Cats, however, were still cruelly used. They were hung up in baskets to be used as targets at country fairs; they were stuffed alive into effigies and placed on bonfires so that their cries could add to the horror of the scene; they were thrown out of garret windows with bladders fastened to them to see how far they could fly. At Ely Cathedral there was ‘a great noise and disturbance near the choir’ one New Year’s Day when a man roasted a live cat on a spit before a large and noisy crowd.12
Man’s ‘charter of dominion over the creatures’, as Thomas Fuller called it, was taken to provide an excuse for cruel sports. However bloodthirstily executed, hunting was ‘yet without guilt’. In Henry VIII’s day it was common practice to have several hundred deer rounded up and then to loose the hounds upon them in a wholesale massacre; and after the slaughter of a deer it was customary for ladies to wash their hands in the blood in the belief that it would make them white.13 James I was far from unusual in appearing insanely vindictive as he hunted down the quarry, riding after the hounds at a wild gallop and dismounting eagerly to cut the stag’s throat as soon as it had been brought down. Then he would rip its belly open, put his hands and sometimes his feet inside and daub his companions with blood. Like so many of his contemporaries – who, according to Fynes Moryson, took more delight in hunting than the people of any other nation – the king not only hunted stags with frenzied enthusiasm, not only killed hares and caught larks, pursued game with hawks and cormorants, he loved to see cocks fighting and bears and bulls being baited to death. To watch bears baited he had a special pit made and once matched a lion with a bear which was to be punished for killing a child, but the lion refused to fight and the bear had to be baited to death by dogs instead.14
The king’s predecessor, Queen Elizabeth I, also much enjoyed hunting and attended the animal baitings that often followed the sport, as she did during the entertainments provided at Kenilworth Castle by the Earl of Leicester in 1575 when a crew of dogs was let loose upon thirteen bears and there was ‘plucking and tugging, scratching and biting and such an expense of blood as a month’s licking … will not recover’.15
Wearing clothes and jewels more suitable for the audience chamber than the hunting field, the queen was not content, even at the age of sixty-seven, to watch the hounds driving the deer along the coursing paddock, and to shoot at the quarry from the stands as her ladies preferred to do. She insisted on going ahead with the men, riding her horse so fast that she tired out her frightened companions, proving that she was quite capable of shooting with a heavy cross-bow and killing the ‘great and fat stagge with her owen Hand’.16
Hare-coursing was still a popular sport. So was hawking, and most rich gentlemen employed a falconer who trained the hawk to fly from the master’s gloved hand and bring the quarry to earth where it was located by the jingling bells tied to its legs. Bows and arrows were still used to bring down wildfowl but by 1559 the ‘keeper of my master’s park’ at Ingatestone was receiving money to buy ‘gunpowder to kill fowl with’; and the fowling-piece, or ‘birding-piece’ as Mistress Ford calls it in The Merry Wives of Windsor, was becoming quite common. Birds and beasts were also snared, netted, limed and trapped; and, although fish were usually drawn out of fishponds in nets, angling was becoming more common than it had been in the fifteenth century when Dame Juliana Berners had sung its praises in A Treatyss of Fysshynge with an Angle and had compared the pleasure of fishing in the ‘swete ayre’ and smelling the ‘swete savoure of the meede floures’ with the laboriousness and frustrations of hunting. ‘For the hunter must always renne and folowe his houndes … swetynge full sore. He bloweth tyll his lyppes blyster, and when he wenyth it be an hare full oft it is an hegge hogge.’ He returns home tired out, his clothes wet and torn, his hounds and hawks lost, and suffering from ‘ryght evyll a thurste’.17
While hunting remained the favourite pastime of the healthy, the adventurous and energetic, most gentlemen enjoyed quieter sports and games as well. Nearly everyone played bowls, and few country houses were without their bowling-greens or bowling-alleys. The game was still played much as it had been in the time of Edward II, but the introduction of the bias, a heavy metal weight inserted into one side of the bowl, demanded much greater skill in play. Some houses also had courts for the playing of tennis, a game introduced from France where it seems to have originated as a sort of handball played in cathedral cloisters. There the game was known as jeu de paume, ‘palm game’, the ball being struck with the palm of the hand, and its English name was probably derived from the French players’ call of ‘Tenez!’, ‘Watch out!’, before serving. By the middle of the sixteenth century the game was being played in roofed courts with rackets and with harder balls made of bits of cloth tightly wadded together which were exported to England in large numbers. King Henry VII had had courts constructed at Blackfriars, Greenwich, Westminster and elsewhere; and his son, Henry VIII, a skilful player in his youth, had built tennis courts also at Whitehall, St James’s and Hampton Court. By Elizabeth I’s day fives, a form of handball played in a walled court with a gloved hand, was also popular; and fencing was becoming as widely practised among the upper classes, both in the Spanish and Italian styles, as archery and wrestling.
