Introduction

I'm Jonathan Healy. I work at the University of Oxford.

One of the tasks that fell to a minister of an English parish

was to record the dead.

In sixteen twenty three in the Rolling Greenfields of the

Cumberland Paris Gray Stoke,

that minister's name was Jeremy Waterhouse,

a graduate of the University of Cambridge.

He had been minister in the slate gray church since sixteen sixteen.

But sixteen twenty three was one of the worst years he could

remember. In sheer numerical terms,

the funerals had become much more frequent but he also

noticed a change in the people being buried.

They were more hopeless, more ragged.

Many were found dead on the road or starved behind hedges.

He decided to record this misery in the paper book that

lay in his charge.

In January, for example,

he recorded the burial of a poor fellow destitute of sucker

found in the street and brought into the house of the constable

where he died. In March, a poor hunger starving beggar child

was buried. She was Dorothy daughter of Henry Patterson, the Miller.

If even the miller's child could not find enough food,

then this shows these were truly desperate times.

Still, the burials continued. One night in May, James Erwin

was buried, a poor beggar stripling born upon the borders of England.

He died. It was said in great misery. All told sixty

four people were recorded by the minister as dying in

Greystoke while starving or destitute between August

sixteen twenty two and May sixteen twenty four times what grim indeed

Sixteen twenty three was a horrific year in the north of

England, many thousands starved to death.

It was bad elsewhere too. The harvest had failed. Men, women

and children took to the roads, pining in want, seeking help

from the hardest of hearts.

Some towns and villages found it necessary to pass new local

laws, forbidding people to beg to gather around grain mills,

even banning householding locals from offering rooms to

the starving poor. These were very, very difficult times,

and they were long in the making. Since about fifteen hundred,

the population of England had been growing two million in

fifteen hundred, over four million by sixteen hundred, and

then somewhere north of five million by the sixteen forties.

This population growth put pressure on land on resources.

The price of rents went up, so did that of food The cost of a

loaf of bread was several times higher at the start of the

seventeenth century than it had been at the beginning of the

sixteenth. With more people, meanwhile,

there was more competition for jobs,

wages were stagnant or falling.

Other things made the problem worse.

The dissolution of the monasteries in the fifteen

thirties removed a key provider of charity.

When the chantry lands were abolished in the fifteen forties,

many of the hospitals that relied on them were forced to close.

Perhaps half of England's hospitals disappeared in the

middle of the sixteenth century.

In the countryside meanwhile,

land was being enclosed in the name of profit for wealthy

farmers. Whole villages could fall into ruin,

left in the landscape as little more than a few bumps in the

ground and an isolated church.

One such village was Hampton Gay in north Oxfordshire,

now just a church in a bumpy field where once a community

stood. A poor lad from the village,

Bartolome Steir was so angry about the situation that he

tried to organize an uprising against the gentry in fifteen

ninety six. He was caught and killed, but the government

shuddered about the threat to social peace.

Ship were eating men. The commentators said,

Greed was destroying homes and leaving people impoverished.

And it was not only them that would suffer but so would the

state Four, as governors believed poor peasants made bad

soldiers and bad sailors.

Another problem lay in changes to rents and ten years of land,

peasants found that they had relative security on their

farms So their landlords tried to change the traditional

customary tenures into market rents,

which were always more expensive.

Below the farming peasantry meanwhile were those who owned

no land at all and had to rent small cottages from wealthier

farmers always an exorbitant and growing rents,

or they could set up a hut on a piece of common land.

Technically breaking the law and trying to scratch a living

gathering berries and maybe grazing a cow plus taking in

whatever they could earn from their wage labor. Men, women,

and children all had to work hard to earn.

Other changes made the issues if not necessarily worse than

certainly more visible.

London was growing.

Eighty thousand people in the time of Henry the eighth,

well over two hundred thousand people by the death of Elizabeth.

Then it doubled to the reign of Charles the first by which time

it had reached a staggering four hundred thousand people.

Londoners didn't grow their own food by and large They needed

to work for wages, which they then spent on bread.

And they lived cheek by jowl with those in positions of

power. When prices rocketed, they knew where to go,

who to petition, how to protest to get themselves heard.

The authorities were particularly techy about unrest in the capital.

They worried it could one day bring down the government so

they made sure Londoners were fed.

Though the necessary consequence of this was

boatloads of grain passing out of provincial ports away from

hungry mouths in the counties to fill bellies in London.

This was a frequent cause of rioting in the countryside and

in small towns, As it happens,

the only person known to have been hanged for taking part in

a food riot in the whole of the seventeenth century was someone

called Ann Carter.

Who called herself a captain and who led a crowd that sees

the ship carrying grain from the port of Malden in Essex

bound for London.

England in the sixteenth century then and into the early

seventeenth was in the grip of a poverty crisis.

More people were considered poor and those who were

considered to be poor were living in deeper poverty.

Population growth and social change were driving it. But

they also perhaps provided a solution.

For the country as a whole was getting wealthier.

More than this,

Its institutions of government were becoming more effective,

more sophisticated,

more granular in their ability to affect social change.

For the one part,

that rise in population was actually benefiting some.

Wealthy peasants, sometimes called yeoman,

were making more money. They had enough land to feed their

own families leaving some grain and food aside to sell at the market.

As the price of that food rose, they made money.

The cost of labor on their farm was lower now too as wages had fallen.

This middle group in society between the rich gentry and the

poor laborers did very well. They built new houses invested

in education for their children, boys,

and girls and spent money on books.

This had two important consequences.

Firstly,

there was more money available in local communities that could

be given to the poor. Secondly,

there was a class of people who might be able to manage a local

system of taxation and poor relief.

This was a crucial theme of the period that we're going to be

looking at. By the middle of the seventeenth century,

in response to this great poverty crisis,

England had developed something unique at this point in World history,

a national system of poor relief based on the systematic

taxation of wealth and the transfer of money to those deemed neediest.

The story of how this happens is the subject of these lectures.