ENGLAND IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.* Mn. DENTON died before his

book was published, yet he lived to finish the MSS., and to revise all but the last few proof- sheets. He has succeeded in bringing together a good deal of • England in the Fifteenth Century. By the Rev. W. Denton, M.A. London: G. Bell and SOUP. 1888.

miscellaneous matter which historians and biographers have omitted, concerning the general condition and habits of our fifteenth-century ancestors ; and although some of it is neces- sarily statistical, Mr. Denton has so worked it into his narrative that the whole becomes attractive as well as instructive. The subject is one in which the author, the preface tells us, was wont to feel the keenest interest and pleasure, and the labour bestowed upon it is only faintly suggested by the numerous authorities cited. He no doubt meant to produce a sketch by means of which the general reader might gain some true im-

pressions of what was going on in this country four hundred years ago ; it hardly aspires to be a book of reference, nor is it

comprehensive enough for the moralist, nor specific enough for the statistician ; but it enables one to form a fair notion of agricultural life and its onerous conditions during the period referred to. Besides the cottages of the agricultural labourers, most villages appear to have contained one or more manor- houses, which were occupied either by the lords of the manors or their reeves, were situate near the entrance to the village, and were generally built to face north-east, so as to avoid both the " blustering " and sickly south and the boisterous

west winds. Such houses were also occupied by tenant- farmers and the frankelyns (substantial freeholders), the latter being so distinguished for their hospitality, that Chaucer wrote of one of them that " it snowed in his house of meat and drink." Then there were the houses of the parson and the miller, both of them larger and of more importance than the others. Of course, no village was without its ale- house, and the number of these throughout the country was

then, as now, excessive ; but we must remember that ale or beer was a necessity at a time when few other drinks were known. Wine, " even English wine," as Mr. Denton calls it— as though he had not a very high appreciation of its good qualities—was beyond the means of the labourer, cider and perry were rarely seen, and tea and coffee had not been heard of. It was, therefore, to the ale-houses that the labourers and their wives resorted of an evening, glad to get away from their own dark, cheerless hovels, into more comfortable quarters, where they would find boon companionship and good cheer.

Although these ale-houses should have closed at 9 p.m., it is on record that the guests frequently sat through the night over their ale-pot, playing at dice, cards, and other forbidden games, whilst some used to remain drinking and gambling through Sundays and other festival days. In connection with these ale-houses, we note also that they were generally kept by women ; that adulteration of ale was common, and rosemary largely placed in the ale-pot to diminish the space for the liquor; that tipplers were those who sold ale, not those who drank it ; and that the sign-boards at the entrances were so gorgeous that they sometimes cost the landlord £30 or £40 (i.e., between £300 and £400 of our money). Besides the labourers, the company of an evening was often of a miscellaneous character, such as the hedger, the ditcher, the rat-catcher, the cobbler, the rag-gatherer, the ostler, the warren-keeper, and men of similar occupations, who drank their ale, and drank much, and swore oaths " a heap," in company with the parish clerk and the curate of the village church.

There is no doubt that to many life was but a bare exist- ence, little raised above that of the cattle they tended, and their surroundings of the roughest and most primitive kind. Compared with the peasants of the present day, the agricul- tural labourers of the fifteenth century were, says Dr. Jessop, one of Mr. Denton's authorities, " more wretched in their poverty, incomparably less prosperous in their prosperity, worse clad, worse fed, worse housed, worse taught, worse tended, worse governed ; they were sufferers from loathsome diseases their descendants know nothing of ; the very beasts of the field were dwarfed and stunted in their growth ; the death-rate among children was tremendous; the disregard of human life was so callous that we can hardly conceive it; there was everything to harden, nothing to soften; everywhere oppression, greed, and fierceness." The cottage homes of the England of Mrs. Hemans, or those we see now, did not exist in the fifteenth century, and the home of the labourer was neither picturesque, wholesome, nor comfortable :-

" A few boards, a load or two of loam dug on the spot and strengthened with moss, straw, or stubble, made the walls of the cottages ; a few bundles of heather from the common, or reed off the fen, supplied the thatch. These were all the materials required."

These habitations consisted of but one room, rarely divided, except at times when a hurdle was stretched across it to keep the pig and poultry from the children. There was no floor and no chimney. At the end of the room, where the family found an imperfect shelter, a fire could be lighted on the ground, and the smoke escaped through the roof or the chinks of the door.

To save fuel, the family sometimes lay huddled up in the litter on the ground, " pleasantly and hot," as Barclay tells us ; but towards the end of the century, some of the farmers possessed the novelty of a chimney, though even at the end of the six- teenth century such a luxury was thought ostentatious. The manor-houses, writes Mr. Denton, hardly differed in size, and not at all in convenience, from the labourers' cottages. During the fifteenth century, one or two rooms were added, and the manor-house then became "the hall," and if more rooms were built on the basement, it was commonly called " the castle :"— " The gentry, who slept on down beds, or on beds stuffed with rabbits' fur and other materials which passed for down, still went naked to their slumbers ; the poor, who slept on bundles of fern, or on trusses of straw spread upon the ground, slept in the dress they had worn during the day, and the cloak or cassock of the ploughman was his counterpane at night."

The town houses were often more substantial and commodious, being two or three storeys high, and built of stone. Although Mr. Denton has fully described the one-room dwellings of the agricultural labourer, he says very little about the residences of the nobility and gentry, though he need have gone no further than to Hallam's Europe in the Middle Ages for sufficient details. We read of baronial castles, and halls, and stables ; but he is silent as to the interiors, the number and arrangement of the rooms, and the nature of the furniture; he is equally reticent about the parsonage and the mill, except the announcement that they were larger and more important than the labourers' cottages. Nor has Mr. Denton:explained the appearance and extent of the manor-houses, for, after telling us that they hardly differed in size from the cottages, he writes in another place of the manor-house at Bletchingly being " properly and newly builded, with hall, chapel, chambers, parlours, closets, and oratories newly ceiled, and wainscotted roofs, floors, and walls, which may be used at pleasure with hangings." This quite supports Dr. Whitaker's description of a manor-house in the fifteenth century, viz.

The usual arrangement consisted of an entrance-passage running through the house, with a hall on one side, a parlour beyond, and one or two chambers above, and on the opposite side, a kitchen, pantry, and other offices."

This is, therefore, entirely opposed to Mr. Denton's first state- ment, that the manor-houses scarcely differed from the cottages in point of size. • It is curious that when describing so minutely what used to happen of an evening in the ale-houses, he should have omitted all mention of their construction or capacity; and so, too, with the inns, which were for the use of bond-fide travellers who required beds for themselves and stabling for their horses, and for the meeting of doctors with their patients and lawyers with their clients. Chaucer says of such inns that " the chambers and stables weren wide," and some were noted for the cleanness and fineness of the bleached linen and the silver and burnished pewter piled on the sideboards ; so such buildings must have formed a conspicuous feature in the town or village, and deserved a few words in Mr. Denton's book as to their general appearance and accommodation.

One scarcely realises the difficulties and dangers travellers had to encounter in the fifteenth century from the badness of the roads and the attacks of highwaymen. The fine old Roman roads had been so neglected and were so grown over, that it was as necessary at the end of that century as it had been three hundred years earlier, for a traveller to hire a guide to point out the roads that were passable and the safest fords. So long as every farthing that could be raised by public taxation was required for the expenses of the wars with France, no money could be spared for making new roads or for mending old ones. Four hundred years ago, the Devonshire roads were notorious for their badness, and it took nine days for the news

of Warwick's defeat at Barnet to reach Plymouth. The roads across the Weald of Kent were described in an Act of Parlia- ment (14 and 15 Henry VIII., c. 6), as " right deep and noyons," and could be made use of only at " great pains, peril, and jeopardy." In 1505, the streets of Canterbury were " foul and full of mire ;" whilst the state of the highways near London in 1500 was worse than in the fourteenth century; on the north side it continued so for one hundred and fifty years longer, and Bunyan is said to have taken his " Slough of Despond," in the Pilgrim's Progress, from this neighbour- hood. The danger of rotten roads, with their gaping ruts, was enhanced by the attacks of robbers who infested the adjoining woods, and plundered all who were not in sufficient force to resist. They had no respect even for Bishops or King's messengers, and they were encouraged by youths of good family, who, when there was no Continental war on hand, used to join these robber-bands. If the traveller could not afford a guide, the alternative was to put off his journey until he could join a company of fellow-travellers large enough to repel such attacks ; but, even then, the con- dition of the roads made it necessary that spare horses should be provided to drag them through the deep mire to which a little rain soon reduced most of the highways. One reason, beside the cost, why the roads received so little atten- tion, was that water-carriage was abundant, the river traffic being relatively far more active and important than it is now.

Our readers will not fail to admire the practical way in which Members of Parliament used to be dealt with by their constituents in distant days. In the forty-ninth year of Henry III.'s reign, a Parliamentary writ had directed payment to be made to Members, and the scale was fixed later on at 4s. a day to a Knight of the Shire, and 2s. to a Burgess. As each Session lasted but a few days, these payments were chiefly to cover travelling expenses, and if a Member was absent, his "wages" were accordingly reduced. The electors having to pay for the time their representatives were absent, kept a rigid control over the length of the Session, and this was such an advantage that, in the words of a writer of the seventeenth century, "Parliaments were more expeditious in counsels, aids, motions, and their acts, debates, sessions, not one-quarter so long as of late times." Mr. Denton considered this custom of payment so necessary, that but for it and the steps taken to compel the attendance of Members, the House of Commons would probably have soon ceased to exist. From the Ninth Report of the Historical Manuscripts Commission we learn, through Mr. Denton, that it was a common thing for Parliamentary candidates to bribe the electors by either abating a portion of their claims, or by foregoing payment for their attendance in Parliament ; and this was a most tempting bribe in the days when it was com- pulsory for towns to be represented.

One thing Mr. Denton especially emphasises is the general deterioration of England during the fifteenth century. The decay, which commenced soon after the reign of Edward I., may be traced through the reign of his successor, and, after his death, went on at an increased rate. Then came the wars of Edward III. with France, which so impoverished and en- feebled the country, when adjoining parishes were thrown into one for want of sufficient inhabitants, and towns were given over to weeds. Pestilence and famine followed in due course, succeeded by the Wars of the Roses ; and the country after the Battle of Bosworth Field was almost on the point of dissolution. From this date things improved ; but during the two centuries which followed Edward I.'s death, everything had retrograded, and the population, which in 1372 was about two millions, showed no increase during the following century.

Nearly one-half of Mr. Denton's book consists of an " introduction," which is a succinct and well-digested chapter of English history, terminating with the acces- sion of the first Tudor King. We do not understand the object of this introduction, for it covers a good deal of the ground occupied by the second half of the book, whereas a judicious blending of the two portions would have avoided much repetition, and at the same time presented a more complete sketch for general reading. In spite of this, Mr. Denton's book contains a great deal to interest the general reader about the condition of the agricultural labourer, his wages and home-life, about highways and bridges, postage, taxation, lazar-houses, game, price of food, and the private wars of the great nobles and their retainers. He has been to the best and latest authorities for what he has to say, and although the treatment of his various subjects is unequal, he has written with knowledge and judgment, and with a scrupulous desire for accuracy.