by Will Durant
Charity, in the Latin countries, was still administered with medieval cheerfulness. Noble families spent a considerable part of their incomes in gifts and alms.48 Lyons inherited from the fifteenth century a complex organization of municipal charity, to which the citizens gave “with openhanded generosity.”49 In Germany and England the hands were not so open. Luther did his manful best to re-establish the charities interrupted by the princely confiscation of monastic properties, but he confessed that his efforts failed.50 “Under the papacy,” he mourned, “people were charitable and gave gladly, but now, under the dispensation of the Gospel, nobody gives any longer; everybody fleeces everybody else.... . Nobody will give a pfennig.”51 Latimer gave a similar report in 1548: “London was never so ill as now.... In times past, when any rich man died .... they would bequeath .... great sums towards the relief of the poor.... Now charity is waxen cold.”52 Two Italian cities, Cardinal Pole told London, gave more alms than all England.53 “As truth spread,” concluded Froude, “charity and justice languished in England.”54 Probably it was not Protestantism, but commercialism and unbelief, that diminished charity.
Pauperism grew to the proportions of a social crisis. Evicted tenants, jobless journeymen, demobilized soldiers, roamed the highways or littered the slums, begging and robbing to live. In Augsburg the paupers were reckoned at a sixth of the population, in Hamburg a fifth, in London a fourth.55 “O merciful Lord!” cried the reformer Thomas Lever, “what a number of poor, feeble, halt, blind, lame, sickly... lie and creep in the miry streets!”56 Luther, whose heart was as kind as his tongue was harsh, was among the first to perceive that the state must take over from the Church the care and rescue of the destitute. In his address To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520) he proposed that “every town should provide for its own poor.” During his absence in the Wartburg his radical followers organized in Wittenberg a community fund to care for orphans, dower poor girls, give scholarships to needy students, and lend money to impoverished families. In 1523 Luther drew up a Regulation of a Common Chest, which urged that in each district the citizens and clergy should tax themselves to raise a fund from which loans were to be made, without interest, to persons in need and unable to work.57 In 1522 Augsburg appointed six Armenpfleger—Protectors of the Poor—to supervise the distribution of relief. Nuremberg followed suit, then Strasbourg and Breslau (1523), Ratisbon and Magdeburg (1524)
In that year a Spanish humanist, Juan Luis Vives, wrote for the town council of Bruges a tract On the Relief of the Poor. He noted the spread of poverty amid growing wealth, and warned that the extreme inequality of possessions might engender a ruinous rebellion. “As it is disgraceful,” he wrote, “for the father of a family in his comfortable home to permit anyone in it to suffer the disgrace of being unclothed or in rags, it is similarly unfitting that the magistrates of a city should tolerate a condition in which citizens are hard pressed by hunger and distress.”58 Vives agreed that all who were capable of work should be made to work, and that no one should be allowed to beg. But since many were really unable to work, some refuge must be set up for them in almshouses, hospitals, and schools financed by the municipality; food, medical care, and elementary education should be given them gratis, and special provision should be made for the mentally defective. Ypres combined Vives’s ideas with the German precedents and organized (1525) a community chest which united all charitable endowments in one fund, and all charitable distribution under one head. Charles V asked for a copy of the Ypres plan and recommended it to all the cities of the Empire (1531), and Henry VIII sent a similar directive to the parishes of England (1536). In Catholic countries the Church retained the administration of charity.
