Chapter 21 Flashcards
What happened to nobility under Elizabeth?
English society remained under aristocratic domination during the reign of Elizabeth. There were few hereditary peers. The highest peerage title, duke, carried inherent dangers in Tudor England: each of the four ducal titles that existed in England in the period from 1547 to 1572 - Somerset, Northumberland, Suffolk and Norfolk - met a bloody end with their holders suffering traitors deaths. After 1572 Elizabeth was careful not to create any more dukes.
By Elizabeth’s reign, the nobility had become more peaceable than in earlier times, and less concerned with defence. Below dukes, the other four ranks of the peerage, though few in number, sought to enhance their prestige through massive building projects; part of the motivation for this was to ensure that they could accommodate the queen in appropriate surroundings on royal progresses. Houses such as Burghley (then in Northamptonshire and built by Lord Burghley) and Wilton in Wiltshire (built by the Earl of Pembroke) were therefore conceived and built on a grand scale. Elizabeth herself chose not to emulate such grandeur, being inclined on cost grounds to modify some of the many building projects of her father.
What happened to gentry under Elizabeth?
Below the peerage came the gentry. This term continued to elude precise definition and embraced a wide social range - from influential knights of
The social structure of early Tudor definition ad figures of national importance, such as Sir Christopher Hatton, modest local landowners. Between these two extremes came the county gentlemen and esquires who dominated local government through their work as justices of the peace (IPs) and who often took on the burden of local office without receiving any tangible rewards. The gentry class increased in size during Elizabeths reign, and the proportion who were seriously wealthy went up.
What happened to classes below nobility and gentry?
The other layers of society differed little from what they had been at the start of the century. However, the reign of Elizabeth was a period during which the gap between rich and poor widened. The period witnessed the beginnings of a consumer society amongst the prosperous members of the landed, mercantile and professional classes. Landed incomes increased, especially after about 1570. On the other hand, poorer sectors of the population found themselves vulnerable to enclosure and to the persistent decline in real wages.
What happened to the population?
the 1550s and 1560s are outlined
By the end of Elizabeth’s reign the population was roughly 4 million.
The bulk of the people still lived in the countryside. The only large city was London, whose population, much of which by now lived outside the bounds of the City, was probably as high as 150,000. London acted as a huge magnet for migrants from other parts of the country. The largest provincial
cities were Norwich and Bristol, but few other cities had populations in
excess of 5000.
Example of local area developing poor relief
Some urban areas had developed their own systems of poor relief by the 1570s and it was a scheme developed in Norwich that provided the basis for the Elizabethan poor law legislation between 1576 and 1601.
Acts passed to relieve poverty in later reign (4)
• An Act of 1572 established the principle that local ratepayers should be required to pay a rate for the relief of their own poor.
•The Poor Law Act of 1576 was the first act to attempt to create a national system of poor relief to be financed and administered locally. Under the Act, towns were required to make provision for the employment of the deserving poor.
• Further Acts in 1598 and 1601 completed the legislative process. Under the Elizabethan Poor Law Act of 1601, the parish became designated as the institution required to raise the rates for, and to administer, poor relief. Each parish was to appoint an overseer of the poor who was to ensure both the efficient collection of poor rates and the appropriate distribution of relief to the poor. The overseers’ key responsibilities were relieving the impotent poor, setting the able-bodied to work and apprenticing poor children. Their activities were supervised by justices of the peace.
Thus, Elizabethan government had taken upon itself the responsibility of ensuring a minimum level of subsistence for the deserving poor.
This was a legislative achievement that remained substantially intact until 1834.
Measures against ‘undeserving poor’
In contrast, the treatment of the undeserving poor remained harsh. An extremely repressive and ultimately unenforceable Act against vagrancy had been passed in 1547. Although it was quickly repealed, the notion remained that the undeserving poor should be whipped. In 1572 an Act added branding to the range of punishments available to the authorities. During the panic of 1597, an Act was passed which laid down that first-time offenders should be whipped and then sent back to the parish of their birth; repeat offenders could
be executed.
