Politics & Economy: An Overview

Between the closing quarter of the fifteenth century and the opening of the seventeenth century, the map of Europe changed extensively, and in an age of discovery and exploration, Europe extended its reach to the Americas. This land-grab created growing political tensions, which, reinforced by the religious wars, changed the pattern of alliances and treaties across the continent.

Life for many ordinary people altered dramatically, and generally, not for the better. The changing nature of agriculture, which led to the enclosure of lands and the substitution of sheep-running for arable farming, created a class of landless labourers, ground down in an unremitting cycle of poverty, chased from town to town as vagrants, and unable even to subsist as their grandfathers had done, on a small plot, with rights of common.

The benefits of increased trade were undermined for many by the huge economic shock of the inflation of the mid-sixteenth century. This economic problem was met with draconian laws against vagrancy, and eventually minimal support through the Poor Laws.

Structural changes in society, the economy and religion, meant political change too.The feudal society of mighty barons, co-operating (or not) with the King and pretty much ignoring laws they did not like, was replaced by power centralised on the King and his immediate councillors, whilst individual loyalties, previously to the local lord, became focused on the nation-state. In England, the monarchs used Parliament to enforce their will, and, in Scotland, after the Reformation, the power of the General Assembly became paramount in shaping legislation.

The great gainers of these changes were the members of the new “middle” class, built up from the luckier tenants who managed to hold and extend their lands, the growing merchant class, and the new bureaucrats who were required to administer the increasingly complex centralised states.