Milton's England Part 1

Milton's England.

by Lucia Ames Mead.

CHAPTER I.

THE LONDON INTO WHICH MILTON WAS BORN

To every well-read man whose mother tongue is English, whether he be born in America or Australia or within sound of Bow Bells, the little dot upon the map, marked "London," has an interest which surpa.s.ses that of any spot on earth. Though in his school-days he was taught nothing of the city's topography and little of its local history, while he has laboriously learned outlandish names on every continent, nevertheless, in his mind's eye, Westminster Abbey looms larger than Chimborazo, and a half-dozen miles of the tidal Thames have more of meaning to him than as many thousand of the Amazon, the Oxus, and the Ganges. To know London--its mighty, historic past and its complex, stupendous present--is to know the religion, the art, the science, the politics,--the development, in short, of the Anglo-Saxon race.

Perhaps there is no better method of coming to know what is most interesting in this centre of all English life than studying one of the supremely important periods of its long history, when it was touched by the spiritual genius of one of England's most n.o.ble sons.

Three periods of a hundred years each stand out above all others since the Christian era in their significance and richness of accomplishment.

The third period began about 1790 with the birth of the American Republic and the outbreak of the French Revolution. The first was that one hundred years which from 1450 to 1550 included the beginning of the general use of gunpowder, which made the pigmy with a pistol more than the match for giant with spear and battleaxe. Then it was that

"Gutenberg made thought cosmopolite And stretched electric wires from mind to mind."

In this period Italian art made its most splendid achievements, and Luther, Calvin, and Columbus gave man new freedom and new possibilities.

The middle period--the one in which England made her greatest contribution to human advancement--is the one that we are to consider. Milton's life covered sixty-six of its one hundred years. It began with the destruction of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and included the brilliant period of exploration and adventure just before Milton's birth, in which Hawkins, Drake, and Raleigh, and other ambitious and not too scrupulous sea-rovers sought, like Cecil Rhodes, jewels and gold, empire, expansion, and renown.

It covered the chief work of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Lord Bacon, Milton, Bunyan, Defoe, Dryden, and fifty other men still read to-day. It included all of Milton's great Puritan contemporaries, who, fighting for the rights of Englishmen, fought the world's battle for freedom. It ended in 1688 with the downfall of the house of Stuart and the final triumph of those principles for which Vane and Milton had struggled and died without seeing the fruit of their labours. Since 1688 no monarch has sat upon the English throne by any outworn theory of "divine right of kings," but only, explicitly and emphatically, by the will of the English people.

For all believers in the people, for all who honour Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln, Robert Burns, John Bright and Gladstone, the century that knew Cromwell and Milton, Sir Harry Vane and Sir John Eliot, John Hampden, John Winthrop and William Bradford must, more than most others, have significance.

John Milton was born in London in 1608; and it is chiefly the London of the twenty years that intervened between the Spanish Armada and his birth which we are to consider in this chapter.

As neither man nor anything that he has made can be well understood except as they are related to their origins, so to understand the names, the customs, and the daily sights that the boy Milton knew in this city, where for nearly two millenniums before his day history had been making, one must go back and take a brief survey.

Into the mooted question of the origin of the name of London we need not enter. Suffice to say that when we first hear of London it was a little hamlet on a hill of perhaps one hundred feet in height, lying between two ranges of higher hills. At the north rose what we now call Highgate and Hampstead, about 450 feet high, and to the south, beyond the marshes and the Thames and a broad shallow lagoon, whose little islands once marked the site of Southwark, rose the Surrey hills, from one of which in our day the Crystal Palace gleams. Men with stone weapons slew antlered deer upon the little marshy island of Thorney, now Westminster. What is now St.

James's Park was then an estuary. Streams flowed down the valleys between the wooded hills. Only their names remain to-day to tell us, among the present stony streets, where rivers and brooks once flowed. West Bourn, Ty Bourn, Hole Bourne, the southern part of which was called the "Fleet,"

flowed from the hills in the northwest in a southeasterly direction into the Thames. Just east of the last named was the little brook called "Wallbrook," by whose banks, on the present Cornhill, the first settlement was made. All these names, of course, belong to a time long subsequent to the first rude settlements made in unknown antiquity before the Christian era. The Tyburn at its mouth divided, enclosing the island Thorney, upon which in later times arose Westminster. Hole Bourne was so named because of its running through a deep hollow. The lower part of the river--the Fleet--was tidal, and formed the western bulwark of London for centuries.

