The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (55 page)

Jane becomes pregnant and is reported to the archdeacon. She admits everything and is sentenced to stand in the church porch in a white sheet ‘and confess her fault penitently after the end of the sermon, praying God and the congregation to forgive her’.
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You cannot help but look towards John and Joan Lawrence, as poor Jane makes her confession.

It is often said that society may be judged by the way it treats its most vulnerable members. In this respect, it is fair to say that Elizabethan England is not just a golden age but also a horrifyingly unjust one. Many of the injustices cannot be said to be politically expedient; they have nothing to do with Star Chamber or the necessity of ensuring the efficient functioning of society. They have nothing to do with the security of the realm. They are merely the results of people being unable to deal with their own natural inclinations, preferring to blame their weaknesses and lusts on their social inferiors, too proud to admit that these sins, which they publicly denigrate and punish in others, are in fact their own.

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Entertainment

If any aspect of daily life were to be consistent across the ages, you would have thought it would be the things that people do to enjoy themselves. After all, we are all human, so the ways in which we gratify ourselves should be more or less the same. Or to put it another way, if we enjoy doing something in one century, then the chances are that we will enjoy doing it in other centuries too. On the whole, this is true: sixteenth-century people are keen on the theatre, playing chess, listening to music, making love, drinking wine and beer, reading books and sightseeing. But they also enjoy things that we recoil from today. If you hear the shouts and look at the excited faces of the bloodthirsty crowd at a bull baiting, or hear the spectators’ cheers as a traitor’s entrails are sliced out and burnt before his eyes, you might wonder how on earth Shakespeare’s fellow Englishmen are able to understand the humanity of his writing.

Sightseeing

If you visit Elizabethan England you will want to go sightseeing, just as you do in the modern world. One of the most popular tourist destinations is Drake’s famous ship,
The Golden Hind
, which is on display in Greenwich. Not only can you go aboard, you can also rent her as a banqueting house. Unfortunately she is slowly being dismantled because most visitors take a piece as a souvenir. If you want to see her in all her glory, go quickly: by 1618 only the keel will be left.
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The royal palaces are arguably the most attractive tourist destinations – not just Whitehall, Hampton Court and Nonsuch Palace (Surrey), but also those further afield, such as Woodstock Palace (Oxfordshire) and Windsor Castle (Berkshire). Not everyone can visit,
of course. You will need to obtain the appropriate letters of introduction from well-connected friends and then hire horses or coaches to take you to these destinations. At Hampton Court you will be shown the royal apartments (including the king’s and queen’s bedchambers) with their woven tapestries and carpets, paintings, clocks, musical instruments and royal furniture, as well as the royal library, chapel and gardens. At Whitehall you will see the queen’s collection of Dutch paintings, her wardrobe and jewels, and an ‘Indian bed’ (Native American) with its ‘Indian’ valance and an ‘Indian’ table.
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At the Tower of London you will be shown around by a guide who will tell you about the large cannon and the armour of Henry VIII, both of which are on display here. Surprisingly your guide will even take you down to the dungeons to show you the instruments of torture used on Catholics. Don’t believe everything he tells you – especially not that Julius Caesar built the White Tower and dined in the hall on the first floor. If you do the whole tour you will see the royal apartments, the Royal Mint, Traitors’ Gate, the execution axe and the royal menagerie (with its lions named after the Tudor kings and queens, ‘the last wolf in England’, a tiger and a porcupine). Bear in mind that you will have to pay a gratuity for every room you wish to see. When Thomas Platter and his two companions visit in 1599 they hand out eight gratuities of about 3s each. The total is the equivalent of twelve weeks’ wages for a labourer, so you can understand why most native Londoners have not seen the Tower.

