The Tudor Year: October

Theme: paradox -- population growth and poverty



Recreation of a Tudor farm. (Image no longer available on the web. Originally from www.wealddown-schools.org.uk; see Weald and Downland Open Air Museum.)

October 12: birth of Prince Edward, 1537
October 24: death of Queen Jane (Seymour), 1537

The salient fact about sixteenth-century England was population growth and therefore -- because a pre-industrial economy did not have enough work for all -- falling wages. People turned out of their situations by the dissolution of the monasteries and the breaking up of great feudal households were reduced to building shelter on 'waste' ground. Country men and women who could find work on a gentleman's estate (like William Petre's) would at least be fed in the master's hall during their employ. A cottage might be one room, 16 feet long, to house a family. Fairly comfortable people might bequeath clothes, furniture, and fireplace tools in their wills; a poor woman left a cow and calf, apples, and a parcel of wool. The half-timbered 'Tudor' architecture with which we are familiar only came in in the second half of the sixteenth century, and then only among the better-off farmers. For great King Harry, October was the month of his one legitimate son's birth, and of the death of the baby's mother twelve days later.

Sources:

Guy, John. "The Tudor Age," in The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, ed. Kenneth O. Morgan. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 223-228.

Fussell, George Edwin. The English Rural Labourer: His Home, Furniture, Clothing & Food from Tudor to Victorian Times. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975 (originally published by the Batchworth Press, London, 1949), pp. 3-4.

Emmison, F. G. Tudor Secretary: Sir William Petre at Court and Home. London and Chichester: Phillimore & Co., 1970 (first published by Longmans, Green, & Co., 1961), pp. 140-141.

Fussell, p. 6.

Ibid., pp. 14-16

Ibid., p. 8.

The Tudor Year: September

Theme: exploration



Replica of the Golden Hind, Brixham Harbor, Devon. (Image from www.bbc.co.uk/devon; photograph by Annette Fisher.)

September 7: Birth of Elizabeth, 1533; death of Catherine Parr, 1548
September 26: Francis Drake returns from circumnavigating the globe, 1580
September 29: Michaelmas

The agrarian year ended at Michaelmas, standing at "the opposite end of the year to Lady Day (March 25th)." It was another important rent paying day and a day for holding local elections. Drake's return from his three-year voyage in the Golden Hind reminds us that the Tudor age was also the age of exploration -- and of plunder, especially Drake's of Spain's rich possessions in South America, and of a burgeoning slave trade. Walter Ralegh sent several expeditions in the 1580s to the area that Queen Elizabeth agreed to call "Virginia" in her honor, but these small colonizing efforts were overwhelmed by the need to prepare for and fight off the Spanish Armada. By the time Ralegh was able to send relief to Roanoke in 1590, the settlement had vanished.

Sources:

Cressy, David. Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989, p. 29.

Somerset, Anne. Elizabeth I. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1991, pp. 324-325.

Ibid., pp. 337-338.

The Tudor Year: August

Theme: war



The boar badge of King Richard III flies over the probable site of Bosworth Field, in Leicestershire. (Image, no longer available on the web, originally from www.24hourmuseum.org.uk.)


August 1: Lammas Day
August 8: Marriage of Henry VIII and Catherine Howard, 1540
August 9: Elizabeth's "Armada" speech, Tilbury, 1588
August 22: Battle of Bosworth Field, 1485

For farmers, August was the month of the corn harvest. Lammas day, or ancient origin, was a quarterly rent-paying day and also a day for fairs and for re-opening enclosed fields so that sheep could graze freely until the next spring. August was also a month of war. Tudor history begins with Henry Tudor's defeat of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. A century later, Henry's granddaughter Queen Elizabeth would defy the Spanish Armada in her famous speech to the troops at Tilbury on August 9, 1588 -- the fact that the Armada had already been decisively defeated and scattered two weeks earlier was not yet fully appreciated. Tudor soldiers served in France, Ireland, Scotland, and the Netherlands, and helped put down rebellions at home. They were often enough rebellious themselves, especially over late pay.

Sources:

Emmison, F. G. Tudor Secretary: Sir William Petre at Court and Home. London and Chichester: Phillimore & Co. Ltd., 1970 (first published by Longmans, Green, and Co., Ltd., 1961), p. 145.

Cressy, David. Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989, p. 29.

Ibid., p. 115

Philips, Gervase. "To cry, 'Home! Home!': Mutiny, Morale, and Indiscipline in Tudor Armies," The Journal of Military History, Vol 65, No. 2 (April, 2001), p. 319

The Tudor year: July

Theme: survival



Lady Jane Grey's prayerbook, believed to be the one she carried to the scaffold. The pale writing at the bottom is a farewell message in her own hand to the lieutenant of the Tower, adjuring him to obey God's laws. (Image from the British Library online gallery.)

