The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life in Renaissance England

by Kathy Lynn Emerson

  ROYAL RESIDENCES

  In 1526, King Henry VIII's properties were designated as either “greater houses,” capable of accommodating the entire winter court of some 800 people, or “lesser houses,” big enough for the traditionally smaller summer court of 400-500. They did not require that many rooms, but even with dormitory-style quarters a great deal of space was needed for beds. The greater houses included Westminster Palace, Greenwich, Eltham, Richmond, New Hall in Essex, and Woodstock in Oxfordshire. There were fifty or so smaller manor houses on the “lesser” list. Henry VIII also acquired Whitehall and Hampton Court (from Cardinal Wolsey) and built one new palace, Nonsuch, in 1538. Nonsuch was demolished in 1682 for building materials.

  PRODIGY HOUSES

  Prodigy houses, built with a royal visit in mind, kept grand apartments intended for use only by the monarch, who might never pay a visit at all. They were generally built according to one of two plans. The old-fashioned courtyard house continued to be built well into the seventeenth century. Theobalds, Holdenby, and Audley End follow this plan. The alternative was to do without courtyards, creating one massive, compact house. Hatfield is one of these.

  Theobalds, in Hertfordshire, built by Lord Burghley between 1564 and 1585, had five courtyards and a gallery that was 123 feet long and twenty-one feet wide. Queen Elizabeth visited there regularly. In 1607 King James persuaded Burghley’s son, Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, to exchange Theobalds for the old palace at Hatfield. Salisbury kept that building for extra lodgings and constructed his Hatfield, another great prodigy house, right next to it.

  SPECIALIZED ROOMS

  banqueting house: A separate building used for banquets, which at this time usually meant not a great feast but rather a sort of dessert party. Size varied greatly, from very small to one, at Holdenby, which was three stories high and had six rooms to a floor.

  bedchamber: References to bedchambers became common in the mid-sixteenth century, indicating that there were now rooms used mainly for sleeping. In most houses this inner room was accessible only by going through other rooms. In royal residences one entered the presence chamber and passed through the privy chamber to reach the bedchamber. Locks, incidentally, were not fastened to doors but rather screwed on when needed. One could also use padlocks, which went through a hasp, or bar the door.

  cellar: The cellar was a storage room and was not necessarily underground. It was usually a wine cellar, but plate (utensils for table and domestic use, often of silver or gold) and other valuables might also be kept there.

  closet: A room used for private study and business and sometimes for prayer. In some houses the closet (also called a study) was constructed as a gallery on the second level of a chapel so that the family could attend services without going downstairs. In some houses this room functioned as a library.

  gallery: The gallery as a place to take exercise was a development of the sixteenth century. Originally any covered walk, sometimes open on one side and sometimes enclosed completely, it was usually constructed adjacent or close to the great chamber, or sometimes on the next floor. As collecting portraits became fashionable, the gallery was used to display them. In 1601, Lord Petre’s gallery at Ingatestone in Essex contained six pictures, nine painted shields, and a few chairs and stools. There generally was not much furniture.

  great chamber: The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were the period when the great chamber became the center of the house. Early on, the chamber was a bed-sitting room used for sleeping, playing games, receiving visitors, and taking meals. Around 1500, changes began. In smaller houses the great chamber was the principal lodging chamber. The owner ate in the hall or in the parlor. In larger houses the high table had been moved from the hall to the great chamber but there was still a bed there, too. In the grandest houses, the great chamber was used only for eating. This eventually became its chief function and by 1600 it was sometimes called the dining chamber. The great chamber might also be used for playing cards, dice, and backgammon, for music, dancing, and putting on plays and masques, for the lying-in-state of corpses before funerals, and for family prayers in houses that did not have a chapel.

  great hall: The old “great hall” was a communal gathering place and had an open hearth at the center. The smoke from the fire was supposed to escape through a hole in the roof above. At the upper end of the hall was a dais, a raised platform for the table where the family and principal guests dined. A bay or oriel window to one side provided light. In other rooms there was at first no heat, but by the fourteenth century fireplaces were becoming common. Wall chimneys eventually spread into the hall. As the sixteenth century advanced, the hall had less importance and would eventually become little more than the entrance the word implies today.

