Chapter 145

In Harrison's time the greater part of the building in cities and towns was of timber, only a few of the houses of the commonalty being of stone. In an old plate giving a view of the north side of Cheapside, London, in 1638, we see little but quaint gable ends and rows of small windows set close together. The houses are of wood and plaster, each story overhanging the other, terminating in sharp pediments; the roofs projecting on cantilevers, and the windows occupying the whole front of each of the lower stories. They presented a lively and gay appearance on holidays, when the pentices of the shop fronts were hung with colored draperies, and the balconies were crowded with spectators, and every pane of glass showed a face. In the open country, where timber was scarce, the houses were, between studs, impaneled with clay-red, white, or blue. One of the Spaniards who came over in the suite of Philip remarked the large diet in these homely cottages: "These English," quoth he, "have their houses made of sticks and dirt, but they fare commonly so well as the king." "Whereby it appeareth," comments Harrison, "that he liked better of our good fare in such coarse cabins, than of their own thin diet in their prince-like habitations and palaces." The timber houses were covered with tiles; the other sort with straw or reeds. The fairest houses were ceiled within with mortar and covered with plaster, the whiteness and evenness of which excited Harrison's admiration. The walls were hung with tapestry, arras-work, or painted cloth, whereon were divers histories, or herbs, or birds, or else ceiled with oak. Stoves had just begun to be used, and only in some houses of the gentry, "who build them not to work and feed in, as in Germany and elsewhere, but now and then to sweat in, as occasion and need shall require." Glass in windows, which was then good and cheap, and made even in England, had generally taken the place of the lattices and of the horn, and of the beryl which noblemen formerly used in windows. Gentlemen were beginning to build their houses of brick and stone, in stately and magnificent fashion. The furniture of the houses had also grown in a manner "passing delicacy," and not of the nobility and gentry only, but of the lowest sort. In noblemen's houses there was abundance of arras, rich hangings of tapestry, and silver vessels, plate often to the value of one thousand and two thousand pounds. The knights, gentlemen, and merchants had great provision of tapestry, Turkie work, pewter, brass, fine linen, and cupboards of plate worth perhaps a thousand pounds. Even the inferior artificers and many farmers had learned also to garnish their cupboards with plate, their joined beds with silk hangings, and their tables with fine linen--evidences of wealth for which Harrison thanks God and reproaches no man, though he cannot see how it is brought about, when all things are grown to such excessive prices.

Old men of Radwinter noted three things marvelously altered in England within their remembrance. The first was the multitude of chimneys lately erected; whereas in their young days there were not, always except those in the religious and manor houses, above two or three chimneys in most upland towns of the realm; each one made his fire against a reredos in the hall, where he dined and dressed his meat. The second was the amendment in lodging. In their youth they lay upon hard straw pallets covered only with a sheet, and mayhap a dogswain coverlet over them, and a good round log for pillow. If in seven years after marriage a man could buy a mattress and a sack of chaff to rest his head on, he thought himself as well lodged as a lord. Pillows were thought meet only for sick women. As for servants, they were lucky if they had a sheet over them, for there was nothing under them to keep the straw from pricking their hardened hides. The third notable thing was the exchange of treene (wooden) platters into pewter, and wooden spoons into silver or tin. Wooden stuff was plenty, but a good farmer would not have above four pieces of pewter in his house; with all his frugality, he was unable to pay his rent of four pounds without selling a cow or horse. It was a time of idleness, and if a farmer at an alehouse, in a bravery to show what he had, slapped down his purse with six shillings in it, all the rest together could not match it. But now, says Harrison, though the rent of four pounds has improved to forty, the farmer has six or seven years' rent, lying by him, to purchase a new term, garnish his cupboard with pewter, buy three or four feather-beds, coverlets, carpets of tapestry, a silver salt, a nest of bowls for wine, and a dozen spoons. All these things speak of the growing wealth and luxury of the age. Only a little before this date, in 1568, Lord Buckhurst, who had been ordered to entertain the Cardinal de Chatillon in Queen Elizabeth's palace at Sheen, complains of the meanness of the furniture of his rooms. He showed the officers who preceded the cardinal such furniture and stuff as he had, but it did not please them. They wanted plate, he had none; such glass vessels as he had they thought too base. They wanted damask for long tables, and he had only linen for a square table, and they refused his square table. He gave the cardinal his only unoccupied tester and bedstead, and assigned to the bishop the bedstead upon which his wife's waiting-women did lie, and laid them on the ground. He lent the cardinal his own basin and ewer, candlesticks from his own table, drinking-glasses, small cushions, and pots for the kitchen. My Lord of Leicester sent down two pair of fine sheets for the cardinal and one pair for the bishop.

