A Brief History of the Tudor Age

by Ridley, Jasper

  But in this area the glassworks had to compete with the ironmasters of the Weald for the wood and other fuel which were rapidly becoming in short supply; and Edward Henraye, who owned the glassworks at Petworth, had opened two new glassworks near Uttoxeter in Staffordshire. Before the end of the Tudor Age, glass factories were opened in Hampshire, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Nottinghamshire and Northumberland. But the ordinary household used glass only for their window panes. Drinking glasses were still used only by rich and fashionable families, and even at the end of the Tudor Age most of the mirrors used by the common people were made of steel, not glass.

  In the sixteenth century, people usually rose at 5 a.m. in the summer and at 6 a.m. in the winter. They sometimes attended prayers, or did a little work before breakfast, and after this first meal set about performing the main part of their daily duties. At about 11 a.m. they ate their main meal of the day, their dinner, a word which until the end of the nineteenth century always meant the midday meal. They then carried on with their work until they had supper at about 5 or 6 p.m., though artisans and labourers were required to work until after 7 p.m. When Parliament was in session, the lords and MPs began the day’s proceedings at 8 a.m., and only occasionally met again after dinner for a second session in the afternoon. Most people went to bed at about 9 p.m.

  The routine was different at Henry VIII’s court. The King’s pages rose before 7 a.m. to light his fire, but Henry normally did not rise and dress till about 7.30 a.m., though occasionally, when he wished to have a long day’s hunting, he rose as early as 4 a.m. He sometimes ate a meal in his bedchamber for breakfast, but his first real meal was dinner, which began at 10 a.m., or a little earlier. On ordinary days he had supper when he returned from hunting at 4 p.m.; but on holy days the meal times were adapted to fit in with the times of Mass and other court ceremonies. After supper, Henry read the State papers, and then stayed up till after midnight, watching masques, dancing, and gambling at cards and dice.

  In comparison with the lower classes in other European countries, ordinary Englishmen ate well during the Tudor Age. They lived on beef, mutton, capons and pigeons. They ate wheat bread and rye bread, butter, cheese, eggs and fish. When Hentzner visited England in 1598 he noticed that they ate more meat and less bread than the French, and had better table manners; that large quantities of oysters were on sale in London; and that they put a great deal of sugar in their drinks, which he thought was the reason why so many Englishmen and women, including the Queen, had black teeth.

  The English ate puddings, pastries and biscuits, and several kinds of fruit and vegetables – apples, pears, strawberries, cherries, damsons, peaches, oranges, figs, grapes, beans, peas, cabbages, leeks, carrots, turnips and parsnips; but potatoes were not known until the Spaniards found them in Peru and John Hawkins brought them back to England from the West Indies in 1563. When Sir Walter Raleigh sent an expedition in 1585 to what is now Virginia and North Carolina, his sailors returned with potatoes, and Raleigh then cultivated them on his estates at Youghal in Ireland.

  A great deal of honey was eaten, and as English honey had a reputation for being particularly good, it was exported in large quantities to France and other foreign countries. But unscrupulous producers and sellers sometimes adulterated the honey with other ingredients. It was partly in order to preserve the reputation of English honey abroad, as well as to protect the home consumer, that Parliament passed an Act in 1581 which also applied to the sale of bees’ wax. Every barrel of honey sold was to contain 32 wine gallons of honey, every kilderkin 16 wine gallons, and every firkin 8 wine gallons. The seller of honey had to brand the head of every barrel with the two letters of his Christian and surname,7 in letters of at least 1½ inches, so that he could be traced if the honey failed to comply with the requirements of the Act. If the filler of the barrel marked it with someone else’s initials, he was to pay a fine of £5 for each offence, of which half was to be paid to the Queen and half to anyone who sued for the money before the local JPs.

