A Brief History of the Tudor Age (21 page)

The Renaissance led to new developments in carving and design of furniture in Italy and Flanders at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and by 1550 many Flemish craftsmen had been invited to
England to improve the furniture at court and in the houses of the nobility; but they merely elaborated the quality of the design of the wooden furniture. The carvings on the great oak chairs,
tables and chests, and on the headboards of beds, became much more elaborate, and the wooden table-legs were
carved into complicated shapes. But it was only in the very last
years of the Tudor Age, about 1600, that the first upholstered furniture and the first chests-of-drawers appeared, very occasionally, in the house of a wealthy Englishman whose tastes were in
advance of his contemporaries’; and they were not generally in use, even among the upper classes, until the reign of Charles II.

The oak armchairs were not as uncomfortable as might be imagined by later generations who are used to the luxury of upholstered furniture. The shape of the chair was designed to provide the
maximum relaxation for the body, though people today, who are not accustomed to it, experience some discomfort from the solid oak front below the seat which makes it impossible for the sitter to
put his legs back under the seat, even to the slightest extent. The wooden seat of the chair was made softer by a cushion placed on it; in wealthy households, this might be a velvet cushion.

Wealthy families had large four-poster beds, surrounded by curtains which, like the linen caps worn by the sleepers in the bed, helped keep them warm in the cold bedroom after the fire had gone
out, or had burned low during the night. They could display their wealth and taste by having bed-curtains of rich material, headboards with elaborate carvings, and by the size of the bed. But large
beds were not the privilege of the nobility and the rich. In less prosperous households, there would often be one large bed in which all the members of the family slept together, while Henry VIII
and Wolsey slept alone in a bed which was nearly as large. Gentlemen often provided a large bed in which their servants and labourers slept together, and this practice continued until the end of
the nineteenth century.

One of these beds, ‘the great bed of Ware’, became famous because it was so much larger than any of the others. No one knows when it was made, though it has been dated as early as
1463 and as late as 1570. The later date is much more likely. It was for many years in the inn, the Saracen’s Head, at Ware, until it was moved to Rye House in the nineteenth century, and
afterwards to the Victoria and Albert Museum in Kensington,
where it can be seen today. It is 11 foot 1 inch long, 10 foot 81/2 inches wide, and 8 foot high, and has ornate
carvings on the headboard and legs. Some historians have suggested that so impressive and costly a bed could not originally have been made for an inn, and must have been designed for one of the
great houses in the vicinity, and later acquired by the inn. This may be so, but it was probably already in the Saracen’s Head when Shakespeare wrote
Twelfth Night
in 1601, because
Sir Toby Belch urges Sir Andrew Aguecheek to insert, in his challenge to Cesario, ‘as many lies as will lie in thy sheet of paper, although the sheet were big enough for the bed of Ware in
England’; and Ben Jonson referred to it in his
Silent Woman
eight years later. Shakespeare and Jonson and their audiences are much more likely to have heard of it if it was not in a
private house but in an inn on the Great North Road where many people had seen it, and perhaps slept in it, sharing it with other travellers.

The walls of the rooms in poor men’s houses were made of plaster; in the houses of the wealthy classes, they were finely carved oak panelling. There were no pictures on the walls. At the
beginning of the Tudor Age, painting was almost unknown in England, and though portrait painting was introduced by Flemish artists in the reign of Henry VIII, the idea of landscape painting did not
develop in England until the eighteenth century. Instead, the walls, in wealthy houses, were hung with tapestries. When the Venetian ambassador, Guistiniani, visited Wolsey at Hampton Court on
diplomatic business soon after his arrival in England in 1515, he was led through eight anterooms before he reached Wolsey’s presence, and saw in each of these rooms beautiful and expensive
tapestries which were changed once a week and replaced by others equally magnificent. They depicted scenes from the Bible, with Esther, David and Solomon; from classical mythology, with Jupiter and
Diana, Paris and Achilles, Jason and Hercules, and Helen of Troy; from the lives of Hannibal, Pompey and Julius Caesar; and from the medieval stories,
The Romance of the Rose
, and
The
Duke of Bry and the
giant Orrible
. On the borders of the tapestries, Wolsey’s coat-of-arms was much in evidence.

