Dictionary:

England

  (ĭng'glənd)

A division of the United Kingdom, the southern part of the island of Great Britain. Originally settled by Celtic peoples, it was subsequently conquered by Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, and Normans. Acts of union joined England with Wales in 1536, with Scotland in 1707 to create the political entity of Great Britain, and with Ireland in 1801 to form the United Kingdom. London is the capital and the largest city of both England and the United Kingdom. Population: 50,800,000.

For more information on England, visit Britannica.com.

The dominant nation of the island of Great Britain should always be distinguished from Britain, the P-Celtic nation occupied by the Romans which England displaced. This is especially important in Welsh and Cornish literatures, as those peoples are direct descendants of the Celts displaced by the invading Angles, Saxons, and Jutes; the Welsh word for Britain, Prydein, may denote Wales. Other P-Celtic Britons inhabited southern Scotland, migrated to Brittany, or fused with the invaders. Modern Irish Sasana; Scottish Gaelic Sasunn; Manx Sostyn; Welsh Lloegr, Lloegyr; Cornish Pow Saws; Breton Bro-Saoz. Medieval Welsh poets used the term Brynaich, among others, to deride the English.

At the level of world history, England between 1485 and 1789 is most important for the developments that helped usher in aspects of the modern world. Three, in particular, are worthy of note. First, the expansion of English power was such that, by 1700, England was the world's leading maritime power and the most important colonial power in North America; by the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, England was the strongest state in the world. Second, the religious and political changes within England transformed the nature of its political culture and therefore ensured the character of the state that was to become the most important in the world, and, to a certain extent, contributed to that development. The most significant of these changes within England were the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century and the overthrow of Stuart authoritarianism in the seventeenth century and its replacement by a political system in which Parliament played a leading role. Third, the period saw the development of the English language. The vocabulary expanded, English replaced Latin and Norman French as the language of the Bible and the law respectively, and, with the plays of William Shakespeare (1564–1616), it reached new cultural heights.

Christianity and Witchcraft

It is also important to draw attention to other aspects of the period that do not so readily accord with this account of modernization. In many profound ways, both the facts and details of life and the attitudes of the period were totally different from those today. This was a realm that was shadowed by a world of spirits, good and bad, and these spirits were seen and believed to intervene frequently in the life of humans. This belief brought together both Christian notions—in particular providentialism, a conviction of God's direct intervention in the life of individuals, the intercessory role of saints, sacraments, prayer and belief, the existence of heaven, purgatory, hell, and the devil, and a related and overlapping group of ideas, beliefs, and customs—that were partially Christianized but also testified to a mental world that was not explicable in terms of Christian theology. This was a world of good and evil, knowledge and magic, of fatalism, of the occult, and of astrology and alchemy. Such beliefs were widely held.

This fearful world could be only partially countered by Christianity, but the very sense of menace and danger helps to account for the energy devoted to religious issues in the sixteenth century and the fears encouraged by changes in church belief and practice, for example, the despoliation of shrines and the ending of pilgrimages. The true path of Christian virtue and salvation was challenged not only by false prophets laying claim to the word of Jesus, but also by a malevolent world presided over by the devil. Witches were prominent among the devil's followers, and concern about witches gained a new prominence in the sixteenth century. James I (reigned 1603–1625), for whose court Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, wrote against witches and was believed to be the target of their diabolical schemes, although he later recanted his opinions and, if anything, became a force for moderation in their treatment.

Witchcraft was not swept away by the Renaissance, the Reformation, or the supposed onset of the modern age. Indeed, belief in prediction, astrology, alchemy, and the occult was especially strong in the early seventeenth century. The last recorded witch trial in England occurred in 1717, and the Witchcraft Act of 1736 banned accusations of witchcraft and sorcery.

Living Conditions in Early Modern England

The sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation with its emphasis on a vernacular Bible ensured that good and evil became more literary and less oral and visual than hitherto, but that did not diminish the need for people to understand their world in terms of the struggle between the two. Evil, malevolence, and the inscrutable workings of the divine will seemed the only way to explain the sudden pitfalls of the human condition.

The average experience of life for the people of the period necessarily came at a younger age than for the average person today, and was shaped within a context of the ever-present threat of death, disease, injury, and pain. There was still joy and pleasure, exultation and exhilaration, but the demographics were chilling. Alongside individuals who lived to old age, there were lives quickly cut short—in the case of women, especially in childbirth. Child mortality figures continued to be high. Thirty-eight percent of the children born in Penrith in the northwest of England between 1650 and 1700 died before reaching the age of six. Defenses against disease remained flimsy, not least because of the limited nature of medical knowledge. Treatments such as blistering and mercury were often painful, dangerous, or enervating. Surgery was primitive and was performed without anesthesia. There was nothing akin to the modern expectation that there should be a medical cure for everything; people were forced to resort to quack medicines, folk remedies, and prayer. Typhus, typhoid, influenza, dysentery, chicken pox, measles, scarlet fever, and syphilis were all serious threats. Other conditions that can now be cured or held at bay were debilitating.

Living conditions contributed to the problem. Crowded housing, especially the sharing of beds, helped spread diseases, particularly respiratory infections. Most dwellings were neither warm nor dry, and sanitary practices were a problem. There were few baths, washing in clean water was limited, and louse infestation was serious. Although outer clothes were worn for long periods and were not washable, those who could afford it wore linen or cotton shifts next to their skin, and these shifts could be regularly laundered. However, most people wore the same clothes for as long as they could. Bedbugs and rats were real horrors and, by modern standards, breath and skin must have been repellent. It is difficult to recreate an impression of the smell and dirt of the period. Ventilation was limited. Humans lived close to animals and dunghills, and this damaged health. Manure stored near buildings was hazardous and could contaminate the water supply, while effluent from undrained privies and animal pens came into houses through generally porous walls. Privies with open soil pits lay directly alongside dwellings and under bedrooms.

Poor nutrition lowered resistance to disease. Fruit and vegetables were expensive and played only a minor role in the diet of the urban poor, who were also generally ill clad. The poor ate less meat. Plant stocks had not been scientifically improved to resist disease and adverse weather conditions and to increase yields.

