No More Learning

restrictions were applied to the importation of foreign goods, and
was advanced by the buying-up processes of the 'bodgers' and
other tricks and frauds of the corn market*. The price of corn
rose wildly, and, no doubt, it was more than once thought that
“there will soon be no wheat- or rye-bread for the poor? A serving-
man is cited, about 1598, as declaring that, in his lifetime, ordinary
articles of wear have trebled in price,' and yet my wages not more
then my great grandfathers, [he] supplying the same place and
office I doe. '
Usury-a remedial process in times of dearth which rapidly
accommodates itself to the needs of any and every class-had
become a crying evil of the age which Greene and Lodge ser-
6
了​。
Es
6
be
1 See the section The Landlord' in Hall, Hubert, Society in the Elizabethan Age
(3rd ed. 1901).
2 Doctor Faustus, 8C. I.
3 Harrison, who recalled with something like regret the times when strange
bottoms were suffered to come in' (p. 131), was an imperialist as well as a free-trader,
and could hardly believe that com exported from England served to relieve the
enemies as well as the friends of church and state (ibid. p. 297). As to exportation,
that of sheep was strictly prohibited, while, as a matter of course, that of wool was
open,
See Symes, J. E. , ap. Traill, 4. 8. vol. III, where a summary is given of the
Elizabethan regulation of trade, industry and labour.
4 Harrison, pp. 297–301.
5 Ibid. p. 163.
6 The Serving-man's Comfort.
E. L. V. CH. XIV.
23


## p. 354 (#378) ############################################

354 Political and Social Aspects of the Age
monised in A Looking Glasse for London and England', and
established itself as one of the ordinary themes of the satire of
English comedy? Of old, loans had usually been made without
interest being demanded, and any demand of this sort had been
illegal; but, after the principle of the illegality of interest had
been abrogated by parliament in 1545, Elizabeth's government had
proved unable to revive it. About the middle of her reign, ten per
.
cent. was the legal rate; but twelve per cent. was quite common.
Under James I, the ordinary rate sank to eight per cent. 3
Though the general condition of the labouring classes does not
appear to have changed very much for the worse during the reign
of Elizabeth, it was, on the other hand, not materially raised from
the low point to which it had sunk by the sixth decade of the
century. In some parts of the country, the poor were so much at
the mercy of the rich that small houses seem to have been almost
swept off the face of the ground; and a general decay of towns
set in, of which, however, the statistics, as is frequently the case
in the matter of depopulation, hardly admit of being either accepted
or rejected". Yet, in defiance of such phenomena, mercantile
enterprise swept forward on its course, made possible, in the first
instance, by the wise initial policy of the queen's government in
establishing coinage on a sound basis, and continuously expanded,
thanks to the farsighted intelligence of those who watched over both
the emancipation and the development of English trade. Crown and
city cooperated, with a notable concurrence of insight, in this policy,
which, during a considerable part of the queen's reign, was under
the guidance of Thomas Gresham, as great a minister (though
without a portfolio) as has at any time taken charge of the com-
mercial interests of a modern states Largely under the influence,
i See, especially, the scene in which the usurer's poor client Alcon is on the point of
losing both cow' and 'gown’unless he resorts to corruption, and the tirade of Oseas:
When hateful usury,
Is counted husbandry, etc.
2 Among the usurers of Elizabethan comedy, there were several who, like Sordido
in Every Man out of His Humour, 'never pray'd but for a lean dearth, and ever wept
in a fat harvest. '
* Cf. Symes, u. s. , and see Harrison, p. 272.
They are given in Harrison, pp. 257—8.
5 Hubert Hall, who has chosen “the great master of exchange, the useful agent of
the Crown, the financial advisor of ministers, the oracle of the city, the merchant
prince, patron and benefactor,' as the type of «The Merchant' in Society of the
Elizabethan Age, pp. 58 ff. , has, while maintaining the proportion necessary in
the treatment of such a theme, shown how unscrupulously Sir Thomas Gresham
also took charge of his own interests. Heywood, in Part I of lj you know not me, etc. ,
appends to the imposing figure of the great nerchant a good deal of what may
probably be set down as idle fiction about his family troubles.
*
<


