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

by Christopher Hibbert

  From 1536 onwards undergraduates were required to renounce Rome and to take oaths of obedience to the monarchy; and from 1581 at Oxford they had to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles. They had to attend the college chapel and from 1616 at Cambridge to attend services at St Mary’s as well. Their orthodoxy thus, it was hoped, ensured, their moral behaviour and educational welfare were entrusted to the guidance of tutors – like all fellows of colleges, unmarried clergymen – whose authority they were expected to respect without question. The tutorial system had developed in the sixteenth century. Some tutors gained a reputation for tutoring the rich and thereby became quite rich themselves. Although theoretically Catholics could not attend university, there were Catholic tutors who looked after Catholic boys. At Caius College, Cambridge, in the late sixteenth century one Catholic tutor taught the sons of various wealthy recusants who had rooms near his own. They had their own Catholic sizars and lived almost separately from the rest of the college.14

  ‘You must be ordered by your tutor in all things for your good,’ Sir Daniel Fleming told his son, James, ‘otherwise it will be much worse for you.’15 Subject to numerous restraints, undergraduates were forbidden, at various times, to bet, to go hunting, to play football (at Oxford, though not at Cambridge), to attend plays and bull baitings. The rules, however, were widely ignored; and Thomas Crosfield, Fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford, in the 1620s, frequently went fishing and bull-baiting, and to puppet-shows and plays with his young charges. He gave a cheerful account of his day:

  I’ th morning pray’d and heard a Latin sermon …

  And to my pupils read Enunciations

  Modifícate, and went to disputation.

  That done we din’d, and after did resort

  To bowls i’ th’ garden and to have some sport.16

  This seems innocent enough, however, when compared with the behaviour of Thomas Greenway, President of Corpus Christi, who in the second half of the previous century had been accused by a fellow of the college of all manner of misdemeanours:

  He spoyleth the College wodes, as the common report is, and maketh in every sale a part of money unto himself. He is noted of many men to have had connexion with viii Infamous women … He is accompted a Whoremonger, a common drunkard, a mutable papist and an unpreching prelate and one of an Italian faith. He resorteth to bull-beytinge and bearebeyting in London. In Christmas last past he, comming drunke from the Towne, sat in the Hall amonge the Schollers until i of the clock, totering with his legge, tipling with his mouth, and hering bawdy songes with his eares as, My Lady hath a prety thinge, and such like. He kepeth vi horse continually in the stable, whereas the Colledge nedeth and alloweth but five. He ys a faithful friend to all the papistes and a mortall enemy to all the protestants in this house … He hath lefte in our fine Box but iis vid, in which, at his cumming, he found cccccli.17

  In a determined effort to improve the behaviour of both fellows and undergraduates at Oxford and to submit them both to a more rigorous discipline, Archbishop Laud, Chancellor of the University, drew up in 1636 the so-called Laudian Code which was to survive until 1864. This code enacted that scholars should ‘keep away during the day, and especially at night, from the shops and houses of the townsmen; but particularly from houses where women of ill or suspected fame or harlots are kept’; that they should also keep away from ‘inns, eating-houses, wine-shops and all houses … wherein wine or any other drink or the Nicotian herb, or tobacco, is commonly sold; also that if any person does otherwise, and is not eighteen years old, and not a graduate, he shall be flogged in public’. It was further ordained that ‘neither rope-dancers nor players (who go on the stage for gain’s sake), nor sword-matches, or sword players are to be permitted within the University of Oxford’. No student or other person was to ‘carry either offensive arms, such as swords, poignards, daggers (commonly called stilettos), dirks, bows and arrows, guns, or warlike weapons or implements, within the verge of the University, unless when he happens to make a journey to parts remote’. Nor must any ‘scholars, particularly the younger sort, and undergraduates idle and wander about the city or its suburbs, nor in the streets, or public market, or Carfax (at Penniless Bench as they commonly call it)’. As for sports and games and personal appearance:

