Poverty and Vagrancy in Tudor England.
The Black Assizes of Cambridge (1522), of Oxford (1577), and of Exeter (1586) cast, in each case, a momentary and vivid light upon the state of England in the Tudor period as late as the middle of the reign of Elizabeth. It has been pointed out in a former chapter that prices and wages were favourable to the cultivators of the soil in the fifteenth century, that the English yeomanry sprang up in that period, that village communities and trading towns prospered although their morals were none of the best, and that the civil wars of York and Lancaster were so far from injuring the domestic peace of England that they even secured it. It was the observation of Philip de Comines, more than once quoted before, that England had the “peculiar grace” of being untroubled at large by the calamities of her civil wars, because kings and nobles were left to settle their quarrels among themselves. “Nothing is perfect in this world,” says the French statesman, who did not like independence of spirit among the lower orders. But he recognizes the fact as peculiar to England in the fifteenth century; and there can be little doubt about it.
The civil wars were hardly over when the troubles of the common people began. Here, if anywhere, is the turning-point brought into Goldsmith’s poem of “The Deserted Village:”
A time there was, ere England’s griefs began,
When every rood of ground maintained its man.
Deserted villages became a reality in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, and throughout the century following. We hear of this depopulation first in the Isle of Wight, where it affected the national defence and therefore engaged the attention of the State. Two Acts were passed in 1488-9, cap. 16 and cap. 19 of 4 Henry VII. The first declares that “it is for the security of the king and realm that the Isle of Wight should be well inhabited, for defence against our ancient enemies of France; the which isle is late decayed of people, by reason that many towns and villages have been let down, and the fields dyked and made pastures for beasts and cattle.” The second relates that
“Great inconveniences daily doth increase by desolation and pulling down and wilful waste of houses and towns, and laying to pasture lands which customably have been used in tilth, whereby idleness, ground and beginning of all mischiefs, daily do increase; for where in some towns two hundred persons were occupied and lived by their lawful labours, now be there occupied two or three herdsmen, and the residue fall into idleness.” The remedy enacted is that no one shall take a farm in the Isle of Wight which shall exceed ten marks, and that owners shall maintain, upon their estates, houses and buildings necessary for tillage.
An instance of the same depopulation is given by Dugdale in Warwickshire: seven hundred acres of arable land turned to pasture, and eighty persons thrown out of employment causing the destruction of sixteen messuages and seven cottages. An instance of the same kind has already been quoted from the neighbourhood of Cambridge as early as 1414; but it is not until the settlement of the dynastic quarrels and jealousies, partly on the victories of Edward IV. at Barnet and Tewkesbury in 1471, and completely after the victory of Henry Tudor at Bosworth in 1485, that agrarian troubles became general. Then began the famous enclosures—enclosures both of the “wastes” of the manors, and of the open cultivated fields of the manors in which all the orders of villagers had their share of tenancy.
A few years after, in 1495, the number of vagabonds and beggars had so increased, of course in consequence of the enclosures, that a new Act was required, cap. 2 of the 11th of Henry VII. “Considering the great charges that should grow for bringing vagabonds to the gaols according to the statute of 7 Richard II., cap. 5, and the long abiding of them therein, whereby it is likely many of them would lose their lives:” therefore to put them in the stocks for three days and three nights upon bread and water, and after that to set them at large and command them to avoid the town, and if a vagabond be taken again in the same town or township, then the stocks for four days, with like diet. The deserving poor, however, were to be dealt with otherwise, but in an equally futile manner. In 1503-4, by the 19th of Henry VII. cap. 12, the period in the stocks was reduced to one day and one night (bread and water as before), probably in order that all vagabonds might have their turn.
The most correct picture of the state of England under Henry VII. and Henry VIII. is given by Sir Thomas More. The passages in his Utopia, relating to the state of England may be taken as veracious history. A discussion is supposed to arise at the table of Morton, archbishop of Canterbury, who was More’s early patron, and who died in 1500. “I durst boldly speak my mind before the Cardinal,” says the foreign observer of our manners and custom, Raphael Hythloday; and then follows an account of the state of England which lacks nothing in plainness of speech.
