The Time Traveller’s Guide to Restoration Britain

by Ian Mortimer

  Clocks are not cheap items. A standard clock in the 1670s has a second-hand value of £2, which is more or less the going rate for a tradesman’s timepiece.12 Monsieur Misson remarks after his journey of 1697 that clocks are still comparatively rare in England, but that almost everyone of any substance has a watch: Tompion’s workshop turns out more than 5,000 watches but only about 650 clocks.13 Everyone else has to rely on the ringing of church clocks and ‘the bell man’ – a chap who walks around the neighbourhood at night, slow-ringing a hand-bell and calling the hour. On 16 January 1660 Pepys notes that he stays up ‘till the bell-man came by with his bell just under my window as I was writing of this very line, and cried, “Past one of the clock, and a cold, frosty, windy morning.”’14 Church clocks also ring through the night, so that if you start work at 4 a.m., you may well hear the hurry-on from your local parish tower.

  Start work at 4 a.m.? Yes, you may have to, especially in summer. And this does not just apply to bakers and market traders. The ability to work depends on there being enough light. Thus Pepys will often be at his office at 4 a.m. in June, July and August, and at 5 a.m. in May and September. In winter, in contrast, he sometimes won’t get out of bed until 8 a.m.15 Those intending to travel long distances get up early to take advantage of the light. King Charles sets out from Newmarket at 4 a.m. to travel back to London in summer; if Pepys has to go on a long journey, he will get up even earlier, at 3 a.m. or thereabouts.16 Ralph Thoresby is a glutton for punishment – rising early even in winter. In November 1680 he resolves on ‘getting an alarm put to the clock, and that set at my bed’s head, to arise every morning by five’, in order to have more time to pray and read about the saints.17 An alternative – if you can afford it – is one of Thomas Tompion’s clocks with a built-in alarm.

  As for bedtimes, most people have their heads on the pillow by 11 p.m. In summer it is quite usual for people to go to bed at 9 p.m. or even earlier if they are planning to be up at 4 a.m. John Milton, the poet, goes to bed at 9 p.m., rises at 4 4 a.m. and has a man read the Hebrew Bible to him from 4.30 4 a.m.18 You do get night owls of course, as well as carousers. Pepys often stays up till the early hours. After dining with the king in June 1660, Lord Sandwich does not get home to go to bed until 5 4 a.m., and sleeps in afterwards until 11 4 a.m.19 By then, most travellers and workers will have been up for seven hours already.

  Language

  The language you will hear spoken in England is broadly familiar, as the diarists you have encountered in this book demonstrate. Whereas you would find it difficult to follow the speech of 1500, that of 1660 is much easier to understand, largely due to the unifying and harmonising effect of William Tyndale’s great Bible translations of the 1520s and early 1530s. More than three-quarters of the Bible used in Anglican church services – known as the King James Version – is his work, and so Tyndale’s syntax and phraseology have permeated the language everywhere it is spoken.20 However, the speech you will hear in the street is not quite the same as modern English. Some past participles are different: people often say ‘he ris’ (rather than ‘he rose’); ‘he durst’ (‘he dared’); ‘he ketched’ (‘he caught’); and ‘he drownded’ (‘he drowned’). The use of ‘thee’, ‘thou’ and ‘ye’ is still common. As for spellings, some have yet to be modernised, so you will see ‘ambassadors’ spelled ‘imbassadors’ and ‘embassadors’, ‘pensions’ written as ‘pentions’, and ‘stationers’ described as ‘stacioners’. Foreign words are prone to phonetic spellings, so Londoners may well write about the ‘piatzza’ in Covent Garden. ‘Hath’ and ‘doth’ are still used by old-fashioned types instead of ‘has’ and ‘does’, but the ‘-th’ forms of other words are fast dropping out of usage.

  Much more confusing for the average time traveller is the fact that words shift in meaning. The result is that you will sometimes believe you understand a man perfectly, when in reality you have misunderstood him completely. For example, in the seventeenth century the word ‘to discover’ means ‘to uncover’ or ‘to reveal’. So if I were to say, ‘The bishop discovered me in bed with his sister’, I do not mean that he pulled back the curtains and got the shock of his life, but that he told someone about the two of us cavorting together. Here is an illustrative selection of ways in which the shifts of language can trip you up:

  Restoration phrase Meaning in modern English

  ‘she hath a fine carriage’ You might presume the speaker is referring to a lady’s mode of transport. Think again. It means ‘she dances [or walks] well’.

  ‘his third sermon was his most painful’ I know what you are thinking. Three hours on a wooden pew listening to a preacher can be hard on the buttocks. Actually the meaning is ‘he took the most care over his third sermon’.

  ‘he read my book with great affection’ Dismiss images from your mind of someone stroking this volume lovingly. It means ‘he read my book carefully’.

  ‘the beer there is rarely good’ If someone said this to me about a modern hostelry, I would avoid it. However, it is a recommendation – for it indicates that ‘the beer there is of an unusually high quality’.

  ‘I lost my wig in my toilet’ It doesn’t mean the article has been flushed away but that ‘my wig came off while getting dressed’.

  ‘Mr Pepys is a most effeminate man’ Well, he most certainly is. In this period ‘effeminate’ means ‘fond of women’.

  ‘she is licensed to be a badger’ She is permitted to buy essential commodities at market and sell them elsewhere for profit.

  ‘she is the meanest woman I ever met’ Nothing to do with how nasty she is: it indicates that ‘she is the poorest woman I ever met’.

  ‘the dancing was interrupted by divers who had not been invited’ Not men in flippers. Rather, it means that ‘the dancing temporarily came to a halt when various uninvited people turned up’.

  ‘His schoolmaster tells me that my grandson is the most pregnant boy he has ever met’ John Evelyn writes something like this in his diary. He is not referring to a medical miracle but that his grandson ‘is full of potential’.

  As you can see, there are many possibilities for making a fool of yourself. When Pepys describes Commissioner Pett’s daughter as ‘a very comely black woman’, he means that she is very pretty and has dark hair, not that she has black skin. If he meant the latter, he would have called her a ‘negress’ or a ‘blackamoor’. However, in other contexts people do use the word ‘black’ to refer to race. As with all languages, only half the meaning lies in the words themselves: the rest is context and cultural understanding.

  When it comes to more difficult words, the late seventeenth century has a great advantage over previous ages in that there are good English dictionaries to help you. The earliest such works are lists of hard words, with very basic definitions. Then Thomas Blount’s Glossographia (first edition 1656; second edition 1661) hits the booksellers’ stalls. As with the earlier writers, Blount defines all the technical terms he has come across in such specialist subjects as law, science, music, architecture and mathematics, but he also includes many new words that are being used by people in the street, such as ‘coffee’, ‘chocolate’, ‘drapery’, ‘omelette’ and ‘balcony’. In total, he carefully defines more than 11,000 words, producing etymologies for very many of them and thus opening the door to lexicography. Glossographia also paves the way for an increasingly sophisticated array of English dictionaries. Most impressive of these is Edward Phillips’s five-volume New World of English Words (1662), which includes names of places, peoples and personages from European and classical history, as well as definitions of words. It informs you as to the original language from which every word was derived, whether Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Gaelic, Dutch or Saxon. It also explains certain antiquated words: readers learn that ‘myriad’ is from Greek and means ‘ten thousand’, that a ‘molar’ or grinding tooth is from the Latin word for a mill, that a ‘muricide’ (‘mouse-killer’ in Latin) is a cowardly fellow and th
at ‘mixen’ is an archaic term for dung or a dung-hill.

  If you travel around Britain you will soon realise that people do not all speak the same way. Dialect words will skitter off your understanding like hailstones bouncing on cobbles. In Devon, for example, the country folk still use many words that Phillips and Blount refer to as archaic: ‘muxy’ for example, which relates to the archaic ‘mixen’, is the way you will hear Devonians talking about a muddy lane. In the far west of Cornwall, beyond the Fal estuary, you might well still hear Cornish spoken: this is a completely different language – a form of Brythonic Gaelic, like Welsh. However, the last sermon in Cornish is preached at Landewednack in 1678; after that date you will not find many Cornish speakers who do not also understand English.21 That is not the case in Wales and Scotland, where Welsh and Scottish Gaelic are still strong. Celia Fiennes notes that there are so many people speaking Welsh on market day in Shrewsbury that you can easily believe you are in Wales.22 About a hundred books have been published in Welsh by 1660 and thereafter they continue to appear at the rate of about seven or eight a year – a marked contrast to Cornish, which has no books at all. Gaelic sees only a handful of publications, but the large number of speakers in the Highlands – about 200,000 – means that very little English is used there. Even where English is spoken, it is either in the vernacular Scots dialect or pronounced with such a broad Scottish accent that anyone other than a local will have difficulty understanding it.23

  Most well-educated Englishmen can speak some French, albeit haltingly, but very few foreigners coming to England can speak any English – rather the reverse of the situation in the modern world. The next most widely spoken languages are Italian and Spanish, which are both popular with gentlemen who go on a Grand Tour. As the knowledge of languages separates the educated from the uneducated, gentlemen sometimes use French to discuss things of a private nature so that the servants cannot spy on them. When Lord Sandwich tells Samuel Pepys about the duke of York’s affair with Anne Hyde, for example, he does so in French.24 Latin is widely read and used as a superior language for scientific books and anything scholarly that is aimed at an international readership, and a few people can converse fluently in Latin. However, it is not quite the universal language that some people suppose: it is pronounced differently in England from the rest of Europe. Magalotti relates how the professors and heads of colleges at the university of Cambridge all gather to welcome Cosimo III in 1669. The Grand Duke is led into the Senate House, where he is seated at a place of honour at a large table, with all the dignitaries at a respectful distance around him; then he is addressed in Latin by a worthy professor. As he speaks, the Italians look at each other in bewilderment, for the Latin is delivered with such a thick accent that they find it as unintelligible as English.25

  Communications and Writing

  Writing a letter, like telling the time, is likely to catch you out. What should you write with? What should you write on? What script should you use? And where can you post your letter once you have written it? You’ll notice that people write differently according to their reasons for writing. If they are writing a note, a letter, an account or a private memorandum, they will write on paper. Of course, the quality of the paper will be selected to suit the nature of the work: many types are manufactured, from fine white writing paper costing 6s 8d per ream to coarse white paper at 2s.26 If, however, they are writing a legal document or something that needs to stand the test of time, like an indenture or a parish register, they will choose to write on vellum, which is a specially processed sheep’s skin. If kept dry and away from rats, it will last for thousands of years. As for what you might write with, you have a choice of a quill, a metal pen, a pencil or even a fountain pen. The best quills are cut from the flight feathers of geese and swans. A thin cut in the nib draws up the ink from the inkwell and allows it to flow back down as the pen is moved across the page. The same principle enables you to employ a metal pen, which can be used for finer drawing work. However, as you will see, it is easy to have too much ink on the nib, which then soaks the paper and not only blots it but causes it to tear. Pencils avoid this, being made of graphite strips encased in wood, very similar to their modern equivalents (except that they are oval in cross-section). As for fountain pens, these are a new innovation and not yet wholly practical. Nevertheless, Pepys – always eager to try out anything new – receives a silver pen that carries its own ink in August 1663.27

  Script-wise, you have a choice. Most printed lettering is described as ‘italic’. This needs no introduction: it is the script you are reading now (whether slanted or not). The only differences are that in the seventeenth century ‘u’ and ‘v’ are the same letter (but ‘v’ is normally used at the start of the word and ‘u’ in the middle); ‘i’ and ‘j’ are similarly interchangeable; and the letter ‘s’ is frequently written in a long form, like an uncrossed ‘f ’. What you might find a little harder to follow is the form of writing called ‘secretary hand’. This is never printed but is rather a cursive script: the letters are joined together so that the pen does not leave the page in the middle of a word (in theory), allowing you to write quickly. Several of the letter shapes are different, in upper-case forms as well as lower-case, so that at first sight it will prove difficult to read. But you will soon get used to it. Far harder are the forms of shorthand or tachygraphy (literally ‘quick writing’) that people employ for speed. In a system like that of Thomas Shelton, many words are represented by a single symbol; it does not look like normal writing at all. Most people cannot read it. This is precisely why Pepys chooses to write his diary this way. Only by concealing his confessions from his wife and servants can he risk setting down the naked truth in its full technicoloured detail.

  Let’s say you’ve written a letter. What next? First, there is no point looking for an envelope: they have yet to be invented. Instead you will write the name and address of the intended recipient on the outside of the folded letter itself. Then you need to seal it, using sealing wax and, if you have one, an engraved signet ring. Finally, you need to post it. If you’re in London, you might take it straight to the General Letter Office. This is on Threadneedle Street, more or less where the modern Bank of England is situated. After the Fire, it moves first to a couple of temporary locations and, in 1678, to Lombard Street. You can hand your letter in there to one of the ‘window men’ and pay him the postage: a single-sheet letter can be sent up to 80 miles within England for 2d, and more than 80 miles for 3d. If you send two sheets, it will cost you double, three sheets treble, and so on. Your letter will then be postmarked with the date (from 1661) and placed in a sack for despatch. Letters and packets for Kent are sent out every day except Sunday. Other parts of the British Isles are served by collections on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.28

  The sophistication of the English postal system is impressive. Fifty sorters work at the General Letter Office, besides the ‘window men’. The post-boys ride at rapid speeds along six main routes, night and day, so that in twenty-four hours your letter might travel up to 120 miles.29 Local carriers then take the mail to the addressee. You can write to someone on the far side of the country on a Monday and expect to hear back from them by the end of the week. In addition, the above postal rates are fixed for the whole nation, so you can post your letter wherever there is a deputy postmaster. There are 182 in Great Britain in 1676, so most substantial towns are covered. In London there are more than 500 receiving houses or shops where you can drop off or collect your letter or parcel and messengers will convey it to the General Letter Office. Lists of these places are published in the newspapers.

  From 1683 there is an additional London postal service: the Penny Post, devised by William Dockwra. You can post any London-bound letter or parcel weighing 1lb or less at one of six sorting offices in the capital: it costs you nothing to send it, but the recipient pays a penny to receive it. There are collections and deliveries every two hours, every day of the week except Sunday. You can send letters in th
e same way twice a day into the suburbs. If you need to send something into the country, up to 10 miles from London (to 148 towns and villages), you will pay 1d per item and the recipient will pay the same again. Monsieur Misson exclaims that it is a wonder that not every city has set up such a system. Other writers agree that England has the best, cheapest and fastest postal service in the world; they add that, in the past, few people sent letters, but these days almost everyone does. Sir William Petty, writing in 1676, reckons that the number of letters posted has increased twenty times over the last forty years.30 Organised transport systems and high levels of male literacy have transformed things. Back in 1603 it took three days for news of Elizabeth I’s death at Richmond to reach Edinburgh, 397 miles away, carried by a special messenger changing horses regularly along the way. That is an average of 132 miles per day. Now only slightly lower speeds of communication are available to everyone, and not just the government acting on matters of national importance. Moreover, it costs only a few pence.

  Not every message is conveyed around the country at breakneck speed. Generally you can assume that reports of important events are circulated at roughly 30 miles per day. The duke of Gloucester, the brother of Charles II, dies of smallpox on 13 September 1660; at Earls Colne, about 60 miles away, Ralph Josselin notes the fact in his diary two days later.31 Although the French attack Teignmouth at 4 a.m. on 26 July 1690, the news does not come to the attention of John Evelyn in London (200 miles away) until a week later.32 International news may take a long time to arrive, due to the great distances involved, but sometimes it may be travelling just as fast as domestic information. An attack on the British port of Tangiers on 14 June 1663 is known about in London forty-two days later (thus travelling at about 40 miles per day, by sea).33