Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution (56 page)

Talkative:
I will talk of things heavenly, or things earthly; things moral, or things evangelical; things sacred, or things profane; things past, or things to come; things foreign, or things at home; things more essential, or things circumstantial; provided that all be done to our profit.

He walked out of their way for a little, whereupon Christian and Faithful began to discuss their new companion.

Faithful:
Do you know him, then?

Christian:
Know him! Yes, better than he knows himself.

Faithful:
Pray what is he?

Christian:
His name is
Talkative
; he dwelleth in our town. I wonder that you should be a stranger to him, only I consider that our town is large.

Faithful:
Whose son is he? And whereabout doth he dwell?

Christian:
He is the son of one
Say-well;
he dwelt in
Prating Row
; and is known of all that are acquainted with him, by the name of
Talkative
in
Prating Row
; and notwithstanding his fine tongue, he is but a sorry fellow.

Faithful:
Well, he seems to be a very pretty man.

Christian:
That is, to them who have not thorough acquaintance with him, for he is best abroad, near home he is ugly enough.

John Bunyan’s
The Pilgrim’s Progress
has often been characterized as the first English novel; it is as if he had the actual characters before him, in imagination, and simply wrote down what he heard; he also employed the plain speech of the time, to the extent that we can hear the ordinary people of the late seventeenth century talking to one another. Yet
The Pilgrim’s Progress
is more than a novel.

John Bunyan, born in Bedfordshire in 1628, gathered the rudiments of learning while young but may have been largely self-educated; he was thoroughly acquainted with the vernacular Bible and with Foxe’s
Acts and Monuments
, but in his youth he read the ballads and romances of the time. He joined the New Model Army at the age of fifteen, but it is not clear whether he saw any active service before his disbandment three years later.

After his marriage to a poor woman he entered a period of spiritual struggle, documented by
Grace Abounding
, in which he fell into despair and fearfulness before being tempted by false hope. He was still afflicted by anxiety and depression when in 1655 he joined a separatist church in Bedford; he began his preaching before that congregation where slowly he found strength and confidence. His ministry widened, therefore, and he came into conflict with the authorities. In 1661 he was consigned to Bedford Prison where, refusing to renounce his right to preach, he remained for the next eleven years. He wrote many books and treatises during this period, but none more popular and significant than
The Pilgrim’s Progress
.

In part it might be read as an account of any seventeenth-century journey, over rough roads, encumbered by mud and puddles, endangered by mires and ditches, pits and deep holes. The travellers must sometimes reconnoitre steep hills where they may catch ‘a slip or two’. Sometimes they go ‘out of the way’ and among ‘turnings’ and ‘windings’ lose themselves; ‘wherefore, at last, lighting under a little shelter, they sat down there till the day brake; but being weary they fell asleep’. We hear the dogs barking at their presence. If they are unfortunate they may be taken for vagrants, and placed in the stocks or in the ‘cage’. If they are fortunate they will find lodgings on the course of their journey, where they will be asked, ‘What will you have?’

They must also face the dangers of robbers waiting for them along the road.

So they came up all to him, and with threatening language bid him stand. At this
Little-Faith
looked as white as a clout, and had neither power to fight nor fly. Then said
Faint-Heart
, Deliver thy purse … Then he cried out, Thieves, thieves!

In the face of such dangers some travellers formed a company for the sake of friendship and security.

‘Then I hope we may have your good company.’

‘With a very good will, will I be your companion.’

‘Come on, then, let us go together…’

Such snatches of conversation are often heard on the road. They are eager to meet one another and, leaning upon their staves, they talk. ‘Is this the way?’ ‘You are just in your way.’ ‘How far is it thither?’ ‘Whence came you?’ ‘Have you got into the way?’ One will greet another with ‘What have you met with?’ or ‘What have you seen?’ ‘Whither are you going?’ ‘Back, back.’ Some travellers want ‘to make a short cut of it, and to climb over the wall’. What does it matter how they reach their destination? ‘If we are in, we are in.’

The vividness of the prose is derived from its immediacy and contemporaneity. ‘I met him once in the streets,’ Faithful says of Pliable, ‘but he leered away on the other side, as one ashamed of what he had done; so I spake not to him.’ Christian says to a man, ‘What art thou?’ and is told, ‘I am what I was not once.’ He tells Hope, ‘I would, as the saying is, have given my life for a penny … this man was one of the weak, and therefore he went to the wall … And when a man is down, you know, what can he do?’ The simplicity and vigour have been tested on the anvil of suffering experience but they also derive from Bunyan’s reading of the vernacular Bible. The words seem to come to him instinctively but they have absorbed the cadence and imagery of the Scriptures.

They come also from Bunyan’s identity as a Calvinist. To read
The Pilgrim’s Progress
is to return to that world of fierce struggle and debate in which deeply held religious faith was the only stay against the dark. Bunyan is nothing like the caricatures of Tribulation Wholesome, Snarl, or Zeal-of-the-Land-Busy, in seventeenth-century drama. He is too desperate and determined to be that. Christian decides to embark upon his journey alone ‘because none of my neighbours saw their danger as I saw mine’. This is the heart of it, this awareness of imminent destruction. It is the source of what he calls his ‘dumps’ that might also be expressed as despair and distraction, of melancholy close to madness, afflicting those who believed themselves to be in danger of spiritual destruction. This fear animates the life of the seventeenth century. It is the fear of what Bunyan calls ‘the bottomless pit … out of the mouth of which there came in an abundant manner smoke, and coals of fire, with hideous noises’. To be saved by the infinite and unlooked-for grace of God, unworthy though you be, is to experience the transformation of the spirit. It is a glimpse into the heart of the fervent spirituality of the seventeenth-century world.

