History of the English People, Volume IV

by John Richard Green

Time, and the natural developement of new branches of industry, were working quietly for the relief of the glutted labour market; but a vast mass of disorder still existed in England, which found a constant ground of resentment in the enclosures and evictions which accompanied the progress of agricultural change. It was on this host of "broken men" that every rebellion could count for support; their mere existence was an encouragement to civil war; while in peace their presence was felt in the insecurity of life and property, in bands of marauders which held whole counties in terror, and in "sturdy beggars" who stripped travellers on the road. Under Elizabeth as under her predecessors the terrible measures of repression, whose uselessness More had in vain pointed out, went pitilessly on. We find the magistrates of Somersetshire capturing a gang of a hundred at a stroke, hanging fifty at once on the gallows, and complaining bitterly to the Council of the necessity for waiting till the Assizes before they could enjoy the spectacle of the fifty others hanging beside them. But the Government were dealing with the difficulty in a wiser and more effectual way. The old powers to enforce labour on the idle and settlement on the vagrant class which had been given by statutes of Henry the Eighth were continued; and each town and parish was held responsible for the relief of its indigent and disabled poor, as well as for the employment of able-bodied mendicants. But a more efficient machinery was gradually devised for carrying out the relief and employment of the poor. Funds for this purpose had been provided by the collection of alms in church; but by an Act of 1562 the mayor of each town and the churchwardens of each country parish were directed to draw up lists of all inhabitants able to contribute to such a fund, and on a persistent refusal the justices in sessions were empowered to assess the offender at a fitting sum and to enforce its payment by imprisonment.

The principles embodied in these measures, that of local responsibility for local distress, and that of a distinction between the pauper and the vagabond, were more clearly defined in a statute of 1572. By this Act the justices in the country districts, and mayors and other officers in towns, were directed to register the impotent poor, to settle them in fitting habitations and to assess all inhabitants for their support. Overseers were appointed to enforce and superintend their labour, for which wool, hemp, flax, or other stuff was to be provided at the expense of the inhabitants; and houses of correction were established in every county for obstinate vagabonds or for paupers refusing to work at the overseer's bidding. A subsequent Act transferred to these overseers the collection of the poor rate, and powers were given to bind poor children as apprentices, to erect buildings for the improvident poor, and to force the parents and children of such paupers to maintain them. The well-known Act which matured and finally established this system, the 43rd of Elizabeth, remained the base of our system of pauper-administration until a time within the recollection of living men. Whatever flaws a later experience has found in these measures, their wise and humane character formed a striking contrast to the legislation which had degraded our statute-book from the date of the Statute of Labourers; and their efficacy at the time was proved by the cessation of the social danger against which they were intended to provide.

Growth of wealth.

Its cessation however was owing, not merely to law, but to the natural growth of wealth and industry throughout the country. A middle class of wealthier landowners and merchants was fast rising into importance. "The wealth of the meaner sort," wrote one to Cecil, "is the very fount of rebellion, the occasion of their indolence, of the contempt of the nobility, and of the hatred they have conceived against them." But Cecil and his mistress could watch the upgrowth of national wealth with cooler eyes. In the country its effect was to undo much of the evil which the diminution of small holdings had done. Whatever social embarrassment it might bring about, the revolution in agriculture which Latimer deplored undoubtedly favoured production. Not only was a larger capital brought to bear upon the land, but the mere change in the system of cultivation introduced a taste for new and better modes of farming; the breed of horses and of cattle was improved, and a far greater use made of manure and dressings. One acre under the new system produced, it was said, as much as two under the old. As a more careful and constant cultivation was introduced, a greater number of hands came to be required on every farm; and much of the surplus labour which had been flung off the land in the commencement of the new system was thus recalled to it.

Growth of manufactures.

A yet more efficient agency in absorbing the unemployed was found in the developement of manufactures. The linen trade was as yet of small value, and that of silk-weaving was only just introduced. But the woollen manufacture was fast becoming an important element in the national wealth. England no longer sent her fleeces to be woven in Flanders and to be dyed at Florence. The spinning of yarn, the weaving, fulling and dyeing of cloth, were spreading rapidly from the towns over the country-side. The worsted trade, of which Norwich was the centre, extended over the whole of the Eastern counties. Farmers' wives began everywhere to spin their wool from their own sheep's backs into a coarse "home-spun." The South and the West however still remained the great seats of industry and of wealth, for they were the homes of mining and manufacturing activity. The iron manufactures were limited to Kent and Sussex, though their prosperity in this quarter was already threatened by the growing scarcity of the wood which fed their furnaces, and by the exhaustion of the forests of the Weald. Cornwall was then, as now, the sole exporter of tin; and the exportation of its copper was just beginning. The broadcloths of the West claimed the palm among the woollen stuffs of England. The Cinque Ports held almost a monopoly of the commerce of the Channel. Every little harbour from the Foreland to the Land's End sent out its fleets of fishing boats, manned with bold seamen who were to furnish crews for Drake and the Buccaneers. Northern England still lagged far behind the rest of the realm in its industrial activity. But in the reign of Elizabeth the poverty and inaction to which it had been doomed for so many centuries began at last to be broken. We see the first sign of the revolution which has transferred English manufactures and English wealth to the north of the Mersey and of the Humber in the mention which now meets us of the friezes of Manchester, the coverlets of York, the cutlery of Sheffield, and the cloth-trade of Halifax.