## p. 355 (#379) ############################################

2
fc
a
CES
Advance of Trade and Industry 355
or through the personal agency, of this ‘merchant royall*,' English
trade had been freed from subjection to that of the Hanseatic
league, and to that of the great Flemish towns; colonial enterprise
on a comprehensive scale was encouraged, and great merchant com-
panies were established, which came, it was said, to absorb the whole
English trade except that with France. At the same time, the
home trade and the home industries on which that trade depended
were actively advanced-especially those which, like the crafts of
the clothier, the tanner and the worsted-maker, might be trusted to
bring money into the country. Companies of craftsmen under the
authority of the crown took the place of the old municipal guilds;
attempts at a better technical education (not for the first time)
were set afoot; and a select immigration of skilled foreign work-
men in special branches of production was encouraged. English
trade abroad, so far as possible, was protected, and a vigorous
banking system—the sovereign instrument for the facilitation of
commercial and industrial activity at home and abroad-was
called into life. Thus, while English merchants became familiar
visitors in distant lands, the goods, domestic or imported, with
which the English market abounded were countless in their mere
names—'all men's ware?
The point which we have reached in this fragmentary survey
seems to allow of a brief digression concerning one of the causes
of that engrossing love of wealth in which many observers recog-
nised one of the most notable signs of the times. Among these
observers were the comic dramatists, and those of them-Ben
Jonson above all-who wrote with a didactic purpose recognised
in this master passion one of the most dangerous, as from an
ethical point of view it was one of the most degrading, of the
tendencies of the age. Yet, even the love of wealth for its own
sake has aspects less ignoble than those which belong to the
pursuit of it for the sake of a luxurious way of living unknown
to earlier generations or less affluent neighbours. In his whole
tis
wala
các
tur
1 As a technical term, this designation seems to have superseded that of merchant
venturer. See the passage from Tell-Trothes New Yeares Gift, ed. Furnivall, F. J. , Publ.
of New Shaksp. Soc. , ser. VI, No. 4, cited by Vatke, T. , Culturbilder aus Alt-England,
p. 201. Antonio, in The Merchant of Venice, is more than once called a 'royal merchant. '
2 Cf. Symes, u. s. p. 370.
8 See the interesting series of dialogues by William Stafford, A Briefe Conceipt of
English Policy (1683), p. 71.
* So early as 1563, the great variety of the articles of English trade and manufao-
ture is illustrated by A Book in English Metre of the rich merchant-man called Dives
Pragmaticus (rptd in Huth's Fugitive Tracts, 1875), an enumerative effort of
extraordinary virtuosity.
232


## p. 356 (#380) ############################################

356 Political and Social Aspects of the Age
conception of luxury, as well as in the names which he bears,
Sir Epicure Mammon is the consummate type of the man whose
existence is given up to this worship of the unspiritual.
The two favourite kinds of luxury in Elizabethan and Jacobean
England, needless to say, were those associated with diet and with
dress respectively. Already in queen Mary's day, her Spanish
visitors were astonished by the excellent table usually kept by
Englishmen, as much as by the inferiority of the houses in which
they were content to dwell. The building of English houses seems
to have struck foreign observers as more or less unsubstantial;
but, thongh the sometimes fantastic and sometimes slight style
of house architecture in vogue may have been partly due to the
influence of Italian example, even magnates of the land had
ceased to care much for residing in castles. For the houses of
the gentry, brick and stone were coming into use in the place
of timber, although most English dwelling houses were still of the
latter material. One of the most attractive features in English
houses was to be found in the rich hangings usual in the houses
of the nobility, and the less costly tapestry in those of the gentry,
and even of farmers? . Noticeable, too, was the store of plate,
kept, in proportionate quantities, of course, in both upper and
middle class houses, and even in the cupboards of many artisans.
On the other hand, a sufficient number of chimneys was still
wanting to many houses, where logs were piled up in the halls
--stoves of course were not ordinarily used-and though the
general quality of household furniture was imposing, bedding was
still sparse in many houses, and a day bed or 'couch' a quite
exceptional indulgence.
The greatest charm of an English house, its garden, might
almost be described as an Elizabethan addition to English domestic
life: previously to this period, private horticulture had chiefly
directed itself to the production of kitchen vegetables and
medicinal herbs. Flowers were now coming to be much prized,
and the love of them and care for them displayed by several
Elizabethan dramatists, and, pre-eminently, by Shakespeare, was,
i In The Alchemist.
2 Paul Hentzner's Travels, p. 64. Of course, the "arras' plays a part, both tragic
and comic, in the Elizabethan drama corresponding to that which it must have played
in real life ; cf. Hamlet and King John, and both parts of Henry IV.
: Cf. Love's Labour's Lost, act v.
• Cf. Beaumont and Fletcher, Rule a Wife And have a Wife, act 11, 80. I. The
last two illustrations are borrowed from Vatke, T. , u. 8. , where a large number of others
Are to be found.
a


