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.