A kind of cricket was being played by the end of the century; but it had not yet caught the general fancy, whereas football had been played by the common people for centuries. With no generally accepted rules, it was a violent game in which ‘young men propel a huge ball not by throwing it into the air, but by striking and rolling it along the ground with their feet’. It frequently led to quarrels and fights, sometimes to riot and murder. Constant efforts were made to control it. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries several proclamations were issued banning it, ordering men to practise archery instead and imposing fines and even imprisonment on those who continued to play it. But it proved impossible to suppress and by the sixteenth century had become established as part of the social life of the country, being played everywhere on public holidays and on Sundays.18 The way in which it was played varied from place to place but in most there were no regulations as to the number of players on each side, no boundaries and no time limit. At Ashbourne in Derbyshire the goals were three miles apart and the game lasted all day. In Pembrokeshire, as described by George Owen of Henlyss – who carried the scars, ‘signes and seales’ of it in his ‘heade, handes and other partes’ – it was played with a wooden ball (‘boyled in tallow to make it slipperye’) by men stripped to the waist and with hair and beards so short their opponents could not get a grip on them. As many as 2000 players took part; and the confusion and violence was so great that a visitor who chanced upon the scene in 1588 observed, ‘If this be but playe, I cold wishe the Spaniardes were here to see our plaies in England. Certes they would be oodielye feare of our warre.’19
Football, indeed, according to Philip Stubbes, was ‘a bloody and murdering practice’.
Doth not everyone lie in wait for his adversary, seeking to overthrow him and pitch him on the nose, though it be upon hard stones, in ditch or dale, in valley or hill, or what place soever it be? He careth not so he have him downe. And he that can serve the most of this fashion, he is counted the only fellow … so that by this means sometimes their necks are broken, sometimes their backs, sometime their legs, sometime their arms; sometime one part thrust out of joint, sometime another; sometime the noses gush out with blood, sometime their eyes start out … But whosoever scapeth away the best goeth not scot free, but is either sore wounded, crazed [concussed] and bruised, so that he dieth of it, or else scapeth very hardly; and no marvel, for they have the sleights to meet one betwixt two, to back him against the heart with their elbows, to hit him under the short ribs with their griped fists, and with their knees to catch him upon the hip, and to pitch him on his neck, with a hundred such murdering devices.20
There were a few who saw good in the game. Richard Mulcaster, headmaster of St Paul’s School, thought that the game ‘strengtheneth and brawneth the
whole body, and by provoking superfluities downewards, it dischargeth the head and upper parts. It is good for the bowels, driveth downe the stone and gravel from both the bladder and kidneies.’ But Mulcaster had to agree that as usually played in England, ‘with bursting of shins and breaking of legs, it be neither civil, [nor] worthy’. If it were to become a game for gentlemen, rules would have to be made and referees introduced to enforce them.21
As it was, most people agreed with Sir Thomas Elyot who thought that football was ‘nothing but beastly fury and extreme violence, whereof proceedeth hurt and consequently rancour and malice do remain with those that be wounded’.22
18 Readers and Music Makers
