D. M. Palliser, The Age of Elizabeth; England under the later Tudors 1547-1603
D.M. Palliser, The Age of Elizabeth; England under the later Tudors 1547-1603, Longman, London and New York, 1983.
England and Wales probably contained about 3 million people in 1547, rising slowly and erratically to 4.3 million in 1603—a total of the order of modern Denmark or Norway. Yet the land contained some 9,4000 separate parishes, and almost as many villages and hamlets as there are today, so that the size of the average settlement was naturally small. The average population of twenty-three Norfolk parishes in 1557 was only 216; (4)
Among Elizabeth’s courtiers, Hatton habitually wrote—and probably said—‘ax’ for ‘ask’; Leicester wrote ‘hit’ for ‘it’; and Raleigh, Aubrey was told, ‘spake broad Devonshire to his dyeing day’, notwithstanding ‘his conversation with the learnedst and and politest person’. William Thomas observed that although there was between different regions of Italy ‘great diversitee of speeche, as with us between a Londoner and a Yorkeshyremen’, Italian gentleman all spoke the ‘coutisane’ tongue and had no regional accents—an implied contrast with England. (6)
The decline of colloquial Latin left diplomacy without a universal language, and most international dealings were conducted in French, Italian or Spanish. Ottaviano Maggi (1556) thought that a good ambassador should understand these three languages, together with German and even Turkish—but not English. ‘Nobody in the sixteenth century except an Englishman was expected to speak English.’ (8)
One sign of the growing stability and integration of the realm was that the sovereigns could afford to remain in the Thamesl valley for more of the time. Henry VII and Henry VIII had inherited, built or acquired most of the favourite Tudor palaces—Whitehall, St James’s Windsor, Greenwich, Richmond, Nonsuch, Hampton, Oatlands—but they had still had to travel extensively on occasion to avert or suppress revolts and to show their power. Edward VI traveled widely in 1552, but his sisters were less mobile. Elizabeth, in particular, spent most of her long reign in and around London and Widsor. It is true that she also combined business with pleasure by extensive and almost annual summer ‘progresses’ through the shires, but she never traveled further north or west that Stafford, Shrewsbury and Bristol. (10)
Admittedly, parliaments were called generally for short periods and only at the will of the sovereign; they say, for example, for a total of under three years during the forty-four-year reign of Elizabeth. Nevertheless, their influence and powers could not be ignored. The House of Lords included all peers and bishops, and the Commons a rising proportion of the more important gentlemen, lawyers and merchants. Its membership was steadily increased from 341 at the accession of Edward to 462 at the death of Elizabeth, making it the largest representative assembly in Europe, not only proportionally to population but absolutely. (11)
The reports of English councilors and ambassadors in 1557 were full of fears that England was ripe for invasion and conquest, with French troops in Scotland and Calais, and with the realm weak, poor, unfortified, and divided in religion. England could easily become ‘a Piedmont’ or ‘an other Milane’, a state disputed or divided between French and Spanish. Philip’s minister Granvelle shrewdly asked the English ambassador: ‘What present store either of expert capitens or good menne of warre ye have? What treasure? What other furniture for defence? Is there oon fortresse or hold in all Inglande, that is hable oon daye to endure the breath of a canon?’ (18)
Elizabeth did secure peace, and a breathing-space to build up England’s armed strength (from 1561 Cecil, her chief minister, was consciously encouraging a nateive armaments industry to make England independent of imports) … (18)
For the first thirty years of her reign, the chief factions coalesced loosely round Sir William Cecil, her chief minister, and Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, her favorite courtier. (19)
The bull of Pope Pius V declaring Elizabeth deposed and excommunicated (1570) made matters worse, as English Catholics were forced to choose between their pope and their queen, and religious persecution, virtually suspended in the 1560s, begun again in 1571. (20)
Puritans, were a minority of the population, but a well-educated, influential and vocal minority. They were especially strong among the gentry (including many MPs), university graduates, the yeomanry, and the richer urban merchants and craftsmen… (21)
