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[painting] Henry VII with his two most notorious lawyer thugs [L-R] Richard Empson, Henry VII, Edmund Dudley
Henry VII used intimidation and entrapment to keep his nobles in line
Henry VII’s financial manoeuvres are a subject in themselves. But in summary, he used legal tools – which he exploited but didn’t in fact invent – to put anyone with any money under the threat of huge fines if they stepped out of line.
He also shifted the machinery of government away from the nobility and other landowners and into the hands of professional administrators – not to say extortioners, gangsters and hatchet men.
The most notorious of them were two lawyers Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley. Empson stacked juries and intimidated judges, or simply sent the heavies round to get what he wanted. Dudley ran a protection racket in London that was worthy of Al Capone.
Dudley’s house on Candlewick Street was the centre of a mafia of so-called ‘promoters’, including a number of Italian bankers, who would sniff out – not to say actually provoke – fraud in the city and then trap their victims until they paid.
By the time Henry VII died THREE London mayors were in the Tower for getting on the wrong side of the king's hatchet men.
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[illumination] Medieval illustration of serfs harvesting wheat with reaping-hooks or sickles, with overseer or Reeve
The Black Death led to a labour shortage and the rise of the bully-proof Yeoman farmer
The economic effects of the Black Death are, as you will imagine, complex and much debated. But, simplifying for the sake of clarity, by the 1390s it was difficult to make big money from farming.
The land - which had previously supported a much larger population - was producing far too much food, so that prices fell. Labour was scarce and the few labourers there now were, could command high wages. By the end of the century there was simply too much land to go round and it was becoming easier and easier to rent on favourable terms if you were a farmer.
By the 1430s ‘Yeomen’ were widely regarded as men with more than about 40 acres of land. They often rented land from several different estates and that made it a great deal harder to bully them around than their peasant fathers and grandfathers.
Even farmers with only 10-40 acres were showing ‘a sturdy self-sufficiency’. These were coming to be known as ‘husbandmen.’
Even those with fewer than 10 acres were able to prosper, as prices for the things they couldn’t grow themselves were low and so were rents.
Even the landless were doing well. The average pay for female labourers for example jumped from just over a penny a day, before the Black Death, to over twopence-halfpenny a day, fifty years later.
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It's official - after 600 years we're back to a Feudal Society!
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