[In the following excerpt, Thomas provides a detailed analysis of the practice of astrology, discussing the components of astrological readings and the means by which astrology reached the populace.]

I resolve these ensuing astrological questions: the sick whether they shall recover or not; the party absent whether living or dead; how many husbands or children a woman shall have; whether you shall marry the desired party or whom else, whether she has her maidenhead or no, or shall be honest to you after marriage, or her portion well paid; if a man be wise or a fool; whether it be good to put on new clothes, or turn courtier this year or the next; if dreams are for good or evil; whether a child be the reputed father's or not, or shall be fortunate or otherwise; ships at sea, whether safe or not; whether it be good to remove your dwelling or not; of lawsuits which side shall have the better; and generally all astrological questions whatsoever.

[John Wilson, The Cheats (1662)]

Despite refinements in detail, the astrology known to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Englishmen was recognisably the same subject as that expounded by the Egyptian Ptolemy in his Tetrabilos in the second century AD. In the seventeenth century the English astrologers were to popularise the doctrines of their science in a vernacular literature which laid every detail of the subject open to public inspection, but the doctrines they enunciated were essentially traditional. Indeed, several of the English treatises on astrology were little more than translations of earlier Latin writings. Like Christianity, astrology proved strikingly adaptable to the needs of a social environment which was very different from that in which it had originated.

The basic astrological assumptions are not difficult to grasp. For if astronomy is the study of the movements of the heavenly bodies, then astrology is the study of the effects of those movements. The astronomers of the ancient world had been impressed by the regular behaviour of the heavens, in contrast with the flux and mutation of life upon earth. They accordingly assumed a division of the universe whereby the superior, immutable bodies of the celestial world ruled over the terrestrial or sublunary sphere, where all was mortality and change. It was assumed that the stars had special qualities and influences which were transmitted downwards upon the passive earth, and which varied in their effects, according to the changing relationship of the heavenly bodies to each other. Owing to their inadequate techniques of astronomical observation, the early scientists had no conception of the infinite number of existing solar systems nor of the vast distances which separate the visible stars from each other. They were thus led to postulate a single system in which the seven moving stars or planets—Sun, Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus and Mercury—shifted their position in relation to the earth and each other, against a fixed backcloth of the twelve signs of the zodiac. The nature of the influence exerted by the heavens at any one moment thus depended upon the situation of the various celestial bodies. By drawing a map of the heavens, or horoscope, the astrologer could analyse this situation and assess its implications. By an extension of the same principle, he could, given the necessary astronomical knowledge, construct a horoscope for some future point of time, and thus predict the influence which the heavens would exert on that occasion.

There was nothing esoteric about these general assumptions. At the beginning of the sixteenth century astrological doctrines were part of the educated man's picture of the universe and its workings. It was generally accepted that the four elements constituting the sublunary region—earth, air, fire and water—were kept in their state of ceaseless permutation by the movement of the heavenly bodies. The various planets transmitted different quantities of the four physiological qualities of heat and cold, dryness and moisture. In the resulting interaction was comprised all physical change. This relationship between earthly events and the movement of the heavens was but one example of the many links and correspondences which were thought to bind the physical universe together. Astrology was thus less a separate discipline than an aspect of a generally accepted world picture. It was necessary for the understanding of physiology and therefore of medicine. It taught of the influence of the stars upon the plants and minerals, and therefore shaped botany and metallurgy. Psychology and ethnography also presupposed a good deal of astrological dogma. During the Renaissance, even more than in the Middle Ages, astrology pervaded all aspects of scientific thought. It was not a coterie doctrine, but an essential aspect of the intellectual framework in which men were educated.

Nevertheless, the subject had a life and independent momentum of its own, especially when the prestige of the Ptolemaic picture of the universe began to crumble under the pressure of the astronomical discoveries of the century and a half between Copernicus and Newton. During this period astrology gradually lost its role as a universal symbolism, and ossified into a separate, and ultimately obsolete, system of belief. This change was still in the future when the sixteenth century opened. Although there had been many sceptics about particular details of astrological dogma, especially as regards the possibility of making definite predictions concerning the behaviour of specific human beings, there were not yet any real heretics, so far as the basic principles of the subject were concerned. No one denied the influence of the heavens upon the weather or disputed the relevance of astrology to medicine or agriculture. Before the seventeenth century, total scepticism about astrological doctrine was highly exceptional, whether in England or elsewhere.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there were four main branches to the practice of judicial astrology (to give it its full title, for the term 'astrology' by itself was often used as synonymous with 'astronomy'). First, there were the general predictions, based on the future movements of the heavens, and taking note of such impending events as eclipses of the sun and moon, or the conjunction of the major planets in one sign of the zodiac. These forecasts related to the weather, the state of the crops, mortality and epidemics, politics and war. They indicated the fate of society as a whole, but not that of particular individuals. Secondly, there were nativities, maps of the sky at the moment of a person's birth, either made on the spot at the request of the infant's parents, or reconstructed for individuals of mature years who could supply the details of their time of birth. If the date of the birth had been lost, the astrologer could try to work it out by inference from the relationship between the 'accidents', or notable events in his client's life, and the state of the heavens at the time. The horoscope at birth could subsequently be followed up by 'annual revolutions', in which the astrologer calculated the individual's prospects for the coming year.

The details of the client's nativity were also needed before he could avail himself of the astrologer's third main service, that of making elections, or choosing the right moment for the right action. By comparing the relationship between the tendencies indicated by the client's horoscope with what was known about the future movement of the heavens, certain times could be identified as more propitious than others for embarking upon any potentially risky undertaking, such as going on a journey or choosing a wife. The election of a proper time was also a desirable procedure for routine operations, like cutting one's hair and nails, or having a bath. Finally, there were horary questions, the most controversial part of the astrologer's art, and one which had only been developed after the days of Ptolemy by the Arabs. Its optimistic assumption was that the astrologer could resolve any question put to him by considering the state of the heavens at the exact moment when it was asked—on the principle that "as the nativity is the time of the birth of the body, the horary question is the time of the birth of the mind" [J. Gadbury, The Doctrine of Nativities, 1658]. If the question was a medical one the patient might accompany it with a sample of his urine; the astrologer then based his answer upon his interpretation of the sky at the moment when the urine had been voided, or when it had arrived at his consulting-room. But every kind of personal problem could be dealt with as an horary question.

These four spheres of activity—general predictions, nativities, elections and horary questions—formed the sum of the astrologer's art. An individual practitioner might specialise in one rather than another, but he was expected to be a master of them all. He might also possess a certain amount of medical learning. Different signs of the zodiac were thought to rule over different parts of the body, and a proper election of times had to be made for administering medicine, letting blood, or carrying out surgical operations. This was generally recognised by all sixteenth-century physicians. But there had also developed a more idiosyncratic system of astrological medicine which linked every stage of treatment to the disposition of the heavens. By casting a figure for the decumbiture, or moment when the patient fell ill, and by resolving a question on sight of his urine, the astrological doctor claimed to be able to diagnose the disease, prescribe the treatment, foretell when the sickness would reach its crisis, and prognosticate its eventual outcome.

Such were the main branches of English (and indeed European) astrology during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although purporting to be an objective science, the system was highly flexible, since it left room for infinite possibilities of disagreement, both over general principles, and over the interpretation of any particular problem. Every astrological prognosis involved a figure of the heavens, in which the sky was divided up into twelve sections or 'houses', each relating to different aspects of human life. Lack of precision in time-recording made the construction of this figure difficult enough in itself, and there was plenty of scope for mathematical error in the intricate astronomical calculations required. But even when the horoscope had been drawn and agreed upon, the problem of its interpretation remained. The planets were deemed to have colours, sexes, physical qualities, and so forth. But the elaborate mythologies which proliferated along these lines were not always consistent. The planets, moreover, were only one variable in a densely crowded mosaic of fluctuating constituents—elements, humours, qualities, houses and signs of the zodiac. The client's own horoscope might also need to be compared with that of the country in which he lived, or those of the other persons with whom he had dealings. The astrologer thus found himself involved in a welter of combinations and permutations which greatly complicated the task of interpretation. It was generally agreed that to pick his way through them he needed not mere technical skill, but judgment. In other words any interpretation was in the last resort bound to be subjective. Different practitioners might give different answers to the same question, and the more specific the prediction the less likely was it to command unanimous assent.

Astrology was probably the most ambitious attempt ever made to reduce the baffling diversity of human affairs to some sort of intelligible order, but as its vocabulary and techniques swelled to reflect the richness and variability of the material with which it was concerned the problem of reaching a definite answer became increasingly intractable. The more subtle the astrologer's terminology, the greater the number of factors he took into account, the more certainly did the prospect of objective pronouncement elude his grasp. His efforts to sharpen his conceptual tools only meant that he came nearer to reproducing on paper the chaotic diversity which he saw in the world around him.

Such difficulties were only dimly apprehended in England at the beginning of the sixteenth century, when astrological activity seems to have been at a relatively low ebb. In the Middle Ages there had been many prominent English astrological authors, but their numbers fell off sharply during the fifteenth century and did not revive for over a hundred and fifty years. The prognostications in circulation during the early sixteenth century were therefore largely of foreign origin. There was, for example, no English contribution to the large literature produced by the conjunction in 1524 of all seven planets in the watery sign of Pisces, even though rumours of the impending deluge in that year are said to have induced Prior Bolton of St. Bartholomew's, Smithfield, to build himself a house on Harrow Hill and stock it with provisions to withstand the threat of inundation. The lack of English astrological writings during this period reflected the general torpor of English science. Interest revived with the mathematical renaissance pioneered by John Dee and the Digges family during the reign of Elizabeth I, and was more or less sustained until the end of the seventeenth century. If the prestige of astrology is to be measured by the publication of astrological works, then the story is one of a peak reached at around the end of the sixteenth century, followed by a discernible lull in the twenty years before the Civil War, and thereafter an unprecedented torrent of publication, which began with the War, but went on until the end of the seventeenth century.

