A Brief History of the Tudor Age

by Ridley, Jasper

  The most common cure for many diseases was blood-letting, which was adopted on religious as well as on medical grounds. Not only did physicians believe that diseases could be cured by getting rid of bad blood – a doctrine which had been duly approved by Galen – but monks believed that a man could rid himself of his sins by ejecting the evil ingredients in his blood. This was probably the origin of the occupation of barber-surgeon. It seems strange in the twentieth century to combine the professions of a surgeon and a hairdresser; but barbers were regularly employed in monasteries to cut the hair and shave the heads of the monks in order to give them a clerical tonsure, and on these occasions the monks would often ask the barber to bleed them so as to get rid of their sins with the bad blood. Bleeding was carried out either by venupuncture, from a vein, or by placing leeches on the naked body of the patient.

  The distinction between physicians and barber-surgeons, which in a very different form still exists today between physicians and surgeons, derived front the intellectual approach of the physicians of the Tudor Age. The physicians did, of course, take personal care of their patients; but as almost the only cures which they could suggest were virtuous living and good diet, their approach was largely theoretical. They therefore spent much more time writing books than attending to patients, when they were not studying Greek, or performing the ecclesiastical and diplomatic duties which they so often combined with their medical practice. The barber-surgeons were not intellectuals, but practical men, who, without knowing Greek, or ever writing, or even reading, a book, set fractures and healed wounds in the traditional way which they had been taught by their predecessors and had picked up by practical experience. Their services were highly valued, particularly by the army in wartime, but they were not considered to be the social equals of the physicians.

  The barber-surgeons were forced to carry out their surgical operations with methods which horrify those of us who are fortunate enough to live in the twentieth century. They pulled out teeth with tongs, straightened fractures by sheer physical strength, and amputated legs and arms, in all cases without any kind of anaesthetic, while the patient was given a good dose of alcohol and was held down by the surgeon’s assistants. Wounds were cauterized by applying a burning iron or boiling oil to the wound. English surgeons in the Tudor Age continued to apply this method to the wounds of soldiers, or to criminals who had had a hand or an ear cut off as a judicial punishment, for more than fifty years after the great French surgeon, Amboise Paré – who wrote his books on surgery in French because he could not speak Latin – had discovered, to his surprise, during the French campaign in Italy in 1536, that the wounded soldiers recovered more quickly when he had no instruments available with which to cauterize their wounds, and therefore merely washed and bandaged them.

  Child delivery was carried out by midwives, who were trained and supervised by surgeons. Babies were sometimes delivered by Caesarean operations. This was widely believed to have occurred when Jane Seymour gave birth to Edward VI. The popular ballad ‘The Death of Queen Jane’ was probably being sung very soon afterwards, though the earliest written record of it dates from the seventeenth century. In the song, Jane says to the surgeon: ‘Rip open my two sides, and save my baby’; but in fact Edward VI was almost certainly born by natural process, and Jane died twelve days later from septicaemia, like so many other mothers during the Tudor Age.

  In the reign of Henry VIII, steps were taken to control the practice of medicine by both physicians and surgeons. Thanks to Linacre’s influence with the King, an Act of Parliament was passed in 1512 which forbade anyone to practise as either a physician or a surgeon within seven miles of the city of London without a licence from the Bishop of London or the Dean of St Paul’s, which was only to be granted after the applicant had been examined by four doctors of physic. It was also forbidden to practise as a physician or surgeon outside the London area without a licence from the diocesan bishop, but this did not apply to graduates of Oxford or Cambridge Universities. In 1540 the authority of the College of Physicians was extended over apothecaries; no apothecary was permitted to sell any drug which had not been approved by four members of the Fellowship of Physicians, on pain of a fine of a hundred shillings for each offence.

