The Time Traveller’s Guide to Restoration Britain

by Ian Mortimer

  As farmers stop using communal oxen they start to employ their own teams of plough horses. These are less costly to keep, faster and more versatile, so although you will still see oxen here and there, their numbers are rapidly declining. At the same time, the horse population of England almost doubles over the period 1660–1700.16 The massive growth of London’s population leads to an ever-increasing demand for meat and dairy products. As meat has to be transported on the hoof, and dairy products have to be moved quickly in order to be sold fresh, large enclosed farms are established in the counties surrounding the capital. The growing demand for meat, coupled with the mass of new enclosures, means that the national sheep population increases to over seventeen million by the end of the century – more than three sheep for every person in the kingdom.17 In the north of England, farmers start planting fields of potatoes for the first time. Elsewhere, from about 1670, you will start to see large areas planted with turnips, to be mashed up for cattle feed.18

  There are other dramatic changes in the countryside too. If you venture into the Fenlands of Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire, you will find an area of wetland extending to about 300,000 acres gradually being drained. Pepys’s mathematical friend Ralph Greatorex designs an engine for pumping water into deep, straight channels built for the purpose.19 John Evelyn goes to see a set of windmills and water pumps in the Fens in 1670. He remarks that the reclaimed land is exceptionally fertile, and that the draining of the marshes has removed the swarms of mosquitoes that hitherto infested the area. You would have thought that such work would be widely welcomed but, as with enclosure, what is progress for some is the very opposite for others. In this case, the Slodgers take a dim view of proceedings. These are the people who live amidst the waterways and marshes and who wish to preserve their independent, semi-aquatic way of life: cutting reeds, fishing and snaring. Accordingly they sabotage the pumps, mills and dams in the hope of flooding the land again. Even in the seventeenth century you can’t please everybody all of the time.

  Not every part of England and Wales is seeing agricultural change. In the south-west peninsula, the fields have all been enclosed for centuries. Large numbers of Red Devon cattle are driven annually in a ‘red tide’ along the deep lanes on their way up to the summer pastures on Dartmoor. Hereabouts you will come across many people living in houses and cottages built of cob – a mixture of earth or clay, straw and sometimes animal hair – with thatched roofs. Thatch tends to last only about thirty years, after which it needs replacing, but in Devon only the top level is removed, so that more and more layers of thatch are built up on top of the straw base. As a result, many houses in this county look ungainly and humped, with thatch six feet deep and wide, overhanging eaves. Around Dartmoor, you will still find many longhouses – medieval granite buildings in which cattle live at one end and the farmer and his family live at the other, all under the same roof, and all entering and leaving by the same door.

  The landscape is also largely unchanged in remote parts of northern England. In Cumberland, for example, each countryman continues to live on his own tenement with a handful of pigs and half a dozen chickens. He keeps his other livestock – perhaps ten cows and about fifty sheep – in small fields or ‘closes’ near his farmhouse. In the autumn you’ll see a black tide of Scottish cattle coming south for sale in Carlisle and wintering on the lowlands, to be resold to graziers further south the following year, or to be slaughtered and salted down for use in ships’ stores. Oats and bigg (a coarse form of barley) are the principal crops grown here, chosen for their hardiness. As for the houses, many are single-storey ‘clay dabbins’ built of cob around a cruck frame and thatched. Sometimes the whole community comes together to build such a house in a single day for a newly married couple.20 Other dwellings are single-storey stone buildings with slate roofs around which the wind whips cruelly in winter. Older versions of these are called ‘bastles’ – farmhouses that have been fortified against the intrusions of Scots reivers, who until relatively recently came south to raid cattle. On high ground you come across stone shielings, where farmers stay temporarily when driving their cattle long distances, or where cowherds live when looking after their grazing animals. When Celia Fiennes is making her way to Carlisle in 1698, she passes through Cumberland and describes the houses there as

  sad little huts made up of dry walls, only stones piled together and the roofs of the same slate. There seemed to be little or no tunnels for their chimneys and [they] have no plaster within or without. For the most part I took them at first sight for a sort of houses or barns to fodder cattle in, not thinking them to be dwelling houses, they being scattered, here one, there another … it must needs be a very cold dwelling but it shows something of the laziness of the people.21

  I suspect that the inhabitants will have their own views on that last comment.

