But chivalry’s day is over. One day soon moss will grow in the tilt yard. The days of the moneylender have arrived, and the days of the swaggering privateer; banker sits down with banker, and kings are their waiting boys.
~Thomas Cromwell in Bring Up the Bodies1
The end of serfdom and the establishment of the wool trade to the Low Countries in the early 15th century was followed by the episodic but ferocious civil War of the Roses. It was fought between noble houses for the throne of England during the latter half of the 15th century and greatly weakened all sides. Preceded by the peasant Rebellion of 1450,2 it had the effect of creating “a legitimacy crisis that left no kind of lordship, religious or secular, unchallenged and unchallengeable” by the lower classes.3
The upstart Henry Tudor (Henry VII) who defeated Richard III in 1485 and, so the story goes, picked up his crown from the dust of the battlefield, was thus able to seize the throne. Henry began to curb manifestations of aristocratic independence in favor of the central state. Following a Yorkist insurrection in 1487, he established the prerogative court of Star Chamber as an expeditious judicial weapon against the nobility to consolidate his rule. As would be expected, aristocrats were usually able to escape justice in the common courts.4 Both he and his second son, Henry VIII, ruthlessly disposed of other potential claimants to the throne, along with any other opposition.
Father and son were alarmed by the large and growing underclass of former peasants, now landless and workless, forced to become “beggers, robbers, vagabonds” due to enclosures. Neither agriculture nor artisan manufacture could possibly absorb them all. Especially under Henry VIII, but also Edward VI and Elizabeth, the most vicious legislation and bloody punishments were enacted to suppress them.5 Thousands of these unfortunates were whipped, branded or hung.6
The falloff of the old nobility opened up room for the gentry to advance.7 Henry VIII renewed the nobility by conferring titles on his supporters, but also sought to control and make use of the new money men. He made Thomas Cromwell, banker and lawyer, his chief minister in 1532. Cromwell favored Protestantism and “ran considerable political risks to make sure that the Bible in English translation was published and circulated in England.”8 He simultaneously reinforced the monarchy and Parliament’s role in government by having the House of Commons endorse Henry’s Reformation. This helped to tie the gentry more closely to the government, uniting the landed ruling class. Thus England was torn away from Rome, ending the outflow of wealth from the one to the other, and subordinating the church to the state, “parishes to squires.” Henry’s government spent much of the savings on shipbuilding and armaments.9
Cromwell ended the teaching of canon law at universities.10 By closing down the monasteries and seizing their lands, to the benefit of the royal treasury and the pauperization of their tenants,11 he attacked a key base of the old nobles’ patronage power and incomes. This one stroke cut in half the number of clerics who sat in the House of Lords.12 Henry VIII’s sale, or gifts, of a large number of estates from the confiscated monasteries increased the aristocracy’s wealth and numbers.13 The Reformation land settlement “created a vested interest in Protestantism” in the ruling class,14 that was to subsequently vex Queen Mary Tudor. Parliament also approved a revision in the order of succession from the Catholic Mary to Elizabeth, and, later, back again. Henry renewed the charter of the Merchant Adventurers company, preserving their monopoly among English merchants on woolen cloth exports to the Low Countries and northern Germany, thereby keeping them tied to the monarchy and the feudal order.
Competition in English trade from mainly German merchants of the Hanseatic League went back some three hundred years, but these foreigners were largely cut out early in Elizabeth’s long reign (1558-1603), helping to stabilize cloth exports.15 During the earlier short reign of Elizabeth’s underage half-brother Edward VI, energetic Protestantism and economic expansion in the realm had gone hand-in–hand. The first Protestant Book of Common Prayer in English was created by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer in 1549 under Edward.16 At the same time, systematic encouragement of manufacturing began.17 Commonwealthmen were financiers and politicians who supported developing domestic industry through what were called projects. They sought to cut the country’s reliance on expensive imports, provide employment to the numerous poor, and make improvements such as draining swamps. Successful projects provided their investors with substantial profits; thus their claim to do well by doing good.18
This policy was interrupted by the boy king’s death, and Mary Tudor’s ascension to the throne. When reinstated by Elizabeth’s government, the policy benefited from the religious wars on the Continent, which drove many Protestant artisans, especially from France and Holland, to seek refuge in England beginning in the 1560s. These foreigners, invited by town officials seeking to foster various kinds of products and processes, brought skills and new techniques with them. Some failed, but many fulfilled the Commonwealthmen’s hopes: increased domestic trade; greater money circulation; less reliance on imports; and in some cases even development of an export trade to the Continent19 (though textiles always remained by far the largest commodity shipped abroad before the Civil War.)20 It was not a linear process; the overall expansion brought plenty of worrying economic imbalances.21 But the overall result was “the integration of English towns into a single national unit, to an extent which was not paralleled on the Continent.”22 The consequent social dislocations, however, forced the government to intervene to regulate trade, and economic life more generally.
