CHAPTER XXXIII
The Life of the People
1517–64

I. THE ECONOMY

IN one sense the drama of religious, political, and martial conflict that filled the front of the sixteenth century was superficial, for it proceeded only by permission of a deeper drama played behind the historic scenes or beneath the pompous stage—man’s daily and perpetual battle with the soil, the elements, poverty, and death. What, after all, were the bulls and blasts of popes and Protestants, the rival absurdities of murderous mythologies, the strut and succession, gout and syphilis, of emperors and kings, compared with the inexorable struggle for food, shelter, clothing, health, mates, children, life?

Throughout this period the villages of Europe had to keep watch night and day against wolves, wild boars, and other threats to their flocks and homes. The hunting stage survived within the agricultural age: man had to kill or be killed, and the weapons of defense made possible the routine of toil. A thousand insects, the beasts of the forests, and the birds of the air competed with the peasant for the fruit of his seeds and drudgery; and mysterious diseases decimated his herds. At any time the rains might become erosive torrents or engulfing floods, or they might hold back till all life withered; hunger was always around the corner, and fear of fire was never far from mind. Sickness made frequent calls; doctors were distant; and in almost every decade plague might carry off some member of the household precious in the affections of the family or in the siege of the earth. Of every five children born, two died in infancy, another before maturity.¹ At least once in each generation the recruiting officer took a son for the army, and armies burned villages and ravaged fields. From the crop at last grown and harvested, a tenth or more went to the landlord, a tenth to the Church. Life on the land would have been too hard for body or soul had not happiness intervened in the gaiety of children, the games of the evening home, the release of song, the amnesia of the tavern, and the half-believed, half-doubted hopes of another and more merciful world. So the food was produced that fed the barons in the castle, the kings in their courts, the priests in their pulpits, the merchants and craftsmen in the towns, the physicians, teachers, artists, poets, scientists, philosophers, and, last and least, the slaves of the soil themselves. Civilization is a parasite on the man with the hoe.

Agricultural science marked time; progress in productivity came chiefly through the replacement of small holdings by large tracts. The new landowning merchants and capitalists brought into stagnant rural areas a lust for profits that increased both production and misery. Enterprising importers introduced into Europe a new fertilizer rich in phosphates and nitrogen—the guano or dung deposited by birds off the coast of Peru. Plants and shrubs from Asia or America were naturalized on the soil of Europe; the potato, the magnolia tree, the century plant, the pepper plant, the dahlia, the nasturtium.... . The tobacco plant was brought from Mexico to Spain in 1558; a year later Jean Nicot, French ambassador in Lisbon, sent some seeds of it to Catherine de Médicis; history rewarded him by giving his name to a poison.

The fishing industry grew as population increased, but the Reformation dealt a passing blow to the herring trade by allowing meat on Fridays. Mining progressed rapidly under capitalistic organization. Newcastle was exporting coal in 1549. The Fuggers multiplied the output of their mines by prodding labor to greater and more orderly effort, and by improving the methods of refining ore. Georg Agricola takes us into a sixteenth-century mine:

In 1527 Georg Agricola was made city physician of Joachimsthal. In that mining town he became between times a mineralogist; there and elsewhere he studied with zeal and fascination the history and operations of mining and metallurgy; and after twenty years of research he completed (1550) his De re metallica, which is as epochal a classic in its field as the masterpieces of Copernicus and Vesalius appearing in the same decade. He described in accurate detail, and engaged artists to illustrate, the tools, mechanisms, and processes of mining and smelting. He was the first to assert that bismuth and antimony are true primary metals; he distinguished some twenty mineral species not previously recognized; and he was the first to explain the formation of veins (canales, channels) of ore in beds of rock by metallic deposits left by streams of water flowing into and under the earth.* ³

Mining, metallurgy, and textiles received most of the mechanical improvements credited to this age. The earliest railways were those on which miners pulled or pushed ore-carrying carts. In 1533 Johann Jürgen added to the spinning wheel, hitherto spun by hand, a treadle that spun it by foot, leaving the hands of the weaver free; production soon doubled. Watches were improved in reliability while diminishing in size; they were engraved, chased, enameled, bejeweled; Henry VIII wore a tiny one that had to be wound only every week. However, the best watches of this period erred by some fifteen minutes per day.⁴

Communication and transport limped behind commerce and industry. Postal service was gradually extended to private correspondence during the sixteenth century. The commercial revolution stimulated improvements in shipbuilding: deeper and thinner keels helped stability and speed; masts increased from one to three, sails to five or six.⁵ Francis I and Henry VIII ran a race not only in war and love and dress but in shipping; each had a grandiose vessel built to order and whim, crowded with superstructure, and flaunting the pennants of their pride. In the Mediterranean a ship of the early sixteenth century could make ten miles an hour in fair weather, but the heavier vessels designed for the Atlantic were lucky to make 125 miles a day. On land the fastest travel was by the postal courier, who rode some eighty-five miles a day; yet important news usually took ten or eleven days to get from Venice to Paris or Madrid. Probably no one then appreciated the comfort of having news arrive too late for action. Land travel was mostly on horseback; hence the heavy iron tethering ring fastened to the entrance door of a house. Coaches were multiplying, but the roads were too soft for wheeled traffic; coaches had to be equipped with six or more horses to drag them through the inevitable mud, and they could not expect to cover more than twenty miles a day. Litters carried by servants were still used by ladies of means, but simple people traveled on foot across the continent.