July 6: execution of Thomas More, 1535; death of Edward VI, 1553
July 10: proclamation of Jane Grey queen, 1553
July 12: Divorce of Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves, 1540; marriage of Henry to Catherine Parr, 1543
July 19: Proclamation of Mary Tudor queen, 1553
July 26: Marriage of Queen Mary to King Philip of Spain, 1554
July 29: Defeat of the Spanish armada, 1588

Political events moved quickly in an age when royalty -- and its henchmen -- still governed by divine right. Lady Jane Grey's famous nine days as Queen (she was a scion of the Tudor family through her descent from one of Henry VIII's sisters) sped by in mid-July, 1553, after the death of the teenaged king, Henry's long sought son, Edward. In quieter times July would be a month for the royal court to begin its summer progresses to freshly cleaned rural mansions. Smallpox, the plague, and the mysterious "Sweat" were the scourges of the season, especially in London. Filth, sickness, vermin, and bad teeth were a part of all people's lives to an extent that we can hardly imagine. So was hunger and the fear of hunger. In the country, a supply of beef and mutton would already have been slaughtered at midsummer, and would have to last, salted, till winter. St. Swithin's Day, July 15th, was a day for the farmer to look at the sky with apprehension: rain on this day was thought to mean a rainy summer and possibly a spoiled harvest.

Sources:

Emmison, F.G. Tudor Secretary: Sir William Petre at Court and Home. London and Chichester: Phillimore & Co. Ltd., 1970 (first published by Longmans, Green, and Co., 1961) p. 239

Ibid, p. 253

Fussell, George Edwin. The English Rural Labourer: His Home, Furniture, Clothing, and Food from Tudor to Victorian Times. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975 (originally published by the Batchworth Press, London, 1949), p. 27.

Cressy, David. Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989, p. 28.

The Tudor year: June

Theme: weddings



Ingatestone Hall, Essex; photo from aboutbritain.com


June 1: coronation of Anne Boleyn, 1533
June 11: marriage of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, 1509
June 22: Chancellor Thomas More declares the Bible in English "not necessary," 1530
June 24: coronation of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, 1509; Midsummer Day
June 28: birth of Henry VIII, 1491

A month of anniversaries for King Henry and, poignantly, for his first queen, reminds us that the June wedding was popular for the Tudor age as well as our own. The picture shows Ingatestone Hall in Essex, the manor of long-serving royal Secretary Sir William Petre. The site had belonged to a wealthy nunnery; Petre's career as civil servant included years carrying out the king's orders to dissolve the monasteries. (The anniversary noted for the 22nd reminds us that religious ferment, caused by the new wonder of printed vernacular Bibles and, not least of all, by the king's quarrel with the Catholic church over his separation from Catherine, was the order of the day.) When Sir William's daughter was married at Ingatestone in June 1552, the staff of this self-sufficient small farm were capable of putting on a wedding feast for four hundred family and guests. That busy year, the bake house and buttery alone turned out the equivalent of 20,000 loaves of bread and over 2600 pounds of cheese.

Sources:

F. G. Emmison, Tudor Secretary: Sir William Petre at Court and Home. London and Chichester: Phillimore & Co. Ltd., 1970. First published by Longmans, Green, and Co., Ltd., 1961, pp. 23-24.
Ibid., p. 128.
Ibid., pp. 134-136
John Guy, "The Tudor Age," in The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, ed. Kenneth O. Morgan. Oxford University Press, 1984, p. 242.

The Tudor year: May

Theme: gardens



Photo credit


May 1 -- May day
May 16, 1568 -- Mary Queen of Scots takes refuge in England
May 19, 1536 -- execution of Anne Boleyn
May 20, 1536 -- betrothal of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour
May 30, 1536 -- marriage of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour


The picture shows some of the gardens of Hampton Court in all their glory. Hampton Court had been the private residence of Cardinal Wolsey, and was taken from him by King Henry VIII in 1529, when Wolsey fell from power. Anne Boleyn was the first mistress of the refurbished palace. The age of exploration brought many new plants -- among them tulips, lilacs, sunflowers, and nasturtiums -- into the English garden, which previously had bloomed with old favorites like primroses, daisies, columbine, roses, and the great favorite, "pinks" (carnations). Plants were grown as much for medicinal as for decorative use, and "every literate man or woman" would know what herbs could be distilled into what "simples" to cure what ailments. A grander home would have a stillroom, and a family its treasured recipes, for this purpose.

