What sense do you get of what life was like in Elizabethan England?
What was life really like for the poor in the
town and cities of Elizabethan England?
In
the towns and cities of Elizabethan England, the markets were usually full of
hustle and bustle, and a town could double in size, especially on market day
with the amount visitors. People usually spent many hours at the market and so
various fast foods were available. Food like cooked meat, pasties, pies and tasty
treats were all on offer but they were pricy so they would only buy some herbs
or some onions to make soup. Some women would carry baskets full of oysters,
seafood or herbs to sell instead of standing by the stalls.
When
it got dark, some people would look out for a man carrying a flame from door to
door as most people used to find it too difficult to light their fires using a
tinderbox (search what this is) and some kindling. So they used to pay for
somebody to light it instead. A tinderbox is a little box containing tinder or
something like flint which is readily ignited, and kindling is small sticks and
twigs used to light fires.
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Tinderbox and Kindling |
Half
of the entire Elizabethan population was under the age of 22 in comparison to
the middle market modern times where they are/were 39. They had so much less
life experience and so being younger meant that they were more aggressive, more
hot-headed, and armed. Most young men used to carry a dagger and others would
wear a sword. This therefore connoted that the poor were really desperate and
those that were desperate for a life of crime had to remember that any penalty
of crime, was death and that included the theft of just thirteen pence worth of
goods. Even taking a fresh shirt from a washing line or taking some silver
spoons from a rich man's house would lead to going straight to the gallows.
Gallows are a structure typically used for the execution by hanging.
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Gallow |
1.
Hanging from gallows.
2.
Traitor’s death of hanging drawing and quartering
3.
Beheading
4.
Burning at the stake
5.
Peine forte et dure (means hard and strong punishment): they were
laid on the ground, and a sharp rock was placed under their spine. Heavy
weights were then added one by one to a board on their body. It could take 12
hours for someone to be crushed to death.
Whilst
the poor had a particularly hard time, there's one cause of suffering that is a
threat to everyone. This was the weather. If they had one bad summer and all
the crops failed, food became scarce prices rose, and whole families suffered
from malnutrition. However, if the harvest failed for two years in a row, they
starved to death. If it failed for three years in a row, as it did in the years
1594-1597, thousands died. Failed harvest meant that many people in the
countryside gad no work and without a job they couldn’t afford to stay in their
homes. In the 16th century, it was against the law to look after a homeless
person who's not from their neighbourhood and they would be fined even for
taking in a perfectly innocent homeless young couple. As a consequence, lots of
people ended up walking for miles up and down the country, searching for work
or food constantly being moved on. Some people even migrated to Kent on foot
from as far away as Lancashire and Yorkshire (295miles).
In
1597, 3 years into the worst famine ever to be experienced, England were about
to make some major changes to the law. In October, Elizabeth's government
passed an act for the relief of the poor, for the first time, people attacked
locally where the money was given to parish overseas to provide for the very
poorest of people. This was a major change and had to account as one the
turning points for English social history. From then, helping the poor wasn't
just left to individual acts of charity, it's a duty that everyone shared. The
new law established the system of caring for the poor for the next 200 years.
For the poorer, life became better under the new laws, however, there threat
especially for the poor. Death was something that they all feared, and due to
the high levels of disease and society, it featured very prominently in their
daily lives.
Most
children lost one parent by the time they grew up, and most parents lost half
their children. In Stratford in the 1560s, on average there were 63 children
baptised and 43 buried. There were so many diseases that they could catch, but
the one they heard about the most was the plague. The 1578 plague orders that
if plague was found in a house, it is to be boarded up and guarded until everyone
inside is either dead or had survived for 6 weeks. For some people feeling or
experiencing the symptoms, it was known that they dug their own graves and laid
down in them waiting upon death. Some medical manuals used to have strange
recipes e.g. live swallow chicks ground up in a pestle in water. However, the
more serious ailments would require the attention of a physician. Unfortunately,
the medicines the physicians prescribed wouldn't just depend on the nature of
their illness, but would also depend on how wealthy they were. Expensive
medicines with the best ingredients were given to the rich and so the poor
received a cheaper alternative.
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Elizabethan Medicine |
What was life really
like for the poor in the countryside of Elizabethan England?
Elizabethan England was dominated by the rich
and powerful but in the countryside, many people were poor and faced great
hardship. In 1558 Elizabeth had just been crowned Queen. Elizabethans found
open spaces and heaths horrific and didn't like them. Dotted around the
countryside, there would be small cottages, some about hundreds of years old
and when one was seen, there were no ideas that life in the countryside was
pleasant. It was typically normal to find as many as 7 or 8 people living a
house like the old small cottages. They lived in complete darkness; they'd go
to sleep in darkness and they'd wake in darkness.
Inside their homes, it was very basic. They only
had one room with an earth floor and in the middle, there'd be a fire that was
permanently lit. With this being said, they'd have a lot of thick smoke filling
the room. A
dark smoke-filled house is one reason why they used to spend a whole day out of
doors. To prevent suffocation, they made openings in the
roofs and their windows are no more than just jokes in the wall because the
windows are unglazed, covered only by a shutter and they let in the cold. This
means that it takes more to retain as much heat as possible even in the summer
months very little would enter. Candles were expensive and a poor family
couldn’t afford lots of light. Nowadays, we take for granted the amount of
light we have. Some families could only afford a few pots, some spoons and
ladles, a basket, and a bench. Their bed used to be the floor, and if they were
lucky, it was a thin straw mattress. With these living conditions, the cold
stuck so deep into them that their flesh was eaten with vermin and corrupt
diseases grew on them.
The
Elizabethan society was strictly divided according to the class that they were
born in and in 1577, a clergyman called William Harrison made a description of
England. A clergyman is a male priest, minister, or religious leader,
especially a Christian one. He described the ordinary sort of people that you
would have met on the road or a village ale house. ‘Most countrymen fall into one of three categories; a yeoman might own or rent
his farm, and employs workers, A husbandman rents the land that he works
on, and Labourers simply work on other people's farms. As an unknown poor person
looking for work in the countryside, their options were extremely limited and
their best bet was to go from farm to farm offering their services as a
labourer. If they ask around or asked the local yeoman or husbandman, they may
have found someone that would employ them on a casual basis and allow them to
sleep in a barn, but they had to be prepared for a hard slog.
Their working days started from sunrise and continued
until sunset and if they were employed as a labourer, their reward for a whole
day was a groat. The groat was a thin coin roughly
the same size as a 20p coin now. The groat was made of pure silver and had been
part of the English currency since the medieval times. It weighed 2.1grams and
was around for 300 years. It was also referred to as ‘fourpence’ 4d. When a
labourer earned fourpence a day, a chicken cost fourpence a day, and a lemon
cost threepence. If chickens were as valuable to us in the Elizabethan times
as it were to them, it would cost about £100 each and a lemon would cost £75. With
fourpence a day, they could get a loaf of bread, a small amount of butter and
some cheese every day, four small pieces of meat and three pieces of fish per
week, and some ale to drink because the water was polluted. This all added up
to about 6000 calories per day which is only enough for a working man and his
wife. This left nothing for firewood, rent, clothing or for the children.
Unless they grew their own vegetables in their garden, made their own clothes, and
went without some of the food, so that they could pay for rent, they wouldn't
be able to raise a family. This meant that lots of ordinary things like getting
married and having children weren't possible if they didn't have enough food or
money. Therefore, on a whole, life in the Elizabethan era was a very major
struggle in order to survive.
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The Groat |
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