BGOK S.
CHARLES KNIGHT'S POPULAR HISTORY OF ENGLAND.° THESE third and fourth volumes of Mr. Knight's work extend from the accession of Edward the Sixth to the Revolution of 1688, and complete the original idea of his scheme ; though he intends to continue it to the accession of Victoria. This scheme, it may be remembered, was to give more prominence to the people, par excellence, than is usually the case in histories ; noting the growth and strength of popular opinion, the social progress of the country, and all those things in houses household gear, arts, letters, comforts, and opulence' that influence do- mestic life. In a certain limited sense, there is no novelty in this plan. The old politico-epic style of history could not help noticing the people when they appeared in public affairs—as in the insurrections of Wat Tyler and Jack Cede; or contrasting the influence of popular spirit and power at different periods, as in the Wars of the Roses, or the great Civil War. Nor, as we formerly remarked, were manners or customs and popular pro- gress entirely overlooked ; but were sometimes noted in passing, and at others treated separately and fully, though possibly rele- gated to an appendix. Indeed, legislation in finance taxation, and, in short, all subjects that bear upon what we call political economy, prevented any such neglect of the people, to the ex- tent assumed by modern contemporary writers. In fact, the justice of the objection may be doubted altogether, regard being had to the general purpose of the older historians. This was to nar- rate the public events which contributed to the power, prosperity, and character of the state ; and to trace the causes which pro- duced, or describe the men who influenced them. In this point of view, the older historians were right in their mode of composition. During the early periods of our history the people had very little
i if any influence; what they had was only exercised upon rare occasions, and when wrought upon. The influence of kings, barons, and ecclesiastics, was continually operating. The private lives of monarchs and great men were as little described as those of the people, save when they were supposed to affect public af- fairs. An analysis of any standard history which should endea- vour to trace the respective influences of sovereigns and minis- ters, and of the people at large upon national affairs, and which should exhibit their respective notice by the historian would be a curious work, with, we suspect, a critical result different from what is now the fashion to assert as to the neglect of the masses.
Nor do we believe a history of the people, such as the title seems generally understood to imply, very easy to be attained. The labour of the research would be enormous. It is true that from the Conqueror till the middle of Elizabeth's reign the mate- rials are rather scanty, but sufficient to task the inquirer. After that time they are bewildering in their number, from the parish and municipal record to the essay, satire, and comedy. The mere acquisition of the material, however, is but the commonest part of the task. The historian of the people must have that rare fa- culty of extracting the truth from the exaggeration of the littkra- tour, and the hyperbole of the satirist, or religious denoun- cer, as well as of distinguishing what is partial or particular from what is general. A rarer but an equally necessary faculty is the imaginative power that can reconstruct the dry bones of the long since past, clothe the skeleton with flesh, and animate the form with life. This cannot be done by labour however conscienti- ous, or literary skill however clever : it must be the work of genius. It is not, for untance, writing a popular history in the sense of a history of the people, to take a couple of pamphlets, whose relation to Elizabeth's age is like that of an Exeter Hall declaimer and Punch (when serious) to Victoria's, and quote those passages as pictures of the time, however cleverly they may be selected, or however the reader may be warned against their exaggerations. Any competent writer who had mastered sufficient of the Elizabethan literature could even now generalite a juster picture of the age than its two contemporaries Stubbes and Nash. "if Stubbes is to be relied upon, all states and degrees rejected the statu- tory notion of what was decent and comely. They wore hats 'perking up like the spear or shaft of a temple ' ; or hate 'flat and broad on the crown, like the battlements of a house ' ; or 'round crowns' with bands of every colour. They wore hats of silk, velvet, taffety, sarsenet, wool, and of fine hair, which they call beaver, fetched from beyond the seas, from whence a great sort of other vanities do come besides.' He was of no estimation among men who had not a velvet or taffety hat ; and so common a. thing it is, that every serving-man, countrymen, or other, even all indifferently, do wear of these hats.' With these exceptional laws, which thus appear to have been wholly inoperative, Elizabeth and her Council left the regula- tion of apparel to a far higher law than any Parliament could enact—to the tastes of the people and their ability to gratify them. The foreign fashions were copied, and the foreign silks and velvets implted, with no restraint that had the least effect.
"'So far hath this canker of pride eaten into the body of the common- wealth, that every poor yeoman's daughter, and every huabandman's daugh- ter, and every cottager's daughter, will not stick to flaunt it out in such gowns, petticoats, and kirtles, as these.' Doubtless, this deseription of the spread of luxury is greatly overdone ; or we might receive it as a proof of the general diffusion of wealth. But when this godly satirist tells us Of these °onagers' daughters,,' they are so impudent that, albeit their poor parents have but one cow, horse, or sheep, they will never let, them rest till they be sold, to maintain them an their bravenes,'—we may be certain that he m speaking in Eccles' vein.' The holiday finery of the village maiden was limited to a ribbon and a coloured nether-stock. A queen of curds * The Popular Fliotory of England: an illustrated History of Society, and Government from the Earliest. Period to our own Times. By Charles Volumes III. IS. With a complete Index to the four volumes. Publish- DY Bradbury and Evans. and cream,' transplanted to a town, might spend the greatest part of the day in sitting at the door, to show her braveries,' but on her native green
she was as pure and simple as the rose in her bosom. • * •
"The puritan writers were not alone in their remonstrances against the luxuries of the table which marked the latter years of the sixteenth century. Stubbes compares the variety of meats and sauces, the sweet condiments, the delicate confections of his time, with the past days, when 'one dish or two of good wholesome meat was thought sufficient for a man of great wor- ship to dine withal.' Thomas Nash, whom the Puritans counted amongst the wicked, enlarges On the same theme ; we must have our tables fur- nished like poulterers' stalls, or as though we were to victual Noah's ark again. . . . . What a coil have we, this course and that course, removing this dish higher, setting another lower, and taking away the third. A general might in less space remove his camp, than they stand disposing of their gluttony.' Excessive drinking, a vice which reached its climax in the degraded court of James I. was not wholly of native growth. The same writer says, From gluttony in meats let use descend to superfluity in drink, —a sin that, ever since we have mixed ourselves with the Low Countries, is counted honourable; but before we knew their lingering wars was held in the highest degree of hatred that might be.' Stubbes says, 'every country, city, town, village, and other places, bath abundance of ale-houses, taverns, and inns, which are so fraught with maltworms, night and day, that you would wonder to see them.' There were punishments for low debauchery, such as the drunkard's cloak. Against this growing sin, which was creeping up from the peasant and the mechanic to the yeoman and the courtier, the preachers lifted up their voices in the pulpit, and not always in vain. Robert Greene, the unhappy dramatist, who died in the midst of his excesses, tells how he was stopped in his earlier career of riot by hearing a good man preach of future rewards and punishments ; but that he could not stand up against the ridicule of his companions, who called him Puritan and Precisian, and so went again to his drinking-booth, his dice, and his bear-baiting. But we may be sure that these earnest preachers in some degree injured the good effect of their religious exhortations against real vices, by denouncing those harmless recreations which to the greater num- ber supplied the place of grosser excitements."
Surely this is not history but an article on Flizabethan modes. Manners' customs, and domestic life in full are (as we incline to think) rather the province of the essayist or disquisitionist than the historian ; though there is nothing to prevent their introduc- tion as distinct sections into a history ; or, if the writer can really manage it, to prevent his infusing into his narrative the air of the age, as Shakespeare does in his historical plays. At the same time there is one historical feature which has been too gene- rally neglected ; and that is the national progress—the contrast afforded between different stages of the nation's growth ; and at no very great intervals of time. The difference, for example, be- tween England and Englishmen at the Conquest and at the time when Magna Charta was extorted from John must have been much greater than historians make us see and feel in their somewhat measured narratives ; and it must have had causes. The mental course of this progress may be almost im- possible to trace other than inferentially. The more material causes may be almost as difficult to get at ; still chroniclers and re- cords, though not yet numerous, could do something. Again, the difference between the times of John and Edward the Third, or rather Richard the Second, must have been enormous; though we only hear of it in passing phrases. And for this periodwe not only have the chro- niclers, fuller records and acts of Parliament, but we have Froissart for military, and Gower and Chaucer for civil life. The contrast between the times of Richard the Second and Richard the Third might not be so obvious ; foreign and civil wars, and the anarchy of a minority, under Henry the Sixth, checked population, in- dustry, and arts, at least until Edward the Fourth was settled on the throne. Still, the rapid advance of the nation during the two generations that followed the accession of the house of Tudor— from Henry the Seventh to Edward the Sixth, and the wonderful progress under Elizabeth indicate that whatever check the trou- bles of York and Lancaster might impose upon material advance- ment, the national mind had been making steady way. From Elizabeth's reign there is no difficulty in tracing this progress, not only by public records of every class and kind, but by a pro- lific literature and artistic delineations as well in maps and plans, as in pictures. And to trace this comparative view at different epochs is, we think, the true social history of the people. It would not exclude customs; for a change in apparel, diet, and the like, may involve signs of very great changes—in foreign commerce for example ; neither would it altogether exclude