Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

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. `06338 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-bodied 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. `06339 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. `063310 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; `063311 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." `063312 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 garcons despoiled Paris in full sunlight. Brantome

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. `063313 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, `063314 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." `063315 Julienne Rabeau, who had killed her child after a

very painful delivery, was burned at Angers (1531); `063316 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. `063317 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.'" `063318

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. `063319 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." `063320 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, `063321 were ahead of their

time; they forbade torture except where national security was held

to be involved. `063322 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. `063323

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 piece de

resistance 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:

-

That country cannot long be well governed, nor maintained with

good policy, where all is ruled by the will of one not chosen by

election but cometh to it by natural succession; for seldom seen it is

that they which by succession come to kingdoms and realms are worthy

of such high authority.... What is more repugnant to nature than a

whole nation to be governed by the will of a prince?... What is more

contrary to reason than all the whole people to be ruled by him

which commonly lacketh all reason?... It is not man that can make a

wise prince of him that lacketh wit by nature.... But this is in man's

power, to elect and choose him that is both wise and just, and make

him a prince, and him that is a tyrant so to depose. `063324

-

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, `063325 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." `063326 Female dancers not infrequently performed on the

stage and elsewhere "absolutely naked"; `063327 this, apparently, is

one of the oldest novelties in the world. Artists looked down their

noses at the rules and regulations of sexual behavior, `063328 and

lords and ladies agreed with the artists. "Among great folk," wrote

Brantome, "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!" `063329 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. `063330

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; `063331 masterpieces of this kind were sold by

street hawkers, letter carriers, strolling players, even at the

great fairs. `063332 All the perversions found place in this

period, `063333 as in the aristocratic pages of Brantome. `063334

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. `063335 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. `063336 In 1560 Michel de l'Hopital, 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 association `063337 rather than

wither with satiation; and Rabelais agreed with him. `063338

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." `063339 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),

-

we have a great horde of young men from all countries, and the

race of girls is getting bold, and run after the fellows into their

rooms and chambers and wherever they can, and offer them their free

love; and I hear that many parents have ordered their sons home...

saying that we hang wives around their necks.... The next Sunday I

preached a strong sermon, telling men to follow the common road and

manner which had been since the beginning of the world... namely, that

parents should give their children to each other with prudence and

good will, without their own preliminary engagement.... Such

engagements are an invention of the abominable pope, suggested to

him by the Devil to destroy and tear down the power of parents given

and commended to them earnestly by God. `063340

-

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. `063341 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. `063342 A triangular menage like

that of Henry II, Catherine de Medicis, 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

Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

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