How to Be a Tudor

Thousands upon thousands of ballad sheets were being produced and circulated by the end of our period, and many of them appear to have ended up pasted to the walls of alehouses for customers to enjoy and sing. Drinking and singing were closely entwined in the Tudor mind. In his Anatomy of Absurdity (1589), Thomas Nashe, a poet of strong opinions, d

Linen was considered to be especially effective at this job as it was absorbent, so it actively drew the grease and sweat away from the skin into the weave of the cloth, like a sponge soaking up a spillage. A change of underwear therefore not only removed the build-up of potentially dangerous waste products but could actively draw more out from the

Soldiers, perhaps unsurprisingly, were another group for whom the codpiece could be prominent, bravado and display being seen as linked to aggression and courage. The young swashbuckler about town, dressed in gaudy colours, his sword audibly swashing against the buckler (a small hand shield) suspended from his belt, could sport the most outrageous

Hay-filled beds are far more comfortable than straw beds, as hay is a softer, finer material, and there are even differences between types of straw. Barley straw is more comfortable than wheat straw, for example.

It is clear both from the written sources and from the thatch that few fields were ever sown with just one variety of wheat. Seed often came mixed, even when bought at market – Markham warns that if what you are buying ‘resemble changeable taffeta’ it is likely to be a combination of whole straw wheat, brown pollard, organe and chilter. Most people

And when the Londoner Humphrey Richardson was publicly called a ‘lousy rogue, nitty britch knave, and scurvy nitty britch knave’ in 1598, he was deeply offended.

In a perfect world you want to roast over a mixture of three types of wood: beech or ash for your main heat, oak for a long hot heart to your fire, and hazel or birch for a quick boost. You can also introduce other woods simply for their flavour, such as apple. Avoid resinous pines as they are both difficult to work with and don’t taste very good,

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

Standing with the arms crossed, for example, was considered foolish by the Humanist Erasmus, and it is noticeable that it is exactly this posture that the king’s fool Will Somers adopts in a miniature featuring him alongside Henry VIII. The king’s own famous stance – looking straight ahead, legs apart, with his weight evenly balanced between them,