The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only) Read online

  CHRISTOPHER HIBBERT

  The English A Social History 1066–1945

  Dedication

  FOR KATE

  with love

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chronology of Reigns

  Prologue

  PART ONE The Middle Ages

  1 Castles, Lords and Chatelaines

  2 Cottagers and Peasants

  3 Plague and Revolt

  4 Churches, Monks and Friars

  5 Drinking and Playing

  6 Wayfarers and Pilgrims

  7 Tournaments, Pageants and Miracles

  8 Town Life

  9 Daughters and Wives

  10 Pupils and Masters

  11 Scholars and Students

  12 Crime and Punishment

  13 Doctors and Patients

  PART TWO The Ages of Shakespeare and Milton

  14 Villagers, Vagrants and Vagabonds

  15 Priests, Parishioners and Recusants

  16 Country Houses and Country People

  17 Animals and Sportsmen

  18 Readers and Music Makers

  19 Clothes and Class

  20 Citizens, Masters and Journeymen

  21 Women and Children

  22 Actors and Playgoers

  23 ‘Whole Counties Became Desperate’

  24 Schoolboys and Schoolgirls

  25 Undergraduates and Tutors

  26 ‘Roasted Chickens – Pease – Lobsters – Strawberries’

  PART THREE From Defoe to Cobbett

  27 ‘A Tour thro’ the Whole Island’

  28 Countrymen, Clergymen and Farmers

  29 Country Houses and Gardens

  30 Interiors

  31 Manners and Dress

  32 Travellers, Postmen and Innkeepers

  33 Hunters, Poachers and Smugglers

  34 Pastimes and Pleasures

  35 Marriage and Divorce

  36 Sex

  37 Theatres and Shows

  38 Quacks, Diseases and Cures

  39 Operators and Tooth-drawers

  40 ‘Youth are Expeditiously Instructed’

  41 Universities, Academies and the Grand Tour

  42 Masters and Workers

  43 Clothworkers and Machine-breakers

  44 Rick-burners, Paupers and Chartists

  45 Below Stairs

  46 Shops and Shopping

  47 Pedlars and Markets

  PART FOUR From the Victorians to Modern Times

  48 Owners of the Land

  49 Dressing, Smoking and Social Rank

  50 Workers on the Land

  51 Towns, Factories and Public Health

  52 Mines, Brickfields and Sweat-shops

  53 ‘No One Knows the Cruelty’

  54 Middle Classes and Class Distinctions

  55 Leisure Hours

  56 The Flesh and the Spirit

  57 Passengers and Drivers

  58 Law and Order

  59 Homes and Holidays

  60 Wars and Aftermaths

  References

  Sources

  Index of Names

  Index of Subjects

  Author’s Note

  A Note on Money

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chronology of Reigns

  Norman Kings

  William I 1066

  William II 1087

  Henry I 1100

  Stephen 1135

  House of Plantagenet

  Henry II 1154

  Richard I 1189

  John 1199

  Henry III 1216

  Edward I 1272

  Edward II 1307

  Edward III 1327

  Richard II 1377

  House of Lancaster

  Henry IV 1399

  Henry V 1413

  Henry VI 1422

  House of York

  Edward IV 1461

  Edward V 1483

  Richard III 1483

  House of Tudor

  Henry VII 1485

  Henry VIII 1509

  Edward VI 1547

  Mary I 1553

  Elizabeth I 1558

  House of Stuart

  James I 1603

  Charles I 1625

  The Commonwealth 1649–60

  House of Stuart (restored)

