More people lived in cities in 1650 than was the case in 1500. This period saw the emergence of a more populous North Italian–Rhineland corridor, an axis of economic strength. The prosperity of that region was as much based on transformations in its rural hinterland as in its urban centres. Globally, such a development was not unique. In China, regions of advanced economic development and urbanization existed before they emerged in Europe. By 1650, the dynamism of Europe’s urbanized corridor became more focused in northwestern Europe, in the lower Rhineland and across the North Sea in eastern England. By some estimates, the proportion of Europe’s population living in towns had surpassed that of China by 1650. The consolidation of this more densely populated and urbanized economic region and other economic changes weakened the social cohesion which underpinned Christendom. This social cohesion is the subject of this chapter.
URBAN SPACES
Towns made an impact on contemporaries in various ways: as military strongholds, places where justice was administered, centres of commerce, locations for élites and points for cultural exchange. They were competitive nodes of concentrated presence that made their mark on the world around them. Their impact was ambiguous and paradoxical. On the one hand, they had an energizing effect upon their environment. On the other, they grew at others’ expense. They increased inequality and risk.
That Europe’s urban space was seen in a new light is evident from the emerging genre of ‘chorography’ or imagined representations of the city. Oblique views conveying an urban ‘presence’ to the contemporary eye were initially preferable to city plans. Sebastian Münster’s Cosmography (1544) and Guillaume Guéroult’s Epitome of Europe’s Chorography (1552–3) contain townscapes depicting public buildings, fortifications and ecclesiastical foundations. The viewer could visualize their surroundings. It was like taking a visitor up the tallest building in a city and looking Chorography over it – which is what the Florentine humanist Anton Francesco Doni recommended as the best way of introducing people to his own town. Cityscapes were part of the art of travel to which humanists initiated their readers.
In 1567, Lodovico Guicciardini published his influential Description of All the Low Countries – the inhabitant of one highly urbanized environment commenting on another. His work was a masterpiece of sixteenth-century urban geography, illustrated by chorographic engravings. Five years later the first volume of The Cities of the World (Civitates Orbis Terrarum) appeared, envisaged as an accompanying volume to the world atlas of Ortelius. The initial volume of 132 town engravings was followed by five further volumes, published mainly in Cologne, so that by 1619 the eventual collection totalled some 546 magnificent bird’s eye views and accompanying text. Many of them were drawn by the project’s creator, the engraver Frans Hogenberg. It became a status symbol for a city to have its plan in the collection. The views were enlivened with human figures and heraldic crests around the margins. These served a double purpose: besides illustrating customs, these figures were believed in Europe to dissuade the Turks from using the engravings, on the grounds that their religion forbade them from studying portrayals of human beings.
The growth in urban space was not, however, uniform. In the Italian peninsula, Milan was a big city of 91,000 inhabitants in 1500, but it shrank by a third after a terrible demographic crisis in 1542, recovering slowly to its former size only by the end of the century. Florence did not match until 1650 the population of 70,000 inhabitants that it enjoyed in 1520. Bologna (55,000 inhabitants in 1493, 36,000 in 1597), Brescia (48,500 inhabitants in 1493, under 37,000 in 1597) and Cremona (40,000 in 1502 and again in 1600) found it hard to compete with smaller neighbours (Padua, Verona, Vicenza) who expanded faster. By contrast, Venice grew by 50 per cent (105,000 in 1509, 168,000 in 1563, 150,000 in 1600). Naples almost doubled in size to rival Paris as Europe’s largest city (150,000 in 1500, 275,000 in 1599). Sicily’s towns (Palermo and Messina) grew at an extraordinary rate. Rome was a modest regional capital of 55,000 inhabitants on the eve of its sack by imperial forces in 1527 but by 1607 it had a population of 109,000.
North of the Alps, the picture was similarly varied. Paris was Christendom’s great metropolis, the only place with over 200,000 inhabitants in 1500. It continued to expand, perhaps reaching 300,000 by 1560. Thereafter, the impact of the French civil wars undermined the fortunes of the great city, its growth resuming only after 1600. London, by contrast, grew no matter what demographic misfortune (the Great Plague of 1665 lies ahead) befell it, a key element in England’s political economy. Lyon may have doubled its population in the years from 1500 to 1560 (40,000 to 80,000), but it struggled to maintain that size thereafter. That was the pattern for other French cities (such as Rouen and Toulouse), although Marseille managed to triple its inhabitants between 1520 and 1600 (15,000 to 45,000). In the Low Countries, the great conurbations (Bruges, Ghent and Brussels) struggled to grow against smaller locations (Liège, Namur and Amsterdam). Antwerp, by contrast, tripled in size between 1490 and 1568, by which date it had over 100,000 inhabitants. But the conflicts of the Dutch Revolt – it was ransacked by mutinying troops (1576, 1583) and besieged (1584) – halved its population, and it only slowly recovered.
Some larger cities in central Europe (Cologne, Lübeck) barely held their own while others (Gdansk, Hamburg) grew. Nuremberg became the largest city in Christendom east of the Rhine. In the Spanish peninsula, Lisbon and Seville more than doubled their populations. Other Spanish cities saw significant growth (Valencia, Toledo, Granada). Madrid expanded from being a small town of 5,000 inhabitants in 1500 to over 35,000 by 1600. The population of cities with at least 10,000 inhabitants has become a classic way of representing how the overall balance of urban Europe tilted from the Mediterranean to the northwest.
Yet a traveller was five times as likely to spend the night in a small town (under 10,000) than in a metropolis. England had over 700 small towns, France over 2,000, the Holy Roman Empire over 3,000 and Poland over 800. The densities varied widely too. In southern and western Germany the average was one every 2.5 square miles. To the cosmographer Sebastian Münster, the towns in the Vosges foothills were so close ‘that you could fire a harquebus from one to the next’. Functional diversity and urban aspirations defined small towns better than population density. In those of Sweden and Finland, there was generally a shoemaker, tailor, blacksmith and carpenter. Urban pretension was reflected in infrastructure – walls, gates, a town hall, fountains and marketplace.
New towns flourished as nobles maximized the value of their estates and princes fostered urban investment; 270 new baronial burghs (incorporated towns) were founded in Scotland after 1500. In Lithuania, almost 400 seigneurial or ‘private’ towns were created in the late sixteenth century to capitalize on the growth of commercialized agriculture around the Baltic. The Vasa dynasty in Sweden granted thirty new charters for towns in the century after 1580 as part of its colonization of space. Meanwhile, the newly chartered towns in Ireland – Philipstown (Daingean) and Maryborough (Portlaoise) for example – became flagships for English plantation under the Tudor and Stuart monarchies. In Spain, there was a new incorporated town almost every year as local communities purchased a privilege that a cash-strapped monarchy was only too willing to sell.
Small towns depended for their viability on the economic landscape around them, and they did not all survive. Ambleside and Shap in the English Lake District, for example, could not sustain their town markets and sunk back to being villages. About three quarters of the new burghs in Scotland and new chartered towns in Norway ended up as ‘shadow towns’, villages in all but name. Hondschoote, a small commune to the east of Dunkirk, blossomed suddenly into a town with more than 15,000 inhabitants, thanks to the manufacture of lighter cloth made of wool mixed with linen. With the conflict in Flanders during the second half of the sixteenth century, however, its prosperity vanished. Oudenaarde, to the south of Ghent, doubled its population in the first half of the sixteenth century. By 1600, however, it had shrunk to under half its earlier size as the population emigrated en masse during the troubles. Urbanization was not a measure of ever-continuing European growth.
The economic relations between town and country acted as widening circles of influence around an urban nexus. Most intense was the space dominated by the weekly market, no more than a day’s journey away, where perishable products were sold in quantities; 75–90 per cent of local production was generally confined within this space. The monthly or quarterly fair represented a more extensive circle of influence. That was where grain and livestock were taken to market, often from places two or three days’ journey away. As with the inner zone, the scale depended upon the size of the city in question. The catchment area that supplied grain to Nuremberg was around 1,930 square miles, and its town council had its factors operating over a radius of 62 miles. That space corresponded to a definable economic region or ‘country’ and it was no coincidence that it also often mapped onto local judicial and administrative space. In economic terms, this region counted for the majority of the remaining 10–25 per cent of local production, the proportion being dictated by the marginal costs of bringing bulk goods to market. To carry the grain to the market of Valladolid in 1559 added 2 per cent to the price for every league (the distance traversed by a cart in an hour – less than four miles) that the sack travelled. That left the most extensive third sphere, represented by the annual market, in which wool, cloth and yarn were traded, often at distances exceeding 25 miles. These circles of influence were particularly significant in the case of large cities, which tended to asphyxiate the smaller communities around them. Rural protest might find an echo inside capital cities, but their patrician oligarchs deployed their authority to close off and patrol their walls and gates. The mutual suspicions between citizens and peasants were too great for them to make common cause for long.