Rural domestic manufacture (the “putting-out” system) was primarily a feature of pastoral areas in England, where the principal activity was raising livestock. In arboreal areas, cereal farming was more labor intensive leaving little time for by-employment, making families mostly dependent on their crop. Only those with larger farms, more varied produce, capital for improvements and/or the ability to hire additional workers, were able to prosper. At the end of Elizabeth’s reign, anything less than 10-20 acres of arable land was “insufficient to provide subsistence for a family.”23 Those in pastoral areas who raised livestock, however, were able to diversify by weaving cloth on looms in their own homes and selling it to a local trader on a regular basis. Having a foot in each segment of the economy provided peasant workers with greater income security, enabling them to maintain themselves on smaller holdings.24 Other trades were pursued by such artisan-farmers as well.25 “‘Urban and rural interests were thus to a large extent identical.’”26 During the time of the early Stuarts, however, “a great deal of cloth production took place in centralised workshops in which a master weaver had three or more looms, sometimes as many as ten, and employed for wages half a dozen to a dozen men.”27 This augured the end of manufacturing in the home, turning independent weavers into wage workers.
Between 1560 and 1630, numerous manufactured products for home consumption came onto the domestic market in England. Often these originated as by-employment on farms, sometimes produced by women and children. They included the making of knit stockings, buttons, pins and nails, salt, starch, soap, knives and tools, tobacco pipes, pots and ovens, ribbons and lace, woven linens, as well as alum mining, brewing, and distilling of aqua vitae. New crops included rape, flax and hemp, woad, madder and weld (used in cloth dyeing), tobacco, flowers and vegetables. These new goods were in addition to the established industries of wool cloth; the mining of coal, iron and lead; and the raising of corn, dairy and meat. The growth and spread of these new products brought money to the lower classes, and capitalist relations “into dark, neglected corners of the kingdom.”28
Household production was
supported by a network of credit, consisting of small loans and debts raised by small producers among their neighbors and kinsmen in village and town. … Most of the consumer occupations, in short, were started on a shoe-string. … Each household enterprise subsisted on a precarious base…but it was the multitude of household undertakings that ensured the survival of the occupation. Only after many decades of domestic enterprise did larger, more capital-intensive undertakings emerge from among the more successful operators.29
As small, casually produced consumer goods proliferated in the countryside, industry was proceeding in the vicinity of some towns.
During the last sixty years of the sixteenth century the first paper and gunpowder mills, the first cannon foundries, the first alum and copperas [iron sulphate] factories, the first sugar refineries, and the first considerable saltpetre works were all introduced into the country from abroad. … The important thing about the “new” Elizabethan industries was that in all of them plant was set up involving investments far beyond the sums which groups of master-craftsmen could muster, even if these artisans were men of some small substance. While in London, Sheffield, or any provincial town, the typical workshop of the smith, the cutler, or the weaver could be equipped with its forge or grinding wheel or loom and other necessary tools for a few pounds, the establishments erected in these new industries cost hundreds, and in many cases thousands, of pounds. A further heavy outlay had to be made on materials and labour, because the process of production frequently required a long time, and it was many months before any return could be expected from sales.30
Mining, for example, was heavily and expensively modernized by ventilation tunnels and pumps, allowing for deeper digging and much greater output.
While the annual output of a coal mine before the middle of the sixteenth century had rarely exceeded a few hundred tons…collieries producing from 10,000 to 25,000 tons of coal…and employing scores and sometimes hundreds of miners, became common before 1640…31
In the years before the civil war, 450,000 tons of coal would be extracted annually in Newcastle alone.32
The slow growth of town manufacture served the interests of the ruling landowners, who were not infrequently investors, as well as the merchants who governed the larger towns on behalf of the aristocrats. But by the late Elizabethan age, with both foreign and domestic Catholic enemies subdued, the nascent manufacturing bourgeoisie no longer needed the protection of the crown. The micromanagement of feudal supervision inhibited the free range of business, so eventually “industry escaped from the restrictions of the towns into the countryside where it permeated agrarian relationships.”33 Taxes, living and production costs, and especially wages, were lower in more remote areas; early manufacturers could “escape” guild regulation and interfering town authorities by moving to the suburbs or small towns. This became particularly important as the textile export industry declined in the latter part of the century.34 That early manufacturers were able to do so presupposed an available pool of “free” labor (i.e., the landless poor).
