10—
Expenditure and Consumption

Accumulation has been stressed throughout this book as a major feature of middle-class life, a thirst for greater wealth which ideally required thrift, economy and miserliness. However, although the miser is the classic image of the capitalist, one suspects that there were not very many amongst the middling people of Augustan London. For, paradoxically, this accumulating class were also great consumers whose collective expenditure was a major part of the effective demand which kept them all in business. In this chapter, the patterns of expenditure on the three main items of consumption, food, dress and domestic goods, will be examined but first the scene will be set by trying to estimate roughly how much the middle class spent altogether.

i—
Disposal of Income

How much did middling people spend a year? Such a question is difficult to answer, but a first approximation can be got from Gregory King's famous table of 'income and expense'. Here he estimated that the greater merchants and traders by sea had an income of £400 a year and an expenditure of £320, the lesser merchants £200 and £168, and the shopkeepers and tradesmen £45 and £42 15s. respectively. These figures, especially those for shopkeepers and tradesmen, seem far too low for London, and for more realistic data one needs to look at the estimates made by Joseph Massie in the middle of the eighteenth century. He subdivided merchants into three classes, spending £600, £400 and £200 a year; nearly all London merchants would have fallen within the two top groups. He provided for six categories of tradesmen, three of Londoners spending £300, £200 and £100 a year, and three in the country spending £100, £70 and £40 a

year. He also had four classes of master manufacturers, the top two spending £200 and £100 a year. This gives a range of expenditure from £600 a year for the big merchants and from £400 down to £100 a year for the bulk of the London middle class.^[1]

In another paper, Massie challenged the contemporary view held by gentlemen that merchants and tradesmen made exorbitant profits. His argument was based on the commonsense observation that, if tradesmen had really been making very large profits, they would have left much more money to their children than they actually did. He suggested that a profit of 15 per cent was as much as the average tradesman could expect and then calculated their accumulation over thirty years, first assuming that they spent two-thirds of their profits and then assuming that they spent only a third. The results suggested that the 15 per cent might have been too high and that most tradesmen spent about two-thirds of their income.^[2]

If Massie's formula is applied to our sample, the results suggest that his calculations were sensible enough. The median fortune of the merchants was £9000, which at 15 per cent gives an income of £1350 and an expenditure of £900 if two-thirds of income were spent. However, as has been seen, 15 per cent is probably too high for merchants.^[3] At 10 per cent, one gets an expenditure of £600 a year, which agrees with Massie's highest figure for merchants. The median fortune of the whole sample was about £2000, which at 15 per cent gives an income of £300 and an expenditure of £200 a year, in the middle of Massie's estimates for London tradesmen. The typical capital of a relatively small shopkeeper or tavern-keeper was about £1000 which, using the same formula, gives an expenditure of £100, again in line with Massie. There were of course many men worth less than £1000—the young, the unsuccessful, small shopkeepers and artisans. Most of these people would probably have spent between £50 and £100 a year, though there must have been some whose middling existence was so mean that they could spend only the £42 15s. suggested by King as an average figure for all English shopkeepers and tradesmen.^[4]

What was all this money spent on? Amongst his many other calculations, Gregory King produced a table of the 'Expence of the People of England in Dyet, Apparel and Incident Charges'.

He divided the population into twelve groups of differing total expenditure per head and then broke this down into his three main categories of spending. The figures for the middling groups, together with the poorest group, are set out in Table 10.1 above. King's breakdown is similar to that of Jacob Vanderlint, who produced in 1734 'an estimate of the necessary charge of a family in the middling station of life', which is analysed in Table 10.2 above. Vanderlint's figures relate to a London family consisting of a man and his wife, four children and one maid and, if one ignores expenditure on rent, which King omits, he estimated that they would spend £232 a year. This puts Vanderlint's family between King's two groups spending £27 and £42 a head per year, both of which have

similar percentages for each of the three categories of expenditure, the main difference being that Vanderlint allowed more for 'other' expenses.^[5]

This may be a happy accident or it may reflect reality. There is not really enough other information available to be sure, though most early modern historians would be prepared to believe almost anything if they discovered similar information in two independent sources. Assuming, then, that King and Vanderlint got it about right, it can be said that middling people spent between a third and a half of their disposable income on food and drink and about a quarter on clothes, a concentration of spending which justifies exploring 'diet' and 'apparel' in some detail in the next two sections.

ii—
Diet

If Gregory King was right, middling families spent between £5 and £20 per head a year on food and drink, while Vanderlint's figures work out at £11 per head. It was suggested earlier that there might be some 20,000 or 25,000 middling families in London, with about seven or eight members each. If, say, £10 per head were spent on all these people, the total demand would have been between £1 1/2 and £2 million a year, a concentration of consumption which explains why farmers thought it worthwhile to specialize in the production of good-quality food for the London market. London demand was well satisfied by this supply and middle-class Londoners ate well for their four or five shillings a week.^[6]

Most people had three meals a day—breakfast, dinner and supper—but nearly all the eating was done at dinner. Breakfast might consist of beer or boiled milk, some bread, perhaps a bowl of porridge, although there were changes from the 1690s with the introduction of hot drinks into the home. Chocolate was an early favourite as a nourishing breakfast drink, and coffee had its devotees, but it was tea which was to conquer from Queen Anne's reign onwards. By the end of our period, the breakfast of toast and rolls and tea which James Boswell used to have in the 1760s would have been normal for a middling family.^[7] Supper, too, was usually a light meal made up of such items as bread and cheese, cake, apple pie or jelly,

but it could be much more substantial. Supper parties were quite popular and, although rarely as massive in content as dinner parties, their menus covered the whole range of foodstuffs which will be considered later. Supper was also a meal where one might have something fairly unusual or expensive, such as pheasant and woodcock, chicken with the first asparagus or lobster. However this was party fare, not everyday diet, and it was on their family dinners that middling householders laid out most of that one-third or more of their total expenditure which went on food and drink. Dinner had once been a meal eaten by all classes at noon, but our period sees the beginnings of those class distinctions in meal-times which have survived to confuse the unwary to this day. Workmen continued to dine at noon, but middling people began to eat an hour or so later and the upper class later still, perhaps as late as three or four o'clock, a change in habit which tended to make supper an even lighter meal but encouraged investment in a rather heavier breakfast.^[8]

Misson provides a good description of what middling Londoners ate at dinner. 'Among the middling sort of people they have ten or twelve sorts of common meats, which infallibly take their turns at their tables, and two dishes are their dinners: a pudding, for instance, and a piece of roast beef; another time they will have a piece of boil'd beef, and then they salt it some days before hand, and besiege it with five or six heaps of cabbage, carrots, turnips, or some other herbs or roots, well pepper'd and salted, and swimming in butter: a leg of roast or boil'd mutton dish'd up with the same dainties, fowls, pigs, ox tripes, and tongues, rabbits, pidgeons, all well moisten'd with butter, without larding: Two of these dishes, always serv'd up one after the other, make the usual dinner of a substantial gentleman or wealthy citizen.'^[9]

A few comments can be made on this interesting description. First and most obvious is the emphasis on meat, a fact of English life which impressed most foreign observers. The number of days on which one ate meat was an index of one's status in the world and about four or five days a week was probably about average for the middle station.^[10] What is perhaps more surprising is Misson's comment on the quantity of vegetables served with the meat, since some historians believe that vegetables were only rarely eaten.^[11] There was certainly a

medical prejudice against them and, except when people mention the first peas, beans or asparagus of the season, one finds few references to vegetables in casual comments on food. Circumstantial evidence, however, suggests that Misson was right. Contemporary cookery books provide for a wide variety of vegetables, as a separate dish, as a salad, dished up with meat or used in a soup or stew. Even more suggestive are the data on market gardening in the London area, one estimate being that the area of garden ground expanded more than tenfold between 1660 and 1720.^[12] Virtually the whole range of modern northern European fruit and vegetables was grown, though two vegetables which are the mainstay of modern cookery had no place in Augustan cuisine. The tomato was widely used in the Mediterranean but, in England, the knowledge that it belonged to the same family as the deadly nightshade was sufficient to damn it and it was hardly eaten at all. The potato, too, faced almost total prejudice in southern England till late in the eighteenth century and bread still provided the bulk in middle-class meals, though not very much of it according to Misson. 'I have known several people in England that never eat any bread, and universally they eat very little: they nibble a few crumbs, while they chew the meat by whole mouthfuls.'^[13]

Medical prejudice also seems to have had little effect on the consumption of uncooked fruit. The quality, quantity and variety of domestic fruit were all much improved in the seventeenth century, many exotic varieties being grown under glass, and people were quite prepared to defy the doctors and sample the treats available. Jonathan Swift reflects both the English ambivalence to fruit and the variety available in a letter to Stella: 'The grapes are sad things; but the peaches are pretty good, and there are some figs. I sometimes venture to eat one, but always repent it.' However, such worries seem to have lessened with time. Dudley Ryder treated his brother and sister at one of the fruit shops in Stocks Market—'it cost me 2s.'—while Vanderlint allowed 2S. a week each to the mistress of his middling household and her four children to 'buy fruit and toys'. Growing seasons were short and much fruit was preserved, to be eaten candied or to find its way into the many sweet-sour recipes which were so popular, while dried fruit was imported from the

Mediterranean—prunes and figs and astonishing quantities of currants and raisins, which arrived in whole fleets to catch the Christmas demand for puddings and pies. This was also the time for the arrival of oranges and lemons, nearly eleven million a year by the late seventeenth century, expensive luxuries which were confined to the middle and upper classes.^[14]

One striking feature of English cuisine was the very liberal use of butter in cooking. Misson noted that the vegetables were 'swimming in butter' and that the meat dishes were 'well moisten'd with butter', while Constance Wilson writes that our period was 'the golden age of butter in English cookery'. This would have been very salt butter, which was rarely eaten with bread by the wealthy, who preferred cheese or cream. However, what was really idiosyncratic about English cookery were the puddings, which became a central element in the English diet in the course of the seventeenth century. Puddings came in all guises, packed with different combinations of meat and vegetables and especially dried fruit; this is the description by Misson, who positively drools over the English national dish:

'The Pudding is a dish very difficult to be describ'd, because of the several sorts there are of it; flower, milk, eggs, butter, sugar, suet, marrow, raisins, etc., etc., are the most common ingredients of a pudding. They bake them in an oven, they boil them with meat, they make them fifty several ways: Blessed be he that invented pudding, for it is a manna that hits the palates of all sorts of people: a manna better than that of the wilderness, because the people are never weary of it. Ah, what an excellent thing is an English Pudding! To come in Pudding time, is as much as to say, to come in the most lucky moment in the world.'^[15]

As has been seen, the usual dinner of the middling family was two dishes, 'serv'd up one after the other'. The normal practice when giving a dinner party would be still to have just the two courses but to serve up several dishes at each course. A cookery book of 1729 suggests the following menu for a winter dinner party: for the first course, gravy soup later replaced by a dish of chicken and bacon, also 'Scotch collops, giblet pie, a fine boil'd pudding, roast beef with horse-radish and pickles round'; for the second course,'a turkey roasted, three woodcocks with toasts, a tansey and garnish with orange,

a hare with a savary pudding, a butter'd apple pie hot'. This huge feast is not merely cookery-book fantasy, as can be seen from Samuel Pepys's Diary. On 26 January 1660, for instance, when he was in his mid-twenties, employed only one maid and was worth only a few hundred pounds, his wife produced the following 'very fine dinner' for a company of twelve: 'A dish of marrow-bones. A leg of mutton. A loin of veal. A dish of fowl, three pullets and two dozen of larks all in a dish. A great tart. A neat's tongue. A dish of anchoves. A dish of prawns; and cheese.'^[16]

Pepys has a number of interesting references to food, but he did not record what he ate every day and one can easily get the wrong impression about eating habits from his diary since it was the unusual that was likely to catch his attention. Very few diarists had such an interest in their stomachs as to allow it to be determined what they ate on a regular basis. One exception was William Byrd the Younger, who wrote down almost every day the main dish that he had for his dinner and also noted what he ate for supper, if anything. One can hardly pretend that Byrd is a typical middle-class Londoner, for, although he was the grandson of a London goldsmith, he was a gentleman from Virginia and lived the life of a gentleman while in London. Nevertheless, what he ate at dinner, as shown in Tables 10.3 and 10.4 (pp. 277 and 278), demonstrates what was available for those with few worries about the cost of their food.

As one would expect, Byrd ate a lot of meat, this providing his main dinner dish on almost exactly half the days in 1718, while he ate various types of fowl on another fifty-four days. However, what is striking is the wide variety of meat and fowl available and the fact that it seems to have been available most of the time. For example, Byrd was able to eat fresh roast beef or beef-steak in every month of the year, indicating that the farmers had largely solved the winter feeding problem, though one can still see a peak of beef eating in the traditional killing months at the end of the year and of mutton in January and February. One should note, too, that Byrd usually ate his meat dressed in the plain English fashion. French cuisine and, to a lesser extent, Spanish were becoming quite popular and one finds constant references to fricassees, ragouts, olios and other

dishes with rich sauces, but few Londoners would have eaten these on a regular basis.