Political morality remained Machiavellian. Spies were taken for granted; those of Henry VIII in Rome were expected to report the most secret conversations of the Vatican.59 Bribery was traditional, and flowed more lushly after the influx of American gold. Governments competed in violating treaties; Turkish and Christian fleets rivaled each other in piracy. In the decay of chivalry the morals of war relapsed into semi-barbarism; cities that had unsuccessfully resisted siege were sacked or burned, soldiers surrendering were slaughtered or enslaved till ransomed; such international law and comity as had existed in the occasional submission of kings to arbitration by popes disappeared in a chaos of nationalistic expansion and religious enmity. Toward non-Christians, Christians recognized few moral restraints, and the Turks reciprocated. The Portuguese captured and enslaved African Negroes, and the Spanish Conquistadores robbed, enslaved, and killed American natives without abating their high resolve to make the New World Christian. Life was so bitter for the American Indians under Spanish rule that thousands of them committed suicide.60 Even in Christendom there was a startling increase of suicides in this age.61 Some humanists condoned self-destruction, but the Church ruled that it led straight to hell, so that the successful seeker fell out of the frying pan into the fire.
All in all the Reformation, though it ultimately improved the morals of Europe, temporarily damaged lay morality. Pirkheimer and Hans Sachs, both sympathetic with Luther, mourned that a chaos of unregulated conduct had followed the collapse of ecclesiastical authority.62 Luther, as usual, was quite frank about the matter:
The more we go forward, the worse the world becomes.... It is clear enough how much more greedy, cruel, immodest, shameless, wicked the people are now than they were under popery.63.... We Germans are today the laughing stock and disgrace of all peoples; we are regarded as ignominious and obscure swine.... We steal, we lie .... we eat and drink to excess, and we give ourselves to every vice.64... It is the general complaint that the young people of today are utterly dissolute and disorderly, and will not let themselves be taught any more.... The women and girls of Wittenberg have begun to go bare before and behind, and there is no one to punish or correct them, and God’s word is mocked.65
Andreas Musculus, a Lutheran preacher, described his time (1560) as unspeakably immoral compared with the Germans of the fifteenth century,66 and many Protestant leaders agreed with him.67 “The future appalls me,” moaned Calvin; “I dare not think of it; unless the Lord descends from heaven, barbarism will engulf us.”68 We hear similar notes from Scotland69 and England. Froude, ardent defender of Henry VIII, summed up fairly:
The movement commenced by Henry VIII, judged by its present results (1550), had brought the country at last into the hands of mere adventurers. The people had exchanged a superstition which in its grossest abuses prescribed some shadow of respect and obedience, for a superstition which merged obedience in speculative belief; and under that baneful influence not only the highest virtues of self-sacrifice, but the commonest duties of probity and morality, were disappearing. Private life was infected with impurity to which the licentiousness of the Catholic clergy appeared like innocence.... . Among the good who remained uninfected the best were still to be found on the Reforming side.70
We can hardly attribute this moral decline in Germany and England to Luther’s unchaining of sex or his scorn of “good works,” or to Henry’s bad example in sexual indulgence and callous cruelty; for a similar—in some ways a more unrestrained—license ruled in Catholic Italy under the Renaissance popes, and in Catholic France under Francis I. Probably the basic cause of the moral loosening in Western Europe was the growth of wealth. A main supporting cause was the decline of faith not only in Catholic dogmas but in the very fundamentals of the Christian creed. “Nobody cares about either heaven or hell,” mourned Andreas Musculus; “nobody gives a thought to either God or the Devil.”71 In such statements by religious leaders we must allow for the exaggeration of reformers disappointed to find how little their theological emendations had improved the moral life. Men had not been much better before, and would not be much better in later centuries, if we may trust the preachers. We can discover all the sins of the sixteenth century in our own age, and all of ours in theirs, according to their means.
Meanwhile both Catholicism and Pro
testantism had set up and strengthened two focuses of moral regeneration: the improvement of clerical conduct through marriage or continence, and the emphasis on the home as the final citadel of faith and decency. In the long run the Reformation would really reform, even to excess; and the time would come when men and women would look back with secret envy to that sixteenth century when their ancestors had been so wicked and so free.