Agricultural labor was arduous, generally daylight to dusk in winter, and 6 A.M. to 6 P.M. in summer. Industrial employment was also hard—up to sixteen hours daily in the Yorkshire alum houses—and often dangerous. Each occupation had its own hazards. Millers worked in dusty and noisy circumstances, frequently suffered from lice, and often developed asthma, hernias, and chronic back problems. Disorders could result from the strain of unusual physical demands or postures, such as those required of tailors and weavers. Many places of work were damp, badly ventilated, and poorly lit. Work frequently involved exposure to dangerous substances such as arsenic, lead, and mercury or was dangerous in itself, particularly construction, fishing, and mining. Many industrial processes were dangerous to others besides the workers: dressing and tanning leather polluted water supplies.

At a more mundane level, uncertainty was a matter not only of demographics but also an aspect of the contemporary world of space, not least of transport. This uncertainty, in comparison with modern life, was captured most vividly by the abrupt shift from light to darkness. The modern world can overcome the latter with electric lighting and, as far as travel and distance are concerned, navigation systems, but, in the early modern world, the dark was a world of uncertainty, danger, and menace. This was especially true for the traveler literally unable to see his routes.

Transportation

In addition to the problems presented by the darkness, road surfaces were unreliable. They were greatly affected by rain, especially on clay soils. Travel through the heavily forested Weald in Kent, Surrey, and Sussex, in the southeast, posed particular problems, but heavy clays, for example in south Essex and the Vale of Berkeley (Gloucestershire), also created difficulties. Furthermore, standards of road maintenance were low. Upkeep was largely the responsibility of the local parish, and the resources for a speedy and effective response to deficiencies were lacking.

The situation did not improve greatly through the early modern period. Travel was not much easier in 1700 than it had been in 1500. Horses were the same, ships were still wooden and wind-powered, most roads were still dirt tracks, and the impact of the weather had not changed. The slowness of land travel, the difficulty of moving bulk goods on land, other than by river, and Britain's island character ensured that trade and travel by sea were more important than they are today. On land, a network of regular and reliable long-distance wagon services did not develop until the seventeenth century. The situation was worse at sea. Shipwreck and the problems of storm-tossed or, in contrast, becalmed journeys engaged the imagination of the age, as can be seen from the role of storms and shipwrecks in such Shakespeare plays as The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Pericles, A Winter's Tale, and The Comedy of Errors.

Plague, Population, and Urban Expansion

There were still virulent outbreaks of the plague, as in 1499–1500, 1518, 1538, 1563, and 1665, the last the Great Plague in which between seventy and one hundred thousand people died. Nevertheless, there was also a major rise in population. Prior to the first national census in 1801, all figures are approximate, but the population of England and Wales seems to have increased from under 2.5 million in 1500 to over 4 million by 1603 and about 5 million by 1651. The impact of this change was accentuated because it followed a period of stagnation after the Black Death (1348–1350) and preceded another that lasted until the 1740s. The increase in population was due largely to a fall in mortality, but a rise in fertility stemming from a small decrease in the average age of women at marriage was probably also important.

The rise in population affected the structure of society by leading to overpopulation as far as the distribution of resources was concerned, certainly in comparison with the fifteenth century. This encouraged a persistent rise in prices in the sixteenth century. The demand for food caused the rents of agricultural land to rise proportionately more rapidly than wages. This hit both tenants and those with little or no land. In the volatile and tense situation, agrarian capitalism became more intense. Landlords tried to increase the yield of their customary estates and to destroy the system of customary tenure. Much of the peasantry lost status and became little different from poorly paid wage laborers. The growing number of paupers and vagrants greatly concerned successive governments, although more for reasons of law and order than because of concern about the poor.

Urban expansion was a product of the role of towns as centers of manufacturing, trade, government, and leisure. Yet all four were also pursued in the countryside, just as there was much market gardening within town walls, as well as orchards and pastures, the latter particularly for milk, which could not be refrigerated, treated, or preserved. With the exception of London, cities were small and the countryside was always nearby. In 1523, Worcester ranked sixteenth among England's towns by population, which was only about 4,000, and only about 6,000 in 1646. Evesham, the next biggest town in Worcestershire, had only about 1,400 people—the size of a modern village—in the mid-sixteenth century.

Rural fairs remained important to trade, their episodic character a reminder of the rhythm of seasonal activity that framed life. Much industry was also located in the countryside, in part because of the importance of waterpower provided by fast-flowing rivers and tapped by the water wheels in mills.

Economic Changes

Alongside any emphasis on elements of continuity, it is necessary to draw attention to signs of economic change. This was both quantitative (increased production) and qualitative (new methods and routes). Both were important. A more integrated economy reflected the demands of a growing population and urban markets and the absence of internal tariffs. Trade increasingly linked distant areas. Northeastern coal was shipped from Newcastle to London. As national markets developed, the importance of transport links and capital availability increased. The processing of rural products—grain, meat, wool, wood, hides, hops—was central to industry throughout Britain. The cost and difficulty of transport encouraged the production of goods near the markets for which they were destined. Thus, rural Britain was dotted with breweries and mills.

Building reflected affluence and expenditure, as with the insertion of chimney stacks in many houses. The world of "things" increased over the early modern period. More artifacts survive from the sixteenth century than from the fifteenth, and other evidence, such as probate inventories, legal records, and literary references, also suggest a marked trend toward possessing more. Increasing material consumption also invited denunciation by moralists and was seen as the cause of what was regarded as a major rise in crime. The world of things had important cultural consequence. Craftsmanship flourished in the manufacture of many goods. The increase in the number of musical instruments, such as lutes, probably ensured that instrumental music came to play a prominent role, especially in genteel society. Songs were set to music, which it must be assumed people could readily play.

Books were an important part of this new world. Early beginnings in printing were less important than sustained growth in the production and consumption of books and other printed material in the sixteenth and later centuries. The availability of books helped to encourage literacy. It was important for its collective functions, especially the use of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer in church and the energizing of cultural production. But it also offered the possibility of a more private and individual culture than that provided by the conspicuous consumption and display of public ceremonial.

The publication of the vernacular Bible helped to validate both books and the use of English rather than Latin. Printing made writing more available in a standard form, creating a shared and repeatable culture that manuscripts could not generate. Print thus lent itself to the demands of a state that from the 1530s was legislating actively in lay and ecclesiastical matters.

As yet, however, the impact of popular literacy and the print revolution upon oral culture was limited. Most people could neither read nor afford books. Furthermore, most people lacked formal education. Thus, printing exacerbated social divisions and gave an extra dimension to the flow of orders, ideas, and models down the social hierarchy. The inability of the poor to express themselves was accentuated. Conversely, education, the world of print, the impact of government, and the role of London all encouraged the gentry increasingly to view politics and society in national terms.

The poverty of the majority was counterpointed by the growing comfort that characterized the wealthy. This contrast was also seen in political and religious change, with the bulk of the population neither consulted nor considered other than as objects of control. The absence of consultation was more disruptive than it had been ever since the Norman Conquest of 1066 because change was not simply a matter of monarchs and aristocratic factions competing for the spoils of power and privilege, but, with the Reformation, also a deep-seated and divisive change in the nation's ideology and culture. The extent of this has been largely overlooked because, from the reign of Elizabeth (1558–1603), the Reformation was seen as the national destiny and central to national identity. English became the language of God's work and the monarch was now head of the church. The assertion by the English Church that purgatory did not exist and the consequent abolition of prayers for the dead destroyed links between the communities of the living and the dead. The loss of the monasteries in the 1530s brought much disruption, including, in many localities, the breakdown of poor and medical relief. Although in the short term monastic charity was ended, before long Protestant-influenced patterns of charitable giving developed. Instead of bequests going to masses for the dead and to chantry priests, they were now more frequently left for parish charities, educational provision, and almshouses.

Religion and Politics

Henry VIII's use of Parliament in the 1530s and 1540s to legitimate his objectives increased its frequency and role. Nevertheless, the idea that there was a revolution in government in the 1530s is questionable: Henry's preference for direct control remained the dominant theme throughout his reign. He kept his grip on the domestic situation, helped by his clear right to the throne, his unwillingness to turn obviously to either religious option, and the selective use of terror. Henry retained control of the government, as well as of the aristocracy through their attendance at court, through the travels of the court itself, through shared participation in military activities and the hunt, and through patronage.

Under Edward VI (ruled 1547–1553), politics at the center and control of the localities were greatly complicated by religious disputes. They made it harder to ensure cooperation and consensus. During his reign, Edward was opened to the influence of Protestantism from the Continent, and there was a surge of state-supported and purposeful Protestant activity. Hostility to religious change played a major role in the widespread uprisings in the southwest in 1549, although the rising in Norfolk that year focused on opposition to landlords, especially the enclosure of common lands and their high rents, and to oppressive local governments. Although crushed, the risings in 1549 indicated the extent to which developments in the 1530s through the 1560s encouraged a degree of hostile popular response that menaced the political system and thus required the development of a new language and practice of apparent consultation within the political nation.

Similarly, under Mary (ruled 1553–1558), the failure of Wyatt's rising indicated the precarious nature of the regime, but also the problems affecting rebellions. Mary, the daughter of Henry VIII and his first wife, Catherine of Aragón, was a devout Catholic who was determined to return England to the Catholic fold. A parliamentary statute declared her power identical to that of a male ruler. She persuaded Parliament to repeal Edward's religious legislation and her father's Act of Supremacy. She restored papal authority and Catholic practice, although a papal dispensation from Julius III allowed the retention of the former church lands by those who now held them. The reign of the sickly Mary was brief, and her chance of success in re-Catholicizing England and Wales was further victim of her failure to produce an heir, in spite of two phantom pregnancies. Mary is chiefly remembered as a persecutor ("Bloody Mary"). Nearly three hundred Protestants were burned at the stake, including many leaders. Her reign was also important because in 1558 the French retook Calais, the last English possession in mainland France: only the Channel Islands were left.

The Age of Elizabeth

Parliamentary management became more important during the long reign of Elizabeth (ruled 1558–1603). This was an aspect of a shift in the politics of the country away from a focus on relations between crown and aristocracy and, instead, toward relations between crown and gentry. At the center, although the royal court remained the major focus of politics, this led to a greater role for Parliament and a stress on ideas of representation, and in the localities to the growing importance of the gentry as justices of the peace. The rise of a numerous and independent gentry with a sense and obligation of public duty was linked to the failure of the peerage to be the prime beneficiary of the sociopolitical changes of the period. The creation of stronger links between crown and gentry was fundamental to the achievement of the Elizabethan period. Elizabeth was the most experienced politician in her kingdom, anxious to preserve the royal prerogative, but knowing when to yield without appearing weak. She had favorites but did not give them power, and she never married. Claiming that she was an exceptional woman because she was chosen by God as his instrument, Elizabeth was pragmatic and generally more successful in coping with, indeed exploiting, divisions among her advisers than Mary had been. She presented herself as "mere English."

Elizabeth's lengthy reign permitted the consolidation of a relatively conservative Protestant church settlement, and also contrasted both with the chaos of the preceding two reigns and with the disturbed situation in contemporary France, where the lengthy civil Wars of Religion (1552–1598) were soon to begin. Like her grandfather, Henry VII (ruled 1485–1509), Elizabeth was a skillful manipulator, not a zealot. In religion, she sought to avoid extremes and would have preferred a settlement closer to that of her father, Henry VIII: Catholicism without pope or monks. She was, nevertheless, a Protestant in the last analysis. Mary's ministers and favorites were mostly dismissed, and the domestic political situation led Elizabeth in a more Protestant direction, but the Protestant settlement she introduced was more conservative than that of the last years of Edward VI. Elizabeth also sought to prevent further change, and this led to disputes with the more radical Protestants, the Puritans.

