long wigs with curls, despite the church's dislike of wigs. This
could hide the short hair of a former Puritan Roundhead. In 1666,
Charles introduced a new mode of inexpensive court dress which was
made entirely from English textiles. This gave rise to gentlemen's
weskits to below the knee with a coat of the same length and full
sleeves. Stockings and shoes replaced the long fitted boots.
Charles set a court tradition of men wearing a scarf tied around
the neck. Ladies often wore their hair in masses of ringlets with
little corkscrew curls on each side of their heads, and later
piled their hair up elaborately on their heads. They wore satin or
silk dresses fitted at the waist with a pointed bodice, and full
skirt. The shoulder line was low and the sleeves full and open at
the front with fastenings of jeweled clasps. The only fast colors
were reds, blues, purple, and yellow, but not green. They kept
their hands warm in muffs. Women wore perfume, rouge, and face
patches. Some women put on a lot of make-up. Many men dressed
effeminately with rouge, face patches, heavily scented clothing,
muffs, and many ribbons of many colors. The facial beauty patches
were in shapes such as stars, crescent moons, and hearts; they
diverted attention from the common smallpox scars. There were
Oxford shoes, which laced up the front through eyelets. The
members of the House of Commons dressed like the gentry and
assumed their manners. There was exaggeration in all complimentary
and ceremonial language.
The gentry were beginning to be thought of as a "squirearchy".
They owned about half the land of the country.
The population according to class was as follows:
Number of Social Ranks, Household Household
Households Degrees, Titles size yearly
income
in pounds
160 Temporal lords 40 3,200
26 Spiritual lords 20 1,300
800 Baronets 16 880
600 Knights 13 650
3,000 Esquires 10 450
12,000 Gentlemen 8 280
5,000 Persons in greater offices and places 8 240
5,000 Persons in lesser offices and places 6 120
2,000 Eminent merchants and traders by sea 8 400
8,000 Lesser merchants and traders by sea 6 198
10,000 Persons in the law 7 154
2,000 Eminent clergymen 6 72
8,000 Lesser clergymen 5 50
40,000 Freeholders of the better sort 7 91
120,000 Freeholders of the lesser sort 5.5 55
150,000 Farmers 5 42.5
15,000 Persons in liberal arts and sciences 5 60
50,000 Shopkeepers and tradesmen 4.5 45
60,000 Artisans and handicrafts 4 38
5,000 Naval officers 4 80
4,000 Military officers 4 60
50,000 Common seamen 3 20
364,000 Laboring people and out-servants 3.5 15
400,000 Cottagers and paupers 3.25 6.5
35,000 Common soldiers 2 14
25,000 Vagrants, as gypsies, thieves, beggars
As can be seen, agriculture is still the most common occupation.
Great houses now had a central dining chamber [saloon] for dining,
with sets of lodgings [suites], usually for couples, around it.
Each lodging had an ante-chamber and/or drawing room, and then a
bedchamber, off of which there was a servant's room and a closet
[cabinet]. No longer did personal servants bed down in the drawing
room or outside their master's door or in a truckle bed at his
feet. The servant's room was connected to a back staircase for use
by servants. Secret guests also used it. The closet room was the
innermost sanctum for privacy and gave its name to the later
cabinet of the government.
There were fewer servants and they were of a lower social status
than before. They were often sons of merchants, clergymen, and
army officers. Gentlemen no longer advanced by service to a great
man, but instead through grammar school and university education,
commerce, the law, or the armed services. This change came about
because the state now maintained reasonable law and order. There
were more female servants, who were paid less to cook and to clean
as well as doing laundry and nursing. Servants were kept more in
the background, preferably out of sight. The elaborate ceremonial
ritual with sewer, carver, and cupbearer was gone. A butler
replaced the yeomen of the buttery, ewery, and pantry, and footmen
began to wait on the table at which the lord, his lady, and other
couples sat. Servants no longer had meals in the hall, which now
had a grand staircase up to the dining chamber. The highest
servants, the officers: clerk of the kitchen, clerk of the check
[comptroller], head cook, butler, and groom of the chambers, and
female housekeeper ate in the gentleman-of the-horse's room,
although at a separate table. The kitchen staff ate in the
kitchen. The footmen, underbutler, porters, coachmen, grooms,
stable-boys, gardeners, maids ate in a servant's room. The steward
was no longer the chief household officer, but had a room near the
kitchen. The bulk of the servants slept in the basement or
subordinate wings of the house.