Sources:

Ian Dunlop, Palaces and Progresses of Elizabeth I. New York: Taplinger, 1970, p. 87

Ibid., p. 93 (Anne Boleyn first mistress)

Elizabeth Burton, The Pageant of Elizabethan England. New York: Charles Scribner's, 1958, pp. 230-231 (English gardens)

Ibid., p. 182 (knowledge of herbs and simples)

F.G. Emmison, Tudor Secretary: Sir William Petre at Court and Home. London and Chichester: Phillimore & Co., 1970, p. 34 (a stillroom)

The Tudor Year: April

Theme: birth


April 2, 1502: Death of Arthur, Prince of Wales
April 21, 1509: Death of King Henry VII
April 23, 1564: Birth of Shakespeare
April 24, 1509: Henry VIII proclaimed king

April, month of renewed life, includes the anniversaries of the births of Thomas Hobbes (April 5th, 1588), and Oliver Cromwell (April 25th, 1599), as well as Shakespeare. In 1555 Queen Mary, exulting in her crown, in her marriage to the Spanish king Philip II, and in her first pregnancy, spent April convinced she was about to give birth to an heir who would help guide her father's kingdom back to Catholicism. Nothing happened. Perhaps Mary was lucky. Childbirth was an unmedicated hazard, and women often died of it, in their teens -- which made women relatively scarce, sought after, and married off young. In rural areas perhaps one third of brides went to the altar pregnant. Where a girl was pregnant and not married, the midwife would ask the father's identity at the very crisis of delivery. If he could be discovered, he would be made to support the child; if the laboring mother kept the secret, the child's maintenance would fall on the parish. "The highest rate of conceptions were in the high summer," thus accounting for quite a few April births.

Sources:

David Starkey, Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne. New York: Harper Collins, 2001 (pp. 178-179).

A.L. Rowse, The Elizabethan Renaissance: The Life of the Society. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971 (pp. 170-180).

The Tudor year: March

Theme: law


photo source: UK Parliament


March 24, 1603: death of Queen Elizabeth
March 25: Lady Day

One of the absolutely "crucial fixed dates" of the Tudor calendar was Lady Day, March 25th. Named for the Virgin Mary, it was the Feast of the Annunciation, the start of a nine-month countdown to Christmas and therefore a fresh start to the familiar pageant of salvation. It was also the day to pay rents and sign contracts, and the day the secular year changed: Queen Elizabeth, dying the day before Lady Day, would be considered by her contempraries to have died on the last day of 1602. In London, Lady Day also marked the end of the first sitting of the Westminster Courts for the year -- official business had been conducted since January 13th -- and the beginning of a vacation which would last until Easter Term, when the courts next sat commencing on the fifteenth day after Easter.

Sources:

David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989, p. 20 ("crucial fixed date"), pp. 10-11 (secular year, Westminster calendar).

The Tudor Year: February

A snowfall at Hampton Court, February, 2009. Photo from Cooking the Books, "the blog of the Tudor kitchens cookery project at Hampton Court palace."

Theme: jewels






(from the National Portrait Gallery, London, via Tudor History dot org)


(photo from Fashion Monitor Toronto)


February 8, 1601 -- Earl of Essex's rebellion against Queen Elizabeth
February 12, 1554 -- Execution of Lady Jane Grey
February 13, 1542 -- Execution of Catherine Howard
February 17, 1587 -- Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots
February 18, 1516 -- Birth of Mary Tudor
February 25, 1601 -- Execution of the Earl of Essex


February's grim roster of executions, particularly of young women, reminds us that to be near royal power, or in the Earl of Essex's case to grasp at it, was to live and die (in Catheine Howard's words) "very dangerously." Depending on the time Easter fell, February was likely to be the month of Shrovetide, a "day of celebration and release before Lent," and then of Lent, which meant, for all Elizabethans, seven weeks of a purely fish diet. Valentine's Day was celebrated by the women of a household -- including servants -- choosing men's names by lot, and then receiving a gift from the man. The first two pictures above show a collection of affordable, middle-class Tudor jewelry, from the Cheapside Hoard discovered in London in 1912. More famous is the fabulous pearl La Peregrina, once owned by Queen Mary I and now belonging -- it was a Valentine's gift -- to Elizabeth Taylor.

Sources:
David Starkey, Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII. New York: Harper Collins, 2003, p. 264 (Shrovetide, "day of celebration").

F. G. Emmison, Tudor Secretary: Sir William Petre at Court and Home. London and Chichester: Phillimore & Co., 1970. First published by Longmans, Green, and Co., 1961 (pp. 142-143 (fish diet), and pp. 217-218 (Valentine's Day).

The Tudor Year: January

Theme: food, leisure




King Henry VIII jousting before his first queen, Catherine of Aragon, to celebrate the birth of their son Henry, Prince of Wales, on New Year's Day, 1511. This much desired infant, whose survival would have forestalled so much interesting history, died at six weeks of age. Picture from Tudor History.

