A Short History of Early Modern England

British Literature in Context

Peter C. Herman

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444394993
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Englische Literaturkritik

A Short History of Early Modern England presents the historical and cultural information necessary for a richer understanding of English Renaissance literature.

• Written in a clear and accessible style for an undergraduate level audience
• Gives an overview of the period's history as well as an understanding of the historiographic issues
• Explores key historical and literary events, from the Wars of the Roses to the publication of John Milton's Paradise Regained
• Features in depth explanations of key terms and concepts, such as absolutism and the Elizabethan Settlement

Map 0.1 The Countries of England and Wales before 1972.

1

An Overview of Early Modern England

Before we begin, the two terms in the above chapter title require definition. First, why “early modern” as opposed to “Renaissance”? Literary scholars and historians have come to prefer the former term because it is more capacious. “Renaissance,” with its emphasis on the rebirth of classical learning and culture, necessarily privileges high culture, whereas there is increasing attention to non-elite cultural products and history, which “early modern” can encompass.¹ Second, “early modern” has the advantage of greater accuracy, because the world we live in at the start of the twenty-first century – the “modern” world – has its beginnings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This period witnessed the rise of the nation state, the transformation of government into a professional bureaucracy, the establishment of the modern economy, including empires, world trade and stock markets, and the development of science. This period also witnessed less happy events, such as wars of religion, a revolution, the execution of a king, and regular outbreaks of the plague. Nearly all (the exception being disease) were greatly enabled by one invention: the printing press, brought into England in the late fifteenth century by William Caxton (c. 1414–92), who became England’s first printer and book retailer. The early version of modernity, including the adoption of new technologies of communication (the printed word), can be traced back to the Tudor–Stuart era, and so literary scholars and historians have tended toward replacing “Renaissance” with “early modern.”

Second, what do we mean when we talk about “England”? The island of Britain (largest of the British Isles) contains two kingdoms and one principality. First, there is the kingdom of England, which takes up roughly three fourths of the island. The most fertile and wealthiest part of the country is in the southeast, not coincidentally the part closest to Europe, and includes London, Oxford, and Cambridge. The principality of Wales, located on the western part of the island, joined England under King Edward I (1239–1307), but Wales retained its own language and identity throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To the far north (beyond Cumberland and Northumberland), lies Scotland, independent of the English crown since the Treaty of Edinburgh of 1328, and sometimes England’s friend, sometimes England’s enemy. Despite the efforts of King James (1566–1625), the sixth king of Scotland and the first of that name to rule England, Scotland would remain its own entity until the Act of Union in 1707. The fourth component is Ireland, once called the graveyard of English reputations, and colonized by England since Norman times. By 1485, direct English authority was restricted to a small area around Dublin, known as “the Pale.” Rebellions against English rule, sparked by resentment against the English presence, Tudor and Stuart attempts to impose Protestantism on the Catholic population, and the second-class status of the native Irish, were brutally repressed. “England” in the Tudor-Stuart era was neither homogeneous nor entirely harmonious, but rather a patchwork of restive, independent and semi-independent political and ethnic identities.

Population Size, Family Life, and Life Expectancy

England’s population steadily grew over the course of the Tudor–Stuart era. In 1485, approximately 2.2 million people lived in England and Wales. By 1660, that number had risen to 5.5 million. Progress, however, was not steady. Outbreaks of the plague and bad harvests, especially the disastrous years 1594–97, significantly increased mortality and halted growth. Overall, the population increased, as did the size of the cities, especially London, which rose from approximately 40,000 inhabitants in 1500 to over 200,000 by 1600. By the end of the seventeenth century, London’s population may have reached 600,000. By way of contrast, the next largest cities were Norwich (15,000), and York and Bristol (12,000 each). While London would grow to be the largest city in Europe, most people lived in rural England.

People got married in this period later than we commonly think. Childhood marriage very occasionally happened at the highest levels of the aristocracy, and even there, only rarely. Robert Cecil, Lord Burghley, Elizabeth I’s right-hand man, refused a possible suitor – the son of an earl, no less – for his daughter because

I have determined (notwithstanding I have been very honourably offered matches) not to treat of marrying of her, if I may live so long, until she be above fifteen or sixteen; and if I were of more likelihood myself to live longer than I look to do, she should not, with my liking, be married before she were near eighteen or twenty.²

Burghley’s preferences are backed up by archival evidence. Studies of parish records show that the average age for marriage among non-aristocratic couples was 25 for the period 1550–99, rising to 26 between 1600 and 1650.³ But while the period’s literature abounds in close relations between parents and children, family life in the early modern period was fundamentally different than today. Childhood as we know it did not exist, and most adolescents, rich or poor, were sent to live, work, and serve in other households. The identification with the household exhibited by Capulet’s servants (“The quarrel is between our masters, and us their men” [Romeo and Juliet 1.1.20]) would have been very familiar to Shakespeare’s audience.⁴

The life expectancy for England’s growing population varied, as one might expect, according to the wealth of the population, members of the elite enjoying a better chance at survival than those who lived in more crowded, less healthy circumstances. But even in the best of circumstances, childbirth, infancy, and childhood were fraught with danger. The chances of mothers dying in childbirth were just under 10 deaths per 1000 births, jumping upward to 16 per 1000 in the later seventeenth century (nobody quite knows why). But rates in London were 30 to 50% higher than in rural England (again, nobody is quite sure why, but crowded and unsanitary conditions in the city likely played a part). By way of contrast, the rate of maternal mortality in the industrialized West today is six to eight maternal deaths per 100,000 births. What this means is that “most people approaching a child-birth of their own or within their immediate family would have known someone who had died in child-birth within very recent memory.”⁵ Women necessarily looked forward to birth with trepidation, but also piety. In a diary entry from 1689, one Mrs. Witton recorded that she considered pregnancy “a means to keep me on my watch and so make me ready for life or death.”⁶ Mortality rates for infants and children were also by modern standards appallingly high – approximately 20%.

