Women of England

by Bartlett Burleigh James

It is interesting to note that at the beginning of the modern era population was increasing so slowly as to be practically stationary, and, indeed, for generations past there had been no appreciable increase. Even after the favorable conditions of the reign of Henry VIII. became general, population made comparatively slow progress. Families were not so numerous, or the number of their members so great, as compared with to-day. It was an exception for a laborer to maintain his family in a cottage to themselves. Farm work was commonly done under the superintendence of country esquires, and the laborers lived in the paternal cottage and remained single, marrying only when by their providence they had managed to save enough to enable them to enter upon some other career. The competition of other countries, notably France, with the industries of England proved disastrous to many forms of England's industrial activities; and to the introduction into the kingdom of a number of wares and merchandise of foreign make was attributed the great number of idle people throughout the realm. To counteract this condition, Henry issued statutes for the encouragement of manufacturing. One of these aimed to stimulate the linen industry. In order that the men and women living in idleness, which was styled "that most abominable sin," might have profitable employment, it was ordained and enacted that every person should sow one-quarter of an acre in flax or hemp for every sixty acres he might have under cultivation. The immediate purpose of the act was to keep the wives and children of the poor at work in their own houses, but it also indicated that the condition of manufactures in England was not such as to encourage an enlarging population.

The condition of the laboring classes during the reign of Henry VIII. was not such as to excite general dissatisfaction; indeed, there are evidences of a general state of contentment among the people. The laws for the encouragement of trade and the sumptuary legislation for the regulation of wages and prices were economic measures which may not stand the test of examination according to modern ideas, but which nevertheless tended, on the whole, to benefit those in whose behalf they were made. Industry was the spirit of the times, and idleness was the most abhorrent of vices. Men, women, and children, alike, were to be trained in some craft or other, to prevent their becoming public charges. The children of parents who could afford the fees which were exacted for apprenticeship were set to learn trades, and the rest were bound out to agriculture; and if the parents failed to see to it that their children were started out in a career of labor, the mayors or magistrates had authority to apprentice such children, so that when they grew up they might not be driven to dishonest courses by want or incapacity.

Throughout the sixteenth century, all classes of society appear to have had a reasonable degree of prosperity, according to their several needs and stations. The country gentlemen lived upon their landed estates, surrounded by those evidences of solid comfort which give attractiveness to such life. The income of the squire was sufficient to afford a moderate abundance for himself and his family, and between him and the commons there was not a wide difference in this respect. Among all classes of the people there was a spirit of liberality, open and free; the practicality of the age was not inaccordant with generous hospitality. To every man who asked it, there were free fare and free lodging, and he might be sure of a bountiful board of wholesome food. Bread, beef, and beer for dinner, and a mat of rushes in an unoccupied corner of the hall, with a billet of wood for a headrest, did not constitute luxurious entertainment, but were regarded as elements of real comfort. Nor was the generous hospitality proffered to strangers often abused; the statutes of the times kept suspicious characters under such close notice, and were so repressive of predatory and vicious instincts, that there was little occasion for alarm such as is felt by the modern housewife in country districts along much-travelled roads. The hour of rising, both summer and winter, was four o'clock; breakfast was served at five, after which the laborers went to their work and the gentlemen to their business. Life lacked much of modern refinement, although it made up for this lack in wholesomeness and heartiness. The large number of beggars in the reign of Henry VIII. was due in part to the suppression of the monasteries and the drying up of those springs of charity, and the open-handed hospitality which had encouraged begging while relieving distress. Upon the assumption that there was no excuse for an able-bodied vagrant, the penalties imposed upon "sturdy beggars" were severe. Such, in brief, was the state of English society at the beginning of the modern era.

The influence of the Church was on the wane before the rupture with the papacy was brought about by Henry VIII., and the laity were beginning to assume the positions, liberties, and privileges which had appertained to the clergy as the one scholarly and dominant class of the kingdom. Under the new conditions of liberty in which we find woman, there was no room for the continuance of even the forms of chivalry. Idealized woman no longer existed; she had become practical. Having sought a position of public activity, she had been recognized as possessing the private rights of an individual of the same nature and of similar status as man. It was no longer needful to go to the convent to find the religious or intellectual types of womankind, for religion, benevolence, and literature were no longer identified only with the cloister. However disastrous was the suppression of the monasteries to the little bands of women who wore the habit of the religieuse, women in general did not feel the upheaval nearly so much as they did the other social changes, which were not so radical, but were very much more influential in their relation to the destiny of the sex as a whole.

Although manners were very free, and nowhere more so than among persons of the higher orders of society, such coarseness is not the true criterion by which to gauge the women of the day. Even if they did not hesitate to use profanity, were adepts at coquetry of an undisguised type, and were guilty of conduct which merited more than the term "indiscreet," it must be borne in mind that they were creatures of their times. While English society was noted for its rudeness and coarseness, it was saved from much of the effeminacy which poisoned the life of its neighbors on the continent. The sixteenth century took a more generous, complimentary, and true view of womankind. In the Middle Ages, she suffered from the exaggerated praise of the knight and the troubadour on the one hand, and on the other from the contempt and contumely of the ecclesiastic. From this equivocal position of being at the same time an angel and a devil she was rescued by the sanity and sincerity of the sixteenth century, and was placed in her true position as a woman, possessed of essentially the same characteristics as men, worthy of like honor, and making appeal for no special consideration excepting that which her sex evoked instinctively from men. The modern idea had begun to prevail, and woman was no longer either worshipped or shunned, but was welcomed as a sharer of the common burdens and joys of life. To continental observers it was marvellous that the English woman should have the large amount of liberty that she enjoyed; and Europeans not understanding the English point of view were apt to construe such liberty as boldness. Thus, one writer from abroad is found commenting upon the sixteenth-century English woman as follows: "The women have much more liberty than perhaps in any other place; they also know well how to make use of it; for they go dressed out in exceedingly fine clothes, and give all their attention to their ruffs and stuffs to such a degree indeed that, as I am informed, many a one does not hesitate to wear velvet in the streets, which is common with them, whilst at home perhaps they have not a piece of dry bread."

