Multitude before “Population”

Before there was population, there were multitudes. Before the precise numbers of people inhabiting specific territories – or the global sum of such numbers – became familiar objects of knowledge and policy, the problem of knowing and governing the multiplicity of people was thought about, experienced, and engaged with in ways so unlike our own that they may fail to register with us as pertaining to population at all. This is not to deny pre-modern manifestations of interest in numbers of people. Long before the coming of demographic statistics, anyone familiar with Scripture knew not only the divine injunction to “be fruitful, and multiply” but also about the practice of “numbering the people” – although the latter had constituted a serious and consequential sin, in King David’s case.Footnote ¹ More learned exegetes explored in greater depth the peopling of the earth by Adam’s troubled progeny, its repopulation after the Great Flood by Noah’s three sons and their wives and the rapid multiplication of the Israelites during their captivity in Egypt. The work of the great sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century chronologists – and that of their less learned but better informed successors in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – involved many calculations of the world’s past population and a great deal of agonizing over rates of growth (or doubling), the incidence of twins, the probable effects of the patriarchs’ superlative longevity and the antediluvian environment on fertility, gestation periods, nursing habits and much else.Footnote ² Sophisticated demographic thought was not lacking in the sixteenth century. Moreover, the heirs of this tradition would number among the earliest and most enthusiastic users of political arithmetic.

Yet, certain features of the exegetical and sacred-historical discourse of population differentiate it from modern modes of demography, on the one hand, and from other early modern engagements with the knowledge and governance of multitudes, on the other. First, it was concerned with the multiplication of mankind not as an object of present or future political concern but rather as a historical and hermeneutical problem with religious implications – which became sharper as challenges to biblical chronology and history mounted in the context of deepening confessional schism.Footnote ³ This implied, second, a global sense of scale. In this regard, modern historians are wrong to see the idea of “world population” as an innovation of our self-proclaimed global era. To the contrary, the history of the world’s population as revealed or implied by Scripture received attention from late antiquity and had attained a high degree of elaboration by the later sixteenth century, for reasons of faith and as a matter of Counter-Reformation geopolitics.Footnote ⁴ Third, and related, this discourse vested demographic agency – the power behind changes in population – not in earthly powers or human passions but in Providence, acting directly or through the mechanisms of the natural world. The successive population, extinction and repopulation of the earth around the Flood, along with the dramatic reduction in human lifespan, were, like the confusion of tongues and division of nations that followed Babel, divine judgments. This left little space for any notion of effectual human policy in the demographic realm. It also imbued demographic events, individual or collective, with profound moral and religious significance in learned and pastoral settings: particular deaths and general plagues, instances of remarkable fertility and large-scale changes in lifespans all indicated the hand of God and the operations of his judgment.Footnote ⁵ Finally, in contrast to many of the practical approaches to multitude discussed later, exegetical discussions of population reveled in quantitative calculations; yet these calculations, which fit demographic history to scriptural chronology on a global scale, lacked empirical foundation. Certain of these features would recur in other engagements with multitude and later in political arithmetic, but these engagements began elsewhere.

The Bible and sacred history were not the only sources for ideas about population. Educated readers could also consult Aristotle’s Politics for the role of numbers in the ancient polis.Footnote ⁶ Here, particularly in Book VII, population was fundamental to politics: “A state … only begins to exist when it has attained a population sufficient for a good life in the political community.”Footnote ⁷ The quantity and quality of inhabitants were elements of the city’s constitution, matters for the legislator from the beginning: “First among the materials required by the statesman is population: he will consider what should be the number and character of the citizens, and then what should be the size and character of the country.”Footnote ⁸ Not only the viability of the state, but also its form of government, mechanisms of administration and share of particular types of people depended in part on the number of its inhabitants – which in turn depended on the extent and quality of territory.Footnote ⁹ Yet number alone was no measure of greatness. For one thing, not all inhabitants counted alike. Besides crucial distinctions between citizens, slaves and foreigners, there was the question of balance between occupations:

At a still more basic level, excess was as harmful as deficiency to the welfare of the community. Here, as elsewhere, virtue lay in mediocrity − a via media between opposite extremes achieved by means of restraint.Footnote ¹¹ Beneath a certain number, a community could not sustain itself; beyond an upper limit, a population became ungovernable – literally unreachable by the voice of command: “For who can be the general of such a vast multitude, or who the herald, unless he have the voice of a Stentor?” In too populous a state, the population, the state’s essential membership, was diluted as foreigners gained citizenship. There was thus a natural limit to the size of a state, determined by experience and circumstance but guided by a vision of economic and aesthetic sufficiency. Aristotle described this as “the largest number which suffices for the purposes of life, and can be taken in at a single view.”Footnote ¹²

If population was conceived here as a problem of government, its quality and effects were envisioned by drawing an analogy between the state and the person, whose beauty and health similarly inhered in the maintenance of balance and proportion between the essential parts of an organic and naturally bounded whole.Footnote ¹³ The goal of statecraft with respect to population was not greatness in a quantitative sense. It was instead a kind of beauty, “and the state which combines magnitude with good order must necessarily be the most beautiful.”Footnote ¹⁴ The knowledge needed to establish an optimal multitude, moreover, involved individual health, fertility and mortality directly:

Aristotle thus presented population not just as a measurable number of inhabitants but also, more saliently, as the living material of the city-state. Its size would be constrained by the territory it occupied. It should be limited, too, by the counterpoised imperatives of magnitude and order in the context of a polity conceived as an organic unit – a body politic – with a constitution. More significant than absolute size was the relative proportion of the body’s parts: The balance between citizens, slaves and foreigners, and between soldiers, husbandmen and artisans.

Aristotelian preoccupations with the quality of the population, in addition or in preference to its quantity, informed sixteenth-century European engagements with population, from Niccolò Machiavelli through Jean Bodin.Footnote ¹⁶ These preoccupations also surfaced in English demographic thinking from the mid-sixteenth century, as it absorbed the influence and adopted the vocabulary of Italian and Continental humanism.Footnote ¹⁷ But the Tudor engagement with knowing and governing multitudes of people predates this. It began not with global, national or urban populations as given objects, but rather on the process of rural depopulation, linked in the first instance with enclosure and with the conversion of arable land to pasture. It dwelt less on the decline of numbers – though this played a distinct rhetorical role – than on the loss of a particular type of person with a vital economic and social function: the ploughman. This discourse of depopulation dealt with changes in the land that might spread from place to place over time but that were experienced primarily at the local or regional level rather than national level. It vested both the responsibility for depopulation and the power to reverse it in human hands. Lordly greed for the profits of the expanding wool trade drove ploughs from the land; the restraining hand of the king might forestall further damage and restore the vanished multitude to its rightful place. In the meantime, however, the effects of depopulation risked spiraling out of anyone’s control as displaced husbandmen and their dependents took to the roads to seek a livelihood, swarming the city and turning, in their idleness, to crime.

Key features of this discourse, originating in the literature of “agrarian complaint,” set the tone for engagements with demography in other contexts and established the position from which later changes – addressing new problems or opportunities and absorbing new intellectual influences – would take place.Footnote ¹⁸ First, the object of concern was not a “population” in the sense of a number of people or a collection of unspecified or interchangeable individuals. It was, rather, a “multitude” with a specific place – a natural and normative location – and a specific role, as well as characteristic moral qualities. The ploughman belonged in the depopulated village just as the plough that employed him belonged on the land. This should remind us of the local – communal, parochial and corporate – nature of demographic phenomena in the experience of early modern people and in their thought. Second, while number was not irrelevant to multitude, numbers did not define multitude or underpin discussions of it. Exaggerated or emblematic figures or ratios served instead to emphasize the qualitative aspects of a group; to emblematize its links to the land, to the other multitudes constitutive of the community and to the fate of the realm and, later, the commonwealth; and to dramatize – but not in any exact sense to measure – its growth or decline. Third, analysis of depopulation’s negative effects, both on the displaced multitude of ploughmen and on the realm, pathologized mobility in the context of a community or commonwealth conceived of as a closed and organic whole.Footnote ¹⁹ The mobility of a multitude implied change: change of place and, therefore, change of nature. Ploughmen denied land ceased to be ploughmen; loose on the roads, they became vagrants. Having lost their place and function, they lost their virtues. Industry turned to idleness, idleness begot crime. Mobility was thus an agent of transmutation (here, degeneration) in that it turned one kind of multitude into another. Fourth, inasmuch as the crown or the nobility had the power to prevent or control this mobility – whether by restraining the passions that produced it or by imposing order on the multitudes it produced – doing so was a political, moral and even religious imperative. Demographic agency rested with the human lawgiver. Its object or target was the marginalized, mobile and degenerate multitude. Its goal was to restore damaged communities by replacing their displaced members.

Denunciations of depopulating landlords were a feature of the literary landscape for over a century. In another genre, however, the governance of multitudes turned much more quickly from an ad hoc, local response to a central component of political rule. Between the late 1520s and the late 1540s – a period that saw Henry VIII’s break with Rome, the dissolution of the monasteries and the sale of their extensive lands – the humanist political writing of Thomas Starkey and Thomas Smith, and the anonymous “Polices to Reduce this Realme of Englande vnto a Prosperus Wealthe and Estate,” offered analyses of the commonwealth that set the challenge of mobile multitudes in a less local and more abstract light. Turning the metaphor of the body politic into a complex social model, Starkey and Smith – the former writing in the context of the Henrician Reformation, the latter in the wake of the 1549 rebellions under Edward VI – treated multitudes not as concrete elements of local communities but rather as functional elements of a national, organic or mechanical whole.Footnote ²⁰ Here, anxieties about the degenerative and disruptive effects of mobile multitudes went hand in glove with a new vision of policy, conceived in terms of the ongoing maintenance of proper balance, proportion and relation between different multitudes. The “Polices” went still further, intimating an atomistic view of human multitudes and a view of the constraints imposed by nature, foreshadowing crucial features of seventeenth-century population thought. Demographic agency remained with the lawgiver; indeed, inasmuch as the health of the commonwealth depended on the concatenation of multitudes, it became constitutive of his office. At the same time, questions about the scope and limitations of this power, themes that marked the path from multitudes to population, were beginning to emerge.

Mobile Multitudes: Enclosure and Depopulation

The earliest extant English use of “population,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was in 1544, and it carried the now-obsolete sense of “a populated or inhabited place.” Its more familiar sense of “the collection of inhabitants” of a given area, or “a body of inhabitants,” in general, entered print only in 1612.Footnote ²¹ In sharp contrast to the sluggish uptake of “population,” “depopulation” – meaning both the “reduction of population” and, less familiar to us, “the action of depopulating” – appeared as early as the 1460s, and was in common usage during the sixteenth century.Footnote ²² If nothing else, this peculiar chronology might caution us against applying statistical ideas of population to the early modern world – for how can the word for a number’s decline have predated the word for the number itself? On the other hand, the prominence of both place and process – the location of population, and the action of depopulation – should alert us to aspects of these ideas that are now lost or muted. A population was, or existed in, a particular place: perhaps a kingdom, but most likely a town or village. It was not a quantum floating in the abstract space of a statistical census but a group of people occupying the concrete place of a parish church, market or guildhall, or a metaphorical limb of the body politic. Depopulation, rather than merely denoting a decrease in numbers, was the hindrance or destruction of this occupation: the forcing of a specific group of people out of a specific place. Its signs were not entries in a ledger but vacant churches, decayed houses and empty villages. And, notwithstanding the pertinence of commercial networks and processes of religious reform, depopulation was not a neutral effect of impersonal economic or social forces but an act – a calculated and callous act – fraught with moral and political implications.

In the earlier part of the sixteenth century, depopulation usually referred to a specific process of rural change. Its victims were ploughmen (often rendered, metonymically, as “ploughs”), a multitude with an essential role that tied its members, families and households to a specific part of the landscape. Contemporary rhetoric blamed depopulation on the “enclosure” of common land – so much so that “enclosure” and “depopulation” sometimes worked as synonyms. As agricultural historians have pointed out, however, this can be misleading. In national terms, enclosure was neither a new nor a single, continuous process. According to Mark Overton, 45 percent of English land had already been enclosed by 1500; the fastest rates of enclosure, however, would occur only in the seventeenth century, during which 24 percent of the country was enclosed – as opposed to a meager 2 percent in the sixteenth century, the high point of antienclosure complaint.Footnote ²³ What made acts of enclosure significant with respect to depopulation was the change in land use that they often marked or enabled. Specifically, enclosure permitted the conversion of arable land (in tillage or under the plough) to pasture for the grazing of cattle and, in the early sixteenth century especially, sheep.Footnote ²⁴ Rather than a loss of population in the absolute sense, depopulation was a community-, county- or shire-level process by which the creation of pasture for sheep meant the displacement of ploughs and the people who depended upon them.

Perhaps the most famous contemporary comment on this process came in Thomas More’s Utopia. In Book I, Raphael Hythlodaye complained that “Your sheep … that commonly are so meek and eat so little; now, as I hear, they have become so greedy and fierce that they devour men themselves.”Footnote ²⁵ Hythlodaye went on to identify the human agents of depopulation, their character and motivations and the effects of their actions:

More’s denunciation was unusual in its eloquence but not in its substance or passion. At the other end of the century, Bastard’s Epigrams on Enclosures (1598) captured the same alteration with similar imagery and pith:

Yet, although they often wrought similar changes in different parts of England over the course of the early modern period, acts of enclosure and the conversion of land from one use to another – with its attendant effects on the shape of rural labor and community – were local events at any given time. As Joan Thirsk has noted, More’s broad indictment “in fact castigates a regional phenomenon only, the increase of sheep in those areas which were already dedicated to sheep-keeping.”Footnote ²⁸

Enclosure brought moral, as much as economic, transformations. The monstrous hunger of sheep for land ventriloquized the monstrous greed of landowners for profit. Rather than simply responding rationally to rising wool prices, landlords were choosing their own good over the common weal; instead of a predictable adjustment in the labor market, the result was the destruction of communities and the return of settled habitations to wilderness. But, as More’s Hythlodaye went on to describe, the effects did not stop here. On the one hand, the reduction of arable hurt grain production and drove up the price of bread, while an expansion of sheep-rearing raised the prices of other livestock products. On the other hand, the displaced – the ploughmen and families driven from their land, homes and communities – suffered moral degeneration as well as social dislocation. Belonging nowhere, they wandered the country, turning to theft and ending on the gallows.Footnote ²⁹ Not only had their former habitations been depopulated; they themselves had been transformed, through enforced mobility, into vagrants and criminals. Private actions borne of moral failure, in the absence of legal restraint, removed a useful multitude from its natural place, destroying it and leaving its putrefying remnants to infect the common weal. This was depopulation.

If Book I treated unregulated mobility as a cause of degeneration, however, Book II – Hythlodaye’s account of Utopia – suggested that controlled mobility could sustain order. At first glance, the Utopian population was marked by homogeneity: “Farming is the one job at which everyone works, men and women, with no exception.”Footnote ³⁰ Although each Utopian was bred to farming, however, each was also trained in “a particular trade of his own, such as wool-working, linen-making, masonry, metal-work, or carpentry”; and, though expected to follow his father’s business, he could be “transferred by adoption into a family practising the trade he prefers.”Footnote ³¹ Rather than belonging to a functional multitude as if by nature, leaving only to degenerate, Utopians could change place without becoming displaced. While a system of adoption tamed mobility, the homogenization of Utopian labor – that is, the elimination of qualitatively distinct multitudes with different relationships to work – ensured industry.

In an Aristotelian vein, More identified an optimal number of households (6,000) for each polis; anticipating Botero and later theorists of empire, as we shall see, he had his Utopians argue that the colonization of nearby “waste” land was justifiable when numbers grew too large.Footnote ³³ Yet, this was a means of keeping stable order in Utopia rather than a route to boundless expansion; the overarching goal was an optimum population and a healthy commonwealth, not a sprawling empire. In this sense, More’s goals were traditional. His means – especially his instrumentalization of mobility and mutability in the service of order – were radical.

More’s utopian vision was remarkable, and his heterotopic domestication of mobility foreshadowed late Elizabethan developments. But his description of England itself indicated more typically early Tudor attitudes toward mobility and mutability, as well toward the religious basis of community before the Reformation. A quarter of a century before Utopia, the 1489 “Act Agaynst Pullyng Doun of Tounes” (4 Henry 7, c. 19) had denounced the “desolacion and pulling down and wilfull waste of houses and Townes within this realme, and leyeng to pasture londes which custumeably have ben used in tilthe.” With a flourish of symbolic ratios, the statute described the decimation of communal life, estimating that “where in somme Townes two hundred persones were occupied and lived by their laufull labours, nowe ben there occupied two or three herdemen.” (Here it is worth noting not only the use of ratio, but also the emphasis on the replacement of one type of person by another.) As for More later on, the harm done by depopulation was moral as well as practical. Husbandry was “one of the grettest commodities of this realme,” and manpower crucial to “the defence of this land ageyn oure ennemyes outwarde”; at the same time, the idleness depopulation brought was “the ground and begynnyng of all myschefes.” Its harm extended into the spiritual realm: “churches destroied, the service of God withdrawen, the bodies there buried not praied for, the patrone and Curates wronged.”Footnote ³⁴

From this perspective, the Reformation exacerbated (and, through the sale of church lands, further fueled) disruptions to parish life and spiritual community that were already linked to enclosure. Writing of the fifteenth century, Eamon Duffy discusses inclusion on the bede-roll (a list of persons to be prayed for) as the basis of inclusion in “the cult of intercession for the dead” – and thus “as a means of prolonging the presence of the dead within the community of the living.”Footnote ³⁵ The destruction of churches decried in the 1489 Act severed links of intercessory prayer that bound living and dead in an economy of salvation oriented to Purgatory and the saints, long before these beliefs came under direct attack by reformers. Indeed, legislation and official views from Henry VIII’s reign echo this lament. The 1517 “Act Avoiding Pulling Down of Towns” (7 Henry 8, c. 1), directed against the encroachment of enclosures of pasture for sheep as well as of parkland for hunting, repeated much of the 1489 statute almost verbatim. It paid the same attention to moral and spiritual effects, denouncing the introduction of “idleness” and the interruption of prayers for the dead. The emblematic reference to numbers of essential types of people lost also reappeared: “in some town 200 persons … living by sowing corn and grains, breeding of cattle, and other necessary for man’s sustenance … now the said persons and their progenies be minished and decreased.”Footnote ³⁶ Two years later, a Commission of Inquiry assailed those who “have enclosed with hedges and dykes … towns, hamlets and other places … where many of our subjects dwelt … and exercised tillage and husbandry,” turning arable to pasture “for the sake of their private gain and profit”; as a result, “our subjects … are now brought to idleness, which is the step-mother of virtues … and the memory of souls of Christians buried there utterly and wholly perished.” This was the “undoing of our realm and diminution of our subjects.”Footnote ³⁷

This last phrase suggests that laments for local multitudes were sometimes linked to concern for the total number of subjects in the realm. As a political idea, this was rooted in the scriptural proverb that states: “In the multitude of people is the king’s honor: but in the want of people is the destruction of the prince.”Footnote ³⁸ Strength in multitude was a truism of early modern political commentary. A 1549 set of “Polices to reduce the Realme of Englande vnto a Prosperus Wealthe and Estate,” for example, repeated the biblical adage that “in the multitude of people Is the state of a kinge: and in the Fewnes of Subiectes is the princes dishonour” before adding the purportedly Pythagorean dictum that “subiectes ar to a kinge as a winde is to a fyer.”Footnote ³⁹ Indeed, numbers of sailors and fighting men were of obvious practical concern in an era of frequent wars and domestic ructions. The central administration kept musters in Elizabeth’s time; Francis Bacon highlighted their potential as demographic guides in 1612, and John Rickman would later cite them in arguing for a national census.Footnote ⁴⁰ Yet, as these examples indicate, the centralization of records and the leap from mustering soldiers to numbering the people were less obvious and longer in coming than might seem logical in retrospect. Before the advent of standing national armies, numbering troops neither required nor implied quantifying the population as such.

It appears that the quantitative impact of enclosure was expressed most clearly when depopulation threatened England’s security – as in 1489, when the Tudor hold on the throne was not yet assured, or in 1548, when William Forrest’s “Pleasaunt Poesye of Princelie Practise” blamed “this Royalmys great depopulation” on lords’ disregard of the yeomanry essential to defense.Footnote ⁴¹ The disastrous year of 1549 saw rebellions in Norfolk and the West Country against enclosure and accelerating religious Reformation, respectively. Though the rebellions themselves were distinct, the two issues were connected in complex ways – not only as threats to communal relationships and ideals, but also in material terms. The dissolution of the monasteries during the later 1530s had meant the transfer of as much as a quarter of English land from church to private hands, as well as the displacement (and transformation) of former monks and nuns.Footnote ⁴² While the suppression of monasteries, convents, chantries and other local sites of veneration desacralized the landscape, the rapid theological reforms of Edward’s brief reign (codified in the “King’s” Prayer Book of 1549) dispensed with the doctrine of Purgatory, which had helped tie the living inhabitants of a place to their forebears through piety and prayer.Footnote ⁴³ If groups of people were becoming mutable and mobile, local landscapes were also, arguably, losing their distinctive spiritual functions. Enclosure both fed on and fueled these alterations.

Inner discord weakened outward strength. John Coke’s Le Débat des Hérauts d’armes de France et d’Angleterre (modeled on an earlier debate written in the wake of the Hundred Years War) pointed up enclosure’s implications for international rivalry. The French herald asserted “the great nombre of people beyng in Fraunce,” contrasting its many “cyties, townes and vyllages” with the “forests, chases, parks, and enclosures” that covered England, where farms of “vi or viii persons” had given way to “oonly a shepparde or wretched heardman and his wife.” Perhaps “you have as many dere in England as we have people in France,” he allowed; “But for men, women and children, there is in France a c. for i. [i.e., 100 for 1]” in England. Yet, ratios gave way to absolute numbers only for specific, functional or elite groups, relating more to the kingdom’s status than to any statistical idea of its population. The herald boasted that “there is in France lxxxxv bysshops, and in England there is only xiiii,” and similarly touted the size of the French nobility.Footnote ⁴⁴ If such figures were meant as proxies for total population, they would have been extremely imprecise. The English herald, in any case, did not dispute figures but instead replied in a qualitative register, deriding “the great nombre of people you have” as “caytives and wretches, lyvyng in lyke thraldom as they dyd to the Romaynes”; 500 of “such ribaldry” weren’t worth “a c. good yomen of England.” Even when discussed in national terms, populations were defined more by the “maner of people” than by the number of people that they comprised.Footnote ⁴⁵

One intriguing exception to this was an anonymous tract printed in 1552, entitled Certayne Causes Gathered Together, Wherin Is Shewed the Decaye of England, Only by the Great Multitude of Shepe.Footnote ⁴⁶ This began with “syxe olde Prouerbes” declaring that increasing numbers of sheep raised the prices or hurt the supply of wool (due to price-fixing by great landowners in Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire), mutton and beef (due to the shift from cattle to sheep), corn (due to the expansion of pasture at the expense of tillage) and “white meat” and eggs (due to the destruction of cottages that kept pigs and poultry, resulting also in declining rural hospitality).Footnote ⁴⁷ The author then spelled out further effects of these changes in more detail. The first was that “there is not so many plowes used, occupied, and mainteyned” in the affected locales. Much as More had pointed out, displaced ploughmen were “for lacke of masters, by compulsion driven some of them to begge, and some to steale.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Another loss, linking enclosure to security, was “the great decay to artyllery: for that we do reken that shepeherdes be but yll artchers.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Once again, as in the 1489 statute and subsequent commentary, depopulation was a national concern by virtue of its military implications. Remarkably, however, Certayne Causes attempted to quantify it.

To do so, the author took the same course that political arithmeticians would employ over a century later, stipulating a household multiplier – a notional number of people (six, in this case) each plough supported. The author then applied this to the number of ploughs destroyed by the expansion of sheep farming, estimated by supposing the number of towns and villages in England to be 50,000 and assuming that one plough, on average, had disappeared from each since 1485. The computation and commentary are worth quoting at length:

Perhaps for the first time, depopulation was made a national number: 300,000 people displaced by enclosure since the accession of Henry VII. Yet, it is easy to exaggerate the departure that this calculation represented. However impressive, the figure was the fruit of speculation. It may have reflected knowledge of real farming households and communities, even if the number of those communities looks like a wild guess. But there was nothing rigorously empirical about it. Nor, in contrast to seventeenth-century calculators, did the author suggest otherwise. He neither justified his assumptions by appealing to logic, personal knowledge or common experience, nor called for further data gathering to improve calculations. The “300,000” mattered in terms of a moral economy of mutable multitudes. What counted was not its statistical meaning – without other statistics with which to compare it, it had none – but the degeneration of the realm for which it stood. Even an absolute number was less a demographic fact than an emblem of decay.Footnote ⁵¹

This remained so even when Bacon, looking back in his 1621 History of the Reign of King Henry VII, linked enclosure and security. His analysis of the 1489 Act began by distinguishing carefully between profitable and “depopulating” enclosures. To forbid all enclosure, he argued, “had been to forbid the improvement of the patrimony of the kingdom…. But they took a course to take away depopulating enclosures and depopulating pasturage and yet not by that name … but by consequence.” Yet, his reading of the act’s goals and mechanism rings true to earlier comment:

The key point was not to sustain numbers but to maintain conditions for the support and reproduction of a functionally defined and organically situated type:

We shall see that Bacon’s emphasis on “improvement” and his anxiety about degeneration were more characteristic of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than of the fifteenth or early sixteenth century. But for him, as for Coke, depopulation was a national concern principally because of the role and location of depopulated multitudes, not their number.

In contrast to the deep appreciation of its local and domestic, moral and social effects, depopulation’s military and strategic implications – and, with these, its total quantitative impact – remained an occasional and undeveloped feature of anti-enclosure literature. With the exception of Certayne Causes, there were hardly any serious attempts at demographic quantification on a national scale in the sixteenth century, and few for a long time thereafter. (Bacon’s commentary, though suggestive of the informational value of musters, included no numbers.) Stress fell instead on relative proportions, such as the 10:1 ratio between households that ploughed and those that kept sheep, the 100:1 ratio between French and English subjects, or the 5:1 ratio between the value of English yeomen and that of French caitiffs. Where specific numbers of people did appear, they most often emblematized the devastation that the conversion of arable to pasture and the ensuing displacement of people wrought on specific localities. In this vein, for instance, the returns to the 1517 enclosure commission included an account of an Essex farm belonging to Sir Robert Cotton, “the M[a]ner plase therof ys decaid and pulled dounby the said Sir Robert and non Inabytacyon wher Ther was wont to be kept on yt a good howseeld and ferm lond plowid.” As a result of enclosure and conversion, “wher ther was wont to be kept in yt a fermer and his wyfe and xviij or xxii personys … now … the tenaunt and his wyfe kepyth” alone.Footnote ⁵⁴ Good land was unploughed, a thriving household decimated. Place and proportion: These were the terms in which people thought about depopulation, while church and commonwealth alike were conceived as politic bodies.Footnote ⁵⁵

Such views persisted well into the seventeenth century, even as local causes were increasingly credited with national political and moral import. In 1604, for example, Lincolnshire clergyman Francis Trigge charged enclosure of the commons with “rooting out” husbandmen as well as eliminating “a multitude of servants,” “depopulating” or “dispeopling” towns and “diminishing the people”; he echoed the scriptural equation of the “multitude of people” with the “honor” of a king, and even asserted that landlords beguiled by “improvement” – that keyword of seventeenth-century projects – would be cursed with barrenness.Footnote ⁵⁶ Tillage supported not only ploughs, but also “a multitude of valiant souldiers” whose loss endangered the kingdom.Footnote ⁵⁷ For Trigge as for Tudor observers, further, the process was degenerative. Enclosure did not simply remove husbandmen and soldiers; “it makes beggers, and … theeves” of them.Footnote ⁵⁸ A generation later, Robert Powell’s Depopulation Arraigned (1636) took the moral condemnation of enclosing landlords to new rhetorical heights and expanded its frame of reference without radically altering the analytical framework that sustained it. A lawyer, Powell emphasized the economic and military costs of enclosure, which, by “translating culture into pasture,” spread idleness, weakened the state – replacing villages of 200 or 300 with handfuls of shepherds – and angered God.Footnote ⁵⁹ “Tillage,” by contrast, “is the occasion of multiplying of people, both for service in the wars, and time of peace”; it promoted virtue and industry, enabling the nation to “stand upon it selfe.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Lest this sound merely pragmatic, the tone of Powell’s “arraignment” of “depopulators” was severe:

The depopulator was a “man of bloud,” a “matricide” who “choakes up the earth our common mother, from yeelding her … increase unto her offspring.”Footnote ⁶² He “robbes and pilles the people of their due meanes and maintenance,” hindering “their service and leige obedience, immediately to their Prince, and mediately to the Common-weale.”Footnote ⁶³ The essence of depopulation was not loss but mutation, the decay of a vital multitude into a troublesome counter-population. Yet, beyond displacing and debasing the multitude, depopulation alienated it. For this reason, its degenerative impact was national: “it alters the quality of the people; from good Husbands, it makes them houseless and thriftlesse, puts them in a course of idleness…. So as they become aliens and strangers to their nationall government, and the kingdome … dispeopled and desolated.”Footnote ⁶⁴ The discourse of depopulation had been absorbed into a larger vision of commonwealth.