In terms of popular accessibility, therefore, the crucial period of English astrological publication was the last sixty years of the seventeenth century, and particularly the Interregnum. In the age of Edward VI the bulk of astrological learning was still locked up in the obscurity of a learned language, whereas by the time of Charles II there was no branch of the subject which could not be studied by the English reader. During the Elizabethan period a few original works and foreign translations were published, but the most elaborate native piece of astrological learning, Thomas Allen's commentary on Ptolemy, remained in manuscript. As has already been seen Robert Fludd's voluminous works were written in Latin and published abroad. Only during the Interregnum, that period when so many other arcana were exposed to public gaze, did the first vernacular guides to the subject pour off the English presses. The popular writings of William Lilly, Nicholas Culpepper, William Ramesey and John Gadbury were followed after the Restoration by the similar vulgarisations of Richard Saunders, John Partridge, William Salmon and John Case. Designed for a mainly nonlearned audience, they constituted a comprehensive summary of astrological beliefs, issued, ironically, at the very period when the whole system was ceasing to command respect in intellectually more pretentious milieux. Ptolemy's astrology was not published in English until 1701.

The availability of English treatises on astrology is thus a poor barometer for the actual prestige of the subject. Despite the lack of a vernacular literature, most Tudor monarchs and their advisers encouraged astrologers and drew upon their advice. Both Henry VII and those engaged in plotting against him maintained relations with the Italian astrologer William Parron. Henry VIII patronised the German, Nicholas Kratzer, prevented his bishops from censuring astrology, and received astrological advice from John Robins, the only contemporary English writer on the subject of any importance. Cardinal Wolsey's interest in astrology was notorious. He was rumoured to have calculated Henry VIII's nativity in order to be able to pander to the King's whims; and he timed the departure of his French embassy in 1527 to coincide with an astrologically propitious moment. The Protector Somerset seems to have been personally sceptical of the predictive powers of astrology, but after his fall the Italian savant, Jerome Cardan, came to England to cast the horoscopes of the young Edward VI and his tutor, John Cheke, a well-known addict. Another leading administrator who shared this interest was the Secretary of State, Sir William Paget, to whom the Basle edition of the Italian astrologer, Guido Bonatus, was dedicated in 1550. His colleague, Sir William Paulet, supported the almanac-maker George Hartgill, while for Sir Thomas Smith, the ambassador and future Secretary of State, the practice of astrology was no casual interest, but so consuming a passion that he could "scarcely sleep at night from thinking of it" [J. G. Nichols in Archaeologia, 1860].

Similar enthusiasm was displayed by the courtiers of Elizabeth I. The Earl of Leicester employed Richard Forster as his astrological physician and commissioned Thomas Allen to set horoscopes. He also offered Allen a bishopric. It was at Leicester's invitation that John Dee chose an astrologically propitious day for the coronation of Elizabeth I. Dee maintained relations with many of the leading nobility of his day and was called in by the Queen to offer his views on the comet of 1577. Burghley made notes on astrological matters, and the Earl of Essex is known to have possessed an elaborate fifteenth-century treatise on astrology and geomancy. Sir Christopher Hatton, Elizabeth's future Lord Chancellor, received the dedication of John Maplet's The DialI of Destiny (1581), an astrological text-book. The evidence for Sir Philip Sidney's attitude to astrology is conflicting, but the Earl of Oxford certainly studied the subject. Small wonder that the Puritan Laurence Humphrey complained in 1563 that among the nobility the science of astrology was "ravened, embraced, and devoured of many" [L. Humfrey, The Nobles: or, of Nobilitye, 1563]. It was customary for aristocratic families to have horoscopes cast at the birth of their children, and more or less unavoidable for them to have recourse to doctors who used semi-astrological methods.

During the seventeenth century this situation changed only slowly. Many of the leading nobility and politicians retained astrological leanings. The Earl of Arundel employed the almanac-maker, Humphrey Llwyd, as his personal physician. Lord Scrope, President of the Council of the North (1619-28), was a patient of the astrological doctor, Richard Napier. Charles I's Treasurer, Lord Weston, appointed the astrologer, Nicholas Fiske, as tutor to his son. The second Earl of Bristol was himself a highly skilled astrologer. The Marquis of Huntly, executed in 1649, was thought to have been ruined by bad astrological advice. "He believed the stars," wrote Burnet "and they deceived him." Another aristocratic victim of the Civil Wars, the Marquis of Montrose, had as a young man travelled overseas with the Earl of Denbigh; together "they consulted all the astrologers they could hear of."

During the Royalist exile Sir Edward Dering, later a prominent London merchant, had attempted to keep up the spirits of his colleagues by assuring them that the stars were on their side. After the Restoration he became a great patron of contemporary astrologers. Charles II himself took astrological advice upon occasions, as we shall sec. Indeed in 1669 Louis XIV thought it worth appointing a French astrologer, the Abbé Pregnani, as a special diplomatic agent to England, after the Duke of Monmouth, one of the Abbé's clients, had told him of the monarch's faith in the art. The venture miscarried after a trip to Newmarket races, where the Abbé unfortunately failed to provide the King with any winners, thus provoking a diplomatic incident which led to his recall. Even after the Revolution of 1688 astrological interests were to be found in high places. Sir John Trenchard, Secretary of State to William III, had his horoscope cast, and confessed on his deathbed that everything the astrologer had predicted for him had come true.

For intellectuals astrology remained a topic of consuming interest. A random list of sympathisers could include such celebrated names as those of Sir Walter Raleigh, Robert Burton, the Anatomist, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Sir Kenelm Digby and Sir Thomas Browne. Among seventeenth-century scientists, the mathematician Edmund Gunter is known to have cast horoscopes, while belief in the possibilities of astrology, in part or whole, was shared by such notables as Napier of Merchiston, Samuel Hartlib, William Harvey and Henry Oldenburg. As a young man Isaac Newton bought a book on judicial astrology at Stourbridge Fair. Among the papers of John Aubrey is the nativity of Walter Charleton, sometime President of the Royal College of Physicians, set by Lord Brouncker, the first President of the Royal Society. John Dryden remained an astrological devotee throughout his life.

These miscellaneous names testify to the sympathetic attitude in which astrology was held in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by many men of rank and intellectual importance. Of course it is not always easy to say just how seriously they took it. Many no doubt had horoscopes cast out of mere amusement or curiosity, whereas others based important decisions on their outcome. But it is certain that until the mid-seventeenth century astrology was no private fad but a form of divination to which many educated people had recourse.

What is more remarkable, however, is that astrological interests were not confined to court circles, or to the entourage of the great, as they had largely been in the Middle Ages, but were widely disseminated throughout the people. For this the invention of printing was chiefly responsible. By its means, astrology was made available to an infinitely wider audience than that enjoyed by the court-based astrologers of the medieval world. The lead in this dissemination was taken by the most widespread form of fugitive literature in early modern England—the almanac.

Strictly speaking, the almanac comprised three quite separate items. There was the Almanac proper, which indicated the astronomical events of the coming year, eclipses, conjunctions and movable feasts. There was the Kalendar, which showed the days of the week and the months, and the fixed Church festivals. Finally, there was the Prognostication, or astrological forecast of the notable events of the year. Usually they were all sold together as one piece, interlarded with the sort of miscellaneous information which diaries still carry today—a list of markets and fairs, a guide to highways and distances by road, a brief chronology of notable historical events since the Creation, medical recipes, legal formulae, hints on gardening. By the mid-seventeenth century they also carried advertisements for books, patent medicines, or teachers of mathematics. These little pocket-books were quite distinct from the broadside sheet almanac, the ancestor of the modern calendar. They contained more information, and were less ephemeral. Contemporaries found them invaluable as diaries, note-books, and vade-mecums generally. As a consequence large collections still survive in the Bodleian, British Museum and other large libraries.

The most obvious difference between the pocket almanac and the modern diary is the strong astrological emphasis of the former. The more elaborate almanacs included Ephemerides, or tables showing the daily position of the heavenly bodies throughout the year. With their aid the reader could predict the movement of the planets through the signs of the zodiac, and foresee the various conjunctions and oppositions. Thus armed, he was in a position to set about casting his own horoscopes. In addition he could consult the almanac's diagram of the Anatomical Man indicating the dominion of the different signs of the zodiac over the different parts of the human body. From this he could work out the appropriate time for taking medicine or medical treatment. Above all, there was the prognostication, in which the author of the almanac demonstrated his virtuosity by detailed forecasts of politics, the weather, the state of the crops, and the health of the population in the year to come.

Medieval almanacs had circulated in manuscript, but they seem to have been intended primarily for students and physicians. It was only in the Tudor period that the printed English almanac rose to a position of enormous popular success. During the early sixteenth century various translations of continental prognostications were issued, some of which sold very briskly. But not until 1545 is an Englishman known to have composed his own forecast for publication. He was Andrew Boorde, an ex-Carthusian, and his prognostication was the first of many. Foreign prognostications still circulated, but their place was steadily usurped by domestic products. By 1600 there had been probably over six hundred different almanacs published in England, and they were still on the increase. The number of separate almanacs issued in the seventeenth century has been estimated at more than two thousand, and well over two hundred authors must have been concerned in their publication. The size of a typical edition is unknown. But it is significant that almanacs, like Bibles, were exempt from the limit of twelve to fifteen hundred copies imposed by the Stationers' Company on single editions of other publications. William Lilly's annual almanac and prognostication, Merlinus Anglicus, printed 13,500 copies in 1646, 17,000 in 1647, and 18,500 in 1648. By 1659 it was said to be selling nearly 30,000 a year. This particular almanac was unusually popular, but it is clear that the figure of three to four million, which is sometimes suggested as the total production of almanacs in the seventeenth century, is a distinct under-estimate; the ten years after November 1663 alone nearly reached that total. Not even the Bible sold at this rate.