  Charles II 1660

  James II 1685

  William III and Mary II 1689

  Anne 1702

  House of Hanover

  George I 1714

  George II 1727

  George III 1760

  George IV 1820

  William IV 1830

  Victoria 1837

  House of Saxe-Coburg

  Edward VII 1901

  House of Windsor

  George V 1910

  Edward VIII 1936

  George VI 1936

  Elizabeth II 1952

  Prologue

  In his riverside palace outside London’s western gate the King of England lay dying. A pious man, known to history as Edward the Confessor, the great-great-great-great-grandson of Alfred the Great, he had no children to whom his crown might be bequeathed. And as soon as he had died four powerful men laid claim to it, two of them brothers of the queen, another the King of Norway. The fourth was Edward’s cousin, William, Duke of Normandy, whose claim was genealogically the strongest. But, ignoring Duke William’s rights, King Edward nominated his brother-in-law, Harold Godwinson, Earl of Essex, his successor; and on 6 January 1066, the very day that the Confessor was buried there, Harold had himself crowned in Westminster Abbey.

  Soon afterwards the queen’s other brother and the King of Norway invaded England. They were both defeated in battle in the north, and both killed. But, having led his tired soldiers south to face the Duke of Normandy whose knights had now also landed on the English coast, Harold was himself defeated and killed near Hastings. Thus William, Duke of Normandy, became King of England.

  Having conquered the country, however, his more difficult task was to hold it and to govern it. He did so with great skill. Within scarcely more than a generation of his victory more than 500 Norman castles had been built; royal officials, mostly churchmen, were administering the country efficiently; Saxon prelates had been gradually replaced by Normans; Norman French had become the language of the law; all land had passed by conquest into the hands of the crown and had been granted, in return for specified services, to tenants-in-chief, bishops, abbots and barons, who in turn had passed much of it on to tenants owing allegiance to them. By the time of William the Conqueror’s death in 1087 about half the cultivated land in the country was in the hands of tenants-in-chief, nearly all Norman or French; a quarter was in the hands of churchmen, only two of them Englishmen; most of the rest was held directly by the Crown. Subordinate to these great lords were the mass of the people, some two and a half million of them, speaking their different versions of English, a race apart.

  PART ONE

  The Middle Ages

  1 Castles, Lords and Chatelaines

  The castles to which the horsemen ride in the fourteenth-century poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, are like fairy palaces, with painted pinnacles and crenellations, cusped turrets and chalk-white chimneys, with ‘carven finials curiously chisel’d’ and ‘many a lovely casement that closed full clean’. The reality was very different. Most of the castles by which the Normans helped to establish their rule in England were built at first of wood. On some commanding site a deep ditch or moat was dug, the earth removed being thrown up to create a mound
or to increase the height of an existing hill upon which a timber tower was constructed. Around the tower above the ditch a palisade was made with felled trees whose ends were sharpened to points; and, enclosed by this palisade, at the foot of the mound, a large yard or bailey was formed with huts for the garrison, stables for horses, workshops, granaries and cattle-sheds. The bailey was usually entered by way of a drawbridge across the moat. This led to a gatehouse from the upper floors of which a portcullis could be lowered to keep out enemies and intruders.

  Gradually the palisades were replaced by curtain walls and the wooden structures by buildings of stone or of flint or rubble faced with stone. The walls of the tower or keep were immensely thick and pierced at intervals by windows which, very narrow at the bottom, might grow wider on the upper floors where they were more easily defended during times of siege or assault. The lower floor, where the castle’s well was dug, was usually used for the storage of food and military equipment and for dungeons; the guard room, chapel and the great hall were on the floor above; and, as castles became homes as well as fortresses, sleeping chambers were formed on the upper storeys and approached by circular staircases within the corner towers. These towers led on to the battlemented roof from which the castle guard could keep watch over the surrounding countryside. In some castles, as at Kenilworth, the staircase was on an outside wall and led to a well-protected door opening directly into the hall.

