Daily Life in Elizabethan England (6 page)

Freemen may have accounted for a quarter to a half of the adult male population in some towns; in London the figure appears to have been as much as three-quarters. They were usually male householders who had acquired their status in one of three ways. Patrimony was the right of any citizen’s son to become a citizen himself once he came of age. Redemption allowed a person to purchase citizenship. The third route was through apprenticeship: a person who successfully completed apprenticeship in a trade was allowed to become a citizen.

The process of gaining the freedom of the town was commonly administered through the town’s guilds, reflecting the close relationship between town government and the guild system. The guilds, often called
companies,
were trade associations that governed the practice of a particular trade in the town, including product quality, working conditions, and who was allowed to ply the trade. The correlation between guild and trade was not always precise. In small towns, many trades might be administered by a single guild: the Mercer’s Company in Kingston-on-Thames included haberdashers, grocers, chandlers, painters, cutlers, vintners, glaziers, and barbers. Some towns had only a single guild to which all tradesmen belonged. Even in a large city like London, with its 60-odd different guilds, a person might belong to one guild even though he practiced the trade of another.

Most urban freemen attained their status through a period of apprenticeship. Upon successfully completing the period of training required by the guild, the apprentice became a freeman of the guild and so acquired freedom of the town as well. A freeman initially ranked as a journeyman, meaning that he was free to work in the trade under someone else’s employ. Those who had the means and were approved by the guild could set themselves up as independent practitioners, called
masters
or
householders.
All freemen had some participation in the governance of the guild, but as with the town government, real authority typically lay in the hands
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Daily Life in Elizabethan England

Table 2.1.

The Social Hierarchy

Aristocracy and

Rural

Urban

Their Servants

Clergy

Commons

Commons

Others

Queen

Duke (1,

executed 1572)

Marquis (1–2)

Earl (ca. 20)

Archbishop

Mayor of

(2)

London

Viscount (2)

Baron (ca. 40)

Bishop (24)

Knight (ca. 300–

Archdeacon

Alderman of

Major legal

500)

London; Mayor

officer

of great town

Esquire, Gentle—

Parish priest

Lesser mayor

Professional

man (ca. 16,000)

(ca. 8,000)

or civic officer;

(Physician,

Merchant

Lawyer, etc.)

Yeoman

Deacon,

Yeoman

Free tradesman

Master of Arts

Vicar

(ca.

500,000)

Groom

Husband-Journeyman

man

Page

Cottager

Apprentice

Laborer,

Laborer, Servant

Servant

Vagrant

Vagrant

A schematized table of the social hierarchy. Approximate numbers have been included where available to give a sense of proportions. Ranks at the same horizontal level could be considered roughly equivalent.

of a self-coopting oligarchy of leading masters, often called liverymen.

The wealth and status of guild members varied enormously: at the lower end, ordinary freemen might live at a level comparable to a yeoman or husbandman in the country, while the richer merchants in London had incomes that approached that of the peerage.

Outside the guilds were those whose work was not part of the guild system, with limited prospects of advancement: servants, porters, water carriers, day laborers, and other unskilled workers. Nor did all skilled workers belong to a guild. Few guilds were authorized to exercise author-Society 21

ity outside the town where they were based, so a tradesman might set up shop beyond the city’s jurisdiction in order to avoid guild restriction. The suburbs of London were a magnet for skilled craftsmen, often foreign, who could not break into the guild system, and many crafts were practiced in the countryside beyond the reach of guild supervision.

THE UNDERCLASS

Unskilled laborers were always at risk of falling into the substantial and growing number of unemployed poor. Perhaps 10 percent of the population at any given time were in need of assistance to support themselves, with the rate of poverty higher in the towns than in the country, due to the constant influx of people in need of work. Many of the poor were orphans, widows, abandoned wives, the elderly, and the infirm; but their ranks were increased by growing numbers of unemployed but able-bodied

adults displaced by economic change, as well as by men returning from service in the army or navy.

Villagers who were unable to support themselves might turn to the

charity of neighbors and relatives. In the towns, there were endowed private institutions, called hospitals, that took in residents for the medium or long term. In London, Christ’s Hospital received orphans and foundlings, St. Bartholomew’s Hospital provided care for those with curable illnesses, St. Thomas Hospital took in the disabled, and Bethlehem Hospital housed those with mental illnesses. Other foundations provided permanent residences for the elderly poor. Conditions in these institutions were generally spartan at best; all were chronically underfunded, and none had the capacity to accommodate everyone who was in need of a place.

In response to growing concerns over the problems of poverty and

vagrancy, Elizabeth’s government began to implement laws to punish
THE PUNISHMENT OF VAGRANTS, 1573

At High Holborn, county Middlesex and elsewhere in the same county on the same day, Nicholas Welshe, Anthony Musgrove, Hugh Morice, John Thomas, Philip Thomas, Alice Morice and Katherine Hevans, being over fourteen years of age, and strong and fit for labour, were masterless vagrants without any lawful means of subsistence. Whereupon it was decreed that each of the said vagrants should be whipped severely and burnt on the right ear.

Middlesex County Records, cited Arthur F. Kinney,
Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy
Beggars: A New Gallery of Tudor and Early Stuart Rogue Literature
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1973), 17.

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Daily Life in Elizabethan England

vagrants while helping those who were genuinely unable to work. Already in 1552 a law had been passed encouraging those of means to contribute to a voluntary parish fund for the support of the poor. In 1563 this contribution was made mandatory, and the first comprehensive Poor Law was issued in 1572, establishing the framework for dealing with poverty that remained in place until the 1800s.

The Poor Laws acknowledged for the first time the existence of involuntary unemployment. Each parish was to take care of its own residents, based on a mandatory tax, called the Poor Rate, levied on those able to pay. Those physically unable to work were to be given regular stipends.

