Daily Life in Elizabethan England

DAILY LIFE IN

Elizabethan

England

Second Edition

Jeffrey L. Forgeng

The Greenwood Press Daily Life Through History Series

GREENWOOD PRESS

An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC

DAILY LIFE IN

Elizabethan

England

Second Edition

Jeffrey L. Forgeng

The Greenwood Press Daily Life Through History Series

GREENWOOD PRESS

An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC

Copyright 2010 by Jeffrey L. Forgeng All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Forgeng, Jeffrey L.

Daily life in Elizabethan England / Jeffrey L. Forgeng. — 2nd ed.

p. cm. — (The Greenwood Press Daily Life through History Series) Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-313-36560-7 (hard copy : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-36561-4 (ebook) 1. England—Social life and customs— 16th century. 2. Great Britain—History—Elizabeth, 1558–1603. I. Title.

DA320.S56 2010

942.05'5—dc22 2009027600

14 13 12 11 10 1 2 3 4 5

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This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America

Copyright Acknowledgments

The publisher has done its best to make sure the instructions and/or recipes in this book are correct. However, users should apply judgment and experience when preparing recipes, especially parents and teachers working with young people. The publisher accepts no responsibility for the outcome of any recipe included in this volume.

Contents

Preface to the Revised Edition

vii

Acknowledgments

xi

A Chronology of Tudor England

xiii

Introduction

xvii

1. A Brief History of Tudor England

1

2. Society

7

3. Households and the Course of Life

39

4. Cycles of Time

73

5. Material Culture

91

6. Clothing and Accoutrements

125

7. Food and Drink

163

8. Entertainments

183

9. The Elizabethan World

225

Glossary

241

Appendix: The Elizabethan Event

245

vi Contents

A Guide to Digitally Accessible Resources

249

Classified Bibliographies

255

Index

269

Preface to

the Revised Edition

When
Daily Life in Elizabethan England
first came out, I was 32 years old and publishing my first book. A dozen years and half as many books later, one would certainly hope that I bring something more to the table for this revised edition. The intervening time has given me a good deal of new experience to work with: during the late 1990s, I continued my involvement in living history, culminating in a stint at Plimoth Plantation, and since that time I have been teaching about this period both to undergradu-ates at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and to the general public as Paul S.

Morgan Curator at the Higgins Armory Museum.

The outcome has been a book substantially revised from the first edition. Based on my work on other volumes in the Greenwood Daily Life series, I have reconceived the chapters in ways that should make them flow better while also allowing expansion in crucial areas—for example, the chapter on the Living Environment has been broadened as Material Culture. I have also deepened both descriptions and discussions, particularly in areas like the chapter on Society, which has grown substantially relative to its previous iteration.

In particular, I am very glad that Greenwood asked me to include side-bars outside of the main narrative. There is a massive amount of primary-source material to offer the reader compelling glimpses of Elizabethan daily life, but it does not always fit well into the main text of a book such as this, precisely because it offers integrated views of the historic environment and loses much of its value when it is shoehorned into a specific slot in the narrative. I am sure readers will agree that the passages from
viii

Preface to the Revised Edition

Claude Hollyband’s dialogues, Lady Margaret Hoby’s diary, and Phillip Stubbes’s
Anatomy of Abuses
add hugely to this second edition.

One of the biggest changes between the worlds of 1995 and today has been the exponential growth of the Internet, which figured only marginally in the appendices of the first edition. The Net offers an outstandingly powerful tool to those who want to go deeper into the topics covered in this book, but finding a way to accommodate the ever-shifting geography of virtual space within the rigid format of the printed page is a formidable challenge—it would be all too easy to produce what would soon amount to no more than a list of dead links. Instead of trying to compile a comprehensive guide to Internet sites, I have tried to lay out a strategy of digital research that should remain useful even when some of the URLs are no longer valid.

While much has changed, I hope that the features that made the first edition so popular continue to remain in place. In particular, I feel that the first-person perspective of the living-history practitioner continues to make this work uniquely valuable in offering the reader a compelling sense of what life in the Elizabethan world was like for the people who lived it.

I also feel that this perspective has proved especially pertinent to a 21st-century readership. One of the issues I most tried to address in the first edition was the material basics that are often glossed over in accounts of daily life but that are crucial to the actual functioning of individuals and societies: food, water, light and heat, sanitation, and the production and life cycles of materials. These topics are much more in the public eye than they were a decade ago, and I feel that this book offers perspectives in this area that can still be relevant today. In fact, I made personal changes in my own lifestyle as a result of writing the first edition, such as altering my daily schedule to the Elizabethan practice of rising with the sun—helpful to anyone who has an ambitious publication agenda, but also one of the many things all of us could be doing to reduce our ecological footprint.

It is perhaps also worth emphasizing here that any broad-reaching portrait of the past will inevitably oversimplify its subject. The on-the-ground realities in any society are vastly more complex than can possibly be captured in writing, and the broader one’s topic, the more violence one has to do to these realities to squeeze them into the space available. Yet the exercise is eminently worthwhile. Even if this book can never do justice to the complexity—and the fascination—of the Elizabethan world, a general introduction of this sort fulfills an essential function as a guidebook for the first-time traveler to this unfamiliar country and will hopefully inspire some readers to get to know the environment a bit more deeply. I have also found my works in this series to be personally helpful when I need to look up technical details—monetary values, agricultural practices, populations, and life expectancies—that are rarely brought conveniently together between two covers.

Preface to the Revised Edition

ix

I would like to thank the people without whom this second edition would never have been possible—Sarah Kolba, as fine a research assistant as one could ever hope for; Laura Hanlan, a magus among ILL librarians; and Christine Drew, whose sage counsel and unfailing patience have been essential in bringing this project to completion.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies at the University of Toronto for permission to reproduce various illustrations in this volume and for their help in obtaining them.

I would also like to thank Sandra Marques of the Museum of London for her unflagging assistance with the illustration by the late Peter Jackson.

Special credit is due to David Hoornstra for several of the illustrations in this book. Special credit is also due to Victoria Hadfield for her work on the illustrations in this volume, some of which are her own.

Thanks also to David Kuijt for providing the rules for Primero.

Daily Life in Elizabethan England
is in part a revision of
The Elizabethan
Handbook,
a manual for Elizabethan living history produced by the University Medieval and Renaissance Association (now the Tabard Inn Society) at the University of Toronto for its “Fencing, Dancing, and Bearbaiting”

event in June 1991, and subsequently revised and expanded for private publication by the present author. Although relatively little of the original text survives, some credit is due to the people who originally produced it, or who had a hand in later revisions, including Susan Carroll-Clark, Maren Drees, Victoria Hadfield, Lesley Howard, Shona Humphrey, A.J.S.

Nusbacher, Tricia Postle, and Tara Jenkins.

A Chronology of

Tudor England

1485

Accession of Henry Tudor as Henry VII 1509

Accession of Henry VIII

Henry VIII marries Catherine of Aragon 1516

Birth of Mary Tudor (first child of Henry VIII, by Catherine of Aragon)

1530–39

Henry VIII breaks with the Catholic Church and dissolves the monasteries

1533

Henry VIII marries Anne Boleyn

Birth of Elizabeth (second child of Henry VIII, by Anne Boleyn)

1536

Execution of Anne Boleyn

1537

Birth of Edward VI (third child of Henry VIII, by Jane Seymour)

1547

Accession of Edward VI

1553

Accession of Mary Tudor

1558

Accession of Elizabeth

1559

Elizabeth withdraws England from the Catholic Church
xiv

A Chronology of Tudor England
1561

Return of Mary Stuart (Mary Queen of Scots) from France to Scotland

1562

First religious war between Catholics and Protestants in France

1563

Plague

1564

Birth of William Shakespeare 1567

Second religious war in France

Rebellion against Spain in Flanders is ruthlessly suppressed by the Duke of Alva

1568

Mary Stuart flees to England 1569

Northern rebellion

Third religious war in France 1570

Pope Pius V excommunicates Elizabeth 1571

Ridolfi plot against Elizabeth 1572

St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Protestants in France 1574

Beginning of covert Roman Catholic mission in England 1576

First permanent theater built in London 1577

Sir Francis Drake sets out on a voyage around the globe 1578–79

Plague

1580

Beginning of Jesuit mission in England

Return of Sir Francis Drake 1581

Parliament enacts harsh anti-Catholic legislation 1582

Plague

1583

Sir Humphrey Gilbert attempts to found an English colony in Newfoundland

Throckmorton conspiracy to overthrow Elizabeth 1585

Sir Walter Raleigh attempts to found an English colony in Virginia (Roanoke Colony, modern North Carolina)

Sack of Antwerp by Spanish troops

English troops are sent to fight Spain in the Netherlands 1586

Babington conspiracy to overthrow Elizabeth

Poor harvests

A Chronology of Tudor England
xv

1587

Execution of Mary Stuart

Birth of Virginia Dare at Roanoke, the first English child born in America

Poor harvests and famine

1588

Spain’s Invincible Armada is defeated by the English fleet