Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (6 page)

The outlying regions of England comprise (moving clockwise from an eight or nine o’clock position) the West Country, the Welsh Marches and the Midlands, the North, and East Anglia. The West Country includes the traditional counties of Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Somerset, and Wiltshire. This area, like the southeast, is fertile, though Cornwall is quite rugged and portions of Devon and Dorset are famous for their forests, heaths and moors – large expanses of wild, uncultivated ground. This part of England never became heavily industrialized or highly urbanized. In fact, it is so remote from London that in 1485, as this book begins, many natives of Cornwall still spoke a separate Celtic language, and Tudor commentators noted their distinct culture.

The Welsh Marches,
⁴
Midlands,
⁵
and the North
⁶
are geographically, topographically, and temperamentally a bit like the Celtic lands. That is, their remoteness from London’s influence and their rugged terrain meant that they were, during our period, less populous, less wealthy, and less well integrated with the center. Even after the Marcher lordships were abolished by the Tudors, English border counties like Herefordshire continued to include a few Welsh-speaking parishes. The North, especially, tends to be characterized by highland terrain: the farmland tends to be less fertile, its soils thinner and rockier, its weather wetter, its growing season shorter. This area is better fitted to sheep and cattle farming than to growing arable crops, resulting in smaller settlements and farms than in the South. Like the frontiers of Ireland and portions of Wales, the North was dominated in the late Middle Ages by a few great – and very aggressive – noble families, in particular the Percy earls of Northumberland, and the Neville earls of Westmorland. All of these great lords were owed military service by their tenants. Because of the recurrent violence on the Scots border, these noble houses maintained extensive patronage networks, or
“affinities,”
which could be transformed quickly into large armies. Great magnates often used these forces against each other, or against the English king, in order to secure even more land and power. The rivalries among these mighty families, the ambitions of their chiefs, the “outlaw” nature of the Anglo-Scottish frontier, and the pervasive feeling that the North was often ignored at court rendered this part of the country a frequent source of instability early in our period. As in Ireland and the Welsh Marches, the English Crown often found that it had little choice but to rely on these great families to keep the peace in this far-flung part of its dominions.

After the period covered by this book, the ruggedness of the Midlands and North became an advantage, albeit temporarily. During the first industrial revolution (roughly 1760 to about 1850), their downward rushing rivers, combined with rich coal deposits, provided perfect locations for the earliest large factories. This led to the expansion of moderately sized towns into the great cities of Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Bradford, and Sheffield. Even then, the money generated by these factories (and many of those enriched by it) tended to head south, toward London. In more recent decades, the collapse of heavy industry in Britain turned much of the North, in particular, into a rustbelt with high unemployment. Recovery only came at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Finally, remote as the crow flies but better connected to London through coastal navigation are the counties of Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Norfolk, and Suffolk, which comprise the region known as East Anglia (
map 2
). This part of England tends to be flat and barren, often fen (or swamp) land and subject to cold winds from the North Sea. But beginning in the sixteenth century, Norfolk and Suffolk’s sheep walks experienced an agricultural revolution and Suffolk in particular became rich on the wool trade. Nevertheless, all of these outlying areas had certain characteristics in common during the early modern period: their remoteness, their relative freedom from London’s influence and control, and, for most of the period, their relative lack of wealth (East Anglia excepted). These factors help to explain why these parts of England would often prove most ready to rebel against the political power of the king or the economic power of the ruling elite.

As indicated above, the North and North Wales tend to be the most mountainous parts of Britain. The Pennine Range, in particular, runs like a backbone down the spine of the North and Midlands (
map 1
). But even these peaks hardly compare to the Rockies or the Alps, English mountains tending to be very tall hills. Indeed, the highest mountain in England and Wales, Mount Snowdon, rises only 3,500 feet. The hilly terrain of the North did have economic consequences, as we have seen, and it could make military operations more difficult, but, by and large, mountains were not important in English history.

Rivers, on the other hand, were very important. The most obvious example is the Thames, the great river in southeastern England which flows into the North Sea (
map 1
). The Thames served as the highway by which nearly every one of England’s migrant groups penetrated its interior. Usually, they settled along its banks – another reason why the southeast is the most populous part of England. Later, the Thames, along with other major rivers (the Severn to the west; the Mersey, the Great Ouse, Humber, Trent, Tyne, and Tees to the north:
map 1
), served as principal highways and trade routes. In the eighteenth century, they would be linked in a great national canal system. Though England had a system of roads emanating from London as first laid down by the Romans, water transportation (around the coast or, internally, via the river system) remained the cheapest and safest way to travel or to ship goods.

But if we were to somehow manage a “field-trip” to England in 1485, the natural feature which would probably strike us most forcefully, especially in comparison to England over five centuries later, would be the forests. Early modern England was covered with trees. The Crown owned most forests; indeed, what defined a forest to contemporaries was not so much trees but forest law jurisdiction. In theory, this law preserved the forests for the purposes of providing the king with the pleasures of the hunt and the game it yielded for his table. In reality, these laws were not everywhere strictly enforced. As a result, people who lived in the forest developed a distinct culture and economic system: living in small hamlets, surviving by dairy farming, mining, and poaching the king’s game. Trees were, in fact, the most important natural resource in England, for a great deal that we make with steel or plastic or rubber today was made of wood in 1485. Ships, houses, wagons, furniture – all were fashioned out of England’s forests. As the population grew during the early modern period, and with it demand for timber as building material and fuel, the forests thinned out dramatically.

