45 results in Literature and Nature in the English Renaissance
Insects
- from PART II - The Tangled Chain
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- Literature and Nature in the English Renaissance
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Summary
One might assume that most early modern Europeans would have regarded the diminutive world of creepy-crawly things with contempt or disgust, if not fear and loathing. In sixteenth-century English the word “bug” signified something like bogeyman and would revealingly come to be used as a generic word for beetles. Yet many Elizabethans also took delight in the miniature, and the correspondence between the microcosm and macrocosm in neo-Platonic cosmology may have helped pique interest in these seemingly lowly or “lesser creatures.” The first great English entomologist, Thomas Penny (c. 1530–89), travelled all over England and Europe collecting specimens, and corresponded with many leading naturalists on the Continent. After his death, Penny's notes and sketches were compiled and given a literary polish by Thomas Moffett, a physician and author of a poem about silkworms (which features Pyramus and Thisbe and may have influenced Shakespeare's burlesque of that tale in A Midsummer Night's Dream). Although Moffett completed the book in 1589, his publishers balked at the cost of printing such a massive tome (which ran to 1,200 folio pages). The Theatre of Insects was finally published in 1634 in Latin and in English fourteen years later. While unfurling the medicinal use, moral significance, and alien beauty of insects, Moffett undercuts the anthropocentric prejudice that size is a true measure of importance.
Source: The Theatre of Insects (1658), Gggg1v–Gggg2v.
I shall add this concerning the dignity of this History of Insects (lest we should think God made them in vain, or we describe them): that in the universal world there is nothing more divine than these except Man. For however in show they are most abject and sordid, yet if we look more nicely ° into them, they will appear far otherwise than they promise on the bare outside.
“It oft times comes into my mind,” saith Gallisardus, ° “to think of our Italians, who commonly admire vehemently things notable for magnitude, or new and unusual, but things obvious in all places, and that are very small they despise. Yet if they look exactly to the matter it will be easy to observe that the divine force and power show themselves more effectually in mean things, and they are far more miraculous than those things the world with open mouth respects so much and admires.
Cooking, Feasting, Fasting, Healing
- from PART IV - Interactions
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These recipes (or receipts, as they were then called) are taken from a popular Elizabethan cookbook, reprinted over half a dozen times before 1650. The selections have been chosen to showcase the range of foods eaten in early modern England, many of which are not typically found in English markets or butchers today.
Source: The Good Housewife's Jewel (1587), A3v, 4v, 7r-8r, 10v, 14r–v, 16r, 18v, 20v–21r.
To Boil Larks
Take sweetbread ° and strain it into a pipkin; ° and set it on the fire and put in a piece of Butter; and skim it as clean as you can and put in Spinach and Endive; and cut it a little, and so let it boil; and put in Pepper, Cloves, Mace, Cinnamon and Ginger, and a little Verjuice; ° and when you serve them up, lay sops ° in the dish …
[4v] To Boil a Neat's ° Tongue
In primis, [boil] in fair ° Water and salt, then peel it and cut it in the middle; and then boil it in red wine, and fill him full of cloves, and a little sugar; and then wash it with a little sweet broth, to do away the scent of the wine; and you must make a little red Muscadine with red wine and prunes boiled together; then strain it, and strain a little Mustard in a fine cloth together, and so serve it up …
[7r] To Boil a Lamb's Head
Strain your broth into a pipkin and set it on the fire; and put in butter, and skim it as clean as you can; and put in your meat and put in endive, and [7v] cut it a little; and strain a little yeast, and put it into it, and currants and prunes; and put in all manner of spices, and so serve it upon sops …
[8r] To Stew Calf's Feet
Take calf 's feet fair blanched and cut them in the half; and when they be more than half-boiled, put to them great raisins, mutton broth, a little saffron, and sweet butter, pepper, sugar, and some sweet herbs finely minced.
Animal-Baiting
- from PART IV - Interactions
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When Queen Elizabeth visited Kenilworth Castle in 1575, her host, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, arranged a hunt and a bear-baiting as part of the entertainments. Laneham's jocular letter describing the festivities conveys the untroubled delight some early moderns took in blood sport. However, the allegorical portrayal of the baiting as a litigious trial reflects a tendency to impose human meanings on non-humans (and vice versa), blurring the species divide on which the cruelty is predicated.
