The most usual form of penance ordered by the archdeaconry courts is to stand at the door of your parish church on Sunday in a white sheet, carrying a white wand, and to confess your fault to your fellow parishioners. You will also have to stand in front of the congregation during the service while the incumbent reads a suitable homily.52 You might have to do penance on two or three Sundays in succession. You may also have to stand or kneel bareheaded and barefooted in the marketplace wearing a paper hat with the words ‘fornicator’, ‘blasphemer’ or ‘adulterer’ written on it. Married women might have to do penance with their hair loose, emphasising their wantonness. People who commit a sin involving two parishes or congregations have to do penance in both places. Such public humiliation is seen both as deterrent and punishment. Having said that, it is not an equitable system. If a couple are accused of adultery and the woman finds sufficient compurgatrices while the man fails to do so, he still has to go through the whole purgation ritual. Strangely his partner in crime may well be sitting in the congregation, having been found innocent, while the man confesses his adultery with her.
If you can’t afford to travel to court with compurgators, then you might well decide to let your reputation go to pieces and accept excommunication: 4,000 people in Essex alone do exactly that during Elizabeth’s reign.53 There are two forms of excommunication. In its minor form it is simply suspension from church services and exclusion from the sacraments of marriage and communion. Major excommunication, however, is far more serious: it means that you will not be welcome in a Christian house, nor may your fellow Christians help you in any way; you cannot be represented or represent yourself in any court, ecclesiastical or secular, nor can you be buried in consecrated ground. If you are a truly morally offensive person, the archdeaconry court can apply to the bishop to seek royal assistance in having you imprisoned.54 This, however, is very rare. Most people succumb after they have been punished with minor excommunication. Those who do not are regarded as beyond the pale by their fellow parishioners and have effectively excluded themselves from their community.
MORAL OFFENCES
What sort of offences will result in you being led to the archdeacon in shame? Failure to observe the rites of the church is a common reason. In fact, it is the second-most-common offence of all secular and ecclesiastical crimes and offences (second only to unlawful sex).55 Attendance at church is compulsory for everyone over the age of fourteen: you must go every Sunday and on nineteen saints’ feast days, as well as the feast of the Circumcision (1 January), Epiphany (6 January), the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary (25 March), Christmas Day, the Monday and Tuesday in Easter Week, and the Monday and Tuesday in Whitsun week.56 Failure to do so will lead to a fine – one shilling if you miss church just once, more if you are absent regularly. Children should be sent to church at least twice a month to be catechised. Failing to present a child for baptism is also an offence, as is opening a shop on a Sunday.
In Stratford-upon-Avon no fewer than thirty-seven tradesmen are accused of opening their shops on holy days in October 1592. When a Stratford woman is accused in court of brawling, being abusive and failing to attend church she replies, ‘God’s wounds! A plague of God on you all, a fart of one’s arse for you!’57 Such a carefully thought-out theological position might well get her into further trouble: blasphemy is also likely to result in her being reported by the churchwardens. Even falling asleep during a sermon is a punishable offence. Considering sermons can last up to three hours, you can see why some people get a little bored. In 1593 Dorothy Richmond of Great Holland, Essex, is taken before the archdeaconry court for causing ‘disquietness’ during a sermon. She ‘thrust a pin in Eddy Alefounder’s buttocks’.58
Defamation is the ecclesiastical equivalent of the secular crime of slander. Most derogatory speech is slanderous – or libellous if written down – but if it impugns the moral character of the victim, it is defamatory and is dealt with by the archdeaconry court. If someone calls you ‘a whore and an arrant whore’, you can report them to the churchwarden and your accuser will have to answer for it in the archdeaconry courts. As a result, an archdeaconry court is rarely a boring place, enlivened by the language, stories and invective. In 1586 John Worme prosecutes Helen Rand for defamation. A witness testifies that she was with Helen Rand and their husbands in the meadow at hay-making time when Helen declared that
John Worme would have been naughty with her and would have laid her down upon a bed in her own house and before she could get rid of him she was fain to promise him the use of her body the next night. Worme did say unto Helen, when he would have had his pleasure upon her, that he could make as good a cunt of a lath and two coney skins as his wife had.59