Netherlands refugees flocked to England in large numbers from the mid-1560s, many of them skilled craftsmen who boosted new industries; and the Council protected them form the inevitable xenophobia. A native armaments industry was fostered to make England independent of imported supplies, and other new industries were encouraged with the help of immigrant skills, such as paper-making and glass-making. Statutes of 1572 and 1576 made the treatment of the poor more effective and humane, while in 1573 the militia system was reorganized to make the defence of the realm more effective. Much of the credit for domestic policy belongs to William Cecil (created Lord Burghley in 1571), who provided powerful continuity as the queen’s chief minister for the first forty years of her reign, first as principal secretary (1558-72) and then, in succession to Winchester, as lord treasurer (1572-98). (21-22)
But Burghley had a poor grasp of foreign affairs, and some of his colleagues were well aware that the continuing peace owed less to England’s strength than to the distractions of her potential enemies, the French with their religious civil wars and the Spaniards with threats from the Turks and revolt in the Netherlands. (22)
Elizabeth and Burghley were reluctantly coming to see Philip as a military threat, especially when his brilliant commander Parma began to subjugate the rebellious provinces in the Netherlands. Both sides hesitated, Spain because of her other commitments, England because of the heavy and increasing cost of warfare, and each because two-edged game of supporting rebels could be played by both. Finally Elizabeth was drawn into open war by the desperate plight of the Dutch rebels in 1584-85. By the Treaty of Nonsuch (1585) she committed herself to military and financial support, and though it never seemed enough to the rebels, and has been castigated recently as short-sighted and inadequate, it was sufficient to tip the scales given Spain’s other heavy commitments, and the defence of the Netherlands ensured the safety of England. Indeed the threat was so effective that Philip was compelled to consider an invasion of England, an invasion he contemplated the more readily when Mary Queen of Scots was finally executed (1587) after declaring Philip her heir. Invasion was planned for 1587, but frustrated by Drake’s raid on the Spanish coast which destroyed ships and naval supplies. It proved only a brief respite, and in 1588 an invasion fleet—the ‘invincible Armada’—was launched against England. The fleet failed to make the essential link with Parma’s troops in the Netherlands, and was scattered by storms, but the danger was acute. Elizabeth now possessed the best navy in Europe, but her land forces and defences were quite inadequate to have resisted Parma’s battle-hardened veterans; (26)
It has become fashionable to write of ‘the crisis of the 1590s’, and without doubt England suffered severely from warfare, poverty, inflation and famine. Yet actual disorder, when measured by records of crime rather than the hysterical statements of contemporaries, was remarkably slight in comparison with other areas of Europe or with England’s own experience fifty years before, and ‘more remarkable than the tensions and eruptions of those years was the success and stability of Tudor rule’. (28)
The international situation was lightening by the end of the queen’s reign in 1603. … The war between England and Spain diminished in intensity after the death of Philip II, though peace was not signed until 1604; and the great Irish rebellion was crushed in 1603. At home, better harvests followed the dearth of 1596-98, and the parliament of 1597-98 reintroduced safeguards against the conversion of arable to pasture, in 1598 and 1601 the poor laws were amplified and made more humane. (28)
Above all, the last twenty years of the queen’s reign witnessed a surge of interest in the colonization and in new trading opportunities, witnessed by the appearance of the massive tomes of Richard Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; 1589-1600) and by the royal charter creating an East India Company on 31 December 1600. Optimism and national pride… (29)
Admittedly, the known morality rates suggest that few grandparents survived to see their grandchildren, but enough cases are known of surviving grandparents living alone to suggest that they, or their children, preferred it so. (39)
Contrary to popular belief, youthful marriage was not the norm, and child marriage was normally confined to aristocratic property transactions, and was rare even in that circle. Burghley himself, flattered that one of his daughters was asked in marriage for an earl’s son, nevertheless argued that ‘she shold not, with my lykyng, by marryed before she was neare xviii, or xx.’ … The aristocratic norm was for marriages in the late teens or early twenties, while commoners’ marriages took place later still. A family reconstitution sample of ten widely scattered parishes shows a mean age at first marriage for women of almost 25 years in the period 1550-99, rising to 26 in the following half-century. (41)
As Laslett comments, ‘it is not true to say that…people, either ordinary or privileged, married much younger than we marry now. In fact they were very much older in relation to their expectation of life.’ (41)