  In the oldest arrangements, one door behind the dais led to the cellar and another to stairs which went up to a great chamber or solar above. At the lower end of the hail were “the screens” which formed a sort of inner porch with doors through which servants could enter with food. Screen meant not the small, fragile, easily moved piece of our day but a large and solid partition attached to the ceiling. The only screen still surviving today is at Rufford Old Hall, a National Trust property in Lancashire.

  The screen end of the hall often had a minstrel gallery above. In addition to shielding those in the hall from drafts from an entrance (often covered with a porch), screens separated the hall from the buttery (from which a butler served drinks), the pantry (originally “bread room” but by now the room from which food was served), and the passage between them which led to the kitchen.

  As the century advanced, some halls were ceiled over to insert a first floor above. The earliest conversion that can be dated was at Hookwood Manor in Surrey in 1571, but this practice became increasingly common. In some cases, open halls ceased to be built in new buildings at all, and where a through passage had once been, there was now a central chimney stack that heated two back-to-back rooms. Beyond the chimney stack was a staircase, and these became grander and grander.

  In the poorest houses, the hall continued to be the only room and, as in medieval times, it served all purposes, from cooking to sleeping to, on occasion, sheltering the family’s animals.

  kitchen: This room was sometimes in a separate building because of fire danger. In the wealthiest homes it tended to be huge, with vaulted ceilings and several arches that held the hearths. Such kitchens also contained a brick oven for baking, a large working table, and a variety of equipment including spits, pots, chafing dishes, graters, mortars and pestles, boilers, knives, cleavers, axes, dripping pans, pot racks, pothooks, gridirons, frying pans, sieves, kneading troughs, fire shovels, barrels, and tubs. In some cases a scullery, where platters and pots were washed, was attached to the kitchen. If so, sinks usually emptied into a ditch beyond the outer wall, as did any washbasins set into the walls. Sometimes dirty water was carried off through pipes to he discharged out of a gargoyle’s mouth on the exterior wall. At Haddon Hall in Derbyshire an L-shaped, spring-fed water trough in the kitchen has three chambers and is rigged to keep the water depth in all three at one inch.

  lodgings: Private accommodations, whether a suite of six or seven rooms or a single chamber, were called lodgings. At a great house, the steward (and one or two other household officers) might have a chamber of his own. Other gentlemen servants would share a room while the lowest orders had dormitory chambers. A few servants slept outside their master’s chamber on woven straw mats called pallets. In a suite of rooms, like a hotel suite, there was considerable privacy. Personal servants might literally be underfoot, but others were kept out. Private family lodgings might also contain a closet, an inner chamber, an outer chamber, a wardrobe, and at least one privy, in addition to the principal chamber.

  parlor: A bed-sitting room early in the sixteenth century, after about 1550 it became only an eating and reception room. It was usually on the ground floor, behind the dais end of the hall and under the great chamber, unless the great
chamber was over the hall. Large houses might have more than one parlor, and a small winter parlor near the kitchen, used in winter when a small room was easier to keep warm, was common from the early seventeenth century.

  privy: Ideally, an outdoor privy was located “a bowshot” (400-500 feet) from the house. Inside a house, it was usually a small, windowless cell set in an outside wall in which a pierced seat was placed over a shaft connected to a pit or drain, or to the slope outside the building. Some houses had “stool houses” or “houses of office” equipped with a close-stool and pewter pan instead. Lord Lisle’s bedchamber in Calais had an adjoining room in which there was a “round curtain of green” and “a close-stool for a Jaques.”

  The French word garderobe, which means wardrobe, was used for the privy in the same way that cloak room is used for toilet today. Other euphemisms were “seat house” and “jakes.”

