The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (40 page)

You will, of course, be very lucky to be invited to stay in a stately residence like Wollaton or Theobalds. Sir Francis Willoughby’s instructions to his usher on the matter of casual visitors are very clear: he should welcome into the hall all those who have a genuine reason to call upon the owner, and give them food and drink; but anyone of an idle or immoral disposition is to be removed immediately. Even if you are considered sufficiently respectable to tarry, you will not necessarily be invited up to see the state rooms or the enviable prospect room. But if you do get to stay in one of the new stately houses, with their elegant classical proportions, high ceilings, acres of glass, bright tapestries and huge square gardens, it will be an experience to remember.

Rural Houses

To the modern eye, some of the smaller manor houses of Elizabethan England are just as aesthetically pleasing as the stately homes.
Hundreds are under construction. William Harrison writes in 1577 that ‘every man almost is a builder and he that hath bought any small parcel of ground, be it never so little, will not be quiet till he has pulled down the old house (if any were there standing) and set up a new after his own devising’. Today, when you need better accommodation, you move house; in Elizabethan England, you rebuild. Huge numbers of medieval hall-houses are being turned into well-proportioned residences of two or three storeys – more than a thousand in Devon alone.
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Across the country, many of the dissolved monasteries are being refashioned to provide extensive living accommodation, such as Newstead Abbey for the Byrons in Nottinghamshire and Buckland Abbey for the Grenvilles in Devon. Old timber-framed manor houses are also significantly extended at places like Little Moreton Hall, Gawsworth Hall and Haslington (all in Cheshire). In their timber patterning these are just as astonishing and distinctive as their equivalents in stone. Even some completely new timber-framed manor houses are being built, such as Tixall Manor and Oak House (both in Staffordshire) and Churche’s Mansion (Cheshire).

The furnishings of these gentlemen’s residences are, in varying degrees, comparable with those of the stately homes. The beds may be less skilfully carved and hung with less costly curtains; the chests may be less lavishly painted; and you will not find an inlaid marble table or a gilt chamber clock; but you will see certain items of luxury. You might find status symbols like a mirror, a set of virginals and a portrait or two of members of the family. Your chamber may well have curtains on rails that you can draw across the windows. However, as you go down the scale of family prestige and household size – from large houses with twenty or more servants to those of gentlemen and yeomen with just one or two – the furnishings become more utilitarian. So do the rooms. It is not just that the sheets of a bed in a yeoman’s house are of a lower quality and the bed itself smaller (in order to fit into a smaller chamber with a lower ceiling); the use of the space is altogether more practical.

Consider the house of Mrs Katherine Doyle of Merton (Oxfordshire), the widow of a gentleman, in 1585. The value of her moveable goods is the substantial sum of £591, including £300 owed to her as a result of three financial agreements. Despite this wealth, and despite the size of her house, she has very few actual living rooms. You enter through a parlour with a table, chairs, stools and benches in the middle, a
cupboard on one side and painted hangings on the walls. The next room is a high old-fashioned hall open to the rafters where there is another table; this doubles up as a kitchen. After that you are through to the dairy, where there is a cheese press, vats, churns, cream pots and wooden pails; and then the buttery, where you will find eleven barrels on shelves along one wall and a table in the middle, as well as bottles of leather and wicker-wrapped glass. The remaining three downstairs rooms are similarly practical: there is a larder containing a mortar for spices, a bread grater, a ladle, a mustard mill, a large chafer for heating water, buckets, dripping pans and skimmers. There is a malt chamber where you will find sacks of malt, barrels of salt, hops, sieves and oatmeal; and there is a cheese chamber containing eighty cheeses on a rack, plus tubs, barrels of verjuice, a soap box, pots of fat, and such like. The three upstairs chambers are used for sleeping and here there are touches of refinement: in the great chamber you will see an impressive four-poster bed with three feather mattresses, a white needlework valance, nine pillows and a trucklebed beneath. Mistress Doyle also has jewellery worth £37 and such luxuries as a looking glass (3s 4d), a writing desk (6s 8d), silk curtains (16s) and a lute (£1 10s). Nevertheless, six of the ten rooms in the house are used for storage or food processing, in addition to the storehouse outside in the yard.
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THE YEOMAN’S HOUSE

