A Brief History of the Tudor Age (25 page)

The Act did not apply to an innkeeper who resold them to customers in his inn; to anyone who had been licensed by the JPs as a common drover and who resold them more than forty miles from the
place where he bought them; or to anyone living within one mile of the sea who bought and resold fish. But Parliament had dealt with profiteering in imported fish in another Statute in 1542.
Fishermen in the Cinque Ports, and in other places in Sussex and Kent, were in the habit of going to sea and meeting French and Flemish fishermen from Picardy, Normandy, Flanders or Zeeland in the
Channel or the North Sea, buying their fish from them, and bringing it back to England to resell at a profit. Parliament, believing that the fish would be sold at cheaper prices if the French and
Flemish fishermen came to English ports and sold it there themselves, made it illegal for anyone to buy fish abroad, or at sea, and resell it in the King’s realm; but this did not apply to
fish that had been bought in Ireland, Scotland, the Orkneys and Shetlands, or in Iceland or Newfoundland.

In view of the law which prohibited artisans and labourers from leaving their employment without their masters’ consent before the expiry of their term of service, many workmen refused to
enter into the usual contract of employment for a year or three months. They became casual labourers, or ‘journeymen’, who agreed to serve a master only from day to day, and left, when
they felt inclined, to take a better job elsewhere. This was prohibited by an Act of 1550, which declared that ‘many young folk and servants of sundry occupations’ would not take
employment by the year, ‘but at their liberty by the day, week or otherwise work . . . to the intent that they will live idly at their pleasure, and flee and resort from
place to place, whereof ensueth more inconveniences than can be at this present expressed and declared’. So it was enacted that weavers, tailors, shoemakers and other craftsmen were not to
employ any unmarried person for a term of service of less than three months, on pain of one month’s imprisonment and a fine of 40s.

Every journeyman who worked at any trade was to be compelled to accept any employment which he was offered in his trade for three months, six months or a year at wages which, if the parties
could not agree, should be assessed as reasonable by the mayor or the local JPs. If he refused to take this employment, he was to be punished by one month’s imprisonment and a fine of 20s.
The statute also enacted that no unmarried person who had never been married – it did not apply to widowers – could be employed as a husbandman for a term of less than one year.

The laws regulating wages and hours of work continued to be widely avoided, and in 1563 Elizabeth I’s Parliament tried again. It recognized that one reason why the law had not been
enforced was because the rise in prices had made the wages too low; so the Act no longer fixed a maximum wage for the various classes of labourers, but, taking inflation into account, enacted that
the wages should be fixed by the local JPs, who had to meet for this purpose every year within six weeks after Easter and send their order to be confirmed by the Privy Council before 12 July. Any
employer who paid more than the maximum wage laid down by the JPs was to be punished by ten days’ imprisonment and a fine of £5, and a servant who accepted a higher wage was to be
sentenced to twenty-one days’ imprisonment. The Act confirmed the working hours laid down in the earlier Acts. Between the middle of March and the middle of September the husbandmen and
artisans were to be at work by 5 a.m. and not leave work till between 7 and 8 p.m., and their rest breaks during the day were not to exceed two and a half hours, including half an hour ‘at
the most’ for a sleep between the middle of May and the middle of
August. Between the middle of September and the middle of May they were to work from dawn to dusk, with
one and a half hours for work breaks.

The Act of 1563 went further than any earlier legislation in conscripting labour for the farms. It drew up a comprehensive list of thirty-one trades, from clothworkers and tailors to
arrowheadmakers and cooks, and enacted that any unmarried man, or married man under thirty, who had been trained in these trades could be ordered by the mayor or local JPs to take employment in his
trade on a yearly contract of service unless he was working in husbandry or in the household of a nobleman or gentleman. Any other man between the ages of twelve and sixty, unless he was a
fisherman, a sailor, a university student, or if he or his father owned land worth 40s. a year or goods worth £10, could be compelled to work as a husbandman for any master who was willing to
employ him. Any unmarried woman between the ages of twelve and forty could be ordered by the JPs to take service for a year, a quarter, a week or a day with any master whom they saw fit to appoint.
If the man or woman refused to accept this employment, they were to be imprisoned until they agreed to take the job. The JPs were given power to order that at haymaking and harvest time any artisan
‘and persons as be meet to labour’ should work from day to day on the land for any farmer whom the JPs nominated; and if they refused to do so, they were to be placed in the stocks for
two days and one night. No master could dismiss a servant, and no servant could leave his employment, without a quarter’s notice on either side, except for a good reason which had been
accepted by the local JPs; and any servant who did so was to be imprisoned. The Act also provided that any servant who assaulted his master, mistress or any person appointed to a position of
authority over him was to be imprisoned for a year and suffer any further punishment that the JPs chose to inflict, provided that it did not entail the loss of his life or limb.

At the end of their terms of service, the husbandman and artisan were not permitted to leave the town or parish in which
they had been employed, unless they had obtained a
certificate from the local vicar, for which the vicar was entitled to charge them twopence. The certificate was to be signed and dated by the vicar, and to be in this form: ‘Memorand, that AB
late servant to CD of E, husbandman, in the county of —, is licensed to depart from his said master and is at his liberty to serve elsewhere, according to the statute in the case made.’
No one was permitted to employ any person who did not produce such a certificate, and any workman who did not produce it within twenty-one days, when required to do so, was to be whipped as a
vagabond.

The Act attempted to prevent husbandmen from leaving the land by enacting that craftsmen could only take a youth as an apprentice if he lived in a market town in the same county and was not the
son of a husbandman or labourer.