The trouble with such cases is that it can be difficult to prove your innocence, as Helen Rand finds. Worse, the failure to prove your case might result in you being accused of defamation yourself. In July 1583 a Hertfordshire woman called Helen Burton suspects her husband is having an affair with Isabel Todd. One day she follows her husband to Isabel’s house. She creeps in and bursts through the door of the bedchamber to see her husband holding Isabel up against the side of the bed without his shirt on. There is uproar and Helen is shoved out of the room. After the event, people round on Helen, telling her, ‘it is an evil bird that defileth its own nest’. To add insult to injury, Isabel the adulteress then successfully prosecutes Helen for defamation.60
Drunkenness might also bring you face to face with the archdeacon. Of course, if you are violent or destructive in your drunkenness you will end up in the secular courts – but just being drunk can lead to you being summoned to the ecclesiastical court. You can be charged for lying down in a field and sleeping it off, for being so drunk that you cannot stand up, and even for wetting your bed in your drunken state – although this mostly happens when it is someone else’s bed. The offender normally has to do penance in church, with a series of pint tankards arrayed before him as he kneels and confesses his transgression. In 1584 the sexton of a Colchester parish is reported as being ‘a railer, a blasphemer, a swearer and a slanderer, and suspected of drunkenness’.61 Whoever reported him to the churchwardens is leaving nothing to chance.
And then we come to sex, by far the most common form of moral offence. Like defamation, unlawful sex can be difficult to prove because most of the time there is no evidence available to the court that an offence has taken place – unless the woman becomes pregnant, or one of the parties confesses or contracts venereal disease. But even pregnancy does not indicate who is responsible. Hearsay, guilt and moral outrage are therefore often the sum total of the ‘evidence’. Of course, the loyalty of one’s husband or wife is of such crucial importance that people are attentive to any signs of dishonour, and even to false rumours; but equally you will find men and women covering up their partners’ sexual transgressions. Men especially do not want the neighbourhood to know they have been cuckolded. Reputation is so important that many people will vigorously defend every accusation laid against them, whether true or not.
Unsurprisingly, adultery is the most common crime for which men and women are summoned to appear before the archdeaconry courts. Or, to be accurate, suspicion of adultery is. In 1591 a woman is seen to allow three men to enter her house at dusk. The authorities come to investigate and find all three men in separate beds and the woman sitting by the fire, wearing nothing but her smock. She is found guilty of acting lewdly and forced to do penance. In 1579 a widow persuades Henry Packer to spend the night in her house. He goes to sleep in a separate room, but during the night he hears her sighing and goes to her. She asks him to warm her cold feet and he obliges. When the widow falls pregnant, the neighbours are convinced they know who is responsible. Both Henry Packer and the widow accordingly find themselves in court. The widow produces sufficient compurgatrices. Henry Packer, however, fails to gather enough support; instead he confesses and is ordered to do penance alone. You cannot help but see the irony – especially considering the common assu
mption that this is a man’s world.
After a while of listening to the proceedings in church courts, you will come to think that the Church is more concerned about the crimes it deals with than about the victims. In regard to sexual misdemeanours, this is true. For example, both men and women can be presented to a church court for simply sheltering unmarried mothers. In the modern world, this would be seen as a charitable act. Not in Elizabethan England. In 1564 a man who gives shelter to a pregnant girl ‘for God’s sake’ is sentenced to do public penance in the market place and to give 2s to the poor, even though there is no suggestion that he is in any way to blame for her pregnancy. In 1566, Agnes Rooke, a widow of West Ham, is brought before the archdeacon’s court accused of harbouring someone else’s pregnant servant. She is only let off when the archdeacon is informed that the girl tried to drown herself and the kind widow saved her and took her in.62
It gets worse. If a female servant is raped and falls pregnant, and cannot persuade the secular courts to take action, she will be made to suffer for her ‘crime’ by the church courts. Just before Christmas 1590 Joan Somers is in a field tending to her mistress’s cattle when one Rice Evans comes up to her. He seizes her and violently rapes her, telling her that she can cry out as much as she wants, for there is no one to hear her. Joan is subsequently presented to the archdeacon for the sin of fornication.63 A similar case is that of Jane Wright in 1579. She is a servant in the household of John Lawrence of Colne Engaine and his wife Joan. One night her master asks her to rub his back as he lies in bed. She refuses, but her mistress Joan urges her to obey her husband. She is made to lie on the bed in her clothes rubbing his back until she feels tired and cold, at which point both John and Joan demand that she continue rubbing him under the covers. Jane later admits that she is then
enticed by him and his wife that night as at other times also to come in bed naked with the two of them, at which times he has carnal knowledge of her, her said dame lying in bed with him and warranting her that she should have no harm and that the other maids used to do the like before.