It emptied into the Thames where now is Blackfriars Bridge.

Far eastward from the Wallbrook, through broad marshes, flowed the river Lea down from the country known to us as Ess.e.x and Hertfordshire. It emptied into the Thames east of the Isle of Dogs, which is now covered with huge docks for the shipping of the great modern city. The Lea still flows as in the time of the Romans and Saxons, though its marshes have largely disappeared. But the other smaller streams are now obliterated, though in Milton's time their course could still partly be discerned, and their degradation into drains was not complete.

Through Bread Street, on which Milton was born, pa.s.sed Watling Street, the old Roman road, named later by the Saxons, which with the Roman wall around the city alone left traces of the Roman occupation in the poet's day. The mosaic floors, the coins, bronze weapons and scanty remains of the Roman period, before the fourth century A. D., are better known to us than to the Londoners of his time. The Roman city spread itself along the river from the Fleet on the west to the site of the present Tower of London on the east, and then gradually crept northward. By the time the Roman wall was built in about 360 A. D., the circ.u.mference of the city, counting the river front, was two miles and three quarters. Here stood the town, not in an area of fertile fields, but surrounded by forests on the north, and on all other sides by wide-spreading marshes. The enclosed s.p.a.ce was originally 380 acres, to which later additions were made upon the north and east. The wall was built of layers of thin red brick and stone about twenty feet high, and was finished by bastions and additional defences at the angles. Though scant traces of any of the original construction now remain, much of the Roman wall, and, at all events, a complete wall of mingled Roman and mediaeval work, encircled the site of the ancient city limits in Milton's day, and its gates were nightly locked until long after his death.

At first, two land gates had sufficed, but in 1600 there were seven; on the east, Aldgate; further north was Bishopsgate; further west, upon the northern wall, were Moorgate and Cripplegate; upon the west, Aldersgate, protected by the Barbican, one of the gateway towers; and south of this, Newgate and Ludgate. Upon the waterside, Dowgate, at the mouth of the ancient Wallbrook, now covered by the narrow street of the same name, and Billingsgate, further east toward the Tower of London, gave access to the city.

In Roman days the whole enclosure was crossed by two great streets,--Watling Street, which came from the northwest and entered near Newgate, and Ermyn Street, which came from the northeast. Where these two met was later the market or _chepe_, from the Saxon word meaning _sale_.

Of the Saxon period, which followed the sudden and mysterious abandonment of their city by the Romans after their occupation of it for three centuries, we have to-day a thousand traces in London names. Evidently the early Anglo-Saxon, like his descendants, had a marked love of privacy and seclusion. His sense of the sacred nature of property was as marked in him as it has always been in his posterity. The idea of inclosure or protection is made prominent in the constantly recurring terminations of _ton_, _ham_, _worth_, _stoke_, _stow_, _fold_, _garth_, _park_, _hay_, _burgh_, _bury_, _brough_, _borrow_. Philologic study of continental terms displays no such marked emphasis upon the idea of property and demarkation lines. Says the learned Taylor: "It may indeed be said, without exaggeration, that the universal prevalence throughout England of names containing this word, _Homes_ [viz., _ham_, _ton_, etc.], gives us the clue to the real strength of the national character of the Anglo-Saxon race." Kensington, Brompton, Paddington, Islington, are but a few of the local names which ill.u.s.trate in their suffix the origin of the word town--originally a little hedged enclosure. [German _zaun_ or hedge.] The most important remnant of the Saxon influence is to be found in the syllable _ing_ which occurs in thousands of London names. This was the usual Anglo-Saxon patronymic, and occurs most often in the middle syllable, as in Buckingham, the home of Buck's son; Wellington, the village of Wells's son, or the Wells clan. Family settlements are traceable by this syllable _ing_.

