The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (38 page)

8

Where to Stay

Where you lay your head in Elizabethan England is – like everything else – very much a matter of status. Poor men will not be offered accommodation in a nobleman’s house, and most noblemen would not deign even to set foot inside a cottage. Travellers can’t expect cheap accommodation at a monastery any more: hospitality is no longer a matter of charity. No doubt the idea still exists in some remote places, but too many people are now on the road for this generosity to be widespread. If you have no money, you will rest wherever you can – in a barn, a woodshed, a cave, under the eaves of a house or simply in the fields. However, provided you have the means to pay and there is room, you will be able to stay at an inn. Charity might have lost its purchasing power, but that of silver is stronger than ever.

Inns

The greater inns are one of the pleasures of travelling in Elizabethan England. You can hardly mistake the lavishly painted sign hanging outside a fine London establishment. Leading your horse beneath the wide entrance arch into the yard, which may well be cobbled or paved, you will see two or three storeys of galleries on either side of you. These provide access to the chambers. A boy will unsaddle your horse and take it through to the stables at the rear of the property, and an ostler will take your bags and lead you to the innkeeper so that you may be ‘appointed a chamber’.

Entering a chamber in a good-quality establishment, you will find at least one bedstead, normally with posts and curtains round it, slung with ropes on which a straw mat is placed and with a couple of featherbeds on top (‘featherbed’ actually refers to the mattress). Foreign
travellers frequently comment on the cleanliness of English inns. So you can expect clean linen sheets ‘wherein no man hath lodged since they came from the laundress’, as William Harrison sweetly puts it, as well as blankets, coverlets and quilts. The feather-filled pillows should similarly have clean linen pillowcases. In many rooms there will also be a truckle bed for servants or children. You will find extra bedding in a chest, and there may be a second chest for your own belongings. Other items you are likely to find in your chamber include a table covered with a linen tablecloth, and two or three stools or chairs. If the walls are not wainscoted (panelled with wood), then they will be generally hung with painted cloths: these look like tapestries, but are much cheaper and give a similar warmth to the room. In a city inn, the chamber windows look out over an inner courtyard and the rooms are quite dark on the first floor because of the overhanging gallery above. At dusk you will be given a candle and candleholder to see your way to bed. It is not unusual also to find dried fragrant flowers on a tin plate in the room to sweeten the air.

The largest London inns have fifty or more chambers and can accommodate 200 visitors, as well as their horses. Rooms are often shared between the members of a travelling party, with single occupancy costing more. You may choose to eat in the hall or in private, in your chamber. In the hall you will no doubt be accosted by the bands of musicians who inevitably press their services on guests in the hope of earning some coins. Prosperous Londoners wishing to throw a feast for their friends and family use the hall of an inn for this purpose, so you may encounter a rowdy party, forcing you to resort to your chamber. Plays are often acted in the yards of big inns at two o’clock in the afternoon, with the gallery making an excellent viewing platform.

The innkeeper is legally responsible for the safety of his guests, and will do all he can to prevent theft or violence on his premises. Your room door will probably be lockable and you will have charge of the key (the innkeeper has a skeleton key that undoes all the doors). At dusk the main gate is locked and non-residents are asked to leave. Theft at an inn is therefore highly unlikely – but that comes with a caveat. Do you recall the ostler who took the bags from your horse when you arrived? For the price of a drink he may tell someone who you are, what is in your bags and where you are heading … If you remember the lesson from the last chapter, you will tell him nothing. That goes
for your charming fellow guests too, some of whom are wearing fine clothes – which may come courtesy of other travellers like yourself.

What about inns in provincial towns? Many are as fine and well-appointed as their London equivalents. On the whole, however, they are much smaller. Let us say you ride into Farnham in 1563 looking for a bed for the night. There you will come across a traditional inn run by Joan Hawle, a widow. Passing beneath the gatehouse arch and entering the hall, you will find it dimly lit, open to the rafters and with a central stone hearth. Smoke from the glowing fire rises to escape through a hole in the roof. Above the fire a couple of pots are hanging from iron frames. On the rush-covered floor lies a pair of bellows next to a fire shovel and a pair of tongs. Three large tapestry-like painted cloths hang on the walls. There are two tables with benches on either side; the benches are covered with mats and cushions, and there are couple of stools. There are no barrels of wine or beer stored in here: they are kept in the buttery next door and pots or flasks are carried through to customers in the hall as and when required.

This is all pretty rudimentary compared to the great establishments in London. But it is more than adequate for most travellers. Joan has four letting rooms, besides her own accommodation. A door in the hall leads through to a large parlour where you will find two oak-framed beds with carved testers at their heads and feather mattresses, bolsters, blankets and quilts. Also in here are an oak cupboard, a trestle table, a bench with a rushwork mat on it, four stools and a chair. There are two carpets: these are for covering the tables and cupboards, they are not used on the floor. Go upstairs to the chamber directly above and you will find a similar room with a trestle table, benches and a settle as well as two beds – one great wooden bed and a truckle bed. In the chamber above the gate there are two bedsteads; and over the buttery there is another chamber with three further beds. None of these rooms are glazed: the windows are covered with wooden shutters. Nevertheless they are large enough for you and a friend to sleep relatively comfortably. Joan’s own private parlour doubles up as a storeroom, and if you lift the lids of the five wooden chests in there you will find folded sheets of canvas (ten pairs), lockram (four pairs), a holland sheet as well as six tablecloths of canvas. Firewood can be found in the barn on the other side of the yard, along with oats and hay for the guests’ horses. If it comes to the worst, there is even a spare bed above the stable.
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Returning to Farnham forty years later, you will find that inns have improved. Stop by at the one run by George Whittingham. He has eight chambers for guests, containing a total of eighteen beds. Let’s say he offers you the ‘Chapel Chamber’ for the night: therein you will find the walls covered with painted hangings, and on one side a standing bedstead with a truckle bed. There are also two cupboards against the wall, both covered with woven carpets, and a table with a cushion-covered bench and two cushion-covered chairs. There are firedogs in the fireplace. Best of all, the room is glazed. You can expect lockram sheets, and he even has some of holland. If you find yourself in the ‘New Chamber’ next door, your four-poster bedstead will have curtains and a valance too. Call for the servant and you can ask for beer, white wine, claret or sack, and be served in silver bowls, not just pewter. Given the stock of ten chamber pots, you will even have the luxury of not having to leave your room at night if you feel the urge.
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Stately Homes

Some of the finest stately homes ever built in England are constructed in Elizabeth’s reign – Burghley, Wollaton Hall, Hardwick Hall, Montacute and Longleat among them. William Harrison declares that ‘if ever curious building did flourish in England, it is in these our years, wherein our workmen excel’. But you might be surprised to find that almost all the nobility and a large percentage of the gentry are still living in the medieval houses and castles that their ancestors built. If you are the guest of an earl with an income of £3,000 a year, don’t expect to be accommodated in a luxurious suite of rooms in a stately home designed by one of the great architects of the age. It is more likely that you will find yourself in a dark chamber in a thirteenth-century turret built to defend some strategic site, but now maintained as a matter of family pride.

Old money is rarely concentrated in one man’s hands; the chances are that one-third of your host’s income is set aside for his mother, the dowager countess. Therefore many noble families simply cannot afford the cost of replacing an old castle with a new house. To compete with Sir Francis Willoughby, builder of Wollaton Hall, they will need to spend about £5,000. To build something like Hardwick Hall will cost almost as much.
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Pride does not allow them to build on a more
modest scale. Besides, all that castellated antiquity is still meaningful: a castle speaks of long-standing high status and connections and ancestral loyalties stretching back centuries.