  It is enacted that scholars of all conditions shall abstain from every kind of game in which there is a money stake, as for instance, the games of dibs dice and cards, and also ball-play in the private yards and greens of the townsmen. Also, they must refrain from every kind of sport or exercise, whence danger, wrong or inconvenience may arise to others, from hunting wild animals with hounds of any kind, ferrets, nets or toils; and also from all parade and display of guns and cross-bows, and, again, from the use of hawks for fowling. In like manner, no scholars of any condition (and least of all graduates) are to play football within the University or its precinct … It is enacted that all the heads, fellows and scholars of colleges, as well as all persons in holy orders, shall dress as becomes clerks. Also that all others (except the sons of barons having the right of voting in the Upper House of Parliament, and also of barons of the Scotch and Irish peerages) shall wear dresses of a black or dark colour, and shall not imitate anything betokening pride or luxury, but hold themselves aloof from them. Moreover they shall be obliged to abstain from that absurd and assuming practice of walking publicly in boots. There must be, also, a mean observed in the dressing of the hair; and they are not to encourage the growth of curls, or immoderately long hair.18

  Undergraduates continued to grow their hair long, however, much to the annoyance of Dr Ralph Kettell of Trinity College, whose ‘fashion was to go up and down the College’, so John Aubrey said, ‘and peep in at the key-holes to see whether the boys did follow their books or no’. Kettell was

  irreconcilable to long hair; called them hairy scalps, and as for periwigs (which were then [in the late 1630s] very rarely worn) he believed them to be the scalps of men cut off after they were hanged, and so tanned and dressed for use. When he observed the scolars’ haire longer than ordinary (especially if they were scholars of the house), he would bring a pair of scissors in his muff (which he commonly wore), and woe be to them that eate on the outside of the table.

  ‘I remember,’ Aubrey added, ‘he cut Mr Radford’s hair with the knife that clips the bread on the buttery-hatch, and then he sang (this is in the old play – Henry VIII – of Gammer Gurton’s Needle), “And was not Grim the collier finely trimm’d?”’19

  Dr Kettell, in Aubrey’s opinion, was ‘an excellent governour’ who soundly scolded ‘the idle young boies of his college’. But there were many heads of colleges who were much laxer than Laud would have wished; and although, towards the end of the century, there were far fewer fellows as dissolute as Matthias Watson of Lincoln College – who, ‘after sundry peremptory warnings’, was dismissed in 1625 because of his notorious lewd and [debauched] course of life’ – or as joyfully and irresponsibly ebullient as Dr Richard Corbet, Dean of Christ Church in the 1620s – who sang ballads ‘at the Crosse at Abingdon on market day, who used to drink and be mery at Fryar Bacon’s study (where was good liquor sold) and where he once cut a sleeping scholar’s good silk stockings full of little holes’ – there were still numerous fellows as eccentric as Thomas Goodwin, appointed President of Magdalen College after the Civil War, a ‘somewhat whimsycall’ scholar who ‘in a frolic once pist in old Mr Lothian’s pocket’.20 Yet by Goodwin’s day the reputation of both Oxford and Cambridge had, at least temporarily, much improved; and in 1682 when they were still the only two universities in the country – an attempt by Cromwell to found a third university at Durham having proved premature – it could be said with not too pronounced exaggeration that ‘in the beautiful fabric of the Kingdom of England the two eyes are the two universities, Oxford and Cambridge, those two nurseries … of learning and religion which are not to be paralleled in the whole world’.21

  26 ‘Roasted Chickens – Pease-Lobsters – Strawberries’
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  The England of Matthew Hopkins’s witch-hunts and of Cromwell’s major-generals was also that of Dorothy Osborne who, in a letter written in the year that Cromwell became Protector, described how she used to go out in the summer evenings to walk on the common near her house where ‘a great many young wenches keep sheep and cows and sit in the shade singing of Ballads’.

