By Charles Dudley Warner

Queen Elizabeth being dead about ten o'clock in the morning, March 24,

1603, Sir Robert Cary posted away, unsent, to King James of Scotland to

inform him of the “accident,” and got made a baron of the realm for his

ride. On his way down to take possession of his new kingdom the king

distributed the honor of knighthood right and left liberally; at

Theobald's he created eight-and-twenty knights, of whom Sir Richard

Baker, afterwards the author of “A Chronicle of the Kings of England,”

was one. “God knows how many hundreds he made the first year,” says the

chronicler, “but it was indeed fit to give vent to the passage of Honour,

which during Queen Elizabeth's reign had been so stopped that scarce any

county of England had knights enow to make a jury.”

Sir Richard Baker was born in 1568, and died in 1645; his “Chronicle”

appeared in 1641. It was brought down to the death of James in 1625,

when, he having written the introduction to the life of Charles I, the

storm of the season caused him to “break off in amazement,” for he had

thought the race of “Stewards” likely to continue to the “world's end”;

and he never resumed his pen. In the reign of James two things lost their

lustre--the exercise of tilting, which Elizabeth made a special

solemnity, and the band of Yeomen of the Guard, choicest persons both for

stature and other good parts, who graced the court of Elizabeth; James

“was so intentive to Realities that he little regarded shows,” and in his

time these came utterly to be neglected. The virgin queen was the last

ruler who seriously regarded the pomps and splendors of feudalism.

It was characteristic of the age that the death of James, which occurred

in his fifty-ninth year, should have been by rumor attributed to

“poyson”; but “being dead, and his body opened, there was no sign at all

of poyson, his inward parts being all sound, but that his Spleen was a

little faulty, which might be cause enough to cast him into an Ague: the

ordinary high-way, especially in old bo'dies, to a natural death.”

The chronicler records among the men of note of James's time Sir Francis

Vere, “who as another Hannibal, with his one eye, could see more in the

Martial Discipline than common men can do with two”; Sir Edward Coke; Sir

Francis Bacon, “who besides his profounder book, of Novum Organum, hath

written the reign of King Henry the Seventh, in so sweet a style, that

like Manna, it pleaseth the tast of all palats”; William Camden, whose

Description of Britain “seems to keep Queen Elizabeth alive after death”;

“and to speak it in a word, the Trojan Horse was not fuller of Heroick

Grecians, than King James his Reign was full of men excellent in all

kindes of Learning.” Among these was an old university acquaintance of

Baker's, “Mr. John Dunne, who leaving Oxford, lived at the Innes of

Court, not dissolute, but very neat; a great Visitor of Ladies, a great

frequenter of Playes, a great writer of conceited Verses; until such

times as King James taking notice of the pregnancy of his Wit, was a

means that he betook him to the study of Divinity, and thereupon

proceeding Doctor, was made Dean of Pauls; and became so rare a Preacher,

that he was not only commended, but even admired by all who heard him.”

The times of Elizabeth and James were visited by some awful casualties

and portents. From December, 1602, to the December following, the plague

destroyed 30,518 persons in London; the same disease that in the sixth

year of Elizabeth killed 20,500, and in the thirty-sixth year 17,890,

besides the lord mayor and three aldermen. In January, 1606, a mighty

whale came up the Thames within eight miles of London, whose body, seen

divers times above water, was judged to be longer than the largest ship

on the river; “but when she tasted the fresh water and scented the Land,

she returned into the sea.” Not so fortunate was a vast whale cast upon

the Isle of Thanet, in Kent, in 1575, which was “twenty Ells long, and

thirteen foot broad from the belly to the backbone, and eleven foot

between the eyes. One of his eyes being taken out of his head was more

than a cart with six horses could draw; the Oyl being boyled out of his

head was Parmacittee.” Nor the monstrous fish cast ashore in Lincolnshire

in 1564, which measured six yards between the eyes and had a tail fifteen

feet broad; “twelve men stood upright in his mouth to get the Oyl.” In

1612 a comet appeared, which in the opinion of Dr. Bainbridge, the great

mathematician of Oxford, was as far above the moon as the moon is above

the earth, and the sequel of it was that infinite slaughters and

devastations followed it both in Germany and other countries. In 1613, in

Standish, in Lancashire, a maiden child was born having four legs, four

arms, and one head with two faces--the one before, the other behind, like

the picture of Janus. (One thinks of the prodigies that presaged the

birth of Glendower.) Also, the same year, in Hampshire, a carpenter,

lying in bed with his wife and a young child, “was himself and the childe

both burned to death with a sudden lightning, no fire appearing outwardly

upon him, and yet lay burning for the space of almost three days till he

was quite consumed to ashes.” This year the Globe playhouse, on the

Bankside, was burned, and the year following the new playhouse, the

Fortune, in Golding Lane, “was by negligence of a candle, clean burned

down to the ground.” In this year also, 1614, the town of

Stratford-on-Avon was burned. One of the strangest events, however,

happened in the first year of Elizabeth (1558), when “dyed Sir Thomas

Cheney, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, of whom it is reported for a

certain, that his pulse did beat more than three quarters of an hour

after he was dead, as strongly as if he had been still alive.” In 1580 a

strange apparition happened in Somersetshire--three score personages all

clothed in black, a furlong in distance from those that beheld them; “and

after their appearing, and a little while tarrying, they vanished away,

but immediately another strange company, in like manner, color, and

number appeared in the same place, and they encountered one another and

so vanished away. And the third time appeared that number again, all in

bright armour, and encountered one another, and so vanished away. This

was examined before Sir George Norton, and sworn by four honest men that

saw it, to be true.” Equally well substantiated, probably, was what

happened in Herefordshire in 1571: “A field of three acres, in Blackmore,

with the Trees and Fences, moved from its place and passed over another

field, traveling in the highway that goeth to Herne, and there stayed.”

Herefordshire was a favorite place for this sort of exercise of nature.

In 1575 the little town of Kinnaston was visited by an earthquake: “On

the seventeenth of February at six o'clock of the evening, the earth

began to open and a Hill with a Rock under it (making at first a great

bellowing noise, which was heard a great way off) lifted itself up a

great height, and began to travel, bearing along with it the Trees that

grew upon it, the Sheep-folds, and Flocks of Sheep abiding there at the

same time. In the place from whence it was first moved, it left a gaping

distance forty foot broad, and fourscore Ells long; the whole Field was

about twenty Acres. Passing along, it overthrew a Chappell standing in

the way, removed an Ewe-Tree planted in the Churchyard, from the West

into the East; with the like force it thrust before it High-wayes,

Sheep-folds, Hedges, and Trees, made Tilled ground Pasture, and again

turned Pasture into Tillage. Having walked in this sort from Saturday in

the evening, till Monday noon, it then stood still.” It seems not

improbable that Birnam wood should come to Dunsinane.

It was for an age of faith, for a people whose credulity was fed on such

prodigies and whose imagination glowed at such wonderful portents, that

Shakespeare wrote, weaving into the realities of sense those awful

mysteries of the supernatural which hovered not far away from every

Englishman of his time.

Shakespeare was born in 1564, when Elizabeth had been six years on the

throne, and he died in 1616, nine years before James I., of the faulty

spleen, was carried to the royal chapel in Westminster, “with great

solemnity, but with greater lamentation.” Old Baker, who says of himself

that he was the unworthiest of the knights made at Theobald's,

condescends to mention William Shakespeare at the tail end of the men of

note of Elizabeth's time. The ocean is not more boundless, he affirms,

than the number of men of note of her time; and after he has finished

with the statesmen (“an exquisite statesman for his own ends was Robert

Earl of Leicester, and for his Countries good, Sir William Cecill, Lord

Burleigh”), the seamen, the great commanders, the learned gentlemen and

writers (among them Roger Askam, who had sometime been schoolmaster to

Queen Elizabeth, but, taking too great delight in gaming and

cock-fighting, lived and died in mean estate), the learned divines and

preachers, he concludes: “After such men, it might be thought ridiculous

to speak of Stage-players; but seeing excellency in the meanest things

deserve remembring, and Roscius the Comedian is recorded in History with

such commendation, it may be allowed us to do the like with some of our

Nation. Richard Bourbidge and Edward Allen, two such actors as no age

must ever look to see the like; and to make their Comedies compleat,

Richard Tarleton, who for the Part called the Clowns Part, never had his

match, never will have. For Writers of Playes, and such as have been

players themselves, William Shakespeare and Benjamin Johnson have

especially left their Names recommended to posterity.”

Richard Bourbidge (or Burbadge) was the first of the great English tragic

actors, and was the original of the greater number of Shakespeare's

heroes--Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Shylock, Macbeth, Richard III., Romeo,

Brutus, etc. Dick Tarleton, one of the privileged scapegraces of social

life, was regarded by his contemporaries as the most witty of clowns and

comedians. The clown was a permitted character in the old theatres, and

intruded not only between the acts, but even into the play itself, with

his quips and antics. It is probable that he played the part of clown,

grave-digger, etc., in Shakespeare's comedies, and no doubt took

liberties with his parts. It is thought that part of Hamlet's advice to

the players--“and let those that play your clowns speak no more than is

set down for them,” etc.--was leveled at Tarleton.

The question is often asked, but I consider it an idle one, whether

Shakespeare was appreciated in his own day as he is now. That the age,

was unable to separate him from itself, and see his great stature, is

probable; that it enjoyed him with a sympathy to which we are strangers

there is no doubt. To us he is inexhaustible. The more we study him, the

more are we astonished at his multiform genius. In our complex

civilization, there is no development of passion, or character, or trait

of human nature, no social evolution, that does not find expression

somewhere in those marvelous plays; and yet it is impossible for us to

enter into a full, sympathetic enjoyment of those plays unless we can in

some measure recreate for ourselves the atmosphere in which they were

written. To superficial observation great geniuses come into the world at

rare intervals in history, in a manner independent of what we call the

progress of the race. It may be so; but the form the genius shall take is

always determined by the age in which it appears, and its expression is

shaped by the environments. Acquaintance with the Bedouin desert life of

today, which has changed little for three thousand years, illumines the

book of Job like an electric light. Modern research into Hellenic and

Asiatic life has given a new meaning to the Iliad and the Odyssey, and

greatly enhanced our enjoyment of them. A fair comprehension of the

Divina Commedia is impossible without some knowledge of the factions that

rent Florence; of the wars of Guelf and Ghibelline; of the spirit that

banished Dante, and gave him an humble tomb in Ravenna instead of a

sepulchre in the pantheon of Santa Croce. Shakespeare was a child of his

age; it had long been preparing for him; its expression culminated in

him. It was essentially a dramatic age. He used the accumulated materials

of centuries. He was playwright as well as poet. His variety and

multiform genius cannot otherwise be accounted for. He called in the

coinage of many generations, and reissued it purified and unalloyed,

stamped in his own mint. There was a Hamlet probably, there were

certainly Romeos and Juliets, on the stage before Shakespeare. In him

were received the imaginations, the inventions, the aspirations, the

superstitions, the humors, the supernatural intimations; in him met the

converging rays of the genius of his age, as in a lens, to be sent onward

thenceforth in an ever-broadening stream of light.

It was his fortune to live not only in a dramatic age, but in a

transition age, when feudalism was passing away, but while its shows and

splendors could still be seriously comprehended. The dignity that doth

hedge a king was so far abated that royalty could be put upon the stage

as a player's spectacle; but the reality of kings and queens and court

pageantry was not so far past that it did not appeal powerfully to the

imaginations of the frequenters of the Globe, the Rose, and the Fortune.

They had no such feeling as we have in regard to the pasteboard kings and

queens who strut their brief hour before us in anachronic absurdity. But,

besides that he wrote in the spirit of his age, Shakespeare wrote in the

language and the literary methods of his time. This is not more evident

in the contemporary poets than in the chroniclers of that day. They all

delighted in ingenuities of phrase, in neat turns and conceits; it was a

compliment then to be called a “conceited” writer.

Of all the guides to Shakespeare's time, there is none more profitable or

entertaining than William Harrison, who wrote for Holinshed's chronicle

“The Description of England,” as it fell under his eyes from 1577 to

1587. Harrison's England is an unfailing mine of information for all the

historians of the sixteenth century; and in the edition published by the

New Shakespeare Society, and edited, with a wealth of notes and

contemporary references, by Mr. Frederick J. Furnivall, it is a new

revelation of Shakespeare's England to the general reader.

Harrison himself is an interesting character, and trustworthy above the

general race of chroniclers. He was born in 1534, or, to use his

exactness of statement, “upon the 18th of April, hora ii, minut 4,

Secunde 56, at London, in Cordwainer streete, otherwise called

bowe-lane.” This year was also remarkable as that in which “King Henry 8

polleth his head; after whom his household and nobility, with the rest of

his subjects do the like.” It was the year before Anne Boleyn, haled away

to the Tower, accused, condemned, and executed in the space of fourteen

days, “with sigheing teares” said to the rough Duke of Norfolk, “Hither I

came once my lord, to fetch a crown imperial; but now to receive, I hope,

a crown immortal.” In 1544, the boy was at St. Paul's school; the litany

in the English tongue, by the king's command, was that year sung openly

in St. Paul's, and we have a glimpse of Harrison with the other children,

enforced to buy those books, walking in general procession, as was

appointed, before the king went to Boulogne. Harrison was a student at

both Oxford and Cambridge, taking the degree of bachelor of divinity at

the latter in 1569, when he had been an Oxford M.A. of seven years'

standing. Before this he was household chaplain to Sir William Brooke,

Lord Cobham, who gave him, in 1588-89, the rectory of Radwinter, in

Essex, which he held till his death, in 1593. In 1586 he was installed

canon of Windsor. Between 1559 and 1571 he married Marion Isebrande,--of

whom he said in his will, referring to the sometime supposed unlawfulness

of priests' marriages, “by the laws of God I take and repute in all

respects for my true and lawful wife.” At Radwinter, the old parson,

working in his garden, collected Roman coins, wrote his chronicles, and

expressed his mind about the rascally lawyers of Essex, to whom flowed

all the wealth of the land. The lawyers in those days stirred up

contentions, and then reaped the profits. “Of all that ever I knew in

Essex,” says Harrison, “Denis and Mainford excelled, till John of Ludlow,

alias Mason, came in place, unto whom in comparison these two were but

children.” This last did so harry a client for four years that the

latter, still called upon for new fees, “went to bed, and within four

days made an end of his woeful life, even with care and pensiveness.” And

after his death the lawyer so handled his son “that there was never sheep

shorn in May, so near clipped of his fleece present, as he was of many to

come.” The Welsh were the most litigious people. A Welshman would walk up

to London bare-legged, carrying his hose on his neck, to save wear and

because he had no change, importune his countrymen till he got half a

dozen writs, with which he would return to molest his neighbors, though

no one of his quarrels was worth the money he paid for a single writ.

The humblest mechanic of England today has comforts and conveniences

which the richest nobles lacked in Harrison's day, but it was

nevertheless an age of great luxury and extravagance; of brave apparel,

costly and showy beyond that of any Continental people, though wanting in

refined taste; and of mighty banquets, with service of massive plate,

troops of attendants, and a surfeit of rich food and strong drink.

In this luxury the clergy of Harrison's rank did not share. Harrison was

poor on forty pounds a year. He complains that the clergy were taxed more

than ever, the church having become “an ass whereon every man is to ride

to market and cast his wallet.” They paid tenths and first-fruits and

subsidies, so that out of twenty pounds of a benefice the incumbent did

not reserve more than L 13 6s. 8d. for himself and his family. They had

to pay for both prince and laity, and both grumbled at and slandered

them. Harrison gives a good account of the higher clergy; he says the

bishops were loved for their painful diligence in their calling, and that

the clergy of England were reputed on the Continent as learned divines,

skillful in Greek and Hebrew and in the Latin tongue.

There was, however, a scarcity of preachers and ministers in Elizabeth's

time, and their character was not generally high. What could be expected

when covetous patrons canceled their debts to their servants by bestowing

advowsons of benefices upon their bakers, butlers, cooks, grooms, pages,

and lackeys--when even in the universities there was cheating at

elections for scholarships and fellowships, and gifts were for sale! The

morals of the clergy were, however, improved by frequent conferences, at

which the good were praised and the bad reproved; and these conferences

were “a notable spur unto all the ministers, whereby to apply their

books, which otherwise (as in times past) would give themselves to

hawking, hunting, tables, cards, dice, tipling at the ale house,

shooting, and other like vanities.” The clergy held a social rank with

tradespeople; their sons learned trades, and their daughters might go out

to service. Jewell says many of them were the “basest sort of people”

unlearned, fiddlers, pipers, and what not. “Not a few,” says Harrison,

“find fault with our threadbare gowns, as if not our patrons but our

wives were the causes of our woe.” He thinks the ministers will be better

when the patrons are better, and he defends the right of the clergy to

marry and to leave their goods, if they have any, to their widows and

children instead of to the church, or to some school or almshouse. What

if their wives are fond, after the decease of their husbands, to bestow

themselves not so advisedly as their calling requireth; do not duchesses,

countesses, and knights' wives offend in the like fully so often as they?

And Eve, remarks the old philosopher of Radwinter--“Eve will be Eve,

though Adam would say nay.”

The apparel of the clergy, at any rate, was more comely and decent than

it ever was in the popish church, when the priests “went either in divers

colors like players, or in garments of light hue, as yellow, red, green,

etc.; with their shoes piked, their hair crisped, their girdles armed

with silver; their shoes, spurs, bridles, etc., buckled with like metal;

their apparel (for the most part) of silk, and richly furred; their caps

laced and buttoned with gold; so that to meet a priest, in those days,

was to behold a peacock that spreadeth his tail when he danceth before

the hen.”

Hospitality among the clergy was never better used, and it was increased

by their marriage; for the meat and drink were prepared more orderly and

frugally, the household was better looked to, and the poor oftener fed.

There was perhaps less feasting of the rich in bishops' houses, and “it

is thought much peradventure, that some bishops in our time do come short

of the ancient gluttony and prodigality of their predecessors;” but this

is owing to the curtailing of their livings, and the excessive prices

whereunto things are grown.

Harrison spoke his mind about dignitaries. He makes a passing reference

to Thomas a Becket as “the old Cocke of Canturburie,” who did crow in

behalf of the see of Rome, and the “young cockerels of other sees did

imitate his demeanour.” He is glad that images, shrines, and tabernacles

are removed out of churches. The stories in glass windows remain only

because of the cost of replacing them with white panes. He would like to

stop the wakes, guilds, paternities, church-ales, and brides-ales, with

all their rioting, and he thinks they could get on very well without the

feasts of apostles, evangelists, martyrs, the holy-days after Christmas,

Easter, and Whitsuntide, and those of the Virgin Mary, with the rest. “It

is a world to see,” he wrote of 1552, “how ready the Catholicks are to

cast the communion tables out of their churches, which in derision they

call Oysterboards, and to set up altars whereon to say mass.” And he

tells with sinful gravity this tale of a sacrilegious sow: “Upon the 23rd

of August, the high altar of Christ Church in Oxford was trimly decked up

after the popish manner and about the middest of evensong, a sow cometh

into the quire, and pulled all to the ground; for which heinous fact, it

is said she was afterwards beheaded; but to that I am not privy.” Think

of the condition of Oxford when pigs went to mass! Four years after this

there was a sickness in England, of which a third part of the people did

taste, and many clergymen, who had prayed not to live after the death of

Queen Mary, had their desire, the Lord hearing their prayer, says

Harrison, “and intending thereby to give his church a breathing time.”

There were four classes in England--gentlemen, citizens, yeomen, and

artificers or laborers. Besides the nobles, any one can call himself a

gentleman who can live without work and buy a coat of arms--though some

of them “bear a bigger sail than his boat is able to sustain.” The

complaint of sending abroad youth to be educated is an old one; Harrison

says the sons of gentlemen went into Italy, and brought nothing home but

mere atheism, infidelity, vicious conversation, and ambitious, proud

behavior, and retained neither religion nor patriotism. Among citizens

were the merchants, of whom Harrison thought there were too many; for,

like the lawyers, they were no furtherance to the commonwealth, but

raised the price of all commodities. In former, free-trade times, sugar

was sixpence a pound, now it is two shillings sixpence; raisins were one

penny, and now sixpence. Not content with the old European trade, they

have sought out the East and West Indies, and likewise Cathay and

Tartary, whence they pretend, from their now and then suspicious voyages,

they bring home great commodities. But Harrison cannot see that prices

are one whit abated by this enormity, and certainly they carry out of

England the best of its wares.