## p. 357 (#381) ############################################

e her
Toni
6
Dube
Per
7,267
Diet and Drink
357
no doubt, fostered by a desire to gratify a widespread popular
tastel.
Even from the few facts given above, it will appear how
simply, even in these days of material advance, Englishmen
were still lodged, and how small a part was played, in their
daily life, by its household gear, as, on the stage (which repre-
sented that life), by its 'properties. ' On the other hand, even
the rector of Radwinter, whom we may safely conclude to have
been temperate in habit as well as in disposition, and who calls
special attention to the fact that excess in eating and drinking
is considered out of place in the best society, avers that 'our
bodies doo crave a little more ample nourishment, than the
inhabitants of the hotter regions are accustomed withall,' and that
'it is no marvell therefore that our tables are oftentimes more
plentifullie garnished than those of other nations? ' Stubbes's
assertion that, whereas in his father's day, one or two dishes
of good wholesome meat were thought sufficient for a man of
worship to dine withal,' nowadays it had become necessary to have
the table 'covered from one end to the other, as thick as one dish
can stand by the other,' seems to point in the direction of un-
necessary display rather than of gluttony. Harrison notes that
the ordinary expenditure on food and drink had diminished, and
that the custom which has been succinctly described as 'eating
and drinking between meals'--'breakefasts in the forenoone,
beverages, or nuntions after dinner'-had fallen into disuse. But,
of course, there was a great deal of gross feeding and feasting in
all spheres of life, and illustrations of the habit are not far to
seek in our comic dramatists 5. That excess in drink was not
uncommon in Elizabethan England, is, to be sure, a fact of which
evidence enough and to spare could be adduced from contemporary
drama ; but the impression conveyed by what we learn on the
subject, from this and other sources, is that in no section of English
society was intemperance, at this time, the fiagrant vice which
it afterwards became, except in that 'fringe' of tipplers, among
* See, especially, of course, friar Laurence's soliloquy in Romeo and Juliet, act 11,
sc. 3. As to early English herbals, see ante, vol. iv, pp. 394—5, and cf. ibid. p. 542 (bibl. )
for a list of these and of works on gardening. Bacon's essay Of Gardens was, no
doubt, in part suggested by the interest taken in the gardens of Gray's inn by the
benchers and other members.
? Harrison, p. 142.
3 Anatomie, pp. 102—3.
6 See, for instance, the beginning of the sheriff's dinner to which the gentle craft'
is summoned by the Pancake bell,' in Dekker's Shomakers Holiday, and the elaborate
description of a more elaborate city feast in Massinger's City-Madam, act II,
TAS
28
三​希
​2015
4
p. 162.
6
4
sc. 1.


## p. 358 (#382) ############################################

358 Political and Social Aspects of the Age
a
whom 'ancients' and other officers and soldiers without pay or
record were prominent, and of whom, in Falstaff's crew, Shakespeare
has drawn perennial types. Heavy drinking was not customary at
ordinary repasts; indeed, much talking at meals was avoided by those
who studied good tone, and the well known custom of encouraging
guests to 'call a cup' when they chose was introduced in order to
avoid a continuous supply of liquor to any one person at table. On
the other hand, there was much drinking at the 'ale-houses,' which,
for this purpose, took the place of the old-established taverns, and
increased in number so largely as to make their licences a profitable
source of general income; and, doubtless, there was not a little
drunkenness in the streets, notwithstanding the five shilling fine 1.
It would take us too far to enquire how far the change of taste
noticeable in this period from light French to Spanish and other
sweet and heavy wines increased the tendency to intemperance ;
Harrison, who reckons that, besides homegrown, there are 56 sorts
of light wines and 30 of strong, insinuates that the stronger they
are the more they are desired? There is every reason for con-
cluding that, in the days of James I, the intemperate habits in
vogue at court spread into other classes of society, and that the
drinking houses of this period deserved the description given of
them by Barnabe Rich%.
Long after its introduction, the use of tobacco was regarded as
a fashionable, rather than a popular, indulgence, but its consump-
tion must have increased with extraordinary speed, if Barnabe
Rich had been correctly informed 'that there be 7000 shops in
and about London, that doth vent tobacco. ' Shakespeare never
mentions this article of Elizabethan luxury.
In the Elizabethan and early Stewart ages, an excessive care
9
1
1 See Vatke's note (u. 8. p. 170) on a well known passage in Much Ado about Nothing,
Act III, sc. 3.
? pp. 149 ft.
He also mentions, besides march and home-brewed beer, me-
theglin and a kind of swish swash' called mead. He does not mention. oburni' (a
spiced drink) or 'hum' (ale and spirits). See The Divel is an Asse, act I, sc. 1. For a
fairly complete account of the favourite drinks of the Elizabethan age, cf. Sandys, W. ,
introduction to Festive Songs, principally of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
(Percy Soc. Publ. , 1848, vol. xxin), where see especially as to the aristocratic beverage
sack. As to the change of taste in wines, and the bonus on heavy sorts which en.
couraged it, see Hall, H. , u. 8. chap. vi ("The Host'), where there is much information
on the whole subject.
* Cf. The Honestie of this Age, etc. (Percy Soc. Publ. , 1844, vol. XI), pp. 18–19.
• Cf. the well known passage as to the scientific training of tobacconists' in Every
Man out of His Humour, act III, EC. I.
As to the date of the introduction of tobacco,
see Mary Bateson, ap. Traill, H. D. , vol. III, pp. 571-2, where Shakespeare's silence on
the subject of the herb and its use is noted.
9


