Of the other great actors in the struggle that was to make the age famous, only John Pym was at this time a grown man. Rupert and Fairfax, the rival cavalry leaders; Falkland and Hyde, the worthiest counsellors of the royalist cause, were not yet born. Many things were in preparation for the coming struggle in James's reign of twenty-two years, and it was the people then growing up who made the great Puritan Revolution. What sort of an England was it that they saw around them? How did the men and women of that time live, and what were they thinking and doing?

In its outward appearance the country has not wholly changed even in three hundred years, and those who will use their eyes can still see much that our forefathers saw then. In every cathedral city, in every large town, in all our older villages, there still stand the very buildings, cathedrals, old parish churches, mansions, even cottages and inns, that were in daily use in King James I's days. The gabled and timbered houses, with their heavy oak beams, their paneled rooms, their galleries and staircases, their carved chimney-pieces and huge open fireplaces, are still to be found in hundreds. We can still see the very pictures and portraits that hung on the walls of mansion and manor-house, and the carved furniture that adorned the rooms. We can still walk on the terraces and garden-paths laid out by the famous gardeners of that age, and enjoy the shade of the very trees they planted.

Yet for all that, what we can see to-day are mere relics of a bygone England, and if we could go back to that age we should feel as if we were in a foreign country. It must have looked very different even in the open country; for the now familiar hedges did not then divide the fields, except in the few districts where scientific farming was beginning. The old open-field system of farming—without hedges and without rotation of crops—was still largely practised.

Wastes and commons, and woods of great extent, were plentiful even in the south and middle of England, whilst the north was almost a wilderness, A few wild boars were still to be found in the royal forests; the last wolf had not yet been killed in the north; foxes were so plentiful as to be shot and trapped as vermin; deer wandered in great herds. Badgers and wild cats were not uncommon. Eagles and bustards were numerous, and in the fens clouds of cranes sometimes darkened the sky.

The south and east of England were then the most civilised parts. They contained the richest and most thickly peopled counties. The north was a wild region, thinly peopled, possessing only a few cities such as York, Newcastle, and Carlisle, and a few new manufacturing towns such as Leeds, Sheffield, and Manchester. The population of England and Wales to-day is over thirty-six millions. It was then only about four millions—less than the population of London to-day. The greatest towns were London, with 400,000; Bristol and Norwich, with about 25,000 each. Few other cities had a population of 10,000. Besides York, Newcastle, Exeter, and Plymouth, the chief towns lay in the middle and south—Oxford Gloucester, Nottingham, Lincoln, Coventry, Leicester, Southampton, Portsmouth, and Shrewsbury. Hull was a great port. Chester was then more important than Liverpool. Manchester and Sheffield, Birmingham and Leeds, were old villages rising into new towns, through their manufactures of cloth and hardware. But the biggest of them had not more than 4,000 inhabitants.

The old walls still stood round the ancient cities of York, Oxford, Exeter, Lincoln, Chester, and Colchester, whilst many English and Welsh towns still had standing large portions of the old defences and gates, of which there is now little trace. The walls were generally too weak to admit of defence by artillery; but as the Civil War proved, they were still useful. For nearly all these cities withstood regular sieges, as did also a score of old castles that had lasted since the Middle Ages. Such were the castles of Pembroke, Harlech, Raglan, Pontefract, Scarborough, Beeston, Sherborne, Arundel, as well as others less famous. Even more modern houses could still be fortified. Lathom, Basing, Faringdon, Wardour, Lacock, and many others, resisted for weeks, and sometimes months, the local forces brought against them.

The towns themselves were picturesque. No rows of houses, every one alike, existed as nowadays. Huge gables, quaint windows, beams arranged to form a pattern, porches and pillars, allowed plenty of scope for individual taste. But the streets were narrow, and the houses consequently dark; drainage was bad, and so floods and damp were a constant evil; open sewers were a great danger to health.

wrote Milton, thinking of his own London. Want of proper sanitation made plague and fever a constant scourge.

In spite of ever-growing trade, all but the very largest towns were still almost self-supporting. To-day every town draws its food and other supplies from the whole world, whilst its special manufactures are carried in turn to supply the needs of other towns and countries. In those days trade was still chiefly local. Flour, beef, mutton, bacon, poultry, eggs, butter, and cheese, came into each place from the immediate neighbourhood. Beer was home-brewed. Workmen of almost every imaginable trade worked in their own homes or in small workshops with a master craftsman, a few journeymen, and two or three apprentices.

