History of England

The Tudors 1485-1605

England under the Tudors experienced major changes to its constitution, to the prosperity of its people, and to their outlook. The Tudor era completed its conversion from a collection of self-sufficient local communities into a nation with a well-established system of governance. There was a renewed growth in population and a substantial increase in both prosperity and poverty. There was also an upheaval of belief, intellectual enquiry and exploration, including a transition from the dominance of Roman Catholicism to the acceptance of other creeds and the transition from exclusively deductive modes of reasoning to the acceptance of the inductive method - as well as the undertaking of numerous voyages of discovery. Finally there was an increase in the importance of relations with its neighbours, and a number of attempts were made to incorporate Ireland, Scotland and Wales into a united British kingdom.

The foundations for a limited system of representative government had been laid during the Plantagenet period and, in England at least, government under the Tudors came to be widely accepted as an instrument devoted mainly to the creation and preservation of social order. Tudor monarchs often made ruthless use of their power to rule by proclamation, but were nevertheless inclined to make use of parliament in support of claims to rule by consent and, although parliaments were mainly compliant, there was significant growth in the influence of the House of Commons over the creation and endorsement of legislation. The administration of law, although formally a royal prerogative, became the province of professional lawyers, exercising a significant degree of independence from the crown, and the practice of petitioning the king to remedy injustice developed into the legal system of "equity" , operating alongside, and sometimes in conflict with the rapidly development system of common law. Access to the law, which was traditionally confined to freemen, expanded rapidly with the disappearance of surfdom.

There are no reliable statistics about Tudor England but historians agree that it must have been a period of substantial growth of population and prosperity. Nearly all of the population was engaged in subsistence agriculture and cottage industry, but there were signs of the growing influence of small-scale industry and commerce. The principal manufactured products were textiles which were mostly the result of household activities, but there was also a growing output of other extracted or manufactured products such as coal and iron. . On the commercial side, there were several companies of merchants who were promoting exports of English textiles to Europe and sponsoring voyages of exploration and the creation of settlements in America, and there were several joint stock companies financing those activities.