Before the age of printing English people rarely read for pleasure. A surprisingly large number of medieval books in manuscript have survived; but most households contained few volumes other than breviaries and psalters, manuals of etiquette, perhaps a technical treatise or two on subjects like medicine and law, guidebooks and collections of moralizing precepts which advised the reader to ‘be given more to wakefulness than sleep’ or ‘to bear poverty with patience since Nature created you a naked infant’. Bibles were not often seen because a licence was required for their possession, and without it the reader might be accused of heresy. Historical chronicles, both in verse and prose, books of travels such as that ascribed to Sir John Mandeville, copies of Chaucer and Langland, and romances, in particular those relating to King Arthur, seem to have been the most widely read books in those households which possessed any books at all. This distressed Roger Ascham who wrote:
In our forefathers’ time when papistry, like a standing pool, covered and overflowed England, few books were read in our tongues saving certain books of chivalry, as they said for pastime or pleasure … As one, for example Le Morte d’Arthur, the whole pleasure of which book standeth in two special points, in open manslaughter and bold bawdry … Yet I know when God’s Bible was banished the Court, Le Morte d’ Arthur [was] received into the Prince’s chamber.1
Most rich men had modest libraries, the books often being prized for their monetary value rather than their literary merit; and many, like Sir John Paston, employed, at great expense, professional scribes and illuminators to copy and embellish texts. At Caister Castle Sir John Fastolf had some twenty books excluding those reserved for use in the chapel. Among them, according to the catalogue, were The Cronycles of France, the Romance da Rose, Meditacions Saint Bernard, A Book of Julius Caesar, Veges de l’arte Chevalerie, Vice and Vertues, a book of etiquette, the Chronicles of Titus Livius, Problemate Aristotelis and Liber de Cronykles de Grant Bretayne in Ryme. These were the kinds of book to be found in most large fifteenth-century households; and some of them would have been found in the public libraries which were beginning to be established. The Guildhall Library in London, a library of mostly theological books chained in their shelves, was established in about 1423 with money left by Richard Whittington, the Lord Mayor; and by 1464 there were also chained libraries at Bristol and Worcester. Both these were open to the public between 10 o’clock in the morning and two in the afternoon. A university graduate acted as librarian, helping visitors and giving a weekly lecture.
Soon after the establishment of these two libraries, William Caxton rented a shop for 10s a year near the entrance to the south transept of Westminster Abbey. Later he took other rooms by the gate leading to the Almonry; and until his death in 1491, from the sign of the Red Pale, he issued seventy-four books printed in English, twenty of them translations into the language made by himself. He was the first English but by no means the first European printer. Johannes Gutenberg had published his celebrated Bible twenty years before Caxton established his press in Westminster; and presses had been set up at Cologne in 1464, at Rome in 1467, at Venice and Paris in 1470 and soon afterwards in Spain, Hungary and Poland. It was at Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to 1472, that Caxton learned the craft of printing.
He had been born in Kent and been apprenticed at the age of sixteen to Robert Large, a rich London mercer. After Large’s death he had moved to Bruges, centre of the European wool trade, where he became rich himself. Of a studious turn of mind, and exceedingly industrious by nature, he began to occupy his leisure hours in 1469 by translating Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des Histoires de Troy during which labours his ‘pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed’. But he was rewarded in 1475 by the pleasure of seeing the book in print, issued by his own press in Bruges. The next year, that of his return to England, saw the appearance both of his translation from the French of The Game and Playe of Chesse and of his first item printed in England, an Indulgence dated 13 December 1476.
