How Did The Tudor Influence The Economy And Society

Index

Index 1
Introduction 2
Biography 3
The Tudors dynasty. 3
Economy and society 4
Financial policy 5
The administration of justice 5
Bibliography 6

Introduction.

The Tudors: the birth of the nation state. The new monarchy.

The Century of Tudor rule (1485-1603) is often thought of as a most glorious period in English history. Henry VII built the foundations of a wealthy nation state and a powerful monarchy. His son, Henry VIII, kept a magnificent court, and made the Church in England truly English by breaking away from the Roman Catholic Church. Finally, his daughter Elizabeth brought glory to the new state by defeating the powerful navy of Spain, the greatest European power of the time.
There is, however, a less glorious view of the Tudor century. Henry VIII wasted the wealth saved by his father. Elizabeth weakened the quality of government by selling official posts.
Henry VII is less well know than either Henry VIII or Elizabeth I, but he was far more important in establishing the new monarchy than either of them. He based royal power on good business sense.
Henry VII firmly believed that war and glory were bad for business, and that business was good for the state. He therefore avoided quarrels either with Scotland in the north, or France in the south.
During the 15th century, particularly during the Wars of the Roses, England’s trading position had been badly damaged. Trade with Italy and France had been reduced after England’s defeat. The Low Countries offered a way in for trade in Europe. After his victory at Bosworth, Henry made an important trade agreement with the Netherlands which allowed England to trade to grow again.
The authority of the law had been almost completely destroyed by the lawless behaviour of nobles and their armed men.
Henry’s aim was to make the Crown financially independent, and the lands and the fines he took from the old nobility helped him do this. He also raised taxes for wars which he then did not fight. He never spent money unless he had to. It may be expected that Henry was unpopular, but he was careful to keep the friendship of the merchant and lesser gentry classes. Like him they wanted peace and prosperity. He created a new nobility from among them, and men unknown before now became Henry’s statesmen. But they all knew that their rise to importance was completely dependent on the Crown.
When Henry died in 1509 he left a huge fortune of ₤2million, about fifteen years worth of income. The only thing on which he was happy to spend money freely was the building of ships for a merchant fleet. Henry understood earlier that England’s future wealth would depend on international trade. And in order to trade, Henry realised that England must have its own fleet of merchant ships.

Biography

Henry was born in 1457. His parents were Edmund Tudor, earl of Richmond and Margaret Beaufort. He was the one to begin a dynasty that lasted 118 years. On his mother’s side, he was descended from John of Gaunt and his mistress. His grandfather, Welshman Owen Tudor, had been a household clerk of Catherine of Valois, whom he married after the death of her husband Henry V. As Henry’s father died and his mother soon married again, he was brought up by his uncle Jasper Tudor in the Duchy of Brittany in France. Henry Tudor’s claim to the throne was, therefore, weak and of no importance until the deaths in 1471 of Henry VI and his only son, which suddenly made him the sole surviving male with any ancestral claim to the House of Lancaster. The usurpation of Richard III to the House of York split the Yorkist party and gave Henry his opportunity. To unite the opponents of Richard III, Henry had promised to marry Elizabeth of York, eldest daughter of Edward IV; and the coalition of Yorkists and Lancastrians continued, helped by French support, since Richard III talked of invading France. In 1485 Henry landed at Milford Haven in Wales and advanced toward London, he defeated Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth on Aug. 22, 1485. Claiming the throne by just title of inheritance and by the judgment of God in battle, he was crowned on October 30 and secured parliamentary recognition of his title early in November. Having established his claim to be king in his own right, he married Elizabeth of York on Jan. 18, 1486, thereby uniting "the white rose and the red" and launching England upon a century of "smooth-fac 'd peace with smiling plenty.

The Tudors dynasty.