The yeomen are the stable, free men, who for the most part stay in one

place, working the farms of gentlemen, are diligent, sometimes buy the

land of unthrifty gentlemen, educate their sons to the schools and the

law courts, and leave them money to live without labor. These are the men

that made France afraid. Below these are the laborers and men who work at

trades, who have no voice in the commonwealth, and crowds of young

serving-men who become old beggars, highway-robbers, idle fellows, and

spreaders of all vices. There was a complaint then, as now, that in many

trades men scamped their work, but, on the whole, husbandmen and

artificers had never been so good; only there were too many of them, too

many handicrafts of which the country had no need. It appears to be a

fault all along in history that there are too many of almost every sort

of people.

In Harrison's time the greater part of the building in cities and towns

was of timber, only a few of the houses of the commonalty being of stone.

In an old plate giving a view of the north side of Cheapside, London, in

1638, we see little but quaint gable ends and rows of small windows set

close together. The houses are of wood and plaster, each story

overhanging the other, terminating in sharp pediments; the roofs

projecting on cantilevers, and the windows occupying the whole front of

each of the lower stories. They presented a lively and gay appearance on

holidays, when the pentices of the shop fronts were hung with colored

draperies, and the balconies were crowded with spectators, and every pane

of glass showed a face. In the open country, where timber was scarce, the

houses were, between studs, impaneled with clay-red, white, or blue. One

of the Spaniards who came over in the suite of Philip remarked the large

diet in these homely cottages: “These English,” quoth he, “have their

houses made of sticks and dirt, but they fare commonly so well as the

king.” “Whereby it appeareth,” comments Harrison, “that he liked better

of our good fare in such coarse cabins, than of their own thin diet in

their prince-like habitations and palaces.” The timber houses were

covered with tiles; the other sort with straw or reeds. The fairest

houses were ceiled within with mortar and covered with plaster, the

whiteness and evenness of which excited Harrison's admiration. The walls

were hung with tapestry, arras-work, or painted cloth, whereon were

divers histories, or herbs, or birds, or else ceiled with oak. Stoves had

just begun to be used, and only in some houses of the gentry, “who build

them not to work and feed in, as in Germany and elsewhere, but now and

then to sweat in, as occasion and need shall require.” Glass in windows,

which was then good and cheap, and made even in England, had generally

taken the place of the lattices and of the horn, and of the beryl which

noblemen formerly used in windows. Gentlemen were beginning to build

their houses of brick and stone, in stately and magnificent fashion. The

furniture of the houses had also grown in a manner “passing delicacy,”

and not of the nobility and gentry only, but of the lowest sort. In

noblemen's houses there was abundance of arras, rich hangings of

tapestry, and silver vessels, plate often to the value of one thousand

and two thousand pounds. The knights, gentlemen, and merchants had great

provision of tapestry, Turkie work, pewter, brass, fine linen, and

cupboards of plate worth perhaps a thousand pounds. Even the inferior

artificers and many farmers had learned also to garnish their cupboards

with plate, their joined beds with silk hangings, and their tables with

fine linen--evidences of wealth for which Harrison thanks God and

reproaches no man, though he cannot see how it is brought about, when all

things are grown to such excessive prices.

Old men of Radwinter noted three things marvelously altered in England

within their remembrance. The first was the multitude of chimneys lately

erected; whereas in their young days there were not, always except those

in the religious and manor houses, above two or three chimneys in most

upland towns of the realm; each one made his fire against a reredos in

the hall, where he dined and dressed his meat. The second was the

amendment in lodging. In their youth they lay upon hard straw pallets

covered only with a sheet, and mayhap a dogswain coverlet over them, and

a good round log for pillow. If in seven years after marriage a man could

buy a mattress and a sack of chaff to rest his head on, he thought

himself as well lodged as a lord. Pillows were thought meet only for sick

women. As for servants, they were lucky if they had a sheet over them,

for there was nothing under them to keep the straw from pricking their

hardened hides. The third notable thing was the exchange of treene

(wooden) platters into pewter, and wooden spoons into silver or tin.

Wooden stuff was plenty, but a good farmer would not have above four

pieces of pewter in his house; with all his frugality, he was unable to

pay his rent of four pounds without selling a cow or horse. It was a time

of idleness, and if a farmer at an alehouse, in a bravery to show what he

had, slapped down his purse with six shillings in it, all the rest

together could not match it. But now, says Harrison, though the rent of

four pounds has improved to forty, the farmer has six or seven years'

rent, lying by him, to purchase a new term, garnish his cupboard with

pewter, buy three or four feather-beds, coverlets, carpets of tapestry, a

silver salt, a nest of bowls for wine, and a dozen spoons. All these

things speak of the growing wealth and luxury of the age. Only a little

before this date, in 1568, Lord Buckhurst, who had been ordered to

entertain the Cardinal de Chatillon in Queen Elizabeth's palace at Sheen,

complains of the meanness of the furniture of his rooms. He showed the

officers who preceded the cardinal such furniture and stuff as he had,

but it did not please them. They wanted plate, he had none; such glass

vessels as he had they thought too base. They wanted damask for long

tables, and he had only linen for a square table, and they refused his

square table. He gave the cardinal his only unoccupied tester and

bedstead, and assigned to the bishop the bedstead upon which his wife's

waiting-women did lie, and laid them on the ground. He lent the cardinal

his own basin and ewer, candlesticks from his own table,

drinking-glasses, small cushions, and pots for the kitchen. My Lord of

Leicester sent down two pair of fine sheets for the cardinal and one pair

for the bishop.

Harrison laments three things in his day: the enhancing of rents, the

daily oppression of poor tenants by the lords of manors, and the practice

of usury--a trade brought in by the Jews, but now practiced by almost

every Christian, so that he is accounted a fool that doth lend his money

for nothing. He prays the reader to help him, in a lawful manner, to hang

up all those that take cent. per cent. for money. Another grievance, and

most sorrowful of all, is that many gentlemen, men of good port and

countenance, to the injury of the farmers and commonalty, actually turn

Braziers, butchers, tanners, sheep-masters, and woodmen. Harrison also

notes the absorption of lands by the rich; the decay of houses in the

country, which comes of the eating up of the poor by the rich; the

increase of poverty; the difficulty a poor man had to live on an acre of

ground; his forced contentment with bread made of oats and barley, and

the divers places that formerly had good tenants and now were vacant,

hop-yards and gardens.

Harrison says it is not for him to describe the palaces of Queen

Elizabeth; he dare hardly peep in at her gates. Her houses are of brick

and stone, neat and well situated, but in good masonry not to be compared

to those of Henry VIII's building; they are rather curious to the eye,

like paper-works, than substantial for continuance. Her court is more

magnificent than any other in Europe, whether you regard the rich and

infinite furniture of the household, the number of officers, or the

sumptuous entertainments. And the honest chronicler is so struck with

admiration of the virtuous beauty of the maids of honor that he cannot

tell whether to award preeminence to their amiable countenances or to

their costliness of attire, between which there is daily conflict and

contention. The courtiers of both sexes have the use of sundry languages

and an excellent vein of writing. Would to God the rest of their lives

and conversation corresponded with these gifts! But the courtiers, the

most learned, are the worst men when they come abroad that any man shall

hear or read of. Many of the gentlewomen have sound knowledge of Greek

and Latin, and are skillful in Spanish, Italian, and French; and the

noblemen even surpass them. The old ladies of the court avoid idleness by

needlework, spinning of silk, or continual reading of the Holy Scriptures

or of histories, and writing diverse volumes of their own, or translating

foreign works into English or Latin; and the young ladies, when they are

not waiting on her majesty, “in the mean time apply their lutes,

citherns, pricksong, and all kinds of music.” The elders are skillful in

surgery and the distillation of waters, and sundry other artificial

practices pertaining to the ornature and commendation of their bodies;

and when they are at home they go into the kitchen and supply a number of

delicate dishes of their own devising, mostly after Portuguese receipts;

and they prepare bills of fare (a trick lately taken up) to give a brief

rehearsal of all the dishes of every course. I do not know whether this

was called the “higher education of women” at the time.

In every office of the palaces is a Bible, or book of acts of the church,

or chronicle, for the use of whoever comes in, so that the court looks

more like a university than a palace. Would to God the houses of the

nobles were ruled like the queen's! The nobility are followed by great

troops of serving-men in showy liveries; and it is a goodly sight to see

them muster at court, which, being filled with them, “is made like to the

show of a peacock's tail in the full beauty, or of some meadow garnished

with infinite kinds and diversity of pleasant flowers.” Such was the

discipline of Elizabeth's court that any man who struck another within it

had his right hand chopped off by the executioner in a most horrible

manner.

The English have always had a passion for gardens and orchards. In the

Roman time grapes abounded and wine was plenty, but the culture

disappeared after the Conquest. From the time of Henry IV. to Henry VIII.

vegetables were little used, but in Harrison's day the use of melons,

pompions, radishes, cucumbers, cabbages, turnips, and the like was

revived. They had beautiful flower-gardens annexed to the houses, wherein

were grown also rare and medicinal herbs; it was a wonder to see how many

strange herbs, plants, and fruits were daily brought from the Indies,

America and the Canaries. Every rich man had great store of flowers, and

in one garden might be seen from three hundred to four hundred medicinal

herbs. Men extol the foreign herbs to the neglect of the native, and

especially tobacco, “which is not found of so great efficacy as they

write.” In the orchards were plums, apples, pears, walnuts, filberts; and

in noblemen's orchards store of strange fruit-apricots, almonds, peaches,

figs, and even in some oranges, lemons, and capers. Grafters also were at

work with their artificial mixtures, “dallying, as it were, with nature

and her course, as if her whole trade were perfectly known unto them: of

hard fruits they will make soft, of sour sweet, of sweet yet more

delicate; bereaving also some of their kernels, others of their cores,

and finally endowing them with the flavor of musk, amber, or sweet spices

at their pleasure.” Gardeners turn annual into perpetual herbs, and such

pains are they at that they even used dish-water for plants. The Gardens

of Hesperides are surely not equal to these. Pliny tells of a rose that

had sixty leaves on one bud, but in 1585 there was a rose in Antwerp that

had one hundred and eighty leaves; and Harrison might have had a slip of

it for ten pounds, but he thought it a “tickle hazard.” In his own little

garden, of not above three hundred square feet, he had near three hundred

samples, and not one of them of the common, or usually to be had.

