The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England

by Mortimer, Ian

Say your morning prayers and desire God to bless you.16

  But what about the rest of the body, you may wonder? What about the schoolboy’s feet? What about his hair? Francis’s bedchamber must smell like a miasma all on its own. This is where all that linen underclothing comes in useful: linen absorbs the moisture of the body and soaks up the sweat. People therefore ‘wash’ in linen, rubbing the skin with linen towels and changing their shirts every day. In the modern world we are fixated with washing in soap and water, but there are many other ways to remove dirt. The Romans used olive oil and a strigil. In the late sixteenth century, when water is scarce and liable to carry infection, it makes sense to clean your body with something else – like linen. Hence the importance of having access to a good laundress: a respectable family will want to have clean linen every day – towels as well as shirts, smocks, ruffs, hose and socks.17

  Linen is also used for cleaning hair. Lady Ri-Melaine asks for her rubbers (linen towels) to be warmed by the fire prior to having her hair rubbed clean with them. A more thorough hair washing can be done at a basin filled with hot water and lye. Of course, not everyone does this. ‘Some cherish their bushes of hair with much combing and washing in lye,’ writes William Horman, implying that others do not. Christopher Sly has his ‘foul head balmed in warm distilled waters’ to convince him that he is a lord in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew.

  If you have a bathtub, servants and enough firewood and reliable water, you might bathe as often as you like. However, as that list of conditions suggests, most people do not immerse themselves very often. In one of the most famous quotations of the period, the Venetian ambassador writes home with the news that Queen Elizabeth has a bath every month ‘whether she needs it or not’.18 People have sniggeringly presumed from this that the queen is unclean while in fact it denotes nothing of the sort. Baths are normally taken for medicinal purposes, not for cleaning the body, so the Venetian ambassador is simply reporting that Elizabeth bathes regularly even if she is not ill. You can be confident that Elizabeth washes every day with linen towels, washes her face and hands each morning and night, and cleans her hands with water before and after every meal. She is known to be fussy about her health. She travels with her own portable bath and has bathing facilities in all her palaces, so it is likely that she actually has a bath more than once a month. At Whitehall her bathroom has water pouring from oyster shells; at Windsor she has a bathroom panelled with large mirrors.19 Such luxury baths are fragranced with herbs in the water and plentiful amounts of cloth are obtained to line the bathtub. Sponges are used to sit on and to wipe the body. If you are ever in the queen’s presence, you will not smell her body but her perfume.

  The less wealthy have a bath as and when the need justifies the risk and the expense. Babies are regularly bathed because small bathtubs are easy to prepare.20 Londoners working in filthy trades, such as latrine cleaners, normally go for a swim in the Thames after they have finished their work. Labourers in the countryside often choose to do the same in local ponds and rivers. Thomas Staple, John Joplyn and George Lee are martyrs to the cause of personal cleanliness as all three men drown while washing themselves in ponds and rivers in Kent, Leicestershire and Cambridgeshire in the summer of 1558.21 In 1571 the vice-chancellor of Cambridge University forbids students from going into pools and rivers ‘whether to swim or to wash’. But prohibition is merely encouragement to some. Everard Digby, a fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, publishes the first treatise on swimming, De Arte Natandi, in 1587. It is abridged and translated into English by Christopher Middleton in 1595, providing simple instructions for swimming safely, cheaply and healthily.

  Just as people believe they can infect themselves by allowing water to enter the pores of their skin, so too they believe they can cure themselves of certain afflictions in the same way. For this reason some people take a bath not to clean themselves, but for medical reasons. William Bullein writes most approvingly on the subject in The Government of Health (1558):

  There is also baths and sweating in hot houses for the pocks, scurvy, scabs, haemorrhoids [and] piles, which hot houses have the virtue of helping the said diseases … The best bathing is in a great vessel or a little close place with the evaporation of divers sweet herbs well sodden in water, which have virtue to open the pores softly, letting out feeble and gross vapours which lieth between the skin and the flesh. This kind of bathing is good in the time of pestilence [plague] or quartan fever; at the end of the bath it is good to anoint the body with some sweet oil to mollify and make soft the sinews. And thus to conclude of bathing, it is very wholesome [as long as] it be not done upon an empty stomach.22

  As Bullein notes, not all baths involve water. There is a long if not widespread tradition of dry and moist baths in England, which work by making the patient sweat. In 1600 an entrepreneur starts advertising a ‘New kind of artificial bathes lately invented’. This contraption is a leather-covered box eighteen feet in circumference, which can be delivered to your house. With half an hour’s preparation you can use it to wash yourself in the following four ways:

  First a dry airy heat warming the cold moist air and preparing the body for sweat by a clean fire in one side;

  Secondly, a moist vaporous heat by a sweet boiling perfume;

  Thirdly a dry vaporous heat by a sweet boiling perfume;

  Fourthly, and lastly but chiefly, a moist heat by water, milk, oil or any other liquor, simple or compound, which commeth at pleasure from all parts powering downwards, flying upwards, sprinkling round about with many trickling streams like strong showers of rain by a continual circular motion, and therefore penetrating and working more powerfully upon all parts of the body, except the head, which is only free for the benefit of fresh air; so covertly that neither the party bathed nor the attendants in the chamber can either see, hear or well perceive, how, whence, or by what direct means the warm water or liquor cometh and goeth with such a manifold distribution and speedy conveyance.23

  It sounds a bit like being trapped in an oversized dishwasher. As for showering in hot milk or oil, I’ll leave you to guess whether this is primarily for health or beauty.

  ORAL HYGIENE

  The bodily odour that Elizabethans tend to remark on most is the breath. You will recall Hugh Plat’s statement that his pomander mixture will make you smell as sweet as any lady’s dog, ‘provided your breath be not too valiant’. You might also know the sonnet by Shakespeare, ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun …’ in which he emphasises the corporeal and earthy character of her body; he does not mention her bodily smell, only ‘the breath that from my mistress reeks’. Indeed, Shakespeare often mentions smelly breath: ‘his breath stinks with eating toasted cheese,’ says Smith in The Second Part of King Henry VI, and in King John there is the ‘black contagious breath’ of night. But such things are not to be marvelled at, for cleaning the teeth and mouth is a difficult business in Elizabethan England. Most people are missing one or two teeth and suffer from severe dental caries.24 Even the queen’s teeth are yellow in the early part of her reign and they go completely black in her old age. Interestingly, a German observer states categorically that the reason for Elizabeth’s bad teeth is the English propensity to eat too much sugar, so the main cause of tooth decay is known.25

  What can you do to clean your teeth and freshen your breath? Try picking your teeth with a toothpick made of a piece of quill or wood: this will help prevent decay and stops the rotting food caught between your teeth from making your breath smell. Not brushing your teeth results in the build-up of plaque, so remove this with a ‘tooth cloth’ (a length of wet linen).26 Boorde recommends washing the teeth every day with water and rock alum. For freshening the breath you could chew spices such as cumin seeds or aniseed. Or you could use a dentifrice (tooth powder) such as the following:

  First in the morning eat or swallow two or three cloves and keep between the gums and the cheeks two cloves, or else … take an ounce of savoury, half an ounce of galingale, a
quarter ounce of the wood of aloes, make powder of this, and eat or drink a portion in the morning and a little after dinner, and as much to bedward.27

  Some surgeons and apothecaries might offer you ‘tooth blanch’ to whiten your teeth, made from powdered cuttlefish bone.28 After rubbing your teeth with the powder, wash your mouth out with white wine and ‘spirit of vitriol’ (sulphuric acid) and rub your teeth with a tooth cloth. An alternative is mouthwash. John Partridge’s recipe is simply rosemary flowers boiled in water.29 William Vaughan claims that his recipe is better than a thousand dentifrices:

  Take half a glass full of vinegar and as much of the water of the mastic tree (if it may easily be gotten), or rosemary, myrrh, mastic, bole Armoniac, dragon’s herb, rock alum, of each of them an ounce; of fine cinnamon half an ounce and of fountain water three glassfuls. Mingle all well together and let it boil with a small fire, adding to it half a pound of honey and taking away the scum of it. Then put in a little benzoin and when it hath sodden a quarter of an hour, take it from the fire and keep it in a clean bottle and wash your teeth therewithal as well before meat as after. If you hold some of it in your mouth a little while it doth much good to the head, and sweeteneth the breath.30

  If all else fails and the toothache drives you mad, you have three courses of action. The first, most civilised one is to go to a tooth-drawer, who will take the offending tooth out using a special lever called a pelican. This has a hook, which the tooth-drawer places on the tongue side of the tooth, a bolster on the outer edge of the tooth and a handle with which he levers it out.31 Alternatively you could ask a surgeon to perform the task. The third option is to ask the local blacksmith, who will remove it with his pliers for a modest fee.

  Illness

  The Elizabethan understanding of why people get ill, outlined at the start of this chapter, will make it difficult for you to accept a physician’s diagnosis of your ailment. If the nature of your problem is unclear, the physician will want to know the time you started to notice the symptoms. Some physicians will calculate the position of the stars at the moment that your humours went out of balance. Most will want to know what you have been eating, in order to see whether food might be the cause. All of them will want to have a good look at your urine. Sixteen pages of Andrew Boorde’s Breviary of Helthe are devoted to interpreting the health of the body by the colour, substance and clarity of the patient’s urine, so a urine that ‘is ruddy, like unto gold, doth signify a beginning of some sickness engendered in the liver and the stomach, and if it be thin in substance it doth signify abundance of phlegm, which will engender some kinds of fevers’.32 Do not be surprised, therefore, if in response to your request for medical help, a physician sends a glass urinal for you to fill. In fact, unless you are rich, most would prefer to see your urine than you in person. For the sake of their dignity, most physicians are reluctant to get too close to their sick patients.

  There is an added complication in that it is not just sixteenth-century medical assumptions that will be wrong; your own interpretation of your symptoms may be equally wayward. Elizabethan people suffer from some afflictions that no longer exist in modern England. Plague is the obvious example, but it is by no means the only one. Sweating sickness kills tens of thousands of people on its first appearance in 1485 and periodically thereafter. It is a terrifying disease because sufferers die within hours. It doesn’t return after a particularly bad outbreak in 1556, but people do not know whether it has gone for good; they still fear it, and it continues to be part of the medical landscape for many years. Other diseases have not disappeared, but have changed their character and may even have different symptoms: syphilis is a good example (discussed below). For this reason, the strangeness of the Elizabethan medical landscape is like the strangeness of the actual landscape: you will recognise the lines of distant hills, and perhaps the curve of a great river; but apart from the largest, most obvious features, very little will be familiar.

  Perhaps the most difficult thing to come to terms with is the scale of death. Influenza, for example, is an affliction which you no doubt have come across. However, you have never encountered anything like Elizabethan flu. It arrives in December 1557 and lasts for eighteen months. In the ten-month period August 1558 to May 1559 the annual death rate almost trebles to 7.2 per cent (normally it is 2.5 per cent).33 More than 150,000 people die from it – 5 per cent of the population. This is proportionally much worse than the great influenza pandemic of 1918–19 (0.53 per cent mortality).34 Another familiar disease is malaria, which Elizabethans refer to as ague or fever. You might associate this with more tropical countries of the modern world, but in marshy areas in sixteenth-century England, such as the Lincolnshire and the Cambridgeshire Fens, the Norfolk Broads and Romney Marsh in Kent, it kills thousands. No one suspects that it has anything to do with mosquitoes; rather people believe it is the corrupted air arising from the low-lying dank marsh (hence the term mal-aria). As a result, you will have no chance of getting proper treatment for the disease. Infant mortality in and around Romney Marsh is exceptionally high, with 25–30 per cent of children dying before their fourth birthday. Overall the death rate there is in excess of 5 per cent, double the annual average, so it is like living in an area afflicted by a permanent influenza epidemic. You will find no physicians there.35 Most local rectors and vicars live elsewhere, employing clerks to conduct the funerals, marriages and baptisms on their behalf. As one writer reports of the parishes of Burmarsh and Dymchurch, which lie within Romney Marsh: ‘both the air and the water make dreadful havoc on the health of inhabitants of this sickly and contagious country, a character sufficiently corroborated by their pallid countenances and short lives’.36