Source: A Letter Wherein Part of the Entertainment unto the Queen's Majesty at Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire in this Summer's Progress, is Signified (1575), 21–4.
Wednesday, her Majesty rode into the Chase, ° a-hunting again of the hart of force. ° The Deer, after his property, for refuge took the soil, but so mastered by hot pursuit on all parts that he was taken quick ° in the pool. The watermen held him up hard by the head while, at her Highness's commandment, he lost his ears ° for a ransom, and so had pardon of his life.
Thursday, the fourteenth of this July and the sixth day of her Majesty's coming, a great sort of ban-dogs ° were there tied in the outer Court and thirteen bears in the inner. Whosoever made the panel, there were enough for a Quest ° and [22] one for a challenge, ° and need were. A wight ° of great wisdom and gravity seemed their foreman to be, had it come to a Jury. But it fell out that they were caused to appear there upon no such matter, but only to answer to an ancient quarrel between them and the ban-dogs in a cause of controversy that hath long depended, ° been obstinately full often debated with sharp and biting arguments on both sides, and could never be decided, grown now to so marvellous a malice that with spiteful upbraids and uncharitable chafings always they fret, as far as anywhere the one can hear, see, smell the other, and indeed at utter deadly foehood. Many a maimed member (God wot), bloody face, and a torn coat hath the quarrel cost between them, so far likely the less yet now to be appeased as there wants not partakers to back them on both sides.
Pastoral: Pastures, Meadows, Plains, Downs
- from PART III - Time and Place
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Ostensibly set in ancient Greece and inspired by the work of the Italian Jacopo Sannazaro, Sidney's pastoral romance also depicts an idealized Elizabethan countryside, modelled on the Wiltshire estate of his sister, the Countess of Pembroke. Notoriously, much of the Earl of Pembroke's manorial lands had been enclosed in the mid-sixteenth century, and Sidney's dismissive account of the Helot uprising can be viewed as a condemnation of anti-enclosure riots (see Part v). Whereas the previous open-field system allowed commons to be divided into strips and used for multiple purposes, enclosed lands could be made more uniform to maximize profits or impose upon them a consistent landscape design. Achieving “order in confusion,” Kalander's garden rejects both the disorder of the commons and the monoculture of agrarian capitalists, exhibiting a horticultural sprezzatura that disguises the nobility's management of the land as natural. Rather than an escape from history, the Arcadia here foresees the environmental degradation caused by the English Civil War, and its “golden world” reflects a feudal land ethic in which the beauty and ecological stability of the countryside result from aristocratic stewardship.
Source: The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (1593), 3v–5v.
In the time that the morning did strew roses and violets in the heavenly floor against the coming of the Sun, the nightingales (striving one with the other which could in most dainty variety recount their wrong-caused sorrow °) made them put off their sleep, and rising from under a tree (which had that night been their pavilion) they went on their journey, which by and by welcomed Musidorus' eyes, wearied with the wasted soil of Laconia, with delightful prospects.
There were hills which garnished their proud heights with stately trees; humble valleys whose base estate seemed comforted with refreshing of silver rivers; meadows enamelled with all sorts of eye-pleasing flowers; thickets which, being lined with most pleasant shade, were witnessed so to by the cheerful disposition of many well-tuned birds; each pasture stored with sheep feeding with sober security, while the pretty lambs with bleating oratory craved the dams' comfort; here a shepherd boy piping as though he should never be old; there a young shepherdess knitting and withal singing, and it seemed that her voice comforted her hands to work and her hands kept time to her voice's music.
Deforestation
- from PART V - Environmental Problems in Early Modern England
- Edited by Todd Andrew Borlik, University of Huddersfield
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The 1536–1542 Acts of Unification with England facilitated the exploitation of Welsh woodlands to supply charcoal for iron-making, silver-mining, and lead-smelting. The following extraordinary poem presumes to speak on behalf of squirrels, and imagines them, according to a prefixed description in the Welsh manuscript, journeying to London to “file and make an affidavit on the bill for the cutting down of Marchan Wood near Rhuthyn.” The poem thus decries the impact of habitat loss, and implicitly links it to territorial annexation.
