EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN SOCIETY

Henry Kamen has taught in the faculties of universities including Edinburgh,

Warwick and Wisconsin–Madison, and was most recently professor at the
Higher Council for Scientific Research, Barcelona. He is a leading authority on
Spanish history and the author of over twenty books. His Philip of Spain was
published to critical acclaim, receiving praise from Antonia Fraser in the Sunday
Times, Hugh Thomas in the New York Times Book Review and John Adamson in
the Sunday Telegraph.

i
ii
EARLY MODERN
EUROPEAN
SOCIETY
THIRD EDITION

HENRY KAMEN

YALE UNIVERSIT Y PRESS

NEW HAVEN AND LONDON

iii
Copyright © 2021 Henry Kamen

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

iv
 CONTENTS

List of Plates vi
Preface viii
Map of Europe c. 1725 ix

1 Identities and Horizons 1

2 Leisure, Work and Movement 50
3 Communities of Belief 70
4 The Ruling Elite 103
5 The Middle Elite 136
6 Solidarities and Resistance 163
7 Gender Roles 208
8 Social Discipline and Marginality 239
9 Modernity and the Individual 277
10 Global Projection of Europeans 317
11 The Rise of the Modern State 344

Endnotes 362
References and Readings 389
Index 400

v
 PLATES

1. Europa regina, by Sebastian Münster, 1570. bigthink.com.

2. Map of the New World, from Cosmographia by Sebastian Münster, 1544.
State Library of New South Wales.
3. Children’s Games, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1560. Kunsthistorisches
Museum.
4. The Triumph of Death, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1562. Museo del Prado.
5. ‘The Hanging’, from The Miseries of War by Jacques Callot, 1633. V&A
Museum.
6. Soldiers Plundering a Farm During the Thirty Years’ War, by Sebastiaen Vrancx,
1620. Deutsches Historisches Museum.
7. ‘The Terrifying Effects of War’. INTERFOTO/Alamy.
8. The Village Festival, by David Teniers the Younger, 1645. Staatliche Kunsthalle
Karlsruhe.
9. The Peasant Dance, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1567. Kunsthistorisches
Museum.
10. The Harvesters, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565. Met Museum.
11. The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, by François Dubois, c. 1580. Musée
cantonal des Beaux-Arts.
12. The Interior of the Grote Kerk, Haarlem, by Gerrit Berckheyde, 1673. © The
National Gallery, London.
13. Anneken Hendriks, Bound on a Ladder, Burned in Amsterdam, 1571, by Jan
Luyken, 1685.
14. The Witches’ Kitchen, by Frans Franken the Younger, c. 1610. Hermitage
Museum.
15. The Witches, by Hans Baldung, 1510. Met Museum.
16. Trier Hexentanzplatz, 1594.
17. The Tree of Ranks, by Hans Weiditz, 1530. Getty.

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 PLATES

18. A View of Longleat, by Jan Siberechts, 1675. © UK Government Art

Collection.
19. Bevern Castle, Saxony. © Biathlonua/Dreamstime.com.
20. Syndics of the Cloth Makers of Amsterdam, by Rembrandt, 1662. Rijksmuseum.
21. Flysheet from the great German peasant wars, from Kulturgeschichte Des
Deutschen Volkes by Otto Henne am Rhyn, 1897.
22. The Family Meal, by brothers Le Nain, 1642.
23. ‘The Burning of the Knight Richard Puller von Hohenburg With His
Servant Before the Walls of Zürich, For Sodomy’, from Grosse Burgunder
Chronik by Dieboldt Schilling, 1482. Zentralbibliothek Zürich.
24. Landscape with Gypsy Fortune-tellers, by Hendrick Avercamp, c. 1625.
Bildindex der Kunst & Architektur.
25. Gallery of Views of Ancient Rome, by Giovanni Paolo Panini, 1758. Met
Museum.
26. Calicut (Kozhikode), from Civitates Orbis Terrarium by Georg Braun and
Frans Hogenberg, 1572. Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg.
27. Portrait of an East India Company official, by Dip Chand, c. 1760. V&A
Museum.
28. Thuiskomst van JC van Neck, by Cornelis Vroom, 1599. The Picture Art
Collection/Alamy.
29. The Battle of Terheide, by Jan Beerstraten, c. 1654. World History Archive/
Alamy.
30. Dutch VOC porcelain, c. 1674. Amsterdam Museum.
31. Winter Landscape with Skaters, by Hendrick Avercamp, 1608. Rijksmuseum.
32. A Scene from The Beggar’s Opera, by William Hogarth, 1729. Tate Images.

vii
 PREFACE

This study is an introduction to crucial features of European society from the

end of the fifteenth to the early decades of the eighteenth century, a period that
scholars frequently identify as ‘Renaissance’, ‘early modern’ or ‘preindustrial’,
imprecise labels that serve nevertheless to distinguish epochs of history from
each other. ‘Europe’, of course, is difficult to identify. For present purposes, it
excludes the borderlands that extended into Asia beyond Russia; it also excludes
the Ottoman territories of the Balkans, and the North African Maghreb, lands
where both society and culture had little in common with the predominantly
Christian structure of the continent. Within those limits of space and time, it is
possible to trace developments and trends that gave the continent its distinctive
character, one that has had a direct impact on the world in which we live today.
Earlier versions of the book were published in 1984 and in 2000. The
completely revised text of this third edition draws with gratitude on the substan-
tial new research done by scholars over recent decades. Each chapter is accompa-
nied by a very few notes and references to readings that may encourage students
and interested readers to make further exploration, but no attempt has been
made to offer a full bibliography for the vast number of themes, regions and
languages covered.
Barcelona, January 2021

viii
 FI NL AND
Habsburg possessions N O R WA Y
Oslo St Petersburg
Holy Roman Empire
Frontiers, c. 1725 SCOTLAND
0 400 miles S W E D E N
Edinburgh Moscow
Riga
0 600 km
IRELAND Nor th Sea
B al t ic LITHUANIA R U S S I A N
Dublin G R E A T DENMARK Sea Smolensk
B R I T A I N E M P I R E
WA L E S UNITED
E NGL A ND PROVINCES HANOVER EAST
Atlantic PRUSSIA
London Berlin PRUSSIA
Ocean Warsaw
Brussels S AXON Y POLAND
Kiev
B OH E M IA
Paris
Strasbourg AU ST R IA
BAVARIA

ix
F R A N C E Vienna
Pest
S WI T Z . Buda
H U NG ARY

R
Toulouse S AVOY

EP
U
B Belgrade
LI Black Sea

AL
C
Marseille O
F
Madrid

UG
PA PA L V O

T
EN
STAT E S
Lisbon S P A I N Barcelona IC
E
T
T

OR
Rome O Constantinople

P
Naples M
A N
KINGDOM OF E M P I
NAPLES R E
Mediterranean Sea

M U S L I M S T A T E S

Europe c. 1725
x
 — one —
IDENTITIES AND HORIZONS

‘My dear Raphael, do not attempt to be brief, but explain in order the
fields, rivers, cities, people, customs, institutions, laws and everything you
think we should know.’
‘There is nothing I would rather do’, he said, ‘however it will require
some time.’
‘Let us dine first and then afterwards we can arrange a time.’
Thomas More, Utopia, book I (1516)

Europe: an insecure identity; Dimensions of European space; The conquest of

distance; Identities and frontiers; The nation, the ‘state’; Languages to reinforce
identity; Basic identities: the rural community; Basic identities: the urban
community; A core identity: the family; A Europe dominated by the young; The
surprising brevity of marriage; Population trends: a Malthusian crisis?; Born to die;
Mortality: epidemics; Mortality: famine; Mortality: war

Europe: an insecure identity

The fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 focused the attention of western
states on the menace of Islam, creating for the first time a consciousness of their
common interest against the enemy. The humanist Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini,
writing the year after its fall, appealed to the west to rally to the concept of
‘Europe’, which he identified with the Christian cause and whose leadership he
assigned to the states of ‘Germania’. Subsequent writers tended to agree that the
continent of Europe included all those countries that had been Catholic in faith
and Latin in culture. Exceptionally, the French humanist Montaigne included
‘Muscovy’ in his view of the continent, since the Russians also were a line of
defence against Islam. But in the Cosmografia (several editions after 1544) of
Sebastian Münster, Muscovy and the Balkan states were portrayed as the mere

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 EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN SOCIETY

skirt-trails of a queenly continent whose heart was in central Europe and whose
crowned head was in Spain.1
‘Europe’ remained a nebulous idea, seldom encountered even in print. Though
delineated carefully in the pioneering maps of Münster, it formed no part of the
mental baggage of westerners. During the Renaissance, propagandists identified the
idea either with the religious extension of papal Christendom or with the temporal
power of the Holy Roman Emperor. Those, such as the humanist Lorenzo Valla,
who rejected both these identifications, preferred to believe in a Europe unified
rather by the uplifting value of a common Latin culture. The attempt to define the
continent became increasingly difficult at its edges. Most westerners were unhappy
about admitting non-Catholic Slav culture into their vision of the world, and took
a very distant and inevitably uninformed – therefore unsympathetic – view of Russia
and its neighbours.2 The Venetians were in touch with Moscow from 1471; the
Holy Roman Emperor sent a special ambassador, Sigismund von Herberstein, in
1516; and the English sent an important trade mission in 1553, but contacts were
few and superficial (language was an enormous obstacle), and the image of Muscovy
as a tyrannical land of slaves continued to persist. And what was one to make of
multicultural Spain? Valla accepted that the Muslims of Spain might be termed
Europeans, but a Bohemian traveller to the peninsula in the 1460s, Leo von
Rozmital, could not disguise his unease at the mixture of Jewish and Islamic culture
he encountered.3
All educated people knew that there was an enormous and complex world
outside, whose existence defined the limits and character of their continent. Direct
knowledge of that world was, however, limited, and the public had to rely on
travel accounts – often highly fictitious – such as those of the late thirteenth-
century Italian traveller Marco Polo. The discovery of the New World in 1492
initiated another phase in the process of the definition of Europe. America became
a mirror to the Old World, the ‘other’ against which Europeans could contrast
themselves. Because they were made aware of the clear differences from inhabi-
tants of other continents, and in the process became more aware of their own
attributes, capacities and culture, Europeans were slowly initiated into a conscious-
ness of their special identity. ‘Europe’ as a cosmographic entity took on shape in
maps and travel accounts, even while its inhabitants remained in general unaware
that any such development was taking place. Contact with other civilisations,
notably with the highly developed ones in Asia, gave further solidity to the percep-
tion of Europe viewed on a global scale (see Chapter 10).

2
 IDENTITIES AND HORIZONS

Dimensions of European space

By the early sixteenth century the traders, adventurers and explorers of the
Atlantic seaboard had begun to extend the horizons of Europeans. The brief and
fragmentary medieval contacts between Europe and Asia were replaced in the
Renaissance epoch by direct and profitable exchanges between the traders of
Europe and the Asian monarchies. ‘What on earth have you come seeking so far
away in India?’, Vasco da Gama was asked when he arrived in May 1498 in
Malabar. ‘Christians and spices’, was his prompt reply. Spices, particularly
pepper, became the chief source of wealth of the Portuguese crown, which in the
first half of the sixteenth century pioneered the European discovery of the East
Indies territories and China and Japan. The Portuguese Ferdinand Magellan,
who had spent seven years in the Indies, eventually passed over into the service
of Spain and helped to give the latter a definitive role in the struggle for overseas
possessions. Between them these two small nations, totalling some 9 million in
population, pioneered opening up the globe to European interests.
Portugal was a small country of barely a million people, with no history of
overseas expansion. Yet in 1415 it startled the world by sending an expeditionary
force to capture the North African port of Ceuta.4 Its leaders subsequently
financed the fleet under Bartomeu Dias that sailed round the southern tip of
Africa in 1487. The riches harvested by Portugal – between l500 and 1520 some
10,500 tonnes of spices from the east, some 410 kilograms of gold a year from
West Africa – stimulated rivalry. In those months the Genoese sailor Christopher
Columbus was also in touch with the Portuguese, looking for backing for his
own dreams of voyages to the east. The Portuguese crown, however, was not at
that moment in a position to finance him. The next news from Columbus was
when he touched in at Lisbon in March 1493 to announce that he had reached
islands near Japan. The Portuguese response was to back the ships under Vasco
da Gama, which reached India after a 309-day voyage from Lisbon.
Apart from the contact with the Caribbean, the most notable Spanish achieve-
ment was the circumnavigation of the world by the vessel Victoria (1519–22),
in a fleet of five commanded at the beginning by Magellan, who lost his life on
the voyage, and finally by a Spaniard, Sebastian Elcano. The Portuguese exercised
strict control over information about their trade, but the Spaniards were never
so secretive and allowed free exchange of ideas, for otherwise, as the historian
Antonio de Herrera argued, ‘the reputation of Spain would fall rapidly, for foreign

3
 EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN SOCIETY

and enemy nations would say that small credence could be placed in the word of
her rulers since their subjects were not allowed to speak freely’. After mid-century
the great collections of travel literature, notably the Venetian Ramusio’s Delle
navigazioni (1550) and Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations (1589), began to dispel
old myths about the overseas territories and presented the literate public with
realities far removed from the tales of bisexual monsters and dog-headed men
with which their fathers had been regaled.
Trade and exploration were the first stage, largely limited to the early century,
of Europe’s discovery of the outside world. In that early period the sense of wonder
was still paramount: many realised with a shock that Asia and America frequently
outdid any marvels that Europe might offer. Antonio Pigafetta, a native of Vicenza
who sailed with Magellan, explained how he came to be there: ‘I was in Spain in
the year 1519, and from books and conversations I learnt that there were wonderful
things to see by travelling the ocean, so I determined to discover with my own eyes
the truth of all that I had been told’. Thanks to his enthusiasm, the most famous
expedition in European naval history was narrated for posterity. The sense of
wonder was always there. Hernando Cortés, writing to his own emperor after
entering the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan in 1521, claimed of Montezuma’s palaces
that ‘there is not their like in all Spain’. The great temple, he said, was one ‘whose
size and magnificence no human tongue could describe’ and the city itself he called
‘the most beautiful thing in the world’. Recalling in his old age the splendours of
Mexico, a veteran of that conquest, Bernal Díaz, said that even the marketplace
was such that ‘some of our soldiers who had been in many parts of the world, in
Constantinople, in Rome, and all over Italy, said that they had never seen a market
so well laid out, so large, so orderly, and so full of people’.
In the course of the century this awareness of Europe’s modest part in world
civilisation was superseded by a more aggressive attitude. Confident in their own
superiority, Europeans moved forward into the colonial epoch. Gama’s epic
voyage of 1497–8 initiated the process.5 The aggressiveness was in part fed by the
conviction that Christianity must be taken to the heathen. The most remarkable
achievements in this respect were of men such as Francis Xavier (d. 1552), a
Jesuit from Navarre, whose global vision took him to Goa, Malabar, Malacca,
Japan and the Chinese coast; and Fray Toribio de Motolinía, who in 1524 landed
in Mexico with 11 other Franciscans to begin the first large-scale conversion ever
undertaken by Christians outside Europe. In part, however, the attitude sprang
from an assumption of inherent racial superiority. ‘How can we doubt’, wrote

4
 IDENTITIES AND HORIZONS

the Spanish humanist Juan Ginés Sepúlveda in 1547, ‘that these people – so
uncivilised, so barbaric, contaminated with so many impieties and obscenities –
have been justly conquered by a nation so humane and excelling in every virtue?’
This may be compared with the words of Jan Pieterz Coen, seventeenth-century
creator of the Dutch East Indies. ‘May not a man in Europe’, he asked a critic of
his policies, ‘do what he likes with his cattle? Even so does the master here do
with his men, for these with all that belongs to them are as much the property of
the master as are brute beasts in the Netherlands.’ European perception of the
outside world was thus rooted in a supreme confidence. ‘All has now been
traversed and all is known’, proclaimed the historian López de Gómara in 1552.
And in tune with this confidence came the growing urge to dominate, as stated
firmly in 1590 by the Jesuit José de Acosta when, applauding the possession by
Spain of America, he affirmed that this was entirely ‘in accord with the desire of
Providence that certain kingdoms rule others’.

The conquest of distance

Not the least amazing feature of the globalisation of Europe was the conquest of
distance. A look at the distances covered by the ships trading to Asia round the
Cape, the voyages made by the English settlers to north America and the terri-
tory traversed by Francis Xavier on his missions or Pizarro on his conquests
might lead to the suspicion that technological progress had made it possible. Yet,
for all the improvements in nautical science, time was barely attacked, and
human endurance alone was a decisive factor in the conquest of distance. From
the mid-sixteenth century European travellers undertook a determined advance
to all points of the compass. Some 70 accounts survive of travels by west
Europeans to Russia during the period 1550–99, where there had been only a
dozen for the first half of the century.
Water, horse or coach were the three means of transport, and their efficiency
varied.6 Over long distances the sea was beyond all doubt the quickest method of
communication, but over smaller overland areas the horse was faster and more
reliable, making it the obvious basis for the nascent postal services of Europe.
Governments took a special interest in improving the quality of the postal service,
which remained very expensive and therefore used less by private individuals than
by the state and by merchants. In Brussels the government from the 1490s had
employed as postmaster François de Tassis, member of a most remarkable family,

5
 EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN SOCIETY

the Tasso, who came originally from near Bergamo, in northern Italy. In the
fifteenth century members of the family were established in both the Netherlands
(where their surname was spelt Tassis) and Germany (where it was spelt Taxis).
Around 1450 they had organised for the emperor mail links from Vienna to Italy
and Brussels. By around 1500 their success in financing postal communications
had earned them wealth and noble rank. On succeeding to the throne of Spain in
1516 Charles of Habsburg – emperor as Charles V in 1520 – confirmed Tassis
and his business associates (members of his family drawn directly from Italy) as
postmasters general for all the territories he governed. The family maintained a
huge postal network that linked Vienna, Brussels, Rome and the Spanish domin-
ions all the way down to Naples. In Castile they became distinguished members
of the aristocracy. In Germany their monopoly from 1597 was known as the
Reichspost, and their family – known as Thurn und Taxis – eventually ended up
as princes of the Empire.
There was no significant increase in the speed of mail during the early modern
period. Uncertainty of conditions meant that in the sixteenth century the post
from Antwerp to Amsterdam normally took from three to nine days, and from
Antwerp to Gdańsk twenty-four to thirty-five days. An English regulation of
1637 specified that mail was to travel in summer at 7 miles an hour and in winter
at 6. A generation later, in 1666, the average speed of letters in England was not
more than 4 miles an hour. Compare this with the New World, where the Inca
postal system attained speeds unequalled until the invention of the internal
combustion engine. The distance from Lima to Cusco took mail-runners three
days, whereas a post-horse in the seventeenth century doing the same distance
took twelve. So efficient was the delivery in Peru that the Inca used to have fresh
fish run up from the coast, a distance of some 350 miles, in two days. Lack of
speed in Europe, however, was compensated for by greater use by the general
public. The Taxis network, for example, was available for use by merchants and
others willing to pay. By the 1600s there were countries such as Muscovy and
Sweden that could make good use of waterways in order to operate postal services,
but the bulk of activity was still in the urban centres of the west. In England by
the end of the seventeenth century almost a million letters a year were being
circulated in the area of London through the services of the ‘penny post’.7
Outside Europe the vastness of distance required measurement in terms of
endurance rather than time. The heroes were those such as Columbus, who informed
Queen Isabella in 1503 that ‘the world is small: I mean that it is not as large as

6
 IDENTITIES AND HORIZONS

people say it is’. Few would have agreed. The circumnavigation of the world by the
expedition of Magellan and Sebastian Elcano, which set out from Seville in 1519
with a crew of 265 in 5 ships, was proof of the high cost of any attempt to make the
globe smaller. The Victoria returned in 1522 with only eighteen European crew and
four Malays. When Francis Drake made a similar voyage fifty-five years later the
difficulties were still prohibitive: he had five ships when he set sail from Plymouth
in 1577 and only one when he returned in 1580. The long absence is deceptive, for
in most voyages far longer periods were spent resting in harbour than at sea.
The ships of the American passage, what Spaniards called the carrera de Indias,
took on average 75 days to cross from Seville to Vera Cruz and 130 days to cross
back. The entire journey, including long waits in Vera Cruz and Havana, might
mean that a ship leaving Seville in July one year did not normally return before
October in the subsequent year. Voyages to Asia were far longer. In the eighteenth
century a ship of the VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, the Dutch
East India Company) took on average 235 days to go from the Netherlands to
Batavia. The fortitude of the Spanish explorers was acclaimed by the historian
Cieza de León, who asked what other race but theirs could have penetrated
‘through such rugged lands, such dense forests, such great mountains and deserts,
and over such broad rivers’. We can reply that the Russians in Siberia, the Puritans
in New England, the Dutch and Portuguese in Africa and Asia, the French in
Canada were each in their own way, and often with methods that few would
approve, bringing the outside world closer to Europe and thereby conquering the
great gulf imposed by time and space.
The government of a world empire was made peculiarly difficult for Philip II
of Spain by the inability to communicate speedily with his administrators.
‘I have not heard anything from the king about the affairs of the Netherlands
since 20 November last’, complained the governor of that region, Luis de
Requeséns, from Antwerp on 24 February 1575. Businessmen no less than poli-
ticians had an investment in overcoming distance and time. In any case it was less
the delay in letters than the unpredictability of their arrival that came to be the
biggest problem. Of thirty-two letters received by Philip from his ambassador in
Paris in 1578, the fastest took only seven days and the slowest forty-nine. Any
delay in the payment of bills of exchange,8 the arrival of the galleons or the ship-
ment of perishable cargo might spell ruin. Yet, when all the evidence for the
urgent demands of these men of the world is considered, there can be little doubt
that they were only a minority group. Time was not yet a universal pacemaker,

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 EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN SOCIETY

and the age appears to move at a casual pace regulated only by the movements of
the sun, the cycle of the seasons and an occasional clock.

Identities and frontiers

The notion of ‘Europe’, we have commented, remained little more than a

perceived ideal. Erasmus in the 1520s centred upon Christendom (he seldom
used the word ‘Europe’) his yearnings for a united, peaceful and cultured civili-
sation without frontiers. Though proud to be Dutch, he asserted that ‘I want to
be a citizen of the world, not just of one town’. Yearning for a universal polity
was also the dream of Tommaso Campanella over a century later. As men of
culture, these and others looked beyond the conflict of governments and faiths
to a system where there were no frontiers.
In the real world, however, there were frontiers, to which mapmakers tended
to give a visible reality but which were difficult to define.9 Borders did not neces-
sarily separate people, they might also help people to understand the differences
in the world that surrounded them, even more so in an epoch when travellers
were beginning to explore strange places and commit their impressions to print.
Europeans began to recognise, for example, differences between the civilised
world and the savage, and writers such as Montaigne attempted to analyse those
impressions, based on the information brought back by those who had ventured
out across strange and exotic borders. As we know from those who crossed fron-
tiers (see Chapter 2), travel enriched in all possible ways the experience of early
modern Europeans.
In administrative terms, a frontier was not territorial but described rather the
limits of a jurisdiction (noble, ecclesiastical, urban). Even then, the overlapping
of different types of jurisdiction made it impossible to arrive at geographic preci-
sion in peace treaties, and frontiers did not necessarily mean that there were any
firm differences of politics and culture between independent political units. The
simplest frontiers (and always the most desired because they made it easier to
trade) were represented by water. The division of land was frequently also deter-
mined by the division of waters: nations tried to define their frontiers according
to the seas and rivers that fed them. Communities fought for the right to include
streams (precious for both food and irrigation) within their domains. States
fighting to establish their identity made every effort to obtain a sea coast or
at least a sea port: seventeenth-century Muscovy successfully ceased to be a

8
 IDENTITIES AND HORIZONS

landlocked country when it managed to obtain an extensive coastline on the

Baltic, whereas a poorer region such as Aragon failed to break through to the sea,
remaining as the only landlocked kingdom in Spain.

The nation, the ‘state’

For historians the most fascinating aspect of European evolution has been the
emergence of the entity known as the ‘state’, at one time identified principally
with the concept of a ‘nation state’ but more concretely studied over recent
decades in terms of ‘power’, that is, in terms of territorial size, population, wealth,
military potential and administrative systems. Some of these aspects of power
will be our concern in Chapter 11.
A central feature of western civilisation, the state operated from above and
imposed its authority.10 It did not represent a primary identity for most
Europeans, who had little contact with it and identified themselves rather with
local entities such as the town or community into which they were born.
Thereafter any sense of ‘belonging’ came into existence through a series of link-
ages that operated upwards, through allegiance to lords and to institutions. From
medieval times and well into the eighteenth century the European landscape was
divided up among these various allegiances, which reflected the feudal pattern of
authority. Those who ruled, whether lords or kings, were in control of jurisdic-
tions that frequently overlapped, did not coincide with political divisions and
often changed according to the mischance of war or of marriage alliances. The
growth of the state has been explained in multiple ways, depending on
the perspective adopted.11 The explanations tend to coincide in pointing to the
primary role of war and coercion in bringing about the organised state,12 a view
that confirms traditional thinking (including that of the seventeenth-century
writer Thomas Hobbes) and has the virtue of coinciding with much of the
historical evidence. This view also makes it clear that the state was an entity quite
alien to the interests and identities of many of its subjects and became acceptable
only when it took on the guise of being a ‘nation’.
What, however, was a nation? If ‘nation’ signifies an autonomous political entity,
then around 1500 there were possibly over 500 nations in Europe, each with its
own history, traditional rulers and institutions. By around 1750, however, ‘nation’
had come to mean something different. The general rule was for large entities to
swallow up small ones, reserving the description of nation only for the large unit.

9
 EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN SOCIETY

The absorption of the principality of Béarn (which claimed to be a ‘sovereign entity,

separate from any other sovereignty and realm’) into the kingdom of France in
1620, illustrated the trend.13 The king of both territories happened to be the same
person, Louis XIII of France, who favoured the merger for administrative con-
venience. Most modern nations have achieved their condition simply by conquest
or fusion of smaller units, but the process has made it extremely difficult to define
the historical origins and character of a ‘nation’. Muscovy absorbed the Ukraine in
the seventeenth century in order to further the growth of the Russian state; Castile
absorbed the crown of Aragon in the early eighteenth century in order to further the
unity of Spain; and England and Scotland, after sharing a common ruler since
1603, fused together in 1706 to form a state with its seat in London.
Though the formation of modern nations appears, at first sight, to have been
a process imposed from above, the reality was more complex. Absorption and
conquest added to the territories of a ‘state’, but did not help to create a ‘nation’.
Throughout Europe, absorbed regions continued to operate for a century or
more as autonomous nations, conserving their own administration, laws and
language. With time, however, the regional elites began to identify themselves
with the interests of the central government and might even participate in it.
When that happened, integration into a ‘nation’ began to take place.
The conclusion is ironic but important enough to deserve emphasis: centrali-
sation repeatedly took place from below rather than from above.14 When prov-
inces began to identify their interests with that of the central state, and when
members of the provincial elite took power at the centre, a broad community of
interest came into existence.15 In the same way, it might happen that the popula-
tion in frontier areas, where identity was always fuzzy, began to accept a relation-
ship with the centre, thereby allowing some feeling of nationality to take place.
On France’s southern frontier of Roussillon, acquired definitively from Spain in
1659, the people began by the eighteenth century to identify themselves with
France as a reaction against their previous identity as subjects of the Spanish
crown.16
Nations, in short, created themselves by accepting a series of shared linkages. It
is possible that some of the linkages were ‘imagined’, for they defined perceptions
or objectives rather than concrete links. It is certain that the end product, the nation
state, was also ‘imagined’,17 for much effort would be spent over subsequent gener-
ations in trying to endow its existence with some reality. The community that
would eventually evolve into a nation had the initial feature that its members did

10
 IDENTITIES AND HORIZONS

not generally know each other, and their relationship was very much imagined;
they neither knew nor had met or heard of fellow members, but built up in their
minds an image of what they shared. Historically, only the smaller regions in
Europe – such as Bohemia or Catalonia or Wales – had a coherent identity in early
modern times. There was no national problem because strictly speaking there were
no nation states and the political reality was one of semi-autonomous regional
entities. In the Russian lands, there was not even a territory or ethnicity to define
the entity to which one belonged; more often than not, they opted for the word
‘people’ (narod) to signify what they had in common.18 At the same time, however,
there were in Europe extensive shared experiences that brought the entities together
and gave them the outlines of a ‘nation’.19 In practice, and despite what is often
assumed, neither unity of administration nor unity of language were prerequisites
for national identity. As the sociologist Arnold Van Gennep has observed, a nation
can come into existence as a complex of collective units that are constantly changing
and constantly varying their relationship to each other.20

Languages to reinforce identity

Since the eighteenth century, when the German writer Johann Gottfried Herder
emphasised that language is a basic identity of the nation, there has been among
nationalist movements a fundamental stress on the priority of a common tongue.
This emphasis, however, has little support in what really happened historically.
Language, we may say firmly, does not create a nation. In nearly all cases, the
nation came before the language. Since most states were composite ethnic enti-
ties, they possessed many languages rather than one alone.21 In all European
countries, the adoption of a common language occurred long after the basic
lineaments of the nation and state had fallen into place. In the unified Italy of
1860, only a tiny minority, less than 3 per cent, spoke the (Tuscan) language that
would soon become the national one. In prerevolutionary France, half the popu-
lation either did not or could not speak the classical French (langue d’oeil) used
in the north. It has been observed that

between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, politically motivated

programs of language promotion were pursued assiduously in most parts of
western Europe. As a result of this process, the major vernacular languages
of the region, including English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Swedish,

11
 EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN SOCIETY

Portuguese and Dutch, were transformed from mainly spoken, highly local-
ised dialects, with small and unstable vocabularies, into the richly abundant,
uniform and standardised written languages of state administration and
literary production with which we are familiar today.22

Where necessary, a single language might at first have special status. In Hungary,
a state of many cultures and languages, the standard speech used in the Diet was
Latin, which remained the official administrative tongue until 1844.23 However,
despite its frequent use by the educated elite and by clergy, Latin never attained the
status we are often told it had, that of being a tongue commonly spoken among
Europeans. It certainly had its age of glory: ‘the revival of classical Latin’, we are
reminded, ‘makes a logical beginning to the story of the modern age. In the long
term, however, the preservation of classical Latinity proved incompatible with the
creation of a new intellectual world.’24 True scholars cultivated it, but by the 1550s
its status was being irredeemably undermined by the vernacular tongues.
By that date Latin was beginning to disappear from the universities, and
diplomats tended to choose Italian as their working language. The notable intel-
lectual Peiresc, who died in 1637 and whose surviving correspondence with the
cultural elite of his time totals over 10,000 letters, also wrote normally in Italian
or his native French. Surprisingly, despite its great political importance Spain’s
language did not achieve universal status in its great age of empire. Another great
European polymath, Leibniz, who died in 1716, corresponded outside Germany
only with residents of Paris, London, Rome, The Hague and Amsterdam. In
Spain Latin may have been taught in select schools, but for the elite and even for
clergy it was a virtually dead tongue.25 In 1587 the author of a Castilian–Latin
dictionary published at Salamanca confessed: ‘the lack of the Latin language
among Spaniards is noticeable to other nations’.
The vernacular, by contrast, was actively promoted by states that valued it for
use in government and administration, and for promoting religious publications
(in Protestant countries, the Bible). Unfortunately, the vernacular was not always
the language of the people. The people of Cornwall rose in rebellion in 1549 in
protest against the new (Protestant) liturgy in English. In 1600 in Spain an
impediment to efficient government was that one-quarter of the population did
not use the common language as a daily spoken tongue. In Catalonia if clergy
preached in Spanish their congregations were unable to understand them.
Throughout the continent, there was a problem over trying to standardise the

12
 IDENTITIES AND HORIZONS

different forms of, for example, French, German and Italian. In Italy the main
obstacle to bringing out a version of the Bible in the vernacular was that there
was no agreement over what was vernacular ‘Italian’.
Language consequently tended to furnish an identity only within smaller
nations. There was, for example, some doubt in the sixteenth century about what
constituted standard spoken English. Thomas Wilson in his Art of Rhetorique
(1553) distinguished between ‘learned Englishe and rude Englishe . . . courte
talke and countrey speache’.26 If the local spoken language were not also privi-
leged by the support of the local elite and the mechanisms of state, it might end
up by being categorised as a mere ‘dialect’; worse, books would not be published
in it and it would end up as a medium of speech but not of literature.
For reasons of administration and communication, therefore, the evolving
state began to favour use of a ‘common tongue’. When England and Wales were
united by law in 1536, only the English tongue was sanctioned for official use.
The French crown in 1539 made a similar rule, that only northern French
(known as langue d’oeil) be used in its law courts. The Spanish Inquisition from
around 1560 conducted all its proceedings in Castilian, even in areas (such as
Catalonia) where few spoke the language. Absorption of smaller territories
supplied a strong motive for using the language of the bigger unit. ‘It hath ever
been the use of the conqueror’, the poet Edmund Spenser commented in the
sixteenth century, with reference to the English occupation of Ireland, ‘to despise
the language of the conquered and to force him by all means to learn his.’
The diversity of tongues ensured the persistence of two major trends in Europe
down to the nineteenth century. On the one hand, multiplicity of tongues
preserved multiple cultural identities, without in any way impeding the growth of
broader perspectives. Within the same frontiers people might continue to speak
different languages without thereby losing their sense of belonging to a shared
society. The best example of this is the Netherlands, which encompassed several
tongues and dialects, but managed all the same to cultivate a sense of national
feeling, thanks in good measure to involvement in the struggle for independence
from Spain. In the same way the inhabitants of the valleys ruled by the Grey
Leagues in Switzerland were conscious of a common political destiny, despite the
use of three quite distinct tongues in the area.
On the other hand, the trend towards an imposition of a ‘common tongue’
was irreversible and had significant consequences. France under Louis XIV and
Spain under Philip V began a policy of administrative change in the provinces

13
 EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN SOCIETY

that involved obligatory use of the official language in public affairs. The changes,
pursued by all states with a concern to improve government, took over a century
to mature. For the most part, they were poorly applied. State intervention, under-
taken with the aim of facilitating the paperwork of the state (and of the Church),
implied an emphasis on the written word. One consequence was the marginali-
sation of oral culture. A parish priest in Bohemia or Catalonia in the 1720s might
preach to his flock in Czech or Catalan, but then have to carry out his correspon-
dence with the authorities in German or in Spanish respectively. In Russia the
government of Peter the Great took steps to reform the Russian language but
made little practical use of it other than to print government decrees, which made
up 90 per cent of printed matter (the other printed language was unreformed
Church Slavonic).27 In such cases Czech or Catalan or Russian failed to develop
adequately, with negative consequences for creative literature. Though the first
Russian grammar appeared in 1696 (published in Oxford by a Dutchman), it was
not until the nineteenth century that a sophisticated creative literature developed.
In Scotland the union with England from 1603 onwards led to the dominance of
the English language in both administration and public worship, with serious
effects on the country’s literary culture. By the end of the seventeenth century,
Scots tended to publish their books in English, and in London.28
A common language, evidently, was the preserve of small nations but took a
very long time to get established in large nations.29 In France a report made in
1794, shortly after the Revolution, affirmed that the majority of people in France
did not speak French, which was the main spoken language in only 15 of the
country’s 89 departments.30 The situation a century earlier is reflected in Racine’s
despairing complaint from the Mediterranean coast that ‘I can’t understand their
French in this country and they can’t understand mine’.31 In eighteenth-century
Languedoc, the people spoke French only when they were drunk, or swearing, or
speaking to outsiders.32 The lack of a single national language was a common
phenomenon in all territories aspiring to be nation states. In 1861 not more than
3 per cent of the Italian population understood what would become the national
language, Tuscan Italian.33 Throughout the early modern period, Europeans
accepted an environment where language tended to divide rather than to unite.
This was unacceptable to both intellectuals and statesmen, and by the early eigh-
teenth century there were serious moves to make language conform to the
demands of political unity. J.C. Gottsched’s Deutsche Sprachkunst (1748)
proposed a solution that became common elsewhere as well: to make one dialect,

14
 IDENTITIES AND HORIZONS

in this case German as spoken in Upper Saxony, serve as the norm for both a
written and a spoken tongue.

Basic identities: the rural community

Unlike the industrialised world of today, early modern Europe was a predomi-
nantly rural society. In western and central Europe in about 1600 less than 5 per
cent of the people lived in some hundred towns of over 20,000 inhabitants each.
A further 20 per cent of the population lived in small country towns; all the rest
lived in rural communities. The great developments of early modern society –
the elements of economic, social and domestic change – occurred less in the
great metropolises and seats of government than away in oft-forgotten corners of
the European countryside. The balance between urban and rural changed over
time. In 1700 over 75 per cent of the English population lived in the country-
side, but by the end of that century England had become – excepting only the
Netherlands – the most urbanised country in Europe.
It was in the rural communities that the social life and solidarities of Europeans
were concentrated: ‘state’ and ‘nation’ were abstracts with which they seldom came
into contact. It is sometimes helpful to apply the term ‘peasantry’ to the general
category of rural producers and residents, but less helpful to use the term ‘peasant’
for individuals, since the economic and social status of each person could vary
enormously across the rural landscape. At the elementary level, in most of Christian
Europe the village community coincided with the parish unit, so the Church
played a leading role in defining the character of the community. In more feudal-
ised areas, the authority of a seigneur might be more decisive, particularly if he
controlled most of the land. The community proper, however, was definable not in
terms of outside influences such as Church and lord, but solely by the bonds
between its members. Some villages, as in England where the peasantry were free
and land distribution usually equitable (with 75 per cent as tenants but only 25 per
cent as owner-occupiers), gave the appearance of being contented self-sufficient
units, with a full spectrum of social classes. By contrast, over much of eastern and
Mediterranean Europe the villages could be depressed one-class communities,
unable to survive out of their own resources (see Chapter 6).
Few villages existed as viable independent units: all had to have close links
with other nearby settlements for such basic needs as food, marriage partners and
commercial exchange. In a very real sense, then, the village was not a complete

15
 EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN SOCIETY

community, which could be identified more exactly in the broader cultural area
that included the village: within this area people grew the same crops, experi-
enced the same environment of soil and weather, did the same types of labour,
dressed similarly and spoke the same language. In England one might think of a
village and its district for 10 miles around as a community, but in the Pyrenees
or in Norway one could apply the term not just to one but to several villages
encompassed within the broad sweep of a mountain valley.
Though the basic unit within each village was the household or family, the
importance of kinship as a social bond was not always paramount. In smaller
communities, and in areas from which people seldom moved, endogamy might be
high and the links of parentage strong. But in those many villages of northern
Europe from which there was constant movement, family bonds were weaker and
people were held together more by relationships of neighbourliness. Whatever the
nature of the bond, the sense of ‘belonging’, the feeling of ‘solidarity’, was always
intense and profound. Community feeling, of a sort seldom experienced today in
our more individualistic world, was indeed perhaps the most powerful social force
in early modern Europe.34 All human activity was judged by norms created by the
community: disapproved marriages were mocked by the ‘charivari’, ‘witches’ were
driven out by hostile neighbours, unfair taxes were resisted with revolt.
The focus of loyalties in the community could also create intense conflicts.
Very small quarrels might lead to the growth of factions, some based on kinship,
some on status. It was possible for such low-level conflict to last from generation
to generation, particularly in the Mediterranean where the notion of ‘honour’
(or one’s ‘reputation’ in the community) was always deeply cherished. Others
might spill out beyond the local level, as in the Sussex village of Cuckfield in the
1570s, when a quarrel between the vicar and the squire split first the community,
then the county and was carried to national level, ending when the queen’s
minister Sir Francis Walsingham intervened in 1582 to secure the vicar’s removal
from office.35 Communities were naturally jealous of each other. In France and
Spain the youths of one village would show their resentment at any of their girls
being married to a man from another village by creating a riot, extorting money
or even resorting to violence. In times of distress, however, the village could unite
remarkably well; and popular revolt, particularly against the local seigneur, often
reinforced local loyalties (see Chapter 6).
Communities always had a historical origin; if they could not prove their orig-
inal privileges they would have been ill-equipped to defend themselves against

16
 IDENTITIES AND HORIZONS

outside authorities. Small settlements of medieval origin might retain a document

or deed. The Grey Leagues in Switzerland, a fascinating case, evolved among the
Alpine valleys during the late fifteenth century through local agreements made in
the face of threats from outside.36 In the German lands the communities became
weaker during the sixteenth century and tended to get submerged into princely
states. Over much of Europe, however, even where clerical and lay lords domi-
nated, ancient forms of communal government still survived in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. A village might be governed by its ‘assembly of inhabitants’
(France) or its ‘general council’ (Spain), consisting in theory of all adult inhabi-
tants but in practice of the propertied male heads of households; even these did
not all attend and decisions fell more and more into the hands of an elite.
Assemblies could coexist with seigneurial authority: in eastern Europe the lord
sanctioned assembly meetings, and in England a jury of villagers might help to
dispense seigneurial justice. Meetings were called only for exceptional business,
sometimes as infrequently as once a year. In Spain bells were rung and the council
met after mass on a Sunday in a traditional or symbolic location (the Basque
national assembly met under the famous tree at Gernika). In Swedish and Savoyard
villages the vote at meetings had to be unanimous.
The community and the village assembly played a crucial role in all aspects of
economic and social life.37 The economy was the basic reality on which the
community was based. The assembly set times for ploughing, decided what crops
should be planted and what cattle should be kept. Exploitation of the soil would
sometimes be on a communalist basis: ploughland and pasture was periodically
redistributed among households, since it belonged in some areas to the commu-
nity as a whole and not to each family. A village with communal holdings – such
as arable, pasture, woods, a mill – might be economically strong, though a domi-
nant feature of early modern Europe was the steady alienation of these assets to
pay taxes and debts. In France the process of alienation became so great a threat
to economic viability that the king’s first minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, forbade
sales of communal land and ordered officials to try to recover property alienated
since 1620.
Law and order was often communally enforced, even when the court was
technically within the jurisdiction of a seigneur.38 In Valencia the community
Tribunal of the Waters, composed of village elders, still meets weekly outside the
cathedral to deal verbally with disputes between peasants of the region. The
community also watched over honour and morality, and by extension intruded

17
 EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN SOCIETY

into family life: in Russia village elders had a say in the arrangement of marriages.39
Well into the eighteenth century in the Black Forest countryside of Württemberg
the community supervised marriages, work, crop rotation, market arrangements,
land transactions and poor relief, and local family and marital conflicts were
settled by a church court presided over by the pastor and community officials.40
By the end of the seventeenth century the autonomous village community
was decaying throughout much of Europe. The single most important cause was
the polarisation of wealth within the village, creating on one hand a propertied
and often tax-exempt elite, on the other a growing number of landless families.
In a group of communities in seventeenth-century Languedoc, over three-quar-
ters of the soil was owned by 15 per cent of the residents, among them the local
nobles, who effectively held the power in the countryside.41 Control of the
assembly fell into the hands of the minority. At the same time capitalisation of
the soil by outside interests (the lord, the city) and the growing demands of the
state (for taxes and military service) helped to undermine the fragile economic
supports of the community. There may have been, all the same, significant excep-
tions to this trend. It has been suggested that in Burgundy, for instance, the state
gave its support to communal structures because they offered a useful basis for
taxation purposes. Communal lands produced good taxable income, so from
about 1683 the government of Louis XIV blocked alienation of communal
property in the province.42 Even in parts of eastern Europe, where changes in the
manorial economy threatened peasant autonomy, it appears that the state author-
ities adapted the structures of the community (as in Prussia)43 rather than
suppressing them. Rural peasant units survived, but with considerable changes.
The intense localism of community feeling survived long after the disappear-
ance of political autonomy, and penetrated upwards into all levels of the state.
The loyalty of a man to his hearth was basic: solidarities were with family, kin,
lord and village, and throughout the early modern period there was little sign
that they had been shaken. Local loyalties preceded those to the distant ‘state’. A
telling example is the series of traditional peace agreements (patzeries) made in
the early sixteenth century by villages on the French and Spanish sides of the
Pyrenees, agreeing to keep the peace between themselves and not participate in
the wars between their respective countries.44
From one political level to the next, regional loyalties threatened the emerging
centralised state. Throughout the early sixteenth century the self-governing city
states of northern Italy remained the political ideal of Europeans, being proposed

18
 IDENTITIES AND HORIZONS

by many of the rebels during the Comunidades uprising in Spain in 1520 as the
desired model for government. Even within themselves, the cities could in times of
crisis break down into constituent communities, as happened with the ‘communes’
in Paris in the revolutionary years 1588 and 1648, and in Bordeaux during the
Ormée revolt in 1650. Persistent particularism everywhere – in Spain, in the
Netherlands – delayed but by no means blocked the formation of national identi-
ties. For most people, the village community of one’s birth was one’s ‘country’ (pays,
país), not the nation state of which it formed a tiny part. So fluid were loyalties that
Marseille in 1591 and again in 1660 proclaimed itself independent of the nation.
When Henry IV recaptured the city in 1596, he exclaimed, ‘Only now am I king
of France!’ In the French Pyrenees as late as 1688 the valley of Aspe claimed that it
was an independent republic not subject to the laws of France.45
The sense of identity of local communities did not of course exclude external
realities: most were integrated at some point into the wider world. The link was often
provided by the nobility and gentry, who were equally at home in their local country-
side and in the capital city, and indeed frequently acted as agents for central govern-
ment in the provinces, helping to collect taxes and recruit troops. A great many other
activities also helped to create linkages, among them the need for interregional trade
and the effects of the constant movement of population. Moreover, for reasons of
defence or political common sense many communities felt it necessary to collaborate
with each other. When communes managed to combine their interests, as among the
several communes of the Grey Leagues in seventeenth-century Switzerland, they
were capable of acting virtually as sovereign states.

Basic identities: the urban community

Town communities were the fundamental political unit of civilised Europe. In

the most densely populated areas – northern Italy and the southern Netherlands
– they were the only political presence, superseding the existence of either nation
or state. Problems of size may give rise to confusion over what we can call a
‘town’. A very large town, with special attributes such as being the seat of a bish-
opric or the centre of regional markets, could be classified as a ‘city’. The world’s
biggest cities were in fact outside Europe, with notable examples such as Delhi,
Isfahan and Tenochtitlan. Hernan Cortés had good reason to wonder when he
compared Spain’s modest urban centres with the immensity of the Aztec megap-
olis at Tenochtitlan, populated by an estimated quarter of a million people.

19
 EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN SOCIETY

These non-European megacities had, of course, a quite different tribal and

social structure. Europeans did not congregate together on that scale. Indeed, in
many regions of Europe the proliferation of very small settlements makes it diffi-
cult to distinguish them from ‘villages’. In practice we may try to define a ‘town’
from two distinct perspectives, its demography and its economic role. Using the
criterion of demographic size, small towns were five times more numerous than
all other types of urban community in Europe.46 In terms of economic function,
however, very many towns continued to be an integral part of the rural land-
scape: they were centres of the agrarian economy and providers of services to the
countryside, and a high proportion of town residents were agricultural workers
during the day.47 Though the majority of the population might live in urban
centres, in the preindustrial era their economic activity was closely bound up
with the countryside.
Our perspective here is centred on those towns, both small and large, that had
a special identity based on political and civic privileges (in England, for example,
the privileges were sometimes created by royal charter). Privileged towns were
often distinguished by possession of walls and roads, special fiscal rights and
an autonomous constitution.48 An important town/city might be the seat of a
bishop. The ideal type perhaps was the German free imperial city, but in reality
such towns – which developed in the thirteenth century and continued unchanged
to the eighteenth – could be found everywhere in the great ‘urban belt’ that
stretched from the Netherlands through western Germany and Switzerland to the
cities of northern Italy.49 Each town or city consisted of communal units that
together composed the political community. Historians agree that the urban
communities possessed distinctive identities that made their citizens feel both a
sense of belonging and a sense of pride. One view is that in the German lands the
small entities – with an upper population limit of around 10,000 people – can be
seen as ‘home towns’, where there was strong social cohesion between the
governing oligarchy, the guilds and the citizen body.50 Enjoying continuous
internal stability, such towns represented the backbone of the nation and helped
to influence the direction of national politics without necessarily participating in
the government of the state.
Even within the large and complex structure of a town or city, the sense of
belonging and of community was fundamental. In Paris, the primary loyalty of the
people was to their immediate neighbourhood, their parish and the local commu-
nity.51 Neighbourhood values predominated, and local concerns took precedence

20
 IDENTITIES AND HORIZONS

over more distant ones. The scale of values extended to religion, with each parish
fiercely jealous of its own church, saints and traditional customs. Paris was not an
exception. Though immigration into large towns was always very substantial, it seems
not to have altered the primacy of neighbourhood values among the population.
There was usually sufficient continuity of residents in an area to maintain a
continuity also of social values. In the London borough of Southwark in the early
seventeenth century, nearly half the householders were still in residence over a
ten-year period,52 a proportion paralleled in other towns. The population turnover
might diminish some aspects of community feeling, but enough residents survived
to maintain a certain continuity in the neighbourhood. Despite the complexity
of a city such as London, residents participated in local concerns of the parish,
the guild and the administration, with sufficient dedication to help maintain
social stability.53
Within towns the fundamental value was ‘peace’, understood in the sense of
the ‘common good’ that citizens shared with each other, and their common
purpose to accept norms that regulated their institutions and kept order.54 In
many towns, citizens had to take an oath to observe the conventions that main-
tained the peace. On this basis, a town might build up a tradition of loyalty that
made its government stable and ensured both survival and the creation of self-
interest and identity among citizens. The way these rules functioned can be seen
most clearly in the constitution of Italian and German city states. Florence was
an outstanding example of a city that evolved an elaborate civic ritual, combining
both secular and religious emblems, to affirm the common interest that all citi-
zens had in their patria, while the Germans enjoyed a more modest pride in the
dignity of their ‘home town’ or Vaterland.
The primacy of the ‘home town’ or the neighbourhood did not exclude
perception of larger roles, of which the most important was the regular market,
an activity that gave life to every aspect of production and social contact. Regular
markets, large or small, were the lifeblood of a town/city. Economic links between
local markets made the growth of some sort of consumer society inevitable, and
improved communications (stagecoach and postal services) brought the prov-
inces into contact with large towns. The essential role that guaranteed the survival
and expansion of cities such as Amsterdam, Leipzig and Florence was the fact of
being an interregional market. In such commercial centres there was a shared
culture among all communities,55 based in some measure on local schools and
what was taught in them, on the spread of news and on the culture of the theatre.

21
 EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN SOCIETY

This allowed territories with a notorious complexity of autonomous towns, such

as Germany, the Netherlands and northern Italy, still to feel capable of sharing a
broader outlook in times of crisis.

A core identity: the family

The ‘family’ continues today to be the active centre of our lives, but in past time it
had both a different character and a different role. In preindustrial Europe, it was
the basic unit of reproduction, of social organisation, of economic cooperation
and of legal and religious obligations; an entity therefore that requires our atten-
tion in order to understand important features of society. Unfortunately, the
historical sources for studying it (parish registers of births, marriages and deaths;
tax documents and census data) are often inadequate or nonexistent and his-
torians have had to work with hypotheses that are often not convincing or have
attracted disagreement on the part of other scholars.
In its most traditional sense, a family was a kinship group based on lineage.
This concept was particularly important among the upper classes, who traced
their descent, and assured the survival of their property, from father to son; it was
less common among classes that had little property to transmit. A family was also
a household, a group of people living together on the basis of marriage. Until
recently it was held that the traditional west European household was a multiple
or stem family, comprising more than one generation and including servants as
well. An influential book by Philippe Ariès argued that this multiple household
gradually gave way by about the sixteenth century to the emergent nuclear
family, consisting only of parents and children.56
The evolution from multiple to nuclear family was accompanied, it has been
argued, by a major change in emotional attitudes. Unlike the large household, in
which relationships were very impersonal and children received little affection,
the nuclear family brought with it what has been called ‘sentiment’, ‘affective
individualism’ or more simply ‘love’: that is, the parents esteemed and respected
each other and also their children. The most prominent supporter of this view
was Lawrence Stone, whose 1977 work Family, Sex and Marriage in England,
1500–1800 presented evidence for ‘vast and elusive cultural changes’ in ‘the ways
members of the family related to each other, in terms of legal arrangements,
structure, custom, power and sex’.57 Other English historians disagreed in detail.
They questioned the emphasis placed on the loveless multiple family, took a

22
 IDENTITIES AND HORIZONS

different view of relationships within marriage and argued that children had
been both appreciated and loved in traditional households, and that sexual affec-
tion had been common among couples.58 Their research affirmed the view that
well into the past of preindustrial England the normal structure of households
was the conjugal nuclear family, consisting of husband, wife and children, with
extended or multiple families numerically quite insignificant.
Other studies for Europe tended, however, to conclude that substantial
changes did occur, depending on the region. For France, it seemed clear that
‘between the sixteenth century and the end of the eighteenth century the family
changed in character and a new morality of family relations was adumbrated’.59
The focus from a broad perspective has moved then from the large multiple
family to the smaller nuclear household, but with ongoing debates about what
may have changed.
It is currently agreed that in early modern Europe ‘peasant family day-to-day
life was centred round the conjugal pair’ and that extended kinship was nowhere
in western Europe the dominant basis for social organisation.60 There were,
however, substantial differences between northern and southern Europe. The
conclusion can be illustrated from northern France: in Brueil-en-Vexin in l625,
85 per cent of households were nuclear and only 7 per cent extended. At Coventry
in 1523 nearly all households were nuclear, the average size 3.8 persons; at Ealing
in 1599 some 78 per cent of households were nuclear, with an average size of
4.7 persons. Dutch middle-class households in the eighteenth century had an
average of 3.7 persons. In north-west Europe at least there was no measurable
transition from one type of family to another; even in medieval times the conjugal
family may have been predominant, and the changes in affective sentiment within
the family may have been frequently exaggerated.
The function of the conjugal pair, however, must be placed within context. In
practice, husband and wife existed as realities not solely because of a sentiment that
bound them together, but because other obligations connected them: relatives,
children, household, work. By contrast, in extensive areas of the continent, such as
Europe east of the Elbe, for which our knowledge in this period is extremely frag-
mentary, the social and economic context was substantially different, and the large
multiple family (known as the zadruga in Serb areas) was more common.
Though core loyalties centred on the small household family, links of kinship
continued in some ways to be of crucial importance throughout early modern
times.61 The nature and extent of kinship links varied from society to society and

23
 EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN SOCIETY

has provoked firm differences of opinion among historians.62 But there is agree-
ment on some aspects. The rules of consanguinity, laid down by canon law,
prohibited marriage with any relatives within four or more degrees of relationship.
In small societies, normal in the Europe of that time, this could make the choice
of a partner difficult. Not everyone knew how to calculate the degrees. The
problem was made more acute by the general practice of counting even spiritual
relationships, such as being godparent at a baptism, as kinship. Kinship was also
important because it affected the laws of inheritance of property: in an age when
titles to land were often complex and imprecise, it was useful to be able to identify
prospective heirs. In addition to these two practical considerations, kinship also
continued to be a sort of bond that created cohesion among elite families and
linked families together in their provinces. The links were usually fragile, but they
contributed to a feeling that the nuclear family was not alone. In this picture we
should not forget the servants, often a permanent part of the preindustrial house-
hold. In 1523 in Coventry two-fifths of the households contained servants, who
constituted almost a quarter of the town’s entire population.
Our detailed knowledge of household structure is based on the technique of
‘family reconstitution’, which involves the arduous collation from parish records
of data on baptisms, marriages and burials, to give a full profile of life and death
in the community. The demographic data, however, do not by themselves explain
the size and evolution of the family. In practice, it is important to insist, house-
hold size was dependent closely on economic and social conditions. In northern
France and in England, where the size of landholdings was small, it was logical
that small family units would be required. But in southern France, over a large arc
stretching from Béarn and Gascony to Provence, and in other parts of the
Mediterranean, farms were larger and family life often tended to concentrate
around the large house: here multiple units were more common. In Montplaisant
in Périgord in 1644 simple families were 50.8 per cent, multiple or extended
families 36.5 per cent, of the population. In Altopascio in rural Tuscany in 1684,
58 per cent were simple, 36 per cent were multiple. In Provence and in Franche
Comté, multiple families were between 20 and 40 per cent of the population.
Thus the larger estates of southern Europe helped the survival of communal forms
of exploitation and encouraged branches of the same family to live together.63 But
as property division proceeded and as laws of inheritance changed, the multiple
tended to be replaced by the nuclear family. It is likely, moreover, that in many
parts of Europe (judging by research on eighteenth-century Austria),64 the very

24
 IDENTITIES AND HORIZONS

same household could vary between multiple and nuclear characteristics,

depending on which members of the family were in residence and which had
died. Austria supplies a further example of possible confusions over the size of the
household. Records for Innsbruck in 1603 indicate that each household had
around four members but each house had around twelve inhabitants, so in such a
case a house was evidently not the same thing as a household.65
Marriage was a major step, nowhere more so than among the upper classes,
where it tied up property. Gentry who married beneath their station, contracting
mésalliances and so putting the family fortune in danger as well as causing inter-
family conflicts, prompted the state to take an early interest in the question. In
France the king by edict in 1556 banned marriages that did not have the consent
of parents, and in 1639 Louis XIII formulated the view that marriage was the
cement of the state. These attempts to protect the social order, however, were
counterbalanced in two respects. The Church (even after the council of Trent,
when the rules were tightened up considerably with the decree Tametsi of 1563,
forbidding ‘clandestine’ marriages) recognised all marriages validly agreed
between the two contracting parties; and social custom for most people outside
the aristocracy allowed a surprising degree of freedom in courtship. In traditional
society, courtship and sexual practice was often freer than has been thought (see
Chapter 8). The allegedly cold English were not so in 1499 when Erasmus
commented delightedly that ‘wherever you move, there is nothing but kisses’,
while an English pamphlet of 1620 said that ‘for us to salute strangers with a kiss
is counted but civility, but with foreign nations immodesty’.
What part did ‘affection’, or ‘love’ as we might call it, play in relationships?
The evidence is that most young people in western Europe did have some
freedom of choice when looking for partners. Parental consent would continue
to be a fundamental feature of marriage, but even when property considerations
(especially in the upper classes) were uppermost, ‘there was a widespread belief
among would-be marriage partners that freedom of choice was their right’.66
One could defy one’s parents. In Spain the consent of parents for those marrying
under the age of 25 was not made obligatory until 1776. In the seventeenth
century in Spain a young man with legitimate claims on a girl could ask the
vicar-general of the diocese to send an official to remove a girl from parental
custody in order to wed her. In any case, in Spain, England, France and else-
where, the fact that young men of the lower classes were usually independently
employed, had probably left the family home and had possibly lost at least

25
 EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN SOCIETY

one parent through early mortality freed them in practice from dependence on
parents in the choice of a partner. Many, moreover, had to go out of their own
villages in search of a husband or wife, thanks to the high level of consanguinity
in some country parishes. These elements of freedom must, of course, be balanced
against strong traditional controls exercised by the head of the family, by the
local community and even by the feudal seigneur. At every level, both in the
village and in the town, marriage was normally less a private affair based on
personal affection than a considered contract involving other elements in kinship
and in the neighbourhood. Love, however, was never wholly absent. ‘If you can
be contented to marry for love’, an understanding sixteenth-century English
father told his daughter, ‘I am contented and do grant you my good will.’67
Once a choice of partner was made, the young couple could proceed to
‘betrothal’, which in traditional Europe was the same as marriage. Catholic practice,
as seen in Renaissance Italy,68 pre-Reformation Hohenlohe and post-Reformation
Catalonia, was that all the essentials of marriage were completed outside church.69
The exchange of promises (verba de futuro) was viewed as a firm contract, sealed
later by the exchange of vows (verba de presenti); agreement on the financial condi-
tions confirmed the contract; and copulation completed the marriage. The
completely secular aspect of this procedure disturbed religious leaders. The Lutherans
made it a firm rule that marriages required a church ceremony, and the Catholics
subsequently refused to recognise contracts that did not include a blessing in church
before a priest.
At the same time Protestants emphasised (as the Catholic state in France also
began to do after 1556) that the consent of parents was essential for marriage. In
rural Hohenlohe in Germany, the Lutheran authorities over the period 1550–
1680 terminated all marriage agreements that did not have the express permis-
sion of the parents involved.70 The Catholic Church after the Council of Trent
(1563), however, reaffirmed the complete liberty of young people to marry if
need be without consent, though at the same time emphasising the authority of
parents and the obligations of children. In practice, the rules laid down by
Church and state varied widely in their application. In England, not until the
early eighteenth century was some order put into the rules validating marriage,
with Lord Hardwicke’s Act of 1753.71
In many parts of France, Switzerland and Spain it was accepted that a
betrothed couple could, with parental consent, sleep together under the family
roof until they were financially ready to marry and set up their own home: the

26
 IDENTITIES AND HORIZONS

custom helps to explain high prenuptial pregnancy in some villages. The

Counter-Reformation Church denounced the practice strenuously but failed to
alter it. In England, where the custom was almost unknown, it was nonetheless
often deemed acceptable for a contracted couple to progress to full intercourse.72
In Spain young couples might live in this condition for years, bringing up their
children but still not proceeding to formal marriage. The Calvinist authorities in
north Holland were informed in 1598 that ‘many persons remain for some
months or even years in unlawful households, with their children, and after-
wards leave each other in a scandalous manner’.73
The informal approach to marriage and sex in many European peasant house-
holds arose largely from economic causes: the lack of enough space to afford
privacy. Communal beds, in which both family and servants slept, were tradi-
tional. A French noble, Noël du Fail, commented in the late sixteenth century:

Do you not remember those big beds in which everyone slept together
without difficulty? All the people, married or unmarried, slept together in a
big bed made for the purpose, three fathoms long and nine feet wide, without
fear or danger or any unseemly thought or serious consequence; for in those
days men did not become aroused at the sight of naked women. However,
ever since the world has become badly behaved, each has his own separate
bed, and with good reason.74

A Europe dominated by the young

Because life was short, as we shall see, the Europe of around 1600 was predomi-
nantly youthful. Children and young people must have been everywhere more in
evidence than the aged. Sebastian Franck claimed in 1538 that ‘the whole of
Germany is teeming with children’. In four parishes of Cologne in 1574, 35 per
cent of the population were aged under 15; in six districts of Jena in 1640 the
proportion was about 38 per cent. Leiden in 1622 had around 47 per cent in
the same age group. Gregory King in 1695 estimated that over 45 per cent of the
people of England and Wales were children. In Table 1.1, seventeenth-century
data are set beside those of mid-twentieth-century England and Wales.
The quantity of young people did not, at least in early modern times, create a
firm distinction between ‘the young’ and ‘adults’. Though some historians have
maintained that children were relegated to being virtually invisible until the

27
 EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN SOCIETY

Table 1.1 Population age groups expressed as percentages

Age Venice England and Elbogen circle England and
group 1610–20 Wales 1695 (Bohemia) late Wales 1958
(King) seventeenth century
0–9 18.5 27.6 26 14.8
10–19 18.2 20.2 20 14.2
20–29 15.4 15.5 18 13.8
30–39 15.7 11.7 14 14.1
40–49 11.0 8.4 9 13.9

}
50–59 8.3 5.8 13.2
13
60+ 12.9 10.7 16.0

eighteenth century,75 in part because high rates of infant mortality discouraged

parents from investing emotionally in them, the view is now not widely shared.
A broad range of different factors, not simply age or dependence on parents and
adults, helped in reality to define whether the young had a significant social role:
variables such as gender, social background, religious affiliation and urban or
rural status had a part to play in our evaluation of the young person’s role in
preindustrial Europe.76 A recent view is that even before early modern times
parents did in fact bestow love on their children, but that ‘the modern concept of
the child, the sentimental concept of childhood, of which there were glimpses in
Renaissance Italy and Reformation Germany, first crystallised in seventeenth-
century England, more or less, and then, in the eighteenth century, in France and
more highly urbanised regions of Europe and the Americas’.77
For the very young, boys no less than girls, schooling might be sometimes
available, though the few studies on the subject suggest that up to the sixteenth
century the privilege was limited to those of higher social status and to males. In
the countryside, women not born into elite families remained predominantly illit-
erate into the eighteenth century. In the period after the Reformation, however,
both Protestants and Catholics became more conscious of the importance of
protecting their faith through schooling the young, which explains why minority
groups such as the Moravian Brethren, the Puritans and the Jews placed emphasis
on children’s education. Susanna, mother of the Methodist pioneers John and
Charles Wesley, wrote in 1732 a study (On the education of my family) explaining
the instruction of her children both male and female. Teaching was to begin

28
 IDENTITIES AND HORIZONS

the day after the sixth birthday, with an emphasis on learning the alphabet and
reading the Bible. Thanks to this, all her ten children, both male and female,
achieved literacy.
After the childhood years some young people entered into service or appren-
ticeship and were therefore able to earn an independent adult wage at around the
age of 14. This meant that they were no longer children. Their work indeed
created and affected vital social relationships: the separation from family in order
to work elsewhere, mobility and the finding of new friends, transition from rural
to urban environments, the new relationship with employers. It was the social
context that helped to define what a ‘child’ was and how adults treated them. The
rules defining childhood in preindustrial society, quite logically, would be
different from those found in modern postindustrial society.
Some sociologists suggest that a sector located between the categories of child
and adult, what one may term ‘adolescent’ (a word and concept that did not
generally exist at that time), can also be found in preindustrial Europe, just as it
can be found in other premodern societies. This stage can tentatively be identi-
fied with the period of apprenticeship outside the family and was a firm prepara-
tion for adult life. A study of servants in a household in Essex between 1560 and
1620 suggests that the years were a vital period of formation when the young of
both sexes from the ages of about 10 to 20 escaped parental supervision and had
independence, money, job prospects, friends, the chance to find a suitable spouse
and to be introduced to sexual activity.78 Because of the freedom available, youth
was deemed to be a dangerous age, when the pleasures of the flesh most needed
to be controlled.79

The surprising brevity of marriage

Marriage marked the end of adolescence because it initiated a person into the
responsibilities of a different context, the adult world. It was the single most
important event establishing independence and the initiation of a separate
family. In both civil and Church law, the minimum age for consent to marriage
was 12 for girls and 14 for boys, but despite the large numbers of young people
they did not, as was once thought, marry very young. Scholars are generally
agreed on the existence of a ‘north-west European’ marriage pattern distinguished
by a late age of marriage with a small age difference between partners, a high rate
of celibacy and a relatively low birth rate.80 The pattern is normally viewed in

29
 EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN SOCIETY

contrast to that of eastern Europe, where conditions were markedly different,

and of the Mediterranean, where there were variations. Evidence for Spain tends
to suggest that in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries girls married at
the age of 20, men at about 25. In Altopascio (Tuscany) in the seventeenth
century girls married when just over 21, though after about 1700 the age was
over 24.81 By contrast, over most of western Europe women’s first marriage
occurred between the ages of 24.5 and 26.5; the men were usually two to three
years older. In all cases, there were firm economic reasons that played a part in
deciding when marriages occurred. Among the elite, the age at marriage tended
to be lower, since an early and profitable wedding helped to secure property:
in the sixteenth century daughters of the Genevan bourgeoisie wed at about
22 years, English noblewomen at just over 20. The lower orders, on the other
hand, probably delayed marriage until they could afford to set up their own
family unit, though some couples, as we have seen, were allowed to live together
after betrothal.
Sexual dalliance short of intercourse appears to have been tolerated quite
freely (see Chapter 2) among the common people of western Europe. Nonetheless,
illegitimacy rates were modest: in England in twenty-four parishes studied, the
rate was 2.6 per cent of live births; in Spain the level at Talavera de la Reina was
3 per cent; in Germany in Mainz in the century and a half to 1780 it did not rise
above 3 per cent.82 Communal prejudice against mothers of illegitimate children
were strong enough to restrict levels. Nearly all births occurred within marriage.
On the other hand, the rate of premarital conception was everywhere quite
high, and more in the cities than in the countryside. In the seventeenth century
the rate in Amiens was nearly 6 per cent of first births, in Lyon up to 10 per cent;
in one village in Galicia 7.5 per cent of children were born within seven months
of marriage. German towns appear to have had a high level, up to 21 per cent for
Oldenburg in 1606–1700. England provides the most startling evidence: 20 per
cent of all first births in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were conceived
before marriage, and in some villages as many as 33 per cent. The figures leave no
doubt that courtship customs in preindustrial Europe often did not conform to
the official Christian ideal of chastity before marriage.
Marriage, it turned out, was seldom for life. Thanks to the high mortality
rate, the average couple could look forward to a shorter married life than is usual
today. In the Barcelona area in early modern times, the average length of marriage
before the death of a partner was not much over thirteen years, though in the

30
 IDENTITIES AND HORIZONS

interior of Catalonia it rose to around twenty years.83 At Basel in the 1660s the
mean length of marriage was just over twenty years. In Colyton in Devon
between 1550 and 1699 it was around twenty years. A nuclear family would thus
be thrown adrift by the untimely death not only of half of the children but also
of one parent. Early death (rather than, as now, divorce) contributed to the early
breakup of marriages. It consequently became the rule rather than the exception
to remarry, within the limits of available wealth and ease of access to new marriage
partners. In the rich Genevan elite in 1550–99, 26 per cent of marriages by men
were remarriages.84 In Crulai (Normandy) 20 per cent of all male and 10 per cent
of all female marriages were remarriages; one widower out of two, and one widow
out of six, married again. In one French peasant parish in the seventeenth
century, we are told by a contemporary,

when a husband loses his wife or a wife her husband, the surviving spouse at
once invites everyone to a meal: this sometimes takes place in the house where
the corpse is lying, and the guests laugh, drink, sing and make arrangements
for remarrying their host or hostess. The widower or widow receives proposals
and gives reasons for acceptance or rejection: it is only rarely that the party
comes to an end before the arrangement has been concluded.85

The relative brevity of married life, and the very high infant mortality, meant
that the balance of birth over death was very precariously maintained. Enormous
importance must therefore be attached to the fertility rate at this period. In
almost every town deaths normally exceeded births, and population levels could
only be maintained by continuous immigration. In Norwich there were 10,000
more deaths than births between 1582 and 1646, yet the town’s population rose
by at least 5,000 because of constant repletion by newcomers. It may have been
that the newer immigrants in fact brought with them lower rates of survival and
that towns left to themselves would have had a healthy demographic balance
with a need for only modest help from newcomers.86 But the observation is
largely an academic one, since in practice all large towns of early modern Europe
experienced very considerable immigration. Though the birth rate among immi-
grants may have been lower, they often contributed solidly in numbers to urban
expansion.
Female fertility was radically affected by late marriage, which meant that
young women started reproducing some ten years after they were able to do so.

31
 EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN SOCIETY

This phenomenon can be referred to as preindustrial Europe’s natural system of

birth control. When we bear in mind that most women had borne their last child
by about forty (the evidence for this across several countries is quite clear), it can
be seen that the average reproductive period of women at the time was fifteen
years, less than half the span of a woman’s normal fertility. The inevitable result
was few children. Age-specific fertility rates show that women marrying in the
age group 25–29 years tended to produce about four children; in older age
groups the rate declined. In Spain mothers normally conceived immediately
after marriage; in England and France on the other hand they tended not to give
birth until fourteen and sixteen months respectively after marriage. The interval
between births grew longer with subsequent children: English averages suggest
an interval of twenty-eight months between the births of the first and second
child, where in France the interval was about twenty-three.
This fairly low reproductive rate, in a society where a high proportion
of women never married, created a distinctive family pattern. In twenty-first-
century Europe the economically privileged classes and nations tend to have
small families, the poorer communities tend to have large ones. In preindustrial
Europe precisely the opposite held good: the poor had fewer children, the rich
could afford to have more. In the sixteenth-century village of Villabáñez (Old
Castile) families seldom had more than four children; in Córdoba in 1683, 58
per cent of families had no more than two children, 32 per cent had no more
than four. In France the average number of children was just over four per family.
In late sixteenth-century Norwich the poor had 2.3 children per family, the richer
burgesses had 4.2. Europe was thus far from having the large families usually
associated with preindustrial communities. The gentry and nobles, however,
often exceeded the norm. The Genevan bourgeoisie, where girls habitually
married younger, was capable of producing eleven and even fifteen children per
family. The English aristocracy modestly limited itself to five per family, though
the record was occasionally upset by the heroic few, such as the first Earl Ferrers
(d. 1717), who had thirty bastards and twenty-seven legitimate children to
his credit.
The absolute dependence of fertility on the age of the mother is solid proof
that birth control was not widely practised. At the same time, however, there were
mechanisms in existence that controlled fertility. It has been argued, as we have
seen, that late marriage in itself was a conscious method of control; though against
this thesis one might cite the evidence of Spain, where a lower marriage age did

32
 IDENTITIES AND HORIZONS

not result in a different pattern of fertility. Breastfeeding, which delays a mother’s

possibility of conceiving, remained normal practice, but the evidence at least from
French towns shows that a fair proportion of mothers from the elite and artisan
classes gave their infants out to be wet-nursed, and this increased their ability to
conceive while reducing that of the wet-nurses. The most commonly practised
method of controlling unwanted children was exposure after birth; illegitimate
infants were the chief victims, but several babies were also left by parents too poor
to care for them. The practice of leaving infants on the steps of churches and
hospitals grew regularly throughout the early modern period and led to the estab-
lishment of foundling hospitals in the major European cities. By the end of the
seventeenth century the number of foundlings had attained alarming proportions:
the hospital in Madrid had 1,400 infants in its care in 1698, and in the same
decade the hospital in Paris was taking in over 2,000 a year.
The best-documented cases of birth control refer not to the rural but to the
urban population and elites. Henri Estienne referred in 1566 to women who
utilised ‘preservatives that prevent them becoming pregnant’; and another French
writer, Pierre de Bourdeille, quoted the case of a servant-maid who, on being
scolded by her master for becoming pregnant, claimed that it would not have
happened ‘if I had been as well instructed as most of my friends’.87 By the next
century, according to a confessor’s manual published in Paris in 1671, priests
were instructed to inquire in the confessional whether the faithful had ‘employed
means to prevent generation’, and whether ‘women during their pregnancy had
taken a drink or some other concoction to prevent conception’.
At the same period contraceptive and abortive practices were known in Spain,
to judge by confessors’ manuals and the prosecutions undertaken by the
Inquisition. A more scientific, though necessarily indirect, guide to contracep-
tive practices is the study of birth intervals: lengthy intervals, such as those of
forty-nine months or more found in all social classes in early eighteenth-century
Geneva, are clear testimony that controls were practised; but it is less certain that
the practices involved anything more than careful abstention. Very gradually, the
unspeakable came to be spoken and birth control was recognised to exist. In
England in 1695 a book called Populaidias, or a Discourse concerning the having
many children, in which the prejudices against having a numerous offspring are
removed defended the older values and attacked those ‘who look upon the fruit-
fulness of wives to be less eligible than their barrenness; and had rather their
families should be none, than large’.

33
 EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN SOCIETY

Population trends: a Malthusian crisis?

What did the demographic ups and downs signify for Europe? In 1798 the
Cambridge scholar and cleric Thomas Malthus published an influential Essay on
the Principle of Population, in which he related population levels to the wellbeing
of the economy. Normally, he argued, population tends to increase at a rate that
exceeds its ability to produce sufficient agricultural resources, resulting in a fall
in the standard of living and aggravating discontent, poverty and death. The
trend towards demographic increase, he maintained, is frequently balanced by
natural and man-made disasters such as epidemics, famines and wars, preventive
checks which despite their negative character could be viewed as controls that
help limit the excessive growth of population. This bleak Malthusian model
seemed to make sense within the context of a preindustrial agrarian economy,
but historians have since then recognised that there were several other factors
that also affected the way population developed in early modern Europe.
In the fourteenth century the levels of population were at their peak, until
the devastation caused by the outbreak of bubonic plague in 1348. After 1450
population began to increase, but very unevenly, given the considerable differences
in demographic structure between various regions. The trend continued, with
various interruptions, until the definitive explosion of population that took place
after about 1750. Although information on trends can be found in tax and mili-
tary censuses of the period, it is to parish records that we turn for reliable details.
Fragmentary data on births, marriages and burials were kept in several countries
prior to the Reformation. But even after registrations became compulsory – in
England after 1538 (not fully effective until 1653), in Catholic countries after the
Council of Trent (1563) – it was rare for a parish priest to keep his records up
to date.
The highest rate of increase was in the north, where the Scandinavian coun-
tries by 1600 registered an advance of two-thirds on their 1500 population levels,
and Britain and the Netherlands over one-half. Central Europe, Spain and Italy
increased by up to one-third, France by perhaps only one-eighth. The most
notable increase, stimulated of course by immigration and by economic activity,
was in the great cities. Antwerp and Seville, under the impetus of trade, doubled
in size in the first two-thirds of the sixteenth century. Lyon quadrupled its popu-
lation from 1450 to 1550, while Rouen tripled in size during the early sixteenth
century. Where in 1500 there had been few towns of over 100,000 inhabitants

34
 IDENTITIES AND HORIZONS

(only Paris, Naples, Venice and Milan), by 1600 there were at least nine (Antwerp,
Seville, Rome, Lisbon, Palermo, Messina, Milan, Venice, Amsterdam), and three
of over 200,000 (Naples, Paris, London). By 1700 these last three had half a
million each, and Madrid, Vienna and Moscow had joined the ranks of those
with over 100,000.
Both on a small and a large scale, and in both town and country, the growth
in population levels was unmistakable. In the village of La Chapelle-des-Fougerets
(Ile-et-Vilaine) the records show an increase of 50 per cent between 1520 and
1610; in the Valladolid region, the village of Tudela de Duero increased by 81.7
per cent between 1530 and 1593. In Provence the demographic level of 1540
was three times that of 1470, in Luxembourg the population increased by 39 per
cent between 1501 and 1554, in Leicestershire by 58 per cent between 1563
and 1603. The territory of Zürich (excluding the city) increased in population by
45 per cent between 1529 and 1585; Norway’s population grew 46 per cent
between 1520 and 1590.
The causes of the demographic increase are not clear, though it is possible to
point – for the early sixteenth century at least – to relative absence of destructive
wars and a lull in the frequent attacks of epidemics. The consequences of the
increase were momentous: a restless movement of migratory populations, settle-
ment of overseas territories, growing pressure on land use, a rise in prices stimu-
lated in part by higher demand, a crisis in the exploitation of labour and the level
of wages. There was a disproportionate increase in the town population, which
probably doubled in England during the sixteenth century. In the province of
Holland the rural population between 1514 and 1622 grew by 58 per cent, the
urban by 471 per cent. Urbanisation was thus a notable feature of the period.88
Towns grew principally, as we have seen above, through immigration from the
rural areas. As cities grew, they generated demand and stimulated the economy.
On the negative side, however, urbanisation pushed up property and rent values
and worsened the material condition of the lower classes. In the rural areas, popu-
lation growth was an undeniable stimulus to higher output in agriculture.
The period of expansion that began in about 1450 was checked temporarily
after the 1580s. Throughout Mediterranean Europe the decades after this were
marked by reverses, associated particularly with epidemics. In France and the
Netherlands, the major negative factor was war. By the early seventeenth century,
much of Europe was entering a phase of demographic stagnation that lasted
until the beginning of the 1700s. In southern Europe the population levels of the

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early sixteenth century were not recovered for 200 years. The picture was not
so bad in England and Wales, where the population level stood at just below
3 million in 1561, rising to 4.1 million in 1601 and to over 5.2 million in 1651,
an overall increase of 75 per cent.

Born to die

Early modern European society was overshadowed by death. Life expectancy at

birth was, by our modern standards, alarmingly low. Boys born in the UK in
2018 can expect to live on average to 87.6 years and girls to 90.2 years, taking
into account projected mortality patterns during their lifetime.89 In the English
peerage in 1575–1674 the average male expectation at birth was 32 years, the
female 34.8 (in the early 1900s, by contrast, a male peer could expect to live to
60, a female to 70).90 In thirteen English parishes in the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries the male life expectancy at birth was 36 years. The lot of the
poorer people was inevitably worse, aggravated by unhealthy conditions and by
infectious diseases that are now extinct. A study covering 3,700 children of all
classes born in Paris at the end of the seventeenth century arrives at an overall life
expectancy of 23 years. A baby born into the elite of Geneva in the seventeenth
century might expect to live 36 years, but the child of a skilled worker there had
an expectancy of only 18.3 years.
These figures are statistical abstracts but are reflected in the real data for infant
mortality. In the demographic system of early modern Europe one out of every
four or five children born failed to survive the first year of life: in England the
average was 20 per cent of all children, in France 25 per cent. Infant mortality
in towns was roughly double that in the countryside. Survival beyond infancy
continued to be extremely hazardous. In the Castilian villages of Simancas,
Cabezón and Cigales in the sixteenth century, up to 50 per cent of the children
died before their seventh year; in the nearby city of Palencia the figure was 68 per
cent.91 In England fewer than 67 per cent of all children born survived the age of
10, in northern France barely a half. Almost one child in two in early modern
Europe failed to live to the age of 10, two live births being required to produce
one human adult. The example of the Capdebosc family in the Condomois
(France) is instructive. Jean Dudrot de Capdebosc married Margaride de Mouille
in 1560. They had ten children, of whom five died before their tenth year. Odet,
the eldest son, married Marie de la Cromp in 1595: of their eight children five

36
 IDENTITIES AND HORIZONS

did not reach their tenth year. Jean, the eldest, married twice. Jeanne, his first
wife, had two children, one of whom died at 9 years, the other at 5 weeks. Marie,
the second wife, had thirteen children in twenty-one years: six of them died in
infancy, one was killed in war, two became nuns. Of the thirty-three children
born to this prolific family during the century, only six founded a family. The
principal reason: infant mortality.92
The process of birth did not spare the mother either. The risk of death when
giving birth was high: in England it accounted for a maximum of one-fifth of all
deaths among women aged between 25 and 34. Since the risk was seen as normal,
it did not provoke comment.

Mortality: epidemics

The one great reality of life was death, readily accepted because always unavoid-
able. It was reflected in the whole cultural environment: in the teaching and
imagery of religion; in art, poetry and drama; in popular entertainment and public
celebrations. Of the three scourges bewailed by the litany ‘a peste, fame et bello,
libera nos Domine’ the first two could be considered as natural, though already
there were suggestions that public policy could remedy their worst effects. In prac-
tice, for most people the environment in which they lived was a permanent source
of mortality.93 They were therefore just as liable, as people are today in the terri-
fying impact of the Covid pandemic, to suffer the agony of grief and loss. Since
medieval times, a whole form of literature, the ars moriendi, instructing people
about the way of dying properly, was developed for the use of the clergy and laity
alike. The danse macabre was one aspect of expressing in art and in popular ritual
the impact of inevitable death. A vast range of popular legends and customs came
into existence, enabling people to deal with the challenges posed by the passage
beyond this life.
Fears were focused primarily on the sudden mortality brought on by epidemic
outbreaks. Plague was the most virulent of all epidemics, though the regular toll
of other diseases such as influenza, typhus, typhoid and smallpox may in reality
have been responsible for more deaths.94 Influenza, for example, may have been
responsible for the English report of 1558 that ‘in the beginning of this year died
many of the wealthiest men all England through, of a strange fever’: it was a
severe crisis (1557–9) during which a tenth of the English population may have
died. Possibly the most common of the regular diseases in Europe was smallpox,

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which had been known since ancient times and continued to be a terrible scourge
to families, especially to the young, of whom between one- and two-thirds died
if they contracted the infection. By the eighteenth century new methods, notably
variolation and, by the end of the century, vaccination, served effectively to
control the disease.
‘Fevers’ were a regular phenomenon, whereas plague could be more easily
identified by its episodic and savage impact. Historians have had doubts about
what the ‘plague’, or ‘bubonic plague’ as it is sometimes termed, really was. The
flea-infected rat has eventually been recognised as the principal carrier of the
disease, though some recent studies suggest that human fleas were equally
responsible, since the rapidity with which plague spread is more explicable by the
mobility of humans than by the movements of the less mobile black rat.
The proportion of people who succumbed to plague, especially in the cities,
could be staggering. Possibly one-quarter of the population of London perished
in the plague of 1563, when the death rate was seven times higher than in normal
years. Although 1665 became known as the year of the Great Plague, in fact
proportionately more people died in the outbreaks of 1603 and 1625; together
the epidemics of these three years caused the death in London of up to 200,000
people. Measuring the impact of disease over a run of years offers a somewhat
different perspective (just 15 per cent of deaths in London from 1580 to 1650)
but hides the gravity of the periodic outbreak. The outbreaks in Amsterdam in
1624, 1636, 1655 and 1664 are estimated to have removed respectively 11 per
cent, 14 per cent, 12.5 per cent and 16.5 per cent of the population.
In Uelzen (Lower Saxony) the plague of 1597 carried off 33 per cent of the
population, whereas a dysentery epidemic in 1599 killed only 14 per cent.95
Santander in Spain was virtually wiped off the map in 1599, losing 83 per cent
of its 3,000 inhabitants. The great ‘Atlantic plague’ of 1596–1603, which gnawed
at the coasts of western Europe, possibly cost a million lives, two-thirds of them
in Spain alone. In France between 1600 and 1670 plague carried off between 2.2
and 3.3 million. Mantua in 1630 lost nearly 70 per cent of its population, Naples
and Genoa in 1656 nearly half theirs. Barcelona lost 28.8 per cent of its popula-
tion in the plague of 1589 and about 45 per cent in that of 1651. Marseille lost
half its people in 1720.96
Epidemics were spread by contact, probably the most mortal of contacts
being the passage of troops in wartime.97 Isolation was, as it still is today with the
2020 pandemic, the commonest remedy adopted. During the 1563 epidemic in

38
 IDENTITIES AND HORIZONS

England the court moved to Windsor and (reports the annalist John Stow) ‘a
gallows was set up in the market-place to hang all such as should come there
from London’. In seventeenth-century Spain, double military cordons were put
around infected communities and commerce was cut; but it was always difficult
to control inland epidemics. A ban on commerce by sea was, on the other hand,
invariably successful: it saved the Netherlands from the English plague of 1563
(but not from its indirect impact through Germany in 1566, after being taken to
the Baltic in English ships) and Spain from the Marseille plague of 1720. The
latter was the last outbreak known in mainland Europe. The epidemic at Messina
in 1743 ended the reign of plague in the west.
The social effects of plague have been imperfectly studied, but there can be no
doubt that it discriminated among its victims. Thriving on filthy conditions, it
struck first and foremost at the lower classes in the towns. In London, the
Mortality Bills show epidemics having their origin in the poorest suburbs. When
an epidemic struck Lyon in 1628 a contemporary comforted himself with the
thought that ‘only seven or eight persons of quality died, and five or six hundred
of lower condition’. We find a bourgeois of Toulouse observing in his journal in
1561: ‘The contagion only ever hits the poor people. . . . God by his grace will
have it so. The rich protect themselves against it.’
The surest protection was in flight. When the plague hit Bilbao in the early
autumn of 1598 ‘only the totally impoverished remained’ in the city. The bour-
geoisie moved to other towns, the nobility to their country estates. Those rich who
remained were aware that the plague discriminated in their favour. The banker
Fabio Nelli, writing from Valladolid in July 1599 in a week when nearly a thou-
sand people had died, commented, ‘I don’t intend to move from here . . . almost
nobody of consideration has died’. Social tensions were aggravated. With the
evidence plain before their eyes, the upper classes felt that the plague had been
spread by the poor. The poor in their turn resented the fact that those who had
never lacked material comforts should also be spared the vengeance of the scourge.
Poverty and poor nutrition were the two vulnerabilities of epidemic victims. In
Sepúlveda (Spain) in April 1599 ‘all those who have died in this town and its
region were very poor and lacked all sustenance’. The connection between poverty
and epidemics encouraged public authorities to improve conditions of hygiene in
the towns, but it is doubtful if any of the measures taken by municipalities was
effective. The lack of defence against disease highlights what was certainly the
biggest failure of early modern European civilisation: its inability to achieve

39
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advances in medicine.98 In towns, salient problems included disposal of waste

food, human and animal faeces, and dead bodies, all of which in theory had to be
deposited under the ground, though the reality was often otherwise. A report from
Pisa in 1612 observed that ‘none of the houses has a privy with its own under-
ground cesspit, but they defecate between the houses, which as well as stinking
horribly is an extremely disgusting sight to those who pass by in the street’.

Mortality: famine

‘This year’, a Spanish correspondent wrote home from Naples in 1606, ‘God has
seen fit to visit this realm and Sicily and other parts of Italy with a ruinous
harvest, and the one here is said to be the worst for forty years.’ The report was
an exaggeration, for there had been an even more severe famine only ten years
previously, but inevitably each crisis seemed to be worse than its predecessor, and
bad years were regular enough to have an adverse cumulative effect. In early
modern England one harvest in four was poor. Between 1549 and 1556 there
was not a single good harvest, and the Privy Council banned corn exports every
year between 1546 and 1550. In 1549 grain prices were 84 per cent higher than
in the preceding year, and in 1556 they were 240 per cent higher than the year
before.99 The incidence of such crises must be put in perspective. Famines, in the
sense of great natural disasters, were infrequent; far more significant was the
threat from the common daily inability to obtain enough food.
The availability of food was affected primarily by the weather, but it depended
also on human factors such as adequate agricultural methods, the volume of
demand from the population, good communication and transport and the pres-
ence of war. In an era when in some countries customs barriers even separated
one province from another, it was possible for one of two contiguous regions to
starve while the other fed adequately. The significance of the ‘subsistence crisis’
for mortality has been much debated. Some scholars have argued that subsis-
tence crises could have a devastating effect, and that people could die in big
numbers in famine conditions. Others have maintained that few ever died from
starvation or malnutrition in early modern Europe and that though undernour-
ishment may have weakened health the real killer in most cases was disease. The
latter argument has been based principally on a study of price data: because in
many cases high mortality has not coincided with high grain prices, it has been
argued that lack of food could not have caused death.

40
 IDENTITIES AND HORIZONS

The evidence for a link between dearth and death prior to the eighteenth
century seems however to be firm, judging by the crises of the 1590s, of 1661
and of the 1690s. The years 1594–7 over most of Europe were ones of excessive
rain and bad harvests, resulting in a steep rise in grain prices.100 In Spain, Italy
and Germany in particular the disaster coincided with heavy mortality brought
on by epidemics of plague. Discontent and unrest led to large-scale peasant
revolts all over the continent (see Chapter 6). In England there were unsuccessful
attempts at armed uprisings. The English government drew up a new Poor Law
in 1597 to deal with widespread poverty and distress. The authorities at Bristol
undertook relief measures whereby, they claimed with satisfaction, ‘the poor of
our city were all relieved and kept from starving or rising’. Newcastle was not so
fortunate. An entry in the town accounts reads: ‘October 1597. Paid for the
charge of buringe 16 poore folks who died for wante in the strettes 6s. 8d.’ In
Aix-en-Provence in 1597 when ‘the clergy of the church of Saint-Esprit were
giving bread to succour the poor, of whom there were over twelve hundred, six
or seven of them died, including little girls and a woman’. At Senlis in 1595 an
observer saw ‘men and women, young and old, shivering in the streets, skin
hanging and stomachs swollen, others stretched out breathing their last sighs, the
grass sticking out of their mouths’.
The crisis of 1659–62 created conditions that in many countries eased the
way to absolute monarchy. The harvest failure of 1661 in northern and eastern
France helped to present the young Louis XIV to his people as a beneficent ruler.
Colbert reported that the king ‘not only distributed grain to individuals and
communities in Paris and around, but even ordered thirty and forty thousand
pounds of bread to be given out daily’. As in most subsistence crises, children
were the most vulnerable: in the parish of Athis, south of Paris, 62 per cent of
those who died in 1660–2 were aged under 10. In the countryside, reported an
eyewitness, ‘the pasturage of wolves has become the food of Christians, for when
they find horses, asses and other dead animals they feed off the rotting flesh’. ‘In
the thirty-two years that I have practised medicine in this province’, reported a
doctor in Blois, ‘I have seen nothing to approach the desolation throughout the
countryside. The famine is so great that the peasants go without bread and throw
themselves on to carrion. As soon as a horse or other animal dies, they eat it.’
The years 1692–4 produced poor harvests in western Europe. In November
1693 the city of Alicante reported that ‘there has been virtually no harvest because
it has not rained for fourteen months’. In Galicia the city of Santiago reported

41
 EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN SOCIETY

that ‘most of the people have died of hunger and most homes have been depopu-
lated’. The claim was not unfounded. In the district of Xallas in Galicia, most of
the conceptions of 1693–4 disappeared in the infant mortality of 1694–5; in
1691 there had been thirty-eight marriages in the parishes, in 1695 there were
only twelve. For France 1693 was possibly the worst year of the century: at
Meulan, north-east of Paris, the price of grain tripled and burials were nearly two
and a half times those in a normal year. With associated attacks of epidemic, the
mortality in France in 1693–4 may have exceeded 2 million. Three years later, in
1696, Finland suffered a disastrous harvest failure which swept away possibly
one-quarter of the country’s population in the course of 1696–7.
Not all the people starved. ‘Nothing new here’, reported a Rome newsletter in
February 1558, ‘except that people are dying of hunger.’ The same newsletter then
went on to describe a great banquet given by Pope Paul IV at which the chief
wonders were ‘statues made of sugar carrying real torches’. The rich were some-
times touched by the plague, but almost never by hunger. In Dijon in the great
famine of 1694 the number of deaths in the wealthy parish of Notre Dame was 99,
in the poor parish of St Philibert 266. Even in normal times the mortality rate was
tipped heavily against the undernourished poor: in seventeenth-century Geneva,
among the upper bourgeoisie 38 per cent of children tended to die before the age
of 10, but the figure for those born to working-class parents was 62.8 per cent.
Among the lower classes, mortality was as a rule higher among the rural
proletariat than in the towns, for while the townspeople could beg for relief the
peasants had to find sustenance from their own inhospitable environment. When
the soil had no grain to offer them, they turned to carrion, roots, bark, straw and
vermin. Of the famine in 1637 in Franche Comté a contemporary recorded that
‘posterity will not believe it: people lived off the plants in gardens and fields; they
even sought out the carcasses of dead animals. The roads were strewn with
people. . . . Finally it came to cannibalism.’
It remains possible to maintain that death from hunger was rare in normal
conditions, but it is not easy to define what ‘normal conditions’ were in a society
that suffered frequently from crises of one sort or another. The common people
were under no illusion about their susceptibility to starvation, and the regularity
of bread riots in towns illustrates their refusal to accept their fate with resigna-
tion. In 1628 one of the pastors in Geneva explained to his congregation that the
current food crisis (which was to last up to 1631) was brought upon them by
their sins:

42
 IDENTITIES AND HORIZONS

The people, who had been suffering for a very long time on a meagre diet
were outraged by this and left the church in great dissatisfaction, saying that
they were more in need of consolation than of accusations . . . that they were
very well aware of the true state of things; and that the pastor had no idea of
the misery of the great number who passed whole days and weeks in their
homes without a few loaves of bread; and that they had to go without that
which others fattened themselves upon.101

Undernourishment was common in Geneva in both normal and abnormal times.

In January 1630, during the subsistence crisis, silk workers were earning only two
sols a day, whereas the cost of bread was five sols a pound and two pounds was the
minimum required for a reasonable daily family diet. In these circumstances the
city council had to order the payment of supplementary wages.
Whole provinces and nations in early modern Europe lived at a parlous level
of subsistence and even in normal harvest years relied on food imports. The
wheat fields of Sicily and of eastern Europe became the great suppliers. Spain in
the sixteenth century was notoriously unable to meet its own needs and became
a regular importer from the Baltic, Sicily and north Africa. In early modern
times, two crops imported from America helped to solve the food problem in
certain areas. In north-west Spain (Galicia) maize, already in use by 1600, formed
by 1700 two-thirds of all cereals grown, and by 1750 nearly 90 per cent.102 With
a yield ratio of 40 to 1, maize saved the peasantry of Spain’s northern coast
during epochs of crisis. In the Netherlands there was not enough land available
to feed the high density of population and import of grain was always necessary:
it was logical that Amsterdam should become the great clearing-house for
imported Baltic wheat.
On a smaller scale, rural communities and individual peasants constantly
lived close to subsistence level, since the land they possessed did not suffice for
their needs. In some areas, fragmentation of peasant estates further destroyed
self-sufficiency. The village of Lespignan in Languedoc is evidence of this process.
In 1492 the great majority of peasant proprietors here were able to produce a
surplus which they sold in order to buy goods, so putting themselves above the
minimum level of independence. By 1607 the majority were having to buy grain
in order to feed themselves and had to support their families by finding work
elsewhere. In Beauvaisis the fragmentation of peasant holdings led to a situation
where as many as nine-tenths of the peasant population were not economically

43
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independent and could not guarantee to feed their families adequately. The
peasant who aspired to economic independence had to farm at least 30 acres in
years of plenty, 65 acres in years of dearth; yet in the seventeenth century less
than one-tenth of the peasants here owned 66 or more acres.
Assessment of health at this period has sometimes been made on the basis of
the calorie content of food.103 This has led to a number of disparate calculations.
In modern diets 3,000 calories a day is assumed to give a minimum level of
adequate nourishment. A study of the food of building workers in Antwerp
around the year 1600, with bread, vegetables, butter, cheese and meat in the diet,
suggests a value of some 2,000 calories a day.104 The average citizen of Valladolid
in the same period apparently had a daily diet of some 1,580 calories. Both these
food levels have been assumed to be adequate for the time. Some fared even
better. A study of peasant diets on the Polish royal estates in the late sixteenth
century arrives at a daily average of 3,500 calories; Spanish seamen are supposed
to have consumed up to 4,000 calories a day in the period; and the Collegio
Borromeo in Pavia supplied its poorer residents with about 6,000 calories a
day. Since in all cases most (perhaps three-quarters) of these calories came
from cereals, the bare figures may be misleading and an analysis of food and
vitamin content might give a truer picture of health values. On the grounds that
among the peasants of the Beauvaisis meat was almost unknown, fruit rare, vege-
tables poor and the staple was normally bread, soup, gruel, peas and beans, it has
been argued that undernourishment here was constant. The same might convinc-
ingly be said of many other peasantries, and it has been shown that armies of the
time – notorious spreaders of epidemics – were also grossly underfed, meat and
vegetables being largely absent from their diet. By the mid-eighteenth century,
however, it appears that the fatal link between dearth and death had all but
disappeared. Agrarian production improved and with it the standard of diet,
providing good conditions for the population recovery that took place from that
period.

Mortality: war

In post-Renaissance Europe the increase in collective violence, not simply

through war but at all levels of group conflict, was seen by many commentators
as a deplorable phenomenon. Men of culture, who had previously categorised as
barbarians only those who lived beyond the confines of western Christendom,

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 IDENTITIES AND HORIZONS

now recognised that Europeans also were capable of barbarism. ‘Do you tremble
at the idea of murder?’ Erasmus asked. ‘You cannot be unaware that murdering
as many people as possible is part of the celebrated art of war.’105 It was against
this background that Montaigne employed his irony to argue that the ‘savages’
of the New World were perhaps less so than those of the Old. Frenchmen in the
late sixteenth century, for whom ‘barbarism’ had previously been a virtually
unknown concept, began during the violence of the civil wars to realise that the
state of nature of American Indians was one of innocence rather than of savagery.
‘We surpass them in every sort of savagery’, Montaigne wrote. Commentators
denounced as particularly criminal the violence committed by soldiers against
the civil population and pressed for observation of the law codes, which
some rulers began to issue from the last decade of the fifteenth century and of
which the most influential was the Carolina issued in 1532 in Germany under
Charles V.
At a time when armies were fairly small, deaths in battle were the lesser part
of the impact of war. It has been estimated that in the English civil war deaths
in battle totalled 85,000,106 but that war-related mortality was much higher,
possibly 100,000 people or 3.7 per cent of the English population. When armies
increased in size, the battlefield casualties rose alarmingly. At Blenheim (1704),
perhaps the most notorious case, 30,000 men died. Yes, the poet laureate Southey
commented with sharp irony, but ‘it was a famous victory’. Other factors, such
as a long siege, tended to raise the death rate, especially among the civilian popu-
lation. There were also exceptional events, such as the disaster of the Armada in
1588, which cost the Spaniards 15,000 men.
It can be argued that military campaigns did not always cause extensive
mortality. Even so, their impact cannot be minimised: the soldiery spread
epidemics, aggravated famine and sometimes committed horrifying atrocities. In
general, it was the civilian population that suffered most. ‘It has been impossible
to collect any taxes’, runs a report from Lorraine in the 1630s, ‘because of the wars
that have hit most of the villages, which are deserted through the flight of some of
the inhabitants and the death of others from disease or from sickness arising out
of starvation.’ Summarising the consequences of the great Cromwellian repression
of Ireland, Sir William Petty, who had full access to evidence in the state papers,
estimated that ‘about 504,000 of the Irish perished, and were wasted by the sword,
plague, famine, hardship and banishment, between the 23 of October 1641 and
the same day 1652’.

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 EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN SOCIETY

The early sixteenth century was relatively free from wars within Christian
Europe, only Italy suffering to any extent (the sack of Rome in 1527 was a notor-
ious example). By the late century war had become universal on both land and
sea, whether in civil and religious conflicts or against the Turks, and armies began
to grow in size: Philip II’s army in Flanders rose to 85,000 men, in 1630
Wallenstein in Germany commanded about 100,000. By 1659 the French state
had 125,000 under arms, the number doubling and tripling under Louis XIV.
The following paragraphs touch on five areas where the army, as in most wars of
the time, ruined the cornfields, drove civilians out their homes and spread infec-
tion, and in the process aggravated mortality and retarded fertility.
The French civil wars (1562–98) were costly in terms of lives: the massacre of
St Bartholomew’s Eve, for example, exterminated over 3,000 Protestants in Paris
and 20,000 throughout France. Many localities suffered an overall loss of popu-
lation: Rouen lost one-quarter of its inhabitants between 1562 and 1594. There
was a brighter side to the picture. A survey of parish registers reveals that the
earlier period, up to the 1580s, coincided with the general expansion of popula-
tion in Europe. In Burgundy births and marriages increased regularly during the
wars, decreasing only in the 1590s, when famines rather than war were respon-
sible for falling birth rates. There is little doubt that the civil wars were a prin-
cipal reason why the total increase of population in France was smaller than in
any other western European country, but the mortality was not so great as to
reverse the period of positive growth up to the 1580s.
In the same years the Netherlands were going through a civil war. The Eighty
Years War (1568–1648) split the country into a northern section (the United
Provinces) and a southern (under Spanish rule). In the early years the north
suffered substantially, but from the end of the sixteenth century it was the south
that took the brunt of the war. Not until the 1630s, when the Dunkirk privateers
successfully attacked northern shipping, did the United Provinces suffer serious
reverses. A number of factors combined to produce disastrous effects on the south.
The collapse of the country was to some extent a consequence of the collapse of
Antwerp, which suffered from the blockade of the Scheldt after 1572 and from
the rebellion of Spanish troops – the ‘Spanish fury’ – in 1576. From 1580 onwards
a severe crisis developed in Belgian territory as the economy ground to a halt. In
1581 the linen industries of Courtrai and Oudenarde collapsed and nothing
could be sown in the fields round Brussels because of the war. In 1582 the Duke
of Anjou’s troops sacked several industrial towns. Mercenaries murdered farmers,

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 IDENTITIES AND HORIZONS

farms were destroyed, fields were left untilled. In 1585 the Scheldt was firmly
closed by the Dutch. Around Ghent for a while the area of cultivation fell by
92 per cent. In most villages of Brabant the population by 1586 had dropped to
between 25 per cent and 50 per cent of 1575 levels. ‘Trade has almost totally
ceased’, reported the Duke of Saxony when he visited Antwerp in 1613. The
outbreak of war in 1621, after the expiry of the Twelve Years Truce between Spain
and the United Provinces, brought further problems. ‘I have come to Amsterdam
where I now am’, reported a priest in 1627, ‘and find all the towns as full of people
as those held by Spain are empty’. Fortunately, in many areas the survival of good
land and other resources helped the people to recover rapidly from the war. The
earlier phase of the Dutch wars coincided with demographic expansion so that
there was only a moderate check to fertility. The wars of the seventeenth century,
however, came at a time of demographic stagnation or decline and had a more
marked effect.
In France the most serious reverses were associated with the Fronde (1648–
53), which took place mainly in the north, around Paris. The Jansenist nun
Angélique Arnauld in 1649 lamented ‘the frightful state of this poor country-
side; all is pillaged, ploughing has ceased, there are no horses, everything is
stolen, the peasants are driven to sleeping in the woods’.107 A report of 1652 on
the area speaks of ‘villages and hamlets deserted, streets infected by stinking
carrion and dead bodies lying exposed, everything reduced to cesspools and
stables, and above all the sick and dying, with no bread, meat, medicine, heating,
beds, linen or covering, and no priest, doctor or anyone to comfort them’.
Harvests collapsed in the affected region. Though war was the cause of misery in
these years, in fact the highest mortality was caused by epidemic disease spread
by the soldiers. The population loss around Paris was about a fifth. In the summer
of 1652, the year of highest mortality in the whole century in the south of Paris,
the death rate was 15 times higher than in the previous four crisis years.108
The Thirty Years War (1618–48) is the most famous of the scourges of this
period. Though literary accounts, notably Grimmelshausen’s famous anti-war
tract Simplicissimus (1668), have helped to exaggerate some of the effects of the
war, detailed research has supported the traditional picture. At the same time
there can be little doubt that epidemic disease, particularly the extensive plague
of 1634–6, was the single most lethal killer. Nördlingen in Bavaria, for example,
lost one-third of its population of 9,000 in the plague of 1634. The human
misery caused by military occupation that same year nevertheless caused a diarist

47
 EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN SOCIETY

to write that ‘it was considered a blessing in these times to die of the plague’. The
Rhineland, fought for by the troops of every nation in Europe, was reduced to
ruins. ‘From Cologne hither’ (to Frankfurt), reported an English ambassador in
1635, ‘all the towns, villages and castles be battered, pillaged and burnt.’ ‘I am
leading my men’, claimed the Bavarian general Johann von Werth when crossing
the Rhineland in 1637, ‘through a country where many thousands of men have
died of hunger and not a living soul can be seen for many miles along the way.’
In the county of Lippe, a region only moderately hit by the war, the popula-
tion fell by 35 per cent between 1618 and 1648. In the district of Lautern in the
Rhineland, a more severely devastated region, of a total of sixty-two towns, thirty
were still deserted in 1656, and a population of 4,200 (excluding the chief town
Kaiserslautern) had sunk to about 500. Augsburg lost half its population and
three-quarters of its wealth during the war; its richest taxpayers fell in number
from 142 to 18. Over the German lands as a whole the urban centres lost 33 per
cent of their inhabitants, the rural areas about 40 per cent.109 The losses varied
from under 10 per cent in Lower Saxony in the north-west to over 50 per cent
in Württemberg in the south and Pomerania in the north. These figures must be
treated with caution: there was an enormous refugee population, of whom many
returned eventually to their homes, so that ‘loss’ may not necessarily mean death
so much as displacement. Not only the German lands, but other adjacent coun-
tries, suffered badly: Franche Comté, devastated between 1635 and 1644, lost
between a half and three-quarters of its population.
A long-forgotten war whose consequences persist down to today was that of
1640–68 between Spain and Portugal, which ended with Spain recognising the
latter’s independence. Years of skirmishes and raids across the frontier turned
every major town into a garrison town, periodically ruined both livestock and
agriculture, aggravated emigration and led to the collapse of both dwellings and
population. The already poor province of Extremadura may have lost half its
population in the quarter century that the war lasted; its capital, Badajoz,
declined by 43 per cent between 1640 and 1691, at a time when most major
cities in Spain were increasing in size.110
Although some areas took as much as a generation to recover precrisis levels,
many managed to do so with surprising speed. The virtual cessation of marriages
and births in some communities was only temporary. As the crisis neared its end,
households which had lost one parent would look around for a replacement, and
the stock of unmarried women would become available for men seeking wives.

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 IDENTITIES AND HORIZONS

Marriages and remarriages would increase steeply. In Nördlingen during the four
months of the plague and military crisis at the end of 1634, only three marriages
took place.111 When the plague died away in December, a massive increase in
weddings occurred: 121 were celebrated in the first four months of 1635. This
wave of crisis marriages would then produce a big upsurge in births, as duly
happened in Nördlingen. Helped additionally by an increase in immigration, the
cities and eventually the countryside would recover steadily from the disastrous
years of war.

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 — two —
LEISURE, WORK AND MOVEMENT

Twelfth of February at Lille in the Low Country; here I break off until

morning, and I in gloom and grief; and during my life’s length unless only
that I might have one look at Ireland.
The exiled priest Fergal O’Gara, 1565

A society where work did not predominate and time did not dictate; Leisure and the
young; Leisure and festivities; A population on the move; Reasons for mobility and
migration; Cultural mobility; Distress and migration

The developed world today is marked above all by the activity of towns. In prein-
dustrial times, by contrast, the countryside contained some 85 per cent of the
total population and dominated Europe: its woods and plains, punctuated here
and there by villages and small towns, gave the traveller a feeling of immense
loneliness. There were, however, significant differences in the density of settle-
ment. In contrast to the highly populated territories of western Europe, Russia
and the Ukraine were vast emptinesses: as one went farther east the towns disap-
peared and the spaces opened up.
The countryside economy predominated but it was simply one part of a
dual reality. Both town and country were closely interlinked at every level
of activity. Rural areas were primary producers (food, wool, wine) but relied
heavily on the local town market to be able to sell their wares. Towns, in their
turn, relied entirely on the local producers for their sustenance. The weekly
market, still to be seen throughout much of rural Europe, was a social event of
the first importance.1 Market day determined economic life through prices and
levels of profits (and taxes); it kept rural and urban populations in contact for
social intercourse and business (the inn was a common meeting place); and it
facilitated personal transactions (more people went to market to chat than to

50
 LEISURE, WORK AND MOVEMENT

buy). Village producers might have several market towns within easy access,
thereby allowing them to sell produce not simply on one day but on several days
a week.2
In political terms, it is relevant to note, the distinction between urban and
rural was often unreal.3 The countryside was seldom independent of the towns.
Those who owned a great part of the land in the countryside were usually from
the towns. A city might be physically defined by the limits of its walls, but in
Italy, Germany and Spain all the surrounding territory, including its villages, was
normally attached to the city in terms of jurisdiction and fiscal obligation. A very
great part of the countryside consequently functioned intimately in step with
urban life and cannot be dissociated from it. As in many other aspects of their
lives, and in contrast to the way that we live today, the activity of early modern
Europeans was not compartmentalised. This applied notably to their use of time.

A society where work did not predominate

and time did not dictate

In our world, it is frowned upon if we do not work. We are also urged not to
waste time. Neither work nor time dictated the rhythm of preindustrial life.
Within their native communities, Europeans were not tied down, as in postin-
dustrial society, to a clear distinction between work time and leisure time. Labour
hours and leisure hours intermingled; in practice, leisure tended to play the
bigger part at all social levels. The imprecision of labour obligations was, in part,
a consequence of the imprecise measurement of time.
Clocks were a relative novelty in the early sixteenth century. The population
still took its division of the hours and minutes from the Church: the day was
measured by liturgical hours, church bells tolled their passing and called the
faithful to prayer. Many big towns by that time were also proud to possess a
public clock, located in the town hall tower. The earliest and best-known clock
of this type, dated to 1410 and renewed frequently thereafter, can be seen in
Prague. Since the hours marked by public clocks were visible to the public, they
helped people to order public duties such as times for holding markets or for
beginning school sessions. By the end of the sixteenth century the clock and
watch industry was booming, particularly when the clockmakers from Catholic
countries fled as refugees to Protestant states. In 1515 there were no clockmakers
in Geneva; after 1550 they came as Protestant refugees from France, and by

51
 EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN SOCIETY

1600 the city had between twenty-five and thirty master clockmakers and an
unknown number of apprentices.
In the mathematical universe of early seventeenth-century intellectuals, clocks
played an essential part. In contrast to the genial pace of earlier decades, in contrast
to Gargantua’s protest, ‘I never rule myself by time!’, the seventeenth century
began the subjection of humanity to the clock. It was the astronomer Johann
Kepler who looked upon the universe and pronounced it ‘similar to a clock’, and
Robert Boyle a generation later who considered it ‘a great piece of clockwork’. The
ordering of time became part of a general attempt by Europeans to organise the
environment in which they worked.4 This could be seen already in commerce and
navigation, which stimulated the development of mapping; in philosophy and
technology, where the science of mathematics became more precise; and in art
and engineering, where the study of physics promoted new advances.
Clocks and watches remained the preserve of a minority, but the ordering of
time had consequences that affected everybody. Though experts were agreed that
changes were needed, it was not easy to tamper with traditional observance of
hours and days. There were important objections when attempts were made to
change the calendar. In France, the king in 1563 decreed that the year should
start in January instead of at Easter; the Parlement of Paris, however, refused to
register the edict until January 1567, a refusal that made the year 1566 in France
only eight months long. A definitive international reform of the old calendar
(called ‘Julian’ after its original sponsor, Julius Caesar) did not come until 1582,
when Pope Gregory XIII introduced a reform that abolished 10 days from the
year. The change was accepted by different countries at different times, with
Philip II of Spain decreeing it at once for his territories in the same year. Most
Protestant countries, on the contrary, refused to accept the change, which led to
the operation for around two centuries of a dual calendar in Europe. The
Orthodox Church in Russia took the fight further and continued with its own
separate calendar until the twentieth century. The British Parliament eventually
in 1750 accepted the Calendar Act, which officially started the year on 1 January,
and adopted the Gregorian reform by removing eleven days from the month of
September 1752.
The problem of calculating hours inevitably affected the regulation of work.
Industrial time was measured by daylight hours, a winter working day being
shorter than a summer one by about two hours, with wages consequently lower.
In sixteenth-century Antwerp, building workers had a seven-hour day in winter

52
 LEISURE, WORK AND MOVEMENT

but a twelve-hour day in summer; winter wages were consequently one-fifth

lower. Concepts like ‘from sunrise to sunset’ were written into work regulations,
but were inevitably imprecise. Only a few trades had their hours of work laid
down by the clock rather than by daylight: in 1571 the printers of Lyon
complained because their working day was timed to begin too early in the
morning (at 2 a.m.) and ended too late at night (at 8 p.m.). For most workers,
especially on the land, imprecision of time fortunately took strict discipline out
of work. Rest from labours was both recognised and encouraged, and the system
of undisciplined hours was not necessarily as harmful as might appear.
Despite the efforts to measure and apply a system of hours, it was difficult to
sort out hours of rest (leisure time) from hours of work (work time). ‘Work’ was
not necessarily time-intensive, and might therefore also include periods of rest.
Working for a wage did not, as it does today in our postindustrial society, domi-
nate daily life. This was even more true in those extensive areas of Europe where
wages did not dictate the rules: there was little coin in circulation and as a result
money did not regulate labour relationships. In the Baltic, central and eastern
Europe and large areas of the west in the seventeenth century, a money economy
was still in the process of formation. Peasants paid their tax dues in the form of
labour services, and received their wages in kind rather than in cash.
At the same time, work was seldom a personal, individualised burden.
Individuals tended to contribute to the work output of groups rather than having
to labour for themselves alone. In a peasant family the various members had their
own allotted tasks, which might involve only a small proportion of the hours in
a day. Many younger members could be spared to go and work elsewhere in
order to learn a trade; their employment as apprentices or as labour in the towns
formed for them a fundamental phase in their life cycle. For adults, work was a
partial occupation of time, and only for the few was it a full-time obligation.
Those who lived outside supportive group structures could, obviously, face
economic difficulties. Normally in the villages of Europe family and community
structures served to maintain those who were in need as a result of being unable
to find work, and in the towns poor-relief systems were beginning to cater for
vagrants.
Unpleasant work was also invariably communal. The labour obligations
imposed by feudal authorities in western Europe and by serfdom in the east
derived from the system within which peasants lived and they accepted the
burden even while resenting it.

