The Weaker Vessel: Women's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England

by Antonia Fraser

  Modesty, that preferred female attribute of the time – for all women, not only wives – received its due mention. Gervase Markham in The English Huswife of 1615 expected his ‘compleat woman’ to be ‘of great modesty and temperance’; Thomas Fuller’s The Good Wife of 1642 was also to be remarkable for her ‘modest carriage’ (although she could at the same time ‘bind her children with a look’ which might imply a slight contradiction in terms).3 But if modesty and deference were to be displayed in theory, in practice a woman needed a formidable combination of organizing ability and sheer physical dexterity if she was to act as a proper crown to her husband.

  Thus Gervase Markham’s ‘compleat woman’ possessed skill in ‘bakery, cookery, physic, banqueting stuff and distillation’. As to organization, the fact that the phrase ‘the family’ was so often applied to the household of the time, be it large or small, expresses the wide responsibilities of its effective ruler – the housewife. In 1631 in The English Gentlewoman, Richard Brathwaite wrote of ‘the office of a Mistress’ that ‘winning Modesty’ at all times should prevent its occupant from becoming an ‘imperious Governess’. Instead, the mistress of a household should know ‘when to put on a smooth brow, and to cherish industry with moderate bounty. Her discreet providence makes her family look with cheerful countenance… The open field she makes her Gallery; her Labourers her living pictures.’4 Modesty and submission might be persistently demanded – Elizabeth Walker was fond of quoting to her daughters another biblical precept: ‘ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands, even as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him Lord’5 – but it was strength and executive ability – even perhaps a touch of the ‘imperious Governess’ – which were actually required in the ‘compleat woman’ if she happened to be a wife, as the great majority of women of this period were at one time or another during their lives.

  To outsiders, the City wives with their rich costumes – grotesquely rich according to playwrights like Dekker who mocked them – affluent furnishings and groaning boards, were figures of fun. Even the old magnate James Houblon, larding his daughters with good advice, begged them to have a care not ‘to puff up’ their children with ‘pride of apparel’.6 It was a commonplace to discuss the magnificence with which wealthy citizens adorned their homes, and at the same time to deride the social ambitions of their wives. Mocked as they might be, or lusted after (Pepys never failed to report a sighting of a pretty citizen’s wife, including at church, if he had reason to suppose she might be available to his advances), the lives these women led ill accorded with the contemporary notion of the wife as modest silent helpmate. Hic Mulier: Or, The Man-Woman, in 1620, paid special attention to ‘the demy-Palaces of Burgers’ which harboured vivacious painted wantons – ‘these Apes of the City’. The citizens’ wives, like all good women, were urged to bear in mind the following salutary quatrain:

  Those Vertues that in women merit praise

  Are sober shows without, chaste thoughts within,

  True Faith and due obedience to their mate,

  And of their children honest care to take.7

  The fact was that strong independent characters were often concealed beneath the finery worn by the citizens’ wives. What was more, this was in keeping with the true demands of such women’s position, which entailed not only running their affluent household, but sometimes acting in virtual partnership with their husbands in business. Dekker, in The Shoemaker’s Holiday, depicted Mrs Eyre, wife of the future Lord Mayor Simon Eyre, at work, bustling away amidst her husband’s apprentices. The Custom of London gave to citizens’ wives one third of their husband’s estate on death, and also allotted to them a further one third if there were no children of the marriage; the last third was bestowed at the testator’s wishes and so might also go to the widow. This meant that a merchant’s wife never expected to be a mere cipher on his death (and as we shall see, this had an important influence on the remarriage of City widows). Nor did she behave as one in his lifetime. A traveller from the Continent noted about City wives: ‘In all banquets and feasts they are shown the greatest honour; they are placed at the upper end of the table, where they are first served.’ In mercantile society in cities elsewhere – nearly a million people at this period lived in towns other than London – in Bristol, for example, in ‘the high and spacious Halls’ of the Bristol merchants, wives were leading active lives in which submission, practically speaking, was the least of the qualities required.8

  This was also true in the urban households lower down the social scale, those of the tradesmen and artisans where young (male) apprentices were taken. Here a wife, living above the shop, became her husband’s active assistant, and effective partner; tales of wives beating apprentices were sufficiently common to prove that the weaker vessel could wield a strong arm on occasion, when she fancied she had the authority to do so. Young Valentine Pettit wrote a sad tale of Mrs Newman, the wife of the man to whom he was apprenticed, to his cousin Richard Oxinden. She was, he complained, ‘a strange kind of woman’ whose hold over her husband was so great that since his marriage he had terrorized his apprentices and would now ‘beat them for any small occasion’.9 There was clearly nothing very submissive about Mrs Newman.