Source: The Burning Tree, trans. Gwyn Williams (1956), 163–5.
Odious and hard is the law
And painful to little squirrels.
They go the whole way to London
With their cry and their matron before them.
This red squirrel° was splendid,
Soft-bellied and able to read;
She conversed with the Council
And made a great matter of it.
W hen the Book was put under her hand
In the faith that this would shame her,
She spoke thus to the bailiff:
“Sir Bribem, you're a deep one!”
Then on her oath she said,
“All Rhuthyn's woods are ravaged;
My house and barn were taken
One dark night, and all my nuts.
The squirrels all are calling
For the trees; they fear the dog.
Up there remains of the hill wood
Only grey ash of oak trees;
There's not a stump unstolen
Nor a crow's nest left in our land.
The owls are always hooting
For trees; they send the children mad.
The poor owl catches cold,
Left cold without her hollow trunk.
Woe to the goats, without trees or hazels,
And to the sow-keeper and piglets!
Pity an old red-bellied sow
On Sunday, in her search for an acorn.
The chair of the wild cats,
I know where that was burnt.
Goodbye hedgehog! No cow-collar
Nor pig trough will come from here anymore.
If a plucked goose is to be roasted,
It must be with bracken from Rhodwydd Gap.
No pot will come to bubbling,
No beer will boil without small twigs;
And if peat comes from the mountain
In the rain, it's cold and dear.
Seasons
- from PART III - Time and Place
- Edited by Todd Andrew Borlik, University of Huddersfield
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When the Italian Renaissance arrived in England in the 1530s via the works of Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, it encouraged a newfound appreciation of nature as a storehouse of imagery. Nevertheless, readers should not presume Howard's sonnet records a first-hand encounter with the environment; a translation of Petrarch's Rime 310, it presents, like much Renaissance pastoral, a mediated literary landscape. Moreover, as in Shakespeare's Sonnets 98 and 99 and Thomas Lodge's “The earth late choked with showers,” the closing couplet registers an intensification of inwardness that alienates the human subject from the rhythms of the seasons (it may even have been written while Howard was in prison). Significantly, however, Howard replaces several of Petrarch's classical allusions with English fauna, thus imbuing the poem with an earthier feel and adapting it to match the local environment. In this regard it is noteworthy that the title (following Petrarch) names the season as spring while the poem identifies it as summer. This confusion reflects the looser usage of the two terms in early modern England, when summer officially began not on the solstice (then called Midsummer) but on 1 May. Rather than hail spring or summer, English poets often praise May as the ideal compound of both, so it was in effect a season of its own, while the annual tradition (which came under assault after the Reformation) of gathering greenery and dancing round the maypole on May Day encouraged human communities to participate in the drama of biological renewal (see Dekker's “Merry Month of May” and Herrick's “Corinna's Going A-Maying”).
Source: Songs and Sonnets (1557), A2v.
The soot ° season that bud and bloom forth brings,
With green hath clad the hill and eke the vale.
The nightingale with feathers new she sings,
The turtle ° to her mate hath told her tale.
Summer is come, for every spray now springs.
The hart hath hung his old head ° on the pale,
The buck in brake his winter coat he flings,
The fishes fleet with new-repaired scale,
The adder all her slough ° away she slings,
The swift swallow pursueth the flies small,
The busy bee her honey now she mings.°
Pet-Keeping
- from PART IV - Interactions
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The historian Keith Thomas observes that it was “in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that pets seemed to have really established themselves as normal features of the middle-class household” (110). In early modern England a wide range of species could be (1) permitted inside the house, (2) given names, or (3) spared from the butcher's knife. The poet Robert Herrick had a spaniel, a cat, a sparrow, a lamb, and even a pet pig (to whom he gave sips of beer), while some kept tame falcons, monkeys, or deer (see Skelton's “Philip Sparrow,” c. 1505, and Marvell's “Nymph Complaining of the Death of her Fawn,” c. 1649). Then as now, pet-keeping could reflect cultural attitudes about class and gender. Whereas Tudor men were encouraged to raise large dogs for hunting or herding, it became increasingly common for city-dwelling gentlewomen to lavish affection on lapdogs. Rather than praise this attachment to a “companion species” (Haraway), Caius growls his disapproval of such attitudes as symptomatic of feminine frivolity. Caius's treatise would later be incorporated wholesale into Topsell's History of Four-Footed Beasts, and was favourite reading of King James, who was once accused of loving his dogs better than his subjects, and whose grandson would have a spaniel breed named after him. Shakespeare knew this book, too, as Kent assumes the alias Caius when he shows a dog-like fidelity to Lear.
