CHAPTER 6
Early Modern Crime
A time of change
The period from the end of the Wars of the Roses in the late fifteenth century
to the reign of Queen Anne in the early eighteenth century saw some of the
most fundamental changes in British religion, politics and society. The country
was still reeling from the effects of the Black Death, which reduced the
population by at least a third, and then the bloody wars between the rival
dynastic houses of York and Lancaster. Wars with the French and Spanish
were set against a background of the dissolution of the monasteries, the
Reformation, and the break from Rome. In the seventeenth century, religious
and political schisms led to the English Civil War, the execution of the king,
the Commonwealth and subsequent restoration of the monarchy, and wars
with the Dutch. At the same time, new lands were being discovered, and as the
religious arguments raged, science was beginning to gain a place in the way
people saw the world. All these events, and more, affected the types of crimes
that were being committed, and the forms of policing and punishment that
were needed to deal with them.
By the start of the seventeenth century, the population was on the rise
again, and society was more complex than in the medieval period. The waning
power of the aristocracy after the Black Death had created a situation in which
a powerful middle class could rise–made up of merchants, yeomen farmers
and lawyers–for whom law and order was seen as an essential prerequisite
for prosperity, both personal and national. Prices rose faster than wages, and
the acquisition of the previous monastic estates by courtiers and speculators
created hardship in the countryside for many of the lower orders. Poor
harvests added to the problems. Many people lost their landholdings and
became vagrants, and vagrancy became the newbête noireof the governing
classes. Whilst not everyone became a villain, bands of vagrants posed a threat
to order in a number of districts, and the perception of the problem may well
have grown out of proportion to its reality.