It is easy to see why the almanacs were commercially so successful. They were issued to fit the varying astronomical meridians of different parts of the country, special almanacs being published for particular towns, even relatively small ones like Aylesbury or Saffron Walden. The information they contained was carefully selected according to the type of readership aimed at. Thus there might be legal terms for the Justice of the Peace, advice on land measurement for the surveyor, or nautical hints for the seaman. By the mid-seventeenth century the almanacs even catered for different varieties of political taste. They were also cheap. In the seventeenth century the standard price seems to have been twopence, although more elaborate productions cost more.

Astrological forecasts, however, were by no means an invariable feature of the almanac, and even when included might relate only to the weather. Highly political prognostications, of the kind common during the Civil War, had been relatively infrequent during the previous century. By the 1630s the so-called Prognostication was often merely an additional calendar of secular occurrences during the year. It was only the subsequent breakdown in censorship which made political forecasting commonplace.

Yet even without a prognostication, the almanac provided a guide to daily action. It indicated astrologically favourable days for blood-letting, purging and bathing; and it showed right and wrong times for engaging in most kinds of agricultural operation, planting, sowing, mowing or gelding animals. Armed with his pocket almanac for the year, or perhaps a more durable guide, like Leonard Digges's Prognostication … for ever (1555, and frequently reissued), the countryman was well equipped to carry out his recurring tasks, while the sick man, whose relatives were responsible for giving him medicine or letting his blood, knew that they were operating according to wellestablished formulae.

In practice, however, the genuine astrological almanac had to compete for popular favour with some much lowergrade products. Chief among these was the prognostication of Erra Pater, allegedly 'a Jew out of Jewry'. ('If one affirm he learned it of a Jew,' ran a contemporary jingle, 'The silly people think it must be true.') Erra Pater was in fact derived from the perpetual prognostication of Esdras, which had circulated extensively in the Middle Ages. Like Digges's almanac it gave a table forecasting the weather according to the day of the week on which New Year began. It also included a list of unlucky days, "on which if any man or woman be let blood of wound or vein they shall die within twenty-one days following; or who so falleth into sickness on any of these days they shall never 'scape it till dead." (These were not astrological at all, but were a version of the so-called 'Egyptian days', which Englishmen had regarded as unlucky since AngloSaxon times.) This crude brochure was reissued at least a dozen times between 1536 and 1640. By the eighteenth century it was being advertised as the work of William Lilly. Henry Peacham wrote of the early Stuart husbandman that "Erra Pater, and this year's almanac (if he can read) are the only two books he spends his time in," while Bishop Hall said in his 'Character' of The Superstitious Man, that he would never go out "without an Erra Pater in his pocket" [H. Peacham, The Truth of our Times, 1638].

Closely allied to Erra Pater were other crude works of prognostication, vaguely astrological in character, but lacking the rigour of the astrological almanac proper. There was The Kalender of Shepherdes, translated from the French in 1503, and reissued at least seventeen times during the ensuing century and a half, despite its distinctly Roman Catholic character. It offered a guide to the influence of the planets upon the human body and a semiastrological method of telling fortunes. Its astrological portions were subsequently pirated under the title of The Compost of Ptolomeus (1532?), which enjoyed an independent life for at least four editions thereafter. A similar handbook was Godfridus, to which was attached The Husbandman 's Practice, or a Prognostication for Ever. It included a system of long-range weather forecasting, based on the day of the week on which Christmas fell, and a prediction of the fate of persons born on different days of the week or phases of the moon. There were at least twelve editions of this work in the second half of the seventeenth century. These were in addition to Arcandam, the Sphere of Pythagoras, and other non-astrological handbooks of divination. 'These be their great masters and in this manner their whole library, with some old parchment rolls, tables and instruments,' wrote Gabriel Harvey of the Elizabethan Wizards: "Erra Pater, their hornbook; the Shepherd's Kalendar, their primer; the Compost of Ptolomeus, their Bible; Arcandam, their New Testament" [Gabriel Harvey's Marginalia, ed. G. C. Moore Smith, 1913]. The astrological almanac was thus but one of a whole genre of publications which told readers how to make predictions about the future, and to choose days which would be particularly favourable for any given course of action. The astrological kind differed from the others only in its intellectual rigour. At the level of popular readership it is doubtful whether the distinction can have been so clear.

