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RELIGION AND THE DECLINE OF MAGIC (1971) STUDIES IN POPULAR BELIEFS IN SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH
CENTURY ENGLAND KEITH THOMAS CONTENTS Foreword ix Acknowledgements xiii Table of Abbreviations xxi 1 PROLOGUE The Environment 3 RELIGION 2 The Magic of the Medieval Church 27 3 The Impact of the Reformation 58 4 Providence 90 5 Prayer and Prophecy 133 6 Religion and the People 179 MAGIC 7 Magical Healing 209 8 Cunning Men and Popular Magic 252 9 Magic and Religion 301 ASTROLOGY 10 Astrology: its Practice and Extent 335 11 Astrology: its Social and
Intellectual Rolt. 383 12 Astrology and Religion 425 THB APPEAL TO THE PAST 13 Ancient Prophecies 461 WITCHCRAFT 14 Witchcraft in England: the Crime and its History 517 15 Witchcraft and Religion 559 16 The Making of a Witch 599 17 Witchcraft and its Social Environment 638 18 Witchcraft: Decline 681 ALLIED BELIEFS 19 Ghosts and Fairies 701 20 Times and Omens 735 CONCLUSION 21 Some Interconnections 755 22 The Decline of Magic 767 Index 801 1. THE ENVIRONMENT IN the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries England was
still a pre-industrial society, and many of its essential features closely
resembled those of the 'under-developed areas' of today. The population was
relatively sparse: there were perhaps two and a half million people in
England and Wales in 1500, and five and a half
million in 1700. Even in the later seventeenth century the economy gave
little indication of the industrialization which was to come. It is true that
there was now a highly commercialized agriculture, a vigorous textile
industry, a substantial production of coal and a growing volume of colonial
trade. But the bulk of the population was still engaged in the production of
food, and the development of capitalist organization was still rudimentary.
There were few 'factories'. The typical unit of production was the small
workshop, and cottage industry was still the basis of textile manufacture. Most of the population lived in the countryside. Gregory
King, the pioneer statistician, to whom we owe most of our figures for this
period, calculated that in 1688 nearly eighty per cent of the population
lived in villages and hamlets. Most of the urban areas were very small;
Birmingham. Bristol, Exeter, Newcastle, Norwich and York were the only
provincial cities with more than ten thousand inhabitants. Norwich, the
largest of these, had about thirty thousand. The one striking exception to
this pattern of life in scattered rural communities was the capital city.
London's population multiplied tenfold during NOTE. This
introductory survey is primarily intended for readers lacking any specialized
knowledge of English history during this period. More information about the
economy and social structure during these years may be found in such works as
The Agrarian History of England and Wales, iv (1500-1640), ed. J. Thirsk (Cambridge, 1967); C. Wilson, England's Apprenticeship,
1603-1763 (1965); P. Laslett, The World We Have
Lost (1965); D. C.
Coleman, 'Labour in the English Economy of the Seventeenth Century', Econ.
Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., viii (1955-6); D. V. Glass, 'Two Papers on Gregory
King', in Population in History, ed. D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley (1965); L. Stone,
'Social Mobility in England, 1500-1700', Past and Present, xxxiii (1966); A. Everitt, 'Social Mobility in Early Modem England', ibid.; E. Kerridge, The
Agricultural Revolution (1967). these centuries; by 1700 it was
well over half a million and still growing. It has been estimated that
perhaps a sixth of the total population spent at least part of their lives in
this great metropolis, many of them returning to their rural communities with
newly acquired urban habits of living. Society was highly stratified and the contrast between
rich and poor was everywhere conspicuous. Gregory King calculated that in
1688 over half the population were ‘decreasing the wealth of the kingdom’,
that is to say earning less than they consumed. There can be no doubt that
between a third and a half of the population lived at subsistence level and were chronically under-employed. These were the
‘cottagers, paupers, labouring people and outservants’,
as King called them. Many of these were copy-holders occupying their own
small tenements, but even more were wage labourers, for the decline of the
English peasantry was already under way. Above them came the more prosperous
classes of farmers. freeholders and tradesmen. At
the top was the traditional elite of landed gentry and nobility, now strongly
challenged by the rising professional groups; lawyers, clergymen, merchants
and officials. King estimated that the landowners and professional classes,
though only five per cent of the population, enjoyed a larger proportion of
the national income than did all the lower c1asses (over fifty per cent) put
together. Conditions of life varied so much among these different
elements of the population that it is hard for the historian not to be struck
more by the differences than by the similarities. Tudor and Stuart England
may have been an under-developed society, dependent upon the labours of an
under-nourished and ignorant population, but it also produced one of the
greatest literary cultures ever known and witnessed an unprecedented ferment
of scientific and intellectual activity. Not every under-developed society
has its Shakespeare, Milton, Locke, Wren and Newton. The social elite was highly educated. It has been calculated that by 1660
there was a grammar school for every 4.400 persons, and that two and a half
per cent of the relevant age-group of the male population was receiving some
form of higher education, at Oxford and Cambridge, or at the Inns of Court.
