The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Ian Mortimer

  List of Illustrations

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  1. The Landscape

  2. The People

  3. Religion

  4. Character

  5. Basic Essentials

  6. What to Wear

  7. Travelling

  8. Where to Stay

  9. What to Eat and Drink

  10. Hygiene, Illness and Medicine

  11. Law and Disorder

  12. Entertainment

  Envoi

  Picture Section

  Notes

  Abbreviations used in the Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  The past is a foreign country – this is your guidebook.

  We think of Queen Elizabeth I as ‘Gloriana’: the most powerful English woman in history. We think of her reign (1558–1603) as a golden age of maritime heroes like Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Richard Grenville and Sir Francis Drake, and of great writers, such as Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare. But what was it actually like to live in Elizabethan England? If you could travel to the past and walk the streets of London in the 15902, where would you stay? What would you eat? What would you wear? Would you really have a sense of it being a glorious age? And if so, how would that glory sit alongside the poverty, diseases, violence, sexism and famine of that time?

  In this book Ian Mortimer answers the key questions that a prospective traveller to late sixteenth-century England would ask. Applying the groundbreaking approach he pioneered in his bestselling The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, the Elizabethan world unfolds around the reader.

  He shows a society making great discoveries and achieving military victories and yet at the same time being troubled by its new-found self-awareness. It is a country in which life expectancy is in the early thirties, people still starve to death and Catholics are being persecuted for their faith. Yet it produces some of the finest writing in the English language and some of the most magnificent architecture, and sees Elizabeth’s subjects settle in America and circumnavigate the globe. Welcome to a country that is, in all its contradictions, the very crucible of the modern world.

  About the Author

  Ian Mortimer is the author of the bestselling The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, eight other books and many peer-reviewed articles on English history between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and was awarded the Alexander Prize (2004) for his work on the social history of medicine in seventeenth-century England. In June 2011, the University of Exeter awarded him a higher doctorate (D.Litt) by examination, on the strength of his historical work. He also writes historical fiction, published under his middle names (James Forrester). He lives with his wife and three children on the edge of Dartmoor, in Devon.

  Also by Ian Mortimer

  The Greatest Traitor: The Life of Sir Roger Mortimer

  The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III

  The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England’s Self-Made King

  1415: Henry V’s Year of Glory

  The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England

  List of Illustrations

  1. George Gower, Queen Elizabeth I: The Armada Portrait, c.1588, © Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire; The Bridgeman Art Library.

  2. Marcus Gheeraedts the Elder, portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, © Private Collection.

  3. Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg, London, first published in Civitates Orbis Terrarum, vol. 1, 1572, © The British Library Board, Maps.C.29.e.1, A.

  4. Claes Janszoon Visscher, Visscher’s view of London, 1616, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

  5. Joris Hoefnagel, A Fête at Bermondsey, c.1569, reproduced by permission of Lord Salisbury/Hatfield House.

  6. Robert Peake, portrait of Elizabeth Buxton (née Kemp), c.1588–90, © Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery; The Bridgeman Art Library.

  7. Bess of Hardwick as a Young Woman, 1550s, English School, © Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire; The Devonshire Collection National Trust Photographic Library; Angelo Hornak; The Bridgeman Art Library.

  8. Hans Ewoutsz, portrait of Lady Mary Fitzalan, © His Grace The Duke of Norfolk, Arundel Castle; The Bridgeman Art Library.

  9. George Gower, portrait of Elizabeth Knollys, Lady Layton, 1577, © Montacute House, Somerset; The Phelips Collection National Trust Photographic Library; Derrick E. Witty; The Bridgeman Art Library.

  10. Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg, Nonsuch Palace, first published in Civitates Orbis Terrarum, vol. 5, 1598, based on a 1582 drawing by Joris Hoefnagel.

  11. Anthuenis Claeissins, A Family Saying Grace Before the Meal, 1585, © Private Collection; The Bridgeman Art Library.

  12. Robert Peake, Queen Elizabeth I being carried in Procession (Eliza Triumphans), c.1601, © Private Collection; The Bridgeman Art Library.

  13. Portrait of Lord Burghley, English School, © Burghley House Collection, Lincolnshire; The Bridgeman Art Library.

  14. Court of Wards and Liveries, Presided Over by the Master of the Court, Lord Burghley, c.1598, English School, © Private Collection; The Bridgeman Art Library.

  15. Isaac Oliver, A Party in the Open Air. Allegory on Conjugal Love, 1590–5, held at the National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen, © SMK Photo.

  16. Isaac Oliver, The Lamentation over the Dead Christ, c.1585, © Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge; The Bridgeman Art Library.

  17. William Segar, portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh, 1598, © National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin; The Bridgeman Art Library.

  18. Isaac Oliver, Portrait of a Young Man, c.1590–5, The Royal Collection, © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II; The Bridgeman Art Library.

  19. Nicholas Hilliard, portrait of Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; The Bridgeman Art Library.

  20. Portrait of Christopher Marlowe, © The Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge.

  21. Dancers and musicians from the Album of Johannes Cellarius, c.1600–6, German School, © British Library; The Bridgeman Art Library.

  22. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Interior of a Farmhouse, © Musée Municipal, Bergues; Giraudon; The Bridgeman Art Library.

  23. A True Description of the Naval Expedition of Francis Drake, who with Five Ships Departed from the Western Part of England on 13th December 1577, Circumnavigated the Globe and Returned on 26th September 1580 with One Ship Remaining, the Others Having been Destroyed by Waves of Fire, c.1587, © Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection; The Bridgeman Art Library.

  24. Theodor de Bry, How They Dance at Important Celebrations, © Paris, Musée de la Marine; akg-images.

  25. The Spanish Armada which Threatened England in July 1588, English School, © National Maritime Museum; IAM; akg-images.

  26. The Ark Raleigh, the flagship of the English Fleet, from Leisure Hour, 1888, English School, © Private Collection; The Bridgeman Art Library.

  27. Queen Elizabeth I Receives Dutch Ambassadors, Dutch School, Neue Galerie, Kassel, © Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel; The Bridgeman Art Library.

  28. The Thames at Richmond, with the Old Royal Palace, c.1620, Flemish School, © Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge; The Bridgeman Art Library.

  29. ‘Old Houses in the Butcher Row’, Smith’s Antiquities of London, 1791.


  30. Treswell Survey of 1–6 Fleet Lane, by kind permission of The Clothworkers’ Company.

  31. Jan Siberechts, Wollaton Hall and Park, Nottingham, 1697, © Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection; The Bridgeman Art Library.

  32. Washerwomen at a river, illustration to the alchemic treatise Splendor Solis, © The British Library Board, Harley 3469, f.32v.

  33. Leg amputation, sixteenth-century woodcut, from Walter H. Riff, Die große Chirurgi oder vollkommene Wundarznei, © akg-images.

  34. Vagrant being whipped out of town, from Raphael Holinshed, The Firste Volume of the Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande, 1577.

  35. Marguerite de Valois dancing la volta at the Valois Court, French School, © Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes; akg-images; Erich Lessing.

  36. Four Gentlemen of High Rank Playing Primero, © The Right Hon. Earl of Derby; The Bridgeman Art Library.

  37. Manuscript of the May Day scene from the play by Sir Thomas More, © The British Library Board, Harley 7368, f.9.

  This book is dedicated to my daughter, Elizabeth Rose Mortimer.

  But when memory embraces the night

  I see those days, long since gone,

  like the ancient light of extinguished stars

  travelling still, and shining on.

  from ‘Ghosts’, Acumen 24 (1996), p. 17

  Introduction

  It is a normal morning in London, on Friday 16 July 1591. In the wide street known as Cheapside the people are about their business, going between the timber-covered market stalls. Traders are calling out, hoping to attract the attention of merchants’ wives. Travellers and gentlemen are walking along the recently repaired pavements of the street, going in and out of the goldsmiths’ and moneylenders’ shops. Servants and housewives are making their way through the market crowds to the Little Conduit near the back gate to the churchyard of St Paul’s Cathedral, some with leather water vessels in their arms, others with casks suspended from a yoke across their shoulders. The morning sun is reflected by the glass in the upper windows of the rich merchants’ houses. A maid looks down on those in the street as she cleans her master’s bedchamber.

