At Enfield, hardly out of sight of the smoke of the capital, was a region of five-and-twenty miles in circumference, which contained only three houses and scarcely any enclosed fields, where deer wandered free in thousands. Red deer were as common in Gloucestershire and Hampshire as they are now in the Grampians. Queen Anne, travelling to Portsmouth, on one occasion, saw a herd of no less than five hundred.
Agriculture was not a greatly known science. The rotation of crops was imperfectly understood. The turnip had just been introduced to this country, but it was not the practice to feed sheep and oxen with this in the winter. They were killed and salted at the beginning of the cold weather, and during several months even the gentry tasted little fresh animal food except game and river fish. In the days of Charles II. it was at the beginning of November that families laid in their stock of salt provisions, then called Martinmas beef.
The state of the roads in those days was somewhat barbarous. Ruts were deep, descents precipitous, and the way often difficult to distinguish in the dusk from the unenclosed fen and heath on each side. Pepys and his wife, travelling in their own coach, lost their way between Newbury and Reading.[2] In some parts of Kent and Sussex none but the strongest horses could, in winter, get through the bog in which they sank deep at every step. The coaches were often pulled by oxen.[3] When Prince George of Denmark visited the mansion of Petworth he was six hours travelling nine miles. Throughout the country north of York and west of Exeter goods were carried by long trains of packhorses.
The capital was a place far removed from the country. It was seldom that the country squire paid a visit thither. "Towards London and Londoners he felt an aversion that more than once produced important political effects" (Macaulay). Apart from the country gentlemen were the petty proprietors who cultivated their own fields with their own hands and enjoyed a modest competence without affecting to have scutcheons and crests. This great class of yeomanry formed a much more important part of the nation than now. According to the most reliable statistics of the seventeenth century, there were no less than a hundred and sixty thousand proprietors, who with their families made a seventh of the population of those days, and these derived their livelihood from small freehold estates.
Such, then, were the chief differences dividing the life of the country from the life of the town. The London merchants had town mansions hardly less inferior to the nobility. Chelsea was a quiet village with a thousand inhabitants, and sportsmen with dog and gun wandered over Marylebone. General Oglethorpe, who died in 1785, used to boast that he had shot a woodcock in what is now Regent Street, in Queen Anne's reign.
The days of the Stuarts were not so rosy as writers of romance have chosen to have us believe. At Norwich, the centre of the cloth industry, children of the tender age of six were engaged in labour. At Bristol a labyrinth of narrow lanes, too narrow for cart traffic, was built over vaults. Goods were conveyed across the city in trucks drawn by dogs. Meat was so dear that King, in his "Natural and Political Conclusions," estimates that half the population of the country only ate animal food twice a week, and the other half only once a week or not at all. "Bread such as is now given to the inmates of a workhouse was then seldom seen even on the trencher of a yeoman or a shopkeeper. The majority of the nation lived almost entirely on rye, barley, and oats."
The change from these conditions to those we associate with the eighteenth century was not a sudden but a slow one. With the increase of average prosperity came the additional requirements in household furniture. It is impossible now to state accurately what the exact furniture was of the various classes of the community. Many of the seventeenth-century pieces now remaining have been treasured in great houses and belong to a variety which in those days was regarded as sumptuous. Now and again we catch glimpses of the former life of the men and women of those days. Little pieces of conclusive evidence are brought to light which enable safe conclusions to be drawn. But the everyday normal character has too often gone unrecorded. We are left with Court memoirs, diaries of the great, literary proofs of the more scholarly, but the simple annals of the poor are, in the main, unrecorded.
In view of this series of queer and remarkable facts strung together to afford the reader a rough and ready picture of those dim days, one comes to believe that much of the ordinary seventeenth-century furniture must be regarded as having belonged to the great yeoman class of the community. With this belief the collector very rightly regards it of sterling worth, as reminiscent of the men from whose sturdy stock has sprung a great race.