There were mattresses and pillows on the beds, as there had been in the days of the Romans and at least in the houses of the wealthier classes throughout the Middle Ages. The inventories of
Hampton Court show that Wolsey owned hundreds of mattresses and pillows; and humbler people usually had at least one mattress for their bed. These were often of very poor quality, and stuffed with
material which was harmful to health; so in 1496 the Wardens of the Fellowship of the Craft of Upholsters within the City of London persuaded Parliament to stop the manufacture of featherbeds,
bolsters and pillows made either of scalded feathers or dry puffed feathers, or of a mixture of flocks and feathers, ‘which is contagious for man’s body to be on’. They also
wished to ban quilts, mattresses and cushions stuffed with horse hair, deer’s hair or goat’s hair, for ‘by the heat of man’s body the savours and taste is so abominable and
contagious that many of the King’s subjects have thereby been destroyed’. The practice had also impoverished many people and discredited the craft of upholstery. Parliament duly enacted
that all featherbeds, bolsters and pillows must be stuffed with either dry pulled feathers or with clean down, and nothing else, and all quilts, mattresses and cushions only with clean flocks. The
poorest families could not afford to buy mattresses, or pillows, and made their own. They were exempted from the provisions of the Acts, which did not apply to mattresses, bolsters, pillows or
cushions which were made, not for sale, but for use in the manufacturer’s own house.

The wealthier classes at least had ironware in their houses – iron chests, iron lampholders, and iron firedogs and firebacks, often engraved with the coat-of-arms of the owner of the
house. In the greatest houses, there was an ostentatious display of silver and gold plate. Guistiniani was as impressed as he was meant to be with Wolsey’s gold and silver at Hampton Court.
Both he and the next Venetian ambassador estimated the value of all the plate in the house at 300,000 gold ducats, or £150,000 – which in
terms of 1988 prices would
be £75,000,000. Guistiniani wrote that the plate on view on the sideboard in the banqueting hall was alone worth £25,000, and that there was a cupboard in Wolsey’s private chamber
which contained gold and silver plate valued at £30,000.

The eating utensils of ordinary families were far simpler. The poorer classes ate off wooden plates; reasonably prosperous yeomen, like merchants and gentlemen, had pewter plates. The big demand
for pewter dishes led to a surreptitious trade to which reputable pewterers and their guild objected. They complained to Henry VII that ‘many simple and evil disposed persons . . . daily go
about this your realm from village, from town and from house to house, as well in woods and forests’, selling pewter and brass which had often been adulterated with other metals and had
sometimes been stolen by thieves from their lawful owners. An Act of Parliament was therefore passed in 1504 which prohibited the sale of pewter anywhere except in fairs and markets; but it could
take place at the buyer’s house if the buyer had expressly requested the seller to come to his house to sell it to him there.

Every household in the country possessed at least one knife, which had nearly always been made in Sheffield in Yorkshire, where knives had been manufactured since the fourteenth century; but not
even the greatest palaces had any eating forks, which were not known in England until a few years after the end of the Tudor Age. In every social class, meat was cut up with a knife and then placed
in the mouth with the fingers. Spoons were used for soup and other dishes. The poorer families had wooden spoons, but for the rich, spoons gave another opportunity to display wealth and taste in
silver. Silver spoons were made in various designs and fashions, which changed from one decade to another.

Water, beer, ale and wine were drunk from goblets made of wood, pewter, silver or gold. Only very rich households could afford to have gold or silver, though an Act of Elizabeth I’s
Parliament of 1576 fixed the maximum price of twenty-two
carat gold at twelvepence per ounce, and of eleven ounce two pennyweight silver at twelvepence per pound. Drinking
glasses were almost unknown in England before the fifteenth century, but by the beginning of the Tudor Age they were being manufactured in Venice on a large scale for export to the countries of
Western Europe, including England. Henry VIII had a very large number of wineglasses which he had imported from Venice, and by his time it had become fashionable for the nobility and the wealthy to
drink from Venetian glass.