It is no longer fashionable to call Henry VII a "new monarch," and, indeed, if the first Tudor had a model for reconstructing the monarchy, it was the example of the great medieval kings. Newness, however, should not be totally denied Henry Tudor; his royal blood was very "new," and the extraordinary efficiency of his regime introduced a spirit into government that had rarely been present in the medieval past. It was, in fact, "newness" that governed the early policy of the reign, for the Tudor dynasty had to be secured and all those with a better or older claim to the throne liquidated. Elizabeth of York was deftly handled by marriage; the sons of Edward IV had already been removed from the list, presumably murdered by their uncle Richard III; the Earl of Warwick was promptly imprisoned; but the descendants of Edward IV 's sister and daughters remained a threat to the new government. Equally dangerous was the persistent myth that the younger of the two princes murdered in the Tower had escaped his assassin and that the Earl of Warwick had escaped his jailers. The existence of pretenders acted as a catalyst for further baronial discontent and Yorkist aspirations, and in 1487 John de la Pole, a nephew of Edward IV by his sister Elizabeth, with the support of mercenary troops paid for with Burgundian gold, landed in England to support the pretensions of Lambert Simnel, who passed himself off as the authentic Earl of Warwick. Again Henry Tudor was triumphant in war; at the Battle of Stoke, de la Pole was killed and Simnel captured and demoted to a scullery boy in the royal kitchen. Ten years later Henry had to do it all over again, this time with a handsome Flemish lad named Perkin Warbeck, who for six years was accepted in Yorkist circles in Europe as the real Richard IV, brother of the murdered Edward V. Warbeck tried to take advantage of Cornish anger against heavy royal taxation and increased government efficiency and sought to lead a Cornish army of social malcontents against the Tudor throne. It was a measure of the new vigour and popularity of the Tudor monarchy, as well as the support of the gentry, that social revolution and further dynastic war were total failures, and Warbeck found himself in the Tower along with the Earl of Warwick. In the end both men proved too dangerous to live, even in captivity, and in 1499 they were executed. The policy of dynastic extermination did not cease with the new century. Under Henry VIII, the Duke of Buckingham, who was descended from the youngest son of Edward III, was destroyed in 1521; the Earl of Warwick 's sister, the Countess of Salisbury, was beheaded in 1541 and her descendants harried out of the land; and in 1546 the poet Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, the grandson of Buckingham, was put to death. By the end of Henry VIII 's reign the job had been so well done that the curse of Edward III 's fecundity had been replaced by the opposite problem--the Tudor line proved to be infertile when it came to producing healthy male heirs. Henry VII sired Arthur, who died in 1502, and Henry VIII in turn produced only one legitimate son, Edward VI, who died at the age of 16, thereby ending the direct male descent.

Economy and society

By 1485 the kingdom had begun to recover from the demographic catastrophe of the Black Death and the agricultural depression of the late 14th century. As the 15th century came to a close, the rate of population growth began to increase and continued to rise throughout the following century. More people meant more mouths to feed, more backs to cover, and more vanity to satisfy. In response, yeoman farmers, gentleman sheep growers, urban cloth manufacturers, and merchant adventurers produced a social and economic revolution. With extraordinary speed the export of raw wool gave way to the export of woolen cloth manufactured at home, and the wool clothier or entrepreneur was soon buying fleece from sheep raisers, transporting the wool to cottagers for spinning and weaving, paying the farmer 's wife and children by the piece, and collecting the finished article for shipment to Bristol, London, and eventually Europe. By the time Henry VII seized the throne, the Merchant Adventurers, an association of London cloth exporters, were controlling the London market. By 1496 they were a chartered organization with a legal monopoly of the woolen cloth trade, and largely as a consequence of their political and international importance, Henry successfully negotiated the Intercursus Magnus, a highly favourable commercial treaty between England and the Low Countries. England was caught up in a vast European spiral of rising prices, declining real wages, and cheap money. Contemporaries blamed inflation on human greed and only slowly began to perceive that rising prices were the result of inflationary pressures brought on by the increase in population, international war, and the flood of gold and silver arriving from the New World. Inflation and the wool trade together created an economic and social agitation. Land plenty, labour shortage, low rents, and high wages, which had prevailed throughout the early 15th century as a consequence of economic depression and reduced population, were replaced by land shortage, labour surplus, high rents, and declining wages. The landlord, who a century before could find neither tenants nor labourers for his land and had left his fields fallow, could now convert his meadows into sheep runs. His rents and profits soared; his need for labour declined, for one shepherd and his dog could do the work of half a dozen men who had previously tilled the same field. Slowly the medieval system of land tenure and communal farming broke down. The common land of the manor was divided up and fenced in, and the peasant farmer who held his tenure either by copy (a document recorded in the manor court) or by unwritten custom was evicted. Farming techniques were transformed, the gap between rich and poor increased, the timeless quality of village life was upset, and on all levels of society old families were being replaced by new. The beneficiaries of change, as always, were the most grasping, the most ruthless, and the best educated segments of the population: the landed country gentlemen and their socially inferior cousins, the merchants and lawyers. By 1500 the essential economic basis for the landed country gentleman 's future political and social ascendancy was being formed: the 15th-century knight of the shire was changing from a desperate and irresponsible land proprietor, ready to support the baronial feuding of the Wars of the Roses, into a respectable landowner desiring strong, practical government and the rule of law. The gentry did not care whether Henry VII 's royal pedigree could bear close inspection; their own lineage was not above suspicion, and they were willing to serve the prince "in parliament, in council, in commission and other offices of the commonwealth.

