o every
well-read man whose mother tongue is English, whether he be born
in America or Australia or within sound of Bow Bells, the little dot upon
the map, marked “London,” has an interest which surpasses that of any spot
on earth. Though in his school-days he was taught nothing of the city’s
topography and little of its local history, while he has laboriously
learned outlandish names on every continent, nevertheless, in his mind’s
eye, Westminster Abbey looms larger than Chimborazo, and a half-dozen
miles of the tidal Thames have more of meaning to him than as many
thousand of the Amazon, the Oxus, and the Ganges. To know London—its
mighty, historic past and its complex, stupendous present—is to know the
religion, the art, the science, the politics,—the development, in short,
of the Anglo-Saxon race.
Perhaps there is no better method of coming to know what is most
interesting in this centre of all English life than studying one of the
supremely important periods of its long history, when it was touched by
the spiritual genius of one of England’s most noble sons.
Three periods of a hundred years each stand out above all others since the
Christian era in their significance and richness of accomplishment.
The third period began about 1790 with the birth of the American Republic
and the outbreak of the French Revolution. The first was that one hundred
years which from 1450 to 1550 included the beginning of the general use of
gunpowder, which made the pigmy with a pistol more than the match for
giant with spear and battleaxe. Then it was that
“Gutenberg made thought cosmopolite
And stretched electric wires from mind to mind.”
In this period Italian art made its most splendid achievements, and
Luther, Calvin, and Columbus gave man new freedom and new possibilities.
The middle period—the one in which England made her greatest contribution
to human advancement—is the one that we are to consider. Milton’s life
covered sixty-six of its one hundred years. It began with the destruction
of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and included the brilliant period of
exploration and adventure just before Milton’s birth, in which Hawkins,
Drake, and Raleigh, and other ambitious and not too scrupulous sea-rovers
sought, like Cecil Rhodes, jewels and gold, empire, expansion, and renown.
It covered the chief work of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Lord Bacon, Milton,
Bunyan, Defoe, Dryden, and fifty other men still read to-day. It included
all of Milton’s great Puritan contemporaries, who, fighting for the rights
of Englishmen, fought the world’s battle for freedom. It ended in 1688
with the downfall of the house of Stuart and the final triumph of those
principles for which Vane and Milton had struggled and died without seeing
the fruit of their labours. Since 1688 no monarch has sat upon the English
throne by any outworn theory of “divine right of kings,” but only,
explicitly and emphatically, by the will of the English people.
For all believers in the people, for all who honour Washington and
Jefferson and Lincoln, Robert Burns, John Bright and Gladstone, the
century that knew Cromwell and Milton, Sir Harry Vane and Sir John Eliot,
John Hampden, John Winthrop and William Bradford must, more than most
others, have significance.
John Milton was born in London in 1608; and it is chiefly the London of
the twenty years that intervened between the Spanish Armada and his birth
which we are to consider in this chapter.
As neither man nor anything that he has made can be well understood except
as they are related to their origins, so to understand the names, the
customs, and the daily sights that the boy Milton knew in this city, where
for nearly two millenniums before his day history had been making, one
must go back and take a brief survey.
Into the mooted question of the origin of the name of London we need not
enter. Suffice to say that when we first hear of London it was a little
hamlet on a hill of perhaps one hundred feet in height, lying between two
ranges of higher hills. At the north rose what we now call Highgate and
Hampstead, about 450 feet high, and to the south, beyond the marshes and
the Thames and a broad shallow lagoon, whose little islands once marked
the site of Southwark, rose the Surrey hills, from one of which in our day
the Crystal Palace gleams. Men with stone weapons slew antlered deer upon
the little marshy island of Thorney, now Westminster. What is now St.
James’s Park was then an estuary. Streams flowed down the valleys between
the wooded hills. Only their names remain to-day to tell us, among the
present stony streets, where rivers and brooks once flowed. West Bourn, Ty
Bourn, Hole Bourne, the southern part of which was called the “Fleet,”
flowed from the hills in the northwest in a southeasterly direction into
the Thames. Just east of the last named was the little brook called
“Wallbrook,” by whose banks, on the present Cornhill, the first settlement
was made. All these names, of course, belong to a time long subsequent to
the first rude settlements made in unknown antiquity before the Christian
era. The Tyburn at its mouth divided, enclosing the island Thorney, upon
which in later times arose Westminster. Hole Bourne was so named because
of its running through a deep hollow. The lower part of the river—the
Fleet—was tidal, and formed the western bulwark of London for centuries.