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 EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN SOCIETY

Though not rigidly defined by obligations, preindustrial work had its disci-
plines. All agrarian activity was determined by very clear signposts, normally
decided by the local community. The days and seasons for sowing, shearing,
harvesting, threshing and other duties were fixed according to the local climate
and the local economy. There is no formal way of calculating what proportion of
time was set aside for what we might call ‘work’. In village communities, the
norm appears to have been that enough hours were worked to maintain the
means of subsistence (crops, herds, fishing). The attention given to leisure
commitments and the absence of work discipline were to create problems for
employers of a later period, who complained in particular that workers did not
respect the working week and treated Monday (often ironically termed ‘Saint
Monday’ in England) as an extension of Sunday, the Lord’s day of rest. Labourers
for their part were aware of their work obligations, but preferred being able to
choose the days or hours when those obligations could be met. The situation
therefore was one of ‘alternate bouts of intense labour and of idleness wherever
men were in control of their own working lives’.5
In early modern Europe, work was not usually an oppressive regime. ‘The
labouring man will take his rest long in the morning’, an English bishop
complained, ‘then must he have his breakfast . . . at noon he must have his
sleeping time . . .’6 In the hot Mediterranean summer the hours spent in avoiding
the direct rays of the sun were even longer, causing northern travellers to
comment on the apparent ‘idleness’ of southern peasants. Concerns over ‘idle-
ness’ can be seen most clearly in the writings of English Puritans, who, like
Richard Baxter in his Christian Directory (1673), affirmed that time was given by
God and must be used in his service, not in idleness nor entertainments. It was
a viewpoint that some scholars have seen as a sort of ‘Puritan ethic’ that valued
work time because it increased production. In the nineteenth century the
German sociologist Max Weber evolved a theory, accepted today by very few
scholars, that linked this so-called ‘work ethic’ with the rise of capitalism.7
The Church authorities, for their part, had problems trying to persuade the
people to distinguish labour time from religious time. The figures may surprise,
but it was normal in much of Catholic Europe for over a third of the days in the
year to be officially days of rest. In the diocese of Paris at the beginning of the
seventeenth century there were fifty-nine obligatory religious holidays, which
together with the Sundays made up well over a hundred days a year. In preindus-
trial Spain between one-third to one-half of the days in the year were holidays.8

54
 LEISURE, WORK AND MOVEMENT

Obligatory religious holidays were, of course, only a proportion of these; the rest
were periods of celebration laid down by local communities.
With such a proliferation of rest days, it was normal in traditional society to
work indiscriminately during any days of the year, even when they coincided
with religious festivals. The Counter-Reformation Church from the later
sixteenth century onwards made firm attempts to restrict this practice by
decreeing that feast days were days of total rest. The intention was to distinguish
the sacred from the profane, what belonged to God from what belonged to
humanity. The disciplining of time – part of a general policy of disciplining reli-
gion (see Chapter 3) – was, however, difficult to achieve. In 1641 the bishops of
Catalonia complained that in the rural areas ‘the feasts ordered by the Church
are not observed’, and in Andalusia in 1673 a Jesuit missionary observed that
farm workers worked straight through feast days and only went to mass once a
fortnight. There was, in the popular mind, very little difference between the
sacred and the secular, or between work and leisure. All formed part of the same
daily reality, and each part was given due attention, but only when it was deemed
convenient.

Leisure and the young

By the same token, leisure in preindustrial Europe was not, as it is today, a

concept viewed as a contrast to the notion of ‘work’.9 For most of the population,
‘leisure’ was less a specific period of rest that alternated with work than a tradi-
tional time of neighbourly concerns and of attention to matters not immediately
connected with productivity. There was an extensive range of activities, available
particularly to the upper classes, that allowed people to indulge in recreations,
sports and pastimes. If seen as a sum of all activities that did not represent ‘work’,
it included fulfilment of obligations to the family, to the community, to the
Church and (for the unmarried) to courtship. For those who enjoyed legal
freedom and were neither enslaved nor in bondage, work time, as we have seen,
occupied only a small proportion of the hours of the week. It follows that leisure
activities were a large and important part of daily life.
Leisure was not, as it is in today’s world, a privilege of the individual, but a
commitment of all members of the community. It was an essential dimension of
good relationships, whether expressed in festivities, sports or quite simply
drinking at the inn.10 When it functioned properly, it strengthened social bonds

55
 EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN SOCIETY

and helped to bring about understanding between people who might otherwise
have provoked conflict within local society. A ball game on the village green had
the appearance of being leisure, but it was also a fulfilment of neighbourly obli-
gations. Village football was, for the Elizabethan Philip Stubbes, ‘rather a friendly
kind of fight, than a play or recreation’. Sometimes the fighting was real, as in the
football match in Berkshire in 1598 when two men were murdered.11 Violence
in sport has of course become endemic in our own day. Within the annual cycle
of days of rest, there were also days (such as Carnival) which by custom allowed
the communal expression of conflict and protest,12 usually through the activities
of the young. Once again, the conflict regularly produced violence. Leisure, in
short, was not divorced from work nor a refuge from it. It complemented the
work activities of members of the community.
Young people formed the most substantial cohort in the population (see
Chapter 1); unlike modern western society with its rapidly aging sector, prein-
dustrial Europe had a very high proportion of young people who played a leading
role in the ordering of every type of leisure, notably in communal activities at
harvest time, in festivities and at weddings. Their contribution was no less
important than that of adults.
The predominance of youth in the population had important cultural effects
that extended into the smallest rural communities, where the young played a key
role in the disposition of leisure. Organised youth groups – called abbayes in
southern France, cencerradas in southern Spain – were often to be found both in
villages and big cities (Lyon in the sixteenth century had some twenty ‘abbeys’),
and had recognised duties that included watching over the correct performance
of obligations in the community. Though the groups tended to be limited
normally to males, young women sometimes had a role: in Roussillon girls
played a leading part in them, organised popular ceremonies and were in charge
of charity.13 The younger generation, however, seems not to have been always in
exclusive control. There is evidence that the significant role of adolescents was
balanced, at least in England, by attempts on the part of the older generation to
impose patriarchal authority and tighten social discipline.14
A substantial portion of the leisure of the young was inevitably spent in
courtship. The late age at which young people married (see Chapter 1) has raised
the question of how they spent their sexual energies in the preceding years.15
There is little doubt that a considerable part of leisure time was spent simply in
getting to know the other sex; courtship would come at a later stage. Meetings

56
 LEISURE, WORK AND MOVEMENT

took place within the restraints imposed by the family and the community, and
were usually carefully regulated. Domestic and communal work might bring
people together, as in the spinning group (Spinnstube) of rural Germany, where
‘young persons of both sexes run together and much wanton frivolousness creeps
in’ (a complaint of 1587 from Württemberg).16 Despite controls imposed on the
Spinnstube, such as the frequent exclusion of males, it was a normal recreative
aspect of rural society and served also to promote marriages. Young people as a
rule, therefore, made use of their social institutions to develop sexual awareness.
At a popular level courting might involve ‘bundling’, which involved a couple
sleeping together fully clothed, without intercourse taking place. Evidence from
France and Germany shows a considerable range of tolerated sexual practices,
usually stopping short of intercourse. The intention was primarily entertainment
to fill in the years before marriage, as we learn from a young man in Barcelona
who stated (1625) that ‘it is common and habitual practice among young men
and young women to court only for pleasure and in order to pass the time, with
no intention of getting married’.17 Contacts for courtship were made also with
other local communities, notably on market and festival days, thereby in some
measure promoting social solidarity.

Leisure and festivities

In perspective, perhaps the most crucial aspect of leisure in preindustrial society

was that it enjoyed freedom from discipline. Though there were things to be
done, they could be done when it seemed fit and not because they were dictated
by norms. The multiple activities of the population in their periods of leisure are
the main components of what historians and anthropologists have classified as
‘popular culture’, a category that is not specifically ‘popular’ (because it includes
in practice all sections of society) and by no means limited to ‘culture’ (because
it covers every aspect of activity, from community traditions to holidays and
entertainments).18
The duration of community festivals is a case in point. One of the high points
of the year’s festivities was Carnival, normally celebrated in the few days before
the coming of Lent on Ash Wednesday. In the Mediterranean things were
different. In the Catalan lands, Carnival lasted very much longer: it began the
day after Christmas and ended over six weeks later, on Ash Wednesday. Leisure
in Catalonia took its most active form in feasts, which may be seen as rites of

57
 EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN SOCIETY

communication that celebrated a traditional event and expressed themselves

through symbolic or real means such as dancing, drinking, ceremonial, satire and
sexuality.19 Feasts celebrated not only release from work but also release from
society’s norms. They encouraged an atmosphere of merriment that contrasted
vividly with the orderly world of conventional relationships.
The disorder of feasts was, by a process paralleled in all preindustrial soci-
eties,20 transmuted into a series of rituals of mockery, laughter and social inver-
sion that varied in form from community to community.21 At one level, inversion
represented the community at play, indulging the freedom to jest and criticise.
At another level, role reversal, inversion and mockery can be regarded as alterna-
tive rituals offering a differing symbolism for the crucial stages of people’s role in
the community. From this point of view, they were possibly subversive. During
the role reversal practised during the Feast of Innocents in early December,
Catholic clergy all over western Europe gave up their role, adopted sexual reversal
by disguising themselves as women, danced in the streets and even allowed
laymen to say mass. In the secular sphere, town councils surrendered their
authority for a day, appointed women as mayors or conceded government to the
youth confraternity. The festivities, we should note, were not merely ‘popular’
but integral to the culture of society as a whole. Nobility and ecclesiastics took
part equally in the masques, celebrations and role reversals. As a young man,
Philip II of Spain habitually took part in the Carnival festivities. In addition to
the street celebrations, however, nobles might have their own festivities, of which
perhaps the most interesting were the rites of chivalry, practised actively in the
aristocratic circles of many countries throughout early modern times.

A population on the move

Early modern Europe was, like the late medieval world, predominantly a stable
society in which little appeared to be changing. Within that appearance of conti-
nuity, however, there were constant elements of novelty. The life experience of
the vast majority was limited to their own region, from which they seldom
moved more than 10 miles. Food, tools and clothing were all normally produced
within the home area, which was also where young people met the partners they
eventually married. There had of course always been elements of movement in
the medieval world: traders, pilgrims and artisans had ranged over the continent
and beyond it, to Africa and Asia and then much later to the new continent of

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America. What, however, of movement within the continent of Europe? In the

course of the sixteenth century, people began to be aware of changes in the
rhythm of life. William Harrison, in his Description of England (1577),
commented that the elders in his village ‘have noted . . . things to be marvel-
lously altered in England within their sound remembrance’. A generation later
Thomas Wilson, in his The State of England (1600), said that ‘I find great alter-
ations almost every year, so mutable are worldly things and worldly men’s affairs’.
One of the most widely commented aspects of change was the population
expansion of the early sixteenth century, which sometimes gave people the
impression that available living space was being used up. As early as 1518, Ulrich
von Hutten claimed that ‘there is a dearth of provisions and Germany is over-
crowded’; while in the same year a commission of Jeronimite friars in Spain
suggested that ‘the surplus population of these realms go and colonise’ America.
In Germany in 1538, Sebastian Franck described the country as being ‘full of
people’. So great was the pressure on space in Swabia, according to a chronicler
of 1550, that ‘there was not a corner, even in the wildest woods and the highest
mountains, that was not occupied’.22 ‘France is full of people’, reported the
Venetian ambassador there in 1561, ‘every spot is occupied to capacity’. The
French writer Jean Bodin in 1568 believed that ‘an infinite number of people has
multiplied in this realm’. Sir John Hawkins could speak of ‘England, where no
room remains, her dwellers to bestow’. ‘The people are increased and ground for
ploughs doth want’, complained an English writer in 1576.
The exaggerations reflect a basic reality that the stable world was changing
and that people were on the move. Most peasant societies of course remained
structurally immobile. Where adult labourers had their own property, or where
they were tied down by feudal obligation and seigneurial control, they were very
unlikely to move away. There were fundamental structures, such as the pattern of
political control and the distribution of the land, that changed very little over
generations. Geography – isolation in mountain areas or quite simply a fertile
environment that gave self-sufficiency – sometimes froze communities into rela-
tive immobility.
But there is ample evidence that elements within the rural societies of early
modern Europe were more on the move than has been thought. For England, a
study of the tax rolls in Northamptonshire shows that in some areas up to 60 per
cent of the nonfreeholders disappeared between 1597 and 1628, and about 27
per cent of the freeholders.23 About half the population of the village of Cogenhoe

59
 EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN SOCIETY

was replaced in the 10 years between 1618 and 1628.24 In 18 villages in

Nottinghamshire, only 16 per cent of the family names present in 1544 could be
found a century later in 1641. Evidence from Germany points the same way. A
study of three towns in Brandenburg shows that in Beeskow only 15 per cent of
the family names present in 1518 were still there in 1652; in Freienwalde between
1652 and 1704 only four family names survived; in Driesen between 1591 and
1718 only 9 per cent of names did so. A century and a half of rural emigration is
illustrated by the villages around the town of Ratzeburg (near Hamburg), where
between 1444 and 1618 about 90 per cent of peasant households changed their
place of residence, 20 per cent of them as many as seven or eight times.
Most people did not move very far. In seventeenth-century Sussex they
tended not to move farther than 20 miles away. In south and central England
between 1660 and 1730, an analysis of 7,000 cases shows that more than half of
those who changed their domicile did so within a range of 10 miles; only 3 per
cent had moved more than 100 miles. By their nature, big urban centres encour-
aged a rapid turnover. A London clergyman at the end of the sixteenth century
claimed that every twelve years or so ‘the most part of the parish changeth, as I
by experience know, some going and some coming’. In east London between
1580 and 1639 only 26 per cent of a sample of cases were born within the
locality. In Cologne one-sixth of the population changed domicile between 1568
and 1574.

Reasons for mobility and migration

While most small towns and rural areas in Europe continued to experience
stability of population, therefore, there is ample evidence that for other commu-
nities a substantial degree of movement was normal. It may help to make a clear
distinction between ‘mobility’ (or ‘movement’) and ‘migration’. Mobility implied
a freedom to modify aspects of daily life without necessarily changing it. Two
main reasons for mobility are apparent: marriage, and employment. In an average
small community blood relationships could present a problem. Marriages within
the fourth degree of kinship were forbidden by canon law and since a high
proportion of the village’s population might be interrelated it became necessary
to seek outside the community for a partner. Consanguinity therefore became a
barrier, but not always so in practice: in the seventeenth-century Spanish village
of Pedralba (Valencia) about one-tenth of marriages were within the forbidden

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degrees. As a rule young people in smaller settlements went, from choice or

because of kinship restrictions, to neighbouring villages where they would be
likely to meet prospective partners at local religious and harvest festivities.
The search for partners would occasionally provoke intervillage strife as young
men tried to defend their women against outsiders and put pressure on the girls
and their families or sought dispensations from consanguinity. Community pres-
sures of this sort might result in a high level of endogamous marriages, though
in general it can be concluded that the degree of endogamy was directly related
to the size of the village. In the small village of Rouvray (216 inhabitants) in
seventeenth-century Champagne, 31 per cent of marriages were endogamous,
while in Mussey (511 inhabitants) in the same area the figure was 68 per cent,
presumably because of the larger choice available. Exogamy was always higher in
the countryside than in the towns. In Altopascio (rural Tuscany) in the late seven-
teenth century about 60 per cent of marriages were with a partner from outside
the parish; in the community of Mediona (Catalonia) 25 per cent of partners
came from outside. In most cases the external partner was male, suggesting that
mobility for marriage was generally masculine except where there was positive
discrimination against men. In exceptional circumstances, when the availability
of partners was, for instance, made difficult by war conditions, cities might also
have a high proportion of marriage with outsiders. In the course of the seven-
teenth century, the majority of Amsterdam bridegrooms were born outside the
city; in the early century they came from the southern Netherlands, in the late
century from Germany.25
Movement in the short distance between communities, and between commu-
nities and the city, accounted for the bulk of mobility. The city was at all times
the greatest magnet, offering all the prospects – freedom, fortune, marriage,
work – not readily available in other communities: the consequent increase in
urban population in this period has already been noted. All classes moved city-
ward. Reports from Dorset that ‘some of our welthie men and merchauntes be
gone from us’ suggest a move to the commercial attractions of London. London
too was the setting of the play The History of Richard Whittington (1605), which
showed how a penniless youth came to the big city, rose to the top of the social
ladder and became thrice Lord Mayor of London. For the rural underprivileged,
all cities had their streets paved with gold.
Mobility over longer distances was occasioned primarily by the search for
employment. In most rural societies migration began when children left home to

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enter into service, a spell as servant being part of the life cycle of a large part of
the population, both male and female.26 The years of absence from home were
also directly related to the north-west European pattern of late marriage. In
Ealing (to the west of London) in 1599, all the children aged under 14 still lived
at home; but 80 per cent of the boys and 30 per cent of the girls aged from 15 to
19 lived away from home, working with other families.27 This young mobile
labour force possibly made up 20 per cent of London’s population in the 1690s.28
In the city of Bern in the 1760s service personnel were 25 per cent of the popu-
lation. In France apprentices were encouraged to train in different towns. Jean de
la Mothe, a sixteenth-century cordwainer, left his home town of Tours at the age
of 16 and ended up in Dijon four years later, after having trained in thirteen
different localities. In sixteenth-century Würzburg, 93 per cent of apprentices
were immigrants; in this city the group showing the highest mobility were males
aged from 15 to 24 years.29
As a rule, migrants of good standing and with skills that were in ready demand
did not need to move very far, whereas the lower- and less-skilled levels of the
working population had to move farther and in greater numbers in order to find
employment. The differences can be seen in Frankfurt: in the fifteenth century
75 per cent of immigrants who were granted the privilege of citizenship came
from less than 47 miles away, whereas of the locksmiths who came to train and
work, 56 per cent came from over 9 miles away. Figures for the city of Zürich in
1637 are similar: only 4 per cent of new citizens came from distant foreign parts
(mainly Germany) but 33 per cent of apprentices did. In Oxford in 1538–57
some 45 per cent of apprentices came from distant areas of Wales and north-west
England.
Seasonal employment accounted for very large numbers of those who moved,
but only in specific areas of Europe, where the available data – for the seventeenth
century – coincide with a period of agrarian crisis that may exaggerate its extent.
North-west Germany tended to send its workers to help with summer labour in
neighbouring Holland; in the eighteenth century some districts sent half their
male population.30 Very many stayed to become part of the resident workforce,
both on the land and on the ships. A village in Extremadura reported in 1575 that
‘most of the people are poor, and they go to Andalusia to earn enough to eat and
are gone most of the year’.31 The best known example of Spanish seasonal emigra-
tion is that of the peasants of Galicia, who, because of their inadequate landhold-
ings, emigrated regularly to Castile and Andalusia to find supplementary work,

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returning usually to help with their own harvest. In the same way, thousands of
French rural labourers crossed the Pyrenees each summer to help gather the
Spanish harvest. Seasonal workers seem not to have been dissuaded by distance:
the records of the hospital at Montpellier in 1696–9 show that hundreds of
labourers came from as far as northern France in search of a wage.
Apart from the reasons for movement that have been noted, inheritance
systems often made it necessary for young people to leave home. In areas where
primogeniture (property going to the eldest son alone) or impartible inheritance
prevailed, such as southern France or Britain, the younger sons were obliged to
leave if they wished to be their own masters. Likewise, where nuclear families
predominated – in effect, northern Europe – the limited size of the property
might oblige children to leave the village in order to marry or to set up home.

Cultural mobility

Europe, it is clear, was not an immobile continent, and those who travelled were
not limited only to people seeking marriage or work. Pilgrimages to the shrines
of saints (notably St James at Compostela in Spain, St Thomas Becket at
Canterbury) were an aspect of the tradition, universal in the Catholic world, of
pilgrimages to sacred places. Believers were encouraged by their clergy to visit
places associated with famous persons (such as the Virgin Mary), or with mirac-
ulous happenings, or above all with the bodies of holy persons (saints). In this
way all Christians would be participating in a common belief, and they would
also become better Christians.
From the very early days of medieval Christianity, going on pilgrimage also
became a penance for sins and crime, and it was common practice for law author-
ities to condemn murderers to go on pilgrimage to make reparation. The places
associated with miracles and holy persons also served a medicinal purpose
because they were reputed to cure diseases and illnesses. For very many different
reasons, the number of people who went travelling in the Middle Ages to visit
holy places grew steadily. The first great centre of devotion was obviously
Jerusalem and the Holy Land, but travel there could often be both dangerous
and too expensive. Very soon the city of Rome became the principal and most
accessible place of pilgrimage. The great age of pilgrimage dawned in the elev-
enth century, when there was more peace – Arabs, Vikings and Magyars were no
longer a threat in northern Europe – and travellers could move without fear.

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The Italian poet Dante in the late thirteenth century commented that the
word ‘pilgrim’ had two meanings, a general and a specific. The word may be
understood, he said, ‘in a general sense, for whoever is outside his own country
is a pilgrim; but in the specific sense none is called a pilgrim except he who is
journeying to the sanctuary of Santiago de Compostela or is returning from it’.
Compostela therefore had a special significance, because for many centuries it
was identified as being in a land subject to Muslim rule and was therefore looked
upon also as the object of a crusade. Pilgrim numbers inevitably fell after the
Reformation, when religion tended to become more associated with individual
nations rather than with the more universal perspective of a cult that attracted all
nations. In any case, the idea of special shrines where miracles were performed
fell out of fashion. Protestant ideas were particularly fatal to the whole religious
outlook associated with shrines, and the eighteenth-century age of Enlightenment
killed off the notion of pilgrimage. However, the idea of travelling in order to
improve knowledge continued to be active, and travel reports became increas-
ingly popular during the sixteenth century.
Very many continued, of course, to travel for religious motives. Rome was
the inevitable centre that all Catholics tried to visit, and where they marvelled
at the universality of the religion, with visitors from every nation in the
streets. Long after the Reformation, some pilgrimages could be big business.
Pilgrims went to Compostela even in the late seventeenth century. All the towns
on the Compostela pilgrimage route profited economically from the enterprise,
a lesson that has not been lost on the government of that region today. Holy Year
1575 brought 400,000 visitors to papal Rome; in 1600 the number was 536,000,
and this to a city whose resident population in that year was only 100,000.32
Even without religion as a motive, major cities in Europe housed permanent
foreign communities: Antwerp in 1568 had over 16 per cent of its inhabitants
listed as ‘foreigners’, Zürich in 1637 had 14.7 per cent, London in 1587 had
4.5 per cent.
From these international group movements, we turn to the less numerous but
culturally significant movement of individuals. Travel in order to be educated
was already a habit practised during the Renaissance. Frequent travellers, such as
the Swiss doctor Thomas Platter, were unimpressed by the insularity of some
peoples; ‘the English’, he commented in 1599, ‘for the most part do not travel
much’. Travel, then as now, could by no means be undertaken without prepara-
tion, for there were innumerable problems to resolve,33 not least the expense, the

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dangers, the difficulties of lodging and of transport. Barely usable roads, perilous
rivers and mountains, carriages that fell apart repeatedly, freezing snow and
driving rain, inns so filthy that the traveller dared not enter, wolves and bears
that threatened the unwary: such were the normal hazards. Yet even so the
journey had to be done, usually in groups of several persons for mutual
security.
The method of travel through the continent was of course the coach, readily
available for hire everywhere but infamous for its discomfort, metallic wheels,
lack of springs and unreliable speed. Passenger services were available on every
major river, notably the Rhine. Every nation produced educated travellers who
went on to write handbooks giving advice to other future travellers. Among
them was James Howell, who published Instructions for Forreine Travell (1642),
which praised the educational benefits of visiting foreign countries and warned
nonetheless of the dangers. Land travel within Europe was not the only perspec-
tive opened up for Europeans. Already in Italy the bibliophile Ramusio published
his multi-volume Navigationi et Viaggi (Venice 1554–6), and after him the
Englishman Richard Hakluyt published a series of volumes (1589) drawing on
the travel experiences of all nations, notably the Spaniards. With these two
collectors of travel literature, however, one enters upon the global dimension of
travel, a theme that takes us well outside Europe. Global travel had its marvels,
as a Spaniard in the Philippines recognised when he wrote in 1613: ‘The farther
you travel the more you see, the more you lend credence to the old novels about
chivalry, knights and magical spells’. This was of course the decade when
Cervantes produced his satire on chivalry Don Quixote.
Moving about between countries was not a casual activity. Most travellers
needed to have some sort of written permission to justify their movement over
frontiers and ran the risk of arrest, or worse, if they encountered problems. One
might be mistaken for a spy, a heretic or a thief. The traveller Fynes Moryson,
who began his travels in 1591 at the age of 25, took care to have a written licence
from his college at Cambridge, where he was a fellow. Like Moryson, many
educated travellers took care to record their experiences in letters and in diaries.
Travellers were the first class of persons to dedicate their time to learning seri-
ously at least one of the languages they might need in their travels. Moryson
advised travellers to contact ‘women, children and the most talkative people’ if
they wished to pick up useful words and phrases. In time the travel habits of
educated persons developed into what the British termed ‘the Grand Tour’ (see

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Chapter 9), a sophisticated but also important aspect of cultural exchange. Well
before the Grand Tour developed, educated individuals from the countries of
northern Europe were journeying – for reasons of fortune, or health, or curiosity
– to the confines of the world with which they had been familiar. The
Mediterranean remained their principal objective, but some also ventured into
exotic areas such as Russia and Turkey. In a sense this was the beginning of
modern tourism, which at least from the eighteenth century produced literary
narratives that reveal what travellers thought of the countries they visited. In
contrast to the exclusivity of the Grand Tour, tourism tended to take the form of
‘pleasure trips’ and ‘summer trips’, could include different social classes as well as
women and children, and tended to be conducted within national boundaries.
By the eighteenth century, ‘the close connection between travel, leisure and
health, lent itself to shorter recreational journeys and was also reflected in the
increasing popularity of seaside resorts and spas across Europe’.34

Distress and migration

The twentieth century surpassed all previous centuries of human experience in

the misery that it brought through war, oppression and massive population
movements. It has been estimated that 21 million people were displaced in
Europe alone at the end of the Second World War. Yet early modern Europe
came close to equalling its record. To emigrate knowing that one could return
home was one thing; to know that return was impossible was quite another. For
hundreds of thousands of people, their native land became no more than a
memory. This happened most notably, as we shall see (Chapter 3), in the confes-
sional migration of Jews, Moriscos and Huguenots.
Distress through the normal hazards of daily existence was a major precipi-
tant of migration between regions. In times of economic distress the drift to the
security of towns became a flood. In 1667, the residents of the villages of Palencia
(Spain) claimed to have lost nine-tenths of their population in the preceding
forty years, ‘households and residents moving to the large towns such as
Valladolid, Rioseco, Palencia and other nearby cities, deserting their houses and
property through lack of capital’. In simple terms, people moved because it was
a practical alternative. For example, tens of thousands of unemployed young
men left the depressed countryside and went abroad to serve in the wars. Eight
thousand Scots are estimated to have left their country to fight in the Thirty

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Years War; from Castile in the sixteenth century some 9,000 men a year went
overseas to fight. Inflation, enclosures and rising rents drove rural labourers from
the villages; heavy taxation and the depredations of war forced many to leave and
look for a new life elsewhere. The available lands of central and eastern Europe
were a magnet for emigrant groups from within the Holy Roman Empire: there
is documentation for Flemish workers who went to Gdańsk, German artisans
who went to Poland, Hutterite sectarians who went to Moravia. The distress of
refugees, whom we mention below, was one of the most decisive phenomena of
early modern Europe.
The expansion of resources devoted to warfare had a direct impact on popu-
lation through the emigration of mercenaries. Tens of thousands of Irish, for
example, facing a life of deprivation at home, found a living abroad in the armies
of France, Spain and Germany with effect from the last decades of the sixteenth
century. Their emigration was ironically favoured by the English government,
which feared their potential for trouble. Apart from career soldiers, hundreds of
thousands of Irish abandoned a homeland subject to English rule.35 With respect
to mercenaries, the most typical case was Switzerland. The cantons in early
modern times possibly did not exceed 1.75 million, yet it has been estimated
that between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries a total of perhaps one
million Swiss men left their country to serve in foreign armies. The greater part
returned, for without them the cantons would have faced a demographic crisis.
Another case is that of the thousands of Italians who took employment in the
armies of foreign powers, notably the Habsburgs of Madrid and Vienna.36
The combination of war, persecution and distress did not limit its impact to
the lower classes.37 Very many members of the elite also found it in their interest
to emigrate. Italian emigrants from the sixteenth century onwards began to play
a prominent part in the life of neighbouring states. From the northern cities of
Vicenza, Locarno and Lucca they went principally to German-speaking
Switzerland, where their chief contribution was in textiles. Zürich’s economic
success came to be founded on the work of the Locarno entrepreneur Evangelista
Zanino (d. 1603), who established the first large-scale industry there. The most
important of the Lucca refugees, Francesco Turrettini (d. 1628), went to Geneva
in 1575 and in 1593 founded the Grande Boutique, the biggest Genevan silk
company of its time.38 Those who went to France sought economic and social
opportunity, brought their skills with them and settled principally in the cities of
Lyon, Paris, Nantes and Marseille.39 Several became bankers, rose into the elite

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and helped to nurture popular attitudes about the parasitic nature of Italian
immigrants, an attitude that played a prominent role in later political events
such as the rebellions against the Italian minister Cardinal Mazarin during the
Fronde civil wars.
The elite were also an important component of the refugees who, during the
long years of military conflict with Spain, fled from the southern Netherlands to
the north. Over 1,900 southern families came to Middelburg alone in 1584–5.
Southern immigration to Leiden was so heavy that it came to be looked on as a
Flemish city, though the Flemings (most came from Bruges) in fact amounted to
only 10 per cent of the population. From 1500 to 1574 only 7.2 per cent of the
citizens (bourgeois) had come from the south; from 1575 to 1619 the figure rose
to 38.4 per cent. In Amsterdam from 1575 to 1606 southerners made up 31 per
cent, in Middelburg from 1580 to 1591 75 per cent, of all new citizens.40 In
total, perhaps around 100,000 people moved from the southern Netherlands to
the north.
Netherlanders also went to other countries in large numbers. In London up
to the end of the sixteenth century they always formed about 83 per cent of the
foreign population. In western Europe they lived chiefly in west Germany and
notably in Frankfurt, where from 1554 to 1561 over 38 per cent of those
obtaining citizenship were Netherlanders.41 By the late 1580s the Netherlands
refugees made up nearly 33 per cent of Frankfurt’s population. It took a long
time for so many immigrants, most of whom were poor, to become accepted by
the host communities. Even noted Dutch liberals could not conceal their atti-
tude: Grotius referred to the immigrants as ‘foreigners, impatient for change’ and
Sebastian Brandt called the southerners ‘restless troublemakers’. ‘People exclude
us everywhere’, complained the immigrant Antwerper Willem Usselincx, who in
fact went on to become one of the great citizens of the Dutch Republic.
Emigration from the Celtic nations of Britain was in some measure provoked
by English hegemony. Scots went to the Baltic countries and, according to an
estimate of 1620, there were about 30,000 of them in Poland alone. Between
1600 and 1700 possibly 240,000 Scots emigrated from their homeland, mainly
to Ireland and the Baltic countries.42 The Irish were, of course, the most direct
victims of English rule. Writing in 1596 the poet Edmund Spenser described the
province of Munster as ‘a most populous and plentiful country suddenly made
void of man and beast’. Irish nobles, soldiers, clergy and scholars all felt obliged
to emigrate. Every Catholic university on the continent had its contingent of

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Irishmen. Typical of these wandering scholars was young Christopher Roche of

Wexford who in 1583 at the age of 22 took passage to Bordeaux, worked and
taught for his living, then went on to study in Toulouse, Paris, Lorraine (for three
years), Antwerp, Brussels, Douai and St Ouen, a long tour of eight years, during
which he both worked for his food and studied when his circumstances allowed.43
Sir William Petty, as we have seen (Chapter 1), estimated Irish population losses
in mid-century alone as over half a million. This total included deportees, of
whom ‘there were transported into Spain, Flanders, France, 34,000 soldiers; and
of boys, women, priests etc no less than 6,000 more, where not half are returned’;
and those transported to Barbados and elsewhere as slaves (estimated at about
10,000). The figures confirm that, for a high proportion of Europeans, insta-
bility and distress brought about not just by religious motives, as often thought,
but by sheer inhumanity, was a permanent feature of their condition.

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COMMUNITIES OF BELIEF

Often when on a winter’s night we youngsters were seated round the

hearth, [my aunt] would set her wheel aside, take a pinch of snuff, and
excite our curiosity and wonder by strange and fearful tales of witches,
spirits and apparitions, whilst we listened in silence and awe, and scarcely
breathing, contemplated in imagination the visions of an unseen world
which her narratives conjured up before us.
Samuel Bamford, Early Days (1849)

Traditional religion: the ritual year; Disciplining belief: confessionalisation;

Disciplining belief: the missions; Dissidences: witchcraft; Disciplining belief: from
persecution to toleration?; Distress and confessional migration

The story of Christianity in preindustrial Europe has generally been approached

through two major themes: the devotional and institutional changes that gave
birth eventually to the Reformation, and developments that took place both
within the traditional Church and within the Reformation itself. These complex
changes have usually been presented under two basic headings: political causes
(such as events in Tudor England or civil wars in France), and doctrinal differ-
ences (such as the evolution of Lutheran or Calvinist ideas). This presentation,
however, often failed to take account of elements that must have been decisive in
forming the religious evolution of both individuals and communities. As they
pursued their research, historians began to uncover complex issues that made
many of them question the definitions and presuppositions that had served their
predecessors. Even basic concepts such as ‘Reformation’ were seen to be inade-
quate or inexact. When did changes really happen, and how and why did they
take place? Did any ‘reform’ take place during the so-called ‘reformation’? A
wealth of exciting scholarship has been published on an enormous range of
issues, to which scant justice can be done in the few explorations that follow.
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Traditional religion: the ritual year

One of the key problems is attempting to define what ‘religion’ meant to people.1
Recent research has made it obvious that far from there being a universal frame-
work of religion, the beliefs and practices to be found in the preindustrial world
differed significantly according to social and cultural levels in the population.
There was no general network of belief but rather a culture that contained within
itself variations depending on region, social status, history, climate and tradition.
In a presumably Christian community, there might always be an undergrowth of
pre-Christian and indeed non-Christian subcultures that shed light on the way
we should understand the people of an era other than our own.
In today’s world we tend to assume that religion represents a person’s private
beliefs and practices, but in that period the role and significance of the individual
was limited. Religion, far from being private, always involved others. There was
of course a distinction in preindustrial society between the beliefs and practices
of the elite, based on property and privilege, and the beliefs and practices of the
people, based on communal tradition. Both, however, formed part of a shared
culture. Both occupied a crucial role in daily life and were intimately tied to the
everyday framework of religious belief, which seemed to govern most aspects of
existence. Some historians have taken an interest in the exceptions to this general
perspective of a shared culture. They have found documentary evidence indi-
cating that an individual – the only impressive reference so far made is the case
of a sixteenth-century miller from Friule in north-east Italy2 – might also have
astonishingly different ideas about the universe. The question is whether excep-
tional microhistory of this sort alters significantly the broader view of the essen-
tially collective place of religion in society.
In order to understand the complex aspects of shared culture, historians have
increasingly turned to the methods adopted by anthropologists in the study of
non-European cultures. The meaning of certain religious practices in African or
Polynesian tribes could also, it has been argued, shed light on similar rites in
European villages. Religion in preindustrial society could accordingly be seen
less as a matter of strict creeds than of social rituals and symbols. Christianity was
not simply the list of beliefs and practices laid down by the Church authorities:
it was also the sum of inherited attitudes and rituals relating both to the invisible
and to the visible world.3 All sections of society, both in town and country,
participated in these rituals, which on the one hand determined leisure and work
activity, and on the other hand assigned people roles and status within the

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community. On this view, there was no separate entity that we might refer to as
‘popular’ culture; traditional culture was shared in, to a greater or lesser degree,
by all sections of the community. Moreover, there was no formal separation
between the sacred and the secular in early modern Europe: the sacred was always
part of the profane world, on which it drew for its symbols and functioning.
Religious leaders, both Protestant and Catholic, subsequently spent much effort
in claiming a special and privileged place for the ‘sacred’ but were less successful
than they might have hoped.4
The interaction of ritual and religion can still be seen today in parts of Europe
that have managed to retain their old traditions. Through the surviving docu-
mentation, scholars have attempted to penetrate this disappearing world, in
order to understand more about the way in which the great revolutions known
as the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation came about. Considered at
one time as two great theological systems locked in a struggle for the souls of
Europeans, the movements are now seen to have had much in common. Both
were heirs to the same reforming humanist tradition; both shared a wish to extir-
pate superstition and inculcate a new morality. While Luther was preaching
change in Germany, the Franciscan missionaries inveighed in the Americas
against superstition, animism, idolatry and other ineradicable obstacles to the
faith. In the same decade the theologian Alfonso de Castro pointed out that
these defects existed also in Spain: in the Basque mountains, he had heard, they
even worshipped a goat. The Protestants realised that it was not enough to
persuade the people to give up popery, but the Jesuits also in their correspon-
dence recognised that Europe remained to be converted. The fact that there was
a common drive against irreligion should not, however, obscure an elementary
distinction between the Catholics and the Protestants: the former were fighting
against traditional unbelief, the latter considered that Catholicism itself was the
great unbelief.5
The environment into which zealots of Reform and Counter-Reform thrust
their dogmatic certainties was overwhelmingly rural. It was a largely unlettered
world, often isolated from the culture of the great cities; the dominant realities
were the precariousness of harvests and the insecurity of life. Food and survival,
as in primitive rural communities today, dictated social, moral and religious atti-
tudes. Poor diet, frequent crop failures, a high mortality rate were all, as we have
seen, not mere hazards but part of the very fabric of existence. They were there-
fore accepted as inevitable: the response to them was not necessarily one of fear

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or of profound anxiety, as is sometimes suggested, but of determination to over-

come the obstacles to survival. Then, as now, people took out insurance against
what they could not foresee or control. Religion was a major protective force
and where official religion seemed inadequate other rites were used. Life was not,
for all that, a pessimistic attempt to ward off disaster. Given that some things
were inevitable, there was every reason to abandon oneself to joy and celebration.
In a rural Europe, there could never be the full-time labour of postindustrial
society, and the Christian Church obliged by turning at least one-third of the
days in the year into obligatory feasts.
Ritual festivities – plays, carnivals, processions – were not incidental but a
major, integral and regular aspect of life.6 They were essential to the life of the
community, which normally dictated their form and content; and they were
pleasing to the Church, with whose great festivals (Christmas, pre-Lenten
carnival) they coincided. The mixture of communal and religious elements in
popular festivities had always caused problems and friction, but long use tended
to hallow the ceremonies. In a preindustrial economy, virtually all rituals were
related to the agrarian life of the community; some might be wholly agrarian in
nature but were normally permitted within the ambit of a church service.
A division may be made between rituals of joy, which welcomed in the seasons
of the year, and rituals of protection; all coincided with the liturgical cycle of the
Christian churches. The annual calendar began at Christmas, succeeded very
quickly by an outburst of celebration for Carnival, which was the prelude to
Lent, a season of waiting and reflection. After the spring solstice, the month of
May arrived with its symbols of life and fertility. Work resumed in the fields, and
the productive season was crowned by the midsummer fire rituals of St John’s
Eve, when in London there were ‘bonfires in the streets, every man’s door . . .
garnished with garlands of beautiful flowers, lamps . . . burning all the night’, as
the annalist John Stow remembered.7 From July the harvest was gathered in,
with further celebrations in the community.
One feature of community festivities was the deliberate inversion of authority
roles – referred to in the last chapter – at a time of celebration. Wise men and
fools, princes and beggars, old age and youth were exchanged, reversed and stood
upside down in a brief mockery of the world and its ways. At carnivals, similarly,
there was an informal licence to gluttonise (as a prelude to Lent, when no meat
could be eaten), be lascivious and misbehave. Role reversal occurred in the English
custom of the ‘lords of misrule’ and in the west European custom of the ‘boy

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bishop’ (a boy from the parish who was placed in the bishop’s chair at some
Christmas celebrations). Partly as a role reversal, partly also as a gesture to sexual
fecundity, young people were given a leading part in carnivals, festivities and
harvest ceremonies; in some areas the young were organised (as we have seen in
Chapter 2) into ‘abbeys of misrule’ headed by an ‘abbot’ (in Provence) or other
symbolic personage. They also directed ‘charivaris’, a curious custom of making a
noise at unsuitable second weddings or to demonstrate disapproval of those who
transgressed against society norms (see Chapter 8). During the great religious
feasts, such as Corpus Christi in southern Europe, all the ingenuity of the
community was directed to organising processions (with giant statues), dances
and music. Some of the celebration might be incorporated into the church
service, as in Artois where sheep were brought into midnight mass or in Besançon
where the labourers did a dance in the church to mark the end of the wine harvest.
There were also rituals of protection, which predominated among the types
of ritual used by the community.8 In the Mediterranean, which suffered from
frequent droughts, virtually all religious processions were made in order to inter-
cede for rain. Of thirty-four identified processions in eighteenth-century
Barcelona, thirty-three were pleas for rain and one was for protection against
epidemic.9
Death in preindustrial society was never greeted passively. Wholly uncontrol-
lable scourges, such as an epidemic, were accepted with resignation, but no effort
was spared to identify the origins, control the outbreak and punish those deemed
culpable of bringing it in. Violent death was always looked on as an outrage. In
spite of this, it is true that mortality was a close companion of all Europeans. As
a result, there grew up an extensive series of rituals connected with death, both
now and in the afterlife. Death was an individual personal experience, but it took
place within one’s family or community and involved passing into another envi-
ronment. For many Christians the late medieval doctrine of purgatory, a halfway
stage between heaven and hell, offered some hope to the dead sinner. The soul in
purgatory could be fully cleansed of its sins by the prayers of the living and so
pass into paradise. But the doctrine never adequately penetrated all corners of
Christendom and was being formally reaffirmed (for example, in Spain) as late
as the seventeenth century.10 By then, half of Europe – the Protestant half – had
turned its back on the doctrine.
Repeated use over centuries of the term ‘Christendom’ has tended to make
us think of pre-Reformation Catholic Europe as a monolith and of ‘belief ’ as

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participation in a great universal creed. More recently, scholars have preferred to

place emphasis on what ‘belief ’ really meant in the day-to-day experience of
ordinary Christians. In what did Christians really believe? And how fundamental
were the changes that took place?
The picture that emerges at the popular level of villages and towns is of a
Christian body made up of an infinite multiplicity of local communities that
could easily, under pressure, split apart from the official structure of the Church
and cause it to disintegrate. The peasants who took part in the great revolts (1525)
in the German lands demanded that their beliefs should be rooted only in the
community.11 It was not a demand for something new, but a reaffirmation of what
already existed. If beliefs were to be scaled down everywhere to the local level, the
universal Church became less relevant. This was the threat that seemed to be
directed against Catholic Christendom, but that in time every Church organisa-
tion, both Catholic and Protestant, had to contend with. Even in Catholic Spain,
as in the community of Mediona in Catalonia, the traditions of local religion
always took precedence over the changes that the Church authorities introduced
from above.

Disciplining belief: confessionalisation

In preindustrial Europe, ‘religion’ was a social system that pervaded all aspects of
life, and ‘belief ’ implied a firm assent to its principles. One influential view is
that the late medieval system offered people a broad range of spiritual and
psychological alternatives (summarised in the concept of ‘magic’) that later
became unavailable in the reformed system offered by the Reformation.12 The
view should be modified in several important respects: the offered alternatives
were seldom part of the official ‘belief ’ of the Church and flourished rather
within the society in which the Church functioned. In a very real sense, the old
Church could even be criticised for its lack of ‘magic’ and lack of answers to the
spiritual and moral problems posed by post-Renaissance society. Both before and
after the Reformation, believing Catholics went outside the Church for folk
remedies and practices, for exotic knowledge or for spiritual and mystical solu-
tions to their anxieties.
Both Catholics and Protestants were in this way heirs to a tradition of unof-
ficial religion that had always coexisted with official ‘belief ’ and was not consid-
ered contradictory to it. Many in authority were sceptical of the exotic ideas of

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Paracelsus or the prognostications of Nostradamus, but the two thinkers were

representative of an extensive area of free intellectual speculation. In the same
way, at a more popular level the prophetic tradition, expressed most famously by
Savonarola but continued throughout Europe by various religious men and
women, such as Lodowicke Muggleton in seventeenth-century England, was
not always considered alien to official belief. Even within the heart of post-
Tridentine Spain, the highest nobility of the court of Philip II became supporters
of prophetic cranks.13
For the generation of religious reformers in the sixteenth century, the problem
was perceived as essentially one of ignorance. Well before the Reformation,
critics had pointed to the low cultural level of the country areas and the superfi-
cial Christianity of those who participated in the festivals but who otherwise
came seldom to church or communion and sought remedies for their daily ills in
superstitious practices. Many of these ignorant simple folk were in later years
singled out as witches. The Protestant reformers were faced with a dual problem:
the survival of Catholic practice and the continuation of popular rites. The
former survived for a remarkably long time: ‘three parts at least of the people’, it
was claimed of England with some exaggeration in 1584, ‘are wedded to their
old superstition still’. As late as 1604 the people of Lancashire were said to be in
the habit of crossing themselves ‘in all their actions’. In seventeenth-century
Languedoc the sign of the cross was still being used among Calvinists, and the
cult of the saints continued for a long time in the Lutheran Rhineland. More
ineradicable than Catholic practice, however, were the popular customs: the
agrarian festivals, maypoles and Morris dances in England; the ‘maypole garlands,
carnal songs and choruses’ condemned by Dutch Calvinists in 1591.
After persistent legislation and prohibition, it proved possible to do away
with most Catholic as well as popular rites; but that was no guarantee that the
people were being Christianised. Lutherans could complain in Wolfenbüttel in
the 1570s that ‘people do not go to church on Sundays. . . . Even if one finds a
man or woman who remembers the words, ask him who Christ is, or what sin is,
and he won’t be able to give you an answer.’ From Wiesbaden in 1594 it was
reported that ‘all the people hereabout engage in superstitious practices with
familiar and unfamiliar words, names and rhymes . . . they also make strange
signs, they do things with herbs, roots, branches . . .’ Criticisms of this sort,
however, were usually made by men with high and exacting theological standards
and may not fully reflect the real situation.

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The evidence does suggest, all the same, that Protestant reformers were up
against more than mere survival of Catholic or community rituals: in a real sense,
they were beginning to penetrate into regions where Christianity had never
shown its face. This situation was worst in isolated and mountainous areas, but
there were also large patches of ignorance close to civilisation. In Essex as late as
1656 there were apparently people ‘as ignorant of Christianity as the Red
Indians’, and Hampshire was said to have ‘ignorant heathenish people’. In many
parts of Europe, then, the Protestants were attempting to convert people not just
from Catholicism but in effect from paganism. In the process, they were trying
to change generations of culture at all levels and replace it with a new disciplined
outlook.14
The Catholics started from the same point: Erasmus, for example, condemned
a carnival he had witnessed in Siena in 1509 as ‘un-Christian’. Church legislators
were trying to stamp out disorder, licentiousness and superstition long before the
Reformation commenced. The Protestant movement gave a timely stimulus to
ineffective and half-hearted Catholic efforts, which picked up energy only from
the mid-sixteenth century and after the conclusion of the Council of Trent
(1563). Although the Counter-Reformation may appear to have had a simpler
task, that of defending the official religion and purifying it, in reality the obsta-
cles were no less daunting because the Catholic reformers were committed to
changes as revolutionary as those proposed by the Protestants. Their early
missionaries quickly concluded that much of Catholic Europe was still pagan.
‘Near Bordeaux’, reported an appalled Jesuit in 1553, ‘stretch about thirty leagues
of forest whose inhabitants live like rude beasts, without any concern for heav-
enly things. You can find persons fifty years old who have never heard a mass or
learnt one word of religion.’ There were similar reports from Spain15 and from
Italy. Another Jesuit in Brittany in 1610 was horrified to see women beating and
drowning images of saints who had not responded to their prayers.
In the course of the later sixteenth century, both in Catholic and in Protestant
Europe, the authorities took the initiative of imposing order on their people.
That, effectively, was when the Reformation began: not in the period when
Luther first denounced indulgences but decades later when innovators were
clearer about their religious ideas and when they could command support among
both the elite and the common people. The impact was more decisive in newly
Protestant areas, where changes in the power structure, often accompanied by
military conflict, had broken down political relationships and undermined the

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autonomy of community religion. It became imperative in these areas to impose

stability. Some German historians have identified for these years, roughly from
about 1560 to the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, the beginning of an effort
by German territorial rulers to impose a social and theological framework that
would strengthen their states. This development, which they have termed
‘confessionalisation’, suffers like all labels from imprecision, from the consider-
able evidence of exceptions and from its inapplicability to many regions of
Europe including England and the Mediterranean. The term nonetheless
provides a useful way of explaining the move, at least within the Germanic lands,
to creating a state-wide context for the organisation of religion, rather than
simply a regional one.16 On this showing, the stabilisation of religious structures
aided the growth of the territorial state.
Disciplining of religion in early modern Europe was undertaken at two levels:
at the top, through a spate of legislation both from the state and from the reli-
gious authorities; and at the popular level, through missionary activity. Both
before and after the Reformation, the authorities in every state were committed
to imposing religious uniformity in the conviction that permitting diversity of
belief was a threat to the security of the state and to the salvation of the soul.
Persecution did not, of course, originate only with the state; it also formed part
of the pressure experienced daily by ordinary people, whatever their social class
or religious beliefs. Religious intolerance, like racial intolerance, always had its
reasons. Popular prejudices and fears stimulated social tensions, thereby creating
public support for the repressive actions of the authorities. Alarmist rumours
encouraged violence: ‘time and again, people were prompted to take pre-emptive
action against religious dissenters by concerns about the security of the country
at large and the safety of their local communities’.17
Coercive legislation became a typical feature not only of Catholic but also of
Protestant states: penalties were threatened against those who did not attend the
new services, or continued with old practices, or observed customs that the new
faith deemed licentious. Calvinist Geneva became famous for its stringent appli-
cation of the new regulations. The evidence suggests that coercion may have
worked more in small communities, such as Geneva, than in larger ones. A
report on the north-west counties made to the English privy council in 1591
stated that ‘small reformation has been made there, as may appear by the empti-
ness of churches on Sundays and holidays and the multitude of bastards and
drunkards’.18 In Brandenburg strict pro-Lutheran ordinances were passed in

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1566 and 1572, with little practical result. The officials there reported in 1572
that ‘the former disorder and gross disobedience continues unabated’; all attempts
to control prenuptial sex failed; and in 1586 ‘although the ringing of bells has
been abolished it still persists’.19 In other parts of Germany they became a public
affirmation by the Catholic clergy, who encouraged the use of bells (to mark the
Angelus, for example), of processions and of church music, in order to assert
control over what has been called the ‘confessional soundscape’ of religion.20
Where effective change occurred, it usually came from within the community
itself. In England, more reformation was achieved at a local level by the religious
practices of influential members of the elite than by all the repression decreed by
bishops.21 This explains why a creed organised on the basis of fully autonomous
religious communities, such as Calvinism, scored successes in imposing moral
control. Within their small communities, presided over by pastors, the Calvinists
paid attention to all types of divergence from the approved norm; they discussed
and controlled matters dealing with belief, personal behaviour, family life, sexu-
ality and dress.22 The discipline was internal and voluntary, not external or
imposed from above. That made it more likely to be successful.
‘Confessionalisation’ had various shapes and forms; in many areas, such as
the Rhine Palatinate, it appears to have provoked resistance rather than confor-
mity. Protestant ‘confessionalisation’ was set in motion by structural changes at
the top. The tendency since the end of the Reformation period had been for state
units and their rulers to adhere to one official creed only. This insistence on
uniformity provoked disastrous and negative consequences in the last real reli-
gious conflict of European history, the Thirty Years War. After the war, the
attempt to identify religious allegiance with state allegiance seems to have
decayed. From the end of the seventeenth century, confessional solidarity was
certainly being reinforced, but mainly at the traditional community level. For
example, in Augsburg the two dominant faiths, Lutheran and Catholic, main-
tained their identities and separateness without attempting to achieve exclusive
control of state power.23 The agreement between the faiths, in a city of 30,000
inhabitants, remained in force from the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648. In
some cities and states, this retreat from full confessionalisation came to produce,
by the eighteenth century, a measure of civil toleration. A notable case is
Brandenburg-Prussia, where different regions of the state allowed a practical
toleration to all faiths, without the state itself attempting to impose an overall
conformity. In Lutheran Hamburg toleration was also slowly introduced.24

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Like the newly formed Protestant faiths, the Catholics also had to struggle to
impose their forms of control. The problem arose in part from the enormous
inroads that secular authorities had made into Church jurisdiction in the gener-
ations before the Reformation. In Tarbes in the French Pyrenees, the bishop
could appoint clergy to only half the benefices in his diocese; in Mallorca in
1590 the bishop controlled only 7 per cent of benefices. In the same way, many
other spheres of Church activity were effectively out of its control. The church
building itself was frequently the property not of the Church but of nobles or the
community; the religious services held in it were governed by traditional usage
rather than by ecclesiastical custom; the public processions held in the name of
religion were invariably regulated and led by laymen. In eighteenth-century
Pamplona, virtually all the parish priests were appointed by the community
rather than by the bishop. With support from the state, Church authorities
therefore began a systematic attempt to impose order on the disordered Catholic
body.
The evidence for Catholic Europe outside Germany suggests, however, that
religious change was not utilised, as it was by German authorities, for the purpose
of state-building. The role of ‘confessionalisation’ in the Mediterranean was
negligible. Though substantial novelties were introduced into the faith and prac-
tice of European Catholics, the continuity of Catholic political systems and the
fact that the ruling classes had not altered their confessional allegiances, mini-
mised visible political change. The Counter-Reformation nevertheless produced
new religious orders, new religious services (including a new mass), new prayers
and practices, and reinforced the role of both clergy and bishops. It also inspired
impressive new music, art and architecture. The changes introduced from above
took a long time, perhaps more than a century, to filter through into the daily
practice of Catholics. Through the period of most intense reform, the Catholic
communities of the countryside, as shown clearly from the experience of the
villages in the bishopric of Speyer25 and the bishopric of Barcelona, maintained
their autonomy in religious belief and in church administration. Reaffirmation
of religion took place within the old parameters of a community faith.
Though changes at the level of the state system were limited in Catholic
countries, important developments took place at the level of societal structure. A
substantial shift in power took place within society, even at the village level,
giving thereby to the Church a primacy that it had not possessed in late medieval
times. Three forms of discipline were affected, if we accept the evidence for

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Barcelona.26 First, public order was reformed, allowing the Church to control
feast days (formerly secularised), carnivals, morality and all public matters
affecting religion. Celebrations such as Corpus Christi were allowed to pass
under Church control, and public processions were now headed by priests.
Second, the Church reaffirmed control over its clergy and over their unique
capacity to celebrate matrimony, the sacraments and administer other parish
matters. The bishop was affirmed as the competent authority, and all clergy at the
fringes of the episcopal structure were marginalised. Uncontrollable countryside
religion, in the form of itinerant clergy and pious hermits,27 was frowned upon
and sometimes prosecuted. Formerly the parish had been under the control of
the community and lay power was expressed by institutions which were indepen-
dent of the hierarchy. Now the village church came to be seen as an outpost of
episcopal authority. Finally, religion became universalised, with universal piety
(and universal saints) taking precedence over local and community religion.
Italian practices (such as use of the confessional), rituals and saints no longer
remained just Italian but were exported to other Catholic countries. The form of
the mass became standardised and imposed, despite much opposition on the
part of clergy, on all Catholics everywhere. Travellers from Poland would now
find themselves in an identical Catholic environment whether they went to
church in Warsaw, Paris or Palermo.
One consequence of greater Church activity was the use of pressure against
non-Catholics, a policy that provoked religious persecution and many decades of
military conflict. Pressure continued long after the end of the epoch of so-called
‘religious’ wars. The outstanding example was the long persecution to which
French Protestants were subjected in the seventeenth century, culminating in the
expulsion of a fifth of their number from France in 1685 (the Revocation of the
Edict of Nantes).
The important changes in the structure of religion, accompanied by a sharp-
ening of ideological conflict, did not, however, always lead to confrontation.
Coexistence of communities with different faiths was still a continuing reality.
Across the whole of northern Europe, in both town and country, Catholics and
Protestants often lived together peaceably even while their political systems prac-
tised discrimination. They remained rivals for power and followed distinct
professional and economic lives, but they evolved towards mutual acceptance
rather than towards conflict. In the period after the peace of Westphalia (1648),
Germans of all faiths attempted to coexist. In Augsburg Catholics and Lutherans

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shared office, in Osnabrück Catholic and Lutheran rulers alternated, in one

northern German village (Goldenstedt) officials even attended each other’s reli-
gious services.28

Disciplining belief: the missions

The Protestant and Catholic reform movements were directed towards the rural
frontiers of Europe. It was some time before religious leaders turned their efforts
to the core of unbelief, or ignorance of belief, in the urban centres. In 1595 when
the police arrested a young beggar in Rome he informed them that the beggars
were not well disposed to the Faith: ‘among us few practise it, because most of
us are worse than Lutherans’. The Spanish writer Pedro Ordóñez observed
(1672) in the same way of urban vagabonds: ‘they live like barbarians, for they
are not known to, nor have they been seen to, go to mass or confession or
communion’.
Many minority groups throughout the continent still remained marginal to
Christianity. The gypsies, even when nominally Christian, were unable because
of their nomadic way of life to have normal recourse to the sacraments. They
were therefore consistently treated as non-Christians by the authorities and
persecuted. The nomadic Cossacks were likewise barely Christianised: some
stages of Stenka Razin’s revolt in 1670 were directed openly against the estab-
lished religion. In Spain and Portugal it was known that many conversos
(Christians of Jewish origin) nurtured hostility to the official faith. But the most
notable examples within Christendom were the Islamic communities of the
Balkans and of Spain. In regions where the Spanish Moriscos lived the traveller
could pause and wonder as, on the eve of a Muslim fast, every dwelling in sight
remained shuttered and closed and no living person could be seen. One hundred
years after their forced conversion to Christianity (around 1500), the Moriscos
scandalised the conscience of the Counter-Reformation, which in Spain initiated
from the 1560s an intense but ultimately unsuccessful campaign of missionary
activity in their areas.
Among the obstacles to reform was the inadequacy of the clergy. Drawing on
long experience and on the support of well-established institutions, the Catholic
Church was able to train and recruit a reformed clergy that – notably in the case
of the Jesuits – often surpassed in quality anything the Protestant reformers
could offer. But there remained serious impediments, notably that of language.

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Throughout the continent, missionaries found themselves frustrated by their

inability to teach or preach in local tongues. Attempts to introduce the new
Protestant English Prayer Book in 1549 to the Cornish people were met by rejec-
tion and revolt. The rebels in 1549 rejected the new mass as ‘a Christmas game’
which they could not understand, and demanded that ‘we will have our old
service in Latin, as it was before’. In Italy, as we have seen in Chapter 1, strong
official opposition to translating the Bible into the vernacular was backed up by
the argument that in reality Italy had no vernacular language.29 The problem was
gravest of all in preaching. In Spain in the 1560s, some Catalan and Basque
congregations had to put up with sermons being preached to them in Spanish, a
language they did not understand. When in 1620 the Jesuits undertook a mission
to the south of Catalonia and delivered sermons for the first time in the native
language, the people exclaimed, ‘At last we can understand the preachers!’
Missions were a major innovation in Europe. In the early years of European
expansion many Catholic clergy – the most famous of them was the Navarrese
Jesuit Francis Xavier – had looked to the ‘Indies’ of America and Asia as the ideal
terrain to seek souls for Christ. With the need to protect souls in Europe against
heresy came the realisation that there were also ‘Indies’ in Europe, primarily
among the rural population. As a direct consequence of the council of Trent,
which ended in 1564, Catholic missions, led principally by the Jesuits, began an
energetic programme of work in Italy, the Germanic lands and Spain. During
the century 1650–1750 the Catholic missions formed a vast network across all
of Europe.30 This was no exercise in mere piety, but rather a sophisticated effort
to discipline the population by, on the one hand, the cleansing rites of confession
and contrition, and, on the other, a superb display of Baroque theatre expressed
through music, processions and emotive sermons. For the most part the ritual
worked. Though it often had the negative consequence of heightening religious
tensions, it would be an exaggeration to suggest, as some historians have done,
that the campaign was repressive or was an offensive trying to terrify the masses
into orthodoxy.31 Nor is there convincing evidence that the process was one in
which an elite culture was imposed on a popular culture, resulting in the trans-
formation and sometimes disappearance of the latter.
Whereas the Protestant effort had been split into distinct geographical areas
and separate confessional loyalties, the Catholic effort became from the 1560s a
vast coordinated campaign backed by pope, bishops and missionary clergy.
Repression was not part of the agenda, nor did the Inquisition play any role.

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Literature was examined and purified, plays were banned, popular participation
in carnivals and feasts was regulated, a whole range of liturgical customs (such as
the boy bishop, or dancing in church, or seasonal rites such as the Song of the
Sibyl in the Christmas service) were rapidly done away with, and statues and
paintings were censored. Religious practice was thoroughly revised. The reforms
were by no means simply a consequence of the Reformation. Long before Luther,
Church authorities had been attempting to impose their preferences on a barely
Christianised population. In Mallorca, attempts to control the public celebra-
tion of Carnival can be dated back to the fifteenth century. The authorities there
banned indecent dances, donning of clerical dress by carousers, running naked
through the streets and the wearing of masks.32 We can see the impact in
Catalonia, where the bishops and the religious orders eliminated popular reli-
gious practices, enforced the new ritual (Catalonia, like England, had had a
distinct rite of mass), ordered Sabbath observance, set up Sunday schools,
changed the imagery in the churches and stopped the custom of ‘playing the
guitar and singing profane songs before the Sacrament’ (1610).
Of the several disciplinary tools used by the Catholic reform movement, one
was uniquely important: the resort to confession.33 A respected and traditional
sacrament, after the Council of Trent confession was slowly transformed from
being a seasonal community ritual (resorted to only once a year) into the main
ingredient of a new routine of devotion and discipline. Seldom properly under-
stood by the population, it was often used simply as a way of denouncing hated
neighbours to the parish priest. Developed in particular by the Jesuits, who used
it to remarkable effect in (for example) Austria, Bavaria34 and Catalonia, confes-
sion became the key to moral discipline and official spirituality. In the French
Pyrenees35 and in Lille36 it became the primary weapon of missionaries during
the seventeenth century. In Milan in 1565 the archbishop, Carlo Borromeo,
introduced a new wooden structure called a ‘confessional’ in which penitents
could preserve their anonymity while confessing their sins to the priest.
The effect of all this in both Catholic and Protestant Europe was comparable.
The forms of religious and popular culture were extensively modified within
two or three generations. Protestant religious music came to dominate and even
replace other forms of melody, filtering down into the everyday singing of
ordinary folk. Catholic hymnology was never so successful; on the other
hand, Catholics through the advantage of possessing a great number of talented
artists and composers were offered brilliant new music, brighter churches, new

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devotions, new saints. Even in traditionalist Spain, the new Catholicism was
recognisably different and therefore not easily accepted by either people or clergy.
Missionaries of both faiths were concerned to replace a defective culture with a
new and superior model.
The changes, however, were difficult to enforce: popular culture was not easily
modified. Ordinary people by their mere passivity made it difficult for new
morality and attitudes to be enforced. After a constant campaign of preaching in
a village in Cambridgeshire the preacher Richard Greenham in 1591 gave up and
left, blaming ‘the unteachableness of that people’; in 1611 a parish priest in
Catalonia explained to his bishop that he did not hold catechism classes because
nobody came to them. Despite such failures the frontiers of Christianity were
certainly extended. In the mountains of Languedoc, Bohemia, Asturias and Wales
a people who had not been instructed were slowly introduced to Christianity. In
the Western Isles of Scotland, where Presbyterian preachers did not venture,
intrepid Catholic missionaries implanted for the first time a Christianity that
endures down to today. Reformation and Counter-Reformation merged into
each other: overtly hostile, they were in practice part of a single great movement
to transform the habits and attitudes of old Europe.
Though changes occurred, it is not clear how profound they were. Since in
most of Europe religion and ritual was the preserve of the community, it appears
that changes in belief and practice made headway only where the community
accepted them.37 Novelties with which the villages felt uneasy were certainly
accepted, but then quietly allowed to relapse. Many changes were never absorbed:
‘to the men and women of the villages, official religion played a small role’.38 If
certain traditional practices disappeared, it may have been not because of pres-
sure but simply because the people had adopted newer cultural forms. A case in
point is the celebration of Midsummer Eve, the feast of St John. In England the
midsummer fires were celebrated until at least the mid-sixteenth century every-
where and in some regions well into the nineteenth century.39 There was little
recorded opposition to the practice after the sixteenth century and the custom
perished through disuse. In Spain, where there was no opposition to the custom,
it also perished through disuse; already in eighteenth-century Barcelona a writer
could refer to the fires of St John as being a custom of ‘the old days’.
Despite the many objectives shared in common by Catholic and Protestant
reformers, it is clear that they were working in different directions. In trying to
eliminate ignorance and superstition, the two faiths had in mind quite different

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goals; the Catholics aimed to control and reassert, the Protestants aimed to over-
turn and rebuild. Despite their efforts, over broad areas of Europe the people
remained poorly Christianised, ripe material for the ‘de-Christianisation’ brought
in by the French Revolution and the secular gospels of the subsequent period.

Dissidences: witchcraft

Popular belief in the villages had always assumed that there were unofficial solu-
tions to common problems. A loved one who did not reciprocate, a recurrent
illness, a cow that would not give milk: all these could be attended to by the local
wise woman (or man), who would offer lotions, unguents or verbal spells.
Fortune telling, love potions, divination for lost goods were ‘white’ magic,
serving where religion and medicine were unable to. By extension, evil effects
could be brought about, such as putting a curse on someone or making their
cattle sick: this was maleficium (evildoing), sometimes called ‘black magic’.
Though both black and white magic had a recognisable function at the popular
level, the belief was also firmly rooted in the uppermost levels of society: princes
and prelates were known to be interested in the possibilities of supernatural
power.
At various times in the medieval period people were tried and condemned for
practising maleficia. When this involved using alien diabolic help the crime was
also called sorcery (sortilegium). Nobody questioned that diabolic intervention
was possible, since medieval theology and imagery had continually emphasised
the reality of the devil. It is more doubtful if the devil played any part in everyday
village magic, which was more preoccupied with finding answers to the anxieties
and insecurity that ordinary people encountered in their normal activities. From
the fifteenth century, for reasons that are still obscure, commentators began to
take the notion of diabolic interference seriously. The authors of the 1486 German
handbook the Malleus maleficarum (Hammer of Witches) claimed that witches
worked harm ‘by the help of the devil, on account of a compact which they have
entered into with him’. More than this, witches acted communally, by attending
midnight meetings called Sabbats at which they worshipped the devil and
performed unspeakable rites. The act of fealty to Satan immediately transformed
witchcraft into heresy. As evidence from witch trials became available, learned
jurists and theologians analysed and identified the problem. Distinguished
manuals were written by men such as Jean Bodin (1580); the coadjutor Bishop of

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Trier, Peter Binsfield (1589); the Chief Justice of Burgundy, Henri Boguet (1591);
the Procurator-General of Lorraine, Nicolas Rémy (1595); and the Belgian Jesuit
Martín del Río (1599). Their works were cited as authority by subsequent witch-
finders, and gradually the notion of the Sabbat worked its way into general recog-
nition, except in England where the Roman Law of the continent was not current
and its concepts consequently not used. The learned men by no means initiated
or promoted persecution of witches; virtually all denunciations originated from
below, where the origins of the phenomenon must be sought.
In early modern Europe tens of thousands of people were executed for sorcery
between about 1500 and 1700.40 Though the numbers of executed have usually
been exaggerated, there is common agreement that two-thirds of all those
condemned were from the German-speaking lands, indicating that Germans had
more severe judicial systems. Some have described the persecution as a witch-
craze (Hexenwahn), thereby stressing the irrational element. It has also been
suggested that since diabolic witchcraft was deemed a heresy, its prosecution
conformed to the intolerance of a confessional age. Yet possibly only one heretic
died judicially in western Europe in the sixteenth century for every ten witches
executed.41
The first and still most difficult question to be answered about the witches is
who they were. The vast majority of those accused were women, which has led
some historians to treat the entire phenomenon as a chapter in the saga of persecu-
tion of females. The available evidence, however, cannot be tied down to one sole
type of explanation; there were areas (in Aragon, for example, and in Normandy)
and periods when more men were accused of witchcraft than women.42 Moreover,
an immense range of illustrative material across the centuries offers us varying
clues about the origins, nature and role of the persons accused of witchcraft.43
The German historian Joseph Hansen pointed out that mountainous areas
were particularly affected, notably the Alps and Pyrenees. The name applied to
one group of Alpine heretics, the Vaudois, was in the fifteenth century applied
also to witches in France and Belgium (in Arras in 1459–61, thirty-two ‘Vaudois’
were tried and eighteen of them executed). The biggest Spanish outbreak, in
1610, was in the Pyrenees; the most sizeable French outbreak, as recorded by
Pierre Delancre, in Toulouse and the French Pyrenees. The great witch-hunter
Henri Boguet operated in the mountains of Franche Comté in the 1580s. Victims
came largely from remote and relatively inaccessible regions with a low cultural
level and a poor record of practising Christianity. Where Christianity had not

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reached, the old folk superstitions were still strong. Perhaps the most intensively
affected area was central Europe, both by the borders of and within Switzerland.
The Valtelline was a hotbed of witchcraft, and so too was Geneva in the time of
Calvin. The theory that victims of witchcraft prosecution were mainly unlettered
mountain-dwellers out of reach of civilisation is, however, not easy to reconcile
with the fact that they were also drawn from lowland areas such as Essex and the
Netherlands. Even these might be fitted into a pattern if we accept the view that
witchcraft flourished in all marginal, outlying areas, whether mountain or
lowland; but this cannot apply to southern Germany, where the phenomenon
was frequently urban.
People accused of witchcraft were generally from the lower levels of rural
society. ‘It is amazing’, commented the Italian humanist Galateo when the witch-
fear began seeping through southern Italy in the early sixteenth century, ‘how
this fantasy has seized on everyone through being spread by the poorer classes.’
The Italian friar Samuele de Cassinis, the first person to denounce the persecu-
tion, pointed out that ‘witches’ were usually the old and weak-minded (quaedam
ignobiles vetulae, aut personae idiotae atque simplices, grossae et rurales). An analysis
of 366 cases in the county of Namur in 1509–1646 shows that the accused came
from the less privileged sectors; and in the Jura region the aged and sick made up
most of the victims. It would appear that those least able to defend themselves
were singled out. Enclosed and isolated communities were particularly vulner-
able, as the cases of ‘diabolic possession’ at the convent of Notre-Dame du Verger
at Oisy (Artois) in 1613–15 and at the convent of the Ursulines at Loudun in
France in 1634 demonstrate.
It was these people, poor, outcast, maimed and afflicted, who were accused of
conjurations and crimes so terrible that judges, bishops and even kings bestirred
themselves to take part in the work of extermination. Maleficia were the most
common offences: all but a handful of the 303 people accused in the courts of
Essex for witchcraft in 1560–1680 were accused of injuring or killing humans or
their property.44 The accused tended to be women, but women as such were not
the objective (see Chapter 7). Men also featured among the accused: one-fifth of
those accused throughout the modern period (1351–1790) in northern France
were men. The testimonies show that many witches really believed in their own
magical powers and were convinced that they had been transported to Sabbats
and had had sexual intercourse with the devil. At the level of folk superstition
there was nothing surprising about this. The Italian peasants of this period (from

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Friule) who believed in the cult of the benandanti were convinced that they had
the power to leave their bodies at night and go out and battle against the powers
of darkness.45 The beliefs of the benandanti, however, were a purely local agrarian
cult with no associations of maleficia. What staggered the courts trying witch-
craft was that in case after case the accused came up with virtually identical
stories and that these varied very little from country to country, so that right
across Europe there emerged the terrifying vision of hundreds of thousands of
formerly Christian souls dedicated to the service of Satan. Sex played little or no
part in witchcraft, whose whole spirit was against fertility. The alleged orgies of
the Sabbat, far from being fertility rites, were in fact infertility rites: congress
with the devil, it was well known, froze the womb.
Denunciations of witches, like denunciations for heresy, arose out of antipa-
thies and grievances within the local community. Petty suspicions, jealousies and
gossip led to the victimisation of individuals and eventually to their prosecu-
tion.46 In a changing society, the disappearance of traditional neighbourly charity
and mutual help might give rise to resentments.47 The fear of retaliation by
witchcraft forced villagers to keep dispensing favours to those who were suspected
of being witches or who, to exploit the situation, claimed to be witches. In times
of crisis such persons were persecuted and denounced to the courts. Reginald
Scot, who argued in his Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) that the phenomenon was
a delusion, described one such accusation:

May it please you to waie what accusations and crimes they laie to their
charge, namelie: She was at my house of late, she would have had a pot of
milke, she departed in a chafe bicause she had it not, she railed, she curssed,
she mumbled and whispered, and finallie she said she would be even with me:
and soon after my child, my cow, my sow or my pullet died, or was strangelie
taken. Naie (if it please your Worship) I have further proofe: I was with a wise
woman, and she told me I had an ill neighbour, and that she would come to
my house yer it were long, and so did she; and that she had a marke above hir
waste, and so had she: and God forgive me, my stomach hath gone against hir
a great while.

But documented cases range far beyond examples of ‘charity refused’. Malice
between neighbours was a universal phenomenon in witchcraft cases. Community
tensions might go beyond the victimisation of one or two individuals: it has been

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argued that the outbreak in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, was provoked by

dissensions that went through the entire town.48
A curious feature of many cases was the role of children. There were cases in
Valenciennes in 1590 and 1662 of children denouncing their own parents; an
outbreak at Chelmsford (Essex) in 1579 started with a sick child’s accusations;
and in the Warboys case, three members of one family were executed in
Huntingdonshire in 1593 on the evidence of children. The important outbreak
in Sweden in 1669 revolved entirely round a group of children accused of witch-
craft (seventy-five people were executed), and children initiated the Salem trials
which ultimately cost twenty-two lives. Perhaps the most bizarre case occurred in
Spain when the inquisitor Salazar in 1611 visited Navarre: 1,802 people came
forward as self-confessed witches, and of them 1,384 were children aged under
14.49 At Quingey (Franche Comté) in 1657, as two boys of 13 and 11 were being
taken out to execution, one of them, dimly aware of the horror into which his
statements had led him, cried out to the examining officer, ‘You made me say
things I didn’t understand!’ The problems involved in the investigation of such
cases go far beyond the merely sociological.
The cost of the witch-craze in terms of human lives was impressive, though
contemporaries, especially the great witchhunters, usually exaggerated their
figures. Nicolas Rémy of Lorraine claimed to have gathered the materials for his
study of demonology from the trials of 900 people he had sentenced to death;
the court records suggest that death sentences were really about one-seventh of
this figure.50 Henri Boguet claimed to be responsible for 600 executions in
1598–1616; the records reveal perhaps 25 executions for that period.51 Pierre De
Lancre is credited with 600 executions in the pays de Labourd in 1609; the true
figure is closer to 80.52 Despite exaggerations, the reality was grim. In south-west
Germany between 1560 and 1670 some 2,953 people were executed for witch-
craft, four-fifths of them between 1570 and 1630; in the Jura over 500 were
executed between 1570 and 1670; at the Essex assizes some 110 people were
condemned between 1560 and 1680. It would be rash to suggest total figures for
trials and executions in the whole of Europe, since the documentation is incom-
plete. The figures are often small when set beside regular criminal executions;
their significance lies not in numbers but in the interesting origins and character
of the witchcraft phenomenon.
If witchcraft was in reality little more than folk superstition, why was it so
heavily prosecuted in the early modern period alone? Did the increase in

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prosecutions reflect a real increase in witchcraft? In the early Middle Ages many
scholars had rejected the belief in witchcraft, which as unofficial magic threat-
ened the monopoly of the Church. By the fifteenth century, in a trend that
culminated in the Malleus Maleficarum, writers accepted the possibility of diab-
olism and then of the Sabbat. Sorcery became politicised, with opponents habit-
ually accusing each other of conspiring with the aid of the black arts. Scotland’s
first great outbreak of witch mania coincided with the crisis in 1590–97 when
the Earl of Bothwell was accused of ‘consulting with witches . . . to conspire the
king’s death’. In England in 1568–71 plots involving Mary Queen of Scots had
important witchcraft complications. In France the wife of the royal favourite
Concino Concini was condemned as a witch, and Cardinal Richelieu accused
another favourite, the duc de Luynes, of plotting ‘with two magicians who gave
him herbs to put in the king’s slippers’. In Russia witchcraft was a regular accu-
sation in political struggles.
The treatises of the great jurists helped give credence to the notions of a
Sabbat and a compact with the devil. The idea of a pact with the devil also
seemed to proliferate wherever torture was used in trials because learned inter-
rogators tried to elicit answers that accorded with their own beliefs. In England,
where torture was not used in such cases, no doctrine of the Sabbat emerged in
witch trials.53 The merging of learned and popular beliefs was largely precipitated
by the same intellectual ferment that gave rise to Renaissance humanism and
the Reformation. Elite intellectuals dabbled in sorcery and the occult because
they presented paths to knowledge. A typical example of this trend was the late
seventeenth-century English freethinker Joseph Glanvill.54 Others reacted against
this and felt that the faith should be protected against the intervention of the
devil. It was therefore no coincidence that the high tide of prosecutions occurred
precisely during the epoch of Reform and Counter-Reform: in destroying
witches the zealots were also destroying superstition and heresy.
Though the opinions of learned men of that time should be taken into
account when trying to understand the nature of witchcraft, the effective origins
of persecution can be seen more readily in social tensions and conflicts. ‘Whence
comes the witch?’ asked Jules Michelet in his study of La Sorcière, ‘I say unhesi-
tatingly: from times of despair.’ Sorcery, he argued, arose in times of depression,
war, famine, economic and social crisis, loss of faith, of certainty and of orienta-
tion. In rural areas ravaged by war and food shortage the population victimised
those in whom they saw their ills personified. The late-sixteenth century doctor

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Thomas Platter offered a similar explanation for cases of sorcery in remote areas
of Languedoc.55 In small communities, denunciations for witchcraft often arose
simply out of family and communal tensions.56 The most intensive outbreaks of
persecution were in times of agrarian disaster, when local communities blamed
the evil influences at work among them. ‘Nearly every city, market and village in
Germany is filled with servants of the devil who destroy the fruits of the fields’,
claimed a German pamphlet of 1590. As a result of crop failures in the Schongau
in Bavaria, sixty-three women were executed as witches in 1589–91 after peti-
tions by the communities.57 In Mainz in 1593 a local official wrote that ‘the
common man has become so mad from the consequences of crop failures that he
no longer holds them for the just punishment of God, but blames witches’.58 The
situation was exactly the same in rural Catalonia in 1621, when (as a bishop
reported) ‘the barons and seigneurs of the villages, on seeing the loss of crops and
the clamouring of the people, have supplied a cure for the ills by punishing these
women’.59
In some parts of continental Europe, learned tradition had never accepted
the possibility of diabolic witchcraft: the most striking example is Spain.
Though secular tribunals there periodically condemned people for witchcraft,
the Inquisition from 1526 onwards systematically refused to prosecute on the
grounds that witches were self-deluded. A discussion paper drawn up for
the Inquisition that year stated categorically that ‘the majority of jurists in this
realm agree that witches do not exist’.60 From 1526, therefore, the inquisitors
refused to take denunciations of witches seriously. In 1550, when the inquisitors
of Barcelona gave in to popular pressure and acted against ‘witches’, they were
immediately sacked from their posts. The inquisitor who was sent to investigate
the case, Francisco Vaca, produced an unequivocal indictment of witchcraft
persecution and condemned the accusations as ‘laughable’. A small relapse from
this position took place in 1610: as a consequence of a frenzied witchhunt being
conducted just across the border inside France by Pierre Delancre, a wave of
hysteria swept into Spanish Navarre and led to a number of witches being
executed at an auto de fe. The inquisitor Alonso Salazar de Frias was sent to
inquire into the circumstances and came to the conclusion that ‘there were
neither witches nor bewitched until they were talked and written about’.
Witchcraft only existed, he felt, if it were prosecuted. As a result, the Inquisition
returned to its previous policy and never again tried witches. In 1665 a Catalan
widow of Mataró, Isabel Amada, went begging for alms one day where some

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peasants were tending two mules and a flock of sheep, but was refused any.
‘Within three days’, testified a witness, ‘the two mules died and also thirty sheep.
The accused claimed that she had caused the deaths among the herd with the
help of the demon.’ Isabel told the inquisitors that she had been set upon and
beaten by the peasants and had only mentioned the demon to save her life. She
was set free.
As in Spain, so in other parts of Europe there was an alternative tradition that
refused to accept the reality of the Sabbat or the devil’s role.61 Opponents of the
witch-craze included scholars from all faiths: Catholics such as Samuel de
Cassinis (in a work of 1505), Adam Tanner and Friedrich von Spee (1631); and
Lutherans such as Johann Weyer, physician to the Duke of Cleve. In his The
deceptions of demons of 1563, Weyer explained that ‘I fight with natural reason
against the deceptions which proceed from Satan and the crazed imagination of
the so-called witches. My object is also medical, in that I show that illnesses
which are attributed to witches come from natural causes.’ Scepticism over
witchcraft cut across religious boundaries. Like Catholic Spain, the Calvinist-
dominated Dutch Republic was one of the first states to play down prosecutions
for the offence. The last death sentence for witchcraft in Dutch territory was
carried out in 1597.62 Prosecutions continued, but subsequent death sentences
were commuted.
One vital factor began to change learned opinion: lawyers and judges became
sceptical about the evidence adduced in witchcraft cases. The Parlement of Paris
in the late sixteenth century rejected a majority of the prosecutions which
reached it, and in the period 1564–1640 confirmed only a tenth of the 1,123
death sentences for witchcraft which came before it as a court of appeal.63 By
1624, when it ruled that all witchcraft sentences involving the death penalty
must be appealed, the offence had virtually ceased to be a crime. In 1644 the
Archbishop of Reims protested to Chancellor Séguier against persecution of
‘witches’ by local magistrates: ‘the abuse is so widespread that one finds up to
thirty or forty falsely accused within a single parish’. By the 1670s Colbert was
intervening to stop any death sentences, and in July 1682 a royal decree forbade
further prosecutions, thereby confirming a situation that had been effective for
over half a century. In the late seventeenth century scepticism grew also among
English judges: the last witch condemned to death in England was Jane Wenham
in 1712, but she was reprieved; and in 1736 an Act of Parliament stopped further
prosecutions. In Hungary, where some 500 witches were executed between 1520

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and 1777, the prosecutions drew to an end with new laws promoted by the
empress Maria Theresa in 1758.
Because the phenomenon of witchcraft prosecutions and punishment calls for
consideration of a fascinating range of social, psychological, anthropological and
judicial contexts, it has given rise to numerous studies (such as Keith Thomas,
Religion and the Decline of Magic, 1971, or Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons,
1997) that offer insight into hidden corners of the mental world of early modern
Europeans.64 Modern research has firmly discounted the crude presentation of
witchcraft cases as being a dimension of misogyny. Women certainly featured as
victims of persecution, as emphasised above, but so too did men. Witches were pros-
ecuted because they were presumed to be witches, not because they were women (see
Chapter 7). The opening of new perspectives has enriched and by extension made
more complex a theme that in the early days of research seemed to be concerned
with more simple concepts such as ‘magic’, ‘superstition’ and ‘persecution’.

Disciplining belief: from persecution to toleration?

The most memorable aspect of ideological change and conflict in all periods of
history is the cost in human lives. Figures are readily available – we have looked
at some above, in Chapter 1 – for the victims of conflict during the French Wars
of Religion and the German Thirty Years War. Religious persecution made its
own contribution to the sum of human misery, leading to depictions of the early
modern period as one that began with religious bloodshed but ended more
happily with rationality and tolerance. The reality was far more complex, and
violence was by no means the only face of belief.
Killings and massacres were frequently provoked by religion, but violence
always had complex triggers and each outbreak had its own reasons, not neces-
sarily religious. Moreover, the statistics for casualties are often unreliable. Despite
the figures often cited for the notorious Spanish Inquisition, for example, it is
certain that in the period of its most intense activity, the forty years from 1480
to 1520, fewer than 2,000 people (mostly conversos of Jewish origin) were
executed for heresy. By way of contrast, three times that number (this time
Protestants) were murdered in a single night in Paris on St Bartholomew’s Eve
1572. A long tradition expressed in the drama and literature of Protestant
England and Holland, and backed up by a current in Jewish writing, has culti-
vated the image of Spain as the archetypical persecuting society, but it is relevant

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to insist that the image, nurtured by political and religious polemic, cannot be
sustained.65 The Inquisition in particular was an instrument neither of spectac-
ular death nor of tyranny, nor did it have any significant impact outside of the
kingdoms of Spain. Persecution of Jewish conversos came to an end after about
1520, and in subsequent decades Protestantism in Spain was never a threat nor
invited any significant repression.
Social conflict, as always, had many faces. In respect of religion, we may
pinpoint two fundamental considerations. First, during centuries and even in
the high tide of the Reformation, communities that did not share the same
beliefs were quite capable of living together peacefully. Second, like cultures in
other parts of the world, Europeans often gave more credence to traditional
beliefs than to official religious dogma.
The first of these considerations merits emphasis. The concept of heresy took
a long time to develop in the medieval Church. The high tide of the Reformation,
in the period down to 1560, was precisely (and ironically) when Catholics and
Protestants could live together in relative tranquillity, reserving their ire for those,
such as Anabaptists, who were not in the mainstream of Christian belief. ‘Millions
of Europeans were still malleable, open to considering the merits of different
beliefs and practices and prepared to shift their views as experience revealed their
political, social and cultural as well as spiritual implications. Which confession
would emerge as the official one of many states was still unclear.’66 It is remark-
able that when Philip II of Spain spent the years 1557, 1558 and 1559 in
Germany, England and the Netherlands, forty years after Luther’s famous protest,
his intimate colleagues and advisers included prominent supporters of the
Lutheran Reformation.
During several decades after the birth of the Reformation, Europeans accepted
the need for living together. In part, this happened because relevant entities
managed to protect their respective rights. Political autonomy, whether of cities
or of nobles, often helped to protect freedom of worship. In Germany the
autonomy of regions, cities and communities made it possible for many citizens,
even two generations after the date that we usually think the Reformation began,
to practise their own beliefs in public. There were cities such as Donauwörth,
Ravensburg and Augsburg where political control was nicely balanced between
Lutherans and Catholics, who were free to put on their separate processions in
the streets and who even on occasion shared the same church building for their
ceremonies. A similar situation existed in France, where Catholic and Huguenot

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nobles were able to protect the religious freedom of their dependents and where
the Crown had to tread carefully between the claims of nobles of differing beliefs.
In time, the concern to ensure survival of the official state religion became
inevitably a spur to intolerance and persecution. The situation, in every country,
was usually aggravated less by religious zeal than by political motives and fear for
national security. As Bishop Sandys stated to Parliament in 1571: ‘This liberty,
that men may openly profess diversity of religion, is dangerous to the common-
wealth. One God, one king, one faith, is fit for one monarchy and one common-
wealth. Division weakeneth, concord strengtheneth. Let unity in religion be
provided for, it shall be a wall of defence unto this realm.’ ‘Defence’ was equally
the concern of other Christian nations, whether Catholic or Protestant.
However, there is also massive evidence that social coexistence was common-
place throughout the centuries that historians have too frequently associated
only with religious conflict. The England of Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare,
for example, is known for religious tension and sporadic persecution but was at
the same time remarkable for considerable coexistence of beliefs.67 With time,
Protestant and Catholic leaders in Europe managed to arrive at a clearer defini-
tion of their doctrines, but until that moment ‘confessional relations were ambig-
uous and pragmatic, shaped more by contingencies than the higher principles of
the faith’.68 This tended to happen because a high proportion of the ruling elite
was still attached to the old beliefs and the state depended on their political
loyalty in order to preserve public stability. Trying to impose a new faith
frequently failed because the political situation would not support it and because
it was impossible to break down community structures: the attempt to force a
Reformation on Ireland under English rule was a case in point.69
There was of course very little public support for liberal attitudes. In England,
for example, people in the centuries of religious change usually managed to live
together for practical reasons rather than because of any commitment to the idea
of religious toleration.70 In central Europe and notably in Poland, it was the
complex political and ethnic situation that created the perfect scenario for reli-
gious coexistence. In a speech to the Diet of Poland in 1592 a Lutheran deputy
stated: ‘there is nothing new about diversity of religion in Poland. Apart from the
Greek Christians, pagans and Jews have been known for a long time and faiths
other than the Catholic have existed for centuries.’ In Switzerland at the same
period, it was similarly the complex balance of power between local authorities
that imposed a policy of religious coexistence.71

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In southern Europe there was even more striking evidence of the possibility
of coexistence. The communities of Christians, Jews and Muslims in Spain never
lived together on the same terms, and their coexistence was always a relationship
between unequals, but within that inequality they played their roles while
attempting to avoid conflicts. In the Mediterranean the confrontation of cultures
was more constant than in northern Europe, but so also was the consciousness of
living together in a multiple society.72 Jews had the advantage of community
solidarity, but under pressure from other cultures they also suffered the disadvan-
tage of internal dissent over belief. They were, it has been argued, a Mediterranean
people with the corresponding openness of perspective to be found anywhere in
the countries of the inland sea.73
The three faiths had coexisted long enough for many people to accept a
certain validity for all of them. A priest in Soria (Spain) in 1490 commented that
‘there are three faiths, and I don’t know which is the best’, but went on to affirm
that ‘I think that everyone can be saved in his own faith’. ‘Who knows which is
the better religion’, a Christian of Castile asked in 1501, ‘ours or those of the
Muslims and the Jews?’ On her travels through the Balkans in the year 1717,
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu met Albanians who ‘living between Christians and
Mahometans and not being skill’d in controversie, declare that they are utterly
unable to judge which Religion is best; but to be certain of not entirely rejecting
the Truth, they very prudently follow both, and go to the Mosque on Fridays and
the Church on Sundays.’ These were societies not of unbelief or of scepticism,
but ones where dogmatic religion had never been firmly imposed. Throughout
the Mediterranean, there is evidence of ambiguity in matters of belief, notably
so in the case of the Jewish Christians who became the principal victims of
the Spanish Inquisition after its foundation in 1480. Jews in the south of
Europe were susceptible to a profound ambiguity of outlook that made them
look kindly not only on Christianity but even on Islam, in the notable case of the
seventeenth-century messianic movement led by Sabbatai Zvi.74
The second of the two considerations mentioned above, on credence given to
traditional beliefs, is amply backed up by testimony from people summoned
before the Spanish and the Italian Inquisitions. A resident of Teruel (Spain)
stated in 1484: ‘Happiness and success can be found only in this world, in the
next world there is no heaven or hell. God is just a tree: in summer he puts out
leaves, in the winter he shakes them off and they fall. That is how God makes and
unmakes us people.’ Long after the epoch of multiple faiths in the peninsula had

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passed, many Spaniards retained at the back of their minds a feeling that their
differences over religion were not divisive. In the Granada countryside in the
1620s, a woman of Muslim origin felt that ‘the Muslim can be saved in his faith
as the Jew can in his’, a Christian peasant felt that ‘everyone can find salvation in
his own faith’, and another affirmed that ‘Jews who observe their law can be
saved’. The attitude was frequent enough to be commonplace and could be
found in every corner of Spain and every inlet of the Mediterranean, so much so
that we can almost regard it as a commonplace of rural philosophy in southern
Europe. When the north Italian miller Menocchio was pressed in 1584 by an
Italian inquisitor on the subject of which was the true religion, he answered:
‘God the father has various children whom he loves, such as Christians, Turks
and Jews, and to each of them he has given the will to live by his own law, and
we do not know which is the right one’.75
We may conclude that throughout Europe, from the Urals to the Atlantic, in
the generations that are too often identified with confessional conflict there were
personal and communal attitudes that accepted the possibility of religious coex-
istence. Coexistence, of course, did not imply ‘toleration’. The landmark legisla-
tion of the period was always inspired by a wish for political stability and never
aimed to concede the right to personal freedom of belief. The most prominent
state decrees in this respect (the peace of Augsburg 1555, the Warsaw
Confederation 1573, the Edict of Nantes 1598, the peace of Westphalia 1648)
were all measures aimed not at conceding religious toleration but at securing
political stability. By the eighteenth century, ‘toleration was nowhere unequivo-
cally and comprehensively embraced in either theory or practice, and where it
gained ground it was partial, fragile, contested and subject to reversal. No clear
metaphysics underpinned toleration claims, nor was there a single, classic, text
commanding universal assent.’76

Distress and confessional migration

Epochs of religious tension were significant in creating permanent refugees, who

formed part of what we may term ‘confessional migration’. Tens of thousands of
people left their own country in order to emigrate to another, but even though
religion and religious persecution may have been a fundamental motive there
were many other driving factors, not least economic ones. Complex circum-
stances drove people not just to seek escape from persecution but no less crucially,

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even when they were not direct victims of repression, to remake their lives in a
better environment.77 Emigration of Puritans (the Pilgrim Fathers), Catholics
and Quakers from England to the New World in the seventeenth century illus-
trates strikingly the distances that courageous minorities often travelled in order
to remake their lives. The Reformation period is frequently looked upon as the
first significant period of migration, but there was of course a significant move-
ment of minorities long before then, notably of Jews and Muslims fleeing from
the Christian Mediterranean.
The most notable case is that of Jewish communities, of which the
great majority lived in eastern Europe and in the Iberian peninsula. They featured
prominently as victims of the famous expulsions from Spain in 1492, an
event whose significance has been frequently distorted in respect of the numbers
involved. The total of all Jews expelled from the peninsula in 1492 did not
in reality exceed around 50,000, less than half of the total resident Jewish
population; even then, many returned when they could. In practice the contin-
uous movement and expulsion over the next few centuries of Europe’s
Jewish populations, not all of Hispanic origin, contributed far more than 1492
itself to extend the Jewish experience and confirm its part in the development
of international culture.78 The subsequent activity of the Jewish community
in cities as far apart as Amsterdam and Salonika, in every aspect of culture
and commerce, for instance, demonstrates the world importance of minority
diasporas.
The largest mass deportation in early modern history was that of the Moriscos
(converted Muslims) from Spain. In 1569, as the result of a rebellion, Moriscos
had been expelled from Granada and exiled to Castile. Attempts to Christianise
them, as well as those in the communities of Valencia and Aragon, were unsuc-
cessful. When the expulsion was eventually decided upon, it was in the conviction
that the Moriscos were an alien minority; yet many informed Spaniards including
nobles, clergy and government ministers were opposed in principle to the measure.
The expulsions began in April 1609 and, with various intervals, continued up to
1614. In all, some 300,000 Moriscos were deported, representing a third of the
total inhabitants of Valencia and a fifth of that of Aragon, with smaller proportions
from other parts of Spain. The great majority went to North Africa: in some towns,
such as Algiers, they were well received; in others, they were rejected as foreigners.
Perhaps as many as 50,000 were received in France, but most decided to travel on
to the Levant because of hostility from the French government.

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The religious changes of the Reformation period were, inevitably, the prin-
cipal cause of confessional migration, which was so dispersed and prolonged that
it is difficult to assess accurately in figures.79 There was considerable religious
persecution of minorities (notably Anabaptists) in the early sixteenth century,
but it was only in the phase of political conflict from the 1560s, when war
disrupted France and the Netherlands, that refugees became a major phenom-
enon. The uprooting of the Netherlands population in those years has been esti-
mated at around 180,000 persons, of whom possibly 15,000 settled in England.80
The flight of Protestants from Catholic states first became significant in the
1540s with the creation of the Chambre Ardente in France in 1547 and the estab-
lishment of the Roman Inquisition in Italy in 1542. The Italian Protestants fled
principally to Switzerland. In 1555 emigration from England began, as a result of
the Catholic restoration there. Of the 800 or so English refugees who fled to the
continent, most went to the Rhineland. Emigration from France was numerically
the most important. Originating in the repression of the 1540s, it reached its
peak after the massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve. The chief centre of refuge was
Switzerland and Geneva. From 1549 to 1587 Geneva probably received as many
as 12,000 French refugees, most of them in 1572. Plans were also made at this
period for Protestants to emigrate to America. Admiral Coligny made efforts to
set up a Huguenot colony in Brazil, and some emigrants did leave France for the
New World. In the seventeenth century these efforts continued: in 1627, 600
Huguenots went to colonise the Caribbean island of Saint-Christophe.
The Thirty Years War in Germany (1618–48) was responsible for many
migrations, notably from the Czech nation. The Battle of the White Mountain
(1620) marked the end of Czech independence. The first refugees were the elite
who had served the Winter King, Frederick of the Palatinate. Early in 1621 the
arrests and expulsions began. Fifty of the Czech leaders were arrested and their
estates confiscated: in June, 25 of them, both Catholic and Protestant, were
executed. The religious persecution began somewhat later, and not until 1624
were the last Protestant clergy ordered out of the country. In 1627 alone about
36,000 families fled Bohemia.81 Inevitably there were others who came in to take
their place: over the years 1618–53, outsiders made up 87 per cent of those who
obtained citizenship in Prague.82 Voluntary and involuntary evacuation reduced
the population of some towns by as much as 33 per cent. By the end of the
Thirty Years War the population of Bohemia had sunk by 45 per cent, that of
Moravia by 25 per cent.

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The peak of Huguenot emigration from France was reached with the persecu-
tion before and after Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Some 2 million
people, or one-tenth of France’s population, were Calvinists (generally known as
Huguenots), living principally in the south-west of the country. As religious perse-
cution gathered momentum in the 1680s, many resolved to emigrate, though the
bulk of refugees left only after the Edict of Nantes (which had theoretically granted
toleration since 1598) was officially revoked in October 1685. The Calvinist clergy
were expelled, but Huguenots in general were discouraged from leaving. Despite
this, some 200,000 French people fled their country between about 1680 and
1720. The largest numbers (70,000) went to the United Provinces,83 the rest to
England, Brandenburg and other Protestant countries. The refugees were mainly
from the professional and artisan classes, who could rebuild their careers in a strange
land; but even members of the highest elite chose to go abroad, among them two
of France’s most prominent generals, Schomberg and Ruvigny. The revocation and
emigration were inevitably condemned by Protestant nations, and many Frenchmen
both then and later doubted the wisdom of the measure. In 1716 a state body, the
Council of Commerce, claimed that of the many reasons for France’s declining
trade position, ‘the first is the flight of our Religionists who have transplanted our
industry to foreign soil’. In fact, the revocation varied in its impact, and was not
uniformly disastrous. Business and industrial centres such as Paris and Lyon had
small Huguenot populations in the late seventeenth century and were barely
affected. France’s problems at the end of the century were due to a number of
factors, among which the revocation was not always the most important.
Though the Calvinist dispersion that followed the Revocation of the Edict of
Nantes is often taken to be a culmination point for confessional migration, there
were many subsequent cases, even after 1700. Particularly memorable is the case
of Salzburg, where in 1731 the authorities expelled some 20,000 Protestant
farmers from the Alpine districts above the city.84 It was an act out of step with
the general religious coexistence of the period and the expelled were resettled in
Prussia at the invitation of its king, but the incident revealed that tensions could
always arise. Nor should we forget the continuous expulsions of Jewish popula-
tions in the eastern territories of Europe.
The migrants almost invariably brought positive consequences to the territories
that received them. Refugees helped to transfer technical skills from one country
to another.85 Although some social tension was caused in host communities, the
newcomers contributed handsomely to their new economic environment.86 In

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England, Swiss watchmakers in the sixteenth century and French textile-makers in

the seventeenth were important contributors to the host economy. The growth of
commerce in Leipzig was sustained almost entirely, over two centuries, by the
efforts of immigrant traders and financiers.87 Emigration also extended national
culture. In Alsace-Lorraine, the frontier of the German language was extended
several miles as a result of emigration after the Thirty Years War. The same happened
to a significant extent in both Switzerland and Bohemia.
It is clear that the transfer of culture by refugees can also be seen as a loss to
their country of origin. The Spanish Jews in exile after 1492 contributed greatly
to universal culture but little to the culture of their original home. They helped
to spread the printing press, which had only just begun to function in Spain.
When they published in exile, their first books tended to be in the typeface of the
Spanish language, in which they printed versions of the Old Testament.
Subsequently, the first Hebrew book printed in Constantinople bears the date
1494, issued by members of a Jewish family from Toledo,88 who left Sepharad
before the expulsion.
Cultural loss was an inevitable consequence of emigration. Of some 10,000
Czech exiles in Saxony in the mid-seventeenth century as many as 22 per cent were
from the educated elite, a proportion that helped to impoverish intellectual life in
Bohemia after the battle of the White Mountain. The same picture is valid across
the continent. Many of the great intellectual figures of early modern Europe were
products of the refugee experience, notable among them Isaac Abravanel, Juan
Luis Vives, John Calvin, Menno Simons, Lelio Socino, Jan Comenius and very
many others, whose contribution to universal culture has been amply documented
in studies. In virtually all cases, exile was not solely a matter of religion but also
involved a personal search for freedom of intellectual expression. There were, inev-
itably, tragic outcomes. Some radical figures, notably Miguel Servet and Giordano
Bruno, ended their experience of exile by being executed for their beliefs.

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 — four —
THE RULING ELITE

In so far as we are born of good lineage, we are the best.

Stefano Guazzo, La civil conversazione (1584)

We live in a moving reality to which we try to adapt ourselves like algae

that follow the thrust of the sea. The Church has been given the promise
of immortality; we, as a social class, have not.
Don Fabrizio, in Lampedusa, The Leopard

A mirror to elites; Power and clientage; The aristocracy of war; The nobility in
business; Estates and fortunes; Crisis and resilience of the aristocracy

A mirror to elites

European society, as commonly recognised at the time, was divided into ranks
ranging from the very rich to the very poor. Acquisition of wealth, however,
created constant movement among the ranks, making it desirable to define status
by criteria other than money. The French jurist Loyseau set out in his Traité des
Ordres (1613) a traditional scheme of society being divided into three orders, ‘the
clergy, the nobility and the third estate’, a scheme in which the last category
covered the broad mass of the productive population, ranging from small farmers
to tradesmen and merchants (see Chapter 5). The poor might certainly fit into
this last group (‘third estate’) but since they usually enjoyed minimum status
they tended to be deprived of privileges and were therefore pushed to the outer
margins of society.
Those who commanded in society were, of course, the rich and propertied.
When Sir William Segar wrote his Honour Military and Civil (1602) he used
the word ‘gentleman’ to describe the uppermost social category as follows: ‘Of

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gentlemen, the first and principal is the King, Prince, Dukes, Marquesses, Earls,
Viscounts and Barons. These are the Nobility, and be called Lords or Noblemen.
Next to these be Knights, Esquires and simple Gentlemen, which last number
may be called Nobilitas minor’. The one word ‘nobility’ – noblesse, nobleza,
szlachta – referred in Europe to the entire status elite and was notoriously impre-
cise. As new men rose into the elite, it became necessary to define terms. The
abstract word ‘gentleman’ (gentilhomme in France, hidalgo in Spain) was accepted
as referring to a ‘true’ noble, one, that is, who was born such and not created. In
the rural provinces of western Europe a knight, caballero or chevalier, was like-
wise normally a representative of the old nobility. Titles were rare, a mark of state
favour rather than a guarantee of old nobility.
Wars of the late fifteenth century brought about an increase in the number of
those rewarded with noble titles. At this time, it was still common to repeat the
medieval division of society into three grades – those who fight, those who work,
those who pray – and to identify nobles with ‘those who fight’. At least for the
sixteenth century, the military ideal continued to be a noble monopoly. At the same
time nobles tended to be in possession of land, their primary source of wealth, and
– more crucially – to exercise jurisdiction, feudal or otherwise, over it. War, land and
jurisdiction were three basic and traditional aspects of nobility, though none of
them was in fact essential to the quality of nobility.1 Because the medieval ideal had
been that a noble should serve his prince, he was also conceded various privileges
which were largely upheld in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, among the
more important being the exclusive right to carry weapons, to have a coat of arms,
exemption from direct taxation and the right to trial by one’s peers.
Changing fortunes and social mobility brought controversy into the ranks of
the elite. What, it was asked, made a member of the noble elite different from
others? Problems centred on three points: the role of the state, of new wealth and
of old blood. The role of the state had been clear since medieval times: only the
king could create new nobles. By the sixteenth century, however, many kings had
multiplied the ranks of the nobility in order to raise money or simply to build up
political support. There were two main methods: royal letters would grant noble
status (Louis XIV in the 1690s issued up to 1,000 letters in an attempt to raise
money); or status would be granted as an automatic corollary of service to the
state (particularly in administration and the judiciary). Though the nobility of
the newcomers was never in doubt, critics maintained, in a phrase that rapidly
gained currency, that ‘the king could make a nobleman, but not a gentleman’.

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The true quality of nobility, in other words, could not be conferred but only
inherited. In the 1500s all monarchies from England to Russia, attempted to
reorganise their elite in order to obtain security for the state. Charles V in Castile
in 1525 divided the aristocracy into two: an elite core of (twenty) grandees, and
a large group of titled nobles (titulos). Together with the thousands of caballeros
and hidalgos, these made up the core of Spain’s noble class.
Doubts about a state-created nobility were aggravated by the number of those
who were rising in the social scale through riches alone. In the sixteenth century
a number of writers, in Flanders, France and Italy,2 reacted against the parvenus
and reaffirmed that the hereditary elite were the true aristocrats (in the original
Greek sense of aristos, the best). The Monferrat noble Stefano Guazzo claimed in
1584 that ‘in so far as we are born of good lineage, we are the best’. Alessandro
Sardo in his Discorsi (1587) maintained that nobility was conferred not by virtue
or service but by birth and lineage and could not be destroyed even by evil acts.
This created a new emphasis, which was to last into the eighteenth century, on
origins and ‘race’. Nobility could only be transmitted by heredity: nobility, it has
been commented, was seminal fluid. The genetic view of status brought with it
an extreme concern over marriage and the dangers of mésalliances, marrying
below one’s rank. In order to project the image of a ‘race’ backwards into the
past, myths were created according to which the aristocracy were descended
from the Franks (in France and Germany), the Goths (in Spain) and other
warlike tribes. The genetic outlook exercised a powerful influence and was inev-
itably accepted even by the newer nobles, who took care to draw up family trees
proving that they were of ancient stock.3
At the same time a broad range of social attitudes was created around ‘repu-
tation’ and ‘honour’, concepts that gave everyday substance to the status of
nobility. Nobility might come through ancient origin, but it was continued and
maintained by correct conduct and by the corresponding respect of one’s peers
and one’s community. An immense range of views about what constituted
‘honour’ came into existence. Merely to be a member of the elite seemed to
impose duties in both private and public affairs, giving rise thereby to a sort of
official mythology about what it meant to be a nobleman.
In broad terms, one may say that there were three types of honour that a
noble needed to cherish.4 First, he had to preserve the purity of his past lineage
(‘blood’ and ‘race’), but even as surely he had to protect that of his present family.
Just as it would be advisable to blot out from the family tree any ancestors who

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might bring discredit, so it was imperative to ensure that present members of the
clan followed the accepted rules about conduct, marriage and way of life. Second,
a noble had to demonstrate his personal achievement. In traditional Europe, it
was essential to have performed military service and no aristocracy admitted into
its ranks a family that could not demonstrate experience in warfare. The military
ethic was projected into pursuits such as hunting and duelling. At the same time,
a noble had to demonstrate his virility, primarily by making a good marriage and
siring children but also by taking part in wars. Third, a noble maintained his
honour publicly by playing his correct social role and thereby winning the respect
of his vassals and his community. Most notably, he should offer hospitality to his
vassals, to the poor and to travellers and neighbours. He would thereby be
honoured as was the seventeenth-century English gentleman who ‘kept a very
bountiful house and gave great entertainment, lived in great repute in his country
and very happily’.5 Noble households, as many nobles learnt to their cost, were
public undertakings and social duties were expensive.
Many writers none the less pointed out that nobility must also be based on
virtue and merit. Guillaume de la Perrière in his Le miroir politique (1555)
claimed that ‘stock and lineage maketh not a man noble or ignoble, but use,
education, instruction and bringing up maketh him so’. The Renaissance
emphasis was on virtue, education and service to the state. Girolamo Muzio in
his 1575 Il Gentilhuomo began by saying that ‘nobility is a splendour which
proceeds from virtue’. He felt that the old noble class had long since lost its
honour and that the future lay with a new civic nobility created by the state
because of its virtue (i.e. its merits and service). The government must still be
aristocratic, though entrusted not to the old militarist nobles but to an aristoc-
racy that had distinguished itself in letters and in laws. This arbitrary distinction
between an old elite of ‘arms’ and a new one of ‘letters’ had long been a common-
place even in medieval times, and was moralistic rather than a real analysis of the
emergence of a different ethic.6 In practice, nobles combined all aspects. A noble,
wrote the author of The Institucion of a Gentleman (1555), ‘ought to be lerned,
have knowledge of tongues and be apt in arms’. Segar himself observed that the
‘endevour of Gentlemen ought to be either in Armes or learning or in them
both’. Despite the newer emphasis on virtue considered as education and service
to the state, in practice the older concept of virtue as the profession of arms was
never superseded.7 In the eighteenth century Montesquieu was still proclaiming
that ‘the principal honour of a nobleman lies in going to war’.

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The differing views of nobility were evidence of a significant change in both

the habits and the social composition of the upper elite, whose overall numbers
probably did not vary in the early modern period. The titled aristocracy were
always a tiny group, but when we add to them the fluctuating number of lesser
nobles and gentry it is possible to estimate that in Castile those claiming noble
status (hidalgos) were as much as 10 per cent of the population, and in Poland
(the szlachta) 15 per cent. By contrast, estimates that are more typical of the
situation across Europe suggest around 1 per cent for the upper elite of Venice
and Naples, under 1 per cent for France and even less for the nations of north-
west and northern Europe.

Power and clientage

Why does the elite deserve attention? Quite simply because they controlled the
most significant part of the nation’s wealth and by extension also enjoyed extraor-
dinary power and were in a position to control the state. That control, however,
did not come easily. When elite and nobles attempted to intervene in affairs of
state, they were consistently at a disadvantage because their power was inher-
ently local rather than national. It was a factor of which rulers made the most.
Governments could feel secure so long as the nobles did not make common
cause together. Thanks to divisions among the elite, the state was able slowly to
extend its authority and encourage the creation of a national loyalty that tran-
scended local allegiances headed by nobles.
In their provinces, the elite were little kings. Virtually since medieval times,
powerful families continued to own the principal estates and control the agrarian
life of the countryside. Their feudal links of kinship and influence enabled them
to have access to large bands of followers, termed in France fidélités. As feudal
bonds began to decay, other common contacts brought nobles together. Links
between families, based on marriage and other interests, created a network of
‘clientage’ and ‘patronage’ systems that criss-crossed the nation and reached up
to national level. In France, where the phenomenon has been most studied, a
great noble could call on three main categories of ‘client’, that is, men who
depended on him. First, there was his own household and its numerous depen-
dants; then came those who were paid to serve him as soldiers; finally there were
the many officials and others who were connected with his estates and offices. All
of these in some sense ‘belonged’ to him and were his clients.8 The system could

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be found not only among nobles but also in the extensive bureaucracy of the
Catholic Church, and in many ruling oligarchies.9 The client received the bene-
fits of income and protection, and in return gave the patron his loyalty. In oligar-
chies and city states, such as in Italy, clientelism depended greatly on kinship and
the network formed through family relationships and neighbourhood influence.
Beyond the clients, a noble could through marriages, influence and purchase of
land build up a series of links with other personages in both Church and state
to form a powerful circle of patronage. The complex links might have feudal
connotations but were more often based on a reciprocity of material interest,
established without any written agreements.
When it broke down, the patronage system threatened unrest. In 1575 the
Viscount of Turenne, feeling that he had not been supported by his patron
François Duke of Alençon, forced his way into the presence of the duke with
three hundred of his own nobles and captains and formally declared himself to
be dissatisfied, or ‘malcontent’. The word ‘malcontent’ was periodically used in
French to signify those who demanded by traditional right a redress of their griev-
ances. The same sort of procedure could be used in reverse, to maintain the peace.
In 1595 the young Duke of Guise came to submit himself to the king, Henry IV,
and brought with him ‘as many of his friends as he could gather’.10 In the language
of patronage, a ‘friend’ was a member of the clan or system of clientage.
It can also be seen that many of the links between nobles were based not on
feudal or material obligation but quite simply on friendship and personal
commitment based on honour.11 In France, nobles relied on their standing
(‘crédit’) with each other in order to form alliances or obtain favours; in their
correspondence the words ‘friend’ and ‘servant’ indicated willingness to accept a
reciprocity of obligations.12 The elite exercised power not through a chain of
command from the greatest to the smallest, but rather through a number of link-
ages whereby both great and small were bound to each other and received appro-
priate benefits. In the same way, horizontal linkages created power bases that were
not simply local but could extend through an entire province and beyond it.
The system of clientage served principally to help the elites maintain their
power but could be used also to help the administration of the state. In 1656 the
intendant of Burgundy, a member of the local elite, wrote to inform Cardinal
Mazarin that ‘I am using my credit and that of my friends and relatives in this
assembly [of the Estates of Burgundy] in order to make the king’s intentions
succeed’.13 A nationwide system of patronage helped in this way to further the

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solidarity of the nation. The links of clientage, kinship and money amounted in
effect to a network of influence and corruption. But ‘corruption’ at that period
can be seen as a constructive element in political life. Modern corruption implies
a deliberate confusion between private interest and the public interest, to the
detriment of the latter. In early modern Europe, by contrast, it was precisely the
public interest (in the form of the crown or the government) that made use of
bribes or pressure in order to advance state authority. The elites occasionally
counter-attacked, as in England in 1701 when Parliament passed a short-lived
resolution that ‘no person who holds an office of profit under the crown should
be capable of serving in Parliament’.

