The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (27 page)

Working conditions are tough. Even in a booming industry, like the wool trade, the hours are long, the work hard, the food questionable or simply non-existent. Mass-production is just starting, with a handful of factories in existence. These have 200 looms operated by 200 men, accompanied by 200 women carding wool and another 200 spinning cloth. But at least such factories are relatively safe. Consider what it is like to work in an Elizabethan coal mine, another booming industry in the north of the country. For a start, the pay is not great: you will earn a maximum of 6d per day. Boys employed to pull the barrows along the underground shafts and to load the crane to lift the coal to the surface might earn as little as 1d per day for twelve hours underground in dark, coal-dust-laden conditions, likely to lead to a host of lung diseases. Nearly half the time the mines cannot be worked due to flooding, escaping gas (‘damp’) or over-production – and if you don’t
work, you don’t get paid. Over-production means there is too much coal on the surface not yet sold and transported away for it to be worthwhile extracting more. Flooding puts you at risk of drowning. In addition, as the miners have to urinate and defecate in the tunnels, diseases spread through the water in which they are standing and parasites burrow into their ankles and feet. Then there is the ‘damp’ – and remember, all the lighting is done with tallow candles. Imagine that you start to pull down a wall of coal and suddenly –
bang!
The explosion might not kill you outright: you may find yourself in the pitch-black tunnel with a broken leg and the water level rising. Every day’s work puts your life at risk – the dangers are unquantifiable – and you will have to accept that accidents happen and men die. When a sough or drainage tunnel is dug, to empty water from the bottom of a shaft, some poor miner must crawl up it and break though the rock into the water-filled shaft. This frequently results in the death of the miner in question as the water rushes through and smashes him back down the sough. Head injuries and broken limbs are common, leaving men helpless as they drown in the darkness. And the reward for those that do this, if they survive? Just £2 – that is how much it takes to tempt a miner to risk his life.
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It is much safer to go into service. This is very common, not least because there is a huge demand for cheap labour in the home. However, there is meaning in the phrase that ‘England is a servant’s prison’. Children as young as six can be forcibly apprenticed as servants in a yeoman’s household, receiving no wages, only board and lodging. Adult menservants will be lucky to earn as much as £2 per year and women just over half that. A good rate for female help is 8d per week (£1 14s 8d per year), which is what Maria, a maidservant in Compton, Berkshire, earns in 1597. At the same time, the male labourers in the same household are earning more than three times as much: 2s 4d per week.
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Two marks (£1 6s 8d) is the salary paid to each of the seven maidservants working at Thorndon Hall, Essex, in 1593; they are paid every three months.
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Sometimes servants are paid even less frequently: live-in servants can go a whole year without salary. In 1583, Joan Jennings makes a claim for payment of her wages at the rate of £1 6s 8d, which have not been paid for two years.
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Although servants might be spoken to as social equals by their employer and his family, for the sake of Christian brotherhood or simple companionship, normally they are seen as inferiors, ordered around by their masters and his family.
Young women also often have to put up with the unwanted sexual attention of their masters; it seems to be accepted that a master of a household will normally have sex with his female servants. In 1599 the mayor’s court in Norwich declares that eighteen-year-old Katherine Vardine should be discharged from her service because her master has syphilis and therefore she is likely to contract the disease too.
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To be a young woman in service is thus a double predicament. To refuse your master is likely to result in dismissal; but to give in is to risk disease and pregnancy, as well as dismissal when the pregnancy is discovered. Finally, should you kill your master, then the crime is one of petty treason. Men are simply hanged, as they would be for any murder. Women are burnt at the stake.

