Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (84 page)

Turning to those who made the goods which merchants sold, at the top were manufacturers whose trade required large numbers of workers and so could not be done in a shop or at home. These included brewers, ironmasters, glassmakers, paper makers, sugar boilers, and some textile manufacturers. Such men were proto-industrialists, presiding over family firms whose operations required complicated equipment and substantial capital investment; employing platoons (if not yet small armies) of workers; and making hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pounds a year. As we have seen, their operations would grow larger, more complicated, and more lucrative during the eighteenth century, spurred in part by overseas trade, in part by war.

More numerous, but on the whole less wealthy, were artisans, craftsmen and service providers like inn- and tavern-keepers. They could make anywhere from £3 to £800 a year depending on their trade and location, but their income was most likely to fall into the £40–80 range. Artisans and craftsmen included, but were certainly not limited to, tailors, haberdashers, shoemakers, weavers and spinners in the cloth trade, blacksmiths, coopers (barrel makers), candle makers, wheelwrights, carpenters, turners and furniture makers, goldsmiths, silver workers, leather dyers and tanners, and booksellers. They worked or oversaw work in small shops which probably also doubled as their places of residence. Theirs would be a family business, but they might employ several apprentices or additional servants. Increasingly, their shops became showrooms, with finished goods in the front room, their fashioning taking place in back. For years, their trades had been regulated by guilds and, more recently, the Statute of Artificers of 1563. But by 1700 the power of the guilds and the effectiveness of the statute were both waning, especially in London. This meant more freedom for artisans and new manufacturers such as the French Huguenot silk weavers in Spitalfields, London. But it also meant less security, as there were fewer safeguards against cut-throat competition. Such businesses were, moreover, always subject to the hazards of fire, theft, debt, even laziness or incompetence on the part of their owners, though the new concept of insurance would soften the first of these. For all these reasons, it was more difficult for artisans and craftsmen to profit from the wealth flowing into eighteenth-century England.

A second longstanding contingent of the middling orders comprised the professions: salaried government officials, attorneys, military and naval officers, medical men, clergymen, and specialized private servants. According to King, the professional classes numbered about 55,000 families in 1688 (see table 1).
¹⁹
None of these groups was really new during the Augustan period, but several, such as the government and military officers, expanded due to the demands of war. The number of civil attorneys, solicitors, notaries, and scriveners also increased because the new financial practices invented in this period lent themselves to new kinds of disputes, abuses, and frauds. All of these groups benefited to varying degrees from the economic health of later Stuart and early Hanoverian England.

Some professions were becoming more “professional” at the beginning of the eighteenth century, regulating their membership and maintaining standards by demanding a higher level of education and competence. One impetus for this was war. England’s future depended on the effectiveness of its financial administration and fighting forces. Thus, government Excise officers underwent a rigorous training. A Royal Naval College was established to train naval officers and strict examinations were set (from 1677) for candidates for the lieutenancy. Though most such officers still emerged from the younger sons of the nobility and gentry, promotion according to seniority and merit, as opposed to birth, became the norm in the 1690s. In contrast, the army, a traditional preserve of the aristocracy, remained much less of a meritocracy: throughout the eighteenth century commissions were purchased and commands determined by court patronage. Traditionally, both military and naval officers had inflated their £80–100 salaries by selling commissions; by contracting at advantageous rates for arms, uniforms, and food; and by seizing plunder. As standards tightened, these sources of income began to dry up, though shady opportunities still remained.

Among professionals, the lawyers and physicians did best. A successful barrister (criminal lawyer) might make £3,000–4,000 a year, an attorney £1,500. A prosperous country physician might bring in £500 a year. The average for both groups, however, was closer to £200 a year. In theory, legal professionals continued to be trained at the universities, followed, in the case of barristers, by instruction at the Inns of Court. Doctors were supposed to be trained at universities both at home and abroad and regulated by the Royal College of Physicians. In fact, by the end of the period, legal education at the Inns of Court and medical education at Oxford and Cambridge were fairly moribund. Increasingly, barristers learned their trade through informal apprenticeships with experienced members of the profession. The best medical training, embracing the scientific method, could be found in European universities, especially Leyden, and, from the 1720s, the medical school of the University of Edinburgh. This did not necessarily mean that eighteenth-century physicians became much more skillful at cure, but they better understood symptoms and hygiene. In any case, most people could not afford the services of physicians, who represented the medical elite. Apothecaries who dispensed drugs and surgeons who set bones and cut for stone were both more numerous and more reasonable in their fees. The former gained business from the availability of new pain-killing drugs from the East. Surgeons also made great strides in the century after 1660: having broken away from their association with barbers, they increasingly benefited from formal training and better instruments, which led to a rise in wealth and prestige.

The clergy also became more professionalized. Successive seventeenth-century purges, of Puritans under Laud, of Arminians under the Commonwealth and Protectorate, of Presbyterians and Independents under Charles II, and finally of nonjurors under William III had fractured and demoralized this group. But under the able leadership of Archbishops Sheldon (served 1663–77), Sancroft (1677–90), Tillotson (1691–4), and Tenison (1695–1715), the quality and
esprit de corps
of the clergy improved steadily: by 1680 nearly four-fifths of the 12,000 or so parish priests were university graduates. Nevertheless, this group experienced the widest variations in income and status of any profession in Augustan England. Most clergymen were poor: while some benefices yielded £100–150, nearly 42 percent paid less than £50 and 13 percent paid less than £20 according to a survey done in 1704. In the words of one commentator, “[t]here are a vast many poor wretches, whose benefices do not bring them in enough to buy them clothes.”
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High Church Tory parsons struggling to make ends meet came to resent Latitudinarian Whig bishops who were increasingly drawn from the younger sons of the peerage and who reaped anywhere from £300 to £7,000 a year from their episcopal estates. The fact that the Anglican clergy could marry offered some consolation, but it also put more pressure on their finances. As a result, despite reform efforts by Tenison and others, pluralism and absenteeism continued, not least because contemporaries still asked clergymen to do so much. The clergy were often the linchpins of their communities, not only ministering to souls, but also caring for the sick, educating the young, and looking after the poor. In 1704 Queen Anne made some attempt to rectify their own general poverty by donating back to them First Fruits and Tenths, an ancient tax that had been confiscated by Henry VIII. Despite Queen Anne’s Bounty, clerical incomes and workload would remain serious issues well into the nineteenth century and beyond.

