POST REFORMATION BRITAIN - FAMINE AND PLAGUE

The political history of Britain alters dramatically at the year 1603, with the union of the Crowns of Scotland and England under James VI and I. The social history does not, however, and instead forms a distinctive period in both realms which spans the eighty years between the downfall of Catholicism in both during 1559–60 and the collapse of effective royal control of them in 1640. It was characterized by the effects of religious reform and of an inflation of population and prices, producing between them a time of exceptional tension and excitement in both society and religion. One label for it used in recent years has been ‘Jacobethan’, after the two monarchs whose reigns straddle most of it, Elizabeth and James; but it is one which gives too much weight to rulers and ignores the fact that over a quarter of those years involved two more sovereigns, Mary, Queen of Scots, and Charles I. The term ‘Post-Reformation’ also poses difficulties, as the process of Reformation itself  certainly occupied the first two or three decades of the period and arguably continued in some respects until the end of the seventeenth century. None the less, it does highlight the importance of religious reform in shaping social attitudes, and avoids the worse shortcomings of alternative labels. As when dealing with political history, both the records and the history that has been written from them exist in much greater quantity for England than for Scotland and Wales, so that this is only in part a British study. None the less, for England at least, a great deal of valuable research has now been carried out.

Famine and Plague 

It has been emphasized that the period between 1560 and 1640 was one of exceptional economic pressure, to which the English found various responses. One further, entirely reasonable, reaction to such pressure was to collapse and die under it, and many took this route. When the surviving parish registers of late Tudor and early Stuart England are inspected, almost all contain years in which the normal number of burials more than doubled, and historians in the 1970s adopted the term ‘crisis mortalities’ for such events. The two obvious questions to ask about this phenomenon are why it occurred, and whether anything changed in it during the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Answers to these questions are fraught with technical problems. In the 1810s, when a national census becomes available against which local data can be checked, it is clear that a third of all deaths were not being registered. The proportion in earlier centuries was probably not very different, and so the records that we have, even where any survive, are no more than a sample of reality. Certain tactics can be adopted to identify the mass killers of the age. Where burials multiply steeply after a bad harvest, then famine is probably the cause. A steep rise in late summer probably indicates bubonic plague, which struck at this season. Several epidemic diseases, however, were not seasonal, and can only be identified from contemporary comments, which are rare and are often frustratingly vague. Where they are precise, interpretation can be difficult for modern scholars; for example, one cause of death mentioned around 1600 was the ‘bloody flux’ (bloody diarrhoea), which was thought to be a mysterious form of disease. It was the experience of modern famines in African nations that taught historians that it is actually the last stage of starvation, when the intestinal wall disintegrates because of lack of nutrients. Bad harvests can usually only be detected from high bread prices, and records of prices only survive for some regions. Finally, if a local mortality was exceptionally severe, then record-keeping would cease altogether, leaving no evidence for crisis mortality.

Crisis mortalities were indeed usually local in character. Most harvest failures only occurred in some regions. The greatest in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries took place in 1596–8, and affected every part of Europe, but in England it had an impact on only 28 per cent of parishes which have left records; it almost completely spared Kent and East Anglia, because of their more diverse economies. The greatest British epidemic was that in 1557–8, almost certainly influenza, which killed between 16 per cent and 20 per cent of the English population; but it reached less than half of the parishes which have left registers. On the whole, town-dwellers were more vulnerable to disease because of their more crowded and dirty living conditions, but less vulnerable to famine because urban centres could lay up stocks of grain. Population pressure hit some places much harder than others. The number of people in England as a whole more or less doubled between 1500 and 1640, but that in Sussex hardly increased.