Elizabeth Lamond's Discourse of the Commonweal recites that there was more employment for the men and women of the towns and cities when the wants of people were more modest. The population of London, despite the attempts made by Queen Elizabeth to prevent the influx of foreigners and persons from the rural districts, increased rapidly during her reign. On coming into the city, the rustics soon wasted their small savings in the rioting and revels which characterized the rough life of the metropolis. Drinking, gambling, and all forms of license enticed the husband from his home and destroyed the domestic felicity which had been the characteristic of country living. Country and town life were still widely separated by bad roads and poor means of conveyance. The wives even of the gentry knew, as a rule, nothing of city life, excepting from the accounts which their husbands might bring back to them from occasional jaunts to the metropolis; to all such accounts they listened with wide-eyed wonder.

The amusements of the women of the better sort, who did not find their entertainment in the vices of the times, took chiefly the form of spectacles, to which they readily flocked. It mattered little whether it was a mask, a miracle play, a church procession or a royal progress, a cock fight or a bear baiting. The brutality of their sports no more affected their feelings than do the revolting circumstances of a bull fight shock the sensibilities of the women of Spain's cultured circles. When any morning they might see the heads of some unfortunates stuck on pikes and gracing with their gruesome presence the city gate, it is not surprising that the people were not repelled by brutal exhibitions of a lesser sort. Nor did the forms of punishment in use for malefactors of one kind or another tend to soften the feelings of the women of the time. It was no unusual thing for a woman convicted of being a common scold to be seen going about the streets with her face behind an iron muzzle clamped over her mouth, a subject for the jeers and ribald mirth of coarse-minded women no better than herself. Such characters were also taken to the ducking stool and thoroughly doused in the water. The punishment of thieves by branding and by mutilation, and the punishment meted out to women whose characters, even in that gross age, affronted public morals, were of a public nature and matters of daily observation. Nor was any woman quite sure that the gibbet, from which she could at almost any time see the swaying form of some unfortunate, might not next serve for the execution of her own husband; for the number of capital offences was large, and the inquiries of justice by no means lenient on the side of the accused.

The destruction of the monasteries brought about, in a large measure, the dissolution of the educational system of the realm. The sons of the poor husbandman, who had been taught at the convent schools, and then passed on through the universities, and thence had gradually worked their way into the professions of religion or the law, had the door of opportunity to a higher station closed to them. The deprivation was more severe in the case of girls, although it did not signify so much for them in relation to their future—unless, indeed, it did so by debarring from the profession of religion some who might have entered it. The clergy tried to meet the educational demands which were so suddenly thrown upon them, but it was impossible for them to afford educational facilities for the youth of either sex at schools without endowment or adequate support. Elizabeth, with the wide view and the sagacity which she showed with regard to all aspects of her kingdom, evinced her recognition of the importance of education by establishing one hundred free grammar schools, whose number rapidly increased during her reign. In the course of time, these schools fell under the control of the middle class and afforded education for their sons and daughters. But in England there were certainly very few, if any, women of the middle class who entered largely into the benefits of the new learning which came in with the Renaissance. The study of Latin and Greek and the discussion of philosophy and science were confined to the women of the leisure classes. The English universities in the sixteenth century were closed to women; but such lack was made up by private tutors, women of rank and position thus having the benefit of the brightest minds of the age.

The great awakening of intellectual life in England, in common with the continental countries, showed itself in activity in all departments of thought: poetry flourished, theology caught the infection of the new spirit of liberty, and the classics were studied with avidity as the springs of the world's literature and learning. The invention of the printing press let loose the floods of knowledge, and the women of the higher classes were caught in the flow of books and pamphlets, and their intellects were quickened and their characters formed by these new sources of inspiration and wisdom. Woman was no longer designated as the daughter of the Church, which was formerly the highest encomium that the condescension of the Church could afford her. She now stood on her own independence of character, possessed of an intellect and accorded the freedom of its use.

The example of the Virgin Queen was held up to the youth of England for their imitation. Elizabeth's education had been most zealously cared for. To her remarkable aptitude for learning she added a studious disposition. At an early age she was an accomplished linguist; the sciences were familiar to her, she "understood the principles of geography, architecture, the mathematics, and astronomy." Her studies, save one, however, she regarded rather in the light of pastime; to the exception—history—she "devoted three hours a day, and read works in all languages that afforded information on the subject." Thus was her mind stored with the philosophy of history; men and events in their ever changing relations were an open book to her. Hence, when the responsibilities of sovereignty devolved upon her she was resourceful and prompt. Whether dealing with her ambitious subjects, or receiving the wily ambassador of a foreign power, her poise could not be disturbed.