The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England

by Mortimer, Ian

  When it comes to dairy products, you will find a mixture of attitudes. Butter is eaten at almost every opportunity; milk is largely avoided. Cheese is available in several forms: green (new) cheese, hard cheese (such as cheddar), soft cheese, cheese with herbs, and particular regional cheeses. All of these are becoming more popular, as cheese is increasingly seen as fit for the dinner tables of the wealthy. Cheshire cheeses are brought south for the privy council’s dinners in 1590. Dutch cheeses to the value of £2,482 are imported in 1559–60. Parmesan too is imported from Italy and commonly grated with sage and sugar. Curiously, the English never adopt the custom of making ‘cheese with worms’, in the German fashion. Andrew Boorde is not the only Englishman who baulks at the practice of deliberately breeding maggots in a cheese – and then eating them together.47

  The moderately well-off have always tended to eat more vegetables than their social superiors, so as the very wealthy start to eat a little more fruit and vegetables, yeomen and merchants have no qualms about following suit. Cookery books include recipes for puddings baked in a turnip, stuffed carrots and cucumbers stuffed with pigs’ livers. In case you don’t believe me, here is the recipe:

  Take your cucumber and cut out all the meat that is within it. Then take the liver of a lamb or a pig, and grapes or gooseberries, and grated bread, pepper, salt, cloves and mace and a little suet, and the yolks of three eggs, and mingle them all together and put in the cucumber, and let your broth boil … the broth must be made of mutton broth, vinegar and butter, strained bread and salt.48

  Artichokes, which were unheard of in England at the start of Henry VIII’s reign, are now common. Pumpkins too have recently been introduced from France, as have melons.49 Cauliflowers are another novelty, introduced from Italy in a dinner given to the privy council in November 1590.50 In East Anglia and the south-east, immigrants from Holland and Flanders introduce their market gardens from the 1570s, thereby bringing in new vegetables such as the edible carrot, chervil and lamb’s lettuce. They also import great quantities of vegetables from Flanders to London, where they are sold near the gates of St Paul’s Cathedral: 12,600 cabbages, sixty-five barrels of onions and 10,400 ropes of onions in the month of November 1596 alone.51 Cabbages, parsnips, carrots and turnips are cultivated around London – the largest cabbages weighing up to 28lbs – and all of these are boiled and eaten with butter.52 The old fears of fruit-eating are similarly weakening. The pioneering gardening writer, Thomas Tusser, lists twenty-seven varieties of fruit trees to be cultivated. William Harrison declares that the gardens of old were just a dunghill compared to those of his own time. Somewhat surprisingly, however, you will hardly ever find mushrooms on the table. Even though many different edible types grow in the woods and fields up and down the country – and John Gerard notes in his Herbal that there are common mushrooms ‘to be eaten’ – people are simply too cautious of the poisonous varieties. ‘Mushrumps’ are well known to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but they never regard them as food: they consider them more suitable for elves to sit under.53

  Food in a Poor Household

  For the poor, the question of ‘what to eat’ is somewhat disingenuous: they eat whatever they possibly can. ‘A few herbs well chopped together will make a mess of good pottage to a hungry man,’ writes William Horman patronisingly, ignoring the low nutritional value of herbs by themselves. The hard fact is that a labourer’s daily wage will barely pay for the food he requires. The diet fed to sailors in the navy in 1565, mentioned in chapter 7, amounts to a substantial 5,800 calories per day – almost double the requirement of 3,000 calories for a moderately active man; but that diet costs 4½d per day.54 A labourer in Elizabeth’s reign earning 4d per day cannot afford more than 5,100 calories – not enough to feed his family as well as himself, let alone pay for clothes and other requirements. His children will suffer from malnutrition unless the family manages to produce more calories from their garden than they require to work the soil. Small wonder so many labourers’ sons are ready to join the navy.

