The Lord Of Misrule (34 page)

The misadventures of apprentice lawyer and aspiring rogue Red Ned Bedwell will continue with The Smithfield Shambles.

My thanks to Robert Greene, an Elizabethan writer of some note, promising talent, and possessed of a vindictive streak a mile wide. It is from his quill that Ned suffers his more adventurous misfortunes in the doubtful repose of the Liberties. With the advent of the printing press came a flood of books and pamphlets starting of course with the Bible, in either Tyndale, Geneva or Coverdale versions, then the classical Greek and Roman works of history, philosophy and sciences. This eventually gave an opportunity and market for the folios of Master Shakespeare’s works (about whom Greene was livid since it appears he regarded Shakespeare as stealing his rightful position as the leading playwright of London). Finally there were the cheaper Tudor equivalents of penny dreadfuls—news broadsheets and small pamphlets of an improving or cautionary nature such as that fount of all mischief and lewdness;
A Notable Discovery of Coosnage 1591
and
The Second Part of Cony Catching 1592
where Master Robert Greene gives us an amusing selection of the cons and scams a country gentlemen would have to be wary of when they came to London. If only Red Ned Bedwell could have gotten hold of a copy.

Regards Gregory House

Terra Australis 2012

During the reign of Henry VIII the value of coins varied wildly since coins were frequently recalled and subsequently reissued with a lower precious metal content to aid the financing of Henry’s expenditure on war and domestic building programs. It got to such a state that the gold sovereign coins stamped with the portrait of the king were nicknamed old copper noses since frequent handling gave them a red gold colour. Rhenish florins, Thalers and Venetian florins were the period’s equivalent of US dollars and accepted all over Europe. All other coins were evaluated to their standard.

farthing = quarter of a penny (0.25d)

halfpenny (0.5d)

1 penny silver coin

Half groat silver coin worth 2 pence

Groat silver coin worth 4 pence

1 shilling silver coin worth 12d

1 noble a gold coin worth 6s 8d. (80p, or 1/3 of a pound)

1 Angel a gold coin worth 7 shillings and 6 pence

1 pound or a sovereign gold coin worth 20 shillings,
i.e.
240 pence

1 mark was the value of 8 ounces of gold or silver; 123 4d

Ale house:
Lower in social scale and quality than a tavern. Usually a room with a few benches and a brew house out the back. In theory, they had to be licensed. These were considered by the city officials as the breeding ground of mischief and crime. Often also called a boozing ken in the slang of Tudor London

Tavern:
Equivalent to a modern British Pub or American Bar usually serving reasonable quality food and ale.

Inn:
These establishments were the Sheratons or Hiltons of their age, large buildings with a courtyard and stables used to catering to gentry and nobility.

Inns of Court:
These where not the same kind of Inns as above, instead they were establishments which housed fraternities of lawyers and clerks. The cluster of buildings also contained lawyers chambers, offices and sometimes residences as well as a library of legal texts and records and the community’s Great Hall for feasts and ceremonies. Some of the better known Inns were Gray’s, Middle Temple Inner Temple and Lincoln’s. Minor Inns included Thavies, Chancery, Clifford, Lyon and Strand.

Stew:
a brothel or a region of disreputable activities

Cony catching
: a common term for any manner of con trick or swindle

Cozener:
swindlers, fraudsters tricksters etc

Cozenage:
the art or play of a scam rort, swindle or slight of hand

Curber, hookman:
curbing the art of lifting clothes from a washing line, via the use of a hooked pole hence the term hookman and curber.

Foister:
A sometime more aggressive cozener or cozener’s offsider

Nip:
a young boy working with a foister, or cozener

Roister:
A swaggering rogue keen for trouble and brawling possibly an apprentice since they tended to have that reputation.

Punk:
a common name for a part time prostitute

Fullans and gourds:
two different types of ‘altered’ dice either weighted or hollowed.

Black Rent:
a fee or tithe paid over to a gang lord, justice of the peace or reaving border lord to ensure your house wasn’t burnt down and that your arm remains unbroken.

Counterfeiting a Crank:
a common ploy by the most experienced beggars where they gain donations by pretending to be afflicted with madness and fits.

Minchin:
a young girl in thieves or Liberties cant, also called a mort

Comfit:
this Tudor term refers to the range of sweets and banquet desserts made from seeds, spices and fruits covered in sugar. To be served these was a sign of high esteem and rank, though in some Tudor writings it also is used as a metaphor for brief and passing fame or pleasure. Sweet one moment and gone the next.

Humours:
Tudor medicine believed the human body was made up of four humours and that bleeding or diet could balance the humours according to consultation with an astrological chart, this finally dropped out of favour in the mid 1800’s.

The Sweats:
This was the common name for an epidemic illness that appeared in the 1480’s and periodically swept through the population until the 1700’s when it seemed to disappear. Like the Plague its mortality rate was high and its onset rapid with the infected hale and hearty in the morning and dead by dusk. Both Anne Boleyn and Cardinal Wolsey survived bouts of this illness and were more fortunate than several others at the Royal Court.

Night School:
the common name for a secret gathering of heretics, evangelicals Lollards or Lutherans meeting to study or discuss the smuggled copies of the Bible translated into English.

