How to Be a Tudor

Henry VIII started keeping four professional actors and their boy apprentice as part of his household just as the townsmen’s mystery plays were beginning to fade away under the eye of the Reformed Church.

The public baths south of the river Thames in London were open for business until 1546, while those in the city of Chester had been running until 1542. At around the same time, John Leland, who wrote a traveller’s guide to England, described three of the ancient Roman baths in the town of Bath as being in daily use when he visited:

It’s a huge amount of work to prepare a ruff for wear. The elaborate sets with polished linen can take an entire day, and even a simple, unpolished, small version requires a couple of hours. Luckily they last quite well. Unless you are caught in torrential rain, a well-starched ruff will stand for several weeks of wear. The real limiting factor is

If you watch a modern ballet dancer performing one of the jumped solos of the classical tradition, with entrechats, where he beats his feet rapidly back and forth mid-jump, and performing huge travelling jetés and spins in the air, you will have some idea of the athleticism and moves of the Elizabethan courtly dance floor, all performed to the ‘one

A room within a room – warm, dark and private – a four-poster, curtained and canopied bed was one of the most sought after and highly prized household items in Tudor times. After bequests of landholdings and cash, beds were often the very first thing upon the minds of those making their wills. Shakespeare’s famous bequest of his second-best bed to

Rooms that had become nasty for one reason or another, perhaps a room where someone had lain sick, for example, could be purified and purged by fumigation. It could be a simple matter of setting fire to large green bunches of rosemary and marjoram and wafting them around the room so that the smoke they generated touched all parts of the space, or a

Most of us are at least vaguely aware of the seasonality of fruit and vegetables, but within the Tudor world all foodstuffs had their season. Hens did not lay during the winter (we use artificial light to stimulate them into laying all year round), and cows had a dry period from late September through to the spring, when they were between calves.

Fights could go either way, and both dogs and bulls were in danger of injury and death. Animals that had proved themselves in previous bouts became favourites with crowds, and matches were often set up in such a way as to prejudice the outcome, with experienced ‘celebrity’ bulls matched with dogs who, due to age, health or inexperience, were unlike

Young girls could show their hair; it was a symbol of maidenly innocence, and as such a young woman’s hair was combed out and worn loose upon her wedding day. Elizabeth I tellingly chose to be crowned ‘in her hair’, invoking the marriage ceremony and making a declaration of faith that all her subjects would have understood.