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

by Christopher Hibbert

  Tunbridge Wells was then more fashionable than Bath. Its waters had been publicized by Lord North who had taken a cure there in 1606 and it had subsequently been patronized by the queens of both Charles I and Charles II, though when Henrietta Maria visited the place in 1030.there was so little accommodation that she and her suite had to stay in tents on the banks of the spring.33

  In the reign of Queen Anne – who compared the place favourably with ‘Epsome, Hampstead and such like places’ – a visitor wrote:

  Those people who have nothing to do anywhere else, seem to be the only people who have anything to do at Tunbridge. After the appearance is over at the Wells (where the ladies are all undressed) … you are surprised to see the walks covered with ladies completely dressed and gay to profusion; where rich clothes, jewels, and beauty not to be set out by (but infinitely above) ornament, dazzles the eyes from one end of the range to the other.

  As for gaming, sharping, intriguing; as also fops, fools, beaux, and the like, Tunbridge is as full of these, as can be desired, and it takes off much of the diversion of those persons of honour and virtue, who go there to be innocently recreated. However a man of character, and good behaviour cannot be there any time, but he may single out such company as may be suitable to him, and with whom he may be as merry as heart can wish. In a word, Tunbridge wants nothing that can add to the felicities of life, or that can make a man or woman completely happy, always provided they have money; for without money a man is nobody at Tunbridge.34

  PART THREE

  From Defoe to Cobbett

  27 ‘A Tour thro’ the Whole Island’

  Soon after the appearance of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe published the first part of his Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, the best authority for early eighteenth-century England that we have. Defoe travelled through East Anglia and in the south-eastern counties from London to Land’s End, in the West Country and Wales, in the Midland counties then up to Yorkshire and throughout the north-east and the north-west. And everywhere he went he saw the countryside and towns through which he passed with the observant eye of a highly skilful journalist.

  Bury St Edmunds was ‘the town of all this part of England, in proportion to its bigness, most thronged with gentry, people of the best fashion, and the most polite conversation. The beauty and healthiness of its situation was no doubt the occasion which drew the clergy to settle here, for they always choose the best places in the country to build in, either for richness of soil, or for health and pleasure in the situation of their religious houses.’ There was also a high proportion of gentry living in Ipswich and here ‘the company you meet with are generally persons well informed of the world and who have something very solid and entertaining in their society. This may happen, perhaps, by their frequent conversing with those who have been abroad.’ At Yarmouth, Defoe was told that the merchants there ‘cured, that is to say hanged and dried in the smoke, 40,000 barrels of merchantable red herrings in one season … But this is only one branch of the great trade carried on in this town. Another part of this commerce is in the exporting these herrings after they are cured; and for this their merchants have a great trade to Genoa, Leghorn, Naples, Messina and Venice as also to Spain and Portugal also exporting with their herrings very great quantities of worsted stuffe and stuffe made of silk … the manufactures of the neighbouring city of Norwich.’ Silk was also made at Canterbury ‘but the great wealth and increase of [this] city is from the surprising increase of the hopgrounds all round the place. It is within the memory of many of the inhabitants now living, and that none of the oldest neither, that there was not an acre of ground planted with hops in the whole neighbourhood, or so few as not to be worth naming, whereas I was assured that there are at this time near six thousand acres of ground so planted within a very few miles of the city.’

  To the north of Canterbury, at Chatham, the chief arsenal of the Royal Navy, the buildings were ‘like the ships themselves, surprisingly large, and in their several kinds beautiful. The ware-houses, or rather streets of ware-houses, and store-houses for laying up the naval treasure, are the largest in dimension, and the most in number, that are anywhere to be seen in the world.’ At Reading, too, there were large storehouses and much shipping to be seen: ‘The town lies on the river Kennet but so near the Thames, that the largest barges which they use may come up to the town bridge, and there they have wharf es to load and unload them. Their chief trade is by this water-navigation to and from London. They send from hence to London by these barges very great quantities of malt and meal … a thousand or twelve hundred quarters of malt at a time.’ Even so, Reading could not, of course, be compared with Bristol, ‘the greatest, the richest and the best port of trade in Great Britain, London only excepted’.

