0307A

Britain in 1500 WAS for the most part an old-settled but, by the standards of much of contemporary Europe, an under-populated landscape. As an Italian visitor put it, �The population of this island does not appear to me to bear any proportion to her fertility and riches�. A steady recovery from the steep population decline of two centuries of plague was only just beginning. England and Wales had perhaps 2.25 million people, Scotland and Ireland about a third of that number each. Lack of population pressure meant that living standards were comparatively high. Sir John Fortescue, writing in the 1470s, mocked French peasants for their diet of �apples and very brown bread made with rye� when Englishmen of all classes ate �every kind of flesh and fish in abundance�. An English builder's wage in 1500-9 bought more food than in any decade until the 1880s. Serfdom was withering away as tenants held a strong hand in negotiating with their lords. Richer peasants in southern England were able to build substantial timber-framed houses on stone foundations with several rooms, fireplaces, separate barns, sometimes even slate roofs. Thousands of them survive to this day.

Pastoral farming for wool, leather and meat throve in upland areas everywhere, but in England it also took up large areas of former arable land as enclosed fields in the lowlands. This bred strife in places where the demand for grain and for access to common land was starting to rise again. There were riots against enclosures around Coventry in 1496 and in 1489 Parliament legislated against the decay of tillage. Scotland's agriculture was less controversial but more vulnerable to famine in a climate less favourable to cereal cultivation. Ireland was divided between an anglicised east and south-east and a Gaelic north and west characterised by the dominance of herds over transient tillage. Since one grain of cereal sown rarely produced more than four harvested, bad weather or blight could readily bring dearth anywhere and would do so more often as the number of mouths to feed grew. By 1527-28 the English government was sending out commissioners to assess grain stocks and prevent profiteering.

Yet disease killed far more than hunger, especially among the young. Infant mortality was high, child mortality not much less so. One-third of the population were under fifteen, but many would not see adulthood. Surviving to thirty was hard, but if one made it, an average life span of about sixty awaited. Plague, though less devastating than before, was recurrent, killing monks at Christ Church Priory, Canterbury, for example, in 1487, 1501, 1504 and 1507. Older-established diseases such as dysentery and smallpox continued to work alongside it, and a new scourge, the sweating sickness, perhaps a virulent form of influenza struck England in 1485, 1508, 1517 and 1528. In 1555-59 bad harvests followed by another influenza-like epidemic killed more than one in twenty of the English population.

Wool was still exported raw to industrial cities on the continent from both England and Scotland, as it had been for several centuries. In England, however, increasing quantities were now made into cloth in booming weaving communities such as Lavenham in Suffolk and Halifax in Yorkshire. In areas unsuitable for intensive agriculture, like Halifax, cloth enabled many families to make ends meet, as wives and daughters span and their menfolk wove. Elsewhere cloth made the fortunes of successful entrepreneurs: the clothier Thomas Spring of Lavenham was the richest commoner in England, not much poorer than the duke of Norfolk according to the tax assessments of 1523. Those who owned the sheep profited too, despite periodic outbreaks of murrain like that in 1480-81 in which the Norfolk lawyer Roger Townshend lost over 2,000 animals. Some of the great gentry of East Anglia ran flocks of 10,000 or more, while well-planned sheep-farming laid the basis for the fortunes of Midlands families like the Spencers of Althorp. Fishing, mining, metalworking and other handicrafts were locally important, but agriculture and cloth were the only truly national industries. Where sheep, cloth and fertile food production went together it made the richest counties in England. Kent, Wiltshire, Essex, Northamptonshire, Suffolk and Berkshire were the top six in pounds per thousand acres raised by the government in the forced loan of 1522. English cloth was sold both to domestic consumers and to European customers via the developing London-Antwerp trade axis. Back from Antwerp came materials for the cloth industry such as alum and dyestuffs, manufactured goods such as high-quality cloth, linens and metal wares. Antwerp also offered European status symbols such as tapestries, paintings and books, as well as luxuries further afield, especially once the trade in spices brought by sea from the East Indies by the Portuguese was established there in 1499. Only wine, counting for more than a quarter of total imports by value in 1500, was more readily found outside Antwerp, notably at the former English stronghold of Bordeaux. Scotland traded its wool, leather, cloth and fish to France, the Netherlands and the Baltic countries for a similar range of imports.

Ports like London and Exeter flourished through this growing trade. Bristol did well out of more distant opportunities from the 1480s, as its merchants began to exploit the rich Newfoundland fishing grounds. From 1496, under the leadership of the Genoese Cabot family, merchants were commissioned to explore the Atlantic for Henry VII and set up colonies in uninhabited or conquered lands, though none as yet resulted. Meanwhile older centres of manufacture and raw wool export such as, Coventry and Boston were in steep decline. Coventry may have lost half its population between 1440 and 1550. Only London, with some 40,000 souls, counted as a big city by European standards, though it was less than half the size of Paris. Bristol or Norwich, with populations a quarter that number, would only have made decent provincial towns in the Netherlands, half the size of Tournai or Utrecht. Edinburgh was probably about the size of Bristol, Dublin rather smaller. Though a smaller proportion of the population lived in towns in Scotland, Wales, and the English Pale in Ireland than in England, urban centres were still major concentrations of wealth, business and administration. Only in Gaelic Ireland and its neighbours the Scottish Isles and Western Highlands were towns insignificant and few.

The rise and decline of different towns, the spread of weaving and enclosure produced shifts in employment and population. For the lucky this might mean going to London and making a fortune. For the unlucky it meant being arrested for vagrancy. A statute of 1495 prescribed three days in the stocks for �vagabonds, idle and suspect persons living suspiciously�; in 1531 this became a still more summary whipping and sending home. Such measures paralleled local outbursts of concern about the behaviour of the young, the poor, the mobile and the under-employed. In market towns, manufacturing areas and along major roads as well as in larger towns, local elites of yeomen, artisans and traders tried to maintain order in their communities through their positions in manorial courts, borough courts and the administration of the parish church. Charitable provision for those genuinely unable to work, through almshouses, confraternities and parish collections, increased at the same time but could not cope with the problem by the mid-sixteenth century, when poor rates began to be levied. As work opportunities for men began to contract, women's options beyond domestic work, child care and spinning contracted still further. Towns placed increasing restrictions on independent trading by women and the steady replacement of ale by hopped beer brewed in commercial breweries limited what had been an important women's trade. More in Part B....