The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (4 page)

You will see exactly how fast Stratford is changing if you return forty years later, in 1598, towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign. The church is still there, the roads have not changed, the Guild buildings and school have not been substantially altered – but more than half the town has been rebuilt. This is partly due to two catastrophic fires in 1594 and 1595, which destroy 120 houses, making about a quarter of the population homeless. There are now many more brick chimneys and consequently many more tall houses. In fact, brick is one of the keys to change. The affordable production of a durable and fireproof chimney material means that two- and three-storey houses can be built even in places where stone is scarce and masonry expensive. Walk back down Henley Street, across the market place and back into the High Street, and you’ll see that the whole skyline has changed. Almost all the houses on your right are now three storeys high, displaying much more elegance and symmetry in their timber construction, with more carved woodwork on the beams facing the street. Some of these houses have greased paper or cloth under a lattice in their windows to allow in a little light while keeping out draughts, but others now have glass in the street-facing chambers. Glass, which is very rare in town houses in 1558, becomes available to the reasonably well-off in the 1570s.
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Not all of the new buildings facing the street will have been constructed with glass windows in mind, for it is still difficult to get hold of in 1598; but most people with disposable income will try to obtain it – importing it in pre-constructed frames from Burgundy, Normandy or Flanders, if they cannot get hold of English glass. Nor will a householder necessarily equip his whole house with glass at once: he might install it in his hall and parlour and leave the other, less-important rooms unglazed. In 1558 a chimney is the prime status symbol to show off to the neighbours. In 1598 it is glazing.

A less desirable aspect of the changes being wrought in Stratford is the accommodation of the poor. You might think that barn conversions are a feature of the modern world, but a glimpse at the back yards of some properties will tell you otherwise. Quite a few old
barns are let out to paupers who have nowhere else to go. The population of Stratford in 1558 is about 1,500; by 1603 it has swelled to 2,500.
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And that latter figure probably does not include all the poor and vagrants in and around the town – one report in 1601 mentions that the corporation is struggling to cope with 700 paupers. Now you can see why the well-off are living ostentatiously in handsome, glazed houses: it separates them from the have-nots. You can see why William Shakespeare, the son of the glover, is so proud of having acquired New Place in 1597, with its brick, glazed windows and chimneys – a far cry from the smelly house where he spent his boyhood (and where his aged father still lives). And you can see why William’s wife, Anne, is pleased to be living in New Place rather than the two-room farmhouse in Shottery where she grew up. There the hall was open to the rafters, with an earth floor, as was the chamber that she shared with her seven siblings. True, at New Place she has to cope with her husband being away in London for long periods of time, but, in the sixteen years since her marriage in 1582, she has seen her living standards undergo an extraordinary transformation, partly due to having more money and partly due to the changes in what that money can buy.

What is true for Stratford and its inhabitants also applies to other urban settlements. In 1600 there are twenty-five cathedral cities and 641 market towns in England and Wales.
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The rebuilding they are all undergoing makes it impossible to compare them in size, for their populations are changing rapidly. London, for example, has a population of about 70,000 in 1558 and about 200,000 in 1603; it moves from being the sixth-largest city in Europe (after Naples, Venice, Paris, Antwerp and Lisbon) to being the third (after Naples, with 281,000 inhabitants, and Paris, with 220,000).
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Some other English towns are growing in similarly dramatic fashion. Plymouth, for example, has a population of 3,000–4,000 at the start of the reign and 8,000 at the end. Newcastle also doubles in size over the years 1530–1600. On the other hand, in some places the numbers are static: Exeter is home to about 8,000 people throughout the sixteenth century. A few towns are even shrinking in population, such as Salisbury and Colchester, both of which have 2,000 fewer souls in 1600 than in the mid-1520s. But the overall growth is noticeable from the fact that in the mid-1520s only ten towns have a population of more than 5,000; by 1600 this number has risen to twenty.
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Several points emerge from the above table. First, although Stratford-upon-Avon is not what you would call a large town, with just 2,500 inhabitants in 1600, only twenty towns in England are twice as populous. Thus we might say that Stratford is truly representative of the majority of towns in England and Wales. Second, only half of the twenty-two English cathedral cities are in the above list. The other eleven – Winchester, Carlisle, Durham, Ely, Lincoln, Hereford, Lichfield, Rochester, Chichester, Peterborough and Wells – all have fewer than 5,000 inhabitants, so you should not assume that a city is a populous place. Third, eleven of the twenty most-populous towns
are ports (twelve if we include York, which has a modest quay). In fact, the fastest-growing large towns – London, Newcastle and Plymouth – are all sea ports, reminding us that a world of opportunities is opening up to Elizabethans through the island’s long coastline and geographical position.
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Medieval people saw the sea as a barrier or frontier. Under the Tudor monarchs it comes to be recognised as one of the country’s greatest natural resources.

The most significant point implicit in the table of populous towns is more subtle. If you compare it with a similar table for medieval England you will see that it reveals a process of urbanisation. The towns on the above list are home to 336,000 people; the twenty largest towns in 1380 had fewer than half this number. In addition, more people live in the many small market towns than they did in previous centuries. Some of these have just 500 inhabitants living in a hundred houses clustered around one single main road or square. But dozens more are like Stratford, housing 2,000–3,000 people, with all the professional and administrative functions one associates with a proper town. In 1600 approximately 25 per cent of the population lives in a town, compared to about 12 per cent in 1380.
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This is an important development: if one in four people grows up in a town, then English culture is becoming increasingly urban. Society as a whole is less closely tied to the countryside. The self-reliant townsman, with a trade and the ambition to advance his status and living standards, is fast becoming the principal agent of social and cultural change. The system of villeinage – the old tradition of peasants being bonded individually and collectively to the lord of the manor, to be bought and sold along with the land – is hardly to be found anywhere.
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Like Stratford, many towns retain their medieval street layout. No fewer than 289 of them preserve their medieval walls.
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Almost all have long lines of timber-framed houses with gables overlooking the streets, interspersed among the medieval churches and old halls. Most have areas where houses with large gardens have something of the ‘urban farm’ appearance: Norwich is said to have so many trees that it may be described as either ‘a city in an orchard or an orchard in a city’.
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But what will strike you is the number of buildings under construction, their skeletal timber frames open to the elements or their stone fronts surrounded by scaffolding. The old friaries and monasteries are being turned into warehouses or demolished to make way for new housing. In the summer months an English town
resembles an enormous building site, as several dozen new houses have their foundations dug and men stripped to the waist haul dirt up in buckets on pulleys from cellars, or lift heavy oak timbers up to form the joists of a house. Watch them passing up long elm boards to their fellows on the upper floors, talking with the master carpenter, measuring and cutting the frames of the windows and the shutters, and filling the gaps between the timbers with wattle or brick. Everyone is moving into a town, it seems.

Towns are not just for the benefit of the people who live in them. They are also crossroads: places where country life and urban professions, services and administrations mix, and where agreements can be given legal force. A town like Stratford might have upwards of one hundred brewers, but that does not mean the whole town is full of heavy drinkers; rather it indicates that all those who come into town from the hinterland on market days don’t have to go thirsty. Similarly a town’s surgeons and physicians do not simply administer to urban needs, but travel out to the parishes in the surrounding countryside, serving a population that might be several times larger than that of the town itself.
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Look among the houses and shops of Stratford and you will see the full range of occupations that make up such a settlement: wheelwrights, carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, tinsmiths, tailors, shoe-makers, glovers, victuallers, butchers, brewers, maltsters, vintners, mercers, lawyers, scriveners, physicians, surgeons, apothecaries and drapers. Most towns like Stratford will have more than sixty recognised occupations; a large city like Norwich or Bristol may have considerably more than a hundred.

Before leaving Stratford, consider how the seasons affect the appearance of an Elizabethan town. The streets are not paved – very few towns are – so in April the showers create quagmires, especially at the crossroads where carts turn, churning up the mud. However much gravel is put down on the main approach roads, it is never enough to be of lasting benefit. In summer the mud dries to cakes of earth and then breaks up, so that the same carts and horses’ hooves now kick up dust. The streets are more crowded too, for people mostly travel in summer. The numbers of country dwellers coming to market are supplemented by merchants arriving from the coastal towns with fresh fish for sale. As the season dwindles to autumn, the roads become less busy. On some days the streets will be almost empty as people in the countryside head out into the fields to gather in the harvest, taking
baskets of food to sustain them on their long working days. Late autumn sees more rain, and cattle, pigs and sheep herded into town to be sold before the feast of Martinmas (11 November) when many will be slaughtered and salted for the oncoming season. Looking down the same streets in winter, with the chill air and the smell of wood smoke everywhere, you will see fewer people out and about. The average temperature is about two degrees Celsius colder than what you are used to, with especially cold snaps in the 1570s and 1590s.
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When snow falls, you wake to see the white blanket across the street – thinner on the edge, where less snow falls due to the overhanging eaves. Houses are decorated with evergreens around the doors. Long icicles hang down from their gutterless roofs, discouraging people from walking too closely to the walls. Carts leave wheel tracks, pressing the snow into slush and mud. Many people remain inside their houses, not even opening their shuttered, unglazed windows. The appearance of the whole town thus shifts with the seasons – to a much greater degree than a paved and glazed modern town, where most activities are conducted under cover.

The Countryside

Leaving Stratford-upon-Avon by the long stone bridge, you have a choice of two routes to London. One takes you via Banbury, the other via Oxford (turn right immediately on the far side of the bridge if you prefer the latter). The country here is flat and sparsely populated: the figure of sixty people per square mile given at the start of this chapter is hardly true of this corn-growing region. Parishes here have about thirty people per square mile, on average; but some are as sparse as seventeen.
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Rather than houses, it is the fields that will catch your attention: massive areas of hundreds of acres, or even a thousand, each one divided into smaller units called furlongs. A furlong is divided in turn into between four and a dozen strips of land, each strip being allotted to a tenant of the manor. Between each furlong there is a narrow path of untilled soil, called a baulk, by which tenants might access their strips with a cart. The contemporary word for this sort of farmland is ‘champaign country’ (from the French
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, meaning field). The countryside is therefore a giant patchwork of furlongs, each characterised by the direction of the
strips and the type of crop that is growing. Some tenants plant wheat on a few of their strips and hardier crops – such as rye, vetches or barley – on the others. Some rotate the crops they plant: barley this year, wheat the next. Often you will see fields left fallow, or areas left to be grazed by pigs and cattle. Here and there, on the edges of the great fields, you will see small enclosures for livestock (known as ‘closes’ rather than fields). This open-field agriculture dominates the Midlands: Oxfordshire is almost entirely unenclosed in 1600, and no fewer than 125 of the 128 rural parishes in the adjacent county of Berkshire have open fields.
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England is not all tilled in this way. In fact, less than one-third is tilled at all. About 11,500,000 acres of England and Wales are under the plough (29 per cent of the total area). Almost as much – about ten million acres (26 per cent) – comprises untilled heaths, moors, mountains and marshland. You will be amazed at how much wasteland and ‘wilderness’ there is. In places like Westmorland this is only to be expected; being so rugged, and so near the lawless Scottish border; it is not surprising that three-quarters of that county is wild. You can say the same for the granite uplands of the south-west: Devon has at least 300,000 acres of moor and heath. But even Hampshire has 100,000 acres of unfarmed land and Berkshire 60,000 acres of waste. On top of this, there are the managed woodland and natural forests, which account for a further 10 per cent of the kingdom, and the pasture, parks, downland and commons, which collectively occupy another 30 per cent. The remaining 5 per cent is towns, houses, gardens, churchyards, orchards, roads, rivers and lakes.
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