Part 10 (2/2)

Charles Francis Adams, in his editing of Morton's _Narrative_, in the Prince Society Publications, in commenting upon the Merrie Mount incident in the early settlement of New England, calls attention in a footnote to the judgment of a contemporary writer as to the iniquities which were practised in connection with what in the popular imagination of the day was a wholesome and happy pastime.

The statement in the pa.s.sage quoted by him of the startling depravity which signalized the day throughout rural England awakens the pertinent question as to what was the moral state of the women of the rural population of the country. The testimony of the manners and customs of the day, and the effect upon England of the indescribable profligacy of the peoples of France and Italy, force the unpleasant conclusion, after making all extenuation for the standards which then obtained, that the vice which in the higher circles was as ”the creeping thing that flieth” appeared in the lower circles of society in all of its foulness.

Life in the country was very delightful; buildings of fanciful architecture were erected, the majority of them still being of wood, the better sort plastered inside and the walls hung with tapestry or wainscoted with oak, against which stood out in bold relief the glittering gold and silver plate, which not alone the n.o.bles and gentry, but the merchants and even the farmers and artisans, loved to possess. But in spite of their love of plate, Venetian gla.s.sware, because of its rarity, was preferred for drinking vessels. The housewife of quality no longer had to strew rushes upon the floor, for Turkish rugs were imported and used by the wealthy. Beds were hung with the finest silk or tapestry, and the tables were covered with linen. The homes of all cla.s.ses showed the increase in the comfort of living. Even the poorest women could boast of chimneys to their houses, and were no longer suffocated by the smoke which for egress depended upon a hole in the roof. In 1589 a wise law was pa.s.sed that no cottage should be built on a tract of less than four acres of land, and that only one family was to live in each cottage. Feather pillows and beds took the place of straw pallets with a log of wood for a headrest. The poorer homes, which could not afford expensive rugs, were still strewn with sweet herbs, which, however, were renewed and kept fresh, and the bedchambers were made fragrant with flowers. The economy of the kitchen was not the hard problem it had formerly been, for in the time of Elizabeth, the period of which we are speaking, the laboring cla.s.ses could obtain meat in abundance. The ”gentry ate wheaten, and the poor barley bread; beer was mostly brewed at home; wine was drunk in the richer houses. Trade brought many luxuries to the English table; spices, sugar, currants, almonds, dates, etc., came from the East.” Indeed, so many currants were imported into the country that it is said that the people of the places from whence they were s.h.i.+pped supposed that they were used for the extraction of dye or else were fed to the hogs; but the real explanation was the great fondness of the English people for currants and raisins in their pastry. While they were not gluttonous, the English then, as now, were fond of the table, and gave much attention to eating and drinking.

The old people of the age regretfully looked back over their lives to former days, when, as they said, although the houses were but of willow, Englishmen were oaken, but now the houses were oaken and the Englishmen of straw. The appearance of chimneys was not greeted as an improvement, for the poor had never fared so well as in the smoky halls of other days; they could not bear the thought that their windows, which were formerly of wickerwork, were now of gla.s.s, or that now, instead of sweet rushes, foreign carpets were upon the floors of many houses; or that so many houses were being built of brick and stone, plastered inside. It was regarded as a sure indication of a decline in virility that the sons of the st.u.r.dy yeomen of a past generation should crave comfortable beds hung with tapestry, and use pillows--luxuries which once were thought suited only for women in childbed. In the midst of an influx of new comforts, there was a barrenness of things considered to-day to be essential, and the absence of which was made the more glaring by reason of the many comforts and luxuries with which life was surrounded. ”Good soap was an almost impossible luxury, and the clothes had to be washed with cow-dung, hemlock, nettles, and refuse soap, than which, in Harrison's opinion, 'there is none more unkindly savor.'”

A Dutch traveller, who in 1560 visited England and recorded his impressions of the English home, introduces us to a pleasant picture of the home life of the times, in the following words: ”The neat cleanliness, the exquisite fineness, the pleasant and delightful furniture in every point for household, wonderfully rejoiced me; their chambers and parlors strawed over with sweet herbs, refreshed me; their nosegays, finely intermingled with sundry sorts of fragrant flowers in their bedchambers and privy rooms, with comfortable smell cheered me up.” The parlors were freshened with green boughs and fresh herbs throughout the summer, and with evergreens during the winter.

During the reign of Elizabeth, the hours for meals were the same as in the fifteenth century, although between the first meal and dinner it was customary to have a small luncheon, mostly composed of beverages, and called a _bever_. A character in one of Middleton's plays says: ”We drink, that's mouth-hour; at eleven, lay about us for victuals--that's hand-hour; at twelve, go to dinner--that's eating-hour.” Dinner was the most substantial meal of the day, and its hearty character was commented upon by foreign travellers in England.

It was preceded by the same ceremony of was.h.i.+ng the hands as in former times, and the ewers and basins used for the purpose were often elaborate and showy. It must be remembered that at table persons of all ranks used their fingers instead of forks, and the laving of the hands during the meals was important for comfort and cleanliness.

After the introduction of forks, the was.h.i.+ng of hands during the meal, though no longer so necessary as before, was continued as a polite form for a while, although the after-meal was.h.i.+ng appears to have been discontinued. The pageantry and splendor which attended feasting reached their greatest height in the first half of the sixteenth century. The tables were arranged around the side of the hall, some for the guests, and others to hold the tankards, the ewers, and the dishes of food; for it had not yet become the practice to put anything on the table in setting it other than the plates, the drinking vessels, the saltcellars, and the napkins. The dresser, or the cupboard, was the greatest display article of furniture in the hall of the houses of the higher orders of society, who invested large amounts of money in vessels of the precious metals and of crystal, which were sometimes set with precious stones and were always of the most beautiful patterns and of odd and elaborate forms. To such lengths went personal pride in the appearance of the dresser, that points of etiquette were raised by careful housewives as to how many steps, or gradations on which the rows of plate were placed above each other, members of the different ranks of society might have on their cupboards. Five for a princess of royal blood, four for n.o.ble ladies of the highest rank, three for n.o.bility under the rank of duke, two for knights-bannerets, and one for persons who were merely of gentle blood, was fixed as proper form. Dinner was still served in three courses, without any great distinction in the character of the dishes served at each course. One of the writers of the times says: ”In number of dishes and changes of meat the n.o.bility of England do most exceed.” ”No day pa.s.ses but they have not only beef, mutton, veal, lamb, kid, pork, coney, capon, pig, or so many of them as the season yields, but also fish in variety, venison, wildfowl, and sweets.” As there were but two full meals in the day, and as the households of the n.o.bility, including the many servants and retainers, were large, and as it was the practice for the chief servants to dine with the family and the guests, it will be seen that a large and varied supply of food was needed. The upper table having been served, the lower servants were supplied, and what remained was bestowed upon the poor, who gathered in great numbers at the gates of the n.o.bility to receive the leavings from their meals. It can be seen that the labors of the women in supervising the affairs of the household were onerous. Among gentlemen and merchants, four, five, or six dishes sufficed, and if there were no guests, two or three. Fish was the article of greatest consumption among the poor, and could be obtained at all seasons.

Fowls, pigeons, and all kinds of game were abundant and cheap. b.u.t.ter, milk, cheese, and curds were ”reputed as food appurtenant to the inferior sort.” The very poor usually had enough ground in which to raise cabbages, parsnips, carrots, pumpkins, and such like vegetables, which const.i.tuted their princ.i.p.al food, and of which both the raising and the preparation for the table were largely the work of the women.

Among the lower cla.s.ses, the various feasts of the year and the bridal occasions were celebrated with great festivity, and it was the custom for each guest to contribute one or more dishes.

”Sham” is the keynote to an understanding of Elizabethan society; the Virgin Queen herself, with all her undoubted worth and abilities, was the embodiment of the vanity and pretence of her age. Young unmarried women loved ”to show coyness in gestures, mince in words and speeches, gingerliness in tripping on toes like young goats, demure nicety and babyishness,” and when they went out, they had silk scarfs ”cast about their faces, fluttering in the wind, or riding in their velvet visors, with two holes cut for the eyes.” The visors here mentioned bring to mind Hamlet's ”G.o.d hath given you one face, and you make yourself another; you jig, you amble, you lisp, you nickname G.o.d's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance.” The general use of masks in public places toward the close of Elizabeth's reign did not improve the moral status of the higher cla.s.ses. The pretentiousness and the superficiality of the times are laid bare by Harrington, the favorite G.o.dson of the queen, whose arraignment is in unsparing terms: ”We go brave in apparel that we may be taken for better men than we be; we use much bombastings and quiltings to seem better framed, better shouldered, smaller waisted, and fuller thighed than we are; we barb and shave oft to seem younger than we are; we use perfumes, both inward and outward, to seem sweeter, wear corked shoes to seem taller, use courteous salutations to seem kinder, lowly obeisance to seem humbler, and grave and G.o.dly communication to seem wiser and devouter than we be.”

