CHRISTENDOM’S MATERIAL FOUNDATIONS
When officials in sixteenth-century Europe counted and taxed their population, they often did so by the ‘hearth’. The term conjures up a family huddled around an open fire, venting through a hole in the roof, dwelling in a couple of rooms, a foyer (where cooking, eating and domestic work took place) and space for sleeping. Storage was everything; human comfort and privacy slight. Prosperity was determined by the existence of a cellar, storeroom and barn. In Europe’s cold winter nights, animals were close by (inside the ‘long house’) for warmth.
That is a stereotype. In reality, Christendom’s material foundations were regionally diverse. Different styles of housing reflected local variations in building materials as well as social and cultural distinctions. Dwellings dictated the evolution of Europe’s demography. By the early sixteenth century one of the changes in their construction had become quite widespread in towns and more substantial rural dwellings: the fireplace, built into a side wall. Chimneys generated much more heat (thanks to improved draught for the fire), which they also largely wasted, but they guaranteed less smoke inside. Better still were closed stoves, built of clay and tiles. An Italian travelling in Poland in the early sixteenth century recounted how whole families slept, wrapped in furs, on benches around the stove. Descartes alluded to a famous insight which became the prelude to his search for a new method of organizing and validating human knowledge as taking place at night in a ‘stove’ (poêle, or heated inn) outside Ulm in 1619. A contemporary chronicler said that there were seventy-four in the palace at Ceský Krumlov. Their moulded contours and coloured lead-glazed surfaces introduced an additional visual aspect to the home. Tile craftsmen miniaturized figurative scriptural scenes from altars and books of hours and transformed them into fireside religion. Changes to the hearth implied transformations in how people lived – their space, privacy, clothing, beliefs and the proximity of rodents.
Wood, stone, brick – building materials vied with social status to determine housing construction. Construction was a motor of local economies – more important than textiles. It is difficult to evaluate how much it cost to put up a house, still less to maintain it. So much of the effort was human and paid for in kind. Even humble cottages were made of stone where it was plentiful (Cornwall, Brittany, Burgundy, the Paris basin). In Mediterranean regions (Catalonia, Languedoc, Provence) the extended family dwellings were often impressive in scale – up to 500 tons in stone-weight and three floors high. The ground floor was where grapes and olives were pressed and wine and oil were stored, with the family living above. The floor under the pantiles (widespread in the Mediterranean) stored grain. The emphasis was on ventilation, appropriate for a Mediterranean climate, with heating in winter provided by fires in braziers. These dwellings were built to last for 300 years or more with only minimal expenses in maintenance. But they cost up to fifteen times as much to build as a house made of wood. That was the preferred material in the towns and countryside in more heavily forested northern Europe. Even then, only in parts of Alpine Europe were houses built entirely from logs. Most were half-timbered – hewn wood forming the weight-bearing frame with wattle and daub in-fill. Wood was cheap, had good thermic properties and was easily replaced piecemeal. These dwellings ranged from the most common house in Poland – a wood frame on stone foundations, with a clay floor, a roof of thatch or shingle, and earth and straw built up around outside for insulation – to the more substantial half-timbered houses of central and northern Europe, with upper storeys for living and farm quarters. Brick was the preferred building material along the coasts and rivers of northern Europe and in the larger cities of the south. Brick-making, however, required transport, plant, skilled labour and investment. Limestone, essential for a durable mortar, was expensive. So, although brick was widely adopted for urban housing, where it was appropriate for stable tall structures and provided excellent insulation without great weight, one did not need to go far outside the town before encountering mixtures of brick and half-timbered buildings or wood.
Social status and function dictated the variety of habitations. Dwellings for day-labourers – cottagers and shack-dwellers – were little more than a refuge from the worst of the elements. Marginal landless tenants in Germany lived in hovels adjacent to the buildings of the farmer on whose land they squatted. Miners in the Auvergne made do with one-room huts. Agricultural day-labourers in Sicily put up with tofts. In Hungary, and on light, well-drained soil in central and eastern Europe, country folk could be found living half-underground in houses constructed of peat and grass turfs. At Pescara, an Adriatic port, about three quarters of its inhabitants (migrant workers) lived in tannery shacks according to an enquiry of 1564. For farming families, their houses were an essential part of their livelihood. Space for processing and storing grain, olives and grapes took precedence over human habitation. If the houses of day-labourers were no more than a refuge, those of more prosperous country people were, as the surviving inscriptions on wooden buildings from the period in central and Alpine Europe suggest, a status symbol as well as an investment. Surviving buildings reveal the intuitive understanding of materials by craftsmen and the elaborate improvisation that went into distributing the weight of upper storeys evenly. ‘Architects’ began to appear in sixteenth-century Italy and France. The humanist Charles Estienne’s La Maison rustique (1564) provided a pattern-book for the farmstead which French master craftsmen followed for almost two centuries. Europe’s demographic vitality sustained remarkable fixed capital investment in its housing stock.
Christendom’s material life is revealed in post-mortem inventories, conducted by auctioneers, notaries and rural scriveners who knew how to value objects at a glance. An inventory was a first move in inheritance from one generation to another, and it was worth undertaking only when there was something to inherit. But that included country people of modest means. Like wills, these documents were not limited to the wealthy. On the contrary, they were important to all those who wanted to secure the inheritance of infant children. In the fenland parish of Willingham in East Anglia, villagers carefully disposed of their cattle and cheese-making equipment. That of 1593 from William Pardye, a waterman, left his only son John two cows, ‘all my lodge as it standith . . . with the fodder that is upon the same lodge, my boat in the fen, my boots, and a pair of high shoes’. In Burgundy, the most common objects were the fireside trivets, stew-pots, cooking utensils and bread-boards. There was often a lockable coffer, a wooden bed and a mattress. Sleeping on straw done up in a sack and laid on the ground or on planks had begun to decline in the fifteenth century. Beds – wooden frames with leather or rope cross-straps – were a significant gift upon marriage. Four poster beds from this period were enormous pieces of furniture, ostentatious signs of family wealth. In his will (25 March 1616) Shakespeare left his wife Anne his ‘second best bed’. Mattresses (stuffed with feathers or wool – straw was a cheap substitute) could be elaborately covered with velvet, braids and silks. But poverty meant most people had little. In La Chanson à boire, the Dutch painter Adriaen Brouwer portrays the inside of a cottage, possibly on the dunes north of Antwerp. Four peasants sit on makeshift furniture (cut out of old barrels) around a table. Apart from the old clothes they are wearing, there is nothing other than a rag, a pitcher and a loaf of bread.