It is true that in certain times and places the commonest age at marriage could fall to 20, and oddly enough the Stratford of Shakespeare’s youth was one such place. The mean age of Stratford brides in the 1580s was 20.6 years, and Shakespeare himself married at 18. Londoners also married young, judging from a family reconstitution sample of four parishes, two rich and two poor (1580-1650). The mean age of brides ranged between 21.3 and 24.7. (41)
One-quarter of the women aged between forty and seventy at Ealing in 1599 were still single, and Hakluyt evidently regarded celibacy as a widespread choice. (41)
…illegitimacy was apparently low, and even the pre-nuptial conception figures may represent only the prevalent practice of commencing sexual relations after the nuptials rather than the church marriage. (42)
It would, therefore, be rash to conclude that the illegitimacy figures indicate a high level of chastity. Hill argues for the existence among the poor of widespread ‘radical sexual practices’, and Emmison’s evidence suggests that 1 per cent of the sexually mature population of Essex was accused of sexual offences every year. (43)
Expectation of life, from eight family reconstitution studies, was 47.5 at birth in the second half of the sixteenth century, but was still 29 at age 30; in other words, a man or woman surviving his or her first 30 years could hope on average to live another 30. However, crowded urban areas could be much less healthy. Expectation of life at birth in some wealthy central London parishes was about 30-35 years, and in the poorer parishes only 20-25. (45)
However, it would be wrong to overstress mortality and early death, for in comparison with many traditional societies Elizabethan England was fortunate. Back-projection suggests that expectation of life at birth was exceptionally high between 1566 and 1621, even falling below 37.4 years (1591) and reaching a peak of 43.7 years in 1581: these were high levels by the general standards of early modern Europe. The best years lay between 1566 and 1586, when mortality was lower than it was again to be until after 1815. (45-46)
Exactly a quarter of the children dwelling at home in Ealing in 1599 had lost one or both parents. Stepparents were inevitably common, as remarriages were frequent, (46)
Whether or not malnutrition lowered resistance to disease, a famine was certainly likely to spread epidemics because starving people would take to the road in search of food, and spread those diseases which were active. (48)
England and Wales probably contained about 3 million people in 1547, rising slowly and erratically to 4.3 million in 1603—a total of the order of modern Denmark or Norway. Yet the land contained some 9,4000 separate parishes, and almost as many villages and hamlets as there are today, so that the size of the average settlement was naturally small. The average population of twenty-three Norfolk parishes in 1557 was only 216; (4)
Among Elizabeth’s courtiers, Hatton habitually wrote—and probably said—‘ax’ for ‘ask’; Leicester wrote ‘hit’ for ‘it’; and Raleigh, Aubrey was told, ‘spake broad Devonshire to his dyeing day’, notwithstanding ‘his conversation with the learnedst and and politest person’. William Thomas observed that although there was between different regions of Italy ‘great diversitee of speeche, as with us between a Londoner and a Yorkeshyremen’, Italian gentleman all spoke the ‘coutisane’ tongue and had no regional accents—an implied contrast with England. (6)
The decline of colloquial Latin left diplomacy without a universal language, and most international dealings were conducted in French, Italian or Spanish. Ottaviano Maggi (1556) thought that a good ambassador should understand these three languages, together with German and even Turkish—but not English. ‘Nobody in the sixteenth century except an Englishman was expected to speak English.’ (8)
One sign of the growing stability and integration of the realm was that the sovereigns could afford to remain in the Thamesl valley for more of the time. Henry VII and Henry VIII had inherited, built or acquired most of the favourite Tudor palaces—Whitehall, St James’s Windsor, Greenwich, Richmond, Nonsuch, Hampton, Oatlands—but they had still had to travel extensively on occasion to avert or suppress revolts and to show their power. Edward VI traveled widely in 1552, but his sisters were less mobile. Elizabeth, in particular, spent most of her long reign in and around London and Widsor. It is true that she also combined business with pleasure by extensive and almost annual summer ‘progresses’ through the shires, but she never traveled further north or west that Stafford, Shrewsbury and Bristol. (10)