The aristocracy of war

The military significance of the nobles lay in their own private armed retinues as
well as in the troops which they called out in the service of the king. Both attri-
butes were feudal, and on both counts the nobility might control most of the
fighting forces within the realm. The privilege which made them the only class
allowed to bear arms confirmed the fact that they had a near monopoly of
violence in early modern Europe. In the Russia of Ivan the Terrible even more
power for violence was put into the hands of the so-called ‘service nobility’ so as
to enable them to extend the authority of the crown through terror. But in the
nation states of western Europe private violence was becoming more and more
of an anachronism because it openly contravened public order, the order main-
tained by the crown.
Arbitrary personal violence by the nobles arose out of community tensions,
clan rivalry and simple gangsterism. Ideals, such as those present in religious or
nationalist wars, were superimposed on this local pattern. ‘The nobility today is
so unbridled and unlicensed that it devotes itself solely to the sword and to kill-
ings’ was the complaint in Épernay in 1560. François de la Noue, a veteran of
many wars, in 1585 condemned gentry who believed that ‘the marks of nobility
were to make oneself feared, to beat and to hang at will’. During the French civil
wars many felt that the nobles were using religion as an excuse for plunder. Was
there not ample evidence of this, claimed a writer in Dauphiné, in the fact that
the nobles seldom attacked each other’s property, even if they were on opposite
sides, and only sacked the houses of commoners? The Huguenot and Catholic
nobility, it was reported from Languedoc, ‘openly help each other; the one group

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holds the lamb while the other cuts its throat’. The wars bred noble banditry:
Claude Haton in 1578 reported the activities in Champagne of a group of
seigneurs ‘perpetrating unmentionable and incredible beatings, robberies, rapes,
thefts, murders, arson and every kind of crime, without any respect of persons’.
Supported by local ties of kinship, powers of jurisdiction and feudal followings
(fidélités), many nobles were strongly ensconced in their localities. The Duc de la
Rochefoucauld raised 1,500 gentlemen within four days for the siege of La
Rochelle (1627) and said proudly to the uneasy king, ‘Sire, there is not one who
is not related to me’. Some local seigneurs were tyrants, such as Gabriel Foucault,
Vicomte de Daugnon, governor of La Marche, described by the chronicler
Tallemant des Réaux as ‘a great robber, a great borrower who never returned, and
a great distributor of blows with a club’, who rewarded his retainers by granting
them other people’s daughters whom he had carried off.
The state tried to harness this violence by absorbing it into the national army,
but was hindered by the fact that up to the early seventeenth century most armies
were still feudal musters. Under Henry VIII in 1523, one-third of the total
English army was directly contributed by the titular aristocracy. When Philip II
invaded Portugal in 1580, much of his army consisted of troops raised by the
aristocracy; and the entire force that invaded Aragon in 1591 was feudal and not
royal. Up to the reign of Louis XIV, France was still employing the militia recruit-
ment known as the ban et arrière-ban (feudal muster), a useful resource that
nobles used during the Fronde enabling their forces to outnumber those of the
crown. It was not surprising in these circumstances that all rulers feared the
power of the aristocracy in rebellions such as that of the northern earls in England
in 1569 and of Montmorency in Languedoc in 1632. Not until the early seven-
teenth century was a serious move made (by Maurice of Nassau in Holland and
by Gustav Adolf in Sweden) to form a national army free of feudal allegiances;
and only with Cromwell’s New Model Army was a modern national force
created. Even then it was inevitable that the nobles and gentry should become
the officer class. In the late seventeenth century, with the professional armies of
Louvois and the Great Elector, nobles and Junkers monopolised all officers’
posts, though this time as servants of the state rather than as commanders of
their own forces.
By around 1700, the state was successfully beginning to lay claim to a
monopoly of violence. It was more difficult to deal with the limited violence
associated with feuds, duels and straightforward crime. The exaggerated concepts

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of ‘honour’ which obtained in France and Italy, and to a lesser extent in other
countries, encouraged duelling. Every state outlawed the practice (which was
also prohibited by the Council of Trent in 1563), but to little effect. In the
Duchy of Lorraine solemn (and apparently unheeded) prohibitions of duelling
can be found in 1586, 1591, 1603, 1609, 1614, 1617, 1626 and so on almost
indefinitely. In late seventeenth-century Madrid challenges (desafíos) occasioned
about a tenth of all prosecutions for crime. The practice was imported from the
continent into England in the late sixteenth century, and deemed illegal from the
very beginning, but juries normally dealt with the offence lightly and duelling
was not formally abolished until 1850.14 In France, the Duke of Sully was bitterly
opposed to duelling and Richelieu in 1627 assented, ‘for the good of the
state’, to the execution of the Count of Bouteville, who had flagrantly defied the
prohibition against the practice. But though there were numerous French edicts
against it between 1609 and 1711, none was ever seriously enforced. The state
was, of course, primarily concerned to stop the ruling class destroying itself,
‘nothing being dearer to me’, as Louis XIII observed, ‘than to do all I can to
preserve my nobles’. The marshal Duke of Gramont claimed (with obvious exag-
geration) that duelling had cost the lives of 900 gentlemen during the Regency
of Anne of Austria. By contrast, according to Saint-Simon, under Louis XIV
‘duels were extremely rare’. The peak period in France came between the 1580s
and 1650, when no less than thirty books were published on the subject.15
During the early eighteenth century duelling came back into fashion in France
(the Parlement of Paris dealt with fifty cases between 1715 and 1724), but it had
become rather a rite of nonviolence than of violence. No longer active in warfare,
the nobility used the duel as a way of demonstrating its ability to protect princi-
ples of honour without the resort to war.16
The aristocracy were tamed, it has been argued,17 in three main ways: by the
deliberate policy of law enforcement adopted by western monarchies, by the
gradual impoverishment of many noble families and subsequent economies in
retinue, and by a growing preference for litigation rather than brigandage. In
1592 an English judge warned the Earl of Shrewsbury that ‘when in the country
you dwell in you will needs enter in a war with the inferiors therein, we think it
both justice, equity and wisdom to take care that the weaker part be not put
down by the mightier’. In 1597, as the reign of Philip II was drawing to a close,
a leading jurist in Castile, Castillo de Bobadilla, claimed that the king had humil-
iated the nobles and ‘did not pardon them with his usual clemency, nor did he

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respect their estates, and there is no judge now who cannot act against them and
take their silver and horses’. By the mid-seventeenth century the older aristocracy
was beginning to lose its taste for the military ideals it had once cherished. In
England, the armaments as well as the retainers kept by leading aristocrats dwin-
dled sharply. In Spain, where nobles avoided going to the wars, the Count-Duke
of Olivares complained of a lack of nobles to serve as officers in the army. Only
in France, with the Fronde, did the nobles reassert their old habits, and that too
was a final gesture.
After the Thirty Years War, the last international conflict to give continuous
employment to professional and mercenary officers, the nobles settled down to
more domestic pursuits and took advantage of the favourable economic climate.
In Siena, which had produced generations of soldiers for foreign armies, they
consolidated themselves by preference in the bureaucracy and in the Church.18

The nobility in business

Just as they had monopolised warfare, so the nobles dominated the sources of
wealth. They owned estates, forests, coastlines and sections of rivers. Their
economic power was very great, but at the same time they tended to look down
on those who were earning new wealth and rising in the social ladder. The
Ferrarese noble Sardo observed that ‘inherited wealth is more honest than earned
wealth, in view of the vile gain needed to obtain the latter’. This was part of the
sixteenth-century reaction in favour of principles of heredity and lineage and
against the ascent of rich self-made men into the nobility. Since the new concepts
of a ‘nobility of race’ were largely confined to the Latin countries, it is no surprise
to find that the prejudice against earned wealth was strongest there, but not
shared by everybody. In Spain the opportunities for trade and industry created
by wool, and by new wealth from America, pushed into the background what-
ever reservations may have existed. There was not a noble in Seville, observed the
writer Ruiz de Alarcón, who did not trade.
In England Thomas Churchyard (1579) distinguished four main types of
noble: the governing elite, the soldiers, the lawyers and ‘the fourth are Merchauntes
that sail forrain countreys’. Among others who recognised the role of trade was
the French jurist André Tiraqueu, whose Commentary on Nobility (1561) claimed
that commerce did not derogate from nobility when it was the only way to make
ends meet. In Italy the jurist Benvenuto Stracca, representing a more conservative

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view than had formerly prevailed in Venice, made it clear in his Treatise on Trade
(1575) that a noble could take part in large-scale trading but not in petty
commerce, nor must he participate in person but only as a director. These distinc-
tions were standard ones and widely accepted. Prevailing views were summed up
by the jurist Charles Loyseau in his Traité des Ordres (1613): ‘it is gain, whether
vile or sordid, that derogates from nobility, whose proper role is to live off rents’.
‘Derogation’ (dérogeance), a concept which was almost unique to France and
unknown in England or Spain, meant loss of noble status for those who partici-
pated in money-making or manual labour; wholesale but not retail trade was
allowed.19 Agricultural labour on one’s own land was, by contrast, never viewed
as derogatory, being considered ‘no less worthy for a gentleman in peacetime than
that of bearing arms in wartime is glorious’. Like other jurists, Loyseau admitted
that to take part in commerce did not result in a loss, but merely a suspension,
of noble status: ‘all that is necessary for rehabilitation are letters signed by
the king’.
Two main influences helped to break down prejudices against nobles in busi-
ness. The first and most important was the strong wish of the self-made elite to
continue in commerce even after they had gained status; the second was the wish
of the state to divert the considerable wealth of nobles into trade and industry.
In France in 1566 the elite of Marseille had expressly been allowed by the crown
to be both noble and merchant. Then in 1607 the royal council informed the
merchant nobles of Lyon that ‘the king wishes them to enjoy fully and freely the
privileges of nobility, as though they were nobles of ancient lineage, and they
may continue to do business and trade, both in money and banking as in any
other large-scale trading’. In the Code Michau (1629), drawn up by Cardinal
Richelieu and the minister Michel de Marillac, it was declared that ‘all nobles
who directly or indirectly take shares in ships and their merchandise, shall not
lose their noble status’, terms repeated in an edict of 1669. In Spain there was far
less opposition than in France to nobles in trade. A Castilian writer of the
sixteenth century maintained that ‘to labour and sweat in order to acquire riches
in order to maintain one’s honour’ was compatible with the noble ethic; and in
1558 the royal official Luis Ortiz argued in a petition to the Crown that all
sons of the nobility should be trained in commerce or a profession. In Aragon
declarations by the Cortes in 1626 and 1677 stated that there was no incompat-
ibility between manufactures and nobility; and in 1682 the Crown, responding
to a petition from the textile manufacturers of Segovia, issued a decree that

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manufacturing ‘has not been and is not against the quality of nobility’, an
important measure that removed all legal obstacles to the social ascent of the new
nobility.
Elsewhere in Europe there was so little objection to aristocratic entrepreneur-
ship that we find everywhere nobles involved in industrial and commercial
activity. It is sometimes said that, in western Europe at least, the nobles seldom
traded and were more concerned with industry. In England Dudley Digges in
1604 claimed that ‘to play the merchant was only for gentlemen of Florence,
Venice or the like’. If nobles preferred industry to trade, however, there were very
good reasons for it. They tended to be landed and the land produced ore, coal,
metals, wood and many similar items which it was only logical for the landowner
himself to invest in. Trade, particularly overseas trade, was not always a priority
for a man with a rich industry in his own back garden. This did not mean that a
noble industrialist was prejudiced against commerce, for very many industrialists
also took an interest in exchanging and exporting.
The attempt to alter established attitudes is shown by the existence at this
period in both Lorraine and France of the term gentilshommes-verriers and
gentilshommes-mineurs, which referred to those who enjoyed noble privileges as a
result of their participation in the industries concerned, glass manufacture and
mining. In England there was little need to break down the barriers. There the
nobles distinguished themselves by the exploitation of mines on their estates and
by their promotion of mercantile enterprises. In the Elizabethan period the most
active entrepreneur in the country was George Talbot, ninth Earl of Shrewsbury.
He was a large-scale farmer, a shipowner, an iron-master and the master of a
steelworks, coalmines and glassworks; in addition he had interests in trading
companies.20 The most prominent aristocratic names in the realm, among them
Norfolk, Devonshire and Arundel, were associated with industrial enterprises.
The scale of their commitment was not very large. Not all the nobles were direct
entrepreneurs: a few merely lent their names. No aristocrat relied on industry
alone for his income. The biggest profits were still in land, and it was to urban
development and to fen drainage that nobles tended to turn after about 1600.
When all allowances are made, however, noble participation in business was still
highly significant. The peerage fulfilled a role that no other class, neither the
gentry nor the merchants, was able to rival. They risked their money in industrial
and trading endeavours to an extent that certainly brought ruin to many, but
also helped to pave the way for the later injection of capital by other classes.

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In Scotland, the Earl of Wemyss told Oliver Cromwell in 1658 that the estate
of many Scottish ‘noblemen, gentlemen and others doth consist very much in
coalworks’. Significantly, the noble entrepreneurs of Scotland relied on a
depressed labour force in their coalworks. This combination of feudalism and
capitalism was common on the continent, where the wealthy noble merchants
and industrialists of Holstein, Prussia, Bohemia, Poland and Russia benefited
from the availability of cheap labour that followed changes in the agrarian
economy. Heinrich Rantzau, the first and greatest of the sixteenth-century
Holstein aristocratic entrepreneurs, made huge profits from demesne farming
and ploughed much of this back into industries on his estates. He established
thirty-nine mills for the production of lumber, flour and oil and for the manu-
facture of articles from copper, brass and iron.21 Both landed and industrial
produce was traded abroad, so the richest merchants in Kiel, for example, were
nobles. After the crisis years of the early seventeenth century the Holstein nobility
tended to withdraw from business and turn to their estates. One of them, the
Duke of Holstein-Gottorf, ended up claiming in 1615 that ‘trade is not proper
for noblemen’.
In the early seventeenth century possibly the biggest capitalist concern
in central Europe was brought into existence in the Duchy of Friedland by
the famous General Wallenstein. There were unusual features connected with
Friedland: it was both financed by and geared to war; and its industries, among
them munitions, were not primarily concerned with peaceful trade. But Friedland
illustrates the common situation that only the nobles had the means of raising
capital and putting it to work. In areas where the bourgeoisie was weak or in the
process of decline, it was the nobility that took control of both trade and industry.
Over the whole of Europe, a significant part of the nobility was active in
business, not excluding trade. In Sweden the nobles were prominent as entrepre-
neurs from the sixteenth century. They tended to work the mines on their own
estates – principally in iron ore – and from mining they moved to trade. Trading
profits allowed them to accumulate capital, which they invested in forges and
manufactories and also lent out at interest. Their investment in trade was assured
by a guaranteed privilege that they could export the produce of their own estates
free of duty. Many of the wealthiest nobles consequently purchased ships. The
nobility of the German lands varied in their application. In Brandenburg they
tended to monopolise both industry and trade. In Lower Saxony Duke Anton I
von Oldenburg encouraged his nobles to take a personal interest in market

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procedures, from which came a class of noble capitalists. One of these was Stats
von Münchhausen, who based his enterprise on land, but then invested his agri-
cultural profits in ironmongery and timber. His fortune grew to be immense: by
1618 he was said to possess over 10 tons of gold and over a million thaler. Some
of this money went into building himself the castle of Bevern on the River Weser.
On the Baltic coast, in Pomerania, the family of Loytze, from the city of Stettin,
made themselves into the ‘Fuggers of the north’ through reinvesting the profits
they made from land. When their firm collapsed in 1572 a large number of the
nobility fell into difficulties and the chancellor of Pomerania committed suicide
because of his losses. ‘The nobles in past years’, commented a Pomeranian official
in the late sixteenth century, ‘have not been very industrious and keen to make
their living. But now in recent years they have become better at it, and since the
country existed the nobility has never been so rich and powerful as nowadays.’
Hungary may be taken as a brief example of the situation in the eastern coun-
tries. Since the economy was in no sense industrialised, Hungarian foreign trade
consisted in the export of agricultural goods and the import of industrial goods.
The nobles were lords of the soil and by extension dominated the trade in its
produce. Hungarian seigneurs were consequently both farmers and merchants.
A royal decree of 1618 in Hungary confirmed the freedom of the gentry from
excise and taxes. In 1625 controls over prices and wages were removed. In 1630
the Diet decreed that the nobles could take part in foreign trade without paying
taxes or customs duties. By 1655 a memoir of the time could claim that ‘the
nobles deal in all kinds of trade’, in corn, wine, cattle, honey and so on. How this
affected other classes was described by the memoir: ‘The seigneurs and nobles
take over trading; they seize for themselves whatever they think profitable; they
exclude the common people and the merchants; they confiscate everything indis-
criminately from the poor, and hold it as their own private property’. In his
autobiography the seventeenth-century Transylvanian nobleman Miklós Bethlen
tells us that he took part in the trade of wheat and of wine. Moreover, ‘I have
traded in salt without losing anything; on the contrary it is by these three items
[wheat, wine and salt] that I have gained nearly all my goods, for the revenue
from my lands alone would never have met all the expenses I had to make’.
Bethlen traded in cattle, sheep, honey and wax.
In Russia, conditions differed so radically from those in western Europe that a
shocked Austrian ambassador reported in 1661 that ‘all the people of quality and
even the ambassadors sent to foreign princes, trade publicly. They buy, they sell, and

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they exchange without a qualm, thereby making their elevated rank, venerable that
it is, subservient to their avarice.’22 The tsar himself was the biggest of Russian busi-
nessmen, with profitable interests in both trade and industry. Industrial enterprise
of every sort existed on the estates of tsars, monasteries and boyars. Among the
biggest noble merchants of the sixteenth century were the Stroganov family, whose
members had international trade connections.23 To serve the producing and trading
interests of the elite, a labour force of ‘state serfs’ was brought into existence.
The nobility in business were not necessarily fulfilling a progressive function.
In central and eastern Europe the entry of aristocrats into business checked the
growth of an independent merchant class (see Chapter 5) and in some cities
destroyed an existing trading sector. The manipulation of capital by the feudal
classes hindered the development of a strong middle elite, and the rise of landed
noble traders led to the decay of urban centres. Only in those countries where
the moneyed classes – both noble and bourgeois – cooperated in creative devel-
opment can the contribution of the nobility be seen as a beneficial step. In any
case the positive aspects of noble investment must not be exaggerated: especially
in western Europe the bulk of noble wealth was tied up in a single immobile asset
– the land – and dedication to other activities could not have absorbed more
than a small proportion of capital.

Estates and fortunes

The one essential mark of nobility was wealth: the aristocracy were the rich.
Although sixteenth-century theorists of a ‘nobility of race’ would have liked to
argue that blood was more fundamental, common opinion was against them. As
a Spanish writer, Arce de Otalora, observed: ‘It is the law and custom in all Italy,
German and France, that those who do not live nobly do not enjoy the privilege
of nobility’. In Spain, too, the ancient laws of Castile declared that ‘if any
nobleman falls into poverty and cannot maintain his noble status, he shall
become a commoner and all his children with him’. In an age when many men
of noble rank were becoming impoverished, it was not surprising that they
should cling to the belief that a blood elite did not cease to be an elite simply
because it had fallen on hard times.
Certainly, when the noble class was as big as it was in Spain and Poland, poor
hidalgos and szlachta were commonplace. In the former, the theme of an impov-
erished gentry became standard in literature, and the subject of irony in

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Cervantes’s Don Quixote. In France the census returns for the arrière-ban (call to
arms) under Louis XIII show that the provincial aristocracy at its base consisted
of a vast number of penniless gentlemen. Despite these cases, the nobles were on
the whole wealthy, their resources coming directly from the land. In western
Europe the aristocracy were drifting away from their estates and becoming
absentee landlords rather than agrarian producers; in the east they were being
drawn further into exploitation of the soil. In west and central Europe the sale of
land, which received its greatest impetus from the Reformation spoliation of the
Church, changed the character of aristocratic income and also facilitated the rise
of a new class of nobles. In England before 1600 the receipts of the Earl of
Rutland from demesne farming came to about one-fifth of his income; after
1613, when leasing of land had begun, they fell to about one-twentieth. The
decay of demesne farming, however, did not mean that nobles lost their grip on
the land, merely that they were turning to cash rather than agricultural income.
In the seventeenth century two-thirds of the fortunes of the dukes and peers of
France were still in land.
The growing role of cash can be seen in some random examples.24 In 1617 the
Marshal d’Ancre, the royal favourite, drew 85 per cent of his income from office;
in 1640 the Duc d’Épernon, a member of the old aristocracy, drew half his
income from office and the rest from his twenty-three estates; in the 1690s
Colbert de Croissy, France’s foreign secretary, drew 98 per cent of his income
from office. In Spain the Duke of Lerma in 1622 drew 67 per cent of his income
from land; in 1630 the Duke of Béjar drew 35 per cent from demesne and 45 per
cent from rents; in 1681 the Marquis of Leganés drew 14 per cent from demesne,
39.8 per cent from rents and cash dues, and 45.5 per cent from state annuities.
Cash came from two main sources: rents (of land and houses), and court
pensions. The growth of courts was a logical development from the rise of
centralised monarchies. The archetype was papal Rome, staffed by wealthy aris-
tocrats such as the Colonna and Orsini, and dispenser of patronage to the largest
bureaucracy in the world, that of the Church. By the early seventeenth century,
Europe’s other principal courts were in London, Vienna, Madrid and Paris. Each
court (Madrid was referred to simply as la Corte) was a combination of city and
monarch’s residence, of political and social life, and above all the heart of the
state bureaucracy. The system was based on patronage. Royal patronage encour-
aged the rise of men such as d’Ancre, Buckingham and Lerma. In addition, kings
sold or gave away lucrative pensions and offices. From 1611 to 1617 the French

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court paid out 14 million livres in pensions to nine nobles. In England the gentry
received lands in gift or on lease, from dissolved monasteries and from Ireland.
They obtained cash (James I in the peak year 1611 gave away £43,600 to Scots
favourites) or annuities and secured trade privileges, tax-farms and monopolies
to such an extent that the merchant class began to direct its resentment over
economic policy against the Crown. In Madrid the nobles were given mercedes
(favours), lucrative offices in Spain and the Indies, annuities and land. The most
famous of courts began to be constructed by Louis XIV in the 1670s at Versailles,
where in 1682 he took up permanent residence. Thereafter, Versailles became the
scintillating centre of patronage, government and culture: an astonishing, indeed
unique, example of showmanship in the early modern state. In the early eigh-
teenth century the role of the royal court probably declined, but the nobles
maintained their inclination for the capital city both as the centre of power and
as an alternative to their country seats.
As courts rose, aristocrats seemed to decline. ‘The lords in former times’,
observed Sir Walter Raleigh in the early seventeenth century, ‘were far stronger,
more warlike, better followed, living in their countries, than now they are.’
‘There have been in ages past’, claimed Francis Bacon in 1592, ‘noblemen both
of greater possessions and of greater commandment and sway than any are at this
day.’ In the United Provinces the aristocracy had lost many estates during the war
of independence. In France the civil wars helped to bring ruin. ‘How many
gentlemen’, wrote François La Noue, ‘are shorn of the riches that their houses
were once adorned with’ under Louis XII and Francis I! The city of Seville in
1627 claimed that the nobility ‘have to keep themselves on incomes that will not
buy today what could be bought previously with one-fourth of the same’. ‘The
greater part of the grandees of Spain’, observed a French visitor under Philip IV,
‘are ruined even though they possess large revenues.’
These comments need to be set in context. Though some great lords disap-
peared, others took their place; many lesser nobles decayed, but were quickly
replaced by rising newcomers. In no European country was there an absolute
decline of the noble estate. Their economic problems, however, were real. We
may summarise them in terms of conspicuous expenditure, declining estate
income and rising expenses aggravated by inflation.
Conspicuous expenditure rose from the need to be seen to live like a noble.
The Spanish Duke of Béjar confessed in 1626 ‘everyone judges me to be rich,
and I do not wish outsiders to know differently, because it would not be to my

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credit for them to understand that I am poor’. The system of keeping a large
household of retainers and servants was a typical problem. In England in 1521
the Earl of Pembroke had 210 men wearing his livery, in 1612 the Earl of Rutland
had 200. Retaining encouraged violence between rival households, kept up the
trappings of feudalism, made idleness fashionable and impoverished the nobility.
Governments consequently tried to limit it. Bacon commented that the benefi-
cial effect of the English Statute of Retainers (1504) was that ‘men now depend
upon the prince and the laws’. In Spain a law of 1623 limited personal house-
holds to only eighteen persons, yet half a century later the chief minister Manuel
Oropesa had one of seventy-four. In Rome the size of households ran into the
hundreds. In Poland the French ambassador reported that ‘many of the nobles
are followed by five to six hundred retainers’. Entertainment was, likewise, a
standard item of conspicuous expenditure. The English Lord Hay in 1621 gave
a feast to the French ambassador, in the preparation of which 100 cooks were
employed for 8 days to cook 1,600 dishes. When in 1643 the Admiral of Castile
gave a great dinner to the ambassadors of the Grey Leagues, ‘the other seigneurs’,
reported a Jesuit, ‘who had also been asked to entertain, were fearful of the event
because they could not do more than he. The times were not propitious for such
excessive expenditure; but if they spent less it would be observed.’ Nobles also
tried to outdo each other in keeping luxury coaches, which were consequently
legislated against in sumptuary laws.
A major item of expenditure was the building of residences. The late sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries were a peak period for investment in houses.
‘What has been created in the past is small in comparison with our own time’,
observed La Noue in 1585, ‘since we see the quality of buildings and the number
of those who build them far exceed any yet known, particularly among the
nobility.’ French gentlemen returning home from the wars yearned to build
houses as they had seen them built in Italy. In Paris the rebuilding was given a
stimulus by Henry IV, who altered the royal palaces and laid out spacious new
squares such as the Place Dauphine. The nobles built large town houses (hôtels),
for which Sully set the style with his Hôtel Sully just as Richelieu did later with
his Palais-Cardinal. In England the great rural reconstruction of this epoch
(several country houses were rebuilt and new ones begun in a process that began
in the 1560s, but reached its peak in the 1690s) was paralleled by the work of the
nobility. It was the age when Chatsworth, Hardwick and Longleat made their
appearance in the world. ‘There was never the like number of fair and stately

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houses’, wrote Bacon in 1592. ‘No kingdom in the world spent so much in
building as we did’, reflected another. European courts and capitals blossomed.
In London, Somerset House and the Banqueting House at Whitehall were
constructed. In Counter-Reformation Rome Pius IV and Sixtus V attempted to
create the most beautiful urban centre in Europe. The sixteenth century saw the
building in Rome of fifty-four churches, sixty new palaces (including the
Vatican), twenty new aristocratic villas, two new suburbs and thirty new streets.
In Valladolid, chief city of the Spanish Crown before Philip II made Madrid his
seat, some 400 seigneurial houses and palaces filled the city.
Estate income varied widely. Many lords profited from the favourable market
conditions of the sixteenth century. In Piedmont the nobles invested in the soil,
since other outlets offered limited scope; in the early seventeenth century their
annual returns came to over 5 per cent of invested capital. Thomas Wilson testi-
fied that in England in 1600 the gentry ‘know as well how to improve their lands
to the uttermost as the farmer or countryman’. The well-administered estates of
the Percy family produced an income that rose from £3,602 in 1582 to £12,978
in 1636. Both in England and on the continent, however, there was a strong
move to lease out land rather than cultivate it. The leasing of demesne was an old
practice, but it was done so extensively in the early modern period that it is
possible to consider most of the nobility of western Europe as a rentier rather
than a producing class. Where rents could be increased this was done: on the
Welsh estates of the Somerset family, rents doubled between 1549 and 1583, and
a sample from the estates of seventeen English noble families shows that their
rents doubled between 1590 and 1640. On this basis, landlords could keep pace
with inflation and even make a profit. English landowners were among the most
proficient at increasing their returns. In the period 1619–51 the rents on the
twelve Yorkshire manors belonging to the Saviles of Thornhill were raised by over
400 per cent.
However, many rents were settled by feudal custom and written agreement
and could not be raised without mutual consent. If, in addition, a tenant of this
sort had a long lease, the landlord would be receiving only a fraction of the real
rental value. In 1624, for instance, the customary tenants of the Earl of
Southampton were paying him a total rent of £272, when the real market value
of their tenancies was £2,372. In 1688 the Duke of Infantado’s tenants in
Jadraque (Guadalajara) were paying him exactly the same cash dues as a century
before, in 1581.25 In such cases a lord’s income was bound to be severely affected.

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A powerful lord could use threats to change the terms of tenancy. But equally
powerful forces could block such moves: the right of tenants to hold to their
customary rent, the danger of rebellion, the social pressures that demanded good
relations between landlord and tenant.
Rising expenses could be blamed in most cases on inflation: the cost of food,
building, clothes and luxuries was rising and could have catastrophic results if
there was no proportionate increase in the revenue from rents and demesne.
There were, however, also other expenses. Service to the Crown in the army and
in ambassadorships could involve unforeseen costs. The state repeatedly – in
France under Richelieu, in Spain under Olivares – tried to get cash sums from
the nobility in order to pay war debts. Payment of dowries could be crippling
(41 per cent of the Duke of Infantado’s debts in 1637 arose from the dowries of
his daughters). Litigation over inheritances and property could absorb money
and drag on for years.
By the seventeenth century, complaints of aristocratic poverty were universal.
In 1591 the Danish historian Anders Sørensen Vedel deplored seeing gentlemen
begging in the streets of Kiel. In 1604 the Danish royal council informed King
Christian IV that ‘an important section of the nobility already has enormous
monetary debts’. Richelieu in 1614 described the French nobles as ‘poor in
money but rich in honour’. In Venice the nobles had had their fortunes tied to
commerce; when that decayed they found it difficult to reinvest. Their numbers
declined from a total of 2,090 in 1609 to 1,660 in 1631; as they shrank, they
became exclusive, caste-ridden and yet more aristocratic. The English ambas-
sador in 1612 observed them ‘buieng house and lands, furnishing themselfs with
coch and horses, and giving themselves the good time’.26 In the United Provinces,
likewise, the nobility had shrunk to a small group who, according to Sir William
Temple in 1673, protected their elitism by refusing to marry below their rank
and by affecting an exclusiveness which showed itself in the adoption of French
dress, manners and speech.
The lesser nobility everywhere were the most prominent casualties. In
Denmark, where of the approximately 500 noble landowners in 1625 one-third
held over three-quarters of all land,27 it was inevitable that many should have few
means. In France the country gentry (hobereaux) were notoriously held to be
poor, but in many cases their poverty was, perhaps, only relative. The rise and
rapid fall of one French family can be traced in the case of Nicolas de Brichanteau,
seigneur of Beauvais Nangis, captain of a troop of fifty men, who died in 1563.

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His son Antoine rose to prominence in the army, won royal favour and ended up
as admiral of France and colonel of the guard. Excessive expenditure in this
exalted position began his ruin. His son Nicolas tried to make his way at court,
but the family’s debts caught up with him. In 1610 the estate of Nangis was
covered with debts, accumulated at court, of up to four times its value. Nicolas
was thereupon forced to retire to his estates in poverty.
In Spain ‘the grandees, títulos and individual gentlemen who own lands and
other rents today’, wrote an observer in 1660, ‘are completely deprived of any
revenue because of the decline in population and in the number of farm labourers,
and because prices have risen so disproportionately’. ‘Many of the Castilian
títulos’, reported a Jesuit in 1640, ‘have excused themselves from court because
of the great want in their finances.’ Indebtedness since the late sixteenth century
is shown by the number of great lords of Castile – the dukes of Alburquerque
and Osuna, the counts of Benavente and Lemos, the marquises of Santa Cruz
and Aguilar – who feature among debtors to the moneylenders of Valladolid in
the 1590s. Alburquerque borrowed to pay for litigation, Aguilar in order to pay
a tax, Benavente to pay a dowry. By the mid-seventeenth century the Spanish
nobility, including the titles of Alba, Osuna, Infantado and Medina Sidonia,
were overwhelmed by debt.
In Naples by the end of the sixteenth century, of 148 noble families as many
as 50 were too poor to maintain their rank and position. The Prince of Bisignano,
who possessed sixty-five estates in Calabria and other regions, was so burdened
by debt that by 1636 all his holdings were sold up. Of twenty-five estates held by
the princes of Molfetta in 1551, fifteen were sold by the early seventeenth
century. Between 1610 and 1640 alone, in eight of the twelve provinces of the
Kingdom of Naples at least 215 towns were sold by their owners, who came from
families with names as distinguished as Carrafa, Pignatelli and Orsini.
‘How many noble families have there been whose memory is utterly abol-
ished!’ wrote an Englishman in 1603. ‘How many flourishing houses have we
seen which oblivion hath now obfuscated!’ In so far as the principal item of
wealth passing out of noble hands was land, it was often the urban elite who
benefited. In Naples the space vacated by the old aristocracy was filled by
Genoese, Tuscan and Venetian merchants and by Neapolitan bourgeois and
office-holders. In Spain the creditors of the nobility were bourgeois and govern-
ment officials. A Norman noble expressed his hatred of the urban sectors in 1656
by claiming that:

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Three things have ruined the nobility: the facility in finding money, luxury
and war. In peace they are consumed by luxury; in war, since they have no
money in reserve, the most comfortable gentleman can go only by mort-
gaging his field and his mill. So true is this that it can be proved that since
1492, when money became more common, men from the towns have
acquired more than six million gold livres of revenues from noble lands owned
by gentlemen rendering service in war according to the nature and quality of
their fiefs. . . . Men from the towns lend money [and as a result] all the
proprietors are chased from the countryside.

But in some parts of Europe it was the lesser provincial nobility – the gentry in
England, the szlachta in Poland – who profited from the difficulties of the aris-
tocracy. Many of the lesser nobles had originally risen from the landed and
trading middle elite and were firmly settled in their new status and lifestyle: in
Italy and Spain they formed the elite in most provincial towns.
The English gentry were not for the most part men of a bourgeois cast of
mind. ‘I scorn base getting and unworthy penurious saving’, wrote one of them,
Sir John Oglander, in 1647, thereby disavowing two of the main hallmarks of
the capitalist. Their fortune followed much the same lines as those of the higher
aristocracy. Some of them fell on hard times, were unable to meet their debts,
sold their property; others prospered from mistakes, invested in land or business
at a time when the returns were promising and founded great fortunes. The
gentry increased in numbers and wealth, due principally to the high turnover of
land in the property market.
How this worked may be illustrated by the sales of land made by Lord
Henry Berkeley between 1561 and 1613. Of a total sales value of about £42,000,
over £39,000 in land was sold to thirteen members of the higher gentry, the
balance being purchased by twenty-five other persons of unspecified rank.
Building their fortunes in this way, by purchase of property, many new families
made their way up the social ladder. In Wiltshire between 1565 and 1602 no less
than 109 new gentry names had been added to the original total of 203. This
swelling in their numbers and wealth gave the gentry a new significance in the
eyes of contemporaries. The political theorist James Harrington went so far as to
claim in his Oceana (1656) that the gentry had become the richest estate in the
realm: ‘in our days, the clergy being destroyed, the lands in possession of the
people overbalance those held by the nobility, at least nine in ten’. Another

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contemporary claimed in 1600 that the richer gentry had the incomes of an earl,
and it was said in 1628 that the House of Commons could buy the House of
Lords three times over. Like many contemporary claims, these statements have
little proof to support them. It is true that the number of gentry increased and it
is most likely that as a group they held more wealth in their hands by 1660 than
a century previously. But there was no radical transfer of power or of wealth from
the aristocracy to the gentry.
The emergence of the gentry cannot in any case be measured merely in terms
of wealth, for there were still few of them who could compete with the great
aristocratic landlords, and even the sales of royalist lands during the republican
period of the mid-seventeenth century did not create a new much-landed gentry
class. If their significance is to be gauged, it must be in terms of a steady accumu-
lation of power in the countryside (rather than at court, where few gentry pros-
pered). That power was based largely on land, but was precipitated by the events
of the 1640s and also by the devolution of authority, after the later seventeenth
century, upon the one class which had maintained its hold on the people of
England.
The changing balance between old and new wealth can be seen in northern
Italy, where the rising class of industrialists and traders eventually transformed
themselves into the patriciate of the cities, reinvesting their money in public
office and land. With a few exceptions (Lucca was one) the northern Italian cities
became re-aristocratised (or ‘refeudalised’, the term used by some Italian his-
torians). In Milan families that had made their fortune in munitions in the early
sixteenth century had moved out into country estates by the end of the century.
Some claimed to exercise feudal authority over their peasantry. The economic
difficulties of the seventeenth century, however, began to hit even the new
nobility. In one noble estate in Lombardy, state annuities in the period, 4 per
cent, promised a higher rate of return than the land, which gave only a 1 per cent
annual profit. The restricted social world of the city-state limited the intake of
new blood, and gradually old and new elites alike began to decay, as in Venice.
In Siena between 1560 and 1760 the size of the elite shrank by 58 per cent.
Although the city was nominally a republic it had become an aristocratic state,
where noble incomes were drawn from land, not from trade, and where by the
early eighteenth century the Loggia della Mercanzia ceased to be a meeting place
for the business community and became the place where on a summer’s day the
Sienese nobles might meet to chat.

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Most of the observations we have made about the economic difficulties of

the aristocracy do not apply to the greater part of eastern Europe. Thanks to
the more feudal landed structure in the east (see Chapter 6), the nobles there
faced different problems. Nevertheless, in the east as well there was a change in
fortunes: the root cause in most cases was political rather than economic. The
rise of the Russian gentry is associated above all with the struggle of the boyars
and magnates against the absolutism of Ivan IV (the Terrible).
Ivan’s attempts in 1564–72 to crush the aristocratic opposition ruthlessly by
confiscating their lands and destroying their persons was, from the political point
of view, a complete success.28 His two principal demands were for a reliable mili-
tary force and adequate revenue. He obtained both by introducing the basic
features of the ‘service state’, in which the state offered protection in return for
services performed. In 1556, for instance, the tsar decreed that landlords were to
supply one fully equipped horse-soldier for each quantity of land held; alterna-
tively, this service could be commuted into a money payment. This was to intro-
duce feudal principles that were falling into disuse in western Europe. Ivan,
however, went further. He arbitrarily divided his kingdom up into a vast demesne
territory controlled by a court called an oprichnina (comprising half of Muscovy
and particularly the area around Moscow) and a territory in which boyar land-
ownership was conceded, the zemshchina. Within the oprichnina area boyar
power was abolished, estates destroyed and opponents executed. To enable this
revolution to succeed, Ivan gathered to him the gentry class, the dvoryanstvo,
who were liberally rewarded out of the land confiscated from the boyars. Writing
to the tsar in 1573 of the excesses committed by the oprichniki, who carried out
Ivan’s policies in the oprichnina, the opposition boyar Prince Kurbsky denounced
‘the laying waste of your land, both by you yourself and by your children of
darkness [the oprichniki]’. Kurbsky’s rhetoric mirrored the very great immediate
evils brought about by the oprichnina: political and social discontent was wide-
spread, agriculture was ruined, depopulation common and the military defences
of Muscovy were shattered.
On the ruins of this old order, the gentry rose into prominence as the new
noble class. The process was continued into the early seventeenth century under
the Romanovs. In 1566 Ivan had summoned an assembly called the Zemsky
Sobor, consisting mainly of gentry in the service of the crown, to serve as a coun-
terbalance to the boyar assembly. The gentry were also granted estates, but on
new terms of tenure; whereas the old magnates had held their lands freely, as

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votchina, the new landowners held it on terms of service, as pomestye, and were
known as pomeshchiki.
As the Russian gentry established their predominance through the land,
so too the Polish gentry, the szlachta, became the noble class of Poland by
extending their control over the soil and over agricultural production. In the
early fifteenth century the noble estate was composed, on the one hand, of
the great magnates with vast demesnes – families such as the Ostorogs, the
Leszczynskis and the Radziwills – and, on the other, of the numerous company
of knights and gentry. The latter increased their political power primarily by
acting as a body to secure constitutional guarantees of their rights and status, and
by establishing their authority at a local level through county committees or
sejms. By the late fifteenth century the local sejms had given rise to a national
Sejm or parliament composed of three orders: the king, a senate (consisting of
bishops and senior nobles in the administration) and a chamber of deputies
(consisting almost entirely of szlachta). The constitution of this parliament was
officially confirmed by the king in 1505, when he promised not to act on any
important issue without its consent. Numerically superior in the Sejm, the
gentry inevitably came to dominate its councils and used it to promulgate legis-
lation that served their own interests. By the late sixteenth century, despite the
continuing influence of the great magnates, it was the szlachta who represented
the nobility of Poland.
Like the gentry elsewhere, the szlachta were not an economically homoge-
neous group. Throughout the Polish territories (essentially, Poland and the
Grand Duchy of Lithuania) the noble class made up about 15 per cent of the
population. But over half of this number were very minor gentry indeed, enjoying
noble rights and status but possessing little more land than an ordinary peasant.
Despite this, it was the land that was the basis of szlachta power, and to defend
their interests they took care to limit the powers both of the clergy and of the
townships. Clerical posts were infiltrated by gentry, and the Church was deprived
in 1562 of its disciplinary powers over heresy. In 1565 the Sejm restricted the
activities of the merchant class. In this way the so-called ‘republic of nobles’ came
into being, where all gentry, of high and low degree, shared equally in the govern-
ment of Poland.
In other lands of central and eastern Europe it is also possible to talk of a rise
of the gentry, associated with a change in the exploitation of the soil. Perhaps the
most outstanding example is East Prussia, where the new nobles, the Junkers,

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made their appearance in the fifteenth century from the knights, soldiers and
adventurers of the German frontier.29 The process of recruitment of this new
landed estate, which must be looked upon essentially as a squirearchy or gentry,
since it possessed little of the elitist ethic of the nobility of western Europe,
continued throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
One way or another, despite phases of problems and decline, the rich in
Europe managed to protect their incomes and affirm their status. The ‘land revo-
lution’ which followed the price rise was for several reasons no less significant
than the price revolution. First, the land protected the privileged. The holders of
estates and manors in Germany, France, England, Italy, the noble lords whose
soil produced corn, whose fields pastured sheep, whose peasants brought in dairy
produce, kept their heads above the waves of inflation. They raised their rents
where possible or necessary, but most important of all began to exploit their
resources to benefit from the favourable level of prices. One success story was the
Seymour family, whose manorial holdings in Wiltshire produced receipts that
rose from £475 in 1575 to £3,204 in 1649–50. The aristocracy – at least the
greater part of it – was not only saved but entrenched itself even more firmly into
the political life of Europe. Second, the sure guarantee offered by land in a world
where most other values seemed to be collapsing inspired those who had been
successful in their own fragile enterprises – finance, commerce – to think of their
families and to buy an estate or two on which to spend their declining days.
Land was both the conserver and the solvent of society; while preserving the old
forces, it also gave greater opportunities for wealth and mobility to those who
had made their fortunes in professions frowned on by the upper classes.

Crisis and resilience of the aristocracy

Like every social class, the upper elite also changed in role and in fortune. Guided
to some extent by commentators of that time, historians have often given more
emphasis to notable changes (the decline of great lords, the rise of the gentry)
and paid less attention to structural continuities. More recent studies accept that
changes occurred, but rather as readjustments within the regional and status
parameters of traditional society. One result has been to cast more light on the
remarkable phenomenon of the survival of the noble elite.30 In the seventeenth
century, for example, up to a half of the seven hundred Lancashire families
claiming gentry status changed, but their overall numbers remained much the

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same,31 demonstrating that the elite benefited from social mobility and a lack of
exclusiveness, and was capable of continually replenishing itself.
Observers in early modern Europe frequently commented on the decline in
the political function of the great nobles. The Venetian ambassador wrote in
1622 of the English aristocracy: ‘the magnates are mostly hated for their vain
ostentation, better suited to their ancient power than their present condition’.
Similar statements were made at various times of the nobles in the Netherlands,
France and Spain. The most visible reason for the decay in noble power was the
increase in Crown initiative, which affected the elite in three main ways: by a
reduction in their military role, by exclusion from high office and by greater
subordination to the law. In all three ways, however, nobles as a class ended up
by integrating themselves into the new structure of authority. Their numbers fell
dramatically, not least because of a failure to produce heirs, but this too was no
obstacle.
Support for Crown power grew, but monarchs were never in principle hostile
to the interests of the aristocracy. On the contrary, kings recognised the nobles as
the natural and traditional rulers of the people, and the only foundation of the
state. They needed them as public ornaments, as administrators and generals
and as pillars of the social structure.32 Though impatient with the proven
incapacity of sections of the elite – ‘their contempt of the various branches of
knowledge and the little trouble they take to fit themselves for various posts’, as
the Duke of Sully put it in the early 1600s – the crown never proposed to super-
sede the nobles in posts of influence. The whole mentality of royal power was too
aristocratic for that. As the state grew in power, therefore, it found itself in an
increasingly illogical position. On the one hand it relied upon and fostered the
hereditary ruling class, and on the other it was obliged to look outside the ranks
of that class for the necessary cooperation in setting up a strong administration.
This created an internal contradiction within the state, one that would be
resolved by radical, even violent, methods in the course of the seventeenth
century.
The first and greatest danger facing the monarchies was the armed might of
the nobles, as we have seen above. Much of the success in controlling noble belli-
cosity must be attributed to the fostering of a strong sense of personal loyalty to
the Crown and to the gradual absorption of noble forces into those of the state.
The results varied from country to country. In England, observed Raleigh, ‘the
force by which our kings in former times were troubled is vanished away’. Strong

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Crown pressure to keep the peace, the inability of nobles to afford private armies,
the relative absence of foreign wars (while three-quarters of the titled English
peerage before the 1550s had done some war service, by 1576 only one in four
had military experience) all helped the English monarchy. In Spain Philip II
drew the nobles into a partnership in which they were given control over all local
militia, with each grandee taking command in his own province, while the
Crown independently recruited the armies serving abroad. Ironically, therefore,
in Spain the grandees became militarily more powerful: a notable case was that
of the dukes of Medina-Sidonia, whose authority over south-west Spain was
extended. The state had no other provincial officials it could use; the peace,
therefore, was kept in Spain, but at a price. In France it was the power of the
nobles to raise troops in the provinces (the Montmorency rebellion in Languedoc
1632, the noble Fronde 1650) that committed Louis XIV to follow a policy
different from that of Spain.
Armed rebellions arose in part from noble complaints that they were excluded
from high office. In medieval times it had been the right of magnates to give
advice to the king, usually through the council, and to hold the chief posts in
their provinces. From the later fifteenth century, the Crown was forced to exclude
overpowerful or unreliable nobles from positions of authority. It was normally
impossible to diminish their power in their home provinces; only time would
attenuate this. At the centre of the administration, however, the state could build
up a bureaucracy consisting of lesser men whom it could trust and who did not
rely on any great lord for preferment. With few exceptions, this bureaucracy was
drawn from university graduates trained in law (see Chapter 8). Though few of
the new administrators had titles, by the time they reached the upper echelons
of the state and judicial apparatus they were already of confirmed noble rank.
All the western monarchies quickly replaced aristocrats with the new trained
bureaucrats, but in no sense was this a resort to low-class officials: the adminis-
trators were of noble status, necessarily so in virtue of the authority that they
exercised over others, and many founded dynasties.
Subordination to the rule of law was seldom a matter of law enforcement,
despite the exceptional executions of the Duke of Norfolk, the Duke of Montmorency
and the Justiciar of Aragon. The state could legislate through the sumptuary laws,
could prohibit duelling, could restrict the competence of seigneurial courts, but in
practice the rule of law could only operate if the nobles adjusted themselves psycho-
logically to the growing authority of the Crown. With time, they did so. Governments

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were aware of the delicate situation and trod carefully. The law of treason, for
example, seems to have been applied rigorously only in England. In France, as late
as the 1650s the state refused to act with severity against the open treason of the
cities of Bordeaux and Marseille (both attempted to ally militarily with Spain). The
Prince of Condé, who led a Spanish army against his own country, was eventually
pardoned and allowed back into his estates. It was in any case in the interests of
the nobles themselves to maintain stability in their territories. The networks of
influence in the provinces reinforced the position of both patrons and clients and
maintained the balance of power without necessarily reducing the role of the
aristocracy.
The aristocracy began to be tamed, though their power base was never seri-
ously undermined. A census of New Castile in 1597 showed that the lords
controlled nearly 40 per cent of the towns and had jurisdiction over 34 per cent
of the population. In Old Castile by the eighteenth century 47 per cent of the
population still lived under seigneurial jurisdiction; in the province of Salamanca
as many as 60 per cent. Great nobles such as the Constable of Castile and the
Duke of Infantado were seigneurs in over 500 towns each. While continuing to
exercise extensive authority, however, the Castilian nobility accepted the role of
the Crown. The partnership between Crown and nobles, initiated by Ferdinand
and Isabella, created a political stability almost unique in western Europe: there
was not a single noble rebellion between 1516 and 1705.
In England the Tudor monarchy (1485–1603) introduced administrative
changes that completely altered the balance of power in the realm. The extensive
authority assumed by the royal council in London and in the provinces was
wielded by nobles and prelates who had adopted the cause of the Crown. But the
men on whom the real task of administration fell more and more were the gentry,
the class from whom sheriffs and justices of the peace tended to be chosen. The
gentry were, in addition, the group that formed the bulk of the membership of
the House of Commons, whose constitutional importance grew enormously in
the late sixteenth century. Cut off for the most part from participation in local
and central government, a task for which they never had much taste anyway, the
aristocracy depended for advancement on the great offices of state that lay within
the gift of the monarch: lord-lieutenancies of counties, posts and sinecures in the
royal household and in the military and diplomatic services. The traditional
loyalty and deference to peers in their country seats still continued to a very great
extent, but even this link was dissolving as feudal tenures disappeared and tenants

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became less dependent on their lords. Inevitably, then, the peers gravitated
towards the court and it remained for the Crown to decide among which groups
the favours should be divided. ‘Gratify your nobility’, Lord Burghley advised
Elizabeth in 1579, ‘and the principal persons of your realm, to bind them fast
to you.’
The efforts of the French monarchy to tame its nobles were constant, from
the time of Catherine de Médicis through Richelieu’s ministry to the reign
of Louis XIV. Under Richelieu plotters were executed: Chalais in 1626,
Montmorency in 1632, Cinq-Mars in 1642. Great military commands were
taken away from the grandees: the offices of admiral and constable of France
were abolished in 1627, and unreliable great nobles removed from the governor-
ships of frontier provinces. In part because of the great size and population of
France, the Crown was unable to control noble separatism, support for popular
rebels and illegal activity; all this made the Fronde possible. Beginning with the
introduction of intendants in the 1630s, and the reform of judicial administra-
tion in the 1660s, a more stable regime began to be created, in which the nobles
were guaranteed all their privileges but effectively excluded from day-to-day
government. The ‘absolutism’ of Louis XIV brought peace not by eliminating the
aristocracy but by redefining their function.
Nobles in former times had earned their social ascent through distinction in
warfare. The western monarchies now played down the emphasis on war and
preferred to reward on their own terms, which included service to the state in
administration, diplomacy and commerce. Loyalty to the Crown became the
major road to preferment. Both old and new nobles benefited. In Spain there
had been 124 titled nobles in 1597, by 1631 there were 241 and Philip IV alone
created nearly 100 new titles. Philip in 1625 explained: ‘Without reward and
punishment no monarchy can be preserved. We have no money, so we have
thought it right and necessary to increase the number of honours’. Between 1551
and 1575, 354 new members of the Order of Santiago had been created; from
1621 to 1645 the total shot up to 2,288. Charles II (1665–1700) created during
his reign as many new honours for the elite as all his predecessors had done in the
preceding two centuries. In Spanish-ruled Naples the number of titled barons
increased threefold between 1590 and 1669.
Before the accession of James I to the English throne in 1603 the realm had
about 500 knights. In the first four months of his reign he created no fewer than
906 new ones; by the end of 1604 the total of new creations was 1,161. The

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titled aristocracy were also affected: in the thirteen years of 1615–28 James and
later Charles I increased their numbers from 81 to 126. This increase pales before
that achieved in Sweden, where Queen Christina within the space of ten years
doubled the number of noble families and sextupled the number of counts and
barons. In Hungary the new titles created between 1606 and 1657 tripled the
number of higher nobles.
In nearly all cases the noble titles were sold: the creations aimed to raise cash
and did not form part of a deliberate policy of social advancement. Louis XIV, as
we have seen, resorted to selling titles on a large scale in the 1690s in order to
raise money. The flood of new creations, or ‘inflation of honours’ as it has been
called, did not necessarily placate the already discontented peerage. ‘It may be
doubted’, wrote Sir Edward Walker in the late seventeenth century, ‘whether the
dispensing of honours with so liberal a hand was not one of the beginnings of
general discontents, especially among persons of great extraction.’ In England
and in Sweden the resentment led to the overthrow of the ruler, and in France
helped to provoke the Fronde. The consequences, however, were not always
negative. In both France and Spain the creations helped to raise up a newer class
of administrators: the families of Phélypeaux in France and of Ronquillo in
Castile were typical of the rising elite of state nobles who served the crown with
distinction for over two centuries.
Though the Crown appeared to be chiefly responsible for their difficulties, it
was also the most reliable ally of the nobles. In the first place, the state guaran-
teed the integrity and status of the noble class. In France from 1555 to 1632
several edicts legislated a fine of 1,000 livres against any commoner usurping
nobility. In 1666 and throughout the reign of Louis XIV a thorough inquiry into
all noble titles was undertaken and rigorous proofs demanded; intendants were
ordered to impose heavy fines. In Spain the inflation of honours led in practice
to a more rigid application of the criteria for nobility. In the second place, the
Crown extended its system of pensions so as to save aristocrats about to topple
into penury: both in Versailles and in Madrid the scale of handouts gave visitors
the impression of an impoverished aristocracy. Poor relief for nobles was in fact
of long standing: in 1614 the French treasury was giving out sums of 10 livres to
‘poor gentlemen . . . to help them live’; and in 1639 the king reminded his judges
‘not to imprison nobles for debt, nor to sell their goods’.
Third, the Crown gave legal protection to noble property. Several countries
had laws allowing only nobles to buy noble land. In Denmark this had the effect

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of preserving within the class the large amount of land that might have been sold
to pay noble debts, estimated in 1660 as equivalent to the value of one-third of
all their land. A more rigorous form of control was the entail, a legal device disal-
lowing any alienation of property. Known as mayorazgo in Spain, the Crown
from Ferdinand the Catholic (1505) onwards made it obligatory on the gran-
dees. This preserved noble assets and thus allowed the ruling class to serve the
state decently. However, precisely because land could not be sold to meet
expenses, many lords fell deeply into debt. This made them more dependent on
the Crown, which in return took exceptional measures to save them. In 1606 the
Duke of Sessa died ‘out of melancholy at being ruined and because the king did
not give him a grant to pay his debts’. In fact, Philip III met one-quarter of the
dead duke’s debts and settled an income on his widow and son. Entails were
common in Italy in the sixteenth century, and in France, Germany and England
in the seventeenth. Because of the problems caused by entails (they provoked
indebtedness and depressed the land market) primogeniture was preferred in
some states since it guaranteed succession to the eldest son. Piedmont attempted
in 1598 to limit the period of entails, and in 1648 Charles Emmanuel II issued
an edict encouraging the practice of primogeniture, ‘since it so concerns us to
maintain and develop the splendour of the nobility’.33
The power elite also had to evolve their own strategies for survival.34 A good
marriage strategy was essential, in part to produce male heirs and so compensate
for the notorious inability of elites to survive over many generations, and in part
to restrict any movement outside the closed circle of the peer group. Thanks to
state protection and their own efforts, the aristocracy survived. Their estates were
favoured by law, their pockets were often flattered by pensions, they were exempted
from most taxation, their persons were frequently immune from criminal proceed-
ings. By the early eighteenth century their lifestyle and political role had altered,
but they remained as powerful as ever; continuity rather than change was their
leitmotiv.35 A comparison of the status of the nobles in Bayeux in lower Normandy
in both 1552 and 1640 shows that in both years the old nobles controlled four-
fifths of the total income in the élection.36 In Holland the old nobility retired from
active political life but held on to their estates and survived instead of decaying. In
a political structure that was actively republican, they kept a hold on power by
transforming themselves into rural counterparts of the governing class of patrician
regents.37 For England it has been argued, on the basis of land sales in the counties
of Hertfordshire, Northampton and Northumberland, that a solid and unchanging

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core of aristocrat and gentry families ran the countryside from generation to
generation, despite the entry of others (just over 10 per cent) into their ranks.38
Over and above simple survival, the upper elite succeeded also in communicating
to society its scale of values. The middle elite, whether urban patricians or state
officials, imitated its behaviour. The English nobles, moreover, did not make the
mistake of relapsing into indolence. They maintained high cultural standards that
set the standard for social taste. In this way they could justify their role in a world
that would soon begin to develop more democratic ideals.

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THE MIDDLE ELITE

We merchants are a species of gentry that have grown into the world this
last century, and are as honourable as you landed folk that have always
thought yourselves so much above us.
A Bristol merchant, in Richard Steele’s Conscious Lovers (1722)

Urban and rural elites, norms and values; Trade: a classic role; Elites and financial
power; Corporate roles and the function of office; Social mobility of the middle elite;
Betrayal by the bourgeoisie?

Urban and rural elites, norms and values

The two most powerful sections of the elite were, we have seen, the nobility and
the Church. Far more numerous than them both were the commoners, who did
not enjoy distinctive privileges but who included a substantial sector that drew
wealth and status from the towns. In his Traité des Ordres (1613) the French jurist
Loyseau used the word bourgeois to refer to the inhabitant of a town or bourg.
More commonly the term referred to the urban elite and it was in this sense that
it was used in Germany (bürger) and England (burgher). When referring to the
middle section of society, Loyseau talked of ‘the Third Estate’, which again signi-
fied the urban classes, since of the three estates normally represented in political
assemblies of the time the third was drawn from representatives of the towns. The
term ‘middle elite’ rather than ‘bourgeois’ will be used here for convenience to
refer to the nonaristocratic elites of both town and country, but no single word is
appropriate.1 The upper strata of this elite occupied different positions in the
social scale, drew their wealth from different sources and enjoyed differing privi-
leges as well as distinct norms and ideals. Moreover, the leading citizens of many
of the principal cities of Europe were in fact already nobles – as in the case of the
elite capitouls (magistrates) of Toulouse – or about to become nobles.

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Normally the members of this elite did not have, as the traditional aristocracy
did, a supposed ethic to which writers could devote treatises. But they possessed
a coherent pattern of values that defined their conduct and their aspirations.2
From this point of view, what bound them together were shared values and
shared contexts, for example as property owners or as members of professional
groups.3 Since their values always, in the society of that time, involved kinship
groups, they strove to give permanence to what their families possessed, some-
times through visible proofs such as lineage trees and even coats of arms. The
coat of arms, in effect, defined achievement and helps historians to identify
members of the elite. The increase of the gentry class in Warwickshire, for
example, can be estimated by the difference between 155 families with coats of
arms in 1500 and 288 with the same distinction in 1642.4 But not all the middle
elite, even in England, yearned after courts of arms or lineage trees.
Elites were participants in a process of change, rather than fixed members of
a social order; as a consequence, they are difficult to measure in size, role or
status. Attrition through lack of male succession, or through rapid mobility from
below, might change their numbers radically: new families who had emerged
after 1500 formed 80 per cent of those claiming gentry status in Dorset in 1642.5
In economic terms, the middle elite were thought of as sandwiched between two
other strata, those at the bottom who might have to toil for their living and those
who lived off unearned income at the top. At the lowest level the middle elite
consisted of petty traders, minor officials, prosperous artisans and others who
tended to have independent means and were not in the employ of another.
Contemporary usage, however, tended to ignore these lower categories and to lay
stress on the well off who were, to cite a statement of the Parlement of Paris in
1560, ‘good citizens living in the cities whether royal officials, merchants, people
who live off their rents, or others’. All these terms imply the possession of prop-
erty, leading to the conclusion that, though there were different types and status
levels among the bourgeoisie, possession of substantial property was always an
essential trait.
‘Good citizens’ signified that in many towns the citizen (bourgeois, bürger)
was one who had been formally accepted into the ‘book of citizens’, which
bestowed several privileges of residence and taxation. In seventeenth-century
Lille the inhabitants were divided into ‘citizens’ (bourgeois) and ‘commoners’;
the former made up one-fifth of the population. ‘Royal officials’ (noted in 1560
by the Parlement of Paris) were evidence that, as the bureaucracy of state grew,

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such officials became more prominent in the towns. Loyseau in his Traité placed
financial officials and lawyers at the apex of his ‘Third Estate’. ‘Merchants’ were
likewise an integral part: Loyseau wrote that ‘the merchants are the lowest of the
people enjoying an honourable status, and are described as honorables hommes or
honnêtes personnes and bourgeois des villes, titles not given to farmers or artisans
and even less to labourers, who are all regarded as commoners’.
Whether through trade, social activity or politics, the ‘citizen’ – whose status
was identified with the urban centre, not with the yet unborn centralised state –
was a key player in the development of certain countries in early modern Europe,
notably England and the Netherlands. One became a citizen through special qual-
ifications, such as membership of guilds, birth and kinship, and ownership of
property. Women also had the right to citizenship, since many women were heads
of households and practised trades, but in general the institution was male-
dominated (in Nördlingen, for example, the citizens were over 80 per cent male).
Being a citizen in its turn bestowed political and social duties, such as the duty to
pay taxes. It has been argued that in the Dutch Republic ‘citizenship arrangements
were a key factor in creating both high tax returns and economic growth’, signi-
fying that citizenship was a relevant element in fostering economic development.6
None of these categories was in any sense fixed or stagnant, and there was
considerable mobility through the middle ranks of society. Some rose into the
bourgeoisie from the shop, some from the plough. In upper Poitou in the
sixteenth century, rich peasants put their sons through university, managed to
buy them a minor office and so initiated their rise into the bourgeoisie. In
Burgundy in 1515 the Ramillon family was still practising agriculture in the
town of Charlay. By the seventeenth century some members of the family had
moved to Varzy: there they took up small trading, as butcher or baker. By 1671
Étienne Ramillon had become a merchant draper. In 1712 a grandson of his
became an avocat to the Parlement of Burgundy7 and therefore a full member of
the middle elite.

Trade: a classic role

Because of imprecision about status, it is difficult to determine the size of the

urban elite. Where figures are available (usually tax figures) they tend to describe
a town oligarchy rather than an economic class. In Venice in the late sixteenth
century the cittadini were 6 per cent of the city’s population. In Norwich in the

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early century the upper middle class numbered about 6 per cent of the popula-
tion and owned about 60 per cent of the lands and goods for which taxes were
paid to the city. A further 14 per cent could be included as coming within the
definition of ‘middle class’, but these were somewhat poorer. In Coventry at
the same period 45 per cent of the property was owned by only 2 per cent of the
people, among them the grocer Richard Marler, who paid 11 per cent of the
town’s subsidy contributions. In later seventeenth-century Beauvais some 300
out of a total of 3,250 tax-paying families constituted the upper bourgeoisie, but
even within these 300 there was a smaller elite of 100 families.
Most of the middle elite achieved status through one of three principal chan-
nels: trade, finance and office. By these means they obtained the capital that
most came to invest in land. The trading bourgeois was a type that had been
known in the Middle Ages and was to be captured perfectly in seventeenth-
century Dutch portraits. He could be found in all the major seaports, industrial
centres and market towns of Europe: in cities such as Antwerp, Liège and Medina
del Campo. Unlike the ‘citizen’ bourgeois, who was firmly rooted in the confines
of his own region, the trading bourgeois had universal horizons, carrying on
negotiations with financiers and merchants throughout the country and over-
seas. He had to be capable of handling large sources of capital, which for him
were little pieces of paper (bills of exchange), and of taking risks with his own
money and that of his associates. The trading community was already interna-
tionalised at the beginning of the sixteenth century, with Genoese merchants in
Seville, Spanish merchants in Nantes and Antwerp, Netherlands merchants in
the Baltic. The chief trading nations were all Catholic, with Antwerp at the heart
of the system.
The Reformation, by taking over many of the trading routes of the older
system, helped to give Protestant enterprise a great stimulus in northern Europe.
The growth of Amsterdam was particularly remarkable. Sir William Temple in
the later seventeenth century testified to the bourgeois ethic of the Hollanders,
‘every man spending less than he has coming in’. Trade, however, was not an
assured and permanent source of profits; and as merchants made money they
tended to diversify their investments in order to gain security. In Amsterdam the
commercial classes became more exclusive in structure as they grew wealthier. In
part this was because of business marriages, in part because of a wish to conserve
control over political life. In 1615 a burgomaster of Amsterdam reported that
the elite – the regent class – were still active in trade; by 1652 it was said that the

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regents were no longer in trade ‘but derived their income from houses, lands and
money at interest’.
Examples from the rest of western Europe show that it is wrong to see the
merchant bourgeoisie as one single-mindedly devoted to reinvesting in commerce.
All who made fortunes were concerned to diversify their income. In Liège, most
big bourgeois in 1577–8 drew their money from both trade and finance. In 1595
a foreigner, Jean Curtius (from the town of Den Bosch), had the biggest single
income in Liège, drawn from munitions. During his most active period of capital
accumulation, in 1595–1603, Curtius invested in precisely the things that
attracted the merchants of Amsterdam: land and rents. In Spain the financier
Simon Ruiz, of Medina del Campo, belonged to a family specialising in trade
with France. He grew rich and founded a hospital for his home town. But from
1576, when the trading world began to get shaky in part because of the Dutch
revolt, Ruiz moved his money into public financing. The next generation of his
family began to dissipate his wealth and preferred to abandon the money market
for the desirable honours of noble status.
These illustrations of a general phenomenon help to place in context Jacques
Savary’s Le Parfait Négociant (1675), where an exaggerated contrast was drawn
between the merchants of France and Holland:

From the moment that a merchant in France has acquired great wealth in
trade, his children, far from following him in this profession, on the contrary
enter public office . . . whereas in Holland the children of merchants ordi-
narily follow the profession and the trade of their fathers. Money is not with-
drawn from trade but continues in it constantly from father to son, and from
family to family as a result of the alliances which merchants make with one
another.

Savary’s view was in part anticipated by a report made to Cardinal Richelieu in

1626: ‘What has hurt trade is that all the merchants, when they become rich, do
not remain in commerce but spend their goods on offices for their children’. It
was realised at the time that alternative investments (offices, rentes) were attracting
money away from commerce. In 1560 the Chancellor L’Hospital had complained
that ‘trade has decayed greatly because of the issue of rentes’. Among the merchant
bourgeoisie of Amiens twenty-seven had been principally active in the textile
industry in 1589–90; only six of them were still active thirty-five years later. A

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Lyon merchant of the time protested that ‘trade creates wealth; and nearly all the
best families of Paris, Lyon, Rouen, Orléans and Bordeaux originate not only
from lawyers, notaries and attorneys, but also from merchants. . . . The merchant
acquires, the office-holder keeps, the nobleman dissipates.’ The complaints about
France, if taken literally, would point to decay of the merchant classes by the early
eighteenth century, a manifestly absurd conclusion. What happened was a steady
move towards securing the future of one’s family in terms of tangible wealth and
social position. The fortune left by the Beauvais merchant Lucien Motte in 1650
shows the beginnings of this diversification: 4 per cent of his assets were now in
land and 27 per cent in rentes and other assets external to commerce.
The trading elite had its own different status levels, determined by wealth and
social practice. Large-scale merchants were very clearly distinguished from small
traders, a difference perhaps most clearly reflected in the guild system. Large
traders in France were organised into guilds known as the ‘merchant bodies’,
corps de marchands, while small traders were grouped into ‘professional commu-
nities’, communautés d’arts et métiers. There were, inevitably, many variations in
practice from town to town and country to country. In seventeenth-century
Spain the goldsmiths, for example, were still arguing that they were more than
mere artisans, and by the eighteenth century they succeeded in being accepted as
capable of nobility.8

Elites and financial power

Rentes were loans made by the public to the state in return for annual payment
of interest. They existed in Italy in the Middle Ages, and most other states began
to issue them in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In France the rentes, though
technically a loan to the crown, were issued by the Hôtel de Ville at Paris. In
Spain state loans were called juros, private and municipal loans censos. In Italy the
monti, as the public debts were called, had long played a part in municipal
finance.
These annuities were a tempting form of investment, particularly where the
state offered both security and a high rate of interest (about 7 per cent in the late
sixteenth century). In an age when banking was relatively unknown, the author-
ities became bankers, borrowing from citizens and paying them their interest out
of taxation. In late fifteenth-century Florence it led to the emergence of a rentier
mentality among the wealthier bourgeoisie and to the concentration of financial

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wealth in the hands of the upper rank of citizens, since it was these who controlled
the machinery of state. It is possible that investment in the monti diverted capital
from entrepreneurial activities. A comparable situation prevailed in other parts
of Italy at a later period. In the Como region near the Duchy of Milan, a vigorous
and wealthy middle class existed. In addition to their other interests, the citizens
of Como devoted themselves to moneylending. Their clients were both peasant
communities and the government, and from these the bourgeoisie drew their
annuities, their censi. In 1663 the rural community of Gravedona, one among
others, complained that it was crippled by debts because of the censi it had to pay
to former councillors and officials of the city.
Investment in rentes was never in itself open to criticism. Critics were
concerned rather with the diversion of funds away from other productive enter-
prises. The Amsterdam bourgeoisie was a rentier class as large as any in western
Europe. Louis Trip, for instance, at his death in 1684 left something like 157,000
florins (in today’s money, around 1.7 million euros) in rentes alone. Yet Dutch
investment in this sort of commodity took place only after the capital demands
of commerce and industry had been met, so rentes tended to eat up only a
proportion of working capital. In Germany, France and Spain, on the other
hand, the devotion to rentes often amounted to a passion.
For many investors in Spain, the juros represented quite simply their prin-
cipal source of income. The nobles invested no less than the bourgeois, and
examples of nobles who in 1680 depended on the juros alone for their cash
income are revealing: the Viscount of Ambite, ‘whose whole income consisted in
them’; the Viscount de la Frontera, ‘who had no other income to live on’.
Innumerable families, particularly widows, drew on juros as though they were a
pension scheme. Those who lived off the interest from annuities were in effect
living off the state, without making any productive contribution to it. Striking
examples of this are from the city of Valladolid, where 232 citizens in 1597 drew
more money from the government by way of juros than was paid by the whole
city in taxes, and Ciudad Rodrigo, where in 1667 the holders of juros drew 160
per cent more from their annuities than the whole city paid in taxes.
The peasantry and the village communities of Europe tended to depend
exclusively on the bourgeois moneylenders of the towns for the capital they
needed in order to improve their landholdings. The cash available to the peasant
was never very considerable; in times of deflation or disaster, when credit was
most needed for improvement and survival, the situation became critical. The

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peasantry inevitably became the largest class of borrowers. The accounts of the
Valladolid notary Antonio de Cigales show, for example, that in the years 1576–7
over 51 per cent of his debtors were peasants. The sums were invariably small,
but certainly helped the peasant to make ends meet and to develop his holdings
when necessary.
It was when the question of payment of annuities and redemption of the loan
arose that difficulties occurred. A peasant who did not manage to repay the loan
when a good harvest came often lost the chance forever. A bad year could bring
with it the beginnings of an inability to pay; this in turn could lead to permanent
indebtedness and final bankruptcy. The rentier could step in and confiscate the
landholding that had been the guarantee of the loan. In the long periods of
agrarian depression that recurred in the rural economy, thousands of peasant
holdings passed out of the hands of their owners into those of the urban bour-
geoisie. Castile in the seventeenth century was amply populated with towns and
villages labouring under the burden of censos: one such was Aldeanueva de
Figueroa, which in the years 1664–86 alone alienated over one-third of its land
to the middle elite of Salamanca.
The transference of land from the peasantry is relatively easy to understand,
but there were other sections of society that also became indebted to the rentiers.
In the number of Antonio de Cigales’s debtors for 1576–7, about 10 per cent
were artisans and 13 per cent were holders of offices, while nearly 3 per cent
were nobles. Not all of these necessarily lost their property, but the cross-section
of society that did tend to lose land was surprisingly wide. In one of the parishes
in the Rouen area in 1521, of a total of 288 people selling their plots of land, 183
were peasant farmers, 52 were artisans, 20 were labourers, 19 were bourgeois
and 14 were priests. The purchasers were almost without exception from the
middle elite.
Loans, therefore, became an instrument for the deterioration and expropria-
tion of an independent peasantry and promoted the conquest of the soil by the
urban classes. The transfer of land from peasant to bourgeois was not, of course,
caused exclusively or directly by rentes. The economic circumstances of the early
sixteenth century had already given a firm impetus to the process. But peasant
indebtedness to rentiers certainly played a large part in it. By the mid-sixteenth
century over half the land around Montpellier was said to belong to the city’s
inhabitants. Whereas tax officials living in the city held only 15 acres of
Montpellier territory in 1547, by 1680 they held 544.

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The upper nobility also were prey to the activities of the town moneylenders.
The scale of indebtedness of the Castilian nobility was so alarming (the Count of
Benavente in the early seventeenth century paid out 45 per cent of his annual
income for censos) that the Crown stepped in to save its ruling class. By royal
decrees, individual noble debtors were allowed to seek reductions in the rate of
interest they paid; if this was refused by creditors, the nobles were allowed to
redeem their censos by creating new debts elsewhere in order to repay the old
debts. So great was the demand for income from censos that reductions were
readily conceded by the creditors.
Thanks to the debts contracted by the nobility, the urban class proceeded to
take over the ownership of the soil from the nobles no less than from peasants.
An extraordinary premium was set on land, as the fortune of Toussaint Foy, a tax
officer for one region of Beauvais, shows. His fortune at his death in 1660 was
made up as follows: lands 55.8 per cent, cash and goods 14.1 per cent, office 5.8
per cent, rentes 13.5 per cent, houses 10.8 per cent. The most valued lands were
those that carried lordship and seigneurial rights with them; although purchase
of these did not confer nobility, it certainly enhanced status. Throughout western
Europe the middle elite of urban centres put their money into soil.
In seventeenth-century Dijon the middle class made up a third of the popula-
tion. Though the core consisted of officials and members of the judicial court
(parlement), there were also several gentry who had moved in from the countryside
in search of income from office. In their turn the bourgeoisie moved their interests
into the countryside, buying land which would give them the mark of qualité that
bestowed status. By mid-century, the city of Dijon had obtained a firm grip on the
surrounding land.9 In Amiens at the same period the upper bourgeoisie drew
nearly 60 per cent of income from land and rents. A survey in Amiens in 1634
showed that 351 citizens, all commoners, held land ranging from small plots to
large seigneurial estates. Of the estates, twenty-eight had feudal jurisdiction, eigh-
teen belonged to the noblesse de robe, five to bourgeois citizens and four to lawyers.
From Alsace in 1587 came the complaint that ‘more and more from day to day
grows the unheard-of pace at which houses and holdings pass into the hands of the
Strasbourgers’. Soon many bourgeois became the new seigneurs of the soil. One
example was Pierre Cécile, a judge of the parlement at Dôle (Franche Comté). By
the time of his death in 1587, he was the owner of twenty-five plots of land and
meadow, three town houses, three small country houses and fourteen vineyards
scattered through the territory over twenty-five different towns and villages.

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The indebtedness of the rural nobility may be studied in the accounts of a

leading judge of the Beauvais region. Of those who held rentes from Maître
Tristan in 1647, nearly three-quarters were noblemen, all with distinguished
names, including that of the family Rouvroy de Saint-Simon. Nearly all the
lands, houses and seigneuries that fell into Maître Tristan’s hands as a result of his
activities as a rentier came from noble debtors. From the illustrious Gouffier
family, descendants of two admirals of France, a family that was now over-
whelmed by debts and had sold all its possessions in Picardy to bourgeois, Tristan
bought the estates and fiefs of Juvignies and Verderel, which remained in his
family for over a century. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Tristans had
climbed to wealth over the decayed fortunes of impoverished noblemen, and in
the early eighteenth century they obtained noble status through the purchase of
an office at court. Their example, one among many even in the confines of
Beauvaisis, illustrates the extraordinary extent to which rentes served to transfer
land and property from the aristocracy to the rising middle classes and helped
eventually to create a new nobility in France.
The acquisition of land by the middle elite has often been looked upon
without qualification as a retrogressive, anti-capitalist development, above all
since it took money out of commerce. In fact, the investment in land was in
principle highly beneficial to the economy. In many regions, only the middle
elite had the capital necessary to revive agriculture, so long neglected by aristo-
crats who had seen their estates merely as property to be exploited or by peasant
farmers who had been struggling against debts. In the estates that the merchant
classes acquired around Toulouse in the mid-sixteenth century, they introduced
a rationalisation of labour. The number of tenants was reduced to a working
minimum, rents were asked for in kind rather than in cash and sharecropping
(métayage) was substituted for less profitable types of tenancy. After the 1630s in
Alsace, it was the urban elite of Strasbourg and other towns who helped to restore
villages destroyed by war. In the 1650s in the Dijonnais, it was thanks to bour-
geois seigneurs that the villages were repopulated, the fields restored, the vine-
yards replanted and extended, the cattle brought back. In many areas of Germany
after the Thirty Years War it was the urban merchants who advanced the capital
without which rural reconstruction was impossible.
The leading part played by the middle elite in handling money was reflected
in their activity as tax collectors and financiers. Since the Middle Ages kings and
prelates had employed commoners to direct their estates and collect their rents.

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These administrators were officials of rank and standing, and not modest func-
tionaries; many were already moving into the ranks of the titled nobility. The
state preferred to rely on men who could draw upon large reserves of credit
rather than on those whose wealth was (like noble wealth) tied up in land. It
therefore turned to traders with international connections, which explains the
regular appearance of foreigners in the tax systems of western Europe. In
sixteenth-century France, Italians (such as Sebastien Zamet) were prominent in
finance, in the seventeenth century Belgians and Germans (such as Barthélemy
Herwart) became prominent. The Spanish crown relied in the sixteenth century
on Germans (the Fuggers) and Italians, in the seventeenth on Italians and
Portuguese Jews.
The middle elite was given a major role in financial matters by two intercon-
nected developments: the growth of military techniques, and the greater role of
the dynastic state.10 The needs of war and administration gave new opportunities
to merchants who had accumulated wealth in other ways and were now willing
to make it available, at favourable rates of interest, to heads of state. The thirty
years during which Emperor Charles V worked in collusion with German, Italian
and Netherlands bankers gave a great boost to the rise of an international busi-
ness class, and also marked a significant step forward in the development of
capitalism. The Fuggers, mentioned above, were an outstanding product of the
process.

Corporate roles and the function of office

Public position was, at some stage, always necessary to the process of social
mobility. By the fifteenth century local elites in all towns had secured a firm hold
on administrative posts; where they failed to secure a monopoly, it was because
the local aristocracy were powerful or because the older system of open elections
was still adhered to. Elite control of local offices created oligarchic rule but also
usually brought continuity and stability into local politics.
Over most of Europe, money was not normally the key to office in the local-
ities, where family influence and other forms of status were more decisive factors.
Most local office-holders were untitled and probably commoners, but important
sectors (such as the gentry in England, the caballeros in Spain) were of noble
status. The greater the extent of oligarchic rule, the less likely it was that money
would play a part in the path to office, whether locally or at government level. In

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England, posts in Parliament or in county administration, all unpaid, were the

reward of status and did not confer status, so money played only an indirect role.
In Venice and the United Provinces, senior posts were controlled by an oligarchy
into which it was almost impossible to rise other than by marriage or favour. Sir
William Temple observed of the Dutch merchants that ‘when they attain great
wealth, [they] chuse to breed up their sons in the way, and marry their daughters
into the families of those others most generally credited in their towns, and
thereby introduce their families into the way of government and honour, which
consists not here in titles but in public employments’.
The phenomenon of a ‘sale of offices’ began when the central government, in
search of money, began to extend its patronage system.11 In Venice this resulted
in minor offices being put up for sale. In Spain the regular sale of offices was
begun in 1540 and pursued by Philip II, principally in towns where the Crown
controlled nominations to posts. By 1600 in Spain, municipal office represented
three-quarters by value of all offices sold. Although such sales appeared at first to
be a threat to local oligarchies, in the end they merely reinforced oligarchic
control, since it was the local elites who purchased the offices. A typical case was
that of Josep Orti, secretary to the Estates of Valencia, who in 1696 reported that
his family had held the post for over 200 years and that he was about to transfer
it to his nephew. In most countries the sales were limited in number; a big excep-
tion was France. The initial purpose of the French Crown in selling offices was to
raise money, but by the sixteenth century this had created major problems. In
1546 the Venetian ambassador reported that ‘there is an infinite number of
offices, and they increase every day’. Loyseau estimated that in the second half of
the sixteenth century about 50,000 new offices had been created. The profession
most represented in this spectacular growth was the law, this ‘amazing flood of
lawyers’ as Noël du Fail put it. It was they who thronged the administrative
bodies of the state at virtually every level – but only on paper. In practice many
of the new officials were absentees who had acquired the office for social position
and a salary. The threat to the state came more from absenteeism than from over-
bureaucratisation. Heavy demand provoked an inflation in prices. A judgeship
in the Parlement of Paris, officially valued in 1605 at 18,000 livres, was worth
70,000 under Louis XIII and 140,000 in 1660.
For many rising bourgeois, the purchase of office was the first step to nobility.
They might then go on to buy land, and the process would be completed by
taking up noble pursuits such as military service. These stages might occur in a

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different order (in Dijon purchase of land normally preceded purchase of office)
or together. Offices were obviously valued most if they could be passed on from
father to son. In 1604 the French government allowed offices to be inherited on
payment of an annual tax, the paulette. Prior to this there had been informal
ways of making office hereditary; the new tax legalised hereditary tenure and
inevitably provoked an inflation in prices. The part that office might play in
incomes can be seen from two examples: in 1589 the fortune of Nicolas Caillot,
conseiller of the Parlement of Rouen and son of a goldsmith, consisted of 22 per
cent from rentes, 33 per cent from rentals and 45 per cent from the fruits of
office; in 1629 the Norman official Jacques d’Amfreville left a fortune of which
offices made up 30 per cent, land 49 per cent. More generally, offices played a
smaller role. Loyseau wrote that the bourgeoisie put

inheritances [i.e. land] in the first place, as being the most solid and secure
property, of which the family fortune should chiefly consist; offices next, for
in addition to the profit they gave rank, authority and employment to the
head of the family and helped him to maintain the other property; and left
rentes to the last since they merely brought extra revenue.

Through venality of office the middle elite rose to govern France, producing
administrators such as Jeannin, de Thou, Séguier, Molé and Talon. They formed
the noblesse de robe, whom the Duke de Saint Simon castigated under Louis XIV
as ‘vile bourgeois’ but who were in every sense noble. Before 1600 the thirty-
strong royal council had consisted largely of the traditional sword nobility
(noblesse d’épée); by 1624, twenty-four were nobles of the robe.

Social mobility of the middle elite

The social improvement of sections of the middle classes was an unquestionable

phenomenon of sixteenth-century Europe. In ascending up the scale, they altered
their status.12 Those who had made their way in trade, office and land were now
concerned to consolidate their gains in social status as well as in political influ-
ence. Together with the increase in importance of the urban elite went the
growing importance of towns in the national economy. It was the moneyed
urban classes that began to set the pace, not only in England and Holland but
also in other countries where working capital was obtainable only from this
group. Their aspirations were widely resented as being subversive of the natural

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order of ranks. ‘Who ever saw so many discontented persons’, complained an

English observer in 1578, ‘so many irked with their own degrees, so few contented
with their own calling, and such numbers desirous and greedy of change and
novelties?’ Even by that date, the process of bourgeois advancement was well
under way in countries such as France, and a new ‘nobility’ had come into exis-
tence in the form of the noblesse de robe. The early modern period was one of
rapid social mobility during which serious inroads were made into the privileged
position held by the partly impoverished aristocracy. In Denmark in 1560 the
merchant classes still described themselves in a petition as ‘lowly branches shad-
owing under Your Majesty and the nobility of Denmark’. In 1658, however, the
middle elite of Copenhagen were openly calling for ‘admission to offices and
privileges on the same terms as the nobles’.
The evidence, clearly observed by many contemporaries, of new blood,
parvenu blood, in the ranks of the gentry, was enough to arouse condemnation.
In October 1560 at a meeting of the provincial estates at Angers, a lawyer named
Grimaudet poured his scorn on ‘the infinity of false noblemen, whose fathers
and ancestor wielded arms and performed acts of chivalry in grain-shops, wine
shops, draperies, mills and farmsteads; and yet when they speak of their lineage
they are descended from the Crown, their roots spring from Charlemagne,
Pompey and Caesar’. In 158l the author of the Miroir des Français, Nicolas de
Montaud, denounced ‘certain gentlemen who have taken the title of nobility as
soon as they emerge from their apprenticeships as shoemakers, weavers and
cobblers’.
These malicious claims had in them more than a grain of truth. Some bour-
geois could work their way up in society in as little as a generation, as with the
sixteenth-century Lyon grocer Jean Camus, whose investments and purchases of
land left him at the end of his life in possession of eight noble estates, some of
which included villages and towns. In Amiens the rise into nobility took one or
two generations. Among the city’s noblesse de robe in the mid-seventeenth century,
office counted for between 30 and 40 per cent of income, but the major part of
the remainder came from land and rentes. Offices or wealth were not in them-
selves enough: only 21 per cent of the 544 patents of nobility granted in
Normandy between 1589 and 1643 were to office-holders. In the end the deci-
sive criterion was whether a man was ‘living nobly’. Those who could prove that
their noble style of life had made them accepted as nobles in their communities
found little difficulty in being granted status.

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The coexistence of old and new nobility was an uneasy one. New nobles and
members of the noblesse de robe were in all juridical respects fully nobles, equals of the
aristocracy. In some cities, such as seventeenth-century Amiens, they intermarried
and were virtually indistinguishable. Yet in the 1690s, it was still possible for Saint-
Simon to sneer at the ministers of Louis XIV as bourgeois and in Madrid in the same
decade the civil governor, Ronquillo, was despised as a parvenu by the grandees even
though his family had been noble for nearly two centuries. In France, intermarriage
between old and new was deceptive: because inheritance was in the male line, male
sword nobles were happy to marry robe daughters but robe males very seldom
married sword daughters, proof that there was active but discreet discrimination.
The nobility in England, though an elite, was not a caste, and it required little
effort to become part of its lower ranks. ‘Who can live idly and without manual
labour, and will bear the port, charge and countenance of a gentleman’, claimed
Sir Thomas Smith at the time, ‘he shall be called master, and shall be taken for a
gentleman.’ One could become a gentleman simply by living as one and without
necessarily having any landed property. ‘In our days’, a dictionary of 1730 stated,
‘all are accounted Gentlemen that have money.’ This was one of several ways in
which the landed and mercantile classes became confused, making it difficult to
distinguish origins. The confusion was increased by the tendency of gentry sons
to engage themselves as apprentices to trade: by the 1630s nearly a fifth of the
London Stationers’ Company apprentices came from gentry stock.
The middle classes in town and country also supplemented the ranks of the
gentry proper. There were two main streams that contributed to this, the
successful yeomen of the country and the rising town merchants who purchased
land. With the yeomen it was certainly the mobility of land that facilitated social
mobility. Independent landholders (though not necessarily freeholders), they
benefited from the increased value of the soil, and as a class their average wealth
probably doubled in the period 1600 to 1640. Living in the same environment
as the country gentry, often more prosperous than many gentry, they rose almost
imperceptibly into the higher status group. ‘From thence in time’, observed a
contemporary in 1618, ‘are derived many noble and worthy families.’ Of the
fifty-seven Yorkshire families granted arms between 1603 and 1642, over half
were wealthy yeomen. Of a total of 335 gentry in the county of Northamptonshire
in the mid-seventeenth century, the great majority were newcomers not only to
the county but also to the squirearchy, and at least three-quarters of them had
only very recently arrived in their new status.

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Land was important: by the early seventeenth century it was difficult to find
a prominent London capitalist who was not also a substantial landowner. The
contemporary John Stow remarked that ‘merchants and rich men (being satisfied
with gain) do for the most part marry their children into the country, and convey
themselves, after Cicero’s counsel, veluti ex portu in agros et possessiones’. But
though land was clearly a spur to mobility it was often (unlike the situation in
France) no more than the last stage in the progress to status, nor did families who
obtained land cease to trade. A study of the wealth of seventy-eight gentry fami-
lies in Elizabethan Sussex shows that among the twenty-five wealthiest families
only four were supported chiefly by land, while the majority had heads who were
still – what they had been before emerging as ‘gentry’ – ironmasters, managers of
forges and furnaces, merchants and lawyers. If we look at the greater merchants
of the city of London in the early seventeenth century, we find them living in the
style of the gentry, with country estates and stewards to manage them, parks and
gamekeepers to patrol them and country houses which regularly dispensed
hospitality. But three-quarters of them, despite this formal commitment to the
country, never moved their roots from London and maintained both their busi-
ness and their friends in the city throughout their career.
Many merchants must have hesitated between the choice of profession or
status. Claude Darc, merchant of Amance (Franche Comté), who died in 1597,
solved his difficulties in a particularly appealing way. His daughters were married
off to legal officials so that their status was guaranteed. Of his two sons he chose
the elder, Guillaume, to remain in the business; but he trained the younger,
Simon, to become a doctor of laws. In this way, one branch of the family would
continue to accumulate wealth while the other sought position. In his will he
spoke of Simon

and all the expense he has caused me, both for the pursuit of his studies and
for his upkeep these twenty-five years past, and at Paris, Freiburg, Cologne,
Rome, Naples, Dôle and elsewhere that he has been up to now, the eight years
that it takes to become a doctor; all this has cost (God help me!) more than
twelve thousand francs.

He also spoke of Guillaume, who had ‘exposed the best years of his youth, and
risked his person many times, to the peril and danger of the long journeys he
made to distant and strange countries, and in those twenty years he has, by his

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work and labours, added to and increased the family fortune by much more than
the said doctor has spent’. Two widely differing paths, but to each the father gave
his wholehearted support.13
In the United Provinces the achievement of national independence left the
middle elite firmly in control from the year 1578, when a coup or Alteratie in the
city of Amsterdam led to the overthrow of the old regime, its officials and clergy.
The ruling council of the city was thereafter staffed with new bourgeois Calvinist
members. In historical terms, the middle elite continued to dominate the United
Provinces because their trading interests had made them support the struggle
against Spain. In geographical terms, it was the west and north-western half of
the country that had profited from the war of independence. ‘Whereas it is
generally the nature of war to ruin land and people’, observed a burgomaster of
Amsterdam, C.P. Hooft, ‘these countries on the contrary have been noticeably
improved thereby.’ Protected by their rivers and with the open sea before them,
the middle elite of Holland and Zeeland had, since the 1570s, enjoyed virtual
immunity from the war, so that, while Spain was expending its strength against
them in the south, they built up in the north-west a flourishing base on which
the Dutch economy was to rest.
The eastern half of the country was, on the other hand, underdeveloped,
primarily agricultural and dominated by the noble class. The nobles of
Guelderland and Overijssel, in particular, were the main support of the House of
Orange in its differences with the bourgeoisie of the west. Their relative weakness
in the country as a whole gave control of administration to the middle elite of
the cities, the regent class. Senior administrative officers of the towns, the regents
were drawn originally either from active merchants or from those who had
recently retired from business. Their tenure of office inevitably became a comfort-
able monopoly and tended to make them withdraw from active trade. The old
clash between commerce and office holding worked to the detriment of the
former. By 1652 the Amsterdam merchants were complaining that the regents
had ceased to support trade and were drawing their income ‘from houses, lands,
and money at interest’. The traders of the later sixteenth century had become a
rentier class in the seventeenth. The de Witts are an obvious example of the drift.
Cornelis de Witt, born in 1545, was burgomaster of Dordrecht and a successful
trader in timber. The most prominent of his sons, Jacob, continued his father’s
business, but his growing involvement in public affairs (notably his opposition
to William II of Orange in 1650) obliged him to dispose of the family business

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between 1632 and 1651. Jacob’s son Johan, a distinguished member of the regent
class, concentrated entirely on the duties of political office.
The Dutch middle elite lived unpretentiously. Sir William Temple testified
that ‘of the two chief officers in my time, Vice-Admiral de Ruyter and the
Pensioner de Witt . . . I never saw the first in clothes better than the commonest
sea-captain . . . and in his own house neither was the size, building, furniture or
entertainment at all exceeding the use of every common merchant and tradesman’.
As for de Witt, ‘he was seen usually in the streets on foot and alone, like the
commonest burgher of the town’. ‘Nor was this manner of life’, adds Temple,
‘used only by these particular men, but was the general fashion or mode among
all the magistrates of the State.’ This apparent austerity was only the prelude to
the adoption of a neo-aristocratic way of life. Social mobility in the usual sense
was an irrelevancy, since in practice the regent class by the seventeenth century
ranked above the old nobility. In this position, the upper bourgeoisie adopted
distinctly conservative habits. ‘Their sons’, reported Temple, ‘after the course of
their studies at home, travel for some years, as the sons of our gentry use to do.’
When they went to university, they usually read civil law. Johan de Witt was one
who read law at Leiden and did the grand tour with his brother in 1645–7. A
patrician class arose and its rise was accompanied by the abandonment of
frugality. ‘The old severe and frugal way of living is now almost quite out of date
in Holland’, Temple complained, having in mind the middle elite of Amsterdam
and The Hague. The trend towards luxury was illustrated by a pamphleteer of
1662 who called for the passing of sumptuary laws on the grounds that people
were beginning to dress and live above their station.
Sumptuary laws were the standard method of attempting to preserve rank
and check mobility, but the Dutch were relatively free of them. Elsewhere in
Europe the pretensions of the middle classes were subject to both legislation and
comment. ‘l doubt not but it is lawfull for the nobilitie, the gentrie and magis-
terie, to weare rich attire’, wrote Philip Stubbs in his Anatomie of Abuses (1583).
‘As for private subiectes, it is not at any hand lawful that they should wear silkes,
velvets, satens, damaskes, gold, silver and what they list.’ The abundant sump-
tuary legislation in Europe at this period is proof that the authorities shared
Stubbs’s views, though legislation was invariably a failure. The French Crown
was obliged to issue thirteen sumptuary edicts between 1540 and 1615, but
with little success. After 1604, when it repealed all existing sumptuary laws, the
English government did not bother to dictate the rules of apparel to its subjects.

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As Jean Bodin observed of sixteenth-century France: ‘Fine edicts have been

passed, but to no purpose. For since people at court wear what is forbidden,
everyone wears it, so that the officials are intimidated by the former and corrupted
by the latter. Besides, in matters of dress he is always considered a fool and bore
who does not dress according to the current fashion.’
The concern with dress suggests that, even though it is difficult to define the
middle class in terms of status and money, there are good reasons for trying to
define it in terms of the culture it possessed. In early eighteenth-century England,
for example, the middle elite was almost totally literate and its members were
the principal patrons of the new communication media of newspapers, the
theatre and novels.14 Through these media, middle-class culture became a deter-
mining factor in English civilisation. In London the success of the middle class
could be seen concretely in the rising standards of domestic comfort. From the
end of the seventeenth century, thanks in part to French influences, the English
middle classes in their domestic furnishings resorted to china, glass, easy chairs,
pictures and clocks.15 Material comfort became the outward expression of social
confidence. In reality, the cultural life of the middle classes, most notably their
attention to reading and writing, and their patronage of art, constitutes the most
interesting aspect of their role, a theme that has encouraged various studies in
European social history.

Betrayal by the bourgeoisie?

The middle elite had an essential role to play in the development of the economy.
They were the sector in which wealth was created and mobilised; by contrast, the
lower classes were unable to accumulate wealth and the upper classes had already
acquired and invested theirs. The commercial and financial life of states was
therefore closely related to the activities of the middle class. The commercial
success of England and Holland was based on a steady investment of capital by
gentry and mercantile bourgeoisie. Out of over 5,000 Englishmen who invested
in their country’s overseas trading companies in the period 1575–1630, 73.5 per
cent were bourgeois merchants, 2.4 per cent were merchants who had been
knighted, 9.9 per cent were knights, 9.3 per cent were gentry, 3.5 per cent were
nobles and 1.4 per cent were yeomen and men in the professions. Gentry and
nobles were prominently active, representing 44.7 per cent of membership of the
Virginia Company and 78.9 per cent of that of the Africa Company; in these

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fifty-six years, moreover, they invested something like £1.5 million in the compa-
nies.16 But it was the bourgeois merchants who were beyond all doubt the foun-
dation of England’s commercial greatness. At no time in the seventeenth century
did any other European nations match the success of the English and the Dutch
in mobilising the resources of the middle and upper classes.
Why was this? In his classic study The Mediterranean, Fernand Braudel
argued that a conscious ‘betrayal by the bourgeoisie’, that is, a failure to follow
the principles that had contributed to social success, had been a root cause of
the decline in the trade of Spain and Italy.17 Other writers have extended this
argument to the trading elite of France and northern Europe. Even in
seventeenth-century England, Thomas Mun was complaining that ‘the son,
being left rich, scorns the profession of his father, conceiving more honour to be
a gentleman than to follow the steps of his father as an industrious merchant’. In
reality the evolution of the merchant class was more complex than the concept
of ‘betrayal’ suggests.18 First, most traders and bourgeois were powerless to
control the conditions of trade under which they worked; they were not free to
make a choice. Second, many – particularly in eastern Europe – were restricted
by political environment and an undeveloped society. Third, many who with-
drew from commerce in order to invest elsewhere did so because it seemed a
rational course to adopt. These points can be illustrated from specific parts of
Europe and go far towards explaining the depletion of bourgeois capital resources.
Spain is the nation about which the most common historical misunderstand-
ings arise. Often presented as an anti-capitalist society, Spain was no less capitalist
than other western societies. Its wealth, though limited, came from trade. By the
fifteenth century there were active trading links between Aragon and Italy and
between Castile and Flanders. The chief export was raw wool, negotiated by colo-
nies of Spanish merchants in Bordeaux, Antwerp and other cities. Under Charles
V and Philip II the fairs at Medina del Campo made Old Castile an integral part
of the west European market, and successful merchants such as Simón Ruiz
represented the most enterprising section of the Castilian bourgeoisie. The expul-
sion of a fairly small number of Jews in 1492 – around 50,000 – had done
nothing to weaken the middle classes, since conversos (Christians of Jewish
origin) continued effectively to carry out the roles Jews had fulfilled. The energy
of the Spanish middle elite, however, was deceptive. Spain around 1500 was a
poor country with inadequate grain output, no significant industry and exports
consisting almost exclusively of raw materials (wool, agricultural produce). This

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was too weak an economic base to nourish a bourgeoisie or to foster investment,

and the import of foreign manufactures (mainly textiles) to balance raw material
exports quickly gave foreign capitalists a big say in the direction of the economy.
‘The foreigners do with us what they will’, complained Simón Ruiz. The discovery
of America temporarily stimulated the Spanish economy but did not improve the
industrial situation, and foreign manufactures rapidly took over the American
market.
Unable to invest in an economy that did not expand, the Spanish bourgeoisie
entered the money market, lending both to the government (juros) and to indi-
viduals (censos). With interest rates at up to 7 per cent in the sixteenth century, it
was an attractive outlay. Moreover, censos to the peasantry were a form of invest-
ment in agriculture and benefited the rural economy. But writers on economic
affairs, the arbitristas, were critical of the extent to which the moneyed classes
were willing to live off unearned interest rather than invest their money in
productivity. Contemplating with dismay the effects of a rentier mentality, the
Valladolid bourgeois Martín González de Cellorigo in 1600 condemned censos as
‘a plague which has reduced these realms to utter poverty, since a majority of
people have taken to living off them, and off the interest from money’. In a
sharply worded passage, he claimed that

censos are the plague and ruin of Spain. For the sweetness of the sure profit
from censos the merchant leaves his trading, the artisan his employment, the
peasant-farmer his farming, the shepherd his flock; and the noble sells his
lands so as to exchange the one hundred they bring him for the five hundred
the juro brings. . . . Through censos flourishing houses have perished, and
common people have risen from their employment, trade and farming, into
indolence; so that the kingdom has become a nation of idleness and vice.

Price inflation, aggravated later by debasement and monetary inflation, added

to the problems of a country where trade was largely in the hands of foreign
interests. Spanish bourgeois were active both in commerce and industry, but the
scanty resources of their environment and the fact that most American bullion
went to pay for foreign imports (hence the continual petitions by the Cortes
against the export of bullion) deprived them of investment capital. Inflation
periodically wiped out trading profits and made the interest rate on juros and
censos all the more attractive as an alternative outlay. Despite its aggressive

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imperial role, Spain remained underdeveloped and an economic colony of other

nations;19 it did not decline because there was no level of achievement against
which ‘decline’ could be measured. Not until the late seventeenth century did
the bourgeoisie begin to find favourable conditions for investment in trade and
industry.
The Spanish experience was reflected in that of Italy, its Mediterranean neigh-
bour. The slowing down of the Venetian textile industry in the late sixteenth
century, and its decline after the opening of the seventeenth, could not fail to
lead to a redistribution of investment. Increasing difficulties in the Levant trade,
and growing commercial rivalry from other Italian cities and from northern
countries, made the comparative security of land and rentals more desirable.
Nobles, citizens and people of Venice purchased property and estates on the
mainland, the Terraferma, particularly at the end of the sixteenth and the begin-
ning of the seventeenth century. At the same time in Venice as in other cities,
opportunities to live as a rentier were readily available. The decline of commerce,
no less than success in business, encouraged the merchant classes to leave their
traditional occupations in favour of security and status. Gradually the mercantile
oligarchy became a patriciate, as in the city of Lucca. In the city of Como the
merchants maintained their business interests but extended their activities into
the collecting of interest from loans made to the government or to rural commu-
nities. In Milan many of the great merchants and industrialists of the fifteenth
century had, by the seventeenth, joined the ruling feudal classes. The Missagli
family, prominent armament manufacturers of the fifteenth century, obtained a
noble title at the end of their period of greatest success and withdrew their capital
from the business. Sixteenth-century merchants such as the Cusani diverted
their money from trade to the purchase of land. Members of the Milanese elite
who had spent their career in the public service (families such as the Borromeos,
patricians such as the Moroni), members of the professions and office-holders
committed their fortunes to the land, from which they derived noble titles and
feudal rents.
The evolution of one family, the Riccardi of Florence, is instructive.20 Starting
in the mid-fifteenth century the family began to buy land: between 1480 and
1517 the output from their holdings increased 3.5 times in grain, 1.5 times in
wine. Between 1517 and 1568 their landholdings increased by 250 per cent.
From the 1560s they began investing their profits from the land in wool and
textiles in Florence, and from 1577 they set up a bank devoted to lending money

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and investing in trade. In the 1580s the Riccardi were trading both to the Levant
and to Spain. In 1600 their business investments – excluding land – were 69 per
cent in banking, 16 per cent in wool, 15 per cent in silk. They continued to buy
more land and to invest the profits in commerce: clear evidence that there was
no formal contradiction between one and the other. By the early seventeenth
century, as business declined (Florence had 152 wool producers in 1561, only 84
in 1616) the Riccardi shifted their emphasis to land and the security of social
position. In the village of Villa Saletta in 1563 they owned 36 per cent of the
land, the Church held 28 per cent and others 36 per cent; by 1620 the Riccardi
held 90 per cent, the Church 4 per cent and others 6 per cent. A member of
the family became a senator in Florence in 1596; in 1598 they bought a palace
in the city. When Riccardo Riccardi, the head of the family, died in 1612, his
fortune consisted of 63 per cent in land, 24 per cent in business, 10 per cent in
loans and 3 per cent in rentes.
Tenure of office characterised the elite in most central German cities. An
imperial decree of 1530 described the urban middle classes as falling into roughly
three categories: the common citizens (including retail shopkeepers and jour-
neymen), then above them the merchants and master craftsmen, and finally the
patrician class of office-holders. In smaller towns the last two groups tended to
merge, in line with the fact that even self-made men allowed themselves to be
attracted by office and by ‘living off investment and rents’ (to quote the 1530
decree). Merchant families supplied recruits to the class of officials, but the vast
majority of them came from the body of university graduates. As everywhere else
in western Europe, these tended to study law in order to enter the administra-
tion, came from patrician families and were therefore assured of a place in the
elite after graduating. In Württemberg in the mid-sixteenth century this group
occupied nearly three-quarters of the places in public administration. Here was
a flourishing middle class, a rising bourgeoisie, yet one that had divorced itself
from any part in the production of wealth and had committed itself to the ideals
of office and rentes, ideals that in a monarchical regime were a prelude to the
attainment of noble status.
The business elite flourished in the early sixteenth century and are best repre-
sented by the financial firm of the Fuggers, whose leading members became
nobles of the Empire and bought estates in Swabia, where by the end of the
century they possessed 100 villages covering about 93 square miles. Good
exploitation of these resources brought the Fuggers an annual average 6 per cent

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return on the capital invested in the land, showing the application of good busi-
ness acumen. Subsequent changing patterns of trade affected the German elite
no less than those of Spain and Italy: the south German towns decayed at the
same time as the trade of Italy and Antwerp.
The fate of the central and eastern European elite was linked to one funda-
mental fact: in a part of the continent with a lower density of population than
western Europe, the towns were smaller and weaker and therefore more likely to
be dominated by the rural areas. The long struggle between the traders of the
towns and the producers of the countryside (a struggle which in Russia lay
behind the great urban revolts of 1648) was eventually resolved in favour of the
producers. The feudal structure of Russian society repressed the growth of an
autonomous urban elite. There was no field that the traders and merchants could
specifically call their own, since the nobility and monasteries dominated large-
scale trade and industry. The tsar’s chief minister Boris Ivanovich Morozov, who
fell from power in 1648, traded in grain, but also mined and produced potash,
possessed distilleries and mills, exploited iron mines and ran a metallurgical
industry. He was at once a great landowner, merchant, industrialist, entrepre-
neur and usurer. When princes of both state and Church promoted capitalism to
this extent, what function could the nascent bourgeoisie possibly have?
What gave the conflict between traders and producers its peculiar importance
was that the latter, owners of the soil and of the peasantry, were the noble class.
Strengthened in their possession of land by the seizure of Church property after
the Reformation, the nobility gradually came to exercise within the state a polit-
ical preponderance that no ruler could dispute. At the political level this had a
serious effect upon the middle elite, since the rulers repeatedly took the side of
the nobles in constitutional disputes with the towns, so the voice of the towns in
the estate of each realm was progressively weakened. But it was the economic
factor that was decisive. The fate of urban privileges in Brandenburg provides an
example. As elsewhere in central Europe, brewing was a leading industry of the
towns. The nobility enjoyed some exemption from taxes on this commodity and
consequently were able to produce cheaper beer than the urban breweries
in open violation of the law that equalised beer prices. They soon took over
much of the rural market and brought depression to the towns: in 1595 the
authorities counted 891 ruined breweries in the towns of Brandenburg, while
new ones continued to spring up in the countryside. Commerce, long an activity
of the town bourgeoisie, suffered similarly. When the nobles began to develop

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production of corn from their estates, they also began to find ways of trans-
porting it themselves in order to avoid the middlemen in the towns. Despite
some attempt to restrict this, by the mid-sixteenth century the nobles were
exporting their corn freely. By the early seventeenth century the Brandenburg
gentry were claiming that they were entitled to export freely by both land and
water and that they were exempt from tolls and duties.
The result was the decline of the towns and their trading population. At times
the towns even had to suffer famine because of the way in which the producers
held back supplies in order to speculate in prices. It was not corn and beer only,
but all the other produce of the land in which the gentry began to deal on the
basis of the unequal privileges they were accorded. The towns lost their privi-
leged trading and industrial position, and the noble class rose at the expense of
the bourgeoisie. The picture was the same throughout the north-east. In Prussia
and in Pomerania, too, exemption from taxes gave the gentry a clear field in the
sphere of corn and beer. After a century of complaints the great port of Königsberg
in 1634 claimed that nothing had been done to remedy the situation. The
economic and commercial decay of the towns and the weakening of their elites
continued through the seventeenth century, and the trend was consolidated in
the 1650s and 1660s by the various measures of state control adopted by the
rulers of Brandenburg-Prussia.
In the east, the case of Hungary presents a similar picture. Suffering from the
burden of the long wars against the Turks, Hungary underwent both a political
crisis and a crisis of production. Anxious to rescue their fortunes, the nobles as
agrarian producers laid claims to control over distribution as well as production.
Some concessions were made when, in 1563, the kingdom passed a law permitting
nobles who were refugees from the Turks to buy houses in the towns and to import
wine from the countryside free, provided this was for their own use only. Once
granted to a section of the nobility, these privileges opened the way to the nobles
as a whole to establish themselves in the towns. Through marriage with the urban
patriciate they also managed to take part in the government of the towns. The
cities in vain in 1571 presented a demand that landlords should not be allowed to
trade in agricultural produce. The Diet ruled that provided the customs duty was
paid they could trade both internally and externally in all goods. Inevitably the
towns and their elites collapsed before the economic domination of the gentry.
This glance at different areas of Europe suggests that if sectors of the middle
elite failed it was because external conditions, rather than a conscious defection,

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determined their situation. When they changed their investment pattern, it was
because developments presented them with a logical alternative. In Antwerp
merchants bought houses and lands (Jacob della Faille in the 1570s owned 800
acres and 11 houses) because these represented tangible wealth as against the
intangible wealth of overseas trade and credit. In 1661 the Venetian merchant
Alberto Gozzi had 200,000 ducats invested in commerce and industry, but he
also had 174,000 invested in land; at this period the percentage return from land
was higher than that from trade, so land was a rational purchase.
At the root of the notion of a ‘bourgeois betrayal’ is the premise that the
bourgeoisie had ideals or an ethic to which they should have held. In some
regions the middle elite certainly showed a clear pattern of behaviour. In Franche
Comté they were the most active social group: as traders, they devoted them-
selves to work, travelling throughout Europe on commercial missions; as land-
owners, they developed the soil and went riding and hunting; the men did
military service; their libraries showed a high level of culture; and their sons were
educated abroad. The group behaviour of members of the middle elite testifies to
a distinctive set of social values by which they lived, but it is more difficult to
identify among them a social ethic of aspirations. The private records and wills
of merchants and capitalists give only fragmentary hints of their outlook, hopes
and ideals. Unlike the nobles, who knew and recognised the ideals of their status,
the middle elite felt that they belonged ultimately not to their present condition
but to the rank towards which they aspired. Social mobility encouraged them to
adopt the ideals of the traditional upper orders. This did not necessarily involve
the withdrawal of capital from wealth formation.
The aristocratisation of the middle classes was inevitable. In the Italian state
of Lucca the commercial ruling oligarchy, which had formerly described itself as
patres, patricii senatoresque, altered its description by the end of the sixteenth
century to nobilitas while the group formerly dignified as plebs et populus was
downgraded to the rank of ignobilitas. The function and status of the new
nobility of Lucca were discussed for the first time by the writer Pompeo Rocchi
in his Il gentilhuomo (1568). In Holland the social change was commented upon
by an English observer in the early eighteenth century: ‘their government is aris-
tocratical; so that the so much boasted liberty of the Dutch is not to be under-
stood in the general and absolute sense, but cum grano salis’. In France, according
to a seventeenth-century robe president of the Parlement of Paris, ‘there is only
one kind of nobility, and it is acquired through service either in the army or in

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the judiciary, but the rights and prerogatives are the same’. The notion of service
likewise formed the basis of the theories of the Huguenot writer Louis Turquet
de Mayerne in his De la monarchie aristodémocratique (written 1591, publ.
1611). He claimed that ‘birth is neither the origin nor the basis of nobility’ and
that ‘the common people are the seed-ground of the nobility’; that ‘True nobility
has its basis only in good acts; in the work, I mean, of men who deserve well of
the state’ and that ‘Proper fulfilment of one’s public office ennobles a man.’ In a
frank justification of bourgeois mobility, Mayerne argued that only the merchant
deserved nobility, for he proved it by his worldly success; moreover, he benefited
the realm through trade, which enriched the country and also gave him knowl-
edge of public affairs that no other profession did. Arms and war, then, were an
ignoble profession; what was noble was trade, finance and agriculture.
Despite obstacles and reverses, the middle elite had no difficulty in ‘staying
on top’.21 They did not give up the basis of their success, which was the creation
of wealth. But they reinforced it by strategies of ascent: monopoly of offices,
careful choice of marriage partners from a closed circle of families, control of
inheritances in order to safeguard the transmission of assets and acquisition of
titles and other insignia of social rank. If they decided to adopt, as nobles were
doing, a policy of primogeniture to safeguard the family fortune, they also took
care to train their younger children in the professions or at least find them an
adequate post in the state or even in the Church. In this way, for example, the
patriciate of Barcelona consolidated itself and laid a basis for the subsequent
move into the ranks of the aristocracy of the province.22 In Brescia,23 part of the
Venetian republic, the oligarchies took part in the trend towards converting
themselves into an exclusive elite: they produced from their own ranks the
lawyers and notaries who staffed the administration; and promoted marriage
alliances to confirm their maintenance of control.

