A Brief History of the Tudor Age Read online

  The fasting laws never applied to drink, and anyone who suggested that they did ran the risk of being regarded as a heretic; for Christ had shown his approval of wine by converting the water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana as the first miracle that He performed; and King Henry, the Supreme Head (next under Christ) of the Church of England, was in the habit of drinking wine.

  The ordinary Englishman drank beer, or ale if he was a little wealthier, but a good deal of wine was imported from Bordeaux. Wine was too expensive for most people, though an Act of 1536 fixed the maximum price at which Gascon, Guion or any French wine could be sold at eightpence a gallon. Malmsey wine from Greece cost more, for the maximum price permitted was twelvepence a gallon; and ‘sack’ (sherry) from Xeres in Spain was even more expensive, and could be sold at any price up to 3s.4d. a gallon. Ale cost a good deal less, for the Act fixed the maximum price at fivepence for a firkin of 9 gallons. Beer cost half the price of ale, with the maximum price fixed at fivepence for a kilderkin of 18 gallons. The price was increased to sixpence a kilderkin in 1544, because the rise in the price of timber had made it more expensive for the brewers to obtain their beer barrels. Breaches of the Act were punished by a fine of 4s.4d. for every time that a seller charged more than the maximum price.

  The most expensive drink of all was that very rare luxury, hypocras, a sweet liqueur imported from Smyrna and the Levant by Venetian merchants and brought by them to England. It was served at the end of banquets at Henry VIII’s court; and at royal christenings and funerals, when no other refreshments were served, the proceedings always ended with wafers and hypocras.

  It was not only because wines were more expensive that the ordinary Englishman drank beer. He preferred beer, and would drink nothing else. In the first military campaign of Henry VIII’s reign, 7,000 English soldiers were sent to Fuenterrabia in northern Spain to help Henry’s father-in-law, King Ferdinand, conquer the kingdom of Navarre from the French. When they found that they could not obtain any beer in Spain, but only wine or cider, they mutinied; and their commander, the Marquess of Dorset, was forced to bring them home. Henry VIII was very angry, but was persuaded by the Spanish ambassador that it would be politically expedient to pardon the mutineers. This was probably the last time during his life that Henry would have done such a thing.

  Henry’s generals and counsellors never forgot the mutiny at Fuenterrabia, and thirty years later, when the campaign against Scotland was being planned in 1542, it was considered to be of paramount importance that the army should not run short of beer. Orders had been issued to the sheriffs and gentlemen in the North of England to be at Newcastle with their tenants, ready to march into Scotland, on 2 October; but as the ships coming from London with the beer had not arrived, the date was put off to 7 October; and as there was still no news of the beer, the date was again put off till 11 October. The beer did arrive on 7 October, but there was not as much as had been expected. The Duke of Norfolk, who was to command the invasion of Scotland, wrote to Henry VIII, explaining that there would only be enough beer for a six-day campaign in Scotland, even if he rationed the men to two pots of beer a day, which he feared might cause trouble.

  Norfolk had no alternative, in the circumstances, but to march with his men to Berwick, and he led them across the Border on 22 October. But either his quartermasters had made a mistake in their arithmetic about the beer, or the soldiers drank more than their allotted ration of two pots a day; for Norfolk soon realized that the beer would give out after only four days. He encountered virtually no opposition from the Scots, and duly devastated the Merse and the frontier districts of Scotland; but the shortage of beer forced him to retreat into England.

  Henry was lucky. Norfolk’s retreat so heartened the Scots that they launched an invasion of England before they were ready, and, crossing the Border in the Western Marches, marched straight into a bog at Solway Moss, where they suffered a humiliating defeat from which only a handful of Scots succeeded in escaping back across the Border into Scotland.

  The war against the Scots continued with increasing savagery, and in the spring of 1544 Henry decided to send an army to destroy Edinburgh, ‘putting man, woman and child to fire and sword without exception, where any resistance shall be made against you’. His general in the North was Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford (later Duke of Somerset). Hertford assured Henry that he could march from Berwick to Edinburgh without meeting any serious resistance from the Scots; but there was one great difficulty. How would they be able to transport the beer for the army across the sodden roads and tracks of Berwickshire and Lothian over which carts could not move if they were heavily laden with beer barrels? The solution was found; an army of 16,000 men could be sent by sea from Tynemouth to Leith in 114 ships, and could march the few miles from Leith to Edinburgh and spend three days burning the city, while all the beer that was required could stay on board the ships at Leith. The plan was carried out successfully; every building in Edinburgh, except the castle, was burned, including the Palace of Holyroodhouse.

  Even at court, more ale was drunk than wine. On ordinary days, when there was no special banquet, dukes and duchesses who were at court were provided with one gallon of ale for dinner and another gallon for supper, and with one pitcher of wine after supper. Earls, barons, knights and gentlemen were served with lesser quantities, according to their rank.

  Apart from wine, ale and beer, the only other drinks were milk and water, for tea, coffee and cocoa only came to England in the seventeenth century, and there were no hot drinks except soup. It was risky to drink water, because of the filth that polluted the rivers and all stagnant water supplies; but many of the poor had to take the risk, and it was very usual for the rich to dilute wine with water. When Catherine of Aragon was being brought up as a child in Spain before 1501, at the court of her father and mother King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, in preparation for her marriage to Arthur, Prince of Wales, she was taught to drink wine, so that she would get to like it before she went to England, as it would be unsafe to drink the water there. It was just the reverse 400 years later, at the beginning of the twentieth century, when English children were taught to like wine before being taken on a holiday abroad, as it was unsafe to drink the water in France and Spain.

  At court, particularly under Henry VIII, there was particularly heavy eating and drinking at all times, with lavish banquets on the holy days. There were also banquets on special occasions, to entertain a visiting diplomatic delegation which had been sent to Henry’s court by a foreign sovereign. On the holy days the banquet was normally held at dinner, at 10 a.m., but the foreign ambassadors were often also entertained at great banquets in the evening. When the ambassador of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian visited Henry’s court in July 1517, he was entertained at an evening banquet at Greenwich on St Thomas of Canterbury’s day. The ambassador sat at the King’s table with Henry, Wolsey, Queen Catherine, and Henry’s sister Mary ‘the French Queen’, as she was still called though she was now the Duchess of Suffolk.

  The guests were served with ten courses and sat at table for seven hours, for the banquet did not end till 2 a.m. Henry’s musicians played throughout the meal. The Venetian ambassador, as usual, was impressed. ‘Every imaginable sort of meat known in the kingdom was served,’ he wrote, ‘and fish too, including prawn pasties of perhaps twenty different kinds, made in the shapes of castles, and of animals of various kinds, as beautiful as can be imagined. In short, the wealth and civilization of the world are here, and those who call the English barbarians seem to me to make themselves barbarians.’

  In 1518 Henry decided to end the cold war with France, which had lasted for three years, and the Admiral of France was sent to England to sign a treaty of friendship with Henry and to solemnize the betrothal of Henry’s two-year-old daughter, the Princess Mary, to Francis I’s son. The Admiral was entertained at an evening banquet at Greenwich which again lasted till 2 a.m. There were eighty-two gold vases and fifty-two silver drinking cups on the ta
ble; and during the supper, servants entered, carrying a shaker 6 feet long in solid silver, which threw wafers into the air for the guests to catch and eat.

  When Henry VIII created his illegitimate son Duke of Richmond, and appointed him Lord President of the Council of the North, Henry’s counsellors drafted instructions to the Duke’s officials as to what he and his household should eat for their dinner and supper at Sheriffhutton, on ordinary days and on fast days. The six-year-old Duke was to be served, for his dinner on ordinary days and holy days between Michaelmas and Shrovetide, a first course of soup, with two rounds of brawn, a helping of beef or mutton, with either swan or goose, a quarter (28 lbs.) of roast veal, three roast capons, and a ‘baked meat’, or biscuit. For his second course, he was to have another soup, four roast rabbits, fourteen pigeons, four partridges or pheasants, a wildfowl, fruit and biscuits, along with 4 gallons of ale and two pitchers of wine. For supper in the evening, he was to have a first course of soup, boiled meat, a quarter of roast mutton, three capons or hens, a wildfowl, and wafers; for his second course, five roast rabbits, fourteen pigeons, two wildfowl, two tarts, fruits and bread, with ale, wine, sauces and spices.

  On the fast days, he was to have for dinner a first course of cod, half a salmon, two pikes, a sea-fish, a fresh-water fish, and biscuits, and a second course of turbot, a fresh salmon, two sea-fish, a fresh-water fish, shrimps, tarts and fruit; and at supper, a very similar diet with the addition of sturgeon as a second course. All this was supposed to be for the personal consumption of the little boy, for his Chancellor, his counsellors, his gentlemen and his grooms had a separate list of dishes allotted to them, each of them receiving less than the Duke and more than the official next below them in rank.

  Of course the Duke could not eat all these dishes, and was not supposed to do so, for this was a display of ostentation and pride, not of gluttony. The food which he left over was taken by the servants and distributed to the villagers and the beggars who crowded into the courtyard of the castle at Sheriffhutton at dinner time and suppertime to receive the uneaten portions of the Duke’s dinner and supper and the dinners and suppers of the members of his household. The Duke was probably brought up to eat at the most a few mouthfuls from each of these dishes, and generously give the rest to the poor.

  The purpose of it all, as with most of the things that Henry VIII did, was to impress. The Duke of Richmond’s personal diet cost £1 18s.8d. a day in 1525, at a time when the husbandman was given an allowance of twopence a day for his food, and had to work six days a week for twenty weeks to earn £1 18s.8d. The cost of the dinners and suppers provided for the Duke and his whole household came to more than £66 a day, or £2,439 a year.

  9

  HUSBANDRY

  IN TUDOR SOCIETY, although a minority of the population were noblemen, courtiers, gentlemen, priests and monks, lawyers, merchants and artisans, the great majority were husbandmen who worked as agricultural labourers on the land. But throughout the Tudor Age, husbandry was threatened by a series of problems which the government and Parliament were constantly trying to put right. The farmers suffered from a shortage of cheap labour, for some people did not wish to work on the land, and preferred to beg or steal; and others, who were willing to be husbandmen, pressed for higher wages and a shorter working day which threatened the farmers’ profits. The situation was made worse by the middlemen and ‘regrators’ who bought up foodstuffs and resold them at a profit, thus raising the cost of the husbandman’s food and increasing his need for higher wages; and the bad state of rural housing exacerbated the problem. While the farmer was facing these difficulties, the thriving wool trade in East Anglia and in south-west England meant that he could obtain good prices for his wool, and gave him every incentive to convert arable into pasture land and to keep sheep instead of tilling the soil.

  By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the conversion of arable land into pasture was worrying statesmen and religious leaders. Sir Thomas More criticized the development in his book Utopia in 1516 as strongly as did his great religious opponent, Latimer, in his sermons thirty years later. But these economic and social anxieties did not concern the author of that very practical handbook for farmers, The Book of Husbandry. It was probably written by Sir Anthony Fitzherbert, a Judge of the Court of Common Pleas, who by a strange coincidence was one of the judges at the trial of Sir Thomas More who sentenced him to death; but Sir Anthony’s brother, John Fitzherbert, may have been the author. Fitzherbert does not hesitate to advise his readers to enclose their land and to concentrate on sheepbreeding, and assures them ‘that sheep, in mine opinion, is the most profitable cattle that any man can have’.