man- ners; but it would use them, like everything else, as applying and illustrating a leading principle. Of course it is not meant that in general histories this progress has been altogether overlooked, especially in politics, or what comes under the head of public opinion. No historian, however narrow in his notions of history, could fail to mark the power of Parliament in the deposition of Richard the Second, as compared with its equivocal existence under the first Plantagenets. Mr. Knight very often notes these advancing changes, but we think as much in matters political as domestic. He remarks for ex- ample the change in the object of the popular insurrections under Edward the Sixth ; they were not like Wat Tyler's or Jack Cade's, social or political, but mainly economical, save that the "old religion" was mentioned. And we think the popular wish to throw open parks, break down inclosures and to render land as much in common as it had heretofore been, worthy of a fuller exposition than Charles Knight has given ; though probably those great commotions with their causes and accesso- ries are better left for Mr. Froude. Our author notes how Eliza- beth avowedly relied through life upon the people ; a sagacious principle of action, and worthy of the great Queen, but perhaps originating in those dark times when only the people stood be- tween her and a ruthless sister. The Protector Somerset is like- Wise noted as a ruler who first avowed a love of the people as a /balm, and acted upon isis avowal. How far a mere love of
popularity may be mistaken for a large regard for the People Nr. do not stop to inquire : it is better, at all events, to take as m
fortunate Protector are scattered here and there, and cannot be called very delicate limning ; for Mr. Knight i Knight does, the kindlier side. The delineationss doeffistihe entun-:
the higher qualities of the historical artist ; but they contain M.. dependent thought and curious particulars, if they are not remark- able for condensed force.
" The circumstances under which Somerset was placed in supreme power, although carrying on the government in the name of the young king, were such as to demand the union of the highest qualities of the statesm The rule of Henry VIII. had been of the most arbitrary nature; puttinx down all opposition of the great by a system of terror; and repressing thi crimes and disorders of the humble by the sternest administration of san. guinary laws. Somerset was, by nature, and out of the necessity of his position, opposed to harsh courses. The preamble of the statute for the re- peal of the new laws of treason says, that, although these laws of Henry VIII. were expedient and necessary,' they might appear very strait, sore, extreme and terrible ; ' but, as in tempest or winter, one garment is eon. venient, and in calm or warm weather a lighter garment may be worn, so the sore laws of one time may be taken away in a calmer and quieter reign. This belief in a coming halcyon season, when men by diligent teachine should be won to the knowledge of the truth—when all should be contentea to live under the reign of clemency and love—was doubtless the foundation of Somerset's policy. But he stood apart from the men who had been trained to administer the rough discipline of Henry's tyranny ; and who had no sympathy with the great mass of the people. Somerset really saw that a State was something more than a king, a nobility, a church, an army; —that there were other interests to be regarded besides those of property. ; and that, to use the words of one of his confidential officers, if the poorest sort of the people, which be members of the same body as well as the rich, be not provided and cherished in their degree, it cannot but be a great trouble of the body, and a decay of the strength of the realm: But Somer- set had not those rare qualities of firmness and prudence which can make government safe in unsettled times. He saw oppression everywhere around him—the powerful assailing the weak by open tyranny, or under the forms of law—the judges venal—the courts of justice practically closed to the needy suitor ; and he attempted to redress these evils by his own personal vigilance. He opened a Court of Requests, where be himself heard com- plaints, and interfered with the regular tribunals to prescribe equitable re- medies. This is the oriental system of justice, which looks so beautiful in a Haroun Alraschid, but which is simply an indication of a general corrup- tion too powerful for the laws. Paget, an acute and honest adviser, wrote to Somerset, meddle no more with private suits, but remit them to ordi- nary courses.' Somerset would feel that the ordinary courses were evil, and beyond his power legally to remedy. Latimer preached that Cambyses was a great emperor who flayed a judge alive, and laid his skin in his chair of judgment, for that the judge was a briber, a gift-taker, a gratifier of rich men.' Latimer cried out. 'I pray God we may once see the sign of the skin in England.' But if the Official system were too dangerous for Somerset to meddle with by constitutional methods, so were the oppressions of tenants by landlords, and of labourers by masters. The evils of society were of too complicated a nature to be dealt with by any one bold measure for the re- dress of grievances. Even if the government could have seen how vain were all attempts to regulate prices—how impossible to prevent men applying capital to land in the way most profitable--the Protector could scarcely have forborne yielding to the popular clamour. Proclamations were issued for the speedy reformation of the unreasonable pirices of victuals in markets;' and against inclosures, and taking in of fields and commons that were accustomed to lie open for the behoof of the inhabitants dwelling near to the same.' Of course these proclamations were wholly ineffectual. There was a general scarcity- throughout Europe' and the nominal prices of commodities were raised in England by the tampering with the coin. Those who were commanded by the proclamation against inclosures to throw open their parks and pastures by a certain day, held the order in contempt; for in the country districts they were the Bole administrators of local authority."