The appeal of the almanac was closely related to the belief in the significance of the changing phases of the moon which was extensively held in rural areas and still lingers on today. Most primitive peoples attribute to the moon an influence upon the weather and upon conception and growth, whether of vegetation, animals or human beings. In medieval theory the balance of humours in the human body was believed to fluctuate with the phases of the moon. The moon was thought to control the amount of moisture in the human body, and the brain, as the moistest part of the body, was believed to be particularly subject to its influence. Hence the notion of the insane as 'lunatic' or 'moonstruck'. A child born at full moon, declared an astrologer in 1660, would never be healthy.

Many people accordingly allowed the phases of the moon to determine their timing of various activities. The medieval Church had inveighed against the practice of only celebrating marriages or moving to a new house when the moon was waxing. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the rising moon was still thought of as the time for putting on new clothes or embarking upon some new course of action. Thomas Tusser and other agricultural writers advised farmers to cut crops when the moon was in the wane and to sow when it was on the increase. In the later seventeenth century, hair-cutting and nail-paring were said to be "commonly done according to the increase of the moon." Some of the popular handbooks of prognostication took the principle further by decreeing that specific activities should be timed to coincide with specific days of the month. They laid down appropriate days for bloodletting, purging, going on journeys, buying and selling, even for starting school. Hardly any of their recommendations would have been endorsed by serious astrologers, and they provide a further reminder of the large gulf between would-be scientific astrology on the one hand, and popular beliefs of a vaguely astrological character on the other.

Published astrological forecasts were always in demand. When Thomas Gataker, the Puritan divine, wanted to compose a refutation of one of Lilly's prognostications in 1653, he had great difficulty in finding a copy, so rapidly had it sold out. But readers could be sceptics. Weather forecasts in particular were received with a good deal of scorn; and the almanac met with a stream of satire and burlesque. From the anonymous A Mery Prognostication of 1544 to Swift's pitiless mockery of John Partridge in 1708, there was an unbroken barrage of anti-astrological squibs. In 1569 Nicholas Allen in his pamphlet, The Astronomer's Game, made effective capital out of a side-by-side comparison of the predictions of three contemporary almanac-makers, and this became a standard method of attack.

But the very frequency with which Elizabethan and Jacobean wits found it necessary to denounce the almanacs and prognostications is in itself testimony to the influence which they exerted, "Who is there," asked one writer in 1612, "that maketh not great account of his almanac to observe both days, times and seasons, to follow his affairs for his best profit and use?" [J. M., A Christian Almanacke 1612]. In 1561 Francis Coxe complained of the common people that "scant would they ride or go any journey unless they consulted, either with these blind prophets, or at least with their prophecies." William Perkins declared that men bought almanacs so as to profit by knowing in advance the state of the crops and the price of commodities. A later writer also noticed that "the common people in reading… almanacs are… are very cautelous in observing them." In 1652 John Gaule observed that it was notorious that the people at large preferred "to look into and commune of their almanacs, before the Bible." In March 1642, on the eve of the Civil War, a responsible observer reported from Westminster that "the best sort even of Parliament men" were much agitated by some passages in John Booker's almanac which forecast "that cruel and bloody counsels shall be put in execution the latter end of this month" [D. Gardiner, Historic Haven. The Story of Sandwich, 1954]. Unusually dramatic testimony to the almanac's supposed influence was provided in 1666, when the London Gazette revealed that six ex-Parliamentary soldiers involved in a republican plot had chosen the third of September for their attempt, after consulting Lilly's almanac and making an astrological calculation. As late as 1708 Jonathan Swift observed that many country gentlemen spent time "poring in Partridge's almanac to find out the events of the year, at home and abroad; not daring to propose a hunting match till Gadbury or he have fixed the weather."

In addition to the routine prognostication attached to the almanac, there was a fugitive literature devoted to such unusual celestial occurrences as comets, eclipses and conjunctions of the major planets, all of which were thought to portend comparable upheavals upon earth. "There was never any great change in the world," wrote the Tudor mathematician Robert Recorde, "neither translations of empires, neither scarce any fall of famous princes, no dearth and penury, no death and mortality, but God by the signs of heaven did premonish men thereof, to repent and beware betimes." The 'new star' which appeared in the constellation of Cassiopeia in 1572, the comet of 1577, the conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn in 1583, 1603 and 1623, the solar eclipse of 1652, the comet of 1680—all excited extensive discussion and prognostication. Elizabeth I gained great prestige by manifesting her indifference to the comet of 1577. When her courtiers tried to deter her from looking at the dreaded object, she advanced boldly to the window, declaring Iacta est alea—"The dice is thrown" [H. Howard, Earl of Northampton, A Defensative against the Poyson of Supposed Prophecies 1620]. James I was reported (after his death) to have summoned Cambridge mathematicians to explain the comet of 1618, and then prophesied both the Thirty Years War, and the fall of the Stuarts.