Admittedly, parliaments were called generally for short periods and only at the will of the sovereign; they say, for example, for a total of under three years during the forty-four-year reign of Elizabeth. Nevertheless, their influence and powers could not be ignored. The House of Lords included all peers and bishops, and the Commons a rising proportion of the more important gentlemen, lawyers and merchants. Its membership was steadily increased from 341 at the accession of Edward to 462 at the death of Elizabeth, making it the largest representative assembly in Europe, not only proportionally to population but absolutely. (11)
The reports of English councilors and ambassadors in 1557 were full of fears that England was ripe for invasion and conquest, with French troops in Scotland and Calais, and with the realm weak, poor, unfortified, and divided in religion. England could easily become ‘a Piedmont’ or ‘an other Milane’, a state disputed or divided between French and Spanish. Philip’s minister Granvelle shrewdly asked the English ambassador: ‘What present store either of expert capitens or good menne of warre ye have? What treasure? What other furniture for defence? Is there oon fortresse or hold in all Inglande, that is hable oon daye to endure the breath of a canon?’ (18)
Elizabeth did secure peace, and a breathing-space to build up England’s armed strength (from 1561 Cecil, her chief minister, was consciously encouraging a nateive armaments industry to make England independent of imports) … (18)
For the first thirty years of her reign, the chief factions coalesced loosely round Sir William Cecil, her chief minister, and Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, her favorite courtier. (19)
The bull of Pope Pius V declaring Elizabeth deposed and excommunicated (1570) made matters worse, as English Catholics were forced to choose between their pope and their queen, and religious persecution, virtually suspended in the 1560s, begun again in 1571. (20)
Puritans, were a minority of the population, but a well-educated, influential and vocal minority. They were especially strong among the gentry (including many MPs), university graduates, the yeomanry, and the richer urban merchants and craftsmen… (21)
Netherlands refugees flocked to England in large numbers from the mid-1560s, many of them skilled craftsmen who boosted new industries; and the Council protected them form the inevitable xenophobia. A native armaments industry was fostered to make England independent of imported supplies, and other new industries were encouraged with the help of immigrant skills, such as paper-making and glass-making. Statutes of 1572 and 1576 made the treatment of the poor more effective and humane, while in 1573 the militia system was reorganized to make the defence of the realm more effective. Much of the credit for domestic policy belongs to William Cecil (created Lord Burghley in 1571), who provided powerful continuity as the queen’s chief minister for the first forty years of her reign, first as principal secretary (1558-72) and then, in succession to Winchester, as lord treasurer (1572-98). (21-22)
But Burghley had a poor grasp of foreign affairs, and some of his colleagues were well aware that the continuing peace owed less to England’s strength than to the distractions of her potential enemies, the French with their religious civil wars and the Spaniards with threats from the Turks and revolt in the Netherlands. (22)
Elizabeth and Burghley were reluctantly coming to see Philip as a military threat, especially when his brilliant commander Parma began to subjugate the rebellious provinces in the Netherlands. Both sides hesitated, Spain because of her other commitments, England because of the heavy and increasing cost of warfare, and each because two-edged game of supporting rebels could be played by both. Finally Elizabeth was drawn into open war by the desperate plight of the Dutch rebels in 1584-85. By the Treaty of Nonsuch (1585) she committed herself to military and financial support, and though it never seemed enough to the rebels, and has been castigated recently as short-sighted and inadequate, it was sufficient to tip the scales given Spain’s other heavy commitments, and the defence of the Netherlands ensured the safety of England. Indeed the threat was so effective that Philip was compelled to consider an invasion of England, an invasion he contemplated the more readily when Mary Queen of Scots was finally executed (1587) after declaring Philip her heir. Invasion was planned for 1587, but frustrated by Drake’s raid on the Spanish coast which destroyed ships and naval supplies. It proved only a brief respite, and in 1588 an invasion fleet—the ‘invincible Armada’—was launched against England. The fleet failed to make the essential link with Parma’s troops in the Netherlands, and was scattered by storms, but the danger was acute. Elizabeth now possessed the best navy in Europe, but her land forces and defences were quite inadequate to have resisted Parma’s battle-hardened veterans; (26)