## p. 359 (#383) ############################################

Dress
359
6
for dress was at least as marked a characteristic of large sections
of English society as a fondness for the pleasures of the table.
Neither sumptuary laws nor moral injunctions proved effectual
preventives, though it may be asserted that, among social failings,
the love of fine dress, on the whole, was that which puritans
visited with their sternest censure. Andrew Boorde (who was by no
means a puritan), a generation earlier, had dwelt on the fickleness
exhibited by Englishmen in connection with this particular foible,
and the mutability of the extravagance continued to remain one
of its most constant features. “Falconbridge, the young baron of
England,' we remember! , ‘bought his doublet in Italy, his round
hose in France, his bonnet in Germany. But Spain and France
were long the rival schools of apparel for young Englishmen of
fashion, though, of the pair, notwithstanding the strong predilection
for things Spanish which long prevailed at the court of James I,
the French model, on the whole, maintained its ascendancy. In
accordance with the general tendency, noticed above, of luxurious
habits of life to efface class distinctions, censure of all this
extravagance is found accompanied by regret that “it is difficult
to know who is a gentleman and who is not from his dress? . As
a matter of course, it was inevitable that, in the matter of dress, the
extravagance of men should be far outdone by that of the other sex,
more especially in the way of those artificial supplements to the
attractions of nature, which left women, in the severe words of
Stubbes, “the smallest part of themselves. While many effeminate
men aped the devices of women's toilets, women, quite as often in
search of notoriety as for purposes of disguise, wore doublet and
hose ; and the confusion of the external attributes of the sexes to
which exception was taken as a practice of the theatre thus,
in this instance also, reflected, at least in some measure, a social
licence of the age. In the matter of dress in general, the mimic
life followed, while, perhaps, as in earlier and later times, it now
and then suggested, the extravagances of the society which the
theatre at once served and imitated. The sumptuousness of
actors' costumes, both on and off the stage, is illustrated by direct
evidence as well as by many well known passages and anecdotes
--among the former, by Gosson's assertion that the verye hyrelings
i The Merchant of Venice, act 1, sc. 2.
2 Stubbes's Anatomie, p. 29.
There follows an elaborate description of the apparel
which the moralist censures. Further details will be found in the introduction to
Vatke, T. , 4. 8.
3 Ibid. p. 75. Cf. the passage in Cynthia's Revels, act v, ad fin. , satirising the
'pargetting, painting, sticking, glazing and renewing old rivelled faces. '