Saddlers, painters, coach-builders, wheelwrights, joiners, weavers, dyers, combers, spinners, embroiderers, skinners, glovers, cutlers, shoemakers, plumbers, founders, goldsmiths, blacksmiths, farriers, pewterers, brewers, bakers, coopers, masons, carpenters, etc., were all to be found in every big town. A few places were noted for special wares, and the cloth trade was gradually spreading from the Eastern Counties to the Northern, but no factories had yet arisen.

By far the larger number, probably three-quarters, of the people, lived not in the towns, as nowadays, but in the villages and the countryside. And life in the country was simpler and ruder than in the towns. Even the oldest industry, farming, was conducted very clumsily, although new ideas were coming in from a country which taught England many things in the seventeenth century. Most of the improvements in the common arts of life came to us just then from Holland. Farming, gardening, various methods in manufacture, painting, ship-building, draining, banking, and many other things, including republican ideas and religious doctrines, were influenced by contact with Holland during the whole of the century.

It was in James's reign that root crops began to be properly cultivated. This gave better supplies of food to the cattle in winter. Hitherto large numbers of cattle had to be killed and salted before winter, for want of good cattle food. Consequently people ate salt meat throughout the winter. The sheep and cattle of those days were much smaller than ours; for it is only through special selection and breeding that our modern beasts have been produced. The best breeds of horses came from abroad, and the Netherlands furnished some of the finest.

One of the greatest hindrances to trade, and to progress in other ways, was the badness of the roads. A horseman might gallop, with frequent changes on the road, from London to Edinburgh in three days, as, did the man who carried the news of Elizabeth's death to James. But a journey by coach or waggon was an affair of weeks. In winter, even the few main roads were often impassable. Beyond the Trent, even the Great North Road became in places a mere cart-track. Travellers between one town and another often lost their way in rough weather. After rain, coaches stuck fast, and had to be rescued by a team of oxen brought from a neighbouring farm. The floods between even London and Ware, in Hertfordshire, sometimes compelled passengers to swim for their lives. A. traveller at Stamford was stopped four days by floods, and only attempted to proceed when he found a company of fourteen members of Parliament, with guides, on their way to Westminster. A viceroy going to Ireland took five hours to travel fourteen miles between St. Asaph and Conway.

For all but the heaviest goods, pack-horses were the best means of transit, as they were less dependent than coaches or waggons on the state of the roads. The age of stage-coaches had not yet begun. Only in the days of the Commonwealth did hackney coaches first appear. The state coaches of royal personages and of the nobles and great gentlemen were oftener seen in the towns than on the country roads.

Not only were the roads bad; they were dangerous from another cause. The days of the most famous highwaymen were not until after the Civil War, but already the roads were infested by robbers, many of them being younger sons of gentlemen. Bad roads and the absence of any real system of police made highway robbery a secure and profitable employment, whilst inn-keepers in remote parts were often suspected of being in league with the thieves. The parish constable, who was often at the same time a small farmer, would raise the hue and cry among his neighbours when a robbery was heard of but the pursuit ended at the parish boundary, and the tired farmer and his rustics would be glad to sit down and then return to their farms, thankful to be rid of a troublesome fellow and to have escaped a broken head or a shot from a pistol.

John Evelyn tells a story of riding within three miles of Bromley, in Kent, when two cut-throats started out of a thicket, and striking with long staves at his horse, threw him down, took his sword, and hauled him into the wood, where they could rob him securely. "After robbing me," he says, "they bound my hands behind me and my feet, having pulled off my boots. They then set me up against an oak with most terrible threats to cut my throat if I offered to cry out. They told me they had pistols and long guns and were fourteen companions!" This was in populous Kent.

In the wild Northern Counties rough private warfare had only just died out, and on the Scotch borders moss-trooping mossy  country on the borders of England and Scotland.")?> and marauding still went on occasionally. Bands of robbers long survived in Northumberland and Yorkshire. Even in Charles II's time it was still the custom for the judges on circuit, with the whole body of barristers, country, attorneys clerks, and serving-men, to travel from Newcastle to Carlisle armed and escorted as if in an enemy's country. No wonder that houses were still fortified, and that the inmates slept with arms by their sides.