Our kin beyond sea have always been stout eaters of solid food, and in

Elizabeth's time their tables were more plentifully laden than those of

any other nation. Harrison scientifically accounts for their inordinate

appetite. “The situation of our region,” he says, “lying near unto the

north, does cause the heat of our stomachs to be of somewhat greater

force; therefore our bodies do crave a little more ample nourishment than

the inhabitants of the hotter regions are accustomed withal, whose

digestive force is not altogether so vehement, because their internal

heat is not so strong as ours, which is kept in by the coldness of the

air, that from time to time (specially in winter) doth environ our

bodies.” The north Britons in old times were accustomed often to great

abstinence, and lived when in the woods on roots and herbs. They used

sometimes a confection, “whereof so much as a bean would qualify their

hunger above common expectation”; but when they had nothing to qualify it

with, they crept into the marsh water up to their chins, and there

remained a long time, “only to qualify the heat of their stomachs by

violence.”

In Harrison's day the abstemious Welsh had learned to eat like the

English, and the Scotch exceeded the latter in “over much and

distemperate gormandize.” The English eat all they can buy, there being

no restraint of any meat for religion's sake or for public order. The

white meats--milk, butter, and cheese--though very dear, are reputed as

good for inferior people, but the more wealthy feed upon the flesh of all

sorts of cattle and all kinds of fish. The nobility (“whose cooks are for

the most part musical-headed Frenchmen and strangers “) exceed in number

of dishes and change of meat. Every day at dinner there is beef, mutton,

veal, lamb, kid, pork, conie, capon, pig, or as many of these as the

season yielded, besides deer and wildfowl, and fish, and sundry

delicacies “wherein the sweet hand of the seafaring Portingale is not

wanting.” The food was brought in commonly in silver vessels at tables of

the degree of barons, bishops, and upwards, and referred first to the

principal personage, from whom it passed to the lower end of the table,

the guests not eating of all, but choosing what each liked; and nobody

stuffed himself. The dishes were then sent to the servants, and the

remains of the feast went to the poor, who lay waiting at the gates in

great numbers.

Drink was served in pots, goblets, jugs, and bowls of silver in

noblemen's houses, and also in Venice glasses. It was not set upon the

table, but the cup was brought to each one who thirsted; he called for

such a cup of drink as he wished, and delivered it again to one of the

by-standers, who made it clean by pouring out what remained, and restored

it to the sideboard. This device was to prevent great drinking, which

might ensue if the full pot stood always at the elbow. But this order was

not used in noblemen's halls, nor in any order under the degree of knight

or squire of great revenue. It was a world to see how the nobles

preferred to gold and silver, which abounded, the new Venice glass,

whence a great trade sprang up with Murano that made many rich. The

poorest even would have glass, but home-made--a foolish expense, for the

glass soon went to bits, and the pieces turned to no profit. Harrison

wanted the philosopher's stone to mix with this molten glass and toughen

it.

There were multitudes of dependents fed at the great houses, and

everywhere, according to means, a wide-open hospitality was maintained.

Froude gives a notion of the style of living in earlier times by citing

the details of a feast given when George Neville, brother of Warwick the

king-maker, was made archbishop of York. There were present, including

servants, thirty-five hundred persons. These are a few of the things used

at the banquet: three hundred quarters of wheat, three hundred tuns of

ale, one hundred and four tuns of wine, eighty oxen, three thousand

geese, two thousand pigs,--four thousand conies, four thousand

heronshaws, four thousand venison pasties cold and five hundred hot, four

thousand cold tarts, four thousand cold custards, eight seals, four

porpoises, and so on.

The merchants and gentlemen kept much the same tables as the nobles,

especially at feasts, but when alone were content with a few dishes. They

also desired the dearest food, and would have no meat from the butcher's

but the most delicate, while their list of fruits, cakes, Gates, and

outlandish confections is as long as that at any modern banquet. Wine ran

in excess. There were used fifty-six kinds of light wines, like the

French, and thirty of the strong sorts, like the Italian and Eastern. The

stronger the wine, the better it was liked. The strongest and best was in

old times called theologicum, because it was had from the clergy and

religious men, to whose houses the laity sent their bottles to be filled,

sure that the religious would neither drink nor be served with the worst;

for the merchant would have thought his soul should have gone straightway

to the devil if he had sent them any but the best. The beer served at

noblemen's tables was commonly a year old, and sometimes two, but this

age was not usual. In households generally it was not under a month old,

for beer was liked stale if it were not sour, while bread was desired as

new as possible so that it was not hot.

The husbandman and artificer ate such meat as they could easiest come by

and have most quickly ready; yet the banquets of the trades in London

were not inferior to those of the nobility. The husbandmen, however,

exceed in profusion, and it is incredible to tell what meat is consumed

at bridals, purifications, and such like odd meetings; but each guest

brought his own provision, so that the master of the house had only to

provide bread, drink, houseroom, and fire. These lower classes Harrison

found very friendly at their tables--merry without malice, plain without

Italian or French subtlety--so that it would do a man good to be in

company among them; but if they happen to stumble upon a piece of venison

or a cup of wine or very strong beer, they do not stick to compare

themselves with the lord-mayor--and there is no public man in any city of

Europe that may compare with him in port and countenance during the term

of his office.

Harrison commends the great silence used at the tables of the wiser sort,

and generally throughout the realm, and likewise the moderate eating and

drinking. But the poorer countrymen do babble somewhat at table, and

mistake ribaldry and loquacity for wit and wisdom, and occasionally are

cup-shotten; and what wonder, when they who have hard diet and small

drink at home come to such opportunities at a banquet! The wealthier sort

in the country entertain their visitors from afar, however long they

stay, with as hearty a welcome the last day as the first; and the

countrymen contrast this hospitality with that of their London cousins,

who joyfully receive them the first day, tolerate them the second, weary

of them the third, and wish 'em at the devil after four days.

The gentry usually ate wheat bread, of which there were four kinds, and

the poor generally bread made of rye, barley, and even oats and acorns.

Corn was getting so dear, owing to the forestallers and middlemen, that,

says the historian, “if the world last a while after this rate, wheat and

rye will be no grain for poor men to feed on; and some catterpillers

[two-legged speculators] there are that can say so much already.”

The great drink of the realm was, of course, beer (and it is to be noted

that a great access of drunkenness came into England with the importation

much later of Holland gin) made from barley, hops, and water, and upon

the brewing of it Harrison dwells lovingly, and devotes many pages to a

description of the process, especially as “once in a month practiced by

my wife and her maid servants.” They ground eight bushels of malt, added

half a bushel of wheat meal, half a bushel of oat meal, poured in eighty

gallons of water, then eighty gallons more, and a third eighty gallons,

and boiled with a couple of pounds of hops. This, with a few spices

thrown in, made three hogsheads of good beer, meet for a poor man who had

only forty pounds a year. This two hundred gallons of beer cost

altogether twenty shillings; but although he says his wife brewed it

“once in a month,” whether it lasted a whole month the parson does not

say. He was particular about the water used: the Thames is best, the

marsh worst, and clear spring water next worst; “the fattest standing

water is always the best.” Cider and perry were made in some parts of

England, and a delicate sort of drink in Wales, called metheglin; but

there was a kind of “swish-swash” made in Essex from honey-combs and

water, called mead, which differed from the metheglin as chalk from

cheese.

In Shakespeare's day much less time was spent in eating and drinking than

formerly, when, besides breakfast in the forenoon and dinners, there were

“beverages” or “nuntion” after dinner, and supper before going to bed

--“a toie brought in by hardie Canutus,” who was a gross feeder.

Generally there were, except for the young who could not fast till

dinnertime, only two meals daily, dinner and supper. Yet the Normans had

brought in the habit of sitting long at the table--a custom not yet

altogether abated, since the great people, especially at banquets, sit

till two or three o'clock in the afternoon; so that it is a hard matter

to rise and go to evening prayers and return in time for supper.

Harrison does not make much account of the early meal called “breakfast”;

but Froude says that in Elizabeth's time the common hour of rising, in

the country, was four o'clock, summer and winter, and that breakfast was

at five, after which the laborers went to work and the gentlemen to

business. The Earl and Countess of Northumberland breakfasted together

and alone at seven. The meal consisted of a quart of ale, a quart of

wine, and a chine of beef; a loaf of bread is not mentioned, but we hope

(says Froude) it may be presumed. The gentry dined at eleven and supped

at five. The merchants took dinner at noon, and, in London, supped at

six. The university scholars out of term ate dinner at ten. The

husbandmen dined at high noon, and took supper at seven or eight. As for

the poorer sort, it is needless to talk of their order of repast, for

they dined and supped when they could. The English usually began meals

with the grossest food and ended with the most delicate, taking first the

mild wines and ending with the hottest; but the prudent Scot did

otherwise, making his entrance with the best, so that he might leave the

worse to the menials.

I will close this portion of our sketch of English manners with an

extract from the travels of Hentzner, who visited England in 1598, and

saw the great queen go in state to chapel at Greenwich, and afterwards

witnessed the laying of the table for her dinner. It was on Sunday. The

queen was then in her sixty-fifth year, and “very majestic,” as she

walked in the splendid procession of barons, earls, and knights of the

garter: “her face, oblong, fair, but wrinkled; her eyes small, yet black

and pleasant; her nose a little hooked; her lips narrow, and her teeth

black (a defect the English seem subject to from their great use of

sugar). She had in her ears two pearls with very rich drops; she wore

false hair, and that red; upon her head she had a small crown, reported

to be made of some of the gold of the celebrated Lunebourg table. Her

bosom was uncovered, as all the English ladies have it till they marry;

and she had on a necklace of exceeding fine jewels; her hands were small,

her fingers long, and her stature neither small nor low; her air was

stately, her manner of speaking mild and obliging. That day she was

dressed in white silk, bordered with pearls of the size of beans, and

over it a mantle of black silk, shot with silver threads; her train was

very long, and the end of it borne by a marchioness; instead of a chain

she had an oblong collar of gold and jewels.” As she swept on in this

magnificence, she spoke graciously first to one, then to another, and

always in the language of any foreigner she addressed; whoever spoke to

her kneeled, and wherever she turned her face, as she was going along,

everybody fell down on his knees. When she pulled off her glove to give

her hand to be kissed, it was seen to be sparkling with rings and jewels.