  Bread underpins the diet of the poor. In the country, most households will bake their own; in towns, you will go to a baker to buy it. Its importance is becoming even greater now that the wealthy have started eating cheese, which used to be the other mainstay of the poor. The quality of the bread depends on harvest conditions. In a year when wheat is plentiful and cheap, the urban poor may well be able to afford white bread, at least occasionally. However, most of the time they and their country cousins will eat bread made from rye, barley or maslin (a mixture of wheat and rye). When times are tough, you make bread with whatever you can. William Harrison notes that in times of dearth the poor have to make bread from peas, beans, oats and acorns. People do not do this without resistance; they feel ashamed to eat foods that are normally eaten by animals, and it is a sad day when a father has to say grace over a loaf of acorn bread; but when his corn is lying sodden and dead in the fields, what else can he do?

  Not all the poor are starving, of course. Consider Joan Mychel, a widow living in a two-room cottage in Chertsey in 1559. She is not destitute: she has chattels worth £17, including a dozen old pewter platters, dishes and saucers with which to entertain her guests, although most of her tableware is wooden, including her spoons.55 Her food consists largely of pottage. It might be cooked with a modicum of bacon or the leftovers of a chicken: these are boiled in a cauldron over the fire, and garlic, oats, cabbages, radishes, pumpkins, coleworts, peas, beans or lentils added from her garden. On a non-meat day, salt cod replaces the bacon – if she can afford it. In autumn and winter, root vegetables such as turnips, parsnips and carrots are added to the pot, which are now eaten by ‘the common people, all the time of Autumn and chiefly upon the fish days’.56 In summer she throws in herbs such as hyssop, thyme and parsley.57 If no meat is available, she will use the bones of a chicken carcase. Spices are quite beyond her reach, but she will make her own verjuice and vinegar and use salt sparingly. When entertaining, Joan will take a pumpkin, remove the pith and seeds, fill it with apples and bake it. Butter is freshened (washed and re-churned repeatedly), to stop it going rancid. Apples, pears, blackberries and cherries are gathered when plentiful and preserved for as long as possible. When food is precious, you will find a large measure of thrift in every poor household.

  What to Drink

  During Elizabeth’s reign drinking glasses begin to replace wooden and pewter cups on the tables of the wealthy. Like glass windows, drinking glasses are a status symbol. English-made vessels, with a characteristic greenish tinge (due to the use of fern leaves in the manufacturing process), are the cheapest, at about 2d each. Venetian glasses from Murano, being the best quality, cost at least five times as much.58 Glasses worth £663 are imported in 1559–60; this rises to £1,622 in 1565.59 But the transformation to glassware is not as quick as you might expect. In part this is due to the queen granting a monopoly on the business in 1575 to an Italian glass-maker in London, Giacomo Verzelini.60 There is nothing wrong with Verzelini’s craftsmanship – far from it: his work is superb – but his monopoly means it is now illegal to import Venetian glass, and there is only so much one glass-maker can produce. In fact, glass drinking vessels are as rare as silver ones in the provincial towns. Most people, even well-off vintners like Simon Tally of Guildford, drink wine from pewter goblets.61 You will very rarely see a glass in a husbandman’s house. Beer and ale are drunk out of wooden mazers, stoneware flagons, earthenware mugs or pewter pots, pottles or tankards. Gold cups are extremely rare, although the queen has forty-three of them, inherited from her father.62

  One thing you will probably not drink in Elizabethan England is water. All sorts of diseases are conveyed by water and most people understand that it is harmful – hence all the references to ‘fair water’ and ‘rosewater’ in the recipes we encountered above. If you are lucky enough to be staying in the country and have rain water collected in a cistern, you might consider using it to water down your wine, but even so, most people won’
t touch it. If they have no beer or wine, they will opt for mead or metheglin. Mead is honey fermented in water, metheglin a similar concoction with herbs. Cider and perry are both commonly drunk in the country; they are popular among the poor not just because they are cheap, but because they do not consume grain like beer does, which can instead be baked into bread. While milk is the other staple drink of the poor, yeomen don’t drink it and give away the whey they have left over after making cream and butter, which is only considered suitable for women and children. If you do happen to notice a yeoman with a flagon of milk (or olive oil), he is consuming it as a prophylactic prior to a heavy bout of wine drinking.