MIGRATION AND MOBILITY
Population was mobile, especially in these zones of higher urban pressure. Hospital registers, apprenticeship indentures, ecclesiastical court books, probate inventories, army muster-rolls, student matriculations, registers of new townsmen and lists of ‘strangers’ reveal complex migration patterns. They were not new but their significance was greater. Demographic mobility explains how overseas empires were peopled. A quarter of a million migrants left Castile for the New World in the sixteenth century, the majority of the early settlers being young men.
Unlike those travelling to the New World, most migrants moved quite short distances, often proceeding as if by a ladder, step-by-step, from the countryside to the neighbouring small town, and then onwards to a larger metropolis. Their movements can occasionally be reconstructed. So, for example, the lives of 155 living-in servants in the parish of Romford, 14 miles east of London in the second half of 1562: most of them were from local families, but a proportion had come from much further afield. One rural farmhand came down from Cumbria at the age of twenty (he became a yeoman in nearby Hornchurch), while another female domestic had arrived aged fourteen from Kent (she later married a Romford tailor). Among the deponents before the Church court at Canterbury, less than 10 per cent declared themselves to be born and bred there. Just over 40 per cent were born elsewhere in Kent while a further 28.5 per cent were from outside the county. Outside urbanized zones such high levels of mobility become rarer. In the market town of Vézelise in Lorraine, half the spouses in a sample taken between 1578 and 1633 came from places that were over 6 miles distant from the town, and one in six of the brides would marry someone who had been born over 15 miles away.
Immigration into towns is easier to document than the countervailing streams of emigration. Yet wherever land was reclaimed there was population movement, drawing from towns and villages. It can be traced in the non-native nomenclatures in Finland and around the Baltic or in eastern Europe. The expansion of the coastal fishing industry of Norway would not have taken place without Scottish and Danish immigrants. Even in the wood-pasture regions in England, in the Forest of Arden or in the Shropshire village of Myddle (where a local antiquary from the seventeenth century recorded its population in detail) new people arrived, built a cottage, and made themselves a living. At the same time, there were temporary circular and seasonal migrations, essential to Europe’s economic fortunes. Each spring saw the arrival of cohorts of part-time labour from inland villages to the Atlantic ports to sail the boats fishing for cod. Almost 60 per cent of the crew on board vessels sailing out of Amsterdam in the seventeenth century originated from outside the Dutch Republic. Harvesting the grain on the plains would have been impossible without migrant labour. Mountain regions served as reservoirs of labour and skill, drawn to the plains to build the walls, clean the ditches, accompany the mule-trains, and serve in the armies. In some Swiss mountain villages there were almost no menfolk about in the summer months.
Migration was a determining element in urban demography, making up the demographic deficit created by high levels of urban mortality. That was a particularly European phenomenon – in the urban environments in China and Japan, mortality rates were not significantly different from those in the surrounding countryside, partly as a result of the greater attention to urban water supplies, sanitation and food contamination. In Europe, by contrast, inward migration replenished population loss from mortality crises. Even in ‘normal’ years, migrants were probably needed to make up a deficit in births among indigenous city populations. Urban notables rightly regarded their environment as dangerous, nauseous, even noxious – a corporate dung-heap. City legislation is full of references to insalubrity, especially (to quote from London’s) the ‘stinking ordure’, ‘putrid smells’, ‘stinking filth’ and ‘odious and infectious stench’. Medical opinion thought that a good smell could drive away a bad one and offered civet, musk and ambergris as antidotes to contagion.
Humanist-inspired magistrates proposed projects for the common good – public fountains of clean water from outside the city, dedicated sewers and publicly funded scavengers. The Paris city provost organized scavengers to sweep the streets and carry the night soil out beyond the city walls to Montfaucon. In Rome, Pope Clement VII appointed an Office of Rubbish but inhabitants refused to pay for it. The same impediment thwarted many efforts to bring fresh water into the cities. It was expensive to the civic purse; everyone recognized the necessity but no one wanted to foot the bill.
PLOUGH AND SPADE
Producing food from the land was hard work. It occupied the overwhelming majority of the population. Agricultural technologies were rudimentary, yields were low, and everything depended on the weather. Exploiting the land meant making a living without increasing the already high risks that it entailed. That resulted in an inveterate caution towards change as well as an ecological concern for what was sustainable in the longer term. Such caution was systemic – hard-wired into the fabric of the rural world through its communal agricultural practices and legal frameworks.
Looking down on the landscape of Europe from a satellite, one would see the great European plain, the champagne lands that stretch through Poland, northern Germany, southern Denmark and Sweden, across into northern France and into the English Midlands. The dominant image would be that of open country, broken up into large fields in which each farming community had plots. The principal colours in summer would have been yellow and brown, for over 90 per cent of the cultivatable surface was devoted to cereal production. The cultivation of grain took place in a system of crop rotation that avoided depleting the mineral content of the soil. In much of northern Europe this was based on three large fields (or multiples thereof). A peasant could reckon to spend at least twenty-five days a year preparing each furlong for the crops and a further three to five days on harvesting the same area.
Agrarian practices were maintained by village custom. There was plenty to discuss each year, from the dates for planting and harvesting to the maintenance of ploughs, the size of plots, the rights of gleaning or the numbers of animals that each community could pasture (‘fold’) on the fallow. Decisions were not lightly taken for they could lead to tensions – and rural economic life was as much directed towards mediating disputes as it was to managing ecological hazard. Getting along with people was vital since it determined the outcome of back-breaking work. Our knowledge about overall grain yields is partial, estimated and derived. Fallowing would take between a third and a half of the arable land out of cultivation each year. Harvesting was inefficient. Further losses occurred in threshing and storage. Once a farmer had put aside the seed corn for the following year he was lucky to net a wheat-yield of more than 4:1. That was what the producers on the lands of the cathedral chapter of Cracow at Rzgów-Gospodarz managed in 1553. They bettered that only twice in eight years of accounts through to 1573. Further west, the producers at Wolfenbüttel would do better (6.5:1 in 1540). The basic picture, however, changed, if at all, only slowly.
With a wider-angle lens, the imagined satellite picture would record greater variety. Within the champagne country there were areas that saw more stock rearing or dairying. In the Netherlands, on the Frisian marshes, or in Mecklenburg between the Elbe and the Oder, the impact of animal husbandry on the cereal yields was significant through animals dunging the land and turning topsoil humus during pasturage. Cattle were pastured with temporary fencing so there was no need for an enclosure of the fields. By bridging the crucial manure-gap, these lands delivered handsome yields: 10:1 was the average at Hitzum in Friesland in the years 1570–73. There, the farmer could even afford to abandon the fallow and crop rotation and simply grow a field of rye everywhere each year. Meanwhile, in parts of England and western France, rationalization of land exploitation with the grouping of fields into enclosures around the farmstead had begun. The construction of ditched hedges – the equivalent of barbed wire in our security-obsessed age – cut poorer people off from customary resources upon which they often depended: rights to commons, to gleaning on harvested fields and to woodland. The change should not be overestimated. Between 1455 and 1637, only 750,000 acres of England were enclosed and not more than 35,000 labourers uprooted from the soil. Sensitive to the social unrest it might cause, the English Parliament conducted commissions of inquiry and passed acts to limit its impact in 1517, 1548, 1566 and 1607.
The fear of social unrest may, in part, explain why agrarian change did not happen more widely. Far more important, however, was the reality that agricultural exploitation was based on trade-offs. Farmers understood the importance of recycling nutrients back to the soil. They had an instinctive appreciation of the importance of preventing the build-up of acid in the soil from too much arable husbandry. But spreading marl (clay, lime-rich soil) to counteract it was possible only in places where transport was readily available. Extend the arable too much, cut down the fallow, and you risked compromising the biomass feedback to the soil. Extend the arable areas into woodland and onto less good soils, and the long-term yields might not make it worthwhile. Increase the number of animals that you were grazing and there might not be enough hay to over-winter them. Too much livestock would compromise the spring growth in the meadows and hay for the next winter season. Europe’s farmers were not lazy, ignorant or stupid. On the contrary, they made sensible decisions within tight constraints.
Besides, changes were taking place quietly in other ways. Rienck Hettes van Hemmema, a farmer at Hitsum in Friesland, experimented with planting peas and beans on the fallow – reducing the amount of land without crops on his estate to just 12 per cent. In Leicestershire, a survey of fourteen farms in 1558 suggests that winter wheat was being reduced, spring wheat increased and peas and beans were being planted most years on the fallow. A farming contract for land at Montrouge near Paris in 1548 stipulates that the farmer plough the land straight after harvest and plant root-crops. Like other farmers in the Paris region, he was taking advantage of proximity to the capital, fattening livestock on their way to the capital’s markets and stabling horses. Such changes happened around other cities too. But agricultural innovation was slow, dispersed, and occurred only as and where local ecological and market conditions were right.