It was the JPs themselves who came off best as a result of the statute. It provided that every JP who carried out his duties under the Act was entitled to five shillings a day for his expenses,
to be paid to him from the parish rates.

If the MPs hoped that this long and complicated statute of 1563 would finally solve the problem of the labour shortage in husbandry, they were disappointed. There continued to be evasions of the
law, and when Parliament passed another Act in 1597 to clarify some ambiguities, it complained that the Act of 1563 was not being properly enforced.

The government throughout the Tudor Age was also concerned with the problem of housing for agricultural workers, for they knew that one of the factors which threatened to cause the decay of
husbandry was that no houses were available for husbandmen. An Act of 1489 compelled landowners who let arable land to maintain in a good condition any houses on the land; but this Act was
ineffective, and more far-reaching legislation was passed in the last years of the Tudor Age. A statute of 1597 enacted that any house which had been let with 20 acres of land for at least three
years since the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558, except the dwelling house of a nobleman or gentleman,
‘shall be adjudged a House of Husbandry for ever’; and any
landowner who had allowed houses of husbandry to fall into disrepair since 1558 was to rebuild a specified number of new houses to replace them.

There was another great cause for concern, which was as serious as the decay of husbandry. The shortage of timber was already being felt at the end of the fifteenth century, and it became much
worse during the Tudor Age. Wood was still very largely used in housebuilding, as well as in the building and repair of ships, and it was the most usual form of fuel, though peat was also burned,
and by the middle of the sixteenth century coal was becoming more common, especially in the districts near the coal mines. The development of the iron industry in the Weald of Sussex, Surrey and
Kent, and later the glassworks which opened in the area after 1560, greatly increased the demand for wood as a fuel for the furnaces, and led to tree-felling and deforestation on a scale which
alarmed the government. When Edward VI’s Parliament in 1553, pursuing its consumer-protection policy, enacted that every faggot of wood sold in London or Westminster must be at least 3 feet
long and 20 inches in circumference, it complained about the poor quality of timber offered for sale ‘these sixty years . . . by reason of the great scarcity of wood, that is happened since
the time of the said King Edward IV’.

Parliament took action in 1544 to restrict the felling of trees. It enacted that anyone who felled a wood consisting of trees of less than twenty-four years’ growth was to leave at least
twelve oak, elm, ash or beech trees standing in every acre of woodland; and no one was permitted to convert woodlands of more than two acres into arable or pasture land unless the woodlands were
within a quarter of a mile of his dwelling house. But there were many exceptions to the Act. It did not apply if trees were felled in order to provide timber for building or repairing houses, dams,
bridges, or ships; and it did not extend to woods in the Weald of Kent, Surrey or Sussex, or within two miles of the sea in Cornwall, or to any trees that were felled by the King’s
command.

With such important exceptions, it is not surprising that the Act did not cure the evil, and further restrictions on tree-felling were introduced in the reign of Elizabeth
I. No oak, beech or ash tree growing within fourteen miles of the sea or of any navigable river which was 1 foot or more wide at the stump was to be used as fuel; but again there was an important
exception, for the Act was not to apply to Sussex, to the Weald of Kent, or to the parishes of Charlwood, Newdigate or Leigh in Surrey.

It was not until 1585 that Parliament at last dealt with the deforestation of the Weald. The MPs realized that because of the number of ironworks in Sussex, Surrey and Kent ‘the great
plenty of timber which hath grown in those parts have been greatly decayed and spoiled, and will in short time be utterly consumed and worked’. So it was enacted that no new ironworks could
be started except on the site of an already existing one, or by an ironmaster who could provide the necessary fuel for the ironworks entirely from timber growing on his own land, on pain of a fine
of £300; and no one was to burn as fuel in an ironworks any oak, ash or elm tree which was 1 foot square or more at the stub. But the shortage of timber continued to be a serious problem
until the use of coal for fuel became more widespread in the seventeenth century.

A
T THE BEGINNING
of the Tudor Age, England had the benefit of the educational system which the Church had maintained throughout the Middle Ages. There
were grammar schools all over the kingdom. Many of them were attached to cathedrals and monasteries, but some were independent new foundations; William of Wykeham, the Bishop of Winchester and Lord
Chancellor, had founded the school at Winchester in 1387, and Henry VI had founded Eton College in 1440. Later, towards the end of the Tudor Age, the school at Harrow was founded in 1571 by a
benefactor from a humbler station in society, the local yeoman, John Lyon.

The purpose of the grammar schools was to give a good education to the more intelligent boys of the locality, including a few exceptionally gifted boys of the lower classes. Cardinal Pole was
expressing the traditional attitude of the Catholic Church when he wrote in 1556 that the chief purpose of the grammar schools was to educate poor children; but already by the beginning of the
Tudor Age an increasing proportion of the pupils were gentlemen’s sons, and the tendency increased after the Reformation. The sons of the nobility, and of course royal
princes, were educated at home by a tutor. Girls were taught at special girls’ schools attached to monasteries and nunneries. The great majority of children – the sons and
daughters of the husbandmen and artisans – did not go to a grammar school; but though some of them received no education, many, and probably most, of them were educated at the ABC school in
their parish, where a schoolmaster taught them the alphabet, simple arithmetic, and just enough Latin for them to learn the Lord’s Prayer, the Ave and the Creed. The teacher at the ABC school
was often the parish priest; but sometimes it was a less educated man who had applied for the post, and sometimes it was a woman.