A. L. Rowse, The Elizabethan Renaissance; The Life of the Society

A. L. Rowse, The Elizabethan Renaissance; The Life of the Society, Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1971

There has been a tendency to elide the differences that marked it off from the medieval world, to an absurd degree with such an historian as Lynn Thorndike, antiquarian of medieval science, with whom it was always ‘the so-called Renaissance.’ Actually Renaissance people undergoing the experience—such representative figures as Alberti, Aldus, Valla, Politian, Leonardo da Vinci, Castiglione, Erasmus—had no doubt that they were engaged in something new, a rebirth of culture: they looked with some contempt on what had gone before, the ‘barbarous’ period out of which they had emerged, and regarded themselves as indubitably improving upon it. (1)

Italian humanists nearly all wrote works with a new conception of history, superior in organization and style, in accuracy and critical acumen, to medieval chronicle. The Italian, Polydore Vergil of Urbino, who spent a half century in England, provided an important example of the new historiography applied to English history, the History Anglica. (It was not much appreciated by the backward, medeivally minded, nationalistic English). But, further than this, the Italian humanists abandoned ‘the medieval habit of seeking supernatural causes for historical events.’ [W. K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought, I.] It was not until the reaction of the Reformation that all that came surging back again. (2)

…the invention of the madrigal [3] before mid-century, the rest of Europe following in its wake. The English madrigal school was at its height at the turn of the century; but where its works are to be counted in hundreds the Italian are to be counted in thousands. (3-4)

There was, too, the freedom accorded to women that so much struck outside observers—at the top of society, something like equality. Indeed at the Italian Courts there was a cult of women, as reflected in the mirror of Castiglione,… (4)

All this, in such a dawn, gave the earlier Italians enjoying such an invigorating experience a feeling of superiority towards the barbarians outside. Even Castiglione expresses it in regard to the French nobility, if we may quote it in the youthful awkwardness of the Elizabethan translation. ‘Beside goodness the true and principal ornament of the mind in every man, I believe, are letters—although the Frenchmen know only the [4] nobleness of arms, and pass for [i.e. set store by] nothing beside. So they do not only set by letters, but they rather abhor them, and all learned men they do count very rascals, and they think it a great villainy when anyone of them is called clerk.’ [Hoby’s Courtier, Everyman edition, 68] (4-5)

Public attention has been so concentrated upon Henry VIII’s matrimonial troubles that it has omitted to notice that, save only for Charles I, he was the greatest patron of the arts of all English monarchs. (5)

In the Middle Ages the English had done not badly, for a small people, in a provincial way, with their poetry, their Gothic architecture and sculpture, their schools of manuscript illumination, their alabasters and opus anglicanum. With Chaucer they had produced a poet of European importance—though nobody could be expected to read his barbarous language. In the sixteenth century no-one, except the English was expected to speak English, and even the English, in diplomacy, were called upon to speak Latin. [G. Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, 217] (5)

The Victorians were apt to think of the Renaissance impulse as having exhausted itself in Italy by mid-century, as they certainly exaggerated the degree of skepticism, irreligion and unbelief. The leading English historian of the subject, John Addington Symonds, closed his story too early: he virtually omitted Tasso, seems to have overlooked the great Venetian painters—Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese—and not to have considered Galileo. What was happening was not much the exhaustion to Italy, which continued to be creative, if not so intensely, as that other peoples were catching up and closing the gap. (6)

Thomas Cromwell…he became a merchant, and then attached himself to a Venetian as an accountant;…help a friend to obtain some Lenten indulgences for Boston. Cromwell thought up a characteristic dodge: he waylaid Julius II, returning tired from hunting, with some choice sweetmeats and jellies—and got the indulgences on the spot. Popes had no terrors for him. … Cromwell, however, knew the language and read Italian books. It is ironical to find Bonner—the later burner of Protestants under Mary—writing to Cromwell in 1530 to lend him Petrarch’s Trionfe and Castiglione’s Cortegiano, and reminding him of his promise to make him a good Italian. Another encounter had a sharper edge to it. The scholar Pole was dilating one day at Wolsey’s house on how to serve a prince with honour, when Cromwell interrupted him to say that he would do better to leave the theoretical learning of the schools for the practical experience enshrined in a recent Italian book—which Pole subsequently found was Machiavelli’s The Prince. (7)

Henry VII’s education was largely French and he did serious reading of books in that language; but his secretary was an Italian, the court-poet Carmeliano, and Polydore Vergil was a notable recruit to his Court. (8)

Henry’s last Queen, Catherine Parr…read Italian; Princess Elizabeth, already a precocious linguist, was learning Italian from the age of ten and came to speak it fluently; Princess Mary spoke Spanish not Italian—therein lay a difference, not the only one, between the generations. The Queen encouraged the princess to translate—Mary from Erasmus, Elizabeth from the Reforming Margaret of Navarre. (11)

The Gothic irregularities of Skelton are still medieval, all the more archaic in that the inflexions in the language had largely broken down since Chaucer and reduced prosody to anarchy. (12)

Welshman, William Thomas [16] … In 1549 he published his History of Italy, which is both history culled from the chronicles and a contemporary guide-book which deserves its description as ‘the best account of any foreign nation written before the seventeenth century’. … He appreciated the honour in which trade was held, with successful merchants regarded as gentlemen. (After all, were not the Medici merchants by origins, proudly displaying the pawnbrokers’ sign for coat-of-arms?) … in Rome, the ruins of antiquity; in Venice, the wealth and power of a well-ordered state; in Florence and Genoa, the opulence of the merchants; in Milan and Naples, the productivity of the soil, the wealth of nature. (17)

He disapproved of the code of revenge on account of ‘honour’ and insults, which led to so many murders…he was shocked by the exploitation of the peasants by the landowners. (17)

In Florence he was impressed by the hospitals and sweetness, i.e. hygiene, of the houses,… (18)

His considered view was that ‘the Italian nation seemeth to flourish in civility most of all other at this day’, i.e. it was the most highly developed culturally. [Thomas, History of Italy, Dedication] (19)

‘Whereas both the Greek and the Latin require long time and study, the Italian is in short space and easily obtained.’ [Thomas, Principal Rules of the Italian Grammar, 1550, Dedicatory Epistle.] …ardently advocated the use of English in education. (19)

Thomas considered that the master should first teach the scholar to understand well in his tongue, then go on to the liberal arts, i.e. school subjects, before tackling Latin. …the inhibiting grip of education by means of the classics—another thing from education in the classics themselves—remained on right up into the nineteenth century. (20)

Thomas apologies for stating his case so passionately—evidently he was aware of his Welsh temperament. (20)

G. B. Parks tells us that, with Thomas’s work, ‘a great enthusiasm suddenly arose in England for Italian culture.’ [53] Certainly the numbers of young Englishmen going to Italy multiplied in Edward’s reign, and they were no longer churchmen but members of the secular governing class, sons of nobility and gentry, diplomats to be, young men preparing themselves for service in government or in their localities. Young Thomas Hoby, the translator of Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, was a representative member of this class. (22)

In 1547 Thomas Hoby, at the age of seventeen, was sent abroad to learn languages. …Young Hoby spent a year, from the summer of 1548 of that of 1549, between Padua and Venice learning Italian and improving his Latin, attending lectures in the humanities, civil law and logic. Parks estimates that while there Hoby encountered at least fourteen fellow Englishmen and another thirteen elsewhere in Italy; and that there were some sixteen [22] of student age at Padua alone, during one year of the Marian exile, 1554-5. (22-23)

When we come, in the next generation, to Philip Sidney’s Italian experience, we notice a difference of inflexion: though only a boy of nineteen he was capable of weighing it up with critical acumen. He had already been put on his guard by his mentor, the eminent Huguenot scholar, Languet, who could not see why an Englishman should want to speak Italian and himself preferred German. (26)

But he maintained a reserve, and was not impressed by ‘all the magnificent magnificences of all these magnificos.’ Young as he was, he was not taken in by external appearances and saw that there was a certain superficiality in all the show. ‘Although some indeed be excellently learned, yet are they all given to so counterfeit learning as a man shall learn of them more false grounds of things than in any place else that I do know. For, from a tapster upwards, they are all discoursers. In fine, certain qualities—as horsemanship, weapons, vaulting and such like—are better there [Italy, in general] than in those other countries; for others, more sound, they do little excel nearer places.’ / In short, the palm was passing to other countries; the inspiration Italy had communicated to Europe was becoming somewhat spent at home. Not, however, in the visual arts: Venice led in painting. … he read books on Italian affairs, studying their politics and diplomacy, with special references to Venice, to which the English felt a greater affinity, for its contemporary independence of Papal authority. He was also reading gin Italian literature: the letters of Bembo, Bernardo Tasso, Lorenzo de’ Medici; books of imprese, of which he became the most original expositor at Elizabeth’s Court. He may have met Torquato Tasso, for whose poetry he had a high admiration—in this original, too, in a literary atmosphere dominated by Ariosto. (28)

With the sharpening of the conflict between Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the peninsula was shrinking to English Protestants. (29)

But with the 1580’s we are at the flood-tide of England’s own version of the Renaissance… (29)

The Court was the effective point of contact with the Renaissance influences from abroad, diffused mainly through other Courts: these reflected the increasingly secular character of the age, in itself a mark of the Renaissance. (30)

Lord Burghley—though he was the third generation of his family at Court—was conspicuous by the sobriety of his dress and demeanour, always carrying Cicero’s Offices or a Prayer Book in his bosom or pocket. (31)

What of Queen Elizabeth’s Court? Since it was dominated by a woman it was one of greater refinement than her contemporaries’, much less brutal, observing dignity and decorum, with considerable restraint upon those competitive and flighty temperaments. But there always has been much more ceremoniousness in the English Court than in the French. A French ambassador had been astonished to see the Princess Elizabeth on her knees three times before her father in the course of one audience. When she was Queen, anyone upon whom her eye lighted as she passed along in procession sank to his knees; when she spoke to him, she graciously raised him up. It was unthinkable that a Tudor monarch should go galloping round the streets, like the Valois brothers—according to L’Etoile—pelting the bourgeois of Paris with stones and knocking off their caps. (31)

She really had a prejudice against marriage—she frequently expressed herself in this vein to her maids-of-honour, though little good it did them. Her objection to a married clergy was notorious:… (31)

Still the Court was no place for Puritans: it talked the language of love and, as Ralegh complained later, the ageing maiden kept it up for far too long. Moreover, nobody was supposed to do anything about it. This imposed a strain. (32)

Besides all this, and rather unrecognized, she was really a kind woman; there are unnumbered instances of her kindness. When all is said, she behaved far better to such people as Leicester, Ralegh, Essex (until the last move) than they behaved to her. The contrast is visible between her Court and her father’s,…The reserve in the faces painted [32] by Holbein is reserve in the face of omnipresent danger, … Behind Henry’s one sees the law of the jungle; behind Elizabeth’s, the slippery ladder of favour, the competitiveness, the exhibitionism encouraged at the top, a world of flattery, attentive to the ladies—in a Court ruled by a lady. In the end, Elizabeth’s Court was—as Courts go—respectable; she had a hard task keeping it so. (32-33)

It was in the 1570’s, in the second decade of her reign—after surmounting its worst crisis, the troubles of 1569-72, after the Papal excommunication and the Queen’s recovery from smallpox brought home to people how much depended on her life—that the cult took shape. Her Accession Day, 17 November, began to be celebrated all over the country with bell-ringing and bonfires, feasts and sermons—and this was a spontaneous movement, not brought into being by any government legislation. [Cf. R. C. Strong, ‘The Popular Celebration of the Accession Day of Queen Elizabeth I, ‘ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XXI. 86 foll.] (34)

The Renaissance itself echoed the idea of the rebirth of a golden age, and Astraea was associated with the concept of right rule, of clemency and [36] justice—Spenser’s celebration of it appears in his Books V, which treats of Justice. … There were not wanting Puritans, of course, who thought all this rather nonsense, and possibly ungodly; but when did they have either imagination or taste? (37)

…Lee invented a romantic entertainment for the Queen’s visit on her summer progress to Kenilworth in 1575. It was a contest between knights for the love of a lady, with speeches, poems—…These tilts became highly organized affairs, with the leading figures at Court taking part in them and enacting a theme, with their attendants dressed to represent it, themselves exhibiting their imprese painted on shields. … All tended to the glorification of the Virgin Queen; it helped to build up the mythology of the age…it took something of the place of the pageantry the Church had previously provided, and turned it to secular, monarchical uses. / Speeches and music were also part of the entertainment; sometimes books of the show were presented. (42)

And how did she occupy herself on these occasions? / With politics, of course. We have a reavealing close-up of her at the Accession Day Tilt in 1595, from the pen of the Dutch envoy, Noel de Caron. Essex was the principal organizer of the Tilt; Caron was his guest. All the ladies and gentlemen of the Court were present at the spectacle, where at her window the Queen sat with only Lord Admiral Howard and Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon. Inviting the Dutch envoy to sit with her, she took the opportunity to converse with him all the afternoon on affairs of state. She was in good spirits, much pleased by the immense throng that had gathered below in thousands—there had never been so many. She beamed down upon them, smiling and giving them thanks for their good wishes. To the knights who were jousting she occasionally called out encouraging remarks; but in the intervals her mind was directed to the business in hand. (43)

…there is very full documentation for Elizabeth’s life, so that we know her intimately, the first of English monarch’s of whom this can be said—in that also marking the transition to modern times. (44)

…Hampton Court (which she liked least, after falling ill of small pox there),… (44)

She was extremely sensitive to smell, and an unfortunate French envoy, M. de Reaulux, suffered from halitosis. ‘Good God!,’ said she, ‘what shall I do if this man stay here, for I smell him an hour after he is gone from me.’ [H. M. C., Salisbury Mss. VII. 217] This unhappily came to the poor man’s ears before he left the country: ‘it is indeed confirmend here by divers that he had a loathsome breath.’ The exchange between her and the famous soldier, Sir Roger Williams, is well known. ‘Faugh, Williams, your boots stink,’ she said; ‘No, madam,’ he replied, ‘it is my suit that stinks.’ (47)

In her Court the ladies were naturally to the fore: she had fewer males in close attendance than her father or even her sister—women took their place. (48)

In the 1570’s [Elizabeth] was not so flamboyant as she later became with age and fame: she seems to fancied black velvet turned out with white satin, with splashes of colour. (49)

…it looks as if the Queen wore a new pair of shoes every week, they then went to the ladies in waiting. (52)

Dwarfs were an especial accompaniment of royalty, as we are reminded by Velasquez—and the cult seems to have spread from the Spanish Court. During the 1560’s and 1570’s the Queen had a dwarf, Ippolita the Tartarian, ‘our dearly beloved woman,’ (53)

…ladies retained their rank and title, if superior, on a second marriage. (55)

Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano, … was the most popular prose-work of the Italian Renaissance, having over a hundred editions in various languages before 1600. In England no less than seventeen versions have been published, beginning with Hoby’s endearing translation of 1561. (59)

[Hoby]… And so shall we perchance become as famous in England as the learned men of other nations have been and presently are.’ This indeed came about—the Elizabethans brought into being a whole literature of translation; but it is significant that it was chiefly the work, not of academic pedants but of people with a wider culture, such as Sir Thomas North, Sir John Harrington, John Florio, Philemon Holland, Geoffrey Fenton, Arthur Golding, William Adlington, Arthur Hall and others. (62)

A courtier, above all, should be a man of courage, good at feats of arms and skilled in the use of his weapon, quick to make use of advantage in the quarrels that arise. Here there was an observable difference between Italian and English circumstances, with the Court of a lady, and between the prevailing temperaments. In spite of the quarrels at Court between Philip Sidney and Oxford, Oxford and Ralegh, Grey and Southampton, these were nothing like so deadly as the Italian, pursued to the death, with the growing cult of the duel and the Italian code of ‘honour’ of which we have seen Englishmen disapprove. The duel did spread, however, with evil results, notably among military men. (62)

In Italian circumstances it was natural the Castiglione should expect some knowledge of painting in courtiers. This must have been much less in England, though it increased as the years went on, and the appreciation of Hillard was widespread. (63)

A gift for languages was very useful, especially French and Spanish, said Castiglione; in English terms that meant French and Italian, in which several of the courtiers were proficient. (63)

England in the sixteenth century was overwhelmingly rural—like nearly all countries, with the partial exception of the Netherlands and the northern half of Italy, the most civilized areas of Europe in the precise sense of the term. Within this context foreigners saw England as dominantly a country of woodland and pasture, parks and chases: they were struck by its greenness… A Frenchman in 1606 declared that it differed in that there was no country ‘which uses so much land for pasture as this.’ [The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. IV, 1500-1640, ed. J. Thirsk, XXX. I am chiefly indebted to her Introduction and chap. 1 in the above paragraphs.] … An Italian noticed more butchers in London than in any two of the chief towns of northern Italy. Observers did not comment on rural poverty—that eternal theme—for the simple reason that it was so much less than the grinding poverty of European countries. / The country was indeed happily underpopulated, … Some sense of the open spaces of the mind may be seen behind the literature of the time, in such players as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, or A Winter’s Tale… (67)

Hence the higher standard of living than that enjoyed by the oppressed peasantries of Europe. An Italian observed that England was known as ‘the land of comforts’. [Thirsk (as above), xxxi] A Netherlander considered that the English were not as industriousness or hard-working as Netherlanders or Frenchmen. Foreigners’ impression of a better standard of living were, by all tests, correct—increasingly in the later sixteenth century, once out of the general hugger-mugger of the Middle Ages. (68)

The Highland Zone is dominantly pastoral and cattle-grazing; … (68)

Even in the South there were forests all the way from the New Forest to Savernake in Wiltshire and to the Chilterns, or across much of Surrey and Sussex into Kent, [68] or in the West Midlands from Sherwood into Worcestershire and Staffordshire. (68-69)

The Highland areas possessed minerals to offset their poorer soil and farming: the tin and copper of Cornwall and Devon, lead in Derbyshire and Cumberland, calamine in Somerset, coal on Tyneside, in West Midlands and South Wales. (69)

Nearly all the rebellions came from the Highland areas: those of 1497 and 1549 from the West Country, the Pilgrimage of Grace and the Rising of 1569 from the North. They offered more fertile seedbeds for Puritanism and Dissent, along with the towns—partly because both were less under the thumb of squire and parson, the authorities of state and church, the bonds of an hierarchical social system. (69)

…London. A town of some 70,000 at the beginning of the century, it had a population of 220,000 at its end, the largest in Europe—… London was even more dominant, relatively, then than it is today: the only town of European importance, already a commercial and financial, as well as political and cultural, metropolis. No other town was in the least degree comparable: in 1543-4 London paid thirty times the amount of subsidy paid by the second town in the kingdom, then Norwich. (69)

Within their bounds, whether walled or no, the towns had much of a rural character. We recall the hundreds of elms in which Stratford was embowered. ‘Elizabeth Leicester kept a country air about it. Orchards, barns, and stables, and large gardens lay among the streets; windmills stood silhouetted as one looked up against the southern skyline; the streets petered out in ten minutes’ walk into lanes redolent of cowdung and hay. [W. G. Hoskins, Provincial England, 90] (70)

…the Queen went on progress in the summer. To some extent government went with her—she was usually accompanied by the leading members of the Council; and wherever she pitched the Court was constituted. Still these exhibitions were irregular, dependent on the whim of the Queen—though of course they served the purposes of government, helped her to keep in touch with her people, whose response was carefully noted. From the first she always made up to them, and was correspondingly popular—unlike her predecessor and her successor. (72)

…we discern among the richest counties, Kent, Sussex, Essex, Suffolk; among the poorest, Cornwall, Durham, Huntingdon, Rutland. [Musters, Beacon’s, Subsidies, Etc., ed. J. Wake, Northhamptonshire Record Soc., 123] (73)

Family-pride blazed forth in such a society as never before: it took many forms and there are a thousand evidences of it. Houses and churches alike were plastered with coats of arms; a line was traced between those who were armigerous and those who were not. No wonder William Shakespeare—better born on his mother’s side than his father’s—was so keep to equip himself, or rather, his father, with a coat of [84] arms: Non sans droict! Sir Anthony Wagner tells us that the pedigree craze was ‘well under way before the end of the fifteenth century but reached its zenith under Elizabeth, … (84-85)

The strenuous shake-up Tudor society experienced in the course of the Reformation, the ups and downs of families, the marked increase in the number of the gentry and aspirants to enter the sacred enclosure, brought this kind of social awareness to the fore: it mattered more whether one was a gentleman or no—and has mattered ever since, up to the social dissolution of our day—more than it had done in the Middle Ages. For another thing, it had something to do with the secularization of society. Medieval society was dominated by religion—the Elizabethans ran up houses, great and small, not churches. Men have, or had, to worship something: when many significant objects of devotion were taken away, the family came to take the place. Where medieval wills often express a wish to be buried in front of some image, Elizabethan wills define a wish to be buried beside father or mother, husband or wife, or at any rate with the family around one. (85)

Francis Bacon expressed himself with patronizing snobbery at a bright economic proposition of Lionel Cranfield’s—‘more indeed than I could have looked for from a man of his breeding’. [q. M. Prestwich, Cranfield, 180] This was a bit much coming from the scion of a very recent family, whose grandfather had kept the sheep and swine accounts for the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. The seventeenth Earl of Oxford constantly referred to Sir Walter Ralegh as ‘the Jack’ and ‘the Knave’, choosing to regard him as an upstart; actually the Raleghs were a very old Devon family, and Sir Walter might well have been the seventeenth in his line. (86)

Urban families came and went in three [86] generations, few even lasted as long in any prominence. The rhythm was—especially for London, the magnet of the national life—from the land to the town, and back to the land. (86-87)

The overwhelming preponderance of eastern England against western, visible all through the Middle Ages and into the succeeding centuries—it decided the Civil War as it had done the Wars of the Roses—is being somewhat counteracted by the increasing fluidity of a money economy in the later sixteenth century. …fifteen of the twenty-five leading towns ‘still lay on the eastern side’: there was no doubt where the balance of power lay, and this was clinched by the linch-pin of it all, London. (88)

‘London, too, recruited her merchant class to a marked degree from the younger sons of small landed families in the provinces.’ [W. G. Hoskins, Provincial England, 75] (88)

English society at the end of Elizabeth’s reign was altogether better off, its social needs better provided for, both more efficient and more humane, than at the beginning. The middle decades from 1533 to 1558, about a generation, were a period of upheaval and disturbance amounting to revolution, with grave dissension and losses, both economic and cultural. But once the upheaval settled down, the experience was digested with its gains, it proved an immense increase of wealth and strength to society, on more efficient, secular lines; … (90)

…one-third of the philanthropic funds contributed over the whole country during the period 1480-1660 came from ‘this one almost prodigally generous city. When we reflect that at no time…did London’s population amount to much more than 5 per cent of that of the realm, the dominant role of the city in founding the necessary institutions of a new age becomes abundantly clear [W. K. Jordan, The Charities of London, 1480-1660. The Aspirations and the Achievements of the Urban Society, 20]… though the money was made in London, it was mostly made by incomers from other parts [90] of England, and most of their philanthropy went to the parts they came from. … The money came, in large proportion, from a small number of the very rich: … (90-91)

