J.P.Sommerville

 

 

 

England in 1529


 
 
 

Society and economy


The towering 180 foot spire of Thaxted Church, Essex - built 1340-1510.
bullet The population of England in 1529 was roughly 2.5 million. This was still far below the peak of 1300, but showing signs of recovery from the nadir around 1400.
bullet During the following century, the population of England roughly doubled. Prices rose, but real wages did not keep pace with them.
bullet English landowners attempted to cope with price inflation by increasing agricultural productivity - in particular by enclosing the old inefficient open fields and curtailing common grazing rights. Poorer peasants were driven from the land by these measures, and forced into wage labor, emigration to towns, or vagrancy.

 

Social critics complained that landlords bent on enclosure - especially for wool production - destroyed rural communities:

"They stop the course of agriculture, destroying houses and towns, reserving only the churches, and enclose grounds that they may lodge their sheep in them. As if forests and parks had swallowed up too little of the land, those worthy countrymen turn the best inhabited places into solitude; for when an insatiable wretch, who is a plague to his country, resolves to enclose many thousand acres of ground, the owners as well as tenants are turned out of their possessions, by tricks, or by main force, or being wearied out with ill-usage, they are forced to sell them. By which means those miserable people, both men and women, married and unmarried, old and young, with their poor but numerous families (since country business requires many hands,) are all forced to change their seats, not knowing whither to go …"

(Thomas More, Utopia)
 


Guildhall Norwich
(built 1407-53.)

 England continued to be a rural society, largely dependent on agriculture.
The largest city was London, with a population of about 50,000 in 1500; it expanded to ten times that by 1700.
In 1529 just two other towns - Norwich and Bristol - had populations in excess of 10,000.

The most important industry was cloth manufacture. The exports of raw wool had fallen and towns such as Lavenham and Boston that had grown prosperous on the wool trade declined.
 

bullet Mining continued to be of importance in some areas of the country - especially coal in northern England, tin in Cornwall and lead in Derbyshire.
bullet There was a boom in house building during the early Tudor period. Throughout the country, the nobility and gentry spent their growing wealth on more comfortable and impressive homes.

The tollgate at Sandwich, Kent
built 1537.

 

Government

bullet The crown continued to shift local responsibility for local government from nobles and sheriffs to gentle Justices of the Peace. Noblemen no longer commanded private armies or regarded their main function as soldiering.
bullet The dividing line between rich gentlemen and noblemen became increasingly blurred as the two groups intermarried.
bullet Increasingly, the route to power, wealth and influence was royal service. The educational level of the upper classes improved as they saw their careers lying in government office.
 


Lincolns Inn
 one of the Inns of Court (law schools in London) built in the reign of Henry VII

 It gradually became common for the sons of noble and gentle families to acquire a smattering of academic education at university and of legal knowledge at the Inns of Court.

bullet The division of Parliament into two Houses - of Lords and of Commons - had become fixed in the course of the later Middle Ages, and the right to sit in the Lords had become the defining characteristic of a nobleman.
bullet The House of Commons was dominated by the gentry - both the knights of the shire and the burgesses being drawn predominately from its ranks. Legislation and taxation continued as parliament's major functions. The view that the king should live from his own income (largely from land, and from the customs duties on international trade) and not impose direct taxation except in emergencies (usually war) remained deeply rooted.
bullet The English Church was a powerful, wealthy and partially independent institution. Its revenues were three times that of the crown, it owned more than one fifth of the land in England, its courts exercised autonomous jurisdiction over moral and spiritual cases, and over wills and marriages, and its clergy was theoretically answerable to Rome.
 


William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury
painted by Hans Holbein (1527.)
In practice, this independence was strictly limited - royal control of nominations of bishops and abbots ensured that career-minded clerics cared more about the king's opinions than the pope's. Wolsey tried to turn the church into a private empire, but only succeeded in destroying any institutional basis for resistance to royal demands.