  Of other towns in the west, Salisbury was remarkable not only for its cathedral but also for the variety of its clothing manufactures which employed ‘the poor of great part of the county around’, in marked contrast to Winchester, ‘a city without trade’ but of ‘abundance of gentry’. Yet Defoe did not think Salisbury ‘the pleasanter for that which they boast so much of: namely the water running through the middle of every street. It adds [nothing] to the beauty of the place, but just the contrary; it keeps the streets always dirty, full of wet and filth and weeds even in the middle of Summer.’ Taunton was also a busy manufacturing town, not one of the looms there being idle and ‘not a child in the town, or in the villages round it, of above five years old, but could (if necessary) earn its own bread’. Shrewsbury, too, was a town ‘full of trade, for here too is a great manufacture as well of flannel as also of white broad-cloth which enriches all the country round it’. Chester was equally prosperous, for this was the centre for Cheshire cheese which, made also in Shropshire, Staffordshire and Lancashire, was shipped by river all over the country in enormous quantities, 14,000 tons a year going to London alone. At Chester, Defoe was much impressed by the water supply. Until recently water had been ‘carried from the River Dee upon horses, in great leather vessels, like a pair of bakers’ paniers, just the very same for shape and use as they have to this day in the streets of Constantinople and at Belgrade in Hungary to carry about the streets to sell for the people to drink. But now it is supplied by pipes to the city plentifully as London is from the Thames, even though some parts of Chester stand very high from the river.’ Defoe did not, however, care for the celebrated rows which served to make the city ‘look both old and ugly’: ‘These Rows are certain long galleries, up one pair of stairs, which run along the side of the streets, before all the houses, though joined to them, and as is pretended, they are to keep the people dry in walking along. This they do indeed effectually, but then they take away all the view of the houses from the street. Nor can a stranger, that was to ride through Chester, see any shops in the city; besides, they make the shops themselves dark, and the way in them is dark, dirty, and uneven.’

  Nor was Defoe much attracted by the other cathedral towns of the west. Hereford he did not consider worth describing. Worcester was ‘a large, populous, old though not a very well built city … the houses standing too thick. The cathedral is a decayed building … very mean in its aspect.’ Gloucester was ‘an ancient middling city, tolerably built but not fine … The large stone bridge over the Severn … and the cathedral is all I see worth recording of this place.’ The large towns of the Midlands, however, were another matter. Northampton was ‘the handsomest and best built town in all this part of England’, Warwick ‘a really fine town, pleasantly situated on the bank of the Avon … It was ever esteemed a handsome, well-built town … but the face of it is now quite altered, for having been almost wholly reduced to a heap of rubbish by a terrible fire [in 1694] it is now rebuilt in so noble and so beautiful a manner that few towns in England make so fine an appearance.’ Nottingham – described by Celia Fiennes as the ‘neatest’ place she ever saw – was ‘one of the most pleasant and beautiful towns in England’; Derby ‘a fine, beautiful and ple
asant town’ with ‘more families of gentlemen in it than is usual in towns so remote’; Leicester an ‘ancient, large and populous town’ with a thriving trade in ‘the weaving of stockings by frames’. ‘One would scarcely think it possible that so small an article of trade could employ such multitudes of people as it does; for the whole county seems to be employed in it.’

  The chief manufacture carried on at Nottingham was also ‘framework knitting for stockings … and as they brew a very good liquor here, so they make the best malt and the most of it of any town in this part of England’. In the countryside around, as in Leicestershire, there were as fine cattle and sheep to be seen as anywhere in the country. In Leicestershire, indeed, ‘most of the gentlemen are graziers, and in some places the graziers are so rich that they grow gentlemen; ’tis not an uncommon thing for graziers here to rent farms from 5001 to two thousand pounds a year rent. The sheep bred in this county and Lincolnshire, which joins to it, are, without comparison, the largest and bear not only the greatest weight of flesh on their bones but also the greatest fleeces of wool on their backs of any sheep of England … The horses produced here, or rather fed here, are [also] the largest in England, being generally the great black coach horses and dray horses of which so great a number are continually brought up to London.’

  Travelling north, Defoe found some of the towns gloomy and forbidding, the streets of Sheffield, for instance, being narrow and the houses ‘dark and black, occasioned by the continued smoke of the forges which are always at work’, Barnsley appearing as grimy and smoky ‘as if they were all smiths that lived in it’. Yet most places were pleasant enough. Doncaster was ‘noble, large and spacious’; Wakefield ‘a large, handsome, rich clothing town full of people and full of trade’; Huddersfield ‘in full enjoyment of the wealth’ which the ‘vast clothing trade’ had bestowed upon this part of the country. York was a ‘pleasant and beautiful city and better furnished than any other with provisions of every kind … The river being so navigable, and so near the sea, the merchants here trade directly to what part of the world they will, for ships of any burthen come up within thirty mile of the city, and small craft from sixty to eighty ton and under come up to the very city.’ Leeds was ‘large, wealthy and populous’ and, with the exception of that at Halifax, had the greatest market for cloth in the north:

  At seven a clock in the morning, the clothiers being supposed to be all come by that time, even in the winter, the market bell rings; it would surprise a stranger to see in how few minutes, without hurry or noise, and not the least disorder, the whole market is filled; all the boards upon the trestles are covered with cloth; and behind every piece of cloth, the clothier standing to sell it …

  As soon as the bell has done ringing, the merchants and factors, and buyers of all sorts, come down, and coming along the spaces between the rows of boards, they walk up the rows, and down as their occasions direct. Some of them have their foreign letters of orders, with patterns sealed on them, in rows, in their hands; and with those they match colours, holding them to the cloths as they think they agree to; when they see any cloths to their colours, or that suit their occasions, they reach over to the clothier and whisper, and in the fewest words imaginable the price is stated; one asks, the other bids; and ’tis agree, or not agree, in a moment.

  The merchants and buyers generally walk down and up twice on each side of the rows, and in little more than an hour all the business is done; in less than half an hour you will perceive the cloths begin to move off, the clothier taking it up upon his shoulder to carry it to the merchant’s house; and by half an hour after eight o’clock the market bell rings again; immediately the buyers disappear, the cloth is all sold, or if here and there a piece happens not to be bought, ’tis carried back into the inn, and, in a quarter of an hour, there is not a piece of cloth to be seen in the market. Thus, you see, ten or twenty thousand pounds value in cloth, and sometimes much more, bought and sold in little more than an hour, and the laws of the market the most strictly observed as ever I saw done in any market in England.

  By nine o’clock the boards are taken down, the trestles are removed, and the streets cleared, so that you see no market or goods any more than if there had been nothing to do; and this is done twice a week. By this quick return the clothiers are constantly supplied with money, their workmen are duly paid, and a prodigious sum circulates through the county every week.

  Large sums of money also passed hands at Halifax where it was quite ordinary for a clothier with a large family to come to town on a market day ‘and buy two or three large bullocks from eight to ten pounds a piece’ and to cart them home to kill for his store. Defoe was fascinated by Halifax and the surrounding villages in which the houses of the clothiers, each standing in an acre or so of land, spread across the sides of the steep hills.

  These hills were ‘infinitely full of people, the people all full of business. Not a beggar, not an idle person is to be seen, except here and there an alms-house where people ancient, decrepit and past labour might perhaps be found, for it is observable that the people here, however laborious, generally live to a great age, a certain testimony to the goodness and wholesomeness of the country which is without doubt as healthy as any part of England. Nor is the health of the people lessened but helped and established by their being constantly employed and … working hard.’

  Every clothier kept at least one horse to fetch home wool and provisions from the market, to carry yarn to the spinners, and his manufactures to the fulling-mill and, when finished, to the market to be sold. Every clothier also kept a cow or two on the enclosed land around his house; and beyond the enclosures were scattered innumerable cottages in which lived the wives and children of the workmen, all of them ‘always busy, carding, spinning etc…. some at the dye-fat, some dressing the cloths, some in the loom, some one thing, some another, all hard at work and full employed upon the manufacture and all seeming to have sufficient business’.

  Manchester, a centre of the cotton trade, ‘one of the greatest, if not really the greatest mere village in England’, was quite as busy and prosperous. It sent no members to Parliament, its highest magistrate was a constable, yet Defoe was not surprised to learn that it contained more than 50,000 people. In fact, its population was probably no more than 10,000, but it was certainly growing fast and the buildings of the town were obviously extending ‘in a surprising manner’. There was ‘an abundance not of new houses only but of new streets of houses’ so that the place was almost twice as large as it had been a few years before.

  Liverpool, ‘one of the wonders of Britain’, was growing at an equal pace. When Defoe had first visited it in 1680 it was already ‘large and handsome’. On his second visit in 1700 it seemed twice as big; and on his third twice as large again. By then there was no town in England, London alone excepted, that could equal Liverpool ‘for the fineness of the streets and the beauty of the buildings’. ‘What it may grow to in time’, he added, ‘I know not.’

  On the north-eastern coast, Hull was quite as prosperous as Liverpool and ‘extraordinary populous, even to a fault’. Defoe believed, indeed, that more business was ‘done in Hull than in any town of its bigness in Europe’: ‘In a word all the trade at Leeds, Wakefield and Halifax, of which I have spoken so justly and so largely, is transacted here, and the goods are shipped here by the merchants of Hull. All the lead trade of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, the butter of the East and North Riding, the cheese from Stafford, Warwick and Cheshire, and the corn from all the counties adjacent, are brought down and shipped here. Again, they supply all these counties in return with foreign goods of all kinds, for which they trade to all parts of the known world.’ Newcastle, too, was a large and bustling port whose wide river allowed ships to sail up to the very quays. ‘And whereas when we are at London and see the prodigious fleets of ships which come constantly in with coals to this increasing city,’ Defoe commented, ‘we are apt to wonder whence they come and that they do not bring the whole country away.
So, on the contrary, when in this country we see the prodigious heaps, I might say mountains, of coals which are dug up at every pit, and how many of those pits there are, we are filled with equal wonder.’

  As he rode along from town to town, Defoe noted all kinds of facts and curiosities, asked questions, recorded replies, closely observed people and customs as well as places. He wrote of the ‘best and nicest oysters’ that were taken at the mouth of Colchester Wharf; of the droves of geese and turkeys, some of them a thousand strong, passing down to London along the road from Ipswich, eating the stubble in the fields on the way or being carried in special carts layer upon layer, four clacking storeys in height; of ‘the strange decay of the female sex … in the damp part’ of Essex where it was frequent to meet with men that ‘had five to six, to fourteen or fifteen wives, nay and some more’. He was informed that in the marshes

  … on the other side of the river over against Candy Island, there was a farmer who was then living with the five and twentieth wife, and that his son, who was but about thirty-five years old, had already had about fourteen … The reason, as a merry old fellow told me, who said that he had had about a dozen and a half of wives himself, (though I found afterwards he fibbed a little) was this: That men being bred in the marshes themselves, and seasoned to the place, did pretty well with it; but that they always went up into hilly country, or to speak their own language into the uplands for a wife: that when they took the young lasses out of the wholesome and fresh air, they were healthy, fresh and clear; and well; but when they came out of their native air into the marshes among the fogs and damps, there they presently changed their complexion, got an ague or two, and seldom held it above half a year, or a year at most. And then, said he, we go to the uplands again, and fetch another; so that marrying of wives was reckoned a kind of good farm to them. It is true, the fellow told this in a kind of drollery, and mirth; but the fact, for all that, is certainly true; and that they have abundance of wives by that very means.