The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (51 page)

The beneficiaries of the agricultural changes grew rich, built new and grander houses, had their portraits painted, and in their new-found wealth and confidence sent their sons to the universities and Inns of Court. Certainly there were rack-renting landlords who mercilessly evicted their tenants as leases expired, who extended their game parks by taking in the miserable half-yardlands upon which their neighbours subsisted, and who let acre upon acre to absentee graziers, but the great agricultural transformation of the later sixteenth century was caused far less by a conspiracy of agrarian capitalists than by the extraordinary population pressure. Economic growth and agricultural advance were gained at a terrible cost. Families were left landless and homeless when their subsistence holdings were no longer viable; they could not afford to pay their rents or the entry fines which came due when land changed hands by sale or inheritance, and were forced deeper and deeper into debt to buy food and seed corn until compelled to sell holdings which they would never recover. Wages were driven down because of the labour surplus, and many could hardly keep their families, however long or hard they worked, even if there were work to be had. Gleaning and gathering firewood were vital to the lives of the poor, and the poor’s assertion of, to them, customary rights sometimes led to disputes when landowners denied those rights. As indigent families were driven from their holdings, and the caste of landless rural wage labourers and
cottagers grew, there grew also an estrangement between the yeomen and the poorer sort. The impersonal forces of the market had tragic personal consequences.

The lives of the greater part of the population, in town and countryside, were always precarious, resting as they did upon the health of the main breadwinner in each family; but for all poor people the difference between survival and privation depended upon the quality of the harvest. In good years, the poor’s own land might allow them to subsist, their wages suffice to buy the grain to make the bread that was the staple of their diet; if not wheat then rye, if not rye, then barley or oats. The poor might weather one year’s bad harvest, but not if another followed, and then another. For the first thirty years of Elizabeth’s reign the harvests had sufficed, but in 1586 the harvest failed. In 1594–7 unrelenting rain and unseasonable cold destroyed four successive harvests. For the poor, with no savings, with nothing but their labour to sell, the seismic impact of harvest failure upon the grain markets was a disaster. The failed harvest of 1594 caused grain prices to leap: in Cambridgeshire, Nottinghamshire and Oxfordshire they were double those of the previous year. In the harvest year 1595–6 prices rose further, and they reached a peak, unprecedented in the century, in the terrible year 1596–7, when there was famine: the last, so far, in English history.

Death followed dearth. The parish registers attest to communities burying their dead rather than celebrating baptisms and marriages. In many areas of England – in rural villages and hamlets, particularly in the North and West, and in the poorest quarters of the cities – bad harvests led to high mortality. Death from starvation alone was rare, but in some places it was the killer. In July 1597 Robert Cecil received a warning from County Durham that the people flocking into plague-stricken Newcastle had not eaten bread for twenty days. When three Dutch grain ships came into the harbour the desperation was temporarily relieved, but in September and October Newcastle Corporation paid for paupers’ burials for twenty-five ‘poor folks who died for want in the streets’. Malnutrition reduces resistance to disease, so the poor succumbed more easily to dysentery and tuberculosis and to epidemics like typhus. In their desperation, the starving ate the inedible, which brought enteric disease – the ‘bloody flux’ – which hastened their demise. The epidemics were most devastating in the winter and spring when the shortage of food was most acute. Many stages of suffering preceded a slow death from privation and neglect.

There were attempts to relieve the poor. The Privy Council, recognizing the extremity of the misery and fearing its social and political consequences, intervened during the dearth to regulate the grain market; many town councils organized public granaries from which grain, flour and bread were sold at subsidized prices; they imported grain. Still the poor suffered agonies, especially in the North and West, where in 1595–7 the mechanisms of poor relief seem to have broken down under the scale of the disaster. A flood of migrants came in search of food to towns which could hardly feed their own citizens. Vagrants took to the road, seeking work, or begging. Some stole rather than starve, and then were hanged for it. As hardship increased in the second half of the 1590s, so did indictment for crime, especially for offences against property – larceny, burglary, robbery – and assize judges made exemplary use of the death penalty. In Devon in 1598 seventy-four people were sentenced to death. When the numbers of migrants, squatters, day labourers, petty thieves and social derelicts increased, the charity which was the basis of neighbourliness came under severe strain. No one could remember such misery. In 1598 the vicar of Wendlebury in Oxfordshire wrote in his diary: ‘This was a sorrowful time for the poor of the land. God grant that such a dearth and famine may never be seen again.’