Government officials also saw wide variations in income. Ignoring the great offices suitable for peers, there were thousands of middling positions in the Household, Treasury, Customs, and Excise paying anywhere from £100 to £1,000 a year, plus perquisites like free meals and lodging, used or surplus provisions, etc. The existence of such perks tells us that professionalism came piecemeal and late to government service: the Excise apart, most appointment was through patronage; sale of office was only outlawed in 1702 (and probably continued under the table); tenure was virtually for life. Nevertheless, if Augustan government was hardly a model of modern bureaucratic probity, it was well ahead of its continental counterparts, as it proved in successive wars. Finally, one should include in the middling ranks of society the many private servants of the aristocracy who had some particular expertise: estate stewards, clerks, valets, and ladies’ maids. These, too, were professionals and might make a few hundred pounds a year for their services.

While the professions were expanding and rising in wealth, this does not mean that a professional career was open to just anyone. All, except service in a noble household, required a “stake,” that is, the money for university tuition or to purchase an office or an army commission. Moreover, one traditional path to a career, university education, was becoming less available to talented poor boys during this period, as scholarships heretofore reserved for them began to be monopolized by the sons of the elite and middling orders. In short, despite the new wealth flooding into the country, the middling sort, like the aristocracy, were in some ways less open to new blood than they had been a century earlier. As with their betters, this period saw the consolidation of merchant and professional dynasties. Successive generations of one family would join the family firm or pursue the same profession, often intermarrying into other mercantile or professional families in their circle. Still, this group remained open to movement within its ranks and, sometimes, to those above. The most common way for a middle-ranking family to rise was by the marriage of a wealthy merchant’s daughter to a member of the aristocracy. More unusually, the great East India merchant and financial adventurer Thomas “Diamond” Pitt (1653–1726) single-handedly founded a family fortune that bankrolled the political careers of two prime ministers.
²¹

Most members of the middling orders did not make this transition. Nonetheless, they were a force for change which alarmed the more traditional minded. Many started off as outsiders, coming from heretofore marginalized groups: Dissenters, Huguenots, or Jews. Many were foreign; they rose quickly to prominence in English life on their wits, not on their birth or connections. Most were Whigs and most lived in cities, beyond the hegemony of the landed aristocracy. By 1714 some 20–25 percent of the English population lived in urban areas and half of these lived in cities of 5,000 or more. London remained, at 500,000 in 1700, the greatest metropolis in the kingdom, the center of government, finance, and trade, “the mighty Rendezvous of Nobility, Gentry, Courtiers, Divines, Lawyers, Physitians, Merchants, Seamen, and all kinds of Excellent Artificers, of the most Refined Wits, and most Excellent Beauties.”
²²

The period after the Restoration saw the rise in both population and importance of the West End, which included not only the court and Parliament but the splendid townhouses and lodgings of the elite (see
map 10
, p. 197). This was a great age for speculation and building by enterprising (if not always scrupulous) developers like Nicholas Barbon (ca. 1637–98/9) in league with the powerful aristocrats who owned so much of the metropolis: hence the many famous squares and streets named for aristocratic speculators such as the Lords Berkeley of Stratton and the Russells, dukes of Bedford.

And yet, the phenomenal growth experienced by London in the seventeenth century began to slow down in the eighteenth. Henceforth, the big story in England’s urban history was the expansion of cities of over 10,000 inhabitants. In 1670 there were five of these; in 1750, 20. Next to London, the greatest urban concentrations continued to be the clothmaking center of Norwich, with 30,000 people; the port of Bristol, with 21,000; and the coal capital, Newcastle, with 16,000 (see map 3, p. 17); some of these numbers would double by 1750. As we have seen, much of the new growth came in ports and naval dockyards like Liverpool (which grew from 5,000 to 22,000 souls between 1670 and 1750) and Portsmouth, or manufacturing centers like Birmingham and Manchester. Increasingly, these regional centers, along with county towns, market towns, and spas, were establishing their own cultural institutions, such as assembly rooms and theater companies, to entertain their residents and the local aristocracy closer to home. True, some merchants and professional men, particularly military and naval officers, moved out to the country, buying landed estates and seeking to live like the aristocracy. But most opted to stay in their professions and their townhouses, avoiding the Land Tax and unknowingly providing an alternative model, urban and “middle class,” for a successful English life. Their increasing wealth and leisure time meant that they could now join with the aristocracy in pursuing “polite sociability”: sponsoring art, forming clubs, attending coffee-houses, reading newspapers, going to Bath. As we have seen, by the early eighteenth century their possessions expanded beyond the mere necessities of life to include luxury goods like clocks and books, as well as fine china and table linen. The wealthiest continued to dominate their local corporations as mayors and aldermen. Increasing numbers served as MPs: there were 55 merchants and a handful of lawyers in the Parliament of 1641; by 1754 there would be 60 merchants, but also 60 lawyers and 40 military or naval officers, albeit mostly younger sons of the gentry.