Phew! 400 and rising.
Q.400. Hi Henry. What were the toilets like in a Palace for the courtiers?
The higher ranking the courtier achieved the better their accommodation so the top ranking one’s hade their own guardrobes for their toilet. The rest of the court who needed to relieve themselves during a banquet would have to go to the common toilet called the Jakes which was just outside the entrance. This is the origin of the Americanised name for a toilet the “John2. The Jakes was for all courtiers and senior servants who lodge outside the Palace, it was a building of two levels each level having about fourteen toilet seats which were just holes in planks of wood over a big hole which went into the moat or river. Yuk!
I must continue this answer into the realms of ridiculous happenings. People who could not be bothered to walk the distance to relieve themselves would use a wall or the nearest convenient space which annoyed me greatly as I cannot stand such crudity and behaviour. I actually had signs mounted for the court and servant to adhere to: “Beware of emptying of piss-pots” and “No pissing in the chimneys”. Now that conjures up horrible visions. There were many toilet devices about in my day, the funniest of all was the wooden chair with a drawer at the bottom full of soil. The cushion would be removed and the rope “springs” moved to make a round hole in the centre, the box would make a high volume noise as the wood reverberated, thus giving this device the name “Thunder Box”, others called them Lambing chairs.
Q.401. Hi Henry. What was an Acatry?
The word catering comes from the term Acatry so it is the “below-stairs” servants, who bought, stored and cooked the food for the Palace.
Q.402. Hi Henry. How does the food of today compare with your food?
You must sit back and think, put all factors into the equation before any possible understanding of our food can be compared. Here are the 10 factors:
1. We had no long term storage of food except for salting, pickling or smoking.
2. We had no mass transportation systems.
3. We had no long reach purchasing to foreign countries.
4. We had no mass production of foodstuffs and any form of refining.
5. We had no health and safety watchdogs.
6. We had no airtight reseal-able packaging.
7. We had fears of dirty food.
8. We had status of certain types of food. I would not eat a vegetable grown under the soil, so goodbye carrots!
9. We had Epothacaries who advised about the healthy effect of certain foodstuffs.
10. We at the Palace fed hundreds of people every day.
BUT the biggest factor of all was the seasonal food growing problem. Strawberries cannot be eaten fresh all the year round in Tudor days, unlike today 2008 thanks to international haulage movement.
Your food is super pure and clean, packed in airtight containers to keep germs at bay, this has increased your lifespan but I believe it beginning to reduce your body resistance to illness.
In my day, the poor eat better balance food than the rich; they had much less meat and more fibrous vegetables. Bread was fresh every day because of storage problems, meat was killed fresh on the day of cooking, fish was farmed for Fridays in Manor ponds. The poor ate quite well and we were the best fed country in Europe as we were self sufficient. Salt lay at the heart of our well being, food flavouring, storage and bodily well being it was the main element of life. We had our own salt in the Cheshire plains, we even exported it. Cooking was mainly by roasting and large simmering pots though we did have a crude form of Steamer powered by hot stones which cooked the suet, sweets and replenished the dry bread. Seasoning and spices were very expensive and we treasured them to the extent of housing them in their own room under lock and key.
I would say that 2008 has much better food than we ever had, you are spoilt for choice, you get fresh every day and all can afford to eat well if chosen. I must say that with all the knowledge and advice about good food, I fail to understand why a large number of people still go down the Rich Tudor route of eating fatty, sweet, cholesterol foods when so much better food are readily available, but then who am I to criticise.?
Q.403. Hi:
Just saw your web site
Can you help me please?
I am trying to find data concerning how young children were treated during the reign of Henry VIII-- were they apprenticed and at what age?
How were poor widows treated and aided financially?
I know there were hated beggars and vagabonds but poor ill men- how did they treat them? Who was responsible??
UNDER ELIZABETH I:
Local parishes vs. the church took care of ill, poor and children UNDER HENRY VIII: who was responsible?
Any resources I can go to also please??
Thanks
Loved your web site but these questions could not be answered on your site.
Charles.
There has been a question answered on the website about the poor, Q36. But, that was a long time ago and I now have much more in the way of explaining the attitude of people in the 1500/1600’s.
First of all you must consider the way people viewed their very existence. They only lived for about 40 years and the death rate of babies was at the chronic level of 50% before the age of 8yrs. To see one’s own grand children and maybe even great grand children, the “adults” would get married at about 11/12 yrs of age which seems, and is very young if not criminal these days. The normal length of time of any engagement for marriage was about 3 years, so parents would organise a marriage for their child and the engagement, would take place at the earliest age of 8yrs. Now notice the significance of the age 8yrs. The children would not be considered to have come of age until they had passed the death rate barrier and achieved 8 years, then they get promised in marriage and start their working life, a rich child would begin their studies. Girls slept on wooden planks tied between two stanchions and they would be tied to it to stop falling off, sleep tight! The Boys would sleep on a pad of hay on the floor, come back to my pad!
