A Brief History of the Tudor Age (40 page)

It is difficult to know how far the Acts against vagabonds were actually enforced in practice. The surviving records of the courts of assizes and quarter sessions contain very few cases of
proceedings against vagabonds; but these records are incomplete, and in any case do not prove that vagabonds were not dealt with in the courts. The records show that about three-quarters of all the
crimes tried in the courts were some form of theft, which is almost exactly the same percentage as it is in the courts in the
twentieth century; and the most likely explanation
of the absence of references in the court records to vagabonds is that it was simpler to prosecute and hang vagabonds for stealing, a crime which they were almost forced by circumstances to commit,
rather than to proceed against them as vagabonds, when they could only be hanged for the third offence. It has been estimated that about 800 thieves were hanged every year in the reign of Elizabeth
I, and many of these were almost certainly vagabonds.

An Act of 1576 inaugurated yet another change in policy and began the practice, which was to last for the next 260 years, of giving work to the aged and impotent poor to perform in their own
homes. In every borough, the mayor was to keep a store of ‘wool, hemp, flax, iron or other stuff’ and hand it out to the aged and impotent poor for them to do any work that they were
able, and were ordered, to do with these materials. The authorities were to pay them what they considered to be a suitable wage for the work done. If any old or infirm person refused to do the
work, or spoiled or embezzled the materials, the churchwardens and Collectors and Governors of the Poor could decide, by a majority vote, to send the offender to the House of Correction ‘in
convenient apparel mete for such a body to wear . . . there to be straitly kept, as well in diet as in work, and also punished from time to time’ as the Governors of the House of Correction
saw fit. Any old or infirm person who was given poor relief but nevertheless went begging was to be whipped and burned through the right ear, and hanged for the third offence, unless an honest
householder with the necessary property qualification was prepared to take him into his service.

The Act of 1576 for the first time imposed a punishment on those parishioners who refused to contribute to the cost of providing relief for the deserving poor or for maintaining a House of
Correction. Anyone who refused to respond to the exhortations of the Collectors for the Poor was to be forced to pay twice the rate that he would otherwise have had to pay.

The problem of vagabonds had always been accentuated by the soldiers discharged from the army; and after the whole nation had celebrated and given thanks to God for the
victory over the Spanish Armada, Parliament at long last made special provision for discharged and wounded soldiers. A statute of 1593 enacted that any soldiers who had ‘adventured their
lives and lost their limbs or disabled their bodies’ by their service in the army since 25 March 1588 could apply to the county treasurers for a weekly sum of money for their relief, to which
every parish was to contribute. Any wounded soldier who, despite receiving a pension, went around begging, was to be punished as a vagabond.

The Parliament of 1597 passed five statutes dealing with old and infirm beggars, with vagabonds, and with wounded and impotent soldiers. The death penalty for vagabonds was again abolished, and
was never reintroduced in England; it was retained only for discharged soldiers who were wandering around the country, committing crimes and terrifying the population. Vagabonds were to be punished
by whippings, and persistent offenders could be sentenced by the courts to confinement in a House of Correction or to be banished from the realm. It was only if they returned without permission
from banishment that they were to suffer death. Parishioners who refused to contribute for the relief of the poor could now be punished by imprisonment; and the parents and children of old, blind
and infirm paupers were required to pay such contributions for their maintenance as were fixed by the JPs. These provisions were re-enacted by two statutes in Elizabeth’s last Parliament of
1601.

The law for the relief of the deserving poor and the punishment of vagabonds, which was enacted in 1597 and confirmed in 1601, continued to apply with very little change till the New Poor Law
was introduced in 1834, when the granting of relief to the poor in their homes, which in some form or other had existed throughout the Tudor Age, was virtually abolished. After another hundred
years, the Abiding Places and workhouses of 1550 were in their turn abolished, and the principle of paying for
poor relief by compulsory insurance was instituted in the
twentieth century. But the dual problem of giving charitable relief to the poor and discouraging idleness is still with us in 1988, though no one now suggests that able-bodied shirkers should be
punished by whipping, mutilation, enslavement or death.

