As to plates and vessels, no general statement would serve, not even for one country, owing to the rapidity with which the supply of silver increased during these centuries. In 1517 an Italian[100] notes of Flanders that all their vessels, of the church, the kitchen, and the bedroom, were of English brass, but that statement no one confirms later. Wood was common in proportion to the unpretentiousness of the inn; except in Muscovy, where it was almost invariable through the frequency and thoroughness of destruction by fires which caused the use of the most easily replaceable material; the few silver tankards they possessed were rendered unattractive by their custom of cleaning drinking vessels but once a year.
The transition from pewter to silver is most clearly marked in France. The former was in general use as late as Montaigne's time; even he, who owns to making himself in a horrid mess at meal-times, was glad to escape from its greasiness. By the middle of the next century an Italian priest notes that the inn-utensils were mostly of silver, although the chalices which he was given for mass were mostly tin; and De Gourville, in his autobiography, mentions that, on being asked by the government for an estimate of the total amount of silver in France, gave a higher estimate than the other experts because he based his on what he had noticed in the course of his frequent journeys about the provinces, in the middle of the seventeenth century, how every tavern had spoons and forks of silver and some a basin and ewer. And as silver drinking-vessels were common among the English middle-classes earlier than this, it may be assumed that inns were so provided, too; in fact, in England silver was considered somewhat vulgar for drinking purposes, gentlemen preferring Venetian glass. The Venetians themselves used glass, as did other Italians; likewise the French; Germans drank from pewter or stone, and their plates were often of wood, when they had any; it would give an altogether too high idea of sixteenth-century luxury to imagine that every one was given a plate. Certainly no one had more than one at a meal, though there is nothing to show that he might not turn it over to use the clean side—unless he was at sea, in which case he would risk being thrown overboard, because every sailor knew that a plate upside down signified shipwreck.
Inseparable from the inns are the bathing-places; in most cases the baths formed part of the inn premises. At Abano, near Padua, the chief bathing resort of Italy, were private rooms with a "guarderobbe"[101] adjoining, through which latter a stream of the water could be turned on. Baden in Switzerland was exceptional in having baths under public control, for poor as well as for rich, besides those in private hands. The inn Montaigne stayed at had eleven kitchens, three hundred persons were catered for each day, one hundred and seventy-seven beds made, and every one could reach his room without passing through any one else's. His party engaged four rooms, containing no more than nine beds; two of the rooms had stoves; and a private bath adjoined. Swiss Baden possessed sixty baths, German Baden three hundred. Spa was much visited, but most of the watering-places have been practically forgotten, so far as the water is concerned, Pougues-les-Eaux, the chief centre in France, for instance, and Aachen, where there existed forty baths outside the town, although the chief ones were within.
GERMAN BATHING-PLACES
The object of the visitors was as much medicinal nominally and as little so really, as might be expected. "Many come thither with no disease but that of love: and many times find remedy."[102] The conditions seem somewhat free and easy: in Rome it was customary to go accompanied by a lady friend in spite of the masseurs being male; of Plombières Montaigne says that it was reckoned indecent for men to bathe naked or for women to wear less than a chemise; from which it may be gathered what ordinary conditions were. The bathing there was "mixed," as at the German baths where these restrictions were not in force and where, consequently, the sight of scores of young couples and parties, some family parties, some not, in a state of nature, or very nearly so, amusing themselves with games played at floating tables, or without any help at all, excited the shame, the interest, and the participation of foreigners from all quarters. Ladies, however, who needed baths and preferred decency, were provided for at Swiss Baden, where private baths were for hire, well lighted by glazed windows, painted, panelled, and clean, with conveniences for reading. The building of Turkish baths seemed to Della Valle to afford more likelihood of a chill than the Italian; but it was, he says, all one could expect for the price, which was much lower. How much lower is not clear, but evidently considerably so, the result of a difference of habit; in Italy the poor did not bathe, in Turkey the rich bathed at home.
Quite apart from bathing customs, however, the position of the lady traveller must frequently have been embarrassing. Many a nephew, perhaps, may disbelieve that they ever did travel in the days when no hot-water bottles existed; but that would be a mistake; there is record of at least two substitutes: (1) a bag of semolina, or millet, heated, (2) a dog. A more serious objection is that the privacy of the bedroom was not respected. Even in France, a murderer was lodged in Gölnitz's room for the night together with the six guardians who were escorting him to the place of trial, and in Picardy bedrooms were merely partitioned off; doors and windows lying open all night with no means of fastening them. But a permanently open window would have been welcome on occasions; as when in 1652 Mademoiselle de Montpensier lodged at an inn in Franche-Comté with no window at all in her room, and consequently had to do her hair at the door.
Again, respectable women would not be travelling alone, and as bedrooms were so few they would always have to be prepared to share the room with their escort, even if with no other man, a condition which persisted up to far more recent times. In 1762, writes M. Babeau, a lawyer, travelling through Périgord with a lady client, her son, and a girl, had to put up at an inn which owned but two beds and those both in one room. This room, by the way, possessed two doors, one opening on a meadow, and with joinery so imperfect that a dog could have crept in underneath it; no dog took the chance, it is true, but the wind did. In the previous century was often reprinted a "Traité de la civilité qui se pratique parmi les honnêtes gens" which established the procedure to be followed in these embarrassing circumstances. The escort must allow the lady to undress and get into bed first, and, for himself, take care to undress at a distance from her bed and remain "tranquille et paisible" through the night. In the morning he ought to be well advanced with his dressing before she awoke. But this book was evidently unknown to Sterne when he pursued his "Sentimental Journey," for when he had to share his room with a lady who was a total stranger, they drew up a special treaty which both promised to observe and which each accused the other of breaking.
Of lodgings and "pensions" and houses for hire, it is unnecessary to speak, because apart from the conditions of living that have already been indicated there is nothing to distinguish them from those of to-day; "pensions" are doubtless still to be found in the same variety now as two hundred and fifty years ago at Blois—"dainty, magnificent, dirty, pretty fair, and stinking."