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SOLIDARITIES AND RESISTANCE

Steere said that it would only be a month’s work to overrun the realm
[England]; and that the poor once rose in Spain and cut down the gentry,
since when they had lived merrily.
Testimony against Batholomew Steere, carpenter (1597)

Solidarities and honour; A precarious environment; The rural community under

threat; Solidarities and protest: was there a general crisis?; Discontent and disorder;
Characteristics of communal revolt

Solidarities and honour

The common people in town and country were not a homogeneous sector; they
had multiple differences of condition and it is impractical to categorise them
together, as we have done for the upper and middle elites. There were, strictly
speaking, no ‘lower classes’ but rather a broad range of conditions associated
with recognisable roles. They could possibly be identified by economic function:
in seventeenth-century Holland, for instance, one could identify small traders,
petty artisans, agricultural labourers, seafaring men and many others who worked
with these or who had no fixed occupation.1 Women occupied a place in this
spectrum, but always at a lower economic level. Since medieval times, it seems,
all those exercising labouring functions were allotted a lowly position in the scale
of social values. It is impossible to say when this discriminatory attitude became
widely accepted, since those who wrote about it varied widely in their judge-
ments. By the fifteenth century, social rules in most European countries agreed
that labouring people were a vulgar mass, clearly differentiated from the respect-
able upper levels of society.2 Loyseau concluded in the seventeenth century that
‘artisans are those who work with their hands [exercent les arts mécaniques], any

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manual work is considered lowly [vil] and abject, and artisans are therefore clas-
sified as lowly persons’. Daniel Defoe in 1728 felt that ‘those concerned in the
meaner employments are called working men, and the labouring poor such as
mere husbandmen, miners, fishers . . . Superior to these are the masters in such
employments, and those are called mechanics or craftsmen.’3
Attitudes to labouring people were complex. Contempt for labour was usually
an artificial prejudice, specifically promoted by higher ranks of the social ladder
in an effort to justify their exclusiveness. Each rung of the hierarchical ladder
professed to despise the rung below it. Lower levels of the ladder, even if despised
by the higher, felt that they in their turn had specific standards and status. Some
commentators thought that the discrimination against ‘mechanical arts’ was
senseless. The Spanish writer Alvarez Osorio y Redín protested in 1687 that ‘all
the actions of men are “mechanical”, it is mechanical to eat, walk and write, and
every movement is mechanical’. The prejudice against ‘degrading’ work was
impossible to dislodge, but it is also true that in many professions and many
communities it was not taken seriously. On the northern coast of Spain, in the
port of Luarca, the fishermen were considered nobles; their explanation in histor-
ical terms was that the apostles of Christ had been fishermen.4
Working men could therefore have their own honourable status. Social
respect was not a privilege only of the elite and the middle classes. Though the
nobility prided themselves on their sense of honour and devoted a substantial
literature to the subject, in the societies of Europe ‘honour’, or its equivalent,
good ‘reputation’, was considered an important quality of all persons, regardless
of social status. However, what constituted honour always varied according to
rank, circumstance and profession; it was never firmly defined, and was almost
invariably identified only when denied, abused or contravened. Honour might
be from one point of view inherent in reference to people’s moral qualities; from
another point of view it was simply the image of people within their social group,
and it was the group that decided their standing and reputation.
In many communities periodic efforts were made to create status distinctions
between the sectors of society, sometimes for fiscal reasons and sometimes in the
interests of public order, so that each group might know the role it was supposed
to play. In towns, a crucial role in determining status was played by the profes-
sional bodies or guilds, which controlled many aspects of economic life and
gave dignity to all those working people who were unable to rise into the upper
ranks of society. Craftsmen enjoyed status and honour because they exercised a

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specialist profession and above all because they were economically ‘free’ and
independent; it was in effect the ‘free work’ that gave them dignity and honour,
a status denied to those in lesser professions.5
In German towns of the late seventeenth century, the craft guilds maintained
the status and honour of specific professions by defining which callings were
acceptable in the guilds and which were not.6 Below the level of these professions
came the category of unskilled workers, who enjoyed no status or privilege what-
soever. Not far behind came the very substantial category of servants, until
recently usually forgotten by historians but who played a fundamental part in
the effective functioning of traditional society.7 Live-in servants were an
important element of society in both town and country, and especially in towns
were a substantial proportion of the population. Studies of their role have tended
to concentrate on their part in urban households and trade, but since preindus-
trial society was overwhelmingly rural it follows that servants were even more
important in the contribution they made to country households and the rural
economy. An estimated 60–70 per cent of young people (between 15 and 24
years) in early modern England spent a part of their lives in service, and sections
of the economy, both domestic households and farms, could not have func-
tioned adequately without them.
In western Europe, servants were usually young adults in their teens, both
male and female, who worked in other people’s households before marriage.
Service began at around 15 years, the peak age for employment being around 18
to 20. Paid in the form of lodging as well as wages, they benefited through gaining
some (limited) independence and also learning a profession, but during their
service had the social status of being dependants and were also frequently subject
to exploitation. Because they lived in, they formed in practice part of the house-
hold, the ‘extended family’ that was typical of much of western Europe. Not all
parts of Europe, however, had servants as a key component of labour and house-
hold. There was also considerable variation in the ratio between male and female
servants. ‘It was a common pattern for female servants to outnumber male
servants in towns, while male servants were a majority in the countryside.’8
The table of ranks does not stop there. A high proportion of the urban popu-
lation consisted of rural workers or peasants who lived in the city but earned
their wages in the countryside. These were invariably consigned to the lowest
status grade in consonance with a growing tendency among the elites to look
down upon the rural population as ‘rustics’. The balance between these different

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grades affected the infinite variety of politics in Europe’s communities. In

Frankfurt, for example, the rich elite represented some 5 per cent of households,
shopkeepers some 11 per cent, artisans some 56 per cent, general labourers some
12 per cent and rural labourers some 11 per cent.9 This profile of a city dedicated
to productivity explains many aspects of Frankfurt’s stormy history during this
period.
Social relations between different sections of the population were affected
profoundly by the type of work that one did and the status or reputation that it
brought with it. It was obviously desirable to possess both good status and a good
reputation. When used in the context of the elite classes, ‘reputation’ was iden-
tical with the concept of honour. At an everyday level, however, the word referred
to the lesser idea of respect accorded within the local community. At this lower
level it was difficult to achieve status or reputation. The positive aspect of prein-
dustrial community relations was the sense of welfare and belonging, but a nega-
tive aspect was the absence of privacy.
Neighbourhoods did not necessarily offer neighbourliness. ‘People were
constantly observed by their neighbours. Reputation shaped the attitudes of neigh-
bour to neighbour.’10 Correct behaviour was as a consequence never simply a
personal option; it was a requirement imposed and judged by community norms,
and regulated according to contexts of religion, gender or economy. Incorrect
behaviour, with the corresponding bad reputation, might provoke grave conflicts
within the community, and very frequently led to banishment from the commu-
nity. A woman with a reputation as a ‘witch’ would be kindly tolerated for many
years by her village, but in a year of agrarian crisis she might find that her lack of
status would work against her.
The status of one’s work was central to the problem. The contempt for labour
was occasionally extended to the peasants working their fields, an attitude lamented
by most writers, who felt that tilling the soil was the most natural and therefore the
most honourable of occupations. By far the most important sector of the economy
before the era of industrial capitalism was the land; by far the largest and most
essential sector of the population was the peasantry. Agriculture was the mainstay
of economy, society and state. The peasant classes were correspondingly considered
by some to be the mainstay of all three. In a well-known German print of the
sixteenth century, the tree of society was illustrated with peasants as the roots and
– after the ascent branch by branch through the lower and upper classes, king and
pope – even more significantly as the crown of the tree.11

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By the seventeenth century, unfortunately, artists began to represent peasants

as drunken, boorish louts, a sign no doubt of a growing lack of comprehension
among the expanding urban population. But the respect attached to the status of
peasant still retained a powerful influence over social attitudes and political policy.
Adam was considered to be the first peasant; all men and all nobles were therefore
descended from peasants. Far from being a revolutionary assertion, the claim was
commonplace and could be found in the literature of most countries in Europe.
In the peasant were to be found those virtues of labour, patience, subordination,
duty and piety that every Christian priest praised from his pulpit. Peasants were
not sullied by the sins of the townsmen, by the search for profit. They represented
self-contained units who lived off no other man and who trusted in God. Such
at least was the myth, and it was by no means a harmless one, for it determined
the prejudices of many centuries of Christian civilisation. In economic life the
acceptance of subsistence agriculture as natural and good and of trade, particularly
in trade for profit, as bad had a persistently regressive effect. Social groups which
did not engage in agriculture to any appreciable extent were ostracised as economic
parasites who would not soil their hands with true work. Hence the popular basis
of much anti-Semitism, since Jews often tended to be an urban minority and were
devoted (many claimed) to the unnatural vice of usury.
The values and honour of peasants and ordinary working people can be
approached in several ways: through their own claims and protests, through
statements by their superiors, through observations by outsiders or through the
affirmation of certain principles when the norms of correct conduct were trans-
gressed.12 Lawsuits between artisans in the city of Dijon, mainly to defend them-
selves against verbal slurs on their integrity, show the concern of working people
to protect their ‘honour’.13 Since many slurs were sexual in content, we can see
that behind the wish to protect ‘honour’ there frequently lurked the need to
defend male virility. But working men were also concerned to defend social
values: time and again, they made claims for ‘justice’, a value that was impossible
to define but that often coincided with ‘traditional’ ways. The traditions they
demanded might often exist largely in their imagination but served to confirm
for them the importance of having access to the means of subsistence. Peasants
valued the economic viability of the family household, the Hausnotdurft claimed
by seventeenth-century Bavarian communities.
Where that economic viability was lost, the individual or family had to ‘toil’ in
order to live, a situation that immediately demeaned status. Witnesses in the

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countryside of seventeenth-century Valencia cited examples where the need to

work was a sign of poverty. ‘He was a poor man’, a miller reported of a neighbour,
‘so impoverished that in order to maintain his household it was necessary for him
to toil continuously.’ Another peasant was described as being so poor that ‘he had
to toil continuously to earn a daily wage’.14 At this social level no honour was
possible, both because the person was poor and because he was dependent on work
for existence. Work was not demeaning in itself, for all professions involved work,
but work associated with dependence was always demeaning and cut off access to
honour. Such at least was the burden of much moralistic writing in all countries of
early modern Europe. The peasant family claimed economic autonomy in order to
preserve its honour, a value that inspired no written manuals but that permeates
the surviving court records where ordinary people sued each other for verbal insults
that called in question their respectability and honour.15
Working men in the cities lived huddled together in restricted space and
enjoyed some types of solidarity, principally those deriving from the family and
from the neighbourhood. Perhaps the most appreciated theatre of social activity
was, as in eighteenth-century Paris,16 the tavern, which outsiders looked upon as
a den of iniquity and idleness but which played an important part in ordering
many aspects of daily life. City councils and even governments made constant
efforts to regulate the hours of taverns and to control what went on inside them,
but to no avail. The tavern remained for many a secular equivalent of the believ-
er’s church.

A precarious environment

The dominant feature of sixteenth-century agriculture was the extension of

arable to meet the food needs of a growing population. Claude de Seyssel in his
Grande Monarchie de France (1519) observed that ‘the abundance of population
could be observed from the fields, for many places and regions which used to be
untilled or wooded are at present all cultivated and peopled with villages and
houses’. Attractively high cereal prices encouraged farmers to make profits by
putting their land under the plough. There were three main features to the boom:
the advance of the plough into forest land, the conversion of common and
pasture land to arable, and the reclamation of land from the sea.
The ploughing of forest land was the least significant of these. Though wood-
land was continually disappearing, causes included not simply conversion to

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arable but also sales of trees by impecunious owners (including the Crown),
levelling of woods to lay out parks (a frequent habit of aristocrats) and thefts of
timber by peasants. In France and Spain there was continuous legislation to
protect forests; in France the Crown made its legislation apply to all feudal and
private woods, claiming that these were within the scope of its sovereignty. Trees
were a major public concern because they supplied fuel, were used in ship-
building and helped to prevent soil erosion (for forests, see also Chapter 10).
Charles I of England seems to have appreciated forests less for these reasons than
because they were a useful source of income in sales of trees (the French Crown
also broke its own laws in this way) and were perfect for hunting. Where woods
were destroyed arable crept in: ‘the countryside is being deforested’, the estates of
Languedoc exaggerated in 1546. In England the argument that arable was of
more benefit to the nation than forests began to gather force in the seventeenth
century and found parliamentary expression in the 1653 Act for the Sale of
Royal Forests. Despite legislation by conscientious public bodies, the European
landscape began to be cleared of trees. The trend had already commenced in the
medieval period but gathered force in early modern times. It has been estimated
that around 1600 one-quarter of Denmark was covered by forest, whereas by
1750 only one-tenth was. There were significant negative consequences on the
lives of the peasants and even on the quality of the air they breathed.17
Conversion of pasture to arable depended on the needs of other agrarian
sectors: livestock, for example, was essential for meat, milk, hides and wool, and
would have been prejudiced by reduction in pasture. Indeed, herding increased.
Cattle figured as 55 per cent of the exports of Hungary to Vienna in 1500 and
93.6 per cent in 1542; the Danish trade in cattle tripled between 1500 and
1600; in Spain the sheep in the Mesta attained their peak numbers in 1550.18
The emphasis, however, was on grain (though it should be noted that an exten-
sion of arable always implied some extension of pasture, since in fallow years the
fields were turned from tillage to grass). In East Anglia the rent of arable rose
sixfold between 1590 and 1650 while that of pasture rose by only two or three
times. Villages and feudal seigneurs extended the plough into common lands: in
Spain this occurred in the Tierra de Campos, for example, and around Valladolid.
At the same time, in the Mediterranean the culture of supplementary foods was
intensified. Vine- and olive-growing areas were extended: at Gignac in Languedoc,
olives in 1519 occupied 15 per cent of the tilled soil, in 1534 as much as 42 per
cent. In the Basque country wine output trebled during the seventeenth century.

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The famous wines of Italy and Hungary began to develop in this period. In the
north of Beaujolais vines in 1580 covered 5 per cent of the soil, by 1680 they
covered 20 per cent.
Land reclamation was striking evidence of the demand for arable. In the
United Provinces between 1565 and 1590 some 19,882 acres were won back
from the sea; from 1590 to 1615 the total was 89,484 acres, the largest area to
have been reclaimed for two centuries. In Schleswig Holstein by 1650 about
61,700 acres of coast marshland had been drained. Henry IV invited a distin-
guished team of Netherlanders under Humphrey Bradley to supervise drainage
of marshes in France, and it was Netherlanders, profiting from their long experi-
ence, who played a leading part in most reclamation schemes elsewhere on the
continent, in Italy and Germany. In England under the early Stuarts, Cornelius
Vermuyden undertook to drain the Fens and some 395,000 acres were eventu-
ally reclaimed.
The emphasis on agriculture was accompanied by a spate of farming manuals.
In Spain Pérez de Herrera’s Agricultura General (1515) held the field for two
centuries. In England the outstanding writers were Walter Blith and Richard
Weston, both writing in the 1640s. In France the works of Charles Estienne and
others were followed by the best-selling Olivier de Serres’s Théatre de l’Agriculture
(1600). In Germany Conrad Heresbach’s De re rustica (1570) was followed at the
turn of the century by Johann Coler’s Oeconomia ruralis. Anzelm Gostomski
published the popular Polish work Notaty gospodarskie (Notes on the rural
economy) in 1588.
At least up to the 1570s there was a steady rise in agrarian output. In the
villages of Bureba (northern Spain), production in grain between the 1550s and
1580s rose by 26 per cent, in wine by 51 per cent. In Calabria on the lands of the
Prince of Bisignano, harvest output rose 75 per cent between the 1520s and
1540s. Output of wheat measured in yield ratios (that is, the ratio of grain reaped
to grain sown) was fairly high in western Europe, ranging from over 10:1 in
Berkshire and Friesland to 7:1 in Bureba and 5:1 in Poitou. In eastern Europe
yields were lower, as much as 6:1 in Masovia (Poland) but below 4:1 in Hungary.
Despite the boom conditions up to the late sixteenth century, no real tech-
nical advance in production was achieved. As much as one-half of the arable soil
in Europe might be vacant in any year, because of adherence to the old method
of leaving fields fallow. Manure was scarce and the rotation of root crops did not
begin to spread until the end of the seventeenth century; agricultural implements

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remained primitive and peasant communities resisted innovative techniques.

Thus, although two important developments occurred in the early modern period
– an extension of cultivated land, involving in some areas (such as land reclama-
tion) a greater investment of capital, and a change in social relationships, which
in western Europe meant the decline of feudalism and in eastern Europe the
onset of a new feudalism – no substantial change occurred in the character of the
agrarian economy.
There were, however, regional variations in this picture. Whereas France
appears to have experienced no significant agricultural innovation before the
nineteenth century, further north in the Netherlands new methods had been
creeping in since the fifteenth century. Population increase and greater urbanisa-
tion in the Netherlands facilitated the use of workers in labour-intensive indus-
tries. Since the land was not capable of producing an adequate amount of cereals,
these were imported in bulk from the Baltic. Available soil could thus be put to
alternative use, for intensive dairy farming and other industries such as hops and
flax. Where land remained under the plough, use was made of convertible
husbandry (i.e. alternating crops and grasses), with clover or peas grown in fallow
years. Turnips were grown as fodder and along with clover and grain were sown
in rotation in the early seventeenth century in Flanders; a wide range of manure
was applied, including both dung and compost. While the overall output of
grain did not apparently increase (and this was never an objective, since the
nation relied on imports) yield per acre was possibly the highest in Europe. For
England likewise, it has been argued that the period witnessed an agricultural
revolution, most of whose achievements occurred before the 1670s.19 Changes
included the floating of water-meadows, the introduction of new fallow crops
and grasses, marsh drainage, manuring and stock-breeding. Crop yields rose, and
in a few areas the food production apparently doubled between 1540 and 1700.
However, the question of adequate output to feed a growing population, posed
as we have seen by Malthus, remained a major problem of the vulnerable rural
community.

The rural community under threat

The soil of Europe was largely in the hands of peasants and rural communities. In
France it has been estimated that about half the land was held by peasants, varying
from a fifth in Brittany and Normandy to over half in Dauphiné. In Brunswick the

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nobles held only 8 per cent and the peasants 67.5 per cent of all agricultural land.
Such figures are deceptive. The term ‘peasant’, though its use cannot be avoided,
fails to describe adequately the broad variations in tenure and income among the
rural classes. Though peasants were the largest social grouping, they were too
numerous for the land available and their holdings were usually inadequate. The
average peasant plot was only in exceptional circumstances capable of supporting
a rural family comfortably. The division of the soil was normally unfavourable, as
at Roquevaire in Lower Provence in 1663, where the clergy owned 1 per cent, the
middle class 19 per cent, the nobles 23 per cent and the peasants 57 per cent. The
peasantry, on the face of it, got the lion’s share. But the landholding community at
Roquevaire was made up of 9 nobles, 12 bourgeois and over 150 peasant propri-
etors, so that in reality each noble family held nine times and each bourgeois family
three times as much as the average peasant landed family.
In any case, few peasants actually ‘held’ land. Peasants were personally free in
most of western Europe, but their land was usually not held outright, and they
had to fulfil various obligations to a lord; in effect this meant a tenancy, not
ownership. The average peasant in Europe was not a freeholder. Where the feudal
system and related contractual systems were operative, peasants had to perform
services both in kind and in labour, a duty that restricted their own effective
freedom. All peasants, whether free or not, were in any case finding that the basis
of their independence was being steadily eroded by developments (such as taxa-
tion) that were beyond their control. Last, and by no means least, a huge propor-
tion of the rural population held no land at all.
Thanks to the administrative and legal structure of feudalism in England,
where the forms of Roman law never took root, the English peasant farmer was
almost totally free by the sixteenth century. The landed peasants in some areas
continued to pay traditional dues to manorial lords, but the proportion was not
numerically or socially significant. Those who did not farm their own land made
up a rural labouring sector that formed as much as a third of the total country
population. As in any period of change, the peasant farmers developed both
upwards and downwards. In the former case, they improved their lot and moved
into the yeomanry or gentry; in the latter, they augmented what was, in an age
of expanding population, a growing rural proletariat. Generalisations like these
become more comprehensible if we look at one detailed example.
The village of Wigston Magna in Leicestershire doubled its numbers from
about 70 to 140 households in the course of the century 1525–1625, thereby

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 SOLIDARITIES AND RESISTANCE

becoming one of the most thriving villages in the English Midlands.20 A break-
down of the occupation of the villagers in the later seventeenth century shows
that 36 per cent depended on agriculture for a living, 30 per cent on crafts and
trades connected with the land, 17 per cent on framework-knitting. In addition,
16 per cent were simply described as ‘poor’. The peasant farmers benefited from
the rise in food prices during the century of inflation and accumulated a comfort-
able surplus, which in the years up to the early seventeenth century was largely
untouched by taxation. The forms of feudal organisation vanished here in 1606
when the last manor was sold by its lord and the villagers refused to continue to
pay the feudal dues to the new occupants. The end of manorial control also
meant the end of tenure by copyhold for the rolls which proved tenure used to
be kept by the lord. All tenure now became freehold. As the village developed, its
economic life became more diversified. The peasant farmers grew wealthier
because of the demand for their food produce. But the smaller peasants were
unable to compete with the larger producers, and as population increased the
landholdings of the smaller peasantry became even more inadequate. Beside the
prosperous farmer there now appeared the beginnings of the rural proletariat.
The village world of subsistence economy was also being invaded more and
more, in proportion to the growth of commerce for the market, by money. Cash
transactions became more common, and a ready example can be found in the
giving of marriage settlements in cash rather than in kind.
In the Midlands the cost of living for a farm labourer rose sixfold between
1500 and 1640, while his real wages over the same period fell by about 50 per
cent. Not surprisingly, economic distress among the rural population was
common and contributed primarily to the growing numbers of landless labourers
seeking employment. The situation did, of course, vary widely in other parts of
England. There were even a few paternalistic figures such as Sir George Sondes
of Lees Court in Kent who for thirty years spent, in his own words, ‘at least a
thousand pounds a year’ in giving economic help to his farm labourers.
An independent and free community such as Wigston Magna serves to illus-
trate the end of feudal control and the increase of both wealth and poverty. But
it is not a clear example of one of the dominant trends of the period, the changes
in land exploitation that in their turn provoked social instability. Small farmers
and farm labourers had an increasingly difficult time: the former because it was
a constant struggle to make output exceed the level of rents; the latter because
wages fell rather than rose. A small landowner might profit, but he had to

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compete with the greater marketing power of the larger producers. Lesser tenants
had to cope with high rent (the rents at Stoneleigh manor in Warwickshire in
1599 came to £418 and in 1640 to £1,440). They also had to contend with an
increase in enclosures (which incurred opposition mainly in the Midlands, where
the lands enclosed in Leicestershire rose from 5,870 acres in 1599 to 12,280 in
1607, and in Lincolnshire during the same period from 4,866 to 13,420 acres).
The complex changes on the land did not necessarily bring misery.21 In the
same way, the condition of the peasantry in other countries need not be seen
exclusively in pessimistic terms. In most of western and central Europe peasants
had relative security of tenure, even if their holdings were small.22 In Denmark
and Sweden agriculture was largely in the hands of peasant producers (in Sweden
in 1700 free peasant owners made up one-third of all peasants). In an economy
where cash transactions were becoming more important, the tendency was for
estates held by the upper classes to be broken up into tenancies and for labour
services to be commuted to money payments. The advantage of freedom was,
however, offset by the burden of taxes. Neither full ownership of the soil (as
‘allodial’ or nonfeudal land) nor security of tenure protected against rising costs.
The peasant on feudal soil had to pay dues to a seigneur (these varied and might
include a nominal cash sum, payment in kind such as a proportion of harvest
and taxes on fishing and using the lord’s mill to grind corn), to the Church
(tithes, not always a strict tenth) and to the state (in France, for example, the
taille). The peasant on free soil was exempt only from the first of these.
In the Beauvaisis (northern France) in the seventeenth century a typical village
community of 100 families might have 2 rich peasant farmers (laboureurs), 5 or 6
middling farmers, about 20 middling peasants (here called haricotiers), and a large
class of up to 50 farm-workers and day-labourers (manouvriers). In the Dijonnais
in Burgundy these workers were the vast majority of the male adults in the coun-
tryside, and totally outnumbered the peasant farmers, who were usually fixed in
their residence while the rural workers had no means of their own and were often
on the move, particularly into the towns. The average haricotier of the Beauvaisis
worked about 12 acres of land. The payment of taxes to the Crown would take up
about 20 per cent of his output (the taille accounted for most of this), leaving him
with 80 per cent of his harvest. The tithe and Church taxes would take up another
8 per cent of his revenue, and other taxes would account for 4 per cent more, so
that eventually the peasant would be left with 68 per cent of his harvest. Another
20 per cent, however, would have to be set aside for running costs and for seed to

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be sown the following year. This left 48 per cent, and still the outgoings were not
at an end for the landlord’s rent remained to be paid. This varied widely, depending
on the system of tenure. What the peasant received eventually might be only a
small fraction of his original harvest. This, of course, was in a normal year and
takes no account of the possibility that the peasant might have debts to be repaid.
If the year had been a bad one or if his debts were many, the peasant faced disaster.
A French lawyer, La Barre, observed in 1622:

If, when he sowed his ground the peasant really realised for whom he was
doing it, he would not sow. For he is the one to profit least from his labour.
The first handful of grain he casts on the soil is for God, so he throws it freely.
The second goes to the birds; the third for ground-rents; the fourth for tithes;
the fifth for tailles, taxes and impositions. And all that goes even before he has
anything for himself.

In New Castile the landholding peasant was in a minority, up to 70 per cent

of the rural male population consisting of landless agricultural labourers
(jornaleros). In many villages there were no landholding peasants at all. A census
of New Castile drawn up for Philip II in 1575 confirms the plight of the peasant
producer, who was obliged on average to consign well over half his harvest to the
payment of taxes and dues. The lightest of his burdens tended to be traditional
dues payable to the seigneur. Tithes, which were usually assessed at a strict tenth,
came to ten times the value of seigneurial dues. After tithes the peasant had to
pay his taxes to the Crown; these often came to about the same value as the
tithes. Finally, and most important of all, came the land rents. In New Castile
these took up between one-third and one-half of a peasant’s harvest, and could
often amount to three times the value of the tithes. Adding up the rent and the
taxes, little could have remained to the producer, as we gather from one village
near Toledo which complained in 1580 that ‘after paying the rent, nothing was
left them’. Nor was this an end to the sorrows of the peasantry for, as we have
already seen, those who fell into difficulties borrowed money and found them-
selves bound by censos. ‘In short’, complained the Cortes of Castile in 1598 when
presenting a petition against censos, ‘everything tends towards the destruction of
the poor peasantry and the increase in property, authority and power of the rich.’
In the west German lands labour services formed part of the system of estate
economy known as Grundherrschaft (some demesne exploitation, but most land

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leased out). In Brunswick the labour dues were formalised by a law of 1597.
According to this the peasantry in that state owed weekly services: an Ackermann
(peasant farmer) was to give two days’ statute-labour with his plough-team; a
Halbspanner (or holder of half a hide of land) was to give one day. When it came
to purely manual labour, the peasants owed services varying from two days to
half a day a week. These demands occurred in a system that is usually described
as free, in contrast to the serfdom of the east. Labour services with a plough, for
example, were onerous, since the team was required to supply two persons and
four horses, with a cart. The enormous utility of these services to the landlords is
shown by the fact that in the demesne of Gandersheim in the fifty years 1610–60
no workhorses at all were kept, since all the ploughing was done by labour teams.
In the year 1639 the demesne obtained 248 ploughing days from labour teams,
more than enough for its needs.
The basic problem of peasant obligations was everywhere in mainland Europe
aggravated by weather, war, fiscality and debt. In Spain the burden of rural censos
provoked depopulation; in France, Loyseau in 1601 observed that ‘debts are
swollen by interest charges, creditors are more pressing, debtors poorer’. A combi-
nation of many factors is shown in the case of the village of Noiron-les-Cîteaux in
Burgundy, which suffered badly from the Thirty Years War and had to sell common
lands to meet debts. In 1557 it had been a free community with a rich domain
and paid only a small taille. By 1666 the domain had vanished in alienations and
to the taille had been added a heavier taille, payments in kind, corvées and a tithe.
Economic difficulties grew for both rural labourers and smallholders.
When such problems arose, three major consequences followed. First, there
was a greater polarisation between rich and poor among the rural classes. A rural
elite grew up side by side with a rural proletariat; many middle peasants disap-
peared. At Chippenham in Cambridgeshire between 1544 and 1712 the small-
holder all but vanished, farmers with over 90 acres increased from 3 to 14 per
cent of residents, landless families increased from 32 to 63 per cent. It was a
process common to all countries on the continent. A 1667 report on Burgundy
observed that ‘formerly all or nearly all inhabitants were proprietors of land
which they worked, now there are only share-croppers [métayers] and labourers’.
The landless labour force supplemented its income by seasonal migration in
search of work and wages. Second, in regions where peasants lost their lands a
concentration of estates took place. In the village of Manguio in Languedoc, in
1595 there was only one estate exceeding 250 acres, by 1653 there were three

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and in 1770 eight. Third, as we have seen above (Chapter 5), the urban elite
appropriated rural holdings. At Avrainville (a village near Paris) the proportion
of land held by Paris townspeople rose from 53 per cent in 1550 to 83 per cent
in 1688; by 1680 around Toulouse only 20 per cent of the land was in local
peasant hands. In the Como region of Italy the expropriation of the peasantry
reached its height in the crisis years 1620–50, with most of the land falling into
the hands of the urban elite and the Church.
It is evident that these developments must have created a crisis for the
European village community. Internally, the community was threatened by
the polarisation of wealth and by the consequent social tensions and loss of the
neighbour ethic known in more favourable times. Families drifted away, and
within the village there were growing conflicts, leading frequently to riots,
between tax-exempt property owners and those poor who had to pay taxes.
Externally, there were severe financial problems: the communal debt was always
the heaviest burden, sharply intensified in this period by the frequency of war
and by the soaring fiscality of the state (in Castile between 1570 and 1670 the
tax burden – not taking inflation into account – probably quadrupled). Common
lands and other assets had to be sold to meet the debts, further weakening the
economic position of the village. Finally, in this weakened condition the commu-
nity was ill-equipped to resist continuous encroachments on its privileges by
seigneurs, urban landlords and the government.23
In eastern Europe (east, that is, of the Elbe) a substantially different develop-
ment took place. The sparsity of population (varying from a density of twenty-
two persons per square mile in Poland to five in the Ukraine) meant that with
a smaller workforce there were special problems of labour availability. The
near-subsistence economy of the region was, moreover, balanced by an extraor-
dinary capacity to supply grain in vast quantities to the west European market.
Finally, the machinery of a centralised state had not come into existence in
the east. This left the nobility with far greater autonomy than in the west. The
predominance of the noble class was a striking feature of eastern Europe. The
sixteenth century saw the emergence of the Junkers in East Prussia, the szlachta
in Poland, the pomeshchiki in Muscovy; these gentry now took their place beside
the older noble class. The paucity of large towns (of the 700 towns in Poland in
1600 only 8 had a population exceeding 10,000), the corresponding lack of a
vigorous urban elite and the constitutional weakness of the Third Estate gave the
nobles an inestimable advantage.

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Since the fifteenth century the eastern ports had been grain suppliers to
western Europe. The produce of eastern estates and the activity of ports such as
Königsberg and Gdańsk were closely tied to the market demands of the west.
With the important exception of Russia, most eastern countries were to some
extent part of the European market. This was true even of landlocked territories
such as Hungary, since, thanks to its political status as a Habsburg sphere of
influence, western Hungary exported agricultural goods through Vienna and
south Germany. The rise in cereal and food prices, caused in part by foreign
demand, supplied the incentive required by landowners of the east. Moreover,
the different price levels between east and west guaranteed a profit for all, both
exporters in the east and importers in the west, concerned in the grain traffic.
While demesne farming declined in western Europe and the nobles attempted to
secure incomes from sources other than agricultural production, in much of
central and eastern Europe they went back to the land as a source of wealth.
On an estate of the Rantzau family in Holstein in 1600, of an annual income
of 5,000 marks only 5 per cent came from peasant rents; the rest came from
livestock, grain and dairy produce.
Peasant and waste lands were absorbed into demesne, and the production
of grain for a lucrative market became a primary occupation. In countries
without access to the sea, grain did not necessarily dominate the economy of
the great estates. On the contrary, in Bohemia the principal item of production
for both the internal and the external market was beer, and in Hungary wine
was by far the most important source of income and capital. Both ecclesiastical
and secular lords shared in this expansion of production, which increased their
capital earnings and allowed them to operate a virtual monopoly over economic
activity.
The economic progress of the great nobility was accompanied by the growth
of serfdom. The recourse to demesne farming stepped up demand for labour, but
peasants were not available in adequate numbers nor were they all obliged to
perform regular labour services. When existing burdens were increased the peas-
ants fled, aggravating the labour problem. Noble influence, therefore, brought in
the power of the state. The legislation passed by various governments from the
sixteenth century onwards had one aim: to make peasants’ labour available by
binding them to the soil and depriving them of freedom of movement.
In Prussia, ordinances of 1526, 1540, 1577, 1612 and 1633 progressively
limited the right of peasants to move from their land or to inherit property.

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Labour burdens were increased, and lords were given the right to exploit the
labour of a peasant’s children. In Brandenburg, laws of 1518, 1536 and subse-
quent years likewise tied peasants to the soil, and the question of labour was
settled in the early seventeenth century when the High Court ruled that all peas-
ants were liable to unlimited services unless they could prove the contrary. In the
Habsburg lands the trend was the same, but the particular problem of these
frontier provinces – proximity to the Turks – caused shifts in policy. The general
picture can be illustrated by the case of Hungary. Laws of 1514 and 1548 fixed
official limits for the labour service (robot), but in practice peasants were exploited
well above the authorised level of fifty-two days a year. This situation led to the
flight of peasants, which in its turn provoked legislation tying the worker to the
soil, as measures of 1556 and 1608 stipulated.
Unlike the west, where hired labour was common, many central European
estates had to survive largely off feudal services. As in the west, peasant obliga-
tions also consisted of tribute in cash and in kind. Since labour rather than
tribute was required on the great estates, it became the universal rule in eastern
Europe to commute services in cash and in kind into labour services. This can be
seen, for example, in the Uckermark of Brandenburg, where in 1608 the Von
Arnim family was granted a general permit to use the services of its subjects
instead of their rents. Extension of labour services became general in this region.
By the end of the sixteenth century most of the villages owned by the cathedral
chapter of Havelberg had to render about ninety days’ labour in the year. Peasants
subject to the nobility in the vicinity of Wittstock in 1601 had to serve as much
as three days in the week normally and had to give unlimited service during
harvest-time. This process was accompanied by attempts to tie the peasants to
the soil. At the end of the fifteenth century a law had declared that any peasant
leaving a domain must find a replacement before he could leave. In the sixteenth
century this law was made a general rule. In 1536 no peasant was to be admitted
to any town or domain unless he could produce a letter from his lord showing he
had left with his consent.
The expropriation of the peasantry did not occur in all parts of central and
eastern Europe. Free and independent peasant communities were still to be
found. In some regions they were few: in Bavaria, by the eighteenth century they
numbered only 4 per cent of the peasant population. In specific areas of Poland,
however, such as the hills south of Krakow or the lands of the Church in
Ruthenia, in the 1660s around half the peasants were free and held over

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two-thirds of the land.24 A community of free and independent peasantry such

as the Colmer of Prussia was, nevertheless, exceptional. The majority were
economically underprivileged and heavily dependent. In a time of crisis they fell
easily into debt and so into the hands of the principal moneylender – the land-
lord himself. Indebtedness of an impoverished peasantry became one of the
essential factors in the evolution of serfdom. There were several categories of
dependent peasant, ranging from the relatively free to the wholly servile, but
most were reduced by poverty to a common level of existence. The deterioration
in status can be seen in Brandenburg, where in 1552 a local writer said in his
description of the New Mark: ‘Rustici omnes in libertate educati sunt: tota enim
Marchia neminem habet servili conditione natum’. Fifty years later the jurist
Joachim Scheplitz commented on the same passage: ‘vix dici potest’. In 1632, for
the first time, some peasants of the Ucker and the New Mark were classified
simply as leibeigen, serfs.
It was in Russia that the reduction in status was most marked. Before the final
legalisation of serfdom, there had been varying grades of peasants, from slaves
and villeins, who were found usually on noble demesnes, to completely free
peasants and independent landholders. Between these extremes there were the
normal categories of tenants, with different degrees of obligations. The second
half of the sixteenth century witnessed a severe dislocation of the Russian state,
caused principally by wars and by the oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible. In the
depression and depopulation that followed these events, the landlords found it
very difficult to secure an adequate labour force. Thousands of peasants had
emigrated beyond Muscovy, and the attempt by the landlords (the pomeshchiki)
to exploit those who remained served only to aggravate the flight from the land.
As feudatories of the crown, the pomeshchiki appealed to it for help. In the spate
of legislation that emerged between the late sixteenth and the mid-seventeenth
centuries, all categories of peasants suffered, both dependent and free. As usual,
the laws concentrated on restricting the peasants’ ability to move. The first of
these laws was in 1580. Its effectiveness can be seen in the monastery of
Volokolamsk, where in 1579–80 as many as seventy-six peasants fled and twenty
were attracted in; in 1581 not a single peasant moved.25
But it was difficult to obtain satisfactory observance of the law everywhere, as
shown by the need for decrees in subsequent years. Of these, the most important
were passed in 1597 and 1607. It is important to observe that these laws, unlike
similar ones elsewhere, bound the peasants not to the soil but to their lord: the

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dependence was wholly personal. While this was going on, the liability of the peas-
ants to taxes and to labour services (barshchina) was being increased. Labour services
were a major obligation not only in central Russia: for, as landlords elsewhere found
it more profitable than ordinary dues in kind, Russian landlords began to extend it
to their peasants. The mounting difficulties faced by free peasants obliged very
many to borrow and hence to fall into debt. A combination of several factors had
by the early seventeenth century reduced the Russian peasants to the common
status of serfs. Finally, in 1649, this was constitutionally legalised.
In the course of these developments, many of the peasants of eastern Europe
lost their land. For the nobles, appropriation of land was nothing new. The spoils
obtained from the Church during the Reformation gave them the basis for new
extensions to their territory. In 1540 in Brandenburg the Margrave granted the
nobles of the Old Mark, and later those of the whole country, the right to buy
out their peasants and to replace peasant holdings by demesne. With the active
support of the rulers, who themselves bought land, the nobles replaced small-
holdings by large estates. Between about 1575 and 1624, according to a survey
of the latter year, in the Middle Mark there was a 50 per cent increase in demesne
lands and an 8 per cent decrease in peasant lands. In north-east Estonia, where
the landlords likewise took over peasant lands, the number of big estates increased
from about 45 in the early seventeenth century to 135 in 1696. The process of
alienation of peasant property can be seen in the Russian district of Varzuga, by
the White Sea, where in 1563 the peasants held 95 per cent of the soil, whereas
in 1622 they held none directly and 97 per cent was then owned by various local
monasteries.26
The new estates were of considerable size, and big estates remained a feature
of the eastern economy, whereas west of the Elbe estates were usually much
smaller. In Mecklenburg, Pomerania and the central area of East Prussia, over
half the estates extended to more than 250 acres of agricultural land each. In
Prussia and Brandenburg between a third and a half were of this size. While the
rise of the manorial estate was at the expense of the peasants, the scale of peasant
expropriation varied considerably. Even by 1624 in the Middle Mark of
Brandenburg the peasants still technically held four units of land to every one
held in demesne. Of the land in Prussia, according to an estimate of the early
seventeenth century, the free Colmer held 15 per cent, the nobles 36 per cent
and the peasants 49 per cent. In some areas the peasant losses were small. In
Saxony the overall loss of peasant land up to the eighteenth century did not

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exceed 5 per cent of peasant holdings. The peasantry possibly suffered more
through deterioration of status than outright loss of land.
What opposition, if any, was there to these developments? The towns and
their burghers resented the economic power that the introduction of serfdom
granted the nobility. In certain areas of Germany and western Europe the urban
elites themselves shared in the expropriation of the peasantry, but in the east this
was almost unknown, and indeed there the nobles actually began to expropriate
the burghers as well. The towns were therefore in some sense fighting for their
own independence. This explains the bitter struggle between the Baltic ports and
the noble estate. Among the cities to resist most strongly was Reval, which carried
on a long but ultimately hopeless fight against the nobility of Estonia. The
burghers objected in particular to the fact that the nobles traded directly with the
Dutch and in 1594 obtained an order prohibiting this, but the order was repealed
later in the same year.
In the same way the city of Riga was engaged in struggle with the nobles of
Livonia. Königsberg committed itself even more directly to protest against the
legalisation of serfdom in Prussia. The city refused to observe the terms of edicts
that restricted the privileges of peasants and maintained firmly that all peasants
fleeing to it were beyond the jurisdiction of their masters. In 1634 the city
authorities in a joint statement claimed that all peasants in Prussia were free and
not serfs, and that they and their children were entitled to freedom of move-
ment. After denouncing exploitation by the Junkers, Königsberg went on to
reject totally the practice of serfdom. Many burghers from other towns also had
the courage to denounce serfdom. Among them was the Stralsund alderman
Balthasar Prutze, who in 1614 described Pomeranian serfdom as ‘barbaric and
Egyptian servitude’.
The state did not always support serfdom. In Electoral Saxony the rulers
preferred to ‘protect’ the peasants, since land passing into seigneurial control
became tax-exempt and strengthened the nobles. The Electors therefore bought
up land for themselves, both from peasants and lords: between 1590 and 1626
Elector John George I bought up 4 towns and 108 villages. Meanwhile, succes-
sive laws – in 1563, 1609, 1623 and 1669 in particular – restricted the burdens
of Saxon peasants and the alienation of their land. In Bavaria there was only a
limited move towards serfdom since the principal landowners were the state and
the Church and neither had any interest in changing the methods of exploitation
already in existence.

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The Church was among the biggest landowners and in the eastern countries
it contributed as much as any other landlord to the growth of serfdom. The
territory held by the Russian monasteries in the 1580s was very considerable: in
the Moscow district they held 36 per cent of all arable land; in the Pskov district
52 per cent. Some of this had been donated during the oprichnina, when the
nobles, fearing confiscation, handed their estates over to the Church in return for
a life tenancy. In 1570–1 alone, ninety-nine such estates went to monasteries in
Muscovy. In Poland, the see of Gniezno possessed (by the eighteenth century)
scattered holdings that included no less than 426 villages and towns. In Poland
and Russia production on Church estates was directed towards an external
market, so the Church had an interest in controlling mobility of labour.
By the beginning of the seventeenth century a combination of economic and
political factors had reduced the peasantry of much of central and eastern Europe
to a condition approaching servitude. Friedrich Engels once described this condi-
tion as a ‘second serfdom’ (zweite Leibeigenschaft) since it differed both in time and
nature from the early period of European serfdom. There were two distinctive
features that created the new serfdom and were essential to its growth: the consol-
idation of landed power in the hands of the noble elite; and the dedication of the
manorial economy to the produce of grain for a (usually external) market.
As in western Europe, the crises of the seventeenth century produced a further
severe depression in the condition of the eastern serf peasantry. Two aspects
predominated: falling west European demand for grain; and the negative impact
of wars. As the west European economy adapted to a falling birth rate and
growing sufficiency in wheat, demand for Baltic grain diminished. Between the
1630s and the 1670s the quantity of grain exported out of the Baltic through the
Sound fell from an index of 250 to one of 100. To make up for declining income,
eastern landlords increased their demands on the peasantry. Dues were increased,
and labour obligations made more onerous.
At the same time, the need to have a reliable source of labour continued to be
urgent. Earlier attitudes to legislation had been casual and unhurried. When in
1616 regulations for the peasants of Pomerania-Stettin were drawn up, these
were described as ‘homines proprii et coloni glebae adscripti’, a major change in
their status no doubt, but one that was not formalised in any official code. In
subsequent years the authorities made every attempt to give formal legal validity
to serfdom. In Estonia a law of 1632 began combating peasant flights, and by
mid-century stability of the labour force had been obtained. A system of

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contractual serfdom, based on that practised by the Swedish estates of the De La

Gardie family on the island of Ösel, was introduced.
In Russia a major social and political crisis preceded the passing of the Code
of Laws, the Ulozhenie, of 1649. As a result of the crisis, in which the victory of
the landed nobility was confirmed, the Russian peasantry were fully enserfed. All
peasants and their families were declared bound to their masters, with no right
of departure, and no right to asylum in the cities. No distinction was made
between peasants and villeins: both had to serve on the same terms and with the
same obligations and lack of freedom. Like the Ulozhenie, the Recess (or Code)
granted by the Elector of Brandenburg in 1653 was influenced by the nobility.
For the first time, this edict assumed that the peasants were serfs, and laid the
onus on peasants to prove that they were not. In the Swedish-occupied terri-
tories, such as Pomerania-Wolgast, the Swedish authorities showed energetic
opposition to serfdom. But the situation proved uncontrollable and in 1645 and
1670 laws issued by them gave additional legislative confirmation to the exis-
tence of serfdom in Pomerania.
In the long run the serf economy harmed the internal economy by undue
emphasis on export, hindered the expansion of urban enterprise, made social
change impossible by fixing status barriers and concentrated wealth in the hands
of a feudal aristocracy. Eastern Europe and its peasantry developed in a direction
opposite to that of the west. In the west the elites and commercial capital devel-
oped hand in hand; in the east they did not merge until the nineteenth century.
In the west the peasants were developing towards greater freedom and mobility;
in the east it was the reverse.

Solidarities and protest: was

there a general crisis?

Stresses and discontinuities played, as they still do today, an important part in

the evolution of society. Disorder was always a permanent aspect of social order,
a reflection of dysfunctions in a usually stabilised society. At a local level disorder
could be provoked by problems in the fabric of traditional social relationships; at
a national level, it reflected the conflicting aspirations of status groups. The prob-
lems and strains were sometimes presented by historians a generation ago as
being signs of a severe turning point, a ‘general crisis’, in the evolution of
European society and politics.27 The concept of a ‘general crisis’, however, suffered

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from lack of evidence and precision and was always open to debate. It now
appears more acceptable to view instability, change and rebellion as integral
features of the social landscape. Protest was normal, and therefore frequent. It
was an accepted feature of relations between lords and tenants or princes and
their subjects. Social harmony was valued on both sides, but discord became
inevitable when attempts were made to alter the traditional pattern of obedience
and consultation. Unpopular legislation was, for example, persistently ignored, a
situation complacently accepted by the authorities, who would quickly realise
that inability to implement a law automatically nullified it.
Resistance to authority was continuous,28 and often limited in scope, but it
formed part of the give and take between governors and governed in preindus-
trial Europe. Because it was normally nonviolent, resistance was usually resolved
through peaceful means, principally through negotiation or through the law
courts.29 The Parlement of Paris, for example, was a forum used regularly in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for peasants to resolve their differences
with their lords.30 Even when force was used to put down resistance, the author-
ities tended to use legal process to restore the peace. Conciliation was the ideal,
not repression. In an extraordinary case in Norway in 1597, a royal commission
ordered the restitution of a fine imposed on peasants and restored the honour of
peasants who had been executed for rebellion.31
The most typical disorder was the riot, particularly the food riot. Essentially
an urban protest, the riot included various modes of action, such as protests
against taxes or food distribution, or attacks against specific persons and their
property.32 Riots were limited in frequency, and authorities always took great
care to prevent them ever occurring. It is helpful to ask the crucial question,
‘Who really took part in riots?’, when examining how the traditional community
confronted the problem of a subsistence crisis. Dearth years were not necessarily
years of social conflict33 and faced with a natural phenomenon such as starvation
the villages were able to adapt remarkably well to accepting circumstances. When
there were food riots, they were restricted in place and time. In certain circum-
stances, however, protesting rioters might go so far as to adopt radical measures
indicating their faith in a system of traditional justice and fair shares, what has
been called a ‘moral economy’.34
An even less frequent type of disorder than riots were revolts, which always
comprised riots but were more extensive in purpose and duration. Revolt might
occur against a background of changes in political organisation or fiscal

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obligation and a changing perception of social relationships. By the sixteenth

century the local communities – the fundamental social units of early modern
Europe – were under pressure. Hard times did not necessarily provoke rural
populations and indeed created greater solidarity and a determination among all
social levels to step up mutual help and to endure difficulties. The incident at
Fuenteovejuna (Spain) in 1476 (mentioned below) is illustrative. It was a small
community acting in unison to eradicate a common problem, but otherwise
uninterested in revolt and refusing to combine with other communities in a
general protest. Problems that did not threaten the basic structure of society were
by preference solved through internal conflict (riots against those who did not
pay taxes, violence against officials and lords, persecution of minorities such as
‘witches’) and seldom led to an outward explosion. Rural incidents or riots were
limited in number and normal; by contrast, ‘revolt’ was exceptional.
Tensions might break out into revolt under two circumstances:35 when there
was an outrage or threat to the moral conscience of the community, and when
the protest escalated from a local to a universal plane. A threat might come in the
form of a violation of subsistence norms (crippling taxes and maldistribution of
food would both threaten a basic right, the right to exist) and would instantly
lower the threshold of violence, precipitating collective action that might not
occur at other times. Any violence would naturally be conservative, not revolu-
tionary; it would aim to conserve and restore disregarded norms. The universal-
isation of protest, by contrast, was a difficult step for the self-centred conservative
local community to take and tended to happen under the influence of outside
ideologies and leaders. Revolt in these circumstances was not a blind unthinking
act of violence, but a carefully coordinated movement – usually agreed by the
leadership of several villages at some regional function such as a fair (as was
the case in Swabia in 1524), a carnival (the French town of Romans in 1580) or
a religious festival (Corpus Christi in Barcelona in 1640) – carried out with
maximum coercion against those individuals or villages that refused to take part.
The apparent tranquillity of the European countryside was permeated with
low-level violence, which was employed not to create disorder but in fact to
restore social order. A study of the rural communities of Provence has unearthed
a total of 374 disturbances, both large and small, over the period 1596–1715.36
A study of Aquitaine over the same period has discovered some 500 cases.37 The
overwhelming majority of these incidents were not directed outward at the state
but were restricted to the confines of the local community, thereby confirming

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the apparent peacefulness of traditional society. A recent view is that the ‘commu-
nities of grain’ employed protest as a form of ‘representative violence’38 against
social conditions that threatened traditional values.
In perspective, it is possible to identify a persistent trend of popular distur-
bance throughout Europe in early modern times, based always on the values of
the community, both urban and rural. It is less likely, however, that these trou-
bles amounted to a ‘general crisis’, a label that appeared at one time to offer an
attractive categorisation of multiple events. Crises of one sort or another were a
part of normal life, but categories suggesting global explanations have so far
failed to convince the majority of those who study and analyse the past.

Discontent and disorder

A glance at popular disturbances of the period helps to illustrate the comments

we have made. In Spain the famous incident at Fuenteovejuna (Andalucia) in
1476, when an entire village accepted blame for the murder of its lord, empha-
sised the tradition of communal revolt. The authorities were unable to punish
anyone in particular because of the solidarity of all residents in claiming they
were upholding norms of universal justice. In Germany there were millennial
movements such as that led by Hans Böhm, the piper of Niklashausen (1476),
and the Bundschuh (or ‘peasant boot’) rebellions (from 1493, mainly in the Black
Forest). The first big revolt of the sixteenth century was that of the Hungarian
peasants in 1514, led by a soldier who was termed ‘supreme captain of the blessed
army of crusaders subject not to the nobles but to the king alone’. In spring
1520, as Charles V was leaving Spain for Germany, the revolt of the Comunidades
(‘communities’) broke out in Spain. Led by the major cities of northern Castile
(and without any echo in the cities of the Crown of Aragon), the revolt was a
complex blend of political, economic and nationalist grievances, involving all
social classes and a strong element of popular rebellion.39 Incipient radicalism
split the Comuneros and frightened the great nobles. These brought in their
troops to help crush the main rebel force under Juan de Padilla at Villalar in
April 1521.
The classic popular revolt of the early century was that of the ‘German peas-
ants’ (1525). Confined neither to Germany nor to the peasants, it was in reality a
vast unintegrated wave of protest that swept over the whole of central Europe and
in some areas was primarily urban. The events have been described in terms of a

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‘war’ or even a ‘revolution’.40 Their long-term cause must be sought in the slow
encroachment of seigneurs on the peasant economy: anxious to maintain their
income levels, lords enforced and extended their fiscal and jurisdictional privi-
leges. In so doing, they came into conflict with the strong village communities,
whose leaders helped to coordinate resistance. The first resort to arms was in June
1524 in Stühlingen (Swabia). By the autumn there were risings all round Lake
Constance and towards the Black Forest. The core of risings in south and central
Germany (February to May 1525) extended into Upper Swabia, then spread
along the Danube down to Bavaria and the Alps. From April there were risings by
peasants, miners and townspeople in Württemberg, northern Switzerland, Alsace,
Thuringia and the Rhineland down to Mainz, the Palatinate and Franche Comté.
By summer the revolts had spread to Saxony, Salzburg, Styria and Austria, then
into French-speaking Lorraine and Burgundy. In the Rhineland the movement
was largely urban, with a notable city revolt in Frankfurt.
Each wave of revolt was distinct in time, motivation, leadership and dura-
tion. The heart of the revolution was in Upper Swabia, where the original Twelve
Articles of the peasants were drawn up at Memmingen in March 1525 by
Sebastian Lotzer, and where the rebels had three armies. In Thuringia the centre
was the city of Mühlhausen, where the radical Thomas Müntzer was active; this
phase ended in defeat at the battle of Frankenhausen (May), when Müntzer was
captured and executed. In the upper Rhineland and in Alsace revolt spread
rapidly, but again was broken by a crushing military defeat at Saverne (May). In
the Tyrol the rebels were led by Michael Gaismair, who early in 1526 drew up a
radical ‘Tyrolean Constitution’ calling for a communistic type of regime.
This astonishing series of uprisings was led for the most part not by peasants
but by artisans, preachers, lesser nobles and bourgeois. Village communities that
would in normal times refuse to cooperate with other villages now combined
together in a common cause. All groups found a common ideology, a universal
legitimation, less in their social grievances than in the appeal to ‘God’s law’. It was
a concept that Luther had pioneered, and many rebels looked to him for support,
but he fiercely denounced the uprising. The Twelve Articles combined social and
religious demands. ‘Henceforth’, says the first, ‘we ought to have the authority for
the whole community to appoint its own pastor.’ ‘Christ redeemed and bought
us all with his precious blood, the lowliest as well as the greatest’, says the third,
‘thus the Bible proves that we are free and want to be free.’ Articles four and five
reiterate the claims of the ‘whole community’ over rights in fishing and hunting.

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The most persistent demand of the Articles, and of the twenty-five other different
versions that appeared within two months in other regions, was that serfdom be
abolished. Given the complexity of the revolt, it was not everywhere a failure. In
some areas, such as Upper Swabia, peasants obtained written agreements modi-
fying labour services. In the Tyrol some tithes were removed and labour services
reduced. In Hesse the landgrave Philip made important concessions.
Among the notable urban revolts of this time were the Grande Rebeyne at
Lyon (April 1529) and the urban revolt at Ghent (1540) in defence of traditional
privileges. More broadly based was the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536) in England.
Though social protest remained strong within the movement the Pilgrimage
quickly became a traditionalist pro-Catholic rising. In 1548 the first of a series of
major uprisings broke out in Aquitaine in protest against the introduction of a
salt tax (gabelle). Rural areas set themselves up into communes, as at Saintonge
and Angoumois, and the revolt (of the ‘Pitauts’) spread into the city of Bordeaux,
which was taken over by the rebels. So extensive was the uprising that a royal
army was sent to suppress it, but the demands of the province were met and
Aquitaine in 1549 was freed ‘forever’ from the gabelle (which, in fact, was rein-
troduced without incident during the seventeenth century). Anxiety for regional
privileges encouraged rebels to hark back to the myth of a medieval freedom ‘in
the time of the English’. ‘Guyenne, Guyenne!’ cried the rioters in the streets of
Bordeaux, appealing to the medieval English presence in Guyenne.
The mid-1580s, particularly the period 1585–7, were a time of bad harvests.
They were years of political crisis throughout western Europe, accompanied by
wars in France and the Netherlands. Some of the more savage undertones of
popular rebellion came to the fore in these years of blood. In the town of Romans
(Dauphiné) in the winter of 1580 a rebellious alliance was formed between the
peasants of the countryside (this was a Protestant area) and the artisans of the
town, led by a certain Jean Serve or Paulmier.41 The economic difficulties of
the time aggravated discontent. Encouraged by support from the townsmen, the
peasants refused to pay their tithes and taille. They armed themselves, broke into
chateaux and threw the terriers (court rolls) into the flames. In Romans the arti-
sans and peasants danced in the streets, threatening the rich and crying that
‘before three days Christian flesh will be sold at sixpence a pound’. The symbolic
language was directed at the upper classes of the town, which was now taken over
by a popular commune. During the winter carnival Paulmier sat in the mayor’s
chair, dressed in a bear’s skin, eating delicacies that passed for Christian flesh.

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When they had their carnival procession, the common people under Paulmier
dressed themselves up as prelates and dignitaries, crying ‘Christian flesh for
sixpence!’ The eating of human flesh, here as in other popular revolts, stood for
the revolutionary overturning of social values. On the eve of Mardi Gras 1580
the elite classes descended on their opponents and massacred them.
In 1585 in Naples a similar event occurred when, after a bad harvest, the
authorities raised the price of bread and authorised the export of flour. In May
an angry mob lynched Vincenzo Starace, one of the magistrates responsible. His
body was mutilated (pieces of his flesh were offered for sale) and dragged through
the streets, while his house and all his belongings were burnt and destroyed.
Nothing was stolen: the proceedings were carried out like a ritual sacrifice. A big
urban revolt followed, to cries of ‘mora il malgoverno, e viva la giustizia’. In the
inevitable brutal repression that took place, over 800 people were brought to trial
between the middle and end of July. In the same epoch, the city of Paris experi-
enced an uprising provoked by the politics of the religious wars. On 12 May
1588, the ‘day of barricades’, a general rising of the population in favour of the
Duke of Guise took place. When the Duke and the Cardinal of Guise were assas-
sinated on the king’s orders, authority in the anarchic city devolved on to a
commune led by a so-called Council of Sixteen.
The conditions of the 1590s were catastrophic: from 1590 to 1597 harvests
were bad, prices crippling. There was famine in 1595 in parts of England,
Languedoc and Naples. Prices in Rome in 1590–9 were double those for 1570–9.
The crisis touched England, France, Austria, Finland, Hungary, Lithuania and
the Ukraine:42 possibly never before had the timing of so many popular rebellions
coincided with each other. In Finland a peasant revolt occurred in 1596–7. A few
English labourers in the Midlands attempted a rising in 1596, but it came to
nothing. Roger Ibill, a miller of Hampton-Gay in Oxfordshire, claimed in the
autumn of 1596 to have ‘heard divers poor people say that there must be a rising
soon, because of the high price of corn’. He was joined by Bartholomew Steere, a
carpenter, who told him that ‘there would be such a rising as had not been seen a
great while’. ‘He would cut off all the gentlemen’s heads’, Steere said, and ‘we shall
have a merrier world shortly’; he also planned ‘to go to London, and be joined by
the apprentices’. But the authorities responded swiftly, arrested the leaders and
snuffed out the rising.
The great rising of the Croquants in France was concentrated in the years
1593–5. It started in Bas-Limousin, spread throughout Limousin and at its

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widest extent covered Périgord, Quercy, Limousin and Languedoc. Originally a

peasant rebellion, it became more complex in its social composition and included
a large proportion of urban labourers in its ranks. The main grievance of the
Croquants was the fiscal system: they firmly opposed both tithe and taille, as well
as seigneurial taxes. In a manifesto of March 1594 they denounced the soldiery,
both Catholic and Protestant, ‘who had reduced them to starvation, violated
their wives and daughters, stolen their cattle and wasted their land’. They reserved
for the urban elites the bitter complaint that ‘they seek only the ruin of the poor
people, for our ruin is their wealth’. The rebel movement was democratically
organised. All religious discrimination was prohibited, and they swore ‘by faith
and oath to love each other and cherish each other, as God commands’. The
programme of social justice and religious unity was one that appealed strongly to
the king, Henry IV, and in the early stages of the rebellion he had not disguised
his sympathy for the Croquants; but as the rising progressed he and the authori-
ties adopted a harsher attitude. The religious unity of the rebels proved to be
their weakest point, which government agents worked to undermine. The main
assembly consisted of two-thirds Catholics and one-third Protestants. Thanks to
the diligent agents, the rebels finally, in 1595, voted to split up into confessional
armies. This led immediately to their disastrous defeat by government forces at
Limoges. The famine of 1595 marked the end of the Croquant uprising.
Upper Austria, ‘beyond the river Enns’ (ob der Enns), with Linz as its capital,
was the theatre of almost continuous peasant uprisings from 1525 to 1648.43 The
risings had a strong religious inspiration, since the territory was Lutheran, but
secular grievances were deeply intermixed. The revolt of 1594–7 was a major one
that lasted nearly four full years. The pastors urged their Lutheran people to
defend themselves against the Counter-Reformation, promoted by Cardinal
Khlesl in Lower Austria and Bishop Passauski in Upper Austria from the 1580s.
The French historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou reported that in 1595 ‘the peas-
ants said that they had taken up arms only to free themselves from the unjust
taxes with which the nobles oppressed them’.44
In the seventeenth century, the first great year of continent-wide rebellion
was 1607. In England there were riots against enclosures of land in the Midlands.
Rioters assured Justices of the Peace that their revolt was not against the king ‘but
only for reformation of those late inclosures which made them of ye porest sorte
reddy to pyne for want’. The leader, John Reynolds, was called Captain Pouch
‘because of a great leather pouch which he wore by his side’. Now for the first

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time, the terms ‘leveller’ and ‘digger’ appeared in England; ‘levellers’ were simply
those who levelled down enclosures, without any hint of radical social doctrine.
The ‘diggers’ appeared in a petition addressed in this year from The Diggers of
Warwickshire to all other Diggers. Preaching at Northampton in June 1607, after
the suppression of the revolt, a parson claimed that ‘they professe nothing but to
throwe downe enclosures, but afterward they will reckon for other matters. They
will acompt with Clergiemen, and counsell is given to kill up Gentlemen, and
they will levell all states as they levelled bankes and ditches, and some of them
boasted, that now they hoped to worke no more.’
The most important rebellion of these years occurred in Russia. The
Bolotnikov uprising of 1606–7 coincided with the dynastic struggle that followed
the death of Tsar Boris Godunov in 1605. In 1606 the boyar prince Dmitry
Shuisky seized the throne, but his rule was opposed by other nobles who raised
armies and marched on Moscow. The core of their support was the peasant
movement led by Ivan Bolotnikov, a former slave who had fled from his master,
been captured by the Turks and after adventures in Italy and Germany had
returned through Poland to Russia. Identifying himself with the opposition to
Shuisky, Bolotnikov became allied to the noble party and raised the peasants for
them.45 In the spring of 1607 he and his forces found themselves trapped in the
fortress town of Tula. After a long and cruel siege Tula capitulated in October.
Bolotnikov was captured and executed.
In Upper Austria in 1626 the biggest popular uprising of the entire Thirty
Years War period took place.46 Nearly all the nobility of Upper Austria were
Lutheran, and their religion was guaranteed by the emperor. But precisely in the
early seventeenth century the Land ob der Enns was put under Bavarian admin-
istration and a Catholic reaction took place. In 1624 the exercise of the Protestant
religion in Upper Austria was prohibited by decree and the old faith was intro-
duced with the use of force, provoking several of the bourgeoisie and nobility of
the region, including the Count of Ortenburg and the Freiherr von Zinzendorf,
to plot rebellion. The revolt began in May 1626 when the peasants along the
Danube were rallied together by their two principal leaders, Stefan Fadinger and
Christoph Zeller. They waged a full-scale war against the imperial armies, laying
siege to several towns and at one stage besieging Linz itself. It was during this
siege that Fadinger was killed. He was the true inspiration of the rising, a folk
hero whose memory remained for centuries among the people of Upper Austria.
His place as leader was taken by a nobleman, Achaz Willinger. By spring 1627

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the rebellion was over: in March Willinger and nine other leaders were executed.
By the end of the war over 12,000 peasants had been killed and numberless
others crippled or driven into exile.
The 1626 peasant war was widely publicised throughout the German lands.
News-sheets were issued in Linz, Augsburg, Frankfurt, Vienna and other cities.
The peasants themselves had their own publicity in the form of songs which they
sang when they marched or when they rested. The most famous of these was
their theme, the Baurenlied or Fadingerlied, which celebrated the end of the old
order, the destruction of lords and priests and the emergence of the peasant as
master:

Das gantz Landt muss sich bekehren

weil wir Bawrn jetzt werdn Herrn,
können wol sitzen im Schatten
(The whole country must be overturned,
for we peasants are now to be the lords,
it is we who will sit in the shade)

The day of clerical tyranny was over:

Die Pfaffen sollen ihre Closter lassen,

die Bawrn seyndt jetzundt Herrn
(The priests must quit their cloisters,
for the peasants are now the masters)

The land had passed from the seigneurs to the peasants:

Jetz wollen wirs gantz Landt aussziehen,

unsere aigne Herrn müssen fliehen
(Now will we sweep throughout the land,
and our own lords must flee)

In France, thanks to Richelieu’s need for money to finance diplomacy and

war, the tax burden in real terms doubled between 1630 and 1650. Up to the
period of the Fronde there were four main waves of revolt: in the Quercy region
in 1624; in several provinces of the south-west in 1636–7; in Normandy in

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1639; and in areas of the south, west and north in 1643–5. By their nature urban
revolts were more frequent (and briefer) than rural revolts; they occurred in
many large towns and cities of France for every year from 1623 to 1647.
Aspects of the French risings can be illustrated by looking at the two largest
outbreaks, that of the Croquants in 1636 and the Norman revolt of 1639. The
date 1636 helps to explain popular discontent, for this was the year after the
entry of France into the Thirty Years War. The correspondence of government
officials in the provinces (above all in Burgundy and Picardy) reported wide-
spread misery and anger caused by the plague, poor harvests and the passage of
troops. Already in 1635 there had been a series of uprisings in the cities of the
south, notably in Agen. The Croquant revolt broke out in May 1636 and was
crushed only in November 1637. It came to cover so wide an area – most of
the territory between the Garonne and the Loire, an area approximating to
one-quarter of France – that it may well be regarded as the biggest peasant rising
in French history.
It was not a unified organised revolt, but consisted of the sporadic activity of
numbers of wandering bands. The first explosion was in the city of Angoulême
and its region, where a massacre of royal tax agents occurred. In one town twelve
tax officials were murdered, and in Saintonge one was cut to pieces while alive.
The uprising became so great and widespread that only a royal army could have
crushed it, as one of the intendants reported to Richelieu. But the army was
occupied elsewhere, in defending France’s frontiers, so the government was
obliged to arrive at a compromise. In August 1636 the governor and the inten-
dant of Angoulême opened talks with the rebels. Several tax concessions were
made, which pacified the rising for the winter. In spring it broke out again,
largely provoked by the fact that the intendant had used troops to help him
collect taxes. The new centre of the rising became Périgord. There nearly 60,000
cried, ‘Vive le Roi sans la gabelle! Vive le Roi sans la taille!’ The leader of the
movement, and ultimately of the greater part of the Croquants, was a nobleman
named La Mothe La Forêt. In the summer of 1637 the repression started. The
Duke of La Valette caught the peasants in the town of Eymet and left over one
thousand dead on the ground. By November further action had crushed all but
isolated groups of Croquants.
Normandy, where the Nu-Pieds rebellion broke out, was one of the most
heavily taxed provinces in France. Henry IV’s chief minister the Duke of Sully
once boasted to the English ambassador that the king drew as many taxes from

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Normandy as from all the other provinces together. Under Richelieu’s fiscal
regime, the complaints of the Estates of Normandy against the burden of tailles
and gabelles went unrelieved. In 1638 the Estates were told that circumstances
made relief impossible. A rumour in 1639 of an increase in the tax on salt, which
was one of Normandy’s chief products, proved to be the last straw. In July 1639
an officer named Charles le Poupinel, arriving in the town of Avranches on some
other business, was mistaken for a gabeleur and gravely wounded during a riot
created by the salt producers. A few days after Poupinel’s death a sheet of verse
was found fixed to his tomb. The last stanza ran:

Si quelque partisan s’arreste

Pour s’en informer plus avant
Di luy que Jean Nuds piedz s’appreste
Pour luy en faire tout autant
(If any tax collector – partisan –
stops here to find out more,
tell him that Jean Nu-Pieds is ready
to do as much to him)

The pseudonym Nu-Pieds was apparently chosen because taxes had reduced
the people to barefoot beggary. Unlike the Croquants, the Normans were well
organised. The peasants were formed into an army called the armée de souffrance
(army of suffering) and their leader signed himself ‘General Nu-Pieds’. Both
Caen and Rouen had popular riots which put them for a while under rebel
control. The uprising was ended in 1640 by bringing over troops from Picardy.
The revolt in Caen was crushed, then the royal troops met the main rebel force
near Avranches and annihilated it, killing most of the leaders.
The years 1647–8 were ones of agrarian crisis throughout Europe. In
England there were bad harvests from 1646 to 1649; the winter of 1647–8 was
particularly wet, and in London prices rose in 1647 to their highest level prior to
1661. In Andalusia, thanks to the rains of 1647, there was a severe bread shortage
in 1647 and 1648. In southern Italy and Sicily the heavy rains of February 1647
were followed by a drought and therefore by famine conditions in 1647 and
1648. In Russia, too, the years leading to 1648 were ones of bad harvest.
Throughout Europe, the distress and protest were concentrated in the major
towns.

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In England, the Leveller movement, under the leadership of John Lilburne

and of his colleagues, including Richard Overton and William Walwyn, made its
first effective appearance in July 1646 when it published a Remonstrance of many
thousand citizens, which called for a republican democracy and religious tolera-
tion in England. From this time, the Levellers published successive policy
programmes, drawn up in the form of a national constitution: each of these
statements, of which the first appeared in 1647, was called the Agreement of the
People. Because the Levellers failed to create an insurrection, it is often easily
forgotten how close they came to creating a revolution.47 In the critical year
1647, when the army quarrelled with Parliament both over policy and because it
had not been paid, the Levellers succeeded in infiltrating the army and in domi-
nating all its proceedings. In October the General Council of the army was
obliged to sit down at Putney, near London, and discuss plans to adopt the
Agreement of the People as the basis of future policy. Only the ruthless hand of
Cromwell succeeded in breaking the Leveller threat. Facing an attempted mutiny
by some regiments in November, he arrested the ringleaders and had one shot.
In April 1649 he arrested a group of Leveller mutineers and had one, Robert
Lockyer, executed; a month later, at Burford, he had three soldiers executed.
Cromwell wisely did not underrate the strength of the Levellers, whose
popular support in London could be seen clearly by the great crowds that turned
out for Lockyer’s funeral on 29 April 1649 and by the thousands who greeted
Lilburne’s release from arrest by the magistrates. From 1647 to 1649 the Levellers’
support could be seen in the volume of protest they managed to stir up, not only
in London but also in the provinces They made ample use of the presses,
dispatched thousands of leaflets throughout the country and had their own
newspaper, the Moderate. Lilburne and his friends made use of the strategy of
petitioning Parliament, the only sovereign the Levellers recognised. Their peti-
tions give valuable evidence of their support. Four days after the arrest in March
1649 of Lilburne and other Levellers, a petition bearing the signatures of 10,000
Londoners was presented to Parliament, proof not only of support but of the
remarkable speed of Leveller organisation. In September 1649 the Levellers
produced their most revolutionary pamphlet, The Remonstrance of many thou-
sands of the free people of England, which was signed by nearly 100,000 people.
In these years the Spanish monarchy was shaken by disaster both within and
without the peninsula. In its Italian possessions the crisis led to major revolts in the
two largest cities of the south – Naples and Palermo. Reacting to the famine of 1647,

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in May a popular procession marched into the cathedral in Palermo and stuck a pole
crowned with bread on the high altar.48 There were shouts of ‘Long live the king and
down with taxes and bad government!’ Mobs set fire to the town hall, opened the
prisons and demolished the tax offices. In August a popular leader emerged in
the form of a goldsmith named Giuseppe d’Alesi. However, when quarrels within
the popular movement produced fighting at the end of August, the authorities
seized their opportunity. D’Alesi was murdered and in September Spanish troops
entered the city. The Palermo revolt exhibits the three main features of the urban
troubles of 1647–8: a food shortage triggered the uprising, the main grievance was
against taxes and the most active enemies of the people were the nobility.
The problems of Naples were very much those of Spain, its overlord.49
Administratively the Spanish crown had only limited control over the kingdom,
which was in the hands of its feudal lords. In 1638 a Spanish official noted of
them that ‘the tyranny and injustice in that kingdom deserve severe punish-
ment’. But taxation for the Spanish war effort was also extremely heavy. The
main fury of the people of Naples on 7 July 1647, the day that a riot in the city
market-place exploded into a major revolt, was directed against the gabelle, the
salt tax.50 Though the illiterate fisherman Masaniello emerged as the popular
leader, the real power behind the rising was his adviser, the 86-year-old priest
Giulio Genoino. Masaniello’s murder in mid-July did not check the revolt, which
now spready rapidly to other parts of southern Italy. The rebels, under a new
popular leader Gennaro Annese, celebrated their victory by declaring a republic,
under the protection of France. French support was only half-hearted, thanks in
part to problems at home, and by April 1648 the Spaniards were back in control.
Spain, reeling from the loss of Portugal and Catalonia and from noble plots
in Aragon and Andalusia, also suffered instability. There was a potentially
dangerous uprising in Granada in 1648. On 18 May the poorer people of the
city, chanting ‘Long live the king and death to bad government’, began a peaceful
agitation that swelled the crowds in the streets; they managed to get the civil
governor (corregidor) replaced. These years of famine and plague helped to
precipitate further risings in 1652 in Granada, Seville and Córdoba.51 In both
Seville and Córdoba the people formed a commune, chose their own corregidor
and set up a popular militia to keep order in the city.
The Fronde in France was the most important of all the urban revolutions of
the year 1648, but the popular struggle never assumed significant proportions.
Even the famous barricades in Paris, which were erected on 26 August 1648 and

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stayed up for three days, were not a purely popular phenomenon and were firmly
under the control of the city elite. The Fronde in Bordeaux had more popular
elements. The first serious disturbances there, in August 1648, were precipitated
by the export of wheat from the city at a time when, as in the rest of France,
starvation was beating on the doors. The Parlement of Bordeaux joined the rebel-
lion and outlawed the governor, the Duke of Épernon, as a public enemy. This
first stage of the Bordeaux Fronde ended with a peace in January 1650. The city
was next caught up in the Parisian struggle when the Princess of Condé won the
leaders of Bordeaux over to her party. From 1651 a new force entered the struggle.
The Ormée, a mass movement named after its initial meeting-place near some
elm trees, was based on popular support but had very divergent aims. It absorbed
the Condé party and by June 1652 had set up a commune in the city. The Ormée
had a membership of thousands and appears to have had genuinely radical views:
‘it is equality that makes for perfection’, claimed one of its pamphlets. ‘The real
cause of sedition and political strife is the excessive wealth of the few.’52
The risings of 1648 in Muscovy were, in their political effect, among the most
important to occur in Europe. Over the whole administrative area of Moscow
there were about 30 urban uprisings from 1630 to 1650; in the city of Moscow
itself the greatest cluster of riots was in the summer of 1648.53 From 1645, Russia
had been ruled nominally by the 16-year-old Tsar Alexei Romanov, but the real
power was wielded by the boyar Boris Morozov. Taxes rose steeply under his
regime and the burgher class was the first to protest. Opposition focused on the
new salt tax, first levied in 1648. Poor harvest conditions, and military reverses
in the fight against Turks and Tatars, helped to foster discontent. In June a riot
broke out in Moscow. When the royal musketeers (the streltsy) were ordered to
break up the crowds, some of them retorted that ‘they did not wish to fight for
the boyars against the common people’. A foreign eyewitness reports that

the Streltsies or life guard, consisting of some thousand Men, took the
Commons part, and thereupon in the afternoone they seized on the Court of
Morozov. . . . The sayd Court they plundred totally, all the stately and pretious
things they found they hewed in pieces . . . the plate of gold and silver they
did beate flat, the pretious pearles and other jewells they have bruised into
powder, they stamped and trampled them under feet, they flung them out of
the windowes, and they suffered not the least thing to bee carryed away,
crying alowd: To Naasi Kroof, that is to say, this is our blood.54

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Officials were murdered, and Morozov was exiled. Moscow, meanwhile, caught
fire in the riot and a large part of the city was destroyed. As a gesture to the popu-
lace in Moscow and other cities, the government agreed to a summoning of the
parliament, the Zemsky Sobor. This met in 1648–9. It was one of the last
moments of Russian constitutionalism.
The Swiss cantons were not free from agitation during the Thirty Years War.
The peasantry benefited from the rise in prices caused by the influx of refugees
from Germany, but the coming of peace reversed the trend: prices tumbled,
leading to an agricultural slump and currency devaluation (1652–3) in Bern,
Lucerne and other cantons. Unfamiliar with the economics of devaluation, the
rural classes rose in revolt.55 The protest movement was led by Johannes
Emmenegger, a wealthy peasant who owned 100 head of cattle and drank out of
a silver goblet. His friends called him the Edelstein der Bauern, the jewel of the
peasants. Other leaders included Niklaus Leuenberger, a wealthy peasant who
later became supreme head of the whole movement, and Christian Schibi, mili-
tary commander of the Lucerne peasants, who was looked upon as a magician
and sorcerer. When the Lucerne peasants failed to get the devaluation revoked,
their leaders met in January 1653 in the town of Entlebuch and took an oath to
struggle together for freedom. At the meeting they also drew up a protest song,
the Tellenlied (song of William Tell), which was to become the anthem of the
peasants as they marched to war. In March 3,000 peasants under Schibi marched
to Lucerne and forced concessions; similar concessions were made in April by
Basel and Solothurn. On 23 April a mass rally of several thousand Swiss rebels
was held in Sumiswald and decided to take the field against their enemies. The
main body of their army, led by Leuenberger, exceeded 24,000 men. By the end
of June, however, they were defeated and in disarray. Schibi was executed in July,
Leuenberger in September.
The indomitable spirit of the Cossacks troubled Russia in the 1660s with the
rise of Stepan (Stenka) Razin, leader of a section of the Cossacks of the river
Don. Razin began raiding in 1667, when he announced that ‘I have come to
fight only the boyars and the wealthy lords’. Fired by the old dream of uniting all
Cossacks he was, by March 1670, at the head of 7,000 Don Cossacks and in
open revolt against Moscow, his professed aim being ‘to remove the traitor boyars
and give freedom to the common people’. His following soon became immense,
swollen by the nomadic populations of the Don and Volga. Many monks and
clergy rallied to his cause; as literate men, they helped to draw up the propaganda

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that was circulated throughout the countryside. In September 1670 the royal
army scattered his forces, with a bloody repression of his humble followers. The
following spring Razin was betrayed by dissident Cossacks and handed over to
the government. Taken to Moscow in a cage, he was tortured and then quartered
alive (June 1671). The most popular folk hero in all Russian history, his stature
may be measured by the legends and bylini (epic poems) devoted to him. Revered
as the ‘shining sun’ (krasnoe solnyshko), he was believed by his followers not to
have died but to be in hiding, waiting for the call of his people.56
In the France of Louis XIV the peasant tradition of revolt seemed to collapse.
A revolt in the region of Boulogne in 1662 was brutally crushed. The main
disturbances during the reign were in 1675, directed specifically against taxation.
In Bordeaux tax riots in March led to street riots and for over four months the
city remained under popular rule, with the number of urban and peasant rebels
estimated at several thousand. The government took a harsh view of what it
regarded as complicity by the city in tax protests and exiled the Parlement. In
Brittany, where tax revolts broke out in Rennes in April 1675, the movement
became an extensive rebellion against taxes and seigneurial oppression and in
favour of regional liberties. In Lower Brittany, where chateaux were pillaged, a
‘Code Paysan’ was drawn up by delegates of village communities of the ‘pays
armorique’. They wanted social peace on the basis of interclass marriages, a revi-
sion of peasant labour services, abolition of the corvée as being against ‘Armorican
liberty’ and all legal proceedings to be free, with judges being elected by peasants.
The peasants wore red bonnets as symbols of the liberty of the province. It was
the last great regional revolt of Louis XIV’s France.57 Only towards the end of the
reign, with the spread of urban disorder in the great subsistence crises of 1693
and 1709, did rebellion again attain the ascendancy it had held during the early
century.
Peninsular Spain experienced some of its most threatening insurrections at the
very end of the century. In 1688 the first stage of a prolonged revolt broke out in
Catalonia. Since 1640, when social order in the principality had almost totally
collapsed,58 the Catalan communities had lived in peace. The approach of war with
France renewed the problem of contributions for the troops, and minor clashes
with cavalry provoked a chain of uprisings. In April 1688 all the villages of lower
Catalonia rose and a peasant host of 18,000 besieged Barcelona. The crisis
continued into late 1689 when once again the peasants laid siege to the capital.
This time, however, energetic action by a new viceroy pacified the rebels and

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scattered their leaders. A few years later, in 1693, the communities of central
Valencia rose in protest at their seigneurial burdens and formed themselves into an
‘Army of the Germanías’ (after the movement of 1520) but were easily suppressed.

Characteristics of communal revolt

In early modern Europe the precipitants of revolt can be reduced very generally
to three: bad harvests, extraordinary taxation and the soldiery. The causes of
revolt did not necessarily coincide with these precipitants. Food shortages did
not by themselves cause discontent; bad harvests were a normal occurrence, and
so long as the common people could see that everyone else was starving they
were long-suffering. Only when it was clear that others were profiting from
distress did they rise: food-exporters and food hoarders were the target in Naples
in 1585, Bordeaux in 1648, Córdoba in 1653. In 1566 in Antwerp and in 1648
in Granada, riots occurred after the food crisis had passed; in the latter, reported
a witness, ‘the supply and price of grain improved, but disorder in the quality
and supply of bread increased’, causing indignation where there had been none
during the actual shortage.
Extraordinary taxation features in nearly every revolt as a direct or proximate
cause; in France, thanks to Richelieu’s war policy, the fiscal burden quadrupled
between 1620 and 1641. Though taxes may have been the provocation, they
were invariably no more than a trigger to release other long-standing grievances.
Few revolts can be considered merely fiscal in scope. Soldiers were also a notor-
ious cause of protest. Troop billeting provoked the rural uprisings in Catalonia
in 1640 and 1688. In some cases the soldiers were an indirect aid to risings. A
report on the French north-east border in 1645 noted that ‘the administration of
justice has been interrupted, through the passage and lodging of armies which
have caused such disorder in the country that the peasants refuse to allow any
judicial action to be taken, and instead rebel even against the judges’.
The tradition of revolt featured as a strong aspect of many insurrections.
Geography was important: banditry tended to recur in mountainous areas (the
Catalan Pyrenees, the Polish Tatr mountains), and frontier areas (such as the
Habsburg frontier with the Turks) had a continuous history of agitation. Certain
localities seem to have been in the forefront of rebellions: in France the little
town of Gourdon in Quercy was at the centre of peasant agitation three times in
three centuries; the 1648 uprising in Seville started in the same quarter that had

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supported the Comuneros in 1520. On a larger scale, endemic regionalism was a

self-evident reason for the persistence of a tradition of rebellion. In Spain,
Catalonia was always looked upon as a source of disorder; in France, Marseille
from 1591 to 1596 maintained itself as an independent state of the Catholic
League and again in 1650 declared itself independent. At times the tradition
took the form of a myth: names such as Croquants, Levellers, Germanías were
adopted repeatedly by subsequent rebels, as if to draw legitimacy from their
predecessors. In Spain the tradition of Fuenteovejuna was invoked frequently. In
1647 in the village of Albuñuelas (Granada) an official reported an uprising to
the Duke of Béjar, lord of the village, and stated that ‘those arrested say they are
Fuenteovejuna, and the judges don’t know how to deal with it’.59 In the village of
Aldeanueva de Ebro in 1663 the residents cried out, ‘Down with the bad govern-
ment! Fuenteovejuna, Fuenteovejuna!’60 The urge to legitimate a rebellion by
establishing continuity from a respected past was constant. The Swiss rebels of
1653 appealed directly to the national hero, William Tell, as the words of the
Entlebuch Tellenlied make plain:

Ach, Tell! ich wollt dich fragen

Wach auf von deinem Schlaf!
(Tell, I beseech you,
wake up from your sleep!)

The leaders and inspirers of uprisings were drawn from the rural elite, urban
artisans and, at the topmost level, the nobility. This was not surprising since
many major revolts, once they had transcended the local level of grievances,
mushroomed out to become large movements embracing all classes and interests.
The lords were in addition keen to protect their communities. In Normandy in
1643 it was reported that ‘the gentry and seigneurs of the villages support and
protect the revolt of their vassals’. Nobles also wished to rescue their people from
the taxation and political authority of the state. Frequently rebels chose leaders
from the upper classes: only nobles had the requisite military expertise, and only
they had the status necessary to give respectability to the rebel cause.
Clergy were prominent participants and leaders. In the rebellion in Angoumois
in 1548 the assistant priest of Cressac marched at the head of his parishioners ‘in
a green bonnet and blue sandals, with a large beard and a two-handed sword’. A
Croquant priest in the same region justified his role ‘because priests are not

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forbidden to go to war . . . and he was defending the public good’.61 In Spain

clergy had a long tradition of rebellion: the preaching of friars in Salamanca in
1520 put the city firmly on the side of the Comunidades. The populist role of
clergy is deceptive; priests and friars participated less for ideological reasons than
because their primary loyalty was to their flocks. Their function in revolts was
social rather than religious.
Town and country had varying roles in uprisings. In eastern Europe the rural
economy dominated the life of the people and the towns, whereas in the west the
towns and the bourgeoisie or nobility controlling them had begun to dominate
the rural areas. In the east, therefore, the conditions of social conflict were radi-
cally different: the revolutionary impetus had to come not from the towns but
from the countryside. When the common people rose in the east it was under
leaders such as Ivan Bolotnikov and Bohdan Khmelnitsky, men who had lived all
their lives outside the towns. In the west, the radical movements tended to orig-
inate in and emerge from the towns, and as a rule they had a considerable bour-
geois component. A brief look at the French revolts of the early seventeenth
century is enough to establish that every significant outbreak began in a town,
expanded its support from the town and maintained its strength so long as it had
urban help. By the 1640s all the major risings in the west were urban – in Naples,
Paris, Granada, Bordeaux. The townspeople were beginning to take the initia-
tive. In eastern Europe no such trend was forthcoming.
In the preceding outline it has been assumed that rebellion was an expression
of community solidarity against outside pressures. But many conflicts also arose
within the broad limits of the local community, where some interests were directed
against others. An analysis of seventeenth-century Castilian towns suggests that
conflict was often provoked by struggles for power between urban oligarchies.
Popular agitation has often been viewed as fragmentary and short-lived, and
consequently of no political importance. The duration of revolts depended in part
on the solidarity of the local community. Where community structures were weak
or even nomadic (as on the Russian frontier), peasant risings degenerated into
skirmishes, all too easily suppressed. Where they were firmer, protracted struggle
was possible: near Linz the peasants of Wildeneck maintained a ceaseless fight
from 1601 to 1662 against the monastery of Mondsee.62 When communities and
towns resolved themselves into ‘communes’ and held together, a revolt might
survive for some time: the Catalan revolt of 1688 lasted for nearly two years, as
did the Croquant rebellion of 1594, and the Austrian peasant rising of 1594 went

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on for three. In numbers, too, the uprisings could not be ignored, rebel armies
amounting to 24,000 in Switzerland in 1653 and 40,000 in Austria in 1595.
A common misapprehension about popular uprisings is that they were
sanguinary. Luther denounced the peasants as ‘murderous’ but the reality was
different. Most rebels respected both life and property. The Austrian rebels of
1595, far from resorting to an orgy of looting, maintained ‘perfect discipline’,
and in one remarkable incident that year they did not kill the soldiers who were
sent to attack them but merely disarmed and beat them, a practice repeated by
the Catalan peasants in 1689. During the Spanish urban risings in 1648 and
1652 not a single death was caused directly by the populace.
The violence of revolts was none the less distinctive. The primary purpose of
rebellion was always to achieve justice: justice was therefore visited, in a primeval
and almost symbolic way, on doers of evil and enemies of the community. Tax
collectors, particularly those who originated from outside the community, were
regular victims. Bodily mutilation, as practised at Agen in 1635 (the private parts
of a tax collector were cut off), was common. The ritual of cannibalism as prac-
tised at Romans in 1580 and ritualistic mutilation of the sort committed on
Starace in Naples in 1585 and on the tax official at Saintonge in 1636 were
further examples of a savagery that was little more than a resort to a form of
justice older than civilisation.
Property likewise was an object of popular justice, the emphasis here being on
purification rites. The scene at the destruction of Morozov’s palace in Moscow in
1648, with rioters throwing valuables out of the windows to cries of ‘This is our
blood!’,63 can be found also in the Starace incident at Naples and in the Seville
rising of 1652. The refusal of outraged rioters to touch tainted property was one
of the most striking aspects of the purification ritual of popular rebellions. It can
be seen in the Naples riots of 1647:

It was admirable what a regular method they observed in their fiery execu-
tions: for they used first to take all the goods out into the Market place to be
burnt, crying out it was the blood of the people of Naples, and ’twas death to
embeazle the least thing; insomuch that one who had stolen but a peep of
Sausage was like to be hang’d by Masaniello; nor did they spare either gold,
silver or jewels, but all was thrown into the flames, as also coaches and horses
were burnt alive, most rich Tapistries and Pictures; but they saved books and
pieces of Piety, which they sent to several Churches.

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These unusual rites of protest were not mere play-acting. The ritual of rebellion
has sometimes been analysed as though it were more significant than the actual
rebellion.64 In reality the popular classes, lacking the means of coercion, had little
option but to resort to symbols of coercion: ‘cannibalism’ was employed as a
threat because no other violence was available.
All rebels took great pains to establish their legitimacy. Lacking any basis for
their authority, they appealed to history, to myth and to God. Side by side with
this pseudo-ideology went a formal belief and trust in the king. Most movements
appealed over the heads of local superiors to a distant ruler. It was rare for them
to question the existence of monarchy, hence the shock felt throughout Europe
when the English in 1649 got rid of theirs. It is exceptional to meet cases, such
as that recorded by Marshal Monluc in his Commentaires, of peasant rebels in the
late sixteenth century who reacted to a mention of the king by saying, ‘What
king? It is we who are the kings; the one you speak of is just a little turd.’ Role
reversal of this type – peasants as kings – was commonplace in most uprisings.
Rebels might dress themselves up as lords and clergy, men might dress up as
women (in the Forest of Dean in 1627 and 1631 the male leader of the revolts
assumed the name ‘Lady Skimmington’, a skimmington being one version of the
charivari). The symbolism was subversive but modelled on the otherwise nonsub-
versive role reversal practised in carnivals. Turning the ‘world upside down’, a
common enough symbol of the carnival tradition,65 became a logical recourse of
rebels. But though social protest can fairly be presented as an array of symbols, it
departed radically from symbolism when it had recourse to violence.
Failing secular legitimacy, rebels appealed to God. The religious radicals of
the German Peasant War wanted to bring the kingdom of heaven down to earth.
The Neapolitan bandit Marco Sciarra titled himself ‘the scourge of God, sent
against usurers and hoarders’. Captain Pouch in the 1607 Midlands revolt
claimed ‘that he was sent of God to satisfie all degrees whatsoevr, and that in this
present worke hee was directed by the lord of Heaven’.66
Authority, however, must be proved by deeds and miracles. The rebel leaders
consequently became invested with supernatural powers in the eyes of their
followers, and on occasion deliberately fostered this sense of magic. In the
Normandy rebellion there was more than one mysterious Jean Nu-Pieds: a leader
who was known yet unknown, who was one yet many, who was here yet also
everywhere; this was the consciously cultivated image that made the leader
appear ubiquitous, elusive, immune to all danger, immortal. In the folk songs,

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Stenka Razin hurls back the bullets fired by his enemies. Wherever the 1607
rising broke out, in the south, in the Forest of Dean, it was reported that Captain
Pouch was there. In addition to this ubiquity Pouch was able to grant immunity,
‘because of a great leather pouch which he wore by his side in which purse hee
affirmed to his company, yt there was sufficient matter to defend them against all
commers, but afterward when hee was apprehended his Powch was seearched
and therein was onely a peece of greene cheese’.
The Lucerne peasant leader Christian Schibi was famed as a magician and
warlock. His superior, Niklaus Leuenberger, maintained his authority by an
outward symbol. He had been given a red cloak by the peasants of Entlebuch
which he wore wherever he rode. ‘He had only to beckon with his hand’, reported
a Solothurn chronicler, ‘or scribble a word and men, women and children would
go by day or night through rain, wind and snow, to deliver his message.’ Catherine
de Medici observed in 1579 of Paulmier, leader of the commune at Romans, that
‘he has such great influence and authority that at his slightest word all the people
of the town and round about will bestir themselves’. The Fugger correspondent
at Linz in 1596 wrote of the Austrian rebels that

they seem bewitched, for as soon as the word is given, even in this cold, they
leave their wives and children, hasten from their houses and farms, yet
attacking neither towns, castles nor even villages. They tell the populace,
whom they drag along with them, that for all they care horses, oxen and cows,
even the women, may perish and they pawn their cattle and drink away their
gold.

How revolutionary were rebels? Most, necessarily, looked to restore what had
been lost, not to gain what they had never had. The widespread Croat rising of
1573, which involved up to 60,000 peasants, demanded little more than the
restoration of ‘ancient rights’. One of the lords reported how his peasants came
to him and asked him ‘not to ally with anyone against them, since they had not
risen against their lords, but only that their ancient rights be restored to them’.67
However limited their aims, they none the less, and despite themselves, threat-
ened the social order. The Croat rebels demanded a reduction of taxes and the
abolition of tithes; had either been granted the structure of authority would have
been shaken. Moreover, the cry of ‘ancient rights’ was revolutionary because it
appealed to a near-mythical age of freedom.

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The yearning for equality was of course perpetual. In 1679 we encounter in

Germany the couplet which John Ball had preached throughout England in the
fourteenth century:68

Da Adam ackert und Eva spann,

Wer war damals ein Edelmann?
(When Adam delved and Eve span,
who was then a nobleman?)

Egalitarianism was not new, but in many risings it became commonplace. ‘We
bear the nobility on our shoulders’, observed a pamphleteer in Paris in 1649,
‘but we have only to shrug our shoulders to throw them on to the ground.’ An
Essex labourer asked in 1594, ‘What can rich men do against poor men if poor
men rise and hold together?’ The oppressors were not shaken off and the opti-
mism of the rebels never bore fruit. Bartholomew Steere in 1596 informed a
friend that ‘he need not work for his living this dear year, for there would be a
merry world shortly’.69 Despite all millenarian hopes, this merry world receded
further and further into the future, until overtaken by the gaunt realities of the
Industrial Revolution.

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 — seven —
GENDER ROLES

In these days the view that men take of us is so adverse that we can neither
win them over with our patience nor impress them with our innocence.
María de Zayas, Disenchantments of Love (1647)

Gender and property; A war of the sexes?; Matrimony; Women and work;
Motherhood and the family; Women in religion; Private and public escapes;
Women in power; Women, honour and the law; Sexual variation and choice

The two principal roles of an individual in traditional society were dictated by

age and by gender: both roles had specific rules and limitations. Europe was a
patriarchal society in which adult males conventionally controlled both property
and power, but there were immense variations such that exceptions can be found
at every level and in every context. Women, like men, had a recognised place in
traditional society, and their role varied across the spectrum of social forms to be
found in preindustrial Europe. The number of studies devoted in the last forty
years to the historical role of women is now both immense and complex,1 and
the present chapter, which is directed to the relative ‘gender roles’ of men and
women within society, can touch only briefly on some relevant aspects.
A strong tradition among earlier historians of the history of women, repre-
sented initially by Alice Clark’s Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century
(first published 1919),2 argued that during the early modern period there was an
erosion of women’s economic and social status in favour of men: women, she
argued, were deprived of part of their productive role, thereby suffering loss of
income and social standing. It was suggested that the legal and religious changes
of the period accelerated this decline. Later research has revealed the complexity
of the picture, and the evidence now indicates that we cannot think of women’s
lot as solely one of deprivation.3

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We have to start nevertheless with the basic social presumption of that time,
which allotted power and property to the male and relegated women to a lesser
role, both privately, in being confined to a largely household role, and publicly,
in being denied positions of authority in the state and the Church. By extension,
the complex laws of the multiple societies of Europe tended to disfavour women,
who found it difficult to defend their claims to property or employment. The
first person who is considered to have challenged prejudices against women was
a French noblewoman of Italian origin, Christine de Pisan (1365–1429), whose
writings (produced before the invention of printing) were a pioneering step in
the development of what has come to be called ‘feminism’.

Gender and property

The factor that most determined the public status of a man or a woman was
possession of property. Though legal systems, tradition and inheritance customs
always confirmed that property rights should be normally vested in the adult
male, male dominance was neither automatic nor universal, nor did the system
universally privilege all men or subordinate all women.4 While the rule of patri-
archy privileged the male sex, not all were beneficiaries: those who had not
reached the accepted age of ‘manhood’ (around 30 years in England), who had
no property (the laws of primogeniture, practised in many countries, limited
succession to the eldest son, leaving other sons without material support) or
who were not married male householders (by no means all men managed to
marry) were evidence that simply being male did not guarantee personal
independence.
A woman with property, by contrast, possessed both status and indepen-
dence; she also surmounted the weaknesses of her sex. She became a highly desir-
able commodity in the marriage market; her male peers accepted her on terms of
equality; and in certain societies she had the right to political representation that
came with her property, especially if she were effectively head of the household.
In some village communities, female heads of household (they made up, for
example, 16 per cent of the households in the Ealing census in England in 1599)
enjoyed the same status as the males. At a yet more elevated level, in some parlia-
ments of Europe women could attend as members. None of this is surprising if
we remember that in most countries (not in France, where the Salic law excluded
them) women could transmit noble titles and frequently succeeded to thrones

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in their own right. In practice, of course, the wide variety of legal systems
in Europe, and substantial differences between Church and state laws, created
important modifications in the relation between women and property.
Property determined the possibility of marriage and a girl with a fair dowry
could always find a husband. Among the lower orders the wife brought little
dowry to a marriage: a small sum of money, perhaps, or in country areas a farm-
yard animal. The existence of property was vital. In the poor French village of
Sennely en Sologne in 1700 the priest complained that his younger parishioners
‘get married out of financial interest rather than any other inclination. Most of
them when looking for a bride only ask how many sheep she can bring to a
marriage.’ The transference of property through marriage dowries assumed
crucial importance among the richer classes and was regulated by complicated
arrangements to ensure the correct disposal of the property. Women conse-
quently became a crucial link in the forging of political and economic alliances
between families, as in Brescia, where the dowry was an essential element in the
strategy of property accumulation practised by the elite.5
Women might possess property and yet not be in a position to control it. In
England, control of property passed to the husband and the common law
dictated that inheritance passed to the eldest son. These rules affected the elite,
who owned the bulk of landed property. However, among the greater part of the
population, who owned little land and were unaffected by the strict laws
governing elite inheritance, the legal system functioned more along lines of
common sense, and working women were able to achieve a surprising degree
of equality in the distribution of settlements.6 The surviving documentation of
different English courts shows nevertheless that daughters, wives and widows
had difficulty maintaining their claims over family property in the face of the
firm preference given to men. Over time, moreover, social attitudes to marriage
status tended to insist that wives be subject to their husbands and that, concom-
itantly, their property also be subject to the husband’s control. The preacher
Jeremy Taylor in 1653 stated: ‘let the husband and wife avoid the curious distinc-
tion of “mine” and “thine”, for this has caused all the lawsuits and all the wars in
the world; let them have but one person, and one interest’.7 Effectively, women
tended to be looked upon as property of the husband, and their property
likewise.
The weaker position of women in questions of inheritance affected their
ability to remarry if they were widowed. A widower usually enjoyed control

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of his late wife’s property and therefore had the means to seek out a new
wife to take care of his household. Fortunate indeed were those widows who
retained property from the marriage and in addition had no children; for them
remarriage was never a problem. Since the majority of widows were not in this
happy position, they remained single. In Coventry in 1523 there were nearly
nine times as many widows as widowers among the registered households.8
Across rural Europe, widows were a significant proportion of the population
profile. But they were not necessarily poor or idle. With no man to earn the keep,
they struggled through on their own resources. In the villages of Zamora in
Spain in the 1560s there were several widows who put their children to work:
one widow had two sons and (she said) ‘she had them with her sometimes, and
at other times they were off earning their living, because they owned no
property’.9
The unmarried adult female also had equal rights. ‘Women’s property rights
varied in accordance with different systems of law, and place of residence; they
varied above all with their marital status.’10 In the simpler societies of village and
countryside, women had a greater share in tasks and their status was less restricted,
whereas in complex urban societies they tended to be more disadvantaged.11
Their gender marked them out for functions – in the family, at work – that
might often be considered subordinate and in some measure gave them a depen-
dent status. But they also had the possibility of rising above allotted roles. The
position of men, by contrast, was based on two decisive functions: the private
one of head of the family, a place which in European society was traditionally
allotted to the patriarchal figure, and the public one of warrior, who not only
protected society but also enshrined the ideals of honour and status on which
society rested.
Women were seldom able successfully to challenge the male monopoly
in these two areas, though there is evidence enough of matriarchy in some
rural societies and of women as armed defenders of the village and the family.
Their formal roles, accepted in the literature of the time, were generally three: as
unmarried women, as wives or as widows or religious persons. But at various
stages of their life cycle, and in select communities of Europe, they were able to
exercise choices that gave them considerable freedom of movement within the
apparently firm restrictions imposed by males. Moreover, as parents or as mistresses
or as property owners they were frequently also in a position of authority that
clearly contradicted the formal gender role allotted to them.12

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A war of the sexes?

In literature of the time the notion of a war between the sexes was commonplace.
Allusions to the theme, as in the works of the seventeenth-century Spanish
novelist María de Zayas, were numerous and reflected a widespread view of
gender roles.13 The ‘querelle des femmes’, as it was termed in French writings, was
for the most part a literary conceit,14 a device used by male authors to assert their
supremacy in specific spheres. Literary works were full of complaints by males
that women were seeking to transcend the limit of their sexual roles and invade
or even take over the male domain. Women hate all subjection was the theme;
they desired, in the words of the playwright Lope de Vega, ‘to assume the reins
that God put into the hands of men’. There was typically among English writers
‘an acutely felt anxiety about how women could best be governed and controlled’.15
Excessive sexuality on the part of women was, for example, a threat to the virility
of men, who might not have the potency to satisfy their women. All the critical
attitudes adopted by men were therefore, María de Zayas perceptively noted,
motivated simply by the concern ‘to make themselves more secure’.16 The secur-
ity was deemed to be basic to the functioning of society. Transgressing the role
was a fundamental threat to patriarchal relations. Though there were multiple
modifications to this scenario, received opinion had changed very little by the
time that Rousseau declared in Émile that ‘la femme est faite pour plaire et pour
être subyuguée, elle doit se rendre agréable à l’homme au lieu de le provoquer’.
When examining the role of women in early modern Europe, it is impossible
to be sure of the extent to which literary references reflected social reality. A
common opinion was that women were more independent and perhaps freer in
northern Europe than in the Mediterranean. Both Spanish and English visitors
remarked on the autonomy of Dutch women.17 German literature referred regu-
larly to the uncontrollable aspects of women.18 But it may be seriously misleading
to construe such references as proof of a social scenario in which all women were
considered responsible for disorder and subversion. Though authority in tradi-
tional society was firmly in the hands of men, they did not consistently wield this
authority against women. Court prosecutions for crime do not by any means
show a direct bias against women.19 Surprising support can be found even in the
Mediterranean for a view that the man–wife relationship was not based on
conflict, for even on an absolute authority exercised by one over the other, but
on a fulfilment of complementary roles.20 Among Spanish writers of the Counter-
Reformation who dealt with domestic roles, Cristóbal Acosta affirmed (1585)

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that the duty of a man was to ‘honour woman and never speak ill of her; employ
the eyes in looking on her, the hands in serving her, the property in giving her
gifts, the heart in making her happy’. Another Spaniard, Marco Antonio de
Camos (1592), maintained that the wife is ‘neither superior nor inferior but
equal in love and companionship’.21 In parts of France and Spain it was common
for the wife to control the household money, which the husband was by custom
obliged to hand over out of his wages. These attitudes refer primarily to the
domestic sphere; outside it, women were notoriously disadvantaged.
The notion of a ‘war’ was of course not far from some aspects of social prac-
tice. In all classes, men outwardly professed an apparent disdain for the inferior
sex. In the eighteenth-century elite, in both Paris and London, it was the fashion
not to admit to being in love with one’s wife.22 At social events women were
regularly separated from men, a custom sometimes practised down to our own
day in private gatherings for after-dinner drinks. In churches women were not
permitted to occupy the same section as men, largely because of the dangers of
physical contact. At some public events, such as theatre-going, the sexes had
different entrances and seating. The practice was medieval in origin. During the
later sixteenth century, it was generally practised in Rome and Milan and appar-
ently enforced in the Netherlands in both Catholic and Calvinist churches. But
attempts to extend separation of sexes to churches in Spain seem to have failed,
despite great efforts by the clergy.

Matrimony

Artistic representations of woman from the Renaissance onwards tended to

follow the stereotypes determined by Christian tradition – woman as saint,
woman as sinner – and can seldom be accepted as reliable images of social reality.
Even the image of the good housewife to be found in Dutch paintings of the
seventeenth century tended to appeal consciously to the image of the virtuous
wife of Proverbs 31. Because of this, prescriptive writings of the period are
possibly a surer guide than art to changing conceptions of a woman’s role. There
were many such writings, instanced on the Catholic side by the treatise of Juan
Luis Vives (1523) and on the Protestant side by the Puritan Thomas Becon’s
Book of Matrimony (1562). In the post-Reformation period, the views of all
Christian writers tended to converge in recognising that women must be shown
love and respect. The treatises, inevitably, limited their scope to one principal

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role: that of the married woman. It was the function that determined most
aspects of woman’s life in traditional Europe.
Though young women might marry late (we have seen that the mean age for
first marriage in western Europe was around 25 years) all those early years were a
mere preparation for, and widowhood a mere postscript to, the condition of matri-
mony. Life outside marriage was, for most women, almost inconceivable. Even the
male-dominated Catholic Church of the Counter-Reformation conceded that
though chastity in the religious life was a high calling, the married life might be an
even higher one. For the majority of women, the norm was matrimony.
Exceptions to the norm, one must say at the outset, were considerable. In the
‘north-west European pattern’ a high proportion of females, possibly up to
20 per cent, abstained completely from marriage, whereas in eastern Europe
virtually all women married. For example, in north-west Spain in the early eigh-
teenth century around 16 per cent of women remained celibate.23 At least 33 per
cent of urban women in England in the early modern period remained single. In
the late seventeenth century over half of the women in London were single.24 The
perceived presence of single women in a community was often very high because
of factors such as the high number of widows. At any given moment in the west,
and taking into account factors such as religious ideals (entry into convents),
economic disability, widowhood or simply the unavailability of men, nearly half
the women under 50 years old might not be in a state of matrimony. Although
in general the population was fairly balanced between male and female, the men
too would suffer difficulties in finding mates. Rome in 1592 had only 58 women
for every 100 men, and in Nördlingen during the Thirty Years War the authori-
ties allowed unlimited immigration to women (even before the war, in 1581–
1610, 22 per cent of brides were immigrant women) but restricted the entry of
males.25 There were also special circumstances, such as the seasonal emigration of
males in search of employment, that might leave villages almost entirely without
young males for several weeks.
We have seen that, depending on a broad range of factors that included above
all the permission of parents, a girl might have considerable freedom in choice of
a partner. Ironically it was in the upper classes, where property questions were
paramount, that girls might find the choice made for them against their will. In
their case marriage was an investment and they were the marketable commodity.
In the lower classes a greater laxity of social control, and more ability to move
around within the region, produced a greater freedom of courtship.

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But what could a woman contribute to matrimony beyond her person in a

traditional society that was male-dominated at every level and where gender roles
were exclusively decided by men? In reality, within the framework of male domi-
nation there could be considerable variation of roles and a woman’s contribution
to a marriage could be very important indeed, both in terms of the property she
brought with her and in terms of the practical work experience she might
provide.
She was, above all and traditionally, the mother, the bringer of life to the
household. Though it was common for the husband to be considered the person
who had to ‘maintain’ the wife and ‘provide for’ her (‘the office of the man is to
spend money, of the wife not to wastefully spend it’, stated an English advice
book in 1573), there were others who saw her role in more elevated terms. Sir
Anthony Fitzherbert observes in his Booke of Husbandrye (1523) that it was ‘an
olde common saying, that seldom doth the husbande thrive without leave of his
wyf ’. Her tasks were seen as embracing all household duties, from keeping the
animals and the garden to helping with the crops, baking bread, going shopping,
cooking meals and helping with the harvest. The domestic role was not the only
one allotted to women: they were also industrially active, engaged in sixteenth-
century England ‘in every branch of textile production in town and country
alike’, active as weavers in centres as important as Bristol, York and London.26 An
analysis of over 4,000 work tasks performed by women in south-west England
over the period 1500–170027 confirms participation in all branches of output
(such as spinning and brewing) as well as in crafts and apprenticeships. Men and
women shared tasks. In Somerset in 1551, Margaret Parsons, a servant, helped
to plough a 7-acre field, while in Knook, Wiltshire, in 1622, Robert Griffin put
mutton ‘into the pot over the fire to make broth and some provision for his wife
being great with child’. The figures of the cited sample for south-west England
indicate that women carried out over 33 per cent of work tasks in agriculture,
made up over 40 per cent of those engaged in manufacturing and formed over
70 per cent of those involved in housework. A similar picture is available for the
gender division of labour at the same period in Sweden and south-west Germany.
Religion had a part to play in determining roles. The dominance of man in a
traditionally patriarchal society was reaffirmed during the confessional age. In the
interests of stability of property and family, the laws strengthened the role of the
husband. Both tradition and common practice tended to give wife and children a
very subordinate role. In 1587 a jurist of Tours commended ‘domestic discipline

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where the father is as a dictator’, and in 1622 an English writer described the
husband as ‘a king in his owne house’. There were extreme cases where customary
law allowed men to beat their wives or kill them for infidelity. But by the early
seventeenth century some attitudes in western Europe were changing. The three
great controls over family behaviour were the state, the Church and the commu-
nity; all three modified their attitude between the fifteenth and the eighteenth
centuries. Perhaps the most significant influences at work derived from the
Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, whose leaders attempted to bring
some order into the rules of marriage. The Reformation, which ceased to recog-
nise celibacy as an ideal state, put more emphasis on the status of marriage; but in
practice both Protestants and Catholics were working with the same problems of
human conduct and came up with virtually the same solutions.28
The intervention of the state aimed invariably to strengthen the patriarchal
authority of the father, with particular concern for the protection of family prop-
erty. A revival of Roman Law among jurists stressed both the rights of property
and the father’s authority over his family. In some parts of France disobedience
to parents came to be regarded as a crime, and in Spain the Madrid city police
arrested disrespectful sons. On the other hand, the state ceased to tolerate the
power over life and limb that husbands had once exercised over wives and chil-
dren and ‘divorces’ or legal separations were granted by state and Church courts
both in France and Spain when the wife could prove systematic beating.
It is significant that over 70 per cent of the petitions for divorce in the arch-
diocese of Cambrai in 1710–36 came from women.29 The majority of petitions
for separation in Spain cited marital violence as the reason. There were two prin-
cipal grounds for granting separation in a Catholic country, if we go by the
practice in Catalonia.30 First, if either spouse threatened the life and honour of
the other (a wife from Sitges stated in 1660 that ‘she is mistreated by her husband
who threatens to kill her and beats her with his fists and kicks her’). Second, if
the spouse refused to give economic support (the same wife stated that ‘her
husband refuses to work and to give her the necessary maintenance’). Impotence
(that is, inability to fulfil marital duties) tended to be cited not in pleas for sep-
aration but in pleas for nullity. Impotence was difficult to prove on personal
evidence alone, and more weight was put on the testimony of the community. In
one case in Catalonia in 1596 the parish priest testified on behalf of the wife that
‘he has heard people say many times in the village that the husband didn’t have
much of a member’.