Source: Of English Dogs, trans. Abraham Fleming (1576), 20–1.
These dogs are little, pretty, proper, and fine, and sought for to satisfy the delicateness of dainty dames, and wanton women's wills, instruments of folly for them to play and dally withal, to trifle away the treasure of time, to withdraw their minds from more commendable exercises, and [21] to content their corrupted concupiscences with vain disport (a silly shift to shun irksome idleness). These puppies the smaller they be, the more pleasure they provoke, as more meet playfellows for mincing mistresses to bear in their bosoms, to keep company withal in their chambers, to succour with sleep in bed, and nourish with meat at board, to lay in their laps, and lick their lips as they ride in their wagons.
PART I - Cosmologies
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Mountains, Hills, Vales
- from PART III - Time and Place
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The sublime is generally regarded as an eighteenth-century concept, formulated by the philosophers Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke. Nevertheless, early modern writers and painters such as Roelant Savery had intimations of the “pleasing horror” that dramatic landscapes could inspire. The following poem appears within a collection of religious verse, which might invite an allegorical reading of the wilderness it depicts. As a Jesuit priest who travelled widely throughout the Continent and England, Southwell may have been better acquainted with actual wilderness than many of his contemporaries. In 1578, he walked from Paris to Rome and this poem is likely based on his crossing of the Alps.
Source: British Library Add MS 10422, 26v–28v; with emendations from Moenie (1595), 27–30.
A Vale there is enwrapped with dreadful shades,
Which thick ° of mourning pines shrouds from the sun,
Where hanging cliffs yield short and dumpish ° glades,
And snowy floods with broken streams do run;
Where eye-room ° is from rock to cloudy sky,
From thence to dales with stony ruins strawed, °
Then to the crushed water's frothy fry,
Which tumbleth from the tops where snow is thawed;
Where ears of other sound can have no choice,
But various blust'ring of the stubborn wind In trees,
in caves, in straits with diverse noise,
Which now doth hiss, now howl, now roar by kind;
Where waters wrestle with encount'ring stones,
That break their streams and turn them into foam,
The hollow clouds full fraught with thund'ring groans,
With hideous thumps discharge their pregnant womb.
And in the horror of this fearful ° choir
Consists the music of this doleful place;
All pleasant birds their tunes from thence retire,
Where none but heavy notes have any grace.
Resort there is of none but pilgrim wights,°
That pass with trembling foot and panting heart;
With terror cast in cold and shudd'ring frights,
They judge° the place to terror framed by art.
Yet nature's work it is, of art untouched,
So strait indeed, so vast unto the eye,
With such disordered order strangely couched,
And so with pleasing horror low and high,
Beasts
- from PART II - The Tangled Chain
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The first major work of English zoology was by and large a translation of a text compiled by the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner (1516–65). For modern readers, it is a book of perplexing contradictions. It rejects many of the superstitions recorded by Pliny, yet includes ambivalent entries for the unicorn (excerpted below) and lamia (a woman with a cat-like body covered in scales whose shapely breasts lure men to their doom). It stresses the authority of eyewitness accounts, yet recycles dozens of fabulous anecdotes from poets, classical historians, and especially the Bible as admissible evidence. It tries to pry off the theological goggles through which the medieval bestiary tradition had viewed non-humans, while still promoting zoology as a sacred science. Readers of Topsell's epistle will not be surprised to learn that the author himself was, like most Renaissance naturalists, a clergyman. With its startling mixture of lore and fact, superstition and scepticism, Topsell's bestiary is a representative specimen of its time.
Source: History of Four-Footed Beasts (1607), A4r–A6r, 712–13, 716, 719.
