Part 10

1. A sovereign authority.

2. Laws incorruptibly administered.

3. Physical comfort generally diffused.

4. Intellectual development and activity generally diffused.

5. Recognition of the fundamental principles of religion and morality.

Without the two first, there can be no security for life and property, both of which must be placed in absolute and unquestionable safety before a single step can be taken out of the lowest depth of barbarism. Without the two last, none of the others can be acquired. These conditions are therefore the basis of the pyramid of society.

Taking these then as the essential constituents of civilization, and applying them as a test to Great Britain, we shall see that at the commencement of the 14th century England was in a state of barbarism, since every one of these elements was wanting, although the foundation of political and social institutions containing the germs of liberty and progress had been already laid.

Practically, however, at that period there was no sovereign authority, for the king had no sufficient power to maintain order, to protect the rights and liberties of the people, or to defend his own throne against armed men nominally his subjects; while the lord of every feudal castle exercised a more perfect sovereignty over his vassals than the so-called monarch over the nation.

Every town was a fortress, and every house in which it was safe to dwell a castle, the inmates of which, like people in a garrison, constantly held themselves prepared to resist attack, from which they were never secure. They slept with arms at their side.

Marauders openly encamped on the public roads for the plunder of the wayfarer, which often ended in his murder. Few persons ventured to travel alone, and none without the reasonable apprehension that they might never return alive.

Scarcely a third part of the area of the kingdom was under cultivation. The remainder consisted of moor, forest, and fen. Vast tracts were under water during the greater part of the year, and at other times formed morasses, marshes, and swamps.

Immediately beyond the walls that encompassed the towns were large stagnant ditches, which being the nearest receptacles for refuse, were full of all sorts of decomposing filth.

The streets were narrow, unpaved, undrained, uncleansed, and unlighted. There was no provision for the removal of the town refuse. Gutters were formed at the sides of the streets, as in Bethnal Green and the neglected parts of all our towns at the present time, into which the inhabitants threw the refuse of their houses; forming in dry weather a semi-fluid mass of corrupting animal and vegetable matter, and in rainy weather black turbid rivulets which ultimately poured their contents into some water-course.

The houses were mean and squalid, built of wood and wattles, thatched with straw, without chimneys, the windows without glass, the floors without boards, the furniture of the rudest description; the use of linen was scarcely known; common straw formed the king’s bed. “The floors,” says Erasmus, writing two centuries later, “generally are made of nothing but loam, and are strewed with rushes, which being constantly put on fresh, without a removal of the old, remain lying there, in some cases for twenty years; with fish bones, broken victuals, the dregs of tankards, and impregnated with other filth underneath, from dogs and men.” Contemporary writers concur in representing the offensive odour of decaying straw and rushes as universal in the houses.

There was no knowledge of the art of collecting, preserving, and storing fodder. The animals for winter food were slaughtered in autumn, and their flesh salted or smoked. It was only during three months of the year, from Midsummer to Michaelmas, that any fresh animal food, excepting game and river fish, was tasted even by the nobles of the land. The common people subsisted chiefly on salted beef, veal, and pork, the price of which was one-half less than that of wheat in the time of Henry VIII.

There were no fresh vegetables. As late as the 18th century salads were sent from Holland for the table of Queen Caroline. Sir John Pringle, writing in the middle of the last century, states that his father’s gardener told him that in the time of his grandfather cabbages were sold for a crown a-piece. It was not until towards the close of the 16th century (1585) that the potato was first brought to England, where it was limited to the garden for at least a century and a half after it had been planted by Sir Walter Raleigh in his own garden. It was first cultivated as a field crop in Scotland so recently as the year 1752.

For many centuries England remained in the condition of country in which no more subsistence is produced than is barely sufficient for the necessities of the people. Consequently every year of scarcity became a year of famine, and such years, about one in ten, occurred for ages with great regularity, and often equalled in their terrible results the worst famines of antiquity.

In a cold climate fuel is nearly as important as food, for which indeed it is a substitute. A large portion of our daily food is used up in supporting that internal fire by which the heat of the human body in every climate, and under every variety of external temperature, is maintained at the 98th degree of Fahrenheit. The greater the loss of heat by cooling, the greater the amount of heat which the body itself must generate to maintain its temperature at this elevated point. This demand for additional heat cannot be supplied without additional quantities of food, and unless these supplies are afforded, the substance of the body itself, its very tissues and organs, are consumed; a process which cannot be continued long without exhaustion, disease, and death. The phrase “starved by cold” expresses a more literal fact than is commonly understood. Unhappily the circumstances which deprive a population of the means of counteracting cold limit also the supplies of food at their command, and the pressure of the twofold privation, want of food and want of fuel, commonly occurs at the very season when both these indispensable supports of life are most needed. Some conception may be formed of the suffering to which our ancestors were exposed from this cause, from the fact that their prejudice against the use of coal as an article of fuel was such that a law was passed rendering it a capital offence to burn it within the City, and there is a record in the Tower importing that a person was tried, convicted, and executed for this offence in the reign of Edward the First. It was not until the reign of Charles the First that there was a regular supply of coals to London.

The habits of the people increased the force of these privations. Intemperance was a national vice. Excessive carousing at home, or days and nights spent in taverns, was the usual practice among all classes, and the physical and moral evils resulting from the custom were neither redeemed nor lessened by the epithet which these habitual convivialities appear to have conferred upon the nation of “Merrie England.” Caius, indeed, one of the most celebrated physicians of the sixteenth century, couples Germany and the Netherlands with England in this common reproach. “These three nations,” he says, “destroy more meats and drynkes without all order, convenient time, reason, and necessitie, than all other countries under the son, to the great annoyance of their bodies and wittes.”

This condition of the country and this mode of life themselves constitute the most powerful causes of epidemics; and an extraordinary concurrence and concentration of these causes are manifested in the combination of the circumstances which have been enumerated, namely, in the malarious state of the greater part of the kingdom, in the confined space of the towns, in the deficiency and putrescency of the food, in the inadequacy of the means of protection from cold, and in the intemperance of the people. These were the true sources of the malignity and mortality of the pestilences of that age.

We have no reliable evidence of the actual mortality produced by these terrible diseases; for no physician has left such an account of the epidemics of which he was an eye-witness as enables us to determine it, and there was no Registrar-General to fill up the momentous columns included in his death-roll. We can therefore only take the statements of the time as we find them.

According to the accounts of contemporary writers, the Black Death swept away, within the space of four years, a fourth part of the population of Europe. Some towns in England are stated to have lost two-thirds of their inhabitants, and it is computed that one-half of the entire population of the country perished.

Of the Sweating Sickness, Bacon says it “destroyed infinite persons;” Stowe “a wonderful number;” and other writers reckon the deaths in the places attacked by thousands.

Similar representations are given of the ravages of the Plague, of the Petechial Fever, and even occasionally of Intermittent Fever; and the substantial correctness of these statements is confirmed by entries in parish registers still extant, which tell the story of the local outbreaks of those days with graphic and touching simplicity.

During some of the worst of these visitations, contemporary writers concur in stating that the living were insufficient to bury the dead; business was suspended; the courts of law were closed; the churches were deserted for want of a sufficient number of clergy to perform the service; and ships were seen driving about on the ocean and drifting on shore, whose crews had perished to the last man.

We can form no adequate conception of the terror inspired by these events. We have seen alarm in our own day, but then it bordered on maniacal despair. It seemed as if the last judgment had come upon the world, and men abandoned alike their possessions and their friends. The rich gave up their treasures and laid them at the foot of the altars; neighbour abandoned neighbour; parents their offspring, and brothers their sisters. “If” says one of the chroniclers, “in a circle of friends any one only by a single word happened to bring the plague to mind, first one and then another of the company was seized with a tormenting anguish; certain that they were attacked with a mortal sickness, they slunk away home, and there soon yielded up the ghost.”

These fearful forms of pestilence were accompanied by moral epidemics more appalling than the physical. Of these the two following may serve as examples:—

Vast assemblages of men and women formed circles hand in hand, dancing, leaping, shouting, insensible to external impressions; some seeing visions and spirits whose names they shrieked out; others in epileptic convulsions with foaming at the mouth; all continuing to make the most violent muscular exertions for hours together, until they fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion. Lookers-on were seized with an uncontrollable impulse to join in these wild revels. Peasants left their ploughs, mechanics their workshops, servants their masters, boys and girls their parents, women their domestic duties, and men their business, thus to spend days and nights; these infatuated crowds passing furiously through streets, along highways, over fields, and from town to town. This madness pervaded the least barbarous countries of Europe for upwards of two centuries, under the name of the “Dancing Mania.” It was universally attributed to demoniacal possession, and its cure was attempted by exorcism. It was one expression and outlet of the violent passions of that time, imposture and profligacy playing principal parts in this strange drama.