Iron and the raw materials necessary to make it, such as tin and coal, also abounded in England in 1485. But they were too expensive to mine and too difficult to fashion at the start of our period to create more than isolated pockets of local economic significance. Far more important was the wood noted above – and sheep. Sheep provided wool, which was, in 1485, virtually the only commodity made in England that was in high demand abroad, in Europe. Nearly every part of the country engaged in sheep farming, but it was especially important in the hillier and remoter areas such as the West Country, the western portion (or West Riding) of Yorkshire, and East Anglia.

Finally, before leaving the question of England’s physical environment, we must address its climate. A standing joke, in England and elsewhere, is that English weather is awful. But weather is really a matter of perspective. If one is used to the weather of Spain or California, English weather is very disappointing. But if one comes from Murmansk or Chicago, the English climate is really quite mild. Thanks to the moderating influence of the Gulf Stream, England rarely gets very hot or cold.
⁷
This mildness, combined with frequent, but not torrential, rainfall, means that England is highly suitable for certain crops, especially heavy grains like wheat or barley. This advantage was of the utmost importance, for on the weather depended the harvest and on the harvest depended everything else. Too much sun and the crops withered. Too much rain and they rotted. Too good a harvest and prices fell, and so did the incomes and purchasing power of farmers. Too poor a harvest and food prices rose, possibly out of the range of the poorest members of society. Too little food and multitudes sickened or starved. The land and its produce do indeed mold the people, for good or for ill.

It is now time to examine the people who were shaped by, and who in turn shaped, the land we have been describing. What were the people of England like in 1485? What mattered to them? How did they explain their world and organize their society? How did they make a living? How would these things change after 1485?

This Happy Breed

If, somehow, we were transported back to England in the year 1485, the first thing that would strike us about its inhabitants would probably be how few there were (which would also be the most obvious explanation for our earlier observation regarding the forests). England (including Wales) in 1485 had only about 2.2 million people (as compared to about 53 million today). In fact, its population had once been much larger, at least 4 to 5 and perhaps as many as 6 million people at the end of the thirteenth century. But in 1348–9 the Black Death – almost certainly bubonic plague – had swept into England, probably carried in the saliva of fleas which were carried by rats which were carried by ships which brought trade from Europe. The Black Death, so named for the swollen black marks it left on the skin, was intensely virulent: if one contracted it, the odds of survival were only one in four. Most victims died a painful death within a matter of days. The result was to reduce the population by nearly one-half by the end of the fourteenth century. It continued to dwindle for most of the fifteenth, in part because the plague returned again and again, albeit with diminishing virulence, until the last major outbreak in 1665.

Even when the plague did not rage, medieval and early modern English men and women were still prey to all sorts of bacterial and viral infections which have been eradicated or neutralized in our own time. This was partly because they lacked modern antibiotics, partly because they lacked any sense of the connection between hygiene and disease, and occasionally because of malnutrition. In fact, when the harvest was good the diet of the average peasant was fairly healthy, consisting of bread, pea soup, cheese, occasional meat, and ale; however, perhaps one harvest in four was poor, one in six so poor as to produce famine. Though deaths from starvation itself were rare (mostly confined to remote areas of subsistence agriculture in the North), historians have been able to show a correlation between bad harvest years and those with a higher incidence of epidemic disease, probably a result of malnutrition. Even in temperate years, clothing and housing were, as we shall see, barely adequate to keep one warm and dry. Even where housing was adequate it was made of cheap plaster framed in wood and, thus, prone to collapse or fire. Few knew how to swim, so drowning in England’s many rivers was common. And there was always the violence of wars and border raids. As a result of these harsh realities, the average life expectancy of a late medieval or early modern English person was about 35 years. This does not mean, of course, that there were no old people, but it does mean that they were far more rare in this society than in our own. Another reason for this depressing figure was that at the beginning of life’s span infant mortality ran at about 20 percent in the first year; another 10 percent of children would die before age 10. It is therefore not surprising that England’s population only began to grow again in the 1470s or 1480s.

Of England’s 2.2 million people in 1485, less than 10 percent lived in cities. Of these, London was by far the largest (see
map 3
). It was at once the capital, the legal center, and the primary seaport for trade with Europe. But, at about 50,000 inhabitants, it was less than half the size of modern-day Peoria, Illinois, or roughly equal to Terre Haute, Indiana, or Carson City, Nevada. In 1485 its governmental and cultural influence on the rest of the country was fairly minimal. London’s population and its influence were to grow immensely, however, during the early modern period. By 1700 London would be the largest city in Europe, with over half a million inhabitants. It would also be the wealthiest city in the world, the hub of a vast empire, an immense emporium for goods and services, and the unchallenged center of government and setter of cultural trends for the British Isles.

The next largest cities – Norwich in East Anglia, Bristol (a seaport off the huge Bristol Channel at the mouth of the Severn) to the west, Coventry in the south Midlands, and York in the North – had no more than 10,000 people each in 1485. Below them came major county towns like Dorchester or Stafford and cathedral cities like Lincoln or Salisbury with a few thousand inhabitants apiece (
map 3
). In general, the fifteenth century had been a time of boom and bust for such middling-sized cities. There were many reasons for this: a general economic crisis in Europe during the second half of the fifteenth century, the disruption of commerce that took place as a result of the Hundred Years’ War and the Wars of the Roses (see chapter 1), and, in particular, the ups and downs of the wool trade. Specifically, the demand for raw wool from England fell throughout the fifteenth century. But that for finished wool cloth rose up to the 1440s, then stagnated for three decades, then rose again from the 1470s. Cities that got in on the latter trade, like Exeter, Salisbury, and Totnes, did well. Those that did not, such as Coventry, Gloucester, Shrewsbury, and York, saw their wealth and populations decline. As the period wore on, more and more manufacturing moved into the countryside, performed by individual farmers’ wives. At the same time London came to dominate the international trade in cloth, which hurt lesser port cities.