How to Be a Tudor

According to Thomas Platter, a Swiss gentleman who was in London in 1599, ‘The actors are most expensively and elaborately costumed; for it is the English usage for eminent lords or Knights at their decease to bequeath and leave almost the best of their clothes to their serving men, which it is unseemly for the latter to wear, so that they offer th

The first permanent theatre was built in 1576, in Shoreditch, by James Burbage and four of his fellow actors from the Earl of Leicester’s professional acting troupe.

Imagine a family of five. The father, working six days a week, brings in three shillings; the wife manages to make another shilling from spinning; and the oldest child, at around eleven years of age, brings in another shilling – a total family weekly budget of sixty pence. Five people eating bread and water alone would cost thirty-five pence if the

The longbow had brought military success at Agincourt and many other battles, and while gunpowder was gradually eroding the archer’s position of military supremacy, few were willing to countenance its abandonment.

To set the scene, in 1485 when Henry Tudor seized the throne, there were under two million people in England and perhaps another half a million in Wales (figures for Scotland and Ireland are almost entirely conjectural). By the time his granddaughter Elizabeth I died in 1603, the population of England and Wales combined had doubled to around four m

Sir Thomas Elyot, in his Castel of Helth, finally concluded: ‘I thynke breakfastes necessary in this realme.’ He was refuting more ancient advice that claimed healthy adult men should wait until dinner. Small children, pregnant women, breastfeeding mothers and the sick had been granted the indulgence of breakfast in medieval advice, but it is clear

Joris Hoefnagel’s painting A Marriage Feast at Bermondsey (c.1569) has a group of five young people dancing. Two men and three women are dancing, to the music of a couple of fiddlers, in poses very reminiscent of the type of dance wherein participants dance singly and take it in turns to display their moves (in a similar way to break-dancing and hi

In his will of 1588, William Lane of Chadwell, Essex, listed two lockram shirts (coarse, heavyweight), one ‘holland’ shirt (fine weight and bleached white) and his ‘marrying shirt’, which presumably was of the best quality and loaded with sentimental significance.

Hay-filled beds are far more comfortable than straw beds, as hay is a softer, finer material, and there are even differences between types of straw. Barley straw is more comfortable than wheat straw, for example.