“But let us consider those things that chance daily before our eyes. First there is a great number of gentlemen, which cannot be content to live idle themselves, like drones, of that which other have laboured for: their tenants I mean, whom they poll and shave to the quick by raising their rents (for this only point of frugality do they use, men else through their lavish and prodigal spending able to bring themselves to very beggary)—these gentlemen, I say, do not only live in idleness themselves, but also carry about with them at their tails a great flock or train of idle and loitering serving-men, which never learned any craft whereby to get their living. These men, as soon as their master is dead, or be sick themselves, be incontinent thrust out of doors.... And husbandmen dare not set them a work, knowing well enough that he is nothing meet to do true and faithful service to a poor man with a spade and a mattock for small wages and hard fare, which being daintily and tenderly pampered up in idleness and pleasure, was wont with a sword and a buckler by his side to strut through the street with a bragging look, and to think himself too good to be any man’s mate.
Nay, by Saint Mary, Sir, (quoth the lawyer), not so. For this kind of men must we make most of. For in them, as men of stouter stomachs, bolder spirits, and manlier courages than handicraftsmen and ploughmen be, doth consist the whole power, strength and puissance of our army, when we must fight in battle.”
So much for the serving-men of the rich, apt to be discarded to swell the ranks of poverty and crime. But further:—
“There is another cause, which, as I suppose, is proper and peculiar to you Englishmen alone.—What is that? quoth the Cardinal.—Forsooth, my lord, quoth I, your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers and so wild that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves. They consume, destroy and devour whole fields, houses and cities. For look in what parts of the realm doth grow the finest and therefore dearest wool, these noblemen and gentlemen, yea and certain abbots, (holy men, no doubt), not contenting themselves with the yearly revenues and profits that were wont to grow to their forefathers and predecessors of their lands, nor being content that they live in rest and pleasure, nothing profiting yea much annoying the weal public leave no ground for tillage; they inclose all into pastures; they throw down houses; they pluck down towns and leave nothing standing, but only the church to be made a sheep-house. And as though you lost no small quantity of ground by forests, chases, lawns, and parks, these holy men turn all dwelling-places and all glebe-land into desolation and wilderness. Therefore the one covetous and insatiable cormorant and very plague of his native country may compass about and inclose many thousand acres of ground together within one pale or hedge; the husbandmen be thrust out of their own, or else either by cunning and fraud, or by violent oppression they be put besides it, or by wrongs and injuries they be so wearied that they be compelled to sell all. By one means, therefore, or by other, either by hook or crook, they must needs depart away, poor silly wretched souls, men, women, husbands, wives, fatherless children, widows, woeful mothers with their young babes, and their whole household small in substance and much in number as husbandry requireth many hands. Away they trudge, I say, out of their known and accustomed houses, finding no place to rest in. All their household stuff, which is very little worth, though it might well abide the sale, yet being suddenly thrust out, they be constrained to sell it for a thing of nought. And when they have wandered abroad till that be spent, what can they then else do but steal, and then justly, pardy! be hanged, or else go about a begging. And yet, then also they be cast in prison as vagabonds, because they go about and work not; whom no man will set a work, though they never so willingly profer themselves thereto.”
Thus were the gaols filled. The policy of Henry VIII. was to hang for petty theft—“twenty together upon one gallows.” And yet the lawyer, the defender of the king’s firm rule, “could not choose but greatly wonder and marvel, how and by what evil luck it should come to pass that thieves nevertheless were in every place so rife and rank.”
