Queen Elizabeth made ineffectual attempts to circumscribe London, whose boundaries were rapidly enlarging under the pressure of the growing population and the constant influx of provincials and foreigners. About this time stone building began to be common, the old timber houses being replaced by more solid if less picturesque edifices. Complaints were made of people flocking to London from the country, and wasting their substance in revels-- “When husband hath at play set up his rest, Then wife and babes at home a hungry goeth.” “The maister may keepe revell all the yeere, And leave the wife at home like silly foule.” Country dames did not often share in the jaunts to the capital made by their husbands. Until the seventeenth century it did not become customary for families to go to London for annual visits. Bad roads and the lack of public conveyances kept town and country apart. The squire’s lady knew nothing of the bustling life led in the sombre, substantial houses of the London burgesses, for whose wives there was plenty of occupation in looking after the servants and the apprentices who formed part of the household, in superintending the cooking of the bountiful meals, buying the household necessaries, and replenishing the family wardrobe. There were no newspapers, but there was abundance of gossip, a much more impressive medium of communicating news. Amusement took the form of spectacles chiefly, and the citizens and citizenesses flocked readily to a mask, a play, a procession, a cock-fight, or a bear-baiting. Women were not squeamish about unpleasant sights. They had not learnt to feel that the brutal sports so common then were degrading. It was hardly likely that they should. There were too many hangings and quarterings and burnings of human beings in London to make people sensitive about the pain of animals. The gallows were constantly working, and women had to accustom themselves to many revolting sights. Worse times were coming, but as yet the shadow of the great civil war had not darkened England. With regard to the education of women in every-day life, there is no evidence to show that they shared in the higher learning cultivated so assiduously by the daughters of the aristocracy. What M. Paul Rousselot says in his “History of the Education of Women in France,” applies equally well to England. The majority of women in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries profited little, he considers, by the great movement known as the Renaissance. To a large extent they were outside it-- “On ne les a pas en général volontairement introduites dans ce progrès, elles y sont entrées, un peu d’elles mêmes, beaucoup par la force des choses.”