However, once one reached adulthood, the chances were relatively good for survival until one’s fifties or sixties. Shakespeare, for example, died at age 52; Michael Drayton at 68; and John Milton at 66. There are rare cases of people reaching their eighties and nineties. Jane Shore, for example, who was Edward IV’s mistress and featured prominently in Thomas More’s history of Richard III (also mentioned in Shakespeare’s Richard III), lived to the ripe age of 82, and the political philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan (1651), lived to 91! But one needs the qualification of “relatively” because of the omnipresent threat of death from one of the many outbreaks of bubonic plague, or “the black death” (which was transmitted by rats) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or such diseases as dysentery, known at the time as “the bloody flux,” which killed Henry V.

Printing, Scribal Circulation, and Literacy

The latter years of Edward IV’s rule witnessed one of the most consequential developments ever in Western culture: the invention of the printing press and its importation into England. Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1398–1468) combined movable type, oil-based ink, and the use of a screw press to create the printing press, and the technology spread very rapidly, with presses set up in Cologne (1466), Rome (1467), Venice (1469), Paris (1470), and Cracow (1473). William Caxton (c. 1415–92) brought the printing press to England in 1475 or 1476, and the first book he published was The History of Troy (c. 1476). Caxton’s second great contribution was to focus on works by native English writers, including John Lydgate and Geoffrey Chaucer (his edition of The Canterbury Tales appeared in 1477). One cannot overestimate the importance of the print revolution. books and the ideas contained within them (sometimes revolutionary ideas) started to become widely available, and, while universal literacy was a long way off, the printing press enabled the steady spread of reading from the monastic and aristocratic elites down the social ladder, with corrosive effects on the hegemony of ideas.

Even as print came to serve the interests of authority, it equally came to serve the interests of those who would resist that authority, allowing dissident ideas to circulate and coalesce, in many cases allowing new communities to form through the lineaments of a book trade.⁷

Printing, it has been rightly said, made possible the Protestant Reformation by allowing a much larger distribution of the Bible than was previously possible. Every literate person could now access the central texts of Christianity, which in turn further encouraged the spread of literacy. The printing press would also play a shaping role in the dissemination of radical ideas during the 1640s and 1650s.

The authorities were quite aware of the power of the press, and in 1538 Henry VIII instituted press licensing as a way of trying to suppress debate on doctrinal matters. Except for a brief period during Edward VI’s reign, when licensing was suspended, all books in the Tudor–Stuart era needed to be submitted to the government for approval. But it would be a mistake to think that Tudor–Stuart press censorship was unified and monolithic, equivalent to censorship in contemporary tyrannies. Censorship “proceeded ad hoc rather than by unifying principle,” and while one can find occasional spectacular instances of censorship, such Elizabeth I’s 1589 order for the destruction of the Marprelate tracts and the Archbishop of Canterbury’s 1599 banning of satires, epigrams, unlicensed histories and plays, overall authors and printers seem to have been granted an amazing amount of latitude.⁸ Nor was it hard to evade the censors. Thomas Deloney’s proto-novels of the late 1590s, such as Jack of Newbury, were likely published without a license, yet were so popular that the initial editions were literally read out of existence, and Elizabeth’s government could never shut down the Marprelate press.

The invention and subsequent growth of the book trade in England, however, did not mean that scribal circulation, meaning writing fiction and poetry by hand and then circulating the manuscript among a small group, some of whom might make further copies for themselves or others, came to halt. Quite the opposite. Throughout the early modern period, manuscript transmission and circulation thrived, and we know (or suspect) that some of the most important pieces of early modern literature, such as Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, the poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt and John Donne, and William Shakespeare’s sonnets, began life in manuscript and only later appeared in print. Sometimes class would play a role in preferring manuscript to print (publishing a book for cash might seem below a gentleman’s dignity), but sometimes “scribal circulation might also be chosen for the speed with which texts could be put into circulation.”⁹ It was quicker to copy an important speech in Parliament, for example, than wait for the cumbersome process of print publication. Scribal and print circulation, in other words, happily co-existed in the early modern period.

The existence of words on the page of course assumes the ability to decipher them, and while it is superficially evident that literacy increased as the years went by, — historians agree that the Tudor–Stuart era was an age of “increasing literacy, education, and book ownership”¹⁰ — determining the precise level of literacy in the early modern period faces serious difficulties. First, the term resists easy definition: does “literate” mean reading and writing? Or reading alone? Also, literacy rates (however defined) varied according to geography and one’s place on the social ladder. London wa...