9 - Hard Times and Hengist, King of Kent

Summary

The later years of Middleton's writing life were hard times in England. There was severe economic crisis, especially in the cloth trade. With the failure of the ill-conceived Cokayne project, growing Dutch competition and the outbreak of war in Europe, cloth exports fell by half from 1615 to 1623; people in the clothing counties were starving and many London tradesmen and merchants were hard hit. A series of bad harvests in the early 1620s brought famine conditions over much of England and Scotland. In 1623 men on the Lincolnshire wolds were eating dog's flesh and old horsemeat, and people at Greystoke in Cumberland died ‘for very want of food and maintenance to live’. The living standards of workmen in the towns and farm labourers in the country were declining all the time. Wages were frozen by law while prices continued to rise, and in the second decade of James' reign real wages for labourers reached perhaps the lowest level ever recorded.

Despite the savage penalties imposed on vagabonds, the landless and workless poor flocked to the towns, where many lived at a bare subsistence level. In bad years children died of hunger and cold in the streets of London; every few hundred yards there were whippingposts for sturdy beggars. And meanwhile the prosperity and luxury of rich landlords and well-to-do gentry was advertised by the building of vast ‘prodigy houses’ of the nobility like Audley End and Hatfield, and innumerable manor-houses and great merchant-houses in the cities and suburbs.