The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England

by Mortimer, Ian

  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:

  poultry (8s)

  nineteen acres of wheat (£27 10s)

  three horses (£6 10s)

  four acres of rye (£5)

  six pigs (£2 13s 4d)

  thirty-two acres of barley (£32)

  eight cows (£16)

  fourteen acres of oats (£10)

  three bullocks (£4)

  ten acres of tares (£5)

  150 sheep (£37 10s)

  four acres of peas (£2 13s 4d)

  twenty lambs (£3)

  1½ acres of beans (£1 5s)

  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.30

  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.31

  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.32 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.33 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.34

  An Act of 1589 stipulates that all new cottages must be provided with four acres of land. In some respects this is quite generous; a lot of people hold no more than that from the lord of their manor.35 But this very generosity means that fewer cottages are built: landlords do not want to give away so much land to every labourer. Even where four acres are set aside, you cannot feed a family on the produce of that area alone, especially as a portion of the land must be left fallow each year. Hence the majority of cottagers have to supplement their farming by labour. William Gullyvor of Cropredy is a day labourer in 1568; the value of his estate is £3 16s. Most of this is represented by the £3 of livestock that he owns – two cows and four sheep. Enter his two-room cottage and you will find in the hall nothing but a table, a bench, a frying pan, two wooden pails, three small platters, three saucers, a kettle and a small pot of brass. In the other room there is just the bedstead, four chests, his sheets and a loom. You can say much the same for Thomas Hawkins, a labourer of Stonesfield (Oxfordshire) until his death in 1587. His cottage has a hall and two chambers – more than most – but he has no chimney, no glass, no featherbed. As with all these workers, the only one of Harrison’s landmark changes that you find in his house is the pewter: he has ten pieces, worth 5s, in his hall. His entire estate is worth just £4 10s 10d – and this is before deducting more than £30 of debts.36 Many labourers rent just a room in someone else’s house. When William Matthew, labourer of Albury (Surrey), dies in 1589, everything he owns (except his seven sheep) can be found in one room.37

  You will therefore take many contemporary statements of improved living conditions with a pinch of salt. While it is true that people with money to spare invest in the luxuries identified by William Harrison, the only one that is universal is the spread of pewter. If you want to sleep on a featherbed and linen sheets in rural England, you will choose to stay in the house of a prosperous yeoman – although you may find that he has not invested in glass and curtains. But then, these are uncertain times. If you visit England in the famine years of 1594–7, you will be glad that your host has stored extra grain and cheeses in his spare bedchamber, and not put all his money into glass.

  Town Houses

  There is just as great a range of wealth and architectural novelty in the towns. In fact, the range is even greater because here you will find a concentration of extremely wealthy people in a small space, all trying to show off their social status and importance. There is thus greater competition for pre-eminence and more ostentation. Look at the carving on the shops and houses in any substantial market town: the tall frontages, large glass windows, painted plasterwork figures, coats of arms, carved and painted joinery and brightly coloured signs all show that the merchant classes are using their houses and shops to draw attention to themselves and their businesses. Meanwhile, at the bottom end of the social spectrum, you have a greater number of poor workers practically living on top of one another in slum accommodation, competing for the very basics of life.

  The largest and most prestigious houses in any town are those arranged around a courtyard and entered by a gatehouse. The majority are timber-framed and two or three storeys high; the timbers are cut t
o size in a sawpit elsewhere and erected into a frame onsite, filled in with either wickerwork and clay or brick, and then plastered and wainscoted. In provincial towns you may have substantial houses built around two courtyards, such as Thomas Taylor’s house in the small town of Witney (Oxfordshire), which contains twenty-four separate rooms around two quadrangles. Mr Taylor is wealthy – he has moveable goods to the value of £409 at the time of his death in 1583 – and so it is unsurprising to find that his hall, both parlours and all the main chambers are glazed. The hall is panelled all the way round, with tapestry hanging down above the wainscot. Two of the five glazed windows in the hall have iron casements (window frames that open) and so do several others in the chambers. These have coloured curtains, hung by hooks from iron rods. There is a turned chair in the hall, a settle and a round table: this last piece of furniture and two rectangular tables are covered with carpets. Elsewhere in the house other items will catch your eye: pewter fruit dishes, a mousetrap, toasting irons, books, candle snuffers, folding tables, a Venetian carpet cloth, cushions covered in tapestry, cushions of needlework and a looking glass. In the outer courtyard there are two sows and three pigs; in the inner one you will find twenty chickens, three hens, three pullets, one cock, a goose and ‘one turkey cock and two turkey hens’. Turkeys are first introduced to England in the 1520s and are rare specimens until Elizabeth’s reign, when their value as a roasting bird is widely recognised and their popularity suddenly increases.38

