Summary_The Industrial Revolution - Transformation of European Society and Economy.docx | HIEU 597

The Industrial Revolution - Transformation of European Society and

Economy

Summary

Liberty University

Introduction

In 1798, at opposite ends of Europe, two major treatises on population were

published. The more authoritative of the two was written by Joseph von Sonnenfels,

the leading political scientist of the Austrian Enlightenment. In his Manual of the

domestic administration of states, with reference to the

conditions and concepts of our age, he summed up the conventional

wisdom, namely that a large and growing population was a Good Thing. Indeed, he

went so far as to assert that demographic increase should be made ‘the chief

principle of political science’, for the good reason that it promoted the two chief

ends of civil society: material comfort and physical security. The greater the

population, Sonnenfels argued, the greater the

country’s agricultural productivity and the greater the capacity to resist both foreign

enemies and domestic dissidents. To clinch it, he pointed out that the more people

there were to contribute to the expenses of the state, the less the tax burden on the

individual would have to be. This common-sense approach was underpinned by the

belief that the population of the world had been declining since classical times. It

was a conviction Sonnenfels

shared with most of his contemporaries, including Voltaire and

Montesquieu. The latter observed gloomily: ‘if this decline in population does not

cease, in a thousand years the world will be a desert’.

A very different view was expressed in the same year by the young Englishscholar

Thomas Malthus, in An Essay on the Principle of

Population as it affects the Future Improvement of Society, At thirty-two, he was

almost exactly half Sonnenfels’ age, but his vision of the future was at

least twice as bleak. His chief concern was to counter the belief in the perfectibility

of the human race advanced by progressives such as William Godwin and the

Marquis de Condorcet. Malthus proceeded from two premises: ‘that food is

necessary to the existence of man’ and ‘that the passion between the sexes is

necessary, and will remain nearly in its present state’. These two natural laws were

not of equal force, however, for ‘the power of population is indefinitely greater than

the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man’. A man and a woman could

give life to

several children, each of whom could do the same. Consequently, demographic

growth proceeded in a geometrical progression, whereas

agriculture could only expand arithmetically. In other words, the number of people

generated by the sequence 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 could not be

sustained by resources generated by the sequence 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. The

necessary result was that, sooner or later, any expansion of population

would be halted naturally when it banged its head against the ceiling imposed by

this discrepancy. A combination of misery and ‘vice’ (by which the Rev. Malthus

meant contraception) would soon redress the balance.

Population of European countries 1650–1800

In the long run, both men were to be proved wrong, but in 1798 either position

seemed credible. During Sonnenfels’ lifetime (he had been born in 1732), both the

power and prosperity of his country had increased hand-in- hand with its population.

One of the four Emperors he served, Joseph II,

stated as a central axiom: ‘I consider that the principal object of my policy, and the

one to which all political, financial and even military authorities

should devote their attention, is population, that is to say the preservation and

increase of the number of subjects. It is from the greatest possible number of

subjects that all the advantages of the state derive.’ Yet all over Europe, periodic

subsistence crises lent support to Malthus’ gloomy

forecast, not least the harvest failure which arguably precipitated the French

Revolution. If Malthus had lived a little longer (he died in 1834), he might well have

found grim satisfaction in observing the misery of the ‘hungry forties’, especially the

potato famine and ensuing mass emigration which reduced Ireland’s population

from 8,400,000 to 6,600,000 in just five years.

As this ambivalence suggests, in this respect the end of the eighteenth century was

on the cusp between old and new. As we shall see,

demographically the period 1648–1815 was in many respects more like the

fifteenth than the twentieth century, although it also had many modern

characteristics.

NUMBERS

It is not difficult to appreciate why, of all the branches of historical

scholarship, demography should be among the most contentious. On the one hand,

its practitioners have the opportunity to crunch numbers down to several decimal

points, thus giving a spurious impression of precision. On the other hand, in any

period before the censuses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, evidence is so

fragmentary that words such as ‘estimate’, or even ‘guess’, seem too precise to

describe the results. The

choice seems to be between bold statements about national totals and the

microscopic ‘reconstitution’ of small communities, on whose microscopic

foundations great airy structures are then erected. Especially in regions with poor

communications, negligible literacy rates and little or no regular

administration, such as Hungary following the Habsburg reconquista of the late

seventeenth century, virtually nothing can be known about the level of population.

However, demographic developments are so fundamental to an understanding of

this, or any other, historical period that an attempt must be made to construct some

sort of structure, although the straw and even most of the bricks are lacking.

A good place to start is a summary of the best population estimates for a number of

European countries between the middle of the seventeenth

century and the end of the eighteenth (see Table 2).

Table 2. Population of European countries 1650–1800(in millions)

All of these statistics are approximate but some are more approximate than others.

The figure for England in 1650, for example, can be set down with far greater

confidence than that for Russia, which may be completely

wrong. To give national figures is also somewhat misleading, as there were wide

regional variations within any given country. For example, in Spain the population of

provinces on the periphery, notably Catalonia, Valencia

and Galicia, increased much more rapidly than in the Castilian centre. In France

growth was strongest in Hainaut, Franche-Comté and Berry, moderate in the

Parisian basin, Brittany, the Massif Central, the south-west and the Midi, and

weakest in Normandy. In Germany, not surprisingly, much higher rates were

recorded by the thinly populated east than by the relatively densely populated

west–indeed, as we shall see, there was a

significant amount of internal migration.

Table 3. Population of Europe (in millions)

Even after every qualification has been carefully noted, a general picture can be

identified. Chronologically, this presents a sequence of

stagnation or slow growth (1650–1700), followed by a general if modest increase

(1700–50) and then by a more rapid expansion (1750–1800). But its true

significance emerges only when it is placed in a much wider time frame. Following

the catastrophic population losses caused by the Black Death in the middle of the

fourteenth century, recovery began in the late

fifteenth and continued throughout the sixteenth. But around 1600, the Four

Horsemen of the Apocalypse returned with a vengeance to many parts of Europe,

bringing war, plague and famine with devastating demographic

consequences. The great plague which struck Castile in 1599–1600, for example,

was only the first of many such visitations which reduced the

population of the region by a quarter by 1650. Only England and the Dutch Republic

managed to avoid the general decline of the first half of the

seventeenth century. So the developments of 1650–1800 represent both a recovery

and a resumption of growth. However, much more important than what preceded

our period, was what followed it. Despite the warnings of

Malthus, the expansion of the second half of the eighteenth century was not

checked by inelastic subsistence. On the contrary, Europe’s population went on

growing throughout the nineteenth century at an ever-accelerating rate.

Geographically, as Table 2 reveals, there was a shift in the demographic balance of

Europe away from the Mediterranean to the north-west. This becomes clearer if the

individual countries are grouped by region (Table 3).

The eminent Dutch economic historian Jan de Vries, who compiled Table 3, added

laconically that he would have added a fourth region–Eastern Europe, embracing

Poland and Russia–but there was insufficient data.

The shift in Europe’s demographic centre of gravity was momentous.

Late medieval and Renaissance Europe had been dominated by the

Mediterranean. In manufacturing, trade and banking, its cities had been pre-

eminent; in culture, the Italian city-states had created a civilization which bore

comparison with classical Greece; in politics, the Spanish branch of the Habsburgs

had created an empire on which the sun never set. Yet by the eighteenth century,

northerners were coming south as if to a museum, their

admiration for its past exceeded only by their contempt for its present. As

an English visitor put it in 1778, Rome had once been ‘inhabited by a nation of

heroes and patriots, but was now in the hands of the most effeminate and most

superstitious people in the universe’. As we shall see, the relative demographic

decline of the region was both symptom and cause of a wider set of problems.

MARRIAGE AND FERTILITY

One possible explanation for the secular increase in Europe’s population was a rise

in fertility as a result of women getting married younger. A drop

in the average age of marriage by just five or six years could mean a 50-per- cent

increase in the number of children born. Indeed, Tony Wrigley has

argued that it was just this sort of reduction which accounts for three- quarters of

the growth of population in England between 1750 and 1800. It was certainly very

easy to get married in England, with an age of consent of fourteen for boys and

twelve for girls. Nor was there any need for a church service–an exchange of oaths

in the presence of witnesses, or even just an

exchange of statements of intent to marry, followed by sexual intercourse, was

regarded as sufficient. Yet here, as elsewhere in northern and western Europe,

marriage was delayed until long after sexual maturity, the average age lying within

a range of 241/2 to 261/2 years. Although there was

certainly a reduction in England during the latter part of the eighteenth

century, Wrigley’s critics have argued that it may have been offset by women calling

an earlier halt to childbearing.