January 1, 1511 -- birth of Henry, Prince of Wales
January 6, 1540 -- marriage of Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves
January 7, 1536 -- death of Catherine of Aragon
January 15, 1559 -- coronation of Queen Elizabeth
January 25, 1533 -- secret marriage of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn
January 29, 1536 -- burial of Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn's last miscarriage
January 29, 1547 -- death of Henry VIII

January was the month of holiday pageantry and New Year's gifts for the royal court, and of the search for winter work for the common man. Beef and pork slaughtered and salted at Martinmas (November 11th) would still provide whatever meat the countryman was eating now; staple foods for all were rough breads made of a mix of grains and sometimes including acorns, and the "white meats" of eggs, cheese, and butter. Indoor amusements for the gentry included music making and gambling at cards or dice. The lower classes were forbidden to gamble except at Christmastime. They were expected to practice archery instead, for the sake of military preparedness.

Notes

Fussell, George Edwin. The English Rural Labourer: His Home, Furniture, Clothing, and Food from Tudor to Victorian Times. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975, p. 5 (winter work). Originally published by the batchworth press, London, 1949.

Trevelyan, G.W., England under the Stuarts, quoted in Fussell, p. 27 (slaughtering of animals on Martinmas)

Emmison, F. G. Tudor Secretary: Sir William Petre at Court and Home. London and Chichester: Phillimore & Co., 1970, p. 134 (staple foods). First published by Longmans, Green, and Co., 1961.

Ibid., p. 214 (music)

Ibid., p. 218 (gambling, archery)

The Tudor Year: December

Theme: clothes



Queen Catherine Parr, sixth wife of King Henry VIII. (Formerly identified as Jane Seymour.) National Portrait Gallery, London. From Tudor History



Hans Holbein, Portrait of an Unknown Young Man at his Office Desk. 1541. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. From Olga's Gallery.



Albrecht Durer, Portrait of the Artist's Mother. 1514. Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin. From Olga's Gallery

December 8th -- birth of Mary, Queen of Scots (1542)
December 13th -- Francis Drake sails from Plymouth to attempt circumnavigation of the globe (1577)
December 16th -- birth of Catherine of Aragon (1485)

The Christmas holidays ushered in the "greatest concentration" of Days of Estate, those feast days of the Church which were also marked by elaborate ceremony at court. The royal family heard Mass, dined in public, and wore their most splendid clothes on these days. The sumptuous look of portraits of the time, showing upper class men and women in rich velvets, furs, brocades, and jewels, might make us forget the one comfort that almost all Tudors lacked -- cheap and easily washed cotton clothing, especially cotton underwear. Cotton came (if at all) from the fabulous east, from Egypt and India, and the labor required to make cotton into thread and then cloth rendered the finished product as expensve as fur. Wool was the fabric of necessity for ordinary people, and wool clothes were absolutely precious enough to be bequeathed in wills. The Western world would have to wait for a combination of factors to come together - among them the slave trade, the opening up of the American South to cotton planting, and Eli Whitney's cotton gin -- before really comfortable and hygienic clothing became a norm in life.

George Edwin Fussell, The English Rural Labourer: His Home, Furniture, Clothing, and Food from Tudor to Victorian Times. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975. Originally published by the Batchworth Press, London, 1949, pp. 14-16.
David Starkey, Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII. New York: Harper Collins, 2003, p. 233.

The Tudor Year: November

Theme: education

Elizabeth, daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, queen at last at the age of twenty-five.

November 17th is the 450th anniversary of the accession of Elizabeth Tudor to the throne, a day celebrated as "crownation day" during her reign and long after her death. While she was maddeningly indecisive with her councillors, the fascination of her personality combined with England's Renaissance flowering -- and military success against superpower Spain -- made the cult of Gloriana inescapable. If nothing else, her education staggers us. Languages, classic ancient literature, religion, penmanship, music, embroidery, and horsemanship were all expected excellencies in a Tudor lady. A gentleman like Robert Dudley added to these his skills in the joust, in tennis, and in archery. As estate owners, both would have understood things like farming, sheep-herding, and minding the books as naturally as we know how to drive a car.

November 14th: Marriage of Prince Arthur and Catherine of Aragon, 1501

November 17th: Death of Queen Mary; Accession of Queen Elizabeth, 1558

November 30th: Queen Elizabeth's "Golden Speech" to her last Parliament, 1601

Sources

David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989. See pp. 136-137.

Carrolly Erickson, The First Elizabeth. New York: Summit Books, 1983. See pp. 99-100.

Anne Somerset, Elizabeth I. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1991. See pp. 10-13, 115-116.