  Other tradesmen’s wives deployed their energies more salubriously: borough records reveal them as energetic participants in their husbands’ affairs, and in some minds they were rated their superiors: ‘Your citizens’ wives are like partridges, the hens are better than the cocks’, was a contemporary comment.10

  In the country the picture of industry – necessary industry – continued. Where rural practices were concerned, indeed, James Howell did not see why the country squires selling ‘Calves and Runts’ and their wives selling ‘Cheese and Apples’ should be held to be more ‘gentle’, that is refined, than the great merchant-adventurers of the town selling silks and satins, diamonds and pearls, with silver and gold. George Herbert’s poem in memory of his mother gives a description of the life of the country clergyman’s wife. The day began with some ‘active kindling prayers’ and a discreet toilette:

  … as good women rightly use, she’d braid

  Her hair with simple art and sparing aid

  Of jewels…

  This was the prelude to a busy schedule:

  Then on her family forth she shone, and spent

  On kitchen, garden, house due management;

  To every thing its time and place disposed,

  And with her needlework the late day closed.

  Her life and household shared her constant plan,

  ‘So many days for this’ each task began.11

  When a woman was married not to a clergyman but to a farmer her ‘constant plan’ would also include traditional and important responsibilities such as the garden and orchard and the poultry; many farmers’ wives were also pig farmers. On the wife too fell the responsibility of training the servants, both male and female. (Dorothy Osborne’s carefree shepherdesses might have to reckon with an irate farmer’s wife, the reverse of modest in her carriage, if any of their charges strayed while they sang their ballads in the shade.)

  John Banks, a Quaker farmer imprisoned for his religion at Carlisle in 1648, who described his separation from his wife as ‘the greatest trial that ever I met with’, specifically termed her ‘a Meet-Help and a good Support to me’ in his work; he worried how she would cope at harvest-time.12 In fact it was not only the tasks close at home which fell to the woman: at harvest-time it was customary for all those capable to lend a hand, including the wives of husbandmen, who might generally tend the pigs and cows after their marriage, or work in the garden. Women could plough and sow; other specifically female tasks were ‘weeding the corn’ and shearing sheep. In his autobiography William Stout of Lancaster tells us that in the absence of his mother, his sister had to look after him as a child: ‘our mother not only being fully employed in housewifery, but in dressing their corn for the market, and also in the fields, in hay and corn harvests, along with our father
and the servants’.13

  Dairy management was another traditional preserve of the farmer’s wife, commemorated in Richard Brathwaite’s picture of another busy woman like William Stout’s mother:

  Oft have I seen her from the Dairy come

  Attended by her maids, and hasting home

  To entertain some guests of Quality.

  The financial side of the farm’s affairs was often undertaken by the wife; and it was frequently the wife on her own who performed the vital role of selling the farm’s produce at the market. The fact that these activities were not without their attendant dangers is demonstrated by the awful story of Maud, the wife of another Quaker farmer, Thomas Collar of Woolavington. Returning from the market at Bridgwater alone, Maud was struck and called ‘ugly toad’ by one Adrian Towes. Then he demanded her purse (presumably containing the farm’s takings); finally he bullied her into kneeling and swearing on the Lord’s blood that she was not a Quaker.14