The long delay in contracting marriage–only one English bride in eight was a

teenager when she first married–was not offset by any compensating extra-marital

fertility. By the standards of the twenty-first century, the illegitimacy rates were

amazingly low: in most European countries the rate rarely reached 5 per cent and

was often below 2 per cent, as it was in England. (In the United Kingdom today the

rate is above 30 per cent). In France it was barely 1 per cent in the countryside and

only 4–5 per cent in Paris. However, there was an undoubted move upwards during

the course of the eighteenth century. By 1789 the illegitimacy rate had reached 4

per cent in French towns with populations of more than 4,000, 12–17 per cent in

full-blown cities and 20 per cent in Paris. In Germany in the same period there was a

similar increase from 2.5 to 11.9 per cent. However, the modest increase in fertility

these figures represented could have had only a small impact overall, even if all of

the children born out of wedlock had survived to adulthood. In the event, as we shall

see, they were especially prone to dying in infancy.

In those parts of Europe where a strong degree of social control was

exercised by churches, guilds or seigneurs, the decision to delay marriage was often

imposed from above. In northern, western and central Europe, however, it was

usually a voluntary response to economic circumstances.

There appears to have been a strong feeling that marriage should not be contracted

until the couple was in a position to set up an independent

household. It was also here that the highest numbers of women who never married

were to be found. In north-western Europe 10–15 per cent and in some places even

25 per cent of women remained celibate, making this a more important check on

population growth than the late age of marriage. In the east and the south, on the

other hand, the rate was much lower and there was also less reluctance to accept a

subordinate position in an

extended household, with a corresponding reduction in the age of marriage.

Everywhere dowries posed a problem, especially for fathers blessed with an excess

of daughters, such as Mr Bennet of Pride and Prejudice. The English social historian,

the late Roy Porter, did not believe that Sir William Temple (1628–99) was being

unduly cynical when he wrote ‘our marriages are made, just like other common

bargains and sales, by the mere

consideration of interest or gain, without any love or esteem’. Certainly the

newspaper announcements Porter cited in support of this generalization have a

flavour all the more hard-nosed for their clerical origin:

MARRIAGES

Married, the Lord Bishop of St Asaph to Miss Orrell, with £30,000.

Married, the Rev. Mr Roger Waind, of York, about twenty six years of age, to a

Lincolnshire lady, upward of eighty, with whom he is to have £8,000 in money, £300

and a coach-and-four during life only.

Disqualified by celibacy from clerical enterprise of this kind, the

Catholic Church made a modest demographic contribution by establishing

institutions such as the Italian monti di maritaggio, to provide dowries for

impecunious girls. The general determination to guard against impoverishment–‘no

land, no marriage’–condemned large numbers of males and females to celibacy if

not chastity. In Catholic Europe, the most

common asylum was the monastery or the nunnery. Unmarried girls obliged to

become brides of Christ rather than men were also required to provide a dowry for

their nunnery, but the sum was appreciably less. It is not often

appreciated just how thriving were the monastic establishments of

eighteenth-century Europe. Around the middle of the eighteenth century there were

at least 15,000 monasteries for men and 10,000 numeries for women, with a total

complement of c.250,000. Voltaire summarized their contribution to society with the

dismissive comment: ‘they sing, they eat, they digest’. As with most of Voltaire’s

anti-clerical jibes, this was grossly unfair, as many monks and nuns worked hard in a

wide variety of demanding roles. But one thing they did not do was procreate.

They did not procreate, except on very rare occasions, although they may well have

engaged in clandestine sexual activity. Indeed, if the increasingly scurrilous anti-

clerical literature of the eighteenth century is to be believed, they engaged in little

else. Mutatis mutandis, married couples were positively encouraged, if not required,

to engage in sexual activity, but did not always procreate. Contraception is a branch

of demography

especially clouded by lack of direct evidence, but it is also one in which there is an

unusual degree of consensus. Whether writing about Colyton, Geneva, Besançon or

Rouen, there is general agreement that family planning was widely practised,

especially among the elites, and on an

increasing scale. In Rouen, for example, fertility rates fell consistently from 1642 to

1792, with a brief interlude in the middle of the eighteenth century.

Births per family halved from eight in 1670 to four in 1800, as women

stopped having babies earlier, or even stopped having them altogether (the

proportion of the wholly childless doubled from 5 per cent to 10 per cent during the

same period).

As contraception in any shape or form was condemned as vigorously by Protestants

as by Catholics, very little evidence has been left of the

techniques employed. There were plenty of herbal and/or magical recipes on offer,

but it may be doubted whether they were very effective. More reliable, but by no

means infallible, was the condom. This was allegedly the invention of a Dr Condom,

seeking to limit Charles II’s brood of illegitimate children, although the word is more

likely to derive from the Latin condus for receptacle. Until the discovery of the

vulcanization of rubber in the 1830s, the only materials available were cloth (too

porous) or animal intestines (too insensitive). Although condoms were certainly in

use, by James Boswell for example, they appear to have been used for the

avoidance of disease rather than contraception. In the words of an anonymous

English poet of 1744:

Let not the Joy she proffers be Essay’d, Without the well-try’d Cundum’s friendly Aid.

Indicative of the low esteem in which the condom was held was the attempt to

portray it as some other country’s invention, the English calling them ‘French

letters’ and the French calling them ‘English overcoats’. Less

cumbersome but more fallible was a sponge inserted in the vagina, allied with post-

coital use of a syringe or bidet for washing out any remaining sperm. Literary

evidence suggests that this combination was especially favoured in France, where

the ubiquitous bidet remained a source of misunderstanding and mirth for foreign

visitors until relatively recently.

The only secure form of contraception was abstinence, or rather

abstinence from ejaculation inside the vagina. Demographic historians find it easy to

agree that coitus interruptus was both the most popular and most effective

technique employed. Unfortunately, it raised intractable theological issues. Was it

acceptable to engage in copulation solely for the purpose of enjoyment, without the

intention of procreation? Was not premature withdrawal of the male member

disturbingly close to the sin of Onan (‘And Onan knew that the seed should not be

his; and it came to pass,

when he went in unto his brother’s wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he

should give seed to his brother. And the thing which he did displeased the Lord:

wherefore he slew him also.’ Genesis 38: 9–10)? How should one interpret, for

example, the Anglican Book of Common Prayer

(1662), which states that marriage was ordained by God for three reasons: ‘for the

procreation of children’, ‘for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication; that

such persons as have not the gift of continency might marry’, and ‘for the mutual

society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in

prosperity and adversity’? That coitus interruptus was widespread, despite these

problems, was demonstrated not least by the numerous–and very popular–

pamphlets which inveighed against it. The

author of Onania; or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, and all its Frightful

Consequences, in both Sexes, consider’d, which went through twenty

editions between 1710 and 1760, was in no doubt about its ethical status: it was

absolutely unacceptable. When a reader wrote in to argue that he and his wife could

not afford to support any more children and therefore his

conscience was clear, he was told bluntly that he was committing ‘an

abominable sin’. From the opposite end of the theological spectrum, no one

summed up better the repertoire of birth control techniques available to an early

modern couple than the marquis de Sade, including his own favoured solution. In

Philosophy in the boudoir (1795) he has his two arch-rakes

explain to the ingénue how to avoid pregnancy:

MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE A girl risks having a child only in proportion to the

frequency with which she permits the man to invade her cunt. Let her scrupulously

avoid this manner of tasting delight; in its stead, let her offer indiscriminately her

hand, her mouth, her breasts, or her

arse…

DOLMANCÉ…To cheat propagation of its rights and to contradict what fools call the

laws of Nature, is truly most charming. The thighs, the

armpits also sometimes offer him retreats where his seed may be spilled without

risk of pregnancy.

MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE Some women insert sponges into the vagina’s interior;

these, intercepting the sperm, prevent it from springing into the vessel where

generation occurs. Others oblige their lovers to make use of a little sack of Venetian

skin, in the vernacular called a

condom, which the semen fills and where it is prevented from

flowing farther. But of all the possibilities, that presented by the arse is without

doubt the most delicious.

MORTALITY–FAMINE

Despite the marquis de Sade’s wishful thinking, sodomy remained very much a

minority taste, not least because it was punished so severely when detected (see

below, pp. 000–0). Certainly it does not appear to have had

any discernible impact on the fertility figures of old regime Europe. On the other

hand, the cumulative effect of birth control techniques certainly depressed rather

than elevated Europe’s population. The trend towards an earlier age of marriage in

some regions certainly pointed in the other direction but not sufficiently to explain

the rise. Demographers therefore

conclude that explanations based on fertility are inadequate. Instead, they

concentrate on a decline in mortality, especially on the diminution, if not

disappearance, of the three great killers of the seventeenth century: famine, war

and plague.

