The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)

by Christopher Hibbert

  Almost as influential as the Bible in maintaining these habits of mind was John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments of These Latter Perilous Times, later published under its more familiar title of The Book of Martyrs: A History of the Persecution of the Protestants. This, with its strong implication that the English people had been chosen by God to fight against Anti-Christ in the person of the pope, was considered so important a work that it was ordained in 1571 that copies should be available in all cathedrals and in the houses of gentry and the upper clergy for the edification of both servants and visitors. It was to be found, indeed, in most libraries in the country. Lady Hoby kept it beside her Bible and her books of sermons; Lady Mary Grey with her works by Whitgift, Luther and Knox, her Psalter, Psalms and Book of Common Prayer, her Treatise on the Resurrection of the Dead, her Comment on the Four Evangelists, her Ship of Assured Safety and her Life and Selected Orations of Demosthenes.6

  As the reign of Elizabeth progressed, more and more books appeared, so many, in fact, that Thomas Coryat feared that there would soon be more books than readers. In the country they were sold at fairs and by pedlars; in London the stalls of the booksellers sprawled in ever increasing numbers across St Paul’s Churchyard. Offered for sale were all kinds of books from digests and encyclopaedias, and works on astronomy, astrology and alchemy, to romances, pamphlets, broadsheets, joke and riddle books, translations of erotic Italian novels and fiction by such English writers as Thomas Lodge, author of A Margarite from America; Robert Greene upon whose Pandosto: The Triumph of Time Shakespeare (that ‘upstart crow’) based the plot of The Winter’s Tale; and Sir Philip Sidney whose The Arcadia first appeared in 1590.

  No books were more popular, however, than those which told of fabulous animals and extraordinary peoples, of adventures and discoveries in strange lands, works like Edward Topsell’s History of Serpents which described Ethiopian dragons ninety feet long, even more monstrous than those described by Pliny; Sir Walter Ralegh’s The Discovery of the Large, Rich and Beautiful Empire of Guiana; and the Principal Navigations of the Rev. Richard Hakluyt who proposed that the overseas trade and colonial policies of England would ‘increase the Queen’s dominions, Enrich her coffers, and reduce many Pagans to the faith of Christ’.7

  As booksellers flourished, so did music makers. The painters and sculptors of Tudor England might not be considered remotely comparable with those of continental Europe; and only in the painting of miniatures did an English artist, Nicholas Hilliard, achieve a mastery that his European rivals envied. Yet, as musicians, Englishmen were recognized masters, adopting towards their calling a professionalism that was largely lacking in other arts. Admittedly few musicians made their living by composing; most had to live by entertaining at court or in rich men’s houses. But, whereas a painter was likely to be either an amateur indulging a hobby or a craftsman who made his money as an engraver or a house decorator, a musician was more likely to be considered, and to consider himself to be, an artist, as well as, perhaps, a scholar.

  Before continental universities had begun to do so, Cambridge awarded degrees in music. Oxford followed suit, Robert Fayrfax, the composer, being awarded the degree of Doctor of Music there in 1511. Christopher Tye became a Doctor of Music at Cambridge in 1545 while John Taverner was nearing the end of his life as Master of the Choristers at Christ Church, Oxford. Thomas Tallis – the other great composer of the early Tudor period who was master of the Elizabethan musician, William Byrd – was employed at the Chapel Royal. Both John Dowland and Thomas Morley were awarded the degree of Bachelor of Music at Oxford in 1588.8

  Queen Elizabeth herself was a talented musician, as her father had been. Her brother, Edward VI, who had employed sixty-five secular musicians at court, played the lute; her sister, Mary, was an expert performer upon the virginals; Elizabeth herself played the virginals ‘excellently well’ in the opinion of Sir James Melville, the Queen of Scots’ ambassador. ‘But she left off immediately as soon as she turned her about and saw me,’ Melville related. ‘She appeared to be surprised to see me, and came forward, seeming to strike me with her hand; alleging she used not to play before men, but when she was solitary, to shun melancholy.’9