  The housewife, if she was literate, was not totally dependent on the traditional lore of domesticity handed down by word of mouth. There were some printed manuals (as there had been since the Middle Ages) and with the slow – the very slow – rise in female literacy, these increased. The desire to cash in on a famous name for commercial purposes being no modern phenomenon, these were generally launched with some fairly high-sounding credentials: The Queen’s Closet Opened, for example, printed in 1655, attested to the universal lure of royalty even under Cromwell’s Protectorate.15 It offered ‘Incomparable Secrets in Physick, Chirurgery, Preserving, Candying and Cookery as they were presented to the Queen [Henrietta Maria]. Never before Published. Transcribed from the true Copies of Her Majesties own Recipe books, by W.M., one of her late servants.’ The author, while admitting that some might view ‘with a kind of indignation’ his action, as a servant who had been entrusted with ‘so sacred a custody’, in making these copies public, gave the classic defence that ‘corrupt copies’ of the same recipes were already circulating. He threw in for good measure the plea that any mistake should be overlooked, since he lived in the country and due to his age and infirmity had not been able to oversee the printing.

  For all its boasted provenance The Queen’s Closet Opened offers merely the conventional remedies of the time for the usual ills. Here is Dr Stephens’ Water (a cordial frequently mentioned) and Dr Read’s perfume against the plague – a fragrant mixture of red rose-water, treacle, cloves and angelica. Recipes for breaking the stone in the kidneys, for curing piles, for alleviating colic (‘Take a turf of green grass and lay it to the Navel…’) jostle with purges, cordials to suppress Melancholy (borage and bugloss with juice of pippins) and other cordials for the heart. Some recommendations, like drinking a camomile infusion to induce sleep, still sound sensible to the modern ear; others, like swallowing the juice of sage or pimpernel to cure dumbness, must have needed a good deal of faith to make them work. However, ‘The Lord Spencers Cherry Water’ – a bottle of sack fortified by four pounds of crushed cherry-stones – certainly has a jolly sound, and one can well believe it might have cured fainting.

  Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Kent, author of A Choice Manuall of Rare and Select Secrets in Physick and Chirurgery, first printed after her death in 1651, was a daughter and co-heiress of the seventh Earl of Shrewsbury. In herself the Countess provided an interesting link with history: she was a granddaughter of that redoubtable bastion of Tudor womanhood, Bess of Hardwicke; her sister had been a god-daughter to Mary Queen of Scots, then a Shrewsbury captive; and both in childhood and later she herself was close to her unhappy cousin Lady Arbella Stuart. As a married woman, the Countess of Kent acted as a generous patron to Samuel Butler, but her outstanding role was as hostess and patron to the great Stuart jurist, John Selden.

  A Choice Manuall was popular and ran through several editions.16 Frequent remedies against the plague remind us that its outbreaks were not so much a dread as a reality in most people’s lives: epidemics of varying severity occurred throughout the century, by no means confined to that notorious one of 1665. ‘A Medicine for the Plague’ begins well with Take a pint of Malmsie’, before departing for the realms of spice and nutmeg. ‘To break a Plague sore’ involved the soberer process of roasting an onion and combining it with a white lily root. Another widespread scourge was the contagious disease known as ‘The Itch’; for this a judicious mixture of unsalted butter and the juice of red sage, with additives of walnut and ginger, was recommended.

  There is continuous mention of ‘Melancholy’ (‘two spoonfuls of Sirrup of Gilliflowers… this will cheer the heart’), ‘the Green Sickness’ (from which the young were often considered to suffer), and ‘fits of the Mother’ (i.e. a form of hysterical convulsion to which all women were subject), not only in the Countess of Kent’s manual but in other similar collections. These were the kind of sufferings, many of which would now be considered psychological in origin, which the mistress of a household would expect to combat with herbs, spices, wines and whatever else took her particular fancy.

  In this connection ‘The Countess of Kent’s special Powder’, otherwise known as ‘Gascons powder’, must have been a useful household requisite: a child of five troubled with much phlegm, a gentlewoman of forty troubled with ‘crude and flatulous humours’, a girl of about eighteen troubled with ‘fits of the Mother’, a young woman of twenty-four ‘not without some suspicion of the Plague’, were all cured by grains of this powder dissolved in assorted liquids. It was also said to be good against smallpox, measles, spotted or purple fever, ‘good in swoonings and passions of the heart, arising from malignant vapours or old causes, as also in the Plague or Pestilent Fevers’. The Countess of Kent concluded with a sweeping recommendation worthy of her grandmother Bess: ‘These and many other Experiments have I with good success tryed, and with Gods blessing recovered divers severall Patients.’17

