The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (5 page)

The reason why so much of England is used for grazing is the value of sheep. They are not just a food source; an even more important reason for farming them is the value of the wool. Many rural communities depend heavily on the wool trade for their income. Huge amounts of money are raised for the government through the imposition of customs duties on wool, woolfells and fleeces exported to Europe. In 1564–5, cloth and woollens account for 81.6 per cent (by value) of all the exports from England – amounting to some £1,100,000 – and the largest proportion of the remaining 18.4 per cent is raw wool, followed by woolfells.
²⁰
This is why you will see so many sheep in England: more than eight million of them, twice as many as there are people.
²¹
Having said that, these are not quite the animals with which you are familiar: they are very small. Average weights are
gradually rising (through improvements in husbandry), from about 28lbs per sheep in 1500 to 46lbs in 1600, with the largest weighing 60lbs; but still these are tiny by comparison with modern ewes, which weigh 100–200lbs (a modern ram can weigh more than 350lbs).
²²
Much the same can be said for the cattle (about 350lbs in Elizabethan times, and 1,200–1,600lbs today).

The fields, commons and rivers are the most striking features of the landscape as you travel towards the city of London. But such a journey will also bring many other agricultural practices to your attention. The area of woodland is now rapidly shrinking. One man in Durham has already started his long career felling trees – by 1629 he will have chopped down more than 30,000 oaks single-handedly.
²³
As these take more than a century to grow to maturity, this is clearly unsustainable; but many landlords do not regret the permanent loss of their woods because the cleared land can be used for other agricultural purposes. The widespread felling is thus doubly drastic: being permanent, it leads to higher prices of wood, encouraging landlords to fell yet more timber. Add the increase in the population and the extra wood needed for all the extra tools, cupboards, tables, beds and chests for all the extra people, not to mention the materials needed for the building (and rebuilding) of their houses, and you can see why there is not very much wood left. On top of all this, the wars with France and Spain have led to increased demand for timber – more than 600 oak trees are needed to build a warship – further adding to the demand for wood.
²⁴
Firewood is thus expensive and in short supply, and many people have started talking about a ‘fuel famine’. The government tries to take action, passing Acts of Parliament in 1558, 1581 and 1585 to prevent wood being used for unnecessary purposes; but demand still massively outstrips supply. The price of timber effectively doubles over the course of the reign.
²⁵

Timber felling is not the only substantial change being wrought on the countryside. A second one is enclosure. Many landlords evict their tenants and level their homes, replacing the good arable land with fields for their sheep. Others create deer parks where there used to be villages. Some landowners even deem it necessary to have two parks adjacent to their country seat, one for red deer and one for fallow. In some respects this is an attempt to hold back the pace of change and to re-create a lost ‘natural world’, where men are free to
hunt their food in a wooded Elysium. In other respects, it is just a status symbol. But whether done for sheep farming or for hunting, the destruction of arable fields and villages is a profound worry to the families who are evicted. It is equally worrying to the authorities in those towns where the homeless husbandmen go begging. The gradual loss of land to the working man and his family may fairly be described as the second-greatest single cause of unrest during the reign, second only to religion. By 1600, in some counties, one in six villages that existed in 1450 has been destroyed by enclosure. As we have seen, Oxfordshire and Berkshire are still almost entirely unenclosed, but they are not the norm. Fifty-eight villages have disapperared in Warwickshire, sixty in Leicestershire.
²⁶

Not all of England’s landscape is the same. Large open fields dominate the heart of the kingdom, from Yorkshire down to the south coast, but they are not found along the Welsh border, nor in the north-west, East Anglia or Kent, where enclosed field systems are the norm. Similarly you are unlikely to come across any large open fields anywhere further west than Braunton, in north Devon. The villages in these regions are also different. Rather than being nucleated – gathered closely around a church, as they are in open-field farming counties – the houses are more spread out, often quite isolated from the centre of the community.

Different types of corn are grown in the various regions. Oxfordshire is mainly champaign country, growing high-quality wheat. Go to Norfolk, however, and you will find more rye in the fields. In Wiltshire, wheat and barley are equally popular. Further west, barley thrives better in the wet conditions. In Lancashire and the north, oats are the most common crop. In Yorkshire three times as much rye is grown as wheat. In Kent – the garden of England – there are more orchards than anywhere else, producing the finest apples and cherries. Indeed, Kent is particularly well provisioned, for the Kentish inheritance system of
gavelkind
means that yeomen’s estates are divided equally between their sons. Thus extensive farms are often broken up and turned into smaller units, and these are carefully tended by the next generation of yeomen, who are owner-occupiers and more efficient in their use of land.

Another rapidly changing area of the countryside is its perimeter – the coast. Ports have existed since Roman times, of course, but changing attitudes to the sea are observable in the way people are
now prepared to live on the coast in smaller communities. The dangers of the early Middle Ages, when any coastal community was prey to Norse and Danish marauders, or Irish and Scots pirates, are long gone. People across England have started to build much closer to the sea, and fishing villages have sprung up all round the coast. Some of these are deliberately planted by the lord of the manor. George Cary builds a stone pier at Clovelly in north Devon in this reign, emulating earlier piers such as those at Port Isaac (early sixteenth-century) and Lyme Regis (medieval). Sir Richard Grenville likewise builds a harbour at Boscastle in 1584. The opportunities provided by the sea are particularly exploited by the Cornish: they start exporting pilchards in huge quantities to Spain. They are closely followed by the people of Sussex, where fishing transforms many villages. Brighton has been home to a modest fishing community since Domesday, but now it is fast becoming a prosperous town on the strength of the industry. Despite the French burning it to the ground in 1514, it has been rebuilt and has eighty fishing vessels by 1580, catching plaice, mackerel, conger eel, cod and herring in local waters, the Channel and the North Sea.
²⁷
Whereas in 1519 William Horman could expect his pupils to recite ‘It is not good living on the sea coasts’, by Elizabeth’s reign more and more families are finding that quite the opposite is true.
²⁸