  On the first floor of the Bell Tower at the Tower of London, a passageway opposite the door to a vaulted chamber with a fireplace and three narrow windows leads to three latrines set in high niches overhanging the moat. At Greenwich, garderobes were provided en suite in most of the principal lodgings but there were also “pissing places” in the courtyards. At Hampton Court there was a common latrine which seated twenty-eight. Privacy was not a high priority.

  privy chamber: The royal privy chamber probably started out as the room between the privy and the great chamber but by this era had evolved into the room where the monarch took meals and held private meetings.

  withdrawing rooms: As large rooms were broken up into smaller ones for greater privacy, the great chamber often led into an adjoining withdrawing chamber with a bedchamber beyond. In the sixteenth century withdrawing chambers took over the functions of a private sitting, eating, and reception area. Servants still slept in them, at least until the end of the century. In some houses the inner chamber off the lord’s chamber belonged to his wife. The wife’s chamber might have a chamber for her gentlewomen off or close to it. The wardrobe might also be a separate room off the chamber and, if so, it usually had its own fireplace.

  ORNAMENTAL GARDENS

  Gardens laid out at Hampton Court by Cardinal Wolsey in figured flower beds started a national style which later borrowed heavily from Italian gardens. One aim was to have as much color as possible all year long. Another was to make the garden an extension of the house. The four-plot design applied to both the garden and its relationship to the house. The house was the center with a forecourt in front, a kitchen garden on one side, and an orchard on the other. At the back (faced by the chief rooms of the house) was the garden.

  The first English gardening book, Thomas Hill’s Profitable Arte of Gardeninge, came out in 1563 and discussed walks, mazes, and arbors. By the 1580s, a formal garden was part of almost every new house of any size. Pleasure gardens were usually enclosed, often by a high, clipped hedge of cypress, hornbeam, or juniper. Windows and arches were sometimes cut through the hedge, and sweerbriar, whitethorn, privet, and roses might be interlaced along the hedge. A square or circle was at the center of the garden, containing a statue, obelisk, fountain, mount (an artificial hill of earth surmounted by steps or a winding path—from the top one could see out of the garden), or sundial. A garden might contain:

  Flower beds—open beds raised above the level of the paths and surrounded by wooden fences. Closed or knotted beds were outlined with low, close-growing plants like hyssop and germander and formed elaborate designs. The open spaces in the patterns might contain daffodils, primroses, or hyacinths.

  Mazes—hedge mazes were low, even those of evergreen rarely reaching a man’s height, and if they were made of hyssop, lavender cotton, thyme, germander, or winter savory they were “dwarf”’ mazes.

  Small turfed areas—these might contain seats (which might also be found in recesses of wall or hedge or under an arbor), carved wooden figures, or works of topiary. Heraldic designs were popular, worked into both topiary (generally done with yew or privet) and knot beds.

  Pleached bowers—formed of trees which branched overhead and entwined, such as willow, lime, wych-elm, hornbeam, privet, whitethorn, and maple. They were planted with sweetbriars, honeysuckles, roses, and rosemary and made into “covert” walks.

  Arbors—built along the enclosure wall with climbers of rosemary, jasmine, or musk roses on wooden latticework. Some had windows.

  Walks—wide and sometimes bordered by brick or stone, walks were rarely turfed but might be sanded, graveled, or planted with herbs such as burnet, wild thyme, or water mint, which gave off an aroma when trod upon.

  Paths—narrower than walks, paths went between beds. They were sanded (often mixed with pebbles and coal dust, which killed weeds) and bordered by low-growing hedges of lavender, box, rosemary, sage, or lavender cotton.

  Other additions—streams (dells) and trout brooks and bridges might be put in if there was space. Wooden galleries might pass through to connect the house with the chapel or some other building. Flights of steps might connect several levels of terraces with garden walks and the garden levels with each other.

  ORCHARDS

  Orchards were fenced in with brick or stone or with a low hedge of cornelian cherry trees and rose, gooseberry, and currant bushes. Inside, one might find apricots, peaches, nectarines, plums, quinces, damsons, bullaces, cherries, apples, pears, filberts, cornelian cherries, and medlars. Orchards were rare outside of Worcestershire, Shropshire, Gloucestershire, Somersetshire, Kent, and Essex. Apricots, peaches, and quinces did not grow well in Yorkshire or farther north.

