At Our Wits' End, page 7
Even among the supposedly celibate clergy, who were generally of relatively high social status, there were many cases of priests fathering children. In 1535, it was reported that the Abbot of Norton, in Cheshire, was not resident at Norton Abbey. He lived with his mistress and had fathered children by her. Bishop Edmund Bonner (c.1500–1569), notorious for persecuting Protestants in England during the bloody reign of Queen Mary I (1553–1558), was the bastard son of the Rector of Davenham, in Cheshire, and this rector was himself the illegitimate son of a knight.[39] Bonner himself fathered two illegitimate sons.[40] Cardinal Wolsey, who was Henry VIII’s chief minister in the first half of his reign, had an illegitimate son.[41] Pope Alexander VI (1431–1503) had four of them, and the infamous Lucrezia Borgia (1480–1519) was his illegitimate daughter.[42] Thus, there is evidence that even in the pre-Modern, Christian world a form of de facto polygamy continued such that the upper class could have pronounced fertility compared to the lower classes. However, it is as we move into the Early Modern Era—with increased record keeping—that we can find direct evidence that the richer half of the population had much higher fertility than the poorer half.
Fertility in the Early Modern Era
From around the beginning of the 17th century, most English parishes began to keep systematic parish records of baptisms, marriages, and burials. Some parishes, right from the beginning, kept very detailed records, including the names of the child’s parents on the baptism record and the name of the father in the case of an infant burial. The survival of wills, proved by parish courts, is sketchy in the 16th century, but is relatively comprehensive by the 17th. As such, we now have a series of fascinating studies that give us real proof that the richer had higher fertility than the poorer in Early Modern England and elsewhere in Europe too.
The most detailed of these studies was produced by the British economist Gregory Clark, of the University of California at Davis. It was reported in his book A Farewell to Alms. Clark shows, drawing upon 1,978 wills from Suffolk and Essex, in the east of England, made between the years 1585 and 1638, that the richer 50% of English testators had almost twice as many surviving children as the poorer 50%.[43] The completed fertility of the richer half was 40% higher than that of the poorer half. Wills extended well down the social hierarchy. In Suffolk, in the 1620s, 39% of males who died aged over 16 left wills and many belonged to what was then known as the ‘lower sort’: labourers, small scale farmers, junior craftsmen, and servants. Analysing the wills and comparing them to the parish records, Clark found that, if we divide the testators into the ‘richer half’ (those leaving the average estate of £100 or more) and the ‘poorer half’, then: ‘A richer man married for twenty or more years fathered 9.2 children while a poorer man would have only 6.4, an advantage to the rich of over 40%.’[44]
Those bequeathing less than £9 had fewer than two children whereas those leaving £1,000 or more had at least four. Around 14% of the poorest left all their wealth to those not genetically related to them. This is compared to only 2% of those with over £1,000 who left all their money to non-relatives. This negative relationship between wealth and bequeathing to friends implies, argues Clark, that the poorer testators were, the more likely they were to have no children and even no surviving relatives at all. Though the relationship is not so clearly linear, wealth also predicts the number of grandchildren bequeathed to in wills. And these poorer testators are themselves 50% more fertile than the 60% of adults who didn’t leave wills. By 1650, testators had 1.5 children compared to 1 for non-testators. So the very poor, who didn’t leave wills, had fewer children even than the poorest testators.
Clark is not the only person to have unearthed this pattern, though his research is the most extensive. In 1978, historian Victor Skipp (1925–2010) found, from a sample of Warwickshire parish records between 1560 and 1670, that the ‘middle class’ (the richer half) had, on average, four children while the ‘working class’ (the poorer half) had three.[45] This was ‘children baptised’ rather than ‘completed fertility’, meaning that, as 45% of children tended to die in infancy, some of the poorest may have ended up with no surviving children at all. In fact, in 1972, historian John Pound found, drawing upon Norfolk records, that between 1500 and 1630 completed fertility was four for the middle class and two for the working class, giving the middle class a fertility advantage of 100%.[46] A similar pattern has been unearthed in many other pre-industrial European societies. For example, according to research by German historian and psychologist Volkmar Weiss, in Saxony between 1547 and 1671, the middle class, on average, had 3.4 children who got married while the working class had 1.6 who did so.[47] See Table 3.
Table 3. Socio-economic differences in fertility in Europe 1560–1674 (Lynn, 2011, p. 45).
