. . .Of course, within both of these great groups there were many grades, but time will not allow us to subdivide. Of course, too, beyond and outside these altogether, lay the seething mass of miscellaneous humanity—the vast fringe of the population—which then, as now, formed so dark and so dangerous an unabsorbed element in the city’s general life. Threads from this dingy and tangled social frilling were sometimes caught up and woven for picturesque purposes into the pattern of the plays of the time. But the epic of the submerged tenth was as yet undreamed of; and all this side of Elizabethan civilization must for the present be left out of view.

The citizens lived for the most part at their shops or places of business; the gentlefolk were more distributed. Some still had their habitations in the commercial portions of the city, and those of them who regularly lived in the country and came to town during term-time—which the. . . Read More