  The Englishman had a reputation throughout Europe for gluttony; it was said that overeating was the English vice, just as lust was the French vice and drunkenness the German vice. Some Englishmen became very fat, and were famous for being so. Henry VIII ate enormous meals, but as a young man he was slim, perhaps because he always took a great deal of physical exercise. By the time that he was forty-five he was suffering from painful ulcers in his leg which prevented him from riding or walking without the greatest difficulty; but though he ceased to take exercise, he ate as much as ever. He then became very fat. We know from his suit of armour in the Tower of London that in later years he was 54 inches around the waist.

  According to the story told by a seventeenth-century writer, a special machine was made, with pulleys, to lift Henry on to his horse and to carry him from room to room in his palaces. But he still liked the outdoor life which he had always enjoyed, and in the last winter before he died at the age of fifty-five he insisted on going out in the coldest weather, when most of his courtiers and servants would have preferred to stay indoors. Having been lifted on to his horse by the pulleys, he would sit there, wrapped up against the cold, watching his hawk pursue its prey, or a great killing of stags in an enclosure, though he had once chased stags for thirty miles a day.

  Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, was always portrayed by the illustrator of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs as a fat man. He began his career as one of Wolsey’s agents, and was with him at Cawood at the time of his arrest. He then entered the King’s service, and was sent by Henry to confront the Pope at the time of the repudiation of Papal supremacy. He distinguished himself by insulting the Pope in a stormy interview at Marseilles; but he was appointed Bishop of London just at the time when Henry intensified the persecution of Protestants under the Act of the Six Articles, and it was his duty to preside at the heresy trials in London, where the Protestants were most numerous, in the years after 1540. Under the Protestant government of Edward VI, Bonner was deprived of his bishopric and imprisoned in the Marshalsea for four years for resisting the measures in favour of the Reformation; but when he was released and reinstated as Bishop of London in Mary’s reign, he was once again in a position to persecute Protestants on an even greater scale than he had done under Henry VIII.

  The Protestants hated him more than any of their other persecutors. Foxe, John Knox and the other Protestant propaganda writers denounced him as ‘bloody Bonner’, and their successors were still calling him this in the seventeenth century. Although this was probably due above all to his position as Bishop of London, it was also partly because of his personality. He was rude and brutal to the prisoners whom he interrogated at their trials; but what seems to have particularly angered his victims was his coarse and jovial humour, which they thought was particularly out of place when he was condemning men and women to be burned. They were also disgusted by his fatness.

  When Elizabeth became Queen, Bonner went with the other bishops to greet her when she came from Hatfield to London; but she shrank from him in horror, and refused to allow him to kiss her hand. He opposed her decision to make England Protestant, and he was again deprived of his bishopric and imprisoned in the Marshalsea, where he died ten years later in 1569. He was so hated by the London Protestants that he had to be buried in secret to avoid a hostile demonstration during his funeral; and thirty years afterwards, when the Londoners saw an ugly, coarse and fat man in the street, they would say that he was Bonner.

  Bishop Bonner flogging a Protestant. From the original edition of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, 1563. Bonner was annoyed that the illustrator emphasized his fatness.

  He preserved his brutal sense of humour in adversity as he had in his hour of triumph. When someone showed him, in the Marshalsea, the picture in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs of him torturing a Protestant martyr, he commented: ‘A vengeance on the fool, how could he have got my picture drawn so right?’

  It was on Sundays and the holy days that the Englishman most indulged in overea
ting. Nearly every day in the year was a saint’s day, often named after obscure saints whose names are forgotten today. At the beginning of the Tudor Age people dated their letters, and kept a note of the days throughout the year, far more by the saints’ days than by the days of the month. They would sometimes date their letters ‘this third day of February’, ‘this ninth day of August’, or ‘this fifteenth day of November’; but until about 1550 they were more likely to date them ‘St Blaise’s Day’, ‘the eve of the feast of St Laurence’, and ‘the morrow after St Erkenwald’s Day’.