[Dedicatory Epistle°]
When I affirm that the knowledge of Beasts is Divine, I do mean no other thing than the right and perfect description of their names, figures, and natures, and this is in the Creator himself most Divine; and therefore such as is the fountain, such are the streams issuing from the same into the minds of men. Now it is most clear in Genesis how the Holy Ghost remembereth the creation of all living creatures, and the Four-footed next before the creation of man, as though they alone were appointed the Ushers, going immediately before the race of men …
The old Manichees ° among other blasphemies accused the creation of hurtful, venomous, ravening, and destroying Beasts, affirming them to be made by an evil God; and also they accused the creation of Mice and other unprofitable creatures, because their dullness was no kinder to the Lord (but like cruel and covetous misers, made no account of those Beasts which brought not profit to their purse).
Contents
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Birds
- from PART II - The Tangled Chain
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While beasts talk in many early modern stories, “Speak, Parrot” is one of the few in which this Aesopian fantasy has a shred of credibility. Henry VIII reportedly owned an African grey parrot (some of which possess thousand-word vocabularies), although Skelton's poem describes the rose-ringed parakeet – a species now naturalized in and around London. Besides taking satiric pecks at the greed, vanity, and political squabbling of Henry's courtiers, the bird also lampoons Renaissance humanists and their educational reforms, including education for women. Humanist pedagogues expected their pupils to learn several languages by rote (Skelton's parrot speaks no fewer than nine). In other words, students would often have to parrot back, as it were, the words of their lesson without comprehending them. While some critics suspect the text to be corrupt, the apparent non sequiturs may be Skelton's attempt to mimic the bird's squawking out phrases at random. However, the poet also identifies with the bird in demanding liberty to speak freely, and the poem's levity belies the profundity of the questions it raises about animal intelligence (Boehrer 2002, 99–132). The same can be said of Skelton's “Philip Sparrow,” which both commemorates and spoofs the emotional bond between a young woman and her avian companion, and even features a mock-requiem mass for the dead bird. How does the parrot challenge not only the human monopoly on reason and language but also the exclusive claim to an immortal soul? The beautiful, rational, musical, over-educated, polyglot parrot seems a parodic embodiment of Renaissance humanism's exalted view of humanity.
Source: Certain Books Compiled by Master Skelton (1545), A2r–A2v, A5v.
My name is Parrot, a bird of paradise,
By Nature devised of a wonderous kind,
Daintily dieted with diverse delicate spice,
Till Euphrates, ° that flood, driveth me into Ind, °
Where men of that country by fortune me find,
And send me to great Ladies of estate.
Then Parrot must have an almond or a date,
A cage curiously carven with silver pin, °
Properly painted to be my coverture,
A mirror of glass, that I may toot° therein.
PART II - The Tangled Chain
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The Draining of the Fens
- from PART V - Environmental Problems in Early Modern England
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In the sixteenth century, a fan-shaped swathe of eastern England in the vicinity of the Wash estuary was chequered with low-lying wetlands known as fens. Inundated for much of the winter, the sparsely populated fen region encompassed almost 1,500 square miles and was one of the country's last remaining bastions of genuine wilderness. While Drayton acknowledges that outsiders sniffed at the fens as a putrid, disease-infested morass, he more emphatically praises them as a precious habitat for a teeming abundance of plants, fish, and fowl. His poetic catalogues could be compared to a recent biodiversity audit of the fens which inventoried over 13,000 species of flora and fauna, including a quarter of the rarest wildlife in Britain, of which 25 are found nowhere else on earth (Mossman et al). Drayton also glowingly depicts the bioregional economy of the fen-dwellers, who supported themselves by fishing, fowling, seasonal grazing, and harvesting sedge and peat. Appearing at a time when the fens had become the target of ecologically disastrous drainage schemes, the quarrel between Holland and Kesteven sounds almost like a parliamentary debate on the topic, in which the poet makes a tacit plea for conserving fens as part of England's environmental heritage.
Source: Poly-Olbion, 2.105–10.