The ladies of the court, handsome and well shaped, followed, dressed for

the most part in white; and on either side she was guarded by fifty

gentlemen pensioners with gilt battle-axes. In the ante-chapel, where she

graciously received petitions, there was an acclaim of “Long live Queen

Elizabeth!” to which she answered, “I thank you, my good people.” The

music in the chapel was excellent, and the whole service was over in half

an hour. This is Hentzner's description of the setting out of her table:

“A gentleman entered the room bearing a rod, and along with him another

who had a table-cloth, which, after they had both kneeled three times, he

spread upon the table; and after kneeling again they both retired. Then

came two others, one with the rod again, the other with a salt-cellar, a

plate, and bread; and when they had kneeled as the others had done, and

placed what was brought upon the table, they two retired with the same

ceremonies performed by the first. At last came an unmarried lady (we

were told she was a countess) and along with her a married one, bearing a

tasting-knife; the former was dressed in white silk, who, when she had

prostrated herself three times, in the most graceful manner approached

the table, and rubbed the plates with bread and salt, with as much awe as

if the Queen had been present. When they had waited there a little while

the Yeomen of the Guard entered, bare-headed, clothed in scarlet, with a

golden rose upon their backs, bringing in at each turn a course of

twenty-four dishes, served in plate, most of it gilt; these dishes were

received by a gentleman in the same order they were brought, and placed

upon the table, while the Lady Taster gave to each of the guard a

mouthful to eat, of the particular dish he had brought, for fear of, any

poison. During the time that this guard, which consists of the tallest

and stoutest men that can be found in all England, being carefully

selected for this service, were bringing dinner, twelve trumpets and two

kettle-drums made the hall ring for half an hour together. At the end of

all this ceremonial, a number of unmarried ladies appeared, who with

particular solemnity lifted the meat off the table and conveyed it into

the Queen's inner and more private chamber, where, after she had chosen

for herself, the rest goes to the Ladies of the court.”

The queen dined and supped alone, with very few attendants.

II

We now approach perhaps the most important matter in this world, namely,

dress. In nothing were the increasing wealth and extravagance of the

period more shown than in apparel. And in it we are able to study the

origin of the present English taste for the juxtaposition of striking and

uncomplementary colors. In Coryat's “Crudities,” 1611, we have an

Englishman's contrast of the dress of the Venetians and the English. The

Venetians adhered, without change, to their decent fashion, a thousand

years old, wearing usually black: the slender doublet made close to the

body, without much quilting; the long hose plain, the jerkin also

black--but all of the most costly stuffs Christendom can furnish, satin

and taffetas, garnished with the best lace. Gravity and good taste

characterized their apparel. “In both these things,” says Coryat, “they

differ much from us Englishmen. For whereas they have but one color, we

use many more than are in the rainbow, all the most light, garish, and

unseemly colors that are in the world. Also for fashion we are much

inferior to them. For we wear more fantastical fashions than any nation

under the sun doth, the French only excepted.” On festival days, in

processions, the senators wore crimson damask gowns, with flaps of

crimson velvet cast over their left shoulders; and the Venetian knights

differed from the other gentlemen, for under their black damask gowns,

with long sleeves, they wore red apparel, red silk stockings, and red

pantofles.

Andrew Boord, in 1547, attempting to describe the fashions of his

countrymen, gave up the effort in sheer despair over the variety and

fickleness of costume, and drew a naked man with a pair of shears in one

hand and a piece of cloth in the other, to the end that he should shape

his apparel as he himself liked; and this he called an Englishman. Even

the gentle Harrison, who gives Boord the too harsh character of a lewd

popish hypocrite and ungracious priest, admits that he was not void of

judgment in this; and he finds it easier to inveigh against the enormity,

the fickleness, and the fantasticality of the English attire than to

describe it. So unstable is the fashion, he says, that today the Spanish

guise is in favor; tomorrow the French toys are most fine and delectable;

then the high German apparel is the go; next the Turkish manner is best

liked, the Morisco gowns, the Barbary sleeves, and the short French

breeches; in a word, “except it were a dog in a doublet, you shall not

see any so disguised as are my countrymen in England.”

This fantastical folly was in all degrees, from the courtier down to the

tarter. “It is a world to see the costliness and the curiosity, the

excess and the vanity, the pomp and the bravery, the change and the

variety, and finally the fickleness and the folly that is in all degrees;

insomuch that nothing is more constant in England than inconstancy of

attire. So much cost upon the body, so little upon souls; how many suits

of apparel hath the one, or how little furniture hath the other!” “And

how men and women worry the poor tailors, with endless fittings and

sending back of garments, and trying on!” “Then must the long seams of

our hose be set with a plumb line, then we puff, then we blow, and

finally sweat till we drop, that our clothes may stand well upon us.”

The barbers were as cunning in variety as the tailors. Sometimes the head

was polled; sometimes the hair was curled, and then suffered to grow long

like a woman's locks, and many times cut off, above or under the ears,

round as by a wooden dish. And so with the beards: some shaved from the

chin, like the Turks; some cut short, like the beard of the Marquis Otto;

some made round, like a rubbing-brush; some peaked, others grown long. If

a man have a lean face, the Marquis Otto's cut makes it broad; if it be

platterlike, the long, slender beard makes it seem narrow; “if he be

weasel-beaked, then much hair left on the cheeks will make the owner look

big like a bowdled hen, and so grim as a goose.” Some courageous

gentlemen wore in their ears rings of gold and stones, to improve God's

work, which was otherwise set off by monstrous quilted and stuffed

doublets, that puffed out the figure like a barrel.

There is some consolation, though I don't know why, in the knowledge that

writers have always found fault with women's fashions, as they do today.

Harrison says that the women do far exceed the lightness of the men;

“such staring attire as in time past was supposed meet for light

housewives only is now become an habit for chaste and sober matrons.” And

he knows not what to say of their doublets, with pendant pieces on the

breast full of jags and cuts; their “galligascons,” to make their dresses

stand out plumb round; their farthingales and divers colored stockings.

“I have met,” he says, “with some of these trulls in London so disguised

that it hath passed my skill to determine whether they were men or

women.” Of all classes the merchants were most to be commended for rich

but sober attire; “but the younger sort of their wives, both in attire

and costly housekeeping, cannot tell when and how to make an end, as

being women indeed in whom all kind of curiosity is to be found and

seen.” Elizabeth's time, like our own, was distinguished by new

fashionable colors, among which are mentioned a queer greenish-yellow, a

pease-porridge-tawny, a popinjay of blue, a lusty gallant, and the “devil

in the hedge.” These may be favorites still, for aught I know.

Mr. Furnivall quotes a description of a costume of the period, from the

manuscript of Orazio Busino's “Anglipotrida.” Busino was the chaplain of

Piero Contarina, the Venetian ambassador to James I, in 1617. The

chaplain was one day stunned with grief over the death of the butler of

the embassy; and as the Italians sleep away grief, the French sing, the

Germans drink, and the English go to plays to be rid of it, the

Venetians, by advice, sought consolation at the Fortune Theatre; and

there a trick was played upon old Busino, by placing him among a bevy of

young women, while the concealed ambassador and the secretary enjoyed the

joke. “These theatres,” says Busino, “are frequented by a number of

respectable and handsome ladies, who come freely and seat themselves

among the men without the slightest hesitation . . . . Scarcely was I

seated ere a very elegant dame, but in a mask, came and placed herself

beside me . . . . She asked me for my address both in French and English;

and, on my turning a deaf ear, she determined to honor me by showing me

some fine diamonds on her fingers, repeatedly taking off no fewer than

three gloves, which were worn one over the other . . . . This lady's

bodice was of yellow satin, richly embroidered, her petticoat--[It is a

trifle in human progress, perhaps scarcely worth noting, that the “round

gown,” that is, an entire skirt, not open in front and parting to show

the under petticoat, did not come into fashion till near the close of the

eighteenth century.]--of gold tissue with stripes, her robe of red velvet

with a raised pile, lined with yellow muslin with broad stripes of pure

gold. She wore an apron of point lace of various patterns; her headtire

was highly perfumed, and the collar of white satin beneath the delicately

wrought ruff struck me as exceedingly pretty.” It was quite in keeping

with the manners of the day for a lady of rank to have lent herself to

this hoax of the chaplain.

Van Meteren, a Netherlander, 1575, speaks also of the astonishing change

or changeableness in English fashions, but says the women are well

dressed and modest, and they go about the streets without any covering of

mantle, hood, or veil; only the married women wear a hat in the street

and in the house; the unmarried go without a hat; but ladies of

distinction have lately learned to cover their faces with silken masks or

vizards, and to wear feathers. The English, he notes, change their

fashions every year, and when they go abroad riding or traveling they don

their best clothes, contrary to the practice of other nations. Another

foreigner, Jacob Rathgeb, 1592, says the English go dressed in exceeding

fine clothes, and some will even wear velvet in the street, when they

have not at home perhaps a piece of dry bread. “The lords and pages of

the royal court have a stately, noble air, but dress more after the

French fashion, only they wear short cloaks and sometimes Spanish caps.”

Harrison's arraignment of the English fashions of his day may be

considered as almost commendative beside the diatribes of the old Puritan

Philip Stubbes, in “The Anatomie of Abuses,” 1583. The English language

is strained for words hot and rude enough to express his indignation,

contempt, and fearful expectation of speedy judgments. The men escape his

hands with scarcely less damage than the women. First he wreaks his

indignation upon the divers kinds of hats, stuck full of feathers, of

various colors, “ensigns of vanity,” “fluttering sails and feathered

flags of defiance to virtue”; then upon the monstrous ruffs that stand

out a quarter of a yard from the neck. “As the devil, in the fullness of

his malice, first invented these ruffs, so has he found out two stays to

bear up this his great kingdom of ruffs--one is a kind of liquid matter

they call starch; the other is a device made of wires, for an

under-propper. Then there are shirts of cambric, holland, and lawn,

wrought with fine needle-work of silk and curiously stitched, costing

sometimes as much as five pounds. Worse still are the monstrous doublets,

reaching down to the middle of the thighs, so hard quilted, stuffed,

bombasted, and sewed that the wearer can hardly stoop down in them. Below

these are the gally-hose of silk, velvet, satin, and damask, reaching

below the knees. So costly are these that now it is a small matter to

bestow twenty nobles, ten pound, twenty pound, fortie pound, yea a

hundred pound of one pair of Breeches. (God be merciful unto us!) To

these gay hose they add nether-socks, curiously knit with open seams down

the leg, with quirks and clocks about the ankles, and sometimes

interlaced with gold and silver thread as is wonderful to behold. Time

has been when a man could clothe his whole body for the price of these

nether-socks. Satan was further let loose in the land by reason of cork

shoes and fine slippers, of all colors, carved, cut, and stitched with

silk, and laced on with gold and silver, which went flipping and flapping

up and down in the dirt. The jerkins and cloaks are of all colors and

fashions; some short, reaching to the knee; others dragging on the

ground; red, white, black, violet, yellow, guarded, laced, and faced;

hanged with points and tassels of gold, silver, and silk. The hilts of

daggers, rapiers, and swords are gilt thrice over, and have scabbards of

velvet. And all this while the poor lie in London streets upon pallets of

straw, or else in the mire and dirt, and die like dogs!”