When not eating meat, Byrd ate an astonishing amount of battered (i.e. scrambled) eggs, which provided his dinner on no less than eighty days, nearly always in his lodgings; a quick and nourishing meal for a gentleman, who often only ate at home when everyone on whom he called was out. This emphasis on eggs is not found in any other source, though they were certainly eaten widely and in many forms, various types of tansy (omelette not necessarily flavoured with tansy) being particularly popular.

Byrd also ate fish nearly once a week, probably more than most Londoners, since fish was 'dearer than any other belly-timber'. However, for those who could afford it, there was a wide variety available and, although Byrd rarely specifies his fish, there are several traditional fish meals in his diet sheet. Londoners tended to turn up their noses at the salt cod of Catholic days, which, as bacalhau or baccalà, was and is a staple of diet in southern Europe, but salt-cod boats still used to arrive during Lent and it was in March and April that

Byrd ate his salt fish. The next excitement in the fish calendar would be the arrival of the mackerel shoals, the first mackerel in late April or May often being noted by contemporary writers. Herrings provided another delicacy in September, to be eaten fresh or pickled in brine. This was also the time when 'damsels first renew their oyster cries', our forefathers like us only eating oysters when there was an R in the month, though Pepys once jumped the gun and had some on the last day of August, 'some pretty good oysters, which is very soon, and the soonest I think I ever eat any'. Oysters were cheap and vast amounts were consumed by both rich and poor, sold by the wheelbarrowmen or delivered in barrels to the homes of the middle station in barrels—'Colchester Oysters may be supplied for this season with the largest pick't fat and green for 3s. a barrel.'^[17]

The four or five shillings per head spent on food and drink by middling Londoners includes money spent on servants and apprentices as well as on the master and mistress and their children. Servants would not of course have enjoyed the magnificent spreads described above. Nevertheless, it seems probable that they ate very well in middling households, much better than they would ever have eaten with their families before going into service. It is striking that, amongst the large number of complaints about masters in the records of the Mayor's Court, complaints about poor-quality or insufficient food are surprisingly few and far between.

All the same, there were complaints and one of them is quoted here at some length since it throws some light on what was expected. 'The defendant [a merchant] and his wife . . . did usually feed very high of ye best sorts of food but as to his servants he kept an extraordinary bad house, for ye servants did very rarely eat of any of the meat which the defendant and his wife feed on but what was left at their table above stares was generally locked up and very seldom (only some few scraps) brought downe to the servants. And the food wherewith the servants were generally fed was very coarse stale mouldy bread and ranck salt butter together with some porrage made of the meat that the defendant and his wife eat abovestares and scraps of fish and sometimes dumplings very dry and with very little of any suet or other ingredients in them. And if it chanced the

servants had any of the meat it was often stale and corrupt and soe stinking that they could scarcely eat it but yet were forced to eate it for mere necessity. . . . And ye bread and butter and also if there were at any time any chees (which was very seldom and but ordinary) it was imediately so soon as they had dyned constantly locked up so that the servants could not come at it. The said servants very seldome had any breakfasts or suppers allowed them and, if they had, it was of such ill food as they were not able to eate to any content . . . All the victuals were constantly lockd up and the beere kept above stares.' Whether it was true or not, one can see from this evidence that servants ate separately from the master, but expected very much the same food sent down to them. They expected, too, to get three meals a day and plenty of it, and, on top of this, they felt that bread and cheese should be kept unlocked in the kitchen and beer in the cellar, not above stairs, so that they could help themselves whenever they pleased.^[18]

Beer was the main drink and houses frequently did their own brewing, many inventories listing 'beere stillings' and 'beere stands' as well as the occasional parcel of malt. Wine was also drunk quite often at home, but nothing has been found like the huge personal wine cellar which Pepys had accumulated by July 1665: 'at this time I have two tierces of claret—two quarter-cask of canary, and a smaller vessel of sack—a vessel of tint, another of Malaga, and another of white wine, all in my wine-cellar together—which I believe none of my friends now alive ever had of his own at one time.' Hardly any of our inventories list any stocks of wine at all, though many houses had large quantities of glass bottles which may well have been taken to the tavern to be filled up.^[19]

It seems reasonable to conclude that, despite occasional complaints and meanness, the men and women of the middle station and their servants ate and drank well. Just how well can be seen by comparing Vanderlint's breakdown of expenditure on food and drink 'of a labouring man and his family in London' with his estimate 'of the necessary charge of a family in the middling station of life'. This is shown in Table 10.5 opposite, where Vanderlint's figures for 1734 are also compared with Gregory King's estimate of English expenditure in the

TABLE 10.5: The Diet of Middling and Labouring Families in London Compared (Cost in pence per head per week) Type of Food Vanderlint King   Middling Labouring All England Bread 5.25 5.25 3.50 Meat and fish 17.50 7.00 4.25 Butter 5.25 1.75   Cheese 1.75 0.87 Milk 0.75 0.87 Beer 9.50 5.25 4.75 Tea and sugar 7.00 0.00 0.00 Others 3.50 1.75 2.00   50.50 22.75 16.50 Source: Vanderlint (1734) pp. 75, 141; King (1936) p. 56. 'Others' is 'roots and herbs, salt, vinegar, mustard, pickles, spices and grocery, except tea and sugar' for the middling; 'roots, herbs, flower, oatmeal, salt, vinegar, pepper, mustard, sugar' for the labouring; 'fruit, roots, garden stuff, salt, oyl, pickles, grocery etc' for King.

1690s. The results give some idea of what it meant to belong to the meat and butter eating and tea drinking classes.

iii—
Dress

'The people in general are well cloathed,' wrote de Muralt of the English, 'which is a certain proof of their living at ease; for in England the Belly always takes place of the Back.'^[20] The latter point was necessarily true of the mass of the people, who needed to devote half or more of their income to their bellies, but for middling people the back ran the belly fairly close, contemporary experts suggesting that about a quarter of their income went on apparel. This section will try to determine how this money was spent.

The first two decades of our period were ones of experimentation, which resulted in an almost revolutionary change in the type of clothes worn by both sexes.^[21] For men, the new clothing was the three-piece suit of coat, waistcoat and knee-breeches, worn with a shirt and drawers, stockings to the knee and

usually buckled shoes rather than boots. Both coat and waist-coat were usually so long that they almost concealed the breeches, with a long line of narrowly spaced buttons right down to the hem. Further embellishment was provided by trimmings and embroidery to the main garments, lace ruffles at the wrist, bands and later cravats or neckcloths round the neck and on the head a wig topped by a beaver or a felt hat. Men doing dirty work and many shopkeepers wore an apron to protect themselves or as a mark of status, while the cloak was increasingly challenged as protective outerwear by the campaign coat, derived from the military greatcoat.^[22]

Most middling women wore smocks and sometimes drawers next to the skin, but their shape was determined by their laced and boned stays, usually called 'a pair of bodies'. These were worn from under the armpits to below the waist and were often laced very tightly. However, from the 1670s and 1680s, women were to lead a rather more relaxed existence with the development of looser fitting outer garments in the form of the mantua and the gown. These were both one-piece garments, fastened at the waist with a sash or girdle, normally trailing to the ground at the back and open below the waist to reveal the petticoat. Long-sleeved waistcoats, buttoning up the front and often padded for warmth, were sometimes worn over the gown or directly over the petticoat. The rest of the ensemble would consist of shoes and stockings, perhaps an under-petticoat, gloves, various items to cover a low décolletage such as pinners, an ever-changing variety of hair-styles, caps and hats, and, for the women of our class, an apron or safeguard to protect their clothes. Decoration and embellishment were even more important than in men's dress and even quite poor women did not like to be seen without a considerable amount of ribbons, braid and cheap lace to brighten up their clothes.

Most fashion was derived from Paris and rapidly adopted in London by the fashionable of the West End. New fashions would then be taken up by middling people, but how quickly is difficult to say. One can find references to deliberate rejection of West End fashion and the loose behaviour that went with it by citizen's wives who laced themselves even tighter and disdained the bare-breasted fashions of Charles II's reign. Such

women might continue to wear the high-crowned and broad-rimmed hats of the Puritan 1640s and 1650s 'as a conscious statement of middle class virtues against the whims of the fashionable world', while their shopkeeper husbands wore their own hair short à la Roundhead and sneered at the courtly foolishness of the wig.^[23] However, such bourgeois rectitude seems to have withered as fashion changes speeded up and, by the reign of Queen Anne, middling people are regularly criticized for their reckless pursuit of the trivia determined each Easter by the haut monde of the West End. Mandeville noted that ladies of fashion were constantly sending for their mantuamakers, 'so that they may have always some new modes ready to take up, as soon as those sawcy cits shall begin to imitate those in being', and other comment on social competition in dress is rife in the first half of the eighteenth century.^[24]

Such competition was made easy in England by the fact that there were no fundamental distinctions in types of dress by class or between town and country. Anne Buck has shown that, as early as the 1640s, class distinctions in dress were matters of detail, no form of dress being so different from those of lower classes 'that it shows a completely unrelated, independent style'. An indication of the depth of fashion can be found in the 1675 inventory of a Limehouse pawnbroker, whose customers were hardly likely to have been upper-class. The goods pawned included three very dressy bundles; the first contained 'two petticoats, a piece of gimp lace, a pair of silk stockings, a silver laced waistcoat and a pair of bodies', the next a 'lutestring [silk] gowne and pettycoat laced, a satin petticoat, a red pettycoat laced with gold and silver lace', and the third 'a red cloth mantle, a tabby [silk] petticoat, a black silk mohaire petticoat and a pair of laced slippers'. Not only are these the same sorts of clothing as were being worn by the fashionable in 1675; they are also made of expensive materials such as silk, 'cloth', which meant good woollen cloth, and gold and silver lace.^[25]

Social distinctions were even less in the eighteenth century when differences were ones of fashion, fabric and the quality of the embellishments, rather than of type, so that it was well worth paying for the skills of high-class tailors, staymakers and mantua-makers in order to rise above the tolerable imitations

made for the ready-made market. The initiated always knew, of course, and many a laugh and a sneer could be had at the expense of those aping their betters, but, for all that, the homogeneity of English dress provided wonderful opportunities for both the makers of clothes and their wearers and was a major factor in ushering in that mass market for cheap textiles whose demand fuelled the Industrial Revolution.

How many clothes did middling people own? A preliminary answer can be found in an unlikely source, the evidence given in disputes between master and apprentice. It was normal practice for parents or friends to supply the apprentice with a satisfactory wardrobe 'at his entrance' and for the master to maintain and replace these clothes at his own charge as became necessary. Since the quality or quantity of the clothes originally supplied was often in dispute, it is quite common to find them listed by witnesses in the Mayor's Court. Such wardrobes obviously varied in value and quantity, but one can still see what were the basic requirements of a young man starting service and these can reasonably be taken as the minimum wardrobe of middling men.

A typical wardrobe would be valued between £10 and £20, and would consist of three complete outfits and accessories. John Hicks, for instance, a gentleman's son apprenticed in the early 1650s, brought into service two new suits and a new cloak, a good large cloth coat and a good old suit, a frieze short coat, two felt hats, two pairs of new worsted stockings, a pair of new waxed boots, two pairs of shoes, four shirts (two new), six new bands and eight old bands, four handkerchiefs and six caps, all of which were said to be worth at least £15. Thirty years later, John Parker, apprentice to an upholsterer, had two new cloth suits and a new serge suit, together with a campaign coat, one new caster and a felt, three pairs each of new hose and new stockings, eight shirts, a dozen and a half of bands, six handkerchiefs and other necessaries, valued at £13 'or rather more'.^[26]

Not many inventories list clothing but, when they do, one can see that the basic male wardrobe of three suits and accessories was maintained into adult life, though many people accumulated much more, such as the merchant William Kersteman, who had seventeen shirts, nineteen neckclothes and five complete suits when he died in 1711. The clothing of men in

this class was normally woollen or worsted for the outer garments and linen for shirts, bands, drawers and sometimes waistcoats, but most men also had some silk in their wardrobe, some silk stockings perhaps, several silk handkerchiefs, one best silk suit and very often a silk 'nightgown', a loose dressing gown worn as much in the day as at night. Many men wore a turban to cover their shaved heads when wearing their nightgowns, a piece of oriental exoticism which was reflected in the furnishing tastes of the middle classes.^[27]

