“When husband hath at play set up his rest,
Then wife and babes at home a hungry goeth.”
“The maister may keepe revell all the yeere,
And leave the wife at home like silly foule.”
Country dames did not often share in the jaunts to the capital made by their husbands. Until the seventeenth century it did not become customary for families to go to London for annual visits. Bad roads and the lack of public conveyances kept town and country apart. The squire’s lady knew nothing of the bustling life led in the sombre, substantial houses of the London burgesses, for whose wives there was plenty of occupation in looking after the servants and the apprentices who formed part of the household, in superintending the cooking of the bountiful meals, buying the household necessaries, and replenishing the family wardrobe. There were no newspapers, but there was abundance of gossip, a much more impressive medium of communicating news. Amusement took the form of spectacles chiefly, and the citizens and citizenesses flocked readily to a mask, a play, a procession, a cock-fight, or a bear-baiting. Women were not squeamish about unpleasant sights. They had not learnt to feel that the brutal sports so common then were degrading. It was hardly likely that they should. There were too many hangings and quarterings and burnings of human beings in London to make people sensitive about the pain of animals. The gallows were constantly working, and women had to accustom themselves to many revolting sights. Worse times were coming, but as yet the shadow of the great civil war had not darkened England.
With regard to the education of women in every-day life, there is no evidence to show that they shared in the higher learning cultivated so assiduously by the daughters of the aristocracy. What M. Paul Rousselot says in his “History of the Education of Women in France,” applies equally well to England. The majority of women in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries profited little, he considers, by the great movement known as the Renaissance. To a large extent they were outside it—
“On ne les a pas en général volontairement introduites dans ce progrès, elles y sont entrées, un peu d’elles mêmes, beaucoup par la force des choses.”
When we read of women discoursing in Latin, writing in Greek, discussing philosophy and science, we must be on our guard, says M. Rousselot, from believing that the initiators of the modern spirit had any idea that the moment was come to institute for women a rational system of instruction and education.
Certainly in England there were no women of the burgess class who could discourse in Latin, and the wives and daughters of country squires were equally guiltless of any such accomplishments. No systematic attempt was made to raise the standard of women’s education in the middle ranks. The founders of the endowed grammar schools in the sixteenth century never thought of girls; they only provided for boys. Queen Elizabeth, excellent scholar as she was, and keen as was her appreciation of learning, did nothing for the intellectual advancement of her female subjects. The Virgin Queen only acted like her compeers.
“Scarcely has there ever appeared, in any period or in any nation, a legislator who has made it the subject of his serious attention, and the men who are greatly interested that women should be sensible and virtuous, seem, by their conduct towards that sex, to have entered into a general conspiracy to order it otherwise.”[38]
Sir Thomas Overbury’s poem, “A Wife,” expresses the sentiment of the age—