PENGUIN BOOKS

RELIGION AND THE DECLINE OF MAGIC

Keith Thomas is President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford and a former President ofthe British Academy. He was previously Professor of Modern History and Fellow of StJohn's College. He has written extensively on the social and intellectual history of theearly modern period. He is the general editor of the Past Masters series (OxfordUniversity Press) and of Oxford Studies in Social History (Clarendon Press). Religion andthe Decline of Magic, his first book, won one of the two Wolfson Literary Awards forHistory in 1972. He is the author of Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes inEngland 1500–1800, which is also published in Penguin, and the editor of The OxfordBook of Work (1999). He was knighted in 1988 for services to the study of history.

RELIGION AND THE DECLINE OF MAGIC

STUDIES IN POPULAR BELIEFS IN SIXTEENTH- AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURYENGLAND

KEITH THOMAS

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1971Published in Penguin University Books 1973

Reissued in Peregrine Books 1978Reprinted in Penguin Books 1991

16

Copyright © Keith Thomas, 1971All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that itshall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise

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ISBN: 978-0-14-193240-8

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To my parents

CONTENTS

ForewordAcknowledgementsTable of Abbreviations

PROLOGUE1 The Environment

RELIGION2 The Magic of the Medieval Church3 The Impact of the Reformation4 Providence5 Prayer and Prophecy6 Religion and the People

MAGIC7 Magical Healing8 Cunning Men and Popular Magic9 Magic and Religion

ASTROLOGY10 Astrology: its Practice and Extent11 Astrology: its Social and Intellectual Role12 Astrology and Religion

THE APPEAL TO THE PAST13 Ancient Prophecies

WITCHCRAFT14 Witchcraft in England: the Crime and its History15 Witchcraft and Religion16 The Making of a Witch17 Witchcraft and its Social Environment18 Witchcraft: Decline

ALLIED BELIEFS19 Ghosts and Fairies20 Times and Omens

CONCLUSION21 Some Interconnections22 The Decline of Magic

Index

FOREWORD

THIS book began as an attempt to make sense of some of the systems of belief whichwere current in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, but which no longer enjoymuch recognition today. Astrology, witchcraft, magical healing, divination, ancientprophecies, ghosts and fairies, are now all rightly disdained by intelligent persons. Butthey were taken seriously by equally intelligent persons in the past, and it is thehistorian's business to explain why this was so. I have tried to show their importance inthe lives of our ancestors and the practical utility which they often possessed. In thistask I have been much helped by the studies made by modern social anthropologists ofsimilar beliefs held in Africa and elsewhere.

As my work progressed, I became conscious of the close relationship which many ofthese beliefs bore to the religious ideas of the period. In offering an explanation formisfortune, and a means of redress at times of adversity, they seemed to be discharginga role very close to that of the established Church and its rivals. Sometimes they wereparasitic upon Christian teaching; sometimes they were in sharp rivalry to it. I thereforewidened my scope, so as to make room for a fuller consideration of this aspect ofcontemporary religion. By juxtaposing it to the other, less esteemed, systems of belief, Ihope to have thrown more light on both, and to have contributed to our knowledge ofthe mental climate of early modern England. I have also tried to explore therelationship between this climate and the material environment more generally.

The result, inevitably, is a very long book. Even so, I am well aware of thecompressions and over-simplifications which have resulted from handling so manydifferent topics over so long a period of time. But I am anxious to bring out theinterrelated nature of these various beliefs and can only do this by treating themtogether. The book is arranged so that the reader who wishes to skip some of thesections can easily do so, but the whole is meant to be more than the sum of its parts. Ialso wish to emphasize the essential unity of the period between the Reformation andthe dawn of the Enlightenment. This is why the book begins with the collapse of themedieval Church in the early sixteenth century and ends with the change in theintellectual atmosphere which is so striking in the years approaching 1700. The sourcesalso indicate a halt at the end of the seventeeenth century, since the records of both layand church courts cease around that time to be so informative on the matters with whichI am concerned.

Few of the topics under consideration are peculiarly English; indeed most of themform part of the general cultural history of the Western world. But this survey has beenstrictly limited to England (with occasional excursions into Wales) and I have resistedthe temptation to draw parallels with Scotland, Ireland, and the continent of Europe. Anexercise in comparative history, however desirable, is not possible until the data foreach country have been properly assembled. As it is, I have only skimmed the surface ofthe English material and have blurred some important regional distinctions.

I particularly regret not having been able to offer more of those exact statistical dataupon which the precise analysis of historical change must so often depend.Unfortunately, the sources seldom permit such computation, although it is to be hopedthat the information contained in the largely unpublished judicial records of the timewill one day be systematically quantified. My visits to these widely scattered archiveshave been less frequent and less systematic than I should have liked. In my attempt tosketch the main outlines of the subject I have only too often had to fall back upon thehistorian's traditional method of presentation by example and counter-example.Although this technique has some advantages, the computer has made it the intellectualequivalent of the bow and arrow in a nuclear age. But one cannot use the computerunless one has suitable material with which to supply it, and at present there seems tobe no genuinely scientific method of measuring changes in the thinking of pastgenerations. As a result, there are many points in my argument at which the reader canbe given no statistical evidence on which to accept or reject the impressions I haveformed after my reading in contemporary sources. But I have been pleased to see that,so far as the subject of witchcraft is concerned, my impressions have been abundantlyconfirmed by the statistical findings of Dr Alan Macfarlane, whose systematic study ofwitchcraft prosecutions in Essex, one of the counties for which the evidence permits suchan operation, has now been published.* My main aim has been to draw attention to alarge and relatively neglected area of the past. I shall be well satisfied if futurehistorians succeed in replacing my tentative generalizations by a more adequate versionof the truth.

Foreword to the Penguin Edition

For this edition I have corrected some errors, pruned a few extravagances and added ahandful of additional references to the footnotes, mainly to take account of recentpublications. I am most grateful to friends, correspondents and reviewers for theirsuggestions.

1 June 1972K.T.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

So many people have supplied me with ideas or information that I cannot hope to listthem all here. I have tried to acknowledge specific obligations in the notes and I offerapologies for any which have been unintentionally omitted. My greatest intellectualdebts are to my former tutors at Balliol College and to my past and present pupils at StJohn's. I am particularly grateful to Dr Christopher Hill, who kindled my interest in theseventeenth century and did so much to guide my early ventures into it. I must alsothank those of my friends, notably Mr Richard Grassby, Dr Brian Harrison and Dr JohnWalsh, who have for years sent me stray references to subjects which they thoughtwould interest me. Many stimulating conversations with Dr Alan Macfarlane havehelped me to clarify my own ideas. Parts of this book have been read as papers andlectures in this country and abroad, and I have tried to benefit from the resultingcriticisms.

The chapters on witchcraft and popular magic include most of the material (and muchof the wording) of my two BBC talks on ‘Witches’ and ‘Wizards’ (reprinted in theListener, 5 and 12 March 1970), and of my paper to the Association of SocialAnthropologists on ‘The Relevance of Social Anthropology to the Historical Study ofEnglish Witchcraft’ (in Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, ed. M. Douglas, ASAMonograph 9, Tavistock Press, 1970). Of those who gave me references and pieces ofinformation I am especially indebted to Dr Philip Tyler, who provided some valuableinformation relating to the diocese of York; Miss Elizabeth Allen, who gave me somereferences to the Peterborough diocesan archives; and Mr F. C. Morgan, who both madeit possible for me to work in Hereford Cathedral Library and also let me borrow andquote from his transcripts of the Hereford City Records. For permission to quote fromtheir unpublished theses I am grateful to Dr J. Addy, Dr M. Bindoff, Dr Macfarlane, LadyNeale, Dr J. A. F. Thomson and Dr R. B. Walker. I also wish to thank Dr B. S. Capp, DrR. A. Houlbrooke, Mr J. A. Sharpe and Mr P. A. Slack.

I have received much help from the many archivists and librarians who have enabledme to consult documents in their custody or provided me with photocopies. I must thankthose in charge of the County Record Offices of Cheshire, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset,Essex, Glamorgan, Hampshire, Hertfordshire, Ipswich and East Suffolk, Kent,Lancashire, London, Middlesex, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Somerset and Yorkshire(East Riding). I am also grateful to the City Librarians of Birmingham, Gloucester andSheffield, the Archivist at the Leicester City Museum, the custodians of the borougharchives of Bridport and Lyme Regis, and the staffs of Lambeth Palace Library, DrWilliams's Library, Reading University Library, the Oxford Museum of the History ofScience, the Guildhall Library, the British Museum and the Public Record Office. I amparticularly indebted to Mrs N. K. Gurney of the Borthwick Institute of HistoricalResearch, Mrs D. M. Owen of the Cambridge University Library, Mr H. L. Douch of theRoyal Institution of Cornwall and Mr E. H. Milligan, Librarian at Friends House.

Documents quoted from the Public Record Office are Crown Copyright.In Oxford my work has been greatly eased by Mr Charles Morgenstern of St John's

College Library, Mr G. Webb of the Codrington Library, and the endlessly helpful andtolerant staff of the Bodleian, for whose many kindnesses I am deeply grateful. Mycollege has been generous with leave and with help towards the cost of typing themanuscript. My wife has helped me most of all.