The manufacture of ‘Normandy glass’ for window panes had been taking place, on a small scale, since the thirteenth century at Chiddingfold in Sussex; but it was not till the
beginning of Elizabeth I’s reign that a much finer glass of the Venetian type was made in England by Jean Carré, who had learned the art of glassmaking in Antwerp, but had come to
England as a Protestant refugee from the persecution in the Netherlands. By 1567 he was operating two ‘glasshouses’ where he manufactured glass near Loxwood in Sussex, with a labour
force composed of Huguenot refugees from Lorraine. Before he died in 1572 he had opened more glassworks near Alfold in Surrey. Enterprising Englishmen were soon following his example. By 1585 John
Lennard, who was the Earl of Leicester’s tenant at Knole, had opened a glassworks at Sevenoaks, and by this time glass was being made throughout the Weald, at Kirdford, Wisborough Green,
Petworth and Northiam in Sussex, and at Penshurst in Kent, as well as at Ewhurst and in the Guildford area in Surrey.

But in this area the glassworks had to compete with the ironmasters of the Weald for the wood and other fuel which were rapidly becoming in short supply; and Edward Henraye, who owned the
glassworks at Petworth, had opened two new glassworks near Uttoxeter in Staffordshire. Before the end of the Tudor Age, glass factories were opened in Hampshire, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire,
Nottinghamshire and Northumberland. But the ordinary household used glass only for their window panes. Drinking glasses were still used only by rich and fashionable
families,
and even at the end of the Tudor Age most of the mirrors used by the common people were made of steel, not glass.

In the sixteenth century, people usually rose at 5 a.m. in the summer and at 6 a.m. in the winter. They sometimes attended prayers, or did a little work before breakfast, and after this first
meal set about performing the main part of their daily duties. At about 11 a.m. they ate their main meal of the day, their dinner, a word which until the end of the nineteenth century always meant
the midday meal. They then carried on with their work until they had supper at about 5 or 6 p.m., though artisans and labourers were required to work until after 7 p.m. When Parliament was in
session, the lords and MPs began the day’s proceedings at 8 a.m., and only occasionally met again after dinner for a second session in the afternoon. Most people went to bed at about 9
p.m.

The routine was different at Henry VIII’s court. The King’s pages rose before 7 a.m. to light his fire, but Henry normally did not rise and dress till about 7.30 a.m., though
occasionally, when he wished to have a long day’s hunting, he rose as early as 4 a.m. He sometimes ate a meal in his bedchamber for breakfast, but his first real meal was dinner, which began
at 10 a.m., or a little earlier. On ordinary days he had supper when he returned from hunting at 4 p.m.; but on holy days the meal times were adapted to fit in with the times of Mass and other
court ceremonies. After supper, Henry read the State papers, and then stayed up till after midnight, watching masques, dancing, and gambling at cards and dice.

In comparison with the lower classes in other European countries, ordinary Englishmen ate well during the Tudor Age. They lived on beef, mutton, capons and pigeons. They ate wheat bread and rye
bread, butter, cheese, eggs and fish. When Hentzner visited England in 1598 he noticed that they ate more meat and less bread than the French, and had better table manners; that large quantities of
oysters were on sale in London; and that they put a great deal of sugar in their drinks, which he thought
was the reason why so many Englishmen and women, including the Queen,
had black teeth.

The English ate puddings, pastries and biscuits, and several kinds of fruit and vegetables – apples, pears, strawberries, cherries, damsons, peaches, oranges, figs, grapes, beans, peas,
cabbages, leeks, carrots, turnips and parsnips; but potatoes were not known until the Spaniards found them in Peru and John Hawkins brought them back to England from the West Indies in 1563. When
Sir Walter Raleigh sent an expedition in 1585 to what is now Virginia and North Carolina, his sailors returned with potatoes, and Raleigh then cultivated them on his estates at Youghal in
Ireland.

A great deal of honey was eaten, and as English honey had a reputation for being particularly good, it was exported in large quantities to France and other foreign countries. But unscrupulous
producers and sellers sometimes adulterated the honey with other ingredients. It was partly in order to preserve the reputation of English honey abroad, as well as to protect the home consumer,
that Parliament passed an Act in 1581 which also applied to the sale of bees’ wax. Every barrel of honey sold was to contain 32 wine gallons of honey, every kilderkin 16 wine gallons, and
every firkin 8 wine gallons. The seller of honey had to brand the head of every barrel with the two letters of his Christian and surname,
⁷
in letters of at
least 1½ inches, so that he could be traced if the honey failed to comply with the requirements of the Act. If the filler of the barrel marked it with someone else’s initials, he was
to pay a fine of £5 for each offence, of which half was to be paid to the Queen and half to anyone who sued for the money before the local JPs.