Disease, Disaster and Death in Mid-Tudor England: ‘Troublous Days of Affliction

The second half of the sixteenth century was amongst the most turbulent periods of English history. Reformation, political faction, economic decline, disputed succession and foreign wars combined with a prolonged series of poor harvests to create a situation that historians labeled the ‘mid-Tudor crisis’. Not least of the problems faced by people at this time was a rising rate of death from disease; which at its height may have seen one in four people dying from a combination of influenza and typhus. As this book argues, such a mortality rate constitutes the largest demographic disaster to strike England since the Black Death two-hundred years before, and dwarfs the death rates both of the seventeenth plague outbreaks, and the 1919 Spanish Flu. In this magisterial study, Dr Moore marshals a phenomenal amount of research to examine the likely impact of this disaster upon an already weakened population. Drawing particularly upon parish registers, he demonstrates that the period witnessed a much higher drop in population than has been hitherto accepted, that in turn leads to a much revised population trend for England during the early modern period. As well as assessing the ramifications of these findings, the book also examines why such a crisis appears to have passed un-noticed - or at least un-commented upon - by most of the contemporaries who lived through it. Based upon twenty-years’ research, and backed up by a wealth of detailed statistical evidence, this work offers a fundamental reappraisal of the social and economic history of Tudor England. It demonstrates how disease and mortality played a major role in shaping demography, and thus the development of early modern English society.