There is less information on the clothing of middle-class women, but what there is suggests that they, too, maintained a minimum of three complete outfits and accessories (and often much more) and that a high proportion of their outer clothing was made of silk or silk mixtures. One can take as an example Frances Gardner, the widow of a grocer, whose clothing was listed in 1665. Frances was only twenty-seven and her husband worth only £642, but her wardrobe shows why the Spitalfields silk industry was to flourish. She had one suit of mixed tabby and one of black lustring, seven petticoats, two unspecified and the others made of sky colour tabby, white dimity, crimson silk mohair, turkey mohair and cloth with gold lace, the most expensive item. She also had a riding suit, a damask cloak with silver hooks, a satin mantle with bonelace, three tufted and three smocked waistcoats, an old black gown and a grogram gown, two fans, two pairs of gloves, an old apron and a parcel of small linen, the whole lot being valued at £17 10s. Susanna Hardy, the widow of an apothecary who died in 1676 worth £652, had a similar wardrobe—'a sute of mourning, two gowns, eight petty coats, one pair of bodyes, a silke petty coat laced with silver and gold lace, a red mantle laced with silver lace, three women's mantles and two pairs of silk stockings', valued at £16. 7s.^[28]

It is difficult to generalize about the cost of clothes because so much depended on the fabric and embellishments. Table 10.6 overleaf gives some idea of the range of prices for a few common types of textile. These are drawn from stock-lists in inventories and would be wholesale prices. One could argue for ever about just what a 'yard' was or what exactly mohair, camlet or drugget were, but it can at least be seen that there was a very wide variation in price for textiles bearing the same

name. It can also be noted that woollen broadcloth was more expensive than all but the most expensive silks and that there was a wide range of cheap silks which overlaps all but the cheapest woollens, worsteds and mixtures. These prices make it clear why the wearing of silk could go so far down the social hierarchy.^[29]

In Table 10.7 opposite, these fabrics are turned in to ready-

made clothes and valuations of some types of men's and women's clothes are listed, again from stock-lists. On the righthand side of the table are Gregory King's valuations for these articles from his table of 'Annual Consumption of Apparell, 1688'. Once again, there was a wide range of prices, depending on the textile used and the quality of the finish. These prices are, of course, the absolute minimum for new clothes, since the stock-list prices are wholesale and King's estimates were supposed to be an average for all classes. In any case, it is unlikely that many middle-class men and women bought their outer garments ready-made, though they would quite often buy shirts, smocks, bands, handkerchiefs, drawers etc. from haberdashers and milliners. Such things might also of course be made up at home by the women of the household.

Drawing on the prices in Tables 10.6 and 10.7 and other prices, it seems probable that it would cost a minimum of £6 or £7 to provide a complete ready-made outfit for a man of any quality at all.^[30] Such a price would soon shoot up if one bespoke the clothes from a tailor or bought anything of even moderately high quality. Pepys, for instance, who was a snappy and ambitious dresser, laid out £17 in 1664 on 'my fine coloured cloth suit, with my cloak lined with plush' and £24 in the following year on 'my new silk camelott sute, the best that ever I wore in my life'.^[31] Pepys did rather tend to overdo the luxury of his dress and was told in 1669 that his gold-lace sleeves were inappropriate to his position, but many merchants and wealthy shopkeepers would probably have spent this sort of money on their clothes, mercers in particular being renowned for their luxurious dress. However, the average man of the middle station would have been much more modest, though he would probably have paid more than the prices listed in Table 10.7 since he would have had many of his clothes made by a tailor.

One can get some idea of making prices from a tailor's account-book of the late 1690s and early 1700s. Most of his customers provided their own fabrics and his bills are for making up the material and the cost of the accessories. Coats cost between 7s. and 9s. to make up, waistcoats and breeches about 5s. or 6s., giving some idea of the labour involved since journeymen tailors got about 10s. a week wages. Accessories, such as buttons, shalloon for lining and pockets, silk thread and

twist, might well cost as much again and all this takes no account of the cost of the cloth. Tailors also did maintenance and repair work on clothes: 2s. for scouring a suit, 1s. for taking spots out of a coat, similar prices for pressing, spongeing, napping and other services. Dressmakers got lower pay than journeymen tailors and costs were normally so modest that few middle-class women would have bothered to make their own clothes at home. And even a mantua-maker was paid better then the sempstress who made up shirts and smocks. Stephen Monteage, for instance, paid £3 6s.6d. for Holland linen to make six shirts in October 1733 and, in November, he paid Mrs Tomlins gs. for making them.^[32]

In order to estimate the total demand for clothes, one also needs to know something about annual turnover. How much did people need to buy each year to keep up with fashion and to replace worn articles? This would obviously vary considerably with the individual and is also something on which there is no real evidence. However, a very rough approximation can be provided by looking at Gregory King's estimates of'annual consumption of apparell'. For instance, he thought that a million 'coats for men' would be consumed every year or rather less than one coat per man per year, assuming that men were a quarter of the population. Since he also put down a million men's waistcoats and breeches and a million each of women's 'petticoats and wastcoats' and 'bodyes and stays', he seems to have believed that most adults would buy on average a complete outfit every year, and presumably middling people would buy rather more than the average. King also allows for roughly two pairs of stockings, shoes and gloves and two shirts per head of the population every year, not to mention a huge range of other items only likely to be purchased by the middling and upper classes, such as perukes, swords, muffs, masks, fans etc.^[33]

If these figures are even roughly right, one can begin to see how Jacob Vanderlint could estimate in 1734 that a middling man would spend £16 a year on his own clothes, £7 each on his four children and £16 for his wife, 'who can't wear much', a total of £60 or just over a quarter of his expenditure. By coincidence, the attorney William Moses, whose personal accounts have survived for the year 1679–80, spent exactly £60 on clothes in the year, of which just over £40 was in seven

separate tailors' bills. Miss Goreing, a young lady living on her own with two servants, spent £31 on clothes in 1697–8, including tailors' bills, fabrics and accessories such as hoods, gloves and shoes, and she spent over £52 in 1703–4.^[34] So, although one cannot really tell if Vanderlint's estimate was accurate, it was certainly not outrageous. People did spend a lot on clothes and it is no wonder that such a high proportion of the population was engaged in making them.

The clothes that were replaced each year still had a long life in them. Some provided the raw materials with which the tailor produced a 'new' suit; others were cut down for children, refashioned for apprentices or given to maid-servants, the fashionable embellishments being carefully removed. Others would end up in the huge second-hand market, to be worn by the poor and then to be cut down to be worn by the children of the poor. Such recycling was much greater in our period than it is today but nevertheless the regularly recurring demand for new clothes, especially by the men and women of the middle station, was one of the major factors keeping the economy going. So was the recurrent demand for furniture and furnishing materials, which is now considered.

iv—
Domestic Comfort

'True comfort, as we understand it, was invented by the French in the seventeenth century,' writes Peter Thornton, who singled out the 1630s as the key decade in this development and showed how the new comfort was quite quickly transferred to the homes of aristocratic Englishmen in the early Restoration period.^[35] This section will look at how the homes of middling Londoners were also transformed in the course of our period.

This is much easier to document then diet or apparel, since most inventories list furniture, often in considerable detail. One can start by looking at valuations of domestic goods, though it should be noted that these are 'clearance sale' and not replacement values, and people actually spent much more than the figures listed by the valuers. Table 10.8 opposite provides average valuations broken down into five wealth groups and distinguishing between two sub-periods, before and after 1690. The table shows that there was little change over time, a rather

surprising result since, as will be seen, there was considerable qualitative change in domestic goods. As one might expect, richer people spent more than poorer people, though it is clear that demand for such goods was relatively inelastic.^[36] It seems, too, that richer people were spending rather less and poorer people rather more as time went on.^[37]

It was seen in Chapter 8 that the typical middle-class house had about seven rooms, comprising four or five bedrooms, one or two living rooms, the best one normally being called the dining-room and and the second best the parlour, and a kitchen. In Table 10.9 above, the average value of the contents of the main rooms is listed and it can be seen that the most valuable

room was normally the best bedroom, a room which was used for entertaining as well as sleeping, as is clear from contemporary prints and descriptions as well as from the inventories. Five of the sample, all merchants, had magnificent best bedrooms valued at over £100. Another merchant, who died in 1701, had a dining-room valued at £100, and there was a tendency for this room to be upgraded as our period continues to provide an increasingly important second focus of display.^[38]

What one might call class as well as wealth affected the level of domestic consumption. For example, 38 of the 162 people worth more then £2000 had best bedrooms valued at less than £15. Since these people could clearly have afforded bedrooms valued at the £20, £30 or more which was normal in this wealth group, it is interesting to see if they shared any characteristics. When one looks at their occupations, it is clear that they did, since, with few exceptions, they made their money in ways not considered very genteel by their contemporaries. There were only two merchants amongst them, for instance, and virtually none of the fashionable sort of shopkeeper. The fact is that most merchants, mercers and drapers made very sure that they would not be found dead in a bedroom worth less then £15, a fear not shared by such ungenteel tradesmen as builders, wine coopers, cheesemongers, coalmongers, soapmakers, distillers, printers and cloth finishers. Such men, although wealthy, saw no reason to lay out money on unnecessary display in their bedrooms or in any other part of their homes, a fact which helps to explain why they often managed to accumulate as much as mercers and merchants, since they were not subject to the same haemorrhage of their capital on domestic display.

One can now look at the qualitative changes in the contents of houses. These were considerable and, for the most part, followed with some delay the changes discovered by furniture historians in their studies of the court and aristocracy.^[39] One striking feature was the increasing emphasis on lightness, both in terms of visibility and in the materials used for hangings, curtains, bed furniture and upholstery. The replacement of small paned windows by sash windows from the late 1680s and a much greater provision of sconces and standing candle-sticks, often backed with mirrors, did much to dispel the gloom of interiors. From the 1690s, many wealthy people were using the

much larger mirror plates now available as chimney glasses above their fireplaces and pier-glasses between the windows, while, in general, one finds a much wider use of looking-glasses and their introduction to nearly every room. In 1691, Guy Miège noted the light and airiness of the London house, the 'lightsom stair-cases, fine sash-windows and lofty ceilings', the latter usually plastered, which 'make by their whiteness the rooms so much lightsomer.'^[40]

The use of lighter textiles was equally marked, heavier draperies such as broadcloth and serge being replaced by lighter mixtures such as mohairs and camlets, and, increasingly, by silks and cottons. These changes in taste are especially marked in the furnishing of beds, which were normally adorned with a huge yardage of textiles in the form of curtains, valances, headcloths and testers, quite apart from the quilts, blankets, rugs and sheets which lay on top of the nearly ubiquitous and expensive feather-beds. By the reign of Queen Anne, the hangings of the best bed in the house were nearly always camlet, mohair, damask or silk and many were also lined with silk or cotton, a development which can be seen throughout the house as camlet and mohair gradually replaced serge in the second and third bedrooms too and as similar textiles were used as hangings and furniture coverings generally.^[41]

The furniture itself was becoming more comfortable, curves which fitted the human body replacing the upright, angular furniture of earlier days, while improvements in upholstery led to better padded seats and a much wider use of cushions and squabs, usually stuffed with down or feathers. Sitting comfortably was now very much the thing to do and the ability to do so is indicated by the increasing appearance of couches, sofas and settees and by the 'easy chair', the high-backed, winged and well-upholstered armchair described by John Gloag as 'a national symbol of ease and comfort'. He dates the easy chair from the 1670s, but it is not common in our inventories before the reign of Queen Anne.^[42] Another innovation was the replacement of the 'turkeywork' chair by the cane chair as the normal form of upright chair for sitting at table and, in general, the much wider use of light, elegant and resilient canework in other types of furniture. Cane chairs are found in aristocratic inventories of the 1660s and John Gloag has suggested that the

demand for the new chairs 'was suddenly and dramatically expanded' by the Great Fire in 1666. This attractive thesis is not supported by our inventories, which show that the key decade for the adoption of the new chair was the 1680s, some twenty years after its first introduction, and it is in the same decade that anguished petitions from the turkeywork makers are found in a bid to ban the products of their competitors.^[43]

The decline of serge as a furnishing material and the rise of the cane chair are just two examples of the influence of fashion on domestic interiors. There were many others, such as the introduction of the 'oval table' from the 1670s, and it is clear that fashion, often derived from French or aristocratic models and followed with a delay of a decade or two, was an imperative influence forcing Londoners to change their furniture and furnishings long before they were worn out. This was good news for manufacturers and traders in general, although there were of course losers, such as the serge-makers of Exeter and the turkeywork makers of Bradford, who had good cause to bemoan their fate, while the cane-chair makers of London were basking in the sun.

