Daily Life in Elizabethan England (2 page)

Poor harvests

1590

Edmund Spenser begins publishing
The Faerie Queene
1592

Plague

ca. 1592

Shakespeare’s early plays 1593

Death of Christopher Marlowe in a tavern brawl

Plague

1594–95

Poor harvests

1596

Poor harvests

English expedition under the Earl of Essex against Spanish port of Cadiz

Irish rebellion under Hugh O’Neill 1597–98

Poor harvests and famine

1598

First performance of Ben Jonson’s
Every Man in His Humour
1599

Globe Theater opens

Earl of Essex’s expedition to Ireland 1601

Rebellion and execution of the Earl of Essex 1603

Plague

Death of Elizabeth

Introduction

The reign of Elizabeth is for many people one of the most fascinating periods in the history of the English-speaking world. Our images of the Elizabethan age, whether derived from the stage, screen, or books, have an enduring romantic appeal: the daring impudence of the sea-dogs, the chivalric valor of Sir Philip Sidney at Zutphen or the Earl of Essex at the gates of Cadiz, the elegant clash of steel as masters of the rapier display their skill. In addition to its imaginative appeal, the period is one of considerable historical importance. In political terms, Elizabeth’s reign saw the definitive emergence of England as a significant naval power, as well as the growth of England’s commercial and colonial activities: the British Empire, which so shaped the world in which we live, had its roots in the reign of Elizabeth. In the cultural sphere, England’s achievements were no less significant, most notably in the person of William Shakespeare.

Elizabethan daily life has received a good deal of attention during the past 200 years. Yet although many books have been written on the subject, this volume is very different in one fundamental respect, which has influenced its shape in many ways.

This is the first book on Elizabethan England to arise out of the practice of living history. In its broadest sense, living history might be described as the material recreation of elements of the past. In this sense, it includes a wide variety of activities. People who play historical music (especially on reproduction instruments) or who engage in historical crafts are practicing a form of living history.

xviii Introduction

An English army on the march. [
Shakespeare’s England
]

In its fullest sense, living history involves the attempt to recreate an entire historical setting. Perhaps the most outstanding example is the historical site of Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts, where the visitor will find not only reconstructed houses of the pilgrim settlers of 1627, but also a staff of highly trained interpreters who represent the individual men and women who were at the settlement in that year, even down to the dialect of English likely to have been spoken by the persons they are portraying.

This book began life as
The Elizabethan Handbook,
a brief guide written by the University Medieval and Renaissance Association of Toronto (an amateur living-history group based at the University of Toronto), to accompany its “Fencing, Dancing, and Bearbaiting” Elizabethan living history event in 1991. It was privately published in expanded and revised form in 1993, as part of a series of manuals geared for living-history use.

Very little of the original text still remains, but the underlying connection with living history is very much present.

The living-history background of this book gives it two particular advantages over previous works. The first is its hands-on approach. In addition to telling the reader what sort of foods people ate, what sort of clothes they wore, and what sort of games they played, this book includes actual recipes, patterns, and rules, based on sources from the period. We ourselves have had great fun reproducing such aspects of the past and hope that readers will enjoy them too.

The second important advantage is the perspective that living history affords. This book is not only based on the author’s reading about the Elizabethan period. It is also informed by time spent living in thatched
Introduction xix

cottages, cooking over open hearths, and sleeping on straw mattresses.

The simple act of doing these things cannot actually tell you how they were done, but there is no better way to focus your attention on the essential parts of historical daily life than by actually trying to live it. As a result, this book offers a uniquely clear, focused, and detailed account of the Elizabethan world. Many fundamental topics that other books mention only briefly (if at all) are given full attention here: water supply, sanitation, sources of heat and light.

This book is also distinguished by its attention to the daily life of ordinary people. Books about Elizabethan England often focus on the world of the aristocracy, leaving the impression that every man in Elizabethan England wore an enormous starched ruff, every woman wore a rich bro-cade gown, and they all lived in huge brick mansions. Yet the lives of ordinary people can be just as interesting and informative. This book tries to give the other 98 percent of the population a degree of attention more in keeping with their numbers.

Another important feature of this book is that it attempts to incorporate a high quality of scholarly research in a form that is accessible to a broad readership. There tends to be a great divide between scholarly and popular accounts of the past. Scholarly accounts generally offer high-quality information based on primary sources—primary sources being sources of information contemporary with the period in question, as opposed to secondary sources, which are modern works that make use of primary sources, or tertiary sources, which are modern works that rely on secondary sources. The information in scholarly works is generally superior, since the authors are in closer contact with the original sources of information, but their language and content tend to be geared toward the specialist, and they often assume a great deal of background knowledge on the part of the reader. On the other hand, popular works are written for a broader audience but often rely on inferior secondary and even tertiary sources of information.

As far as has been possible with so vast a subject, this book relies directly on primary sources; in particular, it has made use of some original books and manuscripts that are especially rich sources of information but are not well known even in scholarly circles (the rules for games, for example, derive from a forgotten 17th-century treatise on the subject). This is particularly true in the hands-on sections of the book: the patterns, recipes, rules, and so on are all based as far as possible on primary sources. Where primary sources are impractical, the book strives to make use of the best and most recent secondary work on the period.

At the same time, I have attempted to present this information in a format that will be accessible and enjoyable for a wide audience. After all, the greatest value of the past lies in its interaction with the present. If history only touches the historians, it is truly a lifeless form of knowledge. Readers of this book may be surprised to find just how much of Elizabethan life
xx Introduction

is relevant to the present. The Elizabethans were dealing with many of the same issues that face us today: unemployment resulting from an economy in transition, conflicting views over the relationship between religion and the state, a technological revolution in the media of communication, bitter cultural strife, and a general sense that the established social order was at risk of disintegration. In the modern age, where we are increasingly worried about our ability to sustain our standard of living and about the impact of our activities on the environment, we can benefit by learning how people lived in a period when their material expectations were much lower and the degree of industrialization was still quite limited. This is not to suggest that we should idealize the Elizabethan age—it was also a period of hardship, brutality, and intolerance—but we can acquire a much more meaningful perspective on the present by becoming familiar with the past.

1

A Brief History of

Tudor England

The Middle Ages are customarily taken to have ended when Richard III was defeated by Henry Tudor at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. Henry’s accession as Henry VII marked the end of the Wars of the Roses, which had dominated English politics for much of the 15th century. The coronation of the first Tudor monarch was to herald the beginning of an unprecedented period of peace that lasted until the outbreak of civil war in 1642.

Henry VII devoted his reign to establishing the security of his throne, which he passed on to his son Henry VIII in 1509. Henry VIII is best known for having married six wives, but his marital affairs were of great political importance as well. His first wife, Catherine of Aragon, produced only a daughter, named Mary. Desperate for a male heir, Henry applied to the pope to have his marriage annulled. The request was refused, so Henry arranged for Parliament to pass a body of legislation that withdrew England from the Catholic Church, placing the king at the head of the new Church of England.

As head of his own church, Henry had his marriage annulled and married Anne Boleyn. This marriage proved no more successful in Henry’s eyes, as it produced only a daughter—little did he know that this daughter, as Elizabeth I, was to become one of England’s most successful and best-loved monarchs. Henry had Anne Boleyn executed on charges of

adultery. His third wife, Jane Seymour, died of natural causes, but not before bearing him his only son, Edward. Of Henry’s three subsequent wives, none bore any heirs.

2

Daily Life in Elizabethan England

Henry had no desire to make any significant changes in church teachings, but there was growing pressure in the country to follow the lead of the Continental Protestants such as Martin Luther; English Protestants were later heavily influenced by Jean Calvin, a French Protestant who established a rigidly Protestant state in Geneva.

The English church moved only slightly toward Protestantism in Henry’s lifetime. Upon Henry’s death in 1547, his son came to the throne as Edward VI. Edward was still underage, and his reign was dominated by his guardians, who promoted Protestant reformation in the English church. Edward died in 1553 before reaching the age of majority. The throne passed to his eldest half-sister, Mary. Mary had been raised a devout Catholic by her mother, and it came as no surprise that Mary brought England back into the Catholic Church. Her reign would prove brief and undistinguished. She committed England to a Spanish alliance by marrying Philip II, who became king of Spain in 1556. The marriage led to English participation in Philip’s war against France. The war went poorly and England lost Calais, the last remnant of its once extensive French empire. Mary died shortly after, in 1558. Today she is popularly remembered as Bloody Mary due to her persecution of Protestants—some 300 were executed during her reign, while others escaped into exile in Protestant communities on the Continent.

With Mary’s death, the throne passed to Henry’s only surviving child, Elizabeth. She was not an ardent Protestant, although she was of Protestant leanings. Even more important, her claim to the throne depended on the independence of the English church. The pope had never recognized Henry’s divorce, so in Catholic eyes, Elizabeth was the illegitimate child of an adulterous union and could not be queen. Elizabeth had Parliament withdraw England from the Catholic Church once more and was established as head of the Church of England, as her father had been.

The new queen faced serious international challenges. Her country

was still officially at war with France and Scotland. Elizabeth swiftly concluded a peace treaty, but Scotland, now under the governance of a French regent, Mary of Guise, remained a potential threat. Mary reigned in the name of her daughter, Mary Stuart (known today as Mary Queen of Scots), who remained in France, where she was queen consort of the French king Francis II. Elizabeth strengthened her position in Scotland by cultivating relations with the growing number of Scottish Protestants who preferred Protestant England to Catholic France. In 1559 John Knox, the spiritual leader of the militant Scottish Protestants, returned to Scotland from exile in Geneva, and the country rose against the regent. After some hesitation, Elizabeth sent military support. The French were expelled from Scotland, and the Protestant party took effective control.

France too had a growing Protestant movement, and the death of Francis II in 1560 led to a civil war between Protestants and Catholics. Elizabeth sent troops to Normandy in 1562 to support the Protestant cause, hoping to reestablish the foothold on the Continent that her sister had lost, but
A Brief History of Tudor England

3

the army was ravaged by illness and had to be withdrawn the following year. Religious conflict between French Catholics and Protestants erupted intermittently throughout Elizabeth’s reign, substantially undermining France’s influence in international affairs.

The death of Francis II impacted Scotland as well, as the widowed Mary Stuart returned to her native country. Her reign was tumultuous, and relations with her subjects were not helped by her firm Catholicism. After a series of misadventures, Mary’s subjects rose against her, and she was ultimately forced to seek refuge in England in 1568.

The situation was extremely awkward for Elizabeth, who believed in the divine right of a monarch to occupy her throne, but who was also dependent on the Protestant party in Scotland to keep England’s northern border secure. To make matters worse, Mary had some claim to the English throne by right of her grandmother, a sister of Henry VIII. According to the Catholic Church, Elizabeth was illegitimate and Mary was the right-ful queen. Mary remained in comfortable confinement in England during a series of fruitless negotiations to restore her to the Scottish throne.