Now in upon the earth, rich Lincolnshire I strain, °
At Deeping, from whose Street the plenteous Ditches drain °
Hemp-bearing Holland's Fen, ° at Spalding that do fall
Together in their course, themselves as emptying all
Into one general Sewer, which seemeth to divide
Low Holland from the High, which on their Eastern side
Th'inbending Ocean holds ° …
From fast and firmer Earth, whereon the Muse of late
Trod with a steady foot, now with a slower gait,
Through Quicksands, Beach, and Ooze, ° the Washes ° she must wade,
Where Neptune every day doth powerfully invade
The vast and queachy ° soil, with Hosts of wallowing Waves,
From whose impetuous force that who himself not saves,
By swift and sudden flight, is swallowed by the deep,
When from the wrathful Tides the foaming Surges sweep
The Sands, which lay all nak'd to the wide heav'n before,
And turneth all to Sea, which was but lately Shore° …
Decay
- from PART VI - Disaster and Resilience in the Little Ice Age
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This poem appears in a manuscript collection compiled by John Lilliat, a vicar and musician at Chichester Cathedral. The aging oak symbolizes the decay of nature, a growing fear amid the Great Dearth of the mid-1590s. Acorn production does cease in old or dotard oaks, although dramatic declines in mast yields can also be caused by late frosts, a common occurrence in the Little Ice Age. The poet jestingly links nature's decline with the attempt to outdo nature in women's fashion, but seems oblivious to the actual damage he inflicts on the oak by carving verses in its bark.
Source: Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 148, 66r.
The sturdy Oak, too old to bear,
Her ancient fruit away is worn:
A sign the withered world doth wear,
As weary of the burden borne;
And aged Atlas' back doth bend,
As wishing all things to have end.
The shadows that our dames adorn,
Bespangled so with Acorn spots, °
I n such abundance now are worn
That Time the Oak but few allots.
And pride Dame Idle so beguiles
That Art poor Nature quite exiles.
THOMAS BASTARD
“Our fathers did but use the world before” (1598)
Aristotle taught that all living things move through three stages: growth, maturity, and decay. The world itself, however, was an exception: it had always existed and would always exist. In contrast, the Roman philosopher Lucretius believed that the earth too was mortal The rediscovery of this theory – a forerunner of entropic heat death – coincided with some the worst weather of the Little Ice Age, triggering fears in late Elizabethan England that nature was already entering its senility and ending with a protracted whimper. The trope of Nature's decay, however, is ambiguous from an environmentalist perspective. While it might foster stewardship and protection, it could also justify greater technological interference or mask human culpability. For the clergyman Thomas Bastard, however, the fault lay squarely with human mistreatment of the environment (see his poems on over-fishing and over-grazing in Parts iv and v, pp. 354 and 405).
Creation and the State of Nature
- from PART I - Cosmologies
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To understand modern attitudes towards the environment, one must begin “in the beginning,” with the Judeo-Christian creation myth. In a now notorious article, Lynn White traced the roots of our environmental crisis back to the first chapter of Genesis, when God instates humans as the overlords of creation. The Renaissance regarded the Torah as a sacred text, dictated by God to Moses. Today, most biblical scholars believe the Genesis story was cobbled together from various sources that underwent mutations and embellishments as they circulated over a four-century span between 900 and 500 bce. Cavilling with the White thesis, some eco-theologians observe that Adam derives from 'adamah, the Hebrew for earth, and insist that the “dominion mandate” stems from a Priestly version (the P-text) of the creation story, whereas the so-called Yahwist account (the J-text) in Chapter 2 promotes stewardship. The excerpt below is taken from the 1560 Protestant-slanted translation known as the Geneva Bible. This edition has been chosen for three reasons: (1) its monumental importance to Elizabethan culture and hence English literature; (2) the marginal glosses (excerpted in the footnotes) offer testimony of how Protestant theologians interpreted the scripture; and (3) the fact that the King James Version (published in 1611) is now far more widely available.
Source: The Geneva Bible (1560), 1–2, 4.
Chapter 1
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the waters. ° Then God said, Let there be light: and there was light. ° And God saw the light that it was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. So the evening and the morning were the first day.
Again God said, Let there be a firmament ° in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters. Then God made the firmament, and parted the waters, which were under the firmament, from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. 8 And God called the firmament Heaven. So the evening and the morning were the second day.