  WINE

  Wine is a luxury, one of the clearest delineations between a gentleman’s style of living and that of everyone else. Fynes Moryson declares that ‘clowns and vulgar men drink only beer or ale but gentlemen carouse only in wine’.63 Wine grapes have not grown in England for the last two hundred years, so it has to be imported. Most of the kingdom’s wine – more than £68,000 worth in 1559–60, equating to about 68,000 hogsheads – arrives in the port of London, and a fair deal of it is consumed in the same city.64 When it arrives, heavy customs duties are levied by the port officials. Also, any wine that is to be drunk in a country house or inland town has to be transported over long distances, and so the cost mounts up. Some wines are not that expensive at the ship’s side – as little as 8d a gallon for claret in London, the same price as good-quality vinegar – but you cannot pick up a bottle from your local shop that cheaply. In a country town the retailer will have paid up to £1 for the carriage of a large cask of wine, depending on the distance. On top of this, wine rapidly increases in price over the course of the reign: a tun that costs £6 6s 8d in 1564 costs £10 in 1575 and £12 in 1579. The duty paid on each barrel also increases, and sweet wines are subject to an additional tax. The wine in Simon Tally’s cellar in Guildford – seven hogsheads (441 gallons) and a butt-and-a-half of sack (189 gallons) – is valued at £57 in 1588. That averages more than 20d per gallon, or 2½d per pint. Many of those who drink wine in London will baulk at the prices charged in the provincial towns.

  Just as a gentleman’s dinner normally consists of several sorts of meat, so too it involves different wines. Thomas Platter attends a lavish reception given by the lord mayor in October 1599 and remarks that he is offered ‘the best beer and all manner of heavy and light wines to follow, as for instance, Greek, Spanish … Languedoc, French and German’.65 When Lord North entertains Queen Elizabeth and her entourage in 1577 he orders 378 gallons of claret, 63 gallons of white wine, 20 gallons of sack and 6 gallons of hippocras. Claret is a clear, light-red wine from Gascony. The white wine is most probably from La Rochelle in France or ‘Rhenish’ (from the Rhineland). Sack is a very popular dry amber wine from Spain, which the English drink sweetened with sugar. Hippocras is a peculiarly English drink: wine spiced with cinnamon and ginger and, again, sweetened with sugar. It is normally drunk at a banquet or a celebratory occasion, such as a wedding or a baptism. Henry Machyn notes many occasions in his diary when London festivities end with the serving of hippocras.

  The above wines are not the only types drunk in England. You will also come across Malmsey (a sweet wine from Crete), Muscatel (a sweet wine from France) and Bastard (a red wine from Burgundy). William Harrison writes that fifty-six wine-producing regions are represented in the London market and adds that there are thirty named sorts of wine from Italy, Greece, Spain and the Canaries, including such exotics as Catepument, Raspis, Osy, Capri and Rumney. Some of these are rarer than others: Rumney, for example, a sweet wine from the eastern Mediterranean, is growing increasingly scarce due to Turkish control of the region. You will find connoisseurs in London who will pronounce on the various merits of each type of wine, although vintages are not specifically recorded. ‘Green wine’ – the ‘green’ referring to the youth of the wine, not its colour – is thought to be especially healthy. People therefore don’t store wine to improve it; most wines are drunk within a year or two of being imported.

  If you are seeking something stronger than wine, it is possible to find distilled brandewijn or brandy, made by Flemish immigrants. Several medical self-help books have recipes for aqua vitae, which is distilled from wines and herbs. The purpose of including the herbs is to capture their ‘essence’, in an alchemical sense, so that their life-giving properties are transferred to the drinker. In fact this is the whole purpose of the drink, so you will find distilled liquor not in a tavern, but in an apothecary’s shop. It is not until the next century that people regularly imbibe strong alcohol for fun, rather than for purely medicinal reasons.

  BEER AND ALE

  Beer and ale are regarded as more or less synonymous in the modern world, but they are very different things in Elizabethan times. Beer is made from malt barley, water and hops and keeps well – and the longer you keep it before it goes stale, the better it will be. Ale is not made with hops and has to be drunk quickly, within three days at the most; and is much less popular as a result. However, it can be made quickly to a great strength, using a high ratio of malt to water, and so it is still brewed. It is also regularly used by cooks in their sauces.