The Reformation ended the useless expenditure of wealth on prayers for the dead—though the policy emanating from London and the progressive South and East had to be imposed on the backward North. Similarly the amount of money spend on church-building dropped to a negligible amount—… The northern capital, York, received a double blow with the decline of its medieval cloth industry, and the drastic reduction of its ecclesiastical institutions and their wealth. (91)

More remarkable was the determined leadership of the great merchants of London, above all—though followed by other towns—to endow experimental schemes about the country to put the poor and unemployed on work, or to provide a stock to lend out to young apprentices starting a trade, or to give dowries to help girls to get a husband. And this in addition to the more obvious forms of philanthropy—outright bequests of money, the founding of almshouses and schools. The national endeavor in regard to education, and founding and endowing of schools, was on an immense scale, right up to the Civil War which destroyed and arrested so much. The clergy, as we should expect, devoted their charities chiefly to education, in particular the universities. The yeomanry followed on behind, though on nothing like the scale of the dynamic elements in society, the gentry and merchants. (92)

By 1600 Bristol, with a population of 17,000, had moved into the second place after London—though longo intervallo—in numbers, wealth and expenditure on social betterment. (94)

Lancashire…was among the lowest, with Cornwall, Cumberland, Durham, or Wales [Cf. Jordan, The Social Institutions of Lancashire, 1480-1660]. It was also a very backward one, still living in the Middle Ages: right up to the Reformation and into it, Lancashire people were still giving [98] largely to religious purposes. Even after the Reformation some wills allot money for masses for souls, ‘if legal’; but of course the government of Elizabeth was not going to let them thus waste their money. If not legal, ‘otherwise to the poor’: it went to the poor. [Cf. the will of George Trafford, a Catholic, in 1572. Ibid, 14] (98-99)

Here we can only illustrate how it [social life] was organized. Completeness is impossible; even the plays of Shakespeare, the most complete portrait of Elizabethan life, omit one of the most important area of that society—the religious. (101)

High summer was the period for the progresses, which were apt to last for two or three months; … The two chief commercial cities, Norwich and Bristol, were thus favoured; the universities several times received visits, with prolonged festivities and entertainments, plays, speeches, disputations. Cathedral cities and lesser towns were taken in their stride; everywhere the pageant passed, bell-ringing and the citizens turned out in fur and feather. The journeys were made in short stages, mostly from great house to great house, with intermediate stops at one of the royal manors lying in the way, … The problem was how to house all the courtiers and their train, for the cortege would number two or three hundred. [102] … The Queen got no farther than Bristol—when prayers were offered in church for her preservation on so dangerous a journey—and into Worcestershire and Staffordshire; she never ventured into the rude North or got so far as its capital, York. / Naturally the progresses were most frequent in the first two decades, when the Queen had to show herself to, and acquaint herself with, the country: they were not mere joy-rides, though she derived much pleasure from them, as her successor did not. (103)

That other people thought so is witnessed by the competition there was to get young nobles and sprigs of leading families brought up in his household. This was a feature of the age: boys of good families were often recommended to a noble house for their training and upbringing for better educational opportunities, company and manners. When the fourth Duke of Norfolk was brought to the block by Cecil (or rather by his own folly), he recommended his children to Cecil’s care and protections. (108)

[Bess of Hardwick, Countess of Shrewsbury] Compared with the immense receipts and outcomings of such an estate, taxation and derisory: it was this that enabled the Elizabethans to build palaces and fill them with objects of art and beauty, in contrast with the waste of a welfare state… it is obvious that taxation was no impediment to building a fortune. She paid far more on wages: an average of (pd) 300 a year. (112)

It would be a fair conclusion that those parishes were lucky that had a great house in their midst, others were helped by having a manor-house of any size or resources, for they were integrated into society and, ceteris paribus, fulfilled an essential function. The really grinding poverty, with little hope of relief in time of dearth, fell upon more ‘democratic’ communities (to use an anachronism), in the North, were there were fewer such houses. (114)

…in England it followed the rule of primogeniture, as succession to the land generally did. This had consequences fundamental to the society, and on the whole extremely beneficial to both incentive and social flexibility. Keeping the title together with the land helped to keep a firm social framework; … It was a contrast to the more rigid class-system on the Continent, where, if you were born into the nobility you remained a noble and, however poor, were too good to go into trade or work for your living. In England, the younger sons of even dukes were commoners—like Sir Winston Churchill’s father, Lord Randolph, on the threshold of our time. (119)

Bastards often kept the family name: the excellent poet and translator of Tasso, Edward Fairfax, kept his. Further north, on the uproarious Borders, the Foster family hardly recognized the inhibiting restrictions of matrimony and cheerfully made little difference among their progeny. Bastardy, too, had some social utility: it was apt to be improving to looks and upgrading to stocks. (119)

It is observable that Elizabeth I was socially more conservative—this was observed by Naunton—as befitted a lady, than her father, who unleashed a revolution. (123)

Sir John Markham, Lieutenant of the Tower, … was enabled to build the fine house, for which he wrote the rules following grander models. … In summer time the men were to be in bed by ten at night, and out of bed by six; from Michaelmas to Ladyday, September to March, in bed by nine, out by seven in the morning. There was no hardship: ten hours’ sleep in autumn and winter, eight hours in spring and summer. (124)

The Elizabethans were nothing if not sententious and didactic—after all they had a whole society to educate and bring out of medievalism. (125)

At Haughton Sir William [Holles] kept open house, not dining till after one o’clock in case some neighbour was travelling from a distance to dine with him. ‘He always began his Christmas at All Hallowtide [Nov. I] and continued it until Candlemas [Feb. 2], during which time any man was permitted freely to stay three days without being asked from whence he came or what he was…This liberal hospitality of his caused the first Earl of Clare to let fall once an unbecoming word, that his grandfather sent all his revenues down the privy house. [G. Holles, Memorials to the Holles Family, 1493-1656 (Camden Soc.) 41-2] … Gervase Holles says of his own grandfather, who was seated very comfortably in the Grey Friars at Grimsby, that he was ‘as well furnished with learning as, in his own opinion, befitted a gentleman. For I have heard him say that he would have a gentleman to have some knowledge in all the arts, but that it did not become him to be excellent in any of them.’ [Holles, above, 125-7] This, again, was in keeping with received theory coming down from the classics. (128)

The period between Elizabeth’s accession and the tragic Civil War was that of the ‘Great Rebuilding,’ during which almost the whole of society, in all but the backward areas of Wales and the North, was re-housed. That is to say, notably in all classes of society except the poorest—though there was a good deal of new cottage-building in many different areas where waste land was being colonized or squatted on: it reflected not only the increase of population but gave elbow-room, even provided something of a safety-valve, along the margins of an ordered, somewhat repressive (if necessarily so) society. We see this last consideration at play in forest-areas, into which poor people crowded because they were freer there to fleet the time carelessly. (129)

… ‘almost all the rural population, except the poorest, enjoyed a higher level of domestic comfort, in the way of furniture, fittings, and household equipment on the eve of the Civil War than their grandparents had done seventy years earlier.’ [W. G. Hoskins, Provincial England, 137-8] (130)

As for the gentry, Dr. Simpson sums up crisply, ‘a man no sooner succeeded in the sixteenth century than he built himself a new home—and more than one if he could afford it.’ [Alan Simpson, The Wealth of the Gentry, 1540-1660, 161, 166] (130)

Perhaps the most general improvement was the insertion of a ceiling in the hall hitherto open to the rafters: this provided a chamber, or a couple of lofts above, useful for storage among other purposes, apart from the diminution of draughts. [It appears that in over a hundred larger Essex houses this feature still remains; cf. A. C. Edwards, A History of Essex] (136)

A hardly less important increase of comfort was provided by the ubiquitous glazing of windows. Hitherto occupation for glaziers had been provided almost wholly by churches; at the Reformation, demand fell off disastrously for a couple of decades. With the Elizabethan renewal of society on a more secular basis the demand for glass windows for houses multiplied enormously. (136)

… ‘those at the bottom of the social scale … could usually afford only a mean, one-roomed dwelling where the whole family cooked, ate, slept, and stored any goods it might possess; though in some cases an extra room would be contrived by sub-division or partial lofting over. The class of small craftsmen and tradesmen above these was most likely to occupy a house of two storeys, like that of a baker of Trinity parish who died in 1564. Behind his shop on the ground floor lay the kitchen and bakehouse, and above these were his hall and chamber. [D. Portman, The Exeter Houses, 1400-1700, 36] (137)

We are familiar with the old-time praise of ‘the yeomen of England’—that class to which Shakespeare’s maternal grandparents belonged, the Ardens of Wilmcote, with their roomy house and the arras hangings on the wall. Bacon praised them, Thomas Fuller regarded them as ‘an estate of people almost peculiar to England,’ other spoke of them as the back-bone of the country. [q. M. Campbell, The English Yeoman, 58, 62] Harrison describes them: ‘they commonly live wealthily, keep good houses and travail to get riches.’ This last consideration may have inclined others to regard them as capitalist farmers—in farming for business not, like most husbandmen, for subsistence. It is an admirable Devon antiquarian, John Hooker, who describes for us the yeoman in his social aspect: ‘his fine being once paid [i.e. in entering upon his lease], he liveth as merrily as doth his landlord and giveth himself for the most part to such virtue, conditions and quality as doth the gentleman.’ Hooker was a townsman, chamberlain of Exeter, but Robert Furse, who was a yeoman-gentleman, describes the type more closely in his predecessor, John Furse: ‘he always maintained a good house, a good plough, good geldings, good tillage, good rearing and was a good husband [i.e. farmer]. Indeed he would never be without three couple of good hounds, he would surely keep company with the best sort. [H. J. Carpenter, ‘Furse of Moreshead,’ Trans. Devon. Assocn., 1894, 179] (138)

…there were still bondsmen in England, in the sense of being tied to the soil: … The fact that one’s legal status was that of a bondman did not prevent one from having money. Even so, manumissions went on into the reign of James I. People of the name of Bond carry into today a memento of their status when the family got its name. / ‘The fourth and last sort of people therefore have neither voice nor authority in the commonwealth, but are to be ruled and not to rule others. Yet they are not altogether neglected, for in cities and corporate towns, for default of yeoman, they are fain to make up their inquests of such manner of people. And in villages they are commonly made church-wardens, sidesmen, aleconners, now and then constables, and many time enjoy the name of headboroughs.’ This was quite as much as they were capable of: they had their parts. [The Derby Household Books, ed. F. R. Raines, 9, 95] (140)

But whence the expansion, the prosperity?—In the increasing returns from the land and from trade, from the discovery and more efficient exploitation of real resources, mineral and manufacturing, … This led to a marked increase of population. (140)

Hoskins… ‘it is likely that the infant mortality-rate (and perhaps maternal mortality also) fell sharply below the level of the medieval and sub-medieval period at the same time. Whatever the dominant factor, it seems probable that the better the more varied food consumed by the mass of the population after the middle of the century, and the simultaneous increase in house-room, in comfort, and in living conditions generally, must have had a cumulative effect in raising the vitality and resistance of the population of the country, especially in the rural districts. [W. G. Hoskins, Provincial England, 147-8] (141)

…the clergy were free now to reproduce themselves, and their quivers were full of arrows. (141)

In one Exeter parish at least, the infant mortality-rate was lower in the later sixteenth century than in the alter seventeenth or the eighteenth. Increasing congestion accounts for this; it is likely that in the Elizabethan period, ‘the infant mortality-rate, in the rural and semi-rural areas at any rate, was reduced to a figure not achieved again until well on into the nineteenth century.’ (141)

…as in all earlier societies, the expectation of life among poorer people was must less than among the well-to-do. Only 10 percent of the population lived to reach forty—in general the fittest survived. [U. M. Cogwill, ‘The People of York, 1538-1812’, The Scientific American, Jan. 1970, 104 foll.] Among poor people females had a shorter expectancy of life than males; whereas they had a longer expectancy than males among the upper classes. (141)

All foreigners were struck by what good trenchermen the English were and especially by the amount of meat they consumed. … English visitors to Italy were struck by the variety of fruits consumed there. [Harrison, ed. cit., 84, 88-9] (142)

[in great households] One did not taste of every dish that stood upon the table, ‘which few use to do, but each one feedeth upon that meat him best liketh for the time. …’ This solves the mystery for us of the immense amounts of varied viands that appeared together as one ‘course,’ contrary to modern usage. (143)

The Queen, who was served with specially refined white bread and moreover had an addiction to sweetmeats, exhibited bad black teeth and suffered recurrent toothache. (145)

The poorest folk in times of dearth were reduced to make their bread of beans, peas, oats, or acorns. (145)

‘Lamb, for example, was very moist and phlegmatic: therefore …unsuitable for old men, whose stomachs were supposed to have already too much phlegm.’ [J. C. Drummond and A. Wilbraham, The Englishman’s Food, 63-4.] Children also were supposed to be phlegmatic, therefore to be nourished ‘with meats and drinks which are moderately hot and moist’—there introducing a qualification. As they grew older they tended to become more sanguine or choleric. Youths, therefore, were to eat ‘meats more gross of substance, colder and moister; also salads of cold herbs, and to drink seldom wine, unless it be allayed with water.’ In old age, when the body was losing heat, hot and moist meats were again the thing. We remember Falstaff’s ‘I love not the humour of bread and cheese, and there’s the humour of it.’ (146)

Little account is made of breakfast, but occasionally we find that the Master is served brawn and mustard, beef and brewis, i.e. a North Country dish of slices of bread with fat broth poured over them; the yeomen in the hall had two messes of beef and brewis. Lady Fairfax had a more ladylike breakfast of butter and eggs; while the work-folks had three messes of brewis. These accounts cover only the meats. Bread was dealt with in the pantry, and drink in the buttery, … (148)

Queen,… Breakfast makes much more of an appearance in her books (1576): manchet and cheat, i.e. the next best sort of fine white bread, ale, beer and wine—Elizabeth drank either small beer or light wine. Then there were various meats and bones for pottage, so there was a variety of soups and broths, with butter. … And one notices a feminine taste in the lighter diet: many more birds, cocks or godwits, larks, partridges, plovers, pheasants, snites (snipe); and more sweet dishes, as we should expect: custard, fritter, tarts, dulcets, friants (dainties). (149)

After the pleasures of food, exoneration. I know of no more intimate account of the systematic purgings to which Elizabethan gentlemen were apt to subject themselves, in spring or autumn, sometimes both, than Throckmorton’s. Though he may have been something of a hypochondriac, there is no need to suppose that he was abnormal, except in his dedication to the subject and the interested expression he gave to it. It was a regular thing for gentlemen of the upper classes to give as an excuse for not answering a summons, to the Privy Council or such, that they had taken physic and were not available for few days. When one reads he was in the care of Dr. Chenell of Oxford, to whom he frequently sent over his footman, Timothy, for physic. [Cf. my Ralegh and the Throckmortons, 276-7] He was not content with a mere eight stools in a day, so he takes a potion that gives him twelve. ‘Brought from Oxford an electuary to take before I sweat, 2s.; three purging potions, 7s. 6d.; bottles of small and strong diet drink, 7s. for each lot, four purgations, 12s…I drank of the strong diet drink at four and when I went to bed, and once at supper of the small.’ Next, ‘I was very ill in my stomach at night,’ so he took another potion which gave him twelve stools. And even this was not his record. (151)

The Elizabethans were much less repressed about physical functions, were more open in their expression of them, before the Puritans conquered the country twice over—once in the seventeenth century with the Civil War and again in the Victorian age. (152)

The smells of these great houses, especially the palaces with their enormous households, must have been appalling—if not quite so bad as 18th-century Versailles, which everybody said could be smelt three miles off. No wonder Elizabethan grandees—particularly the Queen and Leicester—were addicted to perfuming everything, or had such an acute sense of smell, like Shakespeare. (154)

The Middle Ages had been more tolerant too, or more primitive. Up to Henry VIII’s Reformation a famous row of licensed brothels had stood on the South Bank, next Winchester House, on land owned by the bishopric. Stow gives us the constitution of Henry II’s Parliament regulating these ‘Stews’: any single woman to go and come freely when she chose; ‘no single woman to take money to lie with any man but she lie with him all night till the morrow’; ‘no stewholder to receive any woman of religion [i.e. a nun], or any man’s wife’; ‘no stewholder to keep any woman that hath the perilous infirmity of burning’ ; ‘the constables, bailiff, and others every week to search every stewhouse.’ [John Stow, Survey of London, ed. C. L. Kingsford. II. 54-5] Here lay the justification of the authorities: it was in their province to safeguard public health. In the last year of moral king Henry VIII’s reign the stews were put down by proclamation, to the sound of the trumpet. But long were they remembered, if not regretted; and the remembrance went on in the popular phrase, ‘Winchester goose’, which meant a venereal sore in the groin. … It is not to be supposed that the closing of the stews was the destruction of the trade. (160)

Shakespeare, however, is the sexiest writer in the language—more thoroughly so than the Restoration dramatists—to anyone who knows the Elizabethan idiom well enough to recognize the constant barrage of innuendo, double meanings, lascivious puns, in addition to the frank bawdy, the open appeal to sensuality. This is one reason, no doubt, why he was the most popular dramatist of the age, … (160)

The paradoxical thing is that, at the apex, society was given an example of chaste virginity. … The Queen herself was not averse to calling attention to it, in the most public way, when badgered by Parliament to marry and assure the succession. She prayed God ‘to continue me still in this mind to live out of the state of marriage… And in the end, this shall be for me sufficient, that a marble stone shall declare that a Queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin.’ [q. J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and her Parliaments, 1559-1581, 49.] (161)

Some people, then and since, have thought that there was something wrong with her. Those in the best position to know—Burghley, for example—did not think so. Common sense was a sufficient warning as to the dangers of child-bearing at the time, and there were the fearful examples of her sister and her mother to bring it home to her. It is fairly clear to a perceptive eye that she did not intend to marry. The Scotch ambassador, Melville, saw well enough that her deepest passion was to rule and that [161] she would never give herself a master—as any sixteenth-century woman did by marrying. Leicester told the French ambassador at the time of the Anjou marriage-negotiations—which were all politics, of course—that over the past twenty years she had always said, ‘I will never marry.’ [Cf. Elizabeth Jenkins, Elizabeth the Great, 17.] (162)

Though she was fond of her women companions, especially in later years, of Lady Warwick, there was nothing Lesbian about her. (162)

We have already noticed her dislike to matrimony for her ladies, and her attempts to persuade them against it. She detested clerical marriage. Poor Archbishop Parker, who had the misfortune to be married, was quite early on treated to a severe rating on the subject. (162)

Her jealousy of the hot-blooded young men and women of the Court having the fun she couldn’t have, which she could control in herself when they couldn’t, is sufficiently obvious. It all adds up to the recognizable characteristics of the unsatisfied, jealous spinster. (162)

There is something deeply anthropological in the popular hatred and jealousy of Leicester for being too close to the Virgin Queen. When his first wife, who was already dying of cancer, fell down the stairs dead at Cumnor Place, everybody believed that he had had her murdered. (162)

Each time a woman was widowed, she enjoyed one-third of her husband’s estate for life. The more husbands the more attractive: the marriage of widows was a profitable market. (173)

The Canon Law of the medieval Church did not recognize divorce in itself (a vinculo) , merely separation (a mensa et thoro) for carefully restricted reasons, mainly for adultery. In England the Reformation did not change the situation: the Canon Law of the English Church remained what it had been. But many of the forbidden, and complicated, degrees of consanguinity, including even godparents, were sensibly abrogated: they had, of course, made nullity easier for privileged persons, a backdoor way of divorce. Archbishop Cranmer—that eminent, if imperfect, exemplar of the Middle Way—was in favour of clerical marriage, but was strongly opposed to divorce or any relaxation of the rule of marriage. [Sir L. Dibdin and Sir C. E. H. Chadwyck Healey, English Church Law and Divorce, 27-8] In Elizabeth’s reign Protestant divines made some progress with opinion favouring divorce on the ground of adultery, but the legal position remained the same, and marriage, being a sacrament, was governed by the law of the Church. In practice, the Church did not allow the re-marriage of divorced persons. (174)

In the circumstances we have depicted there was, naturally, a great deal of bastardy, particularly in the higher and lower ranks; the middle classes were rather more respectable. (176)

It was usual in such cases [of bastardy] for the midwife to put the question who was the father at the moment of the child’s birth, in the anguish of labour—a piece of crude, but usually effective, psychology. (178)

Such was Elizabethan life—or, indeed, life at all times. We notice however, an interesting difference between town and country in the much higher proportion of brides that came to marriage pregnant in the [179] country than in towns—in a rural Devon parish 33 per cent, compared with 13 per cent in the city of York. [U. M. Cowgill, ‘The People of York, 1538-1812,’ Scientific American, Jan. 1970, 104 foll.] This certainly represented in part the stricter conditions of town life. We can also deduce from the pattern of birth that the highest rate of conceptions were in high summer and Christmas holidays. All very natural, like the animals. (180)

It is, perhaps, a duty to include some treatment, if only for completeness’ sake, of homosexuality, though the difficulty here is not an embarras de richesses but an insufficiency of evidence—and what there is has never been collected. Here, too, the Reformation made a dividing line. Up till then sodomy had been an ecclesiastical offence, naturally enough with all that clerical celibacy. The penitentiaries, it seems, were full of provisions for penance, but Maitland thought that ‘the temporal courts had not punished it and that no-one had been put to death for it for a very long time past. [Sir F. Pollock and F. W. Maitland, History of English Law, II. 556-7] / It was time to put an end to that lax state of affairs, and so it came about with the tightening up effected by the Reformation and the subjugation of the Church. In the very year of the moral Henry’s clandestine marriage to Anne Boleyn and of the Submission of the Clergy, 1533, Parliament passed ‘An Act for the punishment of the vice of buggery.’ [Statutes of the Realm (ed. 1817), III. 441, ao 25 Henry VIII, cap. 6.] The preamble specifically stated, ‘forasmuch as there is not yet sufficient and condign punishment appointed and limited by the due course of the laws of this realm for the detestable and abominable vice of buggery committed with mankind or best,’ the offence was constituted a felony, i.e. the penalty being death with forfeit of property, without benefit of clergy. J.P.s were to have power and authority to hear and determine such cases. The more humane atmosphere of the regime of Protector Somerset qualified this ferocious legislation in one respect: such offenders ‘attained by confession, verdict, or outlawry,’ might incur the new death-penalty ‘without loss of lands, goods or corruption of blood,’ i.e. property and inheritance were safeguarded—more important than men’s lives. / In the first year of Mary’s reign her repeal of much of Henry’s Reformation legislation repealed his statute along with the rest. For the next ten years the action was not punishable—a situation that could not be allowed to endure. So the Parliament of 1563 revived that of 1533, specifically claiming that since the repeal ‘divers evil disposed persons have been the more bold to commit the said most horrible and detestable vice…to the high displeasure of Almighty God.’ [The Statutes at Large, ed. D. Pickering, VI. 208-9, ao 5 Eliz., cap. 17.] That may be as it [180] may be, but certainly the utmost use had been made, at the time of the Dissolution of the monasteries, of the royal visitors’ finding with regard to the monks. They found some such cases, but Dom David Knowles is of the opinion that most of the far more numerous cases noted in the Northern Province really refer to masturbation, for which presumably there was no term. [Dom David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England, III. 296-7] / Protestants, however, had a strong demographic point in their campaign against clerical celibacy; they constantly enforced this argument, father than the undoubted good effects on the stock, eventually, from breeding from more intelligent strains rather than less. Victorian prudery has operated to blanket the subject, to omit to give it proper treatment in the legal text-books and, it would seem, to suppress records of convictions and punishments in the courts. I have failed to find any statistics in this field of investigation. The historian of English Criminal Law, Sir James Stephen, considered that the subject had no social interest. But that is precisely the significance it has. One observes its close connection in medieval minds with sorcery; in the Reformation period legislation against it goes along with the cruel legislation against witchcraft, … (181)

A breach within a very aristocratic Catholic group of friends at Court in 1581 suddenly throws a beam of light upon their tastes. The spacegrace young Earl of Oxford, who denied his wife (Burghley’s daughter) with the asseveration that, if she had a child, it would be none of his, had returned from Italy with Italianate tastes. He had also been reconciled to the Roman Church; so had his friends, Lord Henry Howard and Charles Arundel. When this fact was extracted from him by the Queen, to exculpate themselves this precious pair made envenomed charges against the Earl. Charles Arundel deposed, ‘I will prove him a buggerer, of a boy that is his cook,’ by Oxford’s own confession as well as by witnesses. [S. P. 12/151, 45. This is omitted in B. M. Ward’s too laudatory account, The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, 1550-1604, C. V.] ‘I have seen this boy many time in his chamber, doors close-locked, together with him, maybe at Whitehall and at his house in Broad Street; and, finding it so, I have gone to the backdoor to satisfy myself, at the which the boy hath come out all in a sweat, and I have gone in and found [181] the beast in the same plight. But to make it more apparent my Lord Harry saw more, and the boy it confessed it unto Southwell and himself confirmed it unto Mr. William Cornwallis.’ All these are Catholic names, but these croyants went on to add atheism to Oxford’s vices, as well as the intention to murder Leicester and Sir Philip Sidney, leaders of the extreme Protestant Cour-faction. / We need hardly go into any further disagreeable details, except that Oxford had often expressed the kind of view that Marlowe was well known to hold, and that ‘Englishmen were dolts and nitwits’ not to realize that there was better sport than with women. [S. P. 12/151, 46.] (181-182)

…sodomy. But Spanish writers on the conquest of Mexico, such as Bernal Diaz, deplore its prevalence among the Mexicans—as if it were not endemic in their own Mediterranean countries. … Francis Bacon’s tastes are quite well known, and indeed obvious; when Perez came to lodge with him during his exile in England, Lady Bacon wrote severely to the elder brother, Anthony: ‘Though I pity your brother, yet so long as he pities not himself but keepeth that bloody Perez, yea as a coach-companion and bed-companion: a proud, profane, costly fellow, whose being about him I verily fear the Lord God doth mislike and doth less bless your brother in credit, and otherwise in his health.’ This refers to the brilliant Bacon’s failure to get preferment from Elizabeth; his tastes were no impediment to his rapid advancement under James I, nor were Lord Henry Howard’s, we may add. (184)

Marlowe… there was the famous mot people repeated, that ‘all they that love not tobacco and boys were fools’ … skeptical about people’s religious pretensions, preferring Catholicism to Protestantism, … (185)

This is the place the state firmly, if briefly, that the Sonnets of Shakespeare are not homosexual. Any doubt on the subject is resolved by the [187] very sonnet, No. 20, in which Shakespeare describes the ambivalent nature of Southampton as a youth: … Nothing could be clearer: Shakespeare is not interested in him sexually: his love is platonic, idealized. And that is in keeping with all that is known of Shakespeare—highly sexed, and completely heterosexually. [Cf. Eric Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy, passim, which is very instructive on the subject, and quite right.] (188)

In that world of four hundred years ago we notice a number of enlightened and emancipated minds who would be no disgrace to our day—to think only of leading spirits, like Elizabeth and the Cecils; Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare and Bacon; Ralegh, Hariot, William Gilbert. We think of them as the characteristic Elizabethans, not the benighted and vituperative clerics, whether Protestant, Catholic or Puritan, for ever disputing nonsense questions that could never be settled—for non-sense, metaphysical or theological, is self-proliferating and interminable. Such people, of course, were far more numerous, and perhaps—mutatis mutandis—always will be. But since they do not constitute the difference in the age, they can hardly give it its name. / On the other hand, medieval or pre-medieval types are always with us at any given time—look at the idiot believers in astrology, or whatever, today. Some types will be prehistoric, or positively regressive in the human scale: one has only to keep one’s eyes about one in the streets—some of these might be in trees, other behind bards of one kind or another. They co-existence of such widely differing types at any given time—for, of course, the notion of human equality in any significant sense is visibly untrue—is a hopeful consideration for the attainability of historical knowledge. One is not studying the unobservable, the dead and vanished: they are all around one. The subtlety lies in catching the differences of inflexion; the art of the historian—how few achieve it!—in rendering them like an artist. (190)

That cultivated woman, the Queen, had objected to the pulling down of rood-lofts, but could not prevail in the matter: the Protestant bishops refused to serve unless she gave way. The result is the destitution of some thousands of churches of goodly works of craftsmanship, … (192)

Thus Protestants were determined to destroy the objects of these observances as the most effective way of destroying the observances. (Popular idiocy—people being what they are—then looked elsewhere: there was a notable increase in credulity about witches and the persecution of poor old crones as such.) It is a pity that so few people could attain the cultivated attitude of the Queen and enjoy the works of art without the penumbra of nonsensical belief that surrounded them. Few people were, or perhaps are, capable of the disjunction: hence iconoclasm, then as today. / The Reformation must have been a terrible time for civilized people to endure. Works of art of all kinds were destroyed: … (192)

Enough of these fooleries—though they are the stuff of which history is made. (194)

This seems to have been the usual form elsewhere: the yeoman-farmers dealt with parish business, provided accoutrements and harness for the soldiers and parish contributed to her Majesty’s service, raised funds for parish purposes, including bastards and the poor; larger affairs, of public order, repression of crime etc. were dealt with by the J.P.s, who were [195] always, in the country, from the gentry. A variety of other matters were dealt with by other wardens, ale-wardens and way-wardens; while order was maintained, under the J.P.s, by headboroughs and constables, from down amongst the people. We see that it was a lithe, springy society, not without an element of ‘democratic’ responsibility, if we may use that much-abused word: all the more responsible for being less democratic. (196)

In well-ordered parishes the names of communicants were taken down—to keep an eye on defaulters and recusants. (199)

…contemporary account of parish social activities is that of Richard Carew in his Survey of Cornwall, [ed. 1769, 68 foll.]… Church-ales were run by the young men, two of them as wardens collecting the money: ‘this they employ in brewing, baking, and other acates against Whitsuntide’. ‘Of late times [i.e. towards 1600] many ministers have by their earnest invectives both condemned these Saints’ feasts as superstitious, and suppressed the church-ales as licentious.’ Everything shows the growing strength of Puritanism, which had a deplorable (and abortive) victory with the Civil War. (199)

Sports varied with the nature of the country and climate; but also in accordance with class. Deer-hunting was for the upper-classes; hunting foxes, badgers, otters, polecats, squirrels—which were all classed as ‘vermin’—was for everybody. Hawking, the expertise of falconry, was an aristocratic or ‘gentle’ exercise; killing birds in general, anyhow, was a popular sport. Fishing and angling were open to everybody, though gentlemen had their private fishponds and waters. Coursing the hare was a popular sport, so too with archery, when organized; bowling was more select, middle and upper class, though inns had their bowling alleys, not always permitted. Horse-racing was just beginning to be organized; fencing and dueling—those Italianate delights—were coming in from abroad. Both these were for the socially superior. (201)

James I had a perfect mania for hunting, but even Elizabeth did her duty by the sport and must have derived some pleasure at least from its accompaniments. In September 1600, when she was an elderly woman, we hear that she is ‘excellently disposed to hunting, for every second day she is on horseback and continues the sport long.’ [q. P. Chalmers, The History of Hunting, 287] (201)

The Institution of a Gentleman tells us, ‘there is a saying among hunters that he cannot be a gentleman which loveth not hawking and hunting…A like saying is that he cannot be a gentleman which loveth not a dog.’ [q. P. Chalmers, The History of Hunting, 273] (202)

No Elizabethan could resist deer-poaching; the records and documents, a diary like Throckmorton’s, are full of it, the local courts constantly dealing with offenders. (205)

…falconry… The popularity of a sport, with its new-found sophistication, with the gentry is caricatured by Ben Jonson in Every Man in his Humour, where a simple country squire says, ‘I have bought me a book and a hood and bells and all… Why, you know an a man have not the skill in the hawking and hunting language nowadays, I’ll not give a rush for him.’ (206)

When Ralegh’s Indian falcon was sick of the buckworm, he wrote to ask Robert Cecil, ‘if you will be so bountiful to give another falcon, I will provide you a running gelding.’ [E. Edwards, Sir Walter Ralegh, II. 85] Thus for comparative values. (207)

Organised horse-racing goes back to Elizabeth’s reign, but in a sense its origin is to be traced back to her father, as with so many things; for it was he who took steps to improve the breed of horses, statutorily, and introduced the Italian art of training them in the manage. He also was the [208] the patron of the new Italian school of fencing. Henry’s patronage of masculine sports, of Renaissance art and architecture, his passion for music sports, of Renaissance art and architecture, his passion for music and gifts as a musician, in addiction to ship-building, the creation of a Royal Navy, his interest in military engineering and gunnery, give a more complete picture of the man than the usual disproportionate concentration of Divorce and Dissolution, and helps to account for, what might not otherwise be so easy to understand, the undoubted popularity of the old tyrant. (208-209)

In horsemanship all Europe learned from the Neapolitan school, … (209)

With the general improvement in the breed, the way was open for horse-racing. It was not an exclusive preserve of the gentry, for we find the corporations of some towns promoting it. (210)

Heath-country, bare downs and stubbles being best for hares, coursing was much to the fore in the Midlands and eastern counties. Shakespeare is full of references to coursing, which must have been a favourite sport with him in his youth. Whatever else he was, he was a countryman born and bred: most sports are constantly being illustrated in his writings. Not all, however: he had predilections among them, all the more convincing. The Cotswolds, convenient to Stratford, were good coursing country. At the beginning of The Merry Wives of Windsor, Slender asks: ‘How does your fallow greyhound, sir? I heard say he was outrun on Cotsall,’ (i.e. Cotswold). (212)

Fowling was to the fore where there were stretches of water, not only along the coasts, in estuaries and marshes, but over inland waters, especially where there were ponds and lakes. We hear, for example, of the regular setting of decoys on the forest lakes of Nottinghamshire, though naturally the paradise of fowlers was the Fens, the marshy areas of eastern countries like Suffolk, Essex and Lincolnshire—the wolds of which were no less noted for coursing. (212)

A noticeable exception to Shakespeare’s general interest in country sports is that of fishing and angling—too slow for that busy, hasty man. (213)

Many more rivers were salmon rivers then—the Trent, for example, famous for its salmon. (213)

…the Thames was a first-class salmon river. …Nene and Welland had plenty of pike, roach, tench, eels. [V. C. H. Northhamptonshire, II. 377] (213)

The best account of fishing, fisheries and angling is again Carew’s, for he was an enthusiastic angler, and Elizabethan Isaac Walton. (213)

‘The seal is in making and growth not unlike a pig, ugly-faced, and footed like a mold-warp [mole]. He delighteth in music or any loud noise, and thereby is trained [drawn] to approach near the shore and to show himself almost wholly above water. They also come on land and lie sleeping in holes of the cliff, but are now and then waked with the deadly greeting of a bullet in their sides.’ [R. Carew, The Survey of Cornwall (ed. 1769), 68 foll.] (214)

Cockfighting must have existed from early times, but it received royal recognition from Henry VIII and a great extension in his daughter’s reign. … Cockfighting was an entirely masculine diversion and Elizabeth never patronized it; … (214)

Bull-baiting must have been a prehistoric sport, to judge from the evidences of Crete and Lascaux; … Bear-baiting was a more recent sport, at least it much increased in our period, for numerous bears were imported for the purpose. (215)

The sport [bear-baiting] began to flourish there in the latter part of Henry’s reign, and to be disapproved of by more sensitive puritanical spirits, like Crowly. (218)

In 1590 there were kept at the Bear Garden three bulls, five big bears and four others, over a hundred dogs, a horse and the ape that provided regular amusement by riding horseback to round off the entertainment. Visitors from abroad found this very funny to see the ape clinging to the pony, shrieking and grimacing at the dogs yelping at them. Perhaps it was. … And when Dekker writes that ‘a company of creatures that had the shapes of men and faces of Christians took the office of beadles upon them, and whipped Monsieur Hunks till the blood ran down his old shoulders’, one’s sympathies are all with the Puritans. There is the barbarism of the age—our own has been worse; for such is l’homme moyen sensual. / Nevertheless, these spectacles were considered proper entertainments for visiting notabilities. At the beginning of her reign the Queen provided one such for the French ambassador, and next day he crossed the Thames [218] to the Bear Garden for another. At the end of her reign, in Maytime 1600, we hear from Court: ‘her Majesty is very well. This day she appoints to see a Frenchman do feasts upon a rope in the Conduit Court. Tomorrow she hath commanded the bears, the bulls, and the ape, to be baited in the Tiltyard. Upon Wednesday she will have solemn dancing.’ [A. Collins, ed. Sidney Papers, II. 194] … As for bear-baiting about the country, at fair-time and feasts, or upon no particular occasion at all, references in town-records are so frequent as not to be worth specifying. (218-219)

Bloodhounds were in special use on the Borders for tracking down cattle-stealers. (219)

…lapdogs, which Caius could not abide; though no Protestant—he was in fact a crypto-Catholic—he turns quite moralistic on the subject. ‘These puppies, the smaller they be the more pleasure they provoke, as [219] more meet play-fellows for mincing mistresses to bear the bosoms, to keep company withal in their chambers, to succour with sleep in bed, to lay in their laps, and lick their lips as they ride in their wagons.’ (We notice how much addicted to alliteration the poet Fleming was.) Their only use was ‘to succour and strengthen quailing and quamning stomachs, to bewray [discover] badwry, and filthy abominable lewdness’—and Caius cites a classical instance. / [Reprinted at the end of The Works of John Caius, ed. E. S. Roberts. 38] Caius… He informs us that in England the shepherd followed the sheep, unlike everywhere else, where the shepherd led his flock. (219-220)

…the slow pace of agricultural labour, the ebb and flow of seasons and weather, the numerous saints’ days and holidays—including Sunday, which was pre-eminently the day for sports (hence the fuss made by the Puritans)—gave far more opportunity for games and sports to the people at large than we might suppose. (221)

In winter there was stark naked footracing over the ice, with hundreds of spectators—nor was Derbyshire the only county; it must have been a North Country sport, where there was ice in winter. (222)

More sophisticated games, as with horsemanship and falconry, came in from abroad, in particular tennis, introduced from France. (222)

The reverberating quarrel between Sir Philip Sidney and the Earl of Oxford, that was the beginning of the latter’s fall from favour, took place on the tennis court. It led to a challenge, though the Queen forbade a duel and Sidney withdrew to the country. And while Southampton’s recently wedded wife was giving birth to a child, the father was losing large sums at tennis-play in Paris. [Cf. my Shakespeare’s Southampton, 127] It was obviously a very grand game, only for grandees. (223)

‘Common bowling alleys are privy moths that eat up the credit of many idle citizens, whose gains at home are not able to weigh down their losses abroad; whose shops are so far from maintaining their play that their wives and children cry out for bread. [q. Sieveking, loc. Cit., II. 465] (223)

Roger Ashcam’s Toxophilus, which was written to please Henry VIII—and did. It is not without significance that this admirable example of Tudor prose should have been accomplished by the second Greek scholar of his day. (223)

There was the backwardness of the sixteenth-century English as against the Continent: they remained wedded to their old sword-and-buckler style of combat, … They put up a strong opposition to the new ideas of swordplay coming out of Italy. … the Italians were developing the elegant, controlled art of fencing, with its rules and terms, its finish like any other art. Along with it developed the rapier, a narrower and lighter weapon than the old broadsword, but with a long range, and in place of buckler a parrying dagger in the left hand. … With this came the rise of the duel, as against medieval wagers of battle. / In Italy the masters of fencing were gentlemen, on some equality with their clients; in England they were rather unsavoury plebians. It was something of a social solecism that in order to meet what was an aristocratic punctilio, a point of honour, a gallant had had to resort to a low-class fencing master. Henry VIII came to the rescue once more, or at any rate imposed rules and regulations by granting a recognized status to the London Masters of Defence in 1540. [J. D. Aylward, The English Master of Arms, 18, 26.] [224] … Sword-and-buckler play was a national game; had not the champion John Peeke of Tavistock defeated three Spaniards with rapier-and-dagger in the presence of the Duke of Medina Sidonia at Xerxes? Why forsake old tried weapons, which had answered so well, for foreign innovations? [225] … ‘The rapier was decidedly a foreigner; … Its phraseology had a quaint, rich, southern smack, which connoted outlandish experience and gave those conversant with its intricate distinctions that marvelous character, which was so highly appreciated by the cavalier youth of the time. The rapier in its heyday was admirable weapon to look at, a delicious one to wield. And besides, in proper hands, it was undoubtedly one that was most conclusive. It was, in short, as elegant and deadly as its predecessors were sturdy and brutal.’ [Encyclopedia Britannica, loc. cit.] … Gentlemen at Court adopted the rapier and the new style; thence they spread outward and downward. … Stow tells us that the monopoly of old English sword-and-buckler came to an end about the time of the decisive crisis of the reign, 1569-72. (224-226)

…the development of the duel also expressed the changed manners and time of the time. …In seventeenth-century France it [dueling] was not merely a fashion, but a mania: not all the authority of Richelieu could put a stop to it. / In England both Elizabeth and James I tried valiantly to discourage the nuisance, and in this country it never quite reached the dimensions of a social disease. (227)

…Jonson’s Captain Bobadill, from whom Shakespeare got the hint for Parolles. Here are the latter’s words saying farewell to the young men going to the wars: ‘noble heroes, my sword and yours are kin. Good sparks and lustrous—a word, good metals. You shall find in the regiment of the Spinii one Captain with his cicatrice, an emblem of war. Say to him I live.’ What asses such men were! The wise and skeptical Montaigne, as translated by Florio, says the last word on the subject: ‘the reputation and worth of a man consisteth in his heart and will; therein consists true honour.’ [Sieveking, loc. cit., II. 406] (228)

Lord Grey pursued Southampton... [228] …the Queen imposed her direct prohibition upon their fighting, ‘as noblemen of valour who are fit to reserve yourselves for her Majesty’s service, and not to hazard them upon private quarrels.’ [Salisbury Mss., X. 262] (228-229)

…we shall see operating, as the result of the Reformation, a kind of rationalizing campaign on the part of Reformers and Puritans against the proliferations of the unconscious, the superfluities and elaborations of belief—they called them ‘superstitions,’ unaware that their own were no less so: an instinctive campaign against the instinctual, often absurd enough on both sides. No doubt it meant some progress in rationalization; at the same time it involved a certain impoverishment of the life of the unconscious, deliberate restrictions upon its free movement, in part direction in accordance with the (not wholly) rational will. Nevertheless no absolute contraction in the life of the spirit occurred—as in our dominantly secular, scientific society, with the consequent drying up of inspiration for the arts. For the blissful interval between the Elizabethan Settlement and the Civil War and optimum balance seems to have been struck: hence its astonishing cultural achievement. (231)

It is well known that sixteenth-century school-masters were brutal in the treatment of their boys, but it is less well known that there was an instinctive belief that beating drove knowledge into the boys—really a case of sympathetic magic. (232)

[Christmas] There was much bell-ringing—to which Puritans objected: with more reason than we appreciate, for bells were thought to keep spirits and storms away, apart from exciting people as they did (and still can do). The old custom had been to ring the church bells all night on All Hallow’s eve: it benefited souls in purgatory. Suppressed by Henry VIII, it was revived under Mary; under Elizabeth there was an Injunction against over-much bell-ringing, but the custom continued, to fall only gradually into disuse. In its way, a nice epitome of the course things took. (233)

Folklore and folk-custom are richer, fuller and more tenacious in the Highland Zone of Britain, i.e. roughly north and west of a line from Newcastle to Exeter, as against the Anglo-Saxon South, East and Midlands. (233)

Elizabethans, characteristically, engaged in a horrid sport at this time: tying cocks by a length of cord to a stake, pelting them with sticks, and appreciating the agility with which the poor creatures learned to evade the missiles, if they survived. Such was the barbarism of the people; such are humans. In this context one can understand better the torture, executions, burnings, hangings and quarterings of the time (not that the Germans have been any better in ours). Even so, after the dreadful inhumanity of Henry VIII and Mary, Elizabeth’s reign provided a notable example of lenity, until the crisis of the war with Spain. (234)

Good Friday was a favourite day for witches’ conferences or ‘sabbaths.’ Miners would not go down the mines on Good Friday or Christmas Day; this occasioned some surprise in Jeffersonian America, when Cornish miners carried their old custom over there. (234)

Easter… Many people got up at dawn to see the sun dance for joy at our Saviour’s birth—quite unaware, of course, that they were taking part in something far more ancient and, unbeknownst to themselves, in sun-worship. In the next century Suckling could still write of a pretty girl: And, O, she dances such a way,/ No sun upon an Easter day/ Were half so fine a sight. (235)

A fortnight after Easter came Hock-tide, the origin of which is obscure; it was a time for collecting money for repairs to the church, the universal symbol of the unity of the communal life. There were sports and wrestling—the Elizabethan phrases, ‘a Cornish hug,’ ‘a Cornish fall,’ show how much wrestling was associated with Cornishmen in the popular mind. (236)

Mayday and the eve of Mayday was a time of rejoicing and excitement everywhere, as innumerable evidences remind us. (237)

Whitsun, as we have seen, was the principal time for church-ales, plays and pastorals; … (237)

Midsummer eve saw the lighting of fires all over the country: bonfires, or bona-fires, since they originally consumed bones. These relics of fire-worship are, of course, immensely older than Christianity and continued in fullest force in Celtic areas like Ireland, where women still leap the fire, or in Cornwall where the fires are at least still lit. In many parts it was the custom to watch all night in the church-porch, where the spirits of the neighbours were seen to enter at midnight: those who came out again would marry in the year, those who remained within would die. Divination was practiced at several proper seasons—Easter, among others—for maids to discover, by the curdling of egg-yolk in water etc., whom they would marry or at least their lovers. At Midsummer the proper means of divination was by the sowing of hempseed. (238)

…the remembrance of the departed with All Saints and All Souls, I November and 2 November. For this, in addition to all the bell-ringing and tolling, special soul-cakes were baked—no doubt originally for the dead. In Lancashire and Cheshire where the custom of ‘souling’ still lingers on, the cakes are given to the children who come round singing; in Cheshire the traditional Soul-caking Play has been revived. (239)

