Elizabethan England: From 'A Description of England,' by William Harrison

Here is a 16th-century Englishman looking squarely at his own world and recording everything: what people eat, what they wear, how they're punished, what their houses look like, which rivers run where, and which dogs they keep. William Harrison wrote this as an introduction to Holinshed's Chronicles, but it became a phenomenon in its own right, the nearest thing Elizabethan England had to a documentary. He divides the population into gentlemen, citizens, yeomen, and laborers, then proceeds to catalogue their lives with the obsessive detail of a man who believed every particular mattered. The result is a text that pulses with the texture of daily existence in Shakespeare's England: the food on the table, the laws on the books, the clothes on every back, the pulse of towns rising and falling. Harrison is unapologetically proud, sometimes sour, always observant. Four centuries later, no other source gives us such a full, living picture of how English people actually lived, worked, and thought at the moment their nation began to imagine itself a global power.