A Short History of Early Modern England
British Literature in Context
By Peter C. Herman
John Wiley & Sons
Copyright © 2011
John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4051-9560-7
Chapter One
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. 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.
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. 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.
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 childbirth
within very recent memory." 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." 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.
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. 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." 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" — 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 was more
literate than the provinces, and the aristocracy was almost universally
literate, whereas not everyone among the middle and lower
rungs of society could read, although those numbers continued to
rise, especially after the midpoint of the sixteenth century. While
more non-aristocratic men could read than women, non-aristocratic
female literacy was far from uncommon. In Thomas Dekker's wonderful
play, The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599), Hammon, a suitor,
presents Jane, the wife of a shoemaker, a letter containing the names
of everyone who has died fighting in France (her husband was
pressed into service at the play's start). He asks her, "Cannot you
read?", and when Jane replies "I can," he gives her the letter (sc.12.88–91).
While Hammon does not think that female literacy can be
assumed, neither is he particularly shocked or surprised by Jane's
positive response, and as further evidence, many books of various
sorts, ranging from devotional works to a compendium of laws pertaining
to women, were published explicitly aimed at a female
audience.
Literacy became more widespread in part because schooling
became more widespread. While Oxford and Cambridge remained
the two sources of higher education, and the various Inns of Court
provided legal training (although many attended without either
graduating or becoming lawyers), the sixteenth century witnessed a
significant increase in parish or "petty" (meaning small, not petulant)
schools that were often run by highly educated teachers, thanks
to the numbers of Oxford and Cambridge graduates who could not
find other employment. Children also often arrived at these schools
already knowing how to read. In addition, many, including girls,
were taught by private tutors in the home, and that is how women
were educated. While women were banned from careers and college
degrees, extremely learned women were far from uncommon in
early modern England. Elizabeth I, fluent in several modern and
ancient languages and a more than competent poet, represents
perhaps the best example, but far from the only one.
Religion
Despite the common perception that the so-called "Middle Ages"
were religious and the Renaissance secular, the early modern period
was an intensely religious as well as secular period. There was no
separation between church and state as there is in the contemporary
United States of America (John Milton, in A Treatise of Civil
Power [1659], would be among the first to argue for this concept),
and from Henry VIII onward, England's monarch was at least in
title also the head of the Anglican Church. However, to say that
there was little agreement about doctrine is a vast understatement.
In addition to the division between English Protestants and English
Catholics, also called recusants, Protestantism itself, both inside
and outside of England, was from the start riven by divisions and
furious controversies. Adding to this combustible mix is the fact
that in the early modern era, politics and religion are only artificially
separable, and people fully realized that seemingly arid
debates about church government had very serious political consequences.
Faced with arguments against bishops, King James VI/I
responded, "If bishops were put out of power, I know what would
come of my supremacy. No bishop, no king." The God-centric
focus of early modern culture is also evident from the huge number
of sermons and devotional manuals crowding early modern bookshops.
Indeed, the period's runaway bestseller was the metrical
translation of the psalms by Sternhold and Hopkins (more than 200
editions between 1550 and 1640). Religion and religious controversies
also permeated the literature of the period (e.g., John Bale's
King Johan [1538], Edmund Spenser's epic, The Faerie Queene [1590;
1596]; and George Herbert's The Temple [1633]), and we will deal
extensively with this topic in subsequent chapters.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Short History of Early Modern England
by Peter C. Herman
Copyright © 2011 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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