Harrison laments three things in his day: the enhancing of rents, the daily oppression of poor tenants by the lords of manors, and the practice of usury--a trade brought in by the Jews, but now practiced by almost every Christian, so that he is accounted a fool that doth lend his money for nothing. He prays the reader to help him, in a lawful manner, to hang up all those that take cent. per cent. for money. Another grievance, and most sorrowful of all, is that many gentlemen, men of good port and countenance, to the injury of the farmers and commonalty, actually turn Braziers, butchers, tanners, sheep-masters, and woodmen. Harrison also notes the absorption of lands by the rich; the decay of houses in the country, which comes of the eating up of the poor by the rich; the increase of poverty; the difficulty a poor man had to live on an acre of ground; his forced contentment with bread made of oats and barley, and the divers places that formerly had good tenants and now were vacant, hop-yards and gardens.

Harrison says it is not for him to describe the palaces of Queen Elizabeth; he dare hardly peep in at her gates. Her houses are of brick and stone, neat and well situated, but in good masonry not to be compared to those of Henry VIII's building; they are rather curious to the eye, like paper-works, than substantial for continuance. Her court is more magnificent than any other in Europe, whether you regard the rich and infinite furniture of the household, the number of officers, or the sumptuous entertainments. And the honest chronicler is so struck with admiration of the virtuous beauty of the maids of honor that he cannot tell whether to award preeminence to their amiable countenances or to their costliness of attire, between which there is daily conflict and contention. The courtiers of both sexes have the use of sundry languages and an excellent vein of writing. Would to God the rest of their lives and conversation corresponded with these gifts! But the courtiers, the most learned, are the worst men when they come abroad that any man shall hear or read of. Many of the gentlewomen have sound knowledge of Greek and Latin, and are skillful in Spanish, Italian, and French; and the noblemen even surpass them. The old ladies of the court avoid idleness by needlework, spinning of silk, or continual reading of the Holy Scriptures or of histories, and writing diverse volumes of their own, or translating foreign works into English or Latin; and the young ladies, when they are not waiting on her majesty, "in the mean time apply their lutes, citherns, pricksong, and all kinds of music." The elders are skillful in surgery and the distillation of waters, and sundry other artificial practices pertaining to the ornature and commendation of their bodies; and when they are at home they go into the kitchen and supply a number of delicate dishes of their own devising, mostly after Portuguese receipts; and they prepare bills of fare (a trick lately taken up) to give a brief rehearsal of all the dishes of every course. I do not know whether this was called the "higher education of women" at the time.

In every office of the palaces is a Bible, or book of acts of the church, or chronicle, for the use of whoever comes in, so that the court looks more like a university than a palace. Would to God the houses of the nobles were ruled like the queen's! The nobility are followed by great troops of serving-men in showy liveries; and it is a goodly sight to see them muster at court, which, being filled with them, "is made like to the show of a peacock's tail in the full beauty, or of some meadow garnished with infinite kinds and diversity of pleasant flowers." Such was the discipline of Elizabeth's court that any man who struck another within it had his right hand chopped off by the executioner in a most horrible manner.

The English have always had a passion for gardens and orchards. In the Roman time grapes abounded and wine was plenty, but the culture disappeared after the Conquest. From the time of Henry IV. to Henry VIII. vegetables were little used, but in Harrison's day the use of melons, pompions, radishes, cucumbers, cabbages, turnips, and the like was revived. They had beautiful flower-gardens annexed to the houses, wherein were grown also rare and medicinal herbs; it was a wonder to see how many strange herbs, plants, and fruits were daily brought from the Indies, America and the Canaries. Every rich man had great store of flowers, and in one garden might be seen from three hundred to four hundred medicinal herbs. Men extol the foreign herbs to the neglect of the native, and especially tobacco, "which is not found of so great efficacy as they write." In the orchards were plums, apples, pears, walnuts, filberts; and in noblemen's orchards store of strange fruit-apricots, almonds, peaches, figs, and even in some oranges, lemons, and capers. Grafters also were at work with their artificial mixtures, "dallying, as it were, with nature and her course, as if her whole trade were perfectly known unto them: of hard fruits they will make soft, of sour sweet, of sweet yet more delicate; bereaving also some of their kernels, others of their cores, and finally endowing them with the flavor of musk, amber, or sweet spices at their pleasure." Gardeners turn annual into perpetual herbs, and such pains are they at that they even used dish-water for plants. The Gardens of Hesperides are surely not equal to these. Pliny tells of a rose that had sixty leaves on one bud, but in 1585 there was a rose in Antwerp that had one hundred and eighty leaves; and Harrison might have had a slip of it for ten pounds, but he thought it a "tickle hazard." In his own little garden, of not above three hundred square feet, he had near three hundred samples, and not one of them of the common, or usually to be had.

Our kin beyond sea have always been stout eaters of solid food, and in Elizabeth's time their tables were more plentifully laden than those of any other nation. Harrison scientifically accounts for their inordinate appetite. "The situation of our region," he says, "lying near unto the north, does cause the heat of our stomachs to be of somewhat greater force; therefore our bodies do crave a little more ample nourishment than the inhabitants of the hotter regions are accustomed withal, whose digestive force is not altogether so vehement, because their internal heat is not so strong as ours, which is kept in by the coldness of the air, that from time to time (specially in winter) doth environ our bodies." The north Britons in old times were accustomed often to great abstinence, and lived when in the woods on roots and herbs. They used sometimes a confection, "whereof so much as a bean would qualify their hunger above common expectation"; but when they had nothing to qualify it with, they crept into the marsh water up to their chins, and there remained a long time, "only to qualify the heat of their stomachs by violence."

In Harrison's day the abstemious Welsh had learned to eat like the English, and the Scotch exceeded the latter in "over much and distemperate gormandize." The English eat all they can buy, there being no restraint of any meat for religion's sake or for public order. The white meats--milk, butter, and cheese--though very dear, are reputed as good for inferior people, but the more wealthy feed upon the flesh of all sorts of cattle and all kinds of fish. The nobility ("whose cooks are for the most part musical-headed Frenchmen and strangers ") exceed in number of dishes and change of meat. Every day at dinner there is beef, mutton, veal, lamb, kid, pork, conie, capon, pig, or as many of these as the season yielded, besides deer and wildfowl, and fish, and sundry delicacies "wherein the sweet hand of the seafaring Portingale is not wanting." The food was brought in commonly in silver vessels at tables of the degree of barons, bishops, and upwards, and referred first to the principal personage, from whom it passed to the lower end of the table, the guests not eating of all, but choosing what each liked; and nobody stuffed himself. The dishes were then sent to the servants, and the remains of the feast went to the poor, who lay waiting at the gates in great numbers.

Drink was served in pots, goblets, jugs, and bowls of silver in noblemen's houses, and also in Venice glasses. It was not set upon the table, but the cup was brought to each one who thirsted; he called for such a cup of drink as he wished, and delivered it again to one of the by-standers, who made it clean by pouring out what remained, and restored it to the sideboard. This device was to prevent great drinking, which might ensue if the full pot stood always at the elbow. But this order was not used in noblemen's halls, nor in any order under the degree of knight or squire of great revenue. It was a world to see how the nobles preferred to gold and silver, which abounded, the new Venice glass, whence a great trade sprang up with Murano that made many rich. The poorest even would have glass, but home-made--a foolish expense, for the glass soon went to bits, and the pieces turned to no profit. Harrison wanted the philosopher's stone to mix with this molten glass and toughen it.

There were multitudes of dependents fed at the great houses, and everywhere, according to means, a wide-open hospitality was maintained. Froude gives a notion of the style of living in earlier times by citing the details of a feast given when George Neville, brother of Warwick the king-maker, was made archbishop of York. There were present, including servants, thirty-five hundred persons. These are a few of the things used at the banquet: three hundred quarters of wheat, three hundred tuns of ale, one hundred and four tuns of wine, eighty oxen, three thousand geese, two thousand pigs,--four thousand conies, four thousand heronshaws, four thousand venison pasties cold and five hundred hot, four thousand cold tarts, four thousand cold custards, eight seals, four porpoises, and so on.

The merchants and gentlemen kept much the same tables as the nobles, especially at feasts, but when alone were content with a few dishes. They also desired the dearest food, and would have no meat from the butcher's but the most delicate, while their list of fruits, cakes, Gates, and outlandish confections is as long as that at any modern banquet. Wine ran in excess. There were used fifty-six kinds of light wines, like the French, and thirty of the strong sorts, like the Italian and Eastern. The stronger the wine, the better it was liked. The strongest and best was in old times called theologicum, because it was had from the clergy and religious men, to whose houses the laity sent their bottles to be filled, sure that the religious would neither drink nor be served with the worst; for the merchant would have thought his soul should have gone straightway to the devil if he had sent them any but the best. The beer served at noblemen's tables was commonly a year old, and sometimes two, but this age was not usual. In households generally it was not under a month old, for beer was liked stale if it were not sour, while bread was desired as new as possible so that it was not hot.