Treatment of the poor was the responsibility of the manors, they would be expected to feed the very poor who could not help themselves, they must off work for food to the poor who only needed some help to get going and they would punish malingerers.
I have found a Tudor Steamer cabinet; it has “poverty rails” in the top of the cabinet. The rails have balls and cutters to press a line in the top of stale bread to show it is re-softened second hand bread for the poor; “The bread Line” is not a queue! Poor people would try to grow their own food, work for food and take hand-outs.
Official reports back to their masters, foreign ambassadors have written that “England feeds its poor better than all the rest of Europe”.
Young children left alone after their parents die could be taken into house to work for their food, duties such as looking after the fire, Black guards which became blaggards, they could also do the cleaning and washing eventually working up to the fields as a proper worker.
No apprenticeships for skills in Tudor days, the sons of skilled men would carry it on or the6 would take in a helper to learn the skill. An apprenticeship was a structured system for replacing skills and keeping the skill alive. Towards the Industrial revolution the apprenticeship system came into being for all young boys to apply for, though the age of 8yrs was still the starting age.
Resources for more facts are mainly by the author Alison Weir who makes a point to write about the common person.
The poor were actually better off after the Reformation of the Church, no more Pay to pray and the 10% levy from the Monasteries dissapeared too. Some could argue that it was a ploy to bring the people into the crime and keep any resistance to a minimum, Always expect a kick back eh!
Just a little quip about paying your bills. King Henry’s suppliers of animal stock would be picked from over 20 miles away so that the farmer had to walk for over a day to get his payment, he would then wait all day for the money, then have to walk all the way home. Many suppliers could not be bothered, so they just displayed the Royal order on their sign to show they feed the King. One way of not paying your bills!
Q.404. Hi Henry my name is Georgina
Why did Tudor ships have cannons?
At one time, fighting ships would sail alongside each other and fighting men would swing across to try and capture the ship. To capture a ship was a real prize as it was a very expensive piece of weaponry. Then ships had cannons mounted upon their deck aiming upwards, the cannon ball would fly to the enemy and hopefully break the rigging and bring a mast down. Then we started firing with cast iron cannon barrels which were very accurate and so we aimed the cannon balls directly at the ships hulls to try and sink the vessel. This was because we had built up a good size navy and capturing whole ships was not as important. Cannons were also use to bombard the ports and forts of the enemy on land. We did overdo the number of cannons as the poor old Mary Rose found out when she turned over in the Solent, the problem too was that we also had men in armour ready to board French ships and they weighed too much for the ship to be stable. The wood around the hull was smooth (carvel) and not stepped (clinker) like our older designs and this reduced the resistance to tip over.
HenryR
Q.405. Hi Henry. What did the Spanish think of England as a power?
I’ve been trying to answer this question for ages and it took a trip to Spain, 20 miles North of Madrid to the Castle of Manzanares to find evidence of one of the factors influencing the Spanish attitude towards England.
They considered England to be just an annex to their Empire, but a really strategically placed one with great access to the sea and the new America’s. The change to my Catholic version of their Church was Tolerated until my Son’s reign, when he and the Seymour’s threw it out completely in favour of the Protestant new church. With the death of Edward without children, it became apparent that the English did not want the Holy Roman influence again and tried to usurp the throne with poor Lady Jane Grey. After only nine days, she had lost power to the rightful heir Mary, daughter of a Spanish Princess and an English King. She wanted to marry well and reinforce the Roman Catholic Faith and it took blackmail and threats to force her to execute her own cousin Jane, evidence kept surfacing too about the antics of Elizabeth, she being a staunch Protestant. Mary’s marriage to Prince Phillip of Spain was a sham, he had mistresses and she was too old and ill to bear children. Spain always considered that Phillip was King of England and so their aim to retake their lands culminated in the Armada and their old enemy Elizabeth beating them.
You see from the picture that the Spanish had poor maps of our coastline, so when the weather pushed the Armada up the channel and around the Scottish and Irish Northern coasts, they foundered on the rocks and sandbanks. So rather than laugh at such a ridiculously poor atlas of our land, marvel at how this helped to save us.
Q.406.Hi Henry. I read with interest about how your designs of Fort down the south coast could be classified as “Stealth Castles”, by the way the walls were shaped to deflect incoming cannon balls. Did any other castle design exist before your “Stealth” shapes were introduced, which also deflected the Cannon balls away?