Elizabeth's Protestant settlement aroused Catholic concern, and the situation became volatile in 1568 when her cousin, the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–1587), fled to England, where she was next in line in the succession. Mary's presence acted as a focus for conspiracy, helping trigger the unsuccessful Northern Rising of 1569. Its failure was one of the major stages in the political unification of England, for it marked the end of any viable prospect of regional autonomy centered on a different political and/or religious agenda. This was important because the north was more religiously conservative than the south. Even in 1569, the rebellion had been intended to ensure a change in the policy of the central government. Thereafter, politics centered far more on nationwide attempts to influence the center, rather than local efforts to defy it.

The Northern Rising was followed by an escalation in tension between Elizabeth's government and Catholic Europe. In 1570, Pope Pius V excommunicated and deposed Elizabeth. This eased the path for a number of unsuccessful conspiracies designed to replace Elizabeth with Mary, Queen of Scots, which led in turn to the execution of the latter in 1587.

Two years earlier, English military support for Dutch Protestant rebels against Philip II of Spain, and English raids on Spanish trade and colonies, especially those by Francis Drake (c. 1540–1596), had led to war between the two powers. This conflict was most famous for the Armada of 1588, a Spanish attempt to send a major fleet up the English Channel in order to cover an invasion of England from the Spanish Netherlands (modern Belgium) by the effective Spanish army of Flanders under the duke of Parma. This was thwarted by a combination of poor planning, a skillful English naval response, and the weather. The latter fueled the development of belief in a providential sanction for English Protestantism. To contemporaries, the unassailable nature of divine approval was clear.

Despite the defeat of the Armada, Elizabeth I's reign did not end on a triumphant note. Inflation and a lack of crown revenue created a difficult situation. Elizabeth preferred to cut public expenditure rather than reform the revenue system. Demands for additional taxation and attempts to raise funds by unpopular expedients—especially forced loans, ship money, and the sale of monopolies to manufacture or sell certain goods—led to bitter criticism in the Parliaments of 1597 and 1601. Tax demands were especially unwelcome because of harvest failures and related social tensions. There were problems—political, social, and economic—aplenty, the government had a stopgap feel to it, and Elizabeth was less adept and tolerant in her last years than she had been earlier in the reign.

The Stuart Succession and Civil War

Yet there was no civil war comparable to that in France, and the Stuart succession was inaugurated in 1603 without such a war. The increasing widespread politicization that was a feature of sixteenth-century England did not present insuperable problems. Instead, it contributed to a stronger national consciousness.

Thus, Parliament was a national body, whereas the nearest equivalent in France, the Estates-General, had less impact (and was not summoned between 1614 and 1789) than the regional Estates. As a unitary state, England could not be divided to suit the views of a ruler.

However, in the civil war that began in 1642, the country did split. The Royalists and the Parliamentarians had backing in every region and social group. Parliamentary support was strongest in the most economically advanced regions—in the south, the east, and the large towns—but in each of these regions there were also many Royalists, and the relationship between socioeconomic groups and religious and political beliefs were complex. The latter were important. Charles I (ruled 1625–1649) received much support as the focus for strong feelings of honor, loyalty, and duty. There was also widespread disquiet about possible changes to church government. In contrast, Puritans were his firm opponents. As a consequence, much rivalry was within, rather than between, social and economic groups. The English Civil War was a terrible crisis. Britons fought against and killed other Britons as never before. More than half the total number of battles ever fought on English soil involving more than 5,000 men were fought between 1642 and 1651. Out of an English male population of about 1.5 million, over 80,000 died in combat and another 100,000 of other causes arising from the war, principally disease.

Charles's defeat and his execution led eventually to a republic in 1649, and, in 1653–1658, to a military regime under Oliver Cromwell that suppressed domestic opposition and projected its power abroad with considerable success. However, the Puritan cultural revolution failed. There was widespread anxiety about the overthrow of order in politics, religion, society, and the household. This anxiety was the background to the restoration, in 1660, of the Stuart monarchy in the person of Charles II (ruled 1660–1685). Despite uncertainty and opposition, Charles's reign was more stable than the previous quarter-century. This was important not only for recovery from the mid-century conflicts, but also for economic growth and development. Foreign trade rose during Charles's reign. Economic growth was modest, and the stagnant population was a damper on demand, but there was development in both agricultural and industrial production.

Monarchy, Parliament, the Church of England, and the position of the social elite were all seen as mutually reinforcing, but the Catholicism of Charles's brother and heir, James II (ruled 1685–1688), made this an elusive harmony. James inherited his father's worst characteristics—inflexibility and dogmatism—and pressed forward unpopular authoritarian changes designed to further his goals of greater royal authority and paving the way for re-Catholicization. The political culture of the age assumed deference in return for good kingship, expectations of political behavior that involved a measure of contractualism. James spurned these boundaries.

The Glorious Revolution

James's base of support was narrow, and it collapsed in 1688 as a result of challenge from without by his nephew William III (ruled 1689–1702), stadtholder of the Dutch Republic and the husband of James's daughter Mary (ruled 1689–1694). William's invasion of England was quickly successful, in large part because he ably exploited James's failure of nerve. James was encouraged to flee and Parliament declared that James had abdicated, rather than adopting the more radical notion that he had been deposed. Parliament debarred Catholics from the succession and placed restrictions on royal power. The financial settlement left William with an ordinary revenue that was too small for his peacetime needs, obliging him to turn to Parliament for support. A standing army was prohibited unless permitted by Parliament. In other words, Parliament was by this time stronger than the monarchy.

As with the Tudor triumph in 1485, England had been successfully invaded. But in 1688 the political situation was very different for a number of reasons, not least the validating role of Parliament, and the need to ensure that Scotland and Ireland were brought in line. Nevertheless, there was also a fundamental continuity. Political issues were settled by conflict. Furthermore, the dynastic position was crucial: political legitimacy could not be divorced from the sovereign and the succession. Both these factors ensure that the elements of modernity suggested by the constitutional products of the 1688 invasion have to be qualified by reminders of more traditional features of the political structure.