Over Elizabeth’s reign the standard of yeomen’s houses improves significantly. Brick fireplaces are usual in new houses from about 1570 and glass windows are introduced soon after. The average price of a new house increases accordingly, from £26 in the 1560s and 1570s to £35 in the 1580s and £42 in the 1590s.
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William Harrison remarks on the improvements in yeomen’s living standards, stating that old men dwelling in Radwinter (Essex) have noted three things that have changed hugely in their lifetimes. One is ‘the multitude of chimneys lately erected’, the others are bedding – the shift from rough straw pallets to featherbeds and pillows – and the change of vessels from treen (wooden) platters to pewter, and from wooden spoons into silver or tin. Examples of such changes can be found across the country. Robert Furse, a Devon yeoman, inherits his father’s modest estate in
1572 with its old hall-house. He divides the hall by inserting a floor, builds a handsome stone porch at the front and a grand granite newel staircase at the rear, and glazes all the windows.
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In this way the transformation of yeomen’s houses reflects the rebuilding of the town houses that we saw in Stratford at the start of this book.

It has to be said that Robert Furse is in the vanguard of change. A close inspection of yeomen’s houses in Oxfordshire and Surrey reveals that the majority are still living in traditional draughty hall-houses. Similarly, not every yeoman has made the transition to featherbeds by 1577, as Harrison suggests. Come to William and Isabel Walter’s house in the early 1580s, he being a yeoman of Mitcham (Surrey). The house is thatched, timber-framed and whitewashed, at the end of a dusty lane, with three timber-framed outbuildings grouped around a yard. The front door is oak, secured with a latch and a lock. You enter an unlit flagstone-floored corridor in which there is just a boulting hutch (a chest used for sifting flour) and a ladder going up to the next floor. In the hall there is a small unglazed window in each of the two external walls. There are no curtains and at night they are closed by shutters. The roof is double-height, open to the rafters, and the floor is covered in rushes. There is a hearth in the middle of the room, on raised flat stones. A wooden cradle and two spinning wheels stand nearby and an oak cupboard leans against the wall. On the other side of the hall there is a trestle table, a bench, two stools and two small chairs. You will find no panelling in here, no painted hanging cloth; there is nothing decorative to cover the bare whitewashed walls.

Return to the entrance passage by the way you entered and lift the latch to the door to the parlour: within you will see two bedsteads. These have bases of wooden boards and flock-filled mattresses on top. The ceiling in this room is about seven feet in height. This is the only room with any decoration, having three painted cloths on the walls. In the dim light of the small shuttered window you will see one cupboard and six chests. A door on the far side of the room leads to a storage room where there are shelves stacked with wooden platters, pewter dishes, a basin, a pewter flagon, salt cellars, a pewter spoon, candlesticks and wooden tubs. Return to the entrance corridor. The other door there leads to a servant’s bedchamber: a small dim room containing an old bed and some dumped metal, a ploughshare and three scythes. Ascend the ladder in the entrance passageway and go
up through the trapdoor, and you will see that the chamber above the parlour is almost empty: there is nothing in here but a saddle and a basket of hemp. If you go back down and walk through the hall, and out of the door on the far side, this will take you to the buttery where you will see two large and two small barrels in the gloom, a churn and a couple of leather bottles. There is a ladder here too: in the loft room above is a bedstead, a bow and six arrows, a pair of cards (for carding wool) and three pieces of woollen cloth. The kitchen, containing brass pots, a cauldron and other iron cooking utensils as well as brewing vats, is in a separate small building built a few yards away to avoid setting fire to the house.
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As you walk through William Walter’s house, you cannot help but feel that he and his wife live spartan lives. He is not a poor man: as well as renting this farm in Mitcham he owns a nineteen-acre farm in Kent. His chattels alone amount to £96. But the items inside the house only amount to £13; the remainder is farm stuff. He seems remarkably reluctant to exchange agricultural wealth and security for indoor luxury – but he is by no means alone. Look at Jefferie Smith’s house in Sutton, Surrey, in 1597. He is a married yeoman with several children, some of whom have already grown up, and is twice as well off as William Walter (his goods being valued at £204). But like Goodman Walter, most of his wealth lies in the barns and the fields around his house:

All that comes to £153 9s 8d. If you add the value of the lease of his farm (£10) and wool, malt and other stored farm produce (more than £30), you can see that he too has little wealth in his domestic furnishings. His house has no glass. A newly added chamber above the hall is given over entirely to storing wool, corn, malt and linen. His only luxuries are the featherbeds he has in his hall and inner chamber.
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You probably realise that the idea of a pleasure garden is
incompatible with yeomen’s priorities: they seek comfort in their self-sufficiency, not in luxuries. Outside Jefferie Smith’s house is a range of outbuildings: a boulting house (for sifting flour), a kitchen with a storage loft above it, a milk house, two cart houses, a storehouse, a barn and a gatehouse, with a well in it. The privy is at the bottom of the plot, far away from the house, and you will have to go there each time you feel the call of nature; there are no chamber pots or close stools. The garden here is a place for herbs, vegetables, fruit and nut trees, the storage of lumber and occasionally bee keeping; if you see any flowers, they are self-seeded or planted for use in medicines. It is a far cry from the sculpted gardens at Theobalds and Hampton Court. But William Walter’s and Jefferie Smith’s houses both have something in common with the stately homes described above: they are the homes of ‘the haves’. There are many more people to be classed among the ‘have-nots’, who are starving on the roads or who are sleeping in servants’ rooms and rising at dawn to light the kitchen fire.

WORKERS’ HOUSES

Writing in the 1580s, Richard Carew describes old husbandmen’s cottages in Cornwall as having

walls of earth [cob], low thatched roofs, few partitions, no planchings [ceilings] or glass windows and scarcely any chimneys other than a hole in the wall to let out the smoke; their bed, straw and a blanket; as for sheets, so much linen cloth had not stepped over the narrow channel between them and [England]. To conclude, a mazer and a drinking cup and a pan or two comprised all their substance: but now most of these fashions are universally banished, and the Cornish husbandman conformeth himself with a better supplied civility to the Eastern pattern.
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Has the lot of the husbandman really improved, as Carew suggests? Are William Harrison’s three lifestyle improvements – chimneys, bedding and pewter – true for husbandmen and labourers too?

The richest husbandmen have certainly seen improvements to their lifestyle since the reign of Henry VIII. For example, Ralph Newbury, husbandman of Cropredy (Oxfordshire), has chattels worth £166 when
he dies in 1578. His house is nothing special; it consists of just a chamber, a parlour, a hall, a buttery and a kitchen – no chimneys or window glass for him. But he has several featherbeds, a carpet of ‘red and black’ upon his table, pillows, cushions, twenty tin spoons, three drinking cups and a drinking glass, a mortar and pestle of brass, pewter platters, pewter basins, brass candlesticks and a chamber pot.
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However, he represents the wealthy end of the workers’ spectrum. Many husbandmen at the end of the reign are still living in houses of one or two rooms without glass or chimneys, even if they do have a few items of pewter. John Allibond the elder, husbandman of Wardington (Oxfordshire), has a two-room house in 1589: there is a table, cooking apparatus and dishes, cupboards and three looms in the hall. His chamber is used for sleeping, sorting his spare sheets and storing his grain.
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Thomas Lipscomb, husbandman of Cranleigh (Surrey), lives in a one-room cottage in the 1580s with his wife and son. In that one hall they sleep and cook, store their clothes and food (there are flitches of bacon hanging from the rafters) and keep all their cooking and baking equipment.
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