I must not claim lone ownership of the idea that a design can deflect a speeding cannon ball away from the wall. The Spanish were doing it for over 100 years before me, except they had not quite got the idea of actual redirecting the cannon balls flight, more the case that they skimmed it off at a random angle which was away from harm.
Here is a Castle in 1400’s Spain showing their ideas for diverting the Cannon Balls using Hemispherical shapes instead of flat. I thought this design to be rather crude, so I went back to the flat surface but angled it to give a more accurate redirection.
This next picture is from the same Castle but mid 1500's changes. See how prisms have replaced Spheres!
Q.407. Hi Henry: How did they cross huge spaces to make floors in Castles?
Thanks to the arch and the keystones which were clad above with intermittent beams of wood. See this Picture to explain it and it also explains why the holes are the only thing left today after the wood rotted.
Q.408. Hi Henry. Who told your daughter Elizabeth about how and when Anne Boleyn, her mother, had died?
Not a subject I care to talk about, but I must clear the air and explain the situation for you.
Elizabeth was 3 years old, staying with her guardian the Lady Bryan, Anne was executed on the 19th May, actually the anniversary soon. I sent a special messenger, Lady Mary Tudor, her sister to tell her. Mary always loved Elizabeth even though she hated Anne Boleyn for causing the rift between Katherine and me, or so she thought. I had actually stopped loving Katherine before I even met Anne Boleyn. Mary was kind and told her gently in her garden at Hatfield, Lady Bryan stood there to comfort Elizabeth but she broke down and cried. When my son Edward was born I asked Lady Bryan to be his guardian and gave Elizabeth a new lady to look after her, Kat Cambernowne who became Kat Astley when she married. This decision was to give Elizabeth a second mother figure to love and Kat was wonderful becoming Elizabeth’s best friend for life. Kat Astley was also Anne Boleyn’s second cousin so she knew about Elizabeth’s mother and could tell her about Anne s Elizabeth grew up. I even allowed Elizabeth to stay for a short while with Princess Anna Kleve in Hever Castle where she lived and also where Anne Boleyn was brought up. All this was to give Elizabeth some memories of her mother back to her, though she must not mention her name in court as it brings back bad memories and pricks many consciences.
Anne Boleyn had made a beautiful tangerine dress for Elizabeth’s coming of age and she turned up in it for party at Greenwich which upset me and Mary, Elizabeth was sent to her room to take it off.
Q.409. Hi Henry. Where did you die?
Enfield. Short question and so short answer.
Q.410. Hi Henry: Why did you order the coffin which held your dead son Henry Fitzroy, to be lead lined?
I suspected he was poisoned by the way his skin had turned black, he would have bloated and smelt of the poison, so I had him sealed airtight in his coffin. I instructed Howard to have him buried secretly for a while, then after a few weeks I instructed them to raise the coffin to be buried properly. I always suspected foul play, and the Howard’s were on the top of my list of those with much to gain from Fitzroy disappearing. There was also rumours that Fitzroy was plotting to overthrow me but I never believed he would do such a thing.
Q.411. Hi Henry. Thomas More was made a Saint in the Roman Catholic faith, just how Saintly was he?
He stood up for his beliefs and defied me, so the Roman Catholic faith rewarded his memory. Mind you, so did Lady Jane Grey who died because she would not renounce her Protestant Faith but then the Protestants don’t put memories up as sainthoods.
Thomas More wrote a famous book “Utopia”, the most anti-female book ever written, he tortured men and women to find out their secrets, jailed hundreds of poor people for not paying taxes, physically hit his own family as punishments. So being a saintly person, I think not. Being a high profile denouncer of the reformation, now that’s it in a nutshell. Propaganda. Remember you asked Henry for his opinion and got it.
Q.412. Hi Henry: A difficult question for you. What age could one expect to live for in Tudor times, and are there any figures to show the death rates for each age?
Correct, it is a difficult question to answer and I don’t think even living in Tudor times one could work it out because of poor communications, word of mouth and who cares anyhow. But being a man of great wisdom, I have produced a graph in a spreadsheet using figures written by many Historians of the number of deaths at certain ages including the survival rate of the birth itself. Nobody can say it is right or wrong, but the overall picture does tell a true story of fear of dying before one achieves their aim in life.
It also answers another question, Was King Henry VIII old or middle aged when he died at the seemingly early age of 55? Actually quite old really.
The graph is below, just click the file and download it.
Click here to download this file
I deny any knowledge of population statistics, historical records of England’s population death rates, so don’t bother me with trifles such as “where did you get the numbers from”, just read it as picture of survival in Tudor times.