The latter is a higher figure than any attained again until after the First
World War.1 1. E. A. Wrigley, 'A Simple Model of
London's Importance 1650-1750', Past and Present, xxxvii (l967) p. 49. 2. W. K. Jordan, Philanthropy in
England, 1480-1660 (1959), p. 291; L Stone, The Educational Revolution in
England. 1540-1640'. Past and Present, It was an age of immense creative activity in the fields
of drama, poetry, prose, architecture, theology, mathematics, physics,
chemistry, history, philology and many other learned disciplines. Yet it was
also a time when a large, but as yet unknown, proportion of the population
(perhaps between half and two thirds of adult males in the mid seventeenth
century) was unable to read, or at least signed with
a mark. It is this huge variation in standard of living,
educational level and intellectual sensibility which makes this society so
diverse, and therefore so hard to generalize about. Not only did conditions
change over the two centuries, but at any one point in time there were so
many different layers of belief and levels in sophistication. The invention
of the printed word, moreover, had made possible the preservation and
dissemination of many different systems of thought, deriving from other
societies and sometimes dating from the remote classical past. The task of
the historian is thus infinitely harder than that of the social
anthropologist, studying a small homogeneous community in which all
inhabitants share the same beliefs and where few of those beliefs are
borrowed from other societies. This was no simple unified primitive world,
but a dynamic and infinitely various society, where
social and intellectual change had long been at work and where currents were
moving in many different directions. The beliefs with which this book is concerned had a
variety of social and intellectual implications. But one of their central
features was a preoccupation with the explanation and relief of human
misfortune. There can be no doubt that this concern reflected the hazards of
an intensely insecure environment. This is not to suggest that it was these
hazards which brought the beliefs into being. On the contrary, most of the
latter had been inherited from earlier generations and therefore preceded the
society in which they flourished. Nevertheless, there were certain features
of the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century environment by which they could
hardly fail to be coloured. xxviii
(1964). pp. 68-9, and pp. 44-7. for some important
criticisms of Jordan's estimate of the proportion of schools. 3. The
limited evidence so far available on this subject is discussed in L. Stone,
'Literacy and Education in England, 1640-1900', Past and Present, xlii
(1969), and R. S. Schofield, 'The Measurement of Literacy in Pre-industrial
England' in Literacy in Traditional Societies, ed. J. Goody (Cambridge,
1968). Of these the first was the expectation of life. Systematic
demographic research upon the history of England during these centuries has
only just begun, and the inadequacies of the evidence; probably mean that our
knowledge of the health and physical condition of contemporaries will always
be incomplete. But it is beyond dispute that Tudor and Stuart Englishmen
were, by our standards. exceedingly liable to pain,
sickness and premature death. Even among the nobility, whose chances are
likely to have been better than those of other classes, the life expectation
at birth of boys born in the third quarter of the seventeenth century was
29.6 years. Today it would be around 70. A third of these aristocratic
infants died before the age of five, while the level of mortality among those
who lived to be adults closely resembled that of India in the last decade of
the nineteenth century. In London,
conditions were particularly bad. The first English demographer, John Graunt, estimated in 1662 that, of every hundred live
children born in the metropolis, thirty-six died in their first six years and
a further twenty-four in the following ten years. He calculated the expectation
at birth to be less than that which was to be the figure for India during the
influenza pandemic of 1911-21.1 Graunt's estimate may have been unduly
pessimistic. In any case he lived at a time when the mortality rate was
untypically high. In the mid sixteenth century the expectation at birth may
have been as high as 40-45, for country folk anyway.' But contemporaries did
not need elaborate demographic investigations to tell them that life was
short, and that the odds were against any individual living out his full
span. ‘We shall find more who have died within thirty or thirty-five years of
age than passed it,’ remarked a writer in 1635. Even those who survived could
anticipate a lifetime of intermittent pain. Literary sources suggest that
many persons suffered chronically from some ailment or other, and this impression is
confirmed by inferences from what is known of contemporary diet. 4. T. H.
Hollingsworth, The Demography of the British Peerage (Supple.¬ment to Population Studi~s,
xviii [1964]), pp. 54,56,68. Mr Laslett
points out that the expectation of life in the 1690s compared unfavourably with that of Egypt in the 1930s; The World
We Have Lost, pp. 93-4. 5. The Economic
Writings of Sir William Petty, ed. C. H. Hull (Cam¬bridge,
1899), ii, pp. 386-7; D. V. Glass, 'John Graunt and
his Natural and Political Observations', Notes and Records of the Royal Soc.,
xix (1964), p.75. 1. This is the conclusion arrived at
by B. A. Wrigley in his study of mortal¬ity in the
Devonshire village of Colyton; Daedalus (Spring,
1968). Hollings.. worth's
figures for the sixteenth-century peerage give a life-expectation at birth of
only 35-36 (op. cit., p. 56). 2. D. Person, Varieties (1635), pp.
157-8. The food supply was always precarious and throughout the
period the fate of the annual harvest remained crucial. The meagre evidence
available suggests that the yield-ratio on seed com may have doubled between
1500 and 1660, but so did the population. About one harvest in six seems to
have been a total failure, and mortality could soar when times of dearth
coincided with (or perhaps occasioned) large-scale epidemics. In the seventeenth century, however, it was
rare, but certainly not unknown, for men to die in the streets from
starvation or exposure. Yet even at
times of plenty most people seem to have suffered from a lack of Vitamin A
(yellow and green vegetables) and Vitamin D (milk and eggs). The first of
these deficiencies accounts for the numerous complaints of 'sore eyes' (xerophthalmia). The second for the widespread incidence
of rickets. Scorbutic diseases were also common. The well-known ‘green sickness’ in young women, to which contemporaries gave a
sexual meaning, was chlorosis, anaemia
produced by a lack of iron in the diet, stemming from upper-class disdain for
fresh vegetables. The well-t0-do ate too much meat and were
frequently constipated. They did not regard milk as a drink for adults and
they frequently suffered from the infection of the urinary tract which
produced the notorious Stuart malady of stone in the bladder. The dietary deficiencies
of the lower classes, by contrast, reflected not so much ignorance as simple
poverty. Not until the nineteenth century did labourers get enough meat and
butter. In the seventeenth century they may have escaped the gout and stone
which plagued their betters, and may even have had better teeth from eating
more vegetables. But they were chronically under-nourished and vulnerable to
tuberculosis and gastric upsets ('griping in the guts') 1. B. H. Sticher
van Bath, Yield Ratios, 810-1820 (Wageningen,
1963), pp. 41-2, 47-8; W. G. Hoskins, 'Harvest Fluctuations and English
Economic History, 1480-1619', Agricultural Hist. Rev., xii (1964); id.
'Harvest Fluctua-tions and English Economic
History, 1620-1759', ibid., xvi (1968). 2. Some seventeenth-century
allusions to such deaths may be found in J. Hull, Saint Peters Prophesie of these last daies
(1610), p. 525; The Works of Gerrard Winstanley, ed. G. H. Sabine (Ithaca, New York, 1941), p.
650; L. H. Berens, The Digger Movement in the Days
of the Commonwealth (1906), pp. 15~; C. Bridenbaugh,
Vexed and Troubled Englishmen (Oxford, 1968), pp. 376-7; J. E. T. RogeI'St A History of Agriculture and Prices in England
(Oxford, 1866-1902), v, p. 621; Lastlett, The World
We Have Lost, pp. 115-17 caused by bad food.10 Rich and
poor alike were victims of the infections generated by the lack of hygiene,
ignorance of antiseptics and absence of effective sanitation. Epidemics
accounted for thirty per cent of reported deaths in seventeenth-century
London. There were periodic waves of influenza, typhus, dysentery and, in the
seventeenth century, smallpox, a disease which the contemporary
physician Thomas Sydenham assumed would sooner or later attack most people.
Thirty thousand people died of smallpox in London between 1670 and 1689; and
a study of the newspaper advertisements printed in the London Gazette between
1667 and 1774 shows that sixteen out of every hundred missing persons whose
descriptions were given bore pockmarks on their faces. Most dreaded of all was the bubonic plague,
which was endemic until the last quarter of the seventeenth century. It was a
disease of the towns and it particularly affected the poor, who lived in
crowded, filthy conditions, thus attracting the black rats, which are
nowadays thought to have carried the fleas which spread the disease. (Like
the people of India today. the poorer classes in parts of seventeenth-century
England still used cow-dung as fuel. In the hundred and fifty years before
the great visitation of 1665 there were only a dozen years when London was
free from plague. Some people were thought to have died of it every year and
periodically there were massive outbreaks, although many of the deaths which
contemporaries attributed to plague probably occurred for other reasons. I have
followed I. C. Drummond and A. Wilbraham. The Englishman's Food (revd edn, 1957)). The diet of
labourers is discussed in The Agrarian History of England, iv, pp. 450-53. An interesting piece of contemporary comment
on their health may be found in A. Ascham, Of the Confusions and Revolutions
of Governments (1649), p. 25. 11.