Cane-work was first introduced from the Far East from where the rattans were imported and is an example of a wide range of innovations which bore a Far Eastern, Indian or Levantine influence. Japanning was another oriental import, a technique imitated by English craftsmen from at least the 1670s. Japan work begins to appear in middling homes in the 1690s, the banker Thomas Williams, for example, having Japan boxes, a chest of drawers, a table with matching candle stands and a Japan cribbage board in 1697, while after 1700 references to Japan work become commonplace. Japan and other lacquer-work was usually associated with high-quality cabinet-making and one sees increasing examples of this, much of it imported by the East India Company. The merchant John Barkstead, for instance, who died in 1694, had an 'Indian trunke and frame', 'a pair of India cabinets' and an 'India cabinet and frame'.^[44]

Another oriental product domesticated by the English was china, examples of which can be found in the earliest of our inventories but which did not become really common until the 1690s and the reign of Queen Anne. By this time, collecting china had become a craze for many people, such as John

Sherwood, a drysalter who died in 1703 with some 200 pieces of china and 'tonquin' in his house. Following in the wake of the china boom came the dual invasion of coffee and tea-making equipment into London homes. This was rare before the 1690s but, as with so many other innovations, what was rare or unknown in the 1680s becomes commonplace in the reign of Queen Anne, when inventory after inventory has its coffee-pot and coffee-mill or the standard set of tea-kettle, lamp and stand usually kept in the dining-room.^[45]

Another feature of middling homes was the huge increase in pictures, ornaments and bits and pieces as the period goes on. One finds pictures right from the beginning, but not very many of them. By the 1690s and the early eighteenth century, many people had huge collections of pictures and prints, the latter often being imported by the East India Company and thus giving a further oriental flavour to the houses. The haberdasher, Robert Fotherby, for instance, had forty-four Indian pictures in his dining-room when he died in 1709. Pictures could be found all over the house, often replacing the tapestries and wall hangings which were much commoner in the early part of the period. One is rarely told what was represented, but 'landskips', 'sea peices' and paintings of the King and Queen were quite often mentioned. Portraits of members of the family were also becoming increasingly popular, Daniel Thomas having six 'family pictures' in his hall, an indication of a growing bourgeois self-awareness which must have given a lot of work to portrait-painters from the 1690s onwards.^[46]

Halls were also a common place to find a clock, as indeed was the head of the staircase, Tristram Shandy's father being unusual in 1715 neither in the ownership of a clock needing to be wound only once a month nor in the place where he chose to keep it. Clocks can be found from the beginning of our period and they had become very common, though not ubiquitous, by the reign of Queen Anne. By this date, there were often several clocks scattered through the rooms of houses, the dining-room being the commonest place to keep one, apart from halls and passages. Perhaps surprisingly, there were very few clocks in servants' rooms and workshops, despite E. P. Thompson's insistence on the connection between the development of the clock and labour discipline, the only two examples being Adrian

Vanderpost, sugar-refiner of Vauxhall, who had an 'old' clock in the men's garret and Richard Walford, a metalworker, who kept a clock in his workshop and only an hourglass in his dining-room.^[47]

Bric-à-brac and ornaments, such as 'images' made of alabaster and marble, stags' heads, bird-cages, chess, draughts and backgammon tables and pieces and anything else which might be captured by the catchall word 'toys', all became increasingly prominent and must, together with too much furniture, have made a terrible clutter in many homes. The impact of the collecting fever can perhaps best be seen in the inventory of Daniel Thomas, a mercer who died in 1704. In his closet, he had, amongst other things, 740 books, two models of churches, three telescopes, a globe, several maps, two hourglasses, a sailing compass, a draughts board and some fishing tackle. In other rooms, he had another 150 books and atlases, some 200 pieces of china, getting on for 100 pictures, more maps, a Noah's ark and a small organ, as well as a collection of weapons which included 18 hand-guns.^[48]

Pepys's observation that one in three families in the City had a pair of virginals amongst their goods when they fled from the Fire, and the emphasis on music-making at home in his diary, has led music historians to believe that middling Londoners were a very musical lot indeed, constantly engaged in entertaining each other in impromptu domestic concerts. This, however, is not borne out by our inventories, in which one finds only thirty-three men, less than a tenth of the sample, with any musical instruments in their house and six of these had only an instrument described as 'old' stored in the garret, suggesting that if their household had once been musical it was so no longer. The data give some substance to the view that growing access to professional music in concert rooms from the 1680s had a dampening effect on domestic music, the proportion of men with musical instruments falling from one in seven to one in seventeen before and after 1680.^[49]

The room which saw the least change was the kitchen, with its extensions into buttery and pantry, most of the change that there was consisting of an improvement of amenities in the kitchens of the less wealthy. This development meant that, by the late seventeenth century, the kitchen was the room with the

narrowest range of valuations, the great majority being valued at between £10 and £20, whatever the wealth of the householder. Kitchens were used not just for the preparation, cooking and serving of food but also for washing dishes and for making, mending, washing and ironing clothes, and their contents reflect these various functions. They were also the place where servants, apprentices and younger children ate their meals and relaxed, so that all kitchens contained one or more tables and several chairs and stools, the furnishings becoming increasingly attractive over time, with better quality chairs, curtains, perhaps a canary or a parrot in a cage, a clock, some pictures and a screen to protect the occupants from the heat of the fire.^[50]

Heat was provided by an open fire, either in a grate or a range, the latter presumably being what we understand by a range, with side ovens heated from the fire. Ovens, in fact, are rarely mentioned, possibly because they were landlords' fittings but quite probably because few houses did their own baking, the Londoner being well served by professional bakers, who baked three times a day and delivered to the door as well as being prepared to bake the housewife's pies and pasties in their large ovens. Most cooking involved spit-roasting, frying, simmering and boiling, and a formidable array of equipment for this can be found in all kitchens.

Nearly everyone had at least two or three spits turned by a weight-driven jack, the grease being caught in a large drippingpan. The battery of kettles, pots and pans, which were increasingly made of brass or copper and were becoming more specialized into saucepans, stewpans, fish-kettles, tea-kettles etc., were suspended from hooks over the fire or, from about 1700, from a swinging chimney crane, or they could be placed on the 'cheeks' of the range. All households also had frying-pans, grid-irons for grilling or broiling, long-handled skillets for boiling or stewing, each with their own little legs, and chafing dishes whose base held burning charcoal to keep food hot. Food preparation is represented by cleavers, chopping and shredding knives, flesh forks, skewers, ladles and scummers, a vast array of metalware which helps one to understand why London had so many smiths and metalworkers, the jacksmith for instance being an important and independent trade.^[51]

Very few houses had less then 100 pounds weight of pewter

as well as brass, copper, iron and tinware. This was normally valued by weight but was occasionally itemized. The cheesemonger Samuel Palmer, for instance, had twenty pewter dishes including a basin, a cheese plate and a pie plate, thirty-nine plates, a dish frame, two saucers and a salt.^[52] Pewter was gaining at the expense of the wooden trencher, in common use at the beginning of our period, but losing out to glass, china, copper, brass and tinware. Silver was not in common use as table-ware by the middle class but almost everyone had some 'plate', which might range from the silver cup and two silver spoons of the salesman Richard Stock, valued at £4 12s., to several hundreds of pounds worth for the richer men, objects of pride and display which would only be seen in the kitchen for cleaning. The quantity of cutlery, sometimes silver but usually steel, also grew; forks, in particular, which were hardly used at all for eating in the 1660s, had become a common item by the early eighteenth century.^[53]