Ordering Multitudes: The Commonwealth and the Body Politic

Though More’s Utopia offered an early and celebrated statement of it, the discourse of depopulation was rooted in opposition to enclosure and the expansion of pasturage that had begun in the later fifteenth century. Agrarian complaint, then, fostered English thinking about the governance of a human multitude independently of specifically humanist influence. Still, it was in humanist writing that the task of government more broadly came to be cast in terms of managing the relationships, balance and flows between a series of functionally interdependent multitudes, conceived of in more and more detailed terms as limbs or vital organs of a living polity. As this suggests, a key metaphor in this writing was the familiar one of the body politic. But this was now linked to, and elaborated through, the idea of a “commonwealth” that required active government – or reformation – through some mixture of education, the cultivation of reason and (in more self-consciously Christian and, later, Reformed renderings) conscience, and “policy” or “police” geared to promoting the common weal and fostering “civility” by material as well as moral means.Footnote ⁶⁵ Having first emerged as local problems in the context of specific rural transformations, the governance of qualitative multitudes was recast as a problem of political knowledge and a privileged object of coordinated and sustained intervention. By Elizabeth’s reign, the lenses of the mobility, mutability and mixture of multitudes brought a variety of social and political challenges into focus.

This section examines the mid-Tudor political uptake of multitude through three works. Two are canonical examples of English humanist social thought: Thomas Starkey’s Dialogue between Pole and Lupset (completed between 1532 and 1535, in the wake of Henry VIII’s divorce of Catherine of Aragon, but not printed in the period) and Sir Thomas Smith’s Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England (completed c. 1549, during the troubled reign of Edward VI, but printed only in 1581).Footnote ⁶⁶ Emerging from different historical contexts and intellectual milieus, Starkey and Smith’s works vary in the details of their analysis, as well as in their political and religious outlooks. Nor were they the first or only English humanist works to take up the question of governing multitudes – as witness the specter of More, who was executed in 1535 and whose Utopia was printed in English for the first time in 1551. Yet, they evince similar ideas about the nature of the multitudes that constituted the body politic. The third, an anonymous tract written in 1549 and addressed to the Lord Protector, the Duke of Somerset – entitled “Polices to reduce this Realme of Englande vnto a Prosperus Wealthe and Estate” – departs from these ideas in significant and prescient ways.Footnote ⁶⁷ Yet, all three works employ an analytical and normative vocabulary centered on the possibilities of policy and the imperatives of civility, inflected particularly in the last by religious reform. This vocabulary facilitated the transfer to new contexts, in England, Ireland and beyond, of ideas first voiced in relation to rural depopulation. Long before Bodin and Botero, the governance of multitude was the object of a new and self-conscious politics.

In terms both of chronology and depth of engagement, Thomas Starkey claims pride of place in this change. A humanist, Padua-trained lawyer and sometime associate of cardinal Reginald Pole – splitting with him over the royal divorce – Starkey has long been credited with a major role in the development of English humanism. Exactly what this consisted of, however, is debated. For James K. McConica, Starkey was less an “original mind” than an able exponent of reform and moderation as preached by Erasmus of Rotterdam. On this account, Starkey’s work inspired the Cromwellian injunctions of 1536 and 1538 (the latter of which enjoined the keeping of parish registers), designed to make England an “Erasmian polity” capable of accommodating a range of religious views by means of the conceptual device of adiaphora, or “things indifferent” – matters of religious belief or practice on which Scripture was silent.Footnote ⁶⁸ This view has been undermined, however, both by Alistair Fox’s criticism of “Erasmianism” as a misleading label for Tudor humanists, and by Alexandra Walsham’s and Ethan Shagan’s arguments that the concept of adiaphora – and the ideal of “moderation” for which it stood – implied not the toleration of different views but their suppression in the interest of social harmony.Footnote ⁶⁹ While McConica’s Erasmian moderation was bound to a vision of the church that vanished with Henry VIII only to resurface under Elizabeth, Shagan’s was a flexible language, appropriated successively by conservative reformers, Puritans and separatists alike. Its exaltation of civil, and civilized, power was thus unhindered by changes of regime.Footnote ⁷⁰

In another vein, Neal Wood has seen Starkey, together with Sir Thomas Smith and the author of the “Polices,” as skilled “publicists” for the “social environmentalism” of Erasmus and More. This treated the state as a “mechanism” for the reconciliation of conflicting economic interests, and it presumed a kind of human malleability that made specific multitudes the logical objects of political reform.Footnote ⁷¹ To this view, Phil Withington’s work on the discourse of commonwealth adds an important nuance. Rather than imagining the polity in terms of a traditionally fixed set of estates or corporate bodies, Starkey’s and Smith’s work emerged from and reflected “a process of structural and behavioral urbanisation” that envisioned social interaction itself through a corporatist and moral lens of “enclosed city commonwealths” or bodies politic.Footnote ⁷² To this civic vision of nested polities subject to scalable applications of corporatist language, Withington contrasts the different strain of humanism behind Francis Bacon’s more court-oriented opposition of national subject populations to putatively omnipotent governors.Footnote ⁷³ While Chapter 2 will suggest that this contrast is overdrawn, at least with respect to the question of demographic governance, both the fungible nature of corporatist discourse and the links between moderation and the expansion of the state are important to grasping humanist approaches to multitude.

At the core of Starkey’s Dialogue between Pole and Lupset is a humanist construction of the body politic, influenced by Aristotle but written at a moment of unprecedented royal assertiveness.Footnote ⁷⁴ The goal of “polytyke rule,” for Starkey, is “to enduce the multytud to vertuse [i.e. virtuous] lyvyng.”Footnote ⁷⁵ This depends upon the calibrated function of the body politic’s parts, “that the hole body of the commynalty may lyve in quytenes <& tranquyllyte> every parte dowyng hys offyce & duty.”Footnote ⁷⁶ At the most basic level, much as in Aristotle’s Politics, the polity requires not merely sufficient numbers of people to perform essential duties, but also that this loose substrate, the unspecified “multytude,” be reduced to “gud ordur & cyvylyte” through the “pollycy” or “grete wyse & polytyke men.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Policy, in short, is the artful ordering of multitudes in the shapes, sizes and positions essential to civil life. What makes this possible – what gives human art power over multitudes – is God’s creation of humankind in his image. Man is an “erthely god … lord of al other bestys & creaturys … for al be un to hym subjecte, al by pollycy and brought to his obedyence”; indeed, the earth itself “by the dylygent labur & pollycy of man ys brought to marvelous culture & fortylite [i.e. fertility].”Footnote ⁷⁸ Starkey enthuses over human “memory & wyte,” art and policy, as over the human creation of customs designed to promote virtue and civil laws calculated to reconcile humanity to the immutable “law of nature” – denial of which is a “corrupt opynyon” to be overcome, like all human frailty, by education.Footnote ⁷⁹