More dreaded and dreadful even than famine was the bubonic plague. If not technically endemic, plague was recurrent in Tudor England. Plague was catastrophic not only to the families who were left bereaved and perhaps indigent, but to the whole community. Work stopped, trade was paralysed, the people impoverished. Worse still, the life of the community was traumatized as people faced a grim dilemma: should plague victims, in charity, be helped or, in prudence, be shunned? Should one flee contagion or wait upon providence?

Plague was mainly a disease of the poor, especially in cities. In towns, there might be a chance of relieving the starving, but there was no way of preventing infection spreading through the overcrowded alleys and tenements. In 1579 nearly one third of the people of Norwich died of plague. London, most populous and most crowded, was most persistently afflicted. In 1563 more than 20,000 died in the City and liberties, nearly a quarter of the people; in 1593 nearly 18,000 died; in 1603, 30,000. In 1563 the mortality had been highest in the heart of the City, but by the end of the century the plague struck hardest in the crammed parishes just outside the City gates: Cripplegate, Aldgate, Bishopsgate. In 1603 in Yorkshire Lady Hoby heard that the plague was so virulent
in London that the living were counted rather than the dead. ‘Lord grant,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘that these judgements may cause England with speed to turn to the Lord.’

Since the whole Creation was a monument to God’s providence, every natural event was taken to be a manifestation of His omnipotent will. More awe-inspiring than the harmonies of nature – the seasons in their due order, the fruitfulness of the earth, the stars in the firmament – were the disruptions of the normal, benign patterns of nature. Divine admonitions lay behind natural portents: God was telling His people something. Illustrated pamphlets describing storms, earthquakes and monstrous births were anxiously and avidly read. Changes in the heavens or in the weather were ominous. In 1593, when pestilence struck London, ‘Saturn was passing through the uttermost parts of Cancer and the beginning of Leo’, as in 1563, another plague year, wrote Camden. The conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in 1583 was taken to bode ill. Yet the theatre of nature was an object of wonder, not to be searched into, so it was taught.

Francis Bacon, whose aim was to revolutionize the scientific study of nature, famously told his uncle, Lord Burghley, in 1592, ‘I have taken all knowledge to be my province.’ Yet in the same year he wrote that God had recently sent plague – ‘but with a very gentle hand’ – to teach the curious who dared seek its natural cause to ascribe it only to His mercy. To bow with becoming submission to the first, divine cause was a pious necessity. The danger lay, so clerics taught, in confusing first and second causes, and in imagining that to understand the natural world was to penetrate divine mysteries. The cosmos was not subject to rational interpretation, for divine providence could work independently of the natural order. Could human reason ever have predicted that God would destroy his Creation in the Flood? Only scripture held the key to nature.

So far as human reason could observe and understand it, God ordered nature according to regular laws. But plague was haphazard: it struck one town, not another; usually declined in the winter, but not always; was seemingly irresistible, yet some survived. This very unpredictability proved its providential origin. In the case of bubonic plague, its second cause was believed to be the conjunction of stars which drew pestilent vapours from the earth, creating a miasma. (That God was working through the fleas which infested the black rat,
rattus rattus
, was still unknown.) The corruption which was the origin of plague was understood
to be moral before it was physical. So in 1603 Thomas Dekker described plague in London: ‘Death (like a Spanish Leaguer or rather like stalking Tamberlane) hath pitched his tents… in the sinfully polluted suburbs.’ God sent plague, as he sent any other form of natural calamity, against sin. That malign natural sequence – the summers which were not summers, the unrelenting rain of the 1590s – was necessarily explained in the same way. ‘He is blind,’ preached George Abbott in December 1596, ‘who now beholdeth not, that God is angry with us.’ The cause of a disaster afflicting a whole community was to be found in the sin of the whole people and their ingratitude in not accepting revealed truth. The punishment came from the one to whom ingratitude was shown: God Himself.