  PLAGUE

  Serious though influenza and malaria are, they are not the biggest killers of the age. That title belongs to the plague or ‘pestilence’. No one knows precisely how many die over the course of the reign, but the total is probably around 250,000.37 In 1565 the people of Bristol count up the plague victims for that year and arrive at the figure of 2,070, almost 20 per cent of the population. Ten years later, after another deadly outbreak, they record a further 2,000 fatalities. Norwich sees its worst outbreak in 1579–80, when 4,193 people die of plague, a quarter of the population, half of the victims being immigrants.38 In 1564 plague kills two hundred people in Stratford-upon-Avon (13 per cent).39 Exeter experiences comparable outbreaks in 1570 (16 per cent) and in 1590–1 (15 per cent).40 This last epidemic originates in Portugal and is rought to Devon by mariners. It is ironic that the great naval ships that deliver the English from the threat of the Spanish Armada bring another danger in the form of plague.41 In 1602 a new outbreak of plague sweeps along the south coast by way of Plymouth and Dartmouth; the following year it kills another 2,000 in Bristol and 1,800 in Norwich.42

  Shocking though these figures are, they are dwarfed by those for London. The plague of 1563 is so severe that the city authorities start to compile Bills of Mortality, recording the numbers of people that die in each parish. This marks the beginning of official health statistics.

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  The grim reality is that plague in the capital is as common as the stench of the cesspits and almost as unavoidable. You cannot predict where it will strike: people living next door to infected houses are left unaffected. Some people are not touched even when others in their own house have it.

  Can you do anything to avoid the plague? The answer is: very little. Although there are no fewer than twenty-three medical treatises dedicated to it by 1600, including hundreds of recipes for medicines, none of them will help you. Nor will perfuming your room and airing it with fire save you – despite this being the official advice of the College of Physicians. But you have the advantage of knowing that a flea bite can convey the plague, and that the black rat that carries the plague flea does not like to move about very much, so leaving an affected area is a good strategy. Also, plague is most frequently transferred between people in towns, and it dies down in winter, when the rat
population is less active. Therefore avoid towns in summer; and stay out of the poorer parishes in particular, as these are more severely affected than rich ones. It is possible that plague is occasionally passed from person to person in the breath, so be careful about gatherings of lots of people when the plague is in town (and about kissing too many strangers). Remember also that plague can be transferred from person to person indirectly, for example, through a coat worn by a plague victim.44 It is therefore wise to avoid second-hand clothing. Change your clothes and bedclothes regularly and wash them thoroughly. The fact is that Thomas Moffet’s observation – that it is ‘no disgrace’ for a man to be troubled with fleas – probably explains why the plague spreads so quickly.

  But what if it comes to the worst? What if you have painful black buboes in your groin and armpits, and experience the rapid pulse, the headaches, the terrific thirst and delirium that are the tokens of the plague? There is little you can do. Physicians will prescribe the traditional medicines of dragon water, mithridatium and theriac if they hear you are suffering, but you will suspect that these are cynical attempts to relieve a dying person of his money. The physicians themselves will not normally come near you. Simon Forman, who does attend plague sufferers, is a rare exception: this is because he has himself survived the disease and believes he cannot catch it again. However, his remedy amounts to little more than avoiding eating onions and keeping the patient warm. He has a recipe for getting rid of the plague sores that will afflict you afterwards, if you survive the disease; but that is a very big ‘if’.45 It seems the best advice is provided by Nicholas Bownd in his book Medicines for the Plague: ‘in these dangerous times God must be our only defence’.46

  The important date to bear in mind is 1578. In this year the privy council draws up a series of seventeen orders to limit the spread of plague. From now on, when an outbreak occurs, magistrates in each town meet every two or three weeks to review the progress of the disease, consulting the ‘searchers’ who inspect the corpses for causes of death. The clothing and bedding of plague victims are henceforth to be burnt and funerals are to take place at dusk, to discourage people from attending. Most important of all, any house where an infected person lives is to be boarded up for at least six weeks, with all the family and servants inside, whether they are sick or healthy. Watchmen are to stand guard to make sure no one leaves. You will weep to hear the cries from a woman who has been boarded up with her husband, children and servants because one of them has been found to have the plague. People struggle to understand why the affliction has been sent upon them, why God would have cursed their family. In reality, the watchmen appointed by the JPs are not all cold-hearted; some of them interpret their role as more of a facilitator to those who are locked up: sending messages and bringing medicines and other things that they cannot get while incarcerated.47 But still such isolation is terrifying to experience and distressing to witness.