The English pinmakers, however, either proved unable or unwilling to keep their part of the bargain, and complaints were so loudly made that the pins were not what they should be, that in 1545 the Act was declared “frustrate and annihilated, and to be repealed for ever.” Pins of good quality were of brass, but unscrupulous makers made pins of iron wire, blanched, and passed them off as brass ones.
People who went from home then had no choice—they must either ride or walk. Kings, queens, and gentlefolk all mounted to the saddle, the ladies being accustomed to ride on pillions fixed on the horse, and generally behind some relative or serving-man. Rude carriages, however, made their appearance in England in 1555.
Before the Reformation there were no poor’s rates. The poor had their wants supplied by charitable doles given at religious houses, and by contributions placed in the poor man’s box which stood in every church. In all parishes there was a church house supplied with dishes and cooking utensils. “Here,” says John Aubrey, “the housekeepers met, and were merry and gave their charity.”
Begging, under certain conditions, was regulated by an Act of Parliament passed in 1530. By this Act justices of the peace were required to give licences under their seals to such poor, aged, and impotent persons to beg within a certain precinct as they thought had most need. If anyone begged out of the district assigned to him he was to be set in the stocks two days and two nights; and if anyone begged without first obtaining a licence he was to be put in the stocks three days and three nights, and be fed with bread and water only.
Vagrants were very sternly dealt with; but in this Act, and in subsequent legislation on the same subject, we see that our sixteenth-century forefathers had an honest desire to do their duty in relieving such as were in “unfeigned misery.” In an Act passed in the first year of Edward VI.’s reign we find the curate of every parish required, “on every Sunday and holiday, after reading the Gospel of the day, to make (according to such talent as God hath given him) a godly and brief exhortation to his parishioners, moving and exciting them to remember the poor people, and the duty of Christian charity in relieving of them which be their brethren in Christ, born in the same parish and needing their help.”
One of the interesting households of the period was that of Sir Thomas More, the famous Lord Chancellor who was executed in 1535. More lived at Chelsea, and of his happy home there Erasmus, who knew him well, has given the following charming account:—“More,” he says, “has built, near London, upon the Thames, a modest yet commodious mansion. There he lives, surrounded by his numerous family, including his wife, his son, and his son’s wife, his three daughters and their husbands, with eleven grandchildren. There is not any man living so affectionate to his children as he, and he loveth his old wife as if she were a girl of fifteen. Such is the excellence of his disposition, that whatsoever happeneth that could not be helped, he is as cheerful and as well pleased as though the best thing possible had been done.
“In More’s house you would say that Plato’s Academy was revived again, only whereas in the Academy the discussion turned upon geometry and the power of numbers, the house at Chelsea is a veritable school of Christian religion. In it is none, man or woman, but readeth or studieth the liberal arts; yet is their chief care of piety. There is never any seen idle. The head of the house governs it, not by a lofty carriage and oft rebukes, but by gentleness and amiable manners. Every member is busy in his place, performing his duty with alacrity; nor is sober mirth wanting.”
Speaking of More’s home life in his “Short History of the English People,” Mr. J. R. Green says:—“The reserve which the age exacted from parents was thrown to the winds in More’s intercourse with his children. He loved teaching them, and lured them to their deeper studies by the coins and curiosities he had gathered in his cabinet. He was as fond of their pets and their games as the children themselves, and would take grave scholars and statesmen into the garden to see his girls’ rabbit-hutches or to watch the gambols of their favourite monkey.”
(To be continued.)