The dress of the women of the Elizabethan era shows the same extravagance that is apparent in all the exaggerated social phases of the time. Philip Stubbs, who wrote at the close of the sixteenth century a book ent.i.tled _The Anatomy of Abuses_, appears to have been a choleric and gloomy observer of current manners, but, with due allowance for the spirit in which he writes, a very clear picture can be gotten of the style and excesses of dress of the several cla.s.ses of society. He affirms that no people in the world were so hungry after new-fangled styles as were those of his country. After having dilated on the large amounts spent for dress, he digresses in order to moralize, and adds that the fas.h.i.+onable attire of the day is unsuited to the actual needs of the wearers' bodies and ”maketh them weak, tender, and infirm, not able to abide such bl.u.s.tering storms and sharp showers as many other people abroad do daily bear.” It is curious to find him harking back to the old days of which he had heard his father and other sages speak, when all the clothes for the household were made by the busy housewife, and coats were of the same color as the wool when it was on the sheep's back. In the abandonment of the household woollen industry and the excessive use of imported fabrics, he sees the reason for the many thousands in England who were reduced to the necessity of begging bread. Starch, which is now such a homely and universally helpful laundry a.s.sistant, and to the expert use of which so much of the freshness and smartness of women's attire is due, was then first introduced. ”There is a certain liquid matter which they call starch,” says this censorious critic of current customs, ”wherein the devil hath learned them to wash and dive their ruffs; which, being dry, will then stand stiff and inflexible about their necks.” The ladies of his day must have been more expert in the use of starch than are their sisters to-day, as they introduced into it coloring matter, so that it temporarily dyed the fabrics red, blue, purple, and other colors, of which yellow seems to have been the most esteemed.

The yellow starch which was so much in use originated in France, and was introduced into England by a Mrs. Turner, a physician's widow, a vain and infamous woman, who ended her career on the gallows in expiation of the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. Bulwer says that it is hard ”to derive the pedigree of the cobweb-lawn-yellow-starched ruffs, which so disfigured our nation, and rendered them so ridiculous and fantastical.” It appears that when the introducer of the custom was led to the gallows she was conspicuous in a yellow ruff worn about her neck, and after her execution the wearing of such ruffs rapidly declined. Having said this much about the ruffs which were a characteristic feature of the dress of the day of both men and women, it may be well to add that starch was not wholly depended upon for the support of these preposterous neck dresses. Wire frames covered with silver or silk thread were employed for the purpose. These ruffs are often referred to in the literature of the period. Allusion is made to them in the play of _Nice Valour_, by Beaumont and Fletcher, where the madman says:

”Or take a fellow pinn'd up like a mistress, About his neck a ruff like a pinch'd lanthorn, Which school-boys make in winter.”

Stubbs also pays his respects to the gowns of the women, which he says were no less ”famous” than the rest of their attire. A quotation will serve to give an idea of the materials which were in use for dress goods and the embellishments of women's gowns; ”Some are of silk, some of velvet, some of grograin, some of taffeta, some of scarlet, and some of fine cloth of ten, twenty, or forty s.h.i.+llings the yard; but, if the whole garment be not of silk or velvet, then the same must be laid with lace two or three fingers broad all over the gown, or else the most part; or, if it be not so, as lace is not fine enough, now and then it must be garded with gards of velvet, every gard four or five fingers broad at the least, and edged with costly lace; and, as these gownes be of divers colours, so are they of divers fas.h.i.+ons, changing with the moon; for, some be of the new fas.h.i.+on, some of the old; some with sleeves, hanging down to their skirts, trailing on the ground, and cast over their shoulders like cow-tails; some have sleeves much shorter and cut up the arm, drawn out with sundry colours, and pointed with silk ribbands, and very gallantly tied with love-knots, for so they call them.” To these striking costumes were added capes which reached down to the middle of the back, and which, our author informs us, were ”plaited and crested with more knacks than he could express.”

It is impossible to do more than mention the absurdities in general of women's attire and toilette during the eccentric Elizabethan era.

Ladies painted their faces and wore false hair, as they had done in other ages, only with greater refinements of hideousness; they stuffed their petticoats with tow, and drew in their waists to incredible smallness as compared with the vast expansiveness of their form from the waist down, which was secured by the use of farthingales. The way they tilted up their feet with long cork soles made them amble much after the fas.h.i.+on of the women of China with their bandaged feet. They wore jewels and ornaments in great profusion, fine colored silk hose, which had lately been introduced among the other foreign ”gewgaws”

of the times, and exchanged with their friends as valued presents embroidered and perfumed gloves. In the light of the varied styles of the day, the criticism, ”Like a crow, the Englishman borrows his feathers from all nations,” was a true one.

In the midst of the gayety and frivolity of the Elizabethan age, the forces of reaction were hidden, but already active; and the mutterings of discontent which were heard presaged the social outbreak which was to lead a king to the block.

CHAPTER XI

WOMEN OF THE COMMONWEALTH PERIOD

The great evil of Puritanism was the tendency to hypocrisy which it produced among the people, by forcing upon them the simulation of a virtue greater than they in reality possessed. An affectation of piety which was carried to fanatical extremes, and which affected men and women alike and made them fall into stereotyped expressions and cant utterances having a savor of religiosity, while barren of the spirit of true devotion, was, to say the least, unwholesome for the nation.