Traveling was popular despite roads and inns. Erasmus thought the inns of France were tolerable, chiefly because the young waitresses “giggle and play wanton tricks,” and, “when you go away, embrace you,” and “all for so small a price”; but he denounced German innkeepers as ill-mannered, ill-tempered, dilatory, and dirty.

If matters were really so in some inns, we can forgive a sin or two to the traveling merchants who put up at and with them in the process of binding village with village, nation with nation, in an ever spreading economic web. In each decade some new trade route was opened—overland as by Chancellor in Russia, overseas by a thousand adventurous voyages. Shakespeare’s Shylock trafficked with England, Lisbon, Tripoli, Egypt, India, and Mexico.⁷ Genoa had trading colonies in the Black Sea, Armenia, Syria, Palestine, and Spain; it made its peace with the Porte, and sold arms to the Turks who were at war with Christendom. France saw the point, made her own ententes with the sultans, and, after 1560, dominated Mediterranean trade. Antwerp received goods everywhence, and shipped them everywhere.

To meet the needs of this expanding economy the bankers improved their services and techniques. As the cost of war rose with the change from feudal levies bringing their own bows and arrows, pikes and swords, to masses of militia or mercenaries equipped with firearms and artillery and paid by the state, the governments borrowed unprecedented sums from the bankers, and the interest they paid or failed to pay made or broke financial firms. The savings of the people were lent at interest to bankers, who therewith financed expensive undertakings in commerce and industry. Notes of exchange replaced cumbersome transfers of currency or goods. Rates of interest varied not with the greed of the lender so much as with the reliability of the borrower; so the free cities of Germany, controlled by merchants prompt in payments, could borrow at 5 per cent, but Francis I paid 10, and Charles V 20. Rates declined as economies were stabilized.

Gold and silver from the mines of Germany, Hungary, Spain, Mexico, and Peru provided an abundant and fluid currency. The new supplies of precious metal came just in time, for goods had been multiplying faster than coin. Imports from Asia were paid for only partly by exports, partly by gold or silver; hence, in the decades before Columbus, prices fell, to the discouragement of enterprise and trade. After the development of European mines, and the import of silver and gold from Africa and America, the supply of precious metal outran the production of goods; prices rose, business rejoiced; an economy based on mobile money dislodged the old economy rooted in the holding of land or the control of industry by the guilds.

Guilds were in decay. They had taken form in times of municipal autarky and protectionism; they were not organized either to raise capital or to buy wholesale from distant sources, or to use factory methods and the division of labor, or to reach distant markets with their products. From the thirteenth century onward they had developed an aristocratic exclusiveness, and had made conditions so hard for the journeyman as to drive him into the arms of the capitalist employer. The capitalist was animated by the profit motive, but he knew how to gather savings into capital, how and where to buy machinery and raw materials, run mines, build factories, recruit workers, divide and specialize labor, open and reach foreign markets, finance elections, and control governments. The new supplies of gold and silver cried out for profitable investment; American gold became European capital. In the resultant capital-ism there was a zest of competition, a stimulus to enterprise, a feverish search for more economical ways of production and distribution, which inevitably left behind the self-contentment of guildsmen plodding in ancient grooves. The new system surpassed the old in the quantity, not in the quality, of its product; and merchants were crying out for quantity production to pay with manufactured exports for their imports from the East.

The new wealth was largely confined to the merchants, financiers, manufacturers, and their allies in government. Some nobles still made fortunes through vast holdings with hundreds of tenants, or through enclosures that supplied wool to the textile industry; but for the most part the landowning aristocracy found itself squeezed between kings and business-controlled cities; it declined in political power, and had to content itself with pedigrees. The proletariat shared with the nobility the penalties of inflation. From 1500 to 1600 the price of wheat, with which the poor baked their bread, rose 150 per cent in England, 200 per cent in France, 300 per cent in Germany. Eggs had been 4d. for ten dozen in England in 1300; in 1400 the same quantity cost 5d., in 1500 7d., in 1570 42d.⁸ Wages rose, but more slowly, since they were regulated by government. In England the law (1563) fixed the annual wage of a hired farmer at $12.00, of a farm hand at $9.50, of a “man servant” at $7.25; allowing the purchasing power of these sums to have been twenty-five times greater in 1563 than in 1954, they come to $180.00 or so per year. We should note, however, that in all these cases bed and board were added to the wage. By and large the economic changes of the sixteenth century left the working classes relatively poorer, and politically weaker, than before. Workers produced the goods that were exported to pay for imported luxuries that brightened and softened the lives of a few.

The war of the classes took on a bitterness hardly known since the days of Spartacus in Rome; let the revolt of the Comuneros in Spain, the Peasants’ War in Germany, Ket’s Rebellion in England, serve as evidence. Strikes were numerous, but they were suppressed by a coalition of employers and government. In 1538 the English Clothworkers’ Guild, controlled by the masters, decreed that a journeyman who refused to work under the conditions laid down by the employer should be imprisoned for the first offense, whipped and branded for the second. The laws of vagrancy under Henry VIII and Edward VI were so savage that few workers dared to be found unemployed. A law of 1547 enacted that an able-boldied person leaving his work and roaming the country as a vagrant should be branded on the breast with a letter V, and be given as a slave for two years to some citizen of the neighborhood, to be fed on “bread and water and small drink, and refuse of meat”; and if the vagrancy was repeated the offender was to be branded on cheek or forehead with the letter S, and be condemned to slavery for life.⁹ It is to the credit of the English nation that these measures could not be enforced, and had soon to be repealed, but they display the temper of sixteenth-century governments. Duke George of Saxony decreed that the wages of miners under his jurisdiction should not be raised, that no miner should leave one place to seek work in another, and that no employer should hire anyone who had fomented discontent in another mine. Child labor was sanctioned, explicitly or implicitly, by law. The lace-making industry in Flanders was entirely worked by children, and the law forbade any girl over twelve years of age to engage in that occupation.¹⁰ Laws against monopolies, “corners,” or usury were evaded or ignored.

