THE TIME TRAVELLER’S GUIDE TO RESTORATION BRITAIN

‘Ian Mortimer is a historical truffle hound ... Brimming with such gems, his book is a delightful read’
Sunday Times

If you could travel back in time, the period from 1660 to 1700 would make one of the most exciting destinations in history. It is the age of Samuel Pepys and the Great Fire of London; bawdy comedy and the libertine court of Charles II; Christopher Wren in architecture, Henry Purcell in music and Isaac Newton in science - the civil wars are over and a magnificent new era has begun.

But what would it really be like to live in Restoration Britain? How much should you pay for one of those elaborate wigs? Should you trust a physician who advises you to drink fresh cow’s urine to cure your gout?

This unique guide not only teaches us about the seventeenth century but makes us look with fresh eyes at the modern world.

‘Will entertain and inform anyone with an interest in this extraordinary period’

The Times

‘Any tour of late 17th-century Britain is guaranteed to be exhilarating. And with Mortimer in charge, one always travels first class’

Mail on Sunday

Introduction

It is a normal morning in London, on Friday 16 July 1591. In the wide street known as Cheapside the people are about their business, going between the timber-covered market stalls. Traders are calling out, hoping to attract the attention of merchants’ wives. Travellers and gentlemen are walking along the recently repaired pavements of the street, going in and out of the goldsmiths’ and moneylenders’ shops. Servants and housewives are making their way through the market crowds to the Little Conduit near the back gate to the churchyard of St Paul’s Cathedral, some with leather water vessels in their arms, others with casks suspended from a yoke across their shoulders. The morning sun is reflected by the glass in the upper windows of the rich merchants’ houses. A maid looks down on those in the street as she cleans her master’s bedchamber.

Suddenly there is a great commotion near the market. ‘Repent, England! Repent!’ yells a man at the top of his voice. He is dressed in black, handing out printed leaflets as he strides along. ‘Repent!’ he shouts again and again, ‘Christ Jesus is come with his fan in his hand to judge the Earth!’ This man is no mean fool; he is a prosperous London citizen, Mr Edmund Coppinger. Another gentleman, Mr Henry Arthington, also dressed in black, is following him, striding from the alley called Old Change into Cheapside. He too calls out, declaring that ‘Judgement Day has come upon us all! Men will rise up and kill each other as butchers do swine, for the Lord Jesus has risen.’ The printed bills they hand out declare that they are intent on a complete reformation of the Church in England. For the illiterate majority in the crowd, they call out their message: ‘The bishops must be put down! All clergymen should be equal! Queen Elizabeth has forfeited her crown and is worthy to be deprived of her kingdom. Jesus Christ has come again. The reborn Messiah is even now in London, in the form of William Hacket. Every man and woman should acknowledge him as a divine being and lord of all Christendom.’

William Hacket himself is still lying in bed, in a house in the parish of St Mary Somerset. He cuts an unlikely figure as a latter-day messiah. His memory is excellent – he can recall whole sermons and then repeat them in the taverns, adding amusing jokes. He married a woman for her dowry, then spent it and abandoned her. He is well known as a womaniser, but he is even more famous for his uncontrollable and violent temper. Anyone who witnessed his behaviour in the service of Mr Gilbert Hussey will confirm this. When a schoolmaster insulted Mr Hussey, Hacket met with him in a tavern and pretended to try to smooth over the disagreement. After he had won the schoolmaster’s trust, he put a friendly arm around his shoulders. Then, suddenly, he seized the man, threw him to the floor, flung himself on top of him and bit off his nose. When he held up the piece of flesh, the astonished onlookers entreated him to allow the bleeding schoolmaster to take it quickly to a surgeon so that it might be sewn back on, preventing a horrible disfigurement. Hacket merely laughed, put the nose in his mouth and swallowed it.

In his bed, Hacket knows what Mr Coppinger and Mr Arthington are up to: he himself gave them instructions earlier this morning. They believe he is the reborn Christ largely because he is such a persuasive and fervent character. Together they have been hatching a plot for the last six months to destroy the bishops and undermine the queen’s rule. They have spoken to hundreds of people and distributed thousands of pamphlets. What Hacket does not know is that a huge crowd has started to swarm around his two prophesying angels. Some are curious, some are laughing at their proclamations; others want to join them. Most want to see Hacket in person. Such a large crowd is pressing against them that soon Mr Arthington and Mr Coppinger are trapped. They seek refuge in a nearby tavern, The Mermaid, and manage to escape by the back door, before returning to the parish of St Mary Somerset and their slugabed messiah.

News runs through the city. By noon the city watchmen are marching from house to house. By one o’clock all three men have been sought out by the authorities and arrested. Within two weeks, two of them are dead. Hacket is tried for high treason, found guilty and sentenced to death. On 28 July he is dragged on a hurdle to the gallows, hanged while he spits abuse at the hangman, then cut down and beheaded and butchered in the traditional manner, his headless body being cut into four parts, each with a limb attached. Mr Coppinger dies in prison: the authorities claim he starved himself to death. Mr Arthington enlists the support of powerful friends on the privy council and thereby saves his life, publishing his renunciation of all the things he has said as part of his penance.¹

This is an unusual episode and yet it is evocative of Elizabethan England. Had it taken place two hundred years earlier, Hacket and his gentlemen supporters would have been given a wide berth by the nervous citizens, unused to such sacrilegious uproar. Had it taken place two hundred years later, these events would have been a cause for popular ridicule and a cartoonist’s wit. But Elizabeth’s England is different. It is not that it lacks self-confidence, but that its self-confidence is easily shaken. The seriousness with which the authorities treat the plot, and the ruthless efficiency with which they suppress it, are typical of the time. It is not every day that a man is publicly proclaimed as the risen Christ, and it is extraordinary that well-respected gentlemen believe the messiah to be a violent, philandering, illiterate lout; but it is not at all unusual for Elizabethan people to adopt an extreme religious viewpoint, or for them to fear the overthrow of the monarch. The last few decades have seen so much change that people simply do not know what to believe or think any more. They have become used to living with slow-burning crises that might, at any moment, flare up into life-threatening situations.

This picture of Elizabethan England will come as a surprise to some readers. In the twenty-first century we are used to hearing a far more positive view of Elizabeth’s ‘sceptred isle’. We refer to the queen herself as Gloriana. We think of the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and Sir Francis Drake circumnavigating the globe in the Golden Hind. We think of writers such as Francis Bacon and Sir Walter Raleigh, the poets Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney, and the playwrights Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Surely a society that created such architectural masterpieces as Hardwick Hall, Burghley, Longleat and Wollaton Hall cannot be said to be anything other than triumphal? Surely a small kingdom that sends mariners into battle off the coast of Central America cannot be accused of self-doubt?

The problem is that our view of history diminishes the reality of the past. We concentrate on the historic event as something that has happened and in so doing we ignore it as a moment which, at the time, is happening. For example, when we hear the word ‘Armada’, we think of an English victory, in which the threatening Spanish ships were scattered and defeated in the battle of Gravelines and after which Sir Francis Drake was feted as a hero. Yet at the moment of attack everything was up in the air. As Drake boarded his ship at Plymouth, he would have known that there was a real possibility of the Armada landing successfully and his own ship being sunk. He would have known that a change in the direction of the wind could alter everything – leaving his strategy in jeopardy and his fleet in danger. We can no longer imagine the possibility of the Armada disgorging its troops on English beaches. Our view of the event as a thing of the past restricts our understanding of contemporary doubts, hopes and reality.

I wrote my first Time Traveller’s Guide in order to suggest that we do not always need to describe the past objectively and distantly. In that book I tried to bring the medieval period closer to the reader, describing what you would find if you could visit fourteenth-century England. Where would you stay? What might you wear? What would you eat? How should you greet people? Given that we know so much about the period, it stands to reason that the historian should be able to answer such questions. There are limits, of course: the historian cannot break through the evidence barrier and actually re-create the past. Moreover, imagining a personal visit is decidedly tricky in some matters of detail. You may well understand why the earl of Essex rebelled against Elizabeth in 1601 – but how did he clean his teeth? Did he wear underwear? What did he use for toilet paper? These things aren’t so well evidenced. We must exploit what little evidence there is to satisfy, if only partially, our collective spirit of enquiry.

What will strike you first if you visit Elizabethan England? I imagine that, to start with, it will be the smells of the towns and cities. After a few days, however, I suspect it will be the uncertainty of life. You will be appalled to see dead bodies lying in the street during an epidemic of influenza or plague, and the starving beggars in their filthy rags. You will be disconcerted to notice vulnerability even at the top of society. Elizabeth herself is the target of several assassination attempts and uprisings – from a gentry rebellion, to her physician supposedly trying to poison her. Uncertainty pervades every aspect of life. People do not know whether the Sun goes round the Earth or the Earth goes round the Sun; the doctrines of the Church contradict the claims of Copernicus. The rich merchants of London do not know if their ships will be stranded in a North African port, with the crews massacred by Barbary pirates and their cargo stolen. To gauge what Elizabethan life is like we need to see the panic-stricken men and women who hear that the plague has arrived in the next village. We need to see the farmers in the 1590s, staring at their rain-beaten, blackened corn for the second year in succession. This is the reality for many Elizabethan people: the stark horror that they have nothing to feed to their sick and crying children. We need to appreciate that such people, be they Protestant or Catholic, may well connect their starvation with the government’s meddling with religious beliefs and traditions. We need to see them looking for something stable in their lives and fixing on the queen herself as a beacon of hope. Do not imagine the proud figure of Queen Elizabeth standing stiff and unruffled in her great jewelled dress on the deck of a serene ship, floating on calm sunlit waters. Rather imagine her struggling to maintain her position on the ship of state in heaving seas, tying herself to the mast and yelling orders in the storm. This is the real Gloriana – Elizabeth, queen of England by the grace of God, the pillar of faith and social certainty in the dizzying upheaval of the sixteenth century.

Like all societies, Elizabethan England is full of contradictions. Some practices will impress you as enormously sophisticated and refined; others will strike you with horror. People are still burnt alive for certain forms of heresy, and women are burnt for killing their husbands. The heads of traitors are still exhibited over the great Stone Gate in London, left there to rot and be a deterrent to others. Torture is permitted in order to recover information about treasonable plots. The gap between the wealthy and the impoverished is as great as ever and, as this book will show, society is strictly hierarchical. Humble houses – sometimes whole villages – are destroyed to make room for the parks of the nobility. People still starve to death on the high roads. As for the political situation, a brief note by a government official describes the state of the nation at the start of the reign:

The queen poor, the realm exhausted, the nobility poor and decayed. Want of good captains and soldiers. The people out of order. Justice not executed. All things dear. Excess in meat, drink and apparel. Divisions among ourselves. Wars with France and Scotland. The French king bestriding the realm, having one foot in Calais and the other in Scotland. Steadfast enmity but no friendship abroad.²

This description is far removed from the ‘golden age’ interpretation of Elizabeth’s reign – but there are at least as many positive contemporary verdicts as there are negative ones. In 1577, Raphael Holinshed publishes a chronicle in which he describes Elizabeth’s accession in the following words:

After all the stormy, tempestuous and blustering windy weather of Queen Mary was overblown, the darksome clouds of discomfort dispersed, the palpable fogs and mist of the most intolerable misery consumed, and the dashing showers of persecution overpast: it pleased God to send England a calm and quiet season, a clear and lovely sunshine, a quietus est from former broils of a turbulent estate, and a world of blessings by good Queen Elizabeth.

Holinshed is addressing a Protestant minority who are literate and wealthy enough to buy an expensive two-volume publication. But we do not need to look through his rose-tinted spectacles to see many national achievements and cheering developments. Elizabeth’s reign sees an extraordinary period of wealth creation and artistic endeavour. English explorers, driven by the desire for profit, proceed into the cold waters of Baffin Island and the Arctic Circle north of Russia. Despite the wars with France and Spain, no fighting takes place on home soil, so that for most Englishmen the whole reign is one of peace. In addition to the famous poetry and plays, it is an age of innovation in science, gardening, publishing, theology, history, music and architecture. Two English sea captains circumnavigate the world – proving to sixteenth-century people that they have at last exceeded the knowledge of the Ancient Greeks and Romans. No longer do thinking men claim they can see further than the ancients by virtue of their being ‘dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants’. They have grown to be ‘giants’ themselves.