Great houses of nobles had more rooms, such as a chapel, library,
parlors, dressings rooms, and galleries; there was a variety of
architectural floor plans. The structure of a noble household of
an earl was as follows: The chief official was the receiver
general. He had financial responsibility for the household and
prepared accounts for the household and for the tenants' estates.
These were checked by an auditor. The receiver general was often
the son of a country gentleman and had a salary of 50 pounds
raised to 100 pounds with longevity. He had a servant and an
assistant. If married, he had a house on the property. There was
perhaps an attorney on retainer (paid for a certain number of
hours per week or month). The gentleman of the chamber [privy
purse] kept the accounts of the family and bought them apparel and
toiletries. He was in close personal attendance upon the earl. His
salary was 20 pounds a year. Besides the receiver general and the
gentleman of the chamber, the tutor and chaplain had the closest
personal contact with the family. The lady had a gentlewoman with
a maid servant. The receiver general supervised most of the staff.
There was a steward of 40 pounds a year. He supervised a clerk of
the kitchen and a house bailiff of 20 pounds a year. The bailiff
had responsibility for the produce of the estate, e.g. the
gardens, the deer park, and the fish ponds. Under the clerk of the
kitchen was the cook man and kitchen boys, the latter of whom were
clothed and fed but not paid. The steward also supervised the 4
pound yearly porters, who kept the gates; the watchmen outside;
and the head housekeeper, usually a woman of 2 to 6 pounds yearly.
She supervised the laundry maid and general maids, who spent much
of their time sewing. The steward was also responsible for the
wine cellar. A dozen footmen belonged partly to the house and
partly to the stables and received 2 to 6 pounds yearly. They
waited on the lord and lady in the house and accompanied them in
travels and did errands for them. The gentleman of the horse
supervised the stables, coach, dogs, kennels, and 16 pound yearly
huntsman. Boy pages also worked partly in the house and partly in
the stables. They were clothed and fed, but not paid. The head
gardener received 80 pounds for tending the flowers, vegetables,
and fruit trees. He had casual workers as needed to assist him.
The steward was also responsible for the London house. Here there
was a housekeeper, a watchman, and a 40 pound a year gardener, all
there permanently. When the lord was there, bargemen were employed
for his barge. The salaries for the family estate totaled about
600 pounds a year. Sometimes married sons' or daughters' families
stayed for months at the family estate; then they would pay for
their part of the food.
Well-to-do people drank imported tea and coffee, sometimes from
porcelain ware, and usually after dinner or supper. Most tea
leaves were brewed first for the family and guests and a second
time for the servants; then they were given to the servants'
relatives or friends. Queen Mary encouraged the fashion of
collecting Chinese porcelain. The rich had red or black and gilt
lacquered cabinets and cupboards. Oak gave way to walnut, with its
variegated surfaces. There were grandfather clocks. Some
fireplaces now had cast-iron firebacks. Stuffing began to be
upholstered to woodwork benches. Chairs were taller in the back.
Ladies did needlework to cover them and also made patchwork
quilts. Cane seats came into fashion.
>From the spring of 1665 to the end of 1666 there was a Great
Plague, mostly in London. It was the last and worst plague since
the Black Death of 1348. It lasted over a year and about one-third
died from it. Households with a plague victim were walled up with
its residents inside to reduce contagion, and then marked with a
red cross. Church bells tolling their requiems clanged in
ceaseless discord. The mournful cry "bring out your dead" echoed
in deserted streets. At night groups of people shoveled the
corpses into open graves. To prepare for this revolting task, they
often first became drunk out of their senses. People acquired wild
beliefs in hope of avoiding the plague. For instance, at one time
it was thought that syphilis would prevent it, so maddened hordes
stormed the brothels. At another time, it was rumored that the
plague could be burned out of the air, and all one day bonfires
blazed outside every door and people sweltered in the heat. Other
localities posted sentries on the road to keep Londoners out of
their areas to prevent the plague from spreading there. Since
sneezing was thought to be the first sign of a person getting the
plague, it became common to ask God to bless a person who sneezed.