It was the regular thing to baptize infants within a few days of birth; this was rationalized as necessary to prevent the infant soul from going to Hell. Even such an intelligent man as Archbishop Whitgift thought that this nonsense thought that this nonsense was probably true. [J. F. H. New, Anglican and Puritan, 65] But the real explanation lies in folk-belief: ‘a baby before baptism and a mother before churching were in constant peril from evil spirits, witches and fairies, and every precaution had to be taken to protect them, both at the time, and before and afterwards.’ [C. Hole, English Folklore, op. cit., 3.] It is extraordinary to think that the churching of women, i.e. their purification after child-birth—as if having children, which may well be regarded as an inconvenience, were in itself sinful—still continues in various parts and has a service provided for it in the Book of Common Prayer. But human idiocy is endless and irremediable—the real original sin. (239)

Around the coasts it was thought the birth took place as the tide came in, and life ebbed with the tide—one sees the sympathetic magic in it, the power of analogy in primitive minds, the inability to think straight, except, of course, in relation to work or tools, handicrafts or technique (to which most people’s ‘thinking’ is confined). … One might be in darkest Africa. (240)

Carrying the bride over the threshold was a relic of marriage by capture; … (241)

…the throwing of rice, or of cake at the bride’s return from church in earlier days in Yorkshire, is a fertility charm. (241)

Evidences remain from every county as to the prevalence of child-marriage, not infrequently of infants carried in arms to be married for property considerations, to assure one or other a livelihood. The custom was that, if later the marriage was consummated, it held good; if not consummated and the children grew up to refuse each other, then divorce was possible on ground of nullity. (241)

By the end of the medieval period a vast non-productive expenditure had been built upon hundreds of chantries and thousands of masses for the souls of the dead, trentals and quintals and hundreds of masses for such a soul as Henry VIII—all sheer waste. The Dissolution of the Chantries was an effective step in the more economic re-deployment of so much wealth, … The Protestant denial of the doctrine of purgatory was a blow to the age-long, primitive belief that departed spirits, wherever they were, could be helped or [243] … profited. The folklore belief could not be entirely eliminated, and in remoter parts of the country, especially in the North Country, prayers for the dead long continued. (243-244)

Even for the middle and yeoman classes the funeral feasts, or ‘baked meats’ as we still the phrase, were a considerable time. So, too, were the payments for tolling and knelling. In the Elizabethan age the bell was tolled at a person’s passing, the ‘passing bell’; there was also the funeral knell. Altogether, an Elizabethan city was clamorous with the ringing of bells of all kinds—one may get some idea of it still from living in the centre of Oxford in term-time. Shakespeare has frequent reference to bells—understandably, since they were a constant accompaniment of contemporary life. He several times speaks of the passing bell as ‘sullen’: it was usually the heaviest tenor-bell that was thus rung: … (244)

…the original purpose of the death-[244]knell was to protect the passing soul from the assault of demons. (244-245)

There were also bells for waking up the parish in the morning and sending it to be at night, to send the harvesters out into the fields and bring them home in the evening. (245)

The turning point in the art of bell-ringing came around 1600 with the invention of the whole wheel, which enabled the bells to be swung right round and yield their maximum sound. [T. Ingram, Bells in England, 8] Medieval bells were taller and heavier, but far fewer, and must have jangled like continental bells. (245)

Wells did not altogether lose their healing properties at the Reformation. In 1600 a new-found well in Delamere Forest in Cheshire became suddenly famous for its cures. [C. Hole, Traditions and Customs of Cheshire, 65-6, 69] Many people visited it, some to drink the water, some to wash in it. It cured ague—of which John Greenway and his three sons were all rid—sore eyes, blindness, rupture, gout, ‘aches and griefs in the joints,’ lameness, wild-fire (erysipelas) and deafness. On 2 August 1600 William Johnson came to the spring on crutches and walked home unaided, leaving his crutches on the holly-tree—note that it was a holly-tree—as a thank-offering for his cure. Many others also benefitted: no need to go to Lourdes. (247)

Calvin considered dancing ‘the chief mischief of all mischiefs … there be such unchaste gestures in it as are nothing else but enticements to whoredom.’ (248)

The simplest forms of country dances were ‘rounds,’ the dancers forming a circle; … (249)

Dancing inspired not only music but also literature; the ballad was closely wedded to the dance, broadside were sung, and Sir John Davies wrote a fine philosophical poem on dancing, Orchestra. (250)

Counting out scores—eena, meena, mina, mo—are connected with the Celtic numerals: shepherds in the mountains of Cumberland counted their sheep thus up into the nineteenth century. (251)

‘Hush-a-bye, baby, on the tree top,’ probably goes back to the sixteenth century—Elizabethans said ‘babby.’ (252)

‘Thirty days hath September,/ April, June and November’—our way of remembering it is the same as Shakespeare’s: it is cited by several Elizabethan writers. (252)

…the hare, most ominous of animals. Witches turned themselves into hares; it was very unlucky for a pregnant woman to catch sight of a hare: hence hare-lip in her child. (253)

Did Shakespeare believe in his ghosts? The question has been often debated in regard to Hamlet. It is probable that, as a man of his time, he did; we may be certain that his audience did. (256)

Hardly anyone disbelieved in the existence of witches, certainly not even the unfortunate creatures themselves: to do so was in itself atheistical, according to Sir Thomas Browne. … They were usually, though not always, female and they fell into two main classes. There were white witches, whose works were thought to be beneficent and to whom people resorted for cures or help of various kinds, such as to find lost objects. Then there were those that trafficked with the powers of evil, dealt in ill-wishing people, bringing misfortune upon them or their cattle, caused people to fall ill or die, tormented them by sticking pins into the wax images of those they had a grudge against, or by various acts caused them to waste away. They could control winds and raise storms on land or at sea. … People recognized that the familiars of a witch were a cat, sometimes a hare or a toad: all creature with their own mysterious night-life. Witches flew by night, could transport themselves on a broomstick (the Freudian symbol is obvious), and could change themselves into another shape. (256)

In the sixteenth century… everybody believed, to a greater or lesser extent, in the stars. … We still speak of our ‘lucky stars,’ ... (258)

Astrology as a system—we must not call it a science—achieved sophisticated form, and was debated as such, primarily by the Italians of the Renaissance. They come first in every field: other Continental, and then English, writers depend upon their formal treatises for arguments for and against. In the end, the English but recapitulate the discussion, though giving it their own character, at once less esoteric and more popular, overwhelming in the vernacular. [D. C. Allen, The Star-Crossed Renaissance, 143] We may take this as one more indication, where there are so many—notably the drama—of the greater integration of Elizabethan society. Miss E. M. Butler adds to this: ‘it is an extraordinary experience to follow the dark trail of ritual magic from the Continent (and notably from Germany) to England, and to find oneself escaping from puerility and squalor into poetry, fairy tales, and romance.’ [Salisbury Mss., XIII. 87. I have translated the passage from the original, idiosyncratic French.] She specifically contrasts the ‘pothouse odour’ of the German Faust with spirits like Ariel and Puck. But this is by no means the whole story. (260)

Dr. Dee, the learned mathematician—in popular parlance this was often equivalent to magician—defined astrology as ‘an art mathematical,… (260)

To the Elizabethan mind it was unreasonable to suppose that there were no planetary or celestial influence upon men, since so much of the vegetable growth on the earth visibly in the tides. It was sometimes debated whether astrology should be banned from a well-ordered community—More had banned it from Utopia—as it was before the Queen on 23 September 1592; but this was an academic disputation, and in fact no-one could do without it in some shape or form. / Certainly not the Queen. The horoscope for the most propitious day for her coronation had been cast by Dr. Dee—and nobody could say that that had not been successful. Her attitude is expressed in a personal letter of reproach to Mary Stuart in 1568 for her changeableness (Elizabeth thought of herself as constant, semper eadem): ‘if it were not that I consider that by nature we are composed of earthly elements and governed by heavenly, and that I am not ignorant that our dispositions are caused [260] in part by supernatural signs, which change everyday, I could not believe that in so short a time such a change could take place.’ [Salisbury Mss. XIII. 87. I have translated the passage from the original, idiosyncratic French.]

People then had so much more need of the stars, when they depended upon them to indicate the time by night, as the sun by day. Here is Shakespeare’s carrier in the inn-yard at Rochester: ‘Heigh-ho! An it be not four by the day, I’ll be hanged: Charles’s wain [i.e. the Great Bear] is over the new chimney, and yet our horse not packed.’ (261)

Astrology was held necessary in medicine, when the humours were affected by particular planets, especially in surgery where different parts of the body were under different influences. So too in agriculture; … (261)

[Lear:] Edmund says that in his own character: we are not to accept it as necessarily Shakespeare’s view. As so often, he expressed every point of view on a subject, as becomes the dramatist. All the same we can observe him expressing the regular opinions of the time, normal, moderate, representative. (262)

Calvin…disapproved of any art by which man tried to learn what God did not wish him to know; it revealed a lack of trust in God, i.e. Calvin writ large. Would that man who thought himself bound by the necessity of his horoscope ever call upon God, or would he impute adversity to his own sins? Astrology enabled men to [264] blame their stars, instead of their sins: it was a detraction from man’s free will. Predestination was in order theologically, but not astrologically: … (264-265)

Naturally the popular Stubbes agreed with Calvin: the stars do not cause men’s dispositions but merely incline the soul. ‘Indeed I confess they have effects and operations, but yet are they not the efficient causes of anything good or bad. [q. C. Camden, ‘Astrology in Shakespeare’s Day,’ Isis, vol. 19,26 foll.]

The argument proceeded in nonsense-terms on both sides, the arguments against astrology being as puerile as those for it. Astrologers worked on the basis of too few stars, not all those visible, let alone those invisible. (265)

Nevertheless the ‘wiser sort’ did not always exemplify it, and in our own day Hitler had his astrologer, … (268)

Lord Keynes was naively excited—as no historian would be—by his realization of the magus element in Isaac Newton; [16]

Even the forward-looking Bacon, who thought horoscopes an idle invention, belief in nativities and the hour of birth silly, was more favour-able to astrology than might have been expected and thought that there was a future for it. He agreed with Ptolemy that astral influence was general rather than particular, and that the heavenly bodies did not affect all kinds of bodies, ‘but only the more tender, such as humours, air, and spirit. Here, however, the operations of the heat of the sun and heavenly bodies must be expected, which doubtless penetrates both to [273] metals and to a great number of subterraneous bodies.’ He also considered that these influences operated over large spaces of time, not small pin-points. He concluded that ‘the celestial bodies have in them certain other influences besides heat and light: what very influences however act by those rules laid down above and not otherwise. But these lie concealed in the depths of physics.’ [D. C. Allen, The Star-Crossed Renaissance, 151] Bacon therefore envisaged a reformed astrology, which might lead to more reliable predictions, and not only of natural phenomena—floods, droughts, earthquakes—but also of revolutions, wars, civil commotions, migrations of peoples (as of birds). All this sprang from Bacon’s immense optimism as to the future extension of knowledge. We may perhaps concluded that, with the best minds of the age, ‘the influence of the planets was as one with that of fate and fortune.’ (274)

Nathaniel Torporley, … after Gunpowder Plot in 1605. … cast the King’s nativity for Hariot. [274] … He did not know what use Hariot made of the horoscope, himself made no judgment upon it. No doubt this was deemed harmless enough. Shortly after, Shakespeare was writing Macbeth, with the witches’ enticement by prophecy to Macbeth to take the crown. (275)