  NATIVE AND NEW: FLOWERS AND FRUITS

  In and around London were a number of botanical gardens in which far more varieties of flowers, trees, and other plants grew than were generally available in England. The herbalist John Gerarde (1545-1612) published a catalog of his garden in Holborn in 1597. It contained woodcuts of some 1,800 plants.

  Native English flowers included primroses, marigolds, daisies, violets, columbine, roses, and gilliflowers (stock gilliflowers were stocks, wall gilliflowers were wallflowers, queen’s gilliflowers were hesperis or sweet rocket, and clove gilliflowers were carnations and pinks). Also very common were sweet williams, sweet johns, bachelor’s buttons, snapdragons, poppies, star-of-Bethlehem, star-of-Jerusalem, eglantine, hollyhocks, lilies, valerian, columbine, carnations, and geraniums (not, however, the kind we have today; these were spotted or striped and other names for them were stork’s bill and crane’s bill).

  New flowers imported into England and present in some gardens by 1640 included daffodils, fritillary, hyacinth, crocus (saffron flower), tulip (from Armenia; tulips grew in Holland as early as 1560 but did not reach England until 1600), flower-de-luce (all irises came from Spain), anemone, French cowslip (bear’s ear), candytuft, Persian lilacs, sunflowers (from Peru), crown imperial, everlastings, Persian marigolds, and tobacco. There was considerable variety in roses, including the damask rose (introduced into English gardens around 1520), musk rose, canker or dog rose, rose of Provence, rose of York and Lancaster, crystal rose, dwarf red rose, Frankfort rose, Hungarian rose, velvet rose, cinnamon rose, and apple rose.

  Apple trees were native and varieties included Davy gentle, Master William, summer and russet pippins, pomewater, flower of Kent, gillyflower, Kentish codling (“a flat, insipid apple”), pound royal, leathercoat, and spicing. Hertfordshire apples were used to make “redstreak” cider. Other native fruits were crab apples, strawberries, and pears. Varieties of the latter included the poperin, the warden or stewing pear, saffron, bon cretien, Windsor, and bergamot. Worcestershire was famed for pears; Kent for cherries. Peach trees had come to England with the Romans. There were also vineyards but these were disappearing in this period. Lemon trees were imported as early as 1562, when they cost fifteen crowns apiece. Orange, pomegranate, and myrtle were also early imports, and apricots, almonds, gooseberries, raspberries, melons, and currants first appeared in English gardens in Tudor times.

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY


  Airs, Malcolm. The Tudor and Jacobean Country House: A Building History. Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1995.

  Girouard, Mark. Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History. New York: Penguin Books, 1980.

  Howard, Maurice. The Early Tudor Country House: Architecture and Politics 1490-1550. London: George Philip, 1987.

  Platt, Colin. Medieval England: A Social History and Archaeology from the Conquest to 1600 AD. New York: Scribner, 1978.

  Reed, Michael. The Age of Exuberance, 1550-1700. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986.

  Scofield, John. Medieval London Houses. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.

  Thurley, Simon. The Royal Palaces of Tudor England: Architecture and Court Life 1460-1547. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

  Williams, Neville. The Royal Residences of Great Britain. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1960.

  CHAPTER FOUR: FURNISHING A HOUSE

  The inventories regularly taken at householders’ deaths have left a record of furnishings at all levels of society. One of the most complete is of Petworth House at the time of the death of the ninth earl of Northumberland in 1632. All references to furniture at Petworth are from that list, which is printed in its entirety in G. R. Batho, ed., The Household Papers of Henry Percy, Ninth Earl of Northumberland (1564-1632) (London: Royal Historical Society, 1962).

  An inventory taken in 1584 of the possessions of a Worcester barber listed six tablecloths, five pairs of sheets, brass pots, a frying pan, a framed table, joined stools, a feather bed, carpets, cushions, a pewter chamber pot, eight pewter flowerpots, and a lute. Other records of furnishings also survive, indicating that in a typical hall one might find bankers (bench covers), dorsers (drapes for benches), cushions, a dining board and trestles, an “iron fireplace with tongs,” basins, wash-bowls, candelabra, side tables, a chair, benches, a cupboard, candles, and oil lamps.