A Brief History of the Tudor Age (22 page)

The Englishman had a reputation throughout Europe for gluttony; it was said that overeating was the English vice, just as lust was the French vice and drunkenness the German vice. Some
Englishmen became very fat, and were famous for being so.
Henry VIII ate enormous meals, but as a young man he was slim, perhaps because he always took a great deal of physical
exercise. By the time that he was forty-five he was suffering from painful ulcers in his leg which prevented him from riding or walking without the greatest difficulty; but though he ceased to take
exercise, he ate as much as ever. He then became very fat. We know from his suit of armour in the Tower of London that in later years he was 54 inches around the waist.

According to the story told by a seventeenth-century writer, a special machine was made, with pulleys, to lift Henry on to his horse and to carry him from room to room in his palaces. But he
still liked the outdoor life which he had always enjoyed, and in the last winter before he died at the age of fifty-five he insisted on going out in the coldest weather, when most of his courtiers
and servants would have preferred to stay indoors. Having been lifted on to his horse by the pulleys, he would sit there, wrapped up against the cold, watching his hawk pursue its prey, or a great
killing of stags in an enclosure, though he had once chased stags for thirty miles a day.

Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, was always portrayed by the illustrator of Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs
as a fat man. He began his career as one of Wolsey’s agents, and was with
him at Cawood at the time of his arrest. He then entered the King’s service, and was sent by Henry to confront the Pope at the time of the repudiation of Papal supremacy. He distinguished
himself by insulting the Pope in a stormy interview at Marseilles; but he was appointed Bishop of London just at the time when Henry intensified the persecution of Protestants under the Act of the
Six Articles, and it was his duty to preside at the heresy trials in London, where the Protestants were most numerous, in the years after 1540. Under the Protestant government of Edward VI, Bonner
was deprived of his bishopric and imprisoned in the Marshalsea for four years for resisting the measures in favour of the Reformation; but when he was released and reinstated as Bishop of London in
Mary’s reign, he was once again in a
position to persecute Protestants on an even greater scale than he had done under Henry VIII.

The Protestants hated him more than any of their other persecutors. Foxe, John Knox and the other Protestant propaganda writers denounced him as ‘bloody Bonner’, and their successors
were still calling him this in the seventeenth century. Although this was probably due above all to his position as Bishop of London, it was also partly because of his personality. He was rude and
brutal to the prisoners whom he interrogated at their trials; but what seems to have particularly angered his victims was his coarse and jovial humour, which they thought was particularly out of
place when he was condemning men and women to be burned. They were also disgusted by his fatness.

When Elizabeth became Queen, Bonner went with the other bishops to greet her when she came from Hatfield to London;
but she shrank from him in horror, and refused to allow
him to kiss her hand. He opposed her decision to make England Protestant, and he was again deprived of his bishopric and imprisoned in the Marshalsea, where he died ten years later in 1569. He was
so hated by the London Protestants that he had to be buried in secret to avoid a hostile demonstration during his funeral; and thirty years afterwards, when the Londoners saw an ugly, coarse and
fat man in the street, they would say that he was Bonner.

He preserved his brutal sense of humour in adversity as he had in his hour of triumph. When someone showed him, in the Marshalsea, the picture in Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs
of him
torturing a Protestant martyr, he commented: ‘A vengeance on the fool, how could he have got my picture drawn so right?’

It was on Sundays and the holy days that the Englishman most indulged in overeating. Nearly every day in the year was a saint’s day, often named after obscure saints whose names are
forgotten today. At the beginning of the Tudor Age people dated their letters, and kept a note of the days throughout the year, far more by the saints’ days than by the days of the month.
They would sometimes date their letters ‘this third day of February’, ‘this ninth day of August’, or ‘this fifteenth day of November’; but until about 1550 they
were more likely to date them ‘St Blaise’s Day’, ‘the eve of the feast of St Laurence’, and ‘the morrow after St Erkenwald’s Day’.