One of the most striking differences between Elizabethan England and its forerunners lies in the queen herself. Elizabeth’s personality and the rule of a woman are two things that make England in 1558–1603 a very different place from the England of Edward III or even that of her father, Henry VIII. More than ever before, the character of the monarch is intrinsically woven into the daily lives of her people. She is without doubt the most powerful Englishwoman in history.³ It is impossible to write about everyday life in her reign without reference to her. Her choice to steer England away from the Catholicism of her sister, Mary, and to re-establish an independent Church of England, as pioneered by Henry VIII, affects every person in every parish throughout the realm. Even if her subjects accept her religious choices, and never raise their heads above the religious parapet, her decision-making touches their lives in numerous ways. The Prayer Book changes, church symbols are torn down and bishops are replaced. An individual might become persona non grata just because of his or her religious doubts. If ever there was an argument that rulers can change the lives of their subjects, it lies in the impact of the Tudor monarchs. Elizabeth’s kingdom is very much Elizabethan England.

This book follows my medieval guide but it does not entirely adopt the same form. It would be tedious to make all the same observations about aspects of daily life that contrast with our own society. Moreover, in writing about Elizabethan England, it would be inappropriate to follow exactly the same formula developed to describe the realm of two hundred years earlier. It is not possible, for example, to relegate religion to a subsection in this book: it has to be a chapter on its own, being integral to the ways in which Elizabethans live their lives. The England of 1558 has much in common with the kingdom in 1358, but a great deal has changed. As a result this book is not only concerned with the way Elizabethan England compares with the present day; it also examines how it compares with, or differs from, its medieval roots.

The historian is always a middleman: the facilitator of the reader’s understanding of the past. I am no different, even though this book is written in the present tense and based on the premise that the most direct way to learn about something is to see it for yourself. However, in a book like this, my relationship with the evidence is unusual. Obviously literary texts have been important (plays, poetry, travellers’ accounts, diaries, contemporary surveys), as have a wide range of printed records. But making sense of all this evidence as indicative of lived behaviour requires the historian to draw on personal experience. As I put it in The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, ‘The key to learning something about the past might be a ruin or an archive but the means whereby we may understand is – and always will be – ourselves.’ This goes for the reader’s lived experience too. For example, I presume that readers of this book have not seen a bull-baiting contest, but yet have enough life experience to imagine what is involved, and thus to know that the Elizabethans’ love of this form of entertainment makes them profoundly different from modern English people.

I have been reluctant to include details from outside the period of the reign. Very occasionally I have cited post-1603 evidence, but only in order to illustrate a procedure or practice that certainly existed before 1603. There is more citation of pre-1558 sources: much of Elizabethan England is composed of relics from the late medieval and earlier Tudor periods. This applies obviously to the castles, town walls, streets and churches; but it also applies to books that were printed for the first time in earlier reigns and which are reread and often reprinted in Elizabethan times. It especially applies to legislation: most of the law is based on medieval precedents, and it goes without saying that all the laws in force at Elizabeth’s accession date from an earlier period. It is important to remember that every house and structure that we call ‘medieval’ or ‘Tudor’, because of its date of construction, is also Elizabethan. The same applies to many phrases and customs that were in use and practised before 1558. On this point, readers will note several references to the wonderful Latin phrasebook Vulgaria by William Horman, first published in 1519 (I used the 1530 edition). Horman is vividly expressive of the most basic aspects of daily life, so we learn that ‘unwashed wool that grows between the hind legs of a black sheep is medicinable’ and ‘some women with child have wrong appetite to eat things that be out of rule: as coals’. As his purpose was to provide daily Latin in order to encourage the resurgence of the spoken language, we can be confident these examples reflect the experiences of his readers. And while anything written by him about fashionable clothes or religion is, of course, hugely out of date by 1558, what he says about some pregnant women’s appetites is as true today as it was in 1519. Bearing in mind these caveats, I have done my best faithfully to represent England as it existed between Elizabeth’s accession on 17 November 1558 and her death on 24 March 1603.

Welcome, then, to Elizabethan England, and all its doubts, certainties, changes, traditions and contradictions. It is a jewel-encrusted muddy kingdom, glittering and starving, hopeful and fearful in equal measure – always on the point of magnificent discoveries and brutal rebellions.