What was to be termed by its supporters the Glorious Revolution was to play a central role in the Whiggish, heroic, self-congratulatory account of English development. It was clearly important in the growth of an effective parliamentary monarchy in which the constitutional role of Parliament served as the anchor of cooperation between the crown and the sociopolitical elite. Yet a less benign account is also possible, and not only from the perspective of the exiled James and his Jacobite supporters. The instability of the ministries of the period 1689–1721 suggests that the political environment necessary for an effective parliamentary monarchy had in some ways been hindered by the events of 1688–1689. A parliamentary monarchy could not simply be legislated into existence. It required the development of conventions and patterns of political behavior that would permit a constructive resolution of contrary opinions. This took time and was not helped by the burdens of the lengthy and difficult wars with France—from 1689 to 1697 and 1702 to 1713—that followed the Glorious Revolution. William's seizure of power did not assist this process of resolution for other reasons: alongside praise for him as a Protestant and a providential blessing, there was criticism of him as a usurper. This criticism was marginalized because the circumstances of William's reign permitted him a political and polemical victory over his opponents. As a result, the Protestant and Whiggish vision associated with the victors eventually came to seem natural to the English. However, a tenuous link can be drawn between the willingness to conceive of new political structures and governmental arrangements—seen, for example, with the parliamentary Union of England and Scotland in 1707 and the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694—and the increased interest in taking an active role in first understanding the world and then seeking to profit from this understanding, which flowered with the scientific revolution.

Bibliography

Black, Jeremy. Eighteenth-Century Britain, 1688–1783. Basingstoke, U.K., 2001.

——. Historical Atlas of Britain: The End of the Middle Ages to the Georgian Era. Thrupp, U.K., 2000.

——. A History of the British Isles. London, 1996.

——. A New History of England. Stroud, U.K., 2000.

Burgess, Glenn. The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political Thought, 1603–1642. Basingstoke, U.K., 1992.

Doran, Susan. England and Europe in the Sixteenth Century. Basingstoke, U.K., 1998.

Fraser, Antonia, ed. The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England: William I to Elizabeth II. London, 1998.

Gunn, Steven. Early Tudor Government, 1485–1558. Basingstoke, U.K., 1995.

Hughes, Ann. The Causes of the English Civil War. 2nd ed. Basingstoke, U.K., 1998.

Hutton, Ronald. The British Republic, 1649–1660. Basingstoke, U.K., 1990.

Jack, Sybil. Towns in Tudor and Stuart Britain. Basingstoke, U.K., 1996.

Jewell, Helen M. Education in Early Modern England. Basingstoke, U.K., 1998.

Mac Culloch, Diarmaid. The Later Reformation in England, 1547–1603. 2nd ed. New York, 2001.

Marsh, Christopher. Popular Religion in Sixteenth-Century England: Holding Their Peace. Basingstoke, U.K., 1998.

Rex, Richard. Henry VIII and the English Reformation. Basingstoke, U.K., 1993.

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—JEREMY BLACK

This entry is a subtopic of British Isles.

Since the 1970s, English food appears to have undergone a transformation. A postwar cuisine of plainly cooked meat and vegetables supplemented with baked goods and puddings has apparently given way to multiculturalism. Restaurants serve fusion food. Supermarkets sell chilled meals based on Italian or Asian recipes. The cookery sector of publishing is buoyant. This seems astonishing for a country whose eating habits evolved little between the mid-nineteenth century and 1953, when Second World War rationing ended; but beneath the metropolitan froth, old ideas about plain cooking live on.

Background

England has an unpredictable but generally benign maritime climate, without extremes; relief is low, the highest mountain standing 3210 feet (978 meters). A basic topographic division runs from northeast to southwest, along the watershed of the Trent and Severn rivers. North and west of this, the land tends to be higher, and the climate colder and wetter. To the south and east, hills are generally low, and summers warmer and drier. Annual rainfall ranges from about 97 inches (2,500mm) in the hills of the northwest to about 23 inches (600mm) in the driest parts of the east; winter temperatures rarely drop more than a couple of degrees centigrade below freezing and the summer maximum is about 86°F (30°C).

England's political and cultural dominance of the United Kingdom makes it difficult to disentangle English food habits from those of the Welsh, Scots, and Irish. Successive waves of settlers have brought ideas about food, but few attributions can be made until the twentieth century. Foreign trade has been important to English cuisine since at least the late Middle Ages. Spices came from the East Indies; sugar and currants were initially imported from the Mediterranean, and later from colonial possessions. A dependence on tropical crops—tea, coffee, chocolate, sugar—developed in the nineteenth century; and the idea of curry came home with the nabobs of the East India Company.

Meat

Localized breeds of cattle, sheep, and pigs developed in the nineteenth century. Grass-fed beef from Aberdeen Angus, Hereford, and other traditional breeds is considered best. Most sheep meat is eaten as lamb, under the age of a year; mutton, from older sheep, formerly important, is now almost unobtainable. Fresh pork was and is popular, as is bacon. Wiltshire became an important center for curing meat in the nineteenth century. Bacon provided a relish for the otherwise monotonous diets of the poor. It remains an English favorite, though much is now imported from Denmark. Regional ham cures that became famous include those of York (or, more properly, Yorkshire), Cumberland, Devon, and Suffolk.

Poultry has long been important for both meat and eggs. In the nineteenth century, the counties around London produced Sussex and Dorking chickens; Surrey was famous for capons, and the town of Aylesbury produced ducks. Turkeys and geese were reared on corn (grain) stubble in East Anglia for sale in the capital. Poultry production is now an intensive industry, though small businesses based on high-quality traditional poultry production are appearing. Only geese have not succumbed to intensive systems.

Game has always featured on the aristocratic menu. Venison was most sought after; deer farming has made this more accessible, but it remains a minority taste, as do hares. Rabbits, nurtured in warrens in the Middle Ages, escaped, naturalized, and became pests, and the only wild creatures easily accessible to the poor. Wildfowl of all descriptions were eaten up to the eighteenth century, but subsequently the choice narrowed to about a dozen species, of which pheasants are most common, yet grouse from heather moorlands, and partridges are most prized.

