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

by Christopher Hibbert

  Vegetables are not so often mentioned by Pepys in whose day Covent Garden market was no more than a few sheds grouped under the trees at the south side of a fashionable square. Yet Pepys does make passing references to cabbage, peas, asparagus, onions and cucumber, and to salads in which, though he does not say so, flowers and herbs were tossed with the lettuce, radish and cucumber, though not tomatoes which Pepys never mentions: they had originated in South America, and had probably been introduced to Europe from Mexico, but, since they were considered chill to the stomach, and a possible cause of gout and cancer, they were not to become popular in England until the beginning of the twentieth century.15 Many vegetables were improved strains introduced from Holland, but the poor had little opportunity of eating these, confining themselves largely to the cheaper root vegetables which did not then include Virginian potatoes. Potatoes, in fact, were not often seen until the nineteenth century, despite the commendations of such advocates as Adam Smith who, as Fernand Braudel has noted, deplored the English disdain of a crop which had apparently proved its value as a food in Ireland. Usually grown for export, if grown at all, potatoes were widely suspected to be a cause of flatulence and even leprosy.16

  Most fruits were also too expensive for the poor, the growing season being short and several varieties, apricots, melons and peaches, for example, being very limited in supply since they were grown under glass or in the sheltered gardens of the well-to-do. Oranges were imported in large quantities and the smell of orange peel was as reminiscent of the theatre as that of grease-paint. At a performance of Henry V in 1667, ‘it was observable how a gentleman of good habit, sitting before us eating of some fruit, in the midst of the play did drop down as dead, being choked; but without much ado, Orange Mall did thrust her finger down his throat and brought him to life again’.17 Nearly every theatre had its Orange Mall. Nell Gwyn, Charles II’s delightful mistress who had been brought up in a brothel, had once been an orange-girl at the Theatre Royal.

  Like many of his contemporaries, Pepys distrusted fresh fruit, believing it to be bad for the stomach, and he usually ate it cooked. He was, however, persuaded one day in 1669 to drink some fresh orange juice at the house of his cousin, Thomas Strudwick, a confectioner and provision merchant. ‘Here,’ he recorded, ‘which I never did before, I drank a glass, of a pint I believe, at one draught, of the juice of Oranges of whose peel they make comfits; and here they drink the juice as wine, with sugar, and it is very fine drink; but it being new, I was doubtful whether it might not do me hurt.’18 Apprehensive though he was, Pepys did occasionally eat fruit ‘off the tree’ and in his diary mentions apricots and peaches, cherries, figs, grapes, melons, mulberries, pears, apples, strawberries, prunes and figs, as well as a barrel of lemons which he received as a present.

  Pepys, in common also with most men of his time, distrusted water as a drink, believing that, even if fresh, it was bad for the health. In many towns it was, in fact, far from fresh, being carried up from the river in leather bags strapped to the backs of horses and sold in the streets. Pepys drank wine and beer, sometimes mixed together. He frequently drank too much, complained of a hangover, was advised to drink less for the sake of his health and his memory, gave it up and found himself much better, spending less money and losing ‘less time in idle company’. But then he started drinking again. As he grew older, however, he succeeded in drinking less deeply and almost only at meal times. Most of his contemporaries also drank liberally for most of their lives, considering it bad manners to sip a host’s wine rather than to drink it down, and responding to frequent toasts. According to the evidence provided by the excise revenue from sales of ale and beer, English people as a whole began to drink more heavily than ever in the 1680s. The revenue from such sales dropped in the 1690s, but this was probably because by then many were drinking cheap gin instead.19

  Beer was generally brewed in the home, but there were growing numbers of public brewers who, by 1688, were selling as many as twelve million barrels a year, that was to say an average of more than two barrels, each containing thirty-six gallons, to every man, woman and child in the country.20 It was quite usual for a reasonably well paid working man to drink twelve pints a day. The official allowance of beer for an ordinary seaman was eight pints a day. Beer was still cheap, no more than id or 1½d a pint or about 6s a barrel. Ale was still cheaper; and small beer, a light brew given to children or drunk copiously in summer, was cheaper even than that.