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Catholic practice was that couples might be separated but could not marry
again, for the original marriage was binding. The Protestants, in contrast, gradu-
ally came to accept remarriage after divorce, but were by no means eager to
condone it. Protestant Basel, where divorce was granted to 16.7 per cent out of
1,356 marital cases in 1550–92 and the parties were allowed to remarry after a
year, seems to have been exceptionally liberal. As a rule all Christian denomina-
tions discouraged divorce and preferred to preach the merits of a good marriage.
Anglicans reacted against Catholic teaching on the virtues of chastity by stressing
the high calling of marriage, ‘a state’ (according to the Puritan William Perkins)
‘in itself far more excellent than the condition of a single life’.
The pleas for divorce and separation are a reminder that the state of marriage
in traditional society was not as harmonious as once believed. Though the dura-
tion of marriage between a couple in western Europe was (as we have seen for the
area of Basel, see Chapter 1) around twenty years, after which death would inter-
vene for one of the partners, in practice very few Europeans were able to last
the course. Stability in marriage was a desired ideal rather than a daily reality.
In post-Reformation Germany, the attempt to affirm marriage discipline was a
constant challenge, with the Lutheran courts particularly active in the mid-
sixteenth century.31 ‘It is no surprise’, a Spanish priest observed in 1588, ‘that in
our time there is such unhappiness in marriages’; and another the following year
commented that ‘it is a disgrace to see how openly and unashamedly so many
adulteries are committed’.32 The fact is that in traditional Europe the marriage
bond was not always seen as indissoluble.33 Like any other secular contract,
marriage could be annulled if certain conditions, such as the payment of a dowry,
were not complied with. Because the contract carried no commitment to perma-
nence, many felt themselves free to break the bonds by mutually agreed separation
or even by bigamy. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the offence of
bigamy constituted 5 per cent of all the cases prosecuted in Spain by the Inquisition.
The nature of matrimonial unhappiness varied greatly, then as now, and had a
broad range of scenarios, with physical violence as a constant component.34
Historians have frequently presented the traditional family as one in which
wives suffered, children were beaten and husbands ruled. Though all this
undoubtedly happened, it is important to remember that a profound control was
exercised over marital conduct by community norms. No village remained ignor-
ant of the virtues or misdeeds within families, which were always vulnerable to
the interference of kin and neighbours. In 1617 when the villagers of Yardley in

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Worcestershire petitioned against a householder, they included the accusation

that he ‘did beat his wife most cruellie’. Throughout western Europe the custom
of the charivari (see Chapter 8) allowed members of the community to deride
cuckolds, henpecked husbands, inappropriate second marriages and unfaithful
spouses. Community control of other types survived: in Granada, for example,
the people annually elected a juez del barrio (suburb warden), whose task it was
to oversee the behaviour of families, and battered wives in the same region could
obtain the arrest of their offending husbands. At the very time that the process
of social and political change began to diminish the influence of the community
over the lives of families, other moral norms were being brought into play. The
Puritans in England and America may not have innovated radically in their
approach to marriage, but they certainly shifted opinion towards a more
respectful relationship within families.
The Council of Trent also had a decisive influence. Manuals for confessors
published before its sessions contain no references to the duties of parents,
whereas all manuals published thereafter devote considerable space to the
subject.35 Cardinal Richelieu reflected the new trend when he wrote that the
commandments impose ‘obligations not only on children towards their fathers,
but also on fathers and mothers towards their children, inasmuch as love should
be reciprocal’. One of the most influential Catholic works exalting marriage was
St Francis de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life (1609): for him marriage was
‘a great sacrament, to be honoured by all and in all ways’. The position of woman
was firmly defended in a pioneering work by the Spanish Dominican Vicente
Mexía, Salutary instruction on the state of marriage (1566). He defined the rela-
tion between husband and wife as one of ‘equals in everything: equals in honour
and service and ownership of goods and whatever pertains to the husband: all of
this the wife has equally and without distinction’. The wife, he said, was ‘not a
slave or servant but a free woman, lady of the house and estate and goods and
whatever else he has, with the one obligation of obeying him’.
Affection and love had always been important in matchmaking,36 though
there was never any assumption that they were necessary or could affect the
nature of the marriage contract. Prescriptive writings, however, began to admit
that there should be a basis for stability within marriage. Church manuals before
the mid-sixteenth century did not use the word ‘love’ in a conjugal context; by
the later seventeenth century most did so. In the early sixteenth century it was
almost impossible to break an engagement to marry; by 1665 in France it was

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possible for Jeanne Pluot to be officially released from her engagement on the
grounds that she ‘has never loved and still does not love the said Lasnier, and
would choose death rather than marry him’.37 Normally, however, ‘love’ was not
a criterion accepted by the courts, which used other principles to guide them
when they sanctioned the separation of couples. When the courts failed to satisfy,
couples all over Europe seem to have done what came most naturally: they simply
separated.38 In rural Catalonia, the incidence of separation, apparently accepted
by communities, was so high that the bishops placed it at the top of their list of
moral failings among the people.
The encouragement of intrafamily respect and affection by the Reformation
and Counter-Reformation was one of the ways in which broad external influ-
ences helped to modify the character and development of the family. The evolu-
tion of work patterns was another powerful influence. Before early modern times
there was no significant distinction between place of work and place of leisure:
the family worked where it lived, as peasant families would continue to do for
centuries to come. As work became dissociated from the home (through urban-
isation and later through industrialisation), the family evolved into a centre
where the wage earner retreated for leisure. This helped to privatise the family;
and servants, who had hitherto always been considered members of the family
household, were gradually excluded from the domestic circle.

Women and work

The preparation for marriage obliged all women, rich and poor, to acquire some
experience with which they could bring benefit to the family household. It was
normal for women to do work in the house and also frequently out in the
fields.39 The process started from the early years, when rural families sent their
children away from home to spend a number of years as servants in life-cycle
service in the towns. The female presence in the urban labour market was always
important. In the textile town of Leiden in the 1580s, 10 per cent of the labouring
population were independent women workers, and a further 20 per cent were
women in menial employment.40 Since life-cycle workers had the specific inten-
tion of serving for only a short while, until they had saved money for their dowry
or learned a trade, there was a rapid turnover in their numbers. In the Spanish
town of Cuenca, over 33 per cent of servants left their jobs annually, and a
further one-sixth changed their dwellings every year.41 In global terms, country

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girls employed in domestic service in the towns were a significant long-term

feature of the European labour market. They ‘accounted for 13 per cent of the
population of any city north of the Loire’ in preindustrial times.42 The high
proportion of girls in such employment contributed to the gender imbalance in
many European cities. For every 100 women in the population, Venice in 1655
had 79 men, London in 1695 had 87 men and Zürich in 1671 had 74 men.43
The degree of participation by women in work depended logically on the
nature of local industries. In rural areas, work on farms was supplemented by
work in fisheries, forests and mines. Production based on the domestic loom
could be dominated by women, as in Cologne where it was reported in 1498
that ‘in our city the craft of silkmaking is carried on mainly by women and very
rarely by men, with the result that the women are much more knowledgeable
about the trade than the men’.44 Silk was an exceptional case of an industry in
which women continued to play a predominant role. In Bologna in the 1700s,
when the industry was in decline, women ran two-thirds of the production
centres. In this case the women were not of humble origin, but came from the
middle classes, and acted as producers and guild members while their husbands
acted as merchants and purchasers of raw materials. In Polish cities of the seven-
teenth century, by contrast, women producers and traders were few. Their role
was confined largely to small retail trade,45 and even to moneylending: of a
sample of small loans made in seventeenth-century Gdańsk, three-quarters were
made by women.46
Women were, by custom, excluded from most occupations where men were
the traditional wage earners. By extension, this meant that women were normally
excluded from guild membership and its corresponding status. In many towns in
Germany, Poland and the Netherlands, however, where family links helped them
to participate, they were often accepted into guilds and became apprentices. If
the family controlled a textile firm, they naturally played a significant role in
production.47 In small crafts not controlled by guilds, such as printing, they had
a useful role. In some family businesses, women attended to all the public and
sales activities; in others, they did the bookkeeping or conducted the business
correspondence.48 The Englishman Fynes Moryson, visiting Holland in the
1590s, was of the opinion that in small businesses the men wasted their time
doing nothing while the women took care of all the work. Though pushed
into the background by social custom, wives and daughters were frequently the
mainstay of productivity. In early eighteenth-century London women played a

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significant role directing small businesses. On the basis of fire-insurance policies

taken out by them during the period 1726–9, it can be seen that 37 per cent of
the women concerned were active in food and entertainment (taverns, grocers,
coffee-houses), 31 per cent in textiles (as drapers and milliners) and 11 per cent
in pawnbroking.49
Moreover, women played a fundamental role in the local economy. Excluded
from most professional activities by the guilds, they were an essential part of the
agrarian economy, not only in the tasks of planting, weeding and harvesting, but
also in transporting produce and in buying.50 At every social level, whether
managers of farms or field labourers, whether as dairy farmers or as keepers of
animals, their role was extremely complex and is difficult to define in statistical
terms.51 In some peasant societies, they worked side by side with men. In the
Basque lands and in northern France, women were an important element in
agriculture. In the Mediterranean area, on the other hand, they were sometimes
discouraged from working in the fields as this was held to endanger the man’s
role and therefore his honour. Only men, it was felt, could direct the agrarian
economy.
We may try to summarise a complex picture. Some historical studies consider
work to have been a great liberating force that made women more equal in a very
inegalitarian environment and gave them social advantages. It is not easy to
apply this optimistic view to the realities of preindustrial society, where work
could be neither pleasant nor rewarding, and did not necessarily enhance the
status of women. There is also an alternative view which maintains that women
played only a marginal role in work activity, since they were generally excluded
from guilds and frequently restricted to domestic duties. Some scholars go so far
as to suggest that restrictions on their role in work had worsened the status of
women on the eve of the Industrial Revolution.
The examples cited above suggest that both views may be seriously incomplete.
Women, both unmarried and married, participated to a remarkable degree in all
aspects of work even though they thereby earned no status separate from that of
men nor earned comparable wages. If women’s role declined in some work sectors,
it may not reflect any worsening of their status but might have been because of
changes in those industries or because of changes in family structure that removed
women from the workplace. Recent studies on eighteenth-century France suggest
that women at the work place had a positive role that confirmed their status and
their personality.52 Women retained their traditional and vital role in the family,

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but were also active in both agrarian and urban production processes as managers,
midwives, artisans, shopkeepers, textile workers. Depending on time and place,
women could also overcome the way that men might block their entry into certain
professions. In the city of York, women were not recognised as members of the
guild of tailors before the seventeenth century, but by the mid-eighteenth century
they numbered up to one-third of the members of the guild. At the same period
the city of Nantes permitted guild access to women in professions as diverse as
textile workers, butchers and dyers.
In many respects, women’s part in work during early modern times may have
remained constant (for better or for worse) simply because it was often shared
with men. In societies where the economy was based on the household, much
work was necessarily allotted among members of the family.53 Women played
their part and husbands often appreciated what they did. In 1600 a Salisbury
man, Thomas Reade, left all his property to his loving wife who ‘by her joint
care, travail and industry hath supported and augmented my estate’. There were
obviously very many other cases where working wives did not or were not allowed
to share their work and were correspondingly subjected to a disadvantaged place
in the personal and social scale.

Motherhood and the family

It was commonly recognised at the time that woman’s role as mother was the
most trying of her several duties. It began with the mortal risk of childbirth. In
the upper elites, where it was important to produce a male heir to take over the
family property, women were under constant pressure to give birth. The pleasure
of becoming a mother was superseded by the obligation to beget (male) heirs.
‘Always going to bed, always pregnant, always giving birth’, the Polish princess
Marie Leszczyńska, wife of Louis XV, is reported as saying resignedly. It was no
exaggeration. At a time when giving birth was a risk to life (both of mother and
of child), aristocratic and royal wives complied with their duty and ran the risk.
The need to produce live births was of course a result of the very high rate of
infant mortality, in which possibly one of every three children died in infancy.
Elite wives had to remedy the default, particularly if they kept on producing girls
and were unable to achieve the desired objective of a male heir. In Spain the
young (and subsequently notorious) Princess of Eboli, who consummated her
marriage with the prince of that name in 1557 when she was 17, produced ten

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births over the subsequent dozen years. She was hardy enough to survive. By
contrast, three of the four wives of Philip II of Spain died because of childbirth
complications, and the king’s second daughter, Catalina, died young of the same
cause. Among the general population the proportion of women dying in child-
birth at that period is not clear, but it could have been as high as 10 per cent in
some areas of France,54 much less so among the peasantry than among the elite.
For England it has been estimated that childbirth caused up to 20 per cent of all
female deaths between the ages of 25 and 34.55 The well-known advice (1671) of
Madame de Sévigné to her daughter, who had just given birth, that she should
abstain from sexual relations for a while, demonstrates a common awareness of
the risks involved.
One of the greatest aids to a woman in childbirth was the midwife, whose
services were clearly essential to human survival. The remarkable memoirs of a
seventeenth-century Dutch midwife, Catharina Schrader, who began her notes
in 1693 and continued them until her death in 1746, reveal the experiences and
trials of a career in which she assisted at about 4,000 deliveries.56 The midwife, as
a bringer of life, was a socially respected figure (in 1704 in Chester the local
midwife was the mayoress),57 and was also a valuable witness used by courts
investigating cases of rape and infanticide.
As an extension of the view that love and affection were slow to develop in
western society, scholars from Ariès onward have frequently affirmed that
maternal love towards infants was rare in traditional Europe. The view was rein-
forced by research that showed, as we have seen, that one in every two infants did
not survive into adulthood; mothers, it was presumed, accepted the inevitable
and suppressed their affectionate feelings. The common practice in eighteenth-
century France of upper-class mothers leaving their infants in the (often unreli-
able) care of wet-nurses, seems to supply a concrete example of the general trend.
Some historians ventured to suggest that if maternal affection was sometimes in
evidence, it was simply the consequence of males enforcing a ‘motherly’ role on
women.
These views have been convincingly questioned by scholars. In all preindus-
trial societies, concern for infants was the natural rule and Europe could not have
been an exception.58 The evidence of a large number of surviving first-person
accounts from England reveals beyond any doubt that among the literate classes
affection for children,59 and corresponding grief over their deaths, was the norm.
Children, it seems clear, were both wanted and cared for.

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Women in religion

Throughout Europe women continued to enjoy an important role in religion.

Their first and most important role was in the religious practice of the family and
the upholding of family virtues; by extension they also played a major role in
community religion. At home they cared for the upbringing of the children; in
the community they played a full part in festivities and were normally those who
arranged the cleaning and decoration of the church. Going to church seems
moreover to have been considered the special function of women; at least in the
Mediterranean countryside, the men preferred to stay outside the church, where
they played at dice while waiting for their women to come out.
The Protestant Reformation had an ambiguous impact on the position of
women in the family and in religion. The agreed view is that it ‘both expanded
and diminished women’s opportunities’.60 Women could be found in the
vanguard of the Protestant movement and insisted on their right to participate
equally in the cause with men. ‘Do we have two gospels’, the former nun Marie
Dentière protested, ‘one for men and the other for women?’ Despite the compe-
tition from males, women made a profound impact on the course of the
Reformation. In France, they played a major part in religious changes. Royal
ladies such as Marguerite of Navarre and Jeanne d’Albret gave their support to
Calvinism. It was of course inevitable that noblewomen should exercise consid-
erable influence. But in terms of suffering the ordinary women had the more
heroic role: one-fifth of the martyrs in the Marian persecution in England were
women. The abolition by Protestants of clerical celibacy and of enclosed convents
gave a new dimension to women’s social role but without necessarily improving
it. There were indeed many negative trends that in fact reduced their role. In
traditional society women had been active in festivals, processions and other
community functions; the abolition of these celebrations by the Reformation
sharply reduced the public activities in which women might participate.
The same ambiguity could be found on the Catholic side, with the essential
difference that Catholics did away with no social structures – as the Protestants
did with celibacy – and worked within traditional parameters. Catholic villages
continued to accept the need for clergy to take ‘housekeeper’ mistresses, in part
because they felt that the women contributed a practical experience to the often
sheltered world of celibate men. In Barcelona in 1561–2 the vicar general issued
fifty-seven warnings to clergy of the diocese over their concubines, and in 1613
the Inquisition in the same city disciplined thirty-eight of the clergy for the same

224
1. Europa regina, Europe as queen, an image
first presented to the emperor Charles V in
Palermo in 1535 by the Innsbruck humanist
Johann Putsch. His intention was to display
the unity of all Europe – its head in Spain, its
heart in Bohemia, its triumph in Sicily and
Naples – against its enemies. First engraved
in Paris in 1537, the image in different forms
was much reproduced by other authors.

2. The ‘new islands’ of the New World (Novus Orbis), as depicted in Sebastian
Münster’s Cosmographia (various editions from 1544 on), the first map to
depict the totality of the American continent as well as parts of Africa, India,
China and Japan. The outer fringes are still shown as inhabited by cannibals and
giants, but the map displays confidence in Europe’s contact with the rest of the
oceanic globe.
3. A society ‘teeming with children’, according to a writer in 1538, fully one-half of Europe’s
population were the young. Rarely enjoying the benefit of education, they still made a significant
contribution to the family economy. Bruegel’s fascinating study reveals how they shared in the leisure
activity of their elders.

4. Bruegel’s timeless The Triumph of Death (1562), depicting a huge army of frightful skeletons
devastating the earth, is a medieval-style morality tale on the inevitable impact of the carriers of
destruction. Even wealth and power (bottom left) and youth and beauty (bottom right) offer no
protection. The painting can be linked to Europe’s experience of pandemic and warfare in this period.
5. Jacques Callot, from Lorraine, produced his remarkable series of etchings, The Miseries of War
(1633), as a commentary on the brutality of war and the suffering of both civilians and soldiers.
Number 11 in the series, ‘Les pendus’ (‘The Hanging’), depicts robbers (they were often soldiers)
condemned to death for pillaging.

6. Early modern Europe suffered almost continuous violence. Among the pioneers of artwork
depicting social conflict and warfare was the Flemish painter Sebastiaen Vrancx, who in this work of
1620 denounces the pillaging and murder done by soldiers during the Thirty Years War.
7. ‘The Terrifying Effects of War’: a flysheet printed in Augsburg denouncing the evils brought on all
sections of the population by a conflict that ravaged the greater part of Germany during the period
known as the Thirty Years War (1618–48).

8. Leisure took up a major part of people’s time in preindustrial communities, whether through social
festivities or religious customs. In various works such as The Village Festival (1645), the Flemish court
painter David Teniers the Younger gives us a masterly portrayal of rural celebrations, seen particularly
in dancing, drinking and merriment.
9. The rural classes were the largest sector of the population, but by no means the most fortunate;
peasants usually did not own their land, and were vulnerable to weather, war, taxes and debt. In The
Peasant Dance (1567), Bruegel captures the occasions when celebration and drink compensated for the
travails of daily life.

10. Possibly the best known of Bruegel’s paintings, The Harvesters (1565) captures the tranquil beauty
of a Netherlands summer landscape. As the painting depicts, in Europe’s countryside women normally
made up half the persons working to bring in the harvest.
11. The aggressive face of religious conflict can be seen at its worst in the massacre carried out on St
Bartholomew’s Eve in France in 1572. Like many other similar barbarities, however, the massacre was
inspired less by religious than by complex political motives. The Protestant painter François Dubois’s
extraordinarily detailed picture (c. 1580) is not an exact account but a composition of several different
events which happened that day.

12. Originally the Catholic cathedral of Haarlem, the church of St Bavo was taken over by the
Reformation in 1578 and known as the Grote Kerk. All statues were removed, but the magnificent
interior retained its glory, as seen in this painting (1673) by Gerrit Berckheyde. The coexistence of old
and new in the Netherlands was typical of much religious change in post-Reformation Europe.
 13. A 1685 illustration of the execution by Catholics in Amsterdam of the
Anabaptist Anneken Hendriks in 1571. The Anabaptists, repressed by both
Catholics and Protestants, were the most persecuted of all the sects that
emerged in the early period of the Reformation.

14. From the mid-sixteenth century, so-called witches were massively persecuted throughout
Europe. The theme of supernatural magic involving diabolism appealed to artists. The present
work, known as The Witches’ Kitchen (c. 1610), by the Antwerp painter Frans Franken the
Younger is a fantasy composition with references to several alleged activities. The theme was
repeated by Franken’s workshop in at least seven different versions of the painting.
 15. Popular fantasy in Germany about the
existence and role of witches can be seen
in learned books (Malleus Maleficarum,
1486) and in artistic depictions such as
this woodcut of 1510 by the German
artist Hans Baldung. Tensions within rural
communities encouraged victimisation
of those seen as witches and deemed
responsible for natural disasters.

16. A fascinating German print of 1594, purporting to reveal the customs and activities of the
witch community in the bishopric of Trier, one of the regions most notable for the prosecution
of witches. It is often presumed that women were the main victims of the repression, but the
print shows that men were held to be no less active than women in the hellish arts.
17. The Tree of Ranks (Ständebaum), a late
medieval concept, was a commonplace of
sixteenth-century literature. Peasants, as the
roots of the tree, form the basis of society,
and all other ranks, up to pope and emperor,
are founded on them. But even higher than
these, the peasants appear again at the top of
the tree, piping merrily.

18. Longleat House in Wiltshire, built between 1568 and 1580 and perhaps the most
distinguished example of Elizabethan architecture, has managed to remain in the same family
down to today. It was the first of the palatial country houses that the English gentry built for
themselves and their queen.
19. Bevern Castle, one of the most striking late Renaissance buildings in the valley of the River Weser
in Lower Saxony, was constructed in the years 1603–12 as a symmetrical four-wing building with a
square courtyard, following the scheme of its owner, Baron Statius von Münchhausen.

20. Rembrandt’s Syndics of the Cloth Makers of Amsterdam (1662) allows us a revealing look at some
of the burghers of the most successful trading city in Europe. Close family links between the leading
merchants helped to consolidate capital and promoted the rise of patrician dynasties.
21. The flourishing printing press gives us
unequalled access to the radical opinions and
demands of those who participated in the
popular movements of early modern Europe.
This flysheet of 1526, written in verse and
issued by rebels during the great German
peasant wars in southern Germany, explains
the activities of the rebel leaders.

22. The Family Meal (1642) by the brothers Le Nain was typical of the ‘genre’ painting – portraits of
everyday life – that became popular among seventeenth-century artists. It was a period of important
peasant rebellions throughout France, but the painting does not stress the problem of poverty and
prefers to present the tranquillity of the rural poor in their family environment.
 23. Male and female
same-sex love was a
recognised phenomenon,
commented on in literature
but seldom defined. When
punished by law, the offence
was sometimes referred to
as an act of heresy and the
guilty punished as heretics.
This print depicts the burning
of the knight Richard Puller
von Hohenburg with his valet
before the walls of Zürich, for
sodomy, in 1482.

24. First observed in Europe in the fifteenth century, the gypsies with their language, dress
and vagabond culture became an instant attraction for artists and a subject for romantic
literature. Their exotic customs may also have given life to stories about the Witches’
Sabbath, and provoked repressive laws. In this painting the deaf-dumb seventeenth-
century Dutch artist Hendrick Avercamp shows gypsies begging and telling fortunes.
25. Giovanni Paolo Panini was best known as a painter of views of Rome, among them his Gallery
of Views of Ancient Rome (Galleria di vedute di Roma antica), a canvas of 1758, commissioned by
the French diplomat Choiseul, at that time ambassador to the papacy. The painting is an imaginary
composition of scenes of Rome’s most famous classical sites, precisely the views that European
aristocrats visited Rome to see in the period of the Grand Tour.

26. Europe’s contact with the outside world was quickly transmitted to the public through illustrations
and maps. Perhaps the most outstanding world city atlas was the Civitates Orbis Terrarium by Georg
Braun and Frans Hogenberg, of which the first volume was published in 1572 in Cologne and the
sixth and last in 1617. This Hogenberg map (1572) of Calicut in India demonstrates that Asia, like
America, was already a part of the European experience.
 27. A typical watercolour
done by an Indian artist (Dip
Chand) for officials of the
East India Company, the
merchant grouping created in
London in 1600. By the time
of the painting (c. 1760), the
Company was in a dominant
position in the Indian
subcontinent. The English
official, proudly smoking a
hookah, is shown receiving an
Indian visitor.

28. Dutch naval efforts in Asia concentrated on the spice trade. In March 1599, a fleet of eight
ships under Jacob van Neck, depicted here by the painter Cornelis Vroom, was the first Dutch fleet
to reach the Spice Islands of Maluku, the source of pepper. The ships returned to Europe in 1600
and the expedition made a 400 per cent profit. In 1602 the merchants received the support of their
government in forming a Dutch trading company, the VOC.
29. By the early seventeenth century Europe’s role in the world was naval as well as commercial. In
both spheres the leading protagonists were England and the Dutch Republic. This splendid canvas by
Jan Beerstraten depicts a battle of 1653 between the two powers during the Anglo-Dutch Wars, with
the flagship of the Dutch admiral Tromp (who died in the action) occupying the centre.

30. Though spices were the initial interest of European traders in Asia, merchants soon focused their
attention on textiles and artwork. The Dutch port of Batavia (modern Jakarta) became the centre for
trade in items such as this piece of ceramic ware (c. 1674) imported from Japan and decorated with the
initials of the VOC.
31. The Dutch painter Hendrick Avercamp specialised in painting winter landscapes and skating
scenes, as this work of 1608 shows. Several northern European artists had the same predilection for
painting wintry scenes, a fundamental feature of their seasonal environment which did not, however,
suggest that Europe was passing through an Ice Age.

32. William Hogarth’s painting (1729), one of several versions showing a scene from John Gay’s The
Beggar’s Opera, is set in the dramatic context of Newgate Prison. Hogarth’s satirical attention to low
life, crime and corruption in society marks a new stage in the public consciousness of social problems.
 GENDER ROLES

offence.61 A Catalan priest went so far as to affirm in 1539 that ‘clergy may in
good conscience marry [i.e. ‘cohabit’] even if they are priests’. The staunchly
male-orientated Church of the period after Trent marginalised women in some
respects but in others firmly recognised that, for example, women had a key role
in parish life. Women’s guilds were the mainstay of several aspects of church
activity. Above all, women formed the majority of churchgoers. The outstanding
role of Catholic women can be seen in the French Counter-Reformation, which
produced a crop of canonised noble ladies (such as Jeanne Françoise de Chantal),
important spiritual leaders (such as Angélique Arnauld of Port-Royal) and a
number of highly successful women’s religious orders.
There were, arguably, some negative trends on the Catholic side. The priority
given to an all-male priesthood may have prejudiced the previously significant
role of females in the religious life of the community. The Church after Trent also
tried to minimise the part of women in religious services. Religious reforms
brought order into the chaotic world of convents, but enforcement of the strict
cloister may have excluded women from a public spiritual role. Against this,
however, must be set the major contribution made by the many new female
religious orders, as well as by individual Catholic women, such as Mary Ward,
who modelled themselves on the Jesuits and carried out notable spiritual and
charitable work. Ward argued that she saw ‘no such difference between men and
women that women may not do great things’.62 The supreme achievement was
that of Teresa of Avila, whose influence permeated the religious reforms in both
Spain and France, and who was subsequently proclaimed patron of her nation.
On both the Protestant and Catholic sides, spirituality was a route through
which women succeeded in affirming their interests and making a very special
contribution. This was not wholly surprising. In traditional Europe women had
stood out in popular experience as hermits and visionaries and continued to
carry out the role at all social levels. Holy women, such as the beatas in Spain,
exercised a strong spiritual influence over local communities and even, in excep-
tional cases, became the privileged advisers of kings. María de Agreda, a nun in
a little Aragonese town, was visited by Philip IV of Spain in 1643, and came to
exercise a profound influence over the king, advising him on the highest concerns
of state. But religious women were symbols of power in their own right as well:
many famous convents were governed by influential abbesses and female superi-
ors, and noblewomen played a distinctive role as patrons of religion and of the
religious orders. These favourable aspects coexisted in society with the usually

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unequal position of women in family and economic life. The revolutionary reli-
gious changes of the sixteenth century quite simply continued the ambiguity of
women’s role.
From the seventeenth century onwards, by contrast, an extraordinary initia-
tive was gained for women through their activity in minority religious groupings
that had themselves asserted their autonomy from established structures. The
pioneers were the Quaker movement in England, and the most active of the first
Quaker women was Margaret Fell, wife of a member of the Long Parliament.
Women took part notably in the more radical activities of the movement, such
as in public preaching, and also in their support for the activities of James
Nayler,63 but on the whole they kept within the bounds of discipline. By the mid-
seventeenth century the Quaker women were sufficiently organised for ‘above
seven thousand handmaids of the Lord’ to petition Parliament against payment
of tithes.64
The purely spiritual contribution of women may best be seen through their
extensive impact on religious ideas. Teresa of Avila’s influence spread rapidly
throughout Spain after her death, and her books became best sellers in the
southern Netherlands. In France her writings were adopted as the basis for reli-
gious reform from 1603 onwards. France likewise was the centre for the great
mystical controversies that centred round Madame Guyon. Such famous women,
however, were no more than a sign of a broader tendency. Throughout social
Europe, religion in the postconfessional age was increasingly gravitating away
from men and towards women. In Spain it was notoriously the women who
went to mass and to missions, more so than the men. In early eighteenth-century
Germany, women played a significant part in the Pietist movement. Among the
Methodists in England, ‘where statistics for chapel attendance exist, women
outnumbered men by nineteen to one’.65 Through their role in the Christian
family, and despite a Church organisation that remained almost exclusively in
the hands of men, women were both moulding and determining the shape of
western religious attitudes.

Private and public escapes

Women in traditional society led enclosed lives: when unmarried they were
constantly chaperoned and when married their position seldom improved. A
sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit suggested that young women might be taught

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 GENDER ROLES

to read but not to write (to avoid them writing notes to lovers). Moreover, they
‘should not go out to see other women, should not dance, should not go to
public parties, should not drink wine and should not stir from the house’.66 Girls
in Spain were often not even allowed to go to mass, a restriction much denounced
by some clergy. Though the cloistering of women was most practised in the
upper classes, women of all conditions evaded it at every turn, and the participa-
tion of girls (always criticised by moralists) was one of the delights of public
festivities in the Mediterranean. Perhaps the most significant escape, ironically,
was religion: women went to church in order to find company, both male and
female. Women in general became the mainstay of parish congregations, organ-
isation and festivities.
Education was the most important escape accessible to women, but it was
rarely available outside the noble classes. The first girls’ public school opened in
France was the college of Saint-Cyr, founded by Madame de Maintenon in 1686
for daughters of the nobility. At the same period girls’ finishing schools were
developing in Restoration England. The majority of elite girls were tutored at
home or, in Catholic countries, in convent schools. Education was normally
limited in scope and directed to prepare young ladies for their social duties. In
France the Franciscan educator Jacques du Bosc in 1632 stressed that for girls
‘music, history, philosophy and other similar exercises are more in accord with
our design than those of a good housekeeper’.67
Educated women who also had the benefit of a liberal family environment
could liberate their minds freely by dedicating themselves to letters and creative
writing. Liberal fathers and husbands played their part in encouraging gifted
daughters and wives to write. The evidence from England is impressive: from the
sixteenth century onwards, numerous upper-class women ‘wrote plays, poems,
prose fiction, diaries, prophecies, letters, tracts, philosophy. Any genre that men
wrote in, attracted at least some women writers.’68 Much of what they wrote did
not come to the attention of the public; Aphra Behn in seventeenth-century
London was exceptional in receiving the appreciation of large numbers of readers
and theatregoers. The social importance of literary women was undeniable; more
controversial for scholars today is whether those women can be identified with
any tendency to affirm women’s role, that is, feminism.
Like men, women were free, in special circumstances, to achieve considerable
physical mobility. America is a significant example. Of those Spaniards who
registered formally as emigrants to the New World from Seville, women

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constituted no more than 5 per cent prior to 1519, but by the 1550s they were
some 16 per cent and in the 1560s they were as many as 28 per cent. Most were
single; in the new lands they carved out their own destiny, fighting where neces-
sary alongside the men. Women who went to English America entered a some-
what different society that was still strongly regulated by the customs of the Old
World, but there were still benefits. They were liable to find greater opportunities
for marriage and encountered more possibility of social mobility and less male
arrogance.69

Women in power

It is frequently claimed that women in preindustrial times were deprived of a

significant role in public life. That may be valid for women who did not possess
status, but in fact blood, rank and kinship allowed many women to play a much
larger part in postmedieval politics than is commonly accepted by standard
accounts. Elite women were constantly active in public life and politics, which
gave them an escape normally reserved for men. At the highest level, the role was
based on matriarchy. Ladies such as Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, or María
Pacheco, leader of the Comuneros in Toledo in the 1520s, were fulfilling roles
created by their family position rather than by the accident of their gender. Even
in wholly traditional societies, kinship and matriarchy allowed women to dictate
family politics, down as far as the context of the village community, where
women with property were always in a privileged position. Depending on
context, women were accepted in a wide range of roles. It was traditional for men
to take the lead in warfare, but women on occasion might actively direct military
campaigns, as María Pacheco did during the Comunidades and the Princess of
Condé notoriously did during the Fronde in the 1650s. Women, on a scale that
is seldom fully appreciated, played an amazingly powerful role in the political
and social life of the aristocracies of every nation in Europe.
The most remarkable aspect was the achievement of those who successfully
fulfilled the role of queen: relevant cases in the political sphere are Isabella the
Catholic of Castile, Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth I of England, Catherine de’
Medici and Christina of Sweden, all of whom have been richly studied by count-
less biographers. The list of cultured queens is even more extensive, beginning
perhaps with Marguerite of Navarre and extending to numerous others. It was of
course by no means essential to be queen in order to hold power; women

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managed power equally through the role of consort,70 and sometimes also as
mother, of the king. While Philip II of Spain’s son-in-law the Duke of Savoy was
away at the battlefront in the 1590s, his place as chair of the state council of
Savoy was regularly, and with great effectiveness, occupied by his wife, Catalina.
The number of such women is legion. The many heads of state who were women
were by no means deprived of their gender. It is true that their role function was
essentially as males, for the Crown was considered to be a male symbol. But the
attendant support given to their role usually emphasised their female gender,
notably in the active propaganda created around Elizabeth I of England as
personification of the goddess Astrea.71 In the mythical speech that Elizabeth is
said to have made at Tilbury in 1588, she claimed that ‘I have the body of a
woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king’. It was a clever publicity
exercise on the theme of gender.72 Elizabeth was celebrated by poets and artists
not only as a symbol of imperial, dynastic and religious power – all of them
normally the preserve of men – but also as a virgin, a goddess and an ideal object
of male chivalry.
It is important to understand, consequently, that the exercise of power by
women at every level was widely accepted in early modern Europe. There was
not, as sometimes suggested,73 a permanent male dominance. The vocabulary of
politics was normally expressed in the person of the male, for all language was
(until our own day) predicated on the male; all civil authority, moreover, was
normally patriarchal. But female rule was respected wherever it operated, whether
in the cult of Elizabeth in England or that of Isabella in Castile. The frequently
quoted attacks of John Knox against Mary Stuart and Mary Tudor, in his First
blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of women (1558), were wholly
exceptional and motivated rather by religion and by the exceptional role of
French women in the political life of Scotland. Political theorists who based their
idea of power uniquely on patriarchy, such as Robert Filmer or James I, were
untypical and had few followers. The only western state that insisted on applying
principles of male dynastic power (the so-called Salic Law) was France, where
ironically women dominated the political scenario for the best part of the period
1558–1651.
The problems implicit in female rule over the state arose less from the sex of
the ruler than from related questions, notably the issue of hereditary succession.
Doubts over the succession, and therefore over political stability in the state,
plagued the exercise of power by Mary Stuart, Elizabeth of England and Catherine

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 EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN SOCIETY

de’ Medici. The failure of Isabella of Castile to produce a reliable heir handed her
country over to a foreign dynasty, the Habsburgs. There were, obviously, female
rulers who failed, but they appear to have done so less because of their sex than
because of their own independent attitudes. Christina of Sweden is an outstanding
example of a woman with great personal gifts but an equally great inability to
accept the limitations imposed on her by an overwhelmingly male power
apparatus.
But women also had an important cultural role, whose possibilities were
determined always by the social level to which they belonged. Either personally
or through their husbands, women in sixteenth-century France, particularly in
the merchant and professional classes, played an extraordinary part in the dissem-
ination of ideas sympathetic to Calvinism.74 The cultural role continued to be
one of the most profound contributions made by educated women in Europe.75
The literary salons of seventeenth-century Paris were pioneered by that of the
Marquise de Rambouillet, which was frequented by the great names of the time:
‘she taught good taste to all her contemporaries’, it was commented.76 The tradi-
tion continued into the early Bourbon period. In the same way, Sophie Charlotte
of Brandenburg-Prussia became patron to the philosophical and musical circles
of Berlin. Numerous individual women successfully made their way as creative
persons in their own right. The Italian painter Sofonisba Anguissola in the court
of Philip II of Spain and the writer Aphra Behn in seventeenth-century England,
both of whom made their living exclusively through painting and writing respec-
tively, were pioneers of the new category of professional women. Others were less
successful with their writing but no less determined to succeed. ‘Since all heroic
actions and public employments are denied our sex’, wrote Margaret Cavendish,
Duchess of Newcastle, in the seventeenth century, that ‘is the cause I write
so much’. Despite their signal contribution, creative women were living in an
environment where male values dominated; they were therefore either mocked,
as Molière mocked at the late-seventeenth-century group associated with Mlle
de Scudéry, or not taken seriously. The English, however, were generous enough
to agree that Aphra Behn be buried among the immortals in Westminster Abbey.
Outside their public role, women significantly made their mark on subse-
quent generations through their private escapes into the intimacy of diaries. In
England known diaries began in the seventeenth century and women who kept
them were exclusively from the elite classes. Perhaps the most remarkable case
was that of Lady Margaret Hoby of Yorkshire, who between 1599 and 1605 kept

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the first known diary in English by a woman. Her pages reflected her life as a
country lady but managed also to exclude virtually all reference to her husband.
By contrast, most lady diarists reflected clearly their close dependence on the
men in their household, whether father or husband. A few managed to write
principally about themselves. The first extant autobiography in English by a
woman was that of Lady Grace Mildmay, written in 1619.

Women, honour and the law

Men controlled early modern society, but women were not excluded from their
proper social roles which included protecting their own honour and that of the
community. As we have seen above, honour was a protean concept with
constantly changing rules. Its relevance to women also varied according to time
and place. Some traditional attitudes held that men exclusively possessed honour
and that women partook of it through obedience. ‘Your sex’, the Marquis of
Halifax informed his daughter, in a tract that was published in 1688 and ran
through seventeen editions in a century, ‘wanteth our Reason for your conduct
and our Strength for your protection.’ On this view, a woman’s good reputation
depended on her acceptance of male power and her fulfilment of the roles
assigned to her. In marriage, for example, perfect fidelity was required of a
woman, whereas infidelity in a man was not normally deemed dishonourable. In
compact communities men might on occasion be publicly criticised for infi-
delity, but that was small fare when compared with what women faced: the risk
of an unwanted birth that could bring lasting shame. A similar discrimination
arose at the workplace where certain professions were held to be an exclusively
male domain and women were relegated to marginal activities.
This patriarchal and male-dictated concept of honour, however, did not always
square with what happened in the complex real world. Social practice at every
level, from royal court down to village, often gave many women an opportunity
to assert their own honour, without thereby presenting any threat to male hege-
mony. Chastity, for example, was traditionally considered a fundamental part of
female honour and women who lost it outside the normal course of marriage
were ‘dishonoured’. Women who habitually resorted to sex without marriage
were of course considered quite dishonourable or labelled as ‘whores’. In reality,
these attitudes persisted only in small or simple societies. In more cosmopolitan
societies, such as Restoration London,77 it was possible for high-class whores to

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be honoured and respected because their social rank gave them honour. In cases
of adultery, the so-called ‘double standard’ did not always operate.
The offending woman clearly invited shame, especially if she gave birth to an
unlawful child. But the husband was also seen, by many authoritative commen-
tators, to have acted dishonourably. Women were dishonoured by a husband’s
adultery, the Spanish writer Vicente Mexía argued, and could legitimately plead
for a separation. Another Spanish authority, writing in 1593, affirmed that a wife
could refuse to have any sexual intercourse with her husband if he had committed
adultery.78 It seems fair to conclude that the official Christian view, whether
Protestant or Catholic, ‘never accepted the double standard’.79 Women, especially
among the popular classes, were often capable of prevailing against the dominant
male ethic. They might turn against a man the reputation he sought to preserve
by accusing him publicly of violence and rape; in other cases they might black-
mail him. Though normally at a disadvantage, women too had their weapons,
and the ‘double standard’ operated by males did not always predominate.80
At the same time, male dominance carried with it certain responsibilities and
men who did not fulfil them were called to account. Wife beating is a prominent
example of a practice that was usually criticised by moralists, frowned on by
neighbours and prosecuted (though with negligible penalties) by legal systems.81
Though always permitted, it came to be viewed as dishonourable conduct for a
man. The diocesan courts in sixteenth-century Catalonia made it clear that
beating one’s wife, or failing to support her with the means necessary to her
sustenance, were infringements of her honour and adequate grounds for legal
separation. In this sense, a wife asserted her honour through her husband’s
dishonour: she vindicated herself simply by the shame the husband brought on
himself. In all other aspects of the marital relationship, the woman equally had
an opportunity to demonstrate that her role invited respect.
Similarly, a husband who failed to perform his sexual duties was seen to have
acted dishonourably. Village rituals, such as the charivari, exposed his shame and
thereby vindicated the wife. Traditional societies also sharply criticised husbands
who allowed their wives to dominate them. In all the foregoing cases, a man’s
reputation was in some sense dictated by the woman, and it was the community
that judged whether the man was fulfilling his gender role adequately. In these
circumstances, the patriarchy of man in the household and in society was not
absolutely assured but was frequently threatened and had to be examined and
revised. The seventeenth-century theatre in England, as instanced in productions

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of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, reminded the public of the problem.82

Some men undoubtedly took precautions to ensure that all domestic roles, male
and female, were adequately performed. Few perhaps were as conscientious as
the Puritan Nehemiah Wallington, who in 1622 drew up rules for the conduct
of his household, which he had signed by his servants and apprentice as well as
by his wife.83
The complex relation between sexual roles and honour was, in the final
instance, more favourable to the man. Men could suffer grievously in their
honour because of impotence or sexual misdemeanour or mistreatment of their
wives, but there were other extensive areas where they were free to play different
roles and vindicate themselves, such as in politics or in war. Women, by contrast,
had a smaller choice of roles and therefore fewer opportunities. ‘Whereas for a
woman sexual reputation was the whole of her reputation, for a man it was
merely one part.’84
There were certain very limited areas where women might assert their social
position, even against accepted male norms. The unique role of women as
providers for their children gave them a voice in times of social discontent. As
key participants in many of the riots and rebellions of the period, they were in a
sense the upholders of the community and its norms.85 Their role is most clearly
illustrated by the significant part they played in urban riots. An example is that
of the city of Córdoba, where in spring 1652 a poor woman went weeping
through the streets, holding the body of her son who had died of hunger. Other
women responded to the scene of misery, and persuaded their men to join the
protest. By the end of the morning a popular rising took over control of the city.
In riots and disorders where food supply and therefore community survival
was the main issue, women played a key role. They were prominent in
seventeenth-century English food disturbances.86 Similarly they participated
actively in protests made under cover of ritual community celebrations such as
carnivals. In these events they were responsible for some of the more ferocious
excesses, but more normally their role was a ritualistic defiance of the forces
(inevitably male) of authority and of repression. Female violence frequently took
the form of ridiculing the enemies of the community, so much so that a folklore
tradition consented to males dressing up as women (as in the case of the Lady
Skimmington, used in the west of England) in order to perform the same func-
tion. By contrast, women had a purely ancillary role in extended popular risings
where the emphasis was for the most part on military action.

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Woman’s status and honour evidently depended on an infinite number of

contexts, varying according to class and community. Cases where women
appealed to or came into conflict with the law highlight the ambiguous situation
in which they stood over their social reputation. The primarily domestic situa-
tion of women meant that they appeared very little in statistics of public crime:
most serious and violent crime was male, frequently with women as victims. By
contrast, women were prosecuted for special lesser offences, usually related to
their domestic and sexual role. It does not appear valid to say that they were
unequal (to men) before the law, since in cases of serious crime such as murder
they were treated with equal severity. On the other hand, certain social attitudes
affected them more directly: in Renaissance Italy, only women appear to have
been prosecuted for infringing the sumptuary laws regarding dress in public.87
A special crime for which women alone were indicted was ‘infanticide’.88 It
could represent as much as 10 per cent of detected homicides and in some juris-
dictions such as in northern France the rate was much higher. The typical accused
woman was of low social ranking and was unmarried or a widow; she was treated
with the rigour of the law if she could not prove that the death was accidental.
Death by accident was normally the consequence of bad treatment or neglect or
simply of having put the infant out to nurse. Deaths that had the appearance of
being deliberate were, according to the records, caused by mothers of illegitimate
children. The offence led in England to a parliamentary Act (1624) ‘to prevent
the murthering of bastard children’. The crime was, until a change of attitudes in
the eighteenth century, normally dealt with severely, and in England possibly
more women were executed for it than for any offence other than witchcraft.
Women were most vulnerable in criminal cases involving sorcery. There were
exceptions to this rule, as in northern France and in Aragon, where during the
sixteenth century more men than women were prosecuted for the offence of
witchcraft. The case of Russia was also exceptional: there during the seventeenth
century three-quarters of the accused in witchcraft trials were males.89 Normally,
in most of Europe, women predominated among the accused. The fact that they
made up the overwhelming majority of those prosecuted was due less to the
prejudice of the law than to the nature of the local societies within which the
accusations originated. Several scholars have emphasised recently that witches
were persecuted not because they were women but because they were witches.
The writings of those who attacked witchcraft at the time show no identifiable
prejudice against women as women.90

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There were, certainly, cultural and sexual considerations that put women
more at risk. A woman’s role as creator, as midwife, as healer (the ‘wise woman’
of the village), as visionary provided points at which an anguished male-
dominated society might choose to victimise her for sudden disasters caused by
crop failures or epidemics. Any analysis of the phenomenon of women in witch-
craft persecution must look equally at the problems of the accusing society and
the vulnerable position of the female accused. For though males featured
frequently as accused, all the treatises of the time have no hesitation in cate-
gorising the victims as female. One of the most adamant opponents of the witch
persecution in seventeenth-century Spain was the Jesuit Pere Gil, who knew
many of the accused and described them (1619) as ‘simple-minded women of
little intelligence, feeble and timid, most of them poor, untaught in Christian
doctrine and easily deceived’. ‘There is little opposition’, he wrote, ‘when the
villages and people say of the witches that they do infinite ills and deserve a thou-
sand deaths. For since they are poor, exposed, simple-minded and ignorant in the
Christian religion, no one takes their side.’91 Gil’s analysis, it should be noted,
refers to such women because they were a disadvantaged population in the
villages, not because they were women. The majority of females accused were old,
often marginalised by their communities. But a few were young, either victims of
village tensions or involved through accusations levelled against relatives. Pere
Gil gives the interesting information that many of the accused were in fact
denounced by members of their own family. It was a common problem. In some
witchcraft cases in Augsburg, accusations reflected deep antagonisms among
women themselves, and often the operating motive was simply envy.92

Sexual variation and choice

Though considerable research has been done recently on the personal, social and
cultural aspects of male and female homosexuality in preindustrial Europe, the
theme has seldom occupied space in accounts of social developments. A prefer-
ence for the same sex crops up as an element in stories of political scandal and
royal misdeeds, while popular writers today dubiously attempt to identify the
greatest cultural figures of that time with the scenario of a Renaissance Europe
that was fundamentally homosexual. ‘Il n’est pas exagéré de dire que la Renaissance
européenne est une renaissance homosexuelle’, as the publicity for one recent work
claims.93 A well-cited example is that of Florence, where it seems that in the late

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fifteenth century as many as one in two Florentine men had come to the atten-
tion of the authorities for sodomy by the time they were 30.94
The problem is that the term ‘homosexual’, or any equivalent, did not exist
in early modern times. Homosexuality did not exist as an identity, only as a
possible act that anyone might commit and that in some contexts (such as bodily
intercourse) might be seen as an offence. ‘But did those who engaged in sex with
each other view themselves as belonging to a discrete social group? Or were they
simply taking part in acts that we would now regard as homosexual but which
they saw as simply sexual?’95 Depending on the discipline that they specialise in,
scholars take differing views. The view that in the period before the nineteenth
century there were same-sex acts but no same-sex identity has been increasingly
contested. ‘Many scholars now concur that same-sex characters, dispositions,
subjectivities and modes of identity existed in the sixteenth and much earlier
centuries.’ ‘There is now ample evidence that, at least from the mid-fifteenth
to late seventeenth centuries a discursive tradition flourished that recognised
same-sex relations as a distinctive amorous phenomenon.’96
Sexual variation was severely castigated by medieval law and therefore appears
frequently in judicial documentation, but there is no firm evidence that same-sex
practice was widespread. The punishment of unapproved sexuality by both
secular and Church courts was both severe and haphazard and it is unsafe to be
guided only by judicial details. The case of the Spanish Inquisition shows the
contradictions that existed. The tribunal exercised jurisdiction over sodomy from
its foundation in the 1480s, but in 1509 it decided that no action was to be
taken against homosexuals except when heresy was involved. From the 1520s
only the tribunal of Aragon prosecuted sodomy, which it pursued in the case of
both men and women. The Inquisition in Saragossa was particularly harsh:
between 1570 and 1630 the inquisitors here handled 543 cases and executed 102
persons. It is relevant to observe that the Inquisition was not dedicated to sexual
repression. It did not intrude into the private lives of citizens or spy on them, and
it is consequently important to understand how private sexual practices came to
its attention. Almost without exception, cases of sodomy were revealed in the
way that all other offences were, simply through private denunciations by friends,
family or neighbours.
The first caution to be taken is over definition of terms and contexts. In medi-
eval times same-sex relations were not formally condemned in law codes and
there were no clear definitions of what they entailed; words such as ‘sodomy’

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were not necessarily correct as descriptions, nor did they always refer to sexual
relations. In an influential three-volume study of the history of sexuality,97 the
sociologist Michel Foucault suggested that before the nineteenth century there
was no accurate profile for the theory and practice of those who had same-sex
preferences. We could be guilty, in other words, of projecting into the past a
sexual identity, that of the ‘homosexual’, which did not substantially exist in
early modern times. Foucault’s views, which cover an extensive terrain relating
sexual attitudes to the society of the time, have been contested by scholars but
retain some validity because they remind us that the entire social and legal
context of premodern sexuality can be approached in different ways.
The second important observation to be made is that prosecution of same-sex
relations became current only at the very same period that heresy was also actively
prosecuted, that is, well after the twelfth century. Sexual deviance became equated
with heresy, as an act directed against Christianity (we have noted above the rule
followed by the Spanish Inquisition). When sodomy trials first became common
in Bavaria, in the fourteenth century, the phrase ‘to commit heresy’ was employed
by courts when referring to sexual acts between men.98 It was some time before
Church and city authorities in Germany became active on this matter. Regensburg
had its first trial of a man accused of committing ‘heresy with several men and
boys’ (keczerey mit manigem man und knaben) only in 1456.
Well into the sixteenth century, in German, Swiss and Netherlands cities the
prosecution of sodomy had a low profile in the total of crime cases. In Denmark
only six prosecutions are recorded for the seventeenth century. The English were
much more severe with cases they identified among sailors of the Royal Navy: in
the war of the Spanish Succession 63 per cent of death sentences on sailors were
for desertion, and 27 per cent for sodomy. By contrast no death sentences for
sodomy were ever decreed in Russia, where the death penalty was formally abol-
ished in 1744.99 Identification with heresy was not the only way that courts acted
against an offence that was always difficult to define. Time after time, especially
in very famous cases involving powerful persons, denunciations that were obvi-
ously political by nature added ‘sodomy’ to the list of offences of which a man
might be accused. The same happened in scores of cases where witchcraft
appeared as the principal accusation.
In Germany, only with the adoption of the famous Imperial law code, the
Carolina of 1532, were severe penalties laid down against same-sex relations of
both men and women. Even then there were exceptions to the general rule of

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severity: in Frankfurt am Main between 1562 and 1696 only two persons are
known to have been sentenced for sodomy.100 The decline of prosecutions
suggests that since sodomy was often identified with heresy the decline in prose-
cution of heresy was the reason why courts took less interest in same-sex
offences.101

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SOCIAL DISCIPLINE AND MARGINALITY

Though the number of the poore do dailie encrease, all things yet worketh
for the worst in their behalfe.
Thomas Dekker, Greevous Grones for the Poore (1622)

Community discipline and morality; Controlling poverty; Disciplining crime;

Bandits and brigands; The power to punish; Marginalisation: slavery; Disciplining
the enclosed: insanity

Community discipline and morality

Traditional communities, anxious to conserve their social norms and good order,
attempted to correct divergent behaviour and remedy failures of conduct. In a
changing world, the means to achieve this were not always available: policing
systems, where they existed, had limited authority. Moreover, there were no
commonly accepted norms about what represented incorrect behaviour or in
what way it could be regulated. Long before the sixteenth century, small societies
in Europe had used their local processes of control to regulate conflict and insta-
bility. In fourteenth-century Norfolk, the local court prosecuted operators of
brothels not only because of concern over morality but also because it ‘caused
controversy and discord between neighbours’.1
One of the novelties of the early modern period was the appearance of writings
that, for the first time, attempted to grapple with the issues. There was concern,
for example, about the decay of the habit of neighbourliness. Many claimed to
observe a decline in good manners and courtesy. There were laments about the
end of traditional hospitality. All these old customs had regulated relationships in
the traditional community, preserving the framework of known society. Their
breakdown was seen as the end of an era. Controversies arose moreover about

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whether one should give food and alms to the indigent. In Reformation Europe,
where religious change also precipitated changes in the relationship between lords
and vassals, and between neighbours in the same village, the breakdown in social
relations came sooner than in the Mediterranean, where change was slower.
Hospitality in the era of confessional conflict was unlikely to be extended to
those of another religion. Because of this, minority communities (such as the
Huguenots from France who emigrated to England) tended to evolve their own
systems of mutual help, and in consequence groups such as Huguenots, Moriscos
and Jews tended not to have any visible poor. People looked after their own.
Among lords and gentry the custom of keeping open house – defined in England
in 1698 as ‘a liberal entertainment of all sorts of men at one’s house, whether
neighbours or strangers, with kindness, especially with meat, drink and lodgings’2
– was, however, being eroded by social changes and rising costs. Hospitality
continued nevertheless to be a primary obligation of all social relations, not only
among the elite but also within the village community, where every rite of passage
was a public event that required the dispensation of neighbourly kindness in the
form of food and drink.3
In the Mediterranean, hospitality appears to have been less susceptible to
decay and traditional attitudes survived. In Languedoc the model of honnêteté
involved respecting and performing one’s duties to others and behaving correctly
to them.4 In Valencia the principal grandee, the Duke of Gandía, was still in the
1660s spending large sums at his palace in Gandía (where he did not normally
live, since he was resident in Madrid) on maintaining an open table of meals for
his vassals and for travellers. This practice of hospitality, found frequently among
the higher nobility throughout the continent, evidently served to confirm
authority but also to maintain good social relations within the community. It
was an aspect of what the sociologist Norbert Elias has called ‘the civilising
process’,5 referring to the evolution of manners in western Europe since the
Middle Ages, a development that helped to define what behaviour was correct
and what was not, determining in that way the basic rules of personal and public
conduct. Correct behaviour by the elite in aristocratic courts (the principal
example Elias chose was the court of Louis XIV at Versailles) helped to maintain
the structure of their power in society.
Discipline also involved the regulation of relationships within the commu-
nity, above all those affecting sexuality. Traditionally the community had taken
an interest in the moral behaviour of its members and had expressed its

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preferences about who married whom. If a new bride came from out of town, the
young men of the village would state their approval or disapproval through
time-honoured rituals such as demanding a nominal payment at the church door
before the girl could be allowed in to get married. In southern France,6 parish
standards were enforced by the youth confraternity known as the ‘garçons de la
paroisse’, who for a year after the marriage ceremony supervised the progress of
the couple, to see that the husband behaved and that the wife was dutifully preg-
nant. Wherever sexual norms were broken, such as if the husband allowed
himself to become henpecked, the youths would stage a farce known in one form
or another throughout western Europe and termed ‘charivari’ in French-speaking
lands. Taking the form of discordant noise, or ‘rough music’,7 performed by
groups of youth beating on utensils, the ‘charivari’ was most frequently staged as
a social protest against the remarriage of widows and widowers.8 The custom was
testimony to continued community vigilance of the rites of marriage, which
were deemed to affect not merely the couple but the whole parish.9 But in the
confessional age the official Church, which would have preferred to exercise
control itself, did not look with approval on community regulation of marriage
and morals. From the 1540s in Spain there were firm episcopal prohibitions of
the charivari, and the Inquisition occasionally prosecuted those who performed
it. The prohibitions were largely ineffective. Charivaris were practised in England
and in France throughout the eighteenth century, and in nineteenth-century
Valencia a traveller testified to their survival. The intervention of the ecclesias-
tical authorities was, however, a pointer to a new and significant trend.
Questions of conduct and morality became frequent in the law courts.
Church tribunals, or consistories, had traditionally dealt with issues of morality,
but a novelty of the age of religious conflict was the attention given by them to
sexual questions. The Protestant Reformation seems to have taken considerable
initiative in the matter. The Reformation secularised the consistory courts by
removing all their clerical members and appointing only laymen: this happened,
for example, in Neuchâtel and Augsburg. The same traditional moral discipline
prevailed, but this time under Protestant control. In Neuchâtel the seigneurial
consistory at Valangin prosecuted 2,355 persons in the period 1590–1667: the
offences included fornication, insults and drunkenness.10 Attempts to control
sexual morality loomed large in the programme of the Reformed churches in
Scotland.11 In Sweden the prosecution of sexual offences increased in early
modern times as a consequence of the Reformation.12

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At the same period the Counter-Reformation also put sexual discipline at the
top of its programme. In Spain the Inquisition began from the 1550s to intrude
into spheres of personal conduct that had never before been the subject of
enquiry. In preindustrial Europe, a low level of religious awareness and the
persistence of traditional moral practices combined to produce far greater sexual
freedom among all age groups than is commonly imagined.13 This was reflected
in the remarkably widespread view that sex (known as ‘simple fornication’)
between two independent adults was not wrong if it did not go against other
commitments (such as being already married). From the mid-sixteenth century
some tribunals of the Inquisition in Spain began to pursue the matter. In the
tribunal of Toledo, which was the most active in this respect, prosecutions of
people maintaining that simple fornication was no offence constituted a fifth of
all its cases in 1566–70 and a quarter in 1601–5.
The attempt to improve sexual manners was part of the programme of all
religious reformers, both Protestant and Catholic. We may choose one aspect at
random. Community tradition had sanctioned a number of celebrations during
which there might be contact between the sexes, notably the village fair or dance.
Dancing had featured in traditional festivities, both popular and sacred.14 In the
Mediterranean the custom also existed of priests dancing before the altar in
church, perhaps in imitation of David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant.
From the sixteenth century, zealots considered dancing of any kind indecent and
attempted to prohibit it. In Holland the Calvinist pastors issued injunctions
forbidding dancing at weddings.15 In Spain some of the clergy attempted to
prohibit dancing in popular processions, and banned village dances. One
Franciscan friar took the view that any dancing between males and females was
sinful and that it was only permissible for women to dance with women or men
with men.
There were periods of severe sexual repression in specific societies, such as
seventeenth-century England during the years when the Puritans were in control
of the machinery of state. But it would be misleading to consider that Puritans
were looking only at the sexual side of misconduct. John Milton in 1641 consid-
ered that ‘discipline is not only the removal of disorder, but the very image of
virtue’ and affected all aspects of social and political conduct.16 It is doubtful if
the intrusion of religious authorities into the sphere of public morality had much
effect,17 except where the community gave full support. Community norms
rather than religious belief had always governed sexual conduct and this

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continued to be the rule. In the eighteenth century, examples from France and
Germany show that dancing continued as an uninterrupted feature of social life,
but under the vigilant eye of local people.18
Religious reformers were the driving force behind measures to control or even
prohibit prostitution. In medieval times the practice of sex for money was looked
upon as an evil that could not be eliminated and was therefore either tolerated or
taxed. Queen Isabella in Castile, for example, favoured licensing and taxing
brothels. Italian cities such as Florence and Venice licensed and taxed prostitutes.
‘Public women’ were so far accepted that they featured in several literary works
of the end of the fifteenth century. After the Reformation period there was a
greater tendency to treat public women as criminals: laws against them were
passed in Augsburg in 1532, London in 1546 and Amsterdam in 1578. This was
also the period when syphilis began its ravages and sex workers may have been
seen as guilty of spreading the disease. The pressure was not exclusively sexual
and prostitution was also frowned on because it was seen to be associated with
other vices such as drinking, dancing and gambling.
But the repression was never systematic. A relaxed and even tolerant attitude
to sexuality could be found throughout many of Europe’s urban centres, as in
papal Rome during the Counter-Reformation.19 In Spain a respected theologian,
Francisco Farfán, published in 1585 a massive 1,000-page volume arguing that
the prohibition of prostitution was a greater evil than prostitution itself, because
a society without brothels encouraged homosexuality, incest, the propositioning
of innocent women and an increased number of people living together in sin.
Even so, prosecutions of the trade kept the courts busy. A study of over 8,000
trials of prostitutes in Amsterdam in the century after 1650 reveals the active role
that public sexual activity had in the social life of the city.20 It was a preindustrial
trade like any other. Over the same period, sex workers in Venice were likewise
prosecuted but were also recognised as playing a role in the city’s social and
financial networks as well as in normal family life.21 The long-term tolerance of
prostitution reveals that in the minds of the public there were no rigid rules for
sexual morality and that both men and women felt they were free to make use of
their preferences when necessary.

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Controlling poverty

The decline of neighbourliness was perceived acutely by contemporaries in their

response to growing poverty. The numbers of the urban poor alarmed Juan Luis
Vives, who censured them for entering churches while the faithful were at prayer:
‘they push through the congregation, deformed by sores, exuding an unbearable
smell from their bodies’. Pope Sixtus V in 1587 complained of vagrants in Rome
who ‘fill with their groans and cries not only public places and private houses but
the churches themselves; they provoke alarms and incidents; they roam like
brute beasts with no other care than the search for food’. Pierre de l’Estoile
reported of Paris in 1596 that ‘the crowds of poor in the street were so great that
one could not pass through’.
But who were the poor, and how were they defined? A reliable measurement
of ‘poverty’ at that period is difficult to come by.22 In a town those who were
registered to receive poor relief were normally categorised as poor, but a further
number considered to be indigent might also receive relief in dearth years, and
beyond these were the families who were possibly exempt from taxation because
of their lack of means. Thus in Augsburg in 1558, 5 per cent of the citizens were
in regular receipt of poor relief, a further 5 per cent might need help in crisis
years and in total 47 per cent of the citizens were considered too poor to pay
taxes.23 In western Europe over 20 per cent of a town’s population might consist
of the wholly poor. In Louvain in the mid-sixteenth century the ‘poor’ consti-
tuted 21.7 per cent of the population, and in Leiden about 40 per cent. In
Brussels the proportion was 21 per cent, and in Segovia in 1561 17 per cent were
registered as poor, without counting vagrants. In Elizabethan London, the poor
were about 14 per cent of the population.24 In the towns of Leicester and Exeter,
an estimated half of the population lived below the poverty line. In Bergamo in
1575, 35 per cent of a population of 20,000 were registered as poor, a minimum
figure that included ‘the aged, the sick, and children aged fifteen or below’.
While poverty was an undeniable feature of the towns, with their large
numbers of unemployed, it was not only an urban phenomenon. Many of the
poor came originally from the countryside. In Normandy in the early 1500s a
contemporary census of forty-six rural parishes described 24 per cent of the
families as ‘poor and beggars’. An estimate for eighteen villages in Lower Saxony
suggests that the poor were nearly 30 per cent of the population. For both town
and country poverty was a normal experience. In the villages around sixteenth-
century Valladolid up to 20 per cent of the rural population was poor. A

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pamphleteer of 1641 estimated that ‘the fourth part of the inhabitants of most
of the parishes of England are miserable poor people and (harvest-time excepted)
without any subsistence’.
As towns grew, social classes became economically segregated. In Exeter there
was a nucleus of wealthy residential areas in the city centre, in the parish of
St Petrock, surrounded by a ring of poorer districts, some outside the city walls.
In Valladolid and in Amiens, the centre was held by the propertied classes and
the poor lived in the outer parishes. When poor relief was handed out, women
and children featured as the majority among the registered poor. Of the 765
people qualifying for relief in the parish of St Gertrude in Louvain in 1541, over
half were children. In 1561 in Segovia women were 60 per cent of the adult poor
and in Medina del Campo 83 per cent. Of the poor registered in Norwich in
1570, nearly half were children; in Huddersfield in 1622 children were 54 per
cent. The children were normally under the age of 15, a section of the urban
poor that were unable to find employment or were orphaned through the death
of their fathers. Logically, they featured prominently in schemes for poor relief.
An impressive body of writing was dedicated to the education of young people
and the rescue of abandoned infants. Spanish writers were second to none in
their concern. Luis Vives devoted a chapter to children in his study on the poor,
leading clergy founded hospices for infants, the royal physician Luis Mercado
published a work (1611) on the education of children and the monk Pedro
Ponce de León devised in the 1580s a method for teaching deaf and dumb chil-
dren to speak.25
‘Poverty’ was and is the result of an imbalance in the distribution of resources.
It was aggravated in the sixteenth century by economic developments that
converted it into a permanent feature of western civilisation. The change that
provoked most comment at the time was the rise in prices, sometimes identified
by historians as a ‘price revolution’. In Spain Alonso de Herrera claimed (1513)
that ‘a pound of mutton now costs as much as a whole sheep used to’. Jean Bodin
in France testified (1568) that ‘the price of things fifty or sixty years ago was
one-tenth what it is at present’. All classes suffered: the famous Italian engineer
Giovanni Battista Antonelli, on contract to Philip II, claimed (1581) that in
Spain ‘the prices of goods have risen so much that seigneurs, gentlemen,
commoners and the clergy cannot live on their incomes’. Nearly all the items
that made up the ordinary stock of consumer goods rose appreciably in cost.
Because inflation was imperfectly understood, it was blamed in the first place

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on speculators and hoarders of food. But price changes were also provoked by
currency devaluation, which all over Europe accelerated monetary inflation.
Meanwhile, in 1568 Bodin published a tract arguing that ‘the principal and
almost the only’ cause of the price rise was ‘(a reason that no one has yet suggested)
the abundance of gold and silver’ from America. His argument (which in fact
had been proposed already in 1556 by the Salamanca jurist Martin de Azpilcueta)
was to become the classic exposition of the origins of the price revolution.
In a less flexible economy than ours is today, the impact on incomes was
severe. ‘In times past’, observed an English commentator in 1581, ‘he hath been
accounted rich and wealthy who was worth thirty or forty pounds; but in our
days the man of that estimation is reputed next neighbour to a beggar.’ In the
city of Speyer between 1520 and 1621 wages nearly trebled but over the same
period the price of rye, a basic staple food, increased by fifteen times, that of
wheat thirteen times, that of peas fourteen times, of meat sixfold and of salt
sixfold. In Poitou a farmhand’s wages in 1578 could purchase only 52 per cent
of what they could have bought in 1470. In Languedoc agricultural wages that
stood at an index of 100 in 1500 fell to an index of 44 by 1600. All sections of
the labouring class were severely hit.
There were many workers for whom a money wage formed only a small part
of income, since they were paid in kind – usually one or two meals daily – and
were consequently less dependent on ready cash. This group often included the
unskilled labourers in the towns and over large areas of Europe formed an abso-
lute majority of the rural working population. Many serfs, for example, were
paid entirely in kind. The social problem in the sixteenth century was not, there-
fore, so much one of wages (since so few depended entirely on wages for a living)
as one of rents, prices and debts, issues which affected both the skilled craftsman
and the unskilled wage earner. Thanks to being paid in kind, and perhaps
enjoying fixed rents, some workers might even be cushioned against inflation.
There is no real doubt, however, that among the lower classes as a whole incomes
were a serious casualty of the price rise.
The process of change on the land produced a considerable number of casu-
alties. In England the independent small farmer, the yeoman, sometimes
improved his lot and rose economically, but tended equally to suffer distress.
Even in lands which, like Sweden, had a relatively free peasantry, changes in land
values and soil exploitation led to the expropriation of a section of the peasant
class and to the growth of unemployment, both urban and rural. Landlessness

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became a prime consequence of the rise in land values (in Myddle in Shropshire
only 7 per cent of the population were without land in 1541–70; in 1631–60 the
proportion was 31.2 per cent). At the same time vagrancy increased and agrarian
conflict intensified.
Two widely differing views of the poor were held in this period. One, of an
old humanist and Christian ancestry, felt that the poor deserved well of society
since society had not treated them well. The other, which obtained greater
currency after the Reformation, was that the poor needed reforming, since their
own incapacity had put them where they were. Martin Bucer declared that ‘such
as give themselves wilfully to the trade of begging be given and bent to all
mischief ’. The opposition to public charity, based on a concern for social order,
was elsewhere reflected in a strong belief that class distinctions had been created
by God and that the poor must stay in their place. ‘God hath made the pore’,
observed Sir John Cheke to the rebels in Kett’s revolt, ‘and hath made them to be
pore that he myght shew his might and set them aloft when he listeth, for such
cause as to hym seemeth, and pluck down the riche to hys state of povertie, to
shew his power.’ Others felt that rebellion was proof of the unwillingness of
the poor to turn their hands to any useful thing. In England some Puritans
(such as William Perkins) felt that to be poor was to be wicked, in conformity
with a general belief that idleness was evil. For Perkins, vagrants were ‘a cursed
generation’.
Unemployment fed the political fear that ‘idleness’ bred mischief, which
must be disciplined. The Elizabethan annalist Strype condemned vagabonds as
‘lewd idle fellows . . . who run from Place to Place . . . to stir up Rumours, raise
up Tales, . . . devising slanderous Tales and divulging to the People such kind of
News as they thought might most readily move them to Uproars and Tumults’.26
The fear of rumour, common to Elizabethan England and discernible in
Shakespeare’s plays, was fed by the conviction that the poor and simple were
easily stirred to rebellion. Archbishop Whitgift observed that ‘the people are
commonly bent to novelties and to factions, and most ready to receive that
doctrine that seemeth to be contrary to the present state and that inclineth to
liberty’.
In preindustrial Europe the concept of continuous employment did not exist.
In the bigger towns a high level of unemployment might give justifiable cause for
concern over maintaining law and order. Amiens in 1578, a city of perhaps
30,000 people, was stated to have had as many as 6,000 workers ‘supported by

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the alms of the well-to-do’. In these circumstances charity could be seen as an

attempt to stave off social unrest. In Troyes in 1574, poor who came from outside
the city were, according to a common practice, given leave to stay no more than
twenty-four hours. The reason given was that ‘the richest citizens began to live in
fear of disturbance and of a popular riot by the said poor against them’.27
Unemployment and poverty explains what happened in the city of Tours at
Pentecost in May 1640. About 800 to 900 silkworkers who were dissatisfied with
their wages staged an uprising. Soldiers were called in and when these proved
inadequate some royal troops were called as well. To penalise the people a tax was
imposed. This led to another rising in September, when several tax officials had
their throats cut and the rioters threatened to put the city to the torch.
The risk of riots was higher in Lyon, probably the biggest industrial city in
Europe. Two-thirds of its population of 100,000 were workers, some living in
extreme poverty and many regularly unemployed. In 1619 about 6,000 of the
workers were in receipt of poor relief of some sort; in 1642 the figure was 10,000.
The lesson that unemployment bred insurrection was not forgotten in Spain. In
1679, the authorities in Granada, Spain’s largest industrial centre, which had a
population of some 100,000, estimated that the number of poor who depended
on labour in the silk industry for their daily wage exceeded 20,000. Mindful of
a previous uprising in 1648, steps were taken to relieve the distress, occasioned
this time by the plague. When unemployment in Toledo threatened their liveli-
hood in 1699, the silkworkers of that city protested that although over 3,000
were out of work no steps had been taken to come to their aid. If this situation
were to continue, they threatened, ‘it would not be surprising if in order to
obtain bread they were to resort to all the means permitted by natural law, and
even to those not so permitted. The people have no wish to be angered nor to
cause riots or scandal; all they desire is that their lot should be bettered.’
The social tension brought about by unemployment was well described by
the English writer Thomas Deloney in 1619: ‘The poor hate the rich because
they will not set them on work; and the rich hate the poor because they seem
burdenous’. Feared by their betters, the poor were still essential to their spiritual
welfare for, as Catholic tradition proclaimed, to succour them was an act of
charity. Since charity was given, the protagonist in Mateo Alemán’s novel Guzmán
de Alfarache (1599) argued, less for the material welfare of the recipient than for
the spiritual welfare of the donor, it might as well be given to the false poor as to
the real. In the old medieval attitude to poverty, since poverty could never be

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eradicated (‘the poor you have always with you’, Christ had said) it must be used
as a means of obtaining spiritual graces. Outdoor relief, later attacked as a posi-
tive encouragement to mendicancy, became a corporal work of mercy. Rich men
prepared their way to heaven by leaving sums for the poor in their wills. In
sixteenth-century Valladolid the consciences of the rich were eased by the unusual
practice of having an entourage of paupers bear the candles at the funeral; some
pious rich even had themselves interred as ‘paupers’.
In the early sixteenth century the first studies on combating poverty appeared.
The humanist Juan Luis Vives was the first to outline a methodical approach to
poor relief, in his De subventione pauperum (On the relief of the poor; 1526). His
view of charity was the classic Christian one: the poor have a right to aid, and the
propertied have an absolute moral obligation to help them. But he went beyond
previous practice by opposing begging and rejecting the view that charity was
mere material relief. Hospitals must be set up to take the poor off the streets, and
relief must consist ‘not in mere almsgiving but in all the ways by which a poor
man can be uplifted’. The Christian state had a duty to maintain its less fortunate
citizens and the task should not be left to private charity. Other Spanish writers
addressed themselves to the problem.28 Juan de Medina, in his Plan of poor relief
practised in some Spanish towns (1545), outlined a scheme to abolish begging and
to hospitalise the sick and needy. His plans were apparently already being prac-
tised in Valladolid and seem to have been partially successful. Domingo de Soto
in the same year produced his Considerations on the poor, and in 1598 came
Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera’s Discourse on the assistance of the poor. Juan de
Mariana, in his De rege et regis institutione (1599), confirmed the new emphasis
on state intervention by urging that ‘piety and justice necessitate relieving the
poverty of invalids and the needy, caring for orphans and aiding those in want.
Among all the duties of the Sovereign, this is the chief and most sublime.’ The
evidence from these Spanish writers contradicts a common assumption that it
was the Reformation that was responsible for the laicisation of charity and the
substitution of municipal for clerical relief.
There had always (it seemed) been poor, but contemporaries agreed that mass
beggary was new; and there had always been vagrants, but mass vagabondage was
apparently recent. The publication in Germany in 1510 of the Liber Vagatorum
(Beggars Book), which till then had circulated in manuscript; the expulsion of
vagabonds from Paris by the Parlement in 1516; the beginning of urban poor
relief in the 1520s: all seem to point to a specific period when people became

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more conscious of a problem about an increase in the number of poor. William

Harrison in his Description of England (1577) identified the period of origin
precisely when he claimed of organised beggary that ‘it is not yet full threescore
yeares since this trade began’. The Reformation and other religious changes
played their part: Robert Aske, Catholic leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536),
claimed that ‘in the north parts much of the relief of the commons was by
succour of abbeys’, but this had vanished at the dissolution of the monasteries.
Public action over the rootless poor began in the early years of the sixteenth
century.29 A Vicenza noble wrote in 1528: ‘you cannot walk down the street or
stop in a square or church without multitudes surrounding you to beg for
charity’. There was a surprising unanimity about the measures of control adopted.
Augsburg in 1522 banned street begging and appointed six poor guardians to
supervise relief. Nuremberg followed suit, so did Strasbourg and Breslau in 1523,
Regensburg and Magdeburg in 1524. Luis Vives was the direct inspiration for a
scheme put into practice at Ypres in 1525. Between 1522 and 1545 some sixty
towns on the continent (about thirty in Germany, fourteen in the Netherlands)
reformed their poor relief system. Luther in 1523 helped to reorganise the system
in Saxony, Zwingli did so in 1526 in Zürich, in 1541 Calvin passed an ordinance
on relief in Geneva. All these schemes, both Catholic and Protestant, stressed
three new principles: a ban on begging, centralisation of relief in civic hands and
compulsory work for the able-bodied. In 1528 Venice, where previously the reli-
gious fraternities (Scuole Grandi) had supervised charity, began a system of
hospitals for the poor. In 1531 the civic authorities in Lyon, learning from the
urban riots of April 1529 (the Grande Rebeyne), started to establish the famous
Aumône Générale, which centralised relief and laid particular emphasis on the
creation of jobs for the workless.
Many traditionalists deplored the new attitude. The Sorbonne in 1531
declared the ban on begging to be ‘uncatholic’, the mendicant orders were inev-
itably hostile and the Anglican annalist John Stow lamented the passing of the
‘ancient and charitable custom’ of outdoor relief. On the other hand, Ignatius
Loyola was so impressed by what he saw of the new system that when he returned
to his Basque home town of Azpeitia in 1535 he helped introduce it there. By the
mid-sixteenth century, the Counter-Reformation was giving its support to a revi-
sion of the medieval attitude. Relief was in future intended to secure the spiritual
welfare of the recipients; their bodily welfare was only secondary, as was the
spiritual benefit obtained by the donor. Recipients of relief were required to

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mend their ways, resume their religious duties and seek employment in order to
help their dependants. Hospitalisation was meant to help them achieve all this,
through giving them beds, proximity to a chapel and access to job-training
schemes. Though the Church cooperated closely in all the new relief projects, in
principle they were controlled and financed by the municipality or state. Charity
was not therefore ‘secularised’, but it was largely taken out of private hands.30
One initial problem was to stem the flow of vagrants and localise the problem
of the poor. The earliest control measures consisted in granting beggars a licence
to beg within a certain area only, usually their place of origin. In London in the
1520s genuine local paupers were given licences and identification discs: all
others were to be whipped out of town. The purpose of this was to dissociate
begging from vagrancy. As the poor realised that they could only beg in their
own localities they would cease to drift and vagrancy would soon cease. Charles
V in Spain restricted beggars to an area within a radius of six leagues (about 15
miles) from their home towns. Under Philip II this method of control was
centred on the parish: the parish priest alone issued begging licences, each parish
created officials to superintend the poor and an attempt was made to register all
vagrants. The system of licences failed completely, partly because it was easy to
counterfeit them. In Scotland the laws restricting beggars to their native parishes
were passed in 1535, 1551 and 1555 and not renewed thereafter. In 1556 the
Cambridgeshire authorities banned all begging whatsoever and suspended the
licence system. Norwich followed this example. By mid-century, the licence
system was being discarded.
At about the same time the local authorities resorted to the dual system of
institutional care and outdoor relief.31 Institutional care was provided through
hospitals: in 1544 the great pre-Reformation London hospital of St Bartholomew’s
was refounded, and by 1557 there were four ‘royal’ hospitals in the city – St
Bartholomew’s, Christ’s, Bridewell and St Thomas’. In order to help pay for such
institutions, a compulsory tax for poor relief was decreed in London. Other local
authorities followed suit. In order to maintain its workhouses or ‘houses of
correction’, Norwich in 1557 issued regulations for compulsory taxation.
In France a similar procedure was followed. The Paris authorities in 1554 set
up their first poor hospital, at Saint-Germain; this was subsequently called the
Hôpital des Petites Maisons and lasted till the end of the ancien régime. Hospitals
were meant almost exclusively for the disabled poor; for the able-bodied, work-
houses were set up in all the major towns of England and France. They offered

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refuge and employment, neither in a very appealing form, to those who had no
other way of earning their living. Like England, France delegated control of poor
relief to the localities. The ordinances of Moulins (1566) and Blois (1579) stip-
ulated that local authorities should raise money through parish collections and
tax levies. Lyon was perhaps the earliest of all French cities to provide for the
unemployed, and seems to have been the first to set up workhouses: the Aumône
Générale was in existence as early as 1533 and was replaced in 1614 by the much
larger Hôpital Général de la Charité.
The English poor relief system mirrored those on the continent. Harsh laws
were passed against vagrants; an English pamphleteer of 1580 denounced ‘that
loathsome monster idleness’. In 1547 a statute specified slavery as one penalty
for vagrancy. Two years later the slavery clauses were repealed but in 1572 another
harsh proposal became law. By this act a vagrant could be whipped and bored
through the ear on the first offence, adjudged a felon on the second and be
punished by death on the third. All these penalties were repealed in 1593.
To preserve public order and to keep the poor honest, work must be made
available. ‘This is the best charity’, wrote a seventeenth-century Puritan, ‘so to
relieve the poor as we keep them in labour. It benefits the giver to have them
labour; it benefits the commonweal to suffer no drones, nor to nourish any in
idleness; it benefits the poor themselves.’ The famous Statute of Artificers (1563)
was an elaborate scheme to put the able-bodied to work. Then, at the end of the
reign of Queen Elizabeth, a comprehensive act to regulate poor relief was passed.
This, the act of 1597–8, was amended and re-enacted in 1601. Together, the
legislation of these years formed the basis of poor relief in England for the next
two centuries.
Poor relief was localised: it was placed in the control of churchwardens of the
parish and four overseers of the poor appointed every Easter by the Justices of the
Peace. The poor were divided into categories, each of which was to receive partic-
ular treatment. The able-bodied poor were either to be put to work or confined
in houses of correction; children were likewise either to be set to work or appren-
ticed; and the sick and maimed poor were to be housed and cared for ‘at the
general charges of the parish, or otherwise of the hundred or the county’. Begging
and vagrancy were prohibited. To finance the work of the Act, a compulsory poor
rate was to be raised in each locality. This legislation was devised to meet a severe
emergency, for these were years of great economic distress throughout Europe.
Predictably, the success was only partial. The harsh regime of the workhouses or

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houses of correction resembled prison life and were hated more than prison:
their purpose clearly was to make life so unbearable that inmates would prefer to
seek work outside. A Somerset Justice of the Peace, Edward Hext, cited some
vagrants who ‘confessed felony unto me; by which they hazarded their lives; to
the end they would not be sent to the House of Correction, where they should be
forced to work’. The machinery to run the Poor Law was not always adequate. An
observer of the situation in south-east England in 1622, Thomas Dekker, reported
that ‘though the number of the Poore do dailie increase, all things worketh for the
worst in their behalfe. For there hath beene no collection for them, no not these
seven yeares in many parishes of this land, especiallie in countrie townes.’
The resort to houses of correction has been seen as the first stage of what the
French historian Michel Foucault termed ‘the great confinement’.32 On this
view, there was an increasing move in western Europe to criminalise poverty and
insanity by locking up the poor and the unfortunate. Up to the mid-eighteenth
century, however, there is very limited evidence for the thesis. Houses of correc-
tion were limited to a few major cities; they consequently catered for only a small
proportion of the poor, and many countries had no such institutions. The vast
mass of the poor, whether beggars or criminals, operated freely outside the ambit
of corrective institutions. The Amsterdam workhouse in the seventeenth century,
for example, had room for only seventy persons, by no means an adequate
response to the social problem it was supposed to confront. The real ‘confine-
ment’ in Europe did not come until much later, in the nineteenth century.
Institutionalisation of relief was only one of the many solutions used to tackle
the problems of poverty and mass unemployment. Regulation of wages and
prices was also necessary. Outdoor relief and food subsidies continued: in 1623
the bailiffs of Derby reported that ‘wee have at the charge of the cheife and ablest
inhabitants of this Burrowe provided 140 quarters of corne which wee weekely
afford to the poore as their necessities require under the common price of the
markett’. Sometimes the drastic measure of forced emigration was proposed. In
1617 one London parish contributed ‘towards the transportation of a hundred
children to Virginia by the Lord Mayor’s appointment’. Vagrants were occasion-
ally transported, and on one occasion during the Cromwellian Protectorate it
was suggested that prostitutes be expelled to America. Numerically, however,
compulsory emigration was not significant. Instead, further changes were intro-
duced into the poor relief system. At Bristol in 1696, for example, John Cary
modified the organisation of workhouses.

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French practice followed the same general lines, but lacked the important
central direction provided in England by the Privy Council and Parliament.
Compulsory hospitalisation of the poor was ordered in a French decree of 1611,
but discontinued as general policy after 1616, though there were subsequent
efforts (as in the 1629 Code Michaud) to impose the principle on municipalities.
Each region and city continued local practice. In Aix-en-Provence, for example,
a general hospital or Miséricorde was founded in 1590 and designed to help both
disabled and able-bodied poor. In 1640 alone three important charities were
founded in the city: the Charité (a general hospital), the Refuge (for prostitutes)
and the Providence (for homeless women). Large general hospitals were estab-
lished in Paris in 1612 (the Pitié) and in Lyon in 1614 (the Charité). Frequently
the European hospitals extended medical help to the poor. A striking case is the
city of Nördlingen, where details from 1,500 surviving medical reports made as
part of poor relief between 1570 and 1620 show how both women and men
from the poorer spectrum of textile workers were examined and treated by
doctors.
No significant progress towards change was made in France until mid-
century, when the religious grouping known as the Company of the Blessed
Sacrament turned its considerable energy and wealth to the problem of poverty.
The Company was firmly committed to incarcerate the poor, whom they
regarded as guilty of ‘behavioural disorder’. The establishment of a branch at Aix
in 1638 was primarily responsible for the hospitals set up there in 1640. Other
hospitals were set up at Marseille in 1639, Orléans in 1642, Grenoble in 1661
and in other major cities. The plan for the Company’s Aumône at Toulouse
revealed its hostility to traditional almsgiving, which was regarded as useless.33 In
1656 the Company founded the Hôpital Général des Pauvres at Paris. The insti-
tution was made deliberately unpleasant. The inmates could be punished by the
directors of the hospital, all their activities were timetabled and they were to be
‘clothed in grey robes and caps and have each on their robes a general mark and
a particular number’.
A collaborator of the Company, St Vincent de Paul, became the best known
of all Christian servants of the poor. Combining both a devotion to the medieval
ideal of poverty and a commitment to the reforming concepts of the Counter-
Reformation, he distributed outdoor relief on one hand and founded hospitals
on the other. His hospital for beggars, the Nom-de-Jésus (1653), provided both
shelter and obligatory work. Throughout the north of France in the worst years

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of the Thirty Years War and the Fronde, St Vincent and his helpers were every-
where present to save lives as well as souls. ‘For the last two years’, states a letter
of 1653 to Vincent, ‘the whole of Champagne and this town in particular have
lived only from your charity. All the countryside would have been deserted and
all the inhabitants dead from hunger if you had not sent someone to relieve them
from poverty and give them life.’
From the 1650s, when better times returned to France, the government
turned to a policy of hospitalisation. Colbert later stated that ‘nothing is so detri-
mental to the state as the begging of able men’. An edict of 1662 prescribed the
establishment of a general hospital in every city and large town. The policy was
reaffirmed in a 1676 circular letter to all bishops and intendants, and after 1680
hospitals were founded with more frequency. In 1666 the Salpétrière hospital in
Paris housed 1,900 inmates, of whom 110 were blind and paralysed, 85 were
mad, 90 were infirm aged, 60 were epileptics and 380 were aged over 60. But
only a fraction of the poor could be accommodated. Moreover, the milder regime
of ‘hospitals’ was reserved mainly for women and younger persons; the few men
who accepted charity were put into the harsher ‘workhouses’, from which they
escaped if they could.
In Catholic and Protestant countries alike, it was principally the urban elite
that gave to charity. In the United Provinces, where workhouses were established
from 1589 after the publication of Dirck Coornhert’s Discipline of Knaves (1567,
publ. 1587), an English traveller observed in 1685 that ‘there is nothing shows
more the charitable inclination of the Hollanders than their great care in
relieving, maintaining and educating their poor, for there are no beggars to be
seen anywhere in the streets’. The Calvinist churches in Holland administered
poor relief as an integral part of moral discipline, as we can see from the measures
taken by the congregation in Delft.34
In England the London merchants distinguished themselves in giving to
charity. One of the most significant aspects of the gifts made by London burghers
was the so-called ‘secularisation’ of their donations. It has been estimated that
over the period 1480–1540, when the country was still Catholic, the lesser
merchants of London gave 61 per cent of their gifts to religious purposes and
only 18 per cent directly to the poor. From 1601 to 1640, on the other hand,
religion was given no more than 9.8 per cent, while the poor were given 52.4 per
cent.35 The figures do not prove that the poor benefited: in the earlier period
money donated to religion often found its way to the poor, while in the later

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period it seldom reached the poor directly and went to institutions. But they
demonstrate a growing concern with a grave social problem. In seventeenth-
century Milan private donations were by far the most important source of
income for the poor. Milanese merchants gave large sums to the hospitals; among
them was Giulio Cesare Lampugnani who, besides giving 90,000 lire in legacies
to two charitable institutions, left, in his will in 1630, 196,000 lire in goods and
63,500 in capital for supplying the poor with bread, rice, coal and clothing.36 In
Spain secular donations appear to have played a smaller part in financing poor
relief. The example of Zamora, where religious confraternities were the principal
donors, reflected a common pattern.37 On the other hand, in the seventeenth
century in Madrid several lay brotherhoods came into existence, devoted to
caring for the poor, paying for their education and feeding, and clothing
and burying the indigent. The most active was the Brotherhood of the Refuge,
which was founded in 1618 and went through its most flourishing period in
the 1670s.38
The most striking aspect of the new poverty was its mobility. Many of the
wandering poor were simply looking to earn their living. Subsistence migration,
on the increase in the sixteenth century, was tied closely to the agrarian cycle.
Evidence for England in the 1570s suggests that movement was at its highest in
August and September, at the end of the harvest, and then in April and March,
at sowing time. In contrast with traditional seasonal migration, where workers
moved to harvest areas in summer and then back to their villages in autumn, the
new migrants were often rootless, such as Nicholas Lawrence of Thanet who
explained that ‘he is a poor labouring man and is sometime in one place and
sometime in another’.
Migrants and vagrants were astonishingly mobile, travelling across nations
and across seas. In the sixteenth century Valladolid received migrants from
Galicia, Exeter had migrants from London. Of a sample of vagrants who passed
through Amiens in the early seventeenth century 20 per cent came from
Normandy, 4 per cent from Franche Comté. The Irish, all too often involuntary
migrants from their homeland, fled for economic relief to the land of the oppres-
sors, England. There they met draconian poor laws. A judicial record from Kent
says:

Philip Maicroft and his wife were whipped the 8th March 1602, and had
granted unto them six dayes to be conveyed from officer to officer out of the

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country of Kent, and then to be conveyed to Bristol, the place (as they say)
where they landed, from thence to be conveyed to Dungarvan in Munster in
Ireland, the place (as they say) of their birth.

The emigration from Ireland, especially in times of famine, could not be

stemmed. In 1629 the Mayor of Bristol reported that ‘the scarcity of corn in
Ireland is such that the poor people of that realm are enforced . . . to come over
into this kingdom’. In 1633 the Somerset justices complained of a ‘troop of Irish,
that begin again to swarm out of that country’.
In western Europe the direction of movement was north to south, towards
the Mediterranean. Between France and Spain the movement was almost exclu-
sively southwards, dominated by the host of seasonal workers, often indistin-
guishable from vagrants. Fernández de Navarrete in the 1620s claimed that ‘all
the scum of Europe have come to Spain, so that there is hardly a deaf, dumb,
lame or blind man in France, Germany, Italy or Flanders, who has not been to
Castile’. It was reported of the hospital in Burgos (with probable exaggeration)
that ‘every year, in conformity with its rules, it takes in, cares for and feeds for
two or three days, from eight to ten thousand people from France, Gascony and
other places’.
Criminal activity was popularly associated with two groups: vagabonds (and
picaros) and beggars. The vagabond picaro was a literary type rather than a
historical figure. He emerges as one of the preponderant themes in the literature
of Spain’s Golden Age. Mateo Aleman’s Guzman de Alfarache (1599) is commonly
regarded as the earliest novel to describe the amoral vagabond life of the picaro.
But already in the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes, which appeared half a century
earlier in 1554, the main features of the picaresque life were described, though
without actually using the word pícaro. The next famous work of this genre
was Francisco de Quevedo’s Buscón (1626). The picaresque world of thieves,
vagabonds, prostitutes and swindlers was not confined exclusively to Spanish
society. Italy, Germany and France were no less afflicted by the same social type,
and translations of the Spanish novels found a ready market in those countries.
The Lazarillo, for instance, was translated into German in 1617, Guzmán two
years earlier in 1615. Though the picaro was a literary creation, he was born out
of a social context in which war, displacement, economic crisis and demographic
disaster was endemic. But in literature the features of the delinquent were roman-
ticised and his basic criminality glossed over.

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The literature on beggars was even more exotic than that on picaros. From the
late fifteenth century written sources speak of a strange and mysterious organisation
called the Beggars’ Brotherhood, with vagabonds and professional criminals under
its sway. Romantic and imaginative literature on the Brotherhood, which appears to
have been little more than a myth based on the late medieval predilection for the
vagabond life, ranges from the anonymous Liber Vagatonum in Germany, to the Vie
généreuse des Mercelots, Gueuz et Boesmiens (1596) of Pechon de Ruby in France and
Il Vagabondo (1621) by Rafaele Frianoro (an Italian Dominican friar whose name in
religion was Giacinto de Nobili). Many other writings, including several in English
and Spanish, were also published on the same theme.39
Beggars had their folklore, their methods and their impostures.40 In Rome in
1595 when a youth was arrested for begging he informed the papal police that
‘among us poor beggars there are many secret companies, and they are different
because each has a distinctive activity’. He went on to name nineteen different
types of imposture: the famigotti, for example, were beggars who pretended to be
invalid soldiers; the bistolfi wore cassocks; the gonsi pretended to be rustic idiots.
By 1621, when Frianoro was writing his book, the Italians had twenty-three
categories of imposture; there were similar categories in other nations. Not all
the details given by contemporaries about the beggars can be written off as the
fruit of a romantic imagination. The world of the Brotherhood was a recognis-
able ‘underworld’. The seventeenth-century historian Henri Sauval testified that
the beggars did not practise marriage nor did they frequent the sacraments, and
if they entered a church it was only to cut purses. They were an antisociety,
organised against it, disbelieving in its ethics and religion. They were also sepa-
rated from it by the jargon, called cant in English, Rotwelsch in German, argot in
French, jerga de la germanía in Spanish. Cant had a virtually international vocab-
ulary. The first comprehensive account of it in English was Thomas Harman’s
Caveat for common Cursetors (1567). In France Le Jargon de l’Argot réformé (1628)
and in Holland Adriaen van de Venne’s Tableau of the ridiculous world (1635)
summarised both the language and the alleged customs of the beggars.
The romantic legends about the beggars presented them as essentially vaga-
bonds, tied to no locale, with their home in any nation they chose to reside in,
true citizens of the world. In each major city, so the mythology went, they had a
regular place of assembly, the so-called ‘Court of Miracles’. Most frequently it
was in the heart of the slum quarter. In Paris, Sauval tells us, ‘it was in a very large
square at the end of a large, stinking, noisome, unpaved cul de sac’. There,

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according to one legend from which the Court derived its name, all the poor and
maimed who entered in emerged healed and upright. But, according to another
version, the true miracle was that there ‘the poorest among them is deemed the
richest’. The need for beggars to resort to trickery and crime was explained by
Robert Greene in his Defence of Conny Catching (1592): ‘This is the Iron Age,
wherein iniquitie hath the upper hande, and all conditions and estates of men
seeke to live by their wittes, and he is counted the wisest that hath the deepest
insight into the getting of gaines’.
The vagrant problem was also in part a gypsy problem. Gypsies, the people
who today are identified as ‘Roma’, appeared in eastern Europe in the fourteenth
century and in west and central Europe in the early fifteenth. Their coming coin-
cided with the rise of organised begging and the persecution of witches, so they
were often identified with both. They were repeatedly arrested and accused of
sorcery because of the way in which they dabbled in magical cures and fortune
telling. In Hungary and Transylvania they were enslaved from the fifteenth century.
In Moldavia they were sold at slave markets. In Germany in 1540 Agrippa
denounced them because they ‘lead a vagabond existence everywhere on earth,
they camp outside town, in fields and at crossroads, and there set up their huts and
tents, depending for a living on highway robbery, stealing, deceiving and barter,
amusing people with fortune-telling and other impostures’.41 In 1560 the Estates
General at Orléans called on ‘all those impostors known by the name of Bohemians
or Egyptians to leave the kingdom under penalty of the galleys’. In Spain the harsh
legislation included a 1633 decree ordering them ‘no longer to dress as they do,
and to forget their language’, with bans on public assembly. Apart from the perse-
cution to which they were subjected, and which can to some extent be followed in
the administrative records,42 the gypsies produced no literate culture and therefore
remain largely anonymous, but by the seventeenth century in Spain had arrived at
the curious position of achieving some identification with everyday people and
established a notable appearance in the writings of Cervantes and later on in the
artistic works of the greatest of the country’s artists, Francisco Goya.

Disciplining crime

The disciplining of conduct, we have seen, entailed the disciplining of morality. In

the sense that immoral conduct (what we might define as ‘sin’) was an offence
against society, it was seen as a ‘crime’, and in effect many tribunals throughout the

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early modern period made no firm distinction between the two concepts. There was
also no clear perception of what acts were legal offences: different social levels had
different views. Was vagrancy, for example, a crime before certain laws made it so?
The English Parliament in 1650 declared adultery to be a crime: was it therefore a
crime? The enormous problems confronting any discussion of crime are seen most
clearly when attempts are made to measure it.43 Statistics for crime in preindustrial
Europe are notoriously incomplete: there were few policing bodies, arrests were
easier to make in towns than in the countryside and a large number of offences
went wholly unpunished, creating a substantial ‘dark figure’ of undetected crime.
The existence at that time of multiple jurisdictions, with different courts
competing to try the same offence, reduces seriously the significance of available
statistics. In broad terms, the bulk of cases tried by European courts were crimes
against persons or against property. The former usually took the form of violence
or the resolution of personal problems through injury; in large measure they
were attacks and mutilations provoked by insults, dishonours and brawls. The
picture has led some scholars to assume that early modern society, particularly in
its lower echelons, was oppressively violent. If this is true, violence can be seen as
a hallmark of a traditional society. Evidence for the early modern period, it has
been suggested, shows that ‘Europeans of all social strata were prone to violent
behaviour, a situation quite different from today, when a large proportion of
reported violence is the work of those marginalized in modern society’.44
Is it convincing to suggest that traditional society was more violent than ours
today? In reality it is almost impossible to assess the various factors involved, above
all because of a lack of relevant evidence. It is true that violence might be considered
a constant of life in some parts of ancien régime Europe, such as the rural Haute
Auvergne in France, where between 1587 and 1664 two-thirds of recorded offences
involved violence against persons and only one-third were against property.45 The
scale of violence here led eventually in 1665 to the installation of special royal
courts, the famous grands jours, to stamp out crime. Evidence for other tribunals
suggests that offences against property may by contrast have been more prepon-
derant, but always within the context of changing agrarian conditions.46
Some sociologists believe that western society of premodern times was going
through what Norbert Elias has called a ‘civilising process’, in which for example
the educated classes began to accept new norms of behaviour. In line with this
idea, crimes against property have sometimes been seen as typical of a modernising
society, where the accumulation of wealth and the growing gap between

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propertied and propertyless could lead to social conflict. The idea of an evolution
of misdemeanours in western society from crimes of violence to crimes of theft,
however, is not always sustained by available evidence. Moreover, it is incorrect
to assume that the law courts (and, by extension, most members of society) were
preoccupied mainly with offences involving theft or murder. At the Essex quarter
sessions in 1629–31, some 93 cases of theft were prosecuted, but 698 people
were also punished for failing to observe work obligations, and 652 more were
accused of offences in the drink trade.47
The statistics are clear on perhaps only one point: who the alleged offenders were.
Of some 2,000 persons arrested on criminal charges in Cologne between 1568 and
1612, the majority (five-sixths) were men, and of dependent or lowly status.48
Though this may suggest a certain bias by the courts against the lower classes, the full
picture is difficult to outline. In the case of Cheshire in England, women were just as
likely as men to be the criminals, and they could also be treated as severely as men.49
Some crimes were more naturally masculine, such as theft with violence and theft of
animals, but women were no less guilty of all other types of theft.
The balance between the sexes in terms of those brought before the courts is
difficult to measure. A historian of southwest Germany suggests that court judg-
ments ‘mainly point to a seventeenth-century tightening of patriarchal values’
evidenced by increased prosecution of illegitimate sexual relations outside of
marriage.50 Social order in this area was largely determined by male adult heads
of household. Logically, they took steps to control offenders, whom they gener-
ally perceived to be young people. ‘Youth were never more saucy’, the Englishman
Thomas Barnes complained in 1624, ‘the ancient are scorned, the honourable
are contemned, the magistrate is not dreaded.’ Juvenile crime was the target
of several measures to lock up and educate vagrant young. A solution resorted to
in England in the early seventeenth century was the transportation of vagrant
children to the colonies in Virginia.51
Historians are aware that the ‘dark figure’ – the unidentifiable statistic – of
undocumented crime in early modern Europe is very large. Towns may
have been adequately policed, but the greater part of the countryside lacked
police forces or systems for enforcing law and order. Some basic problems
may be summarised. In the first place, prosecution of crime was always selective.
In many societies, such as in the Mediterranean, coercive violence was seen
as acceptable because it was used as a mechanism to regulate social relations,
protect personal and public honour and control misdemeanours. In such an

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environment, some types of violence would not be seen as crime. In the same
way, when offences against persons and property were committed by those who
controlled power, namely the nobility, they were not prosecuted. As the example
of south-west France shows, nobles were responsible for a high proportion of
rural violence, but seldom punished.52 ‘You will see no one but poor and humble
thieves being hanged’, commented the bandit Oliver in Hans Grimmelshausen’s
classic satire on Germany in the epoch of war, Simplicissimus (1668). ‘Where
have you ever seen a person of high quality punished by the courts?’
In the second place, the offences prosecuted were usually public, those that
occurred in public places and affected public order.53 There is no guarantee
that they represented the bulk of committed offences. A large number of ‘crimes’
that did not occur in the public domain, such as violence between persons and
within the family, did not arrive in court. These private offences were not the sole
preserve of the lower classes but common to all levels of society. In any case, then
as now the parties to a conflict would make efforts to resolve their problems
without recourse to the law. Prosecution through the courts can in some measure
be seen as exceptional; it was certainly more common for rural communities to
seek other solutions for offences.54
Third, there were many ‘crimes’ that did not fall within the jurisdiction of the
governing authority. Early modern Europe was a mass of conflicting jurisdic-
tions, with state, Church and seigneurial courts sometimes overlapping in
authority (for example, the offence of sorcery might be subject to either a Church
or a civil court, or both). Some crimes make no appearance at all in the historical
records of a court simply because another local court (whose records may have
disappeared) exercised authority in the matter.
In France a substantial number of disputes involving crime (theft, insults,
assault) could be settled by the local public notary and so seldom made their way
to the criminal court;55 for the historian who consults only court records, these
cases never happened. In many regions the nobles still exercised authority over all
justice and even retained the power to pass death sentences. The confusion of
jurisdictions often caused prolonged quarrels over competence. As the centralised
state attempted to impose an acceptable system of law and order, it began to phase
out the confusions, introduce its own norms and reserve powers of punishment
to itself alone. In the process it partly superseded community systems of law,
which, however, continued to exist throughout Europe in many forms. Since law
officials were few and normally nonresident, rural communities were often left to

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police themselves. This meant that, for lack of law enforcement machinery, many
‘crimes’ were never punished or prosecuted,56 and apparently tranquil communi-
ties may well have experienced more lawlessness than the records show. On the
other hand, in certain rural areas community controls were exercised over offences
that may not have been formal ‘crimes’ but that threatened to disturb social order.
In the province of Santander in northern Spain this form of social discipline and
policing was the predominant one in the preindustrial period.57
Moreover, even if offenders were arrested, the courts themselves might decide
not to prosecute in order to save costs. It was also common for the local commu-
nity to block official penalties that it considered inappropriate. In Spain, though
rape was officially punishable with death it was more common to force the rapist
to make restitution in the form of cash or marriage. In England, local magistrates
and juries conspired to make several harsh laws inoperative. Of nearly 1,000
cases that came before the Maidstone Quarter Sessions in the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries, not once was the death penalty applied when it
should have been. Faced with the letter of the law juries preferred to acquit rather
than condemn. The attitude of both witnesses and jurymen in Somerset in 1596
was described by a local magistrate, Edward Hext: ‘Most commonly the simple
Countryman and woman, lokynge no farther then ynto the losse of ther owne
goods, are of opynyon that they wold not procure a mans death for all the goods
yn the world, others uppon promyse to have ther goods agayne wyll gyve faynt
evidence yf they be not stryctly loked ynto by the Justyce’.
What the propertied classes considered as ‘crime’, therefore, was not always
seen in the same way by the lower orders; for these, ‘social crime’ was a tolerable
aspect of conduct, not deserving of prosecution. Poaching and banditry often fell
into this category. In countries where there was little chance of popular attitudes
influencing the courts, hostility to the harsh laws intensified opposition, as we
can see by the actions of the rioters in Seville in 1648:

They went to the offices of the secretaries of the criminal courts, broke them
open, seized all the papers and burned them in the middle of the square, in
full view of all the judges. They did the same with the gallows and ladder in
the same square, and with the torture-rack and all the instruments of the
executioner. They also burned at the same time the committal records that
contain the names of all those imprisoned in all the gaols. But great care was
taken not to burn the civil records.

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The real level of crime in preindustrial Europe is therefore impossible to estab-

lish with any confidence. The apparent absence of violence in the countryside was
probably, as we have mentioned, deceptive; and in any case formal prosecutions
tended to be directed against outsiders rather than members of the local commu-
nity. In the Kentish countryside most of the prosecuted crimes involved theft
rather than violence and appear to have been committed not by local people but
by outsiders and travellers, by soldiers in transit to and from Dover and by gangs
operating from London. Records from other regions of England confirm that
theft predominated but show, on the contrary, that local people were involved.
Two-thirds of the 3,129 indictments presented at Essex assizes in 1559–1603
were against local people, for theft.58 It was similar in Wiltshire, where 23 out of
82 indictments in 1615 and 42 out of 103 in 1619 were drawn up against local
people for this offence. Second only to theft in Essex came prosecutions for witch-
craft. Cases of violence were prosecuted but tended to involve mostly kin groups
within the villages. The level of violence in rural England can appear to be decep-
tively low if only the higher courts are consulted. Between 1615 and 1660, for
example, only twenty-three cases of violence from the village of Preston turned up
at the local Quarter Sessions. But there happened also to be a manorial court at
Preston and of the 4,758 cases with which it dealt over the same period over 26
per cent involved assault, a far surer guide to the degree of village conflict.
In rural France, of 400 cases tried before the courts in Angoulême in 1643–4,
23 per cent concerned trespass and other property offences, a further 22 per cent
involved personal wrongs such as marital infidelity, drunkenness and sorcery;
thefts answered for 16 per cent, and violence occurred in 18 per cent of cases. In
Spain violence seems to have been more common than theft. In the region known
as the montes of Toledo, of 1,988 cases covering the period 1550–1700, over 42
per cent concerned violence in various forms, and only 10 per cent involved petty
theft. Partial evidence for the late seventeenth century in Valencian and Catalan
villages shows a similarly high level of violence within the rural community, aggra-
vated by the widespread possession of firearms: in 1676 the Viceroy of Catalonia
deplored ‘the many great and enormous crimes perpetrated in the principality’.
A possibly moderate level of crime in the countryside must be contrasted with the
situation in the large towns, where problems of housing, food and employment were
severe. The figures are, however, frequently misleading. Police officials were particu-
larly harsh to off-duty soldiers and to outsiders, two categories that consequently
appear with frequency in the records. Of those condemned to corporal punishment

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by the municipal court at Bordeaux from 1600 to 1650, nearly 52 per cent were
vagabonds and other outsiders. Urban crime was violent, at least in Spain. In 1578
the municipality of Valladolid had to appoint two extra law officers to deal with the
increase in theft and murder. For Madrid, the reports present a frightening picture:
‘Not a day passes but people are found killed or wounded by brigands or soldiers;
houses burgled; young girls and widows weeping because they have been assaulted
and robbed’, wrote a witness in 1639. ‘From Christmas till now’, wrote another in
June 1658, ‘there have been over 150 deaths and no one has been punished.’
An analysis of Madrid crime in the late seventeenth century gives some
support to these accounts. In 1693, one of the peak years for violence in the
period, repeated street brawls led to the arrest of over 300 persons for disturbing
public order; there were 29 recorded murders and 14 cases of rape. The muni-
cipal police were unafraid to act against nobility, who that year were implicated
in incidents of assault, rape, brawling, theft, wife beating and murder. The
authorities initiated 382 criminal prosecutions during the year but 212 of these
could not be proceeded with because the accused had fled the city. Over the
period 1665–1700 crimes of violence represented about half of all detected
crimes, sexual incidents came next (rape, other sex crimes and marriage quarrels)
and cases of theft last of all.59 Historians have been able to identify the emergence
of a real underworld of organised crime in some European towns. In London in
the 1720s a petty criminal called Jonathan Wild rose to become an Al Capone-
type boss who directed the activities of a network of accomplices.
The Madrid figures seem to emphasise the pervasive violence of traditional
society, but at no time was violence deemed acceptable, as private memoirs of
the time demonstrate. Moreover, in a society where there was no active police
force and prosecutions were initiated on the basis of complaints, the activity of
courts was little more than a reflection of what people chose to denounce. In
sixteenth-century Rome, the courts were frequently mere tools used by malicious
neighbours to take vengeance on each other.60 Many communities took their
own policing measures to control crime. Above all, the civil authorities and the
state attempted, by passing laws and sometimes by direct intervention, to elimi-
nate violence. We have seen that the taming of the great nobles and the forma-
tion of state armies were essential parts of this programme. The role of the army,
notoriously the single most important cause of violence and death in any age,
and therefore an element that can plausibly be considered in association with
crime, has been touched on above (Chapter 1).

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Bandits and brigands

Popular discontent might erupt into uprisings, but it also expressed itself on a
smaller scale in resorting to crime. The frequency of banditry was another
symptom of those very conditions that could cause mass rebellions: heavy taxa-
tion, agrarian distress, class resentment. In general all banditry, both aristocratic
and popular, was criminal, but it was a form of crime that rose out of political
and social crisis. Viewed as crime, aristocratic and popular banditry also shared
the common factor of thriving in areas usually inaccessible to the government,
such as mountainous regions and woods.
Beyond this common ground, the two sorts of banditry differed widely.
Aristocrats who operated robber bands were reverting to a purely feudal defiance
of the state. This was the case with the great bandit-lords of central Italy in the late
sixteenth century, most notable of whom was the Duke of Montemarciano,
Alfonso Piccolomini, who for thirteen years from 1578 was the supreme head of
the brigands in Romagna. Several other distinguished nobles followed Piccolomini’s
precedent, not always with success: in 1587 when the Grand-Duke Ramberto
Malatesta began to operate as a bandit the pope had him seized and executed.
Piccolomini himself was hanged at Florence in 1591. So severe were the pope’s
measures against the bandits that ‘this year’, reported a Roman newsletter of
September 1585, ‘we have seen more heads on the Sant’ Angelo bridge than
melons in the market’.61
Popular banditry, on the other hand, tended to originate as a protest against
misery and seems to have thrived most in periods of economic crisis. Unlike rebel-
lions, which aimed to secure broad support, banditry was at its strongest when its
support was purely local. The men who fled to the mountains to join the bands
were usually those whose crimes, although culpable in the eyes of the state, had not
received general disapprobation in the locality. Regional sympathy defeated all the
efforts of governments to annihilate banditry. The mountainous regions of central
France and the Pyrenees were prominent in the sixteenth century as centres of
banditry. When Charles Estienne published his Guide des Chemins de France in the
mid-sixteenth century, he took care to list some of the roads that were infested by
brigands. Catalan banditry south of the Pyrenees had its heyday in the period
stretching from the French civil wars to the revolt of 1640.62 The peak period for
activity here was in the reign of Philip III, under whom the most famous of all the
Catalan bandits, Perot Rocaguinarda, began his career in 1602. Much of his fame
derives from the appearance he makes in Cervantes’ Don Quixote. A diarist of his

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day reported that ‘Rocaguinarda was the most courteous bandit to have been in
that region for many years: never did he dishonour or touch the churches, and God
aided him’. He ended his career in what became a traditional way, accepting a
pardon in 1611 and going overseas to Italy to serve with the troops.
As in Catalonia, the Italian bandits emerged from an agrarian background,
and periods of agrarian crisis seemed to provoke further bandit activity. The
critical years of the 1580s, followed by a harvest crisis in 1590, initiated wide-
spread disturbances. A Roman newsletter of 1590 reported incidents in Romagna,
where ‘numerous peasants have joined the bandits, and commit murders publicly
in the streets’. The resurgence of banditry was part and parcel of an agrarian
revolt. One of the most prominent leaders to reflect this was Marco Sciarra, a
native of Castiglione, who had been a bandit since 1585, when he emerged as the
leader of a group which had its headquarters in the Abruzzi. For nearly seven
years this group’s activities were viewed as an anti-Spanish revolt, which helped
to bring him popularity. More significant was the fact that he practised a redis-
tribution of wealth that was the classic hallmark of the ‘Robin Hood’ type of
bandit. He was loved by the poor of Naples ‘who used to say’, reports a contem-
porary, ‘that he would soon come to occupy Naples, and make himself king’. The
combination of peasant agitation and banditry can be seen in seventeenth-
century France, where the regularity of popular uprisings gave ample scope to
rebels. In Périgord in this period the principal bandit was Pierre Grellety. He was
never caught and eventually in 1642, in the now accepted way, took up a mili-
tary commission offered to him by Cardinal Richelieu, to serve in Italy.
The Spanish bandits of this period operated not only in Catalonia but also in
Valencia, Murcia and Castile. Their lives displayed a curious mixture of crime
and charity, religion and impiety, the very combination of opposites that made
social banditry a unique phenomenon. One bandit of the time of Philip II was
called el caballero de la Cruz, because he always left a crucifix on the grave of his
victims. Most bandits wore medals and scapulars around their neck and prac-
tised the official religion, but they also drew on popular superstition and were
known to recite prayers to make themselves invisible to their pursuers. Women
were sometimes leaders of the bandit groups, as happened in Granada. One of
the more curious groups active in the early century in Andalusia operated in the
Sierra de Cabrilla. They dressed as gentlemen, were always kind and courteous to
their victims and robbed them of only half their goods: this charitable form of
property redistribution earned them the title of los beatos de Cabrilla – the holy

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ones of Cabrilla. Of a bandit active in Castile in 1644 it was reported that ‘he
never kills anyone but only takes part of their money, leaving them with enough
to continue their journey; he borrows money from villages and individuals,
giving his word as a pledge, and is punctual in payment’.63
The Russian state and its frontiers were the principal victims of brigandage in
the east for two main reasons. First, many of the bands were tribal and racial
groups that were actively at war against Muscovy. Both the Tatars and Cossacks
were long-standing enemies. All the major peasant revolts in the Russian lands
and in Lithuania and the Ukraine were made possible because of the active help
of the Cossacks. Banditry became an essential arm of agrarian revolt, and the
bandits in turn were accepted as defenders of the people, heroes of a popular
tradition in Russia.64 The second reason for the strength of banditry was the
chaos caused in Muscovy by the growth of feudalism and the bitter internal
struggles of the period. The breakdown of order during the Time of Troubles
(1598–1613), for instance, was particularly fruitful in promoting brigandage;
the schism in the Russian Church likewise drove many clergy and others to the
same occupation. Peasants fleeing from feudal obligations were perhaps the
largest single group of people to swell the growth of banditry. In popular estima-
tion, the work of the bandits was a form of social justice since their principal
victims were merchants and other rich travellers, government officials and tax
collectors. In the songs devoted to their deeds, the bylini, they emerged as folk
heroes whose work to redress the evils of the time earned them legendary status.

