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

Author:Ian Mortimer [Mortimer, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-06-26T16:00:00+00:00

Rural Houses

To the modern eye, some of the smaller manor houses of Elizabethan England are just as aesthetically pleasing as the stately homes. Hundreds are under construction. William Harrison writes in 1577 that “Every man almost is a builder and he that hath bought any small parcel of ground, be it never so little, will not be quiet till he has pulled down the old house (if any were there standing) and set up a new after his own devising.” Today, when you need better accommodation, you move house; in Elizabethan England, you rebuild. Huge numbers of medieval hall houses are being turned into well-proportioned residences of two or three stories—over a thousand in Devon alone.24 Across the country, many of the dissolved monasteries are being refashioned to provide extensive living accommodation, such as Newstead Abbey for the Byrons in Nottinghamshire and Buckland Abbey for the Grenvilles in Devon.

The furnishings of these gentlemen’s residences are, in varying degrees, comparable with those of the stately homes. The beds may be less skillfully carved and hung with less costly curtains; the chests may be less lavishly painted; and you will not find an inlaid marble table or a gilt chamber clock; but you will see certain items of luxury. You might find status symbols like a mirror, a set of virginals, and a portrait or two of members of the family. Your chamber may well have curtains on rails that you can draw across the windows. However, as you go down the scale of family prestige and household size—from large houses with twenty or more servants to those of gentlemen and yeomen with just one or two—the furnishings become more utilitarian. So do the rooms. It is not just that the sheets of a bed in a yeoman’s house are of a lower quality and the bed itself is smaller (in order to fit into a smaller chamber with a lower ceiling); the use of the space is altogether more practical.

Consider the house of Mrs. Katherine Doyle of Merton, Oxfordshire, the widow of a gentleman, in 1585. The value of her movable goods is the substantial sum of £591, including £300 owed to her as a result of three financial agreements. Despite this wealth, and despite the size of her house, she has very few actual living rooms. You enter through a parlor with a table, chairs, stools, and benches in the middle, a cupboard on one side, and painted hangings on the walls. The next room is a high old-fashioned hall, open to the rafters, where there is another table; this doubles up as a kitchen. After that you are through to the dairy, where there is a cheese press, vats, churns, cream pots, and wooden pails; and then the buttery, where you will find eleven barrels on shelves along one wall and a table in the middle, as well as bottles of leather and wicker-wrapped glass. The remaining three downstairs rooms are similarly practical: there is a larder containing a

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