Content area
Full Text
The last decade of Elizabeth Tudor's reign has been recognized by historians as an exceptionally volatile period, characterized by "high prices, food shortages, heavy taxation and major wars against Spain and Ireland."(1) Economic historians have found that the years 1594-97 witnessed the most sustained and severe inflation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, culminating in 1597 in the lowest real wages in English history.(2) For example, flour prices in London nearly tripled between 1593 and 1597.(3) Experiencing rates of immigration and population growth that far outstripped the rest of the country London saw an eightfold increase of vagrancy in the period 1560-1601.(4) Steve Rappaport describes a London in which a "fabulously wealthy elite liv
ed
cheek by jowl with a thoroughly destitute majority."(5) Even when gainfully employed, workers in handicrafts earned not much more than subsistence wages: for example, a 1589 proclamation prescribes wages for London linen weavers of 6d a day with meat and drink, or 10d a day without meat and drink.(6)
Given this polarization, it is not surprising that the 1590s were especially marked by social disorder and protest. The language of Elizabeth's proclamations from 1590 to 1595 against apprentices is instructive in this regard. The 1590 proclamation, "Enforcing Curfews for Apprentices," states:
Where the Queen's most excellent majesty, being given to understand of a very great outrage lately committed by some apprentices and others being masterless men and vagrant persons, in and about the suburbs of the city of London, in assaulting of the house of Lincoln's Inn and the breaking and spoiling of divers chambers in the said house ... hath therefore thought good for the better avoiding of suchlike outrages hereafter (by advice of her majesty's Privy Council) straightly to charge and command all such as be any householders ... that they and every of them do cause all their apprentices, journeymen, servants, and family in their several houses ... to tarry and abide within their several houses and not to be suffered to go abroad after nine of the clock at night, upon pain of imprisonment. ...(7)
Here (as in the later proclamations), apprentices are linked with vagabonds and masterless men as criminal elements threatening the social order with violence.(8) The apprentices are not even answerable to the...