The reaction which such heavenly portents could produce is well illustrated by 'Black Monday'—the solar eclipse of 29 March 1652. Over a quarter of the publications collected by the bookseller Thomason for the month of March related to the eclipse and its significance. Even the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London heard a sermon on the subject on the 28th. The alarm among the people was such, recalled John Evelyn, that "hardly any would work, none stir out of their houses, so ridiculously were they abused by knavish and ignorant star-gazers." The rich loaded up their coaches and fled from London, while mountebanks did a thriving trade in cordials which purported to allay the effects of the eclipse. At Dalkeith the poor were said to have thrown away their possessions, "casting themselves on their backs, and their eyes towards heaven and praying most passionately that Christ would let them see the sun again, and save them." One contemporary diarist considered that the ultimate effect of the eclipse was to discredit the prognosticators. No terrible effects followed; indeed it seems to have been a fine day, "so that the astrologers lost their reputation exceedingly." But the forecasts of the astrologers had been political. Lilly predicted the fall of Presbyterianism, the reform of the law and the setting up of a new representative. Culpepper forecast the onset of democracy and the Fifth Monarchy. Other radicals predicted the fall of Rome and the universal end of monarchy. They were probably aiming to counter the original Black Monday tract, a veiled piece of Royalist propaganda issued in December 1651. At a popular level the damage had been done by anonymous pamphleteers predicting darkness, sudden death and "great madness, raging and terrifying thousands of the people." In the end the Council of State put out a paper explaining that eclipses were natural events which could have no political effects.

Printed publication was thus one of the main methods by which the astrologers made their impact upon the life and thought of the period. Some almanacs were so popular that they took on a life of their own and continued to appear long after the death of their original founders. The year 1655, for example, saw the publication of almanacs attributed to Allestree, Pond, Dade, Vaux and Woodhouse, all of whom were dead. But despite their enormous sales, the almanacs did not usually bring their authors much in the way of remuneration: Sir Thomas Overbury assumed in 1615 that an almanac-maker earned forty shillings a year; and this was probably the normal rate in the seventeenth century. But the almanac enabled the practising astrologer to draw attention to the facilities he had to offer by way of private consultation. For it was private practice which gave the professional astrologer his regular means of subsistence; and it was also the way in which he made his greatest impact upon the lives of other human beings.

By the reign of Elizabeth I astrology had become, as one contemporary put it, 'a very handicraft, so that many lived thereby'. Astrological practice was carried on by men (and in a few cases women) of very different degrees of learning and honesty. Sometimes it was only a sideline to some other occupation. In 1560 William Fulke thought that most astrologers were doctors. Many physicians cast horoscopes in connection with their practice, and some gave astrological advice on non-medical matters as well. Astrological procedures were also advertised by village wizards who purported to be able to set figures for fortunetelling or the recovery of stolen goods. At the other end of the scale there were professionals, with extensive London practices, and high-class virtuosi, who cast horoscopes for themselves or their friends, out of curiosity or intellectual interest.

How long this situation had existed is hard to tell, for the origins of regular astrological practice in England are lost in obscurity. Astrological knowledge seems to have been a rare accomplishment in Anglo-Saxon England (although King Edwin of Northumbria is said to have had an astrologus called Pellitus who gave him advice on mili tary matters). It probably only became familiar in court circles with the scientific revival of the twelfth century and the diffusion of Arabic astrological writing. Previously there would have been few men capable of making the observations necessary to set a horoscope. Thereafter it was not uncommon for medieval kings to receive astrological advice or for interest to be aroused by some astrological prognostication. What was much less common was the existence of professional astrologers catering for a wide clientele. Astrology was primarily the concern of Court, nobility and Church. Peter of Blois in the twelfth century thought it worth issuing warnings against astrological consultations, but there is no apparent evidence for the existence in medieval England of anything like the consulting facilities which were available in some contemporary Mediterranean countries.

The first unambiguous testimony to the existence of private astrological practice in England dates from the fifteenth century. A lawsuit of 1505 reveals that the immediate reaction of a carrier, who had money stolen from his pack while lodging at an inn in St. Ives, Huntingdonshire, was to look for an astrologer to help him identify the thief. He failed to find one among the clerks of Cambridge and was forced to go on to London to get a horoscope cast. But he clearly assumed that facilities would be available. (The astrologer he found was described as a 'necromancer' and it may be that some of the 'necromancers' of the late Middle Ages had also operated by astrological means; it was common for them to be described as 'calculating' the whereabouts of lost goods.) Yet sixteenth-century astrology still retained aristocratic associations. The most famous Elizabethan practitioner, John Dee, was no back-alley quack, but the confidant of the Queen and her ministers, though he also gave advice to humbler persons. As late as 1603, Sir Christopher Heydon, the astrological writer, declared that astrology had not "much conversed at any time with the mean and vulgar sort, but … hath been ever most familiar with great personages, princes, kings and emperors." But by this date there was a large, though indeterminate, number of low-level consultants scattered through the country, claiming to operate by astrological methods, and substantially patronised by a popular and unsophisticated clientele.

