Bess’s bloody realm of tiny sheep and high rises
To many of us the Elizabethan age was one of glory but Ian Mortimer reveals a land full of cruelty and, to the modern eye, surprising sights
Cate Blanchett plays Queen Bess in Elizabeth: The Golden AgeWhat is perhaps surprising is that it has remained almost exclusively in the hands of novelists. Historians too can employ the time-travel conceit; doing so allows us to explore earlier societies differently and more immediately than in a traditional historical text. We can ask questions such as: if we really could visit Elizabethan England, what would it look like? What would we wear? What would we eat? And perhaps, most of all, what surprises would there be in store for us?
Imagine you are riding towards London in the winter of 1580-1, the middle of Elizabeth I’s reign. You are probably prepared for the rutted state of the highways, none of which is paved. You pass a carter driving between villages with a load of chickens and capons in crates, and women walking along carrying baskets of eggs or herbs to market, balancing these baskets on their heads with a wreath of straw. But glance to the side of the road and look at the poor houses in which most of the population lives.
Most of us hear “Elizabethan houses” and think of what survives — mansions such as Hardwick Hall and Longleat — but these are not representative. Far more common are the single-storey thatched labourers’ cottages dotted around the countryside. These do not have “more glass than wall” but wooden shutters fastened tight, with smoke coming out through the roofs.
The poorest tenants are still living in houses that consist of just a hall with a packed-earth floor, or a hall with a bed chamber at one end. They keep their shutters shut most of the winter to try to keep the heat in: families live and sleep around the central hearth in near-darkness.
Their social superiors have larger houses of two storeys. Having a fireplace and a chimney allows you to build two rooms on the same patch of ground; but even these folk will keep their shutters closed. A few have panes of horn covering their windows. Only the wealthy have glass — which alerts you to the fact that light is one of the most valuable resources in an Elizabethan house. Candles are expensive and a fire risk. Daylight is essential for sewing, cooking and reading, but in any unglazed Elizabethan cottage you have a stark choice in winter: you can have either light or warmth but not both.
Walking onward past these cottages towards the city you will notice how the landscape itself is different. Rather than the small fenced enclosures with which you are familiar, many of the fields are huge: up to 1,000 acres, each one having a patchwork of sections subdivided into strips.
On the road you’ll see husbandmen driving their herds and flocks to market. But look how small the animals are: the average sheep in Elizabethan England weighs 40lb and the largest only 60lb — roughly a quarter of the size of their modern descendants. The cows too are tiny, about 350lb or between a quarter and a third of a modern cow’s weight.
As you enter London, and finally find paving beneath your feet at the city gates, your senses will be assaulted by sights and sounds. With about 100,000 inhabitants in 1581, London is by far the largest and wealthiest city in the kingdom. Next largest are Norwich and Bristol, each with about 12,000 people.
The city is remarkably “high rise”. Because the Queen prohibits construction in any of the suburbs, houses are built higher and narrower in the city itself. Many are five or six storeys high. Almost all are timber and a serious fire risk.
It is the smell that you will notice most, however. In the modern world most people think of the smell of faeces and detritus in the street as a feature of backwardness. In Elizabethan England it is a feature of progress — of urbanisation. In the country people can dispose of their ordure with little or no inconvenience in cesspits in their gardens or by way of latrines above streams.
In the city, this is not possible. If you are renting a room on the third or fourth floor of a house, emptying a chamber pot requires you to descend a number of stairs and walk to a public latrine. You do not simply throw excrement out of the window — to do so would be to risk being hauled before the constable for fouling the highway. Nevertheless in poorer areas the smell of a shared cesspit is overwhelming.
Queen Elizabeth herself cannot tolerate noisome smells: she will not allow dyeing with woad or burning coal within five miles of her palaces. This might come as a surprise to anyone who recalls the famous line from the Venetian ambassador that Elizabeth has a bath every month “whether she needs it or not”. But that quotation is not what it seems.
Most people do not bathe in hot water except for medicinal purposes. Firewood is expensive, water is difficult to get hold of in towns and clean water is especially hard to obtain. When there are so many waterborne diseases, the whole bathing experience might infect you physically as well as cripple you financially. Therefore most people wash themselves in other ways — using linen to remove sweat, and rinsing just their faces and hands in water.
Only when the physician prescribes a medicinal bath do you invest in the appropriate herbs and carefully selected water. What the ambassador wants his audience in Venice to know is that, unlike most people, Elizabeth bathes purely for the sake of her bodily cleanliness, even when she is in perfectly good health. But then, she can afford to.
This brings us to one of the harsh realities of Elizabethan life: the whole of society is intensely hierarchical. Status affects every aspect of life. It affects education, how you smell, how you dress and what you eat and drink — even what you brush your teeth with (can you afford a dentifrice, or a tooth blanch made from cuttlefish bone?).
Legislation stipulates what rank of person may wear particular clothes such as silk, cloth of gold and furs, and to ensure that servants do not wear outfits above their station. Worse, status denigrates some people to a sub-normal level. Being homeless is an offence; and being unemployed as well is a double crime. Even if you rent a room in a house you might find your host being forced to throw you out or pay a fine — for housing a vagrant.
For women, the social hierarchy is particularly problematic. The property of a married woman legally belongs to her husband. Married women are generally unable to make a will, to enter a legal contract or allow anyone into the home without their husband’s permission.