  By the beginning of the fourteenth century castles were no longer being built primarily for intimidation and defence, although a castellated appearance, complete with battlements, gatehouse and portcullis, was still imposed upon manor houses erected for great families, as it was to be upon sixteenth-century Oxford and Cambridge colleges and Victorian prisons. At the same time licences to crenellate were sought from the king by owners of existing manor houses who wished to strengthen and ornament them by building a tower and curtain wall and digging a moat as the owner of Stokesay in Shropshire had done at the end of the thirteenth century. Over 180 licences to crenellate were issued in the reign of Edward III from 1327 to 1377; but only sixty were granted in the next reign; and no more than seventeen in the first eighty years of the fifteenth century, towards the end of which brick walls began to replace stone as a favourite building material, it being recognized that thick stone walls were no protection against determined battering by heavy artillery and that to withstand a siege was far less conclusive than victory in a pitched battle beyond the castle walls. Nevertheless, both with new castles and those stark Norman keeps which were being developed into huge and rambling structures, their builders, bishops as well as lay lords, wished to present a formidable aspect to the world so as to reflect and emphasize their power and riches.1

  The larger of these castles covered extensive tracts of land – in Henry II’s time Windsor Castle extended over thirteen acres – and they comprised upper and lower baileys, inner and outer courtyards and numerous outhouses. The main stone buildings were often roofed with lead, and, looking down from the battlements, the guard would have seen an extraordinary variety of structures inside the long curtain wall. As well as stables and workshops, pigsties and byres, there were farrieries and dovecotes, kitchens and hen-coops, and perhaps a chapel in addition to the small one in the keep. Covered passages and corridors led to chambers set aside for guests who could not be accommodated elsewhere and to those series of rooms known collectively as the wardrobe in which clothes were kept and tailored and valuable household stores, including expensive spices, were kept in locked chests with jewels and plate.2

  Most Norman halls, like most early Norman castles, were of wood; but some, like that at Oakham in Leicestershire, were of stone and have survived. Oakham’s hall was built in about 1190 by the rich Walkelin de Ferrers. Although exceptional in its finely carved stonework, its design was common to most halls of the period. Since builders could not at that time roof a wide span, it was constructed like a church with a nave and two side aisles. Light came from small windows in the walls of the aisles; warmth from a fire burning in a central hearth such as the one which can still be seen at Penshurst Place in Kent, wall chimneys being virtually unknown until the fourteenth century. In one of the gable walls three doors led respectively to the buttery, where the yeoman of the buttery served out bread, the pantry, where the yeoman of the pantry issued candles and beef, and the kitchen which, like that preserved at Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire, was a building detached from the hall because of the dangers of fire.

  The smoke from the hall fire escaped through a hole in the roof which was fitted by the thirteenth century with a pottery louvre; and, so as to prevent the smoke from blowing about the hall when the doors were opened, screens, at first movable and later fixed, were placed in front of them. Over the passage formed by the fixed screen a gallery might be built so that minstrels could play their pipes and tabors while the lord had his dinner at a table on a raised platform at the other end of the hall, the walls of which were covered with paintings and hung with tapestries. Below him sat the members of his household. They sat at trestle tables in the main body of the hall, the floor of which was more often of rammed earth than of stone and was so littered with scraps of food as well as with straw and rushes that it was commonly referred to as ‘the marsh’. As late as the 1520s Erasmus described such floors as being ‘usually of clay, strewed with rushes under which lie unmolested an ancient collection of beer, grease, fragments, bones, spittle, excrements of dogs and cats, and everything that is nasty’.3

  Whatever the state of the marsh, dinner in a great man’s hall was a formal occasion, announced by ‘blowynges and pipynges’ and conducted with due ceremony. It was generally eaten before noon, supper being served at about four o’clock in the afternoon. Two meals a day were then considered ‘suffycyent for a rest man’, though a ‘laborer may eate three tymes a day’: ‘he that eate often lyveth a beestly lyfe’.

  First, cloths were drawn over the tables, then spoons and cups or tankards laid out. Utensils were usually of earthenware or wood, pewter being rare until the fifteenth century; but on side tables or cupboards there would be displays of gold and silver, of bowls and dishes and ornamental pieces to demonstrate the lord’s riches.

