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

by Christopher Hibbert

  Even after handbags had come into general use in the 1760s a lady who went out unaccompanied by a page or footman would usually carry a gold étui case in which had been packed small bottles of scent and aromatic vinegar and perhaps a snuff-box. She would also carry a fan.

  Fans were sometimes of such large size and wielded so energetically that they were compared to windmills. The more expensive were mounted with diamonds and inlaid with jewels, and were painted with political emblems, verses from popular songs or extracts from books, pictures of fruit and flowers. Great dexterity was required for ‘fluttering’, and all manner of emotions could be wordlessly conveyed by the skilful manipulator, from anger and confusion to amusement and love. Addison said that it took three months’ assiduous practice before the art of ‘fluttering’ was fully mastered.

  The lady might also carry an umbrella of waxed silk or taffeta. Umbrellas had been introduced into England in the late seventeenth century. They were mentioned by Swift in 1704 and by John Gay in 1716. And in the ‘Description of a City Shower’ which appeared in the Tatler in 1710:

  The tuck’d up semstress walks with hasty strides

  While streams run down her oil’d umbrella’s sides.

  Umbrellas were not, however, in common use until much later and men who dared to be seen with them in public were liable to be jeered at by porters and coachmen, as were the lawyers of Lincoln’s Inn who borrowed the large umbrella from Wall’s coffee-house in 1714. John Macdonald, on his return to London from France in 1778, wrote that umbrellas were rarely seen

  except in noblemen and gentlemen’s houses, where there was a large one hung in the hall, to hold over a lady or gentleman if it rained, between the door and the carriage. I was going to dine in Norfolk Street on Sunday. It rained. My sister had hold of my arm, and I had the umbrella over our heads. In Tavistock Street we met so many young men, calling after us, ‘Frenchman, take care of your umbrella.’ ‘Frenchman, why do you not get a coach, Monsieur?’22

  Jonas Hanway, the philanthropist, who is credited with having set the fashion of carrying an umbrella, had to endure the scorn of the mob for thirty years before his habit was accepted without derision. But by the time of his death in 1786 it seems from the large number of satirical prints showing people with umbrellas that they had come into common use in London.23 Elsewhere, however, they were still an unusual sight. George Pryme, Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge, recalled that as late as 1797 there was but one umbrella in the town, this being kept in a shop in Benet Street and hired out by the hour.24

  Ladies indicated their political inclinations by face patches as well as by the motifs on their fans, and these patches, circular or crescent-shaped pieces of black or bright red silk, velvet or paper, remained in fashion long after their political significance had been forgotten, often hiding the worst ravages of smallpox. The skin on the face was also covered with preparations as dangerous as those used in the sixteenth century. A foundation of white lead, which caused serious illnesses in the workmen who made it, was first applied; then, at least until the 1780s when the practice became less common, the cheeks were rouged, perhaps with a red leather imported from Brazil, and the colour of the lips was heightened with carmine or painted with lipsticks made from ground and coloured plaster of Paris. Eyebrows were trimmed, blackened with lead combs, or concealed behind artificial mouseskin eyebrows. False teeth and ‘plumpers’, small cork balls held inside the cheeks to make them appear rounder, helped their wearers to talk with a fashionable lisp. There were also false buttocks, an importation from the Continent, and pads worn over the stomach by those who wished to appear pregnant.25

  Clothes were important because they indicated rank and even occupation; and it annoyed Lord Chesterfield that some young men flouted the recognized conventions.

  Most of our young fellows here display some character or other by their dress [he wrote], some affect the tremendous, and wear a great and fiercely-cocked hat, an enormous sword, a short waistcoat, and a black cravat … Others go in brown frocks, leather breeches, great oaken cudgels in their hands, their hats uncocked, and their hair unpowdered; and imitate grooms, stage-coachmen and country bumkins so well in their outsides, that I do not make the least doubt of their resembling them equally in their insides.26

  Chesterfield believed that a gentleman ought to dress ‘in the same manner as the people of sense and fashion of the place where he is’. If he dressed better he would show himself to be fop, if worse he would be ‘unpardonably negligent’.27 It was also generally accepted that certain professional men should be recognized by their attire. A full-bottomed wig remained the standard wear for lawyers, physicians and clergymen until the middle of the century and was still worn by some in the second half. Many physicians also carried gold-headed canes. Clergymen generally wore black or grey in town, although some habitually chose brighter colours, like the Rev. John Lind – who called upon Jeremy Bentham ‘in his flowered dress of purple and gold and I know not what’ – and the Rev. Charles Churchill, the poet, who shocked the Dean of Westminster by wearing leather breeches, silk stockings, a blue coat, gold-laced hat and ruffles.

  While it was only the rich who could afford to follow every changing fashion, in families throughout the country magazines such as The Fashions of London and Paris and the coloured fashion plates in The Lady Magazine were eagerly awaited and studied. In the country dress was usually much simpler, of course, than it was in the town, though there were a few country gentlemen who dressed at home much as they did in London. John Howard, the future prison reformer who had a small estate in Bedfordshire, was discovered at home by Arthur Young as though he were dressed for an evening in London, wearing ‘a powdered bag wig, white silk stockings, thin shoes’.28 But Howard was an exception. Most country landowners dressed far less elegantly, and some were as negligent as Lord Effingham who, even in the House of Lords, had the appearance ‘both in his person and dress of a Common Country Farmer, wearing a great coat with brass buttons, frock fashion, his hair short, strait, and to appearance uncombed, his face rough, vulgar and brown, as also his hands.’29

  Indeed, some of the tenants on such men’s estates dressed much better than they. In Oxfordshire Carl Moritz noticed in 1782 that the countrymen were dressed not in coarse frocks as they would have been in Germany, but ‘with some taste, in fine good cloth’.30 As for the women, so the author of a pamphlet declared that same year, ‘they wear scarcely anything now but cotton, calicoes, muslin or silks, and think no more of woollen stuffsthan we think of an old almanac’.31 Wool, however, was still used for that ubiquitous item of country women’s apparel – the red cloak, the hooded form of which was known as a riding-hood. These were still being worn at the end of the century when ‘an ample crimson or scarlet cloak of finest wool, double milled and of an intense dye that threw a glimmer wherever it moved’ was donned by women for church or chapel every Sunday. ‘I wish you saw the number of scarlet cloaks and silk pelisses assembled in the churchyard,’ wrote Sarah Hutchinson of a village in Westmorland in 18n.32 Red cloaks were still popular in the 1820s when Mary Russell Mitford described the numbers of them in Berkshire; but by 1840, according to The Workwoman’s Guide, they survived only in the wardrobes of elderly ladies.33

  For countrymen a common form of working dress was a short jacket and sleeveless waistcoat in various shades of brown, breeches and buckled shoes or short boots, perhaps an apron and a black hat. In Stubbs’s ‘The Haymakers’ of 1782 all the men are depicted wearing wide-brimmed round black hats – as they are, too, in his ‘The Reapers’ of 1785 – but most of them have taken off their waistcoats and work in white, full-sleeved shirts. The working women also wear big black hats, and one of them is in a bedgown secured by an apron. Women often wore bedgowns in the fields, and sometimes discarded them and worked in their stays covered only by a short-sleeved shift and a petticoat with a handkerchief over neck and shoulders. Most countrywomen also had linen caps and nearly all had a hat made of straw or ch
ip. These were often worn with ribbons and strings tied beneath the chin and were to be seen at every summer fair, as at Stourbridge Fair where one day the Marchioness Grey met with ‘a Number of clean, tight [trim] Countrywomen and maidens tricked out with their Ribbands and straw hats to whom this is really a happy, jolly day’.34

  By the end of the century farm labourers, carters and shepherds were all wearing smock-frocks both for work and at home and in the alehouse. They were not yet the ornamental garments they were later to become, such gathering as there was being merely to shape the garment; but those ‘of a brown or light blue linen’, which Marianne Thornton saw in Yorkshire in 1797, were ‘extremely picturesque’. They seem to have been less favoured by the younger than the older worker for everyday wear, the young men of the village preferring to appear in more dashing clothes when they could, like the ‘clodpated yeoman’s son’ whom a friend of George Selwyn saw at Leicester races in 1779 in a ‘drab coat and red waistcoat, tight leather breeches and light grey worsted stockings, with one strap of the shoe coming out from under the buckle upon the foot; with his lank hair and silk handkerchief, new for Reacetime, about his neck’.35

  32 Travellers, Postmen and Innkeepers

  Carl Moritz said that he would remember as long as he lived his journey from Leicester to London on his way back to Germany. The getting up alone to the top of the coach was, he thought, ‘at risk of one’s life’. And when he was up there, sitting at the corner of the coach next to a farmer and a blackamoor, he had nothing to hold on to but a short little handle fastened on the side. ‘The moment we set off,’ Moritz recalled, ‘I fancied that I saw certain death awaiting me. All I could do was to take still faster hold of the handle, and to be more and more careful to preserve my balance. The machine now rolled along with prodigious rapidity over the stones through the town, and every moment we seemed to fly into the air.’ As the coach began to climb a hill and consequently slowed down, Moritz thought he would be safer and more comfortable in the basket where the luggage was kept. So, despite the warnings of the black man, who said he would be shaken to death, he climbed into the basket where, when the coach began to rattle down the hill, he was so violently knocked about by the trunks and cases that he thought his last hour had come. He was unable to escape from this torture for an hour; and soon after he did get out it began to pour with rain. At Northampton he changed coaches and this time managed to obtain a seat inside. But this stage of the journey was scarcely better. It was, indeed, not so much a journey as a ‘perpetual motion or removal in a close box’ in which his three travelling companions were ‘unfortunately all farmers who slept so soundly that even the hearty knocks of the head with which they often saluted each other did not awaken them’. After rattling and bumping through Newport Pagnell, Dunstable, St Albans and Barnet, Moritz at length arrived in London looking ‘like a crazy creature’.1

  Moritz’s experiences were not in the least exceptional. There were a few travellers who agreed with César de Saussure that English roads, compared with those in other countries, were ‘magnificent … wide, smooth and well kept’. But to most Englishmen such opinions seemed incomprehensible. ‘In Summer the Roads are suffocated and smothered with Dust,’ wrote Robert Phillips in 1736 in his Dissertation Concerning the Present state of the High Roads of England, especially of those near London,

  and towards the Winter, between wet and dry, they are deep Ruts full of water with hard dry Ridges, which make it difficult for Passengers to cross by one another without overturning. And in the Winter they are all Mud, which rises, spues and squeezes into the Ditches; so that the Ditches and Roads are full of Mud and Dirt all alike.

  Such descriptions are so common that it cannot be doubted that in the first half of the eighteenth century the roads of England were deplorable. It was a well-known fact, the Gentleman’s Magazine maintained twenty years after Phillips’s Dissertation appeared, that a ‘party of ladies and gentlemen would sooner travel [from London] to the south of France and back again than down to Falmouth’.

  Coaches became stuck in the mud or overturned, their axles broke, their horses were lamed, their occupants were thrown out with the luggage into the ditch. A journey from Petworth, a distance of forty miles, undertaken by the King of Spain in 1703, took fourteen hours during which he and fellow-travellers did not once get out of the coaches, ‘save only when overturned or stuck in the mud’. Six years later Ralph Thoresby, the topographer, found the roads between London and Hull atrocious, ‘in some places the ice being broken by the coaches and rougher than a ploughed field, in others yet hard as iron that it battered the horses’ feet’. Horace Walpole described the roads in Sussex as ‘bad beyond all badness, the night dark beyond all darkness, the guide frightened beyond all frightfulness’. One Sussex lady grew so exasperated by her horses’ inability to negotiate the roads which led to her parish church that she had her coach drawn there by a team of six oxen. Even the road between the court suburb of Kensington and Piccadilly was so ‘infamously bad’ in 1736 that Lord Hervey complained of living ‘in the same solitude as if cast on a rock in the middle of the ocean’. ‘All the Londoners’ told him that the road between the City and Kensington was ‘an impassable gulf of mud’. As late as 1763 ‘the roads were so bad [in Yorkshire] at particular seasons of the year that they were for want of proper forming almost impassable; and it has been known in the winter to have been eight days’ journey from York to London’. In 1770 the road from Preston to Wigan in Lancashire was ‘execrable’. Arthur Young knew not, ‘in the whole range of language terms sufficiently expressive to describe’ that ‘infernal highway’ in which the ruts were four feet deep in summer. ‘What must it therefore be in winter?’, he asked. ‘The only mending it receives in places is the tumbling of some loose stones, which serve no other purpose but jolting a carriage in the most intolerable manner.’ The Essex road between Billericay and Tilbury was, if possible, even worse. ‘Of all the cursed roads that ever disgraced this kingdom in the very ages of barbarism’ none ever equalled this, Young thought.