_Chipping_ or _chepe_ was the old English term for market-place, and Westcheap and Eastcheap were the old London markets of Saxon days. When the word _market_ takes the place in England of the old Anglo-Saxon _chipping_, we may a.s.sume the place to be of later origin.

The Saxons, unlike the Romans, were not road-makers, and when they applied the English word _street_, corrupted from the Latin _strata_, as in the case of Watling Street--the ancient road which they renamed--we shall usually find that it marks a work of Roman origin.

Clerkenwell, Bridewell, Holywell, and names with similar suffixes indicate the site of wells from which it would seem that the ancient Londoners derived their water supply when it was not taken from the Thames, the Holborn, or the Tyburn. _Hithe_, which means landing-place, has in later times largely disappeared, except at Rotherhithe near Greenwich.

With the conversion of the Saxons in the seventh century appear the names of Saxon saints. Among the notable ones to whom churches were built was holy St. Ethelburga, the wife of Sebert, the first Christian king, whose church to-day stands on the site of its Saxon predecessor beside Bishopsgate, on the very spot where stood the Roman gate. Another was St.

Osyth, queen and martyr, whose name also survives in Sise, or St. Osyth's Lane, and whose black and grimy churchyard was doubtless green in Milton's day. To these must be added St. Dunstan, St. Swithin, St. Edmund the Martyr, and St. Botolph, to whom no less than four churches were erected.

The devastating fire of 1135 swept London from end to end, and not a Saxon structure remained, though the new ones that replaced them were built in similar fashion. With the coming of the Danes were built churches to their patrons, St. Olaf and St. Magnus; and in the centre of the Strand, St.

Clement's, Danes, is said to mark the spot where tradition a.s.signs a settlement of Danes.

As of the Saxons, so of the Danes, the most permanent record of their influence on London and the Danish district of England was in their suffixes to words which still survive. _By_, meaning first a farm and later a village, is one which occurs some six hundred times. To this day our common term, a _by-law_, recalls the Dane.

The names of the street on which Milton was born and of those in the near neighbourhood to the booths that once surrounded Cheap indicate the products formerly sold there, or the trades carried on within them. To the north the streets were called: Wood, Milk, Iron, Honey, Poultry; to the south they were named after Bread, Candles, Soap, Fish, Money-Changing.

Friday Street was one on which fish and food for fast days were sold.

Of Saxon and Danish London there remains in the old city proper not one stone. Of Norman London, we have to-day the great White Tower, the crypt of Bow Church, from whose round arches it received its name, the crypt of St. John's Priory outside the city, part of the church of St.

Bartholomew's the Great, and part of St. Ethelburga's, Bishopsgate. Much more existed before the Great Fire of 1666. The chief characteristics of the English Norman work are the half-circular Roman arch, seen in all Romanesque work: ma.s.sive walls unsupported by great b.u.t.tresses and not pierced by the large windows which appear in the later Gothic style; square towers without spires; barrel vaulting over nave and aisles in the churches; ma.s.sive piers; the use of colour upon ornaments and wall surfaces instead of in the windows as in Gothic buildings; small interlacing round arches in wall surfaces; zigzag and "dog tooth"

decoration; "pleated" capitals; carvings, more or less grotesque, of human or animal forms. English Norman, like English Gothic, never equalled the French work in both these styles.

In Milton's boyhood the impress of Plantagenet London was everywhere visible. Throughout the centuries, from the earliest to the latest Plantagenet, the influence of the Church reigned supreme. It has been estimated that then at least one-fourth of the area of all London was in some way connected with the Church, or the extensive conventual establishments belonging to it. Their Gothic towers and steeples rose clean and pure to the soft blue of the London sky, unfouled with coal smoke. Their lofty walls, over which English ivy crept and roses bloomed, shut from the narrow streets of the old town stretches of soft greensward and shady walks. Among these rose dormitories, refectories, cloisters, and the more prosaic offices. At every hour bells pealed and constantly reminded the citizens of prayer and service.