St John's College, Oxford1 July 1970

K.T.

NOTES ON REFERENCES

THE notes are so numerous that I have dispensed with a formal bibliography. Thereader who wishes to follow up any aspect of the subject can draw upon the notesthemselves, as well as the brief bibliographical notes which introduce each main section.Aesthetically, it would have been better to cut down the volume of documentation, but Icould not do so without making it impossible for the reader to identify the sources uponwhich statements in the text are founded. I have, however, made extensive use ofabbreviations. These are listed in the accompanying Table of Abbreviations. Otherwise,the full title and details of publication have been given for every source on its firstcitation in the notes to each chapter; thereafter a shortened title has been employed.Greek and Hebrew titles have generally been omitted. Unless otherwise stated, the placeof publication is London. In most quotations from contemporary sources the spellingand punctuation have been modernized.

ABBREVIATIONS

Add. Additional

Ady T. Ady, A Candle in the Dark (1656); reprinted, with same pagination, asA Perfect Discovery of Witches (1661)

A.P.C. Acts of the Privy Council

Archaeol. Archaeological

Ashm. Ashmole MSS (Bodleian Library)

Aubrey,Gentilisme

J. Aubrey, Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme, ed. J. Britten (Folk-LoreSoc., 1881)

Aubrey,Miscellanies J. Aubrey, Miscellanies upon Various Subjects (4th edn, 1857)

Bacon, Works The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis and D. D. Heath(1857–9)

Bernard, Guide R. Bernard, A Guide to Grand-Iury Men (1627)

B.M. British Museum, London

Bodl. Bodleian Library, Oxford

Borthwick Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, York

Brand,Antiquities

J. Brand, Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, revisedby Sir H. Ellis (Bohn edn, 1849–55)

Bull. Bulletin

Burton,Anatomy R. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) (Everyman edn, 1932)

Calvin,Institutes J. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. H. Beveridge (1957)

C.B. Court Book

C.S.P.D. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series

Cooper,Mystery T. Cooper, The Mystery of Witchcraft (1617)

C.U.L. Cambridge University Library

D.N.B. Dictionary of National Biography

D.R.

Diocesan Records:Ely D.R. at C.U.L.Exeter D.R. at Devon R.O.Gloucester D.R.* at Gloucester City LibraryHereford D.R.* at Hereford R.O.London D.R. at Greater London R.O.Norwich D.R. at Norfolk and Norwich R.O.Peterborough D.R. at Northants R.O.Rochester D.R. at Kent R.O.Wells D.R.* at Somerset R.O.Winchester D.R.* at the Castle, Winchester (now Hampshire R.O.)* Not all these records were foliated when I consulted them

D.T.C. Dictionaire de Théologie Catholique, ed. A. Vacant et al. (3rd edn, Paris,1930– )

DurhamDepositions

Depositions and other Ecclesiastical Proceedings from the courts of Durham,extending from 1311 to the Reign of Elizabeth, ed. J. Raine (Surtees Soc,1845)

Durham HighCommission

The Acts of the High Commission Court within the Diocese of Durham, ed.W. H. D. Longstaffe (Surtees Soc., 1858)

E.E.T.S. Early English Text Society

E.H.R. English Historical Review

Ewen, iC. L. Ewen, Witch Hunting and Witch Trials. The Indictments for Witchcraftfrom the records of 1373 Assizes held for the Home Circuit, A.D. 1559–1736(1929)

Ewen, iiC. L. Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism. A concise account derived fromsworn depositions and confessions obtained in the courts of England andWales (1933)

Ewen, StarChamber C. L. Ewen, Witchcraft in the Star Chamber (n.pl., 1938)

Foxe The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe (4th edn, J. Pratt) (n.d. [1877])

Frere andKennedy,Articles andInjunctions

Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the period of the Reformation, ed. W. H.Frere and W. M. Kennedy (Alcuin Club, 1910)

W. H. Hale, A Series of Precedents and Proceedings in Criminal Causes,

Hale,Precedents

extending from the year 1475 to 1640; extracted from Act-Books ofEcclesiastical Courts in the Diocese of London (1847)

Hereford CityRecords

Bound volumes of transcripts of the records of the City of Hereford madeby F. C. Morgan, Esq., and in his possession

Heywood,Diaries

The Rev. Oliver Heywood, B.A., 1630–1702; his Autobiography, Diaries,Anecdote and Event Books, ed. J. Horsfall Turner (Brighouse and Bingley,1882–5)

H.M.C.Homilies

Historical Manuscripts Commission, Reports The Two Books of Homiliesappointed to be read in churches, ed. J. Griffiths (Oxford, 1859)

Josten,Ashmole

Elias Ashmole (1617–92). His Autobiographical and Historical Notes, hisCorrespondence, and other Contemporary Sources relating to his Life andWork, ed. with a biographical introduction, by C. H. Josten (Oxford,1966)

Journ. Journal

Kittredge,Witchcraft

G. L. Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England (1929: reprint, NewYork, 1956)

Kocher,Science andReligion

P.H. Kocher, Science and Religion in Elizabethan England (San Marino,Calif., 1953)

Lambeth Lambeth Palace Library

Lea, MaterialsLib.

Materials towards a History of Witchcraft, collected by H. C. Lea, ed. A. C.Howland (Philadelphia, 1939) Library

Lilly,Autobiography

William Lilly's History of his Life and Times from the year 1602 to 1681,written by Himself (1715), reprint, 1822

Lilly, ChristianAstrology W. Lilly, Christian Astrology Modestly Treated of in Three Books (1647)

L.P. Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic of the reign of Henry VIII, ed. J. S.Brewer et al (1862–1932)

Malleus Malleus Maleficarum, trans. M. Summers (1948)

Murray,Erceldoune

The Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune, ed. J. A. H. Murray(E.E.T.S., 1875)

Notestein,Witchcraft

W. Notestein, A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 (1911;reprint, New York, 1965)

A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, ed. J. A. H. Murray

O.E.D. (Oxford, 1888–1933)

Oxf. Univ.Arch. Oxford University Archives (Bodleian Library)

Perkins,Discourse

W. Perkins, A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft (Cambridge,1608)

Potts Potts's Discovery of Witches in the County of Lancaster… 1613, ed. J.Crossley (Chetham Soc., 1845)

Powicke andCheney,Councils andSynods

Councils and Synods, ii (A.D. 1205–1313), ed. F. M. Powicke and C. R.Cheney (Orford, 1964)

P.R.O. Public Record Office

Procs. Proceedings

P.S. Parker Society

Rev. Review

R.O. Record Office (Archives Office in the case of Kent)

Robbins,Encyclopedia R. H. Robbins, The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology (1960)

Sarum Manual Manuale ad Usum Percelebris Ecclesie Sarisburiensis, ed. A. JefferiesCollins (Henry Bradshaw Soc., 1960)

Scot, DiscoverieR. Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) (The best modern edition isby B. Nicholson [1886]. The most recent (by H. R. Williamson, [1964])has been siently abbreviated)

Sloane Sloane MSS (British Museum)

Soc. Society

Somers Tracts A Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts… of the late Lord Somers, 2ndedn, by W. Scott (1809–15)

Southwell ActBooks

Transcript of Southwell Minster Act Books by W. A. James (ReadingUniversity Library [942.52])

S.T.C.A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, A Short-title Catalogue of Books printedin England, Scotland and Ireland and of English Books printed abroad, 1475–1640 (1926; reprint, 1956)

Taylor,MathematicalPractitioners

E. G. R. Taylor, The Mathematical Practitioners of Tudor and Stuart England(Cambridge, 1954)

Thiers,Superstitions

J.-B. Thiers, Traité des Superstitions qui regardent les sacremens (1679; 5thedn, Paris, 1741)

Thomson,Later Lollards J. A. F. Thomson, The Later Lollards, 1414–1520 (Oxford, 1965)

Thorndike,Magic andScience

L. Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York:Morningside Heights, 1923–58)

Trans. Transactions

T.R.H.S. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

Turner,Providences

W. Turner, A Compleat History of the Most Remarkable Providences, Both ofJudgment and Mercy, which have hapned in this Present Age (1697)

V.C.H. Victoria County History

WingD. Wing, Short-title Catalogue of Books printed in England, Scotland,Ireland, Wales and British America, and of English Books printed in OtherCountries, 1641–1700 (New York, 1945–51)

Wood, Ath. Ox A. Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, ed. P. Bliss (Oxford 1813–20)

Wood, Life andTimes

The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, antiquary, of Oxford, 1632–95, ed. A.Clark (Oxford Hist. Soc., 1891–1900)

YorkDepositions

Depositions from the Castle of York, relating to offences committed in theNorthern Counties in the seventeenth century, ed. J. Raine (Surtees Soc.,1861)

York Manual Manuale et Processionale ad Usum Insignis Ecclesiae Eboracensis, ed. W. G.Henderson (Surtees Soc., 1875)

For this is man's nature, that where he is persuaded that there is the power to bringprosperity and adversity, there will he worship.

