A Brief History of the Tudor Age

by Ridley, Jasper

  The consumer-protection legislation reached its height under Edward VI. An Act was passed in 1549 to protect consumers who suffered from woollen clothes which shrank in the wash. It specified the maximum amount by which any woollen garment which was offered for sale was allowed to shrink when wet. The sellers of cloth were required to state the length of the cloth sold, in a document which was to be sealed and attached to the cloth. The JPs in every town and village where cloth was made were to appoint overseers, who were granted powers to enter the house of any clothier to make sure that he was complying with the Act. Another Act in 1552 prescribed in greater detail the exact length and breadth of the various kinds of coloured and white cloths – of Long Worcesters and Short Worcesters made in Worcester and Coventry, of friezes made in Cardigan, Carmarthen and Pembroke, and of Manchester Cottons, which were not what we call cottons, but were a kind of woollen cloth. No one was to put any hair, flocks or yarn made of lamb’s wool into any cloth; if he did, he was to repay to the buyer of the cloth twice the sum which the buyer had paid for it. An official ‘Searcher of Cloth’ was to be appointed in every district, and no cloth could be sold unless the seal of the Searcher of Cloth was attached to it; if the Searcher of Cloth found that the cloth was badly made, he was to mark the cloth with the letter F to show that it was faulty.

  Parliament also tried to restrict the activities of persons who were called ‘regrators’ in the sixteenth century – those middlemen who bought goods to resell at a profit, thus raising the price which the consumer had ultimately to pay for them. An Act of 1552 enacted that no one was to buy wool unless he intended to use it to weave cloth, or for use in his own household, or to ship it to the Staple at Calais. If anyone who gathered wool from his own sheep did not sell it within a year, he could be compelled to sell it to any clothier who offered him the current market price in the neighbourhood. The Act caused hardship to the poor persons of Halifax; before the Act came into force, being too poor to own a horse, they walked three, four, five or six miles carrying wool on their heads and backs, in order to make a living by buying and reselling the wool. Parliament remedied their grievances by an Act of 1555. In view of the fact that the parish of Halifax was ‘planted in the great wastes and moors where the fertility of ground is not apt to bring forth any corn nor good grass, but in rare places’, and that the ‘inhabitants altogether do live by clothmaking’, they were permitted to buy and resell wool, as long as they resold it only in Halifax.

  A series of statutes tried to restrict the persons who could become weavers and the places where weaving could be carried on. An Act of 1552 which prevented anyone from weaving cloth unless he had been apprenticed to a weaver for seven years was repealed two years later, because of the objections of weavers who had never been apprentices but had worked at the trade for five or six years or had married weavers widows who had known how to make cloth for twenty years. The attempt to limit weaving to a few important towns in various parts of England was seriously weakened by a number of Acts which granted exemption from the provisions to Wales, the North of England, Cornwall, Suffolk and Kent, and the towns of Godalming in Surrey and of Bocking, West Bergholt, Dedham, Coggeshall, Boxstead and Leyton in Essex, and the villages along the River Stroud in Gloucestershire.

  From time to time, the clothiers successfully complained to Parliament that the legal requirements as to the quality of their cloths were making it uneconomic for them to continue production, and were leading to closure of businesses and unemployment in certain districts; but though Parliament thereupon reduced the standards a little, the principle of consumer protection continued to be enforced. An exception was made in the case of garments which were manufactured only for export, because the MPs accepted the argument of the clothiers that there was nothing wrong in selling shoddy goods to foreigners. Edward VI’s last Parliament in 1553 enacted that anyone who lived in Devon or Cornwall and made the cloths known as White Plain Straights and Pinned White Straights for export to Brittany might fill the cloths with hair, flocks, and yarn made of lamb’s wool, which had been prohibited in the case of all other cloths by the Act of 1552, as these goods were ‘but a base and coarse kind of clothes usually made for the use of poor people beyond the seas . . . for that in truth none of the same are worn or occupied within this realm’. Freed from all restrictions, the weavers in Devon and Cornwall proceeded to make doublets for Brittany which were filled with flocks, chalk and flour; but some of them reached more influential customers than the Brittany peasants. Elizabeth’s allies, the States of the Netherlands, complained, and so did some of her own subjects. So an Act was passed in 1601 which stated that as these doublets had been filled with ‘deceitful things’, and when put in water shrank ‘to the great dislike of foreign Princes’, the legal requirements as to quality were to apply to Plain White Straights and Pinned White Straights as well as to all other woollen garments.