Europe’s settlement patterns were determined by a complex mix of historical and social geography. In the mind’s eye, it is the nucleated village which predominates, the settlement with its church surrounded by open fields and common pasture. That was typical of the plains and river basins, and also the dominant pattern around the shores of the Mediterranean and wherever Europe had recolonized land on its margins – on the Meseta in central Spain or on the Hungarian plain. More disparate settlement was the order of the day in Europe’s animal husbandry regions, on its heathlands and marshes, its forests, woodlands and mountain uplands. Across eastern and central Europe the settlement type was the ‘street village’ – straggling communities built along a road. Around the Atlantic shores of northern Europe the equivalent was the coastal village, clustering around a beach or loading station.
Such settlement patterns can be traced in detail through surviving estate maps. Surveying became widely diffused in this period. One of the earliest vernacular printed surveying manuals, the Geometria (Frankfurt, 1531) of Jacob Köbel, explained: ‘Take sixteen men, large and small’ as they come out of the church, and line them up, each with one foot along a rod. Marked at both ends, this created the surveyor’s 16-Schuh staff (the cousin of the English ‘rod, pole, or perch’, about 16.5 feet long) to measure fields. By the end of the sixteenth century, surveyors were expected to use geometry and a compass to triangulate surface areas that were irregular polygons. New instruments helped them: Philippe Danfrie’s graphomètre (advertised in a Paris publication of 1597) and ‘waywisers’ to measure distance. Even so, it was hard to create accurate maps. Paul Pfinzing’s surveying manual, published in Nuremberg in 1598, recommended cutting up pieces of cardboard to the right shapes and weighing them in order to arrive at a collective land area of an estate. His surviving estate maps reveal settlement and land use in remarkable detail. The one for his native village (Hennenfeld) from 1592, for example, enumerates the fields and plots of its seventy-nine inhabitants. Further south, Johann Rauch, a surveyor from the Vorarlberg, prepared a sequence of estate maps for the eastern shore of Lake Constance and Upper Swabia. On his plot of the village of Rickenbach, prepared in about 1628, each house is numbered and the owner’s name and the corresponding fields identified. In Bavaria, Peter Zweidler mapped the estates of the bishop of Bamberg at the end of the sixteenth century, detailing the roads and villages, fishponds and even the stones which marked the edges of the properties in question.
Europe’s patterns of settlement did not change dramatically in this period. The equivalents to the ‘lost villages’ of the Middle Ages (following the Black Death) were to be found in Mediterranean lands after 1600, especially in Spain where rural depopulation became serious in its more arid upland central regions. Count-Duke Olivares left money in his 1642 will for eight pious foundations to help repopulate such deserted communities. Those villages and hamlets which disappeared from Christendom after 1500 did so because of social engineering (emparkment by ambitious aristocrats), revenge (the erasure of the Waldensian communities in the Luberon mountains of Provence in 1545 or in Calabria in 1558), depredations (southern Slovakia and parts of Hungary in the wake of the Turkish offensive in the early sixteenth century) or as a result of climatic change. By contrast, as the marshes and fens of western and southern Europe were reclaimed, new communities sprang up. Fresh villages of miners, salt-workers, quarrymen and fishers took root. Virgin forest and untamed lands still lay to the north and east. The number of farms in Norway began to match those of c. 1300 – there were around 57,000 by 1665. In Norrland (North Sweden) and Savolax (East Finland) new colonization was noticeable by 1570 although there was still vast countryside where habitation was rare. Germans and Slavs colonized central eastern Europe. Further south, in Bohemia and Moravia, villages abandoned in the fifteenth century were resettled. The dominant rural reality was human replenishment.
NAMES ON A PAGE
Modern-style population censuses do not exist in Europe before the French Revolution. Instead, there are census-like documents, especially in Europe’s cities and more urbanized environments. Their purposes were not demographic. Europe’s rulers wanted to tax their populations, enlist them into military service or target new immigrants. Humanist wisdom favoured censuses, albeit for different reasons. Niccolò Machiavelli supported the Florentine property tax, introduced in 1427, because he felt it followed Roman precedents and prevented tyranny. His contemporary Francesco Guicciardini disliked property taxes as an attack upon the notables, but supported other progressive taxes which relied on censuses. The French humanist Jean Bodin advocated a census in his Six Books of the Republic (1576), seeing it as the basis for a tax system that would reflect the geometric proportions (‘harmonies’) in the world at large. In spite of this desire to measure, there was a profound underlying conviction that population had declined since Antiquity and was still diminishing. In the utopian writings of the period (Thomas More’s Utopia, 1516; Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, 1624; Tommaso Campanella’s La Città del Sole, ‘City of the Sun’, 1602), the state had a role in promoting the number of those who are born its citizens. ‘We must never believe that there are too many subjects, too many citizens,’ said Bodin, ‘seeing that there are no riches and no forces beyond people.’
With the advent of the tax-state, population enumeration became more frequent. Italian polities were precocious in this respect – Venice, Milan, Tuscany, Genoa, Rome, the kingdom of Naples and Sicily. In the southern Low Countries, taxation depended on the enumeration of hearths. In Languedoc, it was based on an evaluation of wealth which was then recorded in land and wealth surveys. Not before the early seventeenth century was there anything approaching a civil registration of the population. Then, following Pope Paul V’s Rituale Romanum (1614), various Italian dioceses started to keep annual congregational lists recording the age and family of each recipient of the Easter communion. To the north, the Lutheran clergy of Sweden were required from 1628 to keep annual registers, noting the literacy and religious instruction of their parishioners.