Creighton, A History of Epidemics in Britain, ii, pp. 454-5; D. V. Glass,
'John Graunt ... ·, Notes and Records of the Royal
Soc., xix (1964), p. 72; The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, iv, ed. B.
B. Rich and C. H. Wilson (Cambridge, 1967), p. 54. 12. The
Agrarian History of England and Wales, iv, p. 453; Agrlculturtl
and Economic Growth in England, 1650-1815, ed. E. L. Jones (1967), pp. 61-2; Kerridge, The Agricultural Revolution. p. 242. At
Mudstone in the 15905 the inhabitants of the almshouses kept pigs in their
rooms; W. B. Gilbert, The Accounts of the Corpus Christi Fraternity and
Papers relating to the Antiquities of Maidstone (Maidstone, 1865), p. 92. Some modem medical historians
think that plague may also have been transmitted by the human flea. d. J.-N. Biraben in Daedalus (Spring, 1968), p. 544; Cambridge
Economic History of Europe, iv, p. 7, n. 1. In 1563 some 20,000 Londoners are thought to have died; in
1593, 15,000; in 1603, 30,000, or over a sixth of the inhabitants; in 1625,
41,000, another sixth; in 1636, 10.000; and, in 1665, at least 68,000. In
provincial towns plague deaths sometimes took away an even higher proportion
of the population. The plague
terrified by its suddenness, its virulence and its social effects. The upper
classes would emigrate temporarily from the afflicted area, leaving the poor
to die. Unemployment, food shortage, looting and violence usually resulted.
The refugees themselves were liable to receive rough treatment from country
folk, frightened they were bringing the disease with them. Further violence
accompanied popular resistance to the quarantine regulations and restrictions
on movement imposed by the authorities, particularly to the practice of
shutting up the infected and their families in their houses. The plague, said a preacher, was of all
diseases, the most dreadful and terrible: ... then all friends leave us, then a man or woman sit(s) and
lie(s) alone and is a stranger to the breath of his own relations. If a man
be sick of a fever it is some comfort that he can take a bed-staff and knock,
and his servant comes up and helps him with a cordial. But if a man be sick
of the plague then he sits and lies all alone. When a Western traveller visits a pre-industrial society
of this kind today he equips himself with all the resources of modem
medicine: he takes pills to keep his stomach free from infection and is vaccinated
against smallpox, and inoculated against typhus, plague or yellow fever. No
such immunity was available to the inhabitants of Tudor and Stuart England,
for medical science was helpless before most contemporary hazards to health.
There was an organised medical profession, but it had little to offer. In the
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries university-educated physicians were
given a purely 13. I. F.
D. Shrewsbury, A History of Bubonic Plague in the British Isles (Cambridge,
1970), is an important recent survey, though the critical review by C. Morris
in The Historical lournal. xiv
(1971), should also be read. Creighton, op. cit., remains indispensable, but
account should be taken of the important criticisms of R. S. Roberts,
'Epidemics and Social History', Medical History, xii (1968). Also valuable
are W. G. Bell, The Great Plague in London in 1665 (revd
edn, 1951); F. P. Wilson, The Plague in
Shakespeare's London (new edn, Oxford, 1963) and
the recent surveys by K. F. Helleiner in The
Cambridge Economic History of Europe, iv, chap. 1, and R. S. Roberts in Procs. Royal Soc. Med., lix (1966). 14. The Works of the
Rev. William Bridge (1845), i, pp. 468-9. academic training in the
principles of humoral physiology, as set out in the works of Hippocrates,
Aristotle and Galen. They were taught that illness sprang from an imbalance
between the four humours (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile).
Diagnosis consisted in establishing which of these humours was out of line,
and therapy in taking steps to restore the balance, either by bloodletting
(by venesection, scarification or applying leeches) or by subjecting the
patient to a course of purges and emetics. The physician thus followed a
dreary round of blood-letting and purging, along with the prescription of
pIasters, ointments and potions. He focused on what we should regard as the
symptoms of disease, fever or dysentery, rather than the disease itself. The
patient's urine was taken to be the best guide to his condition, and there
were some practitioners who even thought it enough
to see the urine without the patient, though ,the
Royal College of Physicians condemned this habit. It was just as well that in strict Galenic
theory one of the humours was bound to predominate unnaturally, so that
perfect health was almost by definition unattainable. In the seventeenth century, accordingly, doctors were
quite unable to diagnose or treat most contemporary illnesses. ‘Many diseases
they cannot cure at all,’ declared Robert Burton, 'as apoplexy, epilepsy,
stone, strangury, gout ... quartan
agues; a common ague sometimes stumbles them all.’ Internal
medicine had to wait upon the slow development of physiology and anatomy.
There were no X-rays and no stethoscopes, and a physician was usually quite
ignorant of what was actually going on inside a sick person's body. There
were surgeons who dealt with tumours, ulcers, fractures and venereal disease.
But their art was regarded as an inferior one by the physicians. Besides, without
anaesthetics or knowledge of antiseptics, there was very little they could
do. Operations were largely confined to amputations, trepanning the skull,
cutting for stone, bone-setting and incising abscesses. Patients were
understandably terrified of undergoing this kind of torture and the mortality
rate after such operations was high. Richard Wiseman's standard Severall ChirurgicaIl
Treatises (1676) was popularly known as 'Wiseman's Book of Martyrs'. 15. Sir O.
Clark, A History of the Royal College of Physicians of London (Oxford,
1964-6), i, p. 178. 16. As is
pointed out in R. Klibansky. B. Panofsky and F.
San, Saturn and Melancholy (1964), p. 11 and n. 27. 17. Burton,
Anatomy, ii, p. 210. 18. R.
