A Brief History of the Tudor Age (35 page)

T
HE VIGOROUS AND BRUTAL MEN
of the Tudor Age engaged in vigorous and brutal sports; but sport, like everything else, was regulated by the government.
People were expected to take part in those sports which were suitable for persons of their rank. It was right for noblemen and gentlemen to engage in activities which trained them in horsemanship
and the art of war; but the labourers and artisans, who were required by law to be at work on six days in the week from 5 a.m. till after 7 p.m., did not have much time to play games, and were not
encouraged to do so. On Sundays and holy days, when they were not at work, they were to practise archery, which would be useful in wartime, and not take part in any game which competed with
archery. Certain kinds of games were also condemned on moral and religious grounds, for long before the Puritan revolution in the seventeenth century the Church tried to prevent the people from
indulging in frivolous and immoral sports.

For nobles and gentlemen, the greatest sport was still the tournament, as it had been for the last 300 years. Knights jousted against each other, and displayed their prowess, while the admiring
ladies watched them from the stands. The ladies
had always been an important factor in the ritual of the tournament; they gave their scarves or handkerchiefs to the knight of
their choice, and he wore it during the tournament; they cheered him on, and sometimes incited him to take additional risks to prove his courage and devotion to them; and they rewarded the victor
with a garland and perhaps with a kiss. They also sometimes contributed to the cost of the tournament.

At the beginning of the Tudor Age, tournaments were more popular with the nobility than they had ever been; but they were becoming further and further removed from the reality of war. Steps were
taken to minimize the risks to the participants by dressing them in a heavy suit of armour with a helmet with a visor covering all the face except for the slits for the nose and eyes. This was just
at the time when the development of artillery in war made armour less of a protection in battle, and when the armour worn in war was becoming lighter.

In a tournament, the knights were separated from each other by a wooden barrier about 4 feet high. Each knight rode on the right-hand side of the barrier, carrying his lance in his right hand,
and using it to strike at his opponent as they galloped past each other on opposite sides of the barrier. As the jouster struck with his lance across the barrier at the opponent on his left, the
angle at which the lance struck the armour of the adversary lessened the force of the blow and reduced the risk of serious injury; and by the sixteenth century the lances used in tournaments were
much more brittle than the lances of the cavalry charge of the Middle Ages. If a jouster dealt his opponent a hard enough blow with the lance, it would splinter and do no further damage; and if a
knight splintered his lance when he jousted, this showed that he was skilful and vigorous.

Tournaments were held at court on the more important holy days, and on special occasions, such as the visit of an important foreign envoy, or the signature of a peace treaty. Henry VII did not
personally take part in tournaments; like most of the other kings of the time, he watched from the place of honour in the stands. But Henry VIII took part, incognito, in the first big
tournament of his reign; and as this made a good impression, he continued to joust in tournaments for the next twenty-six years. He found a worthy jousting partner and opponent in his
brother-in-law, the Duke of Suffolk. Sometimes they were the ‘defenders’ in the tournament, who challenged all-comers, and took it in turn to joust against all the other competitors.
Sometimes Henry and Suffolk jousted against each other. They did so in the tournament at Greenwich on St Thomas of Canterbury’s Day in July 1517, when they impressed the spectators by riding
eight courses, and both of them splintering their lances every time.

Despite the precautions taken to prevent injury, a tournament was not free from risk. It took skill and good horsemanship to avoid being thrown by a blow on the breastplate from the
opponent’s lance, even if the blow was softened by the angle and the splintering of the lance. Henry VIII and Suffolk were usually quite capable of remaining in the saddle; but at the
tournament at Greenwich on 24 January 1536 Henry was thrown from his horse, and was unconscious for two hours. He never jousted again. A worse disaster befell King Henry II of France, who received
a fatal wound at a tournament in Paris in 1559, when a fragment of a splintered lance entered his eye through the slit in his visor. He died ten days later.

Edward VI was too young to take part in a tournament, and King Philip did not do so, either as King in England or in Spain; and as both Mary and Elizabeth were unable to joust because of their
sex, royal participation in tournaments ended in England in 1536. But tournaments continued to be held at court during Elizabeth’s reign, with Sir Henry Lee and the Earl of Cumberland playing
the leading part as the Queen’s Champion.

Another great sport held at court during the Tudor Age was riding at the ring. A ring only a few inches wide was suspended on a thread, and a rider, approaching at full gallop, had to put the
point of his lance through the middle of the ring. If his eyesight, concentration and steadiness of hand were good enough to enable him to do this, the thread would snap and he would carry off the
ring on his lance as he rode by.

On days when no tournament was held, the King and his courtiers usually hunted, and noblemen and gentlemen hunted regularly. The animal hunted was ordinarily the stag, which
in the Tudor Age was usually called the hart. In Alsace, the Emperor Maximilian hunted the wild boar, and boars were hunted all over the Continent; but the English wild swine was not as fierce or
fleet of foot as the boar in Europe, and was hardly worth hunting. Sometimes a buck was hunted instead of a hart. Yeomen farmers hunted foxes, but no gentleman did until the end of the seventeenth
century. When a hart or buck was killed, it was eaten.

Harts could be hunted at most times of the year, but not in mid-winter, and the King and his nobles then engaged in hawking instead. Falcons were trained for this sport, and statutes were passed
to punish any poacher who stole their eggs. Poaching by night was considered to be a much more serious offence than poaching by day. An Act of Henry VII’s first Parliament in 1485 made
unauthorized hunting in private forests a felony punishable by death if the offence was committed at night or if the poachers had disguised or obscured their faces to prevent themselves from being
identified; but if it was done in the daytime and without a disguise, it was only a trespass punishable by fine or imprisonment.

