For every wagon and cart in London, there must be a person on foot to guide it to prevent the maiming, wounding, and killing of people, especially the old and children, when drivers ride on their wagons and carts. Later, it was required that carts must display the name of the owner and be registered. Still later, there was a penalty of 10s. for not having a person on foot to guide any cart. Later still, in 1757, if a new owner of a cart did not put his name thereon, he had to forfeit 40s., and the cart and horse could be seized and sold to pay the forfeiture. Persons willfully obstructing passage on streets with empty carts or barrels or pipes shall forfeit 5-12s. or do hard labor up to one month. The justices of London assessed rates and made regulations for carriage of goods. Certain houses and buildings were bought and pulled down to widen several streets, lanes, and passages.
In 1774, persons driving cattle in London, whose negligence or improper treatment of such cattle cause them to do mischief shall forfeit 5-20s. or else go to a House of Correction for up to one month or be publicly whipped.
The roads around London were neither very attractive nor very safe. Along them was land covered with water from drains and refuse and dung heaps. Hogs were kept in large numbers on the outskirts and fed on the garbage of the town. Smoking brick kilns surrounded a great part of London. In the brickyards vagrants lived and slept, cooking their food at the kilns.
Queen Anne's drinking of tea made it a popular drink, but it was still expensive. This habit improved health because to make tea, the water had to be boiled before drunk. Breakfast included tea and bread and butter, and later toast with melted butter. The rich also had coffee and chocolate. The morning newspaper was often read at breakfast. The chief dinner dishes were roast beef, roast mutton, boiled beef or pork, with puddings and vegetables. Roast meat was still the basic diet of town and country gentlemen. There were also fowls, tripes, rabbits, hares, pigeons, and venison. Many elaborate sauces were made. The national dish was the pudding, a compound of steak, kidney, larks, and oyster. Drinks included ginger beer, lemonade, barley water, coffee, chocolate, tea, and foreign wine. Port from Portugal was introduced about 1703, and rum about 1714. Rum, made from sugar, first became popular as a medicine, well-whisked with butter. Beer was drunk by the poorer and middle classes. The poor could afford very little meat now, unlike 200 years ago. Their standard fare was cheese, bread, and tea, the latter of which was usually from used tea leaves bought from rich houses.
Households were smaller; a peer had a household of about 25-50. The proportion of women grew to one-third to one-half. Dinner guests sat and were served in order of rank, with gentlemen on one side of the table and ladies on the other. Later, a fashion came in to sit alternately by sex. Dinner was in several courses and lasted a few hours. Toasts might be made. It was bad manners to put one's elbows on the table, to sniff the food, to eat too slowly or too quickly, to scratch, spit, or blow one's nose at the table, or to pick one's teeth with a toothpick before the dishes were removed. After dinner, the men drank, smoked, and talked at the table. There was a chamber pot under the sideboard for their use. Politics was a popular subject. The women talked together in the drawing room. Later, the men joined the women for tea and coffee. The evening often finished with card games, reading newspapers, verse-making, fortune-telling, walks in the garden, impromptu dancing, perhaps gambling, and supper.
The nobility and gentry became more mobile and now mixed together at parties. At these afternoon parties, there were a variety of simultaneous activities, instead of everyone participating in the same activities together as a group. Guests could choose to engage in conversation, news, cards, tea-drinking, music, dancing, and even go into supper at different times. Sometimes a man other than her husband escorted a lady to a party. Having lovers outside marriage was socially accepted if discrete.
Single women were discouraged from thinking of their independent status not as advantageous, but as regrettable. Weddings were becoming public in church instead of private. Brides wore a white silk or satin dress with a train. Over one third of brides who were capable of having children were already pregnant when they got married. In 1753 a marriage statute required licenses to marry and the consent of parents or guardians in case of minors, calling of banns [advance announcement so that anyone could point out why the marriage should not take place], and need of four weeks residence in the parish where the license was given by bishop or other authority, because of the kidnapping of heiresses, prostitutes trapping unwary youths after getting them drunk, and priests performing marriages clandestinely and not in church, which required banns. Two witnesses to the marriage were required to sign a certificate of marriage, which was then to be registered in the parish books. Manufactured goods relieved ladies from baking of bread, brewing, and spinning. So they often visited with friends, wrote letters, embroidered, and supervised the servants.
Funerals ceremonies started with socializing at the house with refreshments, then going in a procession to the church for burial, and finally returning to the house for more socializing.
It was possible for a woman-covert to be seized of land in fee simple or in tail general or special to her separate use, free from control or intermeddling of her husband.
Houses were warmed in winter by burning coal. Furniture was still sparse. Moderate homes had tent-beds in use, with which cloth was hung on all four sides of the bed from a light iron framework above the bed. The beds were warmed with a warming pan heated in a fire before use. There were often bed bugs and fleas. Everyone wore nightcaps to bed. Pewter tableware was used, but the poor used tinware instead. Copper, brass, and iron pots and pans were increasingly common.