Meat Cookery

Meat cookery demonstrates a preference for plain roasted (or, strictly speaking, baked) meat. Traditional accompaniments are horseradish sauce for beef; mint sauce (finely chopped mint mixed with sugar and vinegar) for lamb, and sage and onion stuffing and applesauce for fresh pork, which is generally roasted with the skin on to make crackling. Roast potatoes and boiled green or root vegetables are also served. Boiled meat dishes, such as salt beef with carrots, or mutton with caper sauce have almost vanished, though some people still marinate beef with salt, spices, and sugar for several days to make spiced beef. Steaks and chops are used for grilling.

Other meat dishes include pies or steamed suet puddings of beefsteak and kidney; oxtail is made into stews and soups. Skirt of beef is mixed with chopped potato, onion, and turnip in Cornish pasties, popular everywhere but closely identified with Cornwall itself. Northern butchers make a paste of cooked beef beneath a layer of fat; this potted beef is a remnant of an eighteenth-century tradition of potting all kinds of meat. Lancashire hotpot is a traditional stew of lamb or mutton chops with layers of onions and potatoes. It evolved in an area where a high rate of female employment led to a reliance on slow-cooked and ready-prepared foods.

Pork products include fresh sausages of lean and fat meat and some type of grain; the Cumberland type, with a high meat content and distinctive coiled presentation, is considered particularly good. Pork pies, survivors of a great tradition of raised pies, are made with a lard-based hot-water crust. Melton Mowbray in the Midlands is famous for a fine version. Black puddings (blood sausages), highly seasoned mixtures of blood, grain, and cubes of fat, are known everywhere but have a strong association with the industrial towns of south Lancashire (as does ox tripe). Hog's puddings, of seasoned grain and fat, are popular in the southwest. Other items include faggots, chopped offal wrapped in squares of caul; haslet, a kind of loaf made from scraps of lean and cured pork; and brawn, a cold jellied dish made from meat picked from the head. Lard, beef suet, and drippings are important in traditional cookery.

Chicken, once an expensive treat roasted for special occasions, is now ubiquitous. It is much used in dishes of foreign origin. Rabbit stews and pies became poverty food, and the taste for them has waned. Hare soup and jugged hare—cooked slowly with wine and herbs, the sauce thickened with the blood of the animal—are classic dishes of English game cookery.

Fish

Cod and haddock, though becoming scarce, are staples of fish and chip shops; grilled Dover sole is a standard of English restaurant cookery. Oysters, until the mid-nineteenth century a cheap food, suffered from pollution and disease and are now a luxury. Morecombe Bay shrimps (Crangon crangon), potted in spiced butter, are a traditional teatime delicacy. Eels, until the 1970s, were closely associated with the food habits of the London poor. Eel pie, and mash (mashed potatoes) shops sold them cold as jellied eels (boiled and allowed to cool in their liquid) or hot with mashed potato and "liquor," a green parsley sauce. Herrings were important until a recent decline in fish stocks. Some were eaten fresh, but most were preserved. Red herrings (heavily salted and smoked for long-term keeping) were superseded in the nineteenth century by lighter cures: kippers (split and cleaned before smoking) evolved in Northumberland, while Yarmouth favored bloaters (whole, lightly salted smoked herrings). Salmon, which became expensive when rivers were polluted during the nineteenth century, is cheap again because of fish farming, and poached salmon with cucumber is an English summer favorite.

Bread and Baking

White wheaten (wheat) bread is of primary importance. Traditional oblong tin loaves have become degraded under industrial production, and foreign influence makes it easier to buy croissants, ciabatta (a bread of Italian origin with a chewy, open texture), pita, or nan bread than a traditional cottage loaf (two-tiered round loaf). Historically, bread grains included rye, barley, and maslin (mixed grain). In the northern hills, oats, the only reliable grain crop, were used for flatbreads. By the seventeenth century a preference for wheat had developed in the London area. Variety diminished as the taste for wheat spread and grain imports grew in the nineteenth century. Now, only the oat-bread tradition survives. Haverbread (from Old Norse hafre, oats), flat ovals about a foot long, can occasionally be found in towns on the Yorkshire-Lancashire border. A stronger custom of baking floppy oatcakes about ten inches in diameter continues in Staffordshire. Barley is now grown for brewing.

There are many small regional breads. Kentish huffkins, Cornish splits, and Yorkshire teacakes are all round and flattish, enriched with a little sugar, lard, and dried fruit. Hot plates are used to bake muffins (made from soft bread dough), and also crumpets, and pikelets (both made from thick, yeast-leavened batter). This trio of foods are all eaten toasted and spread with butter for breakfast or tea. Scones, of flour, sugar, egg, and dried fruit, are common. Chelsea buns and Bath buns are rich and sweet. Hot cross buns, marked with a cross on top, are plainer and spiced; formerly made only on Good Friday, they are now produced for several weeks around Easter.

Lardy cakes made from bread dough folded with lard, sugar, and dried fruit are typical of southern England. Currants, raisins, and candied peel feature in yeast-leavened Guernsey gâches, Cornish saffron cakes, and Yule loaves (sweetened Christmas breads made in the north). Rich fruit cakes are related to these breads historically. Modern versions are heavy with sugar, butter, raisins, currants, and candied cherries. Covered with almond paste and sugar icing, they are essential for Christmas or weddings; baked with a marzipan layer in the middle, they become simnels, for Easter.

The taste for dried fruit extends to Eccles, Chorley, and Banbury cakes—spiced currant mixtures wrapped in puff pastry. Small mince pies, filled with a mixture of dried fruit, spices, and sugar, are eaten all over the country throughout the Christmas season. Originally the mincemeat filling did contain veal, mutton, or beef; now, an enrichment of beef suet is all that survives of this. Such dried fruit and pastry confections have been popular for at least four hundred years.

Ginger is popular in baking. Grasmere gingerbread comes from the Lake District, where local ports were active in the West India trade and a taste for brown sugar, rum, and ginger survives. Parkin is a north-country gingerbread that often contains oatmeal. Cornish Fairings and Ashbourne cakes are also ginger-flavored, and have a crisp, biscuity texture. The diversity of modern British biscuits (cookies) is a product of nineteenth-century industry, but Shrewsbury cakes (related to shortbread) were recorded in the seventeenth century, and Bath Olivers (plain biscuits) in the early nineteenth.