  The restrictions imposed by law on the making and purchase of hats were chiefly designed to help the manufacturers of the woollen caps which were worn by men of the lower classes. An Act of Mary’s Parliament of 1553 enacted that any hat which was imported into the kingdom had to be sold at the port where it arrived, and made it an offence for anyone to buy more than twelve hats in any one transaction, thus discouraging foreign merchants from importing hats into England by forbidding sales in bulk. In 1556 an Act placed restrictions on the manufacture of felt hats in order to help the woollen capmakers; and no one under the rank of a knight or the son of a lord was allowed to wear a velvet hat or cap, or any hat or cap with a velvet covering.

  In 1571 Parliament, on the petition of the Fellowship and Company of Cappers, passed an Act which went further in regulating dress than any other Tudor statute. After stating that the manufacture of woollen caps gave employment to 8,000 people in London alone and to many workmen in twenty-six other towns,6 Parliament enacted that everyone over the age of six was to wear on their heads a woollen cap made in England with English wool, on every Sunday and holy day, except when they travelled out of the town or village where they lived, on pain of a fine of 3s.4d. for every Sunday or holy day on which they did not wear the cap. Masters, parents and guardians were liable to pay the fine if the cap was not worn by every servant and child who lived in their house. The Act did not apply to ‘noble personages’, to any lord, knight or gentleman who owned land worth twenty marks a year, and their heirs, to anyone who had held office as a warden of one of the livery companies of London, or to ‘maidens, ladies and gentlewomen’.

  It is unlikely that the average Englishman in the Tudor Age was either surprised or resentful at being compelled by law to wear a woollen cap on his head every Sunday.

  8

  FURNITURE AND FOOD

  THE GREAT ADVANCE in housebuilding in England at the end of the fifteenth century was not accompanied by any change in the furniture inside the houses. At the beginning of the Tudor Age Englishmen of all classes were still using the type of furniture which their ancestors had used throughout the Middle Ages. The poor man had a few simple wooden stools, perhaps one or two wooden chairs, a wooden table, a simple wooden bed, and perhaps a wooden chest; the chairs and tables often had three legs, as these were firmer on the uneven floors than those with four legs. The King, the nobility and the wealthy classes had many elaborately carved wooden chairs, tables, chests and beds, which were usually made of oak, but often of yew.

  The Renaissance led to new developments in carving and design of furniture in Italy and Flanders at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and by 1550 many Flemish craftsmen had been invited to England to improve the furniture at court and in the houses of the nobility; but they merely elaborated the quality of the design of the wooden furniture. The carvings on the great oak chairs, tables and chests, and on the headboards of beds, became much more elaborate, and the wooden table-legs were carved into complicated shapes. But it was only in the very last years of the Tudor Age, about 1600, that the first upholstered furniture and the first
chests-of-drawers appeared, very occasionally, in the house of a wealthy Englishman whose tastes were in advance of his contemporaries’; and they were not generally in use, even among the upper classes, until the reign of Charles II.

  The oak armchairs were not as uncomfortable as might be imagined by later generations who are used to the luxury of upholstered furniture. The shape of the chair was designed to provide the maximum relaxation for the body, though people today, who are not accustomed to it, experience some discomfort from the solid oak front below the seat which makes it impossible for the sitter to put his legs back under the seat, even to the slightest extent. The wooden seat of the chair was made softer by a cushion placed on it; in wealthy households, this might be a velvet cushion.

  Wealthy families had large four-poster beds, surrounded by curtains which, like the linen caps worn by the sleepers in the bed, helped keep them warm in the cold bedroom after the fire had gone out, or had burned low during the night. They could display their wealth and taste by having bed-curtains of rich material, headboards with elaborate carvings, and by the size of the bed. But large beds were not the privilege of the nobility and the rich. In less prosperous households, there would often be one large bed in which all the members of the family slept together, while Henry VIII and Wolsey slept alone in a bed which was nearly as large. Gentlemen often provided a large bed in which their servants and labourers slept together, and this practice continued until the end of the nineteenth century.

  One of these beds, ‘the great bed of Ware’, became famous because it was so much larger than any of the others. No one knows when it was made, though it has been dated as early as 1463 and as late as 1570. The later date is much more likely. It was for many years in the inn, the Saracen’s Head, at Ware, until it was moved to Rye House in the nineteenth century, and afterwards to the Victoria and Albert Museum in Kensington, where it can be seen today. It is 11 foot 1 inch long, 10 foot 81/2 inches wide, and 8 foot high, and has ornate carvings on the headboard and legs. Some historians have suggested that so impressive and costly a bed could not originally have been made for an inn, and must have been designed for one of the great houses in the vicinity, and later acquired by the inn. This may be so, but it was probably already in the Saracen’s Head when Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night in 1601, because Sir Toby Belch urges Sir Andrew Aguecheek to insert, in his challenge to Cesario, ‘as many lies as will lie in thy sheet of paper, although the sheet were big enough for the bed of Ware in England’; and Ben Jonson referred to it in his Silent Woman eight years later. Shakespeare and Jonson and their audiences are much more likely to have heard of it if it was not in a private house but in an inn on the Great North Road where many people had seen it, and perhaps slept in it, sharing it with other travellers.

  The walls of the rooms in poor men’s houses were made of plaster; in the houses of the wealthy classes, they were finely carved oak panelling. There were no pictures on the walls. At the beginning of the Tudor Age, painting was almost unknown in England, and though portrait painting was introduced by Flemish artists in the reign of Henry VIII, the idea of landscape painting did not develop in England until the eighteenth century. Instead, the walls, in wealthy houses, were hung with tapestries. When the Venetian ambassador, Guistiniani, visited Wolsey at Hampton Court on diplomatic business soon after his arrival in England in 1515, he was led through eight anterooms before he reached Wolsey’s presence, and saw in each of these rooms beautiful and expensive tapestries which were changed once a week and replaced by others equally magnificent. They depicted scenes from the Bible, with Esther, David and Solomon; from classical mythology, with Jupiter and Diana, Paris and Achilles, Jason and Hercules, and Helen of Troy; from the lives of Hannibal, Pompey and Julius Caesar; and from the medieval stories, The Romance of the Rose, and The Duke of Bry and the giant Orrible. On the borders of the tapestries, Wolsey’s coat-of-arms was much in evidence.

  There were mattresses and pillows on the beds, as there had been in the days of the Romans and at least in the houses of the wealthier classes throughout the Middle Ages. The inventories of Hampton Court show that Wolsey owned hundreds of mattresses and pillows; and humbler people usually had at least one mattress for their bed. These were often of very poor quality, and stuffed with material which was harmful to health; so in 1496 the Wardens of the Fellowship of the Craft of Upholsters within the City of London persuaded Parliament to stop the manufacture of featherbeds, bolsters and pillows made either of scalded feathers or dry puffed feathers, or of a mixture of flocks and feathers, ‘which is contagious for man’s body to be on’. They also wished to ban quilts, mattresses and cushions stuffed with horse hair, deer’s hair or goat’s hair, for ‘by the heat of man’s body the savours and taste is so abominable and contagious that many of the King’s subjects have thereby been destroyed’. The practice had also impoverished many people and discredited the craft of upholstery. Parliament duly enacted that all featherbeds, bolsters and pillows must be stuffed with either dry pulled feathers or with clean down, and nothing else, and all quilts, mattresses and cushions only with clean flocks. The poorest families could not afford to buy mattresses, or pillows, and made their own. They were exempted from the provisions of the Acts, which did not apply to mattresses, bolsters, pillows or cushions which were made, not for sale, but for use in the manufacturer’s own house.

