Illustrated English Social History, Volume 2: The Age Of Shakespeare And The Stuart Period

by George Macaulay Trevelyan

age spotting to d/j; piece of the d/j is torn off; chipping to the top of the pages 33-38; gift-note on FEP; pevious owner's name on inside cover

Genres: History

First published January 1, 1944

About the author

George Macaulay Trevelyan, OM, CBE, FRS, FBA, was an English historian. Trevelyan was the third son of Sir George Trevelyan, 2nd Baronet, and great-nephew of Thomas Babington Macaulay, whose staunch liberal Whig principles he espoused in accessible works of literate narrative avoiding a consciously dispassionate analysis, that became old-fashioned during his long and productive career. Contemporary E. H. Carr considered Trevelyan to be one of the last historians of the Whig tradition.

Many of his writings promoted the Whig Party, an important aspect of British politics from the 1600s to the mid-1800s, and of its successor, the Liberal Party. Whigs and Liberals believed the common people had a more positive effect on history than did royalty and that democratic government would bring about steady social progress.

Trevelyan's history is engaged and partisan. Of his Garibaldi trilogy, "reeking with bias", he remarked in his essay "Bias in History", "Without bias, I should never have written them at all. For I was moved to write them by a poetical sympathy with the passions of the Italian patriots of the period, which I retrospectively shared."

Reviews

[Liam Porter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the second volume of G.M. Trevelyan's English Social History, but here published in a Penguin Pelican as an "illustrated" edition which includes in an appendix "descriptive notes" by the author on, impressively, every one of the many high-quality reproductions. This is clearly Trevelyan's favourite era and if you catch his spirit it can seem that we had reached the pinnacle of architecture:

Everywhere, south of the still vexed Border with its grim stone castles and peel-towers, the England of Elizabeth was becoming par excellence the land of manor-houses, bewilderingly different from one another in size, material and style of architecture, but all testifying to the peace and economic prosperity of the age, its delight in display, in beauty, and in the glory of man's life on earth. Wealth and power, and with them the lead in architecture, had passed from the Princes of the Church to the gentry. The great era of ecclesiastical building, after lasting for so many centuries, had at length come to an end. The new religion was the religion of the Book, the sermon, and the psalm, rather than of the sacred edifice; there were already fine churches enough to satisfy the religious requirements of Protestant England. p.46

Internal political relations:

The study of the history and literature of Elizabethan England gives an impression of a greater harmony and a freer intercourse of classes than in earlier or in later times. It is not a period of peasants' revolts, of levelling doctrines, of anti-Jacobin fears, or of exclusiveness and snobbery in the upper classes such as Jane Austen depicts in a later age. [...] The sensible custom of apprenticing the younger sons of squires to trade became less common in Hanoverian times, partly because of the diminution (almost the disappearance) of the class of the small squire. The contemptuous attitude affected by some gentlefolk in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries towards "soiling the hands with trade," was particularly absurd, because nearly all such families had risen wholly or in part by trade, and many were in fact still engaged in it though the smart ladies of the family may not have known much about it. But in Elizabeth's time there much less of this snobbish nonsense. The London apprentices, as we read in Stow, were "often children of gentlemen and persons of good quality", who served their masters obediently, hoping to rise to a share in the business, but in their leisure time "affected to go in costly apparel and wear weapons and frequent schools of dancing, fencing, and music." p.61-63

Colonial living:

England [was] peculiarly fitted to provide colonists of the right sort. [...]The ordinary Englishman was not yet a townee, wholly divorced from nature; he was not yet a clerk or a specialized workman of one trade only, unable to adapt himself to pioneering conditions, unwilling to abandon the advantages of a high standard of living at home for a life of hardship and incessant toil in an unknown land. The Englishman of Stuart and Hanoverian times was more adaptable than his descendants and had stronger incentives to emigrate. No standard of life and no pensions for old age were secured to him at home beyond what he could win by his own efforts. The poor law would keep him from starving, but no more. Moreover, the inhabitant of the seventeenth century English town still knew something of agriculture and the inhabitant of the English village still knew something of craftsmanship. The townsmen tilled their "town fields." The village contained not only men to farm its land but men to build its cottages and barns, weave and cut its clothes, make its furniture, farm implements, and harness. The cottage wives could bake, milk, cook, help in the harvest, spin, mend or make clothes as well as rear families of children. A shipload of emigrants drawn from a number of such self-sufficing villages were capable of creating and maintaining a new village in the wilderness, even where there was no shopping town behind it to supply its needs. p.142-3

And in the full scholarly maturity of the general reading population:

Political and religious controversy was conducted in books and pamphlets forbidding learned to the modern eye, yet in spite of their heavy display of erudition, they caught the eager audience to which they made appeal. Even the famous pamphlet in favour of tyrannicide, entitled "Killing no Murder," written by a Republican and reissued by the Cavaliers with the very practical object of inducing someone to assassinate Cromwell, is made up of learned citations of classical as well as Biblical authorities. Even under Puritan rule, what the Greeks and Romans had said about tyrannicide counted with ordinary readers as much as the views of Hebrew judges and prophets. There were in fact a great many students among the upper and middle classes both of town and country. Every reader had in some sort to be a student, for, apart from poetry and the stage, there was hardly any literature that was not serious. Fiction scarcely existed except in ballads for the common folk, and in the heavy "tomes" of French romances like "Grand Cyrus," which seem to us as dull as sermons, but in those days pleased cultivated young ladies like Dorothy Osbourne. p.179

The book also describes how great success was shared in by emergent classes of the commerical sort, such as the East Indian nabobs:

The rivalry of the Courteen Association followed by the troubles of the Civil Wars in England had almost destroyed the East India Company and put an end to the English connexion with India. But during the Protectorate the old Company, with Cromwell's help, re-established its shaken prosperity and assumed its permant financial form as a single joint-stock enterprise. Hitherto, money had been raised for each seperate voyage [...] sometimes a dead loss due to battle or wreck. But in 1657 a permanent fund, the "New General Stock", was instituted for all future purposes. [...] The great wealth derived from Eastern trade therefore remained in a few hands, chiefly of very rich men. Under the last Stuart Kings, Sir Josiah Child could set aside great sums of money to bribe the Court before 1688, and Parliament afterwards, in the interest of the Company's monopoly. The general public, having to pay a very high price for the stock if they were allowed to buy at all, grew every year more indignant that no one except a few fortunate shareholders in a close concern was permitted to trade beyond the Cape. "Interlopers" from Bristol and elsewhere sent out ships to carry on a "free trade." But the Company's monopoly, however unpopular, was legal, and its agents enforced the law with a high hand [...] p.152-3

And prosperous farmers who, across generations, rose to greater and greater local dominance, their power cemented by the ongoing land enclosures:

Old rural England, on the eve of the wholesale enclosures and the Industrial Revolution, is often presented to the mind's eye of posterity in one or other of two rival pictures. On the one hand we are asked to contemplate a land of independent and self-respecting peasants, most of them attached to the soil by small personal rights therein, contented with the country quiet and felicy which have since been destroyed [...] craftsmen [...] not divorced from rural pleasures [...] enjoying in their daily work the delight of the individual artist [... and] on the other hand we are shown the opposing picture: we are asked to remember the harsh, back-breaking lavour of the pre-mechanical ages, continued for thirteen or more hours in the day; child-labour instead of primary schools; disease and early death [...], neglectful and unimaginative harshness not only to criminals and debtors but too often to women, children and the poor at large [etc. ...]

On this last point, Trevelyan is cagey about the trend for drawing any morals from the story of the enclosure of common land. He thinks that we should only see the two views as "pictures," both of which are significantly borne out by the scholarly evidence:

Confirmation of both these pictures emerges from a study of the period. But which pictures contains the greater and more important body of truth is hazardous to pronounce, partly because the dispute is about intangible values - we cannot put ourselves back into the minds of our ancestors, and if we could we should still be puzzled; partly also because, even where statistic would helps, statistics are not to be had. p.238-9

The book does not dwell long on injustices and "horrible histories." The overall picture of late-Tudor and Jacobean England is one of ruddy spiritual health; a nation which knew itself and resorted to violence only in substantive issues: Trevelyan compares the War of the Roses with the "less selfish" Civil War. Even the great plague is diminished by comparison with earlier outbreaks of the same disease:

The famous "Plague of London" was merely the last, and not perhaps the worst, of a series of outbreaks cvering three centuries. [...] It is thought probable that a third, and possible that one half, of the fellow-countrymen of Baccaccio, of Froissart, and of Chaucer, perished within three years. The Black Death remained in the soil of England, and became known as "The Plague." It never again swept the whole country at one time, but it perpetually broke out in different localities, particularly in the towns and ports and the riversides.[...] So when the last outbreak came in 1665, although it did not destroy a much larger proportion of the Londoners than some of its predecessors had done, it struck the imagination more, for it came in an age of greater civilization, comfort, and security, when such calamities were less remembered and less expected, and, it was followed close, as though at the divine command, by another catastrophe to which there was no parallel in the most ancient records of London. The Great Fire (1666) raged for five days and destroyed the whole City proper between the Tower and the Temple. p.264-6