In practice many of these were indistinguishable from the village wizards. Astrological treatises in English were uncommon before the mid-seventeenth century, so it is doubtful if the learning of earlier would-be astrologers can have amounted to very much. Many, when apprehended by the authorities, proved to be utterly ignorant of the principles of the art which they claimed to practise. Others operated on the basis of a small collection of tattered magical recipes and astrological figures bequeathed by some earlier practitioner. Stephen Trefulacke, for example, who was imprisoned in 1591, proved to be carrying an extensive reference library: two Ephemerides, Arcandam, a translation of the Judgment of Nativities by the Frenchman, Ogier Ferrier, and a variety of such miscellaneous formulae as

figures to know how long one shall live and whether they shall obtain the treasures hoped for; figures to know things lost; a book of conjuration for divers things, … sundry conjurations of raising spirits and binding them; … figures to know whether a man be dead or alive or whether he has another wife; to obtain the love of any woman and other like matters.

This was an imposing if heterogeneous armoury. By contrast, there were cheerful impostors who knew no astrology at all, like John Steward, an exschoolmaster, living at Knaresborough in 1510, and frequently consulted in cases of theft. He readily confessed that he tried to impress clients by pretending to consult a book of astronomy, but that in fact "he could nothing do" although by good luck things did sometimes turn out as he predicted. Astrology was similarly claimed as the basis of his procedures by Thomas Lufkyn, to whom women flocked in Maidstone in 1558, "as it were to a God to know all secrets, past and to come." He was in fact quite innocent of any astrological knowledge, despite his readiness to predict the number of husbands and children his clients would have, and to prophesy death in the coming month for others. Even the notorious 'Doctor' John Lambe, Buckingham's confidant, when examined by the Royal College of Physicians in 1627 proved to be ignorant of the astrological science he professed.

Pretenders of this sort continued to be common, even in the later seventeenth century, when the dissemination of astrological guides in English made it easy enough for those with only a modest education to take up the art. Elias Ashmole complained in 1652 that astrology was being debased by the existence of "divers illiterate professors" who gave the subject an undeserved bad name; and similar protests continued to be made by many serious practitioners. They had in mind such charlatans as the wandering fortune-teller who caused havoc in a Lincoln-shire town in 1695 by informing some of his clients that they were in imminent danger of death, and assuring others that they were undoubtedly bewitched. His equipment comprised some mouldy old almanacs, astrological schemes, and a copy of Wingate's Arithmetic.

But apart from the score or so of prominent practitioners who wrote books on the subject and conducted large-scale London practices, there were many provincial figures who were genuinely acquainted with the basic principles of judicial astrology. Edward Banbury, for example, a Glastonbury apothecary, was asked in 1653 to help in a case of stolen goods. He looked in a book, and wrote out a note, for which he charged two shillings. Accused before the quarter sessions of practising magic, he protested that he worked "according to the rules of astrology and not by a diabolical art." He may in fact have been a pupil of William Lilly. Not far away was Jasper Bale of Cheddon Fitz-paine, near Taunton, who also purported to find stolen goods by 'rules of astrology', though with a uniform lack of success. Such people could be found in most parts of England. William Ramesey, physician to Charles II, thought there were astrologers "in every town and country" [W. Ramesey, Some Physical Considerations of the Matter, Origination, and Severall Species of Wormes, 1668]. There were after all several hundred almanacmakers in the seventeenth century and many of these were practising astrologers. But there must have been far more practitioners at a humbler level. So often it is only an accident which makes us aware of their existence at all. Edward Ashmore, for example, a Nottingham cordwainer in the 1680s, is only known because he happened to be involved in a Chancery suit, during which his astrological activities were exposed in an effort to discredit him as a witness. The resulting depositions reveal that Ashmore had given hundreds of consultations during the course of his career.

The elite of the astrological profession, however, was to be found in London, and it was the mid-seventeenth century which saw it at the peak of its influence. How far the activities of William Lilly and his associates constituted a genuine astrological revival, how far the Interregnum merely brought into the open what had long been practised underground, is difficult to determine. Lilly himself disparaged the achievements of his predecessors and was happy to see himself as the chief restorer of "this art which was almost lost, not only here but almost all Europe over." Other contemporary testimony supports the view that astrology attained an unprecedented vogue during the Interregnum. Judicial astrology, thought Nathanael Homes in 1652, had been "heeded more of late with us than ever was (to our shame let it be spoken) in any Christian Commonwealth since the Creation." It was, agreed Thomas Gataker in the following year, "a practice grown of late with us into great esteem." And, looking back from the next century, Daniel Defoe asserted that in the years immediately before the Great Plague of 1665 "the people … were more addicted to prophecies and astrological conjurations … than ever they were before or since."