  From the kitchen beyond the hall, where cooks had sweated by the heat of the roaring fires, and scullions, in dirty rags if not entirely naked, had turned the handles of the spits and washed up urgently-needed pots and pans, the food was carried across the courtyard or along the covered passage to the door which led into the hall by the screens’ passage. Then the door, the centre one of the three opposite the lord’s dais and larger than the doors on either side, would open and, as in the hall into which ‘the largest man alive’ rides unannounced in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:

  Then comes the first course with loud trumpets’ blare,

  (Those golden reeds which painted banners bear)

  The noble pipes, the little kettles sound,

  Wild warbles wakening startle the clear air

  Till the heart leaps for joy, and all around,

  Grave seneschals direct bright platters overground

  So plenteously ’twere hard to set arights

  One silver dish the more, clean upon cloth,

  Fresh food was there, abundance of delights,

  To each twain dishes twelve and, nothing loth,

  Goblets of beer and of the bright wine both.4

  The procession of servants bearing food was led by the marshal of the hall, carrying a white staff, or, on the occasions of the grandest banquets, by a household officer on horseback. The procession approached the lord’s table which usually stood beneath a canopy. And, after the lord and his family had been served, dishes were carried to the table where the gentlemen of the household sat with the steward, then to those tables where the lesser servants sat, presided over by the marshal of the hall and the clerk of the kitchen. The food was served on trenchers, thick slices of bread or scooped-out crusts which might afterwards be distributed to
the poor or the family’s dogs. Grace was said by the almoner and then all fell to, grabbing the spoons on the table – forks were then unknown – or using the knives which each man carried to the table with him in a case in his belt.

  Table manners were far from meticulous and the noise was tremendous as dogs barked under the boards; falcons sitting on perches behind the benches uttered their sharp cries; and the ushers of the hall marched up and down between the tables calling out, ‘Speak softly my masters, speak softly’. Even noble pages in the fifteenth century had to be advised in books of etiquette such as The Babees Book that wine must not be drunk when the mouth was full; that the upper part of the body must not lean forward over the table with the head hanging into the dish; that neither nose nor nails must be picked at meal times; that salt should not be flicked out of the cellar with a knife; that dirty spoons should not be put down on the cloth; that the knife should not be used to carry food to the mouth; that meat should not be cut in the manner of ‘field men who have such an appetite that they reck not in what wise, where or when or how ungoodly they hack at their meat’, and that when the meal was finished, the guest must ‘ryse uppe withoute lauhtere, japynge, or boystrous words’.5 In his Booke of Nurture, John Russell, marshal of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, thought it necessary to add that young gentlemen must not spit or ‘retch too loud’, or put their fingers into cups ‘to seek bits of dust’, or lick dishes with their tongues. Another well-known book of etiquette, the Booke of Courtesy, cautioned against spitting on the table, cleaning the teeth with the tablecloth, wiping the hands on skirt or tippet after the nose had been blown into them, and against playing with the animals that scratched about under the table eating scraps:

  Whereso thou sitt at mete in borde,

  Avoide the cat at on bare worde,

  For yf thou stroke cat other dogge,

  Thou are lyke an ape teyghed with a clogge.6

  The food served was various and plentiful, for it was considered that the provision of good fare was essential to a great lord’s standing in the world. Provisions would be transported from other manors or bought in a wide variety of markets. At Blakemere, Lord Talbot’s home in Shropshire, one of several Talbot households, supplies were purchased not only from the local market at Whitchurch, but also from Nantwich, Shrewsbury, Chester, Worcester and Gloucester as well as from London. Even when Lord Talbot was away in 1417–18 fighting with the king in France, his steward recorded that, at an average cost of 2½d each, over 15,700 meals were served at Blakemere, well over 2000 of them to ‘strangers who turned up at various times’.7