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rights, but had also a dawning consciousness of power to enforce them. The same absurdities in legislation however, still continued; sumptuary laws were then and for centuries after frequently enacted, to restrain extravagance in living, and to prevent the lower orders from imitating the dress of their superiors; but even these, show an evident improvement in the condition of the laborer. In 1444, the entire yearly allowance as fixed by law, for the clothing of an agricultural servant, was three shillings and fourpence; but, in 1463, only nineteen years after, it is enacted that the "clothing of all common laborers and artificers residing out of a city, and also their wives, should be of cloth not passing the price of two shillings the broad yard," or nearly two-thirds of the former allowance for a whole year!

It seems, also, by another clause in the statute, that they had become fond of ornament, since it prohibits any laborer or laborer's wife from wearing any girdle garnished with silver. A subsequent statute of 1482 permits the laborer to wear hose of the value of eighteen pence-a respectable sum in those days, and proving that the clothing of operatives was becoming better and better, notwithstanding the sumptuary laws.

This spirit of restriction and interference extended to all branches of industry, and even the learned professions did not escape. One of the most curious regulations in this respect, is a statute passed in the reign of Henry the Sixth, in 1455; and which was occasioned by the number of attorneys attending the king's courts in the city of Norwich, and the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk having risen from six or eight to ten times that number. "Under the former state of things," says the statute, "great tranquillity reigned

in the said city and counties, and little trouble or vexation was made by untrue or foreign suits; now, there are three or four score of attorneys, the greater part of whom have nothing to live on but the gains of their attorneyship, and also are not possessed with a proper knowledge of law; and they come to every market, fair, and other places where there is any assembly of people, exhorting, procuring, moving, and exciting the people to attempt untrue and foreign suits for small trespasses, little offences, and small sums of debt." The statute provides a summary remedy for the grievance, by enacting that there shall be but six common attorneys in Norfolk, six in Suffolk, and two in the city of Norwich; which enactment was carried into immediate effect, and is said to have done a great deal of good.

The reign of Henry the Seventh was throughout a triumph of petty rascality. "The chief part of his kingcraft," says a modern writer, "consists in his dexterity in plundering his subjects:" his exactions however, were strictly legal so far as the letter of the law was concerned, and the people had at least the consolation of knowing that their blood was sucked according to the most approved forms and precedents. Henry's first minister, Archbishop Morton, was worthy of his master; and a principle which he laid down, in his instructions to the commissioners appointed to collect one of the king's "benevolences," as they were oddly enough termed, would have immortalized him as a modern financier: "Both those who live sparingly and those who live splendidly," he tells them, "must be made to pay well, since the former ought to be able to afford the money from their savings, the latter by retrenching their expenditure."

This whole reign, in fact, was a worthy prelude to the next; and for the character of the then reigning monarch I shall quote the words of a late English historian.

"The temper," says the history, "of such a legislator as Henry the Eighth, and the thorough subservience, the otherwise incredible cowardice and baseness, of his parliaments, can only be fully exhibited by an enumeration of their penal laws, which, for number, variety, severity, and inconsistency, are perhaps unequalled in the annals of jurisprudence. Instead of the calmness, the foresight, the wisdom, which are looked for in a legislator, we find the wild phantasies, and ever-changing though ever-selfish caprices of a spoiled child, joined to the blind, fierce, malignant passions of a brutal and cruel savage. It would seem as if the disembodied demon of a Caligula, or a Nero, -the evil spirit that once wore their human form, had again become incarnate upon earth, let loose by the Omnipotent for some wise, though to dull mortal eyes dimly-discerned end, to repeat in a distant age, and another clime, that strange, wild, extravagant medley of buffoonery and horror, which is fitted to move at once the laughter and execration of mankind."

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Under the sway of a monarch like this, nothing is to be hoped for the operative; and if we judged merely by appearances we should infer that his social position had retrograded: but, so far from this, the industrious classes were in reality making more rapid progress towards emancipation amid the despotism of this reign, than ever before; and were silently imbibing those influences which, ever becoming stronger with the increasing light of knowledge, were destined in

after times to change the face of the English govern

ment.

The reign of Elizabeth, though less sensual and brutal than that of her father, was quite as tyrannical: the people, although we can trace an evident improvement in their condition, were still depressed; and the parliament were her willing slaves. There is an almost impious strain of adulation running through their addresses, which sometimes leads us to suspect that they were playing with her well-known weakness in this respect, and "fooling her to the top of her bent." On one occasion, when the queen had annulled certain obnoxious monopolies, the history declares that "the gratitude of the commons for her message announcing this, was as if they had been returning thanks for some mighty interposition of Heaven: indeed, they declared the message to be nothing less than a gospel; like the Divinity, she was all truth, and like him, too, she performed all she promised." I notice this fact, not that it has any direct bearing upon our subject, but as an illustration of the modes of thinking then prevalent, and of the depth of degradation to which flattery and obsequiousness were content to descend.

The amount of human life sacrificed in these times, under the forms of law, is absolutely frightful; seventytwo thousand persons were hanged for various offences during the single reign of Henry the Eighth. And there was no great improvement under Elizabeth, since the reports of the magistrates record that forty persons were hanged, during the year 1596, in one county alone, besides thirty-five burnt in the hand, and thirtyseven whipped; one hundred and eighty-three others apprehended for robberies, thefts, and other felonies, were discharged, though most of them were probably

as bad as the others; and this was a fair sample of the remaining counties.

There were, also, in every county, three or four hundred able-bodied vagrants who lived by rapine, and who sometimes gathered in bands of fifty or sixty, robbing and plundering at will, and, by their numbers, so intimidating the magistrates and peaceable inhabitants, that they durst not attempt to enforce the laws against them. This dreadful state of society strongly illustrates the error of allowing the mere external brilliancy of the Elizabethan age to blind us to its true character, and proves, as has already been said, that what are called the good old times, have enjoyed a much better character than they deserved.

The gradual rise of trade and manufactures, which had been going on since Edward the Third, in 1331, invited over the first weavers of fine woollens from the Netherlands, still continued to operate as a constantly increasing stimulus to the national industry: labor, ingenuity and skill, began to be properly estimated and better rewarded; but the curse of inferiority, which barbarian ignorance had stamped upon useful industry, yet existed, and all men in trade, even the mercantile classes, were obliged in Scotland, to wear a distinctive dress, from which bright colors, and ornamental decorations, were excluded. This, however, like all errors, gradually faded away before the ever-advancing light of intelligence; and when the reformation threw its weight into the popular scale, by breaking down that blind reverence for antiquity and its usages under which oppressions and abuses best grow and strengthen, — and when, still more, it threw into the ranks of the people a large body of productive laborers, whose peculiar position under the ancient system had naturally

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