The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (25 page)

Identity and Forms of Address

If you are visiting the sixteenth century you are not going to be greeting many close relatives, so formal modes of address are important. You can refer to a common man – called, say, Smith – as ‘Goodman
Smith’ or ‘my goodman’; don’t use ‘Sirrah’ unless you yourself are particularly superior and want to remind him of his lowliness. The goodman’s wife you might call ‘Goodwife Smith’ or ‘my goodwoman’. You may hear her neighbours call her ‘Goody Smith’, but this is only for those who know her well. Likewise you shouldn’t call her ‘Madam’ or ‘Mrs’ or anything else reflecting a status she does not enjoy. ‘Widow Smith’ is self-explanatory. When it comes to more socially elevated persons, forms of address get a little more complicated. A gentleman who is neither a lord nor a knight should be called ‘Mister’. If he is knighted, he should always be addressed in speech by his Christian name, ‘Sir Francis’. The word ‘Esquire’ is a much lower acknowledgement of official status, but is principally used for men who have the right to bear a coat of arms (i.e. they are descended in the male line from a knight) and, in towns, for those who serve as magistrates. Do not say ‘Squire Brown’, however, just ‘Mr Brown’. The female equivalent of ‘Mr’ is ‘Mistress’ – abbreviated to ‘M
^trs
or ‘Mrs’ – hence you will find young girls and unmarried ladies described as ‘Mrs’ (the term ‘Miss’ for unmarried ladies will not come into use until the next century). When speaking
to
a ‘Mistress Johnson’, rather than
about
her, you should generally call her ‘Madam’. Note that ‘Madam’ is only used when directly addressing a woman who is socially equal or superior to you. ‘My lady’ and ‘your ladyship’ are less specific, but are generally reserved only for the nobility and the upper levels of the gentry. Physicians are not called ‘Doctor’ unless they have a doctorate in medicine from a university: most gentlemen physicians, like gentlemen surgeons, are simply addressed as ‘Mister’. Otherwise men referred to as ‘Dr’ are so called because they have a doctorate in law or theology. You may still call clergymen ‘Father’, and in the first half of the reign it is still customary to address the rector or vicar in the same way as you would a knight: ‘Sir Richard’, ‘Sir Peter’, and so on.
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As for the names themselves, more than half the men you meet will be called John, William or Thomas. Half the women will be Mary, Elizabeth, Agnes, Joan or Margaret. Most of the common Christian names are ones with which you are already familiar, but don’t be surprised if you meet women called ‘Urith’, ‘Charity’, ‘Patience’, ‘Purity’ and ‘Lettice’; women born at Whitsun may well be called ‘Pentecost’. Some women are given names later associated with men, such as ‘Julian’, ‘Timothy’ and ‘Richord’. It is very rare indeed to find anyone with a middle name. Having said that, in Cornwall there is a
variation on the Welsh system of naming boys after the father’s line (e.g. Rhys ap Gruffydd ap Llywelyn …), which gives the appearance of a middle name; in Cornwall, the ‘ap’ is dropped and the father’s name and place appended, ‘John son of Thomas of Pendaris’ becomes ‘John Thomas Pendaris’. While surnames are ubiquitous, a man’s family name can be exchangeable with his occupation or abode, so that a tanner called John Beard might also be called John Tanner. This is one reason why there are so many people with an alias or two – written as ‘John Tanner alias Neville alias Westcott’. Another reason for an alias is to record the fact that a family member was sired out of wedlock. If an unmarried woman called Jones is made pregnant by a gentleman called Raleigh, her offspring may well be baptised as ‘John Jones alias Raleigh’, especially if the gentleman acknowledges the child.

Time

Walking through the fields of a country estate you may well hear the bell of the manor-house chapel ring the hours for the workers. For many people, this is the only formal regulation of time that they know. In towns, the time is set by the church bells ringing; if there is more than one church, one sets the time for the others. Hence you will sometimes find people in towns referring to ‘hours of the bell’ instead of ‘hours of the clock’. But this informality masks an important change: in the Elizabethan age time has become standardised. The medieval system of dividing the daylight and night time into twelve equal sections – so that an hour of daylight in summer is twice as long as in winter – is a thing of the past. People now count a day like we do: twelve hours each of sixty minutes from midnight and from noon. Townsmen listen out for the bell that indicates the hour when the markets open or close, when the curfew is rung for all travellers to be indoors or when the town gates are shut. Those in rural parishes listen for the ringing of the church bell when they need to attend a service or a session of the manorial court. Those clocks that have faces normally have only one hand, pointing to the hour; if you need to count minutes, you will use an hourglass, not a clock. Few people do so, however, except mariners, alchemists, astrologers, natural philosophers and the clergy. Why the clergy, you
ask? A good clergyman will expect to preach for two or even three hours at a time.

Announced by bells, time is therefore a very public thing in Elizabeth’s reign. Only the gentry have ‘small clocks for a chamber to wake a man out of his sleep’. A ‘clock with a dial’ is likely to cost you £5 in the 1580s.
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Even fewer people have watches like Elizabeth’s diamond-encrusted one, worn on the end of a silver chain. When away from home, most people will either estimate the time in the old style – by the passage of the sun across the sky – or use a ring dial. This is a sundial in the form of a brass ring which you can wear on your finger. When you want to tell the time, you adjust it to the correct date (some of them have sliding bands to do this) and check the sunlight penetrating a hole in the top of the ring against the scale engraved inside it. The most elaborate time-telling rings also have a calendar, a table of Christian feasts and the latitudes of major European cities so that they can be used abroad. If you want one of these sophisticated time pieces, enquire at Humphrey Cole’s shop in London, where the best examples are made.
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‘A-mornings I rise ordinarily at seven o’clock,’ writes Robert Laneham in 1575. ‘Then ready, I go into chapel. Soon after eight, I get me commonly into my lord’s chamber … There at the cupboard, after I have eaten the manchet [an allowance of bread] … I drink me up a good bowl of ale …’
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His start to the day is typical. Claudius Hollyband expects his pupils to be with him at school at about eight; his dialogue books have a household servant berating her young master for still being in bed at seven. Hugh Rhodes urges his young charges to be up ‘at six o’clock, without delay’. For craftsmen and labourers the working day starts before 5 a.m. from mid-March until mid-September, as laid out in a statute of Henry VIII; they are expected not to take more than half an hour for breakfast (at about 7 a.m.) and an hour and a half for dinner, and to go on working until between 7 and 8 p.m. From mid-September to mid-March labourers are expected to be working from dawn until dusk.
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If it were not for Sundays and religious feast days – about twenty-seven holy days or ‘holidays’ survive the Reformation – there would be little respite from toil.

Most Elizabethans tell the date in two ways: the year of the reign and the year since Christ’s birth, Anno Domini. The former is calculated from 17 November 1558, so that ‘1 January 1560’ is written as 1 January in the second year of the reign, or ‘2 Reginae Elizabethae’.
The latter is measured not from New Year’s Day but from Lady Day, 25 March each year, so ‘1 January 1560’ is actually in 1561 by modern calculations. Awkwardly, the change of the year on 25 March is not universally accepted. In France the various dioceses use different dates: some use 25 March, but others Christmas or Easter. To put an end to this confusion, in 1564 the king of France issues the edict of Rousillon declaring that henceforth the year will always begin on 1 January. Venice, the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, Prussia, Denmark and Sweden have already shifted to this system by 1560; the Low Countries follow suit in the 1570s and 1580s; and Scotland also does so in 1600. This is most confusing for those living in Berwick, on the English–Scottish border: between 1 January and 25 March each year, the Scottish date is one year greater than the English one.

An even bigger complication for overseas travellers arises in 1582, when the whole of Catholic Europe shifts from the Julian to the Gregorian Calendar. Astronomers have long understood that the Julian Calendar of 365.25 days is about 10.75 minutes too long: by using it one gains a day every 134 years. Reckoning from Christ’s birth, this means that by the late sixteenth century all the religious feasts are ten days out. When the Gregorian Calendar is introduced in France, Spain and Italy, Thursday 4 October 1582 is followed by Friday 15 October. The English system is thus ten days adrift from Europe, as well as starting the year on a different day. Also remember that certain dates are still measured by religious festivals, so you might find someone telling you the date as ‘the eve of the feast of the Purification of the Virgin’. Given the disparities in calendars, this falls on different days in England and Catholic Europe. Things get really complicated when the feast in question is a moveable one, like Whitsun or Easter. Henry Machyn marks his birthday as falling on the Wednesday after Whitsun, so he celebrates it on a different date each year. Of course it would be a totally different day again if he were to go abroad. It is hardly surprising that by the time he is in his fifties he has lost track of how old he is, miscalculating his own age in his ‘cronacle’.
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Units of Measurement

From early times, different parts of the country have had different measurements of distance, area, volume, liquid and weight. From
the thirteenth century there are attempts to regularise such basic units as the inch and the foot; but these are met with resistance. You may think it extraordinary that a monarch can stop the majority of the nation believing in Purgatory and transubstantiation and yet cannot persuade people to use a standard system of weights and measures – but there you are. The good news is that some progress is being made. A statute of 1496 establishes an English standard of eight gallons of wheat to a bushel; every gallon is to contain eight pounds of wheat; and every pound twelve ounces of Troy weight; every ounce twenty sterlings, and every sterling ‘thirty-two corns of wheat from the middle of the ear of the wheat’. This becomes the standard in most places except Devon and Cornwall. In the latter county there are different measures according to whether you are a stranger or an inhabitant, and whether you are buying from the waterside or at a land market. This complicated system states that if you are buying directly from a boat, then there are
sixteen
gallons to the bushel (not eight), but if you are not local, then the quantity varies between eighteen and twenty-four (depending on the port). However, if you are buying at an inland market, then it is eighteen to twenty-four gallons per bushel for all, with the least quantity in the east of the county and greatest in the west.
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Devon is not quite as awkward: there are ten gallons to the bushel there, regardless of whether you are buying from the waterside or not. Both counties divide the pound into eighteen ounces (not sixteen or twelve) and reckon 120 pounds to the hundredweight. At least cloth measures have become standardised – forty-five inches to the ell, twenty nails to the ell, so each nail of cloth is 2¼ inches.

Some measurements are easier to regularise than others. Units that are used by travellers as well as locals tend to be standardised before Elizabeth’s reign. Take the mile: all sorts of customary miles used to be employed up and down the country. But over the last hundred years or so the advantages of a standard mile have come to be recognised. The English mile of 1,760 yards becomes ubiquitous and is enforced by a royal proclamation in 1592. However, there is no unanimity on the unit of measurement for land under tillage. The statute acre was established way back in the thirteenth century as a measure of four perches by forty perches. All well and good – as long your standard perch is accepted as 5½ yards (16½ feet). In Hampshire the customary perch is five yards long, in Devon six
yards, in Cumberland seven yards and in Lancashire it is 8½.
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In this way your customary acre turns out to be anything from 4,000 to 11,560 square yards – somewhat larger than the statute acre of 4,840 yards. Perhaps you will not be surprised to hear that the most extreme variation is to be found in Cornwall. A Cornish acre is not related to tillage, but to feudal service: it is a quarter of a knight’s fee, and comprises nine farthinglands; with each farthingland being about thirty statute acres, so the whole ‘acre’ measures about 270 statute acres.
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Shopping

The word ‘shop’ means ‘workshop’ as well as a place to buy things. In small towns and villages, it mostly relates to a workplace. In large cities, you will find the word being used for any permanent retail premises which are not part of the marketplace, just as in the modern world. Thus for locks you go to a locksmith’s ‘shop’, for shoes to a cobbler’s ‘shop’ and so on. In London, if you go shopping in the newly built Royal Exchange, you will find all the units being described as ‘shops’, whether they are run by fabric merchants or goldsmiths.
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Stepping outside, you might go to a cookshop for something to eat. Buying food in most towns, however, is something you will do at a market.

Every town has at least one market, open at least one day per week and serving the immediate needs of the local community. Some towns have several markets in several places, each one selling different commodities such as poultry, milk and cheese. Unless you are a completely self-sufficient farmer, you will go into town on market day to buy eggs, butter, cheese, meat and fish; you will also come for the gossip, the news and to meet friends. You might also buy cloth; small items of metalwork such as candleholders, nails, knives and other tools; and leather items such as purses, pouches, bags and belts. Livestock is also traded here: farmers bring their cows, sheep and pigs on the hoof to sell to the slaughtermen and butchers, as well as chickens in cages and dead coneys. Cooked meat, pasties and pies – the equivalent of modern ‘fast food’ – are available to those who have come in from the country to do their shopping, as well as copious amounts of ale. Any announcements will be made by the
town crier in the market place: royal proclamations, for example, or the decisions of the mayor and corporation of the town. Normally the market closes before dusk, to avoid pilfering from stalls when the light grows dim.