## p. 360 (#384) ############################################

360 Political and Social Aspects of the Age
of some of our plaiers, which stand at reversion of vis. by the
weeke, jet under gentlemens noses in sutes of silke'
Thus, the increase of luxury and the desire of securing as large
a share of it as money could buy must be reckoned among the
chief causes of the auri sacra fames which contributed to the
unrest of the Elizabethan age, and which, in the next age, re-
mained a strong motive of private, and, too often, of public,
action.
In queen Elizabeth's time the military and naval professions can
hardly be said to have played any part in the social history of the
country. No standing army was kept up for foreign warfare; when
a force was required for that purpose, it was collected partly by
feudal obligation or impressment, and partly by the enlist-
ment of volunteers the last-named, for political reasons, a very
convenient form for collecting a body of troops. It is true that,
already under James I, such forces were often not disbanded
immediately on their return home. Meanwhile, the defensive
force of the land, in principle, and (at all events till the reign of
Charles I) in fact, was a county militia, called under arms by means
of commissions of array, officered by country gentlemen and under
the command of lords lieutenant-though the name 'militia'
was only coming into use at the time when the civil war broke
out on the question of the command of the body so called. The
composition of the force, the numbers of which looked magnificent
on papers, depended largely on the high constables of the hundreds
and the petty constables of the parishes, who seem to have taken
good care to draft into it all the disreputable elements of which
they were fain to get rid", as well as the unemployed 'Shadows'
and “Mouldies' of their generation". Recruits were supplied
with arms-armour proper was falling out of use, and, by the close
of the century, the bow had been entirely superseded by the
musket. Munition was kept in readiness under some sort of
inspection in every town and considerable village; for there were
no garrisons existing except in a few coast towns. The navy was
1 The School of Abuse, p. 29. In Part II of The Returne from Pernassus, act v, sc. 1,
Studioso complains of the glaring satten sutes' in which actors rode through the
gazing streets.
>
6
2 Maitland, F. W. , The Constitutional History of England, pp. 278—9.
3 According to Harrison, the number of able-bodied men on the roll in 1574 and
1575 was 1,172,674, though one-third of this total were not called out.
* See • The Maner of chosing Souldiers in England' cited from Barnabe Rich's
A Right Exelent and pleasaunt Dialogue, between Mercury and an English Souldier, etc.
(1574), in P. Cunningham's ed. of the same writer's Honestie of the Age, p. 48.
o Part II of Henry IV, act iii, sc. 2.
6


## p. 361 (#385) ############################################

Soldiers and Sailors
361
made up of a growing number of ships of war, besides merchant
vessels (including ships chartered by the various trading com-
panies) and fishing boats. Harrison reckons, with pride, that
queen Elizabeth could have afloat as many as from 9,000 to 10,000
seamen; and a census held for the purpose a few years before the
coming of the Armada reckoned more than 16,000 persons in
England (exclusive of Wales) in some sort accustomed to the sea? .
The wonderful year itself proved a great deal more than that
England had the winds and the waves for allies—it also proved
that her ships were much superior to those of her arch-foe in both
manning and gunnery. Though shipbuilding was much improved
in the later years of the century, when the queen built about
one ship a year, much needed reforms in what had now become
a regular profession did not begin till 1618. Thus, in the
Elizabethan age proper, the military, and, here and there, the
naval types which dramatists, in this period, were fond of
presenting were largely of an exceptional sort-men in whom a
mixture of volunteer or privateer and patriot lends itself to
picturesque treatment. Besides these, there must have been in
real life many swaggerers and pretenders, of the Pistol and Bobadill
sort, who on the stage furnished variations of the time-honoured
classical or Italian types“; and there was, especially as a legacy of
the struggle in the Low Countries, a constant influx of discharged
soldiers, quite as often objects of satire as of sympathy, because
of the counterfeits who were largely mixed up with them and
who were one of the pests of the age. No doubt, too, Harrison's
observation was correct, that soldiers who had seen service in the
field could not easily be prevailed upon to resume the habit of
ordinary daily labour, and thus became a disturbing element in
the population. For the rest, in London and elsewhere, order
was kept by watchmen with their brown bills-a familiar type of
1
p. 291.
2 See the section by Oman, C. W. E. , on The Art of War,' ap. Traill, u. 8.
vol. III, where will be found much valuable information concerning the navy under
Elizabeth.
3 E. g. Young Forest in Thomas Heywood's Fortune by Land and Sea, lord
Momford, in Day and Chettle's Blind Beggar of Bednal Green, etc. , etc.
* Jonson, who had himself seen service, preserved a sincere respect for true
soldiers. (Cf. Epigram cviii. )
co Of these, who generally represented themselves as wounded in the Low Countries
when fighting against Spinola, with Essex at Cadiz, or Drake in St Domingo,' see a
graphic account in G. W. Thornbury's amusing Shakespeare's England (1856), vol. I,
pp. 279--30.
* p. 231
6
>
8
A