But the very fact that the pendulum had swung so far in the direction of primitive austerity in life and in wors.h.i.+p showed that behind the hollow and insincere forms and words of Puritanism there was a magnificent earnestness of purpose, such as had been foreign to English life as a whole, although to be found among the followers of Wyckliffe and the Lollards.

As the spirit of Puritanism spread, its opponents, who were styled the Libertines, became more defiant in their att.i.tude and less regardful of the strictures which the narrow-minded bigots, as they styled the Puritans, cast upon them. Thus, the women were divided by the extremes of position occupied by the men. Drunkenness among women of rank became very common. Intellectual fervor declined and learning became superficial, while the pet vices, inanities, and vain pomp of the reign of Elizabeth lost much of their glitter and became mere prosaic and gross immorality. While the women of the court indulged in revelry, to the scandal of their sisters of the middle cla.s.ses, the latter, by their piety as well as by their pious affectations, brought upon themselves coa.r.s.e witticisms, ribald mirth, and allegations of misconduct under the guise of sanct.i.ty. So it happened that just when the women of the middle cla.s.ses were approaching in position their sisters of the higher circles, by the ascent of the cla.s.s to which they belonged and by the recognition on the part of the superior ranks of their worth as individuals and their importance as a sound element of the nation, the tendency toward a uniform equality, however remote its realization, was rudely checked by an issue which sundered the respective cla.s.ses to the nethermost poles. It then became but a question of which section of the nation should administer its affairs and direct its destiny. When the two opposing camps of aristocracy and democracy met in conflict, King Charles was led to the gibbet, not because the feeling of the people was so especially bitter against him personally, as that he was the impersonation of an aristocracy which had become so intrenched in power, that, regardless of its acts, it claimed divine right to rule.

The female s.e.x, as a whole, was not held in high esteem by the Puritans, however dear to them may have been the women of their own households. By the gayety and licentiousness of the brilliant era of Elizabeth, women had forfeited the esteem of these stern censors of public virtue, and were held up as snares in the way of the righteous and as emissaries of Satan. It would be unjust to the sound judgment of those earnest men of powerful thought and tested standards even to suggest that they did not make a distinction between woman in disgrace--as they regarded the women in representative life about them--and woman in her normal and helpful relations.h.i.+p to society, as ill.u.s.trated in the Biblical types of exalted womanhood. It was but natural that, at a time when the social sin was the canker of society, woman should have been looked upon in the light of the temptress in Eden. It is only with such qualification that the characterization of a writer on the period of the Commonwealth, whose description is generally accurate, can be accepted: ”Under the Commonwealth, society a.s.sumed a new and stern aspect. Women were in disgrace; it was everywhere declared from the pulpit that woman caused man's expulsion from Paradise, and ought to be shunned by Christians as one of the greatest temptations of Satan. 'Man,' said they, 'is conceived in sin and brought forth in iniquity; it was his complacency to woman that caused his first debas.e.m.e.nt; let man not therefore glory in his shame; let him not wors.h.i.+p the fountain of his corruption.' Learning and accomplishments were alike discouraged, and women confined to a knowledge of cooking, family medicines, and the unintelligible theological discussions of the day.”

The high tension which had been maintained during the preceding reign was followed during those of James I. and Charles I. by a mental inertia; and the intellectual life of the people, which had resulted from the revival of learning in the sixteenth century, languished and almost died of inanition. Even among those men--the courtiers--who amused themselves chiefly by the foibles of the other s.e.x, there was a morbid reaction against their a.s.sociates in frivolity. It was no longer customary to praise women for their wit and repartee and to look upon them as brilliant, or to regard their coa.r.s.e jests as delicate humor; instead of this, these men affected toward them great contempt, and scoffed at all other men who manifested respect for the s.e.x. Whether among the n.o.bility or among the Puritans, woman was wounded in the house of her friends.

Amid the premonitory rumblings of civil strife and the actual horrors of war, when the nation was rent asunder, the matters of belief and of conduct were the burning themes for thought and discussion; it was not possible to maintain interest in intellectual concerns, even if there had not been a reaction from the highly wrought state of mind of the preceding era. That behind the Puritans' apparent hatred of beauty and of the grace of intellect and of life there was no real abandonment of the true principles which underlie all permanent beauty and grace is sufficiently shown by the production of that poet who sounded deepest the reaches of philosophy and scaled highest the ascents of poetic thought--the great Milton. He it was who caught the deep significance of the movements of the age, and brought them into harmony with the parable of human history--a feat so mighty that it called forth the highest flights of poetic fancy and sought the embodiment of the best graces of language. It is not without interest to note the absence of woman in the lofty theme of Milton, saving only as she appears in the Puritanic conception of the temptress.

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