  You will have as much comfort in a prosperous merchant’s house as you will be able to find anywhere. A wealthy vintner like Simon Tally of Guildford has a substantial house arranged around a courtyard, with a gatehouse and a hall, a great chamber and his own bedchamber, ten further chambers, a buttery and a kitchen, two parlours and two cellars. His hall is glazed; he has sixty-seven pairs of sheets; and his chambers are all full of cushions, featherbeds and beds filled with down. He has plenty of silverware and pewterware. There is more wine in his cellar than you could drink in a year, even if you were to stay there with all your friends. In such a house you will find a wide hall with a painted plaster or wooden chimneypiece above the fireplace, cast-iron firebacks, chairs and settles to feel the warmth of the fire, and painted wooden screens to divide up the room or contain the heat. You’ll see moulded plaster ceilings in the hall and great chamber; there are Persian and Turkish carpets on the tables, and painted cloths on the walls showing pictures from the Bible or from Arthurian romances. Mr Tally has warming pans to warm your sheets before you get into bed, quilts, blankets, books, muskets, bows and arrows … But it is striking that there are no items for entertainment: no musical instruments, no chess sets, no decks of playing cards or dice.39 Staying in a rich man’s house might be luxurious, but it will not necessarily be more fun than staying at an inn.

  Let’s move down the social scale and say that you’re going to call on a blacksmith living in Oxford, by the name of Thomas Heath, in the 1580s. His house is situated in the parish of St Michael’s, inside the North Gate. It consists of a shop with a cellar beneath, a hall and buttery on the ground floor, a staircase with two small rooms above it, then a ‘middle chamber’ and a ‘little chamber’ on the first floor, a ‘higher chamber’ above the kitchen, and a garden. Although his house is within the walls of Oxford, he keeps two cows, a horse, a sow and five pigs in his garden. In the shop, there are the tools of his trade.40 The whole value of his moveable goods is just £38. Nevertheless, his hall is equipped with glass in an iron casement. There is a chimney too, with iron firedogs. He has plenty of pewter in his buttery and five candlesticks. He even has four old flower pots for growing potherbs. Moving upstairs, the beds in the middle chamber are old and have flock mattresses, but there are featherbeds in the little chamber, and this too has glass in the windows. In his high chamber, where Thomas Heath himself sleeps, there are featherbeds, linen sheets and towels, cushions, glazed windows, a ‘brush and a glass’ and a book. In short, this blacksmith enjoys a standard of living higher than that of many yeomen living in the country – for the simple reason that he does not keep 80 per cent of his wealth in his fields and barns. His animals and hay are worth £5 and the tools of his trade another £7 11s 10d; he can afford to spend a far greater proportion of his money on pewter, featherbeds and glazing.41

  In many houses most of the foregoing things are absent. If your relations in town are poor, then there may be no spare bed and no clean linen when you call on them. You will sleep in canvas sheets without a pillow on a straw mattress and will cook over a fireplace in the one room your host occupies. In a house of five or six rooms, each one occupied by a separate family, you will come face to face with the significance of overcrowding. Just think what it must be like staying in a house like Shipdams in Norwich (which we visited in chapter 2), with ten chambers occupied by poor or destitute people. A straw mattress, a sheet, a blanket and a wooden bowl or drinking vessel are probably all they have. Noise will be another issue: you can never get enough sleep in a house tenanted by the destitute, with some people staying up late and arguing, babies crying, prostitutes’ customers coming and going at all hours and in all states of drunkenness, and still others getting up before five o’clock to look for work. But the main problem you will encounter in such a lodging is the lack of water.