The population of Cambridgeshire rose by about 40 per cent, but almost all of that took place in the marshlands of the north of the county, where landless people found it easiest to squat and to find a living; and these overcrowded and poor communities were the most vulnerable to serious mortalities. Even in a single parish, location and income could make a huge difference: the rich lived in better built homes set in better drained and ventilated areas, and so died less easily. It is also true that the data collated by historians does not always match the perceptions of contemporaries. When the burial data for the seventeenth century was finally collated in the 1980s by the Cambridge Group, the most lethal year of all turned out to have been 1657–8. At the time, however, nobody seems to have realized this: there were comments about the summer being ‘sickly’, with slow-working fevers abroad, but no sense of any real danger or disruption. As the eye travels along the other columns in the graph, however, the second tallest represents the year 1665–6, when everybody knew that they were trying to survive a terrifying outbreak of bubonic plague, which closed down two-thirds of the nation.

When all these cautions are applied, certain overall patterns do stand out. Between 1530 and 1630, every serious harvest failure was followed by at least a doubling in local deaths. This does not seem to have been the case in the previous 200 years, even given the lack of comparably good records, and seems genuinely to have been a new phenomenon, showing the impact of population pressure in forcing people towards the bread line. Between 1500 and 1650, moreover, every fifty-year period contained an average seven epidemics severe enough to disrupt the life of the nation badly. The death tolls were prodigious; probably more people died of plague in London alone in three months of 1665 than were killed in the whole of the civil war which rent England and Wales for four years in the 1640s. But this plague was not the worst to hit the city in the early modern period: that of 1563 probably destroyed a larger proportion of its inhabitants. Communities could continue to function almost normally through a famine, which by definition only slew the poor, but a severe outbreak of disease, even though the rich were still significantly less vulnerable, could bring a local economy to a halt, so that commerce could not be transacted and taxes and rates not levied.

Of all these killers, the one that created the greatest fear was bubonic plague, which has been proved in the twentieth century to have been caused by a bacillus carried by the fleas that prey on black rats; as the rats die of it, the fleas bite humans. To earlier generations it was completely mysterious: all that was known was that it had reappeared dramatically in Europe in the fourteenth century, from the east, and remained ever since, swelling into epidemics every twenty to forty years. Humans caught it with appalling ease, and it killed the majority of those who did so, in high fever and the agony caused by suppurating swellings.
 It was entirely responsible for about half of the crisis mortalities that have been detected and explained in early mode England, and was a contributing factor in others. Although it was a long-familiar horror by the Tudor period, the English at that time gradually developed new measures to contain it, enacted at central, regional, municipal and parish levels, in the same spirit as those they developed to combat poverty, alehouses, fornication and other perceived or actual social ills.

By the early seventeenth century, these measures were firmly in place. As soon as plague broke out in a town or district, almost all those who were able to leave swiftly would do so; which by definition consisted only of the wealthier. The exceptions among this group were the clergy and officeholders, who would probably send away their families but were expected themselves to remain at their posts and work to bring the community through the approaching ordeal. Most seem to have done so, maintaining religious services and the machinery of local government throughout.

Four practical measures were adopted in the face of the outbreak, one of which was probably completely ineffectual but the rest of which were apparently very potent. The pointless one was to shut up and guard households in which the disease had appeared, locking in the healthy with the sick, until it had long ceased its ravages. Households which wanted to get rid of their infected members could have them sent to pest-houses, converted or purpose-built shacks on the edge of communities, which were effectively concentration camps for plague victims. As neither of these measures confined the deadly fleas, they almost certainly represented a needless infliction of suffering. What was far more effective was that plague-ridden communities either sealed themselves off from their neighbours or (more commonly) were sealed off from them. This process of quarantine does seem to have worked well, as long as it was strictly enforced, in limiting the spread of the epidemic. It could also work on a national scale, as the British gradually learned the rewards of suspending all contact with foreign ports in which the disease had appeared. Parishes and towns also became increasingly efficient in identifying the disease and in disposing swiftly of the dead, in mass graves served by burial parties working at night. Finally, towns came to lay up funds to cover the cost of feeding households closed up because of infection, and of meeting the increased need for poor relief as commerce was restricted or suspended during the outbreak. These funds were increasingly supplemented by collections of money taken up in churches in regions still free of infection, on royal orders, and sent to assist those that were afflicted.

The short-term impact of such mortalities on social, economic and political life could be devastating. Communities would need to repair the damage to their population, wealth and trade links, and the central government could raise no taxes in them while an epidemic was in progress. A severe outbreak of plague could seriously undermine England’s ability to wage war, not merely by depleting its tax base but by striking at its soldiers and sailors; the complete failure of Elizabeth’s expedition to Le Havre in 1563 was due to the depletion of her army by the disease. On the other hand, it is notable that throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the ruling elites became more and more proficient in keeping themselves out of the way of infection. Until the mid-Tudor period, leading politicians and churchmen, judges, town aldermen and justices of the peace all died in national epidemics; by the seventeenth century they seem to have become largely immune to them. Like hunger, large-scale infectious disease was becoming a tragedy of commoners, and they were easily replaced in a period of growing population. The great flu outbreak of 1557–8 just put that growth back by five years. In most towns, houses left empty by plague were filled up within a few months by immigrants from the countryside, and a few years, at most, were needed to make good the total loss of inhabitants.

Something more fundamental altered as well. After 1623, famine disappeared from England. Bad harvests were just as frequent, but were ceasing to kill people in large numbers, even though they continued to do so in Scotland until the end of the century and in continental Europe for longer. The great outbreak of bubonic plague in 1665–6 was, likewise, the last in Britain, even though the disease continued to ravage other parts of Europe until the eighteenth century. The two greatest scourges of Tudor England were therefore eliminated long before the end of the Stuart period. Discovering why is easy in the case of famine, where there are many explanations. The greatest was that the steady increase in population began to level off in the early seventeenth century, and was replaced by the 1660s with a slight drop. This was the result of greater mortality in the hard years around 1600, increasing immigration to the new American colonies, and, above all, a decline in births. The English were starting to control their own fertility, by marrying, on average, ten years later in 1640 than they had been doing in 1590 and so greatly limiting the period of time in which children could be conceived. In addition, a larger number of people than before had ceased to marry and have children at all. With a drop in population, accompanied by a continuing expansion of the economy, the value of real wages could rise again and increased food production and job opportunities make a considerable impact. Between 1600 and 1660, also, the poor relief system came into general operation, and new forms of farming and small-scale industry were adopted. By the 1660s England was becoming a regular exporter of foodstuffs for the first time, and cottagers were making lace or nails, plaiting straw, weaving and knitting to supplement or replace subsistence farming or labouring. Internal communications and marketing systems were better developed, to move food from regions of surplus to those of dearth.

The disappearance of plague is a more baffling, and contentious, phenomenon. At times in the past, ‘biological’ explanations have been proposed: that either rats or humans developed immunity to the disease, or that the black rats which carry the fatal species of flea were replaced by brown rats, which do not. Both arguments fail, for plague vanished in Britain before the arrival of brown rats and it is not logical that British rats or people should have developed the immunity before those in the rest of Europe while those in Africa and Asia failed to do so. The most plausible alternative is that suggested by Paul Slack in the 1980s: that the local and national systems of cordoning off infected areas were enforced with so much efficiency that in the end they cordoned off the island. This would certainly explain in turn the slow and fitful retreat of the disease from the rest of Europe, as such measures were brought into effect there. Although directed by central and local government, they required the cooperation of the whole population, as even smugglers came to understand the deadly risks of non-compliance.

If correct, these conclusions provide one of the clearest ripostes possible to one of the most influential bodies of historical thought during the 1960s and early 1970s, the Annales school of French scholars. This emphasized the great degree to which medieval and early modern human beings were conditioned by their environment and subjected to its demands; this story would illustrate instead the degree to which, eventually, they could rise to the challenges of that environment and overcome them. They did so, moreover, not because of any inspired leadership from above but because of a massive effort of collective and shared will. In doing so, they made one of the most valuable transitions from the medieval to the modern European worlds, and supplied one of the finest reproofs to the assertion that human beings are individually marvellous, but in a crowd, hopeless.

By Ronald Hutton in "A Brief History of Britain 1485-1660", Robinson, London, 2010. Excerpts Chapter VII "Post Reformation Britain". Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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