  The quantities drunk will no doubt surprise you. When entertaining the queen in 1577 Lord North orders 3,996 gallons of beer and 384 gallons of ale. The daily allowance for a man – whether he be a servant or a nobleman – in many large houses is a gallon of beer, and this is not a notional amount: people really do drink that much on a regular basis. And some of it is strong stuff. The best beer is called March beer, because that is when it is brewed, and if you drink a gallon of that in a day you will not be good for much else. In some places you find it called ‘double beer’, because double the amount of malt is used, which means it can be as intoxicating as wine.66 Small beer for the servants is made with less malt in relation to the quantity of water; it is therefore not as strong, nor does it keep for more than a month.

  As with wine, beer is stored in barrels and decanted into leather jacks or earthenware bottles as required. Bottled beer can be purchased in stoneware bottles bearing the face of a rotund bearded man. However, if you buy one, drink it quickly for the yeast in the beer will continue to ferment, the pressure will build up and the bottle will eventually explode. If you want to taste a good range, you can find them at any country fair. They have poetic names like their modern equivalents. William Harrison lists Huffcap, The Mad Dog, Father Whoreson, Angels’ Food, Dragon’s Milk, Go-by-the-Wall, Stride Wide and Lift-Leg. While these have the power to turn those who drink them into ‘ale-knights who … will not dare to stir from their stools but sit pinking with their narrow eyes, as half-sleeping, until the fume of their adversary be digested’, beer and ale are not without their healthy connotations.67 Some beers are brewed with herbs, thereby containing the essence of something health-giving. Others are made into restorative possets, through the addition of spices and milk. Alternatively you might want to add an egg yolk and sugar or honey, thereby making caudled ale, which is often recommended for the sick.

  Not everyone approves of English ale and beer. Mediterranean visitors in particular cannot understand the Englishman’s love of it. Alessandro Magno writes in his journal that English beer is ‘healthy but sickening to taste. It is cloudy like horse’s urine and has husks on top.’68 Andrew Boorde is even more disparaging about Cornish ale: ‘it will make you spew … it is like wash that pigs have wrestled in’.69

  10

  Hygiene, Illness and Medicine

  There is no concept of ‘health and safety’ in Elizabethan England, so you will inevitably feel vulnerable when you arrive. Nauseating smells and sights will assail your senses; contemporary standards of cleanliness will worry you. People die every day from unknown ailments, the young as often as the old. Infectious diseases periodically kill thousands within a few weeks. Even when plague is not in town, it lurks as an anxiety in the back of people’s minds; when it does strike, their worry turns to terror
. On top of the illnesses, the chances of being attacked and hurt are much higher than in the modern world, and workplace injuries are far more common. Whatever you do in Elizabethan England, you will have need of medical advice or surgery at some stage. But before suggesting what you should do to stay well, and what to do if you fall ill, it is necessary to lay out why Elizabethans think they get sick. This will help you understand the medical strategies they adopt, some of which you might consider more fearsome than your ailment.

  Elizabethans do not understand infection and contagion as we do. It is not that they are completely ignorant as to how illnesses spread – physicians believe they know perfectly well – it is rather that their understanding is very different from ours. The principal ideas underpinning most Elizabethan medical thinking come from Galen, who lived in the second century AD. Physicians will cite him as an unquestionable authority when they explain to you that your health depends on a balance of the four humours: yellow bile or choler, black bile, phlegm and blood. If there is too much choler in your body, you will grow choleric; too much blood and you will be sanguine; too much phlegm and you will be phlegmatic; and too much black bile makes you melancholic. It is from these imbalances that sickness arises.

  How do these humours get out of balance? This is where the overlapping ideas of Elizabethan medicine might leave you a little confused. By far the most important cause is divine intervention. People believe that illnesses may be sent to punish them for a sin – or simply because God wants them to die and go to Heaven. Some hold that God, by sending them an illness, is giving them a chance to atone for some previous transgression through suffering, and so they are thankful for their affliction. Other causes of illness are old age, excitement or contagion through close proximity to other ill people and decaying matter. Filthy areas such as stagnant pools and dead bodies create a miasma around them, and if the air or water of a miasma enters the body, it disrupts the humours. In The Boke for to Lerne a man to be wyse in the building of his howse for the helth of body (1540), Andrew Boorde lays out some key concerns: