The History of England, from the Accession of James the Second - Volume 1, Thomas Babington Macaulay [ebook pc reader txt] 📗

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county town was his metropolis. He sometimes made it his

residence during part of the year. At all events, he was often

attracted thither by business and pleasure, by assizes, quarter

sessions, elections, musters of militia, festivals, and races.

There were the halls where the judges, robed in scarlet and

escorted by javelins and trumpets, opened the King's commission

twice a year. There were the markets at which the corn, the

cattle, the wool, and the hops of the surrounding country were

exposed to sale. There were the great fairs to which merchants

came clown from London, and where the rural dealer laid in his

annual stores of sugar, stationery, cutlery, and muslin. There

were the shops at which the best families of the neighbourhood

bought grocery and millinery. Some of these places derived

dignity from interesting historical recollections, from

cathedrals decorated by all the art and magnificence of the

middle ages, from palaces where a long succession of prelates had

dwelt, from closes surrounded by the venerable abodes of deans

and canons, and from castles which had in the old time repelled

the Nevilles or de Veres, and which bore more recent traces of

the vengeance of Rupert or of Cromwell.


Conspicuous amongst these interesting cities were York, the

capital of the north, and Exeter, the capital of the west.

Neither can have contained much more than ten thousand

inhabitants. Worcester, the queen of the cider land had but eight

thousand; Nottingham probably as many. Gloucester, renowned for

that resolute defence which had been fatal to Charles the First,

had certainly between four and five thousand; Derby not quite

four thousand. Shrewsbury was the chief place of an extensive and

fertile district. The Court of the Marches of Wales was held

there. In the language of the gentry many miles round the Wrekin,

to go to Shrewsbury was to go to town. The provincial wits and

beauties imitated, as well as they could, the fashions of Saint

James's Park, in the walks along the side of the Severn. The

inhabitants were about seven thousand.92


The population of every one of these places has, since the

Revolution, much more than doubled. The population of some has

multiplied sevenfold. The streets have been almost entirely

rebuilt. Slate has succeeded to thatch, and brick to timber. The

pavements and the lamps, the display of wealth in the principal

shops, and the luxurious neatness of the dwellings occupied by

the gentry would, in the seventeenth century, have seemed

miraculous. Yet is the relative importance of the old capitals of

counties by no means what it was. Younger towns, towns which are

rarely or never mentioned in our early history and which sent no

representatives to our early Parliaments, have, within the memory

of persons still living, grown to a greatness which this

generation contemplates with wonder and pride, not unaccompanied

by awe and anxiety.