George Gifford, A Discourse of the Subtill Practices of Devilles by Witches and Sorcerers(1587), sigs.B4v-C1

PROLOGUE

1.

THE ENVIRONMENT*

IN the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries England was still a pre-industrial society, andmany of its essential features closely resembled those of the ‘under-developed areas’ oftoday. The population was relatively sparse: there were perhaps two and a half millionpeople in England and Wales in 1500, and five and a half million in 1700. Even in thelater seventeenth century the economy gave little indication of the industrializationwhich was to come. It is true that there was now a highly commercialized agriculture, avigorous textile industry, a substantial production of coal and a growing volume ofcolonial trade. But the bulk of the population was still engaged in the production offood, and the development of capitalist organization was still rudimentary. There werefew ‘factories’. The typical unit of production was the small workshop, and cottageindustry was still the basis of textile manufacture.

Most of the population lived in the countryside. Gregory King, the pioneer statistician,to whom we owe most of our figures for this period, calculated that in 1688 nearlyeighty per cent of the population lived in villages and hamlets. Most of the urban areaswere very small; Birmingham, Bristol, Exeter, Newcastle, Norwich and York were theonly provincial cities with more than ten thousand inhabitants. Norwich, the largest ofthese, had about thirty thousand. The one striking exception to this pattern of life inscattered rural communities was the capital city. London's population multiplied tenfoldduring these centuries; by 1700 it was well over half a million and still growing. It hasbeen estimated that perhaps a sixth of the total population spent at least part of theirlives in this great metropolis, many of them returning to their rural communities withnewly acquired urban habits of living.1

Society was highly stratified and the contrast between rich and poor was everywhereconspicuous. Gregory King calculated that in 1688 over half the population were‘decreasing the wealth of the kingdom’, that is to say earning less than they consumed.There can be no doubt that between a third and a half of the population lived atsubsistence level and were chronically under-employed. These were the ‘cottagers,paupers, labouring people and outservants’, as King called them. Many of these werecopy-holders occupying their own small tenements, but even more were wage labourers,for the decline of the English peasantry was already under way. Above them came themore prosperous classes of farmers, freeholders and tradesmen. At the top was thetraditional élite of landed gentry and nobility, now strongly challenged by the rising

professional groups, lawyers, clergymen, merchants and officials. King estimated thatthe landowners and professional classes, though only five per cent of the population,enjoyed a larger proportion of the national income than did all the lower classes (overfifty per cent) put together.

Conditions of life varied so much among these different elements of the populationthat it is hard for the historian not to be struck more by the differences than by thesimilarities. Tudor and Stuart England may have been an under-developed society,dependent upon the labours of an under-nourished and ignorant population, but it alsoproduced one of the greatest literary cultures ever known and witnessed anunprecedented ferment of scientific and intellectual activity. Not every under-developedsociety has its Shakespeare, Milton, Locke, Wren and Newton. The social élite washighly educated. It has been calculated that by 1660 there was a grammar school forevery 4,400 persons, and that two and a half per cent of the relevant age-group of themale population was receiving some form of higher education, at Oxford andCambridge, or at the Inns of Court. The latter is a higher figure than any attained againuntil after the First World War.2 It was an age of immense creative activity in the fieldsof drama, poetry, prose, architecture, theology, mathematics, physics, chemistry,history, philology and many other learned disciplines. Yet it was also a time when alarge, but as yet unknown, proportion of the population (perhaps between half and twothirds of adult males in the mid seventeenth century) was unable to read, or at leastsigned with a mark.3

It is this huge variation in standard of living, educational level and intellectualsensibility which makes this society so diverse, and therefore so hard to generalizeabout. Not only did conditions change over the two centuries, but at any one point intime there were so many different layers of belief and levels in sophistication. Theinvention of the printed word, moreover, had made possible the preservation anddissemination of many different systems of thought, deriving from other societies andsometimes dating from the remote classical past. The task of the historian is thusinfinitely harder than that of the social anthropologist, studying a small homogeneouscommunity in which all inhabitants share the same beliefs, and where few of thosebeliefs are borrowed from other societies. This was no simple unified primitive world,but a dynamic and infinitely various society, where social and intellectual change hadlong been at work and where currents were moving in many different directions.

The beliefs with which this book is concerned had a variety of social and intellectualimplications. But one of their central features was a preoccupation with the explanationand relief of human misfortune. There can be no doubt that this concern reflected thehazards of an intensely insecure environment. This is not to suggest that it was thesehazards which brought the beliefs into being. On the contrary, most of the latter hadbeen inherited from earlier generations and therefore preceded the society in which theyflourished. Nevertheless, there were certain features of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century environment by which they could hardly fail to be coloured.

Of these the first was the expectation of life. Systematic demographic research uponthe history of England during these two centuries has only just begun, and theinadequacies of the evidence probably mean that our knowledge of the health andphysical condition of contemporaries will always be incomplete. But it is beyond disputethat Tudor and Stuart Englishmen were, by our standards, exceedingly liable to pain,sickness and premature death. Even among the nobility, whose chances are likely tohave been better than those of other classes, the life expectation at birth of boys born inthe third quarter of the seventeenth century was 29.6 years. Today it would be around70. A third of these aristocratic infants died before the age of five, while the level ofmortality among those who lived to be adults closely resembled that of India in the lastdecade of the nineteenth century.4 In London, conditions were particularly bad. Thefirst English demographer, John Graunt, estimated in 1662 that, of every hundred livechildren born in the metropolis, thirty-six died in their first six years and a furthertwenty-four in the following ten years. He calculated the expectation at birth to be lessthan that which was to be the figure for India during the influenza pandemic of 1911–21.5 Graunt's estimate may have been unduly pessimistic. In any case he lived at a timewhen the mortality rate was untypically high. In the mid sixteenth century theexpectation at birth may have been as high as 40-45, for country folk anyway.6 Butcontemporaries did not need elaborate demographic investigations to tell them that lifewas short, and that the odds were against any individual living out his full span. ‘Weshall find more who have died within thirty or thirty-five years of age than passed it,’remarked a writer in 1635.7 Even those who survived could anticipate a lifetime ofintermittent pain. Literary sources suggest that many persons suffered chronically fromsome ailment or other, and this impression is confirmed by inferences from what isknown of contemporary diet.

The food supply was always precarious and throughout the period the fate of theannual harvest remained crucial. The meagre evidence available suggests that the yield-ratio on seed corn may have doubled between 1500 and 1660, but so did the population.About one harvest in six seems to have been a total failure, and mortality could soarwhen times of dearth coincided with (or perhaps occasioned) large-scale epidemics.8 Inthe seventeenth century, however, it was rare, but certainly not unknown, for men todie in the streets from starvation or exposure.9 Yet even at times of plenty most peopleseem to have suffered from a lack of Vitamin A (yellow and green vegetables) andVitamin D (milk and eggs). The first of these deficiencies accounts for the numerouscomplaints of ‘sore eyes' (xerophthalmia), the second for the widespread incidence ofrickets. Scorbutic diseases were also common. The well-known ‘green sickness’ in youngwomen, to which contemporaries gave a sexual meaning, was chlorosis, anaemiaproduced by a lack of iron in the diet, stemming from upper-class disdain for freshvegetables. The well-to-do ate too much meat and were frequently constipated. They didnot regard milk as a drink for adults and they frequently suffered from the infection ofthe urinary tract which produced the notorious Stuart malady of stone in the bladder.

The dietary deficiencies of the lower classes, by contrast, reflected not so muchignorance as simple poverty. Not until the nineteenth century did labourers get enoughmeat and butter. In the seventeenth century they may have escaped the gout and stonewhich plagued their betters, and may even have had better teeth from eating morevegetables. But they were chronically under-nourished and vulnerable to tuberculosisand gastric upsets (‘griping in the guts’) caused by bad food.10 Rich and poor alike werevictims of the infections generated by the lack of hygiene, ignorance of antiseptics andabsence of effective sanitation. Epidemics accounted for thirty per cent of reporteddeaths in seventeenth-century London. There were periodic waves of influenza, typhus,dysentery and, in the seventeenth century, smallpox, a disease which the contemporaryphysician Thomas Sydenham assumed would sooner or later attack most people. Thirtythousand people died of smallpox in London between 1670 and 1689; and a study of thenewspaper advertisements printed in the London Gazette between 1667 and 1774 showsthat sixteen out of every hundred missing persons whose descriptions were given borepockmarks on their faces.11

Most dreaded of all was the bubonic plague, which was endemic until the last quarterof the seventeenth century. It was a disease of the towns and it particularly affected thepoor, who lived in crowded, filthy conditions, thus attracting the black rats, which arenowadays thought to have carried the fleas which spread the disease. (Like the people ofIndia today, the poorer classes in parts of seventeenth-century England still used cow-dung as fuel.12) In the hundred and fifty years before the great visitation of 1665 therewere only a dozen years when London was free from plague. Some people were thoughtto have died of it every year and periodically there were massive outbreaks, althoughmany of the deaths which contemporaries attributed to plague probably occurred forother reasons. In 1563 some 20,000 Londoners are thought to have died; in 1593,15,000; in 1603, 30,000, or over a sixth of the inhabitants; in 1625, 41,000, anothersixth; in 1636, 10,000; and, in 1665, at least 68,000. In provincial towns plague deathssometimes took away an even higher proportion of the population.13

