"Come unto these yellow sands,
And then take hands:
Curtseyed when you have, and kissed,
The wild waves whist" (hushed).
Another foreigner describes the English as serious, like the Germans, liking to be followed by hosts of servants who wear their masters' arms in silver, fastened to their left arms: they excel in music and dancing, and their favourite sport is hawking: they are more polite than the French in eating, devour less bread but more meat, which they roast in perfection. They put a great deal of sugar in their drink, a habit which may account for their teeth turning black in age. Harrison tells us that the nobles had "for cooks musicall-headed Frenchmen, who concocted sundrie delicacies: every dish being first taken to the greatest personage at the table."
We are told that Sir Walter Raleigh was once staying with a noble lady, whom he heard in the morning scolding her servant and crying, "Have the pigs been fed? have the pigs been fed?"
At eleven o'clock Master Walter came down to dinner, and could not resist a sly remark to his hostess, "Have the pigs been fed?" The lady drew herself up haughtily and rejoined, "You should know best, Sir Walter, whether you have had your breakfast or no." So the laugh was turned on the wit for once: for indeed it had become unusual for people to require any breakfast before eleven o'clock in Queen Elizabeth's time. Formerly they had four meals a day, consisting of breakfast, dinner, nuntion or beverage, and supper. "Now these odd repasts," says Harrison, "thanked be God! are very well left, and each one (except here and there some young hungrie stomach that cannot fast till dinner-time) contenteth himself with dinner and supper only." It was the custom at table amongst yeomen and merchants for the guest to call for such drink as he desired, when a servant would bring him a cup from the cupboard; but when he had tasted of it, he delivered it again to the servant, who made it clean and restored it to the cupboard. "By this device much idle tippling is cut off, for if the full pots should continually stand neare the trencher, divers would be alwaies dealing with them." Yet in the houses of the nobles it was not so, but silver goblets or glasses of Venice graced the tables.
They were content with four or six dishes, finishing with jellies and march-paine "wrought with no small curiosity"; potatoes, too, began to be brought from Spain and the Indies. The best beer was usually kept for two years and brewed in March; of light wines there were fifty-six kinds, mostly foreign, from Italy, Greece, and Spain, clarets from France, and Malmsey wine.
"I might here talk somewhat of the great silence that is used at the tables of the honourable and wiser sort, likewise of the moderate eating and drinking that is daily seen, and finally of the regard that each one hath to keep himself from the note of surfeiting and drunkennesse."
They were a proud, self-respecting people in those spacious times, and even the poorer sort, when they could get a time to be merry, thought it no small disgrace if they happened to be "cup-shotten."
In regard to their dress the English at that time seem to have been somewhat extravagant, copying first the Spanish guise, then the French, anon the Italian or German—nay, even Turkish and Moorish fashions gained favour; "so that except it were a dog in a doublet, you shall not see any so disguised as are my countrymen of England."
Our good friend Harrison waxes quite sarcastic as he describes, "What chafing, what fretting, what reproachful language doth the poor workman bear away! ... Then must we put it on, then must the long seams of our hose be set by a plumb-line: then we puff, then we blow, and finally sweat till we drop, that our clothes may stand well upon us."
It became the fashion for ladies to dye their hair yellow out of compliment to the Queen, who however in her later years used wigs, and was reputed to have a choice of eighty attires of false hair.