SOCIAL CONDITIONS
SECTION 1. POPULATION
[Sidenote: Unity of civilized world]
Political history is that of the state; economic and intellectual history that of a different group. In modern times this group includes all civilized nations. Even in political history there are many striking parallels, but in social development and in culture the recent evolution of civilized peoples has been nearly identical. This fundamental unity of the nations has grown stronger with the centuries on account of improving methods of transport and communication. Formally it might seem that in the Middle Ages the white nations were more closely bound together than they are now. They had one church, a nearly identical jurisprudence, one great literature and one language for the educated classes; they even inherited from Rome the ideal of a single world-state. But if the growth of national pride, the division of the church and the rise of modern languages and literatures have been centrifugal forces, they have been outweighed by the advent of new influences tending to bind all peoples together. The place of a single church is taken by a common point of view, the scientific; the place of Latin as a medium of learning has been taken by English, French, and German, each one more widely known to those to whom it is not native now than ever was Latin in the earlier centuries. The fruits of discovery are common to all nations, who now live under similar conditions, reading the same books and (under different names) the same newspapers, doing the same {452} business and enjoying the same luxuries in the same manner. Even in matters of government we are visibly approaching the perhaps distant but apparently certain goal of a single world-state.
[Sidenote: Changes in population]
In estimating the economic and cultural conditions of the sixteenth century it is therefore desirable to treat Western Europe as a whole. One of the marked differences between all countries then and now is in population. No simple law has been discovered as to the causes of the fluctuations in the numbers of the people within a given territory. This varies with the wealth of the territory, but not in direct ratio to it; for it can be shown that the wealth of Europe in the last four hundred years has increased vastly more than its population. Nor can it be discovered to vary directly in proportion to the combined amount and distribution of wealth, for in sixteenth-century England while the number of the people was increasing wealth was being concentrated in fewer hands almost as fast as it was being created. It is obvious that sanitation and transportation have a good deal to do with the population of certain areas. The largest cities of our own times could not have existed in the Middle Ages, for they could not have been provisioned, nor have been kept endurably healthy without elaborate aqueducts and drains.
Other more obscure factors enter in to complicate the problems of population. Some nations, like Spain in the sixteenth and Ireland in the nineteenth century, have lost immensely through emigration. The cause of this was doubtless not that the nation in question was growing absolutely poorer, but that the increase of wealth or in accessibility to richer lands made it relatively poorer. It is obvious again that great visitations like pestilence or war diminish population directly, though the effect of such factors is usually {453} temporary. How much voluntary sterility operates is problematical. Aegidius Albertinus, writing in 1602, attributed the growth in population of Protestant countries since the Reformation to the abolition of sacerdotal celibacy, and this has also been mentioned as a cause by a recent writer. Probably the last named forces have a very slight influence; the primary one being, as Malthus stated, the increase of means of subsistence.
As censuses were almost unknown to sixteenth-century Europe outside of a few Italian cities, the student is forced to rely for his data on various other calculations, in some cases tolerably reliable, in others deplorably deficient. The best of these are the enumerations of hearths made for purposes of taxation in several countries. Other counts were sometimes made for fiscal or military, and occasionally for religious, purposes. Estimates by contemporary observers supplement our knowledge, which may be taken as at least approximately correct.
[Sidenote: England and Wales]
The religious census of 1603 gave the number of communicants in England and Wales as 2,275,000, to which must be added 8475 recusants. Adding 50 per cent. for non-communicants, we arrive at the figure of 3,425,000, which is doubtless too low. Another calculation based on a record of births and deaths yields the figure 4,812,000 for the year 1600. The average, 4,100,000, is probably nearly correct, of which about a tenth in Wales. England had grown considerably during the century, this increase being especially remarkable in the large towns. Whereas, in 1534, 150,000 quarters of wheat were consumed in London annually, the figure for 1605 is 500,000. The population in the same time had probably increased from 60,000 to 225,000. No figures worth anything can be given for Ireland, and for Scotland it is only safe to say {454} that in 1500 the population was about 500,000 and in 1600 about 700,000.
[Sidenote: The Netherlands]
Enumerations of hearths and of communicants give good bases for reckoning the population of the Netherlands. Holland, the largest of the Northern provinces, had about 200,000 people in 1514; Brabant the greatest of the Southern, in 1526 had 500,000. The population of the largest town, Antwerp, in 1526 was 88,000, in 1550 about 110,000. At the same time it is remarkable that in 1521 Ghent impressed Dürer as the greatest city he had seen in the Low Countries. For the whole territory of the Netherlands, including Holland and Belgium, and a little more on the borders, the population was in 1560 about 3,000,000. This is the same figure as that given for 1567 by Lewis Guicciardini. Later in the century the country suffered by war and emigration.
[Sidenote: Germany]
The lack of a unified government, and the great diversity of conditions, makes the population of Germany more difficult to estimate. Brandenburg, having in 1535 an area of 10,000 square miles, and a population between 300,000 and 400,000, has been aptly compared for size and numbers to the present state of Vermont. Bavaria had in 1554 a population of 434,000; in 1596 of 468,000. Würzburg had in 1538 only 12,000; Hamburg in 1521 12,000 and in 1594 19,000. Danzig had in 1550 about 21,000. The largest city in central Germany, if not in the whole country--as a chronicler stated in 1572--was Erfurt, with a population of 32,000 in 1505. It was the center of the rising Saxon industries, mining and dying, and of commerce. Lübeck, Cologne, Nuremberg and Augsburg equalled or perhaps surpassed it in size, and certainly in wealth. The total population of German Switzerland was over 200,000. The whole German-speaking population of Central Europe amounted to perhaps twenty millions {455} in 1600, though it had been reckoned by the imperial government in 1500 as twelve millions.
[Sidenote: France]
The number of Frenchmen did not greatly increase in France in the 16th century. Though the borders of the state were extended, she suffered terribly by religious wars, and somewhat by emigration. Not only did many Huguenots flee from her to Switzerland, the Netherlands and England, but economic reasons led to large movements from the south and perhaps from the north. To fill up the gap caused by emigration from Spain a considerable number of French peasants moved to that land; and it is also possible that the same class of people sought new homes in Burgundy and Savoy to escape the pressure of taxes and dues. Various estimates concur in giving France a population of 15,000,000 to 16,000,000. The Paris of Henry II was by far the largest city in the world, numbering perhaps 300,000; but when Henry IV besieged it it had been reduced by war to 220,000. After that it waxed mightily again.
[Sidenote: Italy]
Italy, leader in many ways, was the first to take accurate statistics of population, births and deaths. These begin by the middle of the fifteenth century, but are rare until the middle of the sixteenth, when they become frequent. Notwithstanding war and pestilence the numbers of inhabitants seemed to grow steadily, the apparent result in the statistics being perhaps in part due to the increasing rigor of the census. Herewith follow specimens of the extant figures: The city of Brescia had 65,000 in 1505, and 43,000 in 1548. During the same period, however, the people in her whole territory of 2200 square miles had increased from 303,000 to 342,000. The city of Verona had 27,000 in 1473 and 52,000 in 1548; her land of 1200 square miles had in the first named year 99,000, in the last 159,000. The kingdom of Sicily grew from 600,000 in 1501 to {456} 800,000 in 1548, and 1,180,000 in 1615. The kingdom of Naples, without the capital, had about 1,270,000 people in 1501; 2,110,000 in 1545; the total including the capital amounted in 1600 to 3,000,000. The republic of Venice increased from 1,650,000 in 1550 to 1,850,000 in 1620. Florence with her territory had 586,000 in 1551 and 649,000 in 1622. In the year 1600 Milan with Lombardy had 1,350,000 inhabitants; Savoy in Italy 800,000; continental Genoa 500,000; Parma, Piacenza and Modena together 500,000; Sardinia 300,000; Corsica 150,000; Malta 41,000; Lucca 110,000. The population of Rome fluctuated violently. In 1521 it is supposed to have been about 55,000, but was reduced by the sack to 32,000. After this it rapidly recovered, reaching 45,000 under Paul IV (1558), and 100,000 under Sixtus V (1590). The total population of the States of the Church when the first census was taken in 1656 was 1,880,000.
[Sidenote: Spain]
The final impression one gets after reading the extremely divergent estimates of the population of Spain is that it increased during the first half of the century and decreased during the latter half. The highest figure for the increase of population during the reign of Charles V is the untrustworthy one of Habler, who believes the number of inhabitants to have doubled. This belief is founded on the conviction that the wealth of the kingdom doubled in that time. But though population tends to increase with wealth, it certainly does not increase in the same proportion as wealth, so that, considering this fact and also that the increase in wealth as shown by the doubling of income from royal domains was in part merely apparent, due to the falling value of money, we may dismiss Habler's figure as too high. And yet there is good evidence for the belief that there was a considerable increment. The cities especially gained with the new stimulus to {457} commerce and industry. In 1525 Toledo employed 10,000 workers in silk, who had increased fivefold by 1550. Unfortunately for accuracy these figures are merely contemporary guesses, but they certainly indicate a large growth in the population of Toledo, and similar figures are given for Seville, Burgos and other manufacturing and trading centers. From such estimates, however, combined with the censuses of hearths, peculiarly unsatisfactory in Spain as they excluded the privileged classes and were, as their violent fluctuations show, carelessly made, we may arrive at the conclusion that in 1557 the population of Spain was barely 9,000,000.
More difficult, if possible, is it to measure the amount of the decline in the latter half of the century. [Sidenote: Decline] It was widely noticed and commented on by contemporaries, who attributed it in part to the increase in sheep-farming (as in England) and in part to emigration to America. There were doubtless other more important and more obscure causes, namely the increasing rivalry in both commerce and industry of the north of Europe and the consequent decay of Spain's means of livelihood. The emigration amounted on the average to perhaps 4000 per annum throughout the century. The total Spanish population of America was reckoned by Velasco in 1574 at 30,500 households, or 152,500 souls. This would, however, imply a much larger emigration, probably double the last number, to account for the many Spaniards lost by the perils of the sea or in the depths of the wilderness. It is known, for example, that whereas the Spanish population of Venezuela was reckoned at 200 households at least 2000 Spaniards had gone to settle there. An emigration of 300,000 before 1574, or say 400,000 for the whole century, would have left a considerable gap at home. Add to this the industrial decline by which {458} Altamira reckons that the cities of the center and north, which suffered most, lost from one-half to one-third of their total population, and it is evident that a very considerable shrinkage took place. The census of 1594 reported a population of 8,200,000.
[Sidenote: Portugal]
The same tendency to depopulation was noticed to a much greater degree by contemporary observers of Portugal. Unfortunately, no even approximately accurate figures can be given. Two million is almost certainly too large for 1600.
[Sidenote: General table]
The following statistical table will enable the reader to form some estimate of the movements of population. Admitting that the margin of error is fairly large in some of the earlier estimates, it is believed that they are sufficiently near the truth to be of real service.
Country 1500 1600 England and Wales . . . . . . . . 3,000,000 4,100,000
Scotland . . . . . . . . . . . . . 500,000 700,000
The Netherlands (Holland and Belgium) (1550) . . . . . . . . 3,000,000
Germany (including Austria, German Switzerland, Franche Comté and Savoy north of the Alps, but excluding Hungary, the Netherlands, East and West Prussia) . . . . . 12,000,000 20,000,000
France (1550) . . . . . . . . . . 16,000,000
Italy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10,000,000 13,000,000
Spain (1557 and 1594) . . . . . . 9,000,000[1] 8,200,000
Poland with East and West Prussia 3,000,000
Denmark . . . . . . . . . . . . . 600,000
Sweden, Norway and Finland . . . . 1,400,000
[1] For a higher estimate--ten to twelve millions in 1500--see note in bibliography.
SECTION 2. WEALTH AND PRICES
[Sidenote: Gigantic increase in wealth since 16th century]
If the number of Europe's inhabitants has increased fourfold since Luther's time, the amount of her wealth has increased in a vastly greater ratio. The difference {459} between the twentieth and the sixteenth centuries is greater than anyone would at first blush believe possible. Moreover it is a difference that is, during times of peace, continually increasing. During the century from the close of the Napoleonic to the opening of the Great War, the wealth of the white races probably doubled every twenty-five years. The new factors that made this possible were the exploited resources of America, and the steam-engine. Prior to 1815 the increase of the world's wealth was much slower, but if it doubled once a century,--as would seem not improbable--we should have to allow that the world of 1914 was one hundred and twenty-eight times as rich as it was in 1514.
[Sidenote: Change from poverty to affluence emphasized]
Of course such a statement cannot pretend to anything like exactitude; the mathematical figure is a mere figure of speech; it is intended only to emphasize the fact that one of the most momentous changes during the last four centuries has been that from poverty to affluence. That the statement, surprising as it may seem, is no exaggeration, may be borne out by a few comparisons.
[Sidenote: War a test of a nation's financial strength]
One of the tests of a nation's financial strength is that of war. Francis I in time of war mustered at most an army of 100,000, and he reached this figure, or perhaps slightly exceeded it, only once during his reign, in the years 1536-7. This is only half the number of soldiers, proportionately to the population, that France maintained in time of peace at the opening of the twentieth century. And for more than four years, at a time when war was infinitely more expensive than it was when Pavia was fought, France kept in the field about an even five millions of men, more than an eighth of her population instead of about one one-hundred-and-fiftieth. Similar figures could be given for Germany and England. It is true that the power of {460} modern states is multiplied by their greater facilities for borrowing, but with all allowances the contrast suggests an enormous difference of wealth.
[Sidenote: Labor power of the world]
Take, as a standard of comparison, the labor power of the world. In 1918 the United States alone produced 685,000,000 tons of coal. Each ton burned gives almost as much power as is expended by two laborers working for a whole year. Thus the United States from its coal only had command of the equivalent of the labor of 1,370,000,000 men, or more than thrice the adult male labor power of the whole world; more than fifty times the whole labor power of sixteenth-century Europe. This does not take account of the fact that labor is far more productive now than then, even without steam. The comparison is instructive because the population of the United States in 1910 was about equal to that of the whole of Europe in 1600.
The same impression would be given by a comparison of the production of any other standard product. More gold was produced in the year 1915 than the whole stock of gold in the world in 1550, perhaps in 1600. More wheat is produced annually in Minnesota than the granaries of the cities of the world would hold four centuries ago.
[Sidenote: Poverty of the Middle Ages]
In fact, there was hardly wealth at all in the Middle Ages, only degrees of poverty, and the sixteenth century first began to see the accumulation of fortunes worthy of the name. In 1909 there were 1100 persons in France with an income of more than $40,000 per annum; among them were 150 with an income of more than $200,000. In England in 1916 seventy-nine persons paid income taxes on estates of more than $125,000,000. On the other hand the richest man in France, Jacques Coeur, whose fortune was proverbial like that of Rockefeller today, had in 1503 a capital of only {461} $5,400,000. The total wealth of the house of Fugger about 1550 has been estimated at $32,000,000, though the capital of their bank was never anything like that. The contrast was greatest among the very richest class, but it was sufficiently striking in the middle classes. Such a condition as comfort hardly existed.
The same impression will be given to the student of public finance. As more will be said in another paragraph on the revenues of the principal states, only one example need be given here for the sake of contrast. The total revenue of Francis I was $256,000 per annum, that of Henry II even less, $228,000. The revenue of France in 1905 was $750,000,000. Henry VIII often had more difficulty in raising a loan of L50,000 than the English government had recently in borrowing six billions.
[Sidenote: Value of money]
It is impossible to say which is the harder task, to compare the total wealth of the world at two given periods, or to compare the value of money at different times. Even the mechanical difficulties in the comparison of prices are enormous. When we read that wheat at Wittenberg sold at one gulden the scheffel, it is necessary to determine in the first place how much a gulden and how much a scheffel represented in terms of dollars and bushels. When we discover that there were half a dozen different guldens, and half a dozen separate measures known as scheffels, varying from province to province and from time to time, and varying widely, it is evident that great caution is necessary in ascertaining exactly which gulden and exactly which scheffel is meant.
When coin and measure have been reduced to known quantities, there remains the problem of fixing the quality. Cloth is quoted in the sixteenth century as of standard sizes and grades, but neither of these important factors is accurately known to any modern {462} economist. One would think that in quoting prices of animals an invariable standard would be secured. Quite the contrary. So much has the breed of cattle improved that a fat ox now weighs two or three times what a good ox weighed four centuries ago. Horses are larger, stronger and faster; hens lay many more eggs, cows give much more milk now than formerly. Shoes, clothes, lumber, candles, are not of the same quality in different centuries, and of course there is an ever increasing list of new articles in which no comparison can be made.
[Sidenote: Fluctuation in coinage]
Nevertheless, some allowance can be made for all factors involved, as far as they are mechanical; some comparisons can be given that bear a sufficiently close relation to exactitude to form the basis from which certain valid deductions can be drawn. Now first as to the intrinsic value, in amounts of gold and silver in the several coins. The vast fluctuation in the value of the English shilling, due to the successive debasements and final restitution of the coinage, is thus expressed:
Year Troy grains Year Troy grains 1461 . . . . . . 133 1551 . . . . . . 20 1527 . . . . . . 118 1552 . . . . . . 88 1543 . . . . . . 100 1560 . . . . . . 89 1545 . . . . . . 60 1601 . . . . . . 86 1546 . . . . . . 40 1919 . . . . . . 87.27
A similar depreciation, more gradual but never rectified, is seen in the value of French money. The standard of reckoning was the livre tournois, which varied intrinsically in value of the silver put into it as follows:
Years Intrinsic value of silver 1500 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 cents 1512-40 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 cents 1541-60 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 cents 1561-72 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 cents {463} 1573-79 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 cents 1580-1600 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 cents
[Sidenote: Value of Spanish coins]
The standard Spanish gold coin after 1497 was the ducat, which had 3.485 grammes of gold (value in our money $2.40). This was divided into 375 maravedis, which therefore had a value of about two-thirds of a cent each. A Castilian marc of gold had 230 grammes or a value of about $16. After 1537 a handsome silver coin, known as the peso fuerte or "piece of eight" because each contained eight reals, was minted in America. Its value was about $1.06 of our money, it being the predecessor of our dollar.
The great difficulty with the coinage of Germany and Italy is not so much in its fluctuation as in the number of mints. The name gulden [Sidenote: Gulden a general term] was given to almost any coin, originally, as its etymology signifies, a gold piece, but later also to a silver piece. Among gold guldens there was the Rhenish gulden intrinsically worth $1.34; the Philip's gulden in the Netherlands of 96 cents and the Carolus gulden coined after 1520 and worth $1.14. But the coin commonly used in reckoning was the silver gulden, worth intrinsically 56 cents. This was divided into 20 groschen. Other coins quite ordinarily met with in the literature of the times are pounds (7.5 cents), pfennigs (various values), stivers, crowns, nobles, angels ($2), and Hungarians ducats ($1.75). Since 1518 the chief silver coin was the thaler, at first considered the equal of a silver gulden. The law of 1559, however, made them two different coins, restoring the thaler to what had probably been its former value of 72 cents, and leaving the imperial gulden in law, what it had commonly become in fact, a lesser amount of silver.
The coinage of Italy was dominated by the gold gulden or florin of Florence and the ducat of Venice, {464} each worth not far from $2.25 of our money. Both these coins, partly on account of their beauty, partly because of the simple honesty with which they were kept at the nominal standard, attained just fame throughout the Middle Ages and thereafter, and became widely used in other lands.
[Sidenote: Wheat]
The standard of value determined, it is now possible to compare the prices of some staple articles. First in importance comes wheat, which fluctuated enormously within short periods at the same place and in terms of the same amounts of silver. From Luther's letters we learn that wheat sold at Wittenberg for one gulden a scheffel in 1539 and for three groschen a scheffel in 1542, the latter price being considered "so cheap as never before," the former reached in a time almost of famine and calling for intervention on the part of the government. However we interpret these figures (and I believe them to mean that wheat sold at from twelve cents to eighty cents a bushel) they certainly indicate a tremendous instability in prices, due to the poor communications and backward methods of agriculture, making years of plenty alternate with years of hunger. In the case of Wittenberg, the lower level was nearer the normal, for in 1527 wheat was there sold at twenty cents a bushel. In other parts of Germany it was dearer; at Strassburg from 1526-50 it averaged 30 cents a bushel; from 1551-75 it went up to an average of 58 cents, and from 1576-1600 the average again rose to 80 cents a bushel.
Prices also rose in England throughout the century even in terms of silver. Of course part of the rise in the middle years was due to the debasement of the coinage. Reduced to bushels and dollars, the following table shows the tendency of prices:
1530 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 cents a bushel 1537 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 cents {465} 1544 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 cents 1546 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 cents 1547 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 cents 1548 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 cents 1549 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 cents 1550 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 cents 1572 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 cents 1595 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $1.14
Wheat in France averaged 23 cents a bushel prior to 1540, after which it rose markedly in price, touching $1.50 in 1600, under exceptional conditions. In order to compare with prices nowadays we must remember that $1 a bushel was a remarkably good price before the late war, during which it was fixed at $2.20 by the American government. Barley in England rose from 6 cents a bushel in 1530 to 10 cents in 1547 and 33 cents in 1549. It was in 1913 70 cents a bushel. Oats rose from 5 cents a bushel in England in 1530 to 18 cents in 1549; in 1913 38 cents.
[Sidenote: Animals]
Animals sold much lower in the sixteenth century than they do now, though it must be remembered that they are worth more after several centuries of careful breeding. Horses then sold at $2.50 in England and at $4 to $11 in France; the average price in 1913 was $244 for working animals. Cows were worth $2 in England in 1530; from $4 to $6.40 in France; oxen apparently came considerably higher, averaging in England $10 a head in 1547 and in France from $9 to $16 a yoke. At present they are sold by weight, averaging in 1913 9 cents per lb., or $90 for one weighing a thousand pounds. Beef then cost about 2/3 of a cent a pound instead of 40 cents as in 1914. A sheep was sold in 1585 at $1.60, a large swine at $5, and pigs at 26 cents apiece. Pork cost 2 cents a pound; hens sold in England at 12 cents a piece and geese and ducks for the same; at Wittenberg geese fetched only 6 cents in 1527. Eggs might have been bought at 2 cents a dozen.
{466} [Sidenote: Groceries]
Wholesale prices of groceries, taken mostly from an English table drawn up about 1580, were as follows: Oil was $140 the ton, or 55 cents a gallon; train-oil was just half that price; Newfoundland fish cost then $2.50 the quintal dry, as against $7.81 in 1913. Gascon wines (claret) varied according to quality, from 16 cents to 24 cents a quart. Salt fetched $7.50 a ton, which is very close to the price that it was in 1913 ($1.02 per bbl. of 280 lbs.). Soap was $13 the hundredweight. Pepper and sugar cost nearly the same, about $70 the hundredweight, or far higher than they were in 1919, when each cost $11 the hundredweight. Spices also cost more in the sixteenth century than they do now, and rose throughout the century. By 1580 the wholesale price per hundredweight was $224 for cloves, the same for nutmegs, $150 for cinnamon, $300 for mace. Ginger was $90 the hundredweight, and candles 6.6 cents the lb. as against 7.25 cents now.
[Sidenote: Drygoods]
Drygoods varied immensely in cost. Raw wool sold in England in 1510 for 4 cents per lb., as against 26 cents just four hundred years later. Fine cloth sold at $65 "the piece," the length and breadth of which it is unfortunately impossible to determine accurately. Different grades came in different sizes, averaging a yard in width, but from 18 yards to 47 yards in length, the finer coming in longer rolls. Sorting cloths were $45 the piece. Linen cost 20 cents a yard in 1580; Mary, Queen of Scots, five years later paid $6.50 the yard for purple velvet and 28 cents the yard for buckram to line the same. The coarse clothes of the poor were cheaper, a workman's suit in France costing $1.80 in 1600, a child's whole wardrobe $3.40, and a soldier's uniform $4.20. The prices of the poorest women's dresses ranged from $3 to $6 each. In 1520 Albert Dürer paid in the Netherlands 17 cents for one pair of shoes, 33 cents for another and 20 cents for a {467} pair of woman's gloves. A pair of spectacles cost him 22 cents, a pair of gloves for himself 38 cents.
[Sidenote: Metals]
Metals were dearer in the sixteenth century than they are now. Iron cost $60 a ton in 1580 against $22 a ton in 1913. Lead fetched $42 the ton and tin $15 the cwt. The ratio of gold to silver was about 1 to 11. The only fuel much used was wood, which was fairly cheap but of course not nearly as efficient as our coal.
[Sidenote: Interest]
Interest, as the price of money, varied then as it does now in inverse ratio to the security offered by the debtor, and on the whole within much the same range that it does now. The best security was believed to be that of the German Free Cities, governed as they were by the commercial class that appreciated the virtue of prompt and honest payment. Accordingly, we find that they had no trouble in borrowing at 5 per cent., their bonds taking the form of perpetual annuities, like the English consols. So eagerly were these investments sought that they were apportioned on petition as special favors to the creditors. The cities of Paris and London also enjoyed high credit. The national governments had to pay far higher, owing to their poverty and dishonesty. Francis I borrowed at 10 per cent.; Charles V paid higher in the market of Antwerp, the extreme instance being that of 50 per cent. per annum. In 1550 he regularly paid 20 per cent., a ruinous rate that foreshadowed his bankruptcy and was partly caused by its forecast. Until the recent war we were accustomed to think of the great nations borrowing at 2-4 per cent., but during the war the rate immensely rose. Anglo-French bonds, backed by the joint and several credit of the two nations, sold on the New York Stock Exchange in 1918 at a price that would yield the investor more than 12 per cent., and City of Paris bonds at a rate of more than 16 per cent.
{468} Commercial paper, or loans advanced by banks to merchants on good security, of course varied. The lowest was reached at Genoa where from time to time merchants secured accommodation at 3 per cent. The average in Germany was 6 per cent. and this was made the legal rate by Brandenburg in 1565. But usurers, able to take advantage of the necessities of poor debtors, habitually exacted more, as they do now, and loans on small mortgages or on pawned articles often ran at 30 per cent. On the whole, the rate of interest fell slightly during the century.
[Sidenote: Real estate]
The price of real estate is more difficult to compare than almost anything, owing to the individual circumstances of each purchase. Land in France sold at rates ranging from $8 to $240 the acre. Luther bought a little farm in the country for $340, and a piece of property in Wittenberg for $500. After his death, in 1564, the house he lived in, a large and handsome building formerly the Augustinian Cloister, fetched $2072. The house can be seen today[1] and would certainly, one would think, now bring fifteen times as much.
[Sidenote: Books]
Books were comparatively cheap. The Greek Testament sold for 48 cents, a Latin Testament for half that amount, a Latin folio Bible published in 1532 for $4, Luther's first New Testament at 84 cents. One might get a copy of the Pandects for $1.60, of Vergil for 10 cents, a Greek grammar for 8 cents, Demosthenes and Aeschines in one volume at 20 cents, one of Luther's more important tracts for 30 cents and the condemnation of him by the universities in a small pamphlet at 6 cents. One of the things that has gone down most in price since that day is postage. Dürer while in the Netherlands paid a messenger 17 cents to deliver a {469} letter (or several letters?), presumably sent to his home in Nuremberg.
[Sidenote: Wages]
In accordance with the general rule that wages follow the trend of prices sluggishly, whether upwards or downwards, there is less change to be observed in them throughout the sixteenth century than there is in the prices of commodities. Subject to government regulation, the remuneration of all kinds of labor remained nearly stationary while the cost of living was rising. Startling is the difference in the rewards of the various classes, that of the manual laborers being cruelly low, that of professional men somewhat less in proportion to the cost of living than it is today, and that of government officers being very high. No one except court officials got a salary over $5000 a year, and some of them got much more. In 1553 a French chamberlain was paid $51,000 per annum.
A French navvy received 8 cents a day in 1550, a carpenter as much as 26 cents. A male domestic was given $7 to $12 a year in addition to his keep and a woman $5 to $6. As the number of working days in Catholic countries was only about 250 a year, workmen made from $65 to as low as $20. If anything, labor was worse paid in Germany than it was in France. Agricultural labor in England was paid in two scales, one for summer and one for winter. It varied from 3 cents to 7 cents a day, the smaller sum being paid only to men who were also boarded. In summer freemasons and master carpenters got from 8 cents to 11 cents for a terribly long day, in winter 6 cents to 9 cents for a shorter day. The following scale was fixed by law in England in 1563: A hired farmer was to have $10 a year and $2 for livery; a common farm hand was allowed $8.25 and $1.25 extra for livery; a "mean servant" $6 and $1.25 respectively, a man child {470} $4 and $1; a chief woman cook $5 and $1.60, a mean or simple woman $3 and $1; a woman child $2.50 and $1. All were of course boarded and lodged.
The pay of French soldiers under Francis I was for privates $28 a year in time of war; this fell to $1 a year in time of peace; for captains $33 a month in time of peace and $66 in time of war. Captains in the English navy received $36 a month; common seamen $1.25 a month for wages and the same allowance for food.
[Sidenote: Pay of clergymen]
The church fared little better than the army. In Scotland, a poor country but one in which the clergy were respected, by the law of 1562, a parson if a single man was given $26 a year, if a married man a maximum of $78 a year; probably a parsonage was added. Doubtless many Protestant ministers eked out their subsistence by fees, as the Catholic priests certainly did. Dürer gave 44 cents to a friar who confessed his wife. Every baptism, marriage and burial was taxed a certain amount. In France one could hire a priest to say a mass at from 60 cents to $7 in 1500, and at from 30 to 40 cents in 1600. At this price it has remained since, a striking instance of religious conservatism working to the detriment of the priest, for the same money represents much less in real wages now than it did then.
[Sidenote: Physicians]
Fees for physicians ranged from 33 to 44 cents a visit in Germany about 1520. Treatment and medicine were far higher. At Antwerp Dürer paid $2.20 for a small quantity of medicine for his wife. Fees were sometimes given for a whole course of attendance. In England we hear of such "cures" paid for at from $3.30 to $5. Very little, if any, advice was given free to the poor. The physicians for the French king received a salary of $200 a year and other favors. William Butts, physician to Henry VIII, had $500 per {471} annum, in addition to a knighthood; and his salary was increased to over $600 for attending the Duke of Richmond.
[Sidenote: Teachers]
Teachers in the lower schools were regarded as lackeys and paid accordingly. Nicholas Udal, head master of Eton, received $50 per annum and various small allowances. University professors were treated more liberally. Luther and Melanchthon at Wittenberg got a maximum of $224 per annum, which was about the same as the stipend of leading professors in other German universities and at Oxford and Cambridge. The teacher also got a small honorarium from each student. When Paul III restored the Sapienza at Rome he paid a minimum of $17 per annum to some friars who taught theology and who were cared for by their order, but he gave high salaries to the professors of rhetoric and medicine. Ordinarily these received $476 a year, but one professor of the classics reached the highwater-mark with nearly $800.
[Sidenote: Royalties]
The rewards of literary men were more consistently small in the sixteenth century than they are now, owing to the absence of effective copyright. An author usually received a small sum from the printer to whom he first offered his manuscript, but his subsequent royalties, if any, depended solely on the goodwill of the publisher. A Wittenberg printer offered Luther $224 per annum for his manuscripts, but the Reformer declined it, wishing to make his books as cheap as possible. In 1512 Erasmus got $8.40 from Badius the Parisian printer for a new edition of his Adages. In fact, the rewards of letters, such as they were, were indirect, in the form of pensions, gifts and benefices from the great. Erasmus got so many of these favors that he lived more than comfortably. Luther died almost a rich man, so many honoraria did he collect from noble admirers. Rabelais was given a benefice, though {472} he only lived two years afterwards to enjoy its fruits. Henry VIII gave $500 to Thomas Murner for writing against Luther. But the lot of the average writer was hard. Fulsome flattery was the most lucrative production of the muse.
[Sidenote: Artists]
Artists fared better. Dürer sold one picture for $375 and another for $200, not counting the "tip" which his wife asked and received on each occasion from the patron. Probably his woodcuts brought him more from the printers than any single painting, and when he died he left the then respectable sum of $32,000. He had been offered a pension of $300 per annum and a house at Antwerp by that city if he would settle there, but he preferred to return to Nuremberg, where he was pensioned $600 a year by the emperor. Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo both received $129 a month for work done for a prince, and the latter was given a pension of $5200 a year by Paul III. Raphael in 1520 left an estate of $140,000.
[Sidenote: Value of money]
If a comparison of the value of money is made, the final impression that one gets is that an ounce of gold was in 1563, let us say, expected to do about ten times as much work as the same weight of precious metal performed in 1913.[2] If a few articles were then actually dearer, they were comparatively unimportant and were balanced by other articles even more than ten times as cheap. But a dollar will buy so many articles now which did not exist in former ages that a plausible case can be made out for the paradox that money is now worth more than it ever was before. If an ounce of gold would in Luther's time exchange for a much larger quantity of simple necessaries than it will purchase now, on the other hand a man with an income of $5000 a year is far better off than a man with the {473} same income, or indeed with any income, was then.
[Sidenote: Trend of prices]
Notwithstanding the great difficulties of making out any fair index number representing the cost of living and applicable to long periods, owing to the fact that articles vary from time to time, as when candles are replaced by gas and gas by electricity, yet the general trend of prices can be pretty plainly ascertained. Generally speaking, prices--measured in weight of gold and not in coin--sank slowly from 1390 till 1520 under the influence of better technical methods of production and possibly of the draining of gold and silver to the Orient. From 1520 till 1560 prices rose quite slowly on account of the increased production of gold and silver and its more rapid circulation by means of better banking. From 1560 to 1600 prices rose with enormous rapidity, partly because of the destruction of wealth and increase in the cost of production following in the wake of the French and Dutch wars of religion, and still more, perhaps, on account of the torrent of American silver suddenly poured into the lap of Europe. Taking the century as a whole, we find that wheat rose the most, as much as 150 per cent. in England, 200 per cent. in France and 300 per cent. in Germany. Other articles rose less, and in some cases remained stationary, or sank in price. Money wages rose slowly, far less than the cost of living.
[Sidenote: Increase in volume of precious metals]
Apart from special circumstances affecting the production of particular classes of goods, the main cause of the general trend of prices upwards was probably the increase in the volume of the precious metals. Just how great this was, it is impossible to determine, and yet a calculation can be made, yielding figures near enough the actual to be of service. From the middle of the fifteenth century there had been a considerable increase in the production of silver from German, Bohemian and Hungarian mines. Although this {474} increase was much more than is usually allowed for--equalling, in the opinion of one scholar, the produce of American mines until nearly the middle of the sixteenth century--it was only enough to meet the expanding demands of commerce. Before America entered the market, there was also a considerable import of gold from Asia and Africa. The tide of Mexican treasure began to flood Spain about 1520, but did not reach the other countries in large quantities until about 1560. When we consider the general impression concerning the increase of the currency immediately following the pillage of the Aztecs and Incas, the following statistics of the English mint are instructive, if they are not enigmatical. During the first fourteen years of Henry VIII (1509-23) the average amount of gold minted in England was 24,666 troy pounds per annum, and of silver 31,225 troy pounds. But in the years 1537-40, before the great debasement of the currency had taken place, the amount of gold coined fell to 3,297 Troy pounds per annum, and that of silver rose only to 52,974 troy pounds. As each pound of gold was at that time worth as much as eleven pounds of silver, this means that the actual amount of new money put into circulation each year in the latter period was less than a third of that minted in the earlier years. The figures also indicate the growing cheapness of silver, stimulating its import, while the import of gold was greatly restricted, according to Gresham's law that cheap money drives out dear.
[Sidenote: Estimates of gold and silver products]
The spoil of Mexico and Peru has frequently been over-estimated, by none more extravagantly than by the Conquistadores and their contemporaries. But the estimates of modern scholars vary enormously. Lexis believes that the total amount of gold produced by Europe and America from 1501 to 1550 (the greater part, of course, by America) amounted to $134,000,000. {475} F. de Laiglesio, on the other hand, thinks that not more than $4,320,000 was mined in America before 1555. The most careful estimate, that made by Professor Haring, arrives at the following results, [Sidenote: Haring's estimate] the amounts being given in pesos each worth very nearly the same as our dollar. Mexican production:
1521-44 1345-60 Gold . . . . . . . . . . . . 5,348,900 343,670 Silver . . . . . . . . . . . 4,130,170 22,467,111
For Peru the proportions of gold and silver cannot be separated, but the totals taken together from 1531-1560 amounted to probably 84,350,600 pesos. Other small sums came from other parts of the New World, and the final total for production of gold and silver in America until 1560 is given at 139,720,000 pesos. This is a reduction to 70 per cent. of the estimate of Lexis. Assuming that the same correction must be made on all of the estimates given by Lexis we have the following figures for the world's production of precious metals in kilogrammes and in dollars:[3]
Gold Silver Average per annum Average per annum in pesos or dollars of 25
in kilos in dollars kilos grammes 1493-1520 . . . 4270 3,269,000 31,570 1,262,800 1521-44 . . . 4893 3,425,000 52,010 2,080,400 1545-60 . . . 4718 3,302,600 184,730 7,389,200 1561-80 . . . 4718 3,302,600 185,430 7,417,200 1581-1600 . . . 4641 3,268,700 230,480 9,219,200
{476} Combining these figures we see that the production of gold was pretty steady throughout the century, making a total output of about $330,000,000. The production of silver, however, greatly increased after 1544. From the beginning of the century to that year it amounted to $75,285,600; from 1545 to 1600 inclusive it increased to $450,955,200, making a total output for the century of $526,240,800. Of course these figures only roughly approximate the truth; nevertheless they give a correct idea of the general processes at work. Even for the first half of the century the production of the precious metals was far in excess of anything that had preceded, and this output, large as it was, was nearly tripled in the last half of the century. These figures, however, are extremely modest compared with those of recent times, when more gold is mined in a year than was then mined in a century. The total amount mined in 1915 was $470,000,000; in 1917 $428,000,000; for the period 1850 to 1916 inclusive the total amount mined was $13,678,000,000.
[1] See the photograph in my Life and Letters of Luther, p. 364.
[2] No valid comparison can be made for the years after 1913, for in most nations paper currencies have ousted gold.
[3] These figures are based on those of Sommerlad in the Handwörter-buch der Staatswissenschaften, s.v. "Preis," taken from Wiebe, who based on Lexis. Figures quite similar to those of Sommerlad are given by C. F. Bastable in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, s.v. "Money." I have incorporated Haring's corrections.
SECTION 3. INSTITUTIONS
[Sidenote: The monarchies]
For a variety of reasons the sixteenth century was as monarchical in mind as the twentieth century is democratic. Immemorial prescription then had a vigor since lost, and monarchy descended from classical and biblical antiquity when kings were hedged with a genuine divinity. The study of Roman law, with its absolutist maxims, aided in the formation of royalist sentiment. The court as the center of fashion attracted a brilliant society, while the small man satisfied his cravings for gentility by devouring the court gossip that even then clogged the presses. It is probable that one reason why the throne became so popular was that it was, next to the church, the best advertised {477} article in the world. But underlying these sentimental reasons for loyalty there was a basis of solid utility, predisposing men to support the scepter as the one power strong enough to overawe the nobles. One tyrant was better than many; one lion could do less harm than a pack of wolves and hyaenas. In the greater states men felt perfectly helpless without a king to rule the anarchical chaos into which society would have dissolved without him. When the Spanish Communes rebelled against Charles V they triumphed in the field, but their attempt simply collapsed in face of their utter inability to solve the problem of government without a royal governor. They were as helpless as bees without a queen. Indeed, so strong was their instinct to get a royal head that they tried to preserve themselves by kidnapping Charles's mother, poor, mad Joanna, to fill the political vacuum that they had made. So in the civil wars in France; notwithstanding the more promising materials for the formation of a republic in that country, all parties were, in fact, headed by claimants to the throne.
[Sidenote: Councils of State]
Next to the king came the Council of State, composed of princes of the blood, cardinals, nobles and some officers and secretaries of state, not always of noble blood but frequently, especially in the cases of the most powerful of them, scions of the middle class. What proportion of the executive power was wielded by the Council depended on the personal character of the monarch. Henry VIII was always master; Elizabeth was more guided than guiding; the Councils of the Valois and Hapsburgs profited by the preoccupation or the stupidity of their masters to usurp the royal power for themselves. In public opinion the Council occupied a great place, similar to that of an English Cabinet today. The first Anglican prayerbook {478} contains petitions for the Council, though it did not occur to the people to pray for Parliament until the next century.
The countries were governed no longer by the nobles as such but by officials appointed by the crown. It is an indication of the growing nationalization of policy that the sixteenth century saw the first establishment of permanent diplomatic agents. The first ambassadors, selected largely from a panel of bishops, magistrates, judges and scholars, were expected to function not only as envoys but also as spies. Under them was a host of secret agents expected to do underhand work and to take the responsibility for it themselves so that, if found out, they could be repudiated.