North, The Lives of the ... North. ed. A. Jessopp (1890), ii, p. 248. Nowhere was the inadequacy of contemporary medical
technique more apparent than in its handling of the threat presented by the
plague. A few physicians noticed that rats came out of their holes at times
of plague, but they did not associate them with the disease; indeed, by
urging that cats and dogs be killed in order to check infection, they may
have actually worsened the situation. Contemporaries preferred to attribute plague
to a combination of noxious vapours in the air and corrupt humours in the
body, though they disagreed about the causes of these phenomena and about
whether or not the disease was contagious. As a preacher bluntly said in
1603. ‘Whence it cometh, whereof it ariseth and
wherefore it is sent ... they confess their ignorance.’ All sorts of amulets
and preservatives were recommended, tobacco, arsenic, quicksilver, dried
toads. Much energy was also devoted to finding some means of allaying popular
panic, on the assumption that the happy man would not get plague. As a
further preventive, the physicians prescribed better hygiene, which was
sensible enough, and the locking up of infected parties within their own
houses, which was less sensible, since by confining other members of the
family to the habitat of the rats they must have increased the toll of
deaths. No progress had been made in the study of plague by the time of the
great visitation of London in 1665. ‘It is a mysterious disease,’ confessed
the current Secretary of the Royal Society, ‘and I am afraid will remain so.,for all the observations and
discourses made of it.’ 11 Yet the failure of contemporary doctors to offer an
adequate therapy for this or most other contemporary diseases did not matter
very much to most of the population. The attentions of a qualified physician
were effectively beyond their reach, because there was a severely limited
supply of trained men. The Royal College of Physicians had been set up in
1518 to supervise and license physicians practising in the City of London and
within a seven-mile radius. The College seems to have exercised this monopoly
in a jealous and restrictive way, for it kept its numbers small, despite an
immense subsequent increase in the size of the City. In the first years of
its foundation the College had only a dozen members; 19. e.g.,
T. Lodge. A Treatise of the Plague (1603), sig. C2v. 1. H. Holland, Spirituall
Preservatives agains,t the
Pestilence (1603). p. 35. 2. The Correspondence of Henry
Oldenburg, ed. and trans. A. R. and M. B. Hall (Madison and Milwaukee.
1965-), ii, p. 527. whereas London's population was
perhaps sixty thousand. By 1589 the College's membership had risen to
thirty-eight while the population had more than doubled. Thereafter the
number of inhabitants continued to rise spectacularly, but the size of the
College remained almost stationary until the Civil War period. The number of
Fellows was raised to forty in 1663 and the College expanded further in the
later Stuart period. But the ratio of the London population to its resident
members and licentiates can never have been less than five thousand to one
and was usually very much greater.22 In the provinces, where the licensing
powers exercised by the College were never so important as those of the
Church and Universities, the situation was rather better. The number of
country physicians rose steadily through the period. One modern student has
compiled a list of 814 physicians who are known to have been licensed between
1603 and 1643. It shows that some towns were relatively well supplied with
qualified doctors. Norwich had seventeen, Canterbury twenty-two, Exeter
thirteen and York ten. Not all these may have actually practised, but the
list itself is an under-estimate, since not all the records of the period
have survived. By the end of the seventeenth century there can have been few
market-towns without a resident physician. Richard Baxter, the nonconformist
divine, who tells us he was very seldom without pain, was able as a young man
to consult no fewer than thirty-six different physicians. Physicians,
however, were too expensive for the bottom half of the population, even
though they often tailored their bills to fit the pockets of their clients.
In the seventeenth century a gentleman could expect to be charged about a
pound a day for medical attendance, but humbler persons might get off for a
few shillings if the doctor was so disposed.21 22. Clark,
History of the Royal College of Physicians, i, pp. 70, 71, 132, 188, 190,
304, 315, 356; ii, pp. 736-9. The exact number of licentiates before 1673,
when there were nine, is obscure. 23. J. H. Raach,
A Directory of English Country Physicians. 1603-43 (1962). For a thorough
discussion of this whole subject see R. S. Roberts, 'The Personnel and
Practice of Medicine in Tudor and Stuart England" Medical History. vi (1962) and viii (1964). 24. Reliquiae Baxterianae. ed. M. Sylvester (1696). i, p.
10. 25. Apart
from E. A. Hammond, 'Incomes of Medieval English Doctors', lournal of the History of Medicine, xv (1960), and a
'twenty-minutes' talk' by Sir D'A. Power, printed in Procs.
Royal Soc. of Medicine, xiii (1920), there seems to be no modem discussion of
medical fees. The pound-a-day principle is well exemplified in the long
series of accounts in H.M.C. Rutland, iv; The Autobiography and Correspondence
of Sir Simonds Dewes Nevertheless, there were many complaints that it was only
the wealthy who could regularly afford a physician. ‘Physic,’ declared Bishop
Latimer in 1552. ‘is a remedy prepared only for rich
folks and not for poor; for the poor man is not able to wage the physician.’
At the end of the seventeenth century Richard Baxter wrote that ‘many a
thousand lie sick and die that have not money for physicians’: even frugal
freeholders of twenty or thirty pounds a year had difficulty in finding ‘ten
shillings to save their lives in cases of danger’. The Royal College of
Physicians in 1687 ruled that their members should give free advice to the
poor and soon afterwards set up a short-lived dispensary to sell medicine at
cost price. This step angered the apothecaries (grocers-cum-drug sellers) and
did not solve the problem. Parishes were expected to pay medical fees for
their paupers and some municipalities appointed town doctors, but the
provision of a state medical service was urged only by utopian thinkers. One
of them, John Bellers, declared in 1714 that half
the people who died annually suffered from curable diseases, for which only
their poverty prevented them from finding a remedy. In lieu of the
physicians, patients could turn to the surgeons and apothecaries. Seventy-two
surgeons were licensed to practise in London in 1514, while in 1634 the
apothecaries were thought to number at least a hundred and fifty. (1845), ii,
p. S; and Diary of Walter Yonge, ed. G. Roberts
(Camden Soc., 1848), p. xxiii. Clark, History of the Royal College, ii, p.
436, suggests that lOs. was
the usual charge. In the early eighteen century Claver
Morris charged poor men half a crown; The Diary of a West Country Physician,
ed. E. Hobhouse (1934), p. 26. But in 1697 the
surgeon, James Yonge, was demanding up to £S a day
for his services; The lournal of lames Yonge, ed. F. N. L. Poynter
(1963), p. 207. 26. Sermons
by Hugh Latimer, ed. G. E. Corrie (Cambridge, p.s.,
1844), p. 541; F. J. Powicke, 'The Reverend Richard
Baxter's Last Treatise', Bull. lohn
Rylands Lib., x (1926), p. 187. 27. Clark, History
of the Royal College, ii, chaps. xx and xxiii. 28.
e.g., Newcastle (Clark, op. cit., i, p. 163 n.); Denbigh (A. H. Dodd. Life in
Elizabethan England (1961), pp. 46-7); Norwich (J. F. Pound in Univ. of
Birmingham Hist. lourn., viii (1961-2), p. 147); Barnstaple (J. B. Gribble, Memorials of Barnstaple (Barnstaple, 1830),
ii, pp. 293-4); Chester (R. H. Morris, Chester in the Plantagenet and Tudor
Reigns [n.d.], pp. -357-8). See also R. M. S. McConaghey, ~eHistory of Rural
Medical Practice', in The Evolution of Medical Practice in Britain. ed. F. N. L. Poynter (1961), p.