Perhaps no aspect of everyday life in the twenty-first century separates us more

sharply from the early modern period than food prices. Although so taken for

granted as to be invisible, the stability and low level of basic foodstuff prices are

among the more agreeable characteristics of the modern world. Every now and

again, there is a flurry of press interest if, say,

adverse meteorological conditions in Brazil sends the price of instant coffee up by

more than a few pence but, generally speaking, the cost of a regular

shopping expedition is predictable from one year to the next. Moreover, for the

great majority, the proportion of a salary spent on food is low and getting lower. This

is a necessary consequence of a global division of labour, which in turn derives from

quick and cheap transport. But for the

early modern household, by far the greatest single item of expenditure was food,

and by far the greatest source of anxiety was fear that the harvest

would fail. Before steam power opened up the limitless productivity of the North

American plains, most food had to be grown locally. As we have seen in chapter 1, in

the age of the quadruped, so difficult was it to transport the staple crop–grain–that

any profit disappeared before even a few miles had been covered.

This problem was compounded by a dangerous over-reliance on cereals and thus on

the weather. The latter presented two kind of problem in the period 1648–1815. The

first was macroscopic: there is a good deal of

evidence that the late seventeenth century formed part of a much longer ‘new ice

age’ which had begun a century or so earlier. Taking the period 1920–60 as a basis

for comparison, it can be shown that average mean temperatures were 0.9°C lower

during the second half of the seventeenth

century and 1.5°C lower during the 1690s. That may not sound very much, but it

appears to have had a seriously depressing effect on agricultural productivity. The

second meteorological problem was short-term, namely the devastating effect that

a wet winter or spring, or even a sudden hailstorm at harvest-time, could have on

yields. It is worth remembering that early modern cultivators did not select their

seed but simply kept back part of the previous crop; that the varieties they used had

not been adapted to make the most of their soil and growing conditions; that even

in a good year the yield might be as low as four or five grains to each one retained;

that they had no mechanical equipment to harvest, thresh or dry; and that

storage facilities were usually anything but watertight.

So, especially in the lands of the north, west and centre, peasant- producers knew

that it was not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’ a year of dearth would come. When it

did, the signs would already be there by spring, in the form of stunted growth and

rotting roots. With rumours of impending crop failure spreading, prices would begin

to rise, as the well-off hurried to stock their larders. Those with grain to sell–the

noble and ecclesiastical landowners, the grain merchants and the richer tenant-

farmers–would then keep back their stocks from market, waiting for prices to reach

their cyclical peak. Even in a normal year, late spring and early summer formed a

difficult time in the calendar of consumers (and their governments), for it

was then that the grain stocks of the previous year were beginning to run out but

the new harvest had not yet been gathered in. This window of

anxiety was known in France as la soudure (‘the gap’). If the current harvest then

really did prove to be disappointing, prices could start to go through the roof. And

that was not the end of it. Most peasants did not

cultivate enough land to allow them to be self-sufficient, but needed to enter the

market as purchasers to make up the shortfall. To raise the necessary

cash, they relied on labouring or some kind of manufacturing activity such

as weaving or spinning. However, just when higher grain prices made this

supplementary income all the more necessary, demand for manufactured items

collapsed, because consumers were now having to spend so much more of their

income on food.

By the autumn of a year of harvest-failure, a large and growing number of people

would find themselves excluded from the market. To survive, they resorted to

inferior forms of food, to consuming their seed corn, to begging, to crime, to

whatever. The lucky, the young, the healthy and the

enterprising might get through the winter, but woe betide them if the following

year’s harvest also proved to be a failure. In May 1693 a minor official in the French

bishopric of Beauvais noted that the price of corn had gone up sharply, causing

acute hardship. Eleven months later, he wrote

again, this time with a harrowing description of

an infinite number of poor souls, weak from hunger and wretchedness and dying

from want and lack of bread in streets and squares, in the towns and countryside

because, having no work or occupation, they lack the money to buy bread…Seeking

to prolong their lives a little and somewhat to appease their hunger, these poor folk

for the most part, lacking bread, eat such unclean things as cats and flesh of horses

flayed and cast on to dung heaps, the blood which flows when cows and oxen are

slaughtered and the offal

and lights and such which cooks throw into the streets…Other poor

wretches eat roots and herbs which they boil in water, nettles and weeds of that

kind…Yet others will grub up the beans and seed corn which were

sown in the spring…and all this breeds corruption in the bodies of men and divers

mortal and infectious maladies, such as malignant fevers…which

assail even wealthy and well-provided persons.

The demographic effects of this sequence are not difficult to imagine, for one need

only translate the sickeningly familiar images of present-day famines in the Horn of

Africa to a European setting. Most obviously, marriage and birth rates plunged, while

mortality–and especially infant mortality–rates soared. It has been estimated that

during the terrible

mortalité of 1692–4, 2,800,000 people, or 15 per cent of the total

population of France, perished. The 1690s proved to be particularly destructive all

over western, northern, central and eastern Europe. In Finland the famine of 1696–7

carried off at least a quarter and perhaps as much as a third of the population. In

Scotland, a poor harvest in 1695 was followed by severe failure in 1696, a modest

improvement in 1697 but general failure in 1698. In the worst affected counties,

such as

Aberdeenshire, the mortality rate reached 20 per cent. As Sir Robert Sibbald

observed: ‘Everyone may see Death in the Face of the Poor.’ Only England and the

Dutch Republic escaped the holocaust, perhaps because their

agricultural systems were better-balanced but more probably because their better

water communications allowed both better circulation of surpluses and supplies

from outside to be brought in.

There were bad harvests right across Europe in 1660–63, 1675–9, 1693–4 and 1708–

9, together with plenty more localized famines in between. But then the situation

began to improve. After 1709 there were no more famines in France, although there

were plenty of years of acute

shortages, not least in 1788–9. There were widespread subsistence crises in 1741–2,

in the early 1770s and the late 1780s. Every now and again there

would be a local outbreak of horrors of the late-seventeenth-century variety, as

there was in Sicily in 1763 when the harvest failed, tens of thousands

starved to death and social order broke down. For the reasons discussed earlier,

food shortages could not be eliminated from Europe until

improvements in communication opened up the grain-growing plains of the New

World, but, even so, the eighteenth century marked a distinct improvement on what

had gone before. As we shall see in a later chapter, part of the explanation is to be

found in improved agricultural methods and part in more effective government

action. It is also likely that a gradual improvement in meteorological conditions

raised production levels. In any event, one reason for the striking difference

between the demographic histories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

must lie in the reduction in the number and severity of famines.

MORTALITY–WARS

The first fifty years of the seventeenth century had witnessed some of the most

terrible and most sustained blood-letting in human history. At home,

faction-fighting turned into civil war; abroad, few parts of Europe were not affected

by the epochal struggle between Habsburgs and Bourbons. The result was

demographic catastrophe. In 1652, a report to the ecclesiastical authorities on the

condition of the region around Paris affected by the ‘Frondes’, as the civil war of

1648–53 was known, recorded ‘villages and hamlets deserted and bereft of clergy,

streets infected by stinking carrion

and dead bodies lying exposed, houses without doors or windows,

everything reduced to cesspools and stables, and above all the sick and dying, with

no bread, meat, medicine, fire, beds, linen or covering, and no priest, doctor,

surgeon or anyone to comfort them’. Yet these inhabitants of the Parisian bassin

were the lucky ones, for at least the conflict which

engulfed them was of relatively short duration. To the east, by that time, there was

a whole generation which had grown up knowing nothing but the horrors of war.

During the Thirty Years War, which began with the defenestration at Prague on 23

May 1618, armies rampaged across central Europe again and again. Only the Alpine

regions and one or two favoured parts of the north were spared.

Contemporaries were in no doubt that this conflict was especially brutal, even by the

terrifying standards of early modern warfare. Both literature, for example

Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus, and the visual

arts, for example Jacques Callot’s Les Misères et les Malheurs de la Guerre, convey

harrowing evidence of the looting, rape and murder inflicted by the soldiers.

Subsequent scholars have argued long and hard about the quantitative damage

inflicted. German nationalist historians of the nineteenth century were only too

anxious to believe that foreigners had plunged their country back into a dark age,

from which only now–thanks to Prussia–it was at last emerging. That sort of

narrative in turn provoked a

strong reaction in the later twentieth century, when all kinds of qualifications to the

‘doom and gloom’ scenario were advanced. However, the consensus still seems to

favour the figures first produced by Günther Franz in 1943 which showed that the

urban population declined by a quarter and rural population by a third. Those

figures, however, are national

averages; depending on the region, they could range from zero losses to well over

50 per cent.

The recovery of Germany’s population after the end of the war was clearly in part

just that–recovery. Once the armies had gone away, the natural buoyancy could

return. Personifying the amazing virility and fecundity of the survivors was Hans

Bosshardt, who got married for the fourth time at the age of eighty, his bride being

his twenty-year-old

goddaughter. He had three children by her, the youngest being born in the same

year that its sixty-six-year-old half-brother died. The energetic Hans eventually died

aged 100 whereupon his widow kept up the good work by soon remarrying.