These documents are sometimes no more than names on pages. Fiscal records enumerate hearths; church documents list communicants. They require interpretation. Demography in this period is a black art. Everyone agrees that there was a ‘pronounced secular upswing’ in population, but when it began and when it ended is unclear. Very hesitant in the late fifteenth century, it was not significant in many places before 1520. In England, growth started to be registered only around 1510 and then nearly doubled over the next century. In the Low Countries, it was more precocious. In the northern provinces of the Netherlands, it continued towards 1650, but it faltered in the south.
In German lands increases appeared early on – more vigorous in the west than in the east. Whether they slowed down by 1618 is debatable, but they were certainly wiped out by the Thirty Years War. In France, the growth rhythms emerged strongly and evenly from 1500 to 1545, unsteadily from 1545 to 1560; renewed, and then uncertain to 1580. They then declined to coincide with the worst of the civil wars through to the end of the century. Population increase resumed unsteadily in the early seventeenth century but petered out from 1630 onwards, with different regions revealing contrasting trends. The plagues of 1628–32 and 1636–9 often wiped out what the previous generation had replenished. In parts of northern Italy, growth started before 1500 and in most places it continued through to the second half of the sixteenth century, and in some into the seventeenth century. Plagues in the first half of the seventeenth century (in Lombardy, those of 1628–32, 1635 and 1649), however, eliminated most of the increases of the previous century.
In the Spanish peninsula, Castile’s population increased through the sixteenth century, with perhaps the fastest growth occurring in the 1530s. Then, as in Italy and France, epidemic disease (and possibly dearth-related mortality) swept away the gains of a generation in a sequence of bad years. The epidemic of 1599–1600 was frightening in its intensity. Up to 750,000 Spaniards – a tenth of the population – probably fell victim to pestilence in the period from 1596 to 1614. Some places do not seem to have recovered their demographic buoyancy thereafter. Others did, only to find it succumbing to later attacks, especially in 1647 and 1650. A study that concentrates on the number of baptisms in sixty-four parishes from across Castile suggests steep declines in the interior of the peninsula (in Extremadura and Old Castile). Elsewhere, the expulsion of the Moriscos (converted Muslims) in 1609 had a catastrophic impact. Some 275,000 were expatriated, meaning Valencia lost a quarter of its population. The impact in Castile and Andalusia was less, but no doubt important, especially in towns. The real difficulty is to make sense of the general upswing of the sixteenth century in the context of the evidence for stagnation in the first half of the seventeenth century. The latter was not a general crisis on the scale of the Black Death. But it raises questions about the systemic weaknesses that underlay the growth in the century before.
Converting these trends into overall figures requires a deep breath. The numbers, tentative as they are, put the population growth of the ‘long sixteenth century’ into perspective. By some time towards 1600, Europe’s population was about 75–80 million. That is towards the lower end of the estimates for its population in the early fourteenth century on the eve of the Black Death. Europe replenished its countryside in the sixteenth century; it did not transform it. In 1340, Europe’s population might have been around 17 per cent of the world’s total (74 million out of 442 million). By 1650, it was no more than 15 per cent of that total. By 1600, China’s population, which probably grew at a faster rate than Europe’s in the sixteenth century, may have been between 175 and 200 million. Despite losses in the period to 1650, it remained much more than double that of Europe. Europe’s demographic advance in the ‘long sixteenth century’ was not dramatic in world terms. By modern standards, it was modest (1 per cent per annum) and uneven – sluggish in the Mediterranean, more dynamic on the northwestern flanks. France dominated Europe’s heartland, accounting for something like a quarter of Europe’s population: approaching 20 million.
This was the first age of parish registers. Some dioceses, especially in Italy and Spain, were precocious. The bishop of the diocese of Nantes enjoined his parish clergy to keep baptismal registers from 1406 and that is a region with some of the earliest surviving examples. The motives were religious, not demographic – to prevent ‘spiritual incest’ (that is, to stop people marrying into the families of their godparents). Gradually such local initiatives were enshrined in religious and state decrees. The final session of the Council of Trent (24 November 1563) pronounced that parish priests had to keep registers of births and marriages. Secular authorities, too, wanted the means to prove that people had been born, married and buried at a particular place, and on a particular date. In France, the Ordinance of Blois (1579) justified such record-keeping as a way to avoid fraud. The Protestant Reformation’s redrafting of boundaries between Church and state resulted in parochial registration in parts of Switzerland (from the later 1520s), England (from 1538) and elsewhere. In Zürich, parish registers were introduced in 1526 in order to control the spread of Anabaptism. Jean Calvin insisted upon the introduction of registers in Geneva in 1541 as part of his vision of a well-ordered polity.
Approximately 100,000 folios of parish registers survive from the sixteenth century just for one French department (Loire-Atlantique): thousands of ‘Jean’-s (one boy in four) and ‘Jeanne’-s (one girl in five). In theory, by using ‘family reconstitution’ (reconstructing the genealogy of a sufficient number of families over a long period of time) a demographic projection can be generated. In reality, the process is complicated, especially for the period before 1650. Early baptismal registers only irregularly recorded the births of those who died before baptism. In some parts of Europe (for instance, the Basque country and Estonia), the use of a patronym was by no means established. In Holland, those in the lower classes tended not to use their family names in baptismal records, though they might in others. Names were written as they sounded, and people were known by what others chose to call them. Above all, migration makes the problem of family reconstitution a jigsaw puzzle in which some of the vital pieces are missing, and some of the rest belong to another picture altogether.
Once reconstituted, however, the results are like listening through a stethoscope to a breathing organism, in which living is the systole and dying the diastole. The latter was dominated by numbing rates of perinatal and post-natal mortality. In most places, a quarter of the children born did not survive until their first birthday, and only a half lived to celebrate their tenth. The diary of Jean Le Coullon from the countryside around Metz tells an all too familiar story. He was from a family of thirteen children, ten of whom died before they were married. He himself married in January 1545, and his wife bore him his first son, Collignon, the following year, his second son two years later, his third son, Jean, in 1549, and his fourth in 1552. In 1553 his wife died of plague, by which time two children had already died. Jean remarried eleven months later and went on to have other children by his second marriage, but of all the nineteen children of his and his surrounding family mentioned in the diary, only six lived to be twenty years old. He recounts these deaths in his diary alongside details of the weather and the state of the crops. One might imagine that he did not care very much, were it not for the moment when his first namesake son, Jean, died in 1549. Then he writes: ‘It was of such great displeasure to me that I became inconsolable.’
