Part 8 (1/2)

In this connection, it is interesting to refer to the development of the silk industry as a typical occupation of woman. It is impossible to determine the time when ”the arts of spinning, throwing, and weaving of silk” were first brought into England. We do know, however, that, when first established, they were pursued by a company of women called ”silk women.” The fabrics of their skill were in the many forms of laces, ribbons, girdles, and other narrow goods. Toward the middle of the fifteenth century, these women were greatly distressed by the Lombards and other Italians, who imported into the country the same sort of goods, and in such quant.i.ties that their sale was hindered and the workers placed in danger of starvation. This led to a reference of their complaint to Parliament, with a statement of the grievances for which they desired redress. This doc.u.ment bore the t.i.tle: _The pet.i.tion of the silk women and throwesters of the craftes and occupation of silk-work within the city of London, which be, and have been, craftes of women within the same city of time that no man remembereth the contrary_. The pet.i.tion then goes on to set forth ”that by this business many reputable families have been well supported; and young women kept from idleness by learning the same business, and put into a way of living with credit, and many have thereby grown to great wors.h.i.+p; and never any thing of silk brought into this land, concerning the same craftes and occupations in any wise wrought but in the raw silk alone, unwrought, until now of late that divers Lombards and others, aliens and strangers, with a view of destroying the silk-working in this kingdom, and transferring the manufactories to foreign countries, do daily bring into this land,”

etc. Then follows a statement of the inferior grades of fabrics thus introduced, which the complaint said was ”to the great detriment and utter destruction of the said craftes; which is like to cause great idleness among the young gentlewomen and other apprentices to the same craftes.” The pet.i.tion that the importation of these goods should be prohibited was granted, and we hear no more of these estimable ladies and little of their infant industry. It was then thought no disgrace for a lady of quality to conduct such household manufactories.

The town-dwelling woman looked down upon her rural sister, a fact that is not at all surprising when the difference in the condition of the two cla.s.ses of women is considered. The town-dwelling woman had the privileges of guild a.s.sociation and the liberties which it gave her, while the woman in the agricultural districts was but a drudge.

The former were identified with manufactures and commerce, while the latter were tied to the soil. Even after the rise of copyhold tenure of land, the grievances of the agricultural population were considerable, and of many sorts. While the villains flocked to London to demand legal exemption from the old labor obligations which went along with such servile condition, the cottars claimed freedom from labor rents for their homes, and the copyholders of all kinds demanded that they should not be compelled to grind at the lord's mill the corn which they raised for their household needs. The rising tide of industrial revolution represented a climax of centuries of grievance; and when the revolt did come, it was as a demand for the manumission of property held in villanage. There was at the time hardly any personal servitude demanding such strenuous measures for betterment.

The popular agitation seemed to be enlisted against cla.s.s impositions, and so the following lines:

”When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?”

became the slogan of the insurgents.

It is not possible to ascertain how particular grievances in Kent and Ess.e.x became identified with the general movements of the peasantry south of the Thames and in many parts of the midland. The vast movement, however, extended throughout the agricultural districts, and included burgesses of towns, rural priests, yeomen and farm laborers.

It is unlikely that a personal grievance should have caused it, but it was precipitated by such. The immediate occasion was the indignation which was aroused at an outrage committed by one of the tax collectors on the daughter of Wat the Tyler. As the indignation which centred in the sentiment against this act served to cement the feeling of injustice which was prevalent among the peasantry, so it is probable that the act itself was not a solitary instance, but only one of many indignities which were suffered by the peasantry at the hands of the representatives of those above them. Although the insurrection soon came to an end, and those who were responsible for it suffered the severest penalties, nevertheless the various ”statutes of laborers”

which from this date appear on the statute book show that the day had gone by when the lords of manors could require the personal services of tenants in return for the lands they held; so that the one thousand five hundred persons who were executed for this social uprising died as a protest against grievances of the poor tenantry, which were corrected by legislation.

By the close of the fourteenth century the manorial courts had lost much of their former vigor; and there were frequent instances of villain tenants sending their daughters to service beyond the bounds of the manors, in spite of the requirement of a license so to do. Daughters were also married without reference to the lord, or obtaining his permission, or paying the fee. As a result of their extended liberties, women as well as men deserted the country in large numbers and resorted to the towns. The population thus became much more mobile, and among the people there was a wider degree of intelligence because of this fact and of their more varied experience.

As women are the progenitors of the race, it is always important for the intelligence of a people that the mothers shall not be stupid and inane creatures such as were for the most part the women of the agricultural cla.s.ses in England during the greater part of the Middle Ages. They were limited to the narrow confines of homes, humble indeed, and yet homes which they could not feel were their own, and they could not leave these habitations excepting under conditions which were practically prohibitive. Their days were spent in an unvarying monotony of domestic duties and farm labor, which afforded no stimulus to the mind or food for the soul. It is not strange that morals were as depraved as manners were uncouth. In the imagination, superst.i.tion took the place that was unoccupied by intelligence; and the world of the peasant woman, who went about her round of daily hards.h.i.+p, was peopled by a throng of supernatural creatures, and her life spent in fear of violation of some of those strange rules of conduct which now form interesting matter for the student of folklore.

It is difficult to exaggerate the hards.h.i.+p of the agriculturist of the Middle Ages; and as she was an active partic.i.p.ant in such labors, besides having upon her the burdens which commonly belong to the mother of a household, the woman of the times had to bear duties much beyond those of a woman in a similar grade of life in England to-day.

The great pestilences of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries swept away so many lives that, for two centuries and a half before the accession of Henry VII., the growth of population was so slight as to be scarcely calculable. The unsanitary condition of the homes in general was greatly injurious to health; but this was especially so of the homes of the humble, the women of which had no ideas of cleanliness, either in person or surroundings. The weekly s.h.i.+lling or ninepence of the agricultural laborer must have been distressingly inadequate for the needs of the household. These included wheat or rye, which formed the staple of living, the rent of the cottage, the usual manor dues, the national tax, something for clothing, medicine for the children, and occasional items which would enter into a complete enumeration. Even if the wife, as was frequently the case, had to bear the burden of her own support by engaging in some form of industrial activity in connection with her other duties, the wage of the husband was barely enough to meet the needs of the remainder of the family, and he had not a farthing left for ”rainy days,” which were of frequent occurrence, or for those common and extraordinary exactions which could not be evaded. So rigidly were the taxes levied, even upon the poorest, that every form of possession came under tribute; thus, the pet lamb of a poor man, which may have been the one source of joy to his children and pleasure to his wife, appears in an inventory of Colchester as amerced for sixpence. In the fifteenth century, to which this entry refers, the master of a tenant was forbidden by the Statutes of Laborers to a.s.sist him by relieving his poverty; and even in case of illness of his wife or children, the master could not legally furnish him aid. So onerous was the income tax, levied to meet the expenses of foreign wars, that it was not uncommon for bequests of money to be made for the relief of the poor in paying it. The laborer had attached to his cottage a small piece of ground, which his wife and himself tilled; he might also feed his goose or his sheep upon the manor waste, but only on the sufferance of his master.

By the end of the fifteenth century the lot of this cla.s.s of England's population became almost unendurable. The women, who bore more than their share of the burden of work in an attempt to provide the bare necessities of existence, were bowed under a weight of misery which made that existence endurable only because they knew of none better, or none which could possibly come within the range of their narrow hopes. The wretched condition of life among those whose possessions were so limited is well summed up in the following quotation from an article by Dr. Augustus Jessup in the _Nineteenth Century_, February, 1884; he says: such people ”were more wretched in their poverty, incomparably less prosperous in their prosperity, worse clad, worse fed, worse housed, worse taught, worse tended, worse governed,” than the peasants of the present day; ”they were sufferers from loathsome diseases their descendants know nothing of; the very beasts of the field were dwarfed and stunted in their growth; the death rate among children was tremendous; the disregard of human life was so callous that we can hardly conceive it; there was everything to harden, nothing to soften; everywhere oppression, greed, and fierceness.”

Although wages were higher by the end of the century, reaching fourpence a day, meat, cheese, and b.u.t.ter were much dearer than at its beginning, so that it is doubtful if the last of the century found the condition of the laborer at all improved in this respect. As labor was suspended on the holidays of the Church and for a half-day on the eves of those holidays, and as the laborer was forbidden to receive more than a half-day's wage every Sat.u.r.day, the men and women most anxious to work, even if they could obtain constant employment, could not average more than four and one-half profitable days per week. It is not surprising that, for want of nutrition, there was throughout the Middle Ages a wide prevalence of fever, the large death rate of women and children from this cause affording evidence of their physical weakness.