The Reformation fell in with the new economy. The Catholic Church was by temperament antipathetic to “business”; it had condemned interest, had given religious sanction to guilds, had sanctified poverty and castigated wealth, and had freed workers from toil on holydays so numerous that in 1550 there were in Catholic countries 115 nonworking days in the year;¹¹ this may have played a part in the slower industrialization and enrichment of Catholic lands. Theologians approved by the Church had defended the fixing of “just prices” by law for the necessaries of life. Thomas Aquinas had branded as “sinful covetousness” the pursuit of money beyond one’s needs, and had ruled that any surplus possessions were “due by natural law to the purpose of succoring the poor.”¹² Luther had shared these views. But the general development of Protestantism unconsciously co-operated with the capitalist revolution. Saints’ holydays were abolished, with a resultant increase in labor and capital. The new religion found support from businessmen, and returned the courtesy. Wealth was honored, thrift was lauded, work was encouraged as a virtue, interest was accepted as a legitimate reward for risking one’s savings.

II. LAW

It was a cruel age, and its laws corresponded to a pitiless economy, a shameful pauperism, a somber art, and a theology whose God had repudiated Christ.

Among populations mostly fated to poverty here and damnation hereafter, crime was natural. Murder was plentiful in all classes. Every man of caliber dangled a dagger, and only the weakling relied on the law to redress his wrongs. Crimes of passion were as frequent in life as in Shakespeare, and any Othello who failed to slay his suspected wife was rated less than a man. Travelers took highwaymen for granted, and proceeded in groups. In the cities, still unlit at night, robbers were as plentiful as prostitutes, and a man’s home had to be his castle. In the heyday of Francis I a gang of thieves called mauvais garçons despoiled Paris in full sunlight. Brantôme tells us, as unreliably as usual, how Charles IX, wishing to learn “how the cut-purses performed their arts,” instructed his police to invite ten such artists to a royal ball; after the ball was over he asked to see their spoils; the money, jewelry, and garments unostentatiously acquired by them during the evening amounted to many thousands of dollars’ worth, “at which the King thought he would die of laughter.” He allowed them to keep the fruit of their studies, but had them enrolled in the army as better dead than alive.¹³ If we classify as crimes the adulteration of goods, the chicanery of business frauds, the bribery of courts, the seizure of ecclesiastical property, the extension of frontiers by conquest, every second man in Europe was a thief; we may give some the benefit of clergy, and allow for an honest craftsman here and there. Add a little arson, a little rape, a little treason, and we begin to understand the problems faced by the forces of order and law.

These were organized to punish, rather than to prevent, crime. In some large towns, like Paris, soldiers served as guardians of the peace; city blocks had their wardens, parishes their constables; but by and large the cities were poorly policed. Statesmen weary of fighting the nature of man reckoned it cheaper to control crime by decreeing ferocious penalties, and letting the public witness executions. A score of offenses were capital: murder, treason, heresy, sacrilege, witchcraft, robbery, forgery, counterfeiting, smuggling, arson, perjury, adultery, rape (unless healed by marriage), homosexual actions, “bestiality,” falsifying weights or measures, adulterating food, damaging property at night, escaping from prison, and failure in attempted suicide. Execution might be by relatively painless beheading, but this was usually a privilege of ladies and gentlemen; lesser fry were hanged; heretics and husband-killers were burned; outstanding murderers were drawn and quartered; and a law of Henry VIII (1531) punished poisoners by boiling them alive,¹⁴ as we gentler souls do with shellfish. A Salzburg municipal ordinance required that “a forger shall be burned or boiled to death, a perjurer shall have his tongue torn out by the neck; a servant who sleeps with his master’s wife, daughter, or sister shall be beheaded or hanged.”¹⁵ Julienne Rabeau, who had killed her child after a very painful delivery, was burned at Angers (1531);¹⁶ and there too, if we may believe Bodin, several persons were burned alive for eating meat on Friday and refusing to repent; those who repented were merely hanged.¹⁷ Usually the corpse of the hanged was left suspended as a warning to the living, until the crows had eaten the flesh away. For minor offenses a man or a woman might be scourged, or lose a hand, a foot, an ear, a nose, or be blinded in one eye or both, or be branded with a hot iron. Still milder misdemeanors were punished by imprisonment in conditions varying from courtesy to filth, or by the stocks, the pillory, the whipping-cart, or the ducking stool. Imprisonment for debt was common throughout Europe. All in all, the penal code of the sixteenth century was more severe than in the Middle Ages, and reflected the moral disorder of the time.

