How to Be a Tudor

In 1598 Alice was sent to Mr Brooke, along with another woman, Barbara Allen, who earned thirty shillings from the encounter. The bawd took half, but that still left Barbara with more money than some maidservants earned in a year (although they did get board and lodgings as well as the cash). Mr Brooke was a rich and powerful man, brother to Lord C

Sex was thus at the heart of the great religious debate of the era. For the Catholic Church, celibacy was the favoured state and marriage only ever a second best. For the new Protestant faith, marriage and married sex represented a more biblically pure life for adults. Within the British experience of the Reformation, however, there was no clear-cu

The structure of Tudor society, which concentrated resources in male hands, made it virtually impossible for a woman to bring up a child without the financial support of a man, or, in his absence, the support of the parish. Parish rates (local taxation) were very visibly tied to the number of poor people within the parish requiring assistance, a fa

When rifts occurred, the same physical closeness helped to re-establish a cooperative and supportive environment. The anonymous Tales and Quick Answers, Very Mery, and Pleasant to Rede (1567), for example, tells of the widow who wanted a husband, ‘not for the nice play’ but more as a business partner to protect her in a world of men, but when her f

The somewhat misogynistic anonymous text entitled The Deceyte of Women (1557) is a collection of tales very much in the popular tradition about women lying and cheating and frequently taking lovers behind their husbands’ backs. But although it returns again and again to the theme of women as being morally corrupt, men who are deceived by them are t

Thousands upon thousands of ballad sheets were being produced and circulated by the end of our period, and many of them appear to have ended up pasted to the walls of alehouses for customers to enjoy and sing. Drinking and singing were closely entwined in the Tudor mind. In his Anatomy of Absurdity (1589), Thomas Nashe, a poet of strong opinions, d

Beer’s eventual predominance stems from the preservative effect of hops. Ale, whatever its strength or herb flavour, has a short shelf life, a couple of weeks at best, and much less if the weather is hot. Beer will keep successfully for many months, however. From a commercial point of view this is clearly a major benefit, allowing large-scale produ

In 1563 Leicester sought to control social drinking by introducing a bylaw that forbade any townsman or woman from sitting drinking for more than an hour.

Many widows turned to brewing as a way of making a living. You really didn’t need very much to set yourself up as an alehouse. A bench outside provided the only customer accommodation necessary. When the night watch in Shakespeare’s play Much Ado about Nothing say that they will ‘sit upon the bench til two’, they are referring to just such an estab