Table Of ContentLIFE CYCLES IN ENGLAND
1560—1720
Cradle to Grave
Mary Abbott
Routledge
London and New York
First published 1996
INTRODUCTION
This is a book in three parts. It was conceived as a portable archive. The I idea
was that, faced by empty shelves in the library and too broke to buy a book to
prepare for the week’s seminar, the student who had a copy of Life Cycles in
England 1560—1720 would never be reduced to the single received authority of
the conventional key text. The portfolio of images and the dossier of extracts,
although selected and introduced by the author, would offer alternative
perspectives.
The first section of the book plots the human career in England, roughly between
1560 and 1720, from birth to old age. It opens with a chapter, Worlds of
Difference, designed to put the life stories in context. The chapter which follows,
‘Live to Die’, examines what I would argue is one of the most notable
differences between their world and ours, the manner and the meaning of death.
The plan of this section of the book is straightforward: there are chapters on the
first stages of life from conception to weaning, on childhood, youth, love and
marriage, householding and old age. If you feel that death should come at the
end of the book, feel free to read this chapter last. The material is drawn
primarily from the personal testimonies of letters, diaries and memoirs. Chapters
end with a list of suggestions for further reading.
The second section is a collection of extracts from texts written between 1560
and 1720, the great majority transcribed in the Rare Books Room in Cambridge
University Library This is a dossier of public material, much of it published
during the period in question. This section is not designed to be read from
beginning to end The dossier and the portfolio of photographs are your pocket
library or museum, the quarry which you are expected to ‘mine’ for evidence.
If you are not used to reading material written three or four hundred years ago,
you may find some of the texts hard going at first. Language is a living medium;
the meanings of words alter across time. I have given definitions for those I
suspect will prove puzzling or problematic but there may be others which I have
not identified. Context may help but a big dictionary is a better solution: the
multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary is the best. Persevere and you will
enjoy the fascination of exploring a world very different from our own — but
one in which people wrote and spoke in a language we can understand. We can
share the jokes they told each other and eavesdrop on the trials for witchcraft and
murder which riveted the attention of seventeenth-century readers and hearers.
The order in which the texts appear is to some extent arbitrary. Many of them
provide evidence on a range of topics. To take one example: the account of the
trial of two Suffolk women on charges of witchcraft (pp. 201—9). A trial is a
debate about the reliability of evidence and the ways in which that evidence
should be stacked up: the historian, like the judge and jury, is concerned with
evidence and interpretation. The evidence and argument, presented as a verbatim
account taken down by a member of the audience at this public spectacle, is
clearly relevant to the broad theme of difference between the ways we perceive
the world we inhabit and the ways in which our predecessors interpreted their
experiences. Incidentally, it also provides information (how accurate? how
typical?) about various aspects of everyday life. What was the nature of the
important business which led Dorothy Durent to leave her baby son in the care
of a neighbour she suspected of being a witch? Or were her suspicions of Amy
Duny only retrospectively significant? Did childminders normally use the breast
to pacify fractious infants? Did people often try to trap mice with tongs and
dispose of them on the fire or was this a particular response to mice which were
believed to be the familiars of a witch?
The third section is a collection of photographs of images and artefacts made in
England between 1560 and 1720. They are not included simply to decorate and
delight: they are documents to be ‘read’. (I was interested to discover that
Nicolas Poussin, the French painter, born in 1594, talked about viewers reading
his pictures.) And they are a reminder that the study of history is not an activity
confined to the classroom and the library — an observant student can find
material not only in museums and art galleries but in churches and on the
‘heritage trail’.
FURTHER READING
The following books should be readily available in the library you use. To
complement Life Cycles in England 1560—1 720, your best buy would be
Houlbrooke’s Family Life.
General studies
Houlbrooke, Ralph (1984) The English Family, 1450—1716, London
(1988) English Family Lift, 1576-1 700: An Anthology from Diaries, London
Laslett, Peter (1979) The World We Have Lost, London
Sharpe, James (1987) Early Modern England, A Social History, 1550—1760,
London
Wrightson, Keith (1982) English Society, 1580—1680, London
Diaries and memoirs
The diary of Samuel Pepys and the memoirs of Celia Fiennes and Richard
Gough provide lively and idiosyncratic commentaries on their lives and times.