The most eminent of these towns were indeed known in the

seventeenth century as respectable seats of industry. Nay, their

rapid progress and their vast opulence were then sometimes

described in language which seems ludicrous to a man who has seen

their present grandeur. One of the most populous and prosperous

among them was Manchester. Manchester had been required by the

Protector to send one representative to his Parliament, and was

mentioned by writers of the time of Charles the Second as a busy

and opulent place. Cotton had, during half a century, been

brought thither from Cyprus and Smyrna; but the manufacture was

in its infancy. Whitney had not yet taught how the raw material

might be furnished in quantities almost fabulous. Arkwright had

not yet taught how it might be worked up with a speed and

precision which seem magical. The whole annual import did not, at

the end of the seventeenth century, amount to two millions of

pounds, a quantity which would now hardly supply the demand of

forty-eight hours. That wonderful emporium, which in population

and wealth far surpassed capitals so much renowned as Berlin,

Madrid, and Lisbon, was then a mean and ill built market town

containing under six thousand people. It then had not a single

press. It now supports a hundred printing establishments. It then

had not a single coach. It now Supports twenty coach. makers.93


Leeds was already the chief seat of the woollen manufactures of

Yorkshire; but the elderly inhabitants could still remember the

time when the first brick house, then and long after called the

Red House, was built. They boasted loudly of their increasing

wealth, and of the immense sales of cloth which took place in the

open air on the bridge. Hundreds, nay thousands of pounds, had

been paid down in the course of one busy market day. The rising

importance of Leeds had attracted the notice of successive

governments. Charles the First had granted municipal privileges

to the town. Oliver had invited it to send one member to the

House of Commons. But from the returns of the hearth money it

seems certain that the whole population of the borough, an

extensive district which contains many hamlets, did not, in the

reign of Charles the Second, exceed seven thousand souls. In 1841

there were more than a hundred and fifty thousand.94


About a day's journey south of Leeds, on the verge of a wild

moorland tract, lay an ancient manor, now rich with cultivation,

then barren and unenclosed, which was known by the name of

Hallamshire. Iron abounded there; and, from a very early period,

the rude whittles fabricated there had been sold all over the

kingdom. They had indeed been mentioned by Geoffrey Chaucer in

one of his Canterbury Tales. But the manufacture appears to have

made little progress during the three centuries which followed

his time. This languor may perhaps be explained by the fact that

the trade was, during almost the whole of this long period,

subject to such regulations as the lord and his court feet

thought fit to impose. The more delicate kinds of cutlery were

either made in the capital or brought from the Continent. Indeed

it was not till the reign of George the First that the English

surgeons ceased to import from France those exquisitely fine

blades which are required for operations on the human frame. Most

of the Hallamshire forges were collected in a market town which

had sprung up near the castle of the proprietor, and which, in

the reign of James the First, had been a singularly miserable

place, containing about two thousand inhabitants, of whom a third

were half starved and half naked beggars. It seems certain from

the parochial registers that the population did not amount to

four thousand at the end of the reign of Charles the Second. The

effects of a species of toil singularly unfavourable to the

health and vigour of the human frame were at once discerned by

every traveller. A large proportion of the people had distorted

limbs. This is that Sheffield which now, with its dependencies,

contains a hundred and twenty thousand souls, and which sends

forth its admirable knives, razors, and lancets to the farthest

ends of the world.95


Birmingham had not been thought of sufficient importance to

return a member to Oliver's Parliament. Yet the manufacturers of

Birmingham were already a busy and thriving race. They boasted

that their hardware was highly esteemed, not indeed as now, at

Pekin and Lima, at Bokhara and Timbuctoo, but in London, and even

as far off as Ireland. They had acquired a less honourable renown

as coiners of bad money. In allusion to their spurious groats,

some Tory wit had fixed on demagogues, who hypocritically

affected zeal against Popery, the nickname of Birminghams. Yet in

1685 the population, which is now little less than two hundred

thousand, did not amount to four thousand. Birmingham buttons

were just beginning to he known: of Birmingham guns nobody had

yet heard; and the place whence, two generations later, the

magnificent editions of Baskerville went forth to astonish all

the librarians of Europe, did not contain a single regular shop

where a Bible or an almanack could be bought. On Market days a

bookseller named Michael Johnson, the father of the great Samuel

Johnson, came over from Lichfield, and opened stall during a few

hours. This supply of literature was long found equal to the

demand.96


These four chief seats of our great manufactures deserve especial

mention. It would be tedious to enumerate all the populous and

opulent hives of industry which, a hundred and fifty years ago,

were hamlets without parish churches, or desolate moors,

inhabited only by grouse and wild deer. Nor has the change been

less signal in those outlets by which the products of the English

looms and forges are poured forth over the whole world. At

present Liverpool contains more than three hundred thousand

inhabitants. The shipping registered at her port amounts to

between four and five hundred thousand tons. Into her custom

house has been repeatedly paid in one year a sum more than thrice

as great as the whole income of the English crown in 1685. The

receipts of her post office, even since the great reduction of

the duty, exceed the sum which the postage of the whole kingdom

yielded to the Duke of York. Her endless docks, quays, and

warehouses are among the wonders of the world. Yet even those

docks and quays and warehouses seem hardly to suffice for the

gigantic trade of the Mersey; and already a rival city is growing

fast on the opposite shore. In the days of Charles the Second

Liverpool was described as a rising town which had recently made

great advances, and which maintained a profitable intercourse

with Ireland and with the sugar colonies. The customs had

multiplied eight-fold within sixteen years, and amounted to what

was then considered as the immense sum of fifteen thousand pounds

annually. But the population can hardly have exceeded four

thousand: the shipping was about fourteen hundred tons, less than

the tonnage of a single modern Indiaman of the first class, and

the whole number of seamen belonging to the port cannot be

estimated at more than two hundred.97


Such has been the progress of those towns where wealth is created

and accumulated. Not less rapid has been the progress of towns of

a very different kind, towns in which wealth, created and

accumulated elsewhere, is expended for purposes of health and

recreation. Some of the most remarkable of these gay places have

sprung into existence since the time of the Stuarts. Cheltenham

is now a greater city than any which the kingdom contained in the

seventeenth century, London alone excepted. But in the

seventeenth century, and at the beginning of the eighteenth,

Cheltenham was mentioned by local historians merely as a rural

parish lying under the Cotswold Hills, and affording good ground

both for tillage