  Several kinds of ale were supplied by breweries in London, but it was said that the best, and certainly the strongest, ales came from Kent and from the north where, in certain taverns, food was provided free to those who paid for ale. As an alternative to ordinary ale some drank mum – a heavy ale, originally brewed in Brunswick, in which wheat was used instead of hops – or buttered ale which was warmed and not only flavoured with butter but also with sugar and cinnamon, or lamb’s wool which was ale mixed with the pulp of roasted apples. In the West Country cider remained the favourite drink of ordinary people; and in London, cider from Devon was mixed with turnips and sold by innkeepers as a kind of claret.21

  A true claret, Haut Brion, was the only chateau-bottled wine with which most gentlemen were familiar. It was imported by the London restaurateurs, the Pontaques or Pontacks whose eating-house in Abchurch Lane was as celebrated in the 1690s for its meals which cost ‘one or two guineas a head’, as for its proprietor, son of the President of Bordeaux, who spoke several languages, was well read in philosophy, and, as an ‘eternal babbler’, was described by Swift as one whose learning had driven him mad. Nearly all red wines, whether chateau-bottled or not, were imported from France. White wines more often came from Spain, the Canaries and Germany. There were several taverns in London that specialized in German wines, the Rhenish Wine House in Cannon Row, Westminster, being one of the best known. Some white wine was also imported from Hungary, and dessert wines from Italy, Greece and the Levant. Stored in casks, they were served at table in squat, upright bottles, the cylindrical bottle being very rarely seen until the late eighteenth century; and, until the cork stopper came into use towards the end of the century, they were invariably drunk when they were young.22

  Wine, however, was not for the poor who, drinking great quantities of ale and beer, occupied the simplest cottages, possessed little furniture other than oak tables, benches, stools, chests and beds, and had few clothes. A man might well do with two shirts, two pairs of shoes, four pairs of breeches, two of leather and two of wool, a doublet, hat and jerkin. A woman, whose inventory survives, left five skirts, three gowns, an apron, a cloak, two hats, three waistcoats, and ‘wearing linen and other necessities’.23

  At the upper end of the social scale the days were passed, the money enjoyed, the food eaten and the clothes worn as though by inhabitants of a different world. The families of the nobility lived on incomes of up to £40,000 a year. Gregory King estimated that the average noble family had an income over fifty times greater than that of an army officer, and a hundred and fifty times greater than that of an ordinary seaman. In King’s day a fair proportion of the 160 noble families were those of peers of recent creation, almost a hundred of them having been ennobled since the reign of Elizabeth; and many of these were among the richest, though fortunes could disappear as quickly as they came. Sir Lionel Cranfield, who had been apprenticed as a boy to a merchant adventurer, was created Earl of Middlesex for his services to the Crown in 1622 and died worth some £100,000. Yet the third Earl’s heir died penniless. The first Duke of Chandos made so much money from his appointment as Paymaster General to the Duke of Marlborough that he was enabled to build one of the most splendid country houses in England, Canons Park. Such men as these thought nothing of spending as much on clothes as one of their servants might earn in a lifetime. The Earl of Bedford paid as much for the clothes that he and his attendants wore at the Coronation of Charles II as would have fed and clothed a farm-worker’s family for ten years.24

  Rich men strove to ‘imi
tate women in their apparel’, Anthony Wood contended in 1663, ‘viz. long periwigs, patches in their faces, painting, short wide breeches like petticoats, muffs, and their clothes highly scented, bedecked with ribbons of all colours’.25 Evelyn saw a man walking through Westminster Hall with ‘as much Ribbon about him as would have plundered six shops and set up twenty Country Pedlars: All his Body was dres’t like a Maypole or a Tom-a-Bedlam Cap’.26 Even Samuel Pepys, whose income was relatively modest, did not stint himself in finery, having his cuffs edged with silver lace and his cloaks lined with plush. His shoes were made to measure and from 1661 he wore a sword, as was ‘the manner now among gentlemen’, sometimes also carrying a varnished walking-staff in gloved hand or a silver-headed Japan cane.27

  The household papers of the fifth Earl of Bedford show how much a rich man was prepared to spend upon his appearance and accoutrements, upon ‘rich broad gold silver wire purl lace’ at £3 13s a yard and periwigs at £20 each, upon silver buckled belts, fine Holland socks, muslin cravats, gloves scented with jasmine or frangipane, silk dressing-gowns, and, in 1687, soon after their introduction from the East, umbrellas. The Earl also spent huge sums upon the maintenance of Woburn Abbey and upon Bedford House in the Strand where the profits from the family estates were stored in a chest from which sums were taken when needed for the payment of salaries, wages, tradesmen’s bills and personal expenditure. In 1662 the household staff at Woburn included a receiver-general who was paid £50 a year; his assistant who had £30 a year; a lawyer who had a retaining fee of £20 a year and received additional fees for each item of business he conducted and, therefore, died a rich man; a gentleman of the chamber and a gentleman of the horse; a chaplain; a steward; a clerk of the kitchen; a cook; a house bailiff; twelve footmen; sundry porters, watchmen, pages, scullions and turnspits; a gentlewoman and her assistant; a housekeeper; and several maids, including Betty Buskin, Lydia Long, the laundrymaid, and one known simply as ‘Alice-about-the-house’. The pages were clothed and fed but received no wages and had to be content with the hope of promotion and the occasional tip. The watchmen had about £1 a week and received additional payments for such regular or irregular jobs as seeing ‘all candles put out every night’ or ‘killing rats and mice, etc’ In 1664 the total of salaries and wages for all outdoor and indoor servants came to £600.

  Much more than this was spent upon food and drink and fuel. Purchases of coal appear frequently in the accounts, both of sea coal from Newcastle which was bought at St Neots and of coal from the Scottish mines which, at a cost of £11 3s a ton in 1685, was carted to Woburn usually in the earl’s own wagons from the Thames-side premises of a merchant in Durham Yard. In 1654 a dozen pigeons cost 5s 6d, butter was 6d a pound, beef 1s 8d a stone, and cream 3d a pint. Prices rose thereafter: by 1663 white plums were is a dozen, peaches 2s a dozen and apricots 2s a pound. Oysters were 1s 6d a quart. But the rise in prices made no difference to the amount of food bought. Huge numbers of oysters were eaten, being brought up by the barrel load in a carrier’s cart or special wagon from Bedford House whence they had arrived from Colchester.

  Wine, bought from a wine merchant, a merchant adventurer or an impoverished gentleman who received a commission for choosing and importing a few puncheons from France, was another expensive item in the Woburn Abbey accounts. Chablis, Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Rhenish wine, Greek, Navarre and Canary wine, port wine, sherry, brandy and champagne were all carried down by bottle and cask into the cellar, the champagne, sometimes by the hogshead, sometimes by the bottle, at a price in 1676 of four dozen bottles for £6.

  Coffee was also quite an expensive item, rising from 3s 6d a pound in 1689, to 4s in 1690 and 6s in 1692. Indeed, it was not until 1637, at Balliol College, Oxford, that John Evelyn first came across a man drinking coffee. This was ‘one Nathaniel Conopios out of Greece who returning many years after, was made … Bishop of Smyrna’. The custom for coffee drinking, Evelyn added, ‘came not into England til 40 years after’. In fact, the first coffeehouse was established in Oxford in 1649 by a Jew who moved to London two years later and opened a similar place in Holborn; and by 1663, though coffee was suspected of being an anti-aphrodisiac and was condemned as a ‘eunuch’s drink’, there were over eighty coffee-house owners in London, paying is each for their licences, charging id a dish for their coffee and offering also tea – which had come to England via Holland from China in about 1658 – and chocolate, which was first brought to England in 1652 and sometimes drunk enriched with eggs, sack and spices. Tea was much more expensive than coffee, although some blends cost a good deal less than others. At Woburn as much as three guineas a pound was being paid for one blend of tea in 1687 when the cheapest blend bought was 25s a pound.28