Most of these saints’ days were ordinary working days, but the more important ones were holy days. People did not work on Sundays and on holy days – which is the origin of the modern
word ‘holidays’ – but, after going to Mass, spent the day chiefly eating and drinking. There where several holy days in every month of the year, which from the thirteenth century
to 1752 began in England on 25 March. Several of the most important were abolished during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI. After Mary reunited England to Rome in 1554, Cardinal Pole
proclaimed that 30 November, the day on which the reunification took place, should be the Feast of the Reconciliation, to be
celebrated as a holy day to all eternity; but it
was only celebrated for four years.

The Twelve Days of Christmas included Christmas Day, St Stephen’s Day, St John the Apostle’s Day, Childermas, and the lesser feast of St Thomas of Canterbury on 29 December, the day
of his martyrdom in 1170; his greater feast was on 7 July, the anniversary of the erection of his tomb in 1220. The first of January was still called New Year’s Day, in memory of the time in
the twelfth century when the calendar year had started on 1 January, and not on 25 March. It was the day on which people gave each other gifts; at court, the courtiers gave the most expensive gifts
which they could afford to the King and to their superior in the hierarchy of State and Church, and noted with interest which counsellors and courtiers received the most expensive gifts from the
King. The Twelve Days of Christmas ended with Twelfth Day on 6 January.

There were fast days as well as holy days. The fast days, on which people had to eat fish and not meat, served three purposes: they fulfilled the religious duty of abstinence and
self-abnegation; they conserved the supply of meat, which was particularly desirable during Lent in February and March, when stocks were low after the winter; and they helped the fishing industry,
which the government wished to encourage. The fast days were every Friday and Saturday; every day throughout Lent and the four weeks of Advent before Christmas, except Sundays; and the eve of every
holy day; but when the eve of a holy day fell on a Sunday, the fast was held on the Saturday.

Apart from certain categories who were excused from fasting, such as the sick, and pregnant women, it was not very difficult for any individual to obtain a dispensation from the diocesan bishop,
allowing him to break the fasting laws. Erasmus regularly obtained a dispensation from fasting, on the grounds that eating fish upset his stomach, as well as the dispensation which he was regularly
granted allowing him to live outside his monastery and not to wear monkish garb. Erasmus’s statement about his stomach may or may not have been justified, but there is no
doubt that many dispensations were improperly obtained by influence and by bribing officials.

The Protestants objected to holy days and fast days, because there was nothing in the Bible which suggested that any day of the year, apart from the Sabbath Day, was any holier than any other,
or that men should fast on Fridays, Saturdays or in Lent. They ate meat on the fast days, and were duly punished by the bishops’ courts for this defiance of the authority of the Church. The
Catholics said that the Protestant arguments for refusing to fast were really an excuse for indulging in gluttony; the Protestants replied that they avoided gluttony on all the days of the year, as
all good men ought to do, instead of making fast days an excuse for gluttony on the holy days.

Henry VIII and his government strictly enforced the fasting laws, which Henry himself always observed, and any breach of the laws continued to be punished after the repudiation of Papal
supremacy; but in 1537 one of the greatest of the holy days in England, the feast of St Thomas of Canterbury on 7 July, was abolished, along with the lesser feast day on the anniversary of his
martyrdom on 29 December. This was followed by a great propaganda campaign against Becket. Pilgrims had come from all over England and Western Europe to lay their gifts on St Thomas’s tomb,
in memory of his martyrdom at the hands of the impious King, Henry II, and celebrating the triumph of the Church in forcing Henry II to do penance at his tomb. But Henry VIII ordered the clergy to
denounce Becket in the pulpits as a traitor who had defied the authority of his King at the instigation of a foreign Pope. After a commission of inquiry had officially condemned Becket as a
traitor, his bones were dug up and burned, his shrine in Canterbury Cathedral closed, and the treasures at his tomb forfeited to the King under the usual treason laws. It took twenty carts to carry
the treasures from Canterbury to London. Nothing that Henry had done had so outraged the Pope’s supporters; it persuaded the Pope at last to pronounce the sentence of excommunication against
Henry, which he had hitherto refrained from doing.

