The great famine of 1315–1321 was followed by a long series of “hungers”
including one in 1594–1597 just on the eve of the English move toward the
New World. Driven over the edge, the poor died in the streets of many
towns and cities. An entry in the Newcastle town accounts is eloquent in its
simplicity: “October 1597. Paid for the charge of buringe 16 poore folkes
who died for wante in the strettes 6s.8d.”
“Poore folkes” were not just the unemployed. Even the employed suf-
fered. Occupations we now think of as menial were then regarded as privi-
leged; for others we can find no comprehensible parallel in our experience.
Probably not even the most desperate immigrants from the Third World
would work as “pure-finders”—collecting dog excrement to sell by the
bucket to tanneries.
We do not know much about how the seventeenth-century poor
escaped from their daily misery and hopelessness; but by the beginning of
the eighteenth century those who could afford it escaped as often as possi-
ble into gin-induced oblivion. Marx was wrong—it was not religion that
was the opiate of the people; it was gin. Gin, which became popular after
1720, was the crack or heroin of that age. By the middle of the eighteenth
century, London was said to have had one gin shop for each 120 inhabi-
tants. As far as they were able, the English poor stayed drunk, consuming
an average of 8 gallons of gin a year. Henry Fielding wrote that gin was “the
principal sustenance of an hundred thousand people in this metropolis.”
William Hogarth immortalized the scene in “Gin Lane.” Daniel Defoe
thought that Parliament, dominated by the gentry, favored cheap gin
because the members’ estates produced the grain from which gin was
made. Probably a more persuasive consideration, although not so openly
admitted, was that gin immobilized the poor, the “criminal classes,” who
might otherwise revolt. The criminal classes appeared to the upper class an
alien race. Even their language was virtually unintelligible to the wellborn.
Writers and legislators agreed that there was no practical way to integrate
these lower classes into “English” society. It followed that they had to be
rigidly confined, severely repressed, and constantly reduced in number.
Gin was a tool of repression.
Neither in England nor anywhere else was it the absolutely poor, the
group Marx called the Lumpenproletariat,who migrated. Migration, at
70 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA