The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life in Renaissance England

by Kathy Lynn Emerson

  Easter (date varied): Celebrated by playing sports of all kinds and sometimes by holding church ales (ale was brewed and sold to raise funds).

  All Fool’s Day (April 1): April Fool jokes were not played.

  Whitsunday (Pentecost, fifty days after Easter): Church ales continued to he held on this day even after the Reformation.

  St. George’s Day (April 23): It was proper to wear blue on this day, on which twenty-eight towns held fairs. The Knights of the Garter were granted special permission to continue to observe their saint’s day after the Reformation and usually did so with tournaments.

  May Day (May 1): After spending the previous night outdoors, revelers decorated a maypole and then danced around it. London’s maypole was traditionally set up in the Strand.

  Midsummer (June 24): On Midsummer Eve, fires were lit all over the country, at least until the mid-sixteenth century. Divination was practiced by sowing hemp seed. Similar to the Lord of Misrule (a mock king), a Summer Lord presided over these festivities, which might include processions and pageants. Houses were decorated with St. John’s wort (this was also the Eve of St. John the Baptist), fennel, and green birch.

  First Sunday in October: After the Reformation, this was the day set aside to honor local patron saints

  Lord Mayor's Show (October 24): A water pageant first held in 1546.

  All Hallows’s Eve (October 31): Celebrated with seed cakes, ducking for apples, dancing around the fire, and bell ringing.

  All Soul’s Day (November 2): In Lancashire special soul-cakes were baked and given to children.

  Gunpowder Treason Day (November 5): Marked by bells, bonfires, church services, and suspension of everyday activities, this was a day of reflection prompted by the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. The burning of Guy Fawkes in effigy was not added to the celebration until the nineteenth century, but people did dance around fires.

  Accession Day (November 17): After about 1572, Elizabeth’s “crownation day” was celebrated nationwide with spontaneous bonfires, bell ringing, feasts, and sermons. At court there were annual tilts, usually at Whitehall, from 1570 to 1619. Bonfires and bell ringing on November 17, as well as on the Stuart crownation days of March 24 and March 27, continued well into the seventeenth century.

  Christmas (December 25): In some areas a yule log was an ash faggot. A King of the Bean or a Lord of Misrule presided over the entire Christmas season, which lasted from Christmas Eve until the start of Twelfth Night.

  PROFESSIONAL ENTERTAINMENT

  fools: Court jesters or fools were kept by English monarchs and occasionally by others. Sir Peter Legh, whose father had maintained a band of musicians and a troupe of players under Elizabeth, kept both a jester and a piper in Jacobean times.

  masques: Originating at court under Henry VIII as an outgrowth of dancing and mumming, the masque reached its peak in the reigns of James and Charles, when Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson pooled their talents to create a new art form. Amateur actors, both men and women, performed in court masques but the costumes, scenery, music, and script were all done by professionals.

  minstrels: Wandering minstrels were still popular prior to the seventeenth century, although after 1572 they had to have a passport to travel. Town musicians or “waits,” originally employed to play night and morning for the watch, also gave public concerts and hired themselves out to play at playhouses and for weddings. They wore livery and silver chains and badges. The most popular instruments bought for waits by towns were the shawm and sackbut, but lone waits often played the bagpipe. At this time the bagpipe had only two drones.

  mummings: Popular on Christmas and May Day. By the sixteenth century, mummings had developed into little plays. The roles of women were usually taken by men.

  mystery plays: A mystery was a trade or skill, and each trade guild in a town was responsible for mounting a play on a pageant wagon to portray a story from the Bible. This medieval tradition continued into the sixteenth century.

  plays: Miracle plays, morality plays, and interludes were performed long before any permanent playhouse was built. The common players of medieval England occasionally included women in their companies. There is, however, only one record to indicate that any woman ever performed on the public stage prior to the Restoration, and that was in a play acted at Blackfriars in 1629 by a French company. Women’s roles were customarily taken by men.

  Early in Elizabeth’s reign, the Privy Council issued a proclamation declaring that plays must not deal with any matter of religion or of state, and that none could be performed without permission of the mayor of a town or the Lord Lieutenant of the shire or two justices of the peace for the locality. A new play had to be licensed (at a fee of seven shillings) and when one offended, as was the case of The Isle of Dogs in 1597, Edmund Tilney, official censor for stage plays, had the power to ban all plays in retaliation and arrest those directly responsible on charges of sedition.

  Companies of players (this term was more common than actor) sought patrons among the nobility and wore their livery. They performed primarily in guild halls and in innyards, setting up portable stages to act upon. There were boys’ companies as well as adult companies. The first building constructed exclusively for the performance of plays was the Theatre in Shoreditch, built in 1576. The average play there ran three hours. The company consisted of ten players, ten hirelings, a number of musicians, stagehands, and feegatherers, and five boys in training. They gave performances every afternoon except Sunday and were closed during Lent and in plague time. During plague time, players went on tour, taking a smaller company of only ten to twenty men.

  A 1578 sermon at Paul’s Cross by John Stockwood launched the Puritan attack on plays and players. Most objections to plays, however, were because of the rowdy crowds dispersing after dark. Where plays used to begin at four, in the 1590s they had to start by two and be done between four and five. In 1600, 18,000-24,000 Londoners paid their penny and went to see a play every week. After Charles I was removed from power in 1642, the theaters were shut down by decree, although some players did continue to perform in short farces called drolls and in variety acts.

  Shakespeare was not the only “playmaker” of this era, and was not even the most popular. Robert Greene (who could command a fee of twenty nobles for a play), Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and John Webster were also writing during this period and Elizabeth Tanfield, Lady Carew, wrote the first original play in verse in English by a woman (The Tragedie of Miriam, the Faire Queene of Jewry) which was published in 1614. It is Shakespeare, however, about whom the majority of books on English drama are written. Even some of those that are highly speculative are good sources of information on the times.

  puppet shows: Accused of being obscene and sacrilegious, puppeteers were treated as vagabonds and sometimes paid not to perform. Puppet shows were also called “motions.”

  tumblers: Like puppeteers, tumblers were sometimes accused of being obscene or sacrilegious, treated as vagabonds, and paid not to perform.

  wonders: A wonder was any oddity shown for money. Animal wonders ranged from dancing dogs and horses to the royal lions in the Tower of London. These lions had an exercise ground in the moat and were fed mutton and live chickens. King James tried, unsuccessfully, to create a new sport by having the royal lions fight bears, but the lions refused to cooperate. Other sights at the Tower included crocodiles, red deer, antelope from India, a flying squirrel from Virginia, a wolf, and a porcupine. At Paris Garden one could see lynx and tigers, and at St. James’s Park were five camels and the elephant sent to James I by Philip III of Spain.

  The Golden Hinde, the first English ship to circumnavigate the world, was put in drydock at Deptford in 1581 as a monument. Souvenir-hunters took bits of it home with them.

  A “nine day’s wonder” was comedian William Kempe’s Morris-dance from London to Norwich in 1600. The trip actually took a month. In the l630s, adult Siamese twins toured England. Native Americans were looked upon as wonders
, whether they were captives on display or visiting dignitaries. Manteo and Wanchese drew huge crowds in 1584. In 1605, George Weymouth, while searching for a suitable place to found a Catholic colony in the New World, kidnapped five Indians from an island off the Maine coast. Sir Ferdinando Gorges commandeered all five upon Weymouth’s return to England, then sent two of them to Sir John Popham, Lord Chief Justice. The five, including a woman known only as Madam Penobscot (after her tribe), were taught English and English habits, including an appreciation of beer, and then sent out to make speeches to raise money for colonization. Pocahontas, who by then had been baptized Rebecca and was married to John Rolfe, arrived in London in 1616 with her husband to raise funds for the Virginia colony. The climate and unhealthy sanitary conditions of the civilized world proved fatal. She died, probably of tuberculosis, in 1617.

  READING AS ENTERTAINMENT

  Early in the sixteenth century, few people owned books, although listening to stories being read aloud was always a popular pastime. Cheap, popular almanacs were available from 1567 onward. Joke hooks were also published in large numbers, since riddles were popular, and earthy humor always sold well. Broadsides, chapbooks, pamphlets, travel books, books of poetry, and books of plays were also published, although the latter were not generally printed until a play (the exclusive property of its company of players) was no longer being performed.

  In London in 1583, there were fifty-three presses and twenty-two printing houses. The best paper came from France. A ream, reckoned then at 480 pages, cost 7s. The cost of running two presses for a year, producing about 2,000 pages, was about £500. That paid for ink, wages, and overhead. Paper for an edition of 1,000 copies cost £350. Most books were published with print runs of 1,000. If 1,000 copies sold at 24s. each, an average price for a book, the printer made a substantial profit. Writers, then as now, complained about small advances, late royalties, and so on.

  John Day (1522-1584) was a leading Protestant printer in London. He may have gone into exile during the reign of Mary Tudor, but that isn't certain. In the 1560s he had a print shop and house, and probably a warehouse, in the Aldersgate ward. Later he also had a shop in Paul's Churchyard. Among the books he printed was what was popularly called “The Book of Martyrs,” John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, first published in 1563. It was a runaway bestseller in those days, detailing the persecution of Protestants by the Catholic Queen Mary. In the 1570s, Day's stock of unbound works was valued at over £3,000 and he had bound stock worth £300-400.

  ballads: London alone had some 300 ballad sellers in 1641. Two sheets of broadside ballad cost one shilling. About 3,000 ballads were licensed between 1500 and 1700. One estimate puts 9,000 more in circulation.

  chapbooks: These were pamphlets—short, unbound books that readers picked up as we would a newspaper and discarded as easily. Over forty publishers were producing them between 1560 and 1622. They usually sold for a penny and since petty chapmen carried the smaller ones to sell, they eventually became known as penny chapbooks. Chapbooks were the mass-market paperbacks of the Renaissance. They included accounts of executions and other current events as well as action-adventure tales which frequently had a romantic subplot thrown in. Chapbook versions of tales of chivalry (such “romances” as Bevis of Hampton and Guy of Warwick) were enormously popular with the public and so were any stories dealing with Robin Hood or St. George.

  newspapers: The earliest newspapers printed in English originated in Amsterdam because printing the news was illegal in England. The law was changed in 1621 to allow foreign news to be printed, and the “Coranto” appeared in that year. Newspapers were banned again in 1632. Early newspapers were a single sheet printed on one side and came out weekly. The first daily newspaper appeared in 1702.

  poetry: Early poets, though they were not necessarily published in their own lifetimes, included William Dunbar, John Skelton, Sir Thomas Wyatt, and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey. Under Elizabeth, Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser were writing. Late in the period came John Donne, Robert Herrick, and John Milton.

  popular fiction: Balladeer Thomas Deloney also wrote longer works. These early novels (although neither the term nor the genre had been clearly defined at this stage in literary history) included Jack of Newbury (1597). Abridged (chapbook) editions of this tale enjoyed even greater popularity than the original. Most stories about women, at either length, dealt with the tragic consequences of falling in love with a man of a higher station in life. Patient Griselda tells the tale of a woman clinging to her virtue and fidelity in spite of having an abusive, aristocratic husband. At the other extreme was one exception—“Long Meg,” a strong woman who succeeds on her own.

  songbooks: Between 1580 and 1630, some eighty vocal collections were published. The madrigal became extremely popular during the 1560s, as did the ayre, a song performed to lute accompaniment. John Dowland was a master of that genre. Composers whose music is still performed include Thomas Tallis, William Byrd, and Orlando Gibbons.

