing center in decline during the sixteenth century; after the loss of its cathedral and its cycle of mystery plays, the population of this Warwickshire market town was around 6,000 in 1600. In the seventeenth century, Coventry was famous for ribbon making and tanning leather.
Dublin: With a population of about 8,000 in 1540, Dublin was the sixth largest city in the British Isles and the center of English government in Ireland. It had a cathedral and, after 1592, a university. Dublin was a major port, but by 1600 it was in decline and the population had dropped to about 5,500.
Edinburgh: A much more provincial capital than London, Edinburgh was the center of Scots government. Its population in Shakespeare’s time was approximately 9,000 (though some claims have been made for a population as high as 30,000), while Glasgow had about 4,500 and Aberdeen about 2,900. All of Scotland had a population of only 500,000 to 600,000.
Exeter: A provincial capital and cathedral city in Devonshire, Exeter became a county borough in 1538. Its population was 8,000 in 1520 and 9,000 in 1603. Plagues ravaged the city in 1570, 1590, and 1625.
Gloucester: Although generally in decline during the sixteenth century, Gloucester gained a cathedral in 1549 and became a separate county in 1605. It had fourteen churches. The population in 1563 was above 4,000 and, in spite of epidemics in the 1590s and 1630s, had reached 5,500 by 1672.
Ipswich: A port city in Suffolk (in East Anglia), Ipswich had a population of about 5,000 in 1600, by which time glass-fronted shops were replacing wooden pentices.
Leicester: This Leicestershire market town was the center of the leather trade and regional headquarters for the Duchy of Lancaster. It had a population of 3,000 in 1509, when it was said to be in a “sad and derelict state,” and 3,500 in 1603. Plagues caused great loss of life in 1564, 1579, 1583, 1593, 1604, 1606-7, 1610-11 (when 700 died), 1625-6, 1636, and 1638-9. By the mid-seventeenth century, Leicester was renowned for hand-knitted stockings.
Manchester: Not a city but a township, Manchester had a population of 2,000 in Elizabethan times. Called “the London of the North,” this Lancashire trade center relied on the new “cottons” for its wealth. It was already a center of the woolen industry by 1540, and by 1566 cloths of mixed wool and linen were being produced there. Much of the flax and linen was imported from Ireland via nearby Liverpool.
Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Coal-related jobs brought the population up to about 12,550 in the 1660s. Newcastle was also a provincial capital. In the sixteenth century, its location in Northumberland had made it a key supply center for troops based on the border with Scotland. A major outbreak of plague occurred in 1636.
Norwich: The second largest English city, with a population of 12,000 in 1520, 15,000 in 1603 and 20,000 by 1620. About 12,000 of the 20,000 were Englishmen while the rest were “strangers” from the Low Countries. Freemen in this Norfolk city nominated and elected sixty common councilmen, one of two sheriffs, and all twenty-four aldermen, and nominated two candidates for mayor. The mayor was paid £100 in 1600 (raised to £140 in 1616). The sheriff had an annual salary of £30 before 1545 and £80 after 1545. Out of this income he was required to pay for an elaborate feast to celebrate his election and purchase the violet robe he wore on ceremonial occasions. Norwich was a provincial capital, a diocesan center, and a leading cloth-making city. It suffered from epidemics in the early 1550s and from 1589-92.
Portsmouth: A dockyard under Henry VII and a major naval base under Henry VIII, this Hampshire city continued to grow during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries while nearby Southampton declined. Southampton’s population had dropped to about 4,200 in 1596. Portsmouth had 1,000 inhabitants by 1600.
Shrewsbury: Although not the seat of a bishopric or an administrative center, Shrewsbury (population 4,000+) was the shire town for Shropshire and had social, political, and trade importance for both Shropshire and Wales. The Severn was navigable to thirty miles higher than Shrewsbury, making the city a convenient regional supply depot for goods coming from Bristol.
Westminster: Although it bad always been independent of London, and was briefly a city with its own bishop from 1540 to 1550, Westminster officially became a separate municipality by Act of Parliament in 1585. Its boundaries extended from Temple Bar to Kensington and from the Thames to Marylebone. Among other things, that same act restricted the number of common alehouses to 120 along the Strand (the highway between Westminster proper and London), twenty around St. Martin’s, and sixty in the Parish of St. Margaret’s (the area near Westminster Abbey). Because the court was often at Whitehall Palace and because Parliament and the central courts met in Westminster Hall, the population of Westminster varied greatly. One figure for 1513 sets it at a little over 3,000.
