A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

192 Ch. 5 • Rise of the Atlantic Economy: Spain and England

as common laborers, porters, and sweepers, or in other menial occupations,
living in squalor in whatever pitiful lodgings they could afford, or, for many,
living without shelter.
During the sixteenth century, the rich got richer—and lived that way,
dressing and eating differently from the poor. Responding to complaints
that “a Babylon of confusion” might blur class lines because anyone with
money could purchase the most elegant clothing, Parliament had earlier in
the century decreed that only dukes, earls, and barons could wear sable
cloth woven of gold and embroidered with gold and silver. Ben Jonson
(1572—1637), author of scurrilous satires on London life, wrote that to
become recognized as a gentleman, a man had to go to London, “where at
your first appearance ’twere good you turned four or five hundred acres of
your best land into two or three trunks of apparel.”
Cardinal Wolsey had earlier attempted to moderate the dietary excesses of
wealthy people, including the high clergy. Copying sumptuary regulations
that could be found throughout Europe since the Middle Ages, he specified
the number of separate dinner courses that people of various ranks might
consume, with the largest number—nine—reserved for cardinals like him­
self. The poor, however, ate no such meals. Soaring food and lodging prices
sapped the meager earnings of craftsmen, landless cottagers, rural laborers,
and unskilled workers.
There was, to be sure, some degree of social mobility in Tudor England as
new economic opportunities brought greater prosperity to gentry, yeomen,
merchants, and manufacturers. Some yeomen achieved gentry status. The
interests and lifestyles of the middling sort gradually moved closer to those
of gentlemen and their families. Some apprentices became independent
masters within their trades. But social advancement remained relatively rare
among the poor, whose numbers were rapidly expanding along with their
impoverishment.

The Quest for Public Order

After almost a century of inflation accentuated by a rising population, har­

vest failures in the 1590s brought the period of economic expansion to an

abrupt halt in England. Never had there seemed to be so many poor and

hungry people on the roads, dressed in rags, sleeping in fields, searching for

wild berries or edible roots, and begging, just trying to get by. “They lie in the

streets,” one man of means observed, “and are permitted to die like dogs or

beasts without any mercy or compassion showed them at all.”

Ordinary people sometimes took matters into their own hands. Food riots

spread throughout much of England, as the poor seized grain and sold it at

what they considered a reasonable price. Women usually made up the major­

ity of participants in the food riots because it fell to them to try to make ends

meet at the market. Such disturbances increased the resolve of the state to

maintain order at all costs.