Growth of commerce.

The growth however of English commerce far outstripped as yet that of its manufactures. We must not judge of it by any modern standard; for the whole population of the country can hardly have exceeded five or six millions, and the burthen of all the vessels engaged in ordinary commerce was estimated at little more than fifty thousand tons. The size of the vessels employed in it would nowadays seem insignificant; a modern collier brig is probably as large as the biggest merchant vessel which then sailed from the port of London. But it was under Elizabeth that English commerce began the rapid career of developement which has made us the carriers of the world. The foundation of the Royal Exchange at London by Sir Thomas Gresham in 1566 was a mark of the commercial progress of the time. By far the most important branch of our trade was the commerce with Flanders. Antwerp and Bruges were in fact the general marts of the world in the early part of the sixteenth century, and the annual export of English wool and drapery to their markets was estimated at a sum of more than two millions in value. But the religious troubles of the Netherlands were already scaring capital and industry from their older seats. As early as 1560 Philip's envoy reported to his master that "ten thousand of your Majesty's servants in the Low Countries are already in England with their preachers and ministers." Alva's severities soon raised the number of refugees to fifty thousand; and the outbreak of war which followed drove trade as well as traders from the Low Countries. It was with the ruin of Antwerp at the time of its siege and capture by the Duke of Parma that the commercial supremacy of our own capital was first established. A third of the merchants and manufacturers of the ruined city are said to have found a refuge on the banks of the Thames. The export trade to Flanders died away as London developed into the general mart of Europe, where the gold and sugar of the New World were found side by side with the cotton of India, the silks of the East, and the woollen stuffs of England itself.

New trade routes.

Not only was much of the world's older trade transferred by this change to English shores, but the burst of national vigour which characterized the time found new outlets for its activity. The fisheries grew more and more valuable. Those of the Channel and the German Ocean gave occupation to the ports which lined the coast from Yarmouth to Plymouth Haven; while Bristol and Chester were rivals in the fisheries of Ulster. The merchant-navy of England was fast widening its sphere of commerce. The Venetian carrying fleet still touched at Southampton; but as far back as the reign of Henry the Seventh a commercial treaty had been concluded with Florence, and the trade with the Mediterranean which began under Richard the Third constantly took a wider developement. The trade between England and the Baltic ports had hitherto been conducted by the Hanseatic merchants; but the extinction at this time of their London depot, the Steel Yard, was a sign that this trade too had now passed into English hands. The growth of Boston and Hull marked an increase of commercial intercourse with the Scandinavian states. The prosperity of Bristol, which depended in great measure on the trade with Ireland, was stimulated by the conquest and colonization of that island at the close of the Queen's reign and the beginning of her successor's. The dream of a northern passage to India opened up a trade with a land as yet unknown. Of three ships which sailed in the reign of Mary under Hugh Willoughby to discover this passage, two were found frozen with their crews and their hapless commander on the coast of Lapland; but the third, under Richard Chancellor, made its way safely to the White Sea and by the discovery of Archangel created the trade with Russia. A more lucrative traffic had already begun with the coast of Guinea, to whose gold dust and ivory the merchants of Southampton owed their wealth. The guilt of the Slave Trade which sprang out of it rests with John Hawkins. In 1562 he returned from the African coast with a cargo of negroes; and the arms, whose grant rewarded this achievement (a demi-moor, proper, bound with a cord), commemorated his priority in the transport of slaves to the labour-fields of the New World. But the New World was already furnishing more honest sources of wealth. The voyage of Sebastian Cabot from Bristol to the mainland of North America had called English vessels to the stormy ocean of the North. From the time of Henry the Eighth the number of English boats engaged on the cod-banks of Newfoundland steadily increased, and at the close of Elizabeth's reign the seamen of Biscay found English rivals in the whale-fishery of the Polar seas.