These descriptions of the state of England were written about 1517, and the recitals in various Acts of Henry VIII. bear them out. Thus, in 1514 and 1515 (6 Hen. VIII. cap. 5, and 7 Hen. VIII. cap. 1), the towns, villages and hamlets, and other habitations decayed in the Isle of Wight are to be re-edified and re-peopled. In 1533-4 (25 Hen. VIII. cap. 13), there is a more comprehensive Act against the aggrandisements of pasture-farmers, “by reason whereof a marvellous multitude of the people of this realm be not able to provide meat, drink and clothes necessary for themselves, their wives, and children, but be so discouraged with misery and poverty that they fall daily to theft, robbery, and other inconvenience, or pitifully die for hunger and cold.” Some greedy and covetous persons have as many as 24,000 sheep: no one to keep above 2,000 sheep under the penalty of 3s. 4d. for every sheep kept by him above that number. Ten years after comes the well-known Act relating to the decay of towns[797] (35 Hen. VIII. cap. 4).
Besides these recitals in Acts of Parliament, we have other glimpses of the causes of agrarian distress. Thus, in a letter of June 24, 1528, from Sir Edward Guildford to Wolsey: Romney Marsh is fallen into decay; there are many great farms and holdings in the hands of persons who neither reside on them, nor till, nor breed cattle, but use them for grazing, trusting to the Welsh store cattle[798].
In Becon’s Jewel of Joy, written in the reign of Edward VI. the same condition of things is described:
“How do the rich men, and specially such as be sheepmongers, oppress the king’s liege-people by devouring their common pastures with their sheep, so that the poor people are not able to keep a cow for the comfort of them and of their poor family, and are like to starve and perish for hunger, if there be not provision made shortly.... Rich men were never so much estranged from all pity and compassion toward the poor people as they be at this present time.... They not only link house to house, but when they have gotten many houses and tenements into their hands, yea whole townships, they suffer the houses to fall into utter ruin and decay, so that by this means whole towns are become desolate and like unto a wilderness, no man dwelling there except it be the shepherd and his dog.” The interlocutor in the dialogue answers: “Truth it is. For I myself know many towns and villages sore decayed; for whereas in times past there were in some town an hundred households, there remain not now thirty; in some fifty, there are not now ten; yea (which is more to be lamented) I know towns so wholly decayed that there is neither stick nor stone, as they say.... And the cause of all this wretchedness and beggary in the common weal is the greed of gentlemen which are sheepmongers and graziers[799].”
Again, in Bullein’s Dialogue of the Fever Pestilence (1664), the groom Roger who accompanies the citizen and his wife to the country, in the direction of Barnet, points out an estate on which the rents had been raised; the fields had been turned into large pastures, and all the houses pulled down save the manor house: “for the carles have forfeited their leases and are gone a-begging like villaines, and many of them are dead for hunger.”
Vagabonds, beggars, valiant beggars, sturdy beggars, and ruffelers continue to occupy the pages of the Statute Book for many years. In 1530-31 (a long and elaborate Act), and in 1535-6, they are to be repressed by the stocks, by whipping, and ear-cropping; “and if any ruffeler, sturdy vagabond, or valiant beggar, having the upper part of the right ear cut off as aforesaid, be apprehended wandering in idleness, and it be duly proved that he hath not applied to such labours as have been assigned to him, or be not in service with any master, that then he be committed to gaol until the next quarter sessions, and be there indicted and tried, and, if found guilty, he shall be adjudged to suffer death as a felon.” A still more distracted Act was made by the Lord Protector in 1547 (1 Ed. VI. cap. 3): if the vagabond continue idle and refuse to labour, or run away from work set him to perform, he is to be branded with the letter V, and be adjudged a slave for two years to any person who shall demand him, to be fed on bread and water and refuse-meat, and caused to work in such labour, “how vile soever it be, as he shall be put unto, by beating, chaining, or otherwise.” If he run away within the two years, he is to be branded in the cheek with the letter S, and adjudged a slave for life; and if he run away again he is to suffer death as a felon. Similar provisions are made for “slave-children;” while the usual exceptions are brought in for the impotent poor. The above statute remained in force for only two years, having been from the first a monstrous insult to the intelligence of the nation, and never applied. It was succeeded by two