The number of people in a rich man’s household varies enormously. Aristocratic families normally have between 100 and 200 servants and gentleman companions: the earl of Derby has 115 in 1585.10 The cost of maintaining these old-style establishments is another reason why the old nobility cannot afford to build splendid palaces. The new stately homes tend to have smaller, pared-down households. Sir Thomas Tresham, builder of Rushton (Northamptonshire), has fifty-two servants; Bess of Hardwick fifty; Lord Paget has only twenty-nine.11 At Wollaton, Sir Francis Willoughby has thirty-six, including a steward, an usher of the hall, grooms of the hall, a butler, an underbutler, yeomen of the chambers, a clerk, a cook, a carter, a slaughterman and grooms of the stables and pages. All of these are men: the only women in a large Elizabethan household are gentlewomen serving the lady of the house or her daughters. Other women are employed from outside the household for tasks like needlework and laundry, but they do not eat in hall or form part of the official household. Only the royal household has a significant number of women, but even in that establishment there are only the four gentlewomen of the bedchamber, the seven gentlewomen of the privy chamber and a few maids of honour and chamberers.
Sir Francis’s thirty-six servants might seem like a small number to be rattling around in a large hall like Wollaton. Sometimes, however, it is full to bursting. One occasion is 11 November 1588, when Sir Francis entertains the earl and countess of Rutland and several local gentlemen and their retinues, and no fewer than 120 men and women fill the hall for a feast.12 If you think that sounds onerous, have some sympathy for those blessed with a visit from the queen. When she arrives at a country house the owner is expected to provide accommodation for twenty-four courtiers and their households, her principal secretary, a number of government officials and all their servants – several hundred of them. When Elizabeth arrives at Theobalds in 1583 she takes Sir William Cecil’s hall as her great chamber, his parlour as her presence chamber and his great chamber as her privy chamber. Sir William ends up having to eat in a gallery and his servants have to sleep on straw mattresses in the attic of a storeroom. Nevertheless, the visit is a great success. Over the years the queen visits him thirteen times.13
Presuming you arrive at a country house when the queen is not in the neighbourhood, you will have your own bedchamber. Expect to find woven rush matting on the floor and brightly coloured tapestries on all the walls, these being cut away around the door and windows to admit light. You should find curtains and curtain rails in the bed chambers.14 Elizabethan bed frames can be large, so the bed will dominate the room. The Great Bed of Ware, mentioned by Shakespeare, is 11ft square, but this is unique: six feet by seven is more usual. Beds can be just as impressive for their carving and fabric as for their dimensions. Stay the night at Fulford in Devon and you might sleep in a four-poster bed with a carved frame of semi-naked Native Americans, these being all the fashion in 1585. Some beds have elaborately carved testers commemorating a marriage. Some are lavishly hung with taffeta curtains; others have silk-embroidered cloth-of-gold curtains. The featherbed mattresses are piled on top of one another, with a down-stuffed one on top; beds in stately homes are therefore very soft. Pillowcases and sheets are normally of holland, and the pillowcase might have a coat of arms embroidered on it.15 Chests of drawers are very rare – they are mainly used for storing documents at this period – so if there is storage for your clothes, it will probably be a three-panelled chest with an elaborately carved front.16 If covered with a Turkish or Persian carpet and cushions, this may double up as a seat. Adjacent you may have a withdrawing room, where your servant will be expected to sleep.17
With regard to personal grooming in the morning, you may find a mirror or ‘looking glass’ in your chamber. It might be a small round one mounted on the wall or a rectangular one set in an adjustable silver frame and placed on a table (like the one mentioned by Lady Ri-Melaine in chapter 6).18 Alternatively, you could ask your host if you may borrow a hand-held mirror: these are common in good houses. A second table or high cupboard will have a silver or brass ewer and basin, with linen towels for washing your face and hands. As for the loo, you may find a latten or pewter chamber pot in your room or a close stool, and maybe a glass urinal (if you wish your physician to inspect your urine). As Horman puts it, ‘see that I lack not by my bedside a chair of easement with a vessel under and a urinal by’. You will have the option of wiping your ‘nether end’ with blanket, ‘cotton’ (fine wool), linen or, in some places, paper bought especially for the purpose.19
Every great house should have a pièce de résistance, some specific marvel that everyone who sees it will talk about long afterwards. At Wollaton it is the prospect room: a huge light room built on top of the hall, looking down on the towers of the rest of the building and across the surrounding park. Nor is it intended just to be used on a fine day: Sir Francis is interested in astronomy and so invites his guests up to the upper roof to view the stars. At other places the gatehouse is the most imposing spectacle. At Tixall in Staffordshire Sir Walter Aston adds to his father’s recent timber-framed manor house an elegant three-storey stone gatehouse (where, incidentally, I am writing this chapter), with Doric, Ionic and Corinthian columns on each face, extensive large windows and a roof walk. At Longford Castle, the triangular nature of the whole design provides the talking point; at Rushton, the triangular lodge in the grounds similarly provokes admiration. Other places have unusual banqueting houses in the grounds or on their roofs, designed to amuse and impress.
These new great houses all tend to have one other particular feature that their medieval predecessors lack: a formal garden. Whereas the medieval garden used to be a place where noblewomen could go to read, pick flowers or otherwise just escape the hustle and bustle of the household, an Elizabethan garden is a place for both sexes, an area in which Renaissance and aesthetic ideas about architecture, nature and order come together. Henry VIII’s gardens at Hampton Court, Nonsuch Palace and Whitehall provide the original patterns for the English pleasure garden. Glass windows are another reason why pleasure gardens have caught on so quickly: while you would hardly glance out of the small draughty windows of an old castle, you might regularly sit in the wide glass-filled windows of a new house and admire the view. Much use is made of heraldic symbols, sundials and sculpture around these gardens, but it is the use of the square that predominates. It can be found in every great garden, whether marked out in stone, water or a box hedge. Within each square you will find a design in the shape of an elaborate knot (hence ‘knot gardens’). ‘Open knots’ are patterns of rosemary, thyme, hyssop and other herbs, the spaces between the plants being filled with sand or brick dust or different-coloured earths; in ‘closed knots’ these spaces are filled with different-coloured flowers.20 The borders of these squares are formed by shrubs and hedges, including hawthorn, bush firs, ivy, roses, juniper, holly, elm and box. In some places, feats of topiary are worked in rosemary, yew or box. In the privy garden at Whitehall you may see shapes of men and women, centaurs, sirens and serving maids with baskets, created by interweaving dry twigs with the growing shrubs.21
Pleasure gardens are quickly taken up by the owners of stately homes who hope – or fear – that Elizabeth will visit them. At Kenilworth, Robert Dudley lays out eight knot gardens in a rectangle within the outer wall, adding a fountain at the centre and a terrace alongside the keep from which the garden might best be viewed. Lord Lumley redesigns the gardens of Nonsuch Palace with square knots, topiary, obelisks, marble basins and sculptural fountains. You will see a pelican spouting water into a wide stone dish and admire a marble Venus whose nipples gush forth jets of water. At Wollaton, Sir Francis Willoughby and his architect Robert Smythson take the Elizabethan obsession with squares to new heights, treating the whole house as the central square of a plan of nine, with eight square gardens arranged around the house, several of which are divided again into smaller knot gardens.22
Perhaps the most interesting set of gardens is at Theobald
s. In addition to his many duties and other interests, Sir William Cecil is a passionate gardener and garden designer. A German visitor to Theobalds, marvelling at the hall of the house and its design of six trees on each side, is astounded when the steward opens the windows overlooking the gardens and birds fly into the hall, perch themselves in the artificial trees and begin to sing.23 Sir William’s formal garden is actually divided into a privy garden and a great garden. The privy garden is a large square enclosed by a wall. Inside this runs a gravel path with a topiary hedge cut into shapes and interspersed with cherry trees on the inner side. Flights of steps run down to a grass walk where there is another small hedge and then a third inner square. At the heart of this you will find the knot garden, with tulips, lilies and peonies planted in the borders of the ascents. The great garden alongside it extends to more than seven acres, containing nine square knot gardens in one great square. Each of these knot gardens measures seventy feet by seventy feet, with a path twenty-two feet wide between each one. In the middle of the central knot is a white marble fountain. In other knots are sculptures and obelisks, and even a small mound set within a maze dedicated to Venus. Elsewhere there is a summer-house with busts of the first twelve Roman emperors.24
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.25 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.26
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.27 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.28 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.29
The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England Page 29