In London, statistics were collected on the number of plague
victims and their places of death to try to determine the cause of
the plague by correlation, a new method. This was a natural
sequent to merchant John Gaunt's 1662 book "Natural and Political
Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality", which compiled
yearly vital statistics from which to analyze, for instance,
causes of death due to particular diseases. It reached conclusions
such as that fall was the most unhealthy season; females had
longer life spans than males; and infant mortality was very high.
In 1666 a fire destroyed three-fourths of the City of London. The
blazing buildings were so hot that people with leather buckets of
water, hand squirts, and manually operated water-pumping machines
could not get near them. There was a lot of noise from falling
buildings. Panic and desperation were widespread. There was a lot
of crying out and running about distractedly. People saved some of
their possessions by burying them or removing them from the fire's
path as they moved to different lodgings. The streets were full of
carts piled high with furniture and merchandise. The Thames River
was thick with heavily laden barges. Melting lead from St. Paul's
church ran down the streets in a stream. The Tower of London,
upwind of the fire, was saved by blowing up surrounding buildings.
Eventually the wind abated and the fire was put out. A Fire Court
with royal justices was created to offer settlement terms about
property that were free, fair, fast, and final. Army tents and
supplies, and soup kitchens sustained the citizens in the fields.
After the fire, buildings had to be brick or stone rather than
wood, except for doors and windows. Also, more plaster and tile
was used. All roofs had to be of tile or slate, rather than
thatch. There was a general use of tile for roofing. About 1714,
came slate for roofings. All buildings had to be at least two
stories high, with flat facades rather than overhanging upper
floors. They had to have wide brick walls around them to avoid the
spread of fires. Many streets, squares, and alleys were
professionally planned, after the example of Inigo Jones, who had
continued his town planning with Lincoln's Inn field's open square
surrounded by houses with iron balconies. Another example was
Leiscester Square. Main streets had to be wide enough to stop a
fire. The street selling that had caused so much congestion was
removed to new market places. The massive rebuilding of London
ended the monopoly of the building trade claimed by the Mason's
Company. Astronomer and geometrician Christopher Wren designed and
built a new St. Paul's Cathedral and many churches in London, thus
becoming England's first architect. He worked up from a square
base through all sorts of shapes to a circular double dome on top.
The fire put an end to Whitehall as a royal residence and St.
James Palace was used instead. But at least one fire hazard
remained: the practice of lighting new fires by taking buckets of
hot coals from one room or house to another. This was faster than
the several minutes it took to use a tinder box to start a flame,
i.e. striking a piece of flint upon a piece of steel making a
spark which was dropped onto tinder and then blown upon. Matches
were invented in this period, but expensive and unsafe.
Nicholas Barbon began fire insurance in the 1670s. If fire broke
out on an insured premises, the insurance company's firemen would
come with leather buckets and grappling irons, and later small
hand pumps. Barbon also redeveloped many districts in London,
tearing down old buildings without hesitation. He started the
system of selling off leases to individual builders, who hoped to
recover their building costs by selling their houses before they
were completed and before substantial payments on the lease became
due. Entrepreneurial master-builders subcontracted work to
craftsmen and took a large profit or a large loss and debt.
Aristocrats bought large parcels of land on which they built their
own mansions surrounded by lots to be rented to building
contractors and speculators like Barbon. The houses built on these
lots were sold and the underlying land rented. These rentals of
land made the mansions self-supporting. Barbon built rows of
identical townhouses. Sometimes houses were built on all the lots
around a square, which had gardens reserved for the use of those
who lived on the square. Most of the new building was beyond the
old City walls. Marine insurance for storms, shipwreck, piracy,
mutiny, and enemy action was also initiated. Before the fire, e.g.
in Tudor times, the writing of risks had been carried on as a
sideline by merchants, bankers, and even money lenders in their
private offices and was a private transaction between individuals.
