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Introduction

Trying to understand the trials and tribulations of ordinary Tudor life has been my passion for the last twenty-five years. There are other periods of history that I have an interest in, but in truth my heart lies somewhere in the middle of Elizabeth I’s reign. I am both constantly delighted with the ‘otherness’ of Tudor thinking and beguiled by the echoes that have slipped through into modern life, from the belief that redheads have hot tempers to the order in which we eat our meals, with starters, mains and desserts to follow. To get the chance to write some of it down and share my love for all things sixteenth-century has therefore been a delight, rather like being let loose in the sweet shop.

The Tudor era is a long and complicated one, encompassing some of the greatest changes in our history, and no book can hope to tell the truth about all the lives lived throughout it. This, then, is necessarily a series of snapshots of the daily realities of some of the people, some of the time, but for all its incompleteness it is still a heartfelt attempt to understand the practicalities, thoughts and difficulties of our forebears.

To set the scene, in 1485 when Henry Tudor seized the throne, there were under two million people in England and perhaps another half a million in Wales (figures for Scotland and Ireland are almost entirely conjectural). By the time his granddaughter Elizabeth I died in 1603, the population of England and Wales combined had doubled to around four million. More than 90 per cent of the population lived in rural areas. London boasted a population of no more than 50,000 at the start of the period but quadrupled in size to 200,000 by the end, and at all times it contained around half of the entire urban population. This small but energetic population was to become a cultural powerhouse whose ideas and way of life were to influence the subsequent history not just of Britain but of the world.

Throughout this book I have used the term ‘Britain’ as a loose cultural concept, not a political reality. Scotland was an independent nation; Wales was controlled by England throughout the period but the two nations only became legally united in 1536; and English control over Ireland was distant, patchy and fraught. Politically it makes more sense to speak only of England and Wales as an effective power bloc, and when you start to search through the surviving evidence there is a temptation to speak only of England, and southern England at that, where the vast bulk of available information is concentrated. Yet I feel that in much of Wales and at least in some parts of Ireland and indeed Scotland cultural connections and shared ways of life were present, and to write only of England would be quite misleading.

The rural majority were socially organized according to land holdings. The aristocracy at the top of the tree – limited to those holding titles as peers of the realm – owned several large estates, maintained households of up to 150 people and moved periodically between their houses on each estate and a town house in London. Theirs was a very public life of politics and power. Beneath them sat the gentry, whose land holdings were generally smaller and more concentrated geographically. Officially a gentleman was someone who had the right to a coat of arms, but in practice a gentleman was anyone who lived according to generally accepted standards, engaging in no productive labour, owning and renting out land for others to work, maintaining a suitable-sized house, wearing suitable clothing, and entertaining on a suitable scale. Those who were called gentlemen by their neighbours boasted homes of six or more rooms, had several servants whose main focus was personal and domestic service, dressed in the best woollen broadcloths trimmed with silks and furs, sat down to three or four dishes of meat at dinner, and expected to lead local society and hold public office.

Far more numerous were the yeomen. Their land was often rented from those above them, though many owned portions as well, and they farmed it all themselves. In terms of pure wealth, some were richer than some of the gentlemen, but theirs was a life of active involvement on the land. Most of their servants were not of a personal or domestic nature, but farm servants helping to till the soil and care for livestock. Some did hold junior public positions such as churchwarden or constable, but essentially they were prosperous farmers with four- or five-room houses, good wool clothing and simple but hearty dinners.

Next came the husbandmen, farming their rented lands on a much smaller scale. Their homes were generally two-room affairs and most of the labour came purely from within the family. They were the most numerous of all the groups and their lives held precious few luxuries.

Below them were the labourers who held no land at all but had to hire themselves out to their socially superior neighbours for a daily wage. As our period moves forward, their numbers gradually grew as husbandmen increasingly struggled to maintain an independent hold on the land and joined their ranks. It was a precarious life and one generally lived in single-room dwellings with a diet dominated by bread and little else.

For our tiny urban population the hierarchy was a little different, with international merchants occupying the top spots, serving as mayors, living in large, well-furnished and well-staffed town houses, occasionally hobnobbing with the landed elite. Other merchants formed the next layer down, employing apprentices and servants and living a life that was a little more comfortable, but of a similar social level to that of yeomen. Craftsmen occupied the next slot, aided by their apprentices and family, with typically one or two rooms in addition to a workshop. And, just as in the countryside, the bottom of the pile consisted of labourers paid by the day.

The Tudor economy was essentially a money economy, barter being no more common than in our own times, but what it could buy was fundamentally different. Within a twenty-first-century household, food costs consume typically around 17 per cent of the total income, but within a Tudor context food dominated most people’s expenses, taking around 80 per cent. To understand what money meant to a craftsman contemplating a new coat, it is necessary to think more in terms of disposable income, what was left once the family were fed and the rent paid. For a husbandman’s wife, the decision whether to buy in ale, make it herself or let the family make do with water was one that required weighing one set of monetary needs against another, with the margins tipping the balance. At the start of our period a skilled man could command a wage of 4d a day when he was in work, and women could bring in about half that. By the end of the era a skilled wage was more usually 6d. These figures represented the basic survival level for a small family in regular work, enough to eat a plain, cheap diet, but not much more. It is against this subsistence level of financial resources that prices and resources can be gauged.

This then was the structure within which people had to negotiate a livelihood and find a sense of self.

There are many books and studies based on the lives of the Tudor elite, upon the powerful and well-documented, but my interest has always been bound up with the more humble sections of society. As a fairly ordinary person myself who needs to eat, sleep and change the occasional nappy, I wanted from the beginning to know how people coped day to day, to know what resources they really had at their disposal, what skills they needed to acquire and what it all felt like. Twenty-five years ago I could find no book to tell me, and even now when social history receives far more academic attention than before, information is still thin on the ground. So I set out to try and work it out for myself: hunting up period recipes and trying them out; learning to manage fires and skin rabbits; standing on one foot with a dance manual in one hand, trying to make sense of where my next move should be. The more I experimented, the more information I began to find within the period texts that I was looking at. Things that I had just skimmed past in the reading became quite critical in practice, prompting more questions and very much more intense research. Many repeated statements about Tudor life, quoted in very respectable works, turned out to be pure fantasy.

Take for example the assertion that Tudor food was all highly spiced in order to disguise the taste of bad meat. It has thankfully now faded from view as a commonly repeated ‘fact’, but for many years appeared in materials for school use and even within the preambles of some of our most respected historians’ works. A little practical thought quickly points out that nothing disguises the taste of bad meat, that spices were considerably more expensive than a new fresh piece of meat, and that rotten meat makes you sick regardless of its taste. If received wisdom was wrong and food was not highly spiced for disguising taste, was it highly spiced at all? Such thoughts sent me back to look at the import records to see how much spice was entering the country, and at the few surviving household accounts to see how much was bought; and to look again at prices and wages, and to begin to treat the recipe books as well as oft-repeated ‘truths’ with a pinch of salt. These were clearly not records of diet but rather aspirational documents, concentrating upon all that was most luxurious, desirable and fashionable. If I wanted to know about what people ate, how they cooked it and what it tasted like, I was going to have to look a lot further than the recipes.

I found myself increasingly drawn into the web of life, the way everything connected, the interplay between the physical world, ideas, beliefs and practice. Why on earth, for example, would someone believe that tying herrings to the soles of the feet would cure insomnia? Would they really do it and could it possibly work? I found that it was the whole lifestyle that interested me, which is why this book is a broad gallop through a typical day, touching upon the different threads that made up the Tudor way of life, a taste of the ordinary that seems to us so extraordinary.

Wills and probate inventories have been invaluable in hunting out the commonplace. While they have their shortcomings as historical sources, rarely including those at the bottom and seriously underrepresenting women, they do give a feel for what resources were usual and point out the contrasts in the lives of different social groups and geographical locations. Sometimes they even give us a glimpse of a person’s thoughts, feelings and family relationships, such as the baker John Abelson of Olney, Buckinghamshire, who made provision for his wife and his six children, from mention of a grown-up son now in London to his daughter Elizabeth ‘being an innocent’. The phrase ‘being an innocent’ points to her as being mentally handicapped, and another of her brothers is left a substantial holding on condition that he gives her a permanent home. Court records meanwhile contain snapshots of lives at crisis point, when people’s beliefs and assumptions as well as their behaviour come under the spotlight. Testimony can often record their very words. Coroners’ records talk of the accidents and personal conflicts that beset daily life. Books, pamphlets and ballad sheets give us an insight into the thought processes of the more educated and masculine portion of society, and their moans and diatribes hint at the differing values and experiences of others. Even tax records have their place in outlining daily habits, such as the prevalence of cheap combs and the scarcity of pepper.

I have attempted many aspects of the Tudor life, often repeatedly as I try to hone my skills and experiment with different interpretations of the evidence that I am seeking to understand. I don’t claim to have cracked it, but I do have a very much fuller idea of Tudor realities now than I did when I started all those years ago. It’s an ongoing journey and one that I would love to share with you.

1. At Cock’s Crow

First in a mornyng whan thou arte waken and purpose to ryse, lyfte up thy hande and blesse the, and make a sygne of the holy crosse, In nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti, Amen. In the name of the father, the sonne, and the holy gooste. And if thou say a pater noster, an Ave and a crede, and remember thy maker, thou shalt spede moch the better.

John Fitzherbert, The Boke of Husbandry (1533)

Just before dawn the cockerels began their morning chorus and people clambered out of bed. Few were far from a farmyard alarm clock. The vast majority of people lived a rural life. Towns were generally small and interspersed with agricultural spaces, and huge numbers of urban dwellers still kept their own chickens and pigs in the yard out the back. Cattle and sheep grazed on town commons, and a cockerel and his hens could pick a free living on every dungheap, whether it was in the stable yard of an inn or on the edge of the weekly livestock market. Only London and perhaps Norwich and Bristol could truly claim to have a population undisturbed by the morning crowing of farmyard cocks.

Cockerels like to begin their labours at the very first hint of a lightening in the sky, long before the first rays break over the horizon. Those people who waited for the initial beams of light were known as ‘slugabeds’, and likely to find their livestock restless and loudly complaining by the time they got to them. Most people rose as the sky paled, to the sounds of birds and animals stirring. Summer days began at 4 a.m. therefore, while deep in the depths of winter there was little point in rising in the pitch black of night, delaying the business of the day to the much later hour of 7 a.m.

Window glass was still a luxury product, the preserve of the gentry and the richer sorts of merchants, so for the majority of the population the first grey of predawn would have made its way in through an oiled cloth shutter that kept the rain and the worst of the wind out while letting some light through. Some people had wooden shutters, however, which were more secure and kept all but the thinnest fingers of light out.

Yet if window glass was uncommon, curtains at the window were even rarer. Curtains were not for windows, they were for beds. The owner of a curtained bed was lucky indeed. A room within a room – warm, dark and private – a four-poster, curtained and canopied bed was one of the most sought after and highly prized household items in Tudor times. After bequests of landholdings and cash, beds were often the very first thing upon the minds of those making their wills. Shakespeare’s famous bequest of his second-best bed to his wife, Anne, is sometimes seen as a slight, a symbol of a broken relationship, but I doubt that Anne or anyone else in the family saw it like that. Although his best bed went to his married daughter, he made sure that his wife would be warm and comfortable in her later years.

Many people have spent a night in a four-poster bed at a hotel, and some may have one at home, but they are unlikely to have got the full benefit from it within a modern building. Think instead of a Tudor room, which would have been draughty even if there was glass in the window frame. Tudor houses rarely had corridors, and access to rooms was generally through other rooms, so people would wander through now and again, and servants and children would be asleep on other beds within the same room. Even within larger, wealthier homes, few people had a room to themselves. With no separate servants’ quarters (that was a later architectural development), some of the largest houses had the most crowded bedrooms. A house’s occupants were more likely to be divided according to sex rather than social class, with male children and servants in one room and female children and servants in another. You, meanwhile, are tucked up inside your own private tent of thick, usually woollen, curtains, which muffle the sounds of other people’s snores, allow a fug of warmth to build overnight, and keep away prying eyes and ears.

Beds came in a range of shapes, sizes and materials, and I have slept in them all: simple piles of straw on earthen floors; sacks of straw on raised sleeping platforms; pieces of rush matting; wooden box beds; rope-strung truckle beds (small bedsteads on wheels that could be moved out of the way during the day, beneath larger bedsteads); hay mattresses, flock or wool mattresses and feather beds. Some had just blankets, while others had sheets, pillows, bolsters and coverlets. Some of the four-posters came with wooden ceilings (generally called ‘testers’), and some with cloth tops. I have used such beds at all times of year, in temperatures ranging from twenty-eight degrees Centigrade to minus ten, in the snow and frost as well as the height of summer, alone and in company. I can confidently state that I understand why so many Tudor people gave beds a central position in their thoughts.

The more elaborate the bed, the more expensive it was, and beds belonging to the nobility – with four-post testers, silken hangings, multiple mattresses, fine linen sheets and ample sumptuous coverings – could be worth more than a small-scale farmer’s entire holding. Yeomen and husbandmen living and working upon the land generally made do with a wooden bedstead and a flock or wool mattress, while their labourers and servants were lucky to be up off the floor. A simple loose pile of straw formed the bedding of many of the landless, especially at the beginning of the period.

Sleeping in a loose pile of straw upon an earthen floor in your clothes is fine when the straw is clean and well fluffed up, and there is plenty of it, at least for a night or two. But it is not a good long-term solution. Mice and rats were common, and loose straw can work its way between every layer of clothing. After a few days the straw begins to break into short lengths and splinters, which irritate the skin far more. The dust can cause problems for many people, and it is hard to keep yourself clean. Simply putting the straw into a closely woven sack, and sleeping on that, works much better so long as you give the sack a really good shake each day. If you fail to look after your bed, it can quickly become compacted and lumpy.

The word ‘bed’ in Tudor England meant something close to what we today mean by the word ‘mattress’, so this straw-filled sack was known as a straw bed in its own right. A wooden frame to raise it off the floor was an additional refinement, listed in inventories and wills as a bedstead. Hay-filled beds are far more comfortable than straw beds, as hay is a softer, finer material, and there are even differences between types of straw. Barley straw is more comfortable than wheat straw, for example.

Many people carefully selected not just the main bulk of the straw, but also additional stuffing from the straw of particular plants to aid a good night’s sleep. A whole family of plants has the common name ‘bedstraw’ for precisely this reason. Lady’s bedstraw, or Galium verum, was considered to be the finest. Not only is it very soft to sleep on, but it smells of freshly mown hay even when dry and old, and it helps to deter insects, in particular fleas and body lice. If such insects were a major problem and lady’s bedstraw was simply not powerful enough to ensure nocturnal safety, then small amounts of dried wormwood were effective, if smelly. Changing the bed regularly – emptying out the old straw and refilling with fresh – also helped with both comfort and hygiene. According to the medical theory of the time (and something that is also believed today), lavender was good at promoting sleep, so a handful of dried lavender among the straw at the head end of the bed was also a good idea.

At the beginning of the Tudor period many people didn’t even have a straw bed of their own but simply lay down upon the floor. This is not quite as grim as it sounds, however. Many homes still used loose rushes in a deep layer as a floor covering, which removed the necessity for furniture. In addition, domestic buildings were mostly heated by open hearths in the very centre of the room, which allowed the smoke of the fire to make its own way up and out. These central hearths were good at heating the indoor space, with none of the energy being lost up a chimney (chimneys had yet to make much impact on ordinary life, and in 1500 were still largely confined to stone-built castles and monasteries). Hearths were also convenient for cooking upon, allowing 360-degree access. However, the smoke did tend to hang in the air. The higher up you were, the more smoke there was. Spend time in such a building with the fire lit and you’ll soon notice that there is a distinct smoke horizon below which the air is clear and breathable and above which it is not. Life, then, must be lived beneath the smoke layer. Furniture that raises you up is not helpful; you are better off living on the floor, so that floor needs to be warm, dry and comfortable to sit and sleep upon.