He had a clear idea of the kinds of people who constituted the great majority of his readers. His friends were wealthy merchants such as he had been; his patrons were Edward IV and his successor, Richard III, as well as noblemen who, from time to time, commissioned books. His English publications covered a wide variety of subjects, history and philosophy, romance, devotion and English literature, from Dictes and Sayengs of the Phylosophers by Edward IV’s brother-in-law, Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers, to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, much of Lydgate’s poetry, and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur which appeared in 1485. These were the kind of books which English readers preferred and which were provided for them after Caxton’s death by Wynkyn de Worde – who probably came to England as his assistant in 1476 and later established himself in Fleet Street – and by those other English printers who catered for the public that Caxton had helped to create.2
This public was particularly drawn to books of history and travels, translations of the classics, to theological works, and to herbals, treatises of self-instruction, and manuals on medicine and diet. Sir John Mandeville’s wildly fanciful Travels, translated from the French in 1496, were especially popular, as were Ranulph Higden’s universal history, Polychronicon, Robert Fabyan’s The New Chronicles of England and France and Thomas à Kempis’s On the Imitation of Christ, first published in English in 1503. A Treatyse of Fysshynge with an Angle appeared in 1495, and Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus in 1545. Fitzherbert’s Boke of Husbandrie of 1523 was followed by Thomas Tusser’s Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie in 1557. The mathematician Robert Recorde brought out a whole series of widely read books on his subject, including Introduction to lerne to recken with the Pen in 1537, Grounde of Artes, which appeared in numerous editions from 1540 onwards, The Whetstone of Witte, or the second Part of Arithmetike, The Pathway of Knowledge, or the first Principles of Geometry, and The Treasure of Knowledge.
Widely read though they were, most books such as Fabyan’s New Chronicles were printed in what would today be considered extremely small editions, perhaps not more than 200 copies or so, and they were consequently very expensive. It was only those books which were printed in much larger quantities that could be bought for the relatively cheap price of the Book of Common Prayer which was sold at 2s 2d for an unbound copy, 3s 8d bound.3
For much of the period the Bible could not be bought at all. In the fourteenth century various translations of New Testament books had appeared; and although these versions ‘made in the time of John Wyclif or since’ had been suppressed in 1407 at the Council of Oxford, several of them were still in circulation when William Tyndale’s translation, printed on the Continent, appeared in England in the 1520s. Miles Coverdale’s translation, which contained an unauthorized dedication to Henry VIII, was also printed abroad; and it was not until 1537 that a Bible ascribed to one Thomas Matthew was issued with the official consent of the king. Two years later the ‘Great Bible’ was issued under the patronage of Thomas Cromwell; and in 1540 ‘Cranmer’s Bible’ was published with a notice to the effect that it was ‘appointed to the use of churches’. Yet even now not everyone was permitted to read the Bible freely since the king, who had condemned Tyndale’s strongly Protestant marginal notes as ‘pestilent glosses’, considered its unrestricted study ‘a dangerous thi
ng’. Noblemen were allowed to read it to their families, and gentlemen and merchants in a satisfactory way of business could read it to themselves, but the common people not at all. The prohibitions, lifted in the reign of Edward VI, were reimposed during that of Mary, in which yet another English version was printed for Protestant exiles and for the first time divided into verses. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth came the Geneva Bible, also known as the Breeches Bible because in it Genesis chapter 3, verse 7 is rendered, ‘and they sowed figge-leaves together, and made themselves breeches’. For fifty years this was the most widely read of all translations, until the appearance of the splendid Authorized Version of 1611 which soon displaced its predecessors and has proved unsurpassable.4
After the appearance of the Geneva Bible, the reading and listening to the words of the scriptures became an almost universal practice. People no longer had to gather, perhaps in trepidation, around the church lectern to hear the word of God, but could now attend to it at home where for many families the Bible was the only book they possessed, its endpapers becoming, and remaining until Victorian times, a register of births and deaths and a convenient place on which to record cooking recipes and medicines for sick cows. The regular reading of the Geneva Bible, and the Calvinistic marginal annotations with which it was embellished, not only introduced ordinary English people to the kind of religious controversies which flourished on the Continent but also, by the emphasis placed upon the study of the Old Testament, helped to prolong the medieval belief that success in the world depended upon divine favour, and that the world itself was one in which the supernatural was always likely to make a sudden appearance like the deus ex machina of the theatre.5
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