IV. MANNERS
People then, as now, were judged more by their manners than by their morals; the world forgave more readily the sins that were committed with the least vulgarity and the greatest grace. Here, as in everything put artillery and theology, Italy led the way. Compared with the Italians the people north of the Alps, except for a thin upper crust in France and England, were fairly uncouth; the Italians called them barbarians, and many Frenchmen, charmed with their Italian conquests in field and chamber, agreed with them. But the barbarians were eager to be civilized. French courtiers and courtesans, poets and poisoners, followed Italian models; and the English limped sedulously behind. Castiglione’s Courtier (1528) was translated into French in 1537, into English in 1561, and polite circles debated the definition of a gentleman. Manuals of manners were best sellers; Erasmus composed one. Conversation became an art in France, as later in the Mermaid Tavern in London; the duel of repartee crossed the Alps from Italy about the same time as the art of fencing. Conversation was more polished in France than in Germany; the Germans crushed a man with humor, the French punctured him with wit. Freedom in speech was the vital medium of the age.
Since the surface can be more easily made presentable than the soul, the rising classes in the rising civilizations of the North paid much attention to their clothing. Commoners dressed artlessly enough—as we see in Brueghel’s multitudes: cuplike hats, loose blouses with bulging sleeves, tight trousers reaching down to comfortable shoes, with the ungainly composition centering upon a codpiece—an insolent bag, sometimes brightly ornamented, dangling before the male crotch. Moneyed males in Germany enveloped their mighty frames in voluminous folds of cloth, topped with broad hats that lay on the head like terraced pancakes; but German women were apparently forbidden to dress otherwise than as Hausfrauen or cooks. In England, too, the men wore more finery than their ladies, until Elizabeth outshone them with her thousand dresses. Henry VIII set a pace in extravagance of costume, prettifying his pounds with color and ornaments and precious stuffs. The Duke of Buckingham, at the marriage of Prince Arthur to Catherine of Aragon, “ware a gowne wrought of needle worke,” says Holinshed, “furred with sables, and valued at £1,500” ($150,000?).71 Sumptuary laws forbade any man lower than a knight to ape the sartorial splendor of his betters. Englishwomen covered their forms tightly, with dresses reaching from neck to floor, and sleeves to the wrist, with a trimming of fur at edges, and broad girdles buckled with metal ornaments and carrying a pendant or a rosary; in general they wore less jewelry than the men.
Under the appreciative Francis I French women opened their bodices, displayed swelling bosoms, and cut their gowns in the back almost to the last vertebra.72 If the natural bust swelled inadequately, an artificial bust was inserted under the stays.73 Clothing was tightened under the breasts and pinched at the waist; sleeves billowed, hidden wires spread out the skirt at rear and hem, and high-heeled shoes compelled a prancing, airy step. Women of rank—no others—were allowed to wear a train, or tail, to their dresses, the nobler the longer; if nobility sufficed it might be seven yards long, and a maid or page would follow to hold it up. In another style the woman would cover her neck with a fraise or ruff, stiffly supported by wires; and men in a formal mood pilloried themselves in like contraptions. About 1535 Servetus noted that “the women of Spain have a custom that would be held barbarous in France, of piercing their ears and hanging gold rings in them, often set with precious stones”;74 but by 1550 earrings were worn by the ladies of France, and even by men.75 Jewelry continued its immemorial sway. Frenchmen clothed themselves in silk shirts and velvet doublets, padded their shoulders, cased their legs in tight colored breeches, and protected their manhood with a braguette or codpiece sometimes set off with ribbons or jewelry. Reversing the custom of the fifteenth century, they wore their hair short and their beards long. Feminine hair was worn in a variety of structures discouraging to describe; it was braided, curled, netted, filled out with switches, decked with flowers, brightened with gems, perfumed with unguents, dyed to match the fashion, and raised in towers or pyramids above the head. Hairdressers were now indispensable to women of fashion, for growing old seemed a fate worse than death.