  SPORTS AND RECREATIONS

  archery: Shooting at butts was done with both longbow and crossbow.

  ballon or wind ball: A type of handball played with an inflated bladder, the game may also have had some similarities to football.

  billiards: A popular game, played outdoors in the seventeenth century.

  bowling or bowls: Played on both village greens and private grounds by both men and women. The third earl of Southampton liked to play every Tuesday and Thursday in the company of thirty or forty knights and gentlemen.

  bull-baiting and bear-baiting: An established pastime in London by 1174. Most towns had a bull-ring by 1500. Henry VIII had a Master of the Royal Game of Bears, Bulls, and Mastiff Dogs. English mastiffs included Lyme mastiffs, dogs of immense size and pale lemon color, with large heads like bloodhounds, black ears and muzzles, and soft brown eyes. In 1526, Paris Garden opened in Southwark, charging an entrance fee of one penny and an extra penny for the best places in the galleries. At its height, it had three bulls, twenty bears, and seventy mastiffs. In 1592, the Privy Council forbade theaters to open on Thursdays in order to increase public attendance at bear-baitings. Puritan preachers denounced the pastime because the most important matches took place on Sundays.

  card games: A pack was a deck, a bunch, or a “pair of cards.” A trump was a tumbler. A knave was a jack. The Worshipfull Company of Makers of Playing Cards was chartered in 1628, after which the importation of foreign-made playing cards was forbidden. Popular games were primero (fashionable c. 1530-1640—three cards were dealt to each player, each card having three times its usual value), one-and-thirty, noddy, gleek, and Pope July. A new game in the Elizabethan era was triumph (whist). Bassett, lanterloo (loo), and cribbage debuted in the seventeenth century. Picket (piquet), also called cent, had been played since around 1550 but suddenly caught on under the Stuarts.

  checkers: Also called draughts in England. The earl of Leicester had checkers made of crystal inlaid with silver and garnished with his heraldic device, the bear and ragged staff.

  chess: The earl of Leicester had an ebony chess board, with chessmen made of crystal and precious stones. Chess was one of the few games not played for money.

  cockfighting or cocking: Although well established during the Middle Ages, the first regular cockpit was constructed by Henry VIII. James I had a “cockmaster” responsible for breeding, feeding, and training gamecocks for fights in the royal cockpit. Cocks were bred chiefly in Norfolk in the seventeenth century. Cockfighting was suspended in plague time but was not prohibited by law until 1654.

  Cotswold Games: Developed around 1612 from a local celebration into a nationally known competition by a Norwich-born lawyer, Robert Dover (1582-1652), the games were held in rural Gloucestershire every Thursday and Friday after Whitsunday. Competitions included singlestick fighting, wrestling, leaping, pitching the bar, throwing the hammer, tumbling, running races, horse-racing, handling the pike, leapfrog, shin-kicking, hunting and coursing at the hare, dancing, and
, in tents, card games and chess. Music included bagpipes and, to add a classical element, a man dressed as Homer who played the harp. The games were stopped after 1643 but revived with the Restoration.

  cricket: A new game played by schoolboys in Kent and Sussex late in the sixteenth century.

  curling: invented in Scotland around 1511.

  dancing: Popular everywhere, country dances included the roundel, hay, trenchmore, jig, and dump (a slow, mournful dance). Court dances were the cinquepace (galliard), the pavane, the brawl (bransle) and the volte. Morris dancing was usually done only by men. The name may be a corruption of Moorish, hinting at a medieval Spanish origin. In London, “dancing houses” (dancing schools) were outlawed from 1553 (they were suspected of being fronts for less respectable activities) but by 1574, legislators gave up trying to close them down and regulated them instead.

  dice games: Dice were made of gold, silver, ivory, wood, and bone. Popular dice games were hazard and pass-dice, a game that involved each of two players throwing dice until they came up “doublets” (the same number on both dice). If the number was over ten, the caster won. Tables (backgammon) was also played by two people, using a hinged board (divided into four “tables”), two dice boxes, and fifteen men each. There were fourteen different kinds of false dice. The fine for making or selling them was 3s. 4d. for each offense.

  fencing and dueling: Henry VIII was a patron of the new Italian school of fighting with rapier and dagger rather than sword-and-buckler, though some men looked down on “this poking fight” of foreign invention. There were fencing schools in London from 1569 on, the first taught by Rocco Bonetti. He was still the most popular instructor in London in 1599. The duel of honor was a concept unknown in England until the late sixteenth century, but it had become a cause of official concern by the Jacobean era. A 1613 law made it murder to cause a death during a duel.