It emptied into the Thames where now is Blackfriars Bridge.
Far eastward from the Wallbrook, through broad marshes, flowed the river
Lea down from the country known to us as Essex and Hertfordshire. It
emptied into the Thames east of the Isle of Dogs, which is now covered
with huge docks for the shipping of the great modern city. The Lea still
flows as in the time of the Romans and Saxons, though its marshes have
largely disappeared. But the other smaller streams are now obliterated,
though in Milton’s time their course could still partly be discerned, and
their degradation into drains was not complete.
Through Bread Street, on which Milton was born, passed Watling Street, the
old Roman road, named later by the Saxons, which with the Roman wall
around the city alone left traces of the Roman occupation in the poet’s
day. The mosaic floors, the coins, bronze weapons and scanty remains of
the Roman period, before the fourth century A. D., are better known to us
than to the Londoners of his time. The Roman city spread itself along the
river from the Fleet on the west to the site of the present Tower of
London on the east, and then gradually crept northward. By the time the
Roman wall was built in about 360 A. D., the circumference of the city,
counting the river front, was two miles and three quarters. Here stood the
town, not in an area of fertile fields, but surrounded by forests on the
north, and on all other sides by wide-spreading marshes. The enclosed
space was originally 380 acres, to which later additions were made upon
the north and east. The wall was built of layers of thin red brick and
stone about twenty feet high, and was finished by bastions and additional
defences at the angles. Though scant traces of any of the original
construction now remain, much of the Roman wall, and, at all events, a
complete wall of mingled Roman and mediæval work, encircled the site of
the ancient city limits in Milton’s day, and its gates were nightly locked
until long after his death.
At first, two land gates had sufficed, but in 1600 there were seven; on
the east, Aldgate; further north was Bishopsgate; further west, upon the
northern wall, were Moorgate and Cripplegate; upon the west, Aldersgate,
protected by the Barbican, one of the gateway towers; and south of this,
Newgate and Ludgate. Upon the waterside, Dowgate, at the mouth of the
ancient Wallbrook, now covered by the narrow street of the same name, and
Billingsgate, further east toward the Tower of London, gave access to the
city.
In Roman days the whole enclosure was crossed by two great
streets,—Watling Street, which came from the northwest and entered near
Newgate, and Ermyn Street, which came from the northeast. Where these two
met was later the market or chepe, from the Saxon word meaning sale.
Of the Saxon period, which followed the sudden and mysterious abandonment
of their city by the Romans after their occupation of it for three
centuries, we have to-day a thousand traces in London names. Evidently the
early Anglo-Saxon, like his descendants, had a marked love of privacy and
seclusion. His sense of the sacred nature of property was as marked in him
as it has always been in his posterity. The idea of inclosure or
protection is made prominent in the constantly recurring terminations of
ton, ham, worth, stoke, stow, fold, garth, park, hay,
burgh, bury, brough, borrow. Philologic study of continental terms
displays no such marked emphasis upon the idea of property and demarkation
lines. Says the learned Taylor: “It may indeed be said, without
exaggeration, that the universal prevalence throughout England of names
containing this word, Homes [viz., ham, ton, etc.], gives us the
clue to the real strength of the national character of the Anglo-Saxon
race.” Kensington, Brompton, Paddington, Islington, are but a few of the
local names which illustrate in their suffix the origin of the word
town—originally a little hedged enclosure. [German zaun or hedge.] The
most important remnant of the Saxon influence is to be found in the
syllable ing which occurs in thousands of London names. This was the
usual Anglo-Saxon patronymic, and occurs most often in the middle
syllable, as in Buckingham, the home of Buck’s son; Wellington, the
village of Wells’s son, or the Wells clan. Family settlements are
traceable by this syllable ing.
Chipping or chepe was the old English term for market-place, and
Westcheap and Eastcheap were the old London markets of Saxon days. When
the word market takes the place in England of the old Anglo-Saxon
chipping, we may assume the place to be of later origin.
The Saxons, unlike the Romans, were not road-makers, and when they applied
the English word street, corrupted from the Latin strata, as in the
case of Watling Street—the ancient road which they renamed—we shall
usually find that it marks a work of Roman origin.
Clerkenwell, Bridewell, Holywell, and names with similar suffixes indicate
the site of wells from which it would seem that the ancient Londoners
derived their water supply when it was not taken from the Thames, the
Holborn, or the Tyburn. Hithe, which means landing-place, has in later
times largely disappeared, except at Rotherhithe near Greenwich.
With the conversion of the Saxons in the seventh century appear the names
of Saxon saints. Among the notable ones to whom churches were built was
holy St. Ethelburga, the wife of Sebert, the first Christian king, whose
church to-day stands on the site of its Saxon predecessor beside
Bishopsgate, on the very spot where stood the Roman gate. Another was St.
Osyth, queen and martyr, whose name also survives in Sise, or St. Osyth’s
Lane, and whose black and grimy churchyard was doubtless green in Milton’s
day. To these must be added St. Dunstan, St. Swithin, St. Edmund the
Martyr, and St. Botolph, to whom no less than four churches were erected.
The devastating fire of 1135 swept London from end to end, and not a Saxon
structure remained, though the new ones that replaced them were built in
similar fashion. With the coming of the Danes were built churches to their
patrons, St. Olaf and St. Magnus; and in the centre of the Strand, St.
Clement’s, Danes, is said to mark the spot where tradition assigns a
settlement of Danes.
As of the Saxons, so of the Danes, the most permanent record of their
influence on London and the Danish district of England was in their
suffixes to words which still survive. By, meaning first a farm and
later a village, is one which occurs some six hundred times. To this day
our common term, a by-law, recalls the Dane.
The names of the street on which Milton was born and of those in the near
neighbourhood to the booths that once surrounded Cheap indicate the
products formerly sold there, or the trades carried on within them. To the
north the streets were called: Wood, Milk, Iron, Honey, Poultry; to the
south they were named after Bread, Candles, Soap, Fish, Money-Changing.
Friday Street was one on which fish and food for fast days were sold.
Of Saxon and Danish London there remains in the old city proper not one
stone. Of Norman London, we have to-day the great White Tower, the crypt
of Bow Church, from whose round arches it received its name, the crypt of
St. John’s Priory outside the city, part of the church of St.
Bartholomew’s the Great, and part of St. Ethelburga’s, Bishopsgate. Much
more existed before the Great Fire of 1666. The chief characteristics of
the English Norman work are the half-circular Roman arch, seen in all
Romanesque work: massive walls unsupported by great buttresses and not
pierced by the large windows which appear in the later Gothic style;
square towers without spires; barrel vaulting over nave and aisles in the
churches; massive piers; the use of colour upon ornaments and wall
surfaces instead of in the windows as in Gothic buildings; small
interlacing round arches in wall surfaces; zigzag and “dog tooth”
decoration; “pleated” capitals; carvings, more or less grotesque, of human
or animal forms. English Norman, like English Gothic, never equalled the
French work in both these styles.
In Milton’s boyhood the impress of Plantagenet London was everywhere
visible. Throughout the centuries, from the earliest to the latest
Plantagenet, the influence of the Church reigned supreme. It has been
estimated that then at least one-fourth of the area of all London was in
some way connected with the Church, or the extensive conventual
establishments belonging to it. Their Gothic towers and steeples rose
clean and pure to the soft blue of the London sky, unfouled with coal
smoke. Their lofty walls, over which English ivy crept and roses bloomed,
shut from the narrow streets of the old town stretches of soft greensward
and shady walks. Among these rose dormitories, refectories, cloisters, and
the more prosaic offices. At every hour bells pealed and constantly
reminded the citizens of prayer and service.
Hardly a street but had its monastery or convent garden. Most of these
were just within or just without the city wall, as they were founded when
the city had already become of a considerable size, and they were
therefore located in the more open parts. The enormous size of the
equipment of these religious establishments before the Reformation, in
the century when Milton’s grandfather was young, can scarcely be conceived
to-day when the adjuncts of the Church have shrunk almost to nothingness.
In Milton’s boyhood, it must have been an easy task among the recent ruins
and traditions of these great establishments to reconstruct them to the
imagination in their entirety. Sir Walter Besant in his graphic book on
“London” details the numbers supported in this earlier period by St.
Paul’s alone. The cathedral body included the bishop, dean, the four
archdeacons, the treasurer, the precentor, the chancellor, thirty greater
canons, twelve lesser canons, about fifty chaplains or chantry priests,
and thirty vicars. Of lower rank were the sacrist and three vergers, the
servitors, the surveyor, the twelve scribes, the book transcriber, the
bookbinder, the chamberlain, the rent-collector, the baker, the brewer,
the singing men and choir boys, of whom priests were made, the bedesmen
and the poor folk. In addition to these were the servants and assistants
of all these officers; the sextons, gravediggers, gardeners, bell ringers,
makers and menders of the ecclesiastical robes, cleaners and sweepers,
carpenters, masons, painters, carvers, and gilders.
A similar body, though somewhat smaller, was required in every other
religious foundation. No wonder that not only one-fourth of the area but
also one-fourth of the whole city population was needed to supply these
demands.
From Norman London there remained, besides St. Paul’s vast monastic house,
the priory of St. Bartholomew’s, the house of St. Mary Overie’s, the
hospital of St. Katharine’s, and the priory of the Holy Trinity. In
Plantagenet London, we find the priory of Crutched—that is,
Crossed—Friars, who wore a red cross upon their back and carried an iron
cross in their hands. Farther north upon the other side of Aldgate stood
the great monastery of Holy Trinity, the richest and most magnificent in
the city; and the priory of St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate, whose noble ruins
had not disappeared more than a century after Milton’s death. Farther west
and north of Broad Street stood the splendid house of Austin Friars; still
farther west was St. Martin’s le Grand, and just beyond, the foundation of
the Gray Friars or Franciscans. Christ’s Hospital, which lies chiefly on
the site of this old monastery, we shall consider in a later chapter. In
the southwest corner of the London wall dwelt the Black Friars—the
Dominicans—whose name to-day is perpetuated in Blackfriars Bridge.
Outside the walls were other establishments as rich and splendid as these
that were within them. Farther west than the house of the Black Friars
was the monastery of White Friars or Carmelites, and beyond these the
ancient site of the Knights Templar, whose Temple church, in Milton’s day,
as well as ours, alone remained. North of the Norman St. Bartholomew’s was
the house of the Carthusians, whose long history, ending in the
Charterhouse, must be reserved to a later chapter. Northwest from the
Norman house of St. Bartholomew’s stood the Norman priory of St. John’s of
Jerusalem. Adjacent to it lay the twin foundation—the priory of Black
Nuns.
South of the Thames lay two great establishments, Bermondsey and St.
Thomas’s Hospital, while of the hospitals situated among the priories and
monasteries to the north were the hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem and
the great hospital of St. Mary Spital, both of which were originally
planned for religious houses. This is but a dry, brief catalogue, not of
all the great religious houses, but only of those whose walls, more or
less transformed or ruined, were within walking distance and most familiar
to the boy Milton in his rambles around the city of his birth.
Milton must have seen several “colleges” as well as monasteries; among
these were St. Michael’s College on Crooked Lane, and Jesus Commons, and a
“college” for poor and aged priests, called the “Papey.” A portion of the
“college” of Whittington still remained, and on the site of the present
Mercers’ Chapel stood a college for the education of priests, whose
splendid church remained until the Great Fire.
