A Brief History of the Tudor Age (24 page)

Fitzherbert gave his readers useful advice about ploughing, suggesting that on balance it was better to plough with oxen than with horses, provided that the farmer had fields of pasture
where the oxen could rest between the ploughing; for though horses were stronger than oxen, and could work for longer hours, it cost less to feed oxen; and when a horse became old,
bruised or blind, he was useless. But if ‘an ox wax old, bruised or blind, for two shillings he may be fed, and then he is man’s meat and as good ox, better than ever he was’. He
wrote about how to sow barley and oats, how to plough for peas and beans, how to make forks and rakes, how to fell and plant trees and make hedges, how to recognize and treat the various diseases
which the animals might catch, and when to wash and shear sheep. He taught how to make a ewe love her lamb. If a ewe did not like one of her lambs, and was often striking it with her paw,
Fitzherbert advised that the ewe should be tied by her paw to the side of the pen and that a dog should be placed near the lamb in a position where the ewe could see it. This would arouse the
ewe’s protective instincts towards her lamb.

The Book of Husbandry
contained advice on how to repair a highway, for husbandmen were required to work for four days in the year repairing the highways, and this had been increased to
six days in the year by the time that the tenth edition of the book was published, after Fitzherbert’s death, in 1568. He had his own ideas about this, for he thought that the way in which
highways were repaired, especially in the vicinity of London, was unsatisfactory. It was no use digging a trench on both sides of the road to drain the water, and then putting down gravel, because
when the rains came, the soft earth beneath the gravel subsided, and the gravel went with it. Instead, Fitzherbert advised that, after brushing away all the surface water, earth should be put down
in the spring; then, when it had become hardened during the dry weather by the pressure of cartwheels and the feet of pedestrians, the gravel should be placed on top of the dry earth.

The role of the farmer’s wife is dealt with in
The Book of Husbandry
. Fitzherbert told the farmer that she should ‘first in a morning when thou art waked and proposeth to
rise, take up thy hand and bless thee and make the sign of the holy cross. In
nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti Amen. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy
Ghost. And if thou say a Pater Noster, an Ave and a Creed and remember thy Maker, thou shalt speed much the better.’ This advice in the first edition of 1523 remained in all the editions in
Henry VIII’s reign, survived in two editions under Edward VI, and was of course in order in the 1556 edition under Philip and Mary. It still remained in the first edition under Elizabeth I in
1560. But it was changed in 1562. Instead of the wife being urged to make the sign of the cross and the husband to say a Pater Noster, an Ave and a Creed, the farmer and his wife were told to
‘give thanks to God for thy night’s rest and say the Lord’s Prayer and other good prayers if thou canst’; and this Protestant version was reprinted in the editions of 1568
and 1598.

The rest of the wife’s daily duties remained unchanged from the first edition of 1523. She must clean the house, feed the calves, prepare the milk, wake and dress the children, prepare her
husband’s breakfast, dinner and supper, and supervise the servants. She must make butter and cheese, feed the pigs morning and evening, and have a care for the hens, ducks, and geese, and
collect their eggs. She should put her husband’s sheep to good use by making clothes from their wool, and should know how to make hay, to winnow all kinds of corn, to make malt, and ‘to
help her husband to fill the muck wain or dung cart’. She should also be able to go to market if her husband is unable to go himself, and know how to buy and sell shrewdly at market. It was
important that on these occasions she should give a true and full account to her husband of all the money she had spent and received at the market, and her husband should do the same to her; for
many marriages had been wrecked because husband and wife concealed money matters from each other.

Although Fitzherbert and the farmers who read his book saw only the advantages of owning sheep, the government became increasingly worried, and in 1534 an Act was passed to restrict it. The
statute declared that wealthy landowners had bought up arable land and converted it to pasture, and some had acquired
as many as 24,000 sheep; this had doubled the price of
corn, cattle, pigs, geese, chickens and eggs, and also of wool. So it was enacted that no landowner was to own more than 2,400 sheep,
⁸
excluding lambs aged
less than one year, on pain of a fine of 3s.4d. for every sheep over 2,400 which he owned. No one was to take a tenancy of more than two farms unless he lived in the parish where the farm was
situated.

Edward VI’s Parliament passed a more drastic Act in 1552, which enacted that by 25 March 1553 every parish must have as much land in tillage as it had in any year since the beginning of
Henry VIII’s reign in 1509, and that such land must be kept in tillage for the next four years. But the Act proved to be unenforceable.

The legislation did not prevent the continued predominance of the sheep in agriculture. In 1555 Parliament tried to encourage dairy farming by enacting that any farmer who owned more than 120
sheep must keep one cow for every sixty sheep that he owned; but by the end of Elizabeth’s reign the decline of tillage was alarming the government more than ever, and an Act was passed in
1597 which applied to the twenty-five counties where the situation was most serious. All land which had been converted to pasture since the Queen’s accession on 17 November 1558, after having
been in tillage for twelve years, was to be reconverted to tillage before 1 May 1599; and in future no land which had been in tillage for twelve years was ever to be converted to any other use.

From the beginning of the Tudor Age, the government was concerned about the shortage of the cheap labour which was needed in husbandry. Until the fourteenth century the land had been cultivated
by serfs, or bondmen, but by the beginning of the Tudor Age serfdom had very largely disappeared in England. It
lingered on in a few isolated pockets. Several monasteries owned
bondmen, but they were manumitted and set free when the monasteries were dissolved, though as late as 1538 the Earl of Arundel refused to manumit a bondman at Cromwell’s request, on the
grounds that it would diminish the value of his lands for his heirs; and the man had to remain a serf. But by the beginning of the sixteenth century there were only a few thousand serfs remaining
in England. All the other husbandmen worked for their employer, who was sometimes a country gentleman and sometimes a yeoman or man of lower rank, in return for wages paid either wholly in money,
or partly in money and partly in clothing, food and drink.