meek-spirited Acts, 3 and 4 Ed. VI. cap. 16, and 5 and 6 Ed. VI. cap. 2, in which the impotent poor are provided for:—collectors in church to “gently ask and demand alms for the poor.” By the 1st of Mary, cap. 13, the collections for the poor were made weekly. When Elizabeth came to the throne, greater pressure was put upon the well-to-do to support the poor: by the Act of 5 Eliz. cap. 3 (1562-3) those who obstinately refused voluntary alms might be assessed. A more important Act of Elizabeth was that of her 14th year (1572-3) cap. 5, “For the Punishment of Vagabonds and for Relief of the Poor and Impotent.” A vagabond, as before, is to be whipped, and burnt on the ear; for a second offence to suffer death as a felon “unless some honest person will take him into his service for two whole years;” and for a third offence to suffer death and loss of lands and goods, as a felon, without allowance of benefit of clergy or sanctuary. Aged and infirm poor, by the same Act, are to be cared for by “overseers of the poor” in every parish, and to have abiding places fixed for them. In 1575-6 (18th Eliz. cap. 3), the Act of 1572-3 was amended and explained: “collectors and governors of the poor” are to provide a stock of wool, hemp, iron etc. for the poor to work upon, and “houses of correction,” or Bridewells, are to be built-one, two or more in every county for valiant beggars or such other poor persons as refuse to work under the overseers or embezzle their work. The last and greatest poor-laws of Elizabeth’s reign were those of her 39th year (1597-8) caps. 3 and 4 and her 43rd year (1601) cap. 2. These remained the basis of the English poor-law down to a recent period. Overseers of the poor are appointed in every parish—the churchwardens ex officio and four others appointed by the justices in Easter week: the overseers to meet once a month in the parish church after divine service on the Sunday: contributions to be levied by the inhabitants of any parish among themselves, or the parish or hundred to be taxed by the justices, failing the contributions, or, if the hundred be unable, then the county to be rated “in aid of” the parishes.
These being the developments of the poor-law and the law against vagabonds to the end of the Tudor period, we may now return to our particular illustrations, and more especially to the illustrations from popular sickness.
Under the year 1537, one of the citizen chroniclers of London has an entry, “Began a collection for the poor, and a great number cured of many grievous diseases through the charity thereof.” Under 1540, he records that “the collection for the poor people ceased[800].” Preaching before Edward VI. on the fourth Sunday in Lent, 1550, Thomas Lever, Master of St John’s College, Cambridge, said: “O merciful Lord! what a number of poor, feeble, halt, blind, lame, sickly—yea with idle vagabonds and dissembling caitiffs mixed among them, lie and creep, begging in the miry streets of London and Westminster[801].” In May, 1552, Ridley wrote to Cecil that the citizens were willing to provide for the poor “both meat, drink, clothing and firing;” but they lacked lodging, and he wanted the king to give up Bridewell “to lodge Christ in,” or in other words, the poor “then lying abroad in the streets of London.”
Coming to the middle of Elizabeth’s reign, in the year 1579 we find, in an essay dedicated to the queen by Dr John Jones upon general topics of health and morals, an account of poverty and crime which reads little better than Sir Thomas More’s for 1517. In his 31st chapter on “The great cost that the commonwealth is at daily in relieving the poore: Of the number of them that are yeerly executed,” he speaks of the new poor-rate as “a greater tax than some subsidies,” and as a “larger collection than would maintain yeerly a good army;” and, of the felons as “a mightier company of miserable captives than would defend a large country, as in the records of the Clerks of the Peace and of the Assize may easily be seen.”
Even from the outset, the poor-rate does not appear to have met the difficulty:
“And yet housekeepers be but little less discharged, if ye note the continual resort of the needy, especially in the country and towns that be incorporate, the poor (as they say) not much the more aided, as by the moan they make to travellers may be easily gathered, nor theft and wickedness the less practised. For what misery it is to see condemned at one assize in a little shire thirty-nine, notwithstanding the clemency of the Judges, and three hundred and odd in one Diocese to do penance or fine for their loose living in a year. But these be the meanest sort only, for the others scape as though it were in them no offence. And in one gaol of prisoners three hundred and upwards at one time, whereof a great part perhaps may be through negligence of justice or cruelty, that otherwise might be punished answerably to the offences lawfully.”