[Sidenote: Parliaments]
Very powerful was the national popular assembly: the Parliament, the Diet, the States General, or the Cortes. Its functions, prescriptive and undefined, were commonly understood to include the granting of taxes. The assent of the body was also required, to a varying degree, for the sanction of other laws. But the real power of the people's representatives lay in the fact that they were the chief organ for the expression of that public opinion which in all countries and at all times it is unsafe for governments to disregard. Sitting in two or more chambers to represent the several estates or sometimes--as in the German Diet--subdivisions of these estates, the representatives were composed of members of the privileged orders, the clergy and nobility, and of the elected representatives of the city aristocracies. The majority of the population, the poor, were unrepresented. That this class had as great a stake in the commonwealth as any other, and that they had a class consciousness capable of demanding reforms and of taking energetic measures to secure them, is shown by a number of rebellions of the proletariat, and yet it is not unfair to them, or {479} disdainful, to say that on most matters they were too uninstructed, too powerless and too mute to contribute much to that body of sentiment called public opinion, one condition of which seems to be that to exist it must find expression.
[Sidenote: Influence of the Estates General]
The Estates General, by whatever name they were called, supplemented in France by provincial bodies called Parlements partaking of the nature of high courts of justice, and in Germany by the local Diets (Landtag) of the larger states, exercised a very real and in some cases a decisive influence on public policy. The monarch of half the world dared not openly defy the Cortes of Aragon or of Castile; the imperious Tudors diligently labored to get parliamentary sanction for their tyrannical acts, and, on the few occasions when they could not do so, hastened to abandon as gracefully as possible their previous intentions. In Germany the power of the Diet was not limited by the emperor, but by the local governments, though even so it was considerable. When a Diet, under skilful manipulation or by unscrupulous trickery, was induced by the executive to pass an unpopular measure, like the Edict of Worms, the law became a dead letter. In some other instances, notably in its long campaign against monopolies, even when it expressed the popular voice the Diet failed because the emperor was supported by the wealthy capitalists. Only recently it has been revealed how the Fuggers of Augsburg and their allies endeavored to manipulate or to frustrate its work in the matter of government regulation of industry and commerce.
[Sidenote: Public finance]
The finances of most countries were managed corruptly and unwisely. The taxes were numerous and complicated and bore most heavily on the poor. From ordinary taxes in most countries the privileged orders were exempt, though they were forced to contribute {480} special sums levied by themselves. The general property tax (taille) in France yielded 2,400,000 livres tournois in 1517 and 4,600,000 in 1543. The taxes were farmed; that is, the right of collecting them was sold at auction, with the natural result that they were put into the hands of extortioners who made vast fortunes by oppressing the people. Revenues of the royal domain, excises on salt and other articles, import and export duties, and the sale of offices and monopolies, supplemented the direct taxes. The system of taxation varied in each country. Thus in Spain the 10 per cent. tax on the price of an article every time it was sold and the royalty on precious metals--20 per cent. after 1504--proved important sources of revenue. Rome drove a lucrative trade in spiritual wares. Everywhere, fines for transgressions of the law figured more largely as a source of revenue than they do nowadays.
[Sidenote: Wasteful expenditures]
Expenditures were both more wasteful and more niggardly than they are today. Though the service of the public debt was trifling compared with modern standards, and though the administration of justice was not expensive because of the fee system, the army and navy cost a good deal, partly because they were composed largely of well paid mercenaries. The personal extravagances of the court were among the heaviest burdens borne by the people. The kings built palaces: they wallowed in cloth of gold; they collected objects of art; they squandered fortunes on mistresses and minions; they made constant progresses with a retinue of thousands of servants and horses. The two greatest states, France and Spain, both went into bankruptcy in 1557.
[Sidenote: Public order]
The great task of government, that of keeping public order, protecting life and property and punishing the criminal, was approached by our forbears with more gusto than success. The laws were terrible, but they {481} were unequally executed. In England among capital crimes were the following: murder, arson, escape from prison, hunting by night with painted faces or visors, embezzling property worth more than 40 shillings, carrying horses or mares into Scotland, conjuring, practising witchcraft, removing landmarks, desertion from the army, counterfeiting or mutilating coins, cattle-lifting, house-breaking, picking of pockets. All these were punished by hanging, but crimes of special heinousness, such as poisoning, were visited with burning or boiling to death. The numerous laws against treason and heresy have already been described. Lesser punishments included flogging, pillory, branding, the stocks, clipping ears, piercing tongues, and imprisonment in dungeons made purposely as horrible as possible, dark, noisome dens without furniture or conveniences, often too small for a man to stand upright or to lie at full length.
[Sidenote: Number of executions]
With such laws it is not surprising that 72,000 men were hanged under Henry VIII, an average of nearly 2,000 a year. The number at present, when the population of England and Wales has swollen to tenfold of what it was then, is negligible. Only nine men were hanged in the United Kingdom in the years 1901-3; about 5,000 are now on the average annually convicted of felony. If anything, the punishments were harsher on the Continent than in Britain. The only refuge of the criminal was the greed of his judges. At Rome it was easy and regular to pay a price for every crime, and at other places bribery was more or less prevalent.
[Sidenote: Cruel trial methods]
The methods of trying criminals were as cruel as their punishments. On the Continent the presumption was held to be against the accused, and the rack and its ghastly retinue of instruments of pain were freely used to procure confession. Calvin's hard saying that when men felt the pain they spoke the truth merely {482} expressed the current delusion, for legislators and judges, their hearts hardened in part by the example of the church, concurred in his opinion. The exceptional protest of Montaigne deserves to be quoted for its humanity: "All that exceeds simple death is absolute cruelty, nor can our laws expect that he whom the fear of decapitation or hanging will not restrain should be awed by imagining the horrors of a slow fire, burning pincers or breaking on the wheel."
The spirit of the English law was against the use of torture, which, however, made progress, especially in state trials, under the Tudors. A man who refused to plead in an English court was subjected to the peine forte et dure, which consisted in piling weights on his chest until he either spoke or was crushed to death. To enforce the laws there was a constabulary in the country, supplemented by the regular army, and a police force in the cities. That of Paris consisted of 240 archers, among them twenty-four mounted men. The inefficiency of some of the English officers is amusingly caricatured in the persons of Dogberry and Verges who, when they saw a thief, concluded that he was no honest man and the less they had to meddle or make with him the more for their honesty.
[Sidenote: Blue laws]
If, in all that has just been said, it is evident that the legislation of that period and of our own had the same conception of the function of government and only differed in method and efficiency, there was one very large class of laws spread upon the statute-books of medieval Europe that has almost vanished now. A paternal statesmanship sought to regulate the private lives of a citizen in every respect: the fashion of his clothes, the number of courses at his meals, how many guests he might have at wedding, dinner or dance, how long he should be permitted to haunt the tavern, and how much he should drink, how he {483} should spend Sunday, how he should become engaged, how dance, how part his hair and with how thick a stick he should be indulged in the luxury of beating his wife.
The "blue laws," as such regulations on their moral side came to be called, were no Protestant innovation. The Lutherans hardly made any change whatever in this respect, but Calvin did give a new and biting intensity to the medieval spirit. His followers, the Puritans, in the next century, almost succeeded in reducing the staple of a Christian man's legitimate recreation to "seasonable meditation and prayer." But the idea originated long before the evolution of "the non-conformist conscience."
The fundamental cause of all this legislation was sheer conservatism. [Sidenote: Spirit of conservatism] Primitive men and savages have so strong a feeling of the sanction of custom that they have, as Bagehot expresses it, fairly screwed themselves down by their unreasoning demands for conformity. A good deal of this spirit has survived throughout history and far more of it, naturally, was found four centuries ago than at present, when reason has proved a solvent for so many social institutions. There are a good many laws of the period under survey--such as that of Nuremberg against citizens parting their hair--for which no discoverable basis can be found save the idea that new-fangled fashions should not be allowed.
Economic reasons also played their part in the regulation of the habits of the people. Thus a law of Edward VI, after a preamble setting forth that divers kinds of food are indifferent before God, nevertheless commands all men to eat fish as heretofore on fast days, not as a religious duty but to encourage fishermen, give them a livelihood and thus train men for the navy.
A third very strong motive in the mind of the {484} sixteenth-century statesmen, was that of differentiating the classes of citizens. The blue laws, if they may be so called in this case, were secretions of the blue blood. To make the vulgar know their places it was essential to make them dress according to their rank. The intention of An Act for the Reformation of excess in Apparel, [Sidenote: Apparel according to rank] passed by the English Parliament in 1532, was stated to be,
the necessary repressing and avoiding and expelling of the excess daily more used in the sumptuous and costly apparel and array accustomably worn in this Realm, whereof hath ensued and daily do chance such sundry high and notorious detriments of the common weal, the subversion of good and politic order in knowledge and distinction of people according to their estates, pre-eminences, dignities and degrees to the utter impoverishment and undoing of many inexpert and light persons inclined to pride, mother of all vices.
The tenor of the act prescribes the garb appropriate to the royal family, to nobles of different degree, to citizens according to their income, to servants and husbandmen, to the clergy, doctors of divinity, soldiers, lawyers and players. Such laws were common in all countries. A Scotch act provides "that it be lauchful to na wemen to weir [clothes] abone [above] their estait except howries." This law was not only "apprevit" by King James VI, but endorsed with his own royal hand, "This acte is verray gude."
Excessive fare at feasts was provided against for similar reasons and with almost equal frequency. By an English proclamation [Sidenote: 1517] the number of dishes served was to be regulated according to the rank of the highest person present. Thus, if a cardinal was guest or host, there might be nine courses, if a lord of Parliament six, for a citizen with an income of five hundred pounds a year, three. Elsewhere the number of guests at all {485} ordinary functions as well as the number and price of gifts at weddings, christenings and like occasions, was prescribed.
[Sidenote: 1526]
Games of chance were frequently forbidden. Francis I ordered a lieutenant with twenty archers to visit taverns and gaming houses and arrest all players of cards, dice and other unlawful games. This did not prevent the establishment of a public lottery, [Sidenote: 1539] a practice justified by alleging the examples of Italian cities in raising revenue by this means. Henry III forbade all games of chance "to minors and other debauched persons," [Sidenote: 1577] and this was followed six years later by a crushing impost on cards and dice, interesting as one of the first attempts to suppress the instruments of vice through the taxing power. Merry England also had many laws forbidding "tennis, bowles, dicing and cards," the object being to encourage the practice of archery.
Tippling was the subject of occasional animadversion by the various governments, though there seemed to be little sentiment against it until the opening of the following century. The regulation of the number of taverns and of the amount of wine that might be kept in a gentleman's cellar, as prescribed in an English law, [Sidenote: 1553] mentions not the moral but the economic aspect of drinking. The purchase of French wines was said to drain England of money.
Though the theater also did not suffer much until the time of Cromwell, plays were forbidden in the precincts of the city of London. The Book of Discipline in Scotland forbade attendance at theaters. [Sidenote: 1574] Calvin thoroughly disapproved of them, and even Luther considered them "fools' work" and at times dangerous.
Commendable efforts to suppress the practice of duelling were led by the Catholic church. Clement {486} VII forbade it in a bull, [Sidenote: 1524] confirmed by a decree of Council of Trent. [Sidenote: 1563] An extraordinarily worded French proclamation of 1566 forbade "all gentlemen and others to give each other the lie and, if they do give each other the lie, to fight a duel about it." Other governments took the matter up very sluggishly. Scotland forbade "the great liberty that sundry persons take in provoking each other to singular combats upon sudden and frivol occasions," without license from his majesty.
Two matters on which the Puritans felt very keenly, [Sidenote: 1551] blasphemy and Sabbath-breaking, were but scantily looked after in the century of the Reformation. Scotland forbade "grievous and abominable oaths, swearing, execrations and blasphemation," and somewhat similar laws can be found in other countries. Scotland was also a pioneer in forbidding on the Sabbath all work, "gaming, playing, passing to taverns and ale-houses and wilful remaining away from the parish kirk in time of sermon."
[Sidenote: Mail]
Government has other functions than the enforcement of the civil and criminal law. Almost contemporary with the opening of the century was the establishment of post offices for the forwarding of letters. After Maximilian had made a start in the Netherlands other countries were not slow to follow his example. Though under special government supervision at first these letter-carriers were private men.
[Sidenote: Sanitation]
In the Middle Ages there had been efforts to safeguard public sanitation. The sixteenth century did not greatly improve on them. Thus, Geneva passed a law that garbage and other refuse should not be allowed to lie in the streets for more than three days in summer or eight days in winter. In extreme cases quarantine was adopted as a precaution against epidemics.
{487} [Sidenote: War]
It is the most heart-breaking or the most absurd fact in human history, according as the elements involved are focused in a humane or in a cynical light, that the chief energies of government as well as the most zealous forces of peoples, have been dedicated since civilization began to the practice of wholesale homicide. As we look back from the experience of the Great War to the conflicts of other times, they seem to our jaded imaginations almost as childish as they were vicious. In the sixteenth century, far more than in the nineteenth, the nations boiled and bubbled with spleen and jealousy, hurled Thrasonical threats and hyperbolic boasts in each other's teeth, breathing out mutual extermination with no compunctious visitings of nature to stay their hungry swords--but when they came to blows they had not the power of boys. The great nations were always fighting but never fought to a finish. In the whole century no national capital west of Hungary, save Rome and Edinburgh, was captured by an enemy. The real harm was not done on the battlefield, where the carnage was incredibly small, but in the raids and looting of town and country by the professional assassins who filled the ranks of the hireling troops. Then, indeed, cities were burned, wealth was plundered and destroyed, men were subjected to nameless tortures and women to indescribable outrages, and children were tossed on pikes. Nor did war seem then to shock the public conscience, as it has at last succeeded in doing. The people saw nothing but dazzling glory in the slaughter of foemen on the stricken field, in the fanfare of the trumpets and the thunder of the captains and the shouting. Soldiers, said Luther, founding his opinion on the canon law, might be in a state of grace, for war was as necessary as eating, drinking or any other business. Statesmen like Machiavelli and Bacon were keen for the largest armies {488} possible, as the mainstay of a nation's power. Only Erasmus was a clear-sighted pacifist, always declaiming against war and once asserting that he agreed with Cicero in thinking the most unjust peace preferable to the justest war. Elsewhere he admitted that wars of self-defence were necessary.
[Sidenote: Arms]
Fire-arms had not fully established their ascendancy in the period of Frundsberg, or even of Alva. As late as 1596 an English soldier lamented that his countrymen neglected the bow for the gun. Halberdiers with pikes were the core of the army. Artillery sometimes inflicted very little damage, as at Flodden, sometimes considerable, as at Marignano, where, with the French cavalry, it struck down the till then almost invincible Swiss infantry. In battle arquebusiers and musketeers were interspersed with cross-bowmen. Cannon of a large type gave way to smaller field-guns; even the idea of the machine-gun emerged in the fifteenth century. The name of them, "organs," was taken from their appearance with numerous barrels from which as many as fifty bullets could be discharged at a time. Cannon were transported to the field on carts. Rifles were invented by a German in 1520, but not much used. Pistols were first manufactured at Pistoia--whence the name--about 1540. Bombs were first used in 1588.
The arts of fortification and of siege were improved together, many ingenious devices being called into being by the technically difficult war of the Spaniards against the Dutch. Tactics were not so perfect as they afterwards became and of strategy there was no consistent theory. Machiavelli, who wrote on the subject, based his ideas on the practice of Rome and therefore despised fire-arms and preferred infantry to cavalry. Discipline was severe, and needed to be, notwithstanding which there were sporadic and often very annoying {489} mutinies. Punishments were terrible, as in civil life. Blasphemy, cards, dicing, duelling and women were forbidden in most regular armies, but in time of war the soldiers were allowed an incredible license in pillaging and in foraging. Rings and other decorations were given as rewards of valor. Uniforms began first to be introduced in England by Henry VIII.
[Sidenote: Personnel of the armies]
The personnel of the armies was extremely bad. Not counting the small number of criminals who were allowed to expiate their misdeeds by military service, the rank and file consisted of mercenaries who only too rapidly became criminals under the tutelage of Mars. There were a few conscripts, but no universal training such as Machiavelli recommended. The officers were nobles or gentlemen who served for the prestige and glory of the profession of arms, as well as for the good pay.
[Sidenote: Size of armies compared]
But the most striking difference between armies then and now is not in their armament nor in their quality but in the size. Great battles were fought and whole campaigns decided with twenty or thirty thousand troops. The French standing army was fixed by the ordinance of 1534 at seven legions of six thousand men each, besides which were the mercenaries, the whole amounting to a maximum, under Francis I, of about 100,000 men. The English official figures about 1588 gave the army 90,000 foot soldiers and 9000 horse, but these figures were grossly exaggerated. In fact only 22,000 men were serviceable at the crisis of England's war with Spain. Other armies were proportionately small. The janizaries, whose intervention often decided battles, numbered in 1520 only 12,000. They were perhaps the best troops in Europe, as the Turkish artillery was the most powerful known. What all these figures show, in short, is that the phenomenon of nations with every man physically fit in {490} the army, engaging in a death grapple until one goes down in complete exhaustion, is a modern development.
[Sidenote: Sea power]
The influence of sea power upon history has become proverbial, if, indeed, it has not been overestimated since Admiral Mahan first wrote. It may be pointed out that this influence is far from a constant factor. Sea power had a considerable importance in the wars of Greece and of Rome, but in the Middle Ages it became negligible. Only with the opening of the seven seas to navigation was the command of the waves found to secure the avenues to wealth and colonial expansion. In Portugal, Spain, and England, "the blue water school" of mariners speedily created navies whose strife was apparently more decisive for the future of history than were the battles of armies on land.
When the trade routes of the Atlantic superseded those of the Mediterranean in importance, naturally methods of navigation changed, and this involved a revolution in naval warfare greater than that caused by steam or by the submarine. From the time that Helen's beauty launched a thousand ships until the battle of Lepanto, the oar had been the chief instrument of locomotion, though supplemented, even from Homeric times, by the sail. Naval battles were like those on land; the enemy keels approached and the soldiers on each strove to board and master the other's crew. The only distinctly naval tactic was that of "ramming," as it was called in a once vivid metaphor.
But the wild winds and boisterous waves of the Atlantic broke the oar in the galley-slave's hand and the muscles in his back. Once again man harnessed the hostile forces of nature; the free breezes were broken to the yoke and new types of sailing ships were driven at racing speed across the broad back of the sea. Swift, yare vessels were built, at first smaller than the {491} old galleons but infinitely more manageable. And the new boats, armed with thunder as they were clad with wings, no longer sought to sink or capture enemies at close quarters, but hurled destruction from afar. Heavy guns took the place of small weapons and of armed prow.
It was England's genius for the sea that enabled her to master the new conditions first and most completely and that placed the trident in her hands so firmly that no enemy has ever been able to wrest it from her. Henry VIII paid great attention to the navy. He had fifty-three vessels with an aggregate of 11,268 tons, an average of 200 tons each, carrying 1750 soldiers, 1250 sailors and 2085 guns. Under Elizabeth the number of vessels had sunk to 42, but the tonnage had risen to 17,055, and the crews numbered 5534 seamen, 804 gunners and 2008 soldiers. The largest ships of the Tudor navy were of 1000 tons; the flagship of the Spanish Armada was 1150 tons, carrying 46 guns and 422 men. How tiny are these figures! A single cruiser of today has a larger tonnage than the whole of Elizabeth's fleet; a large submarine is greater than the monsters of Philip.
SECTION 4. PRIVATE LIFE AND MANNERS
Of all the forces making for equality among men probably the education of the masses by means of cheap books and papers has been the strongest. But this force has been slow to ripen; at the close of the Middle Ages the common man was still helpless. The old privileged orders were indeed weakened and despoiled of part of their prerogatives, but it was chiefly by the rise of a new aristocracy, that of wealth.
[Sidenote: Nobility]
The decay of feudalism and of ecclesiastical privilege took the form of a changed and not of an abolished position for peer and priest. They were not cashiered, {492} but they were retained on cheaper terms. The feudal baron had been a petty king; his descendant had the option of becoming either a highwayman or a courtier. As the former alternative became less and less rewarding, the greater part of the old nobles abandoned their pretensions to independence and found a congenial sphere as satellities of a monarch, "le roi soleil," as a typical king was aptly called, whose beams they reflected and around whom they circled.
As titles of nobility began now to be quite commonly given to men of wealth and also to politicians, the old blood was renewed at the expense of the ancient pride. Not, indeed, that the latter showed any signs of diminishing. The arrogance of the noble was past all toleration. Men of rank treated the common citizens like dirt beneath their feet, and even regarded artists and other geniuses as menials. Alphonso, duke of Ferrara, wrote to Raphael in terms that no king would now use to a photographer, calling him a liar and chiding him for disrespect to his superior. The same duke required Ariosto to prostitute his genius by writing an apology for a fratricide committed by his grace. The duke of Mayenne poniarded one of his most devoted followers for having aspired to the hand of the duke's widowed daughter-in-law. So difficult was it to conceive of a "gentleman" without gentle blood that Castiglione, the arbiter of manners, lays down as the first prerequisite to a perfect courtier that he shall be of high birth. And of course those who had not this advantage pretended to it. An Italian in London noticed in 1557 that all gentlemen without other title insisted on being called "mister."
[Sidenote: Professions]
One sign of the break-up of the old medieval castes was the new classification of men by calling, or profession. It is true that two of the professions, the {493} higher offices in army and church, became apanages of the nobility, and the other liberal vocations were almost as completely monopolized by the children of the moneyed middle class; nevertheless it is significant that there were new roads by which men might rise. No class has profited more by the evolution of ideas than has the intelligentsia. From a subordinate, semi-menial position, lawyers, physicians, educators and journalists, not to mention artists and writers, have become the leading, almost the ruling, body of our western democracies.
[Sidenote: Clergy]
Half way between a medieval estate and a modern calling stood the clergy. In Catholic countries they remained very numerous; there were 136 episcopal or archiepiscopal sees in France; there were 40,000 parish priests, with an equal number of secular clergy in subordinate positions, 24,000 canons, 34,000 friars, 2500 Jesuits (in 1600), 12,000 monks and 80,000 nuns. Though there were doubtless many worthy men among them, it cannot honestly be said that the average were fitted either morally or intellectually for their positions. Grossly ignorant of the meaning of the Latin in which they recited their masses and of the main articles of their faith, many priests made up for these defects by proficiency in a variety of superstitious charms. The public was accustomed to see nuns dancing at bridals and priests haunting taverns and worse resorts. Some attempts, serious and partially successful, at reform, have been already described. Profane and amatory plays were forbidden in nunneries, bullfights were banished from the Vatican and the dangers of the confessional were diminished by the invention of the closed box in which the priest should sit and hear his penitent through a small aperture instead of having her kneeling at his knees. So depraved was public opinion on the subject of the confession that a {494} prolonged controversy took place in Spain as to whether minor acts of impurity perpetrated by the priest while confessing women were permissible or not.
[Sidenote: Conditions of the Protestant clergy]
Neither was the average Protestant clergyman a shining and a burning light. So little was the calling regarded that it was hard to fill it. At one time a third of the parishes of England were said to lack incumbents. The stipends were wretched; the social position obscure. The wives of the new clergy had an especially hard lot, being regarded by the people as little better than concubines, and by Parliament called "necessary evils." The English government had to issue injunctions in 1559 stating that because of the offence that has come from the type of women commonly selected as helpmates by parsons, no manner of priest or deacon should presume to marry without consent of the bishop, of the girl's parents, "or of her master or mistress where she serveth." Many clergymen, nevertheless, afterwards married domestics.
Very little was done to secure a properly trained ministry. Less than half of the 2000 clergymen ordained at Wittenberg from 1537-60 were university men; the majority were drapers, tailors and cobblers, "common idiots and laymen" as they were called--though the word "idiot" did not have quite the same disparaging sense that it has now. Nor were the reverend gentlemen of unusually high character. As nothing was demanded of them but purity of doctrine, purity of life sank into the background. It is really amazing to see how an acquaintance of Luther's succeeded in getting one church after he had been dismissed from another on well-founded charges of seduction, and how he was thereafter convicted of rape. This was perhaps an extreme case, but that the majority of clergymen were morally unworthy is the {495} melancholy conviction borne in by contemporary records.
[Sidenote: Character of sermons]
Sermons were long, doctrinal and political. Cranmer advised Latimer not to preach more than an hour and a half lest the king grow weary. How the popular preacher--in this case a Catholic--appealed to his audience, is worth quoting from a sermon delivered at Landau in 1550.
The Lutherans [began the reverend gentleman] are opposed to the worship of Mary and the saints. Now, my friends, be good enough to listen to me. The soul of a man who had died got to the door of heaven and Peter shut it in his face. Luckily, the Mother of God was taking a stroll outside with her sweet Son. The deceased addresses her and reminds her of the Paters and Aves he has recited in her glory and the candles he has burnt before her images. Thereupon Mary says to Jesus: "It's the honest truth, my Son." The Lord, however, objected and addressed the suppliant: "Hast thou never heard that I am the way and the door to life everlasting?" he asks. "If thou art the door, I am the window," retorted Mary, taking the "soul" by the hair and flinging it through the open casement. And now I ask you whether it is not the same whether you enter Paradise by the door or by the window?
There was a naïve familiarity with sacred things in our ancestors that cannot be imitated. Who would now name a ship "Jesus," as Hawkins's buccaneering slaver was named? What serious clergyman would now compare three of his friends to the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, as did Luther? The Reformer also wrote a satire on the calling of a council, in the form of a letter from the Holy Ghost signed by Gabriel as notary and witnessed by Michael the Provost of Paradise and Raphael, God's Court Physician. At another time he made a lampoon on the collection of {496} relics made by his enemy the Archbishop of Mayence, stating that they contained such things as "a fair piece of Moses' left horn, a whole pound of the wind that blew for Elijah in the cave on Mount Horeb and two feathers and an egg of the Holy Ghost" as a dove. All this, of course, not in ribald profanity, but in works intended for edification. . . .
[Sidenote: The city]
Though beautiful, the city of our ancestors was far from admirable in other ways. Filth was hidden under its comely garments, so that it resembled a Cossack prince--all ermine and vermin. Its narrow streets, huddled between strong walls, were over-run with pigs and chickens and filled with refuse. They were often ill-paved, flooded with mud and slush in winter. Moreover they were dark and dangerous at night, infested with princes and young nobles on a spree and with other criminals.
[Sidenote: The house]
Like the exterior, the interior of the house of a substantial citizen was more pretty than clean or sweet smelling. The high wainscoting and the furniture, in various styles, but frequently resembling what is now known as "mission," was lovely, as were the ornaments--tapestries, clocks, pictures and flowers. But the place of carpets was supplied by rushes renewed from time to time without disturbing the underlying mass of rubbish beneath. Windows were fewer than they are now, and fires still fewer. Sometimes there was an open hearth, sometimes a huge tile stove. Most houses had only one or two rooms heated, sometimes, as in the case of the Augustinian friary at Wittenberg, only the bathroom, but usually also the living room.
[Sidenote: Dress]
The dress of the people was far more various and picturesque than nowadays. Both sexes dressed in gaudy colors and delighted in strange fashions, so that, {497} is Roger Ascham said, "he thought himself most brave that was most monstrous in misorder." For women the fashion of decolleté was just coming in, as so many fashions do, from the demi-monde. To Catharine de' Medici is attributed the invention of the corset, an atrocity to be excused only by her own urgent need of one.
[Sidenote: Food]
The day began at five in summer and at seven in winter. A heavy breakfast was followed by a heavier dinner at ten, and supper at five, and there were between times two or three other tiffins or "drinkings." The staple food was meat and cereal; very few of our vegetables were known, though some were just beginning to be cultivated. [Sidenote: 1585-6] The most valuable article of food introduced from the new world was the potato. Another importation that did not become thoroughly acclimatized in Europe was the turkey. Even now they are rare, but there are several interesting allusions to them in the literature of that time, one of the year 1533 in Luther's table talk. Poultry of other sorts was common, as were eggs, game and fish. The cooking relied for its highest effects on sugar and spices. The ordinary fruits--apples, cherries and oranges--furnished a wholesome and pleasing variety to the table. Knives and spoons were used in eating, but forks were unknown, at least in northern Europe.
[Sidenote: Drink]
All the victuals were washed down with copious potations. A water-drinker, like Sir Thomas More, was the rarest of exceptions. The poor drank chiefly beer and ale; the mildest sort, known as "small beer," was recommended to the man suffering from too strong drink of the night before. Wine was more prized, and there were a number of varieties. There being no champagne, Burgundy was held in high esteem, as were some of the strong, sweet, Spanish and Portuguese {498} wines. The most harmless drinks were claret and Rhine wine. There were some "mixed drinks," such as sack or hippocras, in which beer or wine was sophisticated with eggs, spices and sugar. The quantities habitually drunk were large. Roger Ascham records that Charles V drank the best he ever saw, never less than a quart at a draft. The breakfast table of an English nobleman was set out with a quart of wine and a quart of beer, liquor then taking the place of tea, coffee, chocolate and all the "soft" beverages that now furnish stimulation and sociability.
[Sidenote: Tobacco, 1573]
"In these times," wrote Harrison, "the taking-in of the smoke of an Indian herb called 'Tobaco' by an instrument formed like a little ladle . . . is greatly taken up and used in England against rewmes [colds] and some other diseases." Like other drugs, tobacco soon came to be used as a narcotic for its own sake, and was presently celebrated as "divine tobacco" and "our holy herb nicotian" by the poets. What, indeed, are smoking, drinking, and other wooings of pure sensation at the sacrifice of power and reason, but a sort of pragmatized poetry? Some ages, and those the most poetical, like that of Pericles and that of Rabelais, have deified intoxication and sensuality; others, markedly our own, have preferred the accumulation of wealth and knowledge to sensual indulgence. It is a psychological contrast of importance.
Could we be suddenly transported on Mr. Wells's time machine four hundred years back we should be less struck by what our ancestors had than by what they lacked. Quills took the place of fountain pens, pencils, typewriters and dictaphones. Not only was postage dearer but there were no telephones or telegrams to supplement it. The world's news of yesterday, which we imbibe with our morning cup, then sifted down slowly through various media of {499} communication, mostly oral. It was two months after the battle before Philip of Spain knew the fate of his own Armada. The houses had no steam heat, no elevators; the busy housewife was aided by no vacuum cleaner, sewing machine and gas ranges; the business man could not ride to his office, nor the farmer to his market, in automobiles. There were neither railways nor steamships to make travel rapid and luxurious.
[Sidenote: Travel]
Nevertheless, journeys for purposes of piety, pleasure and business were common. Pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Rome, Compostella, Loretto, Walsingham and many other shrines were frequent in Catholic countries. Students were perpetually wandering from one university to another: merchants were on the road, and gentlemen felt the attractions of sight-seeing. The cheap and common mode of locomotion was on foot. Boats on the rivers and horses on land furnished the alternatives. The roads were so poor that the horses were sometimes "almost shipwrecked." The trip from Worms to Rome commonly took twelve days, but could be made in seven. Xavier's voyage from Lisbon to Goa took thirteen months. Inns were good in France and England; less pleasant elsewhere. Erasmus particularly abominated the German inns, where a large living and dining room would be heated to a high temperature by a stove around which travelers would dry their steaming garments. The smells caused by those operations, together with the fleas and mice with which the poorer inns were infested, made the stay anything but luxurious. Any complaint was met by the retort, "If you don't like it, go somewhere else," a usually impracticable alternative. When the traveller was escorted to his bedroom, he found it very cold in winter, though the featherbeds kept him warm enough. He would see his chamber filled with other beds occupied by his travelling companions of both {500} sexes, and he himself was often forced to share his bed with a stranger. The custom of the time was to take one bath a week. For this there were public bath-houses, [Sidenote: Baths] frequented by both sexes. A common form of entertainment was the "bath-party."
[Sidenote: Sports]
With the same insatiable gusto that they displayed in other matters the contemporaries of Luther and Shakespeare went in for amusements. Never has the theater been more popular. Many sports, like bear-baiting and bull-baiting, were cruel. Hunting was also much relished, though humane men like Luther and More protested against the "silly and woeful beastes' slaughter and murder." Tennis was so popular that there were 250 courts in Paris alone. The game was different from the modern in that the courts were 121 feet long, instead of 78 feet, and the wooden balls and "bats"--as racquets are still called in England--were much harder. Cards and dice were passionately played, a game called "triumph" or "trump" being the ancestor of our whist. Chess was played nearly as now.
Young people loved dances and some older people shook their heads over them, then as now. Melanchthon danced, at the age of forty-four, and Luther approved of such parties, properly chaperoned, as a means of bringing young people together. On the other hand dances were regulated in many states and prohibited in others, like Zurich and Geneva. Some of the dances were quite stately, like the minuet, others were boisterous romps, in which the girls were kissed, embraced and whirled around giddily by their partners. The Scotch ambassador's comment that Queen Elizabeth "danced very high" gives an impression of agility that would hardly now be considered in the best taste.
[Sidenote: Manners]
The veneer of courtesy was thin. True, humanists, {501} publicists and authors composed for each other eulogies that would have been hyperboles if addressed to the morning stars singing at the dawn of creation, but once a quarrel had been started among the touchy race of writers and a spouting geyser of inconceivable scurrility burst forth. No imagery was too nasty, no epithet too strong, no charge too base to bring against an opponent. The heroic examples of Greek and Roman invective paled before the inexhaustible resources of learned billingsgate stored in the minds of the humanists and theologians. To accuse an enemy of atheism and heresy was a matter of course; to add charges of unnatural vice or, if he were dead, stories of suicide and of the devils hovering greedily over his deathbed, was extremely common. Even crowned heads exchanged similar amenities.
Withal, there was growing up a strong appreciation of the merits of courtesy. Was not Bayard, the captain in the army of Francis I a "knight without fear and without reproach"? Did not Sir Philip Sidney do one of the perfect deeds of gentleness when, dying on the battle field and tortured with thirst, he passed his cup of water to a common soldier with the simple words, "Thy need is greater than mine"? One of the most justly famous and most popular books of the sixteenth century was Baldessare Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, called by Dr. Johnson the best treatise on good breeding ever written. Published in Italian in 1528, it was translated into Spanish in 1534, into French in 1537, into English and Latin in 1561, and finally into German in 1566. There have been of it more than 140 editions. It sets forth an ideal of a Prince Charming, a man of noble birth, expert in games and in war, brave, modest, unaffected, witty, an elegant speaker, a good dancer, familiar with literature and accomplished in music, as well as a man of honor {502} and courtesy. It is significant that this ideal appealed to the time, though it must be confessed it was rarely reached. Ariosto, to whom the first book was dedicated by the author, depicts, as his ideals, knights in whom the sense of honor has completely replaced all Christian virtues. They were always fighting each other about their loves, much like the bulls, lions, rams and dogs to whom the poet continually compares them. Even the women were hardly safe in their company.
Sometimes a brief anecdote will stamp a character as no long description will do. The following are typical of the manners of our forbears:
One winter morning a stately matron was ascending the steps of the church of St. Gudule at Brussels. They were covered with ice; she slipped and took a precipitate and involuntary seat. In the anguish of the moment, a single word, of mere obscenity, escaped her lips. When the laughing bystanders, among whom was Erasmus, helped her to her feet, she beat a hasty retreat, crimson with shame. Nowadays ladies do not have such a vocabulary at their tongue's end.
The Spanish ambassador Enriquez de Toledo was at Rome calling on Imperia de Cugnatis, a lady who, though of the demi-monde, lived like a princess, cultivated letters and art, and had many poets as well as many nobles among her friends. Her floors were carpeted with velvet rugs, her walls hung with golden cloth, and her tables loaded with costly bric-a-brac. The Spanish courtier suddenly turned and spat copiously in the face of his lackey and then explained to the slightly startled company that he chose this objective rather than soil the splendor he saw around him. The disgusting act passed for a delicate and successful flattery.
[Sidenote: 1538]
Among the students at Wittenberg was a certain Simon Lemchen, or Lemnius, a lewd fellow of the baser {503} sort who published two volumes of scurrilous epigrams bringing unfounded and nasty charges against Luther, Melanchthon and the other Reformers and their wives. When he fled the city before he could be arrested, Luther revenged himself partly by a Catilinarian sermon, partly by composing, for circulation among his friends, some verses about Lemnius in which the scurrility and obscenity of the offending youth were well over-trumped. One would be surprised at similar measures taken by a professor of divinity today.
[Sidenote: Morals]
In measuring the morals of a given epoch statistics are not applicable; or, at any rate, it is probably true that the general impression one gets of the moral tone of any period is more trustworthy than would be got from carefully compiled figures. And that one does get such an impression, and a very strong one, is undeniable. Everyone has in his mind a more or less distinct idea of the ethical standards of ancient Athens, of Rome, of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Puritan Commonwealth, the Restoration, the Victorian Age.
The sixteenth century was a time when morals were perhaps not much worse than they are now, but when vice and crime were more flaunted and talked about. Puritanism and prudery have nowadays done their best to conceal the corruption and indecency beneath the surface. But our ancestors had no such delicacy. The naïve frankness of the age, both when it gloried in the flesh and when it reproved sin, gives a full-blooded complexion to that time that is lacking now. The large average consumption of alcohol--a certain irritant to moral maladies--and the unequal administration of justice, with laws at once savage and corruptly dispensed, must have had bad consequences.
The Reformation had no permanent discernible {504} effect on moral standards. Accompanied as it often was with a temporary zeal for righteousness, it was too often followed by a breaking up of conventional standards and an emphasis on dogma at the expense of character, that operated badly. Latimer thought that the English Reformation had been followed by a wave of wickedness. Luther said that when the devil of the papacy had been driven out, seven other devils entered to take its place, and that at Wittenberg a man was considered quite a saint who could say that he had not broken the first commandment, but only the other nine. Much of this complaint must be set down to disappointment at not reaching perfection, and over against it may be set many testimonies to the moral benefits assured by the reform.
[Sidenote: Violence]
It was an age of violence. Murder was common everywhere. On the slightest provocation a man of spirit was expected to whip out a rapier or dagger and plunge it into his insulter. The murder of unfaithful wives was an especial point of honor. Benvenuto Cellini boasts of several assassinations and numerous assaults, and he himself got off without a scratch from the law, Pope Paul III graciously protesting that "men unique in their profession, like Benvenuto, were not subject to the laws." The number of unique men must have been large in the Holy City, for in 1497 a citizen testified that he had seen more than a hundred bodies of persons foully done to death thrown into the Tiber, and no one bothered about it.
[Sidenote: Brigandage]
Brigandage stalked unabashed through the whole of Europe. By 1585 the number of bandits in the papal states alone had risen to 27,000. Sixtus V took energetic means to repress them. One of his stratagems is too characteristic to omit mentioning. He had a train of mules loaded with poisoned food and then {505} drove them along a road he knew to be infested by highwaymen, who, as he had calculated, actually took them and ate of the food, of which many died.
Other countries were perhaps less scourged by robbers, but none was free. Erasmus's praise of Henry VIII, in 1519, for having cleared his realm of free-booters, was premature. In the wilder parts, especially on the Scotch border, they were still rife. In 1529 the Armstrongs of Lidderdale, just over the border, could boast that they had burned 52 churches, besides making heavy depredations on private property. When James V took stern measures to suppress them, [Sidenote: 1532] and instituted a College of Justice for that purpose, the good law was unpopular.
Bands of old soldiers and new recruits wandered through France, Spain and the Netherlands. The worst robbers in Germany were the free knights. From their picturesque castles they emerged to pillage peaceful villages and trains of merchandise going from one walled city to another. In doing so they inflicted wanton mutilations on the unfortunate merchants whom they regarded as their natural prey. Even the greatest of them, like Francis von Sickingen, were not ashamed to "let their horses bite off travellers' purses" now and then. But it was not only the nobles who became gentlemen of the road. A well-to-do merchant of Berlin, named John Kohlhase, was robbed of a couple of horses by a Saxon squire, and, failing to get redress in the corrupt courts, threw down the gauntlet to the whole of Electoral Saxony in a proclamation that he would rob, burn and take reprisals until he was given compensation for his loss. For six years [Sidenote: 1534-40] he maintained himself as a highwayman, but was finally taken and executed in Brandenburg.
[Sidenote: Fraud]
Fraud of all descriptions was not less rampant than force. When Machiavelli reduced to a reasoned {506} theory the practice of all hypocrisy and guile, the courts of Europe were only too ready to listen to his advice. In fact, they carried their mutual attempts at deception to a point that was not only harmful to themselves, but ridiculous, making it a principle to violate oaths and to debase the currency of good faith in every possible way. There was also much untruth in private life. Unfortunately, lying in the interests of piety was justified by Luther, while the Jesuits made a soul-rotting art of equivocation.