Fiennes, Celia (n.d.) The Illustrated Journeys of Celia Fiennes, Christopher
Morris (ed.) London
Gough, Richard (1981) Human Nature Displayed in the History of Myddle, with
an Introduction and Notes by David Hey (ed.), London
Pepys, Samuel (1982) The Illustrated Pepys, extracts from the diary selected by
Robert Latham (ed.), London
—(1985) The Shorter Pepys, selected by Robert Latham (ed.) from the diary of
Samuel Pepys, London.
—(1995) The Diary of Samuel Pepys, R. C. Latham and W. Matthews (eds), 11
volumes including Companion and Index, London.
CHAPTER 1 Page 5
Worlds of difference
For most of us, it will be the attempt to see the world through the eye-sockets of
our predecessors that requires the greatest effort of imagination.
Three or four hundred years ago it was held that the will of God determined that
man should have dominion over all living things and justified the subordination
of women Man’s unlimited jurisdiction over the creatures of the world was in
stark contrast with his impotence in the face of sickness and the elemental forces
winds, flood, fire This powerlessness was a source of anxieties which were
magnified by the widespread belief that those who suffered were targets either of
human malice or divine disapprobation. Since earthly existence was understood
as a brief prelude to eternity serious-minded men, women and even young
children were exercised about their destination in the afterlife. Many feared
hellfire.
This chapter is designed to highlight key aspects of difference and similarity
between the early modern habitat and our own. These themes will be developed
and illustrated in later chapters and in the dossier of documents.
The technological disadvantage suffered by our predecessors in Tudor and Stuart
England is probably the easiest difference to appreciate Many of us have the
experience of living — temporarily — without gas, electricity or running water
Although it is inappropriate to draw close parallels between seventeenth-century
England and developing countries today, we have all seen films of regions in
which walking is still the normal way of getting from one place to another and
much of the water food and fuel consumed has to be carried on the heads or
shoulders of human beings or slung across the backs of pack animals We are
aware if only at second hand, of material deprivation and of the killing power of
hunger and epidemic disease It may be harder to envisage a world without
telephones, sound recordings film, radio or television a world in which only a
minority of adults possessed the skills of reading and writing, a world in which
watches and mirrors were novelties
THE SOCIAL ORDER
William Harrison (born 1534), the Rector of Radwinter, not far from Saffron
Walden in Essex, published his Description of England in 1577. In his view,
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“We in England divide our people commonly into four sorts, as gentlemen,
citizens or burgesses, yeomen and artificers (skilled craftsmen) and labourers. Of
gentlemen, the first and chief (next the King) be princes, dukes, marquises, earls,
viscounts and barons and these be called gentlemen of the greater sort, or (as our
common usage of speech is) lords and noblemen; and next unto them be knights,
esquires and, last of all, they that are simply called gentlemen.”
‘Gentlemen of the greater sort’ had hereditary titles and were summoned to the
House of Lords. Bishops were also ‘called Lords and held the same room in the
Parliament House’. In Harrison’s England, the critical social boundary separated
gentlemen from the rest — the plebeians — but mere gentlemen (gentlemen who
were not peers, knights or esquires) prove harder to define than their superiors.
Harrison argued that those who were able and willing ‘to bear the port, charge
and countenance’ or, to put it i language which might be used today, to maintain
the appearance, dignity responsibilities and expenses associated with the rank of
gentleman were recognised as such. Harrison specifically included those with an
academic background like his own — he was a Master of Arts of the University
of Oxford.
Yeomen, though not gentlemen, were men of substance and ‘commonly’ kept
‘good houses’. Most were farmers, but a good many of them ha interests in other
industrial or commercial enterprises, as millers or innkeepers, for instance.
The majority of people in England belonged to Harrison’s large and
miscellaneous ‘fourth and last sort’: the smaller farmers, the poorer craftsmen
and wage earners. Although he lumps them together, the ‘last sort’ w not by any
means a homogeneous group. Most English towns and village were small-scale
face-to-face societies; people had a very shrewd idea their neighbours’ worth:
money, connections and personal repute all play a part in the equation. Some of
the ‘fourth… sort’ played a significant pa in their local community, as Harrison
acknowledged: it was from among their ranks that many of the officers who ran
the parishes were recruited. Others were regarded as parasites or threats to law
and order. Coping with the problems presented by the poor and destitute of their
neighbourhood was a standing item on the agenda of the churchwardens,
constables and overseers of the poor. Harrison devoted a later chapter in his
Description this topic. Poverty was, he rightly observed, an issue of European
dimensions:
“There is no commonwealth at this day in Europe wherein there is not great store
of poor people, and those necessarily to be relieved by the wealthier sort, which
otherwise would starve and come to utter confusion. With us the poor is
commonly divided into three sorts, so that some are poor by impotency, as the
fatherless child, the aged, blind and lame, and the diseased person that is judged
to be incurable; the second are poor by casualty [ as the wounded soldier, the
decayed householder, and the sick person visited with
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grievous and painful diseases; the third consisteth of the thriftless poor, as the
rioter that hath consumed all, the vagabond that will abide nowhere but run neth
up and down from place to place (as it were seeking work and finding none), and
finally the rogue and strumpet, which… run to and fro over all the realm..
For the first two sorts, that is to say the poor by impotency and the poor by
casualty, which are the true poor indeed and for whom the Word [ God] doth
bind us to make some daily provision, there is order taken throughout every
parish in the land that weekly collection shall be made for their help and
sustentation, to the end that they should not scatter abroad and, by begging here
and there, annoy both town and country. Authority is also given unto the
justices.. . to see… that these two sorts are sufficiently provided for… . But if
they refuse to be supported by this benefit.. . and will rather endeavour… to
maintain their idle trades, then they are adjudged to be parcel of the third sort
and so… are often corrected with sharp execution and whip of justice abroad.”
Harrison’s politically conscious contemporaries would have recognised this as a
reference to a recent piece of legislation, ‘An act for the punishment of
vagabonds and the relief of the poor and impotent [ These principles were
enshrined in the definitive version of the Poor Law which was enacted in 1601
and remained on the statute book until 1834.
To a late twentieth-century reader, the absence of women from Harrison’s
analysis is a striking omission. But contemporaries would have found nothing
amiss. It was assumed that men would head households, manage businesses and
participate in public affairs; women who appeared in these roles generally did so
as standins for their fathers, their brothers, their husbands or their sons.
In the seventeenth century the currency of rank was devalued. More peers were
created. In 1611, in the reign of James I, the first baronets were appointed. Their
heirs inherited the title ‘Sir’ but, unlike holders of superior titles, baronets did
not have a seat in the Upper House of Parliament. Courtesy titles like ‘Esquire’
and ‘Mr’ were used more freely. The debase meant of titles did not erode social
distinctions: knowing your place, defer ring to your superiors, indoors as well as
in the wider community, were obligations drummed in infancy. Day by day, your
gender, the food you ate, the clothes you wore, the company you kept
proclaimed your status in the social pecking order.
As Harrison’s analysis suggests, wealth, power and status were concentrated in
the hands of a tiny minority of gentlemen landowners. Theirs was not a closed
caste. The fortunes accumulated by government servants, successful lawyers,
merchants and farmers invested in the purchase of lands
— and appropriate accessories — could secure their descendants’ admission to
the aristocracy. The linear descendants of William Cecil (born 1520) still occupy
the prodigious houses which his sons built — Burleigh, which dominates the
town of Stamford, and Hatfield in Hertfordshire.
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Refined and wealthy townspeople, who shared the landowners’ culture, also
qualified as gentlemen and -women. Independent farmers and crafts men headed
the plebeian majority of the population. Samuel Pepys, born a plebeian in 1633,
made his fortune as an official of the Navy Board: his increasing wealth and
style of living were signalled in the way he was addressed. Had he taken up his
father’s trade and become a not-very- successful tailor, like his younger brother
Tom, he would have stayed plain ‘Sam Pepys’. As a graduate of the University
of Cambridge he was promoted to ‘Mr Pepys’. As a rising servant of the Crown,
to his delight, flattering correspondents addressed him as ‘Samuel Pepys Esq.’, a
style formally the preserve of the younger sons of peers and their eldest sons and
the eldest sons of knights and their eldest sons.
Some elements of a plebeian inheritance were harder to shed than eat ing habits
and dress codes. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child born on the Feast of the
Nativity in 1642, was, according to the popular superstitions of his day, doubly
destined for success. The son of an illiterate Lincolnshire farmer, he worked his
way through Trinity College, Cambridge. By the time that he was knighted by
Queen Anne in 1705 he was Master of the Mint and President of the Royal
Society in his sixties, forty years away from the daily task of fetching and
carrying, emptying chamber pots for his fellow undergraduates. What disturbed
him was his birth — his mother was carrying him when she married — and his
humble descent. Plebeian women quite frequently went pregnant to the altar;
among gentlewomen prenuptial pregnancy was exceptional. When the first Earl
of Sandwich and his clerk Samuel Pepys were discussing the current ‘story about
how the Duke of York got my Lord Chancellor’s daughter with child’ in October
1660, the Earl repeated ‘one of his father’s many old sayings… that he that doth
get a wench with child and marries her afterward’ was as ill-advised as the man
who ‘should shit in his hat and then clap it on his head’. In attempts to present
his family in the best light, Newton made at least four versions of the pedigree
which was required of new knights by the College of Heralds. In the copy now
in Jerusalem he backdated his parents’ marriage to 1639.
Harrison’s ‘fourth and last sort’ — the labourers — were rarely literate; by no
means all farmers and craftsmen could read and write. Female literacy was low.
Other codes were used to convey information. Pub signs are common today: in
the past all sorts of tradesmen hung out signs to indicate the services they
offered. Writing masters commonly traded under the Hand and Pen — as
Richard Gething did in Fetter Lane in 1616, Christopher Smeaton in the Strand
in 1685, Eleazar Wigan on Great Tower Hill in 1696 and John Rayner in St
Paul’s Churchyard in 1709. In the 1690s you would have found Henry Walton,
locksmith at the sign of the Brass Lock and Key in St Martin’s Lane; Ralph
Sterop and John Yarwell at the Archimedes and Three Pair of Golden Spectacles
in Ludgate Street could have supplied you with reading glasses and telescopes.
(All these examples come from London.) The county maps which Robert Plot
included in the Natural Histories of Oxfordshire
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and Staffordshire which he published in the reign of Charles II have heraldic
borders with a key to enable readers to identify the houses of the gentry.
A coat of arms was a gentleman’s badge and would have been well known to
everyone in his neighbourhood, readers or not.
However, some familiarity with the meanings of Latin words was a prerequisite
for understanding most serious books and, for academic work, a command of
Latin was essential. Nevertheless readers, and hearers, who had no Latin, had
access to a rich literary store. The chapbooks, cheap and crudely printed,
illustrated with bold woodcut pictures and decorations, were widely read and
heard: they came in two varieties — the ‘godly’ and the ‘merry’, which
contained advice to the lovelorn, jokes, love stories and tales of dering-do,
horoscopes and guides to palmistry.
The English version of the Bible was, of course, the best known text of all, the
book most commonly mentioned in inventories. It was a treasury of stories and
poetry, a masterpiece of translation begun by William Tyndale in the reign of
Henry VIII and revised by a committee of scholars under James I. The story of
the Prodigal Son was as familiar as the tale of Dick Whittington. Biblical phrases
were echoed in the spoken and written language of readers and hearers. The
Bible, of course, was considerably more than an ordinary book since it gave,
partly in clear and partly in cipher, access to the mind of God, existing outside
time. It could be consulted not merely as a general guide to theology and
personal conduct but also as a source of specific divinely inspired advice on the
right response to particular circumstances. Oaths were sworn on it — kissing
‘the book’ endorsed a promise. The habit of using the family Bible to record the
dates of birth and names of children is further evidence for its special status. The
Bible was also a political text. Used to justify inequalities of rank and gender by
the establishment, it was also, as Tudor regimes recognised, a potentially
subversive text. It was easy for the disaffected to represent the tiny army of
righteous men who march through the books of the Old Testament, and indeed
the New, finding grace in the eyes of the Lord, as heroes of dissent.
John Bunyan, whose Pilgrim’s Progress, published in 1678, was a steady seller
for well over a hundred years, second only to the English Bible in popularity,
was the son of a man who mended pots and pans. He had very little schooling —
the Bible provided him with his higher education. The careers of Samuel Pepys
and Isaac Newton, however, illustrate the value of a formal university education
to the ambitious plebeian youth.
At all social levels women were disadvantaged by comparison with their male
counterparts; in the middle and upper ranks of society they had much more