The people did not resent these ferocious punishments. They took some pleasure in attending executions, and sometimes lent a helping hand. When Montecucculi confessed, under torture, that he had poisoned, or had intended to poison, Francis, the beloved and popular son of Francis I, he was dismembered alive by having his limbs tied to horses which were then driven in four directions (Lyons, 1536); the populace, we are told, “cut his remains into little morsels, hacked off his nose, tore out his eyes, broke his jaws, trained his head in the mud, and ‘made him die a thousand times before his death.’”¹⁸

To the laws against crime were added “blue laws” against recreations supposedly infringing upon piety, or innovations too abruptly deviating from custom. Fish-eating on Friday, required by common law in Catholic lands, was required by state law in the Protestant England of Edward VI to support the fishing industry and so train men to the sea for the navy.¹⁹ Gambling was always illegal and always popular. Francis I, who knew how to amuse himself, ordered the arrest of people who played cards or dice in taverns or gaming houses (1526), but he allowed the establishment of a public lottery (1539). Drunkenness was seldom punished by law, but idleness was almost a capital crime. Sumptuary laws—designed to check conspicuous expenditure by the newly rich, and to preserve class distinctions—regulated dress, adornment, furniture, meals, and hospitality. “When I was a boy,” said Luther, “all games were forbidden, so that card-makers, pipers, and actors were not admitted to the sacraments; and those who had played games, or been present at shows or plays, made it a matter of confession.”²⁰ Most such prohibitions survived the Reformation, to reach their peak in the later sixteenth century.

It was some consolation that enforcement was rarely as severe as the law. Escape was easy; a kindly, bribed, or intimidated judge or jury let many a rascal go lightly punished or scot free. (“Scot” originally meant an assessment or fine.) The laws of sanctuary were still recognized under Henry VIII. However, laxity of enforcement was balanced by frequent use of torture to elicit confessions or testimony. Here the laws of Henry VIII, though they were the severest in the history of England,²¹ were ahead of their time; they forbade torture except where national security was held to be involved.²² Delay in trying an indicted person could also be torture; one complaint of the Spanish Cortes to Charles V was that men charged with even slight offenses lingered in prison as long as ten years before being tried, and that trials might drag on for twenty years.²³

Lawyers bred and multiplied as the priesthood declined. They filled the judiciary and the higher bureaucracy; they represented the middle classes in the national assemblies and the provincial parlements; even the aristocracy and the clergy depended on them for guidance in civil law. A new noblesse de robe—the “furred cats” of Rabelais—formed in France. Canon law disappeared in Protestant countries, and jurisprudence replaced theology as the pièce de résistance in universities. Roman law sprang back to life in Latin countries, and captured Germany in the sixteenth century. Local law survived alongside it in France, “common law” was preferred to it in England, but the Justinian Code had some influence in shaping and sustaining the absolutism of Henry VIII. Yet in Henry’s own court his chaplain, Thomas Starkey, composed (c. 1537) a Dialogue whose main theme was that laws should dictate the will of the king, and that kings should be subject to election and recall:

Starkey died a strangely natural death a year after writing his Dialogue—but 334 years before it reached print.

III. MORALS

How did the people of Latin Christendom behave? We must not be misled by their religious professions; these were more often expressions of pugnacity than of piety. The same sturdy men who could believe so fiercely could fiercely blaspheme, and the girls who on Sunday bowed demurely before statues of the Virgin rouged their cheeks hopefully during the week, and many of them got themselves seduced, if only as a proposal of marriage. Virginity had to be protected by every device of custom, morals, law, religion, paternal authority, pedagogy, and “point of honor”; yet it managed to get lost. Soldiers returning from campaigns in which sex and liquor had been their chief consolations found it painful to adjust themselves to continence and sobriety. Students majored in venery, and protested that fornication was but a venial sin,²⁵ which enlightened legislators would overlook. Robert Greene declared that at Cambridge he had “consumed the flower of my youth amongst wags as lewd as myself.”²⁶ Female dancers not infrequently performed on the stage and elsewhere “absolutely naked”;²⁷ this, apparently, is one of the oldest novelties in the world. Artists looked down their noses at the rules and regulations of sexual behavior,²⁸ and lords and ladies agreed with the artists. “Among great folk,” wrote Brantôme, “these rules and scruples concerning virginity are made little of.... . How many girls I know, of the Great World, who did not take their virginity to the marriage bed!”²⁹ We have noted the sort of story that sweet Marguerite of Navarre seems to have heard without a blush. The bookstalls were stacked with licentious literature, for which high prices were greedily paid.³⁰ Aretino was as popular in Paris as in Rome. Rabelais, a priest, did not feel that he would reduce the sales of his Gargantuan epic by spattering it with such speech as would have made Aretino run to cover. Artists found a ready market for erotic pictures, even for pictured perversions;³¹ masterpieces of this kind were sold by street hawkers, letter carriers, strolling players, even at the great fairs.³² All the perversions found place in this period,³³ as in the aristocratic pages of Brantôme.³⁴

Prostitution prospered in income and prestige; it was in this age that its practitioners came to be called cortigiane—courtesans—which was the feminine of cortigiani—courtiers. Some generals provided prostitutes for their armies, as a safeguard for the other women of occupied towns.³⁵ But as venereal disease grew almost to the proportions of a plague, government after government legislated against the unhappy filles de joie. Luther, while affirming the naturalness of sexual desire, labored to reduce prostitution, and under his urging many cities in Lutheran Germany made it illegal.³⁶ In 1560 Michel de l’Hôpital, Chancellor of France, renewed the laws of Louis IX against the evil, and apparently his decree was enforced.