## p. 362 (#386) ############################################

362 Political and Social Aspects of the Age
Elizabethan comedy? The general security of the country, no
doubt, was greater than of old; but it was still necessary for serving-
men to be armed when going out at night time, and highway
robberies were not uncommon, especially about Christmas time?
More surprising, perhaps, than the smallness of the share
belonging to army and navy in the life of the Elizabethan age is
the relative depression of the position held about this time-
certainly so far as the evidence of the contemporary drama goes-
by the clergy. As is well known, the recovery of that body, in-
cluding part of the episcopate, from the disrepute into which they
had sunk in the earlier part of the reign, was gradual and, for a
long time, uncertain. A considerable proportion of the episcopate
remained for many years in a position of degrading dependence or
absolute insignificance alike unworthy of their order, while of the
parsonages a large number were not filled up at all, or, in more
ways than one, most unsuitably. As the reign wore on, and the
prudent exertions of the sorely tried archbishop Parker and others
gradually bore fruit, an increasing activity and devotion to their
duties manifested themselves on the part of the bishops; and an
advance was also visible in the case of the inferior or parish clergy,
alike in parochial zeal and in scholarly attainments. Knowledge
of Latin was again becoming universal, and that of Hebrew and
Greek was growing common, among clergymen. The recovery in
question, which as quite distinct from the puritan movement,
though each, in its way, helped to leaven the lump of academical,
as well as of national, life, led, indeed, only very slowly and very
partially to the awakening, in high ecclesiastical places or in quiet
country parsonages, of higher and deeper conceptions of religion.
Yet this tardiness of progress was by no means wholly due to the
decline of the political and social position of the church, and to
1 See among the various counterparts to Dogberry and Verges, those in Samuel
Rowley's When you see me, etc. , in Marston's Insatiate Countesse, in Beaumont and
Fletcher's Cozcombe, and, above all, Blurt and his attendant Stubber in Middleton's
Blurt Master-Constable.
* Harrison, p. 284. Hall, Hubert, u. s. p. 74, gives a number of cases of armed
violence which ended fatally; but they only occasionally come under the above
category.
3 For a highly coloured picture of this condition of things, see Hall, H. ,
in his chapter. The Churchman. ' Harrison's account of the condition of things in his
own day conveys the impression of being written with both knowledge and judgment;
though not puritan in spirit, he is, on the whole, favourable to moderate reform. He
is, however, very acutely sensible of the hardships of various kinds to which his cloth
was subject, and fully alive to the perennial experience that the common sort' are
always ready to cast reproaches on the clergy. In high places, few were quite fair to
their griefs, although Burghley was an exception.
u. 8.
6


## p. 363 (#387) ############################################

The Universities
363
the many alterations in its formularies. It was also due to the
changes which had for some time been at work in
Englands two eyes, Englands two Nurceries,
Englands two nests, Englands two holy mounts,
I meane, Englands two Universities 1.
6
To all appearance, in the middle of queen Elizabeth's reign,
Oxford and Cambridge were in a flourishing condition ; their joint
attendance of students was reckoned at 3000, and, according to
modern notions, it may seem a healthy sign that, in far larger pro-
portions than in earlier times, the sons of the nobility and gentry
were resorting to these places of learning in common with a poorer
class of young men or boys. As a matter of fact, however, more
especially at Cambridge, which, for the better part of two genera-
tions, had taken the lead in the intellectual life of the country,
learning, after having, as elsewhere, become largely absorbed in
theology, was, in the latter half of the century, exposed to a new
danger. The sons of the gentry, whose importance in the general
social system of the country and in its government was, as has
been seen, steadily rising, now frequented the universities for the
purpose of acquiring what may be called 'general culture' rather
than theological or other professed learning. In a word, a new
conception of the work of the national universities was forming
itself which, in more ways than one, was to become of great
importance for the future of the nation as well as for that of the
universities. On the one hand, the risk was being run that deeper
study and research would be elbowed out of existence by
endeavours to gratify the wish for a higher education which
should suit a young gentleman desirous of making his mark in
some recognised public or professional capacity, and which
should not take up too much of his time? And this risk was
materially increased by the introduction into the colleges of
the universities and into the schools which were their feeders of
the system of jobbery which was one of the bad features of the
age: both school and college elections were packed or otherwise
influenced in favour of the well-to-do against the poor, and, more
especially, the best prizes of the university, fellowships, were awarded
in obedience to mandates obtained by fair means or other at
1 Tell-Trothes Message and his Pens Complaint (1600). New Shaksp. Soc. Publ. ,
1876.
? See, on this bead, a very striking passage in William Stafford's Dialogues, cited
above, pp. 20—21.


## p. 364 (#388) ############################################

364 Political and Social Aspects of the Age
court', or as the result of other corrupt methods. This endeavour
to appropriate the universities and their endowments for the
advantage of particular sections of society had many unsatisfactory
consequences-among them an increase of riotous living at college,
in deference to gentlemanlike tastes. Against this was to be set the
fact that a very considerable proportion of the classes whose sons
now frequented the universities was tinged with such general
culture as was to be found there, while many of these young men
acquired something of a real love of learning--and a few some-
thing of learning itself-into the bargain. The later Elizabethan
and Jacobean dramatists take little or no notice of these results-
the academical enthusiasm fostered by the 'university wits' died
out with them, and the usual playhouse type of the university
student was now the feebler variety of undergraduate, whose chief
occupation was to spend his father's money. At the same time, the
public interest benefited directly by the encouragement given by
the queen's government, desirous of attracting nobility and gentry
into the service of the state, to the study of law at the universities,
scholarships being instituted for the support of favoured students
of this subject. The class of students whom these changes hit
hard were the poorer youths, especially those who intended to
devote themselves to the study of theology, with a view to ordina-
tion, and on the training of whom the universities, for some time
previously, had concentrated their activity. Complaints are
constant that, in the bestowal of livings, the same system of
corruption prevailed, in favour of the dependents of nobility and
gentry, or of those who had gained the goodwill of patrons by
illicit means
In general, there can be no doubt that the intellectual
condition of Cambridge, in the later years of the century, was
Letters of commendations-
Why, 'tis reported that they are grown stale
When places fall i' th’ University.
Webster, The Devils Law-case, act 1, sc. 5.
? So Greene . consumed the flower of his youth' at Cambridge amongst wags as
lewd’as himself. The habit of drinking to excess long remained a reproach to the
universities; readers of Clarendon's Life will remember how its prevalence at Oxford,
about 1625, afterwards led him to rejoice that his father had soon removed him from
residence there.
3 So, for instance, Credulous Oldcraft in Fletcher's Wit At severall Weapons.
* A very unattractive account of the methods by which advancement can be best
secured in universities and colleges, as well as in other walks of life, showing how
the system endured and progressed, is given in Tom of all Trades, or the Plaine Path-
Way to Projessions (1631). The reader will, of course, compare the graphio picture of
these things in Part II of The Returne from Pernassus.
6
6


## p. 365 (#389) ############################################

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Puritanism and Protestantism 365
superior to that of the sister university, and reflects itself
as such in our literature. Puritanism, after being repressed at
Cambridge, largely through the influence of Whitgift, held its
ground at Oxford under the patronage of Leicester as chancellor",
and, in the later part of the period under survey, recovered much
of its ground in Cambridge also. To the reaction against Calvinism
at Cambridge in the later part of the reign of James I, and at
Oxford under Laud, a mere reference must suffice. It is curious to
notice the impression of a foreign observer like Paul Hentzner that
the puritan form of faith or religion was distinct from that of the
church as by law established ; in his account of the universities,
he expresses his astonishment that puritans (whom he describes
as entirely abhorring all difference of rank among churchmen ')
do not live separate, but mix with those of the church of England
in the colleges' Such was not the position taken up by those
consistent adversaries of puritanism, the English dramatists of the
Elizabethan and subsequent ages. It has been well pointed out by
Creizenach that, of course with exceptions, it was not so much the
doctrine of the puritans as their conduct of life and treatment of
its outward forms which dramatists visited with their contempt
and ridicule. The satire which puritanism provoked from them was
that which has always directed itself against the assertion, actual or
supposed, by any class, profession or association of men or women,
of a claim to an exceptional degree of moral excellence or virtue, and
against the hypocrisy which this assertion seems to involve. This
was a sort of pretension or 'humour' which robust commonsense,
coupled with keen insight into character, such as signalised Jonson",
would be certain to expose to ridicule and censure, quite apart from
any religious party feeling. Protestant sentiment proper was hardly
a marked characteristic of the Elizabethan or Jacobean drama,
except when it formed an integral part of anti-Spanish or anti-
Jesuit patriotism, and thus directed itself, as a matter of course,
against a representative of the Marian reaction like Gardiner or
an agent of Spanish policy like Gondomars. In a general way,
however, it was natural that this political protestantism should
grow weaker in the Stewart days, when the court was no longer
3
URL
21
>
1 Cf. Mollinger, J. Bass, History of the University of Cambridge, vol. II, p. 283. To
this standard work, the reader must be referred for a complete treatment of the subject.
* Travels in England, English transl. by Horace Walpole (1797), p. 41.
• Vol. iv, part 1, pp. 123–4.
• See The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fayre, eto. The drift of the ridicale in
Middleton's Famelie of Love is equally unspecifio.
o Seo Hoywood's Part I of If you know not me, eto. , and Middleton's A Game at Chesse.