After serfdom began to disappear in the fourteenth century, Parliament on several occasions passed a Statute of Labourers which fixed the maximum wage which could be paid to husbandmen and other
workmen and artisans, and made it a criminal offence for any employer to pay, or for any employee to receive, a higher wage, though the employer was free to pay a lower wage and the employee to
accept it, if they could agree to this by bargaining. At the beginning of the Tudor Age, the law was regulated by the Act of 1444, but a new statute was passed in 1496. It fixed the maximum annual
wage that could be paid to a bailiff in charge of a farm at 26s.8d., with an additional five shillings per annum for his clothing, meat and drink if these were not supplied to him in addition to
his wages. The maximum for a chief shepherd was twenty shillings per annum, with an extra 5s. for clothing, meat and drink. The ordinary husbandman was not to receive more than 16s.8d. per annum
with 4s. for clothing, meat and drink; the woman servant no more than 10s. per annum with 4s. for clothing, meat and drink; and children under fourteen no more than 6s.8d. per annum and 3s. for
clothing, meat and drink.

The wages of artisans were fixed on a daily basis, with a higher wage allowed in summer than in winter, as the workmen worked longer hours during the light summer evenings. The maximum wage of
master carpenters, plumbers, bricklayers and
joiners between Easter and Michaelmas was to be 6d. per day, or 4d. if meat and drink were provided for them, and 5d. per day, or
3d. per day with meat and drink, between Michaelmas and Easter. The summer and winter wages of many other categories of artisans were similarly fixed. The unskilled artisan and labourer was to
receive, between Easter and Michaelmas, 4d. a day, or 2d. a day if meat and drink were supplied; between Michaelmas and Easter the wage was 3d. a day, or 1d. a day with meat and drink. Any employer
who paid higher wages than these rates was to be fined 40s. for each offence, and every workman who accepted higher wages was to be fined 20s., eighty times his daily wage. If any artisan or
labourer who was not in work was offered employment at these wages, and refused to accept it, the employer who had made the offer could ask the local JPs to imprison the artisan or labourer until
he agreed to work for him.

The hours of work were also fixed, because ‘divers artificers and labourers retained to work and serve waste much part of the day and deserve not their wages, sometime in late coming unto
their work, early departing therefrom, long sitting at their breakfast, at their dinner and noonmeat,
⁹
and long time of sleeping at afternoon, to the loss and
hurt of such persons as the said artificers and labourers be retained with in service.’ So it was enacted that between the middle of March and the middle of September every artisan and
labourer had to be at work before 5 a.m. and continue till between 7 and 8 p.m., with breaks of two hours for breakfast, dinner, sleep and noonmeat; and the workman was only to be allowed to sleep
between the middle of May and the middle of August. In winter, the hours of work were to be from dawn to dusk, with the same breaks for meals. The Act also contained a provision that any workman
who left his job without his master’s consent, except to enter the King’s service, was to be punished by one month’s imprisonment and a fine of twenty shillings.

The legislation did not succeed in preventing artisans and labourers from obtaining an increase in wages, especially after the inflation began in about 1545. The influx of
silver from the mines of Mexico to the money market at Antwerp, and Henry VIII’s policy of debasing the currency as a way of raising money to pay for his war with France, nearly doubled
prices in the next ten years; and by 1556 the husbandman’s daily wage had risen to sevenpence.

John Ponet, the Protestant Bishop of Winchester, referred to this in a book against Queen Mary which he published in exile at Strasbourg in 1556 and which was smuggled into England. He tried to
arouse the people’s anger against the government by associating the inflation with the reintroduction of the Catholic religion, though in fact it had already been running at nine per cent a
year under Edward VI.

The inflation ceased after 1560, and prices remained stable for about thirty years; but there was another sharp rise in prices at the end of the Tudor Age, when four bad
harvests in succession between 1594 and 1597 caused an annual inflation of 10.4 per cent. The poorer classes suffered severely, because food prices, except for fish and ale, rose by 190 per cent in
these four years, while wages hardly rose at all.

During the inflation of Edward VI’s reign, Parliament tried to keep wages stable by passing an Act in 1549 to prevent combinations by workmen to obtain a rise in wages. It enacted that if
any artificers or labourers conspired together to obtain higher wages or shorter working hours, ‘or shall not enterprise or take upon them to finish that another hath begun’, they were
to be
punished for the first offence by a fine of £10 or twenty days’ imprisonment on bread and water; and for the third offence the offender was to pay a fine of
£40, and if it was not paid within six days, he was to stand in the pillory, have one of his ears cut off, be forced to work as a labourer all his life, and be for ever incapable of giving
evidence in a court of law.

The government tried to control the rise in prices as well as wages. In 1534 an Act was passed to reduce the excessive price of meat. If, in any district, farmers were refusing to sell their
cattle to butchers at reasonable prices, the butchers could apply to the local JPs to fix a reasonable price for the cattle. More far-reaching measures against overcharging were taken in Edward
VI’s reign. It was forbidden to buy butter or cheese and resell it except in an open shop, fair or market, or to buy corn, wine, fish, butter, cheese, candles, farm animals or rabbits at any
fair or market, and to resell them at any fair or market within four miles of where they were bought; and no one who bought oxen, cows, sheep or goats was to resell them unless he had kept the
animals in his own house or farm for five weeks.