Hardly a street but had its monastery or convent garden. Most of these were just within or just without the city wall, as they were founded when the city had already become of a considerable size, and they were therefore located in the more open parts. The enormous size of the equipment of these religious establishments before the Reformation, in the century when Milton's grandfather was young, can scarcely be conceived to-day when the adjuncts of the Church have shrunk almost to nothingness.

In Milton's boyhood, it must have been an easy task among the recent ruins and traditions of these great establishments to reconstruct them to the imagination in their entirety. Sir Walter Besant in his graphic book on "London" details the numbers supported in this earlier period by St.

Paul's alone. The cathedral body included the bishop, dean, the four archdeacons, the treasurer, the precentor, the chancellor, thirty greater canons, twelve lesser canons, about fifty chaplains or chantry priests, and thirty vicars. Of lower rank were the sacrist and three vergers, the servitors, the surveyor, the twelve scribes, the book transcriber, the bookbinder, the chamberlain, the rent-collector, the baker, the brewer, the singing men and choir boys, of whom priests were made, the bedesmen and the poor folk. In addition to these were the servants and a.s.sistants of all these officers; the s.e.xtons, gravediggers, gardeners, bell ringers, makers and menders of the ecclesiastical robes, cleaners and sweepers, carpenters, masons, painters, carvers, and gilders.

A similar body, though somewhat smaller, was required in every other religious foundation. No wonder that not only one-fourth of the area but also one-fourth of the whole city population was needed to supply these demands.

From Norman London there remained, besides St. Paul's vast monastic house, the priory of St. Bartholomew's, the house of St. Mary Overie's, the hospital of St. Katharine's, and the priory of the Holy Trinity. In Plantagenet London, we find the priory of Crutched--that is, Crossed--Friars, who wore a red cross upon their back and carried an iron cross in their hands. Farther north upon the other side of Aldgate stood the great monastery of Holy Trinity, the richest and most magnificent in the city; and the priory of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, whose n.o.ble ruins had not disappeared more than a century after Milton's death. Farther west and north of Broad Street stood the splendid house of Austin Friars; still farther west was St. Martin's le Grand, and just beyond, the foundation of the Gray Friars or Franciscans. Christ's Hospital, which lies chiefly on the site of this old monastery, we shall consider in a later chapter. In the southwest corner of the London wall dwelt the Black Friars--the Dominicans--whose name to-day is perpetuated in Blackfriars Bridge.

Outside the walls were other establishments as rich and splendid as these that were within them. Farther west than the house of the Black Friars was the monastery of White Friars or Carmelites, and beyond these the ancient site of the Knights Templar, whose Temple church, in Milton's day, as well as ours, alone remained. North of the Norman St. Bartholomew's was the house of the Carthusians, whose long history, ending in the Charterhouse, must be reserved to a later chapter. Northwest from the Norman house of St. Bartholomew's stood the Norman priory of St. John's of Jerusalem. Adjacent to it lay the twin foundation--the priory of Black Nuns.

South of the Thames lay two great establishments, Bermondsey and St.

Thomas's Hospital, while of the hospitals situated among the priories and monasteries to the north were the hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem and the great hospital of St. Mary Spital, both of which were originally planned for religious houses. This is but a dry, brief catalogue, not of all the great religious houses, but only of those whose walls, more or less transformed or ruined, were within walking distance and most familiar to the boy Milton in his rambles around the city of his birth.

Milton must have seen several "colleges" as well as monasteries; among these were St. Michael's College on Crooked Lane, and Jesus Commons, and a "college" for poor and aged priests, called the "Papey." A portion of the "college" of Whittington still remained, and on the site of the present Mercers' Chapel stood a college for the education of priests, whose splendid church remained until the Great Fire.

