The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England by Mortimer Ian

Author:Mortimer, Ian [Mortimer, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781409029564
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

poultry (8s)

nineteen acres of wheat (£27 10s)

three horses (£6 10s)

four acres of rye (£5)

six pigs (£2 13s 4d)

thirty-two acres of barley (£32)

eight cows (£16)

fourteen acres of oats (£10)

three bullocks (£4)

ten acres of tares (£5)

150 sheep (£37 10s)

four acres of peas (£2 13s 4d)

twenty lambs (£3)

1½ acres of beans (£1 5s)

All that comes to £153 9s 8d. If you add the value of the lease of his farm (£10) and wool, malt and other stored farm produce (more than £30), you can see that he too has little wealth in his domestic furnishings. His house has no glass. A newly added chamber above the hall is given over entirely to storing wool, corn, malt and linen. His only luxuries are the featherbeds he has in his hall and inner chamber.30

You probably realise that the idea of a pleasure garden is incompatible with yeomen’s priorities: they seek comfort in their self-sufficiency, not in luxuries. Outside Jefferie Smith’s house is a range of outbuildings: a boulting house (for sifting flour), a kitchen with a storage loft above it, a milk house, two cart houses, a storehouse, a barn and a gatehouse, with a well in it. The privy is at the bottom of the plot, far away from the house, and you will have to go there each time you feel the call of nature; there are no chamber pots or close stools. The garden here is a place for herbs, vegetables, fruit and nut trees, the storage of lumber and occasionally bee keeping; if you see any flowers, they are self-seeded or planted for use in medicines. It is a far cry from the sculpted gardens at Theobalds and Hampton Court. But William Walter’s and Jefferie Smith’s houses both have something in common with the stately homes described above: they are the homes of ‘the haves’. There are many more people to be classed among the ‘have-nots’, who are starving on the roads or who are sleeping in servants’ rooms and rising at dawn to light the kitchen fire.

WORKERS’ HOUSES

Writing in the 1580s, Richard Carew describes old husbandmen’s cottages in Cornwall as having

walls of earth [cob], low thatched roofs, few partitions, no planchings [ceilings] or glass windows and scarcely any chimneys other than a hole in the wall to let out the smoke; their bed, straw and a blanket; as for sheets, so much linen cloth had not stepped over the narrow channel between them and [England]. To conclude, a mazer and a drinking cup and a pan or two comprised all their substance: but now most of these fashions are universally banished, and the Cornish husbandman conformeth himself with a better supplied civility to the Eastern pattern.31

Has the lot of the husbandman really improved, as Carew suggests? Are William Harrison’s three lifestyle improvements – chimneys, bedding and pewter – true for husbandmen and labourers too?

The richest husbandmen have certainly seen improvements to their lifestyle since the reign of Henry VIII. For example, Ralph Newbury, husbandman of Cropredy (Oxfordshire), has chattels worth £166 when he dies in 1578.

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