Large surviving families were not common. Life expectancy at birth was low (say, twenty-five years) and, although it improved if you survived to adulthood, you would be lucky to see the age of fifty-five. Those surviving that long tended not to know how old they were. In 1566, Wiriot Guérin, local provost from the village of Gondreville on the river Moselle, declared that he was forty-four years of age. A decade later, he equally solemnly told the officials of the duke of Lorraine that he was ‘sixty years old or more’. Epidemics of killer disease – bubonic plague, but also typhus, scarlet fever and influenza – could wipe away whole families and have a serious impact on local communities. Our demographic stethoscope registers the spasm of the demographic organism as it tries to cope with death rates that suddenly spiral to 6–10 per cent and, on occasion, 30–40 per cent. An important part of the spasm was the primal, or rather social, urge to replenish. Baptismal rates stutter, then recover fast as the organism worked to restore equilibrium; mini baby-booms were a familiar response to demographic catastrophe. Marriage registers reflect the widows and widowers reconstituting their families and consolidating their inheritances.
How, then, was Europe’s population replenishment sustained? The longer series of surviving parish registers pick out cycles of local and regional growth, periodically arrested by a major mortality crisis, each crisis creating its own peaks and troughs in the family and age cohorts of the future. Most of all this lay outside people’s power to control. So the answer to this question lies not in those elements that prevented demographic growth but in how it was that Europe’s population managed to secure relatively high levels of fertility despite all the constraints that prevented it from doing so. Here is where the demographic evidence is (literally) pregnant with as many questions as answers. How many men and women chose not to get married at all remains unknown, though it may have been as high as 10–20 per cent of the population. For those who married, the pattern of marital fertility corresponded to the modern biological clock, highest for women aged between twenty and twenty-four, and declining thereafter, gently at first, but more rapidly the closer the mother reached forty, by which time most women had conceived for the last time in their lives. Illegitimacy rates, however, were at levels that modern advocates of family values could only dream of. Somewhere between 4 and 10 per cent of brides plighting their troth were already pregnant – but over half of them were in the early months and legitimating their condition. Illegitimate children were rarely more than 4 per cent of the total births, and often under 2 per cent. They were also a declining percentage. Was this a sign of the greater emphasis upon social and sexual discipline that resulted from the religious reformations of the sixteenth century? Perhaps, but illegitimacy rates tended to move in sequence with trends in nuptiality. In early-modern Europe, illegitimate births complemented births within marriage; they were not an alternative to them.
Human fertility across Europe varied widely. Before 1650 there is no evidence for widespread, artificial birth control. Religious strictures and social norms worked together to outlaw it. They did not, however, preclude couples deciding to stop having sex in order to avoid further conceptions, although that does not seem to have been widespread. So the explanation for Europe’s population growth is embedded in that complex social institution, marriage.
MARRIAGE AND FAMILY
The social foundation of Christendom rested on the family. What changed in the relationships between women and men in this period? The continuing subordination of women to men inside and outside marriage is no surprise. The more strident voices in favour of patriarchy that emerge in the wake of the religious changes of the Reformation are. They hint at a fear of possible change. Subordination could mean very different things, depending on the context. Arranged marriages were common but they still involved courtship and negotiation. Widows were not generally forced to remarry by their families and if they had an inheritance it gave them a certain power. Many offspring lived away from home after puberty so that parental authority was not an ongoing reality in their lives. Women’s educational opportunities were very restricted but they had employment possibilities and the Church tried to protect their freedom of conscience. The constraints on women’s behaviour were, above all, social. In the wake of the Reformation, Church and secular courts took an even closer interest in controlling sexual behaviour. Prenuptial pregnancy was widely regarded with fear precisely because it threatened to turn a patriarchal domestic world on its head. In Europe’s rural world especially, women’s lot was not a happy one. They could not hold offices. They generally could not be tenants of land without guardianship. And there was hideous routine male violence directed at women, documented through their attempts at legal redress, risking their honour and reputation, and the counter-charge of being a ‘shrew’.
What stands out most is the variety in Europe’s marriage patterns. There were late marriages and a significant number of celibate individuals (mainly servants) in the family reconstitutions for England and the northwestern urbanized regions from the second half of the sixteenth century onwards. Both help explain how parts of Europe weathered the economic adversity of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Late marriages were a form of natural contraception. The age of marriage followed the inverse of real wages; as the latter fell, the former rose. The pool of ‘life-cycle servants’ (sexually mature people, waiting their turn to be married) was a reservoir of demographic replenishment. Parts of urbanized Europe were demographically resilient in the seventeenth century because of this elasticity.
Beyond this more urbanized region, east of the Elbe and in Denmark for example, marriage choices were determined by the realities of serfdom where landlords could impose a marriage and refuse a household with a female head. In the Baltic countries, Hungary, southern France or central and southern Italy, different family structures reflected a mixture of pressures: the ways of exploiting the land, the relationship of population to resource, the customary laws of inheritance and modes of taxation. In southern Italy – and wherever cereal production was concentrated in the hands of large estates (latifundia) employing day-labourers – marriage patterns reflect a hard life where men did not last long. Marriage came early for both men and women – between sixteen and twenty years old for the latter. Celibacy was almost unheard of outside the monastery or convent. Women did not work outside their home and strongly held notions of family honour prevented its occurring. Widows remarried almost immediately and men queued to take the place of those who had died.
