Week 1 – Setting the Scene – Life in Elizabethan England

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.

Tinderbox and Kindling

As night falls, the towns become less safe and back then people would say that “After dark, it used to be terrifying.” This was because where there was poverty, there was crime.

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.

Gallow

If anyone was found guilty of witchcraft in England, it was likely that they would be hanged, unlike in Catholic countries where witches were burned at the stake. Back then, there were five different ways in which people could have been executed.

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.

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.

The Groat