Unfortunately, it turned out that the war had not gone

away for good. It returned with a vengeance in the 1670s, when Louis XIV sought to

expand France’s frontiers in the east. The Palatinate had barely recovered from the

Thirty Years War when it was laid waste by the armies of General Turenne in 1674.

The Elector Palatine, Karl Ludwig, made Louis XIV personally responsible for the

destruction of thirty years of

rétablissement, but that did not prevent the French armies coming again and again

in the 1680s. In 1689 the systematic, officially authorized destruction of Heidelberg,

Mannheim, Worms, Speyer and many other towns in the region represented a new

and ominous departure in the history of warfare.

In 1693 the French returned, this time to burn Heidelberg to the ground. Far from

being apologetic, Louis XIV had a medal struck bearing the boast

‘Heidelberg deleta’.

It was not only the hapless Germans who suffered repeated demographic setbacks

in the second half of the seventeenth century. In the south-east, the new attempt by

the Ottoman Turks to take control of the

Danube valley and the ensuing Austrian reconquista of Hungary, left huge tracts of

territory virtually uninhabited. In the north-east, the long struggle between the

Scandinavian countries, Poland and Russia for domination of the Baltic region also

decimated the population periodically. In 1658, for

example, Polish armies moved into Denmark to drive out the Swedes. What followed

was a fine illustration of the old adage that, for civilians, allies

were to be feared just as much as enemies. It was reported from southern

Jutland: ‘The Poles drove us from house and home, treated us brutally, and took

away all we had, cattle and corn and everything we possessed, so that many were

doomed to die of hunger; and so in the herred [district] of Malt there are only two,

three or four persons left alive in every parish, and many corpses are eaten up in

the houses by dogs.’ The parish priest of the town of

Malt confirmed this grim news, adding that with but few exceptions all his

parishioners were dead and their houses burnt. Mortality rates of up to 90 per cent

were reported. The herred court was told: ‘in God’s truth [it is]

well known that before this dismal, wretched war and raging pestilence

came upon us, the parish and parishioners of Rev. Christian Jensen were in full

vigour…and there were then in the parish of Føvling forty-five farms and seven

homesteads, of which no more than six farms and three homesteads now remain…

The other farms are quite deserted.’

So war had not lost its teeth. Yet taking a very long view of the period 1648–1815,

or at least 1648–1792, it can be seen that it did gradually lose some of its

destructive force. It was not that wars became less frequent: on the contrary, there

was a major war between the European powers in every decade of the eighteenth

century except perhaps the 1720s. Rather it was

the case that armies were now better disciplined and better provisioned. For

reasons to be discussed later, one state after another moved to establish

control over their armed forces. War was still a terrible affliction for anyone

unfortunate enough to get in its way, but conflicts did become shorter in duration

and more limited in geographical scope. It was Frederick the

Great’s declared ambition to isolate warfare from civilians to the extent that they

would be unware that it was underway. Of course he failed, indeed he himself

claimed that the Seven Years War had been as catastrophic from a demographic

point of view for Prussia as the Thirty Years War. However, there was no return to

the anarchy of the first half of the seventeenth

century. It is impossible to imagine, say, one of Wallenstein’s officers making the

following observation by a Prussian subaltern in the Seven Years War:

We were never short of bread, and it frequently happened that we had a surplus of

meat. It is true that coffee, sugar and beer were often not to be had even at high

prices, while in Moravia we sometimes ran out of wine. But in Bohemia we had local

wine in plenty, especially in the camp at

Melnik in 1757. You know how things are in wartime: if you want to be really

comfortable, you ought to stay at home.

Similar tributes about life on the other side can also be found, an English volunteer

in the Austrian army even maintaining that his colleagues did not desert because

they were ‘well paid, well dressed and well fed’. So there is a great deal to be said

for Sir Michael Howard’s canine metaphor to describe eighteenth-century warfare:

It might be suggested that it was not the least achievement of European civilisation

to have reduced the wolf packs which had preyed on the defenceless peoples of

Europe for so many centuries to the condition of

trained and obedient gun dogs–almost, in some cases, performing poodles.

This verdict has been confirmed, albeit more prosaically, by Fritz Redlich who, in a

general account of military depredation between 1500 and 1815, concluded: ‘The

eighteenth century experienced a fundamental change in outlook and attitude

towards looting and booty.’ As we shall see later in a different context, there was a

return to the bad old days when the hordes of the French Revolution were

unleashed on Europe. For the time being, however, another horseman of the

Apocalypse had had his mount muzzled if not gelded.

MORTALITY–PLAGUE

It will be recalled that the hapless people of Malt complained not only about ‘this

dismal, wretched war’ but also about the ‘raging pestilence’ which had come in its

wake. Some victims were murdered by Polish soldiers, a few may have starved to

death, but most died from plague. This was the third

and greatest source of mortality, although it very often combined with the other

two, for bodies enfeebled by hunger were easier prey for pathogens, and it was

often armies that spread the epidemics. Günther Franz, in the

study of German population losses during the Thirty Years War referred to earlier,

argued that violent deaths were much less numerous than had once been

supposed–it was plague that had been the main killer.

In the twenty-first century, when epidemic disease is both rare and understood, it is

difficult to imagine a time when it was common and not

understood at all. With our life expectancy of between seventy-five and eighty

years, depending on sex and geographical location, and set to

continue increasing to one hundred and beyond, death can be disregarded as

something that happens to other people. When life expectancy lay between twenty-

five and forty, again depending on class, gender and geographical location, death

had terrifying immediacy. In England mortality worsened during the third quarter of

the seventeenth century, life expectancy falling to its lowest point of around thirty

years in the 1680s. It then improved to reach thirty-seven by 1700 and forty-two by

the middle of the eighteenth

century. Even so, when mourners gathered around an English graveside to hear the

clergyman intoning the words of the Book of Common Prayer of 1662–‘in the midst

of life we are in death’–they knew that he was telling the truth. Three years after

those chilling words were published, the Great Plague of London killed perhaps

between 80,000 and 100,000 in less than a year, out of a total population of fewer

than 500,000. Its progress can be followed in a number of contemporary sources,

the best being the diary of Samuel Pepys. Even his naturally ebullient disposition

was chastened by the rapidly mounting death toll. On 26 July 1665 he recorded:

‘The Sickenesse is got into our parish this week; and is hot endeed everywhere, so

that I begin to think of setting things in order, which I pray God enable me to put,

both as to soul and body.’ Two days later he travelled to Dagenham, where he found

the people so terrified of contagion from London visitors that he

exclaimed ‘Lord, to see in what fear all the people here do live would make one

mad’. Back in the capital on the following day, a headache ‘put me into

extraordinary fear’. By the middle of August he could write ‘The people die so, that

now it seems they are fain to carry the dead to be buried by daylight, the nights not

sufficing to do it in.’ Particularly alarming was the death of his physician on 26

August. And so on.

Good luck and Pepys’s natural high spirits got him through the dark days of the late

summer and autumn, after which mortality rates began to fall. Even his anxiety had

not prevented him from indulging his two favourite passions–making money and

philandering–to such an extent, indeed, that he could record complacently on the

last day of the year: ‘I have never lived so merrily (besides that I never got so much)

as I have done this plague-time.’ This turned out to be last major outbreak of

bubonic plague in England, thus bringing to an end a sequence which had begun

back in the mid-fourteenth century with the Black Death. The nature of the plague is

now well established. The bacillus is transmitted by the bite of a variety of flea

(Xenopsylla cheopis) which normally lives parasitically on rats. When the bacillus

becomes particularly intense and the rats start to die, the fleas need to find

alternative hosts from which to draw blood. The most promising candidates are

humans living in the vicinity of the rats. The flea- bite is followed by an incubation

period of usually three to six days,

although it can be as short as thirty-six hours and as long as ten days. Then the

victim is afflicted by shivering, vomiting, acute headache and pain in the limbs,

giddiness, extreme sensitivity to light and a high temperature (c. 40°C). Inside the

body, the bacteria invade the lymph nodes, producing one or more swellings (the

eponymous ‘buboes’) in the neck or the groin and internal bleeding. In between 50

and 75 per cent of cases death follows in

approximately two weeks, ultimately as a result of respiratory failure. Even more

deadly, although less common, are pneumonic plague and septicæmic plague,

which (unlike the bubonic variety) can be easily spread from human to human.

