A Brief History of the Tudor Age Page 27
The King’s reluctance to impose new taxation was very wise, because the ordinary Englishman, though he did not complain that he was obliged to wear a woollen cap every Sunday, strongly resented having to pay an unusual tax, and was ready to join a rebellion to prevent it. So the kings had no alternative but to borrow money from Italian or Flemish bankers, even if the banker asked them to pay a higher rate of interest than the maximum which was permitted under the laws against usury which were periodically enacted during the Tudor Age;13 for they knew by experience and from a study of recent history that the surest way for a prince to become unpopular was to follow the advice of Colet, Erasmus and the small group of intellectuals and abandon the expensive path of military glory.
13
SPORTS AND PASTIMES
THE VIGOROUS AND BRUTAL MEN of the Tudor Age engaged in vigorous and brutal sports; but sport, like everything else, was regulated by the government. People were expected to take part in those sports which were suitable for persons of their rank. It was right for noblemen and gentlemen to engage in activities which trained them in horsemanship and the art of war; but the labourers and artisans, who were required by law to be at work on six days in the week from 5 a.m. till after 7 p.m., did not have much time to play games, and were not encouraged to do so. On Sundays and holy days, when they were not at work, they were to practise archery, which would be useful in wartime, and not take part in any game which competed with archery. Certain kinds of games were also condemned on moral and religious grounds, for long before the Puritan revolution in the seventeenth century the Church tried to prevent the people from indulging in frivolous and immoral sports.
For nobles and gentlemen, the greatest sport was still the tournament, as it had been for the last 300 years. Knights jousted against each other, and displayed their prowess, while the admiring ladies watched them from the stands. The ladies had always been an important factor in the ritual of the tournament; they gave their scarves or handkerchiefs to the knight of their choice, and he wore it during the tournament; they cheered him on, and sometimes incited him to take additional risks to prove his courage and devotion to them; and they rewarded the victor with a garland and perhaps with a kiss. They also sometimes contributed to the cost of the tournament.
At the beginning of the Tudor Age, tournaments were more popular with the nobility than they had ever been; but they were becoming further and further removed from the reality of war. Steps were taken to minimize the risks to the participants by dressing them in a heavy suit of armour with a helmet with a visor covering all the face except for the slits for the nose and eyes. This was just at the time when the development of artillery in war made armour less of a protection in battle, and when the armour worn in war was becoming lighter.
In a tournament, the knights were separated from each other by a wooden barrier about 4 feet high. Each knight rode on the right-hand side of the barrier, carrying his lance in his right hand, and using it to strike at his opponent as they galloped past each other on opposite sides of the barrier. As the jouster struck with his lance across the barrier at the opponent on his left, the angle at which the lance struck the armour of the adversary lessened the force of the blow and reduced the risk of serious injury; and by the sixteenth century the lances used in tournaments were much more brittle than the lances of the cavalry charge of the Middle Ages. If a jouster dealt his opponent a hard enough blow with the lance, it would splinter and do no further damage; and if a knight splintered his lance when he jousted, this showed that he was skilful and vigorous.
Tournaments were held at court on the more important holy days, and on special occasions, such as the visit of an important foreign envoy, or the signature of a peace treaty. Henry VII did not personally take part in tournaments; like most of the other kings of the time, he watched from the place of honour in the stands. But Henry VIII took part, incognito, in the first big tournament of his reign; and as this made a good impression, he continued to joust in tournaments for the next twenty-six years. He found a worthy jousting partner and opponent in his brother-in-law, the Duke of Suffolk. Sometimes they were the ‘defenders’ in the tournament, who challenged all-comers, and took it in turn to joust against all the other competitors. Sometimes Henry and Suffolk jousted against each other. They did so in the tournament at Greenwich on St Thomas of Canterbury’s Day in July 1517, when they impressed the spectators by riding eight courses, and both of them splintering their lances every time.
Despite the precautions taken to prevent injury, a tournament was not free from risk. It took skill and good horsemanship to avoid being thrown by a blow on the breastplate from the opponent’s lance, even if the blow was softened by the angle and the splintering of the lance. Henry VIII and Suffolk were usually quite capable of remaining in the saddle; but at the tournament at Greenwich on 24 January 1536 Henry was thrown from his horse, and was unconscious for two hours. He never jousted again. A worse disaster befell King Henry II of France, who received a fatal wound at a tournament in Paris in 1559, when a fragment of a splintered lance entered his eye through the slit in his visor. He died ten days later.
Edward VI was too young to take part in a tournament, and King Philip did not do so, either as King in England or in Spain; and as both Mary and Elizabeth were unable to joust because of their sex, royal participation in tournaments ended in England in 1536. But tournaments continued to be held at court during Elizabeth’s reign, with Sir Henry Lee and the Earl of Cumberland playing the leading part as the Queen’s Champion.
Another great sport held at court during the Tudor Age was riding at the ring. A ring only a few inches wide was suspended on a thread, and a rider, approaching at full gallop, had to put the point of his lance through the middle of the ring. If his eyesight, concentration and steadiness of hand were good enough to enable him to do this, the thread would snap and he would carry off the ring on his lance as he rode by.
On days when no tournament was held, the King and his courtiers usually hunted, and noblemen and gentlemen hunted regularly. The animal hunted was ordinarily the stag, which in the Tudor Age was usually called the hart. In Alsace, the Emperor Maximilian hunted the wild boar, and boars were hunted all over the Continent; but the English wild swine was not as fierce or fleet of foot as the boar in Europe, and was hardly worth hunting. Sometimes a buck was hunted instead of a hart. Yeomen farmers hunted foxes, but no gentleman did until the end of the seventeenth century. When a hart or buck was killed, it was eaten.
Harts could be hunted at most times of the year, but not in mid-winter, and the King and his nobles then engaged in hawking instead. Falcons were trained for this sport, and statutes were passed to punish any poacher who stole their eggs. Poaching by night was considered to be a much more serious offence than poaching by day. An Act of Henry VII’s first Parliament in 1485 made unauthorized hunting in private forests a felony punishable by death if the offence was committed at night or if the poachers had disguised or obscured their faces to prevent themselves from being identified; but if it was done in the daytime and without a disguise, it was only a trespass punishable by fine or imprisonment.
There was one exception to the legislation which prohibited the destruction of game or the stealing of birds’ eggs. The authorities were alarmed at the damage caused by rooks and crows, who not only did great harm to the husbandman’s crops but also damaged the thatch on the roofs of cottages and barns. An Act of 1533 enacted that every parish must keep nets for catching rooks. Anyone was entitled to enter land without the landowner’s permission in order to destroy rooks, if permission had been asked and refused, without being liable for damages for trespass.
The writer and poet George Turbervile, who had been Randolph’s secretary and had accompanied him on his journey to Moscow, wrote two books on hunting and hawking. In The Booke of Faulconrie, which was published in 1575, he wrote about the breeding and training of hawks; and in his other book, The Noble Arte of Venerie or Hunting, which was probably written
at about the same time, he explained the proper way of organizing a hunt, including those occasions when a prince was present. He followed closely an authoritative French book on the subject, but introduced changes to take into account the different customs which in some respects were followed in England. In France, after the hart was killed, the chief huntsman cut off one of its feet and handed it, on his knees, to the King; in England, the huntsman, also on his knees, handed the hunting knife to the King, who stabbed the hart’s carcass as if he were killing the hart. This English practice was adopted whenever Elizabeth I hunted.
‘Certaine observations for an ostreger in keeping of a Goshawke’. A woodcut from George Turbervile’s Booke of Faulconrie, 1575. The word ‘ostreger’, a corruption of the late Latin word austercarius, means ‘a keeper of goshawks’.