It will have been inferred that we do not consider Mr. Knight's attempt at producing a "domestic history as well as a state his- tory," a very great success. And this remark may apply to the political as well as the social narrative. The more prominent cause of this failure is a want of complete artistic power. The judgment of Charles Knight, if not extremely searching or deep, is sound ; his principles are thoroughly English without being narrow or bigoted ; the drudgery of original research, such as Froude undertook among the now accessible records and state pa- papers, Mr. Knight does not seem to have undergone ; but he has mastered the contemporary writers and published records neces- sary to his purpose. That he continually quotes them verbally instead of reproducing their facts and conclusions, giving to his story somewhat the air of an antiquarian disquisition rather than an historical narrative, is a main instance of the want of art al- ready spoken of. Another impeding trait in the composition is too frequent digression ; the subject is left, and after the reader has lost sight of it, up it comes again. In short the work abounds with valuable and curious historical matter, gathered from a wide and indeed life-long range of inquiry ; it is distinguished by sound and solid thoughts and opinions ; and is animated by a genuine old English spirit, patriotic without being prejudiced; but its composition, using the word in the largest sense, is crude, or proceeds upon a mistaken principle. To the cuts with which the text is almost crowded we do not attach the same value as Mr. Knight has done throughout his public life. Sometimes, as in the ease of the "drunkard's cloak "—a cask with head and arm-holes, 'the figure presents the object with more readiness if not distinctness than words could do. When they are merely "views," and sometimes we suspect imaginary views, or "fancy pieces," they indicate a tendency to appeal to other than literary
resources—to
"rely,
Less on the reader's sense than gazer's eye." All that we have said applies to the book only as a. where we must judge by the rules of historical composition. 1.5 an immense store-house—some two thousand pages of facts bear- ing upon the history, religion, literature, arts, manners, and life of England from the Romans to the Revolution of 1688, inoes popular History of England is beyond all question a very re- markable work. Not the least remarkable feature in it perhaps is the freshness of feeling and the catholicity of mind which still inspires. a man., whom many yet associate with nothing else than the utilitarianism of the " "Gseful Knowledge Society." Here in the remarks on the Liturgy is a specimen. "The resistance to the Act for the Uniformity of Service, to which the people in some places were stimulated by high counsels and examples, was of itself an indication of the fears of the anti-reformers, that the habitual use of a Common Prayer Book, so pure and simple, so earnest and elevated, —so adapted to the universal wants and feelings of mankind—so touching and solemn in its Offices—would establish the reformed worship upon a foundation which no storm of worldly policy could afterwards overthrow. The change in the habits of the people produced by this Book of Common Prayer must indeed have been great. When they gathered together in the spacious cathedral or the narrow village church, they no longer heard the titan), sung by the priests in procession ; but they joined their own voices to the sacred words which they received into their hearts, with Spare us goad Lord,' and We beseech thee to hear us.' This constant feeling that they themselves were to take part in the service, and not be mere listeners to unintelligible though euphonious sentences, was to give a new interest to the reformed worship, far beyond the formal Amen' of the Latin ritual, and the other routine words which they had been taught to speak, 'like pies or parrots.' For a short time it was objected to the new service that it was like a Christmas game ; ' but when the people, after a few years, had come to understand this service, in which they took a real part, they could not be readily led back to the fond lay' of their forefathers, to hear the priest speak aloud to the people in Latin, and the people listen with their ears to hear ; and some walking up and down in the church ; some saying other prayers in Latin ; and none understandeth other.' The English Liturgy, and the constant reading of the Lessons in English, were the corner-stones which held together that Church of England which the reformers had built up. Those who rejected the Liturgy consistently de- manded that the English Bible should be called in again. The records of the Printing-press show how vain was such a demand. The art of Guten- burg and Caxton had made a return to the old darkness an impossibility. Not without reason did John Day, one of the printers of the many editions of the Bible that appeared in the reign of Edward VI., take, in allusion to his own name, a device of the sun rising and the sleeper awakened."
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