born arts and learning of Europe. But when at length the knowledge of the silk, plate-glass, woolen and other manufactures slowly found their way into Western Europe, as they had been slowly introduced into Italy, by the Greeks and Saracens from the East, they long continued, as in their former seats, to minister chiefly to the magnificence of courts and of the nobility, while the humbler mauufactures and the mechanic arts had scarcely an existence. The condition of the common people, and even of the wealthy classes, was therefore but tardily improved during the slow growth of knowledge and of industry. And when Manufactures began to revive under more favorable auspices, the injurious effects of monopolies, growing out of the abuse of royal prerogative, by limiting its profits to a favored few, repressed all competition and all stimulus to improvement.

The condition of the English people, as respects their civilization and social comfort in the century which includes the very early history of the American colonies, may be inferred from a few facts, which supply the place of correct statisties. During the comparatively trazyti reiga of Elizabeth, England had rapidly progressed in wealth and power; ani as history too commonly deals only with the intrigues of events and cabinets, and the actions of lustrious persons, it might be inferred, from the splendor of her count and nobility, that the eimmin people of England were in a condition of comparative comfin In more cutward display, particularly of dress, upholstery, and retinue, those laps er weded our own; but in point of comfort, even the n Gilty and gentry of the Sixteenth century, scarcely equalled the humblest peasantry in me banks of England or the United States at this time; while the lamet classes were for the most part worse fel, ditted, and led thin any dass at present known among as

In the beginning of the Sixteenth century, de brases of the people were, Day of them ball of mud and wood tharched with sar, ed ecnsisted of the room without dirilia of stores The foce was the bare earth de Sar o vend

ENGLISH COMFORT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

19

Glass windows, carpets,

was allowed in the University of Oxford. chairs, and looking-glasses, were still less common than chimneys; and forks were not known until the time of James I. Glass windows in Elizabeth's reign, were movable furniture in the houses of the nobility, and the dining halls of the gentry were covered with rushes or straw. The bedding consisted of straw pallets or rough mats covered only by a sheet and coarse coverlet, with a good round log instead of a bolster or pillow. An old annalist says: "As for servants, if they had any sheet above them it was well; for seldom had they any under their bodies to keep them from the pricking straws that ran oft through the canvas of the pallet, and rased their hardened hides." A mattress or flock-bed and sack of chaff for a pillow, were considered evidences of prosperity in one who had been seven years married, who considered himself "as well lodged as the lord of the town." Skipton Castle, one of the most splendid mansions of the North, had but seven beds, and none of the chambers had chairs, glasses, or carpets. Even the Baronial household of Northum berland, in the beginning of the century, employed but two cooks for a retinue of two hundred persons, including seventy strangers daily counted upon; had no sheets; and the table linen, often extremely costly, was washed about once a month. Forty shillings was the yearly allowance for the washing of the household. The earl had three country seats, with furniture for but one, and carried all with him when he removed, one cart sufficing for all the kitchen utensils, cooks' beds, etc.

The food of artificers and laborers in Henry the Eighth's reign, was "horsecorn, beans, peason, oats, tares, and lentils." Barley bread was the usual food of the poorer classes in 1626, and white bread was but little used by them in 1689. Even as late as 1725, when an improved agriculture had made wheat bread common in the southern counties, in Cumberland, it is said, none but a rich family used a peck of wheat in a year, and that at Christmas. A wheaten loaf was only found after much search in the shops of Carlisle. Servants, and the very poor, ate dry bran bread, sometimes mixed with rye meal. Yet the English peasantry were better fed than the French at that period, who ate apples, water and rye meal. Corn was mostly ground at home by the querne or hand-mill, in the time of Elizabeth. Holland at the time. supplied London with vegetables, and a century later a large part of England was an unproductive waste. In the early reign of Henry VIII., it has been said, not a cabbage, carrot, turnip, or other edible root grew in England. Traveling was most tedious and perilous, as well on account of the wretched condition of the roads, as the prevalence of moss-troopers and highwaymen, who as late as the times of Charles II. were hunted in some counties with blood-hounds. In the reign of Henry VIII., it is

said, 70,000 thieves were hanged in England. Until the middle of the Sixteenth century nearly all traveling was on horseback, and goods were transported on pack-horses, the foremost wearing a bell to warn travelers to turn out to let them pass, such was the narrowness of the way. Coaches did not become general until the time of Elizabeth, or later, when they were without springs and very clumsy. The queen in her old age is said to have reluctantly used so effeminate a conveyance, which it was a disgrace for a young man to be seen to use; and she is said also to have declined a breakfast at Cambridge because she had twelve miles to travel before she slept! Turnpikes were established by Act of Parliament in the time of Charles the Second, but the gates were pulled down by a mob. In 1703, public coaches were advertised to perform the whole journey from London to York in four days! And in 1760, a coach left Edinburgh for London once a month, and occupied a month in the journey. Owing to the difficulties of transportation, many articles were nearly worthless a few miles from any market.

Coals, in the time of Henry VIII., were worth but 12d. per chaldron at Newcastle, and four shillings in London. They became so dear in 1643, that many perished for want of fuel, which the tardy means of supply could not prevent. A pamphlet of that period has the imprint

"Printed in the year

That sea coal was exceeding dear."

