THE HOUSEHOLD FURNITURE.
Of the furniture in these old houses we get an idea from inventories of the period that have come down to us. We have, for instance, such a list of the household equipment of Richard Arden, Shakespeare's maternal grandfather, who was a wealthy farmer; and another of such property belonging to Henry Field, tanner, a neighbor of John Shakespeare, who was his chief executor.
From these and similar inventories we find that the only furniture in the hall, or main room of the house—often occupying the whole of the ground floor—and the parlor, or sitting-room, when there was one, consisted of two or three chairs, a few joint-stools—that is, stools made of wood jointed or fitted together, as distinguished from those more rudely made—a table of the plainest construction, and possibly one or more "painted cloths" hung on the walls.
These painted cloths were cheap substitutes for the tapestries with which great mansions were adorned, and they were often found in the cottages of the poor. The paintings were generally crude representations of Biblical stories, together with maxims or mottoes, which were sometimes on scrolls or "labels" proceeding from the mouths of the characters.
Shakespeare refers to these cloths several times; for instance, in As You Like It (iii. 2. 291), where Jaques says to Orlando: "You are full of pretty answers; have you not been acquainted with goldsmiths' wives and conned them out of rings?"—referring to the mottoes, or "posies," as they were called, often inscribed in finger-rings. Orlando replies: "Not so; but I answer you right painted cloth, from whence you have studied your questions." Falstaff (1 Henry IV. iv. 2. 28) says that his recruits are "ragged as Lazarus in the painted cloth."
In an anonymous play, No Whipping nor Tripping, printed in 1601, we find this passage:—
"Read what is written on the painted cloth:
Do no man wrong; be good unto the poor;
Beware the mouse, the maggot, and the moth,
And ever have an eye unto the door," etc.
When carpets are mentioned in these inventories, they are coverings for the tables, not for the floors, which, even in kings' palaces, were strewn with rushes. Grumio, in The Taming of the Shrew (iv. 1. 52) sees "the carpets laid" for supper on his master's return home. A Stratford inventory of 1590 mentions "a carpet for a table." Carpets were also used for window-seats, but were seldom placed on the floor except to kneel upon, or for other special purposes.
The bedroom furniture was equally rude and scanty, though better than it had been when the old folk of the time were young. Harrison says:—
"Our fathers and we ourselves have lien full oft upon straw pallets covered only with a sheet, under coverlets made of dagswain or hopharlots [coarse, rough cloths], and a good round log under their heads instead of a bolster. If it were that our fathers or the good man of the house had a mattress or flock-bed, and thereto a sack of chaff to rest his head upon, he thought himself to be as well lodged as the lord of the town, so well were they contented."
But feather beds had now come into use, with pillows, and "flaxen sheets," and other comfortable appliances. Henry Field had "one bed-covering of yellow and green" among his household goods.
Kitchen utensils and table-ware had likewise improved within the memory of the old inhabitant, though still rude and simple enough. Harrison notes "the exchange of treen [wooden] platters into pewter, and wooden spoons into silver or tin."
He adds: "So common were all sorts of treen stuff in old time that a man should hardly find four pieces of pewter (of which one was peradventure a salt) in a good farmer's house"; but now they had plenty of pewter, with perhaps a silver bowl and salt-cellar, and a dozen silver spoons.
The table-linen was hempen for common use, but flaxen for special occasions, and the napkins were of the same materials. These napkins, or towels, as they were sometimes called, were for wiping the hands after eating with the fingers, forks being as yet unknown in England except as a curiosity.
Elizabeth is the first royal personage in the country who is known to have had a fork, and it is doubtful whether she used it. It was not until the middle of the 17th century that forks were used even by the higher classes, and silver forks were not introduced until about 1814.
Thomas Coryat, in his Crudities, published in 1611, only five years before Shakespeare died, gives an account of the use of forks in Italy, where they appear to have been invented in the 15th century. He says:—
"The Italian and also most strangers do always at their meals use a little fork when they do cut their meat. For while with their knife, which they hold in one hand, they cut the meat out of the dish, they fasten the fork, which they hold in their other hand, upon the same dish; so that whosoever he be that, sitting in the company of others at meals, should unadvisedly touch the dish of meat with his fingers, from which all the table do cut, he will give occasion of offence unto the company, as having transgressed the laws of good manners."
Coryat adds that he himself "thought good to imitate the Italian fashion by this forked cutting of meat," not only while he was in Italy, but after he came home to England, where, however, he was sometimes "quipped" for what his friends regarded as a foreign affectation.
The dramatists of the time also refer contemptuously to "your fork-carving traveller"; and one clergyman preached against the use of forks "as being an insult to Providence not to touch one's meat with one's fingers!"
Towels, except for table use, are rarely noticed in inventories of the period, and when mentioned are specified as "washing towels." Neither are wash-basins often referred to, except in lists of articles used by barbers.
Bullein, in his Government of Health, published about 1558, says: "Plain people in the country use seldom times to wash their hands, as appeareth by their filthiness, and as very few times comb their heads."
Their betters were none too particular in these matters, and in personal cleanliness generally. Baths are seldom referred to in writings of the time, except for the treatment of certain diseases.
INTERIOR OF ANNE HATHAWAY'S COTTAGE
Reference has already been made to the use of rushes for covering floors. It was thought to be a piece of unnecessary luxury on the part of Wolsey when he caused the rushes at Hampton Court to be changed every day. From a letter of Erasmus to Dr. Francis, Wolsey's physician, it would appear that the lowest layer of rushes—the top only being renewed—was sometimes unchanged for years—the latter says "twenty years," which seems hardly credible—becoming a receptacle for beer, grease, fragments of victuals, and other organic matters.
Perfumes were used for neutralizing the foul odors that resulted from this filthiness. Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621, says: "The smoke of juniper is in great request with us at Oxford, to sweeten our chambers." [See also [page 25] above.]
From the correspondence of the Earl of Shrewsbury with Lord Burleigh, during the confinement of Mary Queen of Scots at Sheffield Castle, in 1572, we learn that she was to be removed for five or six days "to cleanse her chamber, being kept very uncleanly."
In a memoir written by Anne, Countess of Dorset, in 1603, we read: "We all went to Tibbals to see the King, who used my mother and my aunt very graciously; but we all saw a great change between the fashion of the Court as it was now and of that in the Queen's, for we were all lousy by sitting in Sir Thomas Erskine's chambers."