Yet to a large extent the England of the splendid Tudor period and the England of the Stuarts substituted for the beautiful and sincere forms of an earlier period a style of construction and decoration which showed distinct decadence. Witness the carvings in the chapel and dining-hall of the Charterhouse, new in Milton’s boyhood, the carvings in the dining-halls of the different Inns of Court, and mural tablets everywhere with their obese cherubs and ghastly death’s heads. In the quaint beam and plaster front of Staple’s Inn on Holborn still remains the ancient type of domestic architecture which antedated and accompanied Milton’s boyhood. Hundreds of such cosy, homelike residences with their ample windows of many leaded panes lined the city streets. The merchants who lived in them sold their wares in the shops beneath, and, if they were artificers, housed their apprentices within them. They were built solidly to last for centuries. Strong beams upheld the broad, low-studded ceilings. Capacious fireplaces opened into chimneys whose construction was often made a work of art. Around the house-door were carvings of saints or devils, of prophets, hobgoblins or grotesque dragons, of birds and bees, and any wild or lovely fancy that the craftsman loved to perpetuate in wood or stone. The home must be made beautiful as well as the sanctuary. In those days the mania of migration had not yet destroyed the permanence and sacredness of the homestead. Where the young man brought his bride, even in a city home, there he hoped to dwell and dandle his grandchildren upon his knee. It was Milton’s fate to know many homes in London. Discoveries and travel of the Elizabethan period had broken many traditions of the past, and the old order in his day was yielding to the new. But half the architecture of two hundred years before him still remained, and all the traditions of the past were fresh. The dingy and mutilated relics of the time before the Tudors which, outside the Gothic churches, alone remain to us, reveal but little of what he saw.
With Henry VIII. and the widespread and thorough dissolution of religious houses, London became a far more commercial and prosaic place. Green convent gardens were sold for the erection of narrow wooden tenements; ancient dormitories, refectories, and chapels were pulled down or transformed for more secular purposes. Crutched Friars’ Church became a carpenter’s shop and tennis court; Shakespeare and his friends erected a playhouse on the site of the Black Friars’ monastery. A tavern replaced the church of St. Martin’s le Grand, and far and wide traces of the despoiler and rebuilder were manifest.
Stow had then but just written his invaluable chronicles, and little antiquarian interest prevailed. For the first time in human history men sailed around the globe. New worlds were opening to men’s visions. Not only dreams of wealth without labour, but golden actualities had dazzled the imagination of thousands. Drake and Hawkins, Frobisher and Raleigh were adding new lustre to an age hitherto unparalleled in prosperity and enterprise. Emerson’s description of the Englishman as having a “telescopic appreciation of distant gain” was exemplified.
England was rich in poets, great even in Shakespeare’s time. Of two hundred and forty who published verses, forty are remembered to-day. Yet of England’s six million people, half could not read at all. Never was there among people of privilege such a proportion of accomplished men. Every man tried his hand at verses, and learned to sing a madrigal, and tinkle the accompaniment with his own fingers. Gentlemen travelled to Italy and brought back or made themselves translations of Boccaccio, Ariosto, Tasso. Not only learned ladies like Queen Elizabeth, who had had Roger Ascham for instructor, wrote Latin, but many others were accomplished in those severer studies which ladies in a later age neglected.
Sir Walter Besant tells us that from Henry IV. to Henry VIII. herbs, fruits, and roots were scarcely used. At this period, however, the poor again began to consume melons, radishes, cucumbers, parsley, carrots, turnips, salad herbs, and these things as well graced the tables of the gentry. Potatoes were unknown until a much later time. Much meat was eaten, and in different fashion from our own, e. g., honey was poured over mutton. Tobacco cost eighteen shillings a pound, and King James complained that there were those who “spent £300 a year upon this noxious weed.” No vital statistics existed to show the average of longevity. But certain it is that, with modern sanitation and cleanliness, the great modern London, which to-day houses about as many souls as did all England then, has a much lower death-rate. When one remembers that, spite of stupendous intellectual attainments, of exquisite taste in art and literature, spite of wise statesmanship and all manly virtues, the wise men of that day were children in their knowledge of chemistry and medicine, we cannot wonder at the recurrence of the plague in almost every generation.
In 1605 the bills of mortality included the ninety-seven parishes within the walls, sixteen parishes without the walls, and six contiguous outparishes in Middlesex and Surrey. During Milton’s lifetime, they included the city of Westminster and the parishes of Islington, Lambeth, Stepney, Newington, Hackney, and Redriff. Scarlet fever was formerly confounded with measles, and does not appear to be reported as a separate disease until 1703.
In 1682 Sir William Petty, speaking of the five plagues that had visited London in the preceding hundred years, remarks: “It is to be remembered the plagues of London do commonly kill one-fifth of the inhabitants, and are the chief impediment against the growth of the city.”
In Milton’s boyhood common folk were crowded into such narrow, wooden tenements as one may still see within the enclosure of St. Giles’s Church, Cripplegate,—almost the only ones that still remain within the city. There were no sewers and no adequate pavement until 1616. House refuse was not infrequently thrown into the street, and sometimes upon the heads of passers-by, though ancient laws enjoined each man to keep the front of his house clean and to throw no refuse into the gutter. In short, ideas on sanitation in London were much like those in Havana before the summer of 1898.
It is difficult to obtain accurate statistics of the population of London, but Loftie estimates that in 1636 seven hundred thousand people lived “within its liberties.”
Where now lofty, gray stone buildings of pretentious and nondescript architecture shelter banks and offices, gabled buildings with overlapping stories darkened the streets. The city was not dependent on the suburbs or upon other towns for aught but food and raw material. Wool and silk and linen, leather and all metals were wrought close to the shops where they were sold. The odours of glue and dyestuffs tainted the fresh air. The sound of tools and hammers, and of the simple looms and machinery of the day, worked by foot or hand power, were heard.