  Towns, Boroughs and Cities

  As mentioned above, Gregory King estimates that 75 per cent of the people of England and Wales live in the villages and countryside. That figure is worth dwelling on for a moment, because as you walk through some of the settlements that he describes as towns, you might think they are more like villages. Some of them have just 400 inhabitants living in about eighty houses. The reason for this is that a settlement is not called a town on account of its size, but by virtue of it having a market. Likewise, a city is not necessarily a bustling place: it is called a city if it has a cathedral, regardless of whether it has 30,000 inhabitants, like Norwich, or 3,000 like Ely, or just a few hundred, like the Welsh city of St David’s. In total, the number of market towns in England in 1693 is 614 (including 22 cities); and in Wales there are 66 (including 4 cities).22 As for ‘boroughs’, these might be one of several things: a market town that is governed by a mayor and corporation of aldermen; or a place that sends an MP (or two) to Westminster; or a settlement that is simply called a ‘borough’ by tradition. In all, there are 202 Parliamentary boroughs in England and 13 in Wales.23 Not all Parliamentary boroughs are towns, it should be noted. A few are leftovers of a different medieval settlement pattern and have very few residents. Old Sarum has none at all – ‘not as much as the ruins of a house’, as one contemporary puts it – but it still sends two MPs to Parliament.24 Dunwich, once a prosperous port, also sends two MPs even though there are waves lapping at its marketplace in 1677.

  With regard to the larger towns, in 1670 about 680,000 people in England (13.6 per cent of the population) live in a town of at least 5,000 inhabitants. That means more than 86 per cent of the population lives in what you (as opposed to Gregory King) might regard as a rural area. By 1700 that figure has declined only slightly, to 83 per cent. By this reckoning, Wales is 100 per cent ‘rural’ throughout the period: there are no towns of 5,000 people in the principality. The largest settlement, Wrexham, has about 3,500 inhabitants in 1700.25

  English towns with more than 5,000 inhabitants (cities are in capitals)26

  As you wander through the streets of a provincial city, quite a few things will remind you of your visit to the capital. Take Exeter, for example. Like London, it is a river port and growing rapidly, but due to the failure of any local bakers to burn it down, it resembles the old heart of London rather more than the new aristocratic piazzas of the capital. It has a medieval bridge and a medieval castle, and the two towers of its ancient cathedral stand high above every other building, including the city’s medieval Guildhall. The city streets and lanes are narrow, and as you climb the hill up into the city centre, you will see that most of them still have central drains and are cobbled, not paved. Thick stone walls stand to the height of about 13 feet around much of the city, and the five substantial stone gates still give a guarded access. The alleys are muddy, narrow and dark where the old houses are jettied out over them. Some are even narrower and darker here than those in London, for when they were built in the Middle Ages, local transport in Devon was more frequently undertaken by packhorse than cart, so people had scant regard for wheeled traffic when they
laid out the smaller rights of way. As in many other towns and cities, the private houses of Exeter are predominantly old and timber-framed: as you walk around, note how many jetties and beams are decorated with carved figures – here the head of a Moor, there a griffin, there a unicorn, and so on.27 The city has an Exchange, where you find high-quality shops. There is also a second Exchange for merchants, in the remains of the cathedral cloisters, where cloth dealers and manufacturers meet twice a day, as they do in London.28 The markets are still held in the middle of town and so you will smell the blood of slaughtered animals in the streets and the effluent seeping through cellars. You will hear the cries of street vendors and see people queuing for water from the conduit at the top of South Street, just as they do at the Standard on Cornhill, in London.