The wage of women employed in agricultural labor in the first half of the fourteenth century was at the rate of a penny a day, although this was not uniform; and in some parts of the kingdom they received considerably more. Their duties on the farm consisted, in part, in ”dibbling beans, in weeding corn, in making hay, in a.s.sisting the sheep shearers and was.h.i.+ng the sheep, in filling the muck carts with manure and in spreading it upon the lands, in shearing corn, but especially in reaping stubble after the ears of corn had been cut off by the shearers, in binding and stacking sheaves, in thatching ricks and houses, in watching in the fields to prevent cattle straying into the corn, or, armed with a sling, in scaring birds from the seed or ripening corn, and similar occupations. That they might not fail of employment to fill up the measure of the hours, there was the winding and spinning of wool to stop a gap.” But these were not the sole employments of the wives and daughters of the mediaeval farmer, for they took their part in all farmwork together with their husbands and fathers. After the ”black death” had made such terrible inroads upon the rural population of England, a woman received a wage that seldom went below twopence for a day's work; but this amount was diminished by the effect of one of the Statutes of Laborers, which required that every woman not having a craft--that is, not a town dweller, nor possessed of property of her own--should work on a farm equally with a man, and, like the man, she should not leave the manor or the district in which she customarily lived, to seek work elsewhere. It was difficult for a woman of the agricultural cla.s.ses to pa.s.s out of the dreary sphere in which she lived, for it was enjoined that if a girl before the age of twelve years--significant of the time when she was supposed to be a woman--put her hands to works of industry, she must remain for the rest of her life an agricultural laborer, and was not permitted to be apprenticed to learn a trade. These regulations were, of course, very often honored in the breach, but nevertheless they were frequently enforced.

The poverty of the peasantry made it necessary for them to make for themselves almost everything that entered into the needs of their life,--their houses, their clothing, their agricultural implements, and most of their household articles. Flax was raised, and from it the women manufactured the linen for the ladies of the hall; from hemp they made the coa.r.s.e sackcloth for their underclothing, and they spun and wove the wool shorn from the backs of their few sheep for their outer clothing. The women of this cla.s.s frequently could not afford an oven of their own, and so the flour which was made from the grain that was required to be ground at the lord's mill was also baked in his oven. The simple medicines were brewed by the housewife from the herbs which grew by the copse side or on the commons or in the ditches. When the manufacture of wool and flax was withdrawn to the towns, the labor of the women was to that extent lightened, although their income was correspondingly lessened.

The condition of the very poor was pitiful in the extreme; as there had been no opportunity for the laying up of provision for old age, the only recourse for the women and men alike, when indigency and age overtook them, was to seek shelter in the almshouses which had been founded for the decrepit and the dest.i.tute. Many yielded to their ”miserable cares and troubles,” and died from starvation. By the fifteenth century the monasteries had ceased to be important centres for the dispensing of charity, so that relief from dest.i.tution could not be looked for from that source. The conventual orders, in common with the rest of the nation, had become burdened with debt through the wars at home and abroad. The numerous regulations for the control of beggars, and the licenses which were issued to regulate the practice, show the great prevalence of real poverty and want during the whole of the fifteenth century, although throughout the Middle Ages mendicancy was familiar enough.

Such was the condition of the women of the industrial cla.s.ses during the Middle Ages. The period that witnessed the transition from the Middle Ages into modern times, the breakup of feudalism, and the construction of society upon a different basis, was, as transitional periods are apt to be, one of peculiar stress. And as this period in England was marked by severe wars, with all the blight and desolation which they bring to a land, it was one of especial severity upon those who had to bear the burden of such undertakings. Not only was the standard of living brought low, and the comforts of life reduced to the bare necessities, but manners were as disastrously affected as was the economy of the realm. Crime and violence stalked through the country, seemingly under no restraint; and from the prevalence of deeds of violence, it is very clear that law was not only ineffectual, but that public sentiment was not strong enough to create a better state of affairs. The condition was not unlike that which prevailed in Ireland at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Women were the chief sufferers from the prevalent lawlessness. They were seized at night, and, after being dishonored, were compelled to go to the church, where the priest, under threats and despite the protests of the victims, performed the ceremony which linked them to their captors. It mattered little if the woman happened to be already married, as such proceedings were supposed by many to const.i.tute a sufficient divorce. Rent riots were of everyday occurrence, and murders were not unusual. It was not altogether the poor who were involved in such deeds of violence, as there were among them agitators from the upper cla.s.ses, who not only urged them on, but themselves took part in all such outrages. Often murders and other forms of violence grew out of the practice of men of quality having about them bands of retainers who were frequently the roughest of characters, including men under indictment for capital offences. No cla.s.s was quite secure from the disorderly elements of the population, but the women of the country districts were more frequently the sufferers than were their sisters of the towns.

The great increase of sensuality, the low esteem in which women were held, and the little regard they manifested for their own characters, showed the decadence into which the spirit of chivalry had fallen.

Being a child of feudalism, with the decay of that system it went into eclipse. Nevertheless, chivalry contributed to English life real benefits, apart from the elevation of women, and these remained permanent factors in the character of the nation.

CHAPTER IX

THE WOMEN OF THE TRANSITION PERIOD

The authorities upon whom we depend for information as to the condition of the industrial cla.s.ses--particularly the agricultural--during the fifteenth century are in such hopeless conflict that it is impossible to do more than follow the views of some one of them, with such modifications and checks as may be reasonably introduced from the others. The picture already drawn of the utterly miserable condition of the peasantry during that century is not ratified by all the writers, and yet the interpretation of the data, conflicting as it is, must lead to the conclusion that the condition of that cla.s.s of English society was far from being roseate, and that, in the main, it would be difficult to overdraw the misery which existed; but this condition was ameliorated to some extent by the introduction into rural districts of domestic manufactures, after the decay of agriculture. The compensation that accrued to the peasantry by a growth in the clothing trade counterbalanced, in a measure, their other losses, while it also brought the rural districts into industrial relation with the towns and aided in bridging the chasm between the two. The industry was of a nature to enlist the activities of the women of the households and to bring them into contact with the commercial life of the nation, in a lesser degree than their sisters of the craft guilds, it is true, but still in a way that had an important bearing upon the industrial history of the country.

The Wars of the Roses, which had been so destructive to the n.o.bility, and the tendency of the crown to depend upon the gentry as a balance to the power of the feudal barons, aided in making more certain and rapid the advance of the middle cla.s.s. The style of living is a sure index of the degree of prosperity; there was a great increase in the number as well as in the size of the houses which ranked in importance between the castle of the baron and the cottage of the peasant. Also, we meet with a change for the better in the equipment of such houses.

Instead of a few pieces of furniture, rude and primitive, it is not unusual in the inventories of this time to find complete suits of furniture for the various rooms of the house. All of the country gentlemen and more prosperous burghers possessed quant.i.ties of plate.

The custom of having but one bedroom, or two at most, and obliging guests and servants to sleep in the great hall or in rude shacks temporarily erected for their accommodation, was no longer common in this cla.s.s of society. With the increase of the number of rooms in the houses, the importance of the hall diminished. Town and country houses alike were now generally built around an interior court, into which the rooms looked, and the windows opening upon the street and country were small and unimportant. This was not simply an architectural change, but was due to the necessity of studying security on account of the disturbed state of society. Men were beginning to appreciate good houses, and the women had greater resources in the way of household utensils and furnis.h.i.+ngs, particularly in those pertaining to the kitchen. The glittering rows of pewter and plate were a source of great satisfaction to housewives, and were largely depended upon to establish their claim to social distinction. The art of making bricks, which had been lost since the departure of the Romans from Britain, was revived, and the establishment of brickkilns stimulated building.

By the end of the fifteenth century, the domestic house was entirely differentiated from the castle. The materials for dwellings were of the sort readiest to hand. In the eastern counties, where clay was more abundant than stone, bricks were commonly used, while elsewhere the houses were built of stone or wood.

The dwellings of the fifteenth century were commodious and convenient.

A typical country house may be described as follows: a door on the ground floor led into the hall, while a staircase on the outside led to the first floor proper. Inside the door at the head of the stairs was to be found a shorter staircase, which led to the floor on which were situated the chambers. Pa.s.sing into the hall, the visitor would find himself in the most s.p.a.cious apartment of the house. It remained as it had been throughout the Middle Ages, the public room, open to all who were admitted within the precincts of the establishment. The permanent furniture consisted chiefly of benches, and a seat with a back to it, which was used by the superior members of the family. In the hall there was usually at least one table which was a fixture, but the other tables continued to be made up from planks and trestles when needed. Cus.h.i.+ons and ornamental cloths to place over the seats and backs of benches were in general use, and on special occasions the tapestries, some of which had been in the families for generations, were brought out, though apparently they were not used on ordinary occasions. The sideboard was one of the most familiar articles of furniture, and upon it was arranged the plate, which was in charge of the butler, and was intended as much for display as for use. In the large mansions, as in the castles, the hall was not complete without the minstrels' gallery and a dais; though inconveniently large, it was well warmed and lighted, and the walls were often decorated with stags' antlers on which to hang the men's hats and caps, hunting horns and such accessories of the chase, beside which were suspended arms and armor and fis.h.i.+ng nets; while on the sideboard might be found writing materials and a book or two. The fresh rushes with which the floor was strewn gave forth, when first placed, a refres.h.i.+ng smell when crushed by the foot.