The laundry bills of Edward, 3rd Duke of Buckingham, upon a sojourn to London in 1501, reflect the same pattern. The duke presumably arrived with a stock of clean clothing, but then had sixteen shirts laundered along with six headkerchiefs and five pairs of linen sheets seven weeks later. His two serving men, however, had a joint bill for launderin

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

A fifteen- or sixteen-year-old lad at the beginning of his term was useful as a general hefter of water and carrier of firewood, but not much use in the finer points of the trade. Many men record this sort of work as having formed their earliest experiences of apprenticeship. Some investment in training him in a basic repetitive element of the work

When we in the modern Western world think of ploughing, we think of a once-a-year activity taking a couple of weeks’ work, prior to planting the seed. Tudor agriculture did not work like that. Ploughing was an activity that served several functions, things that today are achieved in entirely different ways. First, ploughing provided drainage. Hidde

If archery were simply practised to prepare men for war, argued the character Philologus in Ascham’s book, then surely they would go out into the fields alone and let loose as many arrows as possible with a good strong bow, building strength and speed. And yet we see instead, he says, men going in groups to shoot at targets, favouring accuracy and

If your dairy had a stone, tiled or brick floor, then a bucket of water sloshed over the surface would sink in and slowly evaporate during the day in the cool crossflow of air from your windows. This can reduce summer temperatures by four or five degrees.

The structure of Tudor society, which concentrated resources in male hands, made it virtually impossible for a woman to bring up a child without the financial support of a man, or, in his absence, the support of the parish. Parish rates (local taxation) were very visibly tied to the number of poor people within the parish requiring assistance, a fa

In other parts of the world when the thatch of a building, after many years of service, begins to deteriorate people strip it all off and start again. In Britain we just scrape off the worst of the top coat and pile more on top. Many of the ancient thatched roofs here are four feet thick where layer upon layer has built up over the centuries. And a

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: