Farming Regions in Determining Allegiance in the English Civil War - Essay Example

How important were farming regions in determining allegiance in the English Civil War Farming was of great importance in determining allegiance in the English Civil War. Farming regions growing impact on the nation was the most obvious feature of internal development. At that time, fixation with foreign trade has resulted more from the fact that the records are there, in the customs figures, than from its intrinsic importance. Although exports allowed the import, in return, of goods that helped English merchants make fortunes and eventually, as they cheapened, proved crucial in changing ordinary tastes, the export trade was dwarfed by an often highly localized internal economy that was probably at least twice as large. Even in Jacobean London half the aldermen, the merchant princes, were domestic traders. And in contrast to the faltering export trade, the internal economy was not only diversifying but growing considerably (T. Wilson Hayes, pg 115). London was not the sole 'engine of growth', but farming regions impact the most obvious feature of internal development. The Newcastle region was by no means alone in its integration into an increasingly national economy. The costs and delays of inland transport, especially by road, meant that pastoral regions still grew grain for bread and beer. Outlying upland counties periodically had difficulty in sending taxes to London, especially in winter, since so little traffic went that way, and cross-country contacts by road were even more difficult - indeed, the average price of wheat in Devon late in the dearth year of 1631 was 50 per cent higher than in neighboring Dorset. Nevertheless, growing specialization in agriculture accounts for the fame of Cheshire cheese and Worcestershire apples. Transport ties to London were sufficiently developed for John Taylor's Carrier's Cosmography in 1637 to give details of carriers linking the capital with all regions. By the 1630s regular stage coaches linked London with major towns in the southeast and Midlands, and by the 1650s Edinburgh and most major provincial cities had been drawn into the coaching network. More substantial connections appeared by mid-century, as inns along the scarp slope separating the Severn and Thames valleys allowed traders to join the hinterlands of Bristol and London. The growth of London and the forging of a national economy were both cause and effect of developments in both agriculture. In agriculture the gradual spread of new techniques was symbolized by a new vogue in handbooks, such as Walter Blith's The English Improver (1649). As the market expanded more attention was given to the crops and farming practices best suited to local soils: the growing popularity of 'convertible' or 'up-and-down' husbandry, alternating periods of arable and pasture, is evident across much of lowland England. More striking still is the way many farmers, small as well as large, converted to new cash crops like madder and woad for dye, to tobacco in the Severn valley, as well as to market gardening around towns (Mark Stoyle, 1994). Although the full impact of the new crops was only to be felt after mid-century, when slackening demand encouraged farmers to raise productivity, England slowly outstripped much of the rest of Europe in its ability to feed and employ a growing population. Starvation in the crisis of 1623 was limited to the northwest; and thereafter, despite appalling hardship in the later 1640s, famine seems to have been more or less eliminated. The prevalence of domestic production in textiles, in leather-working, in most branches of the metal industry, makes it impossible to measure economic distress. Cost-of-living figures measure prices in the market. Much of the population was engaged in both agriculture and industry: the small farmer whose wife and servant did some subsidiary spinning or stocking-knitting, the artisan miner with a small plot of land attached to his cottage, even Norwich laborers who did harvest-work in nearby fields in the 1630s, and gleaned after the harvest. The numbers of entirely landless grew, above all in London. But while real wages fell markedly, work was often available for the whole family. People therefore had to work much harder than their ancestors in 1500 to keep alive, but low wages did not cause total privation. The new industries proved critical here, providing considerable support for an expanding and otherwise probably unemployed labor force. It has been estimated that stocking knitting alone provided year-round employment for 100 000. Over a longer period such diversity helped England escape the horrors of starvation which hit Scotland and France in the later seventeenth century. Early-seventeenth-century England was not bound to the unchanging values of the soil. But though economic change supported a burgeoning population, it tended to subvert the corporate assumptions of the body politic. (Under down, David, 1985. 106-145). In medieval theory (if never entirely in practice), trade and industry had been safely confined to towns and to guild structures, while farming had been arranged around manors, where lords dealt with a collectivity of more-or-less neatly stratified peasants. But by 1600 industry was well established, and deregulated, in the countryside and still more the suburb; guilds and manorial courts were withering under pressure of the market and mobility; and English agriculture was headed towards its modern pattern of a small number of large farmers and large numbers of the landless. Elizabethan and Jacobean social commentators reacted fearfully, increasingly dividing the populace not into tranquil rankings of status and occupation but into two blunt categories - 'the better sort' (a term that might include the gentry but more often was used for the minor local elites of town and village), and 'the meaner sort' or 'the vulgar'. Such terms of opposition and distaste underlie the concern of parliament-men and preachers with discipline, and the increasing recourse in the first two or three decades of the century to capital sanctions in defense of property. As the wealthy townsmen of Manningtree in Essex complained in 1627, their poorer, alehouse-haunting neighbours were now 'so rustically that for the better sort it is almost no living with them'. The degree to which English farming has ever been 'peasant', or largely egalitarian and subsistence in character, can be exaggerated, but detailed local studies have found that at the beginning of civil war period many communities were closer to the stereotyped peasant cluster of near-subsistence farms than they were at the end. While 'fielden', or arable, areas already contained many large capital-intensive farms employing landless laborers, in most regions significant numbers of husbandmen still worked the land, with no large pool of the landless beneath them. Half a century later conditions were changing. Continued population growth drove the burgeoning poor to areas where they could find living room and livelihoods, particularly to the towns and to woodland regions with sufficient waste land where they could erect squatters' hovels. While the core of yeomen and husbandmen in the swelling villages of the Forest of Arden in Warwickshire, or in Myddle in Shropshire, remained relatively stable, a new class of landless paupers, comprising about one-third of the population, had appeared below them by mid-century. In many fielden villages too an agricultural proletariat was forming. Although the lords of the manors could often restrain immigration, and the proliferation of the poor that accompanied it, they could not check all economic forces. Thus, in Orwell, Cambridgeshire, the disastrous harvests of the late 1590s and the continuing difficult conditions in the new century combined to wipe out many marginal farmers, polarizing the inhabitants into rich and poor even more effectively than did the expansion downwards of the populations of the woodland and urban zones. Throughout the arable belt, the spread of commercial farming, coupled with inflation, encouraged landlords to put pressure on marginal smallholders unable to pay rents per acre that might seem economic to the larger farmer producing for the market. In 1600 between a quarter and a third of England's rural populace were laborers, but by 1700 that fraction had risen to around a half. Moreover, at that time, women in general were perceived as more visible, more mobile, and more aggressive than before. Some were resisting the ceremony of churching as a remnant of medieval superstition and the greed of the clergy; others were leading food riots or were active in the protests of the 1640s. There is also evidence that women's economic activities in midwifery, dairy farming and small trades were becoming more visible in some areas of the country, and that in those very areas rituals expressing sexual hostility were more prominent. In a world that seemed full of masterless men and women, the apparently masterless, untethered female prophet must have been seen by many as the ultimate threat: When ladies ride abroad with waxed boots, and men thresh with their Cloaks on; when the pot freezes in the Chimney-corner, and Puss sits with her arise to the fire; When women go abroad and fetch home wood, and men sit at home by the fire side and burn it: When isesickles hang at peoples noses, and women cannot catch them a heat with scolding; when all these signs come to pass, you may be confident of cold weather. (Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus, 1985), p. 265) In the long run, social polarization probably helped to pacify agrarian England. The growing wealth of the yeomen, often the purchasers of the lands of failing husbandmen, tied them closer in values to their gentry' superiors than to their inferior neighbors. And since they drew with them many of the rural craftsmen, few local worthies remained who were willing to give a political lead to the agrarian poor. Although the more slowly polarizing forest regions of the southwest and the fenlands of eastern England saw extensive disturbances in the 1620s and 1630s, the countryside after 1650 was far less troubled by popular disturbance than it had been in the previous century. Nevertheless, the alarming reality was the relative and absolute growth in the numbers of the poor. Basically, the concentration of the sale of England's major export, broadcloth, at the single mart of Antwerp for much of the sixteenth century had elevated nearby London's role as the other axis of the trade. 'Outports' like Southampton and Boston had been overwhelmed by the competition, and increasingly the nation's commercial and financial activities centered in the capital, to considerable provincial resentment. London's dominance was growing still further. While the capital shipped 77 per cent of the countries new drapery exports in 1610, the figure had risen to 85 per cent by the 1640s. Thus farming region played very important role as social and political capital as was becoming important as its commercial and industrial dominance. Because they given prospect of London dominance of yet another trade route. Overall, the concentration of farming, trade and resources helped generate economic advance. Wage-rates in the booming capital were double the national average, and as London drove its supply lines far up the east coast as well as deep into the Midlands it did much to stimulate growth. London's grain imports quintupled between the 1570s and the 1630s. Entrepreneurial farmers, especially the market gardeners in immediate hinterland. Work Cited Under down, David. Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603-1660. Oxford: Clarendon, 1985. 106-145. Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus , Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540-1640 ( Urbana and Chicago, 1985), p. 265) Mark Stoyle, Loyalty and Locality: Popular Allegiance in Devon during the English Civil War (Exeter: Univ. of Exeter Press, 1994), pp. 22, 207. T. Wilson Hayes, Winstanley the Digger: A Literary Analysis of Radical Ideas in the English Revolution ( Cambridge, Mass., 1979), p. 115. Read More