He then refers to the Bridewells “so charitably and politicly appointed by the late Act of Parliament, although not yet in every shire erected.” The Act of Parliament was that of 1572 and the Bridewells were the houses of correction for vagrants, the first type of workhouses, and so named after the Bridewell in Fleet Street, which was given by Edward VI. from being a royal residence to be a refuge of the poor. So far as fever was concerned, it mattered little whether the Bridewell were a poor-house or a prison, for in later times gaol fever and workhouse fever were both synonyms for typhus.
It would not have been surprising to find this enormous extent of pauperism, vagrancy and crime attended by the distinctive morbus pauperum, typhus-fever. But we are here concerned only with the evidence, and not with antecedent probabilities. The records are, of course, very imperfect. The gaol-fevers of Cambridge, Oxford and Exeter attracted much notice because they touched the governing class. There may have been much more gaol-fever unrecorded. Hoker, in his account of the Exeter fever, does indeed say: “and this is commonly called the gaol sickness, and many die thereof;” and, in a petition to the Crown, March, 1579, the Queen’s Bench prison in Southwark is said to contain twice its complement, there is in it a disease called “sickness of the house,” and near a hundred had died of that sickness in the prison during the previous six years[802]. We shall not be able to give colour to our epidemiological history by other such instances from the Tudor period[803]; even for plague itself, the records of particular outbreaks are meagre and almost certainly only a part of the whole. The epidemics which shall occupy us for the rest of this chapter are those that had a general prevalence over the country on two or three occasions, the same general prevalence of fever that recurs at shorter intervals in the Stuart period and in the eighteenth century.
Hitherto we have attempted to work out the history of epidemics in Britain without reference to the epidemics in other countries, except in the case of the Black Death, which had remarkable antecedents in the remote East, and in the case of the English Sweat of 1528, which overran a great part of the Continent in 1529 and 1530. To have attempted a parallel record of epidemics abroad would have served inevitably to confuse the vision; for the annals of pestilence in all Europe would have been from year to year an unrelieved record of sickness and death, an unnatural continuance or sequence, from which the mind turns away. The several countries of Europe, and the several cities, had each their turn of plague; but they had each, also, their free intervals, sometimes very long intervals, as we have seen in the case of Aberdeen with no plague for nearly two generations in the sixteenth century. The epidemiography of each country should therefore be kept apart; and within a given country care should be taken to prevent the illusion of universal sickness, which is apt to be created in the bringing of scattered centres of disease (such as plague) together in the same page.
But there are instances of what are called pandemics, or universal epidemics, of sickness. The Black Death was one such, covering a period of perhaps four years in Europe, from 1347 to 1350, the curve of the disease in each locality lasting about six months. With the beginning of the modern period we come to more frequent pandemics, not of plague, but of minor or milder forms of pestilential infection. On the continent of Europe these were in part related to the state of war, which may be taken as beginning with the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII. of France in 1494. Typhus-fever, or war-fever with famine-fever, now begins to be a familiar form of sickness—in 1498, 1505, 1510, 1528, and so on. Other forms are putrid sore throat, dysentery, and varieties of fever included under influenza. The various forms were apt to occur together or in succession, so that epidemiography has a “Protean” character. This epidemic Proteus is at once a great difficulty and a most instructive fact. It opens up the very old doctrine of “epidemic constitutions” of the air, which to many moderns savours of unscientific vagueness; and it brings us face to face with degrees or kinds of infectiveness which are, in matter of fact, more wonderful or more incomprehensible than the deadlier infections, such as the plague or Asiatic cholera. The most familiar instance of the kind is influenza.