  I talk to them [she continued], and find that they want nothing to make them the happiest people in the world, but the knowledge that they are so. Most commonly when we are in the midst of our discourse, one looks about her and spies her cows going into the corn, and then away they all run as if they had wings at their heels.1

  Dorothy Osborne was born in Bedfordshire, one of the richest counties in England with fertile pasturelands and rolling fields of wheat and barley. Bedfordshire’s neighbours, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire were also rich; but, because of London, no county was richer than Middlesex, though Surrey rivalled it. There were fine pastures in East Anglia and in Devonshire and Somerset, splendid flocks of sheep in Warwickshire, Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Worcestershire. Kent was celebrated for its orchards, its hopfields and market gardens, Wiltshire for its dairy farms, Leicestershire for its cornfields, Dorset for its prodigious quantity of cattle. The lead- and coalmines in the Mendip hills, the forges of Sussex and Durham, the tin-mines of Cornwall, the coalmines of Gloucestershire and the ironworks around Birmingham and in Staffordshire gave employment to thousands of workers, while all along the Thames estuary, and in the coastal ports and fishing villages, thousands more made their living at sea as trawlermen, as merchant seamen, smugglers and as sailors in the Royal Navy, so many of them in Plymouth that one traveller reported that only women and children could be seen in the streets of the town. There were fishermen, too, in Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland as well as shepherds; there were textile workers in Lancashire and Yorkshire, knitters and spinners in Norfolk, Suffolk and Lincolnshire, fowlers and reed-cutters in the fen country, working beside the farmers newly settled on the reclaimed lands. There were brewers in Leeds, cutlers in Sheffield, cotton-spinners in Manchester, lace-makers in Exeter.2

  The south of England was much richer than the north and Wales. It was also more populous, three-quarters of the people living in the southern counties and owning three-quarters of the nation’s wealth. York and Newcastle, which supplied London with coal, were prosperous cities; but elsewhere in the north the townspeople appeared far less well fed and clothed than they did in the south: Roger North described Kendal in Westmorland ‘as being very stony and dirty … the common people walked barefoot … but it is almost the same all over the north’.3 Liverpool, soon to become a large and vital port and the centre of the slave trade, was still scarcely more than a fishing village. The custom administration of Hull cost £900 a year, but that was not a twentieth of the cost of London’s.

  After London, which remained exceptional, Bristol, its cobbled streets worn smooth by horse-drawn sledges, was the busiest port in England, its carriers supplying all the south-west and western Midlands with the goods its merchants shipped up the mouth of the Severn. Norwich, which now had thirty-six churches, was still the second largest town in the country with a population, like Bristol’s, of about 30,000 as compared with London’s 350,000 to 400,000 in 1650 rising to 575,000 to 600,000 in 1700. But there were few towns remotely comparable with these. Probably as much as four-fifths of the people of England still lived by agriculture and as many as half of the remainder from the sea. The country was still largely self-sufficient, its principal export remaining cloth, although increasingly goods imported from America and the East by enterprising merchants and such trading companies as the East India Company, were being re-exported to Europe at considerable profits.4

  Throughout the century the contrasts between rich and poor remained painfully marked, and unemployment was high, so high in some places that almost a quarter of those employable could find no work. The cost of poor relief rose to about £1 million a year, and in one county at least, Devonshire, as many as one person in five had no other means of subsistence.5 Those in work continued to receive low wages, not more than about 10d a day for agricultural labourers, 4d or so a day for women, and is or so for skilled craftsmen such as masons and carpenters, although some earned more, as much as 2s a day or even £1 a week, and some highly skilled craftsmen were paid as much as professional men. In the 1660s a silversmith received 3s for engraving a tankard, a music teacher £1 a month for giving lessons to two girls on the harpsichord, a barber 6d for a haircut and 1s for bleeding, a country artist £5 for painting a portrait.6 For such people these incomes were quite satisfactory enough when meat was about 3d a pound, bacon 4d, good cheese 2d, draught ale 2d a flagon and bottled ale 6d a dozen.7 Men like Samuel Pepys who, as a Principal Officer of the Navy, had £350 a year, could live very comfortably. And Pepys, himself, although. often worried about money, certainly contrived to do so.