In Calabria, the Campagnia, Sicily and elsewhere, wherever farming was more mixed or specialized (vineyards, olive groves, fruit trees) and where there were small peasant proprietors, girls married later (between twenty-two and twenty-six years of age), and boys who did not want to stay on the farm were encouraged to move away. In Sardinia, marriages were very late and there were lots of live-in servants – male and female, milkmaids and farmhands. Sardinian children were expected to accumulate their own dowries before marriage by working outside the home, and Sardinian women had a share in the paternal estate. In Umbria, Tuscany and the Romagna, and especially in those regions which practised share-cropping (sharing the farming risk between a farmer and a proprietor), day-labourers lived in nuclear families alongside peasant proprietors whose households included several generations of their own family as well as share-croppers and day-labourers. Where Roman law required the nomination of a single heir, the father generally chose his eldest son, but it could also be the first son to marry. Upon marriage, he handed over control of the farm to the heir and became what in Elizabethan England was known as a ‘sojourner’ in his own home, with arrangements already in hand for the elderly parents to be looked after in their declining years. Family complexity was a function of status. Families with wealth and notability had extended possessions and interests whose preservation and enhancement by marriage and inheritance led to complex domestic and family arrangements. Family formation was an individual and collective way of trying to secure the best conditions of living in a world where recurrent economic and demographic crisis threatened the survival of the whole family unit, and there was no one recipe for all.
Custom played a large part in who inherited what. Negotiation determined the levels of dowries for women and the marriage portions for men. Even more so, customary law dictated what was supposed to happen to a succession after death. When people attended seigneurial courts, notaries reminded them of what the customary law allowed. But there was a bewildering array of customary laws in northern Europe and, as jurists set about ‘codifying’ them in the sixteenth century, they became perplexed by the discrepancies they uncovered. In southern France, northeastern Spain and the hereditary domains of the Holy Roman Emperor, Roman law determined successions. The result favoured the pater familias, who could decide how to order the succession of his property and could hand it on to whomsoever he chose, using preferential legacies and donations to favour a particular individual. Children could choose to stay at home, in which case they retained their interest in the succession. If they chose to leave, however, they had the right to a dowry, but nothing more, and they were cut out of the inheritance. In Baltic lands and the British Isles common law also favoured male primogeniture (inheritance by the eldest son). Elsewhere – in Spain, Italy, northern France and the Low Countries – the customary law was more careful to protect the rights of all the heirs in a succession. It dictated ‘partible inheritance’. So, for example, in Normandy and western France, even individuals who had received property in the form of a dowry were obliged to return it to the family estate when the parents died so that it could all be collectively redistributed on an equal basis around the heirs. These patterns mattered, not least because a dowry created a ‘charge’ on a family – most often acquitted in this period in the form of a rent, thus expanding rural credit and debt arrangements.
Partible inheritance offended jurists because it led to property subdivision and the weakening of patriarchal authority. A chorus of legal treatises demonstrated that, whatever customary law said, the experience of the Hebrews and the accumulated wisdom of the ancients favoured male primogeniture. In a dialogue, probably written in Italy in the early 1530s, the English humanist Thomas Starkey tried to represent both sides of the argument. It was cruel ‘utterly to exclude [younger sons] from all as though they had commit[ted] some great offence and crime against their parents’. It was against reason and natural equity and ‘seemeth to diminish the natural love betwixt them which nature hath so bounden together’. Yet partible inheritance was a slippery slope to the dissolution of wealth: ‘If the lands in every great family were distributed equally betwixt the brethren, in a small process of years the head families would decay and by little and little vanish away. And so the people should be without rulers and heads . . . you shall take away the foundation and ground of all our civility.’
So the great change in this period was the triumph of male primogeniture among Europe’s élites. With it, the science of genealogy enjoyed heightened legal and social respectability, as primogeniture became retrospectively validated by antiquarian researches into noble families and state-sponsored investigations into claims of nobility. Primogeniture became widespread in England among the gentry and merchant élites. The French nobility had long been constrained to practise male primogeniture, while commoners aspiring to join its ranks attempted to bypass customary law in order to concentrate their wealth and estates in the hands of the eldest son. The Italian nobilities practised functional unigeniture – either leaving their estates to a single heir or undivided to a collectivity of brothers, only one of whom would eventually marry. Only among German princes and the landed nobility of eastern Europe and Russia did partible inheritance survive, reflected most dramatically in the bewildering chequerboard of divided domains in Germany.
To what extent did customary law make a difference when it came to family formation? Twenty per cent of all couples had no surviving children at all; a further 20 per cent would have only daughters. That constrained the degree of planning for the future. In any case, there were ways round the customary law and these were increasingly exploited in this period as families adapted the law to their own needs. The growing proportions of wealth in non-landed forms made inheritances more flexible. In two respects, laws of succession seem to have had an important impact, however, on family formation – thus affecting the way that different parts of Europe responded to demographic growth. By comparing two areas in Lower Saxony one can detect both of them. Around Calemberg, impartible inheritance was enforced by the customary seigneurial law and the state. The result was the maintenance and reinforcement of large rural holdings in the hands of wealthy farmers, often living in complex households with more than one generation under the same roof. To deal with the problem of those members of the family who cut loose, the farmers gave them dowries and marriage portions which were paid for by loans on the strength of their property. At the other end of the scale, there was a growth in the numbers of cottage labourers (called Brinkkötter in German lands because they lived on the brink, the common land outside the village), dependent upon others for work. By contrast, fifty miles to the south around Göttingen land tenure permitted partible inheritance. The result was a growing number of smallholders living in nuclear families, sometimes adapting the sheds and stalls attached to the family house as living accommodation. The result was property subdivision especially when sixteenth-century demographic growth turned into a question of economic survival for those who had inherited patches of land which gave them no margin to live on in hard times. Partially disinherited young people, longer periods of domestic service or increasing servitude, peasant debts, smaller property holdings, contested inheritances – these were what linked succession to the broader history of what was happening to Christendom.
THE RED HORSE, THE DARK HORSE AND THE PALE HORSE
In 1498 Albrecht Dürer produced fifteen graphic illustrations for an edition of the Book of Revelation. The apocalyptic vision of John had an undeniable fascination for Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Between 1498 and 1650, over 750 editions of the text or commentaries on it were published, many of them in cheap print formats. Of Dürer’s illustrations, none became more celebrated than that of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Where earlier illustrators had depicted them one by one, he presented them as a posse, riding across a brooding sky, slaying everything in their path, while the monster of hell below devoured the rich and powerful. In the Book of Revelation, the second horseman rides a red horse representing war. The third horseman rides a dark horse, the herald of famine, while the fourth is mounted on a pale horse, the omen of disease and death.