  It was also in 1540 that an apparently contradictory statute was passed which on the one hand united the Company of Barbers and the Company of Surgeons in the Company of Barber-Surgeons, but also for the first time separated the two occupations. Parliament was worried because barber-surgeons sometimes caught ‘pestilence, great pox [syphilis] and such other contagious infections’ from their patients, and then passed on the infection to their customers when they shaved them and washed their hair. So the statute enacted that no barber could practise as a surgeon, and no surgeon could practise as a barber. All surgeons practising within a mile of the city of London were required to display a sign in the street outside their surgeries so that the public should know where to find them. Surgeons were to be exempt from the obligation to wear armour when serving in the army in wartime. The Company of Barber-Surgeons was to be allowed to have four bodies of executed criminals every year for them to dissect for the study of anatomy, which had been revived at the beginning of the sixteenth century under the inspiration of Leonardo da Vinci. The Act was to be enforced by four Masters or Governors of the Company of Barber-Surgeons, of whom two were to be surgeons and two were to be barbers.

  But, as so often with Tudor legislation, there were lobbies and counter-lobbies at work to influence Parliament, and a statute which proclaimed the need to prevent unskilled practitioners from taking advantage of the public and lowering professional standards was often followed by another statute which denounced the governing body of a profession for furthering its professional interests to the detriment of the public welfare. The Acts of 1512 and 1540 were followed by a statute of 1545, which accused the Company of Barber-Surgeons of ‘minding only their own lucres and not having the profit or ease of the diseased or patient’ in mind. The surgeons had ‘sued, troubled and vexed divers honest persons, as well men as women, whom God hath endued with the knowledge of the nature, kind and operation of certain herbs, roots and waters’, and who had used these herbs to cure sore breasts in women, a pin or web in the eye, corns on the hands, burns, sore mouths, stone, or other ailments, although these herbalists had taken no remuneration for their efforts and had helped poor people ‘only for neighbourhood and God’s sake of pity and charity’. This was contrasted with the attitude of the surgeons, for ‘it is now well known that surgeons admitted will do no cure to any person but where they shall know to be rewarded with a greater sum or reward than the cure extendeth unto; for in case they would minister their cunning to sore people unrewarded, there should not so many rot and perish to death for lack of help of surgery as daily do’. After more denunciations of the iniquity and incompetence of surgeons, the Act authorized all persons with experience of herbal cures, or of drinks which would remedy the stone, to administer them to the poor without being harassed by the surgeons.

  It was fortunate for the inhabitants of London that the Act of 1545 made it possible for these herbalists to help them, for they were indeed suffering and dying from neglect; but Parliament, in blaming the greed of the surgeons, had not dared to mention the true cause. The suppression of the monasteries and religious establishments had harmed hospitals as much as grammar schools. In 1545 Henry VIII suppressed chantries, hospitals and mental institutions which had been founded by charitable benefactors; he did this ostensibly for religious reasons, but really as an excuse to raise money to pay for his war against France. The sick and the mentally ill were turned out of the hospitals and left to roam the streets, unless they were conscripted into the army, or helped by the charity of philanthropists. As in the case of schools, the harm was slightly mitigated by the more public-spirited members of the Privy Council and the leading bishops, especially after Henry’s death, though the seizure of religious property continued in the reign of Edward VI
.

  In November 1552 Nicholas Ridley, the Bishop of London, wrote to Sir William Cecil, the Secretary of State, about the plight of the homeless in London.

  Good Master Cecil, I must be a suitor to you, in our good Master Christ’s cause; I beseech you be good to him. The matter is, Sir, alas, he hath lain too long abroad, as you know, without lodging, in the streets of London, both hungry, naked and cold. Now, thanks be to Almighty God, the citizens are willing to refresh him, and to give him both meat and drink, clothing and firing; but alas, Sir, they lack lodging for him. For in some one house I dare say they are fain to lodge three families under one roof.

  Ridley and the Lord Mayor of London, Sir George Barnes, persuaded Edward VI to open two hospitals in London, St Thomas’s in Southwark and St Bartholomew’s in Smithfield; to give his empty palace of Bridewell as a house of correction for vagabonds and harlots; and to open Christ’s Hospital as a grammar school. A number of grammar schools in other parts of England were founded in the reign of Edward VI, though there is some truth in Professor R.H. Tawney’s statement that ‘King Edward VI’s Grammar Schools are the schools which King Edward VI did not destroy’; and the physician and historian, Sir Arthur MacNalty, has estimated that it took 250 years before the hospital accommodation in London was restored to the position which existed before Henry VIII’s expropriations in 1545.

  11

  SHIPS AND VOYAGES

  IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY, the English were protected by their navy from the full impact of continental wars. The Tudor Age began with a successful foreign invasion of England, when Henry Tudor led his French, Breton and Scottish soldiers to victory at Bosworth; and England was threatened by invasion on several occasions during the next hundred years. Perkin Warbeck on two occasions landed in England with a foreign force. The Scots invaded the North of England in 1497, 1513 and 1542. The French burned Brighton in 1514 and Seaford in 1545. There was a false invasion scare in 1539, and two very real invasion threats in 1545 and 1588. But on every occasion the danger passed; the invaders were either defeated, or withdrew before they were driven out. The chain of fortresses which Henry VIII built along the south coast from Deal and Walmer to Hurst and Portland were never put to the test, because the English navy always held the mastery of the ‘Narrow Seas’ (the Straits of Dover) and the Channel, as it had done since the days of Edward III in the fourteenth century.

  The English in the Tudor Age travelled a great deal by water, both on the rivers and at sea. There were obvious advantages in this, when the roads were so bad and slow. In London, people used the barges to cross the Thames, as there were no bridges between London Bridge and Kingston; and it was easier to go from Greenwich or Westminster to Richmond and Hampton Court by barge than by horse overland. The wealthier people had their private barges and their private stairs and landing places; the ordinary Londoner travelled by public barge. This was not always satisfactory. Barges were sometimes unsafe, and watermen inexperienced; and the authorities were a little suspicious of those individualists who did not wish to serve a master, but preferred to be self-employed as watermen, especially as they often went into hiding to avoid being pressed into service in the navy in wartime.

  Philip and Mary’s Parliament passed an Act in 1555 to control watermen. The mayor and Aldermen of London, at their first meeting every year, were to appoint eight Overseers and Rulers of all the Wherrymen and Watermen who rowed on the River of Thames between Gravesend and Windsor. In any barge with two oarsmen, at least one of them had to have a certificate from the Overseers that he was ‘a sufficient and able waterman’; and no unmarried man who was neither the master of a household nor employed by some master was to row for hire on this stretch of the river unless he had been apprenticed to a waterman for at least one year. Every barge carrying passengers for hire had to be at least 22½ feet long and 4¼ feet broad in the midship, and be able to carry safely two passengers sitting on either side; and no barge could be used to carry passengers unless it had been inspected by the Overseers and Rulers, who were also required to fix the fares which the watermen were entitled to charge for the various stages between Gravesend and Windsor. A waterman who failed to comply with these requirements could be fined, imprisoned and have his barge forfeited.

  Barges also operated on the other major rivers; and the government encouraged the development of new inland waterways. The most ambitious project, which was begun in 1571, was to build a new river so ‘that the River of Lee otherwise called Ware River might be brought within the land to the north part of the said city of London’. The Lord Mayor of London and the sheriffs and JPs of Middlesex, Essex and Hertfordshire were to have power to requisition land up to 60 feet on both sides of the new river, and were to appoint sixteen commissioners, four from London, four from Middlesex, four from Essex and four from Hertfordshire, to supervise the construction of the new river, along which all the Queen’s subjects were to have the right to travel. But the commissioners could not raise the necessary money, and almost nothing was done for forty years, until they sold their rights in 1609 to an enterprising businessman in the City of London, Hugh Myddelton. He developed the new river, not for navigation, but to improve London’s water supply. The New River, retaining its original name, continues to provide drinking water for Londoners in 1988.