1

The Landscape

Different societies see landscapes differently. You may look at Elizabethan England and see a predominantly green land, characterised by large open fields and woodlands, but an Elizabethan yeoman will describe his homeland to you in terms of cities, towns, ports, great houses, bridges and roads. In your eyes it may be a sparsely populated land – the average density being less than sixty people per square mile in 1561 (compared to well over a thousand today) – but a contemporary description will mention overcrowding and the problems of population expansion.¹ Describing a landscape is thus a matter of perspective: your priorities affect what you see. Asked to describe their county, most Devonians will mention the great city of Exeter, the ports of Dartmouth, Plymouth and Barnstaple and the dozens of market towns. They will generally neglect to mention that the region is dominated by a great moor, Dartmoor, 2,000 ft high in places and more than 200 square miles in expanse. There are no roads across this wasteland, only trackways. Elizabethans see it as good for nothing but pasture, tin mining and the steady water supply it provides by way of the rivers that rise there. Many people are afraid of such moors and forests. They are ‘the ruthless, vast and gloomy woods … by nature made for murders and for rapes’, as Shakespeare writes in Titus Andronicus. Certainly no one will think of Dartmoor as beautiful. Sixteenth-century artists paint wealthy people, prosperous cities and food, not landscapes.

The underlying reasons for such differences are not hard to find. In a society in which people still starve to death, an orchard is not a beautiful thing in itself: its beauty lies in the fact that it produces apples and cider. A wide flat field is ‘finer’ than rugged terrain, for it can be tilled easily to produce wheat and so represents good white bread. A small thatched cottage, which a modern viewer might consider pretty, will be considered unattractive by an Elizabethan traveller, for cottagers are generally poor and able to offer little in the way of hospitality. Ranges of hills and mountains are obstacles to Elizabethan travellers and very far from picturesque features that you go out of your way to see. Hills might feature in an Elizabethan writer’s description of a county because of their potential for sheep grazing, but on the whole he will be more concerned with listing all the houses of the gentry, their seats and parks.

It is worth being aware of these differences at the outset. It is precisely those things that Elizabethans take for granted that you will find most striking: the huge open fields, the muddy roads, and the small size of so many labourers’ houses. Indeed, it is only at the very end of the Elizabethan period, in the late 1590s, that people start to use the term ‘landscape’ to describe a view. Before this, they do not need such a word, for they do not see a ‘landscape’ as such – only the constituent elements that mean something to them: the woods, fields, rivers, orchards, gardens, bridges, roads and, above all else, the towns. Shakespeare does not use the word ‘landscape’ at all; he uses the word ‘country’ – a concept in which people and physical things are intimately bound together. Therefore, when you describe the Elizabethan landscape as it appears to you, you are not necessarily describing the ‘country’ as Elizabethan people see it. Every act of seeing is unique – and that is as true for an Elizabethan farmer looking at his growing corn as it is for you now, travelling back to the sixteenth century.

Towns

Stratford-upon-Avon lies in the very heart of England, about ninety-four miles north-west of London. The medieval parish church stands at the southern end of the town, only a few yards from the River Avon that flows lazily in a gradual curve along the east side. A squat wooden spire stands on top of the church tower. If you look north, you will see the handsome stone bridge of fourteen arches built by Sir Hugh Clopton in the 1490s. Cattle graze in the wide meadow on the far bank; there is a small wooden bridge downstream where the mill looks over the narrowing of the river.

Standing in this part of Stratford in November 1558, at the very start of Elizabeth’s reign, you may well think that the town has barely changed since the Middle Ages. If you walk towards the centre, most of the buildings you see are medieval. Directly opposite as you leave the churchyard is the stone quadrangle of the college, founded in the 1330s by Stratford’s most notable son, John Stratford, archbishop of Canterbury. Passing an orchard and a couple of low, two-storey thatched cottages, you come to a muddy corner: turn right into Church Street. Looking ahead, you will see the regular divisions of the tenements. These are substantial timber-framed houses, many of them the full width of sixty feet laid down when the town was planned in the twelfth century.² A hundred yards further along on your right are the almshouses of the medieval Guild of the Holy Cross. These make up a line of timber-framed, two-storey buildings with unglazed windows, tiled roofs and jetties that project out above the street at a height of six feet. Beyond is the grammar school and hall of the Guild, a similar long, low building, with whitewashed timbers and wooden struts across the windows. Adjacent is the chapel of the Guild, with its handsome stone tower. Its clock chimes on the hour as you step along the muddy street in the damp autumn air.