Pins were introduced from France in 1543, previous to which, royal ladies used instead ribbons, clasps, and skewers of brass, silver, gold, ivory, bone, or wood. They were first made in England in 1626. Umbrellas, though of great antiquity, were not known in England until 1768, and their first use excited the jeers of the vulgar. London and Westminster were first lighted by order of Parliament in 1743, and coal gas was first used for that purpose in 1814. Yet at that late day the measure was opposed by so enlightened a person as Lord Brougham. But our theme does not permit us to enlarge upon this topic. Every department of the public, private, and social economy of the period, in its intellectual, moral, or industrial aspects, would furnish ample evidence of the dwarfish condition of the kingdom, compared with its present august stature in all the arts of civilized life. Those who would derive a most instructive lesson from history, would do well to consult the third chapter of Macaulay's History of England, and compare the state of England, as depicted by him, just previous to the Revolution of 1688, when the population of the kingdom was between five and six millions, with that of Great Britain as she exists at this day. The progress made since the beginning of the century had been comparatively small; and the examination may better enable the reader to appre

MINING AND AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS IN SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 21

ciate the evidences of activity, and of slow but steady progress made amidst poverty, hardship, and savage hostility, in our own country, even previous to the time when national independence and public spirit, combined with a suddenly progressive character in the age, gave our industry a permanent impulse. The period of our colonization was one of much talent and great promise, but the "car of improvement" was many years in getting under way. Macaulay assures us that a large part of the country beyond Trent was, down to the eighteenth century, in a state of barbarism! That in 1685, the value of the produce of the soil far exceeded the value of all the other fruits of human industry. Yet the wheat crop was estimated at less than two millions of quarters. But the mineral wealth of the kingdom was still less developed. Tin had been an article of export for over two thousand years, and was still one of the most valuable of native minerals. Its product was about sixteen hundred tons. In 1856, it was reported at eight thousand seven hundred and forty-seven tons. The copper mines, he says, then lay wholly neglected, and were not reckoned in the value of land; but Cornwall and Wales, at the time he wrote, produced fifteen thousand tons annually, worth near a million and a half sterling, or twice the annual value of the produce of all English mines in the Seventeenth century. In 1854, Great Britain produced twenty-three thousand and seventy-three tons of copper, worth over two and a quarter millions of pounds sterling.' Beds of rock salt were discovered after the Restoration, but not worked, and the salt made in rude brine pits was nauseous and unwholesome. A great part of the iron used at the close of Charles the Second's reign was imported, and the whole quantity cast annually did not exceed ten thousand tons. In 1740, England and Wales, from fifty-nine furnaces, produced only seventeen thousand three hundred and fifty-six tons; and in 1750, twenty-two thousand tons. In 1856, the product of pig-iron was officially stated to be three millions of tons.

The wages of farm laborers, at the same period, did not exceed ordinarily four shillings a week, but ranged as high as six or seven in summer. And for workmen in woolens, the staple manufacture of England, six shillings were considered fair wages. These prices, it is evident, were not more than one half the rates paid at present; while most articles of consumption cost more than half their present prices. Although as early as 1351, free labor had been recognized in place of villeinage by the legislature, the statute book continued to be loaded with iniquitous laws, regulating the price of labor, down to the time of Elizabeth, when the law of supply and demand was seen to be a better regulator of wages (2) Ibid.

(1) Annals of British Legislation, vol. ii.

than acts of Parliament. But artificers were even then compelled (by 5th Eliz.), under penalty of the stocks, to assist in getting in the harvest.1 Four-fifths of the common people, says Mr. Macaulay, were, in the Seventeenth century, employed in agriculture; a sufficient evidence alone of the undeveloped state of the manufacturing arts. The rate of increase in the population was still more slow, From the year 1075 to 1575, the population of England and Wales but little more than doubled in five hundred years. From 1600 to 1700, the increase was about thirty per cent., and twenty per cent. in the next fifty years. In the first half of the present century, the population of the United Kingdom doubled itself, besides furnishing a constant stream of emigration to this country and to Canada, Australia, California, and other parts of the globe.

Even so late as the latter part of the Sixteenth century, when the first adventurers to America were born and reared, the great majority of the English people had experienced only in a very limited degree, that general comfort which is the fruit of diffused intelligence, and a developed state of mechanical industry. Some grand discoveries had been made in science, and some ingenious minds had labored in the virgin mine of invention. The art of printing, and the use of movable types, had been discovered, gunpowder invented, and the polarity of the magnet was known. Roger Bacon, many years before, had discovered some faint glimmerings of the greater light to be found in the direction of experiment, and the patient observation of nature; and had made some discoveries in Astronomy, Optics, Chemistry, and Mechanics. But his illustrious namesake, the Chancellor of James I., had not yet published his Novum Organum. That great work appeared in 1620; and when the genius of the author had pointed out the way, the world seemed ill prepared to walk in it. So long narcotized by ignorance and superstition, and the nostrums of the past ages, the mental energy of Europe had not recovered from the torpor thereby induced. "Bacon," observes Macaulay, "had sown the good seed in a sluggish soil and at an ungenial season. He had not expected an early crop, and in his last testament had solemnly bequeathed his fame to the next age. During a whole generation his philosophy had, amid tumult, wars, and proscriptions, been slowly ripening in a few well-constituted minds." "The year 1660," he adds, "the era of the restoration of the old constitution, is also the era from which dates the ascendency of the new philosophy. In that year the Royal Society, destined to be a chief agent in a long series of glorious and salutary reforms, began to exist."

But it is always likely to be an axiom that improvements coming in the shape of innovations shall in one form or another meet with opposition.

(1)"Rights of Industry."