There are plenty of references to the strewing of rushes upon floors, from Thomas Tusser’s A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie (1557) back to thirteenth-century poems and on to the plays of Shakespeare. In 1515 the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus wrote in a letter that the floors of English houses ‘are, in general, laid with white clay, and are covered with rushes, occasionally renewed, but so imperfectly that the bottom layer is left undisturbed, sometimes for twenty years, harbouring expectoration, vomiting, the leakage of dogs and men, ale droppings, scraps of fish and other abominations not fit to be mentioned’. If you can accept that this is a man ranting about foreign customs – he goes on to make a huge fuss about the disgusting, unhealthy damp air in England – then it sounds much like a description of modern fitted carpets. The top surface is regularly cleaned, but drinks do get spilled, accidents from pets and children do happen, and the carpet itself carries on getting nastier and nastier at its base. But exactly how well (or poorly) strewn rushes work in practice is something that I have learnt a lot about from experimentation. The earliest trial I was involved in was at the Globe Theatre. There are accounts from Tudor times of the London stages being strewn with rushes. Inspired by these records, we bought fresh rushes, at considerable cost, and scattered them upon the wooden stage. It soon became clear that the rushes were problematic, however: the long stems became caught up in the skirts of the men playing female characters. The rushes were then cut into shorter lengths, which did help, but the actors still found the surface difficult to move around on. We talked about whether the rushes were spread too thinly, and if there needed to be an edge, rather like a kerb, to contain them, but budgets did not allow us to experiment any further.

My chance to try again with rushes came during the making of a programme about castle building. I had a one-room, timber-framed house to work with, an earthen floor, a central hearth, and a nearby marshy area where rushes grew. I found that they performed best when laid in bundles rather than as individual stems, and that the layer needed to be a minimum of two inches thick if the rushes were to stay put and form a consolidated surface. With walls all around, the rushes were contained and much more stable than they were on the theatre stage; I never had any problem with them becoming caught up in my skirts. Left to dry, the rushes turned straw yellow and eventually began to fray and break down into dusty, splintery pieces, but if they were occasionally dampened they kept their suppleness, their pale green colour and their fresh, cucumberish smell. This had the added advantage of ensuring that they didn’t catch light when sparks from the fire landed on them. Since we were sitting and lying on the rushes, I never wet them enough to make them soggy, but just sprayed them lightly from a watering can every few days.

When I laid them at six inches thick I had a floor that was genuinely comfortable to sleep on. The rushes are good insulators, so none of the chill of the ground reached me and the depth gave me a springy and soft bed. A couple of blankets provided all the additional bedding I needed. It certainly makes sense of the sleeping arrangements that one finds detailed in medieval and early Tudor sources. When people talk of the majority of the household sleeping on the floor in the Great Hall, this is how it worked. If you imagine beds or even bed rolls that are put up and down daily, you also have to wonder where they were stored during the day. With a rush floor there is no difficulty. One chest could store the blankets for six or seven people, and converting the space from daytime to night-time use becomes extremely easy.

At the end of my six months of castle building I had a look at the state of the rushes. Not all of us had been sleeping on them every night, but they had most certainly been heavily used by my colleagues and me, both on and off screen, for sitting, walking, standing and working on. Much food had been cooked in there, much drink drunk, and all the spillages that you might expect had certainly happened. A hen had moved in and raised a brood of chicks among us on the rush floor – we didn’t have the heart to evict her – and they of course had been rather messy; there was also a mouse that kept trying to raid the grain ark. But there was no sign whatsoever of any of this activity. That the surface remained clean was no great surprise: stuff simply fell down between the rushes, out of sight, smell and mind. We never noticed any odour or muck the whole time we were there. But when I came to clean it all out at the end I had expected there to be gunge at the bottom. There wasn’t. It was clean and sweet-smelling, free of both insects and evidence of rodents. The earth was clean and smelt only of itself, while the bottom layer of rushes had broken down a little into a dryish, fibrous sort of compost. There was no mould, mildew, slime or gunge of any sort. What it would be like after twenty years I don’t know, but as Erasmus himself implies it was only in the occasional home that the bottom layer was left undisturbed for that long. It is clear to me that it is possible to manage a floor with strewn rushes cleanly and comfortably without too much effort.

As the sixteenth century rolled on, however, fewer and fewer people lay down at night upon the floor. In a wave of home improvements that swept the nation, open hearths become less and less common and chimneys begin to dominate the skyline. As chimneys were installed and homes were divided up into more rooms, there were far worse draughts at floor level. Chimneys draw the smoke up and out, and in doing so pull in cold air at ground level. A bed frame to raise you up off the floor and out of the draught becomes a much more desirable thing, and with the smoke now channelled away up the chimney, the additional height is not going to cause you breathing difficulties.

Many people took some rushes up on to the raised bed frames with them. A wooden box bed, or a frame with a solid wooden base, worked very well with the same laid rushes that had been on the floor; a rope-strung bed worked better with a rush mat. Rope-strung beds gradually took over, probably because they were cheaper to produce. An open frame was made and holes drilled all along the four sides of it, then a rope was strung back and forth lengthways. The same rope, or a separate one, was then strung widthways, between the lengthways rope. This created a square, net-like pattern with a bit of bounce to it. If the ropes loosened, the whole bed would sag in the middle, which would give one dreadful backache, so it was important to ‘sleep tight’ with the ropes under tension. Many surviving beds come with a wooden peg to help retighten the rope. Loose rushes upon this surface would simply fall through, but a woven mat not only lies firmly in place but spreads the load evenly over the whole structure so that you cannot feel the ropes digging into you. On top of the mat you could lay more loose rushes if you wished or perhaps a straw bed. Almost as a postscript, it is worth mentioning that with wooden furniture raising people up off the floor there was now very little reason to bother strewing rushes down there, and by the end of the Tudor era the practice was rapidly dying out.

A flock bed, which was found in abundance among yeomen and husbandmen, was a major step up from a straw bed. Once again it was just a tightly woven sack, but this time stuffed with sheep’s wool rather than straw. Although you can simply shove a couple of fleeces into the sack, this will quickly become lumpy and hard. Unlike a straw bed, a flock bed won’t regain its softness and open structure with just a good shake: the wool tends to felt together quite quickly. It is well worth, therefore, taking a little time to make a proper flock bed. To do this, lay out a piece of stout, tightly woven hemp or linen cloth on a table and begin to lay equal-sized, well-combed locks of wool evenly and thickly all over it, with the fibres pointing in one direction. Then add a second layer with all the fibres pointing at ninety degrees to the first. The more thoroughly combed the wool, the better. You don’t want any bits of twig, grass or even tangles causing hard lumps in the finished bed. Take a second equal-sized piece of fabric and lay it on top. Sew all the way through the layers with two or three tight stitches at about two-inch intervals, trapping the wool in place. A long strip of cloth three or four inches wide can then be attached all the way around the open edge to neaten off the bed. Naturally, fleeces were more expensive than straw, and a flock bed requires more labour to make than a straw one, so most people wanted to look after their flock beds in order to make them last. The best way to do this is to lay a flock bed on top of a straw bed. The straw bed then takes the rubbing against either ropes or boards.

Feather beds sat at the top of the comfort tree and graced the beds of the nobility, gentry and the wealthiest merchants and yeomen. Again they were just filled sacks, but the fabric containing the feathers needed to be especially tightly woven or they would work their way out. Like straw, feathers respond well to vigorous shaking, so there is no need to make a more structured bed. Feather beds are not just the softest beds to sleep on, they are also the warmest. As you sink into them they hold the heat around as well as beneath you. They are most effective when used in conjunction with another bed beneath. And like so many things they vary in quality. How many feathers there are in the bed makes a big difference – the more the better, generally. Small, fluffy, down feathers are better than larger feathers, and the down from eider ducks is the warmest and softest of all; however, as eider ducks are seabirds, eiderdown was hard to get hold of in most of inland Britain.