Many labourers’ cottages in the countryside are still open halls, or two-room structures of a single storey. Houses made of cob are common in the rural parts of the West Country – in areas too far from the moorland granite or the red sandstone of the Exe estuary. Villages and farmsteads reflect the geological make-up of the country far more than the towns: constructed by the local community and designed with practicality in mind, they are made only of local materials. Running across the country, from the East Riding of Yorkshire down through Lincolnshire, Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire to Wiltshire and east Somerset, is a wide belt of limestone; so naturally the local farmhouses and cottages are built of that. Many houses in Cheshire, the Welsh border and the Midlands are timber-framed, due to the lack of stone. Houses in the north are predominantly built with large blocks of limestone or sandstone. In the south-east, Kent can boast more than a thousand timber-framed houses of two storeys, these being part of a gradual rebuilding that started in the late fifteenth century. Here chimneys have already become the norm, although glass
windows are still scarce. But in every region there is a social distinction. The wealthier sort, the gentlemen and the richer yeomen, are busy rebuilding their substantial houses in much the same ways as the merchants in the towns. It is the rural workers who are still living in the same conditions as their forefathers, in old single-storey, draughty, dark, small cottages.

Any village is much more than just a series of houses. There are the communal structures of the church and church house. All across the surrounding parish there are barns, byres, corn lofts, henhouses, stables, cart houses and mills. Watermills are far more common than windmills, but you will find a good many of the latter in the south-east, situated on the tops of hills. Marked out with flags on top of them, they are otherwise largely unchanged from the windmills of the late Middle Ages. They have cloth-covered sails and may be two or three storeys high; but the most remarkable thing about them is that they are built on a pivot so that the whole building can be turned to face the direction of the wind.
²⁹
In most villages you will also come across sawpits, timber piles, dungheaps, haycocks, beehives and, of course, gardens. A statute of 1589 decrees that every new house is to be provided with four acres of land: this is the minimum thought to be appropriate for the needs of a family. All domestic buildings are positioned so as to avoid frost pockets and flooding, with further provision for the best juxtaposition of buildings. ‘A hay house near a stable breedeth peril,’ declares William Horman, indicating just how much thought you need to put into the location of your barns and outhouses.

However much thought goes into the planning of a village, the simple fact of people living in close proximity leads to sanitation problems. Many villages have common drains or sewers, which are regularly blocked by faeces and detritus. Walk through Ingatestone in Essex in the 1560s, for example, and you will find that people have built privies over the common gutter or sewer. In 1562 the manor court has to forbid people from leaving dead pigs, dogs and other carcases in the lanes. In 1564 a local man is ordered to remove a dunghill he has created in a public place, to cease leaving dung and the gore of slaughtered animals on the highway, and to stop doing things that block the common drain and make terrible stinking odours. That same year a general order is passed to prevent villagers building ‘jakes’ or privies above the common gutter, due to the stench thus created. Further orders to that
effect are made in 1565 and 1569. But do not let these incidents give you the impression that Ingatestone is a particularly noisome place; rather these entries in the manor court roll indicate that the manorial officers are particularly sensitive to the fact that their community is built alongside the main highway between London and Chelmsford, and the lord of the manor, Sir William Petre, has no wish to be associated with a village that stinks. Sir William’s own house, Ingatestone Hall, has one of the most highly developed drainage systems in the country. Mind you, in Chelmsford you regularly find people urinating on the market cross; and in nearby Moulsham various people have been known to empty their chamber pots in the garden of a house known as the Friary, much to the annoyance of the inhabitants.
³⁰

London

London is not like any other city or town in England. As we have already noted, it is vastly more populous and geographically larger than anywhere else in the kingdom. Its social organisation is also different: it is far more cosmopolitan and its role in the government of the realm, including that of Westminster, is unique. Even at the start of the reign, when its population is about 70,000, the taxable wealth of its citizens is ten times that of the second-largest city, Norwich, which has about 10,600 inhabitants.
³¹
It is thus not only more populous, it is proportionally more prosperous. By 1603, when London’s population has reached 200,000 people, there is simply no comparison. But forget statistics: long before you reach the city, the tangible social differences will strike you. Just look at the large numbers of people you meet on the highway. Travelling along the old Roman road known as Watling Street, you will come across messengers in their riding gear and farmers driving their animals to the city’s suburbs, physicians riding out of the city to treat patients in the country, and foreign travellers in their carriages on the way to Oxford. So much wealth and variety of life are compacted into the city that in 1599 the Swiss traveller Thomas Platter declares: ‘London is not in England but England is in London.’
³²
Most Londoners would agree. The historian John Stow describes it in his great
Survey of London
as ‘the fairest, largest, richest and best inhabited city in the world’.

All cities are places of contrast – and you will be harshly reminded of this when you get to the junction of Watling Street and the long road that is, in more recent times, Oxford Street. This point is known as Tyburn; here stand the gallows for hanging thieves. Executions normally involve several people being hanged at once. The crowds from the city come to watch the killing as if it were a great entertainment. Afterwards the naked bodies may be left turning in the breeze for a day or two. When they have gone, and the gallows are ominously empty, a haunting atmosphere remains. As the leaves of the tall elm trees that grow here rustle in the wind, you cannot help but contemplate this ancient place of death.