Most kitchens had a cistern or sink, with water pumped from the companies' mains, and most had a copper and numerous tubs for washing clothes. Ironing was done with smoothingirons heated on the fire or with box-irons filled with charcoal, and what had to be ironed can be seen by looking into the linen cupboards, whose contents were usually listed separately, their average value being greater than that of the entire contents of the kitchen but with a similar range from about £10 to £25. These valuations represented an amazing number of separate items, an average of thirty-six sheets, eighty-nine napkins and fifteen table-cloths; linen chests also held pillow-beeres (i.e. cases), towels, childbed linen, window curtains (mainly of cotton or muslin) and yards and yards of Holland, diaper, huckaback, damask etc. which had not yet been made up.^[54]

Peter Thornton writes that faces and hands were wiped after meals with a hot, damp napkin, which would help to explain the large numbers. He also claims that many people in the seventeenth century 'were a good deal less dirty than is now generally supposed'.^[55] He makes a good case but it is difficult to be totally convinced. Houses, clothes, bed linen, cooking equipment and furniture certainly seem to have been kept scrupulously clean—but were people? There is not a single bath-tub, let alone a bathroom, in the 375 inventories that have

been studied, though both the vessel and the name existed. Thornton says that many of the numerous tubs kept in kitchens and cellars may well have been used for personal washing, which seems a reasonable hypothesis but no more. Many houses also list ewers and bowls in bedrooms and, of course, materials for washing such as soap and perfumed washballs were easily available, though pretty expensive. Nonetheless, one must still be slightly suspicious of the personal hygiene of our period. Pepys often complained about dirtiness in other people and seems to have washed regularly every morning but whether this normally went beyond hands and face seems doubtful. Washing his feet seems to have been sufficiently rare to merit the occasional diary entry, as it does in the diary of Stephen Monteage seventy years later, whose feet were washed about once a month, normally by his maid. Whether either of them were in the habit of washing those parts of their bodies which lay between face and feet one cannot tell since they never tell one, which in the circumstances would suggest that they rarely did.^[56]

Innovations in the kitchen may have been rare, except for the multiplication of relatively minor gadgets,^[57] but they were widespread elsewhere in the house and even the kitchen saw the introduction of the equipment for making hot drinks. Who were the innovators? Who were the people who had already abandoned serge bed curtains before 1680, who already had cane chairs in the 1670s, china before 1690 or tea-making equipment before 1700? None of these innovations was particularly expensive; all of them were within the purchasing power of all the sample and indeed virtually everyone had adopted them by the end of the period. Nevertheless, with the exception of china, whose acquisition seems to follow no particular pattern, those who innovated were by no means a random group. They were nearly all either very wealthy men who might well have the entrée to West End houses or they were tradesmen with an aristocratic business who would see the new fashions when they delivered goods to their clients' houses and who might well think that being fashionable themselves could only enhance their business reputation.

These new fashions represent the 'true comfort', which was mentioned at the beginning of this section, and which, by the

reign of Queen Anne, had been introduced to a very considerable extent into the homes of middle-class Londoners. They now lived in houses which were better lit, were hung with more attractive textiles and were furnished in a way which would have made both sitting and sleeping more of a pleasure than they had been in the 1660s. Furniture was more sophisticated, walls were decorated with pictures instead of just hangings and tapestry, and surfaces were covered, perhaps littered would be a better word, with china, glass and ornaments instead of just with table carpets. Overall, there was little difference in the total valuation of domestic possessions at the beginning and the end of the period. However, it does seem clear that the poorer members of the middle station had definitely upgraded their domestic interiors. One might take as an example Thomas Toms, a barber-surgeon of Stocks Market, who died in 1719 aged only thirty. His total assets were valued at £484, of which £49 consisted of the value of his domestic possessions, which were kept in just four rooms. Lack of space forced him to keep a press bed in his dining-room, but the rest of the furniture was very fashionable: a chimney glass, two pier glasses, a pair of glass sconces, nine cane chairs with cushions, eleven pictures and two prints, a glass case, a tea table and forty-one pieces of china. Such a room would have seemed amazingly luxurious to a similar barber-surgeon in the 1660s but, by the 1710s, it was simply in^[58] fashion and Thomas Toms was doing nothing extraordinary in furnishing his room in this manner.^[59]

Such changes made houses much more comfortable, but they also have a wider significance. When one finds that men worth less than £500 were making a fairly successful attempt to furnish their homes in a way similar to those of great merchants, one can be sure that the economy as a whole was benefiting. Thomas Toms' mirrors and his forty-one pieces of china were good news for the expanding English glass and pottery industries. This deepening of the market also encouraged manufacturers and suppliers to cut costs and prices, by innovations, imitations and a successful search for cheaper sources of supply, and this could well be why what seem to be much better domestic interiors were valued in the early eighteenth century at little more or even less then those of the 1660s and 1670s.^[60]

This section has concentrated on those personal possessions

which were accumulated in the house and for most people these were all the possessions that they had, apart from their investments and the tools and stock in trade connected with their business. However, some members of the middle class owned their own transport, the greatest status symbol of the age being one's own coach or carriage. This was no light matter, as readers of Pepys's diary will remember, months of planning, worry and discussion finally ending with the arrival of his coach and horses in November 1668, an acquisition which 'doth put me into the greatest condition of outward state that I ever was in, or hoped ever to be, or desired'.^[61] Such glory was an immense expense, not just for the £50–£100 or more that the coach would cost, but for the very high maintenance costs and such ongoing expenses as rent of a coach house, the wages of the coachman and the cost of feeding the horses, a horse's food being about 5s. a week, very much the same as that of any other member of the household. It is not surprising, then, that only sixteen men in our sample owned a coach, nearly all of them merchants with a median fortune of £15,000.^[62]

Lesser men had to content themselves with their own riding horse, though this too posed problems in the more densely populated areas and horsekeeping was likely to cost considerably more each year than the value of the horse. Nevertheless, one in five men had his own horse, this being virtually essential for some occupations, such as the apothecaries who had to be able to visit their patients. The remainder had to content themselves with hiring a coach or a horse when they needed one, while on most occasions they would have walked, this being much the commonest way of getting round London. Contemporary diaries leave us in no doubt that early modern men and women were much more active pedestrians than we are today.^[63] It is clear, too, that they positively enjoyed walking for the fresh air and exercise and also for their health, though, as will be seen in the next chapter, it might take more than walking to keep a person alive in Augustan London.