DIGITISED MANUSCRIPTS

( 34) England said, ‘Those English have houses made of sticks and dirt!’ This could no longer be said. Glass, which until then was quite a rarity, was imported from Venice. Instead of eating with their fingers, which was a common practice until the year 1563, the people resorted to the use of knives and spoons : forks did not come into fashion until some years later. The floors were now covered with carpet ; heretofore they were strewn with rushes, where dust, and dirt, and vermin accumulated, breeding a peculiar disease, to which Henry VIII. himself had succumbed. Instead of sleeping on straw, with a log of wood as a bolster, feather-beds now came to be used. Wooden plates were eschewed for pewter ones and wooden spoons for silver. ‘There are old men,’ says Harrison, a historian of the latter end of the sixteenth century, ‘yet dwelling in the village where I remain who have noticed how marvellously things altered in England in their remembrance. One is the multitude of chimneys lately erected, whereas in their young days there were not above two or three, if so many, in the uplandish towns of the realm. Such was also the poverty that if some odd farmer or husbandman had been to the alehouse among six or seven of his neighbours, and there in bravery, to show what store he had, did cast down his purse and therein six shillings of silver, it was very likely that all the rest could not lay down as much against it; whereas in my time the farmer will think his gains very small, towards the end of his term, if he has