126 29. J. Bellers, An Essay towards the
Improvement of Physick (1714), p. 2. By 1701 there were said to be a thousand in London and a
further fifteen hundred apprentices. They outnumbered the physicians by five
to one. The apothecaries thus took on
the task of diagnosing and prescribing the medicine as well as supplying it.
The physicians resisted this incursion into their territory and the
seventeenth century witnessed a protracted legal battle which did not end
until 1704, when the apothecaries' right to give medical advice (though not
to charge for it) was upheld by the House of Lords. But they had long engaged
in general practice in the provinces, where distinctions between themselves
and the physicians and surgeons had been less rigid, while in London they
claimed to be handling ninety-five per cent of medical practice before the
end of the seventeenth century. After 1704 their evolution into the modern
general practitioner was assured. Nor was their treatment necessarily
inferior to that offered by the physicians. On the contrary, the very size of
their clientele forced them into prescribing new drugs of a kind frowned upon
by the Royal College in place of the time-consuming humoral remedies.' But the impact of organized medicine upon the lower
reaches of the population was seldom more than superficial. Many of the poor
chose to go outside the ranks of the licensed practitioners altogether, and
to consult an empiric, herbalist wise woman, or other member of that ‘great
multitude of ignorant persons’ whose practice of physic and surgery had been
denounced by Parliament in 1512. In 1542-3 another Act had allowed anyone
with the necessary knowledge to treat external sores and prescribe for the
stone. According to a pamphleteer in 1669, there was ‘scarce a pissing-place
about the City’ which was not adorned by posters advertising the services of
some medical quack. Some of the nostrums thus peddled reflected genuine
country lore about herbs and roots; others did the patient severe or even
fatal damage. 30. R.~. James in Janus, xli (1936); C. Wall and H. C. Cameron,
A History of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, i. ed. E. A. Underwood
(1963), pp. 77, 289, 394; K. Dewhurst in St. Barts.
Hospital Journ., lxvi (1962), p. 261. 31. Wall
and Cameron, op. cit., p. 131. 32. See R.
S. Roberts in History of Science, v (1966). 33. (D. Coxe), A Discourse wherein the (nterest
of the Patient in Reference to Physick and
Physicians is Soberly Debated (1669), p. 313; 3 Hen. viii, cap. 11; 34 and 35
Hen. viii, cap. 8. 34. For a
woman killed by an Elizabethan gardener'S herbal
prescription, see Middlesex County Records, ed. J. C. Jeaffreson
(1886-92). i, p. 276. But this was above all a time when medicine began at home.
Every housewife had her repertoire of private remedies. ‘All the nation are already physicians,’ remarked Nicholas
Culpepper in 1649. ‘If you ail anything, every one you meet, whether a man or
woman, will prescribe you a medicine for it.’ ‘None practise physic or professeth midwifery’, reported the villagers of Dry Drayton,
Cambridgeshire, in 1662, ‘but charitably one
neighbour helps one another’. In childbirth,
indeed, a physician was neyer employed, save by the
very wealthy, or in cases of unusual emergency. There was no shortage of
midwives, licensed and unlicensed, but their qualifications were rudimentary.
The forceps had been invented by Peter Chamberlen
early in the seventeenth century, but he kept it secret and the usual
obstetric tools were cruel and inefficient. A midwife estimated in 1687 that
two thirds of contemporary abortions, stillbirths, and deaths in child-bed
were to be attributed to the lack of care and skill displayed by her
colleagues. The wife of one Newark apothecary was so afraid of any midwife
coming near her that her husband used to lock her alone in her room until the
delivery was over. As for hospitals, St. Bartholomew's and St. Thomas's were
the only two for the physically ill in London at the end of the seventeenth
century and there were few elsewhere. They were in any case meant primarily
for the poor. No person of social pretensions would dream of entering one as
a patient; and if he did he would certainly be increasing his chances of
contracting some fatal infection. Even less could be done for sufferers from mental illness.
Contemporary medical therapy was primarily addressed to the ailments of the
body. ‘For the diseases of the mind,’ wrote Robert Burton, ‘we take no notice
of them.’ Raving psychotics were
locked up by their relatives, kept under guard by parish officers, or sent to
houses of correction, as less dramatic forms of mental illness were regarded
either as cases of melancholy to be treated by purging and bloodletting, or
wrongly diagnosed as ‘hysteria’, stemming from a condition of the uterus. The
uterine origin of nervous diseases was not successfully challenged in England
until the later seventeenth century, when Thomas Willis formulated the theory
of the cerebra) origin of hysteria and pioneered the science of neurology. 35. N.
Culpepper, A Physicall Directory (1649), sig. A2;
W. M. Palmer, 'Episcopal Visitation Returns, Cambridge (Diocese of Ely),
1638-62', Trans. Cambs. and
Hunts. Archaeol. Soc., iv (1915-30), p. 407. cf.
Burton, Anatomy, i, p. 210. 36. E. Cellier, A Scheme for the Foundation of a Royal Hospital
(1687) (in Somers Tracts, ix), p. 248. 1. P. Willoughby, Observations on
Midwifery. ed. H. Blenkinsop
(1863; 1972 reprint, East Ardsley), pp. 240-41. This book gives a remarkable
account of the activities of seventeenth-century midwives. 2. Burton, Anatomy, i, p. 69; A. Fessler, 'The Management of Lunacy in Seventeenth-century
England', Procs. of the Royal
Soc. of Medicine (Hist. section), xlix (1956), based on the Quarter Sessions
records for Lancashire. There was thus no orthodox medical agency which offered
satisfactory cure for mental illness. Various low-grade practitioners took
out licences as ‘curers of mad folks and distracted persons’; some of them
maintained private madhouses. Yet even Bethlehem Hospita!
(Bedlam) in London discharged its inmates as incurable if they had not
recovered within a year. It is not
surprising that supernatural explanations of mental
depression were advanced or that the main psychotherapists were the clergy.
Physic alone was not enough to cure melancholy, declared the Puritan oracle,
William Perkins. These were the circumstances in which so many unorthodox
methods of healing en joyed prestige. The population at large disliked
Galenic physic for its nauseous remedies, and were frightened by the prospect
of surgery. Some of the most intelligent laymen of the day expressed total
contempt for conventional medicine; and the unorthodox empirics hounded by
the Royal College of Physicians often turned out to have influential
champions. King James I regarded academic medicine as mere conjecture and
therefore useless. Francis Bacon thought that ‘empirics and old women’ were ‘more happy many times in their cures than learned
physicians’. Robert Burton, Archbishop Abbot, and many less notable contemporaries,
said the same. Some scientists and intellectuals followed the example of
Paracelsus and were prepared to learn from herbalists and wise women. Thomas
Hobbes, who took a keen interest in the 39. See I. Veith, Hysteria. The History of a Di.'iease
(Chicago, 1965); G. AbricossotI, L'Hysterie aux XVlle et XVllle siecies (Paris, 1897);
I. Hunter and R. A. Macalpine, Three Hundred Years
of Psychiatry (1963), pp. 69, 187. 40. Hunter
and Macalpine, op. cit., passim; Clark, History of
the Royal College, i, p. 263; R. R. James in lanus,
xli (1937), p. 102; E. H. Carter, The Norwich Subscription Books (1937), p.
138; J. Spencer, A Discourse 0/ Divers Petitions (1641); J. J. M., 'A
Clerical Mad-Doctor of the Seventeenth Century', The East Anglian, i (new
ser.), (1885-6). 41. Cited
by Kocher, Science and Religion, pp. 300-1. 1. As was observed by J. Primrose,
Popular Errours, trans. R. Wittie
(1651), pp. 231-3, 278, 280, although proof is hardly needed. 2. Clark, History Of the RoyaICollege,i,pp. 111,
114,116,143-7,195,262. 3. Sir G. Keynes, The Life of
William Harvey (Oxford, 1%6), p. 142; Bacon, Works. iv,
p. 388; Burton, Anatomy, i, p. 257; Clark op. cit., i. p. 195. See also
H.M.C., Rutland, i, p. 163; Yorkshire Diaries, ed. C. Jackson (Sur tees Soc.,
1877), p. 221; G. Harvey. The Art of Curing Diseases by ExpectQa
tion (1689), p. 6. problem of survival. concluded
that he would ‘rather have the advice or take physic from an experienced old
woman that had been at many sick people's bedsides, than from the learneds but unexperienced
physician’. ‘Doctors of physic,’ thought the sectary Lodowick
Muggleton were ‘the greatest cheats in the world.
If there were never a doctor of physic in the world, people would live longer
and live in
better in health.’ Before discounting such lay opinions we should recall that
even Thomas Sydenham, the greatest physician of the seventeenth century,
thought that it would have been better for many patients if the art of physic
had never been invented, remarking that many poor men owed their lives to
their inability to afford conventional treatment.41 Nor was he alone among
his colleagues in holding such opinions. ‘I have heard the learned and pious
Dr. Ridgeley. M.D., say,’ recalled John Aubrey, ‘that if the world knew the
villainy and knavery (beside ignorance) of the physicians and apothecaries,
the people would throw stones at 'em as they walked
in the streets.’ Helplessness in the face of disease was an essential
element in the background to the beliefs with which we shall be concerned. So
too was vulnerability to other kinds of misfortune, particularly when it came
suddenly. Next to plague, perhaps the greatest single threat to security was
fire. This was more of a risk in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than
it is today and contemporaries were much less well-equipped to deal with it.
The towns were particularly vulnerable with their thatched roofs, wooden chimneys
and crowded living conditions. Since there were no safety matches, people
often chose to fetch a bucket of burning coals from a neighbour rather than
waste time struggling with a tinder-box. At night they were dependent on
candles, which when set down in a draughty place, could easily put a house on
fire. ‘Fear candle, good wife,’ warned
the agricultural writer, Thomas Tusser, ‘Fear
candle in hay loft, in barn and in shed.’ When the chimney needed cleaning,
it was common to take a short cut by firing a gun up it or even setting it on
fire: this was how the Beccles fire was started in
1586, with eighty houses burned down as a result. 1. J. Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. A.
Powel1 (1949), p. 251. 2. L. Muggleton.
The Acts of the Witnesses (1699), p. 111. 3. K. Dewhurst, Dr
Thomas Sydenham (1624-89) (1966). pp. 163, 116. 4. Bod!', Aubrey MS 10, f. 113v• A further risk came from the numerous industrial workshops,
scattered among the houses, and observing the most rudimentary safety
precautions. Dyers, brewers and soap boilers were a constant source of
danger: the fire which did £200.000-worth of damage at Tiverton in 1612 began
when a dyer's furnace was allowed to become overheated. Some of the biggest conflagrations were the result of
carelessness engendered by primitive living conditions. A hundred and fifty
buildings were damaged at Woburn in 1595 after an old woman had set her
thatched house alight by throwing all her used bed-straw on the fire.
Tiverton was heavily damaged in 1598 when a fire was started by some
beggar-women who had been pathetically trying to cook pancakes on straw
because they could not afford to buy wood. Much of Northampton was destroyed
in 1675 when a woman left her pot of washing on the fire for too long. Most
of the Palace of Whitehall was burned down in 1698 because a Dutch
washerwoman tried to hasten the drying of her linen by lighting a charcoal
fire indoors. Once fire had broken out it seldom encountered much in the
way of effective resistance. Fire-fighting techniques were virtually unchanged
in England between the Norman Conquest and the death of Elizabeth 1. Even the most advanced municipality
possessed nothing more in the way of equipment than some leather buckets, a
few ladders and iron hooks for pulling down thatch so as to stop the fire
spreading. Until the mid-seventeenth century there were no engines to project
water to a height, and the water supply itself was usually unreliable. Some
towns required householders to keep buckets of water outside their doors.
Others tried to check the erection of wooden buildings, and thatched roofs.
This had been the official policy of the City of London since the twelfth
century. 49. T. Tusser, His Good Points of Husbandry, ed. D. Hartley
(1931~, p. 177; A Collection of Seventy-Nine Black-Letter Ballads and
Broadsides (1867), p.
82. 50. F. J.
Snell, The Chronicles of Twyford (liverton, n.d. [c. 1893]). p.
60. 51. (f. Wilcocks). A Short, yet a
True and Faithfull Narration of the Fear¬full Fire
that fell in the Towne of Woobutne (1595). p. 4;
The True Lament¬able Discourse of the Burning of Teverton (1598); The State of Northampton (1675); A Full
and True Account of a Most Dreadful . .. Fire • .. at Whitehall (1698) (The Harleian Mi,ficellany, ed. T.
Park (1808-13), vi, p. 398). 52. The
early history of fire-fighting is surveyed in the opening sections of G. V.
