Elizabethan England From 'A Description of England,' by William Harrison

Excerpt

I am unwilling to send out this Harrison, the friend of some twenty years’ standing, without a few words of introduction to those readers who don’t know it. The book is full of interest, not only to every Shakspere student, but to every reader of English history, every man who has the least care for his forefathers’ lives. Though it does contain sheets of padding now and then, yet the writer’s racy phrases are continually turning up, and giving flavour to his descriptions, while he sets before us the very England of Shakspere’s day. From its Parliament and Universities, to its beggars and its rogues; from its castles to its huts, its horses to its hens; from how the state was managd, to how Mrs. Wm. Harrison (and no doubt Mrs. William Shakspere) brewd her beer; all is there. The book is a deliberately drawn picture of Elizabethan England; and nothing could have kept it from being often reprinted and a thousand times more widely known than it is, except the long and dull historical and topographical Book I.—The Description of Britaine—set before the interesting account in Books II. and III., of the England under Harrison’s eyes in 1577-87.

How Harrison came to write his book was on this wise. Reginald Wolfe, the Printer to Queen Elizabeth, meant to publish “a universall Cosmographie of the whole world, and therewith also certaine particular histories of every knowne nation.” For the Historical part of the work, he engagd Raphael Holinshed, among other men; and when the work was nearly done, Wolfe died, after twenty-five years’ labour at his scheme. Then the men who were to have borne the cost of printing the Universall Cosmographie were afraid to face the expense of the whole work, and resolvd to do only so much of it as related to England, Scotland, and Ireland.

Holinshed having the History of these countries in hand, application was made to Harrison, who had long been compiling a Chronologie of his own, to furnish the Descriptions of Britain and England. He was then Household Chaplain to the well-known Sir William Brooke, Lord Cobham (so praisd by Francis Thynne), and was staying in London, away from his rectory of Radwinter in Essex, and his Library there. He had also travelld little himself, only into Kent, to Oxford and Cambridge, etc., as he honestly tells Lord Cobham.

Still, mainly by the help of Leland—“and hitherto Leland, whose words I dare not alter”—as well as of “letters and pamphlets from sundrie places & shires of England,” and “by conference with diuers folk,” and “by mine owne reading,” together with Master Sackford’s charts or Maps,” Harrison—notwithstanding the failure of his correspondents and the loss of part of his material—“scambled up,” what he depreciatingly calls “this foule frizeled Treatise of mine,” to “stand in lieu of a description of my Countrie.” But, he says, “howsoeuer it be done, & whatsoeuer I haue done, I haue had an especiall eye vnto the truth of things.” And this merit, I think every reader will allow Harrison. Though he swallowd too easily some of the stories told in old chronicles, etc., though (in his 2nd ed. only) he put Chertsey above, instead of below, Staines, on the Thames, etc., yet in all the interesting home-life part, he evidently gives both sides of the case, “speaks of it as it was; nothing extenuates, nor sets down aught in malice” (Oth., V. ii. 341). When he tells with pride, on the one hand, of the grand new buildings and the many chimnies put up in his day; on the other hand, he brings in the grumble:

“And yet see the change, for when our houses were builded of willow, then had we oken men; but now that our houses are come to be made of oke, our men are not onlie become willow, but a great manie, through Persian delicacie crept in among vs, altogither of straw, which is a sore alteration.

“Now haue we manie chimnies; and yet our tenderlings complaine of rheumes, catarhs, and poses. Then had we none but reredosses; and our heads did neuer ake. For as the smoke in those daies was supposed to be a sufficient hardning for the timber of the house, so it was reputed a far better medicine to keepe the goodman and his familie from the quacke or pose, wherewith, as then, verie few were oft acquainted.”

—when he describes the beauty, virtue, learning, and housewifery, of Queen Elizabeth’s Maids of Honour, he yet acknowledges that as the men

“our common courtiers (for the most part) are the best lerned and indued with excellent gifts, so are manie of them the worst men, when they come abroad, that anie man shall either heare or read of.”

Even the Papist Monks, whom—as a marrid Protestant parson and vicar—he hates, he praises for their buildings....