  The Tudor Parliaments planned other ventures to create new waterways and conduits, passing Acts to dredge, and keep clear for navigation, the Thames, the Severn, and the ‘River of Exeter’, and to bring water to Gloucester, Poole and Plymouth.12 The efforts of Sir William Bowyer, the Lord Mayor of London, to bring water to the city from ‘divers great and plentiful springs at Hampstead Heath, Marylebone, Hackney, Muswell Hill’ and other places within five miles of London, culminated in an Act of Parliament of 1543; and a plan was sanctioned by Parliament in 1585 to build a harbour on the sea at Chichester and a canal one and a half miles long to link it to the city of Chichester. In all these cases, the authorities who were appointed to administer the projects were given power to acquire the necessary land by compulsory purchase, with reasonable compensation to be paid to the landowners.

  Travel by sea was always uncertain and risky for, apart from the danger from pirates, the sailors and travellers were at the mercy of the winds until steamships replaced sailing ships in the nineteenth century. With a favourable wind, travel by sea could be faster than by road; but the sailing ships could be delayed for many days by contrary winds or by absence of wind. When Henry VIII and his army crossed the Narrow Seas to launch an invasion of France from Calais in 1513, the 300 ships sailed from Dover at 4 p.m. on 30 June, on a cloudless summer day, and arrived at Calais at 7 p.m.; but Gardiner and Edward Fox had a very different experience when they made the same crossing in February 1528, having been sent by Wolsey on an important, urgent and arduous winter’s journey to Orvieto in order to persuade the Pope to grant Henry VIII an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.

  Gardiner and Fox set out from Westminster and reached Dover late in the evening of Tuesday 11 February. They sailed for Calais next morning; but when they were half-way across, the wind turned against them, and they were forced to return to Dover. They sailed again on the Thursday morning, but were again blown back, and waited at Dover for another thirty-six hours until they seized their opportunity of a favourable wind and sailed at 2 a.m. on the Saturday morning. But when they were in mid-Channel, the wind dropped completely, and they stayed there becalmed, or drifting very slowly, all day Saturday and half of Saturday night, until at 2 a.m. on Sunday they found that they were within four miles of Calais. Then a tremendous tempest arose, the greatest that the mariners had ever seen. The ship’s captain decided to anchor, but this proved to be impossible, and they were driven by the gale on to the coast of Flanders, though for a long time they were unable to land. Eventually Gardiner and Fox and two of their servants managed to land in the ship’s boat, within a quarter of a mile of Gravelines, leaving their other servants and the ship’s crew on board th
e ship, which was blown into Dunkirk harbour and badly damaged in entering the port. Gardiner and Fox had been for two days and two nights without food and had been very seasick; and their horses, when they were eventually landed from the ship at Dunkirk, were too ill to travel; but Gardiner and Fox managed to hire other horses in Gravelines and rode to Calais, where they arrived at 8 p.m. on Sunday, four and a half days after they had first sailed from Dover.

  The winter gales caused the greatest difficulties, and changed the course of history in December 1559 and January 1560 when Elizabeth I sent a fleet to Scotland to help the Scottish Protestant revolutionaries, while the government of the Duke of Guise in France wished to send reinforcements for the French garrison that was holding Leith for Mary Queen of Scots and her mother, Mary of Guise. Elizabeth’s sea-captain, William Winter, sailed with fourteen ships to the Forth, leaving Gillingham at 9 a.m. on 27 December. He arrived off Harwich at 3.30 that afternoon, and next morning sailed at 10 a.m. and anchored in Yarmouth Roads at 4 p.m.; but then the wind changed, and he waited off Yarmouth for a week, where his ships were badly battered by the gale. Winter decided to return to Harwich to have some of them repaired; but the winds made it impossible for them to get further south than Dunwich, and after staying at sea for two days and nights they were back at Yarmouth on 13 January. Next day they sailed north, but when they reached Flamborough Head after a nineteen-hour journey they were driven back to the Humber, and could not get north of Flamborough Head until 5 p.m. on 16 January. There they encountered a tempest. They lost all their boats and some of the ships were scattered; but the rest of the ships managed to continue their journey and reached Bamborough Castle at 4 p.m. on 18 January and Eyemouth at 11 a.m. on 20 January.