  Exeter still has its old inns, of course: dozens of them, from the renowned Bear Inn in South Street, to nondescript taverns with a spare bed or two in the suburbs. When Grand Duke Cosimo III arrives in Exeter in 1669, the whole of his entourage stays at the finest hostelry in town, the forty-room New Inn in the High Street, which has been known as the ‘New Inn’ ever since it was built in about 1445. There he graciously receives the gentry of the county, and Lorenzo Magalotti writes down his impressions of Exeter. He describes it as ‘a small city’ (even though it is the seventh largest in the kingdom). He carefully notes that ships of 300 tons burden can navigate as far as Topsham, a small town nearby, from where the merchants send their goods by barge up the canal to Exeter Quay. He is impressed by the reach of the trade in woollen cloth such as bays and serge, which are sent all over the world – to the West Indies, Spain, France, Holland, Italy and the Middle East. As for the public buildings, he admires the cathedral, the Bishop’s Palace, the ancient walls and the old castle.29 However, he does not remark on any other structure. There is no doubt as to what he thinks is the chief attraction of the place: ‘the city is intersected almost in the middle by a very large and straight street, full of very rich shops, which is its best and most considerable part’.30 In Exeter, as in London, Magalotti’s real interest lies in shopping.

  All this will remind you of the old heart of London before the Fire. But as you look around you will also see signs of change. The old cathedral yard has been given a new, fashionable function, akin to the walks in London’s St James’s Park. ‘In the square of the cathedral is a most beautiful summer walk, under the shade of trees, which are divided into several rows, as they often are in Holland,’ writes Magalotti.31 If you leave the city by the South Gate and look east, you will see streets of fine new houses under construction. The three buildings directly to your right have recently been built by prosperous tradesmen. They are two storeys high, with a third attic storey; the gable ends face the street in the style of older buildings, and the timber frames are square and infilled with lath and plaster. However, they are wider than Tudor houses, with tall brick chimneys, and they are flat-fronted, not jettied out over the roadway. They are typical of the new structures being built to house the growing population of the city. Here and there among them you will find a fine brick building, proudly declaiming its newness and high level of comfort. There’s a handsome example on Magdalen Road: a substantial mansion of three storeys, built for Thomas Mathew in 1659.32 Initially the bricks for such buildings are imported as ballast in Dutch merchants’ ships. By the 1690s, new brickfields in the parish of St Sidwell, just to the east of the city, lead to the building of many more brick houses. It all creates a favourable impression on Celia Fiennes when she visits in 1698: ‘Exeter is a town very well built: the streets are well-pitched noble streets and a vast trade is carried on.’33

  Exeter is just 2 per cent of the size of London. Although it has many of the same features that the capital enjoys, there are also many it lacks. It has no royal palace and few members of the aristocracy spend any time here. Thus its prosperity depends far more heavily on its economic dynamism than on its position as a social nexus – even if the Grand Duke of Tuscany stays at the New Inn. Celia Fiennes goes into considerable detail about the serges traded in the city, describing how the carriers who bring the wool into town on their loaded horses are ‘thick along the highways’, and how the fleeces are taken to the fulling mills. She notes approvingly that the canal by which the merchandise arrives in barges is being upgraded, so that seagoing ships can sail right up to the city. She describes how the quay has recently been extended to allow for the extra business, and a handsome new customs house has been constructed in red brick, on the ground floor of which the merchandise is unloaded. ‘Serge is the chief manufacture,’ she declares. ‘As Norwich is for copes, calico and damask, so Exeter is for serges – there is an incredible quantity of them made and sold in the town.’34 Seventeenth-century people see towns differently from us too, just as they do the countryside.