Winchester: A Hampshire city, it had a population of 3,000 in 1603. Mayors received £10 at the time of election and another £10 following their term of office (after an audit of the city accounts). If a newly elected mayor failed to entertain the retiring mayor, bailiffs, and other officials with dinner at his own expense,
£5 was deducted out of the first payment. Mary I wed Philip of Spain in Winchester Cathedral in 1554. The city also had a college.
Worcester: A regional center, cathedral city, and cloth town, Worcester was not incorporated until 1555. It became a separate mayorality with county status in 1621 but remained the county town of Worcestershire. The population was 4,250 in 1563 and 8,300 in 1646. More burial ground was needed by the early seventeenth century. Plagues accounted for large numbers of deaths in 1558, 1593-4, 1603, 1609, 1618, 1637, and 1641-5.
York: The ecclesiastical and provincial capital and chief administrative center for northern England, York had (in 1639) 1,786 houses within its walls (enclosing 260 acres) and 370 without. The 1548 population was 8,000. It had increased to 11,000 by 1603 and 12,000 by 1630. Entering the city from the London road at Micklegate Bar, one came first to a wide street running downhill to the Ouse Bridge (rebuilt in 1566). Beyond the bridge the center of town was crowded and narrow and still unpaved in 1571. City government consisted of a mayor (elected January 15 and serving from February 3), aldermen, two sheriffs, a recorder, and a town clerk. The city held two annual fairs, at Whitsun and at the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul (June 29). The Archbishop held a Lammas Fair for two days beginning in the afternoon of the thirty-first day of July. This city was remarkably free of epidemics for the entire period from 1552-1603.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Atkinson, Tom. Elizabethan Winchester. London: Faber and Faber, 1963.
Beier, A.L. and Roger Finlay, eds. London 1500-1700: The Making of a Metropolis. London and New York: Longman, 1986.
Dyer, A.D. The City of Worcester in the Sixteenth Century. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1973.
Evans, John T. Seventeenth Century Norwich: Politics, Religion and Government 1620-1690. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.
Holmes, Martin. Elizabethan London. New York: FA. Praeger, 1969.
Palliser, D.M. Tudor York. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Robertson, A.G. Tudor London. London: MacDonald, 1968.
Scofield, John. Medieval London Houses. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.
Stow, John. A Survey of London. London: Alan Sutton, 1995. This is a new edition of the 1598 text with an introduction by Antonia Fraser.
Willen, T.S. Elizabethan Manchester. Manchester: Cheltham Society, 1980.
Wilson, F.P. The Plague in Shakespeare's London. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: RURAL LIFE
Under Henry VIII, marsh and fenland in the eastern counties were still in their native state and used for fishing, wild fowling, and raising stock. When stubble was burned in the autumn it looked as if the marshes were on fire. The bodies of fresh water known as the Norfolk Broads were already in existence, having been formed by flooding and by extensive peat cutting in the late fifteenth century. Forests of oak, scrub, and timber covered much of the Weald of Kent and Sussex. Windsor Forest stretched from Wokingham to Windsor. When Catherine of Aragon journeyed from Exeter to London upon her arrival in England, she saw more fat sheep grazing on the hills than she’d have seen anywhere else in Europe. Fields in this area were laid out in strips with very few hedges, and there were many windmills.
A 1590 report lists three general types of land: forests and wooded tracts; areas of waste, swamps, and fens; and cultivated open fields. Some 900 forests, chases, and parks were still wild enough that people feared getting lost in them. By 1614, however, many forests were in danger of disappearing. In addition to the overuse of wood in manufacturing, both James I and Charles I sold off trees to raise money.
On the more positive side, there were several projects for draining the fenlands under the Stuarts. In 1634, Parliament brought in a Dutch engineer, Cornelius Vermuyden, to supervise one such undertaking, which eventually increased the number of acres of cultivated land by 400,000. Rowland Vaughan had devised a system of irrigation in Hereford in the 1580s. As for champion (open-field) farming, except in Devon, Cornwall, and Kent, where there had been extensive enclosures, this was still the norm in the early seventeenth century.
In 1649, in The English Improver or a New Survey of Husbandry, Walter Blith listed six improvements landowners should make: floating and watering of land; draining of fens, bogs, and marshland; ploughing of old pasture and enclosure without depopulation; careful use of manures; planting of woods; and the more modest improvement of lands presenting “special problems.”