Blackstone, A History of the British Fire Service (1957). Much reievant material may be found in contemporary borough
records. But such regulations were easier to make than to enforce,
and the fire-fighting equipment usually proved sadly inadequate when the
blaze was under way. There were no fire brigades, and the scene at a fire was
usually one of unrelieved chaos. The only effective way contemporaries knew
of stopping a fire was to blow up all the buildings around it to stop it
spreading. When the flames dwindled there was invariably trouble with
pilferers. Unable to prevent the outbreak of fire, and virtually
helpless during the actual conflagration, contemporaries showed little more
resource when it came to bearing the loss. There was no organised fire
insurance until the last two decades of the seventeenth century. All that the
victim of fire could do was to apply for a Church brief, authorising
a collection to be made on his behalf in places of public worship. These
begging letters were issued for a variety of charitable purposes and were as
unreliable as modern flag-days. Nor was their prestige enhanced by the
numerous petty frauds which grew around them. But they help us to form some
estimate of the actual scale of fire damage. They show, for example, that in
the last fifty years of the seventeenth century there were eighty-nine
separate fires in which the damage incurred was estimated at £1,000 or more:
the total cost of this group of large fires was put at £913,416. In assessing this figure we should recall
that it excludes the Great Fire of London (1666), which did £10 millions of
damage, destroying over 13,000 houses, and leaving perhaps 100,000 people
homeless. It also excludes numerous smaller fires, as well as those for which
no record has survived, or for which no brief was issued. All this, moreover,
took place at a time when fire-fighting methods had begun to improve; in the
sixteenth century the situation was worse. As a purely economic factor, therefore, fire was
exceedingly important. But its human consequences are even more obvious, for
there was no occurrence which so graphically symbolized the instability of
human fortunes. ‘He which at one o'clock was worth five thousand pounds and,
as the prophet saith, drank his wine in bowls of
fine silver plate, had not by two o'clock so much as a wooden dish left 1. See, e.g., G. Atwell, The
Faithfull Surveyour (Cambridge. 1962), pp. 95-6. 2. I have worked out this total from
the list of briefs in W. A. Bewes, Church Briefs
(1896). For some additional figures see E. L. Jones, The Reduction of Fire
Damage in Southern England, 1650-1850', Post-Medieval Archaeology, ii (1968).
55. W. G.
Bell. The Great Fire of London (3rd edn. 1923), pp.
174, 224. to eat his meat in, nor a house
to cover his sorrowful head.’ The briefs which were read aloud in the
churches on Sundays served as constant reminder of how men could be reduced
in an instant from wealth to utter penury, and how there was no telling whose
time might be next. The psychological threat was increased by the capriciousness
of the danger. Some towns escaped serious fire; whereas others suffered again
and again. Tiverton was burned down three times (1598, 1612. 1731).
Marlborough, Blandford. Dorchester and Beaminster all suffered repeatedly. Warwick and
Northampton had only one serious fire each, but in both cases it destroyed a
large part of the town. In the metropolis fires were so common that when the
great fire in 1666 began scarcely anyone outside its immediate vicinity took
any notice. Poverty, sickness, and sudden disaster were thus familiar
features of the social environment of this period. But we must not make the
anachronistic mistake of assuming that contemporaries were as daunted by them
as we should be, were we suddenly pitchforked backwards in time. In Tudor and
Stuart England men were fully accustomed to disease and a low expectation of
life. Parents were slower to recognise the
individuality of their children, for they well knew that they might lose them
in their infancy. Husbands and wives were better adjusted to the idea of the
surviving partner marrying after the other's death. The attitude of the poor
to their lot seems often to have been one of careless stoicism. Many
middle-class observers commented on their insensibility in face of the
dangers of the plague, and were shocked by the general reluctance to obey
regulations designed for their own safety. When starvation threatened, the poor were
capable of using violence to secure food for themselves,
but they made little contribution to the political radicalism of the time and
showed no interest in attempting to change the structure of the society in
which they found themselves. Unlike the inhabitants of today's
under-developed countries, they knew of no foreign countries where the
standard of living was notably higher. Instead of working for social reform
they often turned to more direct methods of liberation. 1. Snell, The Chronicles of Twyford, p. 50. 2. Bell; Great Fire of London, pp.
30-31. There is a list of London fires in Flagellum Dei (1668). 58. See,
e.g., H.M.e. Gowdy, p.
163; e.S.P.D., 1665-6, p. 5; W. Kemp, A. Brief Treatise of the Nature . .. and Cure of the Pestilence (1665), pp. 15-16; Wilson, The
Plague in Shakespeare's London, p. 41. Drink, for example, was built into the fabric of social
life. It played a part in nearly every public and private ceremony, every
commercial bargain, every craft ritual, every
private occasion of mourning or rejoicing. At fairs and markets, which
remained exempt until 1874 from ordinary licensing restrictions, the
consumption could be enormous. ‘Go but to the town's end where a fair is
kept,’ remarked a preacher in 1638, ‘and there they lie, as if some field had
been fought; here lies one man, there another.’ As a Frenchman observed in 1672, there was
no business which could be done in England without pots of beer. Late medieval preachers complained that
working-men got drunk at least once a week; while in the reign of Charles II
foreign visitors noticed that artisans did not let a day go by without a
visit to the alehouse. The beer was cheap to make. The Elizabethan country
clergyman, William Harrison, had 200 gallons brewed every month in his
household, for an outlay of only twenty shillings a time. We do not know the
size of his household, but the daily consumption was obviously high. At sea
and on land the standard allowance of beer per head seems to have been a
gallon a day. Beer was a basic ingredient in everyone's diet, children as
well as adults. The first available figures for the total national
consumption date from the late seventeenth century. They show that in 1684
duty was charged in England and Wales on a total of 6,318,000 barre1s of beer
(4,384,000 of strong beer. 1,934.000 of small beer), each barrel containing 59. (R. Younge), The Drunkard's Character (1638), p. 338; R. V.
French, Nineteen Centuries of Drink in England (2nd edn,
n.d.), p. 224. For an in¬formative
survey by an early temperance reformer of pre-industrial drinking customs,
see J. Dunlop, The PhUosophy 0/ Artificial and
Compulsory Drink¬ing Usage in Great Britain and
Ireland (6th edn., 1839). 60. G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (2nd edn, Oxford, 1961), p. 364; (L. Magalotti),
Travels of Cosmo the Third, Grand Duke 0/ Tuscany, through England (1821), p.
398. 61. W.
Harrison, Description 0/ England, ed. F. J. Furnivall (New Shake¬spere Soc. (1877-1908)), i, pp. 158-9. 62. E. M.
Myatt-Price, fA Tally of Ale', lourn.
Royal Statistical Soc., ser. A, cxxiii (1960); L. Stone, The Crisis of the
Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford, 1965), p. 558; M. Oppenheim, A History of the
Administration of the Royal Navy, i (1896), p. 140; F. G. Emmison,
Tudor Secretary. Sir William Petre at Court and at
Home (1961), p. 150; 1. D. Chambers, Nottinghamshire in the Eighteenth Cel'turv (2nd edn, 1966), pp.