The power to punish

The ruling authorities had always claimed a monopoly over violence: this took its
most notable form in the exercise of the right to punish. During the confessional
period of European history, from 1520 to around 1650, the crime most conspic-
uously punished (not in numbers but in social impact) was that of heresy, which
normally earned the death penalty. Heresy had emerged as a significant crime only
in the thirteenth century, but was dealt with most cruelly during the epoch of the
Reformation. Executions were deliberately staged as public spectacles, meant to
edify and therefore to deter. In Catholic states they were normally managed by
bishops’ courts (as under Mary Tudor) or by special courts of the Inquisition (in
Spain and the Netherlands) that by canon law could not shed blood and therefore
handed condemned persons over ‘to the secular arm’. The majority of deaths for

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heresy in Europe were decreed not, as commonly thought, by ecclesiastical tribu-

nals but by state and urban courts, responsible between them for the majority of
known executions. In France the Chambre Ardente, set up by the crown in 1547,
became for a while the chief court used against heretics. The punishment of heresy
became, in effect, a means through which emergent state power could assert itself.
From 1520 to about 1560, possibly 3,000 persons were executed for heresy by the
state courts in western Europe.65 Two-thirds of them were Anabaptists, sentenced
mainly in the Germanic lands and the Netherlands. Significantly, it was only in
this period, precisely in 1559, that the Spanish Inquisition began to mount its
famous autos de fe.66 The public ceremony of an auto had its origins in the 1480s
in Spain, but did not take on its more theatrical aspects until the epoch of the
Reformation seventy years later. The spectacle (in which executions never played
a part, since they were carried out separately) immediately became equated in the
Protestant mind with religious fanaticism.
The repression of religious dissent applied not only to beliefs and acts but also
to public statements, as we see from the regular prosecution of yet another signif-
icant category of crime, namely verbal offences. Blasphemy, often punished with
the death penalty, was considered the gravest of all offences because it was a public
crime against God. But an extensive range of other verbal offences also continued
to occupy the tribunals.67 Sedition, or fomenting discontent against the authori-
ties, was always punished harshly. In the same way, fomenting discontent against
other people in society, sometimes through the written word but more normally
through verbal slander or defamation, was treated seriously because it affected
personal honour and could give rise to violence. The importance of verbal offences
makes it quite logical that the Spanish Inquisition should have devoted a good
part of its activity in early modern times to this type of crime.68
The punishment of everyday crime was handled by a multitude of local courts
in villages and towns, and supervised by various local jurisdictions. The conse-
quence was an alarming inconsistency in the punishment of offences, with the
quite arbitrary exercise of the death penalty. From the sixteenth century, state
authorities intervened regularly in private jurisdictions in an attempt to control the
situation, but made very slow progress. The efforts made in the Massif Central of
France to impose the Grands Jours d’Auvergne (1665–6), referred to above, are
often seen as a significant step forward, though the real success of such campaigns
is open to doubt. There were three main components in the official programme of
state authorities: an attempt to reserve the death penalty to the government alone;

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a clearer definition of which offences were criminal; and the gradual elimination of
many traditional punishments, some of them popular in nature, some of them
extreme. Various important changes were also introduced into the nature of trials.
Public executions for secular crimes were staged (such as the Spanish auto de fe)
as a public spectacle, but with a greater display of ferocity, intended to dissuade
members of the public and bring home to them the consequences of crime.
Executions of notable political figures had often, in England for example, been
revoltingly brutal. The brutality appears to have intensified as state control
advanced: both in England and in Germany in the eighteenth century criminal
executions were ritualised spectacles.69 It has been argued that the almost theatrical
ritual of executions was in effect a conscious effort by the authorities, both urban
and state, to impose a system of control and repression.70 Fortunately, by the
mid-eighteenth century public executions and their attendant barbarity were no
longer in favour. Certain punishments, such as mutilation, were discontinued.
Torture was still sanctioned, but a growing body of legal opinion argued fiercely
against its use. In accord with social usage, legal concepts of punishment began to
change. It is possible to take the view, moreover, that public executions were infre-
quent. Both in Nuremberg and in Amsterdam in the late seventeenth century and
early eighteenth century the number of criminals executed averaged only four a
year.71 There are, however, not enough statistics to compare the real significance of
specific punishments, since each town had its own criminal jurisdiction and it
would be more revealing to estimate the number of executions over a broader area.
Perhaps the most important aspect of punishment for crime in preindustrial
Europe was also, to modern eyes, the most surprising: criminals were not as a rule
incarcerated. Though gaols existed everywhere they were employed as temporary
residences until the fate of the condemned person could be decided. At the Old
Bailey in London, for example, prison sentences represented around 1 per cent of
the sentences passed in the mid-eighteenth century. The normal punishments for
crime in Europe included corporal chastisement (flogging, mutilation), banish-
ment from the community and execution. Prisons and the penitentiary system as
a systematic punishment did not come into existence until the nineteenth century,
when what is referred to above as ‘the great confinement’ began to function and
special buildings had to be constructed for the purpose.
Banishment from the locality for a specific period had always been a basic
medieval punishment. The English, however, introduced a special form of banish-
ment that had no precedent in Europe: transportation to the colonies. In 1718

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Parliament passed a Transportation Act that permitted the authorities to send

convicted felons overseas to America. It was a highly convenient innovation that
relieved the pressure on London’s jails and saved having to incarcerate or execute
criminals.72 Over the next two generations some 50,000 convicts, mostly young
males accused of theft but sometimes including women and children, were obliged
to make their homes in the New World, principally in Maryland and Virginia.
Physical punishment was the most drastic of the disciplinary solutions offered
for controlling social disorder. It can often be easily identified in the surviving court
documentation, and consequently appears to be the logical response of preindus-
trial society to crime. But there were also other solutions, not often visible in court
documentation and therefore unduly forgotten. We can pick out three such solu-
tions, whose impact was in the long run no less important: marginalisation, exclu-
sion and confinement. They were responses that aimed not at a cure but rather at
expelling what did not fit into the confines of the accepted or what appeared to be
a social threat. We have seen that the poor and vagrants and gypsies were at one
time or another subjected to these solutions. Witches were evidently another social
grouping that faced the same policy of incomprehension and rejection.
A final response also deserves its place in this picture: the resort to pardon.
Traditional society was far readier than our own to pardon and reconcile. In an
age when very many offences were religious, involving wrong attitudes or wrong
beliefs, the authorities were willing to forgive if there was genuine repentance.
The practice had its roots in medieval society, but all ecclesiastical tribunals in
early modern Europe adopted it as standard procedure. The medieval Church,
basing itself on the sacrament of penance, also habitually encouraged malefactors
to atone for their crimes by going on pilgrimage, which was specified for offences
such as murder, incest, bestiality and sacrilege.73 In fourteenth-century Flanders,
the secular courts seem to have used pilgrimage as an all-purpose penalty for
violent crimes. Completing the penance meant that the crime was ‘satisfied’,
though those who were found not to have done the penance were harshly treated.
The Inquisition in Catalonia in the sixteenth century still regularly condemned
minor offenders (guilty, for example, of swearing) to go on pilgrimage, invariably
to the local shrine at Montserrat. It is in Catalonia too that we find an unusual
procedure known as a ‘pardon’, based on the premise that society needed to
forego violent revenge against a murderer in order to save itself from worse ills.
As practised here, the Church intervened directly to exact a promise from the
family of a murdered man that they would not seek personal vengeance on the

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man’s identified murderer or on the murderer’s family. Punishment was to be left

to the appropriate jurisdiction. In this way the threat of a blood feud was warded
off and social order preserved. Similar procedures of reconciliation can be found
in France among both Catholic and Protestant communities. The disputants
were encouraged to make peace together before the community, usually in
church, and to take communion together.

Marginalisation: slavery

A small section of the population enjoyed no civil privileges at all and suffered
from severe social discipline: the slaves. There were, broadly, two types of slavery
in Christian Europe: the ‘colonial’, based on warfare against other peoples, and
the ‘feudal’, based on economic obligations. The ‘colonial’ type of slavery was the
predominant one in western Europe, owing most of its vigour to practice in the
Iberian peninsula. There the Reconquista – the reconquest of Muslim territory –
had since the later Middle Ages led the Christian lords to dominate and exploit
Muslims. The import trade of gold dust from beyond the Sahara also involved
the import of enslaved Africans in considerable number. The struggle between
Christian and Muslim states had the consequence that it was through sea warfare
that the institution of slavery continued to perpetuate itself.
Muslim corsairs were operative throughout the Mediterranean from the
sixteenth century, collecting Christian slaves from as far afield as Russia and
England. Their ships also plundered English coastal towns and enslaved both
civilians and sailors such that, a Member of Parliament complained, ‘the fish-
ermen are afraid to put to sea’. Over the generations of their activity, North
African pirates managed to seize tens of thousands of prisoners who served as
household slaves, rowers of galleys or as prizes for ransom.74 The Christian
powers, in turn, did not scruple to enslave any North Africans they could lay
their hands upon. The numbers involved in this two-way traffic were, the research
shows, far higher than historians have hitherto imagined. With this experience
behind them, the Iberian powers accepted slavery as a standard feature of their
life. The public laws of all Mediterranean states sanctioned the holding of slaves.
Spanish slavery had been firmly Muslim, and continued to be so even after
the expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609. The only Moriscos not expelled from
Spain were those being held as slaves, who must have numbered several thou-
sand. After each Morisco rebellion in the sixteenth century, particularly after the

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rising in the Alpujarra region in 1569, large numbers of rebels reportedly running
into thousands had been sold into slavery. This native source of labour (used
mainly for domestic work, but also for the galleys and for forced labour in the
mercury mines at Almadén) was supplemented from abroad. The Battle of
Lepanto brought many Turks into Spanish households; slave raids were also
fruitful, as with the expedition made in 1611 by the Marquis of Santa Cruz to
the island of Querquenes, where he captured 400 slaves.
When the age of discovery began, Iberian slavery took on a new texture. From
being a Mediterranean institution it became an Atlantic one. The geographical change
also implied a racial one: in the place of North Africans, black Africans from further
south were traded. In both quantity and quality a new era had commenced, for not
only were the blacks enslaved in numbers that exceeded any previous practice, but
they were employed primarily to serve the needs of the colonial economy
in America. The logic of this was that countries which resorted to slavery in their
colonies – Portugal, Spain and, later, France and England – tended to accept the
extension of slavery in their own metropolitan territories, thus introducing into
Europe the colonial pattern of race relations. Slavery served the development of
American colonial production that, from the later sixteenth century onwards, supplied
Europe with sugar and tobacco and by 1800 was also producing coffee and cotton.
Portugal, the first of European countries to develop the new type of slavery
abroad, was the first to be inundated at home. By 1553 a Belgian humanist,
writing from Evora, could report that ‘Portugal is so full of slaves that I could
almost believe Lisbon to have more slaves than free Portuguese’. In 1551 Lisbon
was calculated to have one slave for every ten free Portuguese; by 1633 the esti-
mate was of 15,000 slaves in a city population of 100,000, with a further 2 per
cent consisting of free non-Europeans. In the whole of Portugal, which had a
population of just over a million, slaves and blacks constituted about 3 per cent
of the population, the largest ratio of any European nation.
The development of black slavery in America had a direct effect on Spain. A
Flemish observer reported in 1655 that ‘the American trade has given new life to
the institution of slavery in this country, so that in Andalusia one sees few
servants other than slaves, mostly Muslims as well as blacks’. The slave popula-
tion tended, as elsewhere in the Mediterranean, to concentrate on the seaports.
Seville in 1565 had 6,327 slaves (7.4 per cent of the population), most of them
black; Cadiz in 1616 had 300 Muslim and 500 black slaves. In Spain slaves were
normally domestic servants. There was initially very little racial prejudice against

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non-Europeans or blacks, as shown by the case of Juan Latino, whose parents

were both black slaves. He began his career as page to the Duke of Sessa, managed
to enter the University of Granada, graduated there in 1557, finally obtained a
teaching post in Latin and married the daughter of a noble family.
Outside the Iberian peninsula, Mediterranean slavery could not rely on a
colonial system and owed its continued existence almost exclusively to piracy. In
France the ports of Marseille and Toulon inevitably had to harbour the booty of
slave-hunters. Beyond these Mediterranean ports slavery was very rare in the
country. There were recorded cases of slaves in Roussillon (which became French
in 1659) but they were nearly all of Muslim origin, an overspill from Spain. In
theory slavery was illegal. In 1571 the Parlement of Bordeaux, ruling against a
slave-trader, declared that ‘France, the mother of liberty, does not permit slavery’.
‘All persons in this realm are free’, wrote the jurist Antoine Loisel in 1608, ‘and
if a slave reaches these shores and gets baptised, he becomes free.’75 The growth
of the overseas empire, however, militated against statements like this, and as
colonial slavery grew so did its acceptance by metropolitan France, which
imported non-European labour mainly through La Rochelle and Nantes.
Piracy turned Venice, Genoa and other Italian ports into leading slave
centres.76 A slave cargo brought back from the Levant by four Florentine galleys
in June 1574 had a total of 300, made up of 238 Turks, 32 North Africans,
7 blacks, 2 Greeks, 5 Arabs, 5 Jews, 5 Russians and 6 Christians. They were taken
to the market at Messina, where 116 were sold and most of the Christians freed.
Slaves were purchased for galley and domestic service. The navies of the Italian
states and of Spain were heavily dependent on slaves for rowers. An agent for the
Spanish royal galleys, shopping for slaves in Genoa in 1573, bought 100 slaves
in February and another 32 (these last from Hungary) in April. At this period the
cost of each slave was about 100 ducats. Their places of origin – Aleppo, Salonika,
Istanbul, Algiers – point to the overwhelmingly Muslim character of slavery in
the Christian Mediterranean. In the Arab Mediterranean, of course, Christians
were the slaves. In 1588 it was estimated that over 2,500 Venetian subjects were
scattered throughout the Mediterranean ‘in misera captività’.
In Italy, as in Spain, domestic slavery predominated. A prince of the Church
like Cardinal d’Este was said in 1584 to have had fifty Turkish slaves in his villa
in Tivoli. But though slavery was accepted in practice, the laws were equivocal,
and a fugitive slave (and, in particular, a baptised slave) was legally entitled to be
free. Servitude was looked upon as a temporary condition, a result of adverse

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fortune such as being captured in war. Being temporary, it could not be inher-
ited. It was in those very Mediterranean countries where slavery was most in use
– Spain, Italy and France – that Catholic theology and public law conspired to
guarantee the dispossessed their right, both as men and as Christians, to manu-
mission and social equality. In normal circumstances this would have meant the
gradual disappearance of slavery from Europe. But new life was given to the
institution by the growth of colonial economies dependent on cheap labour.
‘Feudal’ slavery in Europe was associated with the need for labour, not only
in agriculture but also in industry. Scotland’s most capitalised industry, mining,
was introduced to the profits of slavery in this period. Colliers in England had
been personally free up to 1605. Then in July 1606 an Act of Parliament forbade
them moving their labour elsewhere and also in effect froze their wages. The
1606 act applied to coalmines, another in 1607 applied to metal mines and in
1641 a statute extended these terms to factory workers.
In Russia slavery was a standard feature of the rural scene. The slaves (kholopi)
performed essentially the same function as serfs, their distinctive feature being
the loss of personal freedom. One could become enslaved by contract for a
limited or unlimited period, or be enslaved through war, or fall into servitude
because of debt. Non-Russians were also enslaved: Polish slaves rose to positions
of responsibility in noble households, and there was a brisk trade in Tatars
captured on the frontier. In the steppe, where many estates had no peasants, slave
labour was common; the proportion of slaves to free peasants in some districts
was as high as 50 per cent. The importance of slavery in the Russian state is
shown by the fact that 200 of the 940 clauses in the law code (Ulozhenie) of 1649
were concerned specifically with it. Paradoxically, slavery disappeared as it inten-
sified. The distinction between a slave and a serf had always been slight, and as
both categories became depressed in the course of the seventeenth century they
tended to be legally merged into one. The last great distinction between the two
was the exemption of slaves from taxation. Laws of 1680 and 1724 in Russia
made the landless slave as liable to taxation as the landed serf; with these measures
slavery became merged into the large institution of serfdom.

Disciplining the enclosed: insanity

Traditional society had few solutions for those who did not fit into standard
categories. All irrational behaviour was considered, in juridical terms, simply as
the absence of rational behaviour; it could not therefore be made the basis of a

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judicial decision. The situation provided a possible escape route used by both
assassins and heretics when they wished to avoid the penalty of the law. Since
madness did not legally exist, and a state of insanity in a person was difficult to
prove or disprove, the problem was pushed aside.77 Despite its absence from the
juridical canon, irrational behaviour was frequent enough to be accepted as a
commonplace in the literature of the time, and served to amuse theatre audi-
ences.78 Judges and doctors, and the public too, recognised that madness was a
serious condition, but it was commonly assumed to be temporary, and those
guilty of irrational conduct were locked up until they came to their senses. The
notion of insanity as demonic possession was a special development that may
have made its appearance fairly late. In parts of sixteenth-century Germany, the
view of the mad person as a devil seems to have been propagated by preachers
and was not originally present in popular culture.79
The availability of public correctional institutions for the mentally unfit made
it possible for families under pressure to exercise control over relatives who were
becoming an embarrassment. Confinement in institutions was a form of disci-
plinary action that attempted to remedy disorder within individual families and
within urban society. Rowdy individuals, drunken women, violent husbands
were denounced and put into correctional institutions for a few weeks or months.
It was a practice used increasingly, for example, in eighteenth-century Antwerp
and Brussels.80 The problem, by that date, was so general that most countries had
evolved theories and possible solutions for the treatment of insanity.81

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MODERNITY AND THE INDIVIDUAL

The art of Printing will so spread knowledge that the common people,
knowing their own rights and liberties, will not be governed by way of
oppression.
Gabriel Plattes, A description of the famous kingdom of Macaria (1641)

Privatisation and the family; Scepticism, secularism and privatisation of belief;

Printing, literacy and improvement; Despite books, a primarily oral culture; Private
and public education and the state; The Grand Tour; Ego documents: diaries and
letter writing; Books and the development of opinion; The emergence of newspapers;
The modernity of Utopia

Studying the past invites us inevitably to look at broad social landscapes. Yet at
the heart of both great and small movements in European history there also lay
the activity of countless individuals. The contribution of the ‘common man’ has
been seen by some as a crucial factor in the making of the Germanic Reformation.1
More than a century after the Reformation, radicals in England also claimed a
place in society for the common individual: ‘the greatest he’, Colonel Rainboro
asserted at the debates among army officers at Putney in London in 1647, ‘hath
a right to live as the smallest he’. Were ordinary people finding a voice? Were
Europeans moving slowly away from the communal world into the freedom of
individualism, the assurance of greater privacy, the seclusion of personal life?
Evidence for the expression of individualism can be found as far back as the
written records take us. Scholars have claimed to see extensive individualism in
societies with considerable mobility of land and of persons, such as England.2 In
this sense, individualism seems to mean a freedom to make personal and
economic decisions. Others have looked at individualism in terms of an emerging
distinction between what might be ‘public’ concerns and what might be more

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specifically ‘private’. Some intellectuals were probably aware of a significant

difference between their private thought patterns and the alien world outside. ‘In
order to master the sciences’, the Italian humanist Marsilio Ficino argued, ‘it is
necessary for the soul to withdraw from the external to the internal.’3 In practice,
it is difficult for someone familiar with today’s vision of public and private space
to apply that vision to a context of many centuries ago. We may accept that a
person’s house in early modern times was private space, but what are we to make
of the street outside, which had both public and private features? Streets were (as
they still are) a central feature of the various roles of the urban community.4
Views about the ‘modernising’ aspects of preindustrial society have their own
different perspectives and emphases. One historian sees an emergence from the
later seventeenth century in England of a trend towards interest in the individual
personality and a demand for more privacy and self-expression.5 At a private level
the trend might include emphasis on personal sexuality, at a public level it might
involve a move towards toleration of different opinions. The scope of the concept
can be vast, but it does not imply any notion of advance or betterment. In any
case, scholars appear to be sceptical about the evidence for a move towards real
‘privacy’. Some deny categorically that individualism developed.6 The evidence
for a growth in privacy has come so far mainly from England and has referred
principally to its upper classes.
The few comparable studies available for other societies in Europe have not
offered convincing support for the thesis. Norms in European preindustrial
society tended to be set by the group rather than the individual person. Even the
apparently individual affirmation of the Reformation – personal salvation based
on a direct relationship with Christ – was given meaning only within the commu-
nity of believers, the ‘Church’. The joining of two people in matrimony was
likewise not usually private, but subject to the agreement of parents and the
interests of kin groups. Within the communal context there had of course always
been scope for individual affirmation, such as through the assertion of individual
affection or ‘love’. It is more doubtful whether such individual tendencies can be
viewed as part of a more general move towards individual expression.
At the level of social development, it has been suggested that events in early
modern Europe formed part of a process of ‘modernity’, marking the transition
from a traditional, agrarian and religious society to one associated with expan-
sion, mobility, literacy and secularism. Marxist scholars gave particular support
to ‘modernisation’, which seemed to confirm the advance of society towards the

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socialist millennium. The concept, however, is extremely difficult to demonstrate

by the evidence available for Europe before 1750. Despite the extent of change
in all spheres of activity, preindustrial society managed to retain its fundamental
characteristics unchanged for longer than is often thought and it would be
mistaken to apply to the whole continent conclusions that might in part be valid
for one fraction of it, namely England.

Privatisation and the family

At the core of social life in preindustrial Europe, in the domestic group, the rules of
conduct were related fundamentally to the whole family and not to its individual
members. Individual interests, even when they existed, were subsumed in those of
the family, the household and the wider community.7 Nor did the place of work
permit any serious divergence from the rules, since for most people the place of
work was also the place of residence, unlike the twenty-first century where very
many people perform their work and their leisure roles in two distinct environ-
ments. Even more securely, legal systems normally recognised only the rights of the
group; private contracts took place (as many still do) within a context affecting all
members of the public. It follows that standards of conduct and morality in prein-
dustrial Europe did not usually give scope for individual deviation. Despite the
apparent rigidity of this situation, however, there can be little doubt that there were
new trends, particularly among the upper classes, where the so-called ‘civilising
process’ can arguably be identified on one hand in greater courtesy, discipline and
cleanliness,8 and on the other in greater scope for individual expression.
A small but significant example can be seen in attitudes to suicide. Suicide in
early modern society was always looked upon with great horror and treated by the
courts as a crime (canon law forbade church burial, and some laws forfeited the
suicide’s property). For England it has been suggested, based on data from late
sixteenth-century Kent,9 that suicide was more common than homicide and that
its incidence was very similar to that in our culture today. Suicides were generally
seen not as people within society, but as satanic deviants who had put themselves
outside it. All the same, by the eighteenth century in England a significant change
was taking place in educated opinion on the subject.10 Juries in the courts began
to reject the idea that suicide was a crime, rationalist thinkers rejected the view
that suicide was satanic and passive acceptance of the (suicidal) rite of duelling
eased the way to accepting self-killing as a fact. The new approach was echoed by

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the city council of Geneva, which in 1735 declared that suicides were in fact
insane and therefore not to be further castigated in their goods or their honour.11
The Genevan attitude needs to be set beside the fascinating data for another Swiss
city, Zürich, where it appears that suicides among the population increased from
the seventeenth century onwards at the same time that homicides seem to have
decreased. Some 511 suicides are recorded for the period 1500 to 1800, rising
from one a year in the 1630s to four a year in the early eighteenth century.12 In
general, the Zürich authorities did not rule against the victims.
Though there was no formal recognition of the social role of the individual,
there was a growing acceptance of the freedom to express individual preferences,
what may in a limited sense be called ‘privacy’. The world of the ‘private’ took
several forms, among both men and women. It was to be found more among the
privileged classes and can be observed broadly in two areas: in the arrangement
of personal ideas, and in the arrangement of personal space. The development of
personal ideas was visible in literary expression, in the writings of memoirs and
diaries and in the rise of interiorised religious forms such as Pietism. Personal
space was rearranged mainly within the context of family life, with changes in
house construction and the allotting of specific functions to rooms in the
building, of which one consequence was that the elite family (at least in England)
began to be visualised as a ‘private’ rather than a ‘public’ sphere. ‘As every man’s
house is his castle’, Richard Braithwaite affirmed in 1630, ‘so is his family a
private commonwealth.’13 At the elite level, the family continued still to be a
broad concept that might include both kinfolk and house servants, but it was
also seen often as a terrain in which the state should not intervene. It might
possess many of the aspects of ‘privacy’, but the privacy was shared with other
members of the family grouping. Privacy was, in this sense, less individual than
collective.
Among working people, if there was a degree of privacy it was always condi-
tioned by restrictions on space in the household and by the intrusion of the
neighbourhood. In the neighbourhood, where gossip was supreme,14 it was diffi-
cult to maintain a way of life that did not conform to standards laid down by the
local community. Sexuality, in particular, remained a public matter in all small
communities. Collective values dominated rather than individual values. In this
sense, traditional society did not yet accept any effective separation of private
space from what was public, though recent studies suggest that cultural activities
in public spaces and urban streets of early modern Europe help to define the

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difference between individual and group identities.15 What was done in the
street, in a broad range of contexts ranging from religious rites and theatre to
criminal activity, could be marked off clearly – it has been argued – from what
was done at home in a private context.16

Scepticism, secularism and

privatisation of belief

The age-long failure of official religion to penetrate down into the people gave rise
to a surprising persistence of nonreligious attitudes. Drawing on the evidence of
literary culture,17 scholars two generations ago decided that irreligion was not
possible within the context of those times but was a later phenomenon based on
a reasoned rejection of dogmatism. Scepticism, where it existed, had its roots in
belief and arose out of the same attitude that inspired members of the elite
to dabble in magic. Intellectual curiosity impelled the learned to resort to alchemy,
astrology and magic. The link with witchcraft could be seen in the art and
iconography of the age, most notably in the artist Hieronymus Bosch and in
the scientific endeavours of Elizabeth of England’s court magician John Dee. The
Renaissance encouraged inquiry and therefore doubt; the true scholar must main-
tain a mind open to all sources of knowledge, which might include dabbling in
the occult and the Hermetic tradition of allegedly pre-Biblical science. The Faust
story, concerning a doctor who sought knowledge outside the bounds of dogma,
reflected this background: the account was published in Germany in 1587, trans-
lated into English and Dutch in 1592 and into French in 1598. Though early
science was inevitably concerned with what we would consider magic (such as the
attempt to transmute metals), it was a magic that had nothing in common with
naive popular beliefs. Intellectuals were pursuing a truth that did not contradict
or conflict with Christianity. Many (such as Paracelsus) pursued their work outside
the normal academic frontiers, others worked within established circles.
Enquiry into the unknown was, we may conclude, an extension of enquiry
into the frontiers of religion. In Prague the Emperor Rudolf II (d. 1612) gath-
ered round him a circle of scientists (‘magicians’) and freethinkers. In England
Sir Walter Raleigh and his friends denied the reality of heaven and hell, claiming
that ‘we die like beasts and when we are gone there is no more remembrance of
us’. In France after the excesses of the civil wars there was a reaction that made
François La Noue observe that ‘it was our wars of religion that made us forget

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religion’. The epicurean court of Henry IV, like that of James I in England,
encouraged speculative thought or ‘libertinism’. Some made a profit out of their
irreligion, like Jérémie Ferrier, a Huguenot pastor who abjured his faith in 1613,
drew large pensions as a priest until his death in 1626 and claimed that for four-
teen years he had preached Christ without believing in him. Most unbelievers
kept their attitude concealed. This was advisable particularly after the shock felt
in French society in 1623, when the poet Théophile de Viau was arrested for
blasphemy and later condemned to death, a sentence subsequently commuted to
banishment. The result was, as Pierre Bayle claimed, that many ‘die like everyone
else, after confession and communion’. ‘Unbelief ’, the sieur de Rochemont
wrote in 1665, ‘has its laws of prudence.’18
But reasoned unbelief was rare. Most ‘sceptics’ were seeking new intellectual
frontiers within the confines of traditional belief.19 The most famous French
sceptics frequented the literary academies, such as the Rambouillet, or the phil-
osophic academies such as that of the humanist brothers Dupuy. Among them
were the doctors Gabriel Naudé (d. 1653) and Guy Patin (d. 1672), and the
priest Pierre Gassendi (d. 1655). The most active influences still came from Italy,
which Naudé claimed was ‘full of libertines and atheists and people who don’t
believe anything’. Among the restless spirits in Italy was the adept of Hermetic
lore Giordano Bruno, who proclaimed that humankind had ‘by the light of sense
and of reason, with the key of most diligent enquiry, thrown wide those doors of
truth which it is within our power to open’.20
These searchers after truth attempted to find a reality beyond official dogmas;
they were excited by the possibility of rediscovering ancient lost arts. Freemasonry,
which became historically significant only in the early seventeenth century,
attracted many because of its implied access to long-hidden knowledge. It was
this that led the English antiquarian Dr William Stukeley to join the movement
and ‘to be initiated into the mysteries of Masonry, suspecting it to be the remains
of the mysteries of the ancients’. Perhaps the most remarkable of the groups that
practised the new mystification were the Rosicrucians. Their supposed existence
was announced with the publication in 1614 of the Fama Fraternitatis, a work
that provoked widespread excitement and came out in nine editions in three
years. Descartes, who was living at Frankfurt in 1619, tried in vain to join the
group and concluded that it did not exist; Leibniz at the end of the century
proclaimed it to be a fiction. The myth was created by a Lutheran thinker from
Württemberg, Johann Valentin Andreae, probable co-author of the Fama and of

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other works associated with the mysterious movement. The Fama claimed that a
fifteenth-century German nobleman, Christian Rosenkreuz (‘Rosy Cross’), had
been given access to the ancient lore of Persia and India,21 which he now passed
on to others.
Elite belief thus had its marginal zones in which individuals indulged their
private views. A newer development was the wholly nontheistic philosophy of
the Levellers and Diggers. Gerrard Winstanley, the Digger leader, defined reli-
gion only in terms of social justice, adapting the text of James 1:27: ‘True reli-
gion and undefiled is this: to make restitution of the Earth which hath been
taken and held from the common people by the power of Conquests formerly,
and so set the oppressed free’. Two centuries before Marx, Winstanley described
religion as the opium of the people: ‘This divining spiritual Doctrine is a cheat;
for while men are gazing up to Heaven imagining after a happiness, or fearing
a Hell after they are dead, their eyes are put out; that they see not what is
their birthrights, and what is to be done by them here on Earth, while they are
living’. The viewpoint appears familiar, but in practice it is almost impossible to
identify the existence of any systematic alternative to the theism of western
philosophy. The authorities would continue to execute select figures for what
they called ‘atheism’. Jacques Gruet was burnt in 1550 at Geneva, Geoffroy
Vallée in 1574 at Paris, Noël Journet in 1582 at Metz, Giordano Bruno in 1600
at Rome, Cesare Vanini in 1619 at Toulouse; and young Thomas Aikenhead, a
student at the university, was executed at Edinburgh in 1697. But philosophers
had not yet fashioned the conceptual tools necessary for defining unbelief. It was
not until the late seventeenth century that the emergence of probability theory
introduced the notion of degrees of assent.22
The intellectual context of irreligion seemed to point directly towards the age
of individual reason and Enlightenment. Recent studies have made it clear,
however, that scepticism and irreligion also had popular nonintellectual roots
that long antedated intellectual scepticism. In Spain, where the coexistence
of three world religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam) may have fostered
relativism and indifference, scepticism about heaven, hell and salvation was
commonplace and continued to be commonplace for generations more. An
Andalusian villager maintained in 1524 that ‘we are born and die and nothing
more’. A Catalan peasant asserted in 1539 that ‘there is no heaven, purgatory or
hell; at the end we all have to end up in the same place, the bad will go to the
same place as the good and the good will go to the same place as the bad’.

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Another Catalan stated in 1593 that ‘he does not believe in heaven or hell, and
God feeds the Muslims and heretics just the same as he feeds the Christians’.23
Exceptionally, this sturdy rejection of the official cosmology might invent its
own scheme of things, as in the case of the Italian miller Menocchio, from Friuli
in northeast Italy, who at the end of the sixteenth century explained to the star-
tled inquisitors that the universe was not created the way they thought but
evolved through a process of fermentation, like cheese that produces worms.24
None of these affirmations indicates any tendency to privatise religion or assert
the independence of individual belief. Cases like that of Menocchio are random
examples of a fairly common phenomenon. Scepticism about religion and the
afterlife was so widespread in the early modern Mediterranean that we may
assume it to have been ingrained in popular traditions of belief, rather than being
a private deviance. Certainly, the Spanish Inquisition did not take seriously the
many cases of those denounced to it for scepticism and attributed the errors to
simple ignorance.
Privatisation of belief was, in its most concrete form, a legal one. The legal
right to dissidence of belief had a long and respectable history, a fact all too often
forgotten. Massacre and intolerance in the Netherlands and France were the ugly
face of confessional conflict, but they represented only one side of a complex
picture. In Poland, the Confederation of Warsaw (1573) accepted a situation of
mutual toleration between different ideologies. But this was no novelty. We have
noted (above, Chapter 3) the Polish Lutheran who stated in 1592: ‘there is
nothing new about diversity of religion in Poland. Apart from the Greek
Christians, pagans and Jews have been known for a long time and faiths other
than the Catholic have existed for centuries.’25 After the persecutions of the later
Reformation period, religious pluralism became slowly accepted again. In France
toleration of dissidence became common from the 1570s and was legally guar-
anteed for nearly a century after 1598. In the hereditary Habsburg lands, at one
time or another all the religions were tolerated. But in all these cases the tolera-
tion was extended only to community groups.26 Even among the Grey Leagues
in Switzerland, where communes of different faiths coexisted in the sixteenth
century, no dissidence was permitted within each commune.27
Respect for the individual conscience, passionately demanded by Sebastian
Castellio after the execution in Geneva of Miguel Servet in 1553, was not
recognised legally anywhere in Europe until the end of the eighteenth century.
Individuals and small groups were tolerated sporadically, but usually for practical

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reasons and not by the legal system. Not until 1778 were the first legal measures
taken in England to end restrictions against Catholics, nor were Protestants
tolerated in France until 1787. Meanwhile, however, and particularly in the
notable case of the Dutch Republic, a necessary coexistence among social elites
made it possible for the public toleration of Jews and of dissident Christians. The
step from community norms to individual norms of worship was a large one that
was not taken until well into modern times.
The most significant moves towards individualism in belief were made in the
seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries by mystical sectarians, who had in
common a rejection of the dogmatic structure of the official Churches. For the
same reason the Catholic Church always considered with suspicion the constant
reappearance of mystical persons and groups. Pietism, which began like
Lutheranism in the heart of Saxony but then spread throughout the western
world, was perhaps the most powerful of all the individualising tendencies in early
modern religion. Viewed from a modern perspective, it may appear that – in
Protestant countries at least – religion was changing its character and also its role
in society. The increasing importance given to individual piety is beyond doubt.
But religion, even individualistic religion, was always firmly anchored in families
and small communities, where the scope allowed to ‘private’ faith was usually
restricted. It is, consequently, doubtful whether any meaning can be given to the
idea that society in the early eighteenth century was moving towards ‘modern’
criteria or that it was by degrees becoming ‘secularised’.28

Printing, literacy and improvement

Probably the greatest spur to individual expression, and in historical terms the
most valuable evidence of how individuals liberated themselves from their tradi-
tional cultural environment, was the extension of literacy.29 Although knowledge
of reading and writing was considered desirable in medieval Europe, it was still
looked upon largely as a practical skill, a qualification rather than a cultural
necessity. Many medieval monarchs and even prelates of the Church were illit-
erate: they were not, however, uncultured, for they had readers who read to them
and scribes who wrote for them. The importance of literacy as a practical quali-
fication is reflected in the statutes drawn up by an archbishop of York for a
college he founded in 1483, in which one of the purposes of the foundation was
said to be that ‘youths may be rendered more capable for the mechanic arts and

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other worldly affairs’. The Church valued the technical importance of literacy
for only a literate clergy could be the arbiters of religious (no less than social) life.
In a very special sense, literacy was the preserve of the Church, which in Catholic
Europe had a monopoly control over education.
The invention of the printing press in 1438 by Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz
made possible quicker and cheaper methods of producing texts as well as books,
and revolutionised access to knowledge. By 1480 over 100 European towns had
printing presses. Living in the century immediately after Gutenberg, Francis
Bacon described it as one of three great inventions (the others were gunpowder
and the compass) which had ‘changed the appearance and state of the whole
world’. Massive research over the last few decades has confirmed the astonishing
contribution of printing, though not all historians agree with the bold thesis of
Elizabeth Eisenstein that the press in the sixteenth century was the principal
stimulant of intellectual and religious revolution.30 Printing, she argued, enabled
texts and images to be duplicated without limit, facilitated the distribution of
learning and ideas and allowed data to be preserved indefinitely. In this way, it
helped to promote the great changes that impacted on Europe, especially in reli-
gion and science. This positive assessment, however, omits to take into account
the continuing primacy of oral nonliterate culture, the contribution of better
communications to the spread of ideas and the inaccessibility of printing centres
to the mass of the population.
The advent of printed material could not in itself advance literacy. Books
continued for a long time to be a rarity, and in small towns the people were
limited to purchasing printed matter from strolling pedlars, who carried book-
lets (‘chapbooks’) and flysheets rather than weighty tomes. Printed matter, more-
over, was expensive, so that the public resorted less to quality books than to the
cheaply produced tales of love and adventure, known in seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century France as the Bibliothèque Bleue (Blue Library – from the
colour of the binding), that pedlars hawked around. Slowly, printing advanced
its frontiers, even beyond Europe. The first printing press directed by Europeans
arrived in Mexico City in 1539 and in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1638.
Europeans, however, were by no means the absolute pioneers of printing.
Nearly 600 years before Gutenberg, Chinese monks were setting ink to paper
using a method known as block printing, in which wooden blocks are coated
with ink and pressed to sheets of paper. One of the earliest surviving scrolls
printed in this fashion, an amazing and beautiful Buddhist text known as the

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Diamond Sutra, was created in 868 in China. It was only one among about
40,000 scrolls hidden for security in a cave on the edge of the Gobi Desert.
Discovered in 1900, it is now conserved in the British Library in London. Similar
use of wooden blocks occurred also in Japan and Korea, but the complexity of
Asian alphabets impeded the development of printing for texts. By contrast, the
invention by Gutenberg of movable sections of type, and the employment of a
press, guaranteed success to the European style of printing.
Europeans took to movable type quickly. In at least three respects – the promo-
tion of education, propaganda (mainly religious) and the development of popular
taste – access to printing and books had an effect on the cultural level of the
public. The increased availability of information about every aspect of the
expanding world helped to encourage a culture of improvement, that is, the desire
to move forwards, a key component of a modern outlook. It has been pointed out
that in late seventeenth-century England the educated elite had access to ‘infor-
mation about land and trade, population, wealth and well-being, and speculation
about their history and future’, a situation that ‘enabled improvement to become
a morality of collective cooperation in a national purpose’.31 As it happens, elites
elsewhere in Europe were not always so dedicated to improvement.
The greater accessibility of reading material helped to inspire an upsurge of
interest in education. The theory of teaching developed significantly from the
Renaissance onwards: possibly the most outstanding contribution came in the
seventeenth century from the Czech scholar Jan Comenius. A literate education
came to be considered desirable, not solely because literacy was useful but because
it was right and proper to acquire knowledge. There is evidence that, in England
at least, the essentials of reading and writing were being communicated to a high
proportion of the common people. In the city of Norwich in the sixteenth
century, there was free elementary education for the children of the poor. Not
everyone could benefit, however. Reading and writing were considered important
for men to fulfil their roles and duties, so women tended to be excluded from
literacy. Parish schools throughout Europe taught the skills to boys, not to girls.
In Italy, a survey of schools in Venice in 1587–88 found 4,600 male pupils and
only 30 girls. To achieve literacy, girls from the propertied classes had to rely on
private tutors.
A writer in central Sweden in 1631 reported that the people were ‘so fond of
letters that although public schools are very few nevertheless the literate instruct
the others, with such enthusiasm that the greatest part of the common people

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and even the peasants are literate’. What, however, did it mean to be literate? Did
it mean an ability to read as well as write? The available evidence is not reliable.
At one time it was felt that the ability of people to sign their own names was
proof of basic literacy. But it is now clear that very many who knew how to sign
were otherwise unable to write or read. Even the possession of books was no
proof that one could read, as we know from the many cases of illiterate clergy.
Diligent but illiterate priests often relied entirely on memory rather than on their
mass books for saying the mass (in a Latin they did not understand) and other
prayers. In short, the unreliability of evidence makes it difficult to measure
‘literacy rates’ during the early modern period.32

Despite books, a primarily oral culture

Nearly everywhere until the eighteenth century the transmission of secular

culture remained oral. In other words, not only the spread of information but
also the principal social actions, such as contracts of work or of engagement to
marry, were sealed verbally rather than written down. Historians have devoted
studies to the intriguing extent to which much of the knowledge circulating
among the population was in fact drawn from folk memory and not from any
written source.33 In the Church, the power of the pulpit and the spoken word
remained greater than that of the printed word, even in contexts where enor-
mous attention was given to the role of the Bible.
The spread of literacy and printing did not replace the primacy of oral culture,
which remained dominant for example throughout the Mediterranean and the
Russian lands until well into the nineteenth century. With good reason during
the confessional period in Germany did the Jesuits direct their emphasis towards
the theatre and the Lutherans towards hymnology.34 The book was a fruitful instru-
ment, but its successes lay in the future. Educated elites everywhere improved their
grasp of learned culture, but continued to share the same human environment as
the less literate, so it is not easy to determine whether differences between elite and
popular cultures were made sharper. ‘By itself, literacy does nothing.’35 It could
accompany change but not initiate it. It had a perceptible influence on the spheres
of information and administration, but in preindustrial times had no measurable
impact on the level of culture or the development of individualism.
Printing stimulated certain preferences in those who were literate. Readers
chose escapist literature, ‘lewd Ballads’, ‘merry bookes’, ‘corrupted tales in Inke

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and Paper’, to cite English critics of the genre. The ‘Blue Library’ in France
consisted of romantic fiction of this sort. Attempts were, of course, made to
change popular taste. Intellectuals in Spain, most of them clergy, claimed repeat-
edly that the suppression of superficial literature was one of the most useful roles
of censorship. Romances of chivalry were the most criticised. In Spain the poet
Alvar Gómez de Castro felt that ‘since they are without imagination or learning
and it is a waste of time to read them, it is better to prohibit them’.36 Fortunately
for the public, who would otherwise have had to feed on very dull fare, censors
in practice paid less attention to superficial than to ideologically dangerous
literature.
Signatures and books remain, of course, useful evidence of a certain cultural
capacity. Of the 126 people in rural Surrey in 1642 who protested their loyalty
to the government on paper, 33 per cent signed their names and the rest made a
mark. The variation in signatures according to social class was quite notable. In
the English village of Limpsfield only 20 per cent of the servants but 62 per cent
of the householders signed their names. In the Narbonne area in late sixteenth-
century France about 90 per cent of the bourgeoisie signed their names; among
the urban artisans about 65 per cent did so, and among the rural population the
rate varied from 10 to 30 per cent.
In Durham in about 1570, 20 per cent of the lay witnesses in a church court
were able to read; by the 1630s the proportion was 47 per cent. In Sweden the
Lutheran Church insisted on literacy as a condition of active membership: in
one seventeenth-century parish (Moklinta) 21 per cent of adults were able to
read in 1614, and 89 per cent by the 1690s. Yet ‘reading’ in such a case might
amount to no more than the ability to decipher a catechism. Most people who
‘read’ seem never to have been in contact with a book. An examination of 2,843
cases for New Castile in the period 1540–1817 suggests that 45 per cent could
read and write, yet only 8 people out of this total confessed to possessing a
book.37 The evidence shows clearly that in the period before about 1700 there
was no substantial ‘print culture’ outside the elite classes. ‘Though books are
easily procured’, an English essayist commented in 1778, ‘even in this age of
information there are thousands in the lower classes who cannot read.’ A constant
rise in literacy cannot therefore be assumed. It improved in some social sectors
but not in others, in cities but not in the countryside. London in the 1640s had
a ‘literacy’ rate of 78 per cent, but in the counties it was never higher than 38 per
cent. Evidence for England and Spain suggests that some groups were actually

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more illiterate in the seventeenth than in the sixteenth century,38 because educa-
tional opportunities had not been expanded for them.
Promotion of literacy among the common people was undertaken most seri-
ously in Protestant countries. The Bible was the basis for faith and the Bible must
be read. ‘The Scripture’, Luther argued passionately, ‘cannot be understood
without the languages and the languages can be learned only in school.’ The
contribution of the printed page to the spread of the gospel was expressed thus
by John Foxe in the sixteenth century: ‘Hereby tongues are known, knowledge
groweth, iudgment increaseth, books are dispersed, the Scripture is sene, the
doctours red, stories opened, times compared, truth decerned, falsehood
detected, and all through the benefite of printing’.39
Much of the success of the Reformed movement in France was based on
efforts at promoting literacy. Elementary textbooks and alphabet manuals were
distributed among the population. By the end of the seventeenth century the
Protestant countries were arguably the most literate in Europe. In England, by
the 1650s there was a school for every 4,400 of the population. In some Catholic
countries there was no lack of emphasis on education either. By 1700 most
parishes in France were equipped with a school (59 per cent in the diocese of
Toul, 87 per cent in that of Paris), though literacy still varied a great deal. In the
Beauvaisis, 60 per cent of men could sign their marriage acts, but less than 10 per
cent could in Limousin and Brittany. Literacy tended to be much higher in
the north than in the Mediterranean south. Religious reformers on both sides
were concerned to educate their people to read the Bible and manuals of
instruction.
Elementary education was not necessarily a step towards greater literacy. In
most countries the ‘grammar’ taught at school as an adjunct to reading and
writing was Latin grammar rather than the grammar of everyday speech. The use
of Latin was deliberately fostered by writers who believed that knowledge was
the preserve of the few, and even innovators such as Copernicus preferred to use
Latin in the belief that the mysteries of science should not be communicated to
the common public. Latin became a symbol of obscurantism to the Protestant
reformers, who felt that it prevented the people gaining access to the truth.
Vernacular sermons and books therefore assumed a greater importance than ever
before. When Sir Thomas More in 1533 claimed that nearly three-fifths of the
English people could read English, and hence could read a vernacular translation
of the Bible, his purpose was to express alarm at the evil that could be done by

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unlicensed literature. More’s figures were certainly wrong, but the fear of literacy
in the native tongue persisted.
By around 1750 literacy rates may not have changed notably, but the public
impact of printed matter had become substantial. In the cities, newspapers
reached a wide public; books were sometimes cheaper and certainly more diverse
in character, ranging from simple text sheets to full-scale Bibles; paper was more
widely used to validate business and marital agreements. Scholars were the
keenest of all to search for new editions.40 Popular movements, as we have seen,
used the presses to disseminate their demands. The undoubted importance of the
printed word encouraged states to bring into existence new rules of censorship.
Already, the modern world we know today was taking shape.
After the Restoration in England there was a sustained attempt to appeal to
popular opinion. Though licensing of publications was imposed in 1662, after
1695 the licensing system was abandoned. Some restrictions continued, but
with sufficient liberty for a vigorous political press to emerge. Journalism became
a respectable profession. When Defoe founded his Review (1704) he proposed
‘to open the eyes of the deluded people’ and went on to achieve remarkable
success. A contemporary reported that ‘the greatest part of the people cannot
read at all, but they will gather about one that can, and listen to the Review,
where all the principles of rebellion are instilled into them’.41
At the other end of the spectrum, the printed book served to foster the
continent-wide vision of intellectuals who felt that they were the standard-bearers
of what they thought of as an elite ‘republic of letters’. Cultural centres such as the
royal courts in Paris and London were a paradise for literary expression. By around
1700 France was apparently publishing up to 400 books a year, its bookstores were
full and there were printing presses in 158 cities. Publishers looked forward with
optimism to what became known as the Age of Enlightenment.

Private and public education and the state

So many new universities were founded in the age of the Counter-Reformation

that it was as though a new age of learning were coming into existence. In Germany
there were Dillingen (1554), Jena (1558), Helmstedt (1569), Würzburg (1582)
and several others; in the United Provinces there were Leiden (1575), Groningen
(1614) and Utrecht (1636); in Ireland there was Trinity College Dublin (1591);
and in Scotland Edinburgh (1583) and the new Protestant College at Aberdeen

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(1593). The expansion of universities took place throughout Europe. In the old
universities new colleges were founded and the total student membership rose:
Cambridge had 1,267 students on its books in 1564 and 3,050 in 1622.
It is often claimed that the unity of Europe was being fragmented because of
the growth of ideological differences. Despite the differences there still survived
a world of learning in which a part was played by intelligent and educated
persons of all nations. We may call these persons ‘intellectuals’, and the world
they shared was what a French writer in 1699 described as an international
community: ‘The Republic of Letters is of very ancient origin’, he claimed, ‘it
embraces the whole world and is composed of all nationalities, all social classes,
all ages and both sexes’.42 The intellectuals kept in touch with each other through
printed works, through direct contact by means of travel and (as we shall see)
through written correspondence. The language they most commonly used was
Latin, but by the mid-seventeenth century French also served as a regular
medium of exchange. The intellectuals were by no means specialists of one
particular discipline. Like Leibniz and Newton, whose historical fame rests on
being polymaths, they had studied a little bit of many subjects and therefore
enriched their work with the input of different branches of learning. Despite
their extensive vision, they did not necessarily share the same outlook; on the
other hand, they appreciated the opportunities for free expression available in
the cities most identified with their presence, such as Strasbourg, Prague and
Basel.
The notable expansion of universities presents all the appearances of a boom
in higher education. The truth is that, to some extent, the statistics of expansion
are misleading. A great number of the new universities were foundations artifi-
cially created to serve an immediate religious or political bent, and without any
real hope of attracting students. Of the twenty-two new German universities
created between 1540 and 1700, only seven survived into the nineteenth century.
Some of them never attracted more than 100 students and served a purely local
demand. The principal reason why many new foundations came into existence
was not primarily an increased demand for education, but because Catholics and
Protestants refused to attend each other’s universities and instead set up their
own rival colleges. The new establishment at Leiden was created because Louvain
and Douai (the latter founded in 1562) were both in the Catholic southern
Netherlands. The Lutherans had obviously taken care to fortify themselves in the
institutions that passed to them at the Reformation, and the same was true for

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the Anglicans. Where the need for denominational education was still felt, estab-
lishments such as Strasbourg (1538, created a university in 1621) filled the gap.
The Catholics in their turn had to create colleges for their refugees. The first great
university produced by the Counter-Reformation was Würzburg (1582), which
was under close Jesuit control and staffed principally by former professors of
Louvain. In Germany the two most famous Jesuit-orientated universities were
Ingolstadt (a pre-Reformation university) and Dillingen.
The coincidence of the rise in the volume of higher education, with the revo-
lutionary changes of the post-Reformation period, might suggest that the educa-
tional impulse was breaking new ground. Once again, on the whole, this was not
so. The education offered by the many new places of learning was very much a
repetition of old methods and syllabuses. The increase in the number of schools
and universities was not accompanied by any corresponding change in the
methods of teaching. Samuel Hartlib and Jan Comenius were still struggling in
the mid-seventeenth century to bring in that ‘revolution’ in education which had
till then occurred in numbers alone.
Part of the reason for the weak showing of academic learning in the universi-
ties was the rising tide of demand for civil office. Study of the liberal arts was
neglected in favour of the two disciplines – civil and canon law – that offered a
promising career. In the German universities the cultivation of the philosophical
and natural sciences, of mathematics no less than of biology, was neglected. A
fleeting stay at college became one’s passport to a career. Besides, wealth could
purchase degrees. The Wittenberg professor and poet Frederick Taubmann wrote
in 1604 that ‘nothing is easier today than to gain a doctorate, if you have money.
Anyone can become a doctor, without being doctus.’ There were numerous
complaints of the type of education that Oxford and Cambridge offered.
Giordano Bruno in 1583 described Oxford as ‘the widow of good learning in
philosophy and pure mathematics’. Chemistry and experimental science were
apparently neglected and, reported William Harrison in 1587, ‘arithmetic,
geometry and astronomy . . . are now smally regarded’. ‘The secrets of the
creation’, Gerrard Winstanley complained, ‘have been locked up under the tradi-
tional, parrot-like speaking from the universities.’ Aspects of the decay in Spain
may be seen from the case of Salamanca university, which ceased teaching
Hebrew in 1555, a year when only one student registered for it. In 1578 the
chair of mathematics had been vacant over three years. By 1648 the arts faculty
there was described as ‘totally lost’.43

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Until recently, historians took a pessimistic view of the cultural role of the
universities in early modern Europe. Scientific method rarely advanced there.
The great pioneers – Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, Peiresc – were often educated at
universities but did not hold chairs and pursued their research in a more inde-
pendent environment. Perhaps the only significant exception was Italy, where
the pursuit of knowledge in universities lingered on. Evangelista Torricelli was
professor of mathematics at Florence in the mid-seventeenth century. Padua,
thanks mainly to Andreas Vesalius, remained the principal medical school in
Europe, and it was to Padua that William Harvey went as a young man. On
balance, however, historians recognise that universities were the base on which
all other achievements were built. Over 87 per cent of the scientists born between
1450 and 1650 were trained at university.44
From the later sixteenth century private groups of scholars took over some of
the learned initiative from the universities. Literary salons and philosophical circles
were commonplace in late sixteenth-century France and Italy. By the early seven-
teenth century the scientific academies were much in evidence. The two outstanding
Italian ones were the Lincei in Rome (founded in 1603), which counted Galileo
among its members, and the Cimento in Florence (founded in 1657), which
included Giovanni Borelli and other scientists. In England, 1660 witnessed the
formal establishment of the Royal Society, which could trace its origins back over
a decade earlier. Many of the first members of the Society had been professors of
Gresham College, an independent institution set up in London in 1596 to provide
an alternative to the education offered by the major English universities.
Renaissance ideals of culture and education were certainly influential in the
vogue for improvement, especially among the gentry and rising men who wished
to give their children the best. In 1614 Sir Thomas Fairfax asked a Cambridge
college to allocate a good tutor to his son, for ‘my greatest care hitherto hath
bene, and still is, to breed my sonne a scholar’. But higher education was never
regarded as an unmixed blessing. At the French Estates General of 1614 some
deputies of the clergy complained that higher education ‘burdens the state with
too many educated people, weakens the armed forces, destroys trade and the
arts, depopulates agriculture, fills the courts with ignorant people, diminishes
the taille, inflicts simony on the Church, supernumerary officials on the state,
wages and pensions on the Exchequer, and in brief overturns all good order’.
Cardinal Richelieu was strongly opposed to more education: ‘the commerce of
letters would totally drive out that of merchandise’, he claimed in his Political

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Testament. A French writer of 1627 thought that the schools ‘have produced a
great number of literates but few educated people. If someone learns three words
of Latin, of a sudden he ceases to pay the taille tax.’
Education, it was felt, made one a privileged person. Not surprisingly, many
political commentators blamed political turmoil on the pretensions of the great
number of shiftless educated. The Swedish statesman Magnus de la Gardie
claimed in 1655 that ‘there are more literati and learned fellows, especially in
politicis, than means or jobs available to provide for them, and they grow
desperate and impatient’. ‘It is a hard matter for men’, Hobbes was to point out,
‘who do all think highly of their own wits, when they have also acquired the
learning of the university, to be persuaded that they want any ability requisite for
the government of a commonwealth.’ His conclusion in respect of the events of
the crisis year 1640 was simple: ‘The core of rebellion, as you have seen by this,
and read of other rebellions, are the Universities. . . . The Universities have been
to this nation, as the wooden horse was to the Trojans.’
This exaggerated viewpoint does not coincide wholly with reality. Students
went into higher education to serve, not to overturn, the state. If they were to be
criticised it would be for a lack of interest in academic studies: ‘the love of letters’,
observed a high court judge in Valladolid in 1638, ‘brings only a very few to the
colleges’. As pointed out above, in most universities in central and western
Europe two subjects predominated: canon law (in Catholic countries) and civil
law. Then as now, the legal profession was the gateway to employment by the
state. Marburg had been the first post-Reformation university founded (in 1527)
with the express aim of producing graduates to serve the government; other
German universities followed the trend of specialising in law. In Salamanca in
the sixteenth century, enrolments for canon law exceeded those for all other
faculties together; in the early seventeenth century civil law became popular,
taking about half as many students as canon law. In England, those who did not
go to Oxford or Cambridge went to the Inns of Court in London; many (50 per
cent of entrants to the Inns) went to both university and Inns. The governing
class in England became more educated: of 420 members of Parliament in 1563,
110 (or 26 per cent) had matriculated at university; by 1642 out of 552 members
the figure was 276 (or 50 per cent). Most of the local Justices of the Peace in the
country had by the 1640s been either to university or to the Inns.
The increase in university enrolments shows a consistent pattern in England,
Germany and Spain; one may presume that it was the same elsewhere. Figures

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rose during the sixteenth century, with a pronounced increase from the 1550s
until the second decade of the seventeenth century. Very roughly, matriculation
totals doubled in Spain between about 1560 and 1590, in Oxford between about
1550 and 1580, in Leipzig between about 1560 and 1620. The common people
did not, of course, participate in this increase. In England rural folk were 70 per
cent of the population, but at Cambridge they were only 15 per cent of the
student body.
Though law was the main subject taught in most places of learning, the
universities did not become the training ground for a middle-class bureaucracy.
The middle elite in Germany and Spain were conspicuous by their virtual absence
from places of higher learning, and in England they were only a small propor-
tion. Everywhere the nobles and gentry were in ascendance. The Venetian ambas-
sador in 1612 reported that the Inns of Court contained ‘five hundred of the
wealthiest gentlemen of this kingdom’, and records of the Inns confirm that
between 1570 and 1639 gentry were over 80 per cent of entrants. At Oxford, 39
per cent of those matriculating in 1575–9 were gentlemen, by 1600–9 the
proportion was 52 per cent; correspondingly, the number of students of plebeian
origin fell from 55 per cent in 1577–9 to 37 per cent in 1637–9 and 17 per cent
in 1760. At the same time scholarships that had been reserved for the education
of the poor were seized by the privileged.
The picture was repeated in Germany: at Leipzig 289 poor students had
matriculated in 1421–5, but only 17 in 1556–60; at Cologne there had been
743 poor students in 1486–90, but only 10 in 1556–60. It was the same in
Spain, where in the course of the late sixteenth century the sons of the poor were
crowded out of the places originally reserved for them. The University of Geneva
(that is, Calvin’s Academy, founded in 1559) had by the early seventeenth
century become firmly aristocratic, the resort of the Calvinist nobility of
Germany and France and of the premier families of Britain (Beauchamps,
Cavendishes, Cecils, Douglases and Drummonds). Leipzig became dominated
by the patriciates of central Europe and Poland: in the period 1559–1634 its
students included six dukes of Saxony, four princes Radziwiłł, one crown prince
(of Denmark) and numerous other higher nobles.
For the gentry, university was a convenient finishing school.45 However,
William Harrison said in 1577 that ‘they oft bring the university into much
slander’ with their extravagant way of life. Few bothered to stay the course and
take a degree: this applied to half of all those enrolling at Cambridge in

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1590–1640. Of the thirty-five government officials in the 1584 English

Parliament, only thirteen had been to university and only four had a degree. In
Heidelberg between 1550 and 1620 the proportion of matriculating students
who lasted the course and took their final degree never exceeded 5 per cent.
During the seventeenth century universities went into decline, for two quite
distinct reasons. Demographic stagnation led to falling enrolments: in Spain
matriculations nosedived after the 1620s; and in Germany the disruption of the
Thirty Years War created a huge drop in admissions between 1620 and 1645. The
second reason was that, by becoming channels for the bureaucratic elite and
leisure resorts for the aristocracy, universities suffered a lowering of standards and
ceased to be desirable centres of learning. In Salamanca, for example, faculty
chairs were prized because they were stepping-stones to high office: one chair of
canon law was filled sixty-one times in the course of the century. Families from
the European aristocracy who wished to offer their sons an academic training
would send them by preference to private academies or hire private tutors.

The Grand Tour

Nobles usually had private tutors for the formative years of their education.
Universities – particularly foreign universities – were fitted in at the end in order
to ‘finish off’. Hence the Grand Tour, a product of the later Renaissance,
continued to flourish during the period of confessional strife and reached its
apogee in the eighteenth century.46 Though the term ‘Grand Tour’ is more
frequently used with reference to the travels of British aristocrats, journeying for
improving education was a pan-European phenomenon, seen for instance in the
‘Kavalierstour’ practised among nobles from all parts of Germany.47 Northern
European humanists such as Erasmus considered travel and pilgrimage to be a
desirable extension in the search for knowledge, and reports of travels were
specially valued both because they exercised one’s own intellectual curiosity and
because they broadened one’s experience of the outside world.48
The writings of Erasmus, Thomas More (Utopia, 1516) and Montaigne were
outstanding examples of the way in which travel and intellectual curiosity
became closely interconnected. William Bourne’s A booke called the Treasure for
Travellers (London, 1578) called the attention of readers to the practical aspects
of going to foreign parts. Many other similar handbooks were published in
Europe, such as Raiβ Büchlin (Strasbourg, 1557) by the humanist doctor Georg

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Pictorius. In Basel in 1577 the doctor and humanist Theodor Zwinger published
in Latin an extensive guide to the practice as well as the theory of foreign travel,
a work that remained authoritative until late in the seventeenth century.49 The
spread of the printing press encouraged the publication of travellers’ reports,
which stimulated further the search for empirical knowledge.
The great attraction was visiting classical Europe, in particular Italy. When Sir
Philip Sidney undertook the tour in 1572, the main aim was travel. ‘Your purpose
is, being a gentleman born’, he was later to advise a younger brother, ‘to furnish
yourself with the knowledge of such things as may be serviceable to your country.’50
Leaving England at the age of 19 in the company of a tutor and three servants,
Sidney travelled to Frankfurt, Heidelberg and other German cities, Paris, Strasbourg,
Vienna, Padua, Prague and Antwerp, as well as Hungary and Poland, an absence of
three years, only some of it spent in study. The ‘nobilis et erudita peregrinatio’, as the
humanist Justus Lipsius described it, was in practice fashionable only among the
elites of northern Europe; French, Spaniards and Italians did not usually take to it.
Those who had travelled wrote manuals, such as Jerome Turler’s De peregrina-
tione (1574) and another by Thomas Palmer in 1606, which was prepared
expressly ‘for the youngest sort of such noble gentlemen as intend so recommend-
able a course’.51 Fynes Moryson, whom we have encountered above (Chapters 2
and 7), published in 1617 An Itinerary Containing His Ten Yeeres Travels, which he
wrote first in Latin then translated into English, describing the whole as ‘a nosegay
of flowers, hastily snatched in many gardens’. In northern Europe the most influ-
ential work on the subject, The Voyage of Italy, by a former priest Richard Lassels,
was published posthumously in Paris in 1670 and then in London. Lassels’s
volume ‘not only determined the shape of the Grand Tour, it conditioned the
reactions of thousands of tourists’.52 From the late sixteenth century Italy was the
most popular country visited, and Rome and Venice the most chosen destina-
tions, not for religious reasons but because of Italy’s place in classical culture. The
traveller Charles Thompson in 1744 described himself as ‘impatiently desirous of
viewing a country so famous in history, which once gave laws to the world; which
is at present the greatest school of music and painting, contains the noblest
productions of statuary and architecture, and abounds with cabinets of rarities,
and collections of all kinds of antiquities’. The objective was dual: to complete
one’s education, but also to study art. The enterprise, however, needed both
considerable resources and reliable guides, which in practice limited the tour to
the wealthier among the upper classes.

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Public service no less than personal edification was the purpose, if we judge
by Sidney’s remark above as well as by Sir Thomas Bodley’s comment in 1647: ‘I
waxed desirous to travel beyond the seas for attaining to the knowledge of some
special modern tongues and for the increase of my experience in the managing
of affairs, being then wholly addicted to employ myself and all my cares into the
public of the state.’53 John Evelyn wrote in 1645: ‘From the reports of divers
curious and expert persons I’ve been assured there was little more to be seen in
the rest of the civil world after Italy, France and the Low Countries but plain and
prodigious barbarism’.
An analysis of over 200 British gentry who did the Grand Tour in the early
modern period reveals that the tourists were aged between just over 20 and just
over 30 years, spent over £100 a year on the enterprise and around 50 per cent had
managed to attend either Oxford or Cambridge university before their travels.54
By the mid-eighteenth century education was declining as a motive for the tour,
which now featured more professionals from the middle classes, together with
their wives and children. For Britons, Italy continued always to be the main objec-
tive, followed in the eighteenth century by France and in particular Paris.55 In the
process, educated members of the British elite managed to absorb new and
exciting aspects of art, architecture, literature and landscaping from the Renaissance
period down to the eighteenth century. A tour in the mid-sixteenth century,
which often included a stay at a university (such as Padua), might last on average
forty months, but by 1700 the figure was down to thirty, and never recovered
previous levels. A tour might often be rapid: a German noble journeying abroad
in 1578–80 spent, during his visit to Italy, a few days at Bologna, a few weeks in
Perugia, three months in Siena and then one year in Padua, having probably
inscribed himself at all these universities without necessarily studying anything.
Cosmopolitan cities such as Rome and Paris received visitors of all religions.
The Austrian nobility were one group to broaden their cultural horizons by
travel: the Protestants journeyed abroad to Wittenberg, Jena and Marburg
universities, the Catholics to Vienna, Ingolstadt and Louvain; those of either
faith who wished to study law went to Padua, Bologna and Siena.56 Through
these travels they extended their knowledge of the romance languages (Spanish
was in any case a requisite at the court of Vienna), and contacts with Italy brought
them into the sphere of Renaissance literature. In private libraries of the Austrian
nobility three books – all Latin in culture – took pride of place: Cicero’s De
Oficiis, Petrarch’s Canzionere and Ariosto’s Orlando furioso.57

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The practice of the tour shows that even in the age of ideological conflict the
universities had not lost their international character. The rise of state barriers, of
cuius regio eius religio, did not peremptorily destroy the international ‘republic of
letters’. Protestants still went to Italy, Calvinism helped universalise academic study
by opening the doors of its universities to all nations. Of the 161 names enrolled in
the Livre du Recteur of Calvin’s Academy at Geneva in 1559, nearly all were foreign
to Switzerland. Of the 110 who matriculated at the Academy from late 1584 to
early 1585, 9 were Genevan, 10 Polish, 20 Netherlandish, 3 Czech, 3 British and
nearly all the rest from France or Germany.58 As late as 1653 a Genevan pastor
complained that ‘there come to this city a great number of foreign nobility, who live
in great licence’. Attendance in the late sixteenth century at Heidelberg, perhaps the
most important of the Calvinist universities, included about 39 per cent foreigners.
Leiden University can serve to illustrate the continuing internationalism of
higher education. Founded in 1575, it remained open to both Catholics and
Protestants, but flourished chiefly as a centre of Calvinism. In its first twenty-six
years, 41 per cent of its registered students came from outside the United
Provinces; in the subsequent quarter century over 52 per cent were from outside
the country, more than half of them from Germany. In 1639 there were possibly
more Germans matriculating at Leiden than at any German university.59

Ego documents: diaries and letter-writing

To the historian, the most visible sign of literate individualism was the keeping
of diaries. There had been medieval precedents, in the form of business accounts
or agrarian journals, in which personal annotations had sometimes been made.
By the sixteenth century many Catholic parish priests, inspired no doubt by
enforcement of the regulation that they should keep church records, used the
opportunity to scribble memoirs.60 From the period of the Reformation, spiri-
tual concerns were the chief motive for diaries: Ignatius Loyola, notably, kept a
spiritual journal. John Evelyn commented on ‘the infinite benefit of daily exam-
ination, comparing to a merchant keeping his books’,61 and kept detailed notes
of the sermons he heard. The frequency of diaries among Puritan gentry and
clergy was testimony to the importance of spiritual concerns. Most such diaries
were short-term records, not written up continuously, but they may all the same
be considered in the same breath as other first-person writings such as memoirs
and autobiographies which evolved at about the same time.

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The best known diaries come mainly from the literate male elite, and
mainly from northern Europe, where literacy seems to have been higher and the
privatisation of lay spirituality more advanced. The superb seventeenth-century
diaries kept by the Englishmen John Evelyn, Ralph Josselin and Samuel Pepys
all share a deep preoccupation with spiritual matters. Pepys, a distinguished
administrator and politician, kept a detailed diary covering the years 1660 to
1669, in which he recorded not only public events but also all his own spiritual
and sexual concerns (the latter written in code). Over a broad perspective,
however, first-person writings were not limited to males, nor to northern Europe,
nor to spirituality. Women, as we have seen (Chapter 7), were from the seven-
teenth century significant diarists. In the Mediterranean, a rich spirituality
produced remarkable personal memoirs (such as Teresa of Avila’s Life). But the
genre of a personal record was also intimately allied to that of autobiography,
supplying us immediately with significant exceptions to the primary theme of
spiritual matters.
Moreover, the genre of a purely personal record was broadened into that of
public autobiography and memoirs, in which the writers used their own lives as
the basis for a narrative of their experiences and of the important people with
whom they had come into contact. Though such writings cast interesting light
on the writer, they shed even more light on the society of the time. The principal
articulate gentlemen of Renaissance France (such as the Duke of Sully or Pierre
de Brantôme) wrote their memoirs when they had retired from an active military
or political career. Their motives were usually the same as those that prevail today
among public figures: a wish to correct the record and justify their actions retro-
spectively. Seventeenth-century French noblemen and women conveyed their
thoughts to paper extensively, and maybe permitted themselves to doubt at a
private and intimate level what their society at a public level took for accepted.62
Examples of such nonspiritual diaries have also surfaced in the Mediterranean,
such as the extremely valuable memoirs of the Catalan Jeroni Pujades.63
Finally, numerous humble people all over Europe, from parish priests to arti-
sans, kept little diaries that have fortunately survived, though only a few have
been published. The form of such writings is at first glance individualistic, for the
act of committing thoughts to paper was a clear affirmation of personal prefer-
ences, and the subject matter of diaries always reflected an individual point of
view. But there are good reasons for doubting whether they were pioneer expres-
sions of individualism. ‘Perhaps the most striking aspect of early modern

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autobiographical writing at all social levels’, it has been pointed out, ‘is its relent-
less focus on externalities.’64 With rare exceptions, autobiography was rooted in
the environment that produced it. Though it spoke often of private griefs and
public quarrels, it was seldom introspective. The writer yearned perhaps to escape
from his or her personal condition and took to writing as a means of affirming it,
but in general continued to be tied down to the reality of everyday circumstance
rather than to inner experience. Even the spiritual and mystical writers were less
concerned with their own condition than with the great general experience
towards which they aspired.
Early modern personal documents often explored the world of the individual
but differed from postindustrial autobiography in three main ways.65 They paid
less attention to sentiment and the interior self; they were never conscious of the
external pressures of the world of work; and they paid little attention to wider
social problems. First-person writings can nonetheless be used as invaluable
sources for every aspect of social history, from family life to descriptions of the
plague (the latter in Daniel Defoe’s famous Journal of the Plague Year, published in
1722 but describing the London plague of 1665). They remain invaluable tools
for exploring the evolving personal world of the people of preindustrial Europe.
The art of letter-writing may seem to us today to be a private practice, like the
private diary. In the sixteenth century, by contrast, it was more of an exercise in
transmitting information both public and private and had an impressive role in
the extension of cultural knowledge through the continent.66 The most relevant
private letters were those written by famous persons to their families, friends,
professional colleagues and distant correspondents. The information transmitted
in this way included personal but also political and commercial news, as well as
scientific novelties in areas such as natural history, astronomy and philology.
Among the best-known group of letters is the correspondence sent home in
manuscript by generations of Venetian diplomats who had instructions to keep
the rulers of their little republic well informed about developments in the states
to which they were appointed. Whether diplomatic or personal or scientific, the
tens of thousands of letters written, of which enough have survived to fill multiple
volumes, give us an astonishing profile of the way in which Europe continued to
maintain its cultural heritage through the spread of information.67 Religious
exiles, diplomatic and commercial agents, missionaries in exotic climes, travellers
to strange shores committed their information to paper and kept the educated
world informed. The consequences, we shall see, were far-reaching.68

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Books and the development of opinion

From the time of the Reformation, public authorities became aware of the
importance of private opinion and took steps to influence it. Luther addressed
himself at an early stage to individual Germans, hoping thereby to bypass the
existing structures of authority. In an age of low literacy, the most direct contact
with common people was made through the spoken word, in the pulpit.
In medieval times the pulpit had been the chief moderator of public opinion.
From the sixteenth century both Protestants and Catholics rediscovered the
potential of the sermon. The Jesuit Peter Canisius is said to have preserved
Vienna for the faith by his preaching. It must not be supposed that successes
were easily achieved. Most clergy, Protestant and Catholic, did not know how to
preach: in pre-Reformation Europe sermons may have been frequent in the large
towns but they were rare in rural areas. Congregations were quickly bored: in
one parish in Cambridge in 1547, ‘when the vicar goeth into the pulpit, then the
multitude of the parish goeth straight out of the church, home to drink’. All over
Spain in the 1560s pulpits had to be erected in parish churches where preaching
had been unknown. Congregations had to be enjoined to listen reverently:
silence in church was one of the great innovative achievements of the period of
confessionalisation.69 Since no other effective control was available over what
half-educated clergy preached, the services of the Inquisition were called upon to
discipline sermons.
Ecclesiastical permission was required in order to preach. The continental
Reformation liberated the pulpit from Church control, but in episcopal England
the bishops still kept a tight rein on the public expression of dissenting views.
This encouraged Puritan communities to appoint unofficial ‘lecturers’ who,
because they were not formally parish clergy, did not require a licence to preach
and might often put forward theological views that differed from those of the
official Church. As a result Puritan attitudes were disseminated with impunity
from hundreds of pulpits throughout the country and threatened to subvert the
established order. Lecturers, stormed Archbishop Laud in 1629, ‘are the people’s
creatures and blow the bellows of their sedition’. The struggle for the pulpit was
a struggle for people’s minds.
The spoken word was powerful, but transient. It was the permanency of the
printed word that alarmed the authorities, encouraging them to repress
and control information. Printers were in the front of the ideological firing line.
In the post-Reformation era, many emigrated from Catholic to Protestant

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countries; from south to north Germany, from France to Geneva, from Belgium
to Holland (among the exiles from Antwerp was the famous publishing firm of
Elsevier).
The battle of the books continued to be a religious one. Though there were
opportunities for works on literature, travel, law and history, the religious book
(devotional or controversial) was seldom displaced from its leading position. Of
169 books published in Paris in 1598, 32 per cent were in belles-lettres, 29 per
cent on religion, 16 per cent on history and 13 per cent on arts and sciences. In
1645 of 456 works published 38 per cent were on religion, 24 per cent in belles-
lettres, 18 per cent on history and 7 per cent on science. One-third of the books
published between these two dates was on religion.
Books were not the ideal vehicle for controversy or propaganda. They were
still comparatively expensive and tended to be published in small editions (about
1,250 to 1,500 copies). The Bible was always a best seller (possibly a million
copies of Luther’s Bible were printed in the sixteenth century). Devotional works
sold well. The Imitation of Christ (c. 1418), the great product of devotio moderna
spirituality, went through innumerable editions in the course of the sixteenth
century, and in France alone from 1550 to 1610 was issued in thirty editions.
St Francis de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life (1609) totalled over forty
French editions by 1620, and by 1656 had been published in seventeen different
languages. But books in the vernacular were often in a minority, judging from
the catalogues of the international book fair at Frankfurt. From 1564 to 1600
this fair, the largest in Europe, displayed nearly 15,000 books of German origin.
On average, no more than a third of these were in the German language. In
1601–5, of 1,334 books at the fair, 813 were in Latin and 422 in German. Only
after about 1680 did books in German come to be in the majority. In England
the vernacular had a stronger hold on publishing, but despite this there was no
notable attempt to use books in the moulding of opinion.
The literate public was less likely to read weighty books than chapbooks,
pamphlets and flysheets. Short, well-phrased tracts with a clear argument and
simple language became the staple fare of the ideological conflict. From the
pamphlet war of the Reformation to the often cruel propaganda of the Fronde
and the Thirty Year War, it was this category that came closest to providing some
sort of material for the masses to read. The flysheets usually contained satirical
illustrations brilliantly calculated to attract a reader’s attention. In most cases the
text was a piece of doggerel verse, often several stanzas long. Though the entire

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early modern period was one of strife and controversy, pamphlet propaganda was
not a continuous part of it. The overwhelming majority of surviving pamphlets
date from one central epoch only, the middle decades of the seventeenth century,
and are concerned exclusively with three key events: the Thirty Years War, the
Fronde and the English Revolution.
The vast majority of German leaflets dealing with the Thirty Years War
attempted to present the justice of one cause and the excesses of the opposing
side.70 The volume of literary output this involved signalled the emergence of a
particular kind of writer: the professional publicist. The Germans were to produce
many such in the course of the conflict, notably Kaspar Schoppe, who wrote for
the Catholics, and Hoë von Hoënegg, court preacher to the elector of Saxony, for
the Lutherans. All the techniques of crude propaganda – distortion, exaggeration,
plain falsehood – were employed generously by these writers. Small wonder that
to the historian the most interesting of the flysheets are not the blatantly partisan
ones so much as those which react against all the protagonists and plead wearily
for peace and humanity. Typical of these is one of 1642, protesting bitterly against
the sufferings endured by the peasants at the hands of the nobles and soldiery:

The splendour of the land can no longer be seen,

War, robbery, murder and arson are laying it waste,
The free Roman Empire is falling to barbarians.

The literature associated with the English Revolution and the Fronde was,
like the propaganda of the Thirty Years War, produced for the most part by a
handful of skilled publicists. To contemporaries, one of the most alarming
aspects of the troubles in England and France was that the rebel leaders had
invited the common people to partake of mysteries forbidden to them. ‘The
people entered into the holy of holies’, Cardinal de Retz, who played a relevant
part in events, was to say with satisfaction of the Fronde. In England Clement
Walker in his History of Independency (1661) criticised the proceedings of the
Independents: ‘They have cast all the mysteries and secrets of government before
the vulgar, and taught the soldiery and the people to look into them and ravel
back all governments to the first principles of nature’. Another English contem-
porary denounced ‘the tumultuous risings of rude multitudes threatening blood
and destruction, the preaching of cobblers, feltmakers, taylors, groomes and
women’, a list drawn up no doubt in ascending order of outrageousness.

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But despite such testimony, pamphlet literature was not always an expression
of ‘popular opinion’. The pamphlets of the Fronde, produced systematically
by the dominant political groups, were an attempt to win support and not a
spontaneous outburst of popular sentiment.71 In Paris the pamphlets circulated
principally in the period from January 1649 to October 1652. Célestin Moreau’s
catalogue of these Mazarinades (so called after the best-known pamphlet,
La Mazarinade, dated 11 March 1651 and directed against Cardinal Mazarin)
lists over 4,000 items.72 It seems likely that the actual total was about twice
that figure. There was also a lively run of leaflets in Bordeaux during the Fronde
there. The circulation of pamphlets was not restricted only to France: the
Dresden library, for example, possesses over 3,000 items presumably collected
within Saxony and Germany. Each pamphlet was carefully calculated to enter-
tain the reader and to destroy the opposition through rumour, derision or
simple false information. ‘We felt’, de Retz noted proudly in the spring of 1651,
shortly after he had sent fifty of his men out to distribute his latest pamphlet,
‘that we were masters of the street.’ They were influencing and creating public
opinion.
In the English Civil War the output of pamphlets was higher than any known
in Europe. The British Library collection lists nearly 2,000 for the year 1642
alone, an average of nearly 6 pamphlets a day. For the years 1640 to 1661 the
total of surviving pamphlets approaches 15,000. In general, the pamphlets in
England were not sophisticated propaganda nor the handiwork of experienced
publicists. In both England and France many writings were surprisingly irrele-
vant to the crisis that produced them and were simply doggerel. Among the
relevant and politically motivated pieces there were a great many that, despite
their ephemeral character, attempted through the medium of propaganda to
reflect the attitudes of the common people, pamphlets full of proverbs, slang,
vulgarities and outright obscenities. For sheer volume of publicity, the seven-
teenth century was certainly one of innovation.
The activity meant a very busy time for the presses. A Paris printer commented
with exaggeration in 1649: ‘One half of Paris prints or sells pamphlets, the other
half writes for them’. As the leaflets rolled off the press, distributors would be on
hand from early morning to take them out to the streets. After the capital came
distribution to the provinces, carried out with striking efficiency. Mazarin
complained in 1649 of one pamphlet that ‘they have sent more than six thousand
copies of the leaflet against me and d’Hémery [the finance minister] into all the

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provinces’. Since censorship regulations were theoretically still in force, pamph-

leteers always needed to be wary. The Levellers were among the most devious and
successful publicists of this time. John Lilburne made himself a thorn in the side
of authority by his ability to produce unlicensed pamphlets: ‘I am now deter-
mined to appeal to the whole kingdom and Army against them [the Presbyterians]’,
he proclaimed in 1647. From 1648 to 1649 he was helped by the existence of a
newspaper, the Moderate, which presented most of the principal Leveller news to
the public. It was one of the first instances of a close-knit revolutionary group
making extensive use of the press in order to change the climate of opinion.
Incomparably the most important propaganda centre in Europe was the
Dutch Republic. In Amsterdam and in Leiden the presses served the demands of
nearly every leading European language. Amsterdam had a virtual monopoly in
the production of anti-French propaganda, and subversive literature was also
smuggled regularly into England, Scotland and other countries. With the freest
press in Europe, the Dutch threatened the security of every state practising
censorship.

The emergence of newspapers

Supply of information to the general public was one of the first objectives of the
printing press in an age of political crisis.73 Governments were interested in
promoting news of events, of wars, of sieges, of victories, of security measures
such as plague controls; merchants exchanged news of the trade situation, of
disruptions, of fluctuations in prices; writers communicated political and social
gossip. All the data represented ‘news’, some of it trivial and incidental, some of
it an important ingredient in the formation of modern society and the modern
state. The pamphlets and newsbooks were subsequently collected by booksellers
and made available to posterity: the most famous collection is that put together
by the London bookseller George Thomason, who in the 1640s saved some
22,000 titles, now to be found in the British Library. The variety of material
covered was universal.
In his Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton observed in the same century
from Oxford:

I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues,
fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums,

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prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged in France, Germany,

Turkey, Persia, Poland, &c. . . . A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions,
edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances,
are daily brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes
[i.e. corantos, or news broadsheets], stories, whole catalogues of volumes of
all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philos-
ophy, religion &c. . . . To-day we hear of new Lords and officers created,
to-morrow of some great men deposed, and then again of fresh honours
conferred. . . . Thus I daily hear, and such like, both private and publick
newes.

The history of pamphlets overlaps that of the periodical press. The function
of both was to appeal to the public forum, and a pamphlet that appeared period-
ically (the earliest example in England was the series of Marprelate tracts in 1588
and 1589) was already setting a precedent. The real distinction between the
two, however, was that the periodical came out at frequent intervals, aspired to
give continuous news and was, in effect, a news-sheet. The nature of the news,
however, had to be approached with caution. In the sixteenth century, as in some
modern states, revealing news could be dangerous. A printer could be accused of
betraying information to the enemy, or of deliberate distortion and slander, or of
inflaming the people by seditious publication. The penalties for sedition could
be severe: in England in 1637 William Prynne had his ears cut off, was heavily
fined and then imprisoned. In Rome in 1572 Pope Pius V waxed so indignant at
the hostile tone of the avvisi that he forbade their publication, and his successor
Gregory XIII passed an edict against the spreaders of false and malicious news.
One of the journalists who fell foul of these regulations in 1587 had his hand cut
off and his tongue cut out and was then hanged. In previous times, news had
spread by word of mouth and rumour, but the coming of news-sheets did not
necessarily make the information more reliable; incorrect information could
aggravate a situation and was therefore in some circumstances treated as a crime.
The avvisi were principally merchants’ newsletters and were the earliest form
of Italian journalism. Those sent from Venice to the Fuggers in Augsburg in
1554–65 were among the earliest, but the first regular series were those sent from
his agent in Rome to the Duke of Urbino over the years 1554–1605. The best-
known reports were the Fugger newsletters, sent from all over the world to the
banking family of Fugger in Augsburg and preserved today in Vienna. Covering

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the period from the 1560s to 1605, they were for the most part written in
German and were not limited merely to business news but gave information
about everything that the writer considered worth reporting. Newsletters
appeared only infrequently, but by contrast ‘newspapers’ when they appeared
aimed at periodicity. The official Mercure français, published by the French
government at the beginning of the seventeenth century, managed to be issued
annually.
By general agreement the first ‘newspaper’ is dated to the early seventeenth
century. This was the monthly Relation, first produced by the Strasbourg printer
Johann Carolus in 1609 and distributed also in Augsburg. It contained news
reports from seventeen different European towns. Another contender for the
title of being the first newspaper is the Avisa Relation oder Zeitung, which
appeared at Helmstedt in the same year, 1609. A weekly seems not to have
existed until the appearance in 1615 of the Frankfurter Zeitung, published by
Egenolf Emmel. Germany may therefore rightly claim to have been responsible
for both the invention of printing and the beginnings of journalism.
The first French newspaper was published in 1620, not in France, however,
but in Amsterdam. It was in Amsterdam, too, that the first English newspaper
came out, in the same year 1620. This was the Corrant out of Italy, Germany etc.,
which gave regular news reports on the Thirty Years War. The significance of
these sheets must not be exaggerated. There was no ready public for them, they
were not widely circulated and they dealt with happenings that were far from the
experience of ordinary people. It would be well over a hundred years from the
foundation of the first newspaper before it became an everyday part of life, and
only at the end of the eighteenth century would newspapers become a major
agent in forming opinion.74
Two considerations gave a great impetus to the growth of proper newspapers.
In the first place, the state was concerned to publicise its views. Copies of state
edicts were printed and distributed (for the years 1598–1643 alone the National
Library at Paris possesses over half a million different printed papers issued by
the state). The desire to have a regular platform for official views led Théophraste
Renaudot to found in 1631, with the support of Cardinal Richelieu, the Gazette
de France, as a journal for ‘kings and the powers that be’. But the Gazette was also
intended to be a straightforward supplier of information for the average citizen,
so that ‘the merchant will no longer trade in a besieged and ruined town, nor the
soldier seek employment in a country where there is no war: not to speak of the

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comfort for those writing to the friends, who were formerly forced to give news
that was either invented or based on hearsay’. It came out weekly and consisted
of four (later eight) quarto pages. Other states followed suit. Florence got a
weekly gazette in 1636, Rome in 1640, Genoa in 1642, the States General of the
Dutch Republic in 1649 and in Spain the Gaceta de Madrid was first published
by royal order in 1661.
In the second place, news became particularly desirable during a political
crisis and any sort of information was seized on with avidity. ‘From the great to
the small’, says a report on Paris during the Fronde, ‘everyone discusses what is
going on only through the Gazette. Those who can afford it, buy copies and
collect them. Others are satisfied to pay in order to borrow and read it, or else
they group together so as to buy a copy.’ In England the breakdown of censor-
ship during the Civil War gave scope to an unprecedented flood of news-sheets:
in the Thomason collection at the British Library there are only four newspapers
for 1641, but 167 for 1642 and 722 for 1645. The two most important were
the royalist Mercurius Aulicus (edited from Oxford) and the parliamentarian
Mercurius Britanicus. The circulation of the former in London alone was about
500 copies, but each copy was read by several people so that effective circulation
was much higher than the number of sales. If other papers sold as many copies,
the total public they reached must have been large. Censorship was reimposed
with the Licensing Act of 1662, but in the later century when political parties
appeared the demand for tracts was even greater. The common people of London
(where the number of printing presses trebled from 1662 to 1695) became sensi-
tive to the great issues of the day, particularly after the Licensing Act of 1695
abolished prepublication censorship.
Censorship had been strict in the early sixteenth century, as it had been in
medieval times even before the invention of printing. Printing was seen as a
major threat to established authority: it ‘opened German eyes’, wrote the German
historian Johannes Sleidan in 1542. John Foxe commented that ‘either the pope
must abolish knowledge and printing, or printing must at length root him out’.
This optimistic view is reflected also in Gabriel Plattes’s claim (1641) that ‘the art
of printing will so spread knowledge that the common people, knowing their
own rights and liberties, will not be governed by way of oppression’. Every
country had firm controls: in England the first list of prohibited books was issued
in 1529, and in 1530 a licensing system was introduced. The notorious Star
Chamber decree was passed in 1586. One of the first opponents of licensing was

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the Leveller leader William Walwyn, who demanded in 1644 ‘that the Press may
be free for any man that writes nothing highly scandalous or dangerous to the
state’. John Milton made the same demand in his classic masterpiece Areopagitica
(1644). On the continent the Roman and Spanish authorities published guide
lists of forbidden books in their famous Indexes. The Index ironically became
useful to bibliophiles seeking details of anti-Catholic publications: in 1627 the
Bodley’s librarian at Oxford suggested that they be consulted as a guide to books
worth buying.

The modernity of Utopia

At a time of rapid social change and shifting beliefs, one aspiration remained
constant: the yearning for a better world in which humankind would cease to
make mistakes and justice for all would be achieved. The search for a just society
drew on the ideas of the late medieval millenarian clergy (particularly Joachim of
Fiore), on classical mythology and above all on the tradition of the simplicity of
the early Christians.75 Successive thinkers and social rebels looked back to a
mythical ‘age of gold’ which was, assuming that history moved in cycles, to come
again. They contrasted it with their own ‘age of iron’ or ‘iron century’, in which
strife and injustice were rampant. When they proposed improvements, however,
their ideals tended inevitably to arrive at a confusing compromise between the
unattainability of perfection and the reality of human limitations.
In 1516 Thomas More published in Latin a little study called Utopia, which
was not translated into English until 1551. The book described an imaginary
society on the island of Utopia (‘Nowhere’); to this More later added an intro-
ductory dialogue between himself, some friends and a traveller called Ralph
Hythloday, on the main topics of the time. Inspired by medieval monastic ideals
and by the communism of Plato, More presented his Utopia as a place where
people lived in conditions of equality; elected their rulers freely; were all obliged
to work; were guaranteed security, education and leisure; coexisted peacefully
with other states and worshipped without dogmas. Utopia was an exercise in
imagination, not a blueprint for a communist paradise; it made no attempt to be
explicitly Christian because the author was writing in the non-ideological
humanist environment that preceded the Reformation.
The study had been provoked by tales of the lands discovered across the
Atlantic. When Columbus and the first Spaniards reached the New World they

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were astounded by its felicity. The perfections of America appealed immediately

to those who wished to compensate for the evils of the Old World. Montaigne
evolved his myth of the ‘noble savage’, others resurrected legends of the ‘earthly
paradise’. The reality after the conquest was different: the Indians were ravaged
by disease against which they had no immunity, their lands were taken away,
their villages broken up and the men taken off to perform labour services.
Spanish missionaries who still treasured the early vision were horrified. Schooled
in the humanists and in Erasmus, they tried to recreate for the Indians the envi-
ronment they had lost. Vasco de Quiroga, first Bishop of Michoacán, had spent
some time reading and annotating Utopia. As a result he set up at Santa Fe an
entire community based on the practicable principles of More’s book: all prop-
erty and land was held in common, labour was communal, government was
through elected representatives. For the first time in history, Utopia was actually
put into practice. Similar programmes were attempted by Bartolomé de Las
Casas in his settlement of Vera Paz (True Peace) in Guatemala in the late 1530s.
But one by one these schemes collapsed.
After the 1550s the utopian vision faded, to be overtaken by an epoch of
inflation, epidemic and continuous religious conflict: for contemporaries this
was the core of the ‘Iron Century’. The only significant idealist scheme of the
period was offered by an Italian bishop, Francesco Patrizi, in his La città felice
(1553).76 Scholars were more concerned to salvage some order out of the ruins of
their war-torn countries. When Jean Bodin published his Six Books of the Republic
(1576) he disavowed any intention of writing about an impractical ideal state, ‘a
republic in the imagination and without effect, such as those which Plato and
Thomas More have imagined’.
The years of strife were not without practical experiments. After the disaster
of their attempt to set up a sectarian society in Münster (1535), groups of
Anabaptists set about constructing peaceful communities in central Europe,
notably in the mountains of Moravia. Meanwhile, Giordano Bruno in his
Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast (1584) presented a proposal for sweeping
changes in society. His radicalism of outlook, however, tended to be anarchical.
The practical utopias of minority groups were, by contrast, strictly regulated. All
utopias, whether theoretical or practical, depended for their existence on rigid
seclusion from the rest of the world, total uniformity of thought and action, with
a minimum of free choice; collectivisation of functions, and in extreme cases
even collectivisation of the family; abolition of distinctions of rank and wealth;

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and an extensive system of education for all. These principles might work among
small groups in Moravia; they were more difficult to put into practice in South
America, where the grandest of utopias was created by the Jesuits. In Paraguay (a
large area covering a third of Spanish territory in South America) the Jesuits
attempted to liberate the Guaraní tribes from the colonial labour system. In
1611 the local authorities prohibited Indian slavery and permitted the Jesuits to
set up Indian settlements (reducciones).77 By 1676 the Society had 22 reducciones
with a total of over 58,000 Indians who held land in common, were given arms
to defend themselves against marauding settlers (all whites other than Jesuits
were excluded) and had black slaves to do the heavy labour. The experiment
continued until the Jesuits were expelled from America in the late eighteenth
century.
In the early seventeenth century the accumulation of crises seemed to provoke
a resurgence of utopian literature. All the significant writers were convinced
Christians, yet curiously none of their projects was explicitly so. Common to the
schemes of Tommaso Campanella, Johann Andreae, Francis Bacon, Samuel
Hartlib and Denis Vairasse was an emphasis on rational order and a scientific
structuring of society. Knowledge (and therefore education) became the key to a
well-ordered state. Comenius described this outlook as ‘pansophism’, a term he
borrowed from the Pansophia sive Paedia Philosophica, published at Rostock in
1633 by Peter Laurenberg, which drew heavily on the ideas of the medieval
Catalan philosopher Ramon Llull.
Tommaso Campanella (d. 1639), from Calabria, was a Dominican priest and
author of City of the Sun, which he wrote during his long confinement from
1602 to 1626 in a prison in Naples. Presented as a dialogue between a Grand
Master of the Knights Hospitaller and a Genoese sea captain, the work describes
an ideal society without private property, which is abolished because property
encourages acquisitiveness and self-love. ‘But when we have taken away self-love,
there remains only love for the state.’ All things are held in common, all activity
done in common. Living, sleeping, eating are mass communal activities. The
family is likewise abolished, and procreation is controlled by the state. Work is
held to be noble: because everyone works, tasks are completed rapidly and the
average time worked is four hours a day. There is universal education from very
early youth, and the sciences are encouraged. There is no explicit reference to
Christianity, and the physical layout of the city is magical and astrological. The
chief priest who governs the city represents the sun. Procreation is undertaken at

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the right astral conjunction, and the careers of inhabitants are decided ‘according
to their inclination and the star under which they are born’.
In this period of crisis, there were several other schemes for reforming society.
When Johann Valentin Andreae (d. 1654) published his Christianopolis in 1619
his aim was not to describe an ideal state so much as a tiny community of like-
minded people. He conceived of a settlement no larger than a small village: ‘about
four hundred citizens’, he wrote of Christianopolis, ‘live here in religious faith and
peace of the highest order’. There was no private property, and ‘no one has any
money, nor is there any use for any private money’. Manual labour was honour-
able: everyone took part, and the working hours were short. After what we have
already seen of Andreae’s Rosicrucianism, it seems that Christianopolis was really
an exclusivist society and the citizens an elite of intellectuals. Education was
universal, and even ‘their artisans are almost entirely educated men’. Despite the
name of the city, Andreae’s concern was clearly with learning rather than religion.
It was the service of learning that also influenced the great English politician
and scholar Francis Bacon to describe the mysterious island of New Atlantis
(written in about 1624, published posthumously in 1627). The work was left
unfinished and is not strictly utopian. New Atlantis was a monarchy which still
possessed the standard features of property, wealth and rank, and Bacon showed
little interest in discussing social improvements. Its main interest lies in the secret
scientific society (the members of Salomon’s House) that enjoyed a privileged
position in the state. Its members could withhold scientific secrets from the state,
and periodically sent agents out into other countries to learn their secrets. Most
commentators have seen this as a prefiguration of the Royal Society of London,
founded in 1660.
Samuel Hartlib (d. 1662), of Baltic origin but resident in England after about
1628, was interested more in education than scientific learning. A member of his
cultural circle, Gabriel Plattes, published in London in 1641 A description of the
famous kingdome of Macaria, which took the form of a dialogue between a scholar
and a traveller on the theme of an ideal society. Macaria was a monarchy, with a
Great Council that sat annually for a short period. Below this Council were five
lesser councils, dealing respectively with husbandry, fishing, trade by land, trade
by sea and overseas plantations. One-twentieth of the income from husbandry
was taken by the state to finance improvements. Nobody in Macaria held more
land than he could exploit. The kingdom was armed, in order to secure peace
through strength. A college of medicine looked after the health of its inhabitants,

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and medicaments were distributed free. In many respects all this seems more
modern than utopian. We are also told, however, that there were neither Papists
nor Protestants in Macaria: all were nonsectarian Christians. ‘There are no diver-
sitie of opinions among them’, and a divine who comes up with novel opinions
‘shall be accounted a disturber of the publick peace, and shall suffer death for it’.
New opinions could not be published but had first to be debated before the
Great Council, which decided whether to sanction them.
The authors we have noted were men of learning, experience and liberal views,
but their utopias were less a reflection of society’s shortcomings than of their own
private vision. Andreae and Bacon were frankly elitist, Campanella openly exotic.
Plattes’s Macaria was by far the most sober blueprint for society, but it is possible
that concern for reunion among the Churches (one of Hartlib’s chief aims) was
the chief rationale for the work. The only writer to base his scheme for the future
squarely on the errors of the present, and to locate his ideal state not in some
distant island but in his own native country, was Gerrard Winstanley, whose last
and most important work, The Law of Freedom, was published in 1652.
Winstanley’s career with the Diggers had been spent in trying to persuade the
authorities to bring freedom and equality to England. Now in 1652, after the
collapse of the Digger cause, he presented to Cromwell in book form a summary of
his ideas for the new society. ‘I have set the candle at your door’, he addressed
Cromwell, ‘you have power in your hand to act for Common Freedom, if you will.’
The Law of Freedom lacked some of the fire of his earlier published tracts, but in
outline it presented most of Winstanley’s essential ideas. All land and resources
would be held in common by all the people. The economy would be mainly agri-
cultural, practising barter and exchange, but there would be no commerce and no
money. The family unit would remain sacred, and so would family property.
Government wou1d be under a parliament, elected annually. Knowledge would be
made available to all, and education would be free and compulsory. Information
would be circulated throughout the country, and general (rather than just religious)
instruction would be given through the pulpit. Law would be codified and not
depend on interpretation. These radical proposals contrast sharply with the more
conventional ideas of another utopian writer in England, James Harrington, whose
Oceana (1656) was essentially a set of moderate constitutional reforms, based on the
same scientific principles that inspired his colleagues in the educated elite.
The conservatism of late seventeenth-century society was not fertile ground
for the type of revolutionary thought that had flourished in the previous

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generation. The crisis of absolutism in Louis XIV’s France was responsible,

however, for a revival of speculative utopias. Over a dozen projects appeared in
French, the majority written by Protestants who used the genre as an oblique
way of criticising the regime. The Huguenot exile Denis Vairasse presented his
History of the Sevarambians (1675 in English, 1677 in French) as a travel tale of
Europeans shipwrecked in Australia who stumble across the people of Sevarambia.
There are echoes of Campanella in the fact that worship of the sun is central to
Sevarambia; government follows regular utopian lines in being communistic,
and all education is controlled by the state.78 The device of a travelogue was also
used by Archbishop Fénelon of Cambrai in his Télémaque (1699), which followed
the hero as he wandered through various countries and polities in search of his
father Ulysses, but Fénelon’s scheme was less utopian than conservative, a
summons to the classical virtues of the traditional pastoral way of life.
The search for Utopia was by no means an idle dream, as we can see from the
writings of the first prominent Irish intellectual of modern times, George Berkeley,
Bishop of Cloyne and one of the foremost philosophers of the age.79 Disillusioned
by the economic problems in Great Britain, Berkeley in 1723 conceived what
came to be called the Bermuda Project, a plan to found a Christian community
off the coast of North America for training missionaries of both English and
Indian origin. His plan won immense support among the rich and powerful in
London, enabling him to visit America in 1728–31 and clarify that the religious
conversions he was seeking were of native Indians and of black slaves owned by
the settlers. At one and the same time, he supported repression of ‘savage’ races
such as the blacks and the Irish peasants but backed efforts to convert them to
true religion. He looked forward to ‘another Golden Age’ in the America he
conceived and associated it with the extension of Britain’s overseas empire. In one
of his writings on the subject he penned the famous lines: ‘Westward the Course
of Empire takes its Way’. His posthumous fame in the New World was so great
that a century after his death a town in California was given his name.
To summarise, utopian ideas were a reasoned response to the social and polit-
ical problems of the time. Underlying the dreams was a desire to advance beyond
contemporary illusions to the achievement of a perfect science and a just society.
Winstanley, who had seen deliverance from the Iron Age and from ‘the great red
Dragon’ within the people’s grasp, had most cause to hope still for the achieve-
ment of his vision: ‘that we may work in Righteousness and lay the foundation
of making the Earth a Common Treasury for all, both rich and poor’.

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 — ten —
GLOBAL PROJECTION OF EUROPEANS

A small Europe in a very big world; Preindustrial Europe on a world stage;

Europe: the world leader?; Was there a consumer revolution in European society?;
The diffusion of knowledge; Globalisation: disease, environment and climate;
Did globalisation favour the growth of European empires?

A small Europe in a very big world

European societies were aware that they lived in a world of regular movement.
Since the Roman empire and in the Middle Ages there had been periodic inter-
action with other world civilisations. Already from the thirteenth century the
continent was connected via long-distance trade circuits with the Levant,
northern Africa, the Middle East and China.1 The total result of such contacts,
however, was never very significant either in geographical scope or in cultural
and economic impact. Europeans certainly had extensive dealings with Islamic
civilisation. The medieval Crusades brought Christians into direct conflict with
Islam, culminating in the loss of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453.
Thereafter the entire Mediterranean became the scenario for a lengthy military
confrontation.
In contrast to Chinese and Mongol adventurers, as well as Arab seafarers,
preindustrial Europeans tended to remain within their own territories, content
to spend their entire lives in the regions where they were born. Fortunately, they
picked up fragments of information, culture and technology from outside
contacts, fragments that prepared them for new perspectives. For example,
Renaissance scholars took on board what they could learn from Greek and
Hebrew culture; seamen pored over Greek maps in order to find out what the
world really looked like. In addition, there were bankers and business interests
that extended their activity to form small networks that were truly international
and stimulated the growth of early capitalism.

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The big step forward came at the end of the fifteenth century. As the econo-
mist Adam Smith later observed in The Wealth of Nations (1776): ‘The discovery
of America, and of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are
the two greatest and most important events in the history of mankind’. The
pioneering sea voyages to which he referred, those of Columbus in 1492 and of
Vasco da Gama in 1498, initiated for Europeans a contact with other continents
that was primarily based on commerce but then developed into colonial settle-
ment and military occupation, establishing thereby the creation of world rela-
tionships and the rise of new empires. That, according to most historians, was
when ‘globalisation’ began, meaning that Europeans entered on distinctively
new experiences based on contact with civilisations with which till then they had
had limited contact.2
From that point on, however, there is disagreement over interpretations. By
choosing a perspective of international commerce that stretches over several
centuries, some historians find it convenient to divide events into different
periods, viewing the very distant past as an ‘archaic’ phase, while the early modern
period is viewed as one of ‘proto-globalisation’.3 In short, ‘what remains in doubt
is the contemporary impact or significance of these new configurations of long-
distance trade’, though ‘it is far less clear what meaning the new connections had
for those who lived in the sixteenth or even the seventeenth century’.4
European world contact, as we can see from the experience of the Romans, the
Vikings and the cases of Columbus and Da Gama, came about primarily through
seagoing ventures. Seagoing coastal trade had already before the sixteenth century
been the principal mechanism to bring about greater integration of the economy
and culture of regions in Europe: ‘maritime trade contributed to fostering a more
integrated European market as well as a better understanding of otherness, in
material as well as in cultural terms’.5 In early modern times the volume of ship-
ping increased, notably among the Spaniards, the Dutch and the English, and in
consequence stimulated the growth of seaports. The so-called ‘Age of Discovery’
involved a bigger and more varied movement of commodities both between
Europeans and with other continents. The study of this long-distance trade across
the oceans became the first step towards giving shape to what historians after the
1980s referred to as ‘globalisation’. Early imports into Europe were in luxury
items that justified the high cost of transport across enormous distances: gold
dust from across the African desert; spices, silks and porcelain from Asia; then
silver mined in America, followed by pearls, precious stones and hardwoods from

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the New World. The growth of this trade was slow and the impact – apart from
silver – usually marginal to European society.
From the sixteenth century attempts were made to expand the European
frontier into the still unexplored reaches of the globe. ‘The early history of global-
isation is not merely about imperial expansion. It is also about the emergence
and growth of a world economy.’6 There had always been sporadic contact
between the continents, as we know from the surviving literature, but few ma-
terial consequences. At one frontier of the continent, the Russian state remained
for all practical purposes outside Europe. The first adequate description of it was
by the German diplomat Sigismund von Herberstein, whose Notes on the
Muscovites (1549, repeatedly translated and reprinted) was based on travels in
1527. It became the single most influential book on Russia published in the early
modern period and was followed by other western accounts whose primary
interest was the trade and military friendship offered by the tsars.
The Russians themselves had no difficulty in crossing eastwards through the
Urals, but their penetration of Siberia did not involve any significant movement
of population: even as late as 1650 the outposts in Siberia were manned by no
more than 10,000 persons, and these were not settlers so much as mercenaries
and Cossacks employed by the Tsar. The hero and pioneer of the eastern frontier
was Yermak, the famous brigand turned mercenary soldier, who went to Siberia
in 1582. The decades after him saw no heroes, only the remorseless push forward
of troop detachments and fur merchants. The south of Europe was even less
promising a frontier, since the whole of the eastern and southern Mediterranean
lay in the hands of the Muslim powers. Contact was usually military. Parallel
with and contemporary to Yermak was Sebastian, King of Portugal, who like the
Russian perished in an attempt to extend the frontier. Marching out to Morocco
in 1578 at the head of his army, the young king was overwhelmed by Muslim
forces at the Battle of Alcazar-al-Kebir. The dream, initiated by Cardinal
Cisneros’s conquest of Oran in 1509 and continued by Charles V after him, of
extending Christian rule into Africa, was subsequently abandoned. There was no
significant emigration eastward or southward from Europe: the distances were
too hazardous, and the advanced civilisations of the Arabs and the rulers of India
and east Asia were too formidable a barrier.
Westward, on the other hand, there were new and apparently empty lands.
‘Why then should we stand striving here for places of habitation’, argued John
Winthrop in New England in 1629, ‘and in the meantime suffer a whole

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continent [America] to be waste without any improvement?’ The first initiative

into America was taken by Spain. After the voyages of Columbus in 1492, settle-
ment was restricted largely to the West Indies and in particular to the island of
Hispaniola, where the New World’s first European town, Santo Domingo, was
founded. Thanks to the dangers and the high death rate the number of settlers
was at first fairly small, some thousand in 1499. The whole enterprise was
conducted extremely slowly: nearly thirty years – a whole generation – elapsed
between Columbus’s landfall and the conquest of Mexico City by Cortés. At the
end of that timespan, however, Spain had taken part in two epoch-making feats:
the circumnavigation of the globe (1519–22, a voyage begun by the Portuguese
Magellan and completed by the Spaniard Juan Sebastián Elcano) and the over-
throw of the Aztecs (1519–21). Meanwhile the Portuguese had established their
claim to be the most remarkable of the pioneers, with Vasco da Gama’s voyage to
India (1498), exploration of the coasts of Brazil and west Africa, and settlement
in the Canary Islands.
From that first decade after 1500, western Europe used the ocean routes to
make its mark, however small, on the human globe. Efficient shipbuilders and
technical expertise (maps, compasses) helped to ensure success, and the most
significant profits came from what European traders could secure from resources
that were found overseas. The Europeans also began to create for the first time a
colonial system, the most enduring aspect of global expansion.
There were two fundamental features in any colonial system: first, the emigra-
tion of thousands of settlers from the mother country, in order to exploit new
opportunities; second, the organisation of trade links so that benefits could feed
back into the home country. Most of the settlers from Spain were social nonenti-
ties: Hernán Cortés was the son of a ‘poor and humble’ captain of infantry,
Francisco Pizarro had been a swineherd, Pedro Valdivia and Pedro Alvarado did
not even know where they were born. Yet many of them achieved an apotheosis.
Cortés became a marquis in 1529, with the grant of an immense territory in
Mexico comprising over 20 large towns and villages and some 23,000 Indian
vassals. His case also illustrates the point that the Spanish frontier in America, for
all its apparent initial freedom, rapidly began to reproduce the restrictive social
patterns of Spain. The earliest settlers had never wanted this: they consisted of
small traders – shoemakers, blacksmiths, swordsmiths, cooks, plasterers, masons
– who sought new opportunity in freedom. In Paraguay the governor asked that
no lawyers be permitted, ‘because in newly settled countries they encourage

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dissension and litigation among the people’. In Mexico, according to Bernal

Díaz, the Spaniards asked ‘that His Majesty be pleased not to suffer any scholars
or men of letters to come into this country, to throw us in confusion with their
learning, quibbling and books’.
The replication of traditionalist Spanish society helped bar the way to a free
and open society in the New World. Wealth can be a spur to social mobility, but
in America it made the white colonists into a leisured class exploiting the native
population. As new reports of fabled riches trickled through, the settlers moved
into the mainland. ‘Being men fond of adventure’, observed the historian Gonzalo
Fernández de Oviedo, ‘those who go to the Indies are for the most part unmarried
and therefore do not feel obliged to reside in any one place. Since new lands are
being discovered every day, those men believe that they will swell their purses
more quickly in new territory’. A highly mobile settler class needed a secure source
of labour to exploit the land and feed the population: this came from the Indians
and later the blacks. ‘In the Indies’, reported a magistrate of Hispaniola in 1550,
‘Spaniards do not work. All who go there immediately become gentlemen.’
Spanish America certainly offered the underprivileged of the mother country a
new perspective in life, but it did so at the cost of reproducing the inegalitarian
structure of European society. The attempt to break away from the European
pattern and create a new utopian society collapsed by the mid-sixteenth century.
English emigration westward began with Ireland. The plunder of the island
by English soldiers and settlers precipitated the extensive depopulation observed
by Sir William Petty (see Chapter 1). Approximately 170,000 Englishmen and
30,000 Scots had migrated to Ireland by 1672, with further substantial numbers
of Scots – maybe 60,000 more – arriving before 1700. When the English went
to America, they began to construct a society quite distinct from the colonialist
regimes in Ireland and Spanish America. In New England the relevant social
feature of immigrants was their economic status rather than their religion.
Consisting for the most part of small yeoman farmers and lesser traders, they
were – unlike the Spaniards, and lacking a readily available labour force – content
to till their own soil and trade their own produce. As self-sufficient communities
they were from the beginning very close to being a one-class society, without any
landlord or noble stratum above them or any depressed labour force below. There
were several exceptions to this in the early days, notably in Virginia and the royal
colonies, but the dominant trend, even in the proprietary colonies, was socially
democratic and politically oligarchic. The attraction, then, was not so much the

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winning of great wealth, which could be got only through farming or energetic
trading, as the winning of freedom from the social barriers in Old England.
Globalisation promised freedom. The liberty sought by emigrants in the New
World was complete. One could ‘live freely there’, said a character in the play
Eastward Ho, ‘without sergeants or courtiers or lawyers or intelligencers’. Land
was free, rents rare, opportunities unlimited. Sir Edwin Sandys naively hoped that
this environment would produce in Virginia ‘a form of government as may be to
the greatest benefit and comfort of the people, and whereby all injustice, griev-
ances and oppression may be prevented’. Some went to the land of promise invol-
untarily. It was sometimes the practice (not, however, of the Spaniards) to transport
penal offenders to the new lands, though fewer than 180 English were sent to
America prior to 1640. Among those forcibly transported were orphans, vaga-
bonds, ‘loose women’ and unemployed men; thereby, it was claimed with some
truth, ‘many men of excellent wits and of divers singular gifts . . . that are not able
to live in England, may be raised again’. Not without reason did Captain John
Smith in 1624 call America ‘the poor man’s best country in the world’. Much
of the optimism was misplaced, and not all the colonies were as comfortable
as seventeenth-century Massachusetts, where poverty was almost unknown. The
positive aspects of the American experience were, however, undoubted. Liberation
from the feudal structure of Europe, with its class conventions, its economic
disabilities and religious oppression, opened up new horizons and helped to
provoke change in Europe. ‘I have lived in a country’, the preacher Hugh Peter,
recently back from America, told the Long Parliament in 1645, ‘where in seven
years I never saw beggar, nor heard an oath, nor looked upon a drunkard. Why
should there be beggars in your Israel when there is so much work to do?’
Though movements of population out of Europe could be impressive, few
can be measured with any accuracy. From Portugal about 2,400 men a year are
believed to have emigrated to India in the first quarter of the sixteenth century.
In mid-century the Portuguese emigration to Brazil and the Atlantic took over
3,000 men a year. Since Portugal had a population of only just over a million, the
drain was serious, mitigated, however, by the fact that two-thirds of those leaving
for Asia managed to return. Totals for the numbers of Spaniards emigrating to
America are problematic, and frequently exaggerated. The official documenta-
tion is deficient, and there was considerable unauthorised emigration. In the half
century between the discovery of America and 1550, some 150,000 Spaniards
probably crossed the Atlantic; in the whole sixteenth century the total was

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possibly around 250,000. As in the case of Portugal, a very high proportion

returned, a factor too frequently forgotten.
The northern European nations did not begin to send emigrants on any
considerable scale until the seventeenth century, when perhaps some 200,000
emigrated to North America and the Caribbean. Between 1620 and 1640, about
80,000 English emigrated to North America and the West Indies. It is possible
that between 1600 and 1800 about a million Netherlanders left their homeland
to go and work in Asia for the Dutch East India Company (Vereenige Oost-
Indische Compagnie, or VOC). The distances involved were enormous: crossing
the Atlantic took several months, and voyages from England to India averaged
around eight months, making round trips in both cases a terrible ordeal. In that
period both English and Spaniards had a decided preference for the New World.
By around 1800 English North America (including what became Canada) had
around 4.5 million whites and Spanish America around 4 million. In purely
numerical terms, of course, the most significant global movement of population
was that between Africa and the New World, in the form of the slave trade, on
which we have touched in Chapter 8. As with the population transfer from
northern Europe, Africans took with them their entire biological and cultural
heritage: their customs, diseases, plants, languages, rituals and belief systems.
Global contact changed the horizons of people in Europe and challenged
them to face the open world. It was the outside world that offered an initiative
to individuals such as the amazing English traveller Elizabeth Marsh, whose
family links in the mid-eighteenth century took her halfway across the globe over
the world’s oceans.7 In perspective, there were at least four significant differences
between European contacts with America and with Asia. First, in America the
initial contact was with cultures that were disadvantaged by having primitive
economies and technology; it was therefore easy for European invaders to loot
and enslave. This could not happen in Asia, where civilisations were advanced
both economically and technologically, forcing Europeans to be on their best
behaviour. Asian spiritual capacity was shown by the ability of Confucianism,
Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam to consistently resist the pretensions of Christian
missionaries.
Second, in America the peoples were not equipped to go to sea and were
unable to defend themselves against the ocean-going Spaniards and English; by
contrast, in Asia all the maritime peoples were militarily superior in prowess to
Europeans. Chinese seagoing vessels consistently outnumbered and outclassed

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any naval power offered by the Spanish colonisers. Third, Europeans involun-
tarily introduced new diseases into biologically isolated America and contributed
to wiping out a good part of its population; in Asia, where the population had a
long history of contact with other peoples, biological defences were stronger and
no pandemics took place. Fourth, in America the massive immigration of settlers
and of slaves, together with the appalling rate of native depopulation, changed
forever the demography of the continent; whereas in Asia the immigrants were
far fewer and unable to provoke any change in demographic evolution.

