Of cost and fashion rare,
Such cotworks, part lets, suits of lawn,
Bongraces and such ware;
Such gorgets, sleeves and ruffs,
Linings for gowns and cauls,
Coifs, crippins, cornets, billaments,
Musk boxes and sweet balls;
Pincases, pick-tooths, beard-brushes,
Combs, needles, glasses, bells,
And many such like toys as these,
That Gain to Fancy sells.5
There were also numerous hawkers and street vendors outside the building; and in 1570 several women were prosecuted for selling fruit at the Cornhill Gate and ‘amusing themselves in cursing and swearing to the great annoyance and grief of the inhabitants and passers-by’. Yet the row made by such women, by singing chimney-sweeps and itinerant pie-sellers, by bawling apprentices and shouting servant girls, squabbling porters and carters, was often lost in the general hubbub from open windows, workshops and taverns, bear-gardens and builders’ yards, for ‘hammers are beating in one place, tubs hooping in another, pots clinking in a third, water tankards running at fill in a fourth’.6 And everywhere carts screeched, dogs barked, the Public Cryer and the Bellman made their rounds and the life of London went on in all its infinite variety.
Although not to be compared with London in importance or size, other towns in England were also growing, so that by the end of the sixteenth century probably as many as a fifth of the population were townspeople. The population of Norwich was about 17,000; York and Bristol were smaller, but were also large towns by medieval standards, Bristol having some 9000 to 10,000 people. Salisbury had about 7000 and Worcester about 4000.
The towns of the more remote western counties and the north, so much less prosperous than those of the eastern counties and of the clothing districts of the Cotswolds in the Middle Ages, were now beginning to rival them. Totnes, Plymouth and Exeter, with a population of almost 9000 by the end of the century, were already important centres. So were Poole because of its fishing industry, and Newcastle because of its coal. The small towns of the Midlands and Yorkshire were also beginning to come into prominence. Birmingham, ‘swarming with inhabitants and echoing with the noise of anvils’, in William Camden’s words, although still only a town of metalworkers, a sixth the size of Coventry, was starting to grow fast, as were Halifax and Leeds, ‘a pretty market town standing by its clothing’. Leland described Manchester as ‘the fairest, best builded, quickest and most populous town of all Lancashire’. Sheffield, long known for its scythes, was becoming famous for its cutlery.7
The pattern throughout the country was far from regular. York, though still the capital of the north, was not as prosperous as it had been; nor was Southampton. The silting-up of rivers led to the decline of other towns. The Dissolution of the Monasteries harmed the economy of places like Canterbury and Bury St Edmunds. Yet other cities profited from the Dissolution and most shared in the general prosperity of the later years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign that followed the depression of the earlier years of the century. Many of them were pleasant enough places to live in; their inhabitants had room for gardens or allotments and a large proportion kept animals; the cottages stood usually in individual plots rather than in terraces. Some cottages, as Leland observed, were built of stone, like those in the towns of Northamptonshire, while others, such as those in Loughborough and Leicester, were still almost entirely of wood.
The workers who lived in these cottages were not well paid. In the 1590s in Chester, for example, apprentice linen weavers received no more than 1d a day, joiners and smiths 2d a day, bricklayers 2½d and master carpenters 4d, although they did also receive food which cost their masters about 4a a day for each man. In those days beef cost about 2d a pound, butter 5d, coarse cloth 1s 4d a yard and a pair of children’s shoes between 6d and 1s. Such wages and prices were tolerable for the countryman who could find means of augmenting his diet denied to the townsman; but they were less than adequate for many urban workers at a time when wages had not risen nearly as fast as prices had: the cost of wheat was four times as high as it had been in the fifteenth century yet wages had scarcely doubled. At the end of the sixteenth century few workers in London were earning more than 1s a day, while the average weekly wage in the country as a whole seems to have been about 5s.8
Not only were the wages of the sixteenth-century worker subject to strict controls, but so also were his hours of work, the conditions of his employment, even the clothes he wore and the length of his hair. Apprentices who could afford to do so, ‘did affect to go in costly apparel and wear weapons and frequent schools of dancing, fencing, and music’. Such behaviour was not to be allowed. All apprentices – most of whom were not released from their indentures until they were twenty-four – must forswear silk stockings and padded doublets, gaudy colours and embroidered shirts, ruffs and fancy hats. They must stick to plain materials, leather or thread laces in their shoes, and on Sundays and holy days a respectable woollen cap. They were not permitted to keep clothes elsewhere than under their master’s roof; and if they disobeyed these orders and walked abroad in fine array they were subject to severe penalties. A second offence might entail a sound whipping in the hall of their company.
