The Tudor Age (Population Changes)

17.50 in Campus Task

The most potent forces within Tudor England were often social, economic, and demographic ones. Thus if the period became a golden age, it was primarily because of the considerable growth in population that occurred between 1500 and the death of Elizabeth I did not so dangerously exceed the capacity of the available resources, particularly food supplies, as to precipitate a Malthusian crisis. Famine and disease unquestionably disrupted and disturbed the Tudor economy, but they did not raze it to its foundations, as in the fourteenth century. More positively, the increased manpower and demand that sprang from rising population stimulated economic growth and the commercialization of agriculture, encouraged trade and urban renewal, inspired a housing revolution, enhanced the sophistication of English manner, especially in London, and (more arguably) bolstered new and exciting attitudes among Tudor Englishmen, notably individualistic ones derived from reformation ideals and Calvinist theology.

The matter its debatable, but there is much to be said for the view that England was economically healthier, more expansive, and more optimistic under the Tudor than any time since the Roman occupation of Britain. Certainly, the contras with the fifteenth century was dramatic. In the hundred or so years before Henry VII became king of England in 1485, England had been under populated, under developed, and inward-looking compared with other Western countries, notably France.

The process of economic recovery in pre-industrial societies was basically one of recovery population, and figures will be useful.

Between 1525 and 1541 the population of England grew extremely fast, an impressive burst of expansion after long inertia. This rate of growth slackened off somewhat after 1541, but the Tudor population continued to increase steadily and inexorably, with a temporary reversal only in the late1550s, to reach 4.10 million in 1601. In addition, the population of Wales grew from about 210,000 in 1500 to 380.000 by 1603.

Inflation, speculation in land, enclosures, unemployment, vagrancy, poverty, and urban squalor were the most pernicious evils of Tudor England, and these were the wider symptoms of population growth and agricultural commercialization. In the fifteenth century farm rents had been discounted, because tenant were so elusive; lord had abandoned direct exploitation of their demesnes, which were leased to tenants on favourable terms.

At the same time, money wages had risen to reflect the contraction of the wage-labor force after 1348, and food prices had fallen in reply to reduced market demand. But rising demand after 1500 burst the bubble of artificial prosperity born of stagnant population.

Men (and women) were prepared to do a day’s work for little more than board wages; able-bodied persons, many of whom were peasants displaced by rising rent or the enclosure of commons, drifted in waves to the towns in quest of work.

In view of this fundamental truth, the greatest triumph of Tudor England was its ability to feed itself. A major national subsistence crisis was avoided. Malthus, who wrote his historic Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, listed positive and preventive checks as the traditional means by which population was kept in balance with available resources of food. Preventive checks included declining fertility, contraception, and fewer, or later, marriages; positive ones involved heavy mortality and abrupt reversal of population growth. Fertility in England indeed declined in the later 1550s, and again between 1566 and 1571. A higher proportion of the population that hitherto did not marry in the region of Elizabeth I.

The sixteenth century witnessed the birth of Britain’s pre-industrial political economy-an evolving accommodation between population and resources, economic and politics, ambition and rationality.

Finally, it is not clear that vagabondage or urban population outside London expanded at a rate faster than was commensurate with the prevailing rise of national population. It used to be argued that the English urban population climbed from 6.2 per cent of the national total in 1520 to 8.4 per cent by the end of the century. However, London’s spectacular growth alone explains this apparent over-population: the leading provincial towns, Norwich, Bristol, Coventry, and York, grew slightly or remained stable in absolute terms-and must thus have been inhabited by a reduced share of population in proportional terms.