But Turbervile stressed the importance of not going through this ritual until the hart was safely dead; for if the prince really tried to kill the hart, he might be seriously hurt or even killed, for a hart at bay could inflict great damage on its pursuers. Turbervile mentioned that an Emperor named Basil, who had performed deeds of great valour and had conquered all his enemies in war, had been killed by a hart,14 a frightened beast which normally did not dare to look at the weakest man in his kingdom; and this inspired Turbervile to some philosophical reflections. It should be a warning to princes not to oppress a humble subject and goad him into standing in his own defence, and ‘like the worm, turn again when it is trodden so’. But Turbervile hastened to add that his words must not be interpreted as condemning hunting, for that would be contrary to his whole purpose in writing the book; ‘and again I should seem to argue against God’s ordinances, since it seemeth that such beasts have been created to the use of man and for his recreation’. Turbervile inserted in the book a poem, The Wofull wordes of the Hart to the Hunter, in which he expresses the hart’s point of view; the hart, after lamenting the cruelty of the hunter who pursues him and tears him with hounds, prays to God that men will exterminate each other in their wars, so that harts will then be able to live in peace.
The government thoroughly approved of the traditional English sport of archery, as it trained men to use the weapon which had won so many glorious victories in wars. Henry VIII was a very good archer, and regularly practised at the butts. When Wolsey’s gentleman usher, George Cavendish, who had been at Wolsey’s deathbed at Leicester, travelled to London to tell the King how the Cardinal had died, he found Henry shooting at the butts in the park at Hampton Court. Henry told Cavendish to wait until he had finished shooting, and then changed into his nightgown, and taking Cavendish into the palace through a private door, spoke with him alone about Wolsey’s last hours. When Sir George Douglas, the leader of the pro-English party in Scotland, had a secret meeting with Henry to receive his instructions, their talk took place in a lodge in Windsor Great Park when Henry was about to go shooting at the butts.
But from the very beginning of the Tudor Age, Parliament was worried about the decay of archery. An Act of 1487 declared that ‘the great and ancient defence of this realm hath stand by the archers and shooters in long bows’, but that the art ‘is now greatly left and fallen in decay’. The MPs thought that this was because of the excessive price of longbows, and enacted that no one should sell a longbow for more than 3s.4d. But by 1504 they had come to the conclusion that there was another reason why men were neglecting the art of shooting with the longbow; it was because of the popularity of the crossbow, which was being used by more and more people, and often in very improper ways, including the destruction of the King’s deer. So an Act was passed which made it illegal for anyone under the rank of a lord to shoot with a crossbow unless he owned land which brought him rents of 200 marks a year. This was followed by other statutes in 1512, 1515, 1534 and 1542, which made it an offence for anyone who did not own land worth £100 a year to possess a crossbow in his house or to carry one on the King’s highway; but this did not apply to anyone who lived within seven miles of the sea or the Scottish Border, or to any inhabitant of Northumberland, Durham, Westmorland or Cumberland, who were permitted to keep crossbows in their houses for defence ‘against thieves, Scots or other the King’s enemies’. Anyone who owned land worth over £100 a year was entitled to seize and confiscate a crossbow from those who were forbidden to have them.
But Parliament in 1512 believed that it was not only because of the crossbow that ‘archery and shooting in longbows is right little used but daily minisheth, decayeth and abateth more and more’; it was because people were playing tennis, bowls, and closh (skittles), and other illegal games. The laws against these games were to be more strictly enforced, and the owners of any premises where they were played were to be punished. Every man over seventeen and under sixty, except priests and High Court judges, was to keep a longbow and four arrows in his house at all times; and every boy between the ages of seven and seventeen was to be provided by his father or master with a bow and two arrows, so that he could learn to shoot. The mayors and JPs were to provide butts for archery practice in every town and place where they had existed in the past; and in order to ensure that longbows were available for poor people at reasonable prices, every bowmaker was to have two bows of elm for sale for every one bow of yew.