The plague terrified by its suddenness, its virulence and its social effects. The upperclasses would emigrate temporarily from the afflicted area, leaving the poor to die.Unemployment, food shortage, looting and violence usually resulted. The refugeesthemselves were liable to receive rough treatment from country folk, frightened theywere bringing the disease with them. Further violence accompanied popular resistanceto the quarantine regulations and restrictions on movement imposed by the authorities,particularly to the practice of shutting up the infected and their families in their houses.The plague, said a preacher, was of all diseases,

the most dreadful and terrible;… then all friends leave us, then a man or woman sit(s)and lie(s) alone and is a stranger to the breath of his own relations. If a man be sick ofa fever it is some comfort that he can take a bed-staff and knock, and his servant comesup and helps him with a cordial. But if a man be sick of the plague then he sits and lies

all alone.14

When a Western traveller visits a pre-industrial society of this kind today he equipshimself with all the resources of modern medicine; he takes pills to keep his stomachfree from infection and is vaccinated against smallpox, and inoculated against typhus,plague or yellow fever. No such immunity was available to the inhabitants of Tudor andStuart England, for medical science was helpless before most contemporary hazards tohealth. There was an organised medical profession, but it had little to offer. In thesixteenth and early seventeenth centuries university-educated physicians were given apurely academic training in the principles of humoral physiology as set out in the worksof Hippocrates, Aristotle and Galen. They were taught that illness sprang from animbalance between the four humours (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile).Diagnosis consisted in establishing which of these humours was out of line, and therapyin taking steps to restore the balance, either by bloodletting (by venesection,scarification or applying leeches) or by subjecting the patient to a course of purges andemetics. The physician thus followed a dreary round of blood-letting and purging, alongwith the prescription of plasters, ointments and potions. He focused on what we shouldregard as the symptoms of disease – fever or dysentery – rather than the disease itself.The patient's urine was taken to be the best guide to his condition, and there were somepractitioners who even thought it enough to see the urine without the patient, thoughthe Royal College of Physicians condemned this habit.15 It was just as well that in strictGalenic theory one of the humours was bound to predominate unnaturally, so thatperfect health was almost by definition unattainable.16

In the seventeenth century, accordingly, doctors were quite unable to diagnose ortreat most contemporary illnesses. ‘Many diseases they cannot cure at all,’ declaredRobert Burton, ‘as apoplexy, epilepsy, stone, strangury, gout…, quartan agues; acommon ague sometimes stumbles them all.’17 Internal medicine had to wait upon theslow development of physiology and anatomy. There were no X-rays and nostethoscopes, and a physician was usually quite ignorant of what was actually going oninside a sick person's body. There were surgeons who dealt with tumours, ulcers,fractures and venereal disease. But their art was regarded as an inferior one by thephysicians. Besides, without anaesthetics or knowledge of antiseptics, there was verylittle they could do. Operations were largely confined to amputations, trepanning theskull, cutting for stone, bone-setting and incising abscesses. Patients wereunderstandably terrified of undergoing this kind of torture and the mortality rate aftersuch operations was high. Richard Wiseman's standard Severall Chirurgicall Treatises(1676) was popularly known as ‘Wiseman's Book of Martyrs’.18

Nowhere was the inadequacy of contemporary medical technique more apparent thanin its handling of the threat presented by the plague. A few physicians noticed that ratscame out of their holes at times of plague,19 but they did not associate them with thedisease; indeed, by urging that cats and dogs be killed in order to check infection, they

may have actually worsened the situation. Contemporaries preferred to attribute plagueto a combination of noxious vapours in the air and corrupt humours in the body, thoughthey disagreed about the causes of these phenomena and about whether or not thedisease was contagious. As a preacher bluntly said in 1603, ‘Whence it cometh, whereofit ariseth and wherefore it is sent… they confess their ignorance.’20 All sorts of amuletsand preservatives were recommended – tobacco, arsenic, quicksilver, dried toads. Muchenergy was also devoted to finding some means of allaying popular panic, on theassumption that the happy man would not get plague. As a further preventive, thephysicians prescribed better hygiene, which was sensible enough, and the locking up ofinfected parties within their own houses, which was less sensible, since by confiningother members of the family to the habitat of the rats they must have increased the tollof deaths. No progress had been made in the study of plague by the time of the greatvisitation of London in 1665. ‘It is a mysterious disease,’ confessed the current Secretaryof the Royal Society, ‘and I am afraid will remain so, for all the observations anddiscourses made of it.’21

Yet the failure of contemporary doctors to offer an adequate therapy for this or mostother contemporary diseases did not matter very much to most of the population. Theattentions of a qualified physician were effectively beyond their reach, because therewas a severely limited supply of trained men. The Royal College of Physicians had beenset up in 1518 to supervise and license physicians practising in the City of London andwithin a seven-mile radius. The College seems to have exercised this monopoly in ajealous and restrictive way, for it kept its numbers small, despite an immensesubsequent increase in the size of the City. In the first years of its foundation the Collegehad only a dozen members, whereas London's population was perhaps sixty thousand.By 1589 the College's membership had risen to thirty-eight while the population hadmore than doubled. Thereafter the number of inhabitants continued to risespectacularly, but the size of the College remained almost stationary until the Civil Warperiod. The number of Fellows was raised to forty in 1663 and the College expandedfurther in the later Stuart period. But the ratio of the London population to its residentmembers and licentiates can never have been less than five thousand to one and wasusually very much greater.22

In the provinces, where the licensing powers exercised by the College were never soimportant as those of the Church and Universities, the situation was rather better. Thenumber of country physicians rose steadily through the period. One modern student hascompiled a list of 814 physicians who are known to have been licensed between 1603and 1643.23 It shows that some towns were relatively well supplied with qualifieddoctors. Norwich had seventeen, Canterbury twenty-two, Exeter thirteen and York ten.Not all these may have actually practised, but the list itself is an under-estimate, sincenot all the records of the period have survived. By the end of the seventeenth centurythere can have been few market-towns without a resident physician. Richard Baxter, thenonconformist divine, who tells us he was very seldom without pain, was able as a

young man to consult no fewer than thirty-six different physicians.24

Physicians, however, were too expensive for the bottom half of the population, eventhough they often tailored their bills to fit the pockets of their clients. In the seventeenthcentury a gentleman could expect to be charged about a pound a day for medicalattendance, but humbler persons might get off for a few shillings if the doctor was sodisposed.25 Nevertheless, there were many complaints that it was only the wealthy whocould regularly afford a physician. ‘Physic,’ declared Bishop Latimer in 1552, ‘is aremedy prepared only for rich folks and not for poor; for the poor man is not able towage the physician.’ At the end of the seventeenth century Richard Baxter wrote that‘many a thousand lie sick and die that have not money for physicians’: even ‘frugalfreeholders of twenty or thirty pounds a year’ had difficulty in finding ‘ten shillings tosave their lives in cases of danger’.26 The Royal College of Physicians in 1687 ruled thattheir members should give free advice to the poor and soon afterwards set up a short-lived Dispensary to sell medicine at cost price. This step angered the apothecaries(grocers-cum-drug-sellers) and did not solve the problem.27 Parishes were expected topay medical fees for their paupers and some municipalities appointed town doctors,28but the provision of a state medical service was urged only by utopian thinkers. One ofthem, John Bellers, declared in 1714 that half the people who died annually sufferedfrom curable diseases, for which only their poverty prevented them from finding aremedy.29

In lieu of the physicians, patients could turn to the surgeons and apothecaries.Seventy-two surgeons were licensed to practise in London in 1514, while in 1634 theapothecaries were thought to number at least a hundred and fifty. By 1701 there weresaid to be a thousand in London and a further fifteen hundred apprentices. Theyoutnumbered the physicians by five to one.30 The apothecaries thus took on the task ofdiagnosing and prescribing the medicine as well as supplying it. The physicians resistedthis incursion into their territory and the seventeenth century witnessed a protractedlegal battle which did not end until 1704, when the apothecaries’ right to give medicaladvice (though not to charge for it) was upheld by the House of Lords. But they had longengaged in general practice in the provinces, where distinctions between themselvesand the physicians and surgeons had been less rigid, while in London they claimed to behandling ninety-five per cent of medical practice before the end of the seventeenthcentury.31 After 1704 their evolution into the modern general practitioner was assured.Nor was their treatment necessarily inferior to that offered by the physicians. On thecontrary, the very size of their clientele forced them into prescribing new drugs, of akind frowned upon by the Royal College, in place of the time-consuming humoralremedies.32

But the impact of organized medicine upon the lower reaches of the population wasseldom more than superficial. Many of the poor chose to go outside the ranks of thelicensed practitioners altogether, and to consult an empiric, herbalist, wise woman, or

other member of that ‘great multitude of ignorant persons’ whose practice of physic andsurgery had been denounced by Parliament in 1512. In 1542–3 another Act had allowedanyone with the necessary knowledge to treat external sores and prescribe for the stone.According to a pamphleteer in 1669, there was ‘scarce a pissing-place about the City’which was not adorned by posters advertising the services of some medical quack.33Some of the nostrums thus peddled reflected genuine country lore about herbs and roots;others did the patient severe or even fatal damage.34