Every lover of the beautiful must fondly dwell upon the glorious period of Gothic architecture during which these structures rose. Though London in the Tudor period eclipsed in wealth and magnificence the city of earlier times, the Elizabethan age had no power in its development of pseudo-cla.s.sic forms to equal the dignity and beauty of the Norman and Gothic work. Then the unknown reverent artist wrought not for fame or earthly glory, but dedicated his labour to the G.o.d of Nature, whose laws and principles were his chief guide. These were the days when vine and tendril and the subtle curves of leaf and flower or supple animal form suggested the enrichment of capital and corbel. No cheap and servile imitation of lute and drum, of spear and sword and ribbon, of casque and crown and plume, displayed a paucity of inventive genius and abandonment of nature's teaching for that of milliner and armourer. Let John Ruskin, in many ways the spiritual son of the beauty-loving Puritan, John Milton, interpret to us the meaning of those poems reared in stone, which Milton's age was fast displacing:

"You have in the earlier Gothic less wonderful construction, less careful masonry, far less expression of harmony of parts in the balance of the building. Earlier work always has more or less of the character of a good, solid wall with irregular holes in it, well carved wherever there was room. But the last phase of Gothic has no room to spare; it rises as high as it can on narrowest foundations, stands in perfect strength with the least possible substance in its bars; connects niche with niche and line with line in an exquisite harmony from which no stone can be removed, and to which you can add not a pinnacle; and yet introduces in rich, though now more calculated profusion, the living elements of its sculpture, sculpture in quatrefoils, gargoyles, niches, in the ridges and hollows of its mouldings--not a shadow without meaning and not a line without life.

But with this very perfection of his work came the unhappy pride of the builder in what he had done. As long as he had been merely raising clumsy walls and carving them, like a child, in waywardness of fancy, his delight was in the things he thought of as he carved; but when he had once reached this pitch of constructive science, he began to think only how cleverly he could put the stones together. The question was not now with him, What can I represent? but, How high can I build--how wonderfully can I hang this arch in air? and the catastrophe was instant--architecture became in France a mere web of woven lines,--in England a mere grating of perpendicular ones. Redundance was subst.i.tuted for invention, and geometry for pa.s.sion." ("The Two Paths.")

It is in this later Gothic, for example the much admired Chapel of Henry VII. at Westminster, that we find this redundancy of motive and poverty of invention, as, for instance, in the repet.i.tion of the portcullis--the Tudor heraldic ornament. Ruskin would teach us that heraldic signs, though suited for a few conspicuous places, as proclaiming the name or rank or office of the owner, become impertinent when blazoned everywhere, and are wholly devoid of beauty when they reproduce by the hundred some instrument of prosaic use.

Plantagenet London, and its many remnants of domestic architecture, in Milton's day, ill.u.s.trated fully Ruskin's dictum that "Gothic is not an art for knights and n.o.bles; it is an art for the people; it is not an art [merely] for churches and sanctuaries; it is an art for houses and homes.... When Gothic was invented houses were Gothic as well as churches.... Good Gothic has always been the work of the commonalty, _not_ of the churches.... Gothic was formed in the baron's castle and the burgher's street. It was formed by the thoughts and hands and powers of labouring citizens and warrior kings." ("Crown of Wild Olive.")

In a memorable pa.s.sage in his lectures on Architecture in Edinburgh, Ruskin recalls the power with which the Gothic forms appeal to the imagination when embodied in poetry and romance. He asks what would result were the words _tower_ and _turret_, and the mental pictures that they conjure up, removed. Suppose Walter Scott had written, instead of "the old clock struck two from a turret adjoining my bedchamber," "the old clock struck two from the landing at the top of the stair." "What," he asks, "would have become of the pa.s.sage?" "That strange and thrilling interest with which such words strike you as are in any wise connected with Gothic architecture, as for instance, vault, arch, spire, pinnacle, battlement, barbican, porch,--words everlastingly poetical and powerful,--is a most true and sure index that the things themselves are delightful to you." As to stylobates, and pediments, and triglyphs, and all the cla.s.sic forms, even when pure and unvulgarised by decadent Renaissance work, how utterly they fail to satisfy the poetic instinct of the man of English lineage is well expressed by James Russell Lowell, as he stood within the portals of Chartres Minster:

"The Grecian gluts me with its perfectness Unanswerable as Euclid, self-contained, The one thing finished in this hasty world.

But ah! this other, this that never ends, Still climbing, luring fancy still to climb, As full of morals, half divined, as life, Graceful, grotesque, with ever new surprise Of hazardous caprices, sure to please, Heavy as nightmare, airy light as fern, Imagination's very self in stone!"