If the flesh of the body politic is bare multitude civilized by policy, the civil order is an organic one. Starkey repeatedly draws direct and detailed analogies between political and medical health.Footnote ⁸⁰ Both consist not just in the “necessyte, strength & beuty” of the individual parts concerned, but also, most importantly, in their mutual proportion.Footnote ⁸¹ In this schema, that is, functionally defined multitudes are thought of as more or less necessary, strong, beautiful and above all “proporcynabul” limbs and organs. To the extent that any idea of the total population or the overall scale of the bare multitude figures in this discussion, it is under the Aristotelian rubric of “necessity,” the number of people required for the “felycyte” of the whole.Footnote ⁸² What matters is not that this number be large, but that it strike a balance between the constraints of necessity and the demands of discipline – between hands, one might say, and mouths:

The organic civil polity required not a large population but a “convenyent multitude.”

In practice, the strength and beauty of the “polytyke body” depended more directly on the order and proportion of constituent submultitudes than on their cumulative size. As it was with “every mannys body,” wherein “the hart … as the fountayn of al natural powarys, mynystryth them with dew ordur to al other … as the ye [i.e. eye] to se the yere to here the fote to go & hand to hold & rech,” so with the commonwealth: the prince and his officers were as the heart and sensory organs, craftsmen and soldiers the hands and ploughmen and tillers the feet.Footnote ⁸⁴ Strength depended on the transfer of power from the former to the latter “accordyng to the order of nature,” beauty on the proportion between the parts:

The idea of “nombur” – as distinct from actual numbers – functioned here as a component of relative proportion rather than a measure of absolute size. The proportions at issue were those of qualitatively distinct, functionally defined, interdependent multitudes: ploughmen, artisans, tillers of the soil; rulers and their counselors; and denizens of towns and cities. Ordered by policy in accordance with nature, these composed, through their local functions and mutual interactions, a living political community:

Relocating particular multitudes from their geographical locales into the metaphorical space of the body politic, Starkey articulated them both to one another and to the general idea not of a kingdom headed by a monarch but of a state ruling by policy. The government of multitudes, in their operations and relations, was an explicit object of political art.

The metaphor of the body politic implied analogies not only between good order and good health but also between social disorder and physical decay or disease. Starkey’s rendition of the latter was especially detailed.Footnote ⁸⁷ As it had been for writers on enclosure, so for Starkey, discussion began with depopulation, the “great dekey” felt in “our cytes castellys & townes of late days.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Going beyond most of them, however, Starkey clearly suggested an absolute decline in population – that is, he apparently construed depopulation in national (or perhaps generically rural) rather than local terms: “the cuntrey hath byn more populos then hyt is now.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Though he likened this “lake [i.e. lack] of pepul” to “a consumptyon or grete sklendurnes of mannes body,” however, there was “a nother dysease & syknes more grevus than thys,” namely, idleness.Footnote ⁹⁰ Counterpoised to the requirements of a flourishing commonweal, the essence of idleness was not mere unemployment or inactivity in the abstract but more specifically the neglect, through lassitude or “yl” occupation, of the “offyce & duty” dictated by one’s place in the “polytyke body.”Footnote ⁹¹ Idlers high and low came in for criticism: “yf you aftur thys maner examyn the multytude in every ordur & degre, you schal fynd … the thryd parte of our pepul lyvyng in idulnes as personys to the commyn wele utturly unprofytabul.”Footnote ⁹² More dangerous than the number of idlers, as the use of ratio reflects, was the disproportion they caused. Starkey likened this to a “palsy” borne of “dyscord & debate” between the idle and the dutyful in every quarter.Footnote ⁹³

As this catalog of functionally (but no longer geographically) localized imbalances indicates, harmony and proportion within and between the parts of a closed system were uppermost in Starkey’s mind. In this context, numbers – more often implied than stated, and stated more often as fractions than as absolute figures – were symbols of political deformity, not forms of demographic data.

England’s infirmities affected particular parts of the body politic – particular, functionally defined multitudes. Political medicine thus meant policies targeting the relative size, composition and quality of these groups. To be sure, Starkey did address the “grete lake of pepul, the multytude wherof ys as hyt were the ground & fundatyon of thys our commyn wele”; just as “batyl & pestylens hyngur & darth” were to be feared, so means “to allure man to thys natural procreatyon” should be found.Footnote ⁹⁴ But these must be consistent with “a cyvyle ordur,” for while man had the same inborn propensity to increase as other beasts, as the sole creature “borne to cyvylyte … he may not, wythout ordur or respecte study to the satysfactyon of thys natural affecte.” Legitimate increase, in civil conditions, could only be through “lauful matrymony,” and promoting this meant engaging with the corporate characteristics and relative sizes of the multitudes whose orderly articulation composed the polity.Footnote ⁹⁵ Thus, one “let” on marriage (a fraught one, when Starkey wrote) was clerical and scholarly celibacy. Offering a pragmatic argument for a contentious religious reform, Starkey thought it best to “admyt all secular prestys to mary … consideryng now the grete multytude & nowmbur of them.” A similar but secular problem was “the grete multytude of servyng men” unable to form households. To remedy this, Starkey suggested a sumptuary restriction by which noblemen might retain no more servants than they could “set forward” to marriage; this done, “the multytude of them should be mynysched [i.e. diminished] gretely.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Bachelors were also to be taxed. Footnote ⁹⁷ By such means were marriage and the formation of households to be enjoined, and the “convenyent multitude” required for civil life assured.

Other measures targeted particular multitudes in the interests of the strength and beauty of the polity, ecclesiastical and civil. Among these were reducing those “occupy’d … <<in> vayn> craftys”; making clergy “fewar <in nombur> … but better <in lyfe>”; restricting “the multytude of … <advocatys>”; and so on.Footnote ⁹⁸ More than most critics of enclosure, Starkey concerned himself not just with the qualities and relative proportions of such particular groups but also with the causal and generative or degenerative links between them, as well as with the actual flows of people from one multitude to another. As More and others had, for example, Starkey connected the multitude of servants to the multiplication of beggars and thieves.Footnote ⁹⁹ His strictures against excessively large aristocratic households, as we have seen, were designed to channel would-be servants into more productive, and reproductive, places. A hierarchy of productive employments legitimated constraints on the growth of “vayn” professions. The general goal of a healthy, strong and beautiful body politic, free of “deformyte & yl proportion,” was imagined and pursued through the augmentation or diminution, restriction or reformation, isolation or association of specific multitudes.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Compared to the moralistic Starkey, Sir Thomas Smith has been called “the first political economist, indeed the founder of that science.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Accepting the egoistic passions of individuals, Smith is seen as having based his analysis on the operations of self-interested, profit-seeking economic agents, and abandoned both the cultivation of virtue that had justified policy in the mirror-of-princes tradition and the customary assumptions and nostrums of agrarian complaint literature.Footnote ¹⁰² Where Starkey viewed the polity as a body, one might say, Smith pictured the state as a household. More than this: by means of a mechanical analogy he moved toward an understanding of a sphere of economic relations distinct from state and society, in which individual selfishness defied education and legislation but might nevertheless be reconciled to the common good by political means. Smith’s abstraction, naturalistic interpretation and political deployment of specifically economic phenomena in his Discourse of the Common Weal arguably anticipated William Petty’s essays in economic policy, and Bernard Mandeville’s programmatic embrace of human desires, if not Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand.Footnote ¹⁰³ These thinkers are associated with a shift away from corporatist thinking and microcosmic metaphor – the nexus of moral, religious, social and political imperatives in which pre-modern economic ideas were embedded – toward a world of self-owning individuals propelled by natural appetites, deflected slightly if at all by the regulatory powers of the state.

