eedingly fine
clothes, and give all their attention to their ruffs and stuffs to
such a degree indeed that, as I am informed, many a one does not
hesitate to wear velvet in the streets, which is common with them,
whilst at home perhaps they have not a piece of dry bread."

Elizabeth Lamond's _Discourse of the Commonweal_ recites that there
was more employment for the men and women of the towns and cities
when the wants of people were more modest. The population of London,
despite the attempts made by Queen Elizabeth to prevent the influx
of foreigners and persons from the rural districts, increased rapidly
during her reign. On coming into the city, the rustics soon wasted
their small savings in the rioting and revels which characterized the
rough life of the metropolis. Drinking, gambling, and all forms of
license enticed the husband from his home and destroyed the domestic
felicity which had been the characteristic of country living. Country
and town life were still widely separated by bad roads and poor means
of conveyance. The wives even of the gentry knew, as a rule, nothing
of city life, excepting from the accounts which their husbands might
bring back to them from occasional jaunts to the metropolis; to all
such accounts they listened with wide-eyed wonder.

The amusements of the women of the better sort, who did not find
their entertainment in the vices of the times, took chiefly the form
of spectacles, to which they readily flocked. It mattered little
whether it was a mask, a miracle play, a church procession or a
royal progress, a cock fight or a bear baiting. The brutality of
their sports no more affected their feelings than do the revolting
circumstances of a bull fight shock the sensibilities of the women of
Spain's cultured circles. When any morning they might see the heads
of some unfortunates stuck on pikes and gracing with their gruesome
presence the city gate, it is not surprising that the people were not
repelled by brutal exhibitions of a lesser sort. Nor did the forms
of punishment in use for malefactors of one kind or another tend to
soften the feelings of the women of the time. It was no unusual thing
for a woman convicted of being a common scold to be seen going about
the streets with her face behind an iron muzzle clamped over her
mouth, a subject for the jeers and ribald mirth of coarse-minded women
no better than herself. Such characters were also taken to the ducking
stool and thoroughly dou