Ruff and ready!
The Tudors thought hot baths caused disease, used soot to clean their teeth — and Henry VIII changed his socks less often than his wives
HISTORY HOW TO BE A TUDOR: A DAWN-TO-DUSK GUIDE TO EVERYDAY LIFE by Ruth Goodman (Viking £20)
The great thing about the Tudors is that they were Welsh in origin. Shakespeare’s harry Monmouth was King henry V. The second great thing is how beautiful the British Isles must have been in those days — a place of woods, forest sand unpolluted rivers with banks of fabulous wild flowers.
In 1485, when henry Tudor ‘seized the throne’ (as Ruth Goodman puts it — actually he was the victor over the Plantagenet Richard III at Bosworth), the population of england and Wales was 2.5 million. By the beginning of the Stuart reign, in 1603, it was still no more than four million.
What are we today? A verminous 64 million, cheerfully heading f or 70 million. Total insanity.
Tudor London was a pleasant market town of 50,000 souls.
Nevertheless, would it be a good idea to go back in time? Ruth Goodman has done her best to do so.
For some eccentric reason she has chosen to wear Tudor- era knickers, cook Tudor meals, skin rabbits and dance jigs. She has eschewed soap — as t he Tudors had no ‘ grease - dissolving liquids’ save for lye, which is dangerously caustic.
Goodman is a dab hand at folding a ruff. So it is no wonder she was ‘ historical adviser’ to the BBC TV series Wolf hall.
She must be hilary Mantel’s most besotted fan, an equivalent of those Sherlock holmes addicts who sleep in their deerstalkers.
But it was a harsh era to exist in, with the medieval world only slowly and painfully becoming more recognisably modern and industrial.
WITh no alarm clocks, people got up with the sun — 4am in the summer months. Ninety per cent of the populace lived in rural areas, in singleroom dwellings.
Only the rich could afford glass in the windows — everyone else had cloth shutters that let in the damp.
Beds were curtained off, but there was not much privacy. Parents, children and servants would sleep in the same room. Mattresses were sacks of straw on earthen floors. Chimneys only came in later in the century, so food was cooked on open hearths.
The main meal of the day was at 10am, the meat roasted over wood or peat fires.
People ate f rom communal basins, not personal plates, and there was no cutlery except the odd dagger. Pewter platters appeared in wealthy homes from about 1585.
Analysis of Tudor skeletons has disclosed endemic malnutrition, rickets, scurvy and anaemia. I presume that during Goodman’s conscientious and authentic experiments she drew the line at vitamin deficiency and allowing her teeth to drop out. Thank goodness there is no chapter on the plague.
With most people l i ving in the countryside, agriculture dominated the economy.
Sheep- shearing was done by hand with clippers, the fleeces cleaned and then spun by the womenfolk who also, poor things, had to prepare meals, bake bread, brew ale, make butter and milk the cows, before an evening of s e wi n g and weaving. The manufacture of clothing from the wool was big business — the gowns and doublets were so valuable they were frequently mentioned in wills and bequeathed to family, servants or friends, rather than dumped outside Oxfam in plastic bags.
Goodman is hot on the Tudor wardrobe — the linen or canvas shirts, smocks, breeches, hose, ruffs and cuffs.
‘Clean underwear was a major weapon in most people’s arsenal against the pong,’ she writes with authority. The poor changed their shirts once a week, their socks every two months.
Will the fashion for the codpiece, ‘padded or otherwise exaggerated’, ever come back? Big bulges were ‘associated with power and lordship’, and henry VIII would have got himself stuck in a revolving door, if they had existed back then.
According to the Sumptuary Act of 1562: ‘Clothing was supposed to visually place a man within society.’ (Did they also shamelessly split infinitives in Tudor times?) Officials wore floppy black caps, which were doffed from the back of the head, rather than the side or front — see Mark Rylance’s Cromwell demonstrate this over and over.
Ruffs were made from starched l i nen. They restricted head motion, adding ‘a certain elegance to mov e men t , requiring a turn of the whole torso. . . It enforces a mannered, considered style of behaviour’, virtually compelling a person to keep saying egad, f orsooth and prithee.
Once people had risen from their flea-ridden beds, they sluiced themselves with cold water or leapt in to rivers.
hot water was avoided, as it was believed it opened the pores and let in disease. The teeth and gums were cleaned with soot, rubbed around with a finger.
Before shampoo came along, frequent combing of the hair teased out lice and nits. Barbers not only cut hair, they pulled teeth and performed ‘ minor surgery’ (unspecified by Goodman).
Lavender, rosemary and rose oil were used as perfumes, obtainable from the apothecary, who also mixed paint and dabbled in rudimentary pills and medical potions.
ReADING and writing were regarded as separate skills, and the clergy taught the rotelearning of prayers. Few schools had resident teachers, and anyway, education wasn’t to be encouraged as nobody wanted the poor to start thinking too much.
By 1558, however, 20 per cent of men and 5 per cent of women were literate, figures that no doubt compare favourably with today’s. Pens were trimmed from goose quills and ink was made from gum arabic and urine.
In Tudor Britain, folk knew their place and corporal punishment was severe. ‘Obedience to authority was held to be a religious duty. . . a necessary ingredient for peace and prosperity,’ Goodman writes.
Interestingly, illegitimacy was considered a greater sin than homosexuality because the obligations to bastard children upset inheritance laws and created deep resentment, as in numerous Shakespearean plots.
Leisure hours were spent watching bull and bear baiting, cock fighting, archery contests, skittles and dancing. Scrutinising damsels bouncing about and showing their knees was popular, as it would be in any time or place.
everyone was in bed by nightfall, without even the shipping forecast to listen to.
A cure for insomnia was to tie herrings to the soles of the feet. I must try that, when, forsooth and egad, I next take off my ruff and hang up my unfeasibly immense and comical codpiece.