10 - Phoenix arising: crises and growth, 1550–1650

Summary

Now the red pestilence strikes all trades in Rome

And occupations perish.

Shakespeare, Coriolanus III, i

Before considering what eventually replaced the Strange regime – the communal revival of the later sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries – it is necessary to explore the economic and demographic contexts with which all the inhabitants of late sixteenth-century England had to deal as a matter of course. New sources now make it possible to reconstitute aspects of communal experience that can only be deduced from earlier sources. This chapter focuses on two apparently paradoxical themes, a relentless series of severe mortality crises in a context of long-term population growth. Mortality crises had always been part of urban experience. This chapter chronicles a continuing tradition of minor visitations and the incidence, in 1577–9, 1597 and possibly the 1550s and 1621–3, of mortality crises more acute than any since the Black Death. This biological regime impacted directly on religious sensibilities and communal administration and governance, for as Keith Wrightson writes, with reference to a devastating outbreak of the most feared disease of the age at Newcastle in 1636, in the eyes of contemporaries ‘the ultimate cause of the plague was “God's wrathful displeasure … to the Communaltie, to the Kingdom, Citie or place where it is”’.