W
HAT WERE MEN AND WOMEN
like in the Tudor Age? It is not easy to understand the outlook of our ancestors, who are separated from us by only thirteen or
fourteen generations, by studying the contemporary chronicles, the State papers, the Acts of Parliament, the ecclesiastical registers and the law reports, though we can learn a little more from the
few diaries which have survived and from the words and behaviour of the characters in the plays of Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists.

Half a dozen inhabitants of London kept diaries which can still be read today, covering the years between 1485 and 1563. They all have a good deal in common. Charles Wriothesley, the herald,
wrote rather more than the others about political events; and Henry Machyn, the undertaker, was particularly interested in funerals, the lying-in-state of the Kings and Queens, and the Masses held
at the deaths of foreign sovereigns. But together they tell us a great deal about the ordinary life of the Londoners. They refer to the weather, to the very cold Christmas of 1536, when the Thames
was frozen over and it was impossible to travel by barge, and the very hot summer of 1540, when the cattle died because the ponds had dried up. They did not have any way of
measuring heat, for the first thermometer was not invented by Galileo in Italy until 1597, and the improved thermometer which he developed in 1612 did not reach England until later in
the seventeenth century; but the comments of the diarists about the great heat and the bitter cold in the various years are confirmed in nearly every case by the records of the harvests and the
price of corn.

The diarists describe the days of national celebrations, when all the churches in London rang their bells for a day and a night, and the conduits in the streets ran with wine, like the capture
of Francis I by Charles V’s army at Pavia in 1525 and the proclamation of Queen Mary during the revolt against Jane Grey in 1553. The executions of traitors and the burnings of heretics are
often mentioned, usually very briefly and without comment. The Franciscan monk who kept the chronicle of the Greyfriars of London, both before and after the dissolution of the monastery, recorded
very succinctly the burnings of heretics in the autumn of 1538:

But Charles Wriothesley, who was never as concise as the Franciscan monk, wrote at greater length about the execution of Lady Bulmer for high treason because of the support
which she and her husband had given to the rebels of the Pilgrimage of Grace. He recorded that on 25 May 1537, after Bulmer and four of his colleagues had been taken to execution, ‘Margaret
Cheyney, other wife to Bulmer called, was drawn after them from the
Tower of London into Smithfield and there burned, according to her judgement, God pardon her soul, being the
Friday in Whitsun week; she was a very fair creature and a beautiful.’

Natural disasters are recorded, like the thunderstorm of 4 June 1561, when the steeple of St Paul’s Cathedral was set on fire by lightning and St Martin’s Church in Ludgate was
burned down. The diarists, like most of the population, showed great interest in monstrous births; if a child with two heads, or without arms and legs, was born in Oxfordshire or Warwickshire, this
was widely accepted as a sign that God did not approve of the government’s religious policy. When a calf was born at Highgate in December 1548 with two heads, four ears, four eyes, eight feet
and two tails, it was led into London and exhibited to the Lord Mayor and aldermen and the public in Newgate before it was taken to the fields outside the city and killed and buried.

The people were fascinated by unusual murder cases, like the case of young Lord Dacre of Hurstmonceux, who was usually called Lord Dacre of the South, to distinguish him from Lord Dacre of
Gilsland in Cumberland, who was Lord Dacre of the North. On the night of 30 April 1541 Lord Dacre and thirteen young gentlemen and yeomen from London, Sussex and Kent met at Lord Dacre’s
house at Hurstmonceux in Sussex and decided to go poaching on the lands of a gentleman who lived nearby at Hellingly. The party split into two groups, and set out for the woods by different routes.
One group, which consisted of Lord Dacre and seven of his friends, encountered three of the landowner’s gamekeepers, and a fight ensued in which one gamekeeper was killed. Lord Dacre and the
seven other poachers who had met the gamekeepers were put on trial for murder, and condemned to death. There was much sympathy for the good-looking young nobleman of twenty-four, but Henry VIII
insisted that the death sentence be carried out, and Lord Dacre was duly hanged at Tyburn.

