Lesson 1: Setting the Tudor Stage.
England at the start of the Tudor dynasty.
This segment aims to help student understand England of the early Tudors.
When the first Tudor King ascended his throne, England’s population stood between two and three million, a population still recovering from the Black Death, which had depleted England’s population so savagely in 1348, scything down one in three people.
Henry VII ruled a country where nine out of every ten people still lived a rural life, and even the few cities of the period - like London, with its population of about 50,000(1) - are described as villages just taken to a much, much larger scale.(2)
Although painted in 1570, far later than our period, this painting not only shows how the classes dressed, but also conveys the rustic nature of Tudor life.
With rough roads and travel so difficult – in winter or bad weather, villages could easily be cut off from the outside world – people tended to live and die within a very small radius.
One of the main resources for this course examines a village of this time: Eamon Duffy’s Voices of Morebath. In this book, parish records show village life as having been very communal – when one considers how people in these remote areas of England depended on one another for their ultimate survival, that’s not really surprising. In the village of Morebath, each adult person - male and female - had a role and most were prepared to do their duties by the community - a community held together by religious rituals. With religion serving as the life and blood of many people in these times, this pattern would have followed elsewhere in England. One of the most important things achieved by the Tudors was bringing together all these small communities into a cohesive whole, (3) weaving tighter England's fabric and developing a greater sense of Nationhood.
England generally depended on itself for all its resources. In the early Tudor Period, one of the country's most important trade was the cloth trade – made by English weavers from wool shorn from the backs of English sheep. Twice a year, these cloths were sold at the great marketplaces in the Netherlands. But the success of the cloth trade also had dire ramifications for many people in England; whole villages were forced to give way for sheep pastures in this period of ‘land enclosures.' (4) To the dismay of many, Anne and Henry VIII's efforts to marry jeopardised this trade: the ruler of the Netherlands was Charles V, the Roman emperor and the nephew of Catherine of Aragon. When it politically suited him, Charles did what he could to support his aunt, even if it meant just making loud noise about making trade more difficult.
England's great forests still stretched far and wide, but people were waking up to the fact that the forests needed looking after if they were to maintain supplies for building purposes as well as to ensure wood was plentiful enough just keep people alive. This was a primitive time, and fire was necessary for heating and simple survival during winter.
Women and children of the period possessed hardly any true status in Tudor society, regarded as little better than property. Despite much evidence to the contrary (the Tudors had many examples of intelligent women) most men regarded women as not only the weaker sex but also inferior beings. However, women worked in trades or took on leadership roles, but this generally came about because there was no available male for this task. (5)
No matter what class you came from, life was hard – the average lifespan was only about forty-five. Henry VIII was not the only father in this harsh period to lose so many of his children in birth or early infancy.
(1)Christopher Hibbert; The English, a social history 1066-1945; HarperCollins; 1987; page 98
(2) S.T. Bindoff; Tudor England; Penguin Books; 1987 edition; page 39
(3) Ditto; 24
(4) Ditto; 22-3
(5) Ditto; 28
References:
Christopher Hibbert; The English, a social history 1066-1945; HarperCollins; 1987
S.T. Bindoff; Tudor England; Penguin Books; 1987 edition.
Dear Heart, How Like You This? (Metropolis Ink, 2002) tells the story of Sir Thomas Wyatt and his lifelong-love for his cousin Anne Boleyn, the tragic second wife of Henry VIII of England.
Voices of Morebath: the lives of ordinary folk who lived through extraordinary times. Reviewed at Tudor England May 2002.
OUR FIRST EXCURSION...
Let's Go Visit Tudor Portraits and see portraits of the people we are studying