  Like practical handbooks in the twentieth century, The Book of Husbandry was a best-seller. It was probably first published in 1523, and nine more editions appeared in the next forty-five years. Thirty years after the tenth edition of 1568, a new revised edition, ‘now newly corrected, amended and reduced into a more pleasing form of English than before’, was published in 1598. The book was evidently not written for the husbandman and labourer, most of whom were almost illiterate. From time to time, when Fitzherbert is digressing into moral exhortation, he quotes texts from the Bible and other maxims in Latin; but this does not mean that he was writing for Latin scholars, for the Latin texts are mostly those which any layman might have heard quoted in church on Sundays and holy days, and Fitzherbert usually translates them into English. No doubt many country gentlemen read the book, but there are passages in it which suggest that Fitzherbert was writing primarily for the yeoman farmer, who worked himself, with his wife, in the management of the farm, rather than for the gentleman.

  Fitzherbert gave his readers useful advice about ploughing, suggesting that on balance it was better to plough with oxen than with horses, provided that the farmer had fields of pasture where the oxen could rest between the ploughing; for though horses were stronger than oxen, and could work for longer hours, it cost less to feed oxen; and when a horse became old, bruised or blind, he was useless. But if ‘an ox wax old, bruised or blind, for two shillings he may be fed, and then he is man’s meat and as good ox, better than ever he was’. He wrote about how to sow barley and oats, how to plough for peas and beans, how to make forks and rakes, how to fell and plant trees and make hedges, how to recognize and treat the various diseases which the animals might catch, and when to wash and shear sheep. He taught how to make a ewe love her lamb. If a ewe did not like one of her lambs, and was often striking it with her paw, Fitzherbert advised that the ewe should be tied by her paw to the side of the pen and that a dog should be placed near the lamb in a position where the ewe could see it. This would arouse the ewe’s protective instincts towards her lamb.

  The Book of Husbandry contained advice on how to repair a highway, for husbandmen were required to work for four days in the year repairing the highways, and this had been increased to six days in the year by the time that the tenth edition of the book was published, after Fitzherbert’s death, in 1568. He had his own ideas about this, for he thought that the way in which highways were repaired, especially in the vicinity of London, was unsatisfactory. It was no use digging a trench on both sides of the road to drain the water, and then putting down gravel, because when the rains came, the soft earth beneath the gravel subsided, and the gravel went with it. Instead, Fitzherbert advised that, after brushing away all the surface water, earth should be put down in the spring; then, when it had become hardened during the dry weather by the pressure of cartwheels and the feet of pedestrians, the gravel should be placed on top of the dry earth.

  The role of the farmer’s wife is dealt with in The Book of Husbandry. Fitzherbert told the farmer that she should ‘first in a morning when thou art waked and proposeth to rise, take up thy hand and bless thee and make the sign of the holy cross. In nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti Amen. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. And if thou say a Pater Noster, an Ave and a Creed and remember thy Maker, thou shalt speed m
uch the better.’ This advice in the first edition of 1523 remained in all the editions in Henry VIII’s reign, survived in two editions under Edward VI, and was of course in order in the 1556 edition under Philip and Mary. It still remained in the first edition under Elizabeth I in 1560. But it was changed in 1562. Instead of the wife being urged to make the sign of the cross and the husband to say a Pater Noster, an Ave and a Creed, the farmer and his wife were told to ‘give thanks to God for thy night’s rest and say the Lord’s Prayer and other good prayers if thou canst’; and this Protestant version was reprinted in the editions of 1568 and 1598.

  The rest of the wife’s daily duties remained unchanged from the first edition of 1523. She must clean the house, feed the calves, prepare the milk, wake and dress the children, prepare her husband’s breakfast, dinner and supper, and supervise the servants. She must make butter and cheese, feed the pigs morning and evening, and have a care for the hens, ducks, and geese, and collect their eggs. She should put her husband’s sheep to good use by making clothes from their wool, and should know how to make hay, to winnow all kinds of corn, to make malt, and ‘to help her husband to fill the muck wain or dung cart’. She should also be able to go to market if her husband is unable to go himself, and know how to buy and sell shrewdly at market. It was important that on these occasions she should give a true and full account to her husband of all the money she had spent and received at the market, and her husband should do the same to her; for many marriages had been wrecked because husband and wife concealed money matters from each other.