others addressed as “Sir”: Certain offices conferred the style of a knight, if not an actual knighthood. “Sir” was used as a courtesy title with the names of clerics, in particular with household chaplains.
esquires and gentlemen: They were entitled to use the word “Master” (Mr.) before their surnames and might also be addressed as “your worship” by inferiors. “Reverend” was not used before a clergyman’s name, so he was likewise addressed as Master So-and-So. Doctors were also more likely to be addressed as Master than Doctor.
gentlewomen: “Mistress” (Mrs.) was used for maidens, wives, and widows of gentle birth. “Dame” sometimes served as a courtesy title for a schoolmistress.
Goodman and Goodwife: These terms seem to have been used more in Colonial New England than in Old England, but a merchant might be addressed as Goodman Jones and his wife called Goody Jones. In the language of the times the terms farmer and peasant were rarely used. Substantial farmers were called yeomen. Subsistence farmers were husbandmen. Agricultural workers were laborers. Other wage earners were designated by their craft or trade (tiler, brickmaker, thatcher, etc.).
titles and women: Women who inherited titles in their own right or had courtesy titles because of their father’s rank in the peerage, kept these titles if they married beneath them, rather than assuming their husband’s style of address. Marriage to a peeress in her own right did not confer the same rank on the husband. Children (even those of a royal princess) took their style of address from their father.
The fourth and fifth earls of Derby died within a year of each other. The fourth earl’s widow, Margaret, was the dowager countess of Derby, while her daughter-in-law Alice, the fifth earl’s widow, continued to be called the countess of Derby. Her sister-in-law, the sixth earl’s wife, Elizabeth, was also countess of Derby. First names help distinguish them, but in the documents of the times these were frequently left out.
In 1606, in the course of a Star Chamber case, Charles Howard, earl of Nottingham (1536-1624), informed Lady Russell (1528-1609) that “by the law of arms you are no Lady Dowager.” Her late husband, John, Lord Russell (heir to the second earl of Bedford) had died during his father’s lifetime. She replied that the law was “otherwise” before Nottingham was born. On letters, Lady Russell signed herself simply “Elizabeth Russell, Dowager,” but she had already consulted one of the heralds on the subject of titles. Since she’d come so close to becoming a countess, she felt she was entitled to be buried with all the honors due a viscountess.
The case of Ann Stanhope (1497-1587) is an extreme example of how forms of address changed with changes in the family fortunes. The daughter of a knight, Ann was Mistress Stanhope early in life. Had she married Edward Seymour before he was knighted, she would have become Mistress Seymour. As it happened, she moved directly to Lady Seymour, and would have remained Lady Seymour had he been made Baron Seymour of Sudeley. He wasn’t. That title went to his brother. Sir Edward became Viscount Beauchamp and his wife was Lady Beauchamp. When Beauchamp was elevated to earl of Hertford, she became Lady Hertford and their eldest son took the courtesy title Lord Beauchamp. Hertford’s career peaked at duke of Somerset, during his tenure as Lord Protector to Edward VI, his nephew. Ann was thus duchess of Somerset, and unofficially (to her enemies, as she was a somewhat forceful woman) “the Lady Protector.” Somerset was later attainted and executed as a traitor and his title was forfeited. Confined in the Tower of London herself, Ann was now plain Mistress Seymour, but once Queen Elizabeth succeeded to the throne in 1558, Ann’s son was “restored in blood” to become earl of Hertford and she thereafter used the title Dowager Duchess of Somerset. She continued to be called this even after she married a commoner. He, however, remained plain Master Francis Newdigate.
COMMON SLANG TERMS
There were many popular catch-phrases in use, even at the upper levels of society. The same Lady Russell mentioned above, in speaking to her sister's son, Anthony Bacon, reportedly said, “By my faith, nephew, if thy tale be true, then Topnam (Totnes, Devon) has turned French.”
The list below is a small sampling of some of the terms recorded in contemporary documents.