On 6 July 1537 Cranmer held a banquet in Canterbury at which he publicly ate meat, to show that it was no longer the eve of a holy day. His action attracted much attention
and aroused great indignation in many quarters. His critics were particularly shocked that an Archbishop of Canterbury should so publicly repudiate his saintly predecessor in the see.

In ordinary circumstances, Cranmer believed in fasting and in ecclesiastical abstinence. In 1542 he tried to restrain the gluttony of the clergy by issuing an order in the Convocation of
Canterbury restricting the number of dishes which could be eaten at a meal. Archbishops were only to be served with six different dishes of meat or fish, and with four different dishes as a second
course. Bishops were to have only five dishes of meat or fish, and three as a second course; archdeacons and deans, four of meat and fish, and two as a second course; and the lower clergy three of
meat or fish, and two as a second course – that is to say, only two out of, for example, custard, tart, fritters, cheese, apples or pears. Archbishops were only to be allowed three partridges
in one dish, and all lower ranks of the clergy, including bishops, only two; but archbishops were allowed to eat six blackbirds in one dish, bishops four blackbirds, and the clergy below the rank
of bishop three blackbirds. The order aroused so much opposition, and was so widely ignored, that it proved impossible to enforce, and it was withdrawn after a few months.

Although Cranmer allowed Archbishop Edward Lee of York and himself the privilege of eating more than any of his bishops or lower clergy, he did not always take advantage of the order. In the
evenings, he would often sit at the supper table wearing white gloves to show that he was fasting, and eating nothing.

During the drive against the Protestants which followed the Act of the Six Articles and the fall of Cromwell, orders were issued for a strict enforcement of the fasting laws. In London, Bonner
and the Lord Mayor sentenced several Protestants to short terms of imprisonment for eating meat on fast days. When the persecution of the Protestants was intensified in 1543, the
authorities in London sent officers to enter the people’s houses at dinner time to see what they were eating.

In the reign of Edward VI, one of the first problems with which the government of Somerset and Cranmer had to deal when they introduced the Reformation was the Protestant demand for the
abolition of fasting during Lent. Gardiner wrote to Somerset to protest. ‘Every country hath his peculiar inclination to naughtiness,’ he explained, ‘England and Germany to the
belly, the one in liquor, the other in meat; France a little beneath the belly; Italy to vanity and pleasures devised; and let an English belly have a further advancement, and nothing can stay
it.’

Somerset and Cranmer decided to suppress fast days in theory but to continue them in practice. ‘An Act for abstinence from flesh’ was passed in 1549. It declared that although no day
or food was holier than any other, nevertheless as ‘due and godly abstinence is a mean to virtue and to subdue men’s bodies to their soul and spirit, and considering also that fishers
and men using the trade of living by fishing in the sea may thereby the rather be set on work, and that by eating of fish, much flesh shall be saved and increased’, it was hereby enacted that
no one should eat meat on any Friday or Saturday, in Lent, or on any day which had hitherto been a fast day, except on abrogated holy days. The Act did not apply to the sick, to pregnant women or
to soldiers in any garrison whose commander had authorized them to eat meat, or to any persons who obtained a licence from the King to do so. Anyone who broke this law was to be punished by a fine
of ten shillings and ten days’ imprisonment, during which time he was not to be given any meat. For the second and subsequent offences, the penalty was increased to a fine of twenty shillings
and twenty days’ imprisonment without meat. The Act then repealed all other laws enforcing fasting. This meant that the ban applied only to eating meat, and not the ‘white meats’
of butter, cheese and eggs. An Act of 1552 abolished a number of holy days, including Corpus Christi Day and All Souls’ Day, but retained most of them; and though many fast days were
abolished, the prohibition on the eating of meat
was to continue on all the days on which it was formerly banned.