Every lover of the beautiful must fondly dwell upon the glorious period of
Gothic architecture during which these structures rose. Though London in
the Tudor period eclipsed in wealth and magnificence the city of earlier
times, the Elizabethan age had no power in its development of
pseudo-classic forms to equal the dignity and beauty of the Norman and
Gothic work. Then the unknown reverent artist wrought not for fame or
earthly glory, but dedicated his labour to the God of Nature, whose laws
and principles were his chief guide. These were the days when vine and
tendril and the subtle curves of leaf and flower or supple animal form
suggested the enrichment of capital and corbel. No cheap and servile
imitation of lute and drum, of spear and sword and ribbon, of casque and
crown and plume, displayed a paucity of inventive genius and abandonment
of nature’s teaching for that of milliner and armourer. Let John Ruskin,
in many ways the spiritual son of the beauty-loving Puritan, John Milton,
interpret to us the meaning of those poems reared in stone, which Milton’s
age was fast displacing:
“You have in the earlier Gothic less wonderful construction, less careful
masonry, far less expression of harmony of parts in the balance of the
building. Earlier work always has more or less of the character of a good,
solid wall with irregular holes in it, well carved wherever there was
room. But the last phase of Gothic has no room to spare; it rises as high
as it can on narrowest foundations, stands in perfect strength with the
least possible substance in its bars; connects niche with niche and line
with line in an exquisite harmony from which no stone can be removed, and
to which you can add not a pinnacle; and yet introduces in rich, though
now more calculated profusion, the living elements of its sculpture,
sculpture in quatrefoils, gargoyles, niches, in the ridges and hollows of
its mouldings—not a shadow without meaning and not a line without life.
But with this very perfection of his work came the unhappy pride of the
builder in what he had done. As long as he had been merely raising clumsy
walls and carving them, like a child, in waywardness of fancy, his delight
was in the things he thought of as he carved; but when he had once reached
this pitch of constructive science, he began to think only how cleverly he
could put the stones together. The question was not now with him, What can
I represent? but, How high can I build—how wonderfully can I hang this
arch in air? and the catastrophe was instant—architecture became in
France a mere web of woven lines,—in England a mere grating of
perpendicular ones. Redundance was substituted for invention, and geometry
for passion.” (“The Two Paths.”)
It is in this later Gothic, for example the much admired Chapel of Henry
VII. at Westminster, that we find this redundancy of motive and poverty of
invention, as, for instance, in the repetition of the portcullis—the
Tudor heraldic ornament. Ruskin would teach us that heraldic signs, though
suited for a few conspicuous places, as proclaiming the name or rank or
office of the owner, become impertinent when blazoned everywhere, and are
wholly devoid of beauty when they reproduce by the hundred some instrument
of prosaic use.
Plantagenet London, and its many remnants of domestic architecture, in
Milton’s day, illustrated fully Ruskin’s dictum that “Gothic is not an art
for knights and nobles; it is an art for the people; it is not an art
[merely] for churches and sanctuaries; it is an art for houses and
homes.... When Gothic was invented houses were Gothic as well as
churches.... Good Gothic has always been the work of the commonalty, not
of the churches.... Gothic was formed in the baron’s castle and the
burgher’s street. It was formed by the thoughts and hands and powers of
labouring citizens and warrior kings.” (“Crown of Wild Olive.”)
In a memorable passage in his lectures on Architecture in Edinburgh,
Ruskin recalls the power with which the Gothic forms appeal to the
imagination when embodied in poetry and romance. He asks what would result
were the words tower and turret, and the mental pictures that they
conjure up, removed. Suppose Walter Scott had written, instead of “the old
clock struck two from a turret adjoining my bedchamber,” “the old clock
struck two from the landing at the top of the stair.” “What,” he asks,
“would have become of the passage?” “That strange and thrilling interest
with which such words strike you as are in any wise connected with Gothic
architecture, as for instance, vault, arch, spire, pinnacle, battlement,
barbican, porch,—words everlastingly poetical and powerful,—is a most
true and sure index that the things themselves are delightful to you.” As
to stylobates, and pediments, and triglyphs, and all the classic forms,
even when pure and unvulgarised by decadent Renaissance work, how utterly
they fail to satisfy the poetic instinct of the man of English lineage is
well expressed by James Russell Lowell, as he stood within the portals of
Chartres Minster:
“The Grecian gluts me with its perfectness
Unanswerable as Euclid, self-contained,
The one thing finished in this hasty world.
But ah! this other, this that never ends,
Still climbing, luring fancy still to climb,
As full of morals, half divined, as life,
Graceful, grotesque, with ever new surprise
Of hazardous caprices, sure to please,
Heavy as nightmare, airy light as fern,
Imagination’s very self in stone!”