In London you can also visit houses which, in later centuries, will be referred to as cabinets of curiosities. Mr Cope’s house, for example, contains such exotic items as an African charm made of human teeth; the horn and tail of a rhinoceros; a unicorn’s tail; a ‘thunder-bolt dug out of a mast which was hit at sea during a storm’; an embalmed child; ‘a round horn that grew on an English woman’s forehead’; the baubles and bells of Henry VIII’s fool; porcelain from China; a magnifying mirror; and an ‘Indian’ (Native American) canoe and paddles, which hangs from the ceiling in the centre of the room.
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As Shakespeare later puts it in
The Tempest
, ‘in England … when they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian’. For those who cannot afford the entry fee to such houses, there are curios in the street. You can see a Dutch giant, over 7' 6" high, and a dwarf, 3' high, in the city in 1581: the smaller man will walk straight beneath the legs of the giant. A fully grown live camel
is to be seen in one of the houses on London Bridge in 1599. Claudius Hollyband even comes across a ‘makesport’ or street entertainer, who swallows swords for a living.
⁴

The most popular sights of a city, however, are the public ceremonies and processions. First and foremost has to be any event featuring the queen, such as the celebrations in London on 14 January 1559, the eve of her coronation, when she processes through the city to Westminster, with Londoners performing pageants, tableaux and hymns. The day of her accession is also a great occasion, with bells ringing and bonfires and tables set up in the streets for feasting. Within a few years it becomes traditional for courtiers to celebrate the anniversary of her accession by jousting before her on the tilting ground at Whitehall. Thousands turn up to watch Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Henry Lee joust against each other, or to watch the earl of Essex take on all comers in 1596 and break ninety-eight lances in the course of riding 108 courses against them. Chivalry might have had its day, and this ceremonial jousting may not be as violent as the tournaments of earlier centuries, but it is still a great spectacle.
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Occasionally, when the queen goes on a royal progress, you will get to see firework displays, as at Kenilworth in 1575. For those living in the country, there are always the Mayday celebrations, when people go out into the fields and spend the night in pleasant frolics, returning the next morning with a Maypole. Sadly the Puritans are keen to burn all Maypoles, regarding them as ‘stinking idols’. They have already had their way with the great Maypole that used to be set up on Cornhill in London.

Alehouses and Taverns

Elizabethans do love their beer and wine, so alehouses, taverns and ‘tippling houses’ are all popular resorts. Indeed, they are the setting for the greatest array of indulgences, as in taverns you will be provided with food and drink, music, conversation, flirtation – and in some places much more than flirtation. Most taverns are simply the open halls of houses, which are denoted by a sign hanging outside. They are all supposed to be licensed by the magistrates, but many aren’t. In London the better establishments have started placing partitions between the tables by 1599, affording their clientele greater privacy as they quaff wine sweetened with sugar and listen to fiddlers perform.
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For many men, there is the added attraction of the tavern-cum-brothel. The usual charge is 6d a time to sleep with the house harlot. As you will have seen in the last chapter, a lot of prostitution is on a small scale and involves the sexual services of the ale-wife or one of her daughters. Joan Gwin of Clavering (Essex), for example, is the village prostitute and works at her mother’s house, sleeping with those whom her mother admits.
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But even such small-scale enterprises are not without trouble. Just before Christmas 1567 Henry Cooe’s wife decides she has had enough of her husband’s whoring and goes to the alehouse run by Widow Bowden in Chelmsford. It is dark, about six o’clock. When Henry hears his wife’s shouting as she barges in, he hurriedly pulls up his hose and slips out of a back door. Failing to find her husband, Goodwife Cooe seizes Widow Bowden and her daughter (the house harlot) by the hair and starts to beat them. The daughter escapes into the street and raises the alarm. Eventually Henry Cooe is apprehended by the constables, hiding in a garden. Pleasures in certain taverns can cost much more than 6d, even if you don’t catch syphilis.
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In Henry’s case, his wife sounds far more fearsome than the penances imposed by the ecclesiastical courts.

The tavern is also where most people go to smoke. John Hawkins notices tobacco being smoked in Florida in 1565 and probably introduces the practice to England on his return the following year.
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It immediately becomes popular; people find it exotic and fascinating. It appeals to most of the senses: there is the smell, the feeling of inhaling the smoke into the lungs, and the ethereal vision of it silently wafting in the candlelit air of the tavern or blown in smoke rings. Some people are of the opinion that ‘it makes your breath stink like the piss of a fox’, but they are in the minority.
¹⁰
William Harrison notes in his
Great Chronologie
of 1573 that

in these days the taking-in of the Indian herb called ‘Tobaco’ by an instrument formed like a little ladle, whereby it passeth from the mouth into the head and stomach, is greatly taken up and used in England, against rheums and other diseases engendered in the lungs and inward parts and not without effect.

If you are an addicted smoker you will want to visit England after this date. It is not a cheap habit, however: ¼oz of tobacco will cost you 10d in a tavern. Consequently pipes have very small bowls and
are often shared between the smokers. Note that the word ‘smoking’ is not yet used to describe the new fad: at this time you ‘drink’ the smoke. Women ‘drink’ it too, often enjoying it with sweetened Spanish wine.

Not everyone is as certain as Harrison that tobacco is good for your health. A physician writing under the pen-name ‘Philaretes’ publishes a booklet entitled
Work for Chimny-sweepers or a warning for Tobacconists
in 1602. Just like the future king of England, James I, who publishes his own anti-smoking tract,
A Counterblaste to Tobacco
, in 1604, Philaretes is keen to warn people away from the noxious herb. It is too dry to suit most people’s health, he argues, especially being harmful for those of a choleric disposition. It is addictive and causes sterility, indigestion and colds. Moreover, it is also aesthetically unappealing:

If any man be so far blinded with Tobacco that he will not admit for true that the vapour or fume thereof ascending to the brain is dark and swart of colour, and of quality excessively dry, let him but cast his eyes on the smoke issuing forth from the nostrils of the Tobacconists, or the smoky tincture left in the tobacco pipe after the receipt thereof, and he shall easily reclaim his error.
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Thomas Platter seems to have talked with Philaretes or someone else inclined to liken smokers to chimneys. He notes in 1599 that the English

carry the instrument [pipe] on them and light up on all occasions, at the play, in the taverns or elsewhere … and it makes them riotous and merry, and rather drowsy, just as if they were drunk, though the effect soon passes. And they use it so abundantly because of the pleasure it gives, that their preachers cry out on them for their self-destruction. And I am told the inside of one man’s veins after death was found to be covered in soot just like a chimney.
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Games

If you accompany the Cornish gentleman William Carnsew around the county in the 1570s you will see that – when he is not attending to his estates, serving as a JP or reading books – his pastimes are
playing bowls, quoits and card games with his friends.
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All very innocent, you may think. However, playing these games is against the law for almost everyone. Ever since the Middle Ages kings have forbidden people from playing ‘unlawful games’ in order to force them to practise archery. In 1542 Henry VIII reissues legislation prohibiting all artificers, husbandmen, labourers, mariners, fishermen, watermen, servants and apprentices from playing tables (backgammon), cards, dice, football, bowls, tennis, quoits, ninepins and shovegroat.
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Carnsew is only permitted to play these games because he is a member of the gentry with an annual income of more than £100. Everyone else can only play them at Christmas, and then only in their own homes. The penalty for every infringement is a heavy fine of £1.

For this reason you will be cautious about when and where you play games. There are bowling alleys in London and greens across the country, but maintaining an unlicensed bowling alley can result in a fine of £2 per day for the proprietor, and a 6s 8d fine for anyone who plays there. Drake is famously playing bowls on Plymouth Hoe when the Armada is sighted and declares that he has ‘enough time to win the game and beat the Spaniards’. If any of his fellow mariners are playing with him they risk missing the great battle – for technically they should be taken off to face the magistrates at the quarter sessions. In reality, the fines levied are smaller than the law stipulates: men are sometimes fined just 40d by the magistrates in the hope that they will actually pay the more reasonable sum.
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Even so, a fine of ten days’ wages is enough to put off most working men. The same penalties apply to people who maintain unlicensed tennis courts, but you do not see people being arrested for playing tennis in the way that hundreds are for playing bowls. Although it is popular – £1,699 worth of tennis balls are imported in 1559–60 – those who play it illegally do not build unlicensed tennis courts, but play in the streets.
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Tennis courts are the preserve of the aristocrats who play in private, and they are not subject to these restrictions and fines.