Preindustrial Europe on a world stage

The new trade contacts between nations, the regular (but limited) exchange of
goods and the long-term transfer of settlers make it evident that the history of
Europe from about 1500, if not even earlier, can no longer be written within the
confines of one continent. Nor, by the same token, can the history of Asia and of
America be written without taking into account the activity of European traders
and colonists. ‘Globalised’ interaction of some sort, we may recognise, was coming
into existence. Europeans communicated to the globe, just as the rest of the globe
was anxious to communicate with Europe. Europeans were of course by no means
the unique cultural, economic and political motor of the modern world, when we
consider that they came into contact with peoples who from several points of view
were more developed, cultured and powerful than they were. The process has been
perceived in very different ways.8
Scholars today tend to focus attention on two substantially different
approaches to the concept of ‘global’ in the context of preindustrial Europe. On
the one hand, the focus is on economics and trade: historians argue that a global
process means primarily an increase in the mutual trade of commodity goods
between continents, leading to corresponding changes in market structures and
the standard of living. However, they are aware that applying the concept of
globalisation to precapitalist Europe may be misleading because of imprecisions
caused by inadequate factual data and unconvincing chronology.9 Effective
globalisation is therefore seen as coming only after industrialisation in parts
of Europe in the nineteenth century. The globalisation that we perceive in today’s
technological world is an obviously different phenomenon that has almost
nothing in common with the concept when applied to undeveloped early modern
Europe.

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On the other hand, for many other historians ‘global’ may refer quite simply
to an increase in contact and in the interchange of goods, services and percep-
tions, both within the continent and between continents. In this latter sense, a
study of globalisation in preindustrial Europe becomes transformed less into a
history of trade, markets and capital accumulation than into a survey of the
consumption of goods received from outside, and the significance of that supply
both for the suppliers and for the consumers.10 This ‘soft’ perspective of globali-
sation has been extended also to other aspects of the human habitat that brought
continents together, such as geography, climate, biology and disease. It is easy to
guess that in studying such broad aspects a serious problem facing the researcher
can be the lack of precise data and method, an imprecision that has encouraged
dubious and overoptimistic generalisations.11
The two approaches – emphasis on the economics of trade, or simply on the
social impact of the items transported – are based on the fundamental consider-
ation that world population was increasing and that higher demand for products
was stimulating trade between nations. The demand in Europe for certain goods
produced overseas became important in the period after 1500. Whether we refer
to the interchange of commodity goods or to the evolution of demand from
consumers, globalisation in preindustrial Europe may have been very limited but
what there was can be seen as the significant beginnings of the trade that
Europeans had with two large producing areas: East Asia and the American
continent.
The initial attraction in Asia was, of course, spices. Portugal in 1518 imported
little more from Asia than spices, which even as late as 1600 represented in that
country over 80 per cent of imports by value. By the end of the seventeenth
century, spices continued to be a major item in the imports controlled by the
Dutch and the English East India Companies, but by then other goods such as
tea, coffee and sugar were also important. All such goods were naturally luxuries,
very expensive items that catered only for the rich elites in Europe and had no
effect on the market in domestic goods. The trade was constant, but limited both
in scope and impact, as we can see from an analysis over three centuries of the
vessels trading to Asia around the Cape of Good Hope. The data from these ships
suggest that neither in Europe (the recipients of goods) nor in Asia (exporters of
goods) was there a notable quantity of global interchange.12 At the end of the
seventeenth century, less than 6 per cent of the total tonnage of ships in England’s
overseas trade was involved with East Asia. The famous trade in spices also ceased

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to be significant. The Spaniards, who in practice had to concede priority to the

Portuguese in the spice trade, usually did not (as they still do not) accept exotic
spices in their food, and when they imported spices from Asia they usually re-
exported them to northern Europe.13
America was a more complex story. Multiple studies have been devoted to
what is often termed the Columbian Exchange,14 the interchange of goods, crops,
humans, livestock and diseases between the Old World and the New, which some
historians see as the most important global phenomenon of the early modern
world in terms of economic impact. The complexity of Europe’s contacts with
America has inevitably given rise to considerable debate.15 The most direct contact
occurred between the new continent and the Iberian peninsula, principally Spain,
where the impact was surprisingly muted. Some American plant produce filtered
back to Spain. Vegetables such as the tomato and the potato slipped unobtru-
sively but extremely slowly into the Spanish diet; maize began to be grown in the
Cantabrian provinces and by the seventeenth century was a staple food there;
tobacco spread quickly as a habit and became a lucrative state monopoly. In prac-
tice, none of the plants from the New World made any significant change to
dietary habits in Spain or the rest of Europe for well over 200 years.
The real impact in Spain came from imports of American treasure, which
soon accelerated price inflation and had a corrosive effect, weakening those
sections of Spanish society with fixed incomes but benefiting those who could
adapt to and profit from the new situation: it therefore became a primary cause
of social change.16 By the end of the sixteenth century, the bulk of the world’s
silver came from mines in America and acted as the principal stimulant for
global commodity interchange. It was also much sought after by European
merchants who introduced their manufactured goods into Spain in order to
receive silver in exchange. In the same period, Spain’s American colonists sent
quantities of silver across the Pacific to Manila, from where it was sent to China
in exchange for Asian goods. An extensive system of global trade was set in
motion,17 its nexus curiously enough in the faraway Philippines. The total
volume involved was, however, very modest, representing a minute percentage of
economic output in Europe. In terms of overall European trade, the basic reality
is that there was before 1750 only a limited intercontinental transfer of goods:
both production and consumption took place locally, and goods seldom moved
beyond continent borders. An exception to this was Spain, where a high propor-
tion of manufactured European goods entered the country before being sent on

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to America, where the settlers were creating a substantial demand for clothing
they could not obtain in the New World.
Apart from silver, the goods that came to Europe from America had virtually
no impact on economic development. In addition to precious metals the main
Atlantic imports into Europe between 1600 and 1800 were coffee and sugar
(two crops that were originally from the southern sector of the Old World), but
they were consumer goods that did not affect domestic production. The growing
role of colonial goods can be seen from the trade figures. In the Port of London,
one of Europe’s biggest centres for world commerce, plantation crops from
America accounted by 1700 for a fifth of incoming trade and a third of re-
exports to mainland Europe. At that date, sugar and tobacco were the port’s
biggest imports from America by value.18

Europe: the world leader?

The present narrative inevitably gives most attention to the part played by
Europe in the development of global contacts. This perspective logically takes
into consideration the long timespan of several centuries that it cost Europe to
arrive at establishing a position of economic and political pre-eminence in the
world. Many writers have placed emphasis on this pre-eminence (termed ‘the
Rise of the West’) and have presented the notion of globalisation as part of a
European success story.19 Europe, it has been argued, was first; Europe changed
the face of the globe. There is no doubt that Europe took the initiative: the
Chinese at one period had more shipping, but none of their vessels traded to
Europe; the Hindu and Muslim rulers in the Indian Ocean took their trade to
the eastern Mediterranean but they never ventured into west European waters.
The western Europeans, by contrast, were actively there in east Africa, in Calicut,
in Maluku. They were of course only a tiny presence compared to Asia. It has
been calculated that around 1500 the economic output of the states that consti-
tuted the Indian subcontinent alone was around 40 per cent greater than all that
of western Europe. Even more impressive, their output was 100 times greater
than that of Portugal. Europe was a dwarf, Asia a giant.
Why then were European initiatives so successful in the long run? Scholars
committed to the Eurocentric approach have come forward with suggestions to
explain the continent’s enterprise and dominance.20 They have pointed to the
unique development in Europe of capitalist techniques (such as banking), of

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religious zeal, of political institutions such as the nation state and of superior
weaponry. They have also emphasised that between the sixteenth and the nine-
teenth centuries Europeans embarked on a cultural initiative consisting of:

a massive taxonomical exercise in which they named the parts and inhabi-
tants of the world; mapmakers identified and named the world’s seas,
harbours, forests and climate regimes; identified the cultural traits of ethnic
groups in all the world’s regions; classified and named the world’s trees,
bushes, grasses and flowers; named the world’s domestic and wild animals,
birds and fish. During this period the new sciences of botany, zoology and
geology began to take shape.21

This Eurocentric view offers material for extensive debate. It has in many
respects given way to the less chauvinist but probably better documented conclu-
sion that trading activities backed by the small nations of western Europe –
monopolies such as those attempted by Spain in the Atlantic or the VOC in east
Asia – ‘formed the first stage of European penetration of and continuous inter-
action with the wider world’, which led on to radical transformations mainly in
the period after 1750.22 Changes in Europe followed on from fragile global
contacts, but they took up to three centuries to become significant. Where
Europeans eventually managed to impose themselves on other peoples, it was
not because of their superior expertise but because the process of contact between
civilisations developed in their favour, helped by important developments such
as the Industrial Revolution in England after the late eighteenth century.
Early modern European merchants were, of course, seeking sources of wealth
in other continents, in cultures that were often more sophisticated than theirs
and whose part in the process of globalisation was not merely passive. The part
played by non-Europeans in the evolution of early globalisation was crucial, but
they did not always have the good fortune to benefit from it. Indeed, the balance
was often tilted against them. For example, the European search from the
fifteenth century onwards for gold and slaves in west Africa contributed to
the growth of sectors of the European economy.23 But that growth meant that
the European merchants who exploited Africa’s resources effectively contributed
to the underdevelopment of Africa.24
Similar arguments have been applied to Asia, which to begin with had trading
and manufacturing centres far superior to those in Europe. When the Portuguese

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traders arrived in India, they had to compete against commercial networks that
were already controlled by Asian rulers and merchants. Muslim traders, in fact,
were already carrying spices from Asian centres to the eastern Mediterranean.
Asia had its own interregional networks and its own global trade contacts, which
made it a desirable prize for a multitude of reasons. Led by its economic giant
China, Asia boasted not only centres of production, but also impressive naval
resources that far outclassed the shipping resources of western Europe. In short,
the extensive, well-organised and generally prosperous regions of east Asia
enjoyed levels of wealth, culture and technology that played a crucial part in the
process of globalisation.
By the end of the eighteenth century, however, Asia took a different path of
evolution, entering upon what one historian has called a ‘divergence’.25 In the
approximately two centuries of contact with Asia during the early modern
period, Europe experienced few significant economic changes caused by globali-
sation, but its evolution began to diverge towards industrial growth, a develop-
ment that did not happen in Asia. In the enormous land mass of the Chinese
empire, for example, it was impossible to bring about the changes experienced in
Europe. Western developments in technology in the eighteenth century were not
matched elsewhere. The Indian subcontinent, in particular, faced obstacles that
the Europeans, who were at the same stage of social development, did not have.26
At the same time, as seen specifically by advances in agriculture and in factories,
areas of north-western Europe (notably, England) began to display a techno-
logical leadership that placed them at the forefront of human advance and
produced the Industrial Revolution.

Was there a consumer revolution

in European society?

As we have seen, the scope of globalisation can be approached not only through
the prism of trade balances but also through the theme of distributing consumer
goods. European merchants captured some trade with the east as well as devel-
oping an Atlantic trade network. The benefits of the new trade have been well
documented, with rising consumption of new imports such as tobacco, sugar,
chocolate, coffee, tea, cotton and porcelain. Many of these items became well
established in the European market, but (with the exception of sugar) were
consumed by only a tiny minority, usually from the social elite; they took centuries

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to enter into regular use; and had no meaningful impact on social or economic
development within Europe. Significant interchange of the world’s goods occurred
on only a minor scale in preindustrial Europe.
However, there were some long-term consequences for the development of
western society. The employment of slaves in the production of sugar in America,
for example, did not directly affect Europe, but as we have noted (Chapter 8) it
led to a growing acceptance of the institution of slavery. Countries which
employed slaves in their colonial possessions – such as England, Spain and France
– received slaves into the labour force at home. In the same way, distribution of
foreign and colonial produce brought in from outside the continent had a by no
means negligible impact on sectors of society. Some historians have accordingly
moved on from analysing the intercontinental impact of globalisation to concen-
trating more on the commodities that were imported and consumed.27 They
have abandoned the economics of globalisation in favour of a more social
perspective. Commodities can be studied, therefore, not simply for the part they
played in an expanding world market, but also for the changes they brought
about in everyday life in Europe.28 ‘Consumerism’ can be seen as a development
in the relationship between people and the products of their environment.
Imported goods, in particular, can be seen as contributing to the emergence of a
consumer society, and as forming part of a possible ‘consumer revolution’, which
a few historians suggest can be dated to somewhere in the eighteenth century.
Researchers have suggested that there was ‘a connection between global luxury,
European consumerism and industrialisation in the eighteenth century’.29 Others
see the circulation of luxury goods as forming part of the ‘civilising process’
proposed by Norbert Elias.30
The interchange of imported non-European items occurred in two broad cate-
gories: foodstuffs (including drinks), and household objects and clothing. The
variety of imported goods reflected the exotic environment from which they
came, testified to the global links between Europe and the outside world and shed
light on the evolving taste and culture of preindustrial Europeans.31 For instance,
an enquiry into the unprecedented demand in Europe for sugar, tea, coffee and
imported fabrics between 1600 and 180032 serves as a basis for commenting on
the possible consequences for social taste, manners and class mobility.

Silks and cottons, coffee and tea, tobacco and opium, tomatoes and potatoes,
rice and maize, porcelain and lacquerware – the impact of the merchant

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empires on European material culture proved profound and permanent. No

less striking were the mental changes, beginning with wonder at strange
plants, beasts and men and culminating in the fruitful cultural relativism that
sprouted from European encounters with Americans, Africans and Asians.33

As it happens, however, the evidence for consumption of goods across broad

sectors of society is very incomplete and it is difficult to make a case for a
consumer ‘revolution’, since only a tiny proportion of the population was
affected. The moneyed upper classes alone were in a position to enjoy the delights
of imported luxuries. This is especially obvious in the case of the first category
noted here, namely food and drink. The well-known importance of the Asian
spice trade (pepper, cinnamon, cloves), for example, is not backed up by evidence
for consumption of spices, which were appreciated (for food, for medicine, for
perfumes) mainly in northern Europe but were not in use among the general
population in any part of the continent. In the second half of the seventeenth
century, pepper formed only 12 per cent by value of the imports from Asia of the
VOC, and fine spices 23 per cent, but eastern textiles already formed an impres-
sive 35 per cent. The English East India Company by that date had over 80 per
cent of its Asia trade in textiles and only 3 per cent in pepper.
In the same way, foods that made their way over into Spain from America
(potatoes, corn, tomatoes) made no mark at all on popular diet and had to wait
a couple of centuries before Europeans began to eat them. For a very long time,
they were mere ‘botanical curiosities’.34 Even today in Spain, the country that
first introduced its cultivation, maize is virtually unknown as a food crop. The
tomato, a quintessentially American product, appears occasionally in Spanish
documents and paintings of the seventeenth century but not in a recipe book
until 1747, nearly three centuries after the contact of Spaniards with the
American continent. The potato surfaces even later as an object of consumption
and is still a marginal item in Mediterranean diets. The hot chili, known to
Columbus, remains to this day almost unknown in the Spanish diet. The impact
of New World foods is habitually exaggerated and usually undocumented, but
there can be no doubt that they made little practical difference to the tastes of
early modern consumers in Europe and became important only after the nine-
teenth century. Of course, the global movement of food was not simply European,
it affected all continents. The Portuguese took American maize to Macao in
1574, as well as other American crops such as peanuts, sweet potato, tomato,

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papaya and pineapple, but, though there is evidence of plants such as maize
being cultivated along the Yangtze, centuries passed before the imported items
became a staple food diet for Chinese.35
There were certainly foods that demonstrated global contact, notably tea, coffee
and chocolate, and basic consumer products such as sugar and tobacco.36 All these
have been the subject of magnificent studies, and the literature devoted to tea
alone is immense.37 The work on sugar by Sidney Mintz binds together the various
processes – plantations, profits, shipping, slavery – that formed the global basis of
sugar production, but at the same time explores how the commodity, already used
in medieval times, affected and modified European society.38 Not only was sugar a
major import into Europe from the various plantations of the colonial powers, it
became an essential component of the diet of all social classes. Improved sugar
production in America, based principally on slavery, pushed up levels of consump-
tion in Europe, where it gave the working classes access to a luxury that under-
pinned their social welfare. Between 1663 and 1775, the per capita consumption
of sugar in England increased by twenty times, but it would be excessive to identify
the increase in this single item as evidence for a general trend.
The second main category of imported goods is that of objects which served
to furnish the European household. Pioneering studies on the circulation of
imported goods in households in early modern France and the Dutch Republic
suggest that global trade made an impact on the everyday culture of many
Europeans.39 A German visitor to Amsterdam in the early seventeenth century
observed: ‘When I saw the storehouses full of spices, silk, textiles, porcelain, and
whatever China and the Indies produce, I thought Ceylon had sent all its
cinnamon, the Moluccas all their cloves, Sumatra and Java all their spices, China
all its rich textiles, Japan its excellent products, and the rest of the Indies its
pepper and silk’. We may admit the exaggerations, but evidence remains limited
and it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that only the urban rich were able to
reap cultural benefit from a global trade that in reality made no significant impact
on the everyday consumption of goods in Europe.
What we know of the trade in produce serves to measure aspects of contact
in an age of increasing globalisation, but it would be more difficult to demon-
strate that the trade accelerated consumer demand, still less created a ‘revolu-
tion’. Every population centre in Europe had its own specific contribution,
London for example being famed in the eighteenth century as a centre of tea
drinkers while Madrid was known as a centre of chocolate drinkers. Madrid as

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the hub of an imperial network was a centre for consumption of colonial

produce,40 with substantial dedication to food, textiles and furniture from over-
seas. Nobles and clergy, the biggest consumers, were particularly fond purchasers
of chocolate, sugar and cocoa. China was the main source in Madrid for house-
hold items such as crockery, bowls and fans. From the late seventeenth century
France also expanded its imperial activity and became an important centre for
the import of produce from America and Asia.

The diffusion of knowledge

In the preceding discussion our emphasis has been on the interchange of food
and of consumer goods that constituted a fundamental element in the globalisa-
tion of European society. However, there is one other fundamental element to
which the scope of this book cannot give adequate attention, namely the diffu-
sion of knowledge. Contact between civilisations increased their knowledge of
each other and therefore across time helped to change their way of thinking as
well as their vision of the universe. The greatest example of this type of knowl-
edge can be seen in a massive work drawn up in the sixteenth century by a
Spanish friar in Mexico. The earliest and still most awesome attempt to bridge
the cultural gap between Spaniards and Indians in the New World was that made
by Bernardino de Sahagún, whose monumental History of the Things of New
Spain, sometimes known as the Florentine Codex, was drawn up with the help
of Nahua aides, who produced a text that the friar later translated into Castilian.
Under Sahagún’s direction the scribes from around the year 1547 recorded an
immense amount of biological information and folk memory, including native
memory about the nature of the Spanish conquest. Twenty years later Sahagún
began to organise and translate the Nahuatl texts. Though he claimed and felt
that he had written the account himself, it was in essence a direct product of the
Nahua memory. The friar’s great contribution was to have presided over one of
the first authentic accounts of the contact between Spaniards and the people of
the New World, an account that remained unpublished in its full form until the
twentieth century.
The Florentine Codex was paralleled by many other writings that brought
Asia and America within the comprehension of the European mind, and by the
same token communicated something of Europe to Asians and Americans. In his
magnificent work on Asia in the Making of Europe, Donald Lach revealed how

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the contact with Asia helped to shape every important aspect of Europe’s subse-
quent evolution. The impact was not always positive.

The optimism of the early explorers and adventurers that the riches of the
East were there to be taken, was quickly transformed into pessimism as
merchants and missionaries confronted the stark realities of retaining precar-
ious footholds and eliminating competition. . . . Once the European literati
began to assimilate the reports from Asia, they became convinced of the need
to learn what they could about the high cultures of the East and to weigh the
new knowledge in their traditional intellectual balances. . . . The bounds of
European art and thought were stretched to include certain of the artistic
ideas and creations of Asia.41

Collectors began to translate Asian writings and to amass art objects, artefacts,
furniture, flora, fauna and handicrafts. Cartography became revolutionised by
the discovery of new seas and frontiers, missionary linguists – notably the Jesuits
– quickly made an effort to master the languages which alone could serve to
spread the Christian faith. Finally, as in America the religions of Europe took
root in Asia: in Goa, Macao, Japan, Luzón and Batavia.
The contact was of course piecemeal and often superficial but it went far beyond
commerce and interchange of goods, extending to every aspect of the natural world.42
Europeans made use of the printing press – still largely unexploited by Asians – to
send back home a flood of data and images collected by their explorers, missionaries,
merchants, travellers, soldiers and diplomats on every aspect of the exotic globe that
now came within their scope of vision.43 One particular science, that of medicine,
had an exceptional role in this picture. To protect their own health, Europeans over-
seas devoted special attention to the spices and aromatic and medicinal plants used
by the natives. Samuel Brown, an English surgeon who was stationed in Madras in
the late seventeenth century, spent his time collecting medical plants and consulting
with local people about cures. He catalogued what he found and published a
discourse on the subject with the Royal Society in London in 1700. Other colonial
nations produced comparable men of medicine, some of whom even served actively
among the pirates of the Caribbean and in some cases managed to accumulate
enough wealth to return home as rich men. Global contact advanced the cause of
medicine. By the mid-seventeenth century around half the medicinal drugs available
in the English market came from the East Indies.44

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Globalisation: disease, environment and climate

The economic interests of traders served to extend international links and

favoured globalisation. The contacts affected production and technology, but
also had an impact on the natural world in which all humans lived. Cultures that
had formerly lived apart now had to share previously unknown infections. One
of the first visible consequences of global contact between early modern humans
was the dissemination of disease, notably the epidemics that appeared periodi-
cally in the generations after the discovery of America.
The best-known case of globalised infection in early modern times was that
of the appearance of disease identified with sexual contact. French soldiers
returning from the wars in Italy in the 1490s complained of having contracted
the illness there; by contrast, others attributed its origin to the invading French
armies and called it ‘the French disease’, morbus gallicus, the French pox. The
French retaliated with the term ‘Neapolitan disease’.45 Its impact was not as
deadly as that of other epidemics of the time (see Chapter 1) but in its early
period was frequently fatal and produced horrifying symptoms. The infection (it
started with genital sores that later extended over the body, affecting both internal
organs and exterior appearance) spread gradually over Europe, from where trav-
ellers and traders carried it to Africa and Asia. The first detailed medical analysis
of what we now call the bacteria treponema pallidum was published by an Italian
physician in 1514. The disease was given the name ‘syphilis’ from around 1530
and came to be identified mainly with sexual activity. The misfortune helped to
dictate moral attitudes to sexuality and to prostitution.46 In sixteenth-century
Germany, alarm in cities such as Augsburg impelled city authorities to set up a
special ‘pox house’ (Blatterhaus) to examine and treat cases. In the Augsburg
hospital (which began to function in 1495) all treatment was free.
The most common explanation offered at the time for the appearance of pox
was that it was brought from the New World by sailors on the ships of Columbus
and disseminated by Spanish troops in Italy. The evidence is firm that its spread
occurred in the generation after the contact with America, but it has also been
argued recently that the disease was already active a long time before in pre-
Columbian Europe, which if true would invalidate the view of syphilis as a
product of globalisation. A recent team of paleo-pathologists has studied a
sample of nine medieval skeletons from northern Europe and through bone
analysis has reached the conclusion that the bodily remains retained strains of
the treponema pallidum.47 This conclusion follows on from the conclusions of

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some previous researchers, who claim to have identified signs of syphilis in bones
from Roman Pompeii and in skeletons from a fourteenth-century friary in Hull.
There are, however, numerous grounds for having doubts about the validity of
evidence offered so far for the thesis that the disease could be found in pre-
Columbian Europe. Most researchers favour the argument for a transcontinental
origin: ‘Columbus and his crew could have transported a New World, non-
venereal treponemal infection to Europe upon their return, which, once there,
could have responded to dramatically different selection pressures with a new
sexual transmission strategy’.48
The globalisation of disease was evidence of a Europe on the move across
frontiers and continents. People in preindustrial times had, of course, no mean-
ingful contact with the natural world outside the region in which they moved.
Yet that outside world could have devastating consequences for them and their
families, as we can see from their surviving comments on natural disasters,
epidemics and calamities brought on by the weather. Scholars have taken an
interest in ‘environmental history’ because it offers us the possibility of learning
how human societies interacted with the natural world.49 It also sheds light on
crucial problems about human resources and human conduct, and in so doing
helps us also to understand issues such as political crisis and economic develop-
ment. The most direct problem of the environment always of course implied
disaster, such as the all too frequent phenomenon of crop failure, which habitu-
ally brought suffering in its wake.50
In an overwhelmingly agrarian economy, the problems related primarily to
land use. The land occupied the bulk of the labour force, and also – through food
crops and animals – supplied the livelihood of most households. The land was
both the principal means of production and the principal source of tax income.
One of the most relevant environmental issues in preindustrial Europe, however,
was not directly about land use but about the exploitation of forests, which had
at one time covered the greater part of the land surface. Already in medieval
times there were protests voiced against the destruction of forest land because of
the extension of arable. Wood from trees, often developed as charcoal, consti-
tuted the principal source of energy for cooking and heating; wood was also the
fundamental material required for constructing houses and ships. Shortage of
wood hit every sector of society, while overexploitation of trees began the process
of readily visible stripping of forests. The disappearance of trees was a global
issue, affecting both economic development and military expansion.

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It has been commented that ‘deforestation figures as one of the follies in the
history of northern Europe’ in early modern times.51 And not only northern
Europe.52 Much of western civilisation relied on wood for its tools, its buildings,
its ships and other transport, and to provide warmth during the winter. Those
who ruled were aware of this and attempted to protect their forests. But tree
coverage was destroyed nevertheless, most importantly in order to establish
arable for the production of food during the Middle Ages. The exhaustion of
forests continued at an alarming pace. A French official in 1721 reported that
woodland was shrinking, wood was being excessively consumed for fuel and
trees were being removed for agriculture. It has been suggested that by the seven-
teenth century only 7 per cent of England’s land surface was forested and only
2 per cent of Ireland’s; and that France lost half its forests between 1550 and the
Revolution. Such estimates cannot be adequately verified. The reality of defor-
estation across the centuries is, however, both visible and undeniable.53 In Spain
a good part of the Pyrenees was stripped of its trees, while the Netherlands and
Scotland were already highly deforested by 1500. Lack of suitable timber in
Spain for building commercial and military vessels meant that materials often
had to be imported from northern Europe and the Baltic.
But despite the problems it is fair to say that early modern Europe did not suffer
an overall crisis in the supply of timber.54 In England there was no general shortage
of wood, though the problem was aggravated by the high demand for timber from
the booming city of London. There were also alternative fuels available. Outside
London, the English by the end of the seventeenth century were using coal as their
main fuel. Belgium by the end of the sixteenth century was also using coal for fuel,
and the Dutch were using peat. Wood-based fuel was cheap in Vienna and in
Strasbourg, where forest was abundant, but very expensive in the Mediterranean.
The environmental issues that we can identify in early modern Europe were
primarily of domestic concern and unrelated to the broader issue of contact with
other countries. Those who came from Europe, however, were beginning to play
a highly negative part in the ecosystem of the lands which they settled overseas.
There were global transfers, of humans, plants and animals, that had a definitive
impact on the extra-European environment. Through their interest in exploiting
the land surface of the lands they colonised, Europeans advanced what has been
termed ‘green imperialism’.55 In the two centuries after the arrival of Columbus,
the land surface of the Americas began to experience major problems. Spain also
helped to alter the animal and biological geography of the New World. The first

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settlers were obliged to import their own horses for transport and their own pigs
for meat, since America lacked any beasts of burden (other than the humble llama
in Peru) and most domestic animals. Over the years Spanish vessels brought to the
New World all the animals a farmer deemed essential: cattle, mules, fowl, dogs.
Three animals in particular changed the history of America: the horse, which
helped the pioneers in skirmishes and enabled them to cross great distances; and
the sheep and cow, which in their thousands occupied the plains and semideserts,
bringing profits to colonial farmers but depriving Indians of land for their food
and thus creating an ecological crisis and an epoch of recurrent famines. Wherever
cattle went, the Indians died; it was a stark and simple equation. In the biological
sphere, finally, a revolution was initiated by the introduction, among a mass of
other plants and fauna, of three foods considered essential to a native of the
Mediterranean: wheat, vines and olives. By the end of the sixteenth century wheat,
hitherto unknown, was the most widely cultivated crop in the New World.
The impact of settler societies on the New World and other territories was
highly complex and not always negative. Europeans were quite capable of tilling
the soil when global contacts took them out of their own territories. It was the
case of settlers in North America and of those who ventured beyond the confines
of the continent they knew. There were settler societies on the fringes of Europe,
where minority groups went in order to escape from religious and military pres-
sures. Ukrainians, Cossacks, peasants and even Germans emigrated towards the
Russian frontier, where they settled and helped to cultivate the rich black earth
of the region.
In the course of dealing with the challenges of nature, some Europeans began
to revise their attitudes to the natural world. Keith Thomas has claimed that this
change was particularly visible in England, where ‘between 1500 and 1800 there
occurred a whole cluster of changes in the way in which men and women at all
social levels perceived and classified the natural world around them. In the
process, some long-established dogmas about man’s place in nature were
discarded. New sensibilities arose towards animals, plants and landscape.’56
Though the subject has been little explored, there is ample evidence for a certain
sensitivity to the issue in Europe.57 One of the most distinguished persons to
state explicitly his concern for the state of forests and the landscape, as well as
having a deep admiration for the cultivation of gardens, fountains and flowers,
was King Philip II of Spain, who tried to imitate for his gardens in the Escorial
what he had seen during his stay in the countries of northern Europe.58

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In England there was, states Thomas, ‘a new concern’ for the environment,
for animals, forests and flowers.59 The vicar William Harrison at the end of the
sixteenth century commented on the improvement in English gardens, made
more beautiful with ‘herbs, plants and annual fruits daily brought unto us from
the Indies, Americas, Ceylon, Canary Isles and all parts of the world’.60 The
philosopher Francis Bacon stated that ‘God Almighty first planted a garden; it is
the purest of human pleasures’. The English gentry were known lovers of gardens
and countryside, visitors from mainland Europe observed, contrasting them
with French and Italian nobles, who preferred to live in towns.
Some scholars have suggested that global climatic factors played a key role in
the story of relations between humankind and its environment. In 1967 a leading
French historian published a study that stimulated scholars to look further into
the role of climate in human affairs.61 Interest in the undeniable role of climate
soon ventured, however, into exotic territory. Some researchers claimed that they
had identified a phenomenon of an Ice Age which is said to have taken place in
early modern times, over a massive time span of four hundred years, and to have
affected all aspects of environmental evolution and social behaviour.62 The
weather changes were so grave, we are assured, that they provoked wars and revo-
lutions in every corner of the globe.63 Peasants in Europe, one scholar claimed,
began to burn witches because it became too cold: ‘most witches were burnt as
scapegoats of climatic change’.
A problem with climate history is that for the distant past it has few reliable
sources available and usually resorts to ‘reconstruction’ based on fragmentary,
sporadic and very localised evidence.64 This is the case with the thesis of a Little
Ice Age, a period of global cooling, which has inspired a number of scholars even
though it rests less on verifiable data than on sweeping conclusions arrived at
through inspired guesswork. The challenge of trying to understand distant ages
through climate has stimulated some writers to develop theories of universal
catastrophe and global politico-economic crisis. A recent scholar has even main-
tained that the Little Ice Age was the culprit behind a tumultuous series of revo-
lutions, wars and famines which ultimately killed off a third of the human
population. Extreme weather caused crop failures, which led to hunger, disease
and forced migrations, which in turn translated to political and social chaos.65 It
is an imaginative approach to our knowledge of the past, and continues to inspire
studies dedicated to the early modern global system.66 However, substantial
research needs to be undertaken before these theories, admittedly both

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interesting and stimulating, can be connected to events in the tangible world of

documented history.
Did early modern Europe suffer from cold? There is no shortage of anecdotal
evidence for adverse weather from Dutch Golden Age paintings (the beautiful
canvases of ice-skating done by artists such as Bruegel) to monasteries’ tithe records
(on crops hit by frost), but random anecdotes do not amount to adequate evidence.
The thesis of the Little Ice Age has been contested on at least two grounds. First,
recent research by economic historians warns that the apparent (though unproven)
cycle of colder temperatures during some periods of the seventeenth century might
be a statistical illusion caused inadvertently by the techniques applied in climate
research. Kelly and Ó Gráda demonstrated that in year-on-year weather observa-
tions there is little evidence that anything unusual was happening in the seven-
teenth century.67 Second, weather fluctuations and trends only seem to systematically
diverge from their long-term equilibria from the late nineteenth century onwards,
when data become more available, and not at any specific time in the early modern
period. A group of scholars from the Royal Astronomical Society, led by Professor
Mike Lockwood of the University of Reading,68 have suggested after detailed study
of the available evidence that there was no unusual ice activity in the so-called Little
Ice Age. Professor Lockwood has stated that ‘warm summers continued much as
they do today and not all the winters were cold’.
In brief, modern global warming appears to be a real problem, but the Little Ice
Age of previous centuries was not, and it is unconvincing to adduce unproven
climatic reasons for the social and economic problems of the early modern world.
The logic might have been the inverse: the harder the land was hit by wartime disrup-
tion and social strife, the colder the winter might seem to contemporaries. Still, even
if the evidence does not support the claim that the seventeenth century saw climate
change as science understands it now, cycles of randomly bad weather might have
been quite sufficient to aggravate a succession of crises. In short, there were frequent
problems but the evidence for a link between weather fluctuations and universal crisis
is not adequately demonstrated and will continue to be widely debated.

Did globalisation favour the growth of

European empires?

‘European imperialism’, it has been stated, ‘was inseparable from the history of
global environmental change. Metropolitan countries sought raw material of all

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kinds. Europeans sucked in resources.’69 The conclusion can be supported by

abundant evidence for the postindustrial phase of European development. But it
cannot be applied significantly to the period before 1750. In that early phase of
global contact, Europe did not have the resources to build empires based on
exploitation.
This can be seen from the example of Spain in America and that of the English
and Dutch in Asia. In the case of all three nations, global expansion, settlement
and trade would have been impossible without the active support of the ‘state’,
that is, the government at home. The state gave legal, logistic and defensive
support to groups that wished to settle and trade in the overseas territories. It was
valuable help that made it possible for colonies to develop and for cash crops to
be produced. But European primacy in the preindustrial world was not signifi-
cantly based on superior resources, nor even on superior military force.
It has been claimed that ‘the key to the westerners’ success in creating the first
truly global empires between 1500 and 1750 depended upon precisely those
improvements in the ability to wage war which have been termed the military
revolution’.70 However, it is by no means certain (see Chapter 11) that there was
any ‘military revolution’ in Europe, and in any case the changes in military power
that took place in Europe did not act as a spur to expansion overseas. Europe
began to make an impact on the world, but it did not do so through conquest.
Interaction between world societies, we should emphasise, ‘was not the story of
one region dominating all the rest’.71 Quite the reverse: if globalisation signifies
anything it is that regions came into touch with each other and shared experi-
ences. It was by no means a crude question of conquest. ‘Early European inter-
actions with Asian empires went beyond mere physical conquest (although there
was plenty of that) and often took the form of didactic exchanges, philosophical
conversation, and argument.’72 In the Philippines and in Goa, for example, the
intellectual interchange between east and west was often mutually fruitful.
We can dismiss the idea of a Europe imposing itself by dint of its superiority.
Spain, for example, possessed the most extensive world empire of early modern
times, but its government did not have the resources and shipping to maintain
control of interchange with the New World or with Asia.73 Spanish historians of
later generations boasted that their country had conquered America. In reality
no conquest could have taken place, for the continent was too vast, the newcomers
too few and the ‘conquistadors’ were simply adventurers, some of them luckier
and more daring than others. Nor could the Spaniards impose themselves by

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offering tempting items of trade. Spain had nothing to offer and succeeded only
because of the consistent support it received from native tribes and even from
other Europeans who helped in the occupation of the Caribbean and in the
mechanism of the African slave trade.
The English and the Dutch had similar problems. Even worse, unlike the
Spaniards they had no direct access to the gold and silver of the mines. By the
seventeenth century they found a practical solution by giving support to joint
stock private companies in Asian and Atlantic trade. The English government set
up in 1600 an East India Company (EIC). This ‘chartered company’ consisted
of traders who were granted a monopoly in trade but, even more astonishingly,
were ‘given’ by the English government territorial sovereignty over the centres
under their control, with rights to raise armed forces, make war and peace and
even make treaties. The companies were the basis both of globalised trade and of
the future empire. They were something much bigger than a mere trading cor-
poration but were also somewhat less than being an extension of the power of the
state. The Dutch government in 1602 followed the same path by forming
the VOC, a private joint stock company that raised capital by selling shares to
the public and was governed by a board of seventeen directors. A Dutch West
India Company was granted a charter in 1621 for a trade monopoly in the West
Indies as well as in Brazil and North America. Subsequently, the South Sea
Company, founded in 1711, was a British joint stock company that traded in the
West Indies and South America during the eighteenth century. At specific times
and places, the English and Dutch settlements felt free to defend their trading
interests by employing military force against the local rulers, killing natives and
burning villages. Selective brutality was the best alternative available in Asia to
westerners who were otherwise at a consistent military disadvantage. Even so,
their activity failed to overthrow the three great centres of Asian civilisation:
India, China and Japan.
The experience of colonial powers such as the Spaniards and Dutch confirms
that we are dealing here not with the imposition of a superior European system
but with a phenomenon that was far more complex, the evolution of world
contacts in several different areas such as ‘long-distance trade, migration, biolog-
ical exchange and globalisation of knowledge’,74 in which the different parties
manoeuvred and plotted to gain the advantage. The illusion of European superi-
ority was in large measure a construct produced by the imagination of Europe’s
artists, scientists and cultural pioneers.

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Above all others, the Dutch in the East Indies were outstanding in their
ability to bring to life the vision of a hitherto unknown universe whose wealth
and secrets they now hoped to dominate. ‘The Dutch produced the leading
accounts of Asia, Africa and America, and made them widely available in English,
French and Latin.’ By the end of the seventeenth century ‘the Dutch were fast
becoming the leading geographers of Europe: prolific authors of literary and
cartographic texts, producers of tropical paintings and colourful prints, promoters
of exotic rarities and imported naturalia’.75 Their astonishing success as traders in
Asia, for a period that in reality endured little more than a century, laid the basis
for the creation of an image of European hegemony and moral superiority that
became fundamental to the way all Europeans thought of their position in the
world. Cultural geographers in the Netherlands fashioned a vision of the globe
that not only satisfied Dutch self-confidence but eventually also boosted the
self-confidence of all Europeans. Their maps, their globes, their prints, their
tropical paintings, their exotic naturalia, their histories and geographies that
were traded throughout the spheres of commerce and scholarship all became
accepted as the standard for all Europeans.76 The travelogues and maps were not
limited only to the area where the Dutch were most active, the East Indies, but
covered the entire known world, including Africa, America, China, and Japan,
and were published in multivolume editions that remained standard works of
reference in Europe for nearly a century. ‘An explosion of books, maps, prints,
paintings, curiosities and other objects pertaining to the representation of the
non-European world, effectively mapping for the rest of Europe the shape of the
expanding globe’.77 It was a global vision that convinced Europeans of their own
cultural, economic and racial superiority. In accord with this conviction, they
began in the early modern period to accumulate treasures from the overseas terri-
tories, looting when necessary and building up incredible collections that they
subsequently stored in their museums. The Dutch were among the most efficient
collectors, to be outdone later only by the British. Amsterdam houses some of
the most impressive collections of artefacts taken from colonial territories, the
Rijksmuseum alone possessing some 4,000 objects.

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 — eleven —
THE RISE OF THE MODERN STATE

The great and chief end of men uniting into commonwealths, and putting
themselves under government, is the preservation of their property.
John Locke, Of Civil Government (1690)

Prerequisites of political power: economic stability and mercantilism; Was

military power the creator of the modern state?; The affirmation of the state:
did absolutism exist?

In the end, as we can see from the attention devoted to the theme in studies, it
was the political regime that made the most visible imprint on the evolution of
preindustrial Europe. The lineaments of an effective governing authority, the
‘state’, began to take shape. There were, in about 1700, varying forms of state
power ranging from autocratic monarchy in Russia to ‘absolutism’ in France and
constitutional oligarchy in the United Provinces of the Netherlands and England.
It has been traditional among some scholars to explore the process of ‘state
building’ in early modern Europe by dividing regimes of that period into two
main categories, ‘the absolutist and the constitutional; in an absolutist regime
the ruler unites both executive and legislative powers, whereas in a constitutional
regime the legislative prerogative is shared by the ruler and a representative
assembly’.1 This approach, however, can fail to take into account the socio-
economic prerequisites of state formation and can unduly simplify the details of
how power was really exercised. Despite their different institutional characteris-
tics, all forms of the state had to rely necessarily on a firm social basis on which
to establish their authority. This basis had two principal features: first, a stable
economy that would provide income for the various needs of power, generally
expressed in war; second, harmonious collaboration of the elites who controlled
the stability of administration.

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Prerequisites of political power: economic stability

and mercantilism

Europe in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries emerged into a
more quiescent, more stable, epoch. Over most of the continent levels of fertility
appear to have stagnated or fallen (an exception was Spain, where the birth rate
rose as though in compensation for repeated minor epidemics). Scattered
evidence exists of a new tendency to restrict family size by marrying later (between
the sixteenth and the late seventeenth centuries the mean age of brides rose in
Normandy from 21 to 24 years, in Amsterdam from about 24 to over 26 years,
in Colyton in Devon from 27 to 29 years). The move to later marriage helped to
control population levels, which however could maintain adequate growth
because the dreaded bringer of mass mortality, plague, had been banished from
northern Europe and would soon (after 1721) disappear from the Mediterranean.
Subsistence food crises were also much fewer in the late century. There were
natural epidemic and harvest disasters – 1693 and 1709 in France, 1696 in
Finland – but on a more regional scale.
Falling demographic levels were accompanied by falling prices. In southern
Europe agricultural output decayed (again, with the exception of Spain). In
Languedoc yield ratios of nearly 7:1 in the early century fell in the 1680s to
under 5:1, in the Roman Campagna they stagnated at about 6.5:1. In northern
Europe the response to what looked like recession was different. The most
notable case was England. Yield ratios of grain in England were maintained at
about 8:1. Since prices were falling and demand decreasing, rather than cut back
on production tenants and landlords preferred to improve and innovate.
Ironically, therefore, the difficult economic climate in England encouraged
investment in the soil. Agriculture benefited from manuals such as Weston’s
Discourse (1645) and Houghton’s Letters for the Improvement of Husbandry
(1681); from the introduction of new field (clover, lucerne) and fodder (turnips)
crops; and from mechanical innovations (Jethro Tull’s seed drill, patented 1701).
The diet of the poor improved, English corn output rose.
Though the late seventeenth century displays some of the characteristics of a
depression, there is no sign that the economy was contracting. Quite the reverse:
as the preceding chapters have noted, this was the early period of agrarian improve-
ment, of expansion in trade between nations, of capital accumulation and the rise
of a wealthy merchant class, of attempts to improve the quality of living.

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Falling prices did not dampen business; indeed, in northern Europe business
activity increased. Bullion from America, far from decreasing in quantity as
historians once suggested, increased. The metals did not, however, push up
national prices as in the inflation of the sixteenth century. The imported silver
went instead into the international global economy and was re-exported out of
Europe by the English and the Dutch to pay for their purchases in Asia. The
English East India Company in l700–1 alone exported over £700,000 of silver.
Dutch bullion exports from Europe to Asia rose from half a million ducats in
1618 to 1.25 million in 1700. It was a period when the foundations of Europe’s
domination of the world economy were laid: the English, in particular, made
spectacular gains in the Atlantic slave trade, the Asian trades and the re-export
trade from the colonies. Within Europe, cash was made more generally nego-
tiable and bank cheques began to be issued (by the Bank of Amsterdam in 1682).
In 1694 the Bank of England was founded; it issued ‘banknotes’ and offered
attractive interest rates to investors.
The economic difficulties of the early century seemed, then, to be largely
surmounted in the period after 1660, which was an epoch of consolidation.
Lower grain prices benefited the working poor and in effect raised real wages.
Entrepreneur farmers, faced with limited profits, turned their energies to inno-
vation and improvement.2 Regular popular revolts were becoming a thing of the
past: regimes now enjoyed greater security. In most western states, the govern-
ment began to legislate for social stability on the land and in commerce. Well
before 1700, some governments adopted tax policies that helped to bring in
income from the two major sources of productivity: landowning, and overseas
trade (‘mercantilism’). Political stability in both eastern and western Europe
favoured the consolidation of the social regime. Gentry and bourgeoisie
committed their fortunes to the land as the necessary prerequisite for social posi-
tion and political office. In an economic climate where direct exploitation of the
soil could be costly, emphasis shifted to indirect exploitation through rentals.
In the east, meanwhile, serfdom was intensified. The state stepped in to
protect the landed regime of its elites. In eastern Europe the ascendancy of the
nobles was not new, for they had long been the natural rulers of the soil. The
novelty was that this ascendancy was confirmed by the state in conditions where
an extension of state power might have been expected. The noble classes were the
backbone of the economy and rulers such as the Great Elector of Brandenburg-
Prussia chose to ally with them against the towns. In Brandenburg after 1660

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excise taxes were levied on the produce of the towns but the nobles were
exempted, giving them an obvious advantage. In Prussia the Estates granted the
Elector an excise in 1662, but this likewise was used in favour of the nobles and
against the towns. The story was repeated in Russia and other eastern lands.
In England feudal tenures and the Court of Wards were abolished by
Parliament in 1646. This meant that the Crown ceased to be the ultimate land-
lord in the realm. Landowners now gained full ownership of their estates. In
1647 a law of entail was first brought in: owners could settle their land on their
eldest son and prevent alienation of the family estate. This prepared the way for
the great consolidations of property in the eighteenth century. When an Act was
passed in 1660 to confirm the measure of 1646, no additional privileges were
extended to lesser landowners. The smaller men failed to win that security of
tenure which the big landowners had obtained, and the way was prepared for
expanding the land market, which had been boosted by the land sales of the
republican interregnum in the 1650s. In that period Royalist sympathisers (the
side that lost the civil war) had suffered confiscation of estates (this does not
include Crown or Church lands) to the extent of about £1.25 million and a
further £1.5 million was lost in fines. A number of people lost their land perma-
nently in this way, but no real revolution in ownership occurred. Many bought
back their own property, and what was unredeemed often went to members of
the same social class. Perhaps the most important result of the sales was the
acceptance of greater mobility in agrarian relationships.
The sum total of this in England was a situation favourable to the interests of
the big landowner. A property franchise made sure that only those with a ma-
terial interest could vote in elections to the Parliament that formed the govern-
ment of England. To protect those whose incomes came from the soil, Corn
Laws were brought in. In 1670 grain exports were allowed, and in 1673 bounties
were granted on export shipments; finally in 1689 duties on corn exports were
removed and were instead imposed on imports.
The picture was similar in other regions of Europe. In Piedmont it was also a
period of aristocratic consolidation on the land. The noble class – recruited from
the old families as well as from successful bourgeois – continued to accumulate
estates and at the same time provided most of the capital for the bonds issued by
the state from 1653 onwards. Clergy and aristocracy together provided two-thirds
of these loans to the state. It was to preserve the economic power of this class that
Piedmont introduced legislation to protect noble holdings. The most important

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step was the edict of 1648 favouring inheritance by primogeniture. At the same
time the burden of taxation on noble lands was lightened, until by the eighteenth
century they were paying virtually no taxes. The power of the aristocracy was
strengthened in all walks of life. Only under Victor Amadeus II in the early eigh-
teenth century were any steps taken to reduce their hold on political life, but their
economic and landed predominance remained undisturbed.
Whether freed from feudalism (as in England) or subjected to it (as in the
east), the land became the mainstay of an aristocratic regime. State protection
became normal policy because the state protected the interests of the landed
elite. Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s famous 1669 Ordinance on Waters and Forests
restricted the rights of the nonpropertied to cut wood, just as the English Game
Law of 1671 restricted the rights of the rural lower classes to hunt.
The unprecedented legislative activity of the state also had an effect on the
formulation of ‘mercantilist’ policy. ‘Mercantilism’ did not exist as a formal
theory: there were no specifically mercantilist writers and no governments consis-
tently practised mercantilist policies. In retrospect, however, some historians
have suggested that the word may be usefully applied to a number of principles
that the emergent nation states of western Europe were putting into practice.
The state seemed to be intervening for the first time in the formulation of
economic policy, and the interests of the state therefore seemed to be coinciding
with the wishes of the merchant oligarchies and the elite producers. In England
and Holland (as we have seen above in respect of the trade to Asia) there is clear
evidence that commercial companies exercised influence on the formulation of
foreign policy.
The state intervened in economic policy for three virtually self-explanatory
reasons: to protect the sources of tax income, to control the movement of bullion
and to protect the trade of its merchants; in three words, fiscality, bullionism and
protectionism. All three aims are most commonly identified with the economic
policy of France under Colbert, but can be found also in aspects of the policy of
most other states, such as Piedmont under its minister Count Trucchi. In prac-
tice the operation of these policies varied considerably. England and Holland
gave less importance to the role of bullion because their enormous entrepôt trade
made it necessary for them to let a multilateral system of financial exchange
come into existence. France, however, with a simpler trade system, wished logi-
cally to maintain a reasonable trade balance and consequently did not like
precious metals leaving the country.

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Was military power the creator of

the modern state?

War was the main financial business of the state, always consuming the largest
portion of government expenditure. From at least the sixteenth century, many
governments invested a good proportion of their taxes in consolidating their
military and naval power, in face of the reality that warfare of some sort was
omnipresent. It has been calculated that the sixteenth century suffered at least
thirty-four separate wars and that there was a war in Europe 95 per cent of the
time, while the seventeenth century suffered wars for about 94 per cent of its
duration. The figures can of course be misleading for all the conflicts were very
local in impact and limited in duration. However, the reality of war and avail-
ability of finance stimulated important changes in armament, recruitment,
tactics and discipline, ultimately providing material for historians to debate the
development of what Michael Roberts in his 1956 lectures at Belfast called a
‘military revolution’.3
For Roberts and others who developed the idea, the chronology, character
and detail of this ‘revolution’ have served to stimulate discussion about weapons
and tactics, notably in Roberts’s own research on the military reforms introduced
in the seventeenth century by Gustav Adolf of Sweden. Since a great part of
warfare before the eighteenth century involved not battles but sieges, historians
have also emphasised how urban fortifications developed from the period of the
Renaissance, specifically in the construction of star-shaped defensive walls. By
the mid-seventeenth century warfare at sea also became a crucial component of
power relationships, dictated less by an urge for territorial expansion than by
concern to protect commercial interests. Various factors therefore contributed
over time to the need for investment in defence, but only governments with
ample resources were able to contribute. Many states such as Spain and Russia
experienced no military revolution of the style historians claim to have identified
in England, Holland, Sweden and France.
Unsurprisingly there is disagreement about the broader consequences of an
alleged revolution and its possible role not only in economy, politics, finance and
society but also in the global dimensions of European activity. In early modern
Europe warfare certainly became more general and armies considerably bigger,
with a possible ‘twelvefold increase in the number of men under arms’.4 The
terrible impact of consequential military violence has been touched on briefly

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above (Chapter 6). There was an impact moreover on the role of the state.
Warfare changed the state itself, and military factors played a key role in shaping
the early modern world. The power and role of the state in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries were enhanced by the regularity of war.5 Several different
avenues were affected. The declaration of war was reserved to the monarch alone;
he obtained sole right to command the nation’s armed forces; and military needs
provided a pretext to raise extra taxes. Possibly three-quarters of a state budget
might be allotted to war (including defence and diplomacy). In the process,
important structural changes would occur at every level. New administrative
personnel would be required; the armed forces might be made more profes-
sional, thereby cutting out reliance on mercenary troops; the regularity of conflict
would stimulate back-up industries (uniforms, weapons, food supplies) and so
give an added boost to nascent capitalism. Recent studies of military reforms in
seventeenth-century France emphasise how the impressive growth of the French
army served to back up French hegemony in Europe.6
Though war might promote state initiative and administrative change,
however, it did not necessarily lead to princely absolutism. War was a process
that obliged princes and nobles within a country to work with rather than against
each other. No modern state could wage war properly without training an officer
class, and in every case the increase in military activity boosted rather than
diminished the power of the traditional elite. In Brandenburg the Great Elector
relied on the nobles for the efficiency of his army organisation. However, the
soaring costs of war also had negative consequences. Far from stabilising the
state, the costs caused profound social conflict over taxes and might eventually
have provoked revolutions against the monarchy. Military activity, therefore, was
not always conducive to state power. Perhaps the only contexts in which military
expansion can be linked firmly with the growth of absolutism are the French
state under Louis XIV and the Russian state in the early eighteenth century.7
From a broader perspective, military activity should not be viewed as a funda-
mental aspect of Europe’s global power. There is every reason to doubt the claim
that Europe’s active role in other countries of the globe was based on military
efficiency. As we have seen, it has been claimed (cited above, Chapter 10) that ‘the
success of the West in creating the first truly global empires between 1500 and
1750 depended upon precisely those improvements in the ability to wage war
which have been termed “the military revolution” ’.8 The statement is impossible to
sustain from the evidence available for the English in North America, the Spaniards

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in South America or the Dutch in East Asia, none of whom had ‘the ability to
wage war’ against a native environment that (in Asia at least) often had far superior
resources, weapons and manpower. And at home, in Mediterranean waters, the
European powers were also easily outperformed by the Ottoman Empire and its
allies, who had more troops, more supplies, more weapons and more naval
resources, until their capacity began to decline in the early eighteenth century.

The affirmation of the state: did absolutism exist?

Historians agree that the emerging state laid claim to be the sole legitimate user
of force in the community, which is to say that, whereas in medieval times there
were various authorities exercising rights of punishment and death, by the early
modern period the public authority and its legal advisers insisted that these
powers belonged only to the central administration, the Crown. The principal
writers of political treatises in France and Spain in the sixteenth century were
agreed on this. In England by the end of that century the word ‘state’ was being
commonly used by administrators to refer to those persons who directed policy
and made decisions. ‘The state’, a modern historian reminds us, ‘is embodied in
offices’:9 political stability was ensured when there was a harmonious distribu-
tion of offices both at the centre and in the provinces. Disharmony, however,
provoked instability, which took its most visible form in upheavals such as the
civil wars in England and the Fronde in France. Some historians a generation
ago therefore took the view that after the mid-seventeenth century (viewed as a
period of ‘crisis’ and even, more doubtfully, ‘general crisis’) the monarchy reacted
against instability by favouring ‘absolutism’. Louis XIV and Peter the Great were
cited as examples of absolute monarchs.
More recently, however, historians have rejected several aspects of the
simplistic view of royal power as ‘absolutist’.10 They do so because political insti-
tutions are now seen to have had a fairly complex evolution. In England and a
few other nations in the north of Europe and to the east of the Elbe, the medieval
elite maintained their unity in the face of the king, who was consequently obliged
to consult a bicameral body consisting of the landed classes (the lords) and the
great cities (the commons). In France and most of the German lands the elite
became split into interest groups, in accordance with feudalism in its most devel-
oped form: parliaments therefore became tricameral, with nobles, prelates and
commons. Together king and consultative bodies represented an alliance of

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interests, a ‘commonweal’ (to use an English term). The tasks of government

were minimal: to maintain the proper relationship between elites (that is, to
secure order and protect property), and to defend the commonweal.
From the late fifteenth century the collapse of feudalism resulted in greater
emphasis on the role of the ‘prince’. Renaissance writers such as Machiavelli,
Baldassare Castiglione, Claude de Seyssel and Erasmus looked to the prince to
bring some order out of the conflict created in postfeudal Europe. The excellent
advice they tendered was, however, often wishful thinking. The princes of this
time were like an only infant in a domestic nursery: despotic and destructive in
the little zone to which he is confined, but powerless to range over the family
house where he is by common consent the most important resident. France and
Spain were still only embryonic nation states and their rulers had very limited
powers in finance and administration, even though in theory their authority was
considerable. Late medieval ideas, adapting the language of Roman law, had
accepted that the Crown should be absolute. Isabella of Castile referred repeat-
edly to her ‘absolute royal power’, a phrase which recurs several times in her
testament. In France it had been held since the late thirteenth century that the
king ‘holds his power of none save God and himself ’; and later theorists empha-
sised that he was the source of laws and not subject to them. There was a vast gap
between such claims and political reality, but the long-standing theory helped to
justify subsequent efforts by princes to free themselves from the control not only
of their elites but also, most importantly, of the Church and the papacy, which
had also made far-reaching claims to political authority.
In the course of the sixteenth century princes tried to put their claims into
practice. The first great casualty was the papacy, which everywhere found its
authority contested, not only by nations (it was against the papacy that Thomas
Cromwell claimed that ‘England is an empire’ or sovereign state), but also by its
own bishops in each nation. Prelates trained in law maintained in France,
Germany, Spain and England that within the realm the Crown had broad
temporal authority over the Church. The Spanish monarchs by about 1510 and
the French Crown by the Concordat of Bologna in 1516 won extensive control
over their respective Churches. The Reformation, when it came to northern
Europe, took several other Churches completely out of papal control. The Crown
did not benefit from these changes as much as it might have expected. Indeed,
the social changes of the sixteenth century seemed to pose new threats to orderly
government: economic and social mobility gave a stronger voice to interests,

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notably the rural and municipal gentry, that sought political power; the price rise
created difficulties for state finance; in some regions (France, Germany) religious
differences threatened to bring anarchy.
Ferdinand and Isabella, who were in every way feudal rulers, adopted in Spain
a wholly feudal solution to their problems by allying with their noble and muni-
cipal elites. For later European rulers the situation was more complicated. Among
the developments which helped them was the emergence of sedentary royal
‘courts’ with their ritual and their chivalric glamour, which created a visible
centre of authority; the reorganisation of laws and the legal system, which
confirmed that legislation emanated from the prince; the growth of a bureau-
cracy, trained in the law faculties of the expanding university system; and the
evolution of a modern army under the central command of the state, in place of
the old feudal musters. Even while these steps were taking place and writers such
as Jean Bodin (Republic, 1576) were maintaining that sovereign power was abso-
lute and entitled the king to raise taxes, make war and peace, and so on, in prac-
tice rulers were careful not to move a finger without receiving support from
sections of the political nation. Autonomous sovereignty was still only an aspira-
tion; ‘absolutism’ was an ideal construction, very little more, in which thinkers
attempted to create order out of the disorder they saw around them.
The case of Isabella demonstrates that respect for the power of the prince was
never in Europe dependent on gender. Though the system of preference for a male
succession was inflexible everywhere, leading for instance in the case of Henry VIII
to the situation that provoked a Reformation in England, legitimacy was equally
given unbending obedience. The succession to the English throne of Mary Tudor
and Elizabeth rested entirely on legitimacy, and the same was true of Isabella in
Castile and Mary Queen of Scots in Scotland. Mary Tudor addressed her nobles at
the Guildhall in 1554: ‘I am the right and true inheritor to the crowne of this
realme of England . . . My father (as ye all knowe) possessed the regall estate by
right of inheritance, which now by the same right dissended vnto me.’ Elizabeth
had to eliminate insinuations of bastardy when she took over as ruler and did so
successfully, with the result that gender as such never became an issue. Legitimacy
was always the relevant factor. When the most famous of seventeenth-century
queens, Christina of Sweden, took over from her father, it was the power of the
legitimate throne that supported her and gender created no problems.
The persistence of absolutist theories is clear proof that Europeans felt a deep
longing for order and peace, but should be viewed as aspiration rather than

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reality. In this sense, the theories are a significant attempt to deal with a real
problem. Governments were obliged to handle their aristocrats carefully. The
Reformation was a powerful spur to the process of power sharing between the
princes and their elites: land-hungry gentry became natural allies of a prince who
guaranteed them the property they had seized from the Church. At the same
time images of royal authority (for example, the magical ‘king’s touch’ in both
England and France which was supposed to heal scrofula) became divorced from
the Church and more laicised. In England Shakespeare argued for a ‘deputy
anointed by the Lord’ whose authority came from God but was not mediated by
the Church, and Elizabeth I declared (in 1585) that ‘sovereigns are not bound to
render the reasons of their action to any other but to God’. Despite such claims
the rulers of the time acted with remarkable circumspection. Machiavelli in The
Prince (1514) had been impatient with the weakness of rulers, and kings there-
after increased their personal authority significantly, but all as a rule operated
within the limits sanctioned by tradition, with few forays into raison d’état.
At the dawn of the seventeenth century nation states were emerging but the
power of the ruler was still inadequate. Kings were forced to contend with dissen-
sion, revolt, separatism and war at a time when the means available to them, in
terms of both cash and personnel, were exiguous. Kingship itself was shaky:
England and France survived a disputed succession, but the northern Netherlands
had rejected their prince (Philip II) and the elective monarchies of Bohemia and
Poland continued to suffer political uncertainty. Muscovy achieved peace in 1613
only after selecting a new dynasty, the Romanovs. All over Europe the privileged
classes, sitting in their regional and national assemblies, continued to dispute
authority with their rulers.
In Upper Austria in 1610 a Protestant lord actually claimed in the Estates
that ‘the people chose their prince and can also reject him, the territory decides
for itself whether the ruler shall be hereditary’. Princes naturally responded to
such claims with doctrines of absolute power. James I, when King of Scotland
produced his Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598), and when King of England
engaged in a spirited controversy with the papacy and its theorists (Robert
Bellarmine and Francisco Suárez) over the right of kings to demand an oath of
loyalty. Although undoubtedly important at the time, the controversy was over
an issue (the relative spheres of papal and kingly authority) that became quickly
outdated. The loyalty of nationals to their ruler, regardless of his or her religion,
was never again seriously undermined by papal claims.

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In a world of shaky authority, rulers asserted their status in at least two ways:
by the imposition of solemnity and emblems; and by the encouragement of
political theorists. The development of emblems,11 cultivated at every level by
municipalities and lesser nobility, became in the hands of the monarchy a projec-
tion of the image of power. From the publication in 1531 of a book by the
humanist Andrea Alciati on images and heraldry, to the creation in 1663 of
Louis XIV’s famous device of a sun with the words ‘nec pluribus impar’, there was
a systematic development of the emblems of state power. A French writer
observed in 1671 that ‘ever since the king adopted the sun as his symbol, enlight-
ened people have taken him to be the sun. To think of one is to think of the
other.’ The solemnity of power was asserted in part by court ritual, but above all
by the construction of luxurious residences, of which the most notable was
Versailles.12 In Versailles, art became a strategy of power, a pointer towards new
frontiers of authority, for the palace and its gardens kept on expanding continu-
ously until the king’s death in 1715.
The early seventeenth century was the high tide of absolutist theory in most
countries, with the notable exception of Spain where Juan de Mariana and a small
group of others reacted against Protestant supporters of royal power by proposing
instead the democratic foundations of political authority. ‘The king’, Mariana
wrote, ‘must be subject to the laws laid down by the state, whose authority is
greater than that of the king.’ ‘The subject is obliged to obey in accordance with
his own conscience’, argued another Spaniard, Cristóbal de Anguiano. In France
the reaction against the assassination of Henry IV by a monk encouraged more
extreme absolutist theories than were current elsewhere. Notable among the
several works that came out was Cardin Le Bret’s De la souveraineté du Roi (1632),
which held that ‘the sovereign command resides in a single person, and obedience
in all others’. In these same years, attempts were being made – by the Earl of
Strafford in England, Richelieu in France and Olivares in Spain – to harness and
rationalise the resources of the state and strengthen the power of the king. Claude
Joly remarked later during the Fronde that ‘France has never been a despotic
government unless it be in the last thirty years, when we have been subject to the
mercy of ministers’. His sentiments are in some degree testimony to the success
of the western European experiments in absolutism.13
Conflict was inevitable because there were multiple and sometimes contra-
dictory sources of legitimate authority. For example, many petty princes and
small state assemblies also laid claim to sovereignty. In Germany while the

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theorist Theodor Reinking in 1619 defended the emperor as being an absolute

monarch, Hippolitus a Lapide in 1640 claimed the same absolute power for each
state and for the Imperial Diet as a whole. In Aragon the kings were unable to
interfere with the absolute powers (including powers of life and death over their
peasants) of the nobility; and even in Castile many lords were virtually sovereign
in their own estates. In Poland the nobles exercised sovereign power in their
lands and blocked the emergence of a strong central monarchy. ‘Absolutism’, in
short, was not exclusive to the Crown; it was not a form of state government but
merely one way in which power could be exercised.
By the mid-seventeenth century, indeed, in England and Holland some
thinkers had moved towards absolutist republicanism. In the decade after 1640
the English Parliament exercised powers far more absolute than any that the Stuart
kings had dared use, and Henry Parker in various writings claimed for Parliament
the ability even to abolish Magna Carta. In 1649 the Rump Parliament resolved
that ‘the Commons of England . . . being chosen by and representing the People,
have the supreme power in this Nation’. In Holland, Spinoza (Tractatus Politicus,
1677) argued that ‘absolute sovereignty is the sovereignty held by the whole
people’, and Ulrich Huber (De jure civitatis) held that the absolute rule of the
upper classes was superior to monarchical absolutism because it was more broadly
based and therefore more stable.
Even while advocating royal claims, theorists were aware of traditional and
practical restrictions on the exercise of authority. Many apparently extreme writ-
ings can, when read carefully, be seen within their context to be realistic. A good
example is Charles Loyseau, who in his Traité des Seigneuries (1610) announced
that ‘sovereignty consists in absolute power, that is to say in full and complete
authority in every respect, and is consequently without superior’. ‘However’, he
goes on, ‘since only God is all-power the authority of men can never be entirely
absolute. There are three kinds of law which limit the sovereign’s power without
affecting his sovereignty: these are the laws of God, the natural rules of justice
and the fundamental laws of the state.’ Similarly Le Bret in 1632, while declaring
royal sovereignty to be unlimited, went on to specify that the monarch must
respect private property, could not alter the succession to the throne and could
not issue a command contrary to divine law. Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, well
known as an exponent of Louis XIV’s absolutism, declared (in a work written in
1679 but not published until 1709, after his death) that the absolute sovereign
must abide by the laws of the kingdom. An absolute ruler claimed to be free

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(absolutus legibus) from subjection to the law but only because he was the fount
of law, not because he intended to break the law. Absolute power implied
autonomy of sovereignty, not despotism.
Were any acts of European rulers ‘absolute’? The question is potentially a philo-
sophical rather than a historical one. In practice it would seem that any royal
decrees issued on the prince’s sole authority might be ipso facto absolute, hence the
strong suspicion with which lawyers in Tudor and Stuart England regarded the
Crown’s right (accepted in a statute of 1539 but revoked a few years later) to issue
proclamations. Outstanding among occasions when governments in western
Europe acted alone and without consultation were those when raison d’état
permitted political assassination (the murder of Wallenstein on the orders of the
emperor is a good example). Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes, often
quoted as an absolute act, is a particularly weak example of absolutism: it came only
at the end of a decade or more of persecution and merely set the seal on a process
that had originated not with the Crown but in the lower levels of the administra-
tion. In practice ‘absolute’ acts are as difficult to identify as ‘infallible’ papal decrees.
Contemporary critics of Philip II, Charles I and Louis XIV felt on surer grounds
when they condemned ‘tyranny’, a familiar Graeco-Roman concept, whereas ‘abso-
lutism’ fell into no recognised category and so could not be easily identified.
By the same token, even though ‘absolute’ princes preferred to rule without
Estates, government without Estates did not in itself signify absolutism. Bourbon
France after 1614 had no Estates General but was by no means short of represen-
tative assemblies. As a general rule, no western governments thought they were
free from the need to consult at least some of their traditional institutions. In
France, though the Estates were not called, Richelieu convoked the Assembly of
Notables; and though Habsburg Castile had no Cortes after 1665 the cities
represented in Cortes were directly consulted on individual matters. In a society
that was a complex amalgam of many different interests, representative bodies
were not the only guarantors of the rule of law. Rulers had to be wary of the
Church, of city corporations, of regional assemblies. States that were beginning
to evolve some form of central apparatus were far from achieving any authentic
centralisation, thanks to the existence of other autonomies within the nation. By
the early seventeenth century the western monarchies all had consultative and
executive bodies in their capital cities, but in the absence of a national bureau-
cracy they were virtually bodiless heads. Even more important was the fact that
the social structure proved an obstacle to the centralisation of power.

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It is too often assumed that where absolutism flourished the ruling elite was
crushed, its privileges removed, the Church subjected, the common people over-
whelmed by taxes. This negative view identifies state power with coercion. Yet
perhaps the two most successful rulers in the period covered by this book –
Isabella of Castile in about 1500, Henry IV of France in about 1600 – became
living legends and won the hearts of their subjects precisely because they used the
minimum of coercion. There is therefore good reason to argue that consent – a
concept by no means limited to the existence of representative assemblies –
rather than coercion was the basis on which the power of the emergent state
came to rest. If the seventeenth century was more absolutist than the sixteenth,
it has been pointed out, it was not because the laws had been changed to make
them more oppressive, but because the old laws were reasserted and made more
effective; any change was political, not legal.14
Perhaps the most convincing way to view royal ‘absolutism’ is as an overall
supervising authority arbitrating between conflicting interests. Theorists such as
Loyseau and Le Bret felt a need to elevate the executive authority of the Crown
and in so doing they expanded on medieval principles of sovereignty. But at
every stage they recognised that interests such as the Church, the nobility and
the law must be respected. In practice, of course, kings in numberless individual
instances broke all the rules: they usurped ecclesiastical rights, arrested and
executed nobles, levied taxes and broke laws ranging from regional laws to laws
regulating the succession. They were able to do this not because they were strong
but because they were able to play off interests against each other.
A particularly telling example is the way in which the Crown at the French
Estates General of 1614 was able to divide the Estates and annihilate their role
in politics; thereafter the First and Second Estates were summoned separately,
the Third not at all. Similarly the monarchy survived the Fronde not because it
was strong but because its opponents were divided. From the early sixteenth to
the late seventeenth centuries, the undoubted increase in royal authority was
achieved without any significant diminution in the power of elites. This was
possible because power shifted within the ruling class from the traditional to the
recently ennobled aristocracy. The state was able to exploit this shift of power
and use it to its own advantage.
The power of elites altered but did not diminish. In part this was because the
nobility everywhere retained its monopoly of the bulk of national wealth; in part
also because newer status groups – the noblesse de robe, the gentry – broadened

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the hold of the upper classes on political and economic life. In these circum-
stances the Crown could hold and increase its authority only as an arbiter
between interest groups, gratifying sections of the elite with honours and offices
while taking care to protect its own position as the source of patronage. Progress
towards ‘absolutism’ thus involved compromises at every stage. In times of
strained relations the elite took refuge in traditional laws, thus making the Crown
seem to be the aggressor. In Aragon the appeal (in 1591 and 1640) was to the
fueros (charters or codes of law); in England a tradition of Common Law was felt
to be the force by which, as Parliament declared in 1642, ‘the nobility and gentry
enjoy their estates, are protected from any sort of violence and power, and differ-
enced from the meaner sort of people’. These, the meaner sort, in their turn
responded by rebellions that could be used by some of their leaders against the
fiscal pretensions of the ‘absolute’ state.
One contradiction in early absolutism, then, was that more authority was
being gained by the Crown (in France, for example, aristocratic criminal activity
declined during the seventeenth century), but effective political power remained
in the hands of both the old and the new elites. Attempts by the Crown to
achieve greater autonomy led everywhere to a crisis confrontation. The outcome
has sometimes, and unsatisfactorily, been presented as a victory of constitution-
alism over the prince in parts of northern Europe (England, the United Provinces)
and of the prince over the constitution in the rest of the continent. In practice
there was no outright victory by either side. Though revolutionary acts did take
place – in England the abolition of the system of conciliar government, in France
the subordination of the Parlement of Paris and later of the provincial estates –
the social structure remained untouched and immobile, thus guaranteeing both
continuity and stability. In the more favourable economic conditions of the late
century, ‘absolutism’ changed its character. In the early seventeenth century
absolutism was an extension of earlier attempts to consolidate authority in the
person of the monarch. In the later period it had become a device to consolidate
authority jointly in the monarch and the political nation.
The drift towards the newer absolutism was accompanied by the demise of
representative government. However, the disappearance of traditional institu-
tions was not necessarily a sign of tyranny. The Diet in Brandenburg lost its
effective power after 1653, the Estates of Prussia after 1663. The last Zemsky
Sobor met in Russia in 1653, the last Danish parliament in 1660. The Parlement
of Paris was silenced in the 1660s, the French provincial Estates in the 1670s.

359
 EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN SOCIETY

Habsburg Castile had no Cortes after 1665, Sweden and Piedmont became
absolutist in the 1680s. It would appear that freedom was being silenced all over
Europe. In reality most of these bodies concurred (with an occasional protest) in
their own demise. Their disappearance did little to change the balance of power.
In the provinces the local elites were still in firm control. And, even when there
were no active Estates, every rational government had to continue to consult
regularly with municipal corporations, courts of justice, trade guilds and other
national and regional bodies. ‘Absolutism’ therefore succeeded for a while because
it appeared to reconcile the interests of the elite and of the state. Only when it
failed to keep in touch with opinion (this was why criticism arose in the later
years of Louis XIV) did it begin to seem tyrannical.
No political class in Europe would have been so foolish as to sign away all its
political privileges, and no king was so foolish as to believe that absolute power
gave them the right to act against the economic interests of the elite. The theore-
ticians, such as Spinoza in his Tractatus (1677) or Peter Schumacher in the Danish
‘Lex Regia’ of 1709, envisaged the monarch as an epitome of state power: the
king was the state, in the sense claimed by Louis XIV. But, as with the omnipo-
tent modern state, the absolute monarch was meant to be a reconciler of interests.
In practical terms this meant that the monarch must respect the interests, above
all the property interests, of the elite. This is what Bossuet, Louis XIV’s greatest
apologist, meant when he argued that ‘what is termed legitimate government is
by its very nature the opposite of arbitrary government’. Viewed in these terms,
the most realistic political philosopher of the new type of government was not the
idealistic Hobbes with his Leviathan (1650), but the nonauthoritarian Locke,
with his claim in the Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690) that ‘the great
and chief end of men . . . putting themselves under government, is the preserva-
tion of their property’. Despite the many conceptual differences between Locke
and the continental Europeans, his was the most faithful expression of the views
of the propertied elite. And despite institutional differences the social basis of
authority in England was not greatly different from that in France or Denmark.
Certainly the propertied citizens of these countries were no more enslaved than
Englishmen were, despite the decay of their representative bodies.
The rhetoric of absolutist theory should not therefore be confused with the
reality of social experience. Though absolutism might mean the rule of a single
person, that person could not maintain power without the aid of the social struc-
ture: it was the governing class that supplied officers for the army, administrators

360
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for the machinery of state. Agrarian developments of the later seventeenth

century gave landlords a greater part in profits and in the political process: the
state seemed to work hand in hand with the producing elite, thereby assuring
dominance to the gentry in England, the Junkers in Prussia, the rural nobility in
France. The stability of the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries
arose from a broadening of the previously narrow social base on which state
power had precariously rested. Rebellions of the elite, such as the dynastic rebel-
lion of the Scottish Jacobites in 1745, were stirred in part by regional sentiment
but were now virtually a thing of the past. Social and political relationships
settled into the mould that produced, on one hand, the material advances of the
Industrial Revolution in England, and, on the other, the cultural perspectives of
the French Enlightenment. Early modern Europe was about to advance into a
yet more complex era that brought about profound changes in society and in the
way that people perceived the world.

361
 ENDNOTES

Chapter 1 Identities and Horizons

1. The original version of Münster’s map was produced by Johann Putsch in 1537.
2. Stéphane Mund, Orbis Russiarum: genèse et développement de la représentation du monde ‘russe’
en Occident à la Renaissance, Geneva: Librairie Dros SA, 2003; Marshall T. Poe, A people born
to slavery: Russia in early modern European ethnography, 1476–1748, Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2000.
3. Philippe Braunstein, ‘Confins italiens de l’Empire: nations, frontières et sensibilités européenne
dans la seconde moitié du XVe siècle’, and Denis Crouzet, ‘Le concept de barbarie’, in La
Conscience Européenne au XVe et au XVIe siècle, Paris: L’Ecole, 1982.
4. Roger Crowley, Conquerors: how Portugal forged the first global empire, New York: Random
House, 2015.
5. K.M. Panikkar, Asia and western dominance: a survey of the Vasco da Gama epoch of Asian history
1498–1945, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1953.
6. Werner Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus, 3 vols, Munich and Leipzig: Duncker &
Humblot, 1916–27, vol. II, part 1.
7. Paul Slack, The invention of improvement: information and material progress in seventeenth-
century England, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 23–5.
8. A ‘bill of exchange’ was a credit transfer of that period.
9. Thomas Betteridge, ed., Borders and travellers in Early Modern Europe, London: Ashgate,
2017.
10. Charles Tilly, ed., The formation of national states in western Europe, Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1975, is a brilliant range of essays, written from a particular perspective.
11. Wolfgang Reinhard, ed., Power elites and state building, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1996, pp. 3–4.
12. Charles Tilly, Coercion, capital and European states, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990.
13. Christian Desplat, ‘Louis XIII and the union of Béarn to France’, in M. Greengrass, ed.,
Conquest and coalescence: the shaping of the state in early modern Europe, London: Edward
Arnold, 1991, pp. 68–83.
14. Cf. Desplat, ‘Louis XIII’, p. 81.
15. Cf. David Rollison, The local origins of modern society: Gloucestershire 1500–1800, London:
Routledge, 1992, chap. 5, for the national and local interests of the Trotman family.
16. Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: the making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees, Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1989.
17. Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities, London: Verso, 1991.
18. Konstantin Erusalimsky, ‘The notion of People in medieval and early-modern Russia’, Sensus
Historiae, vol. III (2011–12), pp. 9–34.
19. A recent but somewhat confused discussion is that by Adrian Hastings, The construction of
nationhood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
20. Cf. the discussion in Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: the modernization of rural France,
1870–1914, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976, p. 113.

362
 NOTES TO PP. 11–20

21. R.A. Houston, Literacy in early modern Europe: culture and education 1500–1800, 2nd edn,
London: Longman, 2002, chap. 9.
22. Alan Patten, ‘The humanist roots of linguistic nationalism’, History of Political Thought,
vol. 27, 2 (2006), pp. 221–64, quote at p. 224.
23. Peter Burke, ‘Heu domine, adsunt Turcae: a sketch for a social history of post-medieval Latin’,
in P. Burke and R. Porter, Language, self and society, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991, p. 34.
24. Anthony Grafton, Worlds made by words: scholarship and community in the modern west,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2009, p. 152.
25. See Henry Kamen, ‘The myth of a universal language’ in Imagining Spain: historical myth and
national identity, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2008, pp. 150–71.
26. Cited in Klaus Garber, ed., Nation und Literatur im Europa der Frühen Neuzeit, Tübingen: De
Gruyter, 1989, pp. 439–41.
27. G. Marker, Publishing, printing and the origins of intellectual life in Russia, 1700–1800,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985, p. 25.
28. Jane Dawson, ‘Anglo-Scottish Protestant culture and integration in Britain’, in Steven Ellis and
Sarah Barber, eds, Conquest and union: fashioning a British state, 1485–1725, London:
Longman, 1995, pp. 87–114.
29. Aspects of the theme are considered by Peter Burke, Languages and communities in early modern
Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
30. P. Higonnet, ‘The politics of linguistic terrorism’, Social History, 5 (1980), p. 49.
31. Cited in Fernand Braudel, The identity of France, vol. I, London: Harper & Row, 1988, p. 86.
32. Yves Castan, Honnêteté et relations sociales en Languedoc (1715–80), Paris: Plon, 1974.
33. Jonathan Steinberg, ‘The historian and the Questione della Lingua’, in P. Burke and R. Porter,
The social history of language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 198–209.
34. Cf. R. Scribner, ‘Communities and the nature of power’, in R. Scribner, ed., Germany: a new
social and economic history, London: Arnold, 1996, pp. 291–325.
35. Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680, London: Routledge, 1982, p. 62.
36. Randolph C. Head, Early modern democracy in the Grisons, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995.
37. Cf. P. Blickle, Communal reformation: the quest for salvation in sixteenth-century Germany,
Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1992, p. 178.
38. Cf. S. Imsen and G. Vogler, ‘Communal autonomy and peasant resistance in northern and
central Europe in P. Blickle, Resistance, representation and community, Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1997, p. 15.
39. Jerome Blum, ‘The internal structure and polity of the European village community from the
fifteenth to the nineteenth century’, Journal of Modern History, 43 (1971), pp. 541–76.
40. Sheilagh Ogilvie, ‘Institutions and economic development in early modern central Europe’,
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 5 (1995), p. 230.
41. J. Smets, ‘Les chemins du pouvoir dans le village languedocien’, in Libertés locales et vie
municipale en Rouergue, Languedoc et Roussillon, Millau: Fédération historique du Languedoc
méditerranéen et du Roussillon, 1988, p. 187.
42. Hilton L. Root, Peasants and king in Burgundy: agrarian foundations of French absolutism,
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987, pp. 22–44, 208–30.
43. Heidi Wunder, ‘Peasant communities in medieval and early modern Germany’, Recueils de la
Société Jean Bodin, vol. XLIV (1987), p. 46.
44. Henri Cavaillès, ‘Une fédération pyrénéenne sous l’Ancien Régime: les traités de lies et de
passeries’, a classic study of 1910 republished in Lies et Passeries dans les Pyrénées, Tarbes: Société
d’études des Sept vallées et Archives départementales, 1986, pp. 1–67.
45. Christiane Desplat, La guerre oubliée: guerres paysannes dans les Pyrénées (XIIe–XIXe siècles),
Biarritz: J & D-Atlantica Eds., 1993, p. 47.
46. Peter Clark, ed., Small towns in early modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995, p. 1.
47. S.R. Epstein, ed., Town and country in Europe, 1300–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001, pp. 2–3.

363
 NOTES TO PP. 20–28

48. The elite formations we know as ‘city-states’ were at their height in the Middle Ages: see Tom
Scott, The city-state in Europe, 1000–1600: hinterland, territory, region, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012.
49. Cf. Gerhard Dilcher, ‘The urban belt and the emerging modern state’, in Blickle, Resistance,
representation, p. 219.
50. Mack Walker, German home towns: community, state and general estate 1648–1871, Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1971.
51. David Garrioch, Neighbourhood and community in Paris, 1740–1790, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986, p. 54.
52. Jeremy Boulton, Neighbourhood and society: a London suburb in the seventeenth century,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 217.
53. Ian W. Archer, The pursuit of stability: social relations in Elizabethan London, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 59–61, 92–3.
54. The argument, a convincing one, is that of Eberhard Isenmann, ‘Norms and values in the
European city’, in Blickle, Resistance, representation, part IV, pp. 190–5.
55. Cf. Holger T. Gräf, ‘Small towns in early modern Germany: the case of Hesse 1500–1800’, in
Clark, Small towns, p. 204.
56. Philippe Ariès, Centuries of childhood: a social history of family life, trans. R. Baldick, New York:
Vintage, 1962.
57. Lawrence Stone, Family, sex and marriage in England, 1500–1800, abridged edn, London:
Penguin, 1979, p. 21.
58. Katherine Crawford, European sexualities, 1400–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007, p. 40: ‘Over the centuries from about 1400 to 1800, passionate love within
marriage became the ideal.’
59. Jean-Louis Flandrin, Families in former times: kinship, household and sexuality, trans. R.
Southern, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, p. 216.
60. Michael Anderson, ‘The relevance of family history’, in C. Harris, ed., The sociology of the
family, Keele: University of Keele, 1979, p. 50.
61. Cf. Ralph A. Houlbrooke, The English family 1450–1700, London: Longman, 1984, chap. 3;
Flandrin, Families in former times, chap. 1.
62. See David Cressy, ‘Kinship and kin interaction in early modern England’, Past and Present, 113
(1986), pp. 38–69.
63. Cf. John W. Shaffer, Family and farm: agrarian change and household organization in the Loire
valley 1500–1900, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1982, p. 19.
64. L.K. Berkner, ‘The use and misuse of census data for the historical analysis of family structure’,
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 5, 4 (1975), pp. 721–38.
65. Cited in Christopher R. Friedrichs, The early modern city, London: Longman, 1995, p. 40.
66. Houlbrooke, The English family 1450–1700, p. 71.
67. Ibid., p. 76.
68. C. Klapisch-Zuber, Women, family and ritual in Renaissance Italy, 1985, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, p. 193.
69. For Hohenlohe, Thomas Robisheaux, Rural society and the search for order in early modern
Germany, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 117; for Catalonia, Henry Kamen,
The phoenix and the flame, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1993, p. 277.
70. Robisheaux, Rural society and the search for order, p. 108.
71. R.B. Outhwaite, Clandestine marriage in England, 1500–1850, London: Hambledon Press,
1995.
72. David Cressy, Birth, marriage and death: ritual, religion and the life-cycle in Tudor and Stuart
England, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 277–80.
73. A.Th. Van Deursen, Plain lives in a Golden Age: popular culture, religion and society in
seventeenth-century Holland, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 94.
74. Quoted in Flandrin, Families in former times, p. 100.
75. Notably in Ariès, Centuries of childhood; see also Edward Shorter, The making of the modern
family, New York: Basic Books, 1975.

364
 NOTES TO PP. 28–45

76. Ilana Ben-Amos, Adolescence and youth in early modern England, New Haven, CT, and
London: Yale University Press, 1994.
77. Margaret L. King, ‘Concepts of childhood: what we know and where we might go’,
Renaissance Quarterly, 60 (2007), p. 371.
78. M.K. McIntosh, ‘Servants and the household unit in an Elizabethan English community’,
Journal of Family History, 9, 1 (1984), pp. 3–23.
79. Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of manhood, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 24–6.
80. J. Hajnal, ‘Two kinds of preindustrial household formation systems’, in R. Wall, ed., Family
forms in historic Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 65–104.
81. Frank McArdle, Altopascio: a study in Tuscan rural society 1587–1784, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1978.
82. The case of Mainz, in Friedrichs, The early modern city, p. 121.
83. A. Simon Tarrés, ‘La familia catalana en el antiguo régimen’, in La familia en la España
mediterránea (Siglos XV-XIX), Barcelona: Critica, 1979, p. 79.
84. Louis Henry, Anciennes familles genevoises – étude démographique: XVIe–XX siècle, Paris:
Presses universitaires de France, 1956.
85. Cited in Flandrin, Families in former times, p. 115.
86. A. Sharlin, ‘Natural decrease in early modern cities: a reconsideration’, Past and Present, 79,
1978, pp. 126–38.
87. Quoted in Hélène Bergues, La prévention des naissances dans la famille: ses origines dans les
temps modernes, Paris: Plon, 1960.
88. Jan de Vries, European urbanization 1500–1800, London: Routledge, 1984.
89. Factors such as the Covid pandemic of 2020 do not enter into this figure.
90. T.H. Hollingsworth, The demography of the British peerage (suppl. to Population Studies, vol.
XVIII, 2, 1965).
91. B. Bennassar, Valladolid au Siècle d’Or, Paris: Mouton, 1977, p. 195.
92. Cited in J. Mathorez, Les étrangers en France sous l’Ancien Régime, 2 vols, Paris: Librairie
Ancienne Edouard Champion, 1919–21, vol. I.
93. Mary J. Dobson, Contours of death and disease in early modern England, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997.
94. Cf. Charles Creighton, A history of epidemics in Britain, 2 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1891–4, vol. I, p. 533.
95. E. Woehlkens, Pest und Ruhr im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert, Hanover: Becker, 1954, p. 82.
96. J.N. Biraben, Les hommes et la peste en France et dans les pays européens et méditerranéens, 2
vols, Paris: Mouton, 1975.
97. Friedrich Prinzing, Epidemics resulting from wars, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916, pp. 29–33,
72–4.
98. Mary Lindemann, Medicine and society in early modern Europe, 2nd edn, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010.
99. L. Clarkson, Death, disease and famine in pre-industrial England, London: Palgrave Macmillan,
1975.
100. Cf. the essays in Peter Clark, ed., The European crisis of the 1590s, London: George Allen &
Unwin, 1985.
101. Anne-Marie Piuz, ‘Alimentation populaire et sous-alimentation au XVIIe siècle: le cas de
Genève’, Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte, 18 (1968), pp. 28–9.
102. J.M. Pérez García, Un modelo de sociedad rural de Antiguo Régimen en la Galicia costera: la
península del Salnés, Santiago: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 1979, p. 174.
103. Cf. Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and material life, 1400–1800, London: Harper & Row,
1973, pp. 87–9.
104. E. Scholliers, Loonarbeid en honger: de levensstandaard in de Xve en XVIe eeuw te Antwerpen,
Antwerp: De Sikkel, 1960, p. 278.
105. A sombre perspective of the impact of war in the seventeenth century is given by Geoffrey
Parker, Global crisis, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2013 (cited below,
Chapter 10), part I, The general crisis.

365
 NOTES TO PP. 45–59

106. Cited by R.C. Richardson in Social History, vol. 19, no.1, 1994, p. 105.
107. A. Feillet, La misère au temps de la Fronde et Saint Vincent de Paul, Paris: Didier, 1862, p. 127.
108. J.M. Moriceau, ‘Les crises démographiques dans le Sud de la région parisienne de 1560 à
1670’, Annales de Démographie Historique (1980), pp. 105–23.
109. Günther Franz, Der Dreissigjährige Krieg und das deutsche Volk, Stuttgart: G. Fischer, 1961,
p. 8. Alternative figures are summarised by Peter H. Wilson, The Thirty Years War: Europe’s
Tragedy, London: Allen Lane, 2009, chap. 22.
110. H. Kamen, Spain in the later seventeenth century 1665–1700, London: Longman, 1980,
pp. 57–8.
111. Christopher R. Friedrichs, Urban society in an age of war: Nördlingen, 1580–1720, Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979.

Chapter 2 Leisure, Work and Movement

1. A survey relevant to Castile is David Vassberg, The village and the outside world in Golden Age
Castile, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, chap. 2.
2. David Vassberg, Land and society in Golden Age Castile, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984, pp. 186–7.
3. Helen Nader, Liberty in absolutist Spain: the Habsburg sale of towns 1516–1700, Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990, is of the opinion that in sixteenth-century Castile
‘there was no distinction between urban and rural’ (p. 1).
4. Alfred W. Crosby, The measure of reality: quantification and western society, 1250–1600, New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
5. E.P. Thompson, ‘Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism’, Past and Present, 38 (1967),
pp. 49–50.
6. Keith Thomas, ‘Work and leisure in preindustrial society’, Past and Present, 29 (1964), p. 61.
7. Max Weber, The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, London:
George Allen & Unwin, 1930.
8. Henry Kamen, The phoenix and the flame: Catalonia and the Counter-Reformation, New Haven,
CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1993, p. 198.
9. Cf. Peter Burke, ‘The invention of leisure in early modern Europe’, Past and Present, 146
(1995), p. 139.
10. Beat Kümin and B. Ann Tlusty, eds, The world of the tavern: public houses in early modern
Europe, London: Routledge, 2017.
11. Cited by Thomas in ‘Work and leisure in pre-industrial society’, p. 54, n. 21.
12. What Victor Turner, The ritual process, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969, calls
‘liminality’.
13. René Nelli, Le Languedoc et le Comté de Foix: le Roussillon, Paris: Gallimard, 1958, p. 271.
14. Keith Thomas, ‘Age and authority in early modern England’, Proceedings of the British Academy,
62 (1976), pp. 205–48.
15. J.-L. Flandrin, ‘Mariage tardif et vie sexuelle’, Annales, 6 (1972), pp. 1351–78.
16. H. Medick, ‘Village spinning bees: sexual culture and free time among rural youth in early
modern Germany’, in Hans Medick and D.W. Sabean, Interest and emotion: essays in the study
of family and kinship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp. 317–39.
17. Kamen, The phoenix and the flame, p. 304.
18. The imprecise concept of ‘popular culture’ is accepted as ‘a contested, complex, frustratingly
elusive . . . topic of study’, as described in the Introduction to the informative handbook by
A. Hadfield, M. Dimmock and A. Shinn, eds, The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular
Culture in Early Modern England, Abingdon: Ashgate, 2014.
19. Kamen, The phoenix and the flame, p. 175.
20. Barbara Babcock, ed., The reversible world: symbolic inversion in art and society, Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1978.
21. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his world, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968.
22. Wilhelm Abel, Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur, 3rd edn, Hamburg: Parey, 1978, p. 105.

366
 NOTES TO PP. 59–72

23. E.E. Rich, ‘The population of Elizabethan England’, Economic History Review, 2 (1950),
pp. 247–65.
24. P. Laslett and J. Harrison, ‘Clayworth and Cogenhoe’, in H.E. Bell and R.L. Ollard, eds,
Historical Essays 1600–1750, presented to David Ogg, London: A&C Black, 1963, pp. 157–84.
25. A.Th. Van Deursen, Plain lives in a Golden Age: popular culture, religion and society in
seventeenth-century Holland, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 32.
26. M. Kitch, ‘Population movement and migration in pre-industrial rural England’, in Brian
Short, ed., The English rural community: image and analysis, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992, pp. 62–84.
27. Cited in Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans: migration in western Europe since 1650,
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992, p. 34.
28. Michael Anderson, Approaches to the history of the western family 1500–1914, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 17.
29. Steve Hochstadt, ‘Migration in preindustrial Germany’, Central European History, 16, 3 (Sept
1983), pp. 203–4.
30. Hochstadt, ‘Migration’, p. 211.
31. Quoted in Vassberg, The village, p. 70.
32. Jean Delumeau, Vie économique et sociale de Rome dans la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle,
2 vols, Paris: E. de Boccard, 1957–9, vol. I, chap.4.
33. Antoni Maczak, Travel in early modern Europe, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995.
34. See Gerrit Verhoeven, Rosemary Sweet and Sarah Goldsmith, eds, Beyond the Grand Tour:
northern metropolises and early modern travel behaviour, London: Routledge, 2019, pp.14–17,
quote at p. 16.
35. For a summary, see John J. Silke, ‘The Irish abroad, 1534–1691’, in T.W. Moody, F.X. Martin,
F.J. Byrne, eds, A New History of Ireland, Volume III: Early Modern Ireland 1534–1691, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 587–683.
36. P. Bianchi, D. Maffi and E. Stumpo, Italiani al servicio straniero in età moderna, Milan: Franco
Angeli, 2008.
37. See Jacques Dupâquier, ‘Macro-migrations en Europe (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles)’, in Simonetta
Cavaciocchi, ed., Le migrazioni in Europa, 1994, Florence: Le Monnier, pp. 65–90.
38. W. Bodmer, Der Einfluss der Refugianten-einwanderung von 1550–1700 auf die schweizerische
Wirtschaft, Zürich: Verlag Leemann, 1946.
39. J.-F. Dubost, La France italienne, XVIe–XVIIe siècle, Paris: Aubier, 1997.
40. J.G. van Dillen, Bronnen tot de Geschiedenis van het Bedrijfsleven en het Gildewezen van
Amsterdam 1512–1632, 2 vols, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1929–33, vol. I.
41. G. Witzel, ‘Gewerbegeschichtliche Studien zur niederländischen Einwanderung in
Deutschland’, Westdeutsche Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kunst, 29, 1910, pp. 117–82, 419–51.
42. T.C. Smout, ‘Scottish emigration’, in N. Canny, ed., Europeans on the move: studies on European
migration, 1500–1800, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 80–4.
43. A.S. Green, The making of Ireland and its undoing 1200–1600, London: Macmillan, 1908,
p. 440.

Chapter 3 Communities of Belief

1. For one approach, see Edward Muir, Ritual in early modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005, chaps.1–2.
2. The miller Menocchio, mentioned below in Chapter 9.
3. Henry Kamen, The phoenix and the flame: Catalonia and the Counter-Reformation, New Haven,
CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1993, p. 82.
4. The ground covered here is also surveyed, magisterially and from a different viewpoint, by
R.W. Scribner, Popular culture and popular movements in Reformation Germany, London:
Hambledon Press, 1987.
5. Cf. Euan Cameron, ‘For reasoned faith or embattled creed? Religion for the people in early
modern Europe’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 8 (1998), pp. 165–87.

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 NOTES TO PP. 73–84

6. See Kamen, The phoenix and the flame, chap.1; and Ronald Hutton, The rise and fall of Merry
England: the ritual year 1400–1700, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
7. Hutton, Rise and fall, p. 37.
8. Jean Delumeau, Rassurer et protéger: le sentiment de sécurité dans l’Occident d’autrefois, Paris:
Fayard, 1989.
9. Magda Mirabet, ‘Pregàries públiques’, Ier Congrés d’Història Moderna de Catalunya, 2 vols,
Barcelona: Edicions de la universitat de Barcelona, 1984, vol. II, pp. 487–93.
10. Jacques Le Goff, The birth of purgatory, London: Scolar Press, 1984.
11. Peter Blickle, Communal Reformation: the quest for salvation in sixteenth-century Germany,
Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1992, p. 25.
12. Keith Thomas, Religion and the decline of magic, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
13. Cf. Richard L. Kagan, Lucrecia’s dreams: politics and prophecy in sixteenth-century Spain,
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990.
14. For a short discussion see Geoffrey Parker, ‘Success and failure during the first century of the
Reformation’, Past and Present, 136 (1992), pp. 43–82.
15. Cf. Nicholas Griffiths, ‘Popular religious scepticism and idiosyncrasy in post-Tridentine
Cuenca’, in L. Twomey, ed., Faith and fanaticism: religious fervour in early modern Spain,
Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997, pp. 95–126.
16. J.F. Harrington and H.W. Smith, ‘Confessionalization, community and state building in
Germany, 1555–1870’, Journal of Modern History, 69, 1 (1997), pp. 77–101. See also J.M.
Headley, H. Hillerbrand, and A.J. Papalas, Confessionalization in Europe, 1555–1700,
Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.
17. Alexandra Walsham, Charitable hatred: tolerance and intolerance in England, 1500–1700,
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006, p. 137.
18. John Addy, Sin and society in the seventeenth century, London: Routledge, 1989, p. 106.
19. C. Scott Dixon, The Reformation and rural society: the parishes of Brandenburg-Ansbach-
Kulmbach, 1528–1603, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 111, 122, 172.
20. Alexander J. Fisher, Music, piety, and propaganda: the soundscapes of Counter-Reformation
Bavaria, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
21. Hutton, Rise and fall, pp. 126–43.
22. Some examples are in R. Po-Chia Hsia, Social discipline in the Reformation: central Europe
1550–1750, London: Routledge, 1989, pp. 124–9.
23. Étienne François, Protestants et catholiques en Allemagne: identités et pluralisme à Augsbourg,
1648–1806, Paris: Albin Michel, 1993.
24. Joachim Whaley, Religious toleration and social change in Hamburg 1529–1819, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985.
25. Marc R. Foster, The Counter-Reformation in the villages: religion and reform in the bishopric of
Speyer 1560–1720, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992, pp. 200, 246.
26. Kamen, The phoenix and the flame, p. 433.
27. On the persecution of hermits in Spain, see Alain Saint-Saëns, Valets de Dieu, suppôts du
Diable, New Orleans: Presses Universitaires du Nouveau Monde, 1999.
28. Joachim Whaley, ‘A tolerant society? Religious toleration in the Holy Roman Empire after
1648’, in O. Grell and R. Porter, eds, Toleration in Enlightenment Europe, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 175–95.
29. C. Marazzini, Storia della lingua italiana: il secolo Cinquecento e il Seicento, Bologna: Il Mulino,
1993, p. 93.
30. Louis Châtellier, La religion des pauvres: les sources du christianisme moderne XVIe–XIXe siècles,
Paris: Aubier, 1993, pp. 74–88.
31. This was the argument of Robert Muchembled, Culture populaire et culture des élites dans la
France moderne (XV–XVIII), Paris: Flammarion, 1978.
32. P.P. Delgado Alemany and J. Serra i Barceló, ‘La reglamentació del Carnaval’, Espai i Temps
d’oci, Palma: Institut d’Estudis Balearics, 1993, pp. 341–6.
33. R. Po-Chia Hsia, The world of Catholic renewal, 1540–1770, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005, pp. 221–3.

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 NOTES TO PP. 84–93

34. W. David Myers, ‘Poor, sinning folk’: confessions and conscience in Counter-Reformation Germany,
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996.
35. J.-F. Soulet, Traditions et réformes religieuses dans les Pyrénées Centrales au XVIIe siècle, Pau:
Marrimpouey Jeune, 1974, p. 246.
36. Alain Lottin, Lille, citadelle de la Contre-Reforme? (1598–1668), Dunkirk: Les éditions des
Beffrois, 1984, pp. 228–31.
37. H.R. Schmidt, Dorf und Religion: Reformierte Sittenzucht in Berner Landgemeinden der Frühen
Neuzeit, Stuttgart: G. Fischer, 1995.
38. Po-Chia Hsia, Social discipline in the Reformation, p. 134.
39. Ronald Hutton, ‘The English Reformation and the evidence of folklore’, Past and Present, 148,
1995, pp. 110–11.
40. Brian P. Levack, The witch-hunt in early modern Europe, 4th edn, London: Routledge, 2016.
41. W. Monter, ‘Heresy executions in Reformation Europe, 1520–1565’, in O.P. Grell and B.
Scribner, Tolerance and intolerance in the European Reformation, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996, p. 63.
42. Lara Apps and Andrew Gow, Male witches in early modern Europe, Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2003. Chap. 1 of the book discusses reasons why some researchers prefer to
ignore the phenomenon of male witchcraft.
43. Lyndal Roper, The witch in the western imagination, Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia
Press, 2012.
44. Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1970, p. 25.
45. Carlo Ginzburg, The night battles: witchcraft and agrarian cult in the 16th and 17th centuries,
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.
46. Cf. W. Behringer, ‘Witchcraft studies in Austria, Germany and Switzerland’, in J. Barry, M.
Hester and G. Roberts, eds, Witchcraft in early modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997, p. 89.
47. The now classic model proposed by Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane.
48. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem possessed: the social origins of witchcraft, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.
49. Gustav Henningsen, The witches’ advocate: Basque witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition, Reno,
NV: University of Nevada Press, 1980, p. 301.
50. Charles Emmanuel Dumont, Justice criminelle des Duchés de Lorraine et de Bar, 2 vols, Nancy:
Imprimerie de Dard, 1848, vol. II.
51. Louis Duparchy, ‘La justice criminelle dans la terre de Saint-Oyend-de-Joux’, Mémoires de la
Société d’Emulation du Jura, 5th series, vol. II, 1891, pp. 231–461.
52. Henningsen, The witches’ advocate, p. 25.
53. This is the crucial argument of Henry C. Lea, Materials towards a history of witchcraft, 3 vols,
repr. New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1957.
54. Stuart Clark, Thinking with demons: the idea of witchcraft in early modern Europe, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1997, pp. 296–311.
55. Cited in E. Le Roy Ladurie, Les paysans de Languedoc, 2 vols, Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1966, vol. I,
p. 411.
56. Cf. Rainer Walz, Hexenglaube und magische Kommunikation im Dorf der frühen Neuzeit,
Paderborn: Schöningh, 1993, pp. 422–57.
57. W. Behringer, ‘Weather, hunger and fear: origins of the European witch-hunts in climate,
society and mentality’, German History, 13, 1 (1995), pp. 10–11.
58. Behringer, ‘Weather’, p. 17.
59. Kamen, The phoenix and the flame, p. 243.
60. Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: a historical revision, New Haven, CT, and London:
Yale University Press, 2014, p. 271.
61. A discussion of various factors in the decline of prosecutions is given by Edward Bever,
‘Witchcraft prosecutions and the decline of magic’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 11, 2
(2009), pp. 263–93.

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 NOTES TO PP. 93–102

62. A.Th. Van Deursen, Plain lives in a Golden Age: popular culture, religion and society in
seventeenth-century Holland, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 252.
63. See the definitive studies by Alfred Soman, collected in Sorcellerie et justice criminelle: le
Parlement de Paris (16e–18e siècles), London: Routledge/Variorum editions, 1992; my reference
is to Chap. 2, p. 35.
64. A helpful survey of the various studies of witchcraft is Gábor Klaniczay, ‘A cultural history of
witchcraft’, in Magic, ritual, and witchcraft, 5 (2010), pp. 188–212.
65. H. Kamen, ‘Toleration and dissent in sixteenth-century Spain: the alternative tradition’,
Sixteenth-Century Journal, 19, 1 (1988), pp. 3–23.
66. Benjamin J. Kaplan and Michael O. Emerson, Divided by faith: religious conflict and the practice
of toleration in early modern Europe, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007, p. 133.
67. Peter Marshall, ‘Choosing sides and talking religion in Shakespeare’s England’, in D. Loewenstein
and Michael Witmore, Shakespeare and early modern religion, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2015, pp. 40–56.
68. Scott Dixon, Dagmar Friest and Mark Greengrass, Living with religious diversity in early-
modern Europe, Farnham: Ashgate, 2009, p. 2.
69. Felicity Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
70. Alexandra Walsham, Charitable hatred.
71. Georg Jäger and Ulrich Pfister, eds, Konfessionalisierung und Konfessionskonflikt in Graubünden,
16.-18. Jahrhundert, Zurich: Chronos, 2006.
72. Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, chap. 1.
73. Shlomo D. Goitein, A Mediterranean society: the Jewish communities of the Arab world as portrayed
in the documents of the Cairo Geniza, 5 vols, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967–88.
74. On ambiguity among Jews, see David B. Ruderman, Early modern Jewry: a new cultural history,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.
75. Carlo Ginzburg, The cheese and the worms: the cosmos of a sixteenth-century miller, trans. John
Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992, p. 49.
76. Ole Peter Grell and Roy Porter, Toleration in Enlightenment Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000, p. 1.
77. The bibliography is extensive, depending on focus; among recent guides are Timothy G. Fehler
et al., Religious diaspora in early modern Europe: strategies of exile, London: Pickering & Chatto,
2014; G. Tarantino and Charles Zika, Feeling exclusion: religious conflict, exile and emotions in
early modern Europe, London: Routledge, 2019.
78. Ruderman, Early modern Jewry; see especially the maps and pages 24–8.
79. Nicholas Terpstra, Religious refugees in the early modern world: an alternative history of the
Reformation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
80. Nigel Goose and Lien Luu, Immigrants in Tudor and Early Stuart England, Brighton: Sussex
Academic Press, 2005.
81. Eduard Winter, Die Tschechische und Slowakische Emigration in Deutschland im 17. und 18.
Jahrhundert, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1955.
82. Steve Hochstadt, ‘Migration in preindustrial Germany’, Central European History, 16, 3 (Sept
1983), p. 201.
83. A recent study is David van der Linden, Experiencing exile: Huguenot refugees in the Dutch
Republic, 1680–1700, Abingdon: Routledge, 2016.
84. Mack Walker, The Salzburg transaction: expulsion and redemption in eighteenth-century Germany,
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992.
85. Fred A. Norwood, The Reformation refugees as an economic force, Chicago: American Society of
Church History, 1942.
86. H. Schilling, ‘Innovation through migration: the settlements of Calvinistic Netherlanders in
16th and 17th century central and western Europe’, Histoire Sociale/Social History, 16, 1983,
pp. 7–33; Andrew Pettegree, Foreign Protestant communities in sixteenth-century London,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
87. Gerhard Fischer, Aus zwei Jahrhunderten Leipziger Handelsgeschichte 1470–1650, Leipzig:
F. Meiner, 1929.

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 NOTES TO PP. 102–122

88. Nikolai Kochev, ‘Sephardic Jews and printing in the Balkans’, Annual, vol. 34, Sofia, 1989,
p. 26.

Chapter 4 The Ruling Elite

1. A general introduction is M.L. Bush, ‘An anatomy of nobility’, in M.L. Bush, ed., Social orders
and social classes in Europe since 1500, London: Routledge, 1992, chap. 3; and his Rich noble,
poor noble, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988.
2. Claudio Donati, L’idea di nobiltà in Italia: secoli XIV–XVII, Bari: Laterza, 1988.
3. Arlette Jouanna, l’Idée de race en France au XVIe et au début du XVIIe siècle (1498–1614), 3 vols,
Paris: H. Champion, 1976; also André Devyver, Le sang épuré: les préjugés de race chez les gentilshommes
français de l’ancien régime 1560–1720, Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1973.
4. Cf. Anthony Fletcher, Gender, sex and subordination in England, 1500–1800, New Haven, CT,
and London: Yale University Press, 1995, p. 126.
5. Cited in Felicity Heal, Hospitality in early modern England, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1990, p. 184.
6. J.P. Cooper, Land, men and beliefs: studies in early modern history, London: Hambledon, 1983,
pp. 44, 50.
7. Arlette Jouanna. Le devoir de révolte: la noblesse française et la gestation de l’État moderne 1559–
1661, Paris: Fayard, 1989, p. 42.
8. See R.R. Harding, Anatomy of a power elite: the provincial governors of early modern France, New
Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1979; and Sharon Kettering, Patrons, brokers
and clients in seventeenth-century France, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
9. Gunner Lind, ‘Clientelism and the power elite’, in W. Reinhard, ed., Power elites and state
building, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, chap. 7.
10. Both cases cited in Jouanna, Le devoir de révolte, pp. 66, 105.
11. Kristen B. Neuschel, Word of honour: interpreting noble culture in sixteenth-century France,
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989.
12. Jouanna, Devoir de révolte, p. 66.
13. Kettering, Patrons, brokers, p. 114.
14. Donna T. Andrew, ‘The code of honour and its critics: opposition to duelling in England,
1700–1850’, Social History, 5 (1980), pp. 409–34.
15. François Billacois, The duel: its rise and fall in early modern France, New Haven, CT, and
London: Yale University Press, 1990, p. 112.
16. V.G. Kiernan, The duel in European history, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 155.
17. Lawrence Stone, The crisis of the aristocracy 1558–1641, abridged edn, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1967, pp. 129–30.
18. Gregory Hanlon, ‘The decline of a provincial military aristocracy: Siena 1560–1740’, Past and
Present, 155 (1997), p. 107.
19. G. Zeller, ‘Une notion de caractère historico-social: la dérogeance’, Cahiers internationaux de
Sociologie, 22 (1957), pp. 40–74.
20. Lawrence Stone, ‘The nobility in business 1540–1640’, Explorations in Entrepreneurial History,
X, 2 (1957), pp. 54–61.
21. H. Kellenbenz, ‘German aristocratic entrepreneurship: economic activities of the Holstein
nobility’, Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, VI (1953), p. 108.
22. Jerome Blum, Lord and peasant in Russia, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961,
p. 129.
23. W. Kirchner, ‘Entrepreneurial activity in Russian–Western trade relations during the sixteenth
century’, Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, VIII (1955), pp. 245–51.
24. G. d’Avenel, ‘La fortune de la noblesse sous Louis XIII’, Revue Historique, XXI (1883),
pp. 291–311.
25. Kamen, Spain in the later seventeenth century, London, Longman, 1980, pp. 233–4.
26. J.C. Davis, The decline of the Venetian nobility as a ruling class, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1962.

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 NOTES TO PP. 122–148

27. E. Ladewig Petersen, The crisis of the Danish nobility, Odense: Odense Universitetsforlag, 1967,
p. 7. I am grateful to Prof. Petersen for sending me this.
28. Isabel de Madariaga, Ivan the Terrible, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press,
2005.
29. Hans Rosenberg, ‘The rise of the Junkers in Brandenburg-Prussia 1410–1653’, American
Historical Review, 49, 1 (1943), pp. 1–22.
30. See comments in Jonathan Dewald, The European nobility 1400–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996, pp. 1–14. Other general perspectives are given by Ronald G. Asch,
Europäischer Adel in der Frühen Neuzeit, Cologne: Böhlau, 2008, and H.M. Scott, ed., The
European nobilities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 2 vols, 2nd edn, Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
31. Cited in Keith Wrightson, English society 1580–1680, London: Routledge, 1982, p. 26.
32. Cf. A. Mączak, ‘The nobility–state relationship’, in W. Reinhard, ed., Power elites and state
building, Oxford University Press, p. 198.
33. Stuart J. Woolf, Studi sulla nobiltà nell’epoca dell’assolutismo, Turin: Accademia delle Scienze, 1963.
34. Rudolf Braun, ‘Staying on top: socio-cultural reproduction of European power elites’, in
Reinhard, Power elites, chap. 12.
35. This is also the conclusion of Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The gentry in England and Wales
1500–1700, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994, p. 381.
36. J.B. Wood, ‘The decline of the nobility in 16th and early 17th century France: myth or
reality?’, Journal of Modern History, 48, 1 (1976), pp. 1–30.
37. H.F.K. van Nierop, The nobility of Holland: from knights to regents, 1500–1650, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 218.
38. Lawrence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, An open elite? England 1540–1880,
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.

