The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (66 page)

5
. Herbert Moller, ‘The Accelerated Development of Youth: Beard Growth as a Biological Marker’,
Comparative Studies in Society and History
, 29, 4 (October 1987), pp. 748–62.

6
. Quoted in Picard,
London
, p. 174.

7
. Harrison,
Description
, quoted in Picard,
London
, p. 181.

8
. Dyer, ‘Crisis’, p. 92.

9
. Wrigley & Schofield, p. 249. Half of those dying aged under one died in the first month of life. See ibid., p. 363. Child mortality grew even worse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

10
. Pelling, ‘Old age’, p. 78.

11
. Wrigley & Schofield, p. 250.

12
. See G. E. Cokayne, revised by V. Gibbs, H. A. Doubleday, D. Warrand, Lord Howard de Walden and Peter Hammond (eds),
The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britian and the United Kingdom extant or dormant
(14 vols, 1910–88), iv, p. 250. Her husband was born in 1454 but his first wife was still living in 1505, so she did not marry him until after that date. He died aged eighty in 1534; If she married him when he was sixty, and if she was then in her early twenties (as most brides were), she was born about 1490, and so could have been a centenarian.

13
. Pelling,
CL
, p. 74.

14
. Carew,
Survey
, f. 63r.

15
. See Harrison,
Description
, chapter one; Wilson, ‘State’, at p. 17.

16
. Platter,
Travels
, p. 228.

17
. Black,
Reign
, pp. 47–8 (Cecil); 223–4 (parliament). For her dressing-down of an archbishop, see her rebuke of Edmund Grindal in 1577, ibid., p. 197.

18
. The reasons for saying this are: England had Calais until 1558 and Gascony until 1453. The tenure of Gascony overlaps with the inheritance of Normandy, which was lost in 1204. Prior to 1066, Scandinavian kings played a major role in English affairs. One could even say that England had never before been so isolated, for prior to the Viking settlements the kingdom of England did not exist; England was a series of smaller kingdoms.

19
. Rowse,
Structure
, p. 37; John J. Manning (ed.),
The First and second Parts of John Hayward’s The Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII
, Camden Fourth Series, vol. 42 (1991), p. 1.

20
. John Harington,
Nugae Antiquae
, vol. 1 (1804), p. 362 (quoted in
Eliz. People
, p. 17).

21
. Emmison,
Disorder
, p. 40.

22
. Emmison,
Disorder
, pp. 40–3.

23
. J. Bruce (ed.),
Leycester Correspondence
, Camden Society, vol. 27 (1844), p. 237.

24
. Details of the royal processions 1550–63 are to be found in Machyn,
Diary
. See for example, pp. 263–4.

25
. Wilson, ‘State’, pp. 26–9, has a higher figure, £347,587, but this is generally thought to be an overestimate. Black,
Reign
, p. 366, suggests about £300,000. Hill,
Reformation
, p. 81, suggests £250,000 until 1588. The royal revenue was about £300,000 at the death of Henry VIII: £200,000 from the lands and rights acquired at the Reformation and Dissolution to add to the earlier royal income of £100,000; but huge amounts of land, to the value of £1,500,000, were given away or sold under Edward VI (ibid., p. 21).

26
. The budget headings are from Wilson, ‘State’, pp. 26–9.

27
. Hill,
Reformation
, p. 81.

28
. Black,
Reign
, p. 198.

29
. According to Wilson, ‘State’, pp. 2–8, the order of succession in 1600 was as follows: 1. James VI of Scotland, only son of Mary, queen of Scots, and great-grandson of Margaret Tudor, Henry VII’s eldest daughter; 2. Arabella Stuart, cousin of James VI and also a great-grandchild of Margaret Tudor; 3. Edward Seymour, Lord Beauchamp, eldest son of the earl of Hertford, whose mother Lady Catherine Grey was a granddaughter of Mary Tudor, Henry VII’s second daughter; 4. Henry Seymour, younger son of the earl of Hertford, and another great-grandson of Mary Tudor; 5. The earl of Derby, second cousin of the Seymours and another great-grandson of Mary Tudor, through her younger daughter Eleanor. All five potential heirs were Elizabeth’s first cousins twice removed.

30
. Edward O. Smith Jnr, ‘The Elizabethan doctrine of the prince as reflected in the sermons of the episcopacy, 1559–1603’,
Huntington Library Quarterly
, 28, 1 (1964), pp. 1–17.

31
. These were Oxford, Northumberland, Shrewsbury, Kent, Derby, Worcester, Rutland, Cumberland, Sussex, Huntingdon, Bath, Southampton, Bedford, Pembroke, Hertford, Essex, Lincoln and Nottingham. The six Irish earls are not
included in this total.

32
. There was a third viscountcy, Hereford, but that was held by the earl of Essex.

33
. This includes some titles whose holders were children, but excludes titles that were in abeyance in 1600 awaiting a sole heiress to emerge (e.g. Ogle, Dacre and Ros).

34
. Dawson,
Plenti & Grase
, p. 30.

35
. Wilson, ‘State’, p. 22.

36
. Gordon R. Batho, ‘The Finances of an Elizabethan Nobleman: Henry Percy, ninth earl of Northumberland (1564–1632)’,
The Economic History Review
, New Series, 9 (1957), pp. 433–50 at p. 436.

37
. Hill,
Reformation
, pp. 33–4.

38
. Various writers have commented on how difficult it is to enumerate the gentry. It depends on where one draws the line. If one only counts those families that supplied the major offices for each county, such as JPs, deputy lieutenants and sheriffs, then there were about a hundred families per county or roughly four thousand gentry families in England. Mousley found eighty-seven such families for Sussex in his 1959 study of that county (J. E. Mousley, ‘The Fortunes of Some Gentry Families in Elizabethan Sussex’,
The Economic History Review
, 11, 3 (1959), pp. 467–82). However, if one includes all the armigerous families, the average per county in 1600 was probably in excess of 250 and so there were more than ten thousand gentry families. Shropshire had about 470 armigerous families in 1620, Devon a similar number in that year, having had about 250 in 1564. Thomas Wilson declared that there were 16,000 such families in 1600 (Wilson, ‘State’, p. 23) and this more or less tallies with Gregory King’s total of 16,400 in 1688 (1,400 baronets and knights, 3,000 esquires and 12,000 gentlemen: see Thirsk,
Documents
, p. 780). It all depends where one draws the line as to what a ‘gentleman’ is – a moot point now as well as in Elizabethan times.

39
. Wilson, ‘State’, p. 24.

40
. CKS: PRC2/2/169.

41
. CKS: PRC2/5/324 (Love); CKS: PRC2/7/239 (Webbe). The date given is the year before the date of the probate account; most probate accounts date from one to two years after the death but a small proportion were written up later than this, especially where the upbringing of children was concerned.

42
. Mortimer,
D&D
, p. 13. This figure ignores those who held property to the value of £5 in more than one diocese, whose wills and administrations were not dealt with by the consistory court or the archidiaconal one, but in London.

43
.
ODNB
, under ‘Howard, Thomas, fourth duke of Norfolk’.

44
. Schoenbaum,
Shakespeare
, p. 172.

45
. Wilson, ‘State’, p. 22. The values of the livings are taken from those on the eve of the Reformation (1535), used to assess first fruits, given in John Bacon,
Liber Regis
(1786).

46
. For Bacon and Popham, see
ODNB
. For Coke, see Wilson, ‘State’, p. 25.

47
. The first surgeon to be knighted was Sir John Ayliffe (d. 1556). The first physician to be knighted was Sir William Butts (d. 1545).

48
. Black,
Reign
, p. 236. Thomas Wilson in 1600 states that a few were worth £100,000 (Wilson, ‘State’, p. 21). In 1600 Thomas Platter believed that the lord mayor
of London had an
income
of £100,000 – he cannot have been correct in this. See Platter,
Travels
, p. 157.

49
. Wilson, ‘State’, p. 20.

50
. Hoskins, ‘Towns’, p. 18.

51
. Hoskins, ‘Towns’, p. 9.

52
. These proportions are based mainly on those established by Gregory King in his late seventeenth-century tract, ‘Natural and political observations upon the State and Condition of England’, in Thirsk,
Documents
, p. 773. I have assumed for the sake of this exercise that the proportions of a larger provincial city’s make-up did not alter substantially over the seventeenth century.

53
. Margerie M. Rowe and Andrew M. Jackson (eds),
Exeter Freemen 1266–1967
, Devon and Cornwall Record Society, Extra Series, 1 (1973), pp. 83–110.

54
. These ‘other’ are four town waits; a foreigner with letters of denization from the queen (1575); a city beadle (1588); the city swordbearer (1590); one of the city sergeants (1592).

55
. CKS: PRC2/6/13.

56
. BRO: D/A1/96/258C.

57
. Herridge,
Inventories
, pp. 389–90.

58
. CKS: PRC21/6/41; BRO: D/A1/212/194C.

59
. Pound,
Census
, pp. 7, 10. Some of the statistics in what follows have been taken from Pelling,
CL
, p. 84.

60
. Beier, ‘Vagrants’, p. 9; Clark, ‘Migrant’, p. 117.

61
. Carew,
Survey
, f. 67r.

62
. Hill,
Reformation
, p. 31.

63
. Pound,
Census
, p. 23.

64
. Pound,
Census
, p. 25.

65
. Pound,
Census
, p. 35.

66
. The details of Shipdams house are taken from Pound,
Census
, p. 36. For the boy and the blind man, and strategies for survival, see Pelling,
CL
, pp. 79–102, esp. pp. 84–5. For the wages of nurses, see Mortimer,
D&D
, p. 154.

67
. Clark, ‘Migrant’, p. 135.

68
. Duffy,
Morebath
, p. 13.

69
. Stubbes,
Anatomy
, p. 33.

70
. I have taken this figure from Wrightson,
Earthly Necessities
, p. 34.

71
. Clark, ‘Migrant’, p. 127.

72
. Beier, ‘Vagrants’, p. 8.

73
. 5 Elizabeth (1563), cap. 20.

74
. 14 Elizabeth (1572), cap. 5.

75
. 31 Elizabeth (1589), cap. 7. This enshrined in law what had long been the practice in many courts at much earlier dates. See Emmison,
HWL
, p. 268.

76
. Emmison,
HWL
, p. 271.

77
. 39 Elizabeth (1597), cap. 3.

78
. Christopher Dyer,
Standards of Living in Medieval England
(Cambridge, revised ed, 1989), p. 316;
Tudor Tailor
, p. 9.

79
. Traister,
Notorious
, p. 135.

80
. There were female churchwardens at Morebath, Kilmington and St Budeaux in Devon, for instance. See Patricia Crawford,
Women and religion in England 1500–1720
(1993), p. 220, n. 22; Duffy,
Morebath
, p. 124.

81
. Mortimer, ‘Index’, p. 110.

82
. See D. A. Beaufort, ‘The medical practitioners of Western Sussex in the early modern period: a preliminary survey’,
Sussex Archaeological Collections
, 131 (1948), pp. 427–39. Exeter too was a diocese in which the requirement to obtain a licence to practise midwifery was resisted, judging from the paucity of such licences sought.

83
. Williams,
Life
, p. 70.

84
. Traister,
Notorious
, p. 154.

85
. Laslett,
WWHL
, p. 95.

86
. Laslett,
WWHL
, pp. 1–2.

87
. Emmison,
HWL
, p. 111.

88
. This appears in Horman,
Vulgaria
, in the section ‘De conjugalibus’.

89
. William Shakespeare,
Romeo & Juliet
, Act 1, Scene 2.

90
. Laslett,
WWHL
, p. 88.

91
. Wrigley & Schofield, p. 255.