Who were the impotent poor?
a subcategory of the deserving poor, which comprised those who could not look after themselves, either because of age or infirmity or because they were orphans
Who were the deserving and undeserving poor?
the deserving poor were those who were actively seeking work or were too old, too young or too ill to do so; the undeserving poor described those whom society considered to be beggars or vagrants
Overall how peaceful was England internally
England under Elizabeth I was a much more unified State than France or
Spain. It was also, relatively speaking, much more peaceable. Elizabeth’s reign witnessed only one serious rebellion in England - the Northern Rebellion of
1569 - which collapsed fairly quickly, compared with greater social disorder in Spain and outright civil war across more than three decades in France.
The tendency of the aristocracy and greater gentry to abandon fortified castles and instead to build comfortable but essentially indefensible country houses suggested a confidence in social order and peace that was all the more remarkable given the limited resources of the State to enforce its power in
Tudor England.
It should not be assumed, however, that the country was always peaceable.
Ireland, Wales and the north of England all posed problems.
Initial problematic situation with Ireland
Elizabethan attitudes to Ireland were simple. Ireland should be subjected to a policy of ‘Englishness’ in both religious and secular matters. Elizabeth was proclaimed Supreme Governor of the Church of Ireland in 1560. However, she lacked the power to impose Protestantism on a population that was largely Catholic, mostly Gaelic in language and whose customary laws and landownership differed hugely from that of the English. What happened was that Ireland became, in the words of John Guy, a ‘breeding ground for fortune hunters. The ‘get-rich quick mentality of the English incomers and the frequent use of martial law led to bad relations with both the Gaelic Irish and the Old English - the descendants of the Normans and English who had settled in Ireland since the eleventh century.
Consequences of problematic situation with Ireland
It was no surprise, therefore, that rebellions broke out in the south against such English rule in 1569 to 1573 and 1579 to 1582, this latter rebellion being linked with a Spanish incursion into County Kerry. Anglo-Irish relations were further soured by the brutality of the response of the Lord Deputy of Ireland, Lord Grey of Wilton, to the latter rebellion.
Third Irish rebellion and result
It was the third Irish rebellion of the reign, closely linked to the Anglo-Spanish war, that proved much more difficult and expensive for the English Crown to suppress. This was centred on Ulster, where the clan chief Hugh O’Neill, created Earl of Tyrone by Elizabeth in 1585, rose up in rebellion in 1595 with the Spanish attempting to exploit the situation by including an Irish contingent in the Armada of 1596. This was unsuccessful, but the fact that the Spanish had so clearly signalled their intentions caused much unease among Elizabeth and her councillors, made worse when the rebels were victorious at the Battle of Yellow Ford in August 1598. As a result of this battle and its aftermath, Tyrone and his allies were in control of much of Ireland beyond the Pale. It looked as if Tyrone might establish an independent and Catholic Ireland that would look to Spain for support.
How did Elizabeth respond to rebellion and success?
It was in this context that Elizabeth, in some desperation, sent the Earl of Essex to Ireland as Lord Lieutenant in 1599. This proved to be an error, thanks to the readiness of Essex to disobey the queen’s orders. Essex had a large force, but, instead of confronting Tyrone, he made a truce before defying the queen’s orders and returning to court. As soon as the truce expired, Tyrone moved south and camped near Kinsale on the coast, to the south-west of Cork, hoping to link up with a Spanish army. This was to be the high point of his power.
The English, shorn of Essex’s weak leadership, made significant progress under the new Lord Lieutenant, Lord Mountjoy, and Sir George Carew. Tyrone seemed saved by the landing in Kinsale of over 3000 Spanish troops during September 1601. However, the English triumphed on Christmas Eve, 1601.
Tyrone retreated back to Ulster before eventually negotiating a peace with Mountjoy in March 1603. By then, unbeknown to Tyrone, Elizabeth had died, and Mountjoy appears to have offered generous terms in order to be able to leave Ireland and attend the new king, James I.
What was martial law?
legal authority and political control exercised by military authority