Abraham man: Real or bogus ex-inmate of Bedlam; madman.
apple-squire: Servant in a brothel.
beak: A magistrate.
bellman: Watchman.
bit: Money.
black art: Picking locks.
blackjack: Leather beer-jug coated with tar on the outside.
blue-coats: Servants.
cant: Criminal language; beggar’s language.
cheat: Thing.
cheats: Gallows.
cony: Dupe, victim (literally “rabbit”).
cony-catching: Trickery, especially at cards.
cozen: Cheat.
cup-shotten: Intoxicated.
darkmans: Night.
familiar: A spirit in animal form that assisted witches.
knight of the post: Hired witness (perjurer).
maltworm: A tippler.
pettifoggers: Petty legal practitioners.
pottle: Tankard containing two quarts.
pudding-prick: Skewer.
roaring boy: Swaggering bully.
sign of the smock: A brothel.
stews: Brothels.
COLOR NAMES OF THE RENAISSANCE
In his Description of England (1587), William Harrison remarks that he could list some of the hues devised “to please fantastical heads, as gooseturd green, pease-porridge tawny, popinjay blue, lusty gallant, . . . but I pass them over, thinking it sufficient to have said thus much of apparel generally, when nothing can particularly be spoken of any constancy thereof.”
The following list is drawn from several sources. Some of them disagree with each other, making one wish Mr. Harrison had said a bit more on the subject.
blue: Bice (pale blue), milk-and-water (bluish-white), plunket (light blue or sky blue), popinjay (bluish green), violet (indigo), watchet (pale greenish blue), whey (pale whitish blue).
brown: Abraham, beasar (the color of a bezoar stone), heare (hare) color, fig, horseflesh color (a brownish pink or bronze), puke (dirty brown, although Harrison’s editor defines it as blue-black), russet (dark brown—not to be confused with the fabric russet, which can be gray).
flesh, neutral, or tan: Carnation (resembles raw flesh), claie-color (deep cream), Dead Spaniard (pale grayish tan), hair (bright tan), lady blush, maidenhair (bright tan), peach-color (a deep pinkish orange), sheep’s color.
gray: Ash, dove, rat’s color (dull gray), crane (grayish white).
green: Kendal, Lincoln (bright green), pease-porridge tawny (brownish green), popinjay, sea-green (bluish or yellowish green), virli (vivid green), willow (light green).
orange: Blecche, lion-tawny (ochre-orange), marigold (orange-yellow), orange-tawny (orange-brown), roy (a bright tawny), tawny (a dusky brown-orange).
parti-colored: Marble, medley.
red: Brassel (brownish red), Bristol (“a pleasant red”), flame, gingerline (reddish violet), incarnate, lusty gallant (light red), maiden’s blush, murrey (purplish red), pear (russet red), sanguine (blood red), scarlet (vivid red containing yellow), stammel.
yellow: Cane-color, goose-turd (yellowish green), isabelle (light buff), marigold, peach (yellow flushed with pink), primrose (pale yellow), straw (light yellow).
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
McCrum, Robert, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil. The Story of English. New York: Viking Penguin, 1986. Chapter Three, “A Muse of Fire,” is dedicated to the Tudor and Stuart eras.
Partridge, Eric. Shakespeare’s Bawdy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955. This is the “classic” study of language in this era.
NOTE: Readers may also wish to look at the Elizabethan wordlist at the author's website: www.kathylynnemerson.com/wordlist.htm
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: LONDON AND OTHER CITIES
London’s government was administered by a Lord Mayor, aldermen, common councilmen, and two sheriffs,
each of whom had sixteen sergeants, each with a yeoman and six clerks. The city was divided into twenty-five wards (twenty-six after 1550) and further splintered into precincts. Beadles were employed to keep the peace, supervise trade, and oversee matters of sanitation on a local level.
In 1500, the population of London (one square mile north of the Thames and enclosed by a wall) was 40,000. In 1631 a census of that same area counted 130,000. It is “greater London,” however, including Southwark and other out-parishes, to which population figures usually refer.
About 8% of the population were transients, and women outnumbered men by thirteen to ten. By 1640, London was the largest city in Europe and twenty times the size of any other English city.
A MISCELLANY OF LONDON
London Bridge
A stone bridge completed in 1209, this was the only bridge across the Thames at London. The wooden drawbridge at the Southwark end was raised for high-masted ships for the last time in 1500. A new gate was built at that end of the bridge in Tudor times. Its tower was three stories high with a covered way below. On the battlements above this stone gateway were a series of poles which displayed the severed heads of executed traitors. These were parboiled and dipped in tar to make them last longer and customarily left in place until they rotted. The head of the earl of Essex, executed in 1601, was still displayed in 1612.
On the north side of the drawbridge stood Nonsuch House, a huge, square wooden building, four stories high, with cupolas at each corner. Prefabricated, it was erected in 1577 and straddled the bridge so that pedestrian traffic had to pass through an arched tunnel in the middle of the building.
All along both sides of the length of the bridge were merchants’ houses and shops, some rising as high as seven stories. The thoroughfare in the middle was at places as narrow as nine feet. After a fire in 1632, only twenty-five of approximately 200 buildings were still standing.
The Tower of London
Begun by William the Conqueror in 1067, monarchs traditionally spent the night before their coronation in the royal apartments there, but otherwise it was not much used as a royal residence. In Tudor and Stuart times the Tower was also used as a prison and as a menagerie.
St. Paul’s
A public thoroughfare known as Paul’s Walk went right through the cathedral and was so heavily used that in 1554 carrying beer casks or baskets of bread, fish, flesh, or fruit through the Cathedral had to he forbidden. It was also forbidden to lead mules or horses through.
In 1561, lightning struck the spire. The resulting fire melted some of the bells and the roof of the steeple fell in. The roof was rebuilt but the steeple was not replaced. For a penny, people could climb to the top. Many of them carved their names before they went back down.
Churches
Under Henry VIII, there were 120 little churches with chantries and graveyards in London. After the dissolution, there were still almost as many parishes (any area having its own church and priest), but in the churches that remained there were no candles or incense. Painted walls had been whitewashed, altars had been stripped, and saints removed from their niches. A list made in 1638 names 101 London parishes and their incumbents. Out-parishes, such as St. Botolph-without-Aldgate, were located beyond the city walls but still considered part of greater London.
All these churches had bells, rung to mark the canonical hours before the Reformation. “Bow Bells,” the bells of St. Mary-Le-Bow, Cheapside, were famous throughout London. They rang every night at nine and, after 1520, sounded a regular “retreat from work” as well.
Waterworks and Conduits
As it flows through London, the Thames varies between 800’ and 1,500’ in width. It is still a tidal river at London, and at flood tides this made it nearly impossible to pass safely beneath London Bridge, where the piers of the arches were protected by timber frameworks called starlings and the waterway between arches was very narrow at any time. Prudent travelers landed on one side and walked to the other to reembark rather than take a risk and “shoot the bridge.” Waterworks, built in the 1550s on two arches of London Bridge, used the river currents to drive a series of waterwheels, which worked a pump to raise water to a cistern on a tower high enough to supply piped water to much of London.
At the west end of Cheapside was the Little (or pissing) Conduit. At the east end, adjacent to the Poultry, was the Great Conduit. Water was supplied to the Great Conduit by lead pipes from Paddington and was also piped to some houses. It was brought to others by paid water carriers who used great wooden “cans” which looked like milk churns. The poor fetched water for themselves from conduits, fountains, wells, and direct from the Thames. There were more than twenty-five conduits, wells, and pumps in Elizabethan London.
In Plymouth, Sir Francis Drake had been responsible for supplying water to the city from the River Meavy, a project completed in 1591. Mills set up along the watercourse paid Drake back for his efforts. This became the model for bringing the “New River” to London early in the seventeenth century. Between 1609 and 1613, the River Lea was diverted along a new cut which carried water to Islington and fed into great conduits there to supply the city’s needs.
