repeatedly performed by Queen Elizabeth, during her reign, after the maids of honour had first prepared the way for her by a previous washing of the mendicants' feet, and perfuming of the water with essences. In the reign of Henry VIII. Cardinal Wolsey, after his disgrace, held his Maundy in the Abbey of Peterborough, where he washed and kissed the feet of fifty poor men (answering to the number of the years he had lived), and gave to each twelve pence, three ells of good canvass for shirts, a pair of new shoes, a cast of red herrings, and three white herrings. In the same reign the broken-hearted Queen Catherine, after her divorce, proposed to hold her Maundy as she had been wont to hold it-that is, as the rightful Queen of England; but she was prevented by an order arriving from her imperious husband, that she should not perform the ceremony in any other character than that of princess-dowager.* One of the most cheerful of our old national festivals was that of St. Valentine's Day. For what reason this good bishop and martyr was converted into a sort of Christian Cupid we are unable positively to determine: the common idea is, that with a view to christianise the pagan practices of the Lupercalia, one of which was, to enclose the names of young women in a box and draw for them, the early church substituted for the ancient festival the day of St. Valentine, which fell in the same month, and thus gave the sanction of the new religion to those love-lotteries, which might otherwise have too dangerously endeared the memory of the old. The day of this saint became, therefore, the day of lovers; and in the middle ages even the birds were supposed, upon this occasion, to select their mates. The practices of St. Valentine's Day varied at different times; but the essential ceremony was, for the young men and women to select their true love for the season. For this purpose an equal number of each sex assembled; either the true or feigned names of the company were written on slips of paper, and thrown into two heaps; and then a general drawing took place, the women from the male catalogue, and the men from that of the women. After the whole party had thus been paired by chance, amidst a great deal of mirth and laughter, the men gave balls and treats to their mistresses, wearing for several days their billets on their breasts or their sleeves. Another mode of choosing a valentine was, to look out at the door or window in the morning, and the person first seen, if unmarried and of the opposite sex, was considered to be the destined individual. Besides these days of general observance, there were some festivities of a local character that now remain to be mentioned. The chief of these were the parish Church-ales, which were divided into Easter-ales and Whitsun-ales, from the two seasons at which they were held. The origin of these VOL. II. Sir Henry Ellis's Collection. festive meetings is to be traced to those early periods in our national history, when a regular fund for the repair of churches and the maintenance of the poor was still unknown. In this case the clergy, wisely judging that money could be most easily obtained from the benevolence of a crowd whose hearts were moved with brimming flagons, appointed set times at which they brewed a quantity of mighty ale (the favourite huff-cap), and set it to sale in the churchyard, or even the church itself. The villagers and townsfolk, of course, repaired to the spot to enjoy themselves, and did not scruple to pay a high price for the liquor, as the money was to be devoted to pious uses; and conceiving that, by swallowing huge quantities, they thereby furthered the cause of religion, many were guilty on these occasions of the most brutal excesses. Similar to the churchales, though of a still more ancient origin, were the Wakes. It had been the custom, on the dedication of a church, or the birth-day of a saint, for the people to assemble on the night previous, to hold a religious vigil in the open air; and, as they remained all night occupied in devotional exercises, this practice was called a wake. Such a method of spending the night, however, soon gave place to very different employments; and feasting, riot, and licentiousness became the prevailing characteristics of these vigils. These concourses, also, from every neighbouring town and parish, naturally suggested the expediency of improving such opportunities for the purposes of traffic; and hence the wakes gradually became fairs, which in some places they still continue to be. Among the minor points of the English manners of this period it may be mentioned that, when acquaintances met, they saluted with embraces and kisses; and such was still the prevalent simplicity, that these kisses and embraces were exchanged between the sexes as tokens of common good-will. This custom was so pleasant, in the opinion of Erasmus, that in one of his letters he expatiates upon the subject with great unction, and advises his friend to lay aside his gout, and fly to England, for the sake of such delightful welcomes. The practice of profane swearing in common conversation seems now to have reached its height in England. The courtiers swore by such oaths as were current with the sovereign, the royal favourites, and the chief nobles; the clergy swore by the saints, the mysteries of religion, or the duties of their calling; the scholars swore by the classical gods of Olympus; and soldiers were "full of strange oaths," compounded of fire, blood, and havoc, that marked their profession as distinctly as the buff belt or the corslet. This last kind of swearing was carefully conned by all swaggerers and swash-bucklers, and used as proof of their hardihood; so that a man was reckoned a mere coward "who could not interlace every sentence with a bloody oath or two."* The citizens and shopkeepers scorned to be left behind in these practices of the more influential classes; but as • Stubbs. 5 Y CHAPTER VII. HISTORY OF THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE. HE first general fact that presents itself on a broad survey of the social condition of England from the beginning to the close of the present period is, that it was throughout the whole of that space of time, with a few transient interruptions, a condition of progressive amelioration. And this, it is to be observed, is the state of things that best keeps a people in spirits, and diffuses most content and enjoyment among all classes. The feeling of advancement is more important to national, as perhaps it also is to individual, happiness, than any amount of prosperity actually realised. One reason of this is, in the case of nations at least, that if there be not a going forward there must be a going back; for in the affairs of communities a stationary position is impossible, unless when they may have reached that lowest point from which they can fall no farther. The accession of Henry VII. terminated the destructive civil contest which had torn the country for many preceding years; and nothing resembling that state of anarchy and confusion recurred to the end of the period. The popular outbreaks in the reigns of Henry VIII. and Edward VI. were mere local disturbances while they lasted, and none of them lasted above a few months or weeks. Nor was the country during this period engaged in any such exhausting foreign wars as those that make up nearly all the history of the preceding period till the wilder scene of the wars of the barons at home comes to fill the stage. The present was also an age of many changes, of more numerous and more momentous changes, indeed, than the last; and some of them, too, were brought about with no small noise and violence; but the moving power was no longer force physical, but force moral; not captains and armies, but policy and opinion; it was the age, not of the sword, but of the word. The course of events during the thirty years that preceded the accession of Henry VII. had already greatly reduced the power of the nobility, which anciently used in ordinary circumstances to be more than a match for that of the crown. The sanguinary wars of the Roses and the attainders and forfeitures that followed the final victory of the House of York had, on the one hand, thrown down and almost extirpated considerable number of the greatest of the old families; and, on the other hand, transferred a vast mass of landed property formerly held by the aristocracy into the hands of the crown. The famous decision of the judges in the twelfth year of Edward IV., establishing the efficacy of a fine and recovery to bar an entail,* had also introduced a process by which, even in the quietest times, and while public affairs were proceeding in the most regular and ordinary course, the extensive estates of the ancient nobility could not fail to be gradually broken up. The additional facilities of alienation afforded in the course of the reigns of Henry VII. and Henry VIII., by the Statute of Fines, and other statutes carrying out the same principle, or otherwise operating in the same direction,† of course all aided in undermining that which till lately had been the predominating power in the state. In fact, the very smallness of their number now prevented the nobility from being any longer formidable. In Henry VII.'s first parliament the House of Lords contained only twenty-eight temporal peers; and in the first parliament of Henry VIII. only thirty-six. The few additional creations also had strengthened the crown, not the aristocracy; the men raised to wealth and honours by the new family that had come into the possession of the throne were the natural dependents of the reigning sovereign, and his allies and supporters against the small body of the remaining representatives of the ancient baronage. Thus all things combined at the commencement and during the early part of this period to elevate the royal authority, and to depress that of the nobility, which in former times had been its chief antagonist and curb; and it may be said that this in some sort continued to be the case throughout nearly the whole space comprehended within our present review. But the strength withdrawn by the circumstances to which we have adverted from the ancient nobility and other great landholders, the massive pillars of the fabric of feudalism, was not all inherited by the crown; in the unsettlement and transference of landed estates that had begun to take place under the system of alienation, some share of the property thus set at liberty could not fail to fall into the hands of a class of persons who, obtaining it by purchase with their own money, were not by their new acquisition in any respect bound to the crown, but were rather thereby planted in a position in which they might become the root of a power independent alike of the sovereign and of the aristocracy. In this way began to be formed the order of the minor landholders or gentry, which rose to great importance before the end of the present period. Some of the founders of this order were no doubt the younger sons or other near connexions of noble families; others, if the view taken in a former Chapter is to be received as correct, must have been the original tenants in villenage now converted into copyholders;* but the great majority of them probably were persons who thus invested in land the capital which they had accumulated by their own industry and enterprise. For another great influence that was now at work, changing the aspect and constitution of society, was the growth of trade and manufactures, which had been going on ever since Edward III., in 1331, invited over the first weavers of fine woollens from the Netherlands, previous to which, as a foreign writer observes, the English were little more than shepherds and wool-sellers.t In the tranquillity that followed the accession of the House of Tudor commercial and manufacturing industry, which had been checked by the preceding confusions, acquired a new life, and started forward with a quickened activity, the effects of which soon came to be perceived in the general elevation of the condition of all that portion of the population placed between the two extremes of the social scale. Indeed, it may be said to have been now that what are called the middle classes first came into existence in English society, at least in so far as regards the town population, the only middle class population that was fitted to acquire any distinct social station or political influence. It is deserving of remark, however, that the extending prosperity of trade and manufactures, and the rise of a middle class at this time, proved the very reverse of favourable to the interests of most of the old corporate towns throughout the kingdom. In numerous acts of parliament of the early part of the sixteenth century these towns are represented as generally falling into decay, and other corroborative evidence leaves no doubt that this was to a great extent the case. Their corporate privileges, in fact, which confined the right of carrying on most trades and handicrafts to such of the inhabitants as were free of the corporation or members of any of the guilds or civic companies, drove away all other persons to other towns where no such restrictions existed. Thus it happened that while York, and Chester, and Lancaster, and Coventry, and Lincoln, and Winchester, were declining in population, and many of the houses in them becoming ruins, Birmingham and Manchester were rapidly growing in extent and prosperity. In an act passed in 1541, it is stated that the people of Manchester were then "well set to work in making of cloths, as well of linen as of woollen, whereby the inhabitSee vol. i. pp. 885, 886. De Witt, Interest of Holland. ants of the said town have gotten and come into riches and wealthy livings; and by reason of great occupying, good order, strict and true dealing of the inhabitants of the said town, many strangers, as well of Ireland as of other places, had resorted thither."* But upon the condition of the country population also the growth of manufactures and trade was now producing great changes. It was undoubtedly the increased demand for wool, both for exportation and for working up at home, that prompted that extensive conversion of land from tillage to pasturage, which so many acts of parliament were passed in the reigns of Henry VIII. and his son, in all probability ineffectually enough, to restrain. The inclosures, we may observe, which were now made to so great an extent were mainly if not entirely the consequence of this increased profitableness of sheep farming and grazing, the object of inclosing the land being to take it out of tillage and turn it into pasturage. "Inclosures at that time," says Lord Bacon, in his account of an act passed by the parliament in 1488, to check the progress of the supposed evil," began to be more frequent, whereby arable land, which could not be manured without people and families, was turned into pasture, which was easily rid by a few herdsmen;" and in William Stafford's curious dialogue referred to in a preceding Chapter, in which the knight, the merchant, the doctor, the husbandman, and the capper, confer together upon the grievances of their several classes, the husbandman exclaims, " Marry, for these inclosures do undo us all; for they make us to pay dearer for our land that we occupy, and causeth that we can have no land in manner for our money to put to tillage; all is taken up for pasturefor pasture either for sheep or for grazing of cattle; in so much that I have known of late a dozen ploughs, within less compass than six miles about me, laid down within this seven years; and where three score persons or upwards had their livings, now one man with his cattle hath all." And again, "Yea, those sheep is the cause of all these mischiefs, for they have driven husbandry out of the country, by the which was increased before all kind of victuals, and now altogether sheep, sheep, sheep. It was far better when there were not only sheep enough, but also oxen, kine, swine, pig, goose, and capon, eggs, butter and cheese; yea, and bread-corn and malt-corn enough besides, reared altogether upon the same land." In fact, however, although the money price of butchers' meat and poultry had become greater than formerly, along with that of everything else the case being partly that of a mere nominal rise of prices occasioned by a fall in the value of gold and silver and by the depreciation of the coinage, partly that of a real rise produced by an augmented population and a more active demand for these and the other necessaries of life, it is admitted by the husbandman St. 33 Hen. VIII. c. 15. † A Compendious or Brief Examination, &c. Dialogue First, 1581. himself in this very dialogue that the very articles of the dearth, that is, the dearness, of which he complains, had never before been so abundant in the land as they then were. The extension of trade and manufactures was the great primary cause of all the phenomena that now marked the social condition of England-the rise of wages and of prices, in so far as it was more than nominal; the extended rearing of sheep and of cattle, to meet the growing demand for wool and for butchers' meat; the inclosing of arable and waste lands to fit them for pasturage and grazing; the disappearance of small farms and of cottiers; the decay of many of the old corporate towns; the rising population and importance of towns where the absence of corporate privileges permitted freedom of industry; and, finally, the gradual formation of a gentry and a middle class, destined in a future age to come into the possession of that predominant power in the commonwealth which had formerly been held by the feudal nobility, and had in the present state of transition passed into the hands of the crown. Some other circumstances, indeed, accidentally concurred to incline the current of change in the same direction; the devastation made among the old nobility by the wars of the preceding age, for instance, and afterwards the unshackling of their estates from the fetters of entail, had already sapped and shaken the edifice of their supremacy, before it was exposed to the assault of any new or rival power; but even all this would have been of no avail in forwarding the results that ultimately arose, if it had not been that, at the very time the system of feudalism was thus becoming weak from natural decay or violence directed against it from another quarter, the new force that was eventually to take its place was growing up and establishing itself. In the absence of that middle class, which trade was creating, the crown, if it had been able single-handed to subdue the enfeebled aristocracy, would probably have come in not as the mere trustee or temporary depositary of their power, but as its absolute and ultimate inheritor. As matters actually went, the causes that led to the alienation and breaking up of the great estates of the ancient feudal lords of the soil were met and assisted in their operation by the circumstances of altogether different origin which were lifting up a new class of the population into wealth and importance. The two agencies, indeed, assisted each other; the sale of land was promoted by the growth of mercantile wealth, and the rise of the order of the gentry and the middle classes was facilitated by the opportunities thus offered for the investment in land of the money made in trade. But the moving power which impressed upon the changes that were taking place the direction in which they actually proceeded was evidently the new and rising power of commercial and manufacturing industry. It was perhaps fortunate, however, that the legislature did not see this; for, with the usual dread of the world being in danger of falling to pieces if the existing system of society should be suffered to undergo any modification, the lawgivers of that day strenuously endeavoured to resist the natural revolution that was in progress by all sorts of artificial moles and embankments-lamenting over the diminution of tillage, the extension of pasturage, the removal of cottages, the consolidation of small farms, the decay of corporate towns, the increasing size of the new haunts of industry, and wasting much ingenuity in contriving enactments to prevent the further encroachment of these and the other imaginary evils of the altering condition of things. Directed as these efforts were against mere results or symptoms, the real source of which was unknown and unsuspected, they could produce no further effect than for a little while to chafe and ruffle the onward stream of innovation. The growth of the trade and manufactures of the country, which was the true fountain from which the whole of the mischief flowed, the legislature was all the while very anxiously, however in some respects injudiciously, doing everything it could think of to encourage and assist. But Such were the influences already at work, and such the social changes that were going on, when the land was suddenly swept by the hurricane of the Reformation. That mighty event we are here to consider merely in its economical bearings and consequences. We may say of it, in one word, that it impelled all things with greater force than ever towards that new position in the direction of which they were already tending. The temporal peerage had, by the diminution of its numbers and its possessions, been reduced to comparative powerlessness. The ancient spiritual peerage was now struck down to a still lower insignificancy and more complete dependence on the crown; and the crown, by this subjugation of another rival power, and by the confiscation of the church property, was raised to a higher elevation than ever. the circumstances which were rearing and nourishing the popular strength also derived new force in various ways from this great revolution. The mere removal of a vast despotic authority, naturally opposed to all innovation, and linked in its sympathies and its interests with the maintenance of everything established and ancient, was favourable to the expansion of speculation and enterprise of all kinds. The overthrow of an institution so venerable as the church, and which had hitherto held down the whole national mind and habits of thought and action with so comprehensive and firm a grasp, was like the bursting asunder and passing away of all old customary bonds and inclosures, and a throwing open to all men of the clear broad field of a new era. But besides the universal excitement it thus diffused, and the constraint and benumbment from which it released the spirit and energies of the people, the abolition of the old religion operated also in a more palpable way to benefit the cause of the national industry, which is that of the popular strength, by the large number of additional hands it soon set to work in |