The most famous ‘prophecies’ were those of Nostradamus, a French Jew, who was the favourite astrologer of Catherine de Medici and her son Charles IX—the brilliant Valois Court was feverish with astrological and other excitements, sexual and murderous. … We may justly say that Elizabeth’s Court was much less emotionne about this kind of thing than the Valois’, and that the English mentality on the whole was less explosive than the Continental. / The English, however, had their excitements. In spite of the disappointing effects of the Nova of 1572 (in England, for the events of that year were all too exciting in France), people began to be worked up about the approaching conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in 1583. (275)

By 1600 the annual almanac ‘had taken a fixed shape, which continued with very slight variations during the next two centuries.’ [T. Buckmaster, An Almanack and Prognostication and Prognostication for the Year 1598, Shakespeare Association Facsimile, No. 8, Intro. v.] It contained the ecclesiastical calendar, with saints’ days, and days of proper observance; juxtaposed were the conjunctions and oppositions of sun and moon, with the rules for movable feasts. Then there were those for bloodletting, bathing, and purging, with a figure of man’s anatomy, the signs of the zodiac on the body for guidance. There followed the prognostication, which foretold the weather and what to expect in the way of events, how to hold oneself in regard to them, with useful warnings, directions in regard to sowing, harvest, etc. In short, these works were indispensible, as the mechanics in A Midsummer Night’s Dream show:
Snug, the joiner: Doth the moon shine that night we play our play?
Bottom, the weaver: A calendar! a calendar! Look in the almanac; find out moonshine, find out moonshine!
Quince, the carpenter: Yes, it doth shine that night.
Since almanacs were so indispensible, and many of them were issued earlier in the reign with unsettling predictions of disaster, the government brought them under control. In 1571, a time of some crisis, the printers Watkins and Roberts were given a monopoly of issuing annual almanacs and prognostications; this continued until 1603, when the patent was taken over by the Stationers’ Company. [T. Buckmaster, An Almanack and Prognostication for the Year 1598, Shakespeare Association, Facsimile, No. 8, Intro. vi.] (277)

Dr. Dee had left an immense mass of materials, mainly in manuscript, from which it is possible to portray him more fully than almost any Elizabethan—here we can only give it brief attention. But where nearly all Elizabethan diaries are extrovert, confined to external events, Dee’s takes us into the interior of his mind and heart. … [278] Dee’s maniacal desire for knowledge. Dee was really the English Faust. (278-280)

Emperor Rudolph II … With the ambivalent talents of the homosexual, Rudolph himself was a mathematician, much interested in astrology and experience both sensory and extrasensory. At this time he had the astronomer Tycho Brahe in residence there, and a number of English enjoyed the delights of the capital he built, including a youth known as Anton von Rumpf. (280)

Every parish had its ‘cunning women,’ its ‘white witches’, good as well as bad; it is fairly certain that the good immensely outnumbered the evil ones. When the communion that the good immensely outnumbered the evil ones. When the communion cloth was lost from the village church of Thatcham in Berkshire, the churchwardens went to ‘the cunning woman’ of Burfield to find it for them. [G. L Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England, 197-8] … Many such old crones were mid-wives and in the absence of doctors (apt to be more lethal) effected cures with herbs. (284)

…an immensely greater number of people were condemned to death for stealing a sheep, cutting a purse, to such offences. (284)

H. C. Lea, whose collections form the basis for a recent excited view of the subject, thought that some 90,000 persons had been executed as witches in England over the whole period while the statutes were in force; a reliable modern estimate is something less than one thousand in the course of two centuries. Evidently Lea had no critical sense whatever, cannot have known what a figure meant; and those who accept contemporary Continental figures for the burnings of witches abroad are no less naïve—one should know that in history earlier statistics are almost always unreliable. [footnote: H. R. Trevor-Roper, in ‘The European Witch-Craze of the 16th and 17th Centuries’, Religion, the Reformation and Social Change, 162, after telling us on p. 99 that Lea’s ‘History of Witchcraft’, ‘had it been written, would no doubt have stood as firm’—as his work on the Inquisition (‘it is inconceivable that this work on the Inquisition, as an objective narrative of fact, will ever be replaced’) on p. 162 tells us that ‘C. L. Ewen’s careful study of the records of the Home Circuit has discredited all such wild guesses.’ Precisely; but Professor Trevor-Roper does not seem to have noticed the contradiction. I suspect that his naïve acceptance of contemporary Continental figures is equally mistaken.] (286)

‘Witchcraft trials were sufficiently unusual events to excite the interest of the reading public,’ and so our evidence of them comes mainly from tracts the news-sheets. [C. L. Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism, 7.] The truth is that such outbreaks were sporadic and marginal to English society; a subtler understanding of it should indicate that they were very local, depending on chance conjunctions of people given to hysteria, usually young females or children, taking against old crones in their neighboruhood, with persons disposed to religious excitement and inclined to be persecutors. … There are whole areas of the country, perhaps even most of it, where one never hears of a case, however intimately one may be acquainted with its local history during the period. … So there was no unilateral increase of witch-hunting in England marching forward to a culmination during the Commonwealth. Kittredge tells us ‘the plain and simple truth is this: during the twenty-two years of James’s reign there was no more excitement on the subject of witchcraft, and there were no more executions, than under the last twenty-two of Elizabeth. James’s accession was not in any sense the signal for an out-[286]burst of prosecution. The first bad year was 1612, when he had been on the thrown for almost a decade.’ (286-287)

People suspected of being evil-doing witches were almost always those who deviated from expected social norms: rebarbative old women with secondary male characteristics, people with unusual birth marks upon them, solitary and poverty-stricken persons with a psychosis and a scunner against society. Many such people at any time would like to get their own back for what they suffer, would do harm to others if they could; … Witches were almost always poor, lower-class people, sometimes desperate with poverty or bitter dependence. The theory of witchcraft had been built up by educated persons, usually theologians or at least clerics. (287)

On the other side, there was little understanding of the causes of disease, especially of mental disease, melancholia, the manic-depressive temperament, neurosis, psychosis—though intelligent Elizabethans were beginning to appreciate hysteria for what it was. Similarly with tuberculosis, or internal ulcers, or cancer. When people ‘pined away’, without visible cause, it was often put down to being bewitched or ill-wished. (288)

Differences are observable: in England witches convicted of the death of a person might be hanged, as with a murderer, but this was by due process of law, not by the fiat of German princelings or the systematic and relentless pursuit of inquisitors, who burned them in scores. Moreover, witches’ Sabbaths, the gatherings of hundreds of such ghouls for their infernal purposes, which were so widely believed in on the Continent, simply did not exist in England, much more moderate in this as in regard also to torture. Ewen tells us that, from the records of the courts, ‘in the Home Circuit the chance of a witch suffering the death penalty, when arraigned before the regular justices, was small, eighty-one out of every hundred escaping the rope.’ [C. L. Ewen, Witch Hunting and Witch Trials, 31] He goes on to say that the proportion increased severely during the [288] decade 1598-1607; but again one must remember that there were many cases of convicted witches being reprieved, while a sentence to imprisonment for any offence was dangerous enough, the conditions of prisons being so unhealthy and mortality so high in them. (287-288)

Robert Throckmorton’s girls took to having fits—it was a way of drawing attention to themselves—and they took against a poor ill-favoured neighbour, Mother Samuel, who came to the house to work. They insisted that they were bewitched by her, and could not bear the sight of her; when she kept away they had fits again and demanded that they must see her. The poor woman put their behaviour down to pure ‘wantonness’; but so many good people, Cambridge dons, clergyman and uncles, took such an interest in their condition that they were encouraged to carry on. ‘Such were the heavenly and divine speeches of the children in their fits to this old woman… as that, if a man had heard it, he would not have thought himself better edified at ten sermons.’ [W. Notestein, A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718, 44. For Brian Darcy’s activity, v. Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism, 47-51] These young creatures were evidently spoiled, and would have been better for a sound thrashing. The old woman was compelled to live in the house and witness [289] this ill behaviour; she was harried to and fro, experimented upon, tormented to confess, grew ill and sleepless, until she began to believe that she was to blame. ‘O, sir, I have been the cause of all this trouble to your children.’ That was enough—but fortunately nothing worse happened to the little miscreants. They were the centre of attention and received much sympathy. Visited by their uncle, Henry Pickering, from Christ’s (a Puritanical college at Cambridge, home of the vociferous Perkins), who brought several scholars to view them, he told the much-persecuted woman that ‘there was no way to prevent the judgments of God but by her confession and repentance: which, if she did not in time, he hoped one day to see her burned at a stake; he himself would bring fire and wood, and the children should blow the coals.’ [G. L. Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England, 304] This kindly man became a parson in Northamptonshire, and grandfather of Dryden. / What settled Mother Samuel’s fate was that Lady Cromwell crossed her path. ‘This was the second wife of Oliver Cromwell’s grandfather, a neurotic invalid who took much interest in the condition of the Throckmorton girls, and reproaching Mother Samuel one day, received ill words from her. Returning home, Lady Cromwell worsened, began to have dreams of the witch and her cat—and when, after a year, her ladyship died, Mother Samuel was at last brought to book. Harried by the Justices and the rector—several of these were the girls’ uncles—scratched by the women and children to make the blood come out of her, driven from pillar to post, she at length was convinced that she was responsible for Lady Cromwell’s death. This, of course, was equivalent to murder; she was arraigned, with husband and daughter for complicity. The daughter was made to repeat, ‘as I am a witch and consenting to the death of Lady Cromwell, I charge thee, Come out of her.’ The devil came out, and the children recovered from their fits. Everybody was convinced, including the poor husband; in April 1593 all three were hanged, mother, father and daughter. Such was the celebrated Warboys affair. (289-290)

[70] ‘the word of God doth plainly show that there be witches,’ and, since the word of God said so, proved witches must be put to death. To doubt this was atheism. There were people who actually believed that there were no witches, but this was disapproved by the confession of the witches themselves. (291)

In 1584 there appeared a work intellectually far superior to anything else on the subject in the whole discreditable course it ran: Reginald Scott’s The Discovery of Witchcraft. [Republished in 1930, with Intro. by Montague Summers. The title page of this book spells him Scot, but he was one of the well-known Kent family of Scotts of Scott Hall.] Among the prose works of the [291] age it may be rated as a great book: I cannot think that those who mention it in passing can have read it—it is a long book—or they would have perceived Scott’s passionate indignation at the barbarous cruelty unleashed by this obsession, his compassion for the poor creatures that suffered, his complete understanding of their hysteria, the delusions they had in common with their persecutors, the emptiness of the confessions extorted by torture, mental or physical, … Considering that he wrote his book thus early, in 1584, it is not an anachronism to condemn those people for the fools they were, when a humane and intelligent contemporary was able to see already that the whole thing was nonsense. / Though Scott had to doff his cap at the biblical warrant for the existence of witches—and was a religious man himself, a moderate Anglican—he obviously believed that they did not exist. He begins warily, in such an atmosphere, by questioning the physical impossibilities and miracles attributed to witches, showing up the absurdities imputed to them by papists—a shrewd tactical move—as by poets, and finally witchmongers. (291-292)

Scott … A number of people read him, including, it seems, Shakespeare, to whom his skeptical, humane and compassionate nature would be sympathetic. Scott’s indirect influence in creating a more civilized attitude may be more important—such as came about with Charles I and Laud, to the anger of the anger of the Puritans. His attitude of mind appealed in Holland, a civilized and comparatively tolerant country: in 1609 his book was translated into Dutch, at the request of the law and history faculties at Leyden. A second edition was called for in 1637. It was thus one of the few English books thought worthy of translation into a foreign language. Naturally, with the French attitude of cultural superiority, the most effective answer to Bodin was given no currency in that tongue. (295)