There was one exception to the legislation which prohibited the destruction of game or the stealing of birds’ eggs. The authorities were alarmed at the damage caused by rooks and crows,
who not only did great harm to the husbandman’s crops but also damaged the thatch on the roofs of cottages and barns. An Act of 1533 enacted that every parish must keep nets for catching
rooks. Anyone was entitled to enter land without the landowner’s permission in order to destroy rooks, if permission had been asked and refused, without being liable for damages for
trespass.

The writer and poet George Turbervile, who had been Randolph’s secretary and had accompanied him on his journey to Moscow, wrote two books on hunting and hawking. In
The
Booke of Faulconrie
, which was published in 1575, he wrote about the breeding and training of hawks; and in his other book,
The Noble Arte of Venerie or Hunting
, which
was probably written at about the same time, he explained the proper way of organizing a hunt, including those occasions when a prince was present. He followed closely an authoritative French book
on the subject, but introduced changes to take into account the different customs which in some respects were followed in England. In France, after the hart was killed, the chief huntsman cut off
one of its feet and handed it, on his knees, to the King; in England, the huntsman, also on his knees, handed the hunting knife to the King, who stabbed the hart’s carcass as if he were
killing the hart. This English practice was adopted whenever Elizabeth I hunted.

But Turbervile stressed the importance of not going through this ritual until the hart was safely dead; for if the prince really tried to kill the hart, he might be seriously hurt or even
killed, for a hart at bay could inflict great damage on its pursuers. Turbervile mentioned that an Emperor named Basil, who had performed deeds of great valour and had conquered all his enemies in
war, had been killed by a hart,
¹⁴
a frightened beast which normally did not dare to look at the weakest man in his kingdom; and this inspired Turbervile to
some philosophical reflections. It should be a warning to princes not to oppress a humble subject and goad him into standing in his own defence, and ‘like the worm, turn again when it is
trodden so’. But Turbervile hastened to add that his words must not be interpreted as condemning hunting, for that would be contrary to his whole purpose in writing the book; ‘and again
I should seem to argue against God’s ordinances, since it seemeth that such beasts have been created to the use of man and for his recreation’. Turbervile inserted in the book a poem,
The Wofull wordes of
the Hart to the Hunter
, in which he expresses the hart’s point of view; the hart, after lamenting the cruelty of the hunter who pursues him
and tears him with hounds, prays to God that men will exterminate each other in their wars, so that harts will then be able to live in peace.

The government thoroughly approved of the traditional English sport of archery, as it trained men to use the weapon which had won so many glorious victories in wars. Henry VIII was a very good
archer, and regularly practised at the butts. When Wolsey’s gentleman usher, George Cavendish, who had been at Wolsey’s deathbed at Leicester, travelled to London to tell the King how
the Cardinal had died, he found Henry shooting at the butts in the park at Hampton Court. Henry told Cavendish to wait until he had finished shooting, and then changed into his nightgown, and
taking Cavendish into the palace through a private door, spoke with him alone about Wolsey’s last hours. When Sir George Douglas, the leader of the pro-English party in Scotland, had a secret
meeting with Henry to receive his instructions, their talk took place in a lodge in Windsor Great Park when Henry was about to go shooting at the butts.

But from the very beginning of the Tudor Age, Parliament was worried about the decay of archery. An Act of 1487 declared that ‘the great and ancient defence of this realm hath stand by the
archers and shooters in long bows’, but that the art ‘is now greatly left and fallen in decay’. The MPs thought that this was because of the excessive price of longbows, and
enacted that no one should sell a longbow for more than 3s.4d. But by 1504 they had come to the conclusion that there was another reason why men were neglecting the art of shooting with the
longbow; it was because of the popularity of the crossbow, which was being used by more and more people, and often in very improper ways, including the destruction of the King’s deer. So an
Act was passed which made it illegal for anyone under the rank of a lord to shoot with a crossbow unless he owned land which brought him rents of 200 marks a year. This was followed by other
statutes in 1512, 1515, 1534 and 1542, which made it an
offence for anyone who did not own land worth £100 a year to possess a crossbow in his house or to carry one on
the King’s highway; but this did not apply to anyone who lived within seven miles of the sea or the Scottish Border, or to any inhabitant of Northumberland, Durham, Westmorland or Cumberland,
who were permitted to keep crossbows in their houses for defence ‘against thieves, Scots or other the King’s enemies’. Anyone who owned land worth over £100 a year was
entitled to seize and confiscate a crossbow from those who were forbidden to have them.

But Parliament in 1512 believed that it was not only because of the crossbow that ‘archery and shooting in longbows is right little used but daily minisheth, decayeth and abateth more and
more’; it was because people were playing tennis, bowls, and closh (skittles), and other illegal games. The laws against these games were to be more strictly enforced, and the owners of any
premises where they were played were to be punished. Every man over seventeen and under sixty, except priests and High Court judges, was to keep a longbow and four arrows in his house at all times;
and every boy between the ages of seven and seventeen was to be provided by his father or master with a bow and two arrows, so that he could learn to shoot. The mayors and JPs were to provide butts
for archery practice in every town and place where they had existed in the past; and in order to ensure that longbows were available for poor people at reasonable prices, every bowmaker was to have
two bows of elm for sale for every one bow of yew.