The impact of war is difficult to measure but it was more prominent in the century and a half to 1650. The size of Europe’s armies changed and warfare became more attritional. The Spanish siege and capture of Maastricht in 1579 resulted in a third of the city’s inhabitants losing their life. The population of La Rochelle was reduced from 27,000 to a mere 5,000 as a result of the famine and disease of fourteen months of siege in 1627–8. When Magdeburg fell to imperial troops, perhaps as many as 25,000 people (85 per cent of the population) perished amid the flames of the burning city. The cumulative military casualties from the Thirty Years War may have been in excess of 400,000 although, if we take disease into account, the losses may well have been four times that number. The impact of warfare on the local population was greater. Destruction of civilian livelihood to delay an enemy advance became an accepted military practice. Mercenary contingents in the Italian peninsula in the first half of the sixteenth century regularly included ‘devastators’, who not merely built fortifications but destroyed crops and uprooted vines and olive trees in order to cripple a region’s agriculture for years to come. Constable Anne de Montmorency employed just these tactics in Provence to delay the imperial invasion in 1536, as did the troops which invaded the duchy of Lorraine in the early 1630s and the Swedish forces in Bavaria in 1632 (and again in 1646). Unpaid and badly provisioned soldiers were especially dangerous to civilians, as those towns in the Netherlands occupied by mutinying troops during the Dutch Revolt experienced to their cost. In the engraving Peasant Sorrow (Boereverdriet) the Dutch artist David Vinckboons (1576–1632) depicted peasants brutally abused by soldiers. But he followed it up with another piece, showing peasants getting their own back on them. Armies on the move were held in real hatred and fear. Peasants outside Nuremberg massacred straggling Spanish and Italian contingents in the Bavarian army in 1622; stray Swedish units were slaughtered after their defeat at Bamberg in 1631.
Fleeing to the relative protection of a fortified town meant the abandonment of farmsteads and the loss of the harvest. Such migration, however, increased the risk among ill-nourished people of spreading still further the epidemic disease of which armies were often the carriers. The documentary record is fragmentary but warfare probably reversed population growth in the Netherlands and France in the later sixteenth century. Post 1600, the civilian and military deaths, those directly and indirectly related to conflict, during the Civil Wars of the British Isles as well as the Thirty Years War in Germany, were (as a proportion of the overall population) worse than those of the First World War. In Russia, the disastrous Livonian War (1558–83) provoked internal political and financial collapse that led to the Time of Troubles (1598–1613). As tax burdens doubled, peasants fled to the black-soil forest-steppe, leaving (by some accounts) over half the farmsteads deserted. The resulting famine which gripped Muscovy between 1601 and 1603 was intensified by civil war, peasant uprisings and foreign interventions. By 1620, the depopulation in many regions exceeded the disastrous levels of the 1580s. The Russian heartland took longer to repopulate than Germany in the wake of the Thirty Years War. Among the Eurasian civilizations of this period, Europe was unique in the human cost of its conflicts.
Bubonic plague was still capable of wiping out Europe’s population in pandemics, Europe’s interlinked urban regions acting as its conductor. In the period from 1493 and 1649, Amsterdam witnessed twenty-four outbreaks, Leiden twenty-seven, Rotterdam twenty, Dordrecht eighteen. In fourteen English towns during a similar period (1485–1666), plague occurred one year in every sixteen and was a regular London visitor. Large conurbations were most at risk. Plague aetiology required, if rats were its carrier (as seems irrefutable), regular re-infection to take place, something that was sustained by the more marked degrees of European contact and mobility. By the first half of the seventeenth century, however, civil authorities implemented quarantines – not on the basis of agreed medical science but on pragmatic grounds that it controlled the spread of disease. Following the advice of physicians they monitored the causes of mortality, established arrangements for early warning of plague elsewhere and limited contact accordingly, building temporary immunity hospitals to control outbreaks when they occurred.
Plague was rightly feared. A high number of those infected died quickly from it. It was painful and showed no consideration for social class. The French surgeon Ambroise Paré described it as an enemy entering the ‘Fortress or Castle of Life’ and taking it by storm. There was no cure. The best that Paré could offer was a palliative antidote, a mixture of treacle and mithridatum (an old ‘sovereign’ remedy) along with a cream to ‘draw’ the poison out of the body. That did not stop medical practitioners from rivalling one another with explanations, the favoured being ‘miasma’, a corruption in the air. The best antidote was flight – which, of course, further spread the disease.
Plague was joined by other contagious infections (such as smallpox, typhus and influenza), reinforcing the perception of the increasing interdependence of one region with another. Outbreaks of typhus, for example, may have claimed a million Russian peasant lives in the period from 1580 to 1620. It was called ‘typhus’ by physicians from the migraine ‘stupor’ that often accompanied it. No one could remember it appearing much before the last campaign against the Moors in Granada in 1489–92. More commonly it was known as ‘camp-fever’ because of its prevalence in armies. It afflicted the military forces in the Italian Wars and decimated the armies of both Christendom and the Ottomans fighting in Hungary at the end of the sixteenth century. The troops of Count Mansfeld which fled from the battle of the White Mountain (1620) to the Lower Palatine, and then to Alsace and the Netherlands (1621), carried typhus with them; 4,000 died of the disease in Strasbourg alone as a result. French troops returning from the Mantuan campaign in 1629–30 infected over a million people in southern France.
Europe’s soldiers also spread syphilis. Its first major outbreak had occurred in the French armies invading Italy in 1494, who called it the ‘Neapolitan disease’. Elsewhere in Europe it became known as the ‘French (or German, or Polish, or Spanish) Pox’. In 1527 a physician in Rouen, Jacques de Béthencourt, proposed an alternative to the pejorative Morbus Gallicus. He suggested ‘Malady of Venus’ (Morbus Venereus) and three years later, a Venetian medical practitioner in Verona, Girolamo Fracastoro, wrote a Virgilian epic about a shepherd called ‘Syphilus’. With Columbus’s voyage to America in mind, he described how a flotilla reached a new land to the west where the explorers offended the gods by destroying exotic fauna. The natives explained that their ancestors had once ceased to worship the gods and been punished for it with a disease. The shepherd Syphilus was the first to be afflicted. The story perpetuated the myth that syphilis had originated in America. It was a disease ‘by Traffic brought’ (as Nahum Tate’s verse translation of Fracastoro put it), a reminder that international commerce came with a cost.
