Scriveners drew up legal documents, arranged mortgages, handled property transactions, and put borrowers in touch with lenders. They and the goldsmiths and merchants developed promissory notes, checks, and private paper money.
The influx of silver from the New World was a major factor in the second great inflation in England and in the devaluation of money to about one third of what it had been. Also contributing to the inflation was an outracing of demand over supply, and a debasement of the coinage. This inflation benefited tenants to the detriment of their lords because their rents could not be adjusted upward.
There was an increase in bankruptcies.
The Elizabethan love of madrigal playing gradually gave way to a taste for instrumental music, including organs and flutes. The violin was introduced and popular with all classes. Ballads were sung, such as "Barbary Allen", about a young man who died for love of her, after which she died of sorrow. When they were buried next to each other, a rose from his grave grew around a briar from her grave. The ballad "Geordie" relates a story of a man hanged for stealing and selling sixteen of the king's royal deer. The ballad "Matty Groves" is about a great Lord's fair young bride seducing a lad, who was then killed by the Lord. In the ballad "Henry Martin", the youngest man of three brothers is chosen by lot to turn pirate to support his brothers. When his pirate ship tries to take a merchant ship, there is sea fight in which the merchant ship sinks and her men drown. The ballad "The Trees They Do Grow High" tells of an arranged marriage between a 24 year old woman and the 14 year old son of a great lord. She tied blue ribbons on his head when he went to college to let the maidens know that he was married. But he died at age 16, after having sired a son.
May Day was a holiday with dancing around a Maypole and people
dressed up as characters such as Queen of the May, Robin Hood,
Little John, Friar Tuck, Maid Marion, the fool, and the piper. New
Year's Day was changed to January 1st.
Golf was played in Scotland, and James introduced it into England.
James I was the last monarch to engage in falconry.
Francis Bacon wrote the "Advancement of Learning" and "Novum Organum" (New Learning) in which he encouraged the use of the inductive method to find out scientific truths and also truths in general, that is reasoning from a sample to the whole. According to him, the only way to arrive at the truth was to observe and determine the correlations of facts. He advocated a process of elimination of ideas. His "New Learning" showed the way out of the scholastic method and reverence for dogma into the experimental method. He wrote "Natural and Experimental History". He also studied the effect of cold in preventing animal putrefaction.
Galileo Galilei, professor of mathematics at the University of Padua in Italy, conducted experiments, e.g. throwing objects off the tower of Pisa in 1590 to show that all, whether light or heavy, fall at the same rate. This disproved the widely held theory that heavier objects fall faster than light objects. He proved that the force of gravity has the same effect on all objects regardless of their size or weight. His law stated that the speed of their descent increases uniformly with the time of the fall, i.e. speed = gravity times time. Galileo determined that a pendulum, such as a hanging lamp, swings back and forth in equal intervals of time. For this he measured time with water running out of a vessel. Also, the rate of oscillation varies inversely as the square of their cord length, regardless of material or weight. From his observation that an object sliding along a plane slows down at a decreasing rate and travels increasingly farther as the surfaces become smoother and more lubricated, he opined that the natural state of a body in motion is to stay in motion, and that it is slowed down by a force: friction. He conceived of the air offering a resistant force to an object in motion. He expanded on Aristotle's idea of an object in a state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line, so that the former is just a special case of the latter. He opined that bodies at rest stay at rest and bodies in motion stay in uniform motion, unless and until acted upon by some force. So motion need not be explained by the continuing force of a prime mover. He drew a graph of distance versus time for the rolling ball, which indicated that the distance traveled was a square of the time elapsed. He realized that the movement of a projectile involved a horizontal and a vertical component and guessed that the effects of falling were independent of the horizontal motion. He demonstrated that a projectile follows a path of a parabola, instead of a straight line, and that it too descends a distance which is the square of the time taken to fall. That is, a thrown object will strike the ground in the same amount of time as an object simply dropped from the same height.
The telescope was invented in 1608. The next year, Galileo built a greatly improved telescope using a lens to look at the skies. He observed that the surface of the moon had mountains, valleys, and craters much like the earth, and was illuminated by reflected light. He noticed that the planet Jupiter has moons orbiting it. He noted that the planet Venus progresses through phases similar to those of the moon orbiting the earth and that it was very large with a crescent shape or very small with a round shape. This apparent change in size could only be explained if Venus revolved around the sun, rather than around the earth. Thus more credence was given to the Copernican theory that the earth and all planets revolve around the sun, so Galileo was denounced by the church. He argued against a literal interpretation of the Bible. His observation that certain sun spots were on certain locations of the sun but changed over time suggested that the sun might be rotating. He observed that when air was withdrawn by a suction pump from the top of a long glass tube whose lower open end was submerged in a pan of water, the water rose to a height of 34 feet and no higher. He had demonstrated that there was such a thing as a vacuum, which was above the level of the water. About 1600, Galileo invented the first thermometer by heating air at the top of a tube whose open end was in a bowl of water; as the top end cooled, the air contracted and water rose partway up the tube; the column of water rose or fell with every change of temperature. Galileo invented the compound refracting microscope, which used more than one lens, about 1612.
Galileo's book on the arguments for and against the Copernican theory was unexpectedly popular when published in 1632. The general public was so persuaded by the arguments that the earth revolved around the sun that Papal authority felt threatened. So Galileo was tried and convicted of heresy and sentenced to prison as an example to others who might question church doctrine, even though the seventy year old Galileo recanted and some of the inquisition judges who convicted him believed the Copernican theory and their decision did not assert the contrary.