Stubbes was a stout old Puritan, bent upon hewing his way to heaven

through all the allurements of this world, and suspecting a devil in

every fair show. I fear that he looked upon woman as only a vain and

trifling image, a delusive toy, away from whom a man must set his face.

Shakespeare, who was country-bred when he came up to London, and lived

probably on the roystering South Side, near the theatres and

bear-gardens, seems to have been impressed with the painted faces of the

women. It is probable that only town-bred women painted. Stubbes declares

that the women of England color their faces with oils, liquors, unguents,

and waters made to that end, thinking to make themselves fairer than God

made them--a presumptuous audacity to make God untrue in his word; and he

heaps vehement curses upon the immodest practice. To this follows the

trimming and tricking of their heads, the laying out their hair to show,

which is curled, crisped, and laid out on wreaths and borders from ear to

ear. Lest it should fall down it is under-propped with forks, wires, and

what not. On the edges of their bolstered hair (for it standeth crested

round about their frontiers, and hanging over their faces like pendices

with glass windows on every side) is laid great wreaths of gold and

silver curiously wrought. But this is not the worst nor the tenth part,

for no pen is able to describe the wickedness. “The women use great ruffs

and neckerchers of holland, lawn, camerick, and such cloth, as the

greatest thread shall not be so big as the least hair that is: then, lest

they should fall down, they are smeared and starched in the Devil's

liquor, I mean Starch; after that dried with great diligence, streaked,

patted and rubbed very nicely, and so applied to their goodly necks, and,

withall, under-propped with supportasses, the stately arches of pride;

beyond all this they have a further fetch, nothing inferior to the rest;

as, namely, three or four degrees of minor ruffs, placed gradatim, step

by step, one beneath another, and all under the Master devil ruff. The

skirts, then, of these great ruffs are long and side every way, pleted

and crested full curiously, God wot.”

Time will not serve us to follow old Stubbes into his particular

inquisition of every article of woman's attire, and his hearty damnation

of them all and several. He cannot even abide their carrying of nosegays

and posies of flowers to smell at, since the palpable odors and fumes of

these do enter the brain to degenerate the spirit and allure to vice.

They must needs carry looking-glasses with them; “and good reason,” says

Stubbes, savagely, “for else how could they see the devil in them? for no

doubt they are the devil's spectacles [these women] to allure us to pride

and consequently to destruction forever.” And, as if it were not enough

to be women, and the devil's aids, they do also have doublets and

jerkins, buttoned up the breast, and made with wings, welts, and pinions

on the shoulder points, as man's apparel is, for all the world. We take

reluctant leave of this entertaining woman-hater, and only stay to quote

from him a “fearful judgment of God, shewed upon a gentlewoman of Antwerp

of late, even the 27th of May, 1582,” which may be as profitable to read

now as it was then: “This gentlewoman being a very rich Merchant man's

daughter: upon a time was invited to a bridal, or wedding, which was

solemnized in that Toune, against which day she made great preparation,

for the pluming herself in gorgeous array, that as her body was most

beautiful, fair, and proper, so her attire in every respect might be

correspondent to the same. For the accomplishment whereof she curled her

hair, she dyed her locks, and laid them out after the best manner, she

colored her face with waters and Ointments: But in no case could she get

any (so curious and dainty she was) that could starch, and set her Ruffs

and Neckerchers to her mind wherefore she sent for a couple of

Laundresses, who did the best they could to please her humors, but in any

wise they could not. Then fell she to swear and tear, to curse and damn,

casting the Ruffs under feet, and wishing that the Devil might take her

when she wear any of those Neckerchers again. In the meantime (through

the sufference of God) the Devil transforming himself into the form of a

young man, as brave and proper as she in every point of outward

appearance, came in, feigning himself to be a wooer or suitor unto her.

And seeing her thus agonized, and in such a pelting chase, he demanded of

her the cause thereof, who straightway told him (as women can conceal

nothing that lieth upon their stomachs) how she was abused in the setting

of her Ruffs, which thing being heard of him, he promised to please her

mind, and thereto took in hand the setting of her Ruffs, which he

performed to her great contentation and liking, in so much as she looking

herself in a glass (as the Devil bade her) became greatly enamoured of

him. This done, the young man kissed her, in the doing whereof she writhe

her neck in, sunder, so she died miserably, her body being metamorphosed

into black and blue colors, most ugglesome to behold, and her face (which

before was so amorous) became most deformed, and fearful to look upon.

This being known, preparence was made for her burial, a rich coffin was

provided, and her fearful body was laid therein, and it covered very

sumptuously. Four men immediately assayed to lift up the corpse, but

could not move it; then six attempted the like, but could not once stir

it from the place where it stood. Whereat the standers-by marveling,

caused the coffin to be opened to see the cause thereof. Where they found

the body to be taken away, and a black Cat very lean and deformed sitting

in the coffin, setting of great Ruffs, and frizzling of hair, to the

great fear and wonder of all beholders.”

Better than this pride which forerunneth destruction, in the opinion of

Stubbes, is the habit of the Brazilian women, who “esteem so little of

apparel” that they rather choose to go naked than be thought to be proud.

As I read the times of Elizabeth, there was then greater prosperity and

enjoyment of life among the common people than fifty or a hundred years

later. Into the question of the prices of labor and of food, which Mr.

Froude considers so fully in the first chapter of his history, I shall

not enter any further than to remark that the hardness of the laborer's

lot, who got, mayhap, only twopence a day, is mitigated by the fact that

for a penny he could buy a pound of meat which now costs a shilling. In

two respects England has greatly changed for the traveler, from the

sixteenth to the eighteenth century--in its inns and its roads.

In the beginning of Elizabeth's reign travelers had no choice but to ride

on horseback or to walk. Goods were transported on strings of

pack-horses. When Elizabeth rode into the city from her residence at

Greenwich, she placed herself behind her lord chancellor, on a pillion.

The first improvement made was in the construction of a rude wagon a cart

without springs, the body resting solidly on the axles. In such a vehicle

Elizabeth rode to the opening of her fifth Parliament. In 1583, on a

certain day, Sir Harry Sydney entered Shrewsbury in his wagon, “with his

trompeter blowynge, verey joyfull to behold and see.” Even such

conveyances fared hard on the execrable roads of the period. Down to the

end of the seventeenth century most of the country roads were merely

broad ditches, water-worn and strewn with loose stones. In 1640 Queen

Henrietta was four weary days dragging over the road from Dover to

London, the best in England. Not till the close of the sixteenth century

was the wagon used, and then rarely. Fifty years later stage-wagons ran,

with some regularity, between London and Liverpool; and before the close

of the seventeenth century the stagecoach, a wonderful invention, which

had been used in and about London since 1650, was placed on three

principal roads of the kingdom. It averaged two to three miles an hour.

In the reign of Charles II. a Frenchman who landed at Dover was drawn up

to London in a wagon with six horses in a line, one after the other. Our

Venetian, Busino, who went to Oxford in the coach with the ambassador in

1617, was six days in going one hundred and fifty miles, as the coach

often stuck in the mud, and once broke down. So bad were the main

thoroughfares, even, that markets were sometimes inaccessible for months

together, and the fruits of the earth rotted in one place, while there

was scarcity not many miles distant.

But this difficulty of travel and liability to be detained long on the

road were cheered by good inns, such as did not exist in the world

elsewhere. All the literature of the period reflects lovingly the

homelike delights of these comfortable houses of entertainment. Every

little village boasted an excellent inn, and in the towns on the great

thoroughfares were sumptuous houses that would accommodate from two to

three hundred guests with their horses. The landlords were not tyrants,

as on the Continent, but servants of their guests; and it was, says

Harrison, a world to see how they did contend for the entertainment of

their guests--as about fineness and change of linen, furniture of

bedding, beauty of rooms, service at the table, costliness of plate,

strength of drink, variety of wines, or well-using of horses. The

gorgeous signs at their doors sometimes cost forty pounds. The inns were

cheap too, and the landlord let no one depart dissatisfied with his bill.

The worst inns were in London, and the tradition has been handed down.

But the ostlers, Harrison confesses, did sometimes cheat in the feed, and

they with the tapsters and chamberlains were in league (and the landlord

was not always above suspicion) with highwaymen outside, to ascertain if

the traveler carried any valuables; so that when he left the hospitable

inn he was quite likely to be stopped on the highway and relieved of his

money. The highwayman was a conspicuous character. One of the most

romantic of these gentry at one time was a woman named Mary Frith, born

in 1585, and known as Moll Cut-Purse. She dressed in male attire, was an

adroit fencer, a bold rider, and a staunch royalist; she once took two

hundred gold jacobuses from the Parliamentary General Fairfax on Hounslow

Heath. She is the chief character in Middleton's play of the “Roaring

Girl”; and after a varied life as a thief, cutpurse, pickpocket,

highwayman, trainer of animals, and keeper of a thieves' fence, she died

in peace at the age of seventy. To return to the inns, Fyner Morrison, a

traveler in 1617, sustains all that Harrison says of the inns as the best

and cheapest in the world, where the guest shall have his own pleasure.

No sooner does he arrive than the servants run to him--one takes his

horse, another shows him his chamber and lights his fire, a third pulls

off his boots. Then come the host and hostess to inquire what meat he

will choose, and he may have their company if he like. He shall be

offered music while he eats, and if he be solitary the musicians will

give him good-day with music in the morning. In short, “a man cannot more

freely command at home, in his own house, than he may do in his inn.”

The amusements of the age were often rough, but certainly more moral than

they were later; and although the theatres were denounced by such

reformers as Stubbes as seminaries of vice, and disapproved by Harrison;

they were better than after the Restoration, when the plays of

Shakespeare were out of fashion. The Londoners went for amusement to the

Bankside, or South Side of the Thames, where were the famous Paris

Gardens, much used as a rendezvous by gallants; and there were the places

for bear and bull baiting; and there were the theatres--the Paris

Gardens, the Swan, the Rose, the Hope, and the Globe. The

pleasure-seekers went over usually in boats, of which there were said to

be four thousand plying between banks; for there was only one bridge, and

that was crowded with houses. All distinguished visitors were taken over

to see the gardens and the bears baited by dogs; the queen herself went,

and perhaps on Sunday, for Sunday was the great day, and Elizabeth is

said to have encouraged Sunday sports, she had been (we read) so much

hunted on account of religion! These sports are too brutal to think of;

but there are amusing accounts of lion-baiting both by bears and dogs, in

which the beast who figures so nobly on the escutcheon nearly always

proved himself an arrant coward, and escaped away as soon as he could

into his den, with his tail between his legs. The spectators were once

much disgusted when a lion and lioness, with the dog that pursued them,

all ran into the den, and, like good friends, stood very peaceably

together looking out at the people.

The famous Globe Theatre, which was built in 1599, was burned in 1613,

and in the fire it is supposed were consumed Shakespeare's manuscripts of

his plays. It was of wood (for use in summer only), octagon shaped, with

a thatched roof, open in the centre. The daily performance here, as in

all theatres, was at three o'clock in the afternoon, and boys outside

held the horses of the gentlemen who went in to the play. When theatres

were restrained, in 1600, only two were allowed, the Globe and the

Fortune, which was on the north side, on Golden Lane. The Fortune was

fifty feet square within, and three stories high, with galleries, built

of wood on a brick foundation, and with a roof of tiles. The stage was

forty-three feet wide, and projected into the middle of the yard (as the

pit was called), where the groundlings stood. To one of the galleries

admission was only twopence. The young gallants used to go into the yards

and spy about the galleries and boxes for their acquaintances. In these

theatres there was a drop-curtain, but little or no scenery. Spectators

had boxes looking on the stage behind the curtain, and they often sat

upon the stage with the actors; sometimes the actors all remained upon

the stage during the whole play. There seems to have been great

familiarity between the audience and the actors. Fruits in season,

apples, pears, and nuts, with wine and beer, were carried about to be

sold, and pipes were smoked. There was neither any prudery in the plays

or the players, and the audiences in behavior were no better than the

plays.

The actors were all men. The female parts were taken usually by boys, but

frequently by grown men, and when Juliet or Desdemona was announced, a

giant would stride upon the stage. There is a story that Kynaston, a

handsome fellow, famous in female characters, and petted by ladies of

rank, once kept Charles I. waiting while he was being shaved before

appearing as Evadne in “The Maid's Tragedy.” The innovation of women on

the stage was first introduced by a French company in 1629, but the

audiences would not tolerate it, and hissed and pelted the actresses off

the stage. But thirty years later women took the place they have ever

since held; when the populace had once experienced the charm of a female

Juliet and Ophelia, they would have no other, and the rage for actresses

ran to such excess at one time that it was a fashion for women to take

the male parts as well. But that was in the abandoned days of Charles II.

Pepys could not control his delight at the appearance of Nell Gwynne,

especially “when she comes like a young gallant, and hath the motions and

carriage of a spark the most that ever I saw any man have. It makes me, I

confess, admire her.” The acting of Shakespeare himself is only a faint

tradition. He played the ghost in “Hamlet,” and Adam in “As You Like It.”

William Oldys says (Oldys was an antiquarian who was pottering about in

the first part of the eighteenth century, picking up gossip in

coffee-houses, and making memoranda on scraps of paper in book-shops)

Shakespeare's brother Charles, who lived past the middle of the

seventeenth century, was much inquired of by actors about the

circumstances of Shakespeare's playing. But Charles was so old and weak

in mind that he could recall nothing except the faint impression that he

had once seen “Will” act a part in one of his own comedies, wherein,

being to personate a decrepit old man, he wore a long beard, and appeared

so weak and drooping and unable to walk that he was forced to be

supported and carried by another person to a table, at which he was

seated among some company who were eating, and one of them sang a song.

And that was Shakespeare!

The whole Bankside, with its taverns, play-houses, and worse, its bear

pits and gardens, was the scene of roystering and coarse amusement. And

it is surprising that plays of such sustained moral greatness as

Shakespeare's should have been welcome.

The more private amusements of the great may well be illustrated by an

account given by Busino of a masque (it was Ben Jonson's “Pleasure

Reconciled to Virtue”) performed at Whitehall on Twelfthnight, 1617.

During the play, twelve cavaliers in masks, the central figure of whom

was Prince Charles, chose partners, and danced every kind of dance, until

they got tired and began to flag; whereupon King James, “who is naturally

choleric, got impatient, and shouted aloud, 'Why don't they dance? What

did you make me come here for? Devil take you all, dance!' On hearing

this, the Marquis of Buckingham, his majesty's most favored minion,

immediately sprang forward, cutting a score of lofty and very minute

capers, with so much grace and agility that he not only appeased the ire

of his angry sovereign, but moreover rendered himself the admiration and

delight of everybody. The other masquers, being thus encouraged,

continued successively exhibiting their powers with various ladies,

finishing in like manner with capers, and by lifting their goddesses from

the ground . . . . The prince, however, excelled them all in bowing,

being very exact in making his obeisance both to the king and his

partner; nor did we ever see him make one single step out of time--a

compliment which can scarcely be paid to his companions. Owing to his

youth, he has not much wind as yet, but he nevertheless cut a few capers

very gracefully.” The prince then went and kissed the hand of his serene

parent, who embraced and kissed him tenderly. When such capers were cut

at Whitehall, we may imagine what the revelry was in the Bankside

taverns.

The punishments of the age were not more tender than the amusements were

refined. Busino saw a lad of fifteen led to execution for stealing a bag

of currants. At the end of every month, besides special executions, as

many as twenty-five people at a time rode through London streets in

Tyburn carts, singing ribald songs, and carrying sprigs of rosemary in

their hands. Everywhere in the streets the machines of justice were

visible-pillories for the neck and hands, stocks for the feet, and chains

to stretch across, in case of need, and stop a mob. In the suburbs were

oak cages for nocturnal offenders. At the church doors might now and then

be seen women enveloped in sheets, doing penance for their evil deeds. A

bridle, something like a bit for a restive horse, was in use for the

curbing of scolds; but this was a later invention than the cucking-stool,

or ducking-stool. There is an old print of one of these machines standing

on the Thames' bank: on a wheeled platform is an upright post with a

swinging beam across the top, on one end of which the chair is suspended

over the river, while the other is worked up and down by a rope; in it is

seated a light sister of the Bankside, being dipped into the unsavory

flood. But this was not so hated by the women as a similar

discipline--being dragged in the river by a rope after a boat.

Hanging was the common punishment for felony, but traitors and many other

offenders were drawn, hanged, boweled, and quartered; nobles who were

traitors usually escaped with having their heads chopped off only.

Torture was not practiced; for, says Harrison, our people despise death,

yet abhor to be tormented, being of frank and open minds. And “this is

one cause why our condemned persons do go so cheerfully to their deaths,

for our nation is free, stout, hearty, and prodigal of life and blood,

and cannot in any wise digest to be used as villains and slaves.” Felony

covered a wide range of petty crimes--breach of prison, hunting by night

with painted or masked faces, stealing above forty shillings, stealing

hawks' eggs, conjuring, prophesying upon arms and badges, stealing deer

by night, cutting purses, counterfeiting coin, etc. Death was the penalty

for all these offenses. For poisoning her husband a woman was burned

alive; a man poisoning another was boiled to death in water or oil;

heretics were burned alive; some murderers were hanged in chains;

perjurers were branded on the forehead with the letter P; rogues were

burned through the ears; suicides were buried in a field with a stake

driven through their bodies; witches were burned or hanged; in Halifax

thieves were beheaded by a machine almost exactly like the modern

guillotine; scolds were ducked; pirates were hanged on the seashore at

low-water mark, and left till three tides overwashed them; those who let

the sea-walls decay were staked out in the breach of the banks, and left

there as parcel of the foundation of the new wall. Of rogues-that is,

tramps and petty thieves-the gallows devoured three to four hundred

annually, in one place or another; and Henry VIII. in his time did hang

up as many as seventy-two thousand rogues. Any parish which let a thief

escape was fined. Still the supply held out.

The legislation against vagabonds, tramps, and sturdy beggars, and their

punishment by whipping, branding, etc., are too well known to need

comment. But considerable provision was made for the unfortunate and

deserving poor--poorhouses were built for them, and collections taken up.

Only sixty years before Harrison wrote there were few beggars, but in his

day he numbers them at ten thousand; and most of them were rogues, who

counterfeited sores and wounds, and were mere thieves and caterpillars on

the commonwealth. He names twenty-three different sorts of vagabonds

known by cant names, such as “ruffers,” “uprightmen,” “priggers,”

“fraters,” “palliards,” “Abrams,” “dummerers “; and of women, “demanders

for glimmer or fire,” “mortes,” “walking mortes,” “doxes,” “kinching

coves.”

London was esteemed by its inhabitants and by many foreigners as the

richest and most magnificent city in Christendom. The cities of London

and Westminster lay along the north bank in what seemed an endless

stretch; on the south side of the Thames the houses were more scattered.

But the town was mostly of wood, and its rapid growth was a matter of

anxiety. Both Elizabeth and James again and again attempted to restrict

it by forbidding the erection of any new buildings within the town, or

for a mile outside; and to this attempt was doubtless due the crowded

rookeries in the city. They especially forbade the use of wood in

house-fronts and windows, both on account of the danger from fire, and

because all the timber in the kingdom, which was needed for shipping and

other purposes, was being used up in building. They even ordered the

pulling down of new houses in London, Westminster, and for three miles

around. But all efforts to stop the growth of the city were vain.

London, according to the Venetian Busino, was extremely dirty. He did not

admire the wooden architecture; the houses were damp and cold, the

staircases spiral and inconvenient, the apartments “sorry and ill

connected.” The wretched windows, without shutters, he could neither open

by day nor close by night. The streets were little better than gutters,

and were never put in order except for some great parade. Hentzner,

however, thought the streets handsome and clean. When it rained it must

have been otherwise. There was no provision for conducting away the

water; it poured off the roofs upon the people below, who had not as yet

heard of the Oriental umbrella; and the countryman, staring at the sights

of the town, knocked about by the carts, and run over by the horsemen,

was often surprised by a douche from a conduit down his back. And,

besides, people had a habit of throwing water and slops out of the

windows, regardless of passers-by.

The shops were small, open in front, when the shutters were down, much

like those in a Cairo bazaar, and all the goods were in sight. The

shopkeepers stood in front and cried their wares, and besought customers.