  Not all of the old towns are experiencing the same levels of fortune. Although a few (such as Norwich) have growth rates even greater than that of London, many towns are not growing at all. Their expansion is often restricted by their customs and restrictive trading practices, such as keeping out all ‘foreign’ traders. Indeed, some places seem stuck in a rut. When Thomas Baskerville visits Leicester he remarks:

  It is now an old stinking town, situated upon a dull river, inhabited for the most part by tradesmen, viz: worsted combers and clothiers, for the streets being then swept and cleansed against the judges coming in the next morning, the stinking puddles of —— and water being then stirred made me go spewing through all the streets.35

  Manchester, on the other hand, is growing rapidly on the strength of its textiles. Birmingham has strong growth, on account of its metal-working. Among the other large towns undergoing rapid development are Chatham, because of its dockyard; Liverpool and Portsmouth, because of the shift towards the Atlantic trade; Sunderland, on account of its port and its salt processing, dye manufacture and glassmaking; Tiverton, because of the burgeoning wool trade; and Nottingham, as a result of the wool trade and hosiery manufacture. In Plymouth, another port benefiting from the booming Atlantic trade, Magalotti notes that so many men are employed in the export of lead and tin that ‘only women and boys are to be seen – for the men are all at sea’.36 These towns exemplify the industrial bubbling that you will see across the country, as it experiences the challenges and opportunities of economic improvement.

  Alongside these large towns of 5,000 people or more, there are approximately fifty further towns in England with 2,000 inhabitants; in Wales, only Wrexham, Brecon, Carmarthen, Haverfordwest and Swansea fall into this category.37 These too are experiencing a range of fortunes. Many of them are simply carrying on in the way that old market towns do. The population of the city of Lincoln steadily increases from about 3,500 to 4,500, its inhabitants growing more prosperous from its many trades.38 Carlisle, a small city of about 3,000 people on the border with Scotland, is benefiting hugely from the fact that the two kingdoms are no longer at war, so the succession of sieges it has had to endure down the centuries is apparently at an end (there is still the siege of 1745 to come, but don’t tell them that). In Abbey Street there are some handsome new structures of stone and brick, including Tullie House, built in 1689 for the future dean of Carlisle. When Celia Fiennes visits nine years later, she mentions some ‘graceful’ houses, such as the chancellor’s residence, which is ‘built of stone [and] very lofty with five good sash windows in the front’.39 Faring less well in these peaceful times is a town like Ludlow, in Shropshire. It is only slowly recovering from a long siege in 1646. Before the conflict, its population stood at 2,600; by 1660 it has fallen to 1,600. Among the crumbling remnants of the town walls and old timber-framed houses, you will find a profitable market but few signs of urban expansion. In 1700 the town still has only 2,200 inhabitants.40

  If you want to see the most impressive examples of economic dynamism at this time, you need to visit the new ports on the west coast. Smithwick in Cornwall is a striking example. At the start of the century there is nothi
ng here except the manor house belonging to the Killigrew family, and Pendennis Castle, a coastal fortification built by Henry VIII. The Killigrews then construct a port, which they call Falmouth. In 1660 Sir Peter Killigrew obtains a grant of a market for Falmouth; he also builds a prison and two inns. Four years later the place has more than 200 houses. The Killigrews build the custom-house quay in the 1670s. Thereafter the economic growth is rapid, on account of the depth of the harbour and Britain’s growing overseas interests. From 1688 Falmouth is recognised as the official despatch point for the packet ships sailing to British overseas territories in India, the West Indies and America. By 1700 it has 350 houses and the population is approaching 1,500 people.41

  Even more impressive is a little fishing village called Whitehaven in Cumberland, not many miles from Celia Fiennes’s ‘sad little huts’. This has only nine thatched cottages when the Lowther family acquires it in 1631. From that moment on, however, the Lowthers are to Whitehaven what the Killigrews are to Falmouth. Sir Christopher Lowther builds the harbour to export his locally mined coal to Ireland, and his son Sir John obtains the right to hold a market there in 1660. Sir John lays out the settlement with straight roads in a grid; he builds a church and other public buildings, and in many ways provides the prototype for the northern industrial factory town. In 1685 the population passes 1,000 people; in 1700 it is about 3,000 – a massive rate of expansion in just fifteen years.42