Jane becomes pregnant and is reported to the archdeacon. She admits everything and is sentenced to stand in the church porch in a white sheet ‘and confess her fault penitently after the end of the sermon, praying God and the congregation to forgive her’.64 You cannot help but look towards John and Joan Lawrence, as poor Jane makes her confession.
It is often said that society may be judged by the way it treats its most vulnerable members. In this respect, it is fair to say that Elizabethan England is not just a golden age but also a horrifyingly unjust one. Many of the injustices cannot be said to be politically expedient; they have nothing to do with Star Chamber or the necessity of ensuring the efficient functioning of society. They have nothing to do with the security of the realm. They are merely the results of people being unable to deal with their own natural inclinations, preferring to blame their weaknesses and lusts on their social inferiors, too proud to admit that these sins, which they publicly denigrate and punish in others, are in fact their own.
12
Entertainment
If any aspect of daily life were to be consistent across the ages, you would have thought it would be the things that people do to enjoy themselves. After all, we are all human, so the ways in which we gratify ourselves should be more or less the same. Or to put it another way, if we enjoy doing something in one century, then the chances are that we will enjoy doing it in other centuries too. On the whole, this is true: sixteenth-century people are keen on the theatre, playing chess, listening to music, making love, drinking wine and beer, reading books and sightseeing. But they also enjoy things that we recoil from today. If you hear the shouts and look at the excited faces of the bloodthirsty crowd at a bull baiting, or hear the spectators’ cheers as a traitor’s entrails are sliced out and burnt before his eyes, you might wonder how on earth Shakespeare’s fellow Englishmen are able to understand the humanity of his writing.
Sightseeing
If you visit Elizabethan England you will want to go sightseeing, just as you do in the modern world. One of the most popular tourist destinations is Drake’s famous ship, The Golden Hind, which is on display in Greenwich. Not only can you go aboard, you can also rent her as a banqueting house. Unfortunately she is slowly being dismantled because most visitors take a piece as a souvenir. If you want to see her in all her glory, go quickly: by 1618 only the keel will be left.1
The royal palaces are arguably the most attractive tourist destinations – not just Whitehall, Hampton Court and Nonsuch Palace (Surrey), but also those further afield, such as Woodstock Palace (Oxfordshire) and Windsor Castle (Berkshire). Not everyone can visit, of course. You will need to obtain the appropriate letters of introduction from well-connected friends and then hire horses or coaches to take you to these destinations. At Hampton Court you will be shown the royal apartments (including the king’s and queen’s bedchambers) with their woven tapestries and carpets, paintings, clocks, musical instruments and royal furniture, as well as the royal library, chapel and gardens. At Whitehall you will see the queen’s collection of Dutch paintings, her wardrobe and jewels, and an ‘Indian bed’ (Native American) with its ‘Indian’ valance and an ‘Indian’ table.2
At the Tower of London you will be shown around by a guide who will tell you about the large cannon and the armour of Henry VIII, both of which are on display here. Surprisingly your guide will even take you down to the dungeons to show you the instruments of torture used on Catholics. Don’t believe everything he tells you – especially not that Julius Caesar built the White Tower and dined in the hall on the first floor. If you do the whole tour you will see the royal apartments, the Royal Mint, Traitors’ Gate, the execution axe and the royal menagerie (with its lions named after the Tudor kings and queens, ‘the last wolf in England’, a tiger and a porcupine). Bear in mind that you will have to pay a gratuity for every room you wish to see. When Thomas Platter and his two companions visit in 1599 they hand out eight gratuities of about 3s each. The total is the equivalent of twelve weeks’ wages for a labourer, so you can understand why most native Londoners have not seen the Tower.