But this was above all a time when medicine began at home. Every housewife had herrepertoire of private remedies. ‘All the nation are already physicians,’ remarkedNicholas Culpepper in 1649. ‘If you ail anything, every one you meet, whether a man orwoman, will prescribe you a medicine for it.’ ‘None practise physic or professethmidwifery’, reported the villagers of Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire, in 1662, ‘butcharitably one neighbour helps one another’.35 In childbirth, indeed, a physician wasnever employed, save by the very wealthy, or in cases of unusual emergency. There wasno shortage of midwives, licensed and unlicensed, but their qualifications wererudimentary. The forceps had been invented by Peter Chamberlen early in theseventeenth century, but he kept it secret and the usual obstetric tools were cruel andinefficient. A midwife estimated in 1687 that two thirds of contemporary abortions,stillbirths, and deaths in child-bed were to be attributed to the lack of care and skilldisplayed by her colleagues.36 The wife of one Newark apothecary was so afraid of anymidwife coming near her that her husband used to lock her alone in her room until thedelivery was over.37

As for hospitals, St. Bartholomew's and St. Thomas's were the only two for thephysically ill in London at the end of the seventeenth century and there were fewelsewhere. They were in any case meant primarily for the poor. No person of socialpretensions would dream of entering one as a patient; and if he did he would certainlybe increasing his chances of contracting some fatal infection.

Even less could be done for sufferers from mental illness. Contemporary medicaltherapy was primarily addressed to the ailments of the body. ‘For the diseases of themind,’ wrote Robert Burton, ‘we take no notice of them.’ Raving psychotics were lockedup by their relatives, kept under guard by parish officers, or sent to houses ofcorrection.38 Less dramatic forms of mental illness were regarded either as cases ofmelancholy to be treated by purging and blood-letting, or wrongly diagnosed as‘hysteria’, stemming from a condition of the uterus. The uterine origin of nervousdiseases was not successfully challenged in England until the later seventeenth century,when Thomas Willis formulated the theory of the cerebral origin of hysteria andpioneered the science of neurology.39

There was thus no orthodox medical agency which offered a satisfactory cure formental illness. Various low-grade practitioners took out licences as ‘curers of mad folksand distracted persons’, and some of them maintained private madhouses. Yet even

Bethlem Hospital (Bedlam) in London discharged its inmates as incurable if they had notrecovered within a year.40 It is not surprising that supernatural explanations of mentaldepression were advanced or that the main psychotherapists were the clergy. Physicalone was not enough to cure melancholy, declared the Puritan oracle, WilliamPerkins.41

These were the circumstances in which so many unorthodox methods of healingenjoyed prestige. The population at large disliked Galenic physic for its nauseousremedies,42 and were frightened by the prospect of surgery. Some of the mostintelligent laymen of the day expressed total contempt for conventional medicine; andthe unorthodox empirics hounded by the Royal College of Physicians often turned out tohave influential champions.43 King James I regarded academic medicine as mereconjecture and therefore useless. Francis Bacon thought that ‘empirics and old women’were ‘more happy many times in their cures than learned physicians’. Robert Burton,Archbishop Abbot, and many less notable contemporaries, said the same. Some scientistsand intellectuals followed the example of Paracelsus and were prepared to learn fromherbalists and wise women.44 Thomas Hobbes, who took a keen interest in the problemof survival, concluded that he would ‘rather have the advice or take physic from anexperienced old woman that had been at many sick people's bedsides, than from thelearnedst but unexperienced physician’.45 Doctors of physic, thought the sectary,Lodowick Muggleton, were ‘the greatest cheats… in the world. If there were never adoctor of physic in the world, people would live longer and liver better in health.’46

Before discounting such lay opinions we should recall that even Thomas Sydenham,the greatest physician of the seventeenth century, thought that it would have beenbetter for many patients if the art of physic had never been invented, remarking thatmany poor men owed their lives to their inability to afford conventional treatment.47Nor was he alone among his colleagues in holding such opinions. ‘I have heard thelearned and pious Dr. Ridgeley, M.D., say,’ recalled John Aubrey, ‘that if the worldknew the villainy and knavery (beside ignorance) of the physicians and apothecaries,the people would throw stones at 'em as they walked in the streets.’48

Helplessness in the face of disease was an essential element in the background to thebeliefs with which we shall be concerned. So too was vulnerability to other kinds ofmisfortune, particularly when it came suddenly. Next to plague, perhaps the greatestsingle threat to security was fire. This was more of a risk in the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries than it is today and contemporaries were much less well-equippedto deal with it. The towns were particularly vulnerable with their thatched roofs,wooden chimneys and crowded living conditions. Since there were no safety matches,people often chose to fetch a bucket of burning coals from a neighbour rather thanwaste time struggling with a tinder-box. At night they were dependent on candles,which, when set down in a draughty place, could easily put a house on fire. ‘Fear

candle, good wife,’ warned the agricultural writer, Thomas Tusser, ‘Fear candle in hayloft, in barn and in shed.’ When the chimney needed cleaning it was common to take ashort cut by firing a gun up it or even setting it on fire: this was how the Beccles firewas started in 1586, with eighty houses burned down as a result.49 A further risk camefrom the numerous industrial workshops, scattered among the houses, and observing themost rudimentary safety precautions. Dyers, brewers and soapboilers were a constantsource of danger: the fire which did £200,000-worth of damage at Tiverton in 1612began when a dyer's furnace was allowed to become overheated.50

Some of the biggest conflagrations were the result of carelessness engendered byprimitive living conditions. A hundred and fifty buildings were damaged at Woburn in1595 after an old woman had set her thatched house alight by throwing all her used bed-straw on the fire. Tiverton was heavily damaged in 1598 when a fire was started bysome beggar-women who had been pathetically trying to cook pancakes on strawbecause they could not afford to buy wood. Much of Northampton was destroyed in1675 when a woman left her pot of washing on the fire for too long. Most of the Palaceof Whitehall was burned down in 1698 because a Dutch washerwoman tried to hastenthe drying of her linen by lighting a charcoal fire indoors.51

Once fire had broken out it seldom encountered much in the way of effectiveresistance. Fire-fighting techniques were virtually unchanged in England between theNorman Conquest and the death of Elizabeth I.52 Even the most advanced municipalitypossessed nothing more in the way of equipment than some leather buckets, a fewladders and iron hooks for pulling down thatch so as to stop the fire spreading. Until themid seventeenth century there were no engines to project water to a height, and thewater supply itself was usually unreliable. Some towns required householders to keepbuckets of water outside their doors. Others tried to check the erection of woodenbuildings and thatched roofs. This had been the official policy of the City of Londonsince the twelfth century. But such regulations were easier to make than to enforce, andthe fire-fighting equipment usually proved sadly inadequate when the blaze was underway. There were no fire brigades, and the scene at a fire was usually one of unrelievedchaos. The only effective way contemporaries knew of stopping a fire was to blow upall the buildings around it to stop it spreading. When the flames dwindled there wasinvariably trouble with pilferers.53

Unable to prevent the outbreak of fire, and virtually helpless during the actualconflagration, contemporaries showed little more resource when it came to bearing theloss. There was no organised fire insurance until the last two decades of the seventeenthcentury. All that the victim of fire could do was to apply for a Church brief, authorisinga collection to be made on his behalf in places of public worship. These begging letterswere issued for a variety of charitable purposes and were as unreliable as modern flag-days. Nor was their prestige enhanced by the numerous petty frauds which grew aroundthem. But they help us to form some estimate of the actual scale of fire damage. Theyshow, for example, that in the last fifty years of the seventeenth century there were

eighty-nine separate fires in which the damage incurred was estimated at £1,000 ormore: the total cost of this group of large fires was put at £913,416.54 In assessing thisfigure we should recall that it excludes the Great Fire of London (1666), which did £10millions of damage, destroying over 13,000 houses, and leaving perhaps 100,000 peoplehomeless.55 It also excludes numerous smaller fires, as well as those for which no recordhas survived, or for which no brief was issued. All this, moreover, took place at a timewhen fire-fighting methods had begun to improve; in the sixteenth century the situationwas worse.