In 1542 Parliament passed a more extensive Act against unlawful games. It declared that the Act of 1512 was being evaded by ‘many subtle and inventative and crafty persons’ who were inventing new games, like shuffleboard (shove-ha’penny), to replace those which had been banned by the Act of 1512, and that people were playing these games instead of practising archery. The result was that the bowmakers, and the fletchers who made arrows, could not make a good living, and they were emigrating to Scotland and making bows and arrows there for the enemy. So it enacted that no one was permitted to allow these games to be played on his premises unless he obtained a licence from the JPs. No artisan, husbandman, labourer, fisherman, waterman or any servingman was to be allowed to play tennis, dice, cards, bowls, skittles, quoits or any other unlawful game, except at Christmas; and at Christmas they could only play them in their master’s house or in his presence. More penalties were imposed by an Act of 1555 against the owner of any premises where bowls, tennis, dice or any other unlawful games were played.
Another illegal game played by the lower classes was football, which had first been banned by a statute in Edward II’s reign in 1314. The object of the game was to put the ball through the opponents’ goalposts, which were often as far as two or three miles apart. There were no other rules; the ball could be kicked or thrown, or the players could pick it up and run with it; and they could be stopped by any means, by holding, punching, tripping, or tackling in any way. There was no limit to the numbers who could take part on either side, and often all the young men of the village would join in their team; sometimes even women took part. In many towns, a game of football was played in the streets on Shrove Tuesday. The match that was played every year in Chester was very ferocious until the authorities banned it in 1540 and insisted that there should be a race though the streets on Shrove Tuesday instead.
The game was very rough, and almost all the references to it, in books, letters and plays, are to someone being injured. The players were considered by the upper classes to be men of the lowest type. In Shakespeare’s King Lear, the Earl of Kent contemptuously calls Oswald a ‘base football player’. Sir Thomas Elyot, in The Boke named the Governour, condemned ‘football, wherein is nothing but beastly fury and extreme violence whereof proceedeth hurt, and consequently rancour and malice do remain with them that be wounded, wherefore it is to be put in perpetual silence’. In Robert Laneham’s description of the festivities at Kenilworth, when Leicester entertained Elizabeth I there in 1575, he mentions that one of the actors who took part in a pageant walked with a limp, because when he was young he had broken his leg playing football. In 1576 some football players were prosecuted at Middlesex Quarter Sessions for having taken part in a riotous football match between the
villages of Ruislip and Uxbridge; and in March 1581 a coroner’s inquest at South Mimms in Middlesex returned a verdict of murder against two men who had killed a member of the opposite team by a blow on the chest when tackling him during a football match on Evan’s Field at South Mimms.
But the other games which were forbidden to the common people were becoming very popular among noblemen and gentlemen. Many noblemen, like the King, had tennis courts and bowling alleys attached to their houses. Tennis became so associated with the King that when lawn tennis was invented in the nineteenth century, tennis became known as ‘real tennis’ or ‘royal tennis’. Henry VII played tennis at Windsor. When Charles V visited England in 1522, he and Henry VIII played tennis at Henry’s palace at Baynards Castle in London. They were partners in a doubles match against the Prince of Orange and the Marquis of Brandenburg, who had come to England with Charles, while the Earl of Devon and Lord Edmund Howard acted as ball boys. The game was abandoned as a draw after they had played eleven games. Henry VIII also played bowls, and on one occasion, at Abingdon, lost £100 in a game of bowls to his Scottish brother-in-law, the Earl of Angus.
Bowls was played by gentlemen, priests and university fellows. When Cranmer was in prison at Oxford in 1555, and the authorities were putting the greatest pressure on him to recant and repudiate his heresies before he was burned, they adopted the well-known technique of varying the hard and the soft approach. After he had been kept for many months in rigorous conditions in the common jail of Bocardo in Oxford, he was transferred to the custody of the Dean of the college of Christ Church. He was kindly treated, and allowed to mix with the fellows of the college and to play bowls on the college green. After a few weeks he was taken back to Bocardo and treated more harshly than before.