The husbandman and artificer ate such meat as they could easiest come by and have most quickly ready; yet the banquets of the trades in London were not inferior to those of the nobility. The husbandmen, however, exceed in profusion, and it is incredible to tell what meat is consumed at bridals, purifications, and such like odd meetings; but each guest brought his own provision, so that the master of the house had only to provide bread, drink, houseroom, and fire. These lower classes Harrison found very friendly at their tables--merry without malice, plain without Italian or French subtlety--so that it would do a man good to be in company among them; but if they happen to stumble upon a piece of venison or a cup of wine or very strong beer, they do not stick to compare themselves with the lord-mayor--and there is no public man in any city of Europe that may compare with him in port and countenance during the term of his office.

Harrison commends the great silence used at the tables of the wiser sort, and generally throughout the realm, and likewise the moderate eating and drinking. But the poorer countrymen do babble somewhat at table, and mistake ribaldry and loquacity for wit and wisdom, and occasionally are cup-shotten; and what wonder, when they who have hard diet and small drink at home come to such opportunities at a banquet! The wealthier sort in the country entertain their visitors from afar, however long they stay, with as hearty a welcome the last day as the first; and the countrymen contrast this hospitality with that of their London cousins, who joyfully receive them the first day, tolerate them the second, weary of them the third, and wish 'em at the devil after four days.

The gentry usually ate wheat bread, of which there were four kinds, and the poor generally bread made of rye, barley, and even oats and acorns. Corn was getting so dear, owing to the forestallers and middlemen, that, says the historian, "if the world last a while after this rate, wheat and rye will be no grain for poor men to feed on; and some catterpillers [two-legged speculators] there are that can say so much already."

The great drink of the realm was, of course, beer (and it is to be noted that a great access of drunkenness came into England with the importation much later of Holland gin) made from barley, hops, and water, and upon the brewing of it Harrison dwells lovingly, and devotes many pages to a description of the process, especially as "once in a month practiced by my wife and her maid servants." They ground eight bushels of malt, added half a bushel of wheat meal, half a bushel of oat meal, poured in eighty gallons of water, then eighty gallons more, and a third eighty gallons, and boiled with a couple of pounds of hops. This, with a few spices thrown in, made three hogsheads of good beer, meet for a poor man who had only forty pounds a year. This two hundred gallons of beer cost altogether twenty shillings; but although he says his wife brewed it "once in a month," whether it lasted a whole month the parson does not say. He was particular about the water used: the Thames is best, the marsh worst, and clear spring water next worst; "the fattest standing water is always the best." Cider and perry were made in some parts of England, and a delicate sort of drink in Wales, called metheglin; but there was a kind of "swish-swash" made in Essex from honey-combs and water, called mead, which differed from the metheglin as chalk from cheese.

In Shakespeare's day much less time was spent in eating and drinking than formerly, when, besides breakfast in the forenoon and dinners, there were "beverages" or "nuntion" after dinner, and supper before going to bed --"a toie brought in by hardie Canutus," who was a gross feeder. Generally there were, except for the young who could not fast till dinnertime, only two meals daily, dinner and supper. Yet the Normans had brought in the habit of sitting long at the table--a custom not yet altogether abated, since the great people, especially at banquets, sit till two or three o'clock in the afternoon; so that it is a hard matter to rise and go to evening prayers and return in time for supper.

Harrison does not make much account of the early meal called "breakfast"; but Froude says that in Elizabeth's time the common hour of rising, in the country, was four o'clock, summer and winter, and that breakfast was at five, after which the laborers went to work and the gentlemen to business. The Earl and Countess of Northumberland breakfasted together and alone at seven. The meal consisted of a quart of ale, a quart of wine, and a chine of beef; a loaf of bread is not mentioned, but we hope (says Froude) it may be presumed. The gentry dined at eleven and supped at five. The merchants took dinner at noon, and, in London, supped at six. The university scholars out of term ate dinner at ten. The husbandmen dined at high noon, and took supper at seven or eight. As for the poorer sort, it is needless to talk of their order of repast, for they dined and supped when they could. The English usually began meals with the grossest food and ended with the most delicate, taking first the mild wines and ending with the hottest; but the prudent Scot did otherwise, making his entrance with the best, so that he might leave the worse to the menials.