Without denying the novelty of Smith’s analysis, however, one can see similarities between his demographic ideas and those that have been examined here. There are several bases for this continuity. First, the dialogue that carried the substantive “discourse” began as a commentary on enclosure, penned by a royal administrator in the midst of Kett’s Rebellion, and presented as a response to Somerset’s earlier appointment of a commission, under Edward VI’s aegis, to investigate the progress of depopulation since Henry VII’s time.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The Discourse thus addressed a familiar problem in familiar moral terms – to which Somerset’s own response to the rebellion seems to have been peculiarly, and for his own career fatally, sympathetic.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Second, the form of a conversation between stylized personae – a landowning knight, a husbandman, a merchant, an artificer and a scholar (“members of everue state that find theim selves greved now a days”) – enabled Smith to represent received views of the body politic and the interdependent and morally charged types of people it comprised.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ It is noticeable that as Smith’s analysis departed from convention in the text, the three laboring figures dropped out of the conversation, leaving the scholar to present his views to the landowner unopposed. Even so, the structuring role of qualitative multitudes persisted.

Smith divided the Discourse into three dialogues, which dealt in turn with the problems of dearth and disorder facing the commonwealth, their causes and their solutions. The first dialogue began with complaints about enclosure, including familiar estimates of its depopulating effects and social consequences. Fittingly, the husbandman expounded on these:

The tradesman and merchant confirmed the resulting depopulation of both countryside and towns, “London excepted.” The husbandman then went on to catalog the troubles of each estate in a manner suggestive not only of their comprehensiveness but also of their interconnections:

The gentleman’s problems had become the husbandmen’s and the artificer’s, and all of theirs the merchant’s. While the knight himself denied that enclosure caused the dearth either of corn (which, he argued, remained cheap) or of cattle (which enclosure itself helped to supply), he too invoked an organic vision of the polity in his own recommendation that, like physicians, the interlocutors move from symptoms through diagnosis to cure.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

In the second dialogue, discussion turned to the causes of dearth. The husbandman again blamed the knight for raising rents, while the capper reasserted the depopulating and destabilizing effects of enclosure, complete with emblematic proportions: “in stead of some C. or CC. parsons [i.e., persons], that had their livinges theron, now be theare but thre or foure sheppards, and the maister only.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ The scholar demurred on the role of enclosure, though he agreed that should it continue for another twenty years at the rate of the twenty years previous, “the people still encreasinge and theire Liuinges deminished, yt must nedes cume to passe that a greate parte of the people shalbe Idle.”Footnote ¹¹¹ The knight replied – citing the experiences of Essex, Kent and Devonshire – that enclosure had proven to be profitable. Common land, in contrast, was commonly neglected. The scholar’s response was to differentiate the effects of enclosure as such from the conversion of land from arable to pasture; as far as yields went, he argued, landlords “maie not purchace them selues profit by that may be hurtfull to others.”Footnote ¹¹² Nor, however, could they be expected to act against their own interest. The problem was how “To make the profitt of the plow to be as good, rate for rate, as the profitt of the graisiers and shep-masters” – how, that is, to align the interest of each member with the common weal.Footnote ¹¹³

Historians of economic thought have argued that Smith’s dialogue introduced individual economic interest into social thought. “For euerie man will seke wheare most advautage is,” he reasoned, “And so longe [as] it is” more profitable to graze sheep than raise corn, so long shall “pasture … encroche vpon the tillage, for all the laws that euer can be made to the contrarie.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ From a different perspective, however, this analysis implied a precocious deployment of human nature as a fundamental constraint on policy. This would in time become a distinguishing feature of Restoration-era political arithmetic. Yet if decisions were driven by individual perceptions of advantage fed through mechanisms of calculation common to all mankind, still the politically salient effects of these decisions were felt and addressed in terms of the relative waxing and waning of subordinate multitudes and the resultant disproportion between members of the social body. Thus, the reduction of lordly hospitality in the countryside created a mass of servants whose idleness and appetite for consumption were markers of degeneracy; declining cloth exports similarly turned domestic clothiers restless and troublesome to the polity.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Perhaps, the knight suggested, disorderly groups might be transformed into more useful kinds of people. Better not, the doctor cautioned, if this risked making imbalances worse.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Even the doctor’s explanation of “the imporishment of this realme” in terms of the debasement of the coinage partook of a similar logic – debasement was, after all, a kind of degeneration.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Gold and silver had a natural function as “Instruments of exchange.” The specific qualities with which nature had endowed them – the capacity to be divided and recombined, stamped and handled “with out perishinge of the substance,” as well as their “lightnes of cariage” – conduced to their employment as currency, as the “common consent” of the civilized world attested.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Because of this, they knit together the different nations of the world and the different orders of the commonweal. Much as dress distinguished each estate, so royal marks indicated the weight and worth of each coin. Debasement, the “corruptinge of our coine and treasure,” severed the link between external sign and internal value in the same way that mobility and mutability cut multitudes off from their distinctive roles and places. By a perverse alchemy, it turned bullion to “brasse” and made “our chiefe commodities” worthless, just as displacement and indolence turned ploughmen into vagrants.Footnote ¹¹⁹ This is not the place to explore the ties Smith invoked between appearance, credit and dissimulation – a theme later taken up by Elizabethan commentators on consumption and the social order – except to note that this nexus informed ideas around the debasement of people and currency alike.Footnote ¹²⁰ The point here is that for Smith, these two processes were not only formally similar but also causally connected. A degenerate coinage distorted the exchange relationships that kept each multitude in its place and relation to the whole.Footnote ¹²¹

The same logic of degeneration in the context of corporeal analogy ran through the third dialogue, concerning “remidies” for the “deseases” already described. As with the restoration of balance in the body natural, so the aim of physic in the body politic was a restoration of “auncient wealthe” and social equilibrium; the commonwealth’s ills did not require a radical change of regimen but were to be “redressed … with lest daunger or alteration of thinges.”Footnote ¹²² Debasement had set off a chain reaction, pulling one group after another into hardship:

Smith’s audience would have known that these changes in what we consider economic behavior – which implied not merely new stresses on established relationships, but also dramatic and consequential changes in the land itself – inflicted new kinds of mobility, mixture and degeneration on the groups involved. Debasing the currency that bound estates together compromised relations between labor and land, country and town, deforming and displacing essential multitudes whose remnants recombined as cancerous excrescences in the city and on the roads. Smith’s grasp of individual economic motivations may have given him new purchase on the mechanisms by which debasement ramified through English society. But the structure through which the poison spread was still envisioned in organic and corporate rather than mechanical or atomistic terms.