In London you can also visit houses which, in later centuries, will be referred to as cabinets of curiosities. Mr Cope’s house, for example, contains such exotic items as an African charm made of human teeth; the horn and tail of a rhinoceros; a unicorn’s tail; a ‘thunder-bolt dug out of a mast which was hit at sea during a storm’; an embalmed child; ‘a round horn that grew on an English woman’s forehead’; the baubles and bells of Henry VIII’s fool; porcelain from China; a magnifying mirror; and an ‘Indian’ (Native American) canoe and paddles, which hangs from the ceiling in the centre of the room.3 As Shakespeare later puts it in The Tempest, ‘in England … when they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian’. For those who cannot afford the entry fee to such houses, there are curios in the street. You can see a Dutch giant, over 7' 6" high, and a dwarf, 3' high, in the city in 1581: the smaller man will walk straight beneath the legs of the giant. A fully grown live camel is to be seen in one of the houses on London Bridge in 1599. Claudius Hollyband even comes across a ‘makesport’ or street entertainer, who swallows swords for a living.4
The most popular sights of a city, however, are the public ceremonies and processions. First and foremost has to be any event featuring the queen, such as the celebrations in London on 14 January 1559, the eve of her coronation, when she processes through the city to Westminster, with Londoners performing pageants, tableaux and hymns. The day of her accession is also a great occasion, with bells ringing and bonfires and tables set up in the streets for feasting. Within a few years it becomes traditional for courtiers to celebrate the anniversary of her accession by jousting before her on the tilting ground at Whitehall. Thousands turn up to watch Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Henry Lee joust against each other, or to watch the earl of Essex take on all comers in 1596 and break ninety-
eight lances in the course of riding 108 courses against them. Chivalry might have had its day, and this ceremonial jousting may not be as violent as the tournaments of earlier centuries, but it is still a great spectacle.5 Occasionally, when the queen goes on a royal progress, you will get to see firework displays, as at Kenilworth in 1575. For those living in the country, there are always the Mayday celebrations, when people go out into the fields and spend the night in pleasant frolics, returning the next morning with a Maypole. Sadly the Puritans are keen to burn all Maypoles, regarding them as ‘stinking idols’. They have already had their way with the great Maypole that used to be set up on Cornhill in London.
Alehouses and Taverns
Elizabethans do love their beer and wine, so alehouses, taverns and ‘tippling houses’ are all popular resorts. Indeed, they are the setting for the greatest array of indulgences, as in taverns you will be provided with food and drink, music, conversation, flirtation – and in some places much more than flirtation. Most taverns are simply the open halls of houses, which are denoted by a sign hanging outside. They are all supposed to be licensed by the magistrates, but many aren’t. In London the better establishments have started placing partitions between the tables by 1599, affording their clientele greater privacy as they quaff wine sweetened with sugar and listen to fiddlers perform.6
For many men, there is the added attraction of the tavern-cum-brothel. The usual charge is 6d a time to sleep with the house harlot. As you will have seen in the last chapter, a lot of prostitution is on a small scale and involves the sexual services of the ale-wife or one of her daughters. Joan Gwin of Clavering (Essex), for example, is the village prostitute and works at her mother’s house, sleeping with those whom her mother admits.7 But even such small-scale enterprises are not without trouble. Just before Christmas 1567 Henry Cooe’s wife decides she has had enough of her husband’s whoring and goes to the alehouse run by Widow Bowden in Chelmsford. It is dark, about six o’clock. When Henry hears his wife’s shouting as she barges in, he hurriedly pulls up his hose and slips out of a back door. Failing to find her husband, Goodwife Cooe seizes Widow Bowden and her daughter (the house harlot) by the hair and starts to beat them. The daughter escapes into the street and raises the alarm. Eventually Henry Cooe is apprehended by the constables, hiding in a garden. Pleasures in certain taverns can cost much more than 6d, even if you don’t catch syphilis.8 In Henry’s case, his wife sounds far more fearsome than the penances imposed by the ecclesiastical courts.
The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England Page 40