The weather had an impact on crops and rural life. It was bad throughout western Europe in the l590s. The worst period of famine in England was from 1593 to 1598. In a study of statistics on all grains from 1546 to 1603, 1555-7 and 1596-7 were years of dearth, while 1549-50, 1551-2, 1554-5, 1573-4, 1585-6, 1590-1, and 1594-6 were “deficient,” and 1550-1, 1586-7, 1597-8, and 1600-1 were “bad.” In general, there were dry, mild winters, even though this time was part of what has been called the Little Ice Age (which lasted from the fourteenth until the mid-nineteenth centuries). One of the worst winters was in 1607, when five cold weeks began just before Christmas. Also in 1607, floods inundated Somersetshire, Norfolk, Bedfordshire, Kent, Lincolnshire, and Huntingdonshire. Summers were usually wet, cool, and cloudy, especially in the late sixteenth century.
CROPS
Corn was the contemporary name for any cereal crop. Of the corn crops, wheat required the best ground and brought the best prices. Barley, oats, and rye were also major cereal crops. In the highlands, where there was relatively little sunshine, only oats would grow. What we call corn (Indian maize) was not known in Europe until the late l600s.
The entire year was full of hard work in the country. In January and February, farmers ploughed, harrowed, and spread manure. Fertilizers were used more and more as the period went on. Marl was considered to be better fertilizer than dung, muck, or lime and was said to last twenty years if used properly. Winter was also the time to set trees and hedges, prune fruit trees, lop timber, sow peas, barley, and oats, gather browse for cattle, and fill up holes in the pasture. Threshing was done at Candlemas (February 2), when tillage began, and there was an end to free grazing on the previous year’s stubble.
In March it was time to sow flax and hemp, sow white peas, and sow barley and pease, after sowing wheat. Plowing, sowing, and harrowing continued until Easter. Land for wheat and rye was “stirred” and barley sown on “light” land as late as possible. Barley was “drink-corn,” as was a barley and oats mixture. Vetches, oats, and some wheat were also sown. In April and May, gardens were planted, hop vines trailed to their poles, ditches scoured, and coppices cleaned. June meant liming, marling, and manuring fields and summer ploughing. Hay was mowed after Midsummer Day.
Lammas Day (August 1) marked the start of grain harvest. Some threshing was done, trees and hedges were pruned, rosebushes and bulbous roots were planted, and the land was prepared for spring crops. In early September, rye was sown (rye and wheat were the “bread-corn” of the country, but rye was slower to ripen than wheat and therefore sown earlier than winter wheat). Red wheat was sown in the Cotswold Hills. The end of harvest was usually celebrated with sports and fairs, and Michaelmas (September 29) marked the end of one farming year and the beginning of the next.
Throughout the autumn, grapes were harvested, crab apples were gathered to make verjuice used in cooking, cider and perry were made, woodcutting was done, turf and peat were dug for fuel, and rushes were collected, peeled, and dipped in oxen or mutton fat to make rushlights. In November, after all new sowing was complete, strawberry and asparagus beds were covered and barley was threshed for malt. Plough land was prepared for beans in December and the women did the winnowing. Women, in fact, did much the same work on farms as men did, only for less pay. In addition, countrywomen were responsible for the animal tending, cheese making, cleaning, cooking, foraging, gardening, haymaking, sewing, spinning, weaving, and weeding.
ENCLOSURE
The forced enclosures of the eighteenth century have given enclosure (enclosing land
with fences, hedges, or walls) a bad name. In the sixteenth century, the process often helped the local economy, making the land more productive. Enclosures were first made early in the thirteenth century and expanded gradually. After 1550, enclosure was mainly done to create more efficient, arable farmland, although fences and hedges did also keep cattle from straying and gave shade in the summer.
Better land management improved productivity. One estimate places about 50% of the farmland in England under enclosure by 1600. Enclosed land was usually farmed “severally” or “in several” and plowing enclosed land actually increased the need for laborers. A furlong was the distance a pair of oxen could plough a furrow without tiring. On an average, this measured 220 yards. Plowed strips were 20’-30’ wide and were divided by grassy pathways called balks. In 1593, Parliament established the statute mile at eight furlongs (1,760 yards), but the length of a mile continued to vary from county to county, ranging as high as 2,728 yards.
Because of the profits from wool, some landowners turned arable land into pasture, which produced a corn shortage and a labor surplus. When public outcries called excesses in enclosures to national attention, legislation was passed to control such practices. Disrupting lawful enclosure, however, was also illegal. In 1553, ten men found guilty of tearing down enclosures were sentenced to rebuild them.
In Kent, there were extensive enclosures by 1549. Weald fields were enclosed by shaws of oak, beech, or ash. Post and rail fences were used in Romney Marsh. Hedges were used elsewhere, and quicksets could be raised from berries of whitethorn. In Northamptonshire, whitethorn and hazel trees, crab apples, and holly were used for hedging. Plashing was the job of thinning hedges, then bending the remaining branches and intertwining them so that in the spring the growth would be twice as thick as before.
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