In short, plague depended on a quadrilateral relationship between the bacillus, the

flea, the rat and the human. Unfortunately, seventeenth-century Europeans were

blissfully ignorant of the nexus and so could do little to break it. Living cheek-by-jowl

with the source of infection, they unwittingly encouraged its periodic visitations. The

unsanitary conditions of early modern communities has been summed up with

particular eloquence by James Riley:

It was a habitat of stagnant waters and steaming marshes and fetid cesspits; of

narrow, airless, and filth-ridden streets and passages; of hovels and grand buildings

without ventilation; of the dead incompletely isolated from the living. It was, we can

now see, a habitat in which the micro-organisms of disease (and the living vectors

that transmit those micro-organisms and other pathogenic matter) thrived…It is

inescapable to suppose that fleas, lice, houseflies, mosquitoes, rodents, and other

small animals and insects

which act as living disease vectors and vector hosts existed in stupendous numbers

in these conditions. It was the golden age of these organisms.

Some idea of the havoc inflicted by the plague can be gained from

simple statistics: Naples lost about half of its population and Genoa 60 per cent in

1656; Marseilles and Aix-en-Provence lost half in 1721; Reggio di Calabria lost half

and Messina 70 per cent in 1743; Moscow lost 50,000 or about 20 per cent in 1771–

2; and so on. Behind these stark figures, however, lie deep and dark economic,

social, cultural and psychological

chasms of grief and suffering. One example must suffice. It was in 1647 that there

began what proved to be, in the words of Antonio Dominguez

Ortiz, ‘the greatest catastrophe to strike Spain in the early modern period’, when the

first case of plague was reported in Valencia. From there it spread through Aragon

and Catalonia to the Balearic Islands and Sardinia, decimating the population as it

went. In Barcelona, every possible precaution was taken to prevent infected people

entering the city, but in vain. Shortly after New Year’s Day 1651 plague was

established there. By the time it began to relinquish its grasp in late summer,

45,000 people had died. Observing it all was the tanner Miquel Parets, who left a

harrowing record of its effect on his family. In quick succession he lost his wife, his

baby daughter and two of his three sons:

God took our little girl the day after her mother’s death. She was like an angel, with

a doll’s face, comely, cheerful, pacific, and quiet, who made

everyone who knew her fall in love with her. And afterwards, within fifteen days,

God took our older boy, who already worked and was a good sailor

and who was to be my support when I grew older, but this was not up to me but to

God who chose to take them all. God knows why He does what He does, He knows

what is best for us. His will be done. Thus in less than a month there died my wife,

our two older sons, and our little daughter. And I remained with four-year-old

Gabrielo, who of them all had the most difficult character.

In Barcelona, as elsewhere, the outbreak of plague led to a breakdown of social

order, as the healthy struggled to get out of the city while the going was good, the

wealthy sought to buy their way out of quarantine restrictions, and the criminals

took advantage of the collapse of law and order. For the survivors everywhere, the

rewards could be great, as the

acceleration of inheritances concentrated property ownership. The greatest

beneficiary of all was the Church–indeed it could not lose, for it was the recipient of

benefactions inspired both by hope during the outbreak and by gratitude after it.

Catholic Europe is still covered with architectural

evidence of this confidence in the power of the Almighty to ward off disease, in the

shape of chapels, statues and various votive offerings to the ‘plague saints’ St

Rochus (also the patron saint of dogs and dog-lovers) and St Sebastian (also the

patron saint of archers). Even if the plague did strike, eventually it would go away,

thus confirming God’s infinite mercy.

Grandest of all these monuments is surely Santa Maria della Salute, the great

baroque church built at the entrance of the Grand Canal in Venice to

celebrate the end of the great plague of 1631–2. Visually the most exuberant is the

Plague Column erected on the Graben in Vienna by the Emperor Leopold I following

the plague of 1679.

The most popular explanation for a visitation of the plague was divine wrath;

consequently the most popular prophylactic was propitiation. At Marseilles in 1720,

Archbishop Belsunce took the lead, dedicating his fellow citizens to the cult of the

Sacred Heart and leading penitential processions. In Barcelona, Miquel Parets

recorded:

There are no words to describe the prayers and processions carried out in

Barcelona, and the crowds of penitents and young girls with crosses who

marched through the city saying their devotions. The streets were constantly full of

people, many greatly devout and carrying candles and crying out ‘Lord God, have

mercy!’ It would have softened the heart of anyone to see

so many people gathered together and so many little girls, all of them barefoot. To

see so many processions of clergy and monks and nuns

carrying so many crosses and so many rogations that there was not a single church

nor monastery which did not carry out processions both inside and outside their

buildings.

It was to no avail, and Parets was obliged to add, ‘but Our Lord was so

angered by our sins that the more processions were carried out the more the plague

spread’.

Two other techniques were employed to avert or arrest the plague. Least effective

were the various magical and herbal remedies employed, such as the fumigation

with juniper ordered by Peter the Great during the wave of plagues which attacked

Russia between 1709 and 1713. If juniper were not available, he decreed that horse

manure was to be used, ‘or something else which smells bad, as smoke is very

effective against these diseases’.

However, most public authorities did understand enough of the epidemics to

appreciate the need for isolating the outbreaks and their victims. Most Italian cities,

for example, boasted a public health authority or sanità, ready to go into action at

the first sign of illness, excluding or quarantining travellers from infected regions,

sealing off the houses of the afflicted,

establishing pest-houses, disposing of corpses, and so on. Alas, there proved to be

too many ways round the regulations: the infected fled, the sick were concealed,

soiled garments were not burnt but used again, and plague-

controllers were bribed. The need to import provisions meant that no city could be

isolated entirely from the outside world, while municipal prohibitions of public

gatherings were often overruled by the clergy’s penitential processions.

Yet the period 1648–1815 did see, first the retreat, and then the virtual

disappearance of the plague from Europe: England was afflicted for the last time in

1665, central Europe in 1710, France in 1720–21, the Ukraine in 1737, southern

Europe in 1743 and Russia in 1789–91. Numerous

explanations have been advanced. It is possible that the black rat (Rattus

rattus), which liked to live cheek-by-jowl with humankind, was replaced by the

brown rat (Rattus norvegicus), which was less sociable. It is also possible that all

rats developed a higher degree of immunity to the plague bacillus, so the fleas had

less need to abandon them for human hosts. The increasing use of stone for

dwellings, as opposed to wood, wattle and daub, probably created a less welcoming

environment for rodents of all kinds.

Another hypothesis speculates that the bacillus itself naturally transmuted into a

less virulent form. The American scholar James Riley has argued that what he calls

‘the medicine of avoidance and prevention’ made an important contribution to the

decline of all infectious diseases, singling out for special mention improved

drainage, lavation, ventilation, interment, fumigation and refuse burial, the

relocation of refuse-producing industries and waste sites, and cleaner wells. More

effective quarantine regulations

were also adopted by a number of European states. The most important was the

Habsburg Monarchy which, following the reconquest of Hungary from the Ottoman

Turks, issued strict regulations to keep out plague carriers. The long frontier which

straggled for 1,200 miles (1,900 km) across the Balkan peninsula, from the Adriatic

to the Carpathians, was turned into a great

cordon sanitaire. The quarantine period for anyone wishing to cross the frontier from

the east was twenty-one days in plague-free times, forty-two days if an outbreak

was rumoured and eight-four days if the rumour was

confirmed. Guards were under orders to shoot to kill anyone trying to evade the

restrictions. Equally tough action was taken by the French government to confine

the 1720 outbreak to Provence.

None of these possibilities can be a sufficient cause for the decline in the incidence

and severity of plague. Nor can that decline be a sufficient cause for the increase in

Europe’s population. In one of those tricks of

which malevolent nature is so fond, just as plague was waning, other diseases were

waxing. Influenza, typhoid fever, typhus, dysentery, infantile diarrhœa, scarlet fever,

measles and diphtheria all played their part in keeping the mortality rate up. The

great killer of the eighteenth century was smallpox, an air-borne virus which enters

the human body through the mouth or nose, then multiplies in the internal organs,

causing high fever and a rash which turns into blisters and then pustules. The lucky

escape with pock-marked skin, caused when the pustules dry; the less fortunate will

be made blind, deaf or lame (or any two of three); about 15 per cent will die.

On occasions, the mortality rate could be much higher: between 1703 and 1707, for

example, Iceland lost 18,000 of its original population of 50,000.

In Dublin between 1661 and 1745 20 per cent of reported deaths were ascribed to

smallpox. James Jurin, secretary of the Royal Society of London, estimated that

smallpox had killed a fourteenth of London’s

population between 1680 and 1743. At Lodève in Languedoc outbreaks in 1726 and

1751 increased the death rate by almost 200 per cent.