  Suddenly there is a great commotion near the market. ‘Repent, England! Repent!’ yells a man at the top of his voice. He is dressed in black, handing out printed leaflets as he strides along. ‘Repent!’ he shouts again and again, ‘Christ Jesus is come with his fan in his hand to judge the Earth!’ This man is no mean fool; he is a prosperous London citizen, Mr Edmund Coppinger. Another gentleman, Mr Henry Arthington, also dressed in black, is following him, striding from the alley called Old Change into Cheapside. He too calls out, declaring that ‘Judgement Day has come upon us all! Men will rise up and kill each other as butchers do swine, for the Lord Jesus has risen.’ The printed bills they hand out declare that they are intent on a complete reformation of the Church in England. For the illiterate majority in the crowd, they call out their message: ‘The bishops must be put down! All clergymen should be equal! Queen Elizabeth has forfeited her crown and is worthy to be deprived of her kingdom. Jesus Christ has come again. The reborn Messiah is even now in London, in the form of William Hacket. Every man and woman should acknowledge him as a divine being and lord of all Christendom.’

  William Hacket himself is still lying in bed, in a house in the parish of St Mary Somerset. He cuts an unlikely figure as a latter-day messiah. His memory is excellent – he can recall whole sermons and then repeat them in the taverns, adding amusing jokes. He married a woman for her dowry, then spent it and abandoned her. He is well known as a womaniser, but he is even more famous for his uncontrollable and violent temper. Anyone who witnessed his behaviour in the service of Mr Gilbert Hussey will confirm this. When a schoolmaster insulted Mr Hussey, Hacket met with him in a tavern and pretended to try to smooth over the disagreement. After he had won the schoolmaster’s trust, he put a friendly arm around his shoulders. Then, suddenly, he seized the man, threw him to the floor, flung himself on top of him and bit off his nose. When he held up the piece of flesh, the astonished onlookers entreated him to allow the bleeding schoolmaster to take it quickly to a surgeon so that it might be sewn back on, preventing a horrible disfigurement. Hacket merely laughed, put the nose in his mouth and swallowed it.

  In his bed, Hacket knows what Mr Coppinger and Mr Arthington are up to: he himself gave them instructions earlier this morning. They believe he is the reborn Christ largely because he is such a persuasive and fervent character. Together they have been hatching a plot for the last six months to destroy the bishops and undermine the queen’s rule. They have spoken to hundreds of people and distributed thousands of pamphlets. What Hacket does not know is that a huge crowd has started to swarm around his two prophesying angels. Some are curious, some are laughing at their proclamations; others want to join them. Most want to see Hacket in person. Such a large crowd is pressing against them that soon Mr Arthington and Mr Coppinger are trapped. They seek refuge in a nearby tavern, The Mermaid, and manage to escape by the back door, before returning to the parish of St Mary Somerset and their slugabed messiah.

  News runs through the city. By noon the city watchmen are marching from house to house. By one o’clock all three men have been sought out by the authorities and arrested. Within two weeks, two of them are dead. Hacket is tried for high treason, found guilty and sentenced to death. On 28 July he is dragged on a hurdle to the gallows, hanged while he spits abuse at the hangman, then cut down and beheaded and butchered in the traditional manner, his headless body being cut into four parts, each with a limb attached. Mr Coppinger dies in prison: the authorities claim he starved himself to death. Mr Arthington enlists the support of powerful friends on the privy council and thereby saves his life, publishing his renunciation of all the things he has said as part of his penance.1

  This is an unusual episode and yet it is evocative of Elizabethan England. Had it taken place two hundred years earlier, Hacket and his gentlemen supporters would have been given a wide berth by the nervous citizens, unused to such sacrilegious uproar. Had it taken place two hundred years later, these events would have been a cause for popular ridicule and a cartoonist’s wit. But Elizabeth’s England is different. It is not that it lacks self-confidence, but that its self-confidence is easily shaken. The seriousness with which the authorities treat the plot, and the ruthless efficiency with which they suppress it, are typical of the time. It is not every day that a man is publicly proclaimed as the risen Christ, and it is extraordinary that well-respected gentlemen believe the messiah to be a violent, philandering, illiterate lout; but it is not at all unusual for Elizabethan people to adopt an extreme religious viewpoint, or for them to fear the overthrow of the monarch. The last few decades have seen so much change that people simply do not know what to believe or think any more. They have become used to living with slow-burning crises that might, at any moment, flare up into life-threatening situations.

  This picture of Elizabethan England will come as a surprise to some readers. In the twenty-first century we are used to hearing a far more positive view of Elizabeth’s ‘sceptred isle’. We refer to the queen herself as Gloriana. We think of the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and Sir Francis Drake circumnavigating the globe in the Golden Hind. We think of writers such as Francis Bacon and Sir Walter Raleigh, the poets Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney, and the playwrights Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Surely a society that created such architectural masterpieces as Hardwick Hall, Burghley, Longleat and Wollaton Hall cannot be said to be anything other than triumphal? Surely a small kingdom that sends mariners into battle off the coast of Central America cannot be accused of self-doubt?

  The problem is that our view of history diminishes the reality of the past. We concentrate on the historic event as something that has happened and in so doing we ignore it as a moment which, at the time, is happening. For example, when we hear the word ‘Armada’, we think of an English victory, in which the threatening Spanish ships w
ere scattered and defeated in the battle of Gravelines and after which Sir Francis Drake was feted as a hero. Yet at the moment of attack everything was up in the air. As Drake boarded his ship at Plymouth, he would have known that there was a real possibility of the Armada landing successfully and his own ship being sunk. He would have known that a change in the direction of the wind could alter everything – leaving his strategy in jeopardy and his fleet in danger. We can no longer imagine the possibility of the Armada disgorging its troops on English beaches. Our view of the event as a thing of the past restricts our understanding of contemporary doubts, hopes and reality.

  I wrote my first Time Traveller’s Guide in order to suggest that we do not always need to describe the past objectively and distantly. In that book I tried to bring the medieval period closer to the reader, describing what you would find if you could visit fourteenth-century England. Where would you stay? What might you wear? What would you eat? How should you greet people? Given that we know so much about the period, it stands to reason that the historian should be able to answer such questions. There are limits, of course: the historian cannot break through the evidence barrier and actually re-create the past. Moreover, imagining a personal visit is decidedly tricky in some matters of detail. You may well understand why the earl of Essex rebelled against Elizabeth in 1601 – but how did he clean his teeth? Did he wear underwear? What did he use for toilet paper? These things aren’t so well evidenced. We must exploit what little evidence there is to satisfy, if only partially, our collective spirit of enquiry.

  What will strike you first if you visit Elizabethan England? I imagine that, to start with, it will be the smells of the towns and cities. After a few days, however, I suspect it will be the uncertainty of life. You will be appalled to see dead bodies lying in the street during an epidemic of influenza or plague, and the starving beggars in their filthy rags. You will be disconcerted to notice vulnerability even at the top of society. Elizabeth herself is the target of several assassination attempts and uprisings – from a gentry rebellion, to her physician supposedly trying to poison her. Uncertainty pervades every aspect of life. People do not know whether the Sun goes round the Earth or the Earth goes round the Sun; the doctrines of the Church contradict the claims of Copernicus. The rich merchants of London do not know if their ships will be stranded in a North African port, with the crews massacred by Barbary pirates and their cargo stolen. To gauge what Elizabethan life is like we need to see the panic-stricken men and women who hear that the plague has arrived in the next village. We need to see the farmers in the 1590s, staring at their rain-beaten, blackened corn for the second year in succession. This is the reality for many Elizabethan people: the stark horror that they have nothing to feed to their sick and crying children. We need to appreciate that such people, be they Protestant or Catholic, may well connect their starvation with the government’s meddling with religious beliefs and traditions. We need to see them looking for something stable in their lives and fixing on the queen herself as a beacon of hope. Do not imagine the proud figure of Queen Elizabeth standing stiff and unruffled in her great jewelled dress on the deck of a serene ship, floating on calm sunlit waters. Rather imagine her struggling to maintain her position on the ship of state in heaving seas, tying herself to the mast and yelling orders in the storm. This is the real Gloriana – Elizabeth, queen of England by the grace of God, the pillar of faith and social certainty in the dizzying upheaval of the sixteenth century.