Dates
Location
Middle Class
Working Class
Criterion
Reference
1560-1599
England
4.1
3.0
Children born
Skipp, 1978
1620-1624
England
4.4
2.1
Children born
Skipp, 1978
1625-1649
England
4.0
3.4
Children born
Skipp, 1978
1650-1674
England
3.8
3.4
Children born
Skipp, 1978
1547-1671
Saxony
3.4
1.6
Children married
Weiss, 1990
1500-1630
England
4.2
2.2
Children married
Pound, 1972
Clark has examined mortality rates in his sample, comparing christening records with whether the child was mentioned in the will. 63% of the children of poorer testators survived to be mentioned in their father’s will, but it was 69% of the children of richer testators. This would seem to imply that the poor were purposefully having fewer children, or that more of their children didn’t survive long enough to be christened.
So, the 17th century continued to see the pattern, which we see even in pastoralist tribes. Clark has termed it the ‘Survival of the Richest’. The wealthier half of the population were simply more fertile—they left more surviving children—than the poorer half of society, and there were further gradations in favour of the richer even within the ‘rich’ category. In addition, the rich had a far longer life expectancy than the poor. For example, data from 17th-century Geneva shows that the upper class lived, on average, until the age of 35.9, the middle class until 24.7, and the working class until 18.3. This is illustrated in Table 4.
Table 4. Age of death and social class (Lynn, 2011, p. 46).
City
Period
Upper
Middle
Lower
Berlin
1710–1799
29.8
24.3
20.3
Geneva
17th c
35.9
24.7
18.3
Rouen
18th c
32.5
33.0
24.5
Neuruppin
1732–1830
33.2
28.6
28.9
This would mean that the poor simply had less time to have children and this would be compounded by the fact that, by the Early Modern Era, the average age of marriage in Western Europe was relatively late; around 27 for men and around 26 for women.[48] This meant around 25% of people never married and, among men, these were likely to have been the less socioeconomically successful.[49]
The high child mortality rate, of around 45%, meant that the population grew only very slowly. Indeed, when it grew too high—higher than the capacity of the land to be able to sustain it—then there would be widespread famine and the population would dramatically decline. The consequence of this was that England and other European societies were characterised by a system of constant social descent. Every generation, those at the bottom of the hierarchy would die off, without children, and those one step up the ladder would, by necessity, move downwards in order to take their place. In general, the younger sons of the gentry would fall into the ‘middling sort’. They would become yeoman farmers, who, on average, weren’t as wealthy as the gentry and would do some farm labour themselves.[50] Or these younger gentry might become merchants, but, either way, they would work for a living. The younger sons of merchants would become craftsmen and the younger sons of yeomen would be husbandmen, meaning they would take to the plough themselves. The younger sons of craftsmen and husbandmen would be cottagers, who would supplement a smallholding with day labour on the farms of others; and the younger sons of smallholders would simply be labourers. And below these were the destitute and the starving.
As such, we would expect that the qualities that made people socioeconomically successful—including highly genetic qualities such as intelligence—would be growing in the population every generation. The genes for being rich—which is significantly predicted by intelligence, and which is strongly heritable, as we have seen—were being selected for under the harshness of pre-industrial conditions. We would predict that people would have been becoming more intelligent; the average IQ of pre-industrial society would have increased every generation.
With the rise of the internet, researching your family history has become extremely popular. Before the internet, it was a time consuming and costly hobby involving lots of trips to London or the relevant local archive. Now, many records can be searched online and they are combed through by enthusiastic amateur historians, often in the search for ‘interesting’ ancestors, inspired by the BBC television programme Who Do You Think You Are? In this programme, celebrities have their family trees traced and they always uncover some fascinating story or other. However, this illusion of everyone having an intriguing family past is achieved by broadcasting only the more dramatic cases[51] and by tracing every possible line until something that might make good television reveals itself. In reality, most people trace their paternal line and the results are depressingly predictable. If you are English, you probably won’t be able to get beyond the mid-16th century, because that’s when the English parish records begin. And you will very likely find that you are descended from 16th-century ‘yeomen’ or possibly ‘gentlemen’; very wealthy farmers. The reason is simple. It was these people whose offspring survived.