Policy was a kind of restorative medicine, an “arte” that worked by grasping “the chiefe and efficient causes” at work, and then redressing, reversing or redirecting their effects as far as nature and Providence allowed.Footnote ¹²⁴ Counterfeiters had done with the prince’s “treasure house, which is the Realme … as the Alcmistes weare wounte to doe with private men, promising them to multiplie, when of truethe they did minishe.”Footnote ¹²⁵ Undoing the damage meant restoring the “iust and dwe proportion” between coin and content that the nature of the metals and the exigencies of human trust and calculation demanded.Footnote ¹²⁶ On the other hand, the dearth debasement produced, to the extent that it originated in human “Avarice” rather than divine judgment, must be addressed by other means.Footnote ¹²⁷ Getting rid of “covetousness” was no more feasible than “making men to be without Ire, without gladnes, withoute feare, and without all affections.”Footnote ¹²⁸ Policy should seek instead to remove the “occasion” for greed’s expression, namely the “exceading lucre” that made enclosure desirable.Footnote ¹²⁹ To this end, Smith proposed a combination of legislative and demographic interventions: Legal restraints on enclosure, import restrictions to stimulate domestic industry (“20000 persons might be set a-worke with in this Realme” through import substitution projects), incentives for craftsmen to return to towns and the targeted settlement of “strange artificers” from overseas.Footnote ¹³⁰ Foreshadowing later schemes, he suggested fostering export trades and exerting greater corporate control over the function, location and preponderance of different classes of artificer.Footnote ¹³¹ These were dramatic interventions in the body politic, extending even to transplanting foreign bodies into it where vital organs would not regenerate themselves. Even here, however, the aim was to supply a missing part or address a handicap rather than alter the dynamics of social relations and economic activity. Smith’s overarching vision was one of holistic reform, restraint and restoration, geared toward the maintenance of order and proportion between functionally interdependent multitudes of people.

Smith’s analysis was sophisticated in its grasp of economic relations, but in conceptual terms, the anonymous “Polices to Reduce this Realme of Englande vnto a Prosperus Wealthe and Estate” advanced a more radical program “fore the redresse and amendment of the Publicke Weal.”Footnote ¹³² Part of its boldness derived from the author’s overt linkage of political reform and the reformation of the church, which became more programmatic (and more Calvinist in orientation) under Edward VI than it had been in his father’s time. With “the trew worshepping of god” established, the tract expressed the hope that God would at last make king and council “his ministres in plauking vppe by the rottes al the Cawses” of national decay.Footnote ¹³³ Despite this providential strain, the author coupled the usual invocation of Proverbs 14:28 with an appeal to “the wise Phillosopher Pithagoras,” whose purported dictum had a naturalist slant: “the subiectes ar to a kinge as a winde is to a fyer: For the grosher that the winde is the greatter is the Fier.”Footnote ¹³⁴ Alone among the texts so far considered, too, the “Polices” advocated maximizing numbers of people in the realm outright, almost without regard to their qualities or location. As the author put it, its purpose was “to declare how this realme … may be made Populus, the people wealthie the king riche the Realme withoute Cyvill Discorde: vitall plenty.”Footnote ¹³⁵

As with most of the references to national numbers we have encountered, the immediate context for concern with them in “Polices” was the security of the realm. This was conceived in military and economic terms: “thinvasion of eneymies,” “cyvile warres” and especially “penury of victualles” leading to “famyne” all threatened.Footnote ¹³⁶ The “Polices” offered a well-worn and simplistic causal analysis of England’s internal problems, trafficking in broader categories and blunter mechanisms than Smith had used. Husbandry was “the Naturall mother of Victuall,” and victual “the very Norse [i.e., nurse] of all Sciences and Artifficers”; idleness created dearth and thereby raised the price of all “that is wroughte or made by mans hande or labour.”Footnote ¹³⁷ Unlike earlier treatments, however, “Polices” organized its discussion of multitude around a quantitative conception of national strength that owed less to corporeal analogy than to a Christian humanist ideal of stewardship.Footnote ¹³⁸ Idleness was less a matter of individual or collective moral degeneracy than of ill apportioned numbers, days and acres:

Numbers here were not divorced from local contexts and events, much less from moral or spiritual questions. As already noted, “Polices” set its call for political reform in the context of religious reformation. It went on to connect them still more directly: the cultivation of idle land it demanded was also bound up with the suppression of a Catholic ritual calendar that robbed the realm of working days, the elimination of idolatrous practices that wasted time and money, and the suppression of monastic institutions that had harbored an idle multitude of clerics:

Yet, the problem that monks, canons, friars and chantry priests posed was not that they had degenerated from some more useful type. Nor, despite the author’s evangelical leanings, was it simply that they harmed the spiritual health or temporal peace of the body politic. The problem was that they did no work. Like waste land and idle hours, they served no profitable purpose. Unlike displaced husbandmen, they had never done so. Against such a spare construction of the problem of idleness, elaborate corporeal and medical metaphors had little power.

On the other hand, precisely because this negative concept of idleness sidestepped narratives of degeneration and distinctions of place and function, number took on new practical importance. (That this should have happened at a time when calculations remained inescapably speculative indicates how complex a process the advent of quantification was.) For what the “Polices” proposed was the fullest exploitation of numbers of people, acres and days alike:

For Starkey, Smith and other writers concerned with enclosure, the logic of the body politic directed attention to the qualities, roles and locations of specific kinds of people. The author of the “Polices,” by contrast, intimated a view of numbers of bodies as interchangeable laboring units, operating on similarly convertible land – effectively just space – and bound only by the limits of work-time. An ailing body politic needed repair, with the aim of restoration to a former, flourishing state. Idle numbers called instead for maximal exploitation, conjuring visions not of healthy equilibrium but rather of mounting surpluses quantified through the projection of abstract calculations onto land and people. “Polices” was not representative of Tudor or early Stuart views in these respects, but in expanding the spatial and temporal boundaries of demographic governance beyond the confines of bodily metaphor it would turn out to be prescient.

It was prescient, too, in looking to nature for an alternative to the more usual account of idleness as the result of historically specific social dislocations and the consequent degeneration of distinct groups. Having made idleness the attribute not of local types but of national numbers, the “Polices” offered an appropriately general explanation in the landscape these numbers inhabited – what later authors would term the “situation” of England as a whole: “mary even the great fructfulnes of our gronde.”Footnote ¹⁴² This was an unusual move for English authors before the seventeenth century, so it is perhaps not surprising that this author cited an Italian source. His authority on environmental influence was the Sienese humanist Francesco Patrizi:

Similar references to the dynamic, adaptive interaction between land and people – whether praising the hardscrabble industry of the Dutch in overcoming the limitations of their flat and flooded strip of earth, or in scolding the lazy denizens of lush colonial landscapes – would become a staple of later Stuart economic and political commentary. By then, the language of nature was part of a more elaborate framework for differentiating mutable and immutable constraints on policy. The “Polices” did not anticipate this framework. It would have kept poor company with the author’s confident expectation – characteristic of the age – that divinely approved acts of “the Rulers” could right the wrongs of human vice.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ It would also have implied a clearer sense of human nature unmediated by the corporate identities and forms of association to which even the “Polices” ultimately appealed in proposing “brotherhedes” or “fraternities” for different tradesmen. But for the time being, such bodies remained the most visible and tractable manifestations of multitude. They, rather than the numbers that loomed behind them, were still the real objects of governance.