Although people generally avoided drinking water if they had other choices, most did not quite grasp the concept that raw sewage contaminated rivers and streams. Neither was the idea of boiling water to purify it understood.
Streets
Side streets were narrow and tortuous, made more so by wooden pentices—hinged shop fronts let down to display goods offered for sale. This left only room enough for a single horseman to pass. Cheapside was both the main shopping street and the broadest of all London streets. It had room for various structures at its center. The conduits have already been mentioned. Opposite Wood Street was the Eleanor Cross, dating from the reign of Edward I. Gilded and adorned with statues, this was the place from which proclamations were made—until it was destroyed in 1643 in a burst of Puritan frenzy. Opposite Mill Street stood the Standard, a square pillar with a conduit and statues and an image of Fame above. It was often used as a site for executions
Approximate Population of Greater London
1550 120,000
1600 200,000-250,000
1634 230,000-339,824
1640 375,000-400,000
THE HOUSING BOOM
In 1585 Our Lady’s Row in York was described as including nine separate housing units, six tenements and three cottages. Urban tenements in most cities were rebuilt in the sixteenth century to reflect a new taste for privacy. In medieval houses, only the hall had been heated. Now chimneys were a stack of brick instead of wattle and daub and one could serve six apartments or more. By the end of the sixteenth century, glass had also become inexpensive enough to be used in most new houses in the city.
Most London houses were two or three stories high (about 30’) with about 200 square feet of space on the ground floor. Frontages on the street ran 16’-20’. The house opposite would be about 15’ away but because of the structure of the houses, each floor overhanging the one below, people could reach out of their attic windows and shake hands with their neighbors.
Built of wood or of wood and Flemish wall (lath and plaster or other filling), these houses had rooms at the back and front on each upper floor and a cellar, shop, and kitchen on the ground floor. There might be a garret in the gable where the servants slept. A narrow alleyway might run along one side of the house to a small, long (5’-10’) garden or court at the back.
In the seventeenth century, merchants’ houses got taller, rising to five or six stories with a narrow front. Some merchants merged three houses into one, using all three fronts. At the other extreme, tenements were created by subdividing existing buildings. In 1603 a law was passed stating that no new houses could be built within three miles of the city and forbidding existing tenements to be further subdivided. This law was poorly enforced, with the result that in 1612 a chandler in Clerkenwell made one tenement into fifteen.
Half-timbered Tudor h
ouses surviving into the twentieth century in Chester, Exeter, and Shrewsbury show that they were built to a unit-house plan. Each house has a shop on the ground floor at the front, with the kitchen behind. The first floor contains a hall running back from the street. On the upper floors are bedrooms. Records show that a wealthy Exeter merchant might have as many as fifteen rooms in his house while a tradesman could have four or five.
Thatch as a roofing material was banned in Norwich in 1570, Bristol in 1574, and Oxford in 1582, as well as in many other towns, because of the danger of fires. Slate and tile were to be used instead, and only stone or brick for chimneys and flues.
URBAN PROBLEMS
Sanitation
In towns, “Rose Alley” was the euphemism for any spot popular as a urinal and the act itself was called “plucking a rose.” London’s public latrines overhung the River Fleet. Any river that ran through a heavily populated area got to be little better than a sewer, with dead animals floating in it to add to the ambiance. The Fleet, however, was one of the worst. It had once had several docks and been wide enough for shipping. Prisoners had been admitted into Fleet Prison by a water gate. By 1502, however, the channel was all but impassable, filled in with the “filth of the tanners” and other noxious substances. It was cleaned that year and again in 1606, when the Council ordered the cleansing of all town ditches and sewers as a means of controlling the danger of plague, but by 1652 it was once more impassable by boat.
If they didn’t empty directly into the nearest river, privies had to be cleaned periodically. This was usually done at night by a bucket brigade which carried the waste to a laystall or laystow (the common dung heap). In 1612 it cost one shilling to have a privy cleaned. Although it was forbidden to throw the contents of chamber pots out of windows and into the street, most people did so anyway.
The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life in Renaissance England Page 24