As a purely economic factor, therefore, fire was exceedingly important. But its humanconsequences are even more obvious, for there was no occurrence which so graphicallysymbolized the instability of human fortunes. ‘He which at one o'clock was worth fivethousand pounds and, as the prophet saith, drank his wine in bowls of fine silver plate,had not by two o'clock so much as a wooden dish left to eat his meat in, nor a house tocover his sorrowful head.’56 The briefs which were read aloud in the churches onSundays served as a constant reminder of how men could be reduced in an instant fromwealth to utter penury, and how there was no telling whose turn it might be next. Thepsychological threat was increased by the capriciousness of the danger. Some townsescaped serious fire; whereas others suffered again and again. Tiverton was burneddown three times (1598, 1612, 1731). Marlborough, Blandford, Dorchester andBeaminster all suffered repeatedly. Warwick and Northampton had only one serious fireeach, but in both cases it destroyed a large part of the town. Ip the metropolis fires wereso common that when the great fire in 1666 began scarcely anyone outside itsimmediate vicinity took any notice.57

Poverty, sickness, and sudden disaster were thus familiar features of the socialenvironment of this period. But we must not make the anachronistic mistake ofassuming that contemporaries were as daunted by them as we should be, were wesuddenly pitchforked backwards in time. In Tudor and Stuart England men were fullyaccustomed to disease and a low expectation of life. Parents were slower to recognisethe individuality of their children, for they well knew that they might lose them in theirinfancy. Husbands and wives were better adjusted to the idea of the surviving partnermarrying after the other's death. The attitude of the poor to their lot seems often to havebeen one of careless stoicism. Many middle-class observers commented on theirinsensibility in face of the dangers of the plague, and were shocked by the generalreluctance to obey regulations designed for their own safety.58 When starvationthreatened, the poor were capable of using violence to secure food for themselves, butthey made little contribution to the political radicalism of the time and showed nointerest in attempting to change the structure of the society in which they foundthemselves. Unlike the inhabitants of today's under-developed countries, they knew ofno foreign countries where the standard of living was notably higher. Instead ofworking for social reform they often turned to more direct methods of liberation.

Drink, for example, was built into the fabric of social life. It played a part in nearlyevery public and private ceremony, every commercial bargain, every craft ritual, everyprivate occasion of mourning or rejoicing. At fairs and markets, which remained exemptuntil 1874 from ordinary licensing restrictions, the consumption could be enormous. ‘Gobut to the town's end where a fair is kept,’ remarked a preacher in 1638, ‘and there theylie, as if some field had been fought; here lies one man, there another.’ As a Frenchmanobserved in 1672, there was no business which could be done in England without pots ofbeer.59 Late medieval preachers complained that working-men got drunk at least once aweek; while in the reign of Charles II foreign visitors noticed that artisans did not let aday go by without a visit to the alehouse.60

The beer was cheap to make. The Elizabethan country clergyman, William Harrison,had 200 gallons brewed every month in his household, for an outlay of only twentyshillings a time.61 We do not know the size of his household, but the daily consumptionwas obviously high. At sea and on land the standard allowance of beer per head seemsto have been a gallon a day.62 Beer was a basic ingredient in everyone's diet, childrenas well as adults. The first available figures for the total national consumption date fromthe late seventeenth century. They show that in 1684 duty was charged in England andWales on a total of 6,318,000 barrels of beer (4,384,000 of strong beer, 1,934,000 ofsmall beer), each barrel containing thirty-six gallons in London, and thirty-four in theprovinces. This suggests that each member of the population, man, woman and child,consumed almost forty gallons a year, i.e. nearly a pint a day. But allowance must alsobe made for the beer brewed privately on which excise was not charged: Gregory Kingestimated that in 1688 this came to a further seventy per cent of the original total. Evenwithout this addition the per capita consumption figure is higher than anything known inmodern times.63 And this is to take no account of the foreign wine imports or thegrowing volume of spirit consumption.

It may be that the greater quantity of salt meat and fish consumed in the seventeenthcentury made men thirstier. It is also likely that the listlessness produced by apredominantly cereal diet created a greater demand for a stimulant. The absence ofalternative beverages further helped to drive men to alcohol. Tea and coffee were stillluxuries. Tea cost twenty shillings a pound at the end of the seventeenth century64 anddid not establish itself as a working-class drink until the last quarter of the eighteenthcentury. Coffee played an even slighter part in the drinking habits of the population atlarge, though it became very fashionable among London sophisticates.

Alcohol was thus an essential narcotic which anaesthetized men against the strains ofcontemporary life. Drunkenness broke down social distinctions, and brought atemporary mood of optimism to the desperate. It was extensive in Elizabethan prisons65and among the lower classes. (It was only during the seventeenth century that the lordreplaced the beggar as proverbially the drunkest member of the community.) 66 Thepoor took to drink to blot out some of the horror in their lives. Alcohol flowed freely at

times of plague: ‘I have myself seen,’ recalled a preacher in 1638, ‘when the Bills [ofMortality] were at the highest, even bearers who had little respite from carrying deadcorpses to their graves and many others of the like rank go reeling in the streets.’67 Atexecutions drink was always offered to the condemned: the witch, Anne Bodenham, whowas executed at Salisbury in 1653, kept asking for drink and would have died drunk ifher persecutors had allowed her.68 Ale, wrote a contemporary,

doth comfort the heavy and troubled mind; it will make a weeping widow laugh andforget sorrow for her deceased husband;… it is the warmest lining of a naked man'scoat; it satiates and assuages hunger and cold; with a toast it is the poor man's comfort;the shepherd, mower, ploughman, and blacksmith's most esteemed purchase; it is thetinker's treasure, the pedlar's jewel, the beggar's joy; and the prisoner's loving nurse.69

As a means of making life appear momentarily tolerable, drink had few rivals amongthe very poor. There was more good in a cask of ale than in the four gospels, declared afifteenth-century heretic; malt, he thought, did more to justify God's ways to man thanthe Bible.70

A newer form of narcotic was tobacco. Smoking was introduced to England early inthe reign of Elizabeth I and had become well-established by the time of her death. Atfirst there was an attempt to represent tobacco as being taken only for medicinalpurposes, but the pretence soon became unconvincing. In 1597 a contemporaryremarked that addicts were consuming it ‘for wantonness… and cannot forbear it, no,not in the middest of their dinner’. Jacobean observers were familiar with the chainsmoker who puffed his pipe from morning to night, and even in bed.71 ‘Tis death tosome to be barred tobacco,’ declared a Member of Parliament in 1621.72 Yet pipe-smoking was an expensive habit. Tobacco varied widely in price according to thesupply, but it seldom sold for less than a pound per pound in the reign of James I, andoften cost more. Figures for domestic consumption are spasmodic, but they indicate asteady rise, from an annual average of 140,000 pounds in 1614–21 to 11,300,000pounds in 1699–1709. This suggests that the consumption per head of population wentup from less than an ounce a year at the beginning of the century to nearly two poundsat the end. Not until 1907 did the figures reach this level again.73 Tobacco must havedone something to steady the nerves of Stuart Englishmen. One modern historian hassuggested, not entirely frivolously, that it helped to foster the virtues of politicalcompromise which emerged in the later seventeenth century. Holy Communion, thoughtChristopher Marlowe, would have been ‘much better being administered in a tobaccopipe’.74

A further escape from reality was gambling. In modern times the prospect of winninga fortune on the football pools attracts millions of people and sustains the optimism of

many working-class folk in adverse circumstances. In the seventeenth century gamblingdiverted the attention of the labouring poor from the possibilities of self-help andpolitical activism, by holding out the prospect that a lucky person would be able tobetter himself despite the inequities of the social system. Men gambled on cards, dice,horses, foot-races, bear-baiting, cock-fighting, and a host of similar pastimes. Even verypoor men engaged heavily in speculative ventures; and the judicial records of the timecontain occasional references to labourers who were unable to support their wives andchildren because they had lost all their money at cards.75 In 1663 Samuel Pepys wasamazed to see ordinary working-folk losing as much as ten or twenty pounds on bear-baiting and cock-fighting.76

These were the habits which generations of middle-class reformers attempted to breakin their successive campaigns for the Reformation of Manners, by battling againstpopular pastimes, ‘superfluous’ alehouses and lower-class tippling. What they werecombating was the fatalistic hopelessness of those who saw no alternative but to drowntheir sorrows. The beliefs to which we must now turn were all concerned to explainmisfortune and to mitigate its rigour. But we must not forget that some contemporariespreferred recourse to cruder and more immediate forms of escape.

RELIGION

2.

THE MAGIC OF THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH*

Surely, if a man will but take a view of all Popery, he shall easily see that a greatpart of it is mere magic.

