The Time Traveller’s Guide to Restoration Britain
Page 18
Science is more noticeable than ever in the form of domestic technology and machines. It enters Samuel Pepys’s house in the form of a watch, a thermometer, a microscope, a telescope, a monetary calculator and a pantograph (a device for copying images at the same scale). Even those who cannot afford such expensive instruments can see technology in public places. If you stroll through St James’s Park in October 1660 you’ll see a whole display of water-lifting machines, including an Archimedes screw designed by Ralph Greatorex.89 Sir Samuel Morland sends a jet of water 60ft high over the top of Windsor Castle in 1681; smaller and more practical machines for use in mines, houses, ships, wells, draining schemes, garden water fountains and public drinking-water pumps are available from his London shop in Great Russell Street. Morland also develops a speaking trumpet or loudhailer that can make the human voice heard over the distance of a mile.90 Right at the end of our period, Thomas Savery, a gentleman from Devon, devises a steam engine for pumping water out of mines. He obtains a patent for it in 1698 and demonstrates it in front of the Royal Society the following year.
The zeal of all these scientists and engineers allows them to break boundaries that have restrained mankind for centuries. Nothing seems to daunt them. When experiments with blood transfusions in dogs prove promising, the question arises as to whether humans can benefit too. Accordingly a gentleman called Arthur Coga is recruited to have sheep’s blood pumped into his veins: a procedure that he survives more than once. Charles II is in stitches when he is told that the Royal Society is trying to establish the weight of air. Hooke proceeds nonetheless and manages to weigh 119 pints of air at 2⅛ ounces, which is not that far off (the correct weight is just over 3 ounces).91 When a treasure ship laden with gold and ivory goes down off the south coast of England in April 1691, Edmond Halley proposes a new form of diving suit to allow the recovery of the valuable cargo. Flying is another subject to which the scientists return time and time again. Hooke experiments with gunpowder-fired flight, and with gears to give men mechanical wings; he is likely to bore you for hours with his discussions on the subject. One of the few barriers they do not tackle is that of distant time. Everyone still believes the world was created just before dusk on 23 October 4004 BC, in line with Bishop Ussher’s calculations. As a result, when John Conyers discovers a flint hand-axe near some elephant bones in London in 1679, people conclude that it must have been used by an Ancient Briton to kill one of the elephants brought to Britain by the Emperor Claudius in AD 43 – for how else could the elephant have arrived on these shores?92 No one imagines that the axe is 350,000 years old and that elephants were then indigenous to Britain.
Perhaps the most significant shift of thinking connected with all this scientific work is the belief that everything can be subject to quantification. Newton can mathematically determine the depth of a film of air between a lens and flat sheet of glass to the accuracy of 1/100,000 of an inch; Robert Boyle can calculate the relationship between the volume and pressure of a gas; Flamsteed the progress of comets; Halley the life expectancy of the population; and so on. Quantification allows certainty and, in a highly uncertain world, that appeals to many people in many walks of life. Bishop Ussher’s calculation of the date of Creation might seem silly to us but it needs to be seen in the context of this desire to resolve everything into exact quantities, for the sake of certainty. For this reason, quantification quickly becomes fundamental to practical as well as theoretical initiatives, and mathematics acquires a new status. It underpins the novel business of fire insurance in London. It is important for the building of larger ships and the more accurate surveying of land for new streets and squares. People start to quantify society and its problems too. In 1662 John Graunt attempts to calculate for the first time the true population of the city of London, the age bands of its inhabitants and other factors. His influential friend William Petty takes up the quantitative baton in his Political Arthithmetick (1676) and declares: ‘instead of using only comparative and superlative words and intellectual arguments, I have taken the course (as a specimen of the political arithmetic I have long aimed at) to express myself in terms of number, weight or measure’.93 You don’t need to be a scientist to see how much the modern world owes to the rise of statistical thinking in the Restoration period: it underpins all the technological and social progress on which we depend.
Education
This burning desire to find out about the Earth and to measure everything in it might give you the impression that educational standards are riding the crest of a wave. This is, sadly, not the case. Schools have failed to move with the times. They tend to be bound by their charters and the restrictive statutes of their well-meaning founders, who could never have foreseen the different demands on young minds. Thus many old grammar schools teach Greek, Latin and Hebrew, but not mathematics, chemistry or physics. When you come across someone celebrating a child prodigy, it is never because he has achieved a breakthrough in natural philosophy: it is normally because he has mastered a biblical language at a very young age. William Wotton, for example, is praised by Evelyn for his ability to read Latin, Greek and Hebrew at five years old, and Arabic and Aramaic at thirteen.94 The fire that excites members of the Royal Society tends not to burn in the hearts of those whose sole ambition is to spend their careers bedecked with laurel wreaths in ivy-clad educational establishments.
Not everyone goes to school. Most boys whose fathers are husbandmen or labourers receive no more education than regular admonishments on a Sunday from their resident clergyman. However, if you are lucky enough to be launched on the path of learning, you will begin by being taught to read at a petty school for a couple of years, from the age of five or six, principally using a hornbook. This is a single page on which the letters of the alphabet, the numerals and the Lord’s Prayer are written or printed, set in a wooden frame and covered with a thin sheet of translucent horn. The idea is that you will learn to recognise and copy these symbols. By the age of seven or eight you should have learnt to read and be ready for the next stage of your education. However, this is where you might start to doubt that going to school in Restoration Britain marks you out as ‘lucky’. A great deal of teaching comes down to discipline. Rows of boys sit on long hard benches or ‘forms’ in unheated schoolrooms from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.in summer (7 a.m. to 5 p.m. in winter), forced by their masters to repeat old texts parrot-fashion, and they are beaten if they fail. Schools are not places that encourage enquiry but, rather, subservience to tradition. In fact, the Royal Society’s motto Nullius in Verba (‘Take nobody’s word for it’) is directly aimed at this intellectual obsequiousness. Various educational reformers try to introduce more practical syllabuses but, even in their academic utopias, the teaching is invariably conducted in Latin and is backward-looking.
You might wonder why anyone should want their son to go to a school where he will freeze, have to speak in Latin and be beaten regularly. The answer is, of course, that it will elevate him in the social hierarchy. A public school like Westminster, whose pupils learn to make speeches and compose verses in Latin, Greek and Hebrew – and even in Arabic – costs the princely sum of £40 per boy per year.95 On top of this there are extra fees for penmanship, provision of Bibles and other texts, paper and school uniforms. It all adds up to far more than most people earn. You might wonder whether it is worth it, when your ability to write verses in Ancient Greek is unlikely to be in demand at court (or anywhere else, for that matter). But it is not what you learn that matters so much as where you learn it. An expensive education leaves the have-nots in no doubt that they will never achieve parity with you – the cream of society – no matter how clever they are. The few exceptions to this are those boys who are able to take advantage of educational endowments to get a free place at a grammar school and then secure themselves a place at a university by going up as a servitor (a quasi-servant to richer students). If they don’t go to university, most grammar-school boys will leave school at about fifteen and follow their father’s trade
or commence a seven-year apprenticeship. If you do not follow the path from petty school to grammar school, you might be given a place at a charity school (if you are an orphan) or be sent to a private boarding school, but most probably you will not benefit from any further formal education. The sailor Edward Barlow is quite remarkable in that he teaches himself to read and write – but he does so while a prisoner of war in Batavia (modern Jakarta), in Indonesia. Conditions there are almost as bad as those in an English public school.
As you can see, literacy is very closely related to status. Almost all of ‘the great’, ‘the rich’ and ‘the middle sort’ are literate and many of them trilingual – in English, Latin and French. If you serve an apprenticeship and become one of ‘the working trades’, your master will probably encourage you to practise your reading and writing: two out of three English craftsmen and tradesmen can write in the 1680s and 1690s. Literacy is less common among country people: about half of all yeomen can write their names, but only a quarter of husbandmen. As for the poor, only about one in five servants in England can sign their names, and even fewer labourers. Overall, 55 per cent of Englishmen are signature-literate by 1700. This is good in comparison to most of Europe but not as impressive as Scotland, where, thanks to the Calvinist educational tradition and a national network of parish schools, 67 per cent of people can sign their names. To be precise: literacy among Scottish tradesmen increases from about 50 per cent in 1660 to 80 per cent by 1700. Almost three-quarters of Scottish farmers can sign their names by 1700, and the number of servants and labourers who can do so increases from one in ten in 1660 to one in three by the end of the century.96
The education of women is a very different matter. As Hannah Woolley puts it in her Guide to the Female Sex, ‘I cannot but complain of, and must condemn, the great negligence of parents, in letting the fertile ground of their daughters lie fallow, yet send[ing] the barren noddles of their sons to the University.’97 She is of course talking about the great and the rich, but it is fair to say that parents across the social spectrum consider it more important for their daughters to acquire accomplishments than formal academic training. Thus, in the 1680s, only 13 per cent of Englishwomen and 12 per cent of Scotswomen can sign their name.98 Having said this, for every woman who can write, two or three more can read – reading is one of those ‘accomplishments’ that well-to-do people feel their daughters should acquire, as well as needlecraft, singing, dancing and speaking French. Mary Evelyn, the diarist’s much-loved daughter, is literate in French and Italian, well read in history and the classics, sings well and plays the harpsichord. Her sister Susanna has a particular talent for design and painting in oils, and displays great dexterity in needlecraft. She also speaks French and is familiar with most of the works of the Greek and Latin authors of antiquity. And it has to be said that educational opportunities for girls are improving. There are now schools for gentlemen’s daughters in places such as London, Shrewsbury, Leeds and Manchester. But as with male education, schooling reinforces the social hierarchy. If you are not sent to school, you might still learn from a personal tutor. Or, if your father owns a copy of the Bible in English, then you might have the opportunity to teach yourself how to read. If neither of these applies, then the delights of reading will probably never be known to you. Some charity schools that look after orphans take in girls as well as boys: Christ’s Hospital is one, although the girls are taught separately and are only instructed in ‘such work as becomes their sex and may fit them for good wives’.99 How many girls can read and write when they leave is a moot point. There are many men who clearly do not want to educate the poor, especially the female poor, above their station.
The same problems that prevent schools moving with the times beset all six of the universities in Britain – Oxford and Cambridge in England and St Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh in Scotland. Generations of benefactors have left them well endowed, but have prescribed too closely how those endowments will be spent. Tradition, privilege and tenure have done the rest. In 1676, fourteen of the sixteen colleges at Cambridge are headed by men holding the degree of Doctor of Divinity. The university has eight professors: two of divinity and one each of civil law, medicine, mathematics, Hebrew, Greek and Arabic. At Oxford, the five Regius Professors lecture in theology, medicine, civil law, Hebrew and Greek; there are also professors of anatomy, history, natural philosophy, astronomy, geometry, moral philosophy and botany.100 It is noticeable that only two of all these distinguished academics are Fellows of the Royal Society. If it were not for Isaac Newton, FRS, professor of mathematics at Cambridge, and John Wallis, FRS, Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford, you could be forgiven for thinking that the two English universities have nothing to do with the revolution in knowledge that is under way in London. Nevertheless, approximately a thousand boys aged between fourteen and seventeen go up to Oxford each year, and another thousand to Cambridge, to study what amounts to a year of rhetoric (based on a selection of Greek and Latin authors, plus a lot of theology), followed by two years of Aristotelian logic. A hundred or so young men go up to each of the Scottish establishments. In a welcome move, Charles II establishes a chair of mathematics at St Andrews in 1668, and the first professor, James Graham, sets up an observatory there in 1673. But only gradually do the Scottish universities start to reach for the new learning. George Sinclair, who ends his career as professor of mathematics and experimental philosophy at Glasgow, breaks new ground in measuring depths using barometers, astronomical observations, developing diving bells and surveying and draining mines. However, his best-known work is his Satan’s Invisible World Discovered (1685), in which he describes many supposed cases of witchcraft, poltergeists and other demoniac phenomena, in an attempt to prove that they really exist.
