Many yeomen farmers raised both crops and sheep, and in some areas corn-sheep husbandry was combined with apple orchards. When Sir Bassingbourne Gawdry of Norfolk died in 1606 he had over 240 acres of “standing corn” and flocks totaling over 5,000 sheep.
LIVESTOCK
One Berkshire yeoman paid £20 for 100 sheep in 1586. Sheep had value in the fleece, skin (writing material as well as leather), milk (six ewes gave the yield of one cow), and manure, and although they were used for meat, it was not the most important byproduct. Lambing took place in late February or March and sheep were weaned in May. They were washed and sheared before Midsummer Day (June 24) and the fleeces taken to market. In some areas, spring sheepshearing was followed by a festival with special tarts, cakes, and pastries. After shearing, wool was wound, cleaned, and packed into great canvas bags that held about 1,000 pounds apiece. Sheep were counted in August and marked with reddle (red ochre) to keep them separate in a combined flock.
Bullocks were also counted every August, and in the autumn, when the larger fairs were held, the butcher sent an agent to reach an agreement for the delivery of cattle. Cattle from the north and west were moved in herds by drovers, using their own tracks across the landscape, to be sold for meat. Most livestock was slaughtered for the winter supply of meat and because it was expensive to keep animals over the winter, but a cow or two was usually kept for milk. Smaller than the modern animal, one cow might give 120-150 gallons a year. Cows were fed on grass, mistletoe, and ivy.
Goats were kept, though seldom in the lowlands. More common were pigs, which were lanky with longer legs and snouts than modern breeds. In some areas they ran free in the woods all summer. A hogsherd earned 1s. 5d. per quarter in the mid-sixteenth century. In other areas pigs had a ring in the nose and were yoked in pairs to keep them from wandering. In some boroughs and cities a swineherd collected the pigs and took them into the countryside each morning. Each sow farrowed twice a year and litters ran anywhere from seven to nineteen piglets. Pigs were kept for bacon and were slaughtered at Michaelmas, after they’d been fattened up on fallen acorns, beechnuts, crab apples, hazelnuts, and leaves. If they were kept over the winter they were fed on whey.
Bees were kept, as honey was a common sweetener. Wicker hives coated with clay and thatched with straw were used. Church towers were also sometimes used for hives.
Doves were raised in dovecotes as a source of food. In fact, in the winter and early spring months, pigeons might be the only source of fresh meat. Young doves or pigeons (squabs) supplied fresh meat all year long. Older birds were also used to lay eggs. The birds were also bred for their manure, and for the saltpetre in the dung. Saltpetre was used to make gunpowder. One dovecote, built in 1530, could house nearly 3,000 birds in 1,300 double nests. Most were much smaller, but a great household might have more than one dovecote. The one at Cothele in Cornwall has stone walls three feet thick. Inside are thirteen rows of nest holes with thirty holes in each row. Each nest is about eighteen inches deep and twelve inches across at the back. In the layout of a typical dovecote, the potence—a large revolving beam in the center of the cote—is used to collect the squabs. The arms stretching out from it give a gallows effect. The nests, located all around the interior, are L-shaped.
Poultry included swans and geese as well as chickens. Swans were fattened in coops on oats and peas. Geese produced five goslings a year.
Domestic animals included not only dogs and cats, but weasels, which were trained to kill rats and mice. When there were no cats or weasels available, arsenic was used to kill rodents.
MANORS AND FARMS
By Tudor times, the English peasant had evolved into the yeoman and the feudal lord was simply a landlord. No longer was the villein bound to the land. The concept of knight service still existed in some cases, but applied more to the landowner and his relationship with the Crown. There were several types of tenants. Freeholders made fixed payments for life. Leaseholders had a fixed rental for a set number of years. The customary tenant (or copyholder) paid rent but owed no services to the landlord. These tenants could be forced out by raising rents. Laborers worked on lands rented by others for wages and usually cultivated two or three acres of their own in the common fields. In many areas, farmers supplemented their income by doing piecework in the cloth trade.
A manor was a unit of estate management. Most feudal manors included one or more hamlets and a larger village. Since a knight or peer might well own more than one manor, on those where he did not actually live, a steward (or sometimes a bailiff, reporting to a steward responsible for more than one manor) was the actual overseer, managing the farm, buying grain and cattle, and supervising workers. One holdover from the feudal period was the requirement that corn be ground at the lord’s mill, which could be expensive.
Accounts were presented on Lady Day and at Michaelmas. In the 1620s, a new method of accounting was introduced. The old way was on parchment with Roman numerals. The new used paper and Arabic numerals. A typical large manor might require three large volumes, one for income and two for expenditures.
TOWNS AND VILLAGES
The terms parish and town were used interchangeably in the seventeenth century although technically they were not always the same. The parish (an ecclesiastical division) gained prominence as parish officials (churchwardens and petty constables) gradually took over functions previously performed by officials of a manor. In 1555, surveyors of the highway, appointed by the churchwardens, were added to the list of parish officials, and in 1597 the Poor Law stipulated that each parish have two to four overseers of the poor.
Large villages were common in the south and east, small villages and hamlets more prevalent in the north and west. Even in small villages, a large proportion of the population worked for the rest. In Ealing, which had 404 inhabitants in 1599, 109 were servants, living in 34% of the households. 78% of the males and 58% of the females were between the ages of twenty and twenty-four. The average village population was under 200.
In each village, even the smaller ones, there were usually a number of men engaged in specialized work, commonly a baker, a carpenter, fullers, millers, and smiths. If there was no tanner, villagers did their own tanning. Itinerant labor also supplemented work that was done in each household. Specialists came in with dung carts at mowing time and branded animals and gelded suckling pigs. There were also slaters, thatchers, tilers, and tinkers. A trip to the nearest town gave access to chandlers, coopers, glaziers, saddlers, shoemakers, and tailors.
The average town had 400-900 people. A 1588 estimate indicates that there were more than 590 market towns. Another estimate, for 1603, puts the number of market and shire towns at about 641. In 1612, Dorset and Sussex each had eighteen market towns, Westmorland only four, but equally rural Lancashire had fifteen.
By the seventeenth century, the larger market towns had begun to specialize. Bewdley was known for caps, Lanport for eels, and so forth. Most towns also had schools, at least a petty school and frequently an endowed grammar school. Some market towns were also county towns, that is, the focus of trade routes and the location of medieval fortifications. Most county towns had town walls. In general they also had craft guilds.
DEER PARKS AND ROYAL FORESTS
Although there were nowhere near the number of woodlands of an earlier age, there were some preserves left. In Nottinghamshire, Sherwood Forest took up a quarter of the county. In Oxfordshire, the royal forest of Wychwood still covered two-thirds of the shire in 1603.
The dukes of Norfolk had hunting rights in Framlingham deer park. In a normal year 100-200 deer were given to local gentry and others as regular presents. There seems to have been a good-sized herd. Even the hard winter of 1510, which killed 1,307 of Framlingham's deer, did not decimate it.
In the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, which was Crown property, natural resources included game, timber, iron, and coal. Foresters, keepers, and underkeepers oversaw the land on a day-to-day basis, charged with keeping out those
who did not belong there. The forest had its own system of justice, consisting of four separate courts. The minelaw was probate court, trial court, and parliament all in one for miners. The court of attachments, held every six weeks, was run by verderers to deal with offences against the king’s timber and game. The swanimote met three times a year and was composed of freeholders of the forest. The justice seat was supposed to meet every three years in a site outside the forest, but the only recorded meeting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Gloucester was in July 1634. Most of the cases dealt with the theft of timber from the Forest of Dean.
ANTIQUITIES
Hadrian’s Wall in Cumberland was known during the Renaissance as the Picts’ Wall. Stonehenge in Wiltshire was believed to have been built by Aurelius Ambrosius (d. 506). In Somerset, thermal springs had prompted the Romans to build baths which were in more or less continuous use afterward. In 1612, Bath had five open-air baths for people and one (outside the city wall) for horses.
GYPSIES
Gypsies, whose origins were obscure (they were called “offspring of Ptolemy” and “Moon men”), were in France early in the fifteenth century and had reached England, possibly through Scotland, by 1500. The first statutes against them date from the 1530s, and from 1537, efforts were made to deport all gypsies. Some were sent to Norway. The number of recorded cases of “problems” with gypsies throughout the rest of the century, including an accusation of high treason in 1577, indicates how little success this policy had. In 1602, two Englishwomen were tried and convicted of consorting with gypsies. One was hanged; the other was reprieved due to pregnancy.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Campbell, Mildred. The English Yeoman Under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts. London: Merlin Press, 1983. This is a reprint of the “classic” 1942 reference.
Fussell, G.E. The English Countrywoman: A Farmhouse Social History, A.D. 1500-1900. London: A. Melrose, 1953.
Mingay, G.E. A Social History of the English Countryside. London and New York: Routledge, 1990.
Schmidt, Albert J. The Yeoman in Tudor and Stuart England. Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1961.
Speed, John. The Counties of Britain: A Tudor Atlas. London: Pavilion Books Ltd., 1988. Speed’s atlas dates from 1612. Detailed commentary on each county shown on a map is by Alasdair Hawkyard.
Wrightson, Keith and David Levine. Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling 1525-1700. New York: Academic Press, 1979.
CHAPTER NINETEEN: TRAVEL AND TRAVELERS
Less than 20% of the population ever traveled far from home. Most did, however, at least visit the nearest market town on a regular basis. In Elizabethan times the average distance traveled by customers to open market was seven miles. The most common way to travel was on foot, and by walking one might cover three or four miles an hour under optimal conditions during daylight. Very few people traveled at night and no one traveled purely for pleasure. Not only were road conditions terrible, but roads were ill-marked, making getting lost a danger. Highwaymen were also plentiful.
TRAVEL BY LAND
Anyone who could afford to hire a horse or a mule rode. Estimates seem to run around twenty to thirty miles a day as an average that a man could cover on horseback. Keep in mind that it took extra time to ford streams and be ferried across rivers. Bridges were few and far between. Only four crossed the Thames, at Kingston, Chertsey, Staines, and Southwark.
Travel on horseback
The 120-mile journey from Stratford to London took three days on horseback. English gentlemen, who thought it unmanly to ride in any vehicle or on a mare, preferred geldings to high-strung stallions who might throw their riders.
Women also rode on horseback. If they rode astride they used a man’s saddle. Riding apillion involved the use of a pillion, a leather or padded cushion on a wooden frame which was strapped to the horse’s back behind the saddle. A footboard hung from the offside and the woman clung to the man in front of her. This design may have led to the development of the sidesaddle, or it may have developed concurrently with it. There are records of Empress Matilda in the twelfth century riding “sideways in her saddle.” Some sources credit the introduction of the sidesaddle into England in 1382 to Anne of Bohemia. However early it was developed, it did not become generally popular until after 1533, when Catherine de’ Medici set the fashion by bringing one with her to France from Italy.
Hired Horses
Horses could be hired at the same stages (approximately every ten miles) used by the royal post, although until 1635 this was limited to the four main roads of the kingdom. Official riders on public business paid 1d., 1½ d. (1584), then 2½ d. per mile. Private travelers paid 2d. until 1609 when the rate sent up to 3d. a mile. A guide was paid 4d. (the guide’s groat) at each stage and employing one was compulsory, since he brought back the hired horses from stage to stage. He was also willing to carry up to fourteen pounds of the traveler’s belongings.
Some gentlemen who did not own horses could hire one for the entire journey at a rate of 12d. for the first day and 8d. per day thereafter. Another alternative was to buy a horse for the journey and sell it at journey’s end.
Horses in England by the sixteenth century included the Turkey horse, the Barbarian or Barb (small and swift), the Sardinian, the Neapolitan (with a long, slender head), the Spanish jennet, the Hungarian, the High Almaine or German, the Friesland, the Flanders (used as a draught horse), the Sweacian or Sweathland (Swedish—of a mean stature and strength, pied with white legs and body of another color), the Irish hobbym, and the Galloway nag. The Great Horse referred to the English war-horse. The best horses (in order of importance and cost) were war-horses, palfreys (riding horses for the upper class), rounceys (ridden by men-at-arms), hackneys, and carthorses. Horses were also rated by color, bay being best, especially if it had a white star on its forehead
Pack Trains
Pack trains used mules rather than horses on long hauls and carried goods in wicker panniers called dorsers or in cloth packs slung over crude, padded saddles. They could cover fifteen to twenty miles a day but they were usually slower because of poor road conditions or mountainous terrain. By early in the fifteenth century, scheduled pack trains ran from Kendal to Southampton, taking one month for the round trip. They carried letters as well as goods.
Mr. Pickford of Lancashire and Yorkshire was a goods carrier in the early Stuart era. His pack-horse trains consisted of thirty to forty horses carrying up to 350 pounds each in single file across the Pennines. Since Pickford took the precaution of hiring armed guards (the law made him responsible for any losses by robbery), long-distance travelers often joined the pack trains for safety. Carts were rarely used for pack trains in remote areas such as Scotland, Cornwall, Devonshire, and Northumberland. As late as 1760 there was no road suitable for wheeled vehicles between Manchester and Liverpool in Lancashire.
When pack trains went to areas where they could take wheeled vehicles, a variety of two-wheeled and four-wheeled wagons and carts were used to transport goods and people. The usual charge was from 2d. to 4d. per hundredweight of goods (during Elizabethan times). A woman was charged at the same rate as half a pack. A woman traveling from Oswestry to London (120 miles) paid 4s. 6d. and bought or brought her own food. Young gentlemen usually chose to hire a “padd-nag” at 6d. per day rather than ride in a wagon.
An attempt in 1605 to restrict heavy vehicles with iron rims on their wheels (in order to save the roads) and a royal proclamation in 1621 that forbade the use of four-wheeled wagons were both largely ignored. After 1632 owners of overloaded vehicles were fined 50s. In 1637 The Carrier’s Cosmographer listed regular wagon departures from various London inns at stated times, a practice begun in late Elizabethan days. Carriers left for Yorkshire from the Belle Sauvage Inn on Mondays, but the majority seem to have left on Fridays and Saturdays. Every important town had carriers who traveled to and from London at fixed intervals. Some made the trip as often as three times a week.
Road
Conditions and Routes
Some wide (up to 64’), paved roads survived from Roman times, but other “highways” were never more than narrow horse paths. A main highway, of which there were no more than twenty even by 1600, was probably only 30’ wide.
There were few signposts on these roads, though there may have been milestones. Maps existed but were expensive and not always accurate. Hiring a local guide was essential. No one traveled alone if he could help it. The gentry and nobility often took a large retinue, even though that meant they’d be lucky to cover fifteen miles in a day. Their baggage, often including furniture moved from one house to another with its owners, was carried in carts. Traveling chests, for clothing and other personal belongings, were made of leather soaked in oil to make them waterproof and reinforced with iron fittings. A curved top also ensured that rain ran off. These chests were lined with linen to protect the contents from dust and were fastened with locks.
In 1587, William Harrison’s Description of England included a list of all the major thoroughfares in England and gave distances between the principal towns. All roads had their hub at London. There were four old Roman roads still being heavily used at the end of the medieval period. Watling Street went north to Chester and south to Richborough in Kent (the closest point to Dover). Ermine Street went to York. The Icknield Way went into East Anglia. The Fosse Way led to Lincoln.
The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life in Renaissance England Page 26