THE TUDORS
Religious persecution, rampant profiteering, astonishing opulence and widespread deprivation – the dramatic and bloody rule of the House of Tudor reverberated across the land, says Suzannah Lipscomb
The bloody Tudor age was characterised by religious intolerance, rebellion and opulence, says Suzannah Lipscomb
The Tudor era began in 1485 when Henry VII’s troops demolished Richard III on a battlefield near Bosworth and ended in 1603 when a wrinkled and imperious queen finally allowed herself to sleep. And although they died centuries ago, the Tudors – whether much-married monarch or unmarried Virgin queen – still impress themselves upon our imaginations today.
In part, this is because their age really mattered. The Tudor sovereigns oversaw far-reaching changes that affected the whole country. To marry Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII broke off ties with the Roman Catholic church and made himself the head of a new Church of England. The subsequent religious reforms may not all have been desired by Henry but some of them made him rich. In the dissolution of the monasteries (1536-1541), more than 800 religious houses were ‘dissolved’ and their lands expropriated by the Crown.
The largest rebellion of the period occured in 1536 and was a direct reaction by ordinary people who rejected Henry’s religious changes. His Catholic daughter, Mary I, later presided over the burning of nearly 300 Protestant heretics. Her Protestant half-sister, Elizabeth I, subsequently responded by persecuting Catholic priests. What you believed had become a matter of life and death.
NEW WORLDS
It was an age in which horizons changed. The glory of Sir Francis Drake’s voyage around the globe (1577-1580) almost compensated for the loss of England’s final scrap of land in France. It inspired hope that the Tudors could have their Calais in the ‘New World’. Explorers set out looking for lands to claim, and Elizabeth I commissioned those who successfully made it home to stake out territory in North America and establish a private company in ‘East India’, whose only principle was the pursuit of profit.
Meanwhile, poets, painters and playwrights took inspiration from ancient tyranny,
Renaissance technique and exotic tribulations to create some of the finest art that humans have ever produced, while around them, ordinary people suffered the fierce pangs of hunger, cold and deadly disease.
WEALTH AND WILDERNESS
Most of these ordinary people worked the land. The English countryside looked very different to today. Large open fields were divided into furlongs separated by soil paths and each furlong was sub-divided into strips of land, worked by tenants of the manor. From the sky – should anyone have been able to see – the fields would have been a patchwork of strips running in different directions, each growing different crops or lying fallow.
Only about 30% of England’s land was under the till. A quarter was wilderness. This was not only the great moors and heaths of Devon and Westmorland; in the 16th century, untamed wasteland and marshes stretched across the countryside. Forests and woodlands covered another 10%, and as much land was tilled as was given over to animals. There were twice as many sheep as people.
But things were changing. Forests were increasingly plundered for firewood, the dissolution of the monasteries – who had owned as much as a third of agricultural land – created a land market, and landlords were starting to enclose fields and commons. By 1600, many landlords had shifted to contractual tenure, in which rent could be revised upwards. These were known as ‘rack-rents’ – the tenants were stretched as far as could be. People bemoaned private profit being placed above public good.
SIMPLE LIVES
Most people lived in simple houses built on a couple of pairs of ‘cruck-frames’ or wooden arches. Around this timber frame, the walls were made of wattle-and-daub – that is, woven hazel branches slathered with a mixture of mud, dung, horsehair and straw. Over time, the timbers faded to silver and the walls took on an ochre shade; it was the Victorians who decided to render them black and white.
Basic houses, then, had two rooms on one earthen floor – a hall with a hearth and a chamber with a bed. In the Tudor age, central fires were gradually replaced by fireplaces on inner walls, meaning rooms could be built on the floors above. Glass windows were a luxury. They had few others. Robert Holland, a daylabourer of Hampton Poyle in Oxfordshire, died in 1568 and left behind a cow, a heifer, a sheep, three kettles, one little brass pot, four platters, a saucer, one bedstead, one coffer, a sack, two pairs of sheets, one bolster, and one twill cloth. The value of his estate amounted to 19 shillings, or about £162 in today’s terms.
People mostly ate pottage – a vegetable stew. Those with more money would vary this with ‘white meats’ (dairy products) and bread (the whiter, the more expensive). Only the very rich subsisted on a diet of daily meat.
The rich also tended to marry younger than the poor. Ordinary people married at a similar age to today – in their mid- to late-20s. Once married, women were, on average, pregnant every other year. There was no reliable contraception, and the risks of dying in childbirth were great. The risks for the child were even greater: a quarter of all children died in the first year of life, another quarter by the age of 10. But if you made it to 20, you might well live to a ripe old age – that’s if famine, plague or the noose didn’t get you first. • Tudor mega-mansions: Amazing ‘prodigy houses’ sprang up in the Tudor era – Suzannah Lipscomb reveals the best to visit at countryfile.com/article/10-tudor-mega-mansions-visit