26. The budget headings are from Wilson, ‘State’, pp. 26–9.
27. Hill, Reformation, p. 81.
28. Black, Reign, p. 198.
29. According to Wilson, ‘State’, pp. 2–8, the order of succession in 1600 was as follows: 1. James VI of Scotland, only son of Mary, queen of Scots, and great-grandson of Margaret Tudor, Henry VII’s eldest daughter; 2. Arabella Stuart, cousin of James VI and also a great-grandchild of Margaret Tudor; 3. Edward Seymour, Lord Beauchamp, eldest son of the earl of Hertford, whose mother Lady Catherine Grey was a granddaughter of Mary Tudor, Henry VII’s second daughter; 4. Henry Seymour, younger son of the earl of Hertford, and another great-grandson of Mary Tudor; 5. The earl of Derby, second cousin of the Seymours and another great-grandson of Mary Tudor, through her younger daughter Eleanor. All five potential heirs were Elizabeth’s first cousins twice removed.
30. Edward O. Smith Jnr, ‘The Elizabethan doctrine of the prince as reflected in the sermons of the episcopacy, 1559–1603’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 28, 1 (1964), pp. 1–17.
31. These were Oxford, Northumberland, Shrewsbury, Kent, Derby, Worcester, Rutland, Cumberland, Sussex, Huntingdon, Bath, Southampton, Bedford, Pembroke, Hertford, Essex, Lincoln and Nottingham. The six Irish earls are not included in this total.
32. There was a third viscountcy, Hereford, but that was held by the earl of Essex.
33. This includes some titles whose holders were children, but excludes titles that were in abeyance in 1600 awaiting a sole heiress to emerge (e.g. Ogle, Dacre and Ros).
34. Dawson, Plenti & Grase, p. 30.
35. Wilson, ‘State’, p. 22.
36. Gordon R. Batho, ‘The Finances of an Elizabethan Nobleman: Henry Percy, ninth earl of Northumberland (1564–1632)’, The Economic History Review, New Series, 9 (1957), pp. 433–50 at p. 436.
37. Hill, Reformation, pp. 33–4.
38. Various writers have commented on how difficult it is to enumerate the gentry. It depends on where one draws the line. If one only counts those families that supplied the major offices for each county, such as JPs, deputy lieutenants and sheriffs, then there were about a hundred families per county or roughly four thousand gentry families in England. Mousley found eighty-seven such families for Sussex in his 1959 study of that county (J. E. Mousley, ‘The Fortunes of Some Gentry Families in Elizabethan Sussex’, The Economic History Review, 11, 3 (1959), pp. 467–82). However, if one includes all the armigerous families, the average per county in 1600 was probably in excess of 250 and so there were more than ten thousand gentry families. Shropshire had about 470 armigerous families in 1620, Devon a similar number in that year, having had about 250 in 1564. Thomas Wilson declared that there were 16,000 such families in 1600 (Wilson, ‘State’, p. 23) and this more or less tallies with Gregory King’s total of 16,400 in 1688 (1,400 baronets and knights, 3,000 esquires and 12,000 gentlemen: see Thirsk, Documents, p. 780). It all depends where one draws the line as to what a ‘gentleman’ is – a moot point now as well as in Elizabethan times.
39. Wilson, ‘State’, p. 24.
40. CKS: PRC2/2/169.
41. CKS: PRC2/5/324 (Love); CKS: PRC2/7/239 (Webbe). The date given is the year before the date of the probate account; most probate accounts date from one to two years after the death but a small proportion were written up later than this, especially where the upbringing of children was concerned.
42. Mortimer, D&D, p. 13. This figure ignores those who held property to the value of £5 in more than one diocese, whose wills and administrations were not dealt with by the consistory court or the archidiaconal one, but in London.
43. ODNB, under ‘Howard, Thomas, fourth duke of Norfolk’.
44. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare, p. 172.
