energetic. He passed an Act for winning from inundation the drowned grounds and marshes of Lessness and Fants in Kent; another for draining the fens and low grounds in the Isle of Ely, containing about 6000 acres “compassed about with banks called the Ring of Waldersey and Coldham;” a third, to recover a great quantity of ground lately surrounded in Norfolk and Suffolk by the sea, “and to prevent the like for the future.” He also decreed that, for the means to maintain a college he intended to build at Chelsea, a trench should be made to convey water from the River Lea to London; another trench was to bring water from “Cadwel and Anwel in a trunk or vault.” Henry VIII. had previously enacted that no one was to pollute the Thames—an enactment which might have saved many lives if it had been enforced—and Elizabeth had further ensured the well-watering of London by making the River Lea navigable as far up as Ware. The 6000 acres of land recovered in the Isle of Ely were increased by 95,000 additional acres in the time of Charles II. Many Acts tell of structural operations—when bridges were built, when groups of decayed houses were repaired; when new houses were built on waste lands; others, again, relate to the maintenance of good highways, and of the paving of streets. These all show us mediæval England at work with spade and pickaxe, standing ankle-deep in mire, and splashed with clay—a different aspect to that presented in the royal progresses, the tournaments, the pageants, the rebellions, with subsequent display of heads on city-gates, with which it is habitually associated.
There were grades in commerce. Merchants, mercers, drapers, goldsmiths, ironmongers, embroiderers and clothiers dwelling in corporate towns, in Tudor times, were allowed to take no apprentices, except their own children, whose parents were not possessed of freehold property to the value of 40s. per annum; but artificers, smiths, wheelwrights, ploughwrights, millwrights, carpenters, rough masons, plasterers, sawyers, lime burners, bricklayers, tilers, salters, helyers, linen weavers, turners, coopers, millers, earthen potters, woollen weavers (of housewives’ cloths only), fullers, wood burners, thatchers and shinglers, might take apprentices whose parents had no land. No one might practise any “art or mystery” who had not properly served an apprenticeship to it. To maintain a requisite balance no one was allowed to keep more than three apprentices without employing a journeyman. All labourers and journeymen were to be hired by the year. These minute interferences extended to the materials used. Nothing was to be made of felt but hats; caps were to be made of knitted yarn and nothing else, and were only to be dyed two colours—either with copperas and gall, or woad and madder. Death did not put an end to the obligations of the law. “No corps shall be buried in any thing other than what is made of sheep’s wool, on pain of the forfeiture of 5l.” This edict, associated in most men’s minds with Queen Anne’s reign and Pope, was issued by Charles II. It further called upon all persons in Holy orders, or their substitutes, to keep a register of all persons buried in the precincts over which they held charge, and to obtain from the representative of each deceased person, within eight days of the interment, an affidavit that the said deceased was buried in conformity with this regulation. As a proof of the integrity with which the statutes reflected the spirit of the times in which they were passed, we add another clause: —“No penalty shall be incurred by reason of any that die of the plague.”
Mediæval rogues and vagabonds were a different class of persons to those that infest our streets. An Elizabethan statute gives us a category of the persons we might expect to meet on a highway, or skulking along the narrow streets under the shadows of the gabled houses. Her legislators speak of scholars (!) and seafaring men who beg; of wandering persons who either beg or use unlawful games and plays, or feign themselves to have skill in physiognomy, palmistry, or the like, or pretend to tell fortunes; of persons that are or pretend to be (undiscriminating legislators!) collectors for gaols, hospitals; of fencers, bear-wards, common players and minstrels wandering abroad without a written licence from a nobleman to do so; of jugglers, tinkers, pedlars and petty chapmen; of persons “pretending to be Egyptians,”—all of whom when found begging, or wandering, or “misordering themselves,” were to be half-stripped and openly whipped till they bled. Besides these rogues and vagabonds, we might expect to meet wandering soldiers and mariners, counterfeit and real, and wandering glassmen, who were permitted to wander provided they did not beg. We moderns think it more of a misdemeanor to stand still in the gutter or on the curb and beg; the Elizabethan vagabonds were all tramps.
In walled towns the gates were to be shut from sunset till sunrising; and no one might lodge without the town for the night unless his host would answer for him. Between Ascension Day and Michaelmas a night watch was to be kept at every gate, commencing at sunset: six men were to keep guard at each city gate: twelve men at a borough gate; and four or six men at a town gate, according to the number of the inhabitants. We close the book of abstracts of the early statutes, as the six men would close the city gate, knowing that we have but to open it again to stand in the midst of the flow of the quaint, earnest, picturesque life of the middle ages.
THE BROKEN VOW.
I.
Dying lies young Effie Logan
While the snowdrops spring:—
Tho’ her lily hand, so wasted,
Wears no bridal ring,
Yet a babe unto her white breast
Tenderly doth cling!
II.
She is dreaming of the false one,
And the traitor’s vow
That beguil’d her heart so trusting—
Trusting even now!
“He will come!” she softly murmurs—
Death dews on her brow!