Manners and Politeness

Numerous books on how to behave are published in the sixteenth century. One such volume is
The boke of Nurture or Schoole of good manners
, compiled by Hugh Rhodes and published in 1577. Aimed at ‘men servants and children’, it delivers advice on how to behave in a gentleman’s house. As smaller houses ape the manners of their social superiors, Rhodes’s advice should stand you in good stead wherever you go:

General

• Take off your cap when spoken to by a social superior
  
• Don’t look away from someone when speaking to him
  
• Don’t tell secrets to strangers
  
• Don’t correct the faults in others that you commit yourself
  
• Rebuke men only when alone with them
  
• It is better to beat a proud man than to rebuke him
  
• Don’t boast
  
• In the company of a superior, speak only when you are spoken to
  
• Don’t meddle in other men’s affairs
  
• Don’t laugh at your own jokes
  
• Knock at the door of a house before entering
  
• Be courteous to strangers but don’t trust people you don’t know
  

At table

• Wash your hands before you eat
  
• If you are sharing a dish with someone else, don’t crumble your bread into it
  
• If you eat with a social superior, let him start on the food first
  
• Don’t belch in another man’s face
  
• Don’t slurp your soup
  
• When you have finished your soup, wipe the bowl clean and set it down ready for use again
  
• Eat and drink quietly
  
• Don’t scratch your head at the dinner table or put your finger in your mouth, or break wind
  
• Don’t blow your nose on a napkin, but on your handkerchief
  
• Keep your knife bright
  
• Don’t stretch your arms at the table or lean across it
  
• Don’t spit across the table
  
• Don’t blow crumbs or spit on the floor near you
  
• Wipe your mouth after you have drunk from a cup
  
• Don’t dip your meat in the salt cellar
  
• Don’t gnaw bones with your teeth
  
• Don’t throw bones under the table
  
• Eat only small morsels of meat
  
• Don’t cram food into your mouth
  
• Don’t blow on your food in case you have bad breath
  
• Don’t pare your nails or play with the table cloth during the meal
  
• Don’t pick your teeth with a knife, but use a small stick
  
• Don’t share food with someone else if you have putrefied teeth
  
• When you get up from the table, say to your companions, ‘Much good do it ye’ and bow to your master
  
• If you have to spit or blow your nose, don’t leave it lying on the ground, but tread it out of sight
  

What Hugh Rhodes doesn’t tell you is how to greet people. This is a huge omission, for there is no surer way of getting off on the wrong foot than to begin a relationship with an inappropriate salutation. If you know someone well, just using their name is sufficient greeting – as you probably know from Shakespeare’s plays. For others, and those who are simply acquaintances, the usual greetings include ‘God save you, Sir/Madam’ and ‘Sir, God give you a good and long life’. On greeting someone in the morning, you might say, ‘Good
morrow, Mister/Mistress …’ or ‘God give you good morrow’. Late in the day you might prefer, ‘God give you good evening’ or God give you good night’, and at the end of the night, ‘Good rest’. On taking your leave of someone you might add, ‘God save and prosper you, Sir’.
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As you can see, manners remain more or less consistent across time. There are only slight differences. Nevertheless some might surprise you. For instance, it is customary to take your hat off when someone urinates or defecates in your company. Normally men may keep their hats on at all times except in church; but you may be amused to see a lord’s servants all take their caps off if their master’s horse starts to urinate in the street.
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When inviting a man out to a dinner or a reception you need also to invite his wife – ‘for in England it is not customary to invite a man without his wife’, writes Thomas Platter, who is clearly bemused by this English quirk. Platter is also surprised by the ways people greet each other. Gentlemen, he says, ‘greet each other with a bared head and a bow … The women, however, are greeted with a kiss, as in France.’ Samuel Kiechel, visiting England in 158`, notes that if a man is welcomed at the door by a woman, even if she is the wife or daughter of the master of the house, ‘he has the right to take her by the arm to kiss her, which is the custom of the country, and if anyone does not do so it is regarded … as … ill breeding on his part’. Alessandro Magno also comments on kissing women as a way of greeting: ‘if a stranger enters a house and does not first of all kiss the mistress on the lips, they think him badly brought up’.
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Shakespeare’s
Othello
refers to the same custom. On greeting Emilia, Cassio says to her husband, ‘Let it not gall your patience, good Iago, that I extend my manners; ’tis my breeding that gives me this bold show of courtesy’ as he kisses her.

Now you see why Magno writes of Londoners in 1562, ‘they kiss a lot’. You might have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it may be a delightful moment passed on the doorstep. On the other, you have to wonder if kissing strangers on the lips is a wise thing to do in a disease-ridden city – especially when in the following year no fewer than 17,404 people die of the plague.

6

What to Wear

The word ‘fashionable’ is synonymous with being up to date. Dressing fashionably says something about you: that you know what is going on. It is the same in Elizabethan England – in fact, even more so. Fashions change just as fast as in the modern world, but the changes are more significant than on the catwalks of modern cities. In a society dominated by strict hierarchies, everyone is expected to dress according to their rank; the way you look is a statement of how much respect you deserve as a person. Only if you dress like a gentleman will you be accorded that status. Unless you dress like a lady, you will not be treated like one. Nor can you get by just wearing the smart clothes of ten years ago (at least, not without modifying them); ladies’ clothes that were fashionable a decade ago have been passed down to the maidservants. Courtiers wear new fashions only for a short while: as soon as these become fashionable outside court circles they begin to look for something different. As the writer and traveller Fynes Moryson puts it, ‘whosoever wears the old, men look upon him as a picture in an arras [tapestry]’.
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In the sixteenth century, what you wear reveals what you are.

Dressing appropriately is not as straightforward as simply being smart or elegant. If a man is wearing a heavy gold chain around his neck, then clearly he is someone of importance – but what do the colours of his clothes mean? And what should you make of the designs of his wife’s dress? If a lady’s sleeve is patterned with a snake and a heart, what does that mean? Is the pelican significant? If she is revealing a large amount of cleavage, what does that say about her?

It is probably a good idea to begin with aspects of sexual and social propriety. In Elizabethan England you will only find small codpieces. Large ones, stuffed with wool and looking like an erect male member, are out of date. They used to be popular in the reign of the
six-times-married Henry VIII, but they are not paraded about at the court of the Virgin Queen. Garments with overblown shoulders that reflect Henry’s style to accentuate his manliness have also disappeared. It would be most out of place for a man to flaunt his powerful upper body in the face of the queen. Simply by being a woman, Elizabeth alters men’s fashion. It is as if a pin has pricked those massive, dominating male shoulders and they have deflated, shrinking to a level where men can be men and not muscular ogres.

As regards female propriety, ladies
never
reveal their bare arms or legs in public. A washerwoman might bare her legs when standing in a tub of lye, trampling clothes; but such bare-legged women are at the very bottom of society. Showing a great deal of cleavage, however, is perfectly acceptable as long as you are not married. It does not matter how old you are; at the age of sixty-four the queen herself still puts her bosom on display. Paul Hentzner, a German lawyer, sees her in 1598 and remarks on ‘her bosom uncovered, as all the English ladies have it, until they marry’.
²
The French ambassador, André Hurault, sees her the previous year and cannot help but look at her breasts. He meets her on three occasions and each time he describes her clothes, paying particular attention to her bosom. On the second occasion he notes that she is wearing a gown that reveals her skin as far as her navel, displaying not just the cleavage, but the whole breast. The third time he notices that her skin is very wrinkled around the upper part of her breast, but lower down it is very white.
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It is probably safe to assume that, as long as you are not showing your bare arms or ankles, you will not run into any trouble – although too much breast will clearly attract the close attention of the French ambassador.

What you may and may not wear if you are lower in the social pecking order is not entirely a matter of choice. Just as in the medieval period, laws dictate which materials cannot be worn by people of lower ranks. Elizabeth issues a proclamation in 1559 that the sumptuary laws of 1533 and 1554 are still to be obeyed. The regulations of 1533 declare that you are not allowed to wear the following materials unless you are a peer of the realm: cloth of gold or silver; tinsel (silk mixed with gold or silver thread); satin mixed with gold or silver thread; or sable (fur). You have to be a lord, the child of an earl, a marquess or a Knight of the Garter in order to wear the following: woollen cloth made abroad, red or blue velvet, black furs of genet and lynx. Only
if you are a lord, a lord’s son, a knight or have an income of £200 per year may you wear velvet gowns, velvet coats, leopard furs, embroidered clothes, and cloth pricked with gold, silver or silk. Last, unless you have an income of £100 per year, you are not allowed to wear taffeta, satin, damask, outer garments containing silk, velvet garments (except jackets and doublets) or fur except from animals that live wild in England.
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The law of 1554 forbids you from wearing silk in any accessories you might carry unless you have an income of £20 per year.