45. Wilson, ‘State’, p. 22. The values of the livings are taken from those on the eve of the Reformation (1535), used to assess first fruits, given in John Bacon, Liber Regis (1786).
46. For Bacon and Popham, see ODNB. For Coke, see Wilson, ‘State’, p. 25.
47. The first surgeon to be knighted was Sir John Ayliffe (d. 1556). The first physician to be knighted was Sir William Butts (d. 1545).
48. Black, Reign, p. 236. Thomas Wilson in 1600 states that a few were worth £100,000 (Wilson, ‘State’, p. 21). In 1600 Thomas Platter believed that the lord mayor of London had an income of £100,000 – he cannot have been correct in this. See Platter, Travels, p. 157.
49. Wilson, ‘State’, p. 20.
50. Hoskins, ‘Towns’, p. 18.
51. Hoskins, ‘Towns’, p. 9.
52. These proportions are based mainly on those established by Gregory King in his late seventeenth-century tract, ‘Natural and political observations upon the State and Condition of England’, in Thirsk, Documents, p. 773. I have assumed for the sake of this exercise that the proportions of a larger provincial city’s make-up did not alter substantially over the seventeenth century.
53. Margerie M. Rowe and Andrew M. Jackson (eds), Exeter Freemen 1266–1967, Devon and Cornwall Record Society, Extra Series, 1 (1973), pp. 83–110.
54. These ‘other’ are four town waits; a foreigner with letters of denization from the queen (1575); a city beadle (1588); the city swordbearer (1590); one of the city sergeants (1592).
55. CKS: PRC2/6/13.
56. BRO: D/A1/96/258C.
57. Herridge, Inventories, pp. 389–90.
58. CKS: PRC21/6/41; BRO: D/A1/212/194C.
59. Pound, Census, pp. 7, 10. Some of the statistics in what follows have been taken from Pelling, CL, p. 84.
60. Beier, ‘Vagrants’, p. 9; Clark, ‘Migrant’, p. 117.
61. Carew, Survey, f. 67r.
62. Hill, Reformation, p. 31.
63. Pound, Census, p. 23.
64. Pound, Census, p. 25.
65. Pound, Census, p. 35.
66. The details of Shipdams house are taken from Pound, Census, p. 36. For the boy and the blind man, and strategies for survival, see Pelling, CL, pp. 79–102, esp. pp. 84–5. For the wages of nurses, see Mortimer, D&D, p. 154.
67. Clark, ‘Migrant’, p. 135.
68. Duffy, Morebath, p. 13.
69. Stubbes, Anatomy, p. 33.
70. I have taken this figure from Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, p. 34.
71. Clark, ‘Migrant’, p. 127.
72. Beier, ‘Vagrants’, p. 8.
73. 5 Elizabeth (1563), cap. 20.
74. 14 Elizabeth (1572), cap. 5.
75. 31 Elizabeth (1589), cap. 7. This enshrined in law what had long been the practice in many courts at much earlier dates. See Emmison, HWL, p. 268.
76. Emmison, HWL, p. 271.
77. 39 Elizabeth (1597), cap. 3.
78. Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in Medieval England (Cambridge, revised ed, 1989), p. 316; Tudor Tailor, p. 9.
79. Traister, Notorious, p. 135.
80. There were female churchwardens at Morebath, Kilmington and St Budeaux in Devon, for instance. See Patricia Crawford, Women and religion in England 1500–1720 (1993), p. 220, n. 22; Duffy, Morebath, p. 124.
81. Mortimer, ‘Index’, p. 110.
82. See D. A. Beaufort, ‘The medical practitioners of Western Sussex in the early modern period: a preliminary survey’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, 131 (1948), pp. 427–39. Exeter too was a diocese in which the requirement to obtain a licence to practise midwifery was resisted, judging from the paucity of such licences sought.
83. Williams, Life, p. 70.
84. Traister, Notorious, p. 154.
85. Laslett, WWHL, p. 95.
86. Laslett, WWHL, pp. 1–2.
87. Emmison, HWL, p. 111.
88. This appears in Horman, Vulgaria, in the section ‘De conjugalibus’.
89. William Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet, Act 1, Scene 2.
90. Laslett, WWHL, p. 88.
91. Wrigley & Schofield, p. 255.
92. Laslett, WWHL, p. 86. The data are for the period 1600–25.
93. Laslett, WWHL, p. 103, says a
quarter; Wrigley & Schofield, p. 190, suggest 30 per cent.
94. Pelling, CL, p. 148.
95. Platter, Travels, p. 182. This seems to be a quotation from the duke of Württemberg’s trip.
96. Quoted in Eliz. People, pp. 34–5.
97. Magno, p. 144.
98. Scott, EOaW, pp. 48–9, quoting Emanuel van Meteren, Nederlandtsche Historie (1575). It also appears in Rye, England, p. 73.
99. Platter, Travels, p. 170.
100. ‘Everie one in his calling is bound to doo somewhat to the furtherance of the holie building, but because great things by reason of my sex I may not doo, and that which I may I ought to doo, I have according to my duetie brought my poore basket of stones to the strengthning of the walles of that Jerusalem whereof (by grace) wee are all both citizens and members.’ Quoted in ODNB.
101. Emilia Lanier, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611), ‘to the reader’.
3. Religion
1. Stubbes, Anatomy, p. 60.
2. Kocher, ‘Atheist’, p. 231.
3. Kocher, ‘Atheist’, p. 249.
4. ODNB, under ‘Black, David (c. 1546–1603)’.
5. Susanne S. Webb, ‘Raleigh, Hariot and Atheism in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England’, Albion, 1, 1 (1969), pp. 10–18, at pp. 11 and 18.
6. ODNB, under ‘Marlowe’.
7. ODNB, under ‘Marlowe’. For the Vice of Buggery Act, see 5 Elizabeth I, cap. xvii.
8. CSPV, pp. 1,2.
9. Duffy, Morebath, pp. 169–70.
10. Quoted in Scott, EOaW, p. 165.
11. Elizabeth’s speech to the 1585 Parliament. Quoted in Eliz. People, p. 115.
12. Black, Reign, p. 190.
13. BL: Cotton Vitellius F v, f. 109v.
14. Black, Reign, p. 33.
15. Bearman, Stratford, pp. 97–8.
16. Its proper title is Actes and monuments of these latter and perillous days, touching matters of the Church, wherein are comprehended and described the great persecutions and horrible troubles that have been wrought and practised by the Romishe Prelates, specially in this realm of England and Scotland, from the year of our Lorde a thousand until the tyme now present … by Iohn Foxe (1st edn, 1563).
17. Marcia Lee Metzger, ‘Controversy and “Correctness”: English chronicles and the chroniclers, 1553–1568’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 27, 2 (1996), pp. 437–51, esp. p. 450.
18. Mary Cleere of Ingatestone, mentioned in chapter 2, is an example of a woman being burnt for high treason. See Emmison, Disorder, p. 40.
19. On this subject, see W. P. M. Kennedy, ‘Fines under the Elizabethan Act of Uniformity’, EHR, 33 (1918), pp. 517–28. On the trials for sedition in the 1570s and 1580s, see Emmison, Disorder, pp. 39–65.
20. Emmison, Disorder, pp. 46–8.
21. 23 Elizabeth I, cap. 1.
22. Black, Reign, p. 181. As Patrick Collinson says, ‘most “Catholics” did not refuse to go to church’. Collinson, ‘The Mongrel Religion of Elizabethan England’, in Doran, Exhibition, pp. 27–32 at p. 31.
23. Black, Reign, p. 188.
24. 35 Elizabeth I, cap. 1 & 2.