How clean were the bodies behind the frills? A sixteenth-century Introduction pour les jeunes dames spoke of women “who have no care to keep themselves clean except in those parts that may be seen, remaining filthy .... under their linen”;76 and a cynical proverb held that courtesans were the only women who washed more than their face and hands.77 Perhaps cleanliness increased with immorality, for as women offered more of themselves to view or to many, cleanliness enlarged its area. Frequent bathing, preferably in perfumed water, became now, especially in France, part of good manners. Public bathhouses diminished in number as private bathrooms multiplied; these, however, were usually without running water, depending on bowls and tubs. Steam baths, which had come into Western Europe with returning crusaders in the thirteenth century, continued popular through the sixteenth.
The home almost replaced the church as the center of religious worship in Protestant lands. The father served as priest, leading the family in daily prayers, Bible reading, and psalms, and the mother taught her children the catechism. In the middle classes comfort went with piety. This was the age when the table evolved by joining trestles and boards into a sturdy-legged unity, benches and cushions evolved into the upholstered chair, and the four-poster bed, carved and canopied, became a symbol of moral stability and financial success. Furniture, plate, andirons, and kitchen utensils were made to endure, even sparkle, for generations. Pewter replaced wooden platters; spoons of tin or silver replaced those of wood.
Houses were big because families were large. Women bore almost annually, often in vain, for infantile mortality was high. John Colet was the eldest of twenty-two children; by the time he was thirty-two all the others were dead. Anton Koberger, the Nuremberg printer, had twenty-five children, and survived twelve of them. Dürer was one of eighteen children, of whom only three seem to have reached maturity.78 To round out the family there were household pets almost as numerous as the progeny. Parrots had come in from the West Indies, and monkeys from India were domestic favorites.79 A whole literature instructed women and children in the care of dogs and birds.
Meals were enormous. Vegetables were despised, and only slowly won acceptance; the cabbage, carrot, lettuce, rhubarb, potato, lima bean, and strawberry now came into common use. The main meal, or dinner, was taken at eleven in the morning; supper was deferred till seven—the higher the class, the later the hour. Beer and wine were the staple drinks at all meals, even breakfast; one of Thomas More’s claims to fame was that he drank water. About 1550 the Spaniards brought in chocolate from Mexico; coffee had not yet percolated from Arabia into Western Europe. In 1512 the household of the Duke of Northumberland allowed a quart of ale per person per meal, even to boys eight years old; the average consumption of ale in sixteenth-century Coventry was a quart per day for every man, woman, and child.80 The breweries of Munich were renowned as early as the fourteenth century.81 Drunkenness was in good repute in England till “Bloody Mary” frowned upon it; it remained popular in Germany. The French drank more stably, not being quite so cold.
Despite poverty and oppression, many of the graces of life continued. Even the poor had gardens. The tulip, first brought to Western Europe about 1550 by Busbecq, Imperial ambassador at Constantinople, became a national passion in Holland. Country houses were a pleasant fashion in England and France. Villagers still had their seasonal festivals—May Day, Harvest Home, All Saints, Christmas, and many more; kin
gs themselves went Maying, and crowned themselves with flowers. The amusements of the rich sometimes provided exciting pageantry for the poor, as when Henry II entered Lyons in state in 1548; and commoners might, at a respectful distance, watch lords joust at tournaments—till that sport went out of style after the death of Diane’s King. Religious processions became more pagan as the age of Henry VIII moved toward the Elizabethan; and on the Continent an easy morality allowed nude women, in festival pageants, to impersonate historical or mythological characters; Dürer confessed himself fascinated by such a display at Antwerp in 1521.82
And there were games. Rabelais filled a chapter by merely listing them, real and imagined; and Brueghel showed almost a hundred of them in one painting. Bear-baiting, bullfighting, cockfighting, amused the populace; football, bowling, boxing, wrestling, exercised and exorcized young commoners; and Paris alone had 250 tennis courts for its blue bloods in the sixteenth century.83 All classes hunted and gambled; some ladies threw dice, some bishops played cards for money.84 Mummers, acrobats, and players roamed the countryside, and performed for lords and royalty. Within doors people played cards, chess, backgammon, and a score of other games.