  She takes great pleasure in dancing and music [another diplomat, de Maisse, informed his master Henri IV, in 1598]. She told me she entertained at least sixty musicians; in her youth she danced very well and composed measures and music and had played them herself and danced them. She takes such pleasure in it that when her maids dance she follows the cadence with her hand and foot. She rebukes them if they do not dance to her liking and without a doubt she is mistress of the art having learnt in the Italian manner to dance high.10

  Many, if not most of her well-to-do subjects, having learned to love music at school, were as musical as she was; and there were few households that did not possess a number of musical instruments. The inventory of Sir Thomas Kitson’s goods at Hengrave Hall lists six viols, six violins, seven recorders, four cornets, a bandora, a cittern, two sackbuts, three hautboys, a curtal (a sort of bassoon), a lysarden (a deep-toned bass wind instrument), two flutes, three virginals, four lutes and an organ. There were also over fifty books of part-songs.11 The Petres at Ingatestone Hall possessed virginals, lutes and viols, a gittern, an organ; and Sir William, though not a performer on all these instruments himself, seems to have played the virginals and organ, and certainly expended large sums of money on hiring musicians and choristers to perform for the entertainment of his family and guests.12

  In most families, indeed, books of music and musical instruments were left lying about for the pleasure of guests who would also be expected to take part in the singing of madrigals; and if a guest claimed that he had no ear for music, it was as though he had admitted some disgraceful misconduct. ‘Yea, some, might whisper to others,’ wrote Thomas Morley in Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practical Musicke, and would ask how the poor fellow had been brought up.13 Nor was this love of music confined to the wealthier classes. All over the country, in small private houses and public inns, music was played and madrigals were sung. No civic celebration was complete without musical accompaniment; in barbers’ shops lutes were provided for the entertainment of customers as they were waiting for their turn in the chair; even Sir Francis Drake’s Golden Hind had its own orchestra.14

  ‘Manual labourers and mechanical artificers of all sorts,’ wrote the author of Praise of Musicke in 1588, ‘keepe such a chaunting and singing in their shoppes, the tailor on his bulk, the shoemaker at his last, the mason at his wall, the shipboy at his oar, and the tiler on the house top.’15

  At court, music was an essential accompaniment to the masque, that combination of verse, mime, ballet and spectacle which had its origins in Italy. The first mention of the performance of a masque in England is in Hall’s Chronicle which describes a night in 1512 when King Henry VIII

  … with XI other wer disguised after the maner of Italie, called a mask a thyng not seen afore in England. Thei wer appareled in garments long and brode, wrought all with gold, with visers and cappes of gold, and after the banket doen, these Maskers came in … and desired the ladies to daunce … And after thei daunced and commoned together, as the fashion of the Maske is, thei tooke their leave and departed … It was not a thyng commonly seen.16

  A hundred years later, however, the masque had become one of the principal and most elaborate entertainments that the court had to offer. It had developed into a kind of stylized pageant, allegorical and spectacular, whose complicated symbolism was expressed in verse, song, dance, theatrically extravagant movement, intricate mechanical devices, and by the declamations of fantastically costumed courtiers. At Whitehall Palace as well as at the riverside palace, Somerset House, which Inigo Jones had restored for James I’s consort, Anne of Denmark, huge sums of money were expended on these extraordinary productions in which the queen indulged her passion for display and dressing up.

  The first of Queen Anne’s masques, the Masque of Blackness, was performed in
the Elizabethan Banqueting House at Whitehall on Twelfth Night 1605. Its magical theme and setting were characteristic of numerous other masques which were to be staged in various London and country palaces over the next thirty-five years. It told the fantastic story of the twelve daughters of Niger, the Ethiopian river-god, and of their introduction to Albion. Blackamoors and nymphs, tritons and mermaids, monsters and nereids cavorted and sang, appearing from the raging waves in huge conches and disappearing into the fathomless depths of the ocean, all dressed in a marvellous variety of costumes, bejewelled and magnificent.