Working hours, as fixed by statute, were long. From March to September labourers and artificers had to work from five in the morning until seven or even eight at night, and from September to March from dawn till dusk. Missing an hour’s work was to result in the loss of id in wages. Two hours, however, were allowed for their meals, and in the summer they were permitted to sleep for half an hour after their midday meal. A trained worker had to follow his own trade so long as there was work for him in it. If there were not he had to seek work on the land; and if he could find no master in the country, he was to be put to work by the parish as vagrants were.
Yet, despite the regulations to which he was subject and the poor rewards for his labour, the journeyman and the apprentice did enjoy advantages too. Their master’s behaviour was also controlled by statute. He could not dismiss his men before their time was up, and he could be heavily fined for doing so. Nor could be underpay them; nor could he employ apprentices in disproportionate numbers to his journeymen: various stipulated masters of crafts were allowed to have three apprentices to each journeyman; were they to take on another apprentice, they must employ another journeyman as well. Also, while there were, of course, harsh taskmasters, they do not appear to have been common. Most journeymen and apprentices seem to have lived with their masters, their master’s families and servants as accepted members of the family, taking pride in their joint work and supporting each other in their differences with rivals and outsiders. The relationship between Simon Eyre, Dekker’s eccentric master shoemaker, and his servants appears to have been characteristic. They are uncouth and outspoken in their behaviour towards him, but they feel for him a real affection. As he enters the yard in front of his house he calls out, ‘Where be these boys, these girls? They wallow in the fat brewiss of my bounty, and lick up the crumbs of my table, yet will not rise to see my walks cleansed. What, Nan, what Madge Mumblecrust? … What Firk, I say? What Hodge? Open my shop-windows.’
‘O master,’ comes Firk’s voice in reply. ‘Is’t thou that speak bandog and Bedlam this morning? I was in a dream and mused what madman had got into the street so early.’9
21 Women and Children
A huswife good betimes will rise,
And order things in comelie wise,
Her mind is set to thrive:
Upon her distaffe she will spin
And with her needle she will winne,
If such he hap to wive.
Thomas Tusser’s model housewife gets up early and sets all the servants to their tasks, for ‘when husband is absent, let huswife be chiefe, and look to the labour that eateth hir biefe’. She must
Set some to peele hempe or else rushes to twine
To spin and to card, or to seething of brine …
S
et some about cattle, some pasture to vewe,
Some mault to be grinding against ye do brewe.
Some corneth, some brineth, some will not be taught,
Where meat is attainted, there cookrie is naught …
Call servants to breakfast by day starre appeare
A snatch and to worke, fellowes tarie not here.
Let huswife be carver, let pottage be heate,
A messe to eche one, with a morsell of meate.
After breakfast there were brewing and baking to attend to, cooking and washing, work in the dairy and work in the fields. At dinner time the prudent housewife made sure that there was a good meal for the servants but no dainties, since ‘seggons [poor labourers] halfe starved worke faintly and dull, and lubbers doo loiter, their bellies too full’.
As soon as the meal was finished there was more work to do, sewing and mending, making candles, feeding animals, milking cows; and then it was supper time:
Provide for thy husband, to make him good cheere,
Make merrie togither, while time ye be heere.
