Daily Life in Elizabethan England (45 page)

THE ACTOR EDWARD ALLEYN WRITES TO HIS WIFE, 1593

My good sweet mouse, I commend me heartily to you, and to my father, my mother, and my sister Bess, hoping in God, though the sickness be round about you, yet by His mercy it may escape your house, which by the grace of God it shall. Therefore use this course: keep your house fair and clean (which I know you will) and every evening throw water before your door . . . and have in your windows good store of rue and herb of grace . . . Now good mouse I have no news to send you but this, that we have all our health, for which the Lord be praised. I received your letter at Bristol by Richard Couley, for the which I thank you. I have sent you by this bearer (Thomas Pope’s kinsman) my white waistcoat, because it is a trouble to me to carry it. . . . If you send any more letters, send to me by the carriers of Shrewsbury or to West Chester or to York, to be kept till my Lord Strange’s Players come. . . .

Your loving husband, E. Alleyn

[
Postscript
] Mouse, you send me no news of any things you should send of your domestical matters, such things as happens at home, as how your distilled water proves, or this or that or any thing what you will.

[
Address
] This be delivered to Master Henslowe, one of the grooms of Her Majesty’s Chamber, dwelling on the Bankside right over against the Clink.

R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert, eds.
Henslowe’s Diary
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 274–75.

simply be given to someone who was known to be traveling toward the letter’s destination. The letter would be folded over and sealed with wax, and the recipient’s name written on the outside, with some indication of where he or she might be found.

WATER TRAVEL

Water routes played a much more visible role in transportation than they do today, in part due to cost: for bulk goods, transport by water could cost ¼ to ⅟₁₂ of the price by land. Speed was not a factor, since travel by boat was no quicker than land travel and could take much longer depending on weather and the directness of the route. The journey between Dover and Calais, a distance of about 25 miles, took two to four hours with favorable winds and could take as long as seven. The voyage to the New World normally lasted a month or two.

Water transport was especially important to England, an island nation that had no contact with the outside world except by sea. The heavily indented coastline (second in Europe only to Norway) and numerous

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A post rider in the early 1600s. [By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library]

navigable rivers also made water transport accessible to a large part of the country.

Since bridges were comparatively rare, boats were essential in some places as a means of crossing rivers. London had only a single bridge: transportation along and across the Thames was provided by a multitude of small rowing-boats called
wherries,
giving Elizabethan London something of the flavor we associate with Venice. A wherry ride across the river cost 1d.; the trip between London and Greenwich cost 8d. with the tide, 12d. against it. The Swiss visitor Thomas Platter was favorably impressed with these boats: “The wherries are charmingly upholstered and embroidered cushions are laid across the seats, very comfortable to sit on or lean against, and generally speaking the benches only seat two people next to one another; many of them are covered in, particularly in rainy weather or fierce sunshine.”1

Warships and commercial ships were not very different from each other.

The seas were a dangerous place: merchant ships were generally fitted with at least a few guns and were often pressed into military service in times of war. There were a few significant distinctions. Ships built specifi-The Elizabethan World
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cally for war tended to be narrower in proportion to their width, and the largest warships were much larger than any merchant ship. There were no passenger ships as such—travelers overseas would book passage on a merchant ship of some sort. Merchant ships tended to be of about 200

tons (a figure that estimated the number of barrels—
tuns
—that could be carried in its hold), rarely reaching 300 or 350, and almost never anything above; the keel would be around 60 feet long. Warships might be of 500

tons or more, with keels of about 100 feet and beams of 35 feet, carrying 30–40 guns and crews of 200–300. Yet many ships were much smaller. The
Golden Hind,
on which Francis Drake circled the globe, was 100 feet long, 18 feet broad, and of 140 tons, and it carried 16 principal guns and 90

crew.

Hulls were rounded toward the fore, tapering toward the aft, and built up high and narrow at deck level—this served in part to reduce tolls, which were often levied on ships based on deck area. Sails were few: a three-masted ship would carry two square sails each on the fore-and mainmasts, another square sail on the bowsprit, and a triangular lateen sail on the mizzenmast. Under favorable conditions, such ships might make some four to six knots (around five to seven miles per hour).

TOURISM

During the Middle Ages, travel had been generally for professional or military reasons, or for the purpose of pilgrimage. By the late 1500s, personal secular travel—tourism—had become well established. Within England one popular tourist attraction was Drake’s
Golden Hind,
which was ultimately destroyed by visitors taking chips of wood from it. Another favored destination was the Tower of London, where visitors might pay the staff to show them the royal armories, menagerie, and crown jewels.

St. Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey were also tourist sites. Perhaps the most eccentric tourist attraction in England was the Great Bed of Ware in Hertfordshire—this palatial bed, which survives today in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, was over 11 feet wide.

However, the favorite destination for English travelers was the Continent. A young man of the upper classes might follow his formal schooling with a journey to France and Italy, in the company of a tutor hired by his parents: such a trip, it was thought, gave the final polish to his education and breeding. Even older men and women were known to visit the Continent out of sheer interest. Traditionalists viewed such excursions with mistrust, and Italy in particular was seen as a bad influence. William Harrison expressed a view typical of many of his countrymen: “This . . . is generally to be reprehended in all estates of gentility, and which in short time will turn to the great ruin of our country, and that is, the usual sending of noblemen’s and mean gentlemen’s sons into Italy, from whence they bring home nothing but mere atheism, infidelity, vicious conversation,
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and ambitious and proud behaviour, whereby it cometh to pass that they return far worse men than they went out.”2

Those who wished to travel, both internally and overseas, had to secure passports. People traveling outside their home parish needed to be able to prove that they were not mere vagrants—an easy thing to do for someone who was obviously well-to-do, or if you were going only as far as a nearby market town, but if you weren’t rich and were traveling far afield, it was best to get a document signed by two justices of the peace. Those who were found to be vagrants could be whipped and sent home.

Anyone who wanted to journey overseas needed a passport from the

Privy Council. This requirement helped the government keep tabs on the dealings of Englishmen overseas, and permission was not always easy to obtain: it was reported that when someone applied for a passport, Lord Burghley “would first examine him of England. And if he found him igno-rant, would bid him stay at home, and know his own country first.”3

Then as now, tourism could be an expensive hobby: Fynes Moryson, one of the greatest travel writers of the day, recommended allowing expenses of £50–60 a year, several times the annual income of the middling sorts of commoners.

GEOGRAPHY

Travel was not the only way people could broaden their horizons. A growing body of geographical literature was becoming available in English. English scholars compiled substantial volumes detailing the geography, history, and culture of their native country: William Harrison’s broad-reaching and detailed
Description of England
first appeared in 1577; William Camden published his
Britannia
in 1586; and a series of local studies of individual shires came out during Elizabeth’s reign. Other works offered the stay-at-home Englishman a glimpse of the wider world. The most famous was Richard Hakluyt’s monumental bestseller
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation.
First published in 1589, and reissued in an enlarged edition in 1598–1600, Hakluyt’s work in many ways laid the foundation for England’s reputation as a nation of global explorers.

The emerging science of cartography quickly permeated the daily lives of the educated. The Flemish cartographer Gerard Mercator first published his ground-breaking atlas in 1569, and before long maps were becoming a familiar sight in English homes, both as a source of information and as a fashionable form of interior decoration. According to John Dee, people collected maps, charts, and globes, “some to beautify their halls, parlors, chambers, galleries, studies or libraries with; other some for things past, as battles fought . . . and such occurrences in histories mentioned; . . . some other presently to view the large dominion of the Turk, the wide empire of the Muscovite, and the little morsel of ground where Christendom . . . is
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LEONARD DIGGES’S PREFACE TO

HIS TRANSLATION OF COPERNICUS, 1576

In this our age one rare wit . . . hath by long study, painful practice, and rare invention, delivered a new theoric or model of the world, showing that the earth resteth not in the center of the whole world, but only in the center of this our mortal world or globe of elements which environed and enclosed the moon’s orb. . . . Reason and deep discourse having opened these things to Copernicus, and the same being with demonstrations mathematical most apparently by him to the world delivered, I though it convenient together with the old theoric also to publish this, to the end such noble English minds as delight to reach above the baser sort of men might not be altogether defrauded of so noble a part of philosophy. . . . If . . . the earth be situate immoveable in the center of the world, why find we not theorics upon that ground to produce the effects as true and certain as these of Copernicus?

. . . Why shall we so much dote in the appearance of our sense, which many ways may be abused, and not suffer ourselves to be directed by the rule of reason, which the great God hath given us as a lamp to lighten the darkness of our understanding and the perfect guide to lead us to the golden branch of verity amid the forest of errors?

Leonard Digges,
A Prognostication of Right Good Effect
(London: Thomas Marsh, 1576), sig. M1r-v.

certainly known; . . . some other for their own journeys directing into far lands, or to understand other men’s travels.”4 A series of county maps of England were published by Christopher Saxton in the 1570s: by the end of the century, Saxton’s maps had become “usual with all noblemen and gentlemen, and daily perused by them.”5

Before the Elizabethan age, Englishmen had mostly known their world from a ground-level perspective. Travelers found their way from place to place by landmarks such as bridges, hills, and towns and often had to rely on local advice and guides to help them on their way. Now it was becoming increasingly possible to visualize the world from the bird’s-eye perspective of the mapmaker, suggesting the possibility that humans could rise above their natural environment.

SYSTEMS OF BELIEF

The shape of the universe was itself changing, as the geocentric cosmos of the Middle Ages was gradually displaced by the heliocentric model pro-posed by Copernicus (first published in 1543). Originally seen as heretical, and still highly controversial in parts of Europe, the Copernican model was rapidly gaining acceptance in England during Elizabeth’s reign.