Of the type of architecture most favoured by Milton’s contemporaries, Ruskin says:
“Renaissance architecture is the school which has conducted men’s
inventive and constructive faculties from the Grand Canal [in England, he
might have said, old Chester or old Canterbury] to Gower Street, from the
marble shaft and the lancet arch and the wreathed leafage ... to the
square cavity in the brick wall.” This is a strong expression of a half
truth. But the baldness and blankness of Gower Street and a thousand other
streets is not so hopeless as the pretentious bastard Renaissance work
which modern London shows. The rich modern world can not plead poverty as
its excuse for ugliness. Even the village cottage of three centuries ago,
as well as the city streets, showed a popular love of beauty and a power
to attain it which few architects, or rather few of their patrons, permit
the modern world to see.
But let the lover of past beauty take new courage. Hundreds of signs
disclose the dawn of a revival of true taste in which England and America
bid fair to lead the world.
Though in most of its forms the Renaissance art that accompanied the new
age of discovery and expansion of commerce in the century before Milton
indicates a decadence of the love of beauty, exception must be made to
much delightful domestic architecture that has the Tudor stamp and is
distinctly English, and unknown on the Continent.
The introduction into the background of portraits of such classic outlines
as domes, arches, and marble pilasters, is a device used by painters when
they would flatter the vanity of their patrons and give them a courtly
setting. No Byzantine or Norman arch, or Gothic spire or portal, however
rich in decoration, can equal the severe but pompous lines of the
Renaissance in conveying a sense of pride. Says Ruskin: “There is in them
an expression of aristocracy in its worst characters: coldness,
perfectness of training, incapability of emotion, want of sympathy with
the weakness of lower men, blank, hopeless, haughty insufficiency. All
these characters are written in the Renaissance architecture as plainly as
if they were graven on it in words. For, observe, all other architectures
have something in them that common men can enjoy; some concession to the
simplicities of humanity, some daily bread for the hunger of the
multitude; quaint fancy, rich ornament, bright colour, something that
shows a sympathy with men of ordinary minds and hearts, and this wrought
out, at least in the Gothic, with a rudeness showing that the workman did
not mind exposing his own ignorance if he could please others. But the
Renaissance is exactly the contrary of this. It is rigid, cold, inhuman;
incapable of glowing, of stooping, of conceding, for an instant. Whatever
excellence it has is refined, high-trained, and deeply erudite, a kind
which the architect well knows no common mind can taste. He proclaims it
to you aloud.... All the pleasure you can have in anything I do is in its
proud breeding, its rigid formalism, its perfect finish, its cold
tranquillity.... And the instinct of the world felt this in a moment....
Princes delighted in it, and courtiers. The Gothic was good for God’s
worship, but this was good for man’s worship.... The proud princes and
lords rejoiced in it. It was full of insult to the poor in its every line.
It would not be built of materials at the poor man’s hand.... It would be
of hewn stone; it would have its windows and its doors and its stairs and
its pillars in lordly order and of stately size.”
To the novice, who is beginning to decipher the inner meaning of sermons
in stones in which the ages have recorded, all unconsciously, the life and
aspiration of the past, these words may sound harsh and fantastic.
With the memory of such rare geniuses as Michael Angelo and Wren, and
their awe-inspiring cathedrals, built in the Renaissance forms, one may
hesitate before completely accepting Ruskin’s dictum. Ruskin himself has
done homage to their genius and the greatness of their work. “There were
of course,” he says, “noble exceptions.” Yet surely the devout Christian
must feel under their glorious domes not so much like praying and
reverencing his Maker as glorifying the work of men’s hands. Under any
dome and architectural reminder of Roman thought and life, whether it be
Wren’s mighty St. Paul’s, or his small and exquisitely proportioned St.
Stephen’s, Wallbrook, almost in its shadow, the worshipper must feel
something akin to Ruskin’s sentiment. A meek and contrite heart feels
alien and uncomforted amid its perfection.
But Ruskin’s word chiefly concerns the more perfect Gothic of the
Continent, and the manifestations there—worse than any in England—of
riotous and insolent excess in its Renaissance work. The most ostentatious
and offensive monument in Westminster Abbey, which is adorned with
meaningless mouldings, artificial garlands, and cherubs weeping hypocritic
tears, is not so odious as those which Venice, Rome, Antwerp, and a
hundred other cities reared upon the Continent. Those tasteless, costly
structures which modern Englishmen are but now learning to condemn
illustrate completely the pride and arrogance of a world drunk with new
wealth, in which fashion supplants beauty.