Meanwhile the absurd lust of flesh for flesh begot the hunger of soul for soul, and all the delicate embroidery of courtship and romantic love. Stolen glances, billets-doux, odes and sonnets, lays and madrigals, hopeful gifts and secret trysts, poured out of the coursing blood. A few refined spirits, or playful women, welcomed from Italy and Castiglione the pastime of Platonic love, by which a lady and her courtier might be passionate friends but sedulously chaste. Such restraint, however, was not in the mood of the age; men were frankly sensual, and women liked them so. Love poetry abounded, but it was a prelude to possession.

Not to marriage. Parents were still too matter-of-fact to let love choose mates for life; marriage, in their dispensation, was a wedding of estates. Erasmus, sensitive to the charms of woman but not of matrimony, advised youngsters to marry as the oldsters wished, and trust to love to grow with association³⁷ rather than wither with satiation; and Rabelais agreed with him.³⁸ Notwithstanding these authorities, a rising number of young people, like Jeanne d’Albret, rebelled against marriages of realty. Roger Ascham, tutor to Elizabeth, mourned that “our time is so far from that old discipline and obedience as now not only young gentlemen but even very girls dare... marry themselves in spite of father, mother, God, good order, and all.”³⁹ Luther was alarmed to learn that Melanchthon’s son had betrothed himself without consulting his father, and that a young judge in Wittenberg had declared such a betrothal valid; this, the Reformer thought, was bound to give Wittenberg a bad name. In the university, he wrote (January 22,1544),

Marriage contracts could be arranged for boys and girls as young as three years, but these marriages could be annulled later, if not consummated. The legal age for full marriage was generally fourteen for boys, twelve for girls. Sexual relations after betrothal and before the wedding were condoned. Even before betrothal, in Sweden and Wales, as later in some American colonies, “bundling” was allowed: the lovers would lie together in bed, but were admonished to keep a sheet between them.⁴¹ In Protestant lands marriage ceased to be a sacrament, and by 1580 civil marriage was competing with marriage by a clergyman. Luther, Henry VIII, Erasmus, and Pope Clement VII thought bigamy permissible under certain conditions, especially as a substitute for divorce. Protestant divines moved slowly toward allowing divorce, but at first only for adultery. This offense was apparently most prevalent in France, despite the custom of killing adulterous wives. Illicit love affairs were part of the normal life of French women of good social standing.⁴² A triangular ménage like that of Henry II, Catherine de Médicis, and Diane de Poitiers was quite frequent—the legal wife de convenance accepting the situation with wry grace, as sometimes in France today.

Except in the aristocracies, women were goddesses before marriage and servants afterward. Wives took motherhood in their stride, gloried in their numerous children, and managed to manage their managers. They were robust creatures, accustomed to hard work from sunrise to sunset. They made most of the clothing for their families, and sometimes took in work from capitalist entrepreneurs. The loom was an essential part of the home; in England all unmarried women were “spinsters.” The women of the French court were a different species, encouraged by Francis I to prettify themselves in flesh and dress, and sometimes turning national policy by the guided missiles of their charms. A feminist movement was imported into France from Italy, but rapidly faded as women perceived that their power and prominence were independent of politics and laws. Many French women of the upper class were well educated; already, in Paris and elsewhere, the French salon was taking form as rich and cultivated ladies made their homes the rendezvous of statesmen, poets, artists, scholars, prelates, and philosophers. Another group of French women—let Anne of France, Anne of Brittany, Claude, and Renée serve as instances—stood quietly virtuous amid the erotic storm. In general the Reformation, being Teutonic, made for the patriarchal view of woman and the family. It ended her Renaissance enthronement as an exemplar of beauty and a civilizer of man. It condemned the Church’s lenience with sexual diversions, and, after Luther’s death, it prepared the way for the Puritanic chill.

Social morality declined with the rise of commercialism and the temporary disruption of charity. The natural dishonesty of man found fresh forms and opportunities as a money economy displaced the feudal regime. The newly rich. holding securities rather than land, and seldom seeing the individuals from whose labor they benefited, had no traditions of responsibility and generosity such as had gone with landed wealth.⁴³ Medieval commerce and industry had accepted moral checks in the form of guild, municipal, and ecclesiastical regulations; the new capitalism rejected these restraints, and drew men into a strenuous competition that pushed aside the old codes.⁴⁴ Commercial frauds replaced pious frauds. The pamphlet literature of the age groaned with denunciations of wholesale adulteration of food and other products. The Diet of Innsbruck (1518) complained that importers “add brick dust to ginger, and mix unhealthy stuff with their pepper.”⁴⁵ Luther noted that merchants “have learned the trick of placing such spices as pepper, ginger, and saffron in damp vaults to increase their weight. There is not a single article out of which they cannot make profit through false measuring, counting, or weighing, or by producing artificial colors.... . There is no end to their trickery.”⁴⁶ The Venetian Senate branded a shipment of English woolens as fraudulent in weight, make, and size.⁴⁷

Charity, in the Latin countries, was still administered with medieval cheerfulness. Noble families spent a considerable part of their incomes in gifts and alms.⁴⁸ Lyons inherited from the fifteenth century a complex organization of municipal charity, to which the citizens gave “with openhanded generosity.”⁴⁹ In Germany and England the hands were not so open. Luther did his manful best to re-establish the charities interrupted by the princely confiscation of monastic properties, but he confessed that his efforts failed.⁵⁰ “Under the papacy,” he mourned, “people were charitable and gave gladly, but now, under the dispensation of the Gospel, nobody gives any longer; everybody fleeces everybody else.... . Nobody will give a pfennig.”⁵¹ Latimer gave a similar report in 1548: “London was never so ill as now.... In times past, when any rich man died .... they would bequeath .... great sums towards the relief of the poor.... Now charity is waxen cold.”⁵² Two Italian cities, Cardinal Pole told London, gave more alms than all England.⁵³ “As truth spread,” concluded Froude, “charity and justice languished in England.”⁵⁴ Probably it was not Protestantism, but commercialism and unbelief, that diminished charity.

