Our Legal Heritage Part 102

Often a crowd would react before the call of "stop thief" or the hue and cry from the local constable. Pickpockets would be drenched under a pump. Cheats would be beaten up. Dishonest shops and brothels would be ransacked or destroyed. The most common targets were promiscuous women and pregnant servants.

There were many highway robberies and mob actions in London. Mobs in the thousands would turn out against the Catholics, especially at times of unemployment and trade depression. Working people still saw demonstrations and violence as the best way to achieve their economic goals, since strikes didn't work. For example, the silk workers used street violence to get protective legislation against imports and mechanization in 1675. The manufacture of silk material had been brought to England by French workers driven from France. In 1697, three thousand London silk weavers demonstrated outside the Commons and East India House against the importation of raw silks by the East India Co., and a couple months later, they attacked a house in the city owned by a gentleman of the company. In 1701, heavy duties were imposed on the import of Indian silks and wearing of Indian silks was prohibited by statute. Sometimes mobs would break open the prisons to release fellow rioters or take action against strike breakers or informers. Parish constables elected by their neighbors could not control the mobs and stayed within their parishes. Dueling was still prevalent, even though against the law.

In London and Westminster, it was hard to enforce the requirement that inhabitants keep the street in front of their house clean and store the filth until the daily raker or scavenger came with cart and dung pot. So a commission was made responsible for paving and keeping clean the streets, making and repairing vaults, sewers, drains, and gutters, and removing encroachments. It compensated those with encroachments of over 30 years. It a.s.sessed inhabitants of such streets 16d. per square yard from the front of their building to the center of the street. Women continued to empty their pails and pans outside their doors and did their washing on stools in the streets. There was a penalty of 5d. for throwing filth in front of one's house, and 20d. for throwing it elsewhere in the streets. Scavengers and rakers could lodge their coal ashes, dust, dirt, and other filth in such vacant public places as the commission deemed convenient for accommodating country carts returning otherwise empty after their loads were sold.

However, this system did not work because people would not pay their a.s.sessments. So there was a return to the former system of requiring citizens to sweep and clean the streets in front of their buildings twice a week and keep the filth until a scavenger or raker came. The penalty for not doing so was 3s.4d., later raised to 10s. Any one throwing coal ashes, dust, dirt, rubbish, or dung onto the streets or lanes incurred a fine of 5s. There was a fine of 20s. for hooping or washing any pipes or barrels in any lane or open pa.s.sage or repairing coaches, sawing wood, or chiseling stones in the streets. Pigs kept in or about one's house had to be forfeited.

One way that people traveled was to be carried in sedan chairs held up by two horizontal poles with one man at the front ends and another man in back. There were so many sedan chairs and coaches for hire in London that the watermen lost business. All hackney coaches in London or Westminster were required to be licensed and marked with their owner's distinctive mark so that complaints could be made. Their maximum rate was 10s. for a 12 hour day, and 18d. for the first hour and 12d. for every hour thereafter. Licensed coachmen were not allowed to practice any other trade. The coaches paid the commission 5 pounds yearly. Hay sold along the road brought 6d. per load, and straw 2d. per load, to the commission. There had to by paid 3d. for every cart load of hay sold at the hay market and 1d. for every cart of straw, to go towards paving and repairing the hay market street.

Overall, agriculture improved. Fields that would have been left fallow were planted with new crops which restored indispensable chemical elements to the soil. At the same time, they supplied winter food for stock. The size and weight of animals for slaughter grew. There was so much stock breeding that it was more economical for a family to buy meat, milk, and eggs, than to maintain its own animals. There was an explosion in the growing of beans, peas, lettuce, asparagus, artichokes, and clover. The demand for food in London and other urban areas made enclosure for crop cultivation even more profitable than for sheep grazing. The government made no more attempts to curtail the enclosure of farm lands. The number of enclosures grew because copyholders were not successful in obtaining the legal security of tenure. But most land was not enclosed.

In 1661 in the county of Ess.e.x, the wages for mowing one acre of gra.s.s were 1s.10d.; for reaping, shearing, binding one acre of wheat 4s.; and for threshing a quarter of wheat or rye 1s.

Wives partic.i.p.ated with their husbands in general agricultural ch.o.r.es and did the dairy work including making cheese. Every householder kept chickens because egg production was cheap, their market price being only 1s. for a hundred. Wives also took care of the gardening work and traditionally kept for their own the cash that came in from garden, dairy, and poultry products. A wife made jellies and preserves when the fruit trees, bushes, and vines were bearing. Imported sugar enabled fruit to be preserved as jam in jars sealed with a layer of mutton fat to make them airtight. She was likely to concoct medications from her herbs. Meat had to be smoked or salted when there was not enough fodder to keep animals alive through the winter. She saw to it that the soap was boiled and the candles molded. She cooked the daily meals, did the washing, produced cloth for the family's use, and sewed the family's clothing.

Women had less work and lower pay than men. Since most cottages had a spinning wheel, spinning work was readily available to wives. In the 1670s, a female weaver or spinner was paid 2-4d. per day. A domestic servant, who was usually female, was paid 40-80s. a year. Men in the trades objected to compet.i.tion from lower-paid women. Aristocratic ladies actively managed their family's household and estates. The only work available to a high middle- cla.s.s woman who was waiting to get married was to be a governess in another household or a lady-in-waiting to a gentlewoman. Children often worked; this was recommended so that they were under the direct supervision of their parents rather than getting into mischief in the village. The mother typically mingled severity with gentleness, but the father did not dare to err on the side of leniency. Discipline was by whipping. Children were treated as little adults. The lack of a conception of childhood innocence even extended to the practice of adults to tell bawdy jokes in their presence or play with their children's genitals.

About 1660, the Royal Society of London for the Promotion of Natural Knowledge was founded by Charles II, who became its patron. It was formed from discussion groups of the new experimental philosophy. It included the Baconians formerly at Oxford and Cambridge, who were ejected at the Restoration, and a group of Gresham professors of geometry and astronomy. The Royal Society met at Gresham College. Its goal was to compare ideas in mathematics and science and identify specific aims of science. It published scientific reports to make its findings generally known. This was a great improvement over the private correspondence among scientists, which was limited by the use of various languages. Charles himself had his own laboratory and dabbled in chemistry and anatomy. Similar societies were formed in many places in the world. Theologicians warned that scientific research was dangerous.

But it's advances improved agriculture, manufactures, medicine, surgery, navigation, naval architecture, gunnery, and engineering.

Issac Newton was a genius, who in his childhood designed and built model windmills, water wheels, water clocks, sundials, and kites. He came from a family which had risen from the yeomen ranks to the gentry.

For a few years after graduating from Cambridge University in 1665, he secluded himself in the countryside to study. Here, using the work of John Wallis, he formulated the binomial theorem that expands (A+B) raised to the nth exponent power, where n is an integer. He also worked with numbers that had exponents that were fractions, unending decimals, or negative numbers. Certain patterns of numbers, such as the sum of doubling each number in a series as in: 1+2+4+8+...never terminates; the series is infinite. He then developed the notion of a number being the limit of the summation of an infinite converging series of a pattern of numbers, such as the limit of 1+(1/2)+(1/4)+(1/8)...= 2. By considering the state of motion of a ma.s.s-point in an infinitely short time under the influence of an external force, he developed rules for finding areas under algebraic curves [integration], such as the hyperbola, and finding tangents to algebraic curves [differentiation], which he recognized as inverse processes. That is, differentiating the integral of a function results in a return to that function.

Newton discovered that colors arose from the separation, rather than a modification, of white light, that is natural sunlight. He did this using a prism to dissect the white light into its spectrum of const.i.tuent colors and then using a prism and lens to recombine the colors to reconst.i.tute white light. The spectrum was the same as that of a rainbow. He determined the angle of refraction of each color by beaming white light through a prism, and then through a hole in a board which isolated one color, to another prism. When he discovered that all colors reflect from a mirror at the same angle, he invented and built the reflecting telescope, which used a parabolic concave mirror and a flat mirror instead of a convex lens, thereby eliminating the distortions and rainbow coloring around the edges that resulted from the refraction of different colors at different angles. He deemed a ray of light to consist of a rapidly moving stream of atomic particles, rather than Robert Hooke's pulses or Christian Huygens' waves, because shadows showed a sharp boundary between the light and the absence of light. He reasoned that if light was made up of pulses or waves, it could spread around obstacles or corners as sound seemed to do. He approximated the speed of sound by timing echoes in corridors of various lengths.

Newton was methodical and combined the inductive and deductive methods of inquiry, first making observations, and then generalizing them into a theory, and finally deducing consequences from the theory which could be tested by observation. He carried mathematization of data from experiments as far as possible.