Yet to a large extent the England of the splendid Tudor period and the
England of the Stuarts substituted for the beautiful and sincere forms of
an earlier period a style of construction and decoration which showed
distinct decadence. Witness the carvings in the chapel and dining-hall of
the Charterhouse, new in Milton’s boyhood, the carvings in the
dining-halls of the different Inns of Court, and mural tablets everywhere
with their obese cherubs and ghastly death’s heads. In the quaint beam and
plaster front of Staple’s Inn on Holborn still remains the ancient type of
domestic architecture which antedated and accompanied Milton’s boyhood.
Hundreds of such cosy, homelike residences with their ample windows of
many leaded panes lined the city streets. The merchants who lived in them
sold their wares in the shops beneath, and, if they were artificers,
housed their apprentices within them. They were built solidly to last for
centuries. Strong beams upheld the broad, low-studded ceilings. Capacious
fireplaces opened into chimneys whose construction was often made a work
of art. Around the house-door were carvings of saints or devils, of
prophets, hobgoblins or grotesque dragons, of birds and bees, and any wild
or lovely fancy that the craftsman loved to perpetuate in wood or stone.
The home must be made beautiful as well as the sanctuary. In those days
the mania of migration had not yet destroyed the permanence and sacredness
of the homestead. Where the young man brought his bride, even in a city
home, there he hoped to dwell and dandle his grandchildren upon his knee.
It was Milton’s fate to know many homes in London. Discoveries and travel
of the Elizabethan period had broken many traditions of the past, and the
old order in his day was yielding to the new. But half the architecture of
two hundred years before him still remained, and all the traditions of the
past were fresh. The dingy and mutilated relics of the time before the
Tudors which, outside the Gothic churches, alone remain to us, reveal but
little of what he saw.
With Henry VIII. and the widespread and thorough dissolution of religious
houses, London became a far more commercial and prosaic place. Green
convent gardens were sold for the erection of narrow wooden tenements;
ancient dormitories, refectories, and chapels were pulled down or
transformed for more secular purposes. Crutched Friars’ Church became a
carpenter’s shop and tennis court; Shakespeare and his friends erected a
playhouse on the site of the Black Friars’ monastery. A tavern replaced
the church of St. Martin’s le Grand, and far and wide traces of the
despoiler and rebuilder were manifest.
Stow had then but just written his invaluable chronicles, and little
antiquarian interest prevailed. For the first time in human history men
sailed around the globe. New worlds were opening to men’s visions. Not
only dreams of wealth without labour, but golden actualities had dazzled
the imagination of thousands. Drake and Hawkins, Frobisher and Raleigh
were adding new lustre to an age hitherto unparalleled in prosperity and
enterprise. Emerson’s description of the Englishman as having a
“telescopic appreciation of distant gain” was exemplified.
England was rich in poets, great even in Shakespeare’s time. Of two
hundred and forty who published verses, forty are remembered to-day. Yet
of England’s six million people, half could not read at all. Never was
there among people of privilege such a proportion of accomplished men.
Every man tried his hand at verses, and learned to sing a madrigal, and
tinkle the accompaniment with his own fingers. Gentlemen travelled to
Italy and brought back or made themselves translations of Boccaccio,
Ariosto, Tasso. Not only learned ladies like Queen Elizabeth, who had had
Roger Ascham for instructor, wrote Latin, but many others were
accomplished in those severer studies which ladies in a later age
neglected.
Sir Walter Besant tells us that from Henry IV. to Henry VIII. herbs,
fruits, and roots were scarcely used. At this period, however, the poor
again began to consume melons, radishes, cucumbers, parsley, carrots,
turnips, salad herbs, and these things as well graced the tables of the
gentry. Potatoes were unknown until a much later time. Much meat was
eaten, and in different fashion from our own, e. g., honey was poured
over mutton. Tobacco cost eighteen shillings a pound, and King James
complained that there were those who “spent £300 a year upon this noxious
weed.” No vital statistics existed to show the average of longevity. But
certain it is that, with modern sanitation and cleanliness, the great
modern London, which to-day houses about as many souls as did all England
then, has a much lower death-rate. When one remembers that, spite of
stupendous intellectual attainments, of exquisite taste in art and
literature, spite of wise statesmanship and all manly virtues, the wise
men of that day were children in their knowledge of chemistry and
medicine, we cannot wonder at the recurrence of the plague in almost every
generation.