The unemployed were to be apprenticed, placed in service, or sent to workhouses where they were given tasks that included pulling apart old ropes to make oakum (used in sealing ships) or operating treadmills to grind flour. Those who shirked labor might be whipped or imprisoned, and vagrants from outside the parish were to be whipped and sent back to their parish of origin. This last provision could be a real problem for the unemployed poor, since anyone leaving their parish in search of work could theoretically be punished as a vagrant (although it was possible to get a license to travel from a local justice of the peace).

The Elizabethan Poor Laws lie behind the dismal and abusive world

that Dickens would depict two and a half centuries later in
Oliver Twist.

In their own day, the Poor Laws were a serious and innovative attempt to address a growing problem, but they had little real impact on either poverty or vagrancy. The underlying problem of national-level economic change could not ultimately be resolved by parish-level solutions. Rural communities were unable to support their growing populations, and the rural poor who had no prospects in their villages had no choice but to migrate in search of employment. These migrants would eventually gravitate toward emerging centers of manufacture, providing the labor that supported Britain’s industrialization after 1700.

In the mean time, long-term unemployment could lead to a life among the growing number of permanent beggars and vagabonds, who may

have numbered as many as 20,000. In combination with the gypsies, they were beginning to create an underworld culture of their own; in fact, the Elizabethans were both fascinated and horrified by the counterculture of the lawless, much as people today are intrigued by the culture of the Mafia or street gangs. A whole genre of literature emerged that purported to offer a glimpse into the alternative society in which these rogues circulated: social organization, tricks of the trade, and the distinctive
cant
in which they spoke to each other. John Awdeley’s
Fraternity of Vagabonds
(1561) describes a few types:

An
Abraham Man
is he that walketh bare-armed and bare-legged, and feigneth himself mad, and carrieth a pack of wool, or a stick with bacon on it, or suchlike toy, and nameth himself Poor Tom . . .

Society 23

A
Prigman
goeth with a stick in his hand like an idle person. His property is to steal clothes off the hedge, which they call “storing of the rogueman,” or else to filch poultry, carrying them to the alehouse, which they call the “bousing inn,” and there sit playing at cards and dice, till that is spent which they have so filched. . .

A
Kintchin Co
is called an idle runagate boy.4

Thomas Harman’s
A Caveat for Common Cursitors
(1566) offers a canting conversation between two of these vagabonds:

Bene Lightmans to thy quarroms! In what libken hast thou libbed in this darkmans, whether
in a libbege or in the strummel?

Good morrow to thy body! In what house hast thou lain in all night, whether in a bed or in the straw?

I couched a hogshead in a skipper this darkmans.

I lay me down to sleep in a barn this night.

I tour the strummel trine upon thy nab-cheat and togeman. . . . Bring we to Rome-vill,
to nip a bung; so shall we have lour for the bousing-ken. And when we bring back to the
dewse-a-vill, we will filch some duds off the ruffmans or mill the ken for a lag of duds.

I see the straw hang upon thy cap and coat. . . . Go we to London to cut a purse; then shall we have money for the alehouse. And when we come back again into the country, we will steal some linen clothes off some hedges, or rob some house for a buck [laundry-tub] of clothes.5

The cutpurse alluded to here typically wore a horn sheath on his thumb and carried a small knife, so that he could cut people’s purses off their
WILLIAM FLEETWOOD, CITY RECORDER OF LONDON,

DESCRIBES A SCHOOL FOR CUTPURSES IN 1585

One Wotton, a gentleman born, and sometime a merchant man of good

credit, who falling by time into decay, kept an alehouse at Smart’s Quay, near Billingsgate, and after for some misdemeanor being put down, he reared up a new trade of life, and in this same house he procured all the cutpurses about this city to repair to his same house. There was a school house set up to learn young boys to cut purses. There was hung up two devices: the one was a pocket, the other was a purse. The pocket had in it certain counters and was hung about with hawks’ bells, and over the top did hang a little sacring bell; and he that could take a counter without any noise was allowed to be a “Public Foister”; and he that could take a piece of silver out of the purse without the noise of any bells, he was adjudged a “Judicial Nipper.”

Note that a foister is a pickpocket, and a nipper is termed a pickpurse, or a cutpurse.

R. H. Tawney and Eileen Power, eds.,
Tudor Economic Documents
(London: Longmans, 1924), 2.337–8.

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Daily Life in Elizabethan England

belts by slicing against his thumb. Pickpockets would actually filch valuables out of his victims’ pockets (the word
filch,
as the dialogue suggests, comes from the dialect of the Elizabethan rogue). Such thieves especially frequented crowded places like markets, fairs, and public spectacles.

SOCIAL STABILITY AND AMBITION

In principle, Elizabethan society was a rigid and orderly hierarchy that discouraged the pursuit of personal advancement. People were expected to live within the social class of their parents, a man following his father’s vocation or one comparable to it, a woman marrying into a family similar in status to the one in which she was born. Each person was supposed to fit into a stable social network, remaining in place to preserve the steady state of society as a whole.

The realities were much more complex. It was not always easy to be certain of a person’s social status. Formal titles could be verified, as in the case of a nobleman, a knight, or a freeman in a guild. The less formal distinctions, such as between an esquire and a gentleman, or between a gentleman and a yeoman, were not always so clear. A prosperous yeoman might hold more land than a minor gentleman; by subletting it to tenants of his own, he could live off the rents and slip into the gentlemanly class.

Successful merchants often used their profits to purchase land and make themselves gentlemen. For women, the opportunities for advancement were more limited, since they were generally not in a position to accumulate wealth or power independent of a husband, although a woman