  Provision of her own necessities and medicines was only one part of the duty of the mistress of the household: the housewife in a financial position to do so must also act as ‘An Over-seer for the poor’. ‘She takes a Survey daily and duly of them,’ wrote Richard Brathwaite, ‘and, without any charge to the Hamlet, relieves them.’ A good housewife, he concluded, would think ‘that day wholy lost, wherein she doth not one good work at least’.’18

  That ‘crown and glory’ to her husband, Elizabeth Walker, was the daughter of a pharmacist in the City of London named Sadler, and was born in 1623 and married in 1650. Her husband in her biography did refer to the spiritual aspect of the marital partnership: let ‘man and wife be meet helps to one another’ in order to assist each other to reach Heaven. This was one refinement of the concept of the helpmate where Puritan thinking, with its stress on woman’s spiritual capacity, was in advance of its time. However, Elizabeth Walker was aptly described by her husband as ‘both Martha and Mary’;19 it was as Martha, with her conscientious housekeeping and her personally administered charities, that she exemplified the perfect wife of the time, whatever her religious persuasion.

  True, it was as Mary that Mrs Walker began the day, at four o’clock in the morning, and sometimes as early as two or three, in order to obtain some hours of solitary meditation before the household was awake; in fact Mrs Walker was specially commended in the Holy Life for taking the trouble to light her own fire at that godly hour and not requiring some servant to do it for her! (The servants were first summoned at six for readings from the Bible, and prayers for the day-labourers came after breakfast.) After that Martha took over from Mary.

  Indoors there was work with the needle, outdoors inspection of the dairy. Afternoons were spent visiting the sick, distributing salves and medicines. Mrs Walker would also visit women in childbirth, rising at any hour of the night, because of ‘the commands of the Litany’. She was an excellent businesswoman, referred to jokingly by Dr Walker as ‘my land-lady’ because he allowed her £19 worth of rents to handle a year. And he took particular pride in his wife’s skill at cookery; she was ‘cler
k of her little kitchen, if I may so speak’, making her own pastry and cream cheeses.20

  On the last wedding anniversary which they celebrated – honoured by the presence of ‘three coronetted heads’ – this prodigious caterer managed to envelop thirty-nine pies in one dish which she had made herself. Afterwards the fragments were used to feast the many poor families who thronged to the house, pretending to seek Dr Walker’s advice, actually desiring Mrs Walker’s food. At Christmas everyone was offered hospitality, rich and poor; people were even encouraged to bring their children, for whom there was a special table: ‘Trouble not yourselves’, she would say, ‘I love to see this little fry.’21

  Mrs Walker also concocted ‘English wines’ and ciders to give away to her friends as presents. One is relieved to discover that this latter-day saint, who as a minister’s wife always wore black without a redeeming knot or ribbon of colour, reacted most humanly when all the guests’ praise for the cider was directed towards her husband.

  ‘His cider!’, she would exclaim, according to Dr Walker half way ‘betwixt jest and earnest’, ‘’Tis my cider: I have all the pains and care, and he hath all the praise who never meddles with it.’ But then on many counts Elizabeth Walker showed herself a woman of independent view. Dr Walker also tells us – ‘however much it might lessen her in people’s esteem’ – that his wife was in the habit of observing that ‘Blacks and Tawnys as well as Whites were descendants of the first Adam’.22

  The household routine of Mary Rich, although on a far grander scale, particularly after she became Countess of Warwick, conformed to the same ideal. Here, like Mrs Elizabeth Walker, is Brathwaite’s paragon of domestic energy. It is true that her autobiography was ostensibly written as a record of the ‘providences’ in her life after she had undergone a ‘conversion’ and embraced the stricter Puritan faith of her husband’s family (charting spiritual progress in written form, what Isaac Ambrose called ‘a Register of God’s dealings’, was a popular task with Puritan ladies).23 However, so many of these ‘providences’ occurred within the household, such being the intimate pattern of her existence, that we have here a picture that is as much domestic as spiritual.