Among the high-profile casualties in this period were the Elector

Johann Georg IV of Saxony, who was infected when he insisted on kissing his dying

mistress good-bye; the Emperor Joseph I, whose untimely death in 1711 at the age

of thirty-two gave a decisive twist to the War of the Spanish Succession; Louis XV,

who was rumoured to have caught the

disease from the pubescent peasant-girl he had raped; and the Elector

Maximilian Joseph of Bavaria, whose untimely death in 1777 precipitated the War of

the Bavarian Succession. As these examples demonstrate,

smallpox was impeccably democratic, decimating the palace as well as the hovel. If

less destructive than the plague, it was more ubiquitous. In

Candide, Voltaire wrote that if two armies of 30,000 each met in battle, two-thirds of

the combatants would be pock-marked. The position and severity of the scars were

used as a means of identifying criminals and,

significantly, it was thought worthy of comment if they were not marked.

The figure usually given for total European deaths per annum from

smallpox in the eighteenth century is 400,000, although this must be a very rough

guess indeed. In 1800 in the German principalities of Ansbach-

Bayreuth it was recorded that 4,509 people had died from smallpox, or

about 1 per cent of the total population. As an ever-present memento mori, it also

caught the attention of the poets like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,

who contracted the disease in 1715 at the age of twenty-six. She survived the

ordeal but at the expense of her beauty, as she recorded the following year:

How am I changed! alas! how am I grown A frightful spectre, to myself unknown!

Where’s my complexion? where the radiant bloom, That promised happiness for

years to come?

Then, with what pleasure I this face surveyed! To look once more, my visits oft

delayed!

Charmed with the view, a fresher red would rise, And a new life shot sparkling from

my eyes!

Ah! faithless glass, my wonted bloom restore! Alas! I rave, that bloom is now no

more!

MEDICINE

Yet in this case it really was darkest before dawn. It was as a pock-marked spectre

that Lady Mary travelled to Constantinople with her husband, the British consul in

the city. There she found that Turkish peasant women had

found a way of preventing the disease through a form of inoculation. As she

explained in a letter to a friend in 1717:

Apropos of distempers, I am going to tell you a thing that will make you

wish yourself here. The smallpox, so fatal and so general among us, is here entirely

harmless by the invention of engrafting, which is the term they give it. There is a set

of old women who make it their business to perform the operation every autumn in

the month of September when the great heat is

abated…They make parties for the purpose…the old woman comes with a nutshell

full of the matter of the best sort of smallpox, and asks what veins you please to

have open’d. She immediately rips open that you offer to her, with a large needle

(which gives you no more pain than a common scratch), and puts into the vein as

much matter as can lie upon the head of her needle, and after that, binds up the

little wound with a hollow bit of shell, and in this manner opens four or five veins.

These enterprising ladies were exploiting what was common knowledge

everywhere–that a mild form of smallpox granted immunity for life. The

technique may have been known already in western Europe too, but it was certainly

Lady Mary’s proselytizing that led to its popularization. Although she could not set a

personal example herself, as she already enjoyed immunity, she did the next best

thing by having her five-year-old daughter inoculated when she returned to England

in 1721. Her example was quickly followed by the Prince of Wales, who had both his

daughters inoculated.

Other social leaders to set examples included the duc d’Orléans, Frederick the Great

of Prussia, the Empress Maria Theresa, the King of Denmark and Catherine the Great

of Russia. It proved to be uphill work, not least because inoculation was not without

its dangers. There was another major outbreak in London in 1752, when 17 per cent

of all deaths were attributed to the disease. This concentrated the minds of potential

victims everywhere, with

the result that there was a rapid increase in the rate of inoculation during the

second half of the century. Members of the Sutton family, who toured rural areas

offering the treatment, claimed to have inoculated 400,000 in the thirty years after

1750. The dramatic effect inoculation could have on mortality rates is shown by a

number of local studies which demonstrate that by the end of the eighteenth

century, inoculation had spread down from monarchs to the common people.

A second breakthrough came at the very end of the century when an English

country doctor, Edward Jenner, discovered the much safer and less elaborate

technique of vaccination. He had noticed that infection with

cowpox, a disease that is relatively benign when contracted by humans, granted

immunity against smallpox. In 1796 he inoculated an eight-year-old boy with pus

taken from the pustule of a milkmaid infected with cowpox.

The boy suffered nothing worse than a mild fever, but when inoculated a short time

later with the smallpox virus he proved to be immune and

experienced no ill effects whatsoever. This discovery was publicized by

Jenner in An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae, published

in 1798. By 1801 it had gone through two more editions and the technique was well

on its way to gaining universal acceptance. It was made compulsory in a number of

continental countries: in Sweden, for example, where deaths from smallpox per

100,000 fell from 278 in the late 1770s to 15 in the 1810s. In Bavaria, where the

King set a personal example and then made it compulsory in 1807, total deaths

from the disease fell from c. 7,500 per annum to 150 and then to zero by 1810.

Napoleon had his entire army vaccinated. When Jenner wrote to him to ask for the

liberation of a British prisoner of war, Napoleon is reported to have replied:

‘Anything Jenner

wants shall be granted. He has been my most faithful servant in the European

campaigns.’

Smallpox was not eradicated from the world until 1977, according to the World

Health Organization, but it had ceased to be a serious killer in Europe by 1815. Its

virtual eradication was a rare example of an unequivocal success story for medicine

in this period. It also provides a good example of how folk-remedies (the Turkish

peasant women’s ‘smallpox parties’) could combine with scientific observation and

experimentation (Jenner’s vaccination) to produce real improvements in

public health and reduce mortality. Much more typical of early modern attitudes

were the other treatments used to combat smallpox. They were

based on the Hippocratic-Galenic tradition which still dominated western medicine

despite–or Perhaps because of–the antiquity of its eponymous founders (Hippocrates

had lived 450–370 BC and Galen of Pergamum AD 129– 200). At its heart lay the

belief that human health was determined by the interrelationship between four

‘humours’ in the body. These were blood (hot and wet), black bile (cold and dry),

yellow or red bile (hot and dry) and phlegm (cold and wet). According to time of life

or time of year, any one of these humours could become predominant, with adverse

effects. Too much black bile led to melancholy, too much phlegm led to torpor, too

much red bile led to belligerence, and so on. The task of the physician was to

restore the desired balance by draining off any excess.

So the preferred treatment of early modern medicine took the form of laxatives,

emetics, dehydration and phlebotomy, to encourage purging, vomiting, sweating

and bleeding respectively. As Edward Topsell defined the objective in the early

seventeenth century: ‘the emptiyng or voiding of superfluous humors, annoying the

body with their evill quality’. That is

why so much literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries refers to the

arrival of the barber-surgeon with his bleeding-cups and leeches as soon as illness

struck. Indeed, the physician was often referred to as a ‘leechman’ who charged a

‘leech-fee’ and worked at a ‘leech-house’ (hospital). For the smallpox victim, it need

hardly be said, none of these treatments did any good whatsoever, on the contrary.

Nor did such exotic remedies as the ‘red cure’, which required the patient to dress in

red clothes, sleep in a bed

surrounded by red drapes and drink red-coloured fluids. Yet such was the authority

of humoralism that its precepts were accepted by most without question. Samuel

Pepys had himself bled when he thought he was ‘exceedingly full of blood’ and

believed that it would improve his failing

eyesight. Rare indeed was the strong-minded individual such as the Princess

Palatine, of whom Madame de Sévigné recorded when she first arrived at Versailles

in 1670: ‘she has no use for doctors and even less of medicines… When her doctor

was presented to her, she said that she did not need him, that she had never been

purged or bled, and that when she is not feeling

well she goes for a walk and cures herself by exercise.’

There was no lack of medical services on offer in the early modern period, indeed

there was an embarrassment of riches. For most patients, the first port of call was

the household’s fund of accumulated wisdom,

supported by herbal remedies and magical invocation. If a member of the family

was literate, one of the many printed manuals, such as Samuel Tissot’s Avis au

peuple sur la santé (1761) or William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine (1769) could be

consulted. Resort could also be had to the local wisewoman or wiseman, the village

priest, the blacksmith (if bones needed setting) or even the lady of the manor. A

community might be lucky enough to have in its midst an individual with special

powers, such as the seventh

son of a seventh son, or a natural healer identified by being ‘born with the caul’ (i.e.

with a piece of the placenta sticking to his head). There were plenty of travelling

salesmen and quack doctors roaming the country, peddling patent medicines in the

style of Dr Dulcamara of Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore. And there were also, of course,

the official men of medicine–the physicians, the barber-surgeons and the

apothecaries. There was no need to confine oneself to just one of these sources of

medical

advice and probably most sick people sought a second or third opinion.