With all of these various stuffed beds, there is of course nothing to say that you had to sleep on them. Each and every one, from straw to feather, would have worked equally well as a sort of duvet on top. It may be that where people had multiple beds they slept between them.

Ideally, then, the very best Tudor bed would have consisted of a wooden frame with posts at all four corners, a substantial wooden headboard, a thick fabric top, and heavy full curtains all around. It would have had tightly pulled ropes across the bottom, upon which would have sat a thick fresh rush mat; a straw bed packed full of lady’s bedstraw interspersed with a little lavender would have sat on top of the rush. Next would have come a flock bed, with not one but two feather beds above that, the finer quality one sitting at the very top. A bed so soft, warm and comfortable that even a princess should not feel a pea buried down at the bottom. Sheets of finest linen, with bolsters and pillows of feather encased in more linen, together with blankets and an embroidered coverlet, would have completed the ensemble.

From such a bed it would have been hard indeed to rise at cockcrow. But how many people had such a bed to tempt them? It is hard to be certain. If a bedstead, its hangings and beds were listed in someone’s will or inventory, then you know that they had such things at the end of their life, but if they were not listed you cannot be sure that they didn’t possess them. Beds may, for example, just have been part of a general category, such as when someone simply mentions ‘all of my household goods’, and only some people left wills at all.

What we can say is that there are a lot more such beds mentioned at the end of the Tudor period than at the beginning, and that wealthier people were more likely to have had them than those of modest means. In 1587 Thomas and Sarah Taylor, who lived in Stratford-upon-Avon, were a very ordinary urban couple, reasonably well off, but not rich. They had been married for over fourteen years and had five surviving children – Florence, Annis, William, George and Joan – having lost four other children. Thomas made his living in the cloth trade and had a small workshop as part of the house in Sheep Street where he fulled and sheared woven cloth (a finishing process that turned open-textured cloth into something that looked attractively sheer and was much more windproof and waterproof) before it went on to the dyers. Thomas and Sarah had one joined bedstead (with a headboard, posts and curtains), one truckle bed and three other bedsteads. To go on top of the wooden frames they had five flock beds, five coverlets, five bolsters, four pillows, a pair of blankets and two pairs of sheets. It was a comfortable amount then for a family of seven, but not full provision for everyone, and certainly nothing was spare. Presumably Thomas and Sarah shared the joined bedstead with its curtains around, lying upon one of the flock beds and one of the bolsters. They may also have enjoyed one of the pairs of sheets and two of the pillows, with a coverlet over the top. Three of the children could have had a bedstead, flock bed, bolster and coverlet to themselves, but the other two may have had to double up. Since the youngest, Joan, was only just over a year old, it is possible that she had a makeshift crib or shared with her parents, but either way most of the children had to manage without sheets.

Meanwhile, the maidservant of a woman named Katherine Salisbury, who was also from Stratford, was provided with just a flock bed, blanket and covering. The rooms of Katherine’s house were inventoried one by one. Her own room contained both a bedstead and a truckle bed, and the guest room had a full standing bed, but the maid’s room was conspicuously without a bedstead of any type. Even at the end of the century there were plenty of people who still slept on the floor.

Morning prayer

The prayer at first waking was a personal affair, said alone and privately, though preferably aloud rather than silently. Beginning the day with a prayer was a constant throughout the Tudor era, although the language and content of that prayer would undergo a fundamental change. Christianity was almost entirely unchallenged as an explanation of the universe, but the nature of Christianity was the hottest of all topics and the focus of vast conflict and upheaval: from Catholic to Protestant, back to Catholic and then back to Protestant again, with many variations in both denominations along the way and often at the same time. It was a subject over which people were willing to suffer impoverishment, become social outcasts, or even die.

When the goldsmith John Collan of York died in 1490 he left among his goods a primer – a book of prayers in Latin – that was valued at just six pence, roughly two days’ wages for a labouring man at that time. It may have been an old book in very poor condition to be so cheap, or it may have been brand new, straight off the presses of William Caxton, whose first printed primer was produced that same year. Six pence would have been a fair price for one of the new printed prayer books, whether it was Caxton’s or one imported from the Continent. With this book John Collan could have followed a basic version of the monastic cycle of prayer, reciting a slightly simplified version of the office of Lauds at dawn. Perhaps he did so in private every morning when he rose, or perhaps he led his household in a more communal act of devotion. In either case he would have read the Latin words aloud. Such familiar words may well have needed only occasional prompting from the written text.