[Sidenote: Unchastity]
The standard of sexual purity was disturbed by a reaction against the asceticism of the Middle Ages. Luther proclaimed that chastity was impossible, while the humanists gloried in the flesh. Public opinion was not scandalized by prostitution; learned men occasionally debated whether fornication was a sin, and the Italians now began to call a harlot a "courteous woman" [Sidenote: c. 1500] (courtesan) as they called an assassin a "brave man" (bravo). Augustine had said that harlots were remedies against worse things, and the church had not only winked at brothels, but frequently licensed them herself. Bastardy was no bar to hereditary right in Italy.
The Reformers tried to make a clean sweep of the "social evil." Under Luther's direction brothels were closed in the reformed cities. When this was done at Strassburg the women drew up a petition, stating that they had pursued their profession not from liking but only to earn bread, and asked for honest work. Serious attempts were made to give it to them, or to get them husbands. At Zurich and some other cities the brothels were left open, but were put under the supervision of an officer who was to see that no married men frequented them. The reformers had a strange ally in the growing fear of venereal diseases. Other countries followed Germany in their war on the prostitute. In London the public houses of ill fame {507} were closed in 1546, in Paris in 1560. An edict of July 23, 1566 commanded all prostitutes to leave Rome, but when 25,000 persons, including the women and their dependents, left the city, the loss of public revenue induced the pope to allow them to return on August 17 of the same year.
[Sidenote: Polygamy]
One of the striking aberrations of the sixteenth century, as it seems to us, was the persistent advocacy of polygamy as, if not desirable in itself, at least preferable to divorce. Divorce or annulment of marriage was not hard to obtain by people of influence, whether Catholic or Protestant, but it was a more difficult matter than it is in America now. In Scotland there was indeed a sort of trial marriage, known as "handfasting," by which the parties might live together for a year and a day and then continue as married or separate. But, beginning with Luther, many of the Reformers thought polygamy less wrong than divorce, on the biblical ground that whereas the former had been practised in the Old Testament times and was not clearly forbidden by the New Testament, divorce was prohibited save for adultery. Luther advanced this thesis as early as 1520, when it was purely theoretical, but he did not shrink from applying it on occasion. It is extraordinary what a large body of reputable opinion was prepared to tolerate polygamy, at least in exceptional cases. Popes, theologians, humanists like Erasmus, and philosophers like Bruno, all thought a plurality of wives a natural condition.
[Sidenote: Marriage]
But all the while the instincts of the masses were sounder in this respect than the precepts of their guides. While polygamy remained a freakish and exceptional practice, the passions of the age were absorbed to a high degree by monogamous marriage. Matrimony having been just restored to its proper dignity as the best estate for man, its praises were {508} sounded highly. The church, indeed, remained true to her preference for celibacy, but the Inquisition found much business in suppressing the then common opinion that marriage was better than virginity. To the Reformers marriage was not only the necessary condition of happiness to mankind, but the typically holy estate in which God's service could best be done. From all sides paeans arose celebrating matrimony as the true remedy for sin and also as the happiest estate. The delights of wedded love are celebrated equally in Luther's table talk and letters and in the poems of the Italian humanist Pontano. "I have always been of the opinion," writes Ariosto, "that without a wife at his side no man can attain perfect goodness or live without sin." "In marriage there is one mind in two bodies," says Henry Cornelius Agrippa, "one harmony, the same sorrows, the same joys, an identical will, common riches, poverty and honors, the same bed and the same table. . . . Only a husband and wife can love each other infinitely and serve each other as long as both do live, for no love is either so vehement or so holy as theirs."
The passion for marriage in itself is witnessed by the practice of widows and widowers of remarrying as soon and as often as possible. [Sidenote: Remarriage common] Luther's friend, Justus Jonas, married thrice, each time with a remark to the effect that it was better to marry than to burn. The English Bishop Richard Cox excused his second marriage, at an advanced age, by an absurd letter lamenting that he had not the gift of chastity. Willibrandis Rosenblatt married in succession Louis Keller, Oecolampadius, Capito and Bucer, the ecclesiastical eminence of her last three husbands giving her, one would think, an almost official position. Sir Thomas More married a second wife just one month after his first wife's death.
{509} [Sidenote: Treatment of wives]
Sad to relate, the wives so necessary to men's happiness were frequently ill treated after they were won. In the sixteenth century women were still treated as minors; if married they could make no will; their husbands could beat them with impunity, for cruelty was no cause for divorce. Sir Thomas More's home-life is lauded by Erasmus as a very paragon, because "he got more compliance from his wife by jokes and blandishments than most husbands by imperious harshness." One of these jokes, a customary one, was that his wife was neither pretty nor young; one of the "blandishments," I suppose, was an epigram by Sir Thomas to the effect that though a wife was a heavy burden she might be useful if she would die and leave her husband money. In Utopia, he assures us, husbands chastise their wives.
[Sidenote: Position of woman]
In the position of women various currents crossed each other. The old horror of the temptress, inherited from the early church, the lofty scorn exhibited by the Greek philosophers, mingled with strands of chivalry and a still newer appreciation of the real dignity of woman and of her equal powers. Ariosto treated women like spoiled children; the humanists delighted to rake up the old jibes at them in musty authors; the divines were hardest of all in their judgment. "Nature doth paint them forth," says John Knox of women, "to be weak, frail, impatient, feeble and foolish, and experience hath declared them to be unconstant, variable, cruel and void of the spirit of council and regimen." "If women bear children until they become sick and eventually die," preaches Luther, "that does no harm. Let them bear children till they die of it; that is what they are for." In 1595 the question was debated at Wittenberg as to whether women were human beings. The general tone was one of disparagement. An anthology might be made of the {510} proverbs recommending (à la Nietzsche) the whip as the best treatment for the sex.
But withal there was a certain chivalry that revolted against all this brutality. Castiglione champions courtesy and kindness to women on the highest and most beautiful ground, the spiritual value of woman's love. Ariosto sings:
No doubt they are accurst and past all grace That dare to strike a damsel in the face, Or of her head to minish but a hair.
Certain works like T. Elyot's Defence of Good Women and like Cornelius Agrippa's Nobility and Excellence of the Female Sex, witness a genuine appreciation of woman's worth. Some critics have seen in the last named work a paradox, like the Praise of Folly, such as was dear to the humanists. To me it seems absolutely sincere, even when it goes so far as to proclaim that woman is as superior to man as man is to beast and to celebrate her as the last and supreme work of the creation.
[Sidenote: Children]
The family was far larger, on the average, in the sixteenth century than it is now. One can hardly think of any man in this generation with as many as a dozen children; it is possible to mention several of that time with over twenty. Anthony Koberger, the famous Nuremberg printer had twenty-five children, eight by his first and seventeen by his second wife. Albert Dürer was the third of eighteen children of the same couple, of whom apparently only three reached maturity. John Colet, born in 1467, was the eldest of twenty-two brothers and sisters of whom by 1499 he was the only survivor. Of course these families were exceptional, but not glaringly so. A brood of six to twelve was a very common occurrence.
Children were brought up harshly in many families, {511} strictly in almost all. They were not expected to sit in the presence of their parents, unless asked, or to speak unless spoken to. They must needs bow and crave a blessing twice a day. Lady Jane Grey complained that if she did not do everything as perfectly as God made the world, she was bitterly taunted and presently so nipped and pinched by her noble parents that she thought herself in hell. The rod was much resorted to. And yet there was a good deal of natural affection. Few fathers have even been better to their babies than was Luther, and he humanely advised others to rely as much on reward as on punishment--on the apple as on the switch--and above all not to chastise the little ones so harshly as to make them fear or hate their parents.
The patria potestas was supposed to extend, as it did in Rome, during the adult as during the callow years. Especially did public opinion insist on children marrying according to the wishes of their parents. Among the nobility child-marriage was common, a mere form, of course, not at once followed by cohabitation. A betrothal was a very solemn thing, amounting to a definite contract. Perfect liberty was allowed the engaged couple, by law in Sweden and by custom in many other countries. All the more necessary, in the opinion of the time, to prevent youths and maidens betrothing themselves without their parents' consent.
[Sidenote: Health]
Probably the standard of health is now higher than it was then, and the average longevity greater. It is true that few epidemics have ever been more fatal than the recent influenza; and on the other hand one can point to plenty of examples of sixteenth-century men who reached a crude and green old age. Statistics were then few and unreliable. In 1905 the death-rate in London was 15.6 per thousand; in the years 1861-1880 it averaged 23 per thousand. It has been {512} calculated that this is just what the death-rate was in London in a healthy year under Elizabeth, but it must be remembered that a year without some sort of epidemic was almost exceptional.
[Sidenote: Epidemics]
Bubonic plague was pandemic at that time, and horribly fatal. Many of the figures given--as that 200,000 people perished in Moscow in 1570, 50,000 at Lyons in 1572, and 50,000 at Venice during the years 1575-7, must be gross exaggerations, but they give a vivid idea of the popular idea of the prevalent mortality. Another scourge was the sweating sickness, first noticed as epidemic in 1485 and returning in 1507, 1517, 1528 and 1551. Tuberculosis was probably as wide-spread in the sixteenth as it is in the twentieth century, but it figured less prominently on account of worse diseases and because it was seldom recognized until the last stages. Smallpox was common, unchecked as it was by vaccination, and with it were confounded a variety of zymotic diseases, such as measles, which only began to be recognized as different in the course of the sixteenth century. One disease almost characteristic of former ages, so much more prevalent was it in them, due to the more unwholesome food and drink, was the stone.
Venereal diseases became so prominent in the sixteenth century that it has often been thought that the syphilis was imported from America. This, however, has been denied by authorities who believe that it came down from classical antiquity, but that it was not differentiated from other scourges. The Latin name variola, like the English pox, was applied indiscriminately to syphilis, small-pox, chicken-pox, etc. Gonorrhea was also common. The spread of these diseases was assisted by many causes besides the prevalent moral looseness; by lack of cleanliness in public baths, for example.
{513} Useless to go through the whole roster of the plagues. Suffice it to say that whatever now torments poor mortals, from tooth-ache to cold in the head, and from rheumatism to lunacy, was known to our ancestors in aggravated forms. Deleterious was the use of alcohol, the evils of which were so little understood that it was actually prescribed for many disorders of which it is a certain irritant. Add to this the lack of sanitary measures, not only of disinfection but of common cleanliness, and the etiology of the phenomena is satisfactorily accounted for.
[Sidenote: Medicine]
If even now medicine as a science and an art seems backward compared with surgery, it has nevertheless made considerable advances since it began to be empirical. In the Middle Ages it was almost purely dogmatic; men did not ask their eyes and minds what was the nature of the human body and the effect of this or that drug on it, they asked Aristotle, or Hippocrates, or Galen or Avicenna. The chief rivalries, and they were bitter, were between the Greek and the Arabian schools. [Sidenote: c. 1550] Galenism finally triumphed just before the beginnings of experiment and research were made. The greatest name in the first half of the century was that of Theophrastus Paracelsus, [Sidenote: Paracelsus, 1493-1541] as arrant a quack as ever lived, but one who did something to break up the strangle-hold of tradition. He worked out his system a priori from a fantastic postulate of the parallelism between man and the universe, the microcosm and the macrocosm. He held that the Bible gave valuable prescriptions, as in the treatment of wounds by oil and wine.
[Sidenote: Surgery]
Under the leadership of Ambroise Paré [Sidenote: Paré, 1510-90] surgery improved rather more than medicine. Without anaesthetics, indeed, operations were difficult, but a good deal was accomplished. Paré first made amputation on a large scale possible by inventing a ligature for {514} large arteries that effectively controlled hemorrhage. This barber's apprentice, who despised the schools and wrote in the vernacular, made other important improvements in the surgeon's technique. It is noteworthy that each discovery was treated as a trade secret to be exploited for the benefit of a few practitioners and not given freely to the good of mankind.
In obstetrics Paré also made discoveries that need not be detailed here. Until his time it was almost universal for women to be attended in childbirth only by midwives of their own sex. Indeed, so strong was the prejudice on this point that women were known to die of abdominal tumors rather than allow male physicians to examine them. The admission of men to the profession of midwife marked a considerable improvement in method.
[Sidenote: Lunacy]
The treatment of lunacy was inept. The poor patients were whipped or otherwise tormented for alluding to the subject of their monomania. Our ancestors found fun in watching the antics of crazed minds, and made up parties to go to Bedlams and tease the insane. Indeed, some of the scenes in Shakespeare's plays, in which madness is depicted, and which seem tragic to us, probably had a comic value for the groundlings before whom the plays were first produced.
[Sidenote: Hospitals]
As early as 1510 Luther saw one of the hospitals at Florence. He tells how beautiful they were, how clean and well served by honorable matrons tending the poor freely all day without making known their names and at night returning home. Such institutions were the glory of Italy, for they were sadly to seek in other lands. When they were finally established elsewhere, they were too often left to the care of ignorant and evil menials. The stories one may read of the Hôtel-Dieu, at Paris, are fairly hair-raising.
THE CAPITALISTIC REVOLUTION
SECTION 1. THE RISE OF THE POWER OF MONEY
[Sidenote: Reformation and economic revolution]
Parallel with the Reformation was taking place an economic revolution even deeper and more enduring in its consequences. Both Reformation and Revolution were manifestations of the individualistic spirit of the age; the substitution, in the latter case, of private enterprise and competition for common effort as a method of producing wealth and of distributing it. Both were prepared for long before they actually upset the existing order; both have taken several centuries to unfold their full consequences, and in each the truly decisive steps were taken in the sixteenth century.
It is doubtless incorrect to see either in the Reformation or in the economic revolution a direct and simple cause of the other. They interacted and to a certain extent joined forces; but to a greater degree each sought to use the other, and each has at times been credited, or blamed, with the results of the other's operations. Contemporaries noticed the effects, mostly the bad effects, of the rise of capitalism, and often mistakenly attributed them to the Reformation; and the new kings of commerce were only too ready to hide behind the mask of Protestantism while despoiling the church. Like other historical forces, while easily separable in thought, the two movements were usually inextricably interwoven in action.
[Sidenote: Rise of capitalism]
Capitalism supplanted gild-production because of its fitness as a social instrument for the production and {516} storing of wealth. In competition with capital the medieval communism succumbed in one line of business after another--in banking, in trade, in mining, in industry and finally in agriculture--because it was unable to produce the results that capital produced. By the vast reward that the newer system gave to individual enterprise, to technical improvement and to investment, capitalism proved the aptest tool for the creation and preservation of wealth ever devised. It is true that the manifold multiplication of riches in the last four centuries is due primarily to inventions for the exploitation of natural resources, but the capitalistic method is ideally fitted for the utilization of these new discoveries and for laying up of their increment for ultimate social use. And this is an inestimable service to any society. Only a fairly rich people can afford the luxuries of beauty, knowledge, and power, that enhance the value of life and allow it to climb to ever greater heights. To balance this service, it must be taken into account that capitalism has lamentably failed justly to distribute rewards. Its tendency is to intercept the greater part of the wealth it creates for the benefit of a single class, and thereby to rob the rest of the community of their due dividend.
[Sidenote: Primary cause of the capitalistic revolution]
So delicate is the adjustment of society that an apparently trivial new factor will often upset the whole equilibrium and produce the most incalculable results. Thus, the primary cause of the capitalistic revolution appears to have been a purely mechanical one, the increase in the production of the precious metals. Wealth could not be stored at all in the Middle Ages save in the form of specie; nor without it could large commerce be developed, nor large industry financed, nor was investment possible. Moreover the rise of prices consequent on the increase of the precious metals gave a powerful stimulus to manufacture and a {517} fillip to the merchant and to the entrepreneur such as they have rarely received before or since. It was, in short, the development of the power of money that gave rise to the money power.
In the earlier Middle Ages there prevailed a "natural economy," or system in which payments were made chiefly in the form of services and by barter; this gave place very gradually to our modern "money economy" in which gold and silver are both the normal standards of value and the sole instruments of exchange. Already in the twelfth century money was being used in the towns of Western Europe; not until the late fourteenth or fifteenth did it become a dominant factor in rural life. This change was not the great revolution itself, but was the indispensable prerequisite of it, and in large part its direct cause.
[Sidenote: Money-making kings]
Gold and silver could now be hoarded in the form of money, and so the first step was taken in the formation of large fortunes, known to the ancient world, but almost absent in the Middle Ages. The first great fortunes were made by kings, by nobles with large landed estates, and by officers in government service. Henry VII left a large fortune to his son. Some of the popes and some of the princes of Germany and Italy hoarded money even when they were paying interest on a debt,--a testimony to the increasing estimate of the value of hard cash. The chief nobles were scarcely behind the kings in accumulating treasure. Their vast revenues from land were much more like government imposts than like rents. Thus Montmorency in France gave his daughter a dowry amounting to $420,000. The duke of Gandia in Spain owned estates peopled by 60,000 Moriscos and yielding a princely revenue. Vast ransoms were exacted in war, and fines, confiscation and pillage filled the coffers of the lords. After the atrocious war against the Moriscos, the duke of {518} Lerma sold their houses on his estates for 500,000 ducats.
[Sidenote: Officials]
In the monarchies of Europe the only avenue to wealth at first open to private men was the government service. Offices, benefices, naval and military commands, were bought with the expectation, often justified, of making money out of them. The farmed revenues yielded immense profit to the collectors. No small fortunes were reaped by Empson and Dudley, the tools of Henry VII, but they were far surpassed by the hoards of Wolsey and of Cromwell. Such was the great fortune made in France by Semblançay, the son of a plain merchant of Tours, who turned the offices of treasurer and superintendent of finances to such good account that he bought himself large estates and baronies. Fortunes on a proportionately smaller scale were made by the servants of the German princes, as by John Schenitz, a minion of the Archbishop Elector Albert of Mayence. So insecure was the tenure of riches accumulated in royal or princely service that most of the men who did so, including all those mentioned in this paragraph, ended on the scaffold, save, indeed, Wolsey, who would have done so had he not died while awaiting trial.
It is to be noted that, though land was the principal form of wealth in the Middle Ages, no great fortunes were made from it at the beginning of the capitalistic era, save by the titled holders of enormous domains. The small landlords suffered at the expense of the burghers in Germany, and not until these burghers turned to the country and bought up landed estates did agriculture become thoroughly profitable.
[Sidenote: Banking]
The intimate connection of government and capitalism is demonstrated by the fact that, next to officials, government concessionaires and bankers were the first to make great fortunes. At this time banking was {519} closely dependent on public loans and was therefore the first great business to be established on the capitalistic basis. The first "trust" was the money trust. Though banking had been well started in the Middle Ages, it was still in an imperfect state of development. Jews and goldsmiths made a considerable number of commercial loans but these loans were always regarded by the borrower as temporary expedients; the habitual conduct of business on borrowed capital was unknown. But, just as the new output of the German mines was increasing the supply of precious metals, the greater costliness of war, due to the substitution of mercenaries and fire-arms for feudal levies equipped with bows and pikes, made the governments of Europe need money more than ever before. They made great loans at home and abroad, and it was the interest on these that expanded the banking business until it became an international power. Well before the sixteenth century men had made a fine art of receiving deposits, loaning capital and performing other financial operations, but it was not until the late fifteenth century that the bankers reaped the full reward of their skill and of the new opportunities. The three balls in the arms of the Medici testify to the heights to which a profession, once humble, might raise its experts. In Italy the science of accounting, [Sidenote: Science of accounting] or of double-entry bookkeeping, originated; it was slowly adopted in other lands. The first English work on the subject is that by John Gouge in 1543, entitled: "A Profitable Treatyce called the Instrument or Boke to learn to know the good order of the keeping of the famouse reconnynge, called in Latin, Dare et Habere, and, in Englyshe, Debitor and Creditor." It was in Italy that modern technique of clearing bills was developed; the simple system by which balances are settled not by full payment of each debt in money, but by comparing {520} the paper certificates of indebtedness. This immense saving, as developed by the Genoese, was soon extended from their own city to the whole of Northern Italy, so that the bankers would meet several times a year in the first international clearing-house. From Genoa the same system was then applied to distant cities, with great profit, even more in security than in saving of capital. If bills payable at Antwerp were bought at Genoa, they were paid at Antwerp by selling bills on Lisbon, perhaps, and these in turn by selling exchange on Genoa. These processes seem simple and are now universal, but how vastly they facilitated the development of banking and business when first discovered can hardly be over-estimated.
From the improvement of exchange the Genoese soon proceeded to arbitrage, a transaction more profitable and more socially useful at that time when poor communications made the differences in prices between bills of exchange, bullion, coins, stocks and bonds in distant markets more considerable than they are now. The Genoese bankers also invented the first substitutes for money in the form of circulating notes. In all this, and in other ways, they made enormous profits that soon induced others to copy them.
[Sidenote: Great firms]
Though the Italians invented modern banking they were eventually surpassed by the Germans, if not in technique at least in the size of the firms established. The largest Florentine bank in 1529 was that of Thomas Guadegni with a capital of 520,000 florins ($1,170,000). The capital of the house of Fugger at Augsburg, distinct from the personal fortunes of its members, was in 1546, 4,700,000 gold gulden ($11,500,000). The average annual profits of the Fuggers during the years 1511-27 were 54.5 per cent.; from 1534-6, 2.2 per cent.; from 1540-46, 19 per cent.; from 1547-53, 5.6 per cent. Another Augsburg firm, the Welsers, averaged 9 per {521} cent. for the fifteen years 1502-17. Dividends were not declared annually, but a general casting up of accounts was made every few years and a new balance struck, each partner withdrawing as much as he wished, or leaving it to be credited to his account as new capital.
[Sidenote: Risks of banking]
Though the Fuggers and other firms soon went into large business of all sorts, they remained primarily bankers. As such they enjoyed boundless credit with the public from whom they received deposits at regular interest. The proportion of these deposits to the capital continually rose. This general tendency, together with the habit of changing the amount of capital every few years, is evident from the following table of the liabilities of the Fuggers in gold gulden at several different periods:
Year Capital Deposits 1527 . . . . . . . 2,000,000 290,000 1536 . . . . . . . 1,500,000 900,000 1546 . . . . . . . 4,700,000 1,300,000 1563 . . . . . . . 2,000,000 3,100,000 1577 . . . . . . . 1,300,000 4,000,000
A smaller Augsburg firm, the Haugs, had in 1560, a capital of 140,000 florins and deposits of 648,000. As all these deposits were subject to be withdrawn at sight, and as the firms usually kept a very small reserve of specie, it would seem that banking was subject to great risks. The unsoundness of the method was counterbalanced by the fact that most of the deposits were made by members of the banker's family, or by friends, who harbored a strong sentiment against embarrassing the bank by withdrawing at inconvenient seasons. Doubtless the almost uniformly profitable career of most firms for many years concealed many dangers.
The crash came finally as the result of the bankruptcy {522} of the Spanish and French governments. [Sidenote: Bankruptcy of France and Spain, 1557] Spain's repudiation of her debt was partial, taking the form of consolidation and conversion; France, however, simply stopped all payments of interest and amortization. Many banks throughout Europe failed, and drew down with them their creditors. The years 1557-64 saw the first of these characteristically modern phenomena, international financial crises. There were hard times everywhere. Other states followed the example of the French and Spanish governments, England constituting the fortunate exception. Recovery followed at length, however, and speculation boomed; but a second Spanish state bankruptcy [Sidenote: 1575] brought on another crisis, and there was a third, following the defeat of the Armada. The failure of many of the great private companies was followed by the institution of state banks. The first to be erected was the Banco di Rialto in Venice. [Sidenote: 1587]
The banks were the agencies for the spread of the capitalistic system to other fields. The great firms either bought up, or obtained as concessions from some government, the natural resources requisite for the production of wealth. One of the very first things seized by them were the mines. [Sidenote: Mining] Indeed, the profitable exploitation of the German mines especially dates from their acquisition by the Fuggers and other bankers late in the fifteenth century. Partly by the development of new methods of refining ore, but chiefly by driving large numbers of laborers to their maximum effort, the new mine-owners increased the production of metal almost at a bound, and thereby poured untold wealth into their own coffers. The total value of metals produced in Germany in 1525 amounted to $4,800,000 per annum, and employed over 100,000 men. Until 1545 the German production of silver was greater than the American, and copper was almost as valuable {523} a product. Notwithstanding its increased production, its value doubled between 1527 and 1557. The shares in these great companies were, like the "Fugger letters," or certificates of interest-bearing deposits in banks, assignable and were actively traded in on various bourses. Each share was a certificate of partnership which then carried with it unlimited liability for the debts of the company. One of the favorite speculative issues was found in the shares of the Mansfeld Copper Co., established in 1524 with a capital of 70,000 gulden, which was increased to 120,000 gulden in 1528.
[Sidenote: Commerce]
Whereas, in banking and in mining, capital had almost created the opportunities for its employment, in commerce it partly supplanted the older system and partly entered into new paths. In the Middle Ages domestic, and to some extent international, commerce was carried on by fairs adapted to bring producer and consumer together and hence reduce the functions of middleman to the narrowest limits. Such was the annual fair at Stourbridge; such the famous bookmart at Frankfort-on-the-Main, and such were the fairs in Lyons, Antwerp, and many other cities. Only in the larger towns was a market perpetually open. Foreign commerce was also carried on by companies formed on the analogy of the medieval gilds.
New conditions called for fresh means of meeting them. The great change in sea-borne trade effected by the discovery of the new routes to India and America, was not so much in the quantity of goods carried as in the paths by which they traveled. The commerce of the two inland seas, the Mediterranean and the Baltic, relatively declined, while that of the Atlantic seaboard grew by leaps and bounds. New and large companies came into existence, formed on the joint-stock principle. Over them the various governments exercised a large control, giving them a semi-political character.
{524} [Sidenote: Portugal]
As Portugal was the first to tap the wealth of the gorgeous East, into her lap fell the stream of gold from that quarter. The secret of her windfall was the small bulk and enormous value of her cargoes. From Malabar she fetched pepper and ginger, from Ceylon cinnamon and pearls, from Bengal opium, the only known conqueror of pain, and with it frankincense and indigo. Borneo supplied camphor, Amboyna nutmegs and mace, and two small islands, Temote and Tidor, offered cloves. These products sold for forty times as much in London or in Antwerp as they cost in the Orient. No wonder that wealth came in a gale of perfume to Lisbon. The cost of the ship and of the voyage, averaging two years from departure to return, was $20,000, and any ship might bring back a cargo worth $750,000. But the risks were great. Of the 104 ships that sailed from 1497-1506 only 72 returned. In the following century of about 800 Portuguese vessels engaged in the India trade nearly one-eighth were lost. Even the risk of loss in sailing from Lisbon to the ports of northern Europe was appreciable. The king of Portugal insured ships on a voyage from Lisbon to Antwerp for a premium of six per cent.
[Sidenote: Spain]
Spain found the path towards the setting sun as golden as Portugal had found the reflection of his rising beams. At her height she had a thousand merchant galleons. The chief imports were the precious metals, but they were not the only ones. Cochineal, selling at $370 a hundredweight in London, surpassed in value any spice from Celebes. Dye-wood, ebony, some drugs, nuts and a few other articles richly repaid importation. There was also a very considerable export trade. Cadiz and Seville sent to the Indies annually 2,240,000 gallons of wine, with quantities of oil, clothes and other necessities. Many ships, not {525} only Spanish but Portuguese and English, were weighted with human flesh from Africa as heavily as Christian with his black load of sin, and in the case of Portugal, at least, the load almost sent its bearer to the City of Destruction.
But Spanish keels made other wakes than westward. To Flanders oil and wool were sent to be exchanged for manufactured wares, tapestries and books. Italy asked hides and dyes in return for her brocades, pearls and linen. The undoubtedly great extent of Spanish commerce even in places where it had no monopoly, is all the more remarkable in that it was at the first burdened by what in the end choked it, government regulation. Cadiz had the best harbor, but Seville was favored by the king; even ships allowed to unload at Cadiz could do so only on condition that their cargoes be transported directly to Seville. A particularly crushing tax was the alcabala, or 10 per cent. impost on all sales. Other import duties, royalties on metals, excise on food, monopolies, and petty regulations finally handicapped Spain's merchants so effectually that they fell behind those of other countries in the race for supremacy.
[Sidenote: France]
As the mariners of the Iberian peninsula drooped under the shackles of unwise laws, hardy sailors sprang into their places. Neither of the other Latin nations, however, was able to do so. The once proud supremacy of Venice and of Genoa was gone; the former sank as Lisbon rose and the latter, who held her own at least as a money market until 1540, was about that time surpassed, though she was never wholly superseded, by Antwerp. Italy exported wheat, flax, woad and other products, but chiefly by land routes or in foreign keels. Nor was France able to take any great part in maritime trade. Content with the freight brought her by other nations, she sent out few {526} expeditions, and those few, like that of James Cartier, had no present result either in commerce or in colonies. Her greatest mart was Lyons, the fairs there being carefully fostered by the kings and being naturally favored by the growth of manufacture, while the maritime harbors either declined or at least gained nothing. For a few years La Rochelle battened on religious piracy, but that was all.
[Sidenote: Germany]
In no country is the struggle for existence between the medieval and the modern commercial methods plainer than in Germany. The trade of the Hanse towns failed to grow, partly for the reason that their merchants had not command of the fluid wealth that raised to pre-eminence the southern cities. There were, indeed, other causes for the decline of the Hanseatic Baltic trade. The discovery of new routes, especially the opening of Archangel on the White Sea, short-circuited the current that had previously flowed through the Kattegat and the Skager Rak. Moreover, the development of both wheat-growing and of commerce in the Netherlands and in England proved disastrous to the Hanse. The shores of the Baltic had at one time been the granary of Europe, but they suffered somewhat by the greater yield of the more intensive agriculture introduced at that time elsewhere. Even then their export continued to be considerable, though diverted from the northern to the southern ports of Europe. In 1563, for example, 6630 loads of grain were exported from Königsberg, and in 1573 7730 loads.
The Hanse towns lost their English trade in competition with the new companies there formed. A bitter diplomatic struggle was carried on by Henry VIII. The privileges to the Germans of the Steelyard confirmed and extended by him were abridged by his son, partly restored by Mary and again taken {527} away by Elizabeth. The emperor, in agreement with the cities' senates, started retaliatory measures against English merchants, endeavoring to assure the Hanse towns that they should at least "continue the ancient concord of their dear native country and the good Dutches that now presently inhabit it." He therefore ordered English merchants banished, against which Elizabeth protested.
While the North of Germany was suffering from its failure to adapt itself to new conditions, a power was rising in the South capable of levying tribute not only from the whole Empire but from the habitable earth. Among the merchant princes who, in Augsburg, in Nuremberg, in Strassburg, placed on their own brows the golden crown of riches, the Fuggers were both typical and supreme. James Fugger "the Rich," [Sidenote: James Fugger, 1459-1525] springing from a family already opulent, was one of those geniuses of finance that turn everything touched into gold. He carried on a large banking business, he loaned money to emperors and princes, he bought up mines and fitted out fleets, he re-organized great industries, he speculated in politics and religion. For the princes of the empire he farmed taxes; for the pope he sold indulgences at a 33 1/3 per cent. commission, and collected annates and other dues. In Hungary, in Spain, in Italy, in the New World, his agents were delving for money and skilfully diverting it into his coffers. He was also a pillar of the church and a philanthropist, founding a library at Augsburg and building model tenements for poor workers. He became the incarnation of a new Great Power, that of international finance. A contemporary chronicler says: "emperors, kings, princes and governors have sent ambassage unto him; the pope hath greeted him as his beloved son and hath embraced him; cardinals have risen before him. . . . He hath become the glory {528} of the whole German land." His sons, Raymond, Anthony and Jerome, were raised by Charles V to the rank and privileges of counts, bannerets and barons.
Throughout the century corporations became less and less family partnerships and more and more impersonal or "soulless." They were semi-public, semi-private affairs, resting on special charters and actively promoted, not only in Germany but in England and other countries, by the emperor, king, or territorial prince. On the other hand the capital was largely subscribed by private business men and the direction of the companies' affairs was left in their hands. Liability was unlimited.
[Sidenote: Monopolies]
In their methods many of the sixteenth century corporations were surprisingly "modern." Monopolies, corners, trusts and agreements to keep up prices flourished, notwithstanding constant legislation against them, as that against secret schedules of prices passed by the Diet of Nuremberg. [Sidenote: 1522-33] Particularly noteworthy were the number of agreements to create a monopoly price in metals. [Sidenote: 1524] Thus a ring of German mine-owners was formed artificially to raise the price of silver, a measure defended publicly on the ground that it enriched Germany at the expense of the foreigner. Another example was the formation of a tinning company under the patronage of Duke George of Saxony. [Sidenote: 1518] It proposed agreements with its Bohemian rivals to fix the price of tin, [Sidenote: 1549] but these usually failed even after a monopoly of Bohemian tin had been granted by Ferdinand to Conrad Mayr of Augsburg.
[Sidenote: Corners]
The immense difficulty of cornering any of the larger articles of commerce was not so well appreciated in the earlier time as it is now. Nothing is more instructive than the history of the mercury "trusts" of those years. [Sidenote: 1523] When the competing companies owning mines at Idria in Carniola amalgamated for the purpose of {529} enhancing the price of quicksilver, the attempt broke down by reason of the Spanish mines. Accordingly, one Ambrose Höchstetter of Augsburg [Sidenote: 1528] conceived the ambitious project of cornering the whole supply of the world. As has happened so often since, the higher price brought forth a much larger quantity of the article than had been reckoned with, the so-called "invisible supply"; the corner broke down and Höchstetter failed with enormous liabilities of 800,000 gulden, and died in prison. The crash shook the financial world, but was nevertheless followed by still better planned and better financed efforts of the Fuggers to put the whole quicksilver product of the world into an international trust. These final attempts were more or less successful. Another ambitious scheme, which failed, was that of Conrad Rott of Augsburg [Sidenote: 1570 ff.] to get a monopoly of pepper. He agreed to buy six hundred tons of pepper from the king of Portugal one year and one thousand tons the next, at the rate of 680 ducats the ton, but even this failed to give him the desired monopoly.
[Sidenote: Regulation of monopolies]
Just as in our own memory the trusts have aroused popular hatred and have brought down on their heads many attempts, usually unsuccessful, of governments to deal with them, so at the beginning of the capitalistic era, intense unpopularity was the lot of the new commercial methods and their exponents. Monopolies were fiercely denounced in the contemporary German tracts and every Diet made some effort to deal with them. First of all the merchants had to meet not only the envy and prejudices of the old order, but the positive teachings of the church. The prohibition of usury, and the doctrine that every article had a just or natural price, barred the road of the early entrepreneur. Aquinas believed that no one should be allowed to make more money than he needed and that profits on {530} commerce should be scaled down to such a point that they would give only a reasonable return. This idea was shared by Catholic and Protestant alike in the first years of the Reformation; it can be found in Geiler of Kaiserberg and in Luther. In the Reformer's influential tract, To the German Nobility, [Sidenote: 1520] usury and "Fuggerei" are denounced as the greatest misfortunes of Germany. Ulrich von Hutten said that of the four classes of robbers, free-booting knights, lawyers, priests and merchants, the merchants were the worst.
The imperial Diets reflected popular opinion faithfully enough to try their best to bridle the great companies. The Diet of Trèves-Cologne [Sidenote: 1512] asked that monopolies and artificial enhancement of the prices of spice, copper and woolen cloth be prohibited. To effect this acts were passed intended to insure competition. [Sidenote: 1523] This law against monopolies, however, was not vigorously enforced until the Imperial Treasurer cited before his tribunal many merchants of Augsburg accused of violating it. The panic-stricken offenders feverishly hastened to make interest with the princes and city magistrates. But their main support was the emperor, who intervened energetically in their favor. From this time the bankers and great merchants labored hard at each Diet to place the control of monopolies in the hands of the monarch. In return for his constant support he was made a large sharer in the profits of the great houses.
In the struggle with the Diets, at last the capitalists were thoroughly successful. The Imperial Council of Regency passed an epoch-making ordinance, [Sidenote: 1525] kept secret for fear of the people, expressly allowing merchants to sell at the highest prices they could get and recognizing certain monopolies said to be in the national interest as against other countries, and justified for the wages they provided for labor. About this {531} time, for some reason, the agitation gradually died down. It is probable that the religious controversy took the public's mind off economic questions and the Peasant's War, like all unsuccessful but dangerous risings of the poor, was followed by a strong reaction in favor of the conservative rich. Moreover, it is evident that the currents of the time were too strong to be resisted by the feeble methods proposed by the reformers. When we remember that the chief practical measure recommended by Luther was the total prohibition of trading in spices and other foreign wares that took money out of the country, it is easy to see that the regulation of a complex industry was beyond the scope of his ability. And little, if any, enlightenment came from other quarters.
[Sidenote: The Netherlands]
While the towns of southern Germany were becoming the world's banking and industrial centers, the cities of the Netherlands became its chief staple ports. For generations Antwerp had had two fairs a year, but in 1484 it started a perpetual market, open to all merchants, even to foreigners, the whole year round, and in addition to this it increased its fairs to four. Later a new Merchants' Exchange or Bourse was built [Sidenote: 1531] in which almost all the transactions now seen on our stock or produce exchanges took place. There was wild speculation, partly on borrowed money, especially in pepper, the price of which furnished a sort of barometer of bourse feeling. Bets on prices and on events were made, and from this practice various forms of insurance took their rise.
[Sidenote: Antwerp]
The discovery of the new world brought an era of prosperity to Antwerp that doubtless put her at the head of all commercial cities until the Spanish sword cut her down. In 1560 there were commonly 2500 ships anchored in her harbor, as against 500 at Amsterdam, her chief rival and eventual heir. Of these not {532} uncommonly as many as 500 sailed in one day, and, it is said, 12,000 carriages came in daily, 2000 with passengers and 10,000 with wares. Even if these statements are considerable exaggerations, a reliable account of the exports in the single year 1560 shows the real greatness of the town. The total imports in that year amounted to 31,870,000 gulden ($17,848,000), divided as follows: Italian silks, satins and ornaments 6,000,000 gulden; German dimities 1,200,000; German wines 3,000,000; Northern wheat 3,360,000; French wine 2,000,000; French dyes 600,000; French salt 360,000; Spanish wool 1,250,000; Spanish wine 1,600,000; Portuguese spices 2,000,000; English wool 500,000; English cloth 10,000,000. The last named article indicates the decay of Flemish weaving due to English competition. For a time there had been war to the knife with English merchants, following the great commercial treaty popularly called the Malus Intercursus. [Sidenote: 1506] According to the theory then held that one nation's loss was another's gain, [Sidenote: Commercial policy] this treaty was considered a masterpiece of policy in England and the foundation of her commercial greatness. It and its predecessor, the Magnus Intercursus, [Sidenote: 1496] marked the new policy, characteristic of modern times, that made commercial advantages a chief object of diplomacy and of legislation. Protective tariffs were enacted, the export of gold and silver prohibited, and sumptuary laws passed to encourage domestic industries. The policy as to export varied throughout the century and according to the article. The value of ships was highly appreciated. Sir Walter Raleigh opined that command of the sea meant command of the world's riches and ultimately of the world itself. Sir Humphrey Gilbert drew up a report advocating the acquisition of colonies as means of providing markets for home products. So little were the rights of the natives {533} considered that Sir Humphrey stated that the savages would be amply rewarded for all that could be taken from them by the inestimable gift of Christianity.
[Sidenote: Buccaneering]
As little regard was shown for the property of Catholics as for that of heathens. Merry England drew her dividends from slave-trading and from buccaneering as well as from honest exchange of goods. There is something fascinating about the career of a man like Sir John Hawking whose character was as infamous as his daring was serviceable. He early learned that "negroes were very good merchandise in Hispaniola and that they might easily be had upon the coast of Guinea," and so, financed by the British aristocracy and blessed by Protestant patriots, he chartered the Jesus of Lübeck and went burning, stealing and body-snatching in West African villages, crowded his hold full of blacks and sold those of them who survived at $800 a head in the Indies. Quite fittingly he received as a crest "a demi-Moor, proper, in chains." He then went preying on the Spanish galleons, and at one time swindled Philip out of $200,000 by pretending to be a traitor and a renegade; thus he rose from slaver to pirate and from pirate to admiral.
[Sidenote: English commerce]
So pious, patriotic and profitable a business as buccaneering absorbed a greater portion of England's energies than did ordinary maritime commerce. A list of all ships engaged in foreign trade in 1572 shows that they amounted to an aggregate of only 51,000 tons burden, less than that of a single steamer of the largest size today. The largest ship that could reach London was of 240 tons, but some twice as large anchored at other harbors. Throughout the century trade multiplied, that of London, which profited the most, ten-fold. If the customs' dues furnish an accurate barometer for the volume of trade, while London was increasing the other ports were falling behind not only {534} relatively but positively. In the years 1506-9 London yielded to the treasury $60,000 and other ports $75,000; in 1581-2 London paid $175,000 and other ports only $25,000.
As she grew in size and wealth London, like Antwerp, felt the need of permanent fairs. From the continental city Sir Thomas Gresham, the English financial agent in the Netherlands, brought architect and materials [Sidenote: 1568] and erected the Royal Exchange on the north side of Cornhill in London, where the same institution stands today. Built by Gresham at his own expense, it was lined by a hundred small shops rented by him. As the new was rung in, the old passed away. The ancient restrictions on the fluidity of capital were almost broken down [Sidenote: 1542 and 1571] by the end of Elizabeth's reign. The statutes of bankruptcy, giving new and strong securities to creditors, marked the advent to power of the commercial class. Capitalism took form in the chartering of large companies. The first of these, "the mistery and company of the Merchant Adventurers for the discovery of regions, dominions, islands and places unknown," [Sidenote: 1553] commonly called the Russia Company, was a joint-stock corporation with 240 members, each with a share valued at $125. It traded principally with Russia, but, before the century was out, was followed by the Levant Company, the East India Company, and others, for the exploitation of other regions.
To northern Spain England sent coarse cloth, cottons, sheepskins, wheat, butter and cheese, and brought back wine, oranges, lemons and timber. To France went wax, tallow, butter, cheese, wheat, rye, "Manchester cloth," beans and biscuit in exchange for pitch, rosin, feathers, prunes and "great ynnions that be xii or xiiii ynches aboute," iron and wine. To the Russian Baltic ports, Riga, Reval and Narva went coarse cloth, "corrupt" (i.e., adulterated) wine, cony-skins, {535} salt and brandy, and from the same came flax, hemp, pitch, tar, tallow, wax and furs. Salmon from Ireland and other fish from Scotland and Denmark were paid for by "corrupt" wines. To the Italian ports of Leghorn, Barcelona, Civita Vecchia and Venice, and to the Balearic Isles went lead, fine cloth, hides, Newfoundland fish and lime, and from them came oil, silk and fine porcelain. To Barbary went fine cloth, ordnance and artillery, armor and timber for oars, though, as a memorandum of 1580 says, "if the Spaniards catch you trading with them, you shall die for it." Probably what they objected to most was the sale of arms to the infidel. From Barbary came sugar, saltpetre, dates, molasses and carpets. Andalusia demanded fine cloth and cambric in return for wines called "seckes," sweet oil, raisins, salt, cochineal, indigo, sumac, silk and soap. Portugal took butter, cheese, fine cloth "light green or sad blue," lead, tin and hides in exchange for salt, oil, soap, cinnamon, cloves, nutmegs, pepper and all other Indian wares.
While the English drove practically no trade with the East Indies, to the West Indies they sent directly oil, looking-glasses, knives, shears, scissors, linen, and wine which, to be salable, must be "singular good." From thence came gold, pearls "very orient and big withall," sugar and molasses. To Syria went colored cloth of the finest quality, and for it currants and sweet oil were taken. The establishment of an English factor in Turkey [Sidenote: 1582] with the express purpose of furthering trade with that country is an interesting landmark in commercial history.
Even as late as the reign of Elizabeth England imported almost all "artificiality," as high-grade manufactures of a certain sort were called. A famous Elizabethan play turns on the scarcity of needles, [Sidenote: Gammer Gurton's Needle, c. 1559] the whole household being turned upside down to look for {536} the one lost by Gammer Gurton. These articles, as well as knives, nails, pins, buttons, dolls, tennis-balls, tape, thread, glass, and laces, were imported from the Netherlands and Germany. From the same quarter came "small wares for grocers,"--by which may be meant cabbages, turnips and lettuce,--and also hops, copper and brass ware.
[Sidenote: Manufacture]
Having swept all before it in the domains of banking, mining and trade, capitalism, flushed with victory, sought for new worlds to conquer and found them in manufacture. Here also a great struggle was necessary. Hitherto the opposition to the new companies had been mainly on the part of the consumer; now the hostility of the laborer was aroused. The grapple of the two classes, in which the wage-earner went down, partly before the arquebus of the mercenary, partly under the lash and branding-iron of pitiless laws, will be described in the next section. Here it is not the strife of the classes, but of the two economic systems, that is considered. Capitalism won economically before it imposed its yoke on the vanquished by the harsh means of soldier and police. It won, in the final analysis, not because of the inherent power of concentrated wealth, though it used and abused this recklessly, but because, in the struggle for existence, it proved itself the form of life better fitted to survive in the conditions of modern society. It called forth technical improvements, it stimulated individual effort, it put an immense premium on thrift and investment, it cheapened production by the application of initially expensive but ultimately repaying, apparatus, it effected enormous economies in wholesale production and distribution. Before the new methods of business the old gilds stood as helpless, as unready, as bowmen in the face of cannon.
{537} [Sidenote: Gilds]
Each medieval "craft" or "mistery" [1] was in the hands of a gild, all the members of which were theoretically equal. Each passed through the ranks of apprentice and other lower grades until he normally became a master-workman and as such entitled to a full and equal share in the management. The gild managed its property almost like that of an endowment in the hands of trustees; it supervised the whole life of each member, took care of him when sick, buried him when dead and pensioned his widow. In these respects it was like some mutual benefit societies of our day. Almost inevitably in that age, it was under the protection of a patron saint and discharged various religious duties. It acted as a corporate whole in the government of the city and marched and acted as one on festive occasions.
As typical of the organization of industry at the turning-point may be given the list of gilds at Antwerp drawn up by Albert Dürer: [Sidenote: 1520] There were goldsmiths, painters, stone-cutters, embroiderers, sculptors, joiners, carpenters, sailors, fishermen, butchers, cloth-weavers, bakers, cobblers, "and all sorts of artisans and many laborers and merchants of provisions." The list is fully as significant for what it omits as for what it includes. Be it noted that there was no gild of printers, for that art had grown up since the crafts had begun to decline, and, though in some places found as a gild, was usually a combination of a learned profession and a capitalistic venture. Again, in this great banking and trading port, there is no mention of gilds of wholesale merchants (for the "merchants of provisions" were certainly not this) nor of bankers. These were two fully capitalized businesses. Finally, observe that there were many skilled and unskilled laborers {538} not included in a special gild. Here we have the beginning of the proletariat. A century earlier there would have been no special class of laborers, a century later no gilds worth mentioning.
The gilds were handicapped by their own petty regulations. Notwithstanding the fact that their high standards of craftsmanship produced an excellent grade of goods, they were over-regulated and hide-bound, averse to new methods. There was as great a contrast between their meticulous traditions and the freer paths of the new capitalism as there was between scholasticism and science. They could neither raise nor administer the funds needed for foreign commerce and for export industries. Presently new technical methods were adopted by the capitalists, a finer way of smelting ores, and a new way of making brass, invented by Peter von Hoffberg, that saved 50 per cent. of the fuel previously used. In the textile industries came first the spinning-wheel, then the stocking-frame. So in other manufactures, new machinery required novel organization. Significant was the growth of new towns. The old cities were often so gild-ridden that they decayed, while places like Manchester sprang up suddenly at the call of employment. The constant effort of the gild had been to suppress competition and to organize a completely stationary society. In a dynamic world that which refuses to change, perishes. So the gilds, while charging all their woes to the government, really choked themselves to death in their own bands.
[Sidenote: Capitalistic production]
There is perhaps some analogy between the progress of capitalism in the sixteenth century and the process by which the trusts have come to dominate production in our own memory. The larger industries, and especially those connected with export trade, were seized and reorganized first; for a long time, indeed throughout {539} the century, the gilds kept their hold on small, local industries. For a long time both systems went on side by side; the encroachment was steady, but gradual. The exact method of the change was two-fold. In the first place the constitution of the gild became more oligarchical. The older members tended to restrict the administration more and more; they increased the number of apprentices by lengthening the years of apprenticeship and reduced the poorer members to the rank of journeymen who were expected to work, not as before for a limited term of years, but for life, as wage-earners. When the journeymen rebelled, they were put down. The English Clothworkers' Court Book, for example, enacted the rule in 1538 that journeymen who would not work on conditions imposed by the masters should be imprisoned for the first offence and whipped and branded for the second. Nevertheless, to some extent, the master's calling was kept open to the more enterprising and intelligent laborers. It is this opportunity to rise that has always broken up the solidarity of the working class more than anything else.
[Sidenote: Great commercial companies]
But a second transforming influence worked faster from without than did the internal decay of the gild. This was the extension of the commercial system to manufacture. The gilds soon found themselves at the mercy of the great new companies that wanted wares in large quantities for export. Thus the commercial company came either to absorb or to dominate the industries that supplied it. An example of this is supplied by the Paris mercers, who, from being mainly dealers in foreign goods, gradually became employers of the crafts. Similarly the London haberdashers absorbed the crafts of the hatters and cappers. The middle man, who commanded the market, soon found the strategic value of his position for controlling {540} the supply of articles. Commercial capital rapidly became industrial. One by one the great gilds fell under the control of commercial companies. One of the last instances was the formation of the Stationers' Company by which the printers were reduced to the rank of an industry subordinate to that of booksellers.
[Sidenote: Legislation on gilds]
Finally came the legislative attack on the gilds, that broke what little power they had left. There is now a tendency to minimise the result of legislation in this field, but the impression that one gets by perusing the statutes not only of England but of Continental countries is that, while perhaps the governments would not have admitted any hostility to the gilds as such, they were strongly opposed to many features of them, and were determined to change them in accordance with the interests of the now dominant class. The policy of the moneyed men was not to destroy the crafts, but to exploit them; indeed they often found their old franchises extremely useful in arrogating to themselves the powers that had once belonged to the gild as a whole. The town governments were elected by the wealthy burghers; Parliaments soon came to side with them, and the monarch had already been bribed into an ally.
To give specific examples of the new trend is easy. When the great tapestry manufacture of Brussels was reorganized [Sidenote: 1544] on a basis very favorable to the capitalists, the law sanctioning this step spoke contemptuously of the mutual benefit and religious functions of the gild as "petty details." [Sidenote: 1515] Brandenburg now regulated the terms on which entrance to a gild should be allowed instead of leaving the matter as of old to the members themselves. [Sidenote: 1540] The Polish nobility, jealous of the cities' monopoly of trade, demanded the total abolition of the gilds. [Sidenote: 1503 ff.] A series of measures in England weakened the power of the gilds; under Edward VI [Sidenote: 1547] their endowments for religious purposes were {541} attacked, and this hurt them far more than would appear on the surface. The important Act Touching Weavers [Sidenote: 1555] both witnessed the unhappy condition of the misteries and, without seeming to do so, still further put them in the power of their masters. The workmen, it seems, had complained "that the rich and wealthy clothiers oppress them" by building up factories, or workshops in which many looms were installed, instead of keeping to the old commission or sweat-shop system, by which piece work was given out and done by each man at home. The gild-workmen preferred this method, because their great rival was the newly developed proletariat, masses of men who could only be accommodated in large buildings. The act, under the guise of redressing the grievance, in reality confirmed the powers of the capitalists, for, while forbidding the use of factories outside of cities, it allowed them within towns and in the four northern counties, thus fortifying the monopolists in those places where they were strong, and hitting their rivals elsewhere. Further legislation, like the Elizabethan Statute of Apprentices, [Sidenote: 1563] strengthened the hands of the masters at the expense of the journeymen. Such examples are only typical; similar laws were enacted throughout Europe. By act after act the employers were favored at the expense of the laborers.
[Sidenote: Agriculture]
There remained agriculture, at that time by far the largest and most important of all the means by which man wrings his sustenance from nature. Even now the greater part of the population in most civilized countries--and still more in semi-civilized--is rural, but four hundred years ago the proportion was much larger. England was a predominantly agricultural country until the eighteenth century,--England, the most commercial and industrial of nations! Though {542} the last field to be attacked by capital, agriculture was as thoroughly renovated in the sixteenth century by this irrigating force as the other manners of livelihood had been transformed before it.
Medieval agriculture was carried on by peasants holding small amounts of land which would correspond to the small shops and slender capital of the handicraftsman. Each local unit, whether free village or a manor, was made up of different kinds of land,--arable, commons for pasturing sheep and cattle, forests for gathering firewood and for herding swine and meadows for growing hay. The arable land was divided into three so-called "fields," or sections, each field partitioned into smaller portions called in England "shots," and these in turn were subdivided into acre strips. Each peasant possessed a certain number of these tiny lots, generally about thirty, ten in each field. Normally, one field would be left fallow each year in turn, one field would be sown with winter wheat or rye (the bread crop), and one field with barley for beer and oats for feeding the horses and cattle. Into this system it was impossible to introduce individualism. Each man had to plow and sow when the village decided it should be done. And the commons and woodlands were free for all, with certain regulations.[2]
[Sidenote: Medieval farming methods]
The art of farming was not quite primitive, but it had changed less since the dawn of history than it has changed since 1600. Instead of great steam-plows and all sorts of machinery for harrowing and harvesting, small plows were pulled by oxen, and hoes and rakes were plied by hand. Lime, marl and manure were used for fertilizing, but scantily. The cattle were {543} small and thin, and after a hard winter were sometimes so weak that they had to be dragged out to pasture. Sheep were more profitable, and in the summer season good returns were secured from chickens, geese, swine and bees. Diseases of cattle were rife and deadly. The principles of breeding were hardly understood. Fitzherbert, who wrote on husbandry in the early sixteenth century, along with some sensible advice makes remarks, on the influence of the moon on horse-breeding, worthy of Hesiod. Indeed, the matter was left almost to itself until a statute of Henry VIII provided that no stallions above two years old and under fifteen hands high be allowed to run loose on the commons, and no mares of less than thirteen hands, lest the breed of horses deteriorate. It was to meet the same situation that the habit of castrating horses arose and became common about 1580.
[Sidenote: Capitalistic change]
The capitalistic attack on communistic agriculture took two principal forms. In some countries, like Germany, it was the consequence of the change from natural economy to money economy. The new commercial men bought up the estates of the nobles and subjected them to a more intense cultivation, at the same time using all the resources of law and government to make them as lucrative as possible.
[Sidenote: Inclosures]
But in two countries, England and Spain, and to some small extent in others, a profitable opportunity for investment was found in sheep-farming on a large scale. In England this manifested itself in "inclosures," by which was primarily meant the fencing in for private use of the commons, but secondarily came to be applied to the conversion of arable land into pasture[3] and the substitution of large holdings for small. The cause of the movement was the demand for wool in cloth-weaving, largely for export trade.
{544} [Sidenote: Complaint against inclosures]
Contemporaries noticed with much alarm the operations of this economic change. A cry went up that sheep were eating men, that England was being turned into one great pasture to satisfy the greed of the rich, while the land needed for grain was abandoned and tenants forcibly ejected. The outcry became loudest about the years 1516-8, when a commission was appointed to investigate the "evil" of inclosures. It was found that in the past thirty years the amount of land in the eight counties most affected was 22,500 acres. This was not all for grazing; in Yorkshire it was largely for sport, in the Midlands for plowing, in the south for pasture.
The acreage would seem extremely small to account for the complaint it excited. Doubtless it was only the chief and most typical of the hardships caused to a certain class by the introduction of new methods. One is reminded of the bitter hostility to the introduction of machinery in the nineteenth century, when the vast gain in wealth to the community as a whole, being indirect, seemed cruelly purchased at the cost of the sufferings of those laborers who could not adapt themselves to the novel methods. Evolution is always hard on a certain class and the sufferers quite naturally vociferate their woes without regard to the real causes of the change or to the larger interests of society.
Certain it is that inclosures went on uninterrupted throughout the century, in spite of legislative attempts to stop them. Indeed, they could hardly help continuing, when they were so immensely profitable. Land that was inclosed for pasture brought five pounds for every three pounds it had paid under the plow. Sheep multiplied accordingly. The law of 1534 spoke of some men owning as many as 24,000 sheep, and unwittingly gave, in the form of a complaint, the cause thereof, {545} namely that the price of wool had recently doubled. The law limited the number of sheep allowed to one man to 2000. The people arose and slaughtered sheep wholesale in one of those unwise and blind, but not unnatural, outbursts of sabotage by which the proletariat now and then seeks to destroy the wealth that accentuates their poverty. Then as always, the only causes for unwelcome alterations of their manner of life seen by them was the greed and heartlessness of a ring of men, or of the government. The deeper economic forces escaped detection, or at least, attention.
During the period 1450-1610 it is probable that about 2 3/4 per cent. of the total area of England had been inclosed. The counties most affected were the Midlands, in some of which the amount of land affected was 8 per cent. to 9 per cent. of the total area. But though the aggregate seems small, it was a much larger proportion, in the then thinly settled state of the realm, of the total arable land,--of this it was probably one-fifth. Under Elizabeth perhaps one-third of the improved land was used for grazing and two-thirds was under the plow.
[Sidenote: Spain: the Mesta]
In Spain the same tendency to grow wool for commercial purposes manifested itself in a slightly different form. There, not by the inclosure of commons, but by the establishment of a monopoly by the Castilian "sheep-trust," the Mesta, did a large corporation come to prevail over the scattered and peasant agricultural interests. The Mesta, which existed from 1273 to 1836, reached the pinnacle of its power in the first two-thirds of the sixteenth century. [Sidenote: 1568] When it took over from the government the appointment of the officer supposed to supervise it in the public interest, the Alcalde Entregador, it may be said to have won a decisive victory for capitalism. At that time it owned {546} as many as seven million sheep, and exported wool to the weight of 55,000 tons and to the value of $560,000, per annum.
[Sidenote: Wheat growing]
Having mastered the sources of wealth offered by wool-growing, the capitalists next turned to arable land and by their transformation of it took the last step in the commercializing of life. Even now, in England, land is not regarded as quite the same kind of investment as a factory or railroad; there is still the vestige of a tradition that the tenant has customary privileges against the right of the owner of the land to exploit it for all it is worth. But this is indeed a faint ghost of the medieval idea that the custom was sacred and the profit of the landlord entirely secondary. The longest step away from the medieval to the modern system was taken in the sixteenth century, and its outward and visible sign was the substitution of the leasehold for the ancient copyhold. The latter partook of the nature of a vested right or interest; the former was but a contract for a limited, often for a short, term, at the end of which the tenant could be ejected, the rent raised, or, as was most usual, an enormous fine (i.e., fee) exacted for renewal of the lease.
The revolution was facilitated by, if it did not in part consist of, the acquisition of the land by the new commercial class, resulting in increased productivity. New and better methods of tillage were introduced. The scattered thirty acres of the peasant were consolidated into three ten-acre fields, henceforth to be used as the owner thought best. One year a field would be under a cereal crop; the next year converted into pasture. This improved method, known as "convertible husbandry" practiced in England and to a lesser extent on the Continent, was a big step in the direction of scientific agriculture. Regular rotation of crops {547} was hardly a common practice before the eighteenth century, but there was something like it in places where hemp and flax would be alternated with cereals. Capitalists in the Netherlands built dykes, drained marshes and dug expensive canals. Elsewhere also swamps were drained and irrigation begun. But perhaps no single improvement in technique accounted for the greater yield of the land so much as the careful and watchful self-interest of the private owner, as against the previous semi-communistic carelessness. Several popular proverbs then gained currency in the sense that there is no fertilizer of the glebe like that put on by the master himself. Harrison's statement, in Elizabeth's reign, that an inclosed acre yielded as much as an acre and a half of common, is borne out by the English statistics of the grain trade. From 1500 to 1534, while the process of inclosure was at its height, the export of corn more than doubled; it then diminished until it almost ceased in 1563, after which it rapidly increased until 1600. During the whole century the population was growing, and it is therefore reasonable to suppose that the yield of the soil was considerably greater in 1600 than it was in 1500.
[Sidenote: Export of grain after 1559]
It must, however, be admitted that the increase in exports was in part caused by and in part symptomatic of a change in the policy of the government. When commerce became king he looked out for his own interests first, and identified these interests with the dividends of small groups of his chief ministers. Trade was regulated, by tariff and bounty, no longer in the interests of the consumer but in those of the manufacturer and merchant. The corn-laws of nineteenth-century England have their counterpart in the Elizabethan policy of encouraging the export of grain that was needed at home. As soon as the land and the Parliament both fell into the hands of the new {548} capitalistic landlords, they used the one to enhance to profits of the other. Nor was England alone in this. France favored the towns, that is the industrial centers, by forcing the rural population to sell at very low rates, and by encouraging export of grain. Perhaps this same policy was most glaring of all in Sixtine Rome, where the Papal States were taxed, as the provinces of the Empire had been before, to keep bread cheap in the city.
[1] From the Latin ministerium, French métier, not connected with "mystery."
[2] For the substance of this paragraph, as well as for numerous suggestions on the rest of the chapter, I am indebted to Professor N. S. B. Gras, of Minneapolis.
[3] Although some of the inclosed land was tilled; see below.
SECTION 2. THE RISE OF THE MONEY POWER
[Sidenote: Money crowned king]
In modern times, Money has been king. Perhaps at a certain period in the ancient world wealth had as much power as it has now, but in the Middle Ages it was not so. Money was then ignored by the tenant or serf who paid his dues in feudal service or in kind; it was despised by the noble as the vulgar possession of Jews or of men without gentle breeding, and it was hated by the church as filthy lucre, the root of all evil and, together with sex, as one of the chief instruments of Satan. The "religious" man would vow poverty as well as celibacy.
But money now became too powerful to be neglected or despised, and too desirable to be hated. In the age of transition the medieval and modern conceptions of riches are found side by side. When Holbein came to London the Hanse merchants there employed him to design a pageant for the coronation of Anne Boleyn. In their hall he painted two allegorical pictures, The Triumph of Poverty and The Triumph of Wealth. The choice of subjects was representative of the time of transition.
[Sidenote: Revolution]
The economic innovation sketched in the last few pages was followed by a social readjustment sufficiently violent and sufficiently rapid to merit the name of revolution. The wave struck different countries at {549} different times, but when it did come in each, it came with a rush, chiefly in the twenties in Germany and Spain, in the thirties and forties in England, a little later, with the civil wars, in France. It submerged all classes but the bourgeoisie; or, rather, it subjugated them all and forced them to follow, as in a Roman triumph, the conquering car of Wealth.
[Sidenote: Bourgeoisie uses monarchy]
The one other power in the state that was visibly aggrandized at the expense of other classes, besides the plutocracy, was that of the prince. This is sometimes spoken of as the result of a new political theory, an iniquitous, albeit unconscious, conspiracy of Luther and Machiavelli, to exalt the divine right of kings. But in truth their theories were but an expression of the accomplished, or easily foreseen, fact; and this fact was due in largest measure to the need of the commercial class for stable and for strong government. Riches, which at the dawn of the twentieth century seemed, momentarily, to have assumed a cosmopolitan character, were then bound up closely with the power of the state. To keep order, to bridle the lawless, to secure concessions and markets, a mercantile society needed a strong executive, and this they could find only in the person of the prince. Luther says that kings are only God's gaolers and hangmen, high-born and splendid because the meanest of God's servants must be thus accoutred. It would be a little truer to say that they were the gaolers and hangmen hired by the bourgeoisie to over-awe the masses and that their quaint trappings and titles were kept as an ornament to the gay world of snobbery.
[Sidenote: And other agencies]
Together with the monarchy, the new masters of men developed other instruments, parliamentary government in some countries, a bureaucracy in others, and a mercenary army in nearly all. At that time was either invented or much quoted the saying that {550} gold was one of the nerves of war. The expensive firearms that blew up the feudal castle were equally deadly when turned against the rioting peasants.
[Sidenote: To break the nobility]
Just as the burgher was ready to shoulder his way into the front rank, he was greatly aided by the frantic civil strife that broke out in both the older privileged orders. Never was better use made of the maxim, "divide and conquer," than when the Reformation divided the church, and the civil wars, dynastic in England, feudal in Germany and nominally religious in France, broke the sword of the noble. When the earls and knights had finished cutting each others' throats there were hardly enough of them left to make a strong stand. Occasionally they tried to do so, as in the revolt of Sickingen in Germany, of the Northern Earls in England, and in the early stages of the rising of the Communeros in Spain. In every case they were defeated, and the work of the sword was completed by the axe and the dagger. Whether they trod the blood-soaked path to the Tower, or whether they succumbed to the hired assassins of Catharine, the old nobles were disposed of and the power of their caste was broken. But their places were soon taken by new men. Some bought baronies and titles outright, others ripened more gradually to these honors in the warmth of the royal smile and on the sunny slopes of manors wrested from the monks. But the end finally attained was that the coronet became a mere bauble in the hands of the rich, the final badge of social deference to success in money-making.
[Sidenote: Plunder the church]
Still more violent was the spoliation of the church. The confiscations carried out in the name of religion redounded to the benefit of the newly rich. It is true that all the property taken did not fall into their hands; some was kept by the prince, more was used to found or endow hospices, schools and asylums for the poor. {551} But the most and the best of the land was soon thrown to the eager grasp of traders and merchants. In England probably one-sixth of all the cultivated soil in the kingdom was thus transferred, in the course of a few years, into the hands of new men. Thus were created many of the "county families" of England, and thus the new interest soon came to dominate Parliament. Under Henry VII the House of Lords, at one important session, mustered thirty spiritual and only eighteen temporal peers. In the reign of his son the temporal peers came to outnumber the spiritual, from whom the abbots had been subtracted. The Commons became, what they remained until the nineteenth century, a plutocracy representing either landed or commercial wealth.
Somewhat similar secularizations of ecclesiastical property took place throughout Germany, the cities generally leading. The process was slow, but certain, in Electoral Saxony, Hesse and the other Protestant territories, and about the same time in Sweden and in Denmark. But something the same methods were recommended even in Roman Catholic lands and in Russia of the Eastern Church, so contagious were the examples of the Reformers. [Sidenote: 1536] Venice forbade gifts or legacies to church or cloisters. [Sidenote: 1557] France, where confiscation was proposed, [Sidenote: 1516] partially attained the same ends by subjecting the clergy to the power of the crown.
[Sidenote: Bourgeoisie]
Among the groups into which society naturally falls is that of the intellectual class, the body of professional men, scientists, writers and teachers. [Sidenote: Bribes the intelligentsia] This group, just as it came into a new prominence in the sixteenth century, at the same time became in part an annex and a servant to the money power. The high expense of education as compared with the Middle Ages, the enormous fees then charged for graduating in professional schools, the custom of buying {552} livings in the church and practices in law and medicine, the need of patronage in letters and art, made it nearly impossible for the sons of the poor to enter into the palace of learning. Moreover the patronage of the wealthy, their assertion of a monopoly of good form and social prestige, seduced the professional class that now ate from the merchant's hand, aped his manners, and served his interests. For four hundred years law, divinity, journalism, art, and education, have cut their coats, at least to some extent, in the fashion of the court of wealth.
[Sidenote: And subjugates the proletariat]
Last of all, there remained the only power that proved itself nearly a match for money, that of labor. Far outnumbering the capitalists, in every other way the workers were their inferiors,--in education, in organization, in leadership and in material resources. One thing that made their struggle so hard was that those men of exceptional ability who might have been their leaders almost always made fortunes of their own and then turned their strength against their former comrades. Labor also suffered terribly from quacks and ranters with counsels of folly or of madness.
The social wars of the sixteenth century partook of the characteristics of both medieval and modern times. The Peasants' Revolt in Germany was both communistic and religious; the risings of Communeros and the Hermandad in Spain were partly communistic; the several rebellions in England were partly religious. But a new element marked them all, the demand on the part of the workers for better wages and living conditions. The proletariat of town and mining district joined the German peasants in 1524; the revolt was in many respects like a gigantic general strike.
[Sidenote: Emancipation of the serfs]
Great as are the ultimate advantages of freedom, the emancipation of the serfs cannot be reckoned as {553} an immediate economic gain to them. They were freed not because of the growth of any moral sentiment, much less as the consequence of any social cataclysm, but because free labor was found more profitable than unfree. It is notable that serfs were emancipated first in those countries like Scotland where there had been no peasants' revolt; the inference is that they were held in bondage in other countries longer than it was profitable to do so for political reasons. The last serf was reclaimed in Scotland in 1365, but the serfs had not been entirely freed in England even in the reign of Elizabeth. In France the process went on rapidly in the 15th century, often against the wishes of the serfs themselves. One hundred thousand peasants emigrated from Northern France to Burgundy at that time to exchange their free for a servile state. However, they did not enjoy their bondage for long. Serfs in the Burgundian state, especially in the Netherlands, lost their last chains in the sixteenth century, most rapidly between the years 1515 and 1531. In Germany serfdom remained far beyond the end of the sixteenth century, doubtless in part because of the fears excited by the civil war of 1525.
[Sidenote: Regulation of labor]
In place of the old serfdom under one master came a new and detailed regulation of labor by the government. This regulation was entirely from the point of view, and consequently all but entirely in the interests, of the propertied classes. The form was the old form of medieval paternalism, but the spirit was the new spirit of capitalistic gain. The endeavor of the government to be fair to the laborer as well as to the employer is very faint, but it is just perceptible in some laws.
Most of the taxes and burdens of the state were loaded on the backs of the poor. Hours of labor were fixed at from 12 to 15 according to the season. {554} Regulation of wages was not sporadic, but was a regular part of the work of certain magistrates, in England of the justices of the peace. Parliament enforced with incredible severity the duty of the poor and able-bodied man to work. Sturdy idlers were arrested and drafted into the new proletariat needed by capital. When whipping, branding, and short terms of imprisonment, did not suffice to compel men to work, a law was passed to brand able-bodied vagrants on the chest with a "V," [Sidenote: 1547] and to assign them to some honest neighbor "to have and to hold as a slave for the space of two years then next following." The master should "only give him bread and water and small drink and such refuse of meat as he should think meet to cause the said slave to work." If the slave still idled, or if he ran away and was caught again he was to be marked on the face with an "S" and to be adjudged a slave for life. If finally refractory he was to be sentenced as a felon. This terrible measure, intended partly to reduce lawless vagrancy, partly to supply cheap labor to employers, failed of its purpose and was repealed in two years. Its re-enactment was vainly urged by Cecil upon Parliament in 1559. As a substitute for it in this year the law was passed forbidding masters to receive any workman without a testimonial from his last employer; laborers were not allowed to stop work or change employers without good cause, and conversely employers were forbidden to dismiss servants "unduly."
[Sidenote: The proletariat]
In Germany the features of the modern struggle between owners and workers are plainest. In mining, especially, there developed a real proletariat, a class of laborers seeking employment wherever it was best paid and combining and striking for higher wages. To combat them were formed pools of employers to keep down wages and to blacklist agitators. Typical of these was the agreement made by Duke George of {555} Saxony and other large mine-owners not to raise wages, [Sidenote: 1520] not to allow miners to go from place to place seeking work, and not to hire any troublesome agitator once dismissed by any operator.
It is extraordinary how rapidly many features of the modern proletariat developed. Take, for example, the housing problem. As this became acute some employers built model tenements for their workers. Others started stores at which they could buy food and clothing, and even paid them in part in goods instead of in money. Labor tended to become fluid, moving from one town to another and from one industry to another according to demand. Such a thing had been not unknown in the previous centuries; it was strongly opposed by law in the sixteenth. The new risks run by workers were brought out when, for the first time in history, a great mining accident took place in 1515, a flood by which eighty-eight miners were drowned. Women began to be employed in factories and were cruelly exploited. Most sickening of all, children were forced, as they still are in some places, to wear out their little lives in grinding toil. The lace-making industry in Belgium, for example, fell entirely into the hands of children. Far from protesting against this outrage, the law actually sanctioned it by the provision that no girl over twelve be allowed to make lace, lest the supply of maidservants be diminished.
[Sidenote: Strikes]
Strikes there were and rebellions of all sorts, every one of them beaten back by the forces of the government and of the capitalists combined. The kings of commerce were then, more than now, a timorous and violent race, for then they were conscious of being usurpers. When they saw a Münzer or a Kett--the mad Hamlets of the people--mop and mow and stage their deeds before the world, they became frantic with terror and could do nought but take subtle counsel to {556} kill these heirs, or pretenders, to their realms. The great rebellions are all that history now pays much attention to, but in reality the warfare on the poor was ceaseless, a chronic disease of the body politic. Louis XI spared nothing, disfranchisement, expulsion, wholesale execution, to beat down the lean and hungry conspirators against the public order, whose raucous cries of misery he detested. With somewhat gentler, because stronger, hand, his successors followed in his footsteps. But when needed the troops were there to support the rich. The great strike of printers at Lyons is one example of several in France. In the German mines there were occasional strikes, sternly suppressed by the princes acting in agreement.
[Sidenote: Degradation of the poor]
There can be no doubt that the economic developments of the sixteenth century worked tremendous hardship to the poor. It was noted everywhere that whereas wine and meat were common articles in 1500, they had become luxuries by 1600. Some scholars have even argued from this a diminution of the wealth of Europe during the century. This, however, was not the case. The aggregate of capital, if we may judge from many other indications, notably increased throughout the century. But it became more and more concentrated in a few hands.
The chief natural cause of the depression of the working class was the rise in prices. Wages have always shown themselves more sluggish in movement than commodities. While money wages, therefore, remained nearly stationary, real wages shrank throughout the century. In 1600 a French laborer was obliged to spend 55 per cent. of his wages merely on food. A whole day's labor would only buy him two and one half pounds of salt. Rents were low, because the houses were incredibly bad. At that time a year's rent for a laborer's tenement cost from ten to twenty {557} days labor; it now costs about thirty days' labor. The new commerce robbed the peasant of some of his markets by substituting foreign articles like indigo and cochineal for domestic farm products. The commercialization of agriculture worked manifold hardship to the peasant. Many were turned off their farms to make way for herds of sheep, and others were hired on new and harder terms to pay in money for the land they had once held on customary and not too oppressive terms of service and dues.
Under all the splendors of the Renaissance, with its fields of cloth of gold and its battles like knightly jousts, with its constant stream of adulation from artists and authors, with the ostentation of the new wealth and the greedily tasted pleasures of living and enjoying, an attentive ear can hear the low, uninterrupted murmurs of the wretched, destined to burst forth, on the day of despair or of vengeance, into ferocious clamors. [Sidenote: No pity for the poor] Nor was there then much pity for the poor. The charity and worship for "apostolic poverty" of the Middle Ages had ceased, nor had that social kindness, so characteristic of our own time that it is affected even by those who do not feel it, arisen. The rich and noble, absorbed in debauchery or art, regarded the peasant as a different race--"the ox without horns" they called him--to be cudgeled while he was tame and hunted like a wolf when he ran wild. Artists and men of letters ignored the very existence of the unlettered, with the superb Horatian, "I hate the vulgar crowd and I keep them off," or, if they were aroused for a moment by the noise of civil war merely remarked, with Erasmus, that any tyranny was better than that of the mob. Churchmen like Matthew Lang and Warham and the popes oppressed the poor whom Jesus loved. "Rustica gens optima flens" smartly observed a canon of Zurich, while Luther blurted out, {558} "accursed, thievish, murderous peasants" and "the gentle" Melanchthon almost sighed, "the ass will have blows and the people will be ruled by force."
There were, indeed, a few honorable exceptions to the prevalent callousness. "I praise thee, thou noble peasant," wrote an obscure German, "before all creatures and lords upon earth; the emperor must be thy equal." The little read epigrams of Euricius Cordus, a German humanist who was, by exception, also humane, denounce the blood-sucking of the peasants by their lords. Greatest of all, Sir Thomas More felt, not so much pity for the lot of the poor, as indignation at their wrongs. The Utopia will always remain one of the world's noblest books because it was almost the first to feel and to face the social problem.
[Sidenote: Pauperism]
This became urgent with the large increase of pauperism and vagrancy throughout the sixteenth century, the most distressing of the effects of the economic revolution. When life became too hard for the evicted tenant of a sheep-raising landlord, or for the déclassé journeyman of the town gild, he had little choice save to take to the road. Gangs of sturdy vagrants, led by and partly composed of old soldiers, wandered through Europe. But a little earlier than the sixteenth century that race of mendicants the Gipsies, made their debut. The word "rogue" was coined in England about 1550 to name the new class. The Book of Vagabonds, [Sidenote: 1510] written by Matthew Hütlin of Pfortzheim, describes twenty-eight varieties of beggars, exposes their tricks, and gives a vocabulary of their jargon. Some of these beggars are said to be dangerous, threatening the wayfarer or householder who will not pay them; others feign various diseases, or make artificial wounds and disfigurations to excite pity, or take a religious garb, or drag chains to show that they had escaped from galleys, or have other plausible tales of woe and {559} of adventure. All contemporaries testify to the alarming numbers of these men and women; how many they really were it is hard to say. It has been estimated that in 1500 20 per cent. of the population of Hamburg and 15 per cent. of the population of Augsburg were paupers. Under Elizabeth probably from a quarter to a third of the population of London were paupers, and the country districts were just as bad. Certain parts of Wales were believed to have a third of their population in vagabondage.
In the face of this appalling situation the medieval method of charity completely broke down. In fact, with its many begging friars, with its injunction of alms-giving as a good work most pleasing to God, and with its respect for voluntary poverty, the church rather aggravated than palliated the evil of mendicancy. The state had to step in to relieve the church.
[Sidenote: State poor-relief, 1506]
This was early done in the Netherlands. A severe edict was issued and repeatedly re-enacted against tramps ordering them to be whipped, have their heads shaved, and to be further punished with stocks. An enterprising group of humanists and lawyers demanded that the government should take over the duty of poor-relief from the church. Accordingly at Lille a "common chest" was started, the first civil charitable bureau in the Netherlands. [Sidenote: 1512] At Bruges a cloister was secularized and turned into a school for eight hundred poor children in uniform. A secular bureau of charity was started at Antwerp. [Sidenote: 1521]
Under these circumstances the humanist Lewis Vives wrote his famous tract on the relief of the poor, [Sidenote: January, 1526] in the form of a letter to the town council of Bruges. In this well thought out treatise he advocated the law that no one should eat who did not work, and urged that all able-bodied vagrants should be hired out to artisans--a suggestion how welcome to the capitalists eager to {560} draft men into their workshops! Cases of people unable to work should also be taken up, and they should be cared for by application of religious endowments by the government. Vives' claim to recognition lies even more in his spirit than in his definite program. For almost the first time in history he plainly said that poverty was a disgrace as well as a danger to the state and should be, not palliated, but extirpated.
While Vives was still preparing his treatise the city of Ypres [Sidenote: 1525] (tragic name!) had already sought his advice and acted upon it, as well as upon the example of earlier reforms in German cities, in promulgating an ordinance. The city government combined all religious and philanthropic endowments into one fund and appointed a committee to administer it, and to collect further gifts. These citizens were to visit the poor in their dwellings, to apply what relief was necessary, to meet twice a week to concert remedial measures and to have charge of enforcing the laws against begging and idleness. All children of the poor were sent to school or taught a trade.
Though there were sporadic examples of municipal poor-relief in Germany prior to the Reformation, it was the religious movement that there first gave the cause its decisive impulse. In his Address to the German Nobility Luther had recommended that each city should take care of its own poor and suppress "the rascally trade of begging." During his absence at the Wartburg his more radical colleagues had taken steps to put these ideas into practice at Wittenberg. A common fund was started by the application of ecclesiastical endowments, from which orphans were to be housed, students at school and university to be helped, poor girls dowered and needy workmen loaned money at four per cent. A severe law against begging was passed. Augsburg and Nuremberg followed the {561} example of Wittenberg almost at once [Sidenote: 1522] and other German cities, to the number of forty-eight, one by one joined the procession.
For fairly obvious reasons the state regulation of pauperism, though it did not originate in the Reformation, was much more rapidly and thoroughly developed in Protestant lands. In these the power of the state and the economic revolution attained their maximum development, whereas the Roman church was inclined, or obligated, to stand by the medieval position. "Alms-giving is papistry," said a Scotch tract. Thus Christian Cellarius, a professor at Louvain, published A Plea for the Right of the Poor to Beg. [Sidenote: 1530] The Spanish monk, Lawrence da Villavicenzio in his Sacred Economy of caring for the Poor, [Sidenote: 1564] condemned the whole plan of state regulation and subvention as heretical. The Council of Trent, also, put itself on the medieval side, and demanded the restoration to the church of the direction of charity.
[Sidenote: 1531]
But even in Catholic lands the new system made headway. As the University of Paris approved the ordinance of Ypres, in France, and in Catholic Germany, a plan comprising elements of the old order, but informed by the modern spirit, grew up.
In England the problem of pauperism became more acute than elsewhere. The drastic measures taken to force men to work failed to supply all needs. After municipal relief of various sorts had been tried, and after the government had in vain tried to stimulate private munificence to co-operate with the church [Sidenote: 1572] to meet the growing need, the first compulsory Poor Rates were laid. Three or four years later came an act for setting the poor to labor in workhouses. These measures failed of the success that met the continental method. Even compared to Scotland, England developed a disproportionate amount of pauperism. Some {562} authorities have asserted that by giving the poor a legal right to aid she encouraged the demand for it. [Sidenote: 1572] Probably, however, she simply furnished the extreme example of the commercialism that made money but did not make men.