Nonconformists are not allowed to attend the English universities but they are not barred from the Scottish ones. From 1670, if you are an English Presbyterian or a Quaker in need of a degree, you can attend a Dissenting Academy. These are small higher-education establishments, often run by a single polymath, who will teach a few boys at a time so that they are fully prepared to take their degree at a Scottish university or one in the Low Countries, such as Leiden or Utrecht. Although Daniel Defoe does not go on to university, this is how he obtains his education, first going to a private boarding school, before being sent to Mr Charles Morton, the minister of the best-known Dissenting Academy at Newington Green, just north of London. Samuel Wesley, father of John and Charles Wesley (the future founders of Methodism), is also taught by Morton at Newington Green. Teaching is in English and includes instruction in theology, classical studies, history, geography, modern languages, politics, mathematics and natural philosophy. There is a laboratory equipped with air pumps, thermometers and mathematical instruments. Whereas most Dissenting Academies have just half a dozen or so students, Morton’s attracts fifty a year. It is too good to last. Alas, the disgruntled bishop of London closes the school down in 1685, after just ten years. Morton himself emigrates to America in 1686, where he ends his days as vice-principal of Harvard College.101 But Dissenting Academies continue elsewhere for many years afterwards.
Grief
Men and women have always had the capacity for happiness, sadness and all the emotions with which you and I are familiar. But as we have seen, life expectancy in the Restoration period is not great. This raises an important question: how do people cope with grief? This is especially the case with regard to the loss of children, for parents will on average see half their children die before they are fully grown. Are seventeenth-century fathers and mothers inured to death? Are their lives merely tinged with sadness? Or do they feel such losses as sharply and deeply as we do?
If you sit with a father or mother at the bedside of one of their dying children, you will soon see that the emotional impact depends very much on the child’s age. When Ralph Josselin loses a ten-day-old son, he records that the child’s extreme youth has not allowed him to form a strong bond with the boy. The death
of a thirteen-month-old child causes him and his wife only slightly more grief. However, when it comes to the death of their eight-year-old daughter Mary, a huge wave of sorrow engulfs them:
[she] was a precious child, a bundle of myrrh, a bundle of sweetness; she was a child of ten thousand, full of wisdom, womanlike gravity, knowledge, sweet expressions of God, apt in her learning … Lord I rejoice I had such a present for thee … [she] lived desired and died lamented, thy memory is and will be sweet unto me.102
This pattern of being utterly distraught by losing children over the age of two or three, yet simply noting with resignation the deaths of younger infants, is also to be seen in John Evelyn. When he loses his youngest son, aged seven months, he writes a short paragraph in his diary, saying, ‘The afflicting hand of God being still upon us, it pleased Him also to take away from us this morning my youngest son George, now seven weeks languishing at nurse, breeding teeth and ending in a dropsy. God’s holy will be done!’ His distress when his five-year-old son dies from a fever is much more marked. He recalls that the boy, as he lay dying, asked if it was permissible to pray to God without putting his hands together, because the doctors had instructed him firmly to keep them under the bedclothes. At the end of the long entry Evelyn writes: ‘here ends the joy of my life’. But when he suddenly loses his eighteen-year-old daughter, Mary, whose accomplishments we noted above, his anguish is extreme. Pages and pages of the most bitter lamentation fill the diary:
She died the 14th [March 1685] to our unspeakable sorrow and affliction, and not to our’s only but that of all who knew her … What shall I say, or rather not say, of the cheerfulness and agreeableness of her humour? Condescending to the meanest servant in the family, or others, she still kept up respect, without the least pride … Oh dear, sweet and desirable child, how shall I part with all this goodness and virtue without the bitterness of sorrow and the reluctancy of a tender parent! Thy affection, duty and love to me was that of a friend as well as a child. Nor less dear to thy mother, whose example and tender care of thee was unparalleled … Oh how she mourns thy loss! How desolate thou hast left us! To the grave shall we both carry thy memory.103