Other prejudices are simply customary. Women and girls do all the cleaning, and all the laying out of the dead; men never wash anything except themselves. No woman may hold an office or obtain a degree or become a professional person such as a lawyer, clergyman or licensed schoolmaster. It is technically possible for a woman to become a licensed surgeon but only a handful are prepared to put themselves through the testing process, which is overseen by men, of course.
Wives and daughters are heavily protected, hardly ever being allowed to travel without an escort or to go out at night. If a woman travels “alone”, she normally is accompanied by her servants. Only on market days in her home town are you likely to see a respectable woman walking by herself.
One reason for this is that violence is endemic. Hundreds of people are hanged every year for violent offences, including murder, highway robbery, housebreaking and rape.
In London you’ll see the bodies turning in the breeze on the triangular gallows at Tyburn (now Marble Arch) and the heads and skulls of traitors on poles above the gate on London Bridge.
The median age of the population is young, about 22 (today it is 39), so there are many rash young men roaming freely about the highways, often with swords at their sides and always with knives in their belts. In towns it is usual to find curfews enforced: only householders of good reputation are allowed out after dark in London, and even then they have to carry a lantern.
It isn’t just the youth of the population that contributes to the violence on the streets. Society is incredibly cruel. Women as well as men love to watch bear baiting and cockfighting; people revel in the sight of blood. Elizabeth does not go to the Globe Theatre but she does visit the bear pit next door to Shakespeare’s playhouse. It is actually unlawful to slaughter a bull without baiting it first with vicious dogs.
This cruelty extends to the ways people treat each other: many punishments involve the cutting off of people’s ears or hands, or whipping them until all the skin on the back is removed, and even crushing people to death. This in turn affects the way that men treat women and children: a man has the right to chastise his dependants and may legally beat his wife as long as he does not actually kill her.
He may also beat his servants with impunity, and if he happens to beat one to death, the chances are very good that a jury will acquit him. In such cases the jury may find “Richard No Name” (or a similar fictitious person) guilty of the killing and allow the actual killer to go free.
Having said all this, foreign visitors to London look at the freedoms enjoyed by merchants’ wives and declare that England is the “paradise of married women”. Wealthy women are allowed to go out and about in coaches and are afforded much more leisure than their continental cousins. A group of women might go together to a tavern and drink, dance and flirt in a way that simply would not be permitted in many other countries.
One Swiss visitor is astonished to realise that if you invite an Englishman to dinner, he expects the invitation automatically to include his wife. The key to such freedoms and privileges is money. Despite the prejudices against women, it is much better to be a wealthy, high-status woman than a poor man.
The rich love to eat meat, although this is not permitted on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays unless you pay for a licence (and even then you may not eat beef on these days). In addition to the usual red meats, all manner of tame and wild birds are boiled, baked, roasted and consumed — from turkey, goose and chicken to a large number of rare species: bustard, snipe, curlew, bittern, shoveler, peewit, godwit, dotterel, plover, stint and redshank. On Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays an equally extraordinary array of fish is eaten, from sturgeon, turbot and salmon to freshwater fish, including pike, carp, tench and perch.
Vegetables are only just beginning to make their way into the rich Englishman’s diet. Newly introduced varieties include pumpkins and melons (from France), carrots (from the Low Countries), and cauliflowers (introduced from Italy in 1590). You might be amused to hear that one newly introduced fruit is imported only for its decorative qualities. The herbalist John Gerard notes that the Italians and Spanish eat tomatoes but states they are bad for your health. Rich people set them on tables at showy banquets — and then throw them away.
What will you most remember from a virtual tour of Elizabethan England? Playing the government-sponsored lottery in 1567 (first prize: £5,000, the equivalent of a labourer’s wages for about 1,000 years)? The terrible influenza epidemic of 1557-9, which kills about 5% of the population? The plague of London in 1563, which kills 17,404 Londoners (about 25%) and is referred to as the Great Plague for decades? Perhaps Dr John Dee’s idea in 1577 to establish a British Empire with lands in America?
Or maybe something more earthy, such as the fashion for wealthy Londoners to kiss the womenfolk of the houses they call at (wives as well as daughters) on the lips? It all depends what you want to find in that strange place that is Gloriana’s realm.
For me, what I will take away from my own experience of Elizabeth’s reign is an appreciation of the importance of the vernacular Bible. It is not the invention of printing that changes the world, nor is it the translation of the Bible per se, it is the combination of these things.
In 1500 10% of men and 1% of women can read and write; in 1600 those figures have grown to 25% of men and, most importantly, 10% of women. In Elizabeth’s reign, people share knowledge like never before; and they yearn for more. Nearly 400 titles a year are published in the 1590s, most of them in English. And in that reading and that sharing of knowledge is contained the seed of our own, less hierarchical society.
The printed word does not discriminate between the status, wealth or sex of the person who reads it. By the end of the reign, the remarkable Emilia Lanier is arguing that Eve (and women generally) are not to be blamed for the Fall of Man: God made Adam stronger than Eve and so, had Adam acted responsibly, he would have prevented Eve from taking the apple. The fault is thus his, not hers.
That to me is historical magic: getting up close to a society, understanding how it is riven with inequalities and flaws, and then finding the origins of the forces that will expose and attack those inequalities and flaws already present in that society, like cracks in a rock face. When you find such contradictions in a society, you start to understand it. You find tensions and you find passions. You find life.
The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England by Ian Mortimer is published by the Bodley Head at £20