Appendix A - Industrialization and Environmental Legislation in the Early Anthropocene: A Timeline
- Edited by Todd Andrew Borlik, University of Huddersfield
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- Literature and Nature in the English Renaissance
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Summary
1490 First blast furnace at Queenstock, Buxted.
1496 Blast furnace at Ashdown Forest in the Weald.
1503 c. 11 Act against Deer-hays and Buckstalls. Outlaws the use of ditches and nets in forests, chases, and parks and blames them for the “destruction of red deer and fallow.”
1511 c. 11 Act for the Appointing of Physicians and Surgeons.
Prohibits unlicensed physicians from dispensing medicines and accuses “ignorant persons” who do so, such as “smiths, weavers, and women,” of “sorceries and witchcraft.”
1512 c. 8 Strode's Act.
Exonerates Richard Strode, an MP from Devon (himself a tinner) who was imprisoned by the tinners' Stannaries court for attempting to introduce legislation restricting mining rights and calling “for the reformation of the perishing, hurting, and destroying of diverse ports, havens, and creeks.”
1513 Construction of Henry VIII's great warship, Henry Grace à Dieu, consumes 1,752 tons of timber (State Papers Henry VIII, 8, fol. 146.) It has been estimated that Tudor warships required 2,000 mature oaks or 50 acres of woodlands (Perlin 175–6), and a fleet like the Spanish Armada would need 6 million cubic metres of timber (McNeil 398).
1522 c. 12 Act against Unlawful Hunting the Hare.
C omplains that the “game is now decayed and almost utterly destroyed” due to overhunting.
1523 c. 10 Henry VIII renews treaty with Denmark (first negotiated by Henry VII in 1490) to grant English fishing rights in Icelandic waters, suggesting that the demand for fish was exceeding supply. Disputes over these fishing rights created friction with Denmark throughout the Tudor era. Letter urges Cardinal Wolsey (recently appointed Bishop of Durham) to delve more coal pits in Northumberland (Cotton Titus B/I, fol. 301). Parliament debates a bill allowing mine-shafts to be drained onto another person's land.
1527 Proclamation Ordering Enclosures Destroyed and Tillage Restored (MS Harley 442/42).
A response to dearth. The proclamation provoked anti-enclosure riots.
1529 c. 8. Act for the Bringing up and Rearing of Calves to Increase the Multitude of Cattle. Prohibits farmers from slaughtering newborn cattle to inflate the price of meat. Renewed in 1532 as Act “Against Killing of Calves … and Weanlings,” and enlarged in 1609.
Enclosure
- from PART V - Environmental Problems in Early Modern England
- Edited by Todd Andrew Borlik, University of Huddersfield
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Summary
By the late Middle Ages, wool had become the lifeblood of the English economy. As demand increased in the early sixteenth century thanks to the booming textile industry, the market value of wool skyrocketed. As a result, farmers began to expand pastureland at the expense of arable land and woodlands, and to enclose commons. This triggered a great number of economic and social problems, as some displaced agricultural workers apparently turned to theft to survive. More's protest not only anticipates sociological theories of crime but also intuits the monstrous environmental impact of cross-species assemblages, in this case, the “landlord/ sheep hybrid,” that transforms England into a “Ewe-topia” (Yates).
Source: Utopia, trans. Ralph Robinson (1551), C6v– D1r.
“But yet this is not only the necessary cause of stealing. There is another which, as I suppose, is proper° and peculiar to you Englishmen alone.” “What is that?” quoth the Cardinal.
“Forsooth,” quod I, “your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers and so wild that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves. They consume, destroy, and devour whole fields, houses, and cities. For look in what parts of [C7r] the realm doth grow the finest and, therefore, dearest wool, there noblemen and gentlemen—yea, and certain Abbots, holy men, God wote °—not contenting themselves with the yearly revenues and profits that were wont to grow to their forefathers and predecessors of their lands, nor being content that they live in rest and pleasure nothing profiting— yea, much annoying—the weal-public, leave no ground for tillage. They enclose all in pastures. They throw down houses. They pluck down towns, and leave nothing standing but only the church to make of it a sheephouse. And as though you lost no small quantity of ground by forests, chases, lands, and parks, those good holy men turn all dwellings places and all glebe-land ° into desolation and wilderness.
Acknowledgements
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Appendix B - Further Reading: A Bibliography of Environmental Scholarship on the English Renaissance
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