Candlemass:
The religious festival of the Catholic faith held on the 2
^nd
February about forty days after Christmas and at the mid point between the Winter solstice and the Spring Equinox. Also Groundhog Day in the Eastern USA.

Hallowtide:
The religious festival of All Hallow’s Eve or Halloween 1
^st
November.

Brandywine:
later shortened to brandy, alcoholic distillation of wine occasionally also used to describe wine fortified with brandy.

Sack:
A very popular form of fortified wine similar to sherry sometimes augmented with sugar and brandy for extra taste.

Rhenish:
as the name implies a wine from the Rhine region, very popular in England.

Scarlet cloth:
this was the common name of the finest woven woollen cloth used for gowns, kirtles and doublets and does not refer to the colour thus you can have blue scarlet or green scarlet as is described in period documents.

Justice:
the local judge or royal official charged with keeping the peace

The Common Watch:
acted as a police force and occasional fire brigade, and regarded by the Tudor citizens as next to useless and dumber than a pile of pig droppings.

Parish Ward Muster:
citizen militia of reasonable quality and equipment, usually recruited from the better classes of Londoners.

Bedlam:
the Hospital of St Mary of Bethlehem a hospice for those found to be decayed in their wits, mad crazed or deluded, hence the phrase as ‘its bedlam’ or as ‘mad as Bedlam’. In the Tudor period the common term of insanity was Bedlamite.

The Liberties:
areas of the city of London and Southwark under the jurisdiction of the church and exempt from interference by city or county officials, usually swarming with punks, cony catchers, thieves, murders and forgers.

Wherry:
a small boat with one to four rowers used for transport on the Thames, the taxi of its day.

The Lowlands
or Loulands:
the region across the channel that is now Holland and Belgium, often also called the Low Countries. Due to its important position in the Channel trading route London was home to thousands of Lowlanders, in some period documents they are also referred to as Germans or Douche (Dutch).

Lord of Misrule:
During the twelve days of Christmas apart from the usual religious ceremonies other festivities tended to dominate the holidays. The most common and popular was the reign of the Lord of Misrule where the laws and customs of normal society were turned upside down. Servants paraded as lords and many parishes had a boy bishop. It was the one time of the year when the commons could get away with ridicule and satire of their betters.

If you enjoyed this tale of the misadventures of Red Ned Bedwell apprentice lawyer and aspiring rogue in the Tudor London of Henry VIII then you can find more at these sites:

For more Tudor information I suggest you have a look at the following books;

Food and Feast in Tudor England
by Alison Sim

Pleasures and Pastimes in Tudor England Eur
ope by Alison Sim

Elizabeth’s London
by Liza Picard

All meals and food described in these stories are based on recipes and descriptions from royal and gentry recipe books of the period, for further information see the list of sources in my blog.

For a fully listed bibliography of all my Tudor sources used for the background of the Red Ned and Darkness series I suggest you check out my blog site.

Tudor Blogging at
http://rednedtudormysteries.blogspot.com/

History and archaeology Blogging at
http://prognosticationsandpouting.blogspot.com

In this modern secular era, it is sometimes difficult to encompass how deeply religion was embedded in the words, thoughts and actions of our ancestors. The Church was for good and ill part of everyday life. Its parish and cathedral bells announced the time of day and the whole pattern of the year was structured around the calendar of religious festivals. Every individual in the kingdom understood this, starting from birth with the urgent importance of baptism to death and the saying of perpetual masses for the souls of the departed. At this point in the Tudor Age we have the emergence of the concept of ‘indulgence’ and the ability of the Pope to remit sins via payment as crux of faith and politics. Due to the Wittenberg Articles of Martin Luther, we know were that argument led. In all of this the Latin Vulgate Bible was the fount of authority and knowledge for the King, the Catholic Church and all levels of society, which is why its translation into the vernacular was believed to threaten the very foundations of ‘their Christian society’. The sways to and fro in the Tudor Age were equally about power and belief, with the two sometimes so intermixed it was difficult to separate them, especially in the figures of Sir Thomas More, Cardinal Wolsey and His Sovereign Majesty Henry VIII. Questions of conscience or expedience determined religious attitudes and delineated a person’s position in society and all too frequently determined their rise or fall on Fortuna’s Wheel.

To make a valid attempt at presenting this internal and external conflict we have Ned Bedwell viewing his conscience as two distinct entities, his
daemon
and
better angel
. From a number of biographies, lives of saints and religious writings this division and representation of moral and ethical judgement was very common from the highest sections of society to the lowest and in many cases recorded in church courts regarding grievous sins and petitions for penance, the intercession of demons, devils and angels crop up frequently. It is in its way a very important aspect of the Tudor world view. For instance passages such as
‘the devil sorely tempted me and I gave in’
or
‘my good angel or patron saint steered me clear of the peril of sin’
, are very frequent. Even that great Tudor monarch Henry VIII used this style of Divine intercession and explanation in his public presentation of his need for an annulment, the break with Rome and his marriage to Anne Boleyn.

For my fictional character Ned, his
daemon
and
angel
serve as mouthpieces for his questions of conscience and action in his Tudor world. They give you the reader a glimpse of the inner workings of an ambitious lad beset with questions of friendship, loyalty, lust, advancement and the conflicts caused by his decisions.

Regards Gregory House