Until 1568 there were but few silk shops in London, and all those were

kept by women. It was not till about that time that citizens' wives

ceased to wear white knit woolen caps, and three-square Minever caps with

peaks. In the beginning of Elizabeth's reign the apprentices (a

conspicuous class) wore blue cloaks in winter and blue gowns in summer;

unless men were threescore years old, it was not lawful to wear gowns

lower than the calves of the legs, but the length of cloaks was not

limited. The journeymen and apprentices wore long daggers in the daytime

at their backs or sides. When the apprentices attended their masters and

mistresses in the night they carried lanterns and candles, and a great

long club on the neck. These apprentices were apt to lounge with their

clubs about the fronts of shops, ready to take a hand in any excitement

--to run down a witch, or raid an objectionable house, or tear down a

tavern of evil repute, or spoil a playhouse. The high-streets, especially

in winter-time, were annoyed by hourly frays of sword and buckler-men;

but these were suddenly suppressed when the more deadly fight with rapier

and dagger came in. The streets were entirely unlighted and dangerous at

night, and for this reason the plays at the theatres were given at three

in the afternoon.

About Shakespeare's time many new inventions and luxuries came in: masks,

muffs, fans, periwigs, shoe-roses, love-handkerchiefs (tokens given by

maids and gentlewomen to their favorites), heath-brooms for hair-brushes,

scarfs, garters, waistcoats, flat-caps; also hops, turkeys, apricots,

Venice glass, tobacco. In 1524, and for years after, was used this rhyme

“Turkeys, Carpes, Hops: Piccarel, and beers,

Came into England: all in one year.”

There were no coffee-houses as yet, for neither tea nor coffee was

introduced till about 1661. Tobacco was first made known in England by

Sir John Hawkins in 1565, though not commonly used by men and women till

some years after. It was urged as a great medicine for many ills.

Harrison says, 1573, “In these days the taking in of the smoke of the

Indian herb called 'Tabaco,' by an instrument formed like a little ladle,

whereby it passeth from the mouth into the head and stomach, is greatly

taken up and used in England, against Rewmes and some other diseases

engendered in the lungs and inward parts, and not without effect.” It's

use spread rapidly, to the disgust of James I. and others, who doubted

that it was good for cold, aches, humors, and rheums. In 1614 it was said

that seven thousand houses lived by this trade, and that L 399,375 a year

was spent in smoke. Tobacco was even taken on the stage. Every base groom

must have his pipe; it was sold in all inns and ale-houses, and the shops

of apothecaries, grocers, and chandlers were almost never, from morning

till night, without company still taking of tobacco.

There was a saying on the Continent that “England is a paradise for

women, a prison for servants, and a hell or purgatory for horses.” The

society was very simple compared with the complex condition of ours, and

yet it had more striking contrasts, and was a singular mixture of

downrightness and artificiality; plainness and rudeness of speech went

with the utmost artificiality of dress and manner. It is curious to note

the insular, not to say provincial, character of the people even three

centuries ago. When the Londoners saw a foreigner very well made or

particularly handsome, they were accustomed to say, “It is a pity he is

not an ENGLISHMAN.” It is pleasant, I say, to trace this “certain

condescension” in the good old times. Jacob Rathgeb (1592) says the

English are magnificently dressed, and extremely proud and overbearing;

the merchants, who seldom go unto other countries, scoff at foreigners,

who are liable to be ill-used by street boys and apprentices, who collect

in immense crowds and stop the way. Of course Cassandra Stubbes, whose

mind was set upon a better country, has little good to say of his

countrymen.

“As concerning the nature, propertie, and disposition of the people they

be desirous of new fangles, praising things past, contemning things

present, and coveting after things to come. Ambitious, proud, light, and

unstable, ready to be carried away with every blast of wind.” The French

paid back with scorn the traditional hatred of the English for the

French. Perlin (1558) finds the people “proud and seditious, with bad

consciences and unfaithful to their word in war unfortunate, in peace

unfaithful”; and there was a Spanish or Italian proverb: “England, good

land, bad people.” But even Perlin likes the appearance of the people:

“The men are handsome, rosy, large, and dexterous, usually fair-skinned;

the women are esteemed the most beautiful in the world, white as

alabaster, and give place neither to Italian, Flemish, nor German; they

are joyous, courteous, and hospitable (de bon recueil).” He thinks their

manners, however, little civilized: for one thing, they have an

unpleasant habit of eructation at the table (car iceux routent a la table

sans honte & ignominie); which recalls Chaucer's description of the

Trumpington miller's wife and daughter:

“Men might her rowtyng hearen a forlong,

The wenche routeth eek par companye.”

Another inference as to the table manners of the period is found in

Coryat's “Crudities” (1611). He saw in Italy generally a curious custom

of using a little fork for meat, and whoever should take the meat out of

the dish with his fingers--would give offense. And he accounts for this

peculiarity quite naturally: “The reason of this their curiosity is,

because the Italian cannot by any means indure to have his dish touched

with fingers, seeing all men's fingers are not alike cleane.” Coryat found

the use of the fork nowhere else in Christendom, and when he returned,

and, oftentimes in England, imitated the Italian fashion, his exploit was

regarded in a humorous light. Busino says that fruits were seldom served

at dessert, but that the whole population were munching them in the

streets all day long, and in the places of amusement; and it was an

amusement to go out into the orchards and eat fruit on the spot, in a

sort of competition of gormandize between the city belles and their

admirers. And he avers that one young woman devoured twenty pounds of

cherries, beating her opponent by two pounds and a half.

All foreigners were struck with the English love of music and drink, of

banqueting and good cheer. Perlin notes a pleasant custom at table:

during the feast you hear more than a hundred times, “Drink iou” (he

loves to air his English), that is to say, “Je m'en vois boyre a toy.”

You respond, in their language, “Iplaigiu”; that is to say, “Je vous

plege.” If you thank them, they say in their language, “God tanque

artelay”; that is, “Je vous remercie de bon coeur.” And then, says the

artless Frenchman, still improving on his English, you should respond

thus: “Bigod, sol drink iou agoud oin.” At the great and princely

banquets, when the pledge went round and the heart's desire of lasting

health, says the chronicler, “the same was straight wayes knowne, by

sound of Drumme and Trumpet, and the cannon's loudest voyce.” It was so

in Hamlet's day:

“And as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down,

The kettle-drum and trumpet thus bray out

The triumph of his pledge.”

According to Hentzner (1598), the English are serious, like the Germans,

and love show and to be followed by troops of servants wearing the arms

of their masters; they excel in music and dancing, for they are lively

and active, though thicker of make than the French; they cut their hair

close in the middle of the head, letting it grow on either side; “they

are good sailors, and better pyrates, cunning, treacherous, and

thievish;” and, he adds, with a touch of satisfaction, “above three

hundred are said to be hanged annually in London.” They put a good deal

of sugar in their drink; they are vastly fond of great noises, firing of

cannon, beating of drums, and ringing of bells, and when they have a

glass in their heads they go up into some belfry, and ring the bells for

hours together, for the sake of exercise. Perlin's comment is that men

are hung for a trifle in England, and that you will not find many lords

whose parents have not had their heads chopped off.

It is a pleasure to turn to the simple and hearty admiration excited in

the breasts of all susceptible foreigners by the English women of the

time. Van Meteren, as we said, calls the women beautiful, fair, well

dressed, and modest. To be sure, the wives are, their lives only

excepted, entirely in the power of their husbands, yet they have great

liberty; go where they please; are shown the greatest honor at banquets,

where they sit at the upper end of the table and are first served; are

fond of dress and gossip and of taking it easy; and like to sit before

their doors, decked out in fine clothes, in order to see and be seen by

the passers-by. Rathgeb also agrees that the women have much more liberty

than in any other place. When old Busino went to the Masque at Whitehall,

his colleagues kept exclaiming, “Oh, do look at this one--oh, do see

that! Whose wife is this?--and that pretty one near her, whose daughter

is she?” There was some chaff mixed in, he allows, some shriveled skins

and devotees of S. Carlo Borromeo, but the beauties greatly predominated.

In the great street pageants, it was the beauty and winsomeness of the

London ladies, looking on, that nearly drove the foreigners wild. In

1606, upon the entry of the king of Denmark, the chronicler celebrates

“the unimaginable number of gallant ladies, beauteous virgins, and other

delicate dames, filling the windows of every house with kind aspect.” And

in 1638, when Cheapside was all alive with the pageant of the entry of

the queen mother, “this miserable old queen,” as Lilly calls Marie de'

Medicis (Mr. Furnivall reproduces an old cut of the scene), M. de la

Serre does not try to restrain his admiration for the pretty women on

view: only the most fecund imagination can represent the content one has

in admiring the infinite number of beautiful women, each different from

the other, and each distinguished by some sweetness or grace to ravish

the heart and take captive one's liberty. No sooner has he determined to

yield to one than a new object of admiration makes him repent the

precipitation of his judgment.

And all the other foreigners were in the like case of “goneness.”

Kiechel, writing in 1585, says, “Item, the women there are charming, and

by nature so mighty pretty as I have scarcely ever beheld, for they do

not falsify, paint, or bedaub themselves as in Italy or other places;”

yet he confesses (and here is another tradition preserved) “they are

somewhat awkward in their style of dress.” His second “item” of gratitude

is a Netherland custom that pleased him--whenever a foreigner or an

inhabitant went to a citizen's house on business, or as a guest, he was

received by the master, the lady, or the daughter, and “welcomed” (as it

is termed in their language); “he has a right to take them by the arm and

to kiss them, which is the custom of the country; and if any one does not

do so, it is regarded and imputed as ignorance and ill-breeding on his

part.” Even the grave Erasmus, when he visited England, fell easily into

this pretty practice, and wrote with untheological fervor of the “girls

with angel faces,” who were “so kind and obliging.” “Wherever you come,”

he says, “you are received with a kiss by all; when you take your leave

you are dismissed with kisses; you return, kisses are repeated. They come

to visit you, kisses again; they leave you, you kiss them all round.

Should they meet you anywhere, kisses in abundance in fine, wherever you

move there is nothing but kisses”--a custom, says this reformer, who has

not the fear of Stubbes before his eyes, “never to be sufficiently

commended.”

We shall find no more convenient opportunity to end this part of the

social study of the age of Shakespeare than with this naive picture of

the sex which most adorned it. Some of the details appear trivial; but

grave history which concerns itself only with the actions of conspicuous

persons, with the manoeuvres of armies, the schemes of politics, the

battles of theologies, fails signally to give us the real life of the

people by which we judge the character of an age.