Newton theorized that the same gravity force that pulled an apple down from a tree extended out to the moon to hold it in its...o...b..t around the earth. He saw a connection between these movements by imagining a cannon on a mountain shooting a series of cannonb.a.l.l.s parallel to the earth's surface. The first shot has only a tiny charge of explosive, and the cannonball barely makes it out of the muzzle before falling to the ground. The second shot is propelled by a larger charge, and follows a parabolic arc as it falls. The next shots, fired with increasingly more propellant, eventually disappear over the horizon as they fall. Lastly, with enough gunpowder, a speeding cannonball would completely circle the earth without hitting it. By extrapolating from these ever faster projectiles, he opined that the moon was held in its...o...b..t by the same earth force that operated on the projectiles. He correlated the moon's...o...b..t with the measured acceleration of gravity on the surface of the earth. He put various substances with different ma.s.ses and weights into the sh.e.l.l of a pendulum and observed that the pendulum had the same period [time for one oscillation] and fell at the same rate as free-falling objects. Then he formulated the idea that the ultimate agent of nature was a force acting between bodies rather than a moving body itself. Gravity did not act in proportion to the surfaces of bodies, but in proportion to quant.i.ty of matter. Gravity penetrated to the very center of all bodies without diminution by the body. Gravity's force extended to immense distances and decreased in exact proportion to the square of the distance.

Newton opined that an object moves because of external forces on it rather than by forces internal to the object. These are his three laws of motion. 1) He connected the concepts of force and acceleration with a new concept, that of ma.s.s. Ma.s.s is a quant.i.ty intrinsic to an object that determines how it responds to forces, such as the force of gravity.

The greater the ma.s.s of a body, the stronger the force of gravity on it, and the more difficult it is to get it moving. He found that the acceleration of a body by a force is inversely proportional to its ma.s.s, and formulated the equation that force equals ma.s.s multiplied by acceleration. So if a force acts on a planet, it produces a change in velocity that is proportional to the force and in the same direction as the force.2) His law of inertia is that any body, persists in its state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line, unless affected by an outside force. 3) His next law is that when a body A exerts a force on a body B, then B also exerts a force on A which is equal in amount but opposite in direction. This means that forces that operate between different parts of a planet produce no net force upon the whole planet, so that the ma.s.s of a planet can be treated as if it is concentrated at a point.

His law of gravitation explains how the whole universe is held together. This law holds that every object in the universe attracts every other object with a single gravitational force that is directly proportional to the product of their ma.s.ses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centers. Newton had at first accepted the Cartesian system of celestial vortices of aether that swirled the planets and comets around their orbits. He determined that Kepler's law that areas were swept out in equal times implied that gravity acts in the direction of a line between the planet and the sun.

The gross features of the universe and Kepler's observations led to his recognition that the attraction between two bodies decreases inversely in proportion to the square of the distance between them. Only one kind of force would satisfy Kepler's requirement that the sun was a focus of an ellipse and still be consistent with Kepler's law that the square of a planet's period was proportional to the cube of its mean distance from the sun; that was the inverse square law. Then he came to accept Robert Hooke's hypothesis that planets are kept in their orbits by the combination of an attractive power of the sun and of motion in a straight line that was tangential to their orbits. From astronomical data, he calculated this centripetal acceleration of each planet towards the sun to be proportional to the inverse square of its distance from the sun. He also calculated the "centrifugal" accelerations in a straight line. His experiments showed that the centripetal force in a circular orbit was equal to the ma.s.s of the body multiplied by the square of its velocity, all divided by the radius of the circular path.

He used calculus and differential equations to determine centripetal forces of elliptical orbits, where the distance from the sun, the velocity, and the acceleration were variables.

Newton showed that his single gravitational force could account for the way free-falling objects descend to the ground, the parabolic trajectory of projectiles, the path of the moon in its...o...b..t around the earth, the course of the tides every twelve hours, the lower densities of the earth's atmosphere at greater heights, the paths of Jupiter's moons, the paths of comets, and the elliptical paths of the planets in their orbits around the sun. This determination discredited the previous belief that invisible angels moved the planets. Newton proved from his law of gravitation and his three laws of motion the truth of Kepler's laws of elliptical planetary motion. Newton demonstrated from data collected from the comet of 1680 that comets moved according to his law of gravitation. He showed that the path of a body traveling within the gravitational force of the sun is a circle, an ellipse, a parabola, or a hyperbola. He used the concept of a common center of gravity as a reference point for other motions. The fact that the center of gravity of the solar system was within the body of the sun verified that the sun was indeed at the center of the solar system.

Newton deduced that the tides were created by the rotation of the earth with bulges of water on the earth's surfaces that were closest and farthest from the moon. The moon "pulled" the water nearest to it with a greater force than average. It "pulled" the water farthest from it with a force weaker than average. These two moving bulges created two tides a day.