London was residential and commercial. Around the outside were
tenements of the poor. From 1520 to 1690, London's population had
risen tenfold, while the nation's had only doubled. London went
from 2% to 11% of the nation's population. In 1690, London's
population was about half a million. After 1690, London's
population grew at the same rate as the nation's. The first
directory of addresses in London was published in 1677. Business
began to follow the clock more strictly and many people thought of
their watches as a necessity.
London coffee houses, which also sold wine, liquors, and meals,
became specialty meeting places. They were quieter and cheaper
than taverns; for a penny, one could sip a cup of coffee by the
fire, read the newspapers, and engage in conversation. Merchants,
stock jobbers, politician groups, soldiers, doctors and clergymen,
scholars, and literary men all had special coffee house meeting
places. Notices and letters of general interest were posted
therein. Many merchants, brokers, and underwriters, especially
those whose houses had been burned in the fire, conducted their
business at their coffee house and used it as their business
address. Men in marine insurance and shipping met at Lloyd's
Coffeehouse, which was run by Edward Lloyd who established it for
this purpose in 1687. Lloyd provided reliable shipping news with a
network of correspondents in the principal ports at home and on
the continent and circulated a handwritten sheet of lists of
vessels and their latest movements at his coffeehouse. The patrons
cheered safe arrivals and shared their grief over ships lost. They
insured their own risks at one moment and underwrote those of
their friends the next. Auctions of goods and of ships and ship
materials which had been advertised in the newspapers were
conducted from a pulpit in the coffeehouse.
French wine was consumed less because of heavy taxation and
spirits and beer were consumed more. The streets were alive with
taverns, coffee houses, eating houses, and hackney coaches past 9
p.m. at night. Coffee houses were suppressed by royal proclamation
in 1675 because "malicious and scandalous reports" defaming his
majesty's government were spread there, which disturbed the peace
and quiet of the realm. But this provoked such an uproar that it
was reduced to a responsibility of the owner to prevent scandalous
papers and libels from being read and hindering any declarations
any false and scandalous reports against the government or its
ministers.
London air was filthy with smoke from coal burning. In 1684 the
streets were lit with improved lights which combined oil lamps
with lenses and reflectors. Groups of householders combined to
hire lighting contractors to fulfill their statutory
responsibility to hang candles or lights in some part of their
houses near the street to light it for passengers until 9:00 p.m.,
and later to midnight. In 1694 a monopoly was sold to one lighting
company. In 1663 a body of paid watchmen was established in
London. An office of magistrate was created and filled with
tradesmen and craftsmen, who could make a living from the fines
and fees. This was to supplement the unpaid Justices of the Peace.
The public was encouraged to assist in crime prevention, such as
being witnesses, but most policing was left to the parishes.
Crowds punished those who transgressed community moral standards,
threatened their economic or social interests, or offended their
religious or patriotic beliefs. Often a crowd would react before
the call of "stop thief" or the hue and cry from the local
constable. Pickpockets would be drenched under a pump. Cheats
would be beaten up. Dishonest shops and brothels would be
ransacked or destroyed. The most common targets were promiscuous
women and pregnant servants.
There were many highway robberies and mob actions in London. Mobs
in the thousands would turn out against the Catholics, especially
at times of unemployment and trade depression. Working people
still saw demonstrations and violence as the best way to achieve
their economic goals, since strikes didn't work. For example, the
silk workers used street violence to get protective legislation
against imports and mechanization in 1675. The manufacture of silk
material had been brought to England by French workers driven from
France. In 1697, three thousand London silk weavers demonstrated
outside the Commons and East India House against the importation
of raw silks by the East India Co., and a couple months later,
they attacked a house in the city owned by a gentleman of the
company. In 1701, heavy duties were imposed on the import of
Indian silks and wearing of Indian silks was prohibited by
statute. Sometimes mobs would break open the prisons to release
fellow rioters or take action against strike breakers or
informers. Parish constables elected by their neighbors could not
control the mobs and stayed within their parishes. Dueling was
still prevalent, even though against the law.