25. Eliz. People, p. 10. Black reckons 250 Catholics executed in twenty years. Black, Reign, p. 188.
26. William Weston (trans. Philip Caraman), The Autobiography of an Elizabethan (1955), pp. 44–46.
27. Edward Peters, Inquisition (Berkeley, 1989), p. 141, quoting Edward Rishton.
28. From chapter 17 of Harrison, Description.
29. Gerard, Autobiography, pp. 106–10.
30. Emmison, Disorder, p. 45.
31. Quoted in Eliz. People, p. 125.
32. Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Oxford, 1st edn, 1967; rep. 1990), pp. 432–3.
33. Eliz. Home, pp. 1, 10, 12, 111.
34. Eliz. People, pp. 71–2.
35. Beer, TEO, pp. 133–4.
36. Black, Reign, p. 205.
4. Character
1. CSPV, p. 328.
2. Rye, England, p. 70.
3. Alan Macfarlane, The Justice and the Mare’s Ale (Oxford, 1981), pp. 1–26.
4. 24 Henry VIII, cap. 5; Emmison, Disorder, p. 150.
5. These cases are all from Emmison, Disorder, pp. 148–9.
6. Stoyle, ‘Witch’, pp. 129–51.
7. Picard, London, p. 252, citing Edwin Green, ‘The Vintners’ Lobby 1552–68’, Guidhall Studies in London History, 2, (1974).
8. Charles G. Cruickshank, ‘Dead-pays in the Elizabethan army’, EHR, 53 (1938), pp. 93–7.
9. CSPV, p. 35.
10. Stubbes, Anatomy, pp. 6–7.
11. Wilson, ‘State’, p. 19.
12. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare, p. 152.
13. See the Essex examples noted in Emmison, HWL, p. 123.
14. Sh. Eng., II, p. 222.
15. Figures taken from the online English Short-Title Catalogue, maintained by the BL. The table of books published per decade includes books in English published abroad.
16. The English Short-Title Catalogue, http://este.bl.uk.
17. Black, Reign, p. 64.
18. Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster (1570).
19. Eliz. Home, p. 4.
20. Black, Reign, p.323, states that Greek was ‘taught only at Eton, Harrow, Westminster, Shrewsbury and a few others’. For Brownsword’s syllabus, see Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (1997), pp. 8–9.
21. Lane, John Hall, xiv; Mortimer, D&D, pp. 115, 119.
22. Gloria J. Betcher, ‘Minstrels, Morris dancers and Players: Tracing the Routes of Travelling Performers in Early Modern Cornwall’, Early Theatre, 6, 2 (2003), pp. 33–55.
23. Clark, ‘Migrant’, p. 148.
24. Clark, ‘Migrant’, pp. 122, 127.
25. Williams, Life, p. 25; Clark, ‘Migrant’, p. 118, quoting J. Cornwall, ‘Evidence of Population Mobility in the Seventeenth Century,’ Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 40 (1967), pp. 143–52.
26. Black, Reign, p. 246.
27. David Armitage, ‘The Elizabethan Idea of Empire’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth ser., vol. 14 (2004), pp. 269–77; Sian Flynn and David Spence, ‘Imperial Ambition and Elizabeth’s Adventurers’ in Doran, Exhibition, pp. 121–31.
28. Yeames, ‘Grand Tour’, p. 107.
29. Yeames, ‘Grand Tour’, at p. 93.
30. Howard, ‘Women’, at p. 153.
31. Magno, p. 146.
32. Rye, England, p. 70.
33. Platter, Travels, p. 183.
34. Pollitt, ‘Refuge’.
35. Lisa Ferraro Parmelee, ‘Printers, Patrons, Readers, and Spies: Importation of French Propaganda in Late Elizabethan England’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 25, 4 (1994), pp. 853–72.
36. Paul J. Hauben, ‘A Spanish Calvinist Church in Elizabethan London 1559–65’, Church History, 34, 1 (1965), pp. 50–6.
37. Pollitt, ‘Refuge’, D1018.
38. Stow, Survay, pp. 209–10.
39. Emmison, HWL, pp. 306–8.
40. For prostitutes, see Howard, ‘Women’, pp. 150–67; for courtiers, see Platter, Travels, p. 193.
41. In this and the next two paragraphs about English racism in literature I have drawn heavily on an article by Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan, ‘Before Othello: Elizabethan Representations of Sub-Saharan Africans’, The William and Mary Quarterly, third ser. 54 (1997), pp. 19–44.
42. Doran, Exhibition, p. 150.
43. Arnold, Wardrobe, p. 106; Picard, London, p. 110.
44. Marika Sherwood, ‘Blacks in Tudor England’, History Today, 53, 10 (October 2003). The Devon references come from the Friends of Devon’s Archives website giving details of its project on black communities in Devon (http://www.foda.org.uk).
45. Kocher, ‘Cosmos’, p. 104.
46. Leonard and Thomas Digges, A prognostication everlasting of right good effect (1583).
47. Thomas Blundeville, M. Blundeville, his exercises (1594), f. 181, cited in Nicoll, Elizabethans, p. 14.
48. ODNB,
under ‘Gilbert, William’
49. Gerard, Herbal, p. 1338.
50. Madeleine Doran, ‘On Elizabethan “Credulity”: with some questions concerning the use of the marvellous in literature’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 1, 2 (1940), pp. 151–76 at p. 156.
51. Rowse, Structure, p. 28.
52. Iona Opie and Moira Tatem, A Dictionary of Superstitions (Oxford, 1989), pp. 142, 165, 173.
53. As argued in the last chapter of Thomas, RDM.
54. Ecclesiasticus, ch. 38, v. 4, quoted on the title page of Simon Kellwaye, A Defensative against the Plague (1593).
55. Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family in England 1480–1750 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 18–19.
56. Kocher, ‘Cosmos’, p. 105.
57. Black, Reign, p. 310.
58. Traister, Notorious, pp. 59–62.
59. Sharpe, Instruments, p. 39.
60. Thomas Hill, The Most Pleasaunte Arte of the Interpretation of Dreames (1576), from the section on ‘the Distinction of Dreams’.
61. Thomas, RDM, p. 590; Platter, Travels, p. 174.
62. Both quotations come from Thomas, RDM, p. 177.
63. Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A regional and comparative study (1970), p. 98.
64. Sharpe, Instruments, pp. 75–8.
65. Thomas, RDM, pp. 442–3.
66. Stoyle, ‘Witch’.
67. Black, Reign, p. 331.
68. Sharpe, Instruments, p. 169.
69. Sir Henry Ellis, Original Letters of Eminent Literary Men of the Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Camden Society, vol. 23 (1843), pp. 39–40.
70. Anon. [Richard Gough], ‘An Historical Account of the Origin and Establishment of the Society of Antiquaries, Archaeologia, 1 (1770), i–xxxix; Linda van Norden, ‘Sir Henry Spellman on the Chronology of the Elizabethan College of Antiquaries’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 13, 2 (1950), pp. 131–60; C. E. Wright, ‘The Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries and the Formation of the Cottonian Library’ in F. Wormald and C. E. Wright (eds), The English Library before 1700 (1958), pp. 176–212.
71. Michael Bennett, ‘Edward III’s Entail and the Succession to the Crown, 1376–1471’, EHR, 113 (1998), 580–609 at p. 606.
72. In 1582 Norton received a commission from Francis Walsingham to examine what the nation’s history indicated for its future. He reported that the history of Britain undergoes a profound revolution approximately every five hundred years, the last of which took place in 1066. He predicted that England was due another revolution and, looking back at the recent Reformation, suggested a transformation provoked by religion – an accurate prediction, given the events of Charles I’s reign in the middle of the next century. See Barry Shaw, ‘Thomas Norton’s “Devices” for a Godly Realm: An Elizabethan Vision for the Future’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 22, 3 (Autumn 1991), pp. 495–509.
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