Newton's "Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis", was published in 1687. The established church denounced it as being against the scripture of the Bible. Newton did not agree with the established church on many points, such as the trinity, and was considered a heretic. He had his own interpretations of the Bible and doubted the divinity of Jesus. But it was accepted for dissenters like Newton to qualify for full civil rights by maintaining an outward conformity and taking the sacrament in the established church once a year. Newton was given a royal dispensation from taking holy orders as prescribed by the rules for tenure of fellows of his college at Cambridge University. He did believe in a G.o.d who created the universe and who had a ubiquitous presence in all s.p.a.ce. When Catholic King James II tried to have a Catholic monk admitted to the degree of a Master of Arts at Cambridge University without taking the oath of adherence to the established Protestant church, so that he could partic.i.p.ate in the business of the university, Newton was active in the opposition that defeated this attempt. As a result, he was elected to Parliament by Cambridge.

When Olaus Roemer, a Danish astronomer, was applying Newton's laws to the paths of the moons of Jupiter to make a table of eclipses of Jupiter's moons for use in determining one's longitude, he noticed that the eclipses were five hundred seconds ahead of average time at that time of year when the earth and Jupiter were on the same side of the sun, and five hundred seconds behind average time six months later, when Jupiter was on the other side of the sun. He reasoned that this difference was due to the light from Jupiter's moons taking more time to reach the earth when Jupiter was farther from the earth, i.e. on the other side of the sun. He concluded that light does not travel instantaneously, but at a certain speed. From the fact that it took 1000 seconds for light to travel the diameter of the earth's...o...b..t, he calculated its speed in 1676.

In 1668, Christian Huygens formulated the law of conservation of momentum [ma.s.s multiplied by velocity], which held that when objects collide, they may each change direction, but the sum of all their momenta will remain the same. Huygens also recognized the conservation of what was later called "kinetic energy", which is a.s.sociated with movement. He developed laws of centrifugal force for uniform motion in a circle. He derived the formula for computing the oscillations of a simple pendulum. In 1690, he posited the theory that light consists of a series of waves. It states that all points of a wave front of light in a vacuum may be regarded as new sources of wavelets that expand in every at a rate depending on their velocities. He thought this a better explanation of bending and interference of light than Newton's particle theory.

In 1661, Robert Boyle, called the father of modern chemistry, defined an element as a substance that cannot be further decomposed. He distinguished an element from both a mixture, which is easily separable, and a compound, which is not easily separable. He used an air pump he developed and a gla.s.s jar to create a confined vacuum s.p.a.ce for experiments to find the properties of heat, light, and sound. He noted that burning objects such as candles and coal, when placed in the receiver of his air pump, went out after a time although air was still present. He opined that animals were dependent upon a fresh supply of air to live. He studied the relationship between the volume, density, and pressure of air and gases. He proved by experiment that the volume of a gas at a constant temperature varies in inverse proportion to the pressure applied to the gas. Since gas is compressible, he opined that gases must be composed of discrete particles separated by void, and also that basic physical properties were due to motions of particles, or atoms, which was an ancient Greek conjecture. This cast doubt on the long-held belief that everything was composed from four basic elements: air, water, fire, and earth. Boyle's laboratory at Oxford was denounced by the Oxford clergy as destroying religion. In 1679, the steam pressure cooker was invented by Denis Papin from France. He invented the atmospheric engine in 1690.

Robert Hooke helped Boyle build his air pump. Hooke was thirteen when his father, a minister, died. Hooke was a genius with innate mechanical skill and was an able mathematician. He applied a spiral spring to regulate the balance of watches. A lord financed him as a Gresham lecturer of geometry for 50 pounds a year. In 1666, he used a pendulum to measure the force of gravity and showed that the center of gravity of the earth and moon is a point describing an ellipse around the sun. In 1667, he explained the twinkling of the stars by irregular atmospheric refractions. He formulated the theory that light is composed of pulses.

Hooke's Law states that the amount an elastic body such as a spring stretches out of shape is in direct proportion to the force acting on it: its tension. He invented the odometer, a wheel to measure distances.

He constructed an arithmetical machine. He invented the universal joint, which can move in many angles. His book of drawings of microscopic animals is a cla.s.sic. He proposed that fossils can be used as a source of information about the earth's history. Hooke became rich from his inventions, but this was not known until his death, when thousands of pounds were found in his iron chest.

In 1668, Wallis postulated the correct theory of impacts of inelastic bodies, based on the principle of conservation of momentum. In 1685, he introduced the first graphical representation of complex numbers.