As the fifteenth century slipped into the sixteenth, such relatively inexpensive primers became more available. New editions were being produced by Wynkyn de Worde here in Britain, and on the Continent some were being specifically designed for the English market and printed mainly in Paris and the Low Countries. For the gentry and for wealthy merchants, these new printed books offered a form of morning prayer that had previously been the preserve of the clergy and the aristocracy. For everyone else, morning prayer meant the recitation of a stock of prayers learnt by rote.

John Fitzherbert’s advice at the beginning of this chapter was entirely conventional at the time. Written just before the Reformation, it recommends the recitation out loud of the most well-known blessing in Latin, ‘In nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti, Amen’, while making the traditional gesture of a cross over the chest, and also suggests the optional addition of the paternoster (the Lord’s Prayer) and the Ave Maria prayer, along with the Creed (a list of the core Christian beliefs). The ubiquity of this beginning to the day is hinted at by the context of Fitzherbert’s advice. This was not an extract from a devotional book, nor was it part of the educational literature aimed at the training up of wealthy children: this was advice to housewives in a book about agricultural practice and farming techniques.

After Henry VIII broke away from Rome, morning prayer began to undergo a series of changes. Initially they were slight, but by 1545 there was an official primer, with all references to the Pope and to Thomas à Becket and the word ‘purgatory’ removed, and with much less focus upon the Virgin Mary; no other primer was to be used. Surviving older primers often have offending references dutifully rubbed or crossed out. Pressure too was beginning to build in favour of the rote-learnt prayers being recited in English rather than Latin. During Edward VI’s reign the Lord’s Prayer in English came to dominate the approved list of rote devotions, and the official primer began to resemble the later Book of Common Prayer. Latin and something akin to the 1545 primer returned under Mary I, but as Elizabeth I’s reign began to settle down it is clear that the recitation of fixed prayers, whether learnt by rote or read from a primer, was beginning to lose its centrality in the daily practice of morning prayer. Religious literature instead began to resemble extended essays or sermons, where people extemporized upon a theme.

By 1577 the educationalist Hugh Rhodes was telling children in his Boke of Nurture:

At five of the clocke, without delay,

Use commonly to ryse:

And give God thanks for thy good rest

When thou openest thyne eyes.

Pray him also to prosper thee,

And thyne affayres in deede

The better shalte thou speede.

The idea of morning prayer holds strong, but there is no approved list of words to be used. The recitation of doctrinally screened forms of words could encourage orthodox behaviour and belief, but the Protestant reformers were keen to promote a more personal and direct approach to God, and many had come to see rote-learnt prayers as a barrier to emotional and intellectual engagement with the Christian message. Better, they thought, for people to search their own hearts and come up with their own words, words that had significance and meaning to them. Free-form prayer, they believed, could offer a deeper spiritual experience.

Many people, of course, were keen to have some guidance about the nature of this more free-form, unscripted prayer. A Handfull of Holesome (though Homelie) Hearbs, written by Anne Wheathill in 1584, is unusual only in having been written by a woman. It offered a series of prayers for different situations that a person could read and think upon. Carefully conventional and well within the doctrines of the Church of England, it begins with a prayer for the morning. It is one of the shorter of her prayers and could easily be read through in five minutes, ending with the plea ‘here me deare Father and send thy holie Ghost to direct me in all my doings. To thee O glorious and blessed Trinity, the Father, the Sonne, and the holie Ghost, be given all honour and praise, now and for ever more, Amen.’ Protestant, English and free-form it may be, but the echoes of the old traditional Catholic form of morning prayer are very audible.

Ruth Goodman

HOW TO BE A TUDOR

A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Everyday Life

VIKING

Contents

THE BEGINNING

By the same author

Introduction

1. At Cock’s Crow

Morning prayer