  The Masque of Blackness was written by Ben Jonson, whose collaboration with its designer, Inigo Jones, was to bring to the court of James I and of his son, Charles I, as fine a series of entertainments as had ever dazzled the audiences of the Medici court in Florence. Jonson’s subsequent Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, which was produced at the Banqueting House in 1618, was witnessed by Orazio Businor, almoner to the Venetian ambassador:

  A large hall is fitted up like a theatre, with well secured boxes all round. The stage is at one end and his Majesty’s chair in front under an ample canopy. Near him are stools for the foreign ambassadors … Whilst waiting for the King we amused ourselves admiring the decoration and beauty of the house … Then such a concourse as there was, for although they profess only to admit the favoured ones who are invited, yet every box was filled, notably with most noble and richly arrayed ladies, in number some 600 and more according to the general estimate … On entering the house the cornets and trumpets to the number of fifteen or twenty began to play very well a sort of recitative, and then after his Majesty had seated himself under the canopy … he caused the ambassadors to sit below him, while the great officers of the crown and courts of law sat upon benches. The Lord Chamberlain then had the way cleared and in the middle of the theatre there appeared a fine and spacious area carpeted all over with green cloth. In an instant a large curtain dropped, painted to represent a tent of gold cloth with a broad fringe. The background was of canvas painted blue, powdered all over with golden stars. This became the front arch of the stage.17

  Beginning after supper, masques lasted well into the night, and occasionally were not concluded until dawn. Some went on for twelve hours and cost almost as many thousands of pounds, the beauty of the verse being matched by the inventiveness of the costumes and settings and by those marvellous contrivances by which mountains were made to move, angels to fly and devils to sink into hell. To Jonson, indeed, it seemed that Inigo Jones’s costumes and settings, mechanical devices and movable scenery were considered more important – certainly by Jones himself – than his own contributions to their joint enterprise. The final break between the two men came in 1631 when Jonson published the text of Love’s Triumph through Gallipolis, with his name as its author taking precedence on the title page before that of Inigo Jones. For Jones, this was the ultimate insult. Arrogant, self-centred and inordinately vain, he protested indignantly at this suggestion that his own ingenious contrivances, brilliant settings and splendid costumes should be considered of less merit than Jonson’s versifications. Thereafter Jonson, quite as arrogant and as much given to self-commendation as his rival, lost court patronage. Jones worked with other poets, among them Sir William D’Avenant whose Salmacida Spolia was the last masque to be performed at Whitehall before the Civil War brought all such delights and extravagances to an end.18

  19 Clothes and Class

  Rich men who chose to dress in sombre hues, like Burghley and Walsingham, were rare. Most spent huge amounts on velvet suits trimmed with silver and jewellery, and on silk hats which were commonly worn indoors as well as out. The padded doublet, buttoned down the front, was attached to a man’s breeches by tagged laces known as points. The breeches were worn with stockings and, if sewn to them, the garment was known as ‘wholehose’. The armhole joins of the doublet were hidden by padded rolls of material or by tabs known as pickadils and, later, by projections like epaulettes. Ruffs, frequently of the most extravagant design and sometimes in layers, were worn both at the neck, and at the wrist; and, towards the end of the century, leg-of-mutton sleeves became more fashionable than close-fitting ones. Over his doublet a gentleman wore a cloak, often faced with gold or silver lace or even embroidered with pearls and with almost equally elaborate linings. He might also wear a heavy gold chain and jewellery, including earrings as well as a neatly trimmed beard.

  Ladies’ chemises and petticoats, their laced bodices and hooped or padded skirts, their gowns and cloaks and scented gloves, their stomachers, sleeves, farthingales, ruffs and feathers were all as resplendent as the clothes of their husbands.

  The Spanish farthingale, held out by cane hoops, remained in fashion until the 1580s when it was replaced by the French farthingale in which a roll of material around the waist pushed out the skirt almost at right angles to fall vertically to the level of the instep. This farthingale was either in the shape of a circle, an oval, or a semi-circle, and held out the skirt at the back only. Silk stockings were also fashionable. So were court shoes and low-cut jewelled slippers which were replaced for outdoor wear by shoes with high cork soles or by overshoes with cloth uppers. Women still usually slept naked or perhaps in night-smocks; and both they and men generally wore either kerchiefs wound around their heads in bed or nightcaps which, medical authorities suggested, ought to have holes in the top.1