## p. 366 (#390) ############################################

366 Political and Social Aspects of the Age
responsive to this kind of popular sentiment. In a few dramatists,
such as Massinger and Shirley, personal reasons contributed to
favour Roman Catholic ideas and views ; but it cannot be said
that these received from them anything beyond platonic goodwill.
It may, perhaps, be added that the popular feeling which prevailed
in England against Jews cannot be set down as more than the
continued unthinking and undiscriminating acceptance of a popular
prejudice of ancient standing; for Jews in London, during the
whole of this period, were only few in number and very little known,
and neither Shakespeare nor Marlowe is likely to have made the
acquaintance of any Jews abroad!
Except in the fields, now narrowing rather than expanding, of
purely academical scholarship and religious education, London had
more than ever become the centre of the life of the community.
Here, alone, politics, society and intellectual pursuits and diver-
sions of all kinds were at the full height of activity; and here was
the great market for the supply of the luxuries, as well as of the
necessaries, of existence. The influx of inhabitants into London
and its suburbs was very notable. The overgrowth of the popula-
tion beyond the walls was, indeed, arrested by drastic provisions,
dating from 1580; but the total of the metropolitan population
increased with extraordinary rapidity, and, in the century after
the accession of Elizabeth, probably, at least quintupled—and this
notwithstanding the ravages of the plague, which,at times, decimated
-and even decimated twice over-the number of inhabitants.
But it was not numbers only which gave to London its supremacy.
The pulse of life beat more rapidly here than elsewhere; character
and talent-individuality, in short--here had the best chance of
asserting itself. This was largely due, as has been seen, to the court
and, in the same connection, to the great houses of the nobility built
along the pleasant Strand, with the river, London's great high-
way, running by the side of fields and gardens on the way to
Westminster. It was due, in the second place, to the city as the
centre and representative of the mercantile and industrial life of
the nation, with Cheapside, and Goldsmiths' row on its southern
frontage, displaying the magnificence of that life to an admiring
1 Cf. Koeppel, E. , “Konfessionelle Strömungen in d. dramat. Dichtung d. Zeitalters
des beiden ersten Stuart Könige,' in Shakespeare Jahrbuch, vol. XL, pp. xvi ff. , where the
victorious Jewish money-lender in R. Wilson's Three Ladies of London is contrasted
with Barabas, Shylock and the villainous Jewish figures in Daborne's A Christian
turned Turke, Day and William Rowley's Travailes of The three English Brothers, and
Fletcher's Custome of the Countrey. As to the attempt to identify Shylock with an
actual personage, of. ante, chap. VIII.
+


## p. 367 (#391) ############################################

The Legal Profession
367
world. But it was also due to the various colleges of law and
physic, as well as to cathedral and abbey, and the great
schools.
Among the professions which had their proper seat in London,
none, perhaps, in the Elizabethan age and that which followed,
played a more important part in the social system of the country
than the profession of the law. There has assuredly been no
period of English history in which the relations between law
and politics have been more intimate than the age of Bacon and
Coke; and the study of the history of even a single inn of
court, such as Gray's inn, would show how far back in the later
Tudor period this important connection extends. But, apart
from this, though Harrison was of opinion that an excess of
lawyers, like one of merchants, was a clog in the commonwealth
-'all the money in the land' he says 'goes to the lawyers? '-
it was quite inevitable that two characteristics of the age—the
frequent change of ownership in landed property and the frequent
establishment of new trading concerns—should be accompanied by
a large increase of legal practice. This practice was of a kind
which did not necessarily bring its reward in a great harvest of
fees to the London barrister, for there was much more self-help in
that
age
than has been held admissible in later days either in law
or in medicine; and, with regard to the former at all events,
every man was expected to know some law,
so that
many
dramatists with Shakespeare at their head-were, more or less,
of our
1 Nothing can be said here of other favourite centres of intellectual and social
intercourse, among which the taverns—to be distinguished carefully from lesser and
more evanescent places of entertainment did duty for the clubs of later London life.
T. Heywood gives a short list of them in one of the songs inserted in The Rape of
Lucrece, in another of which the cries of Loudon are reproduced. By 1633, the
- number of these taverns was reckoned at 211. Cf. Sandys, W. , Festive Songs, etc. , U. S.
(introduction), and see Vatke, T. , 'Wirthshäuser und Wirthshausleben'in Culturbilder
aus Alt-England. As to 'ordinaries' (the fashionable tables d'hôte of the day), see
the amusing tract The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinarie, or The Walkes in Powles,
1604 (Percy Soc. Publ. , 1845, vol. v). To the main walk of the great gothic church of
St Paul's, a club open to all—even to those who came only to dine with duke Humphrey
-there are frequent allusions in our dramatists. (Bobadill was a 'Paul's man,' and
Falstaff 'bought Bardolph in Paul's. ' See, also, L. Barry's Ram-Alley, act iv, so.