Executing the Less Intelligent
Clearly, ‘Survival of the more Intelligent’ characterised pre-industrial societies. Those who were less intelligent lived in poorer conditions and fewer of their children survived. But there was also a more direct selection pressure against those of low intelligence, which began to manifest itself in the Medieval Era: execution. In an article, which by its very nature aroused controversy, Canadian anthropologist Peter Frost and American anthropologist Henry Harpending (1944–2016) examined the way in which judicial violence acted as a selection pressure in pre-industrial Europe.[52] Up until the 11th century, they note, execution was not widely employed, because the Church was opposed to it, law enforcement was rudimentary, and it was believed that people should have the right to settle their own disputes. But as the Medieval Era progressed, the Church accepted that the ‘wicked’ should be executed so that the ‘good’ could live in peace. By the Early Modern Era, all felonies carried the death penalty and this meant that up to 1% of the male population of Europe was executed each generation, with roughly another 1% dying at the scene of the crime or in prison while awaiting trial. Most of these felons were young men.
Frost and Harpending argue that this process would have altered the nature of Western personality, by preventing those with high psychopathic personality (the criminally-inclined) from passing on their genes. This is likely the case, and they argue that it is evidenced in the way that the murder rate falls. But, as Edward Dutton and Swedish psychologist Guy Madison have noted, it also has implications for intelligence.[53] Those who were executed or died in prison were overwhelmingly poor and uneducated. In England, those who were of high social status could fund relatively luxurious conditions in prison and, unless their crime was treason or heresy, they could avoid execution by pleading ‘Benefit of the Clergy’. In essence, this meant that if they could read then they would avoid execution. It also meant that it was disproportionately those of low intelligence who went to the gallows. In addition, we have already seen that, in general, intelligence is negatively associated with criminality and we might expect this association to be particularly strong when the punishment for felony is death. This would mean that judicial execution was very likely playing a role in boosting European intelligence by removing some of the least intelligent young men every generation.
Upward Social Mobility in the Early Modern Era
We know that, in pre-industrial England, the rich half of the population had higher fertility than the poorer half and there is evidence that intelligence was a major reason for this, even then. This can be better understood if we look at the nature of social mobility in Medieval and Early Modern England. Many people believe that social mobility is a modern phenomenon and that your childhood social status pretty much dictated your life further back in history. But this is simply untrue. Gregory Clark has charted the rise and fall of particular families over time, by focusing on those with unusual surnames. In his book The Son Also Rises (Clark likes Hemingway puns) Clark presents data for assorted countries including England, Japan, the US, China, Sweden, and India. Clark notes that social mobility, in modern times, is often assumed to be high because there is a weak correlation, of around 0.3, between the income of parent and child. But this is problematic because there are different measures of status: wealth, education, and occupational status, for example. People can make trade-offs between these measures. A teacher would have higher occupational status than a plumber but may well earn less. In addition, argues Clark, because the factors which affect social status are likely to be strongly genetic, there will be random fluctuation when comparing father and son. As such, it is better to compare surnames—and thus families—across time.[54]
In England, for example, Clark argues that you can tell the historical social status of a family by the kind of surname they have. High status surnames are those which are Norman (such as those that end in ‘ville’) or those which are ‘locative’—the names of places. People with these surnames are descended from Normans who took the name of their feudal manor. Surnames which refer to a profession—Bailey, Cooper, Thatcher—are middle ranking, while low ranking surnames tend to end in ‘son’, be the name of the father, refer to physical appearance (e.g. ‘Brown’), or relate to the part of the village a person lived in, such as ‘Hill’. Assessing the data between the medieval period and 2012, Clark finds that across the period, and even now, those with Norman or locative names are over-represented among proxies for high social status. These include Oxbridge graduates, barristers, and physicians. Those with low status surnames are under-represented. Over this period, Clark emphasises, there has been a gradual ‘regression to the mean’. This means that those at the representation extremes have moved closer to the average over time, so that Normans are less over-represented than they used to be and Saxons are less under-represented than they used to be.
Clark provides a number of explanations for this. Something akin to regression to the mean happens in genetics. Owing to the large number of genes involved, it sometimes (though rarely) happens that children are significantly more (or less) ‘socially competent’ (Clark’s term for the ability to achieve high socioeconomic status) than their parents. They then marry a person with comparable abilities and move up (or down) the social hierarchy. Alternatively, a person with high genotypic ‘ability’ marries a person with high phenotypic ‘ability’. Finally, as pre-modern fertility was predicted by high social status, Norman surnames would have to spread downwards through the population.