Financial policy

It was not enough for Henry VII to secure his dynasty; he also had to reestablish the financial credit of his crown and reassert the authority of royal law.
Feudal kings had traditionally lived off four sources of nonparliamentary income: rents from the royal estates, revenues from import and export taxes, fees from the administration of justice, and moneys extracted on the basis of a vassal 's duty to his overlord. The first Tudor was no different from his Yorkist or medieval predecessors; he was simply more ruthless and successful in demanding every penny that was owed him. Henry 's first move was to confiscate all the estates of Yorkist adherents and to restore all property over which the crown had lost control since. To these essentially statutory steps he added efficiency of rent collection. At the same time, the Tudors profited from the growing economic prosperity of the realm, and custom receipts rose by the time Henry died. The increase in custom and land revenues was applauded, for it meant fewer parliamentary subsidies and fitted the medieval formula that kings should live on their own, not parliamentary, income. But the collection of revenues from feudal sources and from the administration of justice caused great discontent and earned Henry his reputation as a miser and extortionist. Generally Henry demanded no more than his due as the highest feudal overlord, and a year after he became sovereign, he established a commission to look into land tenure to discover
who held property by knight 's fee--that is, by obligation to perform military services. Occasionally he overstepped the bounds of feudal decency and abused his rights. In 1504, for instance, he levied a feudal aid (tax) to pay for the knighting of his son--who had been knighted 15 years before and had been dead for two. Henry VIII continued his father 's policy of fiscal feudalism. To fiscal feudalism Henry VII added rigorous administration of justice. As law became more effective, it also became more profitable, and the policy of levying heavy fines as punishment upon those who dared break the king 's peace proved to be a useful whip over the mighty magnate and a welcome addition to the king 's exchequer. Generally Henry believed in a good-neighbour policy--alliance with Spain by the marriage of Arthur and Catherine in 1501 and peace with Scotland by the marriage of his daughter Margaret to James IV in 1503--on the grounds that peace was cheap and trade profitable. In 1489, however, he was faced with the threat of the union of the Duchy of Brittany with the French crown; and England, Spain, the empire, and Burgundy went to war to stop it. Nevertheless, as soon as it became clear that nothing could prevent France from absorbing the duchy, Henry negotiated the unheroic but financially rewarding Treaty of Étaples in 1492, whereby he disclaimed all historic rights to French territory (except Calais) in return for an indemnity . By fair means or foul, when the first Tudor died, his total nonparliamentary annual income had risen at least twofold and stood in the neighbourhood.

The administration of justice

The problem for Henry VII was not to replace an old system of government with a new--no Tudor was consciously a revolutionary--but to make the ancient system work tolerably well.
He had to tame but not destroy the nobility, develop organs of administration directly under his control, and wipe out provincialism and privilege wherever they appeared. In the task of curbing the old nobility, the king was immeasurably helped by the high aristocratic death rate during the Wars of the Roses; but where war left off, policy took over. Commissions of Array composed of local notables were appointed by the crown for each county in order to make use of the power of the aristocracy in raising troops but to prevent them from maintaining private armies (livery) with which to intimidate justice or threaten the throne. Previous monarchs had sought to enforce the laws against livery and maintenance, but Tudor, though he never totally abolished such evils, built up a reasonably efficient machine for enforcing the law, based on the historic premise that the king in the midst of his council was the fountain of justice. Traditionally the royal council had heard all sorts of cases, and its members rapidly began to specialize. The Court of Chancery had for years dealt with civil offenses, and the Court of Star Chamber evolved to handle criminal cases, the Court of Requests poor men 's suits, and the Court of Admiralty piracy. The process by which the conciliar courts developed was largely
accidental, and the Court of Star Chamber acquired its name from the star-painted ceiling of the room in which the councillors sat. Conciliar justice was popular because the ordinary courts where common law prevailed were slow and heavy, favoured the rich and mighty, and tended to break down when asked to deal with riot, maintenance, livery, perjury, and fraud. The same search for efficiency applied to matters of finance. The traditional fiscal agency of the crown, the exchequer, was burdened down with archaic procedures and restrictions, and Henry VII turned to the more intimate and flexible departments of his personal household--specifically to the treasurer of the chamber, whom he could supervise directly--as the central tax-raising, rent-collecting, and money-disbursing segment of government. Henry VII sought to enforce law in every corner of their kingdom, and step by step the blurred medieval profile of a realm shattered by semiautonomous franchises, in which local law and custom were obeyed more than the king 's law, was transformed into the clear outline of a single state filled with loyal subjects obeying the king 's decrees. By 1500 royal government had been extended into the northern counties and Wales by the creation of a Council of the North and a Council for the Welsh Marches. If the term "new monarchy" was inappropriate in 1485, the same cannot be said for the year of Henry VII 's death, for when he died in 1509, after 24 years of reign, he bequeathed to his son something quite new in English history: a safe throne, a solvent government, a prosperous land, and a reasonably united kingdom. Only one vital aspect of the past remained untouched, the independent Roman Catholic church, and it was left to the second Tudor to destroy this remaining vestige of medievalism.

Bibliography

The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, Volume 5, Macropaedia, 15th edition, 1995.
An illustrated history of Britain, David McDowall, Longman, 1997.
England a narrative history, Peter N. Williams, www.britannia.com
Britain, the country and its people: an introduction for learners of English, James O’Driscoll, Oxford University Press, 1999.