In 1605 the bills of mortality included the ninety-seven parishes within
the walls, sixteen parishes without the walls, and six contiguous
outparishes in Middlesex and Surrey. During Milton’s lifetime, they
included the city of Westminster and the parishes of Islington, Lambeth,
Stepney, Newington, Hackney, and Redriff. Scarlet fever was formerly
confounded with measles, and does not appear to be reported as a separate
disease until 1703.
In 1682 Sir William Petty, speaking of the five plagues that had visited
London in the preceding hundred years, remarks: “It is to be remembered
the plagues of London do commonly kill one-fifth of the inhabitants, and
are the chief impediment against the growth of the city.”
In Milton’s boyhood common folk were crowded into such narrow, wooden
tenements as one may still see within the enclosure of St. Giles’s Church,
Cripplegate,—almost the only ones that still remain within the city.
There were no sewers and no adequate pavement until 1616. House refuse was
not infrequently thrown into the street, and sometimes upon the heads of
passers-by, though ancient laws enjoined each man to keep the front of his
house clean and to throw no refuse into the gutter. In short, ideas on
sanitation in London were much like those in Havana before the summer of 1898.
It is difficult to obtain accurate statistics of the population of London,
but Loftie estimates that in 1636 seven hundred thousand people lived
“within its liberties.”
Where now lofty, gray stone buildings of pretentious and nondescript
architecture shelter banks and offices, gabled buildings with overlapping
stories darkened the streets. The city was not dependent on the suburbs or
upon other towns for aught but food and raw material. Wool and silk and
linen, leather and all metals were wrought close to the shops where they
were sold. The odours of glue and dyestuffs tainted the fresh air. The
sound of tools and hammers, and of the simple looms and machinery of the
day, worked by foot or hand power, were heard.
New objects of luxury began to be manufactured—fans, ladies’ wigs, fine
knives, pins, needles, earthen fire-pots, silk and crystal buttons,
shoe-buckles, glassware, nails, and paper. New products from foreign lands
were introduced and naturalised—among them, turkeys, hops, and apricots.
Forks had not yet appeared as a necessary table furnishing. Kissing was a
universal custom, and a guest kissed his hostess and all ladies present.
Though in the time of Milton’s father the amenities of life had much
increased, cruelty and severe punishments were more frequent than in an
earlier age. Three-fourths of all the heretics burned at the stake in
England suffered in those five years of the bloody queen who, with her
Spanish husband at her court, ruled from 1553 to 1558 over unhappy
England. Many a time must the boy Milton have heard blood-curdling tales
from aged men of these ghastly days when Ridley, Cranmer, Hooper, and John
Rogers withered in the flames. His own father may have seen the later
martyrdoms of Roman Catholics in Elizabeth’s reign, or of that Unitarian
in 1585 who suffered at the stake for the denial of the divinity of
Christ—a theological view with which Milton himself is shown to have had
much sympathy.
The historian tells us of men boiled and women burned for poisoning; of
ears nailed to the pillory and sliced off for libellous and incendiary
language. We read of frightful floggings through the streets and of an
enormous number of men hanged. Many rogues escaped punishment altogether,
for, though punishment when it came was terrifically out of proportion to
the offence, and in its publicity incited by suggestion to more crime, the
law was often laxly administered.
All periods are more or less transitional, but the England into which
Milton came in the first years of the seventeenth century was peculiarly
in a state of transformation and unsettlement. As in the beginning of the
twentieth century, men’s minds were receiving radical, new impressions,
and had not yet assimilated or comprehended them. The doctrines of
religious and political freedom were the dreams of prophets, and were yet
to be conceived a possibility by the masses, who through dumb centuries
had toiled and laughed and wept, and then stretched themselves in mother
earth and slept among their fathers. The tender, growing shoots which in
the days of Wiclif had sprung from the seed, small as a mustard seed,
which he had planted, had grown. Birds now lodged among its branches. The
time was ripening when, with the axe and hammer of Milton and his mighty
compeers, some of its timbers should help rear a new structure for church
and state; and others should be driven deep under the foundations of the
temple which men of English blood should in the future rear to democracy.