Hunger was frequent and famine not unknown. Chronic food shortage – when foodstuffs became in short supply and impossibly dear – often occurred. In England, there were significant food scarcities in 1527–8, 1550–52, 1555–9 and 1596–8 (the ‘Great Hunger’). In Paris, there were periods of dearth in 1520–21, 1523, 1528–34, 1548, 1556 and 1560. The Mediterranean lands experienced widespread shortages in 1521–4; the Baltic and Poland in 1570 and 1588, and many parts of Europe in the 1590s. In Mediterranean lands after 1600, significant shortage of food occurred so regularly that it was no longer a subject of report. But did people die from famine? There is only a complicated and provisional answer to that question. Major infections did not need malnutrition in order to kill. But severe malnutrition reduced immunity and opened the door to illness. King James I’s physician, Théodore Turquet de Mayerne, advised the English Privy Council that it should control food supplies, since famine was ‘almost inevitable to breede the Plague’. In parts of northern England, there is evidence for the distinctive footprint of dearth-related mortality (a sudden crescendo in the late winter months) in surviving parish registers, especially in the 1590s and 1630s. That same marker has been found in parts of inland Castile, northern Italy, the Papal States and Naples in the 1590s. There are credible reports of itinerant people dying from hunger and cold in winter months following bad harvests, with particular years marked out as killers: 1635, 1649 and 1655. Such dearth-related mortality was not an age-old problem. It was a late sixteenth-century creation, a reflection of the razor-sharp impact of economic change in this period on the traditional patterns of resilience.
Food shortage was a localized problem. Grain markets, especially in the rural world, remained autonomous, prices in them moving independently of one another. In major cities, conscious of the anger that high prices generated (magistrates feared grain riots, by all accounts significant occurrences), there were determined efforts to smooth out high prices by creating municipal granaries. Cities on the Mediterranean littoral stockpiled Polish rye, supplied by Dutch merchants, who consolidated their hold on the long-distance bulk grain trade there from the 1590s. In Dutch towns public authorities almost never interfered in the grain trade, so conflicting were the interests of its traders and its magistrates. Not so elsewhere, where stricter controls upon the grain trade became a staple of mercantilist political economy. Overall, it is as though there were two different sorts of Europe emerging: one which could get by in periods of dearth, and one which could not. Both knew of the other’s existence, and their fates impacted on one another.
EUROPE’S REPLENISHMENT AND GLOBAL COOLING
Was there a pattern to crop failures? Europe’s weather system is complex and a minor change creates excessively cold springs and wet summers which damage crop yields. Paleoclimatologists have databases in which climate and environmental evidence at different dates from across Europe and the globe is collated. Europe already had climatologists in this period. David Fabricius kept a weather diary in Emden from 1585 to 1612, recording evidence for the large number of late frosts and cold summers in that period. The Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe left a detailed account from the island of Hven in the Danish Sound, confirming Fabricius’s account. Renward Cysat, a notable from Lucerne, summarized more detailed observations in monthly reckonings while also reporting on conversations with herdsmen whom he met when botanizing in the mountains. This ‘human archive’, when combined with the ‘natural archive’ (the changing dates of the wine harvest and opening of communal pastures; dendrochronological, palynological, glaciological and ice-core evidence) has enabled a tentative reconstruction of weather patterns and an impact analysis of weather events upon grain, dairy and wine production. It indicates that European (and global) climate changed quite rapidly, and with significant results at this time. There was a period of warming from the mid-fifteenth century through to around 1560. Thereafter, there was a period of notable weather events, typified by the early onset of winter, very wet winters, cold and wet springs, low temperatures in summer and excessive rainfall during the harvest months (July and August). Its severity is noticeable from around 1560 through to the 1640s.
The worst times were when cold springs and wet harvest months occurred in two successive years. These correlated with the years of highest food-grain prices – 1569–74, 1586–9, 1593–7, 1626–9 and 1647–9. In parts of Europe, climate change may well have lowered food production significantly. The impact of the ‘Little Ice Age’ culminated in the 1640s; 1641 was the third-coldest summer on record in Europe’s history. Scandinavia recorded its coldest winter in 1641–2. In the Alps, fields and houses disappeared as glaciers advanced; 1647–9 also witnessed serious climatic anomalies. On the other side of the world, prolonged cold and drought contributed to the demographic crisis of the mid-century and the rebellions that led to the fall of the Ming dynasty.
Explanations centre on very low solar activity (the lowest recorded level in two millennia) and major volcanic eruptions (twelve around the Pacific between 1638 and 1644, the highest number ever registered). Telescopes enabled observers to enumerate sunspots with unprecedented precision. A good number appeared between 1612 and 1614, but almost none in 1617 and 1618, and very few in 1625–6, and then again in 1637–9. Between 1642 and 1644, the astronomer Johannes Hevelius made daily drawings of the sun, recording the location of all spots. They were rare and, after 1645, they almost disappeared until the eighteenth century. The aurora borealis also vanished from the northern hemisphere’s skies. Equally, the known volcanic eruptions produced dust clouds which also served to cool the atmosphere and create unstable weather conditions around the world, including Europe. A Seville shopkeeper noted that, during the first half of 1649, ‘the sun did not shine once . . . and if it came out, it was pale and yellow, or else much too red, which caused greater fear’.
There were some summers that never came, and some exceptional weather events (hailstorms, summer snowfalls, long rainy spells) which contemporaries interpreted as the hand of God and possibly the work of witches. The Spanish agronomist Lope de Dexa advocated a government ministry of astrologers to predict bad weather. The changes were small by modern climate change standards – a fluctuation of not more than 2 per cent over annual mean temperatures and 10 per cent in overall rainfall. But they may have been a significant element in destabilizing farming routines, causing dearth and contributing to a sense of crisis. By 1650, Europe was more dependent on the bulk transportation of grain-stuffs than ever before to feed its urban populations. Europe’s communication systems informed the latter more about their vulnerability and amplified their anxiety.