In London and Westminster, it was hard to enforce the requirement
that inhabitants keep the street in front of their house clean and
store the filth until the daily raker or scavenger came with cart
and dung pot. So a commission was made responsible for paving and
keeping clean the streets, making and repairing vaults, sewers,
drains, and gutters, and removing encroachments. It compensated
those with encroachments of over 30 years. It assessed inhabitants
of such streets 16d. per square yard from the front of their
building to the center of the street. Women continued to empty
their pails and pans outside their doors and did their washing on
stools in the streets. There was a penalty of 5d. for throwing
filth in front of one's house, and 20d. for throwing it elsewhere
in the streets. Scavengers and rakers could lodge their coal
ashes, dust, dirt, and other filth in such vacant public places as
the commission deemed convenient for accommodating country carts
returning otherwise empty after their loads were sold.
However, this system did not work because people would not pay
their assessments. So there was a return to the former system of
requiring citizens to sweep and clean the streets in front of
their buildings twice a week and keep the filth until a scavenger
or raker came. The penalty for not doing so was 3s.4d., later
raised to 10s. Any one throwing coal ashes, dust, dirt, rubbish,
or dung onto the streets or lanes incurred a fine of 5s. There was
a fine of 20s. for hooping or washing any pipes or barrels in any
lane or open passage or repairing coaches, sawing wood, or
chiseling stones in the streets. Pigs kept in or about one's house
had to be forfeited.
One way that people traveled was to be carried in sedan chairs
held up by two horizontal poles with one man at the front ends and
another man in back. There were so many sedan chairs and coaches
for hire in London that the watermen lost business. All hackney
coaches in London or Westminster were required to be licensed and
marked with their owner's distinctive mark so that complaints
could be made. Their maximum rate was 10s. for a 12 hour day, and
18d. for the first hour and 12d. for every hour thereafter.
Licensed coachmen were not allowed to practice any other trade.
The coaches paid the commission 5 pounds yearly. Hay sold along
the road brought 6d. per load, and straw 2d. per load, to the
commission. There had to by paid 3d. for every cart load of hay
sold at the hay market and 1d. for every cart of straw, to go
towards paving and repairing the hay market street. Overall,
agriculture improved. Fields that would have been left fallow were
planted with new crops which restored indispensable chemical
elements to the soil. At the same time, they supplied winter food
for stock. The size and weight of animals for slaughter grew.
There was so much stock breeding that it was more economical for a
family to buy meat, milk, and eggs, than to maintain its own
animals. There was an explosion in the growing of beans, peas,
lettuce, asparagus, artichokes, and clover. The demand for food in
London and other urban areas made enclosure for crop cultivation
even more profitable than for sheep grazing. The government made
no more attempts to curtail the enclosure of farm lands. The
number of enclosures grew because copyholders were not successful
in obtaining the legal security of tenure. But most land was not
enclosed.
In 1661 in Essex, the wages for mowing one acre of grass were
1s.10d.; for reaping, shearing, binding one acre of wheat 4s.; and
for threshing a quarter of wheat or rye 1s.
Wives participated with their husbands in general agricultural
chores and did the dairy work including making cheese. Every
householder kept chickens because egg production was cheap, their
market price being only 1s. for a hundred. Wives also took care of
the gardening work and traditionally kept for their own the cash
that came in from garden, dairy, and poultry products. A wife made
jellies and preserves when the fruit trees, bushes, and vines were
bearing. Imported sugar enabled fruit to be preserved as jam in
jars sealed with a layer of mutton fat to make them airtight. She
was likely to concoct medications from her herbs. Meat had to be
smoked or salted when there was not enough fodder to keep animals
alive through the winter. She saw to it that the soap was boiled
and the candles molded. She cooked the daily meals, did the
washing, produced cloth for the family's use, and sewed the
family's clothing.