  Most people in the country have a choice of water sources. The preferred supply is rain water: ‘we have none other water but that that falleth upon the house and runneth into a great trough by dropping down,’ writes William Horman. Second best is spring water, which is considered to be much purer than well water, the third option; most yeomen and husbandmen have a well in or near their house.42 In the countryside people do not normally take water from rivers except for brewing and washing but in the city, river water is the best one can hope for. The wealthy have private conduits bringing water from the river into their houses; however, the supply is often little more than a trickle, being conveyed in very thin pipes which do little more than drip water after the tap is turned on full. The small dimensions of the pipes (normally described as ‘quills’ of water) mean they are often blocked by a stone or an eel. Unfortunately, if the latter is causing the blockage, you will have to wait until the fish decomposes for the supply to recommence.43

  Large towns have water-bearers who haul water to people’s houses in large three-gallon containers, wide at the bottom and narrow at the top, bound with iron hoops. Normally one delivery will cost you a penny: this is not cheap, especially considering you don’t know where the water has actually come from. Large towns also have systems of bringing water into the centre through public conduits; unfortunately, these are often old and in decay, and the lead of the pipes is sometimes stolen because of its high value. Still, the most common way of obtaining water in a city is to fill a bucket at one of these conduits. In Exeter there is an underground water supply system which has been in use since the Middle Ages, but here the old pipes running through these tunnels need constant attendance as the elm pipes rot and the joints of the lead ones weaken. Plymouth is even worse off, despite being at the confluence of two rivers and the sea. In 1585 a new Act is passed allowing for Sir Francis Drake to build a leat to bring water seventeen miles from the River Meavy on Dartmoor to the town. Just as enterprising are the machines pumping water from beneath London Bridge. Peter Morrice contracts with the lord mayor to supply water to people’s houses by using a waterwheel-powered system which is running by the end of 1582. A rival, Bevis Bulmer, sets up a similar pump shortly afterwards. Again, only the wealthy need apply. And of course it is only Thames water – tidal and salty, suitable only for washing things. Even if you pay for this system you will still need to obtain fresh water from the conduits.

  The result of all this is a hierarchy of water provision. If you rent a room at the top of a five-storey dwelling in London, obtaining water is a long and tiresome business. You have to go out with a pair of buckets on a yoke over your shoulders, walk to the conduit, queue up, fill the buckets, w
alk back home and carry the water up to your lodging, slopping it on the wooden stairs. Washing your face and hands is therefore much more easily done at the conduit. You may even find some people scouring cooking pans there, while others nearby shuffle impatiently with their empty buckets.

  Standing there at the conduit, waiting your turn, you can see that there are considerable discomforts to living in a city unless you have your own house and servants. In the country you could have slept in a chamber full of sheaves of corn and maturing cheeses, with a ewer of fresh water by the window and a cockerel crowing in the yard. However, you would be a long way from the excitement of the markets, the taverns, the dancing and the music – a long way from where everything is happening. Most of the London playwrights rent chambers from householders and only return home to sleep: they live between the taverns and the theatres. Robert Greene rents a bedchamber from a cordwainer in Dowgate, Ben Jonson rents a room from a comb-maker near the Elephant and Castle, Thomas Nashe lodges with a printer in Hosier Lane and Shakespeare stays in a house in Silver Street, where he rents a chamber from a hairdresser.44 You cannot imagine any of these men happily giving up his city room and friends for a quiet life as a hard-working farmer. And while they are not typical, they are representative of the majority in one respect: the quality of their lives does not primarily depend on easy access to water or having glass windows. These things might strike you as being crucial factors in deciding where to stay, but, after you have spent an evening in The Mermaid with Jonson and Shakespeare, enjoying the repartee, oysters and double beer, you frankly won’t give a damn that there is no running water in your chamber. In fact, you might be amazed at the discomforts you can tolerate.