It would be easier to explain the impact of food shortages if more was known about what people ate. In reality, the diet of all but the rich is largely a matter of inference from the records of what was purchased to feed those in institutional care – the sick in hospital or students, lodging in colleges. What mattered most was the grain to make bread. It was a staple to a monotonous degree, accompanying every meal as loaves, piecrusts, and starch in soups and gravies. It gave people the strength to work and it was the most calorific and least expensive foodstuff. Cereals produced six times more edible calories than milk, as well as more protein per hectare than grazing livestock. Christendom was defined by its dependence on wheat, and dry cultivation, less productive than the irrigation agricultures on which over 60 per cent of the world’s population relied by 1600.
For those on day-wages, bread cost them half what they earned. Wheat was the most prized for making bread and pasta. But it was expensive because it was a ‘winter corn’ (sown in the autumn and reaped the following summer) which drained good soils of their nutrients, and needed a fallow one year in three or four, or some form of marling or liming to enable poorer soils to yield a crop. For the mass of the population, wheat was grown for sale or mixed with rye to provide bread flour. Rye was more widespread than wheat, and the two were sometimes sown together since the rye might survive a cold, wet spring when the wheat did not. Harvested together, they provided a bread flour known as ‘maslin’ which was mostly rye with a little wheat added. Spelt, barley and oats were ‘summer corn’, sown in the spring and harvested that same year. Spelt was widely grown in Switzerland, the Tyrol and Germany where it tolerated short summers. Barley was ‘drinking corn’, widely used in northern Europe for making ale and beer, while oats served as provender for horses except in places such as Scotland and Scandinavia where it was also the human staple.
The Columbian Exchange introduced more calorific staples into the European diet, bolstering Europe’s demographic resilience. In the region around Valencia in southern Spain, rice became important (imported from North Africa), and this ‘marsh corn’ was increasingly part of the diet in parts of northern Italy and southern France. Maize (‘Indian corn’) was introduced from the Americas into the Spanish peninsula in the 1490s and increasingly grown in Mediterranean Europe. Fed to cattle initially, it could be turned into corn-bread, while in Italy it was refined into a ground meal (polenta). In the Cévennes, ground chestnuts furnished the ‘nut-bread’ of the poor. But the attitude to food remained conservative. Henry Best, a farmer from Elmswell in Yorkshire, recorded who ate what in his household during the year 1641: wheat for the family, maslin for the servants, and brown bread from rye, peas and barley for the workers on the farm.
Grain mattered because it could be stored for comparatively long periods of time. Most other foodstuffs were perishable. Despite the emphasis on food which could be stored, more vegetables appeared on people’s tables. Parsnips, carrots, cabbages and turnips either made their appearance for the first time, or did so in significant quantities in this period. Many of these were the result of cultural exchange with the Near East, a more significant influence on Europe’s diet than the New World. Pumpkins, melons, cucumbers and courgettes were also cultivated in Europe’s kitchen gardens for the first time. Lettuces and artichokes, grown for the tables of the rich in Rome, conquered France and spread to irrigated gardens around Valencia in Spain. Calabria and Catalonia served as greenhouses for new varieties of almond, fig, pear and damson trees. Dried pulses were a convenient way of overcoming seasonality, though they attracted hostility: ‘more meet for hogs and savage beasts to feed upon than mankind’ reported William Harrison in 1587. In southern Europe, however, haricots, an import from Peru, alleviated food shortages. Annibale Carracci’s painting of The Bean Eater (Il Mangiafagioli), c. 1580, depicts a rural labourer tucking into his bowl of haricots accompanied by onions, a bread roll, vegetables and a glass of wine. Fermenting, for instance cabbage, in salt water was another method of preserving vegetables, much developed in Germany and eastern Europe. When stored in butter-barrels or stone-crocks, sealed with wet muslin and a weighted wooden top, they offered an additional staple through the winter months. Butter, cheese and olive oil could easily be stored.
Meat and fish, however, remained more local and seasonal. Freshly slaughtered meat was mostly to be found on Europe’s tables in spring and autumn, although a proportion was also preserved by pickling in brine, or salting, smoking, spicing and drying it. The resulting raw or cooked sausages had a rich variety of shapes, colours, flavours and names. For François Rabelais, they were the height of cuisine and a subject of ribald fun. Fish became second only to grain as a commercialized foodstuff. Fishing was a great source of employment and an even more important ‘ghost acreage’ of food reserve. White cod (from the Atlantic) was salted. Red cod (from the Mediterranean and Atlantic) was smoked. Herring was fished from the northern Atlantic. Eels, caught around the sluices of the newly drained marshland in the Netherlands, were sold in bulk in the fish markets of Amsterdam and London. If, as seems possible, global cooling brought the migratory shoals of herring southward, it made their commercial fishing that much easier. Europe’s northwest Atlantic marine calorific reservoir was more important than its American ‘ghost acreage’ in the years up to 1650 in making up the dietary shortfalls that resulted from population growth and climatic uncertainty.
There are no entirely convincing and comprehensive explanations for the patterns of human mortality in this period. The devastating impact of demographic crises is evident. But no one can be sure about the relationship between epidemic disease and under-nourishment even though there clearly was one. That is because there is insufficient evidence about people’s diets and about the changing relationship of man to microbe, flea and rat. There is no explanation for why some communities escaped major demographic crises from one generation to another, whereas others did not. Much must have depended on the most vulnerable members of communities, those least able to feed and fend for themselves, or those who were the most mobile and the most likely to carry infectious disease from one locality to another. The aetiology of epidemic disease remains uncertain, and the impact of harvest failure was localized. Europe’s demographic growth was vulnerable to the inveterate forces of nature, but also to those of human conflict. In southern and central Europe, the gains of the sixteenth century were mostly wiped out in the first half of the seventeenth. The resilience in other regions, especially the economically advanced northwestern Europe, accentuated the regional divergences which pulled Christendom in different directions.