290-91. thirty-six gallons in London, and
thirty-four in the provinces. This suggests each member of the population,
man. woman and child. consumed
almost forty gallons a year. i.e. nearly a pint a
day. But allowance must also be made for the beer brewed privately on which
excise was not charged: Gregory King estimated that in 1688 this came to a
further seventy per cent of the original total. Even without this addition
the per capita consumption figure is higher than anything known in modem
times. And this is to take no account of the foreign wine imports or the
growing volume of spirit consumption. It may be that the greater quantity of salt meat and fish
consumed in the seventeenth century made men thirstier. It is also likely
that the listlessness produced by a predominantly cereal diet created a
greater demand for a stimulant. The absence of alternative beverages further
helped to drive men to alcohol. Tea and coffee were still luxuries. Tea cost
twenty shillings a pound at the end of the seventeenth century and did not
establish itself as a working-class drink until the last quarter of the
eighteenth century. Coffee played an even slighter part in the drinking
habits of the population at large, though it became very fashionable among
London sophisticates. Alcohol was thus an essential narcotic which anaesthetized
men against the strains of contemporary life. Drunkenness broke down social
distinctions, and brought a temporary mood of optimism to the desperate. It
was extensive in Elizabethan prisons and among the lower classes. (It was
only during the seventeenth century that the lord replaced the beggar as
proverbially the drunkest member of the community. The poor took to drink to
blot out some of the horror in their lives. Alcohol flowed freely at times of
plague: ‘I have myself seen,’ recalled
a preacher in 1638. ‘when the Bills [of Mortality] were at the highest, even
bearers who had little respite from carrying dead corpses to their graves and
many others of the like rank go reeling in the streets.’ At executions drink
was always offered to the condemned: the witch, Anne Bodenham,
who was executed at Salisbury in 1653, kept asking for drink and would have
died drunk if her persecutors had allowed her. 63. B. R.
Mitchell and P. Deane, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge,
1.962), p. 251; O. King, Natural and Political Observations (in O. Chalmers,
Estimate of the Comparative Strength of Great Britain [1802]), pp. 55-6. d. O. B. Wilson, A.lcohol and
the Nation (1940), table 2. 64.
Drummond and Wilbraham, op. cit., p. 117. 65.
Shakespeare in His Own Age. ed. A. Nicoll (Shakespeare Survey, xvii [Cambridge, 1964]), pp.
98-9. ' 66. A
change noted by J. Hart, The Diet of the Diseased (1633), p. 135. and H. Moseley. An Healing Leaf
(1658), p. 4. 67. Young~,'The Drunkard's Character, p. 248. d. The Plague
Pamphlets of Thomas Dekker, ed. F. P. Wilson (Oxford, 1925), pp. 150-51. ‘Ale,’ wrote a contemporary, doth comfort the heavy and troubled mind; it will
make a weeping widow laugh and forget sorrow for her deceased husband; ... it
is the warmest lining of a naked man's coat; it satiates and assuages hunger
and cold; with a toast it is the poor man's comfort; the shepherd, mower,
ploughman, and blacksmith's most esteemed purchase; it is the tinker's
treasure, the pedlar’s jewel, the beggar's joy; and
the prisoner's loving nurse. As a means of making life appear momentarily tolerable,
drink had few rivals among the very poor. There was more good in a cask of ale than in the four gospels, declared a fifteenth-century
heretic; malt, he thought, did more to justify God's ways to man than the
Bible. A newer form of narcotic was tobacco. Smoking was
introduced to England early in the reign of Elizabeth I and had become well established
by the time of her death. At first there was an attempt to represent tobacco
as being taken only for medicinal purposes, but the pretence soon became
unconvincing. In 1597 a contemporary remarked that addicts were consuming it
‘for wantonness ... and cannot forbear it, no, not in the midst of their
dinner’. Jacobean observers were familiar with the chain smoker who puffed
his pipe from morning to night, and even in bed. ‘Tis death to
some to be barred tobacco,’ declared a Member of Parliament in 1621. Yet
pipe-smoking was an expensive habit. Tobacco varied widely in price according
to the supply, but it seldom sold for less than a pound per pound in the
reign of James I, and often cost more. Figures for domestic consumption are
spasmodic, but they indicate a steady rise, from an annual average of 140,000
pounds in 1614-21 to 11,300,000 pounds in 1699-1709. This suggests that the
consumption per head of population went up from less than an ounce a year at
the beginning of the century to nearly two pounds at the end. 68. E.
Bower, Doctor Lamb revived (1653), pp. 34,36. 69. John
Taylor, the Water Poet, quoted in W. T. Marchant, In
Praise of Ale (1888), p. 57. 70.
Thomson, Later Lollards, p. 62. 71. A.
Chute, Tobacco, ed. F. P. Wilson (Luttrell Soc., 1961), p. xxvii; W. B. Willcox, Gloucestershire. A Study in Local Government
(New Haven. 1940). p. t58. 72. M.
Prestwich, Cranfield (Oxford, 1966), p. 313. Not until 1907 did the figures reach this level again. Tobacco must have done something to steady
the nerves of Stuart Englishmen. One modem historian has suggested, not
entirely frivolously, that it helped to foster the virtues of political
compromise which emerged in the later seventeenth century. Holy Communion, thought Christopher Marlowe, would have been
‘much better being administered in a tobacco pipe’. A further escape from reality was gambling. In modem times
the prospect of winning a fortune on the football pools attracts millions of
people and sustains the optimism of many working-class folk in adverse
circumstances. In the seventeenth century gambling diverted the attention of
the labouring poor from the possibilities of self-help and political
activism, by holding out the prospect that a lucky person would be able to
better himself despite the inequities of the social system. Men gambled on
cards, dice, horses, foot-races, bear-baiting, cock-fighting, and a host of
similar pastimes. Even very poor men engaged heavily in speculative ventures;
and the judicial records of the time contain occasional references to
labourers who were unable to support their wives and children because they
had lost all their money at cards. In
1663 Samuel Pepys was amazed to see ordinary working-folk losing as much as
ten or twenty pounds on bear-baiting and cock-fighting. These were the habits which generations of middle-class
reformers attempted to break in their successive campaigns for the
Reformation of Manners, by battling against popular pastimes, 'superfluous'
ale houses and lower-class tippling. What they were combating was the
fatalistic hopelessness of those who saw no alternative but to drown their
sorrows. The beliefs to which we must now turn were all concerned to explain
misfortune and to mitigate its rigour. But we must not forget that some
contemporaries preferred recourse to cruder and more immediate forms of
escape. 1. C. M. Macinnes,
The Early English Tobacco Trade (1926), p. 35; Mitchell and Deane, Abstract
of British Historical Statistics, pp. 355-7: A. Rive, 'The Consumption of
Tobacco since 1600', Economic History, i (1926). 2. D. Ogg,
England in the. Reign Of Charles 11 (2nd edn,
Oxford, 1955), i, p. 76; P. H. Kocher, Christopher Marlowe (Chapel Hill,
1946), pp. 35-6,60. 1. T. Gataker,
Of the Nature and Use of Lots (2nd edn. 1627), pp.
288-9; Quarter Sessions Records, ed. J. C. Atkinson (North Riding Rec. Soc.,
1884-7), i, p. 209; (T. Brasbridge), The Poore Mans Jewell (1578), sig. biii"',
2. S. Pepys, Diary, 21 Dec. 1663. |