Pauperism grew to the proportions of a social crisis. Evicted tenants, jobless journeymen, demobilized soldiers, roamed the highways or littered the slums, begging and robbing to live. In Augsburg the paupers were reckoned at a sixth of the population, in Hamburg a fifth, in London a fourth.⁵⁵ “O merciful Lord!” cried the reformer Thomas Lever, “what a number of poor, feeble, halt, blind, lame, sickly... lie and creep in the miry streets!”⁵⁶ Luther, whose heart was as kind as his tongue was harsh, was among the first to perceive that the state must take over from the Church the care and rescue of the destitute. In his address To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520) he proposed that “every town should provide for its own poor.” During his absence in the Wartburg his radical followers organized in Wittenberg a community fund to care for orphans, dower poor girls, give scholarships to needy students, and lend money to impoverished families. In 1523 Luther drew up a Regulation of a Common Chest, which urged that in each district the citizens and clergy should tax themselves to raise a fund from which loans were to be made, without interest, to persons in need and unable to work.⁵⁷ In 1522 Augsburg appointed six Armenpfleger—Protectors of the Poor—to supervise the distribution of relief. Nuremberg followed suit, then Strasbourg and Breslau (1523), Ratisbon and Magdeburg (1524)

In that year a Spanish humanist, Juan Luis Vives, wrote for the town council of Bruges a tract On the Relief of the Poor. He noted the spread of poverty amid growing wealth, and warned that the extreme inequality of possessions might engender a ruinous rebellion. “As it is disgraceful,” he wrote, “for the father of a family in his comfortable home to permit anyone in it to suffer the disgrace of being unclothed or in rags, it is similarly unfitting that the magistrates of a city should tolerate a condition in which citizens are hard pressed by hunger and distress.”⁵⁸ Vives agreed that all who were capable of work should be made to work, and that no one should be allowed to beg. But since many were really unable to work, some refuge must be set up for them in almshouses, hospitals, and schools financed by the municipality; food, medical care, and elementary education should be given them gratis, and special provision should be made for the mentally defective. Ypres combined Vives’s ideas with the German precedents and organized (1525) a community chest which united all charitable endowments in one fund, and all charitable distribution under one head. Charles V asked for a copy of the Ypres plan and recommended it to all the cities of the Empire (1531), and Henry VIII sent a similar directive to the parishes of England (1536). In Catholic countries the Church retained the administration of charity.

Political morality remained Machiavellian. Spies were taken for granted; those of Henry VIII in Rome were expected to report the most secret conversations of the Vatican.⁵⁹ Bribery was traditional, and flowed more lushly after the influx of American gold. Governments competed in violating treaties; Turkish and Christian fleets rivaled each other in piracy. In the decay of chivalry the morals of war relapsed into semi-barbarism; cities that had unsuccessfully resisted siege were sacked or burned, soldiers surrendering were slaughtered or enslaved till ransomed; such international law and comity as had existed in the occasional submission of kings to arbitration by popes disappeared in a chaos of nationalistic expansion and religious enmity. Toward non-Christians, Christians recognized few moral restraints, and the Turks reciprocated. The Portuguese captured and enslaved African Negroes, and the Spanish Conquistadores robbed, enslaved, and killed American natives without abating their high resolve to make the New World Christian. Life was so bitter for the American Indians under Spanish rule that thousands of them committed suicide.⁶⁰ Even in Christendom there was a startling increase of suicides in this age.⁶¹ Some humanists condoned self-destruction, but the Church ruled that it led straight to hell, so that the successful seeker fell out of the frying pan into the fire.

All in all the Reformation, though it ultimately improved the morals of Europe, temporarily damaged lay morality. Pirkheimer and Hans Sachs, both sympathetic with Luther, mourned that a chaos of unregulated conduct had followed the collapse of ecclesiastical authority.⁶² Luther, as usual, was quite frank about the matter:

Andreas Musculus, a Lutheran preacher, described his time (1560) as unspeakably immoral compared with the Germans of the fifteenth century,⁶⁶ and many Protestant leaders agreed with him.⁶⁷ “The future appalls me,” moaned Calvin; “I dare not think of it; unless the Lord descends from heaven, barbarism will engulf us.”⁶⁸ We hear similar notes from Scotland⁶⁹ and England. Froude, ardent defender of Henry VIII, summed up fairly:

We can hardly attribute this moral decline in Germany and England to Luther’s unchaining of sex or his scorn of “good works,” or to Henry’s bad example in sexual indulgence and callous cruelty; for a similar—in some ways a more unrestrained—license ruled in Catholic Italy under the Renaissance popes, and in Catholic France under Francis I. Probably the basic cause of the moral loosening in Western Europe was the growth of wealth. A main supporting cause was the decline of faith not only in Catholic dogmas but in the very fundamentals of the Christian creed. “Nobody cares about either heaven or hell,” mourned Andreas Musculus; “nobody gives a thought to either God or the Devil.”⁷¹ In such statements by religious leaders we must allow for the exaggeration of reformers disappointed to find how little their theological emendations had improved the moral life. Men had not been much better before, and would not be much better in later centuries, if we may trust the preachers. We can discover all the sins of the sixteenth century in our own age, and all of ours in theirs, according to their means.