This also goes for the royal family. The royal residences of Windsor Castle, Eltham Palace, Greenwich Palace, the Tower of London, Westminster, Woodstock and Hatfield are all medieval. Nonsuch Palace, built by Henry VIII in 1538, has been sold off to the earl of Arundel, but it is returned to the queen’s ownership in 1591. The other ‘modern’ palaces in the royal estate are Richmond Palace (built by Henry VII in the 1490s) and Henry VIII’s remodelled palaces at Whitehall and Hampton Court. Elizabeth keeps Hampton Court as a sort of shrine to her father, full of his possessions. She is more sanguine about the others: of the twenty palaces she inherits, she gives away seven. New Hall, in Essex, is in a poor state of repair, so she passes it to the earl of Sussex, informing him that she will come to visit, thereby encouraging him to repair the place and build a new suite of stately rooms. She gives Kenilworth Castle to her favourite Robert Dudley, who similarly beautifies it in order to receive the queen in state. As for the more remote castles up and down the country, many are sold off. Wigmore Castle in Herefordshire, for example, goes to the Harley family for £2,600 in 1601. The queen spends an average of £4,000 per year on the palaces she retains, mainly remodelling and redecorating chambers and adding gardens.
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Like the nobility, the monarchy is well behind the vanguard of architectural innovation – strapped for cash and incarcerated by its own heritage.

Who then does build in Elizabethan England? In short, the ‘new men’ – men who have not inherited great wealth, but who have made fortunes through royal service, their own ingenuity or business acumen. Sir William Cecil builds Burghley (Lincolnshire) and Theobalds (Hertfordshire) as well as Cecil House on the Strand in London. His annual expenditure on building regularly runs to more than £2,000.
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Other newly rich civil servants include Sir Christopher Hatton, who builds Holdenby House (Northamptonshire); Sir Francis Walsingham, who builds Barn Elms (Surrey); and Sir John Thynne, who builds Longleat (Wiltshire). The lawyer, Sir Nicholas Bacon, builds a great house at Gorhambury (Hertfordshire); another lawyer, Sir Edward Phelips, constructs Montacute (Somerset). Sir Thomas Gresham, the most charitable London merchant of the age, builds Intwood Hall (Norfolk). The courtier Thomas Gorges builds the
remarkable triangular Longford Castle (Wiltshire). Perhaps the most daring architectural feat of the reign – Wollaton Hall (Nottinghamshire), with its astonishing prospect room above the great hall – is built by a member of the local gentry, Sir Francis Willoughby, who is able to exploit the coal mines on his manors, but almost bankrupts himself in his pursuit of architectural magnificence.
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You do find some exceptions to the rule that it is newly rich commoners who build the great Elizabethan houses. Lord Cobham adds wings to Cobham Hall (Kent) and a few lords plan new houses (e.g. Lord Buckhurst). And of course we must remember the patroness responsible for perhaps the most aesthetically perfect house of the age, Hardwick Hall. Bess of Hardwick is the dowager countess of Shrewsbury and therefore fails to qualify as a ‘new man’ on both accounts. However, she was born into a relatively unimportant section of the gentry and has made her money by outliving four rich husbands. When she sets about building Hardwick in 1590, this grand old noblewoman of sixty-three is in many ways ‘new money’ too.

All this effectively means that, perhaps for the only time before the twentieth century, if you want to stay in a stately home you will not stay with the nobility. A new social order has arrived – and these self-made men are keen to embrace a new architecture to emphasise their status. The principles of this architecture arrive in England in a variety of ways: English tourists pick up ideas on the Grand Tour; skilled French and Italian workmen come to England looking for work; and, most importantly, illustrated publications by Continental architects, such as Vredemen de Vries, Vitruvius, Sebastiano Serlio and Andrea Palladio, are imported.
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In addition, there is the landmark publication of John Shute’s
The First and Chief Grounds of Architecture
(1563). In the 1550s the duke of Northumberland sends Shute to Italy to study the country’s buildings and on his return he produces the earliest published English treatise on the subject. The result is a completely new style. Whereas the highest priority of a medieval nobleman was to defend his kin and his land, and his castle was accordingly a fortified shell of thick walls and small windows, within which he might withstand a siege, the Elizabethan courtier’s highest priority is to demonstrate his connections. A grand Elizabethan courtier’s or lawyer’s residence thus differs from its medieval equivalent in its most fundamental respect: it is designed to show off rather than shut out.