The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England Read online

  Like all societies, Elizabethan England is full of contradictions. Some practices will impress you as enormously sophisticated and refined; others will strike you with horror. People are still burnt alive for certain forms of heresy, and women are burnt for killing their husbands. The heads of traitors are still exhibited over the great Stone Gate in London, left there to rot and be a deterrent to others. Torture is permitted in order to recover information about treasonable plots. The gap between the wealthy and the impoverished is as great as ever and, as this book will show, society is strictly hierarchical. Humble houses – sometimes whole villages – are destroyed to make room for the parks of the nobility. People still starve to death on the high roads. As for the political situation, a brief note by a government official describes the state of the nation at the start of the reign:

  The queen poor, the realm exhausted, the nobility poor and decayed. Want of good captains and soldiers. The people out of order. Justice not executed. All things dear. Excess in meat, drink and apparel. Divisions among ourselves. Wars with France and Scotland. The French king bestriding the realm, having one foot in Calais and the other in Scotland. Steadfast enmity but no friendship abroad.2

  This description is far removed from the ‘golden age’ interpretation of Elizabeth’s reign – but there are at least as many positive contemporary verdicts as there are negative ones. In 1577, Raphael Holinshed publishes a chronicle in which he describes Elizabeth’s accession in the following words:

  After all the stormy, tempestuous and blustering windy weather of Queen Mary was overblown, the darksome clouds of discomfort dispersed, the palpable fogs and mist of the most intolerable misery consumed, and the dashing showers of persecution overpast: it pleased God to send England a calm and quiet season, a clear and lovely sunshine, a quietus est from former broils of a turbulent estate, and a world of blessings by good Queen Elizabeth.

  Holinshed is addressing a Protestant minority who are literate and wealthy enough to buy an expensive two-volume publication. But we do not need to look through his rose-tinted spectacles to see many national achievements and cheering developments. Elizabeth’s reign sees an extraordinary period of wealth creation and artistic endeavour. English explorers, driven by the desire for profit, proceed into the cold waters of Baffin Island and the Arctic Circle north of Russia. Despite the wars with France and Spain, no fighting takes place on home soil, so that for most Englishmen the whole reign is one of peace. In addition to the famous poetry and plays, it is an age of innovation in science, gardening, publishing, theology, history, music and architecture. Two English sea captains circumnavigate the world – proving to sixteenth-century people that they have at last exceeded the knowledge of the Ancient Greeks and Romans. No longer do thinking men claim they can see further than the ancients by virtue of their being ‘dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants’. They have grown to be ‘giants’ themselves.

  One of the most striking differences between Elizabethan England and its forerunners lies in the queen herself. Elizabeth’s personality and the rule of a woman are two things that make England in 1558–1603 a very different place from the England of Edward III or even that of her father, Henry VIII. More than ever before, the character of the monarch is intrinsically woven into the daily lives of her people. She is without doubt the most powerful Englishwoman in history.3 It is impossible to write about everyday life in her reign without reference to her. Her choice to steer England away from the Catholicism of her sister, Mary, and to re-establish an independent Church of England, as pioneered by Henry VIII, affects every person in every parish throughout the realm. Even if her subjects accept her religious choices, and never raise their heads above the religious parapet, her decision-making touches their lives in numerous ways. The Prayer Book changes, church symbols are torn down and bishops are replaced. An individual might become persona non grata just because of his or her religious doubts. If ever there was an argument that rulers can change the lives of their subjects, it lies in the impact of the Tudor monarchs. Elizabeth’s kingdom is very much Elizabethan England.

  This book follows my medieval guide but it does not entirely adopt the same form. It would be tedious to make all the same observations about aspects of daily life that contrast with our own society. Moreover, in writing about Elizabethan England, it would be inappropriate to follow exactly the same formula developed to describe the realm of two hundred years earlier. It is not possible, for example, to relegate religion to a subsection in this book: it has to be a chapter on its own, being integral to the ways in which Elizabethans live their lives. The England of 1558 has much in common with the kingdom in 1358, but a great deal has changed. As a result this book is not only concerned with the way Elizabethan England compares with the present day; it also examines how it compares with, or differs from, its medieval roots.

  The historian is always a middleman: the facilitator of the reader’s understanding of the past. I am no different, even though this book is written in the present tense and based on the premise that the most direct way to learn about something is to see it for yourself. However, in a book like this, my relationship with the evidence is unusual. Obviously literary texts have been important (plays, poetry, travellers’ accounts, diaries, contemporary surveys), as have a wide range of printed records. But making sense of all this evidence as indicative of lived behaviour requires the historian to draw on personal experience. As I put it in The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, ‘The key to learning something about the past might be a ruin or an archive but the means whereby we may understand is – and always will be – ourselves.’ This goes for the reader’s lived experience too. For example, I presume that readers of this book have not seen a bull-baiting contest, but yet have enough life experience to imagine what is involved, and thus to know that the Elizabethans’ love of this form of entertainment makes them profoundly different from modern English people.

  I have been reluctant to include details from outside the period of the reign. Very occasionally I have cited post-1603 evidence, but only in order to illustrate a procedure or practice that certainly existed before 1603. There is more citation of pre-1558 sources: much of Elizabethan England is composed of relics from the late medieval and earlier Tudor periods. This applies obviously to the castles, town walls, streets and churches; but it also applies to books that were printed for the first time in earlier reigns and which are reread and often reprinted in Elizabethan times. It especially applies to legislation: most of the law is based on medieval precedents, and it goes without saying that all the laws in force at Elizabeth’s accession date from an earlier period. It is important to remember that every house and structure that we call ‘medieval’ or ‘Tudor’, because of its date of construction, is also Elizabethan. The same applies to many phrases and customs that were in use and practised before 1558. On this point, readers will note several references to the wonderful Latin phrasebook Vulgaria by William Horman, first published in 1519 (I used the 1530 edition). Horman is vividly expressive of the most basic aspects of daily life, so we learn that ‘unwashed wool that grows between the hind legs of a black sheep is medicinable’ and ‘some women with child have wrong appetite to eat things that be out of rule: as coals’. As his purpose was to provide daily Latin in order to encourage the resurgence of the spoken language, we can be confident these examples reflect the experiences of his readers. And while anything written by him about fashionable clothes or religion is, of course, hugely out of date by 1558, what he says about some pregnant women’s appetites is as true today as it was in 1519. Bearing in mind these caveats, I have done my best faithfully to represent England as it existed between Elizabeth’s accession on 17 November 1558 and her death on 24 March 1603.

  Welcome, then, to Elizabethan England, and all its doubts, certainties, changes, traditions and contradictions. It is a jewel-encrusted muddy kingdom, glittering and starving, hopeful and fearful in equal measure – always on the point of magnificent discover
ies and brutal rebellions.

  1

  The Landscape

  Different societies see landscapes differently. You may look at Elizabethan England and see a predominantly green land, characterised by large open fields and woodlands, but an Elizabethan yeoman will describe his homeland to you in terms of cities, towns, ports, great houses, bridges and roads. In your eyes it may be a sparsely populated land – the average density being less than sixty people per square mile in 1561 (compared to well over a thousand today) – but a contemporary description will mention overcrowding and the problems of population expansion.1 Describing a landscape is thus a matter of perspective: your priorities affect what you see. Asked to describe their county, most Devonians will mention the great city of Exeter, the ports of Dartmouth, Plymouth and Barnstaple and the dozens of market towns. They will generally neglect to mention that the region is dominated by a great moor, Dartmoor, 2,000 ft high in places and more than 200 square miles in expanse. There are no roads across this wasteland, only trackways. Elizabethans see it as good for nothing but pasture, tin mining and the steady water supply it provides by way of the rivers that rise there. Many people are afraid of such moors and forests. They are ‘the ruthless, vast and gloomy woods … by nature made for murders and for rapes’, as Shakespeare writes in Titus Andronicus. Certainly no one will think of Dartmoor as beautiful. Sixteenth-century artists paint wealthy people, prosperous cities and food, not landscapes.

  The underlying reasons for such differences are not hard to find. In a society in which people still starve to death, an orchard is not a beautiful thing in itself: its beauty lies in the fact that it produces apples and cider. A wide flat field is ‘finer’ than rugged terrain, for it can be tilled easily to produce wheat and so represents good white bread. A small thatched cottage, which a modern viewer might consider pretty, will be considered unattractive by an Elizabethan traveller, for cottagers are generally poor and able to offer little in the way of hospitality. Ranges of hills and mountains are obstacles to Elizabethan travellers and very far from picturesque features that you go out of your way to see. Hills might feature in an Elizabethan writer’s description of a county because of their potential for sheep grazing, but on the whole he will be more concerned with listing all the houses of the gentry, their seats and parks.

  It is worth being aware of these differences at the outset. It is precisely those things that Elizabethans take for granted that you will find most striking: the huge open fields, the muddy roads, and the small size of so many labourers’ houses. Indeed, it is only at the very end of the Elizabethan period, in the late 1590s, that people start to use the term ‘landscape’ to describe a view. Before this, they do not need such a word, for they do not see a ‘landscape’ as such – only the constituent elements that mean something to them: the woods, fields, rivers, orchards, gardens, bridges, roads and, above all else, the towns. Shakespeare does not use the word ‘landscape’ at all; he uses the word ‘country’ – a concept in which people and physical things are intimately bound together. Therefore, when you describe the Elizabethan landscape as it appears to you, you are not necessarily describing the ‘country’ as Elizabethan people see it. Every act of seeing is unique – and that is as true for an Elizabethan farmer looking at his growing corn as it is for you now, travelling back to the sixteenth century.

  Towns

  Stratford-upon-Avon lies in the very heart of England, about ninety-four miles north-west of London. The medieval parish church stands at the southern end of the town, only a few yards from the River Avon that flows lazily in a gradual curve along the east side. A squat wooden spire stands on top of the church tower. If you look north, you will see the handsome stone bridge of fourteen arches built by Sir Hugh Clopton in the 1490s. Cattle graze in the wide meadow on the far bank; there is a small wooden bridge downstream where the mill looks over the narrowing of the river.

  Standing in this part of Stratford in November 1558, at the very start of Elizabeth’s reign, you may well think that the town has barely changed since the Middle Ages. If you walk towards the centre, most of the buildings you see are medieval. Directly opposite as you leave the churchyard is the stone quadrangle of the college, founded in the 1330s by Stratford’s most notable son, John Stratford, archbishop of Canterbury. Passing an orchard and a couple of low, two-storey thatched cottages, you come to a muddy corner: turn right into Church Street. Looking ahead, you will see the regular divisions of the tenements. These are substantial timber-framed houses, many of them the full width of sixty feet laid down when the town was planned in the twelfth century.2 A hundred yards further along on your right are the almshouses of the medieval Guild of the Holy Cross. These make up a line of timber-framed, two-storey buildings with unglazed windows, tiled roofs and jetties that project out above the street at a height of six feet. Beyond is the grammar school and hall of the Guild, a similar long, low building, with whitewashed timbers and wooden struts across the windows. Adjacent is the chapel of the Guild, with its handsome stone tower. Its clock chimes on the hour as you step along the muddy street in the damp autumn air.

  Keep walking. On your right, directly across the lane from the chapel, is the most prestigious house in the town: New Place, built by Sir Hugh Clopton – the man who constructed the bridge. It is three storeys high and timber-framed, with brick between the timbers, not willow and plaster work. Five bays wide, it has one large window on either side of the central porch, five windows on the floor above and five on the floor above that. Each of the top-floor windows is set in a gable looking out across the town. The whole proud edifice is a fitting tribute to a successful businessman. In 1558, Sir Hugh is the second-most-famous man of Stratford (after the archbishop), and a figure greatly admired by the townsfolk. The boys leaving the grammar school and walking back into the centre of the town regard this building as a statement of success. A future pupil, William Shakespeare, will eventually follow in Sir Hugh’s footsteps, make his fortune in London and return to live out his last days in this very house.

  As you continue along the street, you come across a few narrower buildings, where the old tenements have been divided to create widths of thirty feet (half a plot), twenty (one-third) or just fifteen feet. The narrower houses tend to be taller: three storeys, with timber jetties projecting out a foot or so further at each level. Unlike some towns, however, the houses in Stratford do not shut out the light with their overhanging upper storeys. Those market towns that were carefully planned in the Middle Ages have such wide thoroughfares that plenty of light enters the front parlours and workshops. Here in the High Street you will find glovers, tailors and butchers as well as a couple of wealthy mercers and a wool merchant.3 Six days a week they will set up their shop boards in the street and place their wares on them to show to passers-by. Most have wooden signs – depicting dragons, lions, unicorns, cauldrons, barrels – hanging by metal hooks from projecting wooden arms. Note that the symbols painted on the signs are not necessarily related to the trade practised: a goldsmith’s shop may well be called ‘The Green Dragon’ and a glover might work by the sign of ‘The White Hart’. On your right, leading down to the pasture on the riverbank, is Sheep Street, where more wool merchants live and wool and animals are traded. On your left, in Ely Street, swine change hands. Carry on along the High Street for another hundred yards or so and you will come to the main market cross: a covered area where needle-makers, hosiers and similar artificers sell their goods. Beyond is the principal market place, Bridge Street. This is more of a long rectangular open space than a street – or, at least, it used to be: the centre is now filled with stalls and shops at street level and domestic lodgings on the floors above.

  At this point, if you turn right you will see Sir Hugh Clopton’s magnificent bridge over a wide shallow stretch of the river. Turn left and you will find two streets of timber-framed houses. One of these is Wood Street, which leads to the cattle market. The other, leading north-west, is Henley Street. Go along here, and on
the right-hand side you’ll find the house occupied by the glover, John Shakespeare, his wife Mary and their firstborn daughter, Joan. Like almost all the other houses in the borough, this has a wattle-and-plaster infill between the beams, with a low roof covering its three bays. This is the house in which their gifted son will be born in April 1564.