  It is for near twelve miles so narrow that a mouse cannot pass by any carriage … The ruts are an incredible depth … and the trees everywhere overgrow the road, so that it is totally impervious to the sun except at a few places. And to add to all the infamous circumstances which concur to plague a traveller, I must not forget the eternally meeting with chalk waggons, themselves frequently stuck fast till a collection of them are in the same situation, and twenty or thirty horses may be tacked to each to draw them out, one by one.2

  The ordinary dangers of the road were compounded by those threatened by highwaymen. No doubt these dangers were exaggerated by contemporaries, and have subsequently been overemphasized; yet, while we may doubt that Englishmen in the 1750s really were, as Horace Walpole said they were, forced to travel even at noon as if they were going into battle, there was no doubt that highwaymen did constitute a major hazard on the road. ‘I was robbed last night as I expected,’ the Prime Minister, Lord North, wrote with characteristic placidity and resigned acceptance in 1774. Our loss was not great, but as the postilion did not stop immediately, one of the two highwaymen fired at him … It was at the end of Gunnersbury Lane.’ The following year the Norwich coach was held up in Epping Forest; three of the seven highwaymen were shot dead before the guard was killed himself. One of the highwaymen who robbed Walpole threatened him with a pistol which exploded in his face and blackened his skin with powder and shot marks. He was left thinking that had he been sitting an inch nearer the window, the ball would have passed through his brain. In the words of one experienced traveller, highwaymen were as ‘common as crows’.3

  Foreigners, accustomed in their own countries to a strong force of maréchaussée to protect the roads, were astonished by this state of affairs. The number of robbers, one Swiss traveller thought, was ‘amazing’. A Frenchman wrote that all the main roads within thirty or forty miles of London were ‘garnis de voleurs à cheval’. The Abbé le Blanc recorded
that in the 1720s highwaymen, ‘in order to maintain their rights’, blatantly ‘fixed up papers at the doors of the rich people about London, expressly forbidding all persons, of what condition or quality soever, to go out of town without ten guineas and a watch about them, upon pain of death’.

  Sixty years later Sophie von la Roche was at a party in the country attended by several ambassadors who all came away early. ‘Perhaps they needed their money for gaming,’ she commented, ‘and hence could not afford to give it to the highwaymen! So they decided to depart all together, as the robbers would hardly hold up four coaches at once.’

  Foreign visitors could at least comfort themselves with the thought that provided they handed over their money and rings and watches quickly and without complaint – and this, they agreed, was essential – the English highwayman was unlikely to pull the trigger of the pistol he always held in his hand like a badge of office. Indeed, as the German historian Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz observed, highwaymen were ‘generally very polite; they assure you they are very sorry that poverty has driven them to that shameful recourse, and end by demanding your purse in the most courteous manner’.

  ‘I have been told,’ a Frenchman confirmed, ‘that some highwaymen are quite polite and generous, begging to be excused for being forced to rob, and leaving passengers the wherewithal to finish their journey.’ And the Duc de Lévis agreed that ‘en général, les choses se passent de part et d’autre avec beaucoup de sang-froid, et souvent même avec politesse.’

  The English newspapers of the time show that the experiences of these foreign tourists were quite common. The ‘Knights of the Road’, as they were flatteringly styled, were evidently much given to polite requests and gracious apologies. ‘He behaved genteely,’ runs a typical report, ‘and by way of apology for what he did told the passengers that his distress drove him to it.’