Poverty, Exploration and Daily Life
The Edexcel specification for this depth study tests candidates not only on high politics and war, but also on the social and economic condition of Elizabethan England. This lesson covers three strands: the problem of poverty, the voyages of exploration, and the contrast between the daily life of the gentry and the poor. All three are testable in Paper 2 Q4(a) and Q4(b) questions, and a strong command of specific detail is what separates a Level 2 from a Level 4 answer.
Two themes run through this lesson: change (poverty and exploration were both new or intensifying problems) and inequality (the experience of Elizabethan England depended enormously on where you stood in the social order).
The problem of poverty
Historians estimate that by 1570 around half of the English rural population lived close to subsistence, and that around a third of town populations depended on some form of poor relief during bad years. Poverty was not new, but its scale and the government's response to it were changing sharply.
Why poverty rose, 1550–1600
Several long-term pressures converged in Elizabeth's reign.
- Population growth. England's population rose from roughly 2.8 million in 1550 to around 4 million by 1600. More mouths chased the same land and jobs.
- Inflation. Prices roughly doubled between 1500 and 1600, outpacing wages. Historians call this the "Price Revolution". Real wages for labourers fell by around a third.
- Enclosure. Common fields and waste were fenced off by landlords to create larger, more profitable units — often for sheep farming. Enclosure displaced small tenants and cottagers.
- Sheep farming. Wool was England's most valuable export; one shepherd and a dog could manage a flock that replaced several ploughmen. The phrase "sheep eat men" (borrowed from Thomas More's earlier Utopia) captured the social anger.
- Bad harvests. The 1580s and especially the 1590s saw repeated harvest failures. Grain prices spiked; the poorest starved.
- Returning soldiers. After campaigns in the Netherlands, Ireland and at sea, demobilised soldiers — often wounded, often unpaid — drifted back to a countryside with no work for them.
- Decline of monasteries. The dissolution under Henry VIII had removed a major source of charitable relief; parishes now carried more of the burden.
Deserving and undeserving poor
Elizabethans did not think of the poor as a single group. Poor Law thinking divided them into two categories:
| Category | Who they were | How society viewed them |
|---|
| Deserving (or "impotent") poor | Orphans, the elderly, the sick, the disabled, widows with young children | Objects of legitimate charity; a Christian duty to support |
| Undeserving (or "able-bodied") poor | Unemployed men and women fit to work; vagrants; "sturdy beggars" | Suspected of idleness and criminality; to be forced to work or punished |
This distinction mattered: policy extended relief to the deserving poor but punishment to the undeserving. In practice the line between the two was blurred — a farm labourer laid off after a bad harvest could be either, depending on who was judging.
Vagrancy and rogue literature
A minority of the poor were mobile — moving between parishes in search of work, charity or opportunity. These vagrants (or "vagabonds") alarmed local authorities because they fell outside parish control and were suspected of theft and disorder.
Printed "rogue literature" fed this anxiety. Thomas Harman's A Caveat for Common Cursitors (1566) claimed to expose the tricks of organised beggars and named categories such as:
- Upright men — leaders of vagrant gangs
- Anglers or hookers — thieves who used hooks on poles to steal through windows
- Abraham men — beggars pretending to be mad
- Counterfeit cranks — beggars faking epileptic fits
- Doxies — female companions of the vagrants
Historians now regard Harman's categories as partly sensational, but contemporaries took them seriously, and they shaped policy.
Government responses: towards the Poor Law
Parliament passed a sequence of Poor Laws that became progressively more systematic.
- 1572 Vagabonds Act. Distinguished sharply between deserving and undeserving poor. Vagrants over 14 could be whipped and bored through the ear for a first offence; repeat offenders faced execution. Each parish had to appoint Overseers of the Poor and collect a compulsory poor rate — a local tax for relief.
- 1576 Act for the Relief of the Poor. Required each town to provide raw materials (wool, hemp, flax) so the able-bodied poor could be set to work. Those refusing to work were to be sent to a House of Correction.
- 1597 Act for the Relief of the Poor. Consolidated earlier legislation; confirmed the role of Overseers.
- 1601 Poor Law. The culmination. Made each parish legally responsible for its own poor; set rates; provided work for the able-bodied; punished the idle; supported the impotent. This framework lasted, broadly, until the 19th century.
Why poverty mattered to Elizabeth's government
Examiners reward candidates who can explain the political significance of poverty, not only describe it.
- Order. Vagrants were feared as a threat to public order — potential rioters, potential recruits for rebellion.
- Tax base. Desperate rural populations could not pay taxes, undermining Crown finance.
- Legitimacy. The Great Chain of Being taught that a godly ruler protected the weak; visible mass poverty raised awkward questions about whether the realm was well ordered.
- Religious anxiety. The dissolution of the monasteries had taken away a major Catholic charitable infrastructure; a Protestant state had to show it could replace it.
The Poor Laws were therefore not only welfare measures but instruments of social and political control.
Exploration: the voyages and their significance
While the poor were being pressed into workhouses at home, a small group of English sea captains were pushing outwards into the Atlantic. The Elizabethan age is sometimes called the first age of English exploration — a slight exaggeration, but a useful label.
Motivations — "Gold, God and Glory"
Contemporaries and historians often summarise the motives of exploration under three heads, to which a fourth — silver — can be added for the Elizabethan context.
- Gold and silver. Spanish America was producing unprecedented quantities of silver from Potosí (modern Bolivia) and Mexican mines. English captains wanted access — by trade if possible, by raiding if not.
- God. Protestants saw the spread of Catholicism in the New World as a religious challenge; English colonisation was presented as a counter-effort.
- Glory. Personal honour, royal favour, and membership of the emerging gentry could be won by successful voyages.
- Trade. Merchants sought new markets for English cloth and wanted to break the Spanish and Portuguese monopolies over Atlantic trade routes.
Sir John Hawkins
John Hawkins was the pioneer of English Atlantic trade.
- From 1562 he led three voyages carrying enslaved Africans from West Africa to the Spanish Caribbean, selling them in defiance of Spain's trading monopoly. These were England's first large-scale involvement in the transatlantic slave trade — a significant and morally troubling part of the story.
- His third voyage was attacked by a Spanish fleet at San Juan de Ulúa (1568). Only Hawkins' and Drake's ships escaped. The episode permanently soured Anglo-Spanish relations and gave Drake a personal grievance.
- From the 1570s Hawkins served as Treasurer of the Navy, modernising English warship design — a contribution that would prove decisive in 1588.
Sir Francis Drake — the circumnavigation, 1577–80
Drake's voyage round the world was the defining exploration of Elizabeth's reign.
- He set out from Plymouth in December 1577 with five ships, nominally on a trading voyage to South America.
- The real purpose, backed secretly by Elizabeth, was to raid Spanish treasure ports on the Pacific coast — coasts the Spanish had assumed were beyond European reach.
- Drake sailed round Cape Horn, up the western coast of South America, captured the Spanish treasure ship Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion (known to the English as the Cacafuego) off Peru in 1579, and continued north as far as modern California before crossing the Pacific.
- He returned to Plymouth in September 1580, the first English commander to circumnavigate the globe. The cargo was worth perhaps £400,000 — more than a year of Elizabeth's ordinary Crown revenue.
- Elizabeth publicly knighted him on the deck of his ship, the Golden Hind, at Deptford in 1581 — a direct insult to Spain, which had demanded his punishment as a pirate.
Sir Walter Raleigh and Roanoke, 1584–87
Walter Raleigh organised the first attempts to plant an English colony in North America.