William Perkins, A Golden Chaine (1591)(in Workes [Cambridge, 1616–18], i, p. 40)

NEARLY every primitive religion is regarded by its adherents as a medium for obtainingsupernatural power. This does not prevent it from functioning as a system ofexplanation, a source of moral injunctions, a symbol of social order, or a route toimmortality; but it does mean that it also offers the prospect of a supernatural means ofcontrol over man's earthly environment. The history of early Christianity offers noexception to this rule. Conversions to the new religion, whether in the time of theprimitive Church or under the auspices of the missionaries of more recent times, havefrequently been assisted by the view of converts that they are acquiring not just a meansof other-worldly salvation, but a new and more powerful magic. Just as the Hebrewpriests of the Old Testament endeavoured to confound the devotees of Baal bychallenging them publicly to perform supernatural acts, so the Apostles of the earlyChurch attracted followers by working miracles and performing supernatural cures. Boththe New Testament and the literature of the patristic period testify to the importance ofthese activities in the work of conversion; and the ability to perform miracles soonbecame an indispensable test of sanctity. The claim to supernatural power was anessential element in the Anglo-Saxon Church's fight against paganism, and missionariesdid not fail to stress the superiority of Christian prayers to heathen charms.1

The medieval Church thus found itself saddled with the tradition that the working ofmiracles was the most efficacious means of demonstrating its monopoly of the truth. Bythe twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Lives of the Saints had assumed a stereotypedpattern. They related the miraculous achievements of holy men, and stressed how theycould prophesy the future, control the weather, provide protection against fire andflood, magically transport heavy objects, and bring relief to the sick. Many of thesestories were retold in The Golden Legend, a popular compilation by a thirteenth-centuryArchbishop of Genoa, which was to be translated by Caxton in 1483 and reissued inEngland at least seven times before the Reformation.2

On the eve of the Reformation the Church did not as an institution claim the power towork miracles. But it reaped prestige from the doings of those of its members to whomGod was deemed to have extended miraculous gifts. It stressed that the saints were onlyintercessors whose entreaties might go unheeded, but it readily countenanced theinnumerable prayers offered to them on more optimistic assumptions. The shrines of thesaints at Glastonbury, Lindisfarne, Walsingham, Canterbury, Westminster, St Albansand similar holy places had become objects of pilgrimage to which the sick and infirmmade long and weary journeys in the confident expectation of obtaining a supernaturalcure. Over 500 miracles were associated with Becket and his shrine; and at the HolyRood of Bromholm in Norfolk thirty-nine persons were said to have been raised from thedead and twelve cured of blindness. Holy relics became wonder-working fetishes,believed to have the power to cure illness and to protect against danger; around 1426the Bishop of Durham's accounts contain a payment for signing sixteen cattle with StWilfrid's signet to ward off the murrain.3

Images were similarly credited with miraculous efficacy. The representation of StChristopher, which so frequently adorned the walls of English village churches, was saidto offer a day's preservation from illness or death to all those who looked upon it. StWilgerfort, better known as St Uncumber, whose statue stood in St Paul's, couldeliminate the husbands of those discontented wives who chose to offer her a peck ofoats. The large mounted wooden figure of Derfel Gadarn at Llandderfel, near Bala,protected men and cattle, rescued souls from Purgatory, and inflicted disease upon hisenemies: Henry VIII's visitors found five or six hundred worshippers at the shrine on theday they went there to pull it down.4 Saints indeed were believed to have the power tobestow diseases as well as to relieve them. ‘We worship saints for fear,’ wrote WilliamTyndale in the early sixteenth century, ‘lest they should be displeased and angry with us,and plague us or hurt us; as who is not afraid of St Laurence? Who dare deny StAnthony a fleece of wool for fear of his terrible fire, or lest he send the pox among oursheep?’5

The worship of saints was an integral part of the fabric of medieval society and wassustained by important social considerations. Individual churches had their own patronsaints, and strong territorial associations could give hagiolatry an almost totemiccharacter: ‘Of all Our Ladies,’ says a character in one of Thomas More's writings, ‘I lovebest Our Lady of Walsingham’, ‘“and I”, saith the other, “Our Lady of Ipswich.” ’6Pilgrims brought money into the community and the inhabitants grew dependent uponthem: in Elizabethan times, for example, it was pointed out that St Wistan's church inLeicestershire had previously been maintained by the proceeds of the annualpilgrimage.7 Every medieval trade had the patronage of its own especial saint, who wascorporately worshipped, and whose holy day had strong occupational affiliations:

Our painters had Luke, our weavers had Steven, our millers had Arnold, our tailors hadGoodman, our sowters [cobblers] had Crispin, our potters had S. Gore with a devil on his

shoulder and a pot in his hand. Was there a better horseleech… than S. Loy? Or a bettersowgelder than S. Anthony? Or a better toothdrawer than S. Apolline?

Reginald Scot could thus mock these occupational saints in the years after theReformation, but his words reveal the depth of the social roots of this form of populardevotion. The patronage of the saints give a sense of identity and of corporate existenceto small and otherwise undifferentiated institutions. Hence their enduring popularity asnames for colleges and schools even in a Protestant era.

Local loyalties could thus sustain an individual's allegiance to a particular saint. Butthe worship of saints in general depended upon the belief that the holy men and womenof the past had not merely exemplified an ideal code of moral conduct, but could stillemploy supernatural powers to relieve the adversities of their followers upon earth.Diseases, like occupations and localities, were assigned to the special care of anappropriate saint, for in the popular mind the saints were usually regarded as specialistsrather than as general practitioners. ‘S. John and S. Valentine excelled at the fallingevil,’ recalled Scot,

S. Roch was good at the plague, S. Petronill at the ague. As for S. Margaret she passedLucina for a midwife,… in which respect S. Marpurge is joined with her in commission.For madmen and such as are possessed with devils, S. Romane was excellent, and friarRuffine was also prettily skilful in that art. For botches and biles, Cosmus and Damian;S. Clare for the eyes. S. Apolline for teeth, S. Job for the pox. And for sore breasts S.Agatha.8

The saints were always on call to deal with a variety of daily eventualities. Pregnantwomen could use holy relics – girdles, skirts and coats – kept for the purpose by manyreligious houses, and they were urged by midwives to call upon St Margaret or theVirgin Mary to reduce the pangs of labour, or to invoke St Felicitas if they wished toensure that the new child would be a boy. Henry VII's queen paid 6s. 8d. to a monk for agirdle of Our Lady for use in childbirth.9 The variety of other secular contexts in whichsaints could also be invoked is indicated by John Aubrey's nostalgic description of thepart they had once played in the daily lives of the Wiltshire country folk:

At St Oswaldsdown and Fordedown, &c thereabout, the shepherds prayed at night andat morning to St Oswald (that was martyred there) to preserve their sheep safe in thefold… When they went to bed they did rake up their fire and make a cross in the ashesand pray to God and St Osyth to deliver them from fire and from water and from allmisadventure… When the bread was put into the oven, they prayed to God and to StStephen, to send them a just batch and an even.10

The impetus behind the worship of saints seems to have slackened considerably duringthe fifteenth century.11 But until the Reformation miracles at holy shrines continued tobe reported. In 1538 a Sussex parson was still advising his parishioners to cure their sickanimals by making offerings to St Loy and St Anthony.

The powers popularly attributed to the saints were, however, only one particularinstance of the general power which the medieval Church, in its role as dispenser ofdivine grace, claimed to be able to exercise. By the early Middle Ages the ecclesiasticalauthorities had developed a comprehensive range of formulae designed to draw downGod's practical blessing upon secular activities. The basic ritual was the benediction ofsalt and water for the health of the body and the expulsion of evil spirits. But theliturgical books of the time also contained rituals devised to bless houses, cattle, crops,ships, tools, armour, wells and kilns. There were formulae for blessing men who werepreparing to set off on a journey, to fight a duel, to engage in battle or to move into anew house. There were procedures for blessing the sick and for dealing with sterileanimals, for driving away thunder and for making the marriage bed fruitful. Such ritualsusually involved the presence of a priest and the employment of holy water and the signof the cross. Basic to the whole procedure was the idea of exorcism, the formal conjuringof the devil out of some material object by the pronunciation of prayers and theinvocation of God's name.13 Holy water, thus exorcised, could be used to drive awayevil spirits and pestilential vapours. It was a remedy against disease and sterility, andan instrument for blessing houses and food; though whether it worked automatically, oronly if the officiating priest was of sufficient personal holiness, was a matter oftheological dispute.

Theologians did not claim that these procedures made the practical precautions ofdaily life superfluous, but they did undoubtedly regard them as possessing a powerwhich was more than merely spiritual or symbolic. The formula for consecrating theholy bread, given away to the laity on Sundays in lieu of the eucharist, called on God tobless the bread, ‘so that all who consume it shall receive health of body as well as ofsoul’.14 It was regarded as a medicine for the sick and a preservative against theplague.

As for holy water, there were some theologians who thought it superstitious to drink itas a remedy for sickness or to scatter it on the fields for fertility; but the orthodox view,firmly based upon the words of the benediction, was that there was nothing improperabout such actions, provided they were performed out of genuine Christian faith.15Periodically, therefore, the holy water carrier went round the parish so that the piouscould sprinkle their homes, their fields and their domestic animals. As late as 1543,when a storm burst over Canterbury, the inhabitants ran to church for holy water tosprinkle in their houses, so as to drive away the evil spirits in the air, and to protecttheir property against lightning. At about the same date the vicar of Bethersden, Kent,could advise a sick parishioner to drink holy water as a help to her recovery.16 In theseventeenth century Jeremy Taylor lamented of the Irish that ‘although not so much as a

chicken is nowadays cured of the pip by holy water, yet upon all occasions they use it,and the common people throw it upon children's cradles, and sick cows' horns, and uponthem that are blasted, and if they recover by any means, it is imputed to the holywater’.17 The Devil, it was agreed, was allergic to holy water, and wherever hisinfluence was suspected it was an appropriate remedy. In the reign of Elizabeth I,Widow Wiseman, later a Catholic martyr, threw holy water at her persecutor, Topcliffe,whose horse thereupon flung him to the ground. Topcliffe raged against her, ‘calling heran old witch, who by her charms had made his horse to lay him on the ground, but[relates the Catholic source for this episode] she with good reason laughed to see thatholy water had given him so fine a fall’.18 Here, as Protestant commentators were tourge, the distinction between magic and religion was an impossibly fine one.

