fowl: Wildfowl included pheasant, partridge, plover, pigeon, heron, bustard, titmouse, wren, lark, quail (imported from Flanders), curlew, crane, stork, bittern, shoveller, moorcock, moorhen, woodcock, duck, goose, swan, and peacock. Chickens were plentiful. Pigeon pie was a frequent summer dish. Doves were raised in dovecotes for food. The first turkeys were brought to England from Mexico in 1520 but they were still rare in the late sixteenth century.
fruits: By 1549, England grew more fruits than France. Native apples and pears grew in orchards along with quinces, peaches, and medlars. For more information on orchards see Chapter Three. Crab apples were used for jelly and verjuice. Verjuice, the juice of any green, unripe fruit (most often grapes) was used for cooking rather than drinking. Strawberries, blackberries, and sloes grew wild. England had vineyards in medieval times, but with the closing of the monasteries in the 1530s, the skill to tend the vines was lost. Grapes were still found in the gardens of big houses and many meals were begun with grapes and cherries. By the sixteenth century, every large household had stores of dried dates, figs, prunes, and raisins. Currants and oranges were imported. Orange “season” was autumn, when ships arrived from Spain. Fresh lemons were a luxury. The banana was an oddity in 1633, displayed in a shop window. Pineapples, of which there is mention as early as 1514, were still curiosities in 1640.
herbs: The term herbs included all green things, and thus all vegetables, a word that was not yet in general use. Most of the vegetables we eat today were then considered fit only for the poor. After all, they came out of the ground! In 1542 the only vegetables considered important enough to grace a gentleman’s table were rape, onions (originally imported from the Low Countries in about 1420), garlic, and leeks. By the latter part of the sixteenth century, there was general growing of melons, pompions (a term used for pumpkins), gourds, cucumbers, radishes, skirrets (a kind of parsnip), carrots, cabbage, and white beets. The potato was the sweet potato. The white potato was called the Potato of America and was not a field crop until the eighteenth century. The yam was known as “skirrets of Peru.” Turnips came from Caen and were not cultivated in England until the seventeenth century; they were eaten boiled or roasted. Parsnips and carrots were boiled. Artichokes were eaten raw with pepper and salt.
meats: Beef, mutton, pork, rabbit, and venison were probably the most frequently served meats. Hugh Platt’s recipe for Polonian “sawsedge” (c. 1600) indicates nothing was wasted: “take the fillers of a hog; chop them very small with a handful of Red Sage; season it hot with ginger and pepper, and then put it into a great sheep’s gut; then let it lie three nights in brine; then boil it and hang it up in a chimney where fire is usually kept; and these sawsedges will last a whole yeere. They are good for sallades or to garnish boiled meats, or to make one rellish a cup of wine.”
pottage: Pottage meant anything from a soup of roots boiled in water to a thick meat stew to oatmeal porridge. The latter was also called frumenty in Dorset, flamery or flummery in Lancashire and Cheshire, and wash-brew in the West Country.
salads: Boiled “sallets” might use leeks, borage, bugloss leaves, hop buds, endive, chicory, cauliflower, sorrel, marigold leaves, watercress, onions, garlic, turnips, rocket, tarragon, radishes, succory, dandelion leaves, beet leaves and roots, spinach, dock leaves, purslane, rampion root, water pimpernel, asparagus, or samphire (a type of seaweed gathered off the Norfolk coast). Green salads were just coming into fashion in the late sixteenth century. Lettuce was recommended as a starter to stir appetite and, after supper, to counteract the drunkenness caused by imbibing too much wine. Both “lettuce of the garden” and wild lettuce were available. Chives were not eaten in salads.
seasonings and sweeteners: In addition to herbs, seasonings included mustard imported from Dijon, olives, and capers, which were used to flavor mutton and beef. Honey was a native sweetener. Sugar was new in the sixteenth century. Hard and coarse, it came in ten-pound loaves (8d. per pound in 1546) or packed in chests.
sweets: “Candy” included all comfits (any sweet containing a nut or seed and preserved with sugar) and suckets (fruit preserved in sugar). Ready-made comfits of carraway and coriander seeds, dipped ten to twelve times in sugar, sold in the 1530s for a shilling a pound. Marchpane, made with blanched almonds and sugar, was a popular dessert. Florentines (kidney, herbs, currants, sugar, cinnamon, eggs, cream, and crumbs) were baked in special pastry and served in deep pewter dishes. Gingerbread was popular, as well as all kinds of puff pastry. Sugar-sops was made from bread, sugar, and spices. Green ginger was a sweetmeat in syrup. Succade was an orange conserve. Dry marmalade was a fairly new confection, a quince conserve from Portugal which came packed in boxes. Apple pies were a traditional part of harvest fare and mince pies were served at Christmas. Also popular for dessert were boiled and suet puddings, egg custards, and all kinds of tarts and cakes. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey (d. 1530), who was also archbishop of York, is credited with making strawberries and cream popular in Henry VIII's time. Ice cream was known in Italy from the thirteenth century and introduced to France by Catherine de’ Medici, but in England it remained a rarity. Charles I is said to have given his cook a yearly stipend of £20 to keep the recipe for “iced cream” a secret.
white meats: This was the contemporary name for dairy products, including milk, cream, butter, curds, whey, cheese, and eggs. All were looked down upon as inferior foods, to be eaten only by the poor.
odds and ends: Rice was known, but rare, since it had to be imported from Italy and was very expensive. At the other extreme, anyone could gather field mushrooms and nuts. Filberts and walnuts were particularly popular.
ALEHOUSES
A 1577 survey of thirty counties counted 17,595 drinking houses. Hertfordshire alone had 125 inns, fourteen taverns and 333 alehouses. Inns (12% of the 17,595) were the most respectable establishments, offering lodging and food as well as drink. The majority of inns sold wine and brewed their own ale and beer. Taverns (2%) were drinking houses which did not offer lodgings, but they might still be sizable establishments. The set meal provided by London taverns (which were not included in this survey) consisted of a hot meat dish, bread, cheese, and ale. Alehouses were also called tippling houses. Up until 1750, the word “tippler” referred to an alehouse keeper. Alehouses had to be licensed by the local justice of the peace until 1618. After that a patent was granted for a monopoly on alehouse licenses. Alehouses accounted for 86% of the survey, but many small, unlicensed alehouses were also in operation. In Lancashire in the early seventeenth century the village of Prescot had one alehouse to every twenty inhabitants.
Drinks available at an alehouse varied by region but might include cider, perry, mead, aqua vitae, ale, and beer. After 1553, wine could not be sold in alehouses. By the early Stuart period, beer was more popular than ale and after 1700 all alehouses were actually beer houses.
Drinkables were stored in casks. A kilderkin held eighteen gallons of beer and a hogshead held fifty-four. There were two hogsheads in a butt (also called a pipe or a piece) and two butts in a tun, which held 252 wine-gallons. A puncheon held eighty-four gallons. A tierce was one-third of a pipe.
DRINKS
ale: Brewed from malt infused in water with the addition of spices (but not hops), or from barley mash, yeast, and water, ale was the common breakfast drink of all classes. A heavy, thick drink, it did not keep well. It was usually served when five days old.
aqua vitae: This was whiskey and was used more as medicine than as drink. In Scotland in 1505, barber-surgeons were granted the sole right to manufacture and sell aqua vitae.
beer: Produced by the addition of hops to fermented malt and water, beer was introduced into England as early as 1420 but was still regarded with suspicion as a “foreign” and adulterated drink until the mid-sixteenth century. The English called hops the “wicked weed.” Beer made from barley eventually caught on all over England, however, both because it kept better than ale (the hops had a preservative effect) and because it was cheaper to make. It was genera
lly served between eight days and one month after it was brewed. Royalty drank beer aged for one to two years. In 1608-10, when William Cecil, Lord Cranborne, was on his Grand Tour of Europe, he traveled with his own brewer because by then the English did not believe they could find good beer abroad. Small or single beer was made by pouring water over the wort in the vat after the “strong” or double beer was drawn off. Double beer could also refer to beer made with twice the quantity of hops to the normal amount of liquid. March beer was another stronger brew.
chocolate: Introduced earlier than coffee or tea, chocolate was drunk in Spain from about 1600. No chocolate at all was imported into England until the middle of the sixteenth century and that was solid chocolate. Chocolate as a drink appeared in England in the late seventeenth century but as it was extremely expensive only the wealthy could afford it.
cider: Made from apples, cider was a popular country drink.
coffee: Not available in England, although the drink had been sampled in Europe. The first coffeehouse in England opened in 1650 in Oxford.
metheglin: Spiced or medicated mead (mead was made from fermented honey), this drink was popular in Wales. Plain mead was more widely consumed.
milk: Considered suitable only for children and the aged, milk was blamed for sore eyes, headaches, agues, and rheums. If milk was required, asses’ milk was preferred. For the aged, milk was heated and mixed with fruit or spices to make a posset. Most milk went into making cheese.
perry: This was made from pears and drunk by country people.
spiced beer: This was beer seasoned with cinnamon, resin, gentian, and juniper.
swish-wash: This was made with honey and water with a dash of pepper or other spices.
tea: Not available in England, although the Dutch East India Company introduced it to London at the end of the period. In 1657 tea sold for sixteen shillings per pound in coffeehouses.
water: Water was drunk at risk because of the pollution.
whey: The watery part of milk which remains after the formation of curds during the cheesemaking process, whey was the drink of poor country people who could not afford better; buttermilk was another.
wine: Wines were poured from the barrel into jugs to serve at the table. They were not aged. The term “bastard” in regard to wine meant sweet and spiced and could refer to any wine sweetened with honey, sugar, or spices. Other sweet wines were Osney (from Alsace), Compolet, Romney (from Hungary), Malmsey (from Crete), Vernage or Verney (a white wine from Italy) and Mount Rose (a red wine from Gascony). King James I drank sweet Greek wines. Clary was a kind of claret, mixed with clarified honey, pepper, and ginger. Both red and white claret were imported. From Bordeaux came Gascoigne, Anguelle, Rochelle, and Galloway wines. Rhenish wines included Brabant, to which honey and cloves were added. Piment was a sour, thin wine sweetened with honey. Sack began to be popular early in the sixteenth century and by the seventeenth was the most popular of all wine drinks. The best came from Xeres, which the English mispronounced as sherry. “Sherry sack” made in Bristol was also known as “Bristol milk.” Hippocras was red wine spiced with ginger, pepper and “grains of paradise.” Raspes was a raspberry wine.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Clark, Peter. The English Alehouse: A Social History 1200-1830. London and New York: Longman, 1983
Drummond, J. C. and Anne Wilbrabam. The Englishman’s Food: A History of Five centuries of English Diet. London: Jonathan Cape, 1939.
Emmison, F. G. Tudor Food and Pastimes: Life at Ingatestone Hall London: E. Benn, 1964.
Markham, Gervaise. The English Housewife. Montreal and Kingston: McGill University Press, 1986 (edited by Michael R. Best)
Sim, Alison. Food and Feast in Tudor England. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.
CHAPTER THREE: ARCHITECTURE
Some claim that the introduction of gunpowder to Europe led to the decline of the castle. By the mid-fifteenth century this was a moot point. People wanted not only comfort but luxury in their homes. Large country houses might be built with the same floor plan as castles and have moats and towers that at first glance made them appear to be fortified, but they were no longer constructed with the idea that they would have to hold off a siege.
The quadrangular castle, which evolved in the second half of the fourteenth century, integrated both military and residential needs. Bolton-in-Wensleydale, built in 1379, included accommodations for eight households and had twelve single-chamber apartments for individuals such as the priest. At Tattershall in Lincolnshire, completed in 1448, the house was shaped like a traditional keep but it had large windows and was built of red brick.
MANOR HOUSES AND MANSIONS
The typical medieval manor house had a two-story hall at center and a smaller room at each end. The first floor over the ground floor was reached by a ladder or staircase. Throughout the sixteenth century this arrangement continued as the basic floor plan for all houses. The room at one end usually developed into a kitchen and that at the other into a parlor or a cellar.
Sir William Cecil’s house at Wimbledon (ten miles southwest of London) in the late 1550s contained a hall, parlor, and two smaller rooms on the ground floor, together with a kitchen, pantry, larder, buttery, and two dairy rooms. The upstairs consisted of a gallery and ten chambers. Among the outbuildings were a brew house, a bake house, a barn, and a stable with stalls for fourteen horses and two sleeping rooms above for the grooms.
Brick and terra-cotta houses were built in the early 1520s by a number of Henry VIII's courtiers. Examples of early Tudor manor houses are Barrington Court, Somerset, and Compton Wynyates, Warwickshire. Stanstead Hall in Halstead, Essex, was rebuilt by 1553 into a two-story brick “courtyard house” (one built around a central courtyard). It boasted the latest in architectural fashion: octagonal chimney stacks, ogee-topped corner turrets, and a brick-lined moat over 180 feet square.
The dissolution of the monasteries, Henry VIII's seizure of lands and buildings which had previously belonged to the Roman Catholic church, led to a building boom in the l540s. Many of those who acquired former religious houses either remodeled them or used the stone from their walls to build new residences. William Sharington purchased Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire for less than £1000 in 1540 and spent the next ten years rebuilding it. The duke of Somerset's London house (built 1547-1552) was constructed from material taken from forfeited ecclesiastical buildings in the city. The new Somerset House occupied a site (six hundred feet of river frontage) formerly taken up by three episcopal residences.
Between 1570 and 1640, rebuilding and new building were widespread among all social classes save the poorest and in all counties but the four most northerly. Thousands of farm and manor houses were modernized. Ceilings were put in two-story halls to create another chamber above. New staircases gave access to upper apartments, replacing loft ladders and the cramped stairs built into the thickness of the wall in some medieval houses. Chimneys proliferated, as did the use of glass in windows. There were even some houses with hallways. Speke Hall, built in 1565, when nearby Liverpool was a fishing village with 138 houses and 690 inhabitants, has this feature, but it continued to be more usual to go through outer rooms to reach inner rooms.
THE ITALIAN INFLUENCE ON ENGLISH ARCHITECTURE
An early attempt to learn about classic architecture was made in 1550 when the duke of Northumberland sent one John Shute to Italy to study the subject. Most building in England in the sixteenth century, however, was what has been called “artisan mannerism” and it was the result of workmen with a slight grasp of Flemish building styles adding on to existing English designs. Inigo Jones, in the reign of King James I, was the first to try to integrate into a building the classical principles of balance and proportion. One of his greatest accomplishments was the renovation of Somerset House into a palace for James’s queen. Completed in 1612 and renamed Denmark House, it was demolished in 1776.
BUILDING MATERIALS
Building materials varied from one region to an
other. Most houses in the Southeast and West were timber-framed, but few houses were constructed entirely of wood. Boards were expensive (imported from the Baltic) and reserved for siding and wainscoting the interior walls. The majority of half-timbered buildings had a steep, thatched roof and upper stories which projected over the ones below.
In Kent and Essex and in London, Southampton, and Hull some builders used bricks arranged in a herringbone pattern and tile instead of thatch for the roof, but this was fairly rare. Bricks simply cost too much until the second half of the seventeenth century. The brickmaking season was short, lasting only during the warm months. Bricks were made in clamps (burned in stacks in the open) rather than in kilns. Tilemaking, which did use kilns, was also seasonal.
In the west, wattle and daub was whitewashed and timbers were coated with tar to create a black-and-white effect. Wattle and daub was fill made of earth, sand, straw, and sticks or reeds. The light wooden wattle core was covered with daub or plaster, instead of with wood.
Stone had always been used for castles, monasteries, and churches, and stone-built and stone-roofed houses proliferated along the belt of limestone that runs from Dorset to the North Riding. Clay houses were built in Devonshire, Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire, Leicestershire, and Warwickshire. Flint was used for building in East Anglia.
Those who could afford to had building materials brought to their sites. Fine white stone came from Caen, but the freight costs were higher than the cost of the stone. Blue slates came from Plymouth. Black paving stone came from the Isle of Purbeck and also from quarries near Berwick, from which it was shipped already squared and polished. When Hatfield House was built early in the seventeenth century, fine white marble from the Carrara quarries in Italy was imported for the fireplaces.
The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life in Renaissance England Page 4