Any temptation to divide these various resources into the scientific and the

superstitious should be resisted. The former often did more harm than good, the

latter often did more good than harm. A striking example of the

shadowy relationship between the two was provided by the discovery of the

cardiotonic properties of the foxglove plant by the Shropshire physician William

Withering in 1775. Unable to help one of his patients with a serious heart condition,

he was suitably embarrassed when the patient obtained a herbal tea from a gypsy-

woman and promptly recovered. Withering

systematically tested each of the brew’s twenty-odd ingredients until he had

isolated foxglove as the benefactor. The digitalis purpurea the plant produces

increases the intensity of the heart muscle contractions while reducing the heart

rate, and can also be used to treat dropsy. After extensive trials on animals and

human patients, Withering published in 1785 An Account of the Foxglove and Some

of its Medical Uses etc; With Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Diseases which

advertised its curative properties to the world. It has been used ever since. There

were several other ‘folk-remedies’ which turned out to be based on sound science,

such as willow-bark tea, which contained salicylates, the active ingredient in

aspirin, or ‘Jesuit bark’, the bark of the cinchona tree which contains quinine. There

was plenty to be said for preferring the practical experience of the wisewoman to

the book-learning of the quack. Thomas Hobbes observed: ‘I would rather have the

advice or take physick from an

experienced old woman that had been at many sick people’s bedsides, than from

the learnedst but unexperienced physician.’

Successes such as inoculation, vaccination or digitalis were few and far between.

Almost all the staples of modern medicine–germ theory, general anaesthesia,

radiology, antibiotics, and so on–were discoveries of the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries. For most patients in most places, the

situation in 1815 was not so very different from that of 1648. In four ways, however,

there can be said to have been progress, in the sense that the

chances of patients receiving beneficial treatment improved. First, there was a fitful

but definite move away from a humoral view of disease to one

centred on the material structure of the body and employing a mechanical

metaphor to understand its workings. The chief theoretical influence here was

Descartes, whose rationalist philosophy divided soul from body, thus allowing the

latter to be studied for its own sake and on its own terms. The chief practical

influence was the growing practice of conducting post- mortems, which boosted

anatomy and pathology at the expense of humoral theory. A landmark was the

publication in 1761 by Giovanni Battista

Morgagni of Padua of De Sedibus et Causis Morborum per Anatomen Indagatis Libri

Quinque (The Seats and Causes of Diseases Investigated by Anatomy in Five Books),

which described 640 post-mortems in detail, relating the state of the organs after

death to the clinical symptoms displayed during life.

Secondly, in a few places there developed clinical training, which gave aspiring

physicians the opportunity to learn their profession at the bedsides of real patients.

The most influential figure here was Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738), professor of

medicine at the University of Leiden in the

Dutch Republic, who applied Cartesian dualism to physiology. He did not invent

clinical training, which dates back to sixteenth-century Pavia, but he did popularize

it. His clinic came to be a most important institutional influence on the development

of eighteenth-century medicine. It was to Leiden that John Monro sent his son

Alexander to be trained in anatomy, as

part of his plan to give the University of Edinburgh a faculty of medicine, duly

established in 1726. It became the most important centre of medical research and

training in the British Isles, not least because it was closely linked to the Edinburgh

Royal Infirmary, founded three years later. Similar institutions for clinical training

were established in Halle, Göttingen, Jena, Erfurt, Strasbourg, Vienna, Pavia, Prague

and Pest. Perhaps significantly, it was not the university but the hospital that

provided the institutional base for medical progress. At the University of Oxford, the

primary duty of the Regius Professor of Medicine was to lecture twice a week during

term on the texts of Hippocrates or Galen. Even that modest requirement proved

too much for Thomas Hoy, Regius Professor from 1698 to 1718, who preferred to

reside in Jamaica and appointed a deputy (who in turn appointed a deputy). Hoy was

not untypical: the official history of the University records gloomily: ‘The holders of

the office between 1690 and 1800, with minor exceptions, performed their duties

with so little commitment that they merit no more than passing mention.’

A third form of progress was provided by voluntary movements of various kinds.

There is no reason to suppose that human nature became more charitable in the

eighteenth century, but the proliferation of private initiatives to relieve suffering was

certainly striking. Whether it was the Medical Institute for the Sick-Poor of Hamburg,

set up ‘to return many

upright and honest workers to the state’ and ‘to reduce distress of suffering

humanity’, the Society for Maternal Charity to serve ‘a class of poor for

whom there are neither hospitals nor foundations at Paris, namely the legitimate

infants of the poor’, or the self-explanatory National Truss Society for the Relief of

the Ruptured Poor of London, the amount of medical attention available greatly

increased. This phenomenon appears to have been particularly common in Great

Britain, although this may simply reflect greater knowledge. Of special importance

for medicine was the ‘voluntary hospital movement’, so-called because the hospitals

in question were founded by groups of charitable individuals. The first was the

Westminster Infirmary, founded in 1720, followed in London by St

George’s, the London and the Middlesex. At least thirty more were founded in the

provinces, among them Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Trumpington Street, Cambridge,

founded in 1766 following a bequest from a former

bursar of St Catharine’s College ‘to hire and fit up, purchase or erect a small,

physical hospital in the town of Cambridge for poor people’.

Lastly, there was certainly a marked increase in the number of formally educated

and certified practitioners. Three broad categories can be identified: at the summit

were the physicians, academically trained, officially licensed and enjoying highest

status and highest fees. More disparate were the apothecaries and the barber-

surgeons, usually organized in guilds and treated as craftsmen. As the name of the

latter group suggests, their primary function was to dress hair. They could turn their

hand to

simple medical tasks such as extracting teeth, lancing boils or setting bones, but

usually were prudent enough to work within their limitations. The development

noted above of the mechanistic view of the human body and the accompanying

development of anatomy led to a corresponding

expansion in the barber-surgeons’ horizons and the dropping of their tonsorial

function. In 1745 the London Company of Surgeons broke away from the Barbers,

completing their elevation to professional status with a royal charter in 1800 which

made them the Royal College of Surgeons. In France, conventional craft-training for

surgeons was ended in 1768.

Everywhere there was a gradual convergence of training for physicians and

surgeons, with a consequent elevation in status for the latter.

Between 1648 and 1815 there were few decisive medical innovations, but there was

probably more change than in the previous millennium,

especially in the way in which the working of the human body was regarded. It

seems appropriate, therefore, to end this section with the optimistic view of the

future voiced in 1794 by William Heberden:

I please myself with thinking that the method of teaching the art of healing is

becoming every day more conformable to what reason and nature require, that the

errors introduced by superstition and false philosophy are gradually retreating, and

that medical knowledge, as well as all other dependent upon observation and

experience, is continually increasing in the world. The present race of physicians is

possessed of several most important rules of practice, utterly unknown to the ablest

in former ages, not excepting

Hippocrates himself, or even Aesculapius.

WOMEN, SEX AND GENDER

In 1703 Sarah Egerton published a collection of poems entitled Poems on Several

Occasions, including ‘The Emulation’, whose opening lines are:

Say, tyrant Custom, why must we obey The impositions of thy haughty sway? From

the first dawn of life unto the grave, Poor womankind’s in every state a slave,

The nurse, the mistress, parent and the swain, For love she must, there’s none

escape that pain. Then comes the last, the fatal slavery:

The husband with insulting tyranny Can have ill manners justified by law,

For men all join to keep the wife in awe. Moses, who first our freedom did rebuke,

Was married when he writ the Pentateuch.

They’re wise to keep us slaves, for well they know, If we were loose, we soon should

make them so.

She wrote with the depth of emotion inspired by personal experience. As a penalty

for writing a long verse satire The Female Advocate at the precocious age of

fourteen (or so she claimed in her autobiography), she was sent away from London

by her middle-class parents to live with relations in rural Buckinghamshire and was

then forced into a loveless

marriage with a lawyer. Released from this servitude by the death of her husband,

she then jumped back into the fire by marrying a widower twenty years older than

herself in c. 1700. Whatever material advantages the Rev.

Thomas Egerton brought her–he was rector of Adstock–they were not

sufficient to expunge memories of Henry Pierce, a humble clerk with whom she was

in love. The unhappy couple’s early attempt at divorce was frustrated by legal

barriers, so they were forced to struggle on in a notoriously stormy marriage.

Another female poet, Mary Delariver Manley, witnessed a ‘comical combat’, in which

both Egertons resorted to violence, he by pulling her hair, she by throwing food.

After the death of her second husband in 1720, Sarah enjoyed just three years of

comfortable, and one hopes peaceful, widowhood before expiring herself at the age

of fifty-three.

In this brief biography can be found some, but by no means all, of the problems

encountered by women in early modern Europe: parental tyranny, the arranged

marriage, the loveless marriage, and the inability to divorce. At least poor Sarah had

the literary skill to leave a record of her resentment.

Nor was she a lone voice. In the very same year that she wrote the lines quoted

above, Mary Chudleigh published Poems on Several Occasions, including ‘To the

Ladies’, whose first lines are:

Wife and servant are the same, But only differ in the name: For when that fatal knot

is tied,

Which nothing, nothing can divide, When she the word Obey has said, And man by

law supreme has made, Then all that’s kind is laid aside,

And nothing left but state and pride.

In her case, it was Sir George Chudleigh Bart., Devon squire, who was displaying

‘state and pride’, although he did also give her six children, only two of whom

survived infancy. Although she never criticized her husband directly, it can be

inferred with some confidence that he was less than ideal. Two years earlier, in

1701, Lady Mary had written ‘The Ladies’ Defence’ in answer to a sermon

advocating the absolute submission of wives to husbands preached by a

nonconformist minister called John Sprint. In the preface she stated that what made

the greatest contribution to marital unhappiness was ‘Parents forcing their Children

to Marry, contrary to their Inclinations; Men believe they have a right to dispose of

their Children as they please; and they think it below them to consult their

Satisfaction’. The poem is a discussion between three men, one of them an Anglican

clergyman, and a woman. The chief spokesman for the male camp is the aptly

named Sir John Brute, who takes the view that ‘Those worst of

Plagues, those Furies call’d our Wives’ can, and should, be treated roughly:

Yes, as we please, we may our Wives chastise, ‘Tis the Prerogative of being Wise:

They are but Fools, and must as such be us’d.

In her reply, the female mouthpiece–Melissa–gives as good as she gets,

apostrophizing men as arrogant tyrants, complacent hypocrites, sadistic brutes, self-

indulgent sots, idle voluptuaries, ‘Empty Fops, or Nauseous

Clowns’, just to mention a few of her epithets. Sir John is given strong clerical

support from the unnamed parson, who patiently explains to Melissa the great gulf

separating men from women:

Your shallow Minds can nothing else contain, You were not made for Labours of the

Brain; Those are the Manly Toils which we sustain. We, like the Ancient Giants, stand

on high,

And seem to bid Defiance to the Sky,

While you poor worthless Insects crawl below, And less than Mites t’our exalted

Reason show.

Because it was Eve’s fault that mankind was expelled from paradise, he asserts, it is

only right that her successors should be enslaved. Melissa replies that any

intellectual limitations suffered by women are caused by men:

‘Tis hard we should be by the Men despis’d

Yet kept from knowing what would make us priz’d:

Debarred from Knowledge, banish’d from the Schools, And with the utmost Industry

bred Fools.

Sir John promptly confirms the justice of this complaint by observing that women

should not be allowed to read, for ‘Books are the Bane of States, the Plagues of

Life, / But both conjoyn’d when studied by a Wife’. The fourth member of the party,

Sir William Loveall, the sort of bachelor so very keen to establish his heterosexual

credentials by boasting of his conquests, tells Melissa that members of the fair sex

should content themselves by being just that–fair–and not trouble their pretty little

heads with matters they

cannot understand. Faced with Brute’s misogyny, the parson’s theology and

Loveall’s condescension, Melissa can only look forward to a more equitable

existence in the next world.

Just how representative were Sarah Egerton and Mary Chudleigh can never be

established, although there were plenty of other straws in the wind.

In Some Reflections upon Marriage (1706) one of Mary Chudleigh’s

correspondents, Mary Astell, wrote ‘if all men are born free, how is it that all women

are born slaves?’ Rather like the ‘submerged nations’ awaiting discovery by the

ethnologist to bring them to the surface, most European women throughout this

period were sleeping beauties (to borrow Sir

William Loveall’s imagery) whose resentment at millennia of oppression was

confined to literary expression. That their general grievances were real is easy to

establish. In every European country the legal system discriminated against them. In

this respect at least, the spread of Roman Law during the early modern period had a

regressive effect, for its attitude to women was underpinned by an assumption of

their mental and physical weakness–Justinian’s Code explicitly referred to their

‘fragility, imbecility, irresponsibility and ignorance’. Of course, such empty vessels

could not be entrusted with any property they might possess. So whatever a woman

brought to a marriage was treated as if it now belonged to her husband; only when

he died might she hope to regain control, and even then she might not have first

claim on the estate. As for her unmarried daughters, more often than not they found

themselves left out in the cold. Even if an estate were not formally ‘entailed’, a legal

device to keep the estate intact from one generation to the next, it was usual if not

invariable for the male heirs to be privileged. That was what Henry Dashwood’s

daughters discovered in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) when their

father died, leaving

everything to his son by an earlier marriage and relying on his heir’s good will to ‘do

something’ for his half-sisters. He had not reckoned with his daughter-in-law, who in

the space of one chapter succeeds in reducing the sum from £1,000 for each of the

girls to nothing:

‘He did not know what he was talking of, I dare say; ten to one but he was light-

headed at the time. Had he been in his right senses, he could not have thought of

such a thing as begging you to give away half your fortune from your own child.’

It might be thought that in this instance Jane Austen did her sex no favours by

presenting Fanny Dashwood as the avaricious female bringing out the worst in her

well-meaning but weak husband.

The Egertons, Chudleighs and Dashwoods were lucky to be literate, for not the least

disadvantage suffered by women was educational. Everywhere in Europe it was men

who were more likely to be literate, although there is some fragmentary evidence

that rates for women were increasing. In the

Electorate of Saxony, for example, the impact of the Reformation with its stress on

the need for all believers to be given access to the word of God, meant that by 1580

about half the parishes had licensed German-language schools for boys, but only 10

per cent for girls. By the end of the following century, those figures had increased to

94 and 40 per cent respectively.

Elsewhere, the ratio appears to have been less favourable: in France on the eve of

the Revolution, for example, about 65 per cent of men but only 35 per cent of

women could sign their names. Moreover, where schools for girls existed, there was

a growing tendency to concentrate on practical

subjects such as sewing and knitting to equip them for their domestic role. In an

essay addressed to the two English universities, published in 1655, Margaret

Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, implored her male superiors not to scorn

women’s intellectual endeavours, lest ‘we should grow

irrational as idiots, by the dejectednesse of our spirits’. It was that fatal lack of self-

esteem

which makes us quit all industry towards profitable knowledge being

employed only in looe [sic], and pettie imployments, which takes away not onely our

abilities towards arts, but higher capacities in speculations, so as women are

become like worms, that only live in the dull world of ignorance, winding ourselves

sometimes out by the help of some refreshing rain of good education, which seldom

is given us, for we are kept like birds in our houses.

As we shall see in a later chapter, for women the intellectual changes of the

eighteenth century were double-edged. On the one hand, the development of the

salons offered the opportunity for a few favoured individuals to gain real influence

and the emergence of the novel gave them a genre ideally suited to the depiction of

their world, but the attitude of the Enlightenment proved to be much more equivocal

than might have been

expected. A better understanding of the physical world and its laws did not

necessarily encourage an egalitarian view of the human beings who inhabited it. By

the late eighteenth century, women might no longer be burnt as witches, but they

continued to be patronized as weaklings. As

Merry Wiesner has pointed out, not only did the ‘scientific revolution’ fail

to destroy the traditional belief in the inferiority of women, but by its privileging of

such ‘masculine’ characteristics as reason, order, control and mechanical processes,

it may have anchored that supposed inferiority even more firmly in European

culture. Nor did the development of new ideas of ‘politeness’ by progressive

intellectuals such as the third Earl of Shaftesbury or David Hume (both of them

bachelors) point towards

equality. Apologists for the superiority of modern commercial urban society and its

civilized discourse might well call for women to be treated with greater courtesy and

generosity, but also assumed continuing deference to the dominant males. It was

against this kind of patronizing kindness that

Mary Wollstonecraft erupted with such eloquence in her Vindication of the Rights of

Women of 1792.

The great majority of European women could not have cared less that David Hume

or Montesquieu thought they were naturally inferior, for they were the illiterate

daughters of illiterate peasants. For them, the absolute priority was scraping

together enough money to attract a husband. By the time they were in their early

teens, or even earlier, they had left the family unit to seek employment. The main

source was domestic service. In France north of the Loire, country girls in service

accounted for 13 per cent of the urban population. For every family that came up

just a little way in the

world, the first luxury was a servant. An exercise of the imagination is required to

appreciate the sheer drudgery involved in everyday life before the introduction of

public utilities and the invention of electricity: fetching water, which in towns often

involved long queues; purchasing supplies from the market on a daily basis; clearing

and relaying fires and stoves; ‘slopping out’ chamber-pots; washing, mangling and

ironing clothes; taking up and beating carpets; and so on and so forth in an endless

round of back- breaking toil. If all went well, then after ten years or so of labour,

enough money might have been hoarded to allow a return to the village and

marriage. But woe betide the servant who was unwise enough to get pregnant or

unlucky enough to fall ill. The division between mere poverty

and outright destitution was as thin as it was crucial.

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