Tudor England: A History

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Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England, 13; Thomas Elyot, The Castell of Helth (1539), STC 7643, fos. 33v–34r. LUCY WOODING: It’s great that people are fascinated by the Tudors. It’s lovely that there are all these films and novels and so on. And, you know, anything that promotes enthusiasm for history, I’m totally behind. Now that was partly because we were looking at history from the top down, much more. So we were looking at the work of, you know, churchmen and scholars. We were viewing it from an elite perspective. Also, assuming that when governments pass legislation declaring the country now to be Protestant, that everything fell into place accordingly.

Fresh water was not widely available, particularly in an urban setting, and the Tudors consumed enormous quantities of beer. Manual workers, sailors and soldiers were assumed to need 4 quarts (over 4 litres) of beer for their daily allowance. [30] There was little concern over alcohol consump­tion, although Thomas Elyot did observe the longevity of the Cornish, who drank mostly water, and commented that men and women brought up on milk and butter were a lot healthier than those who drank ale and wine. [31] Pregnant women necessarily drank a fair amount of alcohol, which may have contributed to late miscarriages; but they were advised to avoid strong drink. [32] Ale, beer and cider, like milk, were mostly produced at home, or close to home. [33] Wine was believed to have health-giving properties, and Elyot recalled the opinion of Plato that it ‘norysheth and comforteth, as well all the body, as the spirites of man’. He thought that God ‘dyd ordeyne it for mankynde, as a remedy agaynstd the incommodi­ties of aege, that thereby they shulde seme to retourne unto youth and forgette hevynes’, but advised that ‘yonge men shoulde drynke lyttell wyne, for it shall make them prone to fury, and to lecherye’. [34] Fasting So, yeah, there is a sort of concerted attempt by some of the upper echelons of society to deride Henry VII’s achievements. To deplore his reign and, you know, his style of kingship, which is deeply unfair. So, the understanding that the fertility of the landscape is a blessing from God, I think this helps imbue the landscape with a lot of religious meaning.

was a crucial year in the story of the House of Tudor. It marked the moment when the crown passed from Queen Mary to her formidable younger sister Elizabeth. It also was the year when the long history of Catholicism in England came to an end. To learn much more about all of this, Violet travelled to Oxford, to meet Dr Lucy Wooding, the author of Tudor England: A History. *** [ About our format ] *** BOGAEV: Hmm. Well, is this why you think, Henry VII didn’t get his own Shakespeare play? I mean, he does appear just at the end of Richard III as Richard’s successor after the Battle of Bosworth Field. But that’s it. Shakespeare didn’t take him on. WOODING: Well, we have to be a little bit careful there because of course we’re still talking about an age in which literacy is limited. But, I think it goes further down society than some people might assume. Wooding’s book covers all the juicy drama of the Tudor nobility, but she argues there’s only so much you can learn about the period by following the ups and downs at court. To get a real sense of what life was like, you have to get out in the streets and in the fields. She opens her book with a chapter about the almost mystical connection Tudor people felt to the land that they inhabited. WITMORE: Lucy Wooding is a Langford fellow and tutor in history at Lincoln College, Oxford University. Her book, Tudor England: A History is out now from Yale University Press.

This bleeds into a revisionist account of Henry VIII that portrays our most notorious monarch not as a sex-crazed monster but as an “oddly bookish king”, who gathered the finest legal and theological minds of his age to try and resolve his “Great Matter”, the divorce of Catherine of Aragon (no less sharp but determined to remain married), in the pursuit of a male heir. It is the dust raised by these tome-flippers that irritates religious orthodoxies, leading in significant part to the Reformation (or indeed reformations – Wooding stresses that it was Henry VIII’s son, Foxe’s “godly imp” Edward VI, whose tenure saw the first Book of Common Prayer, the everyday impact of reform with a meaningfully Protestant character, and a great explosion of anti-papal rhetoric). These counter-examples are not just distracting “whataboutism”. Wooding argues that our modern sense of “good” and “bad” monarchs is a lazy shorthand for the complex ways in which beliefs changed across 118 years of Tudor rule. It is easy for us to see the people of the past as helpless subjects to a procession of heroes or villains at the very top. What really made the difference for poor Perotine though, along with so many others, were the vicissitudes of public opinion across a Renaissance that was “raw, sharp-edged, invigorating and disputed”. Fasting was a regular part of Tudor life, both before and after the Reformation. In the pre-Reformation period, everyone abstained from meat and dairy on Wednesdays and Fridays, on the eve of important saints’ days, and throughout Advent and Lent. One of Protestantism’s attractions was that it dispensed with these requirements. However, the threat to the fishing trade was such that Friday fasting was hastily restored during Edward VI’s reign – although it remained unpopular, as the attempts to regulate butchers’ sales on fast days indicate. [35] In later Protestant culture, it became common to mark times of mourning, or special intercession, with fast days. Public fasts might be held in parish, town or by the nation at large in response to a particular crisis, whilst the godly might keep private fasts, accompanied by prayer and almsgiving, in pursuit of greater personal sanctity. [36] The response to the terrible famines of the 1590s, after three consecutive harvests had failed, was to declare public fasts on Wednesdays and Fridays – with the pious objective of showing penitence to a providential God for the sins that had merited such punishment, and with the practical objective of giving the food saved to the starving poor. The Council interpreted God’s displeasure as a response to the ‘excesse in dyett’ and ‘nedeles waste and ryotous consumpcion’ prevalent throughout the kingdom. [37] In more private fashion, many dedicated Protestants resumed the medieval practice of fasting the night before receiving communion. [38] Growing Vegetables to Feed the Poor When Henry VII landed in a secluded bay in a far corner of Wales, it seemed inconceivable that this outsider could ever be king of England. Yet he and his descendants became some of England’s most unforgettable rulers, and gave their name to an age. The story of the Tudor monarchs is as astounding as it was unexpected, but it was not the only one unfolding between 1485 and 1603. In this episode Dr Lucy Wooding tells us more about these two fascinating characters. Mary and Elizabeth were the first women to rule England in their own right. United in complicated ways by their blood, it turned out that there would be an even greater division when it came to their faith.BOGAEV: Right. You say that 95% of the people lived in villages. But then you had London, this amazingly mutating city. It just had tremendous turnover and it depended on immigrants, you write, to keep the city alive. That they needed, I think you said, 4,000 new arrivals each year to sustain population with so many people dying of, what? Plague and overcrowding and poor sanitation? There is this phenomenon that he marries the women he knows. You know, he marries his former sister-in-law. He marries, most unusually, a succession of women from the court. Well, you know, that’s not really how an early modern monarch is supposed to behave. You’re supposed to make a grand, dynastic match with foreign royalty. The one occasion that he does that, with Anne of Cleves, is a disaster. No, I think he is quite cautious when it comes to his private life. WOODING: Well, because Britain became a Protestant country, because Protestantism became a big part of its identity, we assumed for many years that when Protestantism first arrived in England in the 1520s, that it was enthusiastically welcomed, endorsed by in a great sways of society. We used to think that by 1547, England was already fairly Protestant. WOODING: Well, I mean, this debate has gone through various kind of stages. Some people would see him as just cynically manipulating religion to get his own way to swallow up the wealth of the church, particularly the wealth of the monasteries.

WOODING: I’m not entirely sure. That’s a very good question, and I ask myself that question quite often. I mean, obviously I think this period is utterly fascinating. But you know, this is what I do for a living, so I would say that. Memento: The reliquary known as the ‘tablet de Bourbon’, made by one of the great Parisian goldsmiths and acquired as part of a ransom during the Hundred Years War. Worn by Mary I in the portrait by Hans Eworth. People/Social WITMORE: We can’t seem to get enough of the Tudor dynasty in all of its soap opera twists. But to really know the Tudors, you have to look past the famous names and racy plot lines twist.Richard Gardiner, Profitable Instructions for the Manuring, Sowing and Planting of Kitchen Gardens, STC 11570.5 (1599), Sig. D2v. WOODING: Well, that’s a fascinating question. I think the scholarship that surrounds that play suggests that they were prepared to take her great speech as tongue-in-cheek. I think they thought that Shakespeare was having some fun with this whole debate about the role of women and whether a wife should be submissive or not. Now, within a church that might be within a statue, within a holy relic, something like that, but out in the countryside, you also see holy wells and holy trees and sights associated with saints and pilgrimage ways. So, the landscape is overlaid with a sort of network of spiritual, you know, indicators. Gervase Rosser, ‘Going to the fraternity feast: Commensality and social relations in late medieval England’, JBS 33 (1994), 431.