Keep walking. On your right, directly across the lane from the chapel, is the most prestigious house in the town: New Place, built by Sir Hugh Clopton – the man who constructed the bridge. It is three storeys high and timber-framed, with brick between the timbers, not willow and plaster work. Five bays wide, it has one large window on either side of the central porch, five windows on the floor above and five on the floor above that. Each of the top-floor windows is set in a gable looking out across the town. The whole proud edifice is a fitting tribute to a successful businessman. In 1558, Sir Hugh is the second-most-famous man of Stratford (after the archbishop), and a figure greatly admired by the townsfolk. The boys leaving the grammar school and walking back into the centre of the town regard this building as a statement of success. A future pupil, William Shakespeare, will eventually follow in Sir Hugh’s footsteps, make his fortune in London and return to live out his last days in this very house.

As you continue along the street, you come across a few narrower buildings, where the old tenements have been divided to create widths of thirty feet (half a plot), twenty (one-third) or just fifteen feet. The narrower houses tend to be taller: three storeys, with timber jetties projecting out a foot or so further at each level. Unlike some towns, however, the houses in Stratford do not shut out the light with their overhanging upper storeys. Those market towns that were carefully planned in the Middle Ages have such wide thoroughfares that plenty of light enters the front parlours and workshops. Here in the High Street you will find glovers, tailors and butchers as well as a couple of wealthy mercers and a wool merchant.³ Six days a week they will set up their shop boards in the street and place their wares on them to show to passers-by. Most have wooden signs – depicting dragons, lions, unicorns, cauldrons, barrels – hanging by metal hooks from projecting wooden arms. Note that the symbols painted on the signs are not necessarily related to the trade practised: a goldsmith’s shop may well be called ‘The Green Dragon’ and a glover might work by the sign of ‘The White Hart’. On your right, leading down to the pasture on the riverbank, is Sheep Street, where more wool merchants live and wool and animals are traded. On your left, in Ely Street, swine change hands. Carry on along the High Street for another hundred yards or so and you will come to the main market cross: a covered area where needle-makers, hosiers and similar artificers sell their goods. Beyond is the principal market place, Bridge Street. This is more of a long rectangular open space than a street – or, at least, it used to be: the centre is now filled with stalls and shops at street level and domestic lodgings on the floors above.

At this point, if you turn right you will see Sir Hugh Clopton’s magnificent bridge over a wide shallow stretch of the river. Turn left and you will find two streets of timber-framed houses. One of these is Wood Street, which leads to the cattle market. The other, leading north-west, is Henley Street. Go along here, and on the right-hand side you’ll find the house occupied by the glover, John Shakespeare, his wife Mary and their firstborn daughter, Joan. Like almost all the other houses in the borough, this has a wattle-and-plaster infill between the beams, with a low roof covering its three bays. This is the house in which their gifted son will be born in April 1564.

At this end of Henley Street you are almost at the edge of town. If you carry on for another hundred yards you will find yourself on the road to Henley-in-Arden. As always on the outskirts of a town, you will smell the noxious fumes of the laystall or midden that serves the nearby residents. John Shakespeare has been known to use part of his own tenement as a laystall, but he also maintains a tanyard at the back of his house, where he prepares the leather for his gloves – and nothing stinks quite as much as a tanyard. A walk around the back of these houses in Henley Street reveals that Mr Shakespeare is not alone in making practical use of his tenement for refuse disposal. Many of his neighbours do likewise, disposing of fish and animal entrails, faeces, vegetable matter and old rushes from floors in the dumps on the edge of the great field at the back of their property. If you peer into the messy back yards of those whitewashed timber-framed houses, you can also see vegetable gardens, dunghills, orchards of apple, pear and cherry trees, henhouses, cart houses and barns – places to dispose of rotten food and places to grow new. You might say that Stratford appears to be as much a town of farmers as craftsmen. Many of these outhouses are thatched: a marked contrast to the smart tiles of the houses facing the street. Note that some of the older houses have freestanding kitchen buildings in their gardens; notice too how several gardens have pigs, fed with detritus from the kitchens.

At this point you may wonder again at the medieval aspect of the place. The middens of Stratford stink as much as they did two hundred years ago, and its houses are still predominantly built with timber frames. Many of them are well over a hundred years old. The boundaries and layout of the borough have hardly altered since 1196. The market places have not been moved. What has changed?