  Tobacco was another expensive luxury, the fifth Earl of Bedford being a particularly heavy smoker of both Virginian tobacco at 2s 6d a pound and of Spanish at up to 9s a pound. A huge number of pipes were also purchased, but these were cheap, twelve gross costing no more than £1 4s in 1695.29

  The trade in Virginian tobacco was protected by the government which prohibited the cultivation of tobacco at home. Proclamations against the growth of the plant in England were issued regularly, and without much effect, from 1619. The use of troops to destroy crops, particularly at Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, the most important centre, had begun during the Interregnum. On 19 September 1667 Pepys recorded in his diary,

  She [my wife] tells me how the Lifeguard, which we thought a little while since was sent down into the country about some insurrection, was sent to Winchcombe to spoil the Tobacco there, which it seems the people there do plant contrary to law and have always done, and still been under force and danger of having it spoiled; as it hath been oftentimes, and yet they will continue to plant it.

  They began to desist, however, towards the end of the century when large-scale cultivation in England came to a close.30

  The most extravagant of the Earl of Bedford’s indulgences were the regular visits he liked to make to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he had spent three years before embarking on the Grand Tour. On these visits he travelled in state, accompanied by trumpeters, harpists and bell-ringers. The accounts for one of the jaunts in 1689 have been preserved and include a list of payments which indicate how varied and how costly were both the pleasures and the obligations of a rich nobleman at that time:

  The total cost of this day’s meals at the Red Lion was £15 3s 6d. The following day’s meals, to the cost of which was added that of cheese, bread and beer for the servants (£6 19s 8d) and of ‘firing’ and ‘porterage’, came to £18 us. The short excursion cost over twelve times as much as the annual wages of his most highly paid footman.

  Visits to Tunbridge Wells and Bath where the earl drank the waters for the alleviation of his rheumatism and gout were equally expensive. Of the two resorts the countess preferred Bath, but the earl favoured Tunbridge Wells where he would rent a house for the duration of his stay; on one occasion he took a house ‘at Southborough, near Tunbridge, at £41 os od the week’.31

  In earlier generations the rich had usually gone to the Continent for the cure of their various ailments, in particular favouring Spa in Belgium. But the discomforts and tiresome duration of foreign travel had led to the increasing popularity of English watering places, although none of them had yet attained those fashionable heights they were to reach in the next century.

  Bath, indeed, before the advent of that most fastidious master of ceremonies, Richard Nash – in whose time the city was to be rebuilt in the Palladian style by the two John Woods – had rather a raffish reputation. It was a tawdry place where gentlemen came to dance in top boots, wore swords habitually and smoked in the presence of ladies. Lodgings were both dirty and expensive; sedan chairmen were rude and quarrelsome; there were no respectable assembly rooms, no recognized conventions as to dress and no methods of introduction. Duels were as common as drunkenness.

  Not long after the fifth Earl of Bedford had taken his last cure, another visitor w
rote:

  It has been observed before, that in former times this was a resort hither for cripples; and we see the crutches hang up at the several baths, as the thank-offerings of those who have come hither lame, and gone away cured. But now we may say it is the resort of the sound, rather than the sick; the bathing is made more a sport and diversion, than a physical prescription for health; and the town is taken up in raffling, gaming, visiting, and in a word, all sorts of gallantry and levity.

  The whole time indeed is a round of the utmost diversion. In the morning you (supposing you to be a young lady) are fetched in a close chair, dressed in your bathing clothes, that is, stripped to the smock, to the Cross-Bath. There the music plays you into the bath, and the women that tend you, present you with a little floating wooden dish, like a basin; in which the lady puts a handkerchief, and a nosegay, of late the snuff-box is added, and some patches; though the bath occasioning a little perspiration, the patches do not stick so kindly as they should.

  Here the ladies and gentlemen pretend to keep some distance, and each to their proper side, but frequently mingle … and the place being but narrow, they converse freely, and talk, rally, make vows, and sometimes love; and having thus amused themselves an hour or two, they call their chairs and return to their lodgings.32