For the calamities which struck individuals – lingering illness, the death of a child, the sickening and loss of animals, cows yielding blood instead of milk, the mysterious failure of butter to set – people increasingly found an explanation not directly in divine providence (though nothing happened without divine permission) but in the malign and occult force of witchcraft. Satan, lord of this world, was believed to have agents at work, with mysterious, diabolical power to do harm,
maleficium
. Like idolatry, witchcraft was a sin against the first table of Commandments. Belief in the power of witches was very old, but the persecution of alleged witches was an obsession of the later sixteenth century, when the injunction in Exodus – ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’ – was taken literally. The conviction that witchcraft was a reality offered an explanation for unexpected personal catastrophe, and witch-hunting offered the remedy. Acts of 1542, 1563 and 1604 (the last not repealed until 1736) first made witchcraft a statutory offence and provided the mechanism for the trial and punishment of witchcraft as a crime. George Gifford, a preacher in Essex, the county where most witches were sought and found, wrote that the common people were convinced that ‘if there were no witches, there should be no such plagues’. If witches were hunted down and cast out, so it was believed, acts of harm would cease. The Devil could be defeated in the courts by hanging his human agents.

In pursuit of this simple remedy there was a great rise in witchcraft prosecution, which reached its peak in the last decades of Elizabeth’s reign. At the home circuit of the assizes, covering the counties of Essex,
Hertfordshire, Kent, Surrey and Sussex, there were 109 indictments in the 1570s, 166 in the 1580s, and 128 in the 1590s; thereafter the level fell until the middle of the next century. Between 1570 and 1609, 64 of 263 accused witches were executed; 53 of those 64 were convicted in Essex. At the Essex assizes witchcraft cases formed 13 per cent of all criminal business in the 1580s. Why the obsession was so strong in Essex, where social and economic conditions were not so different from its neighbouring counties, remains unexplained. Ninety per cent of all alleged witches in England were women; their crime,
maleficium
– causing harm.

The horror of the witch-hunt, and the social breakdown and mental torment which lay behind it, should never be forgotten. Women – for it was prevailingly women – who were poor, old, ill-favoured, unprotected, were accused of crimes against their neighbours: the only evidence against them the fact of the misfortune, a conviction of their old malevolence, their possession of a ‘familiar’ – often a cat – which was believed to be a diabolic spirit, and some bodily blemish which could be construed as a witch’s mark. Then as now, a cat fed out of a saucer and cosseted in a wool-lined basket might have been the only comfort of an elderly poor woman; but then it might have been taken as a sign of demonic covenant. For those who wished to find witches, and evidence of their guilt, there were ways enough.

The alleged witch was invariably someone known to the accuser, whom the person harmed had once offended; she was an unquiet spirit within the community, perhaps a scold. In a patriarchal society, these poor old women were often living outside the conventional hierarchies of family and household, without father, brother or son to validate or protect them. It was a perversion of power structures for women to seek power at all, let alone diabolic power. If there was a pattern to the accusation of maleficence it was that the alleged witch had gone to the house of her victim, typically someone richer than herself, and asked for aid – for food, for drink, for alms, for a loan – which was refused. The witch may have been affronted or teased, perhaps by having her geese driven away or even a bough covering a muddy patch by her door removed. So she would have her revenge. Sent away empty-handed and slighted, the witch would curse her uncharitable neighbours, from the master of the household to the piglet in the sty. In the weeks and months which followed the malediction, a misfortune would occur, and the victim would remember being ‘forespoken’, think of the beggar’s curse, and know whom to blame. The Surrey mother whose child fell from her
arms into a fire in April 1567 and died from burns that September, without medicines to heal or opiates to relieve pain, had long months of torment in which to brood upon the witchcraft which she blamed for the accident.