It has become fashionable to write of ‘the crisis of the 1590s’, and without doubt England suffered severely from warfare, poverty, inflation and famine. Yet actual disorder, when measured by records of crime rather than the hysterical statements of contemporaries, was remarkably slight in comparison with other areas of Europe or with England’s own experience fifty years before, and ‘more remarkable than the tensions and eruptions of those years was the success and stability of Tudor rule’. (28)
The international situation was lightening by the end of the queen’s reign in 1603. … The war between England and Spain diminished in intensity after the death of Philip II, though peace was not signed until 1604; and the great Irish rebellion was crushed in 1603. At home, better harvests followed the dearth of 1596-98, and the parliament of 1597-98 reintroduced safeguards against the conversion of arable to pasture, in 1598 and 1601 the poor laws were amplified and made more humane. (28)
Above all, the last twenty years of the queen’s reign witnessed a surge of interest in the colonization and in new trading opportunities, witnessed by the appearance of the massive tomes of Richard Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; 1589-1600) and by the royal charter creating an East India Company on 31 December 1600. Optimism and national pride… (29)
Admittedly, the known morality rates suggest that few grandparents survived to see their grandchildren, but enough cases are known of surviving grandparents living alone to suggest that they, or their children, preferred it so. (39)
Contrary to popular belief, youthful marriage was not the norm, and child marriage was normally confined to aristocratic property transactions, and was rare even in that circle. Burghley himself, flattered that one of his daughters was asked in marriage for an earl’s son, nevertheless argued that ‘she shold not, with my lykyng, by marryed before she was neare xviii, or xx.’ … The aristocratic norm was for marriages in the late teens or early twenties, while commoners’ marriages took place later still. A family reconstitution sample of ten widely scattered parishes shows a mean age at first marriage for women of almost 25 years in the period 1550-99, rising to 26 in the following half-century. (41)
As Laslett comments, ‘it is not true to say that…people, either ordinary or privileged, married much younger than we marry now. In fact they were very much older in relation to their expectation of life.’ (41)
It is true that in certain times and places the commonest age at marriage could fall to 20, and oddly enough the Stratford of Shakespeare’s youth was one such place. The mean age of Stratford brides in the 1580s was 20.6 years, and Shakespeare himself married at 18. Londoners also married young, judging from a family reconstitution sample of four parishes, two rich and two poor (1580-1650). The mean age of brides ranged between 21.3 and 24.7. (41)
One-quarter of the women aged between forty and seventy at Ealing in 1599 were still single, and Hakluyt evidently regarded celibacy as a widespread choice. (41)
…illegitimacy was apparently low, and even the pre-nuptial conception figures may represent only the prevalent practice of commencing sexual relations after the nuptials rather than the church marriage. (42)
It would, therefore, be rash to conclude that the illegitimacy figures indicate a high level of chastity. Hill argues for the existence among the poor of widespread ‘radical sexual practices’, and Emmison’s evidence suggests that 1 per cent of the sexually mature population of Essex was accused of sexual offences every year. (43)
Expectation of life, from eight family reconstitution studies, was 47.5 at birth in the second half of the sixteenth century, but was still 29 at age 30; in other words, a man or woman surviving his or her first 30 years could hope on average to live another 30. However, crowded urban areas could be much less healthy. Expectation of life at birth in some wealthy central London parishes was about 30-35 years, and in the poorer parishes only 20-25. (45)
However, it would be wrong to overstress mortality and early death, for in comparison with many traditional societies Elizabethan England was fortunate. Back-projection suggests that expectation of life at birth was exceptionally high between 1566 and 1621, even falling below 37.4 years (1591) and reaching a peak of 43.7 years in 1581: these were high levels by the general standards of early modern Europe. The best years lay between 1566 and 1586, when mortality was lower than it was again to be until after 1815. (45-46)
Exactly a quarter of the children dwelling at home in Ealing in 1599 had lost one or both parents. Stepparents were inevitably common, as remarriages were frequent, (46)
Whether or not malnutrition lowered resistance to disease, a famine was certainly likely to spread epidemics because starving people would take to the road in search of food, and spread those diseases which were active. (48)
posted by Raul de Saldanha at
6:20 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home