Under Elizabeth, the Trained Bands, an annual mustering of able-bodied men to be drilled and instructed in each parish, were instituted with modern equipment, replacing the outmoded and degenerated local militia.35 In London and the towns, they were usually captained by members of the livery companies (guilds). The Bands’ primary purpose was to help protect the nation in the event of (Spanish) invasion, but they could also be used for domestic purposes if the need arose.36 For this reason, “meaner” men and servants were excluded except in time of war.37 Their officers were local notabls, either officeholders (such as the sheriff) or better-off men of the community, although the local gentleman was the usual titular leader. Caches of weapons were also established around the country, kept under lock and key, for use in an emergency.
Elizabeth’s Protestant reign was dogged by the Catholic minority that still existed in England, and the open hostility of its spiritual head the See of Rome. This forced her to tolerate a greater plurality in the Church than she liked, until the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 freed her from the need for Puritan political support.38 Within the same year she established the court of High Commission as a religious analogue to the Star Chamber. The Act of Uniformity was passed, mandating Sunday attendance at one’s local church on penalty of fines which the poor, at least, could not afford. This struck mainly at Catholic recusants, who refused on principle to attend the episcopal church, but also at Puritans, even if they were not separatists, as many objected attending the services of conservative ministers. The prerogative courts could act on their own or usurp the common courts’ decisions. This high-handed juridical power was directed by the state. Its vicious punishments, steep costs, and frequent excommunications for trivial offenses, which carried legal and economic consequences,39 would become regular features, and a major target for Puritan opponents into the 17th century.
The Elizabethan period also saw foreign trade dramatically expand to Russia, Morocco, Venice, Turkey, Persia, and the East Indies carried out by overlapping groups of monopoly merchants not associated with the Merchant Adventurers. The new trade was based on imports of silks and spices, currants and wines, while cloth exports to these areas initially remained negligible.40 (Only late in the century with the production of dyed cloths, and especially “New Draperies,” clothing made of lighter materials, did cloth and clothing exports to the Mediterranean become substantial.) Luxury imports had formerly been carried by Spanish, Portuguese or Dutch shipping, and reexported to England from those countries. But the intermittent disruptions to the English import trade from Continental ports by the vagaries of political diplomacy, and the lucrative returns to be had, impelled new groups of English merchants to go directly to the sources. This was facilitated by the long-term decline of Spain and Portugal as commercial powers, as well as the growing demand for imported items in England, and the highly profitable re-export of these specialized goods from London to other parts of Europe.41
The royal charters of the overseas trading groups, such as the Levant Company and the East India Company, granted their members monopolies in two ways. One granted the company the exclusive right to trade with a given country or area of the world. The other limited investors in the companies to “mere merchants,” i.e., those who did not pursue any other occupation as well. This was a key clause in every government charter sought by merchant partnerships. The exclusion was squarely aimed at the middling class of shopkeepers, small producers, domestic traders and ship captains, many of whom made good livings, had accumulated some capital, and wanted to share in the high profits afforded by overseas commerce. They were potentially in a position to compete with and undersell the monopoly merchants, thus eliminating the middlemen’s profits. The more successful members of this class would eventually become the future bourgeoisie in full-blown capitalist society, but at this point in time social differentiation was only beginning to occur.42 The hostility caused by the conflict of the economic interests of the wholesale monopoly magnates on the one hand, and of the artisans and retailers on the other, was the major fault line within the growing capitalist business class.43
Thus before the end of the 16th century, England was an economically capitalist country,44 despite the large majority of the population still engaged in agriculture.45 The early penetration of monetary trade in rural areas; spread of manufacture; early industrialization; growth of the domestic market; diversification of agriculture; and expansion of foreign trade; all backed by bourgeois and aristocratic finance and investment, contributed to, and were symptoms of, an elemental change at the base of early modern society.
1 Hilary Mantel, (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2012), 141-142
2 Rollison, “The Specter of the Commonalty,” 240-241
3 Rollison, “The Specter of the Commonalty,” 239-240
4 Anderson, Absolutist State, 119
5 Marx, Capital Vol. 1, 734-736; Hill, 1640, 29
6 Marx, Capital Vol. 1, 736 fn. 1
7 Christopher Hill, “The Social and Economic Consequences of the Henrician Reformation,” in Puritanism and Revolution (London: Pimlico, 1958, 2001), 32
8 Christopher Hill, “The New History of England,” New York Review of Books 25, no. 5 (April 6, 1978), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1978/apr/06/the-new-history-of-england/ Accessed September 15, 2013. Reprinted in The History Teacher 12, no. 1 (November 1978), http://www.jstor.org/stable/491350 Accessed 15 December 2016
