OUR BLOOD AND STATE IN 1660
I believe that we have always had the good conceit of ourselves which we have still. We complain freely of our weather, institutions, habits, manners and customs—but that is a freedom which we arrogate to ourselves: when foreigners do the same we are merely amused, not for a moment supposing either that their charges are true or that they really mean them. Though our grousing can hardly be dated with safety before Horace Walpole, our complacency is of pretty old standing, and goes back to the time when we began to look Europe over, to say nothing of America, and incidentally grew curious about our own country. Leland, Speed, Camden, Drayton, Coryat, and finally old Thomas Fuller, between them have fairly summed up what there can have been to say for us when we had emerged from the Middle Ages and were beginning to shape for posterity; and of all those Fuller is perhaps the least known and the best worth a thought, if only because his eyes were upon what he saw rather than what he knew. The rock upon which most of our eulogists split was archæology. There Leland foundered, Speed and Camden too. Drayton had his troubles elsewhere, and plenty of them, as a poet would. Avoiding Scylla, he barged into Charybdis, where mythopoiesis lurked for him like a mermaid, and sank him so deep that he never came up again. He is very nearly unreadable; he invites ridicule and wins disgust. Over and over his bemused corpus of rime, John Selden, a most learned spider, spun webs of erudition. It is difficult to read either of them, but of the two I prefer the poet. The present Laureate puts the antiquary first. But when you come to Thomas Fuller, D.D., his Worthies of England, that wordy work, encumbered though it be with texts of divinity, you do at least get your teeth into something upon which to bite. He did not live to finish it, though, and the piety of his son John, “the author’s orphan,” as he described himself, erected it as a monument to his memory in 1672.
Fuller, I think, set out with the intention of belauding the human products of our realm. He cast all mankind into categories and, with them for a sieve, shook out the shires to see what he could find. To that he added matter concerning the natural and manufactured commodities of England, which forms the best reading in him to-day. One does not particularly want to know what he had to say about Sir Walter Raleigh or Cardinal Wolsey; even his opinion of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson need not detain us long, though he seems to have known personally the pair of them, and to have considered Jonson considerably the greater man. Wit was always reckoned above genius in that day. But he admits Shakespeare as a worthy of Warwickshire, accords him exactly as much space as Michael Drayton, “a pious poet,” and thinks that in our greatest man “three eminent poets may seem in some sort to be compounded”; a sufficiently qualified judgment. Those three are—“Martial, in the warlike sound of his surname”; Ovid, “the most natural and witty of all the poets”; and Plautus, “an exact comedian, yet never any scholar, as our Shakespeare (if alive) would confess himself.” He goes on, “Add to all these, that though his genius generally was jocular, and inclining him to festivity, yet he could (when so disposed) be solemn and serious.” Not extravagant praise. He does not know the date of his death, leaves it blank. And so much for Shakespeare.
It doesn’t matter; nor are his judgments of Jonson and Donne of any more moment. But it is interesting to know what the counties were doing in 1660, though, except grazing, it was little enough. In fact, what he does not say is surprising. I had certainly understood, for instance, that Newcastle was exporting coal long before that; but Fuller has no “natural commodities” to report of Northumberland. No coal in Lancashire, either. Lancashire’s products were “oates,” “allume,” and “oxen,” and her only manufacture, so declared, “fustians.” Bolton, he tells you, “is the staple place for this commodity, being brought thither” from all parts of the county. But Manchester was spinning cotton. “As for Manchester, the cottons thereof carry away the credit in our nation, and so they did an hundred and fifty years ago. For when learned Leland on the cost of King Henry the Eighth, with his guide travailed Lancashire, he called Manchester the fairest and quickest town in this county, and sure I am it has lost neither spruceness nor spirits since that time.” That is a good report, made no worse probably by the entire absence of Liverpool from the record. But there is more to come. “Other commodities made in Manchester are so small in themselves, and various in their kinds, they will fill the shop of an haberdasher of small wares. Being therefore too many for me to reckon up or remember, it will be the safest way to wrap them all together in some Manchester-Tickin, and to fasten them with the pinns, or tye them with the tape, and also (because sure bind sure find) to bind them about with points and laces, all made in the same place.” That is as near to jocularity as Dr. Fuller can go. With much the same elephantine gambols used Mr. Pecksniff in a later day to entertain his daughters and pupils.
He records as proverbial of Lancashire her “fair women,” not without pointing a moral. “I believe that the God of nature having given fair complections to the women in this county art may save her pains (not to say her sinnes) in endeavouring to better them. But let the females of this county know, that though in the Old Testament express notice be taken of the beauty of many women, a. Sarah, b. Rebekah, c. Rachel, e. Thamar, f. Abishaig, g. Esther; yet in the New Testament no mention is made at all of the fairness of any woman.” Grace, he would have you know, is all, and “soul-piercing perfection far better than skin-deep fairness.” Two other facts about Lancashire are noteworthy: “It is written upon a wall in Rome, Ribchester was as rich as any town in Christendom”—that is one; and the other is that “About Wiggin and elsewhere in this county men go a-fishing with spades and matthooks.” As thus: “First they pierce the turfie ground, and under it meet with a black and deadish water, and in it small fishes do swim.” Such fish, he thinks, are likely unwholesome, and so do I; therefore I am pleased with his comfortable conclusion. “Let them be thankful to God in the first place who need not such meat to feed upon. And next them let those be thankful which have such meat to feed upon, when they need it.” Very much in the manner of Dr. Pangloss.
Fuller’s own fishing after “natural commodities” obliges him to use a small mesh. Even so he sometimes wins nothing. Cambridgeshire gives him eels, hares, saffron, and willows—a mixed bag; Essex oysters, hops and puitts, by which he intends peewits. Hants does better, with red deer, honey, wax, and hogs; but Wilts can only offer tobacco-pipes, and wool. Cornwall gives him diamonds! “In blackness and hardness they are far short of the Indian”—but there they are. He tops up a bumper basket down there with ambergris, garlic, pilchards, blue slate, and tin. Cornwall is easily his richest county, and next comes Cumberland, with pearls, blacklead and copper. Here are some poor ones: Dorset, “tenches,” pipe-clay, and hemp; Berks, “oakes, bark, trouts”; Bedfordshire, “barley, malt, fullers’-earth and larks”; slightly better are Bucks, with “beeves, sheep and tame pheasants”; Kent, “cherries, sainfoin, madder”; Hereford, “wool and salmons.” Clearly it was a day of small things. Staffordshire was making nails; Derbyshire mining lead and brewing mild ale; Somerset produced serges at Taunton; Yorkshire bred horses and made knives at Sheffield, as she did in Chaucer’s time; and that is about all that “the painted counties” were doing in 1660. For the rest, it was grazing and small-farming, large families and the beginning of religious ferment which was to work for another hundred years before it came to a head.
But old Fuller himself was what he calls somebody else, “a cordial protestant,” and does not allow us to forget it for a page at a time. He cannot speak of salt in Cheshire without remembering Lot’s wife, nor of polled cattle without head-shaking over the calf in Horeb. “The historian,” he reminds himself, “must not devour the divine in me.” He never does. The Scriptures are his real affair, as they were coming to be ours in 1660. It would be an edifying exercise, remembering that, to reckon up our gains and losses out of his meandering pages.