Chapter 5 The Middle Elite

1. For example, ‘middle’ elite does not always imply that there was a ‘lower’ elite.
2. Cf. Eberhard Isenmann, in P. Blickle, Resistance, representation and community, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1997, p. 201.
3. See the observations on England by Shani D’Cruze, ‘The middling sort in Colchester’, in J.
Barry and C. Brooks, eds, The middling sort of people: culture, society and politics in England,
1550–1800, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994, pp. 181–207.
4. Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The gentry in England and Wales, 1500–1700, Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1994, p. 11.
5. Heal and Holmes, The gentry in England and Wales, p. 27.
6. Jan Luiten van Zanden and Maarten Prak, ‘Towards an economic interpretation of citizenship:
the Dutch Republic between medieval communes and modern nation states’, European Review
of Economic History, 10 (2006), pp. 111–45.
7. R. Baron, ‘La bourgeoisie de Varzy au XVIIe siècle’, Annales de Bourgogne, XXXVI (1964),
161–208.
8. Pere Molas, La burguesía mercantil en la España del antiguo régimen, Madrid: Ediciones
Cátedra, 1985, pp. 183–7.
9. Gaston Roupnel, La ville et la campagne au XVIIe siècle, Paris: E. Leroux, 1922, pp. 188–228.
10. A.K. Isaacs and M. Prak, ‘Cities, bourgeoisies, and states’, in W. Reinhard, Power elites and state
building, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 223.
11. The pioneering study of the sale of offices was the 1945 work by Roland Mousnier, La vénalité
des offices sous Henri IV et Louis XIII, Rouen: éditions Maugard, in which he studied the
creation of bureaucracy in seventeenth-century France.
12. William M. Reddy, ‘The concept of class’, in M.L. Bush, ed., Social orders and social classes in
Europe since 1500, London: Routledge, 1992, p. 17; this is a discussion based on Reddy’s
Money and liberty in modern Europe: a critique of historical understanding, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987.

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 NOTES TO PP. 152–169

13. Lucien Febvre, Philippe II et la Franche-Comté, Paris: H. Champion, 1911.

14. Peter Earle, The making of the English middle class: business, society and family life in London
1660–1730, London: Methuen, 1989, p. 10.
15. Ibid., pp. 290–301, 336.
16. Data from Theodore K. Rabb, Enterprise and empire: merchant and gentry investment in the
expansion of England 1575–1630, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967.
17. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II, 2 vols,
London: Collins, 1972–3.
18. H. Soly, ‘The betrayal of the 16th-century bourgeoisie: a myth?’, Acta Historiae Neerlandicae,
VIII (1975), pp. 31–49.
19. See the discussion in J.K.J. Thomson, Decline in history: the European experience, Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1998, chap. 6.
20. Paolo Malanima, I Riccardi di Firenze: una famiglia e un patrimonio nella Toscana dei Medici,
Florence: L.S. Olschki, 1977.
21. Rudolf Braun, ‘Staying on top: socio-cultural reproduction of European power elites’, in
W. Reinhard, ed., Power elites and state building, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 235.
22. M.A. Fargas, Família i poder a Catalunya, 1516–1626, Lleida: Pagès editors, 1997.
23. Joanne Ferraro, Family and public life in Brescia 1580–1650, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993.

Chapter 6 Solidarities and Resistance

1. A.Th. van Deursen, Plain lives in a golden age, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991,
chap. 1.
2. J.A. Maravall, Estado moderno y mentalidad social, 2 vols, Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1972,
vol. II, pp. 380–2.
3. Cited in John Rule, Albion’s people: English society 1714–1815, London: Longman, 1992, p. 106.
4. Cited in P. Molas, La burguesía mercantil en la España del antiguo régimen, Madrid: Ediciones
Cátedra, 1985, p. 177.
5. Cf. Hugues Neveux and Eva Österberg, ‘Norms and values of the peasantry in the period of
state formation’, in P. Blickle, ed., Resistance, representation, and community, Oxford: Clarendon
Press, p. 201.
6. Mack Walker, German home towns, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971, p. 89.
7. Recent contributions include Roger C. Richardson, Household servants in early modern
England, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010; and Jane Whittle, ed., Servants in
rural Europe 1400–1900, Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2017.
8. Whittle, Servants in rural Europe, Introduction.
9. Cited in Christopher Friedrichs, The early modern city, London: Longman, 1995, p. 148.
10. Susan Dwyer Amussen, An ordered society: gender and class in early modern England, Oxford:
Blackwell, 1988, pp. 98–101.
11. R. and T. Wohlfeil, ‘Verbildlichungen ständischer Gesellschaft’, in Winfried Schulze, ed.,
Ständische Gesellschaft und sozialer Mobilität, Munich: Oldenbourg, 1988, p. 284.
12. Blickle, Resistance, representation, p. 161.
13. James R. Farr, Hands of honor: artisans and their world in Dijon, 1550–1650, Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1988, pp. 177–95.
14. Examples of 1693 cited in Henry Kamen, Crisis and change in early modern Spain, Aldershot:
Variorum, 1993, p. 685.
15. Blickle, Resistance, pp. 170–2.
16. Daniel Roche, The people of Paris: an essay in popular culture in the eighteenth century, Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1987, pp. 247–68.
17. Thorkild Kjaergaard, The Danish revolution 1500–1800: an ecohistorical interpretation, trans.
David Hohnen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 18, 71.
18. Carla Rahn Phillips and W.D. Phillips, Spain’s Golden Fleece, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1997, p. 253.

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 NOTES TO PP. 171–197

19. Eric Kerridge, The agricultural revolution, London: Allen & Unwin, 1967.
20. W.G. Hoskins, Essays in Leicestershire history, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1950.
21. Eric Kerridge, Agrarian problems in the sixteenth century and after, London: Allen & Unwin,
1969, pp. 131–3.
22. N.J.G. Pounds, An historical geography of Europe 1500–1840, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1979, p. 162.
23. For the view, based on Marxist premises, of Robert Brenner in respect of the evolution of the
peasant economy and the growth of capitalism, see T. Ashton and C. Philpin, eds, The Brenner
debate: agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985.
24. Cited in Pounds, Historical geography, pp. 164–5.
25. J. Blum, Lord and peasant in Russia, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961, p. 254.
26. A.I. Kopanev, ‘Nezemledelcheskaya volost v XVI–XVII vv’ (The non-agrarian sector in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), in Krestyanstvo i klassovaya borba v feodalnoi Rossii,
Leningrad: Soviet Academy of Sciences, 1967, p. 185.
27. See the introduction to Geoffrey Parker and Lesley M. Smith, eds, The general crisis of the
seventeenth century, 2nd edn, London: Routledge, 1997.
28. James B. Collins, Classes, estates and order in early modern Brittany, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994, p. 257.
29. Steiner Imsen and Günther Vogler, ‘Forms and character of peasant resistance’, in Blickle,
Resistance, representation, p. 25.
30. Wolfgang Schmale, Bäuerliche Widerstand, Gerichte und Rechtsentwicklung in Frankreich,
Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1986.
31. Imsen and Vogler, ‘Forms and character’, p. 26.
32. Charles Tilly, ‘Food supply and public order’, in The formation of national states in western
Europe, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 386.
33. R.B. Outhwaite, Dearth, public policy and social disturbance in England 1550–1800, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 42.
34. E.P. Thompson, ‘The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century’, Past and
Present, 50, 1 (1971), pp. 76–136.
35. Cf. J.G. Scott, The moral economy of the peasant: rebellion and subsistence in southeast Asia, New
Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1976, p. 43.
36. René Pillorget, Les mouvements insurrectionels de Provence entre 1596 et 1715, Paris: Editions A.
Pedone, 1975.
37. Yves-Marie Bercé, Histoire des Croquants: etude des soulèvements populaires au 17e siècle dans le
sud-ouest de la France, 2 vols, Geneva: Droz, 1974.
38. Victor V. Magagna, Communities of grain: rural rebellion in comparative perspective, Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1991, p. 23.
39. See Joseph Perez, La révolution des Comunidades de Castille (1520–1521), Bordeaux: Institut
d’études ibériques et ibéro-americaines de l’Université de Bordeaux 1970; and José A. Maravall,
Las Comunidades de Castilla, Madrid: Alianza, 1979.
40. Peter Blickle, The Revolution of 1525, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981;
H.U. Wehler, Der deutsche Bauernkrieg 1524–26, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1975.
41. The classic survey is E. Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival: a people’s uprising at Romans 1579–1580,
London: Scolar Press, 1980.
42. Peter Clark, ed., The European crisis of the 1590s, London: Allen & Unwin, 1985.
43. Georg Grüll, Bauer, Herr und Landesfürst, Linz: FGOÖ 8, 1963.
44. J.-A. de Thou, Histoire Universelle, 11 vols, Paris, 1742, book 114.
45. I.T. Smirnov, Vosstanie Bolotnikova 1606–1607 (The Bolotnikov uprising 1606–1607),
Leningrad: Izd-vo polit. literatury, 1951.
46. Albin Czerny, Bilder aus der Zeit der Bauernunruhen in Oberösterreich, Linz: Ebenhöch, 1876.
47. H.N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution, London: Cresset Press, 1961.
48. Denis Mack Smith, A history of Sicily, 2 vols, London: Chatto & Windus, 1968, vol. I, chap. 21.

374
 NOTES TO PP. 197–210

49. Rosario Villari, La rivolta antispagnola a Napoli: le origini (1585–1647), Bari: Laterza, 1967.
50. M. Schipa, ‘La così detta rivoluzione di Masaniello’, Archivio storico per le province napoletane,
new series, vol. II (1916); A. d’Ambrosio, Masaniello: rivoluzione e controrivoluzione nel Reame
di Napoli (1647–1648), Milan: Istituto Editoriale Brera, 1962.
51. A. Domínguez Ortiz, Alteraciones andaluzas, Madrid: Narcea, 1973.
52. S.A. Westrich, The Ormée of Bordeaux, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972.
53. P. Smirnov, Posadskie lyudi i ikh klassovaya borba do serediny XVII veka (Townspeople and their
class struggle in the mid-seventeenth century), 2 vols, Moscow: Academy of Sciences of the
USSR, 1947–8.
54. L. Loewenson, ‘The Moscow rising of 1648’, Slavonic & East European Review, 27 (1948–9),
pp. 146–56.
55. H. Wahlen and E. Jaggi, Der schweizerische Bauernkrieg, 1653, Bern: Buchverlag
Verbandsdruckerei, 1952; Andreas Suter, Der schweizerische Bauernkrieg von 1653, Tübingen:
Biblioteca Academica, 1997.
56. Paul Avrich, Russian rebels 1600–1800, London: Schocken Books, 1972.
57. Y. Garlan and C. Nières, Les révoltes bretonnes de 1675, Paris: Editions sociales, 1975.
58. A. Simon i Tarrés, ‘Catalunya en el siglo XVII: la revuelta campesina y popular de 1640’,
Estudi General (Girona), I, 1 (1981), pp. 137–48.
59. H. Kamen, Spain in the later seventeenth century 1665–1700, London: Longman, 1980, p. 179.
60. Cited in Pedro L. Lorenzo Cadarso, Los conflictos populares en Castilla (siglos XVI–XVII),
Madrid: Siglo XXI de España Editores, 1996, p. 180.
61. Bercé, Histoire des Croquants, vol. II, p. 665.
62. Georg Grüll, Bauer, Herr und Landesfürst, Linz: H. Böhlaus, 1963.
63. P. Smirnov, Pravitelstvo B.I. Morozova i vosstanie v Moskve 1648g (The government of
V. Morozov and the 1648 Moscow rising), Tashkent: Izd-vo Sredne-Aziatskogo gos.
universiteta, 1929.
64. Rosario Villari, ‘Masaniello: contemporary and recent interpretations’, Past and Present, 108
(1985), p. 120, criticises historians who tend to analyse the symbols rather than the social
context of revolts.
65. Christopher Hill, The world turned upside down: radical ideas during the English Revolution,
London: Temple Smith, 1972.
66. E.F. Gay, ‘The Midland Revolt and the inquisitions of depopulation of 1607’, Transactions of
the Royal Historical Society, XVIII (1904), pp. 195–204.
67. Yu. Bromley, ‘Vosstanie khorvatskikh i slovenskikh krestyan 1573 g’ (The uprising of the Croat
and Slovene peasants in 1573), Uchenie zapiski instituta slavyanovedeniya, vol. 11 (1955).
68. W. Steinitz, Deutsche Volkslieder demokratischen Charakters aus sechs Jahrhunderten, vol. I,
Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1954, p. 68.
69. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, vol. IV (1595–7), p. 345.

Chapter 7 Gender Roles

1. Merry E. Wiesner, Women and gender in early modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008. For a bibliography emphasising mainly literary aspects, see Karen L.
Nelson, Courtney Connolly and Scott Kamen, ‘Publications in English in early modern
women’s studies, 2007–2010’, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 6
(2011), pp. 231–68.
2. Alice Clark, Working life of women in the seventeenth century, London: Routledge, 1982.
3. Cissie C. Fairchilds, Women in early modern Europe, 1500–1700, Harlow: Pearson/Longman,
2007. See also Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in early modern England 1550–
1720, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
4. Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of manhood in early modern England, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003.
5. Joanne Ferraro, Family and public life in Brescia 1580–1650, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993, p. 125.

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 NOTES TO PP. 210–218

6. Amy L. Erickson, Women and property in early modern England, London: Routledge, 1993.
7. Ibid., p. 232; I have modernised the quote.
8. Ralph A. Houlbrooke, The English family 1450–1700, London: Longman, 1984, p. 209.
9. Quoted in David Vassberg, The village and the outside world in Golden Age Castile, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 88.
10. Keith Wrightson, Earthly necessities: economic lives in early modern Britain, New Haven, CT,
and London: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 44.
11. See Martin King Whyte, The status of women in preindustrial societies, Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1978, pp. 167–73.
12. Susan Dwyer Amussen, An ordered society: gender and class in early modern England, Oxford:
Blackwell, 1988, p. 3.
13. José A. Maravall, La literatura picaresca desde la historia social (siglos XVI y XVII), Madrid:
Taurus, 1986, pp. 656–7.
14. Ian Maclean, Woman triumphant: feminism in French literature 1610–1652, Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1977.
15. Anthony Fletcher, Gender, sex and subordination in England 1500–1800, New Haven, CT, and
London: Yale University Press, 1995, p. 27.
16. Maravall, La literatura picaresca, p. 695.
17. A.Th. Van Deursen, Plain lives in a Golden Age: popular culture, religion and society in
seventeenth-century Holland, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 83.
18. Joy Wiltenburg, Disorderly women and female power in the street literature of early modern
England and Germany, Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1992.
19. Cf. Marjorie McIntosh, Controlling misbehaviour in England, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, p. 74.
20. Martine Segalen, Love and power in the peasant family, Oxford: Blackwell, 1983, p. 9.
21. Henry Kamen, The phoenix and the flame, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press,
1993, pp. 297, 330.
22. See Olwen Hufton, The prospect before her: a history of women in western Europe, vol. I: 1500–
1800, London: HarperCollins, 1997, p. 145.
23. José Manuel Pérez García, Un modelo de sociedad rural de Antiguo Régimen en la Galicia costera:
la Península del Salnés, Santiago: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 1979, p. 119.
24. Amy M. Froide, Never married: singlewomen in early modern England, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005, p. 3. The London figures are distorted by the high number of female
servants in the capital.
25. Christopher R. Friedrichs, Urban society in an age of war: Nördlingen, Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1979, pp. 69–70.
26. Wrightson, Earthly necessities, pp. 45–6.
27. Jane Whittle and Mark Hailwood, ‘The gender division of labour in early modern England’,
Economic History Review, vol. 73, 1 (2018), pp. 3–32.
28. Joel F. Harrington, Reordering marriage and society in Reformation Germany, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995.
29. Alain Lottin, ed., La désunion du couple sous l’Ancien Régime: l’exemple du Nord, Paris: Editions
Universitaires, 1975, p. 114.
30. Kamen, The phoenix and the flame, p. 310.
31. Lyndal Roper, The holy household, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, chap. 4; Thomas Robisheaux,
Rural society and the search for order in early modern Germany, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989, pp. 105–15.
32. Kamen, The phoenix and the flame, p. 108.
33. Philippe Ariès, ‘The indissoluble marriage’, in P. Ariès and A. Bejin, Western sexuality, Oxford:
Blackwell, 1985, pp. 140–57.
34. See David Sabean, Property, production and family in Neckarhausen 1700–1870, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990, chap. 4.
35. Jean-Louis Flandrin, Families in former times: kinship, household and sexuality, trans. R.
Southern, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, p. 138.

376
 NOTES TO PP. 218–228

36. Houlbrooke, The English family, pp. 76–8.

37. Flandrin, Families in former times, p. 172.
38. Lawrence Stone, Uncertain unions and broken lives, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
39. Wiesner, Women and gender, pp. 86 onwards.
40. Deursen, Plain lives, p. 8.
41. Vassberg, The village, p. 90.
42. Hufton, The prospect before her, p. 77.
43. Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans: migration in western Europe since 1650, Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 1992, p. 46.
44. Cited by Margret Wensky in S. Cavaciocchi, ed., La donna nell’economia sccc. XIII–XVIII,
Florence: Le Monnier, 1990, p. 140.
45. A. Karpinski, ‘The scale of feminization of retail trade in Polish towns’, in Cavaciocchi, ed., La
donna nell’economia, pp. 283–92.
46. Maria Bogucka, ‘Women and economic life in Polish cities during the sixteenth–seventeenth
centuries’, in Cavaciocchi, ed., La donna nell’economia, p. 191.
47. Martha C. Howell, ‘Women, the family economy and the structures of market production in
cities of northern Europe’, in Barbara Hanawalt, ed., Women and work in preindustrial Europe,
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986, p. 200.
48. Evelyne Berriot-Salvadore, Les femmes dans la société française de la Renaissance, Geneva: Droz,
1990, pp. 502, 514.
49. Peter Earle, The making of the English middle class, London: Methuen, 1989, p. 170.
50. Joan Thirsk, ‘Foreword’, in Mary Prior, ed., Women in English society 1500–1800, London:
Routledge, 1985, p. 13.
51. B.A. Holderness, ‘Women in agriculture: England 1600–1800’, in Cavaciocchi, ed., La donna
nell’economia, pp. 261–74.
52. See Daryl M. Hafter and Nina Kushner, Women and work in eighteenth-century France, Baton
Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2015.
53. Fletcher, Gender, sex and subordination, pp. 230–2.
54. Flandrin, Families in former times, p. 217.
55. R.A. Houston, The population history of Britain and Ireland, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992, p. 46.
56. Hufton, The prospect before her, p. 185.
57. David Harley, ‘Provincial midwives in England: Lancashire and Cheshire 1660–1760’, in
Hilary Marland, ed., The art of midwifery: early modern midwives in Europe, New York:
Routledge, 1993, p. 32.
58. Stephen Wilson, ‘The myth of motherhood a myth: the historical view of European child-
bearing’, Social History, 9, 2 (1984), p. 188.
59. A good selection is in Linda Pollock, Forgotten children: parent–child relations from 1500 to 1900,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. She consulted 496 accounts for her conclusions.
60. Diane Willen, ‘Women and religion in early modern England’, in Sherrin Marshall, ed.,
Women in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 1989, pp. 231–58.
61. Kamen, The phoenix and the flame, p. 324.
62. Cited by M. Rowlands, ‘Recusant women 1560–1640’, in M. Prior, ed., Women in English
society 1500–1800, London: Routledge, 1985, pp. 149–80.
63. Ronald Knox, Enthusiasm, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950, p. 162.
64. Cited in Hufton, The prospect before her, p. 414.
65. Cited in ibid., p. 416.
66. Kamen, The phoenix and the flame, p. 332.
67. Cited in Carolyn C. Lougee, Le paradis des femmes: women, salons and social stratification in
seventeenth-century France, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976.
68. Paul Salzman, ‘Introduction’, in Salzman, ed., Early modern women’s writing: an anthology,
1560–1700, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, p. ix.
69. R. Thompson, Women in Stuart England and America: a comparative study, London: Routledge,
1974.

377
 NOTES TO PP. 229–237

70. Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly and Adam Morton, eds, Queens consort, cultural transfer and
European politics, c.1500–1800, London: Routledge, 2017.
71. Frances Yates, Astrea: the imperial theme in the sixteenth century, London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1975, part II.
72. See Fletcher, Gender, sex and subordination, p. 80.
73. Merry Wiesner, Women and gender, chap. 8, appears to assume that the power structure in
Europe considered female rule unnatural.
74. Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘City women and religious change’, in Davis, Society and culture in early
modern France, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987, chap. 3.
75. Berriot-Salvadore, Les femmes dans la société, p. 540.
76. Cited in Antoine Adam, Grandeur and illusion: French literature and society 1600–1715,
London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972, p. 69.
77. Faramerz Dabhoiwala, ‘The construction of honour, reputation and status in late seventeenth-
and early eighteenth-century England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 6
(1996), pp. 210–12.
78. Kamen, Phoenix and the flame, p. 307.
79. Houlbrooke, The English family, p. 116.
80. Bernard Capp, ‘The double standard revisited’, Past and Present, 162 (1999), pp. 70–100.
81. See Elizabeth Foyster, ‘Male honour, social control and wife beating in late Stuart England’,
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 6 (1996), pp. 215–24.
82. Anthony Fletcher, ‘Men’s dilemma: the future of patriarchy in England 1560–1660’,
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 4 (1994), pp. 61–81.
83. Paul S. Seaver, Wallington’s world: a Puritan artisan in seventeenth-century London, Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1985.
84. Fletcher, Gender, sex and subordination, p. 104.
85. See Yves-Marie Bercé, Revolt and revolution in early modern Europe, Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1987, pp. 107–9.
86. D. Underdown, Revel, riot and rebellion: popular politics and culture in England 1603–1660,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
87. Catherine Killerby, ‘The enforcement of Italian sumptuary law, 1200–1500’, in T. Dean and
K. Lowe, Crime, society and the law in Renaissance Italy, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994, p. 115.
88. Cf Hufton, The prospect before her, pp. 269–76.
89. Valerie Kivelson, Desperate magic: the moral economy of witchcraft in seventeenth-century Russia,
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013.
90. Stuart Clark, Thinking with demons: the idea of witchcraft in early modern Europe, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1997, p. 110.
91. Kamen, The phoenix and the flame, pp. 241–2.
92. Lyndal Roper, ‘Witchcraft and fantasy in early modern Germany’, in J. Barry, M. Hester and G.
Roberts, eds, Witchcraft in early modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998,
p. 211.
93. Didier Godard, L’autre Faust: l’homosexualité masculine pendant la Renaissance, Montblanc:
H&O, 2002.
94. Michael Rocke, Forbidden friendships: homosexuality and male culture in Renaissance Florence,
New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
95. Thomas Betteridge, ed., Sodomy in early modern Europe, Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2002, p. 2.
96. Kenneth Borris, ‘The prehistory of homosexuality in the early modern sciences’, in Kenneth
Borris and George Rousseau, eds, The sciences of homosexuality in early modern Europe, London:
Routledge, 2008, pp. 4, 6.
97. M. Foucault, Histoire de la Sexualité, vol. 1: La volonté de savoir, Paris: Gallimard, 1976.
98. Helmut Puff, Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400–1600, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003, p. 23.

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 NOTES TO PP. 237–243

99. Mariana Muravyeva, ‘Do not rape and pillage without command: sex offences and early
modern European armies’, Clio, (39) 2014, pp. 53–77; https://journals.openedition.org/
cliowgh/466, accessed 1 December 2020.
100. Maria R. Boes, ‘On trial for sodomy in early modern Germany’, in Tom Betteridge, ed.,
Sodomy in early modern Europe, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002, pp. 27–45.
101. William Monter, ‘Sodomy and heresy in early modern Switzerland’, in S. Licata and R.
Petersen, eds, The gay past: a collection of historical essays, New York: Harrington Park Press,
2013, pp. 41–53.

Chapter 8 Social Discipline and Marginality

1. Marjorie K. McIntosh, Controlling misbehaviour in England 1370–1600, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 71.
2. Felicity Heal, Hospitality in early modern England, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990,
p. 3.
3. Heal, Hospitality, pp. 367–72.
4. Yves Castan, Honnêteté et relations sociales en Languedoc (1715–1780), Paris: Plon, 1974,
pp. 22–8.
5. Norbert Elias, The civilizing process, trans. E. Jephcott, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994, previously
published in several editions since the original in German in 1939. See also his The court
society, Dublin: University College of Dublin Press, 2006.
6. Jean-Pierre Gutton, ‘Confraternities, curés and communities’, in Kaspar von Greyerz, Religion
and society in early modern Europe 1500–1800, London: HarperCollins, 1984, pp. 51–4.
7. Martin Ingram, ‘Ridings, rough music and the “reform of popular culture” in early modern
England’, Past and Present, 105 (1984), pp. 79–113.
8. André Burguière, ‘The charivari and religious repression in France during the Ancien Régime’,
in R. Wheaton and T. Hareven, Family and sexuality in French history, Philadelphia, PA:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980, pp. 84–110.
9. For a case in a German Lutheran parish, see Thomas Robisheaux, Rural society and the search for
order in early modern Germany, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 118–19.
10. Jeffrey R. Watt, The making of modern marriage: matrimonial control and the rise of sentiment in
Neuchâtel, 1550–1800, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992, p. 51.
11. M.F. Graham, The uses of Reform: ‘godly discipline’ and popular behaviour in Scotland, 1560–1610,
Leiden: Brill, 1996.
12. Eva Österberg and Dag Lindström, Crime and social control in medieval and early modern
Swedish towns, Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1988, pp. 54, 138.
13. For sexual practice in England, see Martin Ingram, Church courts, sex, and marriage in England,
1570–1640, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 267–74.
14. See Henry Kamen, The phoenix and the flame, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University
Press, 1993, pp. 189–94.
15. A.Th. Van Deursen, Plain lives in a Golden Age: popular culture, religion and society in
seventeenth-century Holland, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 86–7.
16. Cited in Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in pre-revolutionary England, London: Secker
& Warburg, 1966, p. 225.
17. The view that there was a ‘construction of a new authoritarian moral order’, argued in James
R. Farr, Authority and sexuality in early modern Burgundy (1550–1730), Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995, p. 8, is not convincing.
18. Edward Shorter, The making of the modern family, New York: Basic Books, 1975, p. 132.
19. Tessa Storey, Carnal commerce in Counter-Reformation Rome, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008.
20. Lotte van de Pol, The burgher and the whore: prostitution in early modern Amsterdam, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011.
21. Joanne M. Ferraro, ‘Making a living: the sex trade in early modern Venice’, The American
Historical Review, vol. 123, 1 (2018), pp. 30–59.

379
 NOTES TO PP. 244–262

22. See Robert Jütte, Poverty and deviance in early modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994, pp. 46 and following.
23. Cited in Christopher R. Friedrichs, The early modern city, London: Longman, 1995, p. 226.
24. Ian W. Archer, The pursuit of stability: social relations in Elizabethan London, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 153.
25. Juan Luis Morales, El niño en la cultura española, 4 vols, Madrid: TPA, 1960, vol. I, p. 91 and
following.
26. Cited in Frank Aydelotte, Elizabethan rogues and vagabonds, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913,
p. 55.
27. Yves Durand, Cahiers de doléances des paroisses du bailliage de Troyes pour les états généraux de
1614, Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1966.
28. Linda Martz, Poverty and welfare in Habsburg Spain: the example of Toledo, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983.
29. Ernst Schubert, ‘Die Ausgrenzung des fahrenden Volkes’, in Winfried Schulze, ed., Ständische
Gesellschaft und soziale Mobilität, Munich: De Gruyter, 1988, pp. 113–64.
30. Brian Pullan, Rich and poor in Renaissance Venice: the social institutions of a Catholic state, to
1620, Oxford: Blackwell, 1971.
31. E.M. Leonard, The early history of English poor relief, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1900.
32. Michel Foucault, Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison, London: Pantheon, 1977,
p. 141.
33. Cited in E. Chill, ‘Religion and mendicity in seventeenth-century France’, International
Review of Social History, 7, 3 (1962), pp. 400–25.
34. Charles H. Parker, The reformation of community: social welfare and Calvinist charity in Holland,
1572–1620, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 4, 13, 125.
35. W.K. Jordan, The charities of London 1480–1660, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1960.
36. Giovanni Treccani, Storia di Milano, vol XI: Il declino spagnolo (1630–1706), Milan: Fondazione
Treccani degli Alfieri per la storia di Milano, 1958, p. 362.
37. Maureen Flynn, Sacred charity: confraternities and social welfare in Spain, 1400–1700, London:
Macmillan, 1989, pp. 71–6.
38. W. Callahan, La Santa y Real Hermandad del Refugio y Piedad de Madrid 1618–1832, Madrid:
Instituto de Estudios Madrileños, 1980.
39. Erik von Kraemer, Le type du faux mendiant dans les littératures romanes, Helsinki: Societas
Scientiarum Fennica, 1944.
40. Alexandre Vexliard, Introduction à la sociologie du vagabondage, Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1956.
41. Jean-Paul Clébert, The gypsies, trans. C. Duff, London: Vista Books, 1963.
42. Richard Pym, The gypsies of early modern Spain, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
43. An excellent survey is in J.A. Sharpe, ‘The history of crime in late medieval and early modern
England: a review of the field’, Social History, 7, 2 (May 1982), pp. 187–203.
44. Julius R. Ruff, Violence in early modern Europe 1500–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001, p. 2.
45. M. Greenshields, An economy of violence in early modern France: crime and justice in the Haute
Auvergne 1587–1664, Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994, p. 68.
46. J.M. Beattie, ‘The pattern of crime in England 1660–1800’, Past and Present, 62 (1974), pp. 86–7.
47. J.A. Sharpe, Crime in early modern England 1550–1750, London: Longman, 1999, p. 7.
48. Cited in Friedrichs, The early modern city, p. 233.
49. Garthine Walker, Crime, gender and social order in early modern England, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003.
50. Ulinka Rublack, The crimes of women in early modern Germany, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999, p. 255.
51. Paul Griffiths, ‘Juvenile delinquency in time’, in Pamela Cox and Heather Shore, Becoming
delinquent: British and European youth, 1650–1950, London: Routledge, 2017, pp. 23–40.
52. Y.-M. Bercé, ‘De la criminalité aux troubles sociaux: la noblesse rurale du Sud-Ouest de la
France sous Louis XIII’, Annales du Midi, 76, 1 (1964), pp. 41–59.

380
 NOTES TO PP. 262–276

53. See Trevor Dean, ‘Criminal justice in mid fifteenth-century Bologna’, in T. Dean and K. Lowe,
Crime, society and the law in Renaissance Italy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994,
p. 17.
54. J.A. Sharpe, ‘Enforcing the law in the seventeenth-century English village’, in V.A.C. Gattrell,
B. Lenman and G. Parker, Crime and the law: the social history of crime in western Europe since
1500, London: Europa, 1980, pp. 97–119.
55. See Alfred Soman, ‘Deviance and criminal justice in western Europe, 1300–1800: an essay in
structure’, in Soman, Sorcellerie et justice criminelle, London: Routledge, 1992, p. 13.
56. Bruce Lenman and Geoffrey Parker, ‘The state, the community and the criminal law in early
modern Europe’, in Gattrell, Lenman and Parker, Crime and the law, London: Europa, 1980,
p. 15.
57. T.A. Mantecón, Conflictividad y disciplinamiento social en la Cantabria rural del Antiguo
Régimen, Santander: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Cantabria, 1997.
58. J.S. Cockburn, ed., Crime in England 1550–1800, London: Methuen, 1977, p. 55.
59. Henry Kamen, Spain in the later seventeenth century, London: Longman, 1980, pp. 168–9.
60. Thomas V. Cohen, review of P. Blastenbrei, Kriminalität in Rom 1560–1585, Tübingen:
Niemeyer, 1995, Sixteenth Century Journal, 27, 3 (1996), pp. 885–6.
61. Jean Delumeau, Vie économique et sociale de Rome, vol. II, Paris: Bocard, 1959, chap. 1.
62. Xavier Torres, Nyerros i Cadells: bàndols i bandolerisme a la Catalunya moderna (1590–1640),
Barcelona: Quadern Crema, 1993.
63. Cited in J. Deleito y Piñuela, La mala vida en la España de Felipe IV, Madrid: Espasa Calpe,
1951.
64. Denise Eeckaute, ‘Les brigands en Russie du XVIIe au XIXe siècle: mythe et réalité’, Revue
d’Histoire moderne et contemporaine, 12 (1965), pp. 161–202.
65. W. Monter, ‘Heresy executions in Reformation Europe, 1520–1565’, in O.P. Grell and
R. Scribner, Tolerance and intolerance in the European Reformation, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996, p. 50.
66. Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press,
2014, chap. 9.
67. Cf. Alfred Soman, ‘Press, pulpit and censorship in France before Richelieu’, Proceedings,
American Philosophical Society, 120 (1976), p. 443.
68. Kamen, Spanish Inquisition, chap. 13.
69. Richard van Dülmen, Theatre of horror: crime and punishment in early modern Germany,
Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990.
70. Pieter Spierenburg, The spectacle of suffering: executions and the evolution of repression,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
71. Cited in Friedrichs, The early modern city, p. 254.
72. A. Roger Ekirch, ‘Bound for America: a profile of British convicts transported to the colonies,
1718–1775’, The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 42, 2 (1985), pp. 182–200.
73. J. Sumption, Pilgrimage: an image of medieval religion, London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1975,
p. 99.
74. Robert Davis, Christian slaves, Muslim masters: white slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary
Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
75. Both cited in Charles Verlinden, L’esclavage dans l’Europe médiévale, vol. I: Péninsule Ibérique–
France, Bruges: De Tempel, 1955.
76. Ridolfo Livi, La schiavità domestica nei tempi di mezzo e nei moderni, Padua: Cedam, 1928.
77. Jean-Marc Pelorson, ‘Exclusion pour défaut et exclusion pour faute: reflexions sur le traitement
juridique de la folie’, in A. Redondo, Les problèmes de l’exclusion en Espagne (XVI–XVIIe siècles),
Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1983, pp. 125–33.
78. Martine Bigeard, La folie et les fous littéraires en Espagne 1500–1650, Paris: Centre de Recherches
Hispaniques, 1972.
79. H.C. Erik Midelfort, ‘Sin, melancholy, obsession: insanity and culture in sixteenth century
Germany’, in Steven Kaplan, ed., Understanding popular culture, Berlin: Mouton, 1984,
pp. 113–45.

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 NOTES TO PP. 276–284

80. C. Lis and H. Soly, Disordered lives: eighteenth-century families and their unruly relatives.
Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996.
81. For England, see Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: madness, anxiety and healing in
seventeenth-century England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Chapter 9 Modernity and the Individual

1. Peter Blickle, The Revolution of 1525, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981.
2. A. Macfarlane, The origins of English individualism, Oxford: Blackwell, 1978.
3. Cited by Vittor Ivo Comparato, ‘A case of modern individualism’, in Janet Coleman, ed., The
individual in political theory and practice, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996, p. 153.
4. See the chapters in Riitta Laitinen and Thomas V. Cohen, eds, Cultural history of early modern
European streets, Leiden: Brill, 2009.
5. Lawrence Stone, The family, sex and marriage, London: Penguin, 1979, p. 151.
6. ‘The early modern period did not see a growth of individualism’: David Cressy, Birth, marriage
and death: ritual, religion and the life-cycle in Tudor and Stuart England, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997, p. 10.
7. Michael Anderson, ‘The relevance of family history’, in C. Harris, ed., The sociology of the
family, Keele: University of Keele, 1979, pp. 58–68.
8. See Chapter 8.
9. Michael Zell, ‘Suicide in pre-industrial England’, Social History, 11, 3 (1986), pp. 303–17.
10. Michael MacDonald, Sleepless souls: suicide in early modern England, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1990.
11. Cited in MacDonald, Sleepless souls, p. 197.
12. Data in Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, Social discipline in the Reformation, London: Routledge, 1989,
pp. 163–6, from M. Schär, Seelennöte der Untertanen: Selbstmord, Melancholie und Religion im
alten Zürich, Zürich: Chronos, 1985.
13. Cited in Linda Pollock, ‘Living on the stage of the world: the concept of privacy among the
elite of early modern England’, in Adrian Wilson, ed., Rethinking social history: English society
1570–1920 and its interpretation, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993, pp. 78–96.
14. See David Garrioch, Neighbourhood and community in Paris, 1740–1790, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 54.
15. Fabrizio Nevola, ‘Street life in early modern Europe’, Renaissance Quarterly, 66 (2013),
pp. 1332–45.
16. Laitinen and Cohen, Cultural history of early modern European streets.
17. Lucien Febvre, Le problème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle: la religion de Rabelais, Paris: Albin
Michel, 1942.
18. R. Pintard, Le libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle, 2 vols, Paris: Boivin,
1943.
19. R.H. Popkin, The history of scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes, Assen: Van Gorcum, 1964.
20. Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic tradition, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1964, chap. 10.
21. Frances Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972.
22. David Wootton, ‘New histories of atheism’, in Michael Hunter and David Wootton, eds,
Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992, pp. 13–53.
23. Cited in Henry Kamen, The phoenix and the flame, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale
University Press, 1993, chapters 1 and 12.
24. See Chapter 3.
25. J. Tazbir, A state without stakes: Polish religious toleration in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
trans. A.T. Jordan, New York: Kościuszko Foundation, 1973, p. 35.
26. Henry Kamen, ‘Toleration and the law in the west 1500–1700’, Ratio Juris, 10, 1 (1997),
p. 38.
27. Randolph C. Head, Early modern democracy in the Grisons, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995, p. 237.

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 NOTES TO PP. 285–298

28. The case for an increase in secularism is possibly most convincing in the case of England: John
Sommerville, The secularization of early modern England, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
29. An excellent guide is R.A. Houston, Literacy in early modern Europe: culture and education
1500–1800, 2nd edn, London: Longman, 2002.
30. Elizabeth Eisenstein, The printing revolution in early modern Europe, 2nd edn, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005.
31. Paul Slack, The invention of improvement: information and material progress in seventeenth-
century England, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 262.
32. Houston, Literacy in early modern Europe, chap. 6.
33. See for example Judith Pollmann and Erika Kuijpers, ‘On the early modernity of modern
memory’, in Memory before modernity: practices of memory in early modern Europe, ed. E
Kuijpers, J. Pollman, J. Müller and J. van der Steen, Brill: Leiden, 2013, pp. 1–23.
34. Po-Chia Hsia, Social discipline in the Reformation, pp. 94–9, 107–9.
35. Houston, Literacy in early modern Europe, p. 232.
36. Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: a historical revision, New Haven, CT, and London:
Yale University Press, 2014, p. 114.
37. M.-C. Rodríguez and B. Bennassar, ‘Signatures et niveau culturel’, Caravelle, 31 (1978),
pp. 17–46.
38. J.P. Le Flem, on Segovia, in De l’Alphabétisation aux circuits du livre en Espagne, XVI–XIXe
siècles, Paris: CNRS, 1987.
39. Quoted in David McKitterick, Print, manuscript and the search for order, 1450–1830,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 15.
40. Ian Maclean, Scholarship, commerce, religion: the learned book in the age of confessions, 1560–
1630, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
41. J.A. Downie, Robert Harley and the press: propaganda and public opinion in the age of Swift and
Defoe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
42. Quoted in Anthony Grafton, ‘A sketch map of a lost continent: the republic of letters’,
Republics of Letters: a Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics and the Arts, vol.1, 1, (2009),
p. 1; https://arcade.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/article_pdfs/roflv01i01_Grafton_071609_
0_0.pdf, accessed 7 December 2020.
43. Richard Kagan, Students and society in early modern Spain, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1974, p. 213.
44. John Gascoigne, ‘A reappraisal of the role of the universities in the scientific revolution’, in
David Lindberg and Robert Westman, eds, Reappraisals of the scientific revolution, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 207–60.
45. See Hilde de Ridder-Symoens, ‘Training and professionalisation’, in W. Reinhard, Power elites
and state building, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 156–72.
46. A modern perspective on the cultural aspect is Maurizio Ascari, ‘The rise of the Grand Tour:
higher education, transcultural desire and the fear of cultural hybridisation’, Linguae &. Rivista
di lingue e culture modern, vol. 14, 1 (2015); https://www.ledonline.it/index.php/linguae/
article/view/859/711, accessed 7 December 2020. Original aspects are broached in Gerrit
Verhoeven, Rosemary Sweet and Sarah Goldsmith, eds, Beyond the Grand Tour: northern
metropolises and early modern travel behaviour, London: Routledge, 2019.
47. Mathis Leibetseder: Die Kavalierstour: adelige Erziehungsreisen im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert,
Cologne: Böhlau, 2004.
48. Justin Stagl, A history of curiosity: the theory of travel, 1550–1800, Amsterdam: Harwood, 1995,
especially chapters 1 and 2.
49. Ibid., p. 58.
50. Cited in Joan Simon, Education and society in Tudor England, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1966.
51. Cited in Kenneth Charlton, Education in Renaissance England, London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1965.
52. Bruce Redford, Venice and the Grand Tour, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University
Press, 1996, p. 10.

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 NOTES TO PP. 299–316

53. Quoted in Charlton, Education in Renaissance England, p. 218.

54. John Towner, ‘The Grand Tour: a key phase in the history of tourism’, Annals of Tourism
Research, 12 (1985), pp. 297–333.
55. Among numerous studies on the subject, see Edward Chaney, The evolution of the Grand Tour:
Anglo-Italian cultural relations since the Renaissance, London: Cass, 2000.
56. For multiple perspectives on the Grand Tour in the Germanic world, see Rainer Babel and
Werner Paravicini, eds, Grand Tour: adeliges Reisen und europäische Kultur vom 14. bis zum 18.
Jahrhundert, Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2005.
57. Otto Brunner, Neue Wege der Sozialgeschichte, Göttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 1956.
58. S. Stelling-Michaud (ed.), Le livre du recteur de l’Académie de Genève (1559–1878), Geneva:
Droz, 1959.
59. H. Schneppen, Niederländische Universitäten und deutsches Geistesleben, Münster: Aschendorff,
1960.
60. One such scribbled memoir, written by a Catalan village priest, was the basis for my study of
local religion, The phoenix and the flame.
61. Cited in Ralph Houlbrooke, ed., English family life 1576–1716: an anthology from diaries,
Oxford: Blackwell, 1988, p. 3.
62. This, at least, is the argument of Jonathan Dewald, Aristocratic experience and the origins of
modern culture: France 1570–1715, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993.
63. See James S. Amelang, ‘The mental world of Jeroni Pujades’, in R. Kagan and G. Parker, eds,
Spain, Europe and the Atlantic world, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 211–
26. The text of the diary is Dietari de Jeroni Pujades, ed. J.M. Casas Homs, 4 vols, Barcelona:
Fundació Salvador Vives Casajuana, 1975–6.
64. James Amelang, The flight of Icarus: artisan autobiography in early modern Europe, Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 123.
65. Ibid., pp. 239–40.
66. See Grafton, ‘A sketch map of a lost continent’, pp. 9–10. For the notion of a European
republic of letters, see also Marc Fumaroli, La République des Lettres, Paris: Gallimard, 2015;
Herbert Jaumann, ed., Die europäische Gelehrtenrepublik im Zeitalter des Konfessionalismus /
The European republic of letters in the age of confessionalism, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001.
67. Francisco Bethencourt and Florike Egmond, eds, Cultural exchange in early modern Europe, vol
III: correspondence and cultural exchange in Europe, 1400–1700, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007, especially Part I.
68. Jeremy Black, The power of knowledge: how information and technology made the modern world,
New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2014.
69. Kamen, The phoenix and the flame, pp. 129–31.
70. E.A. Beller, Propaganda in Germany during the Thirty Years War, Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1940.
71. Christian Jouhaud, ‘Propagande et action au temps de la Fronde’, in Culture et idéologie dans
la genèse de l’état moderne, Rome: École Française de Rome, 1985, pp. 337–52.
72. Marie-Noële Grand-Mesnil, Mazarin, la Fronde et la Presse 1647–1649, Paris: Armand Colin,
1967.
73. See Brendan Dooley and Sabrina A. Baron, The politics of information in early modern Europe,
London: Routledge, 2001.
74. Andrew Pettegree, The invention of news: how the world came to know about itself, New Haven,
CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2014, chap. 1.
75. Frank E. and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian thought in the western world, Oxford: Blackwell, 1979.
76. L. Firpo, Lo stato ideale della Controriforma, Bari: Laterza, 1957.
77. M. Mörner, The political and economic activities of the Jesuits in the Plata region, Stockholm:
Library and Institute of Ibero-American Studies, 1953.
78. Myriam Yardeni, Utopie et révolte sous Louis XIV, Paris: Nizet, 1980.
79. What follows is drawn from Carole Fabricant, ‘George Berkeley the islander’, in Felicity
Nussbaum, ed., The global eighteenth century, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2003, pp. 263–78. Berkeley was famous for denying the existence of matter.

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 NOTES TO PP. 317–328

Chapter 10 Global Projection of Europeans

1. Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European hegemony: the world system AD 1250–1350, New York:
Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 8.
2. Peer Vries, ‘A very brief history of economic globalisation since Columbus’, in R.C.
Kloosterman, V. Mamadouh and P. Terhorst, eds, Handbook on the geographies of globalisation,
Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2018, pp. 17–42.
3. A.G. Hopkins, Globalisation in world history, London: Pimlico, 2002, pp. 3–6.
4. James Tracy, quoted in Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, ‘When did globalisation
begin?’, European Review of Economic History, 6 (2002), 23–50.
5. Wim Blockmans, Mikhail Krom and Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz, ‘Maritime trade around
Europe 1300–1600’, in Blockmans, Krom and Wubs-Mrozewicz, eds, The Routledge handbook
of maritime trade around Europe 1300–1600, London: Routledge, 2017, p. 2.
6. Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Globalisation: a short history, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2005, p. ix.
7. Linda Colley, The ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: a woman in world history, London: Harper, 2007.
8. Zhanna Barchuk and Mary Jane Harkins, ‘Why teach about globalization?’, Social Studies
Research and Practice, 5, 1 (2010), pp. 13–23.
9. Jan de Vries, ‘The limits of globalisation in the early modern world’, The Economic History
Review, 63, 3 (2010), pp. 710–33.
10. Anne Gerritsen, ‘From long-distance trade to the global lives of things: writing the history
of early modern trade and material culture’, Journal of Early Modern History 20 (2016),
pp. 526–44.
11. Here is one overoptimistic view: ‘global processes knit the early modern world together,
enabling people to perceive in its entirety a world once experienced only in fragments.
Maritime and navigational advances accelerated the pace of connection and the rate of
communication among distant continents. Old intellectual frameworks were irrevocably
challenged,’ in Alison Games, The web of empire: English cosmopolitans in an age of expansion,
1560–1660, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 6.
12. Jan de Vries, ‘Connecting Europe and Asia: a quantitative analysis of the Cape-route trade,
1497–1795’, in D.O. Flynn, A. Giraldez and R. von Glahn, eds, Global connections and
monetary history, 1470–1800, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003, pp. 35–106.
13. Omri B. Frenkel, ‘Transplantation of Asian spices in the Spanish Empire 1518–1640’, PhD
thesis, University of McGill, p. 43; https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/concern/theses/d791sj873,
accessed 10 December 2020.
14. The classic outline is Alfred Crosby, The Columbian exchange: biological and cultural consequences
of 1492, Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. See also Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian, ‘The
Columbian exchange: A history of disease, food, and ideas’, Journal of Economic Perspectives,
24, 2 (2010), pp. 163–88.
15. For example, Pieter Emmer, ‘The myth of early globalisation: the Atlantic economy, 1500–
1800’, Colloques, 2008; https://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/42173, accessed 10
December 2020; first published in European Review, 11, 1 (2003), pp. 37–47.
16. Henry Kamen, Spain 1469–1714, Harlow: Longman, 2005, chap. 2.
17. Arturo Giraldez, The age of trade: the Manila galleons and the dawn of the global economy,
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.
18. Nuala Zahedieh, The capital and the colonies: London and the Atlantic economy 1660–1700,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 195.
19. Niall Ferguson, Civilization: the west and the rest, London: Penguin, 2011. This stimulating
work has provoked considerable debate. Ferguson suggests six foundations for the success of
the west: competition, science, property rights, medicine, consumer society and work ethic.
He defines the rise of the west as ‘the story at the very heart of modern history’.
20. Eric L. Jones, The European miracle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
21. John F. Richards, The unending frontier: an environmental history of the early modern world,
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003, pp. 19–20.

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 NOTES TO PP. 328–336

22. Thomas Brady, ‘The rise of merchant empires, 1400–1700’, in J.D. Tracy, ed., The political
economy of merchant empires: state power and world trade 1350–1750, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991, p. 118.
23. Eric Williams, Capitalism and slavery, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944.
24. Walter Rodney, How Europe underdeveloped Africa, Nairobi: Pambazuka Press, 1972.
25. Kenneth Pomeranz, The great divergence: China, Europe and the making of the modern world
economy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.
26. Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe grew rich and Asia did not: global economic divergence,
1600–1850, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, especially Introduction.
27. Anne Gerritsen, ‘From long-distance trade to the global lives of things’.
28. Daniel Roche, A history of everyday things: the birth of consumption in France, 1600–1800,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
29. Maxine Berg, ‘In pursuit of luxury: global history and British consumer goods in the eighteenth
century’, Past and Present, 182 (2004), pp. 85–142.
30. See Chapter 8, note 5, above.
31. Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, The global lives of things: the material culture of connections
in the early modern world, London: Routledge, 2016, offer a thoughtful presentation of this
approach.
32. Woodruff D. Smith, Consumption and the making of respectability, 1600–1800, New York:
Routledge, 2002.
33. Brady, ‘The rise of merchant empires, p. 119.
34. Ken Albala, Food in early modern Europe, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003, p. 19.
35. See Geoffrey C. Gunn, First globalisation: the Eurasian exchange, 1500–1800, Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2003, p. 69.
36. Marcy Norton, Sacred gifts, profane pleasures: a history of tobacco and chocolate in the Atlantic
world, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.
37. For example, ‘A taste for tea’ in Maxine Berg et al., eds, Goods from the east, 1600–1800: trading
Eurasia, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, Part IV.
38. Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and power: the place of sugar in modern history, New York: Viking,
1985.
39. Jan de Vries, The industrious revolution: consumer behaviour and the household economy, 1650
to the present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
40. Nadia Fernández de Pinedo, ‘Global commodities in early modern Spain’, in M. Perez Garcia
and L. de Sousa, eds, Global history and new polycentric approaches: Europe, Asia and the
Americas in a world network system, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 293–319.
41. Donald F. Lach, Asia in the making of Europe, vol. 2: A century of wonder, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1977, p. xx.
42. Richards, The unending frontier, p. 19.
43. Luís Miguel Peixoto de Andrade Baptista, ‘An oriental autumn in London: encounters, the
meeting of Asia and Europe 1500–1800, at the Victoria & Albert Museum’, Bulletin of
Portuguese–Japanese Studies, 9 (2004), pp. 101–34.
44. Pratik Chakrabarti, Medicine and empire 1600–1960, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2014.
45. Jon Arrizabalaga, John Henderson and Roger French, The great pox: the French disease in
Renaissance Europe, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1997.
46. Claudia Stein, Negotiating the French pox in early modern Germany, London: Routledge, 2016,
Introduction.
47. Kerttu Majander et al., ‘Ancient bacterial genomes reveal a high diversity of treponema
pallidum strains in Early Modern Europe’, Current Biology, 13, 19 (2020), pp. R1092–5.
48. George J. Armelagos, Molly Zuckerman and Kristin Harper, ‘The science behind pre-
Columbian evidence of syphilis in Europe’, Evolutionary Anthropology, 21, 2 (2012), pp. 50–7.
49. A bibliographical overview is Reinhold Reith, Umweltgeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit, Munich:
Oldenbourg, 2011.
50. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological imperialism: the biological expansion of Europe, 900–1900,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986; Richard Grove, Ecology, climate and

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empire: colonialism and global environmental history, 1400–1940, Cambridge: White Horse
Press, 1997.
51. Tamara L. Whited et al., Northern Europe: an environmental history, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-
CLIO, 2005, p. 79.
52. See also, for forests, Chapter 6.
53. Michael Williams, Deforesting the earth: from prehistory to global crisis, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003.
54. Robert C. Allen, ‘Was there a timber crisis in early modern Europe?’, in S. Cavaciocchi, ed.,
Economia e energia secc. xiii–xviii, Prato: 1st. Storia Economica Datini, 2003, pp. 469–82.
55. Richard H. Grove, Green imperialism: colonial expansion, tropical island Edens and the origins of
environmentalism, 1600–1860, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
56. Keith Thomas, Man and the natural world: changing attitudes in England 1500–1800, London:
Allen Lane, 1983.
57. Sara Miglietti and John Morgan, eds, Governing the environment in the early modern world,
Abingdon: Routledge, 2017.
58. Henry Kamen, The Escorial: art and power in the Renaissance, New Haven, CT, and London:
Yale University Press, 2010, pp. 70–5, 133–5.
59. Thomas, Man and the natural world, chap. 6.
60. Alan Macfarlane, The culture of capitalism, Oxford: Blackwell, 1987, chap. 4.
61. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Histoire du climat depuis l’an mil, Paris: Flammarion, 1967.
62. Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: how climate made history, 1300–1850, New York: Basic Books,
2000; Wolfgang Behringer, Hartmut Lehmann and Christian Pfister, eds, Kulturelle
Konsequenzen der ‘Kleinen Eiszeit’: Cultural consequences of the ‘Little Ice Age’, Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2005.
63. A typical study that attributes every significant event of those centuries to the alleged ice age is
Philipp Blom, Nature’s mutiny: how the Little Ice Age of the long seventeenth century transformed
the west and shaped the present, New York: Liveright Publishing, 2019.
64. A general presentation of arguments by climate historians is Sam White, Christian Pfister and
Franz Mauelshagen, eds, The Palgrave handbook of climate history, London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2018. An application of this approach to early modern Europe is Christian Pfister and Rudolf
Brazdil, ‘Climatic variability in sixteenth century Europe and its social dimension’, in Climatic
Change, 43 (1999), pp. 5–53. Wolfgang Behringer, A cultural history of climate, Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2010, pp. 85–166, is an easy-to-read summary that accepts the idea of a Little
Ice Age.
65. Geoffrey Parker, Global crisis: war, climate change and catastrophe in the seventeenth century,
New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2013.
66. Richards, The unending frontier, pp. 17–86.
67. Morgan Kelly and Cormac Ó Gráda, ‘The waning of the Little Ice Age: climate change in early
modern Europe’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xliv, 3 (2014), pp. 301–25. They conclude:
‘We find no statistical evidence of any major breaks, trends, or cycles in European weather of
the sort that one could associate with a Little Ice Age. The anecdotal evidence usually adduced
to demonstrate that episodes of marked cooling occurred between the fourteenth and
nineteenth centuries – for instance, the freezing of the Thames and the disappearance of grape
growing in England – admits of simpler explanations’.
68. Mike Lockwood et al., ‘Frost fairs, sunspots and the Little Ice Age’, Astronomy and Geophysics,
58, 2 (2017), pp. 2.17–2.23.
69. William Beinart and Lotte Hughes, Environment and empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009.
70. The claim is by Geoffrey Parker; for its context see Clifford J Rogers, ed., The military revolution
debate: readings on the military transformation of early modern Europe, New York: Routledge,
2018, p. 5.
71. Charles H. Parker, Global interactions in the early modern age, 1400–1800, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 3.
72. See the fascinating study by Gunn, First globalisation, p. 3.

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 NOTES TO PP. 341–358

73. See H. Kamen, Empire: how Spain became a world power, New York: HarperCollins, 2003,
passim.
74. Parker, Global interactions, p. 11.
75. Benjamin Schmidt, ‘Mapping an exotic world: the global project of Dutch geography, circa
1700’, in Felicity A. Nussbaum, ed., The global eighteenth century, Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2003, pp. 23–4.
76. Ibid., pp. 26–7.
77. Ibid., p. 24.

Chapter 11 The Rise of the Modern State

1. Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: building states and regimes in medieval and early modern
Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 6.
2. Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The gentry in England and Wales 1500–1700, Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1994, p. 117.
3. See Clifford J. Rogers, ed., The military revolution debate: readings on the military transformation
of early modern Europe, New York: Routledge, 2018, chap. 1.
4. Frank Tallett, War and society in early modern Europe: 1495–1715, London: Routledge, 1992,
Introduction.
5. Jan Glete used the term ‘fiscal-military states’ to describe governments affected by this process.
Jan Glete, War and the state in early modern Europe: Spain, the Dutch Republic and Sweden as
fiscal-military states, 1500–1660, London: Routledge, 2001.
6. John A. Lynn, ‘Recalculating French army growth during the Grand Siècle, 1610–1715’, in
Clifford Rogers, Military revolution, p. 117.
7. For Russia, see Nancy S. Kollman, The Russian Empire 1450–1801, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2017, pp. 3–5.
8. Geoffrey Parker, quoted in Clifford Rogers, The military revolution debate, p. 5.
9. Michael J. Braddick, State formation in early modern England, c.1550–1700, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 21.
10. Nicholas Henshall, The myth of absolutism: change and continuity in early modern European
monarchy, Abingdon: Routledge, 2013.
11. Alain Boureau, ‘État moderne et attribution symbolique: emblèmes et devises dans l’Europe
des XVIe et XVIIe siècles’, in Culture et idéologie dans la genèse de l’état moderne, Rome: École
Française de Rome, 1985, pp. 155–78.
12. Gérard Sabatier, ‘Versailles, un imaginaire politique’, in Culture et idéologie, pp. 295–324.
13. Cesare Cuttica, ‘A thing or two about absolutism and its historiography’, History of European
Ideas, 39, 2 (2013), pp. 287–300, discusses how recent historians interpret the notion of
absolutism.
14. I.A.A. Thompson, ‘Absolutism, legalism and the law in Castile 1500–1700’, in R.G. Asch and
H. Duchhardt, Der Absolutismus – ein Mythos? Strukturwandel monarchischer Herrschaft in
West- und Mitteleuropa (ca. 1550–1700), Cologne: Böhlau, 1996, p. 220.

388
 REFERENCES AND READINGS

Useful general discussions of the period include the following:

Collins, James B. and Karen L. Taylor, Early Modern Europe: Issues and Interpretations, Oxford:
Blackwell, 2006.
Dixon, Scott and Beat Kümin, eds, Interpreting Early Modern Europe, London: Routledge, 2020.
Scott, Hamish, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350–1750, vol. 1:
Peoples and Place, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Taylor, Barry, ed. Society and Economy in Early Modern Europe, 1450–1789: A Bibliography of
Post-war Research, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989.
Terpstra, Nicholas, ed., Lives Uncovered: A Sourcebook of Early Modern Europe, Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2019.

Chapter 1 Identities and horizons

Identity and community
Braudel, Fernand, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols,
London: Collins, 1972–3.
Cabourdin, Guy, Terre et hommes en Lorraine 1550–1635, 2 vols, Paris: Université de Nancy II,
1977.
Cipolla, Carlo, Clocks and Culture 1300–1700, London: Collins, 1967.
Friedrichs, Christopher, The Early Modern City 1450–1750, London: Longman, 1995.
Gascon, Richard, ‘Immigration et croissance au XVIe siècle: l’exemple de Lyon (1529–1563)’,
Annales, XXV (1970), pp. 988–1001.
Goubert, Pierre, Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 à 1730, 2 vols, Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N, 1960.
Gutton, Jean-Pierre, La sociabilité villageoise dans l’Ancienne France: solidarités et voisinages du XVIe
au XVIIe siècle, Paris: Hachette, 1979.
Pitt-Rivers, Julian, The People of the Sierra, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1971.
Vassberg, David, The Village and the Outside World in Golden Age Castile, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996.

Population and the family

Anderson, Michael, Approaches to the History of the Western Family, 1500–1914, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Croix, Alain, La Bretagne aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles, 2 vols, Paris: Maloine, 1980.
Deyon, Pierre, Amiens, capitale provinciale, Paris: Mouton, 1967.
Flandrin, Jean Louis, ‘Repression and change in the sexual life of young people’, Journal of Family
History, 2, 3 (1977), pp. 196–210.
Flinn, Michael, The European Demographic System 1500–1820, Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981.
Glass, D.V. and D.E.C. Eversley, eds, Population in History, London: Arnold, 1965.

389
 REFERENCES AND READINGS

Grigg, David, Population Growth and Agrarian Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1980.
Goubert, Pierre, ‘Family and province: a contribution to our knowledge of family structure in early
modern France’, Journal of Family History, 2 (1977), pp. 179–95.
Houston, R.A., The Population History of Britain and Ireland 1500–1750, Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1992.
Kertzer, David I. and Marzio Barbagli, eds, The History of the European Family: Family Life in Early
Modern Times 1500–1789, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.
Laslett, Peter, ed., Household and Family in Past Time, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1972.
Macfarlane, Alan, The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition,
Oxford: Blackwell, 1978.
De Mause, Lloyd, ed., The History of Childhood, New York: Psychohistory Press, 1974.
Medick, Hans, ‘The proto-industrial family economy’, Social History, 3 (1976), pp. 291–315.
Mols, Roger, Introduction a la Démographie Historique des Villes d’Europe du XIVe au XVIIe siècle,
3 vols, Louvain: Université de Louvain, 1955.
Stone, Lawrence, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800, London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1977.
Wheaton, Robert, ‘Family and kinship in western Europe: the problem of the Joint Family
Household’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 5, 4 (1975), pp. 601–28.
Wrigley, E.A., Population and History, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969.
XVIIe Siecle: Le XVIIe siècle et la famille, 102–3 (1974), whole issue.

Population checks
Abel, Wilhelm, Massenarmut und Hungerkrisen im vorindustriellen Europa, Hamburg: Parey,
1974.
Appleby, Andrew, Famine in Tudor and Stuart England, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1978.
Ariès, Philippe, The Hour of our Death, London: Allen Lane, 1981.
Bennassar, Bartolomé, Recherches sur les grands épidémies dans le nord de l’Espagne à la fin du XVIe
siècle, Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N, 1969.
Bergues, Hélène et al., La prévention des naissances dans la famille, Paris: Plon, 1960.
Chaunu, Pierre, La mort à Paris, XVIe, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, Paris: Fayard, 1978.
Finlay, Roger, Population and Metropolis: The Demography of London, 1580–1640, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Gieysztorowa, Irena, ‘Guerre et régression en Masovie aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles’, Annales, 13
(1958), pp. 651–68.
Jacquart, Jean, La crise rurale en Ile de France 1550–1670, Paris: A. Colin, 1974.
Kamen, Henry, ‘The social and economic consequences of the Thirty Years War’, Past and Present,
39, 1 (1968), pp. 44–61.
Keyser, Erich, ‘Neue deutsche Forschungen über die Geschichte der Pest’, Vierteljahrschrift für
Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 44 (1957), pp. 243–53.
Lebrun, François, ‘Les crises démographiques en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles’, Annales, 35
(1980), pp. 205–34.
Lebrun, François, Les hommes et la mort en Anjou aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, Paris: Flammarion,
1971.
Le Roy Ladurie, E., Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate Since the Year 1000,
London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972.
Parker, Geoffrey, ‘War and economic change: the economic costs of the Dutch revolt’, in Spain and
the Netherlands 1559–1659, London: Collins, 1979, pp. 178–203.
Pérez Moreda, Vicente, Las crisis de mortalidad en la España interior: Siglos XVI-XIX, Madrid: Siglo
Veintiuno de Espana, 1980.

390
 REFERENCES AND READINGS

Ranum, O. and P. Ranum, eds, Popular Attitudes Towards Birth Control in Pre-industrial England
and France, New York: Harper & Row, 1972.
Thoen, E. ‘Warfare and the countryside: social and economic aspects of the military destruction in
Flanders’, Acta Historica Neerlandica, 13 (1980), pp. 18–53.
Walter, John and Keith Wrightson, ‘Dearth and the social order in early modern England’, Past
and Present, 71 (1976), pp. 22–42.
Webster, Charles, ed., Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Wrigley, E.A., ‘Family limitation in pre-industrial England’, Economic History Review, 19,1 (1966),
pp. 82–109.

Chapter 2 Leisure, work and movement

Brulez, Wilfrid, ‘De diaspora der Antwerpse kooplui op het einde van de l6e eeuw’, Bijdragen voor
de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 15, 4, (1960), pp. 279–306.
Clark, Peter, ‘The migrant in Kentish towns 1580–1640’, in Peter Clark and Paul Slack, eds, Crisis
and Order in English Towns 1500–1700, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1972, pp. 117–63.
Paul, André, ‘Les réfugiés huguenots et wallons dans le Palatinat du Rhin du XVIe siècle à la
Révolution’, Revue Historique, 157, 1928, pp. 246–76.
van Roosbroeck, Robert, Emigranten: Nederlandse vluchtlingen in Duitsland (1500–1600),
Louvain: Davidsfonds, 1968.
Sombart, Werner, Der moderne Kapitalismus, 3 vols in 5 tomes, Munich and Leipzig: Duncker &
Humblot, 1916–27.
Stone, Lawrence and Alan Everitt, ‘Social mobility in England 1500–1700’, Past and Present, 33
(1966), pp. 16–55.

Chapter 3 Communities of belief

Bercé, Yves-Marie, Fête et révolte: des mentalités populaires du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle, Paris: Hachette,
1976.
Bossy, John, ‘The Counter-Reformation and the people of Catholic Europe’, Past and Present, 47,
1 (1970), pp. 51–70.
Burke, Peter, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, London: Temple Smith, 1978.
Clark, Stuart, ‘French historians and early modern popular culture’, Past and Present, 100 (1983),
pp. 62–99.
Delumeau, Jean, Catholicism Between Luther and Voltaire, London: Burns & Oates, 1977.
Delumeau, Jean, Le péché et la peur: la culpabilisation en Occident, XIIIe–XVIIIe siècles, Paris:
Fayard, 1983.
Ginzburg, Carlo, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-century Miller, London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.
Kamen, Henry, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2014.
Luria, Keith, Territories of Grace: Cultural Change in the Seventeenth-century Diocese of Grenoble,
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991.
Muir, Edward, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005.
Po-Chia Hsia, Ronnie, Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe 1550–1750, London:
Routledge, 1989.
Sauzet, Robert, Contre-Réforme et réforme Catholique en Bas Languedoc: le diocèse de Nîmes au XVIIe
siècle, Brussels: Nauwelaerts, 1979.
Strauss, Gerald, ‘Success and failure in the German Reformation’, Past and Present, 67 (1975),
pp. 30–63.
Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and
Seventeenth-century England, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971.

391
 REFERENCES AND READINGS

Witchcraft
Barry, Jonathan, Marianne Hester and Gareth Roberts, eds, Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Baschwitz, Kurt, Hexen und Hexenprozesse, Munich: Rütten & Loening, 1963.
Behringer, Wolfgang, Hexen verfolgung in Bayern: Volksmagie, Glaubenseifer und Staatsräson in der
Frühen Neuzeit, Munich: Oldenbourg, 1987.
Bever, Edward, The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe: Culture,
Cognition, and Everyday Life, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2008.
Bonomo, Giuseppe, Caccia alle streghe, Palermo: Palumbo, 1959.
Delcambre, Etienne, Le concept de la sorcellerie dans le duché de Lorraine au XVle et XVlle siècles,
3 vols, Nancy: Société d’archéologie lorraine et Musée historique lorrain, 1949–51.
Dupont-Bouchat, Marie-Sylvie, Willem Frijhoff and Robert Muchembled, Prophètes et sorciers
dans les Pays Bas, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle, Paris: Hachette, 1978.
Horsley, Richard A., ‘Who were the witches? The social roles of the accused in the European witch
trials’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 9, 4 (1979), pp. 689–715.
Kittredge, George Lyman, Witchcraft in Old and New England, New York: Russell & Russell, 1956.
Levack, Brian P., The Witch-hunt in Early Modern Europe, 3rd edn, New York: Routledge, 2006.
Mandrou, Robert, Magistrats et sorciers en France au XVIIe siècle, Paris: Pion, l968.
Midelfort, H.C. Erik, Witchhunting in South-western Germany (1562–1684): The Social and
Intellectual Foundations, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1972.
Monter, E. William, Witchcraft in France and Switzerland: The Borderlands During the Reformation,
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976.
Soman, Alfred, ‘The Parlement of Paris and the great witch-hunt (1565–1640)’, Sixteenth Century
Journal, 9 (1978), pp. 31–44.
Zguta, Russell, ‘Witchcraft trials in seventeenth-century Russia’, American Historical Review, 82
(1977), pp. 1187–1207.

Chapter 4 The ruling elite

Agren, Kurt, ‘Rise and decline of an aristocracy’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 1, 1–2 (1976),
pp. 55–80.
Avenel, Georges d’, La noblesse française sous Richelieu, Paris: Colin, 1901.
Baker, George, ‘Nobilità in declino: il caso di Siena sotto i Medici e gli Asburgo-Lorena’, Rivista
Storica Italiana, 84, 2 (1972), pp. 584–615.
Berengo, Marino, Nobili e mercanti nella Lucca del Cinquecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1965.
Bluche, François, ‘The social origins of the secretaries of State under Louis XlV, 1661–1715’, in
R. Hatton, ed., Louis XIV and Absolutism, London: Macmillan, 1976, pp. 85–97.
Brunner, Otto, Adeliges Landleben und Europäischer Geist, Salzburg: Müller, 1949.
Brunner, Otto, Neue Wege der Sozialgeschichte, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1956.
Dewald, Jonathan, The European Nobility 1400–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Domínguez Ortiz, Antonio, La sociedad española en el siglo XVII, Madrid: C.S.I.C, 1963.
Dworzaczek, Włodzimierz, ‘La mobilité sociale de la noblesse polonaise aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles’,
Acta Poloniae Historica, 36 (1977), pp. 147–61.
Fasano Guarini, Elena, ed., Potere e società negli stati regionali italiani del ‘500 e ‘600, Bologna: Il
Mulino, 1978.
Gerbet, Marie-Claude, La noblesse dans le royaume de Castille: étude sur ses structures sociales en
Estrémadure de 1454 à 1516, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1979.
Jouanna, Arlette, Le devoir de révolte: la noblesse française et la gestation de l’État moderne 1559–
1661, Paris: Fayard, 1989.
Kowecki, Jerzy, ‘Les transformations de la structure sociale en Pologne au XVIIe siècle: la noblesse
et la bourgeoisie’, Acta Poloniae Histonca, 26 (1972), pp. 5–30.
Labatut, Jean-Pierre, Les noblesses européennes de la fin du XVe à la fin du XVIII siècle, Paris: PUF,
1978.
Mazzei, Rita, La società lucchese del Seicento, Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 1977.

392
 REFERENCES AND READINGS

Mousnier, Roland, The Institutions of France under the Absolute Monarchy 1598–1789, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1979.
Reinhard, Wolfgang, ed., Power Elites and State Building, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
Rosenberg, Hans, ‘The rise of the Junkers in Brandenburg-Prussia 1410–1653’, American Historical
Review, 49, 1–2, 1943–4, pp. 1–22, 228–42.
Stone, Lawrence, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965.
Vaissière, Pierre de, Gentilshommes campagnards de l’Ancienne France, Paris: Perrin, 1903.
Woolf, S.J., ‘Economic problems of the nobility in the early modern period: the example of
Piedmont’, Economic History Review, 17, 2 (1964), pp. 267–83.
Wyczanski, Andrzej, Studia nad folwarkiem szlacheckim w Polsce w latach 1500–1580 (Studies on
the noble estates in Poland,1500–1580), Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawn, 1960.
Zeller, Gaston, ‘Une notion de caractère historico-social: la dérogeance’, Cahiers internationaux de
Sociologie, 22 (1957), pp. 40–74.
Zenobi, Bandino Giacomo, Ceti e potere nella Marca Pontificia: formazione e organizzazione della
piccola nobiltà fra ‘500 e ‘700, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1976.

Chapter 5 The middle elite

Amelang, James, Honored Citizens of Barcelona: Patrician Culture and Class Relations, 1490–1714,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.
Angiolini, F. and P. Malanima, ‘Problemi della mobilità sociale a Firenze tra la metà del cinque-
cento e i primi decenni del seicento’, Società e Storia, 4 (1979), pp. 17–47.
Barni, G., ‘Mutamenti di ideali sociali del secolo XVI al secolo XVIII: giuristi, nobiltà, mercatura’,
Rivista internazionale di filosofia del diritto, 34 (1957), pp. 766–87.
Baron, Romain, ‘La bourgeoisie de Varzy au XVIIe siècle’, Annales de Bourgogne, 36 (1964),
pp. 161–208.
Berner, Samuel, ‘The Florentine patriciate in the transition from republic to principato, 1530–
1609’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 9 (1972), pp. 3–15.
Burke, Peter, Venice and Amsterdam: A Study of Seventeenth-century Elites, London: Temple Smith,
1974.
Bushkovich, Paul, The Merchants of Moscow, 1580–1650, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1980.
Caizzi, Bruno, Il Comasco sotto il dominio spagnolo, Como: Centro Lariano per gli Studi Economici,
1955.
Clark, Peter, English Provincial Society from the Reformation to the Revolution: Religion, Politics and
Society in Kent 1500–1640, Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1977.
Cliffe, J.T., The Yorkshire Gentry from the Reformation to the Civil War, London: Athlone Press,
1969.
Dewald, Jonathan, The Formation of a Provincial Nobility. The Magistrates of the Parlement of Rouen,
1490–1610, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.
van Dijk, H. and D.J. Roorda, ‘Social mobility under the regents of the Republic’, Acta Historica
Neerlandica, 9 (1976), pp. 76–102.
Estèbe, Janine, ‘La bourgeoisie marchande et la terre à Toulouse au XVIe siècle’, Annales du Midi,
76 (1964), pp. 457–67.
George, C.H., ‘The making of the English bourgeoisie, 1500–1750’, Science and Society, 35, 4
(1971), pp. 385–414.
Grassby, R.B., ‘Social status and commercial enterprise under Louis XIV’, Economic History
Review, 13, 1 (1960), pp. 19–38.
Hellie, Richard, ‘The stratification of Muscovite society: the townsmen’, Russian History, 5, 2
(1978), pp. 119–75.
Kaufmann-Rochard, Jacqueline, Origines d’une bourgeoisie russe, XVIe et XVIIe siècles, Paris:
Flammarion, 1969.
Liebel, Helen P., ‘The bourgeoisie in southwestern Germany, 1500–1789: a rising class?’,
International Review of Social History, 10 (1965), pp. 283–307.

393
 REFERENCES AND READINGS

Mauro, Frédéric, ‘La bourgeoisie portugaise au XVIIe siècle’, XVII Siècle, 40 (1958), pp. 235–57.
Molas Ribalta, Pedro, La burguesía mercantil en la España del antiguo régimen, Madrid: Ediciones
Cátedra, 1985.
Mousnier, Roland, ‘L’opposition politique bourgeoise à la fin du XVIe siècle et au début du XVIIe
siècle’, Revue Historique, 212 (1955), pp. 1–20.
Mousnier, Roland, La vénalité des offices sous Henri IV et Louis XIII, Rouen: Maugard, 1945.
Roorda, D.J., ‘The ruling classes in Holland in the 17th century’, in J. Bromley and E. Kossmann,
eds, Britain and the Netherlands, vol. 2, Groningen: Wolters, 1962, pp. 109–73.
Schulze, Winfried, ed., Ständische Gesellschaft und soziale Mobilität, Munich: Oldenbourg, 1988.
Stone, Lawrence, ‘Social mobility in England, 1500–1700’, Past and Present, 33 (1966),
pp. 16–55.
Swart, Koenraad Wolter, Sale of Offices in the Seventeenth Century, The Hague: Springer, 1949.
Trevor-Roper, Hugh, ‘The Gentry, 1540–1640’, Economic History Review, Supplement, 1953.
Venard, Marc, Bourgeois et paysans au XVIIe siècle, Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1958.
Wrightson, Keith, English Society 1580–1680, London: Routledge, 1982.

Chapter 6 Solidarities and resistance

Abel, Wilhelm, Agricultural Fluctuations in Europe from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Centuries,
London: Methuen, 1980.
Blaschke, Karlheinz, ‘Das Bauernlegen in Sachsen’, Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und
Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 42 (1955), pp. 97–116.
Blickle, Peter, ed., Resistance, Representation and Community, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
Delille, Gérard, Croissance d’une société rurale: Montesarchio et la Vallée Caudine aux XVIIe et XVIIIe
siècles, Naples: Nella sede dell’Istituto, 1973.
Duby, Georges and Armand Wallon (eds.), Histoire de la France rurale, vol. 2: L’age classique des
paysans, 1340–1789, Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1975.
d’Eszlary, Charles, ‘La situation des serfs en Hongrie de 1514 à 1848’, Revue d’Histoire économique
et sociale, 4 (1960), pp. 385–417.
Franz, Günther, ed., Bauernschaft und Bauerstand 1500–1970, Limburg: August Starke, 1975.
Fuchs, Carl Johannes, Der Untergang des Bauernstandes und das Aufkornmen der Gutsherrschaften in
Neuvorpommern und Rügen, Strassburg: Trübner, 1888.
Goubert, Pierre, La vie quotidienne des paysans français au XVIIe siècle, Paris: Hachette, 1982.
Hoskins, William G., The Midland Peasant, London: Macmillan, 1957.
Kula, Witold, An Economic Theory of the Feudal System: Towards a Model of the Polish Economy
I500–1800, London: Verso, 1976.
Lepre, Aurelio, Feudi e Masserie: problemi della società meridionale nel ‘600 nel ‘700, Naples: Guida,
1973.
Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, The Peasants of Languedoc (abbrev. edn), Chicago: University of
Illinois, 1974.
Lütge, Friedrich, Geschichte der deutschen Agrarverfassung vom frühen Mittelalter bis zum
19. Jahrhundert, Stuttgart: Ulmer, 1963.
McArdle, Frank, Altopascio: A Study in Tuscan Rural Society, 1587–1784, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1978.
Makkai, László, ‘Neo-serfdom: its origin and nature in east central Europe’, Slavic Review, 34, 2
(1975), pp. 225–38.
Mika, Alois, ‘Feudalni velkostatek v jiznich cechach (XIV–XVII stol.)’ (The great feudal estates in
southern Bohemia), Historicky Sbornik, 1 (1973), pp. 122–213.
Munck, Thomas, ‘The economic and social position of peasant freeholders in late seventeenth-
century Denmark’, Scandinavian Economic History Review, 25, 2 (1977), pp. 37–61.
Pach, Zsigmond Pál, Die ungarische Agrarentwicklung im 16–17 Jahrhundert, Budapest: Akadémiai
Kiadó, 1964.
Pounds, Norman John, An Historical Geography of Europe, 1500–1840, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1979.

394
 REFERENCES AND READINGS

Raveau, Paul, L’agriculture et les classes paysannes dans le Haut Poitou au XVIe siècle, Paris:
M. Rivière, 1926.
Saalfeld, Diedrich, Bauernwirtschaft und Gutsbetrieb in der vorindustriellen Zeit, Stuttgart: Gustav
Fischer Verlag, 1960.
Salomon, Noel, La campagne de Nouvelle Castille à la fin du XVle siècle, Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1964.
Shanin, Teodor, ‘The nature and logic of the peasant economy’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 1 (1973),
pp. 63–80.
Shmidt, S.O., ‘Kizucheniyu agrarnoy istorii Rossii XVI veka’ (Research into the agrarian history of
16th-century Russia), Voprosy Istorii, 5 (1968).
Skazkin, S.D., ‘Osnovnie problemi tak nazivaemogo vtorogo isdaniya krepostnichestva v sredney i
vostochnoy Evrope (Basic problems of the ‘second serfdom’ in central and eastern Europe),
Voprosy Istorii, 2 (1958).
Slicher van Bath, B.H., The Agrarian History of Western Europe A.D. 500–1850, London: Arnold,
1963.
Smith, R.E.F., The Enserfment of the Russian Peasantry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1968.
Spufford, Margaret, Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974.
Tawney, R.H., The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, London: Longmans Green,
1912.
Topolski, Jerzy, ‘The manorial serf economy in central and eastern Europe in the 16th and 17th
centuries’, Agricultural History, 48, 3 (1974), pp. 341–52.
Vassberg, David, Land and Society in Golden Age Castile, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1984.
de Vries, Jan, The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age, 1500–1700, New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1974.
Wachter, Helmut, Ostpreussische Domänenvorwerke im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert, Würzburg:
Holzner Verlag, 1958.
Wee, Herman van der and Eddy van Cauwenherghe, eds, Productivity of Land and Agricultural
Innovation in the Low Countries (1250–1800), Louvain: Leuven University Press, 1978.
Wrightson, Keith, ‘Aspects of social differentiation in rural England, c.1580–1660’, Journal of
Peasant Studies, 5 (1977), pp. 33–47.
Wrightson, Keith and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling 1525–1700,
London: Academic Press, 1979.

Resistance
Barbier, Pierre and France Vernillat, Histoire de France par les chansons, 8 vols, Paris: Gallimard,
1956.
Bercé, Yves-Marie, Croquants et Nu-Pieds: Les soulèvements paysans en France du XVIe au XIXe siècle,
Geneva: Droz, 1974.
Bercé, Yves-Marie, Revolt and Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1987.
Chistov, Kirill V., Russkie narodnie sotsialno-utopicheskie legendy XVII–XlXvv (Popular socio-uto-
pian legends of 17th to 19th-century Russia), Moscow: Hayka, 1967.
Clark, Peter, ‘Popular protest and disturbance in Kent 1558–1640’, Economic History Review, 29
(1976), pp. 365–82.
Davies, C.S.L., ‘Peasant revolt in France and England: a comparison’, Agricultural History Review,
21, 2 (1973), pp. 122–34.
Goubert, Pierre, The French Peasantry in the Seventeenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986.
Mousnier, Roland, Peasant Uprisings in l7th Century France, Russia and China, London: Allen &
Unwin, 1971.
Porshnev, Boris, Les soulèvements populaires en France 1613–1648, Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N, 1963.

395
 REFERENCES AND READINGS

Schulze, Winfried, (ed.), Aufstände, Revolten, Prozesse, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1983.

Schulze, Winfried, Bäuerliche Widerstand und feudale Herrschaft in der frühen Neuzeit, Stuttgart:
Frommann Holzboog, 1980.
Schulze, Winfried, ed., Europäische Bauernrevolten der frühen Neuzeit, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982.
Sharp, Buchanan, In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England,
1586–1660, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980.

Chapter 7 Gender roles

Brink, Jean, Allison Coudert and Maryanne Horowitz, eds, The Politics of Gender in Early Modern
Europe, Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1989.
Davis, Natalie Zemon, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1965.
Davis, Natalie Zemon and Arlette Farge, eds, A History of Women in the West, vol. 3: Renaissance
and Enlightenment Paradoxes, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Fletcher, Anthony, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800, London: Yale University
Press, 1995.
Frey, Linda, Marsha Frey and Joanne Schneider, Women in Western European History: A Select
Bibliography from Antiquity to the French Revolution, Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982, supple-
ment 1986.
Gibson, Wendy, Women in Seventeenth-century France, London: Macmillan, 1989.
Goody, Jack, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983.
Goody, Jack, Joan Thirsk and E.P. Thompson, eds, Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western
Europe, 1200–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
Hufton, Olwen, The Prospect Before Her. A History of Women in Western Europe, vol. 1: 1500–1800,
London: HarperCollins, 1997.
Medick, Hans and D. Sabean, eds, Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Mitterauer, Michael and Reinhard Sieder, The European Family: Patriarchy and Partnership from the
Middle Ages to the Present, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Safley, Thomas Max, Let No Man Put Asunder: The Control of Marriage in the German Southwest,
Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1984.
Wheaton, Robert and Tamara K. Hareven, eds, Family and Sexuality in French History, Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980
Wiesner, Merry E., Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993.

Chapter 8 Social discipline and marginality

Abel, Wilhelm, Massenarmut und Hungerkrisen im vorindustiellen Europa, Hamburg: Parey, 1974.
Beier, A.L., ‘Social problems in Elizabethan London’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 9, 2
(1978), pp. 203–21.
Beier, A.L., ‘Vagrants and the social order in Elizabethan England’, Past and Present, 64 (1974),
pp. 3–29.
Bennassar, Bartolomé, ‘Economie et société à Ségovie au milieu du XVIe siècle’, Anuario de Historia
Económica y Social, 2, 1 (1968), pp. 186–205.
Bonenfant, Paul, Le problème du paupérisme en Belgique à la fin de l’ancien régime, Brussels: Palais
des Academies, 1934.
Camporesi, Piero, ed., Il Libro dei Vagabondi, Turin: Einaudi, 1973.
Clark, Peter and Paul Slack, eds, Crisis and Order in English Towns 1500–1700, London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1972.
Davis, David B., The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1966.
Deyon, Pierre, ‘A propos du paupérisme au milieu du XVIIe siècle’, Annales, 22, 1 (1967), pp. 137–53.

396
 REFERENCES AND READINGS

Domínguez Ortiz, Antonio, ‘La esclavitud en Castilla durante la edad moderna’, Estudios de
Historia Social de España, 2 (1952), pp. 369–428.
Fairchilds, Cissie C., Poverty and Charity in Aix-en-Provence, 1640–1789, Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1976.
Geremek, Bronislaw, ‘Criminalité, vagabondage, paupérisme: la marginalité à l’aube des temps
modernes’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 21 (1974), pp. 337–75.
Geremek, Bronislaw, ‘La popolazione marginale tra il medioevo e l’era moderna’, Studi storici, 9,
3–4 (1968), pp. 623–40.
Gutton, Jean-Pierre, La société et les pauvres: l’exemple de la généralité de Lyon, 1564–1789, Paris:
Société d’édition ‘Les Belles Lettres’, 1971.
Gutton, Jean-Pierre, La société et les pauvres en Europe (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles), Paris: PUF, 1974.
Hellie, Richard, Slavery in Russia, 1450–1725, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982.
Hernández, J.L. Alonso, El lenguaje de los maleantes españoles de los siglos XVI y XVII: la germanía,
Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1979.
Hufton, Olwen, The Poor of Eighteenth-century France 1750–1789, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1974.
Jiménez Salas, Maria, Historia de la asistencia social en España en la edad moderna, Madrid: CSIC,
1958.
Jordan, W.K., Philanthropy in England 1480–I660, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1959.
Jütte, Robert, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994.
Kamen, Henry, ‘Public authority and popular crime: banditry in Valencia 1660–1714’, Journal of
European Economic History, 3 (1974), pp. 654–88.
Keep, J.L.H., ‘Bandits and the law in Muscovy’, Slavonic and East European Review, 35, 1956–7,
pp. 201–22.
Kuhn, Walter, Geschichte der deutsche Ostsiedlung in der Neuzeit, vol. 1, Cologne: Böhlau,
1955.
Leblon, Bernard, Les gitans d’Espagne. Recherches sur les divers aspects du problème gitan du XVe au
XVIIIe siècle, Paris: PUF, 1985.
Leonard, E. M., The Early History of English Poor Relief, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1900.
Lis, Catharina and Hugo Soly, Poverty and Capitalism in pre-industrial Europe, Hassocks: Harvester
Press, 1979.
Mitchison, Rosalind and Leah Leneman, Sexuality and Social Control: Scotland 1660–1780,
Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
Norberg, Kathryn, Rich and Poor in Grenoble 1600–1814, Berkeley: University of California Press,
1985.
Paultre, Christian, La répression de la mendicité et du vagabondage en France sous l’Ancien Régime,
Paris: L. Larose & L. Teni, 1906.
Pinchbeck, Ivy and Margaret Hewitt, Children in English Society, voI. I, From Tudor Times to the
Eighteenth Century, London: Routledge, 1969.
Pullan, B., ‘Catholics and the poor in early modern Europe’, Transactions of the Royal Historical
Society, 26 (1976), pp. 15–34.
Samaha, Joel, Law and Order in Historical Perspective: The Case of Elizabethan Essex, London:
Academic Press, 1974.
Saunders, A.C. and C. M., A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal 1441–1555,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Slack, Paul, ‘Vagrants and vagrancy in England, 1598–1664’, Economic History Review, 27 (1974),
pp. 360–79.
Verlinden, Charles, L’esclavage dans l’Europe mediévale, vol. 1: Péninsule ibérique–France, Bruges:
De Tempel, 1955.
Wandel, Lee Palmer, Always Among Us: Images of the Poor in Zwingli’s Zurich, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990.

397
 REFERENCES AND READINGS

Chapter 9 Modernity and the individual

Berneri, Marie-Louise, Journey Through Utopia, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950.
Burguière, André, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Martine Segalen and Françoise Zonabend, eds,
A History of the Family, vol. 2: The Impact of Modernity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1996.
Charbonnel, J.-Roger, La pensée italienne au XVle siècle et le courant libertin, Paris: Champion,
1919.
Chartier, Roger, Dominique Julia and Marie-Madeleine Compere, L’éducation en France du XVIe
au XVIIIe siècle, Paris: SEDES-CDU, 1976.
Chrisman, Miriam, ‘From polemic to propaganda: The development of mass persuasion in the late
sixteenth century’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 73 (1982), pp. 175–95.
Cressy, David, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Eisenstein, Elizabeth, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1979.
Frank, Joseph, The Beginnings of the English Newspaper 1620–60, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1961.
Kearney, Hugh, Scholars and Gentlemen: Universities and Society in Pre-industrial Britain, 1500–
1700, London: Faber & Faber, 1970.
Klaits, Joseph, Printed Propaganda Under Louis XIV: Absolute Monarchy and Public Opinion,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976.
Martin, Henri-Jean, Livre, pouvoirs et société à Paris au XVIIe siècle (1598–1701), 2 vols, Geneva:
Droz, 1969.
O’Day, Rosemary, Education and Society 1500–1800: The Social Foundations of Education in Early
Modern Britain, London: Longman, 1982.
Pettegree, Andrew, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know about Itself, New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2014.
Ruyer, Raymond, L’Utopie et les utopies, Paris: PUF, 1950.
Schottenloher, Karl, Bücher bewegten die Welt, 2 vols, Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1951–2.
Spini, Giorgio, Ricerca dei Libertini, Rome: Universale di Roma, 1950.
Stone, Lawrence, ‘The educational revolution in England 1560–1640’, Past and Present, 28 (1964),
pp. 41–80.
Stone, Lawrence, ed., The University in Society, vol. 1: Oxford and Cambridge from the Fourteenth to
the Early Nineteenth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Chapter 10 Global projection of Europeans

Chaudhuri, K.N., Asia Before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of
Islam to 1750, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Horden, Peregrine and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History,
Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.
Kamen, Henry, Empire: How Spain became a World Power 1492–1763, New York: Harper
Perennial, 2003.
Prak, Maarten, ed., Early Modern Capitalism: Economic and Social Change in Europe, 1400–1800,
London: Routledge, 2001.
Watts, David, The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change Since
1492, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Zahedieh, Nuala, The Capital and the Colonies: London and the Atlantic Economy, 1660–1700,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Chapter 11 The Rise of the modern state

Barker, Thomas M., ‘Military entrepreneurship and absolutism: Habsburg models’, Journal of
European Studies, 4, 1 (1974), pp. 19–42.

398
 REFERENCES AND READINGS

Bonney, Richard, ‘The French Civil War 1649–53’, European Studies Review, 8, 1978, pp. 78–100.
Coleman, D.C., ed., Revisions in Mercantilism, London: Methuen, 1969.
Cooper, J.P., ‘Differences between English and continental governments in the early seventeenth
century’, in J.S. Bromley and E.H Kossman (eds.), Britain and the Netherlands, London: Chatto
& Windus, 1960, pp. 62–90.
Daly, James, ‘The idea of absolute monarchy in seventeenth-century England’, Historical Journal,
21, 2 (1978), pp. 227–50.
Fulbrook, Mary, ‘The English Revolution and the revisionist revolt’, Social History, 7, 3 (1982),
pp. 249–64.
Glete, Jan, War and the State in Early Modern Europe: Spain, the Dutch Republic and Sweden as
Fiscal-Military States, 1500–1660, London: Routledge, 2001.
Hatton, Ragnhild, Louis XIV and Absolutism, London: Macmillan, 1976.
Morrill, John, The Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives and Radicals in the English Civil War 1630–
1650, London: Allen & Unwin, 1976.
Parker, David, The Social Foundations of French Absolutism, London: Hodder Arnold, 1983.
Rabb, Theodore K., The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1975.
Roberts, Michael, ‘Queen Christina and the general crisis of the seventeenth century’, Past and
Present, 22 (1962), pp. 36–59.
Rowen, Herbert H., ‘The revolution that wasn’t: the coup d’état of 1650 in Holland’, European
Studies Review, 4 (1974), pp. 99–117.

399
 INDEX

absolute power 41, 354, 356, 360 calendar changes 52, 73

absolutism 126, 132, 316, 344, 350–1, 353, Calvin, John 88, 102, 250, 296, 300
355–60 Campanella, Tomasso 8, 313, 315–16
Alemán, Mateo 248, 257 carnival 56–8, 73, 81, 84
American treasure see silver from New World Castellio, Sebastian 284
Anabaptists 95, 100, 269, 312 Catherine de’ Medici 228
Andreae, Johann Valentin 282, 313–15 celibacy 29, 216, 224
Annuities 118–19, 125, 141–3 censorship of books 289, 291, 307, 310
apprenticeships 29 censos 141, 143–4, 156, 175–6
Ariès, Philippe 22, 223 Cervantes, Miguel de 65, 118, 259, 266
aristocracy see nobility charity, secularisation of 255
Arnauld, Angélique 47, 225 charivari 16, 205, 218, 232, 241
Aske, Robert 250 Charles I 133, 169, 357
Charles V 6, 45, 105, 146, 155, 187, 251,
Bacon, Francis 119–21, 286, 313–15, 339 319
banditry 110, 201, 263, 266–8 childbirth, problems of 222–3
beggars, categories of 258 Christina of Sweden 133, 228, 230, 353
begging 92, 122, 247, 249–51, 255, 258–9 civilising process 240, 260, 279, 330
Behn, Aphra 227, 230 clientage and noble influence 103, 107–9
belief, nature of religious 25, 63, 70–1, clocks 8, 51–3
74–80, 82, 85–6, 91, 94–5, 97–8, Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 17, 41, 93, 255, 348
205, 242, 247, 277, 281–5, 290, Columbus, Christopher 3, 6, 311, 318, 320,
323 331, 335–7
bells, ringing of 17, 51, 79 Comenius, Jan 102, 287, 293, 313
Berkeley, bishop George 316 community, features of 9–10, 15–21, 24, 26,
birth control 32–3 53–8, 60–1, 71–5, 77–81, 84–5, 89,
Blessed Sacrament, Company of the 254 96–7, 99, 105–6, 109, 125, 139, 142,
Bodin, Jean 59, 86, 154, 245–6, 312, 353 163, 166, 171–4, 176–7, 180, 185–8,
Bolotnikov, Ivan 192, 203 203–4, 214, 216–18, 224–5, 228, 231–
books published 4, 12, 14, 102, 111, 204, 4, 239–42, 262–4, 270, 272, 278–80,
226, 286–92, 299–300, 304, 308, 284–5, 292, 312, 314, 321, 351
310–11, 321, 343 Comuneros 187, 202, 228
Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne 356, 360 confessional migration 98, 100–1
bourgeois betrayal 161 confessionalisation 70, 75, 78–80, 303
bourgeoisie see middle elite confinement, the great 253, 270
Boyle, Robert 52 Constantinople 1, 4, 102, 317
brothels 239, 243 Copernicus 290, 294
Bruno, Giordano 102, 282–3, 293, 312 corruption in politics 109
bullion, American 156, 326, 346, 348 Cortés, Hernan 4, 19, 320
bureaucracy of state 130 Cossacks 82, 199–200, 268, 319, 338

400
 INDEX

Counter-Reformation 27, 55, 72, 77, 80, 82, 172, 208, 210–11, 215–17, 219–22,
85, 121, 191, 212, 214, 216, 219, 225, 224, 226–8, 235–6, 243, 262, 271–2,
242–3, 250, 291, 293 274, 277, 279–80, 302, 308, 312–13,
courts of law, and crime 13, 88–9, 118–19, 315, 323, 345
121, 130, 137, 185, 210, 216–17, 219, famine 1, 40–2, 45, 91, 160, 190, 191,
223, 232, 236–8, 240–1, 243, 260–5, 195–7, 257
268–9, 271, 279, 294, 353, 360 Faust legend 281
crime 63, 86, 93, 110–11, 212, 216, 234, Fénelon, archbishop 316
237, 239, 259–71, 279, 308 fertility rate 31–3, 46–7, 73, 89, 345
and property 260, 262, 264 feudalism 115, 120, 171–2, 268, 348,
Cromwell, Oliver 110, 115, 196, 315 351–2
Cromwell, Thomas 352 forests and deforestation 7, 112, 169, 220,
Croquants 190–1, 194–5, 202 328, 336–9
Foucault, Michel 110, 237, 253
dancing 58, 84, 242–3 Fronde 47, 68, 110, 112, 130, 132–3,
de la Noue, François 109, 119–20, 281 193, 198, 228, 255, 304–6, 310,
death rituals 74 355, 358
Defoe, Daniel 164, 291, 302 frontiers of nations 8, 13, 65, 82, 85, 194,
deforestation 337 268, 281–2, 286, 334, 336, 355
demographic change 20, 24, 31, 34–6, 47, 67, Fuenteovejuna 186–7, 202
257, 324, 345 Fuggers bankers 116, 146, 158, 308
Descartes, René 282
diaries 65, 227, 230, 277, 280, 300–1 Galileo 294
Dias, Bartomeu 3 Gama, Vasco da 3–4, 318, 320
Diggers 192, 283, 315 gender roles 208, 212, 215
disease 37–40, 45, 47, 243, 312, 317, 325, general crisis, theory of 163, 184, 187,
335–6, 339 351
distance, conquest of 1, 5–7, 61, 63, 317–18, gentry 125, 127, 299, 339 see also nobility
342 German peasant revolt 187
divorce 31, 216–17 globalisation 5, 317–18, 325, 327–9, 332,
double standard 232 335–6, 340–1
duelling 106, 111, 130, 279 approaches to 324–5, 330
globalisation of knowledge 342
East India Company, English 331, 342, 346 Grand Tour 65–6, 297–9
education 28, 106, 245, 256, 277, 286–7, Great Elector 110, 346, 350
290–300, 311, 313–16 green imperialism 337
Elcano, Sebastian 3, 7, 320 Grey Leagues 13, 17, 19, 120, 284
Elias, Norbert 240, 260, 330 Gustav Adolf of Sweden 110, 349
Elizabeth I of England 96, 132, 228–9, 252, gypsies 82, 259, 271
281, 353, 354
emigration, motives for 48, 60, 67–8, 100–2, Hakluyt, Richard 4, 65
214, 253, 257, 319, 321–2 Harrington, James 124, 315
Enlightenment 64, 283, 291, 361 Harrison, William 59, 250, 293, 296, 339
environment, problems of the 337 Hartlib, Samuel 293, 313–15
epidemics 1, 34–5, 37–9, 41–2, 44–5, 235, Henry IV of France 18, 108, 120, 170, 191,
312, 335–6, 345 194, 282, 355, 358
Erasmus 8, 25, 45, 77, 297, 312, 352 Herberstein, Sigismund von 2, 319
Europe, idea of 3–4, 8 Herder, Johann Gottfried 11
Evelyn, John 299–301 heresy 83, 86–7, 89, 91, 94–5, 127, 236–8,
executions as spectacle 90, 130, 269–70 268–9
Hermetic philosophy 281–2
family, structure of 1, 5–6, 16–18, 22–32, Hobbes, Thomas 9, 295, 360
36, 53, 55, 57, 60, 79, 90, 92, 108, 138, Hoby, Margaret 230
140–1, 148, 150–2, 158, 165, 167–8, homosexuality 235, 243

401
 INDEX

honour, concept of 16, 17, 105–6, 108, 111, love, role of 22, 25–6, 28, 86, 213, 218–19,
113, 122, 147, 155, 163–8, 185, 208, 223, 278, 286, 295, 313
211, 213, 216, 218, 221, 231–4, 261, Loyola, Ignatius 250, 300
269, 280, 314 Loyseau, Charles 103, 113, 136, 138, 147–8,
honours, inflation of 133 163, 176, 356, 358
hospitals 33, 250–1, 254–6 Luther, Martin 72, 77, 84, 95, 188, 204, 250,
Huguenots 66, 100–1, 240 290, 303, 304
hunger 42, 48, 233, 255, 339
Machiavelli 352, 354
immigration 21, 31, 34–5, 49, 68, 214, 324 Magellan, Ferdinand 3–4, 7, 320
imperialism 340 magic and religion 75, 86, 91, 94, 205, 281
individualism 22, 277–8, 285, 288, 300–1 mail, speed of 6, 232
Industrial Revolution 207, 221, 328–9, 361 Malthus, Thomas 34, 171
infanticide 223, 234 Marguerite of Navarre 224, 228
Inquisition, Spanish 13, 33, 83, 92, 94–5, 97, Mariana, Juan de 249, 355
217, 224, 236–7, 241–2, 268–9, 271, market, role of 4, 18, 21, 38, 50–1, 57,
284, 303 139–40, 155–6, 173, 177–8, 183, 197,
Isabella of Castile 6, 131, 228–30, 243, 219–20, 257, 266, 318, 324–5, 329,
352–3, 358 330, 334, 347
Islam 1, 97, 283, 317, 323 marriage, rules of 9, 15, 22–32, 57, 60–3,
Ivan the Terrible 109, 126, 180, 192, 203 105–7, 134, 147, 160, 162, 165, 173,
209–11, 214, 216–19, 222, 228, 231,
James I 119, 132, 229, 282, 354 241, 258, 261, 263, 265, 290, 345
Jesuits 4–5, 55, 72, 77, 82–4, 87, 120, 123, Marsh, Elizabeth 323
225–6, 235, 288, 293, 303, 313, 334 Mary Queen of Scots 91, 228, 353
Jews 28, 66, 96–9, 102, 146, 155, 167, 240, Masonry 282
274, 284–5 matriarchy 211, 228
Joly, Claude 355 Maurice of Nassau 110
Mazarin, cardinal 68, 108, 306
Kepler, Johann 52, 294 Menocchio 284
mercantilism 348
language and identity 2, 10–16, 82–3, Mexía, Vicente 218, 232
102, 108, 229, 258–9, 292, 304, middle class, economic role of 139, 142, 144,
307, 352 154, 158, 172
Latin, use of 1, 2, 12, 83, 274, 288, 290, middle elite 117, 124, 135, 136–9, 143–9,
292, 295, 298–9, 304, 343 152–5, 159–62, 296
Lazarillo de Tormes 257 military revolution 341, 349–50
Le Bret, Cardin 355–6, 358 Milton, John 242, 311
Leibniz 12, 282, 292 missions, religious 5, 70, 82–3, 226
leisure, status of 51, 53–7, 66, 71, 219, 279, mobility, social 104, 128, 138, 146, 149, 151,
297, 311 228
letter-writing 300, 302 mobility of population 29, 37, 50, 58, 60–2,
Levellers 192, 196, 202, 283, 307, 311 64, 129, 136, 148, 183–4, 227, 256,
libertinism 282 277–8, 330, 347, 352
life expectancy 35 modernity 277–8, 311
Lilburne, John 196, 307 Montaigne, Michel de 1, 8, 45, 297, 312
literacy 29, 277–8, 285–91, 301, 303 morality, public 17, 23, 72, 81, 85, 239,
Little Ice Age, theory of 339, 340 241–3, 259, 279, 287
Locke, John 344, 360 More, Thomas 1, 290–1, 297, 311–12
Louis XIII of France 10, 25, 111, 118, 147 Moriscos 66, 82, 99, 240, 272
Louis XIV 13, 18, 41, 46, 101, 104, 110–11, Morozov, Boris 159, 198–9, 204
119, 130, 132–3, 148, 150, 200, 240, mortality rates 26, 28, 30–1, 36–7, 40–2, 45,
316, 350–1, 355–7, 360 47, 72, 74, 222, 345
Louvois 110 and warfare 45–7

402
 INDEX

Moryson, Fynes 65, 298 Pepys, Samuel 301

multiple family 22–5 Perkins, William 217, 247
Münster, Sebastian 1–2 Peter the Great 14, 351
Muscovy 2, 6, 8, 10, 126, 177, 180, 183, 198, Petty, Sir William 45, 69, 321
268, 354 Philip II of Spain 7, 46, 52, 58, 76, 95,
Muslims 2, 97–9, 272–3, 284, 329 110–11, 121, 130, 147, 155, 175, 223,
229–30, 245, 251, 267, 338, 354, 357
Nantes, Edict of 81, 98, 101, 357 Philip IV of Spain 119, 132, 225
nations in Europe 1, 5, 9–11, 14–15, 18–20, Philip V of Spain 13
64–5, 100, 107, 109, 156, 169, 171, picaro literature 257
176, 215, 225, 228, 258, 273, 295, 328, Pietism 226, 280, 285
348, 350, 352–4, 357, 359 pilgrimages 63–4, 271, 297
neighbourhood values 20, 21, 26, 108, 168, Pisan, Christine de 209
280 plague 34, 37–42, 45, 47–9, 194, 197, 248,
neighbourliness 16, 166, 239, 244 302, 307, 345
newspapers 154, 291, 307, 309–10 Plattes, Gabriel 277, 310, 314–15
Newton, Isaac 292 poor relief 18, 41, 244–5, 248–56
nobility 19, 39, 76, 103–7, 111–14, 116, popular culture 57, 72, 83–5, 276
119, 122–5, 127–8, 131–4, 136, 141, population trends 59–60
146–50, 153, 159–62, 164, 177–9, 182, poverty 34, 39, 41, 117, 122–3, 156, 168,
184, 192, 197, 202–3, 207, 227, 240, 173, 180, 239, 244–5, 248–9, 253–6,
262, 265, 296, 299–300, 347, 355–6, 322
358–9, 361 price revolution 128, 245–6
and blood origins 105 primogeniture 209
and violence 109, 110 printing press 102, 286, 298, 307, 334
debts of 120, 122–4, 134, 144–5 privacy 27, 166, 277–8, 280
in business 112–13, 115, 117 property
property of 117, 120–1, 137, 145, 150 and gender 17–18, 22, 24–5, 30, 138–9,
quality of 105, 114 143, 148, 157, 159, 175, 177–8, 181,
taming of 132 204, 208–11, 213–16, 222, 228
Nostradamus 76 and the state 313–15, 344, 352, 356,
nuclear family 22, 23, 24, 25, 31, 63 360
prostitution 243, 335
offices, sale of 147–8 purgatory, doctrine of 74, 283
Olivares, count duke of 112, 122, 355 Puritans 7, 28, 54, 99, 213, 217–18, 233,
242, 247, 252, 300, 303
pamphlets 25, 92, 196, 198, 304–8
Paracelsus 76, 281 Quakers 226
parish in society 14–15, 20–2, 24, 31, 34, querelle des femmes 212
41–2, 46, 60–1, 74, 80–1, 84–5, 93, Quiroga, Vasco de 312
216, 225, 227, 241, 245, 251–3, 289,
300–3 Raleigh, Sir Walter 119, 129, 281
Parlement of Paris 52, 93, 111, 137–8, 147–8, Ramusio, Giovanni Battista 4, 65
161, 185, 198, 249, 274, 359 Razin, Stenka 82, 199, 200, 206
particularism 18 reclamation of land from sea 168, 170
patriarchal society 56, 208, 211–12, 215–16, Reformation 26, 28, 34, 64, 70, 72, 74–80,
229, 231, 261 84–5, 91, 95–6, 99–100, 118, 139, 159,
peasant revolts 41, 188, 199, 206, 268 181, 213, 216–17, 219, 224, 240–1,
peasants, condition of 17, 41–4, 47, 53–4, 243, 247, 249–51, 254, 268–9, 277–8,
62, 75, 88, 93, 128, 138, 143–4, 165–7, 284, 292–3, 295, 300, 303–4, 311,
169, 171–2, 174–6, 178–85, 188–9, 352–4
193, 195, 199–200, 204–5, 267, 288, refugees 51, 67–8, 98, 100–2, 160, 199,
305, 316, 338, 356 293
Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de 12, 294 religion, disciplining of 78, 80

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Renaissance 2, 3, 26, 28, 44, 64, 75, 91, 106, Sofonisba Anguissola 230
213, 234, 235, 281, 287, 294, 297, 299, Spenser, Edmund 13, 68
301, 317, 349, 352 spices, trade in 3, 318, 325–6, 329, 331–2,
reputation see honour 334
revolt, characteristics of popular 16, 18, 82–3, Spinoza 356, 360
140, 163, 186–95, 197, 199–205, 247, Stone, Lawrence 22
266–8, 354 Stow, John 38, 73, 151, 250
Richelieu, cardinal 91, 111, 113, 120, 122, subsistence crisis 40, 43, 185
132, 140, 193–5, 201, 218, 267, 294, suicide 116, 279
309, 355, 357 Sully, duc de 111, 120, 129, 194, 301
riots and rebellion 42, 177, 185–6, 191, 195, sumptuary laws 120, 130, 153, 234
198, 200–1, 204, 233, 248, 250 syphilis 243, 335–6
rite of passage 240
role reversal 58, 73–4, 205 Tassis family 5, 6
Rosicrucians 282 taverns 168
Royal Society 294, 314, 334 Tell, William 199, 202
Rudolf II, emperor 281 Temple, Sir William 122, 139, 147, 153
Ruiz, Simón 112, 140, 155–6 Teresa of Avila 225–6, 301
rural society in Europe 1, 15, 20, 24, 26, Thirty Years War 47, 78–9, 94, 100, 102, 112,
28–9, 33, 35, 42–3, 48, 50–1, 55–61, 145, 176, 192, 194, 199, 214, 255, 297,
63, 67, 72–3, 82–3, 88, 91–2, 98, 104, 305, 309
120, 134, 136, 142–5, 156–7, 159, 163, time, measurement of 52, 55
165–6, 170–7, 186–7, 194, 199, 201–3, toleration, religious 70, 79, 81, 94, 96, 98,
211, 219–20, 244, 246, 260, 262–4, 101, 278, 284, 285
275, 289, 296, 303, 348, 353, 361 tourism 66
transportation 253, 261, 270
Sahagún, Bernardino de 333 travel, motives for 2, 4, 6, 8, 63–6, 99, 153,
Saint-Simon, duc de 111, 145, 148, 150 292, 297–9, 304, 316
Sales, Francis de 218, 304 Trent, Council of 25–6, 34, 77, 83–4, 111,
scepticism 93, 97, 277, 281, 283–4 218, 225
second serfdom 183 Tull, Jethro 345
Segar, William 103, 106 Turks 98, 160, 179, 192, 198, 273–4
Séguier, chancellor 93, 148
serfdom 53, 176, 178, 180, 182–4, 189, 275, unbelief, religious 72, 82, 97, 282–3
346 unemployment 246–8, 253
servants, role of 22, 24, 27, 29, 92, 110, 120, universities 12, 291–300
165, 219, 233, 254, 273, 280, 289, urban society in Europe 1, 6, 8, 15, 19–20,
298 28–9, 31, 33, 35, 48, 50–1, 60–1, 82,
Servet, Miguel 102, 284 88, 114, 117, 121, 123, 135–6, 138,
sexuality 23, 25, 29–30, 56–8, 74, 79, 88, 143–5, 148, 158–60, 165, 167, 177,
167, 212, 223, 232–7, 240–3, 261, 265, 182, 184–5, 187–91, 194, 197–8, 200,
278, 301, 335–6 202–4, 211, 214, 219, 222, 233, 243–6,
Seyssel, Claude de 168, 352 249–50, 255, 269–70, 276, 278, 280,
Shakespeare 96, 233, 247, 354 289, 332, 349
Sidney, Philip 298–9 Utopia 1, 277, 297, 311–12, 316
silver from New World 112, 153, 198, 204,
246, 318–19, 326–7, 342, 346 vagrants 53, 244, 247, 249, 251–3, 256–7,
Sixtus V 121, 244 260, 271
Skimmington, ritual of Lady 205, 233 Versailles 119, 133, 240, 355
slave trade 323, 342, 346 village community 15–18, 26, 30, 32, 35, 54,
slavery 239, 252, 272–5, 313, 330, 332 56, 59–63, 80–2, 85–6, 92, 142, 158,
Smith, Adam 150, 318 166, 172–7, 187–8, 200, 202, 209–11,
social mobility 137, 148–50, 153, 161–2, 321 216–17, 228, 231, 235, 240–2, 264,
sodomy 236–8 289, 314

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Vincent de Paul 254 women

violence 16, 44–5, 56, 78, 94, 109–11, 120, and honour 231
186–7, 204–5, 216–17, 232–3, 260–2, and marriage 214–15
265, 268–9, 359 in power 228
and crime 264 in religion 224–5
Vives, Juan Luis 102, 213, 244, 245, 249–50 social roles of 211
VOC (Dutch East India Co) 7, 323, 328, as witches 234–5
331, 342 work status of 219–22
work, status of 18, 22–3, 29, 43, 50–8, 61–3,
Wallenstein 46, 115, 357 71, 93, 104, 115, 152, 161–8, 170, 176,
warfare 208, 211, 215–16, 218–22, 225, 235,
and violence 349 245, 248–54, 257, 261, 273, 279, 281,
changing character of 67, 106, 111–12, 282, 288, 292, 298, 302, 311, 313–16,
132, 228, 272, 349 321–2
contributes to creating state 350
Wars of Religion 94 Xavier, Francis 4–5, 83
Weber, Max 54
Wesley, John 28 yield ratios 170, 345
Wilson, Thomas 12, 59, 121 young, roles of the 25–9, 31, 37, 41, 55–8,
Winstanley, Gerrard 283, 293, 315–16 61–3, 66, 69, 74, 82, 108, 165, 214,
witchcraft 70, 86–93, 234–5, 237, 281 222–3, 226–7, 235, 241, 245, 261, 265,
and gender 87, 89, 94 271, 283, 294, 319
men as witches 234
Witt, Jan de 152–3 Zayas, Maria de 208, 212

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