9 Hill, Reformation, 35; “Henrician Reformation,” 30-31, 39.
10 Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1958, 1997), 256
11 Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978, 1988), 159; Hill, “Land in the English Revolution,” 27; Marx, Capital Vol. 1, 721, 722 fn. 1
12 Hill, Reformation, 47
13 Hill, “Land in the English Revolution,” 23-24; Anderson, Absolutist State, 124-125
14 Hill, “Henrician Reformation,” 41. “Charles II told the Pope in 1670 that many landowners were restrained from declaring themselves in favour of Catholicism solely by fears for their property.” 43
15 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 6-7, 56-58; Fisher, “Commercial Trends and Policy,” 97, 108-109
16 Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Mumpsimus, Sumpsimus,” London Review of Books 34, no. 10 (24 May 2012), https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n10/diarmaid-macculloch/mumpsimus-sumpsimus Accessed 28 March 2014
17 Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641, Abridged Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 175; Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects, 12-13. Government involvement in the promotion of industrial goods, notably iron, went back to Henry VIII. Thirsk, 24-26
18 Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects, 18. For the ideological background of the commonwealthmen see Rollison, “The Specter of the Commonalty,” 246-249
19 Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects, 14-22, 33, 43-44
20 Rosemary Weinstein, “London at the Outbreak of the Civil War,” in London and the Civil War, ed. Stephen Porter (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 33
21 Fisher, “Commercial Trends and Policy,” 110-112
22 Hill, Reformation, 25
23 Derek Hirst, The Representative of the People? Voters and Voting in England Under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 31
24 Joan Thirsk, “Seventeenth-Century Agriculture and Social Change,” in Land, Church, and the People, ed. Joan Thirsk (Reading, Berkshire: The British Agricultural History Society, 1970). Reprinted in Seventeenth Century England: Society in an Age of Revolution, ed. Paul S. Seaver (New York: New Viewpoints, 1976), 75-76, 80-81, 91-92, 97-98; Manning, English People, 229-230
25 Manning, 1649, 73
26 Manning, English People, 230
27 Manning, 1649, 75
28 Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects, 2-3, 6-7
29 Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects, 170-171, 172-173
30 J. U. Nef, “The Progress of Technology and the Growth of Large-Scale Industry in Great Britain, 1540-1640,” The Economic History Review 5, no. 1 (October 1934): 5-6, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2589915 Accessed 6 February 2017
31 Nef, “The Progress of Technology and the Growth of Large-Scale Industry in Great Britain,” 10-11
32 Barry Coward, “London and the English Civil War,” The Historian, no. 99 (Autumn 2008): 10, https://search.proquest.com/docview/274985556/fulltextPDF/B3512A7ED25C41C4PQ/2?accountid=35635 Accessed 30 August 2020
33 Brian Manning, “The Nobles, the People, and the Constitution,” Past & Present, no. 9 (April 1956): 49, http://www.jstor.org/stable/650042 Accessed 10 August 2015. Reprinted in Crisis In Europe 1560-1660, ed. Trevor Aston (New York: Anchor Books, 1967). Original includes “some preliminary matter” not reprinted in the book. Pearl, London and the Outbreak, 15-16; Hill, Reformation, 90
34 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 36-37
35 Lawson Chase Nagel, “The Militia of London, 1641-1649” (PhD diss., King’s College, London, September 1982), 9-10, https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/files/2927314/403590.pdf Accessed 4 November 2016
36 The first occasion in London was in 1601 against the rebel Earl of Essex. Nagel, “The Militia of London,” 15
37 Hill, World, 19; Reformation, 60
38 Leo F. Solt, “Revolutionary Calvinist Parties in England under Elizabeth I and Charles I,” Church History 27, no. 3 (September 1958): 236, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3161388 Accessed 16 June 2020
39 Hill, Society, 307, 310-311, 313-314, 321
40 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 11
41 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 5, 12; Anderson, Absolutist State, 72-73, 77. See also J. H. Elliott, “The Decline of Spain,” Past & Present, no. 20 (November 1961), https://www.jstor.org/stable/650136 Accessed 20 February 2021. Reprinted in Crisis In Europe 1560-1660, ed. Trevor Aston (New York: Anchor Books, 1967)
42 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 57, 83-84; Manning, Aristocrats, Plebeians, 8-9
43 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 684-685; Manning, Aristocrats, Plebeians, 66
44 Marx, Capital Vol. 1, 715-716; Capital Vol. 3, 332-333
45 Many modern-day historians cite the prevalence of those occupied in agriculture as proof of the feudal nature of English society in this early period. What matters is not the absolute numbers engaged in one form of work or another, but the form of social relations under which they labored.