  When the lady was wakened by her maid who pulled back the curtains of the bed, her clothes would be warmed by the fire in her bedroom before she put them on, a linen smock serving for underclothes. She would then have her hair dressed, perhaps with an ivory comb and silver-handled brush, and then attend to her face. In the early sixteenth century cosmetics were not nearly so widely used as they were to be later, and hairstyles were much simpler than they were to become in the days of Queen Elizabeth I whose wigs were clustered with jewels and pearls. Scents, however, were liberally used by both men and women and far more valued than soap. Soap was imported from Spain and Italy, the products of Castile and Venice being particularly prized. It was also made in England at Bristol, and at about 4d a pound it was not too expensive. Baths, however, were rarely taken regularly except for medicinal purposes, and much reliance was, therefore, placed upon pomanders and scent bottles. One popular scent, said to have been invented by Henry VIII, contained rose water, musk, ambergris and civet. Nutmegs, aloes and storax were used in other recipes. Queen Elizabeth was especially fond of the smell of marjoram. All these ingredients were placed in pomanders which were often attached to the sash end of a girdle.2

  Renaissance ideals of beauty required a white skin and fair hair, a high smooth forehead, thin eyebrows, red lips, and small feet; and those whom nature had not endowed with these qualities did all they could to acquire them. Women bleached their hair sitting in the sun, protecting their faces from its rays by wearing masks which they kept in position by a button held in the teeth. They applied white powder made of ground alabaster to their skin, and a variety of lotions and ointments containing lemon juice, milk of almonds, white wine, white of egg and oil of tartar, honey, beeswax, rose petals, herbs, asses’ milk and the ground jawbones of hogs.

  As the sixteenth century progressed, efforts to simulate the ideal seem to have grown more ruthless. Hairs were plucked out and dyed as well as bleached; more drastic measures were taken to whiten hands and face, neck and breasts; lips were painted red; cheeks glazed with white of egg; lines representing thin veins were drawn upon the bosom which unmarried women left largely exposed; the waist was pressed in with pieces of metal or wood sewn into the bodice; hips were padded; kohl was used to outline the eyes and belladonna to enlarge the pupils. The face under its artificial glaze frequently resembled polished marble, particularly if attempts had to be made to disguise the effects of smallpox.

  Some of the cosmetics used were harmless enough. A lip colouring made of cochineal, white of hard-boiled egg, green figs, alum and gum arabic would have done no damage to the skin. But
other preparations were highly dangerous. A white skin was sometimes obtained, for instance, by the application of white lead mixed with vinegar or with borax and sulphur, red lips by madder or red ochre or by red crystalline mercuric sulphide. As a treatment for spots and freckles birch tree sap was innocuous and often effective; but other remedies containing ground brimstone, oil of turpentine and soliman, which was made of sublimate of mercury, eventually led to a skin as ravaged as white lead left it mummified.3

  Teeth also were ruined by efforts to keep them clean, either by vigorous rubbing with a mixture of powdered pumice-stone, brick and coral, which took off the enamel as well as the stain, or by rinsing with solutions of honey and burned salt, or sugar and honey. Sir Hugh Platt, who considered himself an expert upon such matters, urged his friends not to clean their teeth with aqua fortis, otherwise, ‘within a few dressings’, they would probably be ‘forced to borrow a rank’ of false teeth to eat their dinner. The best method of keeping the teeth ‘both white and sound’, Platt continued, was to ‘take a quart of honey, as much vinegar, and half so much white wine, boil them together and wash the teeth therewith now and then’.4

  Experienced physicians and tooth-drawers recommended wood for toothpicks, but silver and gold implements were commonly used as being more suited to their owners’ standing in the world.

  Social standing was a subject much debated, rank being considered much more significant than nationality or even colour – witness Othello. ‘We divide our people commonly into four sorts,’ wrote William Harrison in 1577. At the summit were the nobles. There were very few of these, no more than fifty-five peers in 1597, the same number as there had been in 1485. Next came ‘knights, esquires and simple gentlemen’. There were very few of these, too, certainly less than 3 per cent of the population, though they were rising in influence and numbers, as rich ‘new men’, particularly those who had done well out of the law or government service, bought land and assumed the trappings of their new estate.