Vegetables and Fruit

The English have never been renowned for sensitivity in cooking vegetables, which were generally boiled and served with butter. Cabbages, carrots, parsnips, spinach, and salads such as lettuce and watercress have a long history of use, as has asparagus: the Vale of Evesham and Norfolk are particularly associated with this crop. One vegetable almost uniquely used by the English is sea kale (Crambe maritima); wild plants were overexploited in the nineteenth century but sea kale is now cultivated in small quantities. Potatoes first gained wide acceptance in the north; by the nineteenth century they were eaten everywhere by everyone, and have continued to be so.

Apples, pears, cherries, and plums are traditional fruit crops of the southeast and southwest. Cobnuts are grown in Kent; soft fruit is grown across much of the country, strawberries and raspberries being favorites. Historically, the north, with a more challenging climate, relied on gooseberries, damsons, and rhubarb, the latter mostly grown in West Yorkshire, where it is forced as an early spring crop. Traditional fruit puddings and jams are a strength of the English kitchen. One vital item, the bitter orange, is grown in southern Spain and imported specifically for making breakfast marmalade. A taste for sugar confectionery has led to numerous boiled sugar sweets, many using fruit flavorings.

Dairy Products

Dairy products were considered food for the poor in the seventeenth century, but have become progressively more important. Cream is mixed with fruit purees for fools, and beaten with wine and lemon for syllabubs. Clotted cream, heated gently to produce a thick crust, is a specialty of Devon and Cornwall. Butter is essential for spreading on bread and toast, as well as in cooking generally. Cheese-making in Britain was centralized during the Second World War, concentrating on "territorial" cheeses—Stilton, Cheddar, Gloucester, Cheshire, Lancashire, Wensleydale, Derby, and Leicester. All named for their areas of origin, they became generic (apart from Stilton, the manufacture of which was restricted to a small area in 1910). A dwindling nucleus of farm cheese-makers was boosted in the 1980s as "new wave" artisans who injected new creativity and energy into the industry.

Meal Times and Names

The British all recognize the early morning meal as breakfast, but after that a division becomes apparent. One pattern is a light midday lunch, perhaps afternoon tea, and a large dinner in the evening. The other is midday dinner and a substantial tea in the early evening. Sometimes this is called high tea or supper, though "supper," confusingly, is also used to indicate a light, late-evening repast. This divide originated when dinner, once a midday meal, slipped first to the early evening and then as late as 8:00 P.M. in the early nineteenth century. Lunch and afternoon tea developed to fill the long hours between breakfast and dinner. Wealthy younger people and southeasterners tend toward the lunch and dinner pattern. Poorer people, older ones, and northerners follow, to a diminishing extent, the dinner and tea pattern.

The "full English" breakfast. There is much nostalgia for the full English breakfast, a meal now mostly encountered in hotels, guesthouses, and cafés. Fried bacon and eggs are essential. Tomatoes, mushrooms, baked beans, fried bread, sausages, and black pudding are often added. Toast and marmalade generally follow. In cafés this meal is often available at any time. Time-consuming to prepare and eat, it is rarely made at home on a workday, when breakfast usually consists of cereal or toast, or coffee and a pastry bought on the way to work. However, cooked breakfasts are often made as a weekend treat.

Other items sometimes found at breakfast are oatmeal porridge (now closely identified with Scotland, but a survivor of a general British tradition of grain pottages) and kippers. In India, the British took khichri, spiced rice and lentils eaten with dried fish, and transmuted it into kedgeree, a mixture of rice, onions, and smoked haddock, still popular. Substantial breakfasts were most fully developed in country houses in the mid-nineteenth century, when huge buffets including such delicacies as deviled kidneys, raised pies, and cold tongue were laid out.

Lunch. Lunch has few special foods linked with it; though large formal lunches are sometimes eaten, a collation of odds and ends is more frequent. Sandwiches are a popular choice. The English have found sandwiches a convenient handheld meal since the mid-eighteenth century, when the Earl of Sandwich is said to have asked for his meat between two slices of bread, so as to avoid leaving the gaming table. Currently enjoying a zenith of popularity and variety, numerous specialty shops sell them filled with anything from conventional cheese and pickles or roast beef and horseradish combinations to chicken tikka or prawns and avocado. For those who want a hot lunch, soup or "something on toast"—cheese, eggs, fish, baked beans—are popular.

Dinner. Dinner is a substantial hot meal, whether taken at midday or in the evening. The traditional pattern is cooked meat or fish with vegetables. A sweet course, usually referred to as pudding, follows. Food may come from the prepared-food counter in a supermarket, and home cooks are as likely to choose dishes from the Mediterranean or the Indian subcontinent as traditional English ones. Take-away (takeout) food, from traditional fish and chips to kebabs, curries, or "a Chinese," are possible choices.

Confounding the lunch-dinner division are the special cases of Sunday dinner and Christmas dinner. These phrases still imply a large midday meal. Sunday dinner is often roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, served with gravy made from the meat juices or a commercial mix. Roasted or boiled potatoes and other vegetables, typically boiled cabbage and carrots, are also served. Lamb, pork, or chicken may take the place of the beef. Pudding choices include trifle (sherry-soaked sponge cake covered with layers of custard and cream); treacle tart (filled with golden syrup, lemon, and breadcrumbs), or lemon meringue pie. Steamed suet or sponge puddings are seen as old-fashioned but remain popular, as do fruit pies.

Christmas dinner usually centers on turkey or goose accompanied by sage and onion stuffing. Bread sauce, milk infused with cloves and shallot, thickened with breadcrumbs, is a classic accompaniment and a survival of a medieval tradition of bread-thickened sauces. Brussels sprouts are generally among the vegetables. This is followed by Christmas pudding flambéed with brandy, served with rum or brandy butter. Turkey is now the general choice, a reflection of centuries of great feasts involving various bird species, though roast beef was also a standard Christmas dish until the nineteenth century.