The same was true of the numerous ecclesiastical talismans and amulets whose use theChurch encouraged. As one Protestant versifier wrote:

About these Catholics' necks and hands are always hanging charms, That serveagainst all miseries and all unhappy harms.19

Theologians held that there was no superstition about wearing a piece of paper ormedal inscribed with verses from the gospels or with the sign of the cross, provided nonon-Christian symbols were also employed.20 The most common of these amulets wasthe agnus dei, a small wax cake, originally made out of paschal candles and blessed bythe Pope, bearing the image of the lamb and flag. This was intended to serve as adefence against the assaults of the Devil and as a preservative against thunder,lightning, fire, drowning, death in child-bed and similar dangers. After the ReformationBishop Hall commented on the survival of the associated belief in the protective powerof St John's Gospel, ‘printed in a small roundel and sold to the credulous ignorants withthis fond warrant, that whosoever carries it about with him shall be free from thedangers of the day's mishaps’.21 In the seventeenth century rosaries were similarlyblessed as a protection against fire, tempest, fever and evil spirits.22

The same preservative power was attributed to holy relics: in 1591, for example, JohnAllyn, an Oxford recusant, was said to possess a quantity of Christ's blood, which he soldat twenty pounds a drop: those who had it about them would be free from bodilyharm.23 The sign of the cross was also employed to ward off evil spirits and otherdangers. In North Wales it was reported in 1589 that people still crossed themselveswhen they shut their windows, when they left their cattle, and when they went out oftheir houses in the morning. If any misfortune befell them or their animals theircommon saying was ‘You have not crossed yourself well today’, or ‘You have not madethe sign of the rood upon the cattle’, on the assumption that this omission had been thecause of their mishap.24

Ecclesiastical preservatives of this kind were intended to give protection in a widevariety of contexts. The consecration of church bells made them efficacious against evilspirits and hence enabled them to dispel the thunder and lightning for which demonswere believed to be responsible. When a tempest broke out the bells would be rung inan effort to check the storm: this happened at Sandwich, for example, in ‘the greatthundering’ of 1502, and again in 1514.25 Alternatively, one could invoke St Barbaraagainst thunder, or tie a charm to the building one wished to protect – though an agnusdei failed to save St Albans Abbey from being struck by lightning in the thirteenthcentury.26 As a protection against fire there were ‘St Agatha's letters’, an inscriptionplaced on tiles, bells or amulets. Fasting on St Mark's day was another means of gainingprotection; or one could appeal to St Clement or to the Irish saint Columbkille.27 In1180 the holy shrine of St Werberga was carried round Chester and miraculouslypreserved the city from destruction by fire.28 In addition, there were exorcisms to makethe fields fertile; holy candles to protect farm animals; and formal curses to drive awaycaterpillars and rats and to kill weeds. At the dissolution of the Abbey of Bury StEdmunds there were discovered ‘relics for rain, and certain other superstitious usages foravoiding of weeds growing in corn’.29

The medieval Church thus acted as a repository of supernatural power which could bedispensed to the faithful to help them in their daily problems. It was inevitable that thepriests, set apart from the rest of the community by their celibacy and ritualconsecration, should have derived an extra cachet from their position as mediatorsbetween man and God. It was also inevitable that around the Church, the clergy andtheir holy apparatus there clustered a horde of popular superstitions, which endowedreligious objects with a magical power to which theologians themselves had never laidclaim. A scapular, or friar's coat, for example, was a coveted object to be worn as apreservative against pestilence or the ague, and even to be buried in as a short cut tosalvation: Bishop Hugh Latimer confessed that he used to think that if he became a friarit would be impossible for him to be damned.30 The church and churchyard also enjoyeda special power in popular estimation, primarily because of the ritual consecration ofthe site with salt and water. The key of the church door was said to be an efficaciousremedy against a mad dog;31 the soil from the churchyard was credited with specialmagical power; and any crime committed on holy ground became an altogether moreheinous affair, simply because of the place where it had occurred. This was recognisedby a statute of the reign of Edward VI imposing special penalties for such offences; if theconsecrated area were polluted by some crime of violence a special act of reconciliationwas necessary before it could be used again for religious purposes.32 Even the coins inthe offertory were accredited with magical value; there were numerous popularsuperstitions about the magical value of communion silver as a cure for illness or alucky charm against danger.

But it was above all in connection with the sacraments of the Church that such beliefs

arose. The Mass, in particular, was associated with magical power and for this, it mustbe said, the teaching of the Church was at least indirectly responsible. During the longhistory of the Christian Church the sacrament of the altar had undergone a process oftheological reinterpretation. By the later Middle Ages the general effect had been toshift the emphasis away from the communion of the faithful, and to place it upon theformal consecration of the elements by the priest. The ceremony thus acquired in thepopular mind a mechanical efficacy in which the operative factor was not theparticipation of the congregation, who had become virtual spectators, but the specialpower of the priest. Hence the doctrine that the laity could benefit from being present atthe celebration even though they could not understand the proceedings. If too ignorantto follow a private mass book, they were encouraged to recite whatever prayers theyknew; so that during the Mass the priest and people in fact pursued different modes ofdevotion. The ritual was said, in a notorious phrase, to work ‘like a charm upon anadder’.33 In the actual miracle of transubstantiation the ‘instrumental cause’ was theformula of consecration. Theologians refined this doctrine considerably, but theirsubtleties were too complicated to be understood by ordinary men.34 What stood outwas the magical notion that the mere pronunciation of words in a ritual manner couldeffect a change in the character of material objects.

The reservation of the sacrament at the altar as an object of devotion had becomecustomary in England by the thirteenth century and the element of mystery attaching toit was enhanced by the construction in the later Middle Ages of enclosed sanctuaries toprotect the elements from the gaze of the public. Literalism generated anecdotes of howthe Host had turned into flesh and blood, even into a child.35 The notion spread thattemporal benefits might be expected from its mere contemplation, and the belief wasenhanced by the readiness of the Church to multiply the secular occasions for whichmasses might be performed as a means of propitiation. There were masses for the sickand for women in labour, masses for good weather and for safe journeys, massesagainst the plague and other epidemics. The Sarum Missal of 1532 contained a specialmass for the avoidance of sudden death.36 In 1516 the Priory of Holy Cross atColchester received a grant of land, in return for the celebration of a solemn mass ‘forthe further prosperity of the town’.37 It was common to attach special value to theperformance of a certain number of masses in succession – five, seven, nine or thirty (atrental). The ceremony could even be perverted into a maleficent act by causing massesfor the dead to be celebrated for persons still alive, in order to hasten their demise. Thefifteenth-century treatise Dives and Pauper inveighed against those

that for hate or wrath that they bear against any man or woman take away the clothesof the altar, and clothe the altar with doleful clothing, or beset the altar or the crossabout with thorns, and withdraw light out of the church or… do sing mass of requiemfor them that be alive, in hope that they should fare the worse and the sooner die.38

The clear implication was that the clergy themselves were sometimes involved in theseperversions.

A plethora of sub-superstitions thus accumulated around the sacrament of the altar.The clergy's anxiety that none of the consecrated elements should be wasted oraccidentally dropped on the floor encouraged the idea that the Host was an object ofsupernatural potency. The officiating priest was required to swallow the remainingcontents of the chalice, flies and all if need be, and to ensure that not a crumb of theconsecrated wafer was left behind.39 The communicant who did not swallow the bread,but carried it away from the church in his mouth, was widely believed to be inpossession of an impressive source of magical power. He could use it to cure the blind orthe feverish; he could carry it around with him as a general protection against illfortune, or he could beat it up into a powder and sprinkle it over his garden as a charmagainst caterpillars. Medieval stories relate how the Host was profanely employed toput out fires, to cure swine fever, to fertilize the fields and to encourage bees to makehoney. The thief could also convert it into a love-charm or use it for some maleficentpurpose. Some believed that a criminal who swallowed the Host would be immune fromdiscovery; others held that by simultaneously communicating with a woman one couldgain her affections.40 In the sixteenth century John Bale complained that the Mass hadbecome a remedy for the diseases of man and beast. It was employed by ‘witches…sorcerers, charmers, enchanters, dreamers, soothsayers, necromancers, conjurers, cross-diggers, devil-raisers, miracle-doers, dog-leeches and bawds’. The first Edwardian PrayerBook accordingly insisted that the bread should be placed by the officiating ministerdirect in the communicant's mouth, because in past times people had often carried thesacrament away and ‘kept it with them and diversely abused it, to superstition andwickedness’.41

It was because of this magical power thought to reside in consecrated objects thatecclesiastical authorities had long found it necessary to take elaborate precautionsagainst theft. The Lateran Council of 1215 had ruled that the eucharist and the holy oilshould be kept under lock and key, and the later medieval English Church showed akeen interest in enforcing this stipulation. As late as 1557, for example, Cardinal Pole,in his Injunctions for Cambridge University, insisted that the font should be locked up,so as to prevent the th