Daily Life in Elizabethan England (48 page)

proctor—A lawyer in the system of ecclesiastical courts.

roll—A padded roll of fabric worn about a woman’s hips.

sacring bell—A small bell used in church services.

saint’s day—A holy day traditionally commemorating a particular saint.

sarcenet—A kind of silken cloth.

squire—See esquire.

Statute of Artifi cers—A law regulating work and wages, passed by Parliament in 1563.

trencher—A wooden plate.

vintner—A merchant or retailer dealing in wine.

wake—A parish festival (sometimes called an ale); also, a social event held at the home of a deceased person prior to burial.

watch—An urban nighttime patrol, staffed by part-time volunteers.

Whitsun—The Sunday seven weeks after Easter (Pentecost), traditionally an occasion for summer festivals.

winnowing—The process of separating cracked grain husks from the seed.

woodland settlement—A system of agricultural organization in which each holding is a discrete parcel of land, as contrasted with champion settlement.

yeoman—The upper rank of landholding free commoners.

Appendix:

The

Elizabethan Event

The text on which this book is based was originally written as a living-history manual for the Elizabethan period. It has since been expanded and reworked to provide an introduction to Elizabethan daily life for the general-interest reader, but it can still be used for organizing a period event such as an Elizabethan fair, festival, or feast. It can also prepare the individual reader to participate in such an event.

For the individual preparing to take part in an event, the first steps will be to choose what sort of character you will be representing and to assemble an appropriate kit of personal equipment. A character toward the lower end of the social scale would be easier to portray well: an upper-class character would not only have expensive clothing but would probably be attended by a servant and would certainly be well versed in all manner of social graces. A minimum outfit for a man would be a shirt, hose, garters, Venetians, doublet, hat or cap, and shoes. For a woman, it would be a smock, petticoat, bodice, coif, and shoes. Depending on the circumstances of the event, you may also need to provide basic eating equipment such as a bowl and/or trencher, knife, spoon, and drinking vessel. Some ideas for identifying suppliers of such items can be found in A Guide to Digitally Accessible Resources.

ORGANIZING AN EVENT

To host a successful event, you will need to attend to the following essentials.

246 Appendix

Define and Disseminate the Goals

First, decide precisely what you are trying to achieve, as this will govern the balance struck between practicality and authenticity. Every group must make its own decisions about the degree of authenticity it wishes to achieve. If the principal goal is entertainment of yourselves or your guests, then historical accuracy may not be a priority although we hope this book will convince you that reasonable accuracy can be both fun and easy. If you are a living-history group putting on a demonstration for the public, you have more of a responsibility to be true to the past. In any case, the most important thing is to be as honest as possible with yourselves and your guests or audience as to what you are actually doing.

Even the best living-history group needs to remember that perfect accuracy is impossible. Bearing this in mind, it is important to define the degree of accuracy your group actually expects. If you expect people to meet a certain standard of authenticity, that standard needs to be clearly articulated. It is worthwhile to compile a list of authoritative sources, people or texts one can turn to as a guide for how to prepare for the event. A source need not be perfect to be considered authoritative: it need only represent a degree of authenticity that you consider adequate for the purposes of your reenactment. This book is in part written to provide an authoritative source of this sort.

Provide for Creature Comforts

No event can succeed without a supply of food and drink, as well as adequate seating, utensils, and the like. The food in particular can require a lot of effort, so if your organizing group is small, you may want to keep it as simple as possible, choosing such dishes as will provide the greatest satisfaction for the least preparation. You will make things easier on yourselves if you prepare dishes ahead of time and serve them cold or reheated.

Define the Space

As Tudor buildings are few and far between, some effort is required to make the setting feel right. In the absence of an Elizabethan hall, an outdoor event is one possibility, especially if you can provide appropriate tentage. If the event is held indoors in a modern-looking setting, it will help to furnish the site with period household accoutrements of some sort: wall hangings will do much to disguise concrete, and much modernity can be overlooked by candlelight. It is also very important to define the physical and temporal space of the recreation. Decide what area is to be used and mark it off somehow so that people know where to go when they are in the mood for the past and where to slip off for a modern break if they need one. Demar-Appendix 247

cate the beginning and end of the recreation by some prearranged signal; for example, someone might welcome the guests at the official beginning and thank them at the end. A clear boundary is essential if you want to keep the modern world from spilling into the recreation.

Arrange Entertainment

If the event is not fun, it will not succeed. This book includes a selection of easily recreated entertainments. They will not only provide enjoyment for the participants but will help them to act as Elizabethans: it is easier to play an Elizabethan game than to discuss Elizabethan politics. For the entertainments to succeed, you will need to ensure that the proper equipment is available, and it will help if the participants have some practice beforehand.

Another kind of entertainment is
scripting.
If some sort of plot or plots are happening at the event comparable perhaps to the “host-a-murder-mystery idea, which has been a popular party theme in recent years this will add to the interest of the occasion. For this purpose, it will help if your group has some idea beforehand of the characters who will be represented at the event.

Prepare the Participants

It is not always easy to recreate the past, and it will help if the group takes an active part in preparing people for the event. Try to ensure that beginners have guidance in assembling their outfits sewing get-togethers are a good way of doing this. It may even be worthwhile to set up a buddy system whereby each beginner has an experienced person responsible for making sure they have everything they need.

The event will work best if there is a core of people who know what they are doing. For this reason, it is worth having a series of workshops prior to the event at which people can practice games, dances, songs, and social interaction. In addition, the day of the event is a good time to hold workshops for the benefit of out-of-town visitors.

You should also be prepared to take an active hand in arranging the social relationships between the participants’ characters. Left to their own devices, people often all choose characters of the same rank (usually aristocratic), with few relationships among them. This tends to make the event both unrealistic and dull. Encourage people to come with prearranged social relationships. One possibility is service: it is relatively easy and inexpensive to portray a servant, and it can be a great deal of fun as well (there are plenty of good examples in the comedies of Shakespeare and Jonson). Other possible relationships include relatives, neighbors, and boon-companions. Again, you may find it worthwhile to organize a session to make this happen before and/or on the day.

A Guide to Digitally

Accessible Resources

When the first edition of this book was published, the Internet was only just starting to become widely accessible. A bit over a decade later, it has transformed the landscape for people who are interested in studying cultures of the past: museum collections from around the globe can be searched online; manuscripts and early printed books are available in digital facsimile; makers of reproduction artifacts can easily be found through the Web; people with similar interests are in constant contact through a variety of digital media.

It is impossible to map fully the ever-changing terrain of digital resources.

The following survey is intended to suggest the range of resources that are out there and how to use them.

Among the many research resources now available, printed books

remain essential. The classified bibliographies at the end of this book are intended to identify especially useful print resources.

REFERENCE RESOURCES

A general Web search engine such as Google or a partially filtered engine like Google Scholar can yield plenty of hits for any given topic. The information from Web sites needs to be viewed with skepticism, but playing around with a few search terms can be a good way to do some preliminary investigation and find your bearings on a topic. It is also important to remember that not everything that is available on the Web is accessible
250

A Guide to Digitally Accessible Resources

through these search engines: many specialized databases can only be searched by going to the database itself.

An essential tool for any kind of meaningful research is a union

database of books and articles, such as WorldCat, which runs unified searches on the databases of libraries across North America and (to a lesser degree) around the world. Such resources are usually accessible through university and public libraries. An increasing number of digital books are accessible on the Web, either in full (generally only if they are out of copyright) or in limited previews. Tools like Google Book Search can help you locate some of these.

Since WorldCat is less global than its name implies, it is also worth knowing about the union catalog
The European Library
(www.theeuropean library.org), which offers similar searching for European libraries.

It is also worth remembering that a growing number of books have been digitized and put up on the Web. Excellent old reference works like
Shakespeare’s England
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916) can now be downloaded from your home PC by running a quick search on a site like www.archive.

org.

An outstanding resource is
British History Online
(www.british-history.

ac.uk), a massive site with extensive online versions of primary and secondary source material relating to British history, searchable by period, region, topic, and other filters.

Among the most valuable specialized resources not accessible through a general search engine is the online version of the
Oxford English Dictionary
(dictionary.oed.com). If you can identify a few relevant keywords for your topic, the
OED
can quickly put you in touch with pertinent primary source material: each entry includes not only definitions but also primary source quotes in which the word appears, with information on where the quotes came from.

INTERNET PORTALS

A variety of specialized Internet sites offer research leads for Elizabethan England. Some good general examples are
Luminarium
(www.lumi narium.org/renlit);
Renaissance: The Elizabethan World
(www.elizabethan.

org); and
Tudor History
(www.tudorhistory.org). These sites provide lists of useful links including primary sources, modern scholarship, databases, discussion groups, and organizations. Personal Web sites can be quirky to navigate but with some patience can yield excellent results; a prime example is www.pbm.com/~lindahl, a treasure-trove of links to resources across the Web.

There are also specialized portals.
The Elizabethan Costume Page
(www.

elizabethancostume.net) has an excellent selection of links to a variety of sites relating to Renaissance costume.

A Guide to Digitally Accessible Resources

251

PRIMARY SOURCE TEXTS ONLINE

Large quantities of primary source material are now available online.

Transcribed copies of a selection of texts can be found at the
Internet Modern
History Sourcebook
(www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook.html), the Shakespeare Authorship Sourcebook (www.sourcetext.com/sourcebook/

e-texts.htm), the University of Oregon’s
Renascence Editions
(www.uoregon.

edu/~rbear/ren.htm), and the University of Birmingham’s
Library of
Humanistic Texts
(www.philological.bham.ac.uk/library.html). Accessible through major research libraries are the PDF versions of large numbers of Elizabethan books in the
Early English Books Online
(eebo.chadwyck.com).