  The wealthier classes at least had ironware in their houses – iron chests, iron lampholders, and iron firedogs and firebacks, often engraved with the coat-of-arms of the owner of the house. In the greatest houses, there was an ostentatious display of silver and gold plate. Guistiniani was as impressed as he was meant to be with Wolsey’s gold and silver at Hampton Court. Both he and the next Venetian ambassador estimated the value of all the plate in the house at 300,000 gold ducats, or £150,000 – which in terms of 1988 prices would be £75,000,000. Guistiniani wrote that the plate on view on the sideboard in the banqueting hall was alone worth £25,000, and that there was a cupboard in Wolsey’s private chamber which contained gold and silver plate valued at £30,000.

  The eating utensils of ordinary families were far simpler. The poorer classes ate off wooden plates; reasonably prosperous yeomen, like merchants and gentlemen, had pewter plates. The big demand for pewter dishes led to a surreptitious trade to which reputable pewterers and their guild objected. They complained to Henry VII that ‘many simple and evil disposed persons . . . daily go about this your realm from village, from town and from house to house, as well in woods and forests’, selling pewter and brass which had often been adulterated with other metals and had sometimes been stolen by thieves from their lawful owners. An Act of Parliament was therefore passed in 1504 which prohibited the sale of pewter anywhere except in fairs and markets; but it could take place at the buyer’s house if the buyer had expressly requested the seller to come to his house to sell it to him there.

  Every household in the country possessed at least one knife, which had nearly always been made in Sheffield in Yorkshire, where knives had been manufactured since the fourteenth century; but not even the greatest palaces had any eating forks, which were not known in England until a few years after the end of the Tudor Age. In every social class, meat was cut up with a knife and then placed in the mouth with the fingers. Spoons were used for soup and other dishes. The poorer families had wooden spoons, but for the rich, spoons gave another opportunity to display wealth and taste in silver. Silver spoons were made in various designs and fashions, which changed from one decade to another.

  Water, beer, ale and wine were drunk from goblets made of wood, pewter, silver or gold. Only very rich households could afford to have gold or silver, though an Act of Elizabeth I’s Parliament of 1576 fixed the maximum price of twenty-two carat gold at twelvepence per ounce, and of eleven ounce two pennyweight silver at twelvepence per pound. Drinking glasses were almost unknown in England before the fifteenth century, but by the beginning of the Tudor Age they were being manufactured in Venice on a lar
ge scale for export to the countries of Western Europe, including England. Henry VIII had a very large number of wineglasses which he had imported from Venice, and by his time it had become fashionable for the nobility and the wealthy to drink from Venetian glass.

  The manufacture of ‘Normandy glass’ for window panes had been taking place, on a small scale, since the thirteenth century at Chiddingfold in Sussex; but it was not till the beginning of Elizabeth I’s reign that a much finer glass of the Venetian type was made in England by Jean Carré, who had learned the art of glassmaking in Antwerp, but had come to England as a Protestant refugee from the persecution in the Netherlands. By 1567 he was operating two ‘glasshouses’ where he manufactured glass near Loxwood in Sussex, with a labour force composed of Huguenot refugees from Lorraine. Before he died in 1572 he had opened more glassworks near Alfold in Surrey. Enterprising Englishmen were soon following his example. By 1585 John Lennard, who was the Earl of Leicester’s tenant at Knole, had opened a glassworks at Sevenoaks, and by this time glass was being made throughout the Weald, at Kirdford, Wisborough Green, Petworth and Northiam in Sussex, and at Penshurst in Kent, as well as at Ewhurst and in the Guildford area in Surrey.