Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/634

620 feast, banquet, and dance all that day, and peradventure all that night, too. And thus these terrestrial furies spend the Sabbath-day in the country."

To relate all the jollity with which Christmas was celebrated is beyond our space. The Christmas carols with which the waits awoke all the sleeping people for a fortnight before; the yule-log dragged into the hall and piled on the fire, the boar's-head feast, with plum-pudding and mince-pies, and all the dances and games, were as much in fashion as in the days of the ancient Church. Plough Monday, Valentine Day, Easter and Whitsuntide, St. John's Eve, and all the charities of Maunday Thursday, were still maintained. Even Palm Sunday, when the figure of Christ went on its procession mounted on a wooden ass, resisted the Reformation till the year 1548, or nearly to the end of the reign of Edward VI.

The drama, which was now shaping itself into freedom and splendour under such men as Shakespeare and Marlowe, was yet conducted in a style very rude. The theatres were mostly of wood; the actors were rarely arrayed in proper costume; women's parts were represented by boys; any scenery which the play had, remained, like a, picture of a country fair booth, through the whole piece. The aristocratic frequenters sate on the stage, for there wore no boxes or dress-circle, and the commonalty sate on stools and enjoyed their pipes and beer during the performance. What was worse, the theatre had to contend with the bear-garden, bull-baiting, and cock-fighting in the affections of the public, even the highest portion of it.

As Sunday had been the great day of the Church plays or Mysteries, so Sunday was the chief day of the theatre, which brought it into disrepute with the serious portion of the community; and when there was bull-baiting, the theatre was closed that it might not interfere. Queen Elizabeth was especially fond of the bear-garden, and that sport was consequently included by Leicester in the recreations which he provided for her at Kenilworth. In truth, bear-gardens, cook-pits, bowling-greens, tennis-courts, dicing-houses, taverns, smoking ordinaries, and the like, abounded, giving us a fair idea of the grade of taste of that age. Hunting and hawking were still pastimes of the gentry, and horse-racing became a great rage. The first notice we have of this latter pastime in on the occasion before mentioned, when Henry went a-Maying in 1515; after which it is said that he and his brother-in-law, the Duke of Suffolk, diverted themselves by "racing on great coursers." In fact, the taste of this remarkable age was of a very low type—sensual, empty, and vulgar; of a stamp, indeed, which none but the lowest of our present population could for a moment endure: a fact showing in a marked degree the immense advance since then of refinement in mind and in morals. A people any purer and more humane could not, in truth, have existed amid the daily spectacles which surrounded them: the heads of traitors stuck on gate and bridge, the bloody execution of queens and nobles, the crowds of wretches Jangling from a thousand gibbets, the flaming stake, the branding-iron, the scourge, and the stocks, were the most familiar objects to a people who required a Shakespeare to interlard his finest tragedies with harlequins and fools.

CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE.

But amid the grossness of this century there must have existed a large intermixture of a more moral class, for the Bible had become extensively read, and the Reformers must have been numerous to enable the Government to effect the ecclesiastical changes which they did; and the advance of physical improvement must not be judged of by the popular condition of to-day, but of previous times. In the course of the century the condition of the people considerably advanced. At the beginning the houses of farmers were generally of timber, and those of labourers of mud, or wattle and mud. In many of them were no chimneys, except one for cooking. Wooden trenchers and wooden spoons were used instead of pewter or earthenware; and a yeoman who had half-a-dozen pewter dishes in his house was looked on as wealthy. Their lodging was equally mean. Straw beds and pillows of chaff were most common; flock beds were a rural luxury; and the farm servants lay on straw, and often had not even a coverlet to throw over them. The bread of the common people was made of rye, barley, or oats, and in many districts of peas or beans. The gentry only ate wheaten bread. The men by the fire in the evening, after their day's work, made their own shoes, or prepared the yokes for oxen, and their plough-gear. The women made the wool and the hemp or flax ready for the weaver at the spinning-wheel. As they do now on the Continent, the countrywomen worked much in the fields. Fitzherbert, the first of our writers on husbandry, says that it was the business of the farmer's wife "to winnow all manner of corn, to make malt, to wash, to make hay, to shear corn, and, in time of need, to help her husband to fill the muckwain, or dung-cart, drive the plough, to load hay or corn, to go to market and sell butter or pigs or fowls."

Latimer, who was a farmer's son, describes the advance in the value of land in his time. When he was young, he says, his father's farm was rented by him at £4 a year; that he employed half-a-dozen men upon it, and had 100 sheep and thirty cows; that his father managed to send him to school and college, and to give to each of his daughters £5 on her marriage. But, continues Latimer, at the time he wrote this, the same farm was charged £16 a year, or fourfold, and that the farmer of it could do nothing for his prince, himself, or his children, nor give a cup of drink to the poor. The cause of this was the increased demand for wool, which had occasioned great enclosures, and a decrease of tillage in favour of pasturage. This pressed greatly on the labouring class who were not employed; for the gentlemen had flocks of from 10,000 to 20,000, and a few shepherds were all they needed in their great enclosures. The gentry, who thus occupied the land, we are told, did not reside there, but crowded up to London, and hung about the Court. "Hence," says Roger Ascham, "so many families dispersed, so many houses ruined. Hence the honour and strength of England, the noble yeomanry, are broken up and destroyed."

The evils of this state of things compelled the legislature to put restrictions on the extent of pasturage, to insist on the tillage of sufficient land for the wants of the community; and penalties were enacted for such as did not build proper cottages for their labourers, with forty acres of land each, or who allowed more than one family in one