It is Lady Day and Spring is here
It is Lady Day and Spring is here
It is March 25th. 1555 and you wake to a bright dawn. It is Lady Day and the first day of Spring. In these times your year is guided by the seasons and, likely, you are relieved that the dark, cold days of Winter are behind you. Things are hard these days.
Maybe you were born in the country as most people were, and recall a childhood of green fields, trees, and hard work. Things changed rapidly in the reign of Kind Edward, as enclosures became the game of the rich. More and more land was taken from tenant farmers and they were thrown from their cottages. In their place were put grazing sheep to support the growing wool trade. Within a few years, woollen cloth will be 81% of all exports through English ports. And what has happened to people of the land? They have moved towards the riches of the cities to seek different employment. The result is that cities are growing fast and vagrancy, begging and destitution is growing even faster. Six years ago, the people of Norfolk tried to fight back through Ketts rebellion. At their strongest, 16,000 men had gathered in protest on Mousehold Heath and they took Norwich City. But how do poor men with pitchforks and a few axes win against the might of the Crown army led by rich and war-educated men like John Dudley? The recollection of so many hungry men swinging on the boughs of trees around Norwich is enough to make people think again of rising up in protest. Thomas Wyatt tried but his focus was religion and he lost his head too.
Then, two years ago, after the debacle of lady Jane Grey being forced onto the throne by grasping men, Mary Tudor entered London to claim the Crown. At first you rejoiced, though likely you were concerned that she was a woman. England had never had a female regent and scholars speak of the evils of power-hungry queens. Was it not Queen Isabella who arranged the terrible death of her husband Edward II with a red-hot poker? At first, all had seemed calm. But now fear is rising. In February the burnings started. The streets murmur with rumour of more terrible executions being planned. You dream of escaping the dirt, the destitution, and the death.
So, you decide to leave the city and get work back in the country. With fields to be tilled and sown, you might get a small wage or even your belly filled. It will be better than holding out your hand on the filthy streets of a city where you often wake up with a dead animal next to you and every day have to duck as pots of excrement are thrown into the streets before dawn. As you walk through dark alleys where the clay floor never dries, the filth creeps through the seams of your worn shoes. You stink for want of a pail of water and the thought of clean air and a hayloft to sleep in is all you need to make you walk through the city gates at dawn and head home to your birth village.
So, what will you see as you walk the road? Well, outside the clamour and chaos of the city, the land looks very different. The road on which you walk will be rough and full of pot holes. Local people are meant to repair them every year and can be fined for refusing, but they are resentful about using their time and money to make a better driving for the rich in carriages and so only essential repairs are done.
The fields either side of the roads are divided into furlongs and further into strips, each a different colour depending on whether it held a crop, has been tilled or has been left fallow. As you keep walking there will be large tracts of waste land, maybe too rough for crops and so left to nature. You will walk through woods, though your father would have remembered much larger, denser patches of woodland as so much has been cut down to fulfil building and the making of furniture. You will see hundreds of sheep on enclosed land. You have been told there are 8 million sheep in the country – twice the number of people. They are small, wiry creatures, but the wool on their backs is like gold to a wool merchant. You will not be educated and so the number of 8 million is nothing to you. All you know is that these woolly creatures are more valued than you and your family.
If you reach a village it will be small. Maybe a cluster of houses around a church and a larger house for the landowner. If you see a house with a chimney then you know it is that of a more affluent man. The rest have a fire in the main room and sit in smoke. People are generally friendly and if you knock on a door to ask for water, it is likely you will be asked in and given small beer and maybe some broth. The floor will be tamped clay and the furniture hewn from rough wood. Here they eat from pots with a wooden spoon while in the city people eat off pewter and plate.
Each village will have a haybarn, a church, a dung heap and a midden. So, there is still a stink, but you can walk around it here. Also, there is an expectation that people will keep their roads clean and the local officials will be quick to move on anyone causing a nuisance to others. Animals are kept in keeps and chickens peck around houses. The larger settlements will have a mill and other storage for food.
If you are young, and strong and favoured, you will get work sowing the harvest. There is much to do. The land needs tilling to turn it after the freeze of Winter. Ploughs are often pulled by men rather than animals and so the work is hard and long. Tilling done, you will be sowing. Depending on where you are the seed will differ. If you have reached Oxfordshire you are casting wheat on the land. In Norfolk it is going to be Rye. Wiltshire will be a mix of wheat and barley and if you have reached the South West, then barley will flourish. If you are a Northerner, you are casting oats. Or are you from Kent and instead of grain, you are heading for the orchards of apples and cherries? Then starts the weeding for as Spring warms the earth every plant with sprout and weeds will only threaten the fruits of the earth.
If you lodge with a family lucky enough to have kept their tenancy, you will eat as they do. Broth is made of grains stored over the cold months. Bread is dark, hard and bitter. You know that in the stores is salted meat from animals slaughtered last November on Martinmas, but it is now Lent and the priests insist there will be no eating of flesh, eggs, cheese, cream, butter or oil. Fish can be eaten, but few villages have a pond sufficient to feed all the villagers. Your grain and vegetables will be washed down with small beer which is brewed by every cottage woman and if you are lucky, the village will have an orchard from which cider is made. If you are in the South West, cider is your water. If you are a young person lent brings another challenge – purity of the flesh. Because Jesus gave up his flesh for man then men must give up the sins of the flesh for Lent. But you know that Easter is coming and that nine months hence, in January next year, a flurry of babies will be born.
As you walk the road, just as we do today, you are likely to feel the warmth of a Spring sun and feel hope as you see primroses in hedgerows while sparrows quarrel and mice scutter. Maybe you think back nine days to when you saw Tomas Thomkins, a weaver, burned at Smithfield. The pamphlets say that tomorrow will see the burning of another Thomas – Thomas Causton, a gentleman of Essex. So likely the sun is dulled by your revulsion. But you have walked two miles already and the stench of the city is behind you. A carter passes and says a farmer is seeking labour five miles ahead.
At least a little hope on Lady’s Day.
If you want to see, smell and feel the England of the Tudors, you will not do better that the books of Ian Mortimer. For this article, I used the Time Travellers Guide to Elizabethan England (2012) as things would be the same in 1555 as they would in 1558 when Elizabeth ascended the throne.