The most significant changes are not physically apparent; they are less tangible. For example, Stratford received a charter of incorporation from Edward VI in 1553 and now, five years later, is governed by a bailiff, aldermen and the most important burgesses. Before 1547 the town was administered by the Guild. Now that has been dissolved and its property has passed to the new town corporation. Although the town in 1558 looks much as it did in 1500, it has altered radically in its governance. Moreover, it is not so much a question of what has changed as what is changing. Most of the medieval houses that still stand in 1558 are hall-houses: one or two ground-floor rooms (a hall and a chamber) with packed-earth floors, open to the roof, and a hearth in the centre of the hall. They do not have chimneys. But just consider what a difference a chimney makes: it allows one heated room to be built on top of another. In this way, a large number of rooms can be built on the same ground as one old hall. No doubt the building that once stood on the patch of John Shakespeare’s house was a hall-house; its replacement has back-to-back fireplaces and a stack rising through the whole house, giving heat to two downstairs and two upstairs chambers. Another stack rises at the far end, heating the workshop and the chamber above. Many of John’s neighbours are still living in single-storey houses; but already in November 1558, Stratford, like all the other small towns in England, has started to grow – not outwards so much as upwards.

You will see exactly how fast Stratford is changing if you return forty years later, in 1598, towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign. The church is still there, the roads have not changed, the Guild buildings and school have not been substantially altered – but more than half the town has been rebuilt. This is partly due to two catastrophic fires in 1594 and 1595, which destroy 120 houses, making about a quarter of the population homeless. There are now many more brick chimneys and consequently many more tall houses. In fact, brick is one of the keys to change. The affordable production of a durable and fireproof chimney material means that two- and three-storey houses can be built even in places where stone is scarce and masonry expensive. Walk back down Henley Street, across the market place and back into the High Street, and you’ll see that the whole skyline has changed. Almost all the houses on your right are now three storeys high, displaying much more elegance and symmetry in their timber construction, with more carved woodwork on the beams facing the street. Some of these houses have greased paper or cloth under a lattice in their windows to allow in a little light while keeping out draughts, but others now have glass in the street-facing chambers. Glass, which is very rare in town houses in 1558, becomes available to the reasonably well-off in the 1570s.⁴ Not all of the new buildings facing the street will have been constructed with glass windows in mind, for it is still difficult to get hold of in 1598; but most people with disposable income will try to obtain it – importing it in pre-constructed frames from Burgundy, Normandy or Flanders, if they cannot get hold of English glass. Nor will a householder necessarily equip his whole house with glass at once: he might install it in his hall and parlour and leave the other, less-important rooms unglazed. In 1558 a chimney is the prime status symbol to show off to the neighbours. In 1598 it is glazing.

A less desirable aspect of the changes being wrought in Stratford is the accommodation of the poor. You might think that barn conversions are a feature of the modern world, but a glimpse at the back yards of some properties will tell you otherwise. Quite a few old barns are let out to paupers who have nowhere else to go. The population of Stratford in 1558 is about 1,500; by 1603 it has swelled to 2,500.⁵ And that latter figure probably does not include all the poor and vagrants in and around the town – one report in 1601 mentions that the corporation is struggling to cope with 700 paupers. Now you can see why the well-off are living ostentatiously in handsome, glazed houses: it separates them from the have-nots. You can see why William Shakespeare, the son of the glover, is so proud of having acquired New Place in 1597, with its brick, glazed windows and chimneys – a far cry from the smelly house where he spent his boyhood (and where his aged father still lives). And you can see why William’s wife, Anne, is pleased to be living in New Place rather than the two-room farmhouse in Shottery where she grew up. There the hall was open to the rafters, with an earth floor, as was the chamber that she shared with her seven siblings. True, at New Place she has to cope with her husband being away in London for long periods of time, but, in the sixteen years since her marriage in 1582, she has seen her living standards undergo an extraordinary transformation, partly due to having more money and partly due to the changes in what that money can buy.

What is true for Stratford and its inhabitants also applies to other urban settlements. In 1600 there are twenty-five cathedral cities and 641 market towns in England and Wales.⁶ The rebuilding they are all undergoing makes it impossible to compare them in size, for their populations are changing rapidly. London, for example, has a population of about 70,000 in 1558 and about 200,000 in 1603; it moves from being the sixth-largest city in Europe (after Naples, Venice, Paris, Antwerp and Lisbon) to being the third (after Naples, with 281,000 inhabitants, and Paris, with 220,000).⁷ Some other English towns are growing in similarly dramatic fashion. Plymouth, for example, has a population of 3,000–4,000 at the start of the reign and 8,000 at the end. Newcastle also doubles in size over the years 1530–1600. On the other hand, in some places the numbers are static: Exeter is home to about 8,000 people throughout the sixteenth century. A few towns are even shrinking in population, such as Salisbury and Colchester, both of which have 2,000 fewer souls in 1600 than in the mid-1520s. But the overall growth is noticeable from the fact that in the mid-1520s only ten towns have a population of more than 5,000; by 1600 this number has risen to twenty.⁸

Several points emerge from the above table. First, although Stratford-upon-Avon is not what you would call a large town, with just 2,500 inhabitants in 1600, only twenty towns in England are twice as populous. Thus we might say that Stratford is truly representative of the majority of towns in England and Wales. Second, only half of the twenty-two English cathedral cities are in the above list. The other eleven – Winchester, Carlisle, Durham, Ely, Lincoln, Hereford, Lichfield, Rochester, Chichester, Peterborough and Wells – all have fewer than 5,000 inhabitants, so you should not assume that a city is a populous place. Third, eleven of the twenty most-populous towns are ports (twelve if we include York, which has a modest quay). In fact, the fastest-growing large towns – London, Newcastle and Plymouth – are all sea ports, reminding us that a world of opportunities is opening up to Elizabethans through the island’s long coastline and geographical position.¹⁰ Medieval people saw the sea as a barrier or frontier. Under the Tudor monarchs it comes to be recognised as one of the country’s greatest natural resources.

The most significant point implicit in the table of populous towns is more subtle. If you compare it with a similar table for medieval England you will see that it reveals a process of urbanisation. The towns on the above list are home to 336,000 people; the twenty largest towns in 1380 had fewer than half this number. In addition, more people live in the many small market towns than they did in previous centuries. Some of these have just 500 inhabitants living in a hundred houses clustered around one single main road or square. But dozens more are like Stratford, housing 2,000–3,000 people, with all the professional and administrative functions one associates with a proper town. In 1600 approximately 25 per cent of the population lives in a town, compared to about 12 per cent in 1380.¹¹ This is an important development: if one in four people grows up in a town, then English culture is becoming increasingly urban. Society as a whole is less closely tied to the countryside. The self-reliant townsman, with a trade and the ambition to advance his status and living standards, is fast becoming the principal agent of social and cultural change. The system of villeinage – the old tradition of peasants being bonded individually and collectively to the lord of the manor, to be bought and sold along with the land – is hardly to be found anywhere.¹²

Like Stratford, many towns retain their medieval street layout. No fewer than 289 of them preserve their medieval walls.¹³ Almost all have long lines of timber-framed houses with gables overlooking the streets, interspersed among the medieval churches and old halls. Most have areas where houses with large gardens have something of the ‘urban farm’ appearance: Norwich is said to have so many trees that it may be described as either ‘a city in an orchard or an orchard in a city’.¹⁴ But what will strike you is the number of buildings under construction, their skeletal timber frames open to the elements or their stone fronts surrounded by scaffolding. The old friaries and monasteries are being turned into warehouses or demolished to make way for new housing. In the summer months an English town resembles an enormous building site, as several dozen new houses have their foundations dug and men stripped to the waist haul dirt up in buckets on pulleys from cellars, or lift heavy oak timbers up to form the joists of a house. Watch them passing up long elm boards to their fellows on the upper floors, talking with the master carpenter, measuring and cutting the frames of the windows and the shutters, and filling the gaps between the timbers with wattle or brick. Everyone is moving into a town, it seems.

Towns are not just for the benefit of the people who live in them. They are also crossroads: places where country life and urban professions, services and administrations mix, and where agreements can be given legal force. A town like Stratford might have upwards of one hundred brewers, but that does not mean the whole town is full of heavy drinkers; rather it indicates that all those who come into town from the hinterland on market days don’t have to go thirsty. Similarly a town’s surgeons and physicians do not simply administer to urban needs, but travel out to the parishes in the surrounding countryside, serving a population that might be several times larger than that of the town itself.¹⁵ Look among the houses and shops of Stratford and you will see the full range of occupations that make up such a settlement: wheelwrights, carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, tinsmiths, tailors, shoe-makers, glovers, victuallers, butchers, brewers, maltsters, vintners, mercers, lawyers, scriveners, physicians, surgeons, apothecaries and drapers. Most towns like Stratford will have more than sixty recognised occupations; a large city like Norwich or Bristol may have considerably more than a hundred.

baskets¹⁶