A Brief History of the Tudor Age (7 page)

The five pageants along the route of the coronation procession, in Gracechurch Street, Cornhill, at the Great Conduit in Cheapside, in Paul’s Churchyard, and at the conduit in Fleet
Street, were all Protestant propaganda. There were pictures, and actors representing, not only the Queen’s father Henry VIII, who had overthrown the power of the Pope, but also her Protestant
mother, Anne Boleyn, who had never been officially rehabilitated after her execution for adultery and high treason, but was still regarded as an innocent victim by the Protestant extremists. There
were pictures of ‘Deborah the judge and restorer of the house of Israel’, and several slogans comparing Elizabeth with this Old Testament heroine who, though a woman, had been
chosen by God to save His people. At the conduit in Cheap, the Queen was handed a Protestant English Bible; she held it to her breast, and promised that she would always read it and
adhere to its teaching.

T
HE COUNTRYSIDE
in the sixteenth century had a different appearance from the countryside today, though the removal of so many hedgerows in the last
forty years has made the England of 1988 look a little more like Tudor England than did the England of 1950. The low-lying and fertile parts of the country consisted of large fields unbroken by
hedges, and only occasionally by stone boundary-walls. Only Devonshire and parts of Kent were divided into small fields by hedges, and probably looked very like the counties that we know.

The countryside was interspersed by roads, the King’s highway, which was sometimes straight and sometimes winding, and linked the market towns. No roads bypassed the towns, for their chief
use was to enable the people to get to market; where there were no towns, there were no highways, only rough tracks leading to the farms and villages.

Most of the people travelling along the roads were going to, or returning from, market. Most walked on foot, though some of them rode on horseback. Many were driving herds of animals along the
roads. There were carts carrying various commodities, including some kinds of food, such as fruit and vegetables; but as
there was no way of preserving the food for very long,
it was seldom taken further than the nearest town. It was very unusual for meat to be carried along the roads in carts; the butchers in the towns normally arranged for cows, sheep and pigs to be
driven to the town from some farm in the country on their four feet and then kept alive, wandering in their gardens or in the streets outside their shops, until they were ready for slaughter.

At the beginning of the Tudor Age, the animals were usually slaughtered by the butcher on his premises in the town; but many of his neighbours found this objectionable. In London, the people who
lived in the parishes of St Faith’s and St Gregory’s near St Paul’s Cathedral objected to the slaughtering of animals and the scalding of swine that was carried on at the butchery
of St Nicholas Fleshamless. After the canons of St Paul’s had been complaining about the butchery for sixteen years, they and the parishioners presented a petition to Henry VII. They told him
that the air in the district was polluted by ‘blood and other fouler things unto your most noble Grace not to be named’, which flowed through the streets from the slaughterhouse. The
stench pervaded to that part of the palace adjoining St Paul’s where the King waited before entering the cathedral when he came there on state occasions; and this may have helped to persuade
Parliament to pass an Act in 1489 which prohibited the slaughter of animals, not only within the city of London, but also within the confines of any walled town in England, except Berwick and
Carlisle. The ban remained in force for forty-three years; but it was repealed in 1533 after the butchers at the slaughterhouse of St Nicholas had built underground sewers to take the blood and
filth, so that the butchery was no longer a nuisance to the local inhabitants.

People who were ill, or very old and incapacitated, sometimes travelled in litters carried by servants on foot or drawn by horses; but there were no carriages or coaches at the beginning of the
Tudor Age. The first coaches to be seen in England appeared in the streets of London in the 1550s. Walter Rippon, a Dutchman living in London, built a coach for the Earl of
Rutland in 1555; in 1564 he built a coach for Elizabeth I, for whom he built another coach twenty years later. But even at the end of the Tudor Age there were only a few coaches in
England; they did not become common until the seventeenth century.

Some people on the road in 1500 were travelling further than the nearest market town. Pilgrims went to the famous shrines to pray beside the corpses or bones of the saints. They came from all
over England, and from many parts of Western Europe, to the most famous of them all, the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk and the tomb of St Thomas of Canterbury – Archbishop
Thomas Becket – in the cathedral where he had been assassinated by order of King Henry II in 1170. Scholars travelled to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge from all parts of England,
and learned foreign doctors came there from the universities of Europe. English and foreign merchants travelled far to attend the great national and international fairs in London and the
Stourbridge Fair in Cambridge. They came from Antwerp, Scandinavia and the Hansa towns of North Germany to Harwich or Ipswich by sea and on from there to Cambridge along the Essex and Suffolk
roads.

Many Englishmen, and an even larger number of Englishwomen, never in their lives left the parish in which they were born, lived and died; but others, more adventurous, travelled to London or
elsewhere to seek their fortune, or just to visit friends, though they risked arrest and a flogging if they left their parish without a licence from the authorities, and could give no satisfactory
explanation of their reason for travelling. There were also the officials travelling on government business, and the couriers taking letters, reports and instructions from the Privy Council and
royal officials in Westminster to the local administrators in the country, and returning with the administrators’ reports to the Council. Foreign ambassadors regularly sent long letters to
their Kings containing reports on the situation in England; at times of crisis, they might write several times a week. Their couriers were constantly riding along the roads of England
and Western Europe, in all weathers and at all seasons of the year, with these letters in their pouches.

If the common man wished to travel a great distance across England, he usually walked. As the old song put it:

If a man was not wealthy enough to own a horse, he could hire one for his journey; but this was expensive, for it cost one shilling – three days’ wages for the
agricultural labourer – to hire a horse for the thirty miles from Southwark to Rochester.

The traveller on foot could not hope to go much more than twenty miles a day at the most, and the ordinary horseman went only a little further. It was unusual for a traveller to ride more than
thirty miles a day; and in bad weather, on the muddy roads, or in hilly country, progress could be restricted to two miles an hour, or some fifteen miles a day. The roads had been deteriorating for
over a thousand years, ever since the days of the Romans. A minimum of road repairs was carried out by forced labour. An Act passed by Queen Mary’s Parliament in 1555 required every cottager
and householder to work for eight hours a day on four days in the year repairing the roads in his parish, or to find someone else to do his stint for him. Every landowner holding land which was
worth £50 a year or more was required to provide two men to work on the roads for this length of time. In 1563, an Act of Elizabeth I’s Parliament increased the labour to eight hours a
day for six days in the year.

Greater efforts were made to improve the streets in some of the towns and busy approach roads to London. In 1534 the inhabitants of Holborn petitioned Henry VIII to take action about the state
of the road leading out of London from Holborn Bridge to the bars at the west end of the street, for ‘not alonely your subjects and inhabitants within the said street of Holborn’ but
also the carriers and other travellers ‘repairing weekly and monthly to your city of London’ along the street (which was ‘the
common passage for all carryings
carried from the west and north-west parts of the realm’) were in danger of their lives from the risk of falling into the holes in the road. An Act was therefore passed which required every
landowner whose property had a frontage on the road to pave his side of the road. This principle was extended by an Act of 1543 to many streets in London and Westminster, from Tothill Street and
Petty France along the Strand and as far as Moorgate and Smithfield. A statute of 1571 ordered that the roads between Aldgate and Whitechapel, and between the Tower and Ratcliff, should be paved by
the landowners, because travellers ‘on horseback and on foot are become so mired and foul in the winter time as hard it is to have any passage for the same through the said ways’.

Between 1544 and 1549 the streets of Cambridge, Chester and Calais were paved, for Parliament did not know that Calais would be captured by the French nine years later and would never again be
an English town. Acts of Mary’s Parliament in 1553 required the roads from Shaftesbury to Sherborne and from Gloucester to Bristol to be paved by the inhabitants of the parishes all along the
roads. Elizabeth I’s Parliaments in 1576, 1581, 1597 and 1601 ordered the paving of the streets of Chichester and of all the roads within five miles of Oxford, and the repair of the bridges
at Rochester, Chepstow, Newport, Caerleon and Wye, and the two bridges over the River Eden near Carlisle; but nothing was done to repair the dangerous wooden bridge across the Tweed at Berwick
until the reign of James I. James had been very frightened when he crossed the bridge at his first entry into his new realm of England in 1603, and he ordered that the bridge should be demolished
and replaced by a new stone bridge which, under the name of the Old Bridge, still stands.

The roads in the Weald of Sussex, Surrey and Kent were a special problem, because the carts in which the ironmasters carried coal to their foundries, and their iron products from the foundries
to their destination, caused a great deal of damage to the roads. After various other remedies had failed, an Act of
1597 required every ironmaster in the Weald who carried
three loads of coal or 1 ton of iron for more than one mile along the roads between 12 October and 1 May, or thirty loads of coal or 10 tons of iron in the summer, to contribute to the cost of
repairing the road with cinders, gravel, stone or chalk.

There were four great long-distance roads in England which were kept in a relatively good state of repair and were used by many important travellers. There was the Great North Road from London
to Berwick and on across the Border into Scotland; the Watling Street from London to Chester, which was used by travellers to Ireland; the Dover Road, which travellers used to go from London to
Dover for the crossing to Calais; and the great road from London to the West, to Exeter and on to Plymouth. The King’s messengers used the relays of fresh horses which were awaiting them at
the ‘staging posts’ along these roads; the staging posts were usually inns about twenty or thirty miles apart. Riders travelling ‘in post’ could cover much greater distances
in a day than the ordinary traveller.

The Great North Road left London through Bishopsgate, and passed through Islington, Enfield, Hoddesdon, Ware, Royston, Huntingdon, Stamford, Grantham and Doncaster on the way to York. North of
York, the traveller entered a very sparsely populated area, but the Great North Road continued through Thirsk and Northallerton to Darneton (Darlington), which was an important military post and
the rear headquarters of the military administrative staff during campaigns against the Scots; then on through Durham, Newcastle and Alnwick to the frontier town of Berwick-upon-Tweed, the
important bridgehead across the Tweed which the English had captured in 1296 and recaptured in 1482, and which they regarded as the counterpart of their other bridgehead, Calais, on the French side
of the Channel. The Great North Road continued into Scotland for another sixty miles along the coast by Dunbar and Haddington to Edinburgh.

The Great North Road was one of only six roads which existed in England north of York. Another was the road into
Scotland from Newcastle by Otterburn across the Cheviot Hills
to Jedburgh and Kelso, which was the shortest way to Edinburgh, but much more dangerous for travellers than the Great North Road, because of the ‘moss-troopers’, the bandits who robbed
and killed travellers on both sides of the Border. The King’s Street ran north from Lancaster to Penrith and Carlisle. Two roads went from east to west, the road from York by Catterick Bridge
to Penrith and the road running from Newcastle to Carlisle by Hexham and Haltwhistle along the north bank of the Tyne. The sixth road north of York was the road from York to the port of
Scarborough, from where a busy trade was carried on with Scandinavia.

The journey from London to Edinburgh took the normal traveller a fortnight at his rate of thirty miles a day; but messengers in post could do it in five days. The record for the journey was set
up in March 1603, when the news of Elizabeth I’s death was carried to her heir, King James VI of Scotland, by Sir Robert Carey, a gentleman of Northumberland, who earlier had won a wager of
£2,000 by walking the 340 miles from London to Berwick in twelve days. Elizabeth died at Richmond in Surrey at about two o’clock in the morning of Thursday 24 March 1603. Carey left
Richmond at once and, after waiting for a few hours in Westminster, rode that day to Doncaster, a distance of 155 miles. Next day he rode 140 miles to Widrington in Northumberland, and on the
Saturday went on for 100 miles to Edinburgh, reaching James’s palace of Holyroodhouse just as the King was sitting down to supper at 6 p.m., having covered the distance from London in less
than sixty hours. His achievement was not equalled till it was surpassed by a stage-coach which brought the news from London to Glasgow of the passing of the Reform Bill in 1832; and soon after
this, the building of the railways made it possible for any traveller to do the journey from London to Edinburgh in ten hours.