  At one of his dinner parties in 1663 Pepys and his guests sat down to ‘a great’ dinner ‘most neatly dressed by [his] own only mayde’. ‘We had a Fricasse of rabbets and chicken,’ he recorded proudly, ‘a leg of mutton boiled – three carps in a dish – a great dish of a side of lamb – a dish roasted pigeons – a dish of four lobsters – three tarts – a Lampry pie, a most rare pie – a dish of anchoves – good wine of several sorts; and all things mighty noble and to my great content.’ Some months later he had Lord Montagu’s two daughters and niece to dinner: ‘and very merry we were with our pasty, very well baked – and a good dish of roasted chickens – pease – lobsters – strawberries’.8

  Dinner was still usually eaten in the middle of the day between about twelve and half past one, and supper, a much lighter meal, in the evenings. Some people had a snack and a drink when they got up, but breakfasts, which had been enjoyed in several households in the past, were not generally taken again until the eighteenth century. At about eleven o’clock, however, it was customary to have a ‘morning draught’ of ale or wine, both drinks being warmed in the winter months, the ale also being flavoured with wormwood and, later, strengthened with gin and known as purl. The draught might be accompanied by anchovies, radishes, pickled oysters or a slice of pie. Some people preferred a cup of whey, a favourite drink of lawyers on their way into Westminster Hall.9

  In grand houses a meal might consist of three or more courses in the French manner with a final course of sweetmeats, tarts, pies and fruit; but the middle classes generally contented themselves with two courses, most if not all the dishes in each course being placed on the table at once, and sweet dishes and puddings sometimes being served with the first course as well as with the second. Forks were coming into use as well as silver monteighs of waters with notched brims from which wine glasses were suspended to cool. But Pepys, who had a set of forks himself, often noted their absence at other tables, even at a lord mayor’s banquet. Napkins and ewers were still used instead, though the lord mayor did not even provide these which Pepys thought ‘very strange’. ‘It was very unpleasing that we had no napkins nor change of trenchers,’ he added, ‘and drunk out of earthen pitchers and wooden dishes.’10

  Meat remained the staple diet of all those who could afford it, joints being generally preferred to minced meat, offal and made dishes. The meat most commonly served was beef, mutton or pork, much of London’s supplies being bought either at the Shambles in St Nicholas Street, or at Smithfield – originally Smoothfield, a ‘grassy space just outside the City walls’ where Bartholomew Fair was held – or at one of those markets where all manner of other foodstuffs could be bought, such as Cheapside, a bustling market since the Middle Ages. The meat was not of high quality since it was not until the eighteenth century that improved strains of beef-cattle and sheep were developed; and, since they had no means of refrigeration, butchers could not allow their carcasses to hang long enough to make them tender.11 Also, for much of the year fresh meat was difficult to obtain, as cattle were slaughtered in the
autumn, there being no means of feeding them during the winter months. So meat still had to be preserved in brine or powdered with salt; and huge amounts of salted beef were eaten. The daily allowance for common seamen was two pounds.12 It was a diet that, with few or no fresh vegetables, often lead to skin diseases. Housewives were instructed in cookery books how to get rid of the salty flavour of meat, but many relished the taste, as they did of other strongly preserved foods. Neat’s tongue in vinegar was a popular dish. Strong Stilton cheese was served with a spoon for scooping up the maggots.13

  Those who could get it through friends in the country served venison at parties. Pepys frequently mentions it and, while very fond of venison pasty, sometimes complained of being offered too much of it: ‘We had at dinner a couple of venison pasties, of which I ate but little, being almost cloyed, having been at five pasties in three days.’14 Pepys also enjoyed turkeys, which were driven into London in huge numbers from East Anglia, as well as pigeon and the occasional partridge, pheasant, goose and duck.

  London’s biggest poultry markets were the Stocks Market – which was founded on the site of the present Mansion House in the thirteenth century and took its name from what was then the only fixed pair of stocks in the City – and Leadenhall which had been established at least as early as the fourteenth century and which was named after a nearby mansion with a lead roof. Leadenhall Market had been rebuilt after the Great Fire around three large courtyards in which the stalls of butchers, fishmongers, cheesemongers and dealers in leather, wool and raw hides could also be found. There were fish markets in New Fish Street and Billingsgate where all manner of fish could be bought: in his diary Pepys mentions anchovies, carp, cod, crab, crayfish, eels, herrings, lampreys, prawns, salmon, scallops, sturgeon, teal, tench, trout and, of course, lobsters and oysters. Shellfish were cheap and plentiful, a good fat lobster costing no more than 5d or 6d in London – 8d when in short supply – and even less along the Devonshire coast and other places where they were landed in large quantities. Fish was also hawked about the town by street vendors, so was poultry and so, indeed, was almost everything else that a housewife might want.