Meanwhile both Catholicism and Protestantism had set up and strengthened two focuses of moral regeneration: the improvement of clerical conduct through marriage or continence, and the emphasis on the home as the final citadel of faith and decency. In the long run the Reformation would really reform, even to excess; and the time would come when men and women would look back with secret envy to that sixteenth century when their ancestors had been so wicked and so free.

IV. MANNERS

People then, as now, were judged more by their manners than by their morals; the world forgave more readily the sins that were committed with the least vulgarity and the greatest grace. Here, as in everything put artillery and theology, Italy led the way. Compared with the Italians the people north of the Alps, except for a thin upper crust in France and England, were fairly uncouth; the Italians called them barbarians, and many Frenchmen, charmed with their Italian conquests in field and chamber, agreed with them. But the barbarians were eager to be civilized. French courtiers and courtesans, poets and poisoners, followed Italian models; and the English limped sedulously behind. Castiglione’s Courtier (1528) was translated into French in 1537, into English in 1561, and polite circles debated the definition of a gentleman. Manuals of manners were best sellers; Erasmus composed one. Conversation became an art in France, as later in the Mermaid Tavern in London; the duel of repartee crossed the Alps from Italy about the same time as the art of fencing. Conversation was more polished in France than in Germany; the Germans crushed a man with humor, the French punctured him with wit. Freedom in speech was the vital medium of the age.

Since the surface can be more easily made presentable than the soul, the rising classes in the rising civilizations of the North paid much attention to their clothing. Commoners dressed artlessly enough—as we see in Brueghel’s multitudes: cuplike hats, loose blouses with bulging sleeves, tight trousers reaching down to comfortable shoes, with the ungainly composition centering upon a codpiece—an insolent bag, sometimes brightly ornamented, dangling before the male crotch. Moneyed males in Germany enveloped their mighty frames in voluminous folds of cloth, topped with broad hats that lay on the head like terraced pancakes; but German women were apparently forbidden to dress otherwise than as Hausfrauen or cooks. In England, too, the men wore more finery than their ladies, until Elizabeth outshone them with her thousand dresses. Henry VIII set a pace in extravagance of costume, prettifying his pounds with color and ornaments and precious stuffs. The Duke of Buckingham, at the marriage of Prince Arthur to Catherine of Aragon, “ware a gowne wrought of needle worke,” says Holinshed, “furred with sables, and valued at £1,500” ($150,000?).⁷¹ Sumptuary laws forbade any man lower than a knight to ape the sartorial splendor of his betters. Englishwomen covered their forms tightly, with dresses reaching from neck to floor, and sleeves to the wrist, with a trimming of fur at edges, and broad girdles buckled with metal ornaments and carrying a pendant or a rosary; in general they wore less jewelry than the men.

Under the appreciative Francis I French women opened their bodices, displayed swelling bosoms, and cut their gowns in the back almost to the last vertebra.⁷² If the natural bust swelled inadequately, an artificial bust was inserted under the stays.⁷³ Clothing was tightened under the breasts and pinched at the waist; sleeves billowed, hidden wires spread out the skirt at rear and hem, and high-heeled shoes compelled a prancing, airy step. Women of rank—no others—were allowed to wear a train, or tail, to their dresses, the nobler the longer; if nobility sufficed it might be seven yards long, and a maid or page would follow to hold it up. In another style the woman would cover her neck with a fraise or ruff, stiffly supported by wires; and men in a formal mood pilloried themselves in like contraptions. About 1535 Servetus noted that “the women of Spain have a custom that would be held barbarous in France, of piercing their ears and hanging gold rings in them, often set with precious stones”;⁷⁴ but by 1550 earrings were worn by the ladies of France, and even by men.⁷⁵ Jewelry continued its immemorial sway. Frenchmen clothed themselves in silk shirts and velvet doublets, padded their shoulders, cased their legs in tight colored breeches, and protected their manhood with a braguette or codpiece sometimes set off with ribbons or jewelry. Reversing the custom of the fifteenth century, they wore their hair short and their beards long. Feminine hair was worn in a variety of structures discouraging to describe; it was braided, curled, netted, filled out with switches, decked with flowers, brightened with gems, perfumed with unguents, dyed to match the fashion, and raised in towers or pyramids above the head. Hairdressers were now indispensable to women of fashion, for growing old seemed a fate worse than death.

How clean were the bodies behind the frills? A sixteenth-century Introduction pour les jeunes dames spoke of women “who have no care to keep themselves clean except in those parts that may be seen, remaining filthy .... under their linen”;⁷⁶ and a cynical proverb held that courtesans were the only women who washed more than their face and hands.⁷⁷ Perhaps cleanliness increased with immorality, for as women offered more of themselves to view or to many, cleanliness enlarged its area. Frequent bathing, preferably in perfumed water, became now, especially in France, part of good manners. Public bathhouses diminished in number as private bathrooms multiplied; these, however, were usually without running water, depending on bowls and tubs. Steam baths, which had come into Western Europe with returning crusaders in the thirteenth century, continued popular through the sixteenth.

