Margaret Kebell, twenty-five, was a widow abducted from her uncle’s house in Staffordshire by one Roger Vernon and 120 armed men. Roger took her back to Derbyshire and forced her to marry him, even though she had planned to wed Ralph Egerton. The Court of the King’s Bench would not help her, but she appealed to King Henry VIII in person. When the matter came before the Star Chamber, Vernon was fined heavily and Margaret was freed from her forced marriage and permitted to wed Egerton instead.
The case of John Stawell illustrates the pitfalls of trying to get rid of a legally married wife. Stawell wed Mary Portman in 1556. In 1572, because of Mary’s flagrant infidelity, Stawell convinced Archbishop Parker to grant him a license to marry Frances Dyer. Mary then sued him for “cohabiting with a gentlewoman as his wife, his former wife being alive.” She was bribed to withdraw the suit, but after Stawell’s death, Mary put in a successful claim for dower rights. Under the law she was his first and only wife.
DEATH
For the period 1550-1700 about 30% of the population was under fifteen and about 10% over sixty. Seventy was considered to be “very old age” but there are a fair number of cases, especially among the upper classes, of women who lived into their eighties (Bess of Hardwick, Anne Cooke Bacon, and her sister, Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell, Lady Russell) and nineties (Ann Stanhope Seymour, duchess of Somerset). In the parish of St. Botolph-without-Aldgate, from 1583 to 1599, forty-three deaths were attributed to “great age.” Twelve of those persons were reportedly over 100. Other records report that one Agnes Sadler, buried on April 26, 1576, was 126. Alice George, born in 1572, was still living in 1681, when she claimed her father had lived to be eighty-three, her mother to ninety-six, and her mother’s mother to 111. One rough estimate indicates that at least half of those people who reached the age of twenty-five had lost at least one of their parents by then, but another study suggests that those who reached the age of twenty-one might reasonably hope to live to be sixty-two.
Causes of Death
Along with disease, war, murder, suicide, and childbirth, accidents were a leading cause of death. Of fifty-five accidental deaths in the parish of St. Botolph-without-Aldgate from 1573 to 1624, the most common causes were drowning and falls.
Funeral customs
Death was announced by the tolling or ringing of bells. Each parish had its own customs concerning death knells, but bell ringing usually included the number of years in the age of the deceased.
Both the lying-in-state and the funeral of a nobleman were lavish, expensive productions. The courtyard and entrance of the house and the staircase and first room leading to the coffin were all draped in black baize. A second room was hung with black cloth. The room beyond that, where the coffin stood, was shrouded in black velvet and the coffin itself covered with a black velvet pall. Less important corpses did not get black velvet, but the tradition of covering everything in sight with black was followed. Mirrors were turned to the wall. In the funeral procession, coaches, saddles, bridles and so forth were also all in black and the church was draped in black from the floor to the roof beams.
An exception to the use of black was made for children and unmarried girls, who might be buried in a coffin covered with a white pall and accompanied to church by bands of young people dressed in white. An infant less than a month old was usually buried in the white chrisom cloth that had been laid over the baby at his or her baptism.
Catholic ritual provided for sustained intercession on behalf of the deceased’s soul before, during, and after the interment. In 1533 the burial of the duchess of Suffolk, daughter and sister of kings of England and former queen of France, began with a mass before the coffin (the body had been embalmed and wrapped in lead because the lying-in-state lasted three weeks). After offerings to the poor, a procession formed. The coffin was on a funeral car canopied in black velvet embroidered with her coat of arms. A carved likeness of her lay on top. The procession was led by 100 poor men who were recruited as mourners and given black gowns and lighted candles. Then came the priests and attendants from her own chapel, members of her household, knights, and gentlemen of the court. Drawn by six horses, draped in black, the hearse was surrounded by 100 yeomen with torches and followed by the family and servants and “all other that would.” At Bury St. Edmunds the body was blessed and a ceremony followed. The next morning there were a requiem mass, a sermon, and a second mass.
By 1552 a funeral service was much simpler and might conclude with a reading of the exploits of the deceased, sometimes composed by himself. Amye Robsart died on September 8,1560. On September 22 her body was buried beneath the choir of St. Mary’s in Oxford. Her husband, Lord Robert Dudley (later earl of Leicester), who was rumored to have wanted his wife dead so that he might marry the queen, was not present, but that was acceptable in the etiquette of the times. The duke of Suffolk had not attended his wife’s rites, either. Margery Norris, a friend of the queen’s, was chief mourner, her train carried by a Mrs. Butler, assisted by Sir Richard Blunt. Also in the procession were Lady Dudley’s family and friends, gentlemen, yeomen, the mayor of Oxford and his brethren, heralds, the choir of St. Mary’s, miscellaneous members of the University, and numerous poor men and women. Eight tall yeomen and four assistants bore the coffin to St. Mary’s and at each corner walked a gentleman bearing a banner. The widower’s chaplain preached a sermon. The total cost was more than £500.
In the 1560s, the funeral of a poor man cost 2s. 9d. It cost 5s. 5d. in 1595. The funeral of playmaker Robert Greene in 1592 cost 10s. 4d. That of the second earl of Bedford in 1585 cost nearly £700. The family had to sell their furniture to pay for it. Mourning for family and servants when Edward Russell, fourth earl of Bedford was buried in 1641, cost nearly £500. More than 300 coaches followed that funeral procession to the church.
After a funeral, food and drink were traditionally served, sometimes at a great feast. Presents of scarves and gloves were given to friends and relatives. Other mourners were given gifts of money, and many had already received mourning robes. Sir Thomas Gresham left money to clothe 200 such mourners, providing 6s. 8d. per yard for material. The total cost of his funeral in 1575 was £800.
Burials
Most burials were in the churchyard, where the request for a grave was made to the sexton. The north side was unpopular, as that was the burial place of unbaptized children. No burial service was said for papists after the Reformation, and they were sometimes buried at night. Suicides were buried in a public highway between 9 P.M. and midnight, after a stake had been driven into the body!
Ordinary folk were buried without a coffin and their bones might be dug up again in a few years to make room for new bodies. In plague time in cities, special rules governed burials. The 1548 plague orders prohibited burials between 6 P.M. and 6 A.M. In the seventeenth century, corpses were covered with a winding sheet and flung, without burial rites, into a common pest-pit.
The wealthy, who could afford to be “chested,” also tended to raise elaborate monuments to themselves. Sometimes they were designed well in advance. The entire family might be represented in marble or stone and it was not at all uncommon for a man to be shown with several subsequent wives. At first these monuments were erected only inside of churches, but during the sixteenth century, headstones began to appear in most churchyards. In a case unusual for that county, Sir Thomas Walmesley of Dunkernaugh, Lancashire, arranged for an alabaster tomb to be erected after his death in 1613.
To prevent the return of the deceased, folk rites involving candle flame, salt, and fire were carried out in the Durham region even late in the Elizabethan period. Of Norse origin, the custom also included singing to the dead body of the journey to the afterlife.
Mourning
Men wore long black gowns and hoods to funerals. A poor man might wear a “rat’s color” gown. On at least one occasion, doublets and hose of frieze were worn as mourning dress at Elizabeth’s court, probably as an affectation of simplicity.
The mourning period
for a parent was three to four years. A surviving spouse usually wore black until he or she remarried or died. Sir Ralph Verney not only slept in a black bed after his wife died, he had black nightclothes and nightcaps, a black comb and brush, and slippers of black velvet.
Mourning jewelry was customary from the Middle Ages on. Lockets, brooches, and rings were designed as containers for a lock of the dear departed’s hair. Rings might also be fashioned as skeletons, coffins, and skulls.
The term widow’s weeds dates from the sixteenth century and was used to denote all mourning garments. Black was the usual color of mourning although the widow of a king of France customarily wore white. Catherine de’ Medici broke with tradition by wearing black.
A mourning barbe, often of pleated linen, was worn by widows until the late sixteenth century, under whatever headdress was then in fashion. The barbe covered the neck in front and in the late sixteenth century was worn below the ruff like a bib. The gorgette was similar to a barbe, but unpleated. The wimple (described in Chapter One) was another alternative style. The widow’s peak was a flap projecting in front from the hood or headdress. It could also be indicated by a dip in the center-front edge of the headdress.
Widows’ Rights and Remarriage
About 30% of marriages were second marriages. On occasion, discussions about the next spouse began as soon as the funeral of the first was over. One well-to-do gentleman took his wife to visit London in 1639. While there, at eight o’clock one evening, he died. Before noon the next day, his widow was married to the journeyman woolen draper who had come to sell her material to make her mourning clothes. Such exceptional cases aside, a bereaved spouse did not ordinarily stay single, even though, in the case of widows, this state gave them, for the first time, control over their own lives and property. A widow’s own property reverted to her and she also enjoyed a life interest in her husband’s lands. She lost these rights only if her husband had been convicted of treason, or if she committed treason, felony, or adultery.
Widows had to have permission to remarry if they held land under the old feudal system. A license cost one-third of the annual value of her dower. To remarry without a license might incur a fine three times that high and might also cause her new husband to be fined for contempt of court. Such complications aside, 50-70% of all widows remarried. Those whose first marriage had lasted less than ten years were more likely to remarry, particularly if they had small children to provide for. Those who had no children were least likely to remarry. Statistics also indicate that the average marriage lasted ten to twelve years and that the average length of time between marriages was about two years.
A number of prominent persons married more than twice. King Henry VIII is infamous for his six wives. His sixth wife, Catherine Parr, had four husbands, as did Bess of Hardwick. So did Catherine Gordon, whose first was the impostor Perkin Warbeck, who claimed to be Richard IV, rightful king of England.
EXTENDED FAMILY
Wards
Until 1646, heirs to land held by knight service and other feudal military tenures became wards if their fathers died before the heirs reached the age of twenty-one. Sale of wardships was a source of considerable profit as was holding one. A child’s guardian was entitled to the profits of a portion of that child’s lands and had the right to arrange his or her marriage.
English law provided that the eldest son inherit all lands, but if there were no sons, lands and goods were equally divided among the daughters. At sixteen a girl was out of wardship if she was under fourteen when her father died. If she was already fourteen at his death, she did not become a ward at all.
When Sir John Basset died in 1528, his son John was just nine. The king granted the purchase of his wardship and marriage to John Worth of Compton Pole, Devon, for 200 marks. Worth then made a private deal with Lady Basset to allow her to raise her own son. In some cases the child’s mother bought the wardship of her own son or daughter outright, but it was just as likely to he sold to a stranger.
Charles Howard bought the wardship of Henry Wriothesley, third earl of Southampton (1573-1624) for £1,000 in 1581. He transferred the care of the boy and the right to arrange his marriage to Lord Burghley but continued to administer Southampton’s lands. Burghley had previously had several other wards in his household. One of them, the earl of Oxford, he married to his own daughter. When he tried to force Southampton to wed one of his granddaughters, however, the earl refused, and ended up having to pay Lord Burghley a hefty line.
Poor Relations
In addition to other people’s children taken in as wards or for fostering, households might also include various relatives. A stint as a servant was regarded by some young people as a useful educational experience. For others it was an economic necessity. Waiting gentlewomen, companions, nursemaids, and governesses were usually recruited from the ranks of unmarried female relations who had nowhere else to go.