Outside Europe’s champagne lands, three-field rotation had never been the norm. Instead, there were combinations of two-field and three-field rotations, some of which were in response to more intensive cereal cultivation or the planting of industrial crops (hemp, madder, etc.). On the heathlands of the Landes in Gascony or the high Meseta Central (Central Plain) in Spain, farmers had to make do with two fallows for every one year of cultivation. East of the Elbe lay pastureland in eastern Poland, Moldavia and the Hungarian plain where extensive livestock husbandry developed. South of the champagne country lay the valleys with the greatest agricultural diversity in middle Europe. In the soft climates of the valley floors, the conditions were ideal for growing grain. On the tops, the conditions were good for pasturing sheep. In between, on the sheltered southerly and easterly slopes, there were vines. On other slopes, woodland provided yet another agrarian system to exploit and one that was (like wood, vines, walnuts, olives and chestnuts) open to commercial exploitation. Common lands (pasture, woodland, uncultivated areas) were a managed and exploitable resource, complementing other, more intensively cultivated terrains.
Such diverse agricultural systems would show up in a satellite picture by the division of open fields into smaller, irregular, sometimes enclosed plots. In northern England, Wales, western and southern France, parts of Lower Saxony, Westphalia and much of southwestern Germany, the landscape was dominated by hedges or stone walls. Around the Mediterranean, there was further variety. On the Tierra de Campos in northern Castile and in parts of inland Sicily, grain predominated. But elsewhere cereals counted for less. There was irrigated rice cultivation, mixed grain and commercial arboriculture (chestnuts, olives, mulberry for silk production, walnuts) as well as the ubiquitous vineyards. Sarrasin (or buckwheat), the ‘black grain’ which is not a grain at all but a plant of the sorrel family, began its conquest of the poorer soils of Brittany at the beginning of the sixteenth century, introduced there from North Africa. The Office of St George, the bank-like institution that ran Corsica for the Genoese republic, required local communities to plant chestnuts to provide a cash crop and flour for the poor. Stone walls and terraces spread up the hillsides as the quest to bring new land into cultivation stretched agrarian systems to their limits.
Land was everywhere being pressed into cultivatable use. In northern Norway, rye was sown for the first time in over 200 years. In Baltic Russia and Poland, monastic and noble estates increased the size of their demesne farms. The enterprising magnate Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, one of the great statesmen of the century, used the profits of office to establish new villages in the Ardennes Forest and the Jura. Forest-keepers reported fighting illegal encroachment. The land surveys of Lower Languedoc reveal a picture of every scrap of land being put to use. This responsiveness to change was most evident, however, in the regions of agricultural diversity that were proximate to urbanized space. It was not always towns imposing their demands upon their hinterlands so much as a series of complementary forces creating economic regions in which agricultural product became more commercialized. The market impact upon the production (and price) of grain supplies was considerable. By 1600, Rome consumed 60,000 cartloads of grain a year.
The impact of this demand can be measured in terms of reclaimed land, improved waterways and irrigation networks, which is where urban capital investment in the countryside was most substantial. In Lombardy, irrigation work in the sixteenth century completed what had been begun a century previously. From Milan to the Ticino river ran the ‘Naviglio Grande’ (31 miles long), a triumph of hydraulic technology. One of its engineers was Leonardo da Vinci, and the drawings of the Codex Atlanticus include his design for a mitred lock-gate to be installed at the San Marco lock in Milan. Compared to the portcullis lock-gates, mitre-gated locks could open wider and more efficiently. By 1530, a network of ancillary canals and waterways covered the Lombardy plain from Milan to Pavia, a land of plenty, at least if you were a rich Milanese notable.
Bologna used hydraulic technology imaginatively. Two new canals provided the mechanical power for flour mills, fulling works and hydraulic saws, fed by underground conduits. The irrigated gardens around Valencia and the sluices of the Vinalopó river increased rice cultivation there. In Provence, the French engineer Adam de Craponne headed up a consortium (including the astrologer Nostradamus) to channel the Durance river to irrigate 50,000 acres of the Plain of Crau. Smaller-scale ventures led to the floating of water-meadows to increase spring forage. Not all these efforts, of course, were successful. Venice gave up its attempts to drain the lower valleys of the Po and the Adige. Ferdinand, grand duke of Tuscany, had only modest success with his great scheme to drain the lakes of the Val di Chiana. Pope Pius IV had high hopes of draining the Pontine Marshes and chose Ferdinand’s engineer (Rafael Bombelli) for the purpose. Although the scheme was initially unsuccessful, Pope Sixtus V reactivated it, but died of malaria after visiting the worksite.
North of the Alps, reclamation was most extensive in the marshland deltas of the Netherlands, the most dramatic human change to Europe’s coastline before 1650. In reality, coastal reclamation was a global phenomenon, probably linked to climate change. In Southeast Asia, the deltas of Burma, Siam, southern China, Cambodia and Vietnam were also transformed into populated regions where new strains of rice were cultivated, supported by inter-regional trade. In the Netherlands, hydraulic technologies permitted over 1,400 hectares of additional land to be recovered each year for agricultural use by drainage in the 1540s–60s. The investment stopped with the onset of the religious and political troubles in the 1560s but then resumed in the 1590s.
The story is heading in a well-known direction: the triumph of capital-intensive agriculture, the large independent farm, owned and run by market-sensitive agriculturalists, high per-acre yield ‘convertible’ husbandry, enclosure and the high road to the ‘agricultural revolution’. Behind it lies the shadow of an even bigger story: that Europe’s northwestern Atlantic seaboard was predestined to be its locomotive to modernity. It is hard not to read the script backwards. Yet the history of Europe’s economy in this period is a reminder of the misconceptions that result when the past is telescoped by seeking the earliest genesis of future ‘success’. Succeeding in the rural world was a difficult business in this period. It involved sharing and minimizing risks, feeding families and relatives year on year, and retaining the longer-term sustainability of the soil, especially when cultivating land which was only marginally capable of bearing arable crops. Is not the evidence of the terraces of cultivatable acreage creeping up the slopes of Lower Languedoc towards the stony upland plateau in fact a sign of a Malthusian crisis in the making?
There is evidence to support that view. Rural smallholdings were becoming smaller as a result of partible inheritance, increasing the temptations upon them to increase risk and place unsustainable burdens on the productivity of the soil. In the Tyneside community of Wickham, for example, the exploitation of coal attracted a small army of workers, some living in hovels around the workings, others in small cottages. Their lifestyle increased their risk and dependency on the market for food. In 1596–7, they starved for lack of it. In some of the uplands in northern England, it was perhaps the choice to concentrate on pastoral husbandry and maximize the profits it seemed to afford, partially abandoning arable cultivation in the process, which explains why dearth-related mortality occurred there in exceptional years. In the unforgiving uplands of Castile, contemporaries noted that the land was becoming exhausted and that the fields were not as productive as they had once been, an impression partially confirmed by tithe and estate records. Such declining yields were partly the result of a stand-off between sheep and arable farmers who (in reality) needed one another. It is possible, too, that the bad weather and crippling effects of epidemic disease in the 1590s meant that peasants were tempted by very high grain prices not to farm responsibly. By the 1620s, it was acknowledged that farming on the high plateau in Spain had become unprofitable for many because of high overheads and low returns. But some communities continued to flourish, so the picture is mixed. Spain would sustain a larger population in the eighteenth century with little by way of agricultural change. If Malthusian crises existed in this period they were limited to specific periods and places.
The impact of urban growth was felt in the countryside. Increases in agricultural production were not achieved by and large through capital-intensive agronomy or spectacular increases in yield per acre. They happened through local change, principally in the cultivated arable area, driven by indigenous population growth and the market prices in foodstuffs. How much of it was through the latter is impossible to say. The rural exposure to the market was always variable – sensitive to price, risk and reward, and often mediated through others. Those who had a plough had the chance to be among the winners; those with a spade would be among the losers. The majority of Europe’s rural population did not have a plough; they had sickles, scythes and spades. These latter were the vulnerable ones. How they fared would depend in part upon other aspects of the rural and urban economy – its systems of exploitation, and its pastoral and manufacturing sectors.
LAND AND EXPLOITATION
Even for institutions like towns, hospitals or monasteries, the outright possession of land was unusual. In 1515, an Italian Dominican theologian Silvestro Mazzolini da Prierio (Sylvester Prierias), encapsulated a long-running debate over the relationship between ius (‘right’) and dominium (‘property’). He wrote that people wrongly thought that these two were one and the same thing, and that anyone who had the ius should have the dominium which accompanied it, and vice versa. Ideally, he admitted, that was how it should be, but the world was not so simple. It was possible for someone to have a ius who did not have a dominium. He cited the example of a father and under-age son. The father had the dominium over the son but the son had the ius, the right to be fed in his father’s household. The legal distinction between having the ownership of a property (dominium directum, as Roman lawyers termed it) and use-rights to it (dominium utile) was universally understood because it was based in the real world.
What mattered to most people were the uses to which the exploitable resources of the land were put. More often than not, these were not vested in the direct ownership of the soil. The rights to fish in a river, to walk over a land, to cut wood from a forest – these were all subject to different property rights, separable from the direct ownership of the soil itself, and among the most frequent and legally contentious issues before law courts. Many use-rights were still vested in communities where a premium was placed on the regulation of access to economic assets. Common land still existed in much of Europe and local communities had to decide on its management, decisions taken in order to mitigate risk to the farming community, to minimize organizational complexity and strife among participants, and to reflect the organization of the society of which they were part.
In many regions of Europe, rural society was still predominantly dominated by manorial estates. Even where they had leased out most of the land to peasants (i.e. smallholding agriculturalists), seigneurs often maintained a role in determining disputed use-rights through the operation of manorial courts. But overlords took an increasingly hard-nosed attitude towards the fees and duties that peasants were obliged to render. These included enfeoffment fees, payable on the death of a peasant or a lord, and comprising 5–15 per cent of the value of a peasant holding (though in some Swabian territories it became a punitive 50 per cent). In some parts of southwest Germany, landlords shortened leases in order to increase the revenues from transfer fees, payable when a new lease was signed. Such burdens multiplied when a peasant was subject to a variety of overlords for different parts of land or to multiple lords for the same piece of land. Landlords also took the offensive in restricting use-rights to woods, streams, lakes and common grazing lands as part of a pattern of agricultural intensification.
For their part, groups of smallholders were shrewd and organized enough to mobilize their village institutions. Village assemblies had representative, organizational and sometimes even a limited jurisdictional role. In much of western Europe, leading farmers became their mainstay, though in Germany and perhaps elsewhere, the headman was at the approval of, or even appointed by, a local lord. Even so, such assemblies took advantage of the law to seek protection against perceived infringements to their local use-rights. Although overlords sought to limit the power of these institutions they often came up against local smallholders whose wealth and influence were cemented in the course of this period by the role that they played as receivers of tax and as local officials, as well as by the growing disparities of wealth between themselves and other smallholders. This rural notability, sometimes assisted by the villages’ priests and notaries, was in a position (if so minded) to mobilize local resistance and determine how it should be deployed. The politics of the rural world revolved around these people and their perception of the law and their responsibilities. Their role was crucial in negotiations with authorities (landlords, ecclesiastical and civil authorities) and, if those negotiations failed, in organizing passive resistance or open revolt. Rural rebellion was most likely to occur in this period where there was a conjunction of smallholders or other economically independent producers, strong traditions of communal organization and representation, and new exactions from landlords, Church and state.
Peasants were vulnerable to the impact of monetary inflation. They were excessively dependent on offering a limited range of products into a market where they often had to pay to participate, and where it was difficult for them to know whether, in cash terms, they would end up with a good deal. The products that were theirs to sell were also those upon which their households depended for food through the year and capacity to sow for the next. A large-scale survey of individual household grain reserves from the duchy of Württemberg in 1622 reveals the dynamics in a period when the Thirty Years War created anxieties about food supplies. Except for a minority of larger farmers, smallholders held on tightly to their harvest of spelt, trading it among themselves in kind. By contrast, they went to market with their oats, a cheaper product, heavily in demand for feeding horses, other animals and the poor, where prices looked too good to miss and the deal did not compromise their own security. The interaction of peasant smallholders and market was like that, varying from year to year and product to product. Peasants needed strong incentives to bring their products to market in order not to feel compromised in their wellbeing.
Rural debt was ubiquitous, even when money was hard to find. Lines of credit were furnished by prosperous townspeople, ecclesiastical institutions and Jews, groups who in turn became targets for peasant unrest. Debts were registered by notaries who often, with merchants and larger landholders, were the principal creditors – thus creating another interaction between town and country. Unpaid debts destabilized peasant security, leading to downsizing a holding, or moving to the increasingly widespread practice of share-cropping, whereby landlord and tenants shared the costs and rewards of agricultural exploitation.
For the unlucky, insolvency meant selling up completely. In almost every region of France, merchants, lawyers and nobles were buying up land from debt-ridden peasants – land transfer on a massive scale. Recorded in hundreds of thousands of notarial transactions, it was obvious enough to be noted by contemporaries. The chronicler of the town of Lyon, Guillaume Paradin, for example, described in 1573 how the city’s wealthy merchants bought land from peasants at bargain prices. Where the land transfer was not to merchants, royal officers and nobles, it went to richer peasants in the same community to consolidate their holdings. The trends were towards an élite of rural smallholders, and an impoverished, dependent underclass of rural cottagers and landless labourers. These underlying tendencies created tensions in communities and, at the same time, weakened their ways of resolving them.
Virtually landless labourers existed in much greater numbers by 1650, living on the margins, dependent on earning most of what they ate, and making do the best they could. Their resilience was remarkable. In Altopascio (near Lucca in Tuscany), a village on the estates of the Medici, the poor built their huts on the swampy land near the river, from which they derived some livelihood. In Ossuccio, a village overlooking Lake Como in northern Lombardy, the landless carried wood down on their backs to Domodossola. But, in times of dearth, their vulnerability was cruelly exposed. Their only escape route was to move to a town and hope for the best. The pressures from greater rural impoverishment are reflected in complaints from city authorities about the poor who invaded their midst. The community of Codogno near Lodi, situated in the midst of wealthy Lombardy petitioned the duke of Milan in 1591: ‘The village . . . lies so close to the territory of Piacenza that it serves almost as an open door to those who come from there. At present, such is the crowd of wretched beggars who, driven by hunger, daily descend from their mountains and find refuge . . . that it looks as if, in a short time, the village itself will overflow with people.’
For many peasants, therefore, an overlord was no bad thing. A seigneur guaranteed social cohesion, mediated local disputes, protected a community against outsiders, ensured a local clerical presence and interacted with the larger, alien world of the state. When smallholders in the Cremona countryside were asked the question in the 1640s, whether they wanted to live under a feudal lord, one reply was: ‘Yes, sir, we would, for we have suffered so much destruction, and a lord would help us in our needs.’ That is the context in which to evaluate the growth and consolidation of domain exploitation in central and eastern Europe in this period, and the increase of serfdom.
Domain serfdom was already partly in place by the beginning of the sixteenth century east of the Elbe, north of the Saale, and in Bohemia and Hungary. In the processes of colonizing new agricultural land, the nobility acquired extensive judicial and economic rights over those who worked their estates. Those processes were reinforced by buoyant prices for agricultural products in the sixteenth century – in local markets, but also in the demands for cattle to supply the markets of central Europe, and cereals, shipped out from Baltic ports. Entrepreneurial lordship in the hands of noble landlords and the administrators of ecclesiastical or princely domains aimed at operating large domain estates, worked by unpaid village labour. It was a model that seemed to offer something to all parties. Those who owned large amounts of land lacked the capital to invest in plough-teams and the labour to work them. Peasants had the labour and plough-teams, but neither were intensively utilized all the year round. Farm rents were rising, so peasants were prepared to commute rent into labour. Economic lordship, in any case, was only an extension of the local juridical powers which the nobility already possessed. Even when peasants were required to build the substantial manor houses and immense barns which were the characteristic landscape features of domain lordship, they had the consolation that strong lordship offered protection from the outside world and social cohesion within. Before 1600, village farms under seigneurial authority were treated as under the subjection of lords, capable of being transferred (along with the domain) to another lord, but the peasants working them were not themselves personally unfree.
How burdensome labour services were depended on how large peasant plots were, how much tenure security they had and the degree to which the peasantry was able to hold labour services within manageable limits. In Brandenburg, peasant plots were large (often 60 acres or more) and the peasantry still worked the majority of the land before the Thirty Years War. They might have to provide two or three days of weekly domain labour with their plough and team of oxen, but they could send a son, or hire someone in their place to do the work. Unmarried sons and daughters might be conscripted for domestic or other work on the farm, but they all had a share in the buoyant market prices for agricultural produce through collaborating with the domain operation for its transhipment and sale. They belonged to village communes, recognized in law, and they could take their lord to court. They had a stake in the local economy and were reluctant to move.
In Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg and Pomerania, by contrast, where the demands from the markets for cattle and cereals were particularly strong, and where public authority was in the hands of the most entrepreneurial lords, villagers’ hereditary tenures were converted into leaseholds. For contemporary jurists, that excluded them from the Roman law category of freeholders (emphyteutae). They became tenants at will (colonii) and tied to the land (ad glebam adscriptus). They were not slaves (homini proprii), but they were serfs (servii) and they were personally unfree. Village communities had few recognized rights of representation, petition or pursuit of legal redress.
Further east, in Poland, peasant plot sizes were smaller and labour service burdens greater. Some villagers, however, managed to negotiate fixed quotas, and to retain some security of tenure. Although Polish villagers lost their rights to appeal against seigneurial lords in royal courts in 1518, they held on to their rights to buy and sell things. If they were dispossessed or abused, they could up sticks and find protection under another lord. There were plenty of opportunities to do so in the Ukraine and Lithuania. In Lithuania, twenty magnate families (the Radziwiłł, the Sapieha and others) controlled a quarter of all peasant households. The peasants who settled on their estates, however, did so on favourable terms. The Polish crown encouraged the development of domain landlording by reforms on its own estates. The model farmstead became a 45-acre farm, laid out on rational lines with peasant obligations established in accordance with the size of the farmstead. Those who possessed one of these units lived well enough. About 130 days a year were spent on the domain, but the rest of the time was theirs to cultivate their plot. But then, as settlements built up, so labour dues as well as money rents increased as part of a strategy of maximizing returns. The conquest of space and the gradual enserfment of the peasantry were, in that sense, like Europe’s colonization in the New World.
Further south in Bohemia and Hungary, large agricultural domains often existed alongside independent villagers with their own landed holdings. Many of these estates were part of the royal domains of the Bohemian and Hungarian monarchies, but were leased out to noble contractors or ecclesiastical foundations (‘lien lordship’). Royal domain administrators required estates to be returned in the condition in which they had been originally leased out. So the Austrian Habsburgs became engaged in establishing norms for the labour services, obligations and status of peasants on their leased-out estates. The numerous peasant protests and uprisings in these regions had as their objective to persuade the emperor and his officials to intervene in cases of abuse by domain landlords. In 1515, a major uprising began with the murder of a seigneur. In 1523, the peasants of the Tyrol revolted against the newly installed seigneurs of Archduke Ferdinand. When the Great Peasant War of 1524–6 spread into the Tyrol, Salzburg and Upper Austria, peasant demands included the abolition of leased domains to nobles and the removal of Maximilian of Bavaria, a leading territorial lord. In the wake of the war, Ferdinand (by then king in Bohemia) agreed in 1527 to the registration of all peasant leasehold tenancies so that their tenancies had a legal existence. Following uprisings in Lower and Upper Austria in 1594–7 against labour dues and other impositions, Emperor Rudolf II issued the Interim Resolution (1597), which limited domain service and affirmed the right of the peasantry to seek redress when those limits were exceeded. Domain serfdom proceeded in Habsburg lands but with state oversight, and without attenuating village solidarity.
The main drivers for harsher enserfment in eastern Europe were not economic landlordism and the lure of the market but the twin evils of war and depopulation. In Russia, the dislocations of the Livonian War and the subsequent Time of Troubles were huge, resulting in a flight from the land. In 1580, Tsar Ivan IV forbade peasants from moving. From 1603, every year was a ‘forbidden year’ until 1649, when the Law Code formally bound peasants and their families to the land in perpetuity. If they chose flight, the lord had the right to demand their return. The number of rural dwellers who had perhaps once held a farmstead but who became dependent cottagers and farmworkers grew dramatically. The numbers of landless labourers in the region around Novgorod rose sixfold from 1560 to 1620 to become more than a quarter of the population. In the Russian heartland they became about 40 per cent of the population. The roots of Russian serfdom lay in the first half of the seventeenth century. In East Elbian Germany and Poland, the Thirty Years and Polish wars had a similar impact. Peasants fled from the conflict zones and domain landlordism temporarily collapsed. With the return of peace, landlords rebuilt their authority and recovered their losses, pushing the Brandenburg dukes and Polish Commonwealth to legalize personal serfdom. The most significant long-term impact of the mid-seventeenth-century crisis in Europe was incontrovertibly the growth of harsh personal serfdom in the East.
SHUTTLING BETWEEN TOWN AND COUNTRY
The shuttle in question was essential to the cloth industry. It was the tool that threaded the weft yarn through the warp strands, held in a trestle (‘shed’) to weave fabric. The textile industry gave employment to thousands of people in town and countryside. Manufacture was often undertaken outside the towns in a domestic environment by rural families for whom it constituted an important by-product, but it was almost always urban merchant drapers who controlled the process and sale. Factories were not unknown either – in reality a concentration of weaving and dyeing shops in urban locations such as Venice, Augsburg, Florence, Norwich or Armentières. Cloth remained the staple of Europe’s long-distance trades, even after a century of expansion in the New World. Bedclothes, table coverings, hangings, towels and napkins were registers of social standing. The bridal trousseau embodied familial virtue in embroidered gowns, veils and underblouses. Almost everything that needed transporting (even bodies for burial) made use of cloth. Drapery, however, was the queen of cloth, displayed ostentatiously in the luminous Cloths of Honour, swags and curtains behind the Madonnas in High Renaissance religious art.
Fine drapery was, like that art, an Italian speciality in the early sixteenth century. There were significant centres of production at Milan, Como, Bergamo, Pavia, Brescia and Florence. The finishing of fine drapery was an expensive business; customers were discerning and quality control was essential to the value of the finished product. So it was vulnerable to competition and disruption. Both assailed Italian drapery production in the first half of the sixteenth century. The Italian Wars disrupted cloth-working at Brescia, Milan, Florence and elsewhere. Some of the centres managed to recover their former glory, but others stepped into their place. They included the Venetians, whose drapery production blossomed greatly in the second half of the sixteenth century. And, north of the Alps, lay the fine drapery centres of the Netherlands at Ghent, Bruges and Courtrai. But they also suffered from competition, this time from a ‘new drapery’.
There was no new technology to new drapery. It was a straightforward imitation of old-fashioned wool using cheaper wools, and mixing them with other yarns such as linen or cotton. The result was known as ‘says’ or serge: lighter, brighter and cheaper. This rejuvenated old cloth-working towns in the southern Netherlands like Lille and its hinterland. It also made the fortunes of places where there was no old merchant corporation to stand in the way: Tournai, Hondschoote, Bailleul, Valenciennes, Armentières. Cloth-workers were hard-pressed, vulnerable to economic depression, and open to new ways of valorizing themselves and their families. Competition lay just across the North Sea in England from worsteds (cloths from East Anglia) and the broadcloth draperies of Suffolk and Essex.
The bulk of the cloth industry, however, took place in the countryside, producing cloth for everyday use. Linen, canvas, woollen mixtures – the variety was considerable, the quality variable, and the role of merchants in commercializing it different from region to region. There were plenty of places (Genoa, Lille, Ulm, Regensburg, Norwich) where cloth production still lay in the hands of independent hand-weavers who brought their pieces to market each week, and purchased their spun yarn for the following week’s work with the proceeds. The individuals concerned were dependent on the market, week by week. If they did not sell their wares, they could not purchase the wherewithal to continue working. They had no control over the costs of their raw materials or the price for their semi-finished goods, and they were subject to detailed quality control. The inclination among independent weavers was to blame merchant clothiers when times were hard. When the latter failed to buy semi-finished goods, they were the target for criticism. Cloth production intensified the dynamics of the rural–urban relationships and sharpened the social contrasts within towns. It made some wealthy and others poor. Cloth production and social protest went hand in hand.
POVERTY AND SOCIAL CONSCIENCE
Being poor was a fact of life for most people. Poverty, on the other hand, was a social construct, existing in the social conscience of the rich. The poor congregated where the rich were, and between 1520 and 1560, city magistrates expressed their consciences through new ordinances for the relief and regulation of the poor. From Nuremberg (1522) to Strasbourg (1523–4), from Mons and Ypres (1525) to Ghent (1529), from Lyon (1531) to Geneva (1535) and on to Paris, Madrid, Toledo and London, cities copied best practice from one another. Their example was then generalized by laws (the Netherlands, 1531; England, 1531 and 1536). Magistrates’ social consciences were framed by humanist ideals of an ordered commonwealth of virtue. When they looked at the streets in their own cities in that light, much needed to be done. There were many charitable foundations, often in Church hands, but they were not well run. They did not diminish the number of visible poor, jostling people in the public squares and entrances to churches, sleeping in doorways and wandering the streets, crying out for alms and making claims on the conscience of the virtuous citizen. And since (it was widely believed) they spread the miasma of disease, reform meant bringing health to the commonwealth.
That was how the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives saw it. In his On the Succour of the Poor (1526) he drew on his experience as a voluntary exile from Spain (partly because of his Jewish blood) in Bruges, his treatise being dedicated to its magistrates. It was, he declared, ‘a shameful and disgraceful thing for Christians . . . to find so many needy persons and beggars on our streets’. Citizens had a moral duty to help them because poverty fostered uncivil behaviour. Vives found beggars offensive to the senses. They were a sign that a community was diseased. His solution was to categorize the problem as a prelude to providing a solution to it. He recognized widows, orphans, the maimed, blind and sick as needing help, possibly on a permanent basis, though he thought they could often do more to help themselves. Shelter, food, schooling, beds and charitable aid should be provided institutionally. He also acknowledged that there were those who had fallen on hard times and who needed assistance at home (the ‘shame-faced’ poor in contemporary parlance). He recommended that they be given succour by parish deputies, whose task it would be to assess their need and administer it. That left those who begged on the streets, ‘sturdy rogues’ whom city authorities should round up and send packing. It sounded simple enough.
Vives’s treatise was emblematic of the mindset of a virtuous magistrate. It probably did not have much direct impact on policy. The mindset, however, did, and most immediately in Protestant Europe, where giving to the poor was no longer seen as a way of earning God’s grace, and the begging of the friars was regarded as an encouragement to knavery. Protestant city councils forbade public begging. The dissolution of religious houses offered the opportunity of turning the buildings into hospitals and schools, which is what happened in Zürich, Geneva and elsewhere. In Catholic Europe, it was more complex. The institutional inheritance, with its ecclesiastical associations and avowed ministry to the souls of both giver and receiver, was retained.
In Venice, the Scuoli Grandi (religious confraternities) remained sumptuously maintained foundations for the charitable impulses and consciences of the wealthy in that city, whose money came in useful to the state when it was short of funds. In Florence, its numerous hospitals offered citizens medical attention from competent physicians in establishments that ministered to their souls as well as their bodies. Elsewhere, however, Catholic cities followed the lead of Lyon in 1534 and reorganized their charitable corporations into a hospital, responsible for ministering to all the poor and involving both laymen and clerics in its administration. And, like their Protestant counterparts, Catholic magistrates (and Tridentine clerics) increasingly regulated begging, responding to the reality of poverty with institutional initiatives (particularly for orphans and reformed prostitutes, and loan banks for the poor – Monti di Pietà). But the distinction between deserving poor and idle rogue always broke down, and expelling the ‘undeserving’ poor from cities was never more than a temporary fix, especially as the fundamental dislocations of Europe’s growth were borne by those who were paid in wages and had to buy their bread with them.
Pioneering research in the 1930s by an international committee for price history assembled data on the daily wages of workers. Economic historians collated the evidence for unskilled and skilled building workers’ wages and compared them in terms of the silver content of local currencies (known as the ‘silver wage’), the volume of grain (the ‘grain wage’) and the amount of bread (the ‘bread wage’) and other consumer essentials that what they earned could purchase. The results confirm the picture of an emerging economic region in northwest Europe where silver wages were high and skilled labour plentiful. In southern and eastern Europe, by contrast, the trend towards higher wages (in terms of the silver they represented) was less pronounced and skilled labour in shorter supply. Wages were up to 100 per cent higher for skilled building workers outside the zone of advanced economic growth, where they were only 50 per cent higher. When one measures wages in terms of what they would purchase, the result is a mirror image. The purchasing power of those who were dependent on money wages fell dramatically in this period, and especially for non-skilled labourers. The gap between northwestern Europe, where those of skilled workers fell least, and the less developed parts of southern, central and eastern Europe, where real wages, especially for unskilled workmen, collapsed, was dramatic.
That is why Europe’s towns also had a significant proportion (from 15 to 30 per cent) of households in regular receipt of charity: by definition, the poor. They could not be disaggregated from the vagrants (‘dangerous poor’), who moved from countryside to town, and who could not be stopped. In Naples, the Papal States, Catalonia and even Venice, vagrants provided the human capital for gangs of outlawed bandits. Tolerated in rural societies, cut-purses and hired killers gave the slip to the most determined of local magistrates. Well-meaning gentry and parochial officials administered the Elizabethan Poor Law (1601) in England. They did their best to distinguish, as required, between the deserving poor and the thriftless ‘vagabound that will abide nowhere’. In 1630–31 the Books of Orders (printed ordinances about food supplies, vagrancy, etc. for local administrators to follow) gave them more detailed advice, but it was to no avail. Similarly defeated were the administrators of Dutch workhouses who aimed to discipline those groups in society which magistrates regarded as idle, disorderly and an affront to a society embarrassed by its riches.
Urban expenditure on public poor relief was never, in any case, more than a tiny fraction of urban wealth as a whole, and municipally channelled poor relief was only one, and not the most important, method of relieving poverty. The most important remained private philanthropy. Protestant preachers emphasized the mutual obligations of rich and poor. People who neglected charity and who wasted their money were ‘poor-makers’. In his Treatise of Christian Beneficence (1600), Robert Allen admitted that some poor people belonged to the ‘monstrous and sottish multitude’, but that was not an argument for stopping being charitable: ‘their evil in no whit diminishes thy goodness’. For both Protestant and Catholic moralists, charity to the poor was about the conquest of souls and, in places where the religions lived side by side, there was straightforward competition. In Brussels in the 1580s, as later in Lyon and Nîmes, hospitals and almonries became contested spaces, and charity one of the ways of rallying the faithful and winning converts. Saving souls proved easier than reconstructing poor people’s lives.
POPULAR PROTEST
The power of localism in Christendom was clearly demonstrated in its patterns of protest. The corporate loyalties and political autonomy of cities had created a tradition (christened a ‘Great Tradition’) among patricians who stood up for their urban rights and negotiated with princes for the maintenance of their privileges, inscribed in laws and charters. When city magistrates bargained with other authorities, they claimed to represent the urban community even though they generally had no explicit mandate to do so. The city walls, town halls, and seals and robes of office were embodiments of a community’s history. That history often included protest and revolt, but it was chronicled in such a way that it was integrated into an ongoing bargaining process between those who claimed authority and those over whom it extended.
Alongside this Great Tradition, however, there was also a ‘little tradition’ of protest, one which included urban artisans and labourers and extended into rural communities. This little tradition did not have the benefit of being chronicled in history or charters or of being institutionalized. It was enshrined in local political culture – the ‘commons’, ‘people’ and ‘community’ being among the ways in which, with differing local and regional accents, that culture sought to express itself. It had its own targets of resentment (the ‘rich’, the ‘traitors’, the ‘bloodsuckers’ of the common weal), its own rituals (based around patronal festivals, parishes, processions) and its folk heroes (local Robin Hoods), as well as ways of assembling and expressing its grievances. Its representatives (the ‘better sort of people’ or the ‘middling sort of people’, as they were sometimes known in sixteenth-century England) were expected to defend the locality against intrusions upon established customs and traditions. They did so by negotiation and mediation but, when that failed, they found themselves leading popular protest.
In Henry VI Part 2, Shakespeare depicted Jack Cade, the leader of the 1450 Kentish rebellion. Drawing on Holinshed’s Chronicles, Shakespeare’s Cade vocalizes the hopes and fears of the little tradition. The ordinary folk, he said, were ignored and held in contempt. Cade had to do business with the gentry, but they were not to be trusted. Strangers and foreigners, too, were regarded with suspicion. Back in the mythical past lay a golden age when (says Cade) ‘there shall be in England seven half-penny loaves sold for a penny; and the three-hoop’d pot shall have ten hoops; and I will make it a felony to drink small beer. All the realm shall be in common.’ The little tradition made itself felt through petitions, bargaining and mediation, but also through staged insurrection. Political authorities in Christendom had learned to live with it.
Most protest before 1500 was limited, held in check by notions of order and respect for authority. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, however, the scale on which it occurred was transformed. Firearms were increasingly dispersed among local populations, and so the violence which accompanied protest increased. Its incidence is difficult to analyse in this period because it was so frequent and multifaceted. Any effort to tabulate such uprisings cannot be complete, for many occurred that went unnoticed on the larger stage. In Provence alone, by one estimate, there were 108 (2.4 per annum) incidents of popular protest between 1590 and 1634, rising to 156 (6.3 per annum) from 1635 to 1660. Rebellion was similarly endemic in Stuart Ireland, the inevitable consequence of the collapse of Gaelic lordship which followed the destruction of the Fitzgerald clan in the Kildare rebellion of 1534 and the attempts to build an English ascendancy on the basis of colonial plantation and a Protestant state. The organized rebellions in Ireland of the later sixteenth century (Desmond, Kildare, O’Neill, O’Doherty) required an English army of occupation that was larger than ones sent to fight in France and the Netherlands in the same period.
The most effective protests were, in any case, passive – the refusal to pay taxes and dues, for example – and unreported. Disorder short of full-scale revolt was widespread – especially if one includes soldiers’ mutinies, brigandage and organized criminality. Brigands were more in evidence, partly as a reaction to the more intensive farming of landed domains in Naples and the Papal States and Catalonia from the late 1580s onwards. Brigands exploited the pastoral regions of the mountains, and flourished on their notoriety and acceptance among local communities. Marco Sciarra, a native of Castiglione in the Abruzzi, became a folk hero for several years in the Romagna during the later 1580s. He proclaimed himself ‘the Lord’s scourge, sent by God against usurers and all who possess unproductive wealth’, said that he was sent to rob the rich to benefit the poor, and played on local hostility to the Spanish. Prior to his assassination in 1593, it was rumoured in Naples that ‘he would soon come and make himself king’. There was more revolt talked about than actually occurred. The English authorities rightly feared a rebellion in the Midlands in 1596. In fact, it did not happen, although there were those like the miller from Hampton Gay Roger Ibill, who thought it would (‘there must be a rising soon, because of the high price of corn’).
Even the incomplete tabulation of unrest, however, indicates that uprising and revolt were broadly dispersed across western, central and northern Europe. There were periods when they affected several regions concomitantly (1530s, 1560s, 1590s, 1640s). Many revolts proved persistent, based on locally rooted opposition and situated in border or inaccessible regions which allowed them to last several years. The Great Tradition of urban revolt (the comuneros in Castile, 1520; Ghent, 1539) became assimilated into the broader sweep of urban and rural conflict which tended to engulf much larger areas than just a town, wrapped up in the bigger politico-religious conflicts of the Reformation. By contrast, the little tradition matured into a major, ongoing dynamic for popular unrest. Ordinary folk continued to believe that they were the ‘people’ whose ‘community’ should defend itself at times when its natural defenders failed to do so.
The scale of protest dwarfed the popular rebellions of the later Middle Ages. The Great Peasant War in Germany (1524–6) was the broadest mobilization of ordinary people into protest in German lands before the nineteenth century. At its height, perhaps 300,000 peasants were under arms. In Württemberg, up to 70 per cent of those capable of bearing arms joined the rebels in 1525. It had a major impact on the course of the Lutheran Reformation. In 1536 20,000 people marched south to Doncaster under the banners of the Five Wounds of Christ, the crusading symbol of the Pilgrimage of Grace. The Croquants’ rebellion in southwest France in 1636–7 was the largest peasant revolt in France after the ‘Jacquerie’ of 1351, with 60,000 reportedly in arms in August 1636. It forced the government into talks. Peasants formed federated bands, negotiated agreements among themselves and with those in nearby towns, and found people to lead them. Their deliberative assemblies broadcast their grievances, mobilized and coerced others to join them, and tried to negotiate with authorities. Although they had different aetiologies, rural and urban protest became intermingled, both caught up in wider movements of protest and change. The coalition of forces behind protest was, however, unstable, reflecting the unpredictable politics of unrest.
The unprecedented scale of popular unrest was a function of its diversity. To some extent it was a consequence of the economic changes and the diminishing social cohesion of the period. That was particularly noticeable in the numerous enclosure riots of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. It was equally evident in the anti-seigneurial and anti-serfdom elements of the Great Peasant War, or the major peasant insurrections in Upper and Lower Austria in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As in the somewhat less numerous examples of food riots in the cities of western Europe in this period, these were confrontations where material things mattered most – rights to land, resources, space, food. But even in these instances, the grievances of protesters were expressed in ways that were not reducible to an economic equation. They presented themselves as on the side of the ‘common weal’ against ‘rich men’ and those who ‘starve the poor’. They sought to recover ‘ancient rights’ through an appeal to the ‘old law’. The famous Twelve Articles of Memmingen (March 1525), the most widely distributed peasant grievances of the Great Peasant War, included an important demand against serfdom. But it did so in terms of traditional demands for social justice, expressed within the language of Lutheran evangelism, respectful of authority: ‘It has until now been the custom for the lords to own us as their property. This is deplorable, for Christ has redeemed us and bought us all with his precious blood, the lowliest shepherd as well as the greatest lord, with no exceptions. Thus the Bible proves that we are free and want to be free – not that we want to be utterly free and subject to no authority at all.’
The most pervasive context for popular unrest was military conflict and its consequences for the civilian population. Compulsory requisitioning and billeting of soldiers, the menacing depredation of troops on the move, and the activities of local opportunists who exploited the breakdown in order were the grievances which surfaced in the popular unrest which punctuated the last decade of the civil wars in sixteenth-century France (the Gautiers of Normandy, the Croquants of Périgord, the Campanelle of the region to the south of Toulouse).
Popular unrest was also fomented by the politico-religious changes of the Protestant Reformation. They affected rituals that were an integral part of local communities. They altered who owned and exploited the land. It is unsurprising that popular unrest was frequently mobilized and vocal against the Reformation (the Pilgrimage of Grace, 1536; the ‘Prayer-Book Rebellion’, 1549). But unrest could work the other way as well. One of the most widespread targets for protest in this period was the tithe, the ecclesiastical equivalent of seigneurial dues upon producers from the land. Beyond the passive refusal to pay which became widespread among Protestants in southern France in the 1560s and in the Netherlands during the early years of the Dutch Revolt, it was an element in the uprisings in Hungary (1562, 1569–70), Slovenia (1571–3) and Upper Austria (1593–5, 1626–7). In the novel circumstances of sixteenth-century religious pluralism, whether to be Protestant or Catholic went beyond the monarch, the magistrate or the magnate. The choice split towns and communities within and among people and their leaders.
When those divisions turned into extreme violence, they were regarded as a demonstration of what those with a humanist education already knew: that ‘the people’ was synonymous with a savage, barbarous and unpredictable mob. Following years of civil and religious contention, the people of the small town of Romans decided during the Carnival season, on the eve of Mardi Gras (15 February 1580), to join in the peasant insurrection that had infected the countryside around (the League of the Commoners – ‘Villains’). Artisans and peasants danced in the streets, threatening the rich and crying: ‘Before three days, Christian flesh will be sold at sixpence a pound!’ Their elected leader, Jehan Serve (‘Captain Paumier’), sat in the mayor’s parlour, dressed in a bearskin, eating delicacies which passed for human flesh, while his followers dressed up as Christian dignitaries and cried ‘Christian flesh for sixpence’. The town’s rich, horrified by this cannibalistic prospect, descended on their opponents and massacred them in a slaughter which lasted for three days. In Naples in 1585, the angry mob, protesting against the high price of bread, lynched the local magistrate, Giovan Vincenzo Starace, for failing to control prices. His body was mutilated, and pieces of his flesh offered for sale before the remains were dragged through the street and his house destroyed. In the 1626–7 insurrection in Upper Austria, a woman removed the eyes of one of the noble victims and took them home in her handkerchief. Another cut off his genitals and fed them to her dog.
The state and political authority were implicated in popular protest because it seemed to threaten both. The senior nobility tried to turn unrest to its own advantage, one element in their efforts to protect themselves against over-mighty princes, and to influence political change. The French nobles were not alone in believing that they had a ‘right of revolt’, by which they meant a legitimate duty to lead protests against a tyrannical prince, one who infringed the freedom which was coterminous with nobility. Irish clan chiefs evidently felt they too had legitimacy on their side to raise the ‘septs’ (the clans) against English domination, with its hostile state, alien religion and colonizing tendencies. But the nobility were playing a dangerous game, not least because there were anti-noble sentiments just below the surface of many popular revolts. ‘Kill all the gentlemen and we will have the Six Articles up again and ceremonies as they were in King Henry’s time’ was the slogan of the English Prayer-Book Rebellion. During an insurrection in the southern French city of Narbonne in 1632, nobles were referred to as ‘Jean-fesses’ (‘Jack-arses’). One peasant song from the insurrection in Austria (1626–7) began: ‘Now will we sweep through the land, and our own lords must flee.’
The Swiss served as a regular example of those who had successfully thrown off their nobility. During the League of the Croquants of 1594–5, it was a commonplace that the peasants wanted to abolish noble privileges and to establish a democracy on the pattern of the Swiss. Besides, princes could use popular protest to turn the tables against their own rebellious nobility. A striking case was the ‘Club War’ in later sixteenth-century Finland, in which Duke Charles – the acting regent in Sweden – encouraged his peasants to rise ‘if by no other means, then with stakes and clubs’ against the Finnish nobles who remained loyal to the displaced Swedish king, Sigismund Vasa.
The state became the focus of unrest, especially when its own taxes were the objects of contention. With the growth of the fiscal state (see below, ch. 16) the focus of unrest became increasingly centred on its role, on the ‘novelty’ of its exactions and the unscrupulousness of its agents. In southwest France, it was the attempt to introduce the gabelle (the tax on salt) that sparked off the peasant revolt that culminated in 1548. In Saintonge and Angoumois, salt-marshes were a profitable enterprise. Communes began by imprisoning and massacring the gabeleurs who had been parachuted in from outside by the syndics of private tax-collectors to whom the collection of those revenues had been leased out at a profit by the state. That became a more common pattern in France in the 1630s and 40s, when local revolts became a rejection of the fiscal state, and the financiers, tax-farmers and intendants which sustained it.
It was in the nature of the little tradition of rural and urban revolt that protest was presented as supporting legitimate authority and seeking a return to a lost age of community and equity. There was a persistent belief that the king was the source of justice and that, if only the tribulations of his people (which had been masked or misrepresented by ministers and favourites) were revealed to him, he would remedy their woes. ‘Down with gabelles’ was the cry during the ‘Nu-Pieds’ rising in Normandy (1639). But at the same time the protesters shouted: ‘Long Live the King.’ In their anonymous manifesto they wanted a return to the good old days of King Louis XII. ‘Death to Bad Government, and Long Live Justice’ declared the rebels in Naples in 1585.
A variant of the same theme in popular protest was that of the saviour, a ‘hidden king’ who would miraculously return to deliver his people from their woes. It had resonances with the millenarian prophecies which could be found in the urban milieu before and during the Protestant Reformation. Old Emperor Frederick was the just ruler in whose name the grievances of the German people were expressed in 1520 at the beginning of the Lutheran troubles. It was a persistent myth in Portugal that King Sebastian had not fallen in battle in Morocco in 1578, but was still alive, the object of visionary writings in the 1630s (mostly of Jewish converso origins), portents in the natural world and learned disquisitions by Jesuits at Évora University. The Bolotnikov Rising in 1606–7 occurred in the wake of the dynastic struggle between Tsar Boris Godunov and the pretender to the throne, the pseudo-Dimitri, a young man who claimed to be the true heir and promised the restoration of peace and justice against Godunov. That appeal to a Pretender was so powerful that the pseudo-Dimitri was propelled to the throne after Godunov’s death in 1605, thanks to a loyalist rebellion led by boyars and supported by Cossacks and Poles. Bolotnikov’s supporters made it to the walls of Moscow in October 1606, although they were compelled to retreat as they alienated the very people in the capital they were trying to influence.
If protest was ‘loyal’ and in defence of conservative values, why was it treated as confrontational in a new way in this period, and so brutally repressed? With only a handful of exceptions, the protests were overwhelmed by force. Those cities (Ghent, 1539; Bordeaux, 1548; Naples, 1585) which rose up against their overlords paid a heavy price. Leaders of revolts were put on trial, tortured and publicly executed. The city’s privileges were torn up, its walls breached and fines imposed on its citizens. In the aftermath of the uprising in Naples in 1585, over 800 people were put on trial, but 12,000 more fled the city, fearing the repression that would ensue. Peasant armies were almost invariably defeated by the greater skills and better armament of their opponents. But deliberate butchery explains the huge loss of lives that occurred in the aftermath of defeat. Over 5,000 peasants died at the battle of Frankenhausen (15 May 1525) during the Great Peasant War. The opposing Landsknechte (mercenary pikemen) had six casualties, two of whom were only wounded. Perhaps as many as 100,000 peasants were put to death in the two years of revolt in German lands from 1524 to 1526. Peasants died in their tens of thousands in the Hungarian insurrection prior to the battle of Mohács (1526). In the wake of the Pilgrimage of Grace, peasant bands in arms were slaughtered ‘like dogs’, according to Captain Cobbler, one of their ring-leaders, awaiting his fate in Lincoln jail. ‘What whore-sons were we that we had not killed the gentlemen, for I thought always that they would be traitors,’ he reflected. Over 5,000 peasants died in the various confrontations that brought the Prayer-Book Rebellion to an end in August 1549. At the battle of Clyst Heath alone, 900 bound and gagged prisoners had their throats slit in ten minutes. In the conflict which brought the Croat peasant uprising in 1573 to a close, Emperor Maximilian II boasted of the death of 4,000 Slovene and Croat peasants. In the wake of the 1626–7 uprising in Upper Austria, over 12,000 peasants were said to have been put to death. At the battle of Sauvetat near Périgueux in 1637, 1,000 peasant bodies were left on the battlefield. Thousands more died in insurrections than were accounted martyrs in the religious confrontations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or than were judicially executed for witchcraft.
The leaders of revolt were given brutal punishments to discourage others from following their example. The Romanian György Dózsa (or Székely), the mercenary captain turned leader of the peasant-dominated insurrections in eastern Hungary that culminated in 1526, captured after the rout at Temesvár, was condemned to sit on a smouldering iron throne with a heated iron crown on his head and a red-hot sceptre in his hand; leading fellow-rebels were condemned to bite his skin where hot pliers had been inserted, and to swallow the flesh. At Frankenburg am Hausruck in Upper Austria, Lutheran peasants revolted against Count Adam von Herberstorff’s attempt to impose a Catholic priest on their community. Despite an amnesty, the count arrested the leaders of the insurrection and (following contemporary military practice) divided them into two groups, forcing them to gamble with dice for their lives. Thirty-six men were hanged, the act triggering the Upper Austrian rebellion which followed.
The fate which awaited rebel leaders was not merely to dissuade others, but also to intimidate local notables and leaders. That was also the objective behind the obsessive concern with absolute obedience, required by God and the prince, which permeated royal ordinances, and which was the staple of the advice literature for magistrates. No effort was spared in proclaiming the dangerous consequences of rebellion, and most of the rhetoric was aimed above the heads of the people themselves. ‘When every man wyll rule who shall obeye?’ asked one tract in the wake of the Pilgrimage of Grace. ‘No, no, take welthe by the hand, and say farewell welth, where lust is liked, and lawe refused, where uppe is sette downe, and downe sette uppe. An order, and order muste be hadde, and a waye founde that they rule that best can, they be ruled, that mooste it becommeth so to be.’ Reflected in the more authoritarian tones of the literature on political obedience was the attempt to educate the larger and more disparate group of local leaders upon whom the state depended. There was a deeper concern as well. The humanist project involved linking the exercise of office to the achievement of public good. There was a persistent danger that magistrates, local officials and lesser nobles might misconstrue where their loyalties lay – to the people, or to the state. Since ‘lesser magistrates’ (and almost anyone in a public office could be thus described) were accorded the duty to God and the people to disobey a higher authority by influential Protestants when it failed to carry out its duties before God, rulers were more exercised by the problem of ensuring the loyalties of that growing group of lesser officials upon whom their authority depended in difficult times.
So, despite the harsh repression of popular revolts and the exhortations to absolute obedience, protest often achieved something of what had been demanded. The Great Peasant War was defeated decisively, but the succeeding Diet of Speyer (June 1526) agreed propositions to alleviate the burdens on the peasantry. In the wake of the rising in the Tyrol in 1526, the Land Ordinance conceded rights of land ownership and limitations to labour services on royal demesnes as well as changes to the laws on hunting and fishing. New fiscal impositions were cancelled or postponed and promises were made to redress wrongs in the wake of social protest, not because the people had won but because the power of local leaders had to be acknowledged. Their attempts to mitigate the effects of economic change in town and countryside – through price controls, ordinances against grain hoarding, poor relief and the purchase of food supplies for release at subsidized prices – help to explain why, despite the crumbling social cohesion in western Europe, there were not more serious uprisings.
Even so, the voices of protest were heard as being seditious, and in new ways. That was partly because they were broadcast to a wider public, and therefore more capable of being manipulated and misunderstood. There was a new nervousness about seditious talk – investigated and prosecuted with much greater determination in the aftermath of the Reformation. When the Oxfordshire carpenter Bartholomew Steere voiced his thoughts in 1596, ‘that the Commons, long sithens in Spaine, did rise and kill all the gentlemen in Spaine and sithens that time have lyved merrily there’, he was misinformed. But that did not prevent the English government from executing him for seditious talk. The progress of popular insurrection could be followed from the mid-sixteenth century through the newsletter service from the banking house of Fugger at Augsburg. Pamphlets issued by, or in the name of, protesters circulated their grievances and demands to wider audiences. The mimetic possibilities of popular revolt were particularly evident in the 1640s. Battista Nani, Venetian ambassador to Paris, wrote in September 1647 about the impact of the revolt of Naples which had occurred two months previously: ‘The most common idea that is spreading among the people here is that Neapolitans have acted intelligently and that, in order to shake off oppressions, their example should be followed. It is understood, however, that allowing the people in the streets to shout aloud their enthusiasm for the revolt of Naples has caused great inconvenience. Therefore measures have been taken to prevent gazettes from reporting further on it.’ The same forces which spread the technological changes transforming Christendom were also disseminating knowledge about protests, themselves manifestations of its diminished social cohesion.