No murder case during the Tudor Age attracted as much attention as the murder of Thomas Arden in his house at
Faversham in February 1551
¹⁶
by his wife and the servant who was her lover, with the help of her maidservant and other servants and their friends in the town. The case had all the necessary ingredients of
violence, sex, and the social standing of the victim, to arouse public interest. Mrs Arden was burned at Canterbury, because she had committed petty treason by murdering her husband. So had the
servants by murdering their master; and the maidservant was burned and the menservants hanged, drawn and quartered at Faversham. The criminals from the town were merely guilty of murder, and were
hanged. People still remembered the murder forty years later, when the play
Arden of Faversham
was performed on the London stage.

It was an age of violence, though gentlemen did not kill each other in duels on anything like the scale on which this occurred in France in the sixteenth century. The common people killed each
other in brawls in taverns, and in playing football. Men struck each other when angry, and to avenge an insult. Masters regularly beat their servants, and Foxe obviously considered that Cranmer
deserved special praise because he never struck or reviled a servant. The Act of 1543, which enacted that if anyone shed blood within the curtilage of the court he was to have his right hand cut
off, expressly exempted a master from punishment if he shed the blood of his servant while he was chastising him.

Men and women often spat as an expression of contempt. They spat at men in the stocks and in the pillory. Women spat at admirers who irritated them, and clergymen spat at other clergymen with
whom they disagreed on questions of theology. When the Protestant martyr, John Philpot, the former Archdeacon of Winchester, was imprisoned in the King’s Bench prison in Southwark in
Mary’s reign, waiting to be burned as a heretic, he met a
fellow-prisoner who was also about to be burned for heresy. The man was an Arian who, like Arius, denied the
divinity of Christ. Philpot spat in the man’s face, and spent his last days before he and the Arian were burned in writing a tract with the makeshift writing materials which had been secretly
smuggled into the prison. It had the splendid title
Apology of John Philpot written for spitting upon an Arian
. He enthusiastically vindicated his action, for the word
‘apology’ in the sixteenth century meant ‘justification’, not an expression of regret.

Violence was always ready to erupt, particularly against foreigners. The English were famous throughout Europe for their hatred of ‘strangers’. Foreigners who came to England were
always encountering this hatred, though sometimes the English would take a liking to one of them, and say: ‘It is a pity he is not an Englishman.’ The feeling against foreigners was
especially strong in London. In 1517, a rumour that the Italian merchants there were seducing the wives and daughters of Englishmen started a riot against foreigners, which Henry VIII sternly
suppressed; he insisted on hanging several of the rioters to show the foreign merchants that they could safely come to England to trade.

The hatred of foreigners certainly played a part in turning the Londoners against the Protestants in the reign of Edward VI, when it was estimated that 5,000 foreign Protestants had come to
London as refugees from religious persecution in their own countries. They constituted a substantial proportion of the 90,000 inhabitants of London in 1553. The Londoners did not like this, and
supported Mary against Jane Grey; but within a few months the hatred of foreigners was a factor working in the Protestants’ favour, after Mary married Philip of Spain, and many Spaniards came
to England. ‘The English hate us Spaniards worse than they hate the Devil,’ wrote one of King Philip’s gentlemen, ‘they rob us in town and on the road . . . We Spaniards
move among the English as if they were animals, trying not to notice them; and they do the same to us.’ The English had better opportunities for displaying their hatred of
Spaniards in the reign of Elizabeth I. For every Englishman who fought against Spain out of his devotion to the Protestant cause, there were probably ten who did so because they hated
Spaniards and foreigners.