Our Legal Heritage: The First Thousand Years: 600 - 1600: King Aethelbert - Queen ElizabethReilly, S. A.
History
Our Legal Heritage: The First Thousand Years: 600 - 1600: King Aethelbert - Queen Elizabeth
Reilly, S. A.
Law -- England -- History
There were endowed hospitals in London for the sick and infirm.
There were others for orphans, for derelict children, and for
the destitute. They worked at jobs in the hospital according to
their abilities. There was also a house of correction for
discipline of the idle and vicious by productive work.
In the towns, shop shutters were let down to form a counter.
Behide this the goods were made and/or stored. The towns held a
market once a week. Fairs occurred once or twice a year. At
given times in the towns, everyone was to throw buckets of water
onto the street to cleanse it. During epidemics in towns, there
was quarantine of those affected to stay in their houses unless
going out on business. Their houses were marked and they had to
carry a white rod when outside. The quarantine of a person
lasted for forty days. The straw in his house was burned and his
clothes treated. People who died had to be buried under six feet
of ground.
Communities were taxed for the upkeep and relief of the prisoners
in the jails in their communities.
Church services included a sermon and were in accordance with a
reformed prayer book and in English, as was the Bible. Communion
of participants replaced mass by priests. Elizabeth was not
doctrinaire in religious matters, but pragmatic. She always
looked for ways to accommodate all views on what religious
aspects to adopt or decline. Attendance at state church services
on Sunday mornings and evenings and Holydays was enforced by a
fine of 12d. imposed by the church wardens. People could hold
what religious beliefs they would, even atheism, as long as they
maintained an outward conformity. For instance, babies were to be
baptized before they were one month old or the parents would be
punished.
There was difficulty persuading educated and moral men to be
ministers. The Bible was read at home and familiar to everyone.
This led to the growth of the Puritan movement. The Puritans
complained that the church exerted insufficient control over the
morals of the congregation. They thought that ministers and lay
elders of each parish should regulate religious affairs and that
the bishops should be reduced to an equality with the rest of
the clergy. The office of archbishop should be eliminated and
the head of state should not necessarily be governor of the
church. Their ideas of morality were very strict and even plays
were though to be immoral. The puritan movement included William
Brewster, an assistant to a court official who was disciplined
for delivering, upon pressure from the council, the Queen's
signed execution order for Mary of Scotland after the Queen had
told him to hold it until she directed otherwise.
The debased coinage was replaced by a recoinage of newly minted
coins with a true silver weight.
Goldsmiths, who also worked silver, often acted as guardians of
clients' wealth. They began to borrow at interest at one rate in
order to lend out to traders at a higher rate. This began
banking.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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