(Cover image – © New York Daily News)
You regain consciousness in the midst of a raging sound coming from your bedside table. It’s your wonderfully smart smartphone waking you up thanks to the equally wonderful alarm it’s been provided with. Accepting your fate, you open your eyes and welcome another Monday full of commodities you find yourself unable to appreciate.
You take your car or bike, or take a bus or a train or even an electric scooter to get to your job and, hopefully, you’ll only work 8 hours before returning home or doing some groceries shopping or whatever the case may be. At night you’ll probably watch some movie over on Netflix while texting to that family member or friend that’s kilometers away.
But that nerdy side of you, the one that has you glued to the screen reading this blog, might have wondered at some point how daily life looked like for non-royals back in the fascinating Tudor era. And I’m here precisely to satisfy that healthy curiosity.
Well, for starters, you might be aware of the absence of any electronic devices to wake people up back then. Vast majority of the population gathered themselves in small villages close to a chapel, with lots of agricultural spaces in between one town and the next. Life happened at farms, in nature, far from the noise and buzzy life of court. Cockerels were the way to go to welcome ourselves once more into reality, the day starting at any point between 4 in the morning during summer to way past 7 during the darker colder months.
One of the main characteristics of Tudor homes was that there were no glass or curtains on the windows and it usually had only one room where every member of the family unit slept. If you managed to get your hands on a bed curtain, you were pretty much a lucky person, because that would’ve given you a chance to have a bit more privacy. The beds could be made with ropes tied across an open frame from which the expression “sleep tight”, used even to this day, could’ve come from. But curtains or not, the first thing you’d do is say your prayers for the day, as a good old Christian fellow.
You may think about brushing your teeth or having a shower but while washing hands and face regularly was accepted and common, body washes were considered to be bad for the body. You’d rinse your teeth with water and then you’d use a toothprick to eliminate food residues after meals. They had something to eat before leaving for their jobs, which wasn’t really a thing amongst people with money and resources that had dinner around 11 until later Elizabethan times.
Clothing was a tricky affair regulated by law. Yes, you’ve read right. Law dictated what you couldn't or must wear. Servants, farmers, labourers and their spouses could spend a maximum of two shillings per yard on clothing. Everything regarding color, cloth, cut and style showed the social level of the person wearing it so it was really important to dress accordingly.
What about the toilet? Well, it could be either a hole on the ground or a piece of wood over a bowl in which you sat and did your business, but with no privacy whatsoever.
And working life? People worked 6 days a week, having public holidays and Holy Celebration days to rest (which were spent dancing, practicing archery, playing sports, going to the theater or playing cards). They were really poor and they lived in poor conditions too. They depended mostly on their land and harvest and if one year went south, they often threw themselves towards stealing as a last resort to survive.
The houses at the villages and cities were all stuck to one another making it hard to let light in on the streets, which favoured robberies and other crimes. Tudor ruling brought somewhat of a peaceful era to England, and that made cities grow with both English and immigrants, which caused some rifts with locals saying people from abroad came to steal their clients from them and rob them of their jobs (sounds familiar? We never learn, indeed).
Poor people (majority of the population) found themselves traveling to the big cities to get a job, but it could be dangerous at times. First time caught unemployed, you’d be whipped. Second, an ear cut off. By the third you risked being considered a vagabond and sent to be executed. Best case scenario, you’d get some charitable donation or go to the church to get food (at least until 1536-1540, when Henry VIII destroyed and closed down lots of monasteries and churches in his quest against Papist Rome). So life was close to being a nightmare to normal people, I may daresay, like you and me. In 1563 new measures to aid the poor were put in motion differentiating three types of people in need: those who were unable to work (were given help with food and clothes), those who could work but wouldn’t do it (they were punished and referred to as lazy) and those who were too young or old or ill to do so (almshouses, hospitals, orphanages).
If your family had the means to do so you could go and learn a craft. To do this, your parents had to pay, which made it difficult for poorer children to access an education. It was also mostly reserved to masculine population, girls rarely ever could do an apprenticeship. You may also end up under an established craftsman's care if you were orphaned and the parish you were in could afford to send you out in a deal that could be now considered a rudimentary form of fostering. Apprenticeships tended to last around 7 years (it got stipulated as the bare minimum in the 1573 Statute of Artificers) and youngsters were completely dependent on their bosses. Masters were responsible for their physical necessities (food, bedding, clothing, etc) as well as their spiritual guidance, and that’s the reason why masters were usually asked to be married before taking any in apprenticeship.
What happened to the poor young people? They spent their teenage years working as servants in different households. Around 70% of the younger population worked as servants during the XVI century. Those who were less than 20 years old received next to nothing, and those above that age could gamble a bit more money, but nowhere near what a professional craftsman would get.
What were women doing while men were out working? They cleaned the house, milked the cows and filtered that milk in order to be drinkable. They cooked, attended the garden, baked bread, worked with wool, did the laundry and lots of other domestic activities. It doesn’t sound that far behind, right? Oh, well…
A fun fact you may not know is that they had takeout service just like we do now. The same mental battle between the Capricorn in you doubting whether or not to spend money on a cooked meal instead of cooking something when arriving home was fought too in Tudor times. Pre-cooked meals were available at meat shops and bakeries and they bought them on the way home from a long day at work, looking forward to supper.
And, finally, night would catch up with daily life; domestic animals would be set for the night, all the chores done and prayers said. If you were lucky enough not to be too tired, you could 'get lucky' as the modern term goes and have sexual intercourse with your spouse but it was a complicated matter: some believed women were not much less than succubus regardless of men being not propense to stray from the marital bed; others talked about sex as it was unholy and the cause of ill health while some approved of it. So really, it depends on where you stood but sex was crucial to validate any marriage and to sire offspring.
One way or another, another day had come to pass. And thus, years and centuries until today, when I found you reading this. Next time you are cuddling your partner in the privacy of your own room, or using a closed up toilet or watching a movie instead of playing cards by the fire, it might be a sensible thing to appreciate all of these appliances that some didn’t get to enjoy.
Would you have liked to have lived during the Tudor era?
Until next time!
- Have a ‘Tudor-fic’ week!
References:
How to be a Tudor. A dawn-to-dusk guide to everyday life, by Ruth Goodman
What was life like in Tudor Times (queenborough.kent.sch.uk)
The Tudors by Numbers: The Stories and Statistics Behind England’s Most Infamous Royal Dynasty, by Carol Ann Lloyd (expected publication date: August 30, 2023)
コメント