Afternoon tea and high tea. Tea is overlaid with social nuances. Apart from tea to drink (a beverage of primary importance in England since the mid-eighteenth century), afternoon tea is a dainty meal: bread and butter, small sandwiches filled with cucumber, a cake. Cream tea is a variant on this, with scones, jam, and cream. Elaborate afternoon teas are now most often taken in a café. High tea is a substantial meal, for people returning from work, or for children after school. It involves hot food such as kippers, eggs, pies, or sausages, or, in summer, cold ham or tinned canned salmon and salad. Bread and butter is always on the table, together with jam, and a selection of cakes—large ones, such as fruit cake or a Victoria sandwich (sponge cake filled with jam and cream), and small fairy cakes (similar to cupcakes or miniature muffins), jam tarts, and cookies.

Recent Developments

A trend toward vegetarianism and concern about animal welfare has become apparent since the 1970s, leading to a growth in consumption of organically produced and vegetarian foods. Another development is a taste for ethnic food. Though imitations of Asian food, such as curry, piccalilli, and mushroom ketchup, have been made since the eighteenth century, in the last hundred years immigrant communities have introduced numerous new ideas. Chinese restaurants were widespread by the 1960s and Italian restaurants soon followed. Indian restaurants began to penetrate beyond major centers of immigration in the 1970s, putting dishes such as chicken tikka masala on the national menu, especially after pub closing time. West Indian, Hispanic, Turkish, and Thai restaurants can now be found in most cities.

London restaurant culture now has a global reputation for excellence, and interest in eating healthily has increased; but London is not England, and the high incidence of cardiovascular disease throughout the country is partially attributed to poor diet. Writers, guides, and chefs have raised the variety and quality of ingredients and of ready-prepared food, and cookery is a popular subject for television. But the best traditional English food remains a specialty found mostly in the homes of dedicated cooks.

Puddings

Pudding has two different but linked meanings. It can indicate any sweet food considered suitable for dessert, ranging from fresh fruit to the most elaborate of sweet dishes. This usage developed after puddings, a fairly neutral staple food in the seventeenth century, evolved a subset of heavily sweetened dishes eaten for the second course at dinner.

Older meanings relate pudding to specific groups of dishes, some savory, some sweet. The oldest group is represented by sausage-type products such as black puddings (blood, fat, and grain) and white puddings, well documented since the sixteenth century. Bag puddings, mixtures of suet and flour or breadcrumbs, wrapped in a cloth and boiled, were known by the seventeenth century, and developed two distinct types. One was the sweet suet pudding with lemon peel, currants, sugar, and spice. Plum pudding, a heavily enriched version with raisins, candied peel, and sugar, has become a symbol of Christmas and remains essentially unchanged since the eighteenth century. Other sweet puddings include versions filled with fresh seasonal fruit, or jam roly-poly, suet crust spread with jam and rolled up, which became a school dinner staple. The second type was the savory suet pudding with a meat filling. These were recorded by the nineteenth century: steak and kidney remains a favorite, though puddings made with steak and oysters, mutton, and game such as partridges are also recorded.

Other ancient pudding types are pease pudding, based on a puree of dried peas, eaten with boiled bacon or ham, and Yorkshire pudding, made from batter baked in a popover pan, the principal survivor of numerous recipes for batter puddings boiled or baked.

In the eighteenth century, many sweet puddings using pastry and fruit or nuts became fashionable. Mixtures of rice or sago with milk and sugar also became common. These remain popular, though often in debased "nursery" versions. Puddings, steamed or baked, based on sponge-cake mixtures, flavored with lemon, ginger, or cocoa, became popular in the mid-nineteenth century, as did summer pudding, based on bread and fresh summer fruit.

Fish and Chips

Fish and chips, a favorite take-away (takeout) food in England, are sold in their own specialized restaurants and shops. There is some debate about when the combination became popular, but fried fish was being sold as street food in London as early as the 1830s, when Charles Dickens mentioned a fried-fish warehouse in Oliver Twist. Chips (french fries) appear to have joined the fish by the 1880s, and the pairing has remained popular ever since.

Cod is most commonly used, though haddock is preferred in some areas; the fillets are dipped in batter before deep-frying. For chips, the potatoes are cut in thick fingers and deep-fried. Vegetable oil is the usual frying medium in the south. Beef drippings are often used in the north. On purchase, the cooked fish and chips are seasoned with salt and vinegar as the customer desires. A pot of mushy peas (cooked marrowfat peas) is sometimes added to the order. Traditionally, newspapers are used for wrapping fish and chips, and the smell of deep-frying combined with hot newsprint is part of the experience. Health regulations now demand layers of greaseproof paper to insulate the food from printer's ink.

Muffins and Muffin-Men

As late as the 1930s, muffins were sold in London by muffin-men, street vendors who announced their presence by ringing a bell. In 1851, Sir Henry Mayhew recorded in London Labour and the London Poor that muffin-men bought their wares fresh from the bakers. The muffins were kept warm by wrapping them in flannel; they were then carried through the streets in baskets for resale door-to-door. The custom apparently derives in part from genteel ladies who did not keep servants who could be sent on errands, but who liked a slap-up (lavish) tea. The muffin-men recognized this, and made their rounds in mid-afternoon, convenient for tea time. Muffins were most popular in winter. To eat them, they were toasted, pulled apart around the circumference, spread with butter, and the halves put back together to allow the butter to melt.

The origin of the name is a mystery. Recipes appear in the mid-eighteenth century, but the idea is probably much older. Muffins enjoyed great popularity but were considered old-fashioned by the early twentieth century, and had almost vanished by the Second World War. In the 1980s, they were revived by industrial bakeries, and are once again available, in varying degrees of quality. Muffins in England—quite unlike sweetened muffins and what people in North America call "English muffins"—are disks about four inches in diameter and an inch thick, and made from plain, soft bread dough. Size and the use of yeast as a leaven relates them to the many other small breads of English traditional baking, while the use of a hot plate puts them in the same category as crumpets, pikelets, and several Welsh and Scottish specialties.

Bibliography

Ayrton, Elisabeth. The Cookery of England. London: André Deutsch, 1974.

Burnett, John. Plenty and Want: A Social History of Diet in England from 1815 to the Present Day.