38

To rise and piss

The prosperous citizen of London would wear a cloth doublet, open at the front to display his shirt and lawn scarf; breeches, stockings and buckled shoes completed the ensemble. For the outdoors he donned his wig and sugarloaf hat, together with a short cloak, and a sword at his side. His wife would naturally wear a brocaded silk dress, looped to display her quilted petticoat; her neck and shoulders were covered with a kerchief and she wore the fashionable French hood of the day.

The house in which they lived, in the period of Charles I and Cromwell, would have been perhaps too dull and plain for modern taste; the floors were of polished wood, some of the walls wainscoted and the ceilings panelled with oak. The rooms were solid and well-proportioned, but a little gloomy and confined; the floors creaked under foot. Only towards the end of the seventeenth century was there a general movement towards lighter and more gracious interiors.

The houses of those who were known as ‘the middle rank’ contained between three and seven rooms; the household would characteristically contain between four and seven people, including servants. In the more prosperous of these dwellings the hall, parlour and kitchen took up the ground floor while above them were one or two bedrooms. Of ornament there was very little. The windows rarely boasted curtains; carpets and armchairs were not widely used. Clocks, looking glasses and pictures were still relatively scarce but they were more in evidence towards the close of the period; this was also the time when the cabinet-maker, working in walnut and mahogany, became more popular. The richer households, however, might place hangings against some of the walls.

Their furniture was not comfortable, being comprised of high-backed chairs, stools, chests and benches with perhaps a few cushions to soften the hard wood. The dining table would have no ornament, and cutlery of the modern type was not in use; the crockery was of pewter rather than of earthenware. A display of plate might be set on the sideboard, but otherwise ostentation was still slight. The rooms were heated with coals. Sanitation was of the most rudimentary, with only the occasional mention of a pewter chamber pot or a ‘close-stool’. There is no evidence of any utensils for washing.

The good citizen might engage in trade as a merchant or in commerce as a shopkeeper, but there was no firm distinction between the various avocations of the city. In the reign of Charles II 3,000 merchants could be found in the Royal Exchange, and in this period foreign trade, domestic industry and shipping all enjoyed rapid growth in advance of that period that became known to twentieth-century historians as the ‘commercial revolution’. In
A Discourse of Trade
, published in 1670, Roger Coke stated that ‘trade is now become the lady which in this present age is more courted and celebrated than in any former by all princes and potentates of the world’. The list of imported commodities included tobacco, sugar, indigo and ginger from the colonies as well as Indian calicoes and chintzes; a large proportion of these goods was then re-exported in English ships to continental Europe.

The gentry and the local administrators of the counties must not be forgotten since in this period they exercised full control of their neighbourhoods. It was a time when the old principles of the social hierarchy were reinforced. The ‘Cavalier Parliament’ had extended the authority of the local aristocracy in such matters as the control of the militia and the administration of the Poor Law. The justices of the peace had almost complete possession of local affairs, from imprisoning vagabonds to fining parish officials for breach of their duties.

The gentry had resumed their role as the leaders of local society, after the unfortunate experiment of republicanism, but they seemed not to have returned to their old complacency. Many of them, for example, paid very close attention to the new methods of agricultural practice. The farmers themselves were engaged in what were known as ‘improvements’ that increased the profitability of the land; in this period the country was able to export grain to mainland Europe.

A large class of ‘professional men’ had also emerged in this period; the lawyers and the doctors were principal among them, but accountants and professional administrators of estates were also to be found. Samuel Pepys has become for posterity the master of this world, and his diary does in some degree provide a mirror for his age. He is twenty-six at the time of his first entry; living with his wife in Axe Yard, near Downing Street, he is about to be appointed as secretary to Edward Mountagu, the lord admiral. This was the period when the Rump Parliament had reassembled and General Monck was beginning his march from Scotland.

And so we read that on 3 January 1660, ‘Mr Sheply, Hawley and Moore dined with me on a piece of beef and cabbage, and a collar of brawn’. Meat was the principal item in the diets of the period, and it is characteristic that Pepys should have two types; dinner was eaten at noon. On another occasion Pepys sat down to a dish of marrow bones and a leg of mutton, a loin of veal and a dish of fowl together with two dozen larks. He also had dinners of fish but, on being offered a dish of sturgeon, ‘I saw very many little worms creeping, which I suppose was through the staleness of the pickle’.

He drank ale and ‘strong water’ that was most probably gin. After dinner there was often a ‘mad stir’ with games and forfeits. Sports were of all kinds including one that Pepys called ‘the flinging at cocks’, in which sticks were hurled at a bird that was tethered by its leg or held down by some other means; whoever rendered it unconscious was allowed to cook and eat it. He also visited a cock-fight in a new pit by Shoe Lane. Other vignettes of the period emerge from his notations. A new disease sprang up in the autumn of 1661, consisting of ‘an ague and fever’.

The cleanliness of the age is perhaps in doubt. He had ‘like to have shit in a skimmer that lay over the house of office’. He made a cloth suit out of a cloak ‘that had like to have been beshit behind a year ago’. ‘This night I had a strange dream of bepissing myself, which I really did.’ He was en route to the Guildhall, ‘by the way calling to shit at Mr Rawlinson’s’. He had forgotten his chamber pot one night, ‘so was forced to rise and piss in the chimney’. In the theatre, ‘a lady spat backward upon me by a mistake, not seeing me’. He sometimes washed himself with warm water, and sometimes washed his feet, but the occurrences were rare enough to merit mention. His wife, Elizabeth, visited a ‘hot-house’ and ‘pretends to a resolution of hereafter being very clean – how long it will hold, I can guess’. Sure enough, on a later occasion, ‘she spent the whole day making herself clean, after four or five weeks being in continued dirt’. Two months later, however, ‘she finds that I am lousy, having found in my head and body above twenty lice, little and great’.