At bed and at boord, howsoever befall,
What ever God sendeth be merrie withall.1
Cheerful and conscientious, strict yet just with the servants, beating them when they deserved it and caring for them when they were ill, the good housewife was always vigilant. She looked into corners to make sure there was no dust lurking there; she kept a watchful eye on her maids so that they did not become lazy in changing their linen; she insisted that food was not wasted and bread was never baked in such amounts that it went hard and mouldy. She saved feathers from plucked poultry for her mattresses and pillows; she kept the cat out of the dairy where there was a mousetrap instead; at night she brought in all clothes and sheets that had been left in the garden to dry so that no hooker with his long pole could lift them over the hedge; and before she went to bed she made her rounds with her keys, ensuring that all doors were fastened and locks secure.2
That was the day of a yeoman’s wife. The wife of a farmer who had fewer servants to help her, perhaps but a single maid, had to work even harder and more strenuously. The Boke of Husbandrie of 1523 told her that ‘it is a wive’s occupation to winnow all manner of corn, to make malt, wash and wring, to make hay, shear corn, and in time of need to help her husband to fill the muck wain or dung cart, drive the plough, to load hay, corn and such other … to go or ride to the market to sell butter, cheese, milk, eggs, chickens, capons, hens, pigs, geese, and all manner of corn’. She was also expected to be in charge of the dairy and of the household accounts, ‘to make a true reckoning and accompt to her husband what she hath received and what she hath paid’.3
Many a lady was kept almost as busy, as is indicated by the diary of Lady Hoby, wife of Sir Thomas Posthumus Hoby, the thin-legged, hunchbacked son of a former ambassador to France. Lady Hoby frequently records a morning spent dyeing wool, winding yarn, busying herself making oil in her closet, or spinning. ‘Went about my stilling; stilled aqua vitas,’ she writes in one entry. ‘After private prayer I saw a man’s leg dressed, took order for things in the house, and wrought till dinner time,’ she recounts in another. She dried fruits, made quince jelly and damson jam, dried rose leaves for pots-pourris, prepared syrups and candied sweetmeats, distilled cordials. She was a skilled nurse; knew how to apply poultices and tie bandages; well understood the medicinal qualities of the herbs that grew in her Yorkshire garden. ‘After dinner,’ she writes, ‘I was busy weighing of wool till almost night … I did see [wax] lights made almost all the afternoon … I went to take my bees and saw my honey ordered … After I dined I talked and read to some good wives … I went to talk to my old women.’ She seems to have known as much about the estate as her husband who clearly valued her advice: ‘Took horse and rode to Harwoodall to see our farm be bought … I walked with Mr Hoby about the town to spy out the best places where cottages might be builded … After supper I talked a good deal with Mr Hoby of husbandry and household matters.’
She found time, however, for other pursuits. She played bowls; she sometimes went fishing; she, once at least, went to Scarborough for a boat trip; she went out in a coach to visit friends or rode over her estate; she entertained visitors, not always willingly: ‘I was visited by a kinswoman, which was some trouble at the first, but considered all Crosses ought thankfully to be borne.’ She was also a most devout Puritan and on Sundays occupied herself with religious pursuits.
After I was ready, I went to private prayers, then to breakfast [she writes of one Sunday]. Then I walked till church time with Mr Hoby, and after to dinner. After which I walked and had speech of no serious matter till 2 o’clock. Then I writ notes into my bible till 3. And after 4 I came again from the church, walked and meditated a little and again writ some other notes in my Bible of that I had learned till 5, at which time I returned to examination and prayer after I had read some of Bond of the Sabbath, I walked abroad. And so to supper, after to prayers and lastly to bed.4
Lady Hoby and her husband had no children, Sir Thomas being thought either impotent or infertile; but her friends had to spend a good deal of time in their nurseries, supervising the nursemaids. A conversational manual describes a mother entering the nursery of a morning and asking the nurse how her baby has slept. The child has been ‘somewhat wayward’, the nurse says; and this the mother attributes to his cutting a tooth. The baby’s ‘swaddling bands’ are then undone so that he can have a bath. While this is being done, while he is being washed and while being dressed, his mother gives continuous instructions to the nurse in the manner of such manuals:
Give him his coat of changeable taffeta and his satin sleeves. Where is his bib? Where is his little petticoat? Let him have his gathered apron with strings, and hang a muckinder [bib] to it … Where is his biggin [baby’s cap] and his little band with an edge … You need not yet to give him his coral with the small golden chain, for I believe it is better to let him sleep until the afternoon … God sent thee good rest, my little Boykin.5
But soon the little ‘boykin’ will be treated like a miniature adult, although he will probably have his meals separately from the adults, being brought in occasionally to greet his parents’ guests, to say grace for them or to read a passage of scripture.6 And, as likely as not, he will be sent away from home as his forebears had been. And, again like his forebears, he will probably be flogged, although perhaps not as severely as Thomas Tusser was at Eton, where the headmaster, Nicholas Udall, who was imprisoned for buggery, once gave him fifty-three stripes. Certainly, few children escaped flogging altogether, and the textbooks that were used in schools in teaching Latin accepted it as a matter of course. The dialogues of J. L. de Vives, a Spanish friend of Erasmus, which were to be found in several English schools, including Eton, Westminster and Shrewsbury, contain numerous references to the practice.7 And in a poem written towards the end of the sixteenth century, Edmund Coote, a schoolmaster at Bury St Edmunds, makes it clear that his pupils will be beaten for every kind of offence from bad manners and untidiness to being late for school, laughing in class or spoiling their books.8
Most parents agreed that flogging was a necessary corrective for their children. When Sir Peter Carew ran away as a schoolboy from a cruel master at Exeter Grammar School and climbed on to a tower of the city wall, threatening to throw himself off if his tormentor came after him, his father had him brought home tied to a dog and chained him in the dog’s kennel.9
22 Actors and Playgoers
Trumpets blared from the theatres’ towers and flags were flown to give notice that the afternoon’s performances were about to begin. Outside the audiences had assembled early, for there were few, if any, reserved seats; and there was generally a scramble for the best. In 1599 a penny would secure admittance to the yard where, so Dekker said, the ‘stinkards were so glewed together in crowdes with the steames of strong breath that when they came foorth, their faces lookt as if they had been boyled’.1 A seat in a gallery cost 2d and the better seats w
ith cushions 3d. These were regarded as reasonable prices when a quart of ale in a tavern would cost 4d and an hour or so with a prostitute 6d.2
Men and women of all classes went to the theatre, groundlings and gentlemen, apprentices and foreign ambassadors, women of the town who sat in the galleries and ladies of position who, sometimes masked, sat in private rooms. Stern critics of the theatre portrayed the playhouses of the period as being full of ‘vagrant persons, maisterles men, thieves, horse stealers, whoremongers, cony-catchers, contrivers of treason and other idele and daungerous persons’.3 Henry Crosse in Vertues, Common-Wealth; or, The High-Way to Honour wrote:
Nay many poore pincht, needie creatures, that live of almes, and that have scarce neither cloath to their backs, nor foode for the belley, yet wil make hard shift but they will see a Play, let wife and children begge [and] languish in penurie … A play is like a sincke in a Towne, whereunto all the filth doth runne: or a byle in the body, that draweth all the ill humours unto it.4
Yet other, less prejudiced observers noted that, while the theatre certainly did attract such customers as Crosse described, they were far from being in the majority. A playgoer from the Venetian Embassy, for example, noted that audiences contained large numbers of ‘handsome ladies who seal themselves among men without the slightest hesitation’.5 And the poet and epigrammatist, John Davies, thus described a typical day in the life of an idle gallant:
Fuscus is free, and hath the world at will,
Yet in the course of life that he doth leade,
He’s like a horse which turning rounde a mill,
Doth alwaies in the selfe same circle treade:
First he doth rise at 10, and at eleven
He goes to Gyls, where he doth eate till one,
Then sees a play til sixe, and sups at seaven,
And after supper, straight to bed is gone,
And there till tenne next day he doth remaine,
And then he dines, then sees a comedy,
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