  Most of these saints’ days were ordinary working days, but the more important ones were holy days. People did not work on Sundays and on holy days – which is the origin of the modern word ‘holidays’ – but, after going to Mass, spent the day chiefly eating and drinking. There where several holy days in every month of the year, which from the thirteenth century to 1752 began in England on 25 March. Several of the most important were abolished during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI. After Mary reunited England to Rome in 1554, Cardinal Pole proclaimed that 30 November, the day on which the reunification took place, should be the Feast of the Reconciliation, to be celebrated as a holy day to all eternity; but it was only celebrated for four years.

  The Twelve Days of Christmas included Christmas Day, St Stephen’s Day, St John the Apostle’s Day, Childermas, and the lesser feast of St Thomas of Canterbury on 29 December, the day of his martyrdom in 1170; his greater feast was on 7 July, the anniversary of the erection of his tomb in 1220. The first of January was still called New Year’s Day, in memory of the time in the twelfth century when the calendar year had started on 1 January, and not on 25 March. It was the day on which people gave each other gifts; at court, the courtiers gave the most expensive gifts which they could afford to the King and to their superior in the hierarchy of State and Church, and noted with interest which counsellors and courtiers received the most expensive gifts from the King. The Twelve Days of Christmas ended with Twelfth Day on 6 January.

  There were fast days as well as holy days. The fast days, on which people had to eat fish and not meat, served three purposes: they fulfilled the religious duty of abstinence and self-abnegation; they conserved the supply of meat, which was particularly desirable during Lent in February and March, when stocks were low after the winter; and they helped the fishing industry, which the government wished to encourage. The fast days were every Friday and Saturday; every day throughout Lent and the four weeks of Advent before Christmas, except Sundays; and the eve of every holy day; but when the eve of a holy day fell on a Sunday, the fast was held on the Saturday.

  Apart from certain categories who were excused from fasting, such as the sick, and pregnant women, it was not very difficult for any individual to obtain a dispensation from the diocesan bishop, allowing him to break the fasting laws. Erasmus regularly obtained a dispensation from fasting, on the grounds that eating fish upset his stomach, as well as the dispensation which he was regularly granted allowing him to live outside his monastery and not to wear monkish garb. Erasmus’s statement about his stomach may or may not have been justified, but there is no doubt that many dispensations were improperly obtained by influence and by bribing officials.

  The Protestants objected to holy days and fast days, because there was nothing in the Bible which suggested that any day of the year, apart from the Sabbath Day, was any holier than any other, or that men should fast on Fridays, Saturdays or in Lent. They ate meat on the fast days, and were duly punished by the bishops’ courts for this defiance of the authority of the Church. The Catholics said that the Protestant arguments for refusing to fast were really an excuse for indulging in gluttony; the Protestants replied that they avoided gluttony on all the days of the year, as all good men ought to do, instead of making fast days an excuse for gluttony on the holy days.

  Henry VIII and his government strictly enforced the fasting laws, which Henry himself always observed, and any breach of the laws continued to be punished after the repudiation of Papal supremacy; but in 1537 one of the greatest of the holy days in England, the feast of St Thomas of Canterbury on 7 July, was abolished, along with the lesser feast day on the anniversary of his martyrdom on 29 December. This was followed by a great propaganda campaign against Becket. Pilgrims had come from all over England and Western Europe to lay their gifts on St Thomas’s tomb, in memory of his martyrdom at the hands of the impious King, Henry II, and celebrating the triumph of the Church in forcing Henry II to do penance at his tomb. But Henry VIII ordered the clergy to denounce Becket in the pulpits as a traitor who had defied the authority of his King at the instigation of a foreign Pope. After a commission of inquiry had officially condemned Becket as a traitor, his bones were dug up and burned, his shrine in Canterbury Cathedral closed, and the treasures at his tomb forfeited to the King under the usual treason laws. It took twenty carts to carry the treasures from Canterbury to London. Nothing that Henry had done had so outraged the Pope’s supporters; it persuaded the Pope at last to pronounce the sentence of excommunication against Henry, which he had hitherto refrained from doing.

  On 6 July 1537 Cranmer held a banquet in Canterbury at which he publicly ate meat, to show that it was no longer the eve of a holy day. His action attracted much attention and aroused great indignation in many quarters. His critics were particularly shocked that an Archbishop of Canterbury should so publicly repudiate his saintly predecessor in the see.

  In ordinary circumstances, Cranmer believed in fasting and in ecclesiastical abstinence. In 1542 he tried to restrain the gluttony of the clergy by issuing an order in the Convocation of Canterbury restricting the number of dishes which could be eaten at a meal. Archbishops were only to be served with six different dishes of meat or fish, and with four different dishes as a second course. Bishops were to have only five dishes of meat or fish, and three as a second course; archdeacons and deans, four of meat and fish, and two as a second course; and the lower clergy three of meat or fish, and two as a second course – that is to say, only two out of, for example, custard, tart, fritters, cheese, apples or pears. Archbishops were only to be allowed three partridges in one dish, and all lower ranks of the clergy, including bishops, only two; but archbishops were allowed to eat six blackbirds in one dish, bishops four blackbirds, and the clergy below the rank of bishop three blackbirds. The order aroused so much opposition, and was so widely ignored, that it proved impossible to enforce, and it was withdrawn after a few months.

  Although Cranmer allowed Archbishop Edward Lee of York and himself the privilege of eating more than any of his bishops or lower clergy, he did not always take advantage of the order. In the evenings, he would often sit at the supper table wearing white gloves to show that he was fasting, and eating nothing.

  During the drive against the Protestants which followed the Act of the Six Articles and the fall of Cromwell, orders were issued for a strict enforcement of the fasting laws. In London, Bonner and the Lord Mayor sentenced several Protestants to short terms of imprisonment for eating meat on fast days. When the persecution of the Protestants was intensified in 1543, the authorities in London sent officers to enter the people’s houses at dinner time to see what they were eating.

  In the reign of Edward VI, one of the first problems with which the government of Somerset and Cranmer had to deal when they introduced the Reformation was the Protestant demand for the abolition of fasting during Lent. Gardiner wrote to Somerset to protest. ‘Every country hath his peculiar inclination to naughtiness,’ he explained, ‘England and Germany to the belly, the one in liquor, the other in meat; France a little beneath the belly; Italy to vanity and pleasures devised; and let an English belly have a further advancement, and nothing can stay it.’

  Somerset and Cranmer decided to suppress fast days in theory but to continue them in practice. ‘An Act for abstinence from flesh’ was passed in 1549. It declared that although no day or food was holier than any other, nevertheless as ‘due and godly abstinence is a mea
n to virtue and to subdue men’s bodies to their soul and spirit, and considering also that fishers and men using the trade of living by fishing in the sea may thereby the rather be set on work, and that by eating of fish, much flesh shall be saved and increased’, it was hereby enacted that no one should eat meat on any Friday or Saturday, in Lent, or on any day which had hitherto been a fast day, except on abrogated holy days. The Act did not apply to the sick, to pregnant women or to soldiers in any garrison whose commander had authorized them to eat meat, or to any persons who obtained a licence from the King to do so. Anyone who broke this law was to be punished by a fine of ten shillings and ten days’ imprisonment, during which time he was not to be given any meat. For the second and subsequent offences, the penalty was increased to a fine of twenty shillings and twenty days’ imprisonment without meat. The Act then repealed all other laws enforcing fasting. This meant that the ban applied only to eating meat, and not the ‘white meats’ of butter, cheese and eggs. An Act of 1552 abolished a number of holy days, including Corpus Christi Day and All Souls’ Day, but retained most of them; and though many fast days were abolished, the prohibition on the eating of meat was to continue on all the days on which it was formerly banned.

  Under Mary, all the old holy days and fast days, and the fasting laws of the Catholic Church, were reintroduced; but the laws of Edward VI were re-enacted under Elizabeth I. In the statutes passed by her Parliaments, the days on which meat was prohibited were called ‘fish days’, not ‘fast days’.