The home almost replaced the church as the center of religious worship in Protestant lands. The father served as priest, leading the family in daily prayers, Bible reading, and psalms, and the mother taught her children the catechism. In the middle classes comfort went with piety. This was the age when the table evolved by joining trestles and boards into a sturdy-legged unity, benches and cushions evolved into the upholstered chair, and the four-poster bed, carved and canopied, became a symbol of moral stability and financial success. Furniture, plate, andirons, and kitchen utensils were made to endure, even sparkle, for generations. Pewter replaced wooden platters; spoons of tin or silver replaced those of wood.

Houses were big because families were large. Women bore almost annually, often in vain, for infantile mortality was high. John Colet was the eldest of twenty-two children; by the time he was thirty-two all the others were dead. Anton Koberger, the Nuremberg printer, had twenty-five children, and survived twelve of them. Dürer was one of eighteen children, of whom only three seem to have reached maturity.⁷⁸ To round out the family there were household pets almost as numerous as the progeny. Parrots had come in from the West Indies, and monkeys from India were domestic favorites.⁷⁹ A whole literature instructed women and children in the care of dogs and birds.

Meals were enormous. Vegetables were despised, and only slowly won acceptance; the cabbage, carrot, lettuce, rhubarb, potato, lima bean, and strawberry now came into common use. The main meal, or dinner, was taken at eleven in the morning; supper was deferred till seven—the higher the class, the later the hour. Beer and wine were the staple drinks at all meals, even breakfast; one of Thomas More’s claims to fame was that he drank water. About 1550 the Spaniards brought in chocolate from Mexico; coffee had not yet percolated from Arabia into Western Europe. In 1512 the household of the Duke of Northumberland allowed a quart of ale per person per meal, even to boys eight years old; the average consumption of ale in sixteenth-century Coventry was a quart per day for every man, woman, and child.⁸⁰ The breweries of Munich were renowned as early as the fourteenth century.⁸¹ Drunkenness was in good repute in England till “Bloody Mary” frowned upon it; it remained popular in Germany. The French drank more stably, not being quite so cold.

Despite poverty and oppression, many of the graces of life continued. Even the poor had gardens. The tulip, first brought to Western Europe about 1550 by Busbecq, Imperial ambassador at Constantinople, became a national passion in Holland. Country houses were a pleasant fashion in England and France. Villagers still had their seasonal festivals—May Day, Harvest Home, All Saints, Christmas, and many more; kings themselves went Maying, and crowned themselves with flowers. The amusements of the rich sometimes provided exciting pageantry for the poor, as when Henry II entered Lyons in state in 1548; and commoners might, at a respectful distance, watch lords joust at tournaments—till that sport went out of style after the death of Diane’s King. Religious processions became more pagan as the age of Henry VIII moved toward the Elizabethan; and on the Continent an easy morality allowed nude women, in festival pageants, to impersonate historical or mythological characters; Dürer confessed himself fascinated by such a display at Antwerp in 1521.⁸²

And there were games. Rabelais filled a chapter by merely listing them, real and imagined; and Brueghel showed almost a hundred of them in one painting. Bear-baiting, bullfighting, cockfighting, amused the populace; football, bowling, boxing, wrestling, exercised and exorcized young commoners; and Paris alone had 250 tennis courts for its blue bloods in the sixteenth century.⁸³ All classes hunted and gambled; some ladies threw dice, some bishops played cards for money.⁸⁴ Mummers, acrobats, and players roamed the countryside, and performed for lords and royalty. Within doors people played cards, chess, backgammon, and a score of other games.

Of all pastimes the best beloved was the dance. “After dinner,” says Rabelais, “they all went tag-rag together to the willowy grove, where, on the green grass, to the sound of merry flutes and pleasant bagpipes, they danced so gallantly that it was a sweet and heavenly sport to see.”⁸⁵ So in England, on May Day, villagers gathered round a gaily decorated Maypole, danced their lusty rustic measures, and then, it appears, indulged in intimacies reminiscent of the Roman festival of Flora, goddess of flowers. Under Henry VIII the May games usually included the morris (i.e., Moorish) dance, which had come from the Spanish Moors via the Spanish fandango with castanets. Students danced so boisterously at Oxford and Cambridge that William of Wykeham had to forbid the ecstasy near chapel statuary. Luther approved of dancing, and relished especially the “square dance, with friendly bows, embracings, and hearty swinging of the partners.” ⁸⁶ The grave Melanchthon danced; and at Leipzig, in the sixteenth century, the city fathers regularly held a ball to permit students to become acquainted with the “most honorable and elegant daughters of magnates, senators, and citizens.”⁸⁷ Charles VI often led (balait) the ballet or dance at the French court; Catherine de Médicis brought Italian dancers to France, and there, in the later days of that unhappy queen mother, dancing developed new aristocratic forms. “Dancing,” said Jean Tabourot, in one of the oldest books on one of the oldest arts, “is practiced in order to see whether lovers are healthy and suitable for one another; at the end of a dance the gentleman is permitted to kiss his mistress, in order that he may ascertain if she has agreeable breath. In this manner... dancing becomes necessary for the good government of society.”⁸⁸ It was through its accompaniment of the dance that music developed from its vocal and choral forms into the instrumental compositions that have made it the dominating art of our time.