Pets
At Calais, Lord Lisle and his family kept, at various times, spaniels, mastiffs, a greyhound called Minikin, a young hound called Hurll, and a dog called Wolf. Dogs were among the most popular pets, especially spaniels, which were kept by Queen Elizabeth’s maids of honor. In addition to lapdogs, house pets included English shepherd dogs, whippets (good watchdogs), “dancing dogs,” mastiffs, and a woolly dog called a shough which was imported from Iceland and apparently tended to eat candles. Sir John Harington, inventor of the water closet, bad a portrait painted of his dog, Bungey.
A number of portraits show ferrets. According to the museum caption on one of these, ferrets were carried around their owners' necks to eat lice!
Other pets included tame foxes, squirrels, marmosets, monkeys (a good one cost £60), and birds. Parrots came into fashion with increased overseas trade. One given to Sir Robert Cecil by Sir John Gilbert came with instructions. It could eat bread, oatmeal groats, and all meats and should be put on the dinner table so it could choose. Salt was to be avoided, but it should drink water or claret wine. It was put in a cage at night, which was covered to keep it warm, but during the day it liked to sit in a gentlewoman’s ruff. Cecil later paid £15 10s. for a “bird of Arabia” in a cage and £20 for a white parrot. In 1607 he sent a man to the East Indies to collect parrots, monkeys, and marmosets. He also had “little artificial parakeets in a cage of silver wire.” Lady Lisle had a linnet sent to her in Calais. After almost being lost in a shipwreck during the channel crossing, this bird survived for a time in a cage, but it was eventually eaten by a cat.
Although cats had an unfortunate link to witchcraft, they were still popular as pets. Two famous prisoners in the Tower had cats with them, the earl of Northumberland (who also kept a dog and a parrot during his captivity) and the earl of Southampton. Southampton even had his cat painted into the portrait done of him during his imprisonment. English cats came in many colors but at this time were all of the domestic short-hair variety.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Clark, Alice. The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968. (Note: this is a reprint of the 1920 text.)
Cressy, David. Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1996.
Fraser, Antonia. The Weaker Vessel: Women's Lotin Seventeenth-Century England. New York: Knopf, 1984.
Fussell, G.E. The English Countrywoman: A Farmhouse Social History, 1500-1900. London: A. Melrose, 1953.
Hogrefe, Pearl. Tudor Women: Commoners and Queens. Ames: Iowa State Press, 1975.
Houlbrooke, Ralph. The English Family, 1450-1700. London and New York: Longman, 1984.
Kelso, Ruth. Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956.
Marshall, Rosalind K. Virgins and Viragos, A History of Women in Scotland from 1080-1980. Chicago: Academy Chicago Ltd., 1983.
Prior, Mary, ed. Women in English Society 1500-1800. New York: Methuen, 1985.
Thompson, Roger. Women in Stuart Engla
nd and America: A Comparative Study. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974.
Of Special Interest in Women’s Studies
Goulianos, Joan, ed. by a Woman writt. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973.
Hull, Suzanne W. Chaste, Silent & Obedient: English Books for Women 1475-1640. San Marino, California: The Huntington Library, 1982.
Stanford, Ann. The Women Poets in English: An Anthology. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972.
Travitsky, Betty, ed. The Paradise of Women: Writings by Women of the Renaissance. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1981.
Woodbridge, Linda. Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984.
CHAPTER SIX: PHYSIC AND PHYSICIANS
Disease at this time was believed to have supernatural as well as natural causes. No one linked illness to malnutrition or to lack of sanitation. The first suggestion that washing hands and removing rings before examining a patient might be wise did not appear in print until 1560, and that was in France, not England. Epidemics were regarded as God’s punishment for man’s sins. Prayers were frequently part of the cure.
Every household also had herbal home remedies, which were the first choice in treating illnesses. There is a letter extant from Lord Edmund Howard to Lady Lisle in which be thanks her for